Tumgik
#she talks to ppl selectively and she has the right to choose to live that way
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ask thing! 1, 2, 47 (although feel free to say bff or marry since these questions are weird LOL), 50, 60, annnnnnd 83? 👀👀👀
hellooooo friend thanks for sending the thingggg <3 1. What is your biggest turn off in a person? ooof a lot of things bc i am a Bitch ahahahaha. jk, i won't act like a bitch if i don't like you but i am veeery picky about who i actually choose as my friend. i really dislike cowardice in people, generally, but esp regarding personal relationships -- we are all little gremlins afraid of rejection, but i feel like that's no excuse not to at least Try ya feel me? it also makes my blood boil when ppl try to rationalise or explain their lack of empathy and human decency as some sort of natural selection like oh i am right to hate this person because they are WEAK like. pls chill :) you are allowed to hate who you want but pls don't be self righteous about it! this also applies to ppl rationalising bad things happening to ppl as something they deserved -- i am aware this is their defence mechanism so their brain wouldn't have to deal with the reality of a Bad Thing happening to them but it makes me so angry lol -- they apply this child-level analogy of like bad things happen to bad ppl and i am Good so therefore nothing Bad will Ever happen to me and usually those ppl have also read about law of attraction and heavily misinterpreted what that's actually about :) also -- selfishness is a biiig turn off! 2. What is your biggest turn on in a person? i will tolerate many things if i like your general vibe hahah! a really big thing for me is actually being able to have quality conversations during which i feel seen. i like people who are able to process and actually hear the things you say and then actually respond to them -- many times ppl will just wait for their turn to talk or not even try to understand where you're coming from, which is fine i guess, but pls miss me with that shit bc i have no patience for it! i guess that requires a high level of emotional intelligence and that's a trait i highly value in ppl! i will try my best to offer the same courtesy to them! i also love when ppl just... try, you know? i understand it can be hard but i really love it when ppl just show up in a relationship (of any kind), flawed and broken, i don't care, but they came and they put in the effort and i will also put in the effort and.... congratulations!! you are building a relationship haha. for real i just love when ppl care and then they show they care, and sometimes it's just as simple as showing up and getting coffee together even though you're busy. it's surprising how many ppl just act on their natural instinct to pull away or get scared of genuine connection (myself included but i am WORKING on it okay). 47. If you could choose one Disney princess to be your best friend who would you chose? i chose to read this as "wife" instead of "bff" and i will have to say megara from hercules, she's exactly the type of woman that i'd go crazy about irl hahaha 50. If you had to live in the world of the last T.V. show you watched where would you be living? thaaaat would actually have to be wednesday hahha! no complaints, any world that has larissa weems in it is a good world to me! as for murderous monsters, those exist in every world, i'm not too worried haha 60. What is a relationship deal breaker for you? my last relationship ended bc my ex had trouble showing me she cared about me in a way i could understand, which, now that i think about it, is a reason many of my relationships came to an end or fizzled out over time, i just wasn't feeling appreciated. so i guess if i'm not feeling wanted i will not waste my time being there, i no longer do that to myself (i used to tho!) 83. What was the last thing that made you laugh? i laugh a LOT ahahahah and i find the stupidest things very funny. i think the last thing that made me scream with laughter was a video of an escape room chase lol it was very scooby-doo-esque. i was watching it with my sibling and literally banging my fists on the table here's a link to it if anyone is interested but prepare to be disappointed bc my sense of humour is that of a 5 year old
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lost-soul-01 · 3 years
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the amount of posts i’ve seen on here commenting negatively abt hyejins lack of interest in social activities … y’all r weirdos why do u expect everyone to want to make small talks and be interested in everyone’s life ? she doesn’t like talking to random ass ppl that she obvs doesn’t care abt and that is not a neg thing . and she does not need character development for it
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papers4me · 4 years
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Fruits Basket SE02 (ep,9). part 1
You know it’s real when kyo is given monologue right from the beginning! It rarely happens that he’s allowed any!, but when he does, it hits like a wild wave changing everything. The story is never the same after each time he’s given inner-talk. Forever changing the dynamics, the secrets & the relationships. e.g. true form ep.
Kyo’s love confession:
The sweetest, most tender love confession from the character that started the show fighting & screaming! The one that hated himself the most! now loves his name, only cuz she said it! “a special ring to it”. the guy who couldn’t look at her face, will repeat stupid things over “if it made you smile”. “Since when did I started” falling in love with you? the show goes on to show us various moment from as early as ep,4 & throughout seasons & scenes! he doesn’t know! We, the viewers, also don’t know when he started loving her!! we kinda gradually~ normally~ unknowingly~ fell in love with them together. The show opened this heavy ep filled with first-hand experience & steps on how Akito destroyed his victim... ouch! well-played, furuba! well-played.
The location: An empty room, no furniture, small, suffocating. The abuser sits far, then slowly walks towards the prey until there’s no space. But not before causing  physical pain to reassure dominance over the victim.
STEP 1: (The BET).
Kyo in his attempts to fight his destiny has met up with Akito prior to the beginning of the story, to defy him. Akito cleverly traps kyo into a bet manipulating his desire to break away from his fate. you said, YOU can fight your destiny? ok. I’ll let you. If you win against yuki, I’ll let you be free. easy, right? kyo this is your chance to prove yourself to yourself! just practice & win a stupid match. EASY! except it isn’t. The rat is superior to the cat. Your trials are in vain. you’ll NEVER rise up to anything except a failure. Try for three years! so generous of Akito! 36 months! you only need to win once! But you WON’T EVER! planting a toxic seed that eats away the victim’s self-esteem, hope & desire. Give him the chance to believe in himself then CRUSH IT. Once kyo fails, he’ll never believe in himself again. The bet is now cancelled before the third year even begins! one year & a half of failure is enough. You LOST. The Directing was phenomenal! The scene is shot in shades of sickening green, with underwater feel, like kyo is drowning deep in Akito’s abuse. Akito was shown from kyo’s perspective. Distorted, scary & demonic. like a monster..
STEP 2: (the past)
Taunting kyo with selective words that hit exactly were it hurts the most, using affirmative sentences in calm authoritative tone, alluding to facts.“cuz you’re a monster, ur mom is dead” “it was ur fault” “u killed ur mom”. Akito painted kyo’s mom in martyr light. giving birth to a monster, admirably protecting & raising him. Her reward? DEATH due to immense pressure from being WITH him. Extra step: painting kyo as the unforgivable & unappreciative son “ her son didn’t even mourn her” cuz kyo didn’t cry in front of others in her funeral. all these words carved his psyche like daggers extracting buried memories of his dad doing like Akito. YOU caused ur mom grief. the memory is now crystal clear. His mom walking slowly with open arms towards death. Giving kyo her back knowing he’s there. choosing to abandon & leave him. cuz it is HIM that is too much to bear. it is HIM that she’s escaping from.
STEP 3: (the present)
“you should’ve died”, “if you didn’t exist EVERYONE would be happy” This everyone in particular destroyed kyo way more than Akito ever planned for. Everyone includes the present. Everyone includes ppl who aren’t sohma-related. Everyone includes a happy mother & daughter. Everyone includes kyoko & tohru. It is NOW that kyo crashes, falls, loses & bends. Kyoko is the nail in his coffin. Akito lets go of kyo’s hand. Mission accomplished.
-Miscalculation in Akito’s plan: (tohru)
Akito unwittingly ruins her plan by mentioning tohru. her triumphant smile disappears & her authoritative powerful voice turns into childish screams to silence kyo, pathetically covering her ears. This drastic shift in power resulted only by mentioning tohru. Realizing that tohru was used as tool for whatever reason gave kyo strength to stand up & defend her. how dare you call her a monster? how dare you call her an angel? NO. she is but a human. A kind soul. That stayed WITH me regardless of all my ugliness inside & outside. WHY? who does that? Who gives & never takes? the foolish traveler.
The foolish traveler’s role in liberating & confiding kyo:
In momiji’s story, the foolish traveler gives the monster her life & dies. Tohru gave kyo her presence. She did NOT heal him or fade the ugliness away. NO. She didn’t treat his trauma. NO. she doesn’t even know abt his mom’s suicide!! she ONLY gave him her presence. She stayed with the monster. WHY? cuz she is a foolish person filled with kindness not wanting anything in return. But what happened to the the foolish traveler at the end of momiji’s story? she died. again DEATH surrounds kyo. If this foolish traveler stays with him death awaits her. History has proven kyo’s company lethal. the cat has cursed his most beloved ppl into death & harm. his dad, mom, kyoko. This story made kyo realize his romantic love to tohru & tragically made him understand the possible sad ending.
Akito’s Rebound:
Akito sizes the chance, strikes back & regains power. Like a hungry monster smelling fear! “ do u think u have the right to fall in love with someone?” “do u think you’re allowed?” Kyoko, reinforcing Akito’s words.”I won’t forgive you”. you, the monster knows love?? “who’s the real villain” you, the killer! “who’s the one who involved her the most” You, the most cursed! “it’s best if you are gone”.” I KNOW!” ,kyo said.
The fighter gives up:
“it was me”. every negative thought kyo has is reinforced by a past experience from someone in his life. Akito blackmails kyo into accepting his confinement in exchange of NOT harming tohru. It is becuz kyo finally loved someone enough to want to EXIST in this word that he finally stops fighting. He fought for years for himself. Now, he’ll give up for another person. Tohru’s love liberated him from hating himself enough to die or take his hatred on someone else, but, her love also imprisoned him into thinking he’ll never be worthy for her. His first thought upon seeing her is “ I want to be with u forever” but once again “ kyoko shows up reminding him” i wont forgive you” How can kyo wish to be with her? his entire trauma is against it. does he has the guts to rip tohru’s smile once he confess abt the past? What does he expect tohru to say once she knows? How would tohru react? he’ll scar her forever more than she’s already scarred. Those scars that she hides oh so well from others will become tragically apparent once he confess. So, No, kyo. Spare her the pain. who are you anyway? a mere monster that everyone will be happy if you disappeared” “why didn’t my mom kill me?” “she should’ve killed me” If she did.. then tohru would’ve been happy with her mom. “Why am I still alive?”
Kyo’s precious flower:
love is against logic. Logic says stay away from tohru & spare her ur unworthy existence. Love says look for her! love makes you run to her! love makes you want to see her first thing after getting out of the that room. love says cherish her, be around, stay with her. Love says she needs you! yes, the unworthy monster has been loved before! way before tohru!. Kazuma flashes in his mind & brings hope, Kyoko, flashes with a kind smile, teasing him, I see different hair styles, maybe repeatedly meeting kyo, love reminded kyo of the friend-kyoko! who recognized his loneliness, patted his head, reached out to him, she told him abt the tiny flower, showed him her most precious treasure. These ppl treated him as a human! NOT a monster, kazuma, kyoko & tohru, love opened his eyes to see the light amidst the darkness, the warmth of the sunset after the depth of suffocation. He won’t give up on life. NO, he wants to LIVE, to LOVE & to give back! he now knows that his existence isn’t completely worthless! he was there for tohru. he has already given her back time after time since they’ve met, he knows that! he made her smile, he saw her! the real her! tiny, foolish & oh so precious!  By the time he reached her he was able to genuinely smile from his heart! yes, he can smile cuz she’s with him now. He doesn’t care anymore abt the disgusting sohma & their curse. He only cares abt her. he won’t trample his precious flower, “ i once hoped to be always together, far away” to “ make you my own” But NO. he can’t hurt her with the painful memories, he’ll treat her with utmost respect, care & love until its time to say goodbye. quietly exiting from her life. As long as she’s not harmed. As long as her smile stays, so, he’ll stay with her together,” until we’re separated far apart”
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kewltie · 4 years
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anyway, abo au where alpha prohero ground zero decides it's time to start a family of his own but he doesn't have a mate and neither does he want one so he signs up for an omega surrogate program & meet his former childhood friend who will now carry his baby for him. 
izuku is a male omega w/ v v v high fertility even for his secondary sex and a strong body which make him an ideal surrogate to give birth healthy babies. w/ the program izuku contracted, izuku had given birth to several babies for various ppl over the years & babies are all happy and that's all that matter.
being a surrogate wasn't ever part of his dream but izuku is an omega & quirkless in a world that doesn't exactly appreciate either. one day when he was fruitlessly working at his 9 to 5 job, a rep from the company approached him w/ a pamphlet about surrogacy. the paid is v v good, the prenatal care & pregnancy compensation is all taken care of by the clients and his company, and he can select and choose which jobs to take. many families and ppl in the world cant have kids of their own for various reasons and izuku is HELPING THEM ACHIEVE THEIR DREAM. in his own way izuku is helping these people!!!!  He may not be saving lives has a hero that he always wanted to be but he's giving them their hope and dream in a child they all want so izuku does his job proudly. the only sadness he gets from it that once it's over the baby isn't his anymore bc he's contracted to sign over his parental rights to his clients.
so he tries desperately not to fall desperately in love w/ each of the babies he had. it's... tough but he loves them all the same. the good point is that some of his clients will let him talk and meet w/ their child’s birth parent so izuku isn't deprived of that connection.
it's a quiet and unconventional job, but izuku is happy w/ this lifestyle that he had chosen even as it make DATING AN ABSOLUTE pain. how do you explain to ppl that no you're not marry yet or date anyone but you have several kids floating around all over japan in various household??? lol /o\ this made him feel terribly alone thinking how he wants a family of his own one day after seeing how he's making his client so happy w/ their new baby in their arms. happiness wrapped in a surreal sadness as he watched his babies w/ their new family wishing for that happiness for himself one day but while izuku is settled in his bubble of melancholy an solitude, katsuki BUSTED DOWN THAT DOOR when he made a requested to have a surrogate. NOT JUST ANYONE WILL DO, the best one you FUCKING GOT: experience, results, good health, strong quirk, smart, and not some fucking easy omega.
the qualifications and requirements are obscene and ridiculous lolol but he paid through the roof to get the absolute best for his future child. izuku hits every one of these markers except... for the quirk one. the program hesitate to bring the two to meet but katsuki is impatience. he had been delayed and delayed over and over again for months as they try to match up a good surrogate partner for him. every one of them he had quickly rejected v v loudly and walked out on the meeting. izuku is literally their last hope as katsuki throws another fit.
katsuki is getting older now, close to his 30s annd still stuck in singlehood while all his colleagues and friends settle down with a family of their own. his parents, esp his old hag, has been relentlessly nagging him to GIVE HER A BABY ALREADY SHE WANTS TO BE A GRANDMA BEFORE SHE DIE so w/ all kind of pressures, he said fuck it, i'll give you a fucking BABY but i dont need a mate to do it but in truth he earnestly does want a baby for his own bc the idea of raising a tiny human w/ all the trails and errors and potentially fucking up is humbling & huge responsibility.  he thinks he’s up for it like the pro-stage where he's standing at the top now, he can conquered it w sheer force and effort as he does w/ any challenge that he face. Parenthood will be his greatest battle and hurdle he has to overcome and he's going to fucking ACE IT. so katsuki is 10000% in this and he wants the best surrogate for his baby.
the program finally have izuku & katsuki meet after wasting 5 months of trying to find katsuki a suitable partner that he won't reject right away. so their first meeting go something like this: multiple slam doors, a table is flipped, and a lot of yelling.
it went great because izuku is hired right away. Just kidding.
katsuki had thought it was some giant fucking joke the moment izuku had walked through that door. "Who the fuck set this up?!" he demanded, kicking a coffee table over. so furious that his hands were shaking bc the idea of the length he'd went through and hoops he'd jumped over to get here JUST SO HE CAN BE MAKE A FOOL OUT OF, he'd stormed out a sec later, slamming doors violently on his way out and they had to dragged his ass back w/ the fervent promise that no IT'S NOT A PRANK AND WE HAVE NOTHING TO DO W/ CHARGEBOLT OR RED RIOT, PLS PLS LISTEN TO US.
he came back to izuku's unperturbed face as he took a sip of his coffee and katsuki snapped defensively, "i hope you won't fucking be drinking that piss when you're pregnant with my baby."
Unimpressed, Izuku replied, "good thing im not pregnant yet bc who said i would agree."
Flustered and red in the face w/ anger bc THE AUDACITY OF IZUKU TO REJECT HIM WHEN KATSUKI SHOULD BE THE ONE TO DOING IN THE FIRST PLACE!! izuku was the one who doesn't deserve to carry his child!! but the director of the program hurriedly assured him that izuku IS THE *BEST*. he got a pages of recommendation/referral, glowing reviews, and every client of his had never been happier bc of him. all his pregnancy were carried to full term and the babies are all good & strong. izuku himself go the gym when he's not on the job, keeping a healthy lifestyle. he doesn't drink or smoke (which katsuki emphasized in his requirement) and his family doesn't have any record any genetic disorder. he may not have finish college but he test high in his IQ and he take his job v v v seriously. the only problem was... he's quirkless.
it's a thing izuku always make it point for all his clients to know what they could potentially get w/ their children if they chose him. some walked away but most stayed with bc izuku is THE BEST OF THE BEST and they want kid more than they want a manufactured perfect child.
"will that be a problem?" izuku asked, meeting his eyes dead on. "does the thought of having a quirkless child anger you?"
katsuki bristles, clenching & unclenching his hands at his side. though no much had change over the years, he's older now, not that dumbass kid anymore, misguided by his own sense of pride and arrogance and warped by prejudice and the superiority of his quirk. He had left that behind in UA, who happily beaten the idiocy out of him. now, he doesn't care if his child is quirkless or not bc they're his and he'll raise and love them all the same. if the world treat his kid crap for being quirkless, he'll teach them to fuck the world up till it bow down and kiss their ass bc they're a bakugou and they don't settle for anything less, which brought back to the point that izuku REALLY IS THE BEST THEY GOT.
so he shook his head and said, "it doesn't matter whether they're quirkless or not bc they're mine and i always take good care of what's mine."
