#/ wake up guys new mal character just dropped

[knowledgesought]

@unlockthestars: Oh but their little sister was a curious being, if they did say so. Maybe she would have more answers for them.

"I'm told you hold all Knowledge," they practically purred, tail flicking behind them. "Is that true or were they pulling my tail again?" Apparently they hadn't heard about the 'three questions a century' rule. But since they were siblings, surely she would be able to tell them more than those humans had? [look I couldn't resist; xoxo A Cat Most Curious]

Oh? Well, this was certainly a first... 

Not a cat, not truly. Whatever this creature that had summoned her was, she couldn't entirely say: something about them was blocked from her vision, from that gift she had always been so burdened with. The Spirit's expression is strange for a moment — staring so closely, eyes narrowed as though trying, trying to peer deeper into this strange being and finding herself unable to pry anything further but a strange pain in the back of her mind.

That same pain she felt when she tried too hard to divine on the Gods, to seek out knowledge that lurked beyond her borders.

"...An exaggeration, perhaps. I certainly have no knowledge of you.

[purple-fireflies]

try to slip past his defense (without granting innocence)

A/N: Soy Luna Grey’s Anatomy au -- some plot devices will be the same, others may differ. (This is just an excerpt, I'll post the full chapter on ao3 & tumblr when I'm done with it!)

Other notes:

The title is from The Fray’s “How To Save A Life” which is basically the show’s anthem song (that and chasing cars)

Sometimes, certain dialogue may be verbatim from the show (this is only for medical-related plot devices, ie meeting patients, assigning lab reports, establishing exposition, etc) so I’m stating here right now that that specific dialogue belongs to Grey’s Anatomy, and the characters belong to Soy Luna, but everything else belongs to me

Juliana never had the last name given in the show, so for story’s sake, it’s Bahiense.

She’s referred to as “The Nazi” but that’s not meant to offend anyone at all, it was the nickname given in the show, so I’m transferring it here.

In Soy Luna, Ámbar is one year older than Luna, but here she’s the same age as her

In Grey’s Anatomy, there are only 5 people in each group of interns, but for plot’s sake, there are 7 each

In the show, Benicio’s name was never mentioned, so for writing purposes, his last name is going to be Calisto

Luna sits up quickly—bad idea.

She winces at the light coming in through the window and groans at her headache.

And someone stirs next to her.

Exactly how much did she drink?

Enough so she doesn’t remember the name of the smirky boy staring at her, pulling on his boxers.

She is never drinking again.

And he needs to leave.

“You are?” He asks, grinning the grin that probably got Luna into this mess.

“Humiliated on so many levels,” She mutters, “And I’m late, as well. So if you could just, I dunno, leave, that would be perfect,”

“Or we could pick up where we left off?” He asks, with a grin that tells Luna he isn’t used to being rejected.

“No, seriously. I’m late. Which I shouldn’t be on my first day of work, so?”

Take the hint.

“Wait, so you live here?”

Jesus Christ, she’s going to be late.

“Huh? Oh yeah, it was my aunt’s house, but I’m selling it so technically, not for long.” She rushes out.

“I’m sorry,” He replies, actual emotion in his eyes.

“My aunt is still ali—you know, we don’t have to do the thing,”

“We can do whatever you want,”

Really?

“No, the thing. Where you pretend you care or ask me nice questions or whatever. Listen. I’m going to go upstairs and shower, and when I get back, you’re not going to be here, uh…”

What was his name?

He laughs softly, “Matteo.”

“Luna,” She replies, shaking his hand.

“Bye, Luna,” He says winking at her.

She smiles in response and jerks her head towards the door.

“Bye, Matteo,”

And that’s the last she has to see of him.

𝅘𝅥𝅮𝅘𝅥𝅮

“Each of you comes here hopeful. Wanting in on the game. A month ago you were in med school being taught by doctors. Today, you are the doctors. The seven years you spend here as a surgical resident will be the best and worst of your life. You will be pushed to the breaking point. Look around you. Say hello to your competition. Eight of you will switch to an easier specialty. Five of you will crack under the pressure. Two of you will be asked to leave. This is your starting line. This is your arena. How well you play? That's up to you,” The chief, Tamara Rios, says as Luna stumbles into the room, causing everyone to stare at her.

Great job, Valente.

Luna walks around the room. She sees Ámbar, avoiding her gaze as if it was poisonous. She sees another girl, a brunette, looking around the room with wide eyes. She sees Simón, looking back at her, and resists waving at him as a kindergartner would. She walks around the OR a little more and sees two girls so close they might as well be stuck together, one a blonde and the other a redhead. She bumps into another boy, who just huffs softly and brushes her off.

Rude.

𝅘𝅥𝅮𝅘𝅥𝅮

The resident takes 3 more interns, leaving Luna with the brunette she saw at the orientation.

“Only 6 women out of 20,” She says, sighing, as if mad at the statistic itself.

“And I think one of them’s a model. As if that would’ve helped with the whole respect thing,” The redhead interjects.

Luna and Ámbar share a look.

Luna turns to the brunette.

“You’re Nina, right?” She says, smiling.

Nina nods, “Which resident did you get assigned to? I got Bahiense.”

“The Nazi? Me too,” Luna replies.

The guy who bumped into her says, “You got the Nazi? So did I. At least we’ll be tortured together,” He says, trying to lean into Luna’s space.

Luna and Nina exchange a quick look saying, God, can you believe him?

A doctor comes up and calls out “Smith, Valente, Ponce, Simonetti, Medina, Sánchez, Álvarez,”

Ámbar walks up to the guy and asks, “Bahiense?”

He points down the hall.

The seven look down to see who he’s pointing at. It’s a woman slightly shorter than them, using a cane to stand up, ordering some other resident around.

The guy who bumped into her says, “I thought the Nazi would be a guy,”

Sexist much?

“I thought the Nazi would be...you know, the Nazi,” Luna mutters.

“Guys seriously? Maybe it’s just professional jealousy. You know, maybe she’s just brilliant and they’re so jealous so they call her the Nazi. Maybe she’s nice.” The redhead says, and Luna sees her nametag saying Jimena Medina.

The blonde next to her, Yamila Sánchez, Luna supposes, nods.

Which means the only one left that she doesn’t know would be...Luna cranes her neck to see his nametag.

Ramiro Ponce. Who is currently staring wistfully at Yamila.

Please.

“Let me guess, you still have hope left in your heart,” Ámbar says to Jimena, rolling her eyes as if it’s what she was born to do.

Jimena shoots Ámbar a dirty look (wow, Luna wishes her luck with that can of worms) and proceeds to try to shake Dr. Bahiense’s hand when she walks over.

Dr. Bahiense looks at her hand as if it’s infectious.

Jimena, undeterred, continues to say, “Right, well. I’m Jimena Medina, but you can call me Jim if it’s easier,”

Yamila, who seemed to jump out of thin air, says, “And you can call me Yam,”

Bahiense looks so unimpressed Luna thinks that if contempt alone was enough to murder someone, Bahiense would be a serial killer.

Luna shares a quick look with Simón, who gives her a reassuring nod.

Bahiense looks them all up and down, evidently annoyed with being stuck with their group (ouch).

"I have five rules. Memorize them. Rule number one, don't bother sucking up, I already hate you, that's not gonna change,” She starts, then moves to a bench, filled with different objects, “Trauma protocol, phone lists, pagers. Nurses will page you, you answer every page at a run. A run, that's rule number two. Your first shift starts now and lasts forty-eight hours,”

Everyone rushes to grab their pagers, studying them before Bahiense starts talking again.

“You’re interns, grunts, nobodies, bottom of the surgical food chain, you run labs, write orders, work every second night till you drop, and don't complain!”

Bahiense opens what Luna supposes is an on-call room, “On-call rooms. Attendings hog them, sleep when you can, where you can, which brings me to rule number three, if I'm sleeping, don't wake me, unless your patient is actually dying. Rule number four, the dying patient better not be dead when I get there, not only would you have killed someone, you would have also woken me for no good reason, we clear?”

Luna rushes to nod, writing furiously on her notepad, and then goes, oh.

She raises her hand.

Dr. Bahiense looks extremely pissed at Luna for having the audacity to have a question.

“Yes?”

“You said five rules. Those were only four.” Luna says, trying not to wilt against Dr. Bahiense’s gaze.

“Rule number five. When I move, you move,” She says after her pager beeps.

That’s some TV show shit right there.

They break into a run and watch as Dr. Bahiense runs down a couple of doctors.

𝅘𝅥𝅮𝅘𝅥𝅮

The helicopter—yes, a helicopter—lands, and a doctor pulls out a teenager on a stretcher.

This is way too much for Luna on her first day.

“What do we got?” Bahiense asks, and Luna hears Nina correct the grammar under her breath.

As the paramedic puts the girl on the stretcher (while she’s seizing) he says, “Katie Bryce, fifteen-year-old female, new-onset seizures, intermittent for the past week, ID lost en route, started grand mal seizing as we descended,”

Bahiense stops, leaning on her cane for a second, and then it’s all business.

“All right. Yam, put her on the side, 10 milligrams diazepam,” Bahiense groans when Yam does it incorrectly, “No, no, the white lead is on the right, righty whitey, smoke over fire, a large-bore I.V. don't let the blood haemolyse, let's go!”

Yam injects the diazepam and Katie stops seizing.

Luna releases the breath that she wasn’t aware she was holding.

Another doctor, in dark blue scrubs, another doctor comes up in stark contrast to what she and the other interns are wearing. Luna catches his name very quickly. Gastón Perida.

Nina sucks in a breath as he walks past them, Luna realizes with a start.

“So I heard we got a wet fish on dry land?” Dr. Perida says, and Luna catches how Nina stares at him with intent.

Dr. Bahiense, her sudden brashness gone, replaced with respect as she says, “Absolutely Dr. Perida,”

Dr. Perida nods, his eyes brushing over the intern group, stopping at Nina, and he then continues.

“All right, Dr. Bahiense, I’m gonna shotgun her,”

“That means every test in the book, CT, CBC, chem. seven, a tox screen, Nina and Ámbar, you're on labs, Ramiro and Yam, patient workups, Luna, get Katie for a CT, she's your responsibility now,”

Wonderful. Her first day and she gets the really hard patient.

“What about me and Simón?” Jim asks.

Bahiense looks so tired when she stares at Jim, “Right, you two, uh. You get to do rectal exams. Okay?”

Jim and Simón have faces that say no, not okay.

Luna makes a face gloating at Simón and he just glares at her in return.

𝅘𝅥𝅮𝅘𝅥𝅮

Ámbar peeks into the OR where Dr. Bahiense is. Bahiense comes out and looks at her expectantly.

“Um, Katie Bryce's labs came out clear, there's nothing in the results that explain her seizures,” She says, hoping to catch Dr. Bahiense to ask her what she really wants to ask her.

“And…?”

“ I heard every year the attending on-call picks the best intern and, and lets them perform a procedure, during the first shift?” Ámbar asks, glaring back at Dr. Bahiense when she tries to stare her down.

Ámbar Smith does not get stared down.

“Go away. Now.” Dr. Bahiense says, and Ámbar groans internally.

𝅘𝅥𝅮𝅘𝅥𝅮

Yam sighs at yet another ill-tried joke Ramiro attempts.

Flirty in med school and flirty now.

Why should she even bother?

“We have one more patient to work up,” She mumbles and he nods, walking slower to keep up with her pace.

She places her stethoscope and hears for a heartbeat. “Everything seems to be in order,”

“So he’ll be fine?” The woman next to him—presumably his wife—asks.

“If you don’t count that my bacon days are over, sure,” The patient replies.

Yam shares a smirk with Ramiro.

“You'll have surgery tomorrow with Dr. Perida, I hear he's good, and after that, you can have all of the bacon-flavored soy product you can eat,” Ramiro interjects, speaking easily with the patients.

“Please, kill me now,” the patient jokes.

“Wish I could, but I took the Hippocratic Oath for a reason,” Yam replies absently, going over and signing his charts.

She blushes at the weird looks she gets and rolls her eyes at Ramiro’s never-ending smirk.

𝅘𝅥𝅮𝅘𝅥𝅮

Katie. Won’t. Stop. Talking. Which isn’t helping Luna find her way through these halls.

Did she just miss the last turn?

“You’re lost,” the kid says, grumbling.

What do you think I’m trying to fix right now? Luna thinks to herself and just about stops herself from saying.

“I’m not lost.” Luna insists, then remembers she’s a doctor, “How’re you feeling?”

“I’m missing my pageant. How do you think I feel?”

“Right. You’re missing your pageant.”

This poor girl is in the hospital with seizures and the only thing that she can think about is her pageant.

Luna feels sorry for her.

“The Spokane Teen Miss? I was in the top ten after the first two rounds. This is my year. I could've won,”

Luna absently hums and realizes that they’re going the wrong way. Again.

She turns around and pushes Katie back the same way.

“You are so lost. What are you, new?”

Luna chokes back a laugh. Yeah, something like that.

𝅘𝅥𝅮𝅘𝅥𝅮

Yam watches Ramiro try to give their patient a central line. It’s not working.

And it’s visibly hurting the patient.

She groans and pushes past him, about to put the line in when Dr. Perida waltzes into their room and raises his eyebrows.

“Out.” He says, his nice demeanor replaced with annoyance.

Do all of the residents and attendings just hate interns on principle?

Yam glares at Ramiro and pulls him out, watching from the window as Perida puts the line in perfectly.

“Bet you used to mess up a lot when you started out,” Ramiro tries to joke with Perida.

Yam just winces and nods at Dr. Perida as she leaves.

Ramiro at least has the decency to look sheepish.

This is going to be a long shift.

𝅘𝅥𝅮𝅘𝅥𝅮

Luna sits, taking Katie’s patient history and generally listening to her incessant babbling.

“I twisted my ankle. I do rhythmic gymnastics, which is like, really cool. Nobody else does it. And I tripped over my ribbon, and I didn't get stuck with someone this clueless. And that was like, a nurse,” Katie says.

Luna bites back a retort.

𝅘𝅥𝅮𝅘𝅥𝅮

Simón groans at the plate of food in front of him. The number of rectal exams he and Jim had to do was enough to take the appetite away from anyone.

“This shift is 80 hours long, you have to eat, Simón,” Ámbar mutters, her gaze hardening after leaving Simón’s eyes.

“I can’t.”

“Eat.” Ámbar insists, pushing Simón’s plate towards him.

“You try eating after performing 17 rectal exams. The Nazi hates me. I want to puke.” Simón says, his face contorting.

“Just don’t puke near me,” Ámbar mutters.

“The Nazi’s just a resident. Attendings hate me,” Ramiro replies.

“Did you know Luna is inbred?” Nina asks, and all heads whip to her immediately.

Partly because no one expected the shy ingenue to say anything.

And partly because Luna being inbred is very surprising.

Simón hurries to say “It’s not uncommon to be the kid of a doctor,”

“I mean royally inbred. Her mother is Lili Benson.”

“Shut up. The Lili Benson?” Jim asks.

Nina nods.

“Who’s Lili Benson?” Ramiro asks.

“The Benson method? Where’d you go to med school, Antarctica?” Yam says incredulously.

No one notices how Simón and Ámbar tense up as Yam continues talking. “She was one of the biggest women surgeons. She practically invented th—”

“She won the Harper Avery. Twice.” Jim says, rolling her eyes at Ramiro.

“So I didn’t know one thing.”

“I would kill to have Lili Benson as my mother. Scratch that, I’d kill to be Lili Benson.” Nina says, her eyes alight.

“Katie Bryce is a pain in the ass. I swear if it wouldn’t get me fired, I’d strangle her with my bare hands.” Luna says, walking over to their table, sitting next to Nina.

She seems to miss the wistful glance Simón throws her way.

She does seem to notice the way everyone’s staring at her.

“What?”

Nina opens her mouth to say something but stops immediately when Dr. Perida walks over.

“Good afternoon interns. It's posted, but I thought I'd share the good news personally. As you know, the honor of performing the first surgery is reserved for the intern that shows the most promise. As I'm running the OR today, I get to make that choice,” Dr. Perida says, and Luna feels a rush of hope.

