#but oh well... i'll take what i can get with what they've given us

[todayisafridaynight]

So, Ichiban’s mom isn’t Janel Monae (as in she’s not black)? If so saaaaaaaaad and missed missed missed opportunity.

if we're real with ourselves there wasn't ever really a chance ichi's mom would be anything but japanese- im more surprised at the fact she's alive lol

#snap chats #it is going to make drawing akane awkward in the future. cause i will of course plan to do that LMAO #but yeah anyways. its not going to stop me from being mad interested in akane #but SPEAKING of biraciality or. binationality? biethnicity.. im on episode two of Smile (the jdrama i just posted bout) #real as hell that vito's named after movie characters jesus christ thats exactly what my parents did ☠️ #when bro was makin an origami pig i thought they were gonna reference lechon or like. Literally Any Filipino Food #idk how close vito is with his filipino heritage yet- he's never been to the philippines and i havent seen his parents yet i dont think #so idek if hed know filipino food.. #but god so far this jdrama is an encapsulation of why im scared of ever going to japan LMAO #LIKE OFC THE XENOPHOBIA'S PLAYED UP FOR THE SHOW but there's def truth to it #the wildest thing from this show is that one of the characters was like 'in japan there's no such thing as 'pure' japanese' #LIKE YES THERE IS LMAOOOOOOOOO SHUT UP so glad vito called out a sec later that there was #anyways... in THAT respect tho and back on topic.. it would have been nice if ichi /was/ biracial #when the plot of his game revolves around japan's less-fortunate members of society and those discriminated against #but oh well... i'll take what i can get with what they've given us #now back to this show one more ep before bed cause my head really hurts

[starlightshadowsworld]

The Wary Weretiger

It doesn't exactly take a Ranpo for the Agency to know Atsushi is struggling. Not for nothing but Atsushi is a homeless teenager in Yokohama.

No one knows where he stays. No one knows how he's managed to fend for himself or how long he's been on the streets.

They do know the money Atsushi has, he stole. Atsushi had just looked at them coldly and asked if they'd arrest him for it.

Dazai had laughed and said if that was the case Kunikida would arrest him for however many times he's stolen his wallet. Which did lighten the mood again.

The Agency did want to help Atsushi. He had unknowingly wormed his way into everyone's hearts.

But the thing is, Atsushi was stubborn. He not accept help nor ask for it. The teen really was the embodiment of a stray cat.

Atsushi hid his hunger pains and the way his cash was depleting. And if they weren't detectives, they might've fallen for it.

Atsushi himself didn't seem concerned by it. Kenji, bless his heart was the only one who could really mention it. Atsushi had shrugged "tigers can go 2 weeks without food, don't worry about it."

No one really wanted to know how he knew that applied to him.

So, everyone was very excited when Kenji burst into the office one day. Quite literally, the door came straight off it's hinges, yelling "Atsushi got the job!"

Dazai grinned "that's great, what did he get?" Atsushi had been quietly job hunting on his own. Though they'd all known, they stayed quiet about it.

"Oh its a lovely little cat cafe." Smiled Kenji, telling them all about it. Dazai's smile wavered because he knew that cafe. Kunikida noticed his change in attitude and looked at him pointedly.

"I might be wrong, but I'm pretty sure that cafes a front company for the Port Mafia."

"What?!" Yelled Kunikida. Ranpo nodded "no yeah you're right on that."

Atsushi took the news well. And by well, he flopped onto the sofa. And screamed out whole bunch of swears that even had Dazai taken aback.... Before writing them down.

Kenji frowned, patting Atsushi's head like one would a distressed kitten. Atsushi sighed, allowing it for a moment before getting up. "So I finally get a job and I have to quit."

"Not necessarily" Said Dazai, getting everyone's attention. "Unlike most front companies, this one is still a legitimate cafe. It just so happens that the owners are running a successful cafe, while money laundering to the Port Mafia."

Atsushi frowned "well that's great and all. But last I checked I was being hunted by the Port Mafia. Wouldn't this just be me walking into a trap?"

Dazai shook his head "see because the Port Mafia don't own the place, they've given the workers and the business protection from all other criminals. Including the Port Mafia themselves."

Ranpo nodded "you're bounty has to mention of you, simply a white tiger. You're ability isn't registed and as long as you don't use it at work, they won't know otherwise.

Atsushi thinks about it for a bit before nodding, slowly. "Alright... I'll stick with it for now. Should've known it was suspicious that the pay was so good."

He doesn't mention how desperately he needed this job. Nor how relieved he is to keep this one.

Dazai smiles kindly "well congrats Atsushi" he said before jumping up excitedly. "And now we can all eat the celebration cake." Atsushi looks at him, confused "cake?" Ranpo jumps out of his chair "finally! Bring it in Kenji!"

Kenji lights up, hurrying off and returning with a delicious looking chocolate cake with "congratulations" in rainbow coloured icing.

"We got the cake from the cafe but me and Kyouka did the icing." Smiled Kenji, Kyouka nodded with a small smile. Atsushi looked at the cake, overwhelmed and disbelief. "You... You did this, for me?" He asked quietly.

And oh the sheer shock on his face made everyone want to hug this poor kid. But they refrained, knowing that wouldn't go well at all. "Of course we did" said Kyouka, before handing him the first slice.

Atsushi took it, and for the first time since they'd all met him, he put down his rucksack. The rucksack that Atsushi guarded like his life depended on it. That held all his valuables and possessions.

He put it down, and moved to sit with Kenji and Kyouka to eat cake. Everyone subtly exchanged smiles, using all their training not to react and dug into the cake together.

#The Wary Weretiger #atsushi nakajima #bsd atsushi #bsd #bsd ranpo #bsd dazai #bsd kenji #bungou stray dogs

[kiiwiigii]

The Bet 

Alec x Fem!Reader

Summary: You use a very naughty word in an attempt to seduce Alec into kissing you. Will it work? 

Warnings: 

Bad words (obviously) 

Slightly NSFW 18+ 

Word Count: 900+ 

Requested?: Yes! I hope you enjoy nonny! 

A/N: I'm sorry this is so late! It took me a while to figure out how I wanted to go about this. 

"Alec, darling." I wrapped my arms around his torso. 

"What is it, amore?" He paused in his typing, looking back at me over his shoulder.  

"I'm bored." 

Alec gave an uncharacteristic snort and put his phone away before pulling away to face me, crossing his arms and leaning against the wall. 

"And just what do you expect me to do about that?" 

"Entertain me for a bit?" 

His eyes darkened and a smirk worked its way onto his lips. 

"Not like that, you pervert!" 

"Oh?" 

"No!"  

My cheeks began to redden, thinking of all the naughty things he was implying with just a look. He put his hands in his pockets, leaning forward seductively. 

"Perhaps I can change your mind." He whispered. 

"Now that's just playing dirty." I narrowed my eyes at him, crossing my arms across my chest to hide my suddenly hard nipples. 

"If it lets me have my way, I'll play as dirty as you like." 

"What if I want to have my way for once?" I quirked an eyebrow at him. 

His smirk twisted into something terrifyingly sexy. 

"And what makes you think I would do that?" 

"Because you love me." I pouted. 

Alec was suddenly laughing, and I wanted to smack him. The only thing holding me back was the possibility of breaking my hand. He sobered up after a minute and ran a thumb across my cheek. 

"I do, indeed, love you, mio cara." He shook his head. "But I have something that I think should prove more interesting." 

"And what is that?" 

"How about a bet?" 

I eyed him suspiciously. "What kind of bet?" 

"The kind where I win, but it will keep you entertained either way." 

He pulled back looking smug.  

"Explain please." 

"Whoever gets the other to kiss them first wins." 

My mouth popped open in surprise. That was just plain mean. Downright diabolical. Alec was well aware that I was a very touchy person, and I gave him kisses on the regular. As in it was a habit.  

"You know what?' I sniffed. "I take back everything nice I've ever said about you. You are the spawn of Satan." 

"That would mean Jane is also the spawn of Satan." Alec deadpanned. 

"She has a different father." 

"We are twins, Y/N. We cannot have a different father." 

I waved my hand in dismissal. 

"She's nicer to me than you are." 

"I have to say, you are the first person that I have ever heard say that." 

I tapped my chin thoughtfully before muttering. "I'll probably be the only one." 

"So?" He hedged. "Will you make a bet with me?" 

"This is basically making a deal with the devil; you know that right?" 

"I thought I was the spawn of Satan?" 

I rolled my eyes at him. "Fine. I'll take you up on this bet. Have fun losing, you psychopath." 

I yelped when he was suddenly before me, lips less than an inch from my own. "Oh, I don't plan on losing." 

I groaned but managed to step back. He stayed exactly where he was, his eyes brightening with a challenge. Finally, he straightened back up, his eyes roaming over me with a satisfied glint that one has when they think they've already won. 

I simply glared back at him. I could do this. And when I won, I was going to have him on his knees, begging. I grinned back at him. This was going to be easy. 

"Oh, before I forget. We cannot purposely avoid the other, so no hiding in the library for days on end, amore." 

With that he disappeared. 

Well shit.  

Maybe this wasn't going to be so easy. 

I needed help. It had been almost a week and neither Alec nor I had barely even touched each other, much less kissed. I was going insane, but I was too stubborn to admit it.  

He almost had me a few times. Cornering me and whispering dirty words in my ear, his wandering hands exploring my body. But it hadn't worked, sadly for him. 

But it had given me an idea. 

You see, in all the times he had fucked me, and I mean well and truly fucked me, my eyes rolling into the back of my head kind of fucked me, I hadn't been able to bring myself to talk back in such a way. I had made one attempt, which he thought was cute, and still teased me about it.  

Well, this time would be different. 

We were in his room, and he had me against the wall again, caged in by his arms, whispering dirtily in my ear. 

"I know the bet was for a kiss on the lips, but I think I would rather have your lips kissing my cock." 

I took a deep breath. Now was the time. I leaned up on the very tips of my toes, my lips brushing softly against his ear. 

"And I'd rather have that cock wrapped up in my cunt." 

Alec's head reared back, his mouth open in shock, gaping at me. I smirked. I had never gotten such a reaction from him. He was usually cool as a cucumber. But I could tell he was turned on, his eyes were darkening, and I watched as he swallowed roughly, as if he was nervous or holding back. 

"What is it darling?" I continued, pulling him back in, barely an inch away from my lips. "Is cunt to much of a dirty word for you? Or are you just imagining the feeling of it strangling your cock as I cum?" 

Before I could blink Alec had his hands tangled in my hair, his lips on mine in a hungry kiss. After he pulled away, I gave him an impish grin, while trying to reign in my breathing. 

"Victory." 

{Masterlist} // {Request Guidelines}

Taglist: @alecvolturi @lack-lust-3rr @rosedpetal

Wanna be notified when I post a new story? Ask to join my taglist!

#alec volturi #alec volturi x reader #reader insert #volturi #twilight #fanfic

[storm-priestess]

☾*✲⋆. HOW DO THEY FEEL ABOUT YOU? ☾*✲⋆.

designed for crushes, but can be used for anyone. if it resonates, it's for you

(arranged 1-2 on top, 3-4 on bottom)

(pictures taken from weheartit)

✲ Pile 1 ☾

a lot of… new energy here. did you just meet? if not, their feelings have recently gone through a change, or they've had a realization…

with the 10 of pentacles in the center, I feel like they were/are focusing on work and then got hit with a love arrow, but what they want to do about that is still up to them

I feel like they are close to moving for a job, with the 6 of swords right next to the 10p, so their plans and feelings don't match up. this does feel relatively new, given the fool and ace of swords, so maybe these feelings aren't strong enough to justify declining a great job or even school opportunity (for some, they could be moving away for college)

either way, there's also a message of returning. they're trying to have faith that if it's meant to be you'll meet again at a better time

all of the lenormand cards i got point to a message, something coming to light, a secret revealed. several things come to mind as to what this could be. I'm thinking a) your feelings are revealed to them, and they (at first) don't know how to feel only to grow affection once the the dirt settles (or they have a grand realization right then and there, which seems a bit less likely but possible); b) they're feelings are revealed; or c) they (or you!) receive a job offer / college acceptance letter that changes the game. either way, a message changes everything

idk who needs to hear this but they're anxious, don't push them. I feel like someone reading this is trying to force affection out of their crush based on pac readings confirming their feelings. give them time, it's a little crazy for them rn (or it will be)

some of you are very intuitive and are very convinced that this is your person, or you will be with them in some romantic context. again, just bc you are ready doesn't mean that they are. just give them some time

i hope you enjoyed the reading! as always feedback is welcome and paid readings are open <3 

✲ Pile 2 ☾

very commanding energy. ngl i got a lil hot under the collar when the first cards came out

they are very insistent to take their own time. the type to hear your confession, reciprocate feelings, but still stay in the teasing or flirting stage bc they are not quite ready to take things to the next level

very 'booked and busy' vibe, they don't feel like a fuckboy, but they have assignments or a competitive job or sports or something that is splitting their attention

it's very passionate (not necessarily 18+, they just have very strong emotions, but they keep them in check well? like they can feel the most lovey dovey way possible but just smirk and go back to doing their homework bc it's due at midnight and they have the control of a fucking steam engine???)

total cap energy, I'll just say it

a lot under the surface as well? I feel like they show very little on their face, maybe they always seem in control and calm, but that's definitely not true. things get to them sometimes

bit of an escapist. has some self doubt and uses work or possibly relationships to escape from things they can't change or require a lot of effort to change. just make sure you're not just a distraction, as that could possibly happen

oh holy hot damn the 'true love' card popped out of the oracle deck, and then the 'wishes will be granted' card 😳 yall

this person is used to getting what they want, at least with people. maybe they fall in love a lot as well. but I would be dumb not to mention the very obvious possibility with these cards that they reciprocate your feelings

overall, they have a very fiery energy when it comes to love and perhaps are used to being chased, so be cautious and make sure that if you want commitment and a serious relationship you are getting it

the 'devotion' card also popped out as I was putting the cards away… just put your foot down and you will be more likely to get commitment out of this person. don't settle!!!

i hope you enjoyed the reading! as always feedback is welcome and paid readings are open <3

✲ Pile 3 ☾

if you guys are friends with your crush and have been getting mixed signals from them, this pile is for you

they're thinking about this connection way too much, so many cerebral cards came out

but also the 10 of cups???

I feel like they overanalyze every single thing you say and do, they are going crazy trying to decipher you

I also feel like they're not entirely sure where they want this connection to go? there's a lot of affection here, but part of it just seems like they'd be happy to have you in their life in any form

maybe they get that you're interested and are debating just going for it, bc they don't want to lose the friendship, but also aren't entirely sure that they have romantic feelings for you? they just like you so much, pile 3

part of them wants to keep things how they are, and are afraid of change, bc they don't know where this could lead and don't want to risk it

even if they do have romantic feelings, their thoughts are on stability. how can they stabilize this relationship? how can they ensure that you both get out of this confusing stage in one piece, holding hands and laughing about it?

might also be a sticky situation like a love triangle or their-ex-is-your-friend type of thing

they do seem very considerate though, they're not just listening to their own feelings but what's best for everyone

oh wow. for some of you this person has had eyes on you since they first saw you and has gotten used to settling for friendship. now they don't know if it's worth changing, since this worked out so well

they're so used to dealing with these feelings alone that they don't realize that the signals you might be sending them are real

they've calmed down a bit only to be thrown back into the arena

godspeed, pile 3 🫡

i hope you enjoyed the reading! as always feedback is welcome and paid readings are open <3

✲ Pile 4 ☾

they seem like they're going to go for it, pile 4

knight of swords and the magician??? not to mention all the cards I pulled with people on them are offering something, facing forward, very direct

they look confident, or at least they are when they're alone, analyzing your interactions

the high priestess is also here, and this particular deck has her smirking, very bold and confident in her intuition. I feel like they somehow know how you feel and are planning on doing something about it

I'm not getting a lot of their emotions, per se, just plans. it's up to you to decide if this person is sincere or just wants to pass the time

they could possibly be using relationships to validate themselves? insecurity or a past with heartbreak could make this person eager to show that they're desirable

again, emotions aren't being shown very much here, so either they don't have much of an emotional attachment to you or they are so far in the game that they have already decided to put their heart on the line and act, not contemplate feelings anymore 

yeah no I hate to say it but there is a bit of a playboy vibe here. protect your energy, pile 4, only go for this if you are okay with where it could lead

omg the charms that came out have me cackling

do they wear a lip ring??? bc if they do I feel like that might be a bit of a warning

also wear pastels or pink regularly, particularly preppy polos or button-up shirts

one charm is a cylindrical crystal attached to a metal hoop w small chains (like a dangly earring), and when it came out the crystal was fit inside the ring 💀 they got something on their mind for surree

if you are okay with one night stands then go for it, but if you are looking for something more I might suggest waiting things out a little bit. no matter what it's up to you!

i hope you enjoyed the reading! as always feedback is welcome and paid readings are open <3

#pac reading #pac #tarot pac #pick a card #pickacard #how do they feel? #how do they feel about you?

[skyepixels]

The Welcome Home Website!!!!! She is Beautiful~! And She Leaves Us With So Many Questions!

First off, I am absolutely astonished at how beautiful she is!!! Clown, Puzz, and everyone else has worked so hard and they've exceeded everyone's expectations with the site!!! What a wonderful little Home they've made, and I'm excited to experience it as a fan!!!

