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tenspontaneite · 3 years

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The Ceracurist (Chapter 3/?)

Even after these past months, she wasn’t yet used to it. Another Full Moon spent alone.

(Chapter length: 10.4k. ao3 link)

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“Did you go to the game night?” Was Ethari’s first question when she called him the next day.

She rolled her eyes at him. “Yes, Ethari.”

He looked delighted. “Did you make friends?”

She hesitated, thinking about it. “…Well, I did beat them all at Antiquitora,” she said eventually. “And you were right, they did appreciate that.” She paused, and added “I’m probably going back, I think.”

She spent the next ten minutes having details pried out of her so warmly and kindly it hardly felt like an interrogation at all. Ethari was good at that. Finally she secured her escape via the need to leave for training, and was farewelled with considerably less fretting than usual. When the call dropped, she was about to shut down the Sunbeam module entirely, but then-

New Contact Requests, said the alert in the corner. Rayla blinked, nonplussed, and opened it, already having a decent idea of what she’d find. Sure enough, there were three new requests from codes she recognised: Kazi, Nihatasi, and Callum. She lingered there for a while, feeling bizarrely overwhelmed, then finally accepted all three of them.

She didn’t linger by the computer, after that – she had training to get to. Rayla paused at the door to perform a final once-over of her armour, then grabbed her swords and left.

---

Rayla stumbled back into her room in late afternoon, covered in about three different kinds of mud and her body aching all-over in the aftermath of prolonged exertion. She spent the next two hours with rigid discipline: cleaning herself, cleaning her armour, checking her weapons. She cooked unenthusiastically and ate, then finally felt justified in utter collapse. She landed face-first into her bed and fell asleep immediately.

Three hours later, she woke to a stirring of magic in her veins, prickling over her skin, all the hairs on the back of her neck standing on end. Slowly, she blinked her eyes open, and pushed herself up; every hint of soreness from training was completely gone. She turned her eyes to the window, staring at the Moon rising full and resplendent past the horizon. Something deep and instinctive in her delighted at the sight of it. But something else twisted, sharp with the pang of homesickness.

Even after these past months, she wasn’t yet used to it. Another Full Moon spent alone. She sighed, and tried not to think of the festivities that would surely be beginning back home. It was moonrise; Ethari and Runaan would be at the Circle by now. Had the dancing already started? With the Moon this high, it must have.

She stared unblinkingly out of the window, turning thoughts over and over in her head. It wasn’t right to be alone at Full Moon. It wasn’t right to spend it all indoors, either. She couldn’t do much about the first thing, but the second…

Silent, Rayla slipped outside. A few of her wingmates were out in the common room, chattering drunkenly with each other near the table. She blinked, slowly, and exhaled. When she passed, they didn’t see her; only started with surprise at the open and close of the door. She crept through the streets like a ghost, visiting each of the parks and training grounds in turn until she finally found one unoccupied: a small stand of well-kept trees, and a fountain that reflected the full body of the Moon in its burbling waters. It would do.

It was no Circle. There were no runes in the ground – nothing here that awaited the careful precision of the lunar dances, nothing that would light up at her passing. But it was better than nothing. Rayla pulled at the moonlight until she was nothing but shadows flickering in the shadows of the trees, and danced.

There were plenty of moondances that could be done alone, and she circled the fountain with all of them, one by one. A tracery of magic hummed in the air at her passing, whispers of light following her; magic summoned by her motions, without the guidance of a Circle’s shaping. Even formless and aimless, it was beautiful. So, for the pleasure of it, she spun through those motes of moonlight and held them flickering in the shadows of her skin; light and dark woven together.

When she was done, she felt…not joyous, maybe, or exhilarated, as a celebration back home might have left her. But she was satisfied. Calm, and a little less sad. With the Full Moon still high above her, its magic brimming in her veins, Rayla headed home once more.

She didn’t bother to hide herself this time, and when she came through the door and passed by the remaining wingmates still up and awake, they saw her perfectly well: skin night-dark, eyes glowing, the edges of her form blurring into the shadows. They were all of them Sunfire and Skywing, and went a little quiet as she went by them; she wondered if they’d ever seen one of her kind at Full Moon before. Somehow, she doubted it.

Finally, Rayla arrived at her door, disarmed its security, and closed it behind her. She sighed, standing for a moment in the moonlight through her window, and considered it. Sleep would be a lost cause for another few hours, probably. So, somewhat inevitably, she ended up checking the computer. Browsing the mageskein was probably the best way to kill a few hours, and it wasn’t like she had anything else to do, this time of night.

Except: her Sunbeam module was still on, humming inside its casing, and…when she looked, it had projected a few message alerts onto the screen. Hesitantly, she checked them.

One was from Ethari, wishing her a good Moon, and entreating her once again to visit a Circle for it. Somewhat belated, that. One was from Kazi, confirming the time of their rematch tomorrow, as well as the address. Nihatasi had sent another, packed with effusive praise for her gaming excellence, insistence that she return, and an offer to come by the house whenever she wanted. Rayla shook her head at that, reluctantly amused. It wasn’t as though she’d met many nomads before – not in a social setting, anyway – but so far, Nihatasi more than matched their reputation for being aggressively sociable.

The last message was from Callum, and she steadfastly pretended that she wasn’t any more interested in it than the rest. He’d cheerfully thanked her for coming to the game night, said he hoped she’d come again, and then made an inquiry about her gaming tastes. Did she play computer games? If so, which were her favourites?

With the slow, halting uncertainty of the socially awkward, Rayla responded to all of them except Ethari’s. Kazi’s was easy enough, she just had to say ‘thanks’ and ‘see you tomorrow’. The other two took more doing. To Nihatasi, she expressed her thanks, and her assurances that she intended to come to a game night again. She said nothing about the house visit. To Callum, she reiterated her intentions to return, and admitted that, yes, she did like computer games, but hadn’t had the opportunity to play many of them, for lack of the necessary modules or a computer with the right specifications.

Given the hour, she certainly didn’t expect any response, so she switched active modules to the mageskein to start browsing. News headlines on the home site vied for her attention: something about the outcome of the latest Katolis-Evenere expedition into the wastelands; the most recent public appearance of the Dragon Prince with his esteemed parents; a gossip piece about some Katolian royal’s birthday. She checked the second one for images, and sure enough, there he was: the young prince Azymondias, still tiny in comparison to his queen mother…and, in the background, a few Dragonguard standing at the ready. Rayla spotted her parents and smiled. She clicked to transfer the picture through its Sunbeam link and waited.

The other module hummed, her computer making distressed noises as it attempted juggling the inputs of Sunbeam and Mageskein at once. The unit at home wouldn’t have had any trouble, but this one…she sighed, and waited, and was eventually rewarded when her Sunbeam successfully imported the image and displayed it full-fidelity, with all the depth and nuance of lighting that a flat picture could never convey. She filed it away, and was about to switch back, when she saw the alert.

A new message. At this hour? It had to be at least two in the morning by now, surely. She checked her clock to be sure, and, yep. 2:14am. She eyed the icon with consternation, then opened it.

Callum had responded. She stared, brow furrowing as she read. Hey, glad to hear back from you! He opened, cheerfully failing to acknowledge the fact that it was currently stupidly late. The rest of it was perfectly normal too; commiserating about her lack of access to proper computing, commenting that yeah, I didn’t get to play any EX games until I moved here, and you know what WX graphics are like, and which ones did you get to play? Any I’d know about?

Rayla reread its entirety several times, mildly flummoxed. At Full Moon her emotions were all closer to the surface than usual, so there was an undeniable thread of glee in her chest about this unexpected late-night contact, but…well, she was curious. In her limited experience with the ways of other students, the only reasons a non-Moonshadow would be up this late would be ‘partying’ or ‘insomnia’. Or ‘last-minute coursework’, but that was unlikely to apply when term was already over. So: You’re up late, she wrote, without thinking about it, and sent it back without responding to any of his actual questions. She’d begun composing a belated second message, but apparently Callum was a lot speedier with typing than she was.

Haha, yeah, I kind of lost track of time. Gaming, incidentally. She thought he must be used to significantly faster systems and transfer times than she was, because that was the entirety of that message, and then he sent another one: What about you? What are you doing up?

Rayla blinked, then settled herself a little more comfortably in her chair, since it seemed like, well. Like there might be a conversation happening, here. She brought the keyboard further forward. It’s Full Moon, she responded to him, a little dryly. Her computer took its sweet time about sending the message, as usual.

Oh. It is? After a pause, during which he presumably looked out of a window or something, he said Huh. So it is. Does it keep you awake?

She paused. Kind of, she wrote, slowly, and then wasn’t quite sure how much more to divulge. Eventually, she wrote It’s kind of hard to sleep through when it’s still high. I’ll be okay in a couple hours.

That must be so cool, he answered, which seemed a weird thing to say to a statement of Moon-induced insomnia. I’ve used artefacts to cast moon-magic before, but it must feel totally different when you’ve got the arcanum. What’s it like?

Rayla stared at her screen. She recalled the implications of him being a mage student, and was suddenly brimming with curiosity. I don’t know, I’m not a mage, she wrote, and then paused. Do you cast a lot of artefact magic, or was that a one-time thing?

She probably should have just outright asked about the mage student thing, rather than trying to be cagey about it. He probably wouldn’t have minded. Except, that turned out to be unnecessary, because the next thing he wrote, as if it were perfectly natural and unsurprising, was Well, I’m doing a thaumaturgy / thaumatology masters, so I definitely cast a lot of magic, yeah. Then, while she was still gawping at that, he followed it up with Listen, do you want to call?

What? She sent back, astonished, still in the middle of trying to process the concept of a human thaumaturgy student. She couldn’t quite get her head around it. How did that even work?

It’s okay if you don’t, he clarified. But your Sunbeam seems to have kind of a lot of connection lag, so it’d probably be faster to talk, you know?

Rayla was, in fact, using a fairly old edition of the Sunbeam module, which did have to establish a new connection for every individual message it sent and received. It was what was cheapest, and the lag was just…an unavoidable side-effect. She called more often than she messaged anyway, so it was rarely relevant. Except, apparently, now. It’s two in the morning, Callum, she sent to him, bewildered.

And we’re both awake, he pointed out, as if it was perfectly reasonable to call someone you’d only met twice before in the middle of the night.

Her first instinct, fuelled by bemusement and social anxiety, was to say no. Her second instinct was quick to the scene, with some very definite opinions about interacting with Callum, even at as weird an hour as this. She hesitated, wavering.

In the end, it was a glance at the Moon through the window that decided her. Rayla was emphatically not a mystical person, but even so, there were things that were deeply culturally ingrained. And one of those things was Full Moon is community time. Family, or friends, or a wider community – it didn’t really matter, but you weren’t supposed to be alone. This…probably counted.

Yeah, okay, she typed in the end, foot tapping under the desk with a frisson of tension. But only for a bit.

He didn’t waste any time about it, just sent the call request. Rayla took a quick moment to check she hadn’t made a mess of herself dancing, realised it was something of a moot point when everything attached to her was veiled in shadows, and finally accepted the call.

Callum’s room was startlingly brightly-lit when it appeared in the monitor, and it hurt her eyes a bit. She blinked rapidly, fighting the urge to squint, and glimpsed what looked like a well-appointed loft room with an unexpectedly dense population of easels. She could see at least three of them, most of which occupied by some sort of paper or canvas. She blinked, nonplussed, then steadfastly did not react when his face came into view. It moved around jarringly as he adjusted the lightcatcher, then finally settled.

He grinned at the screen, looking sleepy but in good enough humour, and said “Hey! Wow your room is dark.”

Rayla opened her mouth, closed it, then blinked. “Oh, right, your eyes,” she said, embarrassed. She generally only ever called her family, whose night vision was perfectly equal to hers. Humans, as well as most other elf races, were not nearly as well-suited for the dark. “Can you even see anything?”

“I can see your eyes,” he volunteered helpfully, looking amused. “They’re glowing. Really brightly, actually.”

“Yeah, that’s the Full Moon,” Rayla told him, already standing to go for the switch of the wall lamp over her desk. She’d never actually had cause to use it before, other than testing it when she first moved in, so the soft blue light it produced was almost wholly unfamiliar. “Is that better?” She asked, moving back to her chair.

“Well, I can actually see your room now, so-“ he started, then cut off abruptly as she settled back down in front of the lightcatcher. “Oh, wow,” he said instead as he stared at her, eyes wide.

Rayla ignored the self-conscious twinge in her stomach and frowned at him, folding her arms. “What?” she demanded.

He startled, as if only just realising what he’d said. “Oh. Um, sorry?” he attempted, weakly. “It’s just – I’ve never seen a Moonshadow elf all, er…” he waved expressively at her, contrite. “You know, Full Moon-ish?”

Oh. She eyed him, determined that he wasn’t messing with her, and relaxed a little. “What, not even in the Honour Games?” She asked, after a moment.

“Well, I mean, sometimes. But that’s usually in broad daylight, you know, and from a distance, and broadcasted.” He shrugged, a light dusting of pink rising in his cheeks, like he was embarrassed. “Kind of different to…” he nodded to her via the lightcatcher, smiling sheepishly.

“Suppose it is a tad different to a close-up Sunbeam call,” she conceded, lips twitching.

“I should’ve expected it, really, considering it’s full moon and everything,” he said ruefully. “Sorry, I’m not exactly at my brightest at two in the morning.”

Oh, that was right. It was the middle of the night. She squinted at him. “Then shouldn’t you be sleeping, instead of sunbeaming random Moonshadow elves?”

“Well, you’re up,” he said, as if this was a perfectly logical reason for him to be awake too. “And it’s not like I have to be up early.”

Lucky for him. She thought of the training and the Antiquitora rematch she had scheduled for the day, and suppressed a sigh. It was sometimes truly inconvenient to live in a mixed-race city that didn’t automatically expect the day after Full Moon (and the day of and before New Moon, of course) to be a rest day. “Wish I could say the same.”

He winced sympathetically. “Can you not cancel whatever it is?”

She opened her mouth to say no, stopped, and frowned. She hadn’t yet missed training even once. But…it wasn’t like attending every session was compulsory. And she did train three other times a week…and besides, a Sunday morning short session had never fallen on Full Moon recovery day before. “Probably, honestly,” she admitted. “My – uncle wouldn’t even tell me off for it. Moonshadow elves aren’t supposed to work the day after a Full Moon.”

“Because none of you can get to sleep the whole night?” He asked with interest, as if the cultural habits of her kind were genuinely intriguing to him. “Makes sense, I guess.”

Rayla huffed and shook her head. “Kinda. Mostly it’s because, traditionally, we’re supposed to spend moonrise to moonset with – family, or the community, or whatever. And we’re not much good for anything except collapsing once the Moon’s gone. So we all take the next day off.”

He blinked at her curiously, but if he wondered why she wasn’t currently out spending the Moon with her rightful community, he was tactful enough not to ask. “You should skip your thing, then. Whatever it is,” he determined, after a moment. “Get some actual sleep.”

“Says you,” Rayla said, wry. “You don’t even have a stupid magical reason to be up this late.”

“Does a technomantic game count as a stupid magical reason?” He grinned at her, his smile lopsided and full of humour. Her stomach did a weird flip-flop. “I mean. It is magical.”

Despite herself, she snorted. “And it is stupid,” she allowed, lips twitching. “As far as reasons to be sleep-deprived go, anyway.”

“Worth it,” he claimed, cheerfully. “I don’t have work till the afternoon anyway, so I’m fine.”

Rayla nodded at that, then a moment later actually recalled what his job was, and practically felt her face heating. Thank the Moon – literally – for her skin currently being too dark to show it.

He noticed some sort of reaction, though. Maybe her shoulders had hunched a bit. He tilted his head at her, a little rueful, and said “Yeah, er, about that. I wanted to apologise, for the others talking about it, yesterday? Couldn’t have been super comfortable.”

Abruptly hyper-aware of the weight and presence of her horns, Rayla did her best not to sink into the chair. “…It’s fine,” she muttered, embarrassed. “It’s not like you told them about it, they just guessed.”

“Yeah, I definitely wouldn’t tell them about who my customers were unless my customers said something about it first,” he assured her. “Not really professional, you know? We’re supposed to be confidential about it.” Suddenly, he smiled again. “Then again, it’s not like I usually end up meeting my customers at game night, so that part tends to be easier to manage.”

“Usually?” she asked dryly, ruthlessly suppressing the urge to lift her hands and hide her face behind them.

“No, yeah, you’re definitely the first time that’s happened,” he admitted. “It was kind of a surprise.”

She thought about how she’d reacted to seeing him appear through that door yesterday. “Just a tad.”

“A good one, though!” he claimed, cheerful. “It was nice to meet you properly.”

Rayla was tempted to say something along the lines of you know, where I come from, touching up someone’s horns is considerably more than a ‘proper’ meeting, but that was too mortifying to express, and he probably knew it anyway. She couldn’t imagine anyone becoming an experienced ceracurist without learning all the assorted implications that sort of thing had. “Even though I kicked your Archdragon across the board?” She questioned eventually, when she found her voice again.

“Even though you totally kicked my butt, yeah,” he agreed readily, looking far too pleased about it. “It was a great match. You’re crazy good at that game.”

An involuntary smile pulled at her lips. “Well, Kazi’s better,” she said, pleased despite herself. “They’d have had me easily, if they weren’t playing Ocean.”

He didn’t argue with her. Clearly, he understood the game plenty well enough to know the truth of that. “Still the second-best player I’ve met,” he insisted staunchly. “Is Antiquitora one of the computer games you said you did play? You must’ve put in some serious practice time.”

Rayla snorted. “I wish. No, the only games I ever actually got to play were on a gameship, just the one time, when I was…” she frowned, trying to remember. “Thirteen, maybe? Good long while ago.”

He perked up, expression brightening. “I love gameships,” he enthused. “There’s one that comes by Gullcrest twice a year, and I swear, all the students in the entire engineering department just disappear on board until it leaves. It’s crazy.” After a moment, he admitted “Well, to be fair, I disappear on board too, so, you know. It’s not like I can judge.”

She blinked, and leaned forwards. “What clan is the ship?” She asked, with considerable interest.

“It’s a joint management. Serat-Demani,” he said, watching her knowingly.

“Moon above,” she swore, and he grinned.

“Right?” Looking exceedingly pleased with her reaction, he took that as his cue to go into extensive, exacting detail about the wonders that a fully-stocked, state-of-the-art Demani entertainment airship had to offer. She listened raptly the entire time, interjecting with questions about the rates, the facilities, the games. If it was a Demani ship, it had to have Skycrawler, surely? What was it like? Was the gameplay everything it was said to be?

In the end, Rayla didn’t think she could really be blamed for losing track of time.

Callum was in the middle of enthusiastically praising Scion of Shadow, with particular attention to its unusually enjoyable stealth mechanics, when out of nowhere a yawn cracked through his sentence. He seemed fully ready to keep on talking once it was done, but Rayla sat up a little straighter, and for the first time in a while remembered that it was the middle of the night. She consulted her Moon-sense, and then the clock, and then buried her face in her hands.

He cut off mid-sentence, inquisitive. “What?”

“Callum, it’s nearly four in the morning,” she informed him, lowering her hands to stare at the clock, consumed with a baleful sense of having been betrayed by the passage of time. “The sun’s probably not even far off rising.”

He blinked, looked to the side, then blinked again. “…Huh,” he observed, a little sheepish. “Yeah, that’s…later than I usually stay up.”

“It’s later than I usually stay up, even on Full Moons.” Technically true, for the ones she’d spent at university. At home, though…moonset was, after all, later than sunrise in summer. Full Moon celebrations usually concluded once everyone’s skin was back to normal, but not always.

Callum shot her a weird look, long and appraising, before he spoke. “You’re still all…Moon-shadowy, though.”

“That won’t stop for a while yet,” she informed him, and shook her head. “I can probably get to sleep by now, anyway. Or another hour off, at most. You…” For a moment, she inspected him, spotting the signs of tiredness in his bearing. “You won’t have that problem, I think. You look knackered.”

He offered a rueful smile. “I’ll probably pass out the second I lay down, yeah,” he admitted. “I kind of lost track of time. Again.”

She rolled her eyes at him. “Well, I’ll just go now, then, so you can’t get distracted again.”

Hastily, he sat bolt upright. “But there was something I wanted to-“

“Tomorrow,” she told him, firmly. “Or…today, technically. Later, anyway. Whatever it is can wait.”

He opened his mouth, closed it, then smiled sleepily at her. It looked far more endearing than it had any right to. “Well, okay then.”

Rayla nodded to him, said “Thanks,” then leaned in and shut the call down without a further word. Sunbeam’s active connection died down, Callum’s face disappearing from the screen, and she leaned back in her chair to fix the ceiling with a long-suffering stare.

On one hand, Ethari would’ve probably been delighted to hear she’d spent a couple hours of her Full Moon socialising, as a proper Moonshadow elf ought to. But on the other….Ethari could absolutely never, ever find out about this. If he knew she’d been up chatting with someone, losing track of time, for actual hours…she’d never hear the end of it. To say nothing of how he’d react if he got wind that she – that she might sort of-

“Ugh,” Rayla grumbled to herself, wiping a hand over her face.

She stared at the ceiling for a good long while, experiencing a variety of emotions that she wasn’t keen on thinking about too hard. She also spent a not inconsiderable amount of time thinking about the conversation, running it over in her head, thoughts stubbornly fixed on Callum. This was how she ended up realising that she’d never actually asked about the mage-student-thing, and she still had no idea how that worked.

“Ugh,” she said again, more emphatically, and finally left her chair. She left her room to perform some necessary ablutions in the bathroom she shared with the next room over, then returned to draw the curtains. Without the direct moonlight through her window, the magic in her skin started to stutter a little. In ten minutes or so, she’d be back to normal again…and, with luck, she might be asleep by then.

Begrudgingly, Rayla peeled herself out of her clothes and threw them haphazardly onto the floor, not even bothering to watch the magic desert them, and climbed into bed. A suboptimal amount of time later, she was asleep.

---

“Goodness, you look tired,” said Kazi, welcoming Rayla in. Rayla, for her part, was a little too exhausted to feel particularly awkward, which was nice. “Was the Full Moon particularly trying?”

Rayla’s lips twitched. At least this one knew when Full Moon was. “No more than usual,” she said dryly, bending to remove her shoes when Kazi made noises about it. “Just, you know, getting enough sleep is kind of a lost cause.”

“Oh, I know the feeling. Or at least somewhat,” they commiserated, leading her through to a small and cosy-looking living room lined with bookshelves, and then through to a somewhat larger dining room, whose table was…occupied. Very thoroughly occupied. Rayla tried not to look at it too closely until she had a chance to inspect it properly. “There was a solar flare a few years ago, and of course I and the other Sunfire elves couldn’t sleep for days. It was quite the experience! And I’m sure you know how the Skywing elves get when there’s a particularly powerful storm abound.”

She had, in fact, had occasion to see what Skywing elves looked like when they were storm-drunk. It had been funny, up until it got annoying. “Probably more of a pain for them and you, really, since none of you take anything like moondust,” she volunteered after a moment, mouth turning up with wry sympathy. She’d hate to be a Skywing and be subject to random, unpredictable bouts of their equivalent of being moonstruck. “You all get the full effect of it.”

Kazi looked a little curious at that, but didn’t ask. “Yes, I suppose so. We should be thankful our magical overload is not so consistent as it is for you. In any case-“ they gestured towards the table. “Please take a seat wherever you prefer! Would you like any stimulants?”

Rayla blinked. “…Could you repeat that?”

“Tea,” they clarified, eyes merry with humour. “Or perhaps reveillant, or coffee, by your preference. I have all three, in some measure.”

For a moment she’d wondered if she was being offered something illegal, which…looking at Kazi, she was quite sure had been on purpose. She shook her head, reluctantly amused, and said “I could try some reveillant? I’ve only had it once.”

“It is not especially common, in a Skywing city like this,” Kazi allowed, already heading in the direction of one of the doorways. They kept speaking as they disappeared through it, still perfectly audible to her ears. “But I always keep a supply. It’s the only one that tastes particularly good cold, after all, unless you are very creative with your teas.” There was the sound of a cupboard opening, and then a good bit of rummaging.

During the wait, Rayla cautiously selected a seat at the table and settled there, finally letting her increasingly wide eyes rove over the board set up across it. She was still gawping conspicuously when Kazi returned, brandishing three brown paper packets of what she assumed to be reveillant.

“Do you prefer unflavoured, citrus, or mixed berry varieties?” they inquired mildly, hiding a smile when they saw her inspecting the board.

“Er, berry?” Rayla offered, only half paying attention. She was too busy looking at the intricate detail on the hand-carved and probably hideously valuable Antiquitora board. There were no pieces on it yet, but even just the tiles…it was astonishing. All of the terrain had been dyed and varnished in different colours, with careful attention to the different biomes. It all gleamed. The ocean tiles had even been coated in some kind of resin, making them look wet. The artisan had even mimicked the effect of the edge of an underwater continental shelf seen from above, with an area of lighter ‘water’ closer to the ‘coastline’.

“Berry it is,” Kazi said, sounding quite smug. Rayla didn’t have the chance to see what their face looked like, because they’d already disappeared back into what she assumed was the kitchen. She spent the next five minutes of beverage preparation time inspecting the game board with undisguised admiration. Rayla wasn’t one to usually pay much attention to art, but…this was game related art. It was different.

“The set you brought to the game night wasn’t your one set, then,” Rayla finally commented, when Kazi reappeared. She accepted her cup with exacting care, not wanting to risk a drink spillage near a board like this. She was honestly surprised Kazi allowed drinks so close to this thing.

Kazi smiled, disproportionately small for the amount of self-satisfaction in it. “Yes, it’s my more portable set,” they said pleasantly, and took a seat across the table from her, setting down their own glass. “This one…well, I certainly do not take it out of the house.”

“I can imagine,” she expressed, uncertain whether to be jealous of the board or just plain impressed. She wouldn’t even want something this pricey. She’d constantly be worrying about damaging it somehow. But, even so…the hint of avarice remained. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“The various tile-pieces and figures are quite a sight themselves, I think,” they said, evidently extremely pleased with themself. Rayla wondered how many people they invited round for Antiquitora for the express purpose of showing off this set. “Have you decided your faction for today? Once we have that settled, we can begin setting up.”

