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introvertguide · 3 years

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The Life of Roman Polanski

The director of our current movie under review, Roman Polanski, is a man that has been surrounded by sadness and controversy. I think that he is a great director and an amazing creator of the visual arts, but he has a major flaw that makes me very glad he is nowhere near me. I think a statement like that deserves some explanation, but know that a lot of my take is based on opinion. I was not alive when a lot of his issues occurred so I base my opinion on news and official record statements. I will try and rely on recorded facts as much as possible and make a point to mention if something is not proven. I also encourage anyone who is interested to find out more because it is a fascinating story.

Polanski started off the in a pretty bad way as he was born in 1933 in Paris during the height of Nazi reign in Europe. He was moved to Krakow in 1937 right before the German invasion and his parents were taken in raids. He was kept alive in foster homes under an assumed identity and was lucky to survive. His mother died in Auschwitz, but he was reunited with his father after the war in 1946. Roman had quite the artistic eye and used it for both photography and filming. He attended the National Film School in Lodz, Poland and started directing short films that gained recognition. One film in particular was called Bicycle. It was a true story of a thief that tricked Polanski out of his money when purchasing a bicycle and instead beat Polanski around the head with the butt of a gun. The thief was found and eventually executed for past crimes including 3 murders.

After graduating in 1959, Polanski went to France and continued to make short films. He reported that there was a problem with xenophobia at the time since so many Polish people had dispersed around Europe after the war. He went to England and made three movies between 1965 and 1968 that gained recognition in America: Repulsion, Cul-de-sac, and Dance of the Vampires. A young woman named Sharon Tate played a role in Dance of the Vampires and Polanski fell in love. He married her in 1968 in England, and they moved to the U.S. so he could make movies in Hollywood. His first film in the states was a horror film entitled Rosemary’s Baby, one of the highest rated horror films of all time. Polanski had a beautiful young wife, a son on the way, a hit movie with more work coming, and great prospects for life in the United States.

As horrific as his formative years were, I am surprised to find myself writing that this is when Polanski’s life really went out of control. On August 9th, 1969, cult members who followed a man named Charles Manson broke into the Polanski home in Los Angeles and murdered the 8 month pregnant Sharon Tate and four friends that were at the home. Polanski had been working in London on a new film and wasn’t there that night. He says to this day that it is by far the greatest regret of his life. Remember this. It seems that some wires got crossed as far as Roman’s thinking process because his behavior really took a turn.

His films had been dark and violent in the past, but they started to have sexual undertones with more graphic nudity. His first movie back after the loss of his wife was Macbeth, a movie that was rated X at the time for graphic nudity and violence. Polanski later said that he was in a dark place, but the media would find things in his movies always looking for a story. He hated the media after the sensationalism and lack of privacy involved with the loss of his wife and son. Next came an extremely odd road trip sex comedy that was appropriately called What?. And then came his last work filmed in the United States and the film he was probably best known for, Chinatown. I don’t want to go over the film too much since it is the film currently under review for the group, but it is very dark and has an extremely down beat ending.

And then another crime was committed in Polanski’s life that would haunt while simultaneously erasing any good will the American public had for him. He was charged for drugging and raping a 13-year-old girl who modeled for him during a Vogue photoshoot. It was recorded as occurring at the Bel Air estate of Jack Nicholson. There is no question about this encounter as Polanski was arrested and confessed to the charges. He thought he was going to receive probation and timed served for a guilty plea, but the judge was reported to have changed his mind and was planning to reject the plea and give Polanski prison time for all charges. This would result in up to 50 years in jail and what amounted to life in prison. Polanski would not serve this sentence so he fled the country to France where he would not be extradited.

The charges are still pending and there is no statute of limitations on rape in the United States, so Polanski is on a list of people that if found outside of certain countries will be immediately sent back to the U.S. to face charges. He has dual citizenship in France and Poland; both countries do not extradite citizens. He went on to make one of his best works, a film called Tess, while in Europe. It was a great success and Polanski was nominated for Best Director. The film ended up winning three Academy Awards (none for Polanski). So it seemed that this acclaimed director would live in France and hope that things would blow over. He settled a civil suit in court with the girl and she went on to marry and says she forgives Polanski. But it didn’t end...

Because the woman was in the U.S. and Polanski was not, she was harassed by the press to speak out and tell her story. She reported that the media did much more harm to her and her family than Polanski did. That is a very strong statement considering the charges. Things finally cooled down somewhat when Polanski married an actress from one of his films, Emmanuelle Seignor in 1989. The couple have two kids together and things were apparently going fine in France.

Things remained well through the 90s although nothing Polanski did got much attention. It seemed he would simply live out his life quietly in France. Then in 1999, he came out with a film called The Ninth Gate that garnered attention since it starred the very popular Johnny Depp. Polanski was back on his game and he directed and produced a film called The Pianist. It stars Adrian Brody and told the story of a Polish-Jewish composer who survived the concentration camps because of goodwill received from German officers that appreciated his work. It is a masterpiece and earned Polanski the award for Best Director. He could not accept the award in person because he would be arrested, so Harrison Ford accepted it on his behalf and took it to him in France. A strange little detail about this is that The Pianist was also up for best picture, but stirrings about Polanski’s past were brought up by a competing producer to throw the award. There is no real proof of this, but the man said to have done this was quite powerful in Hollywood at the time. Ironically, that man who was said to remind people of old rape charges was none other than Harvey Weinstein. I don’t have proof of this, but it is an interesting story. One of those “I heard it is said that” kind of things from TMZ.

Anyway, these reminders had people trying to interview Polanski and his wife about the past and he basically said that people needed to move past it. This does not tend to go over very well with the American public or the legal system and Polanski was arrested while in Switzerland and held in Zurich. Public sentiment in America, France, and Poland leaned towards Polanski being sent to America to face trial. The Swiss judge denied extradition and Polanski was sent back to France. There were requests in 2014 by US courts that Poland send Polanski to stand trial since there was question concerning the conduct of the original judge in Polanski’s case. It was believed that Polanski would be given some form of probation, but it also meant he could travel. Polish courts ruled that Polanski had served his punishment and should not have to face U.S. courts again. In 2016, it was presented by Polish officials that no amount of time could account for the crime of rape, but the decision of the lower court was held.

In 2018, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences removed Polanski as a member. Strangely, that same year, they offered a membership to his wife (who loudly said no).

So the final say about how to feel about Polanski and his works lies firmly on the individual. Here is all the information about the trial that can keep it nice and ambiguous for you. The judge, the lead prosecutor, and the LA County Deputy DA at the time all admitted bias against Polanski. He would not have gotten a fair trial and would likely have ended up in prison for life. The prosecutor said later in an interview for a documentary that he was not surprised at all that Polanski left and it would have been a media circus. Polanski paid the victim almost a million dollars in civil settlement money and she said she doesn’t want to see any further prosecution. Okay. In 2017, a website run by Matan Uziel was sued by Polanski for libel when it was posted that 5 other women had come forward and accused Polanski of sexual assault. Polanski did not show up in court so Uziel was dismissed of charges. Uziel requested specifically that the cases not be dropped so that Polanski could not try and sue him at a future date. It is true that, in 2010, an English actress accused Polanski of “forcing himself” on her during filming of the movie Pirates. In 2017, a Swiss woman accused Polanski of raping her in the 70s when she was only 15. The same month, another woman accused him of assaulting her in 1975 when she was only 10. Finally, in 2019, a former actress model from France said that Polanski violently raped her at a Swiss chalet in 1975.

So what can you say about the man? His early life was tragedy and misery. The loss of his wife and child was horrific. He seemed like he was in a very bad place in the 70s. I don’t want to give credence to accusation without proof, but it can be sure that he committed at least one sexual assault of an under aged girl. He ran from his trial because he knew it would not be fair, but he was still never held accountable in a court of law for what he did. He has been forced to stay in Poland and France, but he is wealthy with a wife and kids, never seeing the jail time for what he did. And if it is true that he has committed other crimes like this, then he needs to be in jail. But could he ever get a fair day in court at this point? The man is 87 and will likely die soon, likely before any sentencing could occur. Also, how reliable is testimony from any parties about things that happened between 40-50 years ago? Everything he is accused of seems to have happened after the death of Sharon Tate and before his marriage to his current wife, so it seems like his behavior was linked to his state of mind and he is no longer in that state. That may explain things but it does not forgive them.

I don’t know. This is probably why I chose psychology instead of law enforcement or criminal justice. Trying to decide if someone has adequately paid for crimes they have committed is not my specialty. It will be a moot point soon enough because he will be dead. So what do we do with the guy? He has encountered both great suffering and great joy in his life. He as also caused great suffering and great joy. I guess it is more about how he will be remembered at this point. I would be curious to hear what others think.

#roman polanski #sharon tate #chinatown #rosemary's baby #film director #extradition #court charges #life and times #assault #70s #media coverage #introvert #introverts

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adenei · 3 years

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Always A Bridesmaid, Never A Bride - Chapter 6

AO3 || FFN

Hermione

It was official. I’d agree to anything if it meant I had a chance to spend time with Harry outside of work. I knew it was a problem, and it was blatantly clear when Jenny called me in a rush this morning. She thought she’d scheduled an appointment to set up her registry at John Lewis for Monday, but her days had gotten mixed up and she took the only open slot for Sunday.

Of course, I knew she’d already booked herself at the bridal salon and florist, and couldn’t fit it in as she was explaining her mix-up. I was going to suggest she reschedule, but then I heard her mutter about sending someone else, and thinking she was going to send Harry, I offered to go, too. So, despite telling myself numerous times to just call her and cancel, I still forged ahead, even though I knew my ulterior motive was despicable.

Jenny had slipped her list of items under my door while I was in the shower. I thought it was odd if she was sending Harry, but then maybe she didn’t have time to stop by his place before her first appointment.

I took the list and caught a taxi to take me to the department store in the city. My phone buzzed and I checked it to see I had a text from Jenny. Your reinforcement should be there soon. Thanks so much for doing this again! I decided to go in and get started at the registry desk since I knew the set-up process would take a while. Finally, after I finished the paperwork, I was ready to begin.

“So, here’s the scanner!” the clerk said. “This is all you’ll need to choose the items that you’d like. Once you hear the beep, you’ll know it’s been added. If you scan something by mistake, just scan it again to take it off. I’ll be here if you need anything, and if not, just drop the scanner off before you leave.”

“Thank you,” I said as I pulled the list out from my bag and determined where I should start first.

I was paying so much attention to the list, I didn’t notice someone joining me.

“Fancy meeting you here.” I looked up to see Ron standing next to me.

“Jenny sent you?” I asked. Surely, this was a joke.

“Are you surprised?” Ron asked me innocently.

“Yes, actually, I am. What writer helps with menial wedding tasks like this?”

“When I cover a wedding, I cover the whole wedding,” he explained as I shook my head. “So, where should we get started?”

“Probably housewares,” I said with a sigh.

I handed Ron the list to check things off as we scanned them. If he was here, I was going to make sure he was helpful. Maybe it’d make the job go by faster.

“Who needs all this useless junk, anyways?” he asked as I scanned a beautiful set of ivory candlestick holders. “Don’t they both have separate flats already? Surely, they have enough stuff between the two of them to outfit one apartment.”

I rolled my eyes in his direction. “When you’re starting a life with someone, you want to pick out items for the home you’re going to share together. You know, to make it both of yours instead of a mix of two people’s things,” I explained.

“So you’re telling me if you were to get engaged, you’d chuck all of your current stuff just to ask for new versions of the same stuff because you’re marrying someone else?”

“Well...not everything, but I’ve been inside Jenny’s apartment and it’s rather bare in there.”

“What about Harry’s stuff?”

“It’s okay, but he is a bachelor. He only has half the stuff he does because of Teddy,” I said.

“Harry has a kid?” Ron asked, his eyes wide.

I chuckled. “Not exactly. Teddy’s an orphan that’s part of the Boys & Girls Club. Harry’s his big brother. Though, I wouldn’t be surprised if he really does try to adopt Teddy after he and Jenny are married.”

“And how does Jenny feel about that?”

“Why do you care so much?” I gave him an odd look.

“N-no reason. It’s just an interesting dynamic, that’s all.”

“Well, when we went to Teddy’s football game, Jenny seemed really taken with him. She’s surprisingly good with kids,” I mentioned offhand.

“Surprisingly? What’s that supposed to mean?” Ron asked curiously.

“Oh, um, I suppose she probably has several nieces and nephews if four of her brothers are married.”

“Ah. Well, that’s good, then. I’m sure they’ll make a beautiful family,” Ron said.

“Yeah,” I said distantly. It was hard not to think about it, even though I really didn’t want to.

Ron was looking at me curiously. “You know what I think you want?”

“What? Please bestow your infinite wisdom about me, a person you barely know, to me,” I scoffed.

“I think you do all this because you just want a wedding for yourself. Not an actual marriage, but a wedding.”

I stared incredulously at him. “How can you even say that? You don’t know me! Of course I want a marriage! Who wouldn’t want someone to spend the rest of their life with?”

“Well then why aren’t you looking harder for your ‘one true love’?” he said in air quotes. “You spend all your extra time helping brides and attending weddings, and it seems like you barely date.”

“I do too date!” I retorted.

“Yeah? When’s the last time you dated someone? I don’t count,” he said pompously.

“What do you mean you don’t count? Of course you don’t!” I argued.

“Oh, you wound me,” Ron said, his words dripping with sarcasm. “Are you going to answer the question?”

I stopped to think about it. Was it bad that I really couldn’t remember. Ron took advantage of my distraction to steal the scanner from me and started scanning random trinkets.

“What are you doing?” I asked as I tried to take the scanner back.

He used his height to an advantage to block me. “Oh, come on, it’s all in good fun. Every couple deserves some random trinkets that they open and have to fake a smile for, don’t you think?”

There was a mischievous glint in his eye that made me laugh even though I should be scolding him. I was still mad at him for his accusations, but I was willing to play along so I didn’t have to answer the dating question.

“Is that what you think?” I said with a smile. “You’d want to open random gifts you didn’t ask for because someone thought it would be funny to play a joke on your registry?”

“It’s never going to happen for me, so it doesn’t matter what I’d do, now would it?”

Ron was smiling, but it wasn’t reaching his eyes. I stopped to contemplate his words for a moment. “Something must have happened to make you resent love so much. So, what is it?”

I snagged the list from his hand to see how we were doing as I began walking again. We needed to get to the linen section next. Ron still hadn’t answered me, so I decided to push his buttons a bit.

“Did your parents get divorced? An ex-girlfriend cheat on you with your best friend like in those cheesy romantic comedies? Or, were you left at the altar or something tragic like that?”

“Yeah, actually.”

I froze. I wasn’t really serious. I turned around to look at him. “What?”

“I was engaged a few years ago, but about two weeks before the wedding she called it off. Apparently she was more interested in my brother instead, and only realized it when she came home to meet the whole family.”

“Oh, my God, Ron, I’m sorry. It was—I didn’t mean it,” I apologized. That was awful and I wouldn’t wish that on anyone.

“It’s fine. I was too blinded by love to see that we weren’t a good fit anyways. My brother saw right through her shallowness and told her to fuck off. So, I guess there was a silver lining.”

I handed him the scanner. “Scan all the ugly things you want. I’ll feign ignorance as long as all the stuff on this list gets added.”

He let out a weak laugh. “Thanks.”

“Are you close with your brother, then?” We hadn’t discussed anything personal yet, aside from my involvement in weddings, but I found myself wanting to learn more about him.

“As close as we can be. He lives in Africa on a wild nature preserve.”

“And your ex was more interested in a—”

“Zoologist? Apparently. Guess my career as a writer wasn’t adventurous enough for her. Or it didn’t make enough money for her lifestyle.”

“If she’s more interested in money than love, you’re better off. You’ll find the one someday, I’m sure.”

“So will you...maybe,” he smirked.

“Good to see you being so supportive,” I said sarcastically.

Just like that, the moment had passed. Maybe I’d been a little too quick to judge Ron without knowing his backstory. First impressions were typically a good indication of a person for me, but now I was starting to think that maybe I’d misjudged him. Even though he reverted right back to his sarcastic ways, I was fairly certain that it was all a cover. I couldn’t help the feeling churning inside of me that yearned to know more.

Ron

I was sitting at my cubicle on Wednesday when Rita stopped by my desk. “How’s the article coming?”

I knew she was talking about the perpetual bridesmaid one. “It still needs work; still a rough draft,” I told her.

“I want to see what you’ve got. Email it to me,” Rita said bluntly before walking away.

“But—” It didn’t matter what I was going to try to say, she was expecting it and I needed to send it along.

I didn’t understand why I was hesitating, though. This was going to be my big break, and yet I had this nagging feeling in my stomach.

Sure, Hermione was strong minded and opinionated, but she was always so interesting to talk to. I found myself craving her company and wanting to learn more about her. Hell, I’d even admitted my darkest secret about Romilda that no one knew outside of immediate family.

The last time I put love ahead of my career I lost the section for my contributing investigative pieces and landed my arse firmly in commitments. I needed to stay focused so I shook the thoughts of Hermione from my head as I carried on with cleaning up the article. It’d been so long since I let anyone into my life, and I just didn’t know her well enough yet to trust her.

I did make one small concession, deciding not to use her real name because of the business. So I called her Hermione Wilkins in the article. No one needed to know, and it was my feeble attempt at protecting her identity. Satisfied with the draft, I pressed send on the email and moved onto my next task.

On Friday, Rita called me into her office. “This is really good, Weasley. You should be proud.”

I looked at her in slight confusion, not exactly sure which article she was talking about.

“The perpetual bridesmaid article! We’re running it on Sunday. You’re on the front page of the Styles section. And you’re out of commitments for good after you cover that Warrington/Potter wedding, of course.”

“Er, right. Yeah, thanks!” I tried to fake excitement over it, but the knot was pitted even deeper in my stomach.

“Why aren’t you more excited?”

“I just think it could use some more time, that’s all. She’s in that wedding, too. The one next weekend. Let me wait and see if I can learn more. You know, to add—”

“Ron, this is perfect as is. Isn’t this what you wanted? Or has someone taken a fancy to Ms. Wilkins?” Rita gave me a knowing smile, but it wasn’t a genuine one. It made me uncomfortable.

“Can we please just push publication one more week?” I asked once more.

Rita sighed dramatically. “I’ll see what I can do, but if you have started to care for her, you might want to tell her. You can go now. I’m sure you have things to accomplish before the weekend.”

I nodded slightly as I turned to leave. I had to find a way to tell Hermione. I wasn’t ready to lose whatever dysfunctional new friendship we’d created, but after she’d already accused me of lying to her, I had no idea how I was going to spin this. No matter how I looked at it, it was totally deceitful.

Not to mention my sister and all of her lies, too. No matter how annoying I thought Hermione could be, I knew she didn’t deserve that. She needed to know this was coming. I had to tell her.

~o~

My phone rang on Saturday afternoon. It was the first Saturday where I didn’t have to do anything related to weddings and it was brilliant, until I saw Ginny’s name on the caller ID.

“What?” I answered.

“I need your help.”

“Aren’t I already helping you enough?”

“Never,” Ginny said through a grin that I knew was undoubtedly plastered on her face.

“Well?” I asked, pretending to be annoyed.

“I just got a call that the favors are done and ready to be picked up in Brentwood. Harry was going to do it after the dinner tasting, but I’m worried that won’t give him enough time to get to Andover for dinner with Mum and Dad since it’s in the complete opposite direction!”

“So, you’re asking me to pick up the favors, then?”

“Unless you wanted to come to dinner—”

“Nope, I’m good. I’ve got to try and get a hold of Hermione tonight for something anyways,” I told her.

“Hermione?” Ginny’s voice sounded intrigued.

“Yeah, but it’s not what you think. It’s not like I’m into her or anything,” I said a little too quickly.

“Sureee,” Ginny teased. “Well, you’re in luck. She’s with Harry right now for the tasting at the Winchester in Putney. She offered to go to the tasting since I was wrapped up with things back home. Maybe she could go with you?”

“Yeah, maybe…” I had to admit that Ginny came up with a good idea.

“Listen, I have to go, we’re getting ready to leave now. Hopefully Harry will be hungry enough. I did reserve a later dinner, but Mum and Dad wanted to get settled at the inn beforehand since they didn’t want to drive home tonight…” Ginny trailed off.

“Okay, tell them I said hi, and I’ll take care of the favors for you.”

“Thanks, Ron, I owe you!”

“Yeah you owe me for a lot of—” I stopped talking once I realized she’d already hung up the phone.

“Doesn’t she believe in saying goodbye?” I said out loud as I shook my head.

I could be at the Winchester House in fifteen minutes. Grabbing my wallet and keys, I headed out the door and hailed a taxi.

When I arrived at the hotel, the maitre’d pointed me in the direction of where Harry and Hermione were seated. It was a relatively nice day. Warm and partly cloudy, but I could tell by the way the sky was changing that a rainstorm was coming in.

I walked through the main area to the outdoor seating section where I stopped near the doorway to look for them. I spotted them on the other side of the terrace overlooking the Thames at a small table. My first thought was of how gorgeous Hermione looked when she was smiling. She normally only reserved scowls for me, and I hadn’t realized how attractive she truly was until that moment.

The thought terrified me. I wasn’t sure if I was even ready to let someone else into my life like that. I’d sworn off love, convinced it wasn’t in the cards for me. If things were meant to look up, there was no way it could be her. Especially not after that article dropped. At least Rita was giving me more time to explain it to her.

I refocused on the two of them and began to take a few steps toward their table. That’s when I saw it. The look I’d seen on every bride who was hopelessly in love with their soon to be groom. How had I never realized it before? The way she smiled and leaned across the table.

All the unabashed flirting. Everything was making sense now. Why she was so upset at the club that first night, why she was so dejected when she called me, and why she wasn’t sure if she even wanted to be part of my sister’s wedding. Hermione was in love with her boss, who was also my sister’s fiancée. I wasn’t sure what was worse. Her pining over a man who had no interest in her at all, or Harry’s complete obliviousness to the entire situation. I’d seen him around my sister long enough to know he only had eyes for her.

I was feeling a mix of hurt and anger that I hadn’t felt since Romilda left me, and I didn’t understand why because it wasn’t like I was in love with Hermione or anything. I just enjoyed her company and was keen on the prospect that she might be a good friend if we could get past her constant accusations.

At that moment I lost all my ambition to tell Hermione about the article, and even to ask her along on the wedding errand. I was about to turn and leave when Harry happened to look in my direction and called me over. Shit.

“What are you doing here?” Hermione looked at me in surprised annoyance.

Of course she was annoyed, I just ruined the probable fantasy she was currently living with this whole situation.

“Jenny called and asked if I could go pick up the favors with you before the shop closes.”

“Oh, I thought I was going to take care of that,” Harry said.

“Yeah, Harry and I were just getting ready to head to Brentwood now,” Hermione said pointedly.

“Well, the bride is worried that it’ll make him late for some dinner that’s past the other side of London, so…”

“Hmm, she does make a good point. And it looks like the rain is heading in, which would make travel conditions worse,” Harry said. “Are you sure you don’t mind?”

“Not at all. Hermione’ll ensure everything is sorted as the maid of honor, right?” I asked, raising my eyebrow in question and knowing she couldn’t say no.

“I—I guess,” Hermione sounded deflated as she shot me a death glare as Harry was finalizing the menu.

Good. Someone needed to pop the bubble because she was holding onto a dream that would never come true.

“Great, thanks again, you guys. I better get going if I have to stop home before heading to Andover.”

Harry got up and clapped me on the back as he took off toward the exit. I smiled widely at Hermione, who looked like she was going to murder me. I couldn’t wait to reveal what I’d found out about her little secret.

