#was also split w fair folk though
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Life of Lea Volume 3 Chapter 4: The Con Magic
Oliver looks at the angry crowd completely confused.
"Is there anything I can help you, folks, with?" Oliver asks.
“Yes! We heard that the Bad Apple mistress is out here! How dare you bring her back home!?” The man in the front replies.
“What are you talking about? My big sister is not home, I brought my mother back home,” Oliver says sternly.
“You dare talk ill of your mother? How vial! We all know Mama Vendetta has been dead for ages!” a woman in the crowd replies.
“She was killed by her daughter in 1994! That’s what she got arrested for” another man implies.
Nami comes forward, “No you're all wrong I was thrown into the timeless zone in 1994, Rosetta didn’t murder me” she explains.
The crowd grew quiet as they looked at each other confused. Sergean gets up slowly as his hands glowed green before zapping the crowd.
“Sergean, why did you zap them? They weren’t going to attack us” Lea exclaims.
“Because it’s obvious that they were put on one big chaos spell…it’s con magic…so I reversed it and freed them from that spell” Sergean replies.
“W-Who would do such a thing?” Lea asks even though she has a small idea of what con magic could be.
Nami goes to the crowd with a gentle expression, “What is the last thing everyone remembers?” Nami asked.
They looked at one of the others as they tried to recall.
“There was a duo of performers who came by earlier,” a girl says as she takes a flier out of her pocket before handing it over to Sergean.
Sergean looks at the flier carefully before scowling, “It’s Kitty Ruton and his partner in crime, Sparrow Olli” Sergean exclaims.
“So that’s why he left without saying anything when we left the mermaid dimension” Lea replies with a pout.
“Now we gotta go find them and interrogate” Sergean exclaims.
“I’ll come with you” Lea implies.
“A good reason to kick him in his balls,” Lea thought.
“Wait-Really?” Sergean says as he looks at her confused and a bit shocked.
“Yes? Now let’s go” Lea said as she got her shoes on.
Sergean nods as they walk around the crowd and go towards Fri Town.
“So, are we gonna split up and look for them or are we gonna look for them together?” Lea asks as she follows him since she doesn’t know which direction Fri Town is in.
“We are gonna look together, of course, if we split, you’d get lost all on your own” Sergean replies as he looks at her suspiciously.
“Fair I would get lost but it doesn’t mean I can try to find them by myself,” Lea says.
“…You just want to kick Kitty in his dick” Sergean replies unamused.
“Well that’s one reason but I also wanna stop being useless” Lea exclaims bluntly.
“Nobody has ever called you useless” Sergean replies as he tries to read her body language.
“They don’t have to say it out loud, their actions speak for themselves…which I interrupt as a disappointment,” Lea says.
“Lea, do you need someone to talk to?” Sergean asks.
“No, I don’t… I just gotta be strong” Lea replied sarcastically.
Sergean stops her as he pulls her into a hug, “It’s ok if you’re not” He exclaims.
“Yeah…ok…whatever you say” she mutters in an annoyed tone as the voice of Mama and her Aunt Nancy ringed in her head telling her to be strong for her mom and help her as much as she can.
“I wanna find that cat soon so I can kick his ass…wHy? YoUr sO wEaK…yOu’Re A bAd DaUgHtEr ThAt’S wHy MoM iS sIcK… iT’S aLl YoUr FaUlT…” Lea shakes her head a bit as she tries not to cry. “…He smells nice…this feels nice…” she thought to herself.
“You ok there, Lea?” Sergean asked curiously as he felt her shake her head.
“Mhm…” Lea lied before Sergean let go of her.
“Let’s get going then,” Sergean says as he tries not to blush as they get out of the forest.
Lea nodded and then followed him since he knew where they were headed.
“Should’ve brought my food with me to finish on the way” Lea thought to herself as her stomach growled.
Sergean notices and takes out a bag of crunchy fried fish.
“Here I grabbed this earlier…help yourself to this” Sergean said as he gave her the bag.
Lea looks him up and down, “What else are you stashing your coat?” she asks.
Sergean chuckles, “That’s for me to know and for you to be in the dark” he replies.
“Yeah that’s gonna get real old and one day sooner or later I’ll body scan you thoroughly as they do at airports,” Lea says as she glares at him.
“Airports?” Sergean replies as he looks at her confused.
“Yes, an airport,” Lea says as they get into Fri Town.
“Ok…anyways let’s start looking for Kitty and Sparrow” Sergean replied.
“So how do we do this? We don’t have the whole group as we did in the mermaid dimension” Lea exclaims.
“Hm…” Sergean says as he looks at Lea, “I think you’re ready to learn the clone spell like Vanessa and the others learned” Sergean replies.
“Really? You said I didn’t have the brain cells to do that spell” Lea says bluntly.
Sergean coughs a little bit as he tries not to laugh at his own words.
“Well now I am taking back my words, you do have enough brain cells to learn the spell” Sergean replies.
“Alright, then how does the spell work?” Lea asks.
Sergean took her to a bench and then got out his spellbook. He then opens the book to the clone spell and helps Lea do the poses.
“Ok now give it a try, Lea” Sergean exclaims as he backs away and sits on the bench to observe her movements.
Lea nods as she does the poses steadily as her body starts to glow orange. Then a poof of smoke appeared and then so did one clone Lea appears to. Sergean clapped as he was proud of her before looking at the clone carefully.
“You did a good job with making this clone, Lea” Sergean exclaims.
Lea nodded in agreement, “Now it's your turn, Sergean” Lea replied.
Sergean nods in agreement then does the clone spell on himself and now they are a group of four.
“Now let’s go find Kitty and Sparrow” Sergean exclaims before they both leave in pairs.
The clone pair looks through the north and south of Fri Town as the main pair looks in the west and east of Fri Town. Lea and Sergean looked around carefully as they stood on guard. Lea and Sergean searched around the city hall, the apartment building; the gym. As they made their way toward Raw Power Park, Sergean put on his under-spell glasses in case Sparrow and Kitty were in disguise. Lea looked around cautiously as they made their way toward the entrance of the park. She notices a man with red hair; and gold eyes walking suspiciously by the fountain and benches. Lea then tugs on Sergean’s sleeve before signaling him to look at the odd guy. Sergean turns to look at the guy and he can see that it is Sparrow in disguise. He then grabs Lea’s hand and rushes toward the guy as she follows him as they charge at Sparrow.
Sparrow notices Lea and Sergean coming toward him, “Um…how may I help you two love birds?” he asks calmly.
“Yes, you can, Sparrow Olli” Sergean replies as he lets go of Lea’s hand before getting ready to chase anything Sparrow would try to pull during the confrontation.
“Sparrow Olli? Who’s he? My name is Sean Edwards” Sparrow exclaims in character.
Sergean then uses a disguise dispeller rope spell that glows gold as it wraps around Sparrow, causing his disguise to disappear. Sparrow’s mint hair, blue & gold eyes, and 1 orange feather are then revealed.
“Well, rats…the cat is out of the bag, you’ve captured me,” Sparrow says dramatically like a drama queen.
“Cut the crap and take us to Kitty. We need to have a chat with him” Lea replies sternly.
“I’m not gonna answer to a shrimp like you,” Sparrow says with a smirk.
Lea looks at Sparrow with a blank expression before kicking Sparrow’s eggs. Sparrow shutters a bit before buckling his legs and falling.
“……Ow” Sparrow mutters before groaning in pain.
Sergean widens his eyes slightly before letting out a slight chuckle.
“Talk now, bird,” Lea says sternly with annoyance as she has channeled her inner Edward Elric.
“Ok…ok…ow…before you give me blue balls…I’ll take you both to Kitty” Sparrow replies as he lies on the ground.
“Good,” Lea says before sending a text to the clones of the news before making a cloud wagon to put Sparrow on.
Sergean puts Sparrow on the cloud wagon while keeping him tied up.
“Lead the way, little birdie” Lea exclaims.
“Go West/South past Fierce Magica School and Cunning Restaurant, at the corner of the town there is a portal colored like Kitty” Sparrow explains.
Lea and Sergean nod and follow his instructions once the clones come back to them. Sergean and Lea get the memories of their clones once the clones dissolve.
“Looks like he is telling the truth, our clones found the portal” Sergean exclaims.
Lea nods as she follows Sergean and walks towards the Fierce Magica School and Cunning Restaurant. Sparrow grovels quietly as he gets pulled on the cloud wagon. Once they got to the pastel portal, Sparrow guided them to Kitty’s office. He tried to mess up the directions but Sergean just made the ropes tighter for Sparrow to cooperate with them. They got to his office after 15 minutes of stalling and misleading instructions.
“Kitty, I’m back! Let me in, I have news for you” Sparrow exclaims once at the door.
“About time… what took you so long?” Kitty replies for Lea to kick him in his con coins.
Kitty groans and falls to his knees before Lea's high kick pins him to the floor.
“Surprise motherfucker,” Lea says while smiling with annoyance.
“Oh…well hello pretty kitty princess~” Kitty replies with a flirtatious expression and tone.
“Shut it pussycat we have questions for you,” Sergean says as he glares at Kitty in annoyance.
“Oh? What about the green giant?” Kitty replies smugly.
“Why did you put a chaos spell on the town folk?” Sergean asks.
“I don’t know why Lea is wearing a dress during the interrogation. Did she want me to have a sneak peek? Let me guess she learned this from Madam Sour Puss, yes?” Kitty replies before chuckling.
“Sour puss? Who are you talking about?” Lea says confused.
“Well from the tell of your shorts, Miss. Sour Puss hasn’t told you why she’s helping with the plan against The Bad Apples, I mean a cat and two teens could take a book anytime” Kitty replies.
“A book?... Hold on, are you talking about Mimi? She’s not a sour puss, she’s more like a sassy delight” Lea exclaims.
“Haha as if, she’s only being risky so she can avenge Dr. Fei and Dr. Perla Lay” Kitty replies smugly.
“Her parents? What does their passing have to do with the Bad Apples?” Sergean asks.
“Ask her bestie, she knows their story” Kitty replies.
“Fine but we’re bringing you and Sparrow with us,” Lea says curiously.
Sergean uses the same rope spell and ties Kitty and Sparrow together. Kitty was then lying on Sparrow’s back as he was facing the ceiling.
“You’ve lost weight congrats, Sparrow,” Kitty says nonchalantly as he looks at Sparrow as much as he can give him eye contact.
“Thanks for noticing, Kit, I have been working hard to strengthen my legs and core” Sparrow replies as Sergean opens a portal to the Ice Region.
Lea and Sergean made their way into the portal while pulling Kitty and Sparrow on the cloud wagon.
“I wonder what Mimi’s story is about,” Lea thought as she remembered the argument between Mimi and Glendora in the Air Region.
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lookalike pt. two (bill denbrough)
part two of this imagine
warnings: angst, swearing, but a hopeful ending!
[losers&reader are 17/18 in this]
bill denbrough, you have found, is not an easy person to love. loving him is the hardest thing you’ve ever done.
it burns inside of you, burrowing into your heart and into your stomach until you feel hollow with it. sometimes, you want nothing more than to scrape yourself free from it, but you don’t think you could; it would destroy you as well. but loving bill the way that you do is going to destroy you, too.
you’ve been avoiding him even harder after your fight, coldly ignoring his every attempt to talk to you or even look at you. you thought you’d have to avoid the other losers at times, too, but they’ve made it clear that they understand. you don’t know how they found out, but you know they know what bill said. and you know they’re upset about it. they’re almost as angry as you are.
and god, are you angry. you have to force yourself not to think about what bill said or else your rage will choke you, thick and cloying and hot in your throat. at inopportune times, his words will play through your mind, and your blood begins to boil.
however, your life hasn’t changed much. you were already avoiding bill to begin with, so not seeing him at all hasn’t really done anything. you still go on dates with jacob, trying not to feel guilty when you look at his smile, and you hang out with the losers whenever you are certain bill won’t be there. there’s a hole in your life and your heart where he should be but slowly, you think you are beginning to grow numb to that absence.
of course that’s when it comes crashing down around you.
foolishly, you had been certain jacob had been none the wiser to the tension inside you. you’d never told him that you had stopped being friends with bill, after all, and you’d even brought the losers along to meet jacob on one of your movie dates. you had thought that things were as perfect as they could get between you two.
he’s already leaning against your locker when the final bell rings one day, fidgeting with the straps of his backpack. he doesn’t return your smile when you greet him, nor does he go to wrap you up in a hug the way that he usually does. instead, he sighs and looks down at his shoes.
“can we talk?” he asks you quietly, his eyes sliding to where richie and eddie are waiting for both of you a few steps down the hall. “alone?”
you swallow, a cold feeling settling in the pit of your stomach. you wave the boys on, trying to smile as reassuringly as possible when they both look concerned. judging by the look richie gives you, it’s shaky at best and downright worrying at worst.
you follow jacob outside, your heart rate spiking even more when he leads you to the place where you and bill had your fight just a few short weeks ago. seemingly oblivious to your anxiety, he sits on the wall where bill had waited for you, and hesitantly, you sit beside him. the few inches between you feel as cavernous as miles.
for a long moment, neither of you talk. you stare down at the sidewalk, your palms sweating against your thighs. you’re about to bite the bullet and ask what’s wrong when jacob murmurs, “i think we need to break up.”
your heart freezes inside your chest. it sits there, colder than you’ve ever been, spreading numb out through your veins as you shakily whisper, “what?”
jacob doesn’t look at you. “i think we need to break up,” he repeats, slightly louder and slightly stronger.
part of you had known this was coming, and that part had honestly been waiting for it to happen. but that part is not the majority, and you are so blindsided that your lips tremble enough that you almost can’t talk. “but... why?”
he sighs, and finally he meets your gaze. he looks sad and resigned, a frown curling the edges of his mouth, but there is something in the set of his shoulders that looks lighter. more free. “we don’t like each other the same way,” he whispers. “and i think i’ve always known that, but i don’t think i can stay with it anymore.”
every word he says spears into your heart. you feel almost sick with guilt and desperation. “jacob, i do like you, i don’t understand—“
“not in the same way,” he interrupts, gently but firmly. “i really like you, (y/n), but you’ve always had feelings for someone else. and that’s okay, really. it’s not your fault. but it’s not fair to either of us.”
the tears you have been trying to suppress finally make themselves known, trickling slowly down your cheeks. you make no move to wipe them away. “how did you know?”
he smiles, soft and small and sad. “i have eyes, y’know,” he murmurs to you. you don’t deserve his kindness, especially now. “it didn’t take a genius to figure out.”
your heart is unthawing, only for fractures to spread through the ice. you can feel it breaking in your chest, slowly but surely with every word he says. “i really do like you,” you rasp. you want to grab his hand but you don’t think you’ll be allowed. “i need you to know that. and i never, ever cheated on you.”
jacob blows out a breath, tilting his head back to stare at the sky. “i do know that, (y/n). i know you like me and i know you’d never hurt me like that. but it’s not really enough, is it?”
he doesn’t say it to be an accusation but you feel it like it is one. your heart splits jaggedly in two. “no,” you whisper. “it’s not.”
you are both silent for several minutes. the bustle of your classmates leaving school for the day continues around you, all of them oblivious to the turmoil inside you. no one has even glanced at you or jacob, even if you feel like there is a neon sign pointing directly to your conversation. lookie here, folks, karma always comes to collect its debt!
“can we still be friends?” your voice is small. your fingers are twisted together in your lap hard enough that they ache. “i don’t want to completely lose you from my life, jake.”
jacob sighs, shaking his head slightly. “i don’t know,” he admits. “i don’t want to lose you either but i think it would hurt too much to just be your friend right now.” he pauses, then gently reaches to bump your shoulder with his own. he gives you a watery smile. “maybe eventually, though.”
there is a note of finality in his words. this is the ending you had been building towards from the moment it all began, and you had been foolish to think otherwise. you had already lost bill, and now you were losing jacob as well.
he gives you a nod, trying to smile again, and then he stands up and walks away. he doesn’t look back.
almost as soon as he’s left, you feel two other people sit down, one on either side of you. you can’t see through the tears blurring your vision but you know that it’s eddie and richie, come to try and comfort you. you don’t say anything, just turn your head into eddie’s shoulder and let yourself cry. they don’t ask, but you hope they understand anyways. you wouldn’t be able to explain if they didn’t.
***
it takes you a little while, but eventually, things start to get better.
the other losers are the best friends you really could’ve ever asked for. bev helps you talk all your feelings out and cry all you want to; stan and mike help you study and keep you from noticing all of your extra free time; ben brings you sweet little gifts, flowers and chocolate and candy, to make you smile on days you don’t feel like doing so; eddie and richie make you laugh with their antics and hug you whenever you need it.
but there’s still that hole left behind where bill was, the one that you desperately try not to think about.
you still haven’t talked to him. you know he knows that you and jacob broke up, because it feels like your entire school knows by now, but you don’t know if you’re ready to face that. you’re still so angry with him but you also miss your best friend.
you’re sitting in between eddie and stan one day at lunch, giggling at something mike said, when richie leans across the table and whispers, “come outside with me?”
he’s flicking his pack of cigarettes in his hand, and even though you don’t smoke you’d never pass up the opportunity to hang out with your favorite trashmouth. you pat stan’s shoulder, ruffle eddie’s hair, and follow richie out the huge double doors.
there’s already someone sitting against the wall in richie’s usual smoking spot, and you turn to say something to richie only to notice richie’s disappeared. you swing around wildly to look for him, and that’s when you realize the person sitting against the wall is bill.
you are struck with sudden deja vu for the day of your fight. you hope this doesn’t destroy you more.
he offers you a small smile, patting the concrete next to him. “c-can w-we talk?”
your heart races at the sound of his voice but you force yourself to keep your face blank. you carefully sit beside him, leaving several inches between your thighs. you don’t look at him at all.
he sighs, his hands balling into fists in his lap. “d-don’t b-be m-m-mad at r-richie. i a-asked h-him to b-b-bring you o-out h-here.”
“why?” your voice is cold and impassive, and you watch him flinch out of the corner of your eye.
he swallows. “s-so i c-could a-apologize t-to y-y-you.”
it makes your heart race for an entirely different reason. you almost crack and turn to look at him, maybe to see how sincere he is, but you’re scared that doing so will make you forget why you’re angry. already, the feeling is melting away at having him by your side again. “i’m listening.”
almost as if a dam has been broken, he tilts his shoulders to face you. his words come out choppy and fast, his stutter infinitely worse than you’ve ever heard it. “i-i-i-i’m s-s-so-oh suh-suh-suh-sor-ry. i-i-i-i wuh-was s-s-s-stupid a-a-and m-m-m-m-m—f-f-fuck—“
without your conscious effort, your hand shoots out to wrap around his wrist. both of you freeze, staring down at the point of contact. you want to pull it away and take it back but something inside of you has unlocked at the feeling of his skin against yours.
