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#also READ murder mysteries! take notes! see how other people do it
fatesundress · 10 months
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⭑ for the love that used to be here. tom riddle x reader
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summary. you and tom are the only muggle-borns in slytherin, until one day he isn’t.
tags. angst, afab reader who is referred to as a witch a few times and rooms with girls but i don't think i ever use she/her pronouns or say the word girl/woman, biggest warning is that this is SO long (idk what compelled me to write a year 1 – post-hogwarts fic but here we are twenty thousand damn words later), blood purity and bigotry, dumbledore is greatly offended by the bonding of two orphans until he can capitalise on it, frequent wwii mentions (specifically the blitz), book clerk tom, MURDERER TOM… ministry reader, kissing, smut once they’re 21/22 May all the minors in the room exit at once, more angst, sad ending kinda, me spreading a very personal and very nefarious tom riddle agenda that is canon to ME but probably only like two other people
note. i need a shower and an exorcism after writing this shit. i'm exhausted. i don't even remember half of it. but i'm also SO stoked, this is my little (very large, frankly) 100 followers celebration! i've only been on here for about a month and the love has been so crazy so thank you mwah mwah mwah ♡
word count. 21.8k (i know... i KNOW)
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You learn quickly that your shade of green is not the same as theirs. The rest of them are emeralds, even at that age — they glitter with their parent’s polish. You are flotsam, sea-sick, envy green; the putrid boiling stuff that brews in your cauldron when you look away for a second too long, and, really, it’s more of a stain than a colour at all. There is a fraction of a second where you find something powerful in that. You are not an easy thing to remove. And then it’s gone, because they want to so badly.
You learn, with a bit less tact, that you doesn’t actually mean just you; that it’s you and him whether you like it or not.
He evidently does not.
“It has to be completely fine,” Tom says to you in Potions, his voice small then but just as practised.
You narrow your eyes. “‘Scuse me?”
“I said the powder has to be completely fine.”
“I heard you completely fine. I know how to read.”
He stares blankly at you before returning to his own station, and that’s that.
It isn’t unheard of for muggle-borns to be sorted into Slytherin, so you’ve been told, but one glance around your common room and you can see it’s pretty damn rare.
There’s Tom Riddle, there’s you, and there’s a seventh-year girl whose knuckles are always white like she’s spent so long with her hands balled into fists that they don’t know how to do anything else. Tom Riddle is a prat, the girl is too old and unapproachable even if she wasn’t, and you are very good at being alone.
That decides it. Flotsam still floats.
Everything is — fine. It’s fine for months; you have no one and need no one and sometimes you catch a jinx in the back of Charms that zips your mouth shut or bends a foot the wrong way (a cruel reminder of how much more these people know than you) and your broom occasionally pivots so sharply the Flying professor has to stop you from careening into a wall and breaking enough bones for a week’s worth of Skele-Gro, but it’s fine. 
…It’s just that he’s insufferable.
The boy is eleven years old and he speaks like he’s stealing glances at an invisible lexicon between every word, more refined than any of the orphans you grew up with which makes you wonder which sort he’s surrounded by, and you take it upon yourself to theorise in passing if you could ever scare him badly enough his real voice would slip and he might just appear human for once.
Only it becomes clear when you’re stirring awake in the Hospital Wing after a mysterious bout of dragon pox (conveniently, all the pureblood children developed an immunity after catching it young) has rendered you bed-ridden and pockmarked, that you don’t think anything can scare Tom Riddle. He’s suffering just as well in the bed beside yours to keep the contagion to the two of you, and he’s all cold, eddied rage under sallow skin and beetling bones. 
“They’re going to kill you,” he says after three days of silence, when the room is dusted in moonlight so thin it’s like squinting through cinema noise or mohair fluff to try to see him.
You blink at the vague shape of him. “What?”
“If you don’t hurt them back, eventually, they’ll just kill you.”
In hindsight, it’s an assumption so hastily bleak only a scared child could make it.
I want to hurt them, you try to say, but for what follows you cannot: I want to hurt them but I’m not good enough to do it.
You roll over and pretend to sleep, and in the morning, you hurt them anyway.
It’s Avery who’s unlucky enough to be the first to test you when you’re three assignments behind in Transfiguration, still a bit groggy from your last dose of Gorsemoor Elixir, and actually, physically green. He tugs your hair and stings your cheek with the promise of “bringing a bit of colour back to your face” and it’s sort of funny how banal it is compared to the other transgressions you’ve been dealt — that this is the thing that makes you bare your teeth, grip your wand in a hand that still can’t hold half of it, and send Avery flying across the room with a Knockback Jinx.
Tom sits with you in the Great Hall for dinner that night, and he never really stops.
You practise spells by the Black Lake between classes and he’s anything but kind about the ordeal, but you teach each other. You end your days with singe prints and sore wrists and you often take more damage than he does, but sometimes, as spring settles in with warm tones (apple and jade and moss — all the greens you’d never imagined), you leave with less bruises than he does. It hardly feels like friendship. It feels much more like purpose.
When summer comes you don’t write to him, and you don’t expect he will either. You don’t suppose you’ve actually written a letter in your life. Instead you try new wand movements under your quilt every night and wait for August’s departure on a big red train.
You sit together when the day does come. He asks you if you’ve been practising. You frown and tell him you’re not allowed to use magic outside of school.
Second year is nothing but monotonous, antiquated theoretics. Most everyone complains. You don’t see why they should — they’re already aeons ahead of you — but that means you finally have a chance to catch up in your less-than-school-sanctioned meetings with Tom while the rest remain practically stationary. 
Deputy Headmaster and Transfiguration professor Albus Dumbledore is imperceptibly less soft with you than he was last year when you make the apparently poor decision to sit beside Tom on the first day, and you file the subtle shift in demeanour into some mental cabinet to review later.
You find workarounds with the librarian, Madam Palles, inclined to sympathy for the poor, orphaned muggle-borns to grant relatively unfettered daytime access to the Restricted Section so long as you keep it tidy and none of the books leave the library. That’s where things get a bit more interesting.
For a month you remain innocuous as can be. You browse through rare historical tombs and foreign biographies that would charge more galleons than you can conceptualise, and you never leave so much as a tea stain on the parchment. You smile at the Madam when you return the key each night, and walk back to the dungeons with your hands behind your back. It is, of course, totally unrelated that a month is what it takes for Tom to master the third-year curriculum’s Doubling Charm. An entirely separate affair when you meet him in the most secluded alcove of the library, slip him the key, and stifle your grin as he duplicates it perfectly. 
You discover Christmas break is your favourite time of the year. Nearly all the purebloods go home. The Slytherin dormitories are effectively halved.
It’s two weeks of earnest, uninterrupted work and sleep without fear of waking up with jelly legs or whiskers.
Madam Palles, most nights, makes a slight, drowsy effort of searching the library for leftover students before she casts the lights out and closes the door. Then, it belongs to you and Tom.
You’re splayed rather ridiculously over one of the big reading chairs on Christmas Eve, Lore of Godelot in hand, enthralled by a chapter detailing his controlled use of Fiendfyre through the power of the Elder Wand.
Tom is cross-legged and sat straight, his brows furrowed in concentration.
“What’ve you got?” you ask, leaning over to answer your own question.
Tom as good as rolls his eyes, holding up the book to give you an easier look.
“Magick Moste Evile?” You scrunch your nose. “Bit much, don’t you think?”
“It’s the stuff they’ll never teach us.”
“I wonder why.”
He steals a glance at your own book and smiles in that smug way that makes you want to slap him.
“What, Tom?”
He shrugs. “You might want to know you’re reading stories about the author.”
You look down. Lore of — Godelot wrote Magick Moste Evile? 
It shouldn’t really be surprising. Three chapters ago your book was recounting his months in Yugoslavia grave-robbing magical burial sites.
“Whatever,” you mumble, “It’s just a biography. Least I’m not reading the words out of his mouth.”
“Well, they’d be out of his quill.”
“Oh my God, Tom, shut up.”
All good things must come to an end. Term resumes and your hackles are back up. 
Abraxas Malfoy, Antonin Dolohov, Walburga Black and the best of the worst of your house have returned, sleek-haired and insatiable and deranged, truly, in such a manner that you don’t think you can be blamed for the instinct you feel every time you pass them to lunge like a wild predator or run like wild prey. All Tom does, though (and so you follow, because he’s standing with you and who has ever done that?) is meet their gazes with equal assuredness. He never seems bothered. He never seems animal. You are still all hammering heart and heavy lungs, and you are learning not to see the world through the eyes of someone who’s only ever had their fists to fight. You have magic, you remember. You’re good at it. You could hurt them, if you really wanted.
Not much is different that summer than the last. The war is hard. The food is hard to chew. You chip a tooth. You’re too afraid to fix it with the Trace on you, but you still smile because you will, and everyone seems put off by that. What is there to smile about? 
You suppose, for them, it’s a question with few answers. 
For you — you’re back on a big red train musing about the functions of muggle warfare with Tom Riddle, chucking a useless card from a chocolate frog out the window and moaning about how you wasted the sickle you found under your seat.
He’s gotten very good at ignoring your theatrics and going right back to whatever it was he was talking about. And you note, unrelatedly, he almost looks like he’s learned how to open the windows at Wool’s. (You dare not suggest he’s doing something so ludicrous as sitting in the sun too, but this is a start.)
Dippet, or the Minister, or whoever it is that’s in charge of the practicality of the curriculum, has become fractionally less stupid in the last three months.
You don’t have to rely on nights in the Restricted Section or weekends at the Black Lake to actually learn something anymore. Of course, without the assistance of those illicit extracurriculars, you wouldn’t be able to match up to your peers the way you are this year, but it’s nice to duel with dummies instead of motioning your wand vaguely over a desk, and you and Tom still climb the notice boards in rapid succession. 
They hate you for it. One of your roommates makes a pointed effort each night to glare at you from her bed like those jelly legs are back on the table, Orion Black (two years younger but just as nasty as his cousin) nearly trips you on your way to Divination, Abraxas Malfoy develops what you think borders on obsession with Tom, and for once it feels almost offhand to not care about any of it.
You’re beginning to think even at its best, Hogwarts is remarkably insufficient. This leads you to books mercifully unrestricted so you can read about a few of the other magical schools for comparison. Beauxbatons is renowned for providing most of the worlds alchemical developments, Uagadou’s early propensity for wandless magic makes it unfathomably more practical than Hogwarts, Durmstrang (though you scoff at their violent anti-muggle sentiment) teaches the Dark Arts as something beneficial rather than unforgivable, and — what do you learn here? Even with the hair’s-breadth of magical leniency you’ve been allowed this year, it’s no surprise so few recognizable names in wizarding history are Hogwarts alumni.
“Let me have a look at that,” you say to Tom one evening, when he’s peering once more over the pages of Magick Moste Evile. He’s a purveyor of knowledge in all forms, but he always seems to come back to Godelot in the end.
He raises a brow, handing it to you like your intrigue doubles his. “No more reservations?”
“Don’t get ahead of yourself. I’m only curious.”
“Curiosity—”
“Killed the damn cat, I know.” You glare at him through the pages. “I think that’s you, in this case though, since you’re the one in love with the bloody thing.”
He shakes his head as he reclines in the low light of the Restricted Section, muttering something that sounds like “ridiculous,” or “querulous,” or something else unimaginably fucking annoying.
You might be wrong. Retract your last quip and expunge it. If Tom’s in love with any book, it’s the behemoth dictionary he’s been spitting stupid adjectives out of since he was eleven.
But Godelot’s musings on the Dark Arts are fascinating enough that you can understand the appeal. He’s no wordsmith, and you appreciate that in a way you’re sure Tom deems regrettable, but his points are straightforward but thoughtful in such a way you can read in them how he was guided by the Elder Wand through everything he did. There’s a stream-of-consciousness to them. Something doctrinal you’re surprised to enjoy for all the obligatory English creed they washed your mouth with at the orphanage.
“Find what you’re looking for?” Tom asks, combing with little interest through the tomb you’d put down in favour of his.
“I’m not looking for anything. I’m just…” You sigh. It’s almost painful to say. “I think you were right, and — oh, shut up, don’t look at me like that — I don’t think we’re learning anything here. Not really; not as much as they do at other schools.”
“Of course,” he says blankly. “Hence this.”
This — restricted books and furtive duels — should not be necessary. 
“You know that’s not gonna be enough. For the rest of them, maybe, but not us.”
He tenses how he always does at the reminder of his difference. And you get it. Sometimes in moments like these you forget the reason you’re here in the first place. It isn’t just the rebellious divertissement of two academically eager students, it’s… survival. What future do you have as a penniless orphan in wartorn London? What future do you have as a muggle-born Slytherin who’s apt with a wand when there are a thousand more your age, just as skilled and twice as pure? 
It isn’t enough to be as good as them. You have to best them, and you have to do it forever.
The night stumbles into an exhaustive silence because you both know it’s true and it’s a bit too heavy right now. The answer isn’t in this room. Just you. Just him. So you sit in the dark and you stare through that muffled nighttime noise playing tricks on your eyes. The worst of the world can wait until morning. 
The worst of the world has impeccable timing.
A fault of both sides of the coin; the muggle world is a travesty and the wizarding world is just a bit fucking late, really.
So there’s the newspaper. It’s October first and the date reads September tenth. School owls are a joke and you can’t afford anything better.
And it’s a dirty, ashen grey. It smudges your green if you ever had it at all. You were born to this and you will return to it always.
BOMB’S HAVOC IN CROWDED PUBLIC SHELTER
MOTHERS AND CHILDREN AMONG THE CASUALTIES
DAMAGE CONSIDERABLE, BUT SPIRITS UNBROKEN
All you can hope to do is pass the paper to Tom and wonder without words what you’ll go home to.
The answer is very little when the summer clouds your vision with dust and you stand dumbly with your suitcase in front of nothing at all. You’d tried your best until your departure to keep up with muggle news, but it had remained, routinely, a month behind with the owls. By the time June arrived you were still holding your breath through May. Tom had attempted to reason with Dippet for summer lodgings at the school but you were both denied in light of the exquisite mercy — the bombs have stopped! The Blitz has ended! Go back to the aftermath and make do with the craters.
It’s a bit ironic that Tom’s orphanage survived and yours didn’t. At least you can finally see what all the fuss is about.
In truth, it’s more strange than anything. You feel unreasonably like you’re impeding on a part of him that has never belonged to you (if any of him does); that place where you intersect but never draw attention to. You remind yourself you had no choice in the matter. The system puts you where it wants to, and these days the options are slim. But it’s — the walls are amber-black tile and plaster, lined with sanitary-smelling hospital beds and a cupboard per room. Per room, you think; you’ve got one of those now, and with only one girl to share it with. 
You figure the reason for the extra space is probably not one you want to know.
Anyway, you don’t actually see Tom for two days. The caretakers bring you a tray of dinner that’s vaguely warm and a bit too salty and you sleep off the debris you think you breathed in that morning, half-sated and sun-tired.
But then you do see him, and he’s in these funny uniform shorts and a thick blazer and your greeting is an offhand joke about the scandal of his knees that he doesn’t seem to appreciate. He eyes your muggle clothes while you wait for your own set and you know you really don’t have any room to judge. 
He doesn’t, or at least doesn’t say he minds your relocation.
You spend half the summer waking up in the middle of the night to acquaint yourselves with the London tube stations, and the other half in whatever crevices of the orphanage you aren’t harangued by Mrs Cole every five seconds, which are far and few between. She seems to have decided fourteen is old enough an age to worry about your intentions unchaperoned, like it’s the bloody 1800’s, and admonishes you and Tom relentlessly despite only ever finding you quietly buried in useless books. 
You begin to miss Madam Palles and her invaluable pity. Everyone’s an orphan here. No one’s sorry.
“What’s his deal?” you ask one stuffy afternoon, reclining in your creaking seat to prop your legs on the desk.
Tom knocks them off (he’s so well-mannered that you sometimes push these little gestures of impropriety just to bother him) and glances at the target of your question. Some broad, blond boy who skitters down the corridor a shade paler than he arrived. You’ve yet to properly introduce yourself to anyone you don’t have to, so names are muddy when you try to apply them to faces.
He shrugs, but there’s a flash of something in his expression you’re fascinated to realise is unfamiliar. “He’s an imbecile.”
“...Riiiiight, but that isn’t a proper answer.”
You smile. Legs return to table. Timeworn Oxfords muddy the surface. Tom scowls. 
“There was an altercation last year,” he says tersely, “he’s rather fixated on the matter.”
“An altercation.”
“Very good, that is what I said.”
You narrow your eyes and he sweeps your legs off the desk again, gaze catching the unmistakable ribbon of an old bullied scar on your shin. 
“And I suppose you’re above such incidents,” he muses.
You cross your arms and huff. He always wins games like these.
You’re grateful when you return to Hogwarts in one piece after your final night of summer is spent underground, and the certainty of knowing where you’ll rest your head for the next ten months cannot be understated. 
But the worst thing has happened, and you blame it on the flicker of a moment where you missed Madam Palles like it was some jubilant, accidental curse to ever miss anyone. A foreign thing you remind yourself never to do again. 
She’s only gone and jinxed the locks to the Restricted Section so they cry like newborn Mandrakes when Tom’s replica key clicks in place.
For a second you both stand there looking stupidly at each other. Getting caught was a fear two years ago; you’d almost forgotten it was still possible.
Tom is quicker to collect himself. He grabs you by the arm and casts a Disillusionment Charm, and you don’t burst running out of the library like two blurry suncatchers reflecting the candlelight as your instinct heeds; you cling to the shelves and you slither silently to the door. (You’ll make a joke about it when you can breathe.)
Madam Palles the Traitor comes heaving into the library in her nightgown, a blinding blue light baubled at the end of her wand, and it’s really just theatrical at this point to use Lumos bloody Maxima when the basic spell would do the job just fine.
“Has she suspected us the whole time?” you say on gasp once you’ve made it to the dungeons.
“Perhaps someone else has,” Tom suggests.
“What? Malfoy?”
You think it’s a good first guess. It could have been any of the Slytherins, upon consideration, but Malfoy seemed most fixated on Tom last year and it wouldn’t surprise you to learn he’d been observant enough to follow you to the library and notice you don’t leave with the other students.
But Tom quashes the idea. “I’m doubtful. Malfoy is attentive, but Madam Palles is hardly partial to him.” (He had, in second year, set one of her books on fire while studying offensive spells.) “I suspect it was someone with more influence.”
Only no one has more influence than Abraxas Malfoy. The rest of the Slytherins follow him like lost pups. But then Tom might mean —
“A professor?”
“It may be.” He says it like he’s already decided his suspect.
He is, as always, and ever-infuriatingly, correct.
It’s that file you tucked away for later, reoccurring when you return to Transfiguration in the morning like a second epiphany: Dumbledore.
He assigns the term’s seating arrangements, which he’s never done before, and there’s something in his tone when he pairs you with Rosier that feels intentionally like not pairing you with Tom. You don’t think it’s paranoia clouding your better judgement, and by the way Tom’s gaze hardens as he takes his seat beside Malfoy, neither does he.
Dumbledore is suspicious for a number of reasons. He disappears for weeks at a time. The Prophet writes articles on his sightings in Austria and France like he’s an endling beast. He’s being sighted in Austria and France — two notable countries in Grindelwald’s ongoing war. Perhaps ancillary, you’ve decided the charmed glass repositories he uses to hold his old artefacts are the same ones encasing the least permissible books in the Restricted Section. And if that isn’t paranoia (which, you’re willing to admit, it may be) then you assume he has them so proudly on display because he wants you to know.
You consider it a warning.
Tom does not.
“Just give it up,” you hiss over a game of wizard’s chess, “I bet we’ve read every book in there twice already anyway.”
His jaw ticks as the sole indicator of his annoyance, and he takes your rook. You scowl.
“Tom, that man thinks you’re devil-spawn. You know he’s just waiting for an opportunity to catch you doing something wrong.”
“So?”
It sounds so petulant you think he’s been possessed by his eleven-year-old self. Then you think he was a lot wiser at eleven.
“So?” You make an aggressive move with your knight. “So don’t give him one!”
He stares at the board and his breath is just a trace sharper and you hate that you know him like this and no one else. You wonder if he knows you like that too, but resolve with ease that he does not. You’re hard frowns and lewd jokes and trousers torn at the knee to bare scars with stories you wish you could forget. There’s no mystery there. Tom is nothing but — gordian knots and fixed expressions and little patterns to learn like the rules of this stupid game between you. You must know Tom Riddle by every atom or not at all. And that isn’t a choice, really. You’ve never known anyone else.
“Are you stupid, Tom?”
You glance at the board. He’s got Check. A terrible, true answer.
“No,” you finish. “Then don’t act like it.”
Your king glances at you and you nod. He falls. The game is resigned.
Tom acts stupid.
Dumbledore knows.
It all happens very fast.
You strike Tom harder in the arm with Confringo than is likely necessary that night, and he returns the favour with a Knockback Jinx that thrusts you into the shallows of the Black Lake.
You gasp. The cold water feels like it’s swallowing you whole when it strikes, an envelope sealed around you and licked shut for good measure. Everything holds to you, and it’s fucking November. Your senses are so overwhelmed that you forget to murder Tom the instant you sink in. You forget to do much of anything.
You wade trembling out of the lake when sense returns and Tom huffs, peeling off his robe to treat the burn on his arm.
“You—idi—iot,” you mutter, trying to find the incantation for a warming charm but the words get stuck between your chattering teeth. “You stole a re… stricted book.”
Tom glares daggers at you between his poor healing job and you scowl, mincing through the grass and grabbing his arm. “Fucking imbec-cile…”
You’ve done enough damage that if he were anyone else you’d be proud of yourself, and somehow, simultaneously, if he were anyone else you’d be able to manage a pinch of guilt. But he’s Tom, and you know him by every atom, so you cannot be proud, and he’s Tom — he retaliated by tossing you in freezing water and now your clothes are clinging sodden and heavy to every inch of you, so you certainly can’t be guilty either.
“I borrowed it,” he says tightly. As if that means anything at all. And then he takes his robe and drapes it spiritlessly over your shoulders. “You could attempt communication before curses.”
“I could attempt communication,” you scoff, uttering a charm to partially close the gash on Tom’s arm, “Fucking h-hypocrite. I did communicate. You lied.”
“I —”
“Omitted information? Withheld the truth? Watch your mouth or I’ll steal your fucking dictionary, Riddle.”
You swear a great deal when you’re cold and mad, apparently.
“I won’t be caught.” His calm is infuriating. “It would hardly earn expulsion regardless.”
“It doesn’t matter! He knows it’s you! He was staring at you all class!”
“So nothing novel then.”
“D’you want me to blast you again?”
His lips form a flat line. No. That’s what you thought.
You sigh, clutching his robes in your fists to quell your trembling. “What’d you take, anyway? We never touch the encased stuff.”
That is, you assume, why Dumbledore was vexed enough about the whole thing to mention it in class today. A highly valuable book has gone missing, from a repository you dare conclude belongs to him, and he has to pretend all the while not to know it’s Tom who took it. You are out of the question. Theirs is some delicate vendetta you can’t begin to unfurl.
“Nothing anyone should miss,” Tom says, a complete non-answer as he stops to murmur a warming charm you could probably manage yourself by now.
“Tom.”
“It was an encyclopaedia. It’s entirely in Runes. I suspect it will take months for me to decipher.”
“God’s sake,” you groan. He really is exhausting. “I think Dumbledore’l take his chances and loot your dorm before that happens.”
Tom wipes a stray droplet of water from your cheek. His fingers are soft. “We should return. You look half-drowned.”
“I am half-drowned, dickhead.”
And you accost him in hushed tones the whole walk back. Runes, Tom, really? Threw me in the damn lake over a Runic Encyclopaedia? He accosts you just the same; You burned me first.
It does, in fact, take Tom months to decipher the Runes, and he’s quite secretive about it. He won’t let you see the book, won’t tell you what it’s about, won’t indulge your queries on how far he’s gotten or if it’s worth the way Dumbledore bores his eyes into the pair of you in the Great Hall with nothing but the glass of his spectacles to soften his censure. You consider — well — you consider taking your chances and looting his dormitory.
The day everything changes starts the same as any. 
You muse over breakfast about muggle news and how the way Tom holds his wand when he casts defensive spells is too sharp when it should be circular. He argues. You soften the criticism by telling him his offensive magic is stellar but you’ll always beat him in defence if he doesn’t swallow his damn pride and listen to you for once. (So, really, you soften it very little.) He doesn’t take Divination so you don’t see him until Herbology that afternoon and he’s silent enough during the hour you share with your wormwood plant that you know he’s done it sometime between breakfast and now. 
Tom has cracked the book.
It’s late spring and the night takes longer to settle than it did in the winter. Errant sunbeams still sparkle on the water when you meet him by the lake, and it’s warm enough to forgo a coat.
“Are you going to tell me what it’s about now?” you ask without preamble, arms crossed over your chest as he approaches.
He hands you the book like it’s worth something to you without his explanation, but you’re intelligent enough to gather something from the illustrations of two twined snakes embroidering the cover.
“I should have suspected it sooner,” Tom says before you can comment. “By the way Dumbledore acted when I told him… I should have known he would have wanted to keep it from me.”
“Tom, I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“It’s an Encyclopaedia on Parseltongue and its known speakers.”
You flip through the pages and none of it means anything. “Parseltongue?”
“The language of serpents,” Tom supplies, and the two of you walk along the edge of the forest. “It’s almost exclusively hereditary.”
“Okay, so, what — you’re trying to learn it anyway?”
“I have no need.”
You frown. “You… you already know it.”
“I always have,” he says, and there’s something almost unrestrained in his voice. He’s proud in a new light, and it takes you a moment to understand and you’re not sure why exactly it makes your heart sink, but —
“You’re not muggle-born.”
“No, I’m not. And Dumbledore knows.”
“So, he —” You try not to sound crushed because why should you be? Why should it matter that he isn’t some exact reflection of you? He’s at your side, he’s still there, he’ll always be there — “How does he know?”
“When he came to Wool’s to inform me I'd been accepted at Hogwarts. I hadn’t known anything, certainly not that speaking to snakes is emphatically rare, so I asked him. He said it was ‘not a peculiar gift.’ Perhaps to keep my interest at a minimum.”
“Why would he lie?”
“Because it isn’t just that I’m of magical blood. I’m a descendant of Salazar Slytherin.”
You can’t be faulted for laughing. It’s not often Tom makes jokes, let alone funny ones.
“That’s good, Tom. Morgana used to have tea with my great-great-hundredth-great-grandmother, so that works out nice.”
He sighs, taking your hand and leading you further into the woods.
“Are you trying to murder me?”
“I might.”
“You’d be the first suspect.”
“No, I wouldn’t. You’ve far too many enemies.”
Not by choice, you start to scold, and then he stops, not so far into the Forbidden Forest that you’re afraid, but far enough you understand this is not something he’d chance showing you in the open.
He closes his eyes and whispers, and it’s — decidedly not English. And you know the sound of a few other languages, at least; this doesn’t sound like words at all. His consonants are pointed, his S’s stretched, the syllables repetitive but separated by a difference in cadence someone less perceptive might not notice. 
It shouldn’t be surprising; it’s exactly what he told you, but it startles you how much it reminds you of a snake.
“Tom?” you murmur, unsure at the prospect of speaking some ancient, unknown language into the air of the Forbidden Forest, and, underneath that, still reeling with the knowledge that this is real at all.  You’ve pinched yourself a few times to make sure.
There’s a low susurration in the grass, wet with dew that catches the moonlight, and you gasp, clinging to Tom’s arm when you see the blades part in helices for the space of an adder.
“It’s all right,” Tom says softly, almost elsewhere, his eyes zeroed in on the snake. “It won’t hurt you.”
You’re still by the balance of his arm and some petrifying awe as he extends a hand to the grass and the adder coils around it, weaving upward to his shoulder.
“Oh my God. Oh my God, Tom.”
The adder points its beady gaze at you, and Tom whispers something else in that strange language before it retreats in agreement or compliance or whatever could come close to expression on the face of a fucking snake, and maybe you’re dreaming this despite your pinching. Maybe you’ve lost your mind.
“Hope you didn’t just tell it to bite me,” you try, and it comes out half-choked.
He smiles. It’s partly for you and partly for this venomous little thing on his shoulder, and that’s a bit startling. Tom Riddle smiles for adders and you and not much else. 
“Should I?”
And all you manage, for whatever reason, is, “Don’t be like them now that you’re not like me.”
It’s out before you can stop it, welling from a small, scared place that embarrasses you to return to. A hospital bed when you were eleven. The walls of a bedroom ravaged by bombs.
Tom’s smile fades. “We’re nothing like them.”
The thing is, neither of you know that’s the day that changes everything.
You celebrate your fifteenth birthday in the Deathday ballroom with Tom, a stolen dinner pastry, a green candle, and a few sad ghosts. You try to learn how to dance. Tom thinks it’s silly. You tell him that’s only because he’s upset he keeps stepping on your toes.
Summer blisters when it comes.