#romione #romione muggle au #side hinny #27 dresses inspired #ron x hermione #Ron Weasley #Hermione Granger

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silveryfairy · 3 years

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hey man if it's not too much trouble, could you give us a brief rundown of the Nocturnes? It's just, every morning I wake up and there's a new one, and I Care everyone in this establishment a lot though I don't really know them, thank you kindly have a nice day

let my preface this by saying: aayushi, i love you, and your enthusiasm and interest for the things i create never ceases to bring me joy. you are the kind of friend i think everyone should have and i say that completely genuinely outside of this bit.

i say that as an apology in advance for what i’m about to unleash upon you, because what you’re going to see is the product of my friend @himepapillon and i’s absolute BRAINROT and what comes of it when not only two people make an oc universe from scratch but what happens when we then have to explain that universe to other people

you are in no way required to retain this information as to be completely honest me and jeremie haven’t fully either and we’re the ones who MADE this shitshow. below is the shoddy family tree i lovingly crafted in ms paint

let us begin.

for starters, i’ll specify some things:

1. not every oc on this chart is mine, as it’s a collaboration between me and jeremie - the koenig family and bishop family belong to faer but the rest is all me baby! for the sake of your soul i will only be going into my half of this Mess

2. the universe this takes place in is a pretty wacky and silly one, just, like, Slightly removed from reality. these characters are all completely batshit insane and do things that no human being probably should. it’s all portrayed critically, as the general concept of this whole thing is “the goings-on of a bunch of unhinged corrupt rich people”. we kind of flip flop on how seriously stuff is played but if i had to slap a genre on this it’d be, like, black comedy drama. i know a lot of these concepts sound kinda fucked to write but that’s just because i’m trying to describe them in a SOMEWHAT concise way without going into Super Introspective mode

the nocturnes are an incredibly influential and rich family in the uk that tends to produce very influential and rich people. they’re also all a little bit insane. the main characters of this Saga are the sons of desmond and xanthes, the family’s resident Power Couple and biggest figureheads. they suck ass but that will become apparent the second i talk about their children.

from oldest to youngest, the nocturne boys are:

ichor nocturne, 25 - the eldest, ichor was disowned from the household when he was 18 for unruly behavior, sent to live alone on a farm so he couldn’t tarnish his family’s image any further. since then, you’d think the isolation has driven him a bit mad - he’s a very prolific cotton farmer and has been doing astonishingly well for himself, running his farm on his own with only his parents’ inheritance as help. ...that, and, of course, the blood of the people he executes to keep his crops growing - or so he believes. he moonlights as an executioner in the small town over, exterminating the ‘pests’ of the city. despite his newfound violence, he still routinely checks in on his siblings, finding ways to mysteriously end up at their door to pay visits. the older brother instinct still hasn’t left

icarus nocturne, 23 - the second eldest (only by technicality, as he is a twin), icarus is the family’s golden child! but not in terms of business or anything, oh no - icarus is a famous heartthrob teen (sorta) musician! he’s been in the limelight since he was a little boy, being an actor as a small child and getting into music as he grew. his general Look(tm), accompanied by infectiously happy rave music, is a trademark cutesy mask over his face with oversized clothing - meant to express as much energy as possible as he bounces about the stage. in reality, he lives a life as forced and controlled as possible by virtue of... living the fucked up life of a child star. but his parents have someone to take the fall - so, what of his twin?

achilles nocturne, 23 - icarus’ younger twin, which wouldn’t mean much... in any family but this one. achilles has had it drilled into his head since the beginning that he was a mistake next to icarus, to the point where legally, he does not exist. following icarus beginning his career, achilles was unpersoned completely - living in the family’s basement with the height of his education being for a very specific purpose... needing to be icarus’ body double on tours and for paparazzi - after all, they can’t have icarus’ purity tainted by all those clamboring fans! it’s a godawful situation. on the bright side, though, achilles has found a hobby where he can be himself: twitch streaming! yes really. under the name of 1upanonymous, hidden under a mask just like his brother, achilles at least has a fanbase that can love him for who he is! ...uh, kind of.

tomasine “tommy” nocturne, 16 - the youngest of the bunch, and it says a lot about his siblings’ capabilities that he’s the technical heir to the nocturnes’ various businesses and fortune. tommy is just a feral 16 year old that doesn’t give two shits about any fame or fortune, he just wants to party and drink and have fun like any other kid his age! he’s rebellious, loud, and charmingly annoying (to his brothers anyway), and has no real care for the gravity of his family’s situations beyond finding it annoying that they want him to be all PRIM and PROPER and BUSINESSY EEWWWWW. he’s just a funny loud little child trying to live his best life. loves his brothers fiercely

already a mess of people. and really, all you need to know about or really keep in mind are those four: the upcoming characters are largely just side ones we came up with because we thought it’d be funny to flesh out this fucked up family more. so let’s get into the anatra branch of the family - headed by jael nocturne, xanthes’ brother and the siblings’ uncle

jael anatra-nocturne, who i am not giving an age for my own sanity trying to decipher this fucking timeline - a crude and playful uncle, jael is someone the nocturne boys either love (icarus, tommy) or hate (achilles, ichor). constantly joking, as he expresses affection with loving insults - kind of a money-driven asshole, but a lovable one - he’s a career politician and met his current husband, joaquin, on the job. or, well... no longer current, because jael’s funny life of debauchery, toxic masculinity, and making fun of his nephews, came to an abrupt end when he was assassinated on live television. yipes!

joaquin anatra-nocturne, who also does not get an age - jael’s former secretary and current widow, joaquin is the local wine uncle. im not sure if that’s a classification but it is now, because he is one. an unapologetic gold-digger, he (publicly) took jael’s death frighteningly well, and is now living his best life with a revolving door of new boyfriends. his relationship with jael was a genuine and very loving one, and joaquin IS devastated by his death, but both of them just found the bit of pretending to be this loveless gold digger/politician couple very funny, and being as suspicious as possible around his husband’s death is exactly what jael would have wanted joaquin to do

taddeo anatra-nocturne, 14 - the youngest child of these two, a shy little boy with big Child In A Horror Movie energies. makes potions in the backyard and probably decorates his clothes with animal bones n stuff when he’s older. despite this he’s pretty harmless, nice and fiercely loyal - tommy especially thinks he’s fun and likes to hang out with him at family gatherings - just so long as you look past the creepy dolls he likes to talk to and fires he likes to set. especially close with jael and wants to be a miniature version of him, buuut still being a shy tween taddeo hasn’t been able to act on that much.

dailon anatra-nocturne, 20 - the adopted second child of jael and joaquin, dailon is a moody and unstable delinquent that was snatched up by them just as he was about to age out of foster care. while he has a chill ‘cool-older-even-though-he’s-younger-cousin’ demeanor, the tension when he’s around his parents - jael specifically - can be cut with a knife. dailon hates his dad: ‘someone who expresses affection with insults and jokes and likes seeing people pissed at him’ and ‘someone who’s volatile, short-tempered, and sullen after living in a foster home most his life’ are just as bad of a combination as you’d expect. dailon gets himself into a lot of trouble, and is an overall very self-centered prick, but we’ll get more on that in a bit.

HELL FAMILY...2!!! that’s the last of the families to cover, buuuut there are still some other names on that list - mostly connected to dailon. this is REAL “just going on in the background” shit that you also do not need to know whatsoever (except for mitzi she’s pretty important she’s just down here for organization purposes) - i just like to play god and make characters get into drama.

[tw: cheating, unhealthy relationships, stalking]

mitzi “moon” altberg, 23 - achilles must feel very far away by now, but we’re back to him for a second! mitzi is his ex-girlfriend he met online, a fan-to-employee-to-lover and one of the maybe two people outside of the family achilles has shown his real face to. however, achilles growing up deeply unstable - between his parents’ abuse, having spotlights on him and adoring fans both as icarus’ body double and as a streamer, and in general not really growing up to be any kind of well developed human being - made this relationship a complete disaster. he grew obsessive and controlling - and when she tried to ignore him, he broke his one rule (to never go outside without permission) to find the hotel she was staying at in real life and show up to confront her. the incident was completely covered up, both by the nocturnes and with their connections, and so mitzi was forced to stay silent. this entire thing is based on this song! as time heals wounds, though, mitzi will end up doing pretty well for herself and putting achilles behind her - even getting a new boyfriend, jared!

reynard fiala, 20 - dailon’s (ex-)boyfriend, who he’s enraveled in his own weird soap opera subplot with. reynard is a relatively chill person, with an interest in art and taxidermy - just as morbid as dailon’s brother, but in a more. Normal way. genuinely a sweetheart who does not deserve what happens to them: getting cheated on with dailon’s best friend. yipes^2! while it's earth shattering in the moment, all reynard will really want to do come some time to process is to move on and for him and dailon both to heal in peace... far away from eachother (which is easier said than done since taddeo thinks reynard is super cool and loves having him over, the awkwardness between them and his brother be damned)

jared summers, 21 - the most normal person here. a longterm best friend of dailon’s, and yes, the very same one i just mentioned. he’s not the sharpest knife in the drawer - what we in the industry would call a himbo if his dumbassery didn’t cause very real damage - who had been pining for dailon for years and him dating was no deterrent, and dailon, thinking the world revolves around him as he tends to do, accepted jared’s confession so they just kinda started dating on the side. jared has the moral backbone of a pool noodle, and even after it causes dailon’s relationship with reynard to fall apart, will need a wholeass intervention to be staged to make them both realize just how shitty they’re being. after that, though, jared will end that mess and be on his way to becoming a better person himself - with the help of a sweet girl he’s met online.

jared and mitzi dating in the future is the most contrived thing on the planet but just hear me out that it’ll be HILARIOUS for achilles to check in on his ex-girlfriend and find she’s dating his cousin’s best friend, who said cousin was apparently dating on the side. very small world, it is.

anyway, thank you if you’ve somehow stuck around to read this entire thing - this isn’t even getting into jeremie’s half of this whole ordeal, which includes some of these fellas’ friends and partners, as well as more crazy rich people nonsense. it’s been very fun to think about and i do love it all dearly, even if putting it all together it’s SUCH a mess.

we don’t intend to make anything Legit out of this, it’s honestly just a fun way to pass the time. it’s the adult equivalent of playing dollhouse. in our minds this is like a 20 season soap opera but actually explaining it to other people it’s just like this

but thank you again for letting me babble i hope it was somewhat entertaining! and again, godspeed if you managed to read this much XD

#nocturnes #ichor nocturne #icarus nocturne #achilles nocturne #tommy nocturne #jael anatra nocturne #joaquin anatra nocturne #taddeo anatra nocturne #dailon anatra nocturne #mitzi moon #jared summers #reynard fiala

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ladyloveandjustice · 4 years

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MHA BABYSITTING ADVENTURES CONCLUDE

HERE IT IS, THE BEST LINE IN MY HERO ACADEMIA SO FAR. WITH JUST A FEW WORDS, I LIKE CAMIE NOW.

I mean it’s not just me she won Bakugou’s heart too:

Camie’s illusions are truly magical. THIS IS SINCERELY THE MOST JOYFUL I’VE SEEN BAKUGOU BE OVER ANYTHING, AND APPARENTLY HE’S HAD THE ABILITY TO NAIL THE OURAN HIGH SCHOOL LOOK HIMSELF AND WAS JUST WAITING FOR THE OPPORTUNITY TO USE IT THIS WHOLE TIME???? AMAZING. (He canNOT do the voice though! His raspy little ikemen imitation is actually pretty adorable in how bad it is)

(I also cannot believe he gave illusion!Todoroki a bad pun nickname and legit thought it was the height of comedy, BUT BASED ON HIS USUAL TASTE IN NICKNAMES I GUESS SHOULDN’T BE SURPRISED)

MEANWHILE MY CLUELESS SON

I ALSO LUV THIS GOOD BOY

anyway the solution to bratty kids is just to build them an amusement park, all parents take note.

“I’M SAYING THIS REALLY HYPOTHETICALLY, IT’S NOT LIKE I HAVE MULTIPLE EXPERIENCES GETTING OWNED OR ANYTHING, OKAY”

it’s basically:

Bakugo *about to vomit*” I g-gu-guess MAYBE violence actually is-isn’t the a-answer s-sometimes

Todorki: *pats on shoulder*” I know that was hard for you man its okay here’s some dramamine

I love that horikoshi decided “the next step in bakugo’s character arc should be that he learns to babysit and holds hands with a five year old and lectures him about the importance of getting on the sweet ice slide with your friends this is naturally where this character is going” it is so perfect to me.

“LISTEN HERE LITTLE SCHOOL-BULLY-CHAN, I’M YOUR SCHOOL BULLY SENPAI, HERE IS MY PSA: BEING A BULLY IS REALLY FUN (GOD I LOVE LOOKING DOWN ON PEOPLE) BUT ALSO I GUESS IT’S ACTUALLY NOT A FULFILLING WAY TO LIVE YOUR LIFE AND YOU WON’T REALIZE HOW MUCH YOU SUCK!!!! ONE DAY YOU’LL REALIZE THAT NERD YOU PICKED ON IS WAY BETTER THAN YOU AND IT WILL LITERALLY MAKE YOU CRY, TRUST ME. SENPAI OUT.

i mean he really does call himself senpai AMAZING.

I JUST LOVE SEEING MY SON HAPPY OKAY

S A M E

and that’s all i’ll say about that. i know the general direction this arc is going, and that’s it’s not quite as bad as it could be in some respects but nnnn. I am at least looking forward to seeing if we’ll eventually learn more about the other members of Todoroki’s fam though, I find his siblings pretty interesting and want to deal more with how his mom feels about things.

1000% endorse this btw

also endorse THIS

I DON’T THINK ANYONE’S ACTUALLY. MISUNDERSTANDING KIRISHIMA HERE, SATO, THIS EXPLAINS A LOT ABOUT HIM

I MEAN PLEASE NOTE BAKUGO’S IMMEDIATE RESPONSE:

Kirishima: ‘YOU KNOW I LOVE IT WHEN A MAN SAYS THAT TO ME BAKUGO!!!’

i mean literally:

ALSO AOYAMA’S A WEIRDO WHO DOESN’T KNOW HOW TO SHOW AFFECTION WITHOUT USING CHEESE BUT MIDORIYA ROLLS WITH IT AND NOW THEY’RE FRIENDS YAY

v. important pic, i luv mina’s mug, when do we get a mina arc i want 12 mina arcs.

#nev watches mha

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n1ghtt1me-stars · 4 years

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Part 10 (1)

Warlock saunters vaguely through life (Warlock saunters vaguely into their lives part 10) - this work is around 20,000 words so will be uploaded in eight parts every week

work on ao3, part one, part two, part three, part four, part five, part six, part seven, part eight, part nine

The five years after the non-apocalypse passed quickly and peacefully.

And Warlock really didn't want anything to change.

In school, he had very few friends - really they were more acquaintances than friends - other quiet people he sat with in the library and the computer suite because everyone knew that they wouldn't disturb each other. Warlock wasn't even a hundred per cent certain on all their names.

After his last GCSE exam, he went straight home. It was physics and Warlock was pretty sure he lost all the marks except on the parts about Space, as Crowley had helped him revise that topic. There was talk about a party that all his year was invited to, but it felt presumptive to assume he was a part of that group.

The tube had become part of his everyday routine: headphones in, head down and praying that it wasn't crammed (though it usually was).

There was a well-done-on-your-exams cake waiting when he arrived home. Crowley and Aziraphale stood proudly behind the table with the cake on it. Smiling, Warlock walked over and gave them a hug. Neither of them really understood human school though they celebrated each achievement and somehow cake became a part of it.

Aziraphale began to plate some slices of cake while Crowley turned to him and asked, "How was school, dear?"

"S'alright," Warlock replied. "Hated the test but my physics teacher gave us sweets afterwards. I think she pitied us."

Crowley laughed and Warlock continued with descriptions of his classmates' looks of despair. Aziraphale chimed in with "Oh those poor dears. Were exams one of mine or yours?"

Leaning back in his chair as he thought, Crowley eventually said, "I can't remember. I think I did it but it could have been a favour."

"I swear," Warlock said, "if you didn't give me cake, I would be really annoyed right now."

Later that evening, Warlock laid on his bed on his phone. Somehow, he had become friends with Adam and his lot. Not so much Wensleydale and Brian (Warlock did get Wensleydale's help with physics as well though it didn't pay off). He spoke a bit with Adam who really liked plants, and Warlock had grown up in Crowley's garden so they had some common ground.

Mostly, Warlock messaged Pepper. They both did ICT as a hobby and as a GCSE (Brian also did the exam but only because he thought it would be easy). Pepper was also into social justice and Warlock knew the best way to be heard in both Britain and America through his father’s complaints.

(They also both liked romantic comedies and were too ashamed to admit it to anyone else)

Is Adam still prepping for the party? Warlock sent Pepper after their rants about exams died off.

Of course. Been planning this since his fifteenth. Warlock can feel Pepper rolling her eyes. He's even made a truce with Johnson because he can get drinks for the after-party.

That's dedication. How's he hiding it from his parents?

Convinced Anathema it’s a rite of passage. She's going to distract all the adults including your parents after the barbecue so we can go to the treehouse.

Sounds fun. And it really did. Since his eleventh birthday, it had become a tradition to throw a joint party with Adam. His parents were usually abroad so they travelled to Tadfield for roughly a week.

To you maybe. Adam’s been setting up rubbish bags and threatening to fight anyone who litters in his woods.

Haha so glad I don't help plan these things

Wish you did, Pepper quickly replied before sending another message, it's annoying that you can't come during Christmas or Easter

I know. Two more years and then I don't have to go back to my parents’ house.

Only two years. Can't believe we're all growing up. Pepper sent.

Yeah, neither could he. Growing up was a surreal thing. Changes happened without you noticing; he doesn't know when the last time he called Crowley Nanny was. He remembered being teased for having servants and stopped referring to Nanny in school. And then, it bled into his home life. Warlock wasn't sure if Crowley noticed because he never said anything, but it made Warlock a little sad thinking about it.

I know. Think Adam will mature once we turn 16?

Nope. Still be thinking he's the centre of the universe till someone knocks him down a couple of pegs

Warlock laughed aloud at that. Adam was regularly self-centred, but he meant well most of the time. Once, when they were thirteen, he didn't talk to Warlock for weeks after he couldn't come over for Christmas despite him explaining why. It took Pepper hitting him for Adam to apologise.

The year after, Adam posted a book about coding to the Dowling house. Warlock still wasn't sure how he got that address.

Before he could reply to Pepper, she messaged again that her mum needed her so she'd talk tomorrow. It was only ten so Warlock doodled in his notebook a bit; he could do rough sketches of a variety of plants and flowers without thinking. For his art GCSE, most of his coursework had been based around plants because he could use Crowley's garden as a source. A few years ago, Crowley had expanded to a greenhouse on the roof (which Warlock was pretty sure was closed off to tenants) and it was so beautiful and full of lush plants in there.

It was definitely one of Warlock's favourite places.

A couple of weeks later (most of it was spent catching up on sleep), Warlock packed for their trip to Tadfield. Technically, he wasn't a military kid like the others he grew up with who moved every few years. But, on the other hand, as a diplomat's son, he went on more short-haul trips so packing was a breeze.

Going through his mental list, he packed his clothes effectively so he could take his tablet and laptop. He knew Aziraphale would be taking enough books for the week so he didn't have to worry about that.

Suitcase ready and his phone on charge for the car journey, he went up to the roof. He passed Aziraphale prepping packed lunches in the kitchen: most likely simple sandwiches if he was trying to make something without magic.

It was a rare clear day and Warlock could see miles of the city all around from the rooftop however he couldn't hear the busy streets. Apparently, plants needed a calm, clean atmosphere (even though they were already in a greenhouse) so the roof was quiet and smelled of clean air and not the usual scent of exhaust fumes.

Pushing open the door to the greenhouse, Warlock was met with a warm wall of humidity. Crowley stood over some vibrant green ferns with his water sprayer, inspecting for any damage and threatening them.

"You all better grow well when I'm away," he said as the leaves trembled. "or you'll know what'll happen. I don't think any of you can survive a fall from a roof."

Warlock gently stroked a shaking leaf and it stopped trembling. As if communicating with the others, all the plants went still and Crowley turned to glare at him. "You and Aziraphale are way too nice to them."

"Yeah," Warlock said, "We're the ones who are too nice."

Crowley waved the spray bottle at him before giving the plants one last glare. Walking out of the greenhouse, Crowley asked, "Are you ready to go?"

To be honest, his stomach was turning. Each year, it was terrifying to be celebrating his birthday with people he only saw once a year and only knew because he was standing in the background when the world nearly ended.

"Yep, can't wait," Warlock said. He must have sounded convincing because Crowley told him to put his stuff in the car before going to find Aziraphale.

They stayed in the same rented cottage every year that was always empty despite it being the height of summer. Like the flat, it was a lot smaller than the house he grew up in, but Warlock preferred it. Every floorboard creaked and the chairs felt like they would collapse whenever someone sat on them but it was never empty.

Unsurprisingly, they arrived before lunchtime because of Crowley's driving, so they had the sandwiches at the cottage. Warlock had several messages from Pepper demanding he come into the woods as soon as possible because Adam is getting stressy about the party and someone needs to distract him.

Leaving Aziraphale and Crowley to sort out the cottage, Warlock jumped the fence in the garden as it was the quickest route into the woods. He only came once a year, but he could walk this path with his eyes closed. It was cool beneath the shade of the trees, yet the light that filtered through made the whole area a nice golden hue. The air had a similar feel to the greenhouse: clean, fresh and the furthest thing from the city air.

The first thing he heard was Adam's voice. "Hang the paper chains evenly in the branches," he shouted. Warlock walked into the slight clearing in time to see Pepper glare at Adam. "Please," he added reluctantly at her look.

No one was really sure if Adam still had his powers, but Adam swung round to lock eyes with Warlock as if he just knew he was there.

"Warlock!" He shouted and smiled widely. However, Warlock's response was cut off when a weight slammed into the back of his knees. Stumbling forwards, Warlock stopped himself from falling as Dog continued to jump and bark at him. For some reason, Dog was always overly enthusiastic around him and no one else.

"Hey," Warlock said as Dog ran over and sat down at Adam's ankles. "How are you?"

"Yeah, I'm fine," Adam said. "It's good you're here actually, you can help Wensleydale with the paper chains. He has no idea how to spread the colours evenly."

Looking over at the tree, Warlock could see what Adam meant. There was a large patch of red on one side of the tree, a couple of stands if blue next to it (where Wensleydale was precariously sitting) and other colours in a pile on the floor. If left to his own devices, all the colours would end up in distinct blocks which would just look weird. "Sure," Warlock said, "I'll save the tree."

"Thank you," Adam said earnestly. Suddenly, he shouted "Brian, no!" before running off to deal with another impending disaster.

On his way over, Warlock said hi to Pepper who was setting up some solar-powered garden lights. "We'll have to take some of that red down," he said to Wensleydale who was clambering down from the tree.

"Yeah," Wensleydale said sadly. He cleaned his glasses on his shirt and put them back on to stare at the paper chains. "I guess it would look better if they were mixed together."

"Yeah..." Warlock said as he studied the colours. "If you get back up in the tree, I'll pass them up and we can spread them out?"

"Sounds good," Wensleydale replied and he climbed the tree again. As they worked, they chatted mostly about the recent exams because that was the only common ground they had.

"How did your RE go?" Wensleydale asked. Warlock was grateful that they had quickly moved on from the physics paper.

"Alright I think," he said as he passed up a green chain. "But it didn't help that Aziraphale kept telling me about misprinted bible quotes. They were all I could remember in the exam."

"Oh, I read about some of those. I think my favourite was 'Thou shalt commit Adultery'."

Laughing, Warlock said, "Nah, 'the unrighteous shall inherit the Kingdom of God' is definitely the best one. It's amazing how these were so wrong with just little mistakes."

Finally finished with the tree (which now looked like an explosion of colour instead of a paint-by-number), Warlock realised that his stomach was growling. Brian and Pepper disappeared a while ago once they had finished their jobs and Wensleydale quickly left as well, claiming he was tired from scrambling around the tree. That just left him and Adam, who was trying to get Dog to stop playing with a scrap piece of paper that he was intent on tearing to bits.

"Dog, drop it!" Adam said. Warlock laughed as Dog ignored him. "Drop it," Adam continued sternly, "or no treats for dinner."

Dog dropped it and Adam looked at Warlock smugly. "I'm pretty sure he only stopped because you mentioned treats," Warlock said and Adam's expression faltered slightly.

No," he said stubbornly. "Dog understood the threat."

"Sure he did," Warlock said, filling his voice with sarcasm. "Well," he added, "I'm hungry so I'm going to ..."

"Come to mine," Adam interrupted. "My mum will be preparing dinner soon."

"Uh..." Warlock couldn't see a valid reason to refuse, except that being around the adult Youngs was weird, but he couldn't admit that to their son. "Sure," he said, "let me just message Crowley."

"Awesome," Adam said, and, as soon as Warlock put his phone back in his pocket, grabbed his arm and started dragging Warlock to his house.

Excluding all the supernatural elements, Warlock wondered if there was anyone else in a similar situation where the child was the one to know that they were adopted and not the adult.

He couldn't help thinking about it as Mrs Young pulled him into a hug and Mr Young gave him a firm handshake. Really, he looked nothing like Mrs Young who shared the same light hair and soft face with Adam, and the only similarity he had with Mr Young was the dark hair colour that his mum also had. Adam, though, did actually look like their son despite not being related.

The situation was strange and Warlock usually tried to ignore it, especially around his family because his father could not find out he wasn't biologically his.

It would be the straw that broke the camel's back; it would be all the excuse his father needed to disown him.

"Sit down," Mrs Young said, ushering Warlock and Adam to the dining table. "I'm making bangers and mash so I hope you're hungry."

"They're vegetarian by the way," Adam said to him.

"Yeah, that's fine," Warlock said. He knew that Adam went vegetarian a while back and that his parents followed his example. Anyway, you could never go wrong with sausages and potatoes.

Warlock could hear the sound of ceramic plates being set out and the kettle whistling in the kitchen. Despite his reservations, Warlock did love being in Adam's house. It was loud and full of life and reminded him of the times when he, Aziraphale and Crowley tried to make a new dish together (with varying degrees of success). It was also the furthest thing from the empty estate that he used to live in.