Or. Felt. Seeing as Dr. Perida is clapping Ramiro on his back (it was kind of worth it to see him choke a little on his salad) and saying, “Ramiro Ponce. You’ll be scrubbing in on an appendectomy this afternoon. Congrats.”

Luna deflates.

She wanted that surgery.

She wanted it really badly.

“Me?” Ramiro asks, not quite believing it. Or maybe he’s just wilting under Yam’s intense glare.

“Enjoy.” Dr. Perida says, nodding to everyone.

Luna doesn’t fail to notice that he’s staring at Nina while he says that.

Nina doesn’t fail to notice either, if the blush on her cheeks has anything to say about it.

Ramiro looks like he’s still in shock.

𝅘𝅥𝅮𝅘𝅥𝅮

“I’ve seen his file. Ramiro Ponce barely even made the cut to get into the program. He’s not your guy.” Juliana says to Gastón, raising her eyebrows.

“Oh, he’s my guy alright,” Gastón responds, absently checking the labs.

Juliana sighs, “Every year you pick your guy, and every year your guy suffers most.”

Gastón smiles. Everyone who knows him knows his easy nature, his inclination to being on the side of less serious.

Unless of course, it has to do with work.

“Terrorize one, and the rest fall in line, Bahiense.”

“I get it. I respect it. But Ramiro? Ponce is a puppy. A cute little puppy that is waiting to be killed. He can’t take the pressure. Think about it, Perida.” Juliana says, walking away.

𝅘𝅥𝅮𝅘𝅥𝅮

Luna watches as Katie’s parents stumble into Katie’s room.

The look of pure worry and fear on their faces makes Luna warm to them immediately.

A couple of hours ago, their kid was supposed to go on stage and wear a sash and be a kid.

Now they’re scared that their kid could be dying.

“Katie?” The mom asks, trying to hold her hand.

Luna falters, not wanting to break their little window.

“They gave her a sedative for the CT scan, so she’s just a tad groggy,” Luna says, standing up.

“Will she be okay?”

“Does she need surgery?” The parents ask at the same time.

Their urging faces make Luna wish she had an answer.

“Uh. You know, I’m not her doctor, I am a doctor, just not hers. Anyway, I’m not Katie’s doctor. I’ll go find him.” Luna rambles.

Luna finds Bahiense, “Katie’s parents have questions. Should I get Dr. Perida to answer them?”

“What? No. Perida’s off the case. The case is the new neuro attending’s case, Dr. Balsano. He’s over there.” Bahiense says, pointing to…

Oh god.

Please.

Not today.

This is not happening.

Matteo turns and stops dead in his tracks, his eyes clicking in recognition.

This is not happening.

Luna is not dealing with this.

She turns away from his gaze and walks away. What is she going to do?

She walks towards the stairwell and gets grabbed in.

She stumbles and Matteo catches her, running a hand through his hair, which Luna grudgingly admits looks not bad.

No. Luna. Stop it. Luna. No.

“Dr. Balsano. Did you need anything?” Luna asks, trying to not look at flustered as she is.

Matteo looks positively ecstatic at this turn of events. “Dr. Balsano? This morning it was Matteo. Now it’s Dr. Balsano.”

Luna dearly wants to slap that smirk off of his face.

“Dr. Balsano, we should pretend this never happened,”

“What never happened? You sleeping with me last night or kicking me out this morning because I don’t know about you, but both are memories I’d dearly love to keep.”

This guy really can’t take a hint.

“No. No. No. This is not happening. There are no memories of anything. I’m not the girl in the bar and you’re not the guy in the bar. I am your intern, Dr. Balsano.”

“I see how it is. You took advantage of me last night and now you want to forget about it.” He says, smirking incessantly.

“I most certainly did not,”

“I was drunk and vulnerable. Not to mention, insanely good-looking,”

“You’re not that good-looking,” Luna says, while her traitorous brain says Liar over and over.

“Sure I’m not. But last night, I was wearing my red shirt and I was extremely good-looking and you took advantage,”

He’s not entirely wrong about the red shirt.

“I didn—”

“Want to take advantage again? Say, Friday night?”

He’s smiling again, only this time it’s a smile, not a smirk.

Maybe Luna wouldn’t have said no if he wasn’t an attending.

“No. You’re an attending. I’m your intern. And I would seriously appreciate it if you stopped looking at me like that,” Luna says, glaring at him. It doesn’t seem to deter him.

“Like what?” He asks innocently as if he has no idea what he’s doing right now.

“Like you’ve slept with me,”

Matteo smirks.

“Dr. Balsano. Have you ever considered the fact that this is inappropriate?” Luna breathes.

He doesn’t say anything.

Luna sighs and leaves, the door slamming behind her.

𝅘𝅥𝅮𝅘𝅥𝅮

“Open. Identify. Irrigate. Close.” Jim instructs, and Yam sighs.

“Jim, I think he’d know,”

“He looks like he’s going to puke,” Jim shoots back.

Yam looks at Ramiro and says, “We have to go to the gallery now. Don’t screw it up.”

They walk up and take a seat behind Luna and Nina.

The intern above them says, “He’s going to faint. He’s a fainter.”

Yam fights back a if you only knew.

“Nah, I’m guessing code brown. Right in his pants,” another intern snickers.

Yam and Jim share a look.

Sure, she’s not a huge fan of Ramiro but he helped her a lot in med school. He helped Jim a lot in med school.

This is just savage.

“He’s going to sweat himself unsterile,”

“10 bucks he’s messing up the McBird,” someone says.

Oh god, they’re betting on Ramiro.

“20 says he cries,” Ámbar says, and sends an apologetic look at Luna.

“I’ll put 20 on him melting down completely,”

“50 says he pulls the whole thing off.” Yam hears herself say.

Luna grins at her, “That’s one of us down there. The first one of us. Where the hell is your loyalty?”

Yam breathes out.

The entire gallery, while it was buzzing before, is now silent.

“75 he can’t even ID the appendix,” Ámbar says again.

This time it’s Simón shooting her the look.

“I’ll take that action,” someone says.

Eric, Yam realizes.

The idiot from their bio class.

Nina elbows Luna when Dr. Perida says, “Okay, Ponce, let’s see what you can do,”

Jim breathes in quickly and Yam also holds her breath.

Do it right do it right please do it right.

“Here it comes,” Simón says.

“Scalpel,” Ramiro says and the nurse hands it to him, echoing the word.

Ramiro takes it and everyone cheers.

Perida motions for them to shut up as Nina says, “God, he’s quite a bit of trouble,”

Ramiro gets ready to cut as Perida instructs, “More pressure.”

Ramiro manages to do it without any mishaps and then proceeds to say, “Pickups.”

The scrub nurse echoes the command and hands him the instrument.

They go on for a little bit, and Yam thinks he might actually pull it off.

Until it goes downhill after Ramiro takes out the appendix.

Perida mutters an angry remark as all the interns in the gallery call him Double O’7.

Jim shares a worried look with Yam and asks Luna, “What does 007 mean?”

Luna sends them an apologetic look.

“License to Kill.”

𝅘𝅥𝅮𝅘𝅥𝅮

The cool air rushes into the basement that Bahiense’s interns have settled into.

The majority of them pile onto the gurney as Nina goes to the vending machine looking for some chocolate.

Luna winces at the whine that Ramiro makes as he walks into their “hideout”.

“They’re calling me 007 aren’t they?”

Luna groans and shoves Simón’s head off of Ámbar’s lap so she can fall asleep in it.

She’s too tired to deal with any human interaction that requires her to, you know, have any sort of emotional security.

“No one’s calling you 007,” Jim and Yam lie (but they do it in unison so like, props).

Ramiro shoots Yam an annoyed look, “I was on an elevator and Eric whispered 007,”

Ámbar pushes Luna’s head off of her lap and glares at Ramiro, “How many times do we have to go through with this? 5, 10, 15? Please tell me soon or I’m going to rim your head off.”

Ramiro sits on the gurney and groans “Eric whispered 007 in the elevator and everyone laughed,”

Luna picks her head up from where she’s trying (unsuccessfully) to fall asleep and actually feels sorry for the guy for a second but the aching limbs and pounding migraine make it kind of hard to console the poor guy.

“They weren’t laughing at you,” Jim says.

“You sure?”

“Would we lie to you?” Jim asks.

“Yes,” Ramiro, Ámbar, Simon and Luna say.

“007 is a state of mind,” Nina yells from the vending machine and throws a packet of chips at Luna as she walks back.

“Says the girl who finished first at freaking Stanford,” Simón yells at her.

Nina just rolls her eyes in response.

Just as Luna finally feels the call of sleep, her pager beeps.

She just wanted 5 minutes.

“It’s 911. Damn. I gotta go,” and Luna takes off at a sprint.

“I should’ve gone into geriatrics. No one cares if you kill an old person.” Ramiro continues after Luna leaves.

“Yes. Yes, they do care if you kill an old person. Plus. Surgery is hot. Geriatrics is… Well, it’s for freaks who live in the basement with their mom,” Simón replies.

“I have got to move out of my mom’s,” Ramiro mutters.

Nina and Ámbar share a grin.

𝅘𝅥𝅮𝅘𝅥𝅮

Luna’s out of breath by the time she gets to Katie’s room.

She really has to go to the gym more.

“Finally,” Katie mutters.

Luna looks around, seeing if anything’s wrong.

Oh god, please tell me she has a good reason for this. She has a good reason. Maybe. Hopefully.

“Are you alright?” The nurse paged me 911.”

“Ha, it took me forever to get her to even pick up the phone. I had to go full Hulk.”

“Wait. So there’s nothing wrong? Nothing medically wrong?”

“I’m bored.” Katie shrugs.

Luna likes to think she’s a nice person. A little absentminded at times, but a nice person nonetheless.

Katie, however, is really testing the whole “do no harm” thing.

“I am not your babysitter. I am not your cruise director. You can’t just page me for anything.”

“Don’t be so overdramatic. My pageant is supposed to be on cable, but it’s like this hospital lives in the ’90s. I can’t find anything. If someone who’s not me gets the crown, I should at least get to see it.”

Luna takes a deep breath. She’s a teenager. You were also stupid as a teenager.

“Okay. This is a hospital. There are sick people here. Go to sleep and stop wasting my time.”

“I can’t sleep, my head’s all full.”

“Those are called thoughts. Run with them.” Luna says in a fit of anger.

She’s been working for almost 24 hours and she just wanted 2 minutes of rest.

But maybe she shouldn’t have snapped at a patient.

But that’s a lesson for another day.

𝅘𝅥𝅮𝅘𝅥𝅮

Luna and Nina are in the ER when they hear a loud voice.

“4B has post-op pneumonia. Let’s get her started on antibiotics, okay?” An intern says to a nurse.

Someone didn’t tell the newbie not to piss off the nurses.

“Are you sure it’s the right diagnosis?”

“Oh gee, I don’t know. I’m only an intern. But here’s an idea. You go and spend 4 years in med school and then talk to me. She’s got shortness of breath and fever. It’s post-op pneumonia. Start antibiotics.” He sneers.

Luna rolls her eyes.

The same guy walks over to her and Nina, “God, I hate nurses. I’m Benicio. I’m with Jeremy. You guys are with the Nazi, right?”

“You know it doesn’t have to be pneumonia, right? It could be splinting. Or she could have aPE.”

He sneers again (does it ever leave his face?), “As I said, I hate nurses.” and walks away.

“Well, he’s an absolute idiot,” Nina says, shooting daggers towards Benicios across the room.

Luna’s about to respond, but her pager beeps again.

“Dammit, Katie.”

This time she walks.

𝅘𝅥𝅮𝅘𝅥𝅮

[oscopelabs]

Christopher Nolan: The Man Who Wasn’t There by Daniel Carlson

1.

So, we’ll start with the fact that all movies are make-believe. It’s a bunch of actors on a set, wearing costumes and standing with props picked out by hordes of people you’ll never see, under the guidance of a director, saying things that have been written down for them while doing their best to say these things so that it sounds like they’re just now thinking of them. We all know this—saying it feels incredibly stupid, like pointing out that water is wet—but it’s still worth noting. There is, for example, no such person as Luke Skywalker. Never has been, never will be. He was invented by a baby boomer from Modesto. He is not real.

And we know this, and that’s part of the fun. We know that Luke Skywalker isn’t real but is being portrayed by an actor (another boomer from the Bay Area, come to think of it), and that none of the things we’re seeing are real. But we give ourselves over to the collective fiction for the greater experience of becoming involved in a story. This is one of the most amazing things that we do as humans. We know—deep down, in our bones, without-a-doubt know—that the thing we’re watching is fiction, but we enter a state of suspended reality where we imagine the story to be real, and we allow ourselves to be moved by it. We’ve been doing this since we developed language. The people telling these stories know this and bring the same level of commitment and imagination and assurance that we do as viewers, too. The storyteller knows that the story isn’t real, but for lack of a better way to get a handle on it, it feels real. So, to continue with the example, we’re excited when Luke Skywalker blows up the Death Star because he helped the good guys win. For us viewers, in this state of mutually reinforced agreement, that “happened.” It’s not real, but it’s “real”—that is, it’s real within the established boundaries of the invented world that we’ve all agreed to sit and look at for a couple of hours. Every viewer knows this, and every filmmaker acts on it, too. Except:

Christopher Nolan does not do this.

2.

There’s no one single owner or maker of any movie, and anyone who tells you different has their hand in your pocket. But there’s an argument to be made that when somebody both writes and directs the movie, it’s a bit easier to locate a sense of personhood in the final product. (This is all really rough math, too, and should not be used in court.) Christopher Nolan has directed 11 films to date, and while his style can be found in all of them, his self is more present in the ones where he had a hand in the shaping of the story—and crucially, not just that, but in the construction of the fictional world. Take away the superhero trilogy, the remake of a Norwegian thriller, the adaptation of a novel, and the historical drama, and Nolan’s directed five films that can reasonably be attributed to his own creative universe: Following (1998), Memento (2000), Inception (2010), Interstellar (2014), and Tenet (2020). These movies all involve themes that Nolan seems to enjoy working with no matter the source material, including identity, memory, and how easily reality can be called into question when two people refuse to concede that they had very different experiences of the same event. Basically, he makes movies about how perception shapes existence. How he does this, though, is unlike pretty much everybody else.

Take Inception. After a decade spent going from hotshot new talent to household name (thanks to directing the two highest-grossing Batman movies ever made, as well as the first superhero movie to earn an Oscar for acting), he had the credit line to make something big and flashy that was also weird and personal. So we got an action movie that, when first announced in the Hollywood trades, was described as being set within “the architecture of the mind.” Although this at first seemed to be a phrase that only a publicist could love, it turned out to be the best way to describe the film. This is a film, after all, about a group of elite agents who use special technology to enter someone’s subconscious dream-state and then manipulate that person’s memories and emotions. The second half of the film sees team leader Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) and the rest of the squad actually descend through multiple nested subconsciouses to achieve their goal, even as they’re chased every step of the way by representations of Mal (Marion Cotillard), Dom’s late wife, who committed suicide after spending too much time in another’s subconscious and lost the ability to discern whether she was really alive or still in the dream-world.

I say “representations” because that’s what they are: Mal is long dead, but Dom still feels enormous guilt over his complicity in her actions, and that guilt shows up looking like Mal, whose villainous actions (the representation’s actions, that is) are just more signs of Dom not being able to come to grips with his own past. It’s his own brain making these things up and attacking itself, and it chases his entire crew down three successive layers of dream worlds. You get caught up in the movie’s world as a viewer, and you go along because Nolan is pretty good at making exciting movies that feel like theme-park rides. You accept that Dom and everybody else refer to Mal as Mal and not, say, Dom. Dom even addresses her (“her”) when her projection shows up, speaking to her as if she’s a separate being with her own will and desires and not a puppet that he’s pretending not to know he’s controlling. It’s only later that you realize that the movie is in some ways just a big-budget rendition of what it would look like to really, really want to avoid therapy.

