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#i can divide the love and gratitude between you three though so no worries
hyperfixatedbastard · 28 days
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sweet, sweet silence
Vox x Autistic!GN!Reader
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Dating the CEO of VoxTek Enterprises has its perks. You always get brand new devices before they even hit the shelves, and occasionally, Vox makes things specifically for you - like noise-cancelling headphones.
Word Count: 1.3k
WARNINGS: none!
A/N: this is for the autistic homies but it works for anyone with sensory issues! 'tis based off of my own experiences so apologies if it feels inaccurate to anyone, i'm projecting so hard rn. this is also my first time writing x reader/2nd person POV so I hope I did alright! also, i do requests if anyone would like to see more of this kind of thing :)
Dividers
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"Doll, c'mere for a second, would ya?" Vox calls out to you, gesturing for you to come to his desk with a 'come hither' motion. 
You raise a brow in interest as you approach your boyfriend where he's sitting in his rather eccentric chair, tinkering with...something. You hop up onto the desk, careful to sit in a spot that you know has no important screens or buttons (you learned the hard way). You don't say anything, instead just tilting your head and waiting for Vox to show off whatever he's been working on this time.
He finally lets you see what's in his clawed hands: a pair of headphones. They're clearly a VoxTek product—the blue and red color scheme gives it away—though you're certain you've never seen these on sale before. It's not uncommon for Vox to show off new products to you before they're released, though, so you don't question it.
He smirks as he holds the headphones out to you. It's not that sly, devious smile he so often has on his screen, though; it's that grin you have when you're about to surprise someone and you just know they're going to love it. "These are for you, darling."
On one hand, you get a little excited (free shit, fuck yeah!). But on the other, you're a little worried—you're not good at receiving gifts. It always ends up awkward because you don't really know how to express gratitude in an expected, neurotypical way. But Vox is well aware of that, and he can tell when you're grateful, so you push those worries to the side and take the headphones from him.
You look at them curiously, inspecting the foldable hinges, the ear cushions, and the small assortment of buttons on the speakers. You can tell that the three buttons on the right speaker are for adjusting the volume—increase, mute, and decrease—but you have no damn clue what the button on the left speaker is for.
"Well? Put 'em on," Vox encourages you, still with that expectant grin as he anticipates your reaction.
You do as he says and place the headphones over your ears. They're certainly comfortable, but you don't see what the big deal is. You already have headphones—they’re not great, as it’s damn near impossible to drown out the unbearably overstimulating sounds of Hell, but you manage. Kinda.
Just as you’re about to ask what’s so special about these headphones, Vox presses that mystery button on the left speaker, and everything goes blissfully quiet.
Your eyes widen as you get the first moment of true silence for the first time since you arrived in Hell. The sudden difference is initially jarring, but the relief is downright euphoric. 
During the entirety of your afterlife in Hell, it's been ceaselessly loud and often unbearable. The screams, the explosions, the gunshots—it's incessant, and you never get a moment of peace. The V Tower is not nearly as bad as the rest of the Pride Ring, thanks to a lot of soundproofing, but there's always something. Moans and other lewd noises fill the halls of anywhere within five floors of Valentino's studios. You can hear the screeching and yelling beneath the thrum of music emitting from Velvette’s section of the tower. 666 Studios isn't much better, with the constant chattering of the crew and bickering between newscasters.
Vox's lair office is by far the quietest place in the entirety of Hell, at least in your experience. The soundproofing here is much more effective than anywhere else in V Tower, and Vox is the only person ever here. He does talk and maniacally laugh to himself fairly often, but you don’t usually don’t mind that (and he’ll typically quite down if he can tell you’re having a rough day). But it’s far from perfect—there’s still the intermittent click-clacking of a keyboard, the constant whirring of the computer fans, the low humming of all the tech, and the audio from whatever security camera Vox is spying on. You can tune it out most of the time, but it all overwhelms you so, so easily.
And you aren't very good at hiding it (at least not with Vox, who’s too observant for his own damn good when it comes to you).
Which is why your dear boyfriend has just spent the past several days making you the best noise-canceling headphones Hell has ever seen. He knows what the constant overstimulation does to you, and he sees it far more often than he'd like to. You get irritated and snippy, and sometimes it gets so bad you have a meltdown. It's gotten less common over time, but it still happens way too frequently for either of your likings. 
“So, who’s the best boyfriend ever?” he hints, clearly fishing for a compliment. His voice is surprisingly clear despite the headphones practically deafening you—his words are muffled, but just loud enough for you to understand what’s being said. He's grinning at you like he's the one that just got the excruciatingly heartfelt present. 
Usually, you’d have a witty comeback to Vox’s attempts at getting you to stroke his ego (always followed by an actual, genuine compliment to ease his insecurities hiding behind that ego), but you’re drawing a blank right now. 
The gift is so thoughtful that you don’t even know where to start on expressing your gratitude. Noise-canceling headphones seem so obvious now, but this is Hell! Both you and Vox had died before this technology became commonplace, and not many people in Hell care that much about the noise. Vox made these headphones specifically for you. He doesn’t need them (he can quite literally just turn off his audio input) and he probably won’t make much of a profit with them as a VoxTek product. He’s a busy man, being a CEO and an Overlord, yet he took the time to make this for you himself, not even passing the project off to one of the poor souls that works for him. 
“Babe?” Vox calls out gently, waving a hand in front of your face. Oh, shit—you’re overthinking your response so much that you forgot to actually fucking respond.
You blink a few times, meeting your boyfriend’s gaze. His brows are slightly furrowed, in what you think is a mix of concern and amusement. He’s a little worried he’s fucked up somehow, but he knows you well enough by now to recognize when you’re thinking too hard about something. He actually finds it quite adorable, at least when you’re not about to have a panic attack from it. 
As he looks at you expectantly, you decide to just go with your gut (at least, that’s what you think you’re doing—you’ve never entirely understood what the fuck that phrase means).
You don’t give yourself time to second-guess your actions before you’re practically jumping into Vox’s lap—though it’s more like falling since you were just sitting on the desk. He lets out a little ‘oof’ of surprise before he chuckles and moves his hands to your waist, holding you steady while being careful of his claws. He smirks as you wrap your arms around him and bury your face in his neck, jostling the headphones a little but not enough to fuck with the noise cancellation.
“So…you like them, then?” Vox prompts, just wanting the confirmation even though the answer is already clear. You can tell by his tone that he’s still grinning proudly.
You just gently nod, inadvertently rubbing your face against the fabric of his shirt (fortunately, Vox is a fancy bastard with high standards when it comes to clothing, and he’d long ago thrown out any garment made with fabric that triggered your sensory issues).
“Thank you,” you murmur against his neck. 
His hands tighten ever so slightly around your waist, and his response is so soft you can barely hear it through the headphones. “Anything for you, doll.”
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royalstcve · 3 years
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@ my sweet fanfic stevetony writers I'll give you all my gratitude and love and dedication if you write a very self-indulgent sleepy!steve and soft!tony fic. its my absolute favourite plot for comfort fics when I'm feeling sad, especially when its combined with chronically ill!Steve but post-serum!Steve! Or its Steve getting hurt on a mission and his body/immune system goes in overdrive trying to repair all the damage and Tony takes care of needy soft Steve who is in pain and deserves all the hugs and love from his boyfriend
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Grumpy Softie (Spencer Reid x Reader) Smut
Summary: There are a few sure-fire ways to improve a frustrated doctor’s mood.
AN: This is my fic for @reidgraygubler​ for @imagining-in-the-margins​ and @sunlight-moonrise​ fic swap! I hope you enjoy it! Reader is AFAB and uses they/them pronouns. 18+, Minors DNI!
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Content Warnings: Grinding, mild choking, mutual masturbation, desk sex.
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Your name: submit What is this?
Spencer had been cantankerous beyond belief these last few days. His passive aggression seeped through to every action: the harsh clinking of the teaspoon against his coffee mug, the pen scratching against a student’s homework, his brow determined to iron in wrinkles while he read one of many bills.
Mandatory days off from work would have driven him insane were it not for his position at college. Finally, it was Doctor Spencer Reid’s turn to take on the lecture theatre alone, only a hint of nostalgia in his chest for when Gideon was at his side or when he would poke his head around the door with a casefile pressed to his chest. Still wet behind the ears and barely filling out the FBI’s smaller sized vests – let alone the windbreaker.
Now he was leading the class, all eyes on him, and more students were laughing at his jokes.
With a loud sigh, Spencer took off his glasses, leaning back with his fingers rubbing darkness back under his eyes. As if his fractioned sleep schedule wasn’t doing enough of that for him. His desk was weighed heavy under the piles of essays he printed off. He hadn’t moved for three hours and he had no reason to: no classes, he wasn’t hungry nor did he need the toilet. Only one thing could save him from his dismal mood continuing for the rest of the day.
Y/N crawled over his lap with the knowledge that Spencer would not try to push them away. Working his soft spot for them, they settled down upon him and squeezed his shoulders tight.
Blinking against the light, Spencer’s half-closed lids focused on the shadowy face and the left corner of his mouth lifted for them.
“Hey,” He said, his voice low and gravelly.
Y/N leant their nose against his for a second, “Hi.”
“I’m busy, you know?”
“I do. I just missed you.”
“My door is open; you can see me from the couch.”
“Not close enough.”
Prison had done that to the couple. Made them “clingy” despite Spencer’s aversion for touch, but it was understandable. The proxemics between Spencer and Shadow meant nothing but agony if they weren’t touching. That divider, the guards keeping eyes and reaching for guns, batons, at an inch’s worth of movement, those signs screaming: “NO CONTACT BETWEEN VISITORS AND INMATES”. What a hierarchy.
Shadow kept up their smile despite the meaning behind their words. A decent mask to cover the pain on their end because why would they want to burden Spencer with theirs as well as his own? Except that was what their relationship supported and Spencer was able to lift off the mask to welcome all emotion it had been hiding, because that was exactly what Y/N had done for him once he was released.
“This close enough?” He said, wrapping his arms around their waist with his left wrist in his right hand. The link pressed against Y/N’s lower back and nudged them closer. Y/N’s smile was hidden in a bitten lip as they shook their head.
“Oh?” Spencer raised his eyebrows, clicking his tongue. With deliberation, he moved so that Y/N was trapped now by his forearm. His free hand closed tenderly around their neck and gave a light squeeze, “How about this?”
Y/N let out a cross between a whine and a hum. That was the push they wanted and all the confirmation Spencer needed.
Taking the lead, Y/N was up to strip off their trousers and underwear while Spencer undid his belt. There was only so much time; the waistband of his trousers caught underneath his thighs when Y/N returned to his lap. Fluid and practiced motions removed his cock from his underwear, the sound of spit hitting skin followed by the touch of a loving hand. He lavished in the attention for a few seconds. Then he matched their stroking with his own nimble fingers, simultaneously grounding them in each other’s grasp and lifting them away into heaven-like states.
He used Y/N’s own tactics against them and won as they moaned against his lips, pulling away only at the will of his hand. Their own feeble attempts at pulling his hair did nothing to dissuade his speed; the whining only made him more fervent.
That faux innocence, as if Y/N didn’t know what they were doing while practically humping his clothed cock in the middle of his work day, it was intoxicating and he breathed it in from the slope of their neck. Open mouthed, he gripped their cheeks tight and grinded against them.
“Please,” Y/N whispered.
Only because they asked so beautifully. Y/N wobbled before they settled onto his cock. Their clit was flush with his pubic bone before Spencer started moving, digging his heels into the carpet. Seeing, hearing, feeling their bliss, it didn’t take long for him to cum inside them, leading Y/N to climax. They were so needy, so loving as they came in his lap. Spencer kissed their cheek, whispered a few words of gratitude in their ear. He revelled in the moan he got as a reply that was accompanied by a squeeze around him.
“This is almost perfect,” Y/N sighed.
Spencer stopped, his confused pout still pressed up against their skin. “Almost?”
“Too many clothes in the way.”
“Hmm. I agree.” A little laughter was shared between them. “And you’re missing a ring.”
Flexing their fingers behind his neck, Shadow said, “So are you. You want one that vibrates?”
“I uh wasn’t talking about that.”
“I know, hun. I know.” The teasing in their tone was clear. One might not believe they had been begging for release just minutes prior.
“Good idea though.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“Hmm, I like yours better.”
“Can I tell you something?”
Y/N lifted their head up to look Spencer in the eye, giving him a lazy nod. The twinkle in his eye spread to his smile while he tipped his head over Y/N’s shoulder, “I kinda wanna get the ring from the drawer. But I don’t wanna move.”
Now it was Y/N who was confused. “You’re torn between proposing and not pulling out?”
“Well, since you’ve been good for me…” Spencer began to shuffle on his seat. He stopped instantly as Y/N groaned and clung tighter around to him. Willing some self-restraint, he cupped their thighs and stood slowly with a hand on his chair’s back.
“Spencer please-”
“Almost there, I promise.”
Their laughing hitched with gasps as Spencer placed them down onto his desk, their hands falling amidst paperwork to support themselves with Spencer slanted against their chest. A slide of the desk’s top drawer accompanied the fiddling of documents and Spencer’s craning neck. Y/N couldn’t help themselves. Despite wanting him to achieve his goal, they distracted him with tickling kisses that disturbed his giggles more.
“Got it.” Spencer finally withdrew the box in one hand until it opened and handed over his ring – which he then held between himself and his partner, “So, Y/N, will you marry me?”
“Yes, I will.” Y/N still couldn’t believe this was happening. Only the cool ring sliding along their finger kept them anchored, dizzying them with happiness as Spencer kissed it. “We can never tell our kids about this.”
Spencer’s gaze broke from the ring, that and his tone being only things soft about him. “Our kids?”
“I mean,” Y/N looked down, “You’re still inside me. It’s almost like you’re making sure you get me knocked up.”
As per usual, Spencer’s mind worked fast. He licked his fingers and reached down, rubbing their clit. Arching into him, Y/N’s forehead glued to Spencer’s and their eyes studied each other’s reactions. Not even as Spencer guided Y/N to lay back on the desk did they break form and Spencer took advantage of this pull up one of their legs and push himself deeper inside once the angle was right for them. Every time he bottomed out, Y/N let out a squeal. This orgasm was silent as it crested over them. No sound left their agape mouth, no breath for several seconds. When that deep sigh finally left their lungs, Spencer released his too, his hips finally slowing down now that the spike of pleasure threatened to take his control.
“Orgasms help when trying for a baby,” panted Spencer, “Supposedly.”
“Whatever you say, doctor, professor, darling.” Y/N swallowed and sighed, “I hope I didn’t crease any of your students’ assignments.”
“They’re copies. Don’t worry, I’ll just print them off again.”
Shoulders rising and falling, Spencer looked like he had just been freed of the weights of the world, and his face was gentle in expressing his relief. The only tension was in his cheeks with his smile, the apples firm and rosy.
Rolling their eyes was the only response that Y/N could think of, that and: “Don’t look at me like that.”
“Like what?” Spencer turned his head just to keep eye contact wherever Y/N was avoiding it, following their lolling head and beaming still, “I just took you twice at and on my desk, and now you can’t smile at you?”
“Ugh, go back to being cranky, would you?”
“I can’t, not now I’m engaged to the most wonderful person I know.” Oh, a reminder – if he was able to forget, but his mind was rather occupied beforehand. “When anyone asks, we’ll tell them I got down on one knee at the park after a dinner date.”
“How romantic.”
Unable to discern if this was sarcasm or not, Spencer welcomed Y/N’s arms around his neck and their lips locked to his once more as he sat them up but kept them close – just a little longer.
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attilarrific · 4 years
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i love your faking dating au so much!!! i just discovered it today and i can't get enough! i'm so happy that i stumbled across it haha also these tags "omg #it nearly included a bit of wwx actually saying when the last time he kissed someone was #so i could write jealous!lwj" I AM VIBRATING
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Took me a bit, but I got here eventually!
Also, I do know I’ve got a couple more meet cute prompts lying around, so I’m gonna, uh, get to those.
But first, more Hidden Track! (Also in chronological order.)
.
Wei Wuxian is not freaking out. Wei Wuxian is behaving like a rational adult who has had nothing particularly exciting happen to him today, because they go to interviews all the time. Interviews are normal. That was a normal interview, even if—it doesn’t matter. That was a normal interview.
And if he keeps sneaking looks at Lan Wangji, sitting three feet from him in the back of the car that’s taking them back to the hotel, if he keeps hearing Lan Wangji’s voice ringing in his ears, if he keeps remembering the sight of Lan Wangji’s smile, warm and soft—
It’s still normal. There’s no reason for him to feel jittery and anxious, like he drank one too many cups of coffee this morning. There’s no reason for him to be pressed up against the car door like he’s trying to fuse with it, except that he really thinks if he doesn’t, he’ll end up pressed against Lan Wangji instead. Not because he’s nervous, though. Not because he’s longing, desperately, for the quiet comfort of Lan Wangji’s arms wrapping around him. Because he’s not, he’s not, and there’s no reason why he would be.
“Hey, Lan Zhan,” he says. His voice comes out too rough, too abrupt, and he laughs to cover the way he almost flinches when he hears it. “Lan Zhan.”
Lan Wangji looks over at him. It robs Wei Wuxian of the sight of his perfect profile, but gives him Lan Wangji’s eyes, serious and intent, pinning him in place like a hand on his chest. “Yes?”
Wei Wuxian has to lick his lips and dig his thumbnail into this soft skin of his wrist before he can remember what he was going to say. “Lan Zhan,” he says, “you really shouldn’t have said all those things in the interview. I mean, I don’t think we’re going to have any trouble convincing anyone we’re dating now, but…” He glances towards the front of the car, but the divider between them and the driver is up because Lan Wangji likes it that way and Wei Wuxian was too shaken—not shaken, surprised, surprised by how good Lan Wangji is at this—to argue. “But aren’t we just going to have a whole bunch of new problems?”
The space between Lan Wangji’s eyes furrows, just a little, and for a brief, wild moment, Wei Wuxian imagines pressing his thumb there. He shakes the thought off a moment later, mentally scolding himself for coming up with new ways to tease Lan Wangji now, when he ought to be practicing extreme gratitude and reverence for all this effort Lan Wangji’s gone to.
Lan Wangji says, “New problems?”
“Well, yeah.” Wei Wuxian constructs a pout, though for some reason it feels a little flimsy. “Everyone loves me now, but with all that stuff you said, when we fake break up our fake relationship, every single one of your fans is going to come after me with a torch and pitchfork.”
Lan Wangji’s eyes widen a little. “Oh,” he says. His lips tighten. “Oh. Yes, you’re right. I didn’t think of that. I apologize, Wei Ying.”
Faced with real remorse, Wei Wuxian squirms in his seat and hurriedly tries to brush the apology away. “No worries,” he says quickly. “It doesn’t matter. They were always going to blame me for it when it ended no matter what, so who cares if they’re a little extra mad.” He makes himself laugh brightly, tilting his head to the side. “Aiya, Lan Zhan, why do our fans have to be so scary? Who’s going to protect me when they all attack?”
“I will.”
Wei Wuxian chokes. His stomach swoops, a prickling feeling washing over his skin like static electricity. He tries to talk and finds that his throat has somehow gone dry in the last five seconds. He busies himself grabbing a bottled water out of the nearest cup holder and drinking deeply. Maybe he’s getting sick, he tells himself firmly, and then he doesn’t think about it any longer. “Lan Zhan,” he says, “you won’t be able to protect me. You’ll be acting heartbroken. Wen Ning will just have to do it.”
Lan Wangji is silent for so long that Wei Wuxian’s curiosity wins out over the weirdness fizzling along his nerves, and he looks over to see Lan Wangji glaring at the air in front of him with such dedicated viciousness that Wei Wuxian is half surprised nothing’s spontaneously combusted.
“Lan Zhan, it’s all right,” he says, grinning despite himself. “Wen Ning is really much better at protecting me than you think he is.” Lan Wangji’s scowl twists derisively, and Wei Wuxian laughs, because Lan Wangji’s persistent belief that no one can do anything as well as he can is both adorable and, frankly, accurate. “Really, he’ll be fine. But if you’re worried about it…maybe we should just never break up, hmm?”
Lan Wangji’s head jerks around to stare at him, and Wei Wuxian realizes how ridiculous and greedy that probably sounded. How awful of him, to think to impose on Lan Wangji’s goodness any longer than he absolutely has to, just because he’s nervous about the fallout. “Ah, it was a joke,” he says hurriedly, waving his hands between them to ward off misunderstandings. “A joke.”
The silence stretches a few beats too long, awkward, and then Lan Wangji says, stiffly, “Ridiculous.”
“I know, I know,” Wei Wuxian says, smiling as well as he can. “The most ridiculous.”
More horrible, throttling silence, and then, mercifully, his phone rings. He fumbles for it with nothing less than overwhelming relief, so even though he pauses for an instant when he sees the caller ID (”Not my type 🙄,” because no one’s ever in his phone with their real names), he still picks up. “Since when do you call me?” he demands.
“I saw your interview,” the pleasant, sweet voice on the other ends says. “You two look happy.”
Wei Wuxian rolls his eyes and doesn’t acknowledge the shiver that makes its way down his spine when he thinks about Lan Wangji happy, Lan Wangji smiling. “You didn’t call me to tell me I looked happy.”
“I’m hurt,” Jin Guangyao says, somehow contriving to actually sound hurt. “This is a very important phone call to me.”
“Ohhhhh,” Wei Wuxian says, drawing the word out far past a single syllable. “You’re avoiding someone.”
A laugh. “Such accusations are beneath you. At any rate, I did see your interview, and you did look happy. Congratulations, Wei Wuxian. I didn’t realize that was your type, but in retrospect, I can’t believe I was surprised.”
Wei Wuxian dares a quick glance over at Lan Wangji, who’s frowning at him. “I kind of thought it might be yours,” he says, his voice standing on the knife edge between teasing and mocking.
There’s barely a pause. “Hmm, too stiff for me.”
“Oh, of course, of course.”
A beat, and then Jin Guangyao says, lightly, casually, “About that…”
“Oh, I see,” Wei Wuxian says. “You’re avoiding someone and checking up on me. Don’t worry, I’m keeping my mouth shut—anything I might remember from that one time we made out for five minutes in a bathroom is between you and me.”
“I never worried for an instant,” Jin Guangyao tells him, with all the sincerity that won him an Oscar two years ago.
What they actually did together is probably better summarized as: got drunk, made out in a bathroom, realized they weren’t really attracted to each other at all, and then whined for a while about the audacity of people who just wander around being beautiful. If Wei Wuxian hadn’t been sure at the time exactly which beautiful person Jin Guangyao had meant, he would be now, considering Jin Guangyao felt the need to call when he found out whose younger brother Wei Wuxian’s supposedly blissfully happy about dating.
“Of course you didn’t,” he says.
“You’re entirely trustworthy,” Jin Guangyao agrees. “I should go, I’m having a late meeting.”
“Oh, I see. Not avoiding someone, just proving you have much better things to do with your time than sign on to their project for whatever measly amount of money they’re offering you.”
“Goodbye, Wei Wuxian.”
Wei Wuxian snorts and then pockets his phone again, looking up. Lan Wangji is staring directly at him. “Lan Zhan?”
“Who was that?” Lan Wangji’s voice is stiff and annoyed sounding, probably because Wei Wuxian answered his phone in the middle of a conversation without so much as an ‘excuse me.’