“calm down,” you murmur, still staring down at your hand. “it’s just me.”
bill draws in a ragged breath, his shoulders trembling with the force of it. his wrist flexes within your grip but he doesn’t pull away. “i-i-i’m s-s-sorry,” he whispers, now slightly calmer. “i-i’m s-s-so s-s-sorry, (y/n). i-i s-shouldn’t h-h-have s-s-s-said t-that. a-any o-of i-i-it.”
you nod, slowly. “so why did you?” you ask, your voice low. “because that hurt, bill. i was so fucking mad at you. i am so fucking mad at you.”
he makes a wounded noise, deep in his throat, and the hand still in your grasp curls into a fist. “y-y-you s-s-should b-be,” he croaks. “i-i w-was a d-dick. i-it d-doesn’t e-e-excuse it, b-but i-i w-w-was... i w-was j-j-jealous.”
it’s not really news to you, since bill had admitted he liked you in the same breath he used to tell you to break up with jacob, but it still makes your blood thrum through your veins. he’s right, it’s no excuse at all, and your anger will likely simmer inside of you for a while to come, but the worst of it is disappearing.
you sigh, finally turning your head to look at him. he’s already looking back, his eyes wide and sad, his expression destroyed. you let go of his wrist but don’t move away from him.
“why didn’t you apologize sooner?” you ask quietly.
he shrugs, giving you a small smile. “i-i d-didn’t th-think y-you w-w-wanted to h-h-hear f-from m-me.”
he’s not wrong; you probably would’ve punched him if he’d talked to you sooner. you nod, looking down at your lap. “i’m still mad at you,” you repeat. “that was fucked up, bill. you just expected me to break up with jacob because you asked me to. you realize how awful that is, right?”
bill blows out a long sigh, nodding his head. “s-stan n-n-nearly k-killed m-me f-f-for i-it,” he admits. “i-i th-th-thought b-ben a-a-actually w-would.” he pauses, and then says, again, “i-i’m s-s-sorry, (y/n).”
you turn to look at him again; he still hasn’t looked away from you. “i don’t know how to forgive you for that,” you confess quietly.
his expression turns anguished, but he doesn’t look surprised. he bites his lip, tucking his chin down into his chest. “c-can w-we s-s-start o-over? i-i-i d-don’t m-mean f-f-forgetting w-w-what i-i d-did. i-i j-just w-w-want t-to e-earn y-y-your t-trust b-b-back.”
it sounds too easy, but as you look at him, you’re shocked by the longing inside of you. you want your best friend back, you want to go back to the days where it was you and bill against the world. and if this is how you’ll get there, then you’ll absolutely take it, if it means you get to have him again.
you swallow and smile, shakily. “yeah, bill,” you breathe. “i’d like that.”
he smiles back at you before he sticks his hand out between you. as you stare down at it in confusion, he nudges your shoulder with his own. “h-hi, i-i’m b-b-bill.”
it makes something warm curl in your chest. you throw your head back and laugh, hearing him laugh along with you. you take his hand in yours, shaking it fondly. “i’m (y/n),” you grin.
maybe that day didn’t ruin anything at all, you think, as he offers you a hand up and holds the door open for both of you to go back to lunch. maybe there wasn’t actually any bomb and you and bill will eventually be okay.
as you rejoin the losers, as you watch stan bully bill relentlessly, as bill smiles at you shyly across the table, you are certain you will be.
#bill denbrough#bill denbrough imagine#bill denbrough x reader#bill denbrough x you#the losers club#the losers club x reader#the losers club imagine#it (2017)#it (2019)#it (movie)#it movie#richie tozier#eddie kaspbrak#stan uris#ben hanscom#mike hanlon#beverly marsh#my writing
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Theories & Predictions for Champion of the Titan Games
If you need a refresher on the full lore of the Fair Folk, do read my post about it. They’ll be quite relevant to these theories. Now, let’s read the theories! If you want anything explained, don’t hesitate to make a comment, or send an ask on anon if you’re shy. It’s weird to write everything down after just having it in my head for so long, so this might be long-winded and incoherent.
Ezabar, the Somber Knight, and Selona - I theorise that the Somber Knight is a lich. The Somber Knight has an especially dark reputation according to Henrick, and resides in catacombs (built by wizards even though Dragon Slayers generally have a distaste for wizards).
The air in his lair is markedly lifeless, though pure.
He is thought to be undead- something more “powerful and evolved” than a zombie or wraith- by Tanu and the public of Terrabelle. When he loses his leg and forearm, he isn’t in danger of dying, but makes his way back to his lair to regenerate. In popular culture, a lich keeps its soul in a reliquary. If destroyed, the lich would re-form at the location of its reliquary.
Like the Somber Knight, liches traditionally spend their time hidden from the world in their lair.
In Fablehaven, liches appear desiccated (like the ones on the Path of Dreams) or completely skeletal (like Calumbra or Ezabar) .Their touch also bruises- both would be good reasons for the Somber Knight to be completely encased in armour.
In Fablehaven, a lich is a type of undead (the lich Belrab used to be a wizard), who deliberately retains some of it’s former human will. Some are able to control lesser undead. I think that the Somber Knight, or Ryland as is his true name, was one of the Fair Folk, and think the Fair Folk had a role in placing him. I don’t think it’s really in question for him to have been a wizard- all Dragon Slayers hate dragons, and tend to distrust wizards. He also has a name that sounds like a Fair Folk name (Like Lockland), and resides under Terrabelle; he would have even been placed there at the same time the territory was established. Eve found his name from “the old stories”, and Lord Dalgorel asked him to help Eve even though only the caretakers of Wyrmroost are supposed to command him. Seth asks Ezabar if he’s a lich, and Ezabar concedes that “that is one label”. Ezabar asks Seth to find a piece of information for him in return for allowing him access to the prison. To help provide context, he explains that he used to live in Selona. It’s possible he lived there as a wizard, but I think that he lived there as one of the Fair Folk, because he asks Seth what became of a boy called Toleron, son of the Duke of Hester, whose mother was called Ingrid. It seems like a matter of personal importance to him. I think that becoming a lich or whatever higher form of undead might be more common among Fair Folk, or at least it doesn’t have the same taboo it seems to have for wizards. Oh, and I asked Brandon Mull if Fair Folk could become undead, and he said that they wouldn’t be normal undead, but could be liches or revenants. Those would be the forms of undead with their own will.
Wizard-Fair Folk Cooperation- Wyrmroost was established by Archadius, the first wizard. Wyrmroost has had several caretakers since its establishment, the fourth of which was Agad. Though the Fair Folk are neutral, there is a settlement of Fair Folk at every dragon preserve, with the three largest settlements being at the three with a Dragon Temple, and this is not common knowledge- perhaps deliberately so. These three preserves are also where the Sage’s Gauntlets, shield-that-repels-dragons, and harp-that-soothes-dragons are guarded by the dragons. The very talismans that helped defeat the dragons long ago. I suspect the Fair Folk are stationed in these locations to keep an eye on the dragons, and that they-at least formerly- are here to prevent the dragons from gaining power over the other races. Further proof that they have diplomatic priority- by “ancient treaty”, the defences of Blackwell Keep do not repel the coach of Stormguard Castle.
I also want to talk about the Sovereign Skull. If you don’t remember it, you can catch up on it here. I think that Selona was created by wizards primarily to house the Sovereign Skull, or at least the sphere it’s located in. I would equate it with Zzyzx, which had a physical location (Shoreless Isle) but was in reality its own realm. Selona would have a physical location in Europe (as Ezabar alluded to) but be its own country. It’s very secret- Eve declines to tell Kendra and Seth about it, Ezabar says it’s impossible to access, and Agad only reluctantly shares information about the location of the skull with Kendra. It makes sense- the Fair Folk enforce neutrality at Selona, and Lord Dalgorel was certain the dragons would need to “crush Selona”. “If our mother country falls, it could create a permanent imbalance, and unending age of dragons.” he says. The dragons mean to destroy the Sovereign Skull. I believe they are connected.
Humbuggle and Curses- What happened at Stormguard Castle is widely referred to as a curse by those who do not know what happened, and was created by Humbuggle. Serena, investigating the Nipsie curse, was last seen headed for Titan Valley, which is where Gabrinko said that Humbuggle’s Castle is. After all, it was Humbuggle, colluding with Graulas, who cursed the Nipsies. My theory is that the Nipsies are a cursed form of Fair Folk- that’s why nothing is ever designed with them in mind (think the Path of Dreams). Calvin says that Nipsies “used to be more powerful. And bigger. Maybe even as big as I am now”. But to curse them, he’d need a motive- I think it’s possible he intends to weaken the Fair Folk as a group. Another curse of his might’ve been the phenomenon in which “Almost no babies are being born anymore. Nobody is sure why.” Weakening the Fair Folk would benefit Humbuggle simply because they are a neutralising force, and of course curses are Humbuggle’s hobby.
Calvin and Humbuggle- I think that Calvin is either colluding with, or he is Humbuggle. I have only circumstantial evidence, but here it is. Look how these parallel one another-
“The curse came with a prophecy,” Calvin said.
“Tell me.”
“All nipsies can recite it:The curse arose from the demon’s blight; the lord who slays him will set it right.”
“It rhymes,” Seth observed.
“Most of the good ones do,” Calvin said. “Some strain more than others. But the basics are clear. Whoever kills the horrible demon will help lift the curse.”
And then these two scenes from Wrath of the Dragon King
“I suppose,” Humbuggle said. “I could also eat plain oatmeal every day to stay alive. An explanation is more pleasant when it rhymes. And a tad more official.”
“To keep the game fair, I will confess that the Wizenstone is jealously guarded by a powerful demon. Any who seek to claim the stone would have to ward off the demon before long.”
I also think it’s intriguing that right after showing Kendra how he morphed into Augie and Elouise, this exchange takes place:
“You’re sneaky,” Kendra said.
“Young one, you have no idea,” Humbuggle replied.
Bracken misses Calvin when he’s reading minds. They never check with the Nipsy elders that Calvin is legitimate. Camarat does not sense any darkness in him, but he is also unable to tell what Calvin is before he reveals himself. This is of note because in SotDS, Camarat is able to tell that the knapsack contains an “unconventional automaton and a hermit troll”, and is able to detect that Seth is a young shadow charmer. Gabrinko says he’s legitimate, but like @carolinelikesdinner said, he’s an outcast from his society and may be exiled for a good reason. He would also have access to Fablehaven- in the Caretaker’s Guide, it’s mentioned that there is a magical dwarf among the colony at Fablehaven, whose intentions are unknown.
Loose Things That I Want To Point Out
-Serena was “with a woman of human size”. I have no evidence, but intuition tells me she is Isadore, an enchantress mentioned in the Caretaker’s Guide.
-Ezarod was killed by Dromadus in dragon form. Dragons, when they become wizards, change their name. Liches are often former wizards. It’s possible, though unlikely, that Ezabar was in fact Ezarod.
-Celebrant’s wings make an unmistakable whistling sound when he approaches by air. I know Chekhov’s gun when I see it.
-The Roost is Wyrmroost Castle. The caretaker used to split time between it and the Keep. It was important enough to even have a scepter. However, I cannot find any other allusion to it, and we can only assume we will learn more in future books, meaning we will hopefully return to Wyrmroost.
Agad is a Shady Bitch- This isn’t a theory, but I have a couple of things I want to point out. First, don’t forget that Ryland thinks he may be:
“Agad became caretaker long after Wyrmroost was founded,” the Somber Knight said. “He was the fourth caretaker. Wizards love their secrets. It is possible he never knew the medallion derived power from a hidden scepter. If he did know, then you were set up to become caretakers, and to discover this knowledge on your own, so you would be forced to decide how to proceed without external influence, thereby assuming responsibility for all the associated risks and perils.”
Agad constantly warns Seth to stay away from the Blackwell. When he departs for Soaring Cliffs in WotDK, he warns Seth to stay away from the Blackwell. Marat, too, frequently warns Seth to stay away from the Blackwell. Of course, this is for the safety of himself and others- but he’s also one of the only people even capable of releasing the beings of the Blackwell.
Vanessa lists shades and haunts as ethereal restless beings, much like apparitions, phantoms, sky phantoms, specters, and wraiths. Shades and Haunts are said by Amulon to live in the Barrows, Lackluster Woods, and Adjoining Meadows- why weren’t the creatures of the Blackwell given their own domain like this? I have a very good reason- Agad’s grudge against the wizard-turned-lich imprisoned there. According to the Sphinx, Belrab is a powerful lich, and controls the other beings imprisoned there. This is eerily similar to the case of a Morisant; he was another dragon-turned-wizard-turned-lich, imprisoned along with his minions. (It’s never explicitly stated Morisant is a lich- but he matches all the requirements)
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My bby 🖤 3, 7, 10, 16, 17!
mittens!!!!!! :)))))))))))
3. Do you write fics from start or finish, or jump around?
i try my best to have one big project going at a time, with maybe some small ones on the side. it would stress me the fuck out if i had like more than one major serious project open at a time cause i’d have to split myself and i dont think thats fair for readers, who won’t get the best quality, and to me because i’m pretty busy in real life (highschool and college kid here folks lmao, i am,,, swamped with so much work, but grind now, earn the fruits of labor later. at least, that’s the theory.)
as for the small ones, ill write self indulgent (well,,, most of the things i write are self indulgent) one-shots just to give myself a break or get something out of my head, which is always nice after making a milestone on a longfic >:)))
7. Which part of writing do you struggle with most?
oh goodness..... it all depends to be honest. i think the hardest part is being in the right mindset for that particular project? for ol&w that fic is particularly dark and severely complex in the sense of the theme, the tone, how the world is built and such, so i have to be in the right mood and mindset to be able to give it justice.
also, editing. i fucking hate editing. but im also a worrier and have posting anxiety and YET i always have mistakes. at this point i’m like whateva, ill go back and fix it at one point or another, as long as its digestible, you know? i’m just lucky i have a dear friend who loves me enough to read through my brain dump of half coherent thoughts. (fun fact! most of the things i post are the first drafts, i don’t usually rewrite unless i have to or i plain hate it, which isn’t common tbh... which might reflect in my writing but meh)
10. Do you enjoy writing dialogue, exposition, or plot the most?
OOOO GOOD QUESTION!!
its definitely a toss up. writing the intricate nature of the plot is so much fun, all the layers, all the thought, the foreshadowing, the blink and you’ll miss it moments. its so much fun and i definitely rub my hands and laugh evilly whenever i write something so deliciously good.
WORLD BUILDING. that is something i pride myself in. if you ever read ol&w you’ll be able to see it clear cut and shining, or if you read my og work (that i’ll hopefully begin posting in july or so) you’ll see it there. world building is my favorite THING EVER. i LOVE IT. especially fantasy world building because i can make shit up and it be this itty bitty thing and suddenly its HUGE later. god i love it.
but also, the words that come from the mouth are so precious for the fic. honestly, i wish i was funnier to where i could write witty dialogue, but alas, i’ve always been the “much too serious mom friend” so i always end up with a bit darker dialogue, though i do love it.
my favorite thing is writing light hearted dialogue and fluffy plotlines and having underlying tension and down right ugliness to it. blink, my loves, and you’ll miss it. ;))
16. What is your most underrated fic?
ooo hmm, let me think tbh
in my opinion, it would be a cocoon in the heart, a spark in the brain because i love leesaku. so much. and here i got to write them in my fav little way, a little sad and a bit raw.
OR god’s pity (also, any fic in so come meet me in the garden (where the angels sing),,, i love those fics so much). GOD’S PITY WAS MY FAV from shikasaku week. i was so excited to share that one, its my favorite. any and all subs in that shikasaku series im super proud of and really love and i really do wish more people would read them :’’’’)
17. What fic are you most proud of?
most definitely of love and war (for now at least lmao) because of the amount of planning and world building and what im doing to the characters. im having so much fun driving everyone insane... corruption arcs are my favorite.
the intimacy of being understood, my first fic on here! took me like a good month and a half to write that sucka, my first child. i really love it tbh, my first dip into the naruto pool ;))
a drop of power (there is an ocean), something i wrote for ks month and through writer’s block that i love with all my heart. its funky and messy and i love my word play and phrasing in this one. its a lil serious, its a lil fluffy, its a lil sad.
OR you taught me how to miss behave; a birthday gift for @elenorie, the actual love of my life. i love the stark contrast between the “poetry” and then the actual fic, that combo of sickly fluff and looming seriousness.
MITTENS THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR ASKING!!! you know i absolutely LOVE hearing from you and picking your brain!!!!
pick my brain, lets see what we find
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There’s a new group of villains on Fear The Walking Dead.
Well not entirely new. These are the same people who’ve been scrawling “The end is the beginning” everywhere. The same people with the submarine who are looking for Morgan who took the Magical Key from the bounty hunter way back at the beginning of Season 6.
I admit, I’m just kind of tired at this point. Tired of all the bullshit and bad writing and the tedious characters and the predictable stories. Tired of the parade of mediocre villains. Bone weary. And yet here I am, still reviewing this damn show.
Let’s take a little walk down memory lane, shall we?
TV’s Greatest Villains
At the beginning of Season 5, after the Most Horrible Villain Of Any Walking Dead Show was taken care of at long last, we got a new group of bad guys who . . . just wanted their warehouse back? And directions to an oil refinery?
Truly, these were now The Most Horrible Villains Of Any Walking Dead Show Ever.
Logan (played by a woefully underutilized Matt Frewer) was the head honcho of these bad apples and he fooled Morgan’s group into flying a plane they didn’t know how to fly far, far away to help some strangers in another part of the vast continent of Texas. Then he . . . moved back into his warehouse! The bastard.
After half a season of trying to fix the plane so they could fly back across the Pacific Ocean (which we all know separates the two halves of Texas) Logan tries to pretend like he’s a decent guy and fools the Morganites into showing him where the oil refinery is. Dastardly Logan! Then, just when Morgan and Logan decide that their names are similar enough that they might as well be friends, the Rangers show up!
They show up on horses with rifles and expertly kill Logan and every single member of his crew but for reasons (reasons!) they spare Morgan and the Morganites. It turns out that Logan was working for the evil witch queen of Lawton, Virginia—Truly The Most Horrible Villain Of Any Walking Dead Show Ever (Seriously). She is so evil that she kills the people working for her, who helped lead her to the oil refinery, and spared some people she didn’t know who weren’t loyal to her at all for reasons.
Yes, you heard me. Reasons! You don’t get to know the reasons. That’s not how scripts work. Scripts are supposed to be confusing, opaque and riddled with plot holes and inexplicable character choices.
Anyways, Virginia and the Rangers with their horses and their cowboy hats and their idyllic Texas aesthetic become the new Big Bads sometime in the second half of Season 5. Morgan and Friends make a PSA documentary to make sure anyone wandering from gas station to gas station is able to know who to call (GHOSTBUSTERS!) if they’re in trouble (which, like, yeah it’s a zombie apocalypse) because Morgan really wants to make up for all the bad things he’s done and so do all his friends.
Virginia is very mean, though, and so she makes a PSA, too, and that pisses Morgan off so bad that he takes his people far, far away to an abandoned Western-themed park-town filled with zombies and they make another PSA on the way that’s even more amazing and magical but a dude dies making it, marking the Best Walking Dead Death of All Time in the process. Seriously a dude decides it’s so important to film a selfie shot for the PSA that he dies when a bridge that’s collapsing surprisingly collapses! And then everyone is very sad!