Rayla snorted, lips turning up into a half-smirk. “Depends what you’re playing as.”

Kazi beamed back. “Do you have a preference? I am perfectly open to suggestions.”

She considered it. Allegedly, Kazi was most beastly when playing Earth or Sun. Rayla herself was best at Moon and Sky…and Sky was exceptionally poorly matched against Earth. Sun’s best counters were Earth and Ocean. Moon wasn’t great against Sun, but not terrible either. “Take Sun,” she decided, eventually. “I’ll do Moon. I want to see for myself how much you wipe the board with everyone when you get to play properly.”

If Kazi had been smiling before, they looked positively frightening now. Not that their smile had widened, or anything; they just seemed to have a way of looking disconcertingly menacing while beaming pleasantly at you. “I will do my best to arrange that,” they said, and reached for three boxes: Moon, Sun, and the tiles and dice and cards.

Setting up would have gone more quickly if not for Rayla’s interest in inspecting the various gamepieces, and Kazi’s interest in flaunting them. Most of the units, from citizens to mages, were all carved in beautifully varnished wood. The Hero and Archdragon figures, though… “Is that gemstone inlay?” Rayla asked with disbelief, inspecting her Lunar Archdragon and turning it this way and that.

“The Lunar Archdragon has mother-of-pearl inlay, in fact,” Kazi said pleasantly. “And, yes, some very small gemstones for the eyes.”

She shook her head at that, half-impressed, half in disbelief. “Where did you even get this?”

“It’s an heirloom,” they elaborated, which made sense. The only other way for someone to have a set like this would be by being ridiculously rich, or by knowing an insanely skilled craftself. “Hence why it has the standardised continent shape. It does need fairly careful maintenance, though. I paid to have some of the varnishing redone recently, for example. But for me, the joy of owning a set like this is well-worth the upkeep.”

Rayla nodded. It wasn’t her sort of thing, personally, but she understood well enough. “I bet you try to get people over to play you every chance you get,” she said, amused. “With a board like this…”

“It would be quite a shame otherwise, yes,” they agreed. “I must thank you for obliging me! This board so rarely sees a high-level game.”

She huffed, amused, and kept unpacking the gamepieces one-by-one. Kazi had to know that they were the better player. If she’d barely beaten them when they were playing Ocean and underestimating her for most of the game, she certainly wasn’t going to win now. “I’ll see what I can do.”

Eventually, when everything was set up, they rolled the starting conditions and began playing. Kazi very obviously knew what they were doing with the primary advantages of the Sun faction – agriculture, population, and military might – but Rayla was perfectly well acquainted with a proper Moon playstyle as well. She leaned into the espionage and intrigue skillset as heavily as she could manage, wreaking political strife in Kazi’s territory wherever she found an opening. When Kazi could find them, her units died; but that certainly wasn’t always.

Even so, the outcome was something of a foregone conclusion. The game lasted a while, because Rayla knew that her main defence against the Sun armies was if they couldn’t find the Moon cities, and planned accordingly…but Rayla hadn’t succeeded in assassinating the Archdragon, and hadn’t managed to get the Sun citizenry to demand a leadership duel either. So, unsurprisingly, Kazi eventually managed to field an assault that broke through the illusory barriers protecting Rayla’s stronghold, striking at her Archdragon precisely on the turn before New Moon. It died of its injuries the turn later.

Rayla considered the board carefully after that. Her best chances of winning against Sun would be crop poisoning, Archdragon assassinating, leadership disputes, or revolution. She’d managed the first and had been making decent headway on the latter two, but, in the end…it wasn’t close enough. She smiled ruefully, and said “Moon concedes.”

They nodded, having expected that, and smiled beatifically. “It was a marvellous game,” they said warmly, already reaching over to begin clearing the pieces. “Thank you very much for it.”

“I don’t know, it was a pretty solid victory for you.” Her voice was dry as she reached out to help, handling each of the intricately-carved figures with care. “You’re obviously the better player, here.”

“Yes,” they agreed, neither modestly nor boastfully, simply as the fact it was. “But nonetheless, you are certainly the best player I’ve encountered in-person in a very long time. Certainly the only one I didn’t arrange to meet with beforehand. It was a good game, no matter that you lost it.”

Rayla dipped her head, smiling a little. It wasn’t like she enjoyed losing…but she’d appreciated the challenge enough to make up for it. She’d ceased finding any sort of challenge back home a long, long time ago. “Yeah, it wasn’t bad.”

Kazi reached for another piece, paused, then eyed her consideringly. “Would you…like to discuss it?” they asked, tilting their head, watching her.

She glanced up, surprised. It was hardly an unfamiliar concept. She’d watched enough matches broadcast on Sunbeam to know how it went; when two top-tier players concluded a match, they talked about it afterwards. They discussed each other’s plays and strategies, pointed out mistakes, considered where there was room for improvement…

The only after-game discussions she’d ever had had been at Runaan’s knee, when she was still small and didn’t know the game nearly as well. It was weirdly flattering to be invited to do it now.

“…Yeah,” Rayla said, eventually, and sat back down. “I’d like that.”

Kazi beamed like the Sun they’d just used to trounce her. “Very good.”

The next half hour involved more talking than Rayla thought she’d done at a time in months…or, well, she would’ve said so, if not for last night. It was certainly a good second-place contender though, and by the end her voice was feeling a little tired from overuse. They concluded the discussion, packed away the gamepieces and board, and then were done.

“But of course, you must stay for another drink,” Kazi said, and whisked her empty glass of reveillant away. “You liked the berry infusion, yes? Excellent, I will get you another.” Good to their word, they did precisely that, and returned in short order.

Rayla did feel a little more awake, on that second glass of the reveillant. It was effective stuff; as much or more so than coffee, with (in her opinion) a considerably better taste. She was debating the merits of asking Kazi where they got it when they spoke up first.

“You’ll be returning, I hope?” they said, and it took Rayla a moment to think of what they meant.

“….Here?” she guessed. “For a rematch?”

“Well, yes, naturally.” Kazi pushed their glasses up, smiling a little. “I had assumed as much. But, no, I was referring to the game society. You’d be an excellent fit, I think.”

Rayla blinked. “Oh.” She thought of the previous night, and hunched down a little in embarrassment.

“I know it was only a very small group when you visited, but I have the impression you prefer that, anyway,” they said, neatly demonstrating that they were as unnervingly good at reading her as she’d sort of inferred. “It can get rowdier in term time – at least at the official meetings. The meet-ups at our houses are much calmer – usually just the core group.”

“Which is?” Rayla asked, a little reserved now, if only to disguise the fact that she really didn’t need convincing. She might have, after just the Friday. But after this…after yesterday…

“Myself, Callum, Nihatasi. Usually Pava, but often he spends the whole time tinkering instead of playing.” They shook their head, amused. “In term time – well, usually I’d say to expect Evairas, but he is spectacularly busy these days, so perhaps not.”

“…They sent messages,” she commented, after a moment. “Callum and Nihatasi, I mean. Pava didn’t.”

“Pava tends to forget Sunbeam exists for weeks at a time, don’t mind him,” Kazi assured her. “Nihatasi and Callum though, I’m not at all surprised. Nihatasi adores new people, and Callum…” they eyed her, just a little speculatively. “Well, I think you impressed him. Has he invited you to Tuesday, yet?”

Rayla blinked with consternation. “Invited me to what on Tuesday?”

“Game meeting, at the house,” they clarified. “It’s hardly an official thing, but it’s often Callum’s house that has everyone over. He hasn’t invited you over, yet? Well, he will. I am quite sure of it.”

For a long moment, she looked into her glass and the dark red liquid therein, pondering it as if it held all the answers for how she was supposed to respond. “If you say so,” she said, finally, and lifted her glass to drink.

“I do,” Kazi claimed serenely, and gracefully changed the topic to (naturally) more about Antiquitora. By the time Rayla finished her drink, she’d learned that Kazi played broadcast games online fairly regularly, under a handle that she recognised; she’d watched a good few of their games before.

“Is there a story behind that skein-name?” she asked, undeniably curious now that she was acquainted with the elf behind it. “’Finguistician’.”

Kazi laughed, like she’d surprised them. “Oh, that,” they said, mirthfully. “It’s something of an in-joke. You see, I have my doctorate in Linguistics – specifically, in non-verbal linguistics. Various sign languages, Draconic Corpus, and so on. I made a joke once, when I was still an undergraduate in a sign-language module, that the course should be called finguistics, given, well,” they waggled their fingers at her.

She snorted, amused. “Did it catch on?”

“Sadly, no. But I do call my sign language classes for the public ‘finguistics’, and no one can stop me, because I am the teacher.” They giggled a little to themself. “Perhaps in time it will become a more widely-used term. I would like that; it would be very amusing. In any case, that is where the handle comes from.”

Rayla thought, for a moment, about a moment from the game night: Kazi and Callum had used some sort of sign language with each other for a second, hadn’t they? She considered asking about it, wondering what his background in that was. Did he take any of Kazi’s lessons, or had he learned some other way?

In the end, she bit her tongue and said nothing. After a little more idle conversation, she eventually made her leave, farewelled at the door by her cheerful host. Without the game to bolster her, she swiftly began to really feel her exhaustion. Stimulants or not, she was so tired that a headache was starting to pound luridly behind her eyes, almost enough to make them water.

She headed home intending to collapse back into bed and nap – if the lingering effects of the drinks allowed her to, anyway. Which was why she was considerably displeased to arrive back to find her wing busy and full of noise and various elves milling about. The halls were crowded. She was about to say “What the fuck”, or perhaps “Shut up, do you know how bad my headache is right now”, but before she had the chance one of the closest elves (some wingmate she didn’t know the name of) spotted her and shouted down the hall “It’s her, she’s here, she’s not dead!”

All eyes went to her, and an immediate chattering started up. Rayla stared, utterly nonplussed, fighting the urge to pull on the Moon and take advantage of a state of near-invisibility to just retreat to her nice, privacy-sealed bedroom. The noise cancellation ought to take care of this racket.

After a few seconds, a face she actually had a name for pushed forwards. It was Stavian, a Skywing elf from her bellatorium, still in armour from training. “Rayla,” he said, sounding very relieved. “Thank goodness, we were about to call for an official search!”

Rayla had no idea what was happening. “What in Xadia’s name is going on here?” she demanded, finally, and her irate tone seemed to remind him that he (for some reason) customarily seemed to be quite intimidated by her. He shrank back a little, and as he did, a few of the rest of the Honour Games team started to appear.

“You didn’t show up for training!” he said, defensively. “And from anyone else that wouldn’t be much of a big deal, but you’ve never missed a day before. And then when we went to check on you afterwards you weren’t here.”

“And none of your wingmates knew where you were,” added one of her teammates: Fiera, a particularly tiny Skywing mage with hair and feathers dyed a distinctive lilac colour.

Rayla stared for a few more seconds, then wiped a hand over her face. “It was Full Moon,” she said, very slowly, her patience already somewhere on level with the floor. “I didn’t get to sleep till around five; of course I wasn’t going to go to morning training.” She ignored the fact that, if not for Callum, she absolutely would have. He’d been right; it was completely reasonable to miss training on a Full Moon rest day, and if they had a problem with that they could bite her.

The vast collective of people assembled in the halls all looked very embarrassed, suddenly. And honestly, they should be. Moonshadow elves were definitely uncommon in Gullcrest, but surely someone should have known it was Full Moon, and made the obvious conclusions. “Oh,” said Fiera, weakly. Her wings drooped a little. “That…makes sense.”

Now looking very abashed, Stavian echoed “Oh.” The crowd of assorted wingmates and guests, probably attracted by the initial hubbub, started to grumble and dissipate.

Rayla sighed, and rubbed at her eyes, attempting to scrounge some sort of positive emotion from beneath her absolute crankiness at being confronted with a noisy group of people when she was this sleep-deprived. “Look,” she attempted, tiredly, “It’s…nice you were worried. I didn’t realise anyone would be looking for me.” She searched for something appropriate to say. “I’ll…put a note on my door, if something like this comes up again?”

Her teammates, four of whom had shown up, nodded contritely. “Sorry for bothering you on a rest day,” offered another of them, starting to shove the others towards the door. “We’ll see you for training tomorrow, right?”

“Yes, I’ll be there,” Rayla looked longingly down the hallway, where her bed awaited. “I don’t exactly make a habit of missing training, you know.”

“Yeah, you’re very – dedicated,” Fiera said, in the tones of someone trying to be diplomatic, still being ushered doorwards. “Have a good rest day!” she called, right before the rest of them filed out and the wing became something approaching quiet again.

Too tired and too grumpy to have much emotional response to the whole thing, Rayla turned and headed down her hallway without a further word. The wing was still bustling, and it was more of a relief than usual to close her door on it; the privacy runes hummed lethargically as they activated, but the noise level outside cut off sharply enough that for once she didn’t mind their quality too much. They mostly did their job, and that was all she really needed.

It turned out that the effect of the reveillant couldn’t really complete with post-Full-Moon sleep deprivation; Rayla crawled into bed and fell asleep more or less instantly.

She woke some hours later, stirring at the sound of some computer module or other humming as it reactivated from idling. It wasn’t loud by any means, but she was quite sensitive to new or changing sounds in her vicinity, so it was enough. She blinked her eyes open, rubbing grit from their edges, and stumbled out of bed with a glance at the clock along the way. Moon-sense said it was late afternoon; the clock was a bit more specific about it, and said 6.33pm. The sky outside was still blue and light, but in that summer-evening way, where the sun had fallen low enough to cast long shadows between the city buildings. It was still bright enough to make her tired to look at.

There were new messages on her Sunbeam.

Rayla dropped into her desk chair and eyed the icon tiredly, uncertain if she was awake or rested enough to deal with any further social contact today. In the end she decided there probably wasn’t any harm in checking them, so…she looked. Kazi had thanked her for the game, and sent her some sort of invitation to make an account on…what looked to be the skeinsite that hosted the high-level Antiquitora broadcasts. She wasn’t sure what the purpose of that was, and didn’t have her head on sufficiently to figure it out, so she left it for later. Ethari had asked how her Full Moon had been. And…

She sighed, not sure whether to be pleased or embarrassed, because: Callum had left messages, too. Fairly recently, actually.

They read Hope you got to sleep okay, and how are you feeling? There was no mention of whatever he’d supposedly wanted to mention before the call ended, so he’d probably forgotten, or…something.

She debated whether or not to reply now. She found she was a little wary of…something. She wasn’t quite sure what. Making a fool of herself, maybe? She’d already spent nearly two very late-night hours sunbeaming him, and…that was already…well.

In the end, Rayla spent about five minutes trying to wrestle some semblance of reason past her sleep-mired brain, finally concluding that she was probably unlikely to come across as an infatuated idiot by responding to a couple of messages. Then, slowly, she picked at the keys to write back: Kind of knackered, but okay. While that one was processing, she hesitantly sent another: Just woke up from a nap. I think it helped?

She left the computer to visit the bathroom, tidying up her hair and washing her face with cold water. It did little to make her feel more alert, or to remove the weird muggy haze of exhaustion from her head, but it was better than nothing. She contemplated getting something to eat, but knew she wasn’t going to be up to cooking tonight. She went for one of her bottles of emergency moonberry elixir instead, which were so full of nutrients they probably counted as some kind of soup.

That in hand, she returned to her computer….and, somehow, wasn’t surprised to find that Callum had already replied. Was he just constantly glued to his computer, or what?

Well, at least it’s apparently traditional to be tired after full moon, I guess? He’d written, light-heartedly. At least you got a nap! Although it’s kind of late. Won’t you have trouble getting to sleep later?

Rayla shuffled forwards in her chair to respond. Nah. There’s a neat trick you can use to get to sleep at night if you’re a Moonshadow elf, and if it’s not Full Moon. Just need to shine a bright light in my face and I’ll be good. She hadn’t had to use it in a while, but she knew where the thing was: on her windowsill, to soak up sunlight during the day. It’d do the job just fine.

The pause in response seemed to be longer than connection lag would account for. That’s so weird, and cool, he marvelled, eventually. I just looked it up. They call them sun lamps?

Yep. Flash of sunlight in a dark place gets us sleepy pretty much every time. Moonshadow elves tended to be mostly diurnal by practice, but naturally, they all had the wiring for a nocturnal lifestyle. Bright sunlight in the eyes after being in the dark would usually trigger tiredness, even in elves perfectly used to going about in the daytime. Sun lamps were extraordinarily simple as far as enchanted objects went, but extraordinarily useful for Moonshadow elves with weird schedules.

What about if someone turns a light on in a dark room? He asked, apparently fascinated.

Nah. Has to be sunlight. It’s pretty specific.

That’s so cool, he reiterated, from that bizarre well of enthusiasm he seemed to have for banal magical elements of everyday life. Rayla waited to see if he’d write anything more, and after a moment, realised she’d started smiling. She wasn’t sure when that had happened. Eventually, he did send something else: I’d ask if you wanted to call again, but you should probably, you know, be getting actual sleep.

What Rayla intended to write then was something along the lines of, ‘yes, you’re entirely correct, I need to sleep for like twelve hours if I’m not going to be a useless wreck for training tomorrow’.

Instead, what she ending up sending was keep it half an hour or less, and you’re probably fine.

I’ll set a timer :) he typed, complete with smiley, which was something she’d never actually encountered outside of the mageskein before. And then he called her.

“How’s the light level?” she asked him, when the call resolved. It wasn’t yet far into sunset, so she thought there ought to be sufficient lighting in her room to see by, but who really knew with humans. She certainly didn’t know how bad their eyes were.

In his own room, Callum was bathed in the warm glow of the light through his windows, shaded the same pink-orange that she was. He was smiling, even as he pretended to squint exaggeratedly at her room. “Yeah, I can just about see,” he said, obviously teasing. “It’s not dark yet.” A pause, and he took a moment to look her over a little more directly. He was a little more concerned when he added “Are you sure it’s okay to be calling? You really do look tired.”

“I think I’ll survive half an hour, Callum,” she told him wryly, and one corner of his lips twitched upwards.

“Yeah, fair enough.” He hesitated for a moment, like he was summoning his nerve for something. “Listen – I wanted to ask before, yesterday, but – there’s going to be a sort of casual gaming night? At my house? On Tuesday. The others will be there. And my housemates, er, obviously.” He cleared his throat. “Sorry if it’s short notice, but – do you want to come?”

Rayla stared at him, half bemused by the offer itself, half at his apparent nervousness. “Kazi said you were going to invite me,” she said, a little too nonplussed to offer any more intelligent response. “I guess they were right.”

He blinked. “You’ve been talking to Kazi?” A pause. “No, wait, what am I saying, of course you’ve been talking to Kazi. There’s no way they’d let someone who beat them at Antiquitora get away.”

“We had a rematch today, actually,” Rayla admitted, lips twitching. “I let them take Sun. Naturally they destroyed me.”

“Ow,” Callum said, with feeling. “I’ve been on the receiving end of Kazi playing Sun before. It’s…” he searched for the words. “Really something.”

She smiled, remembering it. With a few hours separating her from the game, she realised she’d enjoyed the experience more than she’d anticipated. The discussion in particular had been welcome. “I’m just glad to be able to play someone new, honestly,” she confided. “Though it’d be nice to do it again when I’ve actually slept.” A second later, she remembered he’d had an almost equally dubious bedtime, and inspected him critically. He looked surprisingly okay, actually. A little tired, but not like he’d been up most of the night. “Did you sleep in late, or what?” She asked then, a little amused. “You don’t actually look tired.”

He laughed sheepishly. “Yeah, I didn’t wake up till around lunchtime,” he admitted. “I had to go to work after that, though.”

Rayla paused, still very unsure of how to respond to mentions of his work. “And…was that okay?” She asked at last, uncertainly.

“Yeah, actually. I had a pattern etching appointment, and those are some of my favourites,” he said, brightening. “This one wanted one of my new designs, too. It turned out great!”

She’d seen something about that on the posters in the waiting room, she thought. “That’d be the…buzzing patterns into the horns?” She asked, faintly.

“Mmhm. I use sort of a really small thin version of an electric buffer, and work the etching in that way,” he agreed. “I draw the design on first and follow the lines, and then after you can either just polish it up and leave it, or like, fill with metal or something. It takes a while, but, you know, that’s kind of just how art works.” He shrugged. “It looks great, anyway.”

Rayla thought of her looming appointment, maybe a week or so away, and found she was entirely unprepared for thinking about that. “You…seem to kind of do the art thing a lot?” she hazarded, as a distraction, nodding to the nearest easel. “Painting?”

He turned to look, then grinned back at her. “Yeah! I mean, art is…well, I probably draw more than I game, and that’s really saying something. I do all sorts, kinda. I’ll have to show you some of my sketchbooks sometime.” That seemed to remind him of the question she still hadn’t answered, and he abruptly looked nervous again. “So. Er. Um. About Tuesday…?”

She tried, very hard, to keep an even expression. “Er,” she managed, and then finally: “…Yeah. Sounds good? I’ll…be there.” Wherever ‘there’ was. She did have the address written down, but hadn’t actually tried to figure out where it was in the city yet.

Callum straightened up, brightening. “Really? That’s great!” A second later, he amended “It’ll be really nice to have someone new over! We’ll have food and stuff, too.”

She paused at that. “Should I bring anything?” Hospitality expectations tended to be very different depending on culture, so it merited the question.

“Nah. Well, if you want, you can bring snacks or food, but you don’t need to. We have loads.” A second later, he added ruefully “Kassa has some…pretty strong opinions about how fully-stocked a kitchen should be.”

“That’s one of your housemates?” she remembered.

“Yeah! Actually, I lived with Kassa and her mom for a few years before. They sort of hosted me, when I was…well, when I first came to Gullcrest.” He amended his sentence half-way through, as if realising he was about to say too much. She was intensely curious about that. “This house is her family property, too, so we don’t have to pay much on it. We moved in when Kassa started her undergrad.”

She blinked, filing that information away. This had something to do with the mystery of him doing a mage’s masters at the age of eighteen, she was sure of it, but… “What about your other housemates?”

“Nihatasi moved in because we had room and she was a friend,” he said, matter-of-factly. “Soren…” he hesitated. “Well, he’s a childhood friend of mine,” he settled on eventually. “So he came to study here, and he took the last spare room.”

Rayla eyed him, but didn’t question him on the obvious secrets clamouring behind his words. “Looks a lot roomier than usual student wings, at least,” she commented finally. “These rooms are pretty cramped. And the runework is pretty worn-down. My door makes this horrible droning noise every time the wards come on.”

He made an ‘oof’ sound. “I’ve visited student wings before. They’re…well, they’re okay. Definitely prefer this house though.” He eyed her curiously. “Is yours at least one of the ones where you get one bathroom between two people? Because I knew someone who only had one bathroom for twelve, and it was terrible.”

“That sounds disgusting,” she said, making a face. She could hardly imagine how terrible that would be, with how some of her wingmates were. “I’m so glad that’s not me.”

“So glad,” he agreed, and before she knew it, they were off on a weirdly engrossing conversation about the merits of student living compared to home life. He was pretty evasive about it, but she got the impression he’d been used to a fairly fancy home before he came to Gullcrest, and he’d been astonished at what student wings were like.

Rayla was in the middle of describing how chaotic move-in day had been, with so many elves hauling all their boxes of things in at once, when a shrill ringing started up from over Callum’s voicecatcher. He reached hastily to the side and disabled some sort of egg timer that had gone off, settling back into view with a sheepish smile.

“That was the timer,” he said, apologetically.

Half an hour, already. It was a little disconcerting how quickly it’d gone by. “I’d better try to turn in for an early night, then,” she offered, weirdly reluctant to hang up.

He hesitated a fair bit, too. “Probably a good idea,” he agreed, wry. “We can talk again later?” His tone went questioning, at that. A little hopeful.

Rayla resisted the urge to bury her face in her hands. “…Yeah, sure,” she sighed, more and more exasperated with herself for just how much she wanted to talk to him.

Callum smiled again, the edges of him lit up from the light of the falling sun. “Later, then,” he said, and hesitated once again. Then he reached out, and the call disconnected. Sunbeam minimised to its idling overlay around the edges of her screen, the background of Silvergrove scenery back to the fore.

She sighed, and leaned back in her chair. Ruefully, she spend a while reflecting on exactly how in trouble she was. Then she did as a responsible elf on their Full Moon rest day ought, and went to attempt an early night.

She managed it almost as soon as it was dark enough for her magic rune-rock to work. Thank Xadia for sun lamps, honestly.

---

End chapter.

Yeah so this is basically completely unbetaed, even by me, because I’ve been frantically trying to churn out a complete chapter this week in time for the Modern AU day of rayllum month. There will be typos, there will be clunky sentences, that’s just what you get for a rush job. I’ll return to it and do some editing in the morning.

Re: the Antiquitora. ‘Would you like to discuss the game’ *hikago fandom origins vibes intensify*

Worldbuilding notes for this chapter:

Moondances: specific ritual dances made to react with the runic Circles that Moonshadow elves use. The dancing is used as a form of spellcraft, to cast enchantments or strengthen the magic of a community. The Full Moon dances in Silvergrove for example are integral for keeping its magical defences running. (piaj)

EX and WX: East Xadian and West Xadia. A more modern and correct term for the human and elf/dragon sides of the continent, respectively.

Artefact magic: primal magic cast with a power source other than your own arcanum. E.g. a primal stone, a moon opal.

Thaumaturgy: the practice of magic casting.

Thaumatology: the study of magic.

Lightcatcher: magic camera, basically.

Voicecatcher: magic microphone, basically.

Honour Games: a fun sport :) more on this later.

Technomancy/technomantic: alternate proper term for magical engineering.

Antiquitora notes: while the game has been steadily gaining complexity over time, the game at its fundamentals is very old, and quite traditional. It’s considered a respectable strategy game, and Runaan certainly would have approved of Rayla showing an interest in it when she was younger. Modern variants tend to adopt features and ‘house rules’ that don’t strictly conform to traditional standards, though.