I know that everyone's combing through the new website update with a fine toothed comb so I won't be sharing anything we've already found. I don't think I've found anything new in the site that others haven't already found, but oh boy!!!! Does everything there only raise more questions!

What I do love is how all the audio files we've been given through the "bugs" has really shown what everyone's personality is like! I love every one of them, and the voice actors captured them perfectly! Oh and the little tidbits of history with the merchandise, the telephone calls, the little skits! Be still my beating heart~!!!

AND THE WALLY LIVE INTERVIEW. I CANT! It's sooo darn cute!! And Nick Nocturne (I know it's him, that interdimentional cat demon) as the interviewer was such a lovely touch! I cannot wait to hear about that from his YT channel!!! And Wally was so coy with the romance question~ and I think that's the perfect way to answer it for everyone who loves him! Keep it vague, let everyone make their own conclusions and be happy! (I know I certainly will for the time being, and will love him no matter what!) I am so curious about the underlying story here: there's so much to think about it's driving me crazy! They gave so much and answered so little! We can only theorize from here! So here's my little thoughts! None of it's cohesive in any way, nor does it really have all the details or tell full story yet, so just take it in sections if you decide to read it! ______

!~OBSERVATION TIME~!

I think that Wally, Home (And maybe everyone else, not sure) are trapped somewhere. Where exactly isn't certain, but very trapped indeed. My first indication of this from this response in the guestbook for Tayla (Page 8):

"eu não sei onde estamos" - I don't know where we are (A bonus for the multi-lingual side of things there, it makes me really happy to see it!)

I have no concept of what happened to everyone else, but from the little drawings he's made on the guestbook, he's constantly telling people things like "Oh, I'll tell Eddie." or "I'll tell Frank." these messages, but we never get a direct response from any other neighbor! It's always him talking! Just him. He tells people their responses, but we never hear anything direct from the other neighbors! The quick reference I can bring up is the hearts PNG in the guestbook for Kazoo:

itoldhim_hesaidhesflattered_idontknowwhatanyoneistalkingabout_.png I feel like those collections of audio clips with all the neighbors (1-14 to 14-14) are a recount of events throughout an entire day that previously happened that may give insight into what happened to Wally. I think this is the case based on the last audio in the list, 14-14 bh audio, when Barnaby notices Wally acting strange:

BARNABY: Yeah, yeah, real funny! A poor little guy like me deserves some sympathy! A clown without a kazoo is like… Like an artist without his paintbrush! Go on kid, tell ‘em! …Hello? Buddy? Pal? …Hey, you stopped paintin’. Everything alright, Wally?

Well, something happened there. Maybe a change in his psyche, how he perceives things - some strange realization that terrified him. Maybe he got angry at something. What it was? I have no clue.

Another addition that I think is interesting! Frank wrote to Wally describing the unusual bug he found. In the beginning of that letter, Frank says this:

"I know you would ask if you are here." Where is he?

The nature of how Wally and everyone communicates is so vague and weird! I think the telephones, the mail, the TVs - all these things are means of communicating, but there's no direct connection to us! Any time a phone call is made, they can't hear us. This I have inferred from the "It's for you!" Talking telephone toy! They can talk to us and we can hear them, but they can't hear us! What's causing this disturbance? That's the real bug here, and I'm clueless on what that means or how to break through the surface!

Most importantly! I think that Wally specifically trying to communicate with that one person on the WHRP team. That person... is experiencing a lot of heavy sh*t, because I think they remember Wally and the show. They're the closest person right now that's able to help him (either willingly or not!)

I also believe he's specifically working with that WHRP member because in the phone audio (the one you click on when interacting with the toy telephone on the merchandise page), he says:

"You have to go too. You have work to do."

From what I can interpret from the live interview, I think that it implies some semblance of back story! Wally did interact with people and the outside world during his prime in the 70s, when the show was really starting to pick up speed. He was calmer, more in tune with his character and fame. He was in character most of all, and I think being in character was a sense of identity for him that he could rely on!

But those secret audio files we hear from him now? He sounds desperate, like he can't breathe. He's practically breaking from his usual character. What did he realize? What does he know? All of those things boil down to this sentence:

"I will help you understand. I will find a way soon, Neighbor."

Wally (and Home?) are working away at a solution wherever they can I think that WHRP member is the key to that! (Although the methods of how they're doing it, i.e the black paint that apparently you shouldn't touch with bare hands, the mind-boggling phone ringing in that person's ears, the complete distortion of reality - definetely implies a few things.)

I also think that the highlighted in invisible ink is Wally's words throughout the email compilations and other documents! The one where he says "Im so sorry." - I feel like that's him showing some remorse for his actions there, but it's like a sorry that says "I'm sorry, I have to do this." kind of deal (which is... oof)

Also - quick note! Wally keep insisting on being let in, rather than being let out. "Let me in." - Let you in to where? Our world? Reality? Oh so many questions!!!

I also am curious about the WHRP staff too, and their interactions with the Question-Answerer, the Marlo company, the Playfellow Workshop! There's two sides to this story; the human side and the puppet one, and it's so multilayered here that at this point, I'm inclined to distrust what anyone on that website says until we know what's going on!

Lastly, I'm not certain how much we as viewers of this story are involved. While I believe that he's working to get that WHRP member to let him in, he does acknowledge us through the guestbook. Although, I don't think truly aware of how much we see him. i.e "idontknowwhatanyoneistalkingabout" line from the heart PNG.

While I want to believe that Wally can see us through our art, specifically when we draw or recreate his eyes, for engagement's sake (audio from this link), I also am inclined to believe he's refering to the eyes that the WHRP team member keeps drawing on those sticky notes and other places throughout the restoration site:

And and and!!! I think that there's got to be something upcoming with this link: https://www.clownillustration.com/error404

You find this link on the staff-only page at the bottom with the text "It's in here." And I think that with any future updates, the next section of the story will be coming from here.

AHH~! I rambled on too long! Hope you enjoyed it!

#welcome home #wally darling #welcome home arg #welcome home fandom #welcome home wally #skyepixels #welcome home theory #welcome home update #frank frankly #julie joyful #eddie dear #poppy partridge #howdy pillar #barnaby beagle

[chrollo-lucilfers-chains]

Chrollo x gn!reader

His s/o gets taken.

Warnings: Kidnapping (it's not Chrollo tho), murder

Part 1

It has happened.

Chrollo hadn't thought this day would come, especially not so soon. But it had come and he hadn't been prepared.

He's in the middle of finishing someone off when you call him.

Standing on a balcony, the wind blowing strongly so far up, he holds a trembling man by his neck. The man is an unimportant informant of the government and he'd been involved in the troupe's latest heist so he has to be disposed of.

Chrollo has him dangling over the balcony's edge, desperately pleading at him to spare his life.

Without any expression Chrollo ends his victims miserable suffering with a snap of the wrist and lets him fall, pulling out his phone instead. Why would you call him, especially in the middle of the night?

He's told you to never interrupt him with unnecessary calls before. Given, it had been under the pretense of potential interruptions of his 'job', which wasn't really wrong but it didn't give you a lot of information either. You'd understood, of course.

To see your caller ID on his screen now alerted him greatly and so he picked up with a short 'Yes?' only to get interrupted by your strangely hushed voice.

"Chrollo? Oh thank God, it was the right number. I'm sorry to call you this late but I didn't know who else to call! There is someone in my house."

Chrollo's blood runs cold, his face hardening.

"I don't know what they want but there's three or four of them and they're searching for me. I'm hiding in the closet but I don't know how long it takes till they find me!"

He gives a meaningful glance to Pakunoda.

"Shh, calm down, it's going to be okay, angel!", he shushes you in the faked, softer voice that he uses with you so often, not wanting the noise of your whispers to alert your intruders.

His eyes flicker over to Pakunoda who immediately nods and leaves the room in a hurry.

"I'm coming to get you, okay? I'll be there as soon as I can. I'm on my way."

Chrollo stays on the phone as he rushes down the halls. When he reaches Pakunoda, who's already pulled up a car, he gets in and they speed into the night.

In the silent car he can hear your voice clearer than before. No nightbreeze is lashing around him and so he hears the quiet sobs. You're crying, Chrollo notes with displeasure.

"I think they're getting closer, Chrollo. I'm scared", you whimper, your voice clearly trembling.

Chrollo clenches his jaw and closes his eyes.

Six minutes until he'll arrive.

As he focuses on forming a plan how to get you out without alerting the intruders your voice sounds through the phone in a desperate whisper.

"They're infront of the closet!", Chrollo listens as you hold your breath. Everything is silent until a voice cuts through the speakers.

"Well hello there, princess!"

You let out a hitched breath. "Plea- Please, I don't know what you want but just leave, I don't have anything to steal!!"

"Heh, agree to disagre- Wait, is that a phone?"

Chrollo can make out commotion on the other side of the connection. He imagines you holding on to the phone, not daring to let go. Then he hears a scream. Your scream, to be exact and his eyes flash open with rage. Did the guy just hit you?!

There are a few wimpers and then the connection turns silent.

Chrollo ends the call and takes a deep breath as he composes himself. He sits silently in the car, his face mimicking that of a corpse. Shalnark already accessed the needed data and cameras to know where they've taken you. Pakunoda and Nobunaga are now with their boss, on their way to your location.

In the silence of the car Chrollo thinks about you and the person you are, always so ready to give everything. So eager to help him with whatever he needs.

And he takes it. He takes without a concern in the world.

All the years of being starved of human kindness and touch seem to be melting away whenever he's with you, sinking into your warm embrace when you hold him like he could slip away any moment.

His eyes flicker between the buildings passing by. The moonlit night makes it harder to discern them from one another and paints them in a cold light

Somebody is going to die tonight.

#chrollo lucilfer #hunter x hunter #chrollo #mine #my writing #chrollo x reader #gender neutral reader #gn reader #hunter x hunter x reader #gn!reader

[waywardmillennial]

watchergate & where we go from here...

To start at the end, I purchased my annual Watcher TV subscription on April 20th because I wanted to support them when it felt like so many others were not. I'm cancelling another subscription to make this work with my budget, and I'm very happy with this!

Watcher has always made high quality, entertaining content that I love, and I'm happy to support them as they try to grow like they've always wanted to so they can bring on more creators and give us more diverse art.

So, moving forward, I'm going to be posting about Watcher TV when it comes out - spoiler parties with the sexy moots! - and I'll be blocking any and all haters I see. 💜💜💜

(read more bc ofc this got long)

To walk this back and give a little history/context, *ahem* [sotto Byron voice]

April 12, 2024: Watcher announced they had a surprise coming for us in a week's time. The news came in the form of a very spirited ad-read in the Mystery Files s2 finale. And afterwards there were a few blogs posting about it, but I commented to a friend that my dash had been devoid of Watcher posts (oh, how that sweet summer child would grow to long for a day such as that).

There were some corkboard theories, and I broke down the new logo design, but nothing big happened until the following Thursday.

April 18, 2024: I saw the leak for the announcement. It was on reddit and a sock tumblr blog was made sending the link out to people. I didn't post it or share it because it wasn't my news to share. I wanted to wait to see how they were going to explain it.

Maybe I should have said at the time (but it's fine if you don't believe me now I guess) but I was hoping Watcher TV would become like their enhanced Patreon replacement, where the new shows like "Puppet History Karaoke" and "Road Files" would be exclusive, and some other perks like early access. [note: if Apollo is laughing at him right now, I'd kindly request he stuff that red ball somewhere Helios doesn't shine]

I imagined some people would be mad at the streaming news but it didn't prepare me for how bad it would get...

April 19, 2024: Most of us know what happened. The announcement was not well received. Watcher's silence right after wasn't helping, but I don't think many people were willing to give them any grace for their pre-planned trip to the UK and instead demanded answers immediately.

Do I think maybe their announcement could have been timed better? Or maybe given a different tone? Perhaps. But either way what they were trying to communicate was not what people chose to hear, and the response from many viewers was, to choose a very formal phrase here, absolute bonker banana balls insane.

The main anti-streamer "arguments" I saw basically boiled down into these categories:

"high production tv quality content is what they want to make, but we don't want that - we only want them to sit in a blank room and talk to each other with blue and yellow text like the bfu days!!"

"Steven's the one behind all this bc he's rich and greedy and only eats gold"

"they already make enough money off their patreon why are they doing this?? they should have consulted [insert other yt-er here]"

"they've become the capitalist elite that we swore to destroy! so we have to tear them down from their thrones!!"

Even now, feeling better than I have in days, I don't have the energy to say why each of those takes completely misses the point of who they are as a company, as creators, and as human beings. But there are some eloquent posts in my #watchergate tag, or my other post, if you're interested.

April 22, 2024: We got the Watcher update - giving people access to all videos after a month on the new streamer - and that seemed to placate a lot of viewers and those on the fence. But it was also the day I learned about that horrible petition against Steven, and I'd been following all this drama for several days (foregoing some self-care) and so I had a little meltdown...

Even though the new setup is closer to what I'd hoped for like 10 days ago, I hate how we arrived at it. It's shown people that they can bully creators to get them to compromise on their company. In fact, I've seen accounts celebrating this.

Opinions like this have given me trust issues when it comes to the Watcher fandom at large now. As many of my beloved mutuals have said, I'm going to be wary of accounts that follow me and be applying that blocking feature liberally.

I can also only imagine how things like this must have broken some of the trust that the Watcher crew feels for us - fightingfuries really said it best. If they do start distancing themselves on socials and things, I wouldn't really blame them.

I don't have more to say, other than I'm going to support them as much as I can, for as long as they continue to make content. I'm going to send the team a care package. And I hope in time we'll earn back their trust.

Now I'll let Ryan Bergara play me out...

As for the question of why we decided to launch our own platform, when we started Watcher in 2020, we wanted to create shows that we were proud of, that we had ownership over, and that would provide you the caliber of content that we felt you deserved. However, we were finding it harder and harder to stay relevant to advertisers and the constantly changing YouTube landscape. We faced some incredibly challenging decisions. We didn't want to compromise our content to ensure they met advertising requirements. And we definitely did not want to lay people off that have brought Watcher to life behind the scenes. And we didn't want to bring Watcher to a close, which would have happened if we stayed solely on YouTube. - An Update, April 22, 2024

#watchergate #I needed to wrap up some feelings #but closing the tag now #onto posting about happier things! #and I have a little idea/project I want to work on next for any of you who are watcher tv members #vi rants #we now return to my normally scheduled queue

[halfagone]

You know, that recent post with more thoughts on bio mom!Selina has given me an idea. Because Bruce and Selina, in one version of canon, have a daughter. Helena. Huntress. Consider: Another twins au, but with Danny and Helena instead

You have activated my DC knowledge, and I hope you know that >:3

Helena's character is a little more complicated and I am here to ramble about that before I get to the meat of this ask. There is a universe where Helena grew up to become Batwoman, not Huntress. And that is because she was raised by her parents and didn't get separated. But since you specifically mentioned Huntress, I'll try to stick with that one.

For anyone that doesn't know this part of DC comics that well, something you should know is that there are two Huntresses. Helena Bertinelli and Helena "Bertinelli", otherwise known as Helena Wayne. In the New Earth and Prime Earth comic series, their version of Huntress is the real Helena Bertinelli, whose family was a part of the mafioso and she was dubbed a "mafia princess".

But then, there's Earth 2, where Helena Wayne was actually Robin before being sent to another universe alongside Kara (more specifically, Power Girl) and ended up taking the alias of Helena Bertinelli, who had existed in this world but had been missing/presumed dead.

So where does that leave us? [Added a Keep Reading because this got long lol]

Since you specifically addressed Helena as Huntress, I'm going to be using this comic run:

You could probably write a story about how Danny finally finds Helena again and the two reunite, thus revealing that Helena had lied to almost everyone and she was indeed Helena Wayne once upon a time. And this of course would lead to revelations and heart-to-heart discussions about Bruce and Selina's relationship and what kind of parents they were. I like to imagine that when Danny reunited with his family for whatever reason that separated them, Danny becomes Robin as well. So there are two Robins stalking the streets and scaring the living daylights out of criminals.

However... if you wanted to make things a little more interesting, we could take this version of the comic and take it for a little spin.

In the original canon, Helena has already operated as Huntress for years before Damian figured out the deception. She's already an adult, and largely on her own.

But in this case, we can make Helena freshly from the other universe. Lost and unsure and all on her own. Enter Batfamily. The moment they get her in their sights they realize that oh, she's Bruce's kid from another world/timeline/whatever their first assumption is. And then, when they get her to open up, she reveals that she has a twin. Bruce is Unwell at the information and Helena is inconsolable because they only just got him back, and now they've lost her. Her parents are never going to let her out of the house again after this!!

Meanwhile, Danny is losing his mind and their parents are trying to do everything to get her back and it's a whole mess.

If you want to make things a little more interesting, you could make Danny and Helena the only Wayne children, so that when she goes to the other universe she's super taken aback by how many siblings she could've had and "isn't that our neighbor Tim? Tim Drake? Danny's bestest friend ever? What are you doing in that egghead suit, Danny would be appalled to see you dressed like that."

Something I will have to say is that we probably don't get a lot of AUs like this because the rest of the Batfamily would probably be adults and there's a rather large age gap between Damian (as the youngest) and Helena + Danny, in this case. Unless you have them from another world, of course.