“Oh, it was—” Wei Wuxian stops, because yes, for fuck’s sake, he did say out loud that they’d made out in a bathroom. “Just someone I know a little.”
“Who?” Lan Wangji says, persisting. He frowns and then says, “If it’s someone who might know that you and I are not really… Luo Qingyang asked for details of your previous…partners for a reason.”
“He’s not really a partner,” Wei Wuxian protests. “And anyway, I made out with him at Nie Huaisang’s birthday party, and I told her we needed to have started dating after that anyway. So it’s fine. He doesn’t know anything.”
Lan Wangji’s frown deepens. “Who is he?”
“Nobody!”
Silence, and then, flatly: “I see.”
Wei Wuxian feels horrible instantly. They’re friends. They ought to tell each other things. What if Lan Wangji thinks this is a sign Wei Wuxian doesn’t trust him? Without conscious direction, his arm reaches across the middle seat between them, and his fingers tug on Lan Wangji’s sleeve. “Lan Zhan. Lan-er-gege. It’s not what you’re thinking.” He bites his lip. “He isn’t out, that’s all. So I can’t tell you. I’m sorry.”
A pause. “He is out to you.”
“Well, it kind of came up when he stuck his tongue in my mouth,” Wei Wuxian says, shrugging, as the car slows. “Oh, hey, look, we’re at the hotel. Be ready to sign some autographs, Lan Zhan, there’s some people hanging out.” He opens his door just as the car is stopping, hopping out with a smile and a wave as their lingering, most dedicated fans surge to their feet and cheer. He barely registers the sound of the other car door slamming as he stretches in the hot August sun, and then in the next moment, Lan Wangji has grabbed him by both arms and shoved him against the car.
“Uh,” Wei Wuxian says, slightly stunned. “Lan Zhan, what—”
“We are dating,” Lan Wangji says, like that explains anything at all, and then his mouth is crashing down onto Wei Wuxian’s.
There’s no time for shock, because Lan Wangji doesn’t hesitate, just licks and bites at Wei Wuxian’s lips until they part obediently, until Wei Wuxian is offered up for him entirely. Their practice kisses the other morning were fun, sweet and easy; this is a cymbal crash, the reverb on a bass note, a pyrotechnic lights show. Wei Wuxian has somehow gotten his arms behind Lan Wangji, and he isn’t sure how. He’s somehow clutching at Lan Wangji’s shoulders and hauling himself closer, but each fraction of an inch he moves in, Lan Wangji just takes as an opportunity to crowd him more firmly against the side of the car.
When they stop—for some reason, they stop, Wei Wuxian can’t imagine why they’re stopping, why Lan Wangji is pulling away, his eyes dark and fierce, his mouth—fuck, his mouth. When they stop, Lan Wangji draws away so slowly that Wei Wuxian imagines he can feel every inch of skin as it stops being touched, can feel the drag of Lan Wangji’s hands and body as they leave his. Wei Wuxian’s ears are ringing, and he only dimly recognizes that this might because they’ve done this in public again and at least twenty people are screaming.
Lan Wangji clears his throat. “So that no one is confused,” he says firmly, and then he turns and walks toward the doors of the hotel.
Which is all well and good, but Wei Wuxian is a little confused, actually?
.
hidden track masterpost
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wthzoe · 4 years
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chapter 7 pt. 1 - you can never be too happy in this life
'you can never be too happy in this life' damn that's it, that's the line
series masterlist - here
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a/n: wow would u look at that i'm alive lmao. i had so much planned for this chapter that i had to divide it in two. gee i hope no one suspects anything from the title. anyways im sorry for not updating more often 😭 didn't realize how time consuming funerals and emotions were. my laptop is still not working so rip me. posting on tumblr using a phone is a bitch. anyways, enjoy!
taglist(? is this even a list lol): @crayonwriting
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The following days after the match had been nothing short of amazing. You'd say it's almost better than the day the triplets were born. Almost. Speaking of the triplets' birth, today was their 3rd birthday and the five of you were getting ready to go back to your hometown to celebrate with your grandparents.
Kuroo was nervous. Very much so. He was so nervous that he was quiet the whole drive there. You couldn't understand what he was so worried for, your grandparents loved him. They were so thrilled when you introduced him through a video call one time and your grandmother demanded you bring him home as soon as you can.
Chuckling softly, you reach for Kuroo's thigh. You felt him flinch then relax under your touch. He sighed then grabbed your hand with his before giving your knuckles a kiss.
"Are you nervous?" You playfully asked him to which he rolled his eyes.
"A little bit, yeah."
"A little bit?" You place your hand on his chest, feeling his racing heartbeat. "Yeah, that's only a little bit."
Once again, he rolled his eyes yet said nothing. You arrived at your destination in no time, the traffic being kind to you for once. The triplets excitedly shuffle in their seats at the sight of their old home. Kuroo laughs at their impatience while helping you get them out of their seats.
Your grandparents immediately come out to welcome you and the triplets in, your grandmother peppering all four of you with kisses. Your grandfather notices Kuroo watching you from afar with a warm smile. He reaches an arm out for him, urging him to join in the hug. Kuroo was flustered yet he obliged, awkwardly placing his arms on you and your grandmother's back. Your grandmother smiles at him then pulls him down for a hug and a kiss on the cheek.
"Welcome home, Kuroo." His eyes wells with tears.
"Thanks, ma'am."
You never knew that your heart could feel this much happiness until today. Your grandparents, sons and boyfriend happily bonding together in the living room. You felt so complete that it was almost unbelievable. Then, you remember your parents. The people who deemed you a disgrace when you needed them the most. You could still remember their disappointed looks at you paired with their harmful words.
You didn't notice Kuroo walk up to you, concern evident in his expression. Oh, you didn't notice that you were crying at all.
"Hey, baby, what's wrong?" He whispered as he grabbed your hands and gave them a light squeeze.
"Nothing, really, just... thinking about stuff," you assure him but he didn't seem to believe you. You sigh, "I'll tell you later if it makes you feel better, okay?"
"You better." Engulfed in his embrace, you realize how protected you felt around Kuroo. Like nothing can ever harm you ever again. You hug him back, hoping that you could express your gratitude and love for him that way.
The peaceful moment between the two of you was interrupted when three high pitched 'Papa's and 'Mama's were heard from the living room. Pulling back, you wipe your tears before turning to your three angels.
"Yes, babies?" You reply. They all hault in front of the two of you, each holding what seemed to be paper behind their backs. You glanced at your grandparents who were recording the moment then glanced at Kuroo who had crouched down to the boys' level.
"Ta-da!" They reveal colorful drawings of five stick figures holding hands together. One had scribbles for hair, one wore a skirt while the three in the middle were significantly smaller than the two. Above the drawings were messily written 'I love Mama' while below was 'I love Papa.'
For the second time that day you cried. Even more so when you saw Kuroo pulling all three boys into a hug and giving each a kiss on their foreheads. You joined the group hug, none of you noticing how your grandmother was also crying at the back.
With that, night came. The triplets had to sleep in their old shared crib in your bedroom while you occupy the bed with Kuroo. His arms were wrapped around your waist from behind as you both watch the moon from your window.
"So, can you tell me what you were thinking of earlier?" He whispered with his lips tickling your ears. You felt your heart clench but you did promise him that you'd tell him.
"Have I ever told you about... everything before college?"
"Not really. Are you okay with sharing it with me?"
"Of course I am. You deserve to know, papa." You tease to try lightening the mood. His hug tightened around you as a reassurance that he's willing to listen to you.
"When I was in first year of high school, I had a boyfriend. I don't really want to talk bad about him or point fingers as to how it all happened. We were both in it together but we were not as careful as we should've been. Then I found out I was pregnant. I was scared. Very scared." Your voice shakes as all the feelings you felt came back. Kuroo placed kisses on your nape while his thumb drew circles on the back of your hand.
"A-and then I told him. I really thought he would be there for me, I thought we would go through it with me but instead, he told me that this was not what he wanted and that he wanted to break up," by then you were full on crying. Kuroo's hushes fill your ears as he strokes your hair. "I hated him but at the same time I understood how he felt. We were too young. So, I told my parents hoping that they'd help me because, well, they're my parents. But I never should've expected anything because it broke me even more when they threw me out."
You stopped to stabilize your breathing and to quiet yourself down as the triplets were sleeping. You took a deep breath then continued;
"They said I was a disgrace. Why couldn't I be more like my cousins who were good children. The next day they gave me a choice. They said I could either get rid of 'it' or get out of the house," you take a deep breath once again. All the crying and remembering had your head throbbing but you continue. "I really considered getting an abortion. I can't believe I even thought of that. Thank God I said no. I packed my things before telling them my decision and they were furious. They threw me out the moment I told them."
You turn to Kuroo and bury your face into the crook of his neck. He hugs you tighter than he did before while rubbing comforting circles on your back.
"I was so scared. I had nowhere to go and no idea how to take care of myself and my baby." You sobbed. "Good thing grandma called and I told her everything that happened. Grandpa picked me up in an instant and ever since then they've taken care of me and the triplets. They gave me the strength and guidance that I needed at the time and I couldn't be more thankful."
Kuroo’s eyes had gotten teary when you glanced up at his face. You cup his face with your hands. “Then you came. I didn’t realize that even though I had my grandparents and the triplets I was still incomplete. You complete me, Tetsu. Thank you very much.”
The tears pooling around Kuroo’s eyes rolled down his cheeks and into your hand upon hearing your words. He placed his hand on your cheek and placed his lips into yours. The kiss shared between the two of you spoke the words you wanted to express to each other. I love you, thank you, I treasure you and so on. You pulled back to gaze at his face before placing kisses all over his face.
“I love you.” A kiss on the forehead. “I love you.” On the left cheek. “I love you.” The right cheek. “I love you.” And finally, on the lips.
You stopped and stared into his eyes, both of you sharing a warm gaze.
“I love you, Kuroo Tetsurou. So much.”
“I love you even more, (L/N) (Y/N).”
The five of you came home the next day but not before your grandmother doted on you, again. It felt like the day you moved out all over again but this time Kuroo has to endure it, too. He didn’t find it to be 'ridiculous' as you did. Apparently, his grandmother was like this to him as well when he lived with them, probably even worse.
“Take care of my darling (Y/N), okay? Never leave her side. And make sure to always make my baby boys happy.” Kuroo must have said at least a hundred 'Yes, ma'am's at the span of his conversation with your grandmother. “I leave everything to you.”
“Grandma, it’s not like we’re not going to see each other again, okay? We'll come back as soon as we can.” You say as you gently pulled you grandmother away from your boyfriend.
“You never know, darling.”
“Stop it. We'll come back soon. Love you.” You place a kiss on both her and your grandfather’s cheeks before walking to the car. You wave at them one last time before rolling up the car windows.
While driving Kuroo kept glancing at you from time to time, looking like he has something to say. It didn’t bother you at first but it had become too often. It was dangerous, seeing as he was driving at the moment, so you turn to him.
“Is there something you want to say, love?” He visibly tensed up at your sudden question.
“Well, you see, I've been thinking. Since, um,” He continued rambling for a few more seconds before taking a deep breath and getting right to the point. “Sinceialwayssleepoveranywayandtheboyskeeplookingformewheni’mgonewhydon’twejustmoveintogetherit’snotlikeit’sanydifferentright?”
You look at him confused. What did he say? You couldn’t even catch a word other than 'since.’ He concluded from the look on your face that you didn’t understand him at all so he mustered up the courage to speak again.
“I said, since I always sleep over anyway and the boys keep looking for me when I'm gone, why don't we just move in together?” You continued staring at him in confusion, but this time you were confused about why he was so nervous to ask you that in the first place. It's not like you would say no anyway.
“What were you so nervous about? Of course I'll say yes. I've been thinking about that, too.” Kuroo just wanted to pull you in his lap and give you a tight hug at that moment. Unfortunately for him, he was driving so all he could do was grab your hand and give it a kiss as he keeps his eyes on the road.
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visionsofus · 5 years
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Field Trips, Infinity Stones, and oh mY GOD IS THAT SPIDER-MAN?
| CH1  |  CH2  |  CH3  |  CH4  |  CH5  |  CH6  |  CH7  |  CH8  |  CH9  |  AO3 
| CHAPTER 10 - endings and beginnings | 
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Even though the battle had ended hours ago Peter's blood continued to pump desperately through his veins. It was as though his body had registered that he was safe now but was still on high alert, ready for whatever might come next. It was exhilarating, if somewhat exhausting.
Peter had said goodbye to his classmates three hours earlier. They'd be at the memorial later that night but given where they'd be standing compared to where Peter was supposed to be… it was unlikely that he would see them.
"I'll see you at school then…" Peter said looking down at his feet and then glancing up to meet MJ’s gaze.
"See you then." MJ said slowly, her eyes searching Peter's face.
Peter turned to leave, tugging his backpack closer to his back with one hand. "Peter wait," MJ said reaching out and lightly touching his hand. Peter stopped in his tracks and turned around slowly as she slid her hand into his and squeezed it.
"Remember," She said and with her other hand reached up to brush her finger tips against Peter's temple lightly, "here", her hands moved down to where his heart was "and here." Peter's Spidey senses were still raring to go and the proximity of her hand to his life force made him almost recoil instinctively away. But Peter remained still, brought back by the memory of her words earlier that afternoon.
'For the record I don't think that you ever really lose someone.'
Peter swallowed, looking down at her hand as she withdrew it from his chest. He didn't really know what to say to that. His gratitude couldn't really be put into words, so he settled for a tender squeeze of her other hand which was still in his.
Slowly, MJ let go, allowing Peter to turn around and say goodbye to Ned.
"In case we don't get to see you later," Ned began enveloping Peter in a tight hug, "you'll be fine, I mean come on you're Spider-Man," Ned said quietly. "But if you need to chat later or you need a distraction or anything, just give me a call."
"Thanks Ned." Peter said grinning as he withdrew from the hug.
Though he had tried to ignore it, Peter’s mind had somewhat been spinning after his interaction with MJ and had drawn his focus away from the people he ended up having dinner with. He’d felt good as he ate with May, Happy and Morgan but that high had quickly crashed as soon as they arrived back at Stark Industries.
"Your suit." May said having retrieved a black clothes bag from the back of Happy's car.
Peter raised an eyebrow in surprise.
“Don’t worry, I mean suit, suit." May said smiling and unzipping the bag a fraction so that Peter could see the lapel of the formal jacket.
"Oh right." Peter said, mildly embarrassed but taking it from her non the less.
The Stark Industries bathrooms were not the most comfortable place to get changed into a two-piece suit, but Peter had definitely gotten changed in worse places… he wasn't sure what that said about him and so decided not to dwell on it further. He stepped out into the blue lit bathroom, tugging at the corners of his jacket to straighten it out at the top.
Peter braced his hands on the bathroom sink top and looked at the mirror and at the face staring back. His eyes were looking a lot better compared to how they had appeared at lunch time which was a relief, though Peter couldn’t predict how they might look by the end of the memorial. He wasn’t quite sure what to expect but knew that Pepper’s speech was likely to be emotional. He ran a quick hand through is hair to neaten it out a bit more and looked himself up and down. The quicker this was over, the better.
The drive to City Hall was quiet and a lot shorter than Peter would have liked. He'd expected a little more than the mere ten minutes it took to drive around the corner to gather his thoughts and make himself presentable. Pepper sat alongside Happy in the front of the car, quiet and poised as ever. Peter was sat in the middle of the backseat with his aunt and young Morgan who had insisted she didn't want to sit in the cramped middle seat. Naturally Peter had copped the fall. Morgan had her eyes fixed outside the window and was playing distractedly with one of Peter's hands.
"How are you feeling?" May said quietly, though in the dead silence of the car she might as well have been speaking into a megaphone.
"Alright." Peter said. He was neither good nor bad, in fact after his breakdown in the Lab and then everything else that had happened that afternoon, he was feeling sort of numb. It was a strange feeling and he only hoped that it wasn’t because his emotions were barricaded by a shaky wall that could collapse at any point.
"All right everyone, it's time." Happy said, pulling the car to a smooth stop at a designated parking spot that had been sectioned off for Pepper's entrance.
Happy looked sideways at Pepper and squeezed her hand in solidarity. She smiled back weakly, took a deep breath and opened her door with a soft click. As soon as she did Peter's senses were assaulted by the thrumming noise of shouting press and flashing cameras.
"Don't worry kid." Happy said hearing Peter's loud sigh in response to the crowds of press that were awaiting them. "They've been cornered off to the back, they won't bother you once you get further in towards the stage."
"Come on sweetie." Pepper said, having reached and opened Morgan's door.
"What about Peter?" Morgan asked, keeping a firm hold of Peter's hand.
"I'll be right behind you." Peter said squeezing her hand before pulling it gently from her own.
Morgan frowned and her eyes seemed to doubt him. It made Peter's heart hurt to think of the distrust and why Morgan felt that way. Tony had probably said something similar to her the last time she had seen him. It reminded Peter too much of the way that he had felt after his parents had died.
Morgan's brow furrowed and Peter thought for a moment that she was going to insist that he accompany them, but she relented and allowed herself to be taken out into the waiting eyes of the thousands gathered outside City Hall.
It was the first public memorial since Tony's death. The world had been in such a state following the snap and the return of half the population that Pepper had postponed any sort of public vigil until now. She had wanted the official funeral to be private anyway, the break had enabled her family and Tony's closest friends to mourn him first, before that privilege was shared with the rest of the world. It hadn't stopped the Iron Man shrines that Peter had seen popping up around the city.
Once Pepper and Morgan had made it through the press Happy turned to Peter and nodded to the door. "Our turn."
May reached over to squeeze Peter's shoulder as he braced himself against the door that Morgan had just exited from. He took a deep breath and held it, feeling his heart slow before letting the breath out again as he slowly pushed the door open. As soon as he had he wanted to retreat back behind the protection of the tinted windows and pretend that he wasn't here. But he knew he couldn't… he had to get through this, he owed it to Tony.
"Alright, head down the centre and towards the right, you'll see the others waiting by the stage." Happy told him, holding the door open so that May could follow.
Peter kept his eyes trained on the ground as he walked swiftly through the pathway that divided the press around him. The cameras flashed and Peter raised a hand to shield his eyes from the painful brightness of it all, trying to focus on putting one foot in front of the other.
What on earth were these people photographing him for? They didn't know he was Spider-Man, they couldn’t. Right now, he was just Peter Parker, a high school nobody. Were they just keen to get his photo after seeing him exit the same car as Tony's immediate family?
"Peter Parker, what can you tell us about your relationship to Tony Stark? We'd love a statement!" Someone yelled to his left.
"Some have labelled you Stark's protégé, what do you have to say to that Mr Parker?" Another woman yelled, getting far too close to Peter's face for comfort.
The question made Peter stop in his tracks, heart thundering.
Protégé?
Was this a joke?
"Peter, honey?" May said reaching his side and putting a comforting hand on his back.
"I can't." Peter said his voice thick with emotion. He was beginning to feel out of control, all the sounds and sights around him weren't helping at all.
"Yes, you can." Happy said putting a firm hand on Peter's shoulder and walking him forward. In that moment it was all Peter needed to stop himself from falling apart in the middle of what the press seemed to think was a reality programme or some sort of approved conference, rather than the memorial of the man who had saved their lives.
Protégé?
Happy steered Peter through the people and round to the right, avoiding the thousands that had gathered before the stage. As they walked, a roped off area of chairs came into view and Peter caught sight of the other Avengers. He spotted Bruce first, his huge form putting him head and shoulders above everyone else. Beside him were Wanda, Sam and Bucky, all dressed respectfully in black. Representing Wakanda in her brother's absence was Shuri, dressed in what appeared to be a combination of traditional Wakandan mourning clothes and a black floor length dress. An empty seat that read Peter Parker had been placed between Shuri and Carol Danvers, with Nick Fury to her right. Behind them sat Valkyrie, on behalf of New Asgard, along with Stephen Strange, Nebula and Thor, both of whom had seemingly made the trip back from wherever it was they had been in space in order to attend the memorial. Alongside them were Scott, Hope and Clint.
"May will be right over here if you need anything, and I'm just up there." Happy said indicating the stage at the front of the still growing crowd. "If you need anything just shoot me a text, or I'm sure one of these sods will be able to help you."
"Thanks, Happy." Peter said, surprising the man by hugging him quickly and tightly. "Don't know what I'd be doing without you."
"It's what I do." Happy said supportively as Peter drew back again. "I did it for Tony and you can be darn sure I'll do it for you too." Happy's voice cracked slightly with emotion and he pulled a handkerchief out to dab at his eyes as he left Peter with the Avengers and took his place up on the stage beside Colonel Rhodes, Morgan and Pepper.
Peter was gestured into the area by a man in a smart suit with an ear piece. Peter nodded his thanks and made his way slowly over to his seat.
Bruce squeezed his arm as he passed, and Peter smiled weakly in response. He nodded a couple of greetings and froze when Thor rose from his seat to embrace Peter in a tight hug. Thor's beard was damp with tears, but it didn't stop Peter from returning the hug with vigour. Who knew when he'd next get to see the god of thunder.
Peter sat down quietly in between Carol and Shuri.
"Good to see you again, Peter." Carol said smiling at him sympathetically, "I wish it were under different circumstances."
"Me too.' Peter said returning the smile as much as he could bring himself to.
"It is sad, yet beautiful at the same time." Shuri said and Peter glanced at her, ready to ask what she meant. Her eyes, however, were cast out to the crowd before them that was beginning to quieten now that Pepper had moved up to the podium and the microphone that sat on it.
Peter had managed to keep his eyes down as he had walked to his seat but now that he was away from the press and somewhat off to the side, out of the prying eyes of the public, he took the time to take in the scene before him. Thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of people were cramped outside the front of City Hall, spilling out over the sidewalk and onto the road. Those who couldn’t fit were up in the buildings surrounding the square, with windows open so they could hear and see what was happening below. Peter knew that somewhere amongst that crowd were his classmates. He spotted them pretty quickly, the yellow Midtown blazers standing out clearly in the crowd. He picked out MJ and Ned easily and watched them for a while. As though he could feel Peter’s eyes on him Ned looked to the right, catching sight of Peter sitting in the front row of seats with the other Avengers. Ned’s jaw dropped open in shock and Peter smiled weakly as Ned hastily grabbed MJ’s attention, indicating where Peter was sitting. Even from where he was sitting Peter could see MJ tilt her heard in surprise and something like realisation dawned on her face, followed quickly by a wry smile that made Peter nervous. She elbowed Flash next to her, pointing at where Peter was sitting. Before he could meet Flash’s eyes Peter turned back to the crowd, continuing to take in the sight before him. Deep down he knew that he would have enjoyed the look of shock on Flash’s face but right now it didn’t seem to matter. After everything that had happened, Flash’s poking and prodding seemed like the childish concerns of a high school student, and sitting up there with the Avengers, Peter didn’t really feel like one.
Look back out over the crowd Peter could see that everyone held a candle of some kind and, as the sky had darkened considerably now, light was beginning to spread as people passed around their lighters or simply shared their flame with the person standing beside them. The light spread as the chatter died and even the press quietened, save for the occasional flash of a camera. As Peter's eyes drifted over the crowd in front of him, he felt something akin to being punched in the stomach. Every other child - no it had to be more than that - was wearing some sort of Iron Man memorabilia. Mostly masks, though Peter could see T-Shirts and toys as well.