East Xadian computer games: though boasting dramatically better visuals and audio than human technology is currently capable of, the limitations of elven computing mean that computer games are extremely expensive, and difficult to integrate into lesser systems. Most elves will never be able to run the best gaming modules at home.

Nomad Gameships: Brevili nomads are well known for their magical engineering, and produce some of the most advanced technomantic games there are. Owing to the limited number of elves who can actually afford to buy them, they get creative with the marketing: many clans field airships whose sole purpose is travelling around as a sort of mobile arcade, landing at various destinations for a set amount of time, during which customers can pay for access to the many assorted games they have on offer. Demani, as the clan that (a good long while ago) invented the airship in the first place, boasts the most impressive facilities on their ships.

Skycrawler: a game so advanced and finicky that its developers haven’t yet figured out how to get it to run on less advanced systems than the gameships’ computers. There are a handful like these, usually the newest and most technomantically complex titles, and their release on gameships usually serves as something of a ‘beta’ build while they refine the technology for more accessible use. Imunaviga was one of these, and was very recently released for public purchase.

Imunaviga: as several commenters guessed, this is indeed a Subnautica expy. Rayla is not at all keen on the idea of playing it. I spent probably too much time working out the worldbuilding and plot for the elf AU version of this game. It was a lot of fun though.

Scion of Shadow: a well-regarded game with a Moonshadow elf protagonist, involving a lot of stealth gameplay, a highly-lauded storyline, and in-setting ‘fantasy’ elements; i.e. they’d be considered fantasy in this fantasy setting.

Magical overload states: Natural events that cause high levels of ambient primal magic can induce some very unusual effects in beings with the relevant arcana. Terms include ‘moonstruck’ for Moonshadow elves, ‘sunstruck’ for Sunfire, and ‘storm-drunk’ for Skywing. (piaj)

Moondust: a magic-dampening drug taken in different dosages based on the phase of the moon, to dampen the effect of the lunar cycle on Moonshadow elves’ bodies and minds. Not all Moonshadow elves take it, but most do. (piaj)

Reveillant: Sunfire elf beverage made from the dried berries of a shrub with stimulant properties. Some preparations are very strong and are restricted, but preparations from the berries are mild and very popular. (piaj)

Draconic Corpus: a sort of full-body sign language spoken by dragons incapable of complex vocal speech. Given this accounts for the majority of dragons, it’s generally useful to understand some of, even if bipeds are generally incapable of speaking it properly. (piaj)

#rayllum #rayllummonth #tdp callum #tdp rayla #college AU #modern AU #the ceracurist

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scrapyardboyfriends · 3 years

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Belated “Early” Live Blog - Monday and Wednesday - The Aaron stuff

SPOILERS BELOW FOR THOSE WHO CARE...

So....that was a bunch of nonsense that it took me far too long to watch (thanks ITV site).

The thing I continue to come back to is just how unnecessary all of this was. They just did not need to bring up Robert in this capacity for any of this if there’s no pay off to it. They did not need it for Luke’s exit and it wasn’t even satisfying since he just peaced out with no consequences anyway. And it absolutely wasn’t needed to have Aaron move on with Ben.

Do they realize that if they want to have Aaron move on with a new guy that they can just, I don’t know, actually tell that story and that they don’t need to use the possibility of an off screen character coming back to do so?

And I mean, if I were writing this, I also would have brought up Robert but in more normal way where Aaron was just trying to date Ben or whoever but was dragging his feet and hesitant to really move on and take any real steps with the new guy and when he was asked why, then he would bring up Robert and say that he’s still struggling with the idea of letting him go and moving on and that even though he knows that this is why Robert ended things, so that he could have a life, it still feels like a bit of a betrayal. But I’d just have him work through that and have a bit of drama or something where it feels like things are going to end before they begin and then he decides that he really does need to give it a try because he knows he can’t just be miserable and alone forever or something to that effect. Would have made me sad but that would have felt like character driven drama and would have shown some growth from Aaron.

But no...we have this mess. We have Aaron standing there and saying that if Robert were back tomorrow, he’d still choose Ben. Okay, Aaron, sure. Stop lying, you liar, you’re not good at it.

But I mean, you’ve got number one Robert stan Vic, bless her in all of this honestly, running around having the same conversation over and over with Ethan, and apparently talking to Robert on the phone? And where is that going to go? He knows now and then what? Is he just going to decide he doesn’t want to appeal because he doesn’t think it’ll make any difference? And then it will all just disappear? Again, what was the point? And then what does Vic do? Just go back to being irrelevant? I’m already sad for her. Sigh. At least Robert got to hear a friendly voice after all this time.

And then you’ve got Aaron being all belligerent to everyone and making things official with Ben when he’s also like “is he coping?” the moment Vic says she’s talked to him and he was all over the place in that conversation with Chas.

But also, you’ve got Chas pressuring him (surprise surprise) and Ben kind of putting pressure on him to talk and make decisions and then you’ve got Vic putting a different kind of pressure on him and wanting him to get back on board the Robert ship and try and get him out and I mean, I get it, I get why he would be scared to have that kind of hope and have it all snatched away again. And I’m sure he’s terrified that Robert won’t want to talk to him or that they will talk but Robert won’t appeal or will just cut him off again and so he’d rather just say he’s with Ben and try and move on. I do understand where Aaron is coming from. But I don’t understand why the show would want him to make this decision in this way because him choosing Ben is so clearly just reactionary to all of this and isn’t based on how he truly feels.

Because when you look at the Ben of it all and the actual “relationship”, god what a joke. I lost it when Aaron was like “how can I dump someone I’m not even dating?” I was like “THANK YOU! SOMEONE SAID IT!” Because that entire Ben and Chas conversation and all of what Chas said to Aaron was driving me insane. Ben strolling in there to talk to Chas about Robert and the whole Luke/Lee of it all like he’s known about this stuff forever and didn’t literally find all of this out like the day before??? I mean he’d never even heard Robert’s name until Sunday on screen. And he and Luke had said maybe three words to each other in that one scene they had. And Chas talking like they’d been together for months when it’s been barely 5 weeks was laughable. And talking about how happy Aaron had been? WHEN CHAS!?! WHEN HAS AARON LOOKED REMOTELY HAPPY IN THE PAST 5 WEEKS? When he thought he was going to prison? Does he even know he’s not? When he was spending every waking moment worrying about Liv? The most I can give her is that yes, Ben has been “supportive” but that’s it.

Look, I don’t have to like Aaron’s new love interest, I don’t have to ship them, but you have to tell me a coherent story and this is just not it. And they absolutely did not need to bring Robert into any of this in this way.

I just don’t understand any of these decisions.

And I’m still just like “Now what?!” Where does it go? Are they just together now? Does the Robert stuff just disappear? Was there any purpose to any of this?????? I hate these producers so much.

#current emmerdale #current aaron #nonron #emmerdale complaints corner #Emmerdale spoilers #early ed lb

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seb-owns-these-tatas · 4 years

Text

Witcher of the Night (Chapter 20.1)

THIS IS MODERN ERA READER WHO WOKE UP IN THE DIMENSION OF THE WITCHER.

DOUBLE UPDATE FOR A WEEK Y’ALL! MWAH MWAH! PLEASE DO LEAVE A FEEDBACK BEFORE YOU GO---OR MAYBE A REBLOG WILL BE NICE FOR MY EFFORT. Hehehe. Thank y’all!

CHAPTER 20

WOTN MASTERLIST

Characters: Geralt of Rivia x small!Naive!Reader

Summary: Sometimes other people's stories were actually not just a tale of fantasies when the protagonist in the story can't even give you an answer to soothe your insecurity, curiosity and fear over being alone in a dimension you didn't belong in.

Warnings: Soft, touchy and caring Geralt. Insecure and anxious reader. Brooding witcher. Baths with the witcher? Mention of Yennefer. Nudity. Angst. Geralt being too blunt and saying...things. Heh. Don't hate him later please? 😥😘 Mention of Parallel Universe. Doppelganger. Ingrith is just a character I made up, alright? she ain't a part of Yennefer's story in the games, books or show.

Words: 7.6k

A/N: So, Yeap. I wanted to leave ya with all these angst. Hehehe. COMMENTS ARE HIGHLY APPRECIATED! MWAH! *waits for comments about people cursing Geralt lmao 😂😂* @casualfansoul You’ve been such a sweetheart! BELATED HAPPY BIRTHDAY, SWEETIE! I hope you’ll love this chapter dedicated to you! Mwah!

TAGLIST IS STILL OPEN FOR THIS ONE! Heehee! Don’t forget to REBLOG, COMMENT OR GIVE FEEDBACK IF YOU DID LOVE THIS CHAPTER! IT’LL MAKE ME SMILE! Sorry for the grammatical errors and such because English isn’t my mother tongue! PLEASE LEAVE FEEDBACK AFTER READING, BB! This is kinda a rough draft. I apologize for many errors.

Disclaimer: PNG’s and pictures used in edits are not mine even the GIF’s too. However, the edits and this fanfic is definitely from moi. Character development and personalities are based from my understanding and how I want them to be.(Credits to those who made the GIF’s. Some don’t have their watermarks included. I don’t remember where I’ve saved the others from)

MY WORKS ARE NOT NOT NOT NOT NOOOOOOT TO BE POSTED ON ANY OTHER WEBSITES. My official username in Wattpad is “TATATHEPOTATO” and that’s the only other site I have for writing aside from Tumblr. Thank you, Tater tots!

"Will you tell me why you are utterly cranky all of a sudden?"

Face to face with the rim of the wooden bath, you've had your knotted brows in a twist. Pout oh-so-long that Geralt knew as he sat behind you, seeking answers for your upset state. He'd gotten you out of your clothes; forcefully must you say. Earning a glare from him as he was peeling your clothes away like he was caring for his sick, pouty child.

No complaints were accepted as he'd given you the idea to care for your wounds in the tub. Downright secretive about wanting to feel the comfort of your nudity grazing against his without any monkey business going on.

The witcher has received constant grumbles and whines of protests as he poured the potent medicine that evaporated through the fresh wounds; painful enough for you to shriek while his arm surrounding your waist tightened with every whimper of your sobbing self; shushing your cries with a soft coo of his endearment on your ear and the feathery nuzzle of his nose against that tiny spot behind your ear while he soothes your pains.

They've fully had injured your back with more than just wallops. He'd knew by the looks of the lesions, the people in the castle has even burnt your skin with metal; scorching metal that has given you scars that would forever haunt oneself. The mere thought tormenting him by their brutal punishments; keeping him all in wonder when he has never received any violent retorts and schemes from you as they did everything in their willpower to strike a hand. Your submission making the witcher glower behind as Geralt caught sight of such deep wounds whilst taking off the gauze; seeing blood seeping out of the healing skin as it was a sign that he really and badly needed to treat your body.

Sobs were emitted while he watched your wounds dry from the potion he'd mix, receiving kisses on the cold, sweating nape of yours every now and then. A gesture that Geralt started doing when you were shrieking in the midst of being poured by such elixir while you felt his breath on your skin. Sweetly kissing through your pain and lowly humming that you were going to be okay and you've been good.

It felt like all the energy downed on you after he'd stop and was done pouring the elixir everywhere around your body. The warm water lining on your chest turned colder when you've slowly leaned your back on Geralt, hissing from the soreness but actually ending up loving the warmth that he could only give while he kept his burly arm around you, your lips still in a pout while staring at the bed from the far corner of the room; basking in the witcher's silence before he asked.

His question gotten you unready for an honest answer as he bluntly shot the query out, planning to resolve the problem with you in the best way that he thought. Being forthright.

"Hmm." you hummed back in displeasure, sounding exactly the same like how he does.

The corner of his lips lifted in a small smirk, his voice vibrating at the back of your head and against his chest. The buzz keeping you calm and at ease rather than being alone in the castle when he haven't arrived yet. Your anxiety giving you such trauma that made you want to sob again.

But, Geralt's distraction to stifle your cries has technically been useful when he felt you sigh again, watching your face from above and behind to see a frown etching to grow. He heedlessly fetched a cup of water with the palm of his hand, delicately pouring your cheek with water as he gruffly quipped.

"That's my line. Not yours, Midget."

Geralt repeated his gestures with you, lightly damping your hair with water as he gently brushed your tousled wet hair with the spaces of his fingers, keeping them light and comforting which made you lean back a lot more, accepting his gentleness after being physically whacked in harsh moments prior before he came around---your purpose of being upset has now been forgotten by his unfamiliar gestures that was tickling your spine with ants racing on your skin because of how his actions was giving you cavity. A sweet tooth.

Just being held so softly felt good in real life---you didn't know how comforting it feels even back in earth, but right now was just the right time to feel how you would yearn for it when Geralt wouldn't be around.

"I told you, before I even realized that you were important to me was after you've made a wish to the Djinn."

Your swollen cheek fell on the skin of his biceps; sighing while you stared out of nowhere and finally held onto his arm surrounding your waist, keeping you still and steady in his arms. His nudity becoming not much of a problem for you now because it was an experience that you could never forget; eventually having the privilege in familiarizing his body just like how a lover does while he did the same to you.

Though, his imperfect beauty could still get you blushing nevertheless as he liked seeing yours no matter how insecure you get---but he seemed to admire your nakedness a lot which he received with a 'men versus boobs' explanation that his kind of gender would always love the idea of breasts no matter how big or small as the same goes for a vagina.

You'd received a pleased hum after that and also some horny witcher begging and trying his best to get your clothes off in his sneaky techniques.

"I know. I'm sorry I was cranky, Geralt."

The white wet-haired witcher pursed his lips, looking down at your face as you've felt his gaze heavy while he calmly spoke.

"It's...alright. But, must it be for Eanraig to see and hear?"

You've given him another sincere, sweet and soft apology. Caressing your thumb over the top of his scarred hand which was under the waters and he'd let you graze over the tiniest marks on his fingers and palms, swaying under the bath water. Breathing calm and collected while he stayed in bath with you; cherishing such moment again that could get his chest feeling the lightest out of all the times he lived in the continent; more freeing to than the one he had with a particular sorceress whom he had also been connected with; via Djinn.

His free hand lifted away from leaning onto the edge of the tub, reaching down to sweep your hair to the side. Clearing the space on your neck and such wounds from the shoulder blades, others being a scar from his potent medicine that he has poured.

"I remembered your skin clearly in the back of my head. Thoroughly silk like a bairn's bum,"

He paused, prolonging the silence as he gently danced his fingers on the skin of your shoulders; too tender that it began to lick your spine, igniting the tiniest shiver when you've felt the soft, warm feathery feeling of his lips giving your painted shoulder a peck of his specific comfort that he only gives to people who have turned his world a much better place than how much of a hell it has been.

"Now, you are scarred." Geralt grumbled against your skin, giving one last kiss and making everything all worth while as he was still around. Continuously denouncing what they've done to his family---even beating Jaskier to pulp.

"---They've...turned you like me,"

You've slightly turned your head to see his amber eyes withdrawn from reality. Thoughts probably plaguing his mind while he scowled. A simple purse of your lips, suggesting to receive a small, quick buss has Geralt dipping his head down to sweetly smack your lips to his, letting him feel that you were there; finally there with him physically and he didn't need to worry.

Thus, it was just like that. Geralt and his presence, including such soft gestures that you rarely receive nor see that he does for anyone and a soundly kiss has let the upset feelings go away, simply just like that.

Even though, he has never confessed any love yet---this was forging you both to understand what connection you have for each other. Though, clearly unspecific and undistinguished. Or was this his type of love? a love never needed to be told for it can be felt?

The question here, does he even love you? was this love?

Partially turning around in his arms to see him gazing back at you, Geralt seemed to be nonplussed and introverted with his thoughts. Keeping words to himself while he was giving you a solemn frown of his face, examining your swollen eye that you tried pulling him out of his regret and blames with a quirky tone of your voice; sounding like nothing has happened to you nor have you been battered to bruising limbs.

"When are you going to leave?"

"After I take care of you, midget." he deeply murmured, watching you like a hawk with golden eyes as the candle light was making his eyes glow prettier than usual. You grabbed a handful amount of water with your palms, arms sore as you reached up to pour water on his face that surely gotten a deep, complain of his humming when it made him close his eyes from the uninvited rainfalls of liquid.

The fading colored grime has been softly scrubbed off by the pad of your damp thumbs over the apples of his cheeks. His gaze was utmost heavy, shooting you a warm, loving sensation on your chest; surrounding the fading Cicatrix that somehow turned insipid after the nights before with the witcher.

You couldn't help but notice his grouching and grumpy self as he scanned your face with an affectionate flicker in his amber that made you tut. The gentleness you were giving was a thorough unfamiliar feeling he always received from you despite of your negative characteristics---though, he doesn't mind it at all---sometimes, he does but that was beyond the point when he felt comfort from you and aspire to give it back despite of not knowing what and how comfort is to a witcher.

"Stop being such a wild cat---Let me guess, you haven't gotten to have your nap again?"

Geralt huffed out a breath of complaint. A short, low growl that made you giggle quickly when you wiped his face with your fingers; playfully glaring at how you were bathing him.

"When did I ever?"

"It seems like you haven't had it last night again---Stop scowling like you want to strangle me," you lightly poked the dimples of his nose that got him deeply growling his protests. His expressions completely emotionless as he turned his face to avoid your play-time; considering on biting your fingers off to stop annoying the heck out of him.

Howbeit, Geralt went on in silently letting you touch his face. Mesmerized by how his scars really never affected his beauty and probably added perfection over his gorgeousness. The witcher mutely let you trace the bridge of his nose and the scars on his face whilst intently staring at your face in return.

"---Until you came along," he surprisingly continued the topic, never breaking his gaze as he'd seen you lean closer to his face. The tangy scent he was familiar in recognizing from you, mixing with the medicine on your skin. Yet, it didn't stop him to wait for what you had in mind. Your bruised, healing lips brushing against his that made both of your chests tingly for over such sweet intimacy that you've both eventually become accustomed with.

Geralt pursed his lips for your thirsts to calm down; such desperate feeling that both parties yearned for. A twee, syrupy connection of your lips on his---a kiss that made warmth spread through you like an angel's halo trying to make you holy and worth for his affections.

Men in your world will certainly not impress you anymore. Geralt of Rivia has raised the bars of what men should be---he'd ruined the normality of what you expected from such gender because you believed that they may not reach the level of what you've felt for him.

Love as you may see now.

But, it can be quite blurry of a picture for a future that you do not hold or knew how it'll be for the both of you because you've teleported as a miracle that nobody expected to receive.

"If I---If I die---" your pessimist self started to run your mouth over Geralt. Yet, he was quick to cut you off with a sullen chide and an avoidance of your gaze with a grumpy sigh.

"Stop. Don't." he groused with the mouth ends pulled down, "---You're not going to die,"

"What if I do?"

His eyes turned penetrating as if he wanted to tell how much you are wrong about that argument. Those cat-eyes of his; sharp and making a stand for the idea he didn't want to accept.

"I will never let that happen. They can have me hunt down whatever they want, even slice a throat of a nobleman or a monster but I will never let anything happen to you,"

The witcher gently scooped water with a palm of his hand, pouring them over your face. Coming forth with a scrub of it as he shoved his large palm that made you shriek against his hold while he lightly scoured your face as a gesture to clean you more inside the bath; avoiding your healing bruises.

"---I don't want to hear that again while I give you a bath,"

Darkness suddenly turned into seeing Geralt's stony stare after being suffocated by his hand that was suddenly shoved on your face, "I'm sorry," you immediately tried to woo over his vexation, your face wet from the bath water he tried to rinse you in, an involuntary response of your arms slipping around his bare waist shocked your consciousness because of how touchy-feely you've become around him.

The latter welcomed your apology and touches, humming in appeasement for your quick sorry; knowing your way with him and reading that he could not tolerate such physical-contact from you without liking the feel of your skin, you've leaned your body more to him---your naked chests flushed together that got him curling his lips in a small smile whilst feeling your forehead fall on the side of his neck, nuzzling with an apology.

"I-I didn't mean to upset you,"

Quietude embraced you both. Sitting in a tub. Entirely bare for each other to see but it was so wholesome for the betterment of your relationship with him; nurturing what understanding you both have for each other, not entirely specific nor knowing what it is. As a matter of fact, you do know what you felt for him, but not the other way around.

"She..She isn't a queen in my world,"

Bamboozle screamed inside his eyes for your statement, his fingers gliding along the small of your back under the waters as he hummed in curiosity.

"Hmm?"

You've remember the time that the queen has visited your cell. Retched between the hatch of the door came in view was your kind boss who wore the finest set of golden, silk, long gown with rich trimmings. She stopped by to check on your victimized state with a glaze of ignorance in her eyes. She didn't care for your condition because if so, she wouldn't have left the slammer with a quiet scoff.

Out of all the people who could turn out evil was a queen in Geralt's world and a boss you've highly given respect to.

Nonetheless, in this world; it seemed to be like the opposite personalities of how people had been in your world.

"Your queen. Queen Makeda. She's named Angela Cincinnati. The boss of mine who also works in the pizza parlor that I'm in,"

Geralt has leaned back on the edge of the tub in a relaxed posture, lifting his other hand every now and then to pour water on your hair that tickled your insides because of how cold the water has been already. His warmth being your therapy while thinking such hypothetical answers for what mysteries that the continent has been giving you. Jotting down possibilities that a typical earthling could try to guess like they were watching a very interesting movie.

"Does this mean I have someone who looks like me in this world too?" pause. "---Does she have a better life than me?"

Your witcher cocked his head to the side as he was in deep thought over the woman who looked like you. His mouth opening and closing for whatever shit he wanted to say because Savia has been the person who ruined your future by creating such crimes being pointed at you because you looked like her twin.

"Worse. I can say that you had a better life than her and also complicated yours at the same time," he gravely informed.

"My doppelganger then? have you already seen her?"

"Will you try to find her if I say yes?"

"No. I...don't wanna scare her with this drama movie I'm in."

You've leaned away from Geralt and his consoling cuddles, trying hard to rip your body away from him when all you wanted was to bask in his own embrace. Splashing your face with more bath water, he'd given you a curious glint of his eyes. Fixating his gaze on your bare form, subtly sliding his focus on the depths of your neck and wanting nothing more than to give more sweet busses of care. Geralt ignored the modern reference you've muttered about being in a movie and found it more interesting to appreciate the nudity you've freely have been giving him.

It's not like you were naked all the time. The witcher snickered to himself; appreciating the best view of you that he can ever get.

"The water's cold now. Are we done?" you softly whispered, the thought of your doppelganger out there; like a twin from another mother and dimension that you didn't expect to have. It was interesting to know, but frightening to actually see the real her because people like your doppelganger who lived in the medieval era might not be a great sight for the woman.

Geralt grabbed onto the end of the tub, whisking a thin, Ivory robe that was made of silk as he deeply grumbled, "Stand."

You've stood on your feet, hopping off the tub entirely dripping wet from the bath water; feeling eyes heavy on your body and raking over your nudity from behind. The heat started to rise up your face again, making you clear your throat when you've turned your body to grab onto the robe that Geralt has reached out for you. His keen peepers grabbing the chance to shamelessly rake your body in silence.

He'd received no refusal or a loud scolding after thinking it through that he had the liberty of doing so; also, the idea being a gift after trying to protect you from any harm and sacrificing over an endless hunt just for the Kaedwenians to cease their punishments.

"Hmm. A movie. I missed watching one. Though, It's not like if I ask you to go on a date with me again, Geralt---A movie date this time---watching a movie with you will never happen," you turned your head at your front, slipping your arms inside the short sleeves while tightening the knot around your waist; frowning when the witcher couldn't see your face. The truth beginning to bother you when problems began to rise and for such abrupt topic that lingered along your consciousness.

"---Because you and I both live in different worlds, it's like they collide."

Geralt kept his mouth hushed. The loud splash of water echoing around the room when he left the wooden tub; strolling behind to promenade past you. His stark-naked self never bothering him after the night you both had each other. Basking in more of his nudity especially when he slept; knowing that he was mentally complaining over how reserved he needed to be while you slept beside him, his clothes very uncomfortable because of the heat he was feeling.

Basically, he did not know the meaning of clothes after the night of ravish; constantly taking his slumbers in the nude as he covertly tried to wrench them off you as well with his witcher needs.

His bare back and derriere was displayed before you, the distinct foramen of his brawny back giving you a loud greeting as he grabbed onto his trousers on the end of the bed, lending his ear and slipping on his leather pants that was bursting through the seams because of his thick thunder thighs and curvacious derriere.

"My world and yours, they sound like a parallel universe that I completely don't understand even back in earth, it's too complicated to know---too scientific for my thriving brain,"

Quick panic-stricken questions were sent to the witcher; the motion of the words hasty and apprehensive because of such negative ideas forming inside your head; skyrocketing like a plague in your mind while Geralt wore his breeches, not trying to take cover in front of you.

You couldn't help but shift your eyes constantly at Geralt and the queen sized bed, his gigantic biceps straining along his movements while buttoning his pants; lowly grunting from each pull of the hem to fit his curvaceous, muscled arse that you couldn't help but clear your throat, forgetting what you needed to say for a second and being distracted over your trembling anxiety.

You eyes took heed of the opened windows where the brisk wind was slipping in a breeze, seeing how you could see the pale moon from afar. A guess telling you that the room was in a high place. In a few short strides, you've looked out of the window, peering up the Tartarean night sky to meet the moon in its full glory, finding no flaw that you were in a different planet and not yours.

Confusing and complicated to understand in your human perspective because nothing human was basically being shown as you lived in their world.

"This...This is your earth. Your continent. While my earth out there also exists without any one of you knowing. What if I have a count down while I stay in your world---what will happen to me---would I get to stay alive forever in this world when I have been too dependent over you?"

Heavy strides alarmed you for Geralt's presence who loomed behind your back. His mouth curled down when he has heard your questions; feeling no trust in between you both, hesitance scrambling your way and filling your heart when it hasn't been there before you even came to the castle. It was baffling him for your curiosity and determined self to seek answers when he has no answer to it at all.