Think... Batman Beyond, with Terry McGinnis. It's an amazing series, but pretty much all of the main characters that the fandom typically writes about are retired. There is no Nightwing or Red Hood or Red Robin. Damian is alive but he's back with the League of Assassins. Let's not talk about how Tim and Barbara are married.

I think this AU could be really fun, and I'd be interested in trying it out some day. But it is one of the trickier instances. But no less exciting because of it. ;3

#halfagone replies #dpxdc

[crowleyholmes]

Concerning the Metatron's "offer"...

So I've had some thoughts about season 3 and I've hesitated to post them because a little voice in the back of my head kept piping up telling me it's a bit fanficion-y, but, like... was season 2 not fanfiction-y? I feel like with the jane austen ball dancing and the match-making, and the "oh..." moment and the dramatic angsty kiss-and-immediate-break-up, anything is fair game.

So here's what I've been thinking about - it centers around the Metatron's offer to let Aziraphale reinstate Crowley as an angel.

So at this point we're all in agreement that the Metatron knew perfectly well that Crowley was never going to accept the 'invitation' back to heaven, right?

It was only a clever ploy to get Aziraphale to really consider it and to make him finally accept the 'promotion', so they could bring him back to heaven and use him for whatever it is they really want him for, without Crowley, because I think separating the two was a big part of why they want Aziraphale back in heaven. Maybe because their combined miracles are so incredibly powerful and heaven is worried about what they might get up to once they realize?

Anyway.

I don't believe that getting Aziraphale to heaven was the only purpose of the 'offer' to reinstate Crowley as an angel – I think it was a very calculated set-up for further manipulation. And I'm stepping from in-story facts to meta now, because what is it that Aziraphale needs to do next season? He needs to finally and irrevocably separate himself from heaven, right? If he wants to be with Crowley (which we know he does, more than anything), then he can not be with heaven (at the very least not as it is right now).

But heaven, for some reason, needs him to help bring about the Second Coming. So heaven needs to make sure of 3 things: a) to keep Aziraphale away from Crowley, b) to keep Aziraphale in heaven in general, and c) to absolutely turn Aziraphale against hell. Which he already is, but I don't think he is quite strongly enough against hell to satisfy heaven and to be willing to bring about Armageddon #2 and destroy them all. They need to re-brainwash him, fully.

The need to keep up and REINFORCE Aziraphale's desperate believe in heaven as unquestionably The Good Guys, and hell as irredeemably The Bad Guys. And what's the easiest way to Aziraphale's heart? What's the easiest way to manipulate him? What is the most important thing in the world to him? What could we possibly use as a tool to get this little angel to dance to our tune? What would make Aziraphale hate hell with a divine fury?

Mhm.

Something Bad is going to happen to Crowley (either arranged by heaven and convincingly blamed on hell, or done by hell but arranged at LEAST partly by heaven).

And THEN the Metatron can tell Aziraphale 'look what they've done/they're doing to your friend. Look how he's suffering, isn't it awful? He could be here with us right now, safe and sound, because we were ready to forgive him for all his sins and take him back, if only he had accepted our kindness, such a shame...”

I'll go off on a bit of a tangent here but...

This also works very well for another reason that is extremely important narratively: Aziraphale needs to be the one to rescue Crowley from something - it's happened the other way around Too Many Times, there's an imbalance there, a big one. Crowley gives and gives and gives and sacrifices and compromises over and over and over, and Aziraphale has been taking him for granted.

Now don't get me wrong, I know that Aziraphale would come to his rescue IMMEDIATELY the second he got the faintest whiff of there being any NEED for him to. He has, in the past, offered to do things for Crowley, asked him what he could do for him.

It's just that, so far, in his eyes and as far as he knows, Crowley has never needed rescuing, or given Aziraphale any kind of reason to believe that he cannot simply get himself out of whatever situations he might get into. In Aziraphale's eyes, Crowley is incredibly strong and unafraid and capable of anything and does not need him. Or at the very least, does not need his help.

And it doesn't help that Crowley is way too proud (and protective of Aziraphale) to ever admit that he needs help. Hell, he doesn't even tell Aziraphale that he's living in his car because he lost his flat.

Which brings me back to the Something Terrible that is going to happen to Crowley. Aziraphale will see him in whatever horrifying situation, suffering and completely alone, and he will DROP EVERYTHING to get him out of there as fast as he can.

I don't think this will go over well, because at this point Aziraphale will probably already be quite re-brainwashed and while he will likely get Crowley out of any immediate mortal danger, I don't think the two of them will reconcile there already – unless Aziraphale realizes during the rescue that what happened to Crowley was (at least in part but probably in LARGE part) heaven's doing and he'll finally be back on Their Side instead of heaven's or hell's, for good this time.

But even if he doesn't realize that yet, and sticks with heaven for the time being, I think it will be enough to show Crowley that he is loved. Really loved. That Aziraphale asking him to come back to heaven with him was never about making Crowley be an angel again. That was never the part Aziraphale cared about, not really. The part he cared about was that it meant that they would be together and they would be safe, Crowley would be safe.

Because, while I do think that Aziraphale never thought of Crowley as someone who needs saving from anything, Aziraphale isn't stupid. He is very aware that Hell deals out harsher punishments more frequently than heaven does, and he knows that Crowley does not deserve ANY punishment – has never deserved any punishment, beginning with the Fall itself. All he wants is justice and safety and happiness for Crowley, and I think after Aziraphale rescues him (for which, in order to do it, Aziraphale will have to make compromises and sacrifices himself, most likely to Heaven's detriment), Crowley will understand that. Aziraphale loves him exactly as he is. And loves him more than he loves Heaven.

Aziraphale only chose heaven at the end of season 2 because it was, in his eyes (and to be fair, also in my eyes) the right thing to do (as painful as it was), and Aziraphale's most FUNDAMENTAL character trait is that he always strives to do what is right, even if it goes against what Heaven tells him is good.

He chose heaven because he believes it can be saved, and Aziraphale would never give up on anyone or anything that he believes can be saved.

I think in the end, Aziraphale will either actually manage to make a difference, or he will realize that heaven can NOT be saved and that is when he will give up on it and realize that the only place for him to be is With Crowley.

#good omens #good omens meta #good omens 2 #spoilers #good omens theories #aziraphale #crowley #aziracrow #ineffable partners #mine #gomens2 #good omens spoilers #sorry i think this may be a bit incoherent in parts #i stayed up too late last night and slept in too late today and my brain is a bit scrambled

[gay-robot-boyfriends]

What do you like the most about the bucket head (vava)? Share a headcanon about him to us

(Some art cuz the first thing i thought was "oh, Vile's not gonna like this" asdasaas) Oh man, where do I even begin! rubs hands together You guys have no idea how much I adore this manbot! I love everything about him, from his arrogant asshole personality to his design. The purple armour is my most favourite, but the others are growing on me.

Ohhh oh no i have so many headcanons! help!

Okay, first I'll share my canon HCs. In Maverick Hunter X, we see Vile being arrogant and rude, and he hates X for unknown reasons.

My HC is that Vile is annoyed by X's tendency to see the good in everyone, which I think makes Vile distrustful of him. X is also a rookie maverick hunter, but he has already been praised for being the father of all reploids, having infinite potential, and being a peacekeeper. I can see that ticking off Vile as well; he just sees X as any other reploid and isn't impressed, and over time, he grows to hate him.

The event of Maverick Hunter X takes place, and at the end, when Sigma finds Vile (who is dying), he asks him what he was hoping to achieve, to which Vile responds with: "…What did I plan to do? Thinking about it now, I'm not actually sure…" Sigma is not listening to him by that point he's calling for someone to come retrieve Vile. "I don't care what happens to this world… By defeating X, I've validated my own existence… and that's all that matters to me now. My name… is Vile… I … am… I…" Vile then dies or enters an emergency shutdown mode.

What he says at the end made me think he could have been redeemable in some way because his nonsensical ideas were motivated by the need for an objective (or validation) that he gave himself. I'm sure he was built exclusively for the purpose of fighting.

He has more than just his cannon, which can fire energy lasers and boomerang cutters; his entire body is a weapon. He has bombs, plasma weapons, and flamethrowers in his knees, bullets shooting out of his finger tips, removable armguards that allow him to fire missiles from his arms, and, if that isn't enough, he can projectile fire his entire fist and forearm.

Fighting and war are just what makes sense to him. It's what he's always done and known, and he's very good at blowing shit up. But if he had known more or been built differently (he has a malfunction in his robot brain), he could have been redeemable, and I love me a redeemable asshole villain.

OKAY! Let's get to the brain rot, HCs!

For Vile, three things make sense in life: drinking, fucking, and blowing shit up. He has a bar in his headquarters and can make killer drinks, but no one is aware of it! He keeps trophies and mementos from his favourite battles.

Outside of battle, he is actually pretty clean. His place is not messy at all. His cannons and other weapons are on display on the walls. They've all got names! Since he is also a weapons enthusiast, he sometimes disassembles them to clean and modify them, even if it is illegal, like disabling safety features or just making them more dangerous.

I just love the mental image of Vile alone in his headquarters with a drink, tinkering with one of his weapons or even his own body in some cases, given that some of his weaponry is internal. I don't think Vile can actually remove his armour to reveal a fleshy body, but I think he can detach it, revealing some of his inner workings and ammunition. It's how he reloads bombs, missiles, bullets, and fuel for his different flamethrowers.

I got more HC for my vilex bullshit, but I'll stop here! Sorry for the long response, but I love him so much I can't be normal about him!

#Long ass response #mmx #megaman x #it's all about him #vile #VAVA #my beloved #Oh yeah i forgot the obvious HC #Vile's a fucking potty mouth #my stupid french ass can't write #had to use paraphraser ai #cry

[areyoudreaminof]

Storm Song: A Gwynriel Playlist

I didn't forget the Gwynriel! How could I?

Given that I'm 99.9% certain these two are getting the next book, I wanted to make a playlist that captures these two finding one another. That inevitable pull and chemistry they have is exciting. They've got trauma that each can understand in a way no one else can.

Listen Here! and tracklist behind the cut!

This one goes out to all of my Gwynriel girlies. @bookofmirth @bearbluebooks @c-e-d-dreamer @captain-of-the-gwynriel-ship @corcracrow @damedechance @foundress0fnothing @gwyns @gaeleria @itsthedoodle @melting-houses-of-gold @moodymelanist @popjunkie42 @reverie-tales @asnowfern @reverie-tales @sonics-atelier @thelovelymadone @wilde-knight @the-lonelybarricade @sunshinebingo @vulpes-fennec @velidewrites @witchlingsandwyverns @xtaketwox @yazthebookish @acourtdelaluna @separatist-apologist @talons-and-teeth @octobers-veryown @secret-third-thing @labellefleur-sauvage

Storm Song-Phildel

Send a storm to capture your heart and bring you home Oh, carried on the breeze, you'll never find me gone Oh, faster than the post train, burning like a slow flame on I'll send a storm to capture your heart and bring you home

Blue Blood-Foals

You got blue blood on your hands I know it's my own You came at me in the midnight To show me my soul Of all the people I hoped it'd be you To come and free me, take me away And show me my home

How Do You Do It?-Empress Of

Like a nail in the wood Build this house from nothing Now I stand where I've stood Welling up with something

I feel great, I feel good What a long time coming I forgot that I could Let someone fulfill me

Kids in the Dark-Bat For Lashes

Lying next to you And I wanna live for two I tell you I'm never leaving 'Cause you're always on my mind It's been such a hard time But I know it's the real thing

I Love You More Than You Love Yourself

The past, how thick it grows Shakes up what you didn’t know Proceeding, try a little bit harder, baby You’re indifferent You’re a stranger to what makes you feel good

After Dark-Eliot Sumner

After life the after life I ease the mind with you I need the light the after light to see If you can bear another hour, the after hour awaits To sail away we sail away take an opportunity with me

And stay now, what if I stay now? If I stay here I might lose again

Pegasi-Jesca Hoop

You found a map to my heart It led you to the well You combed out my mane I'll wear your saddle and reins With all these stars at my feet I'll stamp and tap the spring With my rider a mount I feel like spreading my wings Take to the sky like poetry

Mecca-Wild Beasts

We move in fear or we move in desire Now I know how you feel I'm a pilgrim and you're the shrine to All the lovers that loved before us and breathed in this ether Where the body goes the mind will follow soon after

Cuz all we want is to know the vivid moment Yeah how we feel now was felt by the ancients

Into Your Heart-Young Ejecta

Is there any way I can dive into your heart? Ain't there any place I might dive into your heart? On a pebble beach, or maybe a moon of Mars Don't push me away, I can dive into your heart

Tell me I can stay here in your heart (don't go away) Know that I am coming, coming into your heart (don't dance away)

Welcome to Feeling-Sam Beam & Jesca Hoop

Happy Welcome to feeling Calm comes We're sleeping in the sun Deep in the sun (deep in the) Dark in the sun (dark in the) Dark inside the sun (dark in the) Deep in the sun (deep in the) Dark inside of won–(wonderful)–der Full of song (deep in the sun) Dark inside of wonder Full of happiness

Wading Waist High in Water-Fleet Foxes

Soon as I knew you All so wide open Wading inside of fire As if I just saw you Cross Second Avenue Wading in waist-high water And I love you so violent More than maybe I can do

Bright Star-Anais Mitchell

Bright star When I first laid eyes upon you I was filled with such a longing To be with you in the dark Bright star Since I could not fly beside you I would chart my own course by you And I’d sail it by your light

#gwynriel #acotar playlist project #we're coming up to the end of this project #Spotify

[runwayrunway]

No. 7 - A jetBlue FaMintly ReBluenion - The Quest for the Bluest Plane

And now, for something completely different.

We're done with jetBlue. I said that and I meant it. But we're not done with this train of thought. This post might not be what you expect. This is a very long post (and I do mean very long), a journey through the history of the US low-cost airline, the cognitive dissonance of the everyman millionaire, the thinly-veiled cynicism of the start-up airline, human kindness squeezed through cracks of a soulless machine which can never stop churning, and above all one man's quest to make the bluest planes he can, and my quest to tell you all if they look bad or not.

Let's begin here: have you ever wondered how new airlines are started? Well, when a wealthy individual or group of individuals love making money very much, they get together and incorporate a publicly traded company, lease a few airplanes, buy some airport slots...

I'll get to the point. Readers, there's somebody I'd like you to meet.

"Never speak to me or my daughter ever again." image: Rick Maiman

This is David G. Neeleman. He's jetBlue's dad. And jetBlue...has siblings.

David Neeleman is a Brazilian-American-Cypriot businessman I would best describe as a serial airline founder. Normally the description 'serial entrepreneur', to me at least, implies flakiness and perpetual failure to get anything properly off the ground, but that's not the case for Neeleman. He's very successful. He's probably some sort of pioneer. I've seen him compared to Howard Hughes. There's really only one stain on his record, one failure to speak of, and it's been over ten years. He has a net worth of 400 million dollars.

image: bloomberg

He's an...interesting person. Very interesting. He was born in Brazil and raised in Utah by a wealthy Mormon family. There are many very funny images of him available through Google. He has ten children, an ADHD diagnosis, no university degree, a whole lot of money, and a weird, weird, weird personal philosophy.

This interview is hard to sum up, but there's clearly a lot going on here. This is a guy who wants so desperately to be down to earth and kind and generous, who thinks he is down to earth and kind and generous, but who just can't take the extra step to realize the implications of the truly obscene wealth involved in venture capital and the inherent contradiction of that with his own ostensible charity and drive towards a fair and comfortable experience for passengers. In a way he seems like he's just too wealthy to really understand what being wealthy means. (It's also an older interview, and I imagine any scrap of genuine convictions he held through cognitive dissonance are now long-gone, given the CoViD thing.) He's also clearly got a chip on his shoulder about being fired from jetBlue. To be fair, having seen what they've done with their livery...I get it.

What else...he's also been CEO of airline booking program Open Skies, was involved with bizjet charter airline Superior Air Charter (then known as JetSuite), is founder and chairman of security company Vizgul for some reason, and is a minority owner of TAP Air Portugal. His nephew Zach Wilson is quarterback for the New York Jets. Oh, and he funded a study to underestimate the prevalence of CoViD. Classy, David. Real classy.

This isn't about David Neeleman. Not really. Not yet, at least. At some point it becomes about him, about his journey, but even then it isn't. When you have 400 million dollars you cease to become a meaningful subject as a person and become a meaningful subject as a distilled effigy of the things which the money came from. I dislike the Tony-Starkification of real people and I refuse to approach him in a way that supports that view of him. His life only matters to me in the context of the airlines he makes, and in what the way he changed over time represents. There's at least one biography out there for anyone particularly interested in the lives of Mormon multimillionaires who take issue with making people die less because they want the line to go up more. He is worth 400 million dollars, which is roughly a million dollars times what I make in one paycheck, delivered every two weeks. He's a creature in a suit who owns an absurd amount of wristwatches, each of which could pay for some sort of surgery for someone out there. There's a bunch of those in the world and this one happens to have made something which eclipses him, and that something is what's been occupying me since Wednesday.

If you're a book-reader - and I recommend being one - I think you're probably better off reading Barbara S. Peterson's "Blue Streak: Inside jetBlue, the Upstart That Rocked an Industry", which talks specifically about jetBlue and the way it pioneered what we now consider normal for aviation in the US. Reading it brought back memories for me of seeing adverts for jetBlue's planes on television, guaranteed to have a TV screen on every seat, and having my little mind which was still scarred by hours upon hours of complete boredom flying all the way from Tokyo to the American Northeast completely blown. Air travel really is unrecognizable from what it was when I was a child, although 20 years feels a lot shorter than it really is when you've lived it. There was no one factor that changed aviation so much in my lifetime, but there were a lot that contributed. ETOPS, 9/11, the recession, geopolitics, gas prices, the internet, legacy airline mega-mergers, privatization...and the jetBlue way of doing things.

