#HE JUST CANT HELP HIMSELF ITS LIKE A COMPULSION OR NEED TO SHOW OFF

[out-of-context-batfam]

Batman: The Adventures Continue #11

#ITS NOT ENOUGH YOU SCARE JIM GORDON BUT NOW KIDS TOO?!!! #LESLIE THOMPKINS IS NOT SO EASILY STARTLED LIKE JIM GORDON #SHE IS UNDOUBTEDLY PISSED THAT BRUCE SHOWED UP WHILE SHE WAS WITH A PATIENT #HE JUST CANT HELP HIMSELF ITS LIKE A COMPULSION OR NEED TO SHOW OFF #dc comics #batfam #batfamily #out of context #batman the adventures continue #batman #bruce wayne #leslie thompkins #funny #dammit bruce #why must you do this #appearing out of thin air #leslie thompkins is unimpressed #mood #500

[kristal-dawn-art]

D&D Player Character Profile

BASICS Name: Avalynn Starsinger (AH-vuh-lin) Nickname: Ava (AY-vuh) Race: High Elf Class: Ranger/Rogue (Hunter/Arcane Trickster) Background: Sage Level: 18

(There’s a lot of info, so under the cut we go!)

AC: 20 HP: 169 STR: 14 DEX: 20 CON: 19 INT: 19 WIS: 13 CHA: 8 Passive perception: 22 Languages Known: Common, Elvish, Dwarvish, Infernal, Sylvan, Thieves Cant Skill Proficiencies: Arcana, Athletics, History, Investigation, Perception, Stealth, Survival Tool proficiencies: Thieves’ tools

Equipment: Studded leather armor+2 Longbow+3 3 quivers of arrows (2 of regular arrows, 1 of adamantine) 2 shortswords

Treasure: Amulet of Health Ring of Protection Cloak of Displacement Tome of Clear Thought Daern’s Instant Fortress Vorpal Scimitar

BACKSTORY The only child of Taeranan and Amaranthea - a moon elven fighter and wood elven rogue, respectively - Sael Starsinger was used to a semi-nomadic lifestyle. When the family of three wasn't traveling, they lived comfortably enough in their residence in the Foreign District of Ravens Bluff. Otherwise, it was the open road for them. 

The trio's infrequent travels put them in a position to gather treasures of some kind; gold, silver, and copper were used to buy luxury textiles, well-made garments, and various trinkets to stock the rather successful shop that the former adventurers tended in the sprawling port city they called home. A few of the treasures they found were offered to the more discerning visitors to the shop, while the rest were exchanged for more coin.  

Having accompanied her parents on their travels from an early age, Sael found it hard to befriend others her age, but she didn't mind; there weren’t many elven children to begin with, and she preferred the company of the written word. When she wasn't training in the ways of the sword with her father, or honing her archery skills with her mother, she could be found sprawled or curled up under a tree, book or scroll in hand. As she grew older, her curiosity and thirst for learning brought her more and more frequently to the library nearest her home, where she caught the eye of its attendant librarian - an elderly wizard and a retired adventurer himself. He took a liking to the quiet young elf - though she would soon be older than he, by all rights, but in many ways still less experienced. Needless to say, the two eventually became close friends, and she would keep him company whenever she elected to stay behind while her parents ventured off.

One day, about a year after the elf came of age and chose the name Avalynn, the family was on yet another of these expeditions and had just left a small farming and mining town where most of the inhabitants were good friends of theirs. Inexplicably, the three found themselves facing a small group of fiends; none knew why the evil creatures were there, let alone if they would target the town, but they all decided to dispose of the fiends just in case. Amaranthea managed to lead three of them away, leaving Taenaran and Ava to deal with the rest who stayed. As a full-grown bear had been the most dangerous creature Ava had had to face so far, she found herself overwhelmed by two fiends and would have been finished off had her father not taken an attack meant for her. Rather than lose her wits, Ava was overcome by a supreme focus she had previously known only when absorbed in a favorite book. From that point, her aim was true, her sword strikes deadly. She remembers very little of the events after that; when she next awoke, she was in a cart watching over her father, and the cart was on the way back to her hometown.

Longing to learn of her mother's fate and mortified that she hadn't been able to hold her own, Ava decided to set out on her own once her father had recuperated enough to be left alone. What better way to hone one's skills than to constantly put them to the test? Seeing the fiends had hammered home the fact that townsfolk lived under threat of more than just wild animals, and Ava decided that she wouldn't just hone her fighting skills - she would use them to try and become the common folk's first line of defense against the evils that lurked beyond the borders of civilization. After purchasing some supplies and being gifted a pair of Taenaran's shortswords, Ava paid one last visit to her wizard friend. Upon learning what had transpired, he promised to look after her father while he recovered, allowing the young elf to venture forth, not quite as burdened as she would have been.

PERSONALITY While still as curious and as observant as when she'd first started out, Ava is no longer as naive, nor as soft-spoken. She usually stays quiet while taking out enemies from afar so her companions at the front line aren't overwhelmed, but will speak up to inform others of a new discovery that could help in the battle, or if directly addressed by an opponent. Almost as strong as her curiosity is her compulsion to do what she can to keep her party alive, whether through healing her companions or eliminating hostiles as quickly as possible. She's the sort who will empty her purse if necessary to buy potions and spell scrolls before a quest, knowing full well that a healing spell or potion may be the difference between someone regaining consciousness and that same someone needing to be raised from the dead. Outside of combat, she's less reticent and thinks nothing of wondering aloud rather than keeping her thoughts completely to herself. This is especially true when she believes she knows something that may be of use to the party. She tends to judge others according to their actions rather than appearance or their personality, and any personal objections to a fellow adventurer are set aside in favor of cooperation with them. 

As serious and driven as she is in combat, she is awkward when encountering average townsfolk, especially those who treat her as almost godlike or show some aspiration to be like her. When with other adventurers, however, she thinks nothing of giving them advice, perhaps even mentoring them for a time if needed. Trivia - Because of all the languages she's learned, her elven accent is very faint. - She's inwardly pleased with her high intelligence because it has come in handy in several adventurers, with a recent instance being when she closed a portal in Melvaunt that led to the Nine Hells despite not being a pure spellcaster. - Her desire to gain information on the enemy even while in combat has led to her coming quite close to death several times (if not outright dying). - While she’s entertaining thoughts of returning to Ravens Bluff, she’s also tempted to get a small house in Elmwood. She’s particularly well-known in the community, but it’s also where she’s most comfortable because of its location.

Avalynn “Ava” Starsinger, art (c) me [Kris/Kae] BG found on Google (I believe it’s from an anime? Just not sure which one) Dungeons & Dragons (c) Wizards of the Coast

#dawnlit drawings #krisart #kristart #kris's art #my art #digital art #Dungeons and Dragons #Dungeons & Dragons #DnD #DnD player character #Dungeons and Dragons PC #DnD PC #DnD OC #high elf #ranger #rogue

[yfere]

meta something i can't get over- it's episode 66 and caduceus is still so- the best i can describe it is "formal" with the m9? like he still calls them mr fjord and miss beau and when he and fjord have their religious talk in the most recent ep, for example, he says "You have great friends"- he doesn't include himself. not "we" but "you". i dunno maybe im not getting something but it's just weird to me, considering how long he's been with them now, how distant(?) detached(?) *something* he is

(same cad anon) and yet- sorry to just. throw this at you but its been bugging me for ages and your takes on stuff are always incredible to read- he’s also so weirdly close. like, in the same religious convo, he asks fjord to just “let us take care of you”. so its like. i cant tell if thats just a Caduceus Thing, or if he really hasnt had very many close moments with the group. aaahhh i love this guy but i dont Get him at all anyway i’m done now. :)

This is fascinating stuff, I could talk about it all day. There are a lot of what look like contradictions to Caduceus and how he interacts with people, ways he shows affection and emotion that really don’t resemble how anyone else approaches the group. We can see, for instance, that he very much views his role as that of an adviser and a caretaker–it’s what he’s good at, the type of social script he learned at the Grove, and it’s also what he likes to do. He only began liking his time on the ocean once he started feeling “useful” to the group, like his skills were Helping Them Achieve Something. His primary form of communication after Confusion is Sage Metaphors, and the sheer strength and stubborness with which he holds to his particular ideas about how the universe works and how it is appropriate to act results in him constantly offering somewhat forceful, somewhat parental/coach-like advice to the others. That’s not to say Caduceus thinks of himself as a parent, but his focus seems to be on Helping Them Become Emotionally Stable and Helping Them Reach Their Potential, (while they help him reach his), while at the same time he holds very specific ideas about good ways vs bad ways for them to reach that potential. 

And he cares for them in other ways too–Caduceus, arguably even more so than Caleb and Jester is a compulsive gift-giver, a crafty DIY guy who makes things for the sole purpose of giving them away–fixing a sword for Fjord, making copper door chimes for Caleb, taking a single spare moment in the Barbed Fields to weave a sunhat for Yasha. His projects, even when they’re simple, show a great deal of thoughtfulness and are made for functionality– showing understanding of Fjord’s need to be useful, Caleb’s ever-present anxiety and paranoia, hell, Yasha being pale and likely to burn! He takes gifts that other people have given him, like the tree, and makes it into a communal area for all of them, with spaces for all of their gods. 

So it’s true that he cares about them, but it’s also true that he holds them at a remove. At a time when Caleb and Jester are calling the M9 a family, Caduceus is drawing lines in the sand–in his religious conversation with Fjord, he talks about “his” family, and “Fjord’s” friends. Because Caduceus already has a family, and not one that can be restructured and absorbed into the M9, like Nott’s family and Jester’s mother can. A family that doesn’t actually resemble whatever mess the M9 are to each other. Caduceus keeps to formal address, and while this is a quirk I personally nevereverever want to go away, it shows not only politeness but a reluctance to engage on a familiar level, to acknowledge a personal and enduring attachment.

If I were to speculate, I believe Caduceus is viewing his project and his attachments with the M9 as transitory and somewhat professional in nature. Not in the same way Fjord thinks it’s transitory, in that Fjord refuses to decorate his room and fears either they will pack up and leave or he will be personally booted from the group the second he’s not professionally useful so there’s no use getting comfortable. Caduceus’ version is more that he sees a definite End to the M9′s relationship, and believes they are following a Direction, however meandering, towards that End. Once they have helped each other fulfill their destinies, Caduceus imagines himself going back to the Grove and continuing to do what his family has done for generations, what they are Supposed To Do. Just like how you handle a mourner in the Grove by offering them help and guidance, and keeping a professional distance before sending them off to live their life away from you, it looks like Caduceus is treating the M9 in large part as a collection of mourners he can offer mutual aid before they set themselves free of each other.

The trouble is that the M9 aren’t customers and mourners it’s necessary to keep a professional distance from, they probably wouldn’t want to float out of his life when all is said and done. And Caduceus, who has only ever interacted with The Family He’s Known All His Life and Outsiders/Customers (he didn’t even have a friend like the Traveler) doesn’t yet know how to alter his social scripts to handle these new relationships he is seeing and participating in.