Which is what makes Nolan different from other filmmakers:

None of this is actually happening.

Again, yes, it’s happening in the sense that we see things on screen—explosions, chases, a fight scene in a rotating hallway that’s still some of the best practical-effects work in modern action movies—but within the universe of the film, none of what’s going on is taking place in the real world. It’s all unfolding in the subconsciouses of Dom’s teammates. In the movie’s real world, they’re all asleep on a luxury jet. They’re “doing” things that have an outcome on the plot, but Nolan sets more than half the movie inside dreams. It’s a movie about reality where we spend less time in reality than in fantasy. Half the movie is pretend.

For Nolan, filmmaking is about using a dazzling array of techniques to create a visual spectacle that distracts the viewer from the fact that the real and true story is happening somewhere else: in the fringes we can’t quite see, in the things we forget to remember, or even in the realm of pure speculation.

3.

Memento arrived like (and with) a gunshot. It seemed to come out of nowhere and leave people struggling to describe it, and they usually wound up saying something like “it goes backward, but also forward at the same time, except some parts are actually really backward, like in reverse, so it’s maybe a circle?” Written by Christopher Nolan from an idea originally shared with him by his brother, Jonathan (who eventually turned it into a very different short story titled “Memento Mori”), the film follows a man named Leonard (Guy Pearce) who has anterograde amnesia and can’t form new memories, so every few minutes he sort of just resets and has to figure out where he is, what he’s doing there, and so on. He’s on the hunt for the man who attacked him and his wife, leaving his wife dead and Leonard in his present condition, which you can imagine does not make the gathering and synthesis of clues easy.

What’s more, Nolan puts the viewer in Leonard’s shoes by breaking the film’s linear timeline into two halves—call them A and B—and then alternating between them, with the added disorientation coming from the fact that one of those timeline halves plays out backward, with each successive scene showing what happened before the one you previously saw. So, if you numbered all the scenes in each timeline in chronological order, they’d look something like this when arranged in the final film: Scene A1, Scene B22, Scene A2, Scene B21, Scene A3, Scene B20, etc. You get why it messed with people’s heads.

As a result, we spend most of the movie pretty confused, just like Leonard, whose suppositions about what might or might not take place next begin to substitute for our own understanding of the film. It’s not until the end that we find out the shoe already dropped, and that Leonard killed the original attacker some time ago and has since been led on a series of goose chases by his cop friend, Teddy (Joe Pantoliano), who’s planting fake clues to get Leonard to take out other criminals. In other words, we realize that the story we thought was happening was pretend, and the real story was happening all around us, in the margins, memories, and imaginations of the characters. The most honest moment in the movie is the scene where Leonard hires a sex worker to wait several minutes in the bathroom while he gets in bed, then make a noise with the door to wake him, at which point his amnesia has kicked in again and he briefly thinks that the noise is being made by his wife. He’s wrong, of course, but this is the only time in the movie that we actually know he’s wrong. It’s the only time we truly know what’s real and what isn’t.

Yet you can’t talk about Memento without talking about Following, Nolan’s first feature. Although the film’s production was so extremely low-budget you’d think they were lying—the cast and crew all had day jobs and could only film on the weekends, so the thing took a year to make—Nolan’s willingness to dwell completely in a make-believe world that the viewer never knows about is already evident. It’s about a bored young writer who starts following strangers through the city for kicks, only for one of those strangers to catch him in the act and confront him. The stranger introduces himself as Cobb—I kindly submit here that it is not a coincidence that this is also Leonardo DiCaprio’s character’s name in Inception, but you already knew that—and reveals himself to be a burglar, spooked by the tail but willing to take on an apprentice. Cobb trains the writer to be a burglar, only for the situation to ultimately wind up implicating the writer himself in a complex blackmail plot. You see, the writer didn’t latch onto Cobb in a crowd; Cobb lured him in. The whole movie has been Cobb’s story all along, with the writer as a patsy who doesn’t understand the truth until the final frame. None of what we saw mattered, and everything that actually happened happened off-screen just before or just after we came in on a given scene. It’s like realizing the movie you’re watching turned out to be just deleted scenes from something else. You can’t say Nolan didn’t show his hand from the start.

4.

That same general concept—that the movie we’re watching is actually the knock-on effect of a movie we’ll only glimpse, or maybe never even see—underpins Nolan’s latest movies, Interstellar and Tenet, too. Interstellar has some concepts that are iffy even for Nolan (it makes total sense for someone to do something for another out of love, but somewhat less sense that that love somehow reshapes the physical universe), but it’s still a big, bold approach to exploring how time and perception shape our actions. As the film follows its core group of astronauts while they search for potentially habitable new worlds, they encounter strange visions and experiences that turn out to be their handiwork from the future reflected back at them. Sure, it raises the paradoxical question of whether they had a first mission before this that failed, so now their future selves are intervening to make the second one (which feels like the first one to the astronauts the whole time) successful, and all sorts of other stuff that your sophomore-year roommate would like to talk with you about in great detail. But so much of what we see isn’t the stuff that happens, or that winds up being important. There’s the great scene where the astronauts land on a planet near a black hole, which is wreaking havoc on how time passes on the planet. A minor disaster delays their departure for the main ship still in orbit, but when the landing team returns, they find that more than 20 years have “passed” since they left, with the one remaining team member on the ship having spent more than two decades waiting for them to return. It’s a moment of genuine horror, and it underscores the fact that what we thought was the one true reality was just the perspective of a handful of characters we happened to follow for a few minutes. There were whole things happening that changed the plot and story and direction of everything that would follow, and we never saw them; we didn’t even know we’d missed them.

Tenet is, of course, the latest and most recursive exploration yet of Nolan’s obsession with showing us a story that turns out to be mostly fake. It is almost perversely hard to even begin to explain the film (Google “Tenet timeline infographic” and have fun). One way to think about it is to imagine if the two timeline halves from Memento somehow existed at the same time, with people moving both forward and backward through time while inhabiting the same location. Basically, some scientists figured out how to “invert” the basic entropy of objects, so that they exist backward: you hold out your hand and the ball on the ground leaps up into it, because you’ve dropped it in the future, so now you can pick it up, etc. … Look, it doesn’t get easier to understand.

The upshot is, though, that we spend the film following the Protagonist (that’s his name), a CIA agent played by John David Washington, as he’s tasked with tracking down the source of the inverted stuff to figure out what’s unfolding in the future and why it’s suddenly started to make itself known in the present. He gets marginally closer to understanding the truth by the end of the film, but because this is a Nolan film that is maybe more expressly about the nature of reality than anything he’s ever done, his journey doesn’t so much take him forward as it does in a large circle. Because, and stop me if you’ve heard this, the true story of Tenet is taking place outside the Protagonist’s actions and knowledge, alongside him but invisible, often steered by people who themselves are moving “backward” through time and thus have already met the Protagonist in the future and are old friends with him by the time he meets them in his youth. Even more brain-liquefying, some of these people have been working under the orders of the Protagonist himself—the future version, that is—because his past self has already achieved the victories that allowed him to send the future people backward through time to meet his younger self so they’d achieve the victories that allow him to etc., etc., etc.

With Tenet, Nolan didn’t just make a movie that challenged perception, like Memento, or that dwelt in fiction, like Inception. He made a movie that can only be understood (to whatever degree true understanding is possible) by rewatching the movie itself, over and over, as the multiple timelines and harrowingly complex bits of cause and effect come into some kind of focus. The whole movie itself isn’t happening, in a sense, but is just the ramifications of something else, the echoes of a shout whose origin we’re straining to pinpoint. It both is and isn’t.

5.

Christopher Nolan is a talented director of action-driven suspense thrillers. He’s canny at controlling the audience’s emotions, and he knows how to put on a dazzling show. Plus he’s fantastic at picking when to deploy non-computer-generated effects for maximum impact. But you could say that about a lot of other directors, too. What sets Nolan apart from the rest, and what makes him a director to keep watching and returning to, is the teasing way his movies wind up being just deceptive enough to fool you into thinking that you know what’s going on, then just harsh enough to disabuse you of that notion. Looking at what seems to drive him, I don’t think Tenet is his best movie-movie, but it’s his most-Nolan movie. It’s almost a culmination of his continuing efforts to tell stories where what you see and what actually happens are two different things. It’s not that he makes puzzles to solve. There is no solving these movies. Rather, it’s that he sculpts these delicate artifacts that only let you see two dimensions at a time, never all three, no matter how you twist your head. Craning back and forth, you can almost see the whole thing, but not quite. Some part of it will always have to exist in your memory. And that’s where Christopher Nolan likes to be.

[descendantsramblings]

Spidermonkey - Jay

A/N- due to the fact that I first found BooBoo in Twilight this is going to slightly seem like the scenes where they jump up to the window or through it.

Characters: Jay x Mother Gothel’s daughter, Best friend Carlos x reader

Words Count: 1,572

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

    “My mother never got over losing Rapunzel but when when I came around she was slightly more okay with letting me out of the house. I’m allowed to actually go to school, though of course you know that It’s only Dragon hall, nothing like your school but it’s still school. Now I even get an hour and a half after school that allows me to do so much more than I could when you guys were still here. I was at Jafar’s store when I met the man who said he could get my letters to you, I don’t know if you even actually know anyone who brings supplies over to the Isle, but he heard me talking about you and Jay with Jafar and he spoke so many praises. I heard that Jay was on the tourney team, the delivery guy says he’s amazing. He said that you were on the team too but he told me more about your brain. He said that you made the 3D printers better and that you’re on the path to become an engineer. Though I don’t exactly know what a 3D printer is but I’m sure what you did is amazing.  I’m a little jealous of you, you get to have the big brain and the nice school. Carlos I’m so proud of you. Tell Jay that I’m proud of him too, it’s so crazy that the cocky lab partner I got my freshman year of highschool would be a hot shot in Auradon.”

    I sigh, staring at the sheet of paper in front of me, it has been months since I saw them. My writing to Carlos wasn’t exactly what I wanted it to be, in all honesty I can’t even tell if I want to be writing to him at all. I wanted him to know how my life was of course, but the true person I wanted to talk to out of the group is the boy who used to sneak up to my window every night. The one who would sneak up that old dying tree and sit on the thickest limb there was up at the level of my window and sit there until the sun was rising so we could just talk. The one who would send me exhausted smiles across classrooms and cafeterias the day after we stayed up talking. The cocky lab partner that became the perfect friend and even at some point a little bit more than that. The one who would climb into my windows on the worst nights and just, hold me.

     I doubt that he would want to hear from me, I’m sure there’s a new girl in his life, maybe even a boy. I hope they’re both happy with whatever the two of them found to occupy their time. I hope that the shy, scared, little boy who walked up to me in the library during lunch and asked if I would want to be friends with him on our first day of school has found a large friend group and maybe even a girlfriend of his own in Auradon. I hope she’s good to him, and gentle.  But none of my hopes for him and Jay are things I can bring myself to write down. I don’t know how to tell him what my life is like with out them, and I’m scared that if I write down my hopes for him that it would come back to my biggest hope. I’m scared I’ll tell them that I want them to come home to me. Telling him that would be the most selfish thing in the world and that’s why I can’t seem to write this well.

   I pick the pencil back up, twirling it between my fingers, “How do you write to someone about what is going on in your life without telling them what they shouldn’t know?” A sudden knock on the wall outside causes me to jump out of my skin and drop the pencil, breaking the tip of it. I jump to my feet, turning to look at the window that sat behind me. The face I saw at the window making me feel like I was going crazy. “To answer your question, if goodness class taught me one thing, it’s that lying is never the answer.” “Jay?” He smiles softly, letting himself climb through the window, “You should really keep that locked, Princess, what if the villain of your story climbs through it instead of me?” “Well, Spidermonkey, I guess that would be really bad for me,” the familiar words seemed to roll off of my tongue as I look at him, still trying to figure out if he’s real.  Jay steps closer to me, placing his large hand back onto my hips and pulling me up to him. 

      “I can’t be here as often as I would like to protect you, Princess, I need you to have those windows locked,” he whispers, leaning down so that our foreheads and noses touched. “What are you doing back?” He hums, “Mal ran back to the Isle, we had to come to get her back for Ben, but it turns out we were all too stupid to realize that bringing Ben was a bad idea.” I look into the dark eyes before mine and felt the familiar calm wash over me, “You always were one for bad ideas Jay.” He chuckles, pecking my lips, “I guess you could say that I’ve only ever had one good idea.” I hum, reaching up to peck his lips back, “What would that idea be?” “Well, you see, in Auradon they have this thing called love, it was a foreign concept to me when I first found out about it. But it makes me think about this one girl back on the isle, who spends all her time reading books and hiding me from her mother.” I bite my lip to hide the smile that is trying to cross my face. 

      “Is that why you’re here Jay?” He smiles, pulling his face away from mine, “Actually I’m here because Carlos wanted help from the biggest brain on the Isle, but I needed to tell you that before I told you that he wanted you.” I giggle softly, “Of course Carlos sent you.” “But I was going to come see you anyway before we went back. I needed to see you.” I smile up at him, “You have no idea how much I missed you.” His hand leaves my left hip to cup my cheek, “What were you working on when I scared you?” “I was actually writing a letter to Carlos, the guy who brings supplies over said he would get the letter to him.” “You weren’t writing me a letter?” I bite my lip, looking away from him, “I was scared that you forgot about me.” 

       “He couldn’t forget about you, he talks about you every single day. Did you ask her yet?” Carlos’ voice drifts in through the doorway causing me to smile. “He asked me but he had to confess his undying love first. Not like I’ll ever get to see you again,” the last part came out as a whisper. Jays lips found their way to my jawline for the first time in months, “We are going to see each other again. Every chance I get.” “Come on if you help us save Ben we’ll guilt him into bringing you back with us,” Carlos smiles from the window, “Now Jay, can you just ask her to be your girlfriend so that we can go? I’ve listened to you talk about wanting to ask her out for months but you’re taking forever to do it!” “Look who’s talking!” Jay laughs as he snaps at Carlos. “Oh there’s a girl?” I ask with a smirk, watching a pink blush spread across his face, “You have to tell me everything Carlos.”  “I will, now I will be waiting at the bottom of this tree, and if you two aren’t down here in five minutes I will be dragging you both out of here,”Carlos’ laugh brought a familiar smile to my face. 

 The last of his salt and pepper hair disappeared before Jay turned me back to face him. “So, the pup kind of ruined my plans on how I was going to say this but-” I cut Jay off with a smile, “Yes Jay, I will be your girlfriend. But you have to promise if  you and Carlos can’t talk Ben into bringing me with you guys that you will come to see me.” “Promise,” he whispers, leaning back down to kiss me. “We better get down that tree now though, we can’t have the big ad dog drag us out,” Jay chuckles, grabbing my hand to pull me to the window. “Would you look at Jay and (Y/n), falling back into bed together,” Mal’s voice drifted up to us causing Jay to roll his eyes. “We’re the next Flynn and Rapunzel, Mal,” he laughs, grabbing my hand to help me out of the room. “Well, then I’ll help you get her to Auradon,” Mal says with a smile from beneath us. “Me too!” Evie’s giggle comes up to us as I step out onto the tree branch. “Guys shut up before you wake up my mom!”Jay chuckles slightly,”It takes a lot to wake her up.” “Oh shut up, Spidermonkey.”

[joesbbqandfootmassage]

We need to talk about Jane and Carlos…

So if someone had to ask me what one of the most underrated things in the world was, I would definitely say dcoms. (Disney Channel Original Movies)

They’re cheesy and dumb and not a single one lacks their flaws.

But they are still just so fun to watch and you just get a whole new experience from watching dcoms than you do any other movie.

Now among all those dcoms is a sub genre of musicals, being made popular by the one and only High School Musical trilogy. But we also have the Cheetah Girls, Teen Beach Movie, ZOMBIES, and the Descendants.

Now while all of those movie series are amazing in their own right, I’m gonna zero in on Descendants.

Kenny Ortega’s big return to Disney Channel and oh my gosh was it hyped up.