It's easy to forget from our current vantage point but low-cost air travel wasn't always like this. Southwest did a lot to pioneer the modern low-cost model but jetBlue is probably the second-biggest player in the airline industry's shift to a culture which tries less to be glamorous and tries more to be fun and approachable (they by no means invented the Fun Airline, but PSA had been gone for 20 years at that point and the market had a gaping hole). They were a huge player in the rise of in-flight entertainment as standard even on low-cost flights. They helped keep aviation going after 9/11, when it was one of the few airlines to actually make money. And jetBlue's story isn't Neeleman's story, even though he founded it. I literally just listed four other major involvements of his, and he hasn't been involved in the business side of jetBlue since 2008. His story involves the founding of four - count em! - other airlines. Let's take a look through them and see if we can spot any patterns.

Morris Air (1992-1994)

sources and further reading: [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] [12] [13]

Never heard of Morris Air? Can't blame you. jetBlue's oldest sibling existed for two years in the 90s. Two years. That's pretty miserable. ValuJet was around for twice that. That said, you're actually probably more familiar with them under a different name: Southwest.

No, Morris Air did not become Southwest. Southwest existed at the time, and it was in fact Southwest which gave birth to Morris Air.

Morris Air was named for its founder, June Morris, who operated one of Utah's largest travel agencies. In 1984 she partnered with a then 25-year-old David Neeleman to launch Morris Air Service. The two had realized something that was about to shake the airline industry: plane tickets were really expensive, and you could charge even less than major budget carriers like Southwest by just buying all the seats on a charter flight and selling them on to customers at an attractively low price. If you did this, even regular working-class people trying to book a trip to Hawai'i or Disneyland could actually afford a plane ticket. This worked successfully, enough that Morris sold off her travel agency, until they incurred a large fine from the DoT for pushing too far and fraudulently passing themselves off as a scheduled airline (which mattered because commercial charters are operated under Part 135 regulations while scheduled services are governed by the much more restrictive Part 121). In response, girlboss queen June Morris and her investie David Neeleman went and started up Morris Air as an actual, genuine, fully certified part 121 carrier, making June Morris the only female jet airline CEO in the US. They operated a fleet of 21 737-300s around the west coast on both scheduled and charter flights, pioneering such cost-cutting measures as e-tickets (wrongly attributed to Southwest, they were actually first used by Morris). This fleet included N75356/N764MA/N697SW, the airframe involved in the TACA 110 incident, which was successfully landed on a levee after losing power in both engines.

image: Richard Silagi

Now, I don't know about you, but these planes don't scream 'vacation' to me. In fact, they don't scream anything. They barely whisper. They breathe lightly on my ear. There are a couple planes in their fleet with weird features, like multicolor painted noses or cheatlines, but these seem to be one-offs and I wouldn't even be surprised if they were just leftovers from previous paintjobs (the one with the cheatline does look suspiciously like the one used on Sierra Pacific planes, one of the operators Morris chartered from). So they don't count. What counts is this.

Maybe if Morris Air didn't want to be instantly forgotten they shouldn't have made their planes completely generic. I'm not sure they cared, though. They wanted to make money and they made money.

A D- for Morris Air.

In 1992, less than two years after gaining its air operator's certificate, Morris Air merged with Southwest and the brand was retired. Despite having posed a legitimate threat to the titan that was Southwest at the peak of its relevance, it's since largely been forgotten. June Morris and David Neeleman both worked in Southwest's upper management for some time, but it was only five months before Neeleman left Southwest for other ventures. Soon, something more familiar would spring up, fed by the dying rays of Morris Air's gargantuan profits.

WestJet (est. 1994, began operation 1996)

Not exactly a deep cut, is it? WestJet is actually the second largest carrier in Canada and the ninth-largest in North America. They carry over 25 million passengers a year. I've never been one of them, but David Neeleman probably has, because he was one of the group of absurdly wealthy individuals who founded this incredibly successful airline in 1994.

WestJet operates a primary fleet of over 100 Boeing 737s of various models and seven Boeing 787s; in the past they also operated the 757 and 767. They operate both scheduled passenger and charter flights, as well as having a cargo division, a fully-owned regional subsidiary, and a Delta Connection/United Express-style brand name under which Pacific Coastal Airlines operates.

These all use more or less the same livery, which has only slightly changed since the beginning of operations in 1996. Pictured above is the original livery. I like the colors, I like the angularity on the tail, but I despise the style of livery with just the isolated tail colored in. This said, they introduced a new, updated livery in 2018.

I am a very predictable person. Given a livery mostly seen on 737MAXes and Dreamliners, I will always pick the Dreamliner to use as a visual example. This is not a slight to the MAX. They are nice looking planes, but the Dreamliner's planform is just on another level. Look at that wing sweep. Immaculate.

I like this color scheme a lot. I just happen to really like sea-green-adjacent colors, this is not the first time I've mentioned this. The font is nice, big, legible. I like the all-caps, I like the descender on the J. I think removing the logo mark on the wordmark and making it solid color was fine as a choice, makes the whole plane feel more balanced between the turquoise and the dark blue. The 'l'esprit du Canada' feels utterly pointless and is blocked by the wing and too small to be clearly read anyway. Tail design not limited to the tail, but mostly white fuselage regardless. Boring, but there's nothing here I can really call...bad? It's what they don't do that feels like the issue here, not what they do. Like, some sort of design on the nose and directly above or below, maybe? I didn't even realize there's any paint on the engines until I was editing my first draft and from most angles you just can't see it. Come on.

Grade: D+

Before I move on, there is something I have to mention. And that is WestJet's sub-brands. WestJet Encore is a fully-owned subsidiary which operates a respectable fleet of Bombardier Dash 8 Q400s, and WestJet Link is a brand name under which Pacific Coastal Airlines operates a couple Saab 340s. And that is...fine, normal, even, but...

Is this a joke to you?!

Change your name to WestProp. Now.

...

Hey. Wait a minute.

David! The large blue plane is coming! It has no engine power because it ran out of fuel and is about to hit you on the racetrack during family day! Oh no, he has airpods in! He can't hear us! image: Cean W Orrett

This guy. David Neeleman. Yeah, him. We were talking about him. I mean, it's been a minute since he came up because as far as I can tell after founding WestJet he did nothing of note related to it again, but...what's he been doing? Wait...wait a minute. This is becoming a habit, David. All your airlines are...well...they share a certain trait, in a very specific area.

David knows what I'm talking about. After all, his next move, in 1998, was to found NewAir, which would shortly become jetBlue.

I have not stopped to count how many words I have written about jetBlue this week. It is a lot. I already delivered a verdict. We are moving on.

Because David didn't stop here. Why would he? It's 2008 and he just got fired from his own company because a winter storm went Southwest-holiday-scheduling levels of horrendous for the airline he raised from infancy. He's got time to kill and money to burn and he wants the line to go up, damn it! Well, maybe he can be in the right place at the right time again. Make a second jetBlue, win back what he's lost. After all, he's got something else up his sleeve - dual citizenship.

Just your regular average Mormon, lurking in forests with a model plane. Nothing sinister about that. image: conde nast traveler

I did mention earlier he was born in Brazil, right? That's always been part of his life. When he was in charge, jetBlue was actually the launch customer for the Embraer E190, an incredibly popular mid-sized regional jet made by Brazilian manufacturer Embraer.

Is it just me, or do the men in this picture somehow look like cardboard cutouts holding a real airplane? There is something very strange about this image. I would go so far as to call it unsettling. image: The Gainesville Sun

So, figuring he'd bled the US dry, I suppose, he moseyed on down to his birthplace with his millions of dollars and presumably a couple little blank model planes waiting to be painted and shown off at a press conference. If you've seen a pattern emerging, prepare to see it continue.

Azul Linhas Aéreas Brasileiras (est. 2008)

Mmm. Helvetica Neue Heavy. Not impressed.

Okay, sure. Technically there was a 'naming contest' and this name 'was the most popular'. But I think at this point I would believe that David Neeleman botted his own vote years before I would believe that Blue Airlines of Brazil just happened to be the winning name.

Okay, all else aside, I would really love to gently hold a plane like this. There's a certain caressing nature to the way he's holding this plane's snout which I crave to someday replicate with a similarly sized model aircraft. image: Paulo Whitaker

Much like jetBlue, Azul began operating Embraer 190 and Embraer 195 aircraft before expanding its fleet to include Airbus models, a handful of ATR 72 tubroprops, and two Boeing 747s for cargo. They started with just five aircraft but grew rapidly, absorbing a bunch of other airlines and securing large investments from the likes of United and Hainan Airlines. Today they operate a fleet of over 150 planes to 161 destinations and are the third largest airline in Brazil. They have a set of crossover liveries with freaking Disney. (I might review those sometime.) They also have a crossover livery with John Deere for some reason. You know, the tractor company. In 2020 TripAdvisor named them the world's best airline.

In addition to the name of the company, they also name their airplanes. I do not speak Portuguese, but thankfully a close friend, @ametri-e, does. I asked him if the names were silly puns like jetBlue's are, and I got this response:

some of these are puns but not particularly funny, some of them just have the word blue in them, and one was funny

So there you have it!

Unlike Morris, which no longer exists; WestJet, which he seems to have minimally contributed to past its founding; and jetBlue, which tossed him unceremoniously on the tarmac with his bags, he remains the chairman of Azul at time of writing.

I find myself briefly wondering if this is all an attempt to recapture his lost glory. Is jetBlue, larger even than the impressive heights Azul has reached, the one that got away? Is he now forced to go forward modeling his work in the image of that which he was robbed of, that which he can never go back to?

I don't know and I don't care. I care about if the livery looks good or not.

Well, I wasn't just going to leave the John Deere plane out. It's a bit underwhelming, though, isn't it?.

So Azul is pretty different from jetBlue at first glance. Mainly, it uses a much darker blue and has a logo to go with the wordmark - a cute little pixel Brazil that looks a bit like a heart to me because of the specific way it's drawn. Everything is scaled nicely so it looks pleasing on the turboprop and I think the dark underside and the way it curves around the ventral fairing actually looks really good with the ATR's airframe, which has a very pronounced ventral fairing relative to similarly-sized props. But, okay, let's look at a jet.

This...is not terrible. I really like the highlights on the trailing edges of the winglets and the end of the rudder, and bordering the deep blue belly. Not crazy about the Helvetica Neue still. Why doesn't the 'u' being cyan carry over to the actual livery? Also, Detached Tail Syndrome. In fact, although it has features beyond this which make a further discussion worth having, the basic layout is what I call the 'Deltalike' because that's the airline I associate with it despite them certainly not being the first to use it - detached tail, painted engines, painted underside that's large enough to see from the sides. It avoids a lot of pitfalls of the other popular archetype, that of the very tail-heavy (which WestJet fell into), but has its own loathesome features. All said, though, I do think Azul is one of the better takes on the Deltalike.

In the first picture the highlights look green, but in reality they're one line of green and one of yellow, for the Brazilian flag. I think they look really nice with this particular blue color, but I am exhausted of this man naming his airlines blue and then having the planes be majority white. They have such a nice shade of blue here, couldn't they make that the primary color of the body?

That aside, the way that the line curves up towards the middle of the plane combined with the tailing-edge highlights creates a sort of aerodynamic feeling. You even see them in other colors sometimes, like the pink ones on the E190s and blue ones on the E195.

It also comes in pink! Were this not a one-off I would ask them to change their name to Rosa Linhas Aéreas Brasileiras, but it is a promotion.

It seems like reconnecting with his origin has given David Neeleman the creative push he needed to beat jetBlue in at least one way - livery. All said, Azul Linhas Aéreas Brasileiras clocks in at a final grade of...

C+

Aww, not quite a B for Brazil. Better luck next time! Though I'll admit I considered putting it there for a bit. This is a very high C+. Still, no cigar. Next time try putting less white on the plane. If you're all about blue, why are all your planes still so white? Come on, David. You are spreading blue paint on every airline you've ever touched but never letting it get past the tailfin. Who are you kidding? You know you're holding yourself back. There's a desire deep in you. You know it's there. I know you want to. It's just a matter of when. You are going to give in to your most animal urges. This isn't enough for you.

You need a bluer plane.

You can feel the thirst for a plane blue enough that you might as well own a piece of the sky straining against the bonds you've tried so hard to impose on it all these years. When will you finally unleash it?

Breeze Airways (commenced operations 2021)

image: inc. usa

Here we are, David. Time has almost caught up to us. It's just you, me narrating, and a very, very blue plane indeed. We have finally reached jetBlue's youngest baby sibling.

"Together, we created Breeze as a new airline merging technology with kindness," David Neeleman said. ​"If you can just be nice, the people will be nice to you in return and your job will be more fun.”

This is an interesting pitch. When Cape Air, with its fleet of tiny airplanes and its founder who started the airline with himself as pilot just to fly one route that he found himself needing to travel regularly, makes their motto Make Our Customers Happy And Have A Good Time Doing It (Mocha Hagodti), it feels...well, it feels like the person who said that didn't understand yet what a company was. Cape Air is its own story with its own contradictions and the vicious cognitive dissonance of capital on stark display but you can sense the desire in its inception to provide a service before running a company. It is the opposite of cynical - it is naïve. It is hopeful and human and starry-eyed.

When a man on his fifth airline makes a pitch like that it's like trying to cloud-watch looking at the ceiling.

That's not the only pitch for Breeze. I mean, even if you've started four successful airlines already and it seems like everything you touch goes on to revolutionize some part of the industry I think that would be a hard sell to investors in 2021. There's a bit more going on here. I'm going to start with the bit that's boring and makes me roll my eyes.

Ever since JetBlue, Neeleman has, like the kid peering into the circus tent, longed to get back into the U.S. airline industry. 

Bill Saporito writes for Inc. USA. I let out one tepid physical laugh. Yeah, David. You've got something great going in Brazil right now, but you want more. You want jetBlue and you can't have it. So instead...you give us an app.

The Breeze app is designed to eliminate chokepoints between passengers and planes. That means fewer people on the ground and lower cost.

Is this revolutionary? Is this destined to end in a Southwest-tier scheduling catastrophe? I'm not sure. I think David Neeleman's history suggests he could make this work, and I think the history of apps being used for things that didn't have apps before suggests that this could horribly blow up in his face. It seems to have gone fine so far, as I haven't heard anything else about it. To be fair, I wasn't exactly invested in the idea, so I haven't been looking. There's always time for some situation to happen nobody had foreseen and it all to go belly-up. Saying you never cancel flights works fine until a blizzard hits and then you have to start all over again, but he didn't build jetBlue by being afraid to take risks.

More interesting is the service they offer. Breeze has a bit of an identity crisis. Breeze wants to be an ultra low cost carrier with a first class cabin. That sounds contradictory because it is. The ULCC model as used by airlines like Ryanair and Spirit fundamentally relies on charging a low fare upfront with the expectation that customers will not receive a crumb extra without paying for it. Everything from seat reservations to snacks to anything else you can think of, you can pay extra for or you can do without. Breeze also follows other trends common with ULCCs, like a lack of seatback screens (the very thing jetBlue pioneered!) and flying point-to-point to smaller airports located outside of major metropolitan areas rather than routing through hubs. Yet Breeze insists it wants to have a first class cabin!

It does have a first class cabin, apparently. The classes are called Nice, Nicer, and Nicest. I wish airlines wouldn't do this. Air travel is the floorboards of stand-up comedy. Everyone already hates flying except weirdoes like me who spend enough time looking at pictures of airplanes to write reviews of their paint jobs, and even I get pretty tired of it if I go too long sitting there without the plane doing some sort of plane thing. You can be honest. You can call the classes Bearable, Unpleasant, and Painful. We all understand. It's okay. I would rather buy a ticket for Miserable But Cheap class than Nice. It probably won't actually be that bad, since Breeze doesn't do long-haul, which makes the presence of first-class even more bizarre. If you want first-class short-haul and have that sort of money just charter a private jet! And David Neeleman has been involved with at least two private jet charter companies too, so...what is he doing?

In 2011, almost exactly 10 years before Breeze began operation, Neeleman was interviewed for Business Jet Traveler. I linked the interview above. It's a powerful display of the cognitive dissonance of a man who considers himself a regular everyday Mormon dad, who donates his salary to his employees, who insists on calling his employees crewmembers, even as the line goes up, and up, and up. I've heard anecdotes about him sitting in the backs of his own planes at jetBlue, observing what he could change to make the experience better for the cabin crew and passengers, noticing a lot of those things could even save money, and I have no reason to disbelieve them.

As the head of a company he is by necessity exploiting those under him, as a businessman he is providing a service not from altruism but because he knows that people need it enough they'll give him money, and the more comfortable the experience for both the less likely he'll lose their labor and their money. Conscious or not, altruism is a means to an end, but it is still startling surrounded by airlines which don't even go that far. 'Nice' as a name for economy class is a pretty good summary of the man David Neeleman was, and the one he still tries to present himself as. But there's a specific question, and a specific answer, which I feel the need to place here.