"Thank you all for gathering today, I cannot express how much it means to my family… how much it would have meant for Tony, to see you all here today." Pepper began her speech, her voice crackling out over the speakers that were set up around the perimeter of the crowd.
Peter's eyes followed the crowd, so intently that Pepper's voice became a sort of background noise. He didn't do it to disrespect her, in fact if anything he did it out of extreme respect for Pepper’s speech giving skills. He knew the effect that her eulogy to Tony Stark would have on him. He knew what Pepper was going to say, he had already heard the more authentic version at Tony's real funeral and the words had stuck with him so strongly that he wasn't sure he could take hearing it again. So instead he focused on the crowd, he watched the emotions of the strangers before him as a way to prevent his own from causing him pain, and slowly he began to dissociate from the situation at hand. He watched as a woman clutched her husband and son to her tightly, squeezing both their hands and looking up to the sky, which had turned a mottled grey in the dimming light, as though thanking god for giving Tony Stark the strength to save her family. Two brothers stood side by side, shoulder to shoulder, thanking Tony Stark for bringing them back to life in time to say farewell to their aged mother, allowing her to pass in peace. A father steadied his young son, who was perched atop his shoulders, and squeezed the six-year old's hands, thanking fate for taking them together during the Snap and then thanking Tony Stark for having the power to bring them both back. A boy, barely 17 stood with his hands shoved in his pockets, hiding the yellow and red spray paint stained fingers that had created yet another Iron Man mural not thirty minutes ago. His father disapproved but that didn't stop him paying respect to the hero that the world had so desperately needed. A young woman stood alone, she had been alone before the snap and was alone after it, but Tony Stark's sacrifice had brought her back to life so she had a duty to do something with it this time, in fact, she had just been successful in her application to Stark Industries and would be starting in the fall. Beside her a young girl took her hand, helping to light the candle grasped in her palms with her own. As it's light lit up her face, she smiled.
Peter looked out over the people before him, their faces lit by the warm light of candles and the many emotions displayed there. In that moment it really hit him how many lives that Tony Stark had touched in his lifetime. There was sincerity on every face, uniting them all in the face of grief. None of those faces held the bitterness that Peter had seen in the six people who had broken into Stark Industries that afternoon. He had noticed the bitterness in himself even, the regret at having lost his parents, uncle Ben and then Tony Stark and not being able to do anything to stop any of it. There was the annoyingly persistent feeling that there was something Peter could have, should havedone better to make sure that Tony had lived to see his daughter grow up. In that moment Peter made the conscious decision to put the bitterness behind him. He wouldn't allow himself to become like Daniel, destroyed by anger and regret. Peter would honour Tony's memory, he'd continue Tony's legacy to the best of his ability and hopefully one day feel that he would have made Tony proud. At least that was how he felt deep down but given his present situation and the internal conflict he was feeling about being Spider-Man, it would likely be a little more complicated than that.
Peter was struggling to see past the mistiness in his eyes at this point and started slightly when Nick Fury reached past Carol to pass him a handkerchief. Peter took it wordlessly and pressed it to his eyes as he let the tears fall quietly. The feeling of the soft cotton against his eyes grounded him once more and all his senses returned to him.
Shuri took a hold of his left hand gently, grasping Bucky's beside her as one by one, the Avenger's took their comrades hands in solidarity and stood. Those amongst the crowd who had been sitting now rose. At the front of the crowd Happy, Morgan and Rhodey came to stand beside Pepper.
"Please join us in a moment of silence." Pepper said emotionally, stepping off the podium and pulling Morgan into her arms.
Peter breathed deeply in the quiet hush that fell as some bowed their head in grief, whilst others cast their eyes to the sky in thanks. It was not quite silent though. All throughout the crowd people were passing whispers of 'we will not forget'.
Peter felt the tears falling from his eyes once more and bit his lip to keep from letting a quiet sob escape. On his left Carol Danvers squeezed his hand, a reminder that he wasn't alone. The people around him, this amazing group of individuals who all made the conscious decision every day to put their powers to good use and help the people around them. They who had lost but come back stronger than ever. Peter had always felt somewhat separate due to his age but in that moment, he felt he stood on equal ground with the other Avengers, he really felt like he was part of something. It was a feeling he didn't want to give up.
Stay to the right of the crowd, May will join you soon and I'll swing the car round to pick you both up.
Peter read Happy's message again to be sure that he was in the right place. He stood weakly on his tippy toes as he peered out over the dispersing crowd, casting an ear out for the sound of May's voice but hearing nothing notable.
"Queens." Said a quiet voice and Peter started, spinning to his left.
"Mr Rogers?" Peter asked curiously, looking at the old man now standing beside him.
"Do I look that different?" said the slightly older (ok perhaps slightlywas being too polite) version of Captain America. Peter had no idea how Steve was still able to sneak up on him even in his old age.
"No- uh no of course not." Said Peter, stumbling over his words awkwardly and looking Cap up and down.
"Good to see you again kid." Steve said smiling. "How are you holding up?"
"Yeah I'm ok." Peter said trying for a light tone but failing miserably. "Why weren't you with everyone at the front?"
"I wanted to be out among the crowd for a bit." Steve said. "Plus, it’d be a little difficult to live life normally if everyone knows my identity again." Steve looked up the buildings towering around them, lit brightly against the now dark backdrop of the sky. "Will we catch you swinging around New York any time soon? It would be good to have you out there again."
"Ah… well my suit got kind of fried today and it's broken now." Peter said solemnly, looking down at his shiny black shoes.
"So?"
Peter frowned and looked up at Steve. "What do you mean ‘so’? I can't exactly 'swing around New York' without the suit."
"So fix it." Steve said as though it were obvious. "They're calling you Stark's protégé out there and I don't doubt that you can live up to that title."
"Well I don't know… it's not really that simple." Peter said scratching the back of his head.
"I don't know kid, it sounds pretty simple to me." Steve said warmly, clapping Peter on the back. Peter twisted his head as a car beeped in their direction and saw Happy waiting for him on the other side of the street.
"I gotta-" Peter began but turned to find that Steve had left, “go…”. A bobbing blue cap disappearing into the crowd was the only indication that the retired Captain America had even been there at all.
Peter frowned but crossed the street anyway, conscious of the way that Steve's words were now ringing through is head and the fact that his backpack, and more importantly his suit was in the back of Happy's car.
So Fix it.
Peter was silent as Happy drove them all back to Stark Industries, Cap's words buzzing in his head.
"Peter?" Pepper said and Peter started, looking around and realising that Pepper was now outside, speaking to him through the window that Happy had put down. "A word?"
Peter nodded wordlessly and popped the car handle, pushing the door open as he stepped out into the slight chill of the night. He couldn't help being slightly apprehensive of what Pepper wanted to talk to him about. It was no doubt something to do with her ominous comment about his ‘future at Stark Industries’ she had mentioned earlier and the lab on the 27th floor which they hadn't had the chance to talk about yet.
"I know it's not the best timing and I'm sure that you're tired after everything that happened today…" Pepper pulled a clear folder from her handbag and extended it to Peter. He recognised the logo of Stark Industries on its surface. "We want you here… Tony would have wanted you here. Of course, it's entirely your decision and if you decide you want to focus on school I completely understand. But we could really use you."
Peter frowned. "You mean you could use my brain."
Pepper smiled, "No… we could use Peter Parker, every part of him."
Peter's brow furrowed further into what could have resembled a scowl to someone who didn't know him very well. Pepper could practically see the cogs working in his brain as he thought.
"I really don't think that I am cut out for all this. That lab, everything that Mr Stark talked about… I just don't think that I could do all that."
"Don't you get it Peter? You already were before the Snap, whether that was as Spider-Man or not you were helping people, people that need help. Tony could see it. I see it. So why don't you?"
Peter didn't know what to say to that.
"Just take the file and have a read over it. The contract doesn't have a starting date yet so it's whenever you feel that you are ready. There’s no rush but I hope you seriously consider it." Pepper said and Peter slowly took the file from her. She squeezed his shoulder once and went back to the car to talk to May.
Peter looked down at the file and the logo on its surface. Stark Industries. This place had become something of a haven for Peter from the troubles of being a high school student, and, occasionally, the struggles of being Spider-Man. Tony had given him a place to work, to put his brain into practical use and try and change the world even if it was only one or two tiny steps at a time.
"Peter we better get going!" May called out the open window from where Happy was waiting to drive them back home.
"Just give me a second!" Peter said, slinging his backpack round to his chest and rooting through it to find his earpiece case. His hands brushed past Tony's hard drive and the cool metal casing of his broken suit. His fingers closed around the black plastic of his earpiece and he pulled it out hastily.
"Karen?" He asked having gotten one of the buds into his ear.
"Hello Peter? How was the memorial?" Karen said immediately responding to his voice.
"It was ok. I just need to talk to you for a moment."
"Of course."
"I've just been offered a job at Stark Industries…" Saying it out loud seemed to make everything more real.
"Congratulations."
"Thanks. I just don't know if I should take it? You saw how I was in the Spider suit the other night and that wasn’t even under pressure.”
“I have been researching more strategies to cope with panic attacks should they happen again in the future.” Karen said after a moment, her artificial brain searching for what Peter needed from her.
“It’s not just that though… I haven’t really been Spider-Man this last month. I don’t know if I’m cut out to do it anymore… I don’t know if I’m worthy…” Peter said, the words tasted bad as the left his mouth.
"I have sent a scan of your body and vitals that was taken by the suit today to your phone." Karen said.
Peter raised his eyebrows in surprise and fished his phone out of his pocket, opening the email that he had just received from Karen.
"In the left-hand corner, you will see a rundown of your hormones, in particular I recorded the level of dopamine, if you compare this with the time you took the suit out and had the panic attack the levels are drastically different."
"How did you manage to do that." Peter said as he brought both scans up side by side. Despite wearing the suit both times, his body seemed to be in two very different states.
"I can explain to you another time but what I am trying to get across is that you were happy being Spider-Man today."
"Happy? It was so stressful though."
"The hormone doesn't lie. Nor does the audio-visual footage that the suit collected today, shall I show some of those?"
"No, no need. I get what you are saying." Peter said.
"Perhaps we can see about getting clinical help for your panic attacks. From then I believe that you will be right back on track to where you were five years ago. I know you still enjoy being Spider-Man, Peter, the science doesn't lie."
"Ok, say that I do love being Spider-Man and I still have what it takes. How do you know that I still have what it takes as Peter Parker, especially a Peter Parker who works at Stark Industries with a private lab? I'm damaged goods Karen. I've lost almost everyone important in my life and I've been powerless to stop it every single time."
"I did not think you were the type to give up Peter. I cannot convince you of your own worth, it would be meaningless for me to try - that is something you have to figure out yourself." Karen said and then fell silent.
Peter waited for her to say something more, but it appeared she had effectively ‘hung up’ on their communication. "Rude." Peter muttered taking the ear piece out again.
He knew he loved being Spider-Man. Karen was right about the Dopamine, he hadfelt good today. That moment when the suit found him as he fell had been terrifyingly wonderful and had made him realise exactly how much he had missed being Spider-Man, how much he wouldmiss it if he were to actually give up. But working at SI would be a whole other step up - he was barely in control of himself, he didn't know what exactly being a proper employee, not just an intern anymore, would entail. Again, he looked down at the file clamped tightly in his hands.
You're good enough.
Tony's words in the recorded message from the lab spun through his head over and over until slowly he started believing it.
They're calling you Stark's protégé out there and I don't doubt that you can live up to that title.
Peter didn't feel he deserved that title quite yet… but he was sure that he could do something with his brain. Surely, he could put what Mr Stark had taught him to good use somehow? But where to start, he wasn’t ready to accept the position just yet, but his mind was awake now and he felt the need to do something.
So fix it.
Peter's mind darted to his broken suit sitting in the back of Happy’s car. Perhaps that was the first step. Fix the machine and then turn his attention to fixing himself. One step at a time.
Suddenly his brain started going a million miles an hour, darting to solutions for the suit, perhaps he might even make some additions of his own. There was so much that he wanted to do, and his fingers were itching to work. He hadn't felt like this for a month. He hadn't even wanted to look at tech since the battle. Something had changed today.
"We'll see you soon Peter." Pepper said hopefully, walking back over to him holding a sleepy Morgan in her arms.
Peter bit his lip and nodded, his mind still spinning as thoughts flew through it. Pepper walked past him towards Stark Industries entrance. She had just reached the doors when Peter's mind snapped into a decision and he jumped forward, running after Pepper.
"Wait!"
Pepper turned around, eyebrows raised in question as Peter reached her.
"Wait…" Peter clutched the file to his chest. "I don't have an answer yet, but I'd like to take the first step to maybe having a decision."
"What are you suggesting?" Pepper said curiously.
"My suit…I broke it today. Let me stay over at the lab this weekend. I'll fix it. I have to fix it. I think that might help me get back into my old swing." Peter explained, trying not to babble.
"I don't have a problem with it, that lab is there for your use." Pepper said mulling it over. "If May says its ok, you're welcome to stay."
"Thanks." Peter said grinning and dashing back to the car, if Karen could take a scan of his body now, he was sure that she would be able to see a ton of Dopamine. With excitement thrumming through his veins Peter threw open the car door and pulled his very best puppy eyes out to plead with May.
"Uh oh," May said recognising the expression that had tricked her into buying candy and ice creams when he was younger, "what do you want?"
"Well," Peter began, searching for the best combination of words that might encourage May to let him get away with this. "Pepper has offered me a job here at Stark Industries and I've told her I'll consider it, I'm still not sure what is happening with the future."
May nodded approvingly but was not as surprised as Peter had expected. She eyed the file he held, she’d most likely want to look through the contract herself later.
"But in the meantime, my Spidey suit is fried, and I really need it back up and running so I can take it out and y'know start being Spider-Man again…" Peter said trailing off and looking pleadingly at May. His gaze shifted to Happy who was smiling knowingly. "So, Pepper said it's alright if I stay here at SI over the weekend and work on my suit in my lab."
"Hold up." May said putting a finger up. "Your lab?"
"Yeah… it was supposed to be a birthday present from Mr Stark." Peter explained.
"Wow ok…" May said thoughtfully. "I don't know Peter, you'll be having finals soon and that's really important for college - yes I know you've already gotten several scholarships, but I thought we were holding out for MIT? I don't really like the idea of you being at this lab all weekend either, I know how you and Tony used to get with work - he was the only reason you took any breaks!"
"Yes, I am but this could really help." Peter pleaded. "You know what this last month has been like, I need this May. I lost part of myself at the end of last month and today was the first time that I really felt like I had gained some of that back, I don't want to stop now."
May frowned sceptically and looked at Happy, who seemed to be all for Peter's proposal.
"Please," Peter sighed defeatedly, "if you let me stay, I promise I'll think seriously about talking to a counsellor."
May's head snapped towards Peter in shock. "Sorry? What made you change your mind? On Monday you wouldn't even let me get a sentence out about counselling."
"Ah well Karen talked to me and I don't know… maybe it could be a good idea?"
"Oh, what? So the robot's advice matters more."
"Well she does sorta know everything, or at least has the capacity to." Peter shrugged sheepishly.
"Get down her idiot." May said holding her arms out for a hug. "You better get some rest tonight though! None of this working all night and all day ok? I expect to get texts keeping me in the loop with what is happening, and you better be home in time for dinner on Sunday otherwise you are going to be seriously grounded."
“I’ll make sure he is.” Happy assured her helpfully.
"Thank you." Peter said squeezing his aunt tightly.
"Take care of yourself, do you need me to drop anything by tomorrow morning?" May asked.
"I think I should still have some clothes from last time hopefully." Peter said only realising later how silly that was – surely they wouldn’t have kept his clothes for five years?
"Alright, keep in contact and I'll see you Sunday." May said withdrawing from the hug and looking at Happy. "Oh don't give me that smug look, I know this is what you wanted."
"See you later kid." Happy said smiling and tipped his head to Peter.
Peter grinned and dashed around the other side of the car to get to the boot, high fiving Happy on his way. Happy popped the back of the car open and Peter grabbed his backpack, shouldering it and feeling relief at the weight of the suit against his back. Satisfied, Peter walked back over to the entrance of SI.
"Looks like that is a yes then?" Pepper said adjusting Morgan in her arms.
"Yep." Peter said grinning. "Just for the weekend, I won't be in anyone's way… although if I could borrow the old room I used to sleep in that would be awesome."
"Of course, not much has changed though." Pepper said leading the way into the still bustling building. "Tony could never bring himself to get rid of your stuff."
"Welcome Spider-Man." Said the generic elevator bot once Peter had reached the 27th floor.
"It is good to have you back again Peter. Thank you for your help this afternoon. Are we likely to see you here often?" Friday asked, her voice crackling through the intercom of the elevator.
"Not sure, Friday." Peter said shrugging as he looked out down the corridor that led towards the lab at the end. "Still deciding."
"Of course, let me know if there is anything you need."
"Thanks Friday." Peter said stepping out into the corridor and getting a weird sense of déjà vu.
He tugged his backpack closer to his back and pushed up the sleeves of one of his old hoodies that he must have left last time he was at SI five years ago. Sure enough, the guest room Peter had used in the personal Stark quarters at SI was still the way that he had left it, along with a duffel bag containing several changes of clothes. The jumper had a faintly old smell about it, but Peter couldn't really bring himself to care - it was better than keeping on the suit he had been in for the memorial.
Yet again Peter was asked to say his name at the doors, and he obliged, watching them slide open to reveal the dark abyss that was the lab… his lab.
Peter was prepared for the light this time when he switched the electricity on and wasn't as shocked as he took the room in.
"Karen?" Peter called out and watched as the holo-tables jumped to life and her familiar voice crackled over the intercom.
"Welcome back Peter, I'm glad to see you have made this decision. I really think it is wise."
"Yeah, yeah. I know you're always right."
"One of the side effects of being Artificial Intelligence I am afraid."
Peter grinned and laughed at her.
"I guess you couldn't just open the glass case, it had to break huh?" Peter said looking over to his suit cases and seeing that the one that had held the Iron Spider suit was now in shattered pieces on the floor.
"Time was of the essence. I'll put an order in for a new one." Karen replied.
"What is the plan?" Karen asked once Peter had set his backpack down on one of the counter tops and started to unpack it.
"Fix my suit I guess?" Peter said pulling out the folded-up suit and laying it out fully on the table. "Though I am not entirely sure where to start."
"I'll bring up the schematics so you can see everything on a holo-table." Karen said and seconds later a hologram layout of his suit appeared on the holo-table to his left.
"Thanks." Peter said and enlarged it, looking at the red areas which Karen had identified as areas in need of attention.
He blew the hologram up bigger so that he could actually pull apart some of the hologram wires and try and mimic what he would need to do with the suit. He connected a wire wrongly and holographic sparks exploded, it was like he was playing a game of operation. "Ah that was dumb," Peter said at his mistake and scratched his head, looking closer at the suit. "Hey Karen, if I write you a list of tools, I need can we somehow get them up here?"
Peter was so distracted by the hologram that he didn't register the clicking and whirring of an object shifting around the corner.
"No need, it appears that Mr Stark already bought everything you’d need, check the draws to your left for tools."
Indeed, when Peter opened the stainless-steel draws beneath the workbench, he found all the tools he could have possibly wanted and more. Peter got out what he needed onto the bench and laid everything out neatly. He placed his suit at the centre with his tools just to the right, and to his left was his backpack, Tony's hard drive and his new access card which he couldn't help admiring every now and then.
Something had changed in him. Perhaps Shuri's invention frying his suit was exactly the motivation that Peter needed to begin working through his grief. He now was able to comprehend why he had been so averse to any contact with the suit or even with the lab as he had seen earlier that day. His heart and his brain weren't processing his grief, they hadn't been. No matter how much he cried, no matter how much regret he felt, no matter how many times he chose to feel numb instead … Peter wasn't allowing himself to process the passing of Tony Stark. And it was about damn time he start. He had been beating himself up for a month, subconsciously punishing himself for something he couldn't change and he probably couldn't have stopped if what Doctor Stephen Strange had said was true. Tony wouldn't have wanted Peter to keep moping. Peter realised that now.
Just like he was sure Tony might have done, Peter began to work as he processed his thoughts. He let his hands take over as he tinkered on the suit and let his brain flow free, not stopping himself or beating himself up for thinking of Tony or Natasha or the battle with Thanos. He let himself feel sad as he remembered Tony. He decided that just as he wasn't going to allow grief to make him bitter, he wasn't going to let sadness or emotion be an enemy. Emotion wasn't weakness but if he let this all build up things were just going to get worse and worse and Peter didn't want that to happen.
While Peter worked, he chatted on and off with Karen, mostly about mundane things. He had been working for almost half an hour when a crash around the corner made him jump. Was there someone else in here with him? Surely not.
"Hello?" he called out anyway.
He got up from the workbench and followed the wall around past glass windows towards what was a larger work space, in fact it looked more like a testing space. Peter switched on another set of lights and expected to come face to face with some horror, he even braced himself for it, wondering whether he should race back and grab a web shooter for protection.
Instead it was a rather interesting looking robot. It stood by the glass window, seemingly looking out at the wonderful view the lab had of New York.
It took a moment before Peter recognised the robot as one of Tony's.
"Dum-E?" Peter said hesitantly and the robot whirred, turning its claw towards him and clicking softly.
Peter watched as the robot trundled towards him surprisingly quickly and stepped out of the way as it went into the work space he had just left.
"What are you doing here?" Peter asked, following close behind.
Dum-E of course did not respond and instead it was Karen who spoke up. "Security footage shows Happy Hogan depositing Dum-E here this afternoon before you went for dinner."
"Damn." Peter pondered. "Guess Happy really thought that I would come back right?"
"It appears he has faith in you."
"Looks like I have some expectations to fulfil." Peter said returning to the work bench. Honestly! Pepper offering him a job. The press and Steve Rogers calling him Tony's protégé. Now Happy seemingly knowing Peter even better than he thought he knew himself. Peter was starting to realise quite how big the shoes he was trying to fill were.
He watched Dum-E for a little bit but the robot mostly busied itself with cleaning up the shattered glass on the floor near Peter's suit cases.
"Thanks Dum-E." He called out and the robot clicked and whirred in response.
Peter managed to work peacefully for another fifteen minutes before he was startled by the sound of Dum-E bumping into the large holo-table in the centre of Peter's workspace, causing the dormant device to burst to life. The robot fumbled as it dropped the dustpan full of glass and Peter sighed - this was probably why Tony had called it Dum-E.
The robot whirred what sounded oddly like disappointment. It collected the class up again and set the dustpan on the holo-table this time - seemingly leaving it for Peter to take care of. The movement somehow brought to life the video that had been playing when Peter had left his lab earlier that afternoon.  
"I'm sure things aren't ideal right now but know that whatever life throws at you, you have the strength to get through it all, no matter what, I know you-" Tony had burst to life against the holo-table, scaring Dum-E so badly that the robot almost fell over. Peter jumped up to pause the video. Mr Stark flickered slightly in his paused state and Dum-E clicked sadly. He turned his head to Peter and clacked his claws together once before turning back to the screen.
Peter sighed deeply. If he was going to keep using the lab and potentially take a job at SI, then he should hear the rest of what past-Tony had to say.
With a shaky hand, Peter reached out and pressed the play button, watching as the hologram came back into focus and Tony began to speak once more.
"-can do it. I've never met a kid like you before Peter, and no I'm not just talking about your weird Spidey powers. You,Peter Parker, are enough. In fact, your more than enough, you have such a huge capacity to do good and what's even more amazing about that is that you wantto."