You couldn’t go two minutes watching Suite Life on Deck reruns without having this shoved in your face.

And you’d be dang right if you thought I was excited to see it. The children of iconic Disney characters all in one shared universe? Sign me the heck up!

Of course we got rid of cable before it came out and it would be maybe two years later until i finally considered watching it with my sister.

Needless to say our reaction could be boiled down to, “Oh. Oh no.”

Love it or hate it, as a movie lover I can say that D1 is a fundamentally broken movie on every level.

Nothing is developed enough and it relies way too heavily on you loving Mal as a character. Spoiler alert, I don’t.

But regardless of that, D1 also introduced me to a guy named Carlos De Vil.

Now i will never be able to comprehend WHY on Earth, puppy-skinning, vampire bat, inhumane beast, Cruella De Vil would EVER do the do with anyone and then still keep the baby after not killing it during pregnancy.

But she did and there he was.

Canonically physically and mentally abused by his mother to such a degree that he wakes up at night screaming.

Something Disney had never really had the guts to do before.

And immediately he charmed the heck out of me because regardless of how awful he had it on the Isle, it didn’t take a genius to see that he was a genuinely a good person at heart.

He was so clearly different and that was shown through maybe a culmination of like five minutes of screen time and Cameron’s incredible acting abilities.

And he deserved so much more in those movies than what was given to him but I won’t complain.

Because we still need to talk about another sweetheart.

Jane gets even less development than Carlos which is to be expected since she isn’t a main character, but you can still figure out and understand her if you read between the lines.

In D1 you not only get the fact that she likes to hide in her own little bubble, but she’s also incredibly insecure. So much so that Mal is quickly able to see it and take advantage of it.

Spending her whole life having to repeat that it’s not the outside that matters, it’s the inside, even though she doesn’t completely believe.

And then someone comes forward and basically validates her in her belief that she isn’t pretty, but she could be if she stopped focusing on the inside.

That’s what leads to her downward spiral throughout the movie as she lets her newfound “beauty” (seriously bobbed hair is cute and Disney needs to calm down) go to her head and she turns on Mal and the rest of the VKs.

Now while I find Mal to be completely irrational, her reversing Jane’s spell makes sense.

It’s Jane’s actions that follow.

Her, so desperate to be beautiful (literally she is so gorgeous how?) deciding to steal her mother’s wand isn’t paced very well and doesn’t make a lot of sense in the plot. But they just wanted to avoid Mal being the cause of the barrier being brought down so her redemption would be easier.

A classic Kylo Ren of avoiding direct contact and having it all be indirect so they can easily be forgiven later.

Now by all means after her actions that day, I’m surprised Jane herself isn’t sent to jail.

But I guess in D3 they show that they have an AK bias so whatever.

Now the important thing about this is that Carlos is there for all of Jane’s worst moments.

The moments where she is not at her best emotionally and it’s manifesting in bad ways. He knows that Mal had planned to use her to get to the wand in the first place before dumping her when that wasn’t going anywhere.

He knows that’s she’s afraid of them by the way she reacts to them in her first scene in Goodness Class.

He knows all of that.

And he still drags her onto a dance floor, refusing to let her be alone.

You could argue that Jay was there too, but her immediately ditched to jump on the Audrey train so…

This small moment, Carlos’ selfless act of kindness, plants a seed that most people laughed at or rolled their eyes - but all the same it was there.

And that little seed began to grow until two years later (six months in the actual movies) we get a beautiful Janelos flower.

Now D2 Janelos is some quality stuff and never have I seen so many people hate a ship that hasn’t done anything wrong.

And I think it’s fitting that Carlos’ arc for D2 is all centered around Jane.

In the first movie, he conquered his fear of dogs.

Now in this movie, he conquers his fear of being rejected by her.

Now if you’re an over analyzer by nature and a Carlos stan by choice, you tend to pick up on subtleties that Disney doesn’t have the guts to cover. Most notably, Carlos being touch/affection starved

You can see it in the ways his mother doesn’t show him love outside of threats and total, emotional reliance. In the way the VKs don’t particularly reciprocate his touches unless absolutely necessary. Or unless you’re Jay and you need to pull and alpha male moment and start wrastling.

And you can definitely see it in the way he thrives off of contact with Dude, and later, Jane.

Now somehow you people don’t think it is absolutely incredible that Carlos De Vil, physically and emotionally abused since birth, grew up on the Isle where love and dating were not a common place thing, fell in love.

And with the girl that was afraid of him in the first movie.

And omg I could talk about Carlos “Heart Eyes” De Vil forever and ever. Amen.

But instead I’m gonna talk about the three most major Janelos scenes in the film.

First one is gonna be the truth gummy scene.

First of all, Carlos’ puppy dog eyes when he’s thinking about Jane restore my life to the full one million years I am supposed to live.

People you are not allowed to overlook what Carlos was going to do in this short and beautiful scene.

Because he’s never really lived a life where he can speak his mind and share his feelings, the whole movie he’s struggling to even figure out how he can open up to Jane.

Not change his personality to get her attention.

Not making a love potion that’ll force her to love him.

No, he decides that the only way to approach it is honesty - by that I mean he agrees to sacrifice lying for the rest of his mortal life. And Mal gives him plenty of reasons to back out, most of them being about her but still, and he simply replies, “I’ll take my chances.”

Ugh.

The world did not do anything good enough to earn Carlos De Vil.

But the thing is, the truth gummy is his only hope to help him spit out how he feels about Jane. Because whenever he’s in her presence all he can do is freeze up and stutter. Simply due to the fact that when he’s faced with the chance, Carlos has no clue how to describe what he feels and what he wants.

But he knows that his heart does.

It’s in there somewhere and dang he’s gonna get it out because he cares about her so much and just wants to TELL her how he feels when he looks at her.

Of course then Dude eats it and all those years Carlos’ heart eyes had given me instantly went away again.

And then the whole Janelos plot line takes a bit of a nap until the third act of the movie when Carlos decides that Mal alienating herself from the Core Four ain’t helping her mental health and their friendship.

That’s when he drops the absolute BARS of knowledge, “Then don’t.”

He tells her that she never should change herself just to make someone else happy, you’ll never know if they really love you that way.

And I just wanna take a moment to wonder where Carlos got all these strong good person energies, because being raised on an Isle where love and dating aren’t even concepts should show in all the VKs.

Yet in D2 and D3 we can see that Carlos and Evie both seem to approach love with an impressive maturity that I can’t even fathom how they figured it out.

His advice is a comfort to Mal as well as Jay’s protective big brother move, and then we get to see the way his own advice affects him.

His Lovecraftian horror paraphrases what he said in the earlier conversation, “If she doesn’t love you for who you are than she isn’t the one.”

But this applies differently than in the Ben/Mal situation.

Carlos doesn’t try to change who he is or how he acts (unless you count the sacrificing lying thing but that wasn’t really used to earn her love so) but he gets the general idea.

And so, Carlos offers himself to her.

Just him, and a date and his love because that’s all he has to give her.

And she can either say yes and accept him and he can finally begin to understand what he’s feeling.

Or, she can turn him away - not wanting anything to do with what he has for her.

Which leads to such a beautiful scene, ugh I could write songs about the Janelos confession scene it’s that good.

First you see Carlos running at the speed of sound just to catch her, and he was definitely running around the whole campus because he absolutely needed to do this before he chickened out like every other time in the movie.

And at first it doesn’t seem to click in Jane’s head, because she’s only ever been just Jane.

Not pretty like Audrey or athletic like Lonnie.

Boys didn’t flirt with her or ask her out on dates, certainly not the boys she liked.

So of course, like the other times he had tried, she just wasn’t getting it. Too preoccupied with party planning and not getting her hopes up to let it sink in.  And that’s when Carlos does something that he didn’t even need a truth gummy to do.

He gives her a list of all that he can give her, looking into her eyes and waiting for her to take or leave it

And not only does she take it, but she fully adds all the things on the list that she’s always wanted to do with him, giving herself right back to him in the process.

Leaving Carlos absolutely shocked and overwhelmed and happy.

He just figured she’d either say yes or no.

Her giving herself to him wasn’t even a consideration in his mind.

And then she throws him for a loop once again, by throwing her arms around him and holding him tight.

And honestly, Carlos’ reaction says it all.

The first time somebody initiated legitimate affection towards him, and it’s from the girl he loves no less.

He’s at a loss for words and can’t even fathom what he’s feeling, but finally, Carlos is the one hugging back. Clinging onto her for dear life because it’s almost like he can’t believe this is real.

The next time we see them, they’re both looking super fine at cotillion; and let me tell you that seeing touch starved Carlos finally getting to hold hands and cuddle with his girlfriend makes me weak every time. You can see that for now, they’re figuring it out, they’ve both been super far away from the whole love thing so now they’ve just gotta go at a healthy pace for them.

Regardless of that, you can really see how much they not only love but need each other.

And then it was gonna be another two years until we’d get to figure what the writers were gonna do with Janelos, if anything at all.

During that time I had gotten well acquainted with the horrifying wall of Janelos hate you had to walk along before getting occasional content. So obviously, I chose to have nothing to do with the fandom and then Janelos fell off my radar again until I found the nerve to watch the third movie.

And oh my goodness remember just a few lines ago when I said that Jane and Carlos needed each other?

That was the key point of their story in D3.

While I think it’s poorly shown, Carlos’ character arc from a quiet abuse victim with a good heart to an honest to goodness hero (I’m talking the kinds they write songs about) is just amazingly beautiful and deserved so much more screen time than it actually got.

In D3, Carlos finally has something to lose.

Or, more accurately, something he needs to protect.

I really wish they had zeroed in on him worrying about Jane more, because while it was still there it wasn’t very focused on.

Not that I can be mad because their reuniting scene was something that made me immediately sit up in my chair and go, “Oh my fluffing gosh they have a thing.”

Like I’m sorry, what?

You’re telling me that whenever they cling to each other like that Carlos has that same look of just, pure happiness.

“She loves me and I love her, I’m never letting her go.”

Carlos De Vil went from someone who had never known or felt love in his life, to loving a girl so much it made me fall out of my chair.

D3 just wanted to remind us that the VKs have come very far, and now they’re happy and loved and we don’t need to worry about them.

All I can say is that Jane and Carlos are just an amazing couple if you step back and just look at what it means for them to be together.

A touch starved abuse victim and an insecure cheerleader fell in love and surrendered their hearts completely. And you don’t see that anywhere near Disney as a franchise, much less dcoms.

Bottom line, I know I went off for a hot minute but if we’re being honest I still have about a trillion things I could say about “Jarlos.”

But I’m pretty sure I’ve elaborated enough  to get my point across.

I just wanna say that Carlos would literally never let his mother come anywhere near the light of his life and that was some total BS.

[themangledsans0508]

Wounded

AGNST WARNING YALL NO MAJOR CHARACTER DEATH BUT BLOOD!

Mal knelt beside Molly, shaking. Molly’s breathing was labored, and her shirt was soaked with blood. She couldn’t believe what had just happened. If she had moved faster if she had been paying attention, if-

“Mal.” Molly’s voice was weak, and she reached a hand up to place on Mal’s cheek. Tears streamed down Mal’s cheeks, her brain wasn’t working. She had done all this medical training, why couldn’t she remember?  She reached over to Molly’s hand and gripped it tightly, squeezing her eyes shut. She drew in a shaky breath.

“Stay with me Mol, it’ll be okay. Stay with me.”  She blamed that voice, that hellish creature that wouldn’t leave Molly alone. She blamed herself, if she had been able to protect Molly, this wouldn’t have happened. 

“Mal! Molly!” Mal whipped her head in the direction of the voice, Jo and April, looking like angels running towards them. She gently squeezed Molly’s hand, looking back to her. 

“It’s gonna be okay Molly, Jo and April are here. It’ll be okay.” Molly smiled weakly.

“I love you Mal.” She shut her eyes.

“MOLLY!” 

~

 Mal paced back and forth in Rosie’s cabin, unable to speak as she and Jen spoke softly between themselves. She wanted to scream, she wanted to run out of that hell and go to Molly’s side. She couldn’t stand this, she didn’t know if her best friend, her partner in everything, was alive or dead. 

“Mal,” Jen spoke softly, breaking the silence. “I know you’re worried about her, but I need you to stay in the cabin right now. All the campers are gonna stay in their cabins for the rest of the day.” 

What about her? Mal wanted to scream. What are we going to do about that thing?

“But-” Mal began her weak protest, her voice hardly working.

“Counselor’s orders, scout.” Rosie placed a comforting hand on her shoulder. “We’re doing our best to take care of her, you’ve got to go take care of your cabin.” Mal complied, dragging herself out the door and down the steps. She walked to the Roanoke cabin, resisting the urge with every step to run to the nurse’s cabin, and stay by Molly’s side.

~

The cabin felt empty without her. Mal laid in her bunk, covered by blankets, filled with dread for the message she felt was inevitable. Nobody knew what to do. Ripley sat oblivious on her bunk, able to feel the sadness of the cabin but not knowing what it was from. April sat flipping through her notebook, looking for anything that matched the description Mal had given her. 

“You said it had claws?”

“Really sharp ones, like sharper than a sword or Rosie’s axes.”

“And it was tall and furry?”

“Yeah, almost like the same color as Sea Farin’ Karen, but it wasn’t her. Too tall, and it had red eyes. Like, horror game red.”

“How’d you guys get it to leave?”

“We didn’t, that voice, or that’s what Molly said, told it to leave, it said that they’d ‘got the job done’, but I don’t know what the job was. The thing just dropped on all fours and ran.”

“How’d it-”

“April, can we please talk about it later? I don’t want to think about it right now.”

 Jo stared out the window, watching the sun dip below the trees, casting everything it a dark shadow. She didn’t know what to think, she liked everything to based on science and reason, which wasn’t at this camp. She loved camp, but with what they were dealing with, she needed something to go on.

Mal wished everything was normal, her and Molly walking together down a worn path, Ripley bouncing far ahead of them and April and Jo playfully bickering. Jen talking about plants, Ripley trying to sneak away, April proving her strength, Jo looking at flora with her magnifying glass she had made, and Molly just being Molly, her eyes lighting up at stuff that she loved, her smile, her laugh.

She let her tears run. She had a feeling she knew what Jen’s message would be when she returned, she wanted to sleep, just dream. In her dreams, even if they weren’t real, they were happy. She did eventually slip into a slumber, but her dreams weren’t what she wanted them to be.

“Molly?” Mal ran frantically through the pitch-black woods, jumping from root to root and narrowing fitting between tree trunks. She finally made it to a clearing, which Molly was kneeling in the center of. “Molly!”

Mal raced to her, reaching her hand out to grab her. Molly turned to her, but it wasn’t Molly, that face wasn’t hers, blood-red eyes and a grin with spiked teeth. The thing morphed, it wasn’t in Molly’s form anymore. It stood up, being at least eight or nine feet tall.

Its fur was tan, and its claws were stained and coated in grime. The muzzle was long, and its lips curled up to show teeth that were stained with red and yellow. It took a thunderous step towards her, then another, and another. Mal was frozen, she could only watch as the monster got closer and closer. It raised its arm up and Mal drew in a deep breath. As it lashed out at her Molly jumped in the way, getting thrown many feet away and leaving a splattered trail of red.

April watched Mal with worry. She knew what it was like to lose someone, and she didn’t want Mal to have to go through that. She also didn’t want to lose one of her best friends, but she knew she had to be strong for everyone. Mal’s tossing and turning in her sleep was concerning, but she was afraid to wake her up. 

April looked out the dark window, seeing the world bathed in a soft glow from the moon. Ripley was asleep, clutching Mr. Sparkles tightly. She couldn’t see Jo, as she had the bunk above her, but she assumed she was either asleep or tinkering with a new project she had. April quietly got up from her bunk and crouched next to it, looking beneath it for a tool she needed. Her eyes had adjusted enough to the dark that she could see the items extremely close to her. She saw the flashlight and grabbed it, pushing the head of it underneath her bunk and flicking it on.