The airlines have been cutting back on frills and first class, which is driving more people to business aviation. Do they need to find ways to treat their high-end customers better? Well, JetBlue doesn't have first class. We treated everyone the same. Maybe it's funny I'm in the JetSuite market because it's so weird to me that on a plane with 150 seats, you give 12 people a great ride and you stick it to 138-squish them all back there because of 12 people. There's something about that that just feels wrong.

Does it still feel wrong, David? Did something change about you between the first million and the 400th? When did this transformation happen? Was it the Ship of Theseus effect? Or...was this what you inevitably were working towards all along? Was it a fool's errand to pretend that there is a difference between what you do and what you are? Aviation is not immune to the society which it is built to serve - it is shaped by it. It feels wrong for 12 people to have a nice ride while 138 are squished in the back, but if you think about the life that 5 million Americans live and the life the other 326 million have to live, all squished back there so the lucky few can have a nice ride, doesn't it feel a little less wrong? After all, you've got the reclining bed. You can just pull the curtain closed. You've probably known what you were all along.

The airlines are a tough business. Why start another after JetBlue? Well, I've done this three times. It's what I know. I've always made money at it, always been successful. I figured out a formula that works and Brazil really needed it. And I had this idealistic view of trying to make a difference. I've got 3,000 people in Brazil that work for us and love their jobs and we flew four million people this year and a lot of those people had never flown before.

Air travel is life-changing. It's not just for those of us who stand outside airports and take a picture of every airplane we see. It is a faster, safer, easier way of getting people and things from one place to another. There are people who live in the remotest places in the world, who deal with mountains and oceans and even just being so far away from anywhere else. They can travel now, and they can do more than that. They can visit their family. They can get places even if they're somewhere railroads don't run to. Cargo planes bring these remote communities necessities. They take their children to university and its sick to lifesaving treatment. It's a lifeline and a fundamental part of infrastructure. Once we invented it we stopped being able to go back.

It isn't an inherently cynical thing to start an airline - not more cynical than starting any other company, anyway. At least, it shouldn't be. But I think it's an inherently cynical thing to start five. To have your position at Azul, which is both massively successful and your own brainchild, which you think is doing good...and to say to yourself "I need more. I need America. I need what I was robbed of when I lost jetBlue."

Very few people have ever started one airline successfully. David Neeleman started four and sat at the helm of Brazil's third-largest airline and decided it wasn't enough for him. He's always made low-cost airlines. To a not-insignificant degree he made the low-cost airline what it is today. But he needs a first-class cabin.

The Inc. piece on Breeze continues to discuss the airline's planned operations. In 2011 Neeleman's employees were crewmembers.

Breeze is also introducing a program in which it will hire college interns from Utah Valley University and mold them into customer-service machines. In exchange for salary, free tuition, and housing, the students will undergo training and then work 15 or so days a month while taking their college courses online. "The big thing is we are going to provide a great service with kind people on a beautiful airplane with a fun atmosphere," says DePastino.

In 2021 they are customer-service machines. They will spend not just their days but their nights in Breeze's living spaces at one of the most vulnerable times in a person's life, learning how to be cogs in a machine right when they're transitioning from being students to entering the turbulent world of trying to find a job. And all of us want a job that makes us feel like we're still us, doing something that makes the world better and that helps us touch the tip of Maslow's pyramid. Almost none of us get it. Most of us slog through something utterly pointless that is entirely separate from our own self-identity to just keep our heads above water. Breeze turns this into a machine and it starts its cogs young.

Would I take this deal if it was offered to me? I'm a university student with barely enough money to keep myself afloat in a very expensive city while paying for university and for medicine and for anything else that may suddenly come up. I love aviation. I have customer service experience. I work in customer service right now and will probably continue to for a long time. I would hypothetically be an ideal candidate for this sort of program. Would I take this offer knowing that nobody, myself included, says to themself as a child that they want to be an airline customer service representative when they grow up? College is supposed to be the place you lay the groundwork for trying to start a career. Nobody wants their career to be 'customer service representative'. Nobody wants their obituary to say 'beloved son, husband, middle management at an airline's call center'. Sure, lots of people end up there, and plenty of them are happy and fulfilled and they have nothing to be ashamed of, but nobody's 18, going into college, and thinks that's what they want to live and breathe for years. They want to intern in the accounting departments, to shadow engineers, to see the sleek jets and peer in on the lifestyles of the people who built this. They want to be David Neeleman. But that's not an option for most of us.

So what would I do? Live this concession to the inevitability of automation which overtakes much more than the flight deck? I might, because at least it's a guarantee of shelter and stability that I don't have trying to stumble my way through an utterly shambolic job market caught between the price of school and the need to earn that money and the costs inherent to autoimmune disease and the number of hours there are in a week. I want to write, or even just to do something that involves words, because even a data entry job might let me pretend I'm still the person I thought I would grow up to be, and even that seems off the table. But it's one thing to know your dreams are never going to be realistic and another to say it out loud and yet another to commit to it in a place that even refers to you outright as a machine as if they don't understand the weight of that word when you provide someone's lodging and pay and everything else they rely on. This is a few steps short of being a company town populated exclusively by the young and vulnerable who think they're going to be entrepreneurs one day.

"When I started JetBlue, it was a customer service company that just happened to fly airplanes," Neeleman says. "Breeze is a technology company that just happens to fly airplanes."

He was talking about the app when he said this, but I think it comes through in a broader sense. jetBlue was a customer service company. Humans interfaced with humans. The idea was in nature lively, giving names to inanimate flying machines. It was a corporation, it made money, it did not actually care about people and it could not because it was not itself human, but it did not wear this fact proudly. It was a regrettable necessity of running an airline, and the CEO donated his salary to the employees. jetBlue under Neeleman and beyond clung to the human element, and to kindness and to making low-cost flight fun and comfortable even though there was nobody on the plane with a first-class ticket. You might be part of a fundamentally unethical system known for cutting corners and lying and sweetheart deals and never suffering consequences when something as simple as a jackscrew nobody lubricated kills 88 people, but you're going to at least try to dampen that impact. It might kill you just as dead but it can hurt less, maybe so much you never realize jetBlue occupies the same slice of the world as Pan Am and as ValuJet.

Breeze Airways lodges young individuals and molds them into machines. It is an ultra-low-cost carrier with a first class cabin. It presents a scenario where people are optimally herded by an app, served by employees who go home at night to the same place they work, and all of it can be reduced down to numbers so easily. It takes the human and it makes it technology. It makes it profit. The human element is gone. It doesn't matter how much it hurts you because if you aren't a person there's nothing to kill. It says the quiet parts out loud and makes you get on the phone and tell your family you're happy here with a gun to your head. It is a machine built of anonymized mannequins who, irrelevant to their role in it, happen to be alive, and it calmly tells you that this is a good thing, and that is a threat. The lowest category of experience you can have is 'nice'. Breeze Airways does not name their planes.

When I was a child I thought airlines were people and airplanes. I've flown many times in my life. There aren't many other ways to get from Japan to the East Coast these days. The world is huge but we can see it all so easily, assuming taking us there can make someone money. I remember being eight and having the pilot standing by the door to greet passengers, having him hand me a little pair of plastic pilot wings I still have now. I remember the stormy night I flew alone for the first time and the stewardess who let me sit next to her for a little bit and answered all my questions about the noises the plane was making. I remember the first time I flew on a propeller plane and the pilot who explained to me what all the gauges meant, and who insisted there was nothing to be afraid of and pointed out all the landmarks we flew past, who clearly knew this route by heart.

That's not what aviation always is. That's not what it usually is. People don't usually start airlines because they wish they could fly everyone around in their little single-engine plane on a commuter route from Boston to Provincetown, from Hyannis to Nantucket, provide that service to the people who don't have a plane and a license of their own, but they just can't do it all themselves. People who start airlines aren't usually intrepid pilots searching for new heights to push themselves to or flight instructors looking to fly people around in a single rented DC-3. They're businessmen. They want money. Juan Trippe was a businessman. Howard Hughes was a businessman.

The corporation is where passion goes to die if it existed to begin with. They build machines to suck the life out of pilots, exhaust them, put them in planes that are falling apart and let them take the blame when they fail to do things they failed to teach them. These people aren't your friends and they don't care about aviation, and if they do it's in the way an American child plays soldiers at the same time a school in Syria is being bombed. They're usually not even pilots. They're people with a lot of money who want even more money. jetBlue isn't unique in that sense and neither is Breeze. One just says it a lot louder.

Sometimes an airline is a technology company that happens to fly airplanes. That's true. Every single positive experience you have is with people, not airlines. I've never once spoken to jetBlue, just a matrix of pilots and flight attendants and customer service representatives who make up its many limbs. Maybe it should come as a relief, a sort of coming clean, that Breeze is tearing back the curtain and reminding you that the time a stewardess calmed you down during turbulence isn't really any different from the time a drugstore cashier let you off even though you were a few cents short of your total and said they'd take care of it. It's not CVS doing that. It's always people.

So many businessmen say they're here to do good, to make the world a better place, to reconcile kindness with venture capital. Any of them could build a tower that reaches all the way to the edge of the solar system and let us all know how many beautiful things there are that we can reach if they can find a profitable way to get us out there, and yet it's still the people who see your transit card is out of money and scan you in using theirs that make me remember that we are capable of kindness despite our surroundings. It is up to all of us whether we wish to be kind or not and it's not something anyone else can build for us.

Companies can't build a kinder, softer, funner, more human place. They can make money. They can provide a service. A service you need, at a cost you can afford, predicated on the fundamental question: whether they think you can make them money. Desperation, need, giving people a non-choice, that's how you make money and kill criticism. That isn't kindness. That's finding a gap in the market. Always has been.

I read that at JetBlue, you also didn't have your own parking spot and you donated your entire salary to a crewmember crisis fund, saying, "It seemed hoggish of me to have all this stuff when others didn't because every time I would get something someone else would have less." Yet then I read about your $14 million mansion in Connecticut. It's my wife's mansion. I never would have built that, ever. I think she's repentant. It was a project for her and it kind of got out of hand. But we all felt funny moving in. That's why we want to sell it.

I'd wondered how you reconciled the mansion with your philosophy. I don't.

image: Bill Bernstein

Okay, Marx or Megatron or whoever you think you are, that's enough of that depressing schlock. You are a tumblr.com airline livery review blog. We're here to answer if the plane looks good or not.

It's not like Neeleman's only goals are money and vapid personal satisfaction. We've been with him from the start. It was just an unacknowledged bit of the tail. He probably didn't notice it at first, but we did, with the gift of hindsight. It germinated. It took root. It grew. It became identity. It became his white whale. Are the planes blue, though?

Well, everyone, meet N206BZ. She's an Airbus A220-300. She's just a year and a half old and was delivered brand-new to Breeze Airways. She doesn't have a name, just a registration, but that's sure one blue plane if I've ever seen one!

The color scheme is visually pleasing. It's all over but it keeps visual interest with the darker tail and rear fuselage, the darker engines, the big white check-mark that serves as an instantly recognizable emblem for the airline. The repetition of it on the winglets is a nice touch.

I hate the wordmark, honestly. The text feels like it's located too low, the lightest blue blends in with the main fuselage until it borders on illegible. As far as I can tell, the typeface is custom. I hate it. It's ugly. The text is bad and it weighs down the rest of the plane.

A lot of how a livery looks depends on the lighting. So let's look at another example. I'd like to introduce you to N140BZ. She's an Embraer E195-200 and she's coming up on 15 but she hasn't slowed down any. She flew for Air Europa for a long time, but from 2016 on she was in limbo, all sorts of holding groups leasing her to each other but nobody putting her into service. Now she's with Breeze. They'll retire their E190s somewhat soon, but for the moment they like to have them. It allows them to operate shorter routes and free up time for charters on other days, just to maximize productivity. She doesn't have a name either. I'd say she still looks pretty blue. A lot of the concept art has a very metallic and reflective feel which I'm glad isn't as present in the actual planes, because it looked a bit sci-fi movie and not in a campy way. It was very blue chalk marker.

I like these colors just as much in this sort of washed-out environment as I do in direct sunlight gleaming at full intensity. Maybe more, even, since the text of the wordmark is so much more legible now and you can even see that the checkmark itself is blue. There's almost nothing on this plane that isn't blue. The only thing not blue about this airplane is that she doesn't have a name to revel in it.

The Breeze livery gets a B-.

It is a competently executed version of the thing it wants to be. There's visual interest. There are choices made. It's more than a logo slapped on a tail and sent off to sit on the tarmac with hundreds of other primarily white airplanes. I like it, I think this is the best Neeleman livery. It's also the bluest.

I find myself thinking the checkmark is an apt logo. Azul wore the shape of Brazil - a country full of people. Azul Linhas Aéreas Brasileiras S/A is a company. It cannot have a soul. But its founder says it does. He wants to make something better for people. Breeze Airways is a checkmark. It satisfies a need. It is 'nice' but there is no pretense that it is people.

The pilots will be kind all the same, and the stewardesses. People will agree to swap seats so families aren't separated. People will compliment strangers' outfits and help the person in line in front of them who's fifty cents short for a bottle of water. We will hold the door for elderly men with canes and exhausted women with strollers. We will take every little chance we can to be kind. We do this because we are people, and not because of where we work, and it's definitely not the people with 400 million dollars to put down on a shiny new airline making that happen. Everything is scheduled through an app, minimizing contact with humans even as the ones we do talk to are 'molded into customer-service machines' over the course of years. N140BZ wears her blue colors well, and not having a name doesn't make her any uglier. So what is it that's changed?

David Neeleman can't make jetBlue a second time. But he doesn't know that. To a man with so much, maybe it makes sense how he could fail to realize that. When you're high enough in the air a thriving uptown and an area of condemned slums look more or less the same, just little blocks of color all the way down there. He doesn't even realize he's given up the ghost. This is only a tragedy if your definition of a happy ending was us believing someone is better than they are instead of being left no room to continue failing to recognize what money is and what money does. The corporation wears two masks - the mask that it wears when it is a corporation wearing a mask, and the mask it wears when it is so close to human that you mistake it for your friend. The businessman wears these masks too. To be sad they've taken them off is to invest more in the virtue of these men than they ever do in the life or death of the 138 people squeezed in the back.

There it is. Two decades, five attempts, the bluest plane. If you've kept reading all the way to the end let me know in the replies what your favorite Neeleman-proximate livery is. I'll see you all tomorrow for our regularly scheduled Runway Runway livery review, and I hope you all have a wonderful night.

#tarmac fashion week #grade: c+ #grade: b- #grade: d- #grade: d+ #neelemanverse #region: north america #region: latin america #region: united states #region: canada #region: brazil #era: 1990s #era: 2000s #era: 2010s #era: 2020s #azul linhas aéreas #westjet #morris air #breeze airways #runwayrunway blueses it #compilations #long haul #charter airlines #leisure airlines #low cost carriers #ultra low cost carriers #defunct airlines #lufthansa declined #deltalike

[trollol360]

396, 397, 398

399

Sorry, I meant to make this way earlier, I just got distracted and busy with other projects.

This was originally written 9/1/23:

MHA 399 dropped and it literally made me cry. I have much to say because oh my god.

"These should boost my speed and mobility for tighter turns! He must be getting bored of the one-sided struggle." The way Toshi has to rely on the support gear because it's all he has left. He has no quirk.

"Tentacole, plus... Froppy Suction Pads!" Eleventh and Twelfth; Shoji and Tsuyu

"Tail-Man. Shoto" Thirteenth and Fourteenth; Ojiro and Shoto

"And then... I'll set the trap." Originally, I was using a fan translation when I wrote this, and it said: "Now... I'm on the hunt." And I said: "Well, well, well, how the turn tables." Not much to say that I haven't already said, lol

"Assuming repeated, massive damage to that body shortens his life span... I know just the quirk to get the job done all at once..." The way he thinks and he's quick on his feet. Toshinori has always been smart (much to Endeavor's "All flash and no brains" comment about him)

"The problem is the power source! Playing this by the book won't be all too effective. Lend me a hand, Anima?" Fifteenth; Kouda. Toshinori specifically states that doing it the regular way won't be enough. All Might knows that All for One can tank hits, so (my assumption at least), he needs to wear him down first to be effective. [Which, now knowing what happens, is incorrect. He needs to give it enough time to power up before he uses it]

"Cackling like a mad fool one minute and scampering and hiding the next?" He's back to being an asshole, but he's still chasing after All Might. Seems like he forgot what he's doing.

"Here he comes!" Uh oh, smile's gone. Didn't expect himself to be found so easily/followed quickly

"Your goal here is no mystery to me. And I don't need to waste excess strength... To twist that grin into an agonized grimace. Power-saver mode is plenty enough for killing you." Jesus fucking Christ, All for One is scary. The people who've said they'd kill All Might during Kamino, but he didn't kill Toshi (nor did he kill his drive). Despite it seeming like All for One captured All Might for one panel, he breaks free. He can just kill him, but either he won't (and wants to drag it out), or he can't (All Might's just too good).

"Rise!! Liar!! Descend!!" (Despite this being a serious battle, Toshi looks really silly, but that might just be me, lol) He's not smiling anymore, something closer to a grimace. Both in the way that All for One said he'd do, but also in the way during the USJ incident (and others). (I.e: "All Might's here... And he's not smiling."

