#(no. o have not decided how they murder jake yet)

[gotnofucks]

(updated 26 October 2021)

MARVEL 

+++++

Steve Rogers

One-Shots

Choose :  Steve realizes he can’t let you go when you’re stuck in a safe house with him (dark!steve x reader)

Ball's In Your Court : Steve and Y/n have been playing games for years. But now that Rogers is acting like a little bitch, Y/n throws him a curve ball that will either make them or break them.

Pot of Gold : You went broke and bet your pussy.

Special Training : Steve takes special interest in your training (dark!Steve x Reader)

Nectar: Steve's waited a long time to have you again after the birth of your daughter. (soft!dark King Steve x Reader)

Their Poison : A billionaire, a sorcerer and a soldier walk into a bar. Their only poison of choice is you. (Dark!Steve x dark!Tony x dark!Stephen x reader)

The Airport Cliché : You make sure your love story has the necessary cliché to make it legit.

No One's Bitch: If Steve thought you'll bend to his will, he was dead wrong. This kitty has some claws (dark!Steve x Reader)

Bartered: You were his, despite wearing another man's ring on your hand. (Dark!Steve x Reader)

Renewing Vows: Steve reminds you of your promises as his wife. (Dark!Steve x Reader)

Colour Me Red: Your boss is chasing you like the proverbial hound of hell, and one vibrant shade of red is going to be his undoing, and yours.

Midnight Adventures: He thinks you’re trying to escape him, even though he’d made it clear who you belong to. Though the truth is far more innocuous than that. (soft!dark Steve x Reader)

Lover's Quarrel: You have the powers to resurrect if you’ve been murdered, and a jealous Steve Rogers indulges heavily in your abilities. He would not let you steal his best friend, that was for sure. So what, if your rivalry regularly caused fire and harm to public property? You just couldn’t let the other win.

The Journey to Daddy: Five times you call Steve 'daddy', and one time he asks you to.

In Mind and Heart : When your former supersoldier lover shows up at your door a year later, the last thing you expect him to do is ask for another fuck. You let in him because of friendship, and he refused to let you go because of love. This was not how it was supposed to go. (Soft!dark Steve x Reader)

Murder at the Whorehouse : When Sergeant Barnes assigns you a murder case at the brothel, you didn’t know you’d cross paths with Steve Rogers who was a bigger mystery than the case itself. (Ft. Stucky x Reader)

Series

At His Alter: You fall in love with a man already belonging to someone else. (Priest!Steve)

Condemned To Him: It’s hard to love someone you were meant to hate. But Steve doesn’t care, and he will have your love no matter how much you deny it. (soft!dark!Steve x Reader)

Happily Ever After : Steve won't take no for an answer (dark!Steve x Reader)

Happily Ever After-2 : You are welcomed in your new life, as the bride of Steve Rogers (dark!Steve x Reader)

Drabbles/Blurbs/Headcanons

Post Traumatic Fuck Fest (Steve Rogers)

Please Hurt me (Mob!Steve Rogers)

Peeping Tom (Steve Rogers)

+++++

Bucky Barnes

One-Shots

Madness, Thy name is Barnes: You and Bucky put on a show for the team

Night Ritual : You and Bucky have a night time ritual

Lovely Shade of Green : Jealousy is a very good look on your boyfriend

Fallen Together : Bucky and you spend a winter morning in each other's arms

Hide-And-Eat : Nothing stops Bucky when he's hungry for you.

Gluttony is a Sin : You and Bucky put a little something extra in your food and Sam learns Gluttony is a sin for a reason

Promised to Him : You return back to your town after years, hoping to start anew. But faces of the past reappear, set to fulfill promises you had made years ago. (dark!Biker!Bucky x Reader)

To the beat of sin : In the heat of music, you do something that makes Bucky mad. He reminds you of who you belong you, but you have a lesson for him too. (rockstar!Bucky x rockstar!reader)

The Second Coming: You were about to marry the love of your life. You were ready to be happy and determined to be a good wife. But then he returned. Your past came into your life to remind you that he would never let you go, and there is little you could do to stop him. (Royal AU) (dark!Bucky x Reader, ft. Peter Parker)

A Sack of Skin: You had thought burying him would have rid you of him. But he came back to haunt you in the worst way possible. (Dark! Ghost!Bucky x Reader, Possessed!Steve x Reader)

Drabbles/Blurbs/Headcanons

A love there is no cure for (WS Bucky)

+++++

Steve x Reader x Bucky

One-Shots

Going Against Nature : Steve and Bucky would change the laws of nature if that’s what would take to make you theirs. or: Steve and Bucky don’t like it when you smell like Peter Parker. (dark!alpha!Steve x reader, dark!alpha!Bucky x reader) A/B/O

Meet the Parents : You're daddies little girl and Peter wants to take you out (featuring Peter Parker)

Murder at the Whorehouse : When Sergeant Barnes assigns you a murder case at the brothel, you didn’t know you’d cross paths with Steve Rogers who was a bigger mystery than the case itself.

Series

•Master of His Own Fate: As far as Bucky knew, fate would not decide who you belong to. Very twisted dark soulmate AU.  (dark!Bucky x Reader, dark!Steve x Reader)

Master of His Own Fate-2

•Their Surrogate : When Steve and Bucky ask you to be the surrogate mother for their child, you couldn’t say no. (dark!Steve x Reader, dark!Bucky x Reader)

Their Surrogate - 2 Their Surrogate-3 (completed)

Drabbles/Blurbs/Headcanons

Bound and Blindfolded (Stucky x Reader)

+++++

Stephen Strange

Congruence :  Stephen and Loki want you. You are confused. Wong is an angsty person. (featuring Loki)

Their Poison : A billionaire, a sorcerer and a soldier walk into a bar. Their only poison of choice is you. (Dark!Steve x dark!Tony x dark!Stephen x reader)

+++++

Loki

Congruence :  Stephen and Loki want you. You are confused. Wong is an angsty person. (featuring Stephen Strange)

+++++

Tony Stark

Series

•My Little Girl:  Prince Tony hunts you on the royal hunting trip (dark!Tony Stark x reader)

My Little Girl - 2:  Prince Tony has taken you, but keeping you proves more difficult that he imagined. (dark!Tony Stark x reader, slight dark!Steve x reader)

My Little Girl-3

One-Shots

Their Poison : A billionaire, a sorcerer and a soldier walk into a bar. Their only poison of choice is you. (Dark!Steve x dark!Tony x dark!Stephen x reader)

+++++

Peter Parker

Protected : How were you to know who's a monster, who's a savior when they all hide behind a mask (dark!Peter x reader)

Meet the Parents : You're daddies little girl and Peter wants to take you out (featuring Stucky)

+++++

SamBucky

Parts of Whole: Steve would see his OTP's ship sail, even from across the grave (ft. Steve Rogers)

Sam Wilson

To Sin in Love: You're forced to choose between the man who owns your heart and the one who owns your soul. (Ft. Lucifer)

RANSOM DRYSDALE

One-Shots

One Day :  Ransom meets sub!reader but she won’t kneel for him

Thirty One Days : Ransom and you are on a month-long challenge. Who will win and what are the stakes?

The Unreformed Rake: Ransom Drysdale is a notorious rake, but he seems to have taken a shine to you. When he plans to make you his, nothing would stand in his way. No is not a word he understands. (Soft!dark Ransom x Reader)

The Fated Mate: Ransom always knew he’d be your alpha. Despite you not presenting yet, he just knew you were meant to be his. No matter how much you ran, you always found him waiting for you at the end of the line. They said it was fated, and sometimes fate was a bitch. (A/B/O)

Sleeping Beauty: He waits for sleep to claim you, so that he can do the same later (dark!Ransom Drysdale x Reader) Kinktober Day 1

Drabbles/Blurbs/Headcanons

Breeding Kink + Housewife Kink w/Ransom

ANDY BARBER

One-Shots

Golden Cage :  You asked Andy to take your case and he asked for you to give yourself to him as payment.  (soft!dark!Andy Barber x Reader)

Trespassing : You trespass on forbidden land, catching the eye of the creature that dwells within. (dark!demon!Andy Barber x Reader)

No Judgements: An Omega in heat is never fit to make a fair judgement, especially not when her delicious meat of an Alpha is concerned. (A/B/O)

His Responsibility : When you're pregnant and scared, Andy decides he will take the responsibility, whether you want it or not. (dark!Andy x reader)

A Man's World: To advance in a man’s world, you must allow one to own you. He promises you success, as long as you give yourself to him. (soft!dark!Andy Barber x Reader)

LEE BODECKER

One-Shots

Sweet Tooth : Sheriff, you and his sweet tooth

The Claiming of the Sheriff: You wanted him, he wanted you. But he was too honourable and you were too greedy. So you made the choice for both of you. (dadsbestfriend!Lee x soft!dark Reader)

Series

•Sell My Soul :  You cut a deal with the Sheriff to save your brother (dark!Lee Bodecker x Reader)

Sell My Soul -2 :  Your husbands finds a secret you’ve been keeping and he is not happy.  (dark!Lee Bodecker x Reader)

Sell My Soul - 3 : Last part to the series (soft!dark!Lee Bodecker x Reader)

Drabbles Masterlist

SHERLOCK HOLMES

One-Shots

What's Your Escape : Sherlock could never resist a mystery, especially not one as deliciously wrapped as you (dark!Sherlock Holmes x reader)

Death by Pleasure : Death by Pleasure isn't a thing. Is it? (Dark!Sherlock Holmes x Reader)

Drabbles/Blurbs/Headcanons

A worthy throne (Sherlock Holmes)

CHRIS EVANS

One-Shots

Loving Dodger : Your journey of overcoming your fear of dogs to loving Dodger.

Muse Music : Chris plays for you

Chemical Romance: Chris won't have you running away from him. You're his. He owns your heart, and now he'll own all of you.

AUGUST WALKER

One-Shots

Compromise: Your surrender to him would ensure the safety of the world (dark!August Walker x Reader)

Prometheus: You disappoint August and must make up for it

Drabbles/Blurbs/Headcanons

Pluto is not a Planet (Hades! August Walker)

LUCIFER

To Sin in Love: You're forced to choose between the man who owns your heart and the one who owns your soul. (Ft. Sam Wilson)

JAKE JENSEN

At the Dinner Table: Request: How about Jake Jensen meeting the reader's parents for the first time and since he's an adorkable idiot, chaos ensues?

Drabbles/Headcanons/Blurbs (Miscellaneous/Multi-characters and fandoms)

When you feel ugly and the boys won't have it (BB, SR, LB, TS, RD, LL, SH)

When Reader is tall and slim and not curvy (SR, BB, RD, LB, AB)

Dick Fingers (very weird ask)

Detention (Severus Snape hc)

Remedial Potions (dark! Severus Snape)

Does your mother know (Hook)

When Reader has anorexia and body image issues (BB, LB, LL)

BODY POSITIVITY CHALLENGE

[acehoons]

drunken confessions with jake . . !

genre: fluff pairings: jake x gn!s/o warnings: none requested: yes

a/n: the minor members are absent for this one, it makes me uncomfy to think about them participating in underaged drinking, so i hope you don't mind

you were invited to a party by your friends during the weekend

you weren't the party-going type, but you also weren't the type to say no to an invitation when you had no other particular plans

you and your friends were already on your way to the party when you found out that it was being hosted by park jay

cue instant panic

the rest are under the cut.

jay was well-known for throwing the best parties in town

but that wasn't the reason why you were panicking

it was because you knew that if jay was hosting, then his friends would definitely be there

including the one and only sim jake

to say that you had a crush on him was an understatement

you had known him all throughout highschool

you weren't extremely close, but you guys often exchanged "hello"s in your school's hallways whenever you guys bump into each other

and liking him wasn't difficult

jake was the epitome of a model student

had high grades, was an athlete, even part of the school government

he was one of those perfect male leads in the kdramas you watch

which is the exact reason why he makes you nervous

he was too perfect and you were just.. well, you.

it was too late to back down from the invite so you gritted your teeth and forced yourself to enter jay's house with your friends

fortunately, jake was missing on the first half of the party, which gave you enough time to actually enjoy yourself

you danced with your friends, drank a little and even played a couple rounds of beer pong with jay's friends, heeseung and sunghoon

a few hours into the party, they decided to play a game

and you were starting to feel a little tipsy

just a little though; you were still pretty aware of your surroundings

but everyone else seemed drunk

except one, and it was jake

somehow, despite being there for a good 2 hours, you had only seen jake now

maybe he arrived late, because he was the only one in his friend group who wasn't drunk yet

you all sat in a circle in the living room, and heeseung was passing shot glasses to everyone

"what're we playing again...?" one of your friends asked

"never have i ever!" sunghoon shouted from across you. "we take turns saying something we've never done before, and everyone else has to take a shot if they've done it."

jay began pouring alcohol in everyone's glasses, and you sat in silence as the game started, trying to avoid looking at jake in fear of getting caught staring

the game went on smoothly, there had been a total of five rounds already, and you had only drank twice.

but since you were already tipsy, you were started to get a little bit more intoxicated as the game progressed

then came one of sunghoon's turns

he thought for a few seconds, eyelids drooping a little with how drunk he was, "oh, oh i have one! never have i ever liked someone from this circle!"

a chorus of "ooh"s were emitted from all of the players

you looked at everyone and no one was making a move to grab their shotglasses

you looked at jake, and he was practically in the predicament as you

looking at everyone, unsure if he should pick up his glass

feeling a rush of bravery, probably from the alcohol, you grabbed your shotglass and downed the vodka in one go

everyone started whooping, cheering you on, but before you could process anything, jake reached for his shotglass and down his vodka as well

everyone started shouting, eyeing the two of you

fortunately everyone was too drunk to question you about your sudden silent confession

and the game went on, with all of you emptying almost four bottles of vodka

the party was nearing it's end, and all of your friends were too drunk to drive

but you had to go home or else your mother was going to murder you

so you just decided to walk

you weren't that drunk anyway, and you were pretty sure you could handle yourself

but someone didn't agree with that

"i'll walk you home." you turned around and saw jake in all of his sober glory, grabbing his jacket

"n-no it's fine, i can go home by myself." you tried to say as you reached for your own coat

"no buts. it's late, and your drunk, i'll take you home." he said in an authoritative tone, leaving no room for argument

"'m not drunk.." you defended, following him out of the house, staggering into the sidewalk

you felt him hold you by the waist, helping you walk "you can barely keep yourself up. are you sure you aren't drunk?"