Once everyone was sat down and eating, Mr Young turned to him and asked, "So, what exams did you do Warlock?"

"Uh, ICT, RE and art," Warlock said, "plus English, maths and combined science of course."

"A good range," Mr Young said, meeting Warlock’s eyes as if he was genuinely interested, "Your parents must be proud."

"Yep," Warlock said, quickly shoving a forkful of mash into his mouth so he didn't have to say anymore. He was pretty sure his father's lecture on why he should do more useful subjects like politics or business lasted an hour when Warlock told him his chosen options.

Thankfully, Adam started talking about the party. He omitted the part about the truce and Johnson bringing alcohol but he waved his cutlery around as he spoke about all the decorations and the games they' were going to play in the woods.

"I'm thinking that we play games that we used to play as kids," Adam said, as though he never stopped playing those games. "Forty forty in is good in the dark..."

"How do you play?" Warlock asked.

Adam turned to look at him with wide eyes, "You've never played?" Adam said. Warlock looked away slightly from his shocked look. As a child, the only game he could remember playing was soccer (well football here, that was probably the only American thing about Warlock) when some of his mother's friends brought their children round. Names of games like 'bulldog' and '123 home' were suggested if he remembered correctly but soccer was the only thing they all knew so they didn't have to waste time explaining it. He never had regular friends to develop these kinds of games with.

"No..." Warlock eventually said, focused on the food in front of him as he cut the sausages into tiny, regular pieces. "I've never heard of it."

"That's fine," Adam said, his cheerful mood not at all affected. "You can be on my team and we’ll destroy the others."

"We never played in teams," Mrs Young added. "If you was IT, you had to do it alone."

"Well, in my version there’s teams and it's more fun when you have someone to work with."

"Okay dear, finish your food," Mrs Young said, gesturing to Adam's half full plate which he had been ignoring whenever he spoke.

They finished in relative silence and Warlock helped Mrs Young carry the plates into the kitchen as Adam took Dog out into the garden. "You're such a polite boy," she said, "not like the chaotic demon I raised." Warlock laughed though it was more at the fact that she didn't know how right she was. "Are you excited for the barbeque tomorrow?" she asked.

"Yeah," Warlock said. "Thank you for hosting it again. They're always brilliant. This will be the fifth one-- won't it?"

"Oh its no trouble," Mrs Young said, dismissing his praise with a wave of her hand. "I can't believe you're all growing up so fast. Soon, you'll be at university and then adults. First, it was Adam's sister and now Adam. Oh God," she paused and wiped her eyes, "I better stop before I start weeping."

Warlock scuffed his feet against the floor. "It's alright," he said, feeling like an intruder. Adam had told him late one night in a rare honest conversation that his older sister visited less and less and that it made his mother upset. In return, Warlock told him how his parents had been distant growing up and he disliked people like his sister, who selfishly took their parents' love for granted.

Adam didn't argue with him. He only said that he was glad Warlock was with Aziraphale and Crowley now.

"Go hang out with Adam," Mrs Young said as she shooed him out of the kitchen. "I'll get Arthur to help me."

Leaving her shouting for her husband, Warlock went into the garden where he found Adam laying on the recently-mowed grass with Dog. The sun was just setting, turning the sky red (Warlock hoped that meant the weather would be good tomorrow for their birthday). Sitting down next to him, Warlock saw that Adam's eyes were closed but he knew that Adam was aware that he was there. He waited in silence until Adam opened his eyes.

From his position sitting up, Warlock had to lean over slightly so he could make eye contact with Adam. "Are you going to stay there all night?" he asked.

"Maybe," Adam said with a smirk. Honestly, Warlock wouldn't be surprised if Adam actually did as he always seemed to belong more outside.

"In that case," Warlock said as he stood up, "I'll be heading back to sleep in a proper bed."

Adam groaned but scrambled quickly to his feet. "I'll walk you back," he said. There were grass stains all down his back and loose stands in his hair. Warlock tried to help by picking some of the pieces out but stopped quickly when he felt Adam still beneath his hand.

"You don't have to," Warlock said, feeling slightly guilty for disturbing him.

Adam waved him off. "I want to," he said, smiling brightly.

Adam took them along the main road instead of the through the woods even though it was longer. Surprisingly, Adam kept quiet (only interrupting occasionally to ask questions) when Warlock spent most of the walk talking about some new plants Crowley had gotten recently and how they were so pretty Warlock had already drawn them many times trying to capture them right.

Finally, they reached the cottage. Pausing at the gate to say goodbye, Warlock was shocked when Adam pulled him into a quick hug. Adam pulled away too soon for Warlock to hug him back and said, "You're so going to love your present tomorrow."

"I bet my present for you is better," Warlock said almost automatically as his brain was still processing the hug.

Adam laughed and said, "Doubt it," before running off.

When Warlock woke up the next morning, his memory of his conversation with Adam was crystal clear while the rest of the evening after that was a complete blur in his mind.

Next part

#warlock tags along #warlock grows up #warlock saunters vaguely into their lives #good omens #good omens fanfiction

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kisskissbanggang · 5 years

Text

Righteous

[<10 min. read, ~1.6K words -- Church!Mark x Female reader -- Smut. -- Mild corruption, temptation]

[Church boy Mark for @hellapainyo💕]

You knew you shouldn’t feel like this. Mark was the cutest, but he was your younger brother’s youth group leader, even studying to become a minister. Visiting home from college was always conflicting because you knew you’d be spending a lot of time at church since your family was still really into it. It wasn’t really your thing anymore for your own reasons, but you knew it was easier to just make them happy while you were home. Besides, you could look at Mark during church and check him out when you picked up your brother from youth group.

It was Friday night, and your parents cajoled you into joining them to watch some horrid improv comedy night thing the youth group was doing as a fundraiser for a camping trip. Harmless, right? Nope. You should’ve thought that one through. Improv was great but teenagers doing church-friendly and church-inspired improv? Excruciating. So you found yourself sitting in the social hall at church on a Friday night, rolling your eyes and attempting to be a supportive sister. That is, until the subject of sex came up. Suddenly, all the performers in the makeshift comedy club scrambled make sure they recited as much abstinence-forward sex ed as possible and you conveniently found yourself needing to "pee". Grabbing your bag, you made a graceful exit to go hang out in the bathroom for ten or so minutes when you nearly passed Mark sitting in a Sunday school classroom, tuning his guitar. You poked your head into the cracked door, curious. He looked up, startled at your sudden presence as your urges got the better of you and you let yourself into the room.

“Hi,” you greeted, “we never talk, but do you remember me?”

“What? Sure! I have your brother in youth group. Oh and, I mean, we went to high school together. Is that what you mean?”

“Yeah!” You casually helped yourself to a tiny chair next to his. “We actually had health class together, remember?”

“Right! I knew we had a class or two together but I didn’t remember which.”

“So…” You steeled yourself, knowing you couldn’t help yourself, “I see the youth group received the same sex talk as our awful class back then.”

Mark’s eyes widened, stammering up the will to defend your sudden attack. He struggled to make eye contact with you, and you almost dared him to look at your tits. You were now very satisfied that your parents dragged you out of the house at the last minute, not getting a chance to throw on a bra under your comfy jeans and t-shirt combo. What had attracted you to Mark in the first place was how he used to look at you back in high school, and now he had the gall to pretend to sort of remember you? Good. He deserved to be tortured by your nipples poking through the thin t-shirt under your jacket, the nubs perked up from the friction. He gave in, much to your chagrin. His eyes barely fluttered wider when he noticed, still babbling some crap about how the youth group wasn’t suffering by only being taught abstinence.

“You know, you come across as a bit of a hypocrite when I know you dated and fooled around.”

“Right,” he sighed, “but those don’t count. I regret those choices and I want these kids to benefit from my hindsight.”

“Or, you know, they could learn all their options and the facts and make their own choices.”

“That doesn’t feel responsible.”

“I respectfully disagree.”

Mark got up, exasperated with the conversation. He laid his guitar on the large table in the room, running a hand through his hair as he attempted to keep his cool. “You know, you weren’t like this in high school.”

You rose to meet him, nudging close and daring him to ogle you. “You barely knew me in high school. You know me even less now.”

“Right. So what gives you the right to criticize how I teach these kids?”

“Because my brother’s one of those kids, and I don’t appreciate you misleading him. Just because you had some bad experiences doesn’t mean you can take that out on them.” The tense void between you had become minuscule in your mutual urge to keep quiet, even though the classrooms were a good walk away from the social hall. You looked up, noticing Mark staring at your lips. Your eyes met. Before you could even tell what came over you, your lips crashed against his. Who had leaned in first? You had no clue, but you couldn’t resist a once in a lifetime chance like this.

Mark’s hands were in your hair as his lips couldn’t decide where to go next. “I definitely don’t remember you being so outspoken,” he mumbled against your neck.

“I don’t remember you being so uptight,” you shot back, pulling open a couple buttons on his shirt so you could suck a bruise onto his chest. He hissed out a moan and tugged you off of him for another kiss, your tongues fighting for dominance. You weren’t sure what compelled you to be like this with him. Spite? The devil itself?

“Give me a break,” he nearly growled, groaning as he let himself grope your breasts, “I have a lot of responsibilities and I’m under a lot of pressure.”

“Oh, then allow me to help alleviate some of that.” You dropped back down onto the tiny chair and roughly tugged his belt and pants open to finally see his cock. “Oh my god,” you breathed. He was so hard already.

“Shh,” he laughed, reaching to trace his thumb along your chin before pulling you closer, “don’t curse like that; I’ll only get distracted.”

“My mistake, I’ll just use less offensive curses like–” You yelped as Mark suddenly shut you up by pulling your lips onto his dick. He threw his head back, moaning as his grip on your hair tightened. He fucked your mouth gently as he lamented his lack of self-control. “Awh, fuck, this is so bad,” he whined. You retaliated his sentiment by pulling yourself further along, relaxing your throat and taking him all the way down to the base. He gasped sharply and began fucking your mouth more roughly. You pressed your hands to his thighs and pulled off of him, switching to jerking his whole length, your hand swiping up and down his hard dick.

“I always wanted to do this,” you moaned seductively for him. If he was going to do something as naughty as this you may as well give him some good memories.

“I’ve always wanted you to,” he panted, “but I can’t cum yet. I have to fuck you. You on protection?” He only sank down onto his knees in front of you once you nodded and began pawing at your jeans. You didn’t have the time or energy to point out the irony. He hurriedly pulled your pants down just enough to feel your wet pussy on his fingers, making you gasp and whine as he kissed you again. The tiny Sunday school chairs put you at just the right height for him as he knelt, pulling your knees up and shoving them against your chest as he sank into you, having pulled your pants down just enough to fit. You bit your lip at the pleasurable stretch, only exaggerated by the position he was taking you in, and it really did feel like he was taking you. It was nothing short of an amazing sensation. He only lasted a few minutes in this position before he needed to try something else, pulling out and bending you over on the carpeted floor. You must’ve been a sight – your ass in the air with your pussy exposed and dripping, practically dying and actively begging for Mark to fill you again.

Mark’s fingers dug into your hips before pulling you back up against him. One hand snaked under your shirt to tease your nipples as the other desperately rubbed your clit, making you tremble under him as he only added to your approaching orgasm. In this position his cock may as well have lived in your g-spot and it was making you lightheaded. “You have no idea how long I thought of doing this,” he moaned, excitedly powering through as you neared your peak. “I’ve pictured you cumming so many times,” he whispered in your ear while he playfully tugged on your nipple. He never stopped rubbing you and teasing you, even as you begged him to hold back or else you’d cum. Eager to finally make it happen, he only stopped teasing you to pull his hand out of your shirt and clap it over your mouth as you finally hit your orgasm, clamping your thighs together tight as you shuddered and spasmed. You heard Mark’s breathing grow ragged behind you, apparently nearing his own as well.

“Mark,” you panted as you looked back at him, “please cum in me.” He let out a surprised grunt at your explicit demand and slid his hands over your hips to hold you tight, cursing quietly as he couldn’t hold back anymore. His vice grip on you wavered as you enjoyed the sensation of his thick cum coating your sensitive walls.

You took a second to recuperate after his orgasm, laughing smittenly to yourself as you realized Mark’s silence was him coming to terms with what just happened. “So,” you prodded as you pulled off his cock, getting up and making yourself presentable again, “Thank you. I'd re-think the sex ed discussion for the future if I were you, seeing as you still enjoy it and everything.” You cheekily kissed his forehead before strutting off to actually use the bathroom now, leaving Mark still kneeling on the floor of the classroom with his wilting dick out and wondering what the hell to do. You were pleased as you walked away, content that it would be a lot more fun to go to church when you visited now.

#cznnet #neowritingsnet #I LITERALLY MEANT TO DO A DRABBLE HOW DID THIS HAPPEN #nct smut #nct imagines #nct fanfic #mark lee #mark lee smut

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whatdoyouexpectthistime · 4 years

Text

MJS Aftermath - SIX FEET Part 2

Both Ishigami and Kaga were more than excited to see the figure on the other side of the door, leaping at him with reckless abandon, but Miho slumped against the door frame. Jazz appeared behind her, biting her lip as Subaru fought the puppies off to wrap Miho in a tight embrace.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered into her hair, shoving the foil covered casserole he had in one hand at Jazz.

This time, Miho didn’t cry, even if Subaru did.

“It doesn’t have coriander in it, does it?”

“You love coriander!” he attempted to joke, but the look on Jazz’s face told him he’d made a terrible blunder.

“No,” Miho disagreed quietly. “That’s Seiji.”

“Oh,” Subaru dropped, cringing a second but he had a smile affixed when he finally brought Miho to arm’s length.

“It’s fine,” she smiled back. “Everyone’s in a bit of a tizzy at the moment.”

“Except you,” he noted a little quizzically. “The very picture of calm and collected.”

“How many times has he nearly died?” she asked, turning and heading into the living area with the pups on her heels. “Every other week, really, right?”

Glancing sideways at Jazz, Subaru followed, shrugging awkwardly. It was clear to Jazz that Subaru didn’t have the words, not to comfort Miho, or himself. True, Subaru and Goto always bickered, but their actions had proven time and time again they were best friends.

“Tea? Coffee?” Miho chirped, obviously attempting to change Subaru’s grim expression.

“Yeah,” he answered ambiguously, scrutinising the house’s interior as he trailed Miho and Jazz into the kitchen.

“Yeah what?”

“What happened here?” he replied, only looking more confused. “This place is spotless.”

Another blunder for anyone who knew Goto was a bit on the untidy side.

“Are you suggesting my home is usually a mess?” Miho sniffed.

“Well, no,” he stumbled. “But there’s clean, and then there’s I could eat off the tiles clean.”

“We’ve been keeping busy,” Jazz clarified.

“Because work isn’t enough to keep us occupied apparently,” Miho dropped sarcastically.

“Should you even be wandering around?” he then asked of Jazz, who while obviously pregnant did not seem to be in any discomfort.

“Being pregnant isn’t a disability, you know,” she grunted, then dropped her voice. “Unlike being an idiot.”

“I heard that,” Subaru grated sourly, but his brows lifted when Miho let out a chuckle.

“If I didn’t know better, I’d think this comedy routine was for me.”

Both her friends fell silent.

“Oh, cut it out will you?” she huffed, throwing up her hands in annoyance. “Come on, Subaru, you’ve known Seiji far longer than me, so you should know this is bullshit.”

“Um…” he squirmed. “I’ve seen the evidence, Miho, the forensics…”

“Yeah?” she snorted. “You know who saw the evidence for Daisetsu’s ‘death’? The forensics? I did, and we all know how that ended.”

Knowingly, and not very discreetly, Jazz rolled her eyes to Subaru.

“Cut that out,” Miho snapped. “He’s not dead, and that’s all there is to it.”

She left them both standing in the kitchen a little bewildered by her curtness, but Jazz eventually let out a heavy sigh.

“I tried to talk to her about funeral arrangements, but she just shuts me down,” she explained solemnly. “I get where she is coming from, what with Daisetsu’s faked death, but if Captain Ishigami and the whole of Public Safety is sure, then…”

Helplessly, she shrugged.

“She doesn’t want me to comfort her,” she exhaled, her eyes misting over a little, and Subaru drew closer. “I don’t know how to comfort her, and I’ve always known.”

“We just be here,” he said, offering his arms and an awkward but honest hug. “So, when she figures out what she needs, we can be there to give it.”

People came and went, but it was the arrival of Goto’s parents and brother that complicated the situation more. Under any other circumstance, the presence of family might have brought some solace, but Miho was… as Miho was – forward about her opinion.

“I’m not interested in burying an empty casket,” she declared stubbornly.

Haruka looked tearily helpless.

Shinichi scowled.

Issei became angry.

“I thought you loved him!” he barked, and Miho’s face darkened in response.

“I love him, present tense,” she snapped. “And it’s because I love him, know him, trust him, that I can’t and won’t believe he’d be stupid enough to get killed.”

“But Miho,” Shinichi beseeched, and in an unusual sign of physical affection he attempted to hug her.

Miho dodged.

“No, Dad,” she argued.

“You’ve always known his work was dangerous,” Shinichi continued, his tone settling back into something gruffer. “As much as we might want this not to be true, there are things beyond our control, beyond Seiji’s control.”

“You go,” Miho told them, nodding emphatically. “I understand. If you believe this, then you need to find closure, but I will not put another box in the ground.”

The door slammed, Kaga and Ishigami lucky to scoot through with tails intact.

In the bedroom, Miho paced back and forth until her eyes came to rest on the pinstripe suit laid out across the grey duvet.

Haruka had picked it out. Even though there wasn’t a body as such to put in it, she’d felt it symbolic of his professionalism, of his nature, and an important part of letting him go. Kaga and Ishigami, however, thought the suit made perfect bedding, and curled up together to watch their mother scowl.

“What the hell, Miho?” Issei charged, bursting into the room. “Where do you get off talking to Mum like that?”

His eyes were red – he had been crying, but now he was just angry.

“You think you’re hurting? What about us?” he snapped, spittle peppering the air between them.

“He’s not dead, Issei!” Miho shouted, right into his face, then pointed at Goto’s suit. “It’s empty, you see that? EMPTY.”

“Because what’s left of him is locked up in a mortuary!” Issei fired back, not backing down – but that only drew him into striking range.

Redder still, Issei looked absolutely shocked with Miho’s palm print emblazoned across his left cheek.

“Your brother would be heartbroken you’ve so little faith in him,” she hissed, her eyes wild and her tone low, seething. “Go pick a casket, choose music and scripture and flowers to lay at a hollow grave, but do not think for a moment I will partake in such a farce.”

She moved so quickly her puppies didn’t have a chance to catch up. Bursting from the bedroom, she stalked to the front door past a bewildered Shinichi and Haruka and snatched her jacket.

After stomping several blocks, Miho hailed a taxi, glad she left emergency money secured in the inside pocket of her coat. It was enough to get her to Station, where Agasa raised an eyebrow at her in recognition. The death of a police officer, regardless of what department they belonged to, did not remain a secret for very long, and though Agasa might have seen Goto and Miho only a handful of times – if that – Second Unit had raised more than a few glasses in honour of a fallen comrade and a good man.

“Mrs. Goto,” he greeted softly, as Miho sat herself down on a stool at the bar. “What can I get you?”

“Enough whiskey to make it all go away,” she replied, not questioning how he knew her, just tapping the bar with her fingertips expectantly.

Agasa knew well enough when to argue with a customer and when to let them drink. At least if she was there, he could keep an eye on her, call in backup if things got a bit too ugly. He placed the bottle down beside her, though it was only a third full, then a glass.

“Don’t go too overboard,” he warned her softly, and in response she grunted and poured for herself.

As she drank, she muttered, but she was not looking for a response from Agasa or those who came and went.

“Shouldn’t have done that,” she murmured, shaking her head.

Hitting Issei like that – she knew she’d done a bad thing and would have to apologise.

“How can I convince them?” she sighed, staring into her glass but quickly turning her head when she sensed a presence close behind her.

“Convince who of what, Princess?” Baba enquired in his usual happy tone.

“You know what,” she replied dryly, taking another sip as he sat down beside her. “You know everything.”

“It is true I know a lot of things,” he smiled, waving to Agasa before pointing at Miho’s glass. “Not quite everything, though.”

Working with Baba at the agency had proven both a blessing and a curse at times. He had this infuriating way of being jovial no matter what happened, this ability to see the upside in even the darkest of situations. It could be both uplifting and excruciating at the same time. There was also the fact that he had made himself available on and off through Miho’s single years as a physical comfort: the best kind of friend with benefits.

“What are you doing here?” she asked him, still not looking into his face.

She wasn’t sure she could stand to see the sparkle in his eyes or the playfulness on his lips.

“You know this is a police bar, right?” she added.

Baba shrugged.

“I don’t know why I should be concerned,” he smirked. “I’m a law-abiding citizen; besides, I don’t think Detective Ayase meets the height requirement to get in.”

Miho might have snorted, but the air in her lungs was lethargic, morose.

“Come on, Princess,” he crooned, giving her arm a gentle nudge with his, as Agasa put a tumbler down in front of him. “I tracked you down because I thought you’d have given me a call by now.”

“I’ve been a little preoccupied,” she pointed out, emptying her glass and pouring herself another, then one for Baba.

“Yes, yes, funerals – so many little details to plan for,” he agreed, one hand moving in an animated way as he spoke. “Eulogies and floral arrangements and boxes for burial.”

Now, Miho looked at him, her eyes narrowed. But she said nothing, studying him, searching him. What he said was not meant to hurt her; no, he was teasing her because…

“Tell me,” she demanded in a cold hiss, turning her body to his. “Tell me I’m right.”

“Right about?” he poked, obviously enjoying the little game, pushing her because he indeed knew her well enough he knew her limits.

“I will fucking deck you, Mitsunari,” she growled, leaning forward and baring her teeth. “Tell me I am right. He isn’t dead.”

“Hot damn, you’re sexy when you get angry,” he grinned. “You really ought to wear more leather.”

Limit.

He probably could have dodged, but he didn’t, so when Miho grabbed him by the tie and dragged him off his barstool, he slid off easily.

“Riding crop, too,” Baba added, allowing himself to be dragged to a booth and shoved into it.

“Cut the shit,” she hissed, dropping in opposite him. “Playtime is over.”

“A little birdy told me something fascinating,” he admitted finally, triumphant. “Did you know that DNA identification of burnt bone can be pretty reliable?”

Eyes sharp, Miho brain raced ahead to find Baba’s point before he voiced it.

“In extremely bad cases though, if someone was to use, say, white phosphorus or thermite, for example, bones don’t leave much at all – no nuclear DNA – and even mitochondrial profiles are sporadic in their reliability at best.”

“The gang he infiltrated had access to thermite and white phosphorus?” Miho blinked.

Of course, she knew Public Safety worked dangerous cases chasing really dangerous people, but for criminals to have and use dangerous chemicals like those put a whole new perspective on it.

“Maybe,” Baba mused noncommittally, “but I think the point is more that it’s highly unlikely any remains burned to that extent could be positively identified.”

Miho licked her lips.

She knew better than to ask about Baba’s sources, and knew through experience – even if she didn’t know how – that his information was always accurate.

“Captain Ishigami wouldn’t, he wouldn’t tell me it’s him if he wasn’t sure,” she exhaled to herself. “He wouldn’t accept the death of a subordinate if there was any doubt.”

“You know the guy that well?” Baba posed. “I mean, these Public Safety guys lie for a living, right?”

“To me? About that?” Miho wondered, her throat dry.

Trembling hands took her mobile phone from her pocket.

“That I don’t know the answer to,” he admitted, leaning a little closer to see what Miho was texting. “Going straight to the top, huh?”

“No, Namba’s out of town,” Miho murmured, as she fired off her text message to Liana, “but Captain Ishigami will do.”

“I wouldn’t want to be him,” Baba smirked swirling the drink he hadn’t touched yet. “You have a plan?”

“Yeah,” Miho rumbled, slipping from the barstool and throwing a fist full of money for her drinks on the counter. “I’m going to get really, really angry.”

Rationality still existed, Miho felt it tugging her in the opposite direction to her destination, but she ignored it. Her rage was a blaze bringing warmth back to the numbness of her flesh, and she allowed it to fill her to overflowing before she arrived at the restaurant Liana had unwittingly revealed as the location of Miho’s target.

“Miho?” Liana blinked, as Miho stalked between the tables – definitely a woman on a mission.

“Mrs. Goto,” Ishigami added, seeming surprised but quick to rise to his feet. “Are you alright?”

“Out of respect for our friendship and your personal and professional relationship with Seiji,” Miho began, her tone an ice-pick: cold, pointed, “I’m going to give you the opportunity to step out with me and have this conversation.”

Understandably, Ishigami looked surprised, but Liana appeared downright shocked and both their mouths hung open too long for Miho’s liking.

“Very well,” Miho grunted. “Explain the conviction you have Seiji is dead, when the extreme heat you’ve admitted rendered the remains you found to nothing but bones?”