"Hmm? No, I really am conserving my power." All for One says he's going to kill Toshinori with low effort, but it seems like he's trying his all (or something close to it) [He's trying to act like he can kill All Might really easily? Or just bluffing about it]

"Now where'd that lovely smile go? You're nothing but a bag of bones missing half his guts! An old fool providing hospice care for himself... With shoddy simulacrums of the children's powers!" All for one notices that All Might's smile is gone. We're shown that Class 1-A's quirks do and have protected Toshinori. During USJ, the first movie, etc. Deku, Todoroki, and Balugou are the students who are closest to All Might's power (Deku being a given). But All for One hasn't seen how well they are [or at least refuses to believe that they've improved]

"Smile, you're still on camera!! The whole world's watching, remember?! They'll see the Symbol of Peace falling to his doom... As the Symbol of Impotence!" 'Impotence -- Inability to take effective action; helplessness'. All Might has already fallen from grace by society's standards because he's not really there anymore (I.e: Stain saying that he's a failure). Toshinori couldn't use his Mech Suit trying to help society anyway, because he knew he'd have to fight All for One eventually. It's not that he's abandoned them. Far from it. Toshinori is a man who wants to help people when he can, that's why he's so god damn depressed in S6. He's seeing Deku abandon him to go out on his own and he couldn't do anything to help. Society fell back to how it was when he was a child. In all his 40 years, society fell back to how it was with just one attack that he couldn't do anything against. When he lost his quirk, it was basically him being quirkless all over again. Being ignored, attempted to be killed, and unhelpful. That's why he's so fulfilled helping again. Because while it's his fight (One for All) with All for One, he's still saving hundreds of thousands of lives again.

"Their guiding light is about to be snuffed out." The way All for One no longer looks human. He fucking slams Toshinori to the ground on his left side.

The ashes of the snuffed-out flame. He doesn't have an ounce of One for All left in him.

"You still don't get it... Good buddy!!" All Might is not done (even when All for One hits him straight on). He puts the Shoto canon in All for One's mouth and fires. He plans on killing him. He wants to kill him.

"Lights tend to flicker on and off! So while my light might be snuffed out... Someone's sure to pick up my torch and shine on!" This isn't a death flag. He's not talking about his life, he's talking about his legacy. Deku, Bakugou, and Todoroki will carry All Might's legacy, while Class 1-A as a whole will carry Toshinori's legacy (at least that's the way I see it).

I don't have much to say about Aoyama's part in this chapter, sorry (but I do love his character). The heroes are downed and Aoyama's one of the only heroes left to fight. Roses coming out of him feels like symbolism. "Hence why I said "merci"... Reminding myself of how shamefully I've lived... Is what spurred me on to follow in the wake of the light they bring! It's given me the desire to shine... From deep down within my core!!" These lines of dialog show Aoyama's character growth from being found out as the traitor.

"Let there be light in the darkness!" The way Aoyama smiles/grits his teeth just like All Might is so... *Chefs kiss*

"So that I might twinkle as well!!" Toshinori doesn't need One for All to keep going, but the lights of his students and people who believe in him. The flame doesn't have to return.

"So no, I'm not here to lose, All for One!!" All Might restates it yet again, cementing it in. He'll kill All for One if he has to.

"Know this name... As you burn away!!" HIS SMILE IS FUCKING BACK!! He looks so tired, beaten, and bruised, but he's still smiling. (The way his face is drawn makes me want him carnally... But that's my simp for him speaking)

"CAN'T STOP TWINKLING! ★" Sixteenth; Aoyama. The parallels of them both attacking with the laser, GOD. This chapter made me so fucking ill. I literally cried and felt like screaming.

#T speaks #mha #bnha #mha spoilers #mha manga spoilers #mha 399 #bnha 399 #my hero academia #boku no hero acedamia #yagi toshinori #toshinori yagi #all might #armored all might #iron might

[thewertsearch]

Asks Comp 5/6

Just like John Cusack, hoo hoo hoo is a universal constant.

I was so excited for her conversations :( And thank you very much! This comic's a slippery one, but that's part of the fun!

I do like the idea of pairing every Homestuck ship with a political ideology. It'd be the perfect storm of discourse, from about five directions at once!

Thank you! I don't think I'll even be in the country for my birthday this time around, so it'll be a quiet celebration.

I think it could still fit as a kismesissitude, even if they aren't all that unfriendly with each other. After all, Karkat's antagonism towards John is only skin-deep, and wears off fast.

FEFERI: There's no reason to be scared! They are not as terrible as they look. FEFERI: When Derse is destroyed, I am going to go to sleep and prove it. FEFERI: I will prove it to you, and to them as well. KARKAT: THEM? FEFERI: Our new friends! [...]

Oh, that does make more sense. Dang, I really liked the idea that the Horrorterrors were scared of Players.

Karkat made S-Tier for a reason. He's on fire this Act, and it's been great to watch!

You don't even get to examine your surroundings!!

I'm even more glad now that I'm using Homestuck Collection. It's clear that I'd have missed a lot without it, and it's a sad state of affairs that the comic's official website seems to butcher it so badly. Definitely recommend checking out the Collection, if just to play the walkarounds yourself!

Underutilized aspects of the trolls: Feferi Edition! [...] I do have to say that, when I think about her, I don't generally remember the Horrorterror connection. But Gl'bgolyb is a Horrorterror, after all. Feferi may be legitimately bubbly and sweet, but of the two races she is meant to unite, it might just be the Horrors and Humans. She's an eldritch Disney princess. Remember that now. ~LOSS (19/5/23)

Does that make Gl'bgolyb her Fairy Elder Godmother?

Ugh, tell me about it. It looks normal when the post is in my drafts, but breaks when I publish it.

I could go back and fix each post manually, but I don't have the time or the patience. Maybe I'll write a script to do it when I release Wertsearch: The Director's Cut.

Thanks! I've had Cat send a transcript over, and I've been copying it for quotes. There was a risk of mild spoilers if I accidentally read ahead, but if it means I can stop quoting entire conversations manually, I'll happily take that chance.

Damn it! There goes my Sollux Was Swapped At Birth theory.

I like these ideas! It's fun to speculate about what our species 'thing' would be, since we don't have any alien species to compare ourselves to IRL.

The idea of NPCs as Player templates is awesome, too. That implies an absolutely wild session in Sburb's past, featuring the Sleuths, the Midnight Crew and the Exile squad as Players.

What would Sburb even look like without Carapacians? Would the chess match in Skaia still exist, just without sentient pieces? I kind of love this idea.

Yeah, it's always nice when a story's really kicked into gear.

Beginnings and endings are difficult, and I usually enjoy the middle of a story more than either. By my count, we're about one-third of the way through Homestuck, and it's definitely found itself.

Thanks! I have a couple of ideas about which of my ships will be supported by canon, and which won't - but we shall see what develops. The comic might surprise me!

Canon Equius design.

It's a big question, and I don't know if I can fully answer this one, given how much of Sburb is still shrouded in mystery.

That said, the first thing I'd change is how Players are assigned. Instead of creating people who have no choice but to participate, I'd look for volunteers in the planets I've seeded. If Players have to be born in the Veil, then those volunteers would have their timelines rewritten, retroactively turning them into meteor babies - but only after they've volunteered for the role.

Also - does a session have to destroy the planet it's seeded on? If it was me in charge, I'd redirect the Reckoning's portals somewhere else. Literally anywhere else, actually. As far as I can tell, the only reason they were pointed towards Earth in the first place was for thematic reasons. The Sallyverse has different themes.

Yep. No special reason why - I've just been pretty busy lately, especially on the weekends. They've also been rolling over onto Mondays more often, too.

I get to 'em when I get to 'em - but I always get to them in the end.

Ooh, that's a deep cut. Possibly coincidental, but I wouldn't be too sure - I wouldn't put anything past Hussie.

I've heard of Higurashi, but I know very little about it. It is my tenuous understanding that it's a murder mystery starring several wealthy families - or is that its sister story, Umineko?

I don't want to look them up, because I might actually check them out at some point, and it is apparently very important to go in unspoiled. Potential future liveblog material, indeed.

I've speculated that the Knight is a protector class - and maybe Knights also protect themselves, hiding behind a particular trait or emotion which serves as their 'shield'.

Puréed puppet, unfortunately.

Now that I've seen all the troll typing quirks, I'm pretty sure I've actually encountered some of these people in the wild! I've definitely seen Terezi's leetspeak, or something very similar, on an anime forum or two.

#full liveblog #act 5.2 #asks

[eventinelysplayground]

A Little Nudge.

This story was inspired by an idea from @yanderepuck and @fang-and-feather, @onegianthotmess you also thought it was interesting. I pull a tiny bit from the very recently released your choice story they released but as usual you don't have to have read it to enjoy it's just a nice tie in. I will be writing an abridged smuttier version from MC's pov later as my smut inspiration has dwindled atm and this was already long. Worried about his friend Comte (with help) decides to use Leonardo's family and jealousy to try and give him the final push he needs to finally bite Mitsuki. WC approx 3635 and I used a cute page divider by @cafekitsune in it to give the eyes a break.

Leonardo walked down the hallway and knocked on Comtes door.

“Yes?”

Leonardo entered his friend's room making sure the door was closed before he spoke.

“Cara Mia said you were looking for me this morning, said you looked unhappy.”

“Yes but I don't think I looked unhappy.”

Leonardo had known Comte a long time and he could tell by now when he was faking that smile. Was a bit jealous too that Mitsuki knew him well enough to pick up on it too.

“What's going on?”

“I didn't want to mention it but it's just getting out of hand again.”

Leonardo took the thick stack of letters Comte handed him and sighed while sitting down on the sofa.

They've started writing again? What the hell do they want from me now?

Leonardo broke the seal on the top letter and skimmed its contents. He got through about half the pile before he stood up and tossed them into the fireplace.

“I take it their contents were the same as always?”

Leonardo ignored Comte and lit the fireplace.

I knew they'd never give up bothering me completely. Too obsessed with getting more purebloods and increasing ‘family prestige’ but so soon, and trying to convince me to take a pureblood mistress? They really don't care about anything or anyone else, those narcisistico…

“Are you really that surprised?”

Leonardo turned his attention from the fireplace to Comte.

“I don't know your family well but from what little I do know about them it's hardly surprising to me that they haven't given up.”

Ya, maybe it was just wishful thinking on my part that they'd finally leave me alone.

“It's what was in the letters that was surprising.”

“Oh?”

“Mainly they want me to take on a pureblood mistress now, even a good candidate.”

“That sounds very hypocritical of them.”

“Esattamente…do me a favor, don't mention this to Mitsuki. The last thing I want is for her to hear about all of this.”

“Of course, you have my word as a gen…”

Comte's words were cut off by a soft knock on the door followed by Mitsukis voice.

“Comte, I have something for you.”

Leonardo sat back down on the couch and wrapped his arms along the back of it as if nothing had happened.

“Come in Cherie.”

“Oh Leonardo, I can come back later if…”

“No need to Cara Mia we were done talking.”

“Oh, okay then.”

Leonardo watched as Mitsuki studied him for a moment before turning her attention to Comte.

“This was just hand delivered for you, there's one for you too Leonardo.”

Leonardo kept his gaze on Mitsuki as she handed Comte an envelope then fished another out of her pocket and handed it to him.

This is Adams seal, probably an invitation to some damn party of his.

“Leonardo, is everything alright?”

I knew those eyes of yours were trouble, but I don't want you finding out about any of this. I don't want you worrying about anything, I just want to see you smile.

“Well Cherie it looks like we need to get you a new dress!”

“What?”

“This is an invitation to a party Friday night from a mutual friend. We don't have a lot of time, I'll make an appointment with my friend for tomorrow morning so be ready to leave after breakfast.”

“But we haven't even decided if we're going yet!”

“Of course you'll attend, if not with Leonardo then with me. I can't let an opportunity to dress you up go to waste.”

Libertino, but it's a good way to distract her for a while.

“It's fine Cara Mia, you know how much he likes to play dress up.”

“Really? You don't mind going?”

“It gives me a chance to show off my stunning wife in a beautiful dress, then the fun of taking you out of it.”

Leonardo grinned as he watched Mitsukis face turn a bright shade of red.

I love the expressions you make, how even now I can make you blush like that. You have no idea how crazy you drive me.

“Then it's settled, you best go and inform Sebastian now so he can make any preparations he needs to.”

“Right, of course. I'll see you both later then.”

Leonardo waited until Mitsuki left to let out a sigh and glare at Comte.

“This is when you say thank you Leonardo.”

“Hehe I'll thank you after I see how hard her dress is to get off.”

***Friday Night***

Leonardo was in a foul mood, he had been ever since his discussion with Comte. As if the letters and having to attend the party weren't bad enough, he barely had a minute alone with Mitsuki since. If it wasn't more work around the mansion it was something to do with her dress, a dress that Leonardo hated. Oh it looked good on her, it fit her like a glove and showed off her best assets just enough but it was too much to his old friends taste for comfort, and the laced back! He'd almost put up a fight over it when he first saw her but when she turned to face him and he saw her bright smile he just melted. Add to it all the compliments she got from Comte and the others as well as all the other men stealing glances at her and he was past jealous.

“Leonardo, I'm honored you came. I know balls aren't exactly your thing, and your lovely wife! It's a pleasure to see you again.”

Adam inclined his head towards them and Leonardo slipped his arm around Mitsuki's waist pulling her close.

“Adam, it's been a while. Nice party you've thrown.”

Just then a woman came along and took Adams' arm.

“Excellent timing my dear, this is an old friend of mine Leonardo…”

“Leonardo? I must say I've heard plenty about you but never thought I'd get the chance to meet you. And this must be your wife, the human woman, how cute is she!”

Scusa? You make it sound like she's my pet or something you…

“Well I think we've taken up enough of your time for now, please enjoy yourselves.”

Leonardo kept his eyes on Adam and his wife as they walked into the crowd. Just as he was wondering what the hell was going on with this week Mitsuki gently placed her hand over his. He looked down at her and she was staring at him like she could see right through him.

“Are you okay? If you don't want to stay we can…”

“I'll be fine Cara Mia, I want you to enjoy yourself tonight. I’ll go get us a drink and then how about a dance?”

There it is, I love your smile. I've said it before but I'll do anything to keep seeing that smile.

“Really, okay then!”

“Wait here like a good girl for me okay.”

Leonardo couldn't help himself and planted a quick kiss to Mitsukis forehead then headed for the punchbowl. Before he could reach it though an acquaintance of Comtes stopped him and insisted on talking.

This guy just keeps on going. He’d probably talk me to death if….what the hell is he doing here?

Leonardo had caught sight of Mitsuki. She was talking to a tall man with dark hair Leonardo knew all too well.

“Scusa but my wife seems to be trying to get my attention.”

Leonardo knew his tone was harsh but all he cared about was getting back to Mitsuki. As he got closer he started to hear snippets of their conversation.

“I'm very happy with Leonardo.”

“Well if you're happy just being a distrazione momentanea who is anyone to tell you differently.”

Quello stronzo è fortunato che siamo in pubb…

“Cesare.”

Leonardo saw Mitsuki flinch at the harsh lilt to his voice while a haughty grin spread across Cesare’s face.

“Ahh Leonardo, I was just getting acquainted with your wife. I have to say she certainly smells divine.”

“Watch your mouth Cesare or…”

Leonardo placed himself in front of Mitsuki blocking her from the other man's sight which only made his grin wider.

“Cara Mia I want you to go find Comte and wait with him until I'm done here.”

Leonardo glanced over his shoulder at Mitsuki.

Please Cara Mia. I don't want you near this guy any longer, just go find Comte like a good girl.

As if she had read his mind Mitsuki nodded her head and began to walk away.

“It was nice meeting you, Cara Mia.”

You're pushing it too far…you trying to get me to punch you?

“Her figure’s not bad, better in motion certainly. I wonder just how ‘good’ she is?”

“I swear to God Cesare I don't care where we are if you say anything else…”

“You'll what Leonardo? Kill me? We both know that's not possible or we would have done it by now. Besides, am I really the one you should be worrying about?”

“Scusa?”

“I know you Leonardo, much as I dislike admitting it I know you better than most and that dress isn't your taste or style and from her fidgeting I doubt it's hers either. So it must be someone else's, and the colors complement Comtes outfit quite well.”

Damn, you would notice that wouldn't you. I've always hated how observant you were.

“Don't scowl at me like that, think of it as a friendly warning from your cousin.”

“Fine, say you're right, just what is it you're doing here?”

“I came along with an invited guest, seemed a good enough way to spend the evening.”

“You know that's not what I meant.”

The two men stared at each other for a moment, two eerily similar sets of golden eyes searching each other before Cesare shrugged.

“When I saw you I became curious, it's been hundreds of years since we've seen each other. I must say nothing much seems to have changed, bit disappointing really. The familia will be happy to hear it though.”

“What are you trying to say?”

“That you're the same as ever and they worried for nothing. You did manage to send them all into a mild panic when they heard you were marrying a human. Nonno had to remind them it was just a matter of time before she would die and you got over this human obsession for good. Zia wasn't so sure, worried you would just bite her. Can you believe it! I laughed so hard I nearly collapsed! You committing to anything for more than a handful of years, it's ridiculous. I told her there was nothing to worry about because you don't have the conviction or courage for it and clearly I was right.”

I don't have the courage for it? Can't say you're entirely wrong there. Guess it was your big mouth that encouraged them to start sending letters again.

“They'll be happy to know I was right and then after you've got this little fetish out of the way you can conduct yourself properly.”