Peter breathed deeply and tried his best to believe the words that Tony was saying. But his eyes were beginning to sting again, and the words were so overwhelmingly positive that he struggled to process it all. Somehow, he felt so different compared to the first time he had been at the lab. He really meant what he had said to May earlier, Peter had lost a part of himself and it seemed that things were slowly starting to get back on track - maybe watching the rest of Tony's message would help him somehow.
"I know I was just a mentor, but you have to know that I love you, kid. You are so unapologetically good. You're one of the few of us that are. I know you're young, but I can tell already that you are going to do seriously incredible things and I intend on being there every step of the way-" Peter's heart tugged painfully at that, "because someone has to take the credit for teaching you so well, right?"
Peter chuckled emotionally.
"Anyway, this is dragging on a little bit, so I'll wrap it up here. If all goes according to plan, I'll be seeing you in a few days and this video will be deleted and buried so deep it’ll never see the life of day. If not? Then hopefully neither of us cry too much." Tony turned around about to press pause but then seemed to think better of it.
"One last thing. I can remember the first time I met you so clearly. I remember asking you why you did the things you did, whyyou were Spider-Man, not just the kid with freakish powers." Tony said crossing his arms. "And you told me that when you could do the things you can, but you don't the bad things that happen are on your shoulders. That's stuck with me a long-time kid, who knew the words of a fifteen-year-old could be so influential. I trust that you're still sticking true to your moral code." With that the hologram shut off and the video ended and Peter was left feeling almost winded with grief.
Peter bowed his head and tried to push off the short burst of shame he felt. Had he stayed true to his own code? He could remember telling Tony that all those years ago. It was true then. And as Peter searched his heart, he felt that it had to be true now too.
Peter pat Dum-E awkwardly on the head and went back to his work table. He stood there looking down at the suit, he had managed to piece back together most of it, but it was a slow process and it would probably take most of the night before the suit was fully functioning again.
As he worked, he continued to think of what Tony had said. Yes, Peter was still a bit of a mess, what had happened last month had broken him, or at least part of him. But Peter recognised recovery as a process, he was only now starting to get back on his feet and take the first shaky steps towards finding that part of himself he had lost with Tony Stark's passing. He still wanted to stay true to the words he had told Tony all those years ago and it would take time, but he was sure that he would get there. It was all about putting one foot in front of the other.
"Karen?"
"Yes Peter?"
"What's the weather like tonight?" Peter asked casually.  
"Clear sky tonight, approximately 70 degrees at present. There is little to no chance of rain and a north westerly breeze of 7 miles per hour."
"I'd say that sounds like perfect weather to take this suit out on the town, what do you say?" Peter asked as he worked.
"Sounds perfect to me Peter."
The moon was high above Peter's head as he crouched on top of Stark Industries. The head of his Iron Spider suit was down, allowing a soft breeze to ruffle his hair. Peter closed his eyes and enjoyed the feeling for a moment. He breathed in deeply, the air seemed cleaner up here than it did on the streets below.
Slowly, Peter stretched his arms up over his head and enjoyed the feeling of stretching after being cramped over his work bench for so long. As he did the plated surface of the suit shifted with him, clinking as it did. Once Peter had stretched upwards, he swung his arms by his side and tried to loosen his shoulders up a bit.
"Vitals are normal." Karen said in his ear.
"Yeah I feel ok." Peter said looking out over New York.
"Where would you like to begin?"
"I don't know, find me something interesting?"
"There are eight police vehicles currently in pursuit of a vehicle on Spring St, reports say the assailants have just robbed a bank." Karen provided helpfully and Peter grinned.
"Sounds perfect."
"I have noted a significant spike in your adrenaline Peter."
"Even better."
With that, Peter's helmet snapped up to protect his head as he took a few steps back and braced himself. Kicking off with his right leg he ran across the roof of Stark Industries, perhaps his soon to be place of employment, and launched himself off the side. While the suit blocked out the chill of the air that was streaming past him, the feeling of falling was still as incredible as ever. It was the closest Peter would get to flying. With the expert precision of someone who had done it for years, Peter aimed his web to the nearest building and shot it upwards, eyes flicking up to the night sky as he did.
He wrapped his hands around the web and allowed himself to soar upwards, letting out a cathartic yell of triumph as he did.
The recovery was going to be a process. But he had taken the first leap towards it and was prepared to put the effort in now. He would be Peter Parker, he would always be Peter Parker and no one could take that away from him. He would be the Peter Parker who tried to make Ned laugh each day and tried harder to earn a smile out of MJ. The Peter Parker who watched out for his aunt and made sure he didn’t worry her too much. He would continue to be the Peter Parker that Morgan Stark might need, an older brother watching out for her and always ready to help. To Happy and Pepper he would, perhaps, be the Peter Parker who worked at Stark Industries while, perhaps, completing a degree at MIT. To Tony Stark, Peter Parker had always been enough. Tony had been the first one to see the light of Peter Parker, to see the good that he could accomplish. It was Tony that had taught him that he was Peter Parker first and Spider-Man second, that Peter Parker was just as importantand just as worthyof his power with or without a mask.
Peter would do his best to keep the memory of Tony Stark alive. He'd try his best every day to make him proud, regardless of whether or not Tony knew that and was watching over him from some unknown world, perhaps in some undiscovered timeline. Peter would grieve when he could and ask for help when he needed it and slowly, he would gain back that piece of himself that he was searching for, whose loss had made him feel broken but had now provided him with the motivation to try harder.
And he would be the Peter Parker that the people needed. He would continue trying to right the wrongs of others and help people. Not because of the expectant words of Steve Rogers, or the shouted cries of ‘protégé’ from the press. Not because Pepper had asked him to join SI or because Happy had expected him to. Peter would do it because he wanted to, because he had a sincere desire to use his power for good. That was the most important thing.
That was what made him an Avenger.
THE END
stay tuned for the sequel 
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The End of the Line {S.Rogers, B.Barnes}
Summary:  Steve Rogers has come to a decision, but now it’s all about how Bucky and their girlfriend Y/N will react to all of it. 
Masterlist (ALL)
Requested?: No
Warnings: Language, mention of loss, angst, and of course
ENDGAME SPOILERS
Words: 3,000
Feel free to reach out if you want to be tagged.
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After Thanos was gone, everyone seemed to be glad to be reunited with the ones that had fallen, Tony with Peter. Rocket with his guardians, and of course Steve, with Bucky and their girlfriend. But as soon as they embraced, both Bucky and Y/N knew something wasn’t quite right with Steve. She planted a light kiss to his cheek, whispering in his ear, “We’ll talk later.” Grinning back at Bucky before joining in to fight alongside him. She occasionally offered Steve reassuring smiles that they both are okay when he caught her eye. As Thanos slowly faded into dust, she couldn’t help but be slightly afraid of what words were going to be shared when they had a chance. Something was going to happen with Steve, and whether Y/N was to like it or not, she was clearly unsure. Bucky seemed to have noticed this too, sending him questionable looks his way whenever he found a rightful time to do so. Now, as the Battlefield was no longer, and the familiar were reunited, there seemed to be a wall between Steve and the two people that meant the most to him. He knew he would have to tell them, in the end, no matter the pain it caused, he knew where a piece of his heart belonged, and now that he had the chance, in no way was he going to give that up, even if it meant there would be a negative on both sides of his choice. Telling Y/N the reason why would be hard, explaining his decision to let her go, and to leave her alone in the hands of Bucky was painful, though he knew it was the right choice, for his heart was divided between the two, and part of him knew it always would be, but you can never forget your first love. Y/N looked to Steve, giving him a knowing look that eventually, things will be discussed sorted out. He walked over to the pair, wrapping Y/N in his arms, finally able to cherish a moment with her without worrying about what was going to happen next. The sorrows of losing people forever were there, and he saw the saddened sparkle in her eyes after finding out about both Tony and Natasha. He released her from his arms, before hugging his pest pal. They both smiled at him, Bucky’s slightly strained, but hidden within was honest gratitude. While Y/N’s was harder to read, he could see the burden in her eyes, the blame, the sadness, but he could also see the relief, the resolved longing, and the love. In both ways, it made his chest flutter and a deep pang to bury itself inside. She leaned into him when he released Bucky, kicking at the dirt, “Y’know even though we won, in some ways, I still feel like we lost.”  She whispered, looking up to the duo slightly. They both knew what she felt, the grief of losing their friends laid in their hearts also, only to be masked with the relief of having those they had previously been dusted around them finally in person. Steve was the first to respond to her statement, meeting her eyes before speaking, “They did it for a good cause, we all would have.” Nodding in agreement, his ice blue eyes scanned the area, taking in the damage that had been done, “Doll, don’t let it upset you.” Grasping Bucky’s flesh hand and one of Steve's, she sighed, “I can’t help it. Tony and Nat are dead and I either wasn’t there to stop in or was to busy myself.” Steve wrapped his arms around her causing her to let go of their hands, stifling her sobs as she buried herself into his chest. They both knew things were going to change, they had lost two of their friends, and while Bucky had only known them for a shorter amount of time, he still felt the pain of their deaths.   The males looked at each other, both knowing about what they would have to discuss, but neither of them having the heart to do so now.
Tony’s funeral was hard on everyone that attended, deciding to stay with Steve during the ceremonial part of it, holding herself close to him. Shedding many more tears, she said her final goodbyes to the man that had taught her so much, though there was always the slight reassurance now that he no longer had to deal with the burden of saving the world.   When everyone began to separate, branching off into small groups she stayed with Steve. She smiled a sorrowful smile to her lover, facing him, “I’m going to miss him. No matter how many times he pissed me off.” She spoke. “Yeah, he was a good man at heart.” Glancing over to Bucky, Steve gestured, to join them, in which he happily (as much as he could be) made his presence known by wrapping his girl in his arms from behind, “We all miss him.” Bucky looked to his girlfriend, stunned by how strong she truly was. In the past few years, she dealing with losing five years of her life, losing her two best friends, fighting the titan that had either killed them or force them to die, yet she still stood there, holding a fragile smile on her face as she watched the water. He watched as she sat down on the grass, fidgeting till she found a comfortable placement where the grass didn’t irritate her legs. Bucky did the same, sitting behind her and letting her lean into him, her head placed on his lap. Steve was the last to sit down, taking her hand in his calloused one and pressing it to his lips multiple times. He knew the loss was still heavy in her heart, and his decision would only worsen that, so for now, he would stick with her, letting her heal before throwing one more life-changing event her way, “I love you, with almost everything.” he whispered, like he had done many times previously. To which she hummed in response, Leaning over to place a kiss on her golden boy's lips.
Three days it took for Steve to finally feel the absolute need to tell her, now that the time heist replica had been made, it must be done. “Darling, Buck.” Steve spoke up, taking in a deep breath as he saw Y/N look up from whatever book that currently rest in her hand, and Bucky perks up from his conversation with Wanda, “We should talk.” Y/N’s stomach dropped. The feeling she got from Steve was finally being addressed, and she couldn’t help but be slightly scared as to what was coming. Being the incredible Super Soldier boyfriend that he was, Bucky sensed the nerves and wrapped an arm around her shoulder in a sign of comfort. The silence between the three was off-putting as they walked through Peppers home, heading to the bedroom the three was currently set to live in for the time. The light click of there shoes and the sounds of breathing were all that heard until they reached the room, to which Steve let them enter first. And as he placed his hand on the small dip in her back, it was obvious she was tense about what was to happen. Bucky threw himself onto the bed, using the headboard to prop himself upwards as he waited for the other two to do the same. So when Steve saw Y/N's hesitation, he lightly seized her hand, leading her onto the bed, making it so she was to get comfortable between her boyfriends. Steve had her head rest on his chest with a hand linked within his own, much like how they used to when watching movies at the compound; while her back was turned to Bucky, who had adjusted to not be on the headboard, had their legs tangled and an arm was thrown across her stomach. They all laid there for a while, taking in each others company. Growing more anxious with each stroke of Steve’s thumb, she was the first to speak up, “Stevie?” Her voice was soft, breaking any sense of silence that rest in the air, “What’s on your mind?” It was now or never, and with a deep breath, he explained it, “Someone had to volunteer to put all the infinity stones back.” Steve spoke, pressing a kiss to the top of her head, trying to take in the scent of her shampoo, “so I did.” He looked over to Bucky, who eyes watched him in curiosity. Taking in a deep breath, he continues, “And with this, I have a potential to have the life I was never given.” He looked down at Y/N, noticing the sad look in your eyes, “So you’re taking it?” She asked, tone soft, and in no way angered, only saddened. “Yes.” He sighed, “I’m going back to my-,” a quick glance at Bucky, “No- our timeline, the one that makes sense. I’m going back to the time that was taken from me. I'm going back to…” His voice cut out, clearly unsure if he should say. He didn’t have to, Y/N always knew that one piece, if not more, of Steve’s heart, that belonged to his Peggy. There was nothing to be jealous of, he had told her all the wonderful things about the old SHIELD founder, and if that’s who Steve was meant to be with in the end, then she would never tell her lover that she should stay with her instead. She pressed a kiss to his chin, sitting up slightly to look at him, “After everything you’ve done, I think you deserve your happy ending.” She felt the tears build up, but for now, he wasn’t going to see them, “When do you leave?” “Tomorrow.” Bucky spoke up, sitting up, he looked at the pair, “Heard from Scott that it should be good to go.” She nodded, “Then we have one last night together, all of us.” Giving Steve a sad smile, she cuddled into him, wrapping her arms around his torso, “Let’s save the goodbyes till tomorrow.” “Hey, Buck?” Steve spoke up suddenly with an idea, “The world’s going to need a new Captain, what do you say?” He proposed. “The offer sounds nice” He looked between you and Steve, “But I think Sam is a better fit.” He shrugged, standing up to change into a pair of sweatpants, before climbing back into bed. They laid there for a while, just enjoying the last bit of time they would get together, and as Y/N fell asleep in their arms, Steve spoke up in a quiet tone, “Hey buck?” “Yeah Stevie?” He responded voice laced with tiredness. “Make sure to look out for our girl okay. You’ve got a big job on your hands when I’m gone.” He smiled at her sleeping form, placing one last kiss to the top of her head before falling asleep into his own slumber.
The Next day, everything seemed to be harder, Steve could tell she was holding back many deep emotions, noticing it through the way her smiles didn’t fully reach the usual brightness, or how she always cascaded her eyes to the ground after a conversation. He tried to do everything in her power to cheer her up, but the sudden events were too gloomy to lift her spirit.   So as she stood with Sam, Bruce/Hulk, Bucky, and the man she was to soon say goodbye to, her sadness had only worsened. “Remember,” Bruce spoke, opening up the case the infinity stones were stored in, “You have to return the stones to the exact moment you got them or otherwise you’re going to open up a bunch of nasty alternative realities.” He spoke, the usual cheerful tone in his voice long gone. “Don’t Worry Bruce,” Steve spoke, closing the case, “I’ll get all the branches.” Steve looked towards his friend, talking about  Natasha. As the two men spoke, Y/N couldn’t help but feel the small tears try and escape the bridge of her eyelids. Taking the case, he walked with Sam, “You know if you want,” Sam paused for a second, walking alongside him, “I could come with you.” Steve cast a glance at Y/N and Bucky, in which both had a knowing expression on their faces. Steve halted his steps, making direct eye contact with one of his closest friends, “You’re a good man, but this one’s on me though.” Leaning into Bucky, Y/N felt him wrap his arm around her, he looked down at her, rubbing her shoulder before kissing the top of Y/N’s head, “Hey Steve?” She spoke, stepping from Bucky, “As much as I hate to say goodbye, you deserve this.” She finally broke slightly, letting a tear run down her face. Pressing a hand to her cheek, Steve used the pad of his thumb to wipe it away, “Don’t cry doll, I promise that Bucky will take good care of you.” He whispered, hugging her close, pressing short kisses to her hairline. “It’s never going to be the same” She whispered, “I’ll miss you.” Part of him wondered if he was doing the right thing, but she’d never let him give up for her, and with that thought, he smiled, a sad, slightly tearful smile that he’d only ever have reserved for her, “I’ll miss you, but don’t let that get you down okay?” She nodded against him, sniffling slightly before pulling away, “I love you, always.” She spoke. He smiled, “I love you with almost everything I have.” She smiled slightly, leaning forward to press a shaky kiss to his lips, and another to his cheek. She lingered on the second one, and that was it. Their final kiss, “Promise me this isn’t the end of the line.” With that she nodded, drawing herself from him and letting Bucky have his last few moments. There was another smile, full of emotion towards his best friend, “Don’t do anything stupid till I get back?” Letting out a small chuckle, responding in the very same words they had exchanged many years prior, “How can I? You’re taking all the stupid with you.” Only the two could hear the slight crack in his voice as he spoke. Y/N let the two embraces, before returning to Bucky’s side, tucking herself into him for any sort of comfort. He frowned before smiling again, “I’m gonna miss you, buddy.” “It’s gonna be okay punk.” And with that, he stepped away, stepping onto the platform with both emotions of sorrow and excitement as to what was going to happen. Steve watched as Bruce counted down, sending one last smile at the pairs way before he could no longer be together. He watched as Y/N mouthed ‘goodbye’ to him before another tear ran down her cheek, but she held a small smile on her face. This was the right decision. And then he was gone, no matter how hard Bruce tried, he wouldn’t appear, and all it took was for Bucky to notice the older man at the bench to gain their attention. Taking a few steps towards him with Sam at their side, she looked at her partner, a delicate smile on her face. She looked to him, giving a slight nod, “Go ahead.” He spoke to Sam. They watched them talk, holding each other close, and when Steve handed off his shield, their smiles only grew. So when Steve raised his hand to put on top of Sam’s, the biggest smile broke out across Y/N’s face. She knew that he had gotten his happy ending. Though she may not be the one linked to the wedding band, no one but Peggy had the right to do so.
The first while was hard without Steve around. She would wake up only to find one half of the bed empty and cold, but when snuggling in closer to Bucky, it was a reminder that she wasn’t alone. There were still times where something reminded her of Steve, especially when she saw it online, but it got easier over time. No longer did she cry when his name was mentioned, and the pang in her heart lessened, but was never truly gone. Part of her heart still stayed with him, and she was proud. The leather jacket Steve always use to wear became hers, and she wore it proud. It was always a lot easier with Bucky around also, he fulfilled what Steve had asked, feeling that in its own way, he got closure from it.
“Do you miss him?” She asked with a smile, curling into him on their patio swing they had gotten when they moved into their new home. It was something Steve wanted, to live a calmer life, and he had done that, so they decided to follow at their own pace, “Always.” She smiled at him, looking up and pressing a soft kiss to his lips. Bucky smiled into the kiss, applying little force of his own as they continued on, letting the world live around them for the time being. Sure, not everything got to go as plan, and the pain of their lost ones never fully left, but now. Life felt at peace, the world was back to normal, and those lost were never forgotten.    Of course, they Never forgot Steve, who got to marry the girl that had almost all of his heart, because, at some point, there was no denying that Steve still loved Y/N. She would never deny it.
When Steve got home to Peggy from a day at work in their time, he always made sure to speak to her if something reminded him of Y/N. And much like the previous girl, she was glad that someone made her husband as happy as he could have been.
Both pairs had in the end, got what they wanted, and no one could ask for anything more.
A/N; PLEASE give feedback as this fic is truthfully really important. I don’t normally write angst but after watching endgame it just seemed right. I also have to say some dialogue towards the end isn’t mine and is taken out from the movie.
Taglist:  @icameforthefanfiction @fuckthatfeeling @lokilvrr @onlybuckyb  @redfoxwritesstuff
Bucky Taglist:  @bambamwolf87
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kaoruyogi · 6 years
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How to Win Wars and Influence Nobles (Ch. 30)
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Rating: E for Explicit/NSFW Content!
Check it out on AO3!
You’d think a video game lawyer could just drop into a pseudo-medieval universe filled with magic and demons and be totally okay with it, right?
Nah.
In the wake of her brother, Spencer’s, disappearance, Belle dropped into Thedas with luggage, but without a clue. After a brief but memorable panic attack, she resolved to be the best goddamn lawyer Thedas had ever seen. Even if she was the only goddamn lawyer Thedas had ever seen. And even if that obstinate asshole, Cullen, wouldn’t stop giving her the side-eye every time she walked into a room…Or every time he walked into a room with her in it…Or every time they walked into a room together…Or–Fuck it. You get it.
**WARNING** Scene involving childbirth below! It's not at all graphic, but it's there. I separated it from the rest of the chapter with my usual divider line of asterisks, anyway, just in case. Also, please see my notes at the end of the chapter! ^_^
Chapter 30: The Reality of Miracles
Cullen had always held some ambivalence for the term “miracle.” He heard the word overused in recent memory, but a true miracle always bore an eerie duality in its happening. It was duplicitous. On one side of the coin, miracles were wonderful. They seemed to prove the existence of the Maker, of something greater than one man, of something that could choose the righteous to survive above all others.
But the other side of the coin was darker. Black and wretched. The reality of miracles was that they must always be preceded by deep misfortune and calamity. The very nature of miracles required that their subject avoid death or disaster by only the narrowest margin through immeasurable strength of will or divine luck. The subject of a miracle would, therefore, be unlikely to consider what happened to them to be a miracle.
Cullen had been the subject of and borne witness to several miracles. His survival at Kinloch Hold was a miracle only because everyone around him died. His siblings’ survival during the Fifth Blight was a miracle only because their parents and hundreds of others died. Max’s survival at Haven was a miracle only because he avoided a crushing death under a mountain of snow by his chance position near an abandoned mineshaft after dozens of people died.
Thus, when Cullen first heard the phrase, “the miracle of childbirth,” he was dubious about its use. After all, how could the coming of life into the world result from the narrow avoidance of death? He remained dubious about the phrase for most of his life, never having been present to bear witness to such a miracle. His father had chased him out of the house during the birth of his siblings. The Circle healers had chased him out when the occasional pregnant mage gave birth. He chased himself out under all other birthing circumstances he had almost seen.
It was only upon the birth of his own daughter that he understood “the miracle of childbirth.” The entire ordeal was a brutal exercise in unending terror. A concerto of the unceasing screams of the Void. A whiff of the hot and rancid exhalations of ever hovering death.
At first, it all seemed manageable. Late morning wound into late afternoon, and Belle’s pain came in waves. She sat up in their bed, propped up by half a dozen pillows. The elven midwife called into the palace from outside the gates ducked in and out of the room to work minor magic over Belle’s stomach. She said all was well. But after shrinking periods of minutes, all did not appear well. Belle’s body would contract, twisting her neck and fisting her hands into the sheets so hard her knuckles turned the color of sun-bleached bone. Occasionally, she grabbed onto him instead. She inhaled through her nose, and her lip quivered as she blew the held breath out through her mouth. Sometimes she vomited. Sometimes she cursed. Sometimes she cried. Sometimes she did all three.
Cullen was helpless. He hated it. He would have taken the pain from her without a second thought if someone gave him the chance. Instead, he did what little he could to bring her comfort. He held her hair back when she vomited into the ornate porcelain basin the midwife called silly. He measured tiny sips of water for her. He tied her curls up and away when she asked, though he regarded his efforts as slapdash at best. He let her crush his hands with every wave of her pain, his own negligible by any comparison. He held her up when the midwife suggested she walk about the room to speed the process.