Some of the children take jobs as mail-sorters and steelworkers and you clasp for whatever you’re (one) allowed and (two) capable of, which isn’t much. You’re both old enough at the end of the day to explore London on your own, opting to spend as much time away from the orphanage as Mrs Cole allots, but you only have knuts and pennies and you warn Tom it would be unwise to swindle muggles and risk a letter from the Ministry. So you work where you’re needed and you eat the rationed nonsense you always do and you miss Hogwarts terribly. It’s much the same: you’re together, you’re hungry, and you’re nothing like them. 
And then it’s different: Tom makes Slytherin Prefect, is suddenly tall, and you wonder in fleeting moments if his face has always suited him this well.
A stupid remark. You fervently ignore it.
Fifth year begins and you have almost the same number of electives as you do core classes, Tom has duties in his new role that take much of his spare time, and despite popular belief, you and him are not a mitotic entity, so this splits you up more often than it had in previous years. Which is fine. You still have plenty of things to talk about during meals and between duels, and you reckon you’ll share DADA until you graduate.
But in his absence, your attentions are forced elsewhere, and you should be grateful they land on something potentially promising.
It’s like Transfiguration just clicks for you this year. You’ve never been the greatest at Transformation (importantly though, you’ve also remained far from the worst), but fifth year launches you into Vanishment and something about that feels like a perfect equation. There are no complicated half-numerals and objects stuck between inanimacy and being — just unmaking the made. Nothing or not. You’re fucking excellent at it. You glean the theoretics fast and then the practise comes like breathing. Even the purebloods struggle as you Vanish Dumbledore’s Conjured garden snakes in brilliant tendrils of light. You exult unabashedly when you brush past them on the way out of class — who was it that didn’t belong in Slytherin?
You say the same to Tom and he rolls his eyes, but the amusement is there.
“Think you can talk to my snakes for me?” you tease, nudging him on the path to Hogsmeade.
“If they’re yours, I doubt they have anything worth discussing.”
And Dumbledore is… a hue nearer to the man you remember from first year. He praises your improvement and smiles when you can’t hide your giddiness as if equally impressed.
He doesn’t shelve people the way Slughorn does (you’re dismayed to find Tom has been invited to join the Slug Club and you have not) but you think if he did you’d be rapidly climbing your way to the top. Maybe get put in one of those neat little repositories he keeps all his best treasures in.
Dumbledore does, however, offer additional assignments for those who are interested, and tasks you with a few if you’re up to the challenge.
You always are.
The Tom-Dumbledore-Encyclopaedia debacle is apparently either resolved, or your part in it forgotten. 
Tom humours you when you’re both singed at the fingers from duelling, yours dipped in the lake while he buries his in the cold moss, about how Abraxas takes the seat beside him at every Slug Club dinner. He tells you he pretends to be very interested in the Malfoy’s business affairs and their stock in the Bulgarian Quidditch team’s win this coming spring. He tells you he finds it amusing to let Abraxas think he can make Tom his pet. Tom says he considers searching for Salazar Slytherin’s fabled Chamber of Secrets and showing Abraxas what a real pet looks like. You smack him in the arm.
He’s had an ego forever. He just has a few too many reasons for it now.
And maybe that’s why you push harder in Transfiguration, dedicate the majority of your studies to it, spend your Saturday nights scrutinising advanced techniques while Tom makes nice with Potions experts and politics with people who don’t even know what he is but like him anyway. It’s patronising, of course — borderline fetishistic; not a real like — but it scares you. Tom Riddle would not allow himself to be anyone’s pretty mudblood show pony if he didn’t have an ulterior motive.
Everything changes but the observable truth that he is still insufferable.
You’re lucky to see him twice a week if it isn’t in class, and the way it starts is so slow you don’t even fully understand what’s happening until Christmas break when Abraxas stays a few extra days and leaves by Dippet’s Floo instead of the train.
You don’t dare ask where Tom has vanished to in that time or why the hell Abraxas Malfoy would willingly subject himself to unnecessarily extended time at school with all his lackeys gone, and it isn’t because you don’t want to. It’s because he won’t tell you himself. It’s because you’re terrified the answer will feel like a broken promise, and you’ve come to realise (it’s been there for so long; such an obvious, tiny thing that you’ve never stopped to really dissect it) that it’s quite difficult to know someone at every atom and not love them a little bit.
You’re suddenly aware of the risk of it: you love him like an inextricable piece of yourself, and, well, you’ve seen war. You know what amputation looks like. You’ve seen the remains of structures designed to stand forever, and you’re strong like them — casts and gauze in all the weak spots because you remember the pain of breaking them — but those were blows dealt without the complication of loving the bombs behind them.
Tom is the green on your robes, the dragon pox tinge you sometimes think never truly faded when you look in the mirror too long, and all the shades you never imagined. Apple, jade, moss. The beginnings of emerald. (No, he couldn’t be that.) 
You wonder what the world would look like if he stole those colours back, and it’s much worse than some brutal decimation; it would leave you with too much. You would just be you without him.
So you love him into June like you always do, and you pluck his Prefect badge off on the last day of school and tell him it makes you jealous like a joke when it’s half-true. 
It’s raining when you walk to the train together, miserable for what should be summer but not at all remarkable in Scotland. Tom wipes it from your cheek. Your wrists are sore from vanishing bits and bobbles all night while you still can, never truly prepared for three months without magic, and you curl into your seat as soon as you’re in it. Tom wakes you up when you arrive back in London, startling you to find that you fell asleep at all.
It rains a lot that summer. There’s nothing much to see in the city and you can’t get anywhere else (you note: the Trace cares little about broomsticks but you can’t afford one of your own and flying might be the only thing Tom is bad at) so you’re stuck to the library again with a noseful of old paper and a certain prose that magical literature cannot replicate. You theorise a lifetime of reckoning with the mundane forces one to be more creative.
Perhaps it’s the cold that makes you sick. Perhaps it’s the state of your meals. Either way, your final weeks before sixth year are hell. Biblical, blazing hell.
The nurses aren’t sure what it is — another influenza epidemic you’re the first in the orphanage to catch — but they isolate you immediately and there’s not much care they can offer. 
You hear Tom arguing with one of them outside your door but can’t make out the words. Everything is dizzy, sweaty, halfway to unconsciousness but without its relief. You’d take dragon pox over this.
Some days later (though you can’t be sure because it feels like bloody centuries), he’s at your bedside, and you think even if you were lucid enough to ask what horrible thing he’d done to change the nurses’ minds, you wouldn’t. 
But you know he’s not beyond breaking wizarding law, because he’s muttering healing spells with a hand to your damp forehead, and you hazily find yourself reaching for him, trying to shake your head no.
“Not allowed,” you mumble. Your throat is sore and your nose is stuffy. You sound terrible and you probably look worse.
Tom is slightly blurry but you think he’s staring at you. You know if he is it’s with the utmost incredulity.
“Not allowed,” he repeats slowly. It’s very easy to picture him clenching his jaw. “I wonder, if the Trace is so exact that it can detect all forms of magic, it can’t also detect malady. You’re burning — and I’m to consider whether saving your life might be illegal?”
He’s angry. He’s angrier than you’ve seen in a long time; and you can actually see it now. His magic courses through you and your vision clears, bit by bit, until your depth perception steadies and you realise he’s closer than you thought. His jaw is, in fact, clenched.
You move to catch his wrist and manage it this time. “Tom.”
“Don’t argue,” he says thinly.
“You’ll get sick.”
His face is far too neutral for the way his fingers stroke your damp cheek. “Hm. Then it’s a good thing you’d break the law for me too.”
Of course he’s right — you love him. Which makes it a good thing he doesn’t get sick.
Some of the younger children do. The fever comes overnight for a girl who wasn’t in the orphanage last year, and it takes her by the next.
When you get back on the train to Hogwarts, the virus is circulating Britain and you’re livid. 
What Tom said is true; you consider the Trace’s precision and the details of the laws on underage magic — how one of the technicalities is that a young witch or wizard may be absolved of the consequences if the circumstances are life-threatening. You think about how it supposedly doesn’t care about broom-riding or Portkeys or Floo travel, and if the Trace is that complex, surely it understands sickness.
You only wonder if the Ministry would understand it. There haven’t been any epidemics in the wizarding world since Gorsemoor cured dragon pox in the sixteenth century, and when there isn’t healing magic there are antidotes and Pepper-Ups and herbs that muggles simply don’t have. The fatality of a fever of all things is not something you imagine could be comprehended by the sort of people who sent you and Tom back to London in the wake of the Blitz.
Of course, the Ministry hasn't written to you, you haven’t been forced in front of a representative from the Improper Use office, and you have no real reason to be upset.
You are regardless. 
It shouldn’t even be a thought: you immolating into oblivion protesting rescue because one of you might get in trouble for it.
A world you’ve never much cared for is blanketed in ash and its people are dying and you can’t help them. A girl is dead. You’ll return next summer and there will certainly be more.
Life is for the magical, you find. The muggles can burn.
It’s what makes you start to panic this year, knowing you’ve only got one more after it. You have no idea what you’re going to do after school, and it doesn’t help that Tom doesn’t appear to share the sentiment. He’s got Head Boy in the bag and when he isn’t with you he’s with Abraxas, who can surely provide him connections if whatever game Tom is playing at works (and you have no doubt it will), but it’s like you said in third year: that isn’t enough for you.
You remember with a small ache that you no longer means you and him.
And then — it makes sense. You feel incredibly stupid.
“You told him, didn’t you?” you ask Tom the first opportunity you can get him alone, in the glum blue light of the Deathday ballroom on your way back from supper.
He sighs like it’s a conversation he’d hoped to put off for longer. “You’re referring to Abraxas, I presume?”
“You’re referring to — yes, you prick, I’m referring to Abraxas. Of course I’m referring to Abraxas, or are there others? Dolohov and Nott seem unusually enthralled by you, now that I think about it.”
“And for a reason I’m supposed to be aware of, this is an error on my part. Should I be apologising?”
“Why did you tell him, Tom?!”
“Why?” he deadpans.
You throw your hands up. “Oh, for fuck’s sake.”
“Shall I provide you with my itinerary as well? Would you accompany me as I tour the third-years around Hogsmeade? Or can you do me the favour of trusting me to make my own decisions with the nature of my ancestry?”
“You’re keeping something from me and there’s a reason,” you say, stepping closer to him, “and forgive me if I want to know what it is when you were willing to tell me you’re the Heir of Slytherin and you can talk to snakes. What — what could possibly be bigger than that?”
Tom returns your approach with one of his own. His eyes are steady, dark, thick with lashes and you can’t reminisce on the details of the rest of him because that would be strange for a friend to do. Stranger to do it now, when you’re angry with him and there’s two sleeping ghosts in the corner and he’s framed by deep indigoes like the ripples in the Black Lake and — you’re doing it anyway.
To be short, he’s close, he’s very beautiful, and sometimes you despise him.
“Trust me,” he says again, without the derision of the last time. “This will change things for us.”
You frown, but it’s a weak upset in contrast to the explosion you came in here willing to make. There were at least twenty questions you meant to ask and you only managed one.
You are not his keeper. You know that. 
“Change them for the better, Tom,” you say on a sigh.
He blinks, and you think he’ll respond with a nod or a slightly offended ‘of course’ but he does not. He blinks and he just keeps looking at you. It’s disarming. It probably resembles the way you often look at him. There’s a rationale somewhere; you never see each other anymore, life is so incredibly busy, maybe he’s forgotten what you look like.
And he does nod, finally, but he does it with his thumb brushing the corner of your lip.
What? Sorry. What’s going on?
He pulls it away like he’s heard you. “You had something.”
You’re almost positive you did not.
Transfiguration this year brings Conjuration, which is an advanced and welcome distraction, and even more exciting when you consider no longer having to Vanish things you have no idea how to bring back. Dumbledore’s is one of three N.E.W.T classes you’re taking — Defence Against the Dark Arts and Alchemy besides. It’s easily your favourite.
You share it with eleven other Slytherins and twelve Ravenclaws. Four of them are muggle-born, and it’s hard to describe the ease you feel among them because you don’t think you’ve ever had anything resembling ease with anyone but Tom.
Your schedule is more crammed than it’s ever been, but it’s good. Two of the Ravenclaw girls invite you to Hogsmeade every other weekend, you share butterbeers when you can afford one, you study until you collapse, you take Dumbledore’s extra assignments and consider trying out for Chaser on one of your more restless evenings before waking up in the morning and resolving there is such as thing as too much of a good thing. Best not to get ahead of yourself.
Your contentment is remedied quickly.
Someone is found unresponsive in the dungeons. Dippet makes an announcement at breakfast that the boy isn’t dead, rather, petrified. No one is quite sure the cause, but the Headmaster warns a few minor precautions, suggests a buddy system, and says that after dinner studying should remain in everyone’s respective common rooms rather than the courtyards or library.
You know next to nothing about petrification, but the victim is muggle-born, and you suspect it was the result of a poorly performed statue curse by one of the many blood zealots in your house. The whole thing makes you hold onto your wand a smidge tighter, but you’re adamant not to let it drive you to paranoia like it would have a few years ago.
Tom nods at your theory when you manage to escape to the Black Lake together in November.
“That isn’t unreasonable,” he says. High praise.
You sink into the moss, sighing. “Do you think there’ll be more?”
He looks out onto the lake, the lapping waves, the crystalline beads that furrow them, midnight algae and flotsam you don’t think you belong to anymore.
You peer up at his silhouette in the dark. “Do you think whoever did it will do it again, I mean?”
“I don’t know,” he says finally, and after another pause: “but I don’t think it would be you.”
“How’s that?”
“No one would be senseless enough to try.”
And he sinks beside you with that, breath shaping the cold in steady, rhythmic clouds while yours are scattered. His robes brush yours and you take his arm with a sleepy hum, tracing patterns in the stars until your eyes feel heavy and he insists on taking you back to your dormitories.
One of the Ravenclaw girls, Marigold Wright, distracts you with a spare blue scarf and an invitation to her next Quidditch match. You watch from the stands and cheer as she catches the snitch to beat Gryffindor.
It’s a bit strange — having a distraction — having a friend. Mari is kind, smart, a good study partner who’s as keen on stepping into the advanced theoretics of Human Transfiguration a year early as you are. She’s funny in a vulgar way, introduces you to all her friends, shows you the best way to sneak into the kitchens, and you sometimes wonder if she was sorted wrong, but — her methods are creative, and she’s definitely intelligent. She’s also definitely not Tom.
You see less and less of him and more of her, Dumbledore, the Ravenclaw common room and the pages of progressive Transfiguration methodologies. He sees less of you and more of Abraxas, Dolohov and Nott and all the other purebloods, Slughorn’s soirées and Prefect meetings that cut into meals.
It happens again.
Second floor lavatory. A girl called Myrtle Warren. She isn’t petrified.
There’s a vigil the following week and her parents are there, two muggles whose sobs wrack the Great Hall even as the students clear out. Flowers descend from the charmed ceiling, little bluebells and white chrysanthemums.
You cry that night. You can’t remember the last time you cried.
This time, you don’t have to seek Tom out. He catches you on your way back from Alchemy and brings you to the Deathday ballroom with a melancholy glance in your direction that you don't hesitate to follow. You realise it’s an odd place to continue to end up in, but no one else goes there and you suppose that makes it yours.
You’ve seen Tom skinny and sickly and olive green, but today his eyes are circled with veined violets and the lack of summer sun this year has whittled him grey once more. He’s still beautiful. He’ll always be beautiful. But he’s tired and — sad — and for the six years you’ve known him you aren’t quite sure what to do with that.
You don’t spend too long pondering it. You just hug him with the dawning newness of a thing like that; a thing you’ve never done, and never really thought to do. (You ask yourself in bewilderment how you’ve never thought to do it before.)
He’s warm. He’s uncertain. He doesn’t reciprocate immediately. 
And then he does, and you understand without caveats or concerns that you stopped having a choice in your destruction the moment you chose him. He’s home, and that’s going to ruin you one day.
Your arms tighten around him and his around you, the rhythm of his breath holding you to earth when you begin to float away. Nothing makes sense in this moment but the mercy that in all the death you’ve seen, you swear to God you’ll never see his. As long as you’re alive, he must be too.
And there’s something to be said about the innate self-slaughter of loving a person (of loving Tom Riddle, especially): that it’ll cleave you in two, that you’ll say feeble things in his embrace that you should be above saying, like ‘I’m scared’, that his hand will find the back of your head and he'll tell you he knows, that that should not feel like enough but it will be. You’ll clasp your hands under black robes and hold this singular embrace together by the faulty adhesive of your fingers. Maybe you’ll cry again, like your body can suddenly comprehend its capacity for it and is making up for lost time.
The first sign that something is wrong, more than the obvious grievance of the death itself, is the Ministry’s happy acceptance of Rubeus Hagrid as the culprit.
The boy is maybe fourteen years old, half-blood — half human, mind — and no one has a bad word to say about him other than he likes to keep eccentric pets. Which leads you to wonder what pet he possessed with the ability to petrify one student and kill another and what cause he’d have for it in the first place besides two terrible, miraculous accidents.
That question draws an even stranger path. Mari says over butterbeers (on her, bless her soul) that she read somewhere years ago that Gorgons can induce petrification, but that she doesn’t remember much else.
One of the boys in DADA says that his father’s an auror, and heard from him that Hagrid’s pet was some sort of arachnid. Tom deducts five points from his house after class with a scowl on his pale face, muttering about conspiracy.
The second sign that something is wrong is that only one of those things would need to be true for the entire case on Hagrid to be called into question. If Mari’s memory serves right, how the hell did Hagrid come into ownership of a Gorgon? (Could Gorgons even be owned?) If the auror’s son is worth your credence, then what species of arachnid is capable of petrification?
You take to the library.
Unsure of where to begin and hesitant to draw attention, your research lingers into Christmas break and stalls some of your extracurriculars in Transfiguration. Tom is busy enough not to notice the new step in your routine, and you’re grateful not to have him breathing down your back, telling you you’re looking in the wrong places or you shouldn’t be looking at all.
The third sign is the end. 
You wish to retract it all. There are time-turners and memory charms and potions that could dizzy you enough to manipulate the truth; there is anything but this. You’d suffer the consequences for the bliss of loving him with one more day before the ruin — you’d write it down to remember through the fog: look at him, duel him without wanting to hurt him, kiss him to know that you did it at least once, have him, be had. You never will again.
He’d shown you the adder. He’d joked about the Chamber of Secrets. He’d spent months disappearing with Abraxas, earning the trust of the sons of the Sacred Twenty Eight. 
And he’d killed Myrtle Warren.
So it’s statue curses and Gorgons and Tom — speaking to serpents when no one else can, buttressed by pureblood boys who want people like you dead.
Don’t become like them now that you’re not like me.
He’s something else entirely.
What do you do in a moment like this? Panting into an empty library at a revelation you wish you could unknow, fingers digging into the hickory of your desk — another memory carved among the initials and hearts; how do you stand from your chair and leave like the world outside this room is the same as it was when you entered? There’s nothing to orbit. You are cosmic debris, tea dregs in a barren cup, flotsam.
You stand; and you tell no one. Not even Tom.
His presence in your life is so infrequent that you don’t even have to come up with excuses for your distance until three weeks after your discovery when you’re paired together in DADA to practise stretching jinxes. 
You almost laugh. He’s standing beside you, tall (lanky like he was when he was a boy if you look long enough) and serious, and you love him without knowing who he is anymore. You’ve skirted corners to avoid him and sat with Mari during lunch and breakfast like he’s some scorned lover to escape confrontation from and not someone who held you through a grief inflicted by his hand. 
“You look tired,” he says, inspecting the daisy you’d been tasked to elongate.
You glance at him. You are tired. It’s exhaustive, bone-deep, aching like nothing you’ve ever known, and maybe that’s why you can look at him and smile sadly instead of thrashing against his chest screaming for what he did. You suppose it happens enough in your head to satisfy. When you can sleep, you sleep to the thought of it. The waking moments are just blank.
“Mhm,” you hum, transfiguring the daisy stem back to its regular length.
Tom observes it with curious eyes. “You’re getting good at that.”
“I’ve been good at it.”
His lips turn, a small frown before he puts it away. You make the observation that he’s tired too; there are still bags under his eyes and his hands tremble ever-so-slightly with his wand when he loosens his grip on it.
His own doing and still you flicker with some relentless hope that he's drowning in regret.
“Sorry,” you say. A ridiculous thing. Do you intend to slowly push him from your life with weak disinterest and diverging academic avenues? As if he were something extricable. He’d never let you.
You’ll have to confront him, and that’s a revelation that holds its weight on your chest until you think you'll suffocate under it.
You’re in the blue light of the Deathday ballroom with a face you've never worn before when it happens, deep into spring, and you know then that you were wrong all those years ago.
He sees all of you.
Takes you in in the flash of a second and maybe it’s your quivering jaw that reveals you or the flint of betrayal in your eyes waiting to be struck and lit. Yes, you were wrong — Tom Riddle knows you at every atom too.
“Are you going to let me explain?" he asks before any hello. His jaw is tight but there’s nothing else to go on to judge his disposition. He's settling into impassivity like an animal drawing its shell. You will not be allowed in if you're going to make it hurt, and you might be the only one who can.
“Explain," you copy with a hard exhale, “Just tell me it wasn’t you. That’s all there is to say."
He stares at you. There’s nothing there.
“Tell me, Tom.”
Your breath catches on an automatic please but you don’t want to offer him that.
“I cannot.”
Then make me forget, you want to scream. Let it be summer. Let us work for pennies and breadcrumbs and be no one together.
It’s late winter and it’s too cold.
“You killed her,” you say quietly.
“If I told you I did not wish for it, would you even believe me?”
“What are you… so it was an accident?”
“There was — an opportunity presented itself that may never have come again; that does not mean I don’t find the nature of it regrettable.”
“Regrettable.” You’re laughing or crying or both, and you must look unwell. Halfway out of your mind.
He’s so composed in the face of it that it only makes you more incensed.
“You told me to change things —”
“You killed someone! Can you understand that?”
“You nearly died,” he hisses, “and if I am to apologise for recognizing it only as the first of many times, I will not. If I am to apologise for doing whatever is necessary to prevent it, I will not. The hand we were dealt will not be the hand we die to — so yes, I understand it. And one day so will you.”
“Don't," you spit, and your anger must look pathetic under your welling tears. “Don't you dare tell me that this was for me.”
“Do you want me to lie?”
“What could her death possibly bring me, Tom?”
“Her death is the first step to —”
“God, stop dancing around the fucking question!” Both hands have wound their way to your head, clutching at your skull like the brain matter might spill through one of the cracks he’s wearing down. “Just… tell me.”
“You recall Godelot's work," he says stiffly. The question of it takes you by surprise, peels the moment back like the rim of a fruit and you're left uncertain.
All you can do is nod, arms falling to cross over your chest.
“There was one form of magic he refused quite concisely to impart. I searched the Restricted Section for days, and under Dumbledore's watch that was not an easy thing to do."
You stole from him, you're urged to remind him, but it's something you'd say with a nudge of annoyance and a roll of your eyes. Such admonishment is small and far away.
“I found it at last in one of the repositories," he goes on, “Secrets of the Darkest Art."
“...What?"
“It's called a Horcrux,” he says. “Murder, by nature, splits the soul. The Horcrux simply makes use of the act; puts the soul fragment into something imperishable so that it is protected, rather than abandoned. In turn, your life cannot be taken. By malady, by magic, by sword — the vessel is destroyed but the soul lives on.”
You blink, feeling dizzy. “Myrtle was the sacrifice.”
“Myrtle was there,” Tom remedies.
“How lucky for you.”
“The circumstances could be ameliorated if one were to be made for you. I would have preferred it be someone who deserves it.”
“For — you’d do it again? Again, Tom?”
His brows crease, and even his upset seems contrived. There’s this barricade he’s placed that you, in all your infallible knowing of him, cannot puncture. It’s agony to begin to question what he could possibly be keeping from you in a confession like this.
“You killed someone, Tom. You — I would never ask you to do that. I would never live at the cost of someone else."
“No, you would not,” he agrees, though he shakes his head like it’s incredulous of you. “Do you think, even if I knew it were certain,  a summons from the Ministry would have stopped me from saving you this summer? Do you suppose the threat of punishment would cause me to waver at that moment? I know it would not hinder you. So, you have your lines and I have mine — you never needed to ask.”
And now it hurts. The emptiness clears and you can't stand yourself for crying, but you do. It comes out in ragged, breathless sobs, clasped behind your palm as you turn away from him. 
You've loved him since you were eleven. It's always been you two — it was always supposed to be you two. What is there to say to him? He's blurring in your periphery like in the midst of your sickness, and there's nothing he can do to heal you this time. Your vision will clear and Myrtle Warren will still be dead. He'll still be a stranger in the face of the boy you love. 
“Why," you whine, a wet, hollow stain in your voice you've never cried enough to hear before. “Myrtle was — wasn't — uh —" You swallow, hysterics severing your words. You can't really think right now. Your body wobbles and your head feels puffy and hot. This might be shock. 
Tom scowls like it irritates him to watch you push yourself, like this is just the unfortunate effect of you depleting your energy in a duel, not eating correctly, treating yourself carelessly. 
Of course you can't stand or talk or think. You're you, contemplating a life without him.
“Sit," he says in frustration. You smack his hand away when he reaches for you, but the world has turned a shade darker and you're slipping into it. 
He tugs a chair towards you with a silent charge and a reprimand, and your body doesn’t possess the wherewithal not to collapse into it the second it’s under you.
After a moment you can speak again, shaking hands steadied by your knees. “Did you… did you think I wouldn't find out? You know, the only thing that can petrify someone besides a serpent is a Gorgon. And — where would Rubeus Hagrid have found one of those?"
“I thought I would have time.”
“To come up with a good lie? Something I’d sympathise with?”
He bites his cheek. “Evidently the particulars matter little to you.”
Fuck him. “Fuck you.”
“Very cogent.”
“No, fuck you, Tom. We could have — we only had a year left and then we could — we could've done anything we wanted." You're crying again. You don't have the energy to be embarrassed. “And you chose this."
He’s indignant as he steps closer. “With what money? For what life? We are better than all of them and it’s never mattered. It never will; you know that. You told me that. You’re angry now, but you must know the truth of it. I would not forsake you. I would not lose you.”
You blink up at him, mouth stuck with some cottony feeling and cheeks stiff from crying.
“You have lost me, Tom."
He stills as if suspended. Some maceration must follow but it doesn’t.
You stand on weak legs to look him in the eyes. You wonder if he can see the love in yours. You wonder if he knows you will walk away despite it. (Of course he does. You’ve never lied to him.) 
You think about how his fingers seem to always find their way to your cheek and you put yours to his. The bone there is sharp, but the skin is soft. Boyish. 
There isn't a word for a goodbye like this. It shouldn't exist and so it doesn't. You just leave.
You fail your N.E.W.T courses. Quite spectacularly.
Mari sits beside you on the train with a soothing hand on your shoulder, and doesn’t ask what’s rendered you into a comatose husk since March. There’s no crying. You chew numbly on soft caramels from the trolley and stare out the window onto the hills.
That summer is spent in your bedroom unless you’re forced elsewhere. A new girl with skin so white it’s nearly translucent sleeps in the bed beside yours, taking meals on trays like you did in your first days here, tracing the cracks in the tiles, humming to herself in the dark. She makes you feel less pathetic for doing much the same. 
You’d been right in your assumption that there would be more dead upon your return, and wrong that there would be more empty rooms. There are always more orphans being made.
And then you receive a letter. It isn’t delivered by owl (only for secrecy, you assume, because there are no muggles who’d be writing to you) but it’s stamped with a vaguely familiar crest. Not Hogwarts’ waxen seal, but something undoubtedly magical. A cockroach and a cup, you think, squinting. Transfiguration.
You tear the envelope open and pull the letter out.
It’s from Dumbledore. Some of it melds together, but the key words stand out.
Spoken to Dippet… Exceptional promise… N.E.W.Ts… May be reconsidered… Upon dispensation… Be well.
Be well.
You are not. You are something half-drowned and half-burned, never enough of one to quell the effects of the other. Sunlight is sparse through your side of the orphanage. On the radio, they warn a pattern of one bomb every second hour. The only other warning is the sound when they fly overhead, and if you can’t run fast enough —
You write your answer in a crowded tube station with a spotty ballpoint pen. Tom is there, looking between you, the dust, and your shaking hands as if to say: tell me I was wrong.
Some of your letter melds together but the key words stand out.
Thank you, Sir. Whatever you need.
It’s a shock that you live to seventh year. It’s a shock that you do it without him — though he watches, and in his gaze you feel regressed. You’re alive, yes, but there’s something there… his dead weight, death-grip; his haunting. They always speak of the dead as something heavy. Something that holds onto you even after it’s gone.
You find that to be true.
Dippet’s condition that you remain in Dumbledore’s N.E.W.T class is that you achieve more than the standard requirement. Essentially, your final exam will be much harder than everyone else's: Human Transfiguration, mastery of petty Transformation (through the means of Wizard’s Chess pieces), Conjuration and Vanishment of various delicate objects — all done nonverbally.
