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qslovebot · 3 years

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KISS FOR YOUR LIFE: SPENCER REID

Summary: A BAU case leads the reader to take on an undercover role to flush out a ten-person mafia. Before the work can begin, things go awry and the reader has to improvise and pretend to seduce Spencer to keep her cover and arrest the real unsub.

Pairing: Spencer Reid x Fem!Reader

Warnings/includes: talk of murder, mentions of sex, suggested past experiences with misogyny, suggestive jokes, unsub is a radical feminist, swearing, arrests, guns, making out, sort of fluffy end.

Word Count: 4159

A/N: Written like an episode. I removed Rossi so... AU? First actual fanfic on here, tell me what you think?

Today was your first official day at the BAU, switching from two floors down as an underestimated agent to upstairs, with the Big League. Agent Hotchner decided he needed new, young-minded blood. He was notorious for picking the best of the best and after an intimidating interview with him and his brooding questions, he decided he wanted you on his team.

You had been here before, of course. You frequently visited the ever-chatting Penelope Garcia for lunch, sometimes in her office, sometimes heading downstairs for a slice of pizza or a salad. She vented about her issues, while you talked about the constant misogyny that ran through the men on your floor. She was five years older than you and decided that as your 'elder' she would put on the angry soccer mom look and kick their asses. But, lucky for you, two floors upward, the men didn't act like children on the job, so Garcia could keep her regular look.

Here it was, glass entrance, high ceilings. The air smelled like paper and was filled with a fresh sort of low mumbling and the small clicks of the keyboards. A semi-fresh start. Today you would organize your new desk, sort files, meet the others...

"Agent (Y/L/N), we have a case in Boston, we will be briefed on the jet. Get your things ready, we leave in twenty-five minutes," Agent Hotchner said as he walked by. He didn't stop for a single second, those dark dress shoes clomping heavily to the desks of your new fellow agents to inform them as well. So much for your plans.

Not wanting to appear unready, you rushed to set your things down and grab the few things you needed for the case. Hotchner had said always bring three spare outfits rolled to the smallest packing size possible, toiletries (toothpaste, toothbrush, hairbrush, and feminine hygiene products) as well as one extra pair of shoes. Those were already packed into a small bag, so in with those went your notebook, pens, and highlighter. You came prepared, so in no time, you were on the jet for the first time, exhilarated.

A hand was extended to you when you took your seat. It belonged to a man with caramel skin and a dazzling smile, "You must be (Y/L/N). The name is Derek Morgan." Anyone who used 'the name is' seemed like they felt superior in some way. It was used in the media to introduce someone of importance. 'The name is Bond, James Bond', ran through your head as you gratefully shook his hand.

"My name is Emily Prentiss and I... didn't quite catch your first name," a woman with a v-neck sweater also reached to shake your hand. "I think I may have heard it, but I must have forgotten."

"(Y/N)," you replied with a small smile. It felt nice to be greeted with kind eyes, rather than greedy ones. "It's not a very memorable name, don't worry."

Emily looked apologetic, but soon reverted to her previous smile. I was greeted by the blonde woman across the aisle, too far to shake my hand. "My name is Jennifer Jareau, I'm the media liaison, but you can call me JJ, everyone does. It's really great to meet you- for a moment I thought Penelope had made up a friend as a result of too many hours in front of a screen."

You laughed a little, ruffling your hair. She seemed outgoing, but I had already started profiling Derek Morgan and I wanted to stop there. Agent Hotchner sat down with someone I had never noticed on my visits to Penelope. I had noticed everyone else here on this jet at least once before, but... not him. How had you missed him?

He stood at about six-one, maybe six-two? He was thin, much the opposite to Morgan's greatly muscular arms. This man was calm-looking, quiet. His clothes said that maybe he was meticulous and orderly- he looked like the kind of person who didn't own a single pair of sweatpants. His face was chiselled, with a sharp jawline and cheekbones that carved the shadows on his face. His eyes, however, were much softer. Long eyelashes and dark eyes made them bigger, but they were slightly blocked by bronze-toned brown curls that at the end of his combed and gelled hair, wrapped around his jaw, neck, and face.

He was beautiful, if you were entirely frank with yourself.

And he didn't even notice you were there until Hotchner nudged his arm in a way that said 'say hello' the same way one would introduce two toddlers. You were sure you weren't a toddler and nor was this man, but it appeared you both may have been the youngest there.

When he looked your way, you wanted to look away, but couldn't. He seemed surprised to see you there and you were trying to play off the staring by introducing yourself. "Hi, I'm SSA (Y/N) (Y/L/N). I don't think we've met, it's nice to meet you." You extended your hand and he just shook his head no, his lips pressing into a tight line.

He didn't shake hands, you realized. Probably a slight germophobe. You cleared your throat, "I'm sorry if that was an uncomfortable gesture, I didn't know." Humiliating.

The tall man opened his mouth to say something, shut his mouth, opened it again but then turned a little pink and sat down immediately next to Hotchner and stared at his hands that were folded in his lap. You had thought you nailed pretty much every introduction, but this one? Fuck.

You reverted back to your business with a sigh, patting your knees. It felt like you had somehow lost something. JJ whispered to you, silently pointing to the tall man, "Dr. Spencer Reid, human encyclopedia, dictionary, and knows pretty much everything." You nodded a thank you and she nodded back.

Derek Morgan, however, tapped Emily Prentiss on the shoulder and mumbled, "Reid did his 'pretty-girl-freakout'."

Emily gasped, "Oh, he did!

The two seemed to have forgotten you were in front of them and they noticed your confusion in unison, both of them freezing up and chuckling nervously. You smiled an extremely awkward smile and left thinking about Dr. Spencer Reid for later as you got to the case.

This was about a female mafia boss who seemed to take on the personality, style, and characteristics of the taste of rich men and kill them after having sex with them. The woman was reported and seen by one witness to see her and that was the only person outside of this mafia who had seen her face, so they were working with the sketch artist and would have the picture ready and accurate upon our arrival.

Victimology was simple, she was after men who had too much power. She probably identified with being a radical feminist. She was after their money and had sex with them to dethrone them on the way. Possibly bordered on a personality disorder considering she seemed to be entirely all-in to her 'disguises'.

The funniest thing was the way they all looked at you when you announced those lines. Perhaps you would work yourself out of the 'child' stage faster than you thought.

The BAU hit the precinct in much less time than I had expected and on the ground, running. You were immediately given things to do and you were on top of it all, every order. That was until the drawing of the Mafia leader AKA 'The Seductress' was pulled up and the whole BAU gasped at how she looked EXACTLY like you.

"Do I need my cuffs?" Morgan joked. You had covered your mouth in disbelief and the rest of the room was doing double-takes.

You laughed nervously, "I swear... that isn't me, but oh my god..." Morgan was laughing and Emily and JJ whispering and had confused smiles. Spencer Reid stood in the corner, his hand on his cheek, seemingly studying the photo. He looked statue-like, borderline godly.

"Can this be used to our advantage?" Hotch launched back into technical thinking, brow furrowed. You looked at him, mouth open, but immediately shut it out of professionalism. What was going on in his head?

Reid spoke up, "If we position her just right and at the right time in one of the hotspots for that group, we can possibly get her to somehow trick the other members into some sort of turn-in."

Her. Indirect. Did you do something wrong?

"Or a simple appearance could start gossip and a possible flock to where she was spotted. As long as people aren't seeing double or reaching to do so, she can play as The Seductress." Emily said, looking at you. "Are you up to try, (Y/L/N)?"

All eyes on you. Your first day turned to chaos. But this was your job and you would prove your place here. So you agreed and in a whisk of an afternoon, you were transformed into the mirror image of The Seductress while you were talked through the plan through a radio. Turned out, so prove a professional place, you needed to make yourself look ridiculously unprofessional.

Pinned up hair, dark cat eye makeup, a dress similar to hers that happened to be on hand. Long, deep red, with a long slit up the side and your tits were practically falling out of it, but the dress fit and they were secure, so you dealt with it. There was no other space for a gun other than the side of your thigh where The Seductress kept hers knife. Now, you had to get going, meaning you had to face the BAU in the getup.

When you walked out, Derek Morgan hooted and whistled and Emily gave him a look that said 'oh lord' like an annoyed sibling. You smiled a little and essentially just kept walking, figuring if you moved, it would give them less time to stare at your tits.

Turning the corner, you noticed that Dr.Spencer Reid was much redder than he had been earlier on the jet. So maybe he really did think you were pretty. You caught yourself smiling at the thought, but shook your head free of any ideas. Professional! No crushes on Spencer Reid!

You arrived near the scene, dropped off by Hotchner. "You know what to do. Reid will be going with you to the crateyard, he will also be nearby when you head in. If you see The Seductress, do not make the arrest. If you can, lure her."

You nodded. Wow, first time in the field with the BAU and you had the leading role. No pressure, no pressure, just... everyone depending on you. But the pressure came back when you realized you had heard right and Reid was going with you, alone. You had done really well with the job so far today, minus finding the tall doctor extremely attractive. He came to stand beside you and since he was much taller than you were, you were sure he could look right down your dress without even trying. Not like anyone had to try, but he had the upper hand.

You ached to cover yourself, but that was a major risk. The Seductress was confident, she wouldn't cover-up. You got into the tinted car with Reid, him in the driver's seat and you in the passenger's seat. Silence crept up, but he turned the engine over and headed east to where the mafia was to meet up.

"Some first day," you mumbled nervously.

Reid seemed to think you had said something to him and he talked to you directly for what seemed like the first time. "P-pardon?" He had a stutter when talking to you and to be honest it was cute but there was no time to crush!

"Oh, I was just remarking to myself on how this is my first day and I'm already... so... out there." You sighed and pat your knees. The jitters crept up, but so did butterflies. "Nervous, I'm nervous."

He looked over and swallowed hard, so hard it was audible. Was he fighting the same urge to be friendlier or was he just fighting the urge to look at your tits like a twelve-year-old boy would? Either way, you were glad he was with you. He smelled like books, leather, and cologne and it was oddly calming.

You reached the other side of the crateyard in a few more minutes and he handed you your gun, which you shoved into the holster on your thigh. "You're going without a vest so... k-keep focused," Spencer said- and it seemed like he had so many words jumbled on the tip of his tongue, but refused to say them. You thought he was afraid to annoy you, as you knew he liked to give lengthy explanations. "I'll be behind, uh- the crates."

You smiled at him and watched him look away, his curls falling in his face. God, he was so gorgeous. If this went wrong, you were glad you would go with that shy look of his in the front of your mind. He pulled on his vest and you put out a hand and stopped him. "If they see you with the vest at all, in any way, they'll know what's happening."

He nodded, keeping his eyes from yours as he pulled on a plain black jacket over the vest. For a genius, he seemed to have his mind a little fuzzy tonight. In the dark of the night, the only lights were flickering lamps on high-beamed poles. Your heart was beating hard as you waited for the signal to begin to move.

"G-good luck," Spencer's words fumbled out of his mouth and I looked at him for a moment where he looked right back at you. He chewed on his bottom lip, eyelids fluttering as you tried to look anywhere else and there it was- the radio signal. The tension that was there in that brief moment defused. You gave him a small smile before opening the car door and standing tall, in the aura of The Seductress.

Spencer waited until you were out between the crates to leave the car. You heard the door shut gently behind you, but his footsteps were silent. Much quicker than you thought, there was a gruff voice that didn't belong to Spencer. "My lady, may I say what an honour it is to have you join us this evening." You spun to face a man in a dark suit. You didn't have The Seductress's voice, so you nodded in the most gracious way you could.

"Bernard and Lolita are waiting inside the abandoned building for the small exchange as well as the rest of us, but Mamacita... you're being tailed by the FBI." He said, pointing to the crate that hid Dr. Spencer Reid. Fuck, fuck, fuck. "I'll go kill him for you!"

So flat out, he wanted to kill Spencer Reid, a rotting smile on his face as if it was an act of kindness. He knew Spencer was there, he saw... but you weren't busted? God, this man was stupid.

"No," you said, in a quiet, yet strong voice, grabbing the gruff man by the shoulder pad. "He is my kill."

The man grinned an evil grin and you did your best to smile evilly in return. You showed him your gun and he rubbed his palms together. "The gluck and Glock," he chuckled. "Can I watch?"

He thought you were going to fuck and kill Spencer. Your heart skipped a beat and you tried hard not to show it. Oh no... how to work your way out of this... Spencer couldn't help you. Or... could he?

You glared at the man, "No, but I know that his team is on the way. Get Bernard, Lolita, and anyone else in on the next killings from that abandoned building and run straight west. Do not stop. I will catch up to you once I'm finished with the agent here." You improvised the best you could and this stupid man bought it. Little did he know that the team was stationed Westbound.

"Got it," his face was dazed and malevolent. "But I'm not leaving until I know you've got this handled, my lady."

"You question my skill?" You shot back, still acting.

He looked scared for a moment, "No, not at all, I just... You're a lot shorter than I was expecting."

You stared daggers, "And you insult me?"

"Just wanted to know you had it covered... in case something is fishy here..." was he really catching on or was he confused and just running through the precautions?

Fuck, you had been so focused on the cover you forgot you were a profiler. This man was small-minded, probably brought into this ordeal through family ties. Since he was so stupid, he was trusted with less... hence why he was outside the building as the lookout, rather than in on the meeting.

Why he wouldn't leave- he was so incapable of proper interaction he had never had the chance to be with a woman. Watching was the only way he would ever see. He was stupid and he was stubborn. He was not going to leave until he saw the beginning.

The best thing would be to let him stay for proof. "Fine. But when I give you my look, you run and get everyone running straight West." You narrowed your eyebrows at him and he looked like he was going to sweat out of his skin. But... this meant...

You had a few seconds, you rushed over to behind the crate to where Spencer stood, his gun in hand. "W-what are you-" he questioned in a whisper-yell.

"He's onto me, I need you to go along with this- can I kiss you, Dr.Reid?" You whispered back. His eyes went wide and his cheeks flushed pink. Once again, being professional called for being unprofessional. You really didn't want to kiss him- at least not now, not like this. He wouldn't speak and the mafia man was coming. "Reid, if I don't do this, he won't flush the group West and we'll both be shot and if not shot, targeted by a mafia!"

"Y-yes!" he practically squeaked, his back to the crate he was hiding behind. This really was the only way- this other man would not be talked down, because he was taught to just shoot, rather than listen and understand. "I'm sorry if I-"

You cut him off by reaching up, grabbing the collar of his shirt and kissing him. It took him a moment, but he kissed back. You could feel the heat off of his cheeks. The first day on the job, you had embarrassed yourself, gotten dressed like a Mafia killer, played the part, and now you were kissing Dr.Spencer Reid in a crateyard... and he was surprisingly not a bad kisser. He was a little sloppy the first few seconds but moments later, he figured it out. His one hand went on your jaw, the other on your waist, both of them shaking. You could tell that the shaking wasn't because the man watching you both right now had a gun, it was you.

You were making out with him, hard. Your body was pressed to his tightly against the crate and Spencer was holding you there. Your hands were still gripping his shirt. Messy altogether but your lips met in every perfect way. It was good, but for work. This was when you knew to stop- you had convinced the other man. You pulled away, turned your head and mouthed to the mafia man, 'GO' and he ran.

Now things would be extremely awkward. You pushed yourself away from Spencer whose hands stayed on your waist and face until you were entirely out of his reach. You laughed anxiously and he stood there, hands behind his back. That was... that was wow, but... it was for the case. For the case.

It was time to get moving. Spencer knew it, you knew it. The real Seductress was on her way. You turned your head over your shoulder and he was moving slowly, head down. You fought off a small smile. He was entirely red, gun still held loosely in his hand.

You turned your head and were met by a sharp blow to the face. Both of you had let your guard down. Stupid.

"I don't like impostors," said the female voice that was the source of the blow. Hell, it was her. Spencer clocked his gun into place and you turned, elbowing The Seductress in the chest. She returned with another hard blow that you ducked, spinning around her and kicking the back of her leg. She recovered quickly and shot up, punching you in the stomach. You lost your breath for a second and she took the opportunity to punch you in the jaw and pull a knife.

"Put the knife down!" Spencer called. His voice was stronger facing a woman with a sharp knife than it was when talking to you alone. "I know who you are, you want what's right for women, correct?"

The Seductress narrowed her eyes at him like her next meal, leaving you on the ground. Would Spencer shoot if she threw that knife? Odd she didn't have a gun on her. She must have been relying on the others for more protection. You stood up quietly, watching her slowly advance on Spencer. He had your lipstick smeared over his lips, he looked rough, but he held his gun out in front of him and had the other hand up to reason with her. "Men like you think yourselves above women. You, FBI, you think yourself better than men and women alike because you're the authority. Tell me, how do you like your women, Agent?"

He gulped, eyes flickering to you. You pulled out your gun. "I think... I think I'm a weak man and I'm no better than anyone. I don't deserve women." Spencer said, looking at the evil lady. In person, she looked a lot less like you.

"Lies. It's the instinct of men to feel superior to women. You'll have a lot less instinct when you're dead!" She snarled, lunging at him with her blade out. You pulled the trigger, she fell to the ground. Not dead, but wounded to pass out. Spencer narrowly jumped out of her way, watching her knife clatter to the ground.

You looked up at Spencer, bewildered. You had done it. You saved the case, took down a murderous mafia boss. It was only when Spencer pointed at your face and said, "Y-you're bleeding, (Y/N), are you okay?"- that you noticed your cut lip and the blood pouring from your forehead. But you also noticed he called you by your first name.

He reached a hand forward but retracted it when you winced from the sudden pain. Adrenaline took the pain away temporarily, you supposed. There were still things to be done. Spencer called for backup and a medic and watched as you cuffed the woman. She wasn't going to die, but she did need help.

Once medics arrived, Spencer drove you both back to the Westward situation, where ten arrests had been made. You were in a state of haze, so how Spencer's jacket got around your shoulders was a mystery. When you stepped out of the car, you were greeted by the rest of the agents.

"Are you okay?!" Prentiss was the first to greet you both. She grabbed you by the shoulders and looked at the nearly-dried blood on your skin. "We got worried when you didn't follow soon after, you got her?"

"Yeah," you smiled tiredly.

She grinned back. "Fill us in on the details on the way back, okay? Let's get you two cleaned up."

But Derek Morgan found Spencer, "Hey pretty-boy, is that royal rouge you've got on your lips there?" he teased. Spencer panicked and looked into the mirror of the nearest car, seeing that he did in fact have your lipstick on his mouth. He tried to wipe it off with his wrist, but it still stained. You wiped your own lip with your thumb and Derek caught you. "Okay, Miss Newbie, I see you."

Your eyes widened and Emily raised her eyebrows at you, a teasing smile on her lips. "It was to keep my cover. It's what sent those guys your way, one of them has serious sexual issues." You made sure they knew it- to save yourself and to save Spencer. Derek Morgan spun away with a huge knowing grin, back to Hotchner who was conversing with the Chief of Police. Emily pulled you away to the other medics and you shot Spencer a smile as you went.

He smiled back, still wiping off his mouth.

-tags

@ellyhotchner @softhairedhotch <3

#spencer reid x reader #spencer reid #criminal minds #criminal minds fanfiction #spencer reid fanfiction #spencer reid x y/n #dr spencer reid #derek morgan #emily prentiss #aaron horkey #spencer x reader #bau #mgg #fanfic #fanfiction #cm #reid #baby 🥺

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gr-ogu · 3 years

Photo

Requested by @tennant!

For this tutorial you will need:

Some basic gif-making knowledge (see my last tutorial!)