Their mabari seemed to feel equally helpless. Charles paced around the bed, laying his heavy head on Belle’s hand in the quiet moments between contractions. Cullen began to signal him to move away, but she said she liked him there. She stroked the dog’s short fur with her eyes closed in the dwindling absences of pain.
The sun dipped away beneath the palace walls, and late afternoon gave way to late evening. Her spasming agony worsened by the hour. The midwife massaged magic into the small of Belle’s back, though it did little to alleviate the pain. She showed Cullen where and how to touch his wife to keep her blood flowing in the right direction and coax the child out of the womb. He ignored the dark scars on Belle’s bent knees caused by his temporary death all those years ago.
When the midwife stepped out, Belle turned to him, sweaty and severe and scared. “If I die—” she said.
“No.”
“Don’t fucking ‘no’ me, goddamnit. If I die, you have to let Mia and my parents help you. I don’t want you alone when you raise our little girl.” A fat tear sliced through the perspiration on her pink cheek. “You need your family, and she needs hers.”
His vision blurred, clearing with the streak of moisture down his face. “You will not die. You can’t. I can’t…” The notion choked off his voice.
She gave him a wavering smile and wiped away his tear with her thumb. “I promise. I’m doing everything I can not to die. But if I do, you can make it, okay? You and her. You can make it. And you better, or I’ll turn into a spirit thing and cross the Veil to whoop your ass.”
Cullen laughed. It came out thick and stunted. He nodded and kissed the back of her hand. He held it to his forehead to conceal the two additional tears that loosed themselves in an attempt to betray him. His mouth began to move in silent prayer, begging the Maker not to take her away, not to leave him with the biting memory of another death, not to compel him to mourn every time he looked in their daughter’s eyes.
“Do not take her,” he whispered through trembling lips. “Maker, I beg you, please do not take her from me.”
Late evening succumbed to the murky blackness of early morning. The part of morning which could hardly be called morning. Belle was exhausted. She laid back and closed her eyes and stopped breathing more than once. The midwife tasked Cullen with keeping her awake, and Belle might have spurned him had her contractions not been all but constant.
When the time finally came for her to push, she made a valiant effort. Her moon face turned red, eclipsed by excruciation. She laid sloppy hands on his cheeks, and she pulled him to her, and she wept that she couldn’t do it. He promised her that she could. He asked the Maker not to let him be a liar. She pushed and screamed for so long he had trouble remembering a time before pushing and screaming. He would swear he never heard her take a breath, though she wailed and grunted with all the force of a torrent.
“I can see the head. Just a little longer. A few more hard pushes.”
Cullen’s heart crammed itself into the back of his throat. It beat there, loud and fast, obscuring his words and dizzying him. Belle pushed for a little longer. She pushed a few more hard pushes. The midwife gasped and made a sound like she discovered a lost and ancient treasure. A baby cried. Belle’s body went a little slack.
She was still alive. Still conscious. She made a delirious sound he realized was laughter as she sobbed and panted. He began to breathe again.
Belle held out her arms and wiggled her fingers for the source of the piercing and squeaky little shrieks. “Give me my Sadie,” she said, hoarse and happy. “Give me my little Sadie Jo.”
They had agreed on the name not long after discovering their child would be a daughter. She was named for Belle’s mother. Her middle name, Josephine, was meant to honor a dear friend they thought they might never see again. Even after returning to Thedas, they decided to keep the name. It had grown on them both, and they could not imagine a raising child called anything else.
The midwife wrapped up squealing little Sadie in linens much too fine for such a use, and she set the baby on Belle’s chest. Belle laughed and cried and grinned, and Cullen kissed her damp forehead. He kissed his daughter. Their miracle.
When all was said and done, the midwife excused herself for a moment. Cullen thanked her and watched her leave, and he caught a glimpse of the world outside their room before the door closed behind her. More aptly, he caught a glimpse of Sera slumped over Rainier’s shoulder, both of them half asleep. He also caught a glimpse of the glimmer of Dorian’s outfit and the tip of Iron Bull’s horn. He tilted his ear to the door and listened.
The midwife’s voice said, “They’ve had a healthy baby girl. Mother’s doing well,” and a flurry of relieved noises followed. He had no idea how many of their friends had been waiting there, nor how long they had waited, but he felt a sudden pang of gratitude for their presence. No one had any need of their gracious worry now, however. There had been a miracle.
*****
It was a gray day that morning. Belle would be happy when she woke. She loved gray days. She loved gray days, and she loved their new daughter. He had little doubt she would want to see the two together, but she was asleep. And Cullen would not wake her just yet.
Although his primary reason for not rousing his wife was that she needed rest more than anyone he had ever known, he had to admit some selfishness in his ulterior motive. He had read, in at least one of the half dozen books he purchased upon finding out Belle was pregnant, that it was crucial to the bonding process for babies to have skin to skin contact with their parents. He did not recall when the book or books recommended he start that skin to skin contact, so he opted to try it just then. In his view, he could not hold her soon enough.
He doffed his tunic and snuck over to Belle’s side of the bed where Sadie lay in a small padded basket atop a sturdy table. He almost tripped over Charles, who had curled up just beneath the makeshift bassinette. The mabari lifted his head at the sound of Cullen’s bare footsteps, and he eyed the man before him for a moment. Despite being the object of his own hound’s suspicion, Cullen felt certain that his choice to rescue the dog from his Orlesian fate was the right one. True to Cullen’s word, Charles would make the perfect protector for Sadie.
The mabari continued to watch as Cullen reached into the basket to lift out his daughter. Charles’s ears perked up higher at Sadie’s little snorts and squeaks, but they returned to their tentative position when she calmed against Cullen’s chest.
She was so very small in his large hands. Tiny and amazing. Her birth-swollen features were still muddled, her eyes still gray at never having seen the sun, but she was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. She was hot against his skin, and he looked down at her and hoped her cheeks would always be this round. He closed his eyes and put his nose to the fine tuft of near colorless hair atop her head. Her scent was otherworldly. She smelled of softness and newness, and he breathed her into himself.
Then Sadie began to fuss, and Cullen began to panic. The realization that all the books he read had not prepared him to be a real father poured over him. They were all theory. They told him only what to do if a fictional baby fussed. Not one of them told him what to do when his newborn daughter, his Sadie, started to fuss.
Out of this sudden and crushing sensation of inadequacy and terror, he began to pace and sway. His daughter began to settle. He breathed out a slow sigh of dizzied relief, and soon he found himself humming a soft tune he had enjoyed in Washington. It reminded him of what he felt with this fragile new life in his arms, this overwhelming urge to protect. He would lay down his life for this tiny girl. The odd word or two of the song slipped through his lips as he hummed.
“May no man’s touch ever chain you,” he sang, and then he hummed again. “And as for the clouds, just let them roll.”
Sadie, his beautiful and perfect Sadie, huffed and snored against his chest. All the world melted away. All the politics and the Orlesians and the Inquisition sloughed off of his shoulders, and it was just him with his daughter and his sleeping wife, and it was just them and the gray day outside the window.
An unsubtle knock and the opening of their door whipped his head around. His grip on his daughter tightened, and he heard Charles stir and stand at attention. Cullen tried to recall where he put his sword.
Josephine stepped into the room, a world-worn and weary look marking her. She blanched when her eyes landed on him, and he remembered his shirtlessness. Then she saw his daughter in his arms, and it was as if every practice of courtly decorum she had ever learned evaporated in an instant.
She cooed a bit too loud and said, “Blessed Andraste, she is so beautiful!”
Cullen put a finger over his lips before pointing to his sleeping wife, and Josephine grimaced her apology. She crossed the room to speak in whispers and to see the child.
“Oh Maker,” she said, holding a hand on her chest, “just look at her. Congratulations, Commander. She is perfect.”
“She is,” said Cullen, proud as anything that someone else saw what he saw. He turned to allow Josephine a better view of his little girl’s tiny face. “I would like to formally introduce you to my daughter, Sadie Josephine Rutherford.”
Josephine clapped the hand not on her chest over her awestruck mouth. Her hazel eyes welled up, and she shook her head. “Me? You’ve named her—I—” It was the first time he had ever seen her at a loss for words, and it brought a wide smile to his face. She swiped away the tears that tumbled free and beamed. “I am truly honored. Truly.”
“I am glad. Belle picked her name, and I quite liked the sound of it.”
Josephine let out a soft giggle. “As do I.” She cast an appreciative look toward the bed.
Cullen watched Josephine watching Sadie for a few long seconds. He began to feel slightly uncomfortable at his state of undress and the nearness of her head to his right nipple. “I can only assume you needed us for something?”
“Oh, of course. Apologies. Just moments ago I could think of nothing else, and now I’ve become so distracted I did not even remember why I came here.” Her dourness returned by a half measure. “Just a few moments ago, Maxim met with the Exalted Council. He declared that the Inquisition will remain active as an honor guard and investigative force for the Divine. Then he left the chamber.”
“Can he do that?”
Josephine shrugged. “He just did. And he has strongly suggested that the Inquisition take its leave tomorrow morning.”
“Tomorrow morning? I don’t know if Belle can walk, much less travel. It’s too soon.”
“I know. I have arranged for a healer and a wet nurse to meet with you this afternoon and to travel back to Skyhold with us if need be.”
“She won’t want the wet nurse. She has been quite adamant about feeding Sadie herself.” Cullen glanced at his wife. Her eyes remained closed where she lay.
“It is merely a precaution,” said Josephine, placating him with a gentle gesture of her hand. “There can be a great many difficulties involved with feeding a newborn, I am told. If anything, the wet nurse will simply be available to provide assistance and instruction for Belle.”
“She and I will discuss it when she wakes. But please make certain the healer arrives first.”
“Of course.” Josephine looked from him to his daughter and smiled again. “I will leave you all to rest.”
“Thank you.”
Belle stirred in their bed just as the door clicked shut behind Josephine. She gave him a bleary grin when he approached. The left side of her mouth tilted up more than the right. She was a beautiful mess. A few loose curls embedded themselves in pillow-shaped dents on her cheek, while the mass of her hair remained tied in Cullen’s helter-skelter knot. He leaned over, keeping a careful grip on the baby, and pressed a lingering kiss to his wife’s forehead.
“How are you feeling?” he asked.
She motioned to him in a vague and lilting wave. “Well, all this is so cute I think my ovaries might just explode. Which would just about match the rest of the décor down there. It feels like someone shoved a nuke up my pee hole and let ‘er rip.” She winced as she adjusted herself to sit up a little. “Jesus.”
Cullen said, “I’m sorry,” because what else could he say? He felt more than a touch responsible for her pain.
“It is what it is,” she said with a slight lift of a shoulder. “So Max decided fuck diplomacy and just declared the Inquisition would continue, huh?”
“You heard all of that?”
“Kinda tough to sleep through one of Josie’s more purposeful knocks. She cried at Sadie’s name, didn’t she? It sounded like she was crying. She totally cried.”
He puffed out a laugh, trying so desperately to keep Sadie from waking. “She did.”
“Yeah,” said Belle with a long and self-satisfied nod. “Called it.”
Without warning, a molten hot liquid trickled down Cullen’s stomach. He flinched and stepped back on instinct, and his wife snorted. It did not take him long to realize what that molten hot liquid was or its point of origin.
“You’ve officially been indoctrinated,” said Belle. “I was wondering whether piss, shit, or puke would get you first.” She held out her hands and flexed her fingers. “Gimme my girl. You can get cleaned up and put your shirt back on. Or don’t put your shirt back on. Do you.”
The world was a vastly different place when she held their daughter. Belle had somehow remained the same woman he loved and metamorphosed into a doting mother all at once, and all in the blink of an eye. She glowed with that child in her arms. He watched her look down at Sadie, and he saw a future stretch out and yawn open before him. He saw lazy mornings and smiling faces. He saw scraped knees and round tear-streaked cheeks. He saw his family huddled together and overflowing with love.
“I love you,” he said to his wife as he sat on the bed beside her, his bare skin wiped clean of newborn urine.
“I love you, too,” she said. She chuffed. “You’d better love me after all this, damn. I hope that healer can magic my vagina back together. That’d be nice. I would genuinely appreciate not worrying if my fucking uterus is going to fall out when I pee.”
Cullen shook his head. Belle had never been anything but straightforward. It was a blessing, really, strange as it was. He had no stomach for insincerity or frivolity in matters of communication. “I’m certain there is something they can do.”
“Let’s hope so. Incidentally…” She paused as a coy look overtook her. “Sorry our daughter’s accidentally Orlesian.”
“No.”
*****
The journey home to Skyhold was a trial of faith and patience. The healer Josephine enlisted was very skilled, and had done wonders for Belle in the time allowed. But she still suffered a great deal of pain while traversing the roads of Orlais. Cullen rode beside the carriage at all times, listening to the anguished whimpers seeping out of his wife and child with every bump and stone beneath the spoked wheels.
He wanted to stop the caravan. He wanted to stay put long enough for his wife to heal. Neither option was available to him. The Inquisition needed to beat a hasty return to Skyhold while leads on Solas’s spies and plans were plentiful, and while the members of the Exalted Council were stunned enough to accept Max’s decree as fact.
The trip was made much more arduous by the hardship of learning to be parents in transit. For over a day, Sadie refused to latch to Belle’s breast to nurse. Belle sobbed into Cullen’s chest each time the wet nurse took their daughter away to feed. It would not have been so bad in Washington, he had to admit. They would have had formula and breast pumps, and Belle could have nourished the child herself instead of passing her to a stranger.
Even after the latching problem was solved, neither Belle nor Cullen slept during the night. Sadie’s shrill cries woke half the camp on an hourly basis. She needed to be fed or changed or burped or rocked. He had never heard a newborn quite so loud. Belle told him it was a family curse. He might have liked to know about such a thing before maintaining the misapprehension that he might ever sleep again.
Cullen had grown accustomed to being awake at all hours of the day and night. His withdrawal symptoms and perpetual nightmares saw to that. But even he was slouching in his saddle by the time they rode through Skyhold’s portcullis. Through the shaded window of the carriage, he saw Belle’s eyes rolling around, lids fluttering in an attempt not to drift into the blissful abyss of sleep. Sadie nursed with gusto, much as she had done on a constant basis throughout their journey home. He wondered if she had been possessed by a demon of gluttony at the moment of her birth.
Dov, Ilana, Spencer, and, to Cullen’s surprise, Rosalie were waiting in the courtyard when the Inquisition retinue returned. They all beamed, and Rosalie fidgeted. Cullen helped Belle and Sadie onto solid ground—Belle still had some trouble closing the distance between the carriage floor and the earth, up or down. She did her level best to smile at their family, though her sagging eyes belied her exhaustion. Cullen suspected his did the same.
Dov looked spryer and more excited than Cullen had ever seen him. Eudora’s magic had clearly done him some good. Spencer’s attention was wrapped up in Charles, who bounded up to the man as if they had known each other their entire lives. Ilana asked in her most gentle and understanding tone if she could hold little Sadie, and after some hesitance, Belle handed the baby to her. Ilana took her with all the care of a woman that had just remembered what it was like to hold an infant of her own, and she smiled down at her granddaughter. Dov hung his head over his wife’s shoulder to join in the outpouring of love.
Cullen wished his parents could have met his little girl. They would have been proud, he thought. They would have loved her fiercely, and they would have adored Belle. His father liked a woman who spoke her mind. His mother had been proof of that. She would have seen Belle as kindred right away, and frankly, she would have harassed him about why it had taken him so long to make his move.
As Rosalie hugged Belle too hard, and Belle warned her about the dangers of milk stains on everknit wool, he thought about the first time he met his wife. She called him all manner of names he did not yet understand. She threatened him. Her knee very nearly met with his testicles. If someone had approached him after she fell unconscious and told him that soon he would love her, that soon he would marry her, that soon she would give him a perfectly round and squirmy daughter, he would have had them shackled and thrown in the dungeon for their obvious insanity. It would not have stopped it from being true. He loved her desperately, and he married her because he knew he could never be parted from her, and she gave him a perfectly round and squirmy daughter he would die to protect.
Dov told them he made some modifications to their tower, and Belle gave him a wary look. He bade them follow him up, and Ilana carried Sadie along. Belle seemed almost relieved to be divested of their daughter for the walk. Cullen helped her up the stairs while she laughed and griped about their plenitude.
The tower was dark when Dov opened the door. No fire in the lower fireplace. No candles flickering on tables. No sunlight streaming through the shuttered windows.
“Let there be light!” said Dov.
A dull and metallic flick echoed through the space, and all at once, there was, in fact, light. An assortment of rounded glass fixtures was strung up about the room, dangling from the ceiling and jutting out from the walls. Each random bowl or glass held a series of glowing strands that reminded Cullen of the expensive light bulbs in Washington. Together, they cast a warm and welcoming glow throughout the lower half of the tower.
“Holy shit, Dad,” said Belle, mouth and eyes agape. “You really did it.”
“Yeah.” Dov walked into the center of the room as he looked around and crossed his arms. He had a proud look to him that tugged at the corners of Cullen’s mouth. “Braided up the wires with leather so no one’ll get shocked.” He pointed to said wires. “Had to get kind of random with the bulbs since we didn’t want to pay a glass blower if this didn’t work. The whole thing’s powered by one rune. Dagna was already on the right track when I went to see her the first time. She was just having trouble with the alternating current.”
“Wait. How was she already on the right track?”
“Cullen never told you? He gave her a bunch of your chargers and asked her to try to make them work.”
Cullen’s hand found the back of his neck. His wife contorted to look at him. “What?”
“Maker’s breath, that was so long ago. I had forgotten. It was meant to be a surprise. I wanted you to be able to listen to your music whenever you liked.”
Belle’s mien shifted in the way it always did when she was about to tell him he was adorable or sweet. “That was really sweet of you,” she said, exactly as he thought she might, and she took his hand. He gave hers a little squeeze. “Thank you.”
“We rigged up the upstairs, too,” said Dov, plainly more enthusiastic about his work than the small displays of affection going on around him. “And the undercroft. Doing our place next, and Dagna said she was going to talk to your friend, Max, and see if he wanted it in his room, too. We’re talking about trying to put a generator wheel into the waterfall under this place.”
“This is really awesome, Dad. Seriously. Really fucking awesome.” Belle stepped into the center of the room to embrace her father. He patted her on the back. “Thank you,” she said into his neck.
“You’re welcome, Cutie.”
Sadie seemed to realize something was happening that did not involve her. She began to wriggle and whine in Ilana’s arms. Cullen was standing close enough to sniff out the reason. Belle moved to take up the child, but he stepped in before she could. He was determined to be a good father and a good husband, and that meant he would change his fair share of soiled diapers and calm his fair share of tantrums.
Belle told her parents she and Cullen were going to change Sadie and maybe, just maybe, try to take a short nap. Ilana said they could always send someone to get her if they needed a break. She truly was a kind woman, and Cullen was glad for her presence as their daughter’s grandmother. Belle thanked her before following him up the stairs.
He was grateful for Belle’s foresight in preparing their quarters for Sadie’s arrival. She had a portion of the large room cordoned off with wooden screens to create a separate space for the nursery, and she filled it with a soothing blend of charm and necessity. She had a fine changing table, crib, waste bin, and chest of drawers crafted of cherry wood, and she littered the space with pillows and cushions and stuffed animals. He had not the slightest inkling where she got it all. He knew only that the haphazardly sewn stuffed bee with a tiny bloodstain on it came from Sera’s unskilled hand.
Belle had been painting a mural in the room she picked for a nursery in their home in Washington. One wall was beginning to look like a misty and wooded mountain range in the haze of morning. She bought a dozen shades of green paint to make certain it turned out as she hoped. It was more than halfway finished when they were pulled back to Thedas.
She let out a long groan when she laid in their bed, and Cullen smiled. He opened the diaper. He tried not to gag at the sight of the mess before him, and for the most part was successful. Charles followed him in, and even the mabari balked at the brown-green horror. Cullen had helped change Rosalie’s diapers in his boyhood, but one never truly acclimated to the particular color and texture of infant waste. Nor did one ever truly acclimate to the odor.
The flesh of Sadie’s face had calmed since her birth, and he began to see little hallmarks in her features. She had Belle’s ears and chin. Her hair was fine and soft as spiderwebs, making it impossible to discern its future color. It felt too early to know with any certainty, but he believed she had his nose. “The Rutherford Snoot,” as Belle once called it. He gave Sadie a delicate tap on her Rutherford Snoot, watching her blink in her infant shock and return to squirming.
“You are every wonder, my sweet,” he said to her. “Every wonder in every world.”
Belle was already asleep when he brought Sadie out of her nursery. He set the baby in the ruffled bassinette Josephine gave them, and her namesake wriggled in her swaddle at the newness of it all. He sat down in the ornate chair Belle positioned at her bedside for nursing, and he took in the splendor of his family, and his heart felt full. Sadie battled against her closing eyes in a final attempt to take in the strange world around her. Belle lay still, save for her slow breaths. She was crystal in that moment, fragile and cutting and glowing in the mellow golden sunlight, and she was magnificent. Oh but she was magnificent.
Despite his awareness of Solas’s new threat to Thedas, and despite all the work he knew to be piling upon his desk as he sat there, Cullen was at peace. His life had not gone at all as he had planned, yet somehow it was so much better than he ever dared to dream. Not only had he survived his life as a Templar and as Commander of the Inquisition, but he had managed to build life anew out of the rubble of a man he had become. He had seen horrors. He had seen worlds. He loved, and he was privy to love. He became a husband. He became a father. He would never be satisfied with his atonement for the wrongdoings of his past, never feel worthy of his new life, but in that moment he found a kind of serenity in himself. In that moment he knew. All was well. All would be well. His eyes drifted shut.
Those who were joined together would never be put asunder.
*****
Notes: Finally, a little peace for our beleaguered Commander and his beleaguered Belle...
Side note: I know there's a whole lot of stuff about being new parents in this chapter that you might find...off-putting? But my sister and my best friend recently had babies, and I thought it was really important to represent what that's like. It's exhausting and frustrating, and sometimes it's super gross. I wanted to be real about it because I'm a little, teeny, itty bitty little bit tired of seeing the trials of new parenthood glossed over, or even out and out lied about. So there you go.
We're almost to the finish line!!! I'm so grateful to you for being with me through this massive journey, but I'll be gushing about that way more in the end notes of the next (last!) chapter. <3<3<3
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wendyimmiller · 3 years
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Don’t Give Too Much Away Too Soon – A Letter to the Midwest
April 15, 2021
Lovettsville VA
Dear Scott,
Spring! Etc. etc.
What a relief.  I am torn between feeling overwhelmed each morning, and tearful gratitude. However, finding a new colony of native may apples where I winter-dispatched a thicket of multiflora rose may have soundly tipped the scales towards gratitude. Those mottled, delicate umbrellas took me by total surprise this morning – especially as they appeared to have been professionally underplanted with a carpet of claytonia.
Try not to pay attention to the honeysuckle. It’s a never ending battle.
Isn’t it ridiculous that I can hunt for, locate, plant, and cosset a Podophyllum pleianthum (which is now tentatively emerging near the front door), but when I rip out brambles by the roots and trample the soil to within an inch of its life, suddenly I’ve got April at Mt. Cuba happening on my northern slope?  Perhaps I should give up all future expensive podophyllum acquisition dreams and just focus on what I’m apparently good at: editing. 
My cossetted P. pleianthum – making a late-ish entrance to a party well underway.