"'m not!" you stopped in the middle of the sidewalk to prove your point. "see???"

jake merely laughed at you

both of you resumed walking

the alcohol was starting to sink affect you slowly

you were barely walking in a straight line

and with the addition of the nighttime darkness, you could barely see anything

jake had to hold you up by your arm to keep you steady

to top it off, you had began rambling, giggling to yourself as you talked to jake

"look! s'a frog.." you said, pointing to a frog by the grass, crouching down to greet it. "hi froggiee..."

jake, amused at seeing you like this, laughed. "let's go, y/n"

due to your alcohol-addled brain, you never noticed jake having his arm wrapped around your waist, keeping you close as to not let you astray

your eyes were beginning to droop, feeling too exhausted and drunk to walk

noticing your plight, jake picked you up, and started carrying you all the way to your house, bridal style

you merely hummed, snuggling up to his chest

coerced by all the vodka, you called out to the man carrying you, "jake...?

"yes?" he looked down at you

"rem'mber earlier, when we.. when we took a shot.. during the game?"

his eyebrows scrunched, before finally remember what you were pertaining to

"yeah, what about it?

"t'was you!" you yelled, "i like you.. like, a lot."

jake stopped in his tracks for a second, "oh," before adjusting his hold on you

then, he started laughing

"why you laughing..?" you pouted

"because i like you too." he said

you were too drunk to understand the implications of what he said, but you replied anyway, "oh, thats good"

as if on cue, the both of you arrived on your doorstep. jake rung the bell before putting you down on the ground

your roommate opened the door and helped take you off of jake's hands

but before the door closed, jake called out for you, "y/n?"

you replied, still shitfaced drunk "yeah..?"

"i'll call you." then he faced your roommate. "tell them i'll call."

your roommate nodded, before shutting the door

"who was that?" you asked your roommate, eyes practically closed

"nobody, y/n." they said, helping you get to your room. "absolutely nobody"

© acehoons 2021

[ashintheairlikesnow]

It sure would be terrible if Jameson got spooked by something and saw Jake and decided Jake was a threat. It would be just awful if it was something innocuous that triggered Jameson so badly that he decided he needed to handle Jake the way he handled Robert, now, in front of a few rescues. And Chris, perhaps

CW: Stabbing, knives, blood, panic response, trauma response, flashback to pet whump, murder reference

Chris vaguely hears a loud thump over the sound of the music blaring through his headphones, ignoring it - it’s an old house, sometimes you hear everything anyone else is doing. He hums along with the song, turning the page on his textbook, trying to make himself focus on the entirely-too-many tiny words, chewing idly on his plastic feather necklace.

Then there’s another sound that breaks through, cracks apart the spell of the song. 

It’s a scream.

Chris’s head jerks up and he pulls the headphones off, freezing first, heart going from a slow and steady thump to racing, a wash of cold fear from head to toe. For a second, there’s nothing, and he wonders if he made it up somehow, if there was never that second sound-

And then the scream comes again, and he hears footsteps flying past his door, the sound of Antoni’s voice calling out. Chris throws his mp3 player to the side and abandons the textbooks he wasn’t really reading anyway, bare feet on warm hardwood, taking the steps three at a time.

He stumbles into the doorway to the kitchen and stares, wide-eyed, at the blood. His breath catches in his throat, it won’t go into his lungs or come back out again, and he feels his knees give way.

There’s so much blood.

Again.

“No,” he whimpers, but no one hears him. They’re too busy trying to pull the new angry rescue off of Jake.

Antoni and Allyn each have their hands gripped onto Jameson’s arms, pulling him forcibly up and away from Jake, lying on the floor with one of the kitchen knives, the narrow one, buried in his shoulder so firmly it looks like it’s stuck him to the floor beneath him. Blood wells up bright red, soaking Jake’s white t-shirt, as he tries to move one hand to grab at it, misses, fails.

“You won’t fucking touch me!” Jameson is screaming, his rasping voice even more hoarse with the volume, tears in his eyes and running down his red face, spitting the words with venom and panic. “You’ll never fucking touch me again, you won’t, you won’t fucking touch me! You fucking won’t, you asshole, I fucking k-killed you-let me go!”

He tries to pull himself free of their grip, but Antoni and Allyn hold him tightly, pulling him still struggling back towards the same doorway Chris is still frozen in.

He stares at Jake, who hasn’t seen him yet, and his face changes, it’s someone else, it’s reddish hair just like his own and a longer jaw, wider eyes, it’s dark brown hair falling over her face and it’s so much blood-

“Jameson,” Antoni says, his voice louder than Chris has ever heard it, firm and strong. “Jameson you must stop this. You are not there. You are not in that place now. You must calm. Look at the windows, Jameson. Look at the walls.” He pauses, his dark eyes moving, landing on Chris, moving again. He can’t stop, Chris thinks, he can’t stop doing this long enough to help anyone else. “Jameson. Look at Allyn.”

Jameson, teeth bared in a snarl, turns almost against his will and meets Allyn’s frightened expression, their huge gray eyes ringed in white, and something... melts out of him, the tension and hate dropping all at once. He slumps, and Allyn pulls him close, whispering into his ear.

It’s the moment Chris needs and he throws himself forwards, onto his knees on the floor next to Jake. “Jake,” he whispers, his hands hovering above the knife, unable to bring himself to touch it. His eyes are locked on the growing bloodstain. “J-Jake, Jake, Jake, n-no, no no no, not you, not, not you, too-”

“Sssshhh, it’s okay.” Jake’s voice is strained and he lets the back of his head thump into the floor. “It’s o-... it’s okay, Chris. Fuck, fuck this hurts, fuck-... it’s okay.”

Chris shakes his head, lips trembling with the tears building up in his eyes, blurring his view. Jake holds up one hand and Chris grabs onto it, and Jake’s hand is so warm. Chris’s fingers have always run cold. He grips tight, rocking forward and back, fighting the urge to curl up and wait for Jake’s body to go cold-

“It’s okay,” Jake says again, a little more faintly. “N-not... this isn’t... this isn’t th-that, Chris. Okay? Look at m-me. Look at me.”

“He’s g-gonna fucking kill me,” Chris hears Jameson saying behind him, and Allyn’s low murmuring reassurance. “I killed him already, h-he can’t, he can’t find me, he c-c-can’t, he’s dead, I k-killed him in the basement I left him in the basement I did it, I did it already, I c-can’t-... he can’t be here-”

“Chrisha, you need to get out of the room,” Antoni says softly, crouching next to Chris with a first aid kit in his hand. “Or out of my way.”

“No hospitals,” Jake says, and he and Antoni meet eyes. There’s a long pause, and then Antoni slowly nods.

“No hospitals,” Antoni agrees. “I can do it here. I have done this before.”

“When?” Jake’s voice thins even more.

“A long time ago.” Antoni’s voice is firm enough to end any hope of further questions. 

“He’ll die,” Chris whispers. “he, he’ll die. Without... without a h-hospital, he’ll, he’ll d-die like, like, like, like-like-like th-they did-”

“It is not in a fatal place, if I am stopping the bleeding,” Antoni says, almost toneless. “I can do this.” His accent is thickening, and Chris remembers with a sickening lurch when a handler found him and Antoni spoke this way, sending him out of a dingy motel and Chris saw... in his hair... “But you must not be in the way.”

“Wh-what-... what do, do, do I do?”

“Care for Jameson,” Antoni intones, flat as the floor Jake is bleeding on. “I will handle this. I have handled this before. Uspokoysya, mladshiy brat.”

Chris stays frozen, his hands still hovering inches from the blade of the knife, above the bloodstain, above the body of someone he loves that will go still and silent and cold while he cries and then-

And then-

“YA dolzhen zabotit'sya o Misha.” Antoni looks up at him, and his dark eyes are somewhere else entirely, some other time. “Ubiraysya otsyuda.”

Chris doesn’t know the words, exactly, but he knows their meaning. He shifts backwards, forcing himself to stand, finding himself rocking forward and back even as he moves, trying to fight the overwhelming fear rushing under his skin like a river, pushing him to do... to do something to get the feeling out. 

He sets his jaw, turning to look and seeing Allyn has pulled Jameson into the den now, their hands on either side of his face. They’ve gone gray around the edges, as terrified as Chris is, but they still don’t let go of him, they keep talking. Jameson nods, or shakes his head, or whispers to them, and Chris sees what he’s never noticed before.

Jameson is as scared as any of them, all the time, and he’s as tightly wound. A dam with cracks that has begun to shatter, water rushing into the valley below, burying what he was so carefully growing there.

The trees washed clear of leaves, left as sickly skeletal branches stripped of bark drowning in the water. The sun won’t come out in time to save them. 

Chris knows how that feels.

There isn’t any sun, in the valley. There’s only the cold white light that lives inside all of their heads.

He takes one step and then another, away from the pull of Jake making huffing noises on the floor trying to hide his pain and Antoni speaking calmly in Russian that none of them understands to a brother that isn’t the one he thinks he’s caring for.

Jameson sees him coming and... flinches. 

Afraid of him.

Chris swallows, his heart racing in circles through his body. Everything feels like ice. “J-Jameson?”

Jameson shakes his head and cringes further back and away, but Allyn follows him, putting their arms around him and holding tight. “Pets don’t have names,” he whispers. “I d-don’t have a name. Pets don’t have names, I don’t have-... I’m not-... I killed him, I know I did, I know I did I made... I made sure-”

“I know,” Allyn soothes him, rubbing circles on his scarred back through his shirt. “I know, I know you did, I know.”

“Why is he here?” Jameson looks young, and lost, and not angry at all. “If he’s dead, why-... why is he here? Why is he still here? Why is he-... still in my head?”

“He’s not here,” Chris says, trying to keep his voice even. This isn’t good. This is so bad. He can’t do this, he isn’t good at helping, he’s never been good at helping.

You did it once, for the one in the museum.

That was different.

Was it?

Jake groans behind him, low agonized deep voice, and Chris feels his whole body shudder. “Mom-” 

Is he begging her? Praying for her help? He can’t remember. He can barely breathe. Her eyes were so dark at the end and he lost those last, when the drip took everything else he lost her eyes last.

Tris, love you-... I love you so much, baby, it’s okay, it’ll b-be okay-

“It’ll be okay,” Chris says, voice shaky, trying to echo her voice. She had been trying so hard to tell him what he needed to know, for this, too, right? Hadn’t she? She’d been trying to say goodbye but to tell him he would be okay, and he is, isn’t he? Sort of?

A little?

He feels like he’s breathing water but he moves closer to Jameson, and then closer again.

“It’s-... it’s okay,” he whispers. “H-he’s-... whoever you-... he’s not, not here.”

“Then who-...” Jameson’s eyes seem to clear a little for the first time. The fear drains from him but it’s replaced by something else entirely. Horrified guilt. “Who did I just kill?”

-

@astrobly @finder-of-rings @whump-tr0pes @raigash @moose-teeth @orchidscript @doveotions @pretty-face-breaker @eatyourdamnpears @boxboysandotherwhump @vickytokio @whumpfigure @outofangband @downriver914 @justabitofwhump @thehopelessopus @butwhatifyouwrite @yet-another-heathen @nonsensical-whump @newandfiguringitout @gonna-feel-that-tomorrow @oops-its-whump @cubeswhump @whumpiary @orchidscript @outofangband

[wingedeclipsed]

I just reread One Of Us Is Lying and am once again struck by emotions, so here is a rushed pile of compliments.

(spoilers under the cut, in case anyone is later to the party than I am)

Reading Book 1 the first time I genuinely couldn’t tell who did it. Maybe I’m just stupid but she makes everyone look suspicious. the TALENT

Speaking of talent: this is the first high-teen book I’ve read where the author really seems to get how high schoolers think. Sure, there’s romance, but it doesn’t take up most of the plot, and they all have lots of other things to worry about. It’s refreshing to read about teenagers who are in real trouble besides the romantic sort,  looking at you Meg Cabot, this 15 y/o girl is looking VERY VERY HARD at you MEG CABOT,

Despite the fact that I’m pretty much his exact opposite in terms of personality, I, too, can relate to Nate Macauley because Bronwyn Rojas would be the love of my life if she were real

and, you know, willing to notice me.

This came out of nowhere but I really appreciated how not all of the characters had a “tragic backstory” involving bad parents. Bronwyn’s family is so supportive, and so is Addy’s sister.

Speaking of the queen herself: Addy’s arc?? How does one begin to describe Addy’s arc??? Addy’s arc is perfect. I heard its dramatic haircut moments are insured for 10000 dollars. I cried for her. Her POVs were so emotional but so full of growth and ultimately hope

In book 2 it’s mentioned that Addy is the “queen of second chances” and Phoebe or someone needs that reminder now and I just. Going from the girl who needs inspiration to the girl who inspires others is a PERFECT ending for Addy it was handled so well hhhh-

Have I mentioned that I would die for Addy Prentiss yet?

Not gonna lie I was kinda hoping Jake would suffer a tragic accident as a footnote in the epilogue. But nothing happened, he’s still there and Addy gets to move on from him completely of her own will without any external force to move them apart. *slow clap*

Moving on to Nate and Bronwyn because I have a massive crush on both of them they’re both such interesting characters. I find Bronwyn the most relatable character of all of them, it’s easy to understand why she does things, and the way she protects her sister was so sweet. This was handled really well in Book 2 also. They genuinely care for each other instead of falling victim to the “ugh I’m so unique and misunderstood I hate my sibling” trope. 

While we’re on the subject of tropes, Nate and Bronwyn’s entire relationship was just *chef’s kiss*

I love that they’ve known each other for a long time before they decide to get together, too- these childhood flashbacks are precious. And they actually seem to enjoy one another’s company. It’s the typical “good girl falls for bad boy” cliche, except the bad boy is falling approximately eight thousand times harder and not that “dark” when you get right down to it. 

Also appreciate that Bronwyn gets to be the coolest most “badass” character in the book and save the day without getting into any physical fights at all. Her strength is in her intellect.

COOPER. COOPER OUR CINNAMON ROLL. 

I love that he conforms to exactly zero (0) gay stereotypes

I know some people tend to over-praise straight authors for including the bare minimum of lgbtq+ representation but Cooper had a complete arc that was given as much attention as the others’ and it gives me life my dudes

I have never played baseball, ever, in my life, but I somehow managed to get emotionally invested in Cooper’s games and the beginning of Book 2 just CAME TO GET ME

“Preteen girls don’t care that he might have committed murder because he has dreamy eyes” I strongly suspect that this is a callout for one specific person

Also someone says “ooh burn” unironically in the second book, and popular culture and Internet language is referenced constantly without ever being awkward. None of that “hey there, fellow young people” vibe at all. The author doesn’t try too hard.