Izuku's eyes widen and for fraction of a second his cool mask of difference crack under katsuki's heartfelt and sincere words. They havent seen each other since middle school, that’s over a decade, and katsuki truly have grown up into someone the entire world can admire and hold up on a pedestal as the no. 1 hero in the country.
"And what about you? you're okay with me?" katsuki retorted. "with the kind of volatile *history* that we shared."
Izuku paused, and then, he said quietly, "i'm not that petty to deny you a child bc of our past bc neither of us are the kids we were back then."
katsuki stood up. "get him the paperworks and have him sign it. i want him and nobody else."
Izuku jerked up in surprised. "that's it? you dont want to ask me anything else? don't you want to go through my records and background to make sure that im the right fit for you."
katsuki stared down at him and it was like pinned under glass before he said, "we may have changed, but something are still the same. you still want to help ppl even if this is a roundabout way  to do it. i trust my instinct and my instinct is screaming at me to give you a fucking chance." He looked away, scratching the back of his head as he continued, "if there's one thing that is made clear to me now is that you're a good person and i was a shittyass kid for not realizing that sooner."
izuku's breath hitched. it's not an apology but it's damn close.
and with that he left izuku dizzy with a confusing cocktail of warmth, shock, and something far too nebulous and strange for him to put a finger to yet. when he first realized it was katsuki who was looking for a surrogate, he'd steel himself of the rejection & lashing out to come. izuku had spent his entire life rejected one way or another, so he was mentally prepare for this to be added to pile esp from the man who had hurt him repeatedly before. when katsuki had left for U.A. and izuku in the dust, they rarely have anything to do w/ each other after that even as he'd followed katsuki meteoric rise to the top, his blazing trajectory that placed him as the current no.1 bc despite everything, katsuki truly is amazing and deserved his place. he just never thought they would meet again in the sort of situation where a baby is the bargaining chip.
izuku was prepared for everything that katsuki would throw at him... but not his fervent agreement. now, izuku got to face the fact that for a year they're going to spend in each other pocket as izuku tries to carry not only katsuki's baby but his hope and future too. it's going to be either a total nightmare or some v v surreal dream bc it's bakugou katsuki with all that fame and temper and strong armed will and izuku is just... plain old izuku. he never had a client w/ such power and weight to throw around and so high profile that every know his name.
oh what did he sign up for, izuku thought as the door to the meeting room was slammed open again and katsuki glared at the director. "wait i want it all to be done today," katsuki said. "put my sperms in him as soon as possible."
izuku dropped his face into his hand and sighed.
the process of getting izuku impregnated is all v clinical and boring. izuku goes under a pseudo heat simulation that fool his body to think he's actually going into heat so his fertility up even more so during this period and he get artificially inseminated w/ katsuki's sperm. this is actually a process and takes several days & even weeks to prepare bc waiting for izuku's most fertile window during his heat period is v v important to have higher chance of success NORMALLY but w/ advance tech izuku can go under a pseudo heat that trigger release of eggs  so they can get it all done pretty quickly and dont have to wait for nature to set it up for them.
katsuki already provided enough sperm to last a fucking lifetime bc he's an overly prepared asshole and it's three days later when they meet back at the clinic to start the process. all of this is under the watchful care of doctors and nurses to make sure everything go right. izuku had done this many times before for his previous clients so this isn't new to him at all but it's the first time that a client specifically demand to be part of the entire process.
izuku stares him down and tells him in no uncertain detail bc it's already weird enough to be the one to carry his former childhood friend's baby but to have him watch izuku get inseminated w/ his sperm?? YEA OK, no. katsuki glowers bc he just want everything to GO SMOOTHLY. his micromanagement & obsessiveness drives the clinic insane but izuku kinda finds it funny and cute?? maybe bc he's aware that it's just katsuki's nerves acting up since this is so terribly new and terrifying for him and HE DOESN'T LIKE IT WHEN THINGS ARENT UNDER HIS CONTROL.
neither katsuki or izuku is alone this bc surrogacy isn't about either them it's about the baby and the ppl who helps make it possible and that's both of them. the surrogate who carries the unborn fetus and donor who gives a part of themselves to make it all possible. izuku hesitates before deciding screw it & reaches out and holds katsuki's hand in comfort AS THOUGH KATSUKI THE ONE GETTING THE PROCEDURE DONE TO HIM. "i'll be fine," he insists. "i've done this plenty of times before and dr. abe even longer than that with 20yrs of experience so i'll be ok."
"I'm not worry," katsuki snaps, even though he squeezes Izuku's hand hard enough that izuku is afraid his bones might crack under the pressure. "i know you'll be fucking fine, wont he dr. abe?" he stares down at the doctor with the full force of his wrath that the doctor shifts nervously.
"o-of course, bakugou-san," dr abe is quick to assure him. "our best ppl is on the job."
izuku rolls his eyes bc while heat inducing artificial insemination isn't exactly a new tech but there's a risk to any kind of medical procedure. it's low though and izuku isn't worry.
katsuki lets him go and izuku just sends him a quick reassuring smile over his shoulder even as katsuki can't take his eyes off of the entire trip to the surgical room. the process takes around 1-2 hours max & izuku comes out of it mostly woozy & still under heat related stress.
he needs to rest the next few days as he lets nature and w/ the help of science takes it course. izuku rests up at the clinic that provide him 24hrs care to make sure everything is alright which is all normal and part of the procedure. what surprise him is that katsuki visiting him DAILY. he actually bring izuku's home cooked meals that are carefully & thoughtfully prepared (healthy food choices!!) that it silences him for a moment.
"you know im not pregnant yet," izuku points out helpfully. "do you want me to explain how biology work in case UA didn't go over it in their curriculum?"
"shut your face and just eat," katsuki says with a glower, and watches intensely as izuku eats every bite and not leave a single piece behind. while there he harasses izuku's nurses and doctors, asking for izuku's vital stats and probing questions about the surgery & his health.it's so annoying and overbearing, but izuku can't help the smile threatening to break through his defense bc that's just like katsuki shoving his business into everything and dominating the entire process even though it is IZUKU who is going through it all. it's dreadfully cute.
izuku is fully recovered after several days of rest as expected and he is, once again surprised, to see katsuki is right there every step of the way as he is release from the clinic. katsuki who took a short shift today just so he can pick izuku up, which IS SUPER RARE. katsuki is a total workaholic and married to his job kind of pro hero so for him to take half a day off is beyond shocking for everyone?? bc HE GOT ENOUGH VACATION/SICK DAYS TO TAKE SEVERAL MONTHS OFF w/o any worry, but he came to take izuku home and make sure everything is in order.
it's not that izuku didn't have any clients wanting to be so involve in the whole surrogacy/pregnancy process but katsuki takes it into a whole new lvl w/ how much he inserts himself into izuku's life like it's not just the baby he care about but izuku too. he delivers izuku home and make sure izuku have his emergency contacts at all time in case ANYTHING, ABSOLUTEY ANYTHING HAPPEN and he wants izuku to text him daily with updates even for stupid things. he's obsessive and demanding and nervous, and izuku thinks it's funny as hell.
so for the next several weeks, izuku flood katsuki's phone w/ commentary about his days that HAS NOTHING TO DO W/ his chance of being pregnant. since izuku full time job is just being a surrogate, he mostly spend his days wandering around the city, reading, volunteering, etc. izuku updates katsuki on his daily activities and while he doesn't always get a reply immediately but his updates are always left on read and sometimes katsuki would leave some *encouraging* word like 'yea,' or 'okay' and izuku doesn't know why but he finds them comforting all the same.
 when he wanders around the city, he'll text katsuki his coordinates bc katsuki is paranoid &wants him to keep away from dangerous area or area under villain attack, he would take pictures of the heroes he see and katsuki would have a snarky comments on each & every one of them. it's in this moments that the two of them really come alive. izuku get a glimpse of the world that he could have had if he had a quirk and pursue his dream of going pro hero and insights on what it's like to be bakugou katsuki, the man standing at the pinnacle of the pro hero scene.
At this point katsuki is even more engaged in izuku's text now. he becomes interest in the books izuku is currently reading, the outreach programs izuku super passionate about esp for young and disenfranchise quirkless youths. then there are izuku's rowdy neighbors and their hilariously complicated love life that izuku is terribly invested bc of his lack of one.
"i think higa-san is going to break up with him today," izuku would update him one day, after watching his neighbors have another blow out.
katsuki texts back an hour later: "yea right, the guy is spineless coward. he wouldn't ever go through it."
izuku lets out a smile as he stares down at the text. it's the most fun izuku ever had in the middle of a job that he forget they're not friends at all but client and surrogate. this is a job for him and izuku is an end to a mean for katsuki. it doesn't mean anything. It couldn’t mean anything. Why is he even trying?
Izuku has been doing the job for seven years and carried his pregnancy to full terms five times. he knows the routine even though each client he had were different from one another and not all pregnancy are the same, but he knows what to expect and prepare. nothing truly surprised him anymore. Or at least they shouldn’t. ,his world didn't suddenly change w/ katsuki's arrival in his ordinary life. izuku is still very much the same person, but all the same he wake up everyday w/ renews energy and lightens heart, looking forward to seeing the text notification from katsuki popping up on his phone screen.
he finds himself looking forward to their interaction the most throughout his days. a glimpse into katsuki's world and what it means to be a part of his life again however temporary it is bc izuku knows there is a time limit to this. he's only allow to talk like this w/ katsuki bc he's doing him a favor, a job, an obligation in exchange of money. they're in a relationship artificially made, they're not friends or colleagues and izuku may be carrying katsuki's baby in the future but he's not a parent w/ katsuki.
He’s an incubator.
these thoughts feel tangibly familiar to his past cases where he had carried the fetus to full term and had to part ways with his baby and the client/parents and separate himself from their lives after the birth but it had never hurt in this way like the thoughts alone would cut his heart into pieces now. it's beyond selfish to get attach and izuku tries to maintain a careful distance w/ katsuki bc they're client and an employee, but katsuki is relentless. he won't settle for just for pieces of izuku and his life. he wants it all. Izuku may be weak enough to give it to him…
 he invests himself into izuku's life, his interest, his worries and thoughts. to katsuki, izuku isn't just an incubator but someone who shares the other half of his baby's genes so of fucking course he IS INVESTED BC izuku is just as important as the fetus he could be carrying right now but izuku has a hard time wrapping his head around it bc while izuku was w/ his other client they were all kind and caring to him during his surrogacy but never to this length. they weren't interest in him as a person but someone who is a means to an end, a tool to make their dream come true.
izuku isn't hurt by that regard bc he knows getting involve w/ your surrogate can be a hot mess & confusing for the baby growing up so izuku knows how to keep his distance and careful to keep his heart walled up but katsuki has a habit of breaking things. He’s so very, very good at it, especially distubring the peace of izuku’s heart.
katsuki may be relentless w/ his attention & dedication but izuku's walls went down embarrassingly easy as though he was waiting for katsuki to reach out toward him after all the years apart and shake him loose from his bubble of solitude. katsuki doesn't realize how affected izuku is by his clumsy and gestures, but izuku won't tell. He’s too embarrassed to ever bring it up because even after all these years katsuki still has such a sever effect on him.
so izuku lends himself to enjoy this upcoming months as much as he can bc once it's over they will part ways again as though they exist solely in different space and the only chance he'll get to see katsuki and the baby is through the screen of his tv. it doesn't bring him any comfort but it's manageable. izuku can deal with it. he got years to get used to it by now.  It’s not gentle but it’s a blunt kind of truth that mend with time.
several weeks after since izuku did the procedure, he doesn't feel any different but izuku wakes up one morning and he could feel a strangeness settling over his body. there are a lot of old wives tales about pregnant omegas and women and most of them are false, standing against scientific knowledge but izuku been going around this block five times already, so he realizes there may be some truths to a few of them.
he gets out of bed and makes breakfast before making sure to send a text and photo to katsuki about his meals bc katsuki is ANAL about making izuku eat right. katsuki motherhenning him miles away even as he is out on patrol is still the most hilarious and weirdly sweet thing, izuku finds. it doesn't feel suffocating at all to him. sometimes he when the thought slip out of him unconsciously he thinks this is what it's like to have an alpha of his own, but katsuki isn't his by any means.
izuku forgoes his favorite breakfast meal this time and go for something he rarely eats. a food that he normally doesn't chose but it feels right this time. it all clicks. the signs were all there several days back. the frequent bathroom usage, his breasts throbbing, and cramps. he'd seen it already but this morning it lines up perfectly like it was all meant to be, like everything is built up just for this moment right here.
so with a bounce to his steps, he waits for katsuki's text back. It takes a few mins when katsuki get back from his morning run bc he got a routine and is terribly predictable in that regard. his following texts rip into izuku's choice of food bc IT ISN'T HIS USUAL at all and katsuki have colorful words about the kind of junk izuku force feed into his body and DOESN'T HE KNOW HOW TO TAKE CARE OF HIMSELF. HOW THE FUCK DID HE SURVIVES ALL THESE YEARS ON HIS OWN.
izuku smiles down at his phone even though katsuki is blasting him and everything he choose to be, but HE DOESN'T EVEN KNOW WHAT IT ALL MEANS. it's kinda adorable so when katsuki get into a slow rant about food group and healthy life choices, izuku cuts in:
me: oh btw im pregnant :)
he didn't get any get any respond from katsuki for the next five mins so during that time izuku makes fresh cup of juice to drink while katsuki works to settle down his panic. when he comes back fifteen mins later, it's to a series of angry keymash and texts.
kacchan: a;sjdasdf
kacchan: as;dlifucccck
kacchan: fuck fuck fuck
kacchan: are you serious?!
kacchan: DONT FUCKING JOKE WIHT ME DEKU
kacchan: i'm coming over right now
kacchan: you better be sitting down
kacchan: don't fucking move even an inch
kacchan: YOU HEAR ME
me: ok
izuku sits there peacefully, enjoying his cup of juice as he waits for katsuki's arrival. one of his hand rests over his stomach carefully & though he hadn't taken any test or get his bloodwork done, he knows, instinctively & intimately that there is a life growing inside of him.
it's all very silly and unproven since there's no concrete evidence to support any of it, but maybe it's his omega instinct, maybe it's his experience as a carrier who brought five children into this world, or maybe it's just wishful thinking on his part, but he knows and this is a truth that won’t be brought down.
izuku takes his job v seriously bc people's happiness hinged on his ability to give them a child they earnestly had wished for so he of course he would want to be pregnant as soon as possible, but--izuku looks down at his stomach, this time even more so he wants it to be real.
 he wants to be the one to fulfilled katsuki's earnest wish and give him the child he desired. it's as much a part of his job, his duty, but also something he selfishly wants for himself. this baby, this child will be his only connection to katsuki once his job his completed. they'll part ways after this--no more late night phone calls, morning texts, and silly anecdotes they exchange to each other everyday bc izuku is unlikely to ever see him again. their worlds are just too far apart, like the two planets stuck in orbit but never meeting but at least with this child, izuku knows there is always a piece of him w/ katsuki always. so more than anything, this child will be his gift to katsuki.
he picks up his phone & sends katsuki a text.
me: if you dont mind, could you pick up a pregnancy test just to be sure?
izuku knows himself & his body, but he wants to be 110% sure for katsuki's sake. he doesn't want to get katsuki's hope up only to crush it later. katsuki's respond back is quick and telling.
kacchan: will three do?
kacchan: do you need anything else?
kacchan: i'll get them
izuku pauses, frowning hard as he looks down at his phone.
me: please don't text and drive
me: also, try stay below the speed limits
me: i dont want you to die before you see your child.
this time it takes longer to get a respond back.
kacchan: dont fucking talk to me about the speed laws kacchan: im not a reckless idiot
kacchan: my entire job description is to uphold the law so degenerates dont fucking run amok
kacchan: ... im not driving right now
izuku's brows furrow in thought before a smile cracks across his face.
me: kacchan... did you pull over to the side just to yell at me?
me: that's so terribly cautious and cute of you :3c
me: you're already on your way to becoming a great dad.
kacchan: FUCK YOU!!!!!!
Izuku laughs, light and so tinged with joy that it feels so strange to him to be this happy about something silly as this.
me: not a chance but thanks.
me: dont forget to buy my pregnancy test and i dont need anything else. just come here as soon as possible afterward
and he leaves it that. katsuki doesnt text him back anymore, leaving izuku to wait for his arrival with anticipation. he should get up and clean the apartment so it's presentable at least to katsuki. he hadn't had a guest in a while so this would get a good change but katsuki's warning still loop in his head. getting up to clean the apartment would constitute moving around and izuku is barely into his first trimester so, it's not like he's straining his body or anything. katsuki is just being an overbearing anxious new father.
izuku had seen that before in his past clients, who constantly fret over izuku's health but they're not THE GROUND ZERO and he has the nagging suspicious that he doesn't want to test katsuki's thinning patience with him. it's fun to tease him like this but he knows his limit. so izuku continues to sit there & waits, playing w/ his phone as he scrolls through the hero news site to check any interesting updates. izuku may have long let go of his dream but he can't disconnect from it completely. it's how he stay in the loop w/o actually being a part of it.
izuku's eyes widen as he spots a tweet on the #groundzero tag on twitter that sits atop of all others: "no jokes, guys i think i just a saw #groundzero stormed into my store and headed toward the omega’s hygiene care aisle. he bought a bunch of stuff before heading out.”
it already got a several thousands likes and retweets, with a flood of comments that ranged from "what?? sounds fake lol" or "okay, who would have guess gz would be the one to secretly keeping an omega on the side" and others are filled with more confusion and disbelief.
izuku makes a face. his contract binds him to confidentially and assurance that his identity remains quiet. he never had any problem with his identity being exposed w/ any of previous clients but then again he never had such a famous client before. this--is going to be a headache. he chews down on his lower lip in thought as he shuts down his phone. he's going to have to remind katsuki to be more careful next time lest they figure out what katsuki is up to... and who izuku is to him. not his friend, not his sweetheart, not his omega but his surrogate.
just as izuku ponders about doing damage control, there is a series of loud insistent knocks on his apartment door. izuku blinks and hurriedly to the door w/o any thought who is on the other side bc somehow he knows it got to be *him*.
he opens to door to katsuki's scowling face.
