Baek Saheon was a sensible man, after all, he had to be. He had a goal. One that he would without a doubt achieve regardless of all obstacles! Even if he hadn't slept in three days, that was nothing to him. He was still perfectly functional, not a problem in sight! Except… perhaps there were more obstacles than he'd care to admit.Obstacles like his horror of a roommate who had left the previous evening to Mokpo, but apparently not without chugging the last remains of Saheon's precious Macadamia milk from their shared fridge and then returning the empty bottle to its shelf — EMPTY. BOTTLE. IN! THE! FRIDGE!Saheon feelt his ribs quiver with a kind of visceral and unnameable rage. No, he thought faintly, it was nameable, and its name was 'Kim Soleum Makes My Life Hell'. He felt a shaky laugh fall out of his chest like a vending machine pettily refusing a too-scuffed coin. Kachak. Oh. There went another one!After 13 minutes of eerie giggling over the petulant complaints of the still-open fridge — he had, of course, been staring at the cheerfully blinking clock on the closed right fridge door and so, was giddily certain of the elapsed time — he let out a wheezing cry and kicked the door of the dairy-less fridge closed like it most certainly deserved for its treachery.Or, at least, he tried to. What actually happened was a masterfully-created Rube Goldberg machine of displaced sauce bottles and jam jars that self-propelled their contents up Saheon's pyjama pant leg in a mockingly neat set of rainbow stripes. His eye twitched.When he next came to he was already halfway down the block, still dressed in his wonderfully-condemented pants and holding only a single 50,000 won note between two fingers.
BREAKING NEWS: HERO 'NICE' IN WRECKED ROMANCE WITH NEMESIS?
Written for The Times by Qǐ ShìIn a fight that sent the city reeling yesterday, Hero 'Nice' once again defeated his long-time Nemesis 'Wreck' in a battle that took to the skies. But citizens are focused on a different part of the broadcast.While coverage was quickly lost on the scene due to the destruction of the only field camera in the vicinity, recovered footage that was leaked early this morning shows an unprecedented interaction.Watch the video here.As eagle-eyed viewers will notice, Wreck seemed particularly distraught during this confrontation that seemed pre-arranged, with Nice arriving on the scene before any property damage had occurred. From the video, few words can be made out but for the closing statement made by the Perfect Hero's nemesis: "I won't let you leave me!"Passionate words that were spoken just after the destruction of a bus stop promoting the publicised event announced yesterday morning that is set to occur later this week featuring Moon and Nice. One which is widely believed to be a format for announcing their official relationship.The combination of these factors makes the truth very hard to ignore: Wreck and Nice were in a relationship, that is completely certain. No wonder the villain has been so obsessed with garnering Nice's attention for so long, but what could've happened in their past relationship to make him turn to villainy? And how will this affect Nice's relationship with Moon?Those are answers we'll just have to wait for.♡ 113,204 Likes 🗨 17,203 Comments
Content Warning: Canon Compliant Suicide of a Minor, Canon-typical Religious Persecution
In the morning, he wakes early. He must make it to the mountain before the end comes for him and before the Summer makes the day too hot.Despite this, the heat beats down on him and makes sweat bead on his neck and fingertips, dampening the letter where his skin makes contact. Blaming this dampness on the heat alone would be delusion, but he feels his resolve growing like a tidal wave regardless. The brief absence he feels now only tells of a greater return.His breath quivers over his tongue as he lays the letter within the stone chest. He presses three fingers to the careful handwriting he had penned the night before, giving himself one last moment to appreciate it before it's over.The stone slab top feels heavier than it ever has as he hefts it atop the squared sides. He drinks in the last sight of its contents as he slides it fully closed, time seeming to lose all the fluid properties it had gained through his research in an instant, instead stretching slow and thick like the tar pits feeding on the woods to the west. He feels himself beginning to sink, but his choice is already set in motion. He refuses to scrabble for purchase at the last second, he refuses to turn to the very people who forced him into this future.In the end, it is tar that preserves things the best. Rafal may be sinking and losing the breath from his lips, but the wood those pits preserve will last for centuries and the hulls it seals win contests against the sea. That is what he must do to prevail — to remain.He cannot lose.