Then, uh, after a spell at the new town that has no resources or water because it’s a theme park town instead of a real town, Wes and Alicia paint some stuff and June and John Dorie get married and Daniel plays some guitar and sings and Frank Dillane is like “Holy shit I’m so glad I bailed on this show” and then Virginia comes because Morgan calls her because instead of walking somewhere else they decide they should call the Evil Witch Queen Of Lawton so she can rescue them by splitting them all up (even Skidmark the cat!) and then the season ends with Morgan getting swarmed by zombies but don’t worry he’s still alive and they’ll tell us as much in a trailer that comes out before Season 6 because AMC is criminally addicted to spoiling their own shows for no reason on social media and . . . and . . .
Somewhere between Season 5’s finale and Season 6’s premiere AMC and showrunners Ian Goldberg and Andrew Chambliss must have put their heads together with Scott Gimple and decided that the Rangers and Virginia were actually super dull villains, just like the last few villains (I skipped the whole Vultures plot because they were actually so stupid they put the stadium under siege but still let Madison and co. go out scavenging because somehow they never read the Siege 101 manual or something).
Anyways, for reasons that must be obvious by now, somebody must have pointed out that Virginia is not a very good villain after all, partly because she’s just not that convincing but mostly because she made a goddamn copycat PSA and someone thought that was actually a cool story because there is no God and life’s not fair and this is also why we can’t have nice things, son.
And they must have realized that the Rangers are a like a cartoon version of what might happen in Texas after a zombie outbreak (just compare this clown show to the far more realistic Vatos gang from Season 1 of The Walking Dead). All these realizations must have felt strangely repetitive after what I can only imagine were similar revelations about Martha, the Vultures and Logan. So many revelations, so little useful insight or meaningful changes!
The Believers
In any case, they had June kill Virginia after a weird series of events that also saw one of the only good characters left on this godforsaken show get killed by yet another brat, and came up with The Believers, a group almost entirely inspired by The Monkees. These totally realistic folk live underground where they grow crops and embalm zombies and talk about how you need to be able to “see” when you look at this one creepy zombie they have entwined in vines in their basement. They’re led by a guy named Teddy played by John Glover who must really be down on his luck to take a role on this ridiculous show, though he’s actually creepy as a villain so that’s something. But no, I’m not going to feel any hope or optimism because fool me once shame on me, fool me again and George W. Bush, man. He has something to say about this.
Wes and Alicia and Al and Luciana all find their way to these people. I honestly can’t remember how they found them, but they show up to scout things out. They get interviewed like we’re back in Alexandria. Things go bad when Wes runs into his long-lost brother and ends up killing him after a scuffle over a gun. Wes’s brother has had a little too much of that Kool-Aid if you know what I mean. Wes isn’t too shook up about it. Remember when the entire brothers Dixon conflict between Merle and Daryl played out over the course of one single episode of The Walking Dead? Yeah, me neither.
Luciana says stuff because she’s still on this show for some reason. She says stuff a few times and people say stuff back to her. Al checks an embalmed zombie with a helmet on thinking it might be her lover girl from Season 5, because you totally embalm zombies with their helmets still on, but it’s not. Boy I was really worried there for a second!
Alicia sets the embalmed zombies on fire so they can get away and the others escape but Alicia doesn’t and then she has to have a whole entire conversation with Teddy and it’s pretty damn awkward when she tells him “You wanna kill me? That’s not gonna happen.”
Teddy’s like “whoa damn I was going to kill you but now that’s not going to happen crap” and Alicia’s like “So there, Teddy. You jerk face with your crazy-man beard.”
He knows something about Madison somehow. And he wants to “save you, Alicia” but “I don’t need saving” she tells him and then he talks in more cryptic circles. Teddy’s been looking for someone like Alicia for a long, long time and she’s like “listen old man at least I got some lines this episode!” which, to be fair, is true.
THE END. CREDITS ROLL.
Verdict
Yes, I am clearly mocking just about everything about this show. But I didn’t come up with this crap. I didn’t come up with Martha and the ethanol, or the plane and the beer-balloon, or Totally Pointless Logan, or Ginny and her boring ass cowboys. Maybe Teddy will be a better villain than all these. To be fair, he is a better villain already in a lot of ways. Then again, the bar set by the Vultures, Martha, Logan and Virginia is not very high. It’s so low, it’s less a bar and more of a speed bump.
So while Teddy is far more intriguing than the rest, and it’s even possible that Glover’s brief appearance here in this episode was better than the sum of all the other villains in this show since Season 4, I imagine they’ll find a way to screw him up also and then, as soon as he’s worn out his welcome, replace him with some other group of bad guys. The Shouters, a group of post-apocalyptic crazy people who wear zombie faces and shout at each other really loud, led by a bald woman named Alphapha.
Here’s the thing.
We need more than just Good Guys vs Bad Guys. There are other struggles to work with in fiction. Friction between the group that causes realistic, compelling internal strife. Survival against the elements and just the struggle of surviving in a world laid low by a pandemic, maybe without creature comforts like walkie-goddamn-talkies. Or perhaps a compelling story about a survivalist group at odds with a Native American tribe over water rights, whose intertwined family histories are marred by murder and revenge, where our heroes find themselves torn between both sides of a bloody fight they know very little about.
Yeah, what a notion.
Like I said at the very top of this review, I’m tired. I’m tired of Fear The Walking Dead. I’m tired of the same crap happening over and over again, another absurd bad guys who ultimately make the same fatal choice: They mess with Morgan Jones. NOBODY messes with Morgan Jones.
Maybe Morgan can make a PSA about how mean and delusional Teddy is and then Teddy can make a PSA about how The End Is The Beginning, Actually, Morgan You Twit. It’s just all nonsense at this point and it has been since the end of Season 3. We aren’t dealing with actual stories about real people. We’re watching a cartoon with two-dimensional cartoon villains and a bunch of uninteresting flat characters. Except a cartoon would be more fun.
What is the point of this show now? It’s like a goofier version of The Walking Dead, which also suffers from too many villain groups at this point and too many characters but not this level of crappy writing (usually).
Let me predict the plot for the remainder of Season 6 and likely part of Season 7 if AMC is actually going to let the current showrunners continue driving this show into the ground:
Teddy wants the key from Morgan so he can use it to activate the nuclear bombs on the nuclear sub that’s in the middle of Texas (because Texas, you recall, is separated by the Pacific Ocean which has dried up because ZOMBIES and the sub is there now). He wants to nuke the planet because he wants to save everyone because they’re weak probably. From this nuclear wasteland, new life will spring eternal and his cult—well protected in their underground parking garage with their cute little gardens—will be the new rulers of the world. Or at least of Texas which—we know because of geography class—accounts for approximately 57% of Earth’s land mass.
Look, I’m sorry. I’m really truly sorry but if this show continues to be a joke I don’t know why we should take it seriously. A mocking review if only fitting for a show that continues to make a mockery of itself. AMC has the resources and the wherewithal to produce a better zombie show and quite frankly audiences deserve one. There was nothing fundamentally awful about “The Holding” so I’m honestly not fully sure why I’m in such a snarky mind frame, but there was nothing very good about, either, and it’s just plain as day to me that they’re already falling into the same traps they keep falling into over and over and over again. Meet the new bad guy, same as the old bad guy. It’s all so predictable.
Because they don’t really learn from their mistakes, or because even if they do they just don’t know how to course correct. That’s the problem when you just don’t have much talent but nobody steps in and says “enough is enough!”
Because seriously, my droogies, enough is enough already.
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This new paper in Nature presents what could be a new way of doing multistep chemistry in a single vessel by the use of solvent layers of different densities in a rapidly rotating container (the examples below are in vessels are spinning at 5400 rpm). You inject these solvents from the central inlet and/or via channels running underneath the container. Folks who have spent a fair amount of money in bars might be reminded, with good reason, of a pousse-café.
The chart illustrates the solvent layers for the “e” example on the left, which are a mixture of aqueous and organic phases along a gradient of densities: W is water with sodium polytungstate (SPT), sodium metatungstate (SMT) or cesium chloride (CsCl), and these are thin clear “separator” layers between the organic phases. Those are dyed and are mixtures of tetrabromomethane (TBM), dibromomethane (DBM), 1,4-dibromobutane (DBB) and n-decane (D), and the whole assembly is stable over time. Meanwhile, the example on the right is all done in various mixtures of polyethylene glycol, methanol, and sodium iodide, and that one does gradually diffuse and blur.
OK, you are probably wondering why anyone would want to do this. Folks who are familiar with an old (and for many chemists, relatively obscure) technique called countercurrent chromatography might be getting some ideas, though: CCC is a separation technique that does a sort of continuous extraction between two immiscible solvent layers. There are several ways to realize this, some of which use this same sort of rotating-cylinder effect. My impression has always been that it needs a good deal of experimentation on the front end of the process, but when it works it can provide clean separations without your desired products ever touching a solid support that might degrade them.
So there are possibilities for (say) having a reaction take place in one solvent layer and allowing a differentially soluble product to be extracted out into another adjacent one (thus providing, in its slickest manifestation, a driving force for the reaction itself as you keep feeding in starting materials). The paper illustrates several multistep sequences that are performed across different solvent layers, where the intermediates alternate (for example) between aqueous-soluble and organic-soluble and work their way out towards the outer immiscible layer as the sequence proceeds. There are several interesting effects to do with the thickness of the various layers, the mixing between them that can be turned on and off by varying the rotation speed, and so on.
And you can do tricks that would otherwise be rather hard to pull off – one example is a simultaneous acid-base extraction, where a chlorinated solvent layer sits in between an acidic layer and a basic one, and the components introduced into the middle split off in both directions at the same time. Quinine nitrobenzoate, for example, disappears from the central organic layer and ends up as quinine hydrochloride in an aqueous HCl layer and sodium nitrobenzoate in an adjacent aqueous NaOH one. Similarly, the paper also demonstrates selective extraction of phenylalanine from a mixture of glucose and lactic acid (as one might find in a fermentation broth). These sorts of things could also be applied to biomolecules, inorganic compounds and clusters, and other species (the paper shows an example with silver nanoparticles which seems to be a real improvement over the known ways of handling them).
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“Not even one snow angel?”
Genre: fluff
Warnings: language bc im too dumb to find better words
Pairing: Jaehyun x gender neutral reader
Author’s Note: yall it’s so cold that they had to cancel school for three days bc it’s supposed to be in the negatives for three days straight, so yall already know what that means: time to write fluff focused around Jung Jaehyun when I should be preparing for my biotechnology debate,,, yeehaw !! also: im shook that yall liked the mark mafia au so much,,, I will have another mafia au out soon, love yall !!
our story is set in fair Verona, where it is cold as tits out
jk its not actually set in Verona but ya know. Romeo and Juliet, am I rite, laid ease and gents?? (even tho that story is high key messed up and I don’t really understand why people aspire to have relationships like that)
no but for real, classes for the next couple of days were cancelled because of a negative ten degree Fahrenheit wind chill, and that meant you had nothing to do (other than procrastinate your class work)
yeehaw, am I rite, laid ease and gents???
n e ways,
rather than staying in your dorm all day w your dorm mate whom you did not always get along very well with,
you decided to carpe the fuck outta that diem and play in the snow with some of you friends
lacing up the boots you shoved over four pairs of socks, you called Johnny, a kid you’d known since your freshman algebra class
“Seo, let’s go outside for once.”
“Excuse me, what? Is it the sleep deprivation talking or did I hear you just say the words lets go and outside in one sentence?” a sleepy Johnny said from the other line
“Haha, very funny, dumbass. Let’s go play in the snow,” you told him, throwing on a winter coat
“Y/N, it is eleven AM,” Johnny told you, causing you to roll your eyes as you shut the door
“Really? I had no clue, Johnny, thank you for telling me.”
“Y/N, it is eleven AM on a day when classes are cancelled,” Johnny rephrased
“Yes, I am well away. Suit up, Seo. I am on my way over, be there in five.”
on your way, you looked at all the snow and tried not to slip on ice
you made a few stops at some of your other friends’ dorms, and by the time you got to Johnny’s, there was a small army of people ready to play in the snow (and wake up Johnny)
“Mark, can I please wear your hat?” Haechan whined, flashing Mark puppy dog eyes and tugging on his sleeve
“Y/N, make him give me his hat,” the boy begged you, turning those eyes on you
“Mark, do what the baby says,” you told him, knocking on Johnny’s door
johnny seo opened the door, and before you could say anything, you were hit with a snowball in the face
“JONATHON SEO, WHAT THE FUCK???”
he started cackling and said, “Before you guys got here, I went outside and made a snowball, then put it in a bowl in my mini fridge.”
“WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU??”
“Nothing, Y/N, I thought you wanted to play in the snow?”
“Johnny, we are not IN the snow right now. We are standing in the middle of your dorm building, while snow drips down my face. I am going to destroy you when we are actually in the snow.”
“I’d like to see you try, dumbass. Oh, also: do you care if I invite someone to hang out with us today?” he asked, and for some reason, everyone pivoted their attention to the six foot tall man, which you did not notice
“Go ahead, the more the merrier. Right, guys?” you asked, and everyone nodded a little too enthusiastically
You narrowed your eyes in suspicion but didn't ask any questions
“Who all were you planning on inviting?” you asked, trying to get more info out of him
Mark, Haechan, Jisung, Chenle, Jaemin, Jeno, and Lucas all avoided eye contact
“I don’t know, probably just a few of the other guys... Ten, Taeyong, Winwin, Kun, and Jae.”
so THAT’S why they were acting weird
those two faced whores
“Jae?” you asked, trying to do some more subtle investigating
“Yes, Jae.”
“Jae as in... Jaehyun?”
“Yes, Jae as in Jaehyun.”
“Like... Jung Jaehyun?”
“Yes, Jung Jaehyun.”
“Like..... your roommate Jung Jaehyun?”
“Yes, my roommate Jung Jaehyun.”
“The one that I think is hot and told you all that I have a crush on him?”
“That’d be the one.”
oh no
oh fuck no
“Unless, of course, you want me to tell him that something has come up and he is no longer invited.”
“No, no, that’s not necessary, he can still.... he can still join us, if he wants.”
“Okay, good, because I told him to come with us, and he should be ready any minute now.”
cue Jaehyun nudging johnny out of the way so he can get out of the door
and all you could think was
ohhhhhhh mannnnnnnn, he’s hot
he had on jeans, a fluffy winter coat, gloves, and boots, but he had you quaking in your four pairs of socks, okay
you could feel your cheeks heat up when he gave you a smile
those dimples had you wEAK, BITCH
“Hi, Jaehyun!” you managed to get out, to which he responded
“Hey, Y/N! That hat looks really cute on you! You always look cute, but, ya know what I mean.”
to say you were malfunctioning would be an understatement
the boys saw you go into a full system reboot
“Let’s get going before all the snow melts!” Chenle said, grabbing your arm and pulling you out of your technical difficulty
“I doubt the snow will be melting any time soon,” Jisung mumbled, getting a slap in the arm from one of the other boys
the only sounds that registered to you were the sounds of the bickering boys, sleds dragging on the floor, and your own heart beat
okay, dawg, just play it cool.
now that’s easier said than done, isn’t it? dumb bitch.
the whole time yall walked outside, you were super aware of the proximity of Jaehyun
after about two minutes, Jaehyun was standing right! next! to! you!
wowie, babey! yee fuckin haw!
when yall finally made it to the “lawn” (whatever the fuck u wanna call it, I am not good with words, yeet) of campus- a huge hill with trees all around, right in the center of campus-
yall threw down the sleds a few of you brought, and got right to it
johnny got on a different sled and challenged you to a race, to which you naturally agreed to
while johnny was getting situated before the race, you made a snowball out of his sight, and right as it started, you nailed him in the face
“yOU MOTHER FUCKER!” johnny yelled as he fell off his sled and you took the lead
the boys all laughed (including Jaehyun! let’s gooooo!) and watched you do a half assed victory dance when you reached the bottom of the hill
winning was great and all, but you had to climb back up the hill:/
not cool, dawg:/
when you finally reached the top, you found that some of the guys were making a snowman
awwwwwwwwwwwww
Jisung saw your heart melting upon the sight and said, “Stop that, this is emo boy gang, either get on board with emotional numbness or get out.”
that stopped melting your heart, but you still loved the sight of all of them so concentrated on making a huge snowman
Jaehyun led the group, telling them what to do and assembling everything
by the time the snowman was complete, it easily was taller than you were
“yo. this is dope, bro,” johnny said to Jaehyun, pulling him into a bear hug
“thanks, bro,” Jaehyun said, laughing a bit at how ridiculous it all was
“Snowball fight time?” Jeno asked, all of the younger boys behind him, looking at you Old Folk for confirmation as to whether or not it’d be socially acceptable to start wailing balls of coldness at each other
you, johnny, and Jaehyun looked at each other and shrugged
“Why not?”
why not, indeed
without a second of hesitation, the younger boys started chucking snowballs at you three
“FUCK” “SHIT” “BITCH”
sicko mode or mo bamba?
“DIVIDE AND CONQUER, DIVIDE AND CONQUER!” you yelled, all three of you taking off in different directions, making the boys split up their force to follow
for some reason, Jaehyun ran along with you, leaving johnny to fend for himself
“Jaehyun, this isn’t a part of the plan!” you scolded, but at the same time loved the situation yall were in
“I know, I wanted to make sure you don’t get hurt.”
wow, we stan !
“That’s awfully sweet of you, but now we have to figure out how to get rid of them.”
“I’ll make a diversion while you hide and make ammunition? Send a signal or something and i’ll find you when you’re ready,” Jaehyun told you, making a sharp left and darting through the trees, a trail of boys following him
since you were left alone, you put your hands on your blushing cheeks and then got to work
within a few minutes, you had more than enough ammunition to hit the boys with and you saw all of them at the bottom of the hill, some wrestling and some throwing wads of snow at the others
great idea: take them out from up there?? yes, let’s go y/n, coming in clutch w that idea
without warning, you began to chuck the hundreds of snowballs you made at the boys
by the time you went through all the ammo, none of the boys were left standing except for johnny and Jaehyun
johnny stood up from behind a statue in the campus center and said, “Holy shit.”
Jaehyun looked at all the boys laying in the fetal position and said, “Holy shit.”
after that, everyone wanted to go home
not sure why, after all it’s not like they just got their asses kicked in the cold
“I don’t feel like going back to the dorms so soo, though,” Jaehyun said to you and Johnny
johnny went :) idea time!
“I am feeling really tired from today, but I heard Y/N say earlier that they wanted to stop at the café at some point today and try one of the new drinks they’re making.” :) ;)
fuck
“Okay, cool. Do you want to go to the café with me, then?” Jaehyun asked you
Jaehyun asked you.
Jaehyun asked you?
“Yes, I’d love to!” you told him, handing your sled to Jaemin to take with him to the dorms
after parting ways, yall went to the café and had a kind of?? date
just a lot of small talk, what is your goal in life, what are your deepest fears, blah blah blah
on the way home, though, that was when it got REALLY couple-y
you slipped on ice!
and he went to catch you!
but he fell, too!
but he made it so that you were laying! on! top! of! him!
Hello, K-drama moment!
instead of speaking, you both stared into each other’s eyes
before you totally #securedthatman by rolling off of him
and making a snow angel
laughing, he stood up and held out a hand to help you up
“Come on, let’s get going, it’s really cold out now. Too cold for snow angels, for sure.”