The closer I came to finishing this book the first time around, the more worried I got because I thought everyone was going to get their picture perfect happy ending without addressing any of their trauma but nope, none of that tropey stuff comes within a hundred feet of that epilogue. Sure, the ending is happy, but it’s also realistic, it fits them and lets them be imperfect. And it continues into Book 2: the murder club still has their issues, they’re still growing up and growing and learning. They’re allowed to be three-dimensional and interesting and flawed right to the end and I love that for them. 

[dahniwitchoflight]

Homesquared Chapter 2

Ohh the part where we get to see the Kids rendered! Id seen panels here and there of these three but now I get to see them see them :D

Vrissy lol cute

LOVING that symbolism of shedding the brackets like a snake sheds its skin, renewal of the ouroborous what is canon becomes non canon what is non canon becomes canon again

Also implying that over time like a snakeskin, Canon will just always degrade to being Non Canon, until its unceremoniously shaken off all at once and becomes Canon but Different each time

Man baby Tavros is just like, exactly like a baby Jake, is he gonna get nicknamed too? or not a problem since Troll Tavros isnt around anyway?

Actually, related: Names being associated with Heart should have been obvious all this time as Unique Identifiers seperating seperate people and identities like the walls between Souls, but it’s nice to have that sorta made explicitly clear, can probably add Names next to Heart’s symbols like Hats

and from that, People sharing the same unique identifier, like all Dirk’s simply being called Dirk, is probably referencing that they are all each part of the Hive-MIND of the being called Dirk

I do remember that once in Homestuck Brain Ghost Dirk was labeled as the full title, even when him and real Dirk never interacted, but now here he is just simply Dirk.

Aww, Tavros speaks in Gamzee purple ): That hurts my soul, that Gamzee would have affected his own self so deeply

Good on ya though Tavros for beating the shit out of his dead body, I’d have done the same

On the next note eyy here’s that bucktoothed child that somehow also encapuslates the rule of every strider being attractive-looking, Harry!

His design is genuinely cute! And maybe a bucktoothed nod to how Roxy may have ended up looking in a timeline where they decided Male was a gender they wanted

Now that I’ve been introduced to all three of the Kids I’m definitely gonna keep my eyes on any classpect stuff for them, which may or may not be relevant ever at some point in this comic maybe? Cuz like, Dirk and Terezi and Rosebot are all up to starting another session and Homesquared so far feels very like the “Journey of the Second Generation” and we just know theres bound to be sburb stuff happening sometime

With the main juicy tidbit being, are their classpects just gonna be mixes of their parents? Unique to them but also with the influence of the parentage, or are they gonna be entirely different?

Like, Harry just from first impression I can definitely see as being a Rogue of Breath, it’s fitting so far

Tavros then could either be a Maid of Hope or a Page of Life, tho I’m HEAVY leaning towards Maid of Hope seeing as that progression would be “relying on others at first for their hope, then learning to create hope for themselves” versus Page of Life being someone incompetently acting out confidence and authority until they gain a truer understanding of it and become rulers in their own right

First impressions fit that very nicely

Vrissy I think genetically is actually meant to be like, Vriska’s true descendant? I think? Like how Aranea was to Vriska, they have that looking up to the other and modeling after their behaviors as a role model dynamic going on, so in all likelihood Vrissy is at least a Light player, but I guess in the troll’s case the class is more up to the individual in question, but Vrissy will no doubt be trying to act out her own Class through seeing the comparisons in Vriska’s Behaviour, same as Vriska Molded her image of Her Ancestor as Thief-like growing up despite Aranea actually being a Sylph, so we may get more clues to Vrissy’s class by seeing how Vrissy idolizes and embellishes what traits she sees in Vriska, so far, she seems to be focusing on how Vriska kills bad people and is straight to the point about it, so nothing really yet. Vrissy seems to be really acting confident around Vriska, but not sure if that’s because she doesn’t really think Vriska is all that cool, or she does and is trying to impress her (The latter being very Vriska behaviour lol)

“ VRISKA: If you want to keep Hanging Out, I mean. Which I assume you Do. “ comes to mind, so definitely think this is Vrissy’s behavioural attempt at wanting in with the Cool People. Try to clarify that she is wanted from the people she values without coming off as wanting to want it haha

Overall she is definitely quite confident and is very open with what she knows and what she doesn’t, suggesting perhaps a Page-y behaviour? we’ll see

it would be like, a perfect little mirror for Vriska to see a younger healthier more stable version of herself literally acting and being like the thing she used to hate and torment herself and others about

so yeah, intital classpect thoughts, really liking these so far:

Tavros: Maid of Hope

Harry: Rogue of Breath

Vrissy: Page of Light

Damn Vriska is gonna get so much emotional trauma whiplash from all the normalcy on Earth C “What do you mean they dont have incinerators at school? where do they put all the viciously murdered bodies??”

“There is something incredibly reassuring, Tavros thinks, about someone who has absolute outward confidence in themselves. The soothing lull of following a simple direction is so overpowering it blots out the logical part of him that knows this is, perhaps, the most outlandishly stupid succession of decisions he has ever made. “

Yeah it is pretty comfortable behavior for a Maid class that isn’t confident to be more confident being led by someone, then again that is also pretty normal behavior for someone who has been abused like Tavros has been.

Hmmm, We get into the nitty gritty of what trauma might do to a person’s classpect as well, assuming the system is more nurture based than predestined nature based. I still lean towards it being predestined nature based, you were always going to be who you ended up being etc Homestuck is just like that after all where Nurture is valued and is absolutely an influence, but with Nature being tied up in timelines and predestination, its just sort of already taking Nurture into account when it’s basing on Nature, Nurture is just inherently a part of Nature already and etc

Imode, Silas and Avril are all 5 letter names, wonder if theres any significance to that? I’m reminded of 5 being a number that pops up in Hiveswap a lot, wonder if it just means “Normal Human bullcrap” in symbolism terms

“JANE: Oh, Tavros, no!

JANE: He wouldn’t--

JANE: Tavros loves his Gamzee! Those rebels must have captured my sweet baby and corrupted his mind.

JANE: My family! My entire family!

JANE: This cannot go unavenged.“

good old Jane, man she is just gone full tilt into only valuing her own perspective of things, her own wants and needs and expectations and the fact that she doesn’t even have a hint of what Tavros’s real situation is like, and she’s already set up to disbelieve any attempt at reconciliation with him

“I’m not bad/evil, it’s everyone else that’s out to get me and my family, even my own family is out to get me.”

hah lol ending on Harry’s “o shit” is great

[randomfandomimagine]

Smart (Jake x Reader)

Character: Jake Peralta

Fandom: Brooklyn Nine-Nine

Categories: Reader Insert, GenderNeutral!Reader, Santiago!Reader, Sibling!Reader

Title: Smart

  Requested by @panda-duuu:

Hi there! How are you? I was wondering if I could request Jake Peralta x Reader where the reader works i as a forensic (kinda csi) and is working on a case with the 99 and maybe related to someone from the precinct, so they already know the reader, and gets in trouble, like kidnapped or something, but can get away since they're trained on escaping situation and then major fluff

 A/N: I tried to write this one a little more like case, I hope it worked and that you all enjoy it :D

WARNING: Kidnapping and slight violence! 

I went up to visit Amy at the 99, and on the way say hello to everyone, they were all really nice. Even if, apart from my sister, I was especially excited to have one of our playful conversations with Jake. That nerd’s presence was so exhilarating and he always managed to put a smile on my face no matter how crappy my day was.

As soon as the elevator doors opened and I entered the bullpen, I felt at home. Sure, I was from forensics and not an actual cop like them, but they were all so friendly that they made me feel like family. Even if one of them was actually my family.

“Y/N is here!” Scully exclaimed when he saw me, warning everyone of my presence.

“Hi, Y/N” Hitchcock said too, so I waved at him.

“Y/N!” Amy was the first one to come to me and hug me. “What are you doing here?”

“Hi, sis” I hugged her back. “I just wanted to come by and say hi”

“That’s so sweet of you!” She smiled at me, and as I smiled back and was about to talk again, someone interrupted me.

“Y/N?” I turned around to Terry as he came from the Captain’s office and sat back down on his desk.

“Hello, sergeant!”

“Hi, sorry to interrupt” Unlike his usual friendly expression, he bore a grave one now. “Captain said your team called, the medical examiner identified the body as a Victor Richardson”

“Richardson?” I exchanged a quick glance with my sister. “Why is that name familiar?”

“I don’t know, maybe you wanna take a look at the file” He picked it up from his table and offered it to me.

“Thank you, sergeant” I took it and quickly examined it, trying to find some answers.

I quietly leaned against the outside wall of the break room and read through the file, reading every single world on it with the utmost attention.

“Hey, Ames” I called my sister as I positioned myself next to her and showed her the contents of the file. “You aren’t working the case of the B&E, are you?”

“The homicide? No, that’s Terry and-“

“Whatcha doing?”

We turned around to a certain familiar goofy face that was trying to read the file over our shoulders.

“Hello to you too, Peralta” I greeted him with a snicker.

“Hi, Y/N, you look great today” To tease me, Jake ruffled my hair. “Whatcha doing?”

“The results of the M.E. arrived” I sighed with a resigned sigh, knowing he would insist until we told him. “The suspect has been identified with the autopsy”

“O-kay” He said in a sing-song voice, snatching the file from my hands and reading it. I didn’t mind, my mind was far off from there at the moment.

“Richardson…” The answer was at the tip of my tongue.

“So that’s it, case solved” With my level of concentration, Jake’s voice sounded distant. “We just gotta find that guy and arrest him, we have enough proof”

“Wait!” I finally said, grabbing the report again and scanning it. “Richardson, that’s where I know him from!”

“What’s that?”

“A murder weapon a week ago, I ran the tests and the results gave me the fingerprints of a Victor Richardson”

“So it’s not the first time he strikes, is it?”

“No, and it’s the same MO” I turned the pages on the file to demonstrate. “Always with a knife, always with a stab on the back. He never leaves any evidence other than fingerprints, except that time he dropped the knife”

“Noice, Y/N!” Jake held his hand up and I gladly high-fived him. “I’ll work on it”

“Noice?” I teased him, knowing how often he did that.

“Yeah, smort” He grinned, kindly patting my back.

“Um, it’s smart” I corrected him, only to mess with him.

“C’mon, Y/N!” Jake pouted at me. “Say ‘smort’ for me?”

“No, I told you, Peralta. You will never hear me say that”

“Fine…”

“You sure you got this, you don’t need any help?” Amy and I followed him to his desk.

“Yup” His fingers quickly typed on the keyboard. “There he is, he’s in the database”

“Well, I guess that’s beyond my field of expertise” I watched my sister when I realized she was frowning at me. “What? I’m a forensic scientist, not a detective”

“You almost were, remember?” Amy arched an eyebrow, examining my expression.

“Wait, you almost were?” That gathered Jake’s attention back on us.

“Yeah…” I sighed, deciding to tell him knowing how insistent and annoying he could be. “I trained for a long time but in the end I went to forensics”

One of the reasons was precisely because of Amy. We were very competitive and I didn’t want our careers to turn into a giant competition between us. Besides, I was interested in forensics after all. It was only after meeting everyone in the 99 and hearing about Jake’s stories that I began wondering if I chose wrong. I was far away from the action, from the epic chases and all the cool stuff.

“So who’s the smart one then?” Jake suddenly asked us.

“What?” Amy replied, voicing my own astonishment at the question.

“Y/N never became a cop so we can never know which one of you is the smartest”

“Watch it, Peralta” I said, jokingly glaring at him. Then I waved goodbye at my sister and headed back for the elevator.

“It’s you, isn’t it, Y/N?” Jake exclaimed, making me grin in spite of myself, even if I was facing my back to them.

“I’m the smart one!” Replied Amy, and I heard him chuckling because he had successfully messed with my sister.

*

As I headed back home, I was quite literally questioning my life choices. What would have happened if I tried to make it as a cop? Would I have been in the 99 with my sister and with Jake and Terry and all those amazing people? Would I have been any good with all the detective work and the action? I would never know.

I got startled when I bumped into someone. It was quite late at night and I was a little jumpy, but it was just a random bystander. He must have been just out of work or something, because he seemed groggy and looked like a zombie.

“Watch were you’re going” I told him over my shoulder, not stopping. But then my heart skipped a beat at the sight of a hazily familiar face.

I quickly hid behind a corner and pulled out my phone. I absently dialed as my eyes focused on the burly figure, not wanting to lose sight of him.

“Peralta” Soon came his answer, even if his voice sounded a little tired.

“Hey, Jake” I whispered, trying not to be heard even if he was too far to hear me.

“Y/N? Why are you calling so late, is everything alright?”

“Yeah, yeah, don’t worry”

“Why are you whispering?”

“I’m after your suspect”

“My suspect?”

“Yes, from the murder case, Richardson?” My eyes followed him as he crossed the street. He might not be the brightest, because he wasn’t the most inconspicuous, he was obviously up to no good. Besides, his MO betrayed him as a big brute with little subtlety. “I ran into him and I’m waiting for him to do something incriminatory”

“I appreciate that, Y/N, but you’re not a cop” Jake said, sounding surprisingly serious for the first time since I knew him. He was always goofing around when I saw him during my brief visits at the 99.

“So? I got a lead”

“So that’s dangerous, and if something happens to you because of me, your sister will kill me”

“Amy is not the boss of me, no matter how bossy she is”

Jake sighed, knowing us Santiagos were a little pigheaded.

I suppressed a gasp when Richardson looked my direction, but I quickly took cover and hid from his sight. I was pretty sure he hadn’t seen me.

“Are you home?” I asked Jake, hoping Amy wasn’t listening to his conversation.

“No, I’m still at work”

“Look, don’t tell Amy, okay? I got this”

“Okay, but you should get out of there. Thanks for the tip, we’ll investigate that area” Jake’s tone was patient yet cautious. “Where are you?”

“I’m-“ I gasped when I felt something against the back of my head, and a sinking feeling grew in my stomach when I realized what it was.

“Y/N?” Jake asked me, even if the phone was taken away from me. “Y/N?!”

I didn’t know when he noticed I was there. How much he knew about me. How interested he was on keeping me alive. But I took my chances even with a gun to my head.