"i told you to not fucking move," katsuki scolds, and pushes his way inside w/o any invite, carefully moving izuku to the side like izuku is made of glass which make izuku annoyed right away but also painfully fond in that . he's an overprotective idiot but he's trying and that's--*something*.
 "how else would i let you in then," izuku retorts, rolling his eyes as he leads katsuki into apartment. "im only couple of weeks pregnant at most and you're already asking for miracles."
katsuki scoffs but doesn't argue as he hands izuku a full plastic bag. "okay, start peeing."
"I--" Izuku opens the bag and looks inside, staring down at the pregnancy tests stuffed to the rim of the small bag, all eleven boxes of them, "I dont have enough pee for this."
katsuki frowns. "drink a lot of water then," he suggests.
Izuku shoots him a glare. "that's not funny," he snaps.
katsuki's frowns deepen. "i'm not being funny," he says.
Izuku sighs and just digs his hand into the bag to grab a handful of the boxes. "i'll do only two so dont even." he throws the rest of the bag at katsuki and heads toward the bathroom.
it horrifyingly takes them all 30mins to be done w/ the tests bc katsuki v loudly insisted that he should do more than two, kept on banging on the bathroom door to let him know that. izuku gritted his teeth and took three more and really DID RAN OUT OF PEE AFTER THE FIFTH ONE.
the wait for the test results which only take a mins or two is ramped up by katsuki anxiously pacing back and forth in front of izuku until izuku grabs him by the sleeve of his shirt and drags him down to the sit next to him in the couch. "it'll be okay," he assures katsuki.
katsuki scowls and brushes off his touch, but he seems to breathe a little easier after that. the first three tests gives them a positive, the fourth is a negative, and the fifth is a positive. izuku frowns at the result. he knows in his heart that is w/o a doubt pregnant and the majority of the results support that but, he casts a nervous glance katsuki whose face is seemingly troubled, that's probably not enough for katsuki who spend a load of money to afford izuku's time, commitment, and body. Izuku is expensive but so is katsuki’s time and investment.
he definitely wants more than a dubious result that isn't 100% guarantee that izuku's pregnant and even if izuku tells him that he is truly pregnant bc izuku knows his own body, that may not go well either. "we can get the bloodwork done tomorrow to check for sure," izuku tries to assures him. Sometimes science speak louder than a parental instinct.
katsuki stares at him, eyes so intently focus on izuku that he feels like's a butterfly pinned under katsuki's gaze. abruptly, he reaches a hand out and grabs Izuku's own, giving it a quick and purposeful squeeze. "Move in with me," he says, sounding so grave and serious.
izuku gets up from his seat. "Do you want something to drink?" he asks, already heading toward the kitchen. "suddenly, im parched."
"did you hear what i just said?!" katsuki demands, trailing after him like a yapping puppy on his heels. "And sit the fuck down! let me get it."
abruptly, izuku stops and turns around to face katsuki with a glower on his face. "im just pregnant and not an invalid," he snaps, annoyance prickling at him. he had been doing this longer than katsuki could even imagine. "And i can get the drinks myself in my *own* home thank you." katsuki's eyes widen slightly at the sharp tone izuku had quickly adapted and heaves a sigh, carding a hand through his hair in frustration like izuku is the one being purposely difficult here. "I--fuck--" He frowns, face scrunches as he search for his next words. izuku waits it out, patient and silence against the inner turmoil that must now be swirling inside of katsuki.
katsuki's gaze drops to the floor, hands balling at his side. his breathing even out as he grimaces. "sorry," he finally settles on with a quiet mumble.
Izuku steps back in surprise. shock, really. "w--wait can repeat that again because i just thought i heard you apologized without any prompting."
katsuki flushes, ducking his head. "shut the fuck up. im not going to repeat myself," he rebukes, but the damage had been done.
Despite the years tempering his recklessness out he can't help wanting to poke the hornet's nest. "i honestly didn't think sorry was in your vocabulary, kacchan," he teases, grinning.
katsuki flinches back as though struck, surprising izuku once more. the words were said in jest, meant to ease katsuki into a laugh or close to it at least but something like pained flickers across Katsuki's face that immediately izuku wants to take it all back, but katsuki's expression had already closed up.
Izuku's heart hurt, thinking that he'd lost him. he'd pushed too hard. they're aren't friends, barely acquaintances really. just a client-employee dynamic that izuku should have been careful of. he always know where to toe the line of the boundaries of his job and with his client, but--they were doing so well that he'd hoped. been so hopeful because it had almost feels like they were sort of friends again.
izuku and katsuki had always orbit each other's world but childish pride, anger, and superiority had torn them apart and izuku was pushed out of Katsuki’s life. now that they're older, izuku is no longer that child blindingly infatuated with this remarkable person before him. he knows what he's capable of and katsuki had certainly earned his place at the top of the world but he won't be cowed either. so it's fine if katsuki doesn't want to fall back into a some kind of make shift friendship with him. it's fine if he just want to think izuku is just a walking incubator for his child. izuku will survive. He had survive this long without katsuki ‘s looming shadow after all.
katsuki hunches over as he grits his teeth. "fuck."
izuku blinks.
  "i'm not that shitty fucked up kid anymore," katsuki nearly growl out, pinning izuku with a look of full intent. "I'm," he swallows, hesitant, wary, "i'm trying to be a better person, a friend, a son, and most importantly a father now that we have a spawn coming our way."
Izuku's heart quickens at the 'we' usage even though it probably means nothing. nothing at all. katsuki was only just opening himself to him. this is something that startling new and truly welcoming experience for katsuki and izuku shouldn't mistake it for anything else. he can't be too greedy. so he steps forward, wanting to reach out and touch katsuki to affirm of his existence, but he doesn't. not when katsuki is like an exposed wire right now--twitchy, nervous, and just a little shy of imploding from carving himself open for izuku to see all his true feelings and motives.
izuku smiles.
"If i didn't think you were a good person then i wouldn't have entrusted this child,” he touches his still flat stomach, knowing life is stirring underneath his palm, "with you." katsuki truly had grown up. he'll be a good father, izuku muses but it's a bittersweet feeling. "i still want my independence though," he continues. "i've done this many times before so you can stop treating me like i'm going to break if you breath the wrong way. thousands and millions of omegas and women have been doing this a lot longer than me and they're fine. im fine, so breathe."
katsuki's presses his lip together into a grim line. "I know that," he shakes his head, "but you dont have to this alone. i'll want to be there with you every step of the way even if it mean you need someone to run to the grocery store for some shitty midnight craving. I want to be the first person you think about when you need any kind of assistance not because you're weak or helpless but because you just need someone, so let me be that person for you," he finishes, looking on in pained after spouting such sweet sentiments.
it makes izuku want to laugh, but he doesn't think that would be welcoming right now because katsuki still got his pride after all. "I'll think about it," he acquiesce, heart warming several hundred degrees as though he's standing under the direct sunlight of bakugou katsuki.
katsuki grimaces, clearly unhappy with izuku's non-answer but he relents anyway with a long heave. "ok, ok, i can deal with that," he says like the words alone was hard enough to swallow, "but if you change your mind at any moment just let fucking know!"
Oh, no, izuku thinks helplessly. he wants to give katsuki a treat for being so annoyingly overbearing but considerate in his own clumsy ways. "well, if you behave yourself, i might even consider taking you with me to my OBGYN doc this thursday," he says casually with a shrug.
Katsuki scowls, but he stands up straighter. "I'll--" he looks away, flushed with an earnest yearning spread across his face, "be good, okay?"
Izuku quietly tucks a smile between his pressed lips before it break through even though this is terrible for his weak, weak heart.
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hencethebravery · 6 years
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TITLE: CS 0155 Data Witchcraft, 1/1 (Ao3)
SUMMARY: All the books and movies seem keen on operating under the assumption that magic is supposed to make your life easier. But apparently it was all lies, because being in one’s 20s seems to suck no matter what kind of spells you’re prone to casting. Emma Swan and Killian Jones, while “blessed” with the gift of magic, are certified emotional disasters—it’s a relief to know that at least they’ve found each other. A Contemporary CS Witches AU.
CONTENT WARNING (RATED M): Contains brief mentions of childhood sexual abuse; swearing; casual, non-depressing drug use; implicit and consensual sexual content between adults. The sexual abuse is mentioned in passing and not described in explicit detail. If you need further details before reading, feel free to send me a message!
AUTHOR’S NOTES: This was a story that I planned on finishing with about 9k. It ended up being completed about 41 words under the 15k limit, and imo it should probably be longer, but since that’s not an option, this is what we’re left with! I’d like to thank a few ppl that made this possible: @the-reason-to-sail-home, @pritkins-little-witch, @initiala, and @wellhellotragic for all of their time and helpful thoughts. This fic ended up being far more challenging than I had anticipated and I couldn’t have done it without y’all. Especially Tessa and Kat, you are both my shining stars. Thank you for never letting me give up on myself. Literally incredible freaking artwork that I cannot stop staring at provided by @clockadile and @princesse-swan, both found here and here (respectively). If you’re interested in listening to the soundtrack I made to suit the particular vibe of this story, you can listen on 8tracks, here. 
“Watch carefully that magic that occurs when you give a person enough comfort to just be themselves." — Atticus, Love Her Wild: Poems
i. ugly_duckling
Emma Swan learns about magic the same way that most children do—slipped in between the pages of a book. She is not granted the privilege of enjoying a conversation typical of most children; that of parents soothing the inevitable disappointment with the truth that magic is not real. The parents might, for the most part, keep the dream alive for a certain number of years. And so, for that certain number of years, the child will be allowed to live in a world where magic exists. That child will spend a few blissful years staring a little too hard at the creepy house at the end of their street; that child will throw a packet of salt over their shoulder, even at the risk of being yelled at by their parents after the fact. Most children will grow up feeling afraid, and not much can be done about it—but to be able to quell that fear, at least temporarily, with the suggestion that there’s a magical world at the heart of it all, waiting to be discovered? That kind of thinking might make the pain of all those unknown variables worth it, at least for most children.
Emma Swan was not most children. She was “most children,” in the sense that she wandered into a library and plucked a book off the shelf with a flying girl on the cover (she rode a broomstick and wore a black hat). She was “most children,” in the way she jumped off picnic tables and prayed that her feet would never touch the ground. But she was not “most children,” when she brought the book home and showed her new “mother” the particular book in question.
“Oh, you silly thing,” Mrs. Swan had so gleefully informed her, a sharp smirk on her stiff, something not quite right about it face. “Hasn’t anyone told you? There’s no such thing as magic.”
In the Swan household there was no such thing as magic. There was a roof over Emma’s head, and a hot meal three times a day, but in all other matters of importance, it may as well have been another orphanage. To make matters worse there was Betsy Swan’s husband, Mitchell Swan—a man who, on his very best days, could hardly summon the courage to lift his ass from the couch, and on his very worst, slip into Emma’s room every other night when his wife was asleep.
As a child, Emma would disappear into her own head, creating elaborate escape attempts from her supposed home. Sometimes she would don her own pointy black hat, put a spell on her own boring broomstick, and turn Mr. Swan into some small, nasty insect she could crush beneath her shoe.
When Emma turns seven, the Swans buy their first computer. It’s a Power Macintosh G3, which matters little to Emma at the time. At first, when she overhears them talking about it, Betsy mentions something about a mouse, and she finds herself unnaturally excited at the prospect of there being an actual animal in the house. That is until she actually sees the thing, and becomes confused and disappointed at the sight of this small, oddly shaped piece of plastic attached to a length of cord. She stares curiously at the blackened screen for a few moments until Betsy returns, yelling at her to get her “behind” away from the most expensive thing in the house.
Like most major developments that might occur within the pages of any generic fantasy novel, Emma makes her first acquaintance with the digital universe in the dead of night. Closer to midnight, if we’re being specific. A clock chimes from the dining room, and the Swan house is blessedly silent as she sneaks down the hall, past the flickering light of the television, the soft sounds of Mitchell’s snores emitting from his armchair.
The machine sits quiet and imposing atop the desk in the office; the light from the moon casting an eerie glow about the room, the dark screen a seemingly infinite void staring back into her wide, curious eyes. She sneaks a glance back towards where she came, expecting to hear Mitchell’s heavy footsteps, or Betsy’s cruel laughter, but she’s only greeted with silence, the odd creak of an old house.
When she finally works up the nerve to power it on there’s a kind of yawning, high-pitched static that hits her ears in a not entirely unpleasant way. It’s just enough that she finds herself overcome with the urge to open and close her mouth comically wide, like when your ears pop inside the cabin of an airplane and you have to re-adjust all the loose air inside your head. There’s a sound afterwards, a low hum that would never really go away. In later years, she would come to understand that there’s always a vague humming associated with most electronics. What was different in Emma’s case was the sound beneath the hum, or rather, the sounds.
She would learn to ignore them after a time, picking and choosing the most relevant or useful voices. Sometimes they were people, other times they were… something else. The first night she boots up the Power Macintosh, it’s all white noise, and she assumes it’s a thing that everyone can hear. It’s a lot of excited whispers, so hushed and quickly spoken that she has a difficult time making out any one word or phrase.
“Hello?” she utters quietly, still silently praying for the Swans to remain asleep and unaware of her trespassing. “Is there anyone out there?”
The humming cacophony of distant voices and dissonant beeps are the only answer, as if her own voice has gotten lost in the din, and her eyes search the desktop until they land on an oddly familiar image of a piece of paper. It is unlike any other piece of paper she’s ever seen, this bold, flat image outlined in blocks of color—untouchable, and with no discernible smell or texture. She has stumbled upon a word processor, a blank document with a blinking, vertical line that waits and waits.
The moon grows a bit brighter in the wake of her excitement, but Emma is too eager to notice the way the darker corners of the room become less so; even the way in which the computer itself has begun to emit its own soft, illuminated ring of greenish light, as if the office has been submerged in water.
“Hello,” Emma writes slowly, one key at a time. With each selection of every letter beneath her fingertips sounds a satisfying clunk, and she grins as she continues, “My name is Emma Swan.”
The silence that follows in the wake of all those voices is nearly deafening, but there’s a clear answer that sounds from within the four walls of her newly christened safe haven; murky and quiet, getting comfortable from her place seated at the bottom of a pool, “Hello, Emma Swan. It is very nice to meet you.”
As it turns out, there is quite a lot about the Swans’ Power Macintosh G3 that they are not privy to. The Swans, in point of fact, seem to be ignorant of a great many things occurring out in the world and even in their own home about 99% of the time. They have never heard the hum of voices coming from the computer room, nor do they seem to receive the same kind of unsettling, predictive programming that Emma can suss out from within the apparent blankness of a darkened television screen. It’s a blessing and a curse. While it’s nice to know she’s not quite so alone as she used to be—while it seems as if she’s been able to lift a veil and spot the real world underneath, there’s still the reality of the Swans always hovering in another room, at her back, or in her bed.
Betsy catches Emma on the computer late one night about a month or so after her first midnight rendezvous, and the subsequent consequences are about as bad as she assumed they would be. There’s a harsh smack to the back of the head, even harsher words, and a rough tugging of her arm towards her bedroom door, tossing her inside and slamming it shut before Emma can say a word in her own defense. She cries and seethes, the tightness at the back of her throat a painful and vicious reminder of the fact that she is little more than a prisoner.
And while Emma stewed inside her room, her small feet pacing back and forth from door to window and back again, Betsy Swan had tried and failed to turn on her new computer after it had shut off quite unexpectedly. It’s screen remained stubbornly dark, and there was Betsy, angrily and futilely attempting to turn it back on, only to give up about 20 minutes later, returning to her own bedroom, mumbling to herself about how they would have to lug the fucking thing back to the store.
It’s all a bit of a different game after that. Emma has to be more careful about how and when she visits that place she’s found behind the curtain. She’s sure to cover her tracks online, deleting files or browsing data as if she had never been. She spends the next few years doing her best to become a ghost—in both of her lives. Within the walls of her “home,” in the hallways at school, and in the cold, impersonal well of the Internet. She studies everything as carefully as she can, but does her best to leave as little an impression as possible. She excels a little too well in her typing class at school, earning her some impressive marks from a teacher, so she fumbles a few weeks later and drops down a grade.
It goes on this way for two or three years, and it’s about when she starts yearning for more that she obtains a bus pass and starts regularly visiting the library. It is during these regular visitations that she meets Lily Page, and wonderfully, her life is never the same.
Emma is close to turning eleven when she gets a private message from a user called “spyro-huntr3ss” on a public message board. At first her instinct is to block the user—she’s been around long enough to know that people are scum wherever you go, even in this digital world where she had felt so safe at first, this place she had decided to call her own.
“I know what it is you’re trolling for,” her mysterious new contact, likely trying to get her age, number, or address had sent, followed by, “and I can help you find it.”
From what Emma has been able to discern thus far, most people using the Internet were just as oblivious as the Swans, which was disappointing. She had been hoping, in vain it would seem, that once she’d been able to locate more users that they might be able to help explain it. The humming, and the voices, and the stories in the static—the songs lost in the high-pitched chorus of a dial-up tone. Unfortunately, it wasn’t to be. Most people thought she was being metaphorical, or just plain paranoid. Message boards were a breeding ground for those folks made of cracks and dark places; lost people looking for patterns and meaning where there were none to be found.