People looked in the direction of the standing pair as they remained facing one another, though the volume of their voices was not especially loud.

“I’m no scientist, Captain,” Miho went on to fill the void once more, “or a weapon’s expert, but to reach the kind of temperatures needed to reduce human bone to the condition you found them in, in an open space like that warehouse, you’d need some seriously restricted firepower.”

“Where did you get this idea from?” Ishigami asked finally, his expression a good approximation of concerned.

“You mean, how do I know you grossly overstated the certainty of my husband’s death?” she snapped, the crack of a whip that silenced everything else in the restaurant.

“Miho,” Liana whispered, reaching for her hand, but Miho yanked it away.

“Look into his eyes, Liana,” Miho growled, pointing into Ishigami’s face. “Imagine Seiji is telling you your husband is dead, all the while you’re holding evidence it isn’t true in your hand.”

“I know this is very difficult for you,” Ishigami attempted, watching the maitre’d cautiously approach in his peripheral vision. “No one wants Lieut..”

“I am his WIFE!” she roared, and people at nearby tables flinched at the violence of her retort, the rawness of her emotion. “Difficult is an understatement I will not bear when you know he’s alive.”

“Ma’am, I’m going to have to ask you t…” the maitre’d interrupted, but the freeze of his jaw when Miho’s eyes fell upon him made it clear he saw death in them.

“Tell me where he is,” Miho demanded on little more than a breath, an imperative she exhaled into Ishigami’s face. “Give me the truth.”

“I can see, Mrs. Goto, the truth is too much for you at present,” Ishigami said evenly, but Liana saw him adjust his glasses – noted and filed it. “Grief is…”

“I will not mourn the living,” Miho snarled, blind to the much larger man who had come to back the maitre’d.

“Ma’am,” came a firmer, warning voice.

Miho tilted her head in some form of acknowledgement but maintained eye contact with Ishigami.

“I will never forget this pain,” she hissed, gaze like razor-wire. “And I will never forget your part in it.”

Before she could be manhandled out of the restaurant, Miho turned on her heels and strode out, to bystanders a vengeful force of wrathful energy.

(GUEST WRITER @BelXsar! Scene RPed)

There was a full moment of silence, then another, and another, before the interior of the restaurant finally started to return to its former activity before the human whirlwind that was Miho Fujisawa Goto had blown in and then just as dramatically swept out. The restaurant staff resumed their former duties, and the other patrons’ gazes went back to their dining companions, while Liana studied her husband with hers, even as he just as studiously avoided it. They had just been contemplating what to have for dessert when Miho had arrived, but it was clear that any appetite for sweets had vanished just as abruptly. With a sidelong glance towards the discarded dessert menus lying on the table, Captain Hideki Ishigami emptied his water glass, then signalled their waiter and coolly asked for the cheque. The bill paid, he got up, and his wife followed him out of the restaurant.

His hand reached out for hers on the street outside, and Liana took it, noting his grasp was on the cool side as usual but his grip a bit tighter. They strode silently, hand in hand, to where their car was parked, and he opened the door for her before sliding into the driver’s seat. As the car pulled into traffic, he still had yet to meet his wife’s gaze which had remained mostly fixed on him all the while.

On the silent drive home, Liana pulled out her phone and tapped a quick text to Jazz Mann Akiwa, hoping their shared friend would update her on what was going on when clearly her husband had no desire to do so.

Ishigami remained silent even as they arrived home. It was after they entered their flat, taken off their shoes, hung up their coats, and he seemed to be heading towards the bathroom, that Liana finally quickened her stride and cut in front of her husband, putting her hand against the wall to block his path.

Enough was enough.

She had given him the appropriate discretion while they had been in public, despite the maelstrom of questions running through her mind. Now, in the privacy of their own home, she could remain silent no longer.

“Hideki,” she said quietly, softly, yet no less firmly. “What is going on?”

Her dark blue eyes sought out his grey ones, intent.

His hand was half-way to his glasses before he actually stopped himself.

“I thought perhaps I would take a shower,” he explained, as if as much was obvious. “I have an early meeting tomorrow and will not have time in the morning.”

If he knew what she was actually getting at – and the man wasn’t a moron, so he knew – there was not a single hint of it in his expression.

Liana tilted her head slightly and gave him a look, one eyebrow raised. “Please don’t insult me, and I won’t return the favor. You know very well what I mean.”

With practised zen, Ishigami’s expression didn’t so much as twitch; still, when he spoke again, there was at least a little emotion in his tone.

“It is understandable Mrs. Goto would not wish to believe Lieutenant Goto is gone,” he explained, “and regrettable her desire seems to have manifested so strongly. You are right to be concerned; I shall organise for a counsellor to touch base with her tomorrow.”

Liana’s eyebrows drew together a little. “As passionate as Miho can be, she’s not a woman prone to hysterics. And I think you appreciate that, Hideki. This is not just a grieving widow deep in denial and going off the deep end. She said something about extreme heat, and remains being reduced to nothing. Which you didn’t deny. You’re deflecting. Whatever it is, I think Miho has proven in the past she can handle it, any truth, rather than a bunch of lies. As Lieutenant Goto’s wife, she deserves that much, at least.”

Responding seemed a little difficult for Ishigami – not because he didn’t know what to say, but because saying it to his inquisitive wife would not be easy.

“You know I cannot discuss an ongoing investigation,” he told her gently, his brows lowering just a little bit.

He wasn’t without empathy.

“Doing so could put further lives at risk, and that is the very reason rules and protocols exist.”

“Then she’s not wrong.”

Liana’s words were murmured to herself as much as her reticent husband, said in confirmation more than any triumph. She looked back up at Ishigami. “You don’t have to tell her any details. But can’t you at least indicate you’re still just trying to confirm the identification of the remains, and that it’s still an ‘ongoing investigation’? If you tell her to keep things to herself, she will. She understands the importance of discretion, as much for her husband’s safety as the case itself. Just don’t add to her trauma, Hideki. You know she’s not someone you want on the warpath against you, and that’s what’s going to happen if you keep lying to her and suggesting she’s crazy.”

His wife calling him a liar was something he knew he just had to weather. Despite his absolute devotion to the job, it hurt no less.

“I do not believe she is crazy,” he said carefully. “Grief takes a great many forms and denial can be a natural part of the mourning process.”

This wasn’t anything Liana didn’t already know.

“If I lost you,” he continued, hazarding to raise his hand toward her cheek, “I would not wish to believe it, either; I would do anything to undo it… But I cannot give this to Mrs. Goto, or to you, no matter how much we both want to alleviate her suffering.”

She looked down for a moment, shaking her head briefly before taking a breath and looking back up at her husband.

“Things don’t always have to be zero sum, you know. I believe rules exist for the spirit of such protocol rather that the strict letter of them. You don’t want to compromise an ongoing investigation, I understand that. So does Miho. But in this case, especially for her — and I’m not just saying that because she’s my friend; I think she’s proven herself in situations like this –, I think you can maintain the integrity of the investigation while not having to deceive her at the same time. Rules are a dead and static thing, made by humans to serve the needs of a situation. And by the same token, situations can change, and so we can be flexible to adapt while remaining true to overall protocol. It’s not ‘either or’ in this case, Hideki, you must be able to see that. Things need not be robotic; in fact, I think something as dynamic as a complicated investigation is best served by anything but.”

Her look was beseeching as much as it was resolute. She wanted, needed, him to understand that there was more than one alternative, and indeed, a better one existed than what dead, strict rules dictated.

His hand had reached her cheek, his thumb had been lightly grazing the skin as she spoke, but the moment she’d mentioned his way was ‘robotic’, his arm sank back to his side.

“You are operating under the assumption I do not know how to effectively perform my job,” he stated, and indeed, this time he sounded more mechanical, “that I am intentionally wounding Mrs. Goto. Please do not forget our duty is not without risk – risk Lieutenant Goto has always accepted as a necessary evil in the pursuit of people who want to destroy our way of life (writes a presidential speech). Lieutenant Goto’s death will not be in vain provided the integrity of this investigation is not compromised, and in time, Mrs. Goto’s pain will diminish.”

His stoic mask was now firmly affixed, a sure sign to his wife he had been affronted. It was rare he showed anger, whether he felt it or not; it was far more common for him to shut down.

Which is what he did – and before she could speak again he had stepped away.

“I am going to take a shower now,” he asserted.

“Is that part of the fake eulogy you’re going to give?” she threw at his retreating back before she could stop herself, her sarcastic side finding voice in her frustration.

She almost wanted to throw something at the firmly closing bathroom door, but knew it would accomplish nothing but a momentary childish satisfaction of noise to punctuate her ire. She thought she understood her husband enough to get beyond the “cyborg” persona his colleagues often referred to him as, but now she wondered how much she was really able to understand him in the dire situations when she felt she should most.

She bit her lip, and after only a moment’s thought, grabbed her phone to text a quick thanks to Jazz for what she was able to surmise by now. She followed this with a quick text to Miho:

“I believe you. I’m sorry about him.”

Liana didn’t want to go more into it than that, over what was really essentially not that secure a channel. She hoped her friend understood the “him” was her infuriatingly stubborn husband.

Liana stood halfway between the hallway and her bedroom, wondering whether she should get ready for bed or go to Miho to apologize to and try to comfort, and help, her friend. She doubted if she would get much further with Hideki tonight, though a tenacious part of her wanted to try, as well as to make him understand she was not against him, but trying to help him as well as her friend and Lieutenant Goto. Or if it would be more helpful to the situation as a whole to go to discuss things over with her friend. A chime from her phone alerting her to an incoming text helped make up her mind.

“I’m going to need more ice cream.”

It was Jazz, and no doubt Miho had chowed her way through all available potential sources to cool her ire.

“Will hijack an ice cream van and be right over. Preferences?”

“Surprise me.”

PART THREE

#hlitf #her love in the force #seiji goto #ishigami #soma #kaga #kurosawa #shinonome #voltage #voltage fanfiction #hlitf fanficiton #angst #drama #miho #jazz #liana

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ranier-layarte · 5 years

Text

LONG Character Survey: Ranier Leveilleur

BASICS.

FULL NAME: Ranier Kyran Layarte Leveilleur

NICKNAME: Ran, Raven

AGE: 21-25 (depending on expac)

BIRTHDAY: 1st Sun of the 2nd astral moon

ETHNIC GROUP: Au ra (Xaela)

NATIONALITY: Eorzean – From Ul'dah

LANGUAGE(S): Eorzean,

SEXUAL ORIENTATION: No

ROMANTIC ORIENTATION: Isn't this the same as the above?

RELATIONSHIP STATUS: Married

CLASS: Weapon Master

• Proficient in almost all martial weapons.

• Tends to carry multiple weapons at all times.

• Prefers Axes out of all the bladed weaponry

HOMETOWN / AREA: Ul'dah

CURRENT HOMETOWN/ AREA: Shirogane Mansion

PROFESSION(S): WoL, Scion, Machinist, Businessman, Crafter

PHYSICAL: Extremely fit, exercises daily. Muscular build

HAIR: Black/Dark Blue

EYES: Crimson

NOSE: Average, straight, roman-esque

FACE: Straight essentially a greek nose. (At least if I had to try and describe it)

LIPS: A bit on the thinner side, very lightly pink.

COMPLEXION: A mix of Fair and Medium?

BLEMISHES: None

SCARS: Scar on left thigh from stab wound, Scar on left midsection, and upper right thigh.

TATTOOS: WoL tattoo on the palm of his right hand. (Working on giving him another)

HEIGHT: 7'4

WEIGHT: 330 LBS/ 150kg

BUILD: Tall, Muscular, Fit,

FEATURES: None

ALLERGIES: None, at least not yet.

USUAL HAIRSTYLE: Long hair parted in the middle framing the face. Pulled into a ponytail and held with a silver bead big enough for the tail.

USUAL FACE LOOK: Around 40% expressionless, 30% Scowling, 20% Reflective, 10% happy.

USUAL CLOTHING: Higher end clothing generally a mix of casual with formal preferring long pants and a short sleeved shirt. Boots of some kind and armor of some kind at all times. Either under or over the clothes having a preference for the bulkier armors.

PSYCHOLOGY.

FEAR(S): Dying and thereby becoming unable to prevent future deaths and incidents. A fear of the unknown. (Which is part of why he tries to prepare for so many things)

ASPIRATION(S): Being able to amass enough wealth to live comfortably and to continue making the lives of the less fortunate easier. Helping create a better society for all.

POSITIVE TRAITS: Empathetic, Compassionate, Humanitarian, Perseverance, Fairness, Courageous, Loving, Self discipline, Reliable, Thoughtful, Patient

NEGATIVE TRAITS: Bossy, Jealous, Secretive, Grumpy, Harsh, Aloof, Stubborn, Cruel (Only to enemies but that doesn't really matter to people does it?) Arrogant (In some things though less now)

ZODIAC: Pisces

TEMPERAMENT: Mix of choleric and melancholic.

SOUL TYPE(S): King, Warrior, Server (In that order)

ANIMALS: Raven, Bear

VICE HABIT(S): Training, Fixing machines, Drinking, Rubbing Chin,

FAITH: The Twelve (Loosely)

GHOSTS?: I mean if you've seen them you can't deny them.

AFTERLIFE?: With everything we see there has to be right?

REINCARNATION?: Yes, it's clear there is.

ALIENS?: Yes.

POLITICAL ALIGNMENT: Leftist

ECONOMIC PREFERENCE: Prosperous, everyone has what they need. Along with the means to go beyond that if they are willing and able.

SOCIO POLITICAL POSITION: I think there’s enough to go on.

EDUCATION LEVEL: Higher end of the spectrum, attended sharlayan schooling for a few years of his life. (Around three) Was home taught and by other teachers. Extensive knowledge in numerous subjects such as Machinery, Technology, Gunsmithing, Gemology, Business. Holding the equivalent of a mixture of Graduate or Masters in the subjects.

FAMILY.

FATHER: Kyran Layarte

MOTHER: Sahar Layarte

SIBLINGS: Kyari Layarte

EXTENDED FAMILY:

NAME MEANING(S): Ranier (Rainier with out the first I Meaning Wise army apparently)Kyran (Beam of Light) Sahar (Early morning or Dawn) Kyari (???)

HISTORICAL CONNECTION?: My families connection to history? My connection? My father was one of the survivors of the hotgo tribe also. Does fighting in the Calamity among all the other events count?

FAVORITES.

BOOK: Whatever has his current interest, it can very.

MOVIE PLAY: Does this mean Movie or Play?

5 SONGS:

• “Shock me” Baroness

• “Up In The Air” Thirty Seconds To Mars

• “Rise” League of Legends, Glitch Mob, The Word Alive

• “Unbreakable” Of Mice and Men

• “Drown” Bring Me The Horizon

DEITY: Halone

HOLIDAY: Valentione's day

MONTH: March

SEASON: Fall

PLACE: Beside his wife or workshop.

WEATHER: Light rain

SOUND: The turning of pages, the sound of rain, metal moving against each other.

SCENT(S): Smoke, Metal, Old books, and sweat

TASTE(S): Dulcet, Spicy,

FEEL(S): Rocks, Silk, Smooth metals,

ANIMAL(S): This was listed before.

NUMBER: 1? I don't know.

COLORS: Black, Blue, Red, Gold, Silver

EXTRA.

TALENTS: Metalworking, Singing, Sewing, Gem Cutting, Technology, Smithing, Machinery, Dexterous.

BAD AT: Getting rest even now, Not over exerting himself, Not overthinking potential scenarios that may never happen. Dealing with almost all animals, Even now sometimes talking about what bothers him too well, but he’s gotten much better over the years/expansions.

TURN ONS: Caring, Helpful, Courageous, Educated, Aggressive. Listening, Reliable,

TURN OFFS: Selfishness, Boastful, Belligerent, Cruelty, Intolerant, Racism, Weak willed, Careless,

HOBBIES: Creating new things be it machines, armor, clothes, weapons, tools, etc. Working on the same as before. Reading, Exercising, Cooking. Shopping.

TROPES: Pragmatic Hero, Bad ass boast, Big Fancy House, Chekhov's Gun, Determinator, Don't You Dare Pity Me, Genius Bruiser, Heroic Build, It's All My Fault, No Challenge Equals No Satisfaction, Super toughness, Friend to All Children, The Chosen One, The Ace, Ain't Too Proud To Beg, Always Save The Girl, Berserk Button, Death glare, Excuse me while I multi task, Game face, Hypocrite, Lady and Knight, Not So Stoic, Not So Invincible After all, Red Eyes, Take Warning, Stern Teacher, Undying Loyalty, The Power of Love

AESTHETIC TAGS: Workshops, Tools, Kitchens, Weaponry, Guns, Armor, Fine Clothes, Rain, Feathers, Azure Skies, Romance.

VOICE CLAIM(S): Keith Silverstein, (Speaking voice) John Rzeznik (Singing) John Baizley (Singing)

FC INFO.

MAIN FC(S): Free company? Azure Talons.

ALT FC(S): What?

OLDER FC(S): What?

YOUNGER FC(S): What?

GENDERBENT FC(S): What the fuck?

MUN QUESTIONS.

Q1: IF YOU COULD WRITE YOUR CHARACTER YOUR WAY IN THEIR OWN MOVIE, WHAT WOULD IT BE CALLED, WHAT STYLE WOULD IT BE FILMED IN, AND WHAT WOULD IT BE ABOUT?:

• I genuinely don’t know. Something with the grandeur of lord of the rings maybe? But with the ability to add comedy and romance in the proper way. I'm all for serious movies but I enjoy the ability to add a well executed joke or sweet moment. It also would probably not just be a single film. Taking the general events and using my fics as material would probably be fine.

I’d have to think about it a lot more than I will right now

As for the name, well, I don't really have many options. But, probably something with Final Fantasy XIV as the main title. Give it a JRPG title I suppose as a sub title. Sort of like Warriors Dissonance or Uncovered Stories.

Q2: WHAT WOULD THEIR SOUNDTRACK / SCORE SOUND LIKE?:

• Ambient, switching to full of energy, able to convey emotion. Again mentioning LOTR, the score by Howard shore is really great and able to accompany many scenes in such a fantastic manner. As for the other bits perhaps the addition of artist tracks such as from favorite bands and those songs that have meaning to him. Like the ones listed above.

Q3: WHY DID YOU START WRITING THIS CHARACTER?:

• As a way to work on and show that, a character doesn't just have to be overly reliant on tropes and cliches. That those are good as part of them but not as defining traits of them. Along with breaking some of those. Like how all protagonists always have dead parents, what's up with that? I enjoy seeing characters that try to break their molds and be more than that.

Q4: WHAT FIRST ATTRACTED YOU TO THIS CHARACTER?:

• My general thing in any game where you can create your own character has always been. To make who you'd want to be in this universe. I did that and then worked on it and reworked things until I got what I have now. So also, yes, he was a self insert.

Q5: DESCRIBE THE BIGGEST THING YOU DISLIKE ABOUT YOUR MUSE:

• Hard one I suppose but. I'd say how he is capable of doing so much. Even though I work with it as it is a key part of him, it's still hard to make him feel right, feel human when he's got these clear incredible strengths. He's very proficient at so many things some would maybe say he's a mary sue type of character. I make an effort to work on how he became that way to offset it. So it's a lot of extra work than if I had him being a more archetypal hero of his type. I may dislike this the most but I also like it. Love hate relationship you know?

Q6: WHAT DO YOU HAVE IN COMMON WITH YOUR MUSE?:

• A good part of our attitudes and personality though on his end they are greater generally. Along with our want to be as best as we can at certain things.

Q7: HOW DOES YOUR MUSE FEEL ABOUT YOU?:

• Honestly, and in my current state. He would probably be very upset with me and to just know me or the hand I have in his creation and self.

Q8: WHAT CHARACTERS DOES YOUR MUSE HAVE INTERESTING INTERACTIONS WITH?

• Alisaie Leveilleur – She is the main one being his main love interest, girlfriend, and wife later. Though overall he sees her as an equal and a partner, which is part of the reason their relationship grows as much as it does. Along with giving someone who he can trust in and rely on, and vice versa.

• Finn Hogveart - Who harasses Ranier often enough especially with his pet and regarding moogles.

• Alphinaud Leveilleur - and him sometimes get along strangely due to Ranier's relationship with his sister. For a long time he tried to spy on Ranier and make sure he was good for his sister even though he knew he was a good person.

• Cid Garlond - Ranier sees him as a mentor of sorts, along with someone that he can bounce ideas off of and work with on projects leading to a solid relationship between the two. The two sometimes bicker regarding their work but it's always just them being passionate for the projects.

• Gerolt Blackthorn – Similar to cid in some ways. Ranier looks up to Gerolt and his ability to continue making such amazing creations. Wanting to learn more regarding the processes means Ranier visits him when possible, bringing some drinks for him when he does. Almost having a relationship like bros. Ranier also sometimes has gone to try and sway Rowena on his behalf to lower his debt.

There are more but I don’t want to make this too much longer.

Q9: WHAT GIVES YOU INSPIRATION TO WRITE YOUR MUSE?

• I do not control the write, also Alisaie.

Q10: HOW LONG DID THIS TAKE YOU TO COMPLETE?:

Uhhhh maybe an hour all together. Over the course of three hours.

==========

Tagged by: @amandafullmetal @lyllyan-weiss

Tagging: @heyafinney @anikisbox and anyone who wants to do it that sees this.

#Ranier Leveilleur #Ranier Layarte #I did the best I could with it with the time i put into it.#I'm not the best at these either Hopefully someone finds new things or interesting #things from it

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theliberaltony · 5 years

Link

via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

Graphics by Rachael Dottle

I grew up at the top of a hill on the east bank of a river that burned.1 That determined so much.

My maternal grandparents bought the house where I grew up in 1949. They were the rare Catholics in Shaker Heights, Ohio, a suburb of Cleveland, and they lived at the edge of the city, a few blocks away from a Jesuit college and parish. They were entering their 40s, and that they could buy in tony Shaker carried a certain cachet. The city probably wasn’t quite as excited to have them. My paternal grandfather, who was a real estate agent and lived a town over, was sometimes told by sellers in Shaker that they didn’t want their homes shown to any Catholics (like him) or Jews. The city had few black residents then. After one black couple did move to Shaker in the mid-1950s, their newly built home was firebombed in the middle of the night. That determined so much, too.

Parma, a city on the other side of the Cuyahoga River — which bisects Cleveland both geographically and transcendentally — was on the precipice of a wild population sprout in ’49. The city’s neat rows of modest houses still speak to the enthusiasm of its post-war suburban sprawl. In the course of two decades, Parma’s population grew from 30,000 to more than 100,000. It was the butt of Cleveland jokes, though. In a blue-collar part of the country, Parma was almost too blue collar — its flamingos-on-the-lawn, pierogies-in-the-kitchen reputation was so infamously parodied by a local 1960s TV personality that the mayor of Parma called the comedy “a dangerous slur to the community.”

For Cleveland suburbs, Shaker and Parma have little in common other than that, until recently, Democratic presidential candidates could count on their votes. But in 2016, Parma voted for Donald Trump, and Shaker didn’t. To Clevelanders, this split followed a certain logic. Shaker and Parma have long been of different tribes, though the same political party.

The two cities, one racially mixed, the other homogenous, have become my reference point for a cultural fissure in the Democratic Party that gaped open with the election of Trump. White Americans have split politically along class lines, and their alienation from each other following 2016 seems utter and complete. But the split that’s happening isn’t just between residents of rural and urban places. It’s also apparent in some suburbs, among people whose lives aren’t, at least on the surface, all that different from one another’s.

Much of my life since 2016 has been subsumed by politics talk — on podcasts, at parties, in conversations I scribble down in my notebook. Those discussions are often about how Americans find their tribe. Whom you date or befriend might hinge on politics. What city you move to might also, as well as what news you read and what books you take as gospel — whether you take the gospels as gospel matters politically, it turns out.

So, I decided to go home to look at the tribalism of where I’m from. Perhaps familiar ground might lead me down some road of insight. By dumb luck, we’re all born some place, to some kind of people. The choices made for and by us along the way, and the histories we absorb, are what shape our politics. They did in 2016, and they will again in 2020.

On the left, the Ridgewood Inn in Parma’s Polish Village. On the right, Shaker Heights High School’s bleachers.

MADDIE MCGARVEY FOR FIVETHIRTYEIGHT

We don’t spend much time thinking about the suburbs. That’s sort of the point — they’re purposely and pleasantly boring, a cul-de-sac monolith of culture. But the suburbs also form the worldviews of 175 million Americans. Whom you live next to, where your parents went to school, what store opens down the street — all these small things shape the politics of Americans before they even know what politics are.

In the past few years, the suburbs have also shown themselves to be the heart of the shifting politics of the nation. According to exit polls, Hillary Clinton lost the suburbs to Donald Trump in 2016, continuing a slump for Democrats — Obama lost the suburban vote in 2012 after nabbing it in 2008. But in the 2018 midterm elections, Democrats took back the House on the strength of their showing in suburban districts.