I’ll be using CC 2017 to do this, but as long as you have the timeline option, this will work for you! 🥰

So, in a sort of part two to my other gif tutorial, (https://luke-patterson.tumblr.com/post/636980573506813952/) this is a slightly more advanced part of gif-making. But I promise it’s easy when you know how!

Assuming you followed the last one, you’ll already know how to make your gifs into a smart object, so we’ll start there!

PART ONE: BLENDING

Drag both of your gifs into the same file. For this to work, your gifs have to be the same number of frames, or at least cropped to the same length in the timeline window, otherwise one will loop before the other, and it will mess up the loop of the gif. (For when we get to the multiple gif part, I recommend having between 60-80 frames, so it stays under tumblr’s 10 MB limit.) As this tutorial uses smart layers, they can both be sharpened as well.

(I made this gif 540 px by 268 px, because I’m going to add more to it later. But we’ll cover that further down in part two!)

Honestly, I find it so much easier to put my colouring on top of both/all the gifs, and then clip individual layers down onto a specific gif, if that one needs more of its own colouring. That way, the extra layers don’t interfere with the other gif(s). It’s so much less confusing visually for me than having lots of groups with their own colourings, and it makes moving the gifs around simpler.

Position them side by side, one on top of the other. Obviously, you can play around with the positioning: this may be easier to do once they are blended, especially as some gifs may be smaller and you need to try them in different places. For example, this is a screenshot of a Lyra/Will set I made in the past, with three blended gifs of different sizes:

Add a layer mask to both of your gifs. You might not need to edit both, but I usually do, as I like to balance how much one gif blends into another! Using the brush tool (set to black, when you’ve clicked on the layer mask), we want the brush to be very big, and very soft.

The bigger the brush, the more seamless the blending will be! By painting parts of the top gif away, the other gif will start to appear underneath. It’s not always necessary, but I usually like to set my top gif to ‘screen’ as well. This helps the gifs merge into one another even more, especially if you have one gif which is darker than the other!

As you can see, by setting it to screen, the top gif has already started to look blended. Then, you can start to paint. As the brush is so big, you might end up painting away too much of the gifs, like so:

I usually go back and forth, switching between black to remove parts of the gif, and white to add it back (always painting on the layer masks). Sometimes, you might need to make the brush slightly smaller, just to fill in tiny gaps.

Another thing you can do is to add a solid black colour underneath all your gifs, just to fill in any spaces. (Sometimes, I do this on top of gifs too, to create spaces where I want blended gifs to go, like in my current header!):

Anyway, back to the original gif. My blended gif is now pretty much how I want it to be, except Lyra is quite far to the left, and Will is taking up a lot of the screen:

So I’m going to see how they look at the start of the gif, to determine how far right I need to move them both to get them mostly in the middle:

And that’s it! Now you can export them [file > export > save for web (legacy)] and you’ll have to change the timing back to 0.05, or use the action I introduced to do this in my last tutorial.

PART TWO: MULTIPLE GIFS

To put more gifs underneath this one I’ve made, I expanded my canvas. Go to image > canvas size. Make sure you click the little ball to the top in the anchor section, so the canvas expands underneath your gif. If you leave it in the centre, it will simply expand from the middle, or the left, right, etc.

Next, we need to remove the black line at the bottom of the gif.

You want to select the space for cropping using the rectangular marquee tool, so in this case, 540 px by 268 px. The tumblr spacing is 4px between each gif in a set, so however many gifs you want, you have to account for 4px less pixels inside your one gif, to give the illusion there are multiple (unless you want them to touch).

For example, (there’s a little maths here: forgive me!) two gifs of equal size, placed side by side, must be 268px in width or length, because (268 x 2) + 4 = 540. (There is one 4px gap in between). For four gifs, it would be (132 x 4) + 12 = 540. (For the three, 4px gaps). For three gifs of equal size, it’s a bit different. These must be 177px, 178px, and 177px, to ensure there is 8px of space left over (two gaps).

Then, make sure the colour white is the primary colour selected on the paint pad (this is vital) and (in this case), the layer mask from before when we blended, is selected. Press ctrl (command on mac), shift, and i to invert your highlighted area (or select > inverse) and then simply delete the excess line, (either using the delete button on windows, or fn + delete on mac, I think!) Then, do this again for the other gif.

And voil��! It’s gone. You can also paint it out (using the black colour as the primary colour to erase), but I would still recommend highlighting the outline of the area you want to erase, using the marquee tool, so that you can paint it out in a straight line, and don’t paint into your gif and erase parts of that by accident.

Now to add in the other gifs! To do this, I use guides, but you can also use lines at a size of 4px, to map out the spaces in between gifs. If you go with lines, just make sure you delete the shapes after. With guides, they are not actually ‘in’ your gif, so you don’t have to remove them before you save. However, guides only work for straight lines, so gifs with other shapes will need to be made using lines, (but I will touch on that at the end!)

I actually have a few psds saved with guides already on, so that I don’t have to draw them out every time. If I was making a set with three gifs in a row, this would be different, but I usually stick to two or four (or three with one big square/rectangle, and two little squares), so this is my most used psd. The guides are set at: 132 px & 136 px, 268 px & 272 px, and 404 px & 408 px, both horizontally and vertically!

I have a red colour underneath just because I find it easier to see the lines between gifs this way - if you do the same, just remember to turn it off before you save your gif, otherwise it will have the colour red instead of mimicking the transparency between gifs.

Now, make a second gif! I decided to have a square in the middle as you can see in the title, and then two rectangles either side.

Then you want to resize it, in this case to 268 px by 268 px, and drag it across into your main file, or go to layer > duplicate layer, and move it that way. Don’t worry, when you move it, it will show the whole gif as if you haven’t cropped it. The reason I crop and resize it beforehand, is so that I can ensure it will be the correct size when I remove the excess parts of the gifs I don’t want, (rather than making it 268px including the black line for example, which would be wrong.)

Then, as before, position the gif where you want it to go, and highlight the area you want to be in the gif. Whilst this is selected, (again ensure white is the primary colour on your paint pad), click the layer mask:

Then the excess around the gif should be gone! (Making a gif of a gif tutorial... meta, lmao.) This way, if you decide you want to change the shape of the gif, or move it slightly, you can just paint parts in and out, or delete the layer mask, move the gif, and reapply it!

You can then sharpen and adjust your colouring to the gif as needed! Next, go ahead and repeat this process for your other gifs. Selecting the area, adding a mask, and sharpening. By the end, you should have something that looks like this:

PART THREE: OTHER SHAPES

If you want to use other shapes (which I haven’t tried myself until now, but I can talk you through some thoughts!) You can use the line tool. So, for example you could make a layer with the lines at 4px, merge it, and then at the end delete it from your gif to leave the gaps transparent:

To make a gif any shape you want, choose a shape (either use the shape tool, or get a png of it), and using a clipping mask. Make sure your gif is above the shape layer, then right-click the gif layer, and select create clipping mask to clip it down:

OR you could use a circle, and then delete the circle to make it look transparent:

The best way to select items which are not rectangular, (so you can’t use the marquee tool), is to use the pen tool. Click around your gif so that it’s got a border of what you want selected. Once you have outlined your gif, right-click and choose make selection:

Then set the feather radius to 0, and then the area you want should be highlighted in the same way as with the marquee tool above, so you can add a layer mask, etc. However, as the pen tool is not always that accurate, there is a little white gap here where it’s not a perfect circle.

A way to overcome this could be to make all the gifs you want, and then simply add one on top with a white 4px border, so it gives the illusion of being transparent! (As I have done above, but save it as white rather than red!)

If I find a better way to do this in the future, I will update this tutorial. I hope this is helpful, and thank you for reading 🥰💖

#gif tutorial #tutorial*#completeresources #yeahps #chaoticresources #allresources #mikesmom #usertom #usersmile #heavensentnetwork #if there's any mistakes pls let me know #i am so tired rn fjghfjhgfjgh

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ninjakitten1699 · 3 years

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More Oni headcanons that I wanted to add on

to @ambrosial-tea post but I forgot until now!

There are different tribes of Oni as stated in the last post. Aka Oni (Red), Ao Oni (Blue), Shiro Oni (Pale/White), and our Kuro Oni (Black/Dark).

We don’t know too much of the Dark Oni we got but we do know that Oni were originally intended to be guardians between Material Plane and Spirit World when the two began overlapping (possibly The Grasslands/Departed, and Cursed Realm before they began separating). Put a tribe of Oni on the Material Plane for a couple years and they’d splinter into subraces of Oni and become more corrupted by the years. Dark Oni became one of the tribes corrupted.

Aka Oni are the most common type of Oni with their dark red colors, large size, and toughness. They’re slightly bigger than the rest of their kin, more violent, unfocused, and pursue immediate satisfaction, disregarding long drawn out plots and schemes. They’re mostly known for strength too.

Ao Oni are known for their unnatural cunning and aptitude for magic, smaller than their red kin but larger than pale, and have different shades of dark blue. They’re the ones you’d catch calculating and meticulously pursuing lofty goals like power and knowledge.

Shiro Oni are known for their aloofness and connections to the spirit realm. They’re the smallest of the main three tribes and the fewest of members. They vary from pale white to light gray. (They may as well adopt other Oni who share their colors and hopefully teach them their ideals.) Pale Oni would rather keep things in balance between the material plane and spirit world as the ancient Oni intended. They guard their locations but will adventure for artifacts of the spirit world and mend balance. If we take that into account perhaps they are another reason why Realm travel is difficult to Oni who try to cross through the any of the realms involving afterlives.

While Oni have no concept of gender since they have both reproductive organs, they also have no concept of sexualities either. Honestly they just didn’t have a name for it when one didn’t feel the need to have sex or when another felt more attracted to the same sex aspects of their partner. (If anything, their type of relationships or way of thinking would be looked up upon because they felt closer to their spirituality and their true selves.) Again they sometimes don’t mate for reproduction but just for the vibes of their partner.

They probably didn’t have a name for having multiple partners at the time either. If one Oni wanted to be a part of what the other two had and they were content with the feel of them, then it was okay. Plus more hands to help raise the cub personally. (Essentially that’s what PolyGarm would basically be. They make Garm happy, they’re happy with him, and Lloyd would basically have more than two parents. At this point Lloyd would just have more dads and Koko is just the one good mom he deserves.)

The second Oni learn what kisses are and how they work, they find it just as addictive as they do with other acts of affection.

Oni are more closer to their family than they are to strangers because in most Oni’s belief, strangers brought suffering to the family. In turn they displayed their family’s name first before their own, showing pride in them and hoping to intimidate any strangers with ill intent towards them.

Speaking of Oni names, they don’t usually have any but when they do their names would be what positive traits the parents wish the child to take on. For example, a son could have “Akihiko”. “Aki” meaning “bright” and “hiko” meaning “boy/prince”. They could want him to be someone brighter than they ever hoped for. For a daughter, “Asuna” with “asu” meaning “tomorrow” and “na” to “greens” or “apple tree”. Maybe the parents are hoping the Oni daughter would lead them to a more plentiful day. And then there’s the family names. The most famous ones are “Hideyoshi” and “Ishikawa”. We’ve heard of these names and the history behind them, I wouldn’t want to come across any of their descendants that carry their name with honor.

Ironically “Harumi” is actually a name for a female Oni in some home brewing lore. One of her meanings is “govern/rule” and “beauty”. Goes to show how far she would take her name literally.

Shiro Oni/Pale Oni don’t have names, but it’s because they don’t want to be too close to the material plane while they guard the spirit realms. They would refer to themselves and each other as “that/this one” instead like how gargoyles in the old days would. If they come up with names, it’s for the sake of working with others on the material plane, but even then it only happens when they really trust the people around them.

Oni have a large appetite that could put the Pythor and the Anacondrai to shame. They could honestly compete against the Great Devourer and other wyrms.

An Oni’s pair of horns are a sign of honor. No pair of horns are alike, not even the closest siblings’ horns look the same. They all have their differences. Their horn length is their pride. Having them sawed off is quite literally shameful to the owner of them but they did do something to deserve it.

It’s possible that some Oni were confused at Garm’s horns not being there at first but they hear about the first time they grew out of his head he quite literally broke them off and bled for a good long while to the point of passing out. (Blood vessels actually go throughout the antlers/horns in animals which is why they aren’t busted right off easily. Why wouldn’t they to Oni horns?) Come to find out it was the FSM’s hate for Oni that made Garm hate himself and how he looked so Garm had them filed down to his scalp or small enough to hide in his hair. It honestly almost hurts the Oni’s look on the FSM even more but hey who hasn’t he hurt? It takes a couple more decades and some therapy before he finally let’s go of his internalized self hatred and trauma that he grows out his horns and finally has pride in himself like most Oni already do.

So it’s not uncommon for Oni to live among other races, whether secretly or not, due to their shapeshifting abilities, however sometimes they’re immediately shunned when their true form slips out. Unless they proved otherwise to the most accepting of inhabitants, they’re allowed to stay. By then they’d have a hybrid appearance with their horns out, either out of their kindness to ease the others’ fear of them or for their own personal benefit.

Oni that do live on their own choose to live in the wilderness or in the mountains. If living in society but still wanting some sort of solitude, they’d either be closer to the outskirts or deep in the downtown where you’d either have to ask directions to specific people to find them or already know where they are. Hence Mistaké with her small tea shop and Wu being able find her.

As stated before Oni have no problems with Half-Oni at all. They’re just welcoming another cub into the pack and it’s just the fact that they are a child of an Oni who fell in love with another humanoid. Although there are some cases of Oni being chased out by the other race with their cub in their arms and they just run until they find the closest tribe. They’d be welcomed into the tribe and the cub is basically adopted by them.

Again half Oni isn’t a problem to them, but they do have a problem with any particular wizards experimenting on Oni breeding with any other humanoids. The know it’s not the parents’ fault neither is the cub’s. If neither parent want nothing to do with them, then the half Oni cub is taken off of their hands by another Oni who was grieving at a loss of a cub (or the realization they couldn’t have any) or a pairing who wouldn’t mind another. The cub won’t have a terrible environment, the parents won’t have to unwillingly interact with the child until they resolve their own issues or they wish to visit and see them grow.

Meanwhile, those wizards will never know peace again until the day they die, even other tribes, who they could be at war with, will catch wind of what happen and help in taking them out. By the time those wizards die, even the Pale Oni who have no ties with Omega or any other tribes won’t be forgiving to them. They won’t do anything too harmful to them, but they will lead them to the terrible part of the Cursed Realm and those wizards proceed to stay there until they fade out of existence entirely.

Enough angst there and let’s go back to fluff. I bet Oni would love dice. Like not even for games but for the click-clack sound. (“Lloyd. They’re metal dice. You cannot have—.” “Shiny sparkly metal bits make pretty sounds! :D” “Garmadon please tell your son not— Not you too!” “Wha~ It does sound pretty.”)

Y’all know how like adult lions play with their babies? They pretend to be hurt and that the cub is super strong to help build up their confidence. Hear me out, Oni do that too. Big goddamn Omega really be taking hits from tiny little cubs, Mistaké be playing with little Garmadon and playing dead on him, then Garm just does the same thing for little Lloyd. (“Koko, sweetie, help. It’s the battle of the century in here. Help, save me. He’s too powerful!” “*tiny war cry*”)

Someone makes a baby Oni cry one time and boy it’s absolutely over. It’s on sight for that person. I’m telling you On Sight!

Oni can purr loud enough to the point where it rumbles in them like a motor and that’s how cubs feel their parents’ purring. Then there’s baby Oni just babbling and the adult Oni just pretend to have a whole conversation with them. Don’t get me started on them playing soft flute music to help the toddler Oni sleep.

We probably only got a few words out of Omega when they first appeared because we were hearing them through human ears. Lloyd’s Oni brain would click on and translates what he knows while Garm in full Oni form can get full sentences out of Omega.

Oni are willing to learn a different language if it helps others understand them and their intentions. Now let’s just think of Lloyd connecting to his Oni side of the family (since let’s face it, the Oni are going to be around longer than most of his friends are) through teaching them sign language.

They also try to teach him their Oni tongue but he can only grasp a few words at a time easily. When he finally learns the language, next thing you know he’s going to be cursing and only Oni will understand. Some (aka Mistaké) want to scold him and others (*cough*Garmadon*cough*) find it hilarious.

Garmadon’s Oni-Dragon hybrid brain wants him to decorate his significant others and now I think of Oni just sharing the precious items they hoard with their mate. Wait till they figure out they can make jewelry and have their significant other wear it.

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maleksrami · 4 years

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gif tutorial ✨🎥

I got a few requests to make a gif tutorial so here it is. hope it helps :) It’s quite long so I’ll put it all under a read more. If you have any questions, feel free to ask or PM me directly for help!

Alright....sooo, I don’t remember the last time I made a gif tutorial on this site, but I figured I would even though I use the same method a lot of gif makers have been using for years. I have never strayed from this process and I’ve been making gifs on this site for a decade.

There are a couple methods to making gifs. You can import your video directly into photoshop and cut your gif there. OR you can use a separate video player that has a screencapping tool, then import all your frames into photoshop; this is the method I use and it’s how I’ve adapted and perfected my giffing skills over time.

This post will be long, but I want to be as detailed as I can and explain it step by step. It’s really NOT difficult once you get the hang of it, which is probably why I’ve always done it this way.

Disclaimer: There are three programs I use and I highly suggest you look for reliable links yourself if I’m not able to provide one. I use pretty old versions of KMPlayer and Photoshop (I’ll explain why later), so be careful where you go looking for downloads. There are some photoshop downloads here, but I can’t vouch for them.

Let’s start :)

DOWNLOADING VIDEOS

I use a program called 4k Video Downloader to rip HD videos from Youtube. 1080p is the way to go, but obviously that’s not always possible. It’s ridiculously easy, all you do is click the “Paste Link” button and it’ll download your video. Clicking the “Smart Mode” button will let you set the default quality and the folder you want all your videos to be saved to.

As you can see, here are all the videos I’ve downloaded recently for my gif posts. You can clear this download history list at any time.

SCREENCAPPING

After your video is done downloading, I open the video in KMPlayer. Now, I use an OLD version of this program because this was exactly how I learned to do this back in the day. You can find old versions online, I don’t really know exactly which version mine is because I’ve had it forever, but it’s the old school one that looks like this.

When you open the video, it might stretch the player to full screen so I always adjust it by dragging the corner of the player inward so it shrinks to a more medium size. This will also make your screencaps not so GIANT, which will take longer to load into photoshop.

Anyways, you’re gonna open your video and right click anywhere on the video to select Capture > Frame Extract... (or Ctrl+G on Windows). This window will come up. Make sure all your settings look like this to ensure a really smooth gif.

The first thing you should do is click that little “G” button next to the window size at the bottom. That’ll lock in the dimensions of however big you’ve made your video window, and if you stretch it you’ll see these numbers change. If you start capping without remembering to push that and you make your window smaller/bigger, your caps might be a wacky size or look stretched and you’ll have to go back and do it again. Also note the extracting location at the top. All your caps will go directly to a default folder titled “Capture”.

Once all the settings are ready, go to your desired section of the video, pause it, and hit “Start”. Play the video, pause the video when you’ve got all your caps, then hit “Stop”.

Locate your “Capture” folder and doublecheck you got all the caps you want. This is where I take a moment to delete any caps I don’t want in my gif, that way you don’t bother loading them into photoshop and making it take longer than it needs to.

MAKING THE GIF

You’re gonna open whatever version of Photoshop you’re using. I hilariously still use CS3 to make gifs because the next script I’m gonna run doesn’t work in the free download that I have of CS5, but that’s what you get sometimes when you don’t pay for stuff. Hopefully whatever more recent version of PS you use, you have no problems.