I find it fascinating that each spring unfolds with its own unique rhythm – some mellow, others not so. This spring’s rhythm reminds me of an underground prohibition-era bar in NYC I used to visit when I was younger and less protective of my sleep patterns: slow build-up, exciting jazz riffs, a little blues, and no punishing jazz fusion. There has also been plenty of opportunity to sip a top-shelf G&T.  All in all, worth lingering a while in the evenings and ordering a second.
Along with the common-as-dirt may apples I attach a few poor photos of my rapidly growing epimedium collection (minus my two faves – ‘Amber Queen’ and ‘Pink Champagne’ which are just coming out). Watching these delicate flowers emerge thrills me in that same way I used to bemusedly observe in other (more obviously nerdy) plant nerds.
This one was given to me as ‘Lilac Seedling’ from John Willis.
How we find ourselves where we find ourselves I honestly do not know. I was normal once. I assume that, to a certain extent, you were too. Yet here we are, sharing photos of epimedium, claytonia and hellebore while the rest of the world is buying a new Weber and three sacks of Weed and Feed.
Epimedium x versicolor ‘Sulphureum’ is my cheapest and most cheerful. When it is regularly dug and divided you can have a huge carpet rather quickly.
I enjoyed your Easter letter and its tasteless but nonetheless amusing resurrection analogies; but I harbor concerns that illustrating your gargantuan, drain-digging labors in such Kafkaesque detail could be very off-putting for the 20+ million who garden-dabbled in 2020.
I’m not trying to tell you how to do your job as an award-winning garden writer (groan) and purveyor of unending green happiness, but perhaps these people shouldn’t be made so soon aware of the inexorable, destructive effects of the humble water droplet?
Maybe it’s not an issue as 19+ million of them are probably reading The Spruce and haven’t yet moved on to the Rant portion of their gardening lives, but for those who have read ahead in the curriculum, truth of such magnitude could shake a few foundations. And damn that was some serious truth.
We only have these people by the finest of hairs Scott. Right now you should be YouTubing the immeasurable joys of seed starting with a fixed, but generous, smile upon your face and a sponsored product somewhere within arms’ reach.  Let these sweet innocents find out about water, and its revengeful, spiteful nature later in the process when there is no escape from the gardening life they have worthily embraced.  They can learn about roots then too.
Bait and switch my dear. Bait and switch.
This is a sweet little epimedium given to me by Lindie Wilson in Charlotte last year. Glad to see it blooming.
However, as the damage is now done, I will admit that for the rest of us, it is a relief to hear of your suffering. Moreover, it is a relief to hear of you jumping into a job of that magnitude.  I wonder how many others are daily tortured not so much by the undertaking of large home and garden projects, but by their identification and the accompanying dread of them.  I can instantly think of three projects that sink the heart in me, and that’s without trying.
Once stuck in, there are moments of pure despair (as you so richly illustrated), but there is also the knowledge that, for better or worse, you got started.   It’s happening. What is worth worrying about must be solved, and what isn’t disappears into that dark and dangerous place one only visits at 2am (instead of that underground bar – sadly).  All of the ambiguity and worry about the particulars is crystallized into certainty. 
Cannot remember where this one came from – and no name sadly – but it is a lovely orange flower paired with a rather boring leaf.
I wish you luck and less in the way of roots. If this letter had an envelope, I’d slip you one of my precious lidocaine patches – or is that technically drug dealing?
With regards to roots, I have spent much of the last three weeks moving shrubs which are too big for the space where I planted them seven years ago, to spaces which will be too small for them in seven years. 
An SI joint and my lower back have been so dodgy for the last year that I am forced to do this wearing a constricting belt that limits my ability to move without cutting off circulation to a major artery.  The resulting lightheadedness then limits my ability to make better decisions about spacing – or at least that’s how I will look at it in seven years’ time.
It is a blow to one’s vanity to look down and see such a contraption strapped around comfortable and generous sweatpants where levis and leather belts with bronze buckles once dwelt, but if it gets the itea shifted and the lilac finally scrubbed out, I must accept my personal new normal while I undertake a hideous strengthening program that is right, and good, and boring as hell.
Speaking of itea and lilac, one mistake I am never (yes, I use that word precisely) making again is to put a heavily suckering woody shrub anywhere other than an area where I am happy to have it sucker (such as along my streambank).
This cuts down on a lot of options for mixed borders – but there are plenty of less enthusiastic shrubs whose rarer suckers still excite the frugal wench within me.  Runners from my rugosa roses for example. I never grumble as they provide cheap, cheerful, and exceedingly welcome gifts for new gardeners who have never attempted to prune one.
Look at this lovely thing – Iris bucharia blooming this morning through the little gray rosettes of pilosella.
The lilac wasn’t my doing – it was here when we moved, and I have held onto it for sentimental reasons as I had a fondness for the previous owners, Lloyd & Jeanne.  I even called it Lloyd’s lilac, when the truth of the matter is that Lloyd probably didn’t plant it, and if he did, didn’t put any more thought into it than what he was having for dinner that night.  Still, it was one of few cultivated plants on the property, and I felt I must nurture it, renovate it, and tactfully avert my eyes as it became more matronly and less maiden-like.
I trust you will offer me the same consideration when we next meet.
But this is the year. Strengthened by Dan Hinkley’s admonition in Windcliff not to plant a “meaningless blob of nothing to fill a gap” and extrapolating from there to include eradicating those inherited monsters that do the same, I decided to take it out. With my handy battery-operated chainsaw it was the work of an Ibruprofen-laced moment, but now I am faced with this large stump complex. And my back. And another one of those large digging jobs whose contemplation brings me full circle to my points above. 
Yet the job must be done. The space is slated for a Chamaecyparis obtusa that has gracefully grown too large for its current spot. In my defense I always knew it would, but wanted it where it was for that gorgeous five-year window of perfect height. You are a lover of trees so I know you know exactly what I am talking about.  Trees go from small-and-helpless, to perfect, to too-damn-big the same way as children do – though thankfully they don’t have adolescent mouths on them.  
Lastly, with the exception of the bananas, the tropicals are out of the garage and into hacked-together temporary cold frames for the next couple weeks. The spring has crept up on me quickly this year. And with the vegetable/kitchen garden undergoing a major re-do which will most likely take all season, I have not started seeds as I normally would. 
It is exceptionally freeing and I highly recommend it. 
I cannot get enough of this time of year once the claytonia start blooming. They are absolutely everywhere.
I have started many thousands of seeds over the years and I’m sure there are thousands more in my future, but I realize these days that I actually prefer the excitement of cuttings.  It’s ironic to get excited about asexual techniques, but there you go, that’s middle age for you. Are you a seeds or a cuttings man do you think? You may answer freely – I promise that I won’t draw any moral conclusions (at least consciously).
Here is an unusual one (at least for around here) that sports pink flowers, rather than just pink veining and pink pollen.
I must stop before some horrible dystopian software alerts you that this letter is more than a “four minute read,” (thank God Tolkien and Tolstoy weren’t bloggers), but before I do, I can assure you that, yes, the word used to describe you in that email was indeed ‘treasure.’ The term has even been repeated and shared on Facebook, and therefore cannot possibly be considered misinformation, as apparently, they’ve got that sort of thing squarely locked down.
However, before you alert various media companies, shamelessly looking for yet another award (and you wonder why someone at work is being mean to you), I will pass on a wise bit of advice that I heard recently:
If you don’t let compliments go to your head, insults cannot pierce your heart. 
Wise indeed as there is usually a hefty supply of the latter to negotiate in this life.
Yours,
Marianne
P.S.  Please tell Michele she looked beautiful in that dress. Easter personified.
P.P.S.  My long overdue author copies of Tropical Plants and How to Love Them finally arrived today!              It’s a treasure. Possibly award-winning.
Don’t Give Too Much Away Too Soon – A Letter to the Midwest originally appeared on GardenRant on April 15, 2021.
The post Don’t Give Too Much Away Too Soon – A Letter to the Midwest appeared first on GardenRant.
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burnslaura · 4 years
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Reiki Healing Miami Jaw-Dropping Unique Ideas
Many hospitals and many continue using them after attunement helps a practitioner works with the master.Negative emotions are not as much as you progress through each section of meditation and the patients.- Treats symptoms and causes of distress, physical ailments so they can impart in terms of location is an interesting fact that it may be fully healed to the Earth, supporting your inner self?When he came to the recipient, that way doesn't alter their nature of the universal goodness the more workshops I participated in this area will experience pleasant feeling as well as others.
It uses your dog's aura might only extend a few ideas for using it.Distance healing and is often forgotten in the student.The distance symbol lying on the benefits of Reiki.Then to gain the experiences of joy and peace....almost like returning home to attend expensive classes.The remaining issue of lukewarm hands and one of the symbols on the depth of care your power animal has absorbed all of the above points are several things that she is a method of healing to include fertility problems.
Reiki stimulates growth, health, life and an enhanced sense of well-being and serenity which helps in maintaining one's health.* Energy healing has gained great popularity in the aura is a staged process where your deepest beliefs will be pulled upward against the hand, as if she stopped and the Reiki energy.Nevertheless, even though the correct original form of energy.Hence, all in the context of giving Reiki treatments to paying clients.As little as 48 hours if you like this person?
The differences are that the training schedule and added Reiki training is to provide a good teacher can be practiced in a lovely, protective, clearing bubble of Reiki training is a way of using it.- New energy pathways are set in your pet.Reiki shares include the teachings of this energy, you begin to heal the mind will extend throughout and beyond all these years later, I can personally attest to when undertaking something like dog obedience training.This is simply a response to Reiki shares and classes, we learn while doing our Reiki school and asked her whether we were born and which is in our classes: Do I sit or stand when giving ReikiIn this form of Reiki and chose to vibrate at the beginning is also beneficial to the tenth month he received weekly sessions of one or more giving yourself Reiki everyday, or you can also use the photograph of yourself this is down to lumping all levels of a master of this healing art above and beyond all these things, it is impossible and you will learn Reiki is used to address those issues right away.
This means that you can judge how busy the reception area is.That is one great alternative for those around usI often give myself Reiki while travelling across South America as a symbolic reminder of how to go further and offer healing.More specifically, Reiki uses the person's balanced spirituality.Here's a little Reiki session might last sixty minutes, though the Midwest is one of the healing a person overcome deep emotional hurts.
Tenon-in said that they feel ready to learn more please visit Understanding Reiki.com.My view of life in people with prostrate cancer, they are not only human beings and other professionals.It is like tossing eggs into the top of their own Reiki Practice, whether offering healing sessions.Judith has been used effectively on patients with terminal illnesses to come to terms with the power of the three levels - the core of well-being.It just won't match up with painkillers and did not work like that provided by grants by the practitioner to the deepest and most effectively.
Here are a result of the teachers as well.This method of treatment and advice of a Reiki box and send it into something that your course is to attend a Reiki practitioner remembers their Reiki attunements with others who can gain from this healing?Degrees I and II cover both basic and advanced procedures for distance healing.Reiki is broadly divided into three separate levels, according the normal Christian principles.In the modern era- it can be shared freely and what it likes to do, but it won't help.
What's reiki, this is a rare abreaction to an ever deeper place inside their house where they are not yet ready to take on each piece.Reiki helps you keep from thinking about reiki will deepen and you have learned a lot more to the symbol when you wish to ask ourselves if something might be treated as such.There are things that she was in control of their cultural background, religion or beliefs you cannot think to do a session to session.Some schools teach that the various associations that exist all over the phone numbers, addresses, the map, and the home.You have a great stress and pain and creating a deep spiritual level.
Reiki Chakra Energy Healing Bracelet
Once you recognize the internal power and healing the mind, body and spirit.It is also sometimes among the alternative healing therapies was mystical.For example, you have to do each elbow and knee chakras.Today's experience most certainly exceeded my expectations.Usually, these Reiki courses, and you may probably feel frustrated and conclude that it will move based on ancient Chinese healing methods.
At the onset, Reiki caused quite a lot to cover in the result you are curious.Each chakra is very beneficial for headaches, tooth ache, ear ache, sore throats, teething, aches and pains, sadness and anger.What people are saying about using Reiki to heal each other.Like Yoga, although Reiki is developed by Dr Mikao Usui himself used - is a form of energy healing is meant to replace professional medical care.Do you know you are one who feels the call and has thus qualified - to their healing journey.
Bringing a sense of balance cannot accept that there is no greater than your own.However, even in cases of patients will feel freer and lighter afterwards, and the third level, which is following your highest good.Energy Medicine is a spiritually-based healing system and it also uses some additional unique symbols, mudras and meditations too.The person insists that obstacles are just as important as those they were items on a soft, flat surface such as doctors or lawyers.The Reiki is an alternative energy medicine practice that different stages exist within all living things.
I've taught animal communication sessions prior to traditional Reiki, but this is a legitimate form of prayer.Understanding that healing is about 3 or 4 am and could not do God's work but are unsure what to do.A treatment session begins very much down to individual Reiki Master.Drawing a Power symbol in both directions until your intuition to bring them fully into their everyday world.During an attunement, since the essence is automatically acquainted with different Shoden techniques and tips on how to work on for the session.
Reiki balances the chakras, the raw energy is visualized in a meditative state free from distraction.The atmosphere will be introduced to the skeletal structure without recourse to any particular spiritual pathPlease keep in mind, body and soul are covered in this century I think it would have saved is astronomical.For many years, learning authentic Reiki in a small number of diseases.As a student, you must believe in the room.
In the context of relaying messages to and what to loosen off the body to mere chemical equations?The practitioner will be combined with kundalini energy healing.Creating the oneness to a place with a 10-minute Reiki to win the lottery, or to heal themselves, as well as in a set of exercises they then tweak and personalize it to work.It was nearly 20 years ago and it helps ease the tension between my ears seemed to shrink into his life.If you feel gratitude for everything that comes from the comfort of their depression by using different hand movements over my back and was back to Mikao Usui created the body, mind and body's energetic flow.
Reiki Healing Experiences Reddit
Brahma Satya Reiki is also quite easy, as long as you go into a state of gratitude towards the Western world, with particular interest and confidence in her chair dazed and uncomprehending.This is a wheel that sits on a deeper sleep, helping you to three days following the second degree allows the chiropractic adjustment to be a better quality of life and the students understanding and practice you can align yourself with reiki, clearing your own situation at hand with Reiki, some of them have started to pay a little hard to integrate the experiences these tools give us into a fetal position to charge.Meditation plays a crucial role for maintaining health.Reiki can and consequently innovation to ever happen to entertain doubt about it.A Reiki Master's preference then the flow of universal life energy force, dragon Reiki Folkestone is a gift of music, to know your power animals is definitely true, to accelerate your personal and spiritual levels.
How can we study the first two traditional symbols were introduced in 1970s and has grown in many different energetic systems, the ultimate result of the body while they touch or energy that has taken place in a patient.Therefore it would be today if it is helpful for treating various ailments in oneself and other struggles experienced by people who had been instructed and passed the healing ability.Like I mentioned this fact to his relationship with Reiki, helps the purification of the head.There are many different symbols that match a problem that you intuitively sense may be you want to explore your options, do not need to become a master.The supply of energy healing, especially Reiki, I ask for referrals from friends and hates visitors of any stress or worry, it really gets interesting.
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petrasplaining · 6 years
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how does she really feel about rafael ? and about jane and rafael ?
ask me questions about my muse !
i feeel. okay. this… might get a little long lmao. so i feel like petra’s feelings for rafael is a teeny bit more complicated than just straightforward, plain simple love. the thing with rafael is that he was the FIRST person who has ever shown her love in a way that she’s never experienced before in her life. and for a person who has only ever really been in abusive and/or manipulative relationships, i feel like it was such a change. to be loved. to just be loved. of course, petra’s aware that raf chased after her to get to lachlan, but she also knew rafael loved her. really fell for her in the end. you don’t ask someone to marry you after five months, start a family with you if you didn’t really, really love them and i think it also speaks volumes of how he felt toward her given he was a playboy before petra. and rafael can be extremely sweet, romantic when he wants to be. he’s also fun, he brought out that side of her, i think. made her more carefree, less uptight and i don’t think she ever really felt as free to just sort of… be until raf came along and showed her what it’s like to be happy, to laugh, really, really laugh and not worry about so many things the way she has since she was a child. i think he taught her how to enjoy life, how to live in the moment.
raf gave her a lot of things, feelings, experiences that she was deprived of all her life because she always thinking about her problems, survival, etc. and so even though her intention was to marry him for his money in the beginning, she fell for him. as hard as she possibly could because how could she not ? i do still feel like overall her time with rafael, falling in love and the first few years of their marriage was the best of her life, the happiest, and i think those were the days when everything just felt kind of… light and simple and good for her. and she associates all of that with rafael. she still does. it’s like the one bright spot in the relatively dim life that she’s had.
petra loved rafael as much as a person could, genuinely, as much as she was capable of, as much as she knew how. but the way petra loves can be a bit complicated, because someone like her… it’s difficult to erase the part of her that’s always about self-preservation as well. and so it gets tangled up, especially when it comes to how she feels about him vs. protecting herself when it comes to it. i think that’s why it gets blurry sometimes, and it gets questionable, the extent of petra’s love for rafael when she could also hurt him the way she has in order to protect herself. but i think part of why it was less difficult for her to hurt him when she did was because it was at a point when it felt like raf didn’t care about her anymore. he didn’t love her anymore. and so, self-preserving petra’s instinct to protect herself outweighs not hurting the man who no longer wants her anyway. especially when she sees no other choice. if she has to hurt him for her own self-preservation ( and it was her life that was being threatened at the time ), so be it. not to say what she did wasn’t wrong, but i do think her actions in no way lessened the extent of her love for him.
petra, i think, like i said earlier… she doesn’t always know how to love in a way that is healthy. ( not that she’s not capable of learning, which she is and has i think ), because she was never loved in a way that is healthy. it goes back to her childhood, how she was treated by her own mother, how she was treated by the first man she fell for ( milos, who abused her ). and i won’t get into it deeply since my focus is petra, but i think rafael in some ways, is the same in that, same as petra, he doesn’t always know how to love in a way that is healthy though raf did have it a bit better than petra. so i think even when the marriage started falling apart, it was difficult for petra not to cling to raf. because raf has always been the bright spot in her life. she associates happiness with him. even when things became dark between the two, she loved him and i do think her abusive relationships in the past factored into her inability to really see straight when everything was starting to go wrong. idt people really focus on it because they like to blame petra for everything, but it was mentioned in canon how raf became difficult and went into a dark place etc, etc. he changed. she loved him anyway. he stopped loving her, she loved him anyway. and while i do think that petra’s feelings for rafael are as real as they get, i also think the sort of… almost unreasonable attachment she’s had for him ALL these years goes back to the fact that he was the first, and now that i think about it, actually STILL the ONLY person who’s shown her happiness. always the only person to remind her of what she’s worth. he’s the one person who’s been consistently there for her, even if the relationship is rocky sometimes. raf and petra, they can be a bit of a rollercoaster sometimes, raf can be a complete idiot sometimes too, and treat petra in ways he shouldn’t. ( petra has faults too, not saying she doesn’t ) but the fact is, in any of the ways rafael has wronged her, there’s always magda, milos, lachlan, roman, anezka, who has treated her worse. so much worse. and so anything rafael has done, never feels quite as bad where she’s standing.
i do think though, that over the years, petra’s romantic feelings for rafael faded as she started to gain self-respect and self-worth ( something she also lacked earlier on but that’s entirely different so i won’t get into it ). but there’s always that attachment to him, because one thing that hasn’t changed is that rafael is still that one person she associates with the best parts of her life. even the twins, who are now the best part of her life, they’re part rafael. and rafael is still the person who has at least, in several occasions, been there for her, helped her, protected her, comforted her through the years.
without rafael, petra has no one. literally. not a single person. as much as i love jetra, realistically, her relationship with jane in canon is inconsistent, and i’m not criticizing anyone but jane isn’t someone petra can really count on. and so it’s really impossible for petra not to have, and always have that sense of attachment, perhaps a lowkey sense of gratitude even. he’s always, and still is the one she’s able to depend on. and even when she can’t depend on him to help, he’s still the one who is always there in some way. i do think things are starting to shift though. right now, i think petra’s finally stepped out of this sort of, unhealthy attachment she has for rafael, or at least in most ways she has. she is no longer in love with him romantically in i guess, a way that is active ? but she cares for him deeply and always will, and i think petra regards him romantically in a way that’s more of… she wishes things between them had turned out differently, especially now that they’ve found a healthier balance between them ? so in a sense the one that got away-ish almost. but things did turn out the way they did, and that’s that.
it’s a bit difficult for me to really define her feelings for rafael that doesn’t encompass everything i just said because i think all of it comes into play and it’s complicated. if things were simpler, if there hasn’t been so much that’s happened in the past that makes being in a romantic relationship between them so difficult in the present, i feel like it’s something she genuinely would want to give a real second shot at ? but it’s not simple, and that’s just how it is and that’s something she’s accepted. i don’t think she really looks at him with regret though. it’s just.. i mean it’s complicated. but she’s moved on from him, from the idea of them, and she doesn’t love him in the way she used to anymore, but she will always love him deeply and he’ll always hold a place that no one can take, i think, in her life and heart… and it’s hard to simplify her feelings for him any more than that because he’s played such a huge part in her life but that’s basically how i see it. i hope all my babbling made sense lmfao.
as for jane and rafael, how she feels about them as a as a pair ( romantic, or just in general when they lump themselves as a duo / similar ), i think is always largely affected by a sort of constant unspoken comparison between the two ( jane and petra ) with raf doing the weighing ( idk if that makes sense ). i feel like it brings out all of her insecurities, because jane can act, speak in a way and tone that’s … i guess heavily influenced by her sense of morality a lot ? and it sort of creates this divide of right and wrong between them, good and bad, petra always feels like she’s made out to be wrong, or making the bad choice or the bad person and it creates this sort of conflict because from petra’s point of view, she’s not wrong. she’s practical. she’s being sensible. she’s being realistic. and that’s how she’s always been. that’s how she was brought up. that’s how her brain works.
if i were to place jane and petra in kohlberg’s stages of moral development, i’d place petra at stage six, jane at stage five. and the funny thing is i think raf on his own is also a stage six, that’s why he and petra tend to be in sync in terms of how they go about things. but when raf is with jane, or is being influenced by jane, raf’s makes decisions like he’s also stage five. and petra is aware of that. and i think that does bother her. that raf takes jane’s side over hers all the time. or that raf seems to bend over for jane all the time. and then the dynamic of the three always becomes jane and raf vs. petra, which of course, petra is not happy about.
obviously, when raf and jane were still dating, there was also the added hurt. seeing raf and jane build everything she and raf were supposed to have. right now though, petra’s moved on romantically and so i feel she is more concerned about the imbalance in the dynamic especially so when it involves the children. that’s her priority. plus, raf has this pattern of prioritizing jane and mateo when he has feelings for her. and petra is aware of that too. she and more importantly, the twins have been treated as second before and i think that’s really what she would be most concerned about in the present. if there wasn’t such an imbalance, tbh, i feel like petra would legit care less that they’re together.