The sorceress has probably told stuff to you, he silently thought as he brushed a hand over your arm and clothed shoulder. The roughness of his palm colliding against your bruised ones as he tries his best to provide what you needed; not knowing what because of how he does not understand this kind of relationship with women because it has always been typically greed, lust or a needed release to calm his overly mutations.

Except for you, Yennefer or Renfri because he actually really cares.

"Do you not want me to protect you?" he gravely mumbled behind, seeming to be slightly taking umbrage after hearing the queries.

"You're only doing this because you have no other choice just like how you've told the king that I was your betrothed when it isn't true at all,"

How sure were you to say that it wasn't true?

Reflecting and debating his thoughts over your judgement, Geralt marred an agonized frown that creased his forehead. He rarely does claim such label but he didn't regret the action after hearing how it made the king lessen the punishments for you; excluding all planned damnation. The witcher had no explanations about the moment he had called you his betrothed nor did he want whatever you were thinking about his actions.

Hence, it instantly made him cantankerous when he hasn't been feeling it before you opened that mouth of yours again.

"You think I have done it with a purpose I don't understand," he incoherently rumbled in his baritone timbre. Slightly pulling away from his own touch on yours to turn around and walk through the end of the bed to wear and grab onto his armor and under shirt, half naked with a straining back; all rigid and stressing under the skin.

"Geralt---"

"With the mishaps of my world and yours, if I ask you to stay; will you leave your kingdom?"

He'd turn his foot around to see him slip the under tunic over his head, the scowl prominent making him appear stony; dour and solemn. His eyes eager while it reflects the candle light on the side of the bed. Reading through the golden hues lay a pining greed that the witcher never knew he craves for; such hungering he does not know that he wanted to find and receive when it was his own faults over not having it because when he feels a deeper connection with someone, the white wolf suddenly becomes disfunctional; pushing her away because of not spitting the truth about his feelings.

He was capable of it; having feelings over another. Love as people may describe but he was in denial and can be reflective, the processing quite slower than usual because he had never received love through out his lifetime; not even a mother who actually cared.

No one.

You didn't understand him; what he really wanted to say or do because his words were spoken on a race track, passing through the chuckholes that could get you knowing what his true feelings were.

Was he letting you stay out of love or out of pity that you were lost, vulnerable and needed adoption?

"Do you believe in love, Geralt?" you've countered back, feeling the warmth spread around your chest for skipping around bushes over the real meaning behind your words; sounding like a confession if he was smart enough. The warmth spreading through like wildfire, scathing your skin as it felt like it was burning from the reality you were seeing.

"---Or are you only doing this because of the Djinn incident? you're only feeling this way for me because I came around while Yennefer isn't?"

The latter gave a grim frown upon the mention of her name. Just like how he always does when Jaskier says her name when it shouldn't been uttered. Now, it was your turn to give a grouch. Your feigned smile joyless when Geralt was unblinking from your unexpected argument.

Was this true love you have with him? Did he even feel the same way when he can't even say the word at all? or will you both hate each other until it grows into spite?

Will you eventually be killed by the hands of a man you love as said by Eanraig's understanding over the curse set between?

"I've heard from the sorceress that you have been finding Yennefer from her a month before I came along and that this connection I had with you also had been the same with that Vengerberg. What if she comes back around? what will happen to me?"

Ingrith has said more information than you can bear. You weren't just physically pained but also mentally as well for whatever bullcrap she wanted to address. Palms over your ears were the only solution to shut the truth off as it echoed around the dungeon. She'd smirked when you've whimpered from the stones, the back of your sweater drenched in blood for using hardened sticks which had pointy twigs; never believing what they were doing to you as they also tried to throughly kick your stomach.

The men who were ordered to do so had no idea why they've been commanded to batter your torso, but you knew it had something to be involved with the cunning sorceress because of how she'd given another dagger of her gaze lingering on your middle like you would magically grow a baby inside of it when it was impossible from the start because of Geralt's infertility.

The witcher was like a bomb about to detonate. Though, the explosion never came other than a tight clench of his jaw. Geralt was wearing a lour like a bad omen over being interrogated; debating over answering the confusing truth that left him debating over himself as well. He has never remembered the sorceress until you've mentioned her; remembering that he'd taken full measures to even try finding Yennefer's long lost cousin for a plan to get back with her and earning nothing in return.

"You're blathering complete nonsense, Midget. You've also been listening to Ingrith when I told you not to. She's cunning and will do anything to ruin you---kill you,"

Your mouth turned upside down; tighter and pensive for being swerved again, "You didn't answer my question." an exasperated huff was let out, "---she was once important to you. I've heard from your bard; you had adventures with her, shared powerful moments that are exactly the opposite of what we are having---she's the first woman you've loved. A powerful, independent lady that you will never regret having in your life because she can defend everyone---and I'm...just me,"

You didn't know what has gotten to you. The insecurities lighting up the sky, constantly reminding you that his existence can be a mere catch of your dreams because he was too good to be true---or jealousy infecting your blood into thinking that he would leave you alone when he never had yet?

Perhaps, it may be how proud Jaskier has told you that she was powerful that it has intimidated you. Her name seems to be beautiful and there was no doubt she was when he has been avoiding of hearing her name.

He had probably been devoted of Yennefer when a tight frown couldn't be erased upon the lips you have been kissing---thoughtlessly thinking that it was genuine or had any meaning to it.

"Really, what am I to you? "

"My home. Also equally important."

"More important than her? Do you dream of her?"

"You know I don't---not anymore."

Not anymore, he said. So, he does dream of her before.

Crossing your arms over your chest, your fingers went straight to the sleeves, anxiously rubbing over the silk against each other for the dreading beats of your heart, your eyes turning to look away as you quietly spoke; highly aware of an expected rejection.

"If I tell you what I really feel about you, will you give me an answer?" you softly spoke to the chilly air embracing your fidgety form.

"---Because then, you will know my answer about staying in this world you're in."

You've turned your head to see him wearing a permanent pucker of his brows, veiled with furrows of indifference and a look of betrayal. Your bluntness being a detriment because of giving an indefinite answer as well, avoiding his question and misunderstanding the sour expression on your face a while ago.

"Is it hate? Disgust?" he gruffly gnarled. His attitude turning colder like an executioner's ax, unaware of the slight wince on your face because of how glazed he appeared to be.

"---because I am highly aware of what people see of me. I am at loss for what Ingrith must've told; lies or what may result that I am seeing you look at me like I've cast the Djinn's curse on you when you have never looked at me like that at all,"

He spat those words with a sardonic drip of his tongue. The frown darkening his expression more than it ever was.

"Don't blame me on this one, Geralt. Don't shift my words like I think so lowly of you when you and I both don't know the real deal between us with the Djinn incident,"

Geralt loudly exhaled his breath through his nose, marching towards you with the face of an angry ape. Disbelieving what he was comprehending from you, saying that what you shared was beyond reality; like he has been told by it the second time. Your words inconspicuous of loudly saying that maybe what you were both feeling was magic after all; having the presence of the Djinn around for another relationship that he was having.

"You don't want to stay," he ceased his footsteps, looming before you. His irritation suddenly intimidating like a bulldozer when you realized he was bigger than he could get if he was mad at whatever you've done; or probably it was just your point of view because you were feeling small over his blaring anger.

"---Isn't that what you wanted to say?" Geralt emphasized much clearer this time, drawling his words with a hopeful hint that he just misunderstood you and he was right.

"What---? I didn't even said that! Give me a reason to stay then! I am in shambles for your way of thinking right now!"

He had a wide-legged stance; leaning onto more of your personal space while his Aureate eyes deeply stared into yours. Volatile and blazing as it looked like a fixed glare, baring his teeth as it curled---his fangs slipping through as he bluntly spoke.

"You aren't being entirely forthright,"

You couldn't help but cross your arms tighter against your chest, shuffling on your feet as you mentally gasp from his retort. Defensive as his attitude was beginning to irritate you too.

"Well, you aren't being forthright too!"

Geralt huffed before you. Momentarily scoping out the ceilings before peering down and staring right back with blazing peepers. Though, the witcher has never raised his voice on you when you've did. But, you knew he was fuming; seething deep inside, "I don't know what's wrong with you." he gravely mumbled to himself, steaming up from your sudden, churlish attitude.

"---you're a cherub for a while then acting hostile the next. Is this your pathetic insecurity talking or you just hate me all of a sudden?"

Your eyes instantly went wide open and jaw falling slack at how he'd open his mouth. Raising a finger to his chest as you slightly backed away.

"You're calling my insecurity pathetic?" you uttered in disbelief, swallowing hard for having to hear him be this way---though, you knew he was capable of being such because of how blunt he was. But, he was never mean to you as much as calling your insecurity pathetic. Tight lips were given to the witcher who had his chest puffed out for his own frustrations and repulse.

"---Also, aren't you the one who said that maybe this whole thing is actually just the Djinn effects before you've even---! Even---!?" put his pickle in a jar. Wreck the punani. Ravished you in bed. Shared Netflix and Chill despite having no Netflix in their world.

You shook your head for stammering, quietly growling for the annoyance he'd given after basically taking care of you---expecting that it was done out of love, just like how you've first initially thought of staying forever by his side when he has asked you to stay in their world regardless of the consequences and disadvantages.

"What's next then? My anxiety is childish for you too? nonsense?" pause. "---You don't even know what I mean---and even have no idea about what feelings I was talking about. You can't even tell me what happened between you and Yennefer without disregarding my question or avoiding the topic---or even cut Jaskier off!"

Standing akimbo, you've narrowed your eyes, tilting your chin to the fullest because of his skyscraper height. The displeasure shown from how your nose was twisted and from how you couldn't control your mouth from taking a marathon.

"If I shut up and never question you about things anymore then it just means that I don't care for you at all when I do so badly. Do you know what this means to me? Nobody has plagued my mind so hard---no other man has filled my mind with crazed thoughts. In my world, this means that I---"

Geralt immediately cut you off. His teeth bared and jaw set as he interrupted you out of the blue, catching you off guard.

"It must be for the better then," he rasped, clearly disgruntled for what he should respond to the quick blatter of your brain. His mind gripping so hard like wires being tightened.

"---It must be for the better that you tighten that mouth of yours because you don't know when to shut up sometimes,"

Geralt had a cloudy countenance from his sudden bark. Suddenly forgetting how to respond after hearing every word inside his head. He shouldn't have cut you off especially when you were about to say your secret---the one you've been delibitating over countless of times inside your head; making everything sure before saying those heartfelt words because it was three words that meant the world to you as it will be the first.

Yet, the witcher had to fuck everything up with his petulant mood.

Your clenched fists turned slack. Expression stolid with your throat tightly swallowing the bane sipping through your esophagus like it was being punished for even hoarding all your confidence over confessing what you've felt for the white wolf. You've rapidly blinked your hazy, cloudy eyes; your chest tightening because it was reading 'rejection' because of how Geralt wanted you to shut up.

Maybe, he didn't need to hear the confession at all.

Eyes cast downward; feeling the medicines he'd given you seep through your skin and making everything numb. You didn't expect the concoction to also numb your fragile heart, experiencing your first heart break. Your palms turned clammy over tightening them over. Passing beside Geralt and avoiding those eyes that was thoroughly regretting what has been said, the bed may seem to be a better place to faint on and cry yourself through the night rather than his comforting arms that you wouldn't get to reject if he'd say his apologies, trying to stop you from crying.

Hurriedly hiding your face away from him, you've sat on the bed with your back away from him. Your face like rain experiencing in the middle of thunder, utterly gloomy and despair for reading the signs in the opposite of what you didn't expect. Forgetting that love shouldn't be filled with expectations so disappointments may be less.

Your toes were scuffing against the carpet with a voice turning smaller, shaky as the tears were threatening to fall and it would be when Geralt decides to talk.

"I hope you didn't say that but...but considering my profound hearing tonight and how angry you made me feel, I suggest that you take care of that monster hunting of yours. I sincerely hope you find that witch. You can throw me away soon so you couldn't hear anything from me again, Geralt. You want me to zip it? I'll zip it, then. Don't bother talking to me if you genuinely don't want to,"

Everything would be perfect. This would've been a utopian scenery when your leading man decides to wrap his arms around you, comforting you from the verge of crying your heart out for his mistakes or for both of yours. But, Geralt was no leading man or a prince that he was highly opposing of. He was beyond repair or a man whom you needed to understand more than any normal one should because of how he was raised and created.

Geralt of Rivia was a witcher you couldn't understand. Hence, he was more human than he could ever get as he decided to be unresponsive. Silent and basking in his own regret. Just like a new potion he'd recently encountered, trying to decipher how it worked---knowing the ingredients to get you simmering down in no time.

It was a wrong word to say. Geralt was sure of it. He was beginning to argue with himself, grinding his own teeth together when he has seen your posture slouch. Your fingers fiddling with the sheets of the mattress, tightly holding them in your hands as you looked outside of the window from the side of the bed, avoiding his eyes.

Then, he heard familiar padded footsteps coming forth outside the doors of your chambers.

Eanraig. He was being requested to be seen for his upcoming hunt in a few hours.

Geralt was dreading to leave you in a state like this because he knew you were mad.

He heard loud taps against the locked door which has subtly make you turn your head towards the doorway without wholly turning your body. A frustrated growl reverberated around the four corners of the room---it was Geralt.

The latter tightly closed his fists on his sides, shooting daggers on your back who avoided giving him attention after his fuming episode, hearing the word 'fuck' slipping through his lips in such an exasperated bark to himself while he padded through the room and grabbed onto his belongings; his weapons and his resentment for such an argument that you blocked him in after receiving a petty, personal attack.

You've heard the lock sliding out of its hook. Swiftly turning on your bed, Geralt was already paving his way out of the door, heavily marching and begrudging. He'd open the door to reveal Eanraig raising an arm to knock a little more louder.

"The king requests for you, Geralt---"

The witcher gave a displeased, unmannerly grumble of his chest. A hum that surely given the druid an understanding that he was not in the best mood to talk, passing through Eanraig as he went straight out of the door with the nastiest scowl he has seen since the moment he arrived.

Lovers Quarrel. He mindlessly thought to himself, watching the witcher strut away and along the stoned hallways like he was bringing all the storm with him. Nobody would notice he was aggravated if they knew him better.

Eanraig quietly shut the door behind him, his eyes meeting your bleary ones that complimented the pouty frown growing more and more when you've realized Geralt left you all mad, never even intending to comfort you, ask what 'feelings' you meant or even bother to tell you that he didn't mean you were pathetic.

In a flash, you've gotten a queasy feeling inside of your stomach which made you grab onto your mouth, your face flinching as you suddenly stood up on your feet, "Little woman," the druid sauntered to where you've strolled---before the open windows as you shot your head out of it, retching after a little while before he was beside you, calmly patting your back to make you feel better.

"Are you okay?"

"Yeah. Just...nauseous. Thank you, Eanraig." wiping your mouth with the back of your palm, you've heaved exhausted breaths while the druid ushered you to sit on the bed. Talking in the midst of it, assuring him that it was nothing but just a stomach bug and feeling weary over it, "---Probably because they've beaten me to pulp,"

The Druid earnestly stared upon your pale face. Hands shaky as you grab onto the soft sheets, softly grazing them beneath the pad of your fingers, caressing with such feeble strength. Eanraig scrutinized your condition as you turned your head away with a face falling over your current fight with the witcher.

The latter languidly sat beside you, a genuine smile turning his eyes into crescent shapes that tells he was intrigued and amused over what signs was receiving from you especially the warm, tender aura radiating off you; more than what you can offer like you came in two's.

"Will you wholeheartedly accept the responsibility of being the mother of your witcher's child, little one?"

I hope you loved the double update, bb’s! FEEDBACKS ARE SO APPRECIATED!

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litttlesilkworm · 4 years

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Is it true that Gorbachev never supported Valery Legasov? Did he have a "court" as they say, or did he realize that Legasov was an expert one should listen to?

Thank you for a great ask, Comrade! 💜💛💚 And please forgive me for such a belated answer! And the same goes to all the authors of all the other anon asks I received but have yet to answer - I deeply value each and every one of them and promise to respond to them very soon!

I do think that David Dencik’s Gorbachev, though not without charm, comes across as this kind of annoyed and needy monarch in the show. The real Gorbachev, with all his shortcomings, was a lot warmer - in a folksy kind of way - and much more personable. Look at this photo for example, of a room from which the Politburo meeting room was modeled in the show, and how Gorbachev sits together with the rest of the members, and not at the head table like a king:

And as to your question more directly - I actually have just the kind of a fascinating text here that I think, will speak for itself as far as the extent to which Gorbachev listened to and trusted Valery Legasov. The text is a transcript of the Politburo meeting that took place in the morning of May 5th in 1986 - merely a week after the accident. It actually is kind of a riveting read - a glimpse into how all those decisions had to be made in real time, with only meager - and constantly changing - information available.

I wanted everyone to enjoy it, so I translated the discussion section from Russian (please see below).

Legasov really shines in this meeting and one can easily see just how much respect he instills in people around him. There is a rather amazing passage where Legasov voices his disagreement with Velikhov’s plan on how to drain the water from under the reactor. Gorbachev immediately takes Legasov’s side and approves his plan. He then sends Shcherbina out of the room during the meeting to make an immediate phone call to Chernobyl to instruct them to ditch Velikhov’s plan and start implementing Legasov’s. That was my favorite part.

Legasov also consistently sounds like the calmest person in the room. Just calmly and intelligently doing his job, solving what is essentially a scientific problem. Even from the transcript it is easy to extrapolate how much respect he commands around the table.

I took the liberty to include some of my own notes/comments in the translation as well. And I am happy to answer any questions I can!

@elenatria, @alyeen1, @shark-from-the-park, @drunkardonjunkyard, @green-ann, @valerafan2, @johnlockismyreligion, @attachedtofictionalpeople, @the-jewish-marxist, @potter012

SHCHERBINA: We found ourselves in front of a situation that has not been considered before, which is why there hasn’t been any protocols in place for this type of an occurrence. The very project itself is built upon never allowing such a situation. There was an uncontrollable speeding up of the reactor. Immediately after the accident, there has been a lack of preparedness on-site to evaluate the situation. The Civil Defense did not warn people. Until the evening there were weddings being held in the city. The fire had to be smothered as soon as possible, and the radioactive fallout had to be reduced. 4 thousand tonnes of materials have been dumped at the reactor. We were able to knock the surface temperature down from 500 to 200 degrees. What shall we do beneath the reactor? People have approached the pool. It is possible that there is an opportunity now to release the water.

LIGACHEV: Don’t get ahead of yourself.

RYZHKOV: We’ll need to see about that. The most important thing is to avoid the explosion.

SHCHERBINA: The most difficult thing is deactivation.

(Note: Deactivation refers to the clean-up and burial of contaminated soil and water, etc - LSW)

GORBACHEV: The most important is to deal with the danger that is below.

SHCHERBINA: People are working selflessly.

(Note: It seems like they might all be talking over each other in an agitated manner. Wish we could hear a recording of this - LSW)

LEGASOV: The work is organized the following way: Comrade Shcherbina is in charge of organizing, Comrade Meshkov studies the reasons of the accident and I work on recommendations regarding prevention of the further spread of the fallout. There are also groups in Moscow conducting the analysis.

(Note: Legasov truly shines here, stepping in calmly and intelligently to get the discussion back on track. - LSW)

The considerations regarding prevention of the consequences of the accident that are being voiced in the West should be taken into account. These aren’t just guesswork, but a result of studies, conducted with other past NPP accidents taken into account. We had to do all the calculations on site, because we didn’t have any established protocols in place.

GORBACHEV: Plus in this case, there is water under the reactor.

LEGASOV: This was done to save money, otherwise one would have to build two separate buildings. Minsredmash did not agree with that. If we had 4-5 pipes that would be stretched away from the reactor and into some distance, this would not have been a problem. This is a miscalculation of everyone working in the energy industry.

GORBACHEV: What about the containment structures?

LEGASOV: Considering the force of the explosion that took place, a containment structure would not have saved anything.

GORBACHEV: We need to focus on what comes next.

LEGASOV: 10 hours later, we were able to stop the reactor. But it continues to emit radioactivity, because after a year of being in operation, it has accumulated a lot of isotopes. The heat output of those debris has been 14 megawatt in the first 24 hours, while today it is 8.5 megawatt. This is like burning 60 tons of coal every 24 hours. Besides that, graphite is burning, too. There is 2.5 thousand tons of graphite there in total. One ton burns up every hour. This equals 24 tons per day. The graphite will burn up completely in one-third of a year.

The number one task is to create a way of filtering out the radioactive isotopes. Right now the amount of them that gets emitted into air is 100-fold less than there would be without taking measures to drop sand and other materials on the reactor from the air. The area located in the vicinity of the reactor has been sacrificed, because dumping the materials from the height of 200 meters raised dust, which increased radioactivity near the power plant.

Currently, the mass that has been melted in the reactor is moving downward. This is difficult to control, because there hasn’t been monitoring devices installed that would allow doing that. This is my fault, too. But, not a single NPP in the world has something like that.

(Note: Remarkably, Legasov accepts blame for something he hasn’t even designed. Only that he hasn’t voiced his concern about this highly improbable scenario. Or maybe he did but doesn’t think he did it strongly enough? - LSW)

On the first day after the accident, the temperature of the melted mass was 1100 degrees, while yesterday at 18:00 it was 20 degrees. It goes up by 135 degrees every day.

(Note: “20 degrees” is clearly a typo and should say ~2000 degrees, as a quick calculation can confirm: 1100 + 135 x 7 days = 2045 degrees. - LSW)

Last night, an experiment was conducted: the melted mass fell into water, and there hasn’t been an explosion. However, if the melted mass from the reactor reaches the water below, there will be powerful formation of steam.

The situation continues to be troubling. The reactor needs to be cooled from below. An underground tunnel needs to be created, and liquid nitrogen needs to be delivered via it. In 2-3 days, we need to allow the circulation of air. Yesterday, there were no air drops to enable the draft.

Regarding the potentially dangerous zone. It cannot be larger than 250 kilometers. Within which the active zone would be 30-50 kilometers. Our institute has previously considered a “Backstop” scenario, concerning this problem. So we have exact calculations on that account.

GORBACHEV: What would happen if the fuel reaches the ground water?

LEGASOV: This is where Velikhov and I could not find common ground. The pool needs to be emptied of water by pumping, not by shooting at it to pour it out.

GORBACHEV (to SHCHERBINA): We should let the site know, so they don’t shoot at it.

(Comrade SHCHERBINA steps out)

LEGASOV: And as for adding the concrete layer, that’s the final operation.

GORBACHEV: What about the remaining three blocks?

LEGASOV: The first two are in working condition. Barring another explosion, they will be fine. As for the third block, it might catch fire if there is another emergency.

GORBACHEV: Should we invite the foreigners? We shouldn’t do it in vain. But if we have to, then don’t be deterred by it.

LEGASOV: We were shown the cipher telegrams regarding this. Only two things were unknown to us: the French foam and the remote controlled robots from West Germany. So there is no need to send a general SOS message, whereas all the ideas originating overseas should be sent to the group for consideration.

RYZHKOV: If the strategy with pumping the water out via a pipe works, can the same pipe be used to pump the liquid nitrogen in?

LEGASOV: Yes. But it doesn’t cancel out the idea of a tunnel.

RYZHKOV: We should do both.

SHCHERBINA: I was just informed that the water pumping has begun.

(Note: looks like Shcherbina returned to the room after calling the site with this information. So, within this brief time span, Velikhov’s plan of shooting at the bubbler pool (with some sort of a projectile?) was rejected and Legasov’s idea was not only approved by Gorbachev, but actually started being implemented in real time. Amazing. - LSW)

(Note: another interesting takeaway is that they were arranging to bring Joker from West Germany way earlier than it was portrayed in the series. - LSW)

ALEXANDROV: Legasov reported everything correctly. Regarding the foreign assistance: it would be good to bring doctors who specialize in bone marrow transplants.

ALIEV: This type of a specialist is already working.

(Note: this must be Robert Gale. - LSW).

LIGACHEV: Is there a possibility of a chain reaction?

ALEXANDROV: There is. But not an explosion, i.e. a momentary process. But there would be major steam generation.

SLAVSKY: Our Ministry is participating in limiting the consequences of the accident. My first deputy is there on site. One of the reasons for what has happened is that the Atomnadzor (Note: a nuclear watchdog/inspection agency - LSW) has done zero work. What is being done right now is correct. No further suggestions.

BREZHNEV (minister of transport infrastructure): Together with Comrades Shchadov and Usanov we went on site yesterday to survey the situation with approaching the water through drilling. The start of pumping is eased by its location. After the pumping, one must start pumping the clay-concrete mix. The drilling is complicated by the fact that the reactor cannot be approached to a distance closer than 250 meters. We have arranged with the military for them to deactivate the area so we could approach to a closer distance, 50 meters.

GORBACHEV: We should be picking up the pace. We should be working not only as if this was a wartime situation, but a nuclear one - around the clock.

RYZHKOV: Comrade Brezhnev should return on site and organize this work.

GORBACHEV: Yes.

GROMYKO: What’s the percentage of the fallout that enters the atmosphere?

LEGASOV: The SO is exceeded 22-fold. There will be zirconium. First, there was iodine coming out, and now it’s the rare earth minerals. The zone in the radius of 30 kilometers is dangerous. Iodine decays halfway in 8 days, and after 80 days there will be nothing left.

SEDUNOV (Deputy Chairman of Goskomgidromet): We are watching the situation with radiation from airplanes and the land sites. The spread of radioactivity depends on wind direction. First, the cloud went north, then west and south. There was a spread of radioactive air into Poland, Scandinavia, then into Romania and Bulgaria, yesterday - into Turkey. In Kiev, its level increased 80-fold above background, this morning it is 45-fold. A norm for the public is considered 10-fold above background over a year. In Minsk and Lithuania it’s 3-fold. In the North Caucasus, 2-fold. We suppose that in Kiev, it will start receding. But if the wind changes, the cloud can head toward Moscow.

(Note: Goskomgidromet is the weather forecasting agency. - LSW).