Go to File > Scripts > Load Files Into Stack...

This window will come up.

Hit “Browse” and locate your capture folder. Highlight all your caps and press OK. You’ll see them all come up in a list as shown above. Press OK again. Your caps will start to load into one big stack of layers. This will take a minute or so.

When it’s all loaded in, you’ll see them all stacked in your Layers window (Windows > Layers). You’re gonna open your animations timeline (Windows > Animation) and click the little drop down button in the top right corner of the window and select “Make Frames From Layers”.

Click that drop down menu again and hit “Reverse Frames”. Click that drop down menu again and hit “Flatten Frames Into Layers” (this is so our sharpening action will work later). Click the drop down menu again and select “Select All Frames”. All your frames will be highlighted. This is where you’ll set your animation speed. Under each frame you’ll see “0 sec.” Click on that and select “Other”. Type in your desired speed. I usually go for 0.04 if it has a lot of frames. For less frames, 0.05 or 0.06. This is honestly entirely up to your preference. I actually made myself a photoshop action doing all these repetitive steps so it saves me a few precious long seconds of clicking around over and over. I just run the action after my caps are loaded. If you make gifs a lot, I recommend it.

Next it cropping. The reason I don’t crop right away after the files are loaded into a stack is because I like to see where the subject in the gif moves before I decide where I need to crop. I don’t want to accidentally cut anything off. The subject might sway in and out of frame or be off center if I crop it blindly before seeing exactly where the object moves around. So I’ll play the gif first to see exactly where to crop.

Anyways, you’re gonna set your desired width x height of your gif. I’m making this a big gif so you can see the details better. 540 px is Tumblr’s width for big horizontal gifs. If you’re making a photoset with two gifs side by side the width for Tumblr is 268 px.

Go ahead and crop your gif. It’ll resize itself as well. Play the gif back so you can see if anything gets cut off or it’s not where you want it. You can undo the crop and do it again until you’re satisfied.

Here is what my gif looks like animated and cropped.

As you can see, it plays nice and smoothly due to our screencap settings from before in KMPlayer and with our set gif speed (I used 0.05 here).

Next is sharpening the gif. I use a sharpening action that can quickly sharpen up to 120 frames. You can download it here. Open the action by going to File > Open and locating the file. It’ll be added to your Actions window. (Window > Actions if you can’t see it.) In order for it to run correctly, you have to have the first frame selected on your animation window, as well as “Frame 1″ in the layers window. Just like this:

Click the play button on the action and wait a few seconds for all the gifs to finish being sharpened. For any gif with less than 120 frames (which I hope is always, good God) a pop-up will come up when it reaches the end of the frames asking you if you want to stop. Click “Stop”.

Tip: If you think you want to delete more frames, run the sharpening action before you do it. Otherwise you’ll have to flatten your frames into layers again. The first frame and the “Frame 1″ layer should always be the same (the little eye will appear to the left of the layer to let you know it’s visible when you have that specific frame selected) otherwise the action won’t work.

Here is what my gif looks like now that it’s sharpened.

COLORING THE GIF

This is where all the fun (or pain) comes in. All your coloring will be done by using Adjustment Layers (Layers > New Adjustment Layer). I usually go in the same order of adjustments, but this is where personal style comes in and you do no have to do it in the same order I do. You can practice with this part all you want and see how you like to do it.

I start with brightening the gif first and fixing the white balance if a scene needs it. I chose this video specifically so you could see this next handy trick that a lot of people don’t even know about. It’s a dark scene and the white balance makes the subject look quite blue.

I can fix this by starting with a Curves layer. By clicking the third eyedropper tool, you can go and click on a white point in your gif (in this case, I clicked on a white square on his shirt) and bumped up the input number a bit for a little contrast (optional). My curves look like this. Click OK.

My gif now looks like this.

It’s much better, right? The white eyedropper tool will become a lifesaver sometimes, but it’s not always needed.

Next, I go in with a Levels adjustment to do some more brightening. This is all up to preference, but you can play around with this. I typically like to add more contrast with this layer. I just adjust the sliders until I’m satisfied.

Here is my gif now.

Onto yet another brightening layer. Brightness/Contrast. A couple teeny tiny more positive numbers and I now have this.

Next is Selective Color. I wish I could explain this in a way that makes sense, but this is the layer that takes a bit of practice getting down and boils down to how you like the colors in your gif to look. I personally don’t like a lot of yellow in mine, so I focus a lot on the Yellow and Black sliders in each specific tab. I start in the Reds, then Yellows, Whites, Neutrals, then bump up the Blacks a tiny bit.

Here is my gif now. It’s a bit more cool toned, which is what I like.

Next I’ll go in with a Color Balance layer and play with the Midtones and Shadows.

Here it is now.

This is usually my last step unless I want to adjust the brightness again (which I do), so I might go back into my Curves and Levels layers to bump it up.

And you can totally stop there, but I would like to mention a few more optional layers to add depending on your gif. If I wanted more saturation, I would add a Hue/Saturation layer at this point, but I think it’s colorful enough so I’m not going to.

Another layer you can use is Gradient Maps.

Setting a black and white gradient map overtop your gif and setting the layer to Soft Light and lowering the opacity to your heart’s desire (you might need to go to the little drop down menu in your animation timeline and hit “Match Layers Across Frames”) can give your gif a very contrast-y look like this.

Or you can change the black color to something else for a different tone, like a dark blue.

Here is my final gif.

If you want to add a caption to your gif, you can do so with your font of choice (Arial and Calibri are good) and add Stroke or a Drop Shadow to it by going to Layer > Layer Style. You can make sure the text is perfectly centered by clicking on your top frame layer under all your coloring adjustments, hitting Select > All, then clicking your text layer again and going to Layer > Align Layers To Selection > Horizontal Centers. Then hit Select > Deselect and go to your little drop down menu in your animation timeline and click “Match Layers Across Frames”.

Here is what it looks like with a caption.

SAVING YOUR GIF

Go to File > Save for Web & Devices...

A big window will come up where you can preview your finished gif by pressing the play button on the right hand side. In the bottom left corner will tell you what size your gif is. Tumblr’s gif limit is a whopping 10 MB, so we’re good.

Your gif settings should look something like this.

We always want to keep all colors at 256 (the highest). Lowering this number will make our gif file size smaller, but also decrease the quality of the gif itself. If your file size is more than 10 MB, I recommend going back and deleting some frames or making some more curve adjustments. Some users also like to set their gif to “Adaptive” instead of “Selective”. This is up to you.

Click Save and you’re done!

#this took me all day and half the gifs dont even move when you view this post on my desktop theme #LOVE THAT #please view this on the mobile view

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oh-so-scenarios · 4 years

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ᴛʜᴇ sᴇʀᴇɴᴅɪᴘɪᴛʏ ᴏғ ᴛʜɪɴɢs...♠| 10

⤖ ᴡʜᴏ ʜᴀs ᴛɪᴍᴇ ғᴏʀ sᴏᴜʟᴍᴀᴛᴇs? Jᴜɴɢ Hᴏsᴇᴏᴋ ɪs ᴛᴏᴏ ʙᴜsʏ ʙᴇɪɴɢ ᴛʜᴇ ʜᴇᴀᴅ ᴏғ ʜɪs ᴍᴀғɪᴀ ɴᴇᴛᴡᴏʀᴋ. Hᴇ ᴡᴏɴ'ᴛ ʟᴇᴛ ᴛʜᴇ sᴇʀᴇɴᴅɪᴘɪᴛʏ ᴏғ ʜɪs sᴏᴜʟᴍᴀᴛᴇ ᴍᴏᴠᴇ ʜɪᴍ…ʀɪɢʜᴛ?

⤖ Mᴀғɪᴀ Lᴇᴀᴅᴇʀ Hᴏsᴇᴏᴋ x ᴅᴏᴄᴛᴏʀ Fᴇᴍᴀʟᴇ Rᴇᴀᴅᴇʀ, Aɴɢsᴛ, sᴍᴜᴛ, sᴏᴜʟᴍᴀᴛᴇ!ᴀᴜ,

A/N: WARNING: Weapons, Injuries, someone getting seriously injured. Blood. ....I played out this chapter in my head for weeks. This chapter and the next chapter that is coming....I’ve planned this out sooooo much. Outlined it differently a bunch off times. And here we are.

**Unedited, please ignore any errors!

(Word Count: 7.34K)

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Y/N:

I strolled into the headquarters with Jennie trailing behind me. She had her phone pressed to her ear, her jaw clenched as she struggled to keep her tone light. She was having an argument with Jaehyun. Since I saw her last in the hospital where Hoseok hugged me unexpectedly, there was an argument.

I didn’t feel that it was business to listen in or ask the specifics. Jennie is talkative if she wanted to tell me, she would. We were supposed to meet with Hoseok to review the previous surgeries and plan for the next ones. Looking at the tears bubbling in Jennie’s eyes, I don’t think she’ll be joining us.

I walked over to our office, thinking of where I placed all the files that were recorded for the surgeries. My heels clicked as I rushed through the room, my eyes narrowing in on the thick black folder that sat on the counter. I was quick to grab it, flipping through the pages and only looking up as I heard the door being pushed open slowly.

Jennie walks in, showing me a strained smile while stepping to the other side of the room. The phone was still pressed to her ear and she turned her back to me. While my eyes lingered on her back, I noticed something out of the corner of my eyes. I didn’t notice it before, but there were two white jackets.

I left the folder opened on the counter and moved towards the items I saw. I reached out and grabbed the first jacket, realizing they were a doctor's coat. They were new, and it was notable because the fabric was still a bit stiff. I ran my fingers over the jacket, a smile pulling at the corner.

I had to bite my lip to suppress the giggle that wanted to leave my lips. Etched onto the jacket in green were the Doc followed by my initials. This had to be the work of Hoseok. The green words were a dead giveaway.

How cute of him. I walked back over to the folder, closing it and holding it against my chest as I glanced at Jennie who now faced me, the angst slowly melting from her facial expression. I left the room without a word, walking back out to the once empty lobby area. Now I was seeing Seokjin at the large circular table with his laptop open in front of him. He wore a casual outfit, his grey tee matching with the loose grey sweater pants he wore.

I haven’t really spoken to the guys in the past few days. Since my emotional breakdown in front of everyone, the place was always empty when Jennie and I came in. We only saw Jungkook when he would bring in patients and see them out. I also haven’t asked about the previous conversation or how things unfolded after Jennie and I left.

“Hey, Y/n,” Jin said, not looking up from his computer screen. His hair was swept over his forehead and the bags under his eyes showed the results of a busy day. I stood there idly for a moment, wanting to ask where Hoseok was. Jungkook dropped us off, and I realized I left my phone in the car. I can’t even text Hoseok.

“Oh!” Jin suddenly exclaims, “Hoseok-ah said to go to his office and wait for him. He’s running late.”

I was a bit confused, realizing that I’ve never been to Hoseok’s office at the headquarters. I’d have you go down that hallway. My mind didn’t gloss over the casual way he called Hoseok’s name.

“H-his office?” I muttered. Jin looks up at me from under his eyelashes and looks back to his computer before nodding.

“Yup, you can’t miss it. It has double doors.” He continues typing away at the keyboard, giving me a clear sign that the conversation was over. I slowly approached the further left hallway, a place I’ve never ventured. Not that I wasn’t curious but...that hallway is where the guys handle most of their business. I didn’t have any reason to go there.

I walked slowly, my heels clicking softly, further showing my hesitation. I walked through the narrow hallway, the grey walls making the space more suffocating. I walked past a few doors, all different in color. A red door, a blue door, a green door, a purple door, and a black door. Each of them with a door handle accompanied by a keypad for a code and another circular lock about the keypad. There was a small rectangle on some of the doors. They seemed like glass peep squares, but the lights of each room were switched off.

I walked further down the hallway until I came to a pair of double doors. They were fine wood with a number pad on above the classical doorknob. The doors were slightly open, giving me a peek into the dimly lit room. I pushed the door opened further and stepped in, taking in a deep breath as I realized the room smelt like Hoseok. The room was dimly light and matched the overall feel of the hallway.

The walls were a combination of a rich rosewood and lighter wood. It made the room feel cozy. The desk and the chairs were dark brown and they wonderfully complemented each other. The whole room just fit together well. I walked further in, setting the folder on the wide desk.

I could lay on the desk and curl my body slightly. It was pretty large. I walked around the side of it, finally noticing the open MacBook that sat in front of the bigger spinning chair. Hoseok’s chair I’m guessing. I walked around the chair, my eyes drifting to the big bookcase displayed behind Hoseok’s seat.

There were some interesting novels, making me wonder how often Hoseok reads them. I stopped at the notice of a black Bluetooth speaker sitting among the books. Is Hoseok a big fan of music? He hasn’t mentioned it much. I walked around to the other side of the chair, noticing the laptop again as it pinged and the keyboard began to light up. I looked away from it, reading the titles on the book spines.

“Where’s Jennie?” Hoseok’s voice said as one of the double doors opened. I jumped at the sound of his voice, becoming used to the quiet that was surrounding me. I turned around to see a white plastic bag in his hand as he walked forward. His eyes were on everything but me, as he set the bags down from across the table.

“How was work?” He questioned softly, glancing down at the folder I set down. I nodded, keeping my eyes on him.

“Work was good. Same old, same old.” I paused, “I think I’ve really befriended this one patient. She’s so funny that I visit her during my free time. What about you?”

He shrugs, finally bringing his eyes up to look at me. I notice his eyes fall down my body, taking in the knee-length A-line skirt I wore and the dark green blouse.

“Work was fine.” He answered simply, his eyes meeting mine again. Goosebumps rose over my skin, a small shiver running up and down my body. Only a heartless person wouldn’t be able to feel the tension and dare I say...chemistry that has been zipping between the two of us. It’s almost...overbearing.

We’ve only gotten as far as kisses on the cheek and hugs but everything in me wants to be totally wrapped up in him. Emotionally, mentally and physically. I want to hug him, kiss him, and have him spill his heart out to me.

It feels like my heart is calling out but I can’t be sure if he hears it. We were standing there staring at each other in silence, not sure what to do next. I watched him stretch the back of his neck while looking down at the floor. I took a step forward, walking around the wide table to the side he stood.

He stood next to the guests' chairs, awkwardly looking down at the food he brought.

“I wasn’t sure if you had dinner.” He said slowly. It took a few short seconds to understand what he was saying. I looked down at the takeout on the table before staring at Hoseok again.

“No, I haven’t!” I beamed, peering into the plastic bag and taking out the plastic to-go bowls. He brought food for me?

I started setting the food out quietly while he picked up the folder. I watched out of the corner of my eye as he flipped through, nodding in an approving manner.

“Face the laptop this way.” He ordered, his attention still on the documents. I stretched my arms out, basically bending myself over the table to grab the laptop. I turned it to face us, seeing as we would be sitting beside each other rather than across from each other.

I pushed it closer to Hoseok before grabbing one of the two guest seats and scooting it closer. I sat down and began eating, humming in joy as I used the plastic spoon to scoop the fried rice.

Hoseok wordless took the other guest seat beside me and drew it in closer to the desk.

“Ok, so I’ve decided it’s best to approve and schedule the operations for a month in advance. It saves time and helps things run smoother.” He explained. I nodded, agreeing as I took another spoon of rice.

I was too focused on eating as Hoseok typed something into the laptop, clicking loudly on the mousepad before turning his attention to me.With my mouth full of rice, I glanced at him and the laptop. It was PDFs of different surgery requests. I quickly chewed my food, leaning forward to read the words on the dimly lit screen,

We sat there doing this for a while, I would either accept or deny certain requests. Hoseok would sometimes ask why, and I’d give a simple answer. The patient's health isn’t stable enough, or I am not comfortable performing such an operation.

I was reviewing another request only to have my view obscured by Hoseok’s arm, his fair cologne washing over me. My brows furrowed as I watched him scoop a bit of the fried rice with an extra plastic fork he pulled from somewhere.

I gawked at him as he stared back, putting the spoon of rice into his mouth. A slight chuckle left my lips as he smiled in return.

“I paid for it,” He jeered, “So I believe I am entitled to a spoon or two.”

I snickered at him and pushed the bowl of fried rice closer to him, so it was almost in-between us both.

“Oh!” I perked up, “I saw the doctor’s coats. Thank you Hoseok, they’re cute.”

He only nodded in acknowledgment, showing me that he was a bit embarrassed by my gratitude.

We worked in comfortable silence for a while, Hoseok trying to keep from laughing every time I grew picky with the operations I would accept. When we finally came to the last request, which I denied, I was reaching for the dumplings that were sitting there forgotten. I pushed the laptop further back, taking the lid off the food.

“They’re cold by now, but I’m sure they’re still good.” After passing the wooden pair of chopsticks to Hoseok and grabbing my own, we started eating as he pulled the laptop closer to him, and began doing some different types of work.

“I’m curious about your investment company,” I said moving to pick another dumpling.

Hoseok raised an eyebrow but didn’t break his focus from the laptop screen.

“So you fund different businesses?”

“Basically. I give funding for a percentage of the company or project.” He answered before grabbing another dumpling.

“I see, that’s very cool. I’m sure you make a lot of money that way.”

“It started as a cover for this black market work, not wanting to draw too much attention to the money I have. However, it grew to be very successful and brought in billions of dollars every year, so it became my part-time job.”

“That is very cool.” I narrowed my eyes at him, “For someone who has so much money, I don’t see you showing it off much.”

Hoseok shakes his head, “I don’t like to draw attention to myself. I spend my money on watches, sometimes suits, while the rest goes back into the business or into my work here.”

I place an elbow on the desk, and hold my cheek in my hand, making sure to turn my body to face Hoseok.

“When was the last time you went on a vacation?”

He pauses, looking up at the ceiling while he thinks for a moment.

“My family went on a trip when I was 13 years old.” He answered casually. My eyes widened, staring at the unphased Hoseok.

“You’ve never taken a break from work?” I sounded so surprised that Hoseok stopped what he was doing to look at me. I take my elbow off the table and sit upright in my chair.

“My whole life is my work.” He said simply. I shook my head before he could finish the sentence. That’s not good. That’s not good at all.

“A man who wants for nothing yet doesn’t have anything.” He muttered to himself, a sad smile playing on his lips.

“Hey!” I snapped at him in a disapproving tone, “You have the guys and you have me! How dare you say you don’t have anything.”

I reached forward and placed a hand on his knee, surprised to not see his body tense up like it usually does. He just looks back to the laptop with a strained smile while I keep my hand on his knee in a sign of comfort. I try to change the conversation, not really minding that his attention as elsewhere. The closer I get with Hoseok, the easier it gets to read his mannerisms.

He wears a poker face perfectly but his body language can be read like an open book. He looks ahead and focuses on something when he gets nervous, and I find it cute.

I leaned back in the seat, closing my eyes. I was ready to fall asleep and since Hoseok wasn’t dismissing my presence, I wasn’t going to leave. Being in the room with him was relaxing and comforting. My hand stayed placed on his knee, my thumb aimless rubbing circles.

“The talk with the guys went well?” My voice came out hoarse and drained of energy. Both of our chairs lacked armchairs, making it easy for my body to naturally lean towards Hoseok.

“It was awkward, tense and uncomfortable but things have felt easier since.” He answered simply and I knew he wasn’t going to push it anymore. I hummed in agreement, happy that things were working out for him.