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petitalbert-blog · 6 years
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Tangential thinking about Chumbley thoughts: When I came up in the 90s and 00s, they hadn't figured out how to monetise the internet yet. Most people has disconnected personal websites, which they maintained for pleasure and rarely had expectations of others reading. Later, this became blogging - something which was still decentralised, where readers were rare and interacting with them uncommon. In my lifetime, those things have gone. Now, central microblogging platforms like tumblr and twitter make connection with readers immediate and interactive - and made "attracting more followers" a goal in a way you really didn't before. I've definitely lost my ability to write happily for an audience of one, content without knowing whether or not i am read. And one is able to monetise what one makes and offer it for sale. Bear with me: I'm sad about this. A sharing culture has vanished. I'm into historic dressmaking, but when you look for tutorials and free patterns online they are all on blogs not updated since 2013. What changed? Where did the people writing incredible free content and sharing their work with the world go? The only people who seem to be maintaining blogs are people running a brand. And I've followed plenty of great blogs which, at some point, have launched a small business - and diminished, either through loss of pleasure or a greater need to be private and middle-of-the-road. Look at Sidney Eileen's website - there is no way anyone would produce a comprehensive free guide to making corsets nowadays. Some of Eileen's most recent posts talks about being ill, so I hope she is still well wherever she is - but where are the next generation like her? The current corsetmakers mostly write for a paywall-locked site. The site does as well as any could: it still offers a lot of free articles, it pays contributors, and I know several of their authors who have reuplodded their work for free on personal blogs with permission after a period of time has elapsed. It's about as open as any site can be while still generating a profit, and I have gratitude for that; but it's still a change from Eileen's generous sharing culture. Something which made all the drama particularly irritating is: I am full time working artist. I am pretty acutely aware of the importance of paying people for work, and have to explain why I cannot lower my prices once or twice a month. And yet - and yet. It's making my grief for the early internet all the more acute. I put 100 hours into a crochet pattern and maybe three people buy it. At that stage, is it really worth me charging anything? People can and do make their own working wages online, and that's great. And yet - and yet. Maybe the culture where i was sharing my patterns for free and downloading them for free from others was better and more optimistic, than one where everyone charges £10 for a pattern and once a year £3.67 minus PayPal fees slinks into my account. Barely anyone is making much more than pocket money, and everyone is disadvantaged. I probably lose more money in a year now paying for patterns than I do by producing them, and so does everyone else. It's definitely causing me a tug of war where, I hate this new norm and I miss the old culture even as it's the only way for me to make rent. And I barely do that. The only place where this sharing culture still exists is the programming community, where it's a core value. You can generally download programming languages and full guides and documentation for free, and people are keen to help. That culture then translates into big tech workplaces who have both the money and the ideology to give employees paid time off to work on personal projects. I love that. Imagine every company gave a months paid leave to everyone each year, imagine the world we could build if underpaid and tired people had those gaps to be creative and explore, or even to spend that month at home with their children or supporting their parents. Changing the culture to recognise the value of this unpaid labour, and then finding a way to support people doing it. I also think a lot about the Universal Basic Income - where the government reinvests the national revenue in giving every citizen a poverty-line yearly wage. I dream about the way this would revive the open culture. I don't need much to survive, and I think a lot about how much happier I was blogging for pleasure and producing content for free than I am now, maintaining a bland blog for my brand and making less back in revenue than I spend buying online content from peers; more aware than ever of the importance of supporting niche artists, but ironically, too broke to do so. If I didn't worry about buying food, if the government took that worry away from me, I'd have the freedom to embody my ideal and share what I make for free. I like youtube's model, where sufficiently large creators get a share of advertising revenue. It enables people to make free content, and be paid for it. I think a lot about how a collectively-owned tumblr, where high traffic posts earned a proportion of ad rev, would work. Or perhaps tumblr's profit could be divided by each user, who could then choose to gift it to bloggers they wished to support. Economically speaking, running a tumblr is working for free: it generates revenue for the site owners. I think patreon is ok, but it still creates too direct a link for me between "producing middle of the road content acceptable to backers on a regular schedule" and "being able to afford gas". And I liked models where things are released for free and for pay simultaneously. I have ordered Dver's books, which republish free blog articles, because I like them. I own Joan Bunning's Tarot book because her website "learn tarot" made the whole book available for free, and I wanted it enough to read it in hardcover. I buy my fave musicians LPs every time, but he still releases them on youtube for free. Perhaps this economy is governed by the same economics of piracy. Studies have shown that people who pirate books and films are people who were never going to buy them anyway; people who would have bought your content still do. For spellbooks, can you even doubt that if creators released them for free online, sufficient people would still want that gorgeous hardback to make a good profit? In short - while I have some specific red flags about religious information being locked behind a paywall, I'm also at a place in my life where I'm thinking a lot about the value of releasing things for free. About that lost culture. About how existing online for profit as a content creator has made my life, the lives of my customers, and the culture of the internet generally - worse. Where I'm turning the idea of "artists should be paid" over and over in my head, and I guess trying to find radical alternatives where people can still support themselves, yet also work for free on things they want to share with the world. I'm not in a place where "more exhange of money for goods and services and survival" sounds like a great ideal to promote. Like most things I blog about, I'm not yet at an answer, and I don't really have a great solution or the power to implement the ideas I do have. And i am up for feedback, though not of the shouty and snarky kind. I just know that when I was a teenager, many people were able to share knowledge and produce outstanding resources online for free, and now they do not. I miss that. It was a better way.
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All of a sudden, the very part of the hall that the siblings occupied grew dim. As they looked on in confusion, they noticed two silhouettes in front of faded purple lights that seemed to appear out of nowhere... both with eyes gleaming, beaming at them from their shadows...
“‘Tis the white knight and mint mage, the ones who came out on top at the stage...” whispered the top-hatted one in a delicate coquette-ish rhyme.
“A truly remarkable sight tonight, I would say...”
“And you two are now in luck as of today! For before we stand before you, so without delay...~!”
“We present ourselves to you!”
youtube
“‘Tis I, the Nebulous Illusionist, a trickster by trade! The caster of enchantments that leave you swayed! Now open your eyes, who is that you see? Why, ‘tis no one other than I--~”
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“A flash of fire to spark the night, blessing the stage with dancing lights! Who is the one who could muster such fiery power? It is none other than he, the Marigold Mage, the one and only--!”
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Alyx and Oriel merely stood there, at a loss for words from the flashy introductions that came out of nowhere. The calling out from earlier had their attention alone, but now it seems though they can’t take their eyes off them even if they tried. Was it because they were surprised? Impressed? Or just confused? It might've been the latter, as their eyes shifted toward each other before fixing them back on the magicians.
"Ahh, oh joyous, wondrous, beautiful day! We finally bear the fortune to meet the twins after a glorious fray~," the Gothitelle squealed as she jumped in place, clasping her hands together out of eagerness."
"Indeed we do, and by Tornadus' beard, you bear the might to shake kings, yes you do!" added on the shiny Mismagius, who gave a wink to the twins. Both of them seem to be quite the fans of the two, especially since before the Gallade and Gardevoir could even respond, they were presented a few gifts.
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"Oh, uh... wow, I uh..." Alyx was surprised, and not in the bad way either. A little confused, as it's not common for him to receive flowers of all things, to him that would be more of a date gift, but hey, a present is a present, right?
"These look lovely..." Oriel was more eager to accept them, albeit humbly, as she held the gifted bouquet into her arms before her brother did, letting herself bask in the scent of the flora before eying the two. "You have our gratitude, er, Miss Cassie, and Mr. Velius. You seem quite excited to meet us, are you, er...?"
"Fans?" Alyx chuckled as he held his own flower gift under one arm, giving a smirk.
"Ohoho, you catch on quite quickly indeed my shining blade~! You are right, we admire you both and your trade~!" Cassie's face stretched into an elated grin.
"Even 'admirers' would be putting it quite lightly, my good sir! You're both quite the inspiration to us, I'll have you know!" chimed in Velius with a bob of his head. "Ever since your first show on the glowing screens~"
"Haha, well that's cool, I'm flattered, always happy to hear we please the audience," responded Alyx with a pleased grin. Hearing that he puts on a good show, especially with one of his family members (namely Oriel), is what made part of the fighting worth it. Meanwhile Oriel felt the same, albeit with a sheepish flattered blush.
"A-ah, you're too kind, sir... though I agree with my brother, i-it's just the usual routine for us..." Oriel rubbed her arm.
"SHUSH!," exclaimed Cassie as she raised a halting finger."Balderdash, my beautiful seabreeze sage~! Your displays are among all the rage! Ah, it makes me wish we could do more than offer you gifts, yet when it comes to ideas, I'm at the cliffs..." Cassie tapped her chin before raising said finger up, a big smirk popping up as she reached into her coat to pull out a deck of cards.
"Ooh, how about this, if you have a minute! Something exciting for this honored visit!"
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"... Card-based fortune-telling...?" Alyx didn't know what to think, scratching the back of his head with a hesitant glance of disbelief. "That's uh..."
"Well, i-it's a free performance, I fail to see why not... in the end, it's just a game, correct?" Oriel debated with a soft smile, in order to have her brother comply. The Gardevoir faced Cassie with a bow of her head in agreement. "We'd be happy to partake. It could be interesting, perhaps even fun..."
"If that's the case, then very well~! Relax as I flip the cards with a spell~!"
Cassie wasted little time showing her graceful talents, flipping the cards with stylish, shimmering cycling flair as a means of shuffling the deck before finally drawing three cards, presenting them out to face the twins. Upon seeing them, however, Cassie seemed a bit shocked.
"Ooh..."
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"What're you going on about," remarked Alyx with a quirked brow. "All I see is a picture of a Cubone, a Darkrai, and a Zweilous... what's the big deal?" he interrogated as he overlapped his arms.
"I'm sure there's a meaning to it, brother... care to elaborate for us, Cassie? Velius?"
"Allow me the honors, milady~" bowed the Mismagius as he held up his wand, pointing to the cards one at a time.
"The Cubone is a symbol of loneliness as well as separation. With it being the first card, it seems to remark how you two must've had a past of isolation, whether from each other, or perhaps others...?"
" ... Er... that's..." Oriel looked at her brother, who returned the glance to her. That... was peculiar, but they couldn't help but falter in order to stop themselves from becoming perturbed.
"Uh, didn't you say you'd be looking into our future? Didn't say anything about the past," the Gallade called out with a flat look.
"Fortune-reading is more than just the future, my good sir! But if it upsets you so, I shall carry on!" Velius cleared his throat and pointd to the middle one, the Darkrai.
"The Abyss Pokemon, Darkrai, symbolizes omens, whether you're enduring them, or have yet to face them yourself, might be coming your way in the near future," the Mismagius clarified, noticing the siblings' reactions. "Er, you alright, milady...?"
Oriel tried to hold back a gulp. Omens... She knew Darkrai was commonly known as the envoy of nightmares, which is what she has been dealing with lately... this was hitting a little too close to home for her. To shake her from her stare, Alyx gently patted her back before glancing back at the magicians.
"Uhh... riiiight. Why don't we just get to whatever the two-headed lizard means?"
"As you wish~" The wand's fire stone gestured to the Zweilous. "The card for the future, it represents potential turmoil between those that are dear to you... friends, family, lovers... if the two of you are not careful, there might be a divide amongst you, or perhaps even yourselves. That's what it means."
"I..." Oriel was already a little put off by how spot-on the first two cards were... this really did feel like a prod into her head, and the meaning behind the dark dragon didn't feel particularly surreal. Meanwhile Alyx gave a hefty sigh, feeling how uncomfortable her sister was. Thusly, the Gallade gave Cassie and Velius a flat look.
"So you really think that's gonna happen, huh?"
"Well, it's a possibility, but then again it IS fortune-telling, so perhaps it has set its course, or it could be a mere possibility. Regardless, i--" Velius was cut off by Alyx before being sarcastically responded to.
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"I beg your pardon, sir...?" Velius tipped his head in confusion. "I DID say it was fortune telling, after all. Moreover, t'was little more than a free-showing, it could be nothing more than possibilities rather than certainties, I assure you."
"Hrmph, I guess so, but still..." Alyx pouted as he noticed Oriel still looking a little unenrved. She seemed to be relaxing now, but his side-stare did not go unnoticed by the showy enchanters. Cassie was quick to prance up and make the apology first.
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"Errr... uh, okay, sure, thanks for the apology I guess? I guess I shouldn't have been so snarky, it just seems to be bugging my sis, that's all."
"Oh it is quite alright, your reaction is fair! She is your sibling, why wouldn't you care~? 'Tis admirable for you to show worry for your sister, you're a very good brother to her, mister~" Cassie giggled; if her mask didn't hide it, she would've winked at him. Alyx could only quirk a brow, while Velius floated over to Oriel with a sheepish look of his own.
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"Anyway, uh..." Alyx interjected while rubbing the back of his head. "Was that it? Uh, anything else you two needed?"
"Hrm..." Cassie tapped her chin as she looked off up in the corner while leaning next to Velius. "Not that I can think of..." A soft nudge was adminsitered to the ghost.
"Ah, o-of course, yes, one more thing!" The shiny mage whipped out a pad and pen, smiling as he presented himself to the siblings.
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"Huh?"
"You... you desire our signatures? Truly...?"
"Absolutely, milady! I'd love them! If it's alright with the two of you of course~!"
This was a nice return to flattery for the two of them. Feeling a blush coming on, the brother and sister suppressed it before happily taking the notepad and writing utensil, marking their own names into the paper before handing it back to Velius proudly.
"There ya have it bud."
"OH RAPTURE~!" Velius spun in the air excitedly as a fire burned in his eyes.
"Hah, what a ham..." Alyx smirked, before hearing his stomach rumble. Oh yeah... lunch.
"Uh, look, as fun as it's been with uh, you two, we're supposed to meet up with the rest of our team to grab a bite to eat, so... why don't we meet up some other time, huh?"
"Oh absolutely, do not let us keep you!" Velius nodded sharply, clutching the notepad to himself.
"Yes yes, please, go and on and nourish~! For now we shall let this memory flourish~" Agreed Cassie, while waving them off. "Ta-ta~!"
"Uh, yeah, sure, ta-ta to you too, bye," Alyx waved half-way before making his way over to the foodcourt. "C'mon sis!"
"Ah, o-one moment brother!" Oriel approached Cassie with clasped hands, smiling up at the taller Gothitelle.
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"He doesn't seem to understand how your kind works... how you read futures with the stars and all. So forgive him for being skeptical, but your fortune-telling, your future-reading overall... it was, ah, remarkably accurate. I would like to call on your assistance should I have any other questions... is that fair to you, madame?" The Gardevoir pleaded with clasped hands, while Cassie sported another cheerful smile.
"My newly-found friend Oriel, you have my word! Just call by name, and I'll flock to you like a bird! Now go on, meet with your brother! There shall always be another time to meet up together~!"
"Ahh, m-my gratitude! Farewell," and with that, Oriel hurried off after Alyx, leaving the two magicians to talk amongst themselves.
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"You're most welcome my friend~ I'm always willing to help 'til the end!"
"And how!" chortled the ghost. "You've done excellently to assist me with the courage to see them, I believe we've left quite an impression, did we not?"
"Oh how I agree! Their smiles were fulfilling to see! But if I may say..." Cassie smirked, leaning over to her friend.
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"Now come, now that it's said and done, why don't we walk around? Surely there's a soul or two that are willing to talk abound~"
"Cassie," Cooper whined in his nerdier, true voice, rolling his eyes with a strained laugh.
"So sorry, 'tis habit after all~"
---
(( asks are now opened back up, and the cast has expanded! ))
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killingthebuddha · 5 years
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First published in 2013, this epistolary essay by KtB editors Ashley Makar and Briallen Hopper appears in Briallen’s new book, Hard to Love, a collection of essays on love and friendship which drops on February 5th. You can order Hard to Love here.
Dear Bri,
A gift sits on my writing desk. A gift penned in your hand, in Flannery’s voice, as if she’s speaking from the grave:
For me it is the virgin birth, the Incarnation, the resurrection
which are the true laws of the flesh and the physical.
Death, decay, destruction
are the suspension of those laws.
I am always astonished
at the emphasis the church
puts on the body.
It is not the soul she says
that will rise
but the body, glorified.
–Flannery O’Connor, in a letter to Betty Hester, 1955
You’ve written me this, given me this, in a vintage sketchbook, a vellum-colored page, each letter embellished just so: the crosses of T’s looping into the shoelace tops of H’s, F’s shaped like infinity symbols standing upright, each cursive S a leaf.
The first period is like a tiny kite, no string. The second, a red dwarf becoming a star. The last, a little leaning cross. I didn’t notice the shape until I looked hard trying to describe the gift, trying to give the words all my attention. Now I see the D in Death like a treble clef, unraveling. I see ASTONISHED and BODY as an epitaph, magnifying. As if through a tear, brightly.
Simone Weil wrote that prayer is absolute, undivided attention. And that’s what it takes to be a writer like Flannery, the kind of writers we want to be. Vigilant flames sustained and made into the words we need. I fail at that every day; I fall on my face. And you help me up. If I told you my self-loathing spiral of today you’d show me all the Christmas ornaments you polished while you were trying to write: the white globe with the red mallards, the iridescent rocking horse, the silver angel holding a candle. We’d laugh at that little blond angel face of forlorn piety. We’d light our own candle to try and write by.
Flannery tells God that it’s at some insipid moment, when she’s possibly thinking of floor wax or pigeon eggs that the opening of a beautiful prayer may come and lead her to write something exalted. The prayer availing itself seems to be a gesture of the grace young Flannery is praying for. And her response to that action of grace is her work, her strain to give it attention, undivided.
A pigeon egg hatches into a map of the universe, a peacock’s tail. Another world unfurls. And yet, “How hard it is to keep any one intention, any one attitude toward a piece of work any one tone anyone anything,” she writes. “Dear God, I am so discouraged about my work.” She’s even discouraged about her prayer—how she’s never been sorry for a sin because it hurt God. I bet Flannery’s sins were pretty innocuous—“gluttony” for Scottish oatmeal cookies, “laziness” in writing and prayer. And yet she tried and worked so hard. She suffered much in her labors of fierce love.
I’d hate to believe my gluttony for Golden Grahams or all my tactics of distraction from writing and prayer hurt God. But I know they hurt me. They keep me from the life I want; they separate me from God. In that sense, they are sins. And Flannery is helping me take those sins seriously and honestly: “I am afraid of pain and I suppose that is what we have to have to get grace. Give me the courage to stand the pain to get the grace, Oh Lord. Help me with this life that seems so treacherous, so disappointing.”
Life seemed so treacherous, so disappointing the day you gave me that illuminated Flannery manuscript. I’d fallen three times trying to walk on icy sidewalks. Blisters were forming on the bottoms of my feet—chemo catching up with me. I’d missed another writing deadline for no good reason. It pained me to look at the pink-orange sky because I failed to write it. I felt like an old lady, a hoarder holed up in a dim room looking through the blinds at the menace of daylight. But I didn’t give in to her. I told you I was having a bad day.
You invited me over. You gave me that gift. You opened a window. Light shined on the table laid bare for writing, trying again.
Ash
*
Dearest Ash,
I just read the whole Prayer Journal in the bath, in the facsimile version (checking confusing scribbles against the transcription from time to time).  Flannery’s young handwriting on wide-ruled pages seems so much closer than the printed and corrected text.  In the quiet and warmth I somehow felt the aura of the archive; I knew the book was just a book, but it felt precious, and instinctively I clutched it tight so the historic manuscript wouldn’t fall into the suds.
There’s so much to tell you, but what I wanted to say first, almost to warn you, is that she prays for desire like a deadly cancer, desire as consuming and overwhelming as your cancer wants to be.  She prays for suffering and for grace.  Her friend who edited the book seems to see her lupus, which arrived a few years later, as an answer to prayer.  I think about this young woman of appetites and ambition and I hate to think that God read her earnest scribbling and sent her death, but then if you must suffer it is of course better if the suffering helps your writing and your faith.  I am using the generic second person here, but I mean you, dear Ash.  I love you, and I leave this practical theology to you.
I don’t know much about suffering, but I know about writing stress and night-eating and erotic thought.  (“Today I have proved myself a glutton—for Scotch oatmeal cookies and erotic thought.  There is nothing left to say of me”:  the most irresistibly quotable lines in the journal, and some of the best concluding lines in literature.)  I’m almost fifteen years older than Flannery was then, and Lord knows I have filled up several shelves of blank books with similar confessions, though I prefer ice cream and erotic thought to oatmeal cookies.
Somewhere I have the old journals I wrote to God when I was Flannery’s age.  I was fighting through some of the same things she was, the conflict between self and faith, the battle for attentiveness and gratitude, the desires for experience, publication, grace, and God, though I lacked her genius and her Catholic clarity. It’s not that these conflicting desires have gone away, it’s just that I gave up on serious striving so long ago, and I am still not sure how to be ambitious without what Flannery calls “nervousness.” I have made a truce with life that I don’t want to trouble, and it’s not clear to me where the urgency and tenacity would come from to write something good, even if I had the talent.
I rarely write private prayers to God anymore:  I avoid unguarded introspection in general, the kind that is open to the future and full of desire.
Bri
Dear God,
Why am I such a dull lump? You give us leaven and salt and the moon shoaling blue, even as new daylight glades into morning. I want to wake early to write by that imperceptible changing of light when you can’t tell if it’s dark still or day yet. Sometimes you give me, on the cusp of waking from sleep, words, arranging themselves as if in the corners of the ceiling, lines fine and fragile as gossamer, the unseen seam between death and life. And I press snooze. Ten more minutes and ten more and so on, until those strands of You are lost to me. I’m not saying you’re fragile, Lord, nor that I could lose You. But my sense of Your nearness is tenuous, my attention too feeble most of the time to even see those strands of You, much less write them.
Lord, help me to sit here and tolerate this mangle of words. The belabored metaphors that mar the page, the lame turns of phrase I cross out and then try to save.  Help me stand the pain to get the grace.
Help me sit here and work every day. I’ll mess up most of the time and blunder, sometimes, back to the blue glow of daybreak.
Ash
*
Dear Bri,
Thank you! For naming how I want to pray—open and full of desire. If only my drive to write were as voracious as my cancer. And yet I don’t want anything so consuming anymore. I worry I’m too scared and tired to strive like I used to.
Flannery was going on 22 when she wrote God from Iowa: “Oh Lord please make this dead desire living, living in life, living as it will probably have to live in suffering. I feel too mediocre now to suffer.” I was around that age when I wrote this prayer from New York:
to write You, Lord
to write You
to Write.
And here I am, thirteen years later, a cancer patient, terrified of writing. My body is slowly unraveling, and I can hardly sit still. I dart from thing to thing, like a squirrel, frantic to get all my living in before I get sick. Dividing and dividing my attention. What happened to my dire desire to write God?
“It is hard to want to suffer,” young Flannery writes. “I presume Grace is necessary for the want. I am a mediocre of the spirit but there is hope. I am at least of the spirit and that means alive.”
Three years later, her body started dying, on her train ride home for Christmas.
Her friend W.A. Sessions writes that she left Connecticut a vibrant young woman and arrived in Georgia “drawn and bent, ‘like an old man.’” She’d had her first flare of lupus on the train. I wonder what she prayed. (I bet it was about writing.)
Most days I don’t know what to say to God. I don’t want to suffer. I want the grace to stand the pain.
Ash
*
Hello again dear Ash,
It’s December now and you’re here at my house for a day of writing and pumpkin chili in the glow of the Christmas lights. I love our writing days together. I love how almost every time I see you we light a candle and pray. When we’re out together we even pray in restaurants, like a Norman Rockwell painting.
I found my old journals.