Lots of theories for the changing political proclivities of suburban Americans have been floated, and white Americans are front and center. (White people are the majority in 90 percent of America’s suburban counties.) Class has something to do with it. Over the past few years, college-educated white people have been increasingly more apt to vote for Democrats, while those without a college education skew Republican.

But what do we mean when we talk about “class” and politics? While Trump’s campaign consistently served messages of blue-collar empowerment, the people who voted for him were often quite well-off. According to an analysis of American National Election Studies data, 1 in 5 Trump voters without a college degree had a household income over $100,000.

Our concept of class is far too vaguely defined, and our political discussions of it too two-dimensional. Class means more than how much money you make or whether you went to college. It encompasses your understanding of racial identity — your own and that of others — and your perceptions of history, whether you look favorably or unfavorably on the country’s evolution. When we say “working-class white,” what we actually mean is a set of people whose understandings of politics is rooted in a specific set of values: those of racially homogenous communities who came up in America through middle-class jobs, often unionized ones.

If Democrats lose these voters in 2020 — both white blue-collar workers and their blue-collar-identifying descendants — it might portend a dramatically different party over the next few decades, or even century. When I went back to Ohio, I gleaned that how white people vote has quite a bit to do with their pasts — the formation of political identity comes from experiences, oftentimes inherited ones.

Parma and Shaker Heights lie on opposite sides of Cleveland’s metropolitan area and on opposite sides of a cultural divide. That cultural divide became a political one in 2016.

MADDIE MCGARVEY FOR FIVETHIRTYEIGHT

Politics are an iteration of ongoing history. So to understand Shaker’s and Parma’s present moment, I went back to the beginning.

Shaker Heights — current population, 28,000 — is named for the Shakers, the celibate Christian sect that settled in what they called “The Valley of God’s Pleasure.” The Shakers rather predictably lost their mojo around the turn of the 20th century because young people kept leaving, rumspringa-style. By 1905, the 1,366 acres of land they had worked found its way into the hands of real estate developers, the Van Sweringen brothers, who bought it for a cool million.

Shaker was to have neighborhood schools, lakes, canoeing, and no undesirables that would bring down home values. Deed restrictions stipulated architectural style, and only four were acceptable: Tudor, Colonial, French provincial and English cottage. (Historian Virginia Dawson has researched the city’s exclusionary real estate tactics extensively, cataloging the stringent regulations of Shaker’s early years.)

It was a rarified, exclusive atmosphere. An early advert talked about “friendly neighbors of our own kind … the peace and beauty and hominess of Shaker Village can never be invaded.”

Early advertisements for housing developments in what would become Parma.

CLEVELAND PLAIN DEALER

The crucial Van Sweringen innovation, though, was a railway line that took Shaker residents directly from their suburban homes to downtown Cleveland. “Open rolling country and deep woods lie beyond, yet the Public Square is but 30 minutes away by Shaker Electric Express,” an ad from 1926 read. Shaker was cosseted suburban life done to perfection yet still had access to the cosmopolitanism of Cleveland.

Perhaps that’s why early news and advertisements for the development that would become Parma conjured up visions of Shaker Heights. (Parma was incorporated as a city in 1931 and before that was known as Parma Township.) “In many ways, it will rival the Heights district,” a 1921 newspaper item said of Ridgewood, the brainchild of developer (and Shaker Heights Country Club member) H.A. Stahl. There were artificial lakes, and “many acres are set out in wonderful orchards,” an ad trumpeted. “Children … will grow strong and healthy out in Ridgewood. Three hundred and twenty-five feet above Lake Erie, where the air is pure and fragrant with the perfume of flowers.”

But the West Side development seemed ultimately more intent on attracting a humbler demographic. Stahl’s company promised that “the man of modest income can buy a homesite at the price of an ordinary lot in a manufacturing district and live amid beautiful surroundings.” And indeed, the real Parma boom came after World War II, driven by migration from the Eastern European Tremont neighborhood of Cleveland. As Andy Fedynsky, director emeritus of the Ukrainian Museum-Archives in Cleveland tells it, Tremont’s big Ukrainian Catholic church had purchased a cemetery plot out in the suburb. “People started gravitating to Parma because every time they buried a loved one, they went there,” Fedynsky said. The churches and people kept coming in droves thanks to the 10-minute drive on the highway from Cleveland to Parma.

Parma’s identity has remained remarkably cohesive — 88 percent of its residents are white, and it’s still a community centered around churches and the Eastern European experience. Most of the city’s immigrants are European — 71 percent, according to recent U.S. Census Bureau estimates. Evidence of the city’s ethnic pride is still easy to see — on a recent visit, I spotted the Polish eagle on the side of one building and signs for “Old World Christmas” on street lights.

Shaker, meanwhile, has seen drastic change.

Homes in Shaker Heights.

MADDIE MCGARVEY FOR FIVETHIRTYEIGHT

Shaker was built for segregation, at the very least the socioeconomic kind. South Woodland, a lovely, tree-lined boulevard, cuts across the belly of the city, dividing it into north and south. The northern reaches are where the real wealth dwelled and still does — it’s where the Van Sweringens built themselves a Tudor fortress. There, larger lots for mansions were built, close to the Shaker Lakes. To the south of South Woodland, there are smaller lots, meant for modest dwellings, including two-family homes.

Neighborhoods on both sides of South Woodland evoked a certain suburban idyll, but the city was far from immune to the racial violence that typified 20th-century America.

The Baileys were a black family that bought a home in Shaker in 1925. Their garage was soon set on fire, and the windows broken. At the time, the Van Sweringens were adding provisions to deeds that stipulated homes couldn’t be sold to people they didn’t approve of. That was mostly code for black and Jewish buyers. The Baileys soon moved back to Cleveland.

Thirty-one years later, in Ludlow, a neighborhood that straddles Cleveland and Shaker, there was another act of racial violence, this one sparking a much different reaction. On Jan. 3, 1956, a bomb destroyed the garage and part of the dining room of John and Dorothy Pegg’s newly built home in Ludlow. The Peggs were black. In the wake of the bombing, a kind of proto-wokeness in the city was born. For decades to come, a part of Shaker’s identity would be its pride in diversity efforts.

Shaker’s Ludlow Community Association formed after the bombing of a black family’s home. The group tried to deter white flight by giving loans to white buyers while also trying to attract black residents to the Ludlow neighborhood that bordered Cleveland.

CLEVELAND HISTORICAL SOCIETY / SHAKER HEIGHTS LIBRARY

After the bombing, Ludlow residents formed the Ludlow Community Association, a group with aims to integrate the neighborhood purposefully. White real estate agents had stopped listing Ludlow homes by the time the community association formed because the neighborhood was integrating, and homeowners feared that a further increase in black residents would decrease property values. Its strategy was to prevent white flight by setting up a mortgage company, offering help to potential white buyers, while still welcoming black residents with open arms. It was a difficult proposition for the time.

Dawson, who lives in Shaker, lauded the careful strategy of the group. “The genius of the way Shaker Heights integrated was that they were trying to attract white liberals who would move in and become cheerleaders for integration,” she told me. To do that, the community association put white residents front and center, she said, even while black residents “were really the leaders.” Today, Ludlow remains an integrated neighborhood.

But elsewhere in Shaker, similar strategies worked with varying degrees of success on the integration front. The Moreland neighborhood had a less proactive neighborhood association, according to Dawson, and its white residents left. Today, it is nearly entirely black.

American suburban life seems to regress to a mean of segregation. A 2011 analysis using Census Bureau data found that a “typical white” American lives in a neighborhood that’s 75 percent white.

Shaker has spent 60 years trying to fight that. And in the process, the city cultivated what might be called, in the parlance of 2019, a woke white demographic. The identity of the city, which once rested on being wealthy and WASP-y, turned unmistakably liberal.

This sort of wokeness has become a trope in today’s Democratic Party, empowering to some, alienating to others. But there’s evidence that white Democrats’ views on race have shifted quite a bit over the past few years. In 2009, according to the Pew Research Center, 50 percent of white Democrats agreed with the idea that the country needs to make changes to give black Americans equal rights to white Americans. By 2017, 80 percent of white Democrats agreed with that position. This shift has come alongside gains for Democrats among white college-educated voters, which seems notable given the change in racial attitudes. Shaker has a lot of that well-educated demographic — 65 percent of the population has a college degree or higher.

Share of the population with a bachelor’s degree or higher, based on the 2013-17 American Community Survey five-year estimate

Bachelor’s Degree or higher Shaker Heights 64.7%

–

Parma 20.7%

–

Source: U.S. Census Bureau

Since I moved away, I haven’t spent much time in the parts of Shaker outside my family orbit — Van Sweringen geography still at work. But on a February afternoon, with time to kill, I took a drive around Moreland and found myself in front of Chelton Park, where I’d played summer-league softball as a kid. Moreland and Ludlow look a decent amount like Parma. Most of the homes around Chelton are doubles. In Ludlow, there’s a mix of the traditional Shaker colonials and Tudors, along with G.I.-era ranch-style homes. As I drove around the area, the street signs switched back and forth from the blue of Cleveland to the white-and-black lettering of Shaker.

Some called the traffic barricades separating Shaker Heights from Cleveland “the Berlin Wall for black people.” Portions of the barricades still stand.

MADDIE MCGARVEY FOR FIVETHIRTYEIGHT

Down the block from Chelton is Scottsdale Boulevard, the boundary between Shaker and Cleveland. During the 1970s, Shaker set up traffic barriers along Scottsdale in an effort, the city said, to control vehicle flow. To many, though, their purpose seemed clear: “the Berlin Wall for black people.” A couple of barriers are still there.

Most Shaker residents probably don’t like the “build the wall” chant that Trump has popularized, but they built one of their own here, years ago, a reminder that the city’s integration was done on its own particular set of terms; it wasn’t necessarily meant for everyone.

Parma was at the very least honest about its discriminatory practices.

“I do not want Negroes in the City of Parma,” City Council President Kenneth Kuczma said in 1971, garnering Parma all the wrong kinds of attention.

He made the statement at a public meeting on whether a proposed new development should have low-income housing. People were worried that Parmatown Woods would attract, as Mayor John Petruska put it at the meeting, the “entire east side of Cleveland,” a thinly veiled reference to black people. The comments were picked up on local and national TV, and the federal government soon got involved. In 1973, the Justice Department sued Parma, accusing it of engaging “in a pattern and practice of racial discrimination in housing in violation of the Fair Housing Act.”

Parma’s Polish Village.

MADDIE MCGARVEY FOR FIVETHIRTYEIGHT

In 1970, Parma, a city of 100,000 people, had only 41 black residents, 0.04 percent of its population. The city was eventually found to have systematically discriminated and was mandated by the court to establish its own public housing committee and to advertise the community as welcoming to minority homeowners; unusually, city officials were required to take a course on housing discrimination. (Historian Dennis Keating, emeritus professor of urban studies and law at Cleveland State University, detailed the events surrounding the lawsuit and its fallout in his 1994 book, “The Suburban Racial Dilemma,” which focuses on Cleveland’s suburbs.)

Today, with a population of around 80,000, Parma is 3 percent black.

“There are places I won’t go here because I know I wouldn’t be welcome,” Karyn Dukes, who is black and lives in Parma, told me recently. “There’s a bar at the end of my corner” — I’d seen the Irish bar with cinder-block half-windows when I’d driven up her street — “I’ve never been there.”

Dukes told me that she thinks twice about going into stores with Polish flags or ethnic emblems on them. “You’re scared to because of the rejection of how people will act or treat you when you’re in there,” she said. “I feel like I have to put on this air. I feel like I can’t act like myself — ‘Hi, how are you!’” She put on an exaggerated perky voice.

Polish sweets at Rudy’s Strudel & Bakery in Parma.

CLARE MALONE

A couple of days earlier, I’d gone into one of those businesses to buy Polish jelly doughnuts. The place smelled like pure sugar, advertised polka dancing lessons and had a picture of Joe Biden on the wall. The woman behind the counter was lovely and insisted on giving me free doughnuts when she found out I was visiting from New York. It felt like a Cleveland hug of kindness, the kind of out-of-nowhere warmth I miss on the East Coast. Would Dukes have felt comfortable walking in, I wondered.

Dukes lives in the upstairs of a two-family home with her son, a sweet and gangly preteen. One of the reasons she moved to Parma nearly five years ago was for the schools, the better housing and the chance to be near her mother, who lives in a town not far away. “I think the area that I live in is a prime location,” she said. “There’s a Sam’s Club, a Walmart. There’s a park, bike trails, all that stuff.” Suburban-ideal kind of stuff.

The 2016 election made things hard for Dukes in Parma. She said that Trump yard signs made her feel like people were signaling that they didn’t believe in having people like her there. “I feel like people have had deep feelings about a lot of the issues that he raises, but they didn’t really say anything about it [before] because Cuyahoga County is predominantly a Democratic county.”

Parma has been shaped by the ebbs and flows of American manufacturing and by generations of close-knit communities of Eastern European descent.

MADDIE MCGARVEY FOR FIVETHIRTYEIGHT

In their book on the 2016 election, “Identity Crisis,” political scientists John Sides, Michael Tesler and Lynn Vavreck talk about something not far off from the phenomenon that Dukes describes: “Once Obama was in office, whites with less formal education became better able to connect racial issues to partisan politics.” The Democratic Party, it was becoming clear, was a party for liberal racial policies. That realization coincided with the party’s loss of white people without a college education. In 2008, roughly half of non-college-educated white people identified as Democrats and half as Republican. By 2015, the share that favored the GOP had grown to 57 percent, while the share that favored the Democrats had dropped to 33 percent.

Dukes told me that she is “an empathizer.” I asked what she thought it was that made some people in Parma hostile to people like her. (The politicians I talked to in the area — all white — said racism isn’t a problem anymore in Parma.) “I think because a lot of them were probably immigrants, from immigrant households themselves,” she said. “They probably feel they worked hard to build a community here so how come people of other races can just come in here and benefit from anything they’ve built.”

Dukes said she’s mostly worried about how the environment in Parma will affect her son. “I’m scared to let my son go down the street and play with other kids because I don’t know if their parents are OK with my son being black,” she said. “And that’s the most frightening part.”

“My son loves everyone,” she said. “I don’t want him to see color, but I also have to put the warning out to him.”

Parma Mayor Tim DeGeeter is a Democrat. So is most of the City Council, the city’s state representative and its Cuyahoga County Council member. “Right to Work Is A Lie” is emblazoned on a billboard above the highway near Parma. (Parma has a General Motors plant, and its United Auto Workers chapter is active.) Online, you can watch a 2008 video of a young Barack Obama working the rope line for an adoring crowd at one of Parma City School District’s high schools; a 2012 clip shows Bill Clinton and Bruce Springsteen rallying a Parma crowd in support of Obama.

Hillary Clinton footage?

“Their campaign didn’t focus on places like Parma,” DeGeeter told me, sitting next to Mickey Vittardi, the head of the city’s Democratic Party. The three of us were discussing which, if any, national Democrats could win the city back after 2016. Parma Democrats, DeGeeter said, were Reagan Democrats: “You know who plays best here — Joe Biden.”

Parma’s Democratic identity is a union identity. Its political history is a union town’s political history. That’s in part because the ebbs and flows of American manufacturing figure heavily into Parma’s well-being as a city. DeGeeter said that when GM announced the closure of a plant in Lordstown, Ohio, “we for sure got on the phone and talked to them.” What would happen if the GM plant in Parma closed, I asked. “I wouldn’t want to think about it,” the mayor said.

The Clinton campaign did send Biden to Parma in 2016, and he returned on a midterm swing through the area in 2018. The former vice president likes to commune with the blue-collar union demographic by talking about Scranton, Pennsylvania, where he was born. Despite a national party that’s heavily flirting with left progressivism, Vittardi said that he was hopeful the Democratic presidential primary would winnow the field to a more moderate candidate. “My friends that I grew up with are strong Democrats, but they’re tired of our party sliding so far to the left,” he said.

In recent years, Parma has tried to court new residents with its affordable housing and cohesive sense of identity.

MADDIE MCGARVEY FOR FIVETHIRTYEIGHT

While Parma’s Democratic identity comes from union politics, its cultural identity is probably best described as “white ethnic.” Because of that, it’s a place that’s well aware of Cleveland’s traditional ethnic geography. “So you’re Irish, what are you doing on the east side?” one person asked me a few minutes into a casual conversation, after he’d found out my last name and that I’d grown up across the river.

DeGeeter told me that the city’s Polish Village, paczki-laden Fat Tuesday celebrations and Ukrainian parades and festivals were real selling points for Parma. Young people, he told me, were eager to move to a community with cheap housing and a cohesive sense of identity.

“People work hard, play hard, want their kids to do better than they did, want their kids to go to college at the Kent States, the Bowling Greens, and be able to afford to go on vacation to Myrtle Beach and Hilton Head,” he said. And they want their politicians to confine themselves to kitchen table issues.

A couple of nights later, I was due in Parma for the city’s local Democratic Party meeting. My usual route west from Shaker takes me by Lake Erie, which I don’t just love for the blue haze it gets in summer or how the spray freezes into icicles in the winter. It’s a useful beauty — you could drink all 127 trillion gallons of fresh water if you needed to. But the route to Parma skirts inland, passing over the industrial heart of Cleveland, where belching towers of smoke sometimes take on the same pearlescent glow of clouds at sunset and shoot ribbons of flame into the night sky. It’s eerily, hellaciously captivating, a reminder, just like the lake, of what made the region. Someone recently said to me, “Who wants to read about Ohio? It’s not even beautiful.” This is just to say, of course it is. Some people just don’t know how to look. And if there is one thing I learned growing up in Ohio and then leaving it, it’s that people dismiss the place. They think it’s the past.

Bill Clinton visited Parma Pierogies Restaurant during his 1992 presidential campaign.

Joe Sohm / Visions of America / UIG via Getty Images

The party meeting was in a VFW hall tucked into a residential neighborhood. I arrived halfway through, and one official had already left for the Cavs game. The small crowd — all white — sipped beer and chatted. Jeff Crossman, who represents Parma in the Ohio House, nursed a beer and told me about a call that he’d gotten a couple of days after his November 2018 victory: “It was [Sen.] Sherrod Brown, and he had called to congratulate me. And we were talking about the [2020] general, and I told him how concerned I was that the national party narrative was hurting us in places like Ohio.” Candidates like Bernie Sanders, Crossman told me, ran the risk of “overpromising and underdelivering.” Ohioans probably weren’t going to go for “Medicare-for-all,” he said. “I don’t know that you can promise free tuition and free health care — it’s not free, first of all,” he said. “There’s a cost somewhere along the line. And I think people in Ohio are smart enough to know that. We’re very pragmatic.”

The break over, Ryan Puente, the soft-spoken, baby-faced executive director of the Cuyahoga County Democrats, got up to brief the crowd on November’s election. The performance of Ohio Democrats has been disappointing over the past couple of cycles, and Puente seemed well aware that his job was to boost morale by putting a spin on the numbers. “Is Ohio a red state?” he asked. “The short answer is ‘no.’”

A lot of that optimism about the competitiveness of the state centered on Brown’s performance. Puente was at particular pains to emphasize the importance of blue-collar suburbs like Parma that might be moving away from the Democratic Party. In Cuyahoga County, he noted, Brown outperformed Democratic gubernatorial nominee Richard Cordray, who lost his race to Republican Mike DeWine, by around 26,000 votes. Puente said that one way to keep Ohio competitive would be to bring all the people who had voted Democratic in the Senate election and Republican in the gubernatorial election back into the fold.

He wrapped up. Were there any questions?

A man wanted to know what to do about Republicans who kept tearing down yard signs by the UAW.

On the left, a flag supporting President Trump flies in Parma. On the right, a sticker in Shaker Heights protests the killing of Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old who was fatally shot by a Cleveland police officer in 2014.

MADDIE MCGARVEY FOR FIVETHIRTYEIGHT

Given FiveThirtyEight’s predilections, I suppose the most pressing question at hand is whether the Democrats can re-unite the political interests of Parma and Shaker in 2020. Can they knit two different tribes back into a single cloth? Will the primary produce the moderate of Parma’s dreams who also appeals to the sensibilities of Shaker’s liberals? That’s what people like to talk your ear off about.

In some ways, though, this near-term political dilemma is far from the only interesting one — what comes after 2020 matters just as much. The realignment of white America’s politics along class lines is likely to continue to define our partisanship.

How that will play out in the culture is an unknown. White Shakerites live in a racially mixed city, a relative rarity in American life. But there is an alliance forming in the Democratic Party between minorities — who are estimated to become the majority in the U.S. by 2045 — and another group of college-educated white people, those who say they share a race-conscious worldview but who don’t live in the same cities as minorities or send their children to the same schools. What that portends for our politics after the upheaval of the Trump era isn’t entirely clear.

Already, that alliance can be tense, particularly on issues where politics are personal. In Shaker, for instance, the schools are ostensibly integrated, but some people feel black students have limited academic opportunities compared with white students.

“There are three Shakers,” Kevin Lowery, the current co-president of the Ludlow Community Association, told me recently. Lowery is black and the father of two children in Shaker’s public schools. He thinks the city isn’t doing enough to grapple with its inherent disparities. “You have your upper-class, elitist Shaker, you have your middle-class Shaker — and those groups have taken ownership of the city,” he said. “Then you have the third group of students that are lower middle class.” Many of those students are black, and in Lowery’s view, they’re treated differently by the city schools. The white parents “have their students placed in upper-level classes whether they can do the work or not,” he said. “But the African American parents and students are steered away.”

Shaker Heights has a diverse school system, but some people have questioned whether white and black students have the same educational opportunities.

MADDIE MCGARVEY FOR FIVETHIRTYEIGHT

When I was in Shaker’s public schools, we all had to attend programming done by the Student Group on Race Relations to talk openly about our inherent biases, although our cafeteria, like so many others, was racially segregated. I was one of two white girls on the middle-school basketball team, but when I got to high school, I switched to the swim team, which was mostly white. Well-intentioned institutional forces were everywhere, pushing us to integrate, but as humans tend to do, a lot of us settled into what seemed like the most familiar territory.

And Shaker seems less preoccupied these days with proactively implementing pro-integration housing policies. The last loan-giving housing integration group in the city, The Fund for the Future of Shaker Heights, dissolved in 2012, handing over its funds to the Shaker Heights Development Corp. It was the end of a grand social experiment in housing integration. Mayor David Weiss told me that the transition to a focus on business development by no means marks an end to Shaker’s efforts to maintain a racially balanced city. “Inclusion is part of our identity and what we bring, part of who we are and part of what makes us different than other communities,” he said. (Full disclosure: My brother is a member of the Shaker Heights City Council.)

I still wonder if Shaker is special, though, or whether one day it too will regress to the American mean of segregation.

And then what? What does it mean to be politically allied with people you don’t live with? Perhaps Parma gives a glimpse of what happens when that distance becomes too much for a political alliance to bear.

Democrats have started attracting more white, college-educated Americans. Will that always be the case? A few months ago, I was writing a story about California, a state that’s so robustly Democratic that its politics are beginning to divide along class lines, as manifested in debates over housing and gentrification. Justin Garosi, who works in the Legislative Analyst’s Office there, told me that a lot of political conflicts in the state “aren’t so much left versus right as pro-development versus anti-development.”

What else could divide Americans in a future class-based political paradigm?

I’m not entirely sure, but it makes me wonder what it will mean, 10 or 20 years down the line, to have grown up at the top of a hill on the east bank of a river that burned.

#IFTTT #Politics – FiveThirtyEight #politics #538 #Clare Malone

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missytearex · 6 years

Text

To Read List - Ziall

This list is purely for myself to keep track of everything I still want to read. Its gonna change as I actually read though them and find more stuff to add.

Find fics I’ve already read here.

Ziall

playing from the same hand by brokendrums

Niall and Zayn grow closer on the European leg of the Where We Are Tour.

Zayn hums again, low from the base of his chest and Niall’s hand skims down Zayn’s arm six more times, Niall counts them slowly to match his rhythm, before it feels a bit more natural.

"Don’t think Perrie’ll make Paris,” Zayn finally says. And that’s that.

It’s Undoubtedly Love by sunshinexbomb

“So, Zayn Malik likes me,” Niall repeats, strumming subconsciously at the guitar that’s still in his hand. “Does he really like me, like me, like me? Do you think he does?” he sings to the same tune as before.

Liam and Louis both shrug. “Dunno, but that’s what he said. What are you going to do?” Liam asks.

“Nothing,” Niall replies, strumming out a few more chords.

“Nothing?!” Louis exclaims. “You’ve gotta do something. Zayn Malik just said he thinks you’re cute and you’re gonna do nothing?”

Niall’s the one to shrug this time. He takes off the snapback on his head, ruffles his hair a bit before saying, “Don’t think there’s really much I can do is there? Just gonna record my video now. Go on with life.”

In which Niall sings songs on YouTube, Zayn is an international pop-star, Harry tells stories, Louis does makeup, and Liam likes to take pictures.