Stan has a problem. Well, he has many, many problems. The most urgent of which is that he’s now homeless… and jobless and cashless… at 11pm on a Wednesday. With only about 5 miles of gas left in the tank, Stan does the only thing he can think to do – the same thing he’s been doing every night since he was 13 after his Ma fell asleep after one too many glasses of sherry – he takes over her calls.This is not at all as simple as it sounds, not in 1971 and not with only the emergency roadside kit in the trunk of his car. All in all, it takes him about two hours and the last of his pitiful funds to strip the telephone line and redirect it through a beat up old landline he’d scavenged from the garbage unit behind Pines Pawns. It’s just past 1am and the roads are well and truly silent, but that’s still plenty of active hours left for the late night Psychic line.It’s not really out of the ordinary for the regular callers to hear him answer the line after all the years he’s been doing what was effectively the early morning shift to cover for his Ma. Most of the regulars like him well enough, having been around long enough to listen to him grow up (and into his “psychic gifts”) and some of them even prefer him to his Ma and her generally unfavourable predictions. That might have something to do with the fact that Stan gives out much more advice and is, on the whole, more invested in getting to the root of the problem and what the callers want to hear than Ma, who mostly just enjoys the unending source of contributors to her pathological lying habit.He spends the rest of the night in his car, parked right up close to the alley wall beside his – or… well, it’s just theirs now – building answering calls meant for his Ma and telling all the callers, regulars and first-timers that he’d be splitting off to form his own call line next week if they’d like to hear from him again.
Renji has always felt watched, but not just in the way all Rukongai orphans were watched: with disgust, mistrust and scorn. Those too, of course, but there was another gaze he felt he couldn’t shake off; that had him looking over his shoulder every time he turned a corner. And yet, even through his constant vigilance, he’s never seen anyone watching him. Not with the weight he feels on his back. Renji has always felt watched, a heavy focus that never abates, almost oppressive in its pervasiveness. And yet, there is no hostility, no scorn; no disgust.It discomforted him initially, when he first began noticing it, like a predator biding its time, waiting for its quarry to make one wrong move. The intensity of it kept him up at night, unable to sleep for fear of being taken in his sleep. But when, after a year, Renji was still alive, still unmolested by the owner of the singular focus, he found himself begin to let his guard down. He fought his instincts on this, he was sure that the moment he did so would be his last. Clearly his hunter was patient. But even the most paranoid Rukongai orphan can’t fight their instincts, not that many try, and after the first few slip ups bring him no stalking retribution, Renji gives in. He lets the gaze wash over him without fear. There’s no point after all, if whoever, whatever was watching him wanted him dead or for any other purpose, he would be gone already.So he let it fade into the background, only brought to the forefront in rare moments of peace, the prickle on his neck that never seemed to leave brought to life by the silence of the night. And if, after all of this, Renji started feeling comfort from the focused attention, from the raising of the small hairs on his arms, that was his business. It was almost nice, the feeling of loneliness that had dogged him before he began to really sense the world around him, before the hunger, was but a distant memory, hazy with time.That all changed when he saw it, or rather, himself.
Some days, it almost feels like Yuuri has been chasing him for his whole life, always looking firmly at his back, never able to catch a glimpse of anything more. More and more, it seems to Yuuri as he grows and competes, that he is falling behind. Even as he finds himself qualifying for the Grand Prix Finals, even as he celebrates and trains even harder with Phichit cheering him on, he can’t shake the phantom feeling of ice cracking beneath his feet, that one day soon, he will have fallen so far behind Viktor that his dream will be impossible. More and more, he feels that moment has already passed.He feels as if he was born to be like this. Like he was made just to be broken.It’s these feelings that suffocate him at night until he can barely breathe, that leech away his warmth during the day and cannibalise his energy in the weeks leading up to the Grand Prix Final in Sochi. It’s getting so bad that even Phichit doesn’t know how to bring a smile to his face anymore. It’s getting so bad that, when it happens the first time, Yuuri assumes it’s just a hallucination, that his mental break has finally happened. He stares listlessly at himself executing a perfect triple salchow with arms raised on the ice from where he’s catching his breath at the side of the rink and feels his heart shatter a little. Even his subconscious is telling him to do better, be better.It’s then that he hears a yelp from his right. When he looks over, Phichit is standing at the rail, pointing dumbstruck at Yuuri’s hallucination on the ice.