My head began to fall to the right, near Hoseok. I’d jerk awake, straighten my back and clearing my throat awkwardly. It was when I went through that motion for the 3rd time that I let my head fall onto Hoseok’s shoulder. My body relaxed and I melted into him, ignoring the slight huff of air he released in reaction.

My eyes closed and my left arm moved to wrap around the front of Hoseok’s waist so I was practically clinging onto him. My face hid in his neck and his scent filled my nose in the same comforting way it always does.

“How the hell am I supposed to get any work done?” His words held no hostility, and it followed a slight snicker as he continued to type away at his laptop.

“Hey Hoseok,” I muttered after some long minutes of silence.

He hums in reply, not missing a beat and the sound vibrating through his chest.

“Your mother…” My voice trailed off and the typing on the laptop stopped as well. The way Hoseok stiffen told me I was poking a sleeping bear.

“Did she pass away?” My voice is soft, not wanting to make any implications. He was silent for so long that I was ready to move away from him, worried that I’d offended him. His chest rose and fell slowly, and while my chest was basically pressed to his side, I could hear the hammering of his heart.

Was it how close I was to him? My chin only needs to be tilted forward to brush the sensitive skin of his neck. With every word I spoke, my breath brushed his neck.

“She…” He pauses, “I don’t know where she is.”

“Oh.” My response hung there in the hair, showing that his answer caused only more questions to sit in my brain.

“My father and my mother were not soulmates. My mother found her soulmate at the peak of my father’s illness.” The atmosphere grows darker and Hoseok’s voice grows colder. He feels very far away at this moment, and though I can’t see his face, I know his expression lacks any emotion.

“Your mother left you and your father for her soulmate?” I assumed, just to make sure I was understanding everything. I can feel Hoseok nod and a wave of understanding hit me. His mother left her whole family for her soulmate. Ugh, what a bad taste that is leaving in my mouth. So Hoseok lost his mother than lost his father. He was completely alone.

I opened my mouth to speak when Hoseok started again, the next works hitting me like a brick.

“Her soulmate was my father’s doctor….who worked at Seoul Sky hospital.” He says it as monotone as possible. It was my turn to stiffen, and it seemed Hoseok was holding his breath while waiting for my response.

Hoseok’s mother left him and his sick father for the doctor that was supposed to be helping his father. Hoseok’s soulmate ends up being me...a doctor at the same hospital that possibly scarred him for life. Young 16-year-old Hoseok, who has probably been carrying this baggage for some time.

“Wow, life is ironic.” Was all I could get out. My voice comes out choked and Hoseok hisses in a playful manner.

“Don’t start crying.” He whines in a way I’ve never heard before.

“I’m not crying, I just understand why you disliked me so much.”

“I wouldn’t say I ever disliked you, it’s just the terms in which I met you.” He speaks honestly, “The first few weeks weren’t me being angry at you, I was angry at the universe for sending me a soulmate that reminded me of how people so easily throw everything away for a soulmate. It reminded me too much of what my mother did.”

“I see,” I answered.

“Every time I saw you, it felt like you were taunting me.”

“Do you still feel that way?”

“No.”

“Does that doctor still work at the hospital?”

“He ran off somewhere with my mom. He doesn’t work there anymore.”

I tighten my arm around him, “Did you become a chairman at the hospital in case they return? Your mother and her soulmate I mean.”

“At first...yes. But, I found another reason to stick around so it’s not the only thing keeping me around,.”

I nodded.

“My mother, before she left my father, told me that staying with a man who has a career like my father was...draining. In the beginning it was all good, love was enough. But it became a burden as life went on.” Hoseok took in a shaky breath, adjusting his body to relax into his seat more.

“She told me someone in my father’s line of work would be better off alone. If I find my soulmate, I should run the other way for my soulmate’s sake.” My other arm slid behind Hoseok’s back, and my left arm rested on his chest now.

This feels so natural. Being wrapped up in each other like this, laying here talking and just enjoying each other's company. It all fit together like a puzzle and everything else was an afterthought.

“That’s horrible, I’m so sorry.”

“She has said worse...but I didn’t blame her. I didn’t blame her for telling me that but I still hold a lot of anger about leaving. I could see my mom wear down over the years. My dad was always coming home late, traveling for days without calling and prepping me to take over.” He sighs.

“That’s probably what she hated the most, the fact that this lifestyle was already being put on me. However, that doesn’t excuse her for leaving. It never will.”

“Of course,” I agree, “It can’t be easy to forgive for something like that.”

We sit in silence again when another question is uttered from my lips, “So are you just counting down till the day I get tired and leave?” My tone was light but the slight tremor in my voice gives away how sad I am feeling.

When Hoseok doesn’t reply, I have gotten my answer.

“I would say I don’t work the same as my father. I try to do my work as quietly as possible, with as few complications as possible.”

“I can tell.”

“But I’ve kind of figured that you’re not going anywhere any time soon.”

I smile widely at his words, “You’re damn right I’m not! You can’t get rid of me Hoseok!”

Hoseok feigns disappointment, “Damn it, I was hoping you’d get fed up and leave.”

I cackle, moving back from him a bit, only for his arm to wrap around me and keep me from moving too far.

“Oh stop it!” I poke fun at him, “stop with the hard to get games and admit you like me.” I giggle while playfully hitting his chest. He narrows his eyes at me and beams the brightest smile I have ever seen from Hoseok.

“I like you, Y/n.”

He was completely serious and I was frozen in my spot. The sudden confession left me completely shocked. My heart zoomed and my brain stopped working for a moment. It was like a brain error. I couldn’t even muster a reply. The smile that shined so brightly leaving me blinded and desensitized.

His smile fades slightly as there is a knock at the door before it opens.

“Hoseok-ah!” Someone yelps, causing both of us to groan. Ugh, they’re so loud sometimes. I notice the way Hoseok doesn’t move to let go of me as the other 6 guys and Jennie make their way in.

“Hyung--” Jimin’s voice stops short as he lays his eyes on us. The knowing grin spreads across his lips and he looks towards the others who soon come into view.

“Hyung! Noona! You guys had food and didn’t share.” Jungkook pouts, looking towards the empty containers.

“Why are you all in here causing noise?” Hoseok hisses, before closing his eyes to try to find some peace.

“Well, we didn’t mean to interrupt your little cuddle sessions we decided that we should do something for your birthday,” Jennie said.

I perked up, “Birthday?” I gasped, reviewing the date in my head, “Hoseok your birthday is in like 2 weeks!”

His eyes are still closed as I look around at the others.

“We have to do something!” I exclaim, only making Hoseok groan again.

“It’ll be something small, I promise!” I pinched his cheek quickly.

~!~

“Are you sure?” I questioned, thinking I heard Hoseok wrong. Jennie grabbed onto my arm, hopping up and down.

“Let’s go!” She whined, gripping my arm tighter. It’s been about 3 days since I was last at the headquarters, wrapped up in Hoseok’s arms and feeling more comfortable than I’ve ever been. Right now I was standing in front of the guys as they prepared for another small mission.

They’re head it 8Heart, a club not too far from here, to find this Seok impersonator. It’s a mission, not a party, not a night out. Yet it seems Jennie doesn’t see it that way. We left work earlier than usual and walked in to find the guys in the middle of planning. A bunch of things written on the whiteboard. It seems there are four men going around in a group, using Hoseok’s name to get what they want.

They rob people and clubs with weapons, so I’d think it would be a dangerous night. It seems that Jennie doesn’t feel that way. She mentioned wanting to go clubbing while all the guys stood at the round table.

Hoseok shrugged and went on explaining the whiteboard. I wasn’t paying much attention, reading a text from my mother. I need to remember to call her and my father. I haven’t even told them I found my soulmate. Knowing my mother, the moment I tell her, she’ll want to meet Hoseok. I don’t want to scare him off just yet, so I think I’ll avoid bringing up Hoseok.

Jennie suggested that we meet up with the guys at 8Heart for a good time. She said we’ve been working hard and need a night off. I was ready to object when Hoseok causally nods and says, “Okay, see you there.”

So when I asked him if he was sure, he glanced at me and gave a small smile. My heart hummed at the action. Hoseok has been in such a good mood lately. The way he opened up to me last time we were together was...electrifying.

I went home and stared up at the ceiling, replaying his small confession in my head over and over again,

“I like you, Y/n.”

He is full of surprises.

“How fun!” Jennie squeaked, jiggling her car keys in her hand. Jennie decided to buy a car in the last 2 days. It makes me realize the Jennie comes from a different walk of life than I do. She paid for half of the car, and her parents covered the other half.

The 2020 Kia was pure white and its bright headlights made it stand out on the road. When she pulled into the parking lot at work, her gleeful prance was enough to see that she loved the attention.

“We will meet you guys there!” She grabbed my arm and started dragging me towards the door. Hoseok was too focused on what he was saying to notice our exit. We stopped by my place to grab a few of my things and sped over to Jennie’s condo.

I’ve been there a few times and was always blown away by her organizing skills. However, today I didn’t have time to take in her wonder decorating.

“Get into the shower! I’ll pick out an outfit for you!” She was eager to go out, seeing as that’s not something we could regularly do with our schedules. I grab one of her extra towels and make my way into the shower, thankfully that we stopped by my place to grab underwear for me.

I didn’t want to go to a cameo. I showered while wondering what Hoseok was liking in the clubbing scene. I’ve heard from the guys that Hoseok would go to clubs sometimes, often to find a companion for...one night.

They reassured me that he doesn’t do such things often. I believed them, Hoseok doesn’t seem like an approachable guy. If I saw him at the club, I’d need liquid courage to even say hello.

But...Hoseok likes me. That handsome unapproachable man is my soulmate. The universe is kind. The universe is also mean. Hoseok opening up to me about his mother and just what she did, makes his animosity towards me in the start a bit understandable.

What kind of woman can leave her dying husband and her son like that? Finding your soulmate is sweet but throwing away the life you already have for your soulmate? I don’t want to say what she did was okay, but just how strong can a soulmate connection be?

I shut off the water, grabbing the towel and wrapping it around my body. I rushed out just in time for Jennie to rush in.

“I picked the cutest outfit for you! It’s on my bed!” She hollered before closing the bathroom door. I took a short walk down the hallway to her room. I walked to the big queen size bed, staring at the clothing she laid out. It was something simple and cute. A black t-shirt dress that had some graphic design on it. It was a-round neck but there was a slight V line dip in the middle of the round neck. There were black biker shorts and black knee-high boots. Of course, she picks out something like this for me.

I get dressed swiftly, borrowing her spray-on deodorant and also her lotion for my legs. When Jennie walked in, I was pulling on the biker shorts, standing up to really wiggle into them. They fight tight, but not to the point of discomfort.

The dress tee stopped just above my knees, and with the biker short underneath, I didn’t feel too exposed. I had some cleavage showing but it was tasteful.

Jennie dressed quickly, while I put on light make up, not wanting to be caked up for such a place. My hair is left down and I sat down on the bed as Jennie got herself together. I held my phone in my hand, scrolling through Instagram and liking random pictures on my feed.

“Did you work out things with Jaehyun?” I asked in a monotone, glancing up at her for a short moment and returning to the pictures on my phone.

“Yeah, we worked it out,” She said while putting her lipstick on. She wore a red lace top, with black torn jeans and low bumps. She had her hair in that iconic low ponytail of her. I watched her put on her cherry red lipstick, striking a pose in her full body mirror on the other side of the room.

“Damn, we’re sexy.” She says before looking at me and blowing a kiss my way. I giggled at her, slipping the knee-high black boots on. Thankfully the heels of the boots were thick and square. They also weren’t too high, making it easier for me to walk. I tied the thin laces at the top of the boots to keep them tight around my legs.

I grabbed some stud earrings that sat on Jennie’s dresser. I slid on the leather jacket and watched as Jennie zipped around her room, making sure she had everything.

“You got your wallet?” She questioned.

“It’s in your glove compartment,” I answered, heading out her bedroom.

“Wow Y/n, you look fine as hell. Hoseok is gonna lose it when he sees you.” She followed behind me, her keys jiggling as she walked. I smiled and looked over at her from over my shoulder.

“You think?”

She nods, “You two have been very close lately, I’m happy to see that.” I beamed as we walked through her living room and towards her front door.

“I never told you but, he confessed that he liked me.” Jennie stops walking for a bit, her mouth falling into an O shape.

I stopped with my hand on the doorknob. I turned to look at her and smiled widely. All I could do is nod as she stared in surprise.

“Really?”

“Yeah!” I exclaimed.

“That’s amazing! Wow, no wonder you two were all cuddle up. What a cute little work date.” She gestures towards the door and I open it, stepping out into the condo complex hallway.

“It wasn’t a date.”

“Of course it was. You guys did some work, ate food and ended up cuddled together. So a date.” She nearly sang as she locked her door and turned to face me.

“You both are such good matches. The universe doesn’t make mistakes, so no matter how different you and Hoseok seem, you still go together so well.”

We both stroll down the hallway to the elevator.

“Just like you and Jaehyun?” I say softly.

She sighs as I press the button for the elevator, “Fights are a natural thing for couples to go through. Even though he grew up so different from me and we have different views on this. But damn, everything seems to work perfectly.”

“The universe doesn’t make mistakes,” I repeat her words as the elevator doors slide open.

The club was a bit further away than we intended but we ended up parking across the street from the place. The music was booming and vibrating the whole street. There was a thick line outside, and I groaned at the thought of standing for that long. The building said 8Heart in pink letters with purple and green lights shining all about.

After parking the car, we stepped out, ignoring the few whistles from other men who were walking about the parking lot. My eyes scanned over the line of people, already eying us as we approached. Their aces weren’t friendly. The wait must have been long because they look fed up.

As we got to the sidewalk, ready to go to the end of the line, a hand was on my wrist. I whipped around, ready to fight when I noticed Taehyung smiling widely at me.

“Hey!” I yelled. The music was already so loud from outside, “We thought we’d get here before you guys.”

Taehyung leaned in close, putting his mouth near my ear, “We got dressed and left soon after you did. Hyung is already inside.” Taehyung keeps a hold on my wrist and I hold Jennie’s hand with my free hand. The bouncer lets us right in, getting a wave of anger from those waiting in line. The music was booming, and the bass who see deep, it felt like my heart was vibrating.

There were bodies moving and dances to all different beats of the song that played. We walked through the big dance area to a lounge looking area. There were a few bit areas with circular sofas and tables in the middle. Taehyung let go of my wrist once we were past the dancing floor. My eyes followed him, rather than walking after him.

Jennie let go of my hand and walked past me, following Taehyung. My eyes moved ahead of Taehyung to find the area the guys were sitting in. I noticed Hoseok right away.

Wow...what a handsome man. He was clearly catching everyone’s attention. All the guys were. Women were lingering around their lounge area. They were whispering to each other and stealing glances. Hoseok sat there with his hair parted on the side, and it gelled in such a way that showed his forehead. Jimin was saying something to him while his eyes scanned the club.

Oh right...they’re here on a mission.

I started towards them, noticing the dirty looks from the women that were eying the men. Just before I reached them, I caught Hoseok’s eyes.

I smiled at him and he showed a small smile, clearly distracted by whatever Jimin was saying to him. I got a few hellos from the guys as I approached. Jennie already had a drink in her hand, swaying to the music in her seat. I felt a bit awkward, shuffling around to find a seat. Yoongi, who sat on Hoseok’s other side, scooted over. I showed him a smile before taking the seat beside Hoseok.

I took off my leather jacket and hung it on the back of the chair. Jennie comes out of nowhere and grabs me a drink. I take the glass, taking a small sip. The drink was bitter, and I felt it burn in the back of my throat for a while.

I down the rest of the glass, my face scrunching up after. I stretched forward and set the cup down on the table. I glanced over to see Hoseok looking my way.

He leaned in close to my ear, his arm going around my back and his hand sliding up the side of my ass to rest on my waist.

“I didn’t know you were such a drinker.” His breath tickled my ear and I leaned my body closer to him.

“Yeah, cause you saw me tipsy at the gala. I usually handle alcohol better than that.” I jeered. Our faces were close enough that I’d only have to turn a bit to catch the corner of his lips. Ugh, I want to kiss him. I should just do it. What’s the worst that could happen?

“Do you want to dance?” I asked bravely.

“I’m here for work, so I can’t. You don’t have to stay here beside me, you can go have fun.”

I look around the club, the pounding music and the lights giving me a few previews of people dancing. I spot a few women shooting me glares and I think Hoseok catches it. I can barely make out the small chuckle from him.

“What will glaring at me do for them?” I muttered to Hoseok.

“It makes them feel better. I don’t come to these places often because women flock to me. Most want money, or want to sleep with me.”

I nod understanding, “Well I don’t want your money so don’t worry.”

Hoseok grins while raising his eyebrows, “So you want to sleep with me?”

My eyes widen in horror, “No! No, I didn’t mean it like that! Not that I wouldn’t want to sleep with you! You’re a very fine man, and it’s natural to be attracted to you not only emotionally but physically--”

I am cut off by a familiar voice calling me through the loud music.

“Let’s dance!” Jennie says when I finally meet her eyes. Hoseok removes his arm from around me.

“Go have fun.” He said and turned his attention back to Jimin. I rose up from my seat, my face still burning from the conversation I just had with Hoseok.

Jennie and I make our way to the dance floor, a smooth RnB track playing. It was a good time. The music kept going and Jennie and I kept dancing, having a good time. I was honestly feeling myself, and though there were a few guys who tried to dance with me but left me along after I gave a stern head shake, it was a wonderful time.

The song changed to “Before I let You Go”, the Beyonce one, and I found my energy all over again. I had eyes closed and moved to the beat, moving my hips to the addictive beats singing along to the words.

I can’t find Jennie, and I’m not sure where she has gone. I panic for a second when I spot her talking with this girl. Based on the hand gestures, they were going on about each other's outfits. I decided to head towards the bathroom really quick. I wandered around the club for a few minutes before I noticed the neon-lit sign that pointed out the bathroom.

I went into the ladies' bathroom and did my business while hovering over the toilet seat. The thought of the possible germs made my skin crawl.

I washed my hands and dried them quickly before heading to the door. As I got to the door, I decided to fix and straighten up my dress when I heard something from the narrow hallway outside the bathroom.

“I heard they work for Seok.” A rough voice hissed. It was hard to hear them, and though the music was muffled, it still overpowering some of what they said.

“I know for sure! The way they’re watching everything, and I saw one of them sniffing around our meet-up spot! They’re onto us!” Another voice said.

“Who do you think is leading them? I say the one in the silk shirt. Let’s send Seok a message! He can’t squish us so easily! After this, everyone on the streets will believe we’re Seok! That faceless coward will never come out in the open.” The first voice said.

I felt my body freeze and for a second, I stopped thinking. I waited a second before pushing the bathroom door open. I didn’t see anyone in the hallway. I’m sure they left. My pulse was throbbing to the point my vision was pulsing. My breathing grew heavy and I took off into the club. There was no way to get to the lounge without going through the dance floor so I pushed past people, ignoring the insults I heard.

I have to tell Hoseok, I have to tell the guys! I don’t know what those men are planning but they’re targeting Hoseok! They think he works for Seok and not that he is Seok. I am scared of whatever lesson they want to teach.

I rush through the hot and sticky bodies till I get to one of the opening points of the dance floor. Hoseok is standing now, looking down at his phone. He was no longer in the pit but stood on the higher floor. I feel relief but it’s short-lived. On my further left, against the wall of the dance floor, body almost concealed by a group of dancing girls was a man who’s angry gaze was focused on Hoseok. I watched as the man reached into his jacket, pulling out a silver handgun. It glinted in the lights as he held it down near his thigh.