#+10 for sweet anons #critical role #cr spoilers #cr meta #long post #this is a mess of an answer I'm sorry #caduceus clay

[xxsovereignsarayaxx]

Elizabeth Mikealson - What If?

Authors Note: Welcome new and old readers to Elizabeth’s story! Feedback is amazing and you can check out my other works and other chapters to this story and many others here. Happy reading xoxo Word Count: 1950 Warnings: None. Pairing: Elijah x Original Female Character.

My name is Elizabeth Mikealson and I'm the wife married to the noble original vampire Elijah Mikealson.

As I sit in the passenger side of Elijah's expensive black Porsche scrolling through my social media waiting for my husband to return from his call outside. We had word gotten to us that Rose and Trevor the two vampires on the run from us had gotten their hands on the Petrova doppelganger. The drivers side opens and Elijah rejoins me after several minutes on the phone. 

"It seems Rose-Marie wishes to see us." Elijah tells me. 

"I see, on what grounds?" I ask. 

"Best you see first hand my dear." Elijah finishes and with that he starts the car and we head towards our new destination. 

Hours later we arrived at a house in the complete middle of no-where. 

I turn my head and look at Elijah. "Lijah grass really? My heels are going to sink and get ruined." I tease pulling a pouty face. 

"Well you can either sit in the car and wait or go in barefoot your call darling." Elijah responds in jest.

"Its a good thing I love you and that I keep flats on the back seat." I reply leaning in towards him to steal a quick kiss. 

I slip off my heels and replace them with the black flat pair I had spare. Elijah is already waiting for me outside the car. I quickly open the door to join him, I loop my arm into his own and we walk up to the front door where he knocks and I faint sound of mumbles comes into my supernatural hearing. Sound of panic runs deep within the house. 

The girl known as Rose opened the door a small scared smile upon her a face, obviously nervous. "Rose-Marie. Is there somewhere where we can talk?" Elijah asks. 

"Yes, in here. You have to forgive the house." She replies gesturing for us to enter.

Elijah lets go and has a gentle hand to my lower back letting me enter the house first then proceeds to hold my hand. "Rose-Marie is great to see you, you being on the run for last half a century has done wonders for you skin." I say with a sly smile. 

"Oh, no, what's a little dirt? I completely understand. So tell me, what is it that gives you the courage to call us?" Elijah asks. 

"I wanted my freedom. I'm tired of running. You in a position to grant me that?" Rose replies.

"I or Elizabeth have complete authority to grant pardon to you and your little pet. What is his name these days? Trevor. If I so see fit." Elijah snaps back.

"Katerina Petrova?" My hand tightens in Elijah's. 

"What of her?" I ask in a low growl. 

"She didn't burn in the church in 1864." Rose replies to me. 

"Continue..." I tell her. 

"She survived." Rose continues she swallows nervously. 

"And where is she now?" I ask loudly. 

My tone of voice getting agitated by the second. 

"Elijah you don't seem surprised by this." Rose tells him. 

"Oh, when you called and invited us into this armpit of civilization, which is a mere three hours from the town we know as Mystic Falls, I surmised it had everything to do with Katerina. Do you have her in your possession?" Elijah tells her. While doing so he rubs small circles on the back of my hands trying to soothe my anger. I instantly start to feel better and calmer. 

"No, but I have better. I have her doppelganger." She says proudly. I whip my head to my husband, 

"Elijah that's impossible, her family heritage ended with her. You told me that." I say to him. 

"The facts are wrong." Rose says profoundly looking at us. 

"Well show her to us." Elijah says. 

"Elijah, you are a man of honor, you should be trusted but I want to hear you say it again." Rose asks him. My boiled rage once again intensifies, I let go of Elijah's hand and step towards Rose making her back away. 

"Your right my husband is a man of honor, but me? Not so much when you get on my bad side, if you continue to doubt Elijah I will rip your heart out, and feed the rest of your body to the wolves do I make myself clear?" 

With that Rose nods to me when Elijah decides to step in and take control of the situation before things escalate any further. "You have my word that I will pardon you."

Rose gets us to follow her and we arrive to the main room of the large house. Obviously this house has seen better days with old dusty pieces of fabric covering what little furnishing survived being left here. There we see her. A girl who exactly looks like Katerina. She looks absolutely petrified, but well if I was in a room with an original vampire I would be too, Elijah rushes over to her and sniffs her neck. He lets out a small smile. 

"Human...It's impossible. Hello there" He says dumbfounded. 

I let out a small chuff and wave at her. "Rose you've never fail to surprise me"

"Come now we must be going we have a long journey ahead of us." Elijah says to the girl. 

"Please don't let them take me." She pleads to Rose. 

"Oh, one last piece of business and we're done." Elijah says to her while walking up to Trevor. 

I switch places with Elijah and head over to stand with the human.

" I've waited so long for this day, Elijah. I'm truly, very sorry." Trevor says. 

"Oh no, your apology's not necessary." Elijah says back to him with a hint of sarcasm. 

"Yes, yes it is. You trusted me with Katerina and I failed you." Trevor says with a stutter. 

"Oh yes, you are the guilty one and Rose aided you because she was loyal to you and that now I honor. Where was your loyalty?" He asks in his calm yet stern tone. 

"I beg your forgiveness." Trevor pleads. 

"So granted." Elijah replies and in one swift movement he chops Trevor's head off, it flies and lands on the floor nearby to where I am stood with the doppelganger. Using the outside of my foot I knock the head away from me and send a small glare towards my husband. Rose falls to her knees sobbing. 

"You..!" She cries. 

"Rose you have earned your freedom it would not be wise to start something you cannot finish." I say sternly. 

"Come now." I say to the human. 

"No, what about the moonstone?" She tells us. 

"What do you know about the moonstone?" I ask her. 

"I know that you need it and I know where it is." She responds.

"Is that so?" I reply straightaway. 

"I can help you get it." She continues. 

"Tell us where it is." Elijah interjects. 

"It doesn't work that way." The doppelganger tells him. 

"Are you foolish enough to negotiate with us?" He asks her. Elijah and myself look at Rose. 

"It is the first I have heard of it." She tells us. Elijah rushes over to the girl and tries to compel her, seeing that it isn't working due to the vervain in her necklace, he grabs it by the pendant and rips it clean from her neck and throws it to the floor. He then gets a hold of the back of the girls neck and looks deep into her eyes and compels her to tell the truth. 

"Tell me where the moonstone is." 

"In the tomb, underneath the church ruins." 

"What is it doing there?" 

"It's with Katherine." 

"Interesting." Elijah says to himself breaking the girl from his compulsion. 

The next thing that was heard was the sound of glass breaking on the upper floors of the house. Myself and Elijah turn to Rose, to where she also seems shocked by the noise. "What was that?" I ask her. 

"I'm not sure." She tells me. 

"Who else is here?" I demand. 

"I don't know." She cries out. Elijah grabs the girl and we are on the move to another part of the house. Elijah throws the girl into Rose's arms and I walk cautiously behind my husband. 

"Rose." I say sternly. 

"I don't know who is here." She tells me. By the look of fear on her face I could tell she was telling the truth which lead to the question who was here and what did they want with us.

"Up here." A voice says. 

I use my sped and charge up the stairs to where I don't see anyone. When another voice picks up Elijah's attention to which he is greeted with a stake through the hand. I rush downstairs back to his side. Elijah makes no hassle in removing the stake from his hand. I look around to see that Rose and the girl are missing from our sight. 

"Excuse me. To whom it may concern, you're making a great mistake if you think that you can beat us. You can't. Do you hear that?" Elijah shouts out to the intruders. 

I walk over to the nearby wooden coat rack and snap a part off and hand it to him, I then proceed to break another piece for a weapon to hold for myself. 

"I repeat, you cannot beat me. So I want the girl, I'm gonna count to three or heads will roll. Do we understand each other?" Elijah continues. 

I notice that the girl appears at the top of the stairs, I proceed to walk up them to meet her. "I'll come with you, just please don't my hurt friends, they just wanted to help me out." I nod and gesture for her to walk down with me to which she throws something at me, it shatters and I'm hit with glass and vervain, the vervain burns my skin and I let out a scream and cry out in pain. 

The shock and the agony I am in makes me lose my balance and I start to fall, Elijah quickly speeds up to catch me before I tumbled and lays me down out of the way and the rushes back up to the top of the stairs for him to meet up with one of the other attacks and he shoots what sounds like a compressed air weapon, my eyes were damaged by the vervain and I cant see what is happening so I'm having to rely on my hearing. As I desperately try and pick out the shards of glass out of my face all I hear is grunts and a large thud. I hear the sound of wood pierce flesh and the faint sound of desiccation. I quickly try my best to leave the building so no further harm would come to me and it seems that Rose also had the same idea. I would come back for Elijah after the two other vampires and the human leave.

A few minutes later it was safe for me to return to the house, finally getting all of the glass from my face I walk over to my husband who lay there, a coat rack sticking from his chest. His face grey and veins magnified. I take hold of the foreign object and which one swift tug I pull it from him. I smooth out his hair while I wait for Elijah to wake up. The grey finally starts to drain away and a smile forms on my lips. 

"Its about time." I say with a smile and Elijah pulls me in for a long awaited kiss.

#the originals #vampire diaries #elijah mikealson #Niklaus Mikealson #Stefan Salvatore #damon salvatore #elijah x reader #elijah mikaelson x reader #Mystic Falls #vampires #original vampire #blood #witches #werewolves #rebekah mikaelson #bonnie bennett #bonbon

[i-am-avacado]

Speech and Body Language: A Guide to the Sides-Roman

Roman:

-SPEECH. It’s no secret that roman is the most over dramatic boy this universe has ever known, and thats why we all love him. His speech very much reflects this. He emphasizes nearly every word in a sentence, which makes it seem like everything he says is the start of a shakespearean soliloquy, and he MUST be listened to (this i think, also reflects his insecurity and compulsive need to be listened to and liked, along with the need for everyone to accept his thoughts and ideas as good ideas). There is a moment from brooklyn nine nine that sums up his speech perfectly. Captain holt says, “Talking quietly and then TALKING REAL LOUD. looking away, then looking right in their eyes. Leaning.” his sentences do that thing where they go up at the end sometimes. Not like a question, but just getting louder. The intensity.

-hes an actor, so of course this is how he talks. But when things get serious, he slows down. He speaks slow, quiet, poignantly. He looks at the ground, he internalizes his grandeur. He also does this thing that i don’t want to call a scoff, but like hes not sure what to say. The part in LNTAO where he goes “No, thomas i know. In truth, I...I do feel bad.” between the “I” and the “do feel bad” is where he makes the noise. He does that a lot when things get serious.

-BODY LANGUAGE. He is the most expressive boy i have ever known and i would die for him. He’s an actor, so a lot of his expression resides in his face. Eyebrows, mouth, and pointed blinking accentuate his points. He puts one hand on his hip sometimes as well, but most of his gestures are wild and performative. Arms waving, fingers wiggling, shoulders moving up and down. He’d run around the room if he could. All of this is ESPECIALLY prevalent in WDWGOBITM, i recommend you watch that if you want more info on him.