Even Dumbledore seems sceptical, but it translates to more rigorous practise rather than resignation, assignments he doesn’t even task to Mari, though she’s just as good, and you can’t begin to understand why he cares so much. 
“I’ll entrust you with these while I’m away,” he says before Christmas break, sliding a sheet of parchment your way with a flick of his wand.
You frown, unfolding it. His instructions are always short now — you’ve learned to decode his meaning well enough without much exposition. 
Teacup to gerbil — to cat, and inverse.
Inanimatus Conjurus spell (cockroach and cup, as instructed) to be Vanished when perfected.
Study Antar’s Doctrine. Miss Wright will act as your partner.
Due February.
It’s far too much to be done in that time. “Sir?”
Dumbledore lugs a messenger bag over his shoulder that appears small, but he carries it in such a way you suspect it’s magically extended. He smiles wistfully, pushing his spectacles up the bridge of his nose. “You know, I often regret how much this war asks of me. A consequence of my own doing.”
Right — Grindelwald. Sometimes you forget between awaiting the next muggle paper. War is everywhere.
You nod. “I hope… Good luck, Sir.”
Another half-smile as he twists open a jar of Floo Powder, and then he shakes his head with something you almost decipher as amusement. A brittle sort. Tired. “Good luck to you.”
And then he’s gone, in a swath of green flames that do nothing to inspire any desire for Floo travel in you.
Antar’s Doctrine is simultaneously prosaic and grandiose. They read like excerpts of a journal and you yawn into them over your morning tea, stirring amongst the first-years, who are the only people at the Slytherin table you can stand to sit with. Your blood status is apparently nullified by your age, and the worst they do is look at you funny. You aren’t sure what Abraxas’s — Tom’s (the new hierarchy never fails to stagger you) — lackeys would do if you sat with the other seventh-years instead. A part of you longs to know. They certainly don’t bother you in class the way they used to, you aren’t tripped in the corridors, but you wonder how far Tom’s influence can stretch. He is the Heir of Slytherin, and he’s earned them. But you are nothing.
You’d like it if he would let them hurt you. You think the incentive would be enough to hurt him back. And God — God, you want to. You want to hurt him almost as much as you want him.
You practise through the doctrine with Mari, as Dumbledore directed. When you’re able to sever Antar’s egotism from his abilities, you can see why Dumbledore would recommend his book to you. It feels like slipping through a crack in glass without shattering the whole thing. You weave in and back out, and Mari grins when she returns from the shape of a teapot to her body without you needing to utter a word to do it.
In the back of your mind, you’re aware what you’re doing is nearly unprecedented. It’s spring, you’re months away from eighteen, muggle-born, and mastering nonverbal Human Transfiguration like it’s a Softening Charm. Mari tells you you’re the smartest person she’s ever met. It makes your cheeks go hot to hear such open praise, worse when you snap out of the thought that you believe her.
Grindelwald falls. The school celebrates in whispers until the evidence is in front of them — Dumbledore, returned without a scar, a new wand in his hand — and then they’re cheers. The feast that night is a great one, and he toasts to you from the end of the staff table, a discreet tilt of his cup before he takes a sip and returns to converse with Professor Merrythought.
You take from your own, and your eyes land on Tom, spine of his goblet tight in his hand. He’s looking at you like you’ve affronted him somehow. You could laugh — by choosing Dumbledore. Of course. As if it was a choice at all.
But if it bothers him… if it feels anything at all like the betrayal you felt, then — good.
You drink, and don’t look away.
By the time your N.E.W.T.s arrive you have a renewed confidence that you’ll succeed, even with the obstacle of performing each exam wordlessly.
There are only twelve students who came out of your sixth year class, so to divide resources for the tests is no grand task. You’re given a Wizard’s Chess set, a desk with assorted vases and goblets, an intricate epergne (you had to whisper to Mari to learn its name), and a Ministry worker borrowed like some laboratory mouse. You suppose it makes sense, though — you’re all capable enough of Human Transfiguration not to mutilate anyone, and performing on a classmate could obfuscate the results. It’s far easier to Transfigure someone you know than someone you don’t.
You start with the chess set, Dumbledore and the Ministry worker observing you as you turn pawns to knights and rooks to kings, the minutiae of the pieces drawing sweat to your brow. They change, and change, and change, and you don’t mutter an incantation once. The Ministry worker puts the set away and directs you to the glass. You Switch the vases with the goblets, Vanish them, and Conjure them again. The Ministry worker takes notes. Dumbledore nods affirmatively at you and you can exhale. The epergne is the hardest; so kitschy and elaborate you don’t know where to start when you’re tasked to Transform it into an animal. 
An animal — like that isn’t the vaguest instruction you’ve ever received.
You look at it on the desk, mirrors and glass and gold on protracted arms, and you go for the first thing you think of because the Ministry worker is staring at you like you’re inept and you see it in his eyes — this is the muggle-born one, this one can’t do it. 
You’re better than them. You can do it forever.
The epergne spins at the dip of your wand, and emerges more than an animal. A big glass tank appears in its place, round and gold-rimmed, water lapping at the sides. Inside it is a jellyfish. Emerald green, bobbing, tentacles and oral arms coiling against the glass like the limbs of the epergne had spanned its centre.
The Ministry worker swallows. Dumbledore smiles.
“And — and back?” the worker says, like that will be the thing that stops you.
You point again, mouth tight with irritation, and reverse the Transformation. A droplet of water smacks your face and you’re lucky to be so hot you can disguise it as sweat. You suspect even an error that small would cost you a mark.
You wipe it away. A strange thing happens; you imagine Tom brushing the water from your cheek at the Black Lake. You imagine his fingers in the rain.
The Ministry worker steps closer with a shameless frown. He tells you to turn his hair red. You do. He regards himself in the mirror and scribbles something down. He tells you to turn it back. You do. To grow him a beard, to change his clothes, to make him taller, shorter, this and that — all read from a list he does not appear enthused to recite. You do it all.
He shakes Dumbledore’s hand when it’s done, duplicates his notes for him to keep, and follows the other Ministry workers through the fireplace when everyone’s exams are finished.
You find out you’ve passed with an Outstanding on your birthday.
Mari drags you to the Three Broomsticks to celebrate, butterbeers on her. (They always are.)
“Can’t believe we’re about to graduate,” she says into her cup, froth on her upper lip.
You sigh into your own, partially giddy and mostly nervous.
Mari squeezes your face between her thumb and finger so your frown is puckered. “Chin up, genius. You’ll be excellent.”
You push her hand away but can’t help a small smile. “Outstanding,” you correct.
“Outstanding!” She bursts out laughing. “Bloody ego on you now…”
“Well, I am the smartest person you know.”
“I take that back.”
She pushes out of her chair with a slightly inebriated wobble. “Going to the loo. Don’t touch my chips.”
Your hands raise in surrender, and you steal only one when she’s gone.
You aren’t the only ones here to celebrate. (Your birthday and your mutual achievement, yes, but the Three Broomsticks is filled wall-to-wall with seventh years drinking their final nights at school away.) There’s music charmed to reach every corner, even yours at the little alcove hidden from plain sight. It’s nice to watch from here — the stumbling, the kisses meant for mouths that land drunkenly on cheeks and noses, the barkeeps that roll their eyes as soon as they turn away from all the newly adult customers, not yet learned or careless in their drinking manners.
It is not nice to be occluded from plain sight in such a way that you don’t notice Tom Riddle until he’s inches away from your table. It is not nice that no one else notices either.
On instinct you don’t make any impressive exit. He slides into the booth next to you and your brain short circuits for a moment at the warm familiarity of his presence beside you. Then it occurs that it’s been more than a year since this was remotely commonplace — that you cannot forget the reason why.
There’s not much time to decide whether you want to be vicious or indifferent or to debate on past precedent which would bother him more. You haven’t attacked him despite being concealed enough to do it unnoticed, and you haven’t shoved furiously out of the other side of the booth.
Indifferent it is. 
“Can I help you?”
“You’re causing quite the stir,” he says, taking one of Mari’s chips.
You’re allowed. It’s infuriating when he does it.
“Am I?”
“It’s enough to fail a N.E.W.T level class and be expressly petitioned back, but to have a special criteria set for your exams and manage an O on top of it all…” He inclines his head as if to appreciate your face so close after so long. You should not let him. “You are incomprehensible. It terrifies them.”
“They’re afraid of the wrong mudblood, then, aren’t they?”
Indifference effaced. You’re angry.
He seems to have come prepared, and shrugs your scorn off like a scarf you would have forced him to wear winters ago. “Of course, they have no reason to suspect Dumbledore might have ulterior motives.”
Ulterior — you certainly hope he isn’t suggesting this is based on anything but your merit, but then — you couldn’t begin to understand why Dumbledore cared so much, could you? You’d made brief inspections of his disdain for Tom in second year, his waning shades of kindness and the matter of his stolen encyclopaedia, but you hadn’t… you hadn’t thought at all about how his dedication to your progress only begun after you’d stopped sharing a class with Tom, how it had developed as you began to drift from one another in fifth year and accelerated in sixth after the first petrification and Myrtle’s death. How Tom had worn you down with a weighted glare at Dumbledore’s little toast.
It wasn’t because you had chosen Dumbledore, you realise. It was because Dumbledore had chosen you.
“Why don’t you worry about your pets, Riddle?” you snarl, “I’m sure there are bigger problems with your lot than my exam results.”
Something in his face shifts at the name. You swell with distorted pride.
He mends the reaction by looking you over in more detail, his features schooled into something he must know you can’t deduce. You try not to squirm under the intensity of it.
He reaches almost mindlessly for your collar (there is nothing mindless about it, you’re sure) and smooths the fabric gently with his fingers. “I always liked you in this colour.”
You blink. His thumb just barely brushes against the skin of your neck before retreating, and your mouth falls open.
“Don’t do that,” you say. Truly a sad attempt. Your repulsion is more with yourself than him, and that’s not at all right.
Where is Mari?
“Your friend was at the bar, last I saw her.”
You stare at him with wild eyes. How the hell — ?
“You were always easy to read,” he supplies, and leans in so you can follow his line of sight to the tiniest sliver of the bar visible between two columns, where Mari looks deeply engaged in conversation with Leo Ndiaye, one of the Gryffindor Chasers.
You take a sharp, exasperated breath at her antics. She might be more in love with the competition than the boy himself. They’d never last without Quidditch to bind them, but you can’t fault her for wanting a bit of fun.
“Well then —” 
Right. Tom hasn’t actually moved away. You turn and his face is just there.
His eyes dart forthwith to your mouth, and — no. No, he won’t be doing that and neither will you.
“...I’m off to bed.” Stop talking to him like he’s your friend, you think miserably. Stop looking at him like he’s your —
“That would be wise.”
He’s still looking at your lips.
No one else is looking at you at all.
It could exist in just this moment, you deliberate; separate from everything else.
Except nothing about Tom exists in its own moment. He’s all over you all the time, skin and bone and soul. You hope you still have a place in the broken fragments of his.
“So I’ll be going now,” you say again.
“I haven’t protested.”
But he’s leaning in, and he has to know that’s impedance enough.
“But you will.”
His lips touch yours. “Yes, I will.”
You grab him by his shirt and you’re kissing him. You’re kissing each other like either of you know what the hell it means to kiss anyone, but you’ve learned the rest together, haven’t you? Your noses bump and you don’t care. You just need to kiss him, and — God, you make some noise against his mouth and the hand cupping your face spreads to capture more of you, greedy and wayward — he needs to kiss you too. It’s a horrible thing to know. It leads you to pose too many questions.
The need must have begun as want, and when did the want begin? How long has he looked at you and wondered what you’d feel like to kiss, touch, mark? (He’ll never have the latter. You swear that.)
You’re pulling away in intervals. “You don’t have me, you know.”
“I know,” he responds, lips on the corner of yours.
“You still lost me.”
“I know.”
“I hate you.”
He pauses for a moment. “I know.”
You kiss him again. Long and soft, memorising his cupid’s bow and the tip of his tongue, and when one of his hands moves to your waist you part from him like you’ve been burned.
“I —” You resist the urge to touch a finger to your lips, standing abruptly from the table and adjusting your shirt. Your body feels like an evolutionarily faulty vessel, too easy to please, though you can’t imagine it responding to anyone else this way. Or perhaps your mind is the problem. Not wired well enough to resist an evidently bad thing. “Goodnight, Tom.”
You thought there wasn’t a word for your goodbye, but that’s it. So simple it sinks you. Goodnight, Tom. I’ll dream of a morning where I wake up beside you, but you won’t be there.
He grabs your hand before you can go, licking his lips and it haunts you to think he’s savouring you. It stings a place deep in your chest you’d spent all year trying to heal.
“My door is always open,” he says.
He lets you go.
You graduate with Mari’s hand in yours, and you aren’t afraid.
Dumbledore requests that you stay for the summer to help him prepare for the first year’s curriculum in the fall. It’s a ridiculous opportunity for someone your age — free lodgings and a stellar impression on your resume, and — you can only accept it with an ire you haven’t felt since the spread of influenza in muggle Britain.
If he’s offering you lodgings now, he could have done it all along.
It sends you down a horrible train of thought while you move your things from the Slytherin dormitories to a little chamber a few doors down from the staff room; Tom will be removed from Wool’s this year. Will he stay at Malfoy Manor? But Tom is still publicly muggle-born — Abraxas’s parents would never allow it. Will he find a job, a flat? Will he swindle muggles once he turns eighteen and the Trace is no longer an obstruction?
You think of him often. You think of his offer.
My door is always open.
Plenty of doors are open to you now. Why should you want to go back to his?
Still, the Second World War ends in November and you feel like you can breathe at a depth you never could before. The school doesn’t celebrate like it did with Grindelwald. No one but you seems to care at all.
It’s a tempting door.
The year passes in a blur of graded papers and lessons Dumbledore sometimes involves you in and sometimes does not. Most of the first-years care little for you, but there are two Slytherin muggle-borns who look at you like a new sun to orbit. Everything is worth it for that.
You see Mari when you can, and find she’s training with the Italian Quidditch team, who apparently are smart enough to care more about skill than blood. She says she misses the complexities of Transfiguration, but any career in it was always going to be yours. Smartest person she knows, she reiterates. Biggest ego too.
The next summer Dumbledore informs you of a posting at the Ministry. Something small with a smaller wage. He emphasises the weight of his personal recommendation, but that you won’t be respected unless you claw tooth and nail for it. You don’t take long to consider a chance to make an actual income with an actual career doing something muggle-borns simply don’t do before you’re nodding assuredly and asking him what you need.
Better clothes are first, and all you can afford until further notice. You take to Gladrags with intent to purchase for the first time in your five years of wandering in the shop with eyes bigger than your wallet, and the owner looks at you with distrust when you slide her your sickles.
The Ministry job is truly, infinitesimally, insignificant. 
It’s far down in the Department of Magical Accidents and Catastrophes. You’re a glorified secretary, and you recall the few times you’d worked as a mail-sorter during the war. It’s some sick irony that you’ve landed yourself in a pile of paper once more.
But the money, though offensively scant to someone with better options (and it’s infuriating the options you deserve), is more than you’ve ever had, and within the next year you’re able to leave the castle and take a cheap room at an inn in Hogsmeade. You’re close enough to Dumbledore to aid him when he needs you, but far enough to feel like your school days are departed, and you need not worry about memories lurching unexpectedly at every corridor. 
A sick part of you still reaches for your mouth sometimes to remember what it felt like to be kissed. That part of you wishes for Tom. You could kiss him into oblivion. You could find a way to make it hurt him back.
My door is always open.
Then you’ll slam it bloody closed.
Mari invites you to her first professional game and you cheer for her in the stands, a green, white, and red scarf around your neck in place of her old blue.
She wins and you get drinks in a muggle pub. You kiss a man at the bar. You go home with him. His hair is dark, but not dark enough. His lips are soft, but the shape is wrong. He makes you feel good, but you wonder if in another life, the dream is true; you roll over in the morning to Tom beside you, and he makes you feel better.
When you can find time between the monotonous demands of your job, you’re in the Transfiguration classroom, staying behind to help the Slytherin muggle-borns with their Switching spells.
It’s one stupid accident the next fall that changes things.
A muggle bank has been robbed, and whatever idiotic, panicked witch or wizard was behind it apparently found themselves incapable of getting the deed done with a simple Imperius Curse (you can’t imagine, based on the scene, that they’re above Unforgivables), and somehow ended up leaving the building half-charred and teeming with at least six bank tellers Transformed into birds, two chirping into the floor tiles with broken wings.
“Renauld’s on it, though,” your coworker says when the news finds your department.
“Renauld?”
He’s a year older than you, a pureblood with parents in high places, and endlessly fucking hopeless.
“Well, yeah —”
You push out from your desk, files fluttering behind you. “Renauld will expose the whole damn wizarding world if he touches that building.”
“But McCormack sent him.”
“Where is it?”
“I… McCormack said that —”
“Where is it, Flack?”
“Um. Um, near King William, I think. Moorgate or, um —”
That’s good enough. You toss the Floo Powder into the fireplace and go.
The place is a mess. You don’t even have to look for it. There’s some ward around the street, bouncing muggles away like an invisible end to a map they don’t even register is there. At least that’s handled right.
But you slip through it and curse under your breath at the muggles trapped inside the wards. They’re like fish prodding at the dome of their bowl, and some run up to you demanding explanations when they see you unaffected by it. You brush them off — Obliviation is not your strong-suit — though you do shout at a pair of DMAC wizards uselessly standing guard outside the bank.
“What the hell are you doing?” you ask on approach. “Renauld’s supposed to handle the inside, yeah? You deal with fixing them.”
You point toward the frantic muggles, and the officials just regard you with vague confusion at your presence. “Renauld said —”
“Oh my God! Fix. The muggles.”
You afford nothing else before pushing past them to enter the bank.
It’s quite impressive, actually; Renauld, the result of generations of foolproof breeding, is waving his wand around like he’s just stepped out of Olivanders for the first time.
“Heal their wings,” you say without greeting.
Renauld jumps. “What? What are you doing here?”
“Heal their damn wings. They’re easier than human limbs and healing magic’s the only thing you aren’t completely shit at.”
“Who authorised you?” he hisses.
“I did.”
In hindsight, it should have gone horrifically wrong. Your wand could have been taken and your life might have been over in all ways that matter, flung back into the muggle world where you’ve always been told you belong.
But Renauld vouches for you. You Transform the walls, you fix the burns, you mend the bank to something presentable. A muggle robbery — dangerous, financially tragic, but believable. And your suggestion to heal the injured bank tellers in their animal forms might be the thing that saved them. When Renauld mends their wings and regenerates their blood, you Untransfigure them, and the other DMAC officials alter their memories with haste.
You were completely out of line and utterly right.
It isn’t something people like you are allotted.
Your probation period is dreadful. You hide in your room at the inn most days, Vanishing little stained panes on your window to feel the warm breeze of air before you Conjure them again. You help grade papers, though Dumbledore is displeased with you and the night is a silent one. He assures you curtly that he’s doing his best with the Ministry to amend this.
And… he does.
With Renauld’s help and the corroboration of the other DMAC officials, you’re back at work by the start of the school year.
It’s a slow process — almost eight months of meaningless paperwork — before the next incident occurs and you’re hectically ushered to the scene like a belated understudy. And then it happens again. And again. And again.
There’s really no choice but to promote you.
Your heroics are torn from a Gryffindor cloth, so says Flack. You urge him never to say such a thing again.
By your twenty-first birthday, you think about Tom almost exclusively in your sleep. You’re much too busy to think about him anywhere else.
The summer is warm and Hogsmeade is lively. You’ve vacated your room at the inn for a little house on the outskirts of the village, decorating it how you like — discovering what you like. You’d never had a chance to find out before.
Mari visits when she can once you have your fireplace connected to the Floo Network (you yourself prefer Apparating) but her name is slowly working its way from the Italian papers to the British ones, and she has so much to tell you there isn’t possibly enough time in her days to tell it. There’s also the matter of Leo Ndiaye, who has, recently, gotten on one knee and proposed to her. If there had been a bet on them ending up together, you would have been out enough galleons to put you in debt.
After especially gruesome days at work, you and a few colleagues make a habit of getting sherries at the Siren’s Tail, complaining that sometimes the nature of your work is akin to an auror’s but without the notoriety and pay.
“Oh, please,” says Emilia Alves, twirling her straw, “have you seen the shit the aurors are up to lately? I’d rather be a blimmin’ Unspeakable.”
“You’d have to be able to keep your mouth shut for that, Alves.”
Emilia punches Renauld in the arm.
“What are the aurors up to?” Flack asks.
“I dunno much. There was a murder all the way in Albania, s’posedly. Reeked of dark magic.”
“Nothing new,” you join, and then frown. “Why’s our Ministry dealing with it though?”
“I dunno. I got word from Hillicker that the Albanians didn’t know what to make of the mess. They’ve never seen anything like it.”
“Hillicker’s not a source,” Renauld scoffs.
“Yeah? Why don’t you ask your daddy for something better?”
“Alves, I’ll have you know —”
You lean in over the counter. “What do you mean they’ve never seen anything like it?”
She grins. “Why? Storming a bank robbery wasn’t exciting enough for you?”
You roll your eyes, taking a drink.
That ought to be the end of it. One extraordinarily lucky incident to push you up the career ladder was rare enough — there is absolutely no way digging around a case that has nothing to do with you or your department could ever end well.
But something about it itches.
You make nice with Hillicker. She’s a year younger than you and far too kind for her own good, and she gushes freely about her husband’s work as an auror (they must be a perfect match for him to gush freely about it with her). It’s a bit manipulative. You have no excellent excuse for it, but… ambition, and all that, you suppose. Flack’s Gryffindor theory is studded with holes.
You are green, through and through.
Emilia’s updates are meaningless when you garner so much information that you’ve already heard everything she has to say over drinks, and at this point her and Hillicker might be a step behind you. Emilia still only knows about Albania; peppery little details of half a story. Hillicker discusses an assortment of murders with no real string between them, and Dumbledore regards you with cool heeding when you bring up the matter with him.
You see him little nowadays but you’ve never been close in any true sense, traces of resentment budding over the years like rainwater collects on glass until the stream finally slips.
You visit Hogwarts mostly for your Slytherins, fourteen or fifteen now, unafraid of the distinction of their blood.
And then there’s one night after you turn twenty-two where drinks take place at yours for a change, Mari and Leo included and happily wed. You have no sherries but your ale is just as well, and it’s only you and Renauld who are sober by the time everyone else is vanishing into the fireplace and going home.
That makes it much worse when you sleep together. 
There’s no excuse of having had a glass too many — so sorry, I’ll be on my way then, and him stumbling over his trousers to get out of your hair. Of course, he does that anyway, scratching the nape of his neck when he reaches your doorway in the morning.
“Thanks for the — well, you have a nice home — I do think I should —”
“Yes.”
“Right.”
“Oh!” He turns around at the last second. “Er — I know you’ve become a tad obsessed with… Hillicker mentioned another, anyway. Hepzibah something. Killed by her own elf, the aurors suspect.”
“Oh,” you echo, sheets pulled up to your shoulders. “Thanks, Renauld.”
“I thought you might like to know. Don’t be daft about it.”
You’re incredibly daft about it.
There’s something reminiscent about Albania in this case that wasn’t there with the others. The tide of dark magic ebbing across the scene, the cherry-picked information released in the Prophet, the claim of an old, dumb House Elf who poisoned her mistress like the Albanian peasant killed in some insoluble accident. 
The itch exacerbates.
You see him in your dreams again. He peers over Runes in a stolen encyclopaedia, he whispers to an adder on his shoulder, he kisses the corner of your mouth and it isn’t enough. He kills you, again and again. You kill him too.
You wake up and he isn’t there.
It’s a new low when you’re invited to the Hillicker’s anniversary dinner and you end up digging through the drawers of their study halfway through the night.
The Albania file offers nearly nothing. There was the charred residue of dark magic imprinted on a hollow tree in the fields of the peasant’s hamlet, but nothing detailing more than a blank imprint of the Killing Curse in his eyes. Still, you tuck the knowledge away for the file of one Hebzibah Smith, whose tea did indeed have traces of poison, but whose den was also ripe with a layer of darkness that didn’t line up with the Ministry’s tale of senile elf.
And then there’s the forgotten matter of her being a purveyor of ancestral artefacts. The file doesn’t recount whether any are missing, since the woman was wise enough not to proclaim all her possessions to the world, but it’s something. A scratch.
You travel to Albania that Christmas. The neighbours in the peasant’s hamlet have skewed memories, so they provide little help, but the man’s house was left almost untouched.
You tear the place apart and Transfigure it back together when you’re done.
All you find, in the end, is a scrap of an old envelope in a suitcase.
R.R
It could be that it’s old. The cursive seems ancient enough. But you swear the letters have the distinct shape of quill ink — too artful for any pen — and maybe that wouldn’t matter if it weren’t for half a wax seal stuck to the torn edge of the envelope. Stained but silver, the barest hint of two ribbons, a crest, and the letter H.
You return to Hogwarts posthaste.
It’s snowing in the courtyards and you waddle with a duotang under one arm to pretend you’re here for something scholarly, an array of excuses prepared in case you run into Dumbledore, but you don’t.
The Grey Lady is as beautiful as she’s rumoured to be. 
You ask her about her mother, and she’s silent, an expression on her face like you’ve struck her.
“Is it found?” she whispers. The snow floats through her.
Your heart hammers as you consider how to approach this. She thinks you know more than you do, which means there’s something to know.
“Yes,” you say. And you dare further with the context you know, “In Albania.”
“Oh,” she hums. “Oh…”
And if she means to say more she doesn’t seem able, washing away through the balusters, then the walls. You think of your house ghost and what he did to her, and you feel sorry for a second.
Madam Palles expels you from the library the moment you find what you’re looking for, and you rush past a throng of staring students to the staff room fireplace. It’s too far a walk to the border of the castle wards to Apparate. You bite back the preemptive sickness, get swallowed by the flames, and go home.
There are blanks to fill in but you do it easily. Rowena Ravenclaw’s diadem. Hepzibah Smith and her assortment of unregistered artefacts. The stain of dark magic. Something so rare not even the aurors recognized it.
But you do, because he told you.
You wonder on your search to find him what object he used when he killed Myrtle Warren. Nothing special, you think — maybe even the closest thing he could find. These murders involved more preparation. He got to mark them however he wanted.
It’s almost disappointing to find him here. In a little flat over Knockturn Alley with a view of charmed coalsmoke and the brick wall of another shop. 
It’s as tidy as his room at Wool’s, the only dirt the irremediable age of the building itself. The whole place looks almost slanted, large enough only for the bare necessities; a kitchen, a toilet, a bedroom that looks more like a closet, and a study/dining room/den you can’t imagine he hosts many gatherings in. You rescind the mere thought. Whatever gatherings Tom Riddle is having these days, you’re sure you can’t begin to imagine at all.
You wait, legs crossed on an old loveseat, fiddling with your wand.
The door clicks open when the snow has turned to hail and there’s no light but the few scattered candles you’d lit on the mantelpiece. 
It strikes you only when he’s standing before you that it’s his birthday.
You’re in Tom Riddle’s flat, on his birthday, adorned by the orange glow of half-melted candles, and you know everything.
He eyes you carefully, a hint of surprise at the sight of you after four years that even he needs a second to recover from. And then he's even, inscrutable Riddle again, and you dare to think, come back.
“I placed wards," he says, hanging his bag on a rack by the wall.
“I thought your door was always open.”
You see his posture change from just his silhouette.
“Wards never work in Knockturn,” you offer additionally, “not really. There's too much conflicting magic; one border cuts into another; leaves a little sliver behind if you’re smart enough to find it. You should know that." 
He turns to you. You take in a moment to acknowledge how he's changed. It's hard to see in the curtained moonlight, and it seems unreasonable to imagine he’s grown, but you think he has. An inch taller, perhaps. Two. Maybe the dress shoes. His arms are bigger under his button-down, but not enough to consider him muscular. His black hair isn't as perfect as you remember, and you suspect a long day of work undoes his curls. You always liked him better that way in school, after a night duel at the Black Lake, his robes askew and his hair a mess. Evidence that you were the only one to dishevel him. Now you were — what? Did he even think of you anymore? Yes. You'd always think of each other.
“Duly noted. What are you here for?” He tries your surname like a foreign language.
You cross your arms, and you're acutely aware that he's observing your changes too. You're not the matchstick witch he once knew. Your emotions are cultured now, taut to mirror his. You wear dull, formal grey, and that glowing green tinge that should be gleaming on you is under a thick carapace. That’s for Mari, Flack, Emilia — even Renauld. Not for Tom.
You wonder if he knows it was Dumbledore who put in the word that got you this uniform. You wonder if he resents you for it.
“There’s been talk at the Ministry," you say finally, “A string of murders. Whispers of something — some dark magic they don’t understand. And you know they're careful about things like that after Grindelwald."
“A string of murders... Hm. That might imply you understand a connective thread. Is there some sort of accusation being made?”