SHCHERBITSKY: Someone confused roentgens and milliroentgens.

(Note: not sure what he is referring to? - LSW).

SEDUNOV: It is important to watch the isotope content of the precipitation. Iodine goes into milk. Today that’s where most of the danger is coming from.

GORBACHEV: What to do with the cattle?

SEDUNOV: No need to destroy it. The Kiev water reservoir may become polluted.

LYASHKO: The water probes are being taken every hour. Radioactivity was only found in upper parts of the Pripyat’ river. We banned the public from drinking water from open sources there.

SEDUNOV: In Moscow everything is normal so far.

SHCHADOV (minister of coal industries): It is dangerous to break through the wall. Water should be pumped out and then the mix should be pumped in. If necessary, we’ll dig under the building.

(Note: Shchadov circles back to talking about the water problem and backs Legasov’s strategy. - LSW)

AKHROMEEV (deputy defense minister): Task number one is controlling the radiological situation. We started the deactivation of roads and other sites. Three thousand people are working on it. Today we will finish preparing the deactivation plan and report to the working group.

SOLOMENCEV: How effective is the cleanup?

AKHROMEEV: It reduces radioactivity by a factor of 3 to 4. We have to create burial sites for topsoil and water. We also have set up medical facilities at 7 thousand person capacity.

LIGACHEV: What does Akhromeev think about approaching the water under the reactor?

AKHROMEEV: My opinion is to break it with a cumulative projectile.

(Note: I think this means an anti-tank missile. A true military man’s response, and one vote for Velikhov’s plan. - LSW)

RYZHKOV: There are enough people.

AKHROMEEV: If needed, we will bring more.

LYASHKO: The Dnieper system provides water for 32 million people. The water samples are taken every hour. Yesterday there was no alarm until the evening. But today, there is. On smaller rivers, radiation levels have increased and are now 10^-4, with 10^-8 being the norm. (Note: Units? - LSW). These areas were instructed to switch to water from closed sources.

Luckily, there are artesian wells here. If need be, we will bring water tanks. What would be more difficult is if we would have to dump the water out of Kiev Reservoir. There is already a water shortage in the South. We need Gosomgidromet’s recommendations on how long we should hold the water in Kiev Reservoir.

GORBACHEV: How are the evacuated people?

LYASHKO: Evacuation was carried out in 3 hours in place of planned 6. One bad thing was that we had no protocol in place for this kind of scenario, no training has ever been conducted. The food for the evacuated has been organized. There turned out to be a disconnect between the services of the 3-rd Minzdrav group and the regional medical services. (Note: Minzdrav is the Ministry of Health Services - LSW). They were kept too secret. I spoke to Comrade Burenkov about it. The situation is getting better now.

The census of the evacuated has been complicated by the fact that there were many who have left on personal transport for the holidays to other towns, to visit family, etc.

Construction workers were sent to other objects. 3.5 thousand people were assigned to the “Mayak” factory. Many went to work at agriculture jobs. They will receive medium wages. Because of property loss, people will have to be paid a compensation out of Gosstrakh (Note: a state insurance agency - LSW). The people from the countryside should be given a one-time amount of 100 rubles for the head of the household, and 50 rubles for each family member. The public insists on being provided more information and guidance: what to do in the situation they are in.

SHCHERBITSKY: It is very important right now.

GORBACHEV: I thought we have already decided to provide such information locally.

LYASHKO: We need the minister of health and the scientists to speak and broadcast these regionally. Water from under the reactor should not be let out into soil, even if it goes into a pit. A pool should be built. We can build this type of vessel. We also need vessels for the deactivated soil. But places like that should be guarded.

VLASOV: We will do that.

LYASHKO: The school year continues. The primary school needs to be let out in a week, the tenth graders should finish as usual. All the children, evacuated ones, should be taken into summer camps. I am requesting openings for them. The milk gets doubly checked. If there is contamination, it is being sent for butter and cheese production.

GORBACHEV: We have got the project of the resolution. What should we add? We should take into consideration that the situation is very difficult in all aspects: radiation, an enormous territory. There will be no definitive answers from scientists as far as the future goes. That’s why we need to work by the worst-case scenario. The top priority should be the reactor with all the options considered. The working group must consolidate all the necessary resources and mechanisms.

At the same time, the work with the public needs to be underscored: living conditions, jobs, healthcare, etc. Water is a special question. What should we do? We should carry out all the calculations, all the forecasts. Especially planning all that needs to be done in the danger zone.

Separately, we must decide how to be with the outside world. Information must be provided in a calm and balanced manner, without overconfidence but firmly. Panic is the luxury of the subordinates, and not of the Politburo or the government.

The local channels in Ukraine should broadcast more expanded information. Across the Soviet Union, primarily the facts should be broadcast. Maybe the informational frame can be expanded to the outer world, as well. Our adversaries are asking us questions that would on one hand, allow them to judge us as a whole, and on the other hand - smear us with mud. If we add more information now, it will be natural, because the time passes, and with that the amount of facts. But we should not create a picture of overconfidence. We are facing the fact that this situation is a signal to everyone. The public’s opinion should be turned toward the steps we are taking towards nuclear disarmament. This accident, on a nuclear object, tells us that a nuclear war should never be allowed to happen. We should talk about this at a press conference. So, the information needs to be added to, but responsibly.

As for bringing the foreign specialists? As I understood from Legasov, there is no need for it. If there will be a need, then we’ll decide.

DOLGIKH: This is written in the next to last section.

GROMYKO: I agree with what Mikhail Sergeevich had said. It is correct that the situation remains serious. In the second section of the project it says: to consider.

GORBACHEV: It should say: approve the proposed measures and intensify the work.

GROMYKO: Section 10. We raised this question at the United Nations. We should use what we’ve already talked about previously.

SHCHERBITSKY: Section 9 needs to be expanded, to mention informing the populace regarding the situation.

GORBACHEV: Add this.

MEDVEDEV: Perhaps we should make a mention of periodically informing our friends.

GORBACHEV: It is already in the project. I suggest incorporating these suggestions and approving it.

POLITBURO MEMBERS: Agreed.

GORBACHEV: Boris Evdokimovich, you said that the analysis of the causes of the accident has been completed.

SHCHERBINA: Yes. On 25th of April, the power plant started conducting an experiment to test the reliability of its functioning, which has been approved by the Chief Engineer. It has been a crudest mistake to conduct such a test without taking the reactor functioning into account.

GORBACHEV: What kind of experimenting was it? This is a nuclear power plant.

SHCHERBINA: These kinds of experiments are conducted at power plants. But the nuclear watchdog agency should have been informed of that. The first scientific deputy hasn’t been there.

GORBACHEV: What about the version with hydrogen?

SHCHERBINA: No. There were two explosions inside the reactor.

GORBACHEV: What about the automated systems?

SHCHERBINA: None of the three systems worked.

GORBACHEV: There has already been resolutions regarding the improper operating procedures at Chernobyl NPP.

SHCHERBINA: The personnel have not been properly chosen.

CHEBRIKOV: We have two reactor systems - two-line (the more reliable ones) and the single-line ones. This is a single-line reactor. It doesn’t tolerate fluctuations in the operating procedure. Unplanned things lead to adverse circumstances. There are three systems in place to stop the reactor everywhere, but this one only had two. Capturing the extra heat output - that’s what the experiment was for. Its planning was done without involving the reactor designers.

SHCHERBINA: The hydrogen version was discarded right away. The problem was with the reactor vibrating and speeding up.

DOLGIKH: We should wait for the results of the final analysis.

GROMYKO: We should start discussing this in Central Planning. A big misfortune had struck us. Someone made an oversight, committed a crime and must be punished. What sort of thing they decided to experiment with. The decision should be such that many generations would not forget about this fact.

GORBACHEV: I suggest approving the resolutions regarding the liquidation of the consequences of the accident at Chernobyl and inviting Hans Blix to the USSR.

POLITBURO MEMBERS: Agreed.

The resolutions are approved.

#chernobyl #valery legasov #boris shcherbina #mikhail gorbachev

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yaz-the-spaz · 4 years

Note

But I want to know your theory. :(

ok ok i guess i’ll spill…i was kinda hesitant to share just cause i’m still not all that solid in my belief in it myself but basically it seems like maybe ziam has made it a tradition to have some kind of couples trip most years (if not every year) in february ever since 2014…

(btw for future reference this ask is a continuation of this ask re ziam both being publicly in vegas earlier this year)

ugh sorry guys! hit enter by accident and posted this wayyyy before i was anywhere near finished lol…this will be updated within the hour (if it doesn’t take me too long to get my thoughts out)

narrator: she did not finish it within the hour.

…

ok so part of the reason i’ve been hesitant to share this is because a good portion of it is VERY speculative and just based on a lot of guesswork and assumptions, but also there’s the fact that it feels like this is something major that more people in the fandom (or at least someone, other than little ass me lol) would have noticed before now and it kind of freaks me out that maybe no one else has?? (unless ofc i just haven’t happened to see any other posts there are about it idk)…

also fyi a lot of what i propose throughout this is heavily based on info from this post just to make sure i remember to site my sources before we get into it lol

alright now onto the actual theory…

SO. all this started with me scrolling through old posts from late 2013/early 2014 and being reminded of the fuckery that was zayn’s bday that year (with the douche canoe crew and everyone pretending like liam was barely there as seemingly some sort of weird over-the-top cover-up)…the same party that seemed kinda like liam’s possible “introduction” to the malik family as more than just zayn’s friend/as his possible significant other. which was also only a month after that suspicious engagement-looking ring first showed up on zayn’s ring finger in december 2013 from bts midnight memories mv footage (and which stayed around as a necklace throughout january 2014 and early febuary 2014 right before the first appearance/debut of the mandala tat in mid feb).

bts midnight memories mv with the ring in view - dec 2013:

(suspicious?) malik family outing/celebration with the ring in view - dec (or possibly late nov?) 2013:

[putting the rest under the cut cause as per usual with me this got insanely long]

liam and aunt zileh at zayn’s bday party - jan 2014:

liam and one of the little cousins at zayn’s bday party - jan 2014:

then sometime in between late jan and early feb 2014 liam went on a trip to barbados with his whole family (and supposedly also sophia lol more on that later*) while zayn was SUPPOSEDLY still home and steadily “posting” pics of himself at home with various members of his family (with the ring on a necklace clearly visible in the pics lol), anddd as some have also pointed out his hair was suspiciously unchanged in these pics despite his claim of getting a haircut BEFORE most of the pics were posted lol

zayn in family pics with the ring on a necklace - late jan/early feb 2014 (sorry i’m not the one who cropped his fam out lol):

but yet we’re supposed to believe zayn - who had just gotten awarded the asian ambassadorship for the VERY FIRST time - mysteriously (and willingly) MISSED the ceremony on feb. 5th with absolutely no explanation. which…we all know how big a deal that was to him from the way he talked about it and how honored he was when he went in 2015…which begs the question if he was really just home not doing much of anything at the time in 2014 why in the world would he just pass/bail on that HUGE HONOR with no explanation??? mayhaps because he was actually already an ocean away with liam and fam in barbados celebrating his engagement (and getting his own “introduction” to the payne family) and literally COULD NOT ATTEND?

anyway so then, we have him getting the mandala tat around feb 18th 2014 - or at least this is the day he debuted it on his old ig, so the date may be a few days off from when he actually got it - but this still would’ve been shortly after they got back from the barbados trip when he debuted this particular tat (aka another solidification of the engagement??)

THEN we get the very first ig ziam likes from the famous and beloved aunt zileh (!!!) in this same month (still feb for reference, but she continues steadily and heavily liking stuff all the way through april when she seems to cool down again). fast forward to the 2014 brits at the end of february where we have the infamous moment with 1) ziam giddy as fucking ever, 2) zayn whispering into and practically mawling liam’s neck in public, 3) liam talking about how it was great to “fill each other in” on what they were up to during their break while zayn’s just steady standing there smiling like a loon and then 4) liam still later being like ‘you don’t wanna know’ when asked what he got up to (and zayn still grinning like a fool)

ziam being gross at brits 2014:

so to sum up so far: 1) one of them possibly proposed around nov/dec 2013 (or that’s my best guess anyway based on the evidence lol), 2) then zayn shows up with a suspiciously-engagement-looking ring in dec 2013, 3) then all the weirdness with liam’s attendance at zayn’s bday party a month later (possibly also liam’s formal intro to the malik family), 4) then liam takes his barbados trip with his fam (and supposedly sophia lol*) just a couple weeks later while “zayn” stays home and posts family pics (but is very likely secretly on the trip with liam lol which is also possibly zayn’s formal intro the payne family and a belated celebration of their engagement), 5) and then we get the beginning of aunt zileh’s likes, 6) the debut of zayn’s mandala tat, 7) and the 2014 brits wildness…all in the space of like 3 months. and most of it happening in FEBRUARY. what a wild fucking journey right?

*side note/fun fact: liam and his fam were posting stuff regularly throughout the duration of the barbados vacay but there were literally zero pics of sophia posted from this trip until like dec 2014 or sometime around then when like ONE random pic suddenly surfaced/was posted and lots of ppl had already speculated that sophia was never there in the first place so once this one pic came up that idea got upgraded to people theorizing that they maybe had some of the fam go back a second time later in the year just to stage take photos to retroactively prove/authenticate the narrative that sophia was there lol

but anyway so back to the actual matter at hand - most of that shit happened in february right? specifically the barbados trip (aka the possible engagement celebration trip)…and when i was talking about all this to a friend we realized ZIAMI WAS ALSO IN FEBRUARY. AND SO WAS THIS YEAR’S VEGAS SHIT. AND THEN. AND THEN. My friend did some research and there was apparently this little known/barely talked about article (or at least barely talked about that i’m aware of) about liam taking a TRIP TO THE MALDIVES IN FEBRUARY 2016… which coincidentally (or not lol considering these shady ass hoes) is also around the same time he got his 4 tattoo (I believe this was the first article, or at least one of the first articles, that mentioned the tat’s debut)

BUT WAIT.

THE INSANE SHIT DOES NOT END THERE FOLKS.

GUESS WHICH MONTH THE CARTIER BRACELET FIRST DEBUTED?

FUCKING FEBRUARY 2016.

specifically on liam’s wrist in preparation for the 2016 brits (photo posted to his brits stylist’s ig on feb 23rd). and he didn’t take it off till like june.

so. quick timeline:

february 2016 - maldives trip and debut of liam’s 4 tattoo (around feb 21st); debut of cartier bracelet via liam (feb 23rd); (there was also that valentine’s day roses pic liam posted feb 14th of this year which was quite interesting considering he and c hadn’t even been officially announced as a “thing” yet…ofc we know it still got retroactively attributed to her anyway but whatever, we all know who it was really for lol 😏)

february 2017 - i don’t have anything on this year, partly cause i stopped paying as close attention due to heavy ramping up of stunts, although if anyone has more concrete info on this period that hints at anything please do hit me up and i will add it in, but anyway just based on a little light research there does appear to be a good period of inactivity from both of them during this time (as in both of them had quite a bit of time in february where they were pretty inactive on sm, not being papped, and essentially mia and would have potentially had time to go on a private trip) - UPDATE: HOLY SHIT I CANNOT BELIEVE I FORGOT ABOUT THIS BUT THIS IS THE YEAR LIAM SHOWED UP AT THE BRITS WITH THE MOTHERFUCKING 25 ON HIS JACKET AND FUCKED SIMON ALL THE WAY UP BY SWERVING ON HIS UGLY BITCH ASS SPEECH IN FRONT OF GOD AND ENTIRE WORLD (and i think also thanked zayn in his speech if i’m not mixing that up with another year??) - all on feb 23rd to be specific.

february 2018 - ZIAMI OBVIOUSLY (which specifically started feb 22nd, or at least that’s the day i’m counting it as ‘started’ cause it’s the day liam joined zayn in miami, can’t recall the exact day zayn arrived but pretty sure it was only a couple days before that)

february 2019 - zayn starts wearing this distinctive fishhook earring in all his ig pics, which on the surface seems like a pretty small thing, but quite possibly commemorates their famous august 2014 fishing trip (directly after which he also started wearing a fish hook pendant on a necklace back in 2014); this was also another period they were pretty quiet/mia as far as i can recall, although again if anybody has more concrete info from this time that could point to something please let me know, but anyway point being they again would have had a good chunk of time to possibly go on a private trip together

february 2020 - VEGAS BABY

ofc i’m sure you all will notice one year was left out - february 2015 they were on tour with no breaks coming anytime soon so they obviously weren’t able to go on a trip that year. BUT. february 14th 2015 (aka valentine’s day lol) is also the day liam was famously papped with some small shopping bags that looked suspiciously but precisely like the type that usually come from a jewelry store, and then later that same night they had a performance (for otra tour) where we have zayn pictured wearing a new gold bracelet (as in he hadn’t been seen wearing it ever before on tour or anywhere else) - btw the op of this linked post actually marks this day as the debut of the cartier bracelet but there’s a lot of counter speculation that it’s not and given that it doesn’t quite look like the cartier bracelet looked in later pics (it’s more round and more gold than the cartier bracelet which imo looks more angular and more kind of a two-tone/silvery-gold than this vday bracelet) i’m inclined to lean more towards it just being a regular but still very sweet vday-gifted bracelet. but anyway back to more important stuff. now considering this was literally just a little over a month before zayn left - and one of my theories for zayn leaving was that it was possible he felt it was the only way to save his relationship with liam…i mean if they were still giving each other vday presents they were clearly still VERY in love at this point. like that’s not the kind of thing you’d expect from a couple that was on the rocks and on the verge of breaking up and i know a lot of ppl (myself included for a brief minute) speculated that zayn leaving the band meant he maybe left liam too/or things weren’t working out b/t them or whatever, but given this context of the vday gifts just a few weeks before him leaving that doesn’t really line up…what does line up though is him being so in love and so sick of the bs that he might be driven to just be done with it all (as far as the stress of the band and mgmt bs is concerned at least). and ofc liam did say that zayn is the most emotionally impulsive/emotionally driven out of all them so when you think about it it really shouldn’t come as that much of a surprise…

anyway, in conclusion:

it appears quite possible ziam has made it a couples tradition (ever since that first honeymoonish vacay in 2014) to go on some sort of trip/getaway together around the end of every february (or at least do something special together/for each other when they can’t) and in further conclusion I AM NOT OKAY AND WILL NEVER BE OVER THIS REALIZATION OKAY THANKS BYE 😭😭😭😭😭🌈🌈🌈

#asks #anons #ziam #ziam february #ziam engagement #ziam anniversary #ziam theories #ziami #ziam vegas #(btw ziam vegas 2020 was feb 23rd but i didn't wanna ruin the aesthetic of the line by putting it in there so i just added it here lol)#ziam jewelry #ziam bracelets #cartier bracelets #aunt zileh #ziam tattoos #mandala tattoo #zayn's mandala tattoo #liam's 4 tattoo #ziam coincidences #ziam masterposts #zayn leaving #ugh i'm soooo sorry guys i did not anticipate this taking me a full 4 goddamn hours wtf #(i started this at 10:30pm and it is now 2:18am what in the actual hell is my brain whyyyy am i like this)#but anyway i really hope this gets a a good amount of notes for all the work (read: blood; sweat & tears lol) i put into #getting all this together in a coherent way lol #(cause y'all do not wanna see the mess of a convo this spawned from - honestly it is A PIPING HOT MESS lol)#anyway enjoy folks #(good lord what is wrong with me i literally just added a whole nother extra hour of work for myself by deciding to add gifs and pics #and more links...it is now past 3am...i have a PROBLEM)

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transformers-fan-continuities · 3 years

Text

Spotlight: Rise of the Radiotrons

Here it is folks, the first fan canon spotlight, showcasing Rise of the Radiotrons created by sleeveev! You can find this over at @riseoftheradiotrons and also on AO3! This is a long post, fair warning.

Q) Give us a run down of your cont! What's it about, what's it called, what's it like?

the cont, despite being called Rise of the Radiotrons, revolves around five main groups of characters, and the mystery that accidentally intertwines all of them. a lot of false identities, undiscovered pasts, mystery that you need to read all the way through to really uncover. it also takes place during the attrition phase of the Autobot-Decepticon war, and Megatron and Optimus are... dead. but... weren't they made immortal by the Eternal Surge? where are they?

Q) What characters take the lead here? Any personal favorites?

characters that take the lead? hoo, boy, there's a lot. and be warned, this is OC-heavy. Wavecrash, Blackarachnia, Sparkplug, Pascal, and Ness make up the Earth detective team, the first to investigate the Radiotrons: Nanotube, Quicksilver, Greenscreen, and [REDACTED] (that is not their name, you will learn it later!).

Starscream, Moonkiller, and Pharma investigate a series of rust-related murders, later with the help of Eclipse and Terraform. the two they investigate? two hulking beings that carry a rust of sheer destruction of anything metal, Turbulence and someone known only as The Crimson Doctor. the third part is mostly with just a few characters. Dial-Up and Absolute Zero are in a cat-and-mouse chase, Dial-Up attempting to capture Absolute Zero and return him to the prison he escaped from. other 'bots come into this story, including Pylon, Airachnid, Suture, and Cyclonus, but they are not the main focus.

Turbulence. this motherfucker. this moldy bitch.

my personal favorites? i love Sparkplug, i love my little gaming PC gal. The Crimson Doctor has also grown on me quite a bit. i'm gonna make fat robots and you can't stop me.

Sparkplug above, Crimson Doctor (Crim) below

Q) I love how he isn’t crimson at all.

oh you'll learn why he's crimson

Q) Ominous! Is there a bigger point to this, like a theme or some catharsis? Or is it just fluffy fun?

a bigger point to this? well, i have quite my fair share of trauma for being in a military family - being on the home front of a war i never even learned about until i was like 12. i wanted to show the horrors of attrition above all, because attrition is the part of war that everyone seems to forget, but is possibly the most dangerous part of it. everyone's killing each other over resources, dying of preventable diseases, resources are spread thin among soldiers and thinner among civilians. it also lets new, perhaps worse groups arise from the dust.

war was never about who was right. it was about who could live longer. and RotR, with its rampant killings that people can't even begin to investigate until their leaders are toppled from their thrones and complete anarchy reigns among military sites, is a testament to that.

war was the cause for part of the namesake of the Radiotrons themselves - the Great Radiation Crisis. war was where everything went wrong

Q) How long have you been working on it?

now, for the slightly less dark - it varies from character to character! while the official plot of RotR was established on August 25 this year, some 'bots go much further back - Pascal's earliest concepts were made on May 8, Nanotube's were made on April 25, and The Crimson Doctor's roots go as far back as a character called The Crimson-Eyed Doctor, a character created on Dec 11, 2019 (happy belated birthday, Crim!).

Q) You’re very meticulous with your dates!

i lose track of all time otherwise

Q) Give us a behind-the-scenes look! Show us a secret ;))

behind the scenes.

this is a mystery cont.

THERE'S A LOT BEHIND THE SCENES.

i will start with some no-context spoilers, here.

and, now for something a bit more genuinely secret.

whether this is a crimson doctor or a red herring, you decide.

Q) Where did you draw inspiration from? What canons, what other fiction, what parts of real life?

this varies from subtle to shameless.

my cont would fit best in an comic format, so it makes sense that i was inspired by IDW - and that it was my entry into the TF fandom! there is also some TFA bits in there, but the majority of it is personal robot worldbuilding, with a couple sprinkles of headcanons and OCs taken from Afterburn, a cont made by a longtime friend of mine.

other fiction i took inspiration from is mostly in the character designs. Blackarachnia was loosely inspired by Tawna from Crash Bandicoot 4: It's About Time (you went through such a good revamp sweetie. neon lesbian.). if you can't tell that Turbulence took inspiration from Cioccolata from JJBA: Golden Wind, i don't know what to tell you. Crim took less inspiration from a character and more from a trope - the "ever-obedient villain subordinate". i just sucked all of the homoeroticism out of it, and also decided to give him more of a self than just someone who serves the villain.

here's Tawna (specifically Crash Bandicoot 4), one of the big inspirations for Blackarachnia's design! we don't talk about your past sweetie.

and Blackarachnia headshot to compare, because her fullbody is still in progress.

i am sharing this specific image of cio, one of turb's inspos, because i BASED A TURB PIECE OFF OF IT.

real life? RADIATION, RADIATION. i have radiation and radioactive things and the PERIODIC TABLE as a special interest and it SHOWS. it's all radiation. even the names. Quicksilver comes from mercury, Starborn comes from all elements being created from stars in space, Nanotube comes from carbon nanotubes, and [REDACTED] comes from... well, you don't know yet. there's also the whole attrition war thing, for real life inspiration, too.

Q) Show off something you're really proud of, a particular favorite part of your cont.

this piece of Eclipse and Turbulence('s hand), for one

(the image is at the end of the post under a readmore, as it contains eye trauma, eye touching, and roboblood)

and another thing i am particularly proud of are all my worldbuilding posts! they look like textbook entries kinda but i really really love em. here's one of them, though there are many more on the blog!

lastly, my favorite character introduction post. if you know Afterburn, you may be pleasantly surprised seeing this.

Q) Ah, that guy.

fun fact about RotR Absolute Zero! his color palette is taken from a diagram of a human heart. here is the motherfucker in question,

Q) What other fan canons do you love and why? Would you like to see them interviewed?

Afterburn. my best friend made this i can't just NOT advertise it. go look at it there's murderers and there's an OC that's actually very inspired by not one but two of my creations (the original OC he was a fanformer of, and his altmode - I'd had thoughts of various greenhouse 'bots like that). @transformersafterburn. please don't simp for Abzero. or maybe do. he's a better option than Turbulence.

Mirror Mirror. found at @transformers-mirror-mirror, it's got so many epic character designs and realistically sized altmodes despite not having realistically sized altmodes this makes me go happy flappy and is also inspiring a future project of mine, also Shattered Glass!