No. No. Oh god no. My body moved before I could think. My eyes focused on Hoseok and flickering to the man. Before I reached Hoseok, he looked up from his phone and smiled. I can’t be sure what my face looked like at the moment. I didn’t want the man to know I was onto him. I don’t know how many guys he had with him or what they’d do. But I was almost jogging to Hoseok.

“Where’d you go? I was looking for you--” My body slammed against Hoseok and I wrapped my arms around him as if I was giving him a hug. At the same moment, I felt a burning pain in my side. My face scrunched up and my eyes began to water. I noticed I could just barely see over Hoseok’s shoulder. All the guys are rising to their feet in concern.

It was my running. It was my sudden hug. They hadn’t realized. Hoseok hadn’t realized.

He chuckled, “Did you miss me already?” He kept his arms at his side, chuckling at my action. The pain was growing throughout my side and I was losing strength in my body. My breathing became labored in Hoseok’s ear.

“Hoseok.” My voice was feeble and weak. My arms went slack and my body leaned on him.

“Y/n?” Hoseok asked, finally wrapping his arms around me. He was all that was holding me up. The next moment, a scream was heard. Though it drowned in the sound of the music, the horrified scream managed to pierce through. Had to be Jennie. Had to be. I was bleeding. Could she see it? I could definitely feel it. Where was she?

“Y-y/n?” Hoseok called again, this time his voice was trembling. There was something I’d never heard before.

Fear. Hoseok was scared.

His arms tighten around me, and I felt his hand touch the area in which the pain was greatest.

“Y-you’re bleeding? Y/n? Y/n!” My hearing was coming and going as my heart hammered in my ear.

Was it my heart beating so wildly? Was it Hoseok’s heart?

Hoseok barked some orders in which I saw some blurred figures moving around us. I...I hope those bad guys don’t escape.

“I’m...tired.” The words are broken as they leave my lips. Before I know it I am swept off my feet. I’m being carried by Hoseok. He’s running. Someone is speaking? Jennie? Hoseok?

The music is going quiet. Everything is going quiet. Everything is going black.

“Please Y/n.” A voice pleaded, “Y/n? Stay awake for me.”

Black. Everything turned black and everything grew quiet.

It’s warm and it smells like Hoseok.

♠----♠----♠-----♠

The next chapter is coming soon. I’m already halfway with the next chapter! My question for you, for this chapter! Do you think this chapter could have used more details? I didn’t feel like this chapter needed details. But I also feel like it lacked.

like, reblog and comment! Let me know what you think!

#bts #kim namjoon #kim seokjin #min yoongi #jung hoseok #park jimin #kim taehyung #jeon jungkook #bangtan #bts angst #bts scenarios #bts fluff #mts smut #jung hoseok angst #bts mafia au #bts reactions #jung hoseok scenarios #jung hoseok x reader

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ofcamerasflashing · 4 years

Text

𝐌𝐀𝐊𝐈𝐍𝐆 𝐆𝐈𝐅𝐒 𝐈𝐍 𝐄𝐙𝐆𝐈𝐅 𝐀𝐍𝐃 𝐏𝐇𝐎𝐓𝐎𝐏𝐄𝐀. This fun and easy + FREE as can be!! Anyways, Let’s get onto the tutorial! I made a tutorial on this before but I wanted to make an updated one. I love making tutorials even if that means redoing and adding even MORE DEPTH in old tutorials. Questions? Requests? Etc? ASK BOX HERE. Please like // reblog if you find this helpful!

The first step is to look at EZ GIF. Gonna cut video into the frames you want to use!. Can upload or use a link. Decide how you want to go about it.

Is what it looks like when you have a video

Playthrough your video until you find when you want it to start and click USE CURRENT POSITION and then when you find the gif ending use USE CURRENT POSITION for the ending of the gif.

So the FRAME RATE is the thing I really wanted to show you. The biggest frame rate of 25 makes the number of FRAMES larger. I wouldn’t suggest that unless you test and see how many frames your gif has beforehand by going to convert to GIF! Just because if your gif already has a lot of frames, it makes for a bigger FILE and it doesn’t work out well.

When you convert to GIF! this is what you see BELOW your gif. It tells you how big your gif in FILE SIZE. Width and height along with the number of frames in total (If you want playing around with frame rate helps.)

You can also go and mess around with cropping the gif, resizing, rotation, optimize (Lowers the quality of the gif), effects, speed of the gif, etc.

My other tutorial shows you more of the PHOTOPEA side of things which you can find HERE You can in-depth color, use psds, etc all in photopea. I will do color tutorials, etc if you need them! I have one HERE about legacies Malivore blue scenes.

When it is all said and done you have yourself a gif that you can post to tumblr / facebook / instagram (If you convert to a video file again) / twitter.

----------------------------------------

In @faithwritess‘s tutorial, you will find a SHARPENING method tutorial for Photopea. It’s pretty much selecting all the layers in the gif and hitting sharpen. I didn’t think this could be done but it can! LINK TO TUTORIAL HERE. I would rec reading it.

------------------------------------

No tutorial or request on learning is too much to ask and I am here to help! I hope this helped you!

#rph #rpt #rpa #photopea tutorial #dearindies #・ ˖ ✦ ⋄ . ❝Mine: Tutorial❞ 【OFCAMERASFLASHING】#・ ˖ ✦ ⋄ . ❝Mine: All❞ 【OFCAMERASFLASHING】

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neojeno · 4 years

Note

I really wouldn't mind you aiding me with some tutorials love

giffing tutorial/resources

hi anon! sorry it took me so long to answer. i figured this might be helpful for others out there who have asked me similar questions, so i’ve compiled a pretty comprehensive list of tutorials/resources. idk about others but when i was new to giffing, it took me a lot of painful effort to go around and look for resources, so i’m putting it all here to make it a little easier!

i download videos using 4k video downloader. it will download very good quality 1080p videos in .mp4 format. if you’re downloading a 4k video, make sure to change the setting option to .mkv so that you get 4k and not 1080p—for obvious reasons since you want the highest quality.

i rely on kpopexciting to get .ts files — which are basically raw, very high quality video files for live performances. they are much less grainy than .mp4 versions of live performances—which are the ones you’ll see uploaded to youtube. i’ve found that 4k videos (in .mkv) are just as good quality as .ts, but obviously you will rarely see live performances in 4k, so get .ts when you can!! you can also try to find .ts files on twitter, but you may have to do a lot of digging. i wish i could recommend you twitter accounts, but the ones i used to go to have been very inactive/taken down all their drives :( but this website is really nice and updated frequently so i would recommend it!

vapoursynth links + download. the reason you would use vapoursynth is to resize your gif, while maintaining the optimal quality of the gif. if you gif without vapoursynth (.ie only using photoshop), it will still be fine, but the image quality may be grainier. also, you will definitely need vapoursynth to gif .ts files —more will be explained in the tutorial i’ve linked below. i would recommend that you have a high processing/lots of ram/newer desktop or laptop to use vapoursynth so that 1, your computer isn’t fried and 2, your vapoursynth process will go a lot faster. i am using a 2017 macbook pro for all my work, and it runs pretty well, but my laptop still gets pretty hot so just make sure you’re not running a million things in the background while using adobe products and vapoursynth lol. i used a pretty old and beat up 2011 model macbook air back then, and i will say that yes vapoursynth worked and ran on it, but it took much longer, and basically fried the laptop’s battery (aka i had to get the battery changed twice and the laptop would die randomly) but issok it was a school borrowed laptop so i didn’t feel too bad lol. im just saying this as a precaution, to preserve the health of your electronic devices!! but don’t be afraid to use vapoursynth! you should still try it at least once.

thank you to @realstraykids for this super detailed, really nice tutorial! it includes how and where to download videos, how to gif using vapoursynth, using photoshop, comparisons, coloring, and pretty much all you need to know. 10/10 would recommend

thank you to @dreamcolouring for this lifesaver!!! the best and easiest way to blur out unwanted captions/objects in your gifs. i recommend doing this step after converting your frames to video timeline and before you do sharpening and coloring. another tip i’ll add is to feather the selection you’ve made right before you click on “add vector mask” —this will make sense once you’ve read through the tutorial. feathering it will make the blurred spot less noticeable and more subtle.

i use this generator to create gradient colored captions! copy and paste your text, then select the colors you want. generate the code, and copy it. change the settings of the text editor on your post to HTML. paste the code, preview, and voila! add elements <blockquote>,<b>,<i>, etc as needed. see more on colored captions in this tutorial by @kylos --i believe op mentioned a different and better color generator but for some reason it won’t work for me :( hopefully it works for u! basically same idea as the previous generator i mentioned.

my own mini tutorial/workflow process of making gifs. this includes working with a .ts file, vapoursynth, photoshop, coloring, watermarking, etc. and a few of my own tips below:

if you are working with an .mp4, you do not have to make any changes to the preprocessor/denoise filters/sharpening in the resizing part of vapoursynth—it doesn’t make that big of a difference if you do. but if you are working with a .ts file, definitely do make those changes,, that’s the whole reason you have vapoursynth. with an .mp4, i like to use vapoursynth to just resize, but i don’t add any additional settings. i use smart sharpen in photoshop to sharpen it, which is pretty good on it’s own (at least in photoshop 2020!).

my rule of thumb is to do add .02 seconds when i am setting frame delay. so if when you first import the frames, they are at 0.04 seconds, i usually change them to 0.06. of course, this is my personal taste—you can make all your gifs faster or slower depending on how you want em to look.

if you are on a mac, you can screen record by pressing Command+Shift+5 (it’s a shortcut to quicktime screen recording). I only screen record for things like the beyond live concert or other live streamed events. the image quality of the screen recording, in my experience, is actually pretty good. when you gif the screen recording however, you may notice that it adds extra frames that you don’t need. by that i mean duplicate frames. you could keep the duplicate frames but that just means the size of your gif is going to be much bigger (keep in mind the limit is 8mb). in order to remove those duplicates, my only solution has been to remove them manually (by holding Command while selecting), or when you are importing the video to frames, select the option to “limit to every 2 frames”—but this method will be less precise and still not as good as manually removing frames. if you remove the duplicate frames, this means you will need to set the frame delay even slower, to make up for lost frames. in my experience, fps(frames per second) and frame delay work in conjunction. so for example, if i delete every other frame because they are duplicates, but the starting frame delay is 0.02, i am now going to change it to something like 0.05 (so i added 0.03 seconds rather than my usual 0.02). if the duration length and the image dimensions of the gif are short/small, feel free to keep the duplicate frames in—i only delete duplicate frames in order to keep my gif under the 8mb limit. then, if you keep the duplicate frames in, continue with your standard frame delay preferences. now that i’m writing this im realizing this might not make a lot of sense lol.. but don’t worry about it for now and if you run into trouble w screen recorded gifs then you can come back to this for reference. again, this is only my experience recording on a mac—it may be a lot different if you use a screen recording program or are on a pc.

i don’t really use .psd templates because i like to give every gif/gifset it’s own unique coloring—so i remake the coloring every time, but if you get into a rhythm it’s pretty easy. there are a lot of nice coloring tutorials out there, too! my personal coloring adjustments in order: levels, exposure, color balance, selective color (if needed), vibrance, photo filter (if needed), color lookup (i use 2strip most often and i put it on ‘color’ blending mode). don’t forget to adjust the opacities and fills of the ‘color lookup’ adjustment layer in case it’s too strong. go back to correct each adjustment layer as needed. then, when you’re done and satisfied, group all those layers, copy the group (you can do an easy command+c), and paste it onto the next gif you’re working on for easy workflow.

if for some reason you can’t see the frames when you import your layers/video, it’s likely because your ‘timeline’ window isn’t showing up. just go to the window menu on photoshop, go to the bottom and you’ll see ‘timeline.’ make sure it has a check next to it.

i recommend watermarking your gifs because a lot of people like to repost tings these days 😠 - so make sure u got your brand on it! i keep my watermark saved to my ‘libraries’ in photoshop so it’s ready when i need it. i use the blending mode ‘overlay’ and adjust the opacity, but if you don’t want to do that you can also add a stroke/shadow to your watermark/do all sorts.

tag #nctinc for your nct creations and #jenonet for your jeno creations!!

here’s my own mini tutorial (well not much of a tutorial ig more like a work process vid?): took about ten minutes including the time to search and download the video (but i didn’t record that part i trust yall know how to do that), vapoursynth, and exporting. i hope this helps somewhat! feel free to ask more questions whenever :)

youtube

keep in mind that giffing takes a lot of patience, energy, and experience—so don’t worry if it takes you a bit to figure things out or if your gifs don’t turn out the way you want them to the first time around. we all start at the same place and all run into problems. i know giffing can sound intimidating and seem like a lot of work, but i promise, once you get into a routine, giffing is going to happen in minutes—and you’ll get beautiful gifs. have fun! 😊

#anon #answered #tut #tuts #giffing tutorial #should i make a tut/resources post on gfx? not rly sure if gfx can be taught.. it's like a lottt about personal style imo lol #hope this helps!#not just for anon but for anyone

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imaginesmai · 4 years

Text

Mob!Tom Holland - Fawn (5)

This is inspired by Don’t play with fire , @peaceisadirtyword. It’s an amazing Ivar fic, take a look if you have time!

Previous parts in the general summary. Click here to read the previous parts!

Plot: you meet Tom again, and he has something to tell you.

Warnings: violence.

It was the next Monday when you met Tom again.

You had spent a whole week on your house, in sneakers and soft sweaters. Richard kept working on the Holland’s file while you focused on your job, so you didn’t really see each other besides on certain occasions. Richard moved everything that had to do with his work to his apartment, with the excuse that it was something really big that he needed to work with some of his friends, and he didn’t want to fill the house with cops every day.

That was as fake as you being okay with what had happened with Tom, because his cops friends had been in the house many more times before that.

However, it gave you a good chance to tear way from him for a while. The house was cleaner without him, and even if he stayed for dinner most of the days, you cleaned after and everything went back to normal. You remodelled two of your projects in your office, kept your dates with Lisa by taking coffee from the dispenser machine and thought about Tom every other second of your week.

He didn’t really know where you lived, as you made him stop on the corner of the parallel street, and you couldn’t contact him. That left you out of the gangster life for a long week, that served you to realized that you had grown used to his chatty self.

On Monday, you went to the laundry shop a few blocks away from your home. Your laundry was broken, and you had been accumulating things in hopes that Richard passed by and took a look into the machine. But you hadn’t seen him since Saturday, so you got fed up and walked to the laundry shop with your bowl full of clothes.

It was heavy and more than once in the short five minutes-walk you thought you might lose something. But then you arrived to the laundry shop, and breathed in relief when your arms rested.

“Hey”

You looked up to see a blonde woman looking at you with a mean glare, while holding up a small bag with her belongings.

“You’re behind me. Put yourself on the queue” she snarled. You looked behind you and saw no one.

“But I’m already the last one” you frowned.

“Yeah, but behind me. Not besides me”

It was true that you were barely misplaced to the left, as your bag was resting on a counter which was besides her. She kept staring at you, as if you would move just by her glaring. You didn’t really feel like moving the bag again, because that would mean leaving it on the floor. And just a few minutes later, rise it up to rest it again in the counter.

There weren’t more than five people there, including you, so you didn’t do as she was saying.

“I know I’m behind you” you tried to reason. “Even if I’m besides you. I’m not going to seep, alright?”

“No, it’s not alright” she said stubbornly, and you felt like throwing her inside the machine. “I was here first and the counter is beside me, not behind me”

“But you weren’t using it”

“Maybe I want to use –“

“Then you can search for another laundry shop with more counters” a new voice announced, and you turned around yourself quickly.

The woman shut up because even a whiney person like her knew who Tom was. Behind you, Tom was smiling and holding up his own basket, that seemed much more bigger and heavy than yours. Still, he was holding it with one hand, while the other had the phone out. He wasn’t looking at the phone though, but at you.

You hadn’t realized how much you had missed his brown sparkling eyes until you saw them that Monday morning. He looked far different than in the club, wearing just a pair of grey jeans and a blue sweater with a weird logo.

All the questions or explanations you had wanted to give to him when you saw him dissolved in your tongue like sand, and you opened your mouth for nothing.

“Hey fawn”

Tom’s voice was as gentle as you remembered, and once more reminded you how different he was from Richard. Even if the last one had been on his best behaviour during the week, Tom still beat him by far. He set a faint blush and tingling feeling in your stomach, and as always that he was in front of you your mouth moved without your brain’s consent.

“You went to midtown highschool?”

Tom looked down to his sweater, his eyebrows raised. He hadn’t given it much thought, neither when he received or when he had put it on in the morning. It was just lying on the back of his wardrobe and, for going to laundry shop, he didn’t need more. He smiled though as he ran a finger across the logo of midtown school of science and technology. It was slightly faded, but you could still read the letters.

“Something like that” Tom shrugged, looking back at you. “I did some kind of scholarship when I was fourteen, and I went there for a week. Pretty sure I was supposed to give it back, but I kept it”

You hummed appreciatively and Tom shifted his weight, balancing the basket on his arm. The sound the machines moving and the occasional huff of angry attitude of the previous woman was all that could be heard for a second. There were a pair of teenagers in the corner, talking calmly and too close to be just friends, and the man who had been with his daughter was now carrying her on his shoulder asleep while he exited.

That left one machine free, and the woman rushed to it, as if you were going to materialize and occupy it before her. It was awkward for a while, and for the first time you didn’t know what to say to Tom.

You focused on the woman, who was taking, exactly, only a pair of jeans, two shirts and a smaller bag with her underwear. So much for having to be the first one. You stepped forward, keeping a hand on your basket, and Tom did the same. You could feel his eyes behind you, but you didn’t turn your back.

At least, until he talked again.

“Are you angry at me?”

The question made you turn around surprised, not expecting him to ask you. Tom was sheepishly looking at the ground, to his sneakers covered shoes. It took you a while to answer, because you couldn’t understand why you would be angry at him. Unless, of course, he had noticed you hadn’t gone to the club for a week – which was, in your opinion and much to your survival instinct dismay again, very sweet.

“Why?”

“I don’t know, you tell me” he shrugged. One of the teenagers laughed loudly, and the woman’s machine started working. “I haven’t seen you in a week”

“Yeah, I’ve been busy with some projects” you said, and resisted the urge of tilting his head up, because he was looking just too cute. “I would have… said something, but I don’t know where to find you, except at midnight in the back of some club”

“That sounded a bit like Cinderella” Tom lifted his head and smiled at you for a short second. “But – I was, uh, talking about Saturday night. You know, with… what happened at Dom’s and the way I kind of, uh, dumped you?”

You were more shocked about the last part than about Dom. Technically, he hadn’t dumped you – he had just been as willing as you to part ways as soon as possible. And it had been a blessing, because if he had started to ask questions, like why you seemed so nervous or why you went to Lisa’s apartment, it would have been a problem. But still, even if you had assumed all the fault about what happened on Saturday’s night, it seemed like Tom had done the same.

“I’ve been busy, really” you returned the smile. “Besides… nothing happened. Right? They were just – a couple of cops. No?”

“We don’t have a good relationship with them” Tom chuckled humourlessly, and it surprised you how little you had to dig for an answer. “It’s kind of obvious, I guess. But we’re not always the bad guys, you know?”

No, you didn’t beat Dom, more like the people who were supposed to protect civilians

Even if Richard had told you half of the truth, it was a rare occasion. He usually hid things from you, and it didn’t take a genius to know that some of the police squad had not only violent tendencies, but also… racists, and a bit homophobic. The comments that they made when they came to your house made you want to throw up.

And you knew, that Richard hadn’t told you what had really happened with Dom. Once someone was classified as scum by Richard, the man had no limit.