“Oh, I'm sure you'd be flattered by accusations. There’s not enough there, as it stands. Just whispers." You sink more comfortably in the seat and the springs make a concerning sound. “But I know you."
His hard, sharp gaze falters for a moment. You watch the flames dance behind him, the firelight playing against the lines of his shoulders, and feel your heart skip a beat. “Who else is speculating?"
“No one." Your fingers brush over the book spines on the coffee table. “I guess their attention hasn't been drawn to a book clerk yet, even if you have taken residency... here." You say it with no shortage of disapproval. 
Knockturn was never where Tom belonged. You'd once imagined a flat together in muggle London, taking the telephone booth to the Ministry together, changing the world together. It's a wish that's a lifetime away now.
“Is this a warning? I assure you, I don’t need the condescension.”
“I'm not warning you," you scoff, “I — I'm seeing you. God knows I'll probably never get the chance to do that again once you get yourself locked up in Azkaban, which you will." 
You sound exasperated. You sound half-pleading. “What are you doing, Tom? Is this — this is really what you want?"
“Yes."
You shake your head. “I don't believe that." And then some of that fiery spit returns to you, and you feel like a child again, stuck in the London tube stations holding his hand at every plane that flew overhead, scowling that you needed his reassurance. Scowling that you were afraid.
“Well, your conjecture is ever-appreciated. Shall I lend you mine? Shall I congratulate you on your revolutionary position at the Ministry? Or is it Dumbledore I should afford my thanks?”
“I earned this,” you hiss.
“You deserve it,” he amends. “But do not lie to yourself and pretend that’s why you have it.”
“Fuck you.”
He smiles. “There you are.”
“I don’t need your congratulations, Riddle. Dumbledore doesn’t need your damn thanks. But,” you say, biting back the snarl that wants out, “you could thank me. After all, I could turn to the Ministry any minute with the truth of your heritage. I could tell them about Myrtle, the Horcrux — Horcruxes.”
The humour dissolves from his face and you despise the immense glee it brings you.
“Oh, did you think I didn’t know? Didn’t understand the connective thread? You are sentimental under all that… fucking posturing, you know. I’m sure it’s all very romantic to you — making Horcruxes out of Hogwarts artefacts. Shame it’s such an insult to your intelligence.”
“Very good,” he says after a long, terse silence. You’re sure he’s thinking just the opposite.
You hum, meddling with your nails. “So what’s your plan?”
“I’d need a Vow for that.”
You laugh. “I’m not that desperate.”
“You’re also not an auror, are you?” He tilts his head appraisingly. “And yet you’ve found your way here.”
“How many do you plan to make? How many people do you plan to kill?”
“A Vow.”
“Absolutely not.”
“Tea, then? Biscuits?”
“Oh, I shouldn’t. I read in the paper the other day about a poor old woman who had her tea poisoned.”
“Hm. Terrible shame.”
Your fist clenches around your wand. “Is it paying off well, Riddle? It must be a good life if you’re willing to split your soul to hell and back to have more of it.”
He smiles at the barb in your words. “You never were good with subtlety.”
“I wasn’t trying to be subtle. This place is horrific.”
“I was referring to your inability to see more than what’s directly in front of you.”
“Oh, really? And what more should I see than a boy who’s very good at getting weak men to bow and do very little else? I’d try to see the bigger picture, but I reckon it wouldn’t fit in here.”
Tom regards you colourlessly. You are slate, Ministry-grey, impermeable like palace portcullis. 
“I suppose I should have killed you.” He says it with the nonchalance of a forgotten chore. He says it like you’re a stain. 
He doesn’t say it like he feels any terrible urgency to remove you; and you think, this time, you’d feel more powerful if he did. You think it’s far more debilitating to sit here and be looked at like he regrets wanting you alive more than he wants you dead.
“Yes,” you concur, “I suppose you should have.” 
You place your wand down on the table and scoot your chair away for good measure. “It’s never too late to rectify your mistakes.”
Tom, for a moment, looks surprised. That makes you feel powerful. You’d take more of that.
“You have wandless magic,” he tries. A weak recovery.
“Scout’s honour, Riddle.”
He doesn’t move for a moment, then fixes his wand in his hand and rises, doused in the same inscrutable calm that always used to drive you mad. Now something in you gleams with the knowledge that he only ever looks like this when he’s trying not to look like anything at all.
He steps closer and it gleams brighter. It trembles inside you and you know, distantly, that this is insane. You’re weighing your life on a childhood trust that was shattered years ago, and you don’t think you’ve ever been that good at faith, but he’s approaching you and that gleam you feel is reflected in his eyes and you just… know. Your spilled blood once crawled with his. There’s no undoing that. Half of you is made of the other.
“I should have killed you,” he repeats.
It’s a murmur. Stilted. Angry, even. Angry that you made him this and there’s no fucking rectifying it — what a joke that is. What an immensely you thing to suggest.
“Yes,” you agree.
It’s a breath. Low. Proud, even. Proud that you’re his only mistake and he’s going to make it again.
Tom kisses you. It’s a murder of its own kind. You kiss him back, and — you were always going to kill each other like this, weren’t you? It’s you and him whether you like it or not.
There should be no love in it. You know that. Love is far behind the both of you, stifled in a gasp at the back of your throat on your eighteenth birthday and the soft, selfish hands of a seventeen year old boy. This is mutual destruction. Spite and teeth and skin that’s cold under your fingers.
He was your first in everything but this.
You push back at him and feel the hunger, the need in him, like a flame as he kisses you deeper and harder, and you find yourself losing yourself to it all over again, like you're back in the dark alcove of a pub where you told him goodbye, pushing to extend the juncture. And then he lets out a hitched, gravelly sound; not a moan but enough to make you shudder.
You pull him onto the sofa and crawl onto his lap.
“How long?” he asks thickly.
You don’t have to ask what he means. You bite against his neck, nails under his shirt as you struggle to pop the buttons open. There must be a violence in all your want for him because if there isn't it's just loss. It's just another thing you'll give him without taking anything back. 
“Sixth year," you pant, “in the Deathday ballroom when we fought for the first time. You — ah — you put your thumb on my mouth. Since then."
You hear a sharp intake of breath, and his hand moves up your back to pull you impossibly closer. His voice is ragged. “Should I tell you how long I’ve wanted you?"
You shudder a breath. “Since —" And it's a bit hard to talk with the way he's rolling your hips — “Since when?"
His lips twitch into a mirthless smile, hands spanning your thighs as you start to rock against him. “When you burned me, and I sent you into the lake." 
You swallow, agonised by the slow pace his grip forces you to keep when all you want to do is go faster. 
“Your uniform was terribly wet,” he says, mouth tracing your jaw. “Did I ever apologise for that?"
“N-no.”
He tuts, the hushed sound warm and deadly on your neck. “Bad manners. I must have been distracted."
Oh. Oh, you think. It seems pointless to flush in the position you're in now, but the knowledge that he wanted you then and you hadn't even known is... all the more devastating. 
But you shiver at the question of how he’d wanted you, in what amount of detail, in what precise way. You almost want to ask. See it for yourself. 
You don't think you'd manage the words. He’s hard underneath you and your head wants to lull toward his shoulder but a big hand holds you from one side of your jaw down the length of your neck, his tongue laving up the other. Instead you’re balanced only by his hands and his mouth, rolling against him because it’s all you can do like this.
He’s marking you, you realise with a gasp, and your fingers bury in his hair to remove his mouth from its descending assault on your collar. Not that. You’d sworn against that.
Your fingers return to his buttons and he copies you by finding yours, pulling at the fabric tucked into your trousers until it’s discarded entirely. You press your hands to the planes of his chest and watch him, your mouth agape as his eyes linger on your chest.
His heart is pounding and he must know you’re about to comment on it because his lips are on yours again and he adjusts his position and your fingers dig into his shoulders at the delicious new feeling of him pressing into your thigh. 
You move for his belt. He moves for your zipper. It’s some sort of race, whatever you’re doing, and you’re at an unfair advantage when you’re still fumbling with his buckle when his hand is already carving a slow path to the band of your underwear. You're scalding under the journey of it, little stars pricking you under every new inch he explores.
He dips in and your eyes wrench shut, grasping frantically for his wrist.
“Shh,” he says softly, caressing your cheek with his spare hand, thumb finding your mouth how it did all those years ago and you want to curse him. The fucker knows exactly what he’s doing.
You shake your head, chest rising with heavy breaths as you return to his belt and scrabble to unbuckle it.
“So tense,” he murmurs. The hand at your cheek draws over your lower lip before it falls to your back to hold you closer. “Rest now.”
And his fingers trace you where you want him most, brushing past your clit as he pulls his face back to watch you.
You sink into the feeling, still swaying on his lap, a half-efforted attempt at finding friction in the hardness between his legs that feels fruitless because it won't be enough until he's inside. Your hand just grips onto the fabric of his unzipped trousers and stays there. It’s a pause. An obstacle on your path to him that you need just a moment to recover from before you’ll make him feel just like this. Better. Worse. It’s hard to tell which is which.
He’s stroking at you now, pleased by the way you lurch against him with every touch.
You have to recover, you have to make it even, you have to… you…
A finger presses inside and you moan.
“You came back to me,” he whispers, close enough to be kissing you but there’s just the stutter of his breath. It's a fucking religious thing to say, the way he does it.
“Doesn’t make me yours,” you breathe.
He shakes his head. “I know. You’ll still take it though, won’t you?”
Oh, fuck.
He makes a sound of approval. “Good.”
Good. Fine. Your hands slip from his zipper to the meat of his thighs, pushing yourself forward so the shape of him is firmer against you, and Tom slips another finger in.
You’ll take it, won’t you? Yes. 
Maybe you don’t need to tear him at the seams (though you want to) to make it even. Maybe this is punishment enough. That he can have you like this and it still won’t make you his, that he’ll give you everything and you’ll lap at it with half the greed he possesses.
You ride his hand, clutching his shoulders, rocking your hips. You take all of it, and it builds something delirious inside you, that it’s him doing this, his perfect fingers, the shape of his lips, the soft dark of his hair when you find your hands in it again. The feeling makes you stutter, and he has to move you by the waist himself to keep the momentum when you can't do it yourself.
He’s painfully stiff, pushing up against you with a degree of self-control that feels like it can only end disastrously for the both of you, and you start smattering kisses down his cheek. You tilt his head back and lick a stripe down his neck. Rest now, you'd say if you could.
But he adds a third finger and your head falls, a cry planted in his collar when you come, and you don't think you say anything.
Tom holds your legs steady, guiding you through it like this is just another one of his studies. You are what he knows better than anything else, and still he wants to learn more.
“Look at you,” he mutters, dipping you back to press his lips down your chest, unclasping your bra while you’re still breaking, the sensation swelling again when he takes a nipple into his mouth.
“Tom,” you try to say. Your mouth is the sticky sort of dry that words refuse to come out of.
“Will you give me more?”
Give, not take. You fuss into a stolen kiss, grappling again with his trousers, pulling them down until you can palm him through his boxers.
He hisses, gripping your wrist like he hadn’t just done the same to you, and then he’s pulling you up and off the couch, trousers discarded with what must be magic because you blink and they’re gone. Greedy boy. (You have no room to judge.) Your back is to the wall an instant before his fingers are on you again, pushing your underwear down your thighs until it falls at your feet like they despised to ever part from you.
You arch to feel him press against your stomach, pushing off the wall so that you can meld to him but he just closes in on you to do it himself.
He goads the heat from you when his fingers push in again, still wet, coiling how you like, where you like —
“Want you,” you protest shakily, hand on his abdomen.
That must kill him a little, because he curses under his breath (a thing he never does) and the immediate absence of his touch is cruel when he goes to free himself from his boxers. You reach for him without thinking as he does, and he pins your hand beside you when your fingers so much as graze the length of him.
You sound frail, but you have to ask. “Is this how you wanted me?”
A cruder version of you would go on. Is this how you pictured it? Taking me against a wall? Have you waited for it all this time?
And you don’t belong to him but you’re so incomprehensibly, contradictorily his. You’ll want him forever. He could do anything, and you’d be his. You could haunt him into his lonely eternity, and he’d be yours. Then, you suppose — haunting him makes him yours by principle.
Maybe you already do.
Tom practically growls into your mouth, pressing against you and — God, it’s skin on skin. He's right there. You could push forward and —
He slides in. You cry out at the feel of him inside you, the angle of it like this.
“I wanted you,” he says lowly, your legs wrapped around him, “everywhere.”
You’re gripping him so tight you think he’ll bleed under your nails and somehow you still feel on the brink of collapse when he thrusts deeper.
“I thought mostly of your mouth,” he rasps. “It felt depraved to imagine it wrapped around me, but then I thought of you splayed out before me instead. That maybe you’d like it if it was my mouth on you.”
You whimper.
“Would you like that?” he asks, hands spanning your hips to snap them into his, like you are a piece removed from him he seeks to reattach.
If you wanted to answer you couldn’t. You’re clinging to him and the rising surge inside you, carved between your legs like something sweltering and unfixable. It rushes in and he pulls out of you. He pushes in and you cry for the release of it, the moment the wave lurches over the edge, but he won’t let you have it.
“But,” he says, and your eyes want to roll back at how heavy his restraint is, callous in the tone of his voice, some leash at his neck he must tug himself lest you take it from him — “If I knew how well you’d take me like this, I would have thought of it much more.”
Taking him, again — you don’t feel at all like that’s what’s happening. You feel possessed. You are buoyant in his arms: his and his and his.
“You can — uh — you can — ”
"Hm?" He brushes down the slope of your brow, your cheek, back to the edge of your mouth, wiping a trail of saliva from your chin. “Poor thing.”
And he slams into you again, drawing a mewl from you that slices your unfinished thought.
You clench around him, flames wild and fluttering at every contact of his skin on yours, and there are too many to count. Too many points where they intersect, just some blend of bodies connected at every curve.
“You’re going to give me more,” he says, like it’s an epiphany when you already told him you would.
You remember then. What you meant to say. “You can take me too.”
You feel him twitch inside you, his pace stilling for a moment, and the thumb on your lip slips into your mouth. Your lips close around him and he curses again.
He fucks you with a finger in your mouth and his teeth clamped over your shoulder, soothing the sting with his tongue. His pace is too slow when he drags his free hand between your legs, but you understand its purpose well enough that the mere recognition almost destroys you. 
He’s patient in bringing you to the edge because there's time here. A slow agony that severs you from the rest of the world until it splits you down the middle. And he may not ever have it again.
You have to promise yourself he’ll never have it again.
But the movement of his fingers against the same spot he’s hitting inside you is too much at once, and you won’t last. You drool around his thumb. You let him mark you. You can see on his neck you’ve marked him too. And you hope impossibly there’s a scar. You hope the little death you coax from him claims him as yours for eternity, keeps him even when you're gone. You tighten, lurch for the edge, and make him mortal once more.
Tom holds you there, your cries reverberating as he sinks another finger in your mouth, and then he’s gasping at your neck, peeling back to look you in the eyes when he spills into you. Your eyes screw together and he releases the sounds you make by holding you by the jaw instead.
“Look at me,” he says, and for the strained need in it you do.
You come down to earth and you kiss him, wetness dripping down your thighs as he pins you to this moment. You love him. You’ll always love him.
He’s still inside you when he’s secure enough to bring you to his bed, only removing himself from you when you’re safely in his sheets, legs surrendering their grip on his waist as you pull apart. You pant into the cold linen of his pillow. Everything smells like him. There’s something empty now; the reason you came today; the reason you left four years ago.
You love him and it isn’t enough. Not even to look at him, the sleepy hint of the boy you knew in his eyes, and know that he loves you too.
“Goodnight, Tom,” you say, finding home in the warmth of his chest.
You’ll dream of a morning where you wake up beside him, but you won’t be there.
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Desperate - J.JH
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INTRO: Days got lonely for you working your plain old 9-5 job and all your colleagues found it hilarious that you hadn't gotten laid in forever. You were only joking when you said you would pay someone to sleep with you at this point...
GENRES: Smut
WARNINGS: Profanity/swearing, oral (F receiving), chocking/breath play, nipple play (receiving and giving), humiliation (giving), slight degradation along with that, Jaehyun seems to have a slight pain kink, dom!femreader, unlikely sub!Jaehyun, overall explicit content - DO NOT ENGAGE WITH THIS POST IF YOU ARE UNDERAGE, PLEASE!
WORD COUNT: 7.7k
AUTHORS NOTE: This turned out a little more hard core than I would've thought it was going to, but still pretty mild. A good fun one to read even if you don't enjoy femdom :)
Jaehyun wasn’t a sex worker and he certainly wasn’t a sub. He was just desperate for money. You knew this when he called you up and introduced himself saying he had heard from a friend of a friend that you were willing to pay a decent sum of money for a man to let you dom them for a night. If you were being honest you were kind of joking when you said it to your friend and everyone knew you definitely didn’t need to pay someone to sleep with you, but after hearing the desperation in his voice you couldn’t turn down the stranger at the end of the line. Not when he had clearly put himself out of his comfort zone to get your number and ring you. You just knew that your friends would be teasing you about this when you told them you’d actually followed through with it. Doming men was always a sort of fantasy you would put on the backburner whenever you slept around. Sometimes it would come out but more often than not it was just left to your imagination, so hence how the discussion came about. 
Over the phone you had made it clear that this would be a one time occurrence, as you were sure that you were breaking some sort of law as it was. Luckily he complied with that, pointing out that was his intention also and he prepared with his own term. No one, under any circumstances, is to find out. You couldn’t agree more. You didn’t need people other than your close friends finding out that you paid someone to sleep with you. Infact, it was bad enough having your small circle of colleagues knowing at all. The two of you agreed on a time and date and it was set. 
When 7pm Saturday comes around you find yourself anxiously sitting on your couch playing with your fingers and picking at your nails. It was dark out already and it was risky meeting a total stranger for the first time at your own house, you knew that. But you weren’t exactly made of money either, so buying a hotel room that you’d probably only spend an hour or two in if you were lucky seemed like a total waste. You just hoped that he wasn’t actually intent on murdering you then robbing the place. 
That thought does nothing to ease your worrying mind, so when the doorbell rings you visibly jump before standing up and flattening the creases out of your dress, trying your best to compose yourself. You begin to make your way to the door to meet the mysterious man who is waiting for you and that’s when it hits. This was a really bad idea. You freeze with your hand on the door handle. ‘Don’t be stupid.” You say to yourself.
You take a deep breath then close your eyes for a second before opening the door. What you immediately notice as the door separating you two leaves, is a hand about to hit you in the face and your eyes widen in shock. A short gasp escapes your lips and you take a step back in alarm. The hand in front of you immediately retracts and that’s when you see the man in front of you. Jaehyun, or at least that’s the name he told you. He must’ve been readying to knock again, you thought to yourself and internally shook your head at your antics. He was tall with black bangs that framed his face. Raking your eyes down his figure you notice that under his rather loose fitting clothes that he has a toned looking figure. When your eyes raise to catch his, you see the hesitancy that glaze through them. He stands slightly tense in front of you and by the soft and slightly worried look on his face you realise that this man couldn’t possibly murder you (but if he was going to he was a damn good actor).
Silence hangs in the air for what only feels like second but must’ve been a minute or two before Jaehyun shifts to lean on one leg. He reaches a hand out, this time gesturing for a handshake. “Hi, I’m-”
“Jaehyun.” You finish his sentence in a breathy whisper before smiling sheepishly. 
He lets out a chuckle nodding his head. “And you must be-”
“Y/N” Inside you cringe. Interrupting people was a rude habit you had to get rid of as it constantly bugged those around you, but Jaehyun just laughs lowly, nodding again. 
It stays quiet for a moment longer before you seemingly shake out of a trance, “Oh, please come in.” You step further into the doorway to allow him through and when he passes with a curt bow of his head and a small smile and you feel your heart melt. This guy had to be someone's boyfriend because there is no way he’s single with manners like this and those adorable dimples. If he’s not a murderer he has to be a cheater. 
You lead him into your living room and gesture for him to sit on the couch. “Would you like something to drink?” You ask, eyes watching him closely as he sits down and observes the room. His own eyes darted to your face, “A water would be fine thanks.” You nod politely before ducking away to the kitchen. When you’re out of sight you let out a breath of relief. This is so awkward, the air around him feels like it’s sucking the life out of you. You try to come up with things to talk about and ways to bring up the current situation without making it even more awkward as you fill up two empty glasses and walk back out to the living room. 
Placing the drinks on the coffee table you proceed to sit across from him in another chair and thank the gods that you actually have enough furniture in your house which means you don’t have to sit right beside him. He picks up a glass and takes a nervous sip while his eyes fly around to anything in the room that isn’t you. 
You clear your throat, forcing a wave of courage to wash over your features but it doesn’t shake the wobble in your hands or the slight tremble in your voice. “So, Jaehyun, what do you like to do in your spare time?” 
“Oh,” The question shocks him, you can tell by the way his eyebrows raise, “well I like to read.” You shift in your seat, trying your best to look more comfortable so that he will in turn, loosen up a bit. “So authors like Mark Twain, Charles Dickens?” You offer up a couple of authors that your male colleagues enjoy but he only shakes his head with a small smile at your suggestion. “No, actually. Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf and Shakespear if I’m in the mood.” It’s your turn to be surprised, an astounded “Really?” escaping past your lips and he nods with a half amused, half fake offence look. “I’m sorry, I just didn’t take you for a fairytale, feminist romantic.” 
He smiles again, this time showing his pretty dimples in all their glory and you can’t help but reciprocate the expression. “If you don’t mind me stating,” he starts and you try to keep an inviting look on your face as he attempts to keep his gaze locked on yours, “you don’t seem like the domineering type, if I’m being honest.” You feel a slight blush rise to your cheeks at his proclamation but pull yourself together with only a slight shake of your pupils being the give away at your uncertainty.  “No?” You question, letting a humorous tint lace your voice as you said the word - raising a brow. He shifts becoming obviously uncomfy but you just watch him amusedly. “Well, I was expecting-”
“A dominatrix?” You finish his sentence again and almost scold yourself aloud for interrupting, however taking note of the way his ears start to flush a deep pink at the very word.
“I suppose.” He admits, attempting to sit up straight and seem less small. Jaehyun had never felt like he wasn’t ever in control of a situation before and it showed. He was probably more nervous about handing over the reins rather than the rest of what was at hand as well. 
“Jaehyun, I’m not a seasoned pro at this. I simply want to experiment a little, but if you don’t feel entirely comfortable with this, then I’m not gonna judge you if you want to walk out right now.” You explain to him trying to seem as unthreatening as possible. His features harden as his lips set into a straight line. “I have to do this, I’m a bit tight for cash at the moment as you know.” He says and you visibly cringe. This is so illegal.
He sees your change in character and immediately stands to his feet to reassure you, “Oh, gosh I don’t want you to think you’re taking advantage of me or anything. This is completely consensual.” You begin to nervously play with your fingers once again as you let out a whisper, “Jaehyun, I’m paying you to have sex with me.”. 
He comes to your side suddenly and you become aware of the pleasant scent that follows him. “Just think of it as a favour, friend to friend.” He tries to convince as he kneels next to you on the ground. You look down at him, “Jaehyun this isn’t vanilla sex.” He cocks his head to the side in fake thought, “I know that. What if I told you I was kind of excited.” He nods sheepishly, letting his head fall to look at the ground where your feet lay. 
You look at the back of his head before he raises his eyes to look at you with a slight blush on his cheeks. “Just be patient. I haven't done this fully before.” You say and he smiles lightly, “I haven’t done this ever, so we’re in the same boat.” He replies and you suck in a breath. Maybe we are in the same boat, but let’s just hope we don’t get hit by a tidal wave. 
You let out the breath and reach a hand down to his chin. Your fingers grasp his jaw as you lower your face to his, ”If I’m gonna go to jail for you then you better make it worth my while.” You don’t get to see his expression before you bring your lips to his softly. The kiss is hesitant as you both get used to the feeling of each other's lips together. His hand reaches towards you to hold your face closer as he opens his mouth. When you nip at his lip he flinches before letting a grunt into the kiss, his grip on you tightening as his other hand rests on your knee. You pull away and take amusement in the way he looks up at you with parted lips.
“What’re your limits?” You mumble centimetres from his mouth and it takes him a minute to register your words. “Sorry?” Is his reply as he finally releases his gaze on your lips to meet your eyes. You shake your head in a show of fake disappointment before gently grasping his chin again. He expects you to lean down and kiss him, but you quickly drop your head to his cheek where the hot air of your breath fans against his ear lobe. It sends a hot chill down Jaehyun’s spine at the feeling, and he has to suppress his desired need to just grab you and force your mouth on his. 
“How far can I push you until you break, hmm?” You change your wording, putting slight emphasis between each word and you swore you could feel the heat pour off him in sensual waves, a barely audible gulp making your ears perk up. “Anything. You can do anything, just ask first if it’s extreme.” 
You hum in approval, allowing a slight grin to appear on your face as you stand up and gesture for him to do so as well. It takes him a moment efore he scrambles to his feet in what seems to be embarrassment if the red tinge that covers his features again is any indication. “We should go to my bedroom.” You mean to suggest, however it comes out as more of a statement. He nods and you then lead the way, taking note of the way he silently moves behind you as you wander through your hallway. 
When you reach the bedroom you open the door for him to step inside. As he does you come in behind him and shut the door quietly. “Sit on the bed,” You say before adding a “please” at the end of the sentence out of habit. You hear him as he takes a seat on your bed whilst you start to search through one of your draws. When you find the item you’re looking for you turn to see him already staring at you, so you smile reassuringly. 
You move over to him and his sitting position gives you a height advantage and you realise that it oddly sends a thrill through you. Even having such a little switch in the usual power dynamic has you excited already. You run the fabric of the blindfold through your fingers so that Jaehyun can see what it is clearly. “Do you have a safeword?” You can tell this question amuses him as a flash of humour passes through the light of his eyes but it leaves just as quickly as he remembers his reason for being here. “Do I have to have one?” He rebuts and you press your lips into a thin line. “I would prefer it if you did.” You reply and as he senses your slight disapproval at his question he mutters the word “Valentine” under his breath. 
You quirk a brow confirming ‘valentine’ as his safe word to which he nods and you breathe out an almost exasperated ‘ok’. “If you’re slightly uncomfortable though, you have to tell me. Say orange or slow down or something.” You say to which he replies with a firm but quiet ‘yes’. You then start to bring the blindfold up to his eyes before tying it firmly around the back of his head. As you do, you can’t help but to run your fingers through his hair. The soft strands tug gently at his scalp and have Jaehyun shivering at the sensation of the action. With his sight obstructed everything you do, everywhere you touch or even when you move, has him sensing things at a heightened level. 
You move away from him and take amusement in the way he rigidly sits, awaiting for you to do something. You have to admit the blindfold was a great idea, and you hoped that Jaehyun thought so too. You thought it might cut out some of the awkwardness and be a good way to start things off if you couldn’t necessarily see each other. With him waiting, you start to undress yourself. Bringing the fabric of your dress over your head to drop it on the floor. Jaehyun hears as it hits the ground and he subtly sucks in a breath at the action. 
You proceed to unclip your bra and slide out of your panties as well, leaving you completely naked in front of him. Jaehyun wouldn’t ever admit it but it was killing him just knowing you were standing only an arms reach away, completely bare, and he couldn’t see or touch you.  
You can tell it surprises him when you climb onto the bed, however you’re away at the other end, leaning on the headboard watching his back as his head turns over his shoulder in your direction. You breathe out a quiet, shaky breath but can’t help the excitement that builds inside of you. All of your skin is exposed and the slight chill mixed with this exhilaration in the air causes your nipples to prick up and goosebumps to appear on your skin. 
“Jaehyun,” You call his name and he lets out a hum at your voice. “Take off your clothes.” Your order has him gulping before standing up and trying to discard his clothing as best he can whilst having no vision at all. It’s clumsy the way he does it as you watch and he almost trips over several times pulling his legs from his sweatpants. He catches the way you chuckle slightly at his struggle and it causes a flash of humiliation to pass through him. 
Nevertheless, he feels his body erupt in tingles and the familiar feeling of becoming hard causes his head to spin at the revolution that this might be something he was into. 
You definitely notice the way he seems to throb at the sound so when he is left in nothing but his underwear you tilt your head to the side, forgetting he can’t actually see you. “What about those?” You question with a hint of judgement lacing your tone and you watch carefully as he slowly grips the band with his fingertips before pulling his last garment of clothing down. 
You aren’t completely shocked by his body. You did make a mental comment on how you thought he was hiding his toned form under less than flattering clothes, I mean after all he didn’t come here with the purpose of impressing you. However, as your gaze travels down his body you can’t help but to admire his athleticism, but what surprises you the most is his hard, leaking cock that stands tall under your gaze. At least you know he’s enjoying himself. 
“You’re so pretty, Jaehyun.” You muse and appreciate the way he shivers at the compliment. He clasps his hands in front of him, obstructing your view and you smirk in response. “Come here.” The order is short but he reacts right away, trying to feel for you on the bed. His head shoots up at your following command, “Crawl.”. You watch in diversion as he ponders the thought before he crawls onto the foot of your bed, proceeding slowly up to you. 