NEW PRIMES OF CYBERTRON. RITO I LOVE YOUR CONT SO MUCH. i summed it up in "transformers ungunned" but THERE IS MUCH MORE GO CHECK IT OUT AFTER YOU FINISH READING THIS INTERVIEW @thenamesblurrito

Q) [insert flattered keysmashing from me, creator of New Primes of Cybertron, otherwise known as TF:SNAP]

Thank you very much veev! Everyone go check out Rise of the Radiotrons! Stay tuned for next week, when we’ll get to see some Shattered Glass...

(aforementioned image under the cut, warning for eye trauma, eye touching, and roboblood)

#tf:rotr #spotlight #long post #robogore #tfoc #YEEHAW SPOTLIGHTS STARTED

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maybankiara · 4 years

Text

I HAVE COME TO SAVE THE DAY

pairing: JJ Maybank x Kiara Carrera

summary: JJ is a postman and Kiara is his favourite receptionist (alternatively, 4 times Kiara didn’t know JJ’s name and the one time she did).

w/c: 5k

a/n: i posted this on ao3 back for jiara week and totally forgot to post it on tumblr, too, so here’s a belated jiara fic, a short ‘lil enemies to lovers trope for y’all!!

masterlist | tag list

read on archive of our own

1: J.

‘Carrera Law Firm, how may I help you?’

The guy standing in front of Kiara in a postman’s uniform gives her a glance that’s part-question part-disbelief, and then points at the device in his hand. ‘Delivery for Anna Carrera.’

‘Oh. Okay.’

Blood rushes to Kiara’s cheeks as she clicks the button on the desk telephone, reaching her mother within seconds.

‘Just sign it in,’ says her mother.

‘Okay.’

She hangs up and looks at the guy, extending a hand. ‘I’ll sign it.’

He gives her a slight eyebrow raise and she may or may not see a hint of wickedness in the tight corner of his smile as she takes the device from him. She’s quick to sign it, with a shaky hand, and give it back to him.

‘You’re new here.’

Kiara nods, says: ‘Yeah, it's my first day’, even though it was a statement, not a question.

He stares at her for a hot second with the same expression, and Kiara expects him to ask something else, make it a conversation—it seemed like a conversation starter—but he doesn’t even acknowledge her answer.

‘Where do I put this?’

There’s a slight thud and she leans across her desk, seeing a medium-sized box with his black combat boot right next to it.

Her lips purse as she realises what he’d done, and decides she dislikes him.

All she wants to do is tell him off, that could be fragile, but she’s new and he seems cocky and reeks of trouble enough to make her bite her tongue.

So all she actually does is lean back into her chair and nod towards the wall to her side. ‘Just leave it there.’

He does so without a question, and on the way out, gives her a two-finger salute.

Kiara checks the paper slip he left on her desk, finding his name with ease: J. Maybank. She thinks of his short but shaggy blonde hair, rugged and self-satisfied appearance that oozed confidence, and yeah, he looked like a boy whose name begins with J.

It’s not the most awkward conversation/situation she has that day, but it’s the most memorable one, mostly because she can't get his smirk out of her head for more reasons than just one (and far too many of them she’d never admit).

She decides she hates him, anyway.

2: JOHN

The next time he comes, it’s Friday and Kiara’s got the hang of it, so she wags a finger at him to tell him to wait as she picks up the ringing phone.

‘Carrera Law Firm.’

She talks with the customer—a lovely lady, has the misfortune of living next to a new construction site—for a little bit, laughter falling from her lips. It’s Friday already and she’s gotten better at this, more confident, and making J. Maybank wait on her is worth it.

(It’s not a personal vendetta, per se – more of karma, really.)

She watches him shift weight from one leg to another, hands resting in his pocket. He’s got a slouch to him, the ease in his shoulders making him seem as if anything he wishes for, the world gives him. Kiara’s friend Sarah calls boys who stood like that suave, but Kiara calls it arrogance.

The same half-smile with the same dose of wickedness in its curve is mocking her when she bids farewell to the lady on the phone. Her back is resting against the chair and a pen slides across the paper, before she actually looks at him.

‘Delivery?’

J. Maybank reaches into the side of his backpack and takes out a handful of letters, placing them on the desk.

Kiara frowns, because he’s still standing there. ‘Do I need to sign those?’

‘Nope.’

He doesn’t budge and neither does his smile.

She collects the mail and goes through it, separating them in piles for each of her mother's employees. It takes her a couple of seconds, but J. Maybank’s gaze on her burns on her cheeks and makes it last a whole eternity.

Her glance at him comes in pair with a single raised eyebrow. ‘Can I help you?’

J. Maybank puts his fingers on the desk, tapping one of them. ‘I can leave a message with you, right?’

‘Yeah, sure.’

‘Okay’'

He nods. Kiara notes his fingers are shaky as he reaches into his pocket, taking out a pen and a piece of paper, even though there’s a bunch of both already on her desk for this exact purpose.

He scribbles down a note and folds the paper in half, hiding the text. He slides the note towards her, fingers still shaky. It’s a far cry from the overconfident, cocky person he was a mere minute ago.

‘I looked up on the internet and it said that you offer free consultations, right?’

Kiara nods. ‘Mostly, yeah. Depends on what you need.’

‘Family law,’ he elaborates.

‘Then a consultation is free. It’s Mrs Viola Glisson’s department.’ Kiara puts her finger on the note and she wants to open it, to see what he’d written. Instead, she swallows dryly. ‘Do you want me to give this to her?’

He nods. ‘That’d be great.’

No thanks comes her way, only a smile that is innocent for less than it takes her to blink. He gives her the same two-finger salute and is back to the cocky J. Maybank in moments, and Kiara hates to admit that she can’t take her eyes off of him as he walks through the glass door. His uniform doesn’t fit the aesthetic of the building, nor Kiara’s smart black trousers and a red t-shirt with a propper-up collar and a zipper on the cleavage, but he doesn’t look out of place.

As soon as he’s out of sight, Kiara’s fingers take the paper note, ready to give it to Viola, a woman who grew up with her mother and Kiara dated her son James back in middle school. She’s planning to give it to Viola immediately, no wicked intentions, but J. Maybank’s face pops up in her mind, complete with the self-confident smirk. She gives in with a sigh, thinking that he deserves her snooping for the way he’s been acting.

To her disappointment, the writing is just a phone number with John Maybank written underneath it.

She hands it to Viola with a sigh, offering no information to go with it. Viola reads the note and a knowing look spreads over her features. ‘Maybank, the postman, right?’

Kiara nods.

‘He’s about your and James’ age, no?’

‘I guess.’ Her face flashes before her eyes and she places him in her school corridors with ease. She knows he doesn’t go to the Cooke Academy because a face with demeanour like his would stand out.

‘He’s a good kid, Maybank. Mowed our lawn a fair amount,’ Viola muses to herself. Her fingers flip through a stack of papers and she writes something down, looking up at Kiara. ‘Did he say what he needed?’

‘Just a consultation with Familial.’

‘Hm? That’s interesting, might be about his father... Can you bring me a cup of coffee on your way out? You make the best coffee I’ve had in years!’

Kiara knows when she’s being dismissed, so she does as Viola asked of her. Her mind buzzes with the newfound information about J.—John—Maybank.

He’s a mystery, and stays in her mind longer than she’d like, again.

3: JOHN J.

‘Mrs Grubbs, I can’t give away our employee’s private information.’

‘It’s just a phone number,’ repeats Mrs Lana Grubbs in exasperation. ‘It’s not private.’

‘A personal phone number is private information. I don’t have the right—’

‘Fine, I’ll just do it myself.’

The short woman with greying brown hair pulled into an elaborate bun walks past Kiara's desk with complete disregard of any manners whatsoever, and is already halfway through the main hallway when Kiara comes up in front of her.

The young Carrera puts her hands between her and the woman, lips pressed tight. ‘Mrs Grubbs, you can’t walk in here unannounced.’

‘Announce me, then.’

‘You need to have an appointment,’ elaborates Kiara. She feels herself close to seething; there are firm rules set in stone when it comes to culture, and the woman before her seems to have completely missed them. ‘I can arrange you an appointment.’

Mrs Grubbs scoffs. Her perfectly defined eyebrows shoot up, and her lips purse as she raises her chin. ‘I need an appointment now, young lady.’

‘My mother is in the middle of a meeting, and is busy until the end of her shift.’

‘She is not that busy. Push me in after this meeting.’

Kiara sighs. Even if she pushed her in, she knew her mother wouldn’t give her time of the day with that attitude. ‘With all due respect—’

‘Ms Lana!’

The two women avert their attention to Kiara’s reception desk, where a fair-haired boy in a postman’s uniform is standing with a small box in his hands and a grin on his face. He waves at them, but he’s looking at Mrs Grubbs.

‘Hey, Ms Lana. How you been?’

Mrs Grubbs’ demeanour changes in an instant – Kiara watches her go from a ruthless witch to a friendly lady from the neighbourhood. She approaches John Maybank and squeezes his cheeks with, asking about school, his friends, and whatnot.

Kiara takes the opportunity to go back behind her desk, eyeing the exchange suspiciously. Before she knows it, John is hugging Mrs Grubbs and she turns to the girl with a disappointed smile on her face.

‘I will arrange an appointment elsewhere,’ she states, as if Kiara is supposed to give a damn. ‘Your services are subpar.’

at least we don’t need to deal with entitled, mannerless assholes like you, crosses Kiara’s mind, but the only thing noticeable is the smile on her face. ‘In that case, I hope you find services that match your demands.’

What she gets in return is a distasteful eye roll paired with an over-dramatic huff. Mrs Grubbs turns on her heel and walks out of the door without so much as a goodbye.

At last, Kiara takes a deep breath and shifts her gaze to the postman in front of her desk.

‘Don’t worry about it,’ he tells her with the smirk she’s gotten used to in the past two weeks. ‘Ms Lana is a bitch to everyone.’

‘Not you,’ sighs Kiara.

‘No, that’s because everyone likes me.’

She raises her eyebrows at him—she seems to be doing that a lot when he’s around—and just opens her hand. ‘What you got?’

‘Delivery for Mrs Viola Glisson.’ He hands her a paper slip and the device to sign, which she does. ‘So you don’t agree that everyone likes me?’

‘I don’t.’

‘Ouch.’ John places a hand over where his heart is supposed to be (a little too far to the left) and grimaces. ‘That hurts my feelings.’

Kiara gives the device back to him, walking around the desk to pick up the box and put it on it. She knows he’s staring at her cleavage (not very exposed, but noticeable when she bends over) and wonders if he left it there on purpose.

When she sits back in her chair, he’s still there, fingers tapping against her desk.

‘Look, thanks for your help with Mrs Grubbs,’ she says, because a) she’s not a fool and she can tell what he did, and b) she can swallow her pride for one second.

‘Does that make me your prince?’

‘You didn’t come on the white horse or in your shining armour.’

‘My uniform’s kinda shiny,’ he says, tugging at the short sleeves that have the reflective tape on it that is a must-have for Kildare. ‘And my bike is white.’

Kiara laughs. ‘Your bicycle?’

‘My motorbike.’

He says it slowly, with the “e” stretching into a knowing smile, and Kiara hates that he knows exactly what he’s doing, and hates even more that it’s working.

Thing is – by now, Kiara is half-certain that the majority of the reason why his presence irks her is because she’s attracted to it, and Kiara Carrera hates being attracted to people who are cocky and self-serving. He looks like he could be a good night’s fun, with his cheeky grin and eyes that remind her of waves she sometimes surfs on, and he reeks of trouble, still. This used to be her type – tall, blonde, with a streak for illegal activities, but Kiara said to herself that she isn’t fifteen anymore. She hasn’t been fifteen in two years, come two weeks. She’s past that childish behaviour.

‘I don’t need a knight in shining armour, pal,’ she states, shutting down her thoughts before they progressed even further. I need a postman.’

‘We could be friends,’ he says. ‘Why not, huh?’

‘Do you always chat with receptionists for longer than it’s appropriate?’

‘Only cute ones.’

Kiara can’t contain her laugh this time, and it echoes in the room full of marble. John is smiling at her, and she thinks that the wickedness in the crook of his smile is just playfulness, instead. Teasing, too, and maybe just the slight hint of a daredevil.

She leans her elbows on the desk, intertwines her fingers, and rests her chin on her hands. ‘I don’t even know your name.’

He cocks his head to the side as if he knows she’s lying and, based on the way he seems (perceptive, in any case – he’s very good at finding out what makes her tick), he knows that she is.

The blond extends her a hand and she takes it. ‘John J. Maybank.’

‘Kiara Carrera.’ His grip is firm but so is hers, and they have a little staredown. ‘Adding in a “J.” to make yourself seem fancy?’

(She pretends her hand isn’t cold once his is away; she pretends she doesn’t feel the blood coursing through her veins, or the knots in her stomach when his eyes fall to her lips.)

John J. Maybank laughs with his whole chest, arms crossed on it. ‘Fancy is the last word anyone would use to describe me.’

Her eyes travel up and down his body, and she tries not to linger on his biceps, accentuated by his pose, or the way his uniform sits just right on his body.

Instead, she grins. ‘I can tell.’

He taps his fingers against her desk, and her eyes catch a pair of rings she didn’t notice before. ‘Anyway, we're friends now.'

‘Do I want to be friends with you?’

John J. Maybank is already halfway out of the building when he turns to her, walking backwards, and shrugs with his arms outstretched. ‘I don’t think you have a choice.’

He’s right – she doesn’t.

She thinks he’d be surprised if he knew just how little choice she has when it comes to him.

4: JOHNNY JAY

John J. Maybank catches her as she’s walking out of the small—hers only—bathroom next to her desk.

‘Hey, friend.’

Kiara still rolls her eyes at the greeting. There’s something off about him, only she doesn’t notice what it is until she's sat down at her desk – he’s wearing a basketball top and short cargo pants, paired with the usual combat boots.

Kiara certainly didn’t expect to find out that the uniform actually hides quite a good bit of his body that is, objectively (and not in the way of Kiara objecting), quite pleasant to look at.

He catches her looking. ‘I’m here for an appointment with Mrs Glisson.’

‘Now?’

John J. Maybank glances at the clock to his right, above the bathroom door. ‘In ten minutes.’

‘Give me a second.’

Her mind buzzes as fast as her fingers flip through the book of visitors. She recalls him asking for a consultation with Viola about two weeks ago, distinctly remembering Viola saying something about his father possibly being the reason. Her fingers land on the last time someone came for Viola.

‘Sorry, she’s still in a meeting.’

‘Thanks. It’s okay, I’m not in a rush,’ he says, taking a seat in the waiting area, a few feet from Kiara’s desk. He throws one hand on the back of the seat next to him, ankle over a knee, and grins. ‘Besides, I don’t mind the company.’

‘I’m busy,’ retorts Kiara.

‘When’s the last time you had fun?’

‘How long ago did you come here?’

‘Damn, dude. You still don’t like me?’

‘Nope.’

They both know it's a lie.

In the past two weeks, he’s been here about five times, and every single one of those, he stayed behind to chat a little bit. Kiara didn’t mind – she liked having someone to talk to, especially someone who was her age.

(Well – not anymore, as of today.)

‘You should come to the Boneyard,’ he says. ‘And before you say you don’t want to—I see you—I’ll just let you know that I know you do, because I’ve seen you there, with Sarah Cameron and the kooks.’

At this, Kiara leans back in her chair, crossing her ankles underneath her desk. ‘Don’t recall the Kooks playing at a Boneyard party. I think they tend to have proper concerts, instead.’

‘So what, you’re gonna say going to Boneyard parties isn’t your bad habit?’

A smile spreads over her lips, heated underneath his gaze. She likes that he caught her reference – she likes that maybe they have the same taste in music. She likes the idea of them dancing to it, at a Boneyard party, red solo cups in hand.

‘Relax, Johnny Jay.’ He raises an eyebrow at the name, but doesn’t interrupt her. ‘Boneyard parties aren’t really my scene anymore.’

John J. Maybank stares at her with the same knowing look. She catches the glimmer in her eye that tells her she's not fooling him, and she sees the intent in the curve of his Cupid’s bow.

He flashes a set of white teeth and a pair of dimples. ‘Bring Sarah Cameron and the kooks. It might be a pogue party, but it’ll be a proper party.’

Kiara’s smile is soft, and her cheeks are heating up again underneath the sharpness of his gaze. ‘What will they say when I find out I’m friends with a pogue?’

‘You care about that?’

‘No,’ she admits, ‘but I thought you might.’

‘Nah, dude. My friends already know about us.’

‘There’s no us.’

‘There could be.’

He gives her an award winning smile, one that must’ve given him the aura of someone good for a night's worth of fun. (She hates that it’s drawing her in the way he is, making her want to say yes when she told herself she’d be more responsible her last year before leaving for college.)

Kiara just sighs, going back to what she was doing before she took a bathroom break – doodling on a paper they used for testing the new printer (the one only Kiara seems to understand, which makes her useful, and the situation annoying).

John J. Maybank walks over to her, fingers on the desk. It irks her when he does it, so he does it as often as possible.

She looks up at him and for once, there is not a hint of anything wicked.

‘Come on, Kiara. Next summer, you’ll be getting ready for college, and you’ll be too busy to enjoy yourself. Then you’re gonna leave for college and you won’t look back, and that’ll be the best years of your life wasted. Besides,’—he taps against her hand and she slaps his—‘I won’t be there anymore.’

He tries touching her hand again, and she slaps it all the same. ‘Why does that matter?’

‘‘Cause I’m the best thing Kildare has to offer.’

as if.

Kiara is about to snap back with something—he hasn’t figured out what—when Rafe Cameron walks past the two of them, giving her a court nod. She pushes John J. Maybank’s hand off the wood, pretending her hands don’t burn where skin touches skin. ‘That’s your cue.’

He nods, and she notices the smile fell off his face while she watched her best friend’s brother walk out. His blue eyes are glazed, and his lips are trembling so Kiara pokes his hand with the top end of her pen.

‘You’ll be fine, Johnny Jay.’

‘Yeah.’ He nods to her, or himself, and taps once against the desk. ‘See you later, I guess.’

Kiara gives him what she hopes to be a reassuring smile.

John J. Maybank leaves, and she listens to the familiar thuds of his boots until she hears Viola's door open, and he walks in. What they’re doing isn’t her business, regardless of how badly she wants to know. Rafe Cameron’s here because he’s dealing with some bullshit his dad’s putting him through, and the only reason she knows any of that is because Sarah told her. Kiara is practically family to the two, even if she isn’t the biggest fan of the boy.

Johnny Jay, on the other hand, is someone she struggles to even consider a friend, since they’ve never met outside the confines of these four walls. They read each other well, bounce off of one another like a pair of old friends, and they’ve got a lot more in common than she would’ve ever thought.

They’re not friends in the traditional way, but they’re friends enough.

The telephone on the desk buzzes with the word VIOLA in place of caller ID. Kiara answers.

‘Kiara, sweetheart, can you please print for me the documents I sent you?’

‘Of course.’

‘Thank you, darling.’

Printing is actually much simpler than any of them realise. Kiara doesn’t even open the documents before sending them to the printer, clicking a few buttons that are just settings for how the page will come out (and most of them she doesn’t even need to touch). The printer is in the building’s library on the first floor, and the room smells of old books and freshly printed papers.

There’s a difference between snooping into a note he left for Viola and looking over the documents that she is currently taking out of the printer – she can’t not see what is written on them when she has to check that the printer hasn’t gone out of ink.

It’s only a glance at each of the pages, but it’s enough for her to see EMANCIPATION FORM and RESTRAINING ORDER FORM written at the headers of each of the two sets to clock onto what’s happening.

The only thought in her head is: shit.

She wasn’t meant to see that.

Kiara’s hands produce a shaky knock against the wooden door, and it’s Viola’s raspy smoker-voice that invites her in. She’s still feeling a little bit sick in the stomach when she enters, papers in hand.

‘Thank you, Kiara,’ says Viola, a thoughtful expression on her face.

‘No problem.’

Her voice is feeble, filling out every inch of space not occupied by something, or someone. She’s halfway out the door before Viola even gets to dismiss her, and she glances at Maybank on the way �� he’s pale, face sickened with something she doesn’t recognise, but his eyes are weary in a way no sixteen-year-old’s should be.

He doesn’t seem angry – it’s Kiara’s last thought before the door shuts, and she can’t see him anymore.

Time passes as she waits for the meeting to be over. The fair-haired boy is all she can think about; she shouldn’t ask questions but there are many in her head, and her doodles can’t distract her anymore. When customers call, she doesn’t chat to them, and no people walk in to divert her attention.

He walks out about quarter of an hour later, a bittersweet edge to the eyebrows looming over his eyes, a stack of paper in tow.

‘Hey, friend.’

A finger taps against the desk, next to a doodle that looks an awful lot like him. She moves her arm and rests her elbow on it.

‘Hey,’ she says back. ‘Did it go well?’

‘Well.’ A sour smile. ‘I’m not sure getting a restraining order against the same old man you’re trying to get emancipated from could ever go well.’

‘I’m sorry,’ offers Kiara, and it's genuine.

To John J. Maybank’s credit, he gives her a court nod and a smile that seems a little less like it’s saying i am doing something that could go terribly right or terribly wrong.

‘Come to the Boneyard on Saturday. Bring Sarah and everybody. It’ll be fun.’

‘I’ll think about it.’

He must know her well enough to be able to tell this is as close to a yes as anyone will ever get from her, because the smile his cheeks stretch into is the one with dimples, and a fancy for trouble.

She knows him well enough to be able to tell that what she found out stays between them.

(Kiara wonders when strangers turned into friends turned into people who understand each other without having to say anything.)

‘Oh and, uh,’ he calls back from the main door, ‘happy birthday!’

He doesn’t stick around long enough to hear her thanks, but he sticks around many other times.

+ 1: JJ

Flowers.

‘Those better not be for me,’ muses Kiara from her desk. ‘I don’t like orchids.’

JJ walks in with a bouquet of flowers and his postman uniform, all accompanied by a wide, cheerful grin on his face. He’s got a spring to his step and he swings himself around the desk, planting a kiss to Kiara’s cheek.

Her hands loop around his waist. With the flowers now on her papers, Kiara feels as if she walked into the Camerons’ backyard.

‘It’s not for you,’ says JJ, wrapping a curl around his finger. ‘For Mrs Glisson.’

‘What’s the occasion?’

Kiara’s—well, whatever they are to one another—hesitates for a second, but she thinks it’s more for dramatic effect than actual hesitation.

His finger taps her cheek, warm and rough at the tip. ‘I’m moving into the Chateau today. Officially.’

‘Have the forms gone through?’

He nods, and Kiara flings her around his neck, pulling him into a full kiss. It shifts into a hug, and she feels him relax into her. ‘I can breathe now.’

‘I can only imagine.’ She pulls back, smiling as wide as he is. ‘How are you feeling?’

‘Shocked. Terrified. Excited. Ambi-feelous.’

‘That’s not a word.’

‘God, you’re starting to sound like Pope. I never should’ve introduced you.’

‘It was inevitable,’ Kiara says.

They both know it, so JJ just runs a finger alongside her jaw, and his lips briefly touch hers. He’s gone after that and so are the flowers (Kiara is genuinely glad they weren’t for her). Viola isn’t in a meeting right now so it’s fair game, and about two minutes in, she’s pretty sure she can hear the woman crying/yelling (when it comes to Viola, those sounds are way too similar). It’s a big deal for everybody – the whole firm took him under their wing once they found out about the horrors of living under the Maybank roof, enough that they decided to do the case pro bono.

(JJ doesn’t like pity, so he made sure to help out in any way they can, from running errands while doing her postman job or being their personal mechanic during his free time.)

When he comes back, he’s all smiles, lips stretched out wider than Kiara thought it possible.

‘I’m picking up post today,’ he says, walking over to the box with mail thrown into it. ‘Busy day.’

‘How busy?’

‘Busy.’

‘Could you spare ten minutes?’ asks Kiara, stepping away from her desk. He can see her in her full glory now – she’s pretty sure he has a thing for secretaries and their lookalikes, and she’s been putting in extra effort the past few days. ‘I think a pipe went off in my bathroom, or something. Since you said you’d help out with maintenance…’

JJ checks the clock above the bathroom, then shrugs, facing away from the camera to give her a coy grin. ‘I guess ten minutes won’t hurt.’

‘Thank you.’ She starts walking over to the bathroom, JJ at her heel. ‘I’ve been dying to get this fixed for days.’

‘Mhm. I can imagine. It must’ve been awful.’

‘Truly terrible.’

The moment they’re behind the closed door of Kiara’s bathroom, she’s pressed against the cold wall, JJ’s body hot in front of her. His lips are all over her neck and her hands making a mess out of his hair, while his are busy tugging her shirt out of her trousers and sliding underneath the fabric, pulling lines on the bare skin.

Instinctively, Kiara’s hips buckle against his as she arches her back and tilts her neck, exposing more skin for him to brush his lips over. She feels the bugle, and lets out a hearty laugh.

JJ stops kissing her, just enough to give her a glare with a frown. ‘I can see how terrible it’s been if you have time to laugh at me.’

‘Shut up,’ Kiara says, tugging at his collar to pull him closer. ‘We’ve got to be quiet.’

His hands travel downwards until they’re in her trousers, cupping her ass, and Kiara buckles against him again. She pulls him closer until they’re chest to chest, and she kisses the spot right below his ear, feeling him moan against her, his hands gripping her tighter. The thrill of being caught is making both their hearts race, and Kiara can think of very few things hotter than this moment.

‘Quiet is the last thing you’re going to be, Kie,’ he threatens.

She’s up on the sink within a heartbeat, and he tugs her trousers down with more ease than she’d think possible.

There’s a mirror on both sides of the wall, in front of her and behind her; she sees the grin on her lips, with self-assurance and a hint of wickedness to it, watching JJ press kisses up her tight that leave marks no one but her will be able to see.

Her hands are tugging on his hair, pulling him closer to her. ‘Ten minutes,’ she reminds him. ‘Make ‘em count.’

All JJ does is bury his head between her legs, and she starts to think that this bathroom had never been meant for anything other than this.