“Not even one snow angel?” you asked, flashing him puppy dog eyes
“Not even one snow angel,” he confirmed and helped you up, and!
he didn’t let go of your hand!
later on, yall consider that snowball fight turned café trip to be your first date, and boy, was it cold, but your hearts sure as hell felt warm that day
in conclusion, uwu
#nct#NCT 127#nct 2018#nct dream#nct au#nct imagines#nct scenarios#nct 127 au#nct 127 imagines#nct 127 scenarios#nct fanfiction#nct 2018 imagines#nct 2018 au#nct 2018 scenarios#jaehyun#jung jaehyun#nct jaehyun
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My Year in Spotify Listening
Like a lot of people I checked out the Spotify year-end summary thingy, and since Spotify is only a certain percentage of my listening, the results were surprising, and I tried to figure out what it meant. In general, I listen to new music via iTunes, if I am sent promos. That only encompasses a certain amount of new music of course, but if I’m sent a download, I tend to use that for my listening all year long. Often, I’m “done with” an album more or less by the time it comes out, but sometimes I’ll keep listening (as w/ DJ Koze this year) and I do that with my promo files. My Spotify listening tends to be a mix of things I stick on a few different playlists based on mood or genre, and they could come from anywhere (but they aren’t usually new).
In terms of my favorite artists (Bill Evans wound up in my top spot, somehow, followed by Joni Mitchell) it was hard to figure out how it’d happened, because I didn’t spend the year obsessed with either. Then I looked at my 100 most played songs, and that did bring back a few things. I’m not sure if the whole list is in order, but the first 5 songs in the playlist are the 5 listed when Spotify gave me my most-listened-to tracks of the year, so I think so? Anyway, that’s what I am going with here. This is how my Top 10 songs show up on the playlist, in order, with one exception: in the middle of the list was Bow Wow Wow’s “See Jungle,” which I already wrote about on Tumblr 8 years ago (and about which I have very little to say now, except that yes I do still listen to this song a fair amount), so I’ve omitted that and included No. 11.
Wussy: “Runaway”
This was my favorite song of the year, it has 600 plays on Youtube and 5,400 on Spotify, which makes me a little sad. Technically it’s not from this year—Wussy put this out on a small-release tape or CD-R a few years ago—but I’m still counting it. This is the rare case where the streaming media playcounts tend to match the responses of folks I’ve talked to about this song—I mentioned to 4 or 5 people, and in each case they said “Yeah that’s kind of nice I guess...why do you like it so much?” I’ll try to answer that here.
First I should say that I have no real interest in or knowledge of Wussy. They’re an indie rock band from Ohio, most notable at this point for the fact that Robert Christgau loves them, and has written rapturous reviews of their work over the years, which surely has helped them to achieve whatever small amount of notoriety they have. I checked them out here and there but they didn’t make much of an impression on me. I wish I could remember how I came across this particular song, but I can’t, probably either Twitter or a streaming media algorithm. But I loved it immediately, like, stop-what-you-are-doing-and-listen kind of loved. It just clicked.
The first thing that comes to mind is the chorus: “I love you, let’s run away.” That’s the theme of so many of my favorite songs, I mean, the first album I bought in my life was “Born to Run,” and if you could sum up the first three Springsteen albums in in 6 words, “I love you, let’s run away” wouldn’t be bad. And I think I liked that this song didn’t try for poetic phrasing, just said it in the simplest way possible.
But the romance of a song like this has a shade of darkness to it, and that draws me in even more. Escape is never a long-term strategy. Eventually you have to figure out how to make life work when you’re in the thick of it. So while it’s such an appealing dream to exit the world with someone you’re crazy about, there is a shelf life to that sort of gesture. I relate to this idea of being fed up with everything in the moment and wanting to jump in the car with the only person who gets you, but eventually, the car is is going to need gas. What then?
I didn’t know when I first heard this song that it was a cover, so the immediate impact of it was as a Wussy song. But I learned that it was written and recorded by another Ohio artist that people in the band had known, a woman named Jenny Mae. She died last year. Pitchfork did a news story on her passing. She was 49. And when I found that it was her song, I listened to her version and I loved it almost as much (but not quite), though her take also made my Spotify Top 20. I did think enough of her version to order the 7-inch, which was her first release. When I read about Jenny Mae’s life, the song took on another layer of meaning. She suffered from mental illness and self-medicated with alcohol. And she was described by people who knew her as brilliant and creative and hilarious but also impulsive and self-destructive. Which for me gives a sentiment like “No one likes us anyway / I hate my job / Sweet, sweet are the innocent / I love you, let’s run away” and “40 ounce between your legs/ Shakin up my heart / Turn around and look at me / Light another smoke” a different tint. These are the kinds of things you say when in the throes of a rush of feeling, but they’re not impulses you can safely follow for a lifetime, even though goddammit, sometimes I want to.
Bo Diddley: “Nursery Rhyme”
In Richmond early this year I bought an old Bo Diddley album called The Originator. I saw it in a used bin, it was $20, and, it was pure instinct, I had a feeling it was interesting. For me, buying used records, $20 is a fair amount of money, I don’t pay that for something I’ve no idea about, typically. But something compelled me to pick it up. I was intrigued that it had none of the hits I knew. And I took it home and when I put it on a short while later it blew my mind. This surprised me because on the one hand it sounds so much like the idea of “Bo Diddley” I keep in my brain, the one rhythm we know from the song he named after himself, but this was just so controlled, so well rendered, with so much atmosphere. The whole thing is brilliant. I became particularly obsessed with this cut from the record, and then I started exploring the “Bo Diddley” beat in general, reading whatever I could about it and listening to examples. This kind of random deep-dive is the best thing about the internet era for a music fan.
Mulatu Asatke: “Tezeta (Nostalgia”
At nights when I hang out with my Mom at her condo in Michigan I play music over a Bluetooth speaker I bought a year ago. My Mom’s default has for a while been to put the television on, but at some point I asked her about playing music instead so we could talk or just hang out, and she grew to like it. Sometimes we’ll chat about stuff, and sometimes she will play Candy Crush on her iPad while I do things on my phone, which sounds distant but is actually very comforting to me. One of the things I’m doing on my phone during these evenings is finding songs to play. It’s quite fun (and interesting) for me to say to myself “What is a playlist that would make my Mom happy?” and then try and figure out what that might be on the fly. She was never really a music person so I don’t have a lot to go on, mostly her age, a story or two about a song she liked, and a vague knowledge of what she might have heard on the radio in my lifetime.
In September, my Dad died, and I stayed with my Mom in her condo for a number of days that month. I felt a strange mix of feelings. On the one hand, he was father, I missed him, I thought about never being able to talk to him again, to not be able to share the things in my life. I thought about the fact that I wouldn’t be able to learn more about his life, my knowledge of which is pretty sketchy. There were all the usual things a person would be sad about. But then there was the fact that he had a severe and debilitating case of Parkinson’s disease for the last eight years, and at times he suffered so terribly. I remembered how on a few occasions he called me while he was delusional, he would tell me that he was sure he was going to die. One time, he told me that he saw someone in the driveway who was going to kill him. Another time, he said that it was hard to explain but that he had been split into two people, and he couldn’t take it, he was terrified. I told him that it would be better tomorrow and he yelled, “I’m going to be dead by tomorrow!” I would get calls like this while I was walking to work in Brooklyn 700 miles away, and I would feel so helpless. And so when he passed, I thought about him during situations like that, and also felt like maybe not he had some peace.
A night or two after my Dad died I was sitting with my Mom, talking, and playing music. She dug out some old photos and we were looking at them, pictures from her in high school that I had never seen. I wanted to see everything, learn every detail. And over that Bluetooth speaker I was playing some random playlist I had found called something like “Jazz for late night.” I wanted background music. And while we were hanging out and talking, this song came on, “Tezeta” by the Ethiopian jazz bandleader Mulatu Astatke. And man, it’s hard to describe, but the mood of this song so perfectly captured the exact feeling I had. The phrase that comes to mind is “bombed out,” that’s the way it seemed, like I’d been beaten up and thrown in a ditch and my ears were ringing and now I was trying to reorient myself after all that had happened. There was a feeling of weariness and sadness but also a feeling that life continues, that we have to gather our memories and keep on. And this impossibly beautiful song captured every bit of that, the one-chord riff moving ahead, in spite of it all, while the sax line captures all the sadness dripping off everything at the same time. I listened to it constantly in the weeks afterward.
Galaxie 500: “Fourth of July” (live)
One of my favorite songs by one of my favorite band in my favorite version. This song is indicative of how (as with all songs on this list) when I’m in the mood I can listen to one track over and over. On a couple of occasions in 2018, I listened to this maybe 8 or 9 times in a row, immediately hitting “back” when it had finished. And the thing I was typically listening to was Naomi Yang’s bassline, which to me holds the lion’s share of the song’s feeling. Her bass playing in Galaxie 500 is so incredibly emotional to me, and it was never more so than here.
Pusha T: “Infrared”
The one truly “new” song on here.” I didn’t have an advance of this record so I listened on Spotify when it came out and I loved it. And this song in particular seemed so perfect, the carefully constructed rap, executed as if it’s coming off the top of his head, the sample—I listened to this many times in a row on a few occasions, and it also sent me to revisit Clipse, which brought me a lot of joy.
Joni Mitchell: “Carey”
Another song about freedom, but here it’s real. Blue is a perfect record but I probably revisit this one more than any other single song because I’m so in love with the production—that bass, that hand percussion...sonically, an album recorded almost 50 years ago simply cannot be improved upon. I remember hearing this one on AM radio when I was very young. It was a single, b/w “This Flight Tonight,” one hell of a 7-inch. I’ve always thought the picture it painted was so incredibly romantic—”Maybe I’ll go to Amsterdam, maybe I’ll go to Rome / And rent me a grand piano and put flowers 'round my room.” Hey, why not! And if Carey is indeed keeping her in this tourist town, we know it’s only for another hour, another day, another week, whenever she’s ready, she can’t be tied down. But then, that’s the future: this night, now, is a starry dome, and we’re alive, inside it.
Arthur Russell: “That’s Us/Wild Combination”
Sometimes w/ my favorite Arthur Russell songs you can hear the strain as he creates a new genre trying to get a particular unnamable feeling across. But not this one. Sitting in a room with his friend Jennifer Warnes he made a song that feels as natural as a breath.
Carole King: “Pleasant Valley Sunday”
I’m in awe of Carole King’s ability to write songs that sound perfect on the radio. Even if her prime hitmaking years only lasted a bit over a decade, the number of her songs with her name on them that left a huge mark on culture is staggering. Her demo for the Monkees hit “Pleasant Valley Sunday” shows how perfect everything was before the artist who would bring the song to the public got anywhere near it. I found this one on Youtube 8 or 9 years ago and it’s been in regular rotation since.
Hank Williams: “The Angel of Death”
In February and March I was doing research my Pitchfork Sunday Review on Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska. It’s one of my favorite records, and I’ve wanted to write something long on it for years, so spending time w/ it as the winter wound down was an intense pleasure. It’s common knowledge that Springsteen was listening to a lot of Hank Williams when he was writing the album, and when I came across this song, I became obsessed with it. One, the melody sounds right off Nebraska, and “My Father’s House” (another song I listened to a lot this year) especially seems directly modeled on it. But this song has so much going for it on its own. It’s about death and the moment of judgement, but Hank’s melody and phrasing don’t sound frightened. It’s hopeful, a prayer instead of an admonishment.
Guided by Voices: “Motor Away”
I’ve loved this song for years but I listened to it intently around the same time I was playing the Hank Williams, when I was thinking about leaving Pitchfork. I’ve never been a big fan of Robert Pollard’s lyrics (though I love many of his tunes), but he second line here is the one I couldn’t put out of my mind: “When you free yourself from the chance of a lifetime.” That’s where I felt I was. Editing this music magazine that I cared so much about was the culmination of a dream that took a long time, a ton of work, and a fair amount of luck to realize. When the chance of a lifetime comes along, you’re supposed to hold on to it as tightly as possible for as long as possible, until someone finally pries it away, which will happen eventually. I knew that. And yet, deep down, I knew that after 11 years, I wanted to try something else. Run away, motor away, drive away. Sometimes a song can give you the tiniest push.
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Rained In
[[In which these two dumbasses say so many words to each other.]]
“Damn,” Ashei sighed on the second day. He leaned against one wall of the cave, watching the rain. “Would you call this is a typhoon or a monsoon?”
The storm had not caught them off guard. In fact, it had rolled in slowly, darkening the sky for several days in warning. It had given them enough time to find somewhere to take shelter that was big enough for the two of them, the cart, his horse, her boar, with room to spare. To be on the safe side, they had ventured deep into the cave until they were satisfied that there was nothing else already in residence that would take offense to them being there. Still, the two of them performed their own protective rites to keep their little campsite safe.
And then the rain came like it had been waiting for them to get settled.
And it came like it hadn’t rained in years.
And it came some more.
For the first day and a half, they had managed to entertain themselves by taking the time to finally sort through their gear and other general cart-keeping. They mended what needed to be mended, sharpened what needed to be sharpened, and made a firm and final pile of what they no longer needed to hold on to. The animals got groomed. The people got groomed. They cleaned the cave. Their bedroll moved around the camp no less than seven times, and got more stuffing added (and removed) twice.
By the second day, Ashei was, to put it simply, bored out of his mind.
Maj leaned against him, having set her book down by the campfire some time ago. “Don’t think we’re near enough to the coast for it to be a typhoon, and monsoons are more wind than this. So, neither. It’s just a big ol’ storm.”
“Huh.” Thunder rolled in the distance. “You piss off any storm elementals then?” He nudged her playfully. She snorted and nudged him back.
“Not recently, no. C’mon, you’ve been standing here for fifteen minutes. If you haven’t willed the rain away by now, I’m sorry to tell you but you’re not a storm mage.”
“That’s heartbreaking. I’m heartbroken.”
“I know you are, honey. But you had to find out one day, and you’re starting to drive me crazy. Let’s play cards or something.” Maj took hold of the arm that had wrapped itself around her shoulders and pulled on Ashei as she spoke. He resisted by pulling her back to his side.
“I don’t wanna play cards with you! You cheat!”
“So do you!”
They played cards. Despite his better judgement, they played with her deck. They counted wins by trading pebbles and other debris back and forth, and he was winning. Based on the size of her smirk after another loss, she was letting him win to prove a point.
“You’re cheating! You’re cheating right now! I know you are. Who uses magic to lose?” He threw his cards down, disrupting their carefully stacked piles of winnings.
Maj laughed and rescued her cards from the ground. “Well, it’s not magic, I’ll tell you that much. You know I can’t do magic on my own, and Vee wouldn’t waste his time with card tricks.” Ashei hated it when she talked about her book like a person. She shuffled the deck as she continued. “There’s a little bit of counting involved, but mainly I know what cards are in play by the backs. Each one is slightly different, so I memorized them.”
“That doesn’t explain how you change your whole hand. I’ve seen you do that.”
“I have my ways.” She did a trick with the cards.
“Aren’t you going to tell me what they are?” Ashei asked after several long seconds passed in silence.
“Why? A lady’s gotta have some secrets.”
“’Cause I know you wanna tell me about it.”
Maj stuck her tongue out at Ashei. He chuckled and returned the gesture.
“You’re right, it’s pretty clever and I’m proud of myself for coming up with it. The fronts of my cards are decorated with little transmutation circles. If I rub a certain component on my fingers before I play, I can touch one of those places and change its appearance. It’s pretty straight forward.”
“I don’t know, stuffing your sleeves with cards sounds like a more straight forward way to cheat.”
“Is that what you do?”
“Absolutely not.” He made a show of shaking out his sleeves. A card fell out. It wasn’t one of hers. “I have no idea how that got there.”
They both laughed, the sound echoing against the walls of the cave and rivaling the sounds of the storm for a few moments. Once they calmed down, they were left with the problem of finding something else to do. With eyebrows wiggling like they had a life of their own, Ashei proposed a more... physical way to pass the time. Maj declined his offer; she didn’t want the animals watching, and it would ruin the mood to know they were out in the rain. Neri and Pappy seemed to sigh in relief. Ultimately, they decided on playing more cards, but with Ashei’s untampered with deck.
“Let’s play a new game. I’m thinking Truth or Lies, but with cards. Loser of each hand has to tell the winner about a story and the winner has to guess if it’s true or not. It can’t be a story you’ve told me before.”
“Isn’t that a drinking game?”
“Well, now it’s a card game.”
“A story I haven’t told you before, huh?” Ashei nodded as Maj got into her most comfortable slouch. “I feel like you’re making these rules up to bully me. What do I get if I guess right?”
“A kiss!” He wiggled his eyebrows again. “No, I don’t know. The thrill of being right? The rest of the story?”
“Let’s go with the rest of the story. Now deal the cards, Ponytail.”
After discussing what game use as the skeleton of their new game, they played. Ashei lost the first round after an embarrassingly short amount of time.
“Ouch, that hurt. Okay. First story.” He scratched at the stubble that was already trying to take control over his face as he thought. “I’ve got it! Once, in a storm much like this one, I had to leap across a river while carrying—”
“—I’ve met Teo.” Maj cut him off. “Getting caught cheating this early isn’t a good sign for you.”
Ashei grinned, putting his hands up in defeat. He dealt the cards again, maybe bending luck a little more to his side as he did so. Maj lost the next two hands in a row. She sighed and leveled a look that could wilt vegetation at Ashei. Ashei grinned wider in response and waited.
“Alright, here’s a school story: I had my own room, but I slept in the library most of the time.”
A simple statement, with none of her typical vigor or gestures. “I think that’s a lie,” said Ashei after a brief deliberation.
Maj’s face split into a smug smirk. “Nope, it’s true. I was so young they didn’t want to stick me in the regular dorms, and having me room with a professor was—no. Out of the question. So. I got my own little room. Jasper still thinks it used to be a broom closet, but it was fine for me. ‘Cept I wasn’t used to sleeping on my own. It was too quiet, so the library it was. It was busier and cleaner than the dining room; folks in there all hours of the day. Just knowing there were other people around was enough for me to relax enough to sleep.”
She lost her second hand.
“Fucker.” She sighed. “How about another Baby Maji story? I scared Ruben so bad that he went off and became a member of the clergy.”
Ashei snorted his drink. “W—which one is Ruben?”
“One up from me.”
“I have no doubt in my mind that that happened.” He shifted to get more comfortable, foot brushing against her leg. “What happened?”
“Ruben told Mica and Mica told me, so it’s a third-hand story, but I guess it’s true. Neither of them are much for embellishing tales. The two of us—Ruben and me—used to share a room before I left, and since no one ever took the second bed out of his room, it’s where I stayed when I came back for term breaks and holidays. This happened when I was like, eight, maybe? Which would have made him,” she paused, trying to place her brothers’ ages in relation to hers, “fourteen or fifteen.
“Apparently what happened was he woke up in the middle of the night one night ‘cause he heard something like whispering, or rustling, or something dragging. It was a noise that had no business being in our bedroom, whatever it was. So he rolled over and opened his eyes, and saw me, talking in a language he couldn’t understand to something he couldn’t see... except for the huge black shadow that was on the wall behind me, even though there wasn’t enough light for there to have been a shadow. And then I looked over at him, and my eyes were glowing. He was so scared he couldn’t even scream.