Crawl Into Your Atmosphere by spibsy (lucy_and_ramona)

Niall doesn't see it coming. Zayn's on the football team. Niall's in marching band. This isn't supposed to happen, except... then it does.

Bombshell Blond (Wired Up To Detonate) by slashter

“Correct me if I’m wrong,” Zayn starts, leaning forward and resting his chin on his hands. “But you look a little...nervous?” Niall scoffs but Zayn can see the worry underneath the surface. “Consider yourself corrected.” Zayn just raises an eyebrow at that, and eventually Niall groans, rubbing at his face. “Fuck. Okay, look, I’m not good at this whole--” he waves his hands around, “--wooing thing. I’m not someone who goes on dates and, like, does all that. I’ve never had the time to do that, even.” “You’ve never been in a relationship?” Zayn asks, a bit surprised. Niall blushes. “Never really cared about stuff like that, until I met you.”

[Or the one where Zayn's a spy, Niall's his target, and the whole world's their playground]

see the sparks filled with hope (you are not alone) by niallszayn

„Hello,” Niall mumbled, hot flush already crawling up his neck again. „I should…I won’t keep you from your work.” Zayn sighed a little and rubbed at his forehead, leaving a small smudge of dirt behind. Niall’s fingers twitched with how much he wanted to reach out and wipe it away. Ireland, 1923. When Niall returns from war, he’s not the same young man he was before. Back home at his parent’s mansion, it takes an old friend and young gardener to get him to open up. But what is Zayn to Niall? What can he be?

The One With The On-Screen Boyfriend by brokenstereotype

Zayn Malik plays the star role of Zander Phelps on the hit television drama show, Bradford Heights. When newcomer, Niall Horan is cast to be Zander's new love interest, things take an interesting turn for Zayn. It might not be the worst thing to happen.

An on-screen boyfriends AU that contains as much drama as there is sweet gay loving. Featuring in-love-but-nonhalant-about-our-feelings Liam/Louis and Harry as the chef roommate that is Zayn's biggest fan.

Out of Space, Out of Time by flares

Zayn: Hey, I’m Zayn. I’m here for our date.

For a few seconds, he just stares at the screen, tapping his fingers lightly against the table. Harry’s voice—“You’re fine, Zayn. You’re doing fine.” — barely registers in his head. The text ‘Niall is typing…’ pops up and Zayn wishes that he’d been more adamant about the alcohol. Wine is sounding really good right about now.

AU in which Zayn is new in town, Niall might not be where Zayn thinks he is, and Harry sets them up on a blind Skype date.

headlights, strobe lights (& we can take the long way) by restitched (beingothrwrldly)

Zayn and Niall go on an American road trip after Zayn graduates from uni.

Warnings for cursing, Niall making fun of Zayn, Zayn making fun of Niall, lots of selfies, lots of kissing, Zayn singing karaoke, Niall with too many feelings, and all of the donuts and waffles on the east coast.

lighthouse by justaboat

au. niall's been waiting for zayn his whole life. when he finally comes it might be too late.

i wanna hurry home to you by roofpizza

zayn is an actor; niall is a cameraman. hollywood sucks, but at least they've got each other

come take my pulse by nicheinhischest

"Everything’s always better when the sun comes up," Niall says, idly drawing a Z on Zayn’s elbow. Or an N. It’s hard to tell. “Sorta funny, when you think about it - whole world’s fucking dead, but the sun still rises and sets like nothing’s changed. The predictability is nice.”

Zayn sighs and tells him tiredly, “Y'know, you say eerily cheerful things for someone who bashed a zombie’s face in with a golf club today."

rhythm & blues by JaneKerkovich

Zayn thinks being a college freshman with an English major and a boyfriend in a frat is enough for him -- until he loses a bet, loses The X-Factor and loses Niall.

bruised giver, grit spinner by hungerpunch

"Niall's never seen romantic love in the real world. His parents were never married, but even the marriages he’s seen haven’t looked happy. He's seen love in the movies, sure, but the movies aren't about Dogtown. The romantic comedies aren't about poor kids with fucked up parents. They aren't about a skinny skater boy and his best friend. But maybe, he thinks, they should be."

A Z-Boys AU.

Experience Points by el_em_en_oh_pee

The good news is that Simon has decided to let Zayn start officially developing the game she and Liam have spent years talking about creating. The bad news is that, because Liam is bedridden after a debilitating accident, Simon puts the new girl, Niall, on the project with Zayn instead. The worse news is that Niall is just Zayn's type.

Some Nights I'm Scared You'll Forget Me Again by pukeandcry

Zayn stifles a groan. He’s not terribly surprised -- Harry’d been mooning over Louis since the day they met three years ago when Zayn had moved into the house next to him -- but he’d been hoping that Harry would eventually get over it and redirect his attention to someone else. This development does not bode well for that turn of events, though. (High School AU)

Not All Stories Have a Happy Ending by KelliDiane

Andy Samuels has been traded. His replacement, Niall Horan, doesn’t really impress the team captain, Zayn Malik.

10 things i ____ about you by robpatFF

“Did the doctors tell you anything already?”

Niall shrugs a little. The movement catches the collar of the too-big t-shirt he has on, one of Liam’s he must have stashed away in his bag. There’s a bruise on his shoulder, probably from the impact, hitting something hard, unmoving and solid. “Far as I know I’m thinking about trying out for X-Factor next month. They said that already happened.” He bites his lip, and his gaze flicks over at Zayn for a moment. “Did I win?”

Amnesia fic.

something about the boy by countthestars

About three things Niall is absolutely positive. First, Zayn is the most attractive person he’s ever seen in real life. Second, the chances he’s actually a vampire are, like, slim to none. Probably. And third, he’s going to kill Harry for putting that idea in his head in the first place.

if i was your boyfriend by countthestars

Zayn's an up-and-coming R&B musician. Niall's a uni student. It's complicated.

burning bright by countthestars

Sometimes people aren't what they seem.

what's a ghost to a nonbeliever by countthestars

Liam shoots Zayn a nervous look. “Zayn’s not,” he starts, clearing his throat. “Zayn doesn’t really believe in ghosts. He’s a, whatchamacallit, a--”

“A skeptic,” Harry says, green eyes gleaming. “How… intriguing."

when the moon hits your eye by countthestars

Niall delivers pizzas and Zayn's a little bit in love.

brighter than sunshine by countthestars

Zayn’s come to trust Niall, and Harry by extension, more than he does most people. Niall had seen through the chinks in Zayn’s armor and had gotten under his skin with impressive quickness. There are still parts of Zayn’s life, though, that he doesn’t know how to share.

Zayn’s learned to trust Niall with himself, he thinks, but he doesn’t know if he can trust him with the most important thing to him.

or; the one where Niall and Harry work in a bakery and Louis and Zayn are struggling to figure it all out.

all the stars align by countthestars

“Your mark,” the boy says. Niall glances down at the name scrawled across the inside of his bicep, his chest suddenly tight. “Yeah,” he murmurs. “'S kinda unusual, right? Never met a Zayn.” “I'm Zayn,” the boy tells him, sounding a bit strained.

Spin For You by sunshinexbomb

“You and Zayn will be going home together tonight if it’s the last thing Payno and I ever do. This pining has gone on too long.”

Niall rolls his eyes, muttering, “I’m not pining.”

“Totally are, mate,” Liam says sympathetically, cuddling into Niall’s side. “But it’s okay. Zayn totally is too. He’s just too,” Liam pauses, making some vague hand gestures, “y’know, to admit it.”

Or in which Niall has a big, huge obvious crush on Zayn and just won't admit it.

Where Everybody Knows Your Name by StormDancer

“Well boys,” he says, scratching at Harley’s head. Rhino barks at that, and Zayn obliges him by petting him too. Apparently, that means that he’s showing too much attention to the dogs, and Tigger appears from wherever she’d been hiding, taking her rightful place in his lap. “And girl,” Zayn adds, politely. “Guess we’re back.”

The Ground Whereon He Walks by StormDancer

“You could come home with me.”

“Yeah?” Zayn turns, waggles his eyebrows and leers. “You offering yourself as a rebound?”

“Hah,” Niall snorts, and glances down at the ground. “No, like. I’m going home to spend the summer, you could tag along, if you wanted.”

Zayn blinks. “To Ireland?”

like a cigarette in the mouth or a handshake in the doorway by zouee

i've been down across the road or two, but now i've found the velvet sun that shines on me and you // Zayn and Niall start living together

Come Get Back in Bed, We've Still Got Time Left by YinAndYangOnIce

based off of this really fucking cute video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EFYlRd85xsQ

Does It Ever Drive You Crazy? by YinAndYangOnIce

like I said based off of Karakura's work about after the Night Changes video, Niall goes to a convenience store to nurse his wounds after a date gone horribly, horribly wrong where he runs into Zayn, who's had a similarly awful night and they find a way to cheer each other up

The Tale Of Lucky and Bright Eyes by YinAndYangOnIce

Zayn is the editor-in-chief of his university's literary magazine who is dragged to a party by his best mates and meets Niall, a carefree, frat boy with whom he is instantly enamored. Soon after that party, someone starts writing anonymous love poems to him and sends them to the magazine.

I Major in Loving You by YinAndYangOnIce

“You told him what?” Liam crowed, staring at him with wide, judgmental eyes while Louis howled with laughter next to him.  “I had no choice!” Niall said, dropping his head into his hands miserably.

“Actually, you did,” Liam said incredulously. “You could’ve told him that you weren’t actually part of the art program!”

“But he was putting words in my mouth and I didn’t want to tell him I’d stalked him there and he was really, really hot, Li, I didn’t want to freak him out,” Niall said pleadingly, as if he was appealing in court and Liam was a law student, so he wasn’t that far off.

Or:

Niall is an idiot in love and is just really bad at this romance thing.

How Can You Swallow So Much Sleep by brokendrums

Tour ends and Niall has insomnia. Zayn vows to cure it.

i set my clocks early 'cause i know i'm always late by theamazingpeterparker

Contrary to popular belief, signing up to be a TA in the US History to 1865 freshman course might be the best decision Niall's ever made.

Or, the one where Zayn reads a lot of books, and Harry reassures Niall that there's nothing wrong with wanting to sleep with your professor.

who let the dogs out by theamazingpeterparker

Zayn wants a puppy and Niall's a huge pushover.

skinny love, just last the year. by theamazingpeterparker

Zayn doesn't like Valentine's Day. Niall gives flowers to random people on the street.

you and me plus baby makes three by alnima

After the death of their friends, Zayn and Niall are forced to raise a baby together. Not like they have a problem with that, just a problem with each other.

follow the sun by carissima

Zayn needs a date to his cousin's wedding. Niall's ready, willing and available to be his plus one.

Or the one where Zayn and Niall are pretend boyfriends and it goes exactly how you think it goes.

perspective by words_unravel

per·spec·tive pərˈspektiv/

noun

1. the art of drawing solid objects on a two-dimensional surface so as to give the right impression of their height, width, depth, and position in relation to each other when viewed from a particular point. 2. a particular attitude toward or way of regarding something; a point of view.

or, a look at four ways Niall and Zayn are Niall and Zayn.

this is how it starts, lightening strikes the heart. by justaboat

zayn doesn't want to date niall (except that he kinda does), niall has a secret, louis is a little shit, and harry and liam are the roommates that give (mostly) bad advice.

You've Got This Spell On Me by VeronikaLP

The one where Niall is a cheery Hufflepuff on said house's Quidditch team and Zayn cheers for him even when he's a Ravenclaw. Featuring disgustingly-in-love Larry, and a pinch of Sophiam.

on the brink of by autopsyofwebs

Niall tries not to think about it. Knowing something and doing something about it are two different things. If anything, he thinks he should feel relief. He’s one of the lucky ones. A lot of people never meet one of their soul mates, much less get to speak to them or see them every day. It doesn’t have to mean anything, he tells himself, and still loses his breath every time he catches Zayn on the stairwell, the crease of his smile, the way he laughs like he’s glad to see him.

les mystères de l'horizon by hungerpunch

"Preferably heist!fic, but anything with ziall as partners in crime (con artists, hackers, assassins, etc.) in an ot5 team. I'd like for one of them to be new to the team and for Zayn and Niall to start off on the wrong foot."

we put the world away (we get so disconnected) by horlik_aholic

Greek Mythology AU where Niall's sad, Zayn's immortal, and Liam and Louis are doing what they can.

Featuring wrathed gods and ancient curses and dazzled Niall.

take a chance on me (you won't regret it) by liferuining_feels

“And what about you? What do you want?”

Niall can’t find his voice but he wants to say you. I want you.

Or the one where Niall tries to help his friends figure out what makes them happy. For Niall? He just wants Zayn.

The Picture of Zayn and Niall by mightierthanthecanon

Based on the prompt: English Lit professor Zayn is a bit confused as to why he's so fascinated with one of his students, Niall Horan.

After All This Time by justyrae

Niall had expectations about his years at Hogwarts, but none of them prepared him for meeting Zayn.

I Wanna Show You Where I Sleep, Keep You There A Couple Weeks by KayleeJohn

Zayn wants to complain that Louis said he’d have the bed until at least morning, but it comes out more of a strangled groan than anything else, “Ngh,” punctuated by a click in Zayn’s throat.

Or the one where Zayn accidentally ends up cuddling with Niall, but he kind of doesn't mind it.

maybe we found love right where we are by niallszayn

Zayn Malik is one of the hottest magazine editors in the industry but he's overworked, so his business partners suggest he get an assistant. Enter Niall Horan, who is quirky and fun and can't write an article to save his life, but he can make a mean frappuccino (and on one rare occasion, give an orgasmic back rub after a long stressful night) so Zayn keeps him around, but definitely not for his face, absolutely not, nope.

Where Do We Begin? by shipsdrifting

Clearly, if he's to follow Niall's lead, the protocol here is for both of them to pretend that they've never met, that they have no recollection of the events that unfolded between them that night.

Zayn takes a breath and sits up straighter. He can do this. Zayn can absolutely try to forget that night ever happened.

Or, Uni AU where Zayn and Niall start working next to each other - and they both kinda pretend that they've completely forgotten about that drunken but mind-blowing one-night-stand they had a month ago.

Who Needs Dubai? by Idzzdi

“Never thought I'd see you on this side of the counter,” Zayn says lowly, looking amused and more awake then Niall has ever seen him in his life before. Also, more attractive. He looks so effortlessly cool it is just not fair and Niall's mouth has become so dry, all he can do is stare.

or Niall has this thing for his coffee shop regular Zayn and they run into each other one night at the airport. Zayn shows him how to properly annoy the airport security.

the awful edges where you end and i begin by nicheinhischest

“I could’ve killed you a dozen times,” Zayn tells him, and he means for it to sound like an apology, maybe. Proof of a conscience, even after everything. Even after this. “A hundred.”

Niall mockingly clicks his tongue in disapproval. “And I’m supposed to thank you for saving it all for a melodramatic stairwell scene?”

You're the cure, you're the pain by ifzi0531

"I hate to break this to you, but I don't think a baby uses rabbit shampoo for bathing." Zayn teased.

Niall pouted, crossing his arms over his chest. "You know what I meant! I thought we agreed that practice makes perfect or whatsoever."

Zayn and Niall babysit a friend's bunny, during which Niall tells Zayn that he wants to adopt a child.

Naive Melody by liquidmeasure

"The clock on the side table says it’s just after midnight when he wakes up to Theo screaming and crying for his mother. Just after midnight, so a good three and a half hours of sleep and that’s that. It’s like the kid has finally caught on that all is not well. That his parents have really and truly gone. He keeps crying when Niall picks him up out of his cot and it seems he doesn’t stop for three days."

Post-Zayn canon fic. Zayn steps in to help Niall deal with Theo. Niall isn't sure how to deal with Zayn.

This is sort of a mish-mash of a couple of my prompts, including canon pining and single dad Niall with optional accidental baby acquisition. I couldn't figure out how to give Niall a baby without something terribly sad happening, so I opted for an extended babysitting gig. I hope it works! <3

of an endless summer by petals

Zayn shrugs unapologetically. “My first time away from home,” he admits with a blush that make Niall’s knees feel weak. “But there are perks, I think.”

“Yeah, I love it here,” Niall says. “It’s kind of nice getting paid to do stuff like this, like watch kids swim in the lake, while you either swim with them, or you could even read a book. I don’t know, there’s a lot to love.”

“Not really the perk I was thinking of,” Zayn says. “But yeah, sure. The lake, whatever.”

Niall stares at him, watching as Zayn winks before he goes back to his food.

All We Got Up To by venividivici

AU where Zayn and Niall go on a double date with Liam and Louis, that Harry ends up accidentally crashing. (But come on, it's Harry.)

You start a fire inside that I could never control by heart_eyes

“They call us freaks you know, in the local paper—on the news.” He said just above a whisper still cautious, as if admitting out loud that Jay's suspicions had been correct that secret service would jump out from where they were hiding just waiting for Zayn's confirmation before they carted him away to some lab somewhere for experimentation.

“That’s because they don’t understand, refuse to…it’s not like that everywhere though, in the bigger cities we’re more accepted not just tolerated so long as we stay hidden but praised for our abilities—they call us heroes.”

“What like Superman? Batman?” Zayn asked, tone mocking and full of doubt, but Jay’s next words chased the amusement right off his face.

“Exactly like them

(or the one where Zayn attends Heroes Anonymous meetings)

and if you know me, like i know you by horlik_aholic

They promised each other they’d keep in touch, but it wasn’t something that even needed to be discussed-- of course they’d keep in touch. They were Zayn and Niall.

Now Niall’s a senior in high school, newly 17 and ready to breeze through this last year and take on college next fall. He hasn’t heard from Zayn in 3 years.

or, Zayn moves to Niall's town after 3 years of not talking and Niall is coping.

(one of these days) i wish you were a hologram by groundopenwide

Zayn’s stomach churns, and he has to squeeze his eyes shut. “Right now—this is real? I’m not imagining things?”

“I’m right here,” Niall says softly. “I’m always right here, Zayn. Been here the whole time.”

Zayn's been having dreams- dreams that seem so real, he can't even distinguish fact from fiction anymore.

better than words (more than a feeling) by petals

im so sorry, Niall sends back. Followed by, mate got a new num, forgot it

He waits for the reply, because honestly, he sent this guy a picture of himself in the bath. In a green bath. The guy is probably laughing about it with his friends, Niall will probably become a meme on the Internet or something. Blond idiot in green water sending naked selfies to stranger meme.

i rly am sorry, he sends, hoping that’ll be enough to keep the guy from spreading his picture.

dnt worry bout it, cutie xx is the guy’s reply and Niall groans, dropping down on his bed face first. He can’t remember how to breathe. Honestly can’t remember.

Happiness, not in another place but this place. by LauDom

Niall stared at the screen for a long time. Had he met someone else in the club last night? What did the Z stand for? Zoe, Zander, Zeus?

So he decided to be funny and even though his face showed a clear hungover and sleep deprived-ness he sent a pouty selfie and texted: “Sorry, I think u have the wrng number.”

Sweater Weather by xTammyVx

It wasn't until they were outside the club that Niall squeezed Zayn's hand and said, “Come back with me?” then, “I kinda like you.”

Zayn wasn't stupid; he knew that the number of people Niall had slept with over the span of his four-year-long career was exactly what one could expect from a superstar, and that he probably pulled with lines like that all the time. However, simmering below that self-awareness was the unbelievable, untamable fire spreading from where they were touching, and all Zayn wanted was more.

2015: Zayn meets Niall on a post-concert night-out.

2019: Niall comes home for a mid-tour break.

So Hot That I Melted by PigSlay

Zayn's working his way through college to get his degree in art by working as a bartender at a local pub. One night, a group of people, including one stunning blonde named Niall, come there. After that, Niall keeps coming back almost every night and after serenading Zayn during one open mic night and exchanging phone numbers, they slowly become the best things to ever happen to each other.

A Story for the Kids (orphan_account)

"Da, why do you look at Zayn like he's a princess?"

[Niall and his daughter are new to London and Zayn's personal life is a bit messy. Somehow, they make things work.]

I'll Dance With You, I'll Laugh With You (Til It's Christmas in the Room) by tobedwithacupoftea

After a death in Niall's family, he must stay at Hogwarts over Christmas their seventh year. Zayn also stays at the castle and though the boys have a more than amazing Christmas, some ill-advised magic at New Years may ruin it all.

crooked love in a straight line down by leighbot

“You’d like him if you got to know him,” Liam whispers while everyone else finds seats as well.

“I already know him,” Zayn responds.

“Seems like there’s a bit of tension between you two.”

Zayn rolls his eyes hard enough they hurt. “Like homicidal, maybe.”

Or, the studying abroad AU where they're all supposed to stick together but Zayn and Niall get off on the wrong foot. Zayn finds solace in his graffiti, a pretty American boy and a mysterious commenter on his art blog.

With side 'love at first sight' Liam/Harry and 'it's complicated' Louis/Eleanor/Nick.

Sore Winner by venividivici

"No. No, no. Just. Just shut up. Figure Skating isn't a game, okay. I don't play figure skating, I perform it. Big difference from your elementary recess time you call a sport. That's a game." Niall only inhales, sighs loudly into the cold air. "This is nice. You and me. This chilly night, the stars are bright. Perfect time to lay out how we really feel about each other, don't you think?" Or, Zayn likes the stars; Niall reads too many horoscopes; and neither is mature enough to drop their irrational hate.

One, Two, Three Strikes You're Mine by littlepinkbow

Having a crush on a player from your rival's baseball team is bad enough. Even worse when they're literally the most relaxed person ever. It just takes a bit of time and a bit more reckless abandon to figure it out.

let your heart go boom by liferuining_feels

Zayn arrives in Dublin with no expectations except to forget about the life he left behind in London. He's here on exchange for a year, and his only plan is to learn to be himself again. But no matter what, he can't seem to shake off the feeling that he's so helplessly lost.

Then he meets Niall, and suddenly life becomes a little bit more easier.

But what Zayn forgets is that time is ticking, and there's a return ticket to London with his name on it.

All He Needs by sunshineflying

Niall is out and proud at uni, but back in Ireland nobody knows he's gay - not even his family. After some conversation with his best friend and roommate Zayn, as well as their friends Liam and Louis, he knows it's time to just go home and be honest with his family. His crush on Zayn complicates things a bit, especially when Zayn offers to go to Ireland with Niall as moral support, but he follows through with it anyway.

Happiest Place On Earth by pocketfullofbees

It's always weird. Each time he sees the actual character he's surprised people recognize him. Then again, he never saw himself as any type of royalty.

_______

Or the AU where OT5 work as face characters at DisneyLand and Zayn's hopelessly in love with an Irish Faerie.

This Night was Made for Us by zaynplusanyone

Niall and Zayn have a tie that binds them, a bond. It takes them a while, but eventually they figure out that that bond is meant to be there, that it means something more. Tonight is about celebrating that bond, enjoying what they have, and remembering that even when the world is moving too quickly around them, they will always have each other.

Promise You'll Be Glad You Came by Jairo

“It’s Halloween and we’re trick-or-treating but you have no candy” AU.

Ain't No Sunshine by acue

AU where Zayn and Niall meet in an airport only because they were the ones to get assigned the same seat and Niall finds something out about Zayn pretty deep into their relationship that should have been mentioned at the way beginning.

Or the one where Zayn is in the army and Niall is completely smitten with Zayn, and waits for him to come home in one piece a lot.

Walk Away Now and You're Gonna Start a War by Niallaeger

Even the glass of water he had tried to force himself to drink, while sitting on the floor by the bedroom in Niall’s apartment debating whether or not he should bother to get up, left such a horrid taste on his tongue that he couldn’t make it past the first couple sips. It was like all the words he hadn’t said that morning mixed with the bitter taste of the ones he hadn’t had the decency to hold back, and now they’re just lingering, in his head, over his tongue, making his stomach turn, and now Harry’s asking him if he’s alright because he looks a little sick and all Zayn can do is nod.

Or, the one where Zayn doesn't think he can do anything right, and Niall just needs a little time. Basically, your soccer!AU with a healthy dose of angst.

The Not Exactly Late Night Show With Niall Horan by WhyHelloThere

When Niall forgets to book a guest artist for his radio show, Harry sets him up with a friend of a friend. Things just go from there.

I'm sending postcards from my heart, I don't care who sees what I've said by niallszayn

Niall spots who has to be the hottest guy on campus at the library but fails to ask him out when they run into each other. He posts about it on this cool new app though, and hopes for the best.

another uni!au full of pining

Skate Your Way Into My Heart by littlepinkbow

Zayn really can't help but being fond over the ridiculously sweet boy attempting to teach the kids in his class how to rollerblade and Louis really really can't keep his mouth shut.

I've got your body on my skin (and tequila on my tongue) by bonjourziall (punkjuggie)

And at that exact moment Zayn didn't feel the need to drown himself in alcohol anymore. Because Niall's lips were far more intoxicating than any brand of tequila and Zayn craved Niall’s touch more than he craved the burning of the alcohol. or Zayn and Niall both start using alcohol as an excuse to keep hooking up with each other. or Niall is literally the reason that Zayn is becoming an alcoholic.