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The unsettling shiver that shrieked down the length of her spine had her head swiveling atop her thin, spindly neck as if she were some kind of anxious, wide-eyed owl; her mouth going dry at the sight of her own name staring back at her in bold, black text. To her profound relief, the library appeared to be just as empty as it had been when she walked in that morning. Not many people would brave the snow-filled streets a few days before Christmas to hang out in a public library, but then again, not many people had the Swans waiting for them at home.
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Emma felt her heart beat anxiously in time with the blinking cursor inside her text box, a taunting slowness that seemed to be daring her to refuse the offer. She glimpsed at the library entrance and observed the snow falling heavily atop the empty city streets, tried to ignore the sickeningly sweet melodies of holiday cheer emanating from the head librarian’s office. The truth had been all she ever wanted, wasn’t it? From the very first moment she’d realized that she had come from nothing, that no one had wanted her, and could that be true? From the feeling of Mitchell’s hands and eyes where they shouldn’t be—wondering if all fathers were like this. From the first time she’d booted up the Power Mac, the ghostly chorus ringing in her ears, always ringing, ringing, ringing—
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Lily’s “truth” is every bit as exciting as Emma’s painfully beating heart had hoped it would be. That yes, Emma Swan, there is a world behind the world and you have been invited to be a part of it. The people who are “in charge?” Those people that have hurt you, that have convinced you that you don’t matter, that what you might want for your life doesn’t matter—those people are powerless here. But not you, Emma Swan, not us. We’re the powerful ones now.
It takes her some time to truly trust her new informant, “spyro-huntr3ss,” who, while forthcoming about the realities of this world, the potential for what they could do, of what was waiting for them a few years down the line, was quite tight-lipped concerning personal details of her own life. Which was understandable, if not a bit frustrating, especially since she had known Emma’s name without having asked for it.
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According to her new source (Emma’s not certain “spyro-huntr3ss” will ever be a friend), there are ways to pick apart the cacophony of sound constantly washing over her in dizzying regularity. There are also, blessedly, ways to tune out the noise. “Invest in a good pair of headphones,” had been one of the first things she’d advised, and after Emma, not yet a teenager, trapped between the freedom of the web and the reign of her parents, had quite logically argued that she had no money for such things, Lily had “laughed,” a peaky mechanical noise echoing in Emma’s ears.
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Despite the fact that she was still technically a child and living under the Swans’ supervision, Emma had never in her life felt so independent. If not for her inconvenient need to eat and drink every once in awhile, the Swans might have forgotten she was there at all. There was of course the unfortunate recurrence of Mr. Swan; still coerced by some dark, unspoken perversions that it was his God-given right to appear by Emma’s bedside every few nights. Until Lily had learned of it, of course. It had been a secret Emma had always kept to herself, except for that first night she had run to Betsy, hoping for a savior and finding a stern hand instead. A disgusted voice of disbelief, calling Emma the sick one, the wrong one. “Mr. Swan would never do that you wicked little thing,” she had hissed into Emma’s small, red face. “You’re lucky I don’t send you right back to the orphanage for this disgusting stunt.”
And of course, Mitchell had found out, because the dutiful wife informs her stalwart husband of every single thing going on in their house, and he had made damn sure that Emma never said a word of their “visits” to anyone, especially not Mrs. Swan.
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They had been messaging one another back and forth for about two years before Lily discovered her dirty little secret, and Emma was quite happy to finally be able to think of her as a friend. Even still, she had never been tempted to reveal the truth—she was embarrassed and ashamed, and she assumed that Lily would never speak to her again should she ever slip-up. Ultimately, it had been Emma’s penchant for frequently keeping extremely late hours, coupled with her recent cell phone acquisition, which she had been keeping underneath her pillow.
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Emma had only recently started cursing, and found that it was one of the few things she genuinely enjoyed. It made her feel like she was older than she was, and the older she was, the closer she was to being free of this fucking place.
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When she wasn’t getting lost within the dark, less than reputable corners of the Internet, Emma learned that she loved to read. Lately, she seems to have gotten into the habit of reading the same kind of story—the same kind of journey, over and over again. She’s read these stories so many times, in point of fact, that she’s begun to seek out these same patterns as they might appear in her own life. Is this beginning? She might ask herself, stepping off the bus and colliding with a polite stranger. Is this the end? She would nervously wonder, thinking she had heard footsteps outside the door to the computer room.
Staring at Lily’s direct yet subtle offer on the screen, she knew that this must be one of those moments; the moment where the story is about to take a turn, and no amount of deus ex machina, or praying, or wishing will ever bring back the life you had once lived.
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Mitchell Swan is stunned to find an ungodly (and almost certainly illegal) amount of money in his bank accounts the next day, and he arrives home from work in an alcohol-fueled panic. Emma watches the two of them, quiet and unbothered from the darkened hallway as they titter and yell at one another like a pair of screeching birds. Her phone feels warm in her pocket, and she smiles at the thought of what’s in store—all those atrocious, sickening pictures hidden away on his work computer. What will the world think of you, Mr. Swan?
Killian Jones often feels trapped by the city—little more than a lifeless, concrete prison; he despises nearly everything about the place. And to make matters worse, he has the misfortune to have been cursed with the burden of having too reliable a memory. It is far too easy to be able to slip back, back, back—all the way back until he’s suddenly standing in the middle of his mother’s garden. Until he can hear her voice in his head, laughing, singing, scolding. In these brief yet harrowing moments of nostalgia he can almost always hear her tears as well; her cries of pain that he had been helpless to alleviate. Logically, he knows he had been little else but a boy when she had first fallen ill, but it matters little. He feels responsible for her illness, even more so for her eventual death, alone and searching for a son that was no longer there.
Killian and Cordelia Jones owned a farm about five hours north of the city. Mr. Jones is long gone, and Killian, while in possession of an exceptionally good memory, remembers little of the man who his mother assures him was his father. She maintained his innocence for many years, wanting her son to know that he was loved, but as he approached a certain stubborn, righteous age, she had been forced to admit that no, he was not the man that Cordelia had hoped he would be.
“But it has not a thing to do with you, my love,” she said quietly, allowing him the benefit of thinking she hadn’t noticed his tears. It was truly astonishing that she never once raised her voice to the boy, especially given his behavior in later years. It was almost always at a level tempo, calm and direct, with just a hint of an Irish brogue that her own mother had possessed, although Killian had never actually met the woman.
“She wouldn’t have put up with your nonsense for a single moment.” Shaking her head at the sight of a broken lamp, or a carton of milk left to spoil on the counter. “You are one lucky lad.”
His mother insisted that the Jones’ were a lucky family. But as an adult he would come to believe that they had never been anything other than cursed. It would always be unclear to him exactly why that was, but he assumed it had something to do with the magic. That was always the case, wasn’t it? “All magic comes with a price,” says every single fantasy novel he had ever read, every magically-inclined film he had ever seen. Their downfall, in later years, seemed to him inevitable. If his mother were still alive, he would have asked her, “Did our family make a deal with the wrong demon?”
His bitterness, however, would still take a few more years to develop. As a child, he was enthralled with the sight of the vines and the flowers crawling their way inside the house. The way his mother would reach her hands deep within the soil and a few moments later, up would sprout the stubborn seeds. Cordelia made their living with her magic, often receiving visitors from the surrounding towns looking for quick-fix solutions to their various troubles. They would often come late at night, or when he was out in the fields, trying to make things grow or flourish, or wilt, as the case may be. But when he would see them walking nervously down the drive, quietly knocking on their aged blue door, he would drop whatever it was he was working on and try to sneak a peek at their meetings.
“What do they ask you for?” he wondered one night as she tucked him into bed, his eyes wide and curious, bright with all kinds of vivid imaginings. “Love,” she answered happily, bringing the blanket up to rest beneath his chin.
“Love?” he asked with a grimace, as if he were about to become infected with a terrible disease at the mere mention of the word. “And sickness,” she continued, chuckling at his obvious disapproval. “And loneliness. Or success in their businesses.”
“Can I help?” he asked sleepily, feeling the effect of the chamomile tea his mother had made him drink every evening before bed.
“One day,” she answered, kissing him on the forehead. “Soon.”
Ten years later and he’s not so sure how she would feel about the kind of man that he’s become. What he’s been using his “gifts” for. The harshest parts of him imagine telling her that heis helping them—helping them forget how terrible the world can be; the blissfulness of ignorance. And if he makes some extra money in the process? Well, then so bloody be it. He can almost imagine himself cruelly bragging of it even, taking pleasure in the heartbroken, disappointed look on her thin, pale face.
It hadn’t started this way, to be sure. Initially, the plan had been to go to the city temporarily, to make some extra money to afford the kind of medicine that would keep her alive for longer than just a few months. Of course she had been lying to his face when she had suggested it. Made him think that there was even the slightest chance that she would live another six months. Unbeknownst to him, she had apparently contracted an illness that even magic couldn’t cure (wasn’t supposed to cure, according to her).
“Then what good is it?” he had yelled despairingly, trying to ignore the pitying look on her face from where she was laid up in bed; small, weak, and complacent. No, not complacent.
“Accepting,” she had sternly tried to correct him. “Magic is not meant to prolong that which should end. You know this, Killian.”
But he had been too angry, too determined to seek out a cure, and Cordelia Jones, knowing her son, knowing his stubbornness, his inability to give up, to grapple with the helplessness of being human, had suggested that if he went to the city, used his abilities to make some extra money, perhaps they would be able to afford the medicine that could save her life.
“And take the cat, would you?” she had asked on his way out the door, shakily calling after him from where she dozed. “I want to make sure she’s well-looked after.”
Chammy was a calico with poor eyesight and an even poorer temperament. Most of the time. If you gave her some extra food or a good brushing she might deign to sit with you on the couch for a bit, but most of the time she was content to sit on a ratty armchair that he had pulled in off the street, her ears and tail flicking at the stray vines or weeds when they would grow too close.
The plan had always been to return. As soon as he had stepped foot off the bus, he had felt suffocated. By the polluted air, the distracting, flickering lights, the sounds and smells of too many human beings packed into one place like sardines in a tin. With Chammy’s crate in one hand and a packed duffle in another, he had wandered angrily through the streets until he’d found the shitty apartment he had managed to rent from a property owner who lived nearer to the farm.
“It’s not much,” he had warned Killian, clearly uncomfortable with the knowledge that Mrs. Jones was wasting away at the back of the house somewhere, “but it’ll do for a time.”
“I’m certain it will,” Killian had answered with a bitter grin, “Thanks for your help.”
Dealing in illicit substances hadn’t been the plan at first either. He had seen the kinds of services his mother provided; there wasn’t really a “modern” term for what she practiced other than “holistic medicine,” which wealthy business people in coastal cities seemed to love opening their wallets for. Unfortunately for Killian, he had never had much of a head for such things. The plants he had managed to cultivate back home, for himself and his friends, the kinds of things the local cops had busted him for on more than one occasion, those were the kinds of things he was good at. However, getting scolded by the cops back home was one thing, winding up in a city prison was quite another.
It had taken many frustrated evenings of trial and error, and even a few angry customers, before he was forced to admit to himself that the “healing” part of it was simply not where his true talents lay.
“This is good shit,” one of his recent acquaintances (the people you sell to should never really be considered anything more) had told him late one night from their perch on his fire escape, “You could make some good money with this.”
And that’s where it had all started; a steady stream of high quality product, and more than enough people willing to pay top dollar for it. He had been just about ready to afford the medicine, the whole reason he had moved to this awful city in the first place, to retrieve the cure and bring it back to his mother, when he had gotten a call from his landlord that Cordelia had passed in her sleep.
“I’m sorry for your loss, son,” he had said quietly in a grating tone of pitying condescension, “you should come back soon, collect her things. Figure out what to do with the place.”
“Yeah,” Killian had barked back, his vision going fuzzy and his throat tightening, “Thanks.”
And he had planned to return home for the burial. He knew that was what he was supposed to do. He had even gone so far as to get a babysitter for Chammy, had bought a bus ticket and packed a bag. Only he had smoked a little bit too much one morning (in preparation for the nightmarish journey home) and when he returned to himself a few hours later, found that he had missed his bus by several days. There were a few voicemail messages, mostly from people back home who had watched him grow up—some of them angry and scolding, others sympathetic and patient, reminding him that legally the farm was still his, that he could take as much time as he needed.
Days turned into weeks, weeks turned into months, and suddenly it had felt too hard, and he was too much of a coward. So, ten years later and here he was—still trapped in his box like every other human-shaped sardine he would often glare at on the subway. He has managed to turn the apartment into something of a home, bringing in some potted plants that he had encouraged to grow a bit above their station. It’s something of an oasis in an otherwise barren hellscape, and while it is rare for him to not feel the occasional pang of regret and longing for what his life should have been, there’s still the nagging cowardice that has left him paralyzed in a life that feels unnervingly unfinished.
If he’s awake before sunrise, odds are whatever he thinks might be at his door at such an hour is more than likely a figment of his imagination. Especially if that figment is a grumpy, petite blonde who looks suspiciously like a Daria reject. Most of that blonde hair (imaginary as it is) would seem to be stuffed into an old, slouchy beanie in desperate need of stitching, but a few stray hairs have escaped to fall across her charmingly furrowed brow.
“Well, I must say this is a surprise,” managing to speak despite the dry mouth and still being half-asleep. “What do you say we continue this meeting at a more reasonable hour? Or preferably never? Never also works well for me.”
Normally he might not be so inclined to such rudeness, but a figment is a figment, and he needs his eight hours if he’s going to be remotely personable throughout the day. And drug dealers are famously nothing without their personalities.
One of the admittedly lovely, yet sadly fictional, woman’s eyebrows shoots quite delicately upwards, and he makes note of her especially twitchy fingers moving restlessly against her folded elbow. “Are you always this rude to potential customers?”
“Only when they interrupt my beauty sleep, darling, now if you’ll excuse me—”
He goes to close the door, only he’s found it blocked by a smallish, military-booted foot stuck between it and the frame, the ends of said boot all soft and scuffed; an experienced leather shoe on a tiny blonde female with impeccably groomed eyebrows. He should probably start laying off the more experimental strains. This was an unusually vivid hallucination.
“Yeah, yeah, you’re very pretty,” she says hurriedly, her own tired eyes trying desperately to meet his, “but I haven’t slept in about three days, so, could you maybe help me out?”
“I’m not in the habit of selling to imaginary wom—ow! Bloody hell, what on earth was that for?”
Her fingernails are painted a formidable shade of black, which was an odd detail to have stuck in one’s mind when they’re in the midst of pinching your chest hair unexpectedly viciously. Her eyes were also a little less tired, a lot more manic, and a particularly vivid and enticing shade of green. It made him think of something—a specific memory, locked away somewhere at the back of his mind where it was supposed to stay .
“I can assure you, I am very real,” she says on a grin, her hand still twisted up in his flannel. “And like I said, I am also very tired. So, please?”
It was the sudden, gentle note of desperation in her voice, paired with the residual nipple pain at the very least, that had his circuits re-firing a little bit better than they had earlier. A familiar kind of exhaustion, an intriguing feeling of despair that he had often felt stirring painfully within his own heart. It was the fact that, while he had only known this woman to be real for a few seconds, he knew that the gentility of her voice, the sudden nervousness—that these were hard things for the slight girl with the pale hands and heavy boots.
“My apologies. Please,” smiling and opening the door wider to allow her entrance, he gestures a hand inwards as she walks into the living room. Staring at the stiff slowness of her movements, the way she filled the space around her—that was when he had suddenly remembered. The sight of the farm in the heat of late summer and the dramatic, end-of-day light that would cast the garden in a fiery glow. The smell of the dirt under his bare feet, the warm flesh of ripening tomatoes. And was that his mother’s voice, calling his name from the porch?
“What did you say your name was?”
“I didn’t,” she answered, no doubt distracted by the unusually green and “lively” look of the place. Not to mention Chammy’s guttural chirps at her feet. “It’s Emma,” she said, extending a thin, still hand. “Emma Swan.”
“Emma Swan,” hoping his grin was a little less frenzied than it felt, “Killian Jones.”
iii. vwthi3f
From the outside looking in, most people would probably suspect that the soul-crushing heartbreak, betrayal, and subsequent imprisonment would have left Emma Swan yearning for the so-called “carefree days” of her youth—but those people would be wrong. It would be safe to assume that those same people had probably lived fairly standard, mediocre lives, and there’s nothing wrong with having lived such a life. Mundane lives such as these, they’re usually of the pain-free variety. Aside from the occasional missed birthday, disappointing grade, or sneaking liquor from the cabinet before they’re able, childhood tends to pass quickly and blissfully. It’s one of those things that adults often recall with fondness; they imagine that if they could go back in time to an age before bills, home ownership, and a number of regretful sexual encounters, that they might be truly happy again. Emma Swan had dreamed of the mundane life even before she had started living with the Swans, and certainly afterwards she had desired it moreso. She wished that her pain (and even now, the labeling of her past as “pain,” felt pitiful and tiresome) was the kind of story you didn’t mind sharing, instead of the harsh, ugly thing that she preferred most people not know. Even if they were your friends.
From her prison cell, she often tries to make a list in her head of all the good things that have happened since leaving the Swans. Those times when she’s feeling a bit lonelier than usual, or after she’s spent a little too much time thinking about his smile. As if breaking one’s heart was the worst thing that could happen to a person. And sure, prison is pretty miserable, but it’s not a foster home, and it’s not the Swans. Prison has designated computer time, and there’s no sneaking down darkened hallways at night. And the prison system, unsurprisingly, knows very little of magic, which is how she so easily bypasses the archaic security software, reaches out across the void, and finds the comforting, if not vaguely biting, words of an old friend.
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At the very least, she is gracious enough to avoid coming right out and saying “I told you so.”