“He packed his bags at the very ass crack of dawn the next day. He didn’t leave for a few weeks, but he wouldn’t even pass through the same room as me.” Maj scratched the back of her neck and shrugged, signifying the end of the story.
Ashei tapped his foot against her leg again, this time on purpose. “Your eyes do kinda glow in the dark, you know.”
On second thought, glowing implied that they produced light. Her eyes just reflected light at the right angles, like a raccoon’s. Or an opossum. He bit the inside of his cheek to keep from snickering at the comparison. But oh, how comforting he had started to find it when he woke up in the middle of the night and found eyes shining in the dark.
Maj’s shrug and demand to take over as dealer shook Ashei out of his tangent. He passed the deck over with little ceremony. He had been cheating, after all, but so did she. It was with very little surprise that he lost the round that Maj dealt him in retaliation.
“Fair enough. When I was still in the monastary, one of the boys I shared a room with and I decided to put glue into one of the ink bottles of our least favorite Brother.”
“Did you get caught?”
“I didn’t.”
“Bullshit, you didn’t get caught!”
“Well,” he dragged the word out, “I, me, did not get associated with the crime. The other boy did eventually get found out.”
“Oh, I see—”
“—Which is also when I found out I could take hits for other people without physically putting myself in front of them.” He cracked his knuckles to have something to do with his hands. “They weren’t exactly gentle with us there. But I guess when you’re trying to train up holy warriors, why would you be gentle with them?”
“Ashei, what the fuck?”
“It’s a useful feat to have though, taking damage for other people. I’m glad to have it! Really.”
“I ain’t glad you have it. That’s fucked up.”
“What do you mean it’s fucked up?”
“I mean, I wish you’d quit doing it to me. I don’t feel pain anyway, it doesn’t matter.”
“Maj—not feeling pain isn’t the same as not being injured—”
“—I’ll still be fine, it’s—”
“It isn’t “fine” for you, I’m—Maisie—D—did you miss the part where I’m literally a holy warrior?”
“No, I got that, Sir Paladin, what I’m sayin’ is,” she slapped her chest for emphasis, “I’m pretty fucking resilient, so we’ll both be fine if you never pull that shit like with the axe again.”
“You’re talking about that damn ballista again, aren’t you?”
“Of course I am!”
“Okay, well, listen, okay. Normal people aren’t usually fine after taking an entire fucking ballista bolt through the chest—”
“That’s my whole point! I was fine! I ain’t nor—”
“—And I’m still going to do my best to protec—”
“--How do you know I’m not some kinda holy warrior too, huh? I—”
A clap of thunder like a mountain being dropped on top of their cave accompanied a flash of lighting so close it bathed the inside of their shelter in bright white light. All of the hair on their arms and legs and everywhere else stood on end from the sheer power of the storm. The animals screamed.
Silence sat in the cave like another camper until the last echoes of thunder grumbled into the distance.
“I…. I guess that’s how you know I’m not a holy warrior.” Maj said once she found her voice.
Ashei took a moment longer to catch his breath before laughing. Maj joined in not long after. They laughed until they cried, clutching their stomachs and gasping for breath. They each tried to speak several times before dissolving back into uncontrollable laughter at the face of the other. Once again, Maj was the first to be able to form coherent words.
“My point,” she said through chattering teeth, “I had a point.”
“Okay,” Ashei supplied helpfully from where he was laid out on the floor.
“I was trying to say that I’m not asking you to not have my back. I want you to have my back, and I want to have yours. But I also want you to keep yourself in mind too. Does that even make sense? I just can’t stand seeing someone I love all beat to hell like that and know it’s—”
“Wait—”
“—all—”
oh no
“—did you just—”
“—my—”
Her blood simultaneously began to boil and turn to ice as her brain started to catch up with her mouth. Ashei sat up fast enough to give himself a head rush.
“...fault.” She ended weakly.
Ashei had scooted closer to her, close enough to reach out and touch her, but he kept his hands to himself.
“Did you just say you love me?” He sounded breathless, and not just from laughing.
Maj couldn’t look at him. She was still staring wide-eyed into the middle distance as she reeled with the realization of what she had said.
“Like, love-love?” He pressed gently. Ashei held his breath until Maj nodded, face firmly hidden in her hands. “Since when?”
Maj groaned and gave an answer to her hands. Ashei waited with patience he didn’t know he had until she scrubbed at her face that was so red it looked painful, blush running from her face, to her ears, and down her chest. Ashei opened his arms to her for a hug. She slunk over to hide her face in his chest, despite the fact that he was the entire reason for her embarrassment.
“Since that boat ride we took last year.” She sighed like a creature with lungs twice her size. “You were terrified of being out at sea, but you didn’t let it get in your way. You still acted up and played with the crew to make sure they liked us the whole time. The easiest way to keep up safe was staying on their good side. No one noticed how much your hands shook when you weren’t holding something, or how much teeth your smile showed.
“And then, gods, we had to sleep sitting up the whole time because—”
“—because the bunks were too tiny for us to lay together, but we couldn’t just sleep separately,” Ashei remembered that trip vividly.
“Yeah,” Maj laughed into his shirt, still refusing to meet his eyes. “That’s when we learned how needy we both are. But we survived the boat somehow, and we made it to land, and you held it together long enough to get away from the dock district entirely before you started dry heaving for like twenty whole minutes.
“But somewhere in the middle of your heaving, you looked up at me and smiled. You looked like you wanted to die, and your hair was all sweaty-plastered to your face, and you smiled. At me. Like you were as glad to have me around as you were to be back on dry land. I thought my heart was gonna beat right out of my fool chest through one of the holes I’d made.
“You took it one step further, because that’s what you do. Once you were done being sick, you reached into your bag and gave me the captain’s star charts to feed to Vee. And that’s…. when I knew I had fallen… in love. With you.”
She pressed her face back into his chest after repeating her admission. Maj wasn’t great with feelings. He could feel the warmth radiating off of her through the fabric. He wrapped his arms tighter around her and thrilled at the feeling of her arms sliding around him. She could hear his heart pounding from where she had her head.
“You know I only stole from them because I thought they were pirates,” He said while he committed the moment to memory.
“Of course they were pirates, Ash. They were the only crew not looking for travel papers. Which we didn’t have. Still don’t have.”
“I can match your story,” he said, his voice full of warmth as he rested his chin on her head. “I realized I had fallen in love with you when we were still looking for information for that ship. We had tracked down a lead to some tavern, what was its name? The Exhausted Explorer? The Busty Mermaid? The Hung Man?”
They laughed and Maj pushed herself away from him enough to look at his face. She was still pink all over and was searching his face for any tells that he was just messing with her. She couldn’t find any. She didn’t look away from him this time.
“Whatever the name was, we found our guy and bought him dinner, and drink, and we’ve been talking to him real nice the whole time trying to butter him up. I’m not sure it’s working. In fact, I was pretty sure he was going to try to run off. And then you reach out and start playing with his hand, and I think, ‘oh shit, I can’t let her try to seduce this creep. That’s my job!’
“But you’re the one holding his hand, and he and I are both so focused on that that neither one of us notices you pull his knife over to you. You lean forward like you’re about to kiss him and for a second, I think I’m gonna kill the guy if his mouth touches yours. Don’t get me wrong, I have never minded you kissing other people before or since then, but in that moment, he had to die.
“At the last second, you said something badass like, ‘if we’re friends now, friends talk to each other. Now talk.’ And then you stab the knife though both of your hands! You don’t even flinch. Then you look over your shoulder at me and grin that mean, crooked grin of yours. And wink at me as the guy starts talking.”
“I still have that scar.” She moved her hand forward to look at it. He took her hand and kissed the scar.
“I know. I was too busy standing there with my mouth hanging open thinking about how hard I had fallen for you to even think about healing you.”
“Gods above and below,” Maj swore, mirth and exasperation in her voice, “We’ve been in love with each other this whole time? And didn’t say anything? How did we survive to adulthood?”
“Well, I guess it’s like you always say. I’m a lucky bastard and you’re a stubborn bitch. We’ll make it work together.”
#long post#biglongpost#hopefully the lack of dialogue tags isn't too confusing#these two have rapid fire bants#and he said she said slowed it down#really hope the readmore still works
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The Son Of Scheherazade, 24
Notes: As always, big thanks to my wonderful editors, Drucilla and BlueShifted!
This arc is going to be kind of... wonky? It's one of those things where I know point A and point C, but no idea how to tie them together via B. So, expect some making up of stuff as I go along. Hasn't hurt me so far, right?
Summary: With the last piece of the "map" in sight, Mickey and Minnie indulge in finding their own treasures. But love comes at a cost, and Mickey isn't willing to pay the price.
The crew bid goodbye and good riddance to Lotus Blossom, after she rejected Mickey's rather generous offer to drop her off at the nearest town – as she correctly guessed that Mickey planned to drop her into the first jail cell he could find – and they were off to the fishing town of Alnihayat. Mickey's guess about the map was, for now, still only a guess, as he had only one small piece of proof. No matter how you arranged the three pieces, they didn't fit in any map-like shape. Instead, as Mickey explained to the crew as he laid out the pieces in his room, they were shaped more like book pages. They appeared to fit together better when one was put on top of the other, and there was an old, sticky substance to the edges that could have been part of a book's binding. They still couldn't read a word of it, but Mickey figured they might not have to – that with the final piece, the spell would be complete, as per the Phantom Prince's plan.
But they could only tackle one problem at a time, and right now that was finding the final piece itself. Everyone was grateful to get back to that chase, as the inner demons of the Cave of Wants had tormented their minds plenty, and boy did they need a distraction. Nobody talked about what they saw, and nobody wanted to think about it, Mickey most of all. As disturbing as the whole thing had been, there had been one damming, undeniable thought he couldn't put away.
What good is controlling your anger after it's already happened?
He could be sorry all he wanted for his actions, and do his best to avoid losing his temper in the first place, but both of those meant squat if he was still continuing to hurt people. He needed to find a way to control himself once his anger was at its highest, and he suspected that his eventual final face-off with the Phantom Prince would make him the angriest he'd ever been. What to do, what to do...?
“Alnihayat is a pretty small town,” Goofy explained that day, when they were laying anchor to the sand and getting ready to depart. “And the locals are friendly, so we shouldn't have any trouble. No legends, no monsters, this town is as normal as normal can be.”
“No town is that normal,” Horace countered with a grumble. “It's probably got some deep dark secret that will pop open the second we step foot inside.”
Clarabelle punched his shoulder. “Oh, you're just upset Lotus stole your wallet.”
“Who steals a wallet from a guy trying to kill himself?!”
Minnie bit her lower lip as she watched everyone talk and discuss who would split off where. Truthfully, she had a slight ulterior motive – when she first heard the words “fishing town”, she had a fair assumption that the ocean would be there, and as someone who had never seen it, she felt an itch to take a look, especially after her revelation within the cave. It felt selfish to ask this, though, as this was a mission, but on the other hand, maybe the map piece was on the beach. Her newfound independence was a shaky thing, but it became stronger each time she used it. She opened her mouth -
“Can I take the beach?” Mickey asked, his voice tingling with excitement. “I've never seen the ocean before!” He then turned to Minnie, oblivious as always. “How about you, Minnie?”
Her first instinct was to say of course master, yes master, whatever you say master, oh happy day, her and Mickey were completely in sync! “I... I haven't seen it either, Ma... Mickey.” It had also been a struggle to say his name instead of his title, but this hadn't gone unnoticed. The first couple of days, it got proud smiles from everyone – save for Daisy, who always had to ruin things (“Aw, is the spice out of your relationship?”) and earned a good ponytail-yank from Mickey again. As she did it more and more the ship adjusted to it, but the one who kept smiling about it no matter what was Mickey. He grinned merrily, and there was an extra flick-flick-flick to his thin black tail. It was embarrassing, and even more embarrassing to admit to herself she enjoyed his reaction.
“Well!” Mickey slapped his hands on the table, unable to stop smiling. “That settles that! Me and Minnie will take the beach!”
“Why don't you take Pluto along with you?” Goofy suggested. “Poor pup's been cooped up here for so long, could use some time in the fresh air. I'll hang back today and guard the ship.”
Mickey's joy grew tenfold. “Aw, really? Thanks, Goofy! Why, I'll even take my flying carpet along, see if I can get it to work! I bet we'll find the last piece of the spell in no time flat!” Flashing one more gleeful grin to Minnie, he jogged off to his room, eager to tell Pluto and grab the carpet. In his room, after sharing the news with man's best friend, he rolled up the rug and tied it to Pluto who offered no complaint. After a few more minutes of planning, Mickey was ready to leave when he saw Donald standing in the doorway. “We're all set, Donald!”
“I figured,” Donald said, glancing this way and that before entering the room. Though Daisy had finally, reluctantly, shown she cared about others, she was still ready to tease and trick at the drop of a hat. Some conversations were better off private. “But I wanted to help you out before you go.”
Mickey raised his eyebrows. “Help with what?”
Donald lowered his voice, one hand to the side of his mouth. “You and Minnie, going together to the beach, a sight neither of you have ever seen before... that's totally a date.”
Mickey's entire face turned crimson, and on impulse he began to flail, his heart skipping several beats. “W-what?! No! No it isn't! It's just a...” Then again, what did he know? He who avoided every sappy lovey-dovey moment with his parents whenever possible? “... Huh. Is it a date?” He glanced at Pluto, in case he had the answers, and the dog shrugged.
“I may not know much about much,” Donald conceded. “But this spells out a date to me. So you gotta make it count! Who knows when another good chance like this will come up? If you want to be Minnie's suitor instead of her Master, you gotta do three things to make this a good date!”
Mickey was ready to learn, but he had to ask. “How do you know what a good date is?”
“I've done my homework,” Donald said, leaving out that he had asked Goofy for advice, as he didn't trust Daisy to be entirely truthful, Horace and Clarabelle would have argued about it, and gods know what kind of musical number Jose and Panchito would have done. After all, Goofy had, somehow, charmed his fair share of women, even if some of it was purely by mistake. “And as long as you do these three things, you've set yourself up for future dates. Number one, you gotta make it enjoyable.”
“Makes sense,” Mickey replied, arms crossed and head tilted. “I'm sure there are lots of fun things we can do at the beach. That's the easy part.”
“Number two,” Donald continued. “You have to learn more about each other. That way, you make sure you're compatible!”
There was a bit of hesitance on Mickey's part about this. “I... guess so...” He didn't care to share his father's bloody history, even if it was to come up someday, and Mickey himself was seemingly very dull. He hadn't gone on any big adventures until he met Minnie, so what could he tell her? On the other side, there was plenty he still didn't know about Minnie. What kind of places had she been to? What kind of masters had she gone through? What were her favorite stories, what were her favorite teas, what were her favorite type of jewels he could reasonably buy to make into earrings – it was fair to say that Mickey wanted to know everything and anything about Minnie, no matter how obscure and tiny the detail. “So what's number three?” Was it a kiss? He hoped it was a kiss.
“Set up the future,” Donald answered, dashing Mickey's silly hopes. “That's what ties the first two together! If you can always find a way to have fun and learn more things about each other, that means you two can be together for life. So make plans for what to next! You gotta think of the big picture, what to do once we beat the Phantom Prince and get your parents back!”
“Oh. Is that all?” Mickey was surprised at this, as that detail had been with him for ages. “Shoot, she'll just come home with me and my folks to live in the palace. Then we can spoil her rotten and give her the life she's always wanted.” It was a perfect, fool-proof plan!
“Oookay...” Donald was reluctant to burst Mickey's bubble, but as he had made it one of his life goals to repay Mickey for all his kindness, it was for his friend's own good. “Sounds nice, really does, just one tiny detail missing... have you asked Minnie if that's what she's always wanted?”
If there was a facial equivalent for a wooden boat crashing into sharp rocks, that was Mickey's face right that second. As the boat broke into tiny splinters, so did Mickey's plan, which ultimately made him the fool. “Uhhhhhhh...” He dragged the sound out, feeling his entire body shrink smaller and smaller. Here he'd been trying to plan for Minnie's freedom and there he went snatching it away. “I... mean... I just... kind of assumed...” And how did that make him any different from any of Minnie's previous masters? Doing whatever they wanted with her and not bothering to ask her opinion on it? He was a heel! He was the biggest heel to ever heel!
“Hey, hey, back into real time, buddy!” Donald poked Mickey's cheeks, trying to snap him out of his downward spiral of self-loathing. “It's okay! You meant well! You just have to talk to her about these things! Take a deep breath now...” In, out, in, out, everything was fine, just fine. “You're going to have a great date with Minnie, you'll learn more about each other, you'll ask her about the future, and in the mean-time, just remember you're not a bad guy. You're going to give her her freedom...” Donald trailed off. Come to think of it...
Mickey took one last deep breath through his nostrils and straightened up. “Okay! You got it, Donald! Pluto, let's head out!” He began to march forward.
Donald turned around, trying to catch him. “Actually, Mickey-”
“Not to worry, I can do this!”
“Yeah, you can, but I just wanted to-”
“I'll let you know how it goes!” And Mickey was gone, Pluto trailing along behind him.
Donald stood alone in Mickey's room, the unheard question still on his lips. Hm. Hm! Perhaps it could wait. Yes, surely someone as nice and kind-hearted as Mickey would figure it out on his own, and if he didn't, Minnie might bring it out of him. They were both wonderful people who deserved one another, and Donald wanted them to be together, as he felt they would be happier this way. He truly did love them both in his own way, like a brother and sister. And he wanted his brother and sister to be together!
“… Right, we tell no one that thought,” Donald said quietly, amazed he could humiliate himself without Daisy's help. “Ah, I'm worrying over nothing. They'll be fine.” He put his hands in his pockets and whistled, a little ray of cheerful sunshine basking over his head. For now, he took that question and tucked it away for another time.
Why was Minnie still a genie?
~*~
It was a warm day, with no clouds in the sky but a pleasant breeze would gently sway in from time to time. The group left the ship and entered the sleepy town before parting their separate ways, and at first Goofy's description won out. It was a tiny town, with only a handful of shops that weren't devoted to fish and the job of fishing, and even tiny children were selling necklaces made out of clean fish bones, yelling out in the wet streets about their wares. Mickey and Minnie were overwhelmed by the smell of the nearby ocean, and they didn't wait to say goodbye before suddenly rushing off in the direction of the boats, knowing their destination was close. Jose mused about young love, and Panchito bought six necklaces.
The two mice zigzagged their way around amused fishermen, Pluto yipping at their heels. They nearly tripped over wooden stairs that led down onto the hot sand, but they refused to stop running until the water was right at their feet. Mickey panted to catch his breath, but when he stood up straight, his breath was taken away again.
Mickey and Minnie had both pictured this mystical sight many times in their imaginations, but none of it could compare to the actual, real thing that brushed over their feet. White foam sparkled like diamonds, and the water wasn't just blue, it was green, it was dark, it was light, it was everything at once, a living thing that breathed in and out alongside Mickey's chest. It seemed to stretch on for ages, each ripple different than the last one.
It was beautiful. Everywhere they looked, it was beautiful. These children of the sand found it impossible to look away, to miss a second of this ever-changing landscape that pulled in and out without fail. But Mickey wasn't content to merely look and call it a day. With a gulp of air, he began to walk forward, his sandals squishing in wet sand.