Perfection Will Not Come by becauseziall

"Later! I promise!" Zayn called after him, backpack weighing down his shoulders. Niall looked back over one shoulder with a goofy grin that overpowered the rest of his face.

"Yeah! Just keep studying your Calc, alright?"

Zayn turned so he walking backwards for a moment. "Yeah," he smiled, "alright," and with that, he turned around, heading back to his dorm, thoughts of sunshine and happiness and beautiful filling his mind.

start off the day singing by leighbot

Secretly, Niall’s pleased by the extra time spent with Zayn, often baiting the children to help him encourage Mr. Malik to join them for a song or two. At least, Niall hopes it’s secret. Based on the teasing he often suffers when around Louis or Harry, he doesn’t think he’s been as subtle as he’d like.

Thankfully, Zayn doesn’t seem to have picked up on Niall’s crush.

Or, the one where Niall is an elementary school music teacher and Zayn's first graders are possibly Niall's favorite class... and not just because Mr. Malik has a pretty smile. Okay, it's a bit because he has a pretty smile.

From Wrong to Right by sunshineflying

Zayn's struggling to let go of an old relationship, but his best friends and roommates Liam and Louis are determined to help him get over it. A chance encounter at a club and a failed attempt at getting someone's number leads Zayn right to the man he's been waiting for.

a house built by a doctor to the stars by fakeheaux

"There's no way you live there," Zayn laughs, brows pulling together. "That's Murder House, bro, no way."

Niall shrugs. "Murder House to you. Murder Home to me."

or niall is the baby of spirits ben and vivien harmon, raised by an eclectic group of ghosts

i don't wanna lose your touch (i don't wanna hurt this much) by fakeheaux

"Okay, so. So...you're stuck with each other," Harry says slowly. "Literally."

Zayn sighs, already done with the whole thing. "Yeah, Harry."

or zayn and niall get magically bonded together after they eat some sus chinese food

know you're not alone by fakeheaux

There are many beliefs of what a shift feels like. The most common one is that the shift always hurts, even after you’ve become used to it. In his opinion, that isn’t quite true. It’s not painful, per se, but it is intense. Shifting, to him, is like a rush of endorphins, adrenaline, and relief all at once. He shifts and it’s like going back home. It’s like - like the best feeling in the world.

or zayn doesn't like dogs which bothers niall so so much

on a wednesday, in a café by fakeheaux

"I like your glasses."

or niall is nosy and zayn speaks urdu in coffee shops

they say we are what we are, but we don't have to be by fakeheaux

"They hate us," Niall murmurs. "They're not going to let us fight with them, just 'cause we wear green."

Zayn shakes his head. "Green's just a color, babe. Don't make you who you are."

it's our paradise (and it's our war zone) by fakeheaux

"We were on a break!" Zayn yells.

or The One With Ross and Rachel, Reimagined

me, her, and the moon by dramaturgicallycorrect

“I think I should go home,” Niall says. “You should really get on. Dance with those boys your mum wants you to dance with.”

“I only want to dance with you,” Zayn says, taking her hand and giving her a spin, watching her dress flair beautifully before she pulls her in tight. She holds Niall’s waist tight, and Niall curls into her, resting her head against her chest. They sway slowly to the muffled sounds of the big band and clutch each other for dear life. This is all Zayn needs, her girl and the moon and the stars.

[Or Zayn invites Niall to her going away party, but neither of them want her to go away.]

that which we call a rose by dramaturgicallycorrect

Zayn pops his head around the door suddenly, the sounds of Louis stomping down the stairwell echoing out behind him. “Wait,” he says, even though Niall isn’t going anywhere. “What’s your name?” “Ah. I’m Niall.” He grins. “Although... what’s in a name?” “That which we call a rose,” Zayn says, trailing off with a small grin before the rest of him disappears behind the closing door.

[Or, they're at Juilliard and Niall plays the guitar and Zayn has a beautiful falsetto and Liam, Harry, and Louis need some help putting on Romeo and Juliet.]

nevada's fault by irishmizzy, miss_bennie

“Niall Horan, will you -- ow,” he winces when Harry flicks his neck, but when Zayn starts up again, the disaffected tone is gone, “will you do me the honor of marrying me tonight and winning this bloody game of truth or dare?”

this is no bridget jones by nicheinhischest

“Harry," Zayn feels like he’s losing it, "Harry, you know my life isn't a romantic comedy, right? No matter how much you try and make it one."

"Please, I've seen Love, Actually like... thirty times," Harry says, grinning. "This is going to be so much better.”

the creation of ursa major by robpatFF

Niall would pull him all the way if he could, wrap his sunlight infused hand around Zayn’s and pull them up until they couldn’t breathe. And Zayn would let him, only to return (loyal, dependable, periodic) and settle around his Sirius before he’d float off again.

i can see the sun in late december by robpatFF

Written for the prompt: it's cold in ireland and zayn is all skin and bones and niall is all extra blankets and warmth and kisses (basically lazy kissing under the covers fic) and then this happened

Settle Down With Me by robpatFF

artist!Zayn and fratboy!Niall. Zayn draws and Niall's in a frat and they make it work somehow, they do.

this silver spoon has fed me good by hickeyziall (scentedziall)

"We realise you won’t be thrilled about this, Zayn, but we hope you understand that this is necessary for you to be considered the heir of our business in the future."

Zayn cleared his throat to gain the attention of the boy, who whipped his head around in response. He was taller than Zayn, young and lanky in a charming way that matched the dimples in his cheeks. He wore long, wild hair, hardly contained in a bun, and the uniform green apron with the patisserie’s logo printed in black and white next to his nametag.

"Good luck. You’ll need it."

aka rich kid working in a bakery au?

The Lost Souls by daretoliveforever

Zayn is unique. He receives visions. Most people would think this is a gift. But Zayn thinks it’s a living Hell. He sees people having their lives taken away from them. Either by themselves, or others. The worst part is Zayn doesn’t know what to do. How can he help people when he’s only seen them in the visions?

Baby, It's You by alnima

Zayn Malik has an obsessive crush on famous Internet blogger Niall Horan, but what happens when Niall starts posting about a crush of his own?

amidst all the weather by Livy_May

Niall doesn’t tell Louis, for obvious reasons. He doesn’t tell Harry, either, because if Harry knows something, it’s only a matter of time before Louis knows it, too. And he doesn’t tell Liam because Liam is honestly the worst liar he’s ever met.

He’s not trying to keep it a secret. It just sort of... happens.

Wings Wouldn't Help You Drown by wasp

Zayn just wanted to watch the sun set, watch it bleed into the sky as same as ever in a world that’s forgotten about them, completely slipped under their feet and morphed and fucked up some more.

to put a little sunshine in your life by khakis

san diego au. zayn's a brooklyn boy who follows his maybe-ex-girlfriend to san diego. it turns out a whole lot lovelier than he could have hoped.

“Look at this little family,” Harry murmurs.

“You big softie,” Louis says, but his voice is so steeped in fondness that Zayn can almost taste it, and he feels warm in a way that has nothing to do with the crush of bodies around him. He cranes his head a little and Niall meets him halfway, anticipating it, grinning as their eyes meet and reaching a hand up to grip comfortingly at the back of Zayn’s neck. Yeah, his gaze says, you belong here. We want you here. I want you here.

And then the chicken is burning and Harry yelps like he’s the one being singed and they fall apart as easily as they fell together.

Up towards the sun by wannabe_free

The first time Niall sees the small lumps on his back he freaks out. He stands naked in front of the mirror, the glassy surface still blurry with the steam of the shower he’s just had. There’s something in his back that feels odd. It doesn’t necessarily ache; it’s like a stretching feeling, something from his insides fighting to come onto the surface, pulling at the skin and muscles that come in its way.

AU- OT5-Niall centric. Niall isn't human.

Perfect Storm (orphan_account)

“Who the hell thought it was a good idea t’watch a horror movie in the middle of a thunderstorm?” Niall groaned.

The boys watch a scary movie during a storm, and it leaves Niall a bit shaken up (not that he'd admit it). And Zayn is there to save the day, as usual.

Whiteboard by lostinsanity

Niall’s a musician, Zayn’s an artist. Music and art are their lives, respectively. And the story shouldn't be much more complicated from there. But it is, because Zayn is deaf.

Of You I Grow Fonder by Klavier

"I'm Niall Horan, and it's a pleasure to meet you without deep-fried potatoes in my hair."

let's get (meta)physical by murkya

Zayn has a Niall situation that he's capital I Ignoring, and then suddenly he's got a burning problem he really can't ignore, capital letters or not. (modern myth/religious beings AU?)

staked through the heart and you're to blame (you give love a bad name) by biggrstaffbunch

Zayn's a vampire slayer and Niall's a vampire and it's all as star-crossed as it sounds. But also, maybe it's not.

(Featuring Liam as a Watcher that would give a certain Sunnydale librarian heart palpitations and Louis as the hell-raising--but not in the literal sense--sidekick. Plus, Harry.)

Inside My Heart, Inside This House by zzegnas

Niall recovers from his knee injury in the comforts of the English countryside with his two best friends, Harry and Liam.

amour doux by bisousniall

Niall runs an authentic French bakery in London, and he swears he hired Zayn for the extra help, not just for his looks. Also his employee Louis is harbouring a huge crush on their customer, Liam. Harry is there to keep them all together.

Eat Your Heart Out, Gertrude Stein by skullage

Zayn doesn’t have a watch any more; he measures time in distance. How long it’s been since he made Niall laugh, how far apart they were when they said goodnight. How many pieces he could put between his room and Niall’s, how many hours, minutes, seconds since Niall said his name.

Compass Rose by eiqhties

“We’re like all the directions coming together, you know? Like a compass. What do they call them? Compass rose, that’s us.”

An AU in which One Direction are an indie rock band touring America. There's lots of open roads, cramped vans, and pining for the service stations in the UK. Oh, there's also a lot of pining for each other, too.

i was made for sunny days (i was made for you) by nicheinhischest

"Don't do dances," Niall repeats with a smile. "Don't do pool parties. What do you do, Zayn Malik?"

Zayn shrugs. "Play baseball. Date you."

swimming pools by pixies

au where everyone is home from college for the summer, and zayn has the summer he never expected. includes: college rivalries, southern accents, and lifeguards.

delivery entrance to narnia by irishmizzy, miss_bennie

"You okay?” Niall mouths. Zayn knows he’s mouthing it but he can hear it loud and clear, which is fucking weird. He blinks. His head hurts, right on the top where Liam had touched it, but all over, too.

(The one where Zayn gets superpowers.)

do you care if i stay? by justaboat

zayn and niall go on a road trip.

Beer and Band-aids by hotnuts

Niall shoves his numbing hands deeper inside the warmth of his hoodie, biting the cold back with chapped lips and shaking limbs. He hums to keep his anxiety at bay, small noises in the form of some drowned out Justin Bieber tune he hasn't been able to get out of his head since he left Ireland.

Or, that one ziall street au where Zayn is a misunderstood artist, Niall is the cute Irishman who shouldn't be walking around London at night and they fall in love with each other over a lot of alcohol, bruises and angst. Also Louis is a sassy pub-owner with a hipster boyfriend.

here i love you by myownremedy

Louis reckons Niall should just tell Zayn, reminds him that they live together in the tiniest, most overpriced apartment in all of New York and the walls are thin enough that Niall knows what Zayn sounds like when he’s getting off, and they never cook because their kitchen is so tiny, it’s basically a flat with two closets serving as bedrooms and an even smaller bathroom, and they are married, according to Louis, so Niall might as well make it official.

Niall and Zayn (and the rest of the gang) are students at NYU, and Niall and Zayn live together in an overpriced shoebox apartment in the Village. Also, Niall's been in love with Zayn since freshmen year.

I Will Give You the Moon (It’s the Least I Can Do) by TheMipstaz

5 times Niall thought Zayn was a werewolf + 1 time Zayn actually was

never felt like home (until i had you) by groundopenwide

“Missed you.”

Zayn’s voice is hushed, careful, as though he’s not sure he’s allowed to fully make the admission. Each syllable slurs together like he’s spinning molasses.

Niall shuffles his head down the pillow until he can kiss each of Zayn’s knuckles, just once. Zayn hums, the sound coming from far away. They fall asleep with their hands intertwined.

Or: Tour ends, and Niall goes home to Zayn.

follow the marks you left by littlecather

“Yeah,” Zayn nods, voice heavy. “Probably best if we … don’t tell them. For now.”

“For now,” Niall agrees. There’s too much promise in that, though. Niall’s not sure just yet if he can see a point in the future when he can tell them - that he went to see Zayn, without any of them knowing. That he kissed Zayn. That he’s going to see Zayn, again, to possibly do that, again.

Secret relationship; canon.

Soul Mechanism by alexenglish

When a chance encounter with a stubborn human manifested a magical bond within Zayn that had been dormant for decades, Zayn could not deny being intrigued; by the connection, and the boy, and what it meant for a demon such as him -- a demon who had been without a master for many years.

The universe always had a purpose, and meeting Niall was only the beginning.

(And you will always be someone who was beautiful, once.) by softly (alexenglish)

I will always love you, or anyway I will always have loved you now.

(Look at you.) by softly (alexenglish)

I do not believe in love at first sight. But god damn.

(Don’t worry. We’re all doomed eventually.) by softly (alexenglish)

I know your weakness. It’s kisses. You are doomed.

(no one could steer me right, but mama tried.) by softly (alexenglish)

You aren’t really a good person, but god damn, you make bad look awesome.

(Let’s join a street gang! Is NASA recruiting?) by softly (alexenglish)

This town isn’t big enough for the both of us. Let’s run away together!

Killing Time With You by flares

“People got together whenever they felt like it before they came up with the clocks.”

“Yeah, and now, like, no one does,” Zayn says. “Most people want to just date their soulmate, because what’s the point in wasting your time if it’s going to end, right?”

You'll Find What You're Missing In Between the Lines by flares

Niall: its weird to take a cat on the bus right ?

Don't Break Character by flares

It’s all a bit mortifying. Zayn wonders how he ended up being the one embarrassed in this situation.

For a Second There, We'd Won by flares

Zayn can’t stop looking at Niall’s fingernails, bitten down and red, and he wonders what had him so anxious. But he’s not in any place to ask anymore, so he keeps his mouth shut.

Looking for Astronauts by flares

He doesn’t have a crush on Zayn. Like, Niall really doesn’t. It would be stupid. They’re in space. They’re the crew of the first human mission to Mars, for fuck’s sake. Niall doesn’t have time for crushes.

Or he shouldn’t, at least. Logically.

Sipping on Something Sweet by flares

It’s ridiculous how careful he is, actually, and Zayn wants to laugh, if only because the alternative would be to cry. Maybe thinking he might break isn’t too far-fetched of a belief.

I'll Be Your Mirror by liquidmeasure

"I don’t want to talk about walking corpses and sisyphean tragedy. Let’s wander. Let’s eat!” He pulls Zayn forward, over the cobblestones, through the dark. “The city is being reborn around us and you’ve been holed up so far away from me for so many decades. I want to show you everything. I want to climb to the top of it and look down and dedicate it all to you.”

A Ziall Vampire Love AU for Halloween.

I've been wanting to write this since I watched Only Lovers Left Alive earlier this year, so if parts of it seem familiar, that's why. I basically took a Jim Jarmusch movie and made it about Ziall. Sue me! (Wait actually don't sue me. Please.)

All of Me by FallingLikeThis

Niall Horan is perfect.

Zayn came to this conclusion a long time ago. And the depths with which he believes it just grow more with each passing day.

#ziall #to read #one direction #1d #mine

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prinzenhasserin · 6 years

Text

AU Exchange

Dear AUex creator!

I am very excited about most AUs, especially if they feature alternative explanations and use the canon dynamics to add something different, so if one of my tag combinations lead you towards an idea, I'd be pretty stoked to receive it, even if you don't use my prompts.

My AO3 name is Prinzenhasserin, and you can find some more of my exchange letters here.

In the grand scale of canon divergent AUs and setting change AUs I happen to love both! And if you want to combine the two, I'm also happy to receive them :D

If you want something more to base your ideas on, here's a non-exclusive list of things I like:

General likes:

loyalty

odd couples!

found family, dysfunctional families that nevertheless love each other

historical stories for same-sex pairings that aren't unhappy but that fit with the society of the time (so like, spinster ladies living together; bachelors-for-life)

cultural differences! age differences! height differences!

heists, rescue missions

character driven narratives

dragons, fairy tales, magical realism, urban fantasy

Space AUs

competent characters

people not realising they’re the most competent at their job/hobby

people failing their way to success

happy endings, earning your happy ending, open yet hopeful endings

cynical humour

mutual pining

everything is better in suits, corsetry, fancy dresses

Identity shenanigans (secret identities, mistaken identities)

Blatant Lies

Enemies becoming friends and/or lovers

outsider POV

epistolary, poetry, unusual narrative formats

orange/blue morality (that is, not entirely human morality); grey/grey morality

non-verbal expressions of affection

DNW:

breaking up requested pairings,

permanent death of the requested characters (if they come back from death, they shouldn’t come back wrong but they can be ghosts),

pregnancy as a main plot point

Legally Blonde

Fanfiction (Medium)

Elle Woods

Group: Vivian Kensington/Elle Woods

ALL: Starfleet Academy AU

ALL: Space Opera AU

ALL: Regency-Inspired Science Fiction AU

All: Space Privateers AU

ALL: Hyperspace test pilot AU

ALL: Character comes into an inheritance with strange conditions

ALL: Organized Crime

ALL: Marriage of Convenience AU

DNW: breaking up requested pairings, permanent death of the requested characters (if they come back from death, they shouldn’t come back wrong but they can be ghosts), pregnancy as a main plot point

STARFLEET ACADEMY

- so I really have wanted a Starfleet Academy AU for Legally Blonde for years now. There are a few really awesome picture sets here https://www.tumblr.com/tagged/cosmically-blonde, if you want the inspiration...

- otherwise: Elle Woods goes into Starfleet with her great SAT scores ("what, like it's haaard?") I can give or take the romantic subplot of the first movie (but I really ship her with Vivian Kensington, who can come from a family of starfleet captains, or engineers or whatever)

- I take even just a snippet of her application! or the way she gets accepted. or how her sorority sisters react to her wanting to go to Starfleet?

SPACE OPERA AU

- I'd love the entire plot translated into a space setting! Space law Harvard, why not. (I hope there's at least a few aliens, and space affirmative action, but I'd also take plenty of robots)

- really, go wild.

REGENCY-INSPIRED SCIFI

- does Elle have to go to space-Harvard to get back her boyfriend, and then it turns out she really wants to go to space-Harvard instead, and there's a comedy of errors because apparently it isn't explicitly forbidden for women to go but there's not really any space for her?

- also good: her parents not understanding why she needs to get her boyfriend back/to go to space-Harvard, but supporting her anyway

- Vivian Kensington who dreamed to go to space-Harvard feeling betrayed that someone like Elle got in on a whim; and then slowly realising how she was hiding her hard work behind a facade and slowly falling in love with her with added SPACE REGENCY, somehow, idk

SPACE PRIVATEERS

- the boyfriend dumps her to go space pirating like his parents always wanted for him, and Elle gets a commission of war just so that she can hunt him down, and then along the way decides she rather wants to stick with pirating (because it's more lucrative, and also she has fun doing it)

HYPERSPACE TEST PILOT

- Elle follows her boyfriend to hyperspace test pilot academy, only to find hyperspace test piloting much more interesting than him.

- if this involves tentacles in any way, or transformations into cyborgs to pilot hyperspace ships, I'm game

ORGANIZED CRIME

- Elle's parents belong to the mob, and Elle studies law to become a mob lawyer? i'd buy this if her enthusiasm for fairness was a front, but I'd also buy this if there's a corrupt government and the mob is the slightly better option-- or if the boyfriend was actually in the mob, and Elle joins to get him back, and takes over while she's there, that works too

- (I have no problem with either assassination or murder, but I'd rather not see the longterm consequences of drug addiction though if you want to mention it that's fine.)

MARRIAGE OF CONVENIENCE

- Elle or Vivian need a scholarship and/or a dorm room and the one they can get is only open for married couples, and Vivian/Elle agree and then they fall in love (or not)

- if you want to add more or different tropes, really, I'd love it

Character comes into INHERITANCE WITH STRANGE CONDITIONS

- yes please.

- Elle needs to marry before she can get her trustfund/access to her property? or exorcise the ghost, and she talks it into leaving instead?

- or maybe it's Vivian whose wacky aunt wants her to experience life to the fullest, and she needs to go on a roadtrip to Vegas with a friend, and Vivian only has Elle since she dumped Walther?

Ocean's 8

Fanfiction (Medium)

Debbie Ocean (Ocean's 8)

Group: Lou Miller/Debbie Ocean

ALL: Space Pirates AU

ALL: Regency-Inspired Science Fiction AU

ALL: Regency AU

ALL: Character comes into an inheritance with strange conditions

ALL: Marriage of Convenience AU

Oh god, don't remind me of these twos sexual tension! (Except please do.) I loved all the outfit changes, the sheer outrageous gumption of doing the heist like they did (but tbh, also the sheer outrageous way Debbie lived her entire life, so if you rather want to focus on that, that'd be great too)

I know I did not want you to break up requested pairings, but I don't mind if the Debbie/Lou thing is tumultuous and fucked-up? Like say, sleeping with whoever Richard Armitage played. I like them best at their grumpy movie-selves, but any other dynamic is great also.

I'd love to see how that translates into a different setting, like say space pirates, or a regency inspired AU, or a combination of both :D

SPACE PIRATES

- how does Debbie built her crew? how does the MET gala translate into a space setting--casino planet? rich tourist spot? a fundraising drive to fund the museum of culture in outer space?

- are any of the women aliens that Debbie hired with abilities that lend themselves well to subterfuge and theft?

- Debbie and Lou in a small space craft, sharing their bunk because they needed to fit in Daphne Kruger into their ship and there are no other bunks left?

REGENCY AU

- Debbie playing up her "I'm only a woman, what could I have done"-look, and robbing the entire aristocracy blind-- tbh, I'd love an appearance by her brother Danny if only to have someone appreciate her genius properly. (And so that she can tell him to stop stealing his marks, probably)

- what's her usual trick to get money fast? does she sell powdered mummy? fake glass as diamonds? does she have an empire of shell companies that lure in investors by promising stuff? selling islands that are either uninhabitable or don't exist?

- Debbie and Lou settling together with a house full of riches and a harem of young admirers after their biggest con?

REGENCY-INSPIRED SCI-FI

-YES! i don't know quite what I want from it-- the thumbing at class differences? the problems with authorities Debbie is going to have? a Debbie/Lou relationship that is really most blatant and very private at the same time?

- aliens! in corsets! and suits!

Character comes into INHERITANCE WITH STRANGE CONDITIONS

- Debbie gets an inheritance from Danny, but first she has to get back at someone/steal a diamond/bankrupt an enemy

- or! it leads to Debbie finding out about the curse put on her family, that their love-life will always lead to them getting caught, and before she can marry/move in with Lou, she has to take care of the curse

Crossover Fandom

Fanfiction (Medium)

Group: Buffy Summers (BTVS) & Anakin Skywalker (SW) & Ahsoka Tano (SW)

Group: Buffy Summers (BTVS)/Ahsoka Tano (SW)

Group: Cher Horowitz (Clueless)/Elle Woods (Legally Blonde)

Group: Jane Marple (Miss Marple) & Hercule Poirot (Poirot)

Group: Jyn Erso (Rogue One)/Amilyn Holdo (SWST)

ALL: Character makes an SO up and SO turns out to be real person

ALL: Character comes into an inheritance with strange conditions

All: Space Privateers AU

ALL: Space Florist AU

ALL: Time Travel

STAR WARS/BUFFY

Star Wars has slowly sucked me into its sphere again, and I just think pairing Ahsoka (and Anakin) with the Vampire Slayer who defeats Evil sounds like the most fun. I don't care if they meet because of Time or Dimension Travel, or whatever, or because Buffy manages to open a pocket dimension in Sunnydale-- though I would rather read space adventures than Anakin Skywalker in a coffeeshop, trying to fend off vampires.

Does Buffy make up an alien she has fallen in love with, and then Ahsoka stumbles out of the pocket dimension and is exactly how she described her, headtails and all?

Or maybe it's the other way around, and Ahsoka gets a talisman from her grandmother for a summon when she desperately needs help, and she uses it (when she leaves the Jedi Order? during a fight she almost looses?) Buffy comes out of it?

Or maybe, instead of making Ahsoka and Anakin join the Clone Army, the Senate gives them a letter of marque with which they travel through the galaxy, fucking up slavers, and finding Buffy who coincidentally is also fucking up slavers?

Or maybe an AU in which Anakin didn't become a jedi for whatever reasons and instead became a space privateer, hunting slavers, and he finds both Ahsoka and Buffy and they become a team?