-his smiles are wide and big and they go all the way up to his eyes and it makes me wanna jump out of a window its so pure. Shows all teeth! Perfect smile. He is very open, he rarely has his arms crossed over or shows closed off behavior, and he is often shown gesturing to the entire group even when talking to one person.

-however, behind all of this, we all know he is very insecure. He cracks jokes to hide it (like someone else we know; *shakes head* right brains, huh?), and he tries to make himself seem bigger than he is to cover up the fact that he feels small. His head is often tilted up, and he looks around a lot to make sure everyone can see him and pay attention. He has a huge ego to cover it up too. (“A role? I am not some bread roll to hold you over while you wait for your dinner, i am the main course!” little overdone, dont you think?). He is passionate and impulsive. Sometimes he is reckless and rude. But he cares deeply about the things he loves and will do anything to protect them. This is part of why he hides his insecurities, so as to help thomas accomplish his goals without having to worry about more than he should, i.e. roman.

-roman is the embodiment of “but wait, there’s more!” he has so many layers to explore under all that paint and i cant wait for thomas to do more with him. Petition to see romans room!!!!!!! Im kidding, but itd be cool!

TLDR; roman is an expressive boy but sometimes uses those expressions to make it seem like hes not as insecure as he really is. He wants to be paid attention to, just on his terms.

Logan

Patton

Virgil

#roman sanders #sanders sides #writing fairy #writing the sides #avacado speaks

[waitinginthedarke]

Sometimes Rain Falls

A BTS Fanfiction

Type: AU/Alternative Universe

Summary: Sometimes a normal life is a good one to lead; its nice…its easy… But sometimes, normal isn’t the way that things were meant to be. And when you’re chosen as a possible candidate for one of the kingdom’s 7 princes, life isn’t as nice and easy as you always presumed it to be…especially when you catch the eye of more than one of them…

Trailer

Masterlist

Chapter 12

She looked peaceful.

Her dress floated around her as though caressing her limbs with the lightest of touches, her pale cheeks almost seeming to make her glow and the way her hair curled in loops and waves around her face perfectly framed the cherubic expression mimicking calm.

But it’s the way she stares blankly up at the stars that tells you she was anything but at peace.

A quiet sobbing interrupts you as you stare at the Princess floating in the fountain, the husky, deeper coos of despair calling to you from the grey, blue and black tones of the dream, and forcing you to quietly walk around the stone basin, frowning when you catch sight of the back of someone curled in on themselves behind the fountain, the mop of hair all too familiar to you.

‘Taehyung?’

Calling his name has him lifting his head to look cluelessly up at you, his unfocused gaze slowly zeroing in on you until he seems to realize it was indeed you stood before him.

‘Y/N?’

‘Tae, what happened?’ you ask quietly, hurrying over and dropping to your knees beside him, reaching your hand out immediately to pull him towards you and cradling him against your chest as he continues to cry.

‘I-I couldn’t stop him…I couldn’t-I tried to save her-‘ he cries, his voice breaking repeatedly as he sniffles, attempting to get himself under control, and you continue to hold him tightly to you, widening your eyes as you understand what he’s saying, lifting your head quickly to scan the area around you immediately in search of Namjoon.

‘Tae, we should go. If he’s still here-‘

‘I wont let him hurt you, Y/N.’ he cuts you off quickly, a steely resolve entering his eye as he looks up at you, appearing so determined despite the tear tracks on his cheeks, that for a moment you’re taken aback…

…but that’s before you hear the sound of gravel crunching under foot, and you look over to the opposite side of the fountain-

-and you see Namjoon’s blazing purple gaze staring right back at you.

‘I wont let him hurt you, Y/N…’

It was like waking up with a new pair of eyes.

It started with the way the light was spilling into the room at a different angle, the warmth on your toes sticking out of the bottom of the duvet making you hum in approval. You felt like a cat as you stretched, pushing your arms out in front of yourself and frowning when you take notice of the beautifully white bed sheets that were encasing you, the black door that stood across the room from you being very obviously not the door of your own room, and, in fact, you quickly realised that none of the furniture in the room was yours either. The shifting of a palm on your bare stomach has you breathing in quickly, pulling your belly in in momentary surprise and confusion as you look beneath the sheets, before you pause for a moment with the sight that greets you. A smile slowly pulls at your mouth as you recognize the smooth skin of his knuckles as it spread over the back of his hand, becoming intricately patterned with veins that decorated it, the slender, yet man-like fingers that curled whisper-like against your stomach making your breath tremble from your lungs as you become distracted by the sensation. You could hear his quiet breaths that whispered across your neck, the sound indicating to you that he was still asleep, and you couldn’t help but think how sweet it was that even in his sleep he was caring for you. As gently as possible, and with heat flooding to your face when you realise how little the two of you were wearing, you turn over to face him, laying back next to him and smiling up at his peaceful expression, the look being so beautiful and angelic on him that you find yourself reaching up to push his fringe back from his face to see it more clearly. Although as soon as your fingers start softly raking through the silky strands of his hair he subconsciously nuzzles into your hand, a low hum escaping him, and you become distracted from how beautiful he was by the adorable way that he was reacting to you, complying with his needs and continuing to comb his hair back from his face, smiling all the while.

As you petted him you couldn’t help but cast your mind back to the night before, staring blindly into space as you recapped everything that you’d been told…

The Princes were immortals.

According to Namjoon they were the most prestigious of their kind and as a result of being immortal they survived on blood.

They had fangs and their faces changed when they revealed their true selves, and after witnessing Namjoon speed across the room, you thought their strength was much more advanced to that of the everyday human.

They also had magical powers that allowed them to control things, …although you still didn’t know Hoseok’s…and really the whole magical powers thing seemed a little ridiculous…

Although…now that you think more about it, and you cast your mind back to the previous evening, you realize… you’d just accepted what Namjoon had said last night as truth…you’d been so taken aback by what he was saying, that you’d just swallowed his tales about what the Princes were, about them having powers; taking these things as explanations for the strange things that had been going on…

…but he hadn’t ever explained to you what had happened to Taehyung’s princess.

And no amount of detail about magical powers, or ridiculous sounding tales of immortal beings that you had found yourself accepting as truth, was enough of an explanation as to why you’d seen the Princess dead in the fountain. …Even when he’d admitted to erasing your memory about her, you’d never questioned him…you hadn’t felt any fear towards him either…

…Now that you think about it…the whole time he’d spoken to you, you’d felt…fine.

Namjoon = Memory…Jin = control…Yoongi = Energy ….Jimin = Emotion-

But he hadn’t been there. At least…you hadn’t seen him there.

Your mind boggled while you tried to add everything up in your head, and you continued to stroke Hoseok’s hair, not noticing that he’d sleepily opened his eyes to peer up at you, blinking the white film free from his irises, watching you as you mentally decided that Jimin must have been the only way you were so calm and unmoved by what you’d been told…

…or maybe it was Yoongi…

…either way, you realized you still needed to get answers about what had happened that night before you could really accept what Namjoon had told you.

And you were going to get them before anything else bad happened.

‘You’re so beautiful.’

His croaky, deeper than usual, morning voice pulls you from your thoughts, and its almost as though you’re staring at him for the first time as the connection of awareness of one another is made between the both of you, your new knowledge of him, and what he was, causing your mind to expect for him to look different, or be different-

-but he was still the same Hoseok; just as beautiful, just as sweet, just as caring and gentle.

‘How long have you been awake?’ he almost growls from his sleep clogged throat, groaning at the sound of his own voice, despite the amused grimace on his face, before rolling onto his back and pulling you half way onto his chest, smirking innocently down at you when he remembers you were wearing his shirt.

‘Not long.’ You respond, smiling happily up at him, and biting your lip excitedly when your eyes lock, his seeming to dance with white flecks and you cant help but bring your lips down on his, wrinkling your nose at the slight morning breath you were both sporting, but not being able to let it ruin the moment as you slowly caress his mouth with yours, grinning all the while.

‘How are you feeling?’ he asks as he begins to slow down the kiss, his thumbs grazing against your cheek to try and gently pry your lips from his, and you cant help but chuckle when you open your eyes and realize that he’d rolled you over at some point and was now hovering above you with a softly inquisitive expression, the curve of his brow showing concern.

‘Happy?’ you ask confusedly, still sporting a smile as you try to strain your neck up to touch your lips to his, but even after he lets you kiss him for a moment, he still proceeds to shake his head slightly, his lips brushing yours with the movement.

‘I meant…after yesterday…what happened…’ he murmurs, the words reluctant to leave his mouth and you pause as you realise what he was angling toward, sighing quietly as you look down between your bodies rather than at him.

‘I still feel the same about you…I still want you-I..I mean, I don’t think its fully sunk in yet.’ You murmur shyly, biting your lip and glancing timidly up at him when you feel his finger touch beneath your chin, encouraging you to look up at him.

‘We have all the time in the world. I want you forever, therefore I will wait for you just as long…I wont pressure you for anything-‘

‘What about turning me into one of you?’

You don’t know where the question had come from, but it was almost like some kind of compulsion had forced the words from you, and the second you realize what you’d said, you wanted to curl in on yourself and disappear.

You couldn’t bare to look up at him, hearing the way he stops breathing, the thought dawning on you that you had yet to really address the reason you’d been brought to the castle in the first place; the reason having become a lot clearer with the revelation the night before; to become an immortal bride.

‘You never asked last night…’ he murmurs, the sentence following your question making you assume he was on about you turning into one of them and you can feel anger bubbling in you at the thought that you were ‘supposed’ to be the one to ask, rather than him tell you despite you knowing almost nothing about it. But he’s quickly shutting down those thoughts when your eyes lock with his and he speaks again.

‘You never asked what my power was.’ He clarifies, his expression neutral, although you could still see a slight downward curve of his lips at the corners, the sight making your heart twang with a need to erase the image, but before you could do or say anything, he’s climbing off of you and pulling you to sit up on the bed, cupping your face with his hands as he kisses your forehead.

‘Let’s get dressed. I want to show you something.’

An hour later, the two of you had taken a pair of horses from the stables and Hoseok had lead you across the fields and through the forest, the two of you laughing and grinning all the while as you’d raced each other. You watch him slow his horse to a walk as the two of you approach what seems like a large densely overgrown bush, the plant-like anomaly seeming to span for miles either side, acting as what you assumed was a border for the castle’s grounds, growing so high that even on your horse you had no way of seeing over it. He slides off and comes to stand beside your horse before you could do the same, reaching up to help you down and you almost leap at him in your happiness, making him chuckle at you as he spins you momentarily before setting you on your feet, watching you with a knowing expression- although you were unaware of what it was he was thinking.

‘Where are we?’ you ask after a few moments of him just watching you, feeling your cheeks heat as he brushes a strand of hair that had come loose during your ride behind your ear, kissing your forehead before catching your hand and beginning to pull you toward the wall of leaves.