She’d admit that she should clean the mess that lived beneath her bunk, but now was not the time for that. She carefully pointed the beam and gently moved it across the span of the bunk, waiting for a glint. She finally saw it, the reflection from that dull blade she had taken from the old Lumberjanes training area, or also known as the roller derby arena. She reached to grab ahold of the hilt, carefully pulling it from its resting place. 

“What are you doing.” April jumped, nearly dropping the sword. She spun around to see Mal sitting up, her eyes red and puffy from crying. April straightened her back and puffed her chest out. 

“I’m taking care of the monster, Mal. Nobody else will be hurt by it.” Mal choked back a sob.

“That’s suicide April. Not even you can beat it.” Mal swung her legs over the edge of her bunk, weakly standing up. “I’m not letting you go.” She positioned herself in front of the cabin door. “If you want to go, you have to go through me.” April gave a broken laugh.

“What is this? Harry Potter? Mal, it hurt one person already, I won’t let it hurt another.”

“The next one it will hurt will be you, and it won’t just be hurt,” Mal growled. “I’m not letting you go through that door. I already lost somebody-” she let out a sob. “I won’t lose you too.” 

“Mal listen to me. I-” 

“No, YOU listen to ME!” Mal shouted. “I just lost my soulmate.”

“Mal you don-”

“I’m not losing anyone else.” Tears streamed from her eyes, she shuddered with every breath.

“What are you two doing?” Jo’s voice rang out, drawing the attention of both girls. 

“Jo! I was just-”

“No. I can see what’s going on. I know you April.” Jo swung herself off her bunk, carefully dropping to the floor. She walked to April, towering over her. She reached a hand for the sword held tightly in her grasp. She grabbed the blade. “It’s too dull to cut anything. Even butter,” she muttered. She looked to Ripley’s bunk, where she remained in her deep slumber, with Bubbles wrapped around her head.

“Mal, I know you’re hurting.” Jo reached a gentle hand to rest on her shoulder. “But April is right, something needs to be done about it.” Jo took back her hand and turned back to April. “However, one person can’t do it alone. Especially at night.” Jo cupped April’s cheek and pressed her forehead against hers. “I don’t want to have to be the one to find you after-” She forced down a sob. “If we go, we all go together, and I don’t mean just our cabin. I want Rosie to advise us on this.” April closed her eyes and nodded her head as much as she could without making Jo uncomfortable. After a few moments, Jo drew back and looked between the two girls. She raised her hand up to wipe a few stray tears away before taking a deep breath. 

“Jen isn’t going to be back tonight, it’s this late already. She probably fell asleep at Rosie’s. We should get to sleep too. April and Mal nodded in unison before swiftly retreating to their bunks. Jo returned to hers as well, sitting in the silence of the partially empty cabin. Her eyes remained focused on the woods, scanning for any sign of the beast residing within. Eventually, sleep overtook her and as she gave up her search for the creature. While her eyes closed to travel to her own dream realm, the treeline shook with the footsteps of a red-eyed monster. 

~

Mal burst out of the cabin the moment day broke, running as fast as her legs could go. She jumped up the steps and rapped her knuckles against the door to the nurse’s cabin. There were a few thuds from inside before eventually, the door swung open.

“Scout, this is supposed to be- oh.” Jen stood hunched over, sleep still dragging her body down. “Mal, you’ve got to remember that there are other people resting in here.” 

“I know,” Mal mumbled. “But how-” The words got caught in her throat. “How is she?” A soft frown formed on Jen’s face.

“Mal, it’s too early to say anything.” She took a deep breath. “She’s still breathing, but she hasn’t woken up yet.” Mal nodded.

“Is it okay if I come in to see her at least?” Mal pleaded. Jen hesitated, before sighing and stepping aside.

“Just don’t spend all day in here, okay? Make sure you do a few activities.” She knelt down and hugged Mal. “Keep your hopes up, okay? She’s strong, you’re strong.” Jen gave Mal a kind smile before heading off, scanning her clipboard for her next activity. 

Mal took a few careful steps into the dark cabin, scanning the area. It was pretty standard, with a desk shoved in a corner covered in bandaids and medical records. There were a couple chairs sitting against the wall the door was fixed to. There were also three dividing curtains, allowing for three closed areas starting against the wall. The curtains could be drawn around the front as well, to allow total seclusion. Only one was shut, and Mal knew who was in there.

She made a beeline towards that curtain, carefully drawing it back as to not make a lot of noise. Her eyes fell upon the girl, deep in her sleep. She took a shaky breath, before fulling stepping in, closing the curtain behind her. Mal stared at her, her shirt was removed and her full upper body was wrapped in bandages, a few bled through but dry. She reached a careful hand to feel the bloodied ones, just to make sure they were dry. She shuddered at the feeling of the bandages, her mind running with all the worse case scenarios possible. She shook her head, moving her hand from Molly’s stomach to her hand.

She gripped her hand tightly, watching her chest move up and down slowly. She cried once again in the past day, bowing her head down. 

“I’m sorry Molly. I couldn’t protect you,” she whispered. “I didn’t even say anything when you told me.” 

“I love you Mal.”

Why hadn’t she said anything?

“I just lost my soulmate!”

How would she know?

I lost my other half.

Mal choked out a sob. She gave up trying to prove herself wrong. Who knew if soulmates were real? Mal felt like she did. She looked at the girl clinging to life and muttered a few words from her mouth.

“I love you too Molly.”

~

Molly didn’t want to wake up. She was tired. She didn’t realize what happened was real. 

Her first hint was the damp feeling against her stomach, and her wetness on her hand. 

The second was sobbing.

The third was that her whole body hurt like hell.

She forced an eye open, unable to recognize her surroundings. The curtains were unfamiliar, so was the bed. She drew in a sharp, and painful breath when she saw her body. 

“Why do I look like a mummy?” She thought aloud. There was a pause in the crying, followed by a sniffle. 

“Molly?”

She turned to look at the voice, familiar but far away. Her vision was fuzzy, but as it slowly cleared she recognized the girl clad in flannel. 

Everything came rushing back at once.

The feeling that something was wrong, that voice in her head telling her what to do, and her disobedience. That disobedience had saved Mal’s life, but at the cost of what? 

Molly didn’t know. All she knew was that it was worth it. Anything was worth it for her. Even the world, the camp; and Molly’s life.

She gave a painful smile. 

“Hey, Mal.” At the mention of her name, Mal broke out in a wide grin. Tears that had temporarily paused ran again, but instead of sadness, they were of happiness. She hugged Molly tightly, but carefully, as to not hurt her.

“I thought I lost you, Molly.” She said, pressing her forehead against hers as Jo had to April the night before. “Never do that again.”

Molly laughed brightly through her pain.

“I don’t ever intend to.”

This was a request for someone I’m not sure if it’s okay with to tag, but if you got a request send it, I’d love to do it.

[indulgnces]

hi howdy hello!! i go by jess and this is my first time playing my sweet bb girl, so i’m pumped! more about my girl audrey below the cut!

❛  ( SARAH JEFFERY )  ◈  dude, shut up ! AUDREY ROSE from DESCENDANTS is on screen. their fans swear they’re just DETERMINED & OUTGOING, but we’ve all seen their JEALOUS & STUBBORN side ! according to TRUMAN WIKIA, they’re TWENTY-ONE years old, BISEXUAL, & identify as CISFEMALE ( SHE/HER ). they’re currently a STUDENT & are RELIEVED about life in truman. luckily they have HER DIARY & HER SONGBIRD NECKLACE with them & can visit THE FAIRY COTTAGE whenever they want. penned by JESS.

sooooooooo confession: i’ve never watched a descendants movie from start to finish 😬 I know! crazy considering I’m playing a character from the movies, but like, have you guys ever seen a character and just be like wOW, that is My Type of character? cause that’s what happened with audrey. descendants 3 came out and was trending, and I checked the tag and like was 👀👀👀 to audrey to the point that I watched queen of mean and got HOOKED. caught a replay of the movie and watched all the audrey parts while skipping over the rest. since then I’ve been in love with my girl and she’s been on my mind so much that I’m returning to rp after a small break to play my girl. In preparation I skimmed through descendants 1 & 3, and adurey’s youtube short story so I’m good to GO. 

CANON LIFE

“A lifetime of plans, gone. Our family status, gone. Audrey, you were supposed to be his Queen, and you let him slip through your fingers. Your mother could hold onto a prince in her sleep.” 

daughter of sleeping beauty and prince phillip, princess audrey has been groomed since she was a child by her grandmother to become the queen of auradon. she’d been friends with prince ben since she was a child, and was expected to marry him when she got older.

grew up used to the finer things of life, and as such, audrey was a bit self-absorbed and spoiled. became the most popular girl in school due to her status and beauty. was cheer captain. finally became romantically involved with ben at some point in high school. life was going exactly as planned. 

then ben decided to invite 4 villain kids (vks) from the isle of the lost to auradon, and everything went to shit. the stark black and white, good vs. evil mentality was deeply ingrained in audrey’s psyche, so she was very much AGAINST the idea of any isle kids coming over. convinced the vks were up to no good, she never warmed up to the them, and bullied them (mostly mal) at times. and you know what? she was RIGHT

mal used a love potion to steal her boyfriend, who then humiliated audrey by serenading mal during a tourney match, where audrey was cheering at. no one gave two shits though?? or suspected foul play at all?? they just cheered and were like “ah, cool! our soon-to-be-king has suddenly declared his love for this new vk who’s only been here for a few days! how awesome and totally natural !! “

audrey was still plenty popular by the end of the movie, but her fairy godmothers decided to treat adurey to a spa trip, which turned into an extended trip that required her needing summer school bc she missed so much school (aka why she was absent for descendants 2)

by the time audrey came back in descendants 3, everyone was ALL up mal’s ass crack. ben proposed to mal in front of everyone, serenading her with the SAME song he did in the first movie when he ceremoniously proclaimed his love for mal while simultaneously dumping audrey, and everyone cheered AGAIN for their union. damn thing broke audrey’s whole ass heart. on top of that, her grandmother chastised audrey for her failures in securing ben and basically failing the family. 

she also lost her status come d3??? like, at the end of d1, she was still cool as fuck. but come d3 girl is not even being invited to her friend’s birthday parties anymore?? she has no friends?? no one gives two shits about how she must be dealing with everything? and wow does that not help things at all.

that night, in her loneliness and anger, audrey decided to steal the queen’s crown from the artifacts museum. it was a petty thing. she was hurt, and just did NOT want to see the crown she’d envisioned as her own for all her life be placed on mal’s head. she didn’t have a goal beyond taking the crown. however, when she went to the museum, maleficent’s scepter sensed audrey’s emotions and desires for revenge, and revealed itself to her. it’s glow lured audrey to it, fed into her emotions, and bing bang boom, audrey became the ultra fabulous QUEEN OF MEAN 

under the scepter's influence, she put half of auradon under a sleeping spell, the other half she turned to stone, then she made ben a beast after he rejected her, and made mal an ugly old hag. she was foiled at the end by mal, and ended up falling under a sleeping curse as a result. with no True Love’s Kiss to awaken her (rip), the heroes ended up getting Hades to use his magic to wake her up.

at the end, she apologizes for her crimes & her emotions were finally acknowledged when mal and ben stepped up and apologized for their inconsiderate past actions to audrey (wELL, they never actually apologize?? they say ‘I owe you an apology” but both don’t like actually say sorry, and that’s 100% something audrey has noticed for sure). she celebrates at the end with everyone else when the barrier is brought down and is last seen dancing with harry hook 

POST CANON

totally headcanon that she’s still not 100% happy as she’s shown in the end while dancing around okay

she’s STILL lonely!! she STILL wants those apologies!! she’s STILL lost about what to do with her future now that her whole life plan has blown up in smokes. she’s HURT okay. her friends? abandoned her! ben? abandoned her! that one hurts the most bc after spotting that pic of audrey/ben as children together, I 100% hc that they have been best buds for years before falling into a relationship. and while it’s clear ben was not really ~in love~ with audrey ( i image they ended up getting together bc it was just Expected yknow?), audrey still had feelings for ben. even if it wasn’t true love (she def wasn’t In Love tho she thought she was), she did still love ben. he was her best friend, and the fact that he never came around to apologize to her for humiliating her the way he did after the love spell broke HURT. 

also hc that she had to take a remedial goodness class following her stunt 

the ending given to her is life a brief showing of her and harry hook smiling at each other all soft like before dancing, which like, i’m game for, but in terms of her actual future, audrey was trying to figure out just how to do life moving forward following everything

TRUMAN

“Tell me it was all a bad dream.”

yeah so I said audrey was relieved about her life in truman? 100000% true!

her life was incredibly sad and lonely before, so convincing her that all that shit was all just a bad dream was an incredibly easy thing to do for the descendants actors okay (im sad for her bc of this tbh)

her life as she knows it: she still comes from a family of high status and money. not technically a princess, but she sure does act like one. believes she was born and raised in truman, but was sent to boarding school at auradon prep since she was a child, where she thrived and grew into a typical Popular Girl (head of cheer team/one of the most beautiful girls), before returning to truman after graduating. basically she believes she had the same perfect life she had before in canon, minus the vks, ben, and the whole fairy tale/royalty stuff (basically everything that ruined that perfect life).

all that other extra stuff, including going all queen of mean and losing ben and being drop kicked by literally everyone, is just POOF, fuzzy memories, bad vivid horror story nightmares! every now and then she’ll witness an engagement, or spot a serenade, and it’ll trigger an overwhelming sense of sadness, but for the most part, she’s content putting her life behind her. her new life is a much happier one. that could totally change once she starts encountering people from her past life again.

only really recognizes her family members as family members, and maybe recognizes some past auradon friends (maybe chad charming as her ex since he’s the only one who didn’t totally abandon her rip)

since “returning” to truman, she’s entered university on the island. she wasn’t sure where she was going with life, but she knew she’s always been really good at drawing and really good at event planning. so in uni, she decided to keep her artistic talents as a hobby and pursue a career in event planning. in pursuit of this, she’s a senior at college, majoring in hospitality management.

PERSONALITY

positive: determined, headstrong, outgoing, self-assured, polite, moral, dedicated 

negative: jealous, stubborn, demanding, bossy, petty, close-minded, seemingly mean (tho she doesn’t consider herself mean, okay? she just can come off as mean/rude)

CANON CONNECTIONS

ben & mal: need them both bc they are the ones who hurt her the most so i’d loooooove to play out these dynamics in truman!! they’d be the most Triggering faces for her 

jay & harry & chad & uma: underrated audrey ships i’d love to play out bc literally crumbs are given to the majority of these dynamics, and so I want to just...explore them?? three of these 4 are vks and 2 of those 3 are people audrey actively pursued in some sort of ~connection~ at the end of the movies when the Couples got together, and she did that even tho she is very Moral and has confusing feelings about vks, and i just wanna know more!! 

TRUMAN CONNECTIONS

yeah this is getting long, so I’m planning on posting a whole separate post in the truman plot tag for these wanted connections! 

and yeah! that’s everything on my girl! if you’ve made it this far, you’re the best my dudes!! I’m gonna be on mobile for a good portion of the day before coming on at night, but if you’d like to do any kind of plotting with my girl, just go ahead and hit that like button, and I’ll slide in y’alls dms! ♥

[lemon-writings]

Playlist: Zamsel

This playlist is for my son character Zach Amsel (Zamsel) from my book WADAA. He’s one of the few characters that gets their own playlist, especially in WADAA. It’s difficult to give characters like Kam playlists, but it’s easy to curate a collection of songs for Zamsel. 

He’s a relatively sad guy, but it’s fair, all things considered. Poor guy has some severe anxiety and a toxic relationship with his girlfriend, Chai. A lot of the songs are New Medicine, which I think of as Chai’s band. It’s also one of the gosh dang saddest playlists I’ve made within the past couple years. Like, wow, buddy. You’re really sad. I wonder who did that to you.

This playlist is continuously growing, so I’ll probably update it from time to time. 