When he places his hand on your out-stretched foot, instead of retracting it shyly like you thought he would, he wraps his fingers around your ankle before following your leg up your body. The action surprises you and you can only sit stunned as he continues to crawl up between your legs, his hand stopping at your hip bone as the other once again rests on your cheek. He brings your mouth to his, connecting your lips in a kiss that feels much less cautious than the first and more full of desire. His lips are passionate on yours, the taste of lust seeping into your mouth from his. It’s not quite a whole mess but the sounds that tumble from your mouth into his make him hold your head on an angle that has his tongue angled deeper into you. 
You break the kiss with a push to his chest and instead of sitting back like you hoped he would, he begins to press firm kisses to your neck and collarbone. You find your hands in his hair, toying with the strands as puffs of air escape your lips before you realise what was supposed to be happening here. “Sit back.” You demand and he hums against your skin, yet doesn’t let up. Your fingers that are in his hair grip at his roots lightly before you use this grasp to pull his head from you. The groan he lets out as his head falls against your hand is pornographic and the sound sends shoots of arousal straight to your core. 
“You have to listen to me, Jaehyun. After all, you are being paid.” Your comment makes his cheeks redden in embarrassment but nonetheless, you marvel in the way his cock twitches. You tug his hair back further causing an arch to form in his back as he leans his chest into you. A chuckle passees through your lips before you lick over his right nipple, causing him to suck in a breath. “I’m paying you to do this because you asked me to. But you seem to enjoy it more than you let on, don’t you?” When no sound is heard from him you take the sensitive bud into your mouth, delivering a sharp pinch of a bite. 
“What was that?” You question, this time hoping for an answer. His hands grab at the sheets below as he lets out a grunt followed by a very quick, “Yes.”. 
Satisfied with his answer you release his hair. “Go sit at the foot of the bed.” Your order is simple and your tone leaves no room for argument as you watch the slightly desperate look on Jaehyun’s face turn to an annoyed one. You can tell he wants to rebut but you lightly slap his thigh in warning, “You don’t get to pick and choose what you get here tonight, Jaehyun.” That’s all it takes for him to tighten his lips before he makes his way to the edge of the bed, with his hands stretched out to find his way. 
While you keep an eye on him, you reach over to your left bedside table and pull out your trusty toy. It might seem pointless to have this man all to yourself and still want to use a vibrator but if you played your cards right, you could have Jaehyun keening in your lap for your attention. It would beat this cool and calm exterior he tries to hide his emotions in anyway. 
The toy you pulled out is a wand vibrator. Enough to push you along and enough to get Jaehyun wound up but sadly not enough to satisfy you tonight. As you switch on the toy, you watch as the man a foot away from your feet slowly swivels his head around, trying to discern where the light buzzing noise is coming from. It humours you when you see the expression on his face change when he figures out what it has to be. 
“Are you kidding me?” His question lacks intrigue and you notice a hint of disappointment in his tone that makes you smile. “What’s wrong, baby.” You ask, a slight mocking tone to your voice and when he doesn't answer you bring the vibrating head of the toy to your clit. You let out a sigh of content and a barely audible moan, that you can tell affects him as he gulps before running his tongue along his bottom lip. 
“What am I here for if you just want to do it like this?” His voice is firm, like he wants an easy answer from you but you only lightly laugh. He looks flushed as his hands fiddle in his lap to not touch anything he shouldn’t, and the amusement you seem to gain from his overall hopeless state only makes his cock throb painfully. 
“Who’s not to say that I didn’t just want you to watch?” You say and you can almost feel the twinkle in your eyes when you moan out loud and Jaehyun clenches his jaw whilst choosing to ball his fists in his lap. “That would be cruel, and I can’t even see.” Is his response. 
“It’s not cruel when you’re being paid generously to just listen. And I’ll let you see soon, maybe.” Your lips curl up when he grunts lowly in response, his pink tinged skin now a permanent feature on his pale complexion. 
Choosing now to let him wallow in his own self pity, you focus on the toy in your hand and start to move it against your sensitive bud with purpose. The whimpers and soft moans that leave your mouth are like a siren song to Jaehyun’s ears, your body calling him yet he’s stuck in place by your authority over him. If this was under any other circumstances, Jaehyun can name all the things he would do to you right now. You teasing him like this was just down right humiliating, Jaehyun was a man notorious for being in control with women. If he didn’t need the money so badly he would be ripping this blindfold off and fucking you into your bed so hard that you would forget your own name. But he wasn’t in charge, you were. So he has to sit still and take what you give him, even if it means listening to you get off on a toy while he was sitting right here eager to do anything for you. 
You call his name as you pleasure yourself but even you become frustrated with how close you’re getting just to sit on the edge of bliss. You turn the vibrator off and place it to the side before running your fingers through your folds. With your legs spread in front of him, if Jaehyun were to take off his blindfold right at this second he would see how impossibly wet you are. But you’re betting he can hear it by the way he licks his lips and the soft groan that escapes him as you stroke yourself. 
“What do you want from me?” He asks, with a desperation in his voice that you hadn’t heard thus far, “What do I have to do for you to use me instead?” His pleading tone makes your core clench, he’s practically begging. Which you could tell was a very rare occurrence from him.
You sit up slightly so that you can see him better. His brows are knit together and his entire body is flushed a light tinge of pink. What catches your eyes though is the sight of his angry red cock, pulsing with need. “What do you want?” You ask, your eyes glancing back to his face to see his eyebrows raise and a look of excitement flashes across his features. 
“Would you let me taste you?” He asks softly but with an edge of confidence as your own eyes raise at his assertive tone. The smirk that crosses your features indicates your mischievousness as you rebut, “How bad do you want to?” Your question doesn’t seem to throw him off like you thought it would, with only a light display of embarrassment becoming present on his face as he replies, “So bad.” 
You make him wait for a minute and the silence hanging in the air makes him think you’ll say no but you spread your legs wider and mumble out, “Go on then.” That’s all it takes for him to practically jump up, however he doesn't come up the bed to you. He instead searches for your foot before tugging you down to the edge of the bed, dropping to his knees when he thinks he has you placed where he wants. His soft hands run up from your knees to your thighs as he leans into your core, taking in your scent. You hear a short “fuck” escape from his lips and Jaehyun only wishes that he could see your pretty pussy. He almost has you jumping from his grip when his warm tongue makes experimental touches against your inner thighs, so close to where you want him. “Jaehyun.” The tone in your voice is once again warning, willing him to cut out the teasing and get on with it. 
He hums against you and gives you no warning when he suddenly parts your lips with the pads of his thumbs and presses his tongue into your heat. Your hands immediately fly to his head pushing him closer as your thighs enclose around his head. Drawn out moans fight their way from your chest into the air as you feel his hot tongue dart inside your dripping hole over and over again. Pulling back from you, you watch the look of concentration on his face as he tries to go at it blindly and you admire the sight of the dark fabric of the blindfold against his pale skin. 
You however get no more than a second of this before he is dipping back in, eager to show you that you should’ve used him from the start. He directs his attention to your clit and uses his thumb and index finger to squeeze it together lightly between the two, before he uses his tongue to poke at it in fast strokes. A series of curses and whines leave your mouth in a hurry, the feeling of his technique nothing like you’ve ever experienced before. While you are distracted one of his fingers begins to probe at your entrance and you don’t notice until he pushes it into you slowly. Your back arches and you once again grip his hair to hold him close as he pumps the digit inside of your heat. Making up your mind, you decide to pull the blindfold from his head, tossing it elsewhere in the room. 
Jaehyun’s eyes adjust quickly to the light of the space and he is immediately grateful to you for not only taking off the blindfold but also for having such a pretty pussy like he had hoped. Your wetness drips down from the finger that’s inside you to pool around his knuckles, and before you can breathe he’s ducking back down to latch his lips around your clit. He adds another finger to your hole carefully and begins to suck harshly on your bundle of nerves, his obvious motivation right now to see you come apart in front of him. 
Your grip on his hair is tight and only makes him groan into your core when your fingernails graze his scalp. The vibration sent through you in turn has your core beginning to clench as the pressure of pleasure builds within you. 
Jaehyun senses your state by your rigid muscles and the raise in pitch of your moans, and works to double his efforts. His fingers draw in and out of your heat at a rapid pace and his mouth suctioning on your clit with his tongue occasionally poking through to prod at it has you seeing stars behind your lids. You cum faster than you ever have when a guy’s gone down on you. The overwhelming pleasure that consumes you as you gush out onto his awaiting tongue has your body twitching while he lets your hips ride against his face. 
When you finally slump back down onto the bed, your muscles are spent and your pussy is still clenching from the power of the orgasm. Jaehyun’s fluffy hair tickles at your thighs as he brings his head back up, a primal look in his eyes as a smile graces his lips. Your mouth twitches into a similar state as you raise a brow, “Why do you look so happy?” 
He shrugs in response before sitting up on his knees, “I bet you wish you let me do that sooner.” His smug expression has your eyes narrowing, a playful hint passing through them. “Why don’t you come sit up here Jaehyun, get up off the floor.” You say indicating for him to lay in the space to your left. 
He stands up to his full height and you begin to remember how good it feels to order around a man who could easily overpower you. It’s even better when you realise that they don’t want to. The bed dips as he lays down beside you and you turn on your side to face him, your faces millimetres from one anothers. 
His eyes hold scepticism as you run your fingertips over his chest, tracing special patterns around his nipples. You feel him shiver under your touch as you do so. Quickly and before he can react you flick his right nipple causing a low hiss to escape his parted lips. “What a sensitive little thing you are, Jaehyun.” You muse, once again a touch of mockery slipping into the speculation. 
Your eyes catch his as a breath escapes him. Maintaining his gaze, you slowly lower your mouth to his chest where you let a dribble of spit slip past your lips before it falls directly onto the flicked nipple. He sharply inhales and you find yourself tingling at the effect you have on him. You do the same to his other nipple before you blow on both of them. Exchanging from the right to the left. 
The harsh temperature change on his sensitive buds has his lids half closing and short pants escaping him before drawing your attention down to his leaking cock. You hum lighlty as you resume flicking his nippples slowly, watching for any signs of actual pain but you only see pleasure enveloping his features as a drawn out breath turns into a whine. Again the easily flustered man immediately tries to catch the sound in his throat, but it’s too late. 
Your eyes zero in on the way he tosses his head to the side in embarrassment and you take this opportunity to lean up and press hard marks to the soft skin of his throat. You surprise him with a pinch to the nipples as you do so, and his hands immediately fly to your waist attempting to pull you on top of him. You pull back and tut, a borderline condescending look on your face as his eyes plead with you to stop teasing and give him what he wants. 
You trail a hand up his thigh tauntingly before stopping just beside his cock. The head pulses almost violently and you wonder if this is what it must feel like for him to have ‘blue balls’. Jaehyun thinks the exact same thing. 
“Do you want me to touch you here?” You question almost sadistically as your fingers dance around where he wants you most. He begins to squirm under your touch and he nods his head. You pretend to ponder the thought, “I think you should ask.” you say in amusement as his head shakes. 
“Touch me.” The demand leaves you slightly stunned but a smirk makes its way to your lips. You grasp his cock suddenly, the tight, dry friction on his sensitive dick having him all but yelp in pain whilst his hips thrust into your grip in contradiction. You lean forward slightly, your smile a sheet hiding your teeth that you display threateningly, “Ask nicely.” 
HIs body heaves in need and the slight pain of your grip and your show of aggressive dominance causes a shameful moan to grace the air. “Please. Touch me.” He rushes out in an attempt to mask the sound. You sit back on your heels, a satisfied smile replacing the sadistic one. “Good boy. You’ll find doing what I say works in your favour.” You pretend to not notice the way his thighs tremble at the pet name, instead choosing to spare him of the added embarrassment. 
You place yourself in between his legs and lean down, but before you can get too close to his leaking member, a hand finds its way into your hair. “No.” You all but growl and the pressure is immediately gone, almost making you wonder if you had imagined it. But as you look up to him from your position the way he turns his head to the side and gulps shows you you hadn’t. 
You choose to let it slide, figuring it was a habit and it would be mean to punish him for it straight away. However as you once again lean closer to his cock his hand is back, this time tangling in your hair. Your sharp eyes puncture him before your words can as you lean over him, your body pressed firmly against his. “For fucks sake Jaehyun, can your stupid little horny brain not comprehend that no means no.” His wide eyed response almost makes you think that your outburst was too much for him but when he swallows a deep groan and thrusts emptily into your thigh, you know. This little shit is getting off to this more than you thought. 
You grab his wrists so tightly you swear your nails leave imprints on him and another moan tumbles from his lips. You breathe harshly, almost annoyed he’s becoming more and more turned on as you become increasingly tired of his antics. You thrust his arms forward above his head causing your boobs to bounce and land an inch or two from his face. His barely open eyes snap to your exposed nipples as he arches himself from the bed, lifting his face to your chest and in turn, causing friction to occur between your tightly pressed bodies. 
His thigh between your legs rubs at your clit deliciously and your eyes all but roll back as his mouth connects with your hardened bud. With your weight still pressing his wrists out of reach he is rendered almost useless and a shot of arousal shoots through your core. You slowly start to grind your pussy against his bare thigh and the sensation has a short gasp pulled from your throat. Jaehyun moans against your nipple as his teeth lightly scrape over the sensitive skin. He tenses his thigh as he switches his attention to the other breast, popping the last from his mouth. 
You continue to rock against him, completely aware of how your own thigh pushes against his balls and lower shaft, causing him slight relief along with an appreciated ting of pain. He seems to mostly get off to how you use him though. The way you tend to lose yourself in the feeling, almost completely forgetting he was there and only focusing on your own pleasure has his mind foggy. “You just let me use you, don't you.” You chuckle, a borderlining scary glint passing through your eyes but it only makes him want for you more. 
You release his wrists from your grip in favour of placing them either side of his head as you sit yourself up in a more comfortable position and the movement has your chest leaving his reach. So you can continue rocking your cunt against his toned thigh but also be close enough to his face for what you wanted to try. You raise your right hand slowly up to his neck before wrapping your fingers loosely around the column of his throat. His eyes immediately close and a light hum of appreciation that exits you turns to an elicit moan as he moves his thigh in a way that has your clit being pressed against it in just the right way. 
With this, your fingers tighten slightly and you feel as his hands twitch above his head where you left them. You lower your head so that your lips hover above his, “Good boy, just lightly. It feels good.” He gasps as you choose this moment to slip his pulsing head into your entrance. A slight rotation of your hips is all it takes and he slips in easily, filling you almost too good. Again, your grip on his throat tightens and you know when the sensation of both hits him as he lets out a gorgeous moan, the sound causing you to tighten around him as you begin to pop your hips on his cock. 
Jaehyun was about to cum. You could feel it by the way he seems to expand inside you, and you wouldn’t blame him. He’s been on edge for a while and the combination of your pussy wrapped around him and your fingers tightly wrapped around his neck, would have him seeing stars. Though, you won’t let it be over that fast. You don’t know Jaehyun’s body well enough to know what his recovery period would be and you are not paying as much as you are to let him cum that fast in your pussy. 
Just as you feel he’s only a stroke or two from exploding you lift off him, causing a pitiful whine of his to fill the room. You release your grip on his neck in favour of tangling your fist in his hair tightly and leaning down. “You know it can’t be that easy baby.” You pout, the now familiar mocking tone present in your voice. 
“What the actual hell.” He groans, pulling his head to the side, almost purposefully so that the tug on his hair is harder. You place a gentle kiss on his sharp jawline before patting his chest, caressing him so lightly as to not rile him into cumming untouched. When enough time had passed that you were satisfied he was again far from orgasm, you slowly sunk down on him again. 
Jaehyun tries not to move, he really does, but he’s just so fucking sensitive from beging edged. He cries out curse words as you move against him slowly. His back arches off the bed and trying to sooth his mind, you tug at his roots till his head tips back again and you lower your head to litter light kisses on his throat. Now marked with light hickeys and obvious marks from where your fingers were tightly coiled around his neck.
All of these light touches and soft movements bring Jaehyun closer to cumming much faster than he thought he could but like before, you felt his impending orgasm and chose to lift right off of him. He whines a hopelessly loud cry and attempts to usher you back down on him by lifting his hips. When you don't budge he frustratingly brings one of his hands that he had so nicely kept above his head, between the two of you where he grasps his cock in his hand. Hissing from the sensitivity of two denied orgasms, he tries powers through and tug at himself desperately.
It’s only when you pull his hand from his cock underneath you that you notice the water pooling in his tear ducts. Dear god, you made him cry. You shush him soothingly and wipe the stray tear that falls. He grabs your wrist looking up at you with pleading eyes. “Safeword?” You question. He shakes his head no and you internally smile. “Please let me cum.” he begs, a strain lingering in his voice. You nod and he prepares for you to take a seat on him when you suddenly roll to the side making him panic. You weren’t going to leave him like this were you? Pay him and send him home? 
“No, no, no. Please.” he pleads before you connect your lips with his, encouraging him to roll to his side as well. He melts into the kiss, easily letting you lead as he obliges, fully facing you as you press yourself closer to him. You lift your leg so that you are half straddling his hip and use the heel of your foot to press his hips to yours. His cock nudges at your thigh and he shudders, lightly placing one hand on your cheek and the other on your waist. Silently asking for permission. When you don’t push him away, he deepens the kiss, moaning into your mouth as you reach a hand down to grasp him softly and align him to your entrance once again. 
He doesn't push himself into you. He seems to have learnt better than that in your short time together. So when you once again press your heel to his ass he gets the hint and jolts into you. His mouth gapes open as you continue to kiss him and small whimpers fall from your own mouth. It’s been a struggle for you too, don’t be mistaken. As everytime he gets edged, effectively, so do you. So when he does finally start to rut his hips into yours you know he won’t last long. His movements are slow and deep as he fights his own sensitivity to finally tip over the edge. 
It feels intimate. The position, the pace, the way he parts from your mouth to look you in the eyes before his lids close in bliss everytime you squeeze around him. You know very well by now when he's getting close so when you feel him begin to throb inside you, you guide his hand on your waist between the two of you and you think he gets the idea. He presses small, slow and sensual circles on your clit that has you quickly tipped over the edge. Your body in turn convulses as he rides you through your high. The pulsing and tight heat of your pussy around him paired with the contractions from your orgasm has his own high crashing into him. The most beautiful sounds leave his raw throat as his eyes screw shut, his grip on you tightening and you swear you’ve never seen a prettier sight. 
The next few moments you two just spend lying in each other's arms, both too sensitive to move until you know that your pussy has held him captive long enough. You gently pull away from him, lowering your leg back down to your side. Another moment passes and Jaehyun still has his eyes closed and you almost think you’ve given him a heart attack. “I don’t want to leave.” he mumbles and you almost laugh in relief. 
“You don't have to leave right now Jaehyun.” You asure and his eyes peel open, grip still tight around your waist. 
“No, you don’t get it. I don’t want to just go and never see you again.” His voice is barely above a whisper and you find yourself caught in thoughts. Does this mean he’s caught some sort of feelings? I mean you would be lying if you said you didn’t feel anything but this was only supposed to be a one time thing. 
You go to move, trying to untangle yourself from his arms and avoiding his gaze. “Look Jaehyun, I’ll just get your money-”
He pulls you close to him so that your noses are nearly touching and your heart thumps hard in your chest as his eyes make contact with yours. “I don’t want the money. I want you.”
You sigh in relief once again. “I want you too.”
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mochiwrites · 2 months
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You say you dont want people copying your work but you dont seem to have a problem with other mumscarian aus that clearly draw heavily on songbird like rift au? Explain
anon wdym? 🤨
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on a serious note:
first of all, belle (stitchthesewords) is a very dear friend of mine, and I happen to enjoy rift au very much. SECOND of all, rift au existed before songbird did. and I'll have you know, belle helped me plan songbird's base storyline. we talk about fic ideas all the time??
I'd genuinely love to see how you think rift au, a fantasy crime story with a resistance against king ren, draws "heavily" on songbird, a fantasy murder mystery with a deeply rooted theme of humanity. these two aus HARDLY have any similarities between them. so I'd love to see what you think is heavy influence.
the only similarities is the fantasy genre, and that mumbo is a vampire. other than that, the stories are two completely separate entities.
I'd rather people not copy my work, this is correct. but taking inspiration from it is fine?? as long as the inspiration inspires your own idea. this may shock you, but songbird took inspiration from the midnight series. and before you assume that series takes heavy influence from songbird, midnight existed first, hope that helps!
there is a fine line between taking inspiration and copying someone's work. copying songbird would be someone taking the plotline and ripping off of it. however taking inspiration would be putting your own spin on an idea or concept.
also it's not like I'm religiously stalking the mumscarian tag to see the fics either???
I don't know if you think I'm supposed to have a problem with other writers taking inspiration from me, but I don't. as long as the plot isn't a straight rip off from my own work, people can go crazy! creativity inspires creativity. that's how stories work! and that's okay. inspiration does NOT equal copying. are there some stories that draw a bit too much influence from my works? yes, I've seen them. and it's not like I can stop people from doing what they want. the most I can do is say "hey, please don't copy/rip off of my work" and hope that people are kind enough to listen.
as I always say, fanfic writing is a hobby, it's not serious or "professional" like publishing a book is. and BOY anon don't look at how publishing works, you might be upset over how the book marketing is done (spoiler alert: agents will ask you to compare your story to at least two other books that are similar to yours!)
you're allowed to take inspiration from the things you read.
and next time? you might want to check if the writers of the two fics you're claiming are "similar" are friends.
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o-uncle-newt · 2 months
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We don't talk enough about the Petherbridge/Walter adaptations of the Wimsey/Vane novels.
(Well, we probably talk EXACTLY enough about Gaudy Night, which is really pretty bad, but besides for that...)
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(Sorry, just a warning, Richard Morant as Bunter is fine but I won't have much to say about him here. I just really like this picture.)
The casting is basically perfect, especially Harriet Walter as Harriet Vane. I no longer see the book character in any other way- the only notable difference is that in the book she's noted as having a deep voice, but Walter's has a distinctive enough tone that I think it works regardless. She is just so, so, so good- captures the character beautifully, sells everything she does whether mundane or ridiculous (probably the best/most realistic reaction of someone finding a body I have EVER seen in Have His Carcase), makes the most of every limited minute she's on screen in Strong Poison and leaves her mark every minute that she isn't... and she looks AMAZING doing all of it. Just perfect, could not imagine better casting.
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Edward Petherbridge I don't hold up to that level of perfection- I think that, try as he might, he's not really able to capture Wimsey's dynamism (possibly because he's a bit too old for the role) and is a bit overly caricatured in many of his mannerisms. But overall he does a pretty good job, in addition to looking quite a lot like how I'd imagined Wimsey- but in particular, I think he does a really lovely job of selling a lot of the emotion that he has to convey in some scenes that feel like they SHOULDN'T be adaptable from the book- specifically the scenes of him and Harriet. Him proposing to Harriet, him being disappointed when she (completely reasonably) turns him down... those shouldn't work on screen with real humans rather than in Sayers's calculated prose, but it DOES work and in no small part because he's great at selling Wimsey's feelings as being genuine even when his actions seem over the top. And, of course, Harriet Walter sells her end of the scenes right back. All in all, I think I have mixed feelings about Petherbridge as Lord Peter Wimsey the detective, but I'm a fan of him as Peter, the man who has feelings for Harriet.
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Overall, though, both are, I think, very successful in capturing these characters- the fact that they take these people who even in the book can sometimes push the boundaries of likeability (which to be clear, is part of what I love about reading them) and make them eminently watchable is a great achievement. And also, in addition to their really looking like their characters individually, they're very well matched as a pair in the way that one pictures them from the book. They're even of very similar height and build, which we know is canonically true from Gaudy Night, and thus at least a somewhat relevant element of their dynamic.
Now, the adaptations are very uneven, and that's even without talking about Gaudy Night because, while it has about as good a rendition of the punting scene as I think we were ever going to get, most of the rest of it is crap and massively expands on what I think are serious problems to Peter and Harriet's relationship that the series as a whole had (not to mention cutting the character of St George, which is a travesty). None of the adaptations are perfect, and mess with aspects of their relationship in negative ways- for example, the ending of Strong Poison is exactly backward in a really awful way. I'll get back to this.
But when the show gets the two of them right, it gets them RIGHT, even when it's adapting Sayers's text/creating new dialogue. There are scenes in this one that I love almost as much as the canon text, like this one:
I don't think any of this is in the book, and there are things that happen here that I don't think Sayers would have ever written. But at the same time, a combination of the dialogue and the actors makes it COMPLETELY believable as these two people, and it captures a moment that is just really key for Peter as he faces his limitations and his feelings- something that in the book is conveyed through a lot of internal narrative on Peter's part that would be impossible to adapt as is, but that in the world of the show needed to happen in a much more visual and narrative way. Not all of the dialogue that this series chooses to fill in those gaps works, but even when it doesn't the actors do their best to sell the heck out of it, and when the dialogue DOES work it is seriously brilliant.
Probably my favorite of the adaptations is Have His Carcase, and scenes like this one are a big part of the reason why:
They change the location, but otherwise it's EXTRAORDINARILY faithful to the equivalent scene in the book, and honestly it shouldn't have worked with real people doing it and yet it does. It's just acted perfectly, given just enough arch and silly humor (particularly with the spinning door) that we don't attempt to take it too seriously, while also conveying the relevant emotions so well. The actors in the scene through only their faces and ways of speaking convey subtext that Sayers, in the book, conveyed a lot later on as actual text in the characters' thoughts, and there's something pretty great about that.
Other Have His Carcase scenes are less good (the dance scene is mediocre at best, I think), but if there's another Have His Carcase scene that I think illustrates how great Walter and Petherbridge are at selling the human sides of their characters, it's That Argument- seen here:
The Argument is a pale imitation of that in the book- the one in the book is, in fact, probably unadaptable as is- but it is still just so good because the actors are so good at selling it. Walter is just brilliant in the role and utterly inhabits it while also imbuing it with her own spin, and makes us feel Harriet's pain- and Petherbridge, through some relatively subtle facial expressions and reactions, is able just as well to make US understand what all of this means to him and how he feels. It's actually really remarkable that, just like how Sayers writes a relationship dynamic that only feels like it works because she's the one who wrote it that very specific way, this scene feels like it only works because these two actors play it in this specific way. Could two other actors do it? Very possibly, but it would feel super different and I wonder if it would feel this authentic. (I do want to note though that this scene made me really wish that we'd seen a Frasier-era David Hyde Pierce in the role of a younger and spryer, but equally posh, witty, and vulnerable, Wimsey. It just gave me vibes of something that he'd do beautifully.)
Now, as I said above, this doesn't get EVERYTHING right. In fact, quite a lot of their relationship ends up going pretty wrong- as I think a major mistake is their throughline which emphasizes Peter's continued pursuit of Harriet as not just reiterating his interest to make it clear that he hasn't changed his mind, but actively taking advantage of moments and situations in a romantic sense, taking a much more specific role in engaging with her physically, commenting on her appearance, saying how difficult it is for him to NOT pursue her more, etc. It makes the whole thing feel a lot more cat-and-mouse rather than a budding relationship of equals, and one where Peter acknowledges the whole time that they HAVE to be equals for a) Harriet to feel comfortable with him and b) them to be good together. In fact, however good the Argument above is, it's kind of undercut by this very pattern- he makes the book's point about him treating his feelings like something out of a comic opera, but he also at that point in the story has had a few much more oppressively serious scenes with her that clearly make her uncomfortable- nothing like anything in a comic opera. It's like the show misses the point a little.
I think the place where this really starts is at the end of Strong Poison. (I could see an argument to be made that it starts earlier, in a few smaller nuances of their jailhouse scenes, but I like those enough that I choose not to read into them too much lol.) After what I think is a great addition to the final jailhouse scene (one that I loved so much I repurposed it for a fic)- "it's supposed to be about love, isn't it" and some excellent reactions from Petherbridge- Harriet goes to court, her charges are dismissed, and unlike in the book, when it's Wimsey who leaves first (which Eiluned and Sylvia point out is a sign of his decency in not waiting for Harriet to thank him), here Wimsey is the one who watches as Harriet rejects him and walks away from him- the beginning of the chase. But nothing about their relationship is meant to be a chase! It's so frustrating to watch as that proceeds to be a continuing issue to a limited degree in Have His Carcase (where it's at least balanced by enough good moments that it doesn't matter so much) and to a MASSIVE, genuinely uncomfortable degree in Gaudy Night.
The only praise I will give it is that while the punt scene in the book is unfilmable, I think this adaptation did its best here and it's pretty good.
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I'm not going to spend much time talking about Gaudy Night otherwise, because I'd need all day for it and also I'd probably need to rewatch it to make sure I get the details right and I have zero interest in doing that, but the way that it has Wimsey imposing himself and his feelings/hopes on Harriet to a really ridiculous degree, in a way that he never, ever does in the book, is just so so discomfiting and makes me feel terrible for Harriet. She doesn't deserve that. If I recall correctly, in that scene at the dance at the beginning, she's so happy just being with him and then he's all "oh so this means you want to marry me" and she just droops. He's so aggressive!