Content Warning: Chronic Illness, Death, MCD, Depression, Survivor’s Guilt, Emotionally Abusive Parents
He has always been a coward, and he is being a coward again. But he isn't hiding from it anymore. He will gladly be cowardly if he can keep her company for as long as she wants it.He blinks and the strawberries are red. The closest few to her window are gone, pink juice stains hastily rubbed from the white paint of the windowsill. And there she is too, cheeks flushed in the cold air and breath coming out in puffs.She's laughing at something he's done as he flits back and forth, portraying her improvised reading of the latest romance he'd brought with him. They're the only thing she gets brought to read, even if she wouldn't choose them and he can't bring her anything more permanent lest the nursing staff find out someone's visited unscheduled.She enjoys them nonetheless, sometimes making him act out the scenes as she reads like today.He falls to the ground dramatically, struck by some horrible X-egg power that the female lead has yet to neutralise and she flings her arm out the window dramatically for whatever line she's about to deliver.Instead, she is wracked with a dizzying cough, spittle dusting the strawberry runners from where she's hunched over the sill.He pushes up from the ground, almost seeing in slow motion as the coughing fit escalates, her lungs to weak to fully expel the phlegm like they need to to breathe again.His hand is on the grass, pushing up-She coughs too hard, pain twisting her face even as her breathing returns.His shoes slip briefly on the wet ground as he scrambles for grip-Her eyes widen through her relief, face twisting as she realises. She's hunched over too far.He's on his feet and running-She falls head first from the window, legs catching against the sill and whipping her body back towards the bricks.He yells but he can only hear the thundering beat of his heart-
Ichigo wakes up.Somehow, once again, he feels something is off before he even opens his eyes. Then he knows something is off when he tries to open his eyes and can’t.“What now?” He thinks, decidedly tired of all this PTSD bullshit. He tries to concentrate on feeling the reishi around him; if he can’t open his eyes, he can at least try his other senses, not that he’s really much better at reishi manipulation now than he was before his brief and incomplete Quincy training.Once he calms his background thoughts, an image starts to resolve itself in his mind’s eye. He’s suddenly sitting in his inner world, on the side of one of the towering buildings as he has done many times before. This time, though, he is alone. Neither the Old Man nor Zangetsu has appeared to greet him. That isn’t all too strange, he has dropped in before while they were both otherwise occupied with trying to beat each other into the ground, whichever direction that may be in this sideways cityscape. But unlike all previous times he’s appeared alone, there are no sounds of destruction in the distance and there is no hint of blood or Zangetsu’s killing intent on the air.This is all too eerie for Ichigo, especially on a half night’s sleep. He sits down, resolving to wait whatever this is out through some meditation. He has been slacking on it lately. It’s just not really his idea of fun. But almost as soon as he gets comfortable, he’s suddenly looking at his room’s ceiling once more. He lets out a sigh of relief, or he tries to. He sort of feels like he has, but he definitely didn’t hear it fall flat in his empty room like usual.He tries to get up and can’t.Oh, great. So whatever hell he’s experiencing isn’t yet over. Is this some kind of sleep paralysis, he wonders, that would be new.As if in response to this thought, he sits up in bed. Well, his body sits up. Ichigo definitely wasn’t trying to do that this time. This is really getting majorly freaky. He’s suddenly no longer looking straight ahead, but down at his hand, which is flexing and unflexing in an uncannily even rhythm.“This is entirely unexpected,” says his voice, from his mouth. But once again, Ichigo hadn’t been trying to say that at all.
Ichigo wakes up.Somehow, once again, he feels something is off before he even opens his eyes. Then he knows something is off when he tries to open his eyes and can’t.“What now?” He thinks, decidedly tired of all this PTSD bullshit. He tries to concentrate on feeling the reishi around him; if he can’t open his eyes, he can at least try his other senses, not that he’s really much better at reishi manipulation now than he was before his brief and woefully incomplete Quincy training.Once he calms his background thoughts, an image starts to resolve itself in his mind’s eye. He’s suddenly sitting in his inner world, on the side of one of the towering buildings as he has done many times before. This time, though, he is alone. Neither the Old Man nor Zangetsu has appeared to greet him. That isn’t all too strange, he has dropped in before while they were both otherwise occupied with trying to beat each other into the ground, whichever direction that may be in this sideways cityscape. But unlike all previous times he’s appeared alone, there are no sounds of destruction in the distance and there is no hint of blood or Zangetsu’s killing intent on the air.This is all too eerie for Ichigo, especially on a half night’s sleep. He sits down, resolving to wait whatever this is out through some meditation. He has been slacking on it lately. It’s just not really his idea of fun. But almost as soon as he gets comfortable, he’s suddenly looking at his room’s ceiling once more. He lets out a sigh of relief, or he tries to. He sort of feels like he has, but he definitely didn’t hear it fall flat in his empty room like usual.He tries to get up and can’t.Oh, great. So whatever hell he’s experiencing isn’t yet over. Is this some kind of sleep paralysis? he wonders, that would be new.As if in response to this thought, he sits up in bed. Well, his body sits up. Ichigo definitely wasn’t trying to do that this time. This is really getting majorly freaky. He’s suddenly no longer looking straight ahead, but down at his hand, which is flexing and unflexing in an uncannily even rhythm.“This is entirely unexpected,” says his voice, from his mouth. But once again, Ichigo hadn’t been trying to say that at all.