“I know” you tightened your lips and avoided saying anything else.

“I’m not a good company, nor my brothers” Tom continued. He looked behind you and checked that the woman had still her earphones on, moving her feet to the music. “They – they related Dom with us, and decided to bring him to the station”

“Is he okay?”

You already knew the answer, or part of it. That Tom had no problem talking to you about it let you think that maybe they hadn’t always been the bad part in the story. You were sure that he had more than a few reasons to be locked up, but you also guessed that at least a quarter of the things Richard accused them for were fake.

“He got released from the hospital yesterday” Tom shrugged, and you saw the pain behind his words. “His wife has taken him home, and is closing the place for a while. We’re going to make sure the business keeps afloat… but there is only so much that we can do”

You paled and Tom must have noticed, because he frowned. After chasing him for hours, Richard had assured you that Dom was fine, just a little roughed up and with a few broken bones, nothing fatal. That one of his men had made sure of it, with a little threat of not saying anything after leaving his house. The part about ‘not be seen with the Hollands any time soon’ was part of the threat, according to him.

But Dom had been in the hospital for a week, a whole week for just some bruises and broken bones. And he wasn’t going to open the place for a while, which meant that he needed some time to heal completely. It was good that you had one hand steadying the clothes, because you were sure they would have fallen if not.

“Hey, he’s fine” Tom assured you and placed his hand on your arm. It felt warm, or maybe it was you who had gone suddenly cold. A flash of regret flashed through his eyes. “I’m sorry. I just – I felt like you should know. I’m sorry, Y/N. I didn’t mean to scare you”

“That I should know why?” you looked at him, sounding as freaked out as you felt.

The teenagers walked past you, too caught up on each other to notice either of you. There was one machine free, and you were the next on the queue, but you didn’t move. Tom seemed to shove himself deeper in the regret, his eyes becoming troubled and foggy.

He did what you least expected, and pushed you against his chest. It was the first time you had contact that wasn’t necessary. You vaguely remembered the day he had reached for something at the same time than you, and your hands had brushed. It was completely different, because Tom Holland was hugging you, and even if when everything started would have seemed a death threat, it felt nice.

The sweater was soft against your cheek, and you slowly wrapped your hands around his middle, discovering that the clothe was too big for him. You focused on listening to his heartbeat, that was slightly accelerated, and Richard came to your mind. You couldn’t remember the last time you hug, or tha the took your hand in the street. Richard made you thought too about why Tom was hugging you.

“Why should I know” you asked again, although it was more of a statement. Tom was silent for a second. “Please, Tom”

“The guy who harassed you, is a cop” Tom asked, and you frowned, wondering how much of a bad person knowing that made you. “He… he has been giving us hell for a while, and saw us together. I just wanted to tell you”

“Why?”

You already knew the answer, and if it had been that simple, you wouldn’t have to worry. But something told you that the sooner you learned what the inner voice had been whispering you the whole week, the better. Tom let you go and you missed him that right second. You didn’t know you could like someone’s hug so much.

“It’s just a stupid idea” Tom hid his hands on the pocket of the sweater. “Dom can’t really remember well what happened, because they hit pretty hard his head. But he swears the chief said something about you. And, since you were there too – I just worry”

You didn’t immediately connect the dots, because you were used to people referring to Richard by his name, not ‘chief’. Someone asked if the machine was free to use, and Tom hesitantly called your name when you didn’t attempt to move. You just kept staring at the begging of the cordon of Tom’s sweater, with the drowning realization that Richard had lied to you for a whole week, and had become the violent man he swore he wouldn’t be.

Want to know more about me? Here is my Masterlist! Feedback is always appreciated!!

Tom Holland/ Peter Parker taglist:

@delicately-important-trash

@lexxxistrips

@smilexcaptainx

@aikaterrina

@zalladane

@gypsystuf (since you didn’t answer me, I just put you on the general taglist. Let me know if you want to change!)

@nikkixostan

Tom Holland Fawn taglist:

@averyfosterthoughts

@killerqueenvibes

@spideylovin

@fantastic-fans

@addictofsupernatural

@americaswritings

@itsjusttor

@sunflxwer99

@dramione-winchester-mccall

@nicolettalauren

@coveredinthemessimade

@spideydobik

@runway-to-my-aid

@yeahimcrying

@herondale-snow-carstairs

@softstarkk

@atomicwinneralienhairdo

@watson-emma

@ifntelyinspirit

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morneboshoff · 3 years

Text

When is it Time for a Website Refresh?

You’ve heard the old adage… You have 6 seconds to convince a website visitor that your website is the website they’ve been searching for – before they hit that back button.

So keeping your website up-to-date is no longer a matter of preference, it’s a matter of survival.

If it’s been a while since you’ve updated your website, it might be a good idea to consider updating the elements on your website like the content, the design, adding new content or completely overhauling your website as part of a major redesign.

Does your website need a refresh?

So What’s a Refresh?

A business changes as it grows. The same is true with your website. As you create your website, make sure it reflects the business it represents.

Your website’s design will become outdated over time, that’s just how it goes. What was popular 2 or 3 years ago, can feel painfully outdated now (remember keyword clouds?) So refreshing the design is necessary to remain competitive.

Does Your Website Need a Refresh?

If your website has been up for a while, it may be a challenge to know when it’s time to update it. But here are some signs it’s time.

The design of your site is not appealing anymore

Conversions are low

Nothing is interesting or exciting on your website

Ineffective communication with website visitors

Leads aren’t coming in like they did before

Bounce rates are high

Recognize any of these? If so it may be time to make some minor updates or revamp your entire website. It just depends on your situation.

Here are 7 ways you can refresh your website

1. The Basics

Let’s start with the basics. The look and feel of your website can be dramatically updated simply by choosing a more modern fonts set to revamp its overall look. Even small changes can significantly impact transforming an old site into something new and impressive. Google fonts is free, and offers many great options.

2. Consider a redesign – when you need more than the basics

Your website plays a big part in the identity of your business. The way your website looks will have a big impact on the way your visitors feel when they land on your website. What will their first impression be? Are they going to want to do business with you? You are not doing yourself any favors by still using outdated stock graphics and imagery.

Your brand’s identity is shaped by elements like layout, fonts, colors, etc. To keep your website looking crisp, determine which sections have aged gracefully and which areas need improvement.

Replace your outdated images & graphics with a mix professionally taken photos of your staff and business along with some carefully curated high end stock images.

Choose a simple, clean font will make your site look sleek and modern. For example, Google Fonts offers many free typefaces.

An updated color palette can also improve the experience of your visitors.

3. Improve Your Communication

We’ve talked about the 6 seconds you have to grab your visitors attention and keep them on your website so it’s not a surprise that there’s little time for you to get your message across.

Regardless of what you sell, the customer is primarily interested in how you will help them solve their problem. It’s always about them, whatever you say. So make sure visitors can find the content they are looking for without a lot of clicking around.

Speaking of communication it’s a good idea to sprinkle in a variety of compelling and relevant CTAs on your site. Believe it or not, your visitors aren’t mind readers so you need to tell them how they take the next step. CTAs provide various options for the visitor to take action, such as:

“Call Now”

“Book Your Appointment Today”

“Join Now by clicking here,”

“Get started Today”

“Connect with us Today”

“Get your free ______ today”

“Signup today and get ________ “

And don’t forget about social sharing buttons.

The most important thing is that your CTA’s should be well-designed and strategically placed in areas where clients can easily see them.

Pro tip: Make sure that your CTA’s contrast well with the rest of your design but don’t get blend into the rest of your content. CTA’s are most effective when they look like buttons.

4. Improve Your User Experience

You must design your website so that the customer can navigate through it quickly. Your site will attract more visitors if it is easy to navigate. Just a few changes to your menu and checking that every link works can make a massive difference in the over all user experience.

Your navigation consists of links connecting your website’s pages. Carefully examine all your website pages and make sure they are still relevant and organized.

Test your links. Make sure that they don’t lead to 404 Error (Page Not Found). This makes your website appear not maintained and sloppy. Take a look at all the links on your site, including internal and external, and ensure they’re taking your visitors where you want them to go.

5. Analyze Your Website Content – And See Where You Stand

It’s not only about looks when it comes to refreshing a website. Your site must be considered current. Ensuring that what you are saying is valid, helpful, and readable to your visitors. So how can you determine whether your content is new, high-quality, and up-to-date?

By conducting a content audit.

A content audit is intended to assess which links get indexed by search engines, which need to be refreshed and no longer exist. Here are some basic steps you need to follow:

Compile all your databases and sitemaps. The sitemap is a document that lists your site’s pages, videos, and other files along with their relationships. Data from your website is organized into your website’s internal database.

Your site’s URLs are indexed by web crawlers who collect content throughout the Internet. An algorithm can be applied to web crawler data to find relevant links in response to specific search terms and keywords. We recommend using Google Analytic, Google Webmaster Tools, and Screaming Frog for crawling website content.

Content auditing can go beyond essentials: You can use titles, descriptions, and word count as primary criteria for content auditing. All of your content entries should contain these elements.

Check organic search, conversions, publish date, time-on-site, page views, load speed, and mobile-responsiveness, too.

The number of conversions divided by unique visits is the conversion rate. By measuring this metric, you can determine if your website traffic is profitable.

Time-on-site is pretty self-explanatory: it’s the amount of time your visitors spend on each of your pages. Content audits can benefit from this metric since you get a clear idea of the performance of your online content.

A page-per-visit measurement indicates how much content is viewed per visit. In most cases, it is presented as an average, which is calculated by dividing the total number of visitors by the total number of page views.

The slower your page loads, the fewer pages search engines can crawl, affecting your search engine rankings.

Take a good thorough look at your content: Identity what content no longer reflects your current business and goals and delete it. Do you need to rewrite or update anything? Is there anything that needs some attention?

Note: It is essential to perform two separate content audits if your website has Desktop and Mobile versions as their codebases are different.

6. Competitor Analysis

You should also examine how your competitors’ sites can be improved while evaluating the same areas where yours could be better. Are they doing anything new on their website that is working? Is their website more responsive than yours? Have they made updates to their website recently?

Aside from seeing what your competitors’ websites look like, it would help if you also figured out which websites link to them. Is it possible to obtain links from these same websites, or can you get links from other high-ranking websites? This is authority backlinking 101 & makes a huge impact on your rankings.

7. Make Sure Applications Are Maintained

Now that you have updated your contact information, added some fresh content, and checked for broken links, make sure that all of your web apps are functioning properly. For your tech to keep pace with your business growth, it must adapt and grow along with it.

App management practices include testing and debugging software, enhancing technology and site functionality, updating and maintaining existing security protocols, maintaining new browser versions, creating and maintaining 3rd party integrations, and more. It is very important to maintain your website’s modules, code, plugins and integrations to avoid various issues.

Honorary Mention: A Mobile-Responsive Website

This one is obvious and goes without saying. But nobody is surprised when I say smartphones are the most popular way people access the web. And a lot of them never use anything other than their phone so to say mobile responsiveness is important would be an understatement.

Plus Google favors mobile web-optimized websites in its search rankings and penalizes those that aren’t.

In conclusion, keep it simple. Think marathon, not a race.

A website refresh can be as extensive as you want to make it… Just like any renovation. Although we’ve covered many small changes you can make to your website some will make a much bigger impact than others. But do not under-estimate the end result.

So what now? evaluate your needs and make a plan of attack – and then get started on it. There’s no time like right now.

DOWNLOAD YOUR DIGITAL STRATEGY PLANNING TEMPLATE

#webdesign #digitalstrategy #digitalmarketing

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writingwithadinosaur · 4 years

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“A Helping Hand” - Oneshot?

“A Helping Hand” - Oneshot

My Masterlist - Here

My Tag List - Here

Malcolm Bright x Reader

Word Count: 3,082

Key: Y/N = Your Name, H/C = Your Hair Color, E/C = Your Eye Color Chunks or lines of text that are in italics means that its (Y/N)’s thoughts.

Warnings: Cursing, Violence, Death (Murder Victim), Anxiety, Fears/Phobias (Specifically focusing on sharp objects, bugs/insects, water, and the fear of imperfection), Gunshot, Talk of Suicide, the joys of writing about a serial killer based on fear.

Summary: Working a serial killer case hits a bit close to home with the latest victim. Malcolm offers a helping hand.

Author’s Note: This all started because I tried to think of how Malcolm would handle a situation involving someone who suffers from dermatillomania. This is a bit of a selfish piece because my own anxiety, depression, and ADHD manifest itself in the form of skin picking and biting a lot.

Please read the warnings because this is a bit heavy with death and anxiety and fear talk. I do hope that this ends up making you smile though.

This is not beta-read so please let me know if there are any mistakes!

If you guys like this story or want this “Scarecrow” killer to be continued, let me know. I already have a little bit of an idea on how to make this into a series. <3

If you would like to be tagged in any of my future pieces, check out my tag list above and let me know! And as always, feedback is greatly appreciated!

- DreaSaurusREX

~~~~~~~~

You weren’t a rookie by any means, you have been in law enforcement and a little bit of psychology backgrounds for the last 5 years. But you were the newest member in this part of the NYPD.

You really didn’t have a choice but to grow with and trust your team with the crazy shit that’s happened over the last few months. Lately, everyone has been going crazy trying over a serial killer dubbed as the “Scarecrow.” He or she took inspiration from the Batman villain and started to prey on people with phobias.

Malcolm had some theories, but for now all you knew was the type of person that the killer targeted and no other obvious correlation between the victims. While Gil, JT, and Dani went out for lunch, Malcolm was at his desk going over the file while you found yourself stuck in the big meeting room during your break, staring at the board full of what your team had so far, trying to find anything that had somehow gone overlooked.:

Vic #1 - Omar Klinden. 25 years old. In a relationship, boyfriend’s alibi checked out. Omar was an entomophobe, someone that fears any sort of bug or insect. He was found tied to a chair in a storage unit that had three walls full of different types of bugs in glass cases, a tarantula, a handful of cockroaches, and some flesh-eating bugs on him. Cause of death was strangulation.

Vic #2 - Daphne Stewards. 26 years old. Single. Hydrophobe, someone that fears water. Found hanging above her bathtub full of water. Shallow tubs of water were laid all over the floor, preventing her from walking away if she had somehow gotten the noose from around her neck. Cause of death was hanging.

Vic #3 - Giorgio Lucinta. 33 years old. Single. Aichmophobe, someone that fears needles or pointed objects. Found tied to his dining room table with a multitude of knives, needles, and scissors stuck in the table and hanging from the lamp above the table. Multiple cuts were found over his body. Cause of death was loss of blood.

The victims didn’t know each other. All three were in therapy for their phobias, but they all saw different therapists. Each body was found in different areas of the city. The only thing connecting them was the fact that before they died, they were tortured by being forced to endure their own personal fears before being murdered.

Scarecrow isn’t physically taking anything from the victims, which means what they are taking from the victims is pleasure. They enjoy seeing people in complete and unfiltered fear for their lives. Each murder has shown more and more craftsmanship. They have been taking more and more time to set up something elaborate with each victim. They--

Before you could keep going, the door behind you opened to Malcolm with a sort of excited smile on his face.

“Gil called. We got a body.”

~~~~

“Victim is Wendy Undurmein. 26 years old. She was an analyst at the Cyrane theater down the road.” Gil gave you the rundown before you even entered the building.

“Cause of death?” You asked while slipping on some gloves, interested to know why you and Malcolm were called.

“Gunshot wound to the head. It looks like suicide.”

“So then why are we here?” You could hear the slight annoyance in Malcolm’s voice, as if the case wasn’t interesting enough for him.

Gil just motioned for you to follow him. He lead you through the apartment building and onto the third floor. JT and Dani were in the hallway, talking to a couple who you assumed to be the neighbors of the victim. Behind the normal yellow crime scene tape on the door of apartment 3538 made you realize why Gil called.

Wendy was tied to a chair in what you think to be the dining room, except every piece of furniture was replaced with an excessive amount of mirrors and lights circling and pointing at the chair in the center of the room.

“This is why I called you in.” Gil steps aside and lets you and Malcolm begin your observations.

You started by looking at the victim, Wendy. She looked younger than 26. Her shaggy bobbed brunette hair framed her delicate facial features. She was most likely wearing what she wore to work that morning. She had been wearing makeup, but you could see where some of it melted away from the tear tracks seen around her eyes and down her cheeks.

She was tied to a nicer made wood chair, but only by her waist and ankles. Odd for a supposed suicide victim to tie herself up before shooting herself. Her head was thrown to the side, from the gunshot wound on her right temple. You follow her right arm down to the floor where the gun would have landed after she shot herself, but there was no gun in sight.

While you were inspecting Wendy, Malcolm was wandering the scene, absorbing everything he could and trying to figure out the meaning of the mirrors and lights or the reason why the rest of the apartment looked normal compared to this single room.

“Where’s the gun?” You peak through a break between a couple of mirrors and find Gil watching Malcolm to make sure he doesn’t mess anything up. He shrugged his shoulders a little bit as he answered you.

“No gun.”

“What do you mean ‘no gun?’ Unless I’m seeing things, she has a bullet hole in her skull.”

“I mean there was no gun found at the scene of the crime.” Gil shifted his gaze to you tilting his head slightly, making it really click as to why you were called.

“Someone else was here before, during, or after this all happened.” Malcolm piped out the now obvious truth from behind one of the mirrors, inspecting it to see if there was anything odd about it. Dani and JT walked in as he spoke.

“I’m assuming before and during. Right after the gunshot was heard, the neighbors called 911 and reported it. When they came in, it was just Wendy here.”

You panned around the scene, trying to find anything else, but then you realized that no one had mentioned the elephant in the room: The mirrors and lights.

“All of this makes a bit more sense if there was someone else here.” Malcolm motioned to the setup, no one spoke up.

He turned to you as if to ask, “What? You don’t see it?” And you had to admit that you could see some possible things, but you were sure that he had a bigger and more coherent picture in his head. You motioned for him to go on.

“These are set up to make sure that Wendy had nowhere else to look other than at herself. The lights are set up so that virtually no shadows would be cast on any part of her, making every pore, line, and hair visible.” He stood behind the chair with Wendy’s body still tied to it, looking at every mirror to see the different angles. “I gotta say that some of these angles are pretty unflattering.” He paused, thinking out loud. “Maybe that was the point: To show the imperfections.”

“Could also be the reason why she wore so much makeup. To try to hide any blemishes,” Dani spoke up.

You and Malcolm swapped. Now he was inspecting the victim and you looked at the scene. But you didn’t look at the mirrors, you looked at the rest of the apartment. Everything was in order. The bed was made as if it was a hotel bed, the towels on the towel racks were perfectly hung. She had awards and degrees hung up perfectly aligned on her wall. Showcasing her achievements.

Imperfections. The word kept sticking out in your brain when something clicked: She was trying to prove that she wasn’t a screw up; that she was doing good things and good work. She wanted to be as perfect as she could be.

As you kept looking and piecing more and more together, Malcolm’s discoveries validated your theory.

“She has small cuts around her fingers as if she was picking or biting at them. Her lips look bitten up too.”

“So? It’s New York and it's been cold out. Maybe it's just the weather making her skin dry or somethin’?” JT questioned.

“Check the inside of her cheeks.” You speak up, a bit panicked from the kitchen, finding everything in picturesque form like the rest of the apartment. You had also found the various pills on her counter. One bottle was paroxetine, an SSRI for treating chronic anxiety disorders, making your thoughts race as you realized the possible severity of this case.