And that's what makes the worst part so bad, because not only does this miniseries not depict Wimsey's apology as the book does- one of the best scenes in a book full of brilliant scenes- it would actually be weird if it did, because this show doesn't imply that there's ANYTHING for Wimsey to be apologizing for! In fact, unlike in the books where we see Wimsey growing and deconstructing the parts of himself that had been demanding of Harriet, in the series we only see him get more demanding- until finally he wins. It's honestly infuriating and I hate it- the actors do their best to sell it (and apparently they were given bad enough material that they actually had to rewrite some of it themselves, though I have mixed feelings about the results) but it is just massively disappointing. Basically the whole emotional journey between the two of them is not just neutered but twisted.
For all of my criticisms of the adaptations' all around approach to their relationship, I do have to reiterate- Walter and Petherbridge do a wonderful, wonderful job. (Especially Walter.) When they're given good material to work with, and even often when they aren't, they are able to sell it so well- and particularly in the case of Walter, I genuinely can't think of the character as anyone but her rendition now. She IS Harriet Vane for me. And, for all the flaws that the series has, that's something pretty dang special.
Anyway, for anyone who read through this whole thing and hasn't seen these adaptations, I DO recommend Strong Poison and Have His Carcase- but not Gaudy Night unless you're either really curious or a glutton for punishment. The first two, though, have very good supporting casts, are quite faithful plot wise (sometimes to a fault- another flaw is that they are really devoted to conveying the whole mystery with all its clues sometimes to the point of dragginess, but will drop sideplots like, for example, Parker and Mary- which is totally reasonable, but still vaguely disappointing as those sideplots tend to add some levity/characterization), and just generally are an overall good time. (Some standout characters for me are Miss Climpson in Strong Poison and Mrs Lefranc in Have His Carcase.) And, of course, the best part is seeing the little snippets of Peter and Harriet that come through- less so their journey, vs in the book where that's central, but so many scenes where we just see the two of them together as they are in that moment and it's so satisfying.
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resident-mercie · 10 months
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Carlos Oliveira Fic - Halcyon Days (NSFW). (Chapter 1).
notes: fem!reader, NSFW mentions, slow-burn, canon violence depictions.
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➵ A slow-burning love story with Carlos Oliveira that transcends the apocalypse.
1998. The Raccoon City incident. Yet also, the day I met him.
I remember it quite vividly, as you can imagine. One day you’re living your monotonous life in the suburbs, next, your life is in tatters, to say the least. I was young and dumb then, in my twenties. No amount of preparation beforehand could’ve prepared me for Raccoon City. It started off mysteriously enough, remembering how myself and my coworkers would chat about the news reports we heard on the radio during our daily commutes. Bizarre murders in the outskirts of the town, yet the corpses had part of their remains almost bitten off. We just chalked it down to some wild dogs or coyotes taking an opportunity to get a little free food. Yet the reality was so much darker. There I was one evening, preparing for bed, and that’s when the apocalyptic uproar began. Screams, then sirens, then the sound of them. In my rush to see the ever growing commotion, my world turned upside down. The cinema, that I’d visit every weekend as a kid, was alight, the posters of new premieres reduced to nothing but ash. The donut store, that was usually full of workers making a slight detour from their commute home, was eerily silent amidst the cacophony of apocalypse.
It was entrancing, like my own little world. A world so vastly different from the monotony of my own, that it was painfully jarring. So jarring, that I didn’t notice the creature lumbering towards me—
A sharp whistle shook me out of the trance I was trapped in, as I stared at the beast that fell at my side, its crimson liquid splattering across the debris-ridden sidewalk. The reality dawned on me, as the creature squelched beside me, a slight wail emanating from its jaws.
It’s an apocalypse. A fucking apocalypse.
It was like watching a horror flick cliche in front of me. This creature is a zombie. A zombie, in my hometown.
“D’you wanna get eaten? Don’t just stand there!”
A hand grabbed mine, and I was back to reality, grounded at last. It was adorned in a fingerless glove, yet the fingers were quite coarse. Unlike the creature at my feet, the hand of my rescuer was warm, one of the few glimpses of humanity I would experience for a long while.
The hand pulled me away from the scene, as the monster by my feet began to reanimate itself slowly. Half aware of the situation I was in, I let myself be pulled away, witnessing the danger unfold in front of my eyes. Panic. Running. Screaming.
Everyone was going the opposite way to us, a realisation I made as my trance began to end, and the real world dawned on me.
"Why are they going—"
It was if he read my mind.
"I'm taking you somewhere safe. We've been converting the subway station into a safe spot. You're safe now, but you have to trust me."
You have to trust me.
For the first time since my rescuer grabbed ahold of my hand, I finally looked at him. He was adorned in military gear, underneath being a tight-fitting black t-shirt, a slight hole made in its sleeve. His forearms were muscular, one being used to guard myself from any incoming threat, while the other had an assault rifle of sorts hoisted upon his shoulder for easy access. His skin was a tanned olive shade, his forehead beading with sweat. There was a caring, yet determined, look that was plastered across his face.
I could trust him. I will trust him.
We kept running – it was the only thing we could do. Glass kept shattering. The screams were growing quieter now, a feeling that made me sick to the very core of my stomach. It could only mean one thing, really – that many of the people that we had ran past just moments before were about to meet a fate worse than death.
"Through here. Quickly." His voice was one that was firm, yet also one with concern.
“What the hell is this place?”
“It’s the subway. Me and uh, my gang, have been converting the train carriages into a safe place of sorts. You’re okay now.”
I nodded, the whole situation being a bitter pill to have to swallow. I could hardly get my words out of my mouth, unable to fully comprehend the extent of the horrors I bore witness to today.
“Why did you save me?”
“Because—“ He began, but his speech faltered, as if he struggled to put his thoughts into words. “Ah, I mean, it’s my duty. Do you mind if you come on down to the first aid carriage? Need to check you over for cuts and the like. Can’t be bringing an infected into the safe place, y’know?’
I nodded, before the words fell out of my mouth, unable to control my racing thoughts any longer.
“I need to know your name. You risked your life for me, and I don’t even know who you are.”
His gaze softened a little, turning to face me with a smile of reassurance.
“Oliveira. Carlos Oliveira. Now, shall we get going? I can’t have you turning on me.”
There was even something reassuring in his laughter, in his humour, and in his smile. I gave a smile back, albeit an exhausted one, before following him into the sanctum of the subway.
“Okay, I just need you to stay put here for a while. Any unusual symptoms? Wanting to eat me because I look delicious? Anything like that?” Carlos smiled, producing a half full first aid kit from an area of the carriage.
I shook my head. “No, nothing like that.”
“Boo. All the ladies usually want a piece of Carlos, zombie or not.” He rolled his eyes jokingly, taking an ear thermometer from the kit. “Do you mind if I take your temperature at all? Standard procedure, of course.”
“Of course.” I leant forward, cringing slightly as the thermometer entered my ear.
Carlos leant forward, his sweet breath hitting my cheeks. “I’m sorry if this hurts.” His voice was lowered, raspy. Being so close to the man who just saved my life was a little infatuating, to say the least.
“No, no. It’s okay.” My breathing grew unsteady, unable to cope with the closeness of his presence.
Surely I wasn’t in love with a guy I met fifteen minutes prior?
“Your temperature is fine.” Carlos frowned, removing the disposable cap from the thermometer and placing it back in the dishevelled first aid kit. "Are you sure you’re alright, though? You seem a little on edge. Is there anything I can do for you?”
Anything.
Every cell in my body screamed, pleading with me to ask for something. Anything. I was completely and utterly infatuated with Carlos Oliveira. I wanted to kiss him, feel my body melt into his, have him rail the ever living shit out of me in this godforsaken carriage—
“Could, you, uh, give me a hug?”
“I mean, so long as you don’t turn. But being eaten by a cutie would be a good way to go, I suppose.”
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void-writing · 1 year
Text
really enjoying episode 4 of Scarlet Hollow and i want to put together some miscellaneous thoughts about my experiences so far
Spoilers to follow, so I’ll put it under a cut :)
Sybil and the Cat
As much as it pains me, I do not trust Sybil. She was setting off so many alarms for me this chapter during the tea meeting. Like, she has fucking castor beans in her tea room--which if you picked the Book Smart trait are revealed to be full of ricin aka: one of the deadliest poisons ever that was used by KGB to carry out stealth assassinations because you only need a tiny dose for it to be lethal and there is no antidote. And when we see it again in the clinic’s medicine room, we recognize it but somehow we can’t remember where we saw it even though we were just at Sybil’s tea room and when we ask Dr. Kelly how she settled on using ricin to subdue Reese’s...condition...we mysteriously don’t hear who Dr. Kelly went to for it. I 100% believe that Kelly got it from Sybil because she claimed she had an “errand” to run on Main Street (aka, where the General Store is) when Reese distracted her.
Also, Sybil is definitely doing something to Kaneeka. There is something in that tea that makes her more subjective to Sybil’s influence because when we came into the General Store, Kaneeka went to her room way too easily, and there’s a scene where we manage to get Kaneeka out of her room to come with us to the clinic, but Sybil stops us and insists Kaneeka isn’t well despite her momentary insistence to the contrary. And then...she just changes her mind and we have to go alone. And if you picked the Mystical trait, you specifically note that something is encroaching on your mind and trying to make you agree with Sybil that Kaneeka should rest.
And I haven’t even touched on the tea reading itself because something I find highly suspicious is the notion of the “cat” figure, the “hidden enemy.” There’s an option to pose the question that Sybil is the cat but it’s immediately shot down. You don’t even voice it. It just tells you “there’s no way Sybil is the cat. She’s helping you. Why would she warn you about the cat if she’s the cat. Pick someone else.” Also, the time I picked Tabitha as my suspect, Sybil was strangely insistent on encouraging that conjecture. It’s like she’s trying to subtly drive a wedge between us and Tabitha, which makes me concerned because Tabitha at least seems to value Sybil’s council and got some mysterious “tea” from her in episode 3 (which I think is either for the Scarlet’s mysterious prisoner or for us, and I’m fairly sure that it’s meant to subdue whoever drinks it somehow). Plus, I think it would be a classic fake out if Sybil is this hidden enemy because even without the tea forcing us to not suspect Sybil, it’s a lot like how in murder mystery shows, sometimes the one who reports the crime is the one who committed it in order to throw suspicion off them. Because why would they raise the alarm if they were the culprit?
And honestly, her tea reading itself is kind of sus too. If you have Mystical as a trait, you can ask to see the tea leaves yourself and...it’s just kind of a mess of leaf shreds. Sybil claims that tea reading is something that takes years to learn, but I’d think that with the Mystical trait, we’d be able to pick up something. But nothing flags and we hand it back. Plus, the reading doesn’t...tell us anything new aside from this “hidden enemy.” It’s supposedly just a mess of omens of ill fortune and doom. Which we already know from the Ditchlings. And it doesn’t point us to any useful direction. Other than the clinic and seeking out more of the carvings. She says it’s to arm yourself with knowledge (and honestly, I do find that to be a kernel of sound advice) but we don’t know much about the carvings aside from 1) only Scarlets feel the pull and see visions from them, usually of some dark secret truth, 2) people keep dying near or even on them, 3) a Witch told Charles Shaw Junior to seek them out for currently unknown reasons, only to get whammied by Eddie--who seemingly was in some kind of involuntary trance--as soon as he finds it, 4) we keep passing out and having seizures when we see them for the first time, and 5) something bad happens whenever we see them the first time (the mine collapsed, Charles Junior’s whole puppet show, Reese...). It feels like we’re being...primed for something. Prepared. And it feels like we’re being prepared as a sacrificial offering somehow to strengthen whatever curse/mystic whatever that has its hold on the town.
We get some backstory from Sybil about both herself and our mother, but Sybil was vague about herself. She only mentioned that her family has been in the Holler for as long--if not longer--than the Scarlets. So, maybe she’s a descendant of The Witch from Charlie’s haunting. The one that likely has “ulterior motives” according to the Mystic Trait. Sybil also seems quite insistent on downplaying the extent of her power and knowledge and denying being a witch when asked. All in all, Sybil seems very insistent on pushing the “innocent old lady” image. She also dropped some Scarlet lore too. Apparently our maternal grandmother died in childbirth due to being too young to be giving birth, let alone birthing twins. All the husbands after Edwardine’s time are still unknown, Sybil writing them off as flings or just not being terribly remarkable. I’ll talk more on my thoughts about this later.
In summary, Sybil is sus. I think she knows more than she’s letting on. She’s doing something to Kaneeka (Miles also looked pissed for some reason during the scene where Sybil stops us from taking Kaneeka with us to the clinic. Whether his rage is on Kaneeka’s behalf or directed at Kaneeka, I don’t know) and was almost certainly the one supplying Dr. Kelly with castor beans. There was something in that tea that we drank that makes us less suspicious of Sybil (maybe it’s part of the “preparation” I’m theorizing is going on. After all, we were given the same tea when we first arrived in Scarlet Hollow...). I think she’s trying to throw suspicion off of herself by warning us about the “hidden enemy” herself. Tabitha trusts her but tried to subtly drive us to suspect Tabitha of being an enemy.
Reese and Doctor Kelly
First of all, Dr. Kelly definitely likes kids better than...most people. If you don’t have the Keen Eye trait, Rosalina loses a leg and when we go to visit Oscar to check in and see if he’s seen Stella, Dr. Kelly is there giving Rosalina shots and checking up on her. During this, Dr. Kelly is downright kind and gentle until she notices us and she turns into the Ice Queen Doc that we saw last episode. Oscar told Dr. Kelly everything that happened the night before and she...seems to believe him, but if we try to warn her about the carving in the clinic and ask to see it, she gets defensive rather than dismissive.
Reese might be an Anti-Christ. I mean...the biggest reason I think that is that Dr. Kelly was having “romantic” sleep paralysis dreams for months and suddenly got pregnant despite not seeing anyone romantically. There’s also the fact that Reese has a downright supernatural healing factor, which is definitely how he’s survived consuming regular doses of one of the most deadly poisons on Earth (and also getting shot by Tabitha if you call her) and why he seems...strangely fixated and enthused by the idea of human suffering and cosmic horror. Like...those on their own are fine. I get it. It’s fascinating to explore in art and media, but...Reese seemed to be talking about people experiencing it in real life during the build up to his transformation. Idk. During that, it didn’t feel like he was talking about the horror movie that was on.
Reese has encountered Wayne before. He didn’t know his name, so he didn’t make the connection to Wayne as our stalker until we name him. Wayne knows that Reese is something other and dangerous, but didn’t know what until the fight broke out. I want to talk more about Wayne, but I’ll leave that for later. Also, Reese was absolutely convinced that Wayne hated him and meant to hurt him (I mean...I don’t think he was necessarily wrong in that tbh).
Dr. Kelly has been prepping for the eventuality that Reese will no longer listen to her and take his “medicine.” There’s an outcome where Reese gets locked away in Dr. Kelly’s safe room (which is the outcome I favored most since I don’t want to kill Reese but I also don’t want to let him kill Dr. Kelly). And the ricin was actually Dr. Kelly’s second option. She switched to it when she had to stop ordering official meds because what she was ordering was poisonous and people would get suspicious. Also, what she was giving Reese wasn’t working anymore anyway. His body adapted. So I think the poison was meant to keep Reese’s powers busy. If they’re focused on healing the damage the ricin does, then he won’t have enough to spare to Hulk out. And even the ricin seemed to be losing effect too because it only took a couple hours for Reese’s powers to rebound (he did carry us from the carving, up and down several flights of stairs despite being a walking skeleton, which is sus on its own but extra sus if you have the Powerful Build trait, which makes you even heavier. I think).
Reese can turn his paintings into minions. With the Mystical Trait, you’re able to sense in episode 3 that something dark lingers in those paintings in a much more literal sense and Reese talks about feelings building up within him that he releaves by putting them into the paintings. Guess it was a lot more literal than we thought.
Reese also got...strangely defensive of us when Wayne shows up. I haven’t done anything to support or oppose him yet, but I do find it a bit odd. I mean, he’d only met us for like an hour tops the day before. Maybe it was just because we were there and depending on how the medicine room goes (and what traits you picked), we alerted him to the Doc’s “true” intentions with him and his “medicine.” But he doesn’t seem to exhibit the same feelings towards his life-long friends. Not that they came up during the whole *gestures vaguely* but I’d think that if he was feeling so under threat that he’d mention, even off-handedly, staying with Kaneeka or Stella. I don’t quite know what to make of it yet, but it felt odd to me.
Dr. Kelly was also looking over death records of Scarlets in her office. We have the option to snoop at them (which I’ve always taken so far because I love me some lore) and we get some...interesting bits of info. That, I’ll talk more on later, but I find it interesting that she’s looking at those especially since in episode 3, Dr. Kelly mentioned that Scarlets seem to be...averse to hospital and doctor visits. I wonder what she was looking for in those.
The Carvings
There’s a chance of being able to examine the second carving (which I will be calling the Goat carving for simplicity’s sake) if Rosalina didn’t lose a leg and we placate Charlie’s spirit. If you have Book Smart, you notice that the carving’s style is Greeco-Roman, the weathering points to it being from a temple, and that the carving from the mine (which will henceforth be called the Chain carving) were made by the same artist and likely came from the same place.
They seem to lose their magnetism on us after we encounter them the first time.
The carvings also seem to be in sites of death. The Chain carving was in the depths of the condemned Shaw Mine where miner’s died due to rotted beams (and if you have the Mystic trait, you get extra scenes from these carvings. In the Chain carving, you see an argument between Charles Shaw Senior and Enoch Scarlet, where Charles Senior confronts Enoch about using subpar wood in the mines and Enoch writes him off. I don’t remember if you get an extra scene in the Goat carving, but the third one also gives us a vision of Enoch doing something dubious. So it seems that whatever’s going on in the Holler might have started with him). Charles Shaw Junior freaking died on one, murdered by a Scarlet. And the third one was in a “clean air” clinic that was turned into a proper doctor’s office after the mine collapse to treat the survivors. And I doubt all of them survived.
And the third one...I’m calling it the Chimera carving because there was...a lot going on visually in that one, we see an injured man in a hospital bed, presumably Theodore Scarlet, Enoch’s brother and our great uncle who supposedly died in the Shaw mine collapse. Enoch assures Theodore(?), who says the doctors told him he’ll never walk again, that he’s sorted this out by talking to The Witch. Theodore doesn’t seem to know who Enoch is talking about, responding with “A...witch?” rather than “The Witch” like Enoch. I’m guessing she’s the same Witch from Charles Junior’s memories, but Enoch claims that Theodore doesn’t have to worry about his legs or anything again and that he’ll be taking him home by the end of the week. If you have the Mystic trait, you get an extra scene of Enoch in the doctor’s office, telling the doctor that the man claiming to be Theodore isn’t his brother and insisting that he died in the mine collapse. I’m not sure who Enoch was lying to, but I think it was most likely that Enoch lied to the doctor and declared Theodore dead when he wasn’t and then hiding him in the estate. Though, I think it would have been just as likely that Enoch killed this guy.
The symbolism of the carvings to me points to the themes of cycles and sacrifice. The arms circled in chains, each swinging some kind of improvised chain flail(?). The goat’s head, surrounded by three wolves (and the fact that the Shaws had a lot of goat symbolism during Charlie’s haunting. Possibly pointing to how the Shaws were scapegoats for the Scarlets and potentially a sacrificial goat as well). The Chimera carving involves seven (mostly) alternating figures or humanoids and animals, all bound together by a long, tangled snake. The animals are a lion, a goat, a sheep, and possibly either a cow or a pig (I can’t tell). The humanoids all have something fantastical about them. One man has a crown and long ears (kind of gives me Midas vibes with his scepter and almost donkey-like ears), the man opposite to him has horns and similarly pointed ears, and the last figure is fairly ambiguous gender-wise and has no visible ears (they actually look fairly normal, but something about their appearance feels fae-like to me for some reason) but the snake’s head is hovering over their shoulder, its tongue flicking out. The goat and pig or cow remind me of a Roman suovetaurila, a very important type of sacrifice, usually made to Mars (one of their gods of war) to bless and purify land. There’s two types, but the biggest and most important involves a goat, which we’ve seen three times in the story so far, so I’m more keen on referencing that one (...though now that I think of it, “ram” also could mean a male sheep, which is more likely considering the word “suovetaurilia is literally the Latin words for pig, sheep, and bull smushed together). I don’t know, this one is less clear symbolically, but we might not have enough info yet.
Scarlet Lore
So, we get a fairly hefty amount of Scarlet lore this chapter. And Alexandra’s doll moves! Of course, if you picked Keen Eye, you pick up on a bloody, pussy residue that we’ve come to associate with Wayne, so someone’s been rooting through the closet in our absence. Creepy.
Tabitha brought a goat into the greenhouse for some reason. Again, I’m thinking for sacrificial purposes, but even with Talk with Animals, the goat (creatively named “Goat”) doesn’t know much either. So, a mystery for another day, I guess.
Our mother, Vivian apparently was terrified over being pregnant according to Sybil (who I am still sus of and will be taking everything see says with a Dead Sea’s worth of salt from now on). Understandable fear given that we were apparently conceived out of wedlock with a still unknown father and Vivian’s mother--our grandmother--died in childbirth. But I don’t know. There’s definitely more to this. Maybe Vivian knew that we’d be destined for something horrible and left the Holler with us to try and prevent it? Not enough info yet, but I’m definitely keeping that in the back of my mind. God. What if Vivian got pregnant the same way Dr. Kelly did? I mean, we have the option to have some legit magic powers (the Talk with Animals and Mystic traits), and since Edwardine, the paternal lineage of the Scarlets has been strangely obscured and surprisingly matriarchal. If I’m remembering right, every descendant of the Scarlets since Edwardine--Enoch’s daughter--has been female, which is an interesting coincidence that--for me, at least--would be quite innocent in any other setting. Fuck. What if this is a Hell Bride situation? Like, Enoch promised a female Scarlet to some otherworldly force through the Witch in exchange for bettering Theodore’s condition (if Enoch actually cared for his brother) or to ensure that the Scarlet family continues to hold power over the Holler and everyone in it (and maybe that’s why no one seems to be able to leave. At least...not for long anyway).
We have an opportunity during our journey into the clinic’s morgue to see Pearlanne herself and...uh...she’s definitely a dead body. Though, I don’t think she’s been embalmed. I’m not an expert in funerary practices and I know embalming isn’t everyone’s preference but it does seem to be the standard and I find it...odd that it doesn’t seem like her body’s been embalmed at all with her funeral in three days. I don’t know. I’m just highly suspicious of literally everything right now.
We get to see some death records and they have some interesting tidbits in them.
Enoch and Alexandra (Edwardine’s first daughter) both died on the exact same day. Well. Enoch died for sure. Due to a supposed “hiking accident” where he fell off a cliff. Alexandra, meanwhile, just straight up vanished and was declared dead by Edwardine. While I have no idea what could have been up with Alexandra disappearing, I definitely think Edwardine murdered Enoch as retribution for whatever mystic forces he tampered with that compelled her to murder Charlie. After all, Charlie did specifically mention that whatever was going on with those carvings, Enoch was responsible.
Edwardine’s child with Charlie was supposedly stillborn. A boy, named Andrew Charles (kind of sweet of Edwardine to give the boy his father’s name for a middle name). There was no doctor and it was a home birth, so we only have Edwardine’s word to go on. I definitely think there was more to this. What, I don’t know yet.
Theodore, our great uncle who died in the Shaw mine (supposedly), was declared dead by Enoch, his younger brother, who fully took over the mines after he died. Supposedly. Is it possible Enoch murdered his brother to take the mine and estate and town for himself? I wouldn’t rule it out yet, but Enoch is hella sus.
Edwardine had two brothers who died in Normandy during WWII, each within a day of each other. We kind of already knew that from episode 3, but the confirmation of death records is interesting.
Edwardine is probably the longest living Scarlet in...a long time, and possibly ever. She lived to be almost 90. Pearlanne was second longest-living and both seem to have passed from old people illnesses (sleep apnea and heart disease).
Edwardine raised Pearlanne and Vivian in place of her daughter, Mary-Belle (the woman who’s portrait hangs in our room. Actually, I think we’re in her room, so she has her missing, probably dead sister’s doll in her closet...). And according to Sybil, our mother was something of an emotional punching bag for the rest of the family.
As far as I remember right now, only Edwardine and Pearlanne lived past thirty.
Enoch made some kind of deal, either for his own benefit or for the sake of his brother. Don’t know which yet, if these are even the only two options. Enoch seems like a very two-faced, self-serving bastard to me so far, but we’ll see.
Wayne
Oh boy...if I didn’t think he was something supernatural before, I do now. Not even counting that Wayne knew Reese was something eldritch and other, he fought Reese and managed to repeatedly find his way into places taken over by entities trying to keep him out. Also, there’s something about his yellow pus-goo that harmed Reese on contact. I want to know so badly what Wayne is. My current tentative theory is that if Reese is something demonic, what if Wayne is something angelic? If Wayne’s the one that pulls everyone out of Charlie’s haunting, Sybil hints that us bending to Charlie’s demands would “go against everything he is.” A curious phrase, for sure. Sybil seems to be convinced that Wayne is harmless, though again, I’m suspicious of Sybil, but Wayne seems to be acting as like...a musty, spooky guardian angel. So far, he’s been nothing but helpful to us, if not blatantly protective.
We actually saw quite a bit of Wayne this episode. He followed us to the Church and I saw him lurking by the clinic as we approached it. To my knowledge, this is the first time we see Wayne watching us from afar since episode 2 if we stayed at the Estate following the events of episode 1.
Most importantly, if we don’t decide to pursue the romantic subplot with Stella, Wayne walks us back to the estate and we get the opportunity to ask him some questions. Naturally, he’s vague about a lot of things, but he’s following us specifically because “[we’re] special” and when we ask why he answers “you just are.” Annoying, but mildly informative in the sense that there is something inherent to us specifically that is unique, even amongst our kin, limited though they are. Wayne also says that we’re bonded to him in some way. He doesn’t elaborate, but he does imply that he will stand by us for...whatever’s coming.
This mysterious “bond” is a bit suspect to me and I’m curious about what that exactly means (personally, I hope it’s not romantic...).
He also encourages us to snoop around the estate when Tabitha is out and busy with the strike. He might want us to find something there. Perhaps the mysterious imprisoned entity? Perhaps something else.
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sensitiveheartless · 7 months
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🥺, 😈, 👀, ✅!!!
Aaa thank you Nawy!! (Hi :D)
🥺 Is there a certain type of moment or common interaction between your characters that never fails to put you in your feels?
Being subconsciously protective. It gets me every single time: Chuuya tackling Dazai to safety in Stormbringer, Dazai keeping Chuuya’s head in his lap in Dead Apple while he sleeps (and the HAND) and Chuuya being genuinely concerned for Dazai during the Lovecraft fight — all of that!
To go on a brief related ramble, there’s this scene in a Miss Marple murder mystery that I read years ago where Miss Marple is watching this young couple touring a house. While the couple is on a balcony, the railing suddenly breaks, and the woman nearly falls down several stories. Instead of reaching out to grab her, her partner actually steps back off the balcony, leaving her to regain her balance on her own.
Miss Marple goes up to the woman afterwards and basically says “that young man will not make you a good partner if his first instinct is to save himself rather than help you.” And while it’s perhaps a bit of a surface level way to judge relationships, that always stuck with with me (and later got reinforced by a few Life Experiences), so that aspect has always been important to me with characters! (More reasons why I love Chuuya’s character so much alskdjfjf)
😈 Has there been a point in a story where you did something just to be playfully mean to your readers?
…Hmmm I’m actually struggling to think of one — tbh I’m pretty sensitive to angst (see blog title lol) so if I write things that are too mean I always end up making myself sad too 😅
…Oh except maybe the first chapter of “This is how it feels to take a fall”. That was very mean — BUT I would argue also necessary for the plot! (And again I did make myself very sad alskjdfj) (…come to think of it there were a few Howl AU cliffhangers that were also a bit mean)(oops)
👀 Tell me about an up and coming wip please!
*Vibrates in place* I am so desperate to have more sleep and time so I can actually finish things alsksjdjfj BUT here are a few updates: I’m making progress (if slower than I had hoped) on the Howl AU epilogue, and after that’s finished I’ll be working on the next Skyline Pigeon chapter, as well as a Howl AU extra that I recently figured out I’m going to call “Rimbaud and the Man of Many Ways”! I am very excited to work on that >:D also the Howl AU sequel will probably be a long time coming, but it’s going to be called “Chuuya and the Castle in the Air”! I’ve been working on plotting it, because I’m working some setup/foreshadowing into the main story epilogue so I need to know what I’m doing at least somewhat lol
Also here is a preview of the beginning of the Howl AU epilogue because I have no self control and also this part has been done for ages, it’s just the later parts that are taking forever alskdjfjf (also apologies for the screenshot I’m currently too sleepy to copy paste this whole chunk and format it on mobile)
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✅ What’s something that appears in your fics over and over and over again, even if you don’t mean to?