‘This is my happy place.’ He states, his voice growing soft as he speaks and you look up at him to see the sentimentality burning in his eyes, his fingers lacing gently with yours as he stops before a slightly sparser section of thicket.

‘When I first learned about my power…lets just say I wasn’t too happy about it. My brothers…their powers are much more…instant…they are able to control things, to manipulate people at a whim, with the consequences being rather…well…inconsequential.-

-I’m not able to be as impulsive with my power.’ He muses, his eyebrows pulling together and you subconsciously squeeze his hand to offer comfort, the move instantly making the corners of his lips twitch up in a smile as he glances at you from the corner of his eye.

‘It was because of my power that I discovered this place. I was so angry that I tried to run away, to ‘escape my fate’ if you will…I ran for ages…and then I found this wall…and I found this-‘ he says, stepping forward suddenly, his free hand reaching forward to the sparse patch of bush and you raise your eyebrows as he begins to pull you toward it…and then through it.

Before the twigs and leaves could scratch your face or your clothes he’d curled himself around you, continuing to pull you through till you could suddenly feel warmth on your face, and you look up…

It was a cliff edge.

Or rather, it was the most dreamlike tiny meadow over-crowded with multitudes of flowers and soft meadow grass, that within 10ft dropped away to reveal the rest of the kingdom…your home.

‘As far as I know, im the only one that knows about this place. I’ve never known any of my other brothers to speak of it, and im almost sure they would have said something had they been here before.’ He chuckles humourlessly, letting go of your hand so that you could explore the small space, and you’re so distracted by the beauty of the tiny bubble of land that you don’t see the way he closes his eyes as your fingers slip from his, a broken sigh leaving him.

‘Its…Its just so beautiful.’ You say, biting back a smile as your fingertips trace over the tulip heads, the sunflowers rising above them and the maple leaves falling from above to frame the flower bed. You cant help but touch everything, your breath hitching with each new flower, each bramble, and each berry, finding yourself becoming continually distracted by the view of the kingdom, the yearning in your heart for the home that you’d left, continuing to subconsciously pull at your heart strings till you’re standing on the cliff edge, looking down at the river that separated the castle from the towns below, the brief question running through your thoughts, wondering how deep it was…

‘What is your power?’

Its as you’re staring out at the view of the kingdom, imagining that you could still smell the fresh bread from the baker who lived next to your house, could still hear the children singing as they ran through the streets, and could still feel the warmth from your mother’s arms, that you remember why he’d brought you down here- a part of you hoping that he was about to tell you he had a way for you to return home.

‘…I can control time.’

You turn quickly to look at him when the sentence computes in your mind, the shock of his impossible statement causing you to take a stabilizing step back-

-off of the cliff.

Before the breath that you’d been holding had even left you in your shock, his arm was around your waist and your arms were in a stranglehold around his neck, the hedge hiding the area filling your vision when you manage to open your eyes, and you realize he’d pulled you back so suddenly in his shock that he’d managed to launch you both to the other side of the clearing in his haste.

‘Are you okay?’ he breathes in your ear, his quiet pants licking against the inner alcove of your ear. You only manage a nod in response, tightening your arms around him and burying your face in his neck as you try to regain your bearings, being greatly helped by Hoseok as he presses gentle kisses to your temple and hair once he’d managed to calm himself, leaving you unaware that his façade had slipped in his panic and that he’d appeared momentarily in his true form.

‘I didn’t mean to shock you-‘ he goes to attempt to apologize when you still hadn’t spoken after a few minutes, but you quickly shake your head as you pull it from the alcove of his neck, sniffling back tears that had been caused by adrenaline as you look into his eyes, drawing in a deep breath as you smile gently at him, touching your palm against his cheek and smoothing out the concerned look he was shooting you, his warm brown gaze filled with worry.

‘Tell me.’

Walking through the castle didn’t feel the same since you’d found out.

Even when you’d shuffled down the corridor with him earlier in the day when he’d dragged you to his secret Cliff side cove, the place you’d come to call home had felt like a new person, the metaphorical stranger holding its hand out in greeting by way of pleasant smiles offered by servants and the Prince’s hands, but you found yourself hesitant to accept it.

It was even more strange now that Hoseok had told you about his power.

‘I have the ability to turn back time.’ He’d said, keeping a calculated, watchful gaze on you as you let his words sink in, your mind trying to fit the pieces of the Princes’ puzzle (and the past few days) together quickly, but still coming up with half a dozen loose pieces that just wouldn’t slot into place.

‘I say turn back, simply because that’s the only way I’ve ever really used it before. …Although, I have paused time,… but in a lot of cases the up-keep to make sure no-one ‘unaware’ of my powers becomes freaked out by me continuing a conversation out of nowhere, or suddenly disappearing and reappearing with something-…well..it just becomes confusing very quickly.’ He explains, the calm note to his voice helping to keep your head in the moment, and you realize that this was one of those rare moments where Hoseok was just being himself, where he was openly talking about himself without a guard.

‘Have you ever tried going into the future?’ you ask curiously, quickly coughing to clear the note of hesitation from your voice seeing the way he gives you a quizzical look for how calm you were being, before slipping his hands into yours and smoothing his thumbs over your knuckles, holding them between the two of you where you sat opposite one another, in the small clearing of meadow beside the cliff.

‘I…I have tried…but so far I haven’t been able to work out how to do it…other than getting a few glimpses of things that will happen in the next second or minute; a cup falling, or someone walking in the door…I haven’t ever been able to fully disappear into time.’ He explains, appearing almost aggravated by his inability, and you quickly kneel up and pull his head toward you so that you could drop a kiss to his lips, smiling comfortingly at him as you pull back and seeing the way the tips of his ears glow at being caught off guard.

‘I wouldn’t want you to disappear from me anyway.’ You mumble quietly, the words making him smile shyly, shaking his head gently as he looks down at his lap before suddenly pulling you into him, the move making you squeal and laugh as the two of you fall back onto the grass in a heap of limbs and happiness, slipping back into the familiarity of one another as you forget about reality.

‘Me either.’

He’d confessed to you after that about turning back the time so that you’d had to endure two welcoming parties, seeming slightly nervous as he’d explained, but you’d laid with him and listened quietly, attempting multiple times to ask him about why he was so angry about Taehyung, and the little bits of information that he’d told you along the way…but the words never seemed to leave you.

Although, it was probably better that way.

You knew you were denying the truth of the matter that you were all too aware of; that no matter how many times you tried to run away, your purpose at the castle was to become an immortal bride. But after Hoseok had stopped you from talking about it earlier, you couldn’t help but imagine that he wouldn’t force you to…allowing yourself a selfish indulging in false pretences.

However, that wasn’t the only thing that was bothering you.

Your mind, throughout the day, continued to return to the Princess in the fountain, the dream you’d had the night before being testament to that fact, and you had the creeping suspicion, that if you didn’t find out more about what exactly had happened, you were going to continue to be in danger from forces you couldn’t see.

…And then there was Taehyung.

You hadn’t seen him since the dream you’d had whilst waiting for Hoseok the night before when everything had been revealed...the dream that had been so real…

…you almost wanted to believe that you’d been sleep walking. …

‘Why are you staring at me?’

You bite back your grin at his words as you sit on the window seat across from him, raising your book just enough to hide your smile from him and pretending to go back to reading.

‘Because you’re beautiful.’

With just the tiniest glance up at him you see the way the tips of his ears flare a deep pink, and lowering your book a little you can see the way his cheekbones had followed suit, his own book now covering his mouth to prevent you from seeing his smile at your words.

‘Stop being cute and go back to your book. You were the one who insisted on sitting in this dusty library.’ He mutters, humour clear in his voice, and when you lock eyes with him over both of your books you’re about to answer him with a witty come back about him turning back the time to change your mind…

…but then you catch sight of something out the window.

‘…What is it? What are you looking at?’ he asks with a jovial tone when your pause goes on for too long, leaning forward toward you and following your line of sight-

To the fountain.

‘Why are you staring at the fountain like that? Was someone there?’ he asks, turning his head to look back at you and surprising you out of your thoughts by dotting a kiss to your cheek, smiling at you and biting his lip as he sits back in his seat appearing completely oblivious to what you could be thinking about, and remaining slightly closer to you than he had been before.

‘No…I was just…just thinking-‘

‘About?..-‘

Before you could reply to him the door to the library is suddenly opened and you both look up to see Jimin and Jungkook waltzing into the room, chattering away and smiling over at you when they realize the two of you were in the room too.

‘Good Afternoon, Hyung, Y/N. How are you both?’ Jimin asks, smiling his boyish grin as he walks over, the expression dulling slightly with the closer he gets, and you cant help wondering if he was using his power in that very moment; trying to sense out your emotions, or already knowing that you were nervous with the two other Prince’s presence in the room; your mind instantly on high alert since this was the first time seeing any of the other Princes since learning the truth.

‘We’re well, thank you, Jimin.’ Hoseok responds for you both, taking your hand languidly into his and smiling at you radiantly for a moment as you get distracted from your staring at Jimin to look at him, before he looks back over at his younger brother.

‘What have the two of you been up to today?’ Hoseok goes on, continuing to stroke his thumb over the back of your hand, his other sat on your knee, and you feel the edges of your mouth curl up in a smile at the movement, becoming side-tracked by the feel of his skin against yours…

…but that was before Jungkook spoke up.

‘Well, we were meant to go for a hack on the horses with the girls, but Jimin’s Princess is taking a little longer to wake up from the change-‘

‘Jungkook!’ Jimin quickly snaps at him, smacking his hand against the younger boy’s upper arm and giving him a look that could kill.

‘What?’ the younger Prince asks, eyes blown innocently wide, and you only realise how tightly you’re gripping to Hoseok’s hand when his other begins to stroke gently over your knee, bringing your gaze up to his to see him watching you steadily.

‘I thought you said she knew?’ Jungkook asks in a murmur, the question clearly only meant to be directed to Jimin, but you’re aware everyone is waiting for your response, and so you quickly swallow down your surprise and answer him yourself with an almost too bright smile.

‘Well it’s a bit late to go for a hack, but if you guys are bored, its almost time for dinner, we could go together-uh…I-…’ you start tripping over yourself when your brain begins to question if they actually needed to eat food, despite having shared the dinner table with them multiple times before, but thankfully Jimin saves you before any awkwardness could incur.

‘That sounds great.’

You sigh heavily with his warm words, smiling timidly up at him as he grins at you, and instantly feeling yourself relax, standing up quickly as sudden eagerness fills you and pulling on Hoseok’s hand to get him to follow you, frowning slightly when you see him scowling lightly at his younger brother, but not being able to ask any questions before he’s slid his arm around your waist and you all begin to make your way to the dining room.

‘Are you okay?’

You smile at his whispered words, turning your head towards him where his face was hidden in your neck and nodding gently as you lean into him where he sat beside you at the table, the two of you going unnoticed amidst the chaotic debate that was being argued across the dining room table and that had been happening for the past 20 minutes.