“I’m on 10th with-“ But before I could finish my sentence, everything turned black.

*

I squeezed my eyelids tight, trying to get over the throbbing headache beating in my temple. I slowly opened my eyes and jumped at the sight of someone unwanted.

“So you’re a cop, huh?” Was his greeting. At least he had kept me alive, maybe to question me and find out how much I knew. Or to torture me.

“Technically not” I said to try and buy myself some time, because I figured that as soon as I told him what he wanted to know, I would stop being useful.

I analyzed my surroundings to grow aware of my situation. I was in some sort of warehouse, lying on the ground. My wrists were stuck together with duct tape behind my back, just like my ankles were tied together. There was no bursting out of there on my own.

“Who are you?” He asked me, and his piercing stare was intimidating, and his eyes were dark and fierce.

“No one of importance” I half-questioned, gulping violently.

He glared at me, and I had the nasty realization that I was going to die. I wouldn’t be able to say goodbye to Amy, to thank her for being such an amazing sister, person and inspiration for me. I would never see my family again, nor anyone from the 99. I thought back to Jake, nearly relaxing when I pictured his sweet brown eyes and his cute goofy smile. I… liked him. It took me a death threatening situation to finally realize I had a huge crush on Jake! And I couldn’t even act on it!

“You have new messages, from someone called Jake” I gasped when he held up my phone, which he obviously took when I was unconscious, and began reading them out loud. “There’s a lot: ‘Y/N, where are you?’, ‘Answer your phone’, ‘Amy says you didn’t get home last night’, ‘Please tell me you’re okay’, ‘This isn’t funny anymore’, blah blah blah”

“Y-Yeah” I nodded energetically, fidgeting as I tried to sit up, which was hard with my hands tied behind my back. “Jake and Amy are coming after me, and they’re the best detectives in New York, they’ll find me and arrest you”

“Detectives” He repeated, looking at the phone. “Peralta and Santiago?”

It felt like it wasn’t the first time he heard about them, and I wondered if they had dealt with him before. Not that they had mention anything, but then again, they went through a lot of cases those last eight years.

However, I held my breath when I realized I had given him some precious information. Now he knew they were after him, and who they were. Stupid! I had definitely gone through basic training to prepare for situations like this, but unlike my friends, I had never been put in them and I had no experience. The adrenaline was rushing through my veins and I behaved recklessly and illogically.

“Write to them” Just as I managed to finally sit up, he kneeled in front of me.

“What?” I gawked at him, shrinking away from him when he pulled out a knife.

“Write them a message” He used the knife to break the restrains in my wrist but not in my ankles. “Let them know you’re okay and safe”

I stared at him, wondering if he was actually stupid. I could just make it so they suspected of my message and realized something was wrong. It would also tell them I was alive and I could even hint at where I was. Not that I knew about that.

Richardson saved his knife and handed me back my phone. Then he stared at me as he rose to his feet, towering over me once more.

“Now!” He suddenly pulled out his gun, making me yelp as he pointed at me.

“Okay, okay!” I quickly tapped the messaging app and began typing.

“Don’t try anything” To reinforce his threat, he took the safety off his weapon.

My thumbs hovered over the keys as I thought of what to type. I needed to send an eloquent message that would alert them. I decided to send it to Jake, figuring he would check his phone more often than Amy. I took a deep breath as I typed it.

“Hey, Jacob! I’m okay, don’t worry about me, my phone just died” I said out loud as I typed, trying to make the text as intriguing as possible without having Richardson suspect it. “Btw, you were right about Amy: smort”

Richardson stared at me, unamused by the way I usually interacted with Jake.  which I took to my advantage and tapped my screen again when he wasn’t looking at my hands.

“That casual enough for you?” He didn’t reply, just kept staring as he snatched the phone frm my hands. I looked away, uncomfortable. He might not have been the brightest, but he gave such a violent and intimidating vibe.

“Okay” He turned around and walked over to a close by table. “Now I’m gonna tie you up again”

“Like hell you are” I quickly stood up and began running for the entrance.

My plans were foiled, however, when I realized my feet were still tied up and I could only hop in an attempt to escape.

“Come back here!” Richardson was gaining on me fast.

“Oh, no” I looked over my shoulder to him, he was way too close already.

Before I could even brace myself, he hit me in the back of the head.

*

Ugh, what a nightmare! I had to put an end to it, only I could save myself. I knew or… hoped, that Jake and Amy were looking for me. But what if they were too late? What if they didn’t find me?

I groaned as I came to, as my previous headache had worsened. The second blow to the head had rendered me in an uncomfortable, weak and queasy state. I forced my brain to work faster even though my thoughts were swampy and hazy.

I tensed up when I felt someone kicking me in the back, but didn’t open my eyes. All I had now was the fact that he had kept me alive. As long as he didn’t find more information from me, I would be safe. I pretended to be still unconscious while I thought of a plan, which was hard with my probable concussion.

I rummaged through my mind as I gathered what I knew so far. I didn’t know where I was, except that I was in a warehouse somewhere. I had sent Jake a suspicious message and activated my GPS when Richardson wasn’t looking, but they hadn’t found me yet.

I slowly moved my hands, realizing he had tied them back together with duct tape behind my back. Then I suddenly remembered that I always carried a knife with me and a spark of hope made my heart race.

As soon as I moved, however, my whole body complained. I strained my arms and shoulders as I tried to reach the back pocket of my jeans, there where I kept my knife. Hopefully, Richardson wasn’t bright enough to think of checking all my pockets after he found my phone.

I stopped moving when I heard footsteps. Richardson was behind me, pacing, and I had no idea what he was doing. I tried to hurry up just in case.

Trying to repress a gasp in celebration, my fingers wrapped around the knife and I pulled it out of my pocket. I thought it would be better to untie my feet first so I could run, not wanting to make the same mistake twice. So I painfully twisted my body to try and reach my ankles.

After several more seconds, the knife finally reached the tape in my ankles and tore it apart. My heart skipped a beat with the sound, but Richardson seemed too preoccupied to notice. Maybe he had somehow found out the police was on its way and he got nervous.

I took a deep breath, letting the adrenaline build up, and decided to act. My wrists were still tied together, but I didn’t want to waste any more time, I could escape even if my hands were behind my back, I just needed to run.

I jumped to my feet, unable to use my arms to gather my balance, and quickly turned to him.

“What the-?” He began, startled by my sudden movements.

Before he could reach out for his gun, I kicked him as hard as I could where the sun doesn’t shine. He groaned in pain and dropped to his knees, holding there where it hurt.

“That’ll teach you, dirtbag!” I exclaimed to my surprise, still feeling the adrenaline pumping through my veins.

I then ran to the door, wondering how I was going to get it open with my hands tied behind my back. To my surprise, however, it suddenly swung open before me.

“NYPD, you’re under arrest!” I found face to face with none other than Jake Peralta… pointing a gun at my face.

“Jake!!” I exclaimed, trying to hold my hands up in defense as an instinct even if they were still tied.

As I jumped up by his sudden outburst, I lost balance and was unable to regain it, not used to being unable to move my arms.

“Y/N!” Jake said, immediately lowering his gun and extending his arms to catch me when I stumbled forward.

“Jake, Richardson!” I warned him, accommodating against his torso. “He’s right behind me!”

“Terry!” Jake shouted, firmly wrapping my frame and moving me out of the way.

He took me with him as he stepped away, just in time to let the police squad burst into the warehouse, with Terry at the head of the operation. I noticed there were two police cars not far from us. The sirens were turned off, but I assumed they wanted to be sneaky not to alarm Richardson taking in consideration I was his hostage.

“Jake, you’re here…” I whispered, starting to feel exhausted as the adrenaline began wearing off. Not that he was there, I knew I was safe.

“Y/N, oh my god…” He whispered back, quickly turning me around and tearing the tape off my wrists. “You’re alive…”

Before I could say anything else, Jake had attracted me towards his torso again and was hugging me tight. I feebly leaned my weight against him, feeling extremely tired and woozy.

“Are you okay?” He gravely asked me, putting his hands on my arms and gently breaking the hug to take a good look at me.

“I think so” I winced when my temples began throbbing. “But I have a killer headache”

“Did he knock you out?” Jake frowned, his brown eyes dripping with concern. “That bastard”

I just nodded as my strengths slowly left me. I was honestly surprised that I was able to attempt my escape, but I blamed it on the adrenaline.

“How did you find me?” I gladly let Jake wrap an arm around me just in case.

“Well, we tracked your phone, and luckily your GPS was on –good job with that –and followed you here since he was stupid enough to keep your phone”

It was my first proper case as a ‘cop’, and even though I had kept myself alive, I had lucked out. If Richardson hadn’t been sloppy and were a criminal mastermind instead, I may not have lived to tell the deed.

“You knew I was in trouble, I knew you’d know”

“You said ‘smort’ and I knew it was a code”

I stupidly chuckled, feeling my eyelids growing heavier. I leaned my side against him just to alleviate my exhaustion, not making my body support its entire weight.

“Not the fact that I called you ‘Jacob’ or admitted my sister is smarter than me?” I asked him, patting his shoulder.  

“Yup, that too” He kindly rubbed my arm.

Oh, Jake, I was really hoping he would find me. I had managed to get away, but I couldn’t be sure that Richardson wouldn’t have gotten me again. My hands had been literally tied and since he hit me in the head twice I wasn’t in the best condition.

But Jake… his presence reminded me of how much I thought about him. How I wished I would live through that to tell him how I really felt. To see him again and hug him and kiss him.

“Jake” I called him, carefully pushing myself off him to say what I had to say. “I kept thinking about you and how I never told you how I actually feel and…”

“I… didn’t get anything of what you just said, you’re slurring too much” Jake stared at me, even if a slight grin tugged at the corner of his lips. “I think you have a mild concussion”

“Makes sense” I sighed, not really knowing if what I was about to do was a good idea. “This is what I mean”

I put my hands against his face and pulled him closer to me until our lips touched. It was a brief and gentle kiss, but I hoped it delivered the message that my words failed to send him.

“Oh” Jake muttered, resting his hands on my waist. “I get it now”

“That’s it, I just wanted to say that” Exhausted, I bowed my head down so my forehead rested against his shoulder. Still wrapping an arm around my back, Jake kindly caressed the back of my head.

“Y/N, I-“

“You don’t have to say anything, Jake… Besides, I don’t think I’m good to talk. I just needed to let you know”

“Okay”

When I looked up at him, he was smiling down at me. As I shoved my face on his chest, he sighed and wrapped his arms around me like he had done before, softly squeezing me against him.

“Your sister’s gonna kill me” He broke the silence, absently playing with my hair.

“Oh my god, Amy!” I urgently looked up at him. “Where is she?! Is she okay?!”

“Don’t worry, she’s fine” He held a hand up to calm me down. “She’s looking for you, but she’s okay, she’s just gonna be mad at me”

I heaved a sigh of relief, even if I knew she would definitely lecture me when she saw me again. After all, I had been reckless and stupid when I was unexperienced.

“In her defense, you were the one that filled my head with that stupid action nonsense” I tiredly replied, treasuring that moment of tranquil, I really needed his comfort.

“Guess you’re right” He chuckled, his hands gently rubbing my back.

“Jake?” I reached out to hold on to his shoulders.

“Yeah?”

“My knees are giving in”

“Okay, time to get you to the paramedics”

Jake scooped me up in his arms and carried me to the ambulance. The paramedics immediately knew I was the victim and opened the doors so he could sit me in the back. There, Jake stayed by my side without me having to ask him to. He also took my hand in his and didn’t let go, just as he never stopped gently smiling at me.

@c-taylor-wanna-be-a-glader, @xionroxas, @qtmeryr

[prongsmydeer]

Ayesha Liveblogs One Tree Hill S1

No matter how many times I watch the pilot I consistently forget that Nathan and Peyton used to date

“Don’t bother showering tonight” is that really your come-on Peyton I will never understand sports

Lmao @ Nathan and Peyton “OTP: Distracted Driving”

“You’re despicable, you know that,” said Dan, a literal future murderer

I’m always so thrown when ppl in shows start drinking at their workplaces like what kind of bold behaviour Whitey you work at a high school

“What are you wasting your time at now?” Nathan ur a terrible boyfriend

“I say that the people who pray here are wasting their time. God doesn’t watch sports” I know Lucas is pretentious as all hell but this is my favourite line in any sports show ever

Karen is such a good mom ahhhhh like she just wants Lucas to be happy and she knows he’ll put other people’s happiness first 

Dan calling Lucas ‘this kid’ like he’s not his wholeass son what a dick

It’s not lost on me that Keith telling Lucas stories about his father means that it’s Lucas’s grandfather Keith Scott is truly the only dad in this show who matters

“So why’d you just tell me all that” because he loves to monologue

“If I could [change the fact that Lucas exists], I would” Dan answer your door I need to send you a very rude telegram

I am in love with Moira Kelly and also I want Karen to punch Dan

The music of this show is really.... transcendent 

Djhfkjhfkjh since Lucas is implied to have like, five friends.... is that crowd of supporters hugging him just a bunch of people who think Nathan is a dick

I admire Lucas for deciding he was gonna put up with all this bullshit to do something he loves

Omg I forgot that Brooke wasn’t in the pilot she’s such a major character

“Nice hands” “Nice legs” Emo flirting in a jock setting lmaooooo

My inner 2007 angst awakens every time I hear Gavin Degraw. He is THAT bitch

“You ever think I might want to talk” Peyton and Nathan’s relationship is truly nothing but blind horniness they have nothing in common at all in this juncture of their lives

“I didn’t invite you to come in, I just asked if you wanted to” Peyton is so weird but I kind of want to marry her. Is this what Lucas feels like

Lucas’s economic status is really part of Brooke’s romance criteria at the age of 17 they teach the bourgeois early huh

Oh my god I cannot BELIEVE Jake recommended Atlas Shrugged to Lucas jhjhgjhgjh the undertones of this basketball show really are about capitalism

HAHAHAH Nathan’s word being “revenge” calm down Sasuke Uchiha

I haven’t said so yet but Haley is so very endearing she’s great

God. Lucas turning around to reveal to Dan that he’s cast away his name. HE is that bitch

Ghjkghjkgh Keith hissing at the rude Boosters mum. Love of my life

“Maybe he’s gay” “No, I think he’s just nice” who writes this dumbass show

“Do you even care that it’s slipping away” maybe it’s because I went away for university but the idea that someone is this deeply invested in their kid’s high school basketball career is. A lot

Nathan simultaneously trying to bother Lucas and pass English while about to fall in love: I can multitask!!!