Minnie was jolted out of her gazing. “What are you doing?”
Mickey glanced back at her with a grin. “You're not just going to stand there, are you? C'mon!” He offered her his hand.
Minnie reached out, but stopped, smirking. “Do you know how to swim?”
“... No. Do you?”
“Not at all. So I can't save you if you drown.”
“Well then, I won't drown!” Mickey flashed his own toothy grin, swatting the water around him to splash at her.
Minnie shrieked, only out of surprise, not expecting the water to be that chilly. “It's so cold!”
“Now you're just making excuses! I bet you want me to drown so you can kiss me back to life.” He'd been practicing that line in his head for an hour and was very proud of himself for not stuttering once.
Minnie's eyes widened, and it was time for battle. “You – you're awful!” She laughed, and used both of her hands to splash right back.
Mickey yelped – that was cold! “Hey, take it easy! I gotta get used to it first!”
“Oh, you think you can tease me and get away with it, your highness?”
“What happened to saying my name!”
“I'll say whatever I like!”
It was a nonsensical argument that went around in circles, and it was one of the happiest talks they'd ever had, their splashing becoming wilder and more erratic. Pluto was tempted to join them, but decided it was too risky as the carpet might get wet. He was just grateful to be outside, and so used his time to dig up potential holes for potential bones. He figured he was having more fun than those two, who were now chasing each other up and down the shoreline, Mickey trying to scare Minnie with a piece of seaweed and pretending it was an eel, and Minnie retaliating by dropping a gooey mound of wet sand down the back of his shirt. It was a war with no winners, and they wound up soaked from head to toe.
They only stopped their chase when Mickey stubbed his toe on a spiky seashell, which made for a fascinating discovery. It was a completely foreign object to both of them, and they began collecting as many as they could find, comparing shapes and colors and trying to guess how they were formed. One fun time led to another, as Minnie realized that since wet sand stuck together, maybe it could be formed into shapes. At first they tried to create miniature statues, but they fell apart easily, and so the idea of creating buildings came next. Minnie enjoyed decorating them with the shells, while Mickey made up stories of those who lived within.
“The brave soldier has returned home!” Mickey declared as a skittish hermit crab climbed its way into the mouse-made castle. “At long last, he can put down his sword and rest.”
“And tell all his friends about the life he's led,” Minnie offered, digging a small hole in the interior for a makeshift swimming pool. “And stay up all night and day for every story he's got.”
“But he must also stay vigilant! For any moment, one of his former enemies could-” But Mickey's dramatic gestures knocked down one of the columns, interrupting his plot twist. “Whoops.” He quickly tried to build it back up. “Sheesh, this stuff doesn't stay up for too long.”
Minnie sat down in the sand, curious. “Does your palace look like this?”
“Naw, it's kind of more... square-ish. If it were, my room would be right about... here,” He pointed out, drawing a line on the wall. “And it's got a balcony, where I can see the whole kingdom. And my parent's room would be right over this way, and this there would be Pete's room...” Mickey went on explaining where everything and everyone was, noting where the gardens flourished and how tall the highest tower was, his favorite places to hide when Pete was on the prowl, where the cooks hid their snacks and often shared with their favorite prince, and Mickey's voice grew more and more quiet as he talked. To think that so long ago life in the palace was dreadful, and now he missed it terribly.
Looking back on it now, the servants and the townsfolk never meant any harm when they called him the Son of Scheherazade. They just wanted to show their gratitude for his mother's selflessness and bravery, and since they couldn't constantly go to her and shower her with gifts and praises, he was the next best thing. Would any of that change if they learned what saved them wasn't her mind, but her Eye? Just as importantly, would they listen when Mickey would come home and stand up for himself? He sighed, and then shook his head. Dwelling on it wouldn't help, and this was a prime opportunity to take step two of Donald's plan. “Say, uh, you ever been to a lot of palaces?”
Minnie nodded, having waited patiently for Mickey while he thought of his homeland. “I've been in all kinds of homes, from tiny shacks to grand castles... although with my powers, they didn't stay that way for long.” She plucked one shell off from the wall, this one pink and white. “They weren't all bad... One woman wished for flowers to grow every day in her house. Then she would cut them all and give them away as bouquets to her neighbors.” She smiled fondly at the memory, trying not to think of when the neighbors had gotten suspicious and eventually raided the poor woman's home to get their hands on Minnie. “And then there was the time I wound up in the hands of a little boy... he wished everything he touched would turn into candy.” She giggled, recalling how the boy soon had his favorite toys turned into taffy. “He had me undo it in ten minutes!”
Mickey snorted, able to see himself making a very similar wish at that age. “Sounds like you've been all over... and I've never even left my kingdom before. By now, you've probably got way more stories than my Ma. I bet she'll want to hear them all...” He hadn't meant to jump to step three so quickly, but here they were, and he didn't want to waste the chance. He nervously fidgeted with a sand dollar that had once been a door. “My... my folks will probably have a lot of work on their hands when they get home, since they've been gone for so long. And I'll do my best to help 'em out, even if I'm not sure what I can do. What... what do you think you'll do?” he lifted his head. “When this is all over... when you're free... what do you want to do?”
This was a question that used to fill Minnie with dread and keep her up at night. Yet as she hugged her knees, watching the hermit crab inspect his surroundings, she felt tranquil. “It's strange... I've been wanting freedom all my life, but... I'm not sure what I'll do. I'm not even sure what I'm good at, besides granting wishes... but... at the same time...” She smiled, brushing some sand off her arm. “It's kind of exciting, don't you think? Having all the choices but not knowing which ones to start with... I think no matter what I wind up doing or where I wind up going, I'll be happy. Because it'll be my own doing.”
All right, Mickey decided, time to ease into this slowly. Whatever you do, do not just blurt out YOU CAN COME LIVE WITH ME THAT'D BE SWELL. “Well, uh... you could, um, if you wanted...” Mickey's fingers tapped on the sand dollar, the question bouncing up and down in his throat and refusing to enter his mouth. “I know I just said we'd be busy and all, but... it'd be one of those 'we need all the help we can get' situations, right?” He found it difficult to look at her sweet eyes, and the stammering and stuttering increased tenfold. Because, from a certain point of view, this was, kind of, sort of, in a way, like a m-m-marriage proposal... Not that it WAS because it WASN'T and DANG IT DONALD LOOK WHAT YOU DID!!!! “Y-y-y-you, um, that is, i-i-if you like, them, and me, if you liked all of us, together, then, m-m-maybe, possibly, there's room, there's always room, th-th-there's always room...”
Minnie could tell whatever Mickey wanted to say was going to take a while. As awful as it was, a laugh began to rise in her throat. How could she have ever thought the Mickey of the Mirror was the real one? Sillier still, why did she think she wanted him that way? Her lips trembled, and the urge was getting harder to fight. It wasn't her fault Mickey was ridiculously adorable! What would he have thought if he saw that “other” self in her dream? Envious or incredulous? She bit down on her lip, but lost the battle, and she wound up laughing so hard she had to hold her stomach. “I-I'm sorry!”
Mickey blushed deeply, deeply, deeply. “H-Hey! I'm tryin' to say something!”
“I-I know! It's not you, it's just... heehee... I can't explain... teehee... it's too much!”
“You can explain right now!” Mickey tried to grab Minnie, but miscalculated and landed belly-first on the castle. He winced, and then froze, hoping he hadn't squished the hermit crab – nope, it quickly crawled out and headed away from the nonsense. Naturally this made Minnie laugh much harder, and were their positions reversed, Mickey would have been fit to burst as well. “Aw, you're a real riot, Minnie! I could wish the truth right out of you!”
“Instead of wishing you could talk to me without stuttering?” she teased, lightly poking his forehead.
“I don't s-s-stutter... I don't s-s-s.... I D-D-DON'T...” She was going to be the death of him, he was going to be the first person to literally die of embarrassment. “Quit giggling! I wanted to ask you somethin', dang it!”
“I really am sorry.” And Minnie mostly meant it. “It's just... you wouldn't understand, it was the Cave of Wishes, what it made me see...”
Mickey finally began to get up. “What about it? I know exactly what you saw.”
Any remaining laughter died in Minnie's mouth. No he didn't. Surely he didn't. “What... do you mean?”
“I mean, isn't it obvious?” Mickey shrugged his shoulders. “I bet the entire crew knows what happened in your dream.”
What a fine way to turn those positions around – now Minnie was struck with the love arrow of denial. “Uh, no, I'm... very, very sure you all... didn't see anything...” She wasn't that obvious, was she?! Could all of them really guess that she wanted to sit in Mickey's lap while he caressed her with sweet nothings? No way, nooo way – Daisy would have never let it go!
“It's written all over your face,” Mickey went on, mortifying Minnie even more. “What else am I supposed to think?”
All over her face, even right now?! “W-well... I... I am...” Her voice died down, and she looked down at her twiddling thumbs, mumbling shyly. “I am a girl, after all, and...girls like to... hear certain things, sometimes...”
“What's being a girl got to do with it?” Mickey asked, dumbfounded. “I think anyone in your position would want the same thing – your freedom!”
… Well. He wasn't wrong, technically. She made sure to look away, a hard, fake chuckle forcing its way past her lips. “... Y-Yes, of course, that was it... that, and nothing else, absolutely nothing else...” Not Mickey kissing her neck and telling her she was beautiful, ha ha ha haaaaaa.
To Minnie's dismay, Mickey's obviousness wasn't as strong today. “Was there... something else in the dream?” What else could she possibly want? Was it something he could also grant?
It turned out the flight or fight instinct also lived in genies – rather than answer that, Minnie took to her feet and ran. Mickey stared and then chased after her. “HEY! What was in the dream?!”
“NOOOO I'M NEVER TELLING YOUUUU!”
“NOW I JUST WANNA HEAR IT MORE!”
Mickey never did get around to asking the important question, but at least he got step one and two down. Even with the two of them being humiliated in different ways, that was fun in its own frivolous way. Minnie never did tell him what the other part of her dream was, even when Mickey tackled her down and tickled her. She distracted him with the discovery of a sea star, and they spent many minutes mesmerized in feeling its bristles. Mickey recalled a story his mother once told of mermaids, and given her Eye there was a possibility they actually existed, and Minnie responded with stories of past masters, including one who had wished to breathe underwater.
Mickey was learning not to hold a pointy sea urchin in his hand after Minnie spoke of a master who wished to be faster than ten racing camels. “Gee, Minnie... you sure do remember a lot. Do you really remember each and every single one of your masters?”
“I do,” Minnie said with a notch of pride. “It might be part of my magic, but I recall every single day of all my many years. I remember every morning, noon, and night I spent with them, all as if it happened yesterday.”
“Shoot, sometimes I can't remember what I had for breakfast,” Mickey replied, fairly impressed. Such an ability sounded like both a blessing and a curse. He sat down in the sand, letting his feet get wet in the passing tide. He felt his next question was a simple one. “What was your first master like?”
And Minnie...
… couldn't remember.
She knew her earliest master, a dark-skinned gentleman who thought perhaps she was a goddess first, before understanding she was a servant. Yet a part of her knew that this was not the first master. A feeling, a dreadful feeling, a coldness deep in her bones told her not to go any further. “I don't... know...” she said softly, her eyes going over the water's horizon. “My... my first memories, I already knew who I was, and what I could do...” But how does any living creature know such things right away? How does all life come into being? Once more, the Imp's wickedly amused inquiry came to mind.
Do you remember how you were created?
Minnie shut her eyes, her mind flashing with pain. “I don't know!” she suddenly cried out, to the Imp and herself. “I don't know where I came from, or who made me... and every time I try to think about it, I get so scared... It's like... there's another me telling me I shouldn't.” But why? What was so awful about her birth? She wasn't a mortal, but she had understood this, lived with it, what anguished truth was being locked away? Would she ever know?
Mickey's hand clasped hers, warm despite being covered in cold ocean water. “It's okay,” he insisted, trying to put on a brave smile for her. “There are plenty of things I don't know either... and maybe we'll find out. Maybe we won't. That's not so bad.” He scooted in closer, and put an arm around her shoulders. “Whatever happens, we'll face it together. Long as you want me around, I'll be there. Whatever you wanna do once those shackles come off, I'll support it.” Not only because he loved her, not only because he promised her, but because most of all, it was the right thing to do. That, to Mickey, mattered most of all. The right thing should always be done, regardless of how it would affect him and his heart.
If the right thing meant letting Minnie go and never seeing her again... it would hurt. It might be a wound from which he might never recover. Yet he would do it. He heard Minnie whisper quiet words of thanks, her head tucked under his chin. Even with this closeness and tenderness, it was no absolute guarantee she would stay with him. The thought of it almost drove him to tears. When he freed his parents, he could lose her, but she deserved to be free and happy, whether it was with him or not. He had to ask her, even as the question now hurt his soul.
“Minnie... when you're free...” Dang it all, his eyes felt wet. Why hadn't his parents warned him that love could be as painful as it was wonderful? If it came to be that she told him no, and her days on the ship would be their last together, he still wouldn't trade the memories he had of her for anything in the world. Their time had made him a better person, he believed it, and he would treasure every second they spent, even the angry and confusing ones. “After everything is done, and my parents are free... If you want... Will you...”
“WOOFWOOFWOOFWOOF!”
Mickey paused, and rushed to wipe away the tears from his eyes. “Pluto, this is NOT a good time to ask for a treat!”
He whipped his body around, but Pluto wasn't interrupting for snack time. As the two mice had been sharing memories and trust, a few ner-do-wells from the docks had spotted Pluto's odd carpet attachment. Fabric like that was rare in this part of the world, and the three beagle-faced bandits had decided to take it for themselves, even if it meant taking the dog along. Mickey had turned just in time to see three grown men lifting Pluto up and away, with Pluto barking frantically for help.
“PLUTO!” Mickey yelped, on his feet in seconds as was Minnie. “Leave my dog alone!”
“Finders keepers, kiddo!” the head beagle snapped, and with his brothers they began to run towards the stairs back to the docks.
“Give him back!” Mickey yelled, placing his hand on the hilt of his sword and running after them, with Minnie in hot pursuit. “Don't you hurt him!” The beagles had a head-start on the hunt, and it didn't help that many busy fishermen had returned and were trying to unload their smelly wares. Mickey and Minnie had to leap over full fish nets, burst past ripped sails, and slip past soggy sailors. With so many obstacles in their way, it was getting difficult to catch up.
“Mickey!” Minnie shouted when it became harder to see the thieves. “Use a wish to stop them!”
“No!” Mickey objected automatically. “We'll find another way!” Think, think, there had to be a better way than to use a wish – they were entering the fisher's market, and there was a fresh crowd that made things all the harder to push through. “Come on...” Mickey's eyes flew around until he saw a lopsided banner advertising the world's mightiest minnows. “I got it!” He ran towards the falling banner and began to use it as a climbing rope, scrambling until he was on the rooftop. “I'll get the drop on 'em!” He backed up, and then sprang forward in a hot run, jumping from that building to the next.
“Mickey!” Minnie shrieked, yelling as loudly as she could to be heard over the crowd. “Stop! It's too dangerous! You'll get yourself killed! Use a wish!”
He didn't need a wish, he was fine! Mickey had trained under Horace and Clarabelle's watchful eye, and his stamina and speed had built up considerably. He would get ahead of the thieves and catch them from above! It would be as easy as -
As slipping on a loose stone and plummeting downward.
Mickey managed to catch himself by the skin of his teeth, or more literally, by clutching onto the decaying store rooftop with his fingers. But this store was in need of many repairs, including a crumbling roof, and Mickey could feel himself starting to slip, his ocean-wet fingers making it harder to stay on. Maybe, just maybe, he wasn't fine.
“MICKEY!” Minnie was now screaming so loudly the entire shopping audience could hear, and now all were staring at the boy who was near death's door. “USE A WISH! Wish for the carpet, wish to fly, wish for the ground to be made of marshmallows, just wish for something!” Pluto, hearing all the distress, could feel the carpet wriggling fiercely under the tied knots, and he clawed desperately to free it if not himself.
“No!” Mickey said again despite all reason, teeth gritted, trying to climb back up but finding it impossible to do so. “I can't! I should only use wishes... for emergencies!”
“WHAT DO YOU THINK THIS IS?!”
Just because she was right didn't mean he had to concede anything! “I... I can't! I just can't!” His fingers were starting to ache fiercely...
“We've been in so many life-threatening situations before! The Cave, the Imp, and you still wouldn't use a wish! You can't keep doing this! Why am I still a genie if you aren't going to use my powers?!”
“Because... because...” He had his reasons! He needed to be ready for any emergency! He needed to save them for his parents! He didn't want to hurt her! He didn't want to waste an opportunity! But for each and every single reason he could think of, none of them held weight to the awful, real truth that he'd been trying to avoid. “Because I... I don't... I don't want... I don't want to let go!”
But he did. And down he went.
Instead of meeting the harsh, unforgiving ground, he met the soft, rather forgiving carpet. He blinked a few times to make sure this wasn't some sort of dying illusion – a pinch to his cheek proved the truth – and he rolled onto his stomach, staring at the familiar mix of colors. “Huh. Not quite how I wanted to test you out, but thanks!” Maybe it was just the near-death high messing with his eyes, or maybe the carpet's tassels actually gave him a thumbs-up. “Mind helping me down?”
The carpet gently glided downward, with the crowd backing up in surprise and wonder, talking excitedly to each other about the miracle they just witnessed. Once he was close enough, Mickey hopped off the carpet, and gave it an appreciate pet like he would've Pluto. “See, Minnie? It all worked out, everything is-”
A hard slap to his left cheek proved that, no, things were not whatever he'd been about to say.
Mickey slowly turned his head, touching his hurt cheek, to see Minnie trembling with anger, her hand still in the air. Her teeth were tight together, a sign that she was pushing back the urge to cry. Mickey gulped, sure he was in trouble but not quite sure why. At least, Mickey thought, things can't get any wor-NO, NO, NEVER THINK THAT, NEVER THINK THAT -
Too late. It had been thought, and just to prove him wrong, the man who'd they soon learn was the ringleader of the thieves stepped from the crowd, an all too familiar face. “Look who's come crawling back to the most magnificent man in the world!”
Mickey's stomach and jaw dropped together. “... Mortimer?”
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Laid-Back Camp - Episode 01
Alright, we’ve got a fun little one. I’ve been trying to figure out where to squeeze this one in, and since I need a little more time before I can slam down some bombshells, now will work. It’s time for some more cute girls doing cute things, folks. Specifically, it’s Laid-Back Camp, episode 01! Here we GO!
-We begin, with actual camping. A crackling little campfire, marshmallows and hot drinks, a group of girls having fun out in nature. Looks like we’ve got a total of five, so we’ll presumably be meeting them properly over this episode and one or two more…
-Opening! It’s actually a quite clever little opening, with some solid editing and visuals. I’m not sure if it’s quite up to the level of some of the greats and legends, but it is really solid.
-And we’re back. On a lonesome road, with a girl pedaling along her little folding bike loaded down heavily with supplies strapped to the rear rack. No lie this is what I came for. You can do it, lonesome cycle girl! It’s through a tunnel, and she keeps going through some really pretty shots on the way. Tragically, the gorgeous mountains are lost behind some clouds today, so no perfect photo opportunity.