‘Hey! You cant do that to him! That’s unfair! We were arguing theoretically, you cant just suddenly use your powers on him!’ Jungkook argues as Yoongi renders Jimin exhausted in his seat, Mina having gone to hurry over to him, but not before Namjoon stops her and Jin rolls his eyes at Yoongi, the other boy suddenly sitting bolt upright in his chair, and the minute he shuts his glowing blue eyes in an attempt to over-ride Jin’s control of him, Jimin is able to stop himself from his precarious position almost falling off of his seat, his energy returning to him.

‘Do they always do this?’ you murmur to Hoseok, layering your hand over his on your waist and chuckling quietly when he nods and hums into your skin, sitting back and resting his other arm along the back of your chair as he witnesses the state of his brothers himself.

‘Having the new Princesses in the castle made it almost civilized…at least whilst you all didn’t know about us.’ He murmurs, trailing off slightly at the end, and the nervousness in his voice over the fact he was still unsure how you felt about him being an immortal, despite you telling him multiple times that he was still the same person to you, has you leaning back into him to press a kiss to the edge of his lips, your hand laying gently on his chest as you smile up at him.

‘I guess I’ll have to get used to it then.’

The smile that slowly begins to pull at his lips with your words has your insides fluttering, and your heart skips a beat when he suddenly catches you up in his arms and kisses you hungrily, not caring about the others around the table.

‘Yah! Hoseok! Stop with the PDA!’ you hear Jin call, although his voice sounds distant compared to the pounding of your heart in your ears. However, you reluctantly peel yourself away from your prince, laughing at his reluctance when you feel his hand tighten on your waist.

‘Ignore him, keep kissing me.’ He whispers eagerly, his nose grazing yours and the grin that stretches his face has you giggling bashfully as you bury your face in his neck, hearing Jimin and Jungkook laugh where Hoseok had obviously began to glare at his older brother over your head.

It’s strange how hearing the other boys talk without looking at them has you noticing his absence for the first time that evening, the way Hoseok presses a kiss against your temple not really factoring into your mind as you frown behind him at the view of the gardens outside, and the darkness that encapsulated them.

‘Do you want to head to bed?’ Hobi asks quietly when he feels you tense up slightly in his hold, gently peeling you from his shoulder so that he could look you in the eye, and you force yourself to smile up at him as you push the dark thoughts surrounding the absent brother from your mind, shaking your head as you turn back to the table and take in the way everyone was smiling and laughing with one another, the feeling of comfort and calm pulling you in.

‘Not yet…just 5 more minutes.’

TAEHYUNG

So close.

He had been so close.

Even when he forced his eyes closed against the images of her mouth being so close to his, he couldn’t not see it.

He’d been so close.

So..SO close…

…If only Hoseok had stayed away a little longer.

He could feel the change rippling over his skin as he curled against the fire place in his room, having been hiding there for the past 18 hours, trying desperately to absorb the burning heat of the flames so that the urges would go away…but so far it was to no avail.

He ached so much.

His thoughts wouldn’t stop flitting from the feel of her beneath his fingertips to the almost agonizing hunger that was running rampant through his body, both for blood…and for her.

He hadn’t fed in days. He couldn’t bring himself to after seeing his Princess in the fountain…how pale…how lifeless she’d looked.

His throat felt like someone was dragging their fingernails up it from the inside, the need for sustenance screaming from every vein in his body, but he knew if he just held out…just a little longer…

…

He couldn’t tell Jimin.

As much as his brother loved him, Jimin wouldn’t help him when he found out that Taehyung was going against his father.

Besides the boy was currently so pre-occupied with his Princess that he had failed to see Taehyung’s blatant use of power upon his brothers- although that was probably because he forced himself to keep his emotions in check when he was around him.

Jin and Yoongi wouldn’t realize what he was doing until it was too late, they weren’t the most observant members. And Jungkook continued to be so infatuated with obeying everything his older brothers asked of him that he hadn’t been paying any attention to Taehyung.

Hoseok had noticed…but since he’d used his power to erase those two days to make her forget what he’d told her- in an attempt not to let him hurt her, he probably thought Taehyung had gone back to ‘normal’.

He hated how simple-minded they thought he was.

Although, he’d noticed the way Namjoon had been looking at him at the party before, when he’d found her begging him for information. Despite his perfect façade of obliviousness, Taehyung had caught him watching him closely from the corner of his eye, his stare lingering a little too long and being a little too intent, causing Taehyung to clue into his older brother’s suspicions. He wanted to curse at him for being so observant, but really he only felt thankful toward him; thankful that he didn’t just brush Taehyung off like his other brothers did.

…then again…

Namjoon had been the one at the fountain…

The fire burned in the Prince’s eyes as he stared into the flames, clawing tightly at his arms to try to keep the monster from rearing its head, breathing heavily as he continued to lose himself in the vision he had conjured up for her the night before…

…finding himself growing more infatuated…

…and ever hungrier…

(T.B.C)

#bts #bts fanfiction #bts fluff #bts angst #bts smut #bangtan sonyeondan #bangtan boys #jung hoseok #hobi #jhope #bts jhope #bts jhope fanfiction #bts hoseok #bts hobi #hobi fluff #jhope fanfiction #jhope fluff #jhope angst #kim taehyung #kim taehyung fluff #kim taehyung angst #bts jhope smut #namjoon #jin #jimin #yoongi #jungkook #kpop #bts supernatural au

[honestgrins]

Inhuman || Klaroline

Klaroline Infinity Day 6 - Other Supernatural

Klaus is almost ready to break his curse, but he refuses to do so without Katerina finally doing her part. She has managed to elude him so far with the help of various allies, but the latest distraction proves to be far more interesting to Klaus.

"Funny," Klaus noted with a smirk. "Katerina usually prefers to employ male cannon fodder."

The little blonde merely stood before him, unafraid. She didn't even bother to reply. Her head canted to the side as she watched the Original draw closer to the door of his hotel room, where she had been waiting.

It was something of a game for Klaus in his hunt to break the curse restraining his wolf, to allow Katerina Petrova's various pets enough of a fight to be fun for him. The werewolf from whom she had stolen the moonstone lacked the strategy of battle; the vampire brothers she bounced between were too busy competing for her favor to put up a decent showing. Even Elijah was easily a pawn to the wily doppelganger, though at least daggering him was an actual challenge.

This girl, however, smelled young. Klaus couldn't sense any power, as he could on a vampire, wolf, or witch. Humans were often too stupid to realize the danger he posed, but they could still feel a frisson of unease in his sheer presence. She seemed almost serene.

But he had gone to great trouble in collecting the necessary ingredients to break his curse. Not using Katerina as his vampire sacrifice would be such a waste. He had followed her trail to a small college campus where blood and sex were easy to come by - her favorite habitat. Unable to draw her out from hiding, Klaus left hints of his arrival through well placed rumors and the occasional murder of a curly-haired brunette.

Katerina sent a message of her own: bleeding sorority girls appearing twice a day at his hotel room door, none of whom held any recollection of the bitch. Compulsion was a favorite of hers, he supposed. Well fed, he had no problem playing the long game as long as she stayed in town.

Then he found her witch.

"Did you know the Bennett girl?" Klaus asked teasingly, daring to brush the blonde curls from the strange woman's face. "I figured the grandmother was the draw for Katerina, all that knowledge and disdain for us Originals, but the girl… Oh, she had power." He gave a wicked smirk at the twitch in her otherwise impassive expression. "To die so young."

"At least it was quick," she replied hoarsely. "I won't thank you for snapping her neck, but I can be grateful she didn't suffer."

It was a small mercy, one of expedience rather than any real remorse. Klaus needed Katerina to retaliate, giving her an opportunity to make the mistake he needed to finally capture her.

The blonde waiting for him in front of his door as he returned from killing the Bennetts had been an odd form of retaliation, but he wasn't complaining.

Letting his fingernail drag down the skin of her neck, Klaus watched her curiously. "You don't seem like the type to have seen much suffering, love." He dug his nail in deeper, bringing her blood to the surface. When he expected to feel hunger at the scent on her skin, however, he frowned at the utter lack of desire to rip open the pulsing vein. Even after a thousand years, Klaus had never felt such apathy at the sight of human blood.

Human blood.

"What are you?" he hissed, pushing her up against the wall. Mikael-induced paranoia aside, it was the unknown threat that kept Klaus ever vigilant to his status in the supernatural world. He always knew the enemy he was up against, and he didn't like that Katerina had managed to find a weapon he never knew existed. Shoving the girl back harder, he yelled it in her face. "What are you?!"

His fingers pressed into her flesh, only to feel her shoulders expand with sharp spines biting into his hands. He let go immediately to jump back, and he watched in confusion as her skin slowly receded back to her bare shoulders. For a moment, he would have sworn her shoulders had puffed like a blowfish. "What are you?" he repeated more softly.

Standing straight, she walked toward him proudly to poke a sharp talon in his chest - literally, a bird's talon right where her index finger should be. "I'm not a what, I'm a who," she snapped. "My name is Caroline Forbes, and you don't scare me."

"But Katerina must if you do her bidding," he countered.

Caroline rolled her eyes and gestured for him to open the door to his hotel room. "Are you going to let me in, or what?"

"Why are you here? I don't negotiate with the help."

"I hear you don't negotiate at all," she pointed out humorlessly. "Look, you killed my friend. I think that buys me a frank conversation about what the hell you're doing on my campus and chasing after the one person left in the world who cares about me."

Just curious enough not to kill her outright, Klaus nodded as he swiped the key card to his door and led her inside. "Katerina Petrova cares for no one but herself."

"Katherine Pierce saved me," Caroline answered hotly. "Hate her all you want, but I don't want to see her dead for some shit that happened five hundred years ago. God, get a grip."

Anger flared within Klaus, and he clenched his fists in rage. "For the last time," he gritted out, "what are you, and why are you here?"

Curious or not, his patience had its limits.

Caroline scoffed as she made herself comfortable on the couch. "You're like a billion years old, right? Surely, you've heard of mutants from time to time."

"I have," Klaus nodded in realization. "But as witches and werewolves pass down their genetic traits to manifest in predictable ways, mutants seem to defy logic and reason of current science."

With an almost imperceptible shudder, Caroline met his eyes with hers blazing. "Yep, we're all just freaks for people to write off or use for science. Geez, no wonder Kat hates you."

"Someone's projecting," Klaus commented, shrewdly noting her aversion to the scientific aspect of her situation. "I assume Katerina rescued you from some dreadful experimentation."

Caroline hardened, her skin almost turning into stone as he watched. "I'm what they call a 'survivor,' practically immortal because my cells can somehow mimic animal adaptations. My father trained me to use this power at will, since I was a young child who scared the local swimming hole by staying underwater for too long. Instead of drowning like they feared, I just grew gills. I thought Dad was teaching me to protect myself from a world that would only love me if I could fit in."

Though he didn't want to, Klaus felt an odd kinship with the young woman lost in her memories.

"But he didn't want to protect me, he just wanted me to be strong enough." Klaus could hear her teeth grinding. "I needed to be strong enough to withstand the real work performed by the Augustine Society. He was a founding member of this 'scientific research group' meant to extort genetic abnormalities for whatever findings could improve life for the 'normal' people, only to find out he had a mutant freak for a daughter himself. All my life, and he just wanted me as a test subject."