Bad Habit - Ben Platt

You always said that I'd come back to you again / 'Cause everybody needs a friend, it's true / Someone to quiet the voices in my head / Make 'em sing to me instead, it's you

Hate to say that I love you / Hate to say that I need you / Hate to say that I want you / But I do

You make me feel like I'm floatin' off the ground / Above this little town, you do / Look at me smile with tears in my eyes / I love the way you lie, I do

Like A Rose - New Medicine

You better pray she took her morning medication / Or you might have to pick her up at the police station / 'Cause if there's trouble in this town, you know she's gonna find it / She's like the devil in a short skirt but I don't mind it / Everybody thinks I'm crazy, but they don't even know

She got jagged edges and a dirty mouth, what a lady / And she got everything that I don't wanna live without / She's kinda like a rose / She's kinda like a rose / She's kinda like a rose and you might wanna run / 'Cuz even when she's cold, she's burnin' like the sun / The bitch is rock n roll, and let me tell you, son / Don't care if you don't like her / I love her, I love her

Broken Girl - New Medicine

I wish I didn't know you, I wish I didn't care / I shoulda known that we were never going anywhere / I shoulda lied a little, I shoulda cheated too / I guess you only want to love someone who hurts you

Yeah, you're always calling me at 3:00 A.M / Drunk and lonely, here we go again

Hey, you're begging me to stay / And know just what to say / I gotta get away, you're just a broken girl / Oh, your body's saying "go", you're naked on the floor / Don't love me anymore, you're just another broken girl

I wish that I could fix you, I know I never could / Maybe you're just afraid of anything that's any good / You say you think about me, but you see other guys / Sometimes I guess I feel like loving you is suicide / Still there's somethin' I just can't resist / I guess that's how it always comes to this

Dead Love Song - New Medicine

I didn't wanna break you down / I sacrificed myself, my conscious wouldn't let me out / Oh, there's the cage I'm in / Poison dropping on my skin / Goodbye's hanging on my tongue / And I know I'll die if I don't run

I only got one thing on my mind / Nothing's gonna stop me, not this time / Wasted way too long, living in the lines of a dead love song / I've been afraid to let you know / I've been afraid to let you go, I've been afraid 

Heart With Your Name On It - New Medicine

Goddamn, you treat me like shit / But I keep coming back for more / I'm so over it, but I just can't run / 'Cause just when I think I've had enough of your suicidal love / Well, you always suck me in

It's like the more fucked up shit you do, the more I'm into you / And I just can't say goodbye

Breaking up was my idea, so why do I feel so low? / You know that I tried like hell to forget you / I'm lying in someone else's bed, but you're all up in my head / Like there's no escaping you 

Boy Like Me - New Medicine 

She's the only girl I see / She don't wanna be with a boy like me 

She's the kinda girl that you can never please / She don't even really wanna talk to me 

I don't wanna live another day like this / In a world where she don't even know that I exist 

Self Esteem - The Offspring

But she came over, I lost my nerve / I took her back and made her dessert / Now I know I'm being used / That's okay, man, 'cause I like the abuse / I know she's playing with me / That's okay 'cause I've got no self-esteem

When she's saying, oh, that I'm like a disease / Then I wonder how much more I can spend / Well, I guess I should stick up for myself / But I really think it's better this way / The more you suffer / The more it shows you really care / Right? Yeah, yeah, yeah

Late at night, she knocks on my door / She's drunk again and looking to score / Now I know I should say no / But it's kind of hard when she's ready to go / I may be dumb, but I'm not a dweeb / I'm just a sucker with no self-esteem 

Sex in the City - Hobo Johnson

Sex in the city / Probably feels really really nice / With hands placed on faces and twinkles in their eyes / Sex in the city / Probably looks really really great with / A girl that's like a ten and a guy that's 'bout an eight / Sex in the city / Sounds like it takes place on stage / Both moaning in key while Marvin Gaye sings / Sex in the city / Candles smell like great jobs and promising careers / My candles smell like fear my roommates may hear

I have really bad b-acne / It looks like the gosh-dang night sky / And I promise I'm gonna get it taken care of

Peach Scone - Hobo Johnson

And I love the thought of being with you / Or maybe it’s the thought of not being so alone! / Hey, the second one’s way sadder than the first one / But I don’t know

Shit, I love being—I love being loved, but / Don't like crying on the phone

And if you find someone who loves you for who you are / Keep loving 'em, man / 'Cause that shit happens like, once in a lifetime, y'know? / And who am I to get in the way of someone living their lifetime, Y'know?

House of Gold - Twenty One Pilots

She asked me, "Son, when I grow old / Will you buy me a house of gold / And when your father turns to stone / Will you take care of me?" / I will make you queen of everything you see / I'll put you on the map / I'll cure you of disease

Let's say we up and left this town  / And turned our future upside down / We'll make pretend that you and me / Lived ever after happily

And since we know that dreams are dead / And life turns plans up on their head / I will plan to be a bum / So I just might become someone

Twin Size Mattress - The Front Bottoms

It’s no big surprise you turned out this way / When they closed their eyes and prayed you would change / And they cut your hair, and sent you away / You stopped by my house the night you escaped / With tears in my eyes, I begged you to stay / You said “Hey man, I love you, but no fucking way”

This is for the lake that me and my friends swim in / Naked and dumb on a drunken night / And it should've felt good, but I could hear the Jaws theme song / On repeat in the back of my mind / Make sure you kiss your knuckles before you punch me in the face / There are lessons to be learned / Consequences for all the stupid things I say / And it is no big surprise you turned out this way / The spark in your eyes, the look on your face, I will not be brave

She hopes I’m cursed forever / To sleep on a twin-sized mattress / In somebody’s attic or basement my whole life / Never graduating up in size to add another / And my nightmares will have nightmares every night / Oh, every night, every night

Relapse - Divided By Friday 

I don’t wanna be somebody falling into relapse / Every time I see that smile again / I just think of when you said “I love you / But I don’t think I can be the one.” 

Did you forget that we said “I’m never gonna leave you / Always gonna keep you right here next to me?” / So why am I the only one; the lonely part of “we?”

Colors - Halsey

You were red, and you liked me because I was blue / But you touched me, and suddenly I was a lilac sky / Then you decided purple just wasn't for you

Ease My Mind - Ben Platt

Most days, I wake up with a pit in my chest / There are thoughts that I can't put to rest / There's a worry that I can't place / Most nights, I am restless and quiet won't come / So I lay there and wait for the sun / There's a trouble that won't show its face

Darling, only you can ease my mind / Help me leave these lonely thoughts behind / When they pull me under, and I can feel my sanity start to unwind / Darling, only you can ease my mind

Peach - The Front Bottoms

One day, you will find someone / Who will love you like you deserve / But tonight, I'm the only one left / And I'm betting it's a fact that you will never learn

You say I'm gonna miss you when you leave / And you are probably right

You say I should think before I talk / You say I shouldn't think about my life

Archive - Mal Blum

And so I spent the winter bundled up / Pretending I was sane / And giving up / The things I love the most / Because they felt like pain

And I lied to all my friends, said I was happy when I wasn't / And you lied to all yourselves / Said I could give you what you wanted / But it all feels so much bigger than / Some blame-filled, lonely break up 

[vernons-laugh-is-my-aesthet-blog]

Memeteen guide to Seventeen

S.coups: 

carats make fun of his stage name holding a couple s.coups of icecream and a S.cup of noodles 

chicc

the poor man between jeongjicheol

papa coups 

embarrasing dad

wings it at choreo sometimes

has 12 children 

wants to c h o k e jeonghan

the type of dad that would challenge his 5 yr old child to a game of soccer and then gets too competitive and swerves that bitch to get goals

 his smile and his smile alone gave one of Seventeen's stages a crap ton of views

say the name!

camel

piggy bank

beagle leader

“eyes look like 9:15″

eyelashes for ddaayyyysss

Everybody SCREAMM

fireworks are the only enemy

My EGG YOLK T-T

members rebel against him at times

someone save him

Jeonghan:

John-Oops I mean Jeonghan

Laying down is his preferred physical state

swindler

long hair majestic unicorn and short hair majestic prince. He majestic no matter what fam

"Joshua was the first one to approach me"

 toucher of asses 

shamelessly feeds off of members' love 24/7

Makes members have couple wallpaper and phone cases with him 

 "angel"

the mother of Seventeen

“Dino, nugu aegi?”

All members are under his spell

giraffe running

Jeonghan's warm cup of milk

sa-sa-say the name seventeen 

Doubts OFD pds

bitter smile of betrayal 

vernon crushed his balls once

athletic with no stamina

creator of the Carat mating call: *incoherent screaming*

Joshua:

Gentleman

fukn weeaboo

the b e s t freestyle rapper in Seventeen. Dont @ me

ded meme(?) "Jisoos Christ"

The 'normal one'-SIKE bitch

That poor waterbottle

When-one-of-the-members-wear-a-shirt-with-questionable-english-words-everyone-blames-me-lol  guy

I pledge allegence to the flag of the united states of amerca and to the re-

dRinK WaTeR

pin drop and worm master +uncle dance

pingpong vlive 

“EAT THIS” signature move

"over here"

The english teacher everyone wants and deserves 

white cap

Chicken can heal the heart

L.A motherfuckerss

piggy bank

"Ïm part of vocal unit too! T-T"

Jun

Heechul's reincarnated body that was too early bc he aint ded lol

chinaline

child actor 

nyeac nyeac 

logos are out to get him 

eyeroll king 

punny and awkward

king of china

404 lines not found

My I now

"Ice ice froze." (that crazy in love Wonwoo lyric) moments

sexy expression

convinced he is the number one visual 

shy vlives

proceeds to tell members to call him handsome in chinese

ofd positivity boy

Hoshi: 

naega hosh + pose

 What time is it? 10:10 bitches

‘ten hour ten minute’

 shinee’s biggest fanboy

 from soft 1 to hipthurst 100  real quick.

HAM HAM. HAMHAMHAMHAM

My name’s soonyoung call me soon

hamster cheeks

suffers with spicy food

beurora hurricane

Coco his chicken 

his love for the angsty teen makne 

"HEy MIDDLE" 

glitter face

pretty u first win cry face

Mounteen

kwon fire

 making dances out of things that inspire him; ex: crab, octopus, noodles, street lamp, backpack

kwon edward soonyoung 

refuses to be bottom visual 

rivalry with seungkwan and wonwoo 

claps like a child

KWON SOONYOUNG FIGHTING *wakes up* 'YYEEEEAAAHHH"

Grandma

Wonwoo:

lowkey highkey loves his own visuals 

beanie bro 

garden fairy 

voice so deep adele's rollin in it 

"life is hamburger"

cheese burger aegyo 

emo 

let him sing fam

fukn nerddd 

sick wonwoo days with the plushy

Tsundere™

make him an actor pls 

got hit in the balls with a ball one time 

nose crinkle 

specs 

lack of highfives

middle school’s dance machine

him vs. Hoshi in ofd japan

bag of luck

Woozi:

Smol bean that would kill for a single cornchip 

Reminds me of a old grandpa teddy bear idk lol 

Done with life, hates aegyo and human contact, but will accept it when he wants to

members mock his crying from pretty u first win every chance they get 

if he does anything out of character they tease him about it till no end tbh

Suga's son

his need to grab and hit people when he laughs

guitar is his greatest weapon

ccrriinnggeee & finger ccurrlll

producer-nim

 adore u is a funky pop song that has fun and fresh lyrics that match seventeen's age on top of an addictive melody 

members exposing his ass in project svt

Dk:

the actual sun

 built in speakers bc he loud as shit 

sacrifices his beautiful face to make people laugh

 smile that can cure all the worlds sickness

 stop eating cds

woojoos_daddy

‘come to daddy’ tee

horsemin MAL

pigeon

GRILLED PPPORRKK

 chicc

 pure and goes along with jokes the best 

heLL0 mY naMe Is LeE SeOkMIN my moTheR’S naMe Is

hightone rap

wat is basketball? 

do it from your heart 

Jeonghan's fool 

mosquito 

Happy birfthday broo

orange peel king

wow, unbeliebable  

Grandpa

Two-teen

Mingyu:

MingEW and all his sneezin

flowercap boi 

tol and clumsy

If Seventeen doesnt drop somethign, Mingyu certainly will 

actually very organized and neat 

Minghousewife 

was a cheeto for a split second

proud father of OG BongBong 

Mingyu sunbaenimmm

Seventeen cant live without their swiss army knife 

Akita sound

oh. my. god. Oho My GOD

‘Your name is bob’

Where Is Your Tag???

squeals 

"Seventeens official visual" 

oooo000OOO yEAh 

The8: 

got7 bambam taught him how to dab and he never looked back since

 thughao

IMMA

before: Yeah I'll have her home before 10 ^-^ 

          now: she'll spend a night at my house ;)

nunchuuk daddy

404 no lines found pt.2

now My I

his predebut pictures are  e p i c

side-eye king

arms for days

fashionista

rolled thin porkbelly hair

learns more korean to roast bitches

flipping is his preferred transportation 

dirty dirty jamjam ^-^ *svt flipps out in cringe* 

Kermit is his bitch

Seungkwan: 

fresh baked buns bebe

divaboo

 just put boo in any word and it gets 100 times better

supports AND hates aegyo

Beyonce who?

MCboo, talk talk talk. 

"Thomas the train" omg rip XD 

Vernon's number 1 fan

OHMYGOD JASMIN

cries in jeju accent

John?

Boonon, svts rapper 

Oh Laaaddiieesss~~ this is your story 

red 

haunted house screaming 

volleyball fanatic

 kimbap kidding? 

Crab walks away 

Son of Jeju 

fashTion 

'13th visual' (fuk nah)

Im the BEST quality 

Vernon:

child actor but never fukn talks about it

attempts vocal runs

looks confused most of the time  

iconic rap lines "pull up on you wacks with a mac fuly loaded", “i'm only seventeen i only got a few dollars” "Chili Chicken in the microwave"

fortune cookie hair 

headlines headlines ( HaJiMAaaaAa, dont mention smtm4)

his obsession with hotline bling

"speaks english, but forgets that one english word" (bilingual problems)

Person: h- 

          Vernon: I was born in america but moved to korea when I was five 

Kidney function is not a right its a privilege

woke af

His mom is my bias

teeth

bubble pop

*slightly lifts glasses* 'ding' 

sofia

Leonardo Dicaprio AND Leonardo Divinci

Dont take him fishing

stitch

Dat laugh tho

lotto

My favorite part of Seungkwan is-

Dino:

Michael Chanson

"Im growing!"

not Jeonghan's aegi

we will now forget mansae era duck ass hair

Diamond makne

“he’s going through puberty now”-Hoshi

a new born savage

Makne’s visual ranking

GloUp of the century

"michael jackson version" 

bitter smile 

loud laugh 

*runs over hoshi's toes with scooter* 

*scrolls through phone and half-heartedly says*  I love you.

[baddyxangel]

 I love The Darkling and think that he and Alina should be together. Baghra claims that he was just using her but I'm not convinced. So what do you think, does he have feelings for her or not?

I don't think he loves her... but I agree with Harmony that he's addicted to power and wants to have power over her. But then I ask myself, why her specifically? Is he attracted to her in some distorted, villainous way? But then why does he ignore her so often? And then I just don't know what to think anymore D=

I think that the evidence in the book shows that he does really like her, i believe that they belong together because of the darkness in his heart can be changed with her light. I think he's afraid of becoming weak as he said, so he ignored her. "the problem with wanting is that it makes us weak" During the book he always clenched his hands whenever Alina even mentioned Mal. 

I think you have to look at Leigh as a writer, and the fact that she loves complex villains and has even said on Twitter that the Darkling isn't evil. I've also read enough books to recognize types of characters. The Darkling is waaaay more complex than "I'm going to use this girl, I'm evil, I'm going to take over the world mwahaha." There's no doubt the Darkling's initial intentions were to use Alina. How many characters meet under bad intentions? lol A LOT. That doesn't mean those feelings don't change though; that's why there's character and relationship development. :P I think it's very telling that Leigh hasn't written in Darkling's POV and doesn't plan on it until AFTER Ruin and Rising. She doesn't want us to know what's in his head, which means what Alina thinks and her assumptions about him are probably false. I don't know if I'd say he loves her but he certainly isn't "only" using her.