★

tagging. @jjmaybanky @chasefreakinstokes @drewstarkey @thatsme-johnbookerroutledge @outrbank @juneyxx @drewstarkeyobx @ilovejjmaybank @teamnick @jjmaybanksbaby @mahleeyuh @nicolewithasoul @kiarawilliams127 @starlightstarkey @anonymous0writer @outerbongs @warnettc @jjandreidsgirl @jjmaybanqs @sofiesshitshow @kaitieskidmore1 @maybanksbaby @abbiesthings @tempestuousjj @coconutroseowl @queenofthepouges

#jiara #jiara fic #jiara fanfic #outer banks #obx #outer banks fanfiction #obx fic #jj maybank #kiara carrera #jj maybank x kiara carrera #jj x kiara #jiara au #my fic #f: obx #s: jiara

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tsarisfanfiction · 4 years

Text

Toffee

Fandom: Thunderbirds Rating: Gen Genre: Family Characters: Gordon, Grandma, John

Back again with another fic for @gumnut-logic‘s #irrelief! Another one for you, Nutty: “Toffee on the couch”. There are plans for this to go multichap, but until I’ve got that all firmed up, here’s the first chapter as a stand-alone/teaser (it won’t be crossposted elsewhere until I’ve finished writing the whole thing, so don’t expect it on AO3 or FFN any time soon).

Gordon is a lover of many things. Toffee is not one of them.

Gordon was tired. Very, very tired. By all rights, he should have stumbled to his bedroom to flop on his wonderful, soft, comfy bed, but that required tackling stairs and he was too tired for that nonsense. His launch chute got him up as far as the den, so that was as far as he was going. A graceless collapse had him landing face first on a sofa.

His body connected with cushions, as expected. His face found contact with something less soft and desirable – and sticky.

Weariness was immediately abandoned as he lurched upright, clawing at his face in an attempt to clean it of whatever someone had left on the sofa. Squinting, his fingernails came away with something brown under them, and his first instinct was to recoil in horror before the sweet scent registered.

Cautiously, he sniffed his fingers, and scowled.

Which one of his evil brothers had left half-melted toffee on the sofa for him to faceplant? It would have been a stroke of genius as a prank, if not for two important factors: first off, it was not Gordon’s prank, and secondly, they hadn’t left anything between the sticky nonsense and the cushions themselves. Even he was careful not to make a mess that would get Grandma up in arms.

He didn’t know which of his brothers was responsible, but Gordon smelt an accident, not a prank, if only for that fact. If even he didn’t dare push Grandma’s buttons when it came to food on the furniture, then none of his brothers would. Now, the question was, did he ignore it and let it be someone else’s problem, or did he get up and do something about it?

The knowledge that if it was left to someone else, the blame might come crashing down on the resident prankster’s – his – head spurred him into reluctant action. If nothing else, he could just report it to Grandma, he reasoned, yawning loudly. Yes, he’d do that. The clean-up could be done by the brother responsible.

He stumbled down the flight of stairs to the kitchen, where Grandma was almost certainly to be found, to his stomach’s ongoing distress. Sure enough, arguing with the automated kitchen module again, his purple-clad grandmother was wielding a whisk in a manner that was too similar to the wooden spoon of his childhood.

“Hey, Grandma?” Interrupting her in the kitchen was a dangerous business, and already he was formulating several possible excuses to not eat anything he was offered as she turned to him.

“Hello, kid,” she grinned. “Long rescu- What have you got on your face, young man?” she demanded as his toffee-covered face caught her attention.

“I think it’s toffee,” he groaned, making a half-hearted attempt to cover another yawn. It had been a long rescue, and with Virgil off on another mission when the call had come in, and the trouble off the Australian coast, he’d had to launch from the island and complete it solo.

He didn’t do solo missions often. Thunderbird Four often relied on her big green sister for transportation to rescue sites, meaning that Virgil was guaranteed to be with him, and it wasn’t unusual for Thunderbird One to come a-hovering overhead, worried big brother supervising and ready with a helping cable on the off chance it might be needed. Maybe, just maybe, he was used to being able to crash out on the way home, and actually having to pilot all the way back to base was unusual enough to be an additional strain on a tired aquanaut.

“And why is there toffee on your face?” Grandma asked him, finding a cloth from somewhere and wiping at his face like he was a child. He was too tired to stop her.

“Face-planted the sofa and found someone left toffee on the cushion,” he yawned.

“Someone?” she asked, pausing her dabbing to narrow her eyes at him.

“Wasn’t me, Grandma,” he mumbled in protest. “Don’t like toffee. Wouldn’t get the sofa sticky, either.”

She scrutinised him intently for several moments before resuming her cleaning of his face. He leaned against the counter and let her.

“So who is cleaning my sofa cushions?” she asked him, and he shrugged.

“I don’t know,” he admitted. “Not me.”

“I can see that,” she chuckled. “You’re asleep on your feet, kid. Up to bed with you. I’ll find the culprit.”

“Wanna watch,” he protested, and she shook her head.

“I’m sure I can get Brains to record the hunt,” she told him. “Bed, now. Unless you want supper first?”

Supper?

Gordon’s body found another surge of energy, straightening up and stumbling for the stairs.

“That’s okay, Grandma,” he waved sleepily. “I’ll eat something later.”

It wasn’t his record for a kitchen to bedroom flight, but it was still pretty impressive. Face-planting his bed – where he should have gone in the first place, although at least now Grandma believed he hadn’t done it, against whatever claims his guilty brother might make – he made no effort to undress.

“John?” he called out sleepily, and a hologram flickered into life by his bed.

“I’ll record it,” his brother said without prompting. “Get some shuteye while you can.”

“You know whose toffee it is?” he mumbled, and John let out a short sound of amusement.

“What do you think?”

Gordon groaned, because that was either John speak for ‘no, but I’m not admitting I don’t know something’ or, more likely considering the amusement, ‘yes, but I’m bored and I’m an evil, evil brother who wants to watch and laugh’ - or however John expressed his amusement, because flat-out laughter was not his style (although Gordon suspected he just laughed when there was no-one to hear him, thereby preserving his image).

“Sleep, Gordon,” John insisted.

“Sleeping,” he groaned into the pillow.

He wasn’t sure what woke him, but the sun was glaring in through his window which meant it was way past time he should have been doing his morning laps, and he groaned, pushing himself up from his bed and cautiously stretching out his back. A little stiff, but nothing worse than usual.

Nothing a good swim couldn’t fix.

Urgh, he was still in yesterday’s clothes. Forget showering after the mission, he hadn’t even shed his shirt, and the pool hadn’t done anything to deserve something this gross (it suffered enough from Thunderbird One’s exhaust, thank you, Scott).

Okay, shower first, then swim, then another shower. That sounded like a perfect, if belated, start to the day, provided a certain space resident didn’t pipe up and send him out on a rescue.

Speaking of John, he’d been talking to him last night, he was sure of it. What was it..? He stumbled into his en suite, glared at the mirror that greeted his thoroughly dishevelled appearance, and poked at a lump of something brown that had caught in his hair.

Toffee.

The toffee!

“John?” he called, shucking well-worn and stinky clothes and lobbing them out into a dirty clothes pile by the door, ready to be well and truly shoved into the washing machine at the nearest opportunity. Clean freak he was not, but Thunderbird Four was the only place he suffered foul-smelling laundry and body odour for any length of time. The hazards of research trips.

“Did you have to wait until you got rid of your clothes before calling me?” his older brother sighed, ginger head flickering into view. Was it slightly weird that his brother had access to his bathroom? Probably, but rescues didn’t wait for dirty squids (or flyboys, for that matter; Gordon had seen all of his brothers in less clothing than he’d particularly care for during mission briefings before). Besides, it was a great place for private conversations – none of his fellow Earthlings were going to walk into his bathroom unannounced.

“Jealous?” he asked, flexing arm muscles out of habit as he stuck his tongue out. There was at least a concession that the holocam couldn’t detect anything below chest height in bathrooms – whose benefit that was actually for, who knew. It wasn’t like it was nothing any of them had seen before (individual bathrooms was an Island luxury – they’d been sharing bathrooms and even baths at times in Kansas).

“Of what, your height?” John quipped. Gordon narrowed his eyes at him. “I have something you want, Gordon. Don’t try it.”

So that was a yes to the unasked question: Grandma had found the culprit, and there was a recording ready and waiting for Gordon’s viewing pleasure. He looked at the floating head expectantly, hand on hip as he waited for it.

“You’re going to watch it in the shower?” John asked, before shaking his head with a sigh. “How am I related to you?”

“Because we both take entertainment from our brothers ending up on Grandma’s bad side?” Gordon offered. John acknowledged the point. “So now that we’ve agreed that we are, in fact, brothers, can I have that video?”

“One last thing.” Gordon groaned. Maybe asking John to record it had been a bad idea. Maybe he should have trusted Grandma to get Brains or MAX to do it for him. Who knew what he was going to have to pay John for this privilege?

Aw, who was he kidding? No matter who recorded it, John was going to end up with monopoly on who could watch it. He was sneaky like that.

“Two, in fact.” Gordon groaned more loudly. Still, waiting was always worse, and unlike certain other brothers, John didn’t have the sadistic streak of making him beg – much, anyway. He derived his amusement in other factors. Like playing brothers off against each other… Gordon was starting to get an inkling what one of those two things might be.

“Okay, what are they?”

“First is a message from Grandma: She’s got him on laundry duty for the next week, including all of the sofa covers, and says to be creative with your revenge.”

“Revenge? Moi?” Gordon certainly hadn’t been planning to exact a little revenge for an accident that got toffee on his face. Certainly not.

“Secondly,” John continued as though he hadn’t said anything – he was good at that, was John – “You did not get this footage from me, nor does any other assistance that might appear during your endeavours over the next week have anything to do with me.”

Ooh, Johnny-boy wanted to get involved. Gordon’s face split into a grin. This was going to be fun. He hadn’t had a team-up with the second eldest, so-called ‘responsible’ one, in a while.

“What did our culprit do to you?” he asked. The grin he got back was maybe a little chilling, as he was reminded that the current resident prankster was not the original resident prankster.

“Who said they did anything?”

That proved it. John was bored. Gordon almost felt sorry for the brother who left toffee lying around. Almost. His face was still phantom-sticky.

“Play the video, big bro,” he grinned, stepping into the shower.

Grandma on the hunt. He hadn’t seen that in a while (without being the prey, anyway).

It was almost disappointing, how easily she collared the perpetrator. She’d put on a show – one Gordon appreciated – of interrogating each and every non-Gordon Island resident (and even John, although both parties had been too busy trying not to show their amusement for that to be anything but staged), but it was clear even from the very beginning that she Knew.

The final confrontation was pitiful. A confession, right off the bat? Clearly his brother had no understanding of how the world worked. Confessing to a crime of that magnitude did not reduce your sentence one iota, which a crestfallen face at a week of laundry duty showed some belated awareness of.

It did not escape Gordon’s attention that at no point had his unfortunate encounter with the toffee been mentioned. Brothers had mentioned his name, of course (even Brains, oh ye of little faith), but Grandma had expertly deflected them away from his scent. Oh to watch a master – or mistress, as it may be – at work.

Gordon hadn’t done a prank with Grandma as an ally since he was a very small child, imagination limited to switching the salt and sugar. With John and Grandma secretly supporting him, the possibilities were endless.

But really, there was only one way to start this.

“John,” he sing-songed, stepping out of the bathroom after towelling himself dry and pulling on some underwear – if he wanted to pull this off, he was going to need to keep John on his side, which meant keeping him sweet and not playing the usual obnoxious younger brother beyond keeping up the charade.

“Yes, Gordon?” John’s hologram appeared by his bed, this time almost full length and in an almost sitting position.

“How might a squid locate Scott’s toffee stash without the assistance of an eye in the sky?”

He hadn’t even known Scott had a toffee stash until the confession. Crafty biggest brother. Crafty.

Not crafty enough.

Chapter 2>>>

------

As this fic is still in its infancy, any ideas on toffee-related pranks are welcome :D I can’t guarantee using them, depending on if they fit with where this fic is currently trying to head, but I am hopeless at thinking up pranks of any sort myself!

#irrelief #irrelief2020 #thunderbirds are go #thunderbirds are go fanfiction #tsari writes fanfiction #gordon tracy #grandma tracy #sally tracy #john tracy #title and summary are also still a wip #when a fic decides to run away from you #you were supposed to be a oneshot dammit #no promises when i'll update this one it's not finished #i got a headache trying to decide if they'd call it a sofa or a couch #alan says sofa cushions in earthbreaker i'm going with sofa #americanisms are a pain when you're british #toffee

38 notes · View notes

tdystmr · 4 years

Text

college student! jackson x sugar daddy! mark // sugar daddy x baby socmed au

b a c k g r o u n d i n f o 🍓

jackson is THE popular kid despite him having his own set of financial problems. he lives with a foster family because his parents died in a car accident when he was 11, but still grew up to be a well-mannered, cheerful boy

mature 21 year old who knows his strenghts and weaknesses. very motivated and hard working, but tends to fall for the bad type rather than good influences. is also too nice and sweet to point out other’s mistakes and flaws so he usually goes along with whatever his friends do. has always wanted to move out because as much as he loves his foster family, he knows that they struggle with their own swt of problems as well and feels like a burden now that college fees are piling up

mark is a millionaire, successful bachelor at the fine age of 29. recognised for his success in starting and building his own business at 22, took him only 7 years to reach his current success of a multi-million enterprise in Seoul trading and exporting goods.

is a very mysterious figure to the press because he is extremely private about his life outside of work. lives alone, has no known dating history, only known family is his family in USA ands seems to be completely disinterested in relationships under than a tight-knit group of friends. the press would love to get some dirt on this successful businessman.

jjp are mark’s close friends and a power couple of Korea ( lgbtq+ rs are supported in korea in this au ) and have always wanted him to look for a partner. yugyeom, mark’s other close friend, also wants him to not be so lonely anymore since he’s pushing 30 already.

meanwhile, youngjae + bambam are jackson’s best friends. youngjae’s fam is jackson’s foster fam while the three of them all attend Seoul University tgt. they’re close friends because they all share an interest in music and just enjoy each other’s company. they’re the same age in this au, so they met at the usual freshmen orientation drinking session and bambam almost puked on jackson’s crotch. ever since then, they’ve been inseparable.

youngbam are also well known in the school - youngjae for performing on stage every year at the annual talent show while bambam is known for his cool style and being the vice president of the dance club.

p l o t 🍓

jackbamjae are joking arnd in their gc abt life after college when jackson finally tells them his plan to move out of his foster home after they finish their second year of college. yj ofc objects because he doesn’t see js as a burden, but respects jackson’s decision because js insists.

bambam suggests a sugar daddy website to get money. ofc, both of the other two question him on how he got to know such a site existed. he tells them that ten ( pres of the dance club ) got to know his bf through this site. bam tells them that it isn’t super shady or wtv and the men aren’t so bad at all

js says wtv and gives it a go, so he signs up with the help of bamjae. he has a basketball friendly match, so he rushes off after that

at the same time, mark’s bday is approaching. jjgyeom are planning a surprise for him and hopefully, it’ll include some sort of a date that mark will agree to go on. yugyeom had also come across the sugar daddy website by simply lurking on the nsfw side of the internet and jjp have learnt not to question him too much on what he does in his free time.

he found js’s profile and knowing mark’s type, immediately suggested the idea to jjp. jb, who’s been mark’s longest friend, says that mark might not completely be opposed to it because he knows that mark has been stressed lately and a way to let out that frustration would be good. jy, on the other hand, cautions that mark might not like the idea because mark is the kind of guy to value genuine relationships over meaningless hookups, not to mention paying someone for sex and whatnot. despite that, the three arrive at mark’s place on the night of his bday to surprise him

yg suggests the idea to mark after they’ve all had some dinner and mark obv gets mad at first. he says exactly what jy had said, but calms down after jjgyeom explain that they’ve all been worried about how he’s coping and don’t want him to be alone and stressed anymore. mark sees that his friends have good intentions and decides to give it a go, starting the convo with jackson over the website that night after all his friends have left

after about a week of weird dms and some actually good interactions over the site, jackson is about to give up because he hasn’t found anyone truly interested in talking and not just sex. then, he gets mark’s dm

the two hit it off immediately and they end up texting till 3am. they exchanged socmed accounts before they went to bed as well, and js decides to tell bamjae in the morning abt it.

they obv know who the hell mark tuan is and are freaking out over this. jackson rmbs that mark had told him not to spread this and realises that’s the reason why. he warns bamjae not to tell anyone, even their other close friends. bamjae suggest for him to keep texting and to even meet mark on the weekend.

they meet and it goes well and stuff, them slowly establishing their own sort of relationship. they’re more platonic than sexual most of the time, but they do look for each other when they’re horny and in need of release

one day, the press captures mark waiting for js after school at seoul uni + js getting into his car. they post an article with a caption insinuating that mark has a secret relationship, which he fires down with an instagram post about invading his privacy and posting false rumours. he does this because he’s scared that js might be affected.

js is affected, because he realises that he doesn’t mind being in a genuine relationship with mark at all. he tells bamjae ofc, and they help him to realise that he might have developed feelings for the older man. he freaks out because that isn’t part of the deal of being a sugar baby but he doesn’t want to cut mark off either

it’ll end happily, definitely, but the angst will come right after this and i hope it’ll be good :<

e x t r a c t f r o m f i r s t c o n v o 🍓

Yien_duan_

Hey, is this Wangpuppy825?

Wangpuppy825

that’s me! you can call me jackson ☺️

Yien_duan_

Oh, okay sure. I’m Mark. How old are you again?

Wangpuppy825

i’m 21 this year 🤩 wbu?

Yien_duan_

I’ve just turned 30

What’s your major in college?

Wangpuppy825

just? when’s your birthday? 🧐

i major in Sports science studies at SNU

Yien_duan_

4 september

Woah, you sound like a pretty smart kid

Wangpuppy825

oh, belated birthday mark hyung 🥳🥳

i can call you that, right 🥺

also, i’m not that smart hahah i just study hard 😌

Yien_duan_

Yeah, hyung is fine

Thank you, by the way :)

Wangpuppy825

no prob, hyung ☺️

quick qn though, do you look really old?

Yien_duan_

Ummm.....no?

Wangpuppy825

do you mind sending a pic 😖

i’m sorry if this sounds weird it’s just i’ve gotten lots of dms from 50 year olds posing as 20-30 year olds and it’s creepy 😳

Yien_duan_

Okay but you can’t tell anyone about this, okay?

Wangpuppy825

why? is it embarrassing for you 😮

Yien_duan_

[image attached]

It’s not really about being embarrassed, I guess

Wangpuppy825

omg

Yien_duan_

Why?

Wangpuppy825

you look so hot wtf 🥵

and you look so young????? you look my age 😳😳

god is unfair for making you so pretty 😤

Yien_duan_

You mean you...

Wangpuppy825

i...???

Yien_duan_

Oh, nothing hahah

I’m just surprised you think I look good because well...

You’re really cute, Jackson :<

Wangpuppy825

wow okay you have no idea how different it feels to hear that from a hot person rather than just my friends hyping me up 😳😳😳

Yien_Tuan

Your friends? Did they persuade you to do this?

Y’know, my friends actually set me up with you as sort of a birthday present

Wangpuppy825

oh? then i guess i should thank them 😳

and yes, my friends did persuade me to do this hhahaha

Yien_Duan_

Thank my friends? What for?

Your friends did a good job with the basketball pictures. I think those were what made my friend Yugyeom choose you

Wangpuppy825

thank them for setting me up with such a hottie 🥵

oh! you play?

Yien_Duan_

Ahh, you’re making me embarrassed... 😳

Yeah, I played when I was in college in USA

Wangpuppy825

omg you used an emoji for the first time 🥰

usa? you’re a foreigner too?

Yien_Duan_

Hahah, I don’t really use emojis because I’m used to texting formally at work 😅

Wow, it feels like we’ve got a lot in common huh

Wangpuppy825

use them more 🥺

it does! you’re probably the most interesting person i’ve met on this site the whole week 😌😌

Yien_Duan_

Then I’m honoured I got your attention first :)

Tell me more about yourself? Unless you’ve got to go to bed already

Wangpuppy825

oh, no no hahah

i usually sleep way past midnight so this is fine 🤩

anyway, who would be crazy enough to turn down a conversation with someone like you 😖😖

Yien_Duan_

Flirtatious, are we?

Wangpuppy825

only because you’re adorable 🥰

t a g s 🍓

sugar daddy x sugar baby au

social media au

possessive mark

switch jackson

dominant mark

sexting / nudes

fluff / angst / smut

college student! jackson

friends with benefits-ish to lovers

#got7 markson #jackson wang #mark tuan #got7 aus #sugar daddy au #sugar daddy mark tuan #sugar baby jackson wang #got7 social media au

10 notes · View notes

lycorogue · 4 years

Text

Latest Story: The Truest of Friends

Happy Belated Plagg Appreciation Day!

I’m not sure why it was such a strain for me to get this written this go, but I managed! This story is largely inspired by two things: 1. This picture prompt that @chibisunnie sent me. 2. The song “Thank You for Being a Friend” by Andrew Gold on repeat for about 3hrs straight. @_@

You can stay here to read my latest story, or you can find it on these other sites: on AO3, on FFN, or on DA.

The Truest of Friends

Summary: It's the second day of the new school year, which also means it's been a year since Stoneheart first attacked Paris. Adrien wonders how he could best celebrate the anniversary of becoming Chat Noir, and how to properly showcase how much he cares for someone very special in his life.

Rating: General Audience

Word Count: 3307

Status: Completed one-shot

“Kitty? Chat Noir, you with me?”

“Hmm?” Chat Noir blinked a couple of times to catch his bearings before looking over at Ladybug.

She was still lounged across the rooftop, basking in the setting sun. However, while the rest of her body seemed relaxed, her face was tight in concern: her eyebrows stitched together and her mouth a thin line. Tilting her head to the side slightly, she reached out for him. “You okay? You kind of drifted off there.”

“Oh, yeah, no. Sorry. I was- I'm just a bit distracted. What did you want?”

Her expression softened. Sitting up, she shifted so she could playfully bump Chat Noir in the shoulder with her own. “We can head out if you have something you need to do. I was just commenting on how much I'm going to miss these summer sunsets.”

“Yeah.” Chat Noir's voice was soft; distant. “Me too.”

“You sure you're okay? You don't quite seem yourself tonight.”

He gave her a sweet little smile and gently shoulder bumped her back. “Nah. Don't worry about it. I was just thinking that with the end of summer it's also the end of something else.”

“It is? What?”

“Our first year as superheroes.” He playfully winked at her, but quickly shifted his gaze to the cityscape stretched out before them. “At least, our first year as partners, right? Tomorrow is the anniversary of Hawk Moth akumatizing his first victim; which is also the first time we met.”

“Yeah, I guess it is. I've gotten so caught up in everything, I- how did I forget that?”

“It's fine. It's probably not something most people want to immortalize, especially the poor kid who got akumatized.”

“I dunno. It's also when he started dating that girl, remember?” Ladybug winked at Chat Noir, making his smile deepen. “I mean, technically that's the day after tomorrow,” Ladybug clarified, her face tightening again as she mini-rambled, “but they got together because of the whole Stoneheart thing and Ivan finally letting Mylène know how he truly felt about her-”

“Thanks to you, if I recall correctly.” Ladybug relaxed, and the two shared a light chuckle. Then Chat Noir glanced down at his ring. “You already know I was new when we met. I don't know if I should also tell you this, but that was actually my first day as a superhero.”

“Mine too.” Ladybug placed a hand on Chat Noir's shoulder, and gave it a gentle squeeze.

Chat Noir stole a quick glance over at Ladybug before again studying his ring. “Is it wrong that part of me is slightly thankful for Hawk Moth? I mean, I know he's terrorizing the city and exploiting people's lowest moments, and he absolutely needs to be stopped. I'm not excusing anything he's doing, but-” He shifted slightly away from Ladybug so he could get a better angle of looking her in the eye. “If it weren't for him attacking Paris, I never would have received the Cat Ring. I wouldn't have the freedom to be Chat Noir. I wouldn't be able to help people the way I can as a superhero. I don't know if I'd ever meet you, M'lady. And-” He played with his ring, looking back down at it. “-and I wouldn't have ever met my kwami.”

Ladybug briefly bit her lip, her own eyes downcast before scooping Chat Noir's left hand in both of hers. “It's okay. I understand. I feel the same way.”

“You do?”

She nodded. “I'm- I'm nothing like, well, like this when I'm out of costume. Being Ladybug is a lot to burden, if I'm honest, but it also gives me confidence I didn't know I had. I also can't really imagine life without my kwami now that I know how amazing her companionship is.” Ladybug then cupped Chat Noir's left jaw. “Hawk Moth also allowed me to meet one of my best friends.”

"One of?” Chat Noir teased. Ladybug lightly elbowed him in the ribs, and they shared another chuckle. “I know what you mean about your kwami, though. I don't know if I could bare ever being without him again. He's more than my kwami or even a friend to me. He's- well, he's-”

“Family,” Ladybug finished.

“Yeah.”

“Yeah, mine too.” She sidled beside him, and rested her head on his shoulder. Her left hand reached up to her earrings, brushing them lovingly.

Chat Noir leaned his head against hers, and played with his ring a little more. “It feels like I've known him for more than just a year. Is that crazy?”

“No.”

“No offense, M'lady, you're amazing, but Plagg- he's the only one who truly knows me. All of me, ya know?”

“Yup. Same with Tikki.”

“I love him. I don't know what I'd do without him. Even if I was never Chat Noir again, I'd still need him. Do you think he knows that?”

“Considering how much you tell me how much you love me?” she teased, “I find it hard to believe anyone you know doesn't know exactly how you feel.”

Chat Noir stiffened with a sharp inhale.

“Kitty?”

“Sorry. I have to go. I have something I need to do after all.” Before Ladybug could protest, Chat Noir scooped up her hand and placed a quick peck on the back of it. “Thank you for listening, L.B.” He rolled away from her, and onto his feet. “Can we meet up again tomorrow? For our... anniversary?” He gave her an exaggerated and suave wink.