Update: He also managed to trash Lucas’s favourite basketball court somehow in all his business. He really can multitask!

“If it makes you feel any better I called some woman a bitch the other day” [giggle] I love Karen and Lucas’s relationship

Haley is such a good friend to Lucas and hoo boy Nathan when do you grow a conscience

“You’re both so broody. You could brood together” that’s it, that’s Peyton and Lucas

These emails and VCR references are really dating this show

Nathan is a straight up sociopath in these early eps my god he humiliates Lucas publicly twice at this party and just pops over to Haley like “Hey cutie :) Idk why Lucas is so mad :) I’m rlly nice :)”

Nathan really taking his girlfriend’s car to hit on another woman how much of a crapbag

As soon as I said this he (drunk?) drove her car into a streetlight my god 

Deb and Karen having a nice lesbian coffee shop AU would be a pleasant turn in this show instead of literally anything that happens in either of their narratives

“Why would you even go there” “Because I loved getting dumped on” That is... accurate

“I’ll call you when you’re not so PMS” said Nathan, when his (ex) girlfriend rightfully lambasted him for crashing her car

I take it back Peyton and Nathan do have one thing in common it’s their disregard for traffic laws

HELL YEAH Keith IS your dad Lucas <3 <3 <3 <3 

Whitey talks a lot of shit for someone who advised Dan to abandon Luke 

I had been wondering why Lucas had the Scott name when Dan is such an ephemeral piece of shit and I guess there’s my answer thanks Karen 

Does Haley ever find out about the shit Nathan pulled at the party I feel like these are relevant details in her budding affection

“Dad send you to spy on me? Poison my drink?” This is the second time in two episodes Deb has been accused of being Dan’s spy I wonder if she still considers that a red flag 17 years into marriage

“One of the boys doesn’t have a father” BUUUUURN Dan

Rhkgjhgjkh the last moment of this scene:

Keith: There is enough room in my heart for each of my brother’s mistreated sons even the rude ones Nathan

Nathan, experiencing a split second of paternal love: :O

Ghkjghkjgh the Scott bonding in hatred of Dan continues with Lucas asking Nathan if he too would like to spite Dan:

Lucas: You will be receiving your “I Hate Dan Scott” Club invitation in the mail shortly Nathan, mom, Uncle Keith and I hold meetings biweekly

Nathan: Biweekly as in every two weeks or twice a week 

Lucas: Both! See you on Tuesday

“Does this mean we’re dating” yes it does the mixed CD is emo code

“Good luck with your game” “yeah, you too, Ma” hehehehe

Someone revoke this college medic’s license hoo boy

Ghjghkgh Lucas keeping his money tucked into his boxers what a doofus

I can’t believe Nathan and Lucas’s second big bonding moment is threatening dudes while in their boxers after beating on each other what a brotherly bond lmao

Okay but highkey if ur a lady and ur friends are gonna leave you alone and vulnerable at night get new friends

“I can live without my shirt” Nathan is thirteen shades of petty lmaooo

Dan is such a bad (abusive) father that Nathan literally would prefer to have none at all my god 

“Can I tell you a secret? I pretended too” just get marrrried 

“Thanks for cutting Lucas some slack” talk about accepting the bare minimum Haley kjhgkjhgkj

Brooke is really unbearable in this episode is it any wonder her, Lucas and Peyton’s relationship is as dysfunctional as it will soon become 

Hoo boy the one (1) time Nathan doesn’t do something douchey and he gets blamed for it 

LMAO @ Lucas approaching the one girl at this school with commitment issues with a bold “I wanna be here [in your heart]” hahaha

“Yeah, they can have their world,” said Lucas to Haley, about the two people they would literally go on to marry

The fact that Peyton doesn’t turn off her webcam and just covers it also really speaks to the era

This Gabe dude is really ready to assault a minor like he’s not just a r*pist he’s also a predator double KO 

It is not lost upon me that it looks like one pill has been popped out before so he is also a serial r*pist big fucking yikes

“What, you got a cellphone too, dawg? Things sure have changed” also quite dated hahahaha

They really went out of the way to redeem Brooke not only did she give Nathan and Haley a very very cute date she also saved her friend from being assaulted

“So you don’t have any brothers, do you” jhgkhgkhg Brooke please 

“Why are you only nice to me when we’re alone” a very legitimate question Haley

Nathan’s dating methodology: There’s nothing in life that can’t be solved with make-outs

Deb is really so nice but every time I look at her I think of her drinking a lot and sleeping with Nathan’s friends lmao

Haha that North Carolina sign explains the mild Southern accents 

Aieeeeeeeeeee you kiss that man and follow your dreams Karen

Even if Nathan is still A Lot this season him and Haley are so cute:

Haley, smiling: We can’t do this here right now

Nathan, giggling: We just did

Lucas says more to Dan by constantly leaving with a look of disgust than any words ever could

“My heart’s racing too. That’s what happens when I’m around you. (And on drugs. I’m very unstable Haley.)”

Lucas and Nathan’s very intentional “pressure from your dad” and “you don’t know anything about my dad” bc Lucas will not acknowledge that Senor Crabag Sr. is anything resembling a father bless 

Drunk tattoos with crush’s bff Lucas has decided to make all mistakes at once and I respect it

Poor Keith he is trying his best but Lucas just chose this week to hit his rebellious phase

YESSSSSSSSSS DEB KICK THAT ASS OUT OF THIS HOUSE

“Do you really think that Nathan would choose you over me” uh???? Are you not aware you are... the worst father in town

Brooke you were fully aware of Peyton and Lucas’s vibing and actively pursued him/interfered so you have no moral high ground to be like “:) I’d never choose a boy over my friendship”

Skillz and Mouth accurate “hoo boy don’t look” when ur friends start PDA

“Mom doesn’t want things to get back to normal, she wants them to be better” hell yeah Nathan gaining emotional intelligence

Lucas quit projecting your childhood issues onto Jake he too is a child let him decide how he wants to live Jenny’s 6 months old not like she’s gonna remember lmao

Damn Nathan LET LOOSE on Dan fuck that dude

JGFHJGFJGFJH I forgot Gavin Degraw had a cameo hahahahah

Did Luke.......... break into Jake’s house. His parents work at night how was he able to get into Jake’s coffee table

“You do not have to feel like a third wheel” The pure dumbass energy.... Peyton is literally CRYING do u really think her issue is “third wheel” you KNOW she and Lucas had a thing Brooke???????

Me watching this team form a brotherly bond over their mutual love of basketball: Mayhaps sports are... good 

Hahahaha Lucas threatening Peyton’s dad with a rake is weirdly endearing

“Hey you.” “Hey you, and you,” is a good summary of this seasons Brooke/Lucas/Peyton dynamic lmao

Why is Dan’s head... shaped that away. It is like a bar of soap

“I don’t mind you playing ‘Daddy’ to one of my offspring, but leave the good one alone, will you?” Dan. Meet me in the Denny’s parking lot at midnight and we’ll have words

“The whole Nice Guy thing is wearing kind of thin” foreshadowing for all the dick moves Lucas is about to pull lmao

“He’s got you skipping school now?” “Lucas talk to me when you get your tattoo removed”

Lucas:

Lucas is such a meddler lmao how many family dynamics is he going to alter

I don’t trust Dan being nice for a minute all he wants is the upper hand with Deb in the inevitable custody battle over Nathan

Props to Nathan and Haley for somehow, some way, being the only normal couple on this show despite their incredibly dubious origins lmao

Scott family dinners are bananas I count four (4) major revelations and they haven’t even revealed that Deb and Dan are separated

Lucas and Peyton are really hitting every fictional couple trope in this ep - road trip, bed sharing, hurt/comfort, truly the YA bases 

“The truth? In this house?” Props to Deb for drama lmao 

Brooke saying ‘I love you’ you’ve been dating for like two episodes but okay kjhgkjhg

I can’t say I understand Nathan’s logic lmao but I guess they have to bring him back to basketball sometime

Wow Lucas zero hesitation on that second kiss lmao u r a mess

This scene is the definition of “that escalated quickly” they go straight to undressing 

HAHAHAH NATHAN BEING SHIRTLESS IN HALEY’S DREAM FOR NO REASON 10/10 TEENAGE ACCURACY

“How do you explain being with me and not her?” “Because with you, I saw a future” that’s Dan code for ‘I’m a gold digger’

You’re literally macking on Peyton in the middle of the hallway while you’re dating the other most popular girl in school Lucas how are you this ridiculous and bold BREAK UP WITH BROOKE U DUMBASS

“So what are we going to do” I’ll tell you what you should do BREAK UP WITH BROOKE

Keith it is still daylight out stop bringing alcohol into this high school you have a drinking problem

“Can’t control love, you know?” THAT’S NOT ADVICE LUCAS BREAK UP WITH BROOKE

I really can’t handle watching Keith and Lucas self-destruct this episode how is Nathan the only Scott in a happy, healthy relationship

“You know that this is... wrong, so that makes it feel... deeper?” Lucas asks, as if he were not entirely in the wrong by carrying on with Peyton (who is not in a relationship) while dating Brooke

“I don’t want to hurt Brooke,” he said, about to start his third secret cheating makeout session of the week

“But then again our spouses aren’t here are they” [Deb opens door] COMEDIC TIMING

Gjjhgkjhg Nathan revealing his messed up intentions with Haley entirely by accident Scotts have no self-control whatsoever it’s their kekkei genkai

Lucas evading responsibility for his romance crimes by literally dying

Hahahah Karen’s confused vibes at Brooke are kind of the highlight of this episode 

How funny would it be if Lucas woke up to Karen scolding him about his tattoo

Hahahaha for such dysfunctional partners Nathan and Peyton are excellent exes 

AHHHHHHHHH LUCAS WAKING UP TO HIS BROTHER... MY HEART

Keith rlly was gonna propose after zero (0) days of dating I’m telling you no self-control is truly the Scott clan kekkei genkai

Ahhhh bless Karen’s compassion 

Dan is literally blackmailing his son into staying in his custody he is in Deb’s words an “abusive son of a bitch”

Fucking finally Lucas ends this sham of a relationship with Brooke

It’s wild that Nathan is the only Scott with a happy and healthy romantic relationship 

Nathan divorcing his parents is a real power move 

I’m glad Haley announced Sheryl Crow’s name because let me tell you I would not have recognized her on sight

“How’s my daughter” Lucas really chooses exclusively to hook up with people who have devastating emotional consequences for his immediate friend group huh

“Funny I didn’t know you were forgiving at all” Lmao Peyton is that really the position you’re going to take after cheating with your best friend’s boyfriend 

All the deodorant product placement lmao ‘this ep sponsored by Secret’ 

All things considered I think Lucas is handling Haley’s constant ditching p well 

Bfhkghghjg Keith buying a new shirt just to go to dinner with Karen stop

OH MY GOD THE EP REALLY WAS SPONSORED BY SECRET IT’S GOT SECRET ON THE CHEER COMPETITION BANNERS AND A LITTLE GIFT BAG RANDOMLY IN ALL THE CHEERLEADER CONFRONTATIONS JKGHKJGH

The comedic timing of “hungover idiots” panning to Karen and Larry kills me

“She used to be this totally original.... Haley” what does this mean????

I don’t think Nathan and Haley are being entirely fair to Lucas bc he was only a dick once she ditched him twice (or thrice?) in one weekend 

This boy toy auction as a concept is so inappropriate on so many levels

“I get Nathan for free” Fhjkfhkfjh Haley pls

God I was so very concerned about whether or not Nathan and Peyton were gonna kiss 

“You’re not a mess, you’re just in love” [Ole Del Paso Girl voice] Why not both?

“She’s nine months old, just in case you forgot” to be fair I assume Nikki gave birth so she would remember that you can’t hold that one over her 

It must take Lucas some mental disconnect to assume Peyton and Nathan are cheating when he also kissed Haley

Fhjfhkjfhjfh Keith fulfilling my fave trope of ‘we are not even dating but how about we get married bc we’ve been repressed in love for years’

“You know I asked your mom to get an abortion,” said Dan, to his literal son

I really can’t figure where this pregnancy storyline is going bc I know Brooke doesn’t have a baby

Nathan and Haley really need to consider oral or smth there’s a middle ground between making out and having vaginal sex

“It all hurts just the same” Brooke really out here trying to say that cheating is in any way equivalent to faking a pregnancy (even if only for a week)

Peyton and Brooke are way more invested in each other than Lucas 

“I got you a high five” Hahahhaa I love Peyton 

Gary like: Wow Nathan it’s humanizing that your father is an abusive dick

“Maybe this is the one that changed him” Lucas joining Dan as the second and only non-Dan member of the Dan Scott Apologism Club

It’s wholly unreasonable that Haley expects her boyfriend not to look at p*rn lmao

I love all this Lucas and Nathan bonding but I hate that it comes at the cost of Dan being near them at all u stay away from those boys u manipulative fuck

Ah the foreshadowing about Peyton changing in front of her webcam finally pays off

I’m no legal expert but I don’t think that taking your daughter out of state will help you in the custody battle in the long term Jake - nor will dropping out of high school

“What do I get out of it” r u 4 real Keith u dont get payment for loving your family

“I’m leaving because I can’t look at you anymore without my heart breaking” I like you Keith but that sounds like a You Problem

This is a fun way to shoot this episode One Tree Hill has such good directing tbh

Nathan discarding the Scott name from his jersey just like Lucas did in ep 2: 

Haley: Having sex will solve all of my problems Nathan what are you talking about

I remembered that at some point Deb and Keith have sex and I’m glad they fuck things up early bc I could not deal if it was later on

“I’ll miss you too, little brother” 😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭

KJKGHKJHGJHKJHGKJHKJ I CAN’T BELIEVE NATHAN AND HALEY GOT MARRIED JUST TO HAVE SEX THIS IS WHY THEY DON’T LET PEOPLE YOUNGER THAN 18 VOTE

[forkanna]

[AO3 LINK] [WATTPAD] [QUOTEV]

Characters © Frederator/Cartoon Network and so forth. Story ©2020 to me! All rights reserved.

This little fic was commissioned by MorbidHero. Enjoy! I'm not a superfan but I hope I still did the fandom justice, more or less. Even though there are no bacon pancakes or appearances from Billy.

Orono Or DIE.

The sign was unique enough to attract attention. That was probably the idea. Still, the girl with the long, black hair and the red-and-blue striped sweater seemed a little surprised when a car pulled over on the long, lonely stretch of Highway 95. Her eyes narrowed to slits as headlights attempted to blast the pupils wide, and she shadowed them with a pale hand.