“Excuse me?” Gil spoke up, confused as to where you were going. Malcolm had looked away from Wendy to watch you walk back towards them, noticing small psychological hints that the others wouldn’t. Your eyes were flicking to different parts of Wendy, your breathing was slightly shaky, and you had a look that told him that you were trying to keep your cool while your mind was frantic.

You kept your breathing as controlled as you could, but you felt your chest tightening. You know these signs because you have lived through them. You tried to not focus on your hands while you explained your thought process.

“I think this may be a Scarecrow victim.”

Gil walked up next to you, you felt yourself starting to nip at the insides of your cheeks as he whispered “Are you sure? This doesn’t look like it fits his profile. We can’t just throw that out in the air without knowing 100%...”

Malcolm was curious but cautious, so he stayed silent as you went on, keeping a close eye on you to see if you were going to be okay.

“Wendy had anxiety. She--”

“So does most of New York. That doesn’t mean she’s a Scarecrow Vic.” JT quipped.

“Hear her out.” Malcolm defended before giving his attention to you, motioning for you to go on.

“Wendy had anxiety. It could be generalized anxiety disorder, but I think it's more than just ‘generalized.’ You kept saying imperfections and it made me realize how much she valued perfection… and feared imperfection. The fear of imperfection is called Atelophobia. It also means to fear not being good enough.”

You were visually focusing on Wendy’s body, but as you said “phobia” you saw Gil step away, sigh, and run his hand over his face from the corner of your eye. He, and everyone else in the room, were beginning to believe that this was the work of their serial killer. Malcolm knew about the phobia, but kept listening to see how far you could explain before needing help.

“She has her proudest achievements hanging perfectly on her wall to try to validate herself. Her lips are chewed up and there are signs of permanent damage at the skin around her fingers where they’ve been continuously picked at for an extended period of time.”

You subconsciously hold your hands and try to not scratch. This doesn’t go unnoticed by Malcolm.

“Wendy saw or felt when her skin would get dry and start to peel and view those as imperfections, making her pick and bite until she couldn’t anymore. She was trying to get rid of the mistakes.” You paused, trying to keep yourself in check. “And I’m sure if you look at the inside of her cheeks, they’ll be bitten up too.”

You were going to try to explain the mirror set up in correlation to the phobia, but your hands started to shake as you thought about your struggle with anxiety. Malcolm could see that you were unsettled by something and took over, seeing how it all worked together.

“The killer set these mirrors up for the reason we said earlier: to make Wendy see herself. They manipulated her into seeing all of the lines or dots or blemishes or what have you, progressively making her more and more scared of herself. Knowing that this phobia stretches to the idea of not being good enough, the killer most likely pointed out examples of when she messed up. Even the smallest of mistakes could set off Wendy’s spiral. They then gave her a choice to either live in fear and shame or to kill herself. And after exposing her to her phobia so intensely, she chose the gun.”

You just nodded as turned to walk out of the room, not making eye contact with anyone as you quietly said “I need to get some air.”

Gil turned to follow you and see if you were okay, but Malcolm was already on it as he put a hand up to Gil that said, “I got this.”

You found the exit to the alley behind the apartment building and found a spot against the wall to sit, close your eyes, and try to breathe. As soon as you sat down, you unknowingly start picking at the cuticles around your nails, old habits coming back. Your chest was tight and you couldn’t slow down the shirt, quick breaths that fled your panicked lungs.

You heard someone open the door a minute after you and thought nothing of it until you heard someone sit a respectable distance from you. You didn’t bother opening your eyes figuring it was Gil or Dani.

“Hey. If you don’t get your heart rate down, you're going to pass out.”

Your eyes shot open as you realized that Malcolm was the one that came to check on you. After a second, you realized that it made sense why he would come out to try and help. He has a better understanding of psychology than anyone on the team. All you could do was nod your head in understanding because you knew that you had to calm down, but it was just harder than expected.

“Would it help to try to follow my breathing?” You nodded your head, which prompted Malcolm to sit a bit closer next to you against the wall, making his breaths more audible. Slowly but surely, your breathing started to even out. Malcolm reached to his side and produced a water bottle that he had gotten from his car.

“Here. Take a couple small sips. Sorry it’s not cold, but it should still help.”

You did as he said and then started to fidget with the water bottle. It was better than picking more at your fingers.

“So how long have you had dermatillomania?” Malcolm asked cautiously, scared that talking about it might make it worse.

“A majority of my life.” You sighed out.

“Do you want to talk about it?” Malcolm was watching you closely, looking for any signs that your anxiety would flare up again. You figured that he was curious and deserved to know how you came to the conclusion at the scene.

“When I was in college, I started seeing a therapist. We thought I had atelophobia. But after a few sessions, we realized that it was a mix of GAD, depression, and ADHD. The dermatillomania is the way most of that energy comes out. It’s mostly in high anxiety situations or when my ADHD is really bad. You have your tremors, I have” you looked down at your hands and realized you had begun picking again and that your finger was now bleeding a little bit. Raising your hands up, you sighed in annoyance, “this bullshit.”

You plopped your hands down in your lap and looked up at the sky, closing your eyes and taking another few frustrated deep breaths.

“Thank you for telling me.”

Without opening your eyes or moving away, you responded. “Well, I figured if anyone on this team was going to understand and respect it, it would be you.” You both half chuckled before you returned your gaze to him. “Thank you for listening and for having my back up there.”

Malcolm waved his hand to dismiss the second part of your thanks and then remembered something. You looked as he reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a bandaid he had snagged from one of the med kits at the scene. He held out his hand as if to ask for yours. You gently gave it to him and he proceeded to bandage up the fingertip that you had been picking at. Once he finishes, making sure it's not too tight or uncomfortable, he holds your hand for a little bit longer as he speaks his mind.

“I know how bad this job can get for people like us that have mental battles going on. And now that I know at least a little bit of what’s going on, I want you to know that you can come to me for help if you need it. If something in a case isn’t sitting right with you, or you need to go and grab a coffee for a distraction, or even just someone to find a bandaid for you, I’d be happy to lend a helping hand.” He ended with a true and contagious sympathetic smile that you don’t see very often on the face of Malcolm Bright.

“I really appreciate that. I will probably take you up on it.” He nods in contentment. “This offer does go both ways though, Bright.” He looked at you with a slightly tilted head. “I know you have a lot going on in that mind of yours that I may not fully understand, but if there is ever anything I can do to try and make it a bit more pleasant, let me know.”

“Sounds like a deal, (Y/N).” He gives your hand a squeeze before letting go. The two of you sit there in silence, focusing on your breathing together for the next five or so minutes. Without warning, Malcolm stands up and extends his hands out to you with a smile. You give him a questioning look.

“I could actually really go for some good distracting coffee right now, and I would like you to come with me and be equally distracting. If you want.”

You couldn’t help but smile back. There was something about this strange man that made you feel comfortable. And after dealing with your anxiety more than you had hoped for, you find yourself reaching for his hand.

“That sounds like a fantastic idea.”

#prodigal son fandom #prodigal son fanfic #Malcolm Bright x Reader #Malcolm Bright Fic #Malcolm Bright imagine #Malcolm whitly x reader #malcolm whitly fic

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cherry3point14 · 4 years

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Stranger Than Fanfiction: Ch 4

Series Masterlist

Pairing: Dean x Reader Warnings: Like one big boy word. Criminal activity. Word count: 3,185. Chapter Summary: Staying late at work is usually nice and quiet. Usually. A/N: This chapter is so dumb but I love it a lot.

Ao3 if you prefer

Y/N would say that one of the perks of her job was getting out of the office from time to time. Sometimes a case required anything from a simple home interview to speaking to several family members over a number of days. She relished in the peace working away from inboxes and water cooler talk however, every once in a while she could find the same serenity in the uniform walls of her employment building. Today was one of those very days. Today she sat at her desk, alone, long past her colleagues' departure at five pm. The overhead lights were off and Y/N, whose fingers sped over the keyboard urgently, was lit only by the cool glow of her screen.

“It’s not super peaceful when you won’t shut up.” As much as you fought becoming complacent to the voice in all honesty you were glad to have her back in some small way. You hadn’t heard her for days now, not since you started reading Supernatural. It’s only now that you’d finished, she was back to her usual tricks. Some ridiculous ten-minute lecture about you waking up late for work was your reunion this morning. While it was true that you were very late for work today—two hours to be precise—she didn’t once mention that it was because of your late-night finishing off Swan Song.

That wasn’t too concerning. The voice ignoring your reading habits was minor in comparison to her being back at all. Her return meant your aneurysm hadn't been temporary and you were closer to one of two things. Solving the mystery of why Maggie Hall’s file was so important, or dying.

Obviously, option number one was preferable.

After an entire day of her, you have fallen completely into accepting that she's not going away anytime soon. For the most part, you have let her harp on like she’s looking for a book deal but now that you’re alone and trying to concentrate, you find yourself responding to her. For your own satisfaction of answering back.

She was feeling productive. Each word she wrote punctuated by the precise click of her fingers on the keyboard. A familiar sense of achievement swelled within her chest as she began to summarise her decision on the claim. Summaries are nothing more than detailed endings, which is why Y/N was particularly excited to be writing this one. More so than any other claim she had finished up before.

An ending was exactly what she was hoping for. The unusual situations she had found herself in over the last few days were too messy for even her to organize. Tangled up like a ball of string after being batted around by a cat. Logically then she was focusing on the only thing that made sense, tie up one loose end and the others would right themselves. Finish this piece of work and maybe she'd live.

How unfortunate then for Y/N that the universe did not look kindly upon her attempts to be orderly. How utterly unlucky that she had not guessed any of the answers correctly. Today was not fated to hold any happy endings for her. Not the closing of file twenty-four zero one, nor the reasonable explanations she had been searching for.

Your fingers stutter to a stop. What the hell does she mean you weren’t closing this claim? You are ten minutes of proofreading away from pressing submit, you had stayed late to finish. At this point, it would take an act of God himself to stop you.

That’s when you see a flash of light coming from reception. Flash is vague. A beam of light might be a better description, as in, the kind of beam emitted by a flashlight. Wait, there are two flashlights now. Oh shit.

Suddenly you taste bile in your throat and your hands are clammy enough to be sticky. The voice said this case would kill you and now you’re sitting here working late, and she’s saying you weren’t going to close it and… and… is it going to happen now? You’d assumed it was something in the file that killed you but you’d also assumed you had more time. Really, truly, this could be it. Imminent death means about to happen, not will happen when it’s convenient for you. This is it, isn’t it? You’re about to be accidentally murdered in an office robbery because you stayed to work late. On that particular file.

She was not prepared to die. Not while there still wasn’t a grey hair on her head or while she hadn’t been to the Grand Canyon. Y/N had no preparations for the end.

No. Not now. It couldn’t be.

She had no will, no funeral plans, and no video message to her family about a series of clues leading to a great treasure. And on Wednesday night, early June with spring barely making way for summer was the last possible moment she would ever expect to meet her maker.

You want to hide but it’s impossible. Hiding would require you to have some control over your body. An impossible feat, while you're listening with bated breath to what you assume, is your last paragraph.

Obviously, Y/N would not be dying tonight.

“Are you joking? How is that obvious?” You whisper into the dark, edging into frustration. Barely enjoying the relief of not dying when your narrator is toying with you.

She still had a new life to begin. One which began and ended with two men that had left as quickly as she'd met them. Fate has a perverted sense of humor and had chosen to push her forward into the unknown. This is why these important men were breaking into her office at precisely that moment.

The footsteps of the intruders get closer. You don’t have a direct view of reception but you’d seen the flashlights on account of it being dark in here. They sound like they're near reception, maybe twenty seconds from coming in. Once they’re in the main part of the office then all they’d have to do is turn a little to their left and they’d spot you. In the corner hanging out.

But it’s the guys breaking in? The cosplayers. They’re the wannabe Winchester’s who have turned to robbery to get their kicks?

You don’t know if it's actually them, not really. Not until they do take those last steps into the room but you hear them before you see them.

“Remind me why you haven't done some nerd computer thing to get this?”

“I already tried, remember? Their system says it’s still in process so none of the details are on their servers yet. And since we need to find out where the money went…”

“... we need to get the physical file. Got it.” Mystery man number one sighs before he continues, “S’no fun killing a monster if you don’t have to work for it.”

A monster? It’s almost impressive how much these guys committed to whatever insane game they're playing. Almost being the keyword. These guys were genuinely crazy, and that was coming from someone with an unexplainable voice in her head.

Y/N finally overcame the initial wave of fear that had hit her when the flashlights had cut through the darkness. She reached up and shut off the monitor on her desk, the last thing that had been lighting her up like a Christmas tree. Her laptop was still running in its dock, she had no intention of losing all her work. She only wanted to lose herself, hide, snuffing out the screen, and rolling her chair backward seemed to do the trick. She felt safer already. Her heartbeat returning to something akin to its normal steady rhythm now that she was cloaked in darkness. As soon as they were distracted she might even be able to risk slinking to the floor and hiding below her desk. It wasn’t a risk she was willing to take right now though, while they were still on high alert having just arrived.

You’re grateful that the voice is playing ball and giving you some useful information. It’s completely new, having so far only heard ominous foreshadowing and cryptic introductions, but it’s nice. Dare you say it, fun. For once in this whole ordeal, you actually feel like you’re in a story while you do exactly what she says. You sneak the smallest smile when you see their large shadows, finally step into the office. This might be where you have some luck on your side.

“You check out the desks, I’ll go find the filing cabinets.” It’s pretty hard to make out with their backs to you but you’d wager it was the taller shadow that said that.

The same bigger shadow starts walking towards the back of the office. He doesn’t know he’s heading towards the break room, although he probably thinks he has all night to figure it out. He can have all the time he wants as soon as you’re under your desk. Once you’re properly out of the way you look forward to not interrupting them as a stupid person might. You were perfectly ok with not being a hero.

Of course, she was not accustomed to the cat and mouse game of breaking and entering. Y/N was not used to dark corners and darker rooms. And since she hadn’t used one since the last time her power went out, she seemed to have forgotten how flashlights worked as well.

“What?” you splutter. Faith in the voice shattered in an instant.

In the next second, you’re blinded by a light in your eyes, you reach up to block it out but as you do his voice booms out. “Sam! We got company.”

The tall guy comes running and now there are two lights in your face.

“Do you think we could not blind me?” They start lowering their flashlights when the other shoe drops, “wait, Sam? You-you’re using the names too?” It shouldn’t shock you, they’re driving the car and wearing the flannel clearly, they’re adopting the names too. But until now you’d been able to compartmentalize the books you’d read and the men that drove around in a car with the Winchesters fictional license plate.

Coming face to face with them she feels completely different now. The territory is hers; her office, her desk, her mug with her name on. The problem; this was not her game, it was theirs. Y/N was simply working late whereas they were more adept at the after-hours version of this story. She might think they were delusional but this wasn’t the first crime she had them on the hook for. She could only imagine the hundreds, if not thousands, of other illegal activities they had gotten away with, all to play pretend.

“Nobody was supposed to be here.” The guy pretending to be Sam says to the guy who you can only imagine is pretending to be Dean.

“Well, there she is anyway.” Wannabe Dean huffs, both angry and disappointed at the same time. “But hey, maybe this can speed everything along, no more looking around in the dark at least.”

They’re both very good at talking about you while simultaneously ignoring you. Neither of them even flinch when you get up out of your chair and walk over to the light switch.

The room flooded with light like any room would when a switch is flipped, however, this wasn’t any kitchen light switch. The office is a large space and the fluorescents required to illuminate it are industrial. It’s enough to pain anyone's eyes with how sharply their pupils contract. Unless you are the one pressing the switch in the first place. It was Y/N’s hand flipping the four switches required and so her eyes were closed in preparation. However the mystery men had been seconds from bickering so they jerk their heads as if trying to escape the inescapable, like it's the first time they've ever seen anything so bright. Y/N felt wholly better with the heat on her closed eyelids. Because she knew when she opened them the office would hers again, the control would be hers.

When you dare to look they both whip their heads to you, shocked that you’ve moved. You’ve managed to find an ounce of confidence in the light, or if you believe the voice in your head, a whole gallon. “I don’t know what game you’re playing pretending to be people, first at the house and now this. I didn’t tell anyone about this,” you motion a hand at where they're standing, “clearly that was my mistake. So, uh-just get out of here and I won’t say anything else about it.”

“Sweetheart, we ain’t playing games here and we ain’t leaving.”

He steps towards you, a finger pointing to the floor to reiterate that he’s staying put. You wrongly assumed this would be as easy as it had been at Mrs. Halls when they'd run so quickly, forgetting that you'd had an audience there.

“You are if you don’t want me to call down to security. I’m sure the cops would love a case like this—there’s an eyewitness!”

Y/N would never in a million years be able to describe where the sudden anger that consumed her had come from. She was hardly an agitated person. She could be sad or sarcastic, she’d been known to give a measured but scathing comeback and some would even call her curious. That’s not to say she’d never been angry, she had, but anger was never the first thing she chose to be, or feel. It was always such a demanding emotion. So, then this agitation was almost foreign to her and the way it forced her hand, more so.

“Maybe we should…” Not Sam starts before he’s interrupted.

“No Sam. We need that file if we’re going to stop this thing and right now this is our only option.” He points at you now signaling that you are the ‘this’ part of his sentence; their only option.

In another life, she might have rolled over rather than stare down the barrel of this argument. She might have seen the opportunity to get rid of them by giving them something small, like say confidential information, and done it without question. This was not her old life, nor the old Y/N. This was the new life she hadn’t realized was starting. The funny thing was she hadn’t needed to know. All she’d needed was this man in front of her to force her into a rage and as if by magic, she had begun to transform.

You push past fake Dean to make your way back to your desk, “that’s not happening. All client information is property of First National which means it isn’t mine to give. Not to mention the fact that you didn’t say please.”

Her shoulder connects with his and it's the exact moment she realizes how close he was standing to her. He realizes the same. He’s close enough to grab her and spin her around but Y/N's body shudders tellingly with his fingers pressing into the flesh of her forearm.

“I don’t know what kind of power trip you think you're on but..." He grits through his teeth still holding you.

“Dean, can you calm down?”

The breaking point of your anger turns into a sardonic laugh aimed at him. “You too?” You pull your arm away and get back to your chair. “I can’t get normal criminals breaking in while I’m working late? It has to be two weirdos running around pretending to be the Winchesters.”

It’s clear immediately that you’ve said something neither of them was expecting. You’re sitting at your desk waiting for one of them to stop you from picking up the phone, while they don’t seem to even notice your hand is on the receiver.

“How do you know that? I mean, how do you know about us?” The tall guy that you refuse to call Sam, even in your head, asks.

Two pairs of eyes bore into you waiting for an answer and for some reason your hand goes lax on the phone. “I ran your plate from outside Mrs. Halls because you don’t work with me. And I found these books but I mean, why are you even driving around with fake plates from some books anyway?”

It was a simple question that you were hoping had a simple answer, you know, fanboys or something. Instead of any answer at all, they start having one of those lovely conversations that excludes your existence, again.

“Goddamn son of a bitch, we’ve got to get rid of those things.”

“Charlie said there’s no point now they’re online. How would we even start? Great example right here.”

“So what? We just roll over and die?”

Tall guy, not Sam, takes a reassuring step to fake Dean which means he takes a step away from you and your desk. “This might be a good thing ok, if she knows she can help us track it.”

You refuse to believe it because it’s ridiculous. Those books are works of fiction and there’s no possible way they are real. Because if the books are true then that means monsters are… nope. You live alone so there’s definitely no way. But you should clarify. Even if it’s a thousand percent the most ridiculous thing you have ever heard, you should still double-check.