One of the first things she notices about Lily Page (and isn’t that just irony at its finest) is her hair. It’s long, dark, pin straight, and some of the thickest she’s ever seen. She always threatens to chop most of it off, but never does (and never will), despite Emma’s playful needling. Unsurprisingly pale, with deep red lips and black, wet eyes that always make it appear as if she’s on the verge of tears. “Ask me if I’m ‘okay,’ one more fucking time, Swan,” she would frequently threaten before fleeing the room. She would eventually, and begrudgingly, admit that being on the receiving end of someone else’s “concern” made her feel slightly nauseous, which Emma had found to be pleasantly relatable.
Lily had been living in a very small studio at the tip-top of a tall, post-war building in the financial district. It was a charming place to live, but not particularly well-suited to housing two people, so they found another. As Emma had already been led to believe, money wasn’t much of a concern when most of it was digital these days anyway, and while they couldn’t go for something especially lavish (so as not to draw too much attention to themselves), it was still a nicer home than Emma could have ever imagined as a child.
The feeling of safety and comfort in her own home is one of the good things on her list. If nothing else, one of the very best. Having the security of a door with a lock on it—a roommate who always knocks. The first night in their new place she has the best night of sleep she’s ever had, and when she woke up in the early afternoon the following day, her blankets unmoved from the night before, her door still blessedly shut, she had to muffle her relieved sobs with the absurdly soft pillow beneath her head, lest she force Lily into an awkward moment of interpersonal comfort she often found distasteful.
“I’m better online,” she had humbly conceded after an awkward, consolatory pat on the back. But it was okay. She was still the best friend that Emma had ever known, and besides, she wasn’t great with people either.
Their apartment was a veritable hive of high-end, up-to-date tech. The walls practically hummed with it all, the various cords trailing in and out between rooms, framing windows and doorways. Another thing to add to the list; the small touches that made it both a home and impenetrable fortress from which they might change the world if they had a mind to. She’s got the friend, never really had one of those before, but on top of that, she gets a teacher—she gets power. A lot of it. She also gets an iBook G4 with 1.5 GB of memory (that she manages, with some magical prowess, to enlarge to around 3 or 4). She loves that it fits in her lap, that she can feel the warmth of it against the tops of her thighs when she hasn’t powered it down for 48 hours. The sounds of the keys beneath her fingertips, loud and decisive, wary of her at first, but after a few weeks, craving her touch.
“We all have different strengths and weaknesses,” Lily had explained over coffee, twirling the length of headphone cord round and round her finger. “You seem to be especially adept at Research.”
Emma huffs. “Couldn’t anyone be good at that?”
“Not when it involves talking to corpses and seeing the future.”
“I don’t think they liked to be called that,” Emma had said uncomfortably, turning the sound down on the phone in her pocket. “Well,” Lily answered smartly, forcing down her cold coffee with a grimace, “that’s why I’m not so good at it, isn’t it?”
Emma eventually learns that when Lily says “Research,” it doesn’t necessarily mean traditional forms of information gathering. She could hop on Google and find an article, probably quicker than most, sure, but what Lily really means is communication and knowledge; she means dipping her fingers into the void and coming back with Truth. Apparently there’s a whole freaking dictionary of witch-related vocabulary that she’s missed out on, and funnily enough, it’s not online.
“Where anyone could find it?” Lily explained, dropping the aged, poorly bound manuscript onto Emma’s lap, “Analog has its uses.” Knowledge is good. Answers are good. The world is vast and old and it’s all in one place, just waiting for her to hit the power button.
It sounds stupid, but she could eat ice cream whenever she wanted. It’s one of the good things, and as Lily had informed her, it’s also one of those things that kind of made her just like everyone else. “Most people enjoy the privilege of being able to eat ice cream whenever they want,” she said, distracted with something or other on the screen in front of her, “congratulations, you’re finally normal.”
There was a note of sarcasm in her tone (surprise, surprise), but  Emma couldn’t suppress the grin that had appeared on her face at the thought of being just like everyone else. If one were to totally ignore the “tech-savvy witch,” thing, obviously. Eating ice cream, “just like everyone else,” while a good thing at first, would ultimately return to bite her quite firmly on the ass, but for a while it had been Rum Raisin and Moose Tracks whenever the hell she wanted. Mercifully, it was sold cheap at the corner bodega and sometimes she would wander out of the apartment mere hours before the sun was due to rise and buy herself one or two pints (even though there were several unfinished sitting in the freezer). She met Neal Cassidy during yet another trip to the store in order to indulge in one or two flavors she hasn’t had the pleasure of trying yet. Like Cherry Garcia or the one with the caramel-filled chocolates shaped like fish. Lily had referred to the fish-shaped chocolate as a “crime against nature,” but she could be a tad dramatic sometimes.
“Gotta cure those night-bites somehow, I guess, right?”
Emma Swan dislikes and distrusts men as a general rule. So when she heard a distinctly male voice at her back, had sensed the way he stood over her, she had felt uncomfortable almost immediately. Her phone started to buzz quite incessantly in her pocket, despite the fact that she had left Lily sleeping and no one else had her number—she had, mistakenly, ignored it.
Emma had never entertained the prospect of a romantic relationship before Neal. At that point in her life she’d been getting closer to 18, so she knew it was about “that time,” but it had never really been something she wanted to pursue. She had only just started getting used to the feeling of Lily sitting next to her on the couch; the non-threatening way she might bump their hips together when she moved past her in order to get to the fridge. And it’s not like he managed to get under her skin quickly (if anything she remembers noting that he had quite the punchable face), but there was something about him she had found charming, and unfortunately she was not quite as repulsed as she might have expected herself to feel.
“What?” she had asked with some confusion, hoping her facial expression was not quite so dumb as she imagined it to be.
“Late night cravings,” he clarified, nodding at the ice cream in her hand, “I know the feeling.”
She managed to surmise he was talking about being high, not that she would have really known. But she nodded anyway, finding herself in the familiar predicament of having to pretend she’s “in on the joke,” so to speak. She had never done any kind of drug at that point, but she had preferred he assume she knew what he was talking about and let her off the hook, rather than come off as some kind of dense pre-teen. Luckily for her it had worked, and he simply smiled and walked off, snagging a candy bar and shoving it into his pocket as he went. Despite the obviousness of the lift the clerk had failed to notice, and Emma rolled her eyes, finally pulling the buzzing phone out of her pocket.
Idiot, read a text from an unknown number, the less frenzied hum of a few dozen voices scrolling in the darkness of her closed eyes, infinite, vertical rows of ones and zeroes. That’s a walking prison sentence if we’ve ever seen one.
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Emma stares up at the ceiling of her bleak, unremarkable prison cell and thinks about how she might yell at those numbers now, if she could. Thinking they’re so smart all the time just because they’re dead. Or, ya know, “untethered by their human forms,” or whatever the fuck. In yet another teachable moment, Lily had tried to explain that while most of the time she was in conversation with the dead, sometimes she was just reaching out to other Techies wandering around in the same playground as her.
“You shouldn’t trust everything they say,” Lily had warned, “I know it seems like they know everything because they’re ‘one with the machine,’” her eyes rolling, “but most of them are just as lost and fucked up as we are. There’s no power greater than your own instinct.”
It’s too bad Emma never really got around to the whole “trusting herself” thing. Especially when it came to Neal Cassidy—the first boy to make her feel special. The asshole who had given her a taste of what it meant to love and be loved only to rip the still beating heart out of her chest and squish the particularly sensitive parts between his toes. Not that she had known that at the time. At the time she had simply been relieved to know that she wasn’t completely broken. That someone could care for her, that she could care for them in return. That she could bear the feeling of his hand wrapped around hers (ignoring the fact that she was often bothered by the unusual sweatiness of his palms).
When she’s not walking in circles around the prison yard or in the computer lab, she’s replaying her memories of the last year as if they were disassociated segments of a silent film—a distorted, desaturated mess of key scenes that would ultimately lead her to this very moment, to this hard bed beneath her back. That’s usually when the bad begins, when she goes back to adding good things to the list.
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The dead ones always want to know because they’ve forgotten, and they’re hoping that she’ll be able to help them remember what it was like, being alive. Please, Emma Swan, please bore us with the details.
It’s not quite so bad at first. They flirt a lot, which Emma finds fun despite never having really done it before, and then there’s her first kiss, and the first time having sex she actuallyenjoys, and running through the darkened city streets without a care in the world. There’s sharing her story with someone who seemed to care, a lover and not a friend; who upon learning of her abilities got a gleam in his eye that she would live to regret ignoring. There was getting high for the first time and trying not to feel hurt when he had laughed at her obvious inexperience, despite having promised that he wasn’t going to. It was stupid to ignore the hint of warning in Lily’s eyes when she started spending more nights at Neal’s place. Not to mention the dozens of ominous text messages from unknown numbers.
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Emma had become defensive and snarky almost immediately. Taking offense at the suggestion that she couldn’t handle herself in her first grown-up relationship, as if she wasn’t a smart, experienced woman with a good head on her shoulders.
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As it turned out, the “babysitter” probably would have been helpful. Maybe the babysitter would have been able to stop her from transferring all of those large, traceable funds into Neal’s accounts. When she has a difficult time conjuring up another good thing to add to the list, his smarmy voice pops into her head instead, reassuring her that “no one would ever find out.”
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Three years and one prison sentence later she often finds herself haunted by her own words. Disgusted with herself for betraying the one person who had never been anything other than kind in a world full of monsters. “All’s well that ends well,” Lily had said in greeting upon picking her up from prison, her face hidden beneath the shadow of a baseball cap. “Breathe in that sweet, sweet freedom.”
The only useful thing that Neal had managed to leave in his wake, aside from a renewed sense of disgust with humanity as a whole, was the innocuous drug habit. She didn’t consider herself to be an addict by any means, not that an actual addict would admit to such a thing, but she certainly imbibed more frequently than she might have predicted a few years earlier. The problem (if you had to call it that) was using it for normal human things that most people were able to accomplish without the chemical assist—things like sleeping.
Emma has always had trouble sleeping. It was unsurprising given her history, but as it turns out, staring at screens almost 24 hours a day doesn’t really help the situation either. She had tried a handful of other remedies over the years: a hot cup of chamomile tea before bed (that always made her have to pee right on the edge of sleep); some user generated playlists comprised of soothing instrumentals (except for that one “experimental” song at the end that left her heart racing); charge and cast spells left waiting in her camera roll, various hand drawn sigils or long strings of emojis (while effective, often accompanied by odd dreams). For whatever reason, the weed had been the most helpful. She had felt ashamed at first; good little girls don’t use drugs after all (sounding suspiciously like Mrs. Swan in her head), but it was like Lily always said, “If it works, it works.”
While their first meeting had undeniably fallen on the rougher end of the friendship spectrum, there’s something about her that insists upon a second. Especially after he’s had more sleep, and his charm is significantly more effective. He’s held her hand for an almost inappropriately long few moments before he comes to his senses and asks after her problem—what is it she’s in the market for? It’s as she’s said, “trouble sleeping,” and he reminds her that his product, while almost exclusively well-received is a bit, shall we say, “stronger” than the usual fare.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” she asks, glancing suspiciously around his oddly lush studio despite it being midwinter.
“My methods can be a bit,” pausing for effect, a bit of vague handwaving for emphasis, “unusual.”
“‘Unusual,’ like laced, unusual?”
“Good heavens woman, no,” he says hurriedly at the angry look on her face, frustrated with his seeming inability to form sentences this morning. “Let me show you.”
Normally, he might not be so inclined to reveal his “gifts” to a new client, but as he surmised from their awkward yet brief conversation at his door, there was just… something about her. And for whatever reason, he got the sense that she wasn’t about to be shocked or frightened by his admission. He leads her over to a large, round window that looks out over a dismal alleyway. The tops of other apartment buildings with decrepit looking antenna rest precariously on their respective roofs. The glass of the window is warped, evidence of the building’s rather respectable age; dotted with air bubbles and flecked with dirt and pollen. The window itself, while framed by some aesthetically pleasing distressed brick, is also encircled by a rather impressive wreath of thick, green vines.
Beneath the window he’s setup his appropriately named “Alchemist’s Table,” complete with ceramic pots and glass test tubes, even an old microscope he had acquired at a middle school auction. “You some kind of mad scientist?” Her words sound a bit sharp, but they’re nowhere near harsh enough to hide the curiosity and wonder in her voice, and he plays along with a bit of a “mad” grin.
“After a fashion.”
He shows off a bit after that, there’s no denying it, sticking a finger into a pot of soil with a small sprout peeking out of the dirt. A young and fragile thing. Emma watches, entranced, as it begins to grow and stretch itself into being, and after a few seconds, a small, pale green strawberry appears. “It’ll be ripe enough to eat in a few hours,” he says casually, reining in his laughter at the look of shock on her face, “if you’d like to stay for a bit.”
While he’s used to women finding this particular trick alluring, he finds himself quite surprised at what she ends up saying instead. “You’re one of us.”
“Sorry, love, one of who?”
“Us!” she says happily, her hands clapping gently together, “I’ve never met a non-Techie before.”
“A non-what?”
“Do you not know?” she asks, suddenly sobering, her head tilted endearingly to one side. At the blank look on his face she smiles softly, her earlier fidgeting having evaporated at the prospect of revealing this apparent truth. She leans close enough that he can smell the sweetened coffee on her breath, and an oddly familiar floral scent that seems to stem from the blonde tips of her hair.
“You’re not the only one,” she divulges in an excited whisper, and he becomes abruptly alarmed at the likelihood of falling in love with this strange woman who ended up being undeniably  real. “There’s more.”
The smoke tastes sweet on his lips. She’s not sure if it’s magic or something else. Something unique to whoever or whatever he is. They kiss on the first day they meet and she’s not quite sure what that says about her. She’s fairly certain that it says more about him—that perhaps there is something a bit irresistible about a man who has briefly wondered whether or not you truly exist. Which is ironic, because for the first half of her life it was all she could do to make sure that people knew she was there, but that was mostly so someone would feed her or give her a place to sleep. It was only after she had stopped feeling so hungry that she had hoped she would disappear.
“I have a question,” she starts, taking a hit off of his “free sample” while trying not to marvel at the trail of pinkish smoke that escapes from in between her lips. “If you were so sure that I wasn’t real, why did you even talk to me?”
When he exhales the smoke is blue rather than pink, and when it meets the colorful cloud above their heads it blends together in shades of vibrant purple. She can’t help feeling like she has stumbled into a scene from Alice in Wonderland, having found herself in a strange land with an excitable man (who likes to leave empty mugs scattered about his home), as well as the literal toadstools and the rather odd sensation akin to falling down a rabbit hole.
“Rather pretty for a figment, I suppose. Wouldn’t do to ignore such a lovely, imaginary thing,” crushing the the last of the joint against a small, porcelain plate, “might hurt her feelings.”
Her phone buzzes in her pocket and she almost ignores it. But it was hard to forget about the nightmare that had ensued when she had ignored it the last time, and she pulls it from her pocket with a polite “give me a minute,” gesture.
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She snorts at the sight of the word “airs,” her mind conjuring a 16th century French courtesan in a dramatically large dress, and silently warns her heart not to get it’s hopes up. Me too.When she looks up from her phone his head whips away too quickly for him to have been doing anything other than staring at her, and she wills the inevitable blush from her cheeks.
“We should exchange numbers,” she says suddenly, “for when I need more.”
Thankfully he ignores her rather abrupt request and pulls a most surprising device from his pocket that has her temporarily forgetting the way he had been so obviously observing her earlier. It’s a Motorola Razr V3 (launched in 2004), and the only thing funnier than the phone itself is the offended look on his face after she bursts into loud, obnoxious laughter at the sight of it.
“I’m doing my best not to feel quite so hurt right now, Swan.”
“I’m sorry,” she gasps in between her embarrassing bout of giggling, “I just didn’t think you could even get your hands on one of those things anymore.”
“It may not be your ‘high-tech’ nonsense,” he goes on proudly, “but she’ll do in a pinch.”
“Oh, Killian,” she says sweetly, “I’m sure she will.”
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They start texting with a frequency far more reminiscent of an honest to goodness friendship rather than that of a business relationship, and Emma finds herself having to reassure the small, frightened girl inside of her that the whole thing won’t end in disaster. He’s not Neal, she thinks desperately, trying to trust in the hopeful parts of herself without succumbing to the bitter voice inside her head that struggles to forget the less admirable parts of humanity. What’s another potential stint in prison for such a pretty face, after all?
The first night she tries what he recommended, a strain he refers to as “Sailor’s Delight,” she dreams of the ocean. It’s an especially vivid dream, unlike anything she’s ever experienced—she can smell the sourness of low tide; taste the salt on her lips, and feel the warmth of the sun on her face. First thing in the morning she reaches for the phone beneath her pillow, her fingers flying across the screen.
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She hesitates briefly before sending that last text. While it’s true her mind feels calm and her body re-energized, her heart hammers wildly inside her chest—the tiny fists of an anxious child warning her of the inevitable. While her own nervousness is enough to give her pause, she does try and take comfort in the fact that her “ghostlier” comrades would seem to have taken a backseat for the moment.
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His texts often arrive in the form of mini paragraphs. Full sentences and words bundled together and sent to her as if they were handwritten letters. She can see his fingerprint on each and every one, a dirt-stained brand that conjures some unknown, vast greenery made of hills and fir trees, winding back roads and cloudless skies.
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“He better not track any dirt in here,” Lily warns her the evening before he was supposed to be coming by to drop off another batch. It was to be his first visit to their apartment, and Emma could not be more nervous if she tried. She’s been back to his place a few times since that first visit, but allowing him to come here had been an unexpected offer on her part. Not that it matters, she thinks calmly, what do you care what he thinks?
“Don’t be such a snob, Lil.”