She giggled even while giving him a dismissive shake of the head. “Sure, but it's a purely professional anniversary. I'm still in love with someone else, in case you forgot.”

“How could I?” he teased, a smile still on his lips. “Same place, same time?”

“I'll be here.”

Chat Noir presented her with an elaborate bow before leaping off into the city. He raced across the rooftops, hooting gleefully into the night air.

Landing in his bedroom a few minutes later, Chat Noir released his transformation; once more becoming Adrien.

“Boy, weren't you getting sappy up there on that rooftop.” Plagg hovered where the Miraculous spat him back out. His demeanor was as dismissively aloof as always, but his eyes were softer than usual.

“Yeah, sorry about that, Plagg.” Adrien tossed his kwami a slice of Camembert before jogging over to his desk.

“What are you doing?” Plagg gobbled down the cheese before floating over to Adrien and glancing over the teen's shoulder.

“Making plans for tomorrow,” Adrien replied excitedly. He started grabbing papers and a pencil, then hurriedly typed away on his phone.

“Blech.” Plagg made a face, zipped into the cheese cabinet beside the desk, and floated back out with the rest of the Camembert wheel held over his head. With a kick of his little flipper-foot, Plagg closed the cabinet door behind him. “You're going to get all sappy again. Aren't you?”

“Yup.” Adrien didn't hesitate a second as he replied and began scribbling notes onto a sheet of paper.

“No thank you. I'm going to take a catnap.” Plagg brought the cheese over to Adrien's bed, and started nibbling on it as he snuggled onto one of the pillows.

Adrien didn't mind. He welcomed the space as he discreetly scrolled through a cheese selection on his phone, and writing some ideas down on a piece of paper.

That night he hid the list inside his treasured unsigned valentine. In the morning, while Plagg continued to lay about, Adrien rushed the list to his bodyguard.

“I was wondering if you could get this for me for lunch? And let Nathalie know to not bother prepping anything for me. I want to do that myself, if I could.”

The Gorilla looked over the simple list, and grunted acknowledgment of the request. The easy part done, Adrien hurried back to his room to finish getting ready for school.

The morning crawled by. It was only the second day of classes, so the lessons were mostly renewal to help the students recall what they were taught the previous year. It granted Adrien plenty of time to plot out the next bits of his plan, and scribble down the words he wanted to make sure he said, hoping he didn't get too emotional.

Finally, the bell rang for lunch, and he had to keep himself from sprinting to his father's town car. The Gorilla handed Adrien a large grocery bag, then started for home.

“What's that?” Plagg loudly whispered; inching closer to inspect the bag, threatening to just phase through it.

“It's for my anniversary surprise.” Adrien replied with a sweetness and excitement that made Plagg mime a foul taste in his mouth before scurrying back to Adrien's shirt.

“Nevermind,” Plagg murmured, “I don't need to know what crazy scheme you're coming up with this time. Just let me know when it's about to blow up in your face, Romeo.”

Plagg's poor attitude wasn't about to soak into Adrien. He welcomed the peace. Once home, Adrien bee-lined to his bedroom. He tossed his bag onto his desk chair, scooped up a wheel of Camembert he kept in his room, and scurried back to the kitchen; Plagg begrudgingly in tow.

Leaving the Camembert open on the far counter, his phone next to Plagg to keep the kwami entertained, Adrien untucked another note he scribbled down the night before. Checking that Plagg wasn't watching him, Adrien unpacked his bodyguard's shopping.

A container of sprinkles. A bottle of honey. A bag of dried cranberries. A pomegranate. Adrien then riffled through the pantry for a bag of sugar, a bag of flour, and ground Cayenne pepper. He lined his work station with all of the sweets, then checked in with Plagg to make sure his kwami was properly distracted.

Carefully, he finished unpacking the rest of the shopping: another wheel of Camembert, a block of cream cheese, and a small packet of rice flour. Another glance at Plagg to make sure he didn't smell the Camembert and try to steal it, and then Adrien grabbed milk, an egg, and a stick of butter from the refrigerator.

Like a parent leaving his young toddler mildly unattended for the first time, Adrien glanced over at Plagg every couple of minutes, making sure he hadn't moved. Once or twice the magical being did look over to see what Adrien was doing, but upon seeing the wall of sweet ingredients, he turned back to the phone and left Adrien alone.

The most trying bits were plucking the pomegranate arils out, and thickening his treat over a fire without drawing more of Plagg's attention. By the time he was done with his surprise, Adrien only had the time to quickly grab an apple and a handful of almonds for lunch before heading back to school; his treat hidden inside the refrigerator.

Another agonizingly slow second half of the school day ticked by, but it again gave Adrien time to prep his speech for later. Ladybug had told him that she couldn't imagine anyone not knowing exactly how he felt, and he was determined to make sure that was true. He needed to rush when he got home, though, to make sure everything was perfect before he had to head out to meet up with Ladybug. It was a small window, but luckily it was one of the few days he didn't have an after school activity, and the homework was still fairly light.

The final bell was a sweet sound, and he nearly bolted out of the classroom. Adrien only managed to contain himself long enough to say goodbye to Nino and wave to the girls; keeping himself as perceptively calm as possible to not rouse suspicion.

“Finally!” Adrien sighed as he got back to his bedroom. He jogged up his spiral steps to the mezzanine where he kept his DVDs, books, and video games. Scooping up the one he knew to be Plagg's favorite, he rushed back to his TV and popped the game in. “Here ya go, buddy.” He placed the controller on the sofa and gestured for Plagg to take his spot beside it. “I just need to finish up that surprise. Mind entertaining yourself a bit more?”

“Pfft. Fine! I get it. I guess I don't need any love today,” Plagg grumbled, but he still accepted the offered controller and started up his game.

Adrien slowly backed away, making sure to finish whatever prep-work he could manage in his room so that Plagg saw that he was nearby. Once he was confident his kwami was too distracted to notice him sneaking out, Adrien raced to the kitchen. Pulling his surprise out of the refrigerator, he placed it on a dish, and pulled out the final item he had asked his bodyguard to get: a box of club crackers.

~ o ~ o ~ o ~ o ~ o ~

“Plagg?” Adrien creaked his door open, slid inside, and carefully closed it behind him. A little metal food dome rested on top of a plate in his left hand. Adrien's eyes darted between the domed plate and the video game still playing on the TV. Raising his voice slightly, Adrien called out for his kwami again.

“Ha! Take that!” Plagg finished up his battle in the game, then paused it. “Adrien? Is it time to meet up with Ladybug already? I was hoping to get some dinner in.” He pouted as he floated over to his holder.

Adrien shook his head, and struggled against the smile fighting to spread across his face. “I have something else I needed to make sure to do before meeting up with L.B. tonight.” He held the plate out for Plagg. “I hope this works for dinner. Go ahead, lift the dome.”

Plagg quirked an eyebrow, but complied. The metal dome then crashed to the floor.

Sitting on the plate was a kind of sloppily, but lovingly, made cheese ball. It was a little lumpy across the top, and it looked a bit softer than it probably should. The sides were decorated with panels of club crackers, and pomegranate arils were sprinkled across the top, along with crushed walnuts, and a honey drizzle. More crackers, some grapes Adrien had found sitting out in the fruit bowl, and a couple of slices of brie lined the plate like a moat around the cheese ball.

“I know it's a bit sweeter than what you normally like, but-”

Plagg's eyes watered up. “It's beautiful, Adrien. The most magnificent thing I've ever seen!”

Adrien blushed slightly, then placed the plate down on the coffee table in front of his sofa. He peeled one of the club crackers off the side of the cheese ball, and used it to cut into his masterpiece. The inside of the ball was stained red from the chopped up dried cranberries hidden throughout the cheese mixture. He offered the coated cracker to Plagg.

“Happy anniversary, Plagg. A year ago today I opened that jewelry box and found you and my Miraculous, and, well, I wanted to make sure I celebrated with you before I celebrated with Ladybug. Especially since I only met her because of you.”

Plagg greedily devoured the cheese covered cracker, then went for another bite.

“When did you do this?”

“Over lunch. I tried to throw you off with the sprinkles and sugar and stuff.” Adrien peeled another cracker off the cheese ball and tried some of his concoction. It didn't look pretty, but it did taste fairly good. The recipe he found online was thankfully simple enough for him to follow. He'd have to remember to leave a kind review on it later.

“You did this for me? Today?”

“Of course. I- wait, hold on a second.” Adrien dug his notes from earlier out of his pocket. Unfolding his speech, Adrien cleared his throat.

“Plagg, I should make more of a point of making sure you know this, but especially today, I wanted to prove to you how much you mean to me. You aren't just my kwami. You're not even just my friend. You're my family, and there are days where you feel like the only one I have.”

Plagg hovered over his cheese ball present, a cracker dangling from his little flipper-hands as he gaped at Adrien.

“I can truly be myself around you, Plagg. I can follow the rules. I can be a little rebellious. I can be mellow and reserved. I can be free-spirited and playfully over-the-top. I can be stupidly lovesick, and I can be confused as to what love even is. I can be on the top of the world, loving life. I can even be freely sad. I know you accept me and love me for who I am, and you do so much to try to make sure I feel that love.”

“Hey now,” Plagg sniffled, swallowing the cheese-dipped cracker whole before wiping tears away. “Don't go all cheesy on me! I- I just- I was-”

“Being a great friend,” Adrien replied. “You try all the time to cheer me up and make sure I know I have someone in my corner. You may tease me, but it's all good-natured, and to my benefit, actually. You even root for me and Ladybug to get together, even after complaining about how much I talk about her. You try to be your best self around me, and you encourage me to do the same. When it looks like my heart will be broken, you also help me figure out my next move, or how I might be able to move on.”

Adrien tucked his speech away, and scooped Plagg up in the palms of his hands. “You always have my back, and are there for me even when I fear that Ladybug isn't. You cheer me up when I miss my mom, or I'm sad about my father. You help me remember to have fun. I can talk to you about anything, and- and even if I could never be Chat Noir again – if I could never feel that level of freedom again – I would still want you by my side. I need you, Plagg, as my brother. As my truest friend. I would never want to give our friendship up.”

Adrien pulled Plagg close to his chest, cradling the small being near his heart. “I love you, Plagg. You mean so much to me, and I hope you know that.”

Plagg again sniffled back some tears as he wrapped Adrien in as tight of a hug as his tiny body would allow.

“You truly are the best Chat Noir I've ever had, Adrien. I love you too. Thank you, for everything.”

“Same.”

They hugged for another couple of seconds before Plagg pushed back against Adrien's chest, batting him away. “Okay, okay, okay. This is getting way too sappy! Let me go!”

Laughing, Adrien complied.

“Alright, we can't let this cheese go to waste now, can we? Let's go, otherwise I'm just eating it all myself.” Plagg scraped more cheese off with a cracker, then popped it in his mouth, shortly followed by a grape.

“Yeah. Okay.” Adrien tossed a grape into his own mouth. “Happy anniversary, buddy.”

“Yeah. You too.” Plagg did the closest thing to a blush that Adrien ever saw. Then the two quietly munched away at more of the cheese ball Adrien made, enjoying the time they had together before Chat Noir was due to meet up with Ladybug.

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

Did you enjoy this? Check out my other Plagg Appreciation Day stories.

Breaking Monotony Summary: Plagg’s days are all starting to feel exactly the same. As he goes through yet another school day with Adrien, he wonders if he can do something to start shaking up the status quo. At the same time, though, he reflects on how great it is that his life is fairly predictable.

Forever in Darkness Summary: Plagg has always been in darkness. It had become all he knew. Then he got a ray of sunshine, and it helped save him. There was a reason he believes Adrien is the best Chat Noir ever.

Alternatively, I JUST started up a series (I still don’t quite understand the collections set-up) on AO3 that will also house all of my Plagg Appreciation Day stories.

The next Friday 13th is in November. Who wants to join me in showing Plagg some love? Did you post any Plagg appreciation today? Please send me a tag! I’d love to see what you did. :D

@discoveringmiraculouswriters

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xxx-cat-xxx · 5 years

Text

Settle our bones (like wood) over time, over time

Tony is down with the flu, so Rhodey helps out by looking after Morgan (and her dad).

Seems like Endgame has turned me into a fluff writer. This is probably one of the softest things I’ve ever written. Contains fever dreams, vomiting, some angst and light spoilers, but nothing too grave.

A million thanks to @whumphoarder for putting so much work into beta-reading.

Rhodey has just finished showering and is fixing himself a sandwich when his custom-made StarkPhone starts blaring the unmistakable melody of Black Sabbath’s Iron Man (The phone was a belated gift from Tony for his last birthday - subtlety has never been his best friend’s strength).

“Hey man,” he greets.

“Rhodes?” Tony asks, sounding slightly off.

“Yes, it’s me. You should know this, seeing as you called.” A bit of worry starts gnawing in Rhodey’s gut.

“Listen...I might need your help here.”

Rhodey sighs internally. This is the same sentence he heard a year ago, when Tony’s bots managed to blow up a pyramid of paint buckets in the nursery and both of them spent the next seven consecutive hours hurrying to clean up the mess before Pepper came home. Rhodey’s just returned from a rather arduous week with Nat in Morocco and was looking forward to an afternoon spent entirely with himself, his food, and his TV remote.

“Sure,” he replies, trying his best not to sound entirely unmotivated. “What’s the mission?”

“Just, Morgan,” Tony says. “I, I guess I caught a flu bug, and I can’t - Pepper’s in L.A., and I can’t even open these stupid baby food jars without puking. Pep will kill me if I have Dum-E feed the kid.”

He breaks off and Rhodey hears a muffled cough from the other side.

“I know you just got back, but-” There’s a clatter, a muttered curse, and then the sound of a baby crying in the background. “I’m sorry, dude,” Tony continues in a hoarse voice.

Rhodey frowns. If Tony is calling him for help - hell, if he is actually apologising - things must be pretty desperate.

“On my way,” he confirms, getting up with a groan but already feeling his own fatigue fading into the background. “Be there in ten.”

The cabin sits at the lake, calm as ever. Rhodey smiles a little to himself when he thinks that his Tony, the former party king of New York, has chosen a lonely place in the woods as the site for his retirement. The front door opens automatically as soon as the hidden scanner has examined his face, and Rhodey steps into the warm interior.

“Welcome, Colonel Rhodes”, Friday’s voice greets him.

“Hey, Fri. Where’s Tony?”

“Boss is upstairs in the nursery.”

“Thanks.”

Giving Morgan the bedroom under the roof was probably one of Tony’s more selfless deeds (well, apart from saving the universe multiple times), considering the breathtaking amount of stars that are visible through the window directly from her bed.

On the other hand, Tony is understandably not very fond of stars anymore.

Rhodey makes his way upstairs, avoiding the building bricks littering the steps as well as the heap of washing on the first floor landing that needs to be ironed.

Tony is sitting on the floor in Morgan’s room, leaning heavily against the bed frame, the eight-month-old baby on a blanket next to him. She’s not exactly crying, but the noises she’s making definitely express discontent. Tony is trying to capture her attention with a screwdriver that he circles above her face, but he seems barely able to keep his own head up. There’s an unopened baby food jar and a spoon on the bedside table next to him.

“You look like crap,” Rhodey assesses. “What’s your temperature at?”

“I called you to babysit Morgan, not me,” Tony rebuts hoarsely. “If you’re fussing, I’ll ship your ass straight back home.”

“Sure you will.” Rhodey bends down to stroke the girl’s hair, noticing that she is swaddled up in multiple blankets like a baby-burrito.

“Is the little hobbit sick, too?”

“What?” Tony’s head shoots up. “No, I hope not.”

“Then why’s she wrapped up like this?”

“‘t was freezing this morning...Her skin felt cold…”

Rhodey frowns and checks the kid’s temperature. If anything, she’s a little overheated and clearly uncomfortable in too many layers. “That was probably the fever messing with you.”

“Oh.” Tony shifts uncomfortably. He is entirely too pale, with a hint of green on his face.

“When is Pepper coming back?” Rhodey inquires as he unwraps the blankets around the unhappy baby.

“’s Wednesday today, right?”

“Thursday,” Rhodey corrects.

“Ah,” Tony rubs his hand over his eyebrows in an exhausted gesture. He looks about ready to keel over. “Tonight, then. Probably late. You can, you can stay over in the guest room if you want to…”

“I know, Tony, don’t worry about it,” Rhodey reassures. “I’m gonna feed her now. You should move to your own bedroom, try and get some rest.”

“Yeah,” Tony nods, glancing at his feet for a moment as if not sure whether they will carry his weight. “There’s an idea.”

He hoists himself up and strokes Morgan’s hair out of her face with slightly trembling fingers before shuffling towards the staircase.

When the baby is fed and asleep, Rhodey makes his way to Tony’s room, hoping against better knowledge that his friend would be following the baby’s example. But of course that’s not the case. The sounds of dry heaving are carrying clearly over to the staircase from the first floor bathroom.

“Tones?” Rhodey knocks on the door.

“’m good, don’t come in.”

“Sure…”

Rhodey pushes the door open and takes in the scene. Tony is slumped over the open toilet bowl, his cheek resting on the seat. His face is showing an unhealthy pallor. Towels and discarded bottles of Gatorade are strewn around him, and the smell of sickness hangs thickly in the air. It’s obvious that Tony has been ill for a while already.

“Dude,” Rhodey starts.

“I said don’t come in. Not pretty,” Tony rasps.

“Well, I’ve seen you worse.”

“Yeah, don’t remind me…” Tony coughs again and retches drily, not even bothering to lift his head anymore. Rhodey can see the muscles in his back contracting when he throws up again, the ribs visible under his shirt. Hs still hasn’t gained back his full weight after the three weeks in space.

“Oh, fuck this.” Tony reaches up weakly to flush, then crashes back against the giant bathtub. Tiredly, he looks up at Rhodey, his dark eyes glazed over from fever.

“Okay. Back to bed,” Rhodey orders.

“Not sure if I’m done,” Tony admits.

“I’ll get you a bucket.” Rhodey grabs Tony under the armpits to pull him up and steadies him until he is sure that Tony’s own feet can take his weight. Then he hands him a glass of water to rinse his mouth.

“Do you want some Tylenol?” he asks, scanning the medicine cabinet.

“Nah,” Tony shakes his head. “Tried. Didn’t stay down.”

“At least drink a bit of water. You must be getting dehydrated.”

Tony obeys, sipping at the glass while supporting himself on the wash basin. His hand is shaking so hard that water is spilling over the edge, even though the glass is barely filled two-thirds.

All at once, Rhodey vividly remembers the week after Tony had returned from Titan. True to his word, the first thing he did when he was able to stand again on his own was try to shave. His hands were shaking so much that Rhodey had to help him, steadily clearing the stubble that was more gray than black, deliberately not talking about Steve and space and the child whose absence was so present in each of Tony’s words and actions.

It still is.

Rhodey gets Tony settled into bed. The engineer lies down on the mattress gingerly, as if his whole body hurts. Within minutes, he falls into an exhausted slumber, looking entirely spent.

He is undeniably older now - a fight in space, a lost child, and another one born having taken their toll - but something about the way he keeps his forearm curled protectively around his face reminds Rhodey of college, of watching over him while he slept off his highs, an arrogant, vulnerable, entirely too-young kid in a world that didn’t care enough.

Rhodey carefully pulls a blanket over his friend. He goes to the kitchen to fetch some crackers for himself and a basin in case Tony gets sick again and checks once more on Morgan, who is sleeping peacefully, hugging an Iron Man plush toy, then settles down in an armchair in the corner of the master bedroom. He picks up Tony’s tablet, scrolling lazily through the news, before setting out to ruin his friend’s Netflix viewing history.

Twenty minutes later, Tony starts moaning quietly, his face scrunched up and slick with sweat. He rolls to and fro, hands balled into fists, his eyeballs moving rapidly below his eyelids as he mumbles something unintelligible.

Rhodey sighs and stands up to wake him. Before he can do so, Tony snaps upright. “Peter,” he croaks breathlessly. His eyes dart around the room, taking it in with a mixture of confusion and fear.

Rhodey just shakes his head. “No, Tony. I’m sorry,” he says quietly.

“Oh.” Understanding settles in Tony’s features, disappointment, sadness. He slumps back against the pillows, brushing an arm over his face to wipe away sweat and maybe more. So much pain. So much guilt. “Is Morgan—?”

“She’s fine. Go back to sleep,” Rhodey advises.

Tony grunts in response. He closes his eyes, but opens them again a few seconds later, looking paler than before. “I need- ” he clasps a hand over his lips, sitting up, and tries to get his feet under him.

Rhodey takes the basin from the nightstand and pushes it into his hands, silently ordering him to stay in bed. “Here. It’s okay.”

Tony eyes the bowl and takes a few shallow breaths, closing his eyes. Rhodey can see his throat working as he tries not to be sick.

Upstairs, Morgan starts to cry.

Tony reflexively makes to stand up. “I got her,” Rhodey reassures, already half out the door. He feels his heart go a little warm. The one man whom nobody ever would have thought would be a father has turned out to be a pretty good one.

He hears Tony retch behind him and the sound of liquid splashing into the bowl when he climbs the stairs. Rhodey makes a mental note to keep an eye out for signs of dehydration since the only thing Tony could possibly be bringing up at this point is the few sips of water he had earlier.

Morgan is crying at a volume louder than should reasonably be possible for someone of her size. Rhodey changes her diaper and carries her around the room, talking nonsense to soothe her. It takes a while to settle her back down. She knows Rhodey well, but it’s clear that she wants her parents.

When he returns, Tony is still in the same position as he left him, but now slumped over, holding his head in his hands. The half-filled basin is sitting in between his knees.

“Hey.” Rhodey takes the bowl out of his lap gently and sets it on the floor. Tony barely reacts. He’s malleable, radiating heat, the fever evidently much higher than earlier. He barely opens his eyes when Rhodey helps him to lean back against a heap of pillows in front of the headboard. Rhodey goes to clean the evidence and returns with a wet washcloth that he uses to wipe down Tony’s face and then cool his forehead.

Tony is too feverish and uncomfortable to actually fall back asleep, so Rhodey starts the TV for some white noise and settles into the bed next to him. Tony watches with half-lidded eyes and heavy breaths, his hands clenching the blanket. He keeps shifting his weight against the pillows until his head lands on Rhodey’s shoulder, the sweaty hair hot and damp through his shirt. Rhodey adjust his position a little to make him more comfortable.

“So that’s what it takes to get you into bed with me,” Tony slurs.

Rhodey rolls his eyes. “You wish.”

There’s a pause as the weak smirk fades from Tony’s features and he lets out a tired sigh. “I…” He struggles to form words. “Just…thanks, dude.”

“It’s okay, Tony. I know.”

And he does, he’s always known. During the nights at MIT, he understood the way Tony sought distraction in parties and wine to quiet his thoughts and how he brought people home to bed to keep the loneliness at bay. He was there when Tony OD-ed on his graduation day, after Howard hadn’t shown up and Tony had worn an AC/DC shirt instead of a suit, insisting he didn’t give a damn about his summa cum laude. And that other, horrible night, after Tony’s parents died and he stood on Rhodey’s doorstep, high and silent, with red-rimmed eyes and traces of tears on his face.

After he’d returned from space, starved and broken, when he was too weak to cry and water just seemed to flow out of his eyes like from an overfilled pond, Rhodey understood that those tears were for Peter Parker. And the day Morgan was born and Tony was more afraid than ever before, Rhodey had quietly waited at the hospital all the way until the door opened and Tony stepped out with his daughter in his arms, smiling like the proudest man on earth.

Now he just sits there, feeling Tony shiver when the chills run through him, doing what he always does - being there.

He stays until Morgan starts up again and he has to extricate himself from the bed. She’s clearly awake this time, and it seems she’s had enough time without her parents, so Rhodey takes her to the master bedroom.

Tony is too out of it to even move much, so he just lets the baby crawl around him and numbly plays with her hair while she tries to grab his fingers.

“Yeah, kiddo. Daddy’s not much fun today,” Rhodey comments. Tony just shoots him a tired glare.

“You up for some toast?” Rhodey asks.

“Please don’t.” Tony’s face scrunches up with nausea.

Rhodey gets him to very slowly drink half a glass of water during the next fifteen minutes before Tony lies back down fully while Morgan is on her stomach, playing with a War Machine doll that has inexplicably found its way into the bed. After a while, Rhodey wets the washcloth again and drapes it over Tony’s burning forehead, receiving a grateful sigh.

Tony’s breaths eventually even out again and Rhodey gently picks up Morgan. He takes her outside and feeds her dinner, and she stares at him intently with the dark, warm eyes Rhodey knows all too well.

When Pepper comes home late that night, Rhodey is on the porch, carrying a crying Morgan in his arms who has decided a few hours ago that she was definitely done sleeping for the day.

“What happened?” Pepper asks, a crease appearing between her brows and worry set in her eyes. It’s been almost two years and the fear is still there, always lingering below the surface, ready to materialise upon the smallest provocation.

“Hey, everything’s okay. Tony’s got the flu, but it’s under control. He was very well-behaved - called me earlier today to help out.”

Pepper raises an eyebrow. “He told me he had a cold when I called him up last night.”

Rhodey sighs. He’s never seen Tony ask for someone to be around when he was sick, thanks to Howard Stark, and he’s sure that he wouldn’t have done it this time if it hadn’t been for Morgan.

Pepper takes the child from his arms and greets her with a kiss before entering the house and making straight for the master bedroom, not bothering to remove her shoes or jacket. Rhodey follows her upstairs, but stops just outside the bedroom door. He watches Pepper step in softly, Tony warily blinking his eyes open and then struggling to sit up when Pepper settles down on the side of the mattress.

Rhodey can’t hear what they are saying, but he sees Tony mumble something and warmth filling his tired eyes. The tension bleeds out of Pepper’s body when she ghosts a kiss on his cheek. Morgan giggles upon seeing her father, not understanding the words, but fully able to feel the completeness, the love, the rightness of it all.

It’s an impossible life they lead, Rhodey thinks, but something right has come out of it after all.

@badthingshappenbingo - This is the fill for the square “Big Brother Instinct” on my Bingo card.

Link to all my fics

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