Guy this post contains some spoilers. But it says why I think The Darkling likes Alina Guys The Darkling likes Alina! In 2cnd book (Kind of a spoiler but not really) There is a part on page 26 it says this: "Drink." More broth. I don't fight it now. I don't want to choke again. I fall back, let my lids drop, drifting away, too weak to struggle. A hand on my cheek. "Mal," I manage to croak. The hand is withdrawn. Nothingness (Credit to Leigh Bardugo) Anyways think; who's hand can that be? Mal's? Pshhh.... The Darkling would have control of the fjerdans and shu hans before mal would get to do that plus Mal would say something like: "Alina....." Or something else, or he might have been dragged away screaming and he wouldn't be able to with draw his hand the guards would drag him away. Sturmhound's? No he would wake her up and wouldn't make her to drink the broth. Ivan? Um..... no just no..... he wouldn't touch her like that. Only one who is left? If you guessed the darkling you guessed correctly! He would do something like that because he <3 her and how is he going to seduce her while she is half unconscious? So its not just seducing her people! Also the hand is withdrawn because she says "Mal," The Darkling would have felt burned and would have just withdrawn his hand! Also if you read the rest of siege and storm there will be other facts.... But sometimes he may seem to dislike her...... maybe that because he felt burned? Like seriously in first book he was cold because he just saw Mal and Alina kiss and have a very long and all 'bout love conversation of course he would be cold! then in 2cnd book she ran away from him with mal and he thought they were like doing couple stuff and stuff so when they entered the fold of course he would be cold! but then he ends up softening ^.^ SO he likes her people! Btw sorry if I spoiled anything for any1. Oh and btw I think this is what happened (In The Darklings view): 1.)She is kind of cute..... 2.)Well she is new to this and funny..... 3.) Hell with it im using her for all the grisha and for controlling the world but I like her! 4.) I will make my move on her! *KISS* 5.) She looked kind of seduced after that.... oh and Ivan saw that... oh boy I told him seducing here was the plan.... but I actually kind of like her.... *RUNS HAND THROUGH HAIR* 6.) Ik! This can come to my advantage! It will make controlling her easier but I also like her..... this is getting interesting 7.) *MAKES ANOTHER MOVE* Ivan, tell the fabrikators to make Alina's winter ball kefta black. 8.) *MAKES ANOTHER MOVE* Here come with me. After, can I come to your place? 9.) Uh wth am I doing? 10.) Oh boy she ran away from me.... My mom had something to do with it great, anyways I have to catch the stag in anyways+ I have a feeling she is going north after the stag because obviously that tracker is with her 11.) *JUST WITNESSES KISSING SCENE AND ULTRA LONG LOVE CONVERSATION* *GNAWS ON LIP TRYING NOT TO LOSE HIS CALM AND KILL THE TRACKER WITH HIS KNIFE AND TOO NOT SHOW HE HAS FEELINGS FOR ALINA TO EVERYONE ELSE THEN STAG COMES OUT OF BUSHES AND TREES. I SEE MAL SAYS ALINA LOOK, ALINA HESITATES KILLING THE STAG. SEES A CHANCE! COMES OUT OF HIDING AFTER SHOOTING THE STAG* Oh wow that was a wonderful and touching scene we witnessed alina....... but you know you should have listened to him; you should have killed the stag 12.) Oh boy I just enslaved Alina. Now I control her. Her heart will be mine if I kill the tracker on the fold tommorow. 13.)IVAN! CALL ALINA HERE! 14.) *ALINA COMES* You betrayed me........ *ALINA ASKS HIM TO BE MERCIFUL TO MAL* Merci? I can be merciful Alina. *GIVES THEM THE NIGHT* *ALINA JUMPS ON HIM SCREAMING AND SCRATCHING* *ALINA IS TAKEN AWAY* 15.) Tears come to his face but he doesn't let them spill the tears turn from sadness into anger...... 16.) *SEES ALINA RUN AWAY WITH MAL AND GAINS POWER* *STILL LOVES HER DEEP IN HIS HEART* 

I think the Darkling's love has to do with his personality. He may not be capable of love in the ordinary way, but he definitely intends on being with Alina one way or another. However its a bit twisted because really the romance is just a side benefit to the power he gets from her. Maybe in a way, she sees through him and into the good, which is why he likes her. She reminds him that evil, while a efficient way to accomplish things, isnt always what he should be doing...

I'm not quite sure about this. On one hand, he is obsessed with power and is only attracted to Alina because she "completes" him in a twisted way. On the other hand, a lot of his facial expressions and actions in the book seem to contradict his ulterior motives. My theory: he's respected and feared, so no one actually treats him like a person. Alina does. He of course wants Alina for himself so that he can use her power, but he's also developing deeper feelings for her, and the thought of falling for her is terrifying and confusing. That's why he reverts so quickly to a villain once Alina runs off and he catches her with Mal. I think he would have been somewhat more merciful had he not caught them together, but he's jealous (both out of pride and real hurt) and doesn't want her to think him weak.

I think a lot of people think the Darkling has to either A) want Alina ONLY for power or B) love/like her. When in reality, he can be both. He can want Alina for power AND develop feelings for her. Many characters seek another out for their own reasons (to use their power or whatever), only to end up falling for them genuinely. Happens all the time in books and movies. :P I'm not saying the Darkling doesn't want Alina for power, but he can want her for that AND for other reasons too.

I honestly think he wants to use Alina and ended up with a bit of a hate-crush/boner for Alina along the way. I'm not waxing romantic, but he definitely has a soft spot for her if he fell for the "my power is your power" bit.

It's no wonder the Darkling was so pissed when he was kissing her. He's torn. On one hand, he's lonely and I think he's jealous of Mal (or maybe he's jealous that Alina feels for Mal what he wants her to feel for him), but at the same time, he doesn't want to want her more than his own ambitions. He wants her but doesn't want to, maybe. I'd LOVE for Alina to end up on the throne with the Darkling at her side. The potential for this ending is epic.

It'd be a ruthless ending, not necessarily a happy one. honestly I have no idea where this is going to end. A very dark part of me at least wants her to fuck the darkling, because in no way are those feelings over. It's there. It's so there.

Hahahaha. It needs to happen, regardless of the ending. No doubt there will at least be an intense make out session. (Leigh said one of her favorite scenes is when the Darkling reveals his name, so I'm sure that scene is a deep one.)

I think he loves her as much as he's capable of, which could be a very limited way... You know, on account of all the evil. It's clear that he wants her badly and also that her mere existence has made him realize how lonely he feels. We're gradually seeing evidence of how his interest for Alina has evolved. In Shadow and Bone we see more than anything, the practical and physical aspects, namely world domination on the one hand and barely-able-to-control desire, on the other. In Storm and Siege, he's starting to know her and he wants her to relate to him, to realize how much they have in common. However, what really got to me is that he, in his creepy way, was there for her when she was lonely. Was this all innocent? No, we know there are so many ulterior motives for his apparition trick: undermining her, isolating her even more (from Mal especially), making out, etc But the fact remains that he would just be there because he wanted her company, as much as she wanted his. After all, it was her calling to him without knowing it. (Let's face it, by the time Alina gave up on changing anything in his bedroom -on day one-, we all knew she was just missing him badly, even if she didn't know it herself.) On the one hand, I think Alina's quest will change her completely, to the point where she will probably not be entirely human in the end. On the other hand, perhaps they'll be together just to keep one another in check, to keep the balance of whatever forces are at work, and because they literally compliment each other, being light and shadow. It can only be an eternity of fun... mostly.

You perfectly summed up my thoughts on all of this. I like the Darkling. A lot. He's sexy. And fun to pretend to be queen with. So the indulgent part of me ships him with Alina. 

I have my opinion both ways. The relationship between them is complicated. I think that the darkling kinda liked Alina. For her power and real love. But as Alina reveals his secrets in shadow and bone, you really start doubting if the darkling still has a thing for her. It's really complicated. The darkling is a sick and messed up person. It's funny how he keeps popping out of nowhere in the shadows surprising you. When Alina and Mal were on the run and popped out, they felt so startled. I think he was jealous of Mal. He probably would've gotten closer to Alina if Mal wasn't an obstacle. It's jealousy and he knows it. It's written all over his face. Dark and kinda evil.

I think he wanted her, but had no real emotion for her. He needed her power, so he was infatuated with her. I hope he ends up really loving her at some point though because I have the biggest obsession with The Darkling. I am so attracted to him, so I really hope he ends up doing some good and turning himself around

I think the real question is: why would the Darkling love Alina? (I don't say that to be mean, either. Just analyzing her character as a person.) I think the Darkling is drawn to the idea of another person being like him, as he's a very lonely and isolated creature. He longs for an equal or mate, so to say. Maybe he's loved in the past, but he outlives almost everyone so maybe he decided there was no point. (Until he found an equal) Regarding her personality, I think the Darkling's interest in her stems from how she surprises him, which doesn't happen often. She spits out whatever is on her mind, she catches him off guard, she thwarts him, etc. R&R just needs to hurry up so Leigh can talk about his character. She's pretty tight lipped, not wanting to give away the Darkling's true intentions. (Which to me is a big red flag that he isn't as evil as people seem to think)

I believe he loves her but has yet to reach a point where he can truly believe it himself. I'm fairly sure that he is right when he claims that he admires her power and that he never feared her. And that admiration had something more coming after. I do hope they end I end up together. He might be evil but he has reasons and he never acted as a whiny boyfriend as Mal did(well he did enslave Alina after seeing that kiss scene but anyway....)  I guess my favorite scene between the Darkling and Alina is at the end,the night before going back to the Fold. He calls her to his tent and I'm not sure why. He says she must have a lot to say and when she refuses to talk, he threatens her. As their conversation unfolds, it looks like he just wanted to have an argument with her... the "why-did-you-run-off-with-him" argument. In that moment, he behaves like someone in a relationship and I liked him. I don't know if that counts as whiny but it was a vulnerable side of him that we don't get to see often. To me that is the one scene where he reveals the most emotion: jealousy, longing and also pain... the desire to stop feeling whatever it is he's feeling for her. I wonder if he was drunk... 

In siege and storm though he does showing that he likes her. At the end however, in the chapel Alina nearly killed herself and the darkling when she grabbed hold of his power. And in siege and storm it shows that the darkling is jealous. He does also have feelings for her because in siege and storm why would he keep visiting her. When Alina asked him why won't you leave me alone, he said then I would be alone.

I honestly don't know how to answer this question because I still don't know what I believe lol I think we've seen glimpses here and there that he might have feelings for her but he usually comes across as so power hungry and ruthless that it really doesn't seem like he cares about anything but himself and his ambitions. I think part of him is enamored with her because she is the only other being in his entire life that is even remotely similar to him. And he hates that he feels that way, just like in Shadow and Bone when she felt anger when kissing him. He thinks it makes him weak. He said in Siege and Storm that he's lonely, maybe he seeks some sort of comfort in her? Maybe, maybe not. I think there can be valid arguments made for both sides but ultimately I think that it doesn't really matter if he loves her or not, because he will never love her more than he loves his own aspirations and goals. In other words, she will never be his number one priority. It depresses me really, because I love the Darkling. He is such a magnetic character and in some dark, twisted way I think they complete each other. I can't wait to see what happens in Ruin and Rising. I just hope he doesn't die :P

I totally ship Darklina/Alarkling. I do not think that he loves her or that she loves him. They do seem, to me, to be very attracted to each other. Sometimes I wonder if something bigger is going on because the Darkling and the Sun summoner seem to be sort of like Yin and Yang; they seem to complete each other and are two halves of a whole as well as wield power over one another.

I don't think it's love, but I feel like they're two halves of the whole, and because of that, they have an unbreakable bond. I totally agree with you. Find me weird but I think the Darkling and Alina are the perfect match for each other.

The Darkling is such a complex character that you really can't reduce his feelings about Alina to love vs. hate. Kind of like when she realizes that he wants her, but hates himself for wanting her, during their heated make-out session after the Winter Ball. Clearly, he needs her, but not just as a way of augmenting his powers. He needs her on a personal, intimate level, as the one being in the world who can truly, intimately, share his burdens, understand why his life is "rich in grief" and be a true partner to him. Alina's feelings for him are also tangled, and hardly straightforward. These are great books, and the Darkling is a fantastic character.

Just to clarify my comment above, I think the Darkling loves Alina, because she's the only one who can truly "get" him, with her potential to be as eternal as he is, with all that entails. But it's a love as complex as he is, not hearts-and-flowers, happy-ever-after like she could have with Mal, or even the kind of marriage-of-convenience-with-genuine-affection-that-could-ripen-into-love she could have with Nickolai. It;s complex, and twisted and dark, but it is love, not just obsession. Which is one of many reasons I freakin' adore these books.

Leigh mentioned that he did have strong feelings for her so i think he loves her, but i kind of have to agree with the obsession part, it seems he had his heart set on her being his consort from the whole "you were meant to be my balance" thing. Do any of you suppose he gave the whole "let's be just friends" thing consideration? And i do believe that Alina still had some, not a lot, of feeling left behind for him since he did understand her, when not many did.

I think he's more obsessed than in love with Alina. He's been alone for so long that the only other person who understands his eternity is his mother. So when Alina enters the story, he's a person who could be like him: live forever and make eternity less loney. Plus, she's meant to balance him out--the whole light and darkness thing. And she's the only one who could ever become his equal, albeit only if she has the amplifiers. I think this chance at a future not alone makes him possessive over Alina and we see this at the end of Shadow and Bone and a little bit in Siege and Storm. I don't think it's love, just an obsession with power mixed with desperation to not be alone and possessiveness to protect that.

Alright, after careful consideration and with the series fresh in my mind I have reached a conclusion. The Darkling loves Alina, is in love with the idea of being with her, but is not IN LOVE with her. The Darkling has existed for many centuries, life dull and boring, and has no one to love him, not even his mother. He is terrified of that, of the thought of being alone forever. Finally, he finds Alina, and his affections grew from the mere idea of using her for his own gain. He learns to want her, to crave her attention. At first this is successful and he realizes that once he controls Ravka, he will never have to be alone again. All of this comes crashing down once she leaves and returns to Mal, and the thought of her being with someone else, of being less than she is, and more importantly being alone again, angers him to the brink of breaking. This was a personal betrayal, and the Darkling spent the remainder of the series desperately trying to attain power and love from Alina, wanting nothing more, save the throne, than to have her as his own. When Alina loses her powers, he is so mournful, so distraught that he will forever be alone, leading his rampage. He believed that if Mal were dead, she would be his at last, no more fighting or obstacles stopping him. Yet he is condemned, and that is why he needed to be killed. He would've kept her alive, but only to suffer for his loss. When he is dying, I think that was the most happiness he has ever felt, that the one he loves, as much as he could love her, is there to mourn him. She is there to say his name and give him the hope that he was loved by her. The Darkling is an exceptionally written character and he loved Alina, not truly, but as much as he was possible.

If the Darkling was only using Alina for power, then he would have been completely done with her when she lost her powers, but the fact that he asked Alina to say his real name again when he was dying (which she also did when they were alone) proves he had some romantic feelings.

I just love the darkling so so much. I also think that no character can ever be completely evil. Because of his power of darkness he believes that he is a bad person and that his powers being dark must be used for evil intentions. When Alina comes along she shows him light, and begins to believe that he is not evil. Alina could've fixed the darkling who feels alone in his power and destined to be evil because of it. There relationship is so complex and interesting and I do think he loves her but this power almost forces his feelings in the opposite direction.

I see it as a way of the Darkling wanting to claim Alina for himself. As he had stated, he knew no one would understand Alina but him since they are alike in many ways. The Darkling probably didn't want to feel the isolation he had to experience for years until he finally met Alina which made him realize that he wouldn't have to face his own difficulties alone but with someone else alongside him.