Lily’s mouth is full of frosted flakes as she leans against the refrigerator, glaring at the back of Emma’s head. “This shit’s expensive, and I don’t have time to fix anything he manages to break.” She suspects a note of jealousy in Lily’s ire, so she decides to cut her some slack, pressing a kiss to her cheek with a guaranteed dirt-free visit.
“It’ll be fine,” she says, heading towards her room to straighten up for no other reason than the fact that it has been a while. “Besides, aren’t you curious?”
A playful shout at her back, “Not nearly as curious as you, my little thief!”
The next morning he’s standing at her door holding a potted plant. “It’s a succulent,” he says happily, his hair sticking up in all directions. He smells like the city after it’s been sanitized by a particularly cold frost, and she wonders how he’s managed to keep warm in a half-buttoned flannel and a knitted scarf. “Notoriously hard to kill,” he assures her, shoving the thing into her hands, “I’m sure you’ll get along famously.”
The brief facade of confidence he had displayed while foisting the plant upon her departs rather suddenly at the sight of her apartment, and he looks all kinds of adorable and confused at the otherworldliness of it all. She supposed it would look rather intimidating to a person like him, surrounded by all those green things. Not that the wires and the screens were any less alive—they were just better at playing dead.
He does have some dirt on his fingertips and beneath his nails, but Emma finds herself quietly charmed by the sight of it; the deep impression of his prints highlighted by the dark soil permanently staining his skin. It’s been getting harder and harder to pass off their brief moment of intimacy as a one time thing. Especially when she can’t seem to stop thinking about it. Especially when she does stupid things like noticing his hands and trying not to recall the pleasant sensation of their roughness against her cheek.
“Don’t worry,” Emma says teasingly at the awed look on his face, “this is the most secure room in the city.” With a few magical fortifications no one and certainly no obscure, supernaturalthing was getting past the barriers they had implemented when they had first moved in, and it had only gotten stronger over the years.
Lily pops her head in from the kitchen, most likely with the intention of embarrassing her only friend. “Hey, Sprout,” she says, glaring at Killian from behind her thick curtain of hair, “don’t touch any of my stuff.”
“Don’t worry about her,” and Emma takes a moment to stick out her tongue in Lily’s direction. “She’s trapped in a state of perpetual grouchiness.”
“I heard that.”
There’s something incredibly momentous about the occasion of his entering her room. Lily had only hung out in there a few times, and Neal had never even been inside (she had spent all their nights together at his place). It’s her favorite time of day, which helps. Late afternoon, which often brings a light that seems warmer than at any other time—and with those big windows, the ones she suspects Lily had a hand in ensuring were a fixture of the apartment, the light falls and frames the room in a buttery yellow that makes winter feel that much further away.
In a probable attempt to diffuse the tension of Lily’s condescending nickname (and subsequent scolding), he laughs and runs a hand through his hair, making it bigger than it already was.
“Well, she’s charming.”
“She’s a good friend,” Emma says quickly, irritated with her sudden urge to leap to Lily’s defense as if he had said something wrong. Which he hadn’t.
“I’m sure she is, Swan,” he reassures softly, “it was only a joke.”
Then comes the urge to apologize, which she knows she has no reason to, and fuck, there is no reason why this should be so hard . He takes a seat in a large armchair she’s tucked away into a corner of the room, his eyes making quick work of all the unfamiliar equipment. The curious awe with which he observes her space gives her pause—takes her back to the day when she had first seen the Swans’ new computer in the room at the end of the hall. Forbidden, yet waiting for her all along.
“Make sure you keep her in the light.”
“Who?” Confused by the pronoun and wondering if he’s been seeing imaginary women again. “The plant,” he explains, gesturing towards the small, green twig in her hands, “make sure she gets a decent amount of sunlight.”
A part of her wants to remind him that she’s shut up in the dark most of the time. That was why she needed the drugs in the first place. Aside from the few short hours pre-sunset when she would, occasionally, open the curtains. But he looks so hopeful, she doesn’t really have the heart to deny him. “Sure. Sunlight.”
In the days following Killian’s visit to the apartment, all of the various cords and sundry start growing towards the sunlight as if they were starving for it. She even starts to notice some small weeds pushing their way through her keyboard. It doesn’t seem to be a problem at Lily’s end of the apartment; her equipment seems to have stayed blessedly put, but Emma’s room is another matter entirely. She even goes so far as to make a post on a message board where other witches have been known to frequent, despite the fact that they usually have terrible advice and she’s generally better off not having spoken to them in the first place.
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She attaches a picture and hopes for the best, but unfortunately no one seems to have a clue. Someone does suggest watering them and seeing what happens, but that seems incredibly stupid, so she deletes the post and moves on. Or she tries to at any rate—pretends that there is nothing at all odd about her frequent compulsions to text him anytime a meaningless thought enters her head. The way she starts opening her curtains for a few more hours each day; the feeling of the sun on her skin becoming a welcome part of her routine, as opposed to a cruel reminder of the world that exists beyond the walls of her bedroom.
Their odd, somewhat unlikely friendship grows and flourishes like one of Killian’s plants. It is not without the occasional thorn or weed, like most relationships. The both of them are not without their mutual baggage that stings when you poke at it. Neither one of them can help messing with the other’s wounds, it would seem. Emma had always been under the impression that picking at the thing made it worse, but Killian insists on acting as an infuriating salve that alleviates the pain and leaves the injured place stronger than it had been before.
Beyond the niceties of being one’s drug dealer, getting to know another person can be quite difficult, which had been expected. From the very first, Emma had betrayed an innate desire to keep parts of herself hidden from others. Her passion for witchcraft—the excitement with which she had explained her kind to him that first meeting, it was a good trick, but it wasn’t long before he would come to realize that Emma Swan would rather place a curse upon herself than share the sordid details of her past with anyone.
It had been in the aftermath of his own unburdening—his sudden desire to finally reveal to her all of the messy details of his own life. About his mother, her passing, how maybe he was living a life she had not wanted for him. Emma had been nothing but understanding in the face of his admission, just as she suspected, their unexpected kinship made his pain an easy pill for her to swallow, but that didn’t mean she was necessarily ready to reciprocate.
“I barely tell Lily things about my past,” she had shouted angrily, her arms folded defensively in front of her chest, “why the fuck would I tell my drug dealer?”
“Oh, is that all?” Spoken into the sudden, sucking quiet of his apartment, forcing himself to ignore the painful look of regret on her face. She could wish away her words all she liked, he refuses to be anyone’s whipping boy, no matter how damaged they are. “Then you’ve gotten what you came for,” he said, patiently opening his front door for her convenient departure, “and you let me know should you require my services again.”
Her facial expression could not have been more pained—a fervent desire to take back what she had said, to offer an apology and admit to him the facts of the case. The fact that he had, quite unexpectedly, become one of the more important people in her life. The fact that she often daydreamed about the hour or so in which they had forgone the illusion of platonic friendship. The fact that she often considered the Killian-shaped hole in her future where he would almost undoubtedly be. But, alas, stubbornness won out, and she stormed away, so swiftly and in such a rage with herself that she left her jacket behind. A weathered, burgundy leather number, soft to the touch and smelling vaguely like an electrical fire. At least she’d have an excuse to see him again.
He waits a few days. Keeps his phone buried in a drawer beneath all of his socks and underwear, resisting the urge to send her a text, to wonder if she had sent him one. Eventually, he returns the jacket with a proposition. “Come with me,” he says, not quite begging, but with a breathlessness that he does find mildly humiliating. “Please.”
They take a bus upstate, far enough away from the farm that he doesn’t feel claustrophobic, but with enough distance between themselves and the city that he feels like he can finally breathe. They wander through small, sleepy towns full of charming coffee shops and bookstores, grabbing a cheap breakfast before venturing further into the countryside, stumbling through various trails and parks suggested to them by the locals. “There’s a particularly nice spot,” remarked the older woman who had served them coffee, “right here.” Marking up the paper map that Killian had insisted they buy.
It is a bit nippy further north, and despite the fresh smell of earth and rain, their noses still turn pink as they walk through the woods. The “nice spot” in question is a ledge of rock that overlooks a large, clear lake that sparkles in the sun. A light mist hovers over the top, and when he takes a quick peek to gauge Emma’s reaction, he is momentarily stunned at the way the sunlight has fallen across her face—how it has betrayed the sheen of wetness that seems to be gathering at the corners of her eyes.
“Swan?”
“It’s not a nice story,” she begins after a few moments of quiet. “I don’t like to tell people. Because it’s just not…” She huffs in frustration, turning away briefly to face the sun, staring out over the water as if it will be able to finish this conversation for her. “I don’t want people treating me differently.”
He hesitates before gently pulling some stray hairs from her chapped lips, and when she looks back at him it feels as if he’s been punched in the gut. Having never seen this particular look on her face before; perhaps moments away from arriving at this emotional plateau, only to shutter it away at the last moment. It is glassy eyed and fragile, her nose wrinkling and her hands fidgeting with the ends of her sleeves—it is a choked admission of all the horror she has known; of her adoptive family, her villainous “father,” the computer at the end of the hall, the young girl waiting at the other end who had stormed the tower and rescued her from a cruel fate.
When the tale is finally done, and he pulls her into his arms, the sun has moved higher into the sky. The fog has evaporated completely from the surface of the water, and now it merely shimmers. Their legs dangle over the rockface, and he presses a firm kiss against the side of her head. “I swear,” he whispers against the shell of her ear, “you are still the same person you were before. And if it seems as if I look at you differently—” He considers his words carefully, her fingers tapping nervously against his upturned palm, “It’s because I am more in awe of you then I was before.”
Her kiss is a salty, stinging thing against his tongue, and he can still feel the occasional soft hiccup resonating from the back of her throat. “I’m tired,” she admits quietly, her head rolling against his shoulder.
“Aye, love,” giving her another squeeze, a brief kiss to her cheek that reddens under his lips. “Let’s go home.”
It’s the fact that he never actually asks that makes her want to do it. That and the fact that he has bared his soul to her on multiple occasions and asked for so little in return. And quite honestly, there’s not much left he could do to her, given the fact that she’s spilled her damage all over him anyway.
Their feet hang over the fire escape out Emma’s window, the chilly spring air keeping it brisk yet refreshing. A hint of warmth that reminds the world of the impending season. “If you could,” she begins gently, taking a sip of their shared beer, “would you want to talk to her?”
He nibbles at his lower lip in response, an infuriating and distracting movement that has her discreetly pinching the top of her own hand. “I’m not sure,” he admits quietly, looking a bit like someone who feels ashamed by who they have become. Although, if she had the strength, she would have stopped him in that moment, reminded him that there was nothing to be ashamed of. That he was every bit the sweet, loving man his mother had suspected he would become. “Not sure she’d very much want to speak with��me, if I’m being honest.”
Her heart breaks at the sound of his nervous, self-deprecating laughter, but she keeps her earlier, enamored thoughts to herself. While he’s lighting a cigarette she pops back into her room quickly, grabbing her laptop and returning to the ledge to face his sadness; the light and sound of a sleepless city, awaking slowly from a long, hard hibernation.
“I can’t guarantee anything,” resting the quiet machine on her lap, trying not to twiddle her thumbs, “but we can try.”
When she boots up the laptop, a soothing hum ignites in her fingertips and rushes through her veins. Now this, this she can do. She can feel his nervousness from over her shoulder, can see his fingers peeling the label away from the bottle out of the corner of her eye. “Relax,” she says softly, closing her eyes, her fingers flying across the keyboard. She’s not sure how much time passes, but at some point, in the midst of all the chatter, she hears it—a song that sounds familiar even though she is certain she’s never heard it before. “Do you hear it?”
He doesn’t seem to, not at first, not until she increases the volume on the laptop and slides it carefully onto his lap. “Take as long as you want,” pressing a kiss to his temple before standing and returning to her room, “I’ll be right here.”
It’s hard for her not to let her mind wander, to consider the particulars of a conversation that he’s been waiting to have for years , a voice and a face that he’s been tortured by everytime he closes his eyes. She had never even really considered looking for her own parents. What would she even say to them? Thanks for the childhood trauma, I have multiple lifetimes worth of debilitating baggage and it’s all thanks to you. And what would they do, anyway? Apologize? Fat lot of good that would do.
When he comes back inside she’s petting the soft edge of her succulent, somehow still flourishing regardless of her complete lack of knowledge as to how to properly care for the thing. His eyes are red and wet, and he tries to smile when he sees her obviously worried expression, only it crumbles as soon as she touches him, her hands coming up to frame his face with a gentleness she had not been sure she possessed. “Killian—”
“I’m quite alright, Emma. Thank you.”
It hurts to call the look in his eyes “love,” but she doesn’t know how else to describe the way he admires her with words of gratitude on his lips. It doesn’t matter what it is he’s thanking her for, whether it be the opportunity to speak with his mother one last time, her physical presence, or something else, it seems to encompass all of these things and more. The weight of this realization leaves her grasping for how to react, and in a moment of panic and a heavy, painfully beating heart, she presses her lips to his; aligns their bodies so firmly and precisely together that any suggestion of space between the two of them ceases to exist.
“Real enough for you?”
“Yes,” he rasps hotly against her lips, and the shiver she feels traveling down her spine and between her legs allows the terrifying rush of unwanted thoughts skittering elsewhere. “You are the realest thing I have ever known.”  
The sun shines bright and disarming the following morning. Having left her curtains open the night before, he is able to admire the sight of her eyelashes dusting atop her cheeks in the cleansing light of a new day. The world feels different. The only other time he can recall feeling this way was waking up the morning his mother had passed, sensing that something fundamental had changed, that his life would be forced to take a direction he had not expected. For the first time in years, he can picture the farmhouse in his head as if it were a photograph. Can smell the aged wood, the cooling stove, the chamomile tea brewing on the counter. Time to go home, he thinks suddenly, staring at Emma as she twitches mildly in her sleep.
The way the blankets have come to rest beneath her breasts, her hair splayed over the pillow, she looks not unlike some unnamed renaissance painting one might see hanging in a museum somewhere. Her skin smooth, soft, and warm, he can’t resist the temptation to run his fingers gently over her ribcage, observing the slight, sloping arcs of her.
“Hey,” she says quietly, stretching her arms above her head. “What are you thinking about?”
In the days, weeks, and months following this morning, he will freeze this moment in his head. The way she had looked at him, with a contented yet desirous look that had almost convinced him to put off the conversation for a few hours. Oh, how he wished he had. Perhaps, if he had waited just a bit longer, if he had considered how she might respond with greater care—if he hadn’t been quite so excited by the change in the wind.
“I’ve been thinking,” he said with a smile on his face, “that it might be time for me to return home.”
Hell, if he had even relayed the thought in a way that implied his wish for her to come with him. That he was by no means planning to abandon her , that in all of his visions of the future,of course she played a starring role. But in his haste to share the news, to embark upon this journey that he had awoken to find simmering beneath the surface, he had failed to consider the fragility of her heart. A vulnerability she often hid well, but to his eyes, not well enough.
“Oh,” responding with a deceptive pleasantness, leaving his side quicker than he would have liked. “That’s uh, that’s great, Killian.”
“I think you’ll like it,” he continued, oblivious to her discomfort, a point which he would absolutely kick himself for later. “Might take a bit to get the Internet hooked up, but—”
“Wait, did I miss something?”
For someone with so remarkable a memory, all of the words they throw back and forth seem to grow a bit fuzzy after that. Their voices grow louder and crueler than he can stand; they twist and turn inside the labyrinth of his mind with all the gentleness of a machete hacking through a jungle—sharp, incomprehensible things that end in one undeniable fact: he leaves, she stays.
A year passes. In the city, a year passes in rides on the subway. It passes in television shows and which bars you’ve decided to stop going to. Some new diet you’ve decided to try in lieu of really examining oneself as a person. On the farm, it passes in sunsets—in which vegetables take root at what time, and will they make it? Maybe, and he can hear his mother’s voice, if it’s their time. It passes in whether or not Chammy has decided if she’ll be sleeping at the end of his bed. Can he feel her small, humming warmth atop his feet? Winter. Has he lost track of her hungry chirps each morning? Spring.
The months without Emma Swan are dimmer than he can stand. Desaturated, cornerless days of trying not to think about the jagged edges of her hair. Or the way she smelled, or how she had curled around him in sleep with a fierce, desperate grip. Please, stay. Winter is hard, since winter was when it had all began. With beanies and boots, and pale hands reaching for his. He will wonder, occasionally, if she’s managed to keep the plant he had given her alive without his reminding her to water it. And then, inevitably, his mind will wander to the shape of her face, or the color of her eyes—and the months apart feel more like years. He writes a lot of e-mails that he never gets around to sending. Some of them biting and cruel; others quite obviously lovelorn. Pathetic.
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Sometimes, when he stands in his cold kitchen waiting for the fire to take the early morning chill out of the place, he imagines his mother’s voice in the silence. Come now, Killian, she remarks playfully, it’s not all bad is it? And then the sun will shine through the bare trees, and Chammy will scratch at the door, and he’ll take a breath. No, not all bad. The only time he hears the honk of a car horn is when he drives into town for supplies. His lungs never feel as if they were in danger of collapsing (unless he’s thinking about Emma Swan, in which case, he finds himself yearning for the gritty, polluted haze of the city); and his feet feel rooted to the earth.
Life goes on—it grows.
Emma Swan returns to him in midsummer. All solid flesh and sinew, with striking green eyes that appear almost golden in the pre-evening sunlight. She walks towards him in the same boots she had worn the morning they met, only with more tape wrapped around the toes. She walks with a lightness that he had only managed to catch a glimpse of—that day at the lake, when her blessed history had come rushing through her lips like a waterfall after too much rain.
It feels like another year has passed when she comes to a stop in front of him, her bag falling heavily off of her shoulder. The both of them staring at the ground as if it will save them, her bag and his feet, toes wiggling in the dirt.
“Your hair,” he says finally, admiring the sight of the freckles that have begun to bloom across her cheeks. “I like it.”