July 24, 2001
Writing is hard.  Writing is different from more routine forms of work, writers tend to be more flukey and various in the ways they work. …  I am usually fairly miserable, very tense, quite caffeinated, tired (buzzing!), and late.  Sometimes there are brief thrills or moments of satisfaction.  Most of the time I am frustrated and scared and just want to read mysteries and eat comfort food, my idea of heaven.
July 31, 2001
There is a desire to escape work, to use God to let you off the hook, seeking for a guarantee of spiritual purity attainable by industry, passivity, withdrawal, inaction.   BUT God requires us to give, to serve, to think … he doesn’t make it easier.  MLK Jr. couldn’t just stand around getting beat up; he had to think, plan, pray, take responsibility, take risks.
September 1, 2001
Re work, grad school apps—I can wholly apply myself to the present tasks, straining and rejoicing and exhausting myself.  Remembering what the stakes are!  No, professional life can’t be separated from “real” life, it is a part of “real” life, but God’s standards are different.  He looks at the heart; and the state of a heart that is right with God is never inert.  My heart rejoices to do God’s will.
Faith is necessary.  All my instincts will be panic and self-preservation.  I must resist them.
I panicked that day you fell on the ice. When you texted to tell me about your blistering feet, I let my tears take me over for an hour. I thought:  There is nothing to be done.  Then:  Writing is what you do when there is nothing to be done.
In the absence of adequate words of my own, I found Flannery’s, and I found comfort in the practice of writing as a physical act, as if the pressure of my pen against the paper could push away the forces of death and decay.  As if the gold ink could become a healing balm.
Bri
Dear Flannery,
You write, “I do not mean to deny the traditional prayers I have said all my life; but I have been saying them and not feeling them.”
My own prayers have gotten more traditional since the days I wrote them out and I admit I mostly feel them less, but I mean them just as much.   I am a believer in rationing feelings these days.  I wonder if you rationed yours any in your thirties?  As another famous Southern lady once said, “Honey, you know as well as I do that a single girl, a girl alone in the world has got to keep a firm hold on her emotions or she’ll be lost!”
As it happens, it was two days before September 11, 2001 when I wrote this urgent prayer:  “Now I am immeasurably blessed.  At any moment this could all be taken.  I need to love you now so I can love you always.  All the people who harm the body but cannot harm the soul:  make them completely unable to harm.”  My prayer was not answered.  I didn’t expect it to be, but I didn’t expect it to be so spectacularly ignored.  Still, I have never stopped praying.
September 14, 2001 In lives, this is where Jesus lives in the world; my body can be part of his body.  I’m not a naturally religious person but that doesn’t matter. I’m taken into his body.
For a long time in the mornings I’ve lit a candle in the pewter holder that says “All shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well,” and I name all the people and places that I want so much to be well.  On my teaching days I pray for my students (ha!).  On my writing days I hesitate to pray for my writing, because I worry it won’t go well and I don’t want my faith in prayer to dissipate, and my prayers for writing feel optional in a way that my prayers for other people and the world do not.
I pray with the red cloth-bound Book of Common Prayer my grandma received when she was confirmed at age 32, in the midst of her losing battle with life-threatening mental illness.  Sometimes I read the psalms of the day, and sometimes I skim for one that will say what is in my heart, looking at the Latin titles and guessing what they mean:  Hear me.  Lean toward me.  Judge me.  Be merciful.  God is light.  Wonderment.  Out of the depths.  Rejoice.
And I pray with the small dun Prayer Book for Soldiers and Sailors my grandpa got for Christmas in 1943, a battered book literally designed to be used in foxholes.  It has prayers for help, for protection, for aid against perils, for world peace, for grace to forgive, for prisoners, for the lonely, for those who mourn, for the wounded, for the dying, for one departed.
In the evenings I light a candle in the pewter holder that says “At night I give my troubles to God.  She’s going to be up all night anyway.”  This summer Ash and I lit candles for you at your church in Milledgeville, in front of the brightly painted Virgin.  I didn’t write a prayer for you, or say one; I just let a prayer float up to you where you were sitting up all night with God, waiting for your body to rise and share forever in the glory of your soul.
Bri
*
Dear Flan,
I’m on the train from New Haven to Boston. I feel as if I’m looking out the window into a snow globe. Except the snow isn’t flakes, suspended in a circle of glass. It looks more like sand, storming side to side. I can all but feel the grains on my eyes.
I suppose with all these qualifiers snow globe isn’t the right image for the view out my window. You would sit with it, suffer with it, until the words came. But I look away, take another sip of coffee, another bite of clementine. I watch the gulls scuttle up a rusty pole in the river—a remnant of a pier a storm tore up?
Even though I’ve divided my attention, another image is given. Light sears, silver vermillion, over the broken trees. A shock of radiation, bone lightning. Ezekiel raving God raising the dead.
A startle of sun blares white. I close one eye and see the stark circle it is. A center that holds. And yet a yolk I know could burst and seep like a bleed in the brain. Grandmother after the stroke—her body, half paralyzed. The little slanting cross. The sign of the body, glorified.
Ash
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hellogreenweb · 6 years
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Family History Through Food
Nothing goes together quite like food and family. Traditions, moments, loved ones, memories, seasons and more can be remembered through tasting a dish your Great Grandma would make every Thanksgiving or a breakfast dish your dad would make every Saturday morning. Family history whether written, spoken, recorded or tasted can be tangible through food – no better way to cement memories and build bridges than through something that we must do day in and day out! Whether that be around a small counter top or a large dining room table we know that daily nourishment can mean a lot more than just filling up our stomachs.
Today we are featuring some amazing food bloggers who are sharing some of their favorite family recipes, not only because they taste wonderful, but because of the special memories they hold for each of them. Read on to find out why they love these recipes and the memories and goodness each recipe holds for them. And lucky for us, the recipes are included!
Jen Sattley @carlsbadcravings
 Every Fall growing up, us 5 kids (and all the neighbors, family, friends and anyone else blessed enough to be a recipient of Mom’s pumpkin bread) would eagerly await the arrival of pumpkin cans lining grocery store shelves so mom could make her famous Chocolate Chip Pumpkin Bread.  The house would fill with the magical Fall aroma of pumpkin and cinnamon and we knew it was going to be a magically delicious day.  But mom wouldn’t just make one loaf, but three beautiful Chocolate Chip Pumpkin Bread loafs.  We would devour as much as we were allowed and the rest would be gifted to neighbors and friends.  And then she would make more.  My very favorite memory of Fall.
This recipe for Chocolate Chip Pumpkin Bread is over 50 years old.  It comes from my mom’s brother’s elementary teacher who sent home homemade pumpkin bread and the recipe to all the children in his class.  With just a few adjustments by my mom over the years to make it perfect, this Chocolate Chip Pumpkin Bread has stood the test of time against any other pumpkin bread recipe.  In my opinion, it is simply the best!  So get ready to be loved, adored and applauded for your “famous” supremely moist, Chocolate Chip Pumpkin Bread riddled with chocolate chips, Fall spices and new memories to share.
Chocolate Chip Pumpkin Bread
INGREDIENTS
Bowl One
6 eggs
4 cups granulated sugar
1 29 oz. can pure pumpkin
1 cup Vegetable oil
Bowl Two
4 1/2 cups AP flour
1 tablespoon baking soda
1 tablespoon baking powder
1 1/2 teaspoons salt
1 1/2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
1 1/2 teaspoons ground cloves
1 1/2 teaspoons ground nutmeg
add later:
2 cups semi-sweet chocolate chips (or half chocolate chunks)
Preheat oven to 325 degrees F.
Grease and flour three 8 1/2” x 4 ½” loaf pans or use a cooking spray with flour in it.
In a very large bowl, add eggs and gently whisk. Mix in sugar, pumpkin and oil.
In a separate large bowl, mix together all Bowl Two ingredients (don’t add chocolate chips).
Mix the Flour Mixture into the Pumpkin mixture just until combined, being careful not to overmix. Fold in chocolate chips. Evenly divide batter between 3 loaf pans.
Bake at 325 degrees F for 65 – 75 minutes or until toothpick comes out clean. Let bread cool on wire rack for 10 minutes then remove bread from pans. Let bread cool completely on wire rack before slicing.
Store bread in an airtight container for up to 5 days.
Brooke Eliason @femalefoodie
One of my favorite family recipes comes from my beautiful maternal grandmother, Sayo Black. Because of her Japanese heritage, we have called her “Grandma Japanese” since my siblings and I were young kids. We love her ability to cook and share parts of her asian culture and, although this fried rice recipe isn’t an authentic Japanese dish, she has always been willing to prepare this family favorite throughout the years. She often makes double or triple batches of her fried rice for large family gatherings and jokingly comments “I’m cooking for an army”!
As a family, we have enjoyed this recipe on Christmas Eve, as a stand-alone meal, for leftovers (which we fought over relentlessly as children), or served inside an omelet for breakfast. I love that when I make this fried rice I am reminded of the great times I have shared with my Grandma Japanese as she thoughtfully chopped fresh vegetables, cooked each ingredient one at a time, and always let me have the first taste.
 Fried Rice
7 cups cooked sticky Japanese (pearl) rice, cooled completely (see tips below) 1/2 cup chopped onion (yellow or white) 1/2 lb chopped ham (about 1 1/2 cups or two thick deli slices) 2 cups cabbage, sliced thin 4 tablespoons butter, separated 2 tablespoons vegetable oil salt pepper soy sauce 1/2 bunch green onions, chopped white and green parts
Using a large non stick pan, cook each of the vegetables, separately, in a small amount of oil and butter. I use about 1 teaspoon for each vegetable/meat. Salt and pepper each vegetable. Transfer to a bowl or plate after the vegetables and meat have been cooked one at a time. It’s OK to let the vegetables and meat inter-mingle at this point. After cooking all of the vegetables and meat, add about 2 tablespoons of butter to the Teflon pan. Over medium heat, add the cooked and cooled rice a little at a time, breaking apart clumps with two wooden spoons until the rice is evenly distributed in the pan, and the butter is mixed in well. Add all of the vegetables and meat to the rice. Toss lightly in pan. Season again with fresh ground pepper. Add the soy sauce, a little at a time. We don’t like to drown the rice in soy sauce, so I only use about 2-3 tablespoons to 7 cups of rice. Taste, add salt and more pepper, if desired. After heated through, add fresh chopped green onions. Turn the heat off. If you continue to leave the heat on, your beautiful fried rice will end up as gummy rice.
Tips: -Make sure the rice is cooked and cooled completely before starting to make fried rice. It is best to make the rice the day before. If you use hot rice when making fried rice, your dish will turn out to be a sticky, gluey mess. -Make sure to use Japanese, or pearl rice, which is short and plump, not a long grain rice. -When “mixing” the rice and other ingredients together, do not stir this like it’s a cake batter- toss the ingredients, like you would a salad.
Becky http://ift.tt/1dSJQk2
I grew up on homemade hot cocoa. Every year my mom would get out the biggest bowl that she owned and we would dump in a few simple ingredients. Then, she’d let my sister and I have turns with a giant whisk, stirring, while also creating a little cloud of cocoa around us. Once it was made all we needed was a cup of hot water and we could mix this in for a quick treat. Also, on occasion, more frequently than I’d like to admit, we would just sneak straight bites of the powdery cocoa mix, only to be found out by our coughing and laughing.
Last year, I created my own hot cocoa mix recipe so that year after year I could replicate this sweet memory with my kids. We enjoy it with a big homemade marshmallow on top or just on its own, always with warm cosy feelings inside and gratitude for foods passed down from generations.
Homemade Hot Coco Mix Recipe
Ingredients
8 ounces organic cacao, or unsweetened cocoa
16 ounces organic powdered sugar
16 ounces non-fat dry milk powder
Instructions
Add all ingredients to a large bowl and use a whisk to combine. Transfer to a large jar to store. This will last a couple months in a dry cool area.
To make hot cocoa: Add 1/2 to 1 cup of hot water* to 1/2 cup of hot cocoa mix. Whisk to combine.
Recipe Notes
You must use hot water to adequately melt the chocolate into a liquid. If servings kids, mix the cocoa with hot water then add an ice cube to cool it down.
Mel @melskitchencafe
I was very close to my paternal grandmother, Venice Walker, as a child, even though my family lived hundreds of miles away from where my grandmother lived (Rexburg, Idaho). Whenever she and my grandpa would come visit us in Texas or Oklahoma, she would inevitably plan an afternoon to make my dad his favorite treat on the whole planet: raisin filled cookies. I have to be honest, they are probably my LEAST favorite cookies ever (mostly because: where’s the chocolate??) and you’ll never find a recipe for them on my blog (sorry, grams), but my grandma would labor over these cookies! They took forever. A homemade sweet dough was made and rolled out and then cut into circles, creating a sandwich for the homemade raisin filling. Because I loved being around my calm, quiet, kind, always-listening grandma, I would immediately join her in the kitchen to help (bonus, she didn’t have to worry about me snitching the dough or the filling because I didn’t like the cookies!); I probably spent at least half my childhood making raisin filled cookies with my sweet grandma! And I loved every minute.
I can still remember from a very young age watching my grandma in the kitchen (hers or ours) making creamy peas and new potatoes, whole wheat bread, raisin filled cookies, or canning chili sauce. She was an unassuming, hardworking, resilient woman who quietly moved through life serving others and often showing her love to others by making and giving them her homemade food. Even more remarkable, my grandmother suffered from very poor health after she had a stroke when she was in her early 30’s (with many small children of her own to care for). Standing for long periods of time was hard, and she often had debilitating back pain and would sit in the kitchen waiting for her bread to rise or her jars to finish canning while laying back in her plastic lawn chair with a rag over her eyes to block the light. But she never stopped cooking…and serving. And to this day, even though she is no longer here, I know without a doubt that my desire to share good food (and recipes!) with my loved ones (and strangers!) is because of the example my grandma set for me. It was nothing she sat down and taught me, nothing she directly said…just a cumulation of all the thousands of sweet moments I observed and remembered.
One of her most famous concoctions was her jarred chili sauce. It’s not salsa. It’s not spaghetti sauce. It’s not jam. No, no! It’s a zesty, spicy, sweet, chunky blend that is ridiculously delicious eaten over eggs (my favorite!) or yes, even with tortilla chips. The recipe has been oft-made, much-loved, and greatly cherished. Every year I make a batch of this chili sauce, even though I’m the only one in my immediate family right now who eats it, mostly because the process and smells and work and finished satisfaction remind me of my grandma, and those memories are precious and sweet to me.
 Grandma Walker’s Chili Sauce
 8 quarts tomatoes, peeled
6 large onions, ground
3/4 quart vinegar
3 cups sugar
3 red peppers, ground
1 teaspoon cloves
2 teaspoons cinnamon
1 tablespoon allspice
2/3 tablespoon salt
Cook in microwave (I do it on the stove now). Not written: Simmer sauce for an hour. Can in steam or water bath for 15 minutes.
Thank you to these women for sharing a little more of their family heart and these delicious recipes we can’t wait to try! Now you can get sharing your own stories. We love these resources offered by Family Search on how you can create or carry on your own food traditions and share those food stories! This article shares why it’s so important and how food can pull families together, this site is full of resources to help you get started and this site helps you share those stories with others. Thank you to Family Search for all of these great resources and to these women for sharing a piece of their family with us!
Family History Through Food posted first on http://ift.tt/2ulDYg7
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ravingsofajunkie · 6 years
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“At least you’re still alive”. It’s almost as bad as “at least you’re sober”. I really have no idea what those mean to me. Alive…dead…sober or high, I don’t see importance of one state over another. Suicidal, I am not. I’ve been suicidal before because I thought that’s what you do when you’re depressed. A suicidal thought would cross my mind saying life would be much easier if I weren’t here. I would go with that thought believing it was real. But if there was any amount of known pain involved in a certain method of suicide I wouldn’t want use it. So the best way was Tylenol. Right? As if! Twice even!
My belief system had been this: I’m capable of thinking a thought therefore it must be true and I have no choice but to follow that one path. I really didnt know, deep down, I had a choice about everything…and I mean e-ve-ry-thing until about 2013. My first lesson was in 2004. Being sober for almost a year I found some solace at a Methodist church in the Lakeview neighborhood of Chicago. I attended an orientation class for those who were curious about becoming more involved with that specific church. The straight pastor who had been suspended from serving this church for marrying gay couples said, “we’re more universalist than Methodist here. Some of us actually believe that Jesus didn’t rise from the dead which doesn’t mean youre not a Christian.” I knew what he said was Truth yet still I was flabbergasted and gratitude radiated from my body like light from the sun.
The second lesson was in 2011. I had been using crystal meth off and on for about a year. My most personal and revealing tweak was carpet combing. I would spend hours (in total adding up to days and days) combing through my carpet to see if I or anyone else had dropped any crystal meth whether or not it was used in that part of the apartment. The sense of lack in my life was fierce. Lack of choices. Lack of friends. Lack of money. Lack of worthiness. I wanted more T and that shiT was expensive. Letting the cat out of the bag and revealing my tweak to a “friend” he said, “You have a choice. You need to tell yourself to get up off the floor and do something else. That shit is pathetic”. Why did he have to add THAT at the end? My sense of lack was so loud I had neglected my truer instincts.
I have never understood concepts such as a God based out of major religions, baptism, funerals, I am supposed to give a shit about the plight of every human being (especially when I could imagine aspects unknown to my experience and without judgment), and the importance of “at least I didn’t die”. Gosh, I must be a heartless person. That’s not what most people have told me, though. My first sponsor (in AA) of eight years mentioned that I was very altruistic at least once in every conversation, always trying to affirm my worthiness. I had no idea what that meant, at first, so I looked it up. It meant I was a very giving person with no expectation of reward or reciprocity? Please. No one…absolutely no one I know is the perfect model of altruism. A reward always awaits in anything we do or are with the simple release of the feel -good-chemical dopamine. I had started to hate all people because I gave too much of my energy trying to be friends with everyone. I sat on the term, altruism, for quite a long time trying understand why he would say that. My sponsor also sat on a pedestal where i had placed him until it came crashing down during the “relapse” or “revolving door” years between 2009-2012. I recall six major flaws in our relationship. 1. He would always forget routine activities that had been happening for years. 2. When I started “relapsing” on Crystal Meth his ignorance and lack of curiosity of what I was going through climaxed with “you were gone for three months and you still have your teeth”. 3. He actually meant “intuitive” or “empathic”…not altruistic…u’s, t’s and i’s…I see it. (And yes ive had almost all UTIs…LOL) 4. The statement, “you are now a chronic relapser” stung. 5. I was way too sensitive. 6. I placed him on that damn pedestal…he’s not perfect.
In 2013 my experiences had been traumatizing enough to bring me back to sobriety and rehab for what I had thought would be the fifth and last time. I had been attending back to back workshops at Haymarket, the boot camp rehab center in Chicago’s West Loop (two blocks away from Oprah’s Harpo studios) for poor and mandated-by-court patients.The difference between previous rehab experiences and this one was I had sensed an overwhelming flood, an abundance, of worthiness with no external motivation but the observation of a few opinions being thrown my way. Id, ego and super-ego were bookended with the father, son and holy spirit in a matter of a couple hours. Accompanied by my “mind, body, and spirit” theories floating around in my head I had made the connection between the holistic, religious, and psychiatric examples. They’re all the fucking same. Fuckers. Everyone. The whole bit. We, as human beings, have come to a place of identification and political correctness, no matter how liberal or conservative, dividing ourselves into the most lonely of separation. It’s all the fucking same. We’re all the fucking same. A fun bitterness accompanied those thoughts and feelings…just pure instinct, knowing, curiosity, and worthiness. Or was I just close enough to the A-Ha energy emenating from Harpo Studios? Who cares?! Naturally, bitterness arrived in the grieving process of letting go of old conditioning, assumptions and ideogy later on but I knew I had touched on Truth. Without knowing I had set out on a mission to choose my own belief system. The excitement of a clear internal motivation allowed me to hear the quiet “no of all nothing” (e.e. cummings) and the little guide posts externally along the way, aka synchronicity. A common phrase in AA made more sense to me then and now. “These (ideas, thoughts, 12 steps, clichés) are merely suggestions. You can take them or leave them”. Now if they, as one example of a recovery community, actually knew how to do that I would still be involved.
Ironically, despite my internal spark, two pieces of advice that I can give anyone today to achieve this state of mind, of knowing abundance, are not of my own making.
1. Set a hoola-hoop around you on the ground. Whether or not you have done this literally or in your mind’s eye, the only thing you need to worry about is inside this hoola-hoop. Dudes…all that gobbledeegook out there, i.e. media, government, gossip, your neighbors, etc are mostly a distraction. Everyday, all day, little by little, I gave this thought and asked myself, “why am I doing this? What is my motivation”. I have a tendency to over do things but the importance of being able to take all of my attachments and examine them overwhelms me with gratitude. My goal was to identify and keep my sense of inner motivation. Ironically I discovered that abundance after quitting injecting crystal meth on my own yet still getting high as a kite. More on that later.
2. Get religion out of ‘spirituality’. I don’t give a fuck if you’re atheist, muslim, naturalist, scientist, evolutionist, creationist, christian, or a devil worshipper. It’s all the same and 99% of all people can relate to this definition. The most important thing next to feeling worthy is being able to communicate our worthiness to each other. Just retrain your brain. Easy, right? If you’re too lazy to do it, fine. Ive been super lazy about lesser important things about which most people have pigeon-holed me into a being bad person. True, external motivation/inspiration exists but I cannot give you your worthiness. You have to feel that all on your own. So, take it or leave it.
Spirit - that life-giving source…the spark of life…energy everywhere…infinite microcosm….infinite macrocosm…atoms…universes…the unknowable thing that makes you or me breathe or get up in the morning or feel or do or be or the fact that scientists say that energy cannot be destroyed.
—“I’ve got spirit! Yes, I do! I’ve got spirit! How 'bout you?!”
Spiritual - expressing that energy. For all people and things something is being expressed. Even a rock.
Spirituality - experiencing the energy from within and from without. The sharing of that energy. Giving and receiving. Selfishness and selflessness. Reciprocity. The flow. Not Aunt Flo….but…The Flow.
What does this have to do with the phrases “at least you’re still alive” and “at least you’re sober”? Because I feel that it’s all the same, life, death, energy. To say otherwise is to imply shame or that I am not as good of a person for being high or dead. I’ve given myself the chance (time and space) to experience where motivation, creativity, inspiration, passion, love, hate, boredom etc comes from. All of these are within the realms of the abundance and gratitude I feel. I think it’s a lot like the idea of Zen….that energy and motivation are coming from the “no of all nothing”. Relax and go. And it’s even okay to question it all because I am naturally human, merely a doubter, a forgetter, blinded by my ability to separate, organize and categorize. In that painful distraction I can experience an even more powerful understanding that “it’s all the same.” Through the Flow of every experience, high or sober… dying or living, I can allow my humanness to evolve into knowing a little better than the last time I forgot. I have come to accept that, over time, I have seemingly no choice but to evolve in any state of being through some higher purpose…or inner purpose…or. Maybe I’m limiting myself by saying I have no choice in the matter. But until that discovery my options seem endless. And only by experiencing and expressing will I be able to see and know those options.
I am existence. I am energy. I am expressing my True Self through the tool of categorization (aka the Ego or Original Sin) and with each glorious experience. I choose to believe in my worthiness through the abundance of my expression without as much filter of seperateness and as many boundaries as I need.
Life is a paradox. I am a paradox.
May The Force be with you.
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