"Hello!" cried a voice that sounded like a music box. "Are you in need of aid?"

"Uhhhh…" The squinting eyes shifted. "There a person in there?"

"Of course! I am a person! Please, it's too cold to be out here alone!"

The stranger approached the passenger window, bending down to look inside. By the light of the dash screen, she saw a rosy complexion and bright pink hair to match. The girl's round face held the sweetest, most angelic smile she had ever seen.

"I… whoa."

"Yes?"

"N-nothing. You're really gonna give me a lift? I could be an axe murderer."

The driver's eyebrows raised. "Are you an axe murderer?"

"Sorta." She opened her black guitar case, covered in stickers from all manner of bands and destinations, to display a red bass that actually was shaped like an axe, a snarky half-smile displaying some prominent canines. "I slay on this thing alllll the time."

"Oooh! A wandering minstrel! Prithee, do not tarry thither, but let us away in mine chariot!"

"I… huh?"

Cheeks turning a bit rosier, she whispered, "Just get in the car."

With her bass, cardboard sign, and knapsack stashed in the cramped back seat, the two pulled away from the shoulder and back onto the near-deserted highway. There reigned silence for a moment or two until the driver decided to attempt pleasant conversation.

"What's your name, minstrel?"

"Not Minstrel. Marcy. Or Marce, Marceline, Nightmarce… Elvira, if you're everybody in my high school."

"That sounds very unkind, and I am not from your high school so I will not do that." She smiled over at her. "I'm Bonnibel, or Bonnie."

"Cool. This, uh… this car seems weird."

"Oh!" she piped up animatedly. "It is a hybrid, but I have converted the combustion engine to run on used peanut oil."

"Is that why I have a craving for a PB&J out of nowhere?!"

Bonnie laughed, and Marcy wore a smile of her own. That was bizarre; why would she smile at some stranger who just picked her up to give her a lift? "Perhaps! It is also why I will eventually have to visit a Five Guys restaurant to refuel."

Chuckling quietly, Marcy fought down a groan as she struggled out of her black leather boots and propped her feet up on the dash. "Sorry, but I've been walking for hours. Nobody else would pick me up, except for this creepy trucker who would probably have murdered me. With my own axe."

"It is alright! I can't blame you, that sounds like a terrible day. How did you end up out here all by yourself? With no car?"

"Ash, ugh."

"Gesundheit?"

Rolling her eyes, Marcy explained, "No, Ash is my ex. Also the lead guitarist of our band, Vampire Queen. But like, he's been impossible since we broke up, and he threw his guitar at my head during our last show. I told him I wasn't riding in the van with him anymore and they took off without me. Jerkfaces."

Bonnie's expression was completely thunderstruck. She reached over to pat Marceline's thigh. "That is just unacceptable, you could have been hurt!"

"Uh… yeah?" She thought that was obvious. And the sudden physical contact made her squirm.

"No, I mean you should remove him from the band. He is clearly dangerous and you have every right to feel safe on the stage."

"Oh. Well… it's not that easy. He writes half our songs, and he's no great singer but he does know all the guitar parts already. But… I guess he's more replaceable than Fionna or Jake."

"You should send him to prison. Or castrate him," she added, tapping her chin thoughtfully.

Which is what finally made Marceline realize neither of her hands were on the wheel. She sat up quick and shouted, "HEY, we're gonna crash! Are you insane?!"

"Hm?" Glancing ahead, she calmly stated, "No we aren't, we're driving perfectly straight. And there are no other cars."

"Well… yeah, but…" She watched their course correct very slightly, still glancing at Bonnie's hands. "Oh, is this one of those self-driving things?"

"Yes! Oh, I see; you thought I was neglecting the wheel." The pink-haired oddity giggled as if Marcy were the weird one.

"Do you just pick up random strangers and scare them to death? Messed up hobby, girl. I can respect it though."

At that, Bonnie's smile lessened as she stared ahead again. "I'm sorry. Sometimes I forget that not everyone has access to the technology I do. I didn't mean to cause you any undue strife."

"Not everybody swallows a dictionary for breakfast, either." When that wiped the smile away entirely, the rocker turned to look out the passenger window as she tightened her arms around her stomach. "Nah… I'm sorry, I'm a bitch."

The car was silent for a few seconds. "You aren't. I just don't spend a lot of time with other people. When I do, they tell me I am awkward."

"Yeah? Agoraphobic or something?" She paused. "Yeah, I know some big words, too."

"I never said you didn't. But no, that isn't the problem. I'm a workaholic. Even when I'm not in my lab, I'm still focused on inventing or revising previous inventions. I like speaking with people, but there never seems to be any time…"

"Dude, nerdslut. Got it."

"WHAT?!"

The outburst was harsher than Marce expected. "Sorry," she muttered, head ducking lower. "I didn't-"

"I'm not a slut! I'm…" Her cheeks began to glow. "I've never even been on a date."

"I was kidding, man. I didn't really mean…" Her fingers ran through her fringe. "Look, you told me you don't get out much. So I'll do my best not to tease you like I normally would, but no promises. I'm pretty edgy." She even threw up devil horns to add to the effect.

"You're teasing. Yes, I understand." The bubbly girl sighed and relaxed, smiling again. Apparently, it was that easy.

"What do you do for a living, anyway? All the inventing…"

"Oh! Have you heard of PeebleCo?"

A brief pause. "If I say 'no', does that mean I'm dumb?"

"It's alright. I am the president and CEO. Though the board members make most of the day-to-day decisions, they consult with me before making any large changes. And I am also the head of the R&D department."

"Whoa. And you're what, like, eighteen?"

"Nineteen."

"Excuse me," she snickered. "But yeah, that's pretty young to have your whole future figured out. I'm still kind of drifting through life in the shadows."

Bonnie shrugged as she pulled off the highway. "It is okay. I know I am strange, and that most people have to take some time to find their true destiny."

"Where… are we going?"

"To this hotel! I have been driving all day."

"Oh. Guess this is where I get off, then."

"It is if you want. Or you are welcome to share my hotel room and I will continue to ferry you to your destination in the morning."

Marceline raised an eyebrow as she watched Bonnie smoothly guide the car into a parking spot — having to use her hands this time, of course. "Are you totally insane, or just the nicest person on the planet?"

"Does it have to be one or the other?" she asked with a huge grin. And yet again, Marcy found she was grinning back.

                                                      ~ o ~

Once they had brought their bags inside, the hitchhiker plopped herself on the bed and kicked off her boots again. Then she started tuning her bass. Bonnie started unpacking her little pink rolling suitcase immediately, though she cast a casual glance over at her guest now and then.

"What? Am I bugging you?"

"Not at all. I have just never seen someone play a guitar in person before."

"Never?!" When the inventor shook her head, Marceline chuckled softly. "Damn, you really don't ever crawl out from under that rock to see what the sun looks like. Not that I do, either."

"It's because I'm working," she protested with a slight pout. "Not because I don't want to meet people. I love people!"

"Oh yeah, me too. They're delicious."

Bonnie cackled as she plugged her BMO's charger into the wall. At least she got that joke. "You're so funny and cool! I wish I was like you."

"No you don't, trust me. I'm kind of a cunt."

"Are you? Well, I think that's still preferable to being boring. I might have an important job but as a person, I am… vanilla pudding."

"Yeah? Well I mean, vanilla pudding can be pretty good. Add a little red food coloring to make people think you're eating ketchup? I like red things, they look more badass."

"Vanilla is not interesting," she sighed as she seated herself on the other twin bed, pulling off her Uggs. Marceline tried not to pay too much attention to how her white leggings hugged her shapely calves and thighs. "Being a vanilla pudding when there are so many chocolate puddings around me… that is why I focus on my work."

The hitchhiker thought that over as she played a couple of notes, a few chords she used in their sets. The hook from "Smoke On The Water", then the bassline from "The Chain".

"I think you're cool, Bonbon."

"You do?" she asked in pure shock. Marcy looked up — and immediately averted her eyes when she saw her company was wearing only her underwear.

"WHOA, hey, warn a girl or something!"

"Oh, I'm sorry!" she hissed, arms trying to hide parts of her body pointlessly. "The other girls in gym class never cared!"

Pale cheeks flooding with color, the rocker cleared her throat and studied the carpet, watching pale pink toes curl nervously into the fibers. "Gym, yeah. Um… I'm sorry, that was stupid. Me flipping out. If you're cool with stripping down in front of me, like… it's your hotel room…"

"No, you are right, it was my mistake. We have only just met today. And I am decent." When Marceline chanced another glance, she saw a long pink nightgown covering Bonnie from neck to ankle. She was also wearing an embarrassed little smile that was more adorable than it had any right to be.

"You're definitely decent."

"Jingo-jango!"

"Gesundheit?" she re-joked with a slight smirk.

"Free candy!" She practically pounced on the little mint laying on her pillow, unwrapping it and devouring it in mere seconds. "Mmmmhhh… oh, divine!"

The moans of pleasure definitely made Marcy have to clear her throat again. Desire was stirring within her in a way that blindsided her; Bonnie was a girl. One she had met literally that day! Was she losing it?! Sure, she had always known she liked girls as much as boys, but she had never really been serious about one.

"Marcy?"

"SHIT!" she gasped out when she saw those beautiful features only a couple of inches away from her own. It seemed Bonnie's concern had brought her over to the other bed. "I… what? I'm fine, you can go back to getting ready for bed or whatever."

"You are flushed. What if you have a fever, from being out in the cold too long?"

Then the bouncy inventor touched their foreheads together, to check her temperature. Marceline knew that was the reason… yet she still felt her heart speed up, her sweat glands stirring to life.

But she was no shrinking violet. Anti-social, sure, and inexperienced hitting on girls versus guys. But she figured she might as well give it a shot and see what happened.

"You give me fever," she began to sing in a smoky voice. Bonnie's concerned eyes shot wide. "Fever when you kiss me, fever when you hold me tight."

A tiny whispered "What?" fell from small pink lips. And not even the oblivious shut-in could miss the rock star's meaning. "Me?"

After they held each other's gaze for a few more seconds, Marceline burst out with a chuckle and looked away, strumming her bass. "Couldn't resist. You're such a cute little marshmallow, it's too easy."

And that was that. Or so she thought. After she had played a few more notes and glanced up again, expecting that Bonnie would have rushed off to the bathroom by now, she saw she was being studied carefully.

"Sorry. Told you I'm a bitch."

"Why are you sorry? If you meant it… which you did…"

"Who says I did?" she grunted. "Hey-"

"I do," Bonnie told her in even tones as she finished pulling the guitar strap from around Marceline's neck. How could this awkward bean be so bold all of a sudden?! "You are blushing like I am blushing. That means you meant it, doesn't it?"

"No. It means… maybe I was out in the cold too long. Whatever."

Sighing like a patient teacher facing an obstinate student, Bonnie leaned over and took her lips gently. And poor Marcy felt her brain short-circuiting. This girl was going for it! How?! This girl?! Even more shameful was that it took three or four seconds for her to pull back from the kiss, panting and clutching at the bedspread.

"WHAT THE WHAT?!"

"Oh wow," Bonnibel whispered, reaching up to touch her own bottom lip with delicate fingers. "I did that."

"Yeah? Like, what, you're surprised you kissed somebody? That's fucking weird!"

"I am. I have never done it before, I didn't think it would be so easy. But I wasn't afraid like I expected to be, and I enjoyed the feeling."

One single fact kept Marcy from harping on about how bold of an assumption it was to kiss her out of nowhere. "Whoa, hold up. I'm really your first?"

"Yes," she breathed, cheeks warming to match Marceline's as she fidgeted with her fingers.

"That… amazing one you just planted on me was your first kiss?!"

Bonnie raised her eyebrows at her. "Oh, it was good?"

"Dude, I'm practically at full sail down here already!" When the hapless girl didn't seem to have any idea what she meant by that, she clarified, "Yes, it was good!"

"Oh. Then it was a successful experiment! Hooray!" Marceline just gaped at her open-mouthed. "We should do more experiments, I think."

"Yeah? What, you think I'm that easy?" she scoffed, trying to focus on reaching for her bass instead of blushing scarlet. But she barely touched the neck before firm hands were pinning her to the bed. "HEY!"

"You will assist me," the girl she had once mistaken for a marshmallow ordered her with a sly smirk.

Marceline finally understood that she had been hoodwinked. Well, not really; she believed this girl had no experience, but she had made the erroneous assumption that also meant she would be timid. Nope.

"I will? That's pretty interesting, I thought I got to decide that part."

"You do. But I already know you will decide to help me." Her hips started shifting on top of Marceline's, eyes briefly falling shut. "Mmm… mm?"

The rocker looked away, waiting for the backlash. Bracing to be shouted at, or called any number of names. She had been down that road before — most recently with Ash, who had no problem doing that to her but only when he was angry.

"You're a transgender person."

Stunned by the bluntness of the phrasing, she finally looked up to see nothing but surprise in Bonnie's features. No judgment, no disgust. "Um… yeah. Well, we prefer just 'trans'."

"Oh! 'Justrans' then." She shifted a few more times, prompting a little groan from both of them. "This will certainly make the experiment easier; I already know how to work with one of these from anatomy class."

Marcy knew she wasn't trying to be cruel. She could tell. But she still hissed up at her, "Can you like, not act like I'm some kind of sex slave robot? There's a real person with a real blackened soul down here."

With a little gasp, she covered her mouth. "Bloobalooby! I'm sorry, you're right." Her hips rolled again, sending a wave of heat down into the rocker from their point of contact, blinding her with pleasure. "Do you consent to experimenting with me sexually, and taking my virginity?"

Marceline could only sputter. And she almost told her 'no' simply because she was so shocked at the entire situation. But it was beginning to feel way too good. Why? Why did she want to?

"Sure. If you really don't care that I'm some problem you picked up off the side of the road."

"You are perfect." For just a second, Marcy felt a flutter in her stomach from such praise. Then Bonnie elaborated, "I'm comfortable with you, and I can tell that you are an adequate size to give me a wonderful first experience."

"Oh. That kind of 'perfect'. Right."

Genuinely puzzled, she tilted her head and asked, "What other kind is there?"

Instead of answering, Marceline pulled her down for a heated kiss. They kept that up while rolling around on the bed, running their fingers through each other's hair, humming into the contact. By the time they came up for air, she realized her sweater had disappeared.

"Can I see you?"