Grown past her shoulders in the months following his departure in long, soft waves that he has often dreamed of running his fingers through. Only he’s not dreaming now, and has grown sick with waiting. “Thanks,” she begins to say, only he finds himself overcome with the sound of her voice, and before she can complete her thought he has snuck a hand against the back of her neck and pulled her mouth to his—all of those beautiful words waiting in the lovely depths of her soul, and he is ecstatic at the prospect of being able to hear each and every one.
Eventually, he leads her by the hand towards his front porch, newly sanded and finished, replete with antique rockers and potted plants lining the steps. He thinks it might be polite to offer her a drink, to ask her about her trip, but he’s finding it difficult to do anything other than stare at their joined hands—his browned with the sun and the dirt, her’s just as pale as he remembers, only her polish has turned a friendly blue as opposed to the chipped black he can recall with such fondness.
“Lily says ‘Hi,’” she says, her voice thick with emotion.
“I have a hard time believing that.” His heart thumps at the brief, shy smile she sends his way, her knee moving up and down with a familiar degree of anxiety that he knows he still loves—even still, he knows, and although there are few things he knows, this he can say with certainty, he loves her. He places a hand on her knee and she stills, her eyes roaming over his features with a gaze so hungry he finds himself struggling to breathe.
“I’ve missed you,” she says softly, and he can practically feel her nerves buzzing around them as if they were sitting beneath a hornet’s nest, “I thought that, maybe, everything would just go back to the way it was, like always, but—”
Her hair lifts in a warm breeze that seems to engulf them in an almost eerie, magical quiet, and while he wants nothing more than to ease her fears, to reassure her that no matter what she says, he will never let her go again, he lets her speak her piece, her eyes meeting his once more. “I didn’t want it to. I don’t want things to go back to the way they were before you.”
When their foreheads meet, he thinks he might catch a flash of their future. In the next few minutes, they might move inside to find a bright, well-ventilated kitchen that he has renovated with his own two hands. She might meet Chammy with a pleased hum, cradling his old companion in her strong, steady arms. Would she then relax in the garden with him? Snapping pictures of his bare, freckled back with her phone, laughing and sending them to Lily even though she held little affection for such things. Installing wires and cables and slipping them beneath the persian rugs in the living room in order to maintain the illusion that she has fully embraced the country life.
Holding one another tightly each night, perhaps recalling the loneliness, the anger they had once felt and marveling at the seeming improbability of finding each other in such a vast, concrete sea. But for now he makes her tea. He tucks some strands of that new, thick hair behind one ear as they listen to the final, evening chorus of the birds, the water boiling in the kettle. “I am so very happy to see you,” he admits with a smile, relishing in the sight of her flushed, joyful face, “Emma Swan.”
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larryrickard · 4 years
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lets get personal.
i know this is supposed to be an ask meme but i’m fucking bored & no one ever sends me them, so.  also i’m kinda pissy rn unfortunately so forgive pls some of my answers lol
01: 6 of the songs you listen to most?:  idk.  mostly i listen to everything on random anymore, and only in my car.  the only song i’ve listened to on repeat recently has been ‘stupid love’ by lady gaga. 02: If you could meet anyone on this earth, who would it be?:  speaking of which, lady gaga. 03: Grab the book nearest to you, turn to page 23, give me line 17.:  the only book near me would be all the books, as in my bookshelf.  unless you count my kindle, in which case there would be no line 17 because of the font size.  sorry. 04: What do you think about most?:  idk.  whatever my current obsession is i guess. 05: What does your latest text message from someone else say?:  “And you don't have to cook it”. 06: Do you sleep with or without clothes on?:  with.  i don’t like being naked and don’t understand those who do.  also i get cold. 07: What’s your strangest talent?:  i don’t have talents. 08: Girls… (finish the sentence); Boys… (finish the sentence):  are soft and beautiful.  meh, have to earn my trust. 09: Ever had a poem or song written about you?:  a song, yes. 10: When is the last time you played the air guitar?:  a very long time.  it’s not a thing i ever do lol. 11: Do you have any strange phobias?:  i don’t think so.  my phobias are pretty standard. 12: Ever stuck a foreign object up your nose?:  when i was a kid, yeah.  plenty.  once my parents had to hold me down and tweeze a chewed up wad of juicy fruit out of my nose.  i fucking love the smell of that gum.  three year old me may have been stupid but, hey.  i was being economical.  also i blame it on my parents for, you know, giving a fucking toddler some gum. 13: What’s your religion?:  don’t have one.  former christian, which is gross.  don’t indoctrinate children, please and thanks. 14: If you are outside, what are you most likely doing?:  walking to or from my car.  that’s about it.  :/ 15: Do you prefer to be behind the camera or in front of it?:  behind.  no one deserves to see my face.  rip to everyone who sees me in person on a regular basis. 16: Simple but extremely complex. Favorite band?:  jars of clay, jimmy eat world, the elms. 17: What was the last lie you told?:  that i’m not in debt lmao.  the only time i’ve lied to my psychiatrist :/ 18: Do you believe in karma?:  no but sometimes i wish i did.  so many people deserve their comeuppance. 19: What does your URL mean?:  doesn’t really mean anything, he’s a character from the flash. 20: What is your greatest weakness; your greatest strength?:  all sorts of things?  and idk. 21: Who is your celebrity crush?:  lady gaga, angelina jolie, carlos valdes, idk if shane madej is a ‘celebrity’ but him, brie larson, michael sheen... idk, i don’t really have “crushes” but those are the first ppl to come to mind. 22: Have you ever gone skinny dipping?:  nope.  and no thank you. 23: How do you vent your anger?:  lol. 24: Do you have a collection of anything?:  funko pops?  but not seriously.  i mean.  i have a lot of them bc i love a lot of characters and there are some pretty fuckin dope funkos.  but it’s not my goal in life to have a huge collection or anything.  at least i can say i have less than a hundred of them lol.  (less than 75.) 25: Do you prefer talking on the phone or video chatting online?:  ew, neither.  but if i had to choose, phone.  bc, you know.  my face. 26: Are you happy with the person you’ve become?:  lmfao no.  i mean, i’m better than the person i used to be, that’s for sure.  (see:  indoctrinated as a child, including your typical conservative bullshit like racism for starters.) 27: What’s a sound you hate; sound you love?:  so many.  i have misophonia.  and people chewing + mouth sounds is definitely a big one.  love?  idk???  music?  rain?  my cat’s cute lil meow? 28: What’s your biggest “what if”?:  what if my thyroid issues were discovered earlier on instead of a year or more after they started.  my childhood doctor was Not Great.  it took her two weeks to figure out i had a sinus infection.  i was in the fourth grade.  still bitter about both of those. 29: Do you believe in ghosts? How about aliens?:  no, ghosts aren’t real.  aliens yes.  not the stereotypical ones, but in a “given the size of the universe it’s literally impossible that we’re the only life out there” way. 30: Stick your right arm out; what do you touch first? Do the same with your left arm.:  right, the cat.  left, air. 31: Smell the air. What do you smell?:  nothing?  it’s my house/room, so to me it smells like nothing. 32: What’s the worst place you have ever been to?:  uh... i’ve no idea? 33: Choose: East Coast or West Coast?:  west, obviously. 34: Most attractive singer of your opposite gender?:  no such thing as ‘opposite’ gender.  of a different gender, though?  lady gaga. 35: To you, what is the meaning of life?:  who the fucking fuck knows.  literally know one knows, though tbh.  they just think they do. 36: Define Art.:  lmfao how would i know.  i don’t have a creative bone in my body so i should be the last person to comment on the subject. 37: Do you believe in luck?:  nope.  i hope it’s obvious by now that i don’t believe in fictional things. 38: What’s the weather like right now?:  cool.  cloudy.  typical oregon winter weather.  i want rain tho :( 39: What time is it?:  3:04am. 40: Do you drive? If so, have you ever crashed?:  yes.  and yes, several times.  three.  two totaled cars.  the last one is the only one that was actually my fault, though.  driving too close after it rained.  don’t do it, folks. 41: What was the last book you read?:  the diviners by libba bray.  currently reading a short history of nuclear folly by rudolph herzog.  fascinating, but kind of  depressing af. 42: Do you like the smell of gasoline?:  no. 43: Do you have any nicknames?:  hal (to a very select few bc 99% of the time i hate it, so fuck you if you call me this without permission), hals, hallie bird, hallie strawberry. 44: What was the last film you saw?:  i honestly don’t know.  haven’t done a whole lot of movie watching lately.  maybe the fall (2006).  (please watch this movie, it’s so gorgeous and lovely.) 45: What’s the worst injury you’ve ever had?:  i’ve never had a serious injury.  well.  i take that back, i guess.  in my first car accident i was stopped and rear-ended at like, 40mph.  so i’ve had back issues since i was 18.  usually it’s fine but sometimes it’s bad and sometimes i can set it off really easily.  idk if that counts as “serious”, though.  lots of people have back problems. 46: Have you ever caught a butterfly?:  i don’t think so? 47: Do you have any obsessions right now?:  i guess buzzfeed unsolved and watcher.  and ‘stupid love’ by lady gaga lol.  good omens, as usual. 48: What’s your sexual orientation?:  asexual. 49: Ever had a rumour spread about you?:  yes.  thankfully only a few (that i know of, anyway). 50: Do you believe in magic?:  no. 51: Do you tend to hold grudges against people who have done you wrong?:  yuuup.  they deserve it. 52: What is your astrological sign?:  taurus. 53: Do you save money or spend it?:  spend it :||  every paycheck i tell myself i’ll be better at saving it, but............ 54: What’s the last thing you purchased?:  preordered chromatica by lady gaga. 55: Love or lust?:  if i had to choose, love.  lust and all that stuff is gross. 56: In a relationship?:  nope.  shocker, i know.  (this is sarcasm.  it is no shocker to anyone as to why i’m single.) 57: How many relationships have you had?:  just the one. 58: Can you touch your nose with your tongue?:  nope. 59: Where were you yesterday?:  work on my day off for a staff meeting, and then my psychiatrists’ office. 60: Is there anything pink within 10 feet of you?:  a few things, yes. 61: Are you wearing socks right now?:  yes.  almost always. 62: What’s your favourite animal?:  cats, then birds.  mice are p adorable, too.  i miss having them.  i haven’t had mice since middle school or early high school i think :(  i’d love more but my current cat would definitely try to eat them... same with a bird.  i’ll probably never have a bird :( 63: What is your secret weapon to get someone to like you?:  be sarcastic and love stupid puns and bad jokes? 64: Where is your best friend?:  one is in ohio and the other is in massachusetts. 65: Give me your top 5 favourite blogs on Tumblr.:  no idea lol.  i haven’t been on here much recently, and i’m never caught up anyway.  and i don’t usually pay attention to who is posting/reblogging. 66: What is your heritage?:  mostly german.  the rest is other typical white stuff that i can’t remember.  some irish?  either way idc. 67: What were you doing last night at 12AM?:  uh, rewatching some buzzfeed unsolved for the 100th time?  and playing with my tamagotchi? 68: What do you think is Satan’s last name?:  he doesn’t exist so idc. 69: Be honest. Ever gotten yourself off?:  nope.  also, Nice™. 70: Are you the kind of friend you would want to have as a friend?:  incredibly doubtful. 71: You are walking down the street on your way to work. There is a dog drowning in the canal on the side of the street. Your boss has told you if you are late one more time you get fired. What do you do?:  go to work.  i love my job way too much.  i’d probably try to get someone’s attention if there was anyone around, and/or call animal services.  (there are no canals around here anyway and i don’t walk to work and ain’t gonna.) 72: You are at the doctor’s office and she has just informed you that you have approximately one month to live. a) Do you tell anyone/everyone you are going to die? b) What do you do with your remaining days? c) Would you be afraid?:  who tf knows, i hate this shit.  i’d really rather not think about it bc it stresses me out.  i probably wouldn’t tell very many people tho.  try to find someone to take my cat :(  i sure as shit wouldn’t leave her to my parents :(  and i wouldn’t want to leave her in a shelter.  she’s already done that once and it makes me too sad. 73: You can only have one of these things; trust or love.:  trust.  you can’t have love without trust, though... 74: What’s a song that always makes you happy when you hear it?:  ‘sweetness’ by jimmy eat world, ‘fade to grey’ by jars of clay, ‘thunderhead’ by the elms, ‘bad romance’ and ‘g*psy’ by lady gaga (latter is... i hate the name but the song is so fucking catchy, ugh), ‘torn’ by natalie imbruglia, ‘bring it all back’ by s club 7, ‘... baby one more time’ by britney spears, ‘where’s the love’ by hanson, ‘who do you think you are’ by the spice girls, ‘as long as you love me’ and ‘everybody (backstreet’s back)’ by the backstreet boys, ‘black balloon’ by goo goo dolls, ‘spark’ by tori amos, ‘last beautiful girl’ by matchbox twenty, ‘push it’ by garbage, ‘i want you’ by savage garden, ‘minority’ and ‘she’ and ‘basket case’ and ‘macy’s day parade’ by green day... how’s that lol. 75: What are the last four digits in your cell phone number?:  not giving out that kind of personal information lmao. 76: In your opinion, what makes a great relationship?:  i wouldn’t know. 77: How can I win your heart?:  you probably can’t.  idk anyway. 78: Can insanity bring on more creativity?:  sure, but lack of insanity is a better way to go.  don’t perpetuate the bullshit notion that you need to be suffering to create Great Art™. 79: What is the single best decision you have made in your life so far?:  idk.  i haven’t made very many. 80: What size shoes do you wear?:  10 in women’s. 81: What would you want to be written on your tombstone?:  i’m going to be cremated and you probably should be, too.  just don’t get embalmed, k? 82: What is your favourite word?:  fuck. 83: Give me the first thing that comes to mind when you hear the word; heart.:  ‘alone’ by heart. 84: What is a saying you say a lot?:  idk.  someone who spends time around me irl would have to tell me. 85: What’s the last song you listened to?:  ‘stupid love’ by lady gaga on repeat. 86: Basic question; what’s your favourite colour/colours?:  blue.  then green, and in no particular order, black, grey, purple. 87: What is your current desktop picture?:  it’s boring, just the default mac catalina background lol.  i was having issues choosing a background and was getting way too fucking picky, so i just said ‘fuck it’ and have been using this one for months. 88: If you could press a button and make anyone in the world instantaneously explode, who would it be?:  donald trump. 89: What would be a question you’d be afraid to tell the truth on?:  idk?  how much in debt i am?  lmao. 90: One night you wake up because you heard a noise. You turn on the light to find that you are surrounded by MUMMIES. The mummies aren’t really doing anything, they’re just standing around your bed. What do you do?:  assume i’m having a night terror or am hallucinating.  and be scared. 91: You accidentally eat some radioactive vegetables. They were good, and what’s even cooler is that they endow you with the super-power of your choice! What is that power?:  hopefully teleportation. 92: You can re-live any point of time in your life. The time-span can only be a half-hour, though. What half-hour of your past would you like to experience again?:  maybe when i met carlos valdes & got a picture with him.  he’s super sweet, is living sunshine, and gives amazing hugs. 93: You can erase any horrible experience from your past. What will it be?:  so many :/  idek where to start tbh. 94: You have the opportunity to sleep with the music-celebrity of your choice. Who would it be?:  i’m sex-repulsed so no thank you.  also, gross question.  get a life. 95: You just got a free plane ticket to anywhere. You have to depart right now. Where are you gonna go?:  new zealand. 96: Do you have any relatives in jail?:  yes, my cousin bc he murdered my dad ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ 97: Have you ever thrown up in the car?:  no. 98: Ever been on a plane?:  many times. 99: If the whole world were listening to you right now, what would you say?:  indigenous people aren’t history, they still exist.  shut the fuck up and listen to them.  build a time machine to go back in time and prevent colonisers.  just straight-up kill them, we deserve it.
#me
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nieloxychen · 5 years
Text
time to ramble abt a weird and super real feeling dream i had that ill now try to make a story and multiple ocs out of
important: takes part across several worlds with one single connecting character. most of the ocs exist in the last, most recent world (that main oc tries his fucking best to stay in bc its actually not a complete dumpster fire)
main oc is tito (he/him, they/them, it/its on occasion)
world 0 - 
doesnt remember much
his origin
died in a car(?) crash somewhere in a desert next to a broken down rv
world 1 -
 wakes up semi corporeal somewhere in a desert next to a broken down rv
something bad (not defined yet) happened and a young woman is hiding in the rv from the sth bad that happened
shes looking fr her sister
tito cant help but help her out and they look for her together since 2 is better than 1
she has been looknig for help for a while
no one has been willing to since she thinks her sister is in the middle of the bad thing
(also the big city. lots of gross stuff everywhere, lots of ppl trying to murder)
no one wants to go there
they go together and nearly die a lot
both get infected w a strange illness
shes geting better, hes slowly dying
they find the sister (why she was there idk yet) and tito basicly sacrifices themself so the sisters can escape the bad thing
badly wounded he crawls away into an alley and breaks down next to some trash cans
(just remembered that somewhere in this world there was like a hill made of grey bodies all weaved together and like tunnels in there and the arms were moving and shit what)
colour here were mostly grey and brown
world 2 -
wakes up in an alley next to some trash
hears music, its a festival!! 
he goes to check it out, its a sports thing w like speed and stuff! 
seems like a nice place right? wrong. 
that sport is forced, loser gets sacrificed to big weird monster thing
 kind of a hunger games situation happens, he offers himself up so a parent isnt seperated from a child (just cant not help, its a bad decision and they get that but they just *clenches fist* hero comlpex a bit)
obviously looses, he doesnt fucking know the sport, what did he expect? 