Or perhaps Anakin starts a flower business with his mother, except they run into trouble with the flower smuggling business, and while he's being interrogated somewhere Buffy rescues him (because real flowers in space is where the money is at, obviously)

CHER HOROWITZ (CLUELESS)/ ELLE WOODS (LEGALLY BLONDE)

- Character comes into an inheritance with strange conditions: either one of them! they have to find a macguffin! they need to marry to get the deed to the property! they find out that their great-grandmother was an alien and need to do some quick intergalactic diplomacy!

- or! there's Cher and her father is really worried about her since she broke up with Josh, and so she makes up this awesome lawyer that only exists in her brain, except then she meets Elle...

- look, in my mind Space Florists are really in demand-- the 1% like to have extravagant things, you see, and importing real flowers from far off corners of the universe is probably the most extravagant thing ever. There's an entire smuggling industry around getting fresh flowers fast and fresh to where they need to go. If you want either one of them to own a flower business, that would be interesting! or, Cher is an environmentalist who tries to curtail the flower industry, and Elle is the lawyer helping her?

- Space Privateers!

Jane MARPLE & Hercule POIROT

I feel like they would not like each other at all. Or maybe they would, but they'd despair of each other's affectations, and would only barely be able to talk with each other before getting annoyed by the other. Or perhaps, they might even be acquaintances who met during their adventures, and were suspicious of the other's motives until they found out about their investigations-- of two different crimes that maybe turn out to have the same perpetrator?

- I'd love Jane as an immortal being, but I forgot to request something for that, but I'd also love her as a timetravelling hero who is quite happy to be seen as just a tottering old woman. Does Poirot notice her real self?

- Poirot gets notice of an inheritance from a woman who he never met, who thinks she has been murdered, and then he starts seeing her everywhere... (she could be a ghost? or it's part of the inheritance? or maybe she leaves a diary) This is against my DNW, but I'd like it anyway.

- space privateers

- space florists are the people the most crimes happen to in space; it is Known (I'd love an AU in which for some reason they have a space flower business together! or maybe there's a case a space florist is involved in, I'm really not fussy :D)

Miss Marple

Fanfiction (Medium)

Jane Marple (Christie)

ALL: Character comes into an inheritance with strange conditions

ALL: Character is slowly turning into an eldritch creature

ALL: Forbidden magic exists that can be used to raise the dead

ALL: Space Florist AU

ALL: Space AU

ALL: Organized Crime

ALL: One character is a dragon

INHERITANCE WITH STRANGE CONDITIONS

- Miss Marple inherits a dragon hoard, because what the dragon hoards is... unsolved crimes? small-town happenings? detectives? and the dragon feels like Miss Marple is the ideal recipient of that hoard

- Miss Marple's great-great-grandmother happened to be an eldritch creature, and sometimes it skips a few generations, but now that her grandmother vanished, Miss Marple has to deal with it instead

- Miss Marple inherits money, but she needs to solve a murder to get to it

SLOWLY TURNING INTO AN ELDRITCH CREATURE

- Miss Marple's great-great-grandmother happened to be an eldritch creature, and sometimes it skips a few generations, but now that her grandmother vanished, Miss Marple has to deal with it instead

- There's always been a Miss Marple at St. Mary Mead's. Sometimes, there needs to be a new one.

ORGANIZED CRIME

- Miss Marple knows who murdered all of the people because she's the one arranging all the hits and bringing her contesters into jail is a nice plus.

- or! Miss Marple is a fixer who is hired to bring light into the mob's many betrayals, and she does so because it reminds her of the cutthroat nature of her knitting circle and the mob boss asked nice and politely, not like the local inspector.

RAISE THE DEAD

- Miss Marple likes to chat with dead people, and that's how she knows so much about murders. Of course, since she's a nice old lady, and necromancy isn't exactly on the up-and-up, she doesn't mention that.

SPACE AU

- Miss Marple is from a small town in Coruscant, or wherever, and solves space crimes.

SPACE FLORIST

- So I do know that Miss Marple doesn't have a job, canonically. But it would be really funny if she had a flower business in space, and everyone always underestimated the trouble florist have. But there's many additional dangers to the flower trade in space: some people (aliens) like to send each other flowers from far off worlds they know are poisonous to breathe for that species, some people get high on flowers, and trading flowers involves some serious money (so there's a lot of smuggling of poisonous, maybe illegal flowers going on)

- either way, i'd love adventures involving space flower trade

Grace and Frankie

Fanfiction (Medium)

Group: Grace Hanson/Frankie Bergstein

ALL: Regency-Inspired Science Fiction AU

ALL: Space Florist AU

ALL: classical musicians AU

Grace and Frankie: Grace and Frankie marry each other

All: Character has a secret identity

ALL: Organized Crime

ALL: Character comes into an inheritance with strange conditions

REGENCY SCIFI

I am here for it, and if it involves my favourite old lesbian couple, then even better!

SPACE FLORIST AU

Grace and Frankie are obviously still living on a beach somewhere, but instead of investing in a dildo manufacturer, they invest in a local flower shop--maybe one with sex pollen to encourage the sex drive of older women?

CLASSICAL MUSICIANS AU

Grace and Frankie feel like they need to collaborate now that their husbands are collaborating, and their respective fields compliment each other well, so it would be ideal (since their husbands were their usual collaborators) but Frankie’s approach is so free-style, and Grace’s approach is so very technical and they need time to arrange themselves.

THEY MARRY EACH OTHER

I don’t care for when, only that they do. Would also read an AU, in which they married each other instead of their husbands :D

CHARACTER HAS A SECRET IDENTITY

- Grace is secretly a superhero? or perhaps a voice actress for romance novels that Frankie likes to read

- Frankie was the girl Grace slept with in college, but only one of them knows

- One of them is a mob boss

ORGANIZED CRIME

yes please.

INHERITANCE WITH STRANGE CONDITIONS

- Grace and Frankie have to marry to fulfil the conditions!

- Grace and Frankie have to fulfil a ridiculous request, and fall in love?

Naruto

Fanfiction (Medium)

Group: Dai-nana-han | Team 7 (Naruto)

Group: Yamanaka Ino/Haruno Sakuro

Group: Maito Gai | Might Guy/Hatake Kakashi

Group: Nara Shikamaru/Uzumaki Naruto

Group: Uchiha Sasuke/Uzumaki Naruto

ALL: Time Travel

Naruto: Uzushio wasn't destroyed

Naruto: Sasuke is possessed

Naruto: Sakura is a necromancer

ALL: Character's love interest is actually a tentacle monster

All: Space Privateers AU

ALL: Canon Character can see ghosts

ALL: Character comes into an inheritance with strange conditions

I really love these characters and I’d love anything about these freeforms. (And I hope to add more prompts tomorrow, but feel free to not use them!)

TIME TRAVEL

yes! time loops, groundhog scenarios, dimensional hopping, making the past work out differently, fix it fics -- I’m not so much a fan of dark endings, but Sasuke travelling back in time to, idk, murder Itachi, and failing, and becoming something resembling a human being with feelings would be great too.

UZUSHIO WASN’T DESTROYED

I’m still bitter we didn’t get a story line about the Uzumaki clan. Or like, the diaspora of the Uzushio people. Or like, anything about the village it had been, and why nobody remembers it.

SASUKE IS POSSESSED

look, it’d be cool? also, it’d explain a lot.

SAKURA IS A NECROMANCER

how will this change the way Team 7 operates? does Orochimaru want to kidnap the entirety of Team 7 (and does he succeed?)

CHARACTER’S LOVE INTEREST IS ACTUALLY A TENTACLE MONSTER

I don’t care who, but omg, yes please. (You can’t tell me that this doesn’t fit the wacky Naruto worldbuilding, come on, there’s ninja that fight with bubbles. and paper. and fucking Kisame with his shark dicks)

SPACE PRIVATEERS AU

Instead of ninja getting their permit from the daimyo, they’re pirates who get their permit from a shadowy government?

INHERITANCE WITH STRANGE CONDITIONS

yes please! does Ino have to prove herself in mind arts? does Sasuke get a ghost sword he can only use to restore people back to life, but only if he first manages to climb a mountain? does Naruto inherit a ton of money, but only if he travels to Uzushio?

CHARACTER CAN SEE GHOSTS

Sasuke is haunted by the people he killed. Naruto is haunted by a lot of red-heads who teach him pranks, and like to see him eat ramen. Kakashi sees the people who he killed, and they generally seem to prefer his dogs. Sakura’s ghosts teach her stuff she wouldn’t normally know. Or something else, maybe?

Harry Potter

Fanfiction (Medium)

Group: Regulus Black/Harry Potter

Group: Sirius Black & Harry Potter

Group: Nymphadora Tonks/OFC

Group: Nymphadora Tonks & Regulus Black & Harry Potter

Group: Remus Lupin/Sirius Black

HP: Regulus Black lives

HP: Tonks becomes Lord Black

HP: Sirius survived the battle in the Department of Mysteries

HP: Time Travel

HP: Harry is the Master of Death and thus immortal

HP: Sirius never goes to Azkaban

HP: Sirius is exonerated after POA

ALL: One character is a time traveler from a different era

ALL: Character comes into an inheritance with strange conditions

ALL: Marriage of Convenience AU

HP: Voldemort's end is early and anticlimactic

I love the magic, and I love cracky takes on this. I have read so many HP time travel AUs and tropey magical crack, but I cannot get enough of it, and there’s especially always a lack of my favourite characters, even though there’s so much fic already.

REGULUS BLACK LIVES

Basically, what it says. Does he time travel? Does Kreacher manage to go back to save him? Does he schlepp himself out of the cave and wakes up with a case of amnesia?

TONKS BECOMES LORD BLACK

So, I really think that this is an underused trope, because it would be so great-- the House of the “Always Pure”, gloomy Grimmauld Place with bubbly, pink-haired Tonks as its figurehead? Sign me up.

Perhaps she inherits because Sirius is in prison, and everyone else presumed dead, and her mother is the oldest? Or there’s a loophole for metamorphmagi to inherit? (Does she need to prove that she can morph a fully functional dick?)

Also great would be Tonks opening her house for Harry for the summer. Or tricky ministry politics by the Malfoys who want the Black House for themselves?

SIRIUS SURVIVES; SIRIUS NEVER GOES TO AZKABAN; SIRIUS IS EXONERATED

Pretty self-explanatory. Does he time-travel? Does he kidnap Umbridge and torture her explain that she’s overstepping her bounds? Does he make Crouch eat it? Does he rescue Harry from the Dursleys/boredom/Mrs Figg?

INHERITANCE WITH STRANGE CONDITIONS

Omg, really. This is the opportunity to go really wild. I hope there’s lots of magical circumstances, and perhaps vows or magical traditions. It’s kinda canon, too, with Dumbledore and his snitch, book, and deluminator, but I’d also appreciate a story in which they have to fulfil someone’s last will.

MARRIAGE OF CONVENIENCE AU

yes please! Tonks needs to prove that she intends to raise children, and finds a friend who needs a place to live so they can cheat the Black Inheritance Rituals, or something? I read this for contrived reasons, or for friends just living together, or for slowly developing romance, but all pairings I asked for are great for this!

Star Wars Sequel Trilogy

Fanfiction (Medium)

Group: Ahsoka Tano & Leia Organa & Luke Skywalker (SWST)

Group: Amilyn Holdo/Leia Organa/Jyn Erso (SWST)

Group: Ahsoka Tano & Luke Skywalker (SWST)

ALL: Space Pirates AU

SWST: Leia did become a Jedi and goes after the New Order herself

SW: Luke turns to the Dark Side and Leia has to learn her powers and bring him back

SW: Leia and Luke raised as Jedi

ALL: Robot Revolution

SWST: General Leia Organa time travels back to the Tantive IV at the start of ANH

ALL: Canon Character can see ghosts

I'm requesting all these things under the Sequel Trilogy, because I really like things set in the future, and I'd love to see the continuation of the OT-- if you want to set it during the ST that's great! But I'm also interested in the 30 years between OT and ST.

SPACE PIRATES

So, the new republic took time to built probably, and I can see every single of the requested characters taking the time out of their busy schedules to start (and finish) a war with any of the pirates blocking the trade routes (and trading slaves); possibly even without permission from the New Republic.

Or, if you want to recreate the Trilogy with a space pirate dynasty, instead of a Jedi dynasty, that would be grand too.

- ‘Canon Character can see ghosts’, ‘Leia becomes a Jedi and goes after the New Order herself’, and ‘Luke turns to the Dark Side and Leia has to learn her powers to bring him back’ are pretty self-explanatory, I feel? but to reiterate, I’d love all those groups, together or apart.

ROBOT REVOLUTION

I'm all for droid rights, and I feel like the droids are definitely under-utilised in their usefulness of bringing down the New Order. Or the New Republic. Or sneaking into ships and casino's to retrieve stuff.

- General Leia Organa time travels back to the Tantive IV at the start of ANH

Does General Leia try to resurrect the New Republic? Is her younger self aware of her? Does she steal a flotilla for herself and wage war on slavers/the order/politicians who blackballed her when she was younger? Maybe she sacrifices herself to take out the Death Star leaving her younger self more time to get the rebellion going?

LUKE AND LEIA RAISED AS JEDI

look, I'm not sure this request makes entirely sense within the sequel trilogy, but what would the far-reaching consequences be if Luke and Leia had been raised as Jedi? would they have had a relationship with their father's padawan? would Leia have noticed Snoke? would she have been tempted to go dark, or have gone dark, and what kind of impact would that have made on Luke? would he have felt as responsible as with her son, or would he have dragged her back the same as what he did with his father?

Star Wars Prequel Trilogy

Fanfiction (Medium)

Group: Anakin Skywalker | Darth Vader (SWPT)

group: Obi-Wan Kenobi/Anakin Skywalker (SWPT)

Group: Padmé Amidala/Anakin Skywalker (SWPT)

ALL: Robot Revolution

ALL: Different First Meeting - Captured by Slavers

SWPT: Force Ghost Qui-Gon trying to influence events

SWPT: Qui-Gon survives the battle with Maul

ALL: Time Travel

ALL: Space Florist AU

All: Space Privateers AU

ALL: Hyperspace test pilot AU

SETTING AU

(Space Florist, Space Privateers, Hyperspace Test Pilot, Robot Revolution)

Any of these sound great, and I love any of those with or without them being set in the Star Wars universe (but they could conceivably all be set there too!)

TIME TRAVEL

I like spontaneous time travel, or closed loops, or dimensional hopping, or going back into the past!person, or force ghosts influencing the past, or groundhog-day scenarios

DIFFERENT MEETING CAPTURED BY SLAVERS

-Yes, please. This could also be combined with space florists, space privateers, hyperspace test pilots or robot revolution, depending on who was captured and who freed them, and where this happened. What if Padme gave Anakin a letter of marque? or the opportunity to go to space pilot academy? what if Anakin started the robot revolution by trying to rescue Padme (or Obi-Wan?) from slavers? what if Padme gave Anakin (and Shmi) a flower business to manage after she was rescued by Anakin?

or maybe Padme is the one to rescue Anakin? and sets him up with her family's flower business because he has no other skills?

FORCE GHOST QUI-GON INFLUENCING THINGS; QUI-GON SURVIVES

Dude, wouldn't it be great if a force entity could tell them who the Sith in the senate was? I always thought so, and I'd think Anakin would appreciate Qui-Gon's help with both Obi-Wan and Padme too. Or simply with not, you know, going dark-- or successfully freeing all the slaves, and the clones, and Shmi and while we're at it a robot revolution would be cool too (or just one of these things, I'm simply very greedy :P)

Qui-Gon actually teaching Anakin the way of the force (and possibly doing something about Shmi) would be great, too. Or simply seeing the change alive!Qui-Gon had on future!Anakin

Gentleman Bastards

Fanfiction (Medium)

Group: Locke Lamora/Jean Tannen

ALL: All Characters Genderswapped

ALL: Ocean's 8 AU

ALL: Ocean's Eleven-esque heist

It'd be so cool. Jeanne Tannen, the big-hulked butch who could break Locke Lamora in half? Yes please. You could also swap every single character in the entire series--I'd love to read it. Would also read it as an Ocean's 8 Fusion, or an Ocean's Eleven-esque heist, or like, simply chilling out after canon things happened.

(Sadly I forgot I could request art, because this would be very awesome to look at, but I'm equally ecstatic about having actual descriptions of Locke being a little shit but also a woman.)

#exchange letter

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jaellydonats · 6 years

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Pentagon’s Reaction; Their crush on We Got Married (2/2)

Hello again! After having to deal with wonky internet connection, a whole load of preparations for the Christmas season and getting distracted, I am finally done with this request after so long! :’) Thank you all for being so patient and I am so glad to know that you guys did enjoy the first part of this series. :) Today, this will be for the maknae line of Pentagon! Will their reactions be any different? Read more to find out and if you guys have any requests at all, don’t hesitate to simply send an ask or even send me a direct message! ^^ Anon requests are welcomed too, and don’t worry, I don’t bite! :> Without further ado, I hope that all of you like this part as much as the first one and happy holidays everyone!! ^^

Part 1: Hyung Line

Yeo One:

This boy would be such a sweetheart when he knows that his crush is going to be on We Got Married. As we all know, he is already one of the softest little beans in Pentagon with his emotions (and has a heart of gold), so could you imagine him with his crush? Furthermore, this was also the reason why he was placed together with Hongseok during Critical Beauty’s concept of twins, simply because they were the romantics of the band. He might seem a little mainstream at first, planning and executing all that he knows from watching romantic comedies and movies, but his intentions are pure and genuine. For example, he does look very much like the type who would be capable of pulling off cheesy (yet cute) confessions, such as using pickup lines and buying a bouquet of flowers with a fake flower in the middle, before saying how his love would last until the last flower dies. Being a celebrity is a pretty tough job, so you can count on Yeo One to always be by your side, through the good and the bad. In fact, he looks like those who would actually go out of his way to see his crush on her activities and be her emotional source of strength, even if filming We Got Married did not require it and will show up on the pretence that he is her on-screen husband anyway, and not to mentioned that he would also be armed with frequent care packages containing his crush’s favourite products, snacks and things that she has been eyeing on. With Yeo One, I could definitely imagine the two becoming the true definition of #couplegoals and would probably be affectionately name as the nation’s idea of what a relationship should be like; loving, fun and nurturing.

Yan An:

Considering the fact that he is a “motae solo” (meaning that he has been single his entire life), he would probably be the most awkward little squishy bean eVER. If one thought Yuto was the most awkward member with his apparent lack of emotions, Yan An would take the spot away from Yuto easily. However, that does not mean that he has no idea how it should work. Knowing him, he would definitely want the best for his crush, ensuring that she would get the best and the most memorable experience with him, and hence, he would definitely seek the help from his more “experienced” members for some guidance or even his parents for that matter. I could see him taking down both mental and physical notes, and would probably even go out of his way to come up with a checklist. For him, it would definitely be better if his crush was a little more laid back and chill, because that would mean that she probably would not mind his lack of experience. Then again, why would one even want to make his life hard anyway? Nevertheless, Yan An would always be seen trying his best for his crush and ensuring that she would only get the best, and would even ask the producers and writers for some tips, advice and inspiration for his future actions. He might take a while to get used to the whole thing, but once he’s all good, it’s clear that he would actually be one of the best on-screen husbands there can ever be. He would take care of his crush and do whatever that is within his means to be by her side through everything, and would probably plan a series of chill dates where she could take a breather from the hectic life of an entertainer. And besides, he doesn’t seem too much to be into adrenaline pumping activities. Sure, it might sound boring, but count on Yan An to make sure that his crush gets the best and the most fun experience, even if it could be simply sitting by the beach to watch the sunset. It might not be obvious but he is quite the sentimental being and would prefer meaningful dates over fun anytime.

Yuto:

Yuto would be a little bit of a tough nut to crack, and would not actually show his true emotions when he knows that his crush would be on the show together with him. Of course he would be extremely excited and happy, but for some reason, it does not seem to show on his face, which might make it seem like he prefers to be cold and distant for the time being. He is truly a man of few words, really, and might seem like he’s uncomfortable when he’s simply trying to sort out all his thoughts to make sure that he does not mess up. His crush might be a little uneasy initially, especially when his initial first impression might not be so great with his quick greeting and a whole load of silence that follows, but he would definitely be someone who would try to make it up to her by using actions instead of words. For example, he would silently give his jacket to her, either to keep her warm or cover her legs if she was wearing a skirt, or even help her to carry her things to the shared apartment. She would not have to voice it out because even though Yuto might not seem like the part, he would do all those automatically, simply because it seemed like the right thing to do at that point. All in all, it would take quite a while for him to open up to this brand new environment of having an on-screen wife and being an on-screen husband, but once he actually does, it would be the sweetest thing. To me, he looks like those who would be capable of preparing little care packages for his crush every single month, and even more so when he knows that she is going to have another comeback or even another drama to star in, depending on whether she is a singer or an actor respectively. He might not speak very much, but that would make him an incredible observer to your preferences and all the care packages would consist of all the things that you would need and love. Also, he does not seem like one who would go out very much so his crush could probably be prepared for a home cooked meal of Japanese food, a wide selection of movies and simply cuddling with fluffy blankets in each other’s arms, although there would be the occasional time for night walks by the river, late night snack runs, window shopping and chill cafe dates. In a nutshell, everything’s chill with Yuto, but he would also be a huge romantic at the same time, ensuring that you are well taken care of and that he would always remain by your side, filming or not.

Kino:

Kino might be one of those who would be easily misunderstood, especially when all one has to is to see him dance and it is likely that they would be heads over heels. In my opinion, just looking at Kino might give the wrong impression that he won’t be the nicest person that one will ever meet, but once his crush walks in, like Hui, he would not hold back his true feelings either and get all smiley and excited at the same time. We all know that he has a pretty distinct, unique and cute laugh so when his crush walks in (together with those cherry blossom effects), it’s most likely that he would start laughing in happiness and disbelief at the same time, especially when his crush is just standing right in front of him now. Furthermore, he was now going to be her official on-screen husband; can you imagine how elated this boy is going to be? With his naturally friendly persona, his crush would most likely get comfortable with him in no time and even though he probably cannot wait to give you a hug, hold your hand or simply kiss you on the cheek, he would be such a gentleman anyway, covering you with his jacket (which he probably wore on purpose) if you got too cold and would most likely show up with a bouquet of your favourite flowers (coincidence? I think not.) . With Kino, one could easily be prepared for a whole range of dates, from photography trips to dates at an amusement park or a carnival. Who knows? If his crush were down for something as rugged as a camping trip, Kino would go without hesitation. In fact, I would see him as someone who would enjoy the freedom and calm of the outdoors; roasting marshmallows, disconnecting from his idol life as Pentagon’s Kino, stargazing and having meaningful conversations. Nevertheless, underneath all that fun and definite love that his crush would receive, he would also be an amazing support system throughout her activities too, and even when times get tough. Like Yeo One, he would be sure to visit his crush as a surprise to her filming sites (if she was an actress) or her music show performances (if she was a singer) and hold livestreams for fans to see how proud he was of you. Honestly, it would be the sweetest thing and one could be almost 100% sure that he would keep in touch with his crush long after the season was over, and perhaps, when the time is right, they will then become more than friends (which many fans would have already expect anyway).

Wooseok:

He might be one of the tallest idols out there in the Kpop industry, towering with a whopping height of 188.4cm (and possibly still growing) and is also someone who would tend to have a serious and stoned expression on his face 95% of the time, which would then make him appear unfriendly, cold and aloof. However, once he gets comfortable, especially around people he just met, be prepared for a whole load of craziness, fun and dorkiness. It would be honestly shocking, simply because it is totally unexpected from someone like him, and I am pretty sure that his crush would feel the same way about him as everyone else, especially when it comes to first impressions. However, he would still try his best to be a quiet gentleman, starting off as a little tsundere, before he actually provides some form of way for the two to become more than friends. Even though he is quiet, there is still something endearing about Wooseok, even if I’m not too sure how to express it. When it comes to the experience on the show, he would most likely prefer stay-at-home and domestic-like dates; cooking, watching all sorts of movies, going to the supermarket to get ingredients for a home cooked meal… The list would be endless really, unless you managed to trick him like Hui did by sending him on a fun hiking trip. Based on what we have seen, he’s not entirely the best kitchen assistant (or cook for that matter) but he would always be one to watch and learn, trying them out for himself on his own free time to prepare for a surprise later into the show. Furthermore, he would also watch out for his crush’s safety, making sure that he would always be ready with first-aid, should anything unfortunate take place. Wooseok might be young, but that does not mean that he does not know when to be serious, and would silently envelop his crush in a warm embrace, whether she was going through tough times as an entertainer or simply sharing her proudest moments on stage or on television, depending on her occupation. Because of this, I could see the potential in the relationship becoming something that would grow pretty fast, but considering Wooseok’s personality, he would most likely be the one to wait the longest for a clear signal that his crush is ready, before making his first official move in asking her out after the entire season is over.

Request a Pentagon scenario here!

Rules

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