I believe that he does, or at least feels akin to her, after all she is very similar to him: the dark pulls at the light and the light chases it away. I feel that he is drawn to her because they are so similar in nature. He was a child that was coveted, grew up alone (from what we know) and had made a very big name for himself, he is also one of a kind. We also have to consider that this is a man who has lived for a great many number of years alone, where the only person who has lived longer than him is his own mother, any chance at a relationship would end up with him outliving them. Where as if we look at Alina, a girl who is young, never really gotten the chance to live or love. She is almost to the point where her lack of powers, or lack of knowledge of them has left her dull and withered, but when she discovers them the world starts changing around her. She is put in the same position as Alexander was. Make a name for yourself or be a freak that could end up being hunted or worse. They're alienated and alienate together, and drawn to each other over that fact because no one else in the world can possibly understand what they have gone through, the choices they've made, and the sacrifices they've endured. If the Darkling doesn't love her, then he's certainly attached to her in that he knows that at the end of the day she is the only one that shares that experience. It's hard not to feel akin to that, or at least drawn towards it, and it's even harder to accept it as a loss.

I think at the beginning he loves Alina's power and the idea that finally, he is not alone. In the book, the power of the Darkling and Baghra is unique, even believed to be an abomination. Then here comes Alina, another Grisha with a power that only she has and as strong as the Darkling's power. The Darkling is somehow in love with the idea that he is not alone and thought that Alina was made for her. He strongly believes that Alina is his complement -- that he is the Yin and Alina is the Yang. It was because of that thinking that he was attracted to Alina. Then, as he get to know her more, I think he fell for her to the point that he is obsessed with her. In book 1, the Darkling displayed jealousy towards Mal (Alina kept on asking about Mal when they were in a coach going somewhere). In the last book, the Darkling did something that convinced me he loves Alina. He also ask Alina not to let him be alone. So there.

I don't think he quite loves her the way people would usually think of love. He's an incredibly lonely person and it seems that he has nothing else to do other than world domination, so I doubt he would even realize that he liked Alina. And I don't think he really does, because most of the attraction probably comes from seeing her as very similar to himself because she would probably outlive everyone else and he sees her as being lonely in perhaps a century. But in a twisted way, maybe he does love Alina. But I guess even if he does, he does not know how to express it. Most of the time, he comes off as a little creepy, and somewhat malicious. He blinded his own mother, for god's sake. If anything, I doubt he really has much capability for loving and I think being alone has numbed him somewhat from hurt or any emotion. Maybe at the start he only intended to use her, but I think it developed into an obsession, as many others have pointed out, and maybe it's love, but he doesn't know how to express it.

I definitely agree with Illyria, the Darkling was obsessed with the sun summoner (not Alina) and how perfect they would be together as polar opposites. Even so, he may have have had some very fragile real feelings for Alina. During his death scene, although he at first looks at her in disgust for losing her power, "you're nothing now." He also says her name and wipes tears from her cheek so....

I am fascinated with the Darkling character and hope there will be a series dedicated to his earlier life and how that shaped who he became and his mindset - complete with relationships. I read the Darkling prequel and that was a great little start but I'd like more - maybe even going back to how his mom grew up and how she survived without a mother and father and how that affected her and her son. How did he and Mal become amplifier? And why and when did the Darkling change from a relatively sweet and innocent kid with a protective mom to the person capable of such evil? I can't help but feel sorry for the Darkling and found myself rooting for a turnaround and happy ending for him. For some strange reason, I even found myself pulling for he and Arlina to get together. I think he was born a good person and had good intentions, but over 1,000 years (or however long it was), he became corrupted and twisted by his growing power and magic that was beyond his control and transgressions from others that he couldn't resolve or forgive. I like to think that he still had a little good left in him, and he partly was drawn to Arlina (whether conscious of it or not) for the the good and "balance" she could bring. He even referenced this "balance he needed" when talking with her once. I also think he was attracted to her through some higher power that he didn't necessarily understand nor like to start with but couldn't resist, although she turned on him time after time. He cared what she thought of him and it was clear that he was a lonely person and wanted an equal and companion. I think in the end he was almost as much dismayed with the loss of this eternal companion he saw as an equal as he was with the loss of power, but maybe that's just my "always rooting for the underdog" and giving someone "second chances" personality. I thought the writing and creativity and story plot were superb. I love a good love triangle too and we had a quadrangle in this one. Actually, I don't think the Prince felt for Arlina to the extent as did Mal and the Darkling. Mal loved her personality and goodness and the Darkling had a raw , powerful connection with her with the promise of an eternal companion. I thought the touch of the Darkling sharing his name with Arlina was so impactful and enlightening. You get the sense no one ever really knew or understood him, and that was what he might have craved more than anything else although he might not have realized this fully himself. While he didn't get the turnaround I was hoping for, I was at least glad to see he got a few tears from Arlina before he left this world.

"He loves her in a dark way. It’s just the kind of character he is." agreed and well said!

I do really think that in his own twisted way he really cares for her and loves her , maybe not somuch as a person but definitly the idea of her. I think he doesn't realy know what love is and how to care in the right way and thats why he acts to cruel but underneath it all he is just a lost boy and i do think he loves Alina because she is light.

I'm pretty confident that he actually likes Alina and there seem to be facts almost hidden by the book to support that. Sure he did try and control her but he didn't have to like her to do that. The darkling is a really complex villian here and do remember that he was actually raised by Baghra while she was still angry about Morozova. I think in the beginning in a kind of twisted way he wanted to help Ravka but while time passed he got to be obsessed with power.

"Some part of the Darkling that is still good is drawn to Alina, as a moth to a flame. But ultimately, they cannot be true partners without destroying the other." really like what you said, beautifully written. I would argue that he did like her in his own way, but he had to be cruel because of his plans for Ravka and the liberation/protection of Grisha. His ultimatum was much stronger and ancient than his developing feelings for Alina, and he has a complex psychology.

I think it's a mix of her/her power and neither of them are exactly able to figure it out. In the end, he let himself love her to a degree, I suppose, because he figured he was safe in the sense that she wouldn't die and leave him alone. In my opinion, he saw it fit to allow himself some sort of emotion because he didn't think he was gonna lose it, but R&R happened.

[theherothechampiontheinquisitor]

You’ve Got Mail - Chapter 1

Summary:: Belle French and Callan Gold meet in an AOL chatroom in the late 90′s and quickly bonded over email. Little do they know that in real life they are business rivals that completely hate each other. 

Originally published under melissabosquez, September 2014. Cover by Midstorm

Belle French held her breath and watched slyly from the curtain of her bedroom window for her long term live in boyfriend, Geoffrey, to exit the building on his way to work. The mornings were the favorite part of her day, especially when her boyfriend was gone so that she could indulge herself in one of her guilty pleasures; the internet. Geoffrey was a bit of a technophobe that was convinced that modern advancements were going to be the downfall of all mankind, beginning with the internet. Whenever he caught Belle online he would begin harping his conspiracy theories and it was easier for her just to wait until he was gone. He didn’t like what he couldn’t seem to understand, whereas Belle appreciated it for the marvel it was.

They had been in a relationship together for nearly five years now and it had become a thing of habit more than any kind of love or connection. She didn’t doubt that Geoffrey was any more interested in her than she was in him. He was convenient though. Comfortable.

She waited for a few more moments and finally he appeared out the front door of their apartment complex and was on his way down the street. With a squeal Belle dropped the curtain and ran the short distance from the window to her desk and opened up her portable computer with a grin. With a grin and the crack of her knuckles she double clicked the AOL icon and waited to be connected to the internet.

If Belle was perfectly honest with herself, it wasn’t exactly the wondrous depths of knowledge or endless possibilities that the internet entailed that excited her. Those were all good things and she loved to see how things progressed further but all she really was looking forward to was three little words. You’ve. Got. Mail. She smiled and spoke the words out loud in time with the computer voice, quickly clicking on the icon of a letter waiting in a mailbox. The page loaded and she felt her stomach tighten in anticipation as she was rewarded with an email from her favorite person, thespinner61.

Belle had met thespinner61 in an AOL chat room several months ago by accident. It was supposed to be a chat room to talk about common interests in books but turned out to be nothing but crude jokes and desperate attempts at cybersex. Belle had almost logged off after several sexist comments were directed towards her for not instantly responding to queries of her a/s/l. To be honest she had no idea what that even meant. Before she could respond thespinner61 came to her rescue and responded, “Go shake your ears.” Belle had laughed, catching the literary reference to Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare. It had very obviously flown over the head of her aggressor to which thespinner61 replied again, “The simplicity of your character makes you exquisitely incomprehensible to me,” and “If I were as ignorant as you Ben Rogers I wouldn’t let on.” Each quote taken from The Importance of Being Earnest and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn respectively. He had won her over instantly.

After that incident they had started sending each other emails back and forth for literal hours on end. They talked about all kinds of things. Literature, politics, art, film. Sometimes they even talked about things as simple as the weather and it never felt awkward or forced. The one thing they agreed to not speak of were things that were too personal. Names, ages, addresses and the like were never brought up. The only thing Belle knew was that he too lived in New York City and he had a long term girlfriend of his own.

They had been sending each other emails back and forth for five months now and the thrill of “you’ve got mail” had yet to wane.

To: bookworm1984

Subject: RE: RE: RE: RE: books you must read spinner!

My dearest bookworm. I write to you from the middle of Atlanta as all hell is breaking loose as General Sherman and his Army invade. Our lovely protagonists have just braved all peril to escape and now have shared a very personal smooch before Rhett has decided (rather foolishly and quite dramatically) to go back and join the war efforts, leaving our strong, but distressed damsel to her own devices as she plots to make it to Tara.

If you haven’t noticed, at your quite incessant behest, I am hundreds of pages into your favorite literary endeavour, Gone With The Wind. Not exactly my cup of tea so far but I cannot say I am entirely dissatisfied with the quality of writing. Margaret Mitchell has a very distinct style and I must say that I quite enjoy when she becomes caught up in her descriptions, especially of the surroundings. It’s enchanting in its own way. I will continue the ill-fated adventures of Scarlett O’Hara and Rhett Butler when I return home this evening.

Tell me, now that I have started your novel, will you finally stop your hemming and hawing and pick up the Hunter S. Thompson novel we were discussing? I promise, his political commentary is often surprising, always amusing and generally spot on in ways you would never imagine. I recommend Fear and Loathing On the Campaign Trail ‘72. Great introduction to his Gonzo journalism. I raise a glass of Wild Turkey to him for that one.

From the thumping noises coming from above, it would seem that the dragon has finally stirred. Best I get the coffee pot brewing before she scourges me with her hellfire.

One last note in regards to your work related problem. Tell the guy threatening your business to fuck off. Stand up for yourself. Do the brave thing and bravery shall follow my dear.

----Spinner

You’ve got mail!

Callan Gold turned back to look at his open laptop on the table. Bookworm was a fast writer this morning he thought with a smile. Normally she took longer to respond, indicating that she was pensive and probably didn’t agree with something that he had said, usually something over literature. The faster she responded, the better mood that she was in, the more excited she was to discuss things.

Turning back to the coffee mug he was fixing, he added three packets of sugar and some hazelnut creamer, stirring and finishing just in time to hand it off to it’s recipient, Mal, as she stumbled blindly through the swinging kitchen door. Mornings were not Mal’s high points of the day, whereas Callan had always been a bit of an early riser.

Mal graciously accepted the steaming cup and slinked into one of the chairs at the small breakfast table. She shoved Callan’s laptop back over to his side of the table as he rejoined her. He raised an eyebrow to her as she slurped the coffee down, not seeming to care how hot it was.

“I’m starting to believe you are really a dragon with your high tolerance to scorching coffee,” he smirked and resumed reading his newspaper as Mal made an incomprehensible grunt, finishing her first cup of coffee of the day and standing to fix another.

He and Mallory had been going through this same routine for decades. First as friends and then as more, though he would hesitate to call her his girlfriend. Their relationship wasn’t like that. They were more roommates. With benefits. They lived together, worked together, slept together but there was no real romantic love between them. They had been friends longer than Callan could even remember. One day not too long after his wife had left him and took their now estranged son with her, Mallory had shown up at his door and never left.

It was an arrangement that they both were happy with. Neither of them had to be alone anymore.

Mal took a drink out of her second cup of coffee and feeling decidedly more human, leaned back against the counter and eyed Callan though his face was obscured by the paper.

“So, do we have any small business owners lives to ruin today?” she asked, her voice still a bit raspy with sleep, a hand combing through her messy blonde hair.

“Only one today I’m afraid. That same damn little bookshop around the corner from where we are building. The owner is stubborn as a mule, refuses to sell. I sent her one last offer that I think may entice her. If not well, don’t say that we didn’t try to help her come six months down the road when her little shop is in the hole,” he answered back, folding the paper up in front of him.

Mal gave him a crooked smile. “There’s a reason that you are known more for your cruel business tactics than your shite coffee.”

“I’m a tea man, Mal. You’ve known this for 20 years. Perhaps if you could wake up at a normal time you could make your own coffee instead of being forced to have your first five cups of the day be my ‘shite’ brew.”

Mal laughed in response. That was something that would definitely never be happening. “Well, I’m off to shower, Cal, I’ll be ready to go quicker than you can say Maleficent!” she winked in regards to the nickname he had given her when he didn’t think she was listening.

Callan waited until he heard the tell tale screech of the shower faucet coming to life before he pulled his laptop in front of him and grinned at the unread message from bookworm1984.

To: thespinner61

Subject: RE: RE: RE: RE: RE: books you must read spinner!

The Hunter S. Thompson speech again? After seeing that Johnny Depp film based off of his book last year I must admit that I am still a bit sceptical to read any of his works. Though the film did have a few redeeming qualities, particularly the wave speech at the end as he discusses the death of the American dream. I will trust you on this just as you have trusted me on Margaret Mitchell.

Speaking of, I promise that you will quite enjoy Gone With the Wind if you will quit being so cynical. You are right though, MM’s imagery is one of my favorite things of the book. Aside from the strong female characters and the delightfully scandalous Captain Butler.

Perhaps I shall take a page from Scarlett O’ Hara’s book and stop being worried all of the time. I’ll think of my problems tomorrow and accomplish what I need to today. I suppose I should keep this passage in mind...

“A startling thought this, that a woman could handle business matters as well as or better than a man, a revolutionary thought to Scarlett who had been reared in the tradition that men were omniscient and women none too bright.”

I will take your advice to heart my friend. Do the brave thing and bravery will follow, right? Let you know how it turns out tonight.

Hope you have a great day. Beware the fire breathing dragon.

----bookworm

Callan closed his laptop instead of choosing to respond. He didn’t always consider himself a very sound advice giver but when bookworm1984  had told him she was having trouble with a pushy man trying to hurt her business (which she refused to reveal to him, as per their anonymous disclosure), he knew that she just needed a little bit of a push to stand up for herself. If there was one thing that he knew, it was business. He was glad he could at least inspire marginal confidence and hoped that it would all work out for her in the end.

As the CEO of a successful, multi-billion dollar chain of bookstores, Golden Books,  he would like to think that he knew a few things about chasing away a competitor. After today, if the owner of Fairytale Corner accepted his buy out offer, his new store would be the only bookstore around for miles.

Packing up his things he moved towards the staircase as he heard Mal beginning to make her way down. It always amazed him how quickly she could go from the monster that morning to the beautiful, intimidating business woman she now presented herself as.

“Intimidating as always, my dear,” he joked, taking her hand in his and kissing it.

“Why, Cal, you aren’t turning romantic on me now are you?” she raised a brow.

“Of course not, we have business to tend to. If Fairytale Corner decides not to sell then we will just have to put them out of business the old fashioned way,” he grinned, already calculating plans in his mind.

“What’s the owner’s name again? I will give them a call before lunch, see if I can push this little deal along any quicker.”

“I think it’s something french sounding,” he said as he pulled a few papers out of his briefcase. “Ah, yes. Ms. Belle French, owner since her mother passed away five years ago.”

Mal accepted the papers from Callan and gave him a quick kiss on the cheek. “Well, lets go kick this little girl out of the neighborhood then.”

Callan offered her a smile and then his arm as they made their way out the door.