“What did you jus…”

“Leonardo.”

Leonardo's words halted and the command and malice in Cesare's voice.

“You've had more than enough time to play around and indulge yourself. Once she’s gone you will do as our familia tells you, glare all you want but it's not going to change. Like I said, you're still a coward when it really matters and that will never change.”

Leonardo clenched his fist at his side.

“You best run along now before your friend steals your plaything out from under you.”

Cesare inclined his head and Leonardo turned to see Comte and Mitsuki laughing and dancing together.

Normally I don't care if you want to flirt with her but not tonight old friend. My heart and my ego can't take any more.

Leonardo made his way over to the edge of the dance floor waiting for the music to finish. As soon as it was over he took Mitsuki by the hand and pulled her close to him.

“Leonardo?”

“Come on Cara Mia we're going home.”

“Oh okay.”

Don't look so sad Cara Mia

“Already Leonardo, you haven't been here very long?”

“If I stay any longer there may be an incident.”

“What happened, is there anything I can do?”

“I already took care of it, let's go home.”

Comte watched as Leonardo led Mitsuki out of the ballroom and once they were out of sight he headed over to a quiet corner of the ballroom.

“Bonsoir Comte, I was just telling Adam here what a delightful evening this has been.”

“Just what exactly did you do Cesare?”

“Don't worry Comte, I mostly followed your rules.”

“Honestly I'm surprised you even agreed to help us.”

“Even though it was my idea I have to agree, I thought you hated Leonardo.”

“You thought right, I only agreed to help you because it benefits me. Leonardo had always been the favorite when we were children and even being a bastard they had high hopes for him. As he grew older though that changed and they started focusing on me. They never could entirely give up on him though, even now that he's running around with some human plaything.”

“I do hope you didn't really call her that.”

“Not to her face. Look, the point is if he turns her then that's it, the familia will have no choice but to give up on Leonardo adding anything meaningful and I get to keep everything that's rightfully mine.”

“No wonder Leonardo stopped dealing with you, you all sound so… charming.”

“Oh we're all assholes, I just don't hide it. Why you and Comte are doing this as his friends is beyond me.”

“Because we're worried for him. Mitsuki was ill back in the winter and Leonardo was beside himself. If he ever loses her…”

“Plus he seems to be wavering in his conviction slightly. A little nudge won't hurt anything.”

“You certainly like to meddle in others' lives don't you Comte? This will be your only shot so I suggest praying it works.”

As soon as the carriage door shut Leonardo pulled Mitsuki into his lap.

“You alright Cara Mia?”

“I'm fine. Who was that man Leonardo?”

I knew that was coming. You're going to worry all night if I don't tell you but you'll just be upset if I do.

“I'm sorry if I upset you, he said he was a very old friend of yours and he didn't seem to be lying…”

Don't blame yourself Cara Mia, none of this is your fault.

“You're right, Cesare is a lot of things but he's not a liar.”

Leonardo leaned his head back against the seat and sighed.

“We’ve known each other since we were little, used to play together and get into all sorts of trouble.”

Leonardo saw the confusion on Mitsukis face, he pulled her closer and kissed her softly on the lips.

“As we got older we grew further apart and it stayed that way until the day I cut ties with my familia.”

“He's family?”

Leonardo let out a self-deprecating chuckle before he noticed Mitsuki's falling expression.

“Don't take everything that he said so seriously Cara Mia.”

“You're the one that said he never lies.”

“Doesn't mean he can't be wrong.”

Leonardo looked into Mitsukis eyes, normally they were so bright and full of happiness but right now all he could see in them was sadness.

“Frowns don't suit you.”

Leonardo ran his fingers through Mitsukis hair then pulled her closer and kissed her deeply. He licked along her lower lip and as her lips parted he pushed his tongue forward seeking out hers. Leonardo felt her hands on his chest and then he heard her soft moans. Leonardo broke the kiss and whispered huskily into her ear.

“I can't take you how I want here so be a good girl and wait just a little longer.”

Leonardo grinned at her nod.

When they reached the mansion Leonardo took Mitsuki straight to his room. He locked the door while shrugging off his jacket then he pulled her to him, capturing her lips in a forceful needy kiss.Ever since I met you it's like I've been caught up in a storm, god what you do to me Cara Mia.

“Let's get this dress off you.”

Leonardo kissed Mitsukis ear then made his way slowly down her neck while his agile fingers worked at undoing the laces of her dress.

“Leonardo…”

Leonardo felt Mitsukis arms snake around his neck and one of her hands twine in his hair as she pulled his head closer to her. He let out a low moan and ripped the rest of the laces then yanked her dress down.

“Sorry about your dress but I can't wait any longer.”

Leonardo quickly stripped off their remaining clothes and finally had Mitsuki laying naked beneath him. He ran one of his big hands slowly down her body enjoying the feel of her soft skin, delighting in the sight of her growing needy and wanton at his touch. As his hand traced along her thigh he felt her hips buck.

“Don't…tease me…”

Leonardo spread her thighs apart pushing one of her legs up. He planted a soft kiss to her knee then made his way down towards her center while his fingers slid into her wet core.

“Mmm! Nngh!”

“Keep moaning like that and I could get lost in you.”

Leonardo moved his fingers deeper inside as his lips reached her sweet spot. He watched her throw her head back in pleasure while her hips bucked against him.

“Leonar…ahhh!”

Leonardo pulled his head back, his fangs had descended and he was on the verge of losing control from it all.

I can't lose control, I won't..

"you don't have the conviction or courage for it."

Leonardo let out a low growl at the intrusive memory and then he found himself staring into Mitsukis eyes. Those bright eyes were so full of love and desire for him and he found himself remembering a recent passionate night.

IF I was going to bite you, where would you want those waves of pleasure to splash down?

If you were the one biting me, I'm sure anywhere would feel good.

Are you telling me I have carte blanche to do whatever I want?

For the most part…

Leonardo slid his fingers out and Mitsuki whined in displeasure.

Sorry Cara Mia but I need you to be able to think as clearly as you can right now.

“Mitsuki look at me, do you remember what we talked about a few weeks ago?”

Leonardo waited as Mitsuki propped herself up on her elbows and her eyebrows knit together in concentration. Wanting to hurry her memory along he opened his mouth wide so she could see his fangs before he placed another kiss on her thigh.

“I remember.”

“Do I still have carte blanche?”

“Do whatever you want with me, Leonardo.”

Leonardo studied Mitsuki for a moment, looking for any sign of hesitation or concern. When he didn't find any, a mischievous grin lit up his face. He got back on top of Mitsuki and kissed her more passionately then he ever had before as he thrust himself inside her. As their hips moved together he watched her head fall back against the pillows and a breathy moan escaped her lips.

“It only hurts for a moment Cara Mia, are you ready?”

“Yes.”

Leonardo kissed his way down her neck and collarbone to the swell of her breast and then he pierced her skin and sunk his fangs in deep. Her blood tasted better than he ever imagined and it felt so warm as it coated his tongue and traveled down his throat. Mitsuki screamed out his name as she wrapped her arms around his broad back. Her skin was hot and he felt her walls tighten and spasm around him as the climax hit her hard.

“I love you Leonardo.”

Hearing those words Leonard thrust deeper into her before breaking his hold on her breast as his own climax hit.

“I love you too Cara Mia, for eternity.”

Leonardo saw Mitsuki smile at him briefly before her eyes fluttered shut. He licked his lips clean of her blood then ran his tongue over where he had bitten her before moving to lay beside her. Leonardo held Mitsuki for a long time before getting up, dressed and heading to the balcony. Half way through his cigarillo he heard familiar footsteps behind him.

“How was the rest of the party?”

“The usual.”

“Interesting choice of words.”

Leonardo blew out a puff of smoke and stared at his old friend.

“Comte”

“Yes Leonardo?”

“I've been thinking. All this week seems like things just kept happening to get me riled up, the letters from my familia, all the time you and Cara Mia we're spending together, the extra housework.”

Leonardo moved to stand beside Comte.

“Then tonight Cara Mia's all dressed up to your liking, complimenting your colors when I happen to run into Cesare. It all seems a little too coincidental now that my blood lust is gone.”

It was subtle but Leonardo saw Comte flinch slightly and he smiled a wry smile before stomping out his cigarillo.

“I better get back. I want to be there when she wakes up, see if she smiles at me the way she did before she closed her eyes.”

Leonardo heard Comte let out a relieved sigh as he walked towards the door. Just as his hand reached for the doorknob Comte called out to him.

“This is when you say thank you Leonardo.”

Leonardo let out a chuckle.

“Not with how tedious that dress was to get off.”

#ikemen vampire #ikevamp leonardo #ikevamp #ikemen vampire leonardo #ikevamp comte #ikemen vampire comte #ikevamp saint germain

[maxsix]

Ad Astra: The Theory Of Relativity | An Interstellar Ateez story Part I | Part II | Part III | Park IV (Words 5130, Warnings: mild swearing)

It's just after 7pm when they finally pull up the dirt driveway to their home. The sun has set in the sky, its blue hour casting a soothing indigo over the property, and although they can't see them clearly, the gentle rustle from the surrounding corn fields comforts something deep within Hongjoong's soul. They've all been so careless to take this scene for granted every single day. 

Kyungmoon is relieved as he greets the brothers at the door, indulging Wooyoung in his tall tales and energy but when he catches Hongjoong's eyes, he silently motions upstairs, where Yunho must still be. 

"He's been worried." The older man says by way of explanation, "He helped me make dinner but didn't want to eat it until you got back. You might want to go talk to him."

"Thanks Uncle Moonie," Hongjoong nods. "I'll do it now."

After Wooyoung finally allows their uncle to go home, they both head to the kitchen to grab a drink of water, still parched from the day's events, and that's when they notice that Yunho had set the table already, all three plates and glasses flipped upside down to prevent any dust collecting. 

"Oh nice, corn cakes!" Wooyoung rushes forward when he spots the food containers, only to be abruptly yanked back by the neck of his hoody.

"No."

"What? It's dinner time isn't it?"

"Wait till I get Yunho. You know he's upset about today. Do not eat anything until I get back."

"Because we went without him?" Wooyoung asks. "He should've come with us." 

Hongjoong sighs. "Just sit and wait." 

He makes his way up the stairs and knocks gently on Yunho's bedroom door. There's nothing for a few seconds but he resists the urge to barge in, remembering how much he hated that when he was teenager himself. 

"Yunho? It's just me, can I come in?"

"No."

"Well, okay, can I talk to you through the door then?" 

"Just go away Hongjoong. I'm fine."

They haven't fought in such a long time that Hongjoong wonders if things have been building up to this anyway. 

"Sorry I didn't radio in this afternoon. They took the truck from us for a while but we're both fine now."

There's silence after this and Hongjoong knocks again.

"Yunho?"

"Leave me alone Hongjoong, I said I'm fine!"

If today was any other day, if NASA stayed dead, if there was no hopeful future to think about, if their parents never died, if he was just an older brother who only needed to think about himself, Hongjoong would've walked away and given his brother the space to deal with his emotions on his own. 

But in his heart, even without committing to anything, he knows their lives will change now. He doesn't have the luxury of time, none of them do, and now more than ever, he doesn't want to waste it over small petty misunderstandings or disagreements. 

"Okay but I just wanted to say sorry for coming home so late." Hongjoong says to Yunho's door. "Thanks for making us dinner by the way, that was really good of you, but your brother is about to eat the whole thing if you don't come down."

It's then that he hears angry stomping and the door being wrenched open with such force that the rush of air ruffles Hongjoong's hair into his eyes. 

"But that's for all of us! God, why is he so annoying!?"

Yunho rarely gets angry for long but he's a teenager like any other and not immune to exploding with volcanic rage. Right now, he fills up the entire doorway and Hongjoong has to take a step backwards to make some space. 

He's grown so tall now, towering head and shoulders above nearly everyone, and for a split second, with his balled fists and tightly wound muscles, Hongjoong wonders if his brother has ever wanted to punch him in the face just to release the anger. 

But the rage always fizzles out as quickly as it boils over. 

On seeing his older brother standing there with tired shadows under his eyes and the same crumpled clothes he's seen a million times before, Yunho slowly lets the feelings of betrayal fade away, only to find them replaced by shame and guilt.

Hongjoong catches the change as it happens and knows he has to derail that train of thought.

"Well, hate to break it to you but he's not adopted and it's completely genetic."

Yunho huffs out a laugh, almost against his will, but the fight has left his body now. He isn't completely immune to Dad Jokes yet. 

“He’s kinda stuck with us forever, so don't be too mad at him."

"I'm not mad at him." Yunho says, voice back to normal.

"Are you mad at me? It's okay if you are."

Yunho doesn't answer, preferring to silently stare at their feet. Hongjoong was still in his sturdy old work boots but Yunho’s much larger feet were encased in blue slippers and the old dog socks that their mum had given them all one year. It makes Hongjoong suddenly nostalgic for Christmas holidays, back when it was a day to actually celebrate and not actively dread because another year was over. 

"Come on, it's been a long day, do you want to come down and eat dinner with us? You did all the hard work for it."

Yunho shoulders slump and he lets out a defeated sigh. "Fine."

The mood is a little brighter over dinner and even though Hongjoong is relieved that Yunho rarely holds much of a grudge, he also knows that his brother masks his hurt the best out of the three of them. Hongjoong is mostly too tired to pretend and Wooyoung broadcasts his emotions on every wavelength and frequency that exists, whether he realises it or not. 

But ever since he was a child, Yunho had often chosen to suffer in silence, especially if it meant keeping the peace.

It's why Hongjoong is knocking on his door again at bedtime. 

"Hey Yunho, it's me. Can I talk to you for a bit?"

This time his brother opens the door and invites him in. 

In stark contrast to Wooyoung's biohazard of a bedroom, Yunho's was much neater: with cleaned floors, a closet of folded clothes and a desk only half littered with homework. There are two photo frames on the bookshelf: one of them all at an amusement park with their parents and another from last year when Wooyoung had won a science competition at school. 

“I just wanted to say sorry about today again.” Hongjoong says as he sits down at the desk.

"It's okay Hongjoong, I know you had to go."

"Well, I didn't really and I didn't give you any notice so that was real shitty of me." Hongjoong says earnestly. "Is that what you were angry about?"

Yunho shrugs and looks at the floor. 

There's a long pause followed by a barely audible mumble.

"What?"

Yunho sighs with pained effort and looks everywhere but at his brother.

“You both just left.” He says quietly. “I thought you weren't coming back.”

Hongjoong chest aches at the words. He fucked up and he knows it. 

"I'm sorry," He repeats, knowing how inadequate it sounds now. "I know it was a stupid. I wasn't planning to leave you here by yourself. I didn't tell Wooyoung to come."

"Well, he went anyway."

"I know." Hongjoong says in exasperation, "I didn't want him to. He was supposed to stay here with you."

Yunho starts picking at the sleeves to his sweater but doesn't reply or look up. 

“I know you hate it when I do stuff like this.” Hongjoong continues apologetically, "I really didn't plan to leave you alone like that."

Yunho shrugs again.

"I'm....I'm really trying to make better decisions that are important for us, all of us. You know that right?"

"Yeah, I know."

"I thought about turning back and taking you with us but your school's social worker is already hassling me about my "unconventional parenting."

Yunho looks up now. "She is?"

"Yeah, I think they're just waiting for me to mess up." Hongjoong chuckles bitterly. 

"Well, she doesn't know anything." Yunho says with a scowl. "It's just her job to be like that with kids when their parents die."

"Well, as annoying as she is, it's good that you have people like that looking out for you guys at school."

"We can take care of ourselves too." Yunho says defiantly, voice now regaining back some of its confidence, albeit shakily. "I'm not a little kid." 

"I know." Hongjoong smiles. "I know you can look after yourself and I know you can look after Wooyoung too but I'm still your older brother, so I'll keep trying not to do so many stupid reckless things. No guarantees but I'll try."

"You love doing stupid things though." Yunho mutters under his breath. "That's why you have no friends."

"Hey! I have friends!"

Yunho just gives him a withering look. "The Park uncles don't count and people you do jobs for don't count either."

"Yeah yeah whatever." Hongjoong says with a dismissive hand wave. "Hey, speaking of stupid things, what the hell happened with your driving test? And that punk on a bike?"

Yunho suddenly flops face down into his bed with a frustrated groan. "Why does everyone know about that?!"

"Because it's hilarious?" Hongjoong laughs. "So who is this kid? Someone in your class right? Have I met him? Her? Them?"

Yunho's ears turn bright red. "Do we have to have this conversation Hongjoong? I forgive you or whatever okay? Can we just stop talking about this now please?"

"Well, I'm trying to do more conventional parenting, so spill it: who is this giant that's got you so distracted that you almost crashed into Farmer Lee's paddock?"

With his face down in the pillows, all that comes from Yunho is muffled gibberish. 

"What? I can't hear anything you're saying."

Yunho rolls over now to look at the ceiling, there's a deep blush colouring his cheeks. "It's just.......well, um, it's a...guy...I think."

Honjoong chuckles, "You think?"

It's then that it hits him; he may have known about Yunho's preferences for years but his brother is only figuring it out for himself now. He's tried his best to give Yunho a safe space to tell him, whenever he was ready to, but it never came.

He can't fuck this up now.

"Oh hey, that's cool! What's he like?" 

Instead of answering, Yunho looks over at his older brother, eyes shifty and nervous at the over enthusiastic response. "So you're not...mad at me?"