…My first instinct is to say “cuddling”, but that’s pretty deliberate — I crave the FLOOF. So I guess the more accurate answer, for both my writing AND my comics, would be “cooking together”, because that wasn’t something I noticed I was doing until other people started pointing it out XD (I even somehow managed to get it into the Little Mermaid AU — in retrospect my friend’s note of “wait they’re cooking bread now??” was an early sign lololol)
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slutforwings · 3 months
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books i read in 2023 that i recommend :) mainly because i am trying to find new books to read in the 'book rec' tag and none of these people give summaries so I shall bravely do it instead for others!
wrong place wrong time - gillian mcallister (mystery)
Blurb: a woman sees her son killing someone in front of her, then wakes up the next morning only to realise it's the day before the murder. she keeps traveling back in time, unraveling the reason for the murder and trying to stop it along the way Review: i misread the back and thought it was gonna be a time loop but this was even better actually. i fucking devoured this book it was so compelling. i tend to devour mystery books like these regardless of their well-writtenness but this was genuinely really good and tied up everything neatly at the end.
autobiography of a corpse - sigizmund krzhizhanovsky (short stories)
Blurb: bunch of fantastical short stories like about the people living in your pupil, a society that deals in anger and malcontent, a guy trying to bite his elbow Review: this book made me realise i love short stories, but then it turned out i mainly love THIS GUY'S short stories. they were just that good. slavic writers are built different
the secret history - donna tartt (psychological fiction)
Blurb: cult group of pretentious college kids study greek and turn it into a personality trait. also theyre gonna conspire to kill one of their own and then try to hide it Review: all of these characters are cunts and i love them so much. do not believe the dark academia girlies peddling this book, these people are stupid and pretentious and morally corrupt and theyre SO MUCH FUN!! the internal monologues are fantastic, i want to study Dick's brain. its a very Long book and absolutely takes its time and yet it does not feel like any parts are really unnecessary. really good.
this is how you lose the time war - amal el-mohtar & max gladstone (sci-fi)
Blurb: two time travelers from opposing agencies each have a mission (the mission involves historic meddling through time travel but is honestly not as important) and keep encountering each other and leaving letters to taunt, falling in love throughout the story Review: listen i saw that tweet 'do not look up anything about this book and just read it' and i did and i had zero regrets. i bought the paperback after reading the ebook bc it was just that good. beautiful prose, fantastic worldbuilding that is sometimes only hinted at but everything made me go !!! can you tell i love time travel.
notes on an execution - danya kukafka (pyschological fiction)
Blurb: serial killer on death row recounts his life, as well as pov of the police officer that investigated the cases and got him in jail + pov's of the family of the victims Review: incredible story about family, morality and love. raises a lot of questions about criminals and 'evil' and does not answer them because that's the whole point. insane quotes too. also very vivid storytelling in the way that i could picture all the locations perfectly despite them not being described in detail. i think it was due to the intense Vibe
bunny - mona awad (uh. horror?)
Blurb: um. goth/'not like other girls' girl gets indoctrinated into joins a cult group of really girly girls that all call each other bunny and have kind of weird rituals meetings. Review: listen. i hate when people do this to me but. just read it. if you're a fan of magical realism and cult-y things, you're in for a treat. this book made me bike home in a daze. i love stream of consciousness where you as the reader are just as lost as the character! i love you bunny!
instructions for a heatwave - maggie o'farrel (fiction)
Blurb: a pensioned father leaves the house for his newspaper and then doesnt return. all the children are gathered by the mother to try and figure out what the fuck happened. Review: not so much a 'hey where'd he go' as it is a rumination on family and unconditional love. ofc theres some family secrets that get revealed but i found it more interesting to watch the family dynamic and the changes the secrets brought to it. bittersweet :)
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luminnara · 13 days
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Your Cranium? Enourmous. Your Fics? Delectable. Hotel? Trivago.
I like me a good Feyd fic, but I really love how the Harpies interact with the reader in yours, and their relationship with Feyd is fantastic. Neither Feyd or the Harpies are soft but they show love (in their fucked up ways but still) in such fascinating ways to the newest concubine. Yarina and Issa were ready to destroy their fellow concubine's former house at the drop of a hat. No Hesitation in them beady little eyes.
The affection they show for each other, the touching and holding is *muah*, chefs kiss. I want more. I need more fics to take notes from yours. I need more fics to incorporate the Harpies, and them having a relationship with the reader and Feyd. (Also how Feyd and reader interact, also fantastic)
When part 3 drops I will go feral.
Yeeee thank you! I’ve really enjoyed writing this fic and I’m glad my weird concubine story is turning out okay! I have so many random HCs for the harpies that I want to sprinkle in and I just really really love them ok phew
Writing their relationships and how they show the affection that they DO HAVE for each other and the reader has been SO much fun. It’s so interesting to come up with the ways in which they might express that love and almost worship they have for feyd, because he really is the center of their world for so many reasons. I especially love figuring out his side of things, and tip toeing along what I think is a reasonable amount of affection from him for this fic. I know I write him a little softer, and I do love fics that have him go even SOFTER than this, but I also like exploring what his affection can be like when he’s given the opportunity to show it behind closed doors, with people who exist within this vacuum with him. Like yeah, he’s a murderous rampaging party boy, BUT when he’s alone with these people who have been perfected and MADE to cater to his very specific tastes, and who see an entirely different side to him and yet never judge him and in fact RELY on his brutality for their snacksies, what might he be like?? It’s just so fun to come at his character from these different angles.
I would also love to read more fics with them involved, I just think they’re SO neat and mysterious!! Love me some industrial cyber fetish goth girls. Part 3 is coming soon!
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gvtted-ratz · 21 days
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read all our tags/ratings. they r important n give u all u need 2 decide if u wanna actually read or not. do not like the tags/rating? do not read.
FEM ALIGNING/IDENTIFYING PPL (unless mutuals/friends) DNI WITH OUR MLM WORKS. fem ppl can still request tho. respect our wishes or get blocked. yes we do read/check everything. we tag appropriately/use tags that go with our posts.
want 2 request? find the rules: here!
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What’s Your Favourite Scary Movie, Eddie?
Edward Nashton (The Riddler) x Ghostface!Trans!M!Reader
Last Edited: 06/04/2023
TW: gore, blood, murder, stalking, dead bodies, transphobia, foul language, body dysphoria, phone harassment
Requested: no
Word Count: 2,381
AO3 LINK -> HERE
Notes: literally rewatching the batman 2022 as i make this lel. also, kinda think of the ghosftface from dead by daylight as i love that costume/look so the outfit that’s described. i finished this shit on 1 hour of sleep btw so hope u enjoy
He’s an odd man. His schedule used to remain constant until it didn’t. You’re unsure of what changed. He’s still a forensic account by all means. He forged those documents to get the job so of course he wouldn’t simply just quit. That part stayed the same. It’s after work when he deviates from his original schedule. Going out at night, spying on people, and getting odd information. There’s also his online presence getting stronger. You see him on his computer more and more. Sometimes he’s typing, other times he has some sort of outfit on to do live streams.
No matter what, he’s always busy with something. That something has gotten more and more odd these past few weeks. He’s obsessing over a vigilante. A man dressed in black who goes around beating people down until they cannot get up to fight anymore. A “Batman” is what they call him. For someone so many fear, little ol’ Eddie surely loves him. It makes your stomach twist in disgust. How can this man obsess over this random vigilante? Sure, he fights crime but he’s not going for the bigger people. He lets cops run around, nabbing the criminals only to let them go after a bit of bribing. Some saviour he is. Plus, to see this somewhat nerdy and dainty-looking man go for a man who appears to be jacked screws with your head.
You can’t help but want to maul your own skin at this observation. The mousey man wanting the dark, mysterious, and bulky body type makes you think of your own figure. You don’t have the exact body type so may want after all the struggles to so much as get the medicine you needed for your transition. It takes time, ranging from months to years. And the first man you see him obsess over is the usual “jacked” and “hot” man makes you angry. That original figure you had has changed over time, into something you’re more comfortable with. While some changes haven’t been made yet due to the lack of money, you feel better; like you can actually live in your own skin now after so long of feeling like your body was out to destroy you.
But that feeling does fade now and then, especially when you see someone you’ve been watching and pinning over for months wanting the one thing you feel like you can’t be at times. Sometimes it’s your mind, other times it's old words from people you knew. The majority is the people you see online spouting nasty things, all ranging from hatred to fetishizing; there are even times when it’s a mixture of the two. A “real” man is what they want. For some reason as well, a “real” man isn’t someone who takes hormones or changes their body. A “real” man isn’t someone who says they are a man, even if they don’t transition. If they don’t pass their assessments, they’re not a “real man”. But how can they be one? How do they know what a “real” man is? They call those bulky hunks in bars real men. They’ll call the men from the army real men. The men from the gym are real men. But the moment a man so much as acts, looks, sounds different or doesn’t have the “right” body, they’re fake. And to you, it’s all bullshit. No one has any right to tell someone they’re not a “real” man, especially when they themselves know nothing about you or others in the same boat.
So to suddenly see such people in his streams? You can feel yourself losing it. While you wouldn’t kill them for such a thing unless they preached or even tried to kill people for being different or “unreal”, it’s the fact that so many were actual shitbags added to it. From people who wanted to simply kill innocent people, to people wanting to do awful acts to those they hate, you can’t allow that. Spying from the rooftops and alleyways turns into watching him from his very own streams.
Your username on the streams is Gh0stFac3, read as GhostFace, is usually caught in the streams, never saying a word. You let yourself lurk while he’s online, letting out passionate rants about Gotham and some sort of “renewal plan”. You don’t necessarily watch him on these streams. You do listen though, taking down notes on his words. You do have other people to watch and kill later on, of course. Some from his streams, others from night outs. A few are even from your times at bars, hearing their nasty talking or genuine disgust about certain groups of people who’ve done nothing but live their lives.
Another name is jotted down in your notebook, a multitude of pictures clipped to the page with the target. You scratch at your neck from under the mask, sighing. It’s just another asshole really. This one is from one of Edward’s streams. From what you found out, the guy had been sending nasty messages to a coworker who rejected him. Pathetic in your case. But you can feel that itchy feeling creeping up under your skin. You’ll have to kill again soon. It’s like a drug and it makes you feel powerful in a way. From people seeing you as some dainty girl back in the day, nothing more than something to be used for bearing kids and eye candy to look at, to feeling like a man after treatment, meds, and eye-opening articles; along with blogs talking about their own experiences, you feel like you can actually feel and do the things you felt you deserved to do. The people who looked down on you or disowned you disappeared in just a blink. All you needed was time away to find yourself, who you truly are, before returning and dealing out the same amount of pain to them they forced you to go through for so many years.
You snap the notebook closed, rubbing at the face under your mask. All this thinking about how your body is, alongside was, is giving you a headache. It doesn’t help that you have more than just that man as the next victim either. You’re not sure who to choose just yet. Or, well, you do. However, all the constant thinking, together with your inner voice reminding you of all the transphobia you’ve faced thus far, is killing your mood. A snort leaves you. Killing your mood. You’re truly a riot with your own jokes.
You grab the flip phone closest to you, flicking it open. It’s a burner you picked up a bit ago. There were plenty of others but the satisfaction of snapping the phone shut after a call is enough for you to keep it around. You look at Edward’s stream; he’s still going. You give a sharp grin under your scream mask before dialling his number.
You can hear it ring from the stream. Seeing him go silent immediately is satisfying. He looks like a mouse again; a confused one at that. He starts up his rant again, seemingly going to ignore it. Narrowing your eyes, you end the call before texting him. The ding he gets is ignored. Another ding. Another. Another. His hands are shaking, eyes wide and crazed. Finally, you type in chat.
> Hello, Mouse.
The chat, usually fast, stops for a moment. They seem to notice something is off.
> Will you answer your phone?
> I’m calling.
> I’m texting you, Mouse.
People in the chat start to type, sending in a multitude of messages. Some are asking Edward if he knows you. Others are asking if you know him. You don’t answer them at all.
> Answer. I won’t stop calling.
He looks mad, grabbing his computer. “Who do you think you are? You know nothing! You’ve said nothing until now! You’re just someone trying to bring me down aren’t you?! You’re trying to destroy everything I’ve been working for to help Gotham!”
> Answer the phone, Eddie.
Everything stops. It’s like the entire chat froze as well as Edward. You know no one has any idea what his name is. The fact that you know it and suddenly type it with no hesitation only shows you know more than does. With shaking hands, he lets go of the computer and sits back in his chair. “I’m sorry everyone… But it looks like we have a leak. I’ll be making sure to get rid of the mole and that they are dealt with accordingly. I’ll host another stream next week after all of this is fixed.” His voice is eerily blank, almost like he’s bored or in shock. With those final words, the entire stream ends. You sit for a moment before calling him once more. Edwards finally picks up this time.
“Oh, Eddie… Did you really have to take that long?” The voice changer in your mask disguises your voice. From what you’ve been told by many victims before, you sound like a very attractive young man.
“Who are you?” His question, asked in a cold way, makes you hum.
“Ghostface. What about you, Eddie? Are you Edward Nashton? The Riddler? Who are you?” His breathing has changed; he’s panicked. You’ve heard that type of breathing so much that you don’t do much beside coo at him. “Don’t worry, Dear Eddie. I don’t want to hurt you. I don’t want to destroy all that you’ve been working on. After all, you’ve changed your schedule to fit this odd thing now…” You sigh, leaning forwards in your chair. You prop your masked head on your gloved hand. “After all, you spent so much time and resources on it. It’s honestly been the most interesting thing I’ve seen in years.”
“Why are you calling, Ghostface?” He asks, wanting to get this call over with. You don’t want that though. You like how he sounds in your ear. You like how you can make his breathing change with just a few words.
“What’s Your Favourite Scary Movie, Eddie?” The teasing way you say it only adds character, or that’s what you tell yourself. You want Eddie to like you. You want him to obsess over you as he does Batman. You want him.
“I’m not playing your games!” He’s stressed, practically about to cry from the frustration. You’ve ruined his stream, teased him over the phone, and called him Eddie in front of people who don’t know his name. In his eyes, you’re out to destroy him.
“Eddie…” You feel slightly bad. You really do want him to like you and this is the only thing you had thought of. It’s clearly not working. “I like you, Eddie. You’re doing what others can’t or won’t… How about a deal?” The idea of a deal to possibly end this talk seems to get to him.
“What’s the deal, then? Or are you going to keep talking to me in circles and messing with me?”
“I wasn’t trying to mess with you. As I said before. I like you. You’re the only person who went from a possible victim to something else entirely… You should be proud! No one has ever gotten that far! Usually, I’d be in their home by now, hiding and waiting for the right moment to strike…” As you talk, it seems he’s intently listening to you with genuine intrigue. “The fighting is always hard but so, so fun. And the moment my knife meets their flesh and blood spills? It’s beautiful.” You let out a sigh, one could almost call it dreamy with how you talk about your deadly hobby. “The screams are a bit much, not going to lie there, Eddie. They’re so loud.. But the moment the life is gone from those shitbags, I can make them oh so pretty.” You’re out of your chair, pacing around your apartment. Your combat boots are heavy against the wooden floors of your home. One of your hands moves as you ramble, giving more passion despite the other man unable to see it. “A few more cuts, maybe some mutilation, a bit of stabbing.. Then I have to set them up how I want and take a few selfies. The selfies are always fun… I can send you a few if you’d like. They always turn out great, I make sure of it.”
The silence on the other end snaps you out of whatever state you had been in when talking about your hobby. You don’t hear anything, not even Edward’s breathing. Your hidden lips pull into a frown. Here you are, pouring your heart out and he’s said nothing! No congratulations. No good job. Nothing. The squeaking of your gloves is heard as you tighten your grip on the burner.
“How does this help me? How are you going to help me with some pictures of your pinned-up dead bodies?” You grit your teeth, hating this call more and more.
“I’m saying that I can be your blade, dammit! You can sit in your messy lil’ apartment, talking, coding, streaming! I’ll hunt down whoever you want! I’ll mutilate them! I’ll leave clues or riddles, I don’t care!” You’re yelling into the receiver, finally tired of listening to the man’s complaining. Taking a deep breath, you try to calm yourself. “I do all the killing and you continue doing whatever it is your doing.”
“But what are you looking for? What do you get out of it?” A hum leaves you, letting all that rage go. A nasty smirk crawls over your features.
“I get to watch you work… I love seeing you put your pretty lil’ head to use after all, Baby.” You practically purr, the distorted warmth filling you. It’s unhealthy how much you like him paired with how much you want him to like you. Unhealthy or not, you don’t care. If he can have unhealthy views and plans, so can you.
You hear the end of his line go dead, having hung up on you. You give a mocking put from behind the scream mask. Quickly, you let your thumb fly over the numbers. You snap the phone closed, happy to see that this is the start of something very exciting.
> Can’t wait to work with you, Sweetheart ;))
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nanowrimo · 2 years
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Writing Descriptions, Perseverance, and Other Words of Advice from Legendary Authors
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One of the best ways to grow as a writer is to learn from others. Today on the blog, Olga Stal has compiled great advice from 4 legendary authors that will hopefully energize your writing spirits and give you new tools and tricks to try!
Octavia Butler–Read Often, Write Often, and Forget Talent
Octavia Butler was a science fiction author and penned many award winning novels, like Kindred, Patternmaster, and more. She is an example of persistence. In childhood she struggled with dyslexia, but that didn’t stop her from becoming a writer. Here are 3 pieces of advice that she recommends to novice authors in this interview.
“I have advice in just a few words. The first, of course, is to read. It’s surprising how many people think they want to be writers but they don’t really like to read books.”
“Write, every day, whether you like it or not. Screw inspiration.”
“Forget about talent, whether or not you have any. Because it doesn’t really matter. I mean, I have a relative who is extremely gifted musically, but chooses not to play music for a living. It is her pleasure, but it is not for a living. And it could have been. She’s gifted; she’s been doing it ever since she was a small child and everyone has always been impressed with her. On the other hand, I don’t feel I have any particular literary talent at all. It was what I wanted to do, and I followed what I wanted to do, as opposed to getting a job doing something that would make more money, which would make me miserable. This is the advice that I generally give to people who are thinking about becoming writers. It’s certainly not a matter of sitting there and having things fall from the sky.”
Agatha Christie–Writing Gripping Mystery, Writing Descriptions, and Removing Distractions
Secondly, I’ll talk about the queen of mysteries, Agatha Christie, author of the famous Murder on The Orient Express. Her detectives fascinate me because it's hard to guess who the killer is.
How did Agatha create her novels? Work on the novel began with the development of intrigue. Then she inscribed the crime in the interior (in an apartment, house, plane or train), then a detective was connected, then the investigation proceeded in a logical direction. Agatha clearly planned her works down to the smallest detail. Dialogues, interiors, landscapes, descriptions were carefully and meticulously laid out. When she sat down to write, she used the "closed door" technique, leaving all worries and distractions to fully immerse herself in her book. 
If you are looking for a great example of precise and vivid descriptions, pick up an Agatha Christie book and take notes on how she does it! Also try the closed door technique and see if it works for you.
Milan Kundera–Writing With Purpose and Philosophy 
Milan Kundera is the author of many novels, one being The Unbearable Lightness of Being. In my opinion, Kundera is an example of human resilience. When he was 39, Soviet troops occupied the Czech Republic. His life collapsed. He survived the occupation and emigration. At 46, he had to start all over again. And he started. 
While reading his novels, I noticed a few moments.
Notably, his characters are philosophical. Each of them are driven by their ideological beliefs, and think deeply about the philosophical implications of their actions. Kundera doesn’t describe the human body as a perfect, unattainable ideal. The character’s body may have some shortcomings, but the hero does not see those imperfections as inhibiting, limiting, or disappointing. 
In his "The Art of the Novel" Milan Kundera outlined several interesting positions:
The writer must show not what he feels;
The plot should revolve around the central theme;
History and philosophy should be presented in doses, to understand the characters and the logic of their actions.
The character should be endowed with a worldview; 
It is necessary to write concisely, immediately throw the reader into the story and characters, so that the reader immediately understands the essence of the novel;
Write to survive a moment of ecstasy. 
Louise May Alcott–Success When Least Expected
Louise May Alcott is the author of perhaps one of the most iconic novels in Western Literature: Little Women. From the age of seven she kept a diary, where she wrote down about her feelings, impressions, ideas. She kept them, later reread them, found interesting moments, and recycled them in novels and stories. In her early career, she wrote spicy novels to make a living, though she condemned it later on.
Alcott was actually reluctant to write Little Women. She didn't think it was a great idea. She was surprised by its success and critical acclaim. This is a great lesson on believing that what we want may come when we least expect it. Therefore, writers, don’t give up!
As for Alcott's craft, she created interesting, distinct characters. Each of them has its own characteristics, preferences, hobbies, thoughts. They aren’t confused with each other, each of them has a bright persona. She pays a lot of attention to each character. Moreover, women in her works are depicted as strong and creative personalities. Also in her novels, Alcott realistically depicts life. 
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Olga Stal is from Ukraine. She loves writing novels, reading and creating something new.  She runs a blog on Instagram (@olga_stal_ ), where she writes reviews of books, shares her writing experience, and talks about Ukrainian culture, art, history, prominent figures.  She also writes articles for various projects.
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As someone who follows you for usually good & informed takes on fandom things, it's quite disappointing to see you reblog the anime/manga/kpop idols discourse with clearly no idea what the whole thing even is. Everyone on those tags are also way off line without clearly much care for actual fact based sources for what most of those idols have even said about watching the anime (only Taeyong seems to have read it which is another thing on its own but as for Soobin, Woozi & Mingi they're anime watchers and have only mentioned the anime and Soobin has even said he doesn't read any manga, only watches anime). You & many others might not care for these idols to begin with but saying they support p3dophilia or are one themselves bc of a cartoon they've watched is like saying enjoying murder mysteries or true crime is condoning and wanting to commit murder?! Like bfr. The anime is literally on Disney+ and is definitely not marketed as cp or ca glorification + it's heavily censored in Korea.
Mingi seems to have been the most recent idol to mention the anime but he did not even actually recommend it, all he said was that he started watching it but didn't carry on bc he found it a little too much, and so he wouldn't rec it. For Woozi he briefly mentioned it over a YEAR ago on his live as one of the animes he had started watching during tour but hadn't even finished bc he was too busy; he never recommended it either and nobody knows if he ever even finished it, he hasn't talked about it since.
Here's a good thread that explains more so especially abt Soobin & the anime in general: https://twitter.com/S00BIEB00BIE/status/1726443795229864085?t=KJL4c9VbQSQNSQ7z5rorVA&s=19
Ppl so carelessly throwing around the p3do word over a 2D fictional cartoon without knowing any facts to begin with is just blatant defamation.
Made in Abyss has been seen as controversial for years (including the censored version, by the way). You can find popular online discourse from years ago discussing how uncomfortable viewers were with various versions of the show, noting the numerous instances of child sexualisation or sexual violence against children, the obvious fetishes on display held by the (apparently known pedophile) original creator. It's not some random view that people just came up with this week with no discernible basis.
2. Child sexualisation content is absolutely not the same as true crime. For example, a large majority of true crime especially popular outlets for it like My Favourite Murder are outlets run by women and written by women, with the explicit purpose of repositioning true crime from the perspective of the usual victims (i.e. women) and discussing why it is that they, as the victim class, are so drawn to these stories. In fact the entire true crime genre has had a pretty significant shift due to discourse about what true crime is, why it is presented or framed the way it is, and whether or not there is something misogynistic about that.
On the flip-side, many child sexualization stories are written by people who are clearly just detailing their own personal fantasies and doing so in public. For example, when Call me by your name first came out in cinemas, it was very popular. But then a discourse began about the age difference in the film, the obvious abusive elements etc. Does the "problematic" aspect of CMBYN mean that the movie should never have been made? Not necessarily. Stories like CMBYN do actually occur in real life, and its absurd to argue that pedophilia or abuse can never be written about in general. But when you read quotes from the book's author which show a worrying interest in sexualising children more generally, it becomes in my view disturbing to talk about the film and not discuss normal and important things like context (ie who wrote this and why) and how that impacts on themes (ie creepy age differences) and whether this form of media being so awarded and seen as representational of queer cinema is in some way homophobic (and playing to the trope that all gay men are pedophiles). There's a difference between someone like Nabokov writing Lolita, where Nabokov was violently anti pedophile and the whole point of the book is to critique societies' fascination with defending paedophilic content that happens to be 'beautiful', and someone who has given comments like the author of CMBYN writing stories which seem to take those comments and action them.
There is a long history in multiple genres of active pedophiles using their art as a way to not only express but normalise their own desires, whether its Woody Allen making a whole film about a grown man falling in love with a teen (Allen was 43 and his co star was 17; same guy who ended up raping his own daughter), or the subset of anime or manga that is very open about sexualising or portraying the rape or abuse of children. People will often argue the moral distinction between child pornography and manga content that displays the same or similar things is the fictionality, but have they considered that actual pedophiles use fictional content to normalise and groom young readers and see the fictional distinction as a loophole?
There's a similar moral difficulty with platforms like AO3. For the most part, most of the stuff on AO3 is somewhere within the realm of morally normal and not criminal (although people have tried and failed to sue for RPF before). However, it isn't arguable that a very, very, very small subset of AO3 is used by people who genuinely appear to have pedophilic inclinations writing fictionalised stories that mimic child pornography.
Another interesting thing is e.g. a gore writer using his 'fiction' to basically shame and punish a female reviewer for her negative criticisms of his previous works. This happened quite recently, where a woman reviewer gave a mid review to a somewhat prominent niche gore writer, and he then dedicated his next book to her and it was not so subtly entirely about raping and abusing her. Is it perhaps interesting that so much of the gore genre is written by men and targeted, either explicitly or impliedly, at women? We don't have to argue for censorship to take a critical look at the genre and what it seems to be 'about' and who it seems to be 'for'.
Another example again is Colleen Hoover. Her books are very popular. These also constantly romanticise abuse in relationships and do so with seemingly little care or awareness. Should she be censored? Probably not lol. Is every person who has read her works an abuse apologist? Probably not but surely some are. Is it interesting or potentially an issue that her books are so popular and marketed as romantic when they contain relationships that are highly abusive? Probably. Is it ok to judge your friend who likes Colleen Hoover books and suspect they might have a toxic view of relationships? Yes lol. I'm sure there are some people who enjoy her books and are fully aware of those elements, but many people do heavily romanticise them uncritically too.
Ultimately, there's a big difference between arguing for censorship and arguing that people who crave to uncritically engage with objectively disturbing content are morally irresponsible or even dangerous.
The idea that consuming something does not equal agreeing with it morally is true. But not always true. Like many things its a nuanced conversation. For example, does consuming Harry Potter in the year 2023 when the author has said she sees consumption of her work as affirmation of her political views a moral act, especially when she is alive and profiting financially from that interest and directing those funds to active hate groups? Reading Crime and Punishment does not mean you agree with, you know...murder...but it is folly to pretend that there aren't instances where consuming and enjoying a form of media is a moral position or. betrays qualities other people are entitled to not like.
3. Victims of child abuse and pedophilia exist and are fully within their right to abhor this content and to be highly suspicious of people who consume it.
Here are some comments online from years ago about the censored version of the anime:
"Yeahhhhh I really don't understand why people can look past this stuff. The show is pretty gross and awful and the manga is much worse apparently. It bothers me that some folks can just look past blatant pedophilic content because it's "well written."
"It's widely accepted by the fandom that the author is a pedophile. It's not illegal or even uncommon among a certain sector of mangakas.
I also find it very unsettling, though I have been able to push past it because the rest of the show is so engrossing."
"Hopefully, the author keeps his pedophilic tendencies to fiction and drawings, where it isn’t a big problem. After all, I would rather a pedophile be free and just satisfy themselves with fictional characters and other sources, rather than then be in jail because they had sex with a kid who is far too young to be having sex."
Now, some of these people may be able to see the pedophilic elements of the work and quote 'overlook it', but can you seriously blame people who have been the victim of CSA being angry that this content is glorified and defended? Even looking at summaries of the content of various versions of this show is disturbing enough. The fixation on e.g. children wetting themselves when seeing something violent or sexual is quite disturbing given bed wetting is a known sign of molestation.
4. I don't think I saw anyone call any of the idols involved 'pedophiles'. I did see people saying they were disturbed by those men enjoying or consuming content that had those overt themes, which is entirely fair. Funnily enough, you are entitled to read what you like and people are entitled to dislike you for it!
It should not be a surprise to anyone that fans of kpop, and most of them are women and/or gender diverse and/or part of victimised minorities, are often going to be wary of people who give them reason to believe they may enjoy consuming child sexualisation content or not see it as child sexualisation even though it is. You have idols like BamBam saying in public that they'd rather date a 16 year old than a grown woman (?????????), idols like Leeteuk hitting on multiple 13 year old girls, you have relationships like the one between Momo and Heechul where fans saw them together as early as like 2017 (and that age difference therefore becomes odd) or Chaeyoung and her non-idol ex partner who was like over 35 when she was 19. The sexualisation of young people and children is so normalised in the industry that you have HYBE basically defending itself for putting out a song sung by minors about cunnilingus, and fans defending it too. It is not a shock then that many fans are going to be highly sensitive to indications of who may or may not have appropriate views around children and content.