"Oh, is that going to help with the experiment?" Bonnie lowered her voice. "Am I… sexy?"

"Well, duh," she laughed as she dropped her jeans. But she fell speechless when she saw the shapely pink body coming into view. "I'm… yep. Definitely stand by my statement."

"I think you are sexy as well." But she was saying it shyly, as if stating a secret, rather than in a flirty way. This girl really didn't understand human sexuality but she was trying her best.

Weird but cute. And her face was glowing red like a stoplight… and Marceline liked red things.

They fell into each other with eagerness, kissing all over faces and necks as their bodies combined. Bonnibel was so soft inside, and her skin smelled like flowers. The little gasps and mewlings at the foreign sensations only made Marcy throb harder, willed her hips to begin moving.

Minutes later, she broke yet another kiss to whisper urgently, "I'm… I'm gonna finish, I d-don't have… a condom…"

"I'm on birth control, to regulate my cycle. I will not become pregnant." But she was biting her lip. The sensations had changed how she reacted. "Will you…? Please?"

She would. Moans fell freely from both of them as their bodies shifted faster and faster, until the dam burst and Marceline felt both their bodies convulsing with the proof of their pleasure. It was an instant, it was an eternity. It was everything.

As they lay curled up together, silence reigned for a few minutes. Experiment complete. Neither of the new quite what to say. Until finally Bonnie whispered, "You sang."

"Huh?"

"When you ejaculated. It was like singing." She closed her eyes, a small smile on her lips as her hand drifted up to cover her own heart. "It was so sweet…"

Marceline scoffed, resisting the temptation to roll over and away to protect her own feelings. "N-no way. I don't do 'sweet', you're loopy. Literally fucked your brains out."

"No, my brains are still intact," she teased with a light chuckle as she began to draw little circles on Marcy's pale shoulder. "And you sang. And I am very, very satisfied with your 'axe'."

That prompted a gleeful giggle from both women. "Told you. I slay all day, Bonnie-bae."

                                                      THE END

[uhhhhhhokay]

Shows With Good LGBT+ Rep

Now for starters, I’ll admit that I do not watch Riverdale. I tried it, didn’t like it, that’s basically it. The show does have LGBT rep (but not ace rep), I would never dismiss that, but they make sure to do the bare minimum. Based off the people I follow who are fans, scenes for the characters, more specifically Chonie (Cheryl x Toni), are either constantly deleted or they are nonexistent. 

They have romantic scenes together but not nearly as many as the rest of the leading cast. This matters because one of the girl in the relationship, Cheryl, is advertised as a main, but yet she’s treated as a side character, and Toni is given even less. From what I’ve heard of the show, they dedicate an immense amount of time to the pairings of the main characters, but this focus does not seem to apply to Cheryl and her relationship with Toni. This applies to them as individual characters and as a pairing, as I’ve heard that neither character get much screen time. 

I understand wanting representation and I understand wanting to support representation, but the point that I’m trying to make is that Riverdale is not the show to put your desire and need into because they will never give the proper treatment or storylines that these characters and relationships they deserve. You can still watch but just know that there are shows out there with much better rep. So I’m here today, writing this long essay that no one asked for, to inform you guys of LGBT+ rep that actually gets treated well by their writers and is given the screentime and love they deserve. 

Warning: Some of these shows have been cancelled. If they do not say they’ve been cancelled, then that either means the show is still going or that it ended on it’s own terms.

Also this list does not include shows with the bury your gays trope.

Feel free to add on! This list is mainly comprised of some of my favorites. I tried to very best on the descriptions but I am a tired student with little free time. 

#1: The Bold Type ~ Kat x Adena

Kat Edison, the head of the social media department of Scarlet magazine, meets Adena El-Amin, a proud Muslim lesbian photographer in episode one. The two bond and grow closer and closer, eventually causing the “out and proud hetero” Kat to question her sexuality and acknowledge her romantic feelings for Adena. Adena, as I said earlier, is a lesbian and Kat is bisexual. 

#2: Black Lightning ~ Anissa x Grace

Ah, the first black lesbian superhero! The second season is currently airing on Tuesday’s at 9pm on the CW. Being the daughter of the infamous vigilante Black Lighting has it’s unexpected perks, like having superpowers! The intelligent activist Anissa Pierce discovers her powers of super strength and decides to use them for good and defend her city under the name of Thunder.

Grace Choi was in a few episodes of season one, but her relationship status as girlfriends with Anissa in the comics assures us that she will be coming back and we will see her and Anissa’s relationship develop further.

#3: Doctor Who ~ Bill x Heather

Throughout all of time and space, these two manage to come back to each other. After being split up by an alien in ‘Pilot’, Heather comes back to Bill’s rescue in the season finale, kissing her and making her immortal, leaving the both of them to travel across the universe together. Their journey has sadly come to an end in the series, but it came to a spectacular and happy one!

#4: BBC Class ~ Charlie x Matteusz

Part of the Doctor Who universe comes Class, a teenage sci-fi drama that takes place in Shoreditch. Now, first I should say that this is one of my favorite shows and you don’t need to watch Doctor Who in order to watch it. It is its own separate show.

Charlie Smith, an alien prince from the planet Rhodia, comes to earth to escape the Shadowkin, the monsters that killed his race. Him and the only other survivor of his planet, Miss Quill, come to earth and are instructed by the Doctor to hide themselves as human. Charlie attends Coal Hill Academy while Quill teaches.

Once prom comes around, Charlie asks the Polish boy, Matteusz, to be his date. The prom is hijacked by the Shadowkin and it is revealed to Matteusz that Charlie is an alien, but he doesn’t mind because it does not change the way he feels about him. The two continue to date throughout the series whilst fighting off aliens with four of their friends and Miss Quill

This show has been cancelled, but audios have been made since then to fill in the gaps between episodes and there is a chance there might be more! Also there are three books!

#5: In The Flesh ~ Kieren x Simon

The dead have come back to life! Kieren and Simon are both PDS sufferers, meaning they have partially deceased syndrome, meaning that they died and were brought back to life. Series 1 is centered on Kieren Walker, a 18 year old boy who died back in 2009, who is adjusting to his new zombie life and dealing with the people who want him back in the ground.

In series 2, Simon is introduced as a part of an PDS activist who is fighting for equal treatment for PDS sufferers while trying to find the first risen to bring on the second rising. Connected by a mutual friend, Simon and Kieren are introduced to each other, and the two strike up a relationship which develops into something romantic.

#6: Faking It ~ Multiple Characters

In an attempt to gain popularity, Karma and Amy fake being lesbians, but after a kiss at the school’s prep rally, Amy realizes that she isn’t as straight as she thought she was. In fact, she is head over heels in love with her childhood best friend, Karma. She confides in the out and proud Shane about her feelings for Karma and asks for advice on how to get a girlfriend. This show, while not always perfect, is incredibly diverse. Amy is bisexual, Shane is gay, Lauren is intersex, and in season 3, Shane forms a crush on the new student, Noah, and after their first kiss Noah comes out as trans to Shane. 

The show was unfortunately cancelled after three seasons, leaving much of the story still left unsaid, but the show still has an enjoyable and satisfying ending, even if it wasn’t the ending the creator wanted. The creator’s ideal ending, had he been given the chance to write it, was that Karma would eventually realize that she herself is bisexual too. 

#7: Hit The Floor ~Multiple Characters

Jude x Zero

Junior sports agent Jude Kinkade brings basketball sports star Zero to LA on the promise to be a star. One night in a limo before Zero flies to an away game, Jude, to his surprise, kisses Zero. When Zero comes back, the two begin a friends with benefits relationship that develops into something deeper, and the two fall in love.

Lionel x Eve

Lionel’s sexuality has never been explicitly stated in the show. She had sex with many men and the majority of viewers assumed she was straight. That was until the cunning Eve came in. The two decide after a brief meeting to go and get drinks together which ends up with them having sex. Later, Lionel admits to Jude, that she has slept with many women before Eve. Their relationship is complicated and it’s much different from the other relationships on the show. 

Jude x Noah

Due to the show’s unexpected renewal and switch from VH1 to BET, not all actors returned. Adam Senn (Zero) did not want to return, but never fear, because the show’s creator wasn’t about to let the beautiful Jude Kinkade go to waste!

A year after his break up with Zero, Jude’s best friend Lionel takes him out for drinks in the hopes to find him a hunk and get him laid. Later that night, Jude and Noah meet, hook up, and move on with their lives. Until the next day when Jude sees Noah at the Devils arena and finds out that the two will be working together. 

Hit The Floor has not been renewed or cancelled.

#8: Wynonna Earp ~ Multiple Characters

Waverly x Nicole 

i’m sure many of you have heard of these two, but incase you haven’t, let me introduce you to Waverly and Nicole! Waverly, the younger sister to the Earp heir, and Nicole, a sheriff at the Purgatory police department, strike up a romantic relationship after Waverly ends things with her shitty boyfriend Champ. These two are so cute and are head over heels in love with each other. 

Jeremy x Robin

Jeremy is introduced in season 2 and Robin is introduced in season 3. After discovering a murder tree, Robin goes to the police station in search of help. Directed to Jeremy, Robin explains everything he saw, then the two go on a date to investigate the murder tree, and after that the two become boyfriends.

Warning: The show, while amazing with LGBT characters, does not treat their POC characters well. 

#11: Brooklyn Nine-Nine ~ Holt and Rosa

Raymond Holt is captain of the 99th precinct. He is married to his longtime partner Kevin, who often guest stars on the show, and the two of them are truly iconic. Holt has fought hard for gay rights in the police department since joined the force. As a out gay black man, Holt had to fight and work hard to get to his position as captain. 

Rosa Diaz is bisexual and she is played by a bisexual actress. Rosa is a secretive, hard, ruthless, and a soft bean of a character. She is one of the key characters to the Nine-Nine. She has yet to have a steady girlfriend but here’s to hoping that she will have one next season!

#10: BBC Cuffs ~ Multiple Characters

Jake x Simon

Don’t sleep with the enemy. New PC Officer, Jake Vickers, joins the police force and meets the well known and disliked solicitor, Simon Reddington. Despite the fact that they are on opposing sides that hate each other, the two begin dating. They try to keep their professional life out of their relationship to avoid conflict. But alas, that’s where the sweet angst comes in. 

Donna x Alison 

The time these two start dating it unclear, but when the show begins it is said that they’ve been together for a few years. They’ve been living happily together for quite some time. Donna is part of the main cast as a police officer and is given a lot of screen time in action. Alison is a side character who makes a few appearances throughout the show but her interactions with Donna are sweet, beautiful, and realistic. 

This show has been cancelled.

#11: Shadowhunters ~ Magnus x Alec

Ghaad, these two are the best. A gay shadowhunter and a bisexual warlock fall in love. Malec has good communication. Magnus and Alec have their own storyline and a storyline with each other, making them both equally important and have intimate/emotional scenes. The show also makes sure to tackle harmful bisexual stereotypes. (Thanks to @spicychipsdemon for helping me write this one.)

This show has been cancelled but it’s being given a special to wrap up the story.

#12: Superstore ~ Mateo x Jeff

An employee and district manager meet at the Cloud 9 store during a strike. Mateo is a out gay man and so is Jeff, the thing is that his cannot date the employees at the store so the two of them keep their relationship private from the other coworkers, because they would not be able to keep it a secret from Jeff’s boss. These two are actually really cute and they’re hilarious and underrated to be quite honest.

#15: Orphan Black ~ Multiple Characters

Besides the white girl dreads, these two are nice. They are the sci-fi couple that beat the shit out of the bury your gays trope. A clone and a woman who is assigned to look after that clone, uncoincidentally meet. What starts as an assignment is developed into something much deeper, leading Delphine to realize she’s bisexual. These two are happily living their life making crazy science with each other.

There are more LGBT characters in the show. There is a trans clone but unfortunately he is only in one episode. One of the main clones, Sarah is revealed to be bisexual in s4 and her foster brother Felix, a series regular, is gay. 

#16: Picnic at Hanging Rock ~ Multiple Characters 

Three schoolgirls and their governesses mysteriously disappear on Valentines Day in 1900 at the infamous Hanging Rock. This show, while slow in some areas, transformed the 1967 book written by Joan Lindsay. What was initially about the disappearance of three girls and the attempt to find them was changed into a six part series about the repression of sexuality and expression of young girls. Miranda, Irma, and Marion, are the three young women that go missing, and they are all lesbians. There are two more characters in the story: Mike and Albert. They had a close relationship in the book but the tv show made their relationship canonically romantic. 

The show does suffer in the sense that hetero couples that barely existed in the book get more screen time and make out sessions than they should. I included this show because character wise it’s so drastic from it’s original content and it ends up putting wayyyy more focus on the girls than the book did. It turned a simple plot into a meaningful story about gender roles and sexuality and three girls trying to break free of them and two boys falling in love and running away together. Not a perfect show, but damn if it didn’t do some things right. Still recommend.

This show is a miniseries. Unlike other series, it ends where the book ends.

#17: One Day At A Time ~ Elena x Syd

If you haven’t watched these two then I don’t know wtf you’re doing. This show is precious and they are precious and god just watch it already honestly. Elena is a lesbian and Syd is a non-binary lesbian. Once a criminal breaks loose and the two have to cancel their plans to go to comic con, the two are trapped in their home with the rest of their family. As the evening builds up, Elena finally gets the courage to kiss Syd.

#18: Crashing ~ Sam x Fred

This show and this relationship is f*cking wild and it’s amazing. The show surrounds a group of people who are guardians to an abandoned hospital and they live in it. Sam meets Fred on his birthday when the two are paired up for a scavenger hunt. They relationship is odd at first with Sam constantly flirting with Fred and blatantly ignoring his feelings for him. These feelings rise to the surface and force Sam to confront them when Fred gets a rich bf who wants them to move in together. 

This show has been cancelled. The show does not end with a cliffhanger. The show does end with Sam finally leaning in a kissing Fred. 

#19: Charmed (2018) ~ Mel x Niko

Now this show is only one episode in so who knows where this show and relationship will go but it’s off to a good start with having the Mel and Nico relationship as the only romantic relationship in the show so far. I did not pay attention to the advertising of this show but as far as I know the show kept this relationship under wraps as a happy surprise for it’s premiere. The pilot has it’s flaws but it is cute, and to me personally, it works for me better than the original. These two have been dating for a while. Nico is a detective while Mel is just finding out months after her mothers death that she is a witch. A lot is going on. The pilot was interesting enough to get me to continue. The sisters are amazing and I hope the writers keep this relationship up front. This show not only has a lesbian relationship as it’s main love story right now but the three sisters are all women of color. 