"For what?"

"For....that it's not, you know, a girl?"

"No, Yunho. No. I am not mad at you." Hongjoong says gently but firmly, making sure there's no room for any misunderstanding. "That's the last thing I would be mad about, and besides, it would be kind of hypocritical of me to judge you for that."

There's a pause so deafening that they can both hear the wall clock tick tick in the room. Yunho eyes widen in shock as he slowly comes to the realisation about his brother. 

"WHAT."

"What?"

"Since when were you...."

"Into guys?" Hongjoong supplies helpfully, "Since always little bro. So when you need to have that other talk, let me know. Safety first!"

"Oh my god. Make it stop." Yunho flops down into his pillows again. "We are not having that conversation right now!"

Hongjoong chuckles but decides to take pity on his brother; he remembers how big, life-altering and world-ending all his teenage crushes felt back then too. Young love is as potent a blessing and as it is a poisonous curse.

Adult love wasn't much better. 

"Okay okay, I'm leaving. Get some sleep." Hongjoong rises from the table but can't resist walking over to thump Yunho's back a few times in solidarity. "I'm very proud of you today okay? Tell me when you want to have that other conversation. Anytime. Okay?"

There's a muffled "okay" in reply and a small “Thanks” as Hongjoong exits the room.

They will be fine.

But he can't go to sleep yet. 

There's still the matter of the manic fourteen year old banging around in their basement instead of sleeping. 

"Wooyoung, it's been a long day." Hongjoong rubs his eyes in exhaustion. "Can you leave the drone alone? It'll still be here in the morning."

Wooyoung is sitting in front of the dissected drone with a contemplative expression, like a surgeon about to engage in some delicate neurosurgery. Hongjoong sighs as he plucks the wire cutters from his brother's hand.  

"Seonghwa can build robots. Did you know that?" Wooyoung asks him. "He probably told you when you had your meeting. He's so smart. And he's so nice. And he's so tall, I think he's definitely taller than you."

"How is that even important?" Hongjoong replies defensively as he tidies the mess of papers and pencils strewn around the work bench. "He's a know-it-all, is what he is."

Wooyoung blinks at him for a few seconds before going back to the drone. "Yeah that's what I meant: he's really smart."

"Why are you even on first names basis with him? You met him for like ten minutes."

"But that's his name? Doctor Park Seonghwa? He said to call him Seonghwa." Wooyoung says in confusion. "Why? What do you call him then?"

"This isn't relevant." Hongjoong mumbles dismissively. "That place is full of astrophysicists, they're all smart."

"I have to start building more robots.” Wooyoung announces matter-of-factly. “Seonghwa said he built his first one out of Lego when he was thirteen. I'm a whole year behind Hongjoong! I've only built radios and circuits. Do you think we can find some Lego?"

Oh God. 

Raising a fourteen year old is a never ending cycle of lost battles.

“If you stop terrorising that drone and go to sleep right now, I'll ask around for some Lego. How's that?"

Wooyoung peers at him skeptically with a sharply raised eyebrow. “Tomorrow?”

"Sure, tomorrow."

"Okay, deal."

Hongjoong falls asleep as soon as he hits the mattress but while his body is dead to the world, his mind is alive with visions of space shuttles, sunsets and a binary moon. He’s never alone in the dream but he doesn’t know who is next to him either. It’s someone kind. Someone who understands him. Someone he loves.

It isn't a nightmare, it doesn't feel like a dream, it just feels like a memory he hasn’t lived yet.

*

After their encounter with NASA, not that much changes for awhile. Hongjoong deliberately keeps it that way, not yet ready to face the big decisions looming in the distance. He doesn't tell Wooyoung all the details of that day at NASA, he doesn't tell Yunho or anyone else either, not out of sworn secrecy but out of fear for their reactions. It weighs heavily on his mind, like a persistent dark cloud that follows him everywhere.

Yeosang contacts him a few times to gather more details and sends through some proposals for his involvement. Professor Park calls him too, just to talk about the updates. He doesn't say 'yes' to anything but eventually agrees help with the training manual for the pilots. He can do that. It's easy to work on it when the boys are asleep. Nobody has to know. Nothing has to change. 

One day, a week after he sends his suggestions for the pilot program, he's in the middle of fixing their neighbour's tractor when a package arrives in the mail, hand delivered by a man he's never seen in these parts of town before. 

Dear Mr Kim, 

On behalf of the astrophysics and aerospace divisions at NASA, we would like to acknowledge and thank you for your submission regarding the current pilot program. Your suggestions will now enter the appropriate channels for review and consideration. Please contact me should you have any further questions or wish to extend your involvement. 

Regards, 

Dr Kang Yeosang

NASA Head Of Public Relations and Communications

Hongjoong folds the letter back into its envelope and stuffs them both in his desk drawer. This is enough involvement. He did what they had asked of him, his job is done for now, and he tries to put it out of his mind. 

The school year drags on to keeps them all busy. Wooyoung's suspension is revoked when he promised to retake the science test. Of course he gets an A and Hongjoong feels smugly victorious about it, knowing Kim Yonghwan would've absolutely hated grading that and how it means the fourteen year old would not fail science after all. 

Yunho passes his driving test on the second attempt. No bike distractions this time. 

As the year draws to a close, there was the small matter of his high school graduation. Despite always doing well academically, Yunho had simply announced one day that he intended to keep working at the Lucky Corn Mill after graduation but also wanted to help Hongjoong with his engineering jobs. 

"You can study at the university in the next town too." Hongjoong reminds him. "If you want that. We'll make it work."

But Yunho had shaken his head, "No, I want to stay here. I like working at the Mill and Uncle Moonie said he would level up my job if I learnt how to repair the machines like you do."

Hongjoong had been half skeptical, wondering if Yunho was keeping the peace again by taking the path that would be the most easy for their family. But when Hongjoong asks him this, he's met with an easy grin. 

"No, I really want to stay here. Our town needs the Mill. I don't want to move to another place and not know anyone. Seems like a big hassle if you ask me."

It doesn't come as a surprise to Hongjoong. It was what he had expected. Wooyoung always had his head in the clouds, dreaming big dreams and having big ambitions that he didn't know how to realise, but Yunho was grounded in this town's dirt and dust, rooted in the same community that he grew up in and cared for. 

The graduation day itself is a flurry of activity that seemed so unnecessary. It's unbelievable how stressful getting three sets of suits cleaned and ironed turns out to be. Wooyoung wears a tie and brushes his long dark hair only after the promise of more Lego and electronics to build his robots. Hongjoong caves in to the demands for the sake of his own sanity. 

It all culminates in Yunho having an uncharacteristic crisis in the truck on the way to the ceremony. 

"Don't embarrass me!" Yunho tells them firmly. "Especially you Wooyoung."

"What? Why especially me?"

"You always make so much noise and I swear to God, do not to ask every single person I introduce you to if we're dating. I'm not dating anyone! Got it?"

"Got it." Hongjoong salutes, while Wooyoung just mumbles something unintelligible. 

"And don't dad my friends." This one he directs at his older brother.

"I don't do that!" Hongjoong replies defensively.

"Yes you do!" Both younger brothers yell in unison. 

“Recommending sunscreen is not dad-behaviour. It’s just common sense. Our ozone layer is not what it used to be.”

Yunho sighs as Wooyoung wheezes like an asthmatic bird next to him.

“See all this?” Yunho says, gesturing to everything in the truck. “This is what I need you not to do!”

The graduation takes place in the school's indoor basketball court and it's all too familiar for Hongjoong, right down to the colours of the gowns, the cheerful balloons and streamers and the chatter of proud parents and overexcited teenagers. 

Wooyoung is inhaling the free food and Hongjoong leaves him there to mingle with some parents he knows, like he's an Actual Responsible Adult now himself. He does not make eye contact with the social workers, just in case they have any more unsolicited feedback about his parenting skills.

Against strict instructions not to do it, they let out loud cheers when Yunho is called out with his classmates and Hongjoong finds it endearing how red his brother gets at the attention. There are two other tall boys in the class, one he knows already, the Song's only son Mingi, and one he's never met before. He wonders which one owns the infamous bike. 

Wooyoung insists on being the official photographer of the event and sneaks up front to take copious photos of Yunho getting his certificate. 

Third in his class. 

Hongjoong is so proud of him. The overwhelming feeling sneaks up without warning and he doesn't realise he's tearing up until it's too late. The lump in his throat formed without his consent but as he claps and cheers, he thinks to himself, overcome with relief: I didn't fuck it up, he turned out okay.

After the formalities are done for the day, Yunho goes off to talk to his friends. They meet up later for a late lunch with Kyungmoon and Jonghoon, who gift Yunho with some new work boots that he tries on immediately.

As a treat, Hongjoong drives them both to a supermarket on the edge of town that still carried a small assortment of junk food that contained so many preservatives, they never really seemed to expire. They sit in the back of the pick up truck to eat it. 

"Hongjoong CRIED. How lame!"

"Thanks Wooyoung. That's real nice of you to point that out, you little punk."

Yunho laughs and uses the good mood to ask Hongjoong for a sip of his beer. Hongjoong gives him a bottle of his own instead. It's a maize lager that's barely alcoholic at all but Yunho relishes every single drop of it like it was the best thing he's ever tasted. 

Even in the time of a global food shortage, humankind will always find a way to manufacture alcohol.

Wooyoung sets the camera to takes a dopey photo of them all grinning like lunatics and while the boys fight over the last of the candy, Hongjoong can't help thinking that if life never gets better than this, it's okay. 

They're okay. This is okay. 

And they deserve so many more decades of it.

*

The weather is hot and dry over the summer school break. They have a few days of rain but it's not enough. Yunho takes more shifts at the Mill to help process as much of the existing crop as urgently as possible. On his days off from his regular jobs, Hongjoong takes Wooyoung to the Mill to help the Park brothers fulfill the orders that were coming in hard and fast. 

The town is thrown into panic mode by the threat of a drought and it only slows down when they get a solid week of heavy rains. Jonghoon chuckles at the fickleness of the weather, lamenting poetically how mercurial and precarious it was for humankind's survival. It was all meant to lighten the mood but even the jokes had a bitter nervous edge to them. 

Yunho takes renewed interest in mechanical engineering and Hongjoong is all too happy to pass on his knowledge, going as far as having Yunho tag along to his jobs, whenever he wasn’t at the Mill. As expected, he takes to it like a duck to water, but surprises them both with his capacity for learning.

Wooyoung litters the basement with what Hongjoong can only describe as a small army of Lego robots. They don’t question the teenager and leave him be, only periodically coming down to feed and water him. 

Life is peaceful for a period.

Then several letters from NASA begin to arrive, increasing in frequency and then urgency. 

*

Dear Mr Kim, 

Following review from the aerospace division, we are pleased to advise that your suggestions were met with favourable agreement. Given the sensitive and complex nature of operations, we would be grateful if you could make contact regarding an in-person discussion on the best way to move forward with your involvement.

Regards, 

Dr Kang Yeosang

NASA Head Of Public Relations and Communications

*

A week later, prompted by his lack of response, another letter arrives. 

Dear Mr Kim, 

I am writing on behalf of our aerospace division to follow up your response regarding your involvement with our pilot program. Please contact me to discuss this matter. 

Regards, 

Dr Kang Yeosang

NASA Head Of Public Relations and Communications

*

Dear Hongjoong, 

Yeosang's gotten himself in a stress spiral over the pilot program. I read your suggestions and proposal, it was brilliant as expected. Please contact my poor colleague to save him from his descent into madness. Our young pilots would most benefit from your guidance, particularly in person. 

The shuttle is coming along well. They will be mounting the boosters soon. I apologise for the urgency but time is always of the essence, as you know. 

Please send my best to the boys.

Kind Regards, 

Professor Park 

NASA Director of Astrophysics and Aerospace Engineering, PhD

*

Dear Mr Kim, 

I am writing to follow up on the numerous unanswered correspondence you have received from our organisation. I have word that the letters have arrived safely to you in person, please advise if you have moved residences since or remain confused by the information provided and need assistance. 

As per our previous correspondence(s), I wish to reiterate the importance of our aerospace and pilot program and also remind you of their role in both our imminent and future stellar missions. We simply cannot proceed without their involvement.

I have read your suggestions for the pilot training program. It would seem your experience would be greatly beneficial to our young trainees. 

Please advise Dr Kang Yeosang if you do not wish to remain involved in assisting our mission as his time, and mine, would be better served in less futile pursuits. 

Regards, 

Dr Park Seonghwa

NASA Deputy head of Astrophysics, Robotic Engineering and Interstellar Biology, PhD

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Dear Doctor Park, 

I am writing to confirm I have received and was able to read all the letters. I'm glad to hear my suggestions were helpful in some way. Contrary to popular belief, I have many other equally important commitments here.

I wasn't trying to waste Yeosang's time or yours but as I explained to your father before, my priority is to ensure the ongoing stability for my family. It would not be practical to travel multiple hours out of town to train your pilots on a regular basis. 

I remain available to offer assistance in other forms. 

Regards, 

Kim Hongjoong

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Dear Mr Kim, 

It seems you are capable of answering correspondence in a timely manner after all. 

I have taken the liberty of proposing a relocation of our partial pilot simulator to a venue more accessible to you. I believe it will cut down your travel time to half an hour each way. Yeosang will draw up a proposed schedule, taking into account the days you are available from your current occupation.

Please reply promptly if this is agreeable to you as I would like to progress this situation without further delays.

Regards, 

Dr Park Seonghwa

NASA Deputy head of Astrophysics, Robotic Engineering and Interstellar Biology, PhD

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Dear Doctor Park, 

Yes, that would be agreeable. 

Thank you, 

Kim Hongjoong

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Dear Mr Kim, 

I have made arrangements for the partial simulator to be relocated to its new venue in 10 days. I have included all the details of such in this pack, including your security ID and paperwork, which you will need to return to Yeosang ASAP. 

There is no set launch date available at this time but I am compelled to tell you that all pilots need to be ready when they are called. 

Please do not lose your security ID. It is particularly tedious to obtain a replacement. 

Thank you for your cooperation. 

Regards, 

Dr Park Seonghwa

NASA Deputy head of Astrophysics, Robotic Engineering and Interstellar Biology, PhD

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Dear Doctor Park,

Thank you for making the arrangements. It’s incredible that you were able to do all that so quickly. As per your threat, I have returned all the security paperwork to Yeosang this morning. 

There might be typos and one of Wooyoung’s robots spilled coffee on the pages. 

I’m looking forward to meeting your pilots.

Regards, 

Hongjoong

P.S I will try my best not to lose the security ID

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Dear Mr Kim, 

I have confirmed that Yeosang has received your paperwork and processed it. It was rather difficult with the coffee staining but he is a professional after all. 

I am glad to hear that your brother has chosen to take his talent for science so seriously. Robotics is a noble pursuit with significant benefits to society. 

Regards, 

Dr Park Seonghwa

NASA Deputy head of Astrophysics, Robotic Engineering and Interstellar Biology, PhD

P.S Please do not include P.S notes in official correspondence letters

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Dear Doctor Park, 

Please send my apologies to Yeosang for all the inconveniences. 

Wooyoung insists I say Hi to you on his behalf. He’s threatening to send his robot army to kill me in my sleep if I don’t. 

Regards, 

Hongjoong

P.S Okay

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Dear Mr Kim, 

It is perplexing that you continually choose to be contrary to my recommendations. I also note the lack of apology to myself, who also had to assist with your coffee stained paperwork. 

Please advise Wooyoung that I said Hello and wish him the best with his killer robot army. I am certain their enemy will be of no match. 

Regards, 

Dr Park Seonghwa

NASA Deputy head of Astrophysics, Robotic Engineering and Interstellar Biology, PhD

P.S Please stop this, it’s unprofessional

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Dear Doctor Park, 

I didn’t apologise to you because it seems like my brother is trying to follow in your footsteps and has taken over our entire basement. I had to ask the entire town for all their old Lego bricks, they all think I’ve gone nuts now.

The Coffee Incident is your fault. So I’m not sorry. Wooyoung wants to show you his killer robot army one day but I’m sure you’ve got plenty of other important things to do.

Yeosang gave me my new schedule, thank you for taking my job and brothers into account. I’m meeting your new pilots in two days. Will the rest of the team be there too?

Regards, 

Hongjoong

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Dear Mr Kim, 

The rest of the team is not required to attend. Relevant members of the aerospace division will be present to provide you with orientation but I understand you are already well familiar with how the simulators work. 

You will be asked to provide direct feedback to my father or Yeosang, however you may also send your evaluation reports to me directly if it is easier. 

Please advise Wooyoung that when time permits, it would give me great pleasure to see his killer robot army. Unfortunately, at present I am trying to find solutions for interstellar biodynamic viability.

Your lack of remorse is deeply disrespectful but expected for one so unappreciative of robotics. I send Wooyoung my condolences.

Regards, 

Dr Park Seonghwa

NASA Deputy head of Astrophysics, Robotic Engineering and Interstellar Biology, PhD

P.S: I wish you the best for your first day with our pilots

#Ad Astra: The Theory Of Relativity #Ateez Fic #Ateez AU #Hongjoong #Seonghwa #Wooyoung #Yunho #Interstellar AU #Ateez #this deviates from the original movie and i always thought it was a pity we never learn much about young tom (Yunho's character) #if you have questions that need to be clarified i am happy to answer them #but there's not that much science in this one