Klaus knew what it meant to be held against his will, even by his own mind when the hunter's curse had taken hold of him. "Were you alone?" He didn't like the thought of that.

"Not even in my abilities." Caroline chuckled, though it sounded sad. "Armando Munoz," she said reverently. "He was my friend. He tried to save me, and they annihilated every cell in his body just to prove that they could. Even at absolute zero, our bodies were able to survive like we were in a deep hibernation. The last time they put him in the freezer, they tested his ability to adapt without molecular movement. He couldn't."

Standing, Caroline began to pace the room and Klaus tracked her movements carefully. "I was going to be next, but Kat swooped in killed them all in a blink. I didn't even know vampires existed, let alone all the cool tricks you get."

"Some would call your abilities 'cool tricks,'" Klaus said, considering what she had shared. "Absolute zero. It's not very sporting to tell me how to kill you."

"They did it in the name of bettering the human condition, despite the inhuman depravity their science required," Caroline spat. "Even you're not that cruel."

With a dark smile, Klaus stood to crowd her space, though she didn't cower to him. He liked that. "You'd be surprised, love. I did kill your friend, after all."

"In a mostly painless way," she countered. "You still had shit reasons to do it, but you don't pretend you're anything less than the evil you are. The Augustine Society thought they were the good guys."

Klaus leaned forward, mere inches from her face as he regarded her cool expression. "If your enemy is already dead, then why are you here fighting Katerina's battle? Surely, you've earned a bit of rest. Travel, perhaps? Rome or Paris; Tokyo is nice this time of year."

Scoffing, Caroline pushed away from him. "My bag is already packed," she admitted. Klaus frowned as her legs seemed to disappear into the decorations of his room. "I'm not here to fight you, Klaus. I just had to keep you occupied long enough for Kat to leave the country. Did you know the cuttlefish can blend almost perfectly with its surroundings in the ocean, the camouflage is unmatched in the animal kingdom."

He gripped her arms, even as they too disappeared within his firm hold. Klaus could feel her flesh and the pumping of her blood, but even his vampiric senses could barely see her. "Do you really think I'll just let you go?"

"Do you really think you have a choice?" she challenged before a second set of arms suddenly appeared from behind her still visible torso and snapped his neck.

When Klaus awoke, he found himself utterly alone and thirsting for something even greater than his vengeance against Katerina.

He wanted Caroline Forbes and the challenge she presented.

#klarolineinfinity #klaroline drabbles #klaroline #my writing #round and round

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Invisible unicorns: 35 big companies that started with little or no money

Joseph FlahertyContributor   Joe Flaherty is director of Content & Community at Founder Collective. More posts by this contributor: Theres no shame in a $100M startup Overdosing on VC: Lessons from 71 IPOs Venture capital is a hell of a drug, and its possible tooverdose on VC, but for most founders that is a champagne problem. More often the question investors hear is how do I get a VC to back my startup? These founders arent worried about how overcapitalization will make their IPO prospects trickier theyre scrambling to get someone, anyone, to sign their first term sheet. Theres a widespread belief among founders that venture capital is a precursor to success. VC is a common denominator of the most successful tech startups, but it isnt a prerequisite, especially at the early stages. Entrepreneurs can prove out quite a bit with little to no capital. Capital wont make your company insightful. If you cant creatively turn $1 into $10, why do you expect to be able to turn $1 million into $10 million? To help illustrate how startups can move forward, here are 35 examples of companies that started with a few thousand dollars, or even just sweat equity, and went on to become exemplars of what I call efficient entrepreneurship. Many of these companies have subsequently earned billion-dollar valuations, some even have billions of dollars in revenue, but none started with anything other than what would be considered a seed round. Most of these startups raised money from VCs, but only after they established the fact that their success would come with or without a wire transfer from an investor. Even now, many of them arent widely known they are the invisible unicorns of the tech industry. So before scrambling to schedule meetings with investors, read these stories. They provide a counterbalance to the VC-centric outlook held by many founders, and provide alternative ways to think about funding. What follows are brief and simplified descriptions of these companies (categorized by approaches they share) and links to stories where you can read more about them. Remember, taking venture capital should be a choice, not a compulsion. These companies show how its done. Figure something out, then ask for money You dont need venture capital to get started in most industries if you can solve a real problem for customers and charge money for it. Here are three ways to think about this: Automate your workflow The easiest way to build a useful product is to automate some part of your daily workflow. This will ensure youve got proven demand for what youre building and a pre-existing funding source for your project. MailChimp: Co-founder/CEO Ben Chestnut was running a design consulting business in the year 2000 and had a stream of clients who wanted email newsletters created. The only problem was that he hated designing them. So, to spare his team the tedium, he decided to build a tool that would streamline the process.MailChimp, a $400 million run rate business, was born. Lynda: Lynda Weinman started as a teacher in need of tools to instruct web designers in the late 1990s. The offerings at bookstores were bland, so she began producing training films that better educated her students. Tutorial by tutorial her company helped software developers and designers improve their skills. She spent two decades building a content library and tech assets that had enough scale to entice LinkedIn to pay $1.5 billion to acquire the company. Start with a capital-efficient product Many entrepreneurs make frontal attacks on industry leaders, usually resulting in failure. This is especially true in the case of hardware. Instead of trying to compete with a company like Apple, these scrappy startups filled the gap left by RadioShack and built businesses worthy of respect and emulation. AdaFruit Industries: Limor Fried started her DIY electronics e-commerce empire as a student at MIT by assembling DIY kits comprised of off-the-shelf parts. Fried merchandised the same building blocks found at electronics stores, but also crafted quirky content that made the prospect of soldering a replica Space Invaders cabinet seem reasonable. Now she has 85 employees and earns $33 million per year. SparkFun: Similar to AdaFruit, Nathan Seidle started SparkFun out of his dorm room by selling electronics kits and oddball components to a coterie of engineers who wanted to explore exotic new sensors and systems. Now his e-commerce empire employs 154 and has revenues of $32 million per year. Solve an existing problem and leverage an existing business model Startups dont have to be particularly innovative in terms of business model. Building a better mousetrap on top of a more modern technical platform, or with a UX layer, can be enough. None of the companies that follow reinvented the wheel, but all wound up creating real value. Braintree Payments: Exchanging money online, without being fleeced by fraudsters, is one of the oldest problems on the web. All parties to a transaction happily agree to pay a fair tax for a superior experience. Braintree built a better tech solution and survived on the proceeds of those transactions for four years before raising $69 million in two rounds of venture capital, which preceded an $800 million acquisition. Shopify: Shopifys founders were looking for a shopping cart solution when they were starting an e-commerce site for snowboarders. Unable to find one, they decided to scratch their own itch and built a bespoke solution on the then red-hot Ruby on Rails framework. It turned out to be a perfect solution for plenty more people, and the founders ran the business independently for six years on the revenue they generated. They ultimately raised money from VCs and later IPOed, which rewarded them with a billion-dollar valuation. Self-reliance rules Many entrepreneurs waste their time playing CEO, crafting a strategy and drawing up a dream org chart for what their business might become. Dont do that. Instead, figure out what you can do, today, to advance this idea using only the resources you have. Ipsy: Sending boxes of makeup to amateur beauticians has become a growth industry thanks to pioneers like Birchbox. YouTube star Michelle Phan didnt have first-mover advantage, but she leveraged her online celebrity (8 million+ YouTube subscribers), relationships with cosmetics brands and <$500,000in seed funding to build a subscription box startup that generated $150 million in revenue before raising $100 million in VC. Capital wont make your company insightful. ShutterStock: Jon Oringer was a professional software developer and an amateur photographer. He combined this set of skills and used 30,000 photos from his personal photo library to start a stock photo service that is currently worth $2 billion. His capital efficiency paid off and ultimately turned him into a truly self-made billionaire. SimpliSafe: People scoff at the idea of trying to bootstrap a hardware business, but SimpliSafes Chad Laurans did it. He raised a small amount of money from friends and family and then spent eight years building a self-install security business, literally soldering the first prototypes himself to save money. Eight years later, the business has hundreds of thousands of customers, hundreds of millions in revenue and $57 million in VC from Sequoia. Everyones money is green Funding doesnt always come millions of dollars at a time. Founders can scrape together money from grants, incubators and angels, or even pre-sales. The savviest entrepreneurs design their business model so they collect payment before they deliver their product, turning customers into a source of growth capital.   Tough Mudder: Track & field entrepreneur Will Dean turned $7,000 in savings into a company with more than $100 million in annual revenue. The secret was pre-selling registrations to races and then using those funds as working capital to construct the electrified obstacle courses that have made Tough Mudder a global phenomena. CoolMiniOrNot: CoolMiniOrNot started out as a website where geeks could show off their ability to paint Dungeons & Dragons figurines. Eventually, the sites founders decided to design and distribute games of their own, leveraging Kickstarter as a channel. They have run27 Kickstarter campaignswhich have raised$35,943,270million dollars of non-dilutive funding. Game on. Sell! Sell! Sell! Usually the best source of capital is a customer, and selling has two benefits. First, you make the cash register ring immediately. Second, you quickly learn what resonates with customers and can use those insights to refine your offering. Scentsy: DNVBs are hip, but they are over-reliant on twee launch videos and Facebook ads to drive revenue. Scentsy sold candles at swap meets when they couldnt afford to buy ads. It wasnt glamorous, but it did give the founders a solid grounding on the messages that resonated with buyers now they have more than $545 million a year in revenue. CarGurus: This app leverages data analytics to help customers find the best deal on used cars, but the companys CEO credits its $50 million a year in revenue, and profitability, to hiring a sales team early in the companys life cycle. Nearly half the companys 350 employees are busy making sales calls, not writing software. LootCrate: LootCrate had more than 600,000 customers and $100 million in revenue before they raised institutional capital. Part of the reason they were so efficient was that the company started charging customers from its first weekend in existence. The founders were at a hackathon, set up a landing page, collected orders and used that capital to buy the geeky goods that would fill the packages. Be miserly with marketing Startup marketers might not want to waste time with unmeasurable brand marketing. Efficient entrepreneurs need campaigns to be additive, immediately. Wayfair: The home goods e-commerce company was profitable from its first month of operation because they skipped brand advertising and bought up hundreds of domain names that were exact matches for common search terms. This model kicked off a decade of profitable growth until they ultimately raised a Series A worth $165 million shortly before going public and earning a market cap that is currently over $4 billion. If you cant creatively turn $1 into $10, why do you expect to be able to turn $1 million into $10 million? Cards Against Humanity: With just $15,700 in funding from Kickstarter, the Cards Against Humanity team built a business that grossed more than $12 million in its first year. Theyve also sustained their brand with a series of canny marketing stunts, selling cow poop, cutting up a Picasso, digging a big hole representing the ennui of a post-Trump America, then selling Trump bug out bags and simply asking for money. These promotions arent cheap to run, but they make enough money to defray costs while earning a disproportionate amount of free media. GoFundMe: Viral marketing is dismissed, rightfully, when it is tacked on to a business model, but it can be a powerful driver when properly integrated into a business model. Paired with hyper-efficient conversion rate optimization (CRO), it can be unbeatable. The founders of GoFundMe were able to use these twin forces to bootstrap a business to the point where it was valued at ~$600 million. Efficiency > Capital Startups are often measured by how much money theyve raised. Its more important to ask how efficiently those companies use the capital. Efficiency doesnt mean penny-pinching, but instead, finding entrepreneurs who orient their business around a technology or business model that is intrinsically more effective at multiplying capital. PaintNite: The idea of combining Monet and Merlot has been around for a while, but the founders of PaintNite wanted to make the model more cost-effective. While their competitors relied on a slow, expensive franchise sales model, PaintNite paired art teachers with existing bars that wanted to sell wine on weekdays and created a business that did $30 million in revenue the year before it raised venture capital. Plenty of Fish: The dating site was founded in 2003 and didnt change dramatically regarding functionality or aesthetics over the next decade. Other sites had more features, flashier graphics and copious amounts of venture funding, but PoF was free and spent most of its resources fighting spam accounts. As with Craigslist, Plenty of Fishs biggest asset was its reputation as a well-stocked pond. The company iterated on the product over time, but never needed massive infusions of capital. Ultimately, the company sold for $575 million. Mojang: The masons behind Minecraft never raised any venture capital, employed just 50 people and earned nearly a billion dollars in profit before selling to Microsoft. The Swedish studio never got sucked into fads like Zynga-inspired social spamming and predatory microtransactions. Minecraft grew by charging users a flat fee, resulting in a $2.5 billion acquisition. Fortune favors the boring Boring isnt a value judgment. Many of the most impressive, successful companies that managed to grow without capital thrived by solving acute, if somewhat dry, problems. If you solve a hard problem, customers will happily fund it. SurveyMonkey was founded in the dot-com bubble of the 90s and though it wasnt as disruptive as peers like Kosmo, it was more durable. It survived the dot-com crash and steadily grew into a nine-figure run rate, only raising $100 million 11 years after getting started. Protolabs does for plastic injection molding what Vistaprint does for business cards, and is currently worth $1.2 billion. Cvent, worth $1.3 billion, builds event management tools and Textura, acquired for $663 million, handles construction management neither typically considered a hot or hip market. Grasshopper is a phone networking company that had 150,000 customers and more than $30 million in annual revenue, but no VC on the books, and was eventually acquired by Citrix. Epic was founded by Judith Faulkner in 1979; the Wisconsin-based electronic medical records provider may be the largest bootstrapped software company operating today. eClinicalWorks was founded in 1999 when the mantra was get big fast, and many of its contemporaries crashed and burned. By focusing on excelling at the dull, yet profitable work of managing clinical data, the company survived and now employs more than 4,000 workers and generates $320 million in annual revenue. Unity became a backbone of the mobile gaming industry by focusing on all of the unsexy aspects of game development, like cross-platform compatibility and bump mapping. They went years without raising capital, but now have a valuation over $1.5 billion, and are more successful than the majority of branded game startups. GitHub took the pain out of version control and became a critical part of the tech ecosystem before raising capital. Qualtrics started as a tool to administer surveys for schools and businesses in a basement in Utah and now employs 1,000 and rakes in $100 million a year, profitably. Blessed are the unfundable Sometimes raising capital is almost impossible. Weve seen companies with tens of millions in revenue, triple-digit growth rates and other advantages struggle to raise even small amounts of money. Fortunately, these startups tend to prevail in the end, despite this apparent disadvantage. Atlassian: One of the benefits of building a startup outside Silicon Valley, NYC, LA or Boston is that there isnt much VC available. This may sound like a curse; after all, how could it be helpful to have no access to capital? It can be a blessing in disguise. This kind of isolation prevents you from daydreaming about what youd do with millions of dollars and forces you to make happy the paying customers you do have. Atlassian, based in Australia, bootstrapped its way to a $4 billion market cap. If it had easier access to funding, they might have found themselves chasing low-quality growth and gone under before they figured out how to scale efficiently. You dont need permission from funders to found and scale a startup. Campaign Monitor: One of the odd features of capital-efficient companies is that their first rounds of funding tend to be eye-popping sums that look more like proceeds from IPOs. This is the case for Campaign Monitor, whose first round of funding amounted to $250 million. Sydney-based Campaign Monitor didnt have easy access to venture capital, so they bootstrapped the business and built a unique technology that offered superior email analytics to companies like Disney, Coca-Cola and Buzzfeed. Time will tell if raising a quarter billion dollars helps or hurts the company, but it is certainly a validation of the progress theyve made so far. The Trade Desk: While he had a unique view of how to power the programmatic advertising industry, founder Jeff Green started The Trade Desk late in the funding cycle for modern adtech. This overcapitalization of the market, combined with investors getting burned by bad performers, made every round of funding a struggle throughout the life of the company. Green was a consummate startup CEO, who raised only $26.4 million in venture capital during the companys first six years and turned it into a billion-dollar business traded on the NASDAQ. How? By embracing the constraints of having less capital, focusing on the highest return activities and building a culture of innovation powered by ideas rather than infusions of capital. (Disclosure: Founder Collective is an investor in The Trade Desk.) VCs arent perfect, and even the best miss out on ideas that seem like sure things. It is shocking how common it is to hear founders talk about how they couldnt sell investors on an idea that went on to become a billion-dollar business. AppLovin founder Adam Foroughi sold his business for $1.4 billion, but found it hard to raise venture capital, even with serious revenue. I couldnt find anyone to give us an investment at what I thought was a reasonable starting point valuation (maybe $4 million or $5 million) and, by the end of our first year of operations, we were profitable and doing over $1 million a month in revenue. The rest, as they say, is history. Takeaway: Avoid designing your business around VC Too many founders orient their businesses around venture capital from day one. Startups used to figure stuff out and then ask for money. Today, they ask for money to figure things out. Outside of drug discovery or aeronautical hardware, this is usually the wrong decision. In fact, making progress without resources is the best way to get VCs to take an interest in your company. The companies mentioned above chose not to raise money for protracted periods of time, but when they did, they had their pick of investors and could set the terms. Our advice isnt to try to bootstrap a business in perpetuity. Venture capital has powered nearly every major tech company from Apple to Zappos. Just remember that you dont need a penny to get started. You dont need permission from funders to found and scale a startup. So the next time a VC tells you they pass, remember these three principles: Its possible to get a tech-enabled business off the ground with no capital. Its feasible to scale a tech business rapidly with very little capital. Its often in the founders best interest to limit the amount of capital they take. If you know of some other companies that self-funded their way to an extraordinary outcome, please let me know.