BUT the infection from world 1 did sth to him? (superpowers kinda, has no clue what anything is or does) 
hes still affected by it somehow and is able to escape the ppl leading him to the monster thing to eat
finds out they picked a rando instead and feels bad
tries to save the rando
figures out monster thing is basicly a big fungus that uses ppl to carry spores 
-> the infection he carries infects a spore carries and they die immediatly
quick plan: infect fungus w a disease it is completly unkonw to
doesnt work, spore carriers actually are connected to fungus, its building anti-bodies
he dies in the sewers trying to escape the ppl feeding the fungus.
world 3 - 
wakes up in the sewers
THERS WERE-PPL!! dont change into any specific animal, but tend to have a favourite
theyre kinda nice, help them out, give them food 
they accidentally get infected through shenanigans (it was very non-specific in the dream yo)
tries to figure out both infection based power systems here, quicker to get the were-thing since ppl aroung them actually know what that is. everything else is just weird to everyone
also - possibility of first infection evolving through each world change? didnt notice powers in world 1, only some in world 2, more here?
BUT also very little time to try and figure shit out till now
very chill for a while, hopes they can settle down and maybe not die maybe
SURPRISE children are getting kidnapped!!
by who?? to where? why??? no fucking clue!!
so tito goes to help bc thats just what theydo by now fuck
gets captured, basicly forced to do what kidnappers want w threat of children getting killed (im just gonna say they were able to do them damage for a while before the kidnappers figured out who he is/ a weakness. there was no reason anywhere)
they find a hole in the command chain, go out in a blaze of glory, all the kidnappers are gone (as far as they know)
theyre also very dead and bleed out in the middle of a field
world 4 - 
HOLY SHIT WHAT IS HAPPENING
flying vampires, flesh-goo ppl (idk, the pic i remember was a lady changing into a black-greyish flesh-goo to climb up 90° walls in a seond), theres slenderman maybe????? all kinda sorta want to kill tito for the reason of...
well there has to be a reason he keeps waking up in different worlds right?
but hes not super good at thinking and they dont stop to explain it so??
arent just trying to kill him though, theres also some old man theyre going after
helps the old man, is the grandchild (adopted) of some immortal lady
she is very thankful and gives him the gift of 3 very specific magic powers of his choosing (theyre like marbles and he has to pick 3)
1. Open any door anywhere (doesnt need to be connected) and just wish to go to a place (the more specific the better)
2. Change anything he wants to into a small marble though sheer will power. has to concentrate to keep the shape
3. basicly featherfall but more controlled. actually, more like steven universe floating powers
by now the first infection is basicly a magic system of its own but its all very instinct based. poor tito has no fucning clue
the colour here were very bright, lots of flowers and sunshine and stuff
and just a fucking slenderman flying behing dream-me, blasting through houses and trees and shit?
dies after being chased by flying slender-vampire and goo lady (wasnt fighting back bc they were proctecting sth? idk what though) in like an abandoned farmhouse
world 5 -
wakes up in farmhouse, theres a person!
ocs here we go
person is helke. shes nice but kind of scary sometimes. its mostly a joke for her though
she helps him get used to the world
his powers are by now vry fucking op. but there are SO many powers here too and she fills him in
silver minds: can sense things like weapons if theyre being carried w the intent to harm them or someone they want to look out for. can redirect them against their users, or just stop them alltogether. somewhat staticy voice when stressed, very cold to the touch. born this way
schalks: completly immune to mind intrusion based powers. somewhat of a pack mentality. cannot be located if they dont want to be, very selective in what contact they want. group together for social contact, and also: need contact to eachother bc they need to share excess energy between eachother or they kinda implode. infection based, 2 schalks can have schalk bbys but not often
werewolves: ya only wolves. helke is one! grow up in packs, but adults tend to seperate from larger packs to form their own. can change whenever, super strong always, also fast when changed. just really like raw meat yk? born this way, packs can be made up from basicly anything
more im gonna add, but these i remember. not including the names
basicly helke wants to start a pack and invites him to stay since she doesnt like being alone and wants to help, and ofc he wants to help her
they meet another young werewolf (i think. big fighty and a beard. might be sth else at some point) and he joins them. this is nikola
they meet a young girl, whos a silver mind and kinda running away from home bc bad home life. her names rita.
they invite her to join the pack, which she does and pack rules are kinda big so after proving themselves as reasonably good guardians for her shes officially adopted
she runs into a lonely (very lonely, kinda dying) schalk who lost contact to their group and the pack help them find their group.
their name is an
the group becomes kinda part of the pack, but the rest of the schalk group isnt a fan of big groups of ppl, so the 4 schalks and the 4-pack live in different locations
now /someone/ notices tito like how goop-slener-vamp did in world 4 and tries to capture tito (who was hanging out w rita while that happened.
thank fuck for marble magic, so rita is safe, tito can flee to the schalks (take us somewhere safe)
an turns tito into a schalk, so he wont be found anymore so now he has to kind of move between the 2 camps a lot
on their way to and fro they meet another kid called jacko (also running away, wont say why). is taken into the pack after more safety precautions
hes just a lil human, no magic nothing 
thats the story ig
tito - (he/they/it), roughly 25 (time is weird) not good at thinking, wants to be nice, wants to help, very op, kinda whimsical, very sweet person. DOES NOT WANT TO DIE AGAIN it sucks just want to be happy and make others happ, protective big sibling, everyone is their baby sib
helke - (she/her), 27 wants to help and have a big family/pack, big jokester, tries to be scary, only strangers will believe that, great at handywork and making every sort of meat food. also hunting. lumberjack vibe, chills w nikola, sports w tito, gmaes w kids
nikola - (he/him), 24 chill weed vibe. big fan of cleaning, lock your door if you dont want him to do your laundry. big into birdwatching. somehow in a pack w very intense or op folk which he finds a bit intimidating. doesnt realise hes also big intimidating. has gotten into 3 fights in his life but they were SCARY af, safe zone for tito, fun zone w tito
rita - (she/her), 15 good girl, can be kinda scary, very competetive, VERY COMPETATIVE, will draw hearts on your cast and help you and stuff, after having broken your arm, close w helke and tito
jacko - (he/him), 11 good boy, v shy, v opinionated. would have a blog if older. tried to make one but fled after 1 bad interaction. had to talk abt that a lot to understand it. arts n crafts boy, also climbing, looks up to nikola a lot
an - (they/them), 26 very quiet, thinks theyre right p much always, wants the best for everyone, but not super great at respecting ppls wishes. needs sense knocked into them every now and then. tries very hard. fails. plyam w leena and karim, not good w nikola
leena (she/them), 25, big into animals, big into food, big into random interest of the week. looses interest quickly though
karim (he/him), 26, big art, the one braincell between all the schalks (including tito bc omg BOY), draws creepy things on trees to fuck w ppl, prankster fuck
essek (he/they) 24, fashion and food, loudest of the schalks, goes into the city to get neccessities and general stuff, kinda crushing on tito, sib of karim
in general, the pack is very close. even an and nikola, but theyre kinda cold since an turned tito (tito is ok w it, nikola is big mad an didnt give tito an option, big fight 3, very fucking scary). but they do love eachother a lot, what ive noted were just the stand outs.
same w the schalks, theyre very close but i havent had any of these long enough to get a super good feel on the relationships between eeryone
but i love them already
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myvmk · 6 years
Text
Halloween Month
Updated October 31st, 2017
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When the crypt doors creek and the little bats fly. The witches are brewing and the spiders pass you by. A chill on the neck and ghosts all around. The air stands still and there is no sound. Grim Grinning GHOSTs come out to trick or treat. It's Halloween month on MyVMK! We have lots of creepy things to come your way. So relax and sit back, there's not a moment to delay. Keep checking the newsletter to hear what we have to say! Please note that all releases will happen Saturday at 12am EST. This will be the schedule until further notice.
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MyVMK is now playable on for our Mac users! A work around for Mac users has been made into a downloadable client. We have also made MyVMK Pal the official downloadable client of MyVMK. This is not the new client for MyVMK but is a temporary addition. Find out how to download the Mac client by clicking here!
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This week in the Golden Horseshoe Mercantile we have some amazing happy haunting treats in store for you! This week we have Halloween Ghost Bag, Halloween Witch Bag, Halloween Cat Bag, Gravity Falls - Candy Bowl Skull, Black Flame Candle, Black Fence, Winifred Top, Winifred Skirt, Sarah Top, Sarah Skirt, Mary Top, and Mary Skirt! Available all month!
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Available all month in the Golden Horseshoe Mercantile some things that have been dying to return!
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  Come try your luck for this week's Host prize, a Hocus Pocus Gate and the Consolation prize, a Broomstick Chair. Stay in line after the event for a special queue prize, a Evil Candy Chair Red.
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  Join the MyVMK Staff for an impromptu game of Hide and Seek! Today the staff will be hosting two Hide and Seek games and hiding in public rooms only. Games will be announced as an in-game announcement and on our Twitter (@MyVMK) 15 minutes before the game begins. To win, you must walk up to a staff member that is hidden and say the following statement exactly: "Trick or treat (StaffMemberName)!". Make sure to use the correct prefix (BOO_/GHOST_/EEK_). If you win, you will have the chance to choose one of the three exclusive pins seen above. You are allowed to win only two times per hide and seek event. The staff will not hide in rooms where players are already sitting. Do not "camp out"! This will ensure everyone has a fair chance at finding the staff members. Good luck out there, seekers!
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The Evil Queen has cooked up her best batch of apples yet. Creep on over to Trick-or-Trades for a chance to get some of the sweetest treats that she has to offer in our Halloween Candy Shop! We do not accept Free, NPC, or 1 Credit Pins!
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Pull this month's exclusive pins from the Sword in the Stone! For a chance to win, ride the rides in the Fantasyland Courtyard and you will have a chance at getting a Sword in the Stone pin! You can use this pin to have a chance at pulling the sword from the stone, and if you succeed, you will win one of these pins as a prize or some credits!
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Avast there mateys! Sail on over to the Pirates Treasure room for a chance to plunder some great loot! Collect them all or ye will be sent to Davey Jones Locker! Available all month!
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The votes are in and we are really proud to anounce our 2017 Haunted House Compeition Winners!!
Best Overall Winner! Thorn
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As dusk approaches, Master Gracy has invited all 999 Happy Haunts to materialize for your arrival! We'd like to open our doors to all of you as we welcome you to your own, personal Swinging Wake.
Best Overall Runner-Up! harleyquinn
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Welcome to Red Queen's castle, where she keeps the remains of her victims once they lose their heads. Don't upset the queen or you'll end up here like the rest of them!
McLovin
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Once the sun sets down the kids all run to the streets in hope of getting buckets full of candy. Will they get treats or tricked?
Bernardo_S_Rocks
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Dare to enter? A cool shudder trickles down your spine. The grounds have been inhabited by the spirits of the deceased. Would you make it out alive or become one of them?
Angelo
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Many people choose to not set foot upon 29 Neibolt Street. It may look abandoned, but Pennywise the Clown is watching you from inside. Missing children float within the sewers of the house. Turn away now, or you'll float too.
Dean
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Ghostly Lane only appears for 1 night each year in this small town. No one knows how it gets there or who lives in these spooky estates. Do you dare knock on 1 of these doors for a treat?? Don't get tricked!
Best Theme Winner! Joela
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In this town lies a mansion no human has ever seen. The ghosts that haunt it scare the trick-or-treaters away, in hope that they will be able to stay. "Everybody make a scene!" they chant. "This is our town of halloween!"
Best Theme Runner-Up! Ern
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Spooky.
Confidential
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Cut off from the outside world, you wander along a path that leads you to a seemingly abandoned mansion. Along side this giant is an old cemetary. You see a fresh grave... WAIT! Is that your name carved into it?!
scrubu
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It was all fun and games until your ball rolled into the yard of the mansion across the street. Your parents had warned you about this place. You and your friends venture in but what could lurk beyond the steel gates?
Angie
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Mansion of Lost and Found: Dare enter the mansion if you choose to seek ghosts and other creatures that creep. If you do, best be aware that you are in for a scare. Entering would put your life at risk, but it's nothing next Halloween can't fix.
Fotogirl
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Climb up on the hay wagon and get ready for a heart pounding ride thru the spookiest property in MyVMK. Your journey will take you through the old cemetary and past the scary entrance to the most haunted house around these parts.
Most Creative Winner! MagicAvinash
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You unfortunate soul! You have entered the ruins of what used to be the manor of a very powerful wizard. What remains is a magic orb that wields infinite power. All who have tried to capture it have been unsuccessful. Do you have what it takes?
Most Creative Runner-Up! Ken
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Step into the Creature's haunted lagoon lair and feel the power of radiation take hold. Be careful where you step... you wouldn't want to end up as the Creature's lunch!
Cowboy_Pirate
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N/A
kcoop
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Welcome to Grimsly Manor. You are just in time for our Spooktacular Ball. All of our ghosts have been dying to meet you. Costumes are required.
GypsyRose
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Hansel and Gretel trek across the haunted forest in search of the infamous candy cottage. As they finally approach they realize all is not what it appears to be. Evil lurks behind these sweet walls. They proceed with caution! >:)
Lily
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Welcome to the Vampire Manor. You are one of our guests of honor. Or should I say meal of honor. The hedge maze is the only way of escape... But no one has ever seem to make it through. Some are still trying while others died inside those walls...
These are the Prizes for the 2017 Haunted House Competition
Winner Prize: Haunted House Comp Winner Pin Two Magic - Dancing Inferno Soulless Mickey Witch Hat Purple Room Pin - Halloween Refreshment Corner
Runner-Up Prize: Haunted House Comp Runner-Up Pin One Magic - Dancing Inferno Soulless Mickey Witch Hat Orange Room Pin - Halloween Refreshment Corner
Participation Prize: Haunted House Comp Participation Pin Mickey Witch Hat Green Room Pin - Halloween Refreshment Corner
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Go and check out the Design a Pumpkin Contest 2017 on our official forums and enter for a chance to win an awesome forums exclusive medal and an forums exclusive in-game prize! You can find out more be clicking here! Good luck everyone!
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  Create a Great Guest Room! Get Recognized!
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Player created Guest or Game Rooms demonstrate originality in concept and design. Our judges are looking for creativity, so try using traditional items in different and unique ways. Rooms are judged randomly by MyVMK Staff every month and selected from player rooms.
October Best Guest Room
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Join Enchanted in “Fantasyland Hangout With Rides”! Where ppl can talk 2 friends or take a ride on 1 of the 3 rides in Fantasyland. Mad Hatter Tea Cup Ride / If you want More of a ride try The Pan Ride/ Or try the Alice Ride, But Watchout for the Sneaky Rabbit Pink Hugs VMK<3<3<3 Congratulations!</p>
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The Best Guest Room Winner receives: - 10,000 credits - A Castle Suite Guest Room Pin - plus furniture! - Best Guest Room Award Pin - Plus! A party in Club 33!
    Create a Great Game Room! Get Recognized!
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Create a game room and play with friends and others, and a MyVMK staff member may notice your idea! Game rooms that get the nod offer a new game idea or a new twist on an old favorite. In all rooms we look for room owners who welcome everyone with a smile and show a willingness to answer questions about their room.
October Best Game Room
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Check out “Shadows in the Mansion” by Ebenezer. The La Bouff mansion is under attack from the evil spirits of the shadow man! When I say Go two players will spin the gens in the middle. The number spun will activate traps for the spirits. Left player needs a 1, 2 & 3 to win, Right player needs 4, 5 & 6! Congratulations!
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The Best Game Room Winner receives: - 10,000 credits - A Castle Suite Guest Room Pin - plus furniture! - Best Game Room Award Pin - Plus! A party in Club 33!
This could be you! Find out the details on entering for Best Guest Room and Best Game Room by clicking here!
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Ever wanted to know more about your favorite staff member? Now you can! Every month we will be interviewing a different member of the MyVMK Staff. Here is the most recent interview!
She's not a glitch.. She just has pixlexia okay? Start your engines for this month's Staff member of the Month VMK_Schweetz!
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What is your favorite thing to do around the Kingdom?
My favorite thing to do is walk down the middle of Main Street both during the holidays to see the beautiful decorations and just normally. It makes me feel like I am actually there!
What is the best item for building your rooms?
This is tricky. Am I allowed to say glitched pixels? I use those a lot. I keep like, one-hundred of them in my inventory at all times so I don't run out, and I do run out of them rather quickly.
What has been your favorite game to host thus far?
Oh gosh. I think my favorite would have to be Dreams Month. It was so much fun when all the HOSTs and Moderators went around spreading joy to the MyVMK Community while somehow in the process bringing us all together.
What is your favorite mini-game in MyVMK?
Haunted Mansion. Who doesn't like catching some ghosts while pretending to be a ghost buster?
What is your favorite type of Guest Room?
The Beauty and the Beast Ballroom! It's so pretty and the music that plays when you enter it is just so perfect! <3</p>
Favorite MyVMK memory?
The first time I met Amy! It was during dreams month. She literally trolled me in front of some people in the Esplanade. It was absolutely hilarious and I will never forget it. I still laugh at it now!
What is your favorite Public Room in the Kingdom?
This is a tough question because I have so many. Sci-Fi Dine-In, Castle Forecourt, Fantasyland In The Sky; it's just so hard to choose!
What is your favorite theme on VMK?
Anything Christmas related. I just love Christmas so much. It's the time of the year that brings family and friends together and I think that's a magical thing.
What is your favorite Disney park?
The Magic Kingdom! It's so magical just walking around the park and seeing all of Walt Disney's creations.
Who is your favorite Disney Character?
I have like, three. That would be Lucky from 101 Dalmatians, Stitch from Lilo and Stitch, and Vanellope Von Schweetz for obvious reasons! Lucky was my first ever favorite Disney character and will always have a special place in my heart.
Is there any advice you would give to players?
Be respectful to others and treat people the way you would want to be treated. You never know what could be happening in another person's life behind that screen.
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