-Anyways then she runs into a png-haired girl sleeping on a bench. And promptly passes her by. Our proper protagonists-meeting will have to wait, because it’s time to check in and get some space at a campground. And we get the name Shima Rin! Rin who is here to camp, on her own, in the winter, on just a bike. It’s somethin’ else but really cool.
-And she plops down at a lake, where again I really have to note how nice some of these shots are. Like, usually a lot of these CGDCT shows go lazy with their background work, but this one clearly cares about getting it right. Also Rin explicitly comes here intentionally in the off-season so she’s basically solo. So out comes the tent, a tiny little one-person thing, her inflatable sleeping pad… A tiny little folding table and chair…You get the idea. But I’m also noting these because of how familiar a lot of these things are, and how careful the artists have been to really show them accurately and well. It speaks to a loving care that hobby-type CGDCT shows don’t always get the luxury of receiving.
-Episode 01! Mount Fuji and Curry Noodles
-Okay, campsite sorted, heating pad activated, and now Rin’s just going to kick back with a good book…Except it’s a little too cold to get by with just a pad and her…Does it still count as a shawl if it’s obviously a thick material intended for cold weather, or do they have to be more thin? I’m not entirely sure where the line on that goes. Anyways, seriously it’s like 5 degrees celsius, just a heating pad isn’t going to make it comfortable enough to sit and read The Mystery of Ancient Civilization X. A title that immediately tells us a lot about Rin here.
-Yeah she’s not having a good time. But a proper campfire is gonna be a pain, so she tries to hold out. ..Yeah that doesn’t last very long before she gets out into the woods and starts gathering fire materials. Dry pinecones and broken-off branches are the order of the day, as the anime even stops to give actual advice on good firewood. I am rapidly starting to see why this one so firmly got people into camping in Japan.
-Also, Rin consistently gets too many pinecones and too much firewood…And is a bit melodramatic with her wood-splitting knife. I like her already. …And then she runs into that pink-haired girl again when she goes to the bathroom. She has moved but is still just napping. Okay then.
-Anyways, fire! I will spare you the fine details of forming a campfire, though it is interesting that the advice here starts with burning kindling and adds the main wood to it. I was always taught to build the wood structure, bring in kindling, and then bring fire to the kindling. But anyways, even with all the troubles of a true campfire, Rin is comfortable at last. Now to get some water boiling, and get back to her book, right?
-Not right. Text message from a friend who gets sent a photo from the campsite. Takes photos, camps, cycles, little overdramatic, yeah I’m gonna like this girl. And all is calm, as she enjoys her day…
-Sunset comes and let’s cut miles away to a house, where another woman wonders when she’ll be returning…
-Back to the campsite after dark, where it’s legitimately pretty dark. Rin has to get out her lantern, and also has to brave a trip to the camp bathroom. This time, no pink-haired girl. Probably just day-trip—OH GOD HUMAN. THE PINK-HAIRED GIRL! So Rin has a panic and begins a wild and frantic sprint to the gate and front building, chased by the pink-haired devil!
-Okay things have calmed down and the girls are around Rin’s campfire. So let me walk you through what happened. Our pink-haired girl moved to the area just today. She went on a bike ride to try and see Mount Fuji. She got lost, then got tired, then fell asleep. She slept through the entire day, and awoke to pitch-black night without a single light to be found. And it is way too dark to dare ride back down without a proper light, especially through a series of dark tunnels.
-So, plan B. Call her folks? her phone seems, to be, gone. Also she is totally without a food and is slowly starving to death.
-…So Rin offers her a cup noodle. For 1500 yen. That’s…That’s just cruel. Especially since this girl only has 100 yen to her name. But it’s just a bad joke. So out comes the jet-boil style mini-camp-stove to get the water going, and Rin’s phone to make the call…
-Only one other problem. She moved, like, today, and so doesn’t remember the new number.
-Oh.
-Right.
-Shit.
-Her own phone’s number?
-Who remembers their own phone’s number in this day and age?
-It is a cruel joke, this life.
-But okay. Food, more wood for the fire. Warmth and comfort. And Rin experiences camping with an actual other person with her for the first time…And damn, that is not a cheap cup-noodle Rin gave her. That looks really good actually, and brings this poor rookie back to life! She’s adorable.
-And also we get into her head as she realizes Rin is here on her own, despite being a tiny little thing. Which even leads to assuming Rin is a fair bit younger than she probably is. But they get to talking, and it turns out that her town’s wayyyy down at the bottom of this hill. Which is why she rode so far, only to not see any…thing…
-Look behind you.
-God. Damn. The clouds parted, the full moon came out…That’s…Fuck. I don’t know which shot I’m going to use for this episode, now. Our pink-haired girl is just awed, as she sees Mount Fuji for real, and just takes it in…And that’s when her brain finally kicks on and she remembers her sister’s cell number!
-So yeah hard cut to the purple-haired woman from before having to apologize for the idiocy of her kid sister. And then drag her ass into the car to be taken home for quite a punishment. But not without leaving Rin w ith a thank-you gift for caring for the girl, an entire bag full of kiwis…
-Oh and now that this girl has her phone back and its number, she stops long enough to give Rin her contact info. Kagamihara Nadeshiko, such a strange girl…But just interesting enough for Rin to add her. And back in the car, Nadeshiko’s already asking her sister if they have any camping supplies at home. Something has sparked, in this plucky pink-haired girl.
-As the credits play, we see her normal day, setting out for class on her own little portable bike to the station, racing to her first day at her new school…And running past two of the other girls we’ll be meeting. Because she’s so dang excited. And missing encountering Rin by like two seconds.
-Also we have an after credits sequence, the Outdoors Club. Which leads to imagining a heated tent for winter camping. Except what they’re describing is just a particularly tall kotatsu. …Not that I wouldn’t winter-camp in a particularly tall kotatsu. That sounds like the best.
Okay so far every single character we’ve met is great. This is gonna be fun on a bun. We’ll see where it goes next time, and if it stays so fun, in episode TWO of Laid-Back Camp. Wait for it!
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[SASO2017] Haikyuu!! - by your side
Title: by your side
Fandom: Haikyuu!!
Pairing: Kurodai
Summary: For SASO2017 Bonus Round 1. “Prompt: Childhood frenemies > lovers AU. Take that as you will.”
Also found here on AO3.
Word count: 1,788
The basketball club is using their side of the gym again.
Daichi stalks across the gym, his shoulders squared and his hands balled up in fists as he stops before the captain of the basketball club. His shoes squeak on the polished wood floor irritably and the basketball captain breaks off mid-conversation to look at him. He smirks that damned smirk of his and Daichi has just had about enough of him.
“Kuroo-san,” he says civilly.
“Sawamura-san,” Kuroo says back just as coolly.
“It’s raining.”
“I am aware.”
“Then you should know that the baseball club uses this side of the gym when it rains.”
“I am also aware of that.” Kuroo cocks an eyebrow at him, one hand on his waist and his weight resting on one leg. He has at least ten centimetres on Daichi and he uses that difference against him, looking down at him the best he can.
Daichi stretches tall without actually tiptoeing and looks dead into Kuroo’s eyes. “Then why are your basketball players here?”
“Oh, give them a bit of time to get their warmups done. We’ll return back to our side of the gym once we start playing.”
“And what are we supposed to do in the meantime? Sit back and watch your basketball practice?”
“Well,” Kuroo says casually, “we certainly wouldn’t mind that. Anyway, you baseball folks should take it easy from time to time.”
“We have a game next week!” Daichi thunders in Kuroo’s face, taking a step forward and poking Kuroo in the chest. “And then it’s the start of the tournament, which means back to back matches so we need all the practice we can get now, Kuroo-san.”
“Are you sure you aren’t working your guys too hard?” Kuroo grasps Daichi’s hand and lowers the offending finger away from his chest. “You should know the importance of rest to an athlete, Sawamura-san.”
Daichi pulls his hand away and scowls at him. “Says the guy who’s always overworking himself.”
Kuroo pinks slightly. “I’ve learnt my lesson so I’m trying to give you some good friendly advice here.”
“I don’t need it. I know my limits unlike a certain someone.”
“You’re so stubborn.” Kuroo scowls back at him. “Don’t come crying to me when your rank in class drops after the next test because all you’ve got is baseball on your mind.”
“You should watch out for yourself.” Daichi crosses his arms and doesn’t give in an inch. “Someone didn’t do so well on their previous math test.”
“Captain!”
The both of them jump at the interruption and Daichi turns to see a first year standing behind him, his eyes flicking nervously to Kuroo as he says, “We’ve finished our warmups.”
“Start on conditioning,” Daichi tells him. “Do we have enough space for it?”
Daichi looks around and he sees the basketball club on their side of the gym, keeping their drills within the boundary line split right down the middle. When he glances over at Kuroo, he sees him in conversation with his vice-captain which ends with Kuroo receiving a not-so-friendly punch to the arm.
“Sorry, Sawamura,” the basketball vice-captain says cheerily, “I’ll get this stray cat under control now.”
He tows Kuroo off to their side of the gym and Daichi’s eyes linger on Kuroo for a brief moment, taking in the chastened slouch of Kuroo’s shoulders and the droop of his head as his vice-captain pulls him by the shirt. He bites back a sudden smile as he thinks of how apt the metaphor is. A stray cat indeed.
—
Daichi sees Kuroo fall in the corner of his eye and when he whips around there is a crumpled heap of red and black on the gym floor. Kuroo’s face goes white, his hands reaching for his ankle, the basketball that had been in his hands bouncing away from him.
He isn’t supposed to be on their side of the gym but Daichi finds himself yanking up the netted wall dividing the baseball club from the basketball club and making a dash for Kuroo.
“What happened?” Daichi asks the nearest basketball player as he slides to his knees by Kuroo’s side.
“W-we collided and then Kuroo-san fell on his foot wrongly,” the player blubbers. “I heard something crack!”
“We need to get him to the infirmary,” the basketball vice-captain says grimly. “We’ve got people running to go get the nurse.”
“Can none of you bring him there?” Daichi demands, his hands already reaching for Kuroo.
“Oh, Sawamura, my saviour,” Kuroo murmurs from the floor, his face strained even as he says that. “Don’t you have practice to be getting to?”
“You basketball types seem to like disrupting our practice,” Daichi replies, peeling Kuroo’s hands off his ankle and feeling gently around it. It is starting to swell and the other player’s account of Kuroo’s fall worries him.
“We’re staying on our side of the gym this time like the good boys we are.”
“Not good enough.” Daichi shakes his head and glances around. “Come on, get up. I’m taking you there.”
The vice-captain touches his shoulder. “Sawamura-san, leave him to us— oh my.”
Daichi lifts Kuroo as gently as he can but he still hears Kuroo hiss against his chest, his face red with mortification as Daichi hefts him in his arms, princess-style. He wiggles like a fish, trying to get back down on the floor, but Daichi only tightens his grip on him and starts towards the entrance of the gym.
“I’m never going to live this down,” Kuroo mumbles, pressing his face against Daichi’s chest. “But at least this is nice.”
“What?” Daichi flushes as he hurries through the school corridor with Kuroo in his arms.
“Nothing. I said I’m in terrible pain so you better hurry up before I go into the light.”
—
They lose.
They’ve been working so hard all this time and they still lose.
Daichi knows that this is the way the world works, that they can’t all be winners at the top, that you can put in so much effort and still have it all come to a screeching stop by another team who puts in just as much, or more, or less effort.
He knows this but he is eighteen and young and all his life up from childhood has just been about baseball and he thinks, it’s just not fair.
His team has left, leaving him behind when he told them that he would catch up once, twice, thrice before they finally got the message. He sits in their empty locker room, the stench of sweat and gym clothes mixing with the intensely sweet scent of deodorant.
He feels sick. He feels like crying and he has cried, holding it all back until the last of his teammates left the locker room. He doesn’t want any of them walking back in and seeing him like this, hunched over on a bench with his towel over his head, the tear tracks on his face still fresh.
“Sawamura—” The door bursts open and Daichi jerks up on instinct, sees Kuroo standing in the doorway and then whips his face away. Kuroo is the last person he wants to see him like this. This sucks.
The light in the locker room goes off and Kuroo shuts the door behind him as he says quietly, “Sorry.”
Daichi doesn’t say a word as Kuroo comes to sit down beside him, keeping a good distance between them as he drops onto the bench. There is silence for a while and Daichi thinks that maybe this is one of the rare times Kuroo won’t want to talk when Kuroo says conversationally, “You know, you played well. You and your team.”
That pulls a harsh bark of laughter from Daichi’s throat. “Not well enough.”
“You lose some, you win some.” Daichi can almost hear the shrug in Kuroo’s voice. “That’s life.”
“For you, maybe.” Daichi turns on Kuroo and suddenly he doesn’t care if Kuroo can see that his eyes are red-rimmed from crying or that his nose is starting to run unattractively. “We can’t all move on whenever we feel like it.”
Kuroo’s mouth twists. “You’re still mad about that.”
Daichi rubs at his eyes angrily and Kuroo blurs in his vision. “I thought you’d go into baseball in high school after you got better again. Not basketball. You liked it even more than me when we were kids. Enough to near-kill your elbow doing all those pitches.”
“It just wasn’t for me. Baseball was always your sport.”
“I lost,” Daichi says bitterly.
“Move on. Try again in university. Try new things in university. You’re only eighteen, Daichi. You have the whole world at your fingertips.”
“You make it sound so easy.” Daichi’s head suddenly feels too heavy. He is tired, his uniform still stinks of mud and sweat, and he just played a full nine innings. He leans towards Kuroo, crossing the short distance between them to rest his head against his shoulder.
“It isn’t,” Kuroo admits and he doesn’t move away, even though Daichi is probably getting dirt all over his clothes.
“You lost too,” Daichi says, just to be mean, digging his head into Kuroo’s shoulder. “I saw your last match.”
“Way to rub salt into the wound.” Kuroo rolls his eyes and wraps his hand around Daichi’s, his touch first tentative then braver when Daichi squeezes his hand back.
“Then maybe you shouldn’t have come here.”
“Then you wouldn’t have a shoulder to cry on, loser— ouch!”
—
It is their first day at university and there is so much to see at the student life fair. Different clubs and societies try to grab his attention as he walks past their booths and Daichi fends off the ones he isn’t interested in with polite smiles and well-timed dodges.
He misses one and a hand snakes into his pocket, pulling him sideways into a warm body. Up close, Kuroo grins back at him as he wraps an arm around his waist and shoves a flyer into Daichi’s face.
“Volleyball?” Daichi asks, scanning the flyer with a raised eyebrow.
“It’s something new,” Kuroo says. “You’ve never played volleyball and neither have I. So what do you say? Want to give it a try with me?”
“You’re not going to back out on this on me again, are you?” Daichi takes the flyer sceptically.
“I’ll make sure to give you prior warning.”
“And I’ll make sure to give you prior warning when I evict your ass from our apartment.”
“You’ll miss my ass.” Kuroo leers at him.
“Don’t push your luck, flat-ass.” Daichi meets his leer with a grin of his own before shoving Kuroo’s face away. “So? When and where are tryouts?”
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Below the cut is some very important meta pertaining to Violet’s main verse, much of this is based off of conspiarcies from @snicketsleuth, and also insane conversations between @eyedisguised and myself (and now @thousandseye thanks jan), if we’re roleplay partners please read this !! and feel free to discuss w/ me tyty. <3
please note: a lot of this is gonna be hard to follow if u haven’t read the books. also this is basically a stream of consciences IE a complete fuckin mess so if u get confused at any point hmu !!
( this post has been edited from when it was on my other blog so plz give it a quick reread !!!! )
For timelines sake we are assuming, here, that violet was born in august of 1960. If you wanna know the reasons for that hit me a message. I know it’s hard to tell what the fuck time period dani/el hand/ler placed ASOUE in so !!
actually wait one more thing before I begin: I WILL NOT BE TALKING ABOUT THE MATTER OF VIOLETS PATERNITY IN THIS. Daniel leaves that entire thing SUPER vague and while Violets conception coincides w/ the time that Beatrice and Lemony broke things off, it is also still entirely possible that she is Bertrand’s. Plus leaving it vague means that I get to have more fun. ; ))))
LMAO BINTCH NAW I HAVE BEEN KEPT AWAKE FOR LIKE A WEEK NO THINKING ABT WHO VIOLET’S DADDY IS WE ABOUT TO GET INTO IT FOLKS HOLD ON TIGHT.
ANYWHO.
UNKNOWN TIME B4 VIOLET’S BIRTH: The Baudelaire parents, with the help of Kit Snicket, murder Count Olaf’s parents in a plot to get his money.
In Snicket’s prequel series to ASOUE (ATWQ) it seems that Lemony, Beatrice, and several other young VFD members are very intent on changing the nature of the VFD. One can assume that to do this, they need a fair amount of money that is their own ( here meaning, out of the VFD’s reach ) , and did so by killing Olaf’s parents who we can assume, are well off. Honestly Imma just link you guys to this snicket sleuth article bc it explains it better and in full detail and I’m lazy.
SEPTEMBER 1960: Violet Baudelaire is born almost immediately after Beatrice and Bertrand are banned from the island. She is conceived nine months prior, INCREDIBLY close to around the time Lem and Beatrice broke it off and emotions where high if you get what im implying if not ur too young chip go home
Violets childhood is very vague. She doesn’t remember much before Klaus was born and it seems there’s still more she doesn’t remember after that. What she does remember is a nursery rhyme. She recalls it as Row Row Row Your Boat. However she also recalls her parents singing something with “The World Is Quiet Here” in it. She also claims that the name “snicket” is familiar to her in The Penultimate Peril. After closely reading Lemony Snicket’s Unauthorized Biography we find that she is actually recalling the same song, as the sheet music that Lemony provides to his editor is written to the melody of “row row row..” [ SNICKETSLEUTH, 2 ]
“though they lived in a big mansion,
down robber road a tad,
it was at the farm the lady
bore the little snicket lad.
[…] so don’t scream when we take you:
the world is quiet here.”
[THE LITTLE SNICKET LAD - LEMONY SNICKET’S UN-AUTHORIZED AUTOBIOGRAPHY, PP. 9-19]
IMPORTANT NOTE: neither Klaus nor Sunny seem to remember this song, so I’m going to assume here that it was only sung to Violet.
This next part is all shitthaticameupwith™
SO. Let’s talk about the VFD’s whole mentor/pupil thing they got going on. It’s canon that they take talented children from a very young age and recruit them into the cult organization. We know this from Snicket’s “autobiography” where he provides pictures of him as a toddler and claims that shortly after that picture he was taken by his ankles from the kitchen (just as his siblings were) and recruited.
Now, with a schism in the midsts it’s fair to assume that both sides would be recruiting members as heavily as possible. They are essentially at war with one another at this point and need as many “soldiers” as they can get.