[viralhottopics]

How dropping acid saved my life

When writer Ayelet Waldman fell into depression she started microdosing with LSD. She tells Rachel Cooke about her extraordinary experiment with acid

Some time ago for reasons that will become apparent I am not allowed to say when, exactly the American writer Ayelet Waldman scored some LSD. She did this, not on a street corner or via the dark web, but middle-class style, through an acquaintance of an acquaintance, for which reason the drug arrived at her home in Berkeley, California, in a stamp-encrusted brown paper package whose sender (an elderly professor, she believed) identified himself only as Lewis Carroll, a fellow resident of her town. Mr Carroll had, however, troubled to write her a brief note. Our lives may be no more than dewdrops on a summer morning, it said. But surely, it is better that we sparkle while we are here. The bottle he enclosed contained 50 drops of vintage quality LSD, of which he advised her to take two at a time. Waldman was delighted. Not to put too fine a point on it, she believed this drug might save her life.

For as long as she can remember, Waldman has been held hostage by her moods. When she is up, she is up; when she is down, she is down. These highs and lows she has managed over the years with the help of therapy and a number of drugs, with which she has had varying degrees of success. At the time of the parcels arrival, though, she had entered a new and much more scary phase.

I was so profoundly depressed, she says. It wasnt the kind of depression where you fall into bed. Ive been through that before, and while its grim, its manageable. This was more of a mixed state, a kind of activated depression, and thats a dangerous place to be. I was doing everything I could to ruin my own life. I was afraid that if I stayed on that track, I would force my husband to leave me, and that I would probably attempt suicide and being a very capable person, I dont think a failed attempt was on the cards.

It was while she was in this state of mind that she stumbled on The Psychedelic Explorers Guide, by the psychologist and writer James Fadiman, who since 2010 has been collecting reports from individuals who have experimented with regular microdosing of LSD and psilocybin, a naturally occurring chemical found in a variety of mushrooms. Fadimans book is certainly not the result of a scientific research project; there has never been an officially sanctioned study of microdosing.

Here comes happiness: Ayelet Waldman at home. Photograph: Barry J Holmes for the Observer

But the people whose accounts it gathered together spoke repeatedly of experiencing, thanks to LSD, increased focus and better mood. They reported rarely losing their tempers, and becoming more fun to be with. None, moreover, had suffered any side effects. To put it simply, they went to bed feeling they had enjoyed that most elusive of things: a really good day. As Waldman read on, she grew envious. How she needed to have one of those! Was this her glimmer of hope? She thought it might be.

Waldman contacted Fadiman, and received a memo entitled To a Potential Self-Study Psychedelic Researcher. The protocol was simple. In order to participate in his international self-study group on the effects of sub-perceptual doses of LSD, she should take a microdose of the drug every third day. The suggested dose was a minuscule 10 micrograms, one 10th or less of what a person would have to take in order to experience an altered state of consciousness (ie to trip).

Meanwhile, she should lead life as normal, pausing only to record her moods, productivity and physical symptoms. Did this sound to be blunt preposterous? It did. Waldman is a middle-aged mother of four who, in addition to writing novels, lectures on the criminal justice system (she is a Harvard-educated former lawyer). As someone who is law-abiding and swotty, nothing in the world irritates her more than hippies, slackers, free spirits. Even people who wont stay on the right hand side of escalators drive her nuts. Ken Kesey she is not. But she was suffering. She had nothing to lose. Why shouldnt she try it, just for a month?

Having found a supplier, then, she did indeed begin taking the drug, an experience she has now recorded in her own book A Really Good Day: How Microdosing Made a Mega Difference in My Mood, My Marriage, and My Life. Its publication is certain to cause controversy. In fact, the madness has already begun. When we speak via Skype, a month or so before it arrives in bookshops, she tells me that only a few days earlier an excitable reporter got in touch to inform her that his editor had given him permission to drop acid with Ayelet Waldman. (Her response to his question about when they might schedule this journalistic endeavour was: Like, never.)

Loved up: Waldman and husband Michael Chabon. Photograph: Albert L Ortega/WireImage

Attitudes to drugs in America are irrespective of those states that have legalised cannabis far from liberal. Trump has appointed to the Department of Justice a war-on-drugs advocate [the Alabama senator, Jeff Sessions] who is so retrograde in his thinking, he believes the US suffers from an under-incarceration problem, she says. Its for this reason that she wont reveal when her experiment ended: there is a three-year statute of limitations on drugs charges. Do I think a white, middle-class lady will be high on his list of targets? No. But in this crazy new world we live in, you cant be too careful.