Now you're perfectly right that these men seemed to give different styles of comments in relation to the work. Mingi saying he tried it but ended up not pursuing it because it was 'too much' is different to Soobin saying he 'loved season two' (which is by all accounts, worse than season 1 in terms of the content). At the end of the day, people can decide for themselves which of these views concerns them and they are entitled not to engage with or endorse that person any further. No idol is entitled to anyone's adoration.
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floating-in-the-blue · 5 months
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Twenty Questions Writer Meme
Thank you soooo much for tagging me @nuandia <3 <3 <3
How many works do you have on AO3? 84
What's your total AO3 wordcount? 341,785
What fandoms do you write for? currently (and for the foreseeable future), it's only Julie and the Phantoms (with a very minor guest spot from Red White & Royal Blue). In the past, I've also written for Metal Gear Solid and Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries with a few more random ones sprinkled in, but usually just for a single fic or two.
What are your top five fics by kudos? Will You with 409 kudos (one of my earliest jatp fics when the fandom was still hungry) Home is Where My Ghost is 253 kudos (even earlier jatp fic but let's be real, not as good) In Your Starlight  253 kudos as well (the jatp Star Trek au) Silent Souls  with 254 kudos (somehow this little Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them soulmate au got really popular) Under My Skin  208 kudos (a silly, fluffy Metal Gear Solid tattoo artist/florist au)
Do you respond to comments? I really want to say "always" but there's a few that I haven't responded to yet. Though mainly because I've been talking with the people on other sites already. But in general, save my few lapses, I do believe that it's only good manners to say 'thank you' if someone takes the time to not only read but also comment what you've written.
What is a fic you wrote with the angstiest ending? Well, the angstiest ending, because very sad and bittersweet, is the one I wrote for Nature 2.0 but which hasn't been published yet but I love a lot. There's two more finished Metal Gear Solid fics with sad endings, Dear Dave and Battlefield, because they're both, strictly speaking, major character death fics. The death just happens to be more or less natural at the end of a (mostly) fulfilled life.
What's the fic you wrote with the happiest ending? Except for the sadder MGS fics, most of my fics have proper happy endings so I'm not sure. The Star Trek AU has a very hopeful ending that I quite like and I think my current wip, the Alex Adoption Fic, will have a very happy ending, especially considering the beginning.
Do you get hate on fics? I have once received anon hate on a prompt fill gift fic that asked for genderswapped Snake/Otacon because the anon thought I was transphobic. It was honestly very laughable so I didn't take it very seriously. And of course there was the whole blacklist disaster in the jatp fic and me ending up on that list because I'd dared to write jatp smut (once, at that point, very loving, with aged-up characters). But I didn't receive hate on the actual fic, either on AO3 or here.
Do you write smut? If so, what kind? Yes, see above ;D I've gotten better at the steaminess, I think, but my characters still talk more than I usually expect them to (though I love it) and they're also very bad at hiding their feelings. I also like to keep it a little down to earth with some awkwardness or clumsiness and lighthearted notes. So no hardcore pwp with only bare resemblances to the actual characters from me. I do believe even the sexiest times need to make sense with the characters ;D
Do you write crossovers? What's the craziest one you've written? The earliest fanfic lil me ever attempted was a massive crossover of Star Trek (TOS and VOY), Stargate, X-Files and Star Wars (and maybe a few other things I can't remember right now) but I never got very far. Incidentally, that's the only fanfic of mine my parents ever read (they were very encouraging ... not sure what they would think of things now XD). But actually published fic? I might forget some earlier things, but I don't think I've ever written a crossover with characters from two distinctly separate fandoms meeting somehow (except co-writing, see answer below). Only ever AUs with maybe a borrowed universe or plotlines.
Have you ever had a fic stolen? not as far as I know. There was somebody who stole a bunch of smut fics for jatp and posted them over on wattpad but mine weren't among them. Still not sure whether to be glad or affronted about that ;P
Have you ever had a fic translated? I have! Silent Souls (Vietnamese translation) ... it's all in the title ;D It got 8 kudos and a bookmark. It doesn't really count but I've also translated rpg-turned-fics written by me and a friend into English and once I get access to those files again (hopefully saved from my old hard drive) I'd like to get back to those and finish the translation. Maybe once I run out of inspiration for jatp if no other fandom has claimed me by then.
Have you ever co-written a fic before? Evidently, the answer is sort of. They weren't properly written as fic. But turning an rpg into a fic was also a lot of fun and a nice challenge. Luckily, my writing partner's and my own style meshed well enough so it was easier to put it together. As vans already mentioned, she and I brainstormed a very nice polyphantoms idea that I still quite like but we never got beyond brainstorming. I might ask her if I could tackle the idea again now she's moved on to other fandoms but I'm not sure I could write polyphantoms any more. I also once wrote a self-insert Final Fantasy X/Dark Angels crossover fic with a friend in high school. It was not good but lots of fun.
What's your favorite all-time ship? I'm assuming this is about writing and then the answer is obviously Willex (Alex/Willie from jatp) because I've written so much for them and still have so many ideas. But I also really enjoyed writing for Snake/Otacon from Metal Gear Solid. They're angstier and burdened with more baggage and their canon ending is more bitter than bittersweet but the philosophical soldier/genius nerd combination is a very nice flavour to explore.
What's a wip you want to finish, but doubt you ever will? Nature 2.0 probably. It's the only one of those ambitious fics I actually started posting on AO3 and so will forever haunt me there. I'm not saying never but it is very unlikely at the moment.
What are your writing strengths? I think character, dialogues, and scene flow. I'm also a decent editor (for a non-native speaker) so pretty all of my stories should be pretty readable without having to stumble over frequent repetitions or typos or weird tense changes.
What are your writing weaknesses? action scenes and PLOTTING
Thoughts on writing dialogue in another language for a fic? Does it count as writing dialogue in another language if I'm writing in English even though I'm not a native speaker? XD As for other other languages. It hasn't come up yet, tbh.
First fandom you wrote for? Aside from the aforementioned massive crossover lil Yeo attempted as a young teen, I think it was the self-insert Final Fantasy X (never published, thankfully) with a friend.
Favorite fic you've written? This is always difficult but also not. I think the one fic I am 100% happy with is Call For a Date, (Don’t) Fall in Love the willex fake boyfriend agency au. That doesn't mean I don't love my other fics though because I generally do.
I'm not sure who's done this and who hasn't but let's try @innytoes and @jonairadreaming <3
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awheckery · 1 year
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DEATH TW and mentions of murder so if that is triggering for you don’t read, but if it’s not then i’d like to ask if you’ve heard of forensic genealogy? while i am uneasy at the prospect of using it to find suspects, it can also be used to find the identities of unidentified decedents, who die of accidental causes or are murdered, and often it’s the only hope to identify those who have been unidentified for decades. the dna doe project is a nonprofit that’s mostly volunteer run, and i think that your research skills could be useful there or somewhere like there. i know this is kind of a random ask to receive, identification of unidentified remains is my special interest but i don’t have the time or training to get better at researching beyond a few tricks here and there.
I feel like we've read the same articles recently; did you see the tumblr post (and linked articles) about Joseph Augustus Zarelli, the Boy in the Box?
Which is to say, yes, I am aware of forensic genealogy and the DNA Doe Project, because like many white American women, I'm a true crime junkie.* My big Thing is investigative procedure tho, so I'm also deeply interested in plane & train crash investigations, medical mysteries, archaeology, anthropology... basically 'what happened, and by which processes and methods do we figure out what happened?'
So far as getting into the game myself, I dunno. I assume there's probably some sort of required formal training, along with the expectation of reliability and sustained effort, and I'm a chronically ill autodidact with ADHD. I'm the research equivalent of a sprinter; investigative genealogy requires a marathoner, because there's so much exhausting, grinding work involved.
Something I've never seen brought up before in any investigation is how many extant family trees are just wrong. Genealogical sites make it too easy to crib notes from other users, and all it takes is one person deciding 'eh that's probably the right guy' for dozens of other amateur researchers to make the same mistake, and then somebody ties that erroneous information to their DNA profile. I don't know how the forensic genealogists deal with that.
You also have to take into account how many people throughout history have just gone missing, or otherwise fallen off the historical record. Just because someone's date of death is absent doesn't mean something nefarious happened to them. (Just because someone's date of death is present doesn't mean it's correct.) People emigrate. They marry. They change their names. They die alone and unknown in a ditch**, or they die somewhere that doesn't make those records public***. Paper records can burn or flood out, and family stories rarely make it down more than one or two generations. History is messy.
I've only done serious research into my family background for two years, in fits and starts interrupted by illness flare ups. Half the time it feels like I find more questions to ask than I get answers. I've found a pair of illegitimate daughters and a handful of adoptees. I've found some two dozen 'missing persons' who may as well have disappeared into thin air, for how suddenly they dropped out of the historical record. I've found a murder victim and a (maybe) would-be murderess.
And four months ago, I found the answer to another family's 150 year old missing person case, and it changed everything I thought I knew about my mother's family.
This is how.
Five months ago, I thought I knew everything there was that could be known about John Robert McDowell.
I knew he was born July 1st of either 1868 or 1869, in Belfast, Northern Ireland. According to his naturalization petition, he came to the United States in April of 1883, when the absolute oldest he could have been was fourteen, and at the time of his naturalization in 1896 he claimed his nationality was English, presumably due to anti-Irish sentiments at the time.
I knew John's handwriting was idiosyncratic: he wrote the J in his name with a rightward upper loop that scooped up again before curving back around the center staff, and his uppercase R was a mess of curlicues. I've never seen the like before or since.
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I knew that despite living in America for ten years longer than he'd lived outside it, John still had an accent in 1908 when his second son was born. Spelling is incredibly inconsistent across historical records because up until very recently, it was the practice of the record keepers to write down their best guess at what they heard, and in 1908 a midwife heard and recorded John's surname as McDoul.
John's life was actually remarkably well-documented, in comparison to his contemporaries. I bought myself access to Newspapers.com along with my Ancestry subscription, and he made semi-regular appearances in the Newport News Daily Press for the better part of thirty years as a Navy veteran, successful entrepreneur, and president of a labor union that later became the United Steelworkers Local 8888. (A seemingly throwaway notice in the Daily Press was the only record I've yet been able to find for his divorce, which eventually led me to find out whatever happened to his wife, which is another saga entirely. Pauline, you dirty rotten cheater.)
I knew that John was in and out of the hospital with thyroid cancer, but he was such a tough old bastard it took the better part of fifteen years to kill him, and he died in 1954 at the age of 86.****
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According to John's death certificate (and the U.S. Government records at the VA hospital where he died), his parents' names were Thomas McDowell and Isabell Rabb (or possibly Robb, the Accent strikes again.)
This is the only record linked to either of them on Ancestry.com at all.
I have most of a history degree, so I wasn't surprised. There are next to no records of the 1890 census of the United States, and that was down to a fire in the National Archives. Ireland was dragged backwards through hell by the ankles for centuries by a succession of British monarchs and governments, and Belfast was in the prime of especially conflicted territory for much of it. No census records from John's lifetime were kept, and the likelihood his parents would show up in the surviving fragments from 1841 and 1851 was slim to none.
There were transcribed indexes from birth and marriage records available, at least, and I scoured them through, looking for a John McDowell, and there wasn't a single damn one born to a Thomas or Isabelle McDowell in a decade on either side of 1868. There wasn't any record I could find at all of a Thomas McDowell marrying an Isabelle Rabb until well after John left Ireland.
Five months ago, as far as I knew, John Robert McDowell was probably a bastard, who'd either been left out of whatever records were taken at the time, or he was one of the unfortunate ones whose birth record had been lost.
Four months ago, I realized that the record indexes on Ancestry included film numbers, which meant there were pictures of those records to be found somewhere. If they were organized chronologically, I could try to find his birth registration that way. Googling "ireland civil registration records" brought me to the Civil Records search page of a genealogy site run by, of all things, the Irish government's tourism department.
Once again, there wasn't a John McDowell born to the right parents during the right time period, so I went looking for his parents' marriage. And found it.
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If they married in 1872, John would probably still technically be a bastard, but I had a point to start from. Once I clicked into the actual scan of the record I nearly snapped myself in half sitting upright in attention, because Thomas McDowell's father's name was Duncan, John named his eldest son Duncan, Isabella's father's name was John, I had to have the right two people, this couldn't be a coincidence.
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And then I noticed Isabella was a widow. Isabella was a widow.
Who was your husband, and when did he die, Isabella? I searched again, and found her marriage to a Thomas Logan July 30th, 1866. No men named Thomas Logan died in Belfast between 1866 and 1870, which meant he was probably still alive when John was born. It meant I had been looking in the wrong direction the entire time.
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John Robb Logan came into the world on July 1st, 1868, in the Ballymacarrett district of Belfast, the second child of four born to Thomas Logan and Isabella Robb. Once I knew what I was looking for the rest came easy.
John's early life was riddled with tragedies. His younger brother Joseph was six months old when he died in March of 1870. His father died of smallpox in December of the same year, exactly one month after the birth of his sister Mary. Three months before his fifth birthday, his first half-sibling Bella died, at just five months old. And in 1879, his older brother William died after a long, miserably drawn-out illness from spinal tuberculosis.
(As an aside, god, poor Isabella. She had four children with Thomas Logan, and a further nine with Thomas McDowell, and before her early death from a long respiratory illness she buried a husband, two sons, and two daughters. How do you go on after that, how are you not forever shattered?)
If I hadn't been sure I'd found the right family, I was after William died. Thomas McDowell was the person who reported William's death to the registrar's office after sitting by his deathbed. The registrar recorded William as a "child of [the] baker" that Thomas was by profession; Thomas McDowell claimed his stepson as his own.
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Duncan McDowell, John's step-grandfather, had a family burial plot in Ballygowan, and he named William Adam Logan as his grandson, with no qualifiers, when they buried him.
All the evidence suggests that the McDowells loved John Robb Logan and his siblings, and he loved them back every bit as much. You don't choose to take on the surname of people you hate, and it seems very much the case that John chose to go by McDowell when he came to America. I'm honestly not sure there was a way for Thomas McDowell to bequeath his name to his stepchildren, given John's brother William died a Logan and his sister Mary married as one.
John Robb Logan disappeared from history after his baptism, and John Robert McDowell made his first confirmed appearance in the historical record in 1883, but I was certain they were one and the same. The problem was proving it to my mother, because McDowell was her family name. She'd grown up with it, as had her sisters and her dozens of cousins and her father and his siblings and her father's father; I only had a paper trail arguing the name she knew didn't belong to any of them by blood.
So I went for blood.
I refuse to give my DNA to Ancestry.com on a principle born from paranoia and ethics concerns. It's absolutely not happening, ever, like hell do I expect a corporation to do the right thing with my genetic material. My mother doesn't share my concerns, either now or four years ago, when she bought an Ancestry DNA kit and then did absolutely nothing with her results besides marvel at the unexpected Swedish heritage in her 'Ethnicity Estimate' because doing anything else looked like too much work.
It took a few days to figure out how to hook my mother's DNA results into the tree I've built, and a few more for all the features to populate, but all told it took less than a week between learning the truth about my great-great-grandfather's parentage and proving it irrefutably with DNA, via several descendants of his full-blooded sister Mary and a grandson of his half-brother Wallace.
Ancestry doesn't tell you when new DNA matches are found, or when someone adds you to their tree (and thank god for that, my mother has somewhere in the neighborhood of twenty thousand matches). To those descendants of Mary Thomasina Logan, the handful of John's descendants who've shelled out for Ancestry DNA kits could be any random person. Frequently the relationships between matches aren't clear, because of all the folks like my mom who never add a tree to their results, or those who don't try to go any further back than their grandparents.
As far as Mary Logan's descendants know, the sons of Thomas Logan dead-ended his line, and when I do find John in their trees there's never more than a birth year and a blank space where there would usually be a year of death. (They all have the wrong Isabella Robb too, but I don't really blame them; apparently Isabella was one of the most popular names for girls for well over a century, and Robbs weren't exactly thin on the ground.)
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Someday soon, I'm going to reach out. People who study genealogy do it because they're looking for something: long lost relatives, answers to questions asked too late, or even a better, more personal understanding of history by learning about the people who were there when it happened. Every family has its mysteries and this one, at least, could be solved.
John's story doesn't end here. Here is where it begins.
~
*I'm aware of the problematic nature of White Lady True Crime Brain Poisoning, but I'm gonna have to pull the 'I'm not like other girls' card. I'm incredibly discerning about my crime shows, I hate the fucking cops, and I'm realistic about how unbelievably low my chances are of ever being the victim of a violent crime. I'm white, I'm broke as shit, I'm built like a running back and walk like the Terminator, and most importantly, I'm single and planning to stay that way for the rest of my life. The only way I'm getting murdered is if I happen to get caught in a random mass shooting, which isn't outside the realm of possibility because America.
**In case anyone's gotten this far and is still interested, there's strong evidence that the mystery of the Somerton Man was finally solved last year. At some point I'd like to take a look at the tree the forensic genealogists built tho, because I have some Doubts. There was only one person in that family that fell off the map in the 40's? Just one? I was lightning-strike kinds of lucky enough to find John's real parentage, but I dug up more unanswered questions with it, because two of his half-brothers dropped out of the records after 1901. Completely setting aside the possibility of infidelity in the Webb family and how common inbreeding has been (both historically and in recent memory) in populations of European descent, I have a hard time buying that Carl Webb was the only person who could be the Somerton Man. It's still cool as shit that they have a strong possibility tho.
***Maryland and Kansas specifically can blow me, if somebody died in either of those states I have to find an obituary or a tombstone to get the mcfrickin' date, and I have to either pay money and prove a relationship to see a death certificate, or show up to an archive in person to search on their intranet, MARYLAND WHY DO YOU NOT WANT ME TO KNOW WHEN MY GREAT-GRANDMOTHER DIED. (Being fair, I don't know if she died in Maryland, that's just a great-uncle's best guess, because she ran away from her family in 1949 and nobody ever saw her again after the early 60's. Helen, where the hell did you go?)
****One of the big reasons why I got into genealogy in the first place was to see if I could find how far back the predisposition to early deaths and autoimmune disease went in my family. What I hadn't expected to find was a predisposition for extreme longevity on all sides. Longevity as in 'skewing the life expectancy bell curve' kinds of longevity. As long as someone didn't come down with a freak illness or make a looooooooong string of poor life choices, they were apparently immune to death, which honestly explains a few things about Crazy Grandma, god damn.
#genealogy#forensic genealogy#research throwdown#storytime with stella#long post#I'm seriously not kidding it's a long goddamn post#image heavy#all images described in alt text#I don't think I did a particularly great job communicating why I shouldn't get into this professionally#this took a long goddamn time to figure out#I think most people want answers quicker than *checks back of hand* seven-ish months?#fwiw my mother took it remarkably well#our big family mystery has always been What Happened to Helen?#that was probably the central question of my grandfather's life: not knowing what happened to his mother#so that was my mom's big question too#and luckily we had other weird familial circumstances as precedent#me: 'heyyyyyyyy uh so great news yr great-grandfather wasn't a criminal on the lam OR a bastard child. he was kind of adopted?'#mom: 'adopted??? huh. like your grandpa with the mudds?'#me: '....actually. yeah. almost *exactly* like that. but like if grandpa changed his last name and then never told you he'd done it'#tho I still have no idea why john changed 'robb' to 'robert'#my theory for a long time was that he was just REALLY leaning into the scottish heritage; the guy named his sons duncan & bruce#then I learned about irish naming conventions and while that answered some questions it just wound up leaving me with MORE questions#I went through all 8 stages of grief a year ago when I figured out john's presbyterian funeral meant the fam married into catholicism LATER#and thus were probably scots colonizers to the plantation of ulster instead of former gallowglasses#I don't love the idea of my ancestors being unionist kiss-asses#which the naming scheme kinda supports#but john was a LABOR UNION ORGANIZER#he left well before the clearances in the 20's but labor activism was synonymous with catholicism & nationalism for aaaaaaaages#he had to have picked that up from a parent. two of his half brothers (who also emigrated to the states) were union members too
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SONIC EVENT: CRUISE BLUES
NOTE: THIS IS FOR THE SONIC RPC ONLY! Check this post for basic rules.
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    The weather is getting warmer (somewhere), don’t you just wish you could get out there and see it all? How about instead of that, you’re stuck on a gigantic cruise ship, no expense spared, full amenities, and your way completely paid! Welcome, one and all to TBM's EXTRAVAGANT CRUISE SHIP! You, YES YOU, are invited to take a load off for a FULL WEEK! Celebrate with friends, participate in all kinds of activities, please enjoy the complimentary HIGH SPEED WIFI in case you get bored of social interaction, as well as really anything you can imagine! We’ve GOT IT! But, you can’t leave until the Cruise is done.
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    Huh? You didn’t want to come? That’s too bad, because you’re already here! You’ve woken up in your quarters! The lodgings have been split up so everyone has at least once roommate! Who’s your roommate? No idea! We at TBM like to make sure your vacation is as eventful as it is relaxing!
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(examples of what the cabins look like-- Who will you be sharing your cabin with?)
    Any luxury cruise activity you think would be fun, feel free to do! Just don’t try to jump off the ship or fly off of it… It’s a real pain to have to go back for you. And if you just fly off well… you’ll definitely get tired eventually. Why not just stay, relax, and take a load off?
(Want an idea for on-cruise activites? Check here!)
    You can be fine for a full 7 days on a cruise ship with only a limited space to be able to run around in, right?
   MUSES CANNOT:
    -Destroy the property.     -Kill or seriously injure another character     -Have 18+ RP tied to the event. If you really want to write that kind of stuff, please use your own tags for it. DO NOT POST IT IN THE EVENT TAG! I BEG OF YOU FOR ALL OF THE PEOPLE IN THIS RPC PLEASE DO IT FOR THEM GIVE THEM A CHANCE
    Muses of any and all ages are welcome in this event, but there MAY BE ALCOHOL consumption, depending on the thread! Please respect people's rules when you're interacting with their posts.
   FOR THE MUNS:
    Sonic muses only! Sonic fandom OCs are also allowed. Duplicates encouraged! Everyone should have a chance to participate.
  MAKE SURE YOUR RULES PAGE IS EASILY ACCESSIBLE (AND READABLE).
    (Please remember that there are people using the beta editor and people who aren’t. Dash stretch may happen regardless, so as a courtesy to your RP partners, consider putting the bulk of your starter under a read-more, in case the post breaks on trimming!) (If you’ve recently started using the Beta Editor and don’t know how to trim, be sure to get Xkit Rewritten! Trimming comes AFTER the post is posted, not before! You can save your reply to drafts and then trim, AND THEN post. Also you can now respond to Asks and then trim the ask box itself off later.)
    If you want to participate, you may reblog this event post to boost it, but DO NOT START THREADS OFF THIS POST. IC wise, the cruise is for one week, but feel free to continue your threads as long as you want. Despite how ominous this event feels, it’s not a murder mystery nor is Dr Eggman behind it. But feel free to set up your own fun!
    Important to know: Since characters have to have roommates, feel free to plot with each other in private and come up with who is staying with who, you can also make it open ended if you want someone to take up the opportunity! It's up to you! If you don't get any takers, a random NPC will be the roommate, or whatever you choose to do. Have fun! Read and respect each other's rules!
    the tag for the event is:
    #SONIC EVENT: CRUISE BLUES
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How Obey Me Shot Itself In The Foot: Michael, Part 2
MASSIVE WARNING FOR DISCUSSION OF RELIGION. Specifically of Abrahamic religions (Islam, Christianity, and Judaism) and their shared God. I am doing this in a media analysis context, not to shame any particular religion or anyone’s particular beliefs. If that makes you uncomfortable, feel free to not read this post, stop reading at any point, and/or unfollow/block me. DO NOT try to start religious discourse on this post or in my askbox/DMs, I will clown on and block you.
Also spoiler warnings for a ton of different Obey Me lessons.
Intro (X), Michael (X)(you're here)(X)(X), Conclusion (X)(X)
This section is the beginning of a three part analysis of Michael's character. I promise this will eventually connect to why Raphael should stab MC with a spear in a non-horny fashion.
Michael, He Who is Like God
A Michael whose characterization draws primarily from his connection to God and his role as God’s representative to the angels is a Michael rife with divine contradictions. Because, for the purposes of this silly analysis, God has two main roles to fulfill: the moral paragon, and the powerful tyrant I mean ruler. 
I can’t speak to the specifics of how this manifests for Islam and Christianity, but from what I’ve seen, God is consistently both a “carrot” and a “stick”, capable of giving amazing gifts and inflicting terrible punishments, and these are inexorably linked. For example, the story of Exodus is the story of how God delivered the Jewish people out of slavery in Egypt — by inflicting 10 (or 20, or 50 or 200— depends who you ask) plagues on the Egyptians. All of them. Including, most famously, all their firstborn sons, no matter how old or how responsible for the slavery of the Jews.
God is the protector and saviour of the Jewish people. God is the torturer and murderer of the Egyptians. 
(Not to get Too Real in an obey me theory post, but if God or anyone’s way of helping my people is to subjugate others, I Don’t Want It.)
This is one of the big “issues” with monotheism as a whole: if you have only one god, that one god is responsible for Everything, good and bad. You worship that god not just to receive good things, but to avoid having bad things done to you, whether it’s implicit or explicit. As a deity, this conflict can be excused as “God works in mysterious ways” or “everything serves a greater purpose”.
However in the context of interpersonal relationships, a powerful figure who controls your life and keeps you in line with promises of lavish gifts and threats of great harm, as well as demonstrations of what those threats might look like against others… is an abuser.
On that note, goodbye religious people, if you somehow made it this far!
How does this relate to Michael?
Well, this Michael is taking God’s place narratively. This means that while God (or Father as they call him in Obey Me) is technically the one who sentenced Lilith to death and banished the brothers from the Celestial Realm, Michael is at the very least upholding these rulings. As far as I know, Obey Me hasn’t actually 100% confirmed that Michael was Lucifer’s equal and opposite in the Great Celestial War, but given his biblical role as such, it’s not a big leap to assume he was. 
Under this lens, the way he talks about and treats Lucifer, Mammon, Simeon, and Luke takes on a very unflattering light. 
With Lucifer, we see a sibling rivalry that started out lighthearted and became a bitter civil war, one that still has many lingering feelings involved. Michael does seem to miss Lucifer, but it’s unclear if he actually misses him, or misses the idea of him, the him he was before the war. There may also be an element of bitterness there in that Lucifer left not just the Celestial Realm, but Michael himself. A duty they once shared is now resting entirely on him, and that’s gotta be tough to handle.
Does that bleed into how he treats Simeon, an angel on the fence of falling who couldn’t quite make the jump, one of his few close allies left? Does he perhaps view/use Simeon as some kind of replacement for Lucifer? He seems to foist a lot of responsibilities onto Simeon, much like how he did with Lucifer, including another one of his protegés, Luke. Is it a demonstration of trust, or a test of loyalty?
Speaking of former protegés, Mammon. With Mammon, based on how the aforementioned demon talks about Michael and Raphael, it’s clear they thought of him as a “problem child” who wasn’t worth “fixing”, hence Michael “giving” Mammon to Lucifer to deal with. As still-a-morosexual-help pointed out, it’s quite possible the punishment he subjected Mammon to was isolation in an enclosed, dark space. That’s a hands off, but still terrible thing to do to someone.
Now back to the present. To Luke. Luke, who was chosen to go to RAD, a program run by demons dedicated to promoting peace between the three realms. Luke, who has very deeply entrenched ideas about what demons are like. 
Luke, who is Michael’s protegé. 
If Michael is, in fact, on board with the exchange program, and its corresponding goal, why is Luke so prejudiced against demons? Where did it come from? It’s not Simeon, who does display some disdain for demons but tries not to let that affect his usual behaviour and later admits that his prejudice is just that. He seems to want Luke to be more open to demons, he’s just hands-off about teaching him.
So that leaves Michael, someone Luke clearly admires and trusts. Though not as much as he once admired Lucifer… hmmmm… Could there be a personal motivation for Michael sending Luke to the Devildom, to see a fully demonic Lucifer in action?
It seems to me like Luke being sent to the Devildom wasn’t a genuine attempt to open his mind, but more as part of a further grooming tactic: to let him see how dangerous demons are and further entrench his negative opinions about them. 
And I can’t even get into the fucking angel bangles because that’ll be a whole rant in of itself. Short version: FUCKED. UP. MIKE.
So this Michael is trying to fill some really big shoes and is struggling hard. To compensate, he delegates a lot and has extremely high standards for his subordinates. He also has an issue with control because of this. He is the head of the Celestial Realm and thus not only does he have to perfectly embody its values, so does everyone under him. And God help them if they don’t.
But that’s not really fair, is it?
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