1964
Enter Violet Baudelaire, age 4, who exhibits extreme skill in inventing from a very young age. Enter Violet Baudelaire who the VFD suspect might be Violet SNICKET which would be insanely important to them as the snicket’s have made some of the best VFD members yet and would put high value on keeping that bloodline in the organization
With the schism, the broken memories, and the cloudy memories of VFD references ( which again, were not made to Sunny and Klaus, and seemingly stopped after Klaus’ birth – along with the parents adamancy in keeping the VFD a secret from the kids ). I’m going to make the assumption that at some point, when Violet was just a toddler, the VFD tried to take her.
Cue traumatic event,
cue Violet forgetting shit,
cue the Baudelaire parents realizing that they don’t want their children to have anything to do with this organization. After all, they did consider having Violet on the island to shield her from the worlds treachery, and only left because they were kicked off.
So why would the Baudelaire’s continue to have children? Well my theory is fairly simple. Beatrice was most likely already pregnant with Klaus at the time, and Sunny was an accident (sorry sunny, u were a happy accident i promise Violet loves u).
BACK TO THE KIDNAPPING. So now not only do the Baudelaire parents want to keep any knowledge of the VFD from their children, they also start concocting a plan (with the help of who I can only presume is the Quagmires), to get a blank slate – to start over somewhere far away from the VFD’s grasp. And how exactly do they do this?
With Olaf’s fortune that was split between themselves and the Snickets.
1974
The plans are finally ready to come to fruition, the Baudelaire parents are ready to flee. However, upon finding that their friend and partner in crime Kit Snicket is pregnant, they offer to include her in the plan, assuming she would want her child to stay away from the VFD in the same manner they do. However, Kit being an EXTREMELY loyal VFD member, betrays them to the organization. (perhaps this is why the children are sent to the beach ?? So B&B can meet with Kit, whom they were also keeping a secret from the children.)
*casually winks at @thousandseye from this point forward u kno y*
the VFD ( probably possibly even Kit herself tbh ), in response to this, burns down the baudelaire mansion. Killing Bertrand, and later Beatrice at the Masquerade. Knowing full well they can blame these fires on the fire-starting side of the organization, namely Olaf.
NOTE: I will, of course, discuss this headcanon with any Kit’s I interact with, and leave it up to them if they wish to include it in their portrayal or not. If they don’t I will disregard it as it could have been anybody – ( maybe even the Quagmires in hopes of securing their children’s safety ?? ) who betrayed them.
LE FIN
post note: I realize that these theories will undoubtedly have holes in them, but this is what makes the most sense to me and my portrayal of Violet. If you have any questions/comments/concerns PLEASE !! TALK !! TO ME !! remember that none of this necessarily has to come up in our threads unless you want it to, it can go completely IGNORED as she has no knowledge of any of this, but it does affect the way she thinks and acts, and I figured I would throw it out there incase anyone wanted to use it as a basis for plotting.
thank u and i hope u enjoyed this dissertation on Veronica Bloodyliar.
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Time and tax deduction method changes
I feel like one of the wrung out wacky clocks in Salvador Dalí's "The Persistence of Memory" every time we have to spring forward and lose an hour. (Oil on canvas, 1931 © Salvador Dalí, Gala-Salvador Dalí Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photograph taken in 2004. Image via About.com, fair use, Wikipedia Commons)
Time and tax deduction method changes
It's that time again, literally for most of the United States that switches from Standard to Daylight Saving Time (DST).
Whether you like the shift to DST, which provides more sunshine at the end the day. Or hate it since it forces you to head to work in the dark. Or are of the #LockTheClock persuasion like Florida Sen. Marco Rubio and mainly just hate the forced changes and want one time all year.
Right now, though, we're stuck with it. Unless you live in Arizona, Hawaii and some U.S. territories who stay on Standard time year-round.
Even worse, we have to deal with DST during tax season.
Really? Losing an hour now? Most of us, regardless of whether we're taxpayers doing our own 1040s or tax professionals dealing with beaucoup returns, need every single minute to meet the tax deadlines.
Two types of tax deductions: This alternating time method does, however, bring up another tax comparison. The deduction methods used by taxpayers.
Just like there are the two distinct time-keeping systems, Standard and Daylight Saving, there are two distinct tax deduction methods, standard and itemized.
But unlike the two times, in the tax world, we get to make a choice every single filing season. We can keep or change our deduction method depending on which one saves us the most taxes.
And, not inconsequentially, based on which method saves us the most tax preparation time.
Standard deduction details: Time is one of the key reasons why most taxpayers have year after year opted to use the standard deduction method.
It's also much simpler.
When you itemize, you have to collect and keep receipts and records, then add them up (and often do more calculations) on Schedule A to arrive at the amount of expenses you can claim as deductions.
With the standard deduction, you just know what your filing status is and look at your Form 1040 to find out how much of a standard deduction you can claim.
For the 2019 tax year, those are, as show on the excerpt from the 1040 below (you can click to get a larger image), $12,200 for single or married filing separately taxpayers; $18,350 for heads of households; and $24,400 for married couples filing a joint tax return.
These amounts are adjusted annually for inflation. They are bumped up a bit for the 2020 tax year. But since we're filing 2019 returns right now, the standard deduction amounts for that tax year earn this week's By the Numbers honors.
Older and visually impaired filers used to have to do a bit more figuring, but now that's covered in the new 1040-SR, which lists the increased standard amounts right on that form, again shown below (again, click image for bigger picture).
Itemized extra work: As noted earlier, if you itemize your expenses, it's more work.
Not only do you have to know what is an allowable itemized expense, you and to keep track of all them that you can claim.
Then you have to file Schedule A, which in some cases, requires even more figuring. Allowable medical expenses are the best example here.
There are a lot of different medical costs you can use in this first section of Schedule A. So you want to have that documentation on hand. This is where good, year-round record keeping helps. It's must easier at filing time to pull out that material than to track it down or try to recreate it.
But while there are many allowable medical costs, not every dollar counts toward your itemized doctor and dental claims. You can one claim the total of your medical costs that exceed 7.5 percent of your adjusted gross income (AGI).
For some folks, that's worth the trouble. But it's a pain, pun intended, when you enter all your medical costs, run the AGI percentage and find you get a minimal or no write-off at all.
Bunching deduction strategy: The good think about the two tax deduction options is that, as previously noted, you get to decide which one you'll use.
You'll always want select the one that gives you the larger deduction.
If you find as a tax year goes on that you'll be close to having more itemized expenses than your standard deduction amount, consider bunching those costs. This is simply pulling or pushing deductible expenses into one year where you can make the most of them.
Sticking with our focus on medical expanse, have your children's orthodontia work and get extra pairs of prescription glasses for the whole family in one tax year. These costs could help you clear the 7.5 percent AGI itemized hurdle.
It works with most of the Schedule A claims. As I noted in a recent #TaxBuzzChat with the Tax Twitterverse on tax minimization strategies, I've been shifting the calendar payment of state and local taxes (SALT) since the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) set a $10,000 limit on their deductibility.
A1. we've itemized over the last few years even under TCJA. I've been splitting SALT payments, paying in one year just enough to claim; pushing rest into next tax year in case limit is increased or eliminated #taxdreams #TaxBuzzChat
— Kay Bell (@taxtweet) March 4, 2020
Such annual deduction tweaks also work if you're philanthropic. You can double up your gifts to your favorite charity in that same tax year you'll be claiming all those doctors' costs.
Alternating deduction methods: Bunching, however, will mean that the next tax year you'll probably not come anywhere near being able to itemize.
Not to worry.
Unlike our two time-keeping methods, we taxpayers get a choice every filing season as to which deduction method we want to use.
You can itemize for five years in a row and then, bam, you have lots of medical bills so you itemize for that year.
Or, if you employ bunching, you'll more likely alternate years of itemizing and claiming the standard amount.
Agree! It's even more powerful now that the Std Ded is higher. Can really make a big impact!! #TaxBuzzChat
— Jina Etienne CPA CGMA (@MissTaxCat) March 4, 2020
As Jina @MissTaxCat Etienne and I discussed, you can itemize this year, then next filing season claim the standard deduction amount. Then go back the following year to filling out a Schedule A. Rinse, deduct, repeat.
Also as Jina points out, the TCJA greatly increased the standard deduction amount so there are even fewer filers claiming itemized deductions.
But the great thing about the deduction options is that you get to make the choice. So don't think just because you used one method for many years that you're locked into it. Look at your tax situation and your expenses.
If you find it's better this year to itemize rather than take the standard deduction, then do that, even if it takes more time to do your taxes. The larger deduction payoff should make up for that time loss.
And if going with the standard claim is better, then hurray! You get a better tax result for less work.
The point is, check them both out and decide.
Now, since I have no choice, I'm off to make sure I didn't miss resetting any clocks last night.
I'm pretty sure I got them all, but then I think that every year, both when we spring ahead or fall back an hour. (Planning notice: Standard Time returns this year on Nov. 1.)
And twice a year, weeks after the changes, I'll find a timepiece still on the other time.
via GIPHY
You also might find these items of interest:
2 tax deductions you can claim as late as April 15
22 tax deductions, no itemizing required, on Schedule 1
Thumbing through the IRS' medical deduction (or not) list
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Will Texas and Texas A&M play again? The post-breakup tracker
Realignment broke up one of college football's greatest hate-relationships, but the two won't stop eying each other. Let's keep track as they work their way to meeting up again. Last updated Oct. 26.
Texas and Texas A&M. It's a relationship that goes way back, but after an ugly conference realignment breakup, the two just can't seem to get back on the same page.
Here's a timeline of their trials and tribulations since splitting apart.
Oct. 25, 2017
The governor wants to get involved.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott: "My next goal as governor is to reunite the Texas-Texas A&M rivalry. Hook 'em Horns."
— Brian Davis (@BDavisAAS) October 25, 2017
THE HEAT SCALE, rating the flirtatious energy between Texas and A&M: 2, because the governor isn’t in charge here. Just because an ex-couple’s parents badly want them to get back together doesn’t mean the kids will go along with it.
July 17, 2017
Texas' new head coach is on board!
Tom Herman on scheduling: "We don't play a rival at home ever. I don't know why we can't play A&M as our marquee non-conference opponent."
— Brian Davis (@BDavisAAS) July 18, 2017
THE HEAT SCALE: 4. Texas' old head coach was also on board, and look where that got us.
June 28, 2017
"Their AD (DeLoss Dodds) at the time came out and said we will never play Texas A&M again, and they worked along with Baylor and the conference to have no one in the (Big 12) schedule us," former A&M AD Greg Byrne said. "There were other forces at work to make sure we didn't play."
THE HEAT SCALE: 4. That story has a bunch of disheartening stuff on this rivalry and Kansas-Missouri, but that particular quote is at least hot.
June 16, 2017
"Me, personally? I think over the course of time that's going to happen," A&M head coach Kevin Sumlin said when asked, while also talking about how well he knows new Horns coach Tom Herman. "With our move to the SEC, scheduling has become a real issue."
THE HEAT SCALE: 3. Sumlin's been predicting a reunion for years now, not that we don't appreciate him doing so.
June 10, 2016
"They're trying to work something out right now where we're going to play the Aggies," Charlie Strong said at an event. A Texas spokesman said no specifics have been discussed, but we didn't even hear any of the words in this second sentence.
THE HEAT SCALE: 8. Do it.Texas and Texas A&M. It's a relationship that goes way back, but after an ugly conference realignment breakup, the two just can't seem to get back on the same page.
April 14, 2016
A&M athletic director Scott Woodward, via DailyTrib.com in Texas:
Will the Aggies play the University of Texas in football again?
"We have to really assess what is our best path to winning the (Southeastern Conference) West," Woodward said. "I don't foresee anything happening in the near future. There are a lot of opinions well above my pay grade. Rivalries, I think, are healthy for the game.
"It'll be something we'll consider," he added. "It'll be a discussion I'll have to have. I have no objection to it. It's something that has to work for us and for folks."
HEAT SCALE: 5.
March 19, 2016
The two nearly played again in March Madness, but Texas had to go and lose to Northern Iowa on a buzzer beater. Aggies everywhere were torn between laughing at rivals and lamenting the chance to square off, but the likely A&M starting QB had the definitive opinion:
lol http://pic.twitter.com/S95xNzXEfi
— Jake Hubenak (@hubenak_j) March 19, 2016
HEAT SCALE: Unchanged. Laughing at your fallen rival is standard human behavior.
September 30, 2015
Texas A&M regent Tony Buzbee in a Facebook post, via the Austin American-Statesman:
I am going to advocate that the Aggies play Texas again in the near future. Because of our brutal SEC West schedule [...], the Aggies need some cupcake games to rest and heal. In my view, Texas is just as weak if not weaker than the non-conference games we play, so we may as well play them.
HEAT SCALE: 5. Buzbee is, as he mentions, only one regent, and regents aren't athletic directors, but eating pastries is often an enjoyable date activity.
June 18, 2015
Texas A&M chancellor John Sharp is quoted as saying this in response to Texas selling beer at games now:
A&M chancellor Sharp on alcohol at events: "Our athletic program has not reached the point where we require the numbing effects of alcohol."
— Gabe Bock (@GabeBock) June 18, 2015
HEAT SCALE: 3. These rivals can neither imbibe nor abstain without thinking of each other, but we already knew that.
May 8, 2015
A&M chancellor John Sharp took swipes at the Longhorn Network and Texas' recent on-field struggles in an interview.
We're hopeful that sometime in the future there will be a bowl game that we're able to play in, you know, if [Texas] gets there. But the great thing about playing us is that you can get on real TV if you play us.
HEAT SCALE: 2. Sharp ended with "of course I'm just joking about all of this." Stick to your guns, John!
April 16, 2015
When asked about renewing the rivalry, Strong joked that he wasn't pushing too hard for it yet because he wanted to win some games first. Specifically, he said "I don't know if I want to go walking into College Station right now."
That has caught on at A&M, including with incoming five-star defensive tackle Daylon Mack, who signed with the Aggies over Texas.
http://pic.twitter.com/A7D5F0TWex
— THEE MACK TRUCK (@DaylonMack) April 16, 2015
HEAT SCALE: 7. Twitter banter's usually a 2, but that shirt's a 5 by itself.
April 14, 2015
Oh my:
Texas' Charlie Strong and Texas A&M's Kevin Sumlin both in the last week expressed to ESPN.com a desire to resume playing the longstanding rivalry after a three-year hiatus that coincided with the Aggies leaving the Big 12 and joining the SEC in 2012.
HEAT SCALE: 8.
July 23, 2014
Texas coach Charlie Strong on playing Texas A&M: “You would like to see us play each other"
— Brett McMurphy (@Brett_McMurphy) July 23, 2014
HEAT SCALE: 7. We're cookin' now.
May 27, 2014
Texas A&M’s Kevin Sumlin on future games w/Texas: “Eventually I think it will happen"
— Brett McMurphy (@Brett_McMurphy) May 27, 2014
HEAT SCALE: 6.
May 26, 2014
Texas and Texas A&M are playing again! In baseball. Postseason baseball, meaning they had no choice.
HEAT SCALE: 3. Baseball.
April 25, 2014
UT AD Steve Patterson told us ``unless there is a compelling reason,'' the football series between Texas and Texas A&M is dead.
— Paul Finebaum (@finebaum) April 25, 2014
HEAT SCALE: 2. There's no reason in love.
April 1, 2014
Texas AD Steve Patterson: Playing A&M "not at the top of my list."
HEAT SCALE: 3. /Patterson throws Strong into a cold shower
March 7, 2014
New Texas head coach Charlie Strong, sharing his thoughts on resuming the rivalry: "I'd love to play it."
HEAT SCALE: 11. Whoa, take it easy, Charlie. You can't come on so strong, that's just going to creep them out
Nov. 20, 2013
A&M president Loftin: "There's no reason why we shouldn't play each other, if we want to. I think (Texas) will at some point in time feel like it's the right thing to do as well, and we'll get there."
HEAT SCALE: 7.
Nov. 6, 2013
After Texas hires Steve Patterson as AD, Texas A&M senior associate AD Jason Cook says the Aggies are not looking to renew the annual rivalry: "We hope to play them again in a BCS bowl or Playoff game at some point."
HEAT SCALE: 3. "I mean, if we run into 'em at a bar or something and they wanna hook up, we're totally down. But we ain't looking for a long-term thing. Just wanna keep it casual, ya know?"
Sept. 11, 2013
Texas A&M DB Toney Hurd Jr. takes to Twitter, proclaiming, "Texas A&M is the university of Texas." Then-Longhorns head coach Mack Brown responds to the media: "We are the university in this state, regardless of what some kid tweets."
HEAT SCALE: 2. They just can't let each other go, but man, it's getting nasty.
May 31, 2013
Texas A&M president R. Bowen Loftin: "It's not relevant to us anymore, that's the whole point. It's not an important issue."
HEAT SCALE: 3. "Who? Yeah, I think I remember someone by that name."
April 1, 2013
OH MAN THEY'RE GETTING BACK TOGETHER.
HEAT SCALE: 0. Wait. Awww dammit, April Fools' got us again.
March 18, 2013
Texas AD Dodds: "They're the ones that decided not to play us. We get to decide when we play again. I think that's fair."
HEAT SCALE: 6. It's not gonna be that easy, baby.
Jan. 29, 2013
Texas State Rep. Ryan Guillen proposes law forcing A&M and Texas to play.
HEAT SCALE: 0. Will you two give it a rest and get back together already. You're all each other talks about, and we're tired of seeing you like this. Jeez.
Nov. 19, 2012
Texas DE Alex Okafor, in the buildup to the Longhorns' new year-end game against TCU: "I feel sorry for A&M. We still have a big-time game on Thanksgiving. They're missing out."
HEAT SCALE: 8. "OH. OH OK YOU FOUND SOMEONE NEW? WELL WE FOUND SOMEONE NEW TOO AND WE'RE DOING JUST FINE." /Texas quickly puts its arm around the first school it can find, which happens to be TCU
May 30, 2012
Texas A&M and LSU agree to become annual end-of-season rivals.
HEAT SCALE: 6. A&M is moving on with its new life in a new place, but one has to think it's hoping Texas will notice the Aggies' sexy new companion.
Nov. 25, 2011
In the final scheduled meeting, Texas defeats A&M, 27-25, on a game-winning field goal as time expires.
HEAT SCALE: 10. Texas just came over to get that last box of t-shirts and CDs, and of course it turned into a raucous night of love-making, just like the old times. A&M was pretty mad when the Longhorns left an upper-decker before running out laughing, though.
Oct. 15, 2011
Texas AD DeLoss Dodds: "What we have right now is a full schedule."
HEAT SCALE: 1. "I can't on Friday. Saturday's no good, either. Neither is next week. Or next month."
Sept. 26, 2011
Someone creates a "Keep the Texas vs. Texas A&M Rivalry Game Tradition Alive - Drama Free" Facebook page. It garnered only 89 likes and, as we all know, didn't get the pair back together.
HEAT SCALE: 1. This isn't really a spark between the 'Horns and Ags. It's a desperate plea from their friends to give it another shot.
Sadness scale: 10. :-(
Aug. 29, 2011
Report surfaces Texas A&M is set to announce its departure from the Big 12.
HEAT SCALE: 1. It has been a long road together, but after one last big fight over A&M wanting its own space, the Longhorns and Aggies agree that they just don't have anything in common anymore, and it's best to go their separate ways.
Any more?
We'll update this as more of these arrive over time (and they certainly will). Did we miss any from the past?
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