“Are you trying to say that you’re actually Sam and Dean? Like, you think you’re Sam and Dean from the books?”

It’s scarily-similar-to-the-description-of-Dean who leans in with both hands flat on your desk and growls. “Honey, we don’t think okay, we are them. I’m Dean and this is Sam, and those books you decided to read? Yeah, they’re about us.”

“But that means monsters are…”

“Real. Monsters, angels, and everything between.”

She may not have known about the ticking clock already counting down the remaining seconds of her young life. She may mistakenly have thought that her newfound temper was the reason for her flushed cheeks. She did know one thing for sure. One completely life-changing fact with absolute certainty, because that fact was staring at her with more intensity than she'd ever known. A man named Dean Winchester just told her that every terrifying monster she could imagine was real.

The voice in your head, unfortunately, had not been wrong yet.

Continue to Chapter 5.

5eva tags: @divadinag @darthdeziewok @fluentinfiction @witch-of-letters @supernatural-teamfreewillpage @magnitude101999 @alexwinchester23 Dean babes: @thewinchesterchronicles @akshi8278 @bloodydaydreamer StrangerThanFiction tags: @jaylarkson

#dean x reader #supernatural fanfiction #spn x reader #dean winchester x reader #spn fanfiction #supernatural #spn #spn fanfic #supernatural fanfic #dean winchester #dean winchester x you #dean x you #dean x y/n #dean dean the soft lil bean

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lov3nerdstuff · 5 years

Text

Wicked Game {Part 2}

~Professor Hiddleston AU~

*Tom Hiddleston x reader*

Part: 2/30

Words: 4k

Warnings: Professor x student (college AU), little language

Summary: After transferring to a new university for the last year of your master's, you meet Professor Hiddleston and soon find yourself unable to stay away from him.

A.N.: I really suck at summaries, I'm so sorry 😅 this is a slow burn romance with lots of pining 💗 this chapter is sweet but a little painful, sorry not sorry 😁 but you're gonna love the next chapter so stay tuned!!!

[Part 1] [Part 2] [Part 3]

All Parts can be found on my Masterlist!

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Your alarm blared loudly, making you groan and hit the snooze button. It was too early and too cold outside of your bed, especially after the long night you'd had… So you just lay under the warm covers and thought about the day ahead. Today, you'd see Hiddleston again and you were determined to not be caught off guard by him once more. After all, you didn't even know if he was worth swooning over and all you could tell was that he looked like a god and was nicer than an angel. Wow, that thought didn't help at all.

After another fifteen minutes filled with scrolling through various apps, you finally felt ready to tackle the day and got out of bed with a long sigh. You were in dire need of coffee and made a mental note to stop by the small coffee shop you had noticed yesterday on your way to class. For now, your first problem was that you didn't really know what to wear to class today. Usually questions like that didn't bother you much and you just wore whatever was decent enough, but today you felt like making an effort. You were trying to convince yourself that it wasn't because of Hiddleston, though.

After you had finally settled for black skinny jeans, a dark green wool pullover and boots with semi-high block heels, you added some dainty golden jewelry and already felt like you looked a lot nicer than ninety percent of the rest of the year.

As you went to pack your bag, you realized that you still hadn't found your keys. Sighing you put on some music and dug through your whole room, without any results. The damn keychain was gone and you sat down on your squeaking bed in despair. You'd had such high hopes for your last year and for the new college… but at the moment, everything was going pear shaped. It was getting quite late and you still wanted to get some coffee, so you packed your books and supplies into a leather backpack (mindful to not repeat yesterday's mistake of bringing a broken satchel that wouldn't close), then wrapped a big scarf around yourself and made your way to the metro.

The ride wasn't too long, just enough time for you to get out your headphones and listen to a few songs. In no time you reached your station and made your way towards the coffee shop you'd seen yesterday. It was on a quiet corner a little off campus and to your surprise not all that many students were inside. Must be because of the Starbucks that was right on campus… You didn't mind Starbucks, but preferred good coffee over status symbols.

You ordered your favorite beverage in as large as possible (yes, it was necessary) and waited patiently for your order while quietly singing along to the song you were listening to. When the customer before you received his order, the minimalist logo on the cup caught your attention. Wasn't that the same kind of cup Hiddleston had kept in his office yesterday? That's when an idea struck you, an idea both stupid and very much necessary after making such a fool of yourself. You'd bring him coffee as a thank you for being so nice.

"Excuse me…" You turned to the girl behind the counter. "Uhm… is there any chance you'd remember the tall man with the incredible blue eyes who was here yesterday morning?"

"Kinda curly hair, glasses, handsome as fuck?" She chuckled.

"That's him." You smiled back. "Do you still remember what he ordered?"

"Uhm, yeah, I think so." She thought for a moment. "Must've been a large filter coffee with a tiny dash of milk, no sweetener but a teaspoon of cocoa. He was very precise about that."

"Then please add that to my order." You said and let out a breath you didn't know you were holding. It was set, you'd bring the man in question coffee. Maybe that was inappropriate, but if you could build a good (and professional) relationship with him, maybe he would be willing to supervise your thesis at the end of the year. You'd worked so long for those degrees and he seemed like a good fit since he was an expert in both fields of your study. For now, that was a good enough justification for your behavior.

A moment later you picked up your order and slowly made your way to class. This time around you knew how to read the weird room number on your schedule: first the tower, then the floor, then the corridor and finally the actual room number. That truly was one disadvantage of a bigger university… too many rooms! Making your way towards your room, you continued to silently sing along to your music in an attempt to ignore the people around you until you reached your destination.

The room was open but yet empty, so you made your way to the second row (first would've been too… weird, after yesterday), set down the coffees and your bag and finally sat down yourself. There were still ten minutes to go until your class would start, so you closed your eyes and enjoyed the music for a while.

"You can sing really well." His voice made your eyes snap open in an instant and you had the immediate feeling of a dejavu. You hadn't even realized that you had been singing along loudly, but obviously you had, and just embarrassed yourself in front of your professor once again.

"Mr. Hiddleston!" You shrieked, stopping the music and putting away your phone and headphones. "I didn't notice you coming… Sorry."

"It's alright." He smiled as he set his bag down at the front. "Have you considered joining the university's choir? I mean it's none of my business, but I'm sure they would welcome a great voice such as yours."

You blushed furiously, and he also seemed to be taken aback a little by his words. For a moment, the whole room was silent.

"Uhm…" You remembered the coffee and rose to your feet, taking the cup and slowly walking towards the front. "I… I brought you coffee. As a thank you for yesterday. You really saved my ass with those room numbers…"

His eyes widened slightly as he slowly reached out to take the cup from you. Then, for a short moment, he just stared at you in disbelief and you felt your heart sink to the floor and even lower. It had been a bad idea after all, stupid even, how could you have thought…

"That's very thoughtful of you, but not at all necessary." He finally said in a kind voice, breaking your downward spiral of thoughts. "I'm just glad I could help." Then he smiled once more as if nothing had happened.

"I just thought you'd appreciate it." You smiled slightly and went to sit back down.

"I do." He muttered quietly as he took a sip, frowning once more once he tasted his signature mix. The irritation and surprise in his face made you smile a little too widely and you would've paid quite a bit to see it again.

"How…?" He laughed, pointing at the cup and then at you.

"I'm good at guessing." You shrugged and couldn't help but smirk at him. However as he rose an eyebrow at you in amusement and pushed his glasses up, you laughed out loud.

"I asked the barista in the coffee shop. I noticed how you had their cup on your desk yesterday, and that gave me the idea in the first place." You admitted, shaking your head to yourself.

"Very clever, Miss L/n…" He mused, taking another sip with an expression of pure bliss and you followed the example.

"I hope you'll say the same after class." You chuckled, getting your books out of your backpack and hoping that your heart rate would slow down soon. But his voice was like honey: once you'd enjoyed its sweet sound, you were bound to be drawn in and kept within it's comfort again and again.

Mr. Hiddleston walked back to his table at the front and also grabbed his materials from his bag, preparing for the class ahead. Meanwhile a bunch of other students filed into the room, taking their seats around you. A girl with green hair and quite a few piercings sat down next to you, throwing a judging look at you.

"I'm Sky." She said simply, waiting for a response.

"Y/n." You smiled at her without any judgement, which she obviously didn't expect.

"You… you're new here, right?" She asked, now a lot friendlier.

"Do I look that lost?" You chuckled, thankful for the distraction from staring at Hiddleston.

"No, but I've never seen you around. What's your major?"

"I'm doing a double degree in cultural studies and literature." You sighed. "It's my last year."

"Wow…" Sky said, clicking her pen a few times. "Because of him?" She pointed to the front where Mr. Hiddleston stood, flipping through a fancy green journal that instantly caught your interest. However you remembered the conversation you were having and shook your head a little too eagerly.

"No!" Your voice sounded an octave too high. "I… I don't even know him. I…. I've been in this degree for two years already, and this is only my second day at this school and…"

"Woah, calm down!" Sky laughed. "I was just kidding!"

You let out a shaky breath and tried to smile. "Not funny…"

"Well, but funny is that everyone is crushing on him." She mentioned around the room. "That's why his classes are always completely crowded. He's a darn good teacher, but pretty demanding."

"Good to know." You sighed. "What's your degree?"

"Literature." She shrugged. "Only one degree, two more years to go. I'm not that much of an overachiever."

You snorted, shaking your head at her comment. "I'm aiming for a career in academics. One gotta stand out to get there, you know…"

"Oh geez, Hiddleston will love you then…" She chuckled.

"So, you've taken his classes before?" You assumed, looking at your new acquaintance with sincere interest.

Sky opened her mouth to answer, but Mr. Hiddleston interrupted your conversation to start the class.

"Hello everyone. I'm Professor Thomas Hiddleston and this is my lecture about advanced literature analysis in context of hermeneutic theory. Today, we're going to handle things a bit differently than you'd expect. We start straight with the first topic, formalities will be covered at the end of class." He announced, glancing at you for just a short moment. You looked down at your notebook with a small smile, happy at the prospect of actually learning something. Sky on the other hand looked at Mr. Hiddleston, then at you with an amused smirk, before focusing on her own notes.

The rest of the lecture went by without any further interruptions and you focused solemnly on your studies. Most of the things that were covered today you had already read the night before and thus you could focus on learning the small details he was giving. When the lecture was over and everyone had asked their questions and collected their syllabi, you tried to resist the temptation of staying behind to talk to your professor. You wanted to tell him how much you enjoyed the class and how interesting the topic had been, but you also knew that it would leave the wrong impression. The last thing you wanted was to annoy him and he probably didn't want to talk to you anyway. You'd already had your daily dose of awkwardness when you had bought him coffee.

So you quickly packed up and walked towards the door where Sky was waiting to grab lunch with you.

"Miss L/n!" Mr. Hiddleston called after you, pushing his way through a crowd of female student who wanted to talk to him very desperately.

You squeezed your eyes shut for a moment, pulling yourself together to not become a blushing mess once again.

"Miss L/n…" He said as he stepped closer to you, so close in fact that you could faintly smell his cologne. "I found your keys. In, uhm… in my office… last night." He fished them out of his pocket as unsuspiciously as possible and placed them in your hand. When his fingers brushed against yours, as lightly as a feather, you could practically see him jump and shudder, but he quickly regained his composure and put on a fake smile. The small action made your heart drop a little, but you chose to ignore it. If he was so uncomfortable with you, even at this minimal and accidental touch, you would do him the favor and stay away from him outside of class.

"Wow, thank you! I was so worried I'd lost them." You said and then smiled at him encouragingly. "This class was amazing. Thank you, professor." With a small nod you closed your hand around your keys and took a few steps backwards, before turning around and heading for the door.

"What was THAT about?" Sky smirked as you walked down the hallway together.

"He just gave me my keys back." You rolled your eyes. "I forgot them at his office yesterday."

Now Sky straight-out stared at you with utter amusement until you realized how what you had just said must sound.

"Gosh, that came out so wrong." You sighed and hid your face in your hands. Sky laughed and led you to the cafeteria for lunch, while you told her about your encounter with Hiddleston from the previous day.

"He really brought you all the way to your room? In the E tower?" She asked while chewing on a bunch of fries. "That's kinda cute."

"It's not!" You complained, stealing one of her fries. "He had to teach a class in the same tower anyway."

Sky laughed, shaking her head. "Did he tell you that?"

"Yeah, I told him he didn't have to and he said it's fine, he'd have to go there anyway." You shrugged, sipping on your water.

"Such a liar!" She grinned. "The E tower is for foreign languages, he's got nothing to do there."

You felt your skin heat up for a short moment, but even when it faded, the tingles remained. "Well, maybe he was just trying to be friendly. Or his class was moved to a different room. Who knows. Isn't he always nice to his students?"

Sky shrugged. "He's one of the nicest people on campus, that's true. Except for… well, that won't happen to you anyway."

"Tell me!" You inquired. "Except for what?"

"Well, he gets really into his studies and the topics and stuff… and when students disrespect him or act like asses he can lash out pretty badly."

"And… does that happen often?"

"Nah, don't worry about it. It usually only hits people who really deserve it." She waved it off and you nodded.

"So… you're not crushing on him then?" You asked after a few minutes.

"Hell no!" She laughed out loud. "I'm not into… well, anything actually. I'm very happy on my own. Are you? Crushing on him, I mean?"

You breathed deeply and frowned. "I don't think so… I mean he's nice and stuff, but he's being nice to everyone and it didn't mean anything that he showed me to my room. And most importantly: I don't even know him really!"

"Very true…" She nodded. "And he's a professor after all… if he's interested in anyone, it'll probably be someone who's on the same level as him, like, cognitively and academically and stuff…"

You nodded and finished your sandwich, not even hungry anymore. The feeling of being absolutely ridiculous had taken over your body and you were in desperate need for some alone time to get your messed up emotions sorted out. And you were granted just that, as Sky excused herself for she had a class in five minutes. With a tired sigh you took another look at your schedule and then headed to the library to do some more reading on today's topics.

The rest of the day you spent studying, passing time up to your evening class. For some reason it was way more difficult to focus in this class, let alone to enjoy the topic, as you had already taken pretty much the same class at your old college. But the class was a requirement here and you were determined to do well in it despite the inevitable boredom. So when you got some homework at the end, you headed straight back to the library. It was already eight in the evening and campus was pretty deserted, except for the poor souls such as yourself who happened to have night classes. The assignment was easy, horribly easy even, and you had double- and triple-checked your work by nine thirty and handed it in per email at shortly before ten. Finally done for the day, you raced to the metro to head home (the last train left shortly after ten and you weren't going to walk that damn long way home at night), where the inevitable noises of your roommate's friends made you want to cry. Oh, how desperately you wanted to move out… but yet, you hadn't found a better place to live and honestly, you couldn't really afford any of the fancy apartments around.

When you were in the safety of your room, the day finally caught up with you and you felt dead tired, ready to sleep for a very long time.

Three weeks went by like this: you worked your ass off, every day and every night, in an attempt to distract yourself from your thoughts about your professor. In class, you had gotten so far ahead that you could answer every single one of his questions, sometimes before he even asked them. Sky remained your only friend at uni, but she knew better than to try talking to you about Mr. Hiddleston. She noticed however that after the day he had given you your keys back, he avoided talking to you, or even looking at you if it wasn't for the sole purpose of having his questions answered in class. And you had to admit, it broke you. The more you tried to be good enough, to prove your worth in class, the more he pulled back. It wasn't like he was straight out ignoring you, but after the day you had brought him coffee (which, in your eyes, had gone really well and he had seemed genuinely happy) he had still been very friendly to you, but in a forced, fake way and he was distant if possible. In one of the rare moments when you had caught him off guard in the hallway, his eyes had been a blazing storm, deeply torn and full of questions. When he had looked away, you'd known that whatever you had done wrong, it wasn't easy to be made up, if it was to be made up at all. At least he was still giving you (well deserved) top grades in all your assignments, and as long as that stayed this way you would stay away from him and try to study as hard as possible. However at the beginning of the fourth week, when you were unable to fall asleep on Monday night, you had to admit that you had been lying to yourself. Every time you had gotten the chance, you had heavily insisted that you had absolutely no feelings for and no interest in Thomas Hiddleston. But lying was getting too difficult, it was too exhausting to pretend anymore. So on Monday night, you decided that you would be honest about it, if only to yourself: you were desperately falling for him. Of course you knew that it was wrong and stupid and utterly hopeless, but you'd let yourself dream that in some other world, he could maybe be yours.

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Tom had always thought that the biggest problem in his career would be a student unhappy with their grade, or maybe one of those horrible plays the faculty made their professors do every few years.

But as it turned out, his biggest problem liked to drink coffee in class and to stay at the uni's library until closing time.

The day he had found you sitting all alone in the classroom, singing along to Zombie, he had been more than determined to treat you like everyone else. But when he had heard your lovely voice, singing a song he adored, he just couldn't help but comment on it. And that's when things had started to get really difficult for him. You had brought him coffee, his favorite kind from his favorite coffee shop… of course you didn't have any ulterior motives behind that, but he had been momentarily stunned by the kind gesture. It was really uncommon, sure, but he'd appreciated it so very much… more than he should have. For that day's lecture he had noticed how his eyes had darted back to you whenever possible, and he had felt horrible about it. If it hadn't been for your keys, he would gladly have gotten some distance between you and him. And then your hands touched… and he was gone, lost in the desire to be closer to you. You had complimented his teaching, then left quickly. Oh, he had felt so stupid after that, especially when the usual bunch of female students had tackled him and followed him all the way back to his office.

During the three next weeks he had tried once again to force you out of his brain, but you made things very difficult for him. The things you knew, your brilliant opinions and ideas… he didn't even have to ask, you could always tell what he would be saying next. And if he would've let himself, he would've spent the entirety of class only talking to you. However he feared that the two of you had slipped into rather the contrary of what he wanted so badly: you stayed away from him as much as possible if not to answer a question, hardly even looking at him. And he had known it was for the better if he stayed away from you as well. He had felt creepy and wrong for wanting to be near you, and surely it would only get him in a lot of trouble if he acted on this… whatever it was.

The worst thing was that he didn't even know anything about you and he had absolutely no reason to even feel the way he did… but that's just what it was about, he WANTED to get to know you, as more than just another student. And the fact that almost every girl was practically chasing him while you did everything to stay out of his way was probably a good thing too. He didn't know if he could deal with another direct encounter with you, outside of class… he didn't know if he could keep himself from doing something stupid. Like asking you out, to grab a coffee with him. Or to help him grade the first-year assignments. Though the first idea would be more fun.

For now, on a stormy Monday night, he sat in his apartment, drinking a double Jameson on ice and asking himself if he would lose his interest in you if only he didn't act on it. After his fourth whisky he came to the lasting conclusion that he wouldn't do either: he won't allow himself to act on it, but he would allow himself to dream.

_______________

Tags:

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@lotus-eyedindiangoddess

@foodthatsgoodforyoursoul

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@spookycatqueen

@wegingerangelica

@exygon

@izzy10718

@jenna-sakura

@kinghiddlestonanddixon

Everyone who's crosses out, Tumblr wouldn't let me tag! I'm very sorry about that...

If you'd like to be added to the tag list comment down below 💗✨💚

#tom hiddleston x reader #professor tom #professor hiddleston #professor loki #tom hiddleston imagine #tom hiddleston fanfiction #tom hiddleston #tom hiddleston x you #tom hiddleston x y/n #loki of asgard #loki fanfic #loki odinson #loki #loki (marvel)#loki imagine #loki series #loki fluff #wicked game

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