Its reception will also doubtless be muddied by the fact that she is its author. In America, Waldman is well known as an acclaimed writer in her own right and as the wife of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Michael Chabon, to whom she has been married since 1993. When she writes about herself, moreover and this is something she does a great deal in A Really Good Day people have a tendency to respond with unnerving fury.

Most famously, this was the case in 2005, when the New York Times published her essay Motherlove, in which she declared that she loved her husband more than her children (If a good mother is one who loves her child more than anyone else in the world, I am not a good mother. I am in fact a bad mother.) In the days that followed, ABCs daytime show The View hosted an unaccountably vitriolic debate about Waldman, her neighbours could be heard tearing her to shreds in Starbucks, and her inbox filled with emails from strangers threatening to report her to social services, the better that her children might be taken away.

Waldman is clever and funny and open-hearted. But as she readily admits, even her more sympathetic readers may sometimes have cause to wonder, in the case of A Really Good Day, which aspects of her behaviour her compulsion to tell the world things that others might prefer to keep private among them are simply the result of her personality, and which can be attributed to her illness. It is hard to distinguish between them, she says, almost wonderingly.

Still, she is probably better placed, now, to cope with any onslaught. Waldman is no longer using LSD her experiment really did last for only a month but its effects have, in some ways, been lasting. I miss its anti-depressant quality, and I miss the way it made me focus. It was like Ritalin [a drug commonly prescribed in the US to children with ADHD] without the side effects, which is frankly incredible. But that month got me out of a dark place. Within the first couple of doses, it was like the computer of my brain had been restarted. I was still moody. I had some really good days, but there were also crappy days, and days when it was just the normal shit. Somehow, though, the bad days were not hellish days, and so I had the capacity to work on issues I just couldnt before. Sure, I was hoping for joy. What I got instead was enough distance from the pain I was in to work on the things that were causing it.

Expand your mind: 1960s LSD advocate Dr Timothy Leary, who advised us to turn on, tune in, drop out. Photograph: AP

That work continues. Im still not on an even keel. Im still struggling with my moods. But Im committed to that. Im doing a new kind of therapy that is working quite well, even if not quite so well as it might be if I was still microdosing. If someone sends her a mean tweet in the coming weeks, she is unlikely to respond as venomously as she might once have done, or even at all.

Given its benign effect on her, why didnt she just find herself a new supplier, and continue taking it? There were, she says, two reasons. The first was her complete inability to purchase illegal drugs: towards the end of her book, she describes how, having made contact by text with a dealer, she panics, having convinced herself that Lucy is a police informant. The second was her determination to write a book about her experience: for that to be safe, she had to no longer be using.

If I could have overcome those things, there is no doubt in my mind that I would have carried on. Of course, it might not have kept working; Ive been on medication before that seemed to be working, and then wasnt. But if it was to be made legal, Id be the first in the queue, and I periodically remind myself that, if I get desperate again, I do have the option.

Her book is well-researched and, in the matter of LSD itself, careful and no-nonsense. The drug, a variation on the ergotamine molecule (ergot is the fungus responsible for the disease known in the Middle Ages as St Anthonys Fire) which was first synthesised in Basel in 1938 by Dr Albert Hofmann, has, she argues, an undeservedly bad reputation. The scare stories it trails of young men and women whose LSD hallucinations lead them to jump off high buildings have little basis in reality. Rather, they are largely the result of conservative Americas response to the 1960s counterculture, to Timothy Learys suggestion that people turn on, tune in, drop out. Twenty million people have used it in the US, and millions more around the world, with no ill effects at all.

Its complicated, but when it comes to the drugs possible use in the treatment of mental illness, what you need to know is that LSD stimulates the 5-HT2A serotonin receptor, which in turn leads to the stimulation both of brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), something a pharmacologist described to her as like Miracle-Gro for the brain It stimulates growth, connections, and activity, and of glutamate, the neurotransmitter most responsible for brain functions, such as cognition, learning and memory. (Hence its supposed new-found popularity in Silicon Valley, though Waldman thinks that, in reality, there are more magazine articles about tech dudes using LSD than there are, well, tech dudes using LSD: If there were some mass secret movement, it would have been a lot easier for to get hold of my drugs.)

She believes that during her experiment her neuroplasticity was enhanced, and that this didnt only enable her to work for hours at a time, to achieve a real sense of flow at her desk, but that it also made her happier and less impulsive. What little research has been done backs her up a study at Imperial College London showed that even a single dose of LSD produced robust psychological effects though scientists still dont fully understand the relationship between what happens in the brain, and the psyche.

Why isnt more research carried out? The simple truth is that LSD still carries with it a lot of leftover political baggage. During the writing of her book, the few researchers sanctioned by the FDA (Food & Drug Administration) who are out there were reluctant to allow Waldman to quote them, fearing that to associate themselves with a personal experiment would tarnish their hard-won credibility.

So far, so good. However, when her book is on more personal territory, as it frequently is, Waldman is vastly less cautious, and for the reader especially, perhaps, the British reader this can be, well, excruciating. I know! she says, when I tell her this. Can you imagine what it would be like for me if I lived in London? Chabon, a feminist with whom she shares the childcare, has the power of veto over everything she writes. But because hes a writer, too, this seems not to be something he often invokes. In A Really Good Day, nothing is out of bounds, from their agonising couples therapy (My husbands eyes filled I collapsed in his arms, crying so hard I soaked his shirt), to their sex life (I know you love me, I said, as we made love), to their periodic use of MDMA, aka ecstasy, as a way of opening up their lines of connection. What we did was talk, she writes, of the first time they tried it, in a hotel room theyd booked specifically for the purpose. For six hours, we talked about our feelings for each other, why we love each other, how we loved each other.

Waldman reveals that her moods can be triggered by everything from her writerly insecurities, to the dog, to the sound of her husband eating nuts (she suffers from misophonia, or selective sound sensitivity syndrome): I handed him a handful of almonds, and walked out of the kitchen I heard a crunch, the smack of lips; I felt a wave of anger. She is also fed up that her husband earns more than her, and that she has to share his writing studio, which has an uncomfortable couch: Though hes welcomed me in, I feel like a girlfriend whos been given a drawer in the bachelor pad bathroom. Poor Michael Chabon. The reader begins to feel he is some kind of saint.

Well, he is somewhat saintly, Waldman says. He makes my friends crazy. He gives great gifts. He has impeccable taste in clothes and jewellery. He is a know-it-all, but then, he does sort of know everything. Hes misanthropic, in that we [the family] are all he has space for; he doesnt have any close friends, which I think he would benefit from. I was about to say that hes far better than I deserve, but thats the pathology speaking, because I am a very good wife for him.

Isnt he ever mean to her? Yeah, sure he is. He encouraged her to embark on LSD experiment because he was desperate, too.

Before we hang up, I have to ask: does she ever worry her extraordinarily intense relationship with Chabon on Twitter she has been known to post pictures of her husband, along with a line informing her 15,800 followers just how much she loves him might be another symptom of her illness? For the first time in our conversation, she is hesitant. The gale of her voice drops to a light breeze.

Yeah, I have thought about this. I have said to him: If I were to get healthy, would I still love you, and would you still love me? There is a way that Ive confused needing with loving. I dont want to sound like a Hallmark card, but love is [supposed to be] unselfish, and in my most internal, whirling dark places, I think I need him so badly because he takes care of me, protects me, makes me feel safe. One of the things that saved our marriage in that [dark] period was when I brutally tried to disentangle those things.

The upshot is that she thinks, now, perhaps its OK to need him. After the LSD, when I was having this intense new therapy, I took a drive one night in northern California, where the countryside is very beautiful. I had this thought: maybe I dont love him after all. It was terrifying, and I was crying. But then the phone rang, and it was him. How did she feel then? His voice filled me like a glass of water.

People have been curious, even excited: an extract from A Really Good Day

A fewdays ago, I began tentatively to tell people about this experiment. To my surprise, I encountered few negative reactions. Every once in a while a listener might arch an eyebrow or smile uncomfortably, as if trying to figure out whether her discomfort meant that she wasnt hip enough, or whether I really was nuts. But those have been in the decided minority. Most people have been curious, even excited.

Those with histories of mood disorders were intrigued to hear that my spirits have lifted, that though I sometimes feel the familiar clutch of anxiety in my chest, I am generally able to use mindfulness techniques to make it dissolve. When I told them that I have not gained weight and that my libido has not withered away, they got really excited. The side effects of SSRIs are so ubiquitous and unpleasant that the idea of a medication protocol with fewer of them is thrilling.

Friends who incline to the spiritual were disappointed when they heard that Ive experienced no connection to the divine, but reassured when I mention the pleasure Ive taken in the natural world, the tree outside my window, the smell of the jasmine beside the city sidewalks. Risk takers and hedonists were disappointed that I was unable to provide details of hallucinations. No kaleidoscopic colours, they asked wistfully, no feeling that the floor was shifting beneath your feet? I live in California. The last thing I want to feel is the floor shifting beneath my feet. They urged me to try a real dose. It would change my life, they said, as though my problem is that my life has been too devoid of weirdness. Besides, my life is changing.

Tonight, however, was a different story. These two writer friends are about 20 years older than my husband and me, which puts them firmly in the boomer generation. They were in their 20s in the 1960s. Theyve travelled the world, rejected a life of secure conformity in favour of the risks and rewards of art. What better people to confide in? I thought.

Well, I said, Ive been writing, but not working on a novel. Ive been writing about microdosing with LSD.

What does that mean, the woman of the pair asked? Are you writing some kind of nonfiction article on people who use LSD?

I took a breath and then explained.

Her face froze. If she had been wearing pearls, she would have clutched them. She looked horrified, even disgusted, as if Id told her that Id taken up murdering baby seals. Her husbands reaction was only slightly less disturbing. He smiled uncomfortably and changed the subject. I immediately agreed, yes, the antipasto was delicious, and, no, I didnt want any more.

Their reaction launched a series of cascading anxieties. Will I be condemned for doing this? Will people reject me as a nutcase, a crank, a deluded acid freak? Will I lose whatever credibility I have in the world? Will parents not let their children come over to our house any more, under the misapprehension that I keep drugs in my home?

As soon as dinner was over, I tried the technique for dissipating anxiety that my cognitive behavioural therapist recommends. I took a few deep breaths, exhaling for half again as long as I inhaled. My chest and throat unclenched. The anxiety ebbed. I was calm again. I was OK.

Also, I had some perspective. This couple were young in the 1960s, when Timothy Leary was spreading the gospel of psychedelic recklessness. For all I know, they had complicated histories with the drug that influenced how they responded to me. In all likelihood, their discomfort had far more to do with them than with me.

A Really Good Day: How Microdosing Made a Mega Difference in My Mood, My Marriage, and My Life by Ayelet Waldman is published by Corsair at 13.99. To order a copy, go to bookshop.theguardian.com

Read more: http://bit.ly/2i5NhJg

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