This show and the actresses have been facing a lot of racist backlash so any support to ensure a future seasons be amazing!

#20: The Halcyon ~ Toby x Adil

(Ayyyeeee I got to use my own gif go follow at @tlmedits please)

Honestly f*ck BBC for cancelling so many good shows with LGBT characters. The Halcyon is a tv show that takes place during the 1940′s. Now, unlike many other periodic shows, this one is diverse, including poc and gay characters in the cast and giving them good storylines. The Halycon hotel is own by the Hamilton family, and Toby is the youngest son. Adil is a bartender in the hotel lobby. One night, while Toby is hiding from a woman his mother had set him up with, he runs into Adil who then kisses him. The two the next day begin a relationship. 

As I mentioned before, this show was cancelled.

[wetookanoath]

ooh what are your headcanons for the coco au?? 👀

Well, right now I have…

TW: Racism, implied homophobia and transphobia, sexism, way too many languages in one tiny family, necessary Major Character(s) Death(s), this is not a fanfic but a way too elavorated AU lol, Trans Male Character, trans pregnancy.

S/O to @faequill and @impossiblevvings for educating my ass by sharing his experiences as a trans parents. And also S/O to @from-one-fandom-to-the-other for making THIS and THIS wonderful art and talking about this AU with me. And also S/O to this anon for asking.

Set in the 30s, I’m thinking in maybe Baja California or Guadalajara. During this time, Mexico is still getting together after the Mexican Revolution left tons of deads and shattered states. In this time, the Golden Age of cinema flourishes and singers like Pedro Infante and Jorge Negrete become famous. Enter the music theme of the story.

That said, Mexico has a long history of having good relations with european countries such as Germany, Ireland, Austria and Poland. During the Colony, tons of people came to Latinamerica because there was work, commerce and land (I mean, stolen land– you know how that goes), so entire families would come with the hopes of a better life. 

During this time, chinese people build a China Town in what will be Mexico City later (still stands and is a wonderful place), japanese people will came in their own commercial ships to either work or be with their families, since samurai getting jobs as big names spaniard’s bodyguards, and soon other business people came with their families.

I’m saying all this to then say that,

Ryan’s family has always had it bad because they are mixed. His father’s grandpa decided to move to a small community where most people is mixed near the principal city of their state, yet not so close. This is so they can all live in peace.

Ryan’s grandfather gets out the country, builds a life in the States where he meets Ryan’s grandma, an also mexican woman who went to live in the States. Years later, Steve, Ryan’s dad, meets Linda, daughter of immigrants too, and they build their own family.

When Ryan is a teenager, his parents understand he is trans and caliming economic problems, Steve decides to take his family back to the family’s ranch in Mexico, where they can protect their kid, so no one knows he is trans and they know him only as Ryan. They grow up learning from all their cultures and speaking very accented english and spanish. Ryan and Jake also talk a broken japanese their mom is always cheering. They cook strange stuff that convines all three cultures and people think they are weird, but it works.

To their little town comes a group of immigrants from Poland, men are there to work in the energy plant near the Bergara’s ranch.

Ryan and Jake met Shane then, he’s older than them and Ryan gets irritated at his funny spanish, but finds himself talking to him daily until Shane starts to work, too.

So, every day, Shane and his brother walk in front of the Bergara ranch and he can always see Ryan at the window with a guitar or just asleep. He always waves at him and soon, Ryan finds himself waiting for the boy to pass by his window.

There’s a lot of Ryan insulting Shane in either spanish or japanese, to what Shane always answers with polish and both look at each other like ¬¬

They fall in love eventually.

Both families get along well, it’s then when Linda and Sherry start to notice something between their kids. It’s unspoken and like a known secret, and only once did they tried to talk about it but, like it happens so often in remote places of Mexico, no one said a word.

Ryan’s family is well known, names move sea, dirt and sky in Mexican societies, and so life goes on– of course, leaving the santity of their small town means dead and treats, and so none go.

Scott and Jake both leave eventually, it is known then that Ryan will take the ranch. When he’s already an adult, Shane and his mom move to the ranch after his father dies and Scott leaves.

Later in life, Scott gets married in the ranch, and they are all such a funny and curious mix of a family.

They have a few happy years where Ryan and Shane are together, dream of music and suddenly, something changes.

When Ryan realizes he’s pregnant, he’s worried shit will go down. Shane is actually pretty happy and excited, and after the initial shock, both feel good about it. With his mother’s support, he is able to tell his father, and to his freakin’ surprise, he’s happy. 

Ryan has to stay in the ranch to protect himself and the baby, seeing the struggle, fear starts flourishing in Shane and instead of saying something, he keeps it all in him. He needs an actual job, not just his music delucions, and he needs to do better and make sure nothing ever happens to Ryan and their baby.

They have a girl, they name her Alejandra, and she grews up listening to her parents sing together and even with economic struggles, they were happy.

Then Shane leaves.

When Alejandra was little, Shane met bitch ass Ernesto who used to listen to him at the local bar where he sang with Ryan and other pals they had. Shane originally didn’t want to become a singer, but he wanted to keep writing songs, Ernesto made him believe they could be both singers.

Note: Mexico has a big time problem with colorism and favoritism of whites™, but when it comes to music and so, especially at that time, the mexican public wanted to the men who sang to be the stereotype of a Strong Mexican Man™, like Jorge Negrete and Pedro Infante (this doesn’t mean they weren’t talented and amazing at their art, because they sure as hell were). A man like Shane would had never find fame and acceptance at that time, so this bitch ass Ernesto fooled him deeply.

Ryan doesn’t like Ernesto one bit, and feels him fake as shit with his “support” of their family when Shane is idiot enough to tell him the truth. This causes their first big fight, since Ryan didn’t want a man like this bitch to know about him and that Ale is their biological daughter.

Fights start to become terrible, and finally Shane tells Ryan he wants to try this and if it doesn’t work, he’s coming back right away. If in six months he hasn’t done shit, he is coming back. 

Ultimately, Ryan believes in Shane’s talent and lets him go. At first, they write to each other constantly and Ryan always reads part of Shane’s laters to Ale.

Eventually, the letters stop and a year later, Ernesto is in everyone’s TV and Ryan tries his best to find out what happened to Shane. When he finds out he was murdered, Ernesto tells him some story about being mugged and what not, and in his pain he believes it.

In the back of his head, there’s always the tiny voice that says this is not true, but the pain and his pride are stronger, and so he decides to keep going.

He makes the ranch prosper with his bare hands and the whole family helps, as years goes by, they can mantain themselves with the ranch’s production of meat and leather.

Note: totally not based on my own ranch, lol.

Ryan dies later in life, having his daughter carry his name when he decided to change her name to take away Shane’s (because we mexicans are petty and this was super common. Your husband left you? Change your kids’ name to yours– my name should be Rivera, guys, but my great grandma said fuck you to his father, and changed her name to León -her mom’s name- and here we are…) and the ranch.

~ The After Life ~

Shane is there before anyone else. He could be send to his polish family, he could find the other Bergaras, but he is not sure of what to do. His situation as someone his family has decided to forget mantains him in the streets with the ones without a family, which is bullshit because he knows his family must be somwhere.

His first years, he forgets about the Día de los Muertos tradition, among other traditions, and is only worried to find a way to know if Ryan and Ale are okay, and soon he’s hit with a newspaper from a maxican lady that has hear his story of having his family in Mexico, she reminds him of the bridge that opens on November 2.

That’s when he starts trying and when he’s told his family doesn’t put a picture of him, that breaks his heart and spirit more than he cares to admit. He gives up after.

Years later, re-animated by the fact that he needs to let Ale know he loves her more than anything in the world, he keeps trying. This is when he recognizes Ryan for the first time.

He is an emotional mess, trying to reach him and when he sees he is with their entire family, he is a rying mess. But then, Ryan looks at him and there’s complete silence– it’s unspoken that Ryan is kind of the family’s head, so the others wave at him but don’t do much when Ryan finallly turns around to cross the bridge without saying a word to Shane.

His heart is shattered to not repair that night and on.

Shane concentrates then into getting to the Human World to see Ale. His parents and other family members would talk to him from time to time, and at least he gets to know his daughter grow well, but also gets to know Ryan had it bad for a while and will take him time to accept him back.

He tries to tell Ryan about Ernesto more than once. He courts him, and sings, and does all he can until Ryan is tired of him and finally tells him he doesn’t want excuses, he doesn’t want to see him and he should go right now.

Shane is not sure anymore if there’s more heart to break, but it hurts all the same.

Ryan, when in the After Life, woke to his family and only accepted to himself to be disappointed of not seeing Shane there. He finds out later about his situation, and for a while decided to not search. It’s better this way.

When he hears Ernesto has died and it’s there among them, he tries to find Shane, and maybe clear things once and for all. But he finally drops the idea and lets it go.

His no-life goes on, and when he sees Shane for the first time before the bridge, all he wants is to slap the idiot and kiss him, but his pride is stronger and so he turns around and leaves.

He cried all the way to the Human World.

When he realized their great-great grandson was a lot like Shane, a lot like both of them, he couldn’t help but smile.

After Ryan finds out the truth, Shane’s picture is put on the Altar of their family and he goes to no-live with them in the Land of the Death, they have a long talk about their lives and cry together for having found their way to each other again, no matter what.

Both feel guilty for a while, though. Shane for leaving and never finding a way to let Ryan know what happened. And Ryan for closing himself and not believing in Shane’s love for him and Ale, and for their family forgetting him for such a long time.

Eventually, they can heal together. They have all the time in the world now.

At some point, Ryan looks up at Shane with a smirk and goes, “See? Ghosts are real” and Shane wants to die again.

When Ale dies and she reuinites with her parents, there’s a crying fest. 

It hurts Shane that he didn’t get to see his Alejandrita grow up, and that she thought for a long time that he decided to leave them and was selfish enough to never look back to his family.

But seeing Ale’s happiness to see him again and all the love of his family, helps him slowly heal. Now they can all be together.

Shane’s first Día de los Muertos is so funny to everyone, because he doesn’t know what to do and still gets all ?? with some tradition, but he enjoys it all the same.

Life goes on in the Human World, their great-great grandson grows up, he gets married and has his own children than still put their picture in their Altar, and like that, things are okay.

[kaorei-endgame]

Ranking of Resident Evil save room themes?

I got my first latte of the season, it’s chilly enough to wear pants indoors, #Streamtober started yesterday. LET’S DO THIS, NICK. >:O 

17. Resident Evil 6 Chapter Ends, All Characters: Back to the cabbage patch. None of you are valid, with your Netflix Original knock-off of some ABC knock-off of 24-ass soundtrack. Go suck a giraffe’s dick with an Ada clone, Jake Muller.

16. Resident Evil, Deadly Silence: What is this Resident Evil for Babiez? Nintendogz+ResidentEvilz? Imagine listening to this on the crappy DS speakers. Wasn’t there something creepy about Jill’s costume in this game, like you could tear pieces of it off, or am I just conjuring fall memories and combining them with how they went out of the way to add boob bounce to the REmake 15 years after the fact, and now Jill’s boobs on PS4 undulate languidly beneath her shirt like a pair of Dragon Quest Slimes yearning to be free. This track: aural despair, unleavened. A way to quickly induce nausea in dogs who have eaten chocolate or raisins.

15. Resident Evil 6, Ada Chapter End: Well, okay, this one is all right. The first fifteen seconds feel like a HiFi version of a track from those Playstation 1 top-down shooters where you played a murder clown or a pyro guy escaping a space prison where you were held for crimes you definitely DID commit. The little background jog kicks in soon after and look, I’m a soft sell for ululation, what can I say.** But it just all just serves to stir memories like embers finally gone to smolder beneath the fireplace ash, stoking them after all these years, reminding me what a weird psycho they turned Ada into in this game. I like reflecting on how people got so mad about there not being co-op in Ada’s campaign that Capcom patched in a partner but his name is like “TeamMate” or “Buddy” and he has no lines of dialogue and is never addressed in the story in any way and thus is either a figment of Ada’s imagination or he’s a real dude who’s just pretty quiet and ultimately drowned on that sub? Well, I guess life’s tough if you’re the (potentially imagination) friend of an ex-spy turned pod person.

**(i contacted my musician friend, Kylie, who confirmed that ululation  was the term i was thinking of, lest i second guess myself. at the same time, i’ll post her text here lest i misrepresent her words “Yeah, ululate as a technical term is vibrato using the tongue, so that would be wrong, but ululate as a descriptor refers to a sound that has a very pronounced waver between tones to it.” cool! i’ve often wondered if that’s the most accurate way to describe it. thanks Kylie!! :D)

14. Resident Evil Revelations 2: Claire gets the best costumes probably across the whole series and yet it feels like she’s gotten the least love of all the main cast. I never really got it, she looks good in denim, whether jacket or pant, and her Revelations 2 blazer does her all the favors. But now they’re remaking RE2 and they turned her face into this weird porcelain Precious Moments dol—MY BELOVED DAUGHTER. MY MOIRA. I SWEAR I’LL FIND YOU. FOR THE SAKE OF JBLL I WILL AVENGE YOU AND THE OTHER ONE.

13. Resident Evil 0: What’s with all the shivery whiney stuff. Like your younger sibling running nails down the chalkboard of your spine, like how the speed run of this game hinges on juggling an evasive bat with 5 out of the 6 flame rounds on hand, so try. Neither relaxing nor scary. Do I hear something like a bongo in the distance? That is the clarion call of Becky Chamber’s goose booty coming home to roost.

12. Resident Evil 7: I had a dream last night about this game. If you have phobias about glass and/or mouths and/or wasp genitals, I would skip this paragraph. I was in the house where you have to run away from the mom with the disgusting wasp hive vagina. Also—unrelated and yet somehow related, as dreams always are—I had opened a beer bottle in such a way that the stem broke. I had decided to drink it anyway and now, as I progressed through the house, I found that there seemed to be endless small slivers of glass in my mouth that I had to repeatedly spit out lest they cut me. When I woke up, my jaw was clenched to the point of soreness. Welcome to the family, I guess. Otherwise this save room music reminds me of the game itself: mostly dull and barely there.

11. Resident Evil Revelations: Item Box Music, only Save Room Adjcanet. Can’t disassociate this from the “swish-swish-swish-SHUCK” sound effects of navigating menus to equip Charge Shot 2 to my Shotgun. Not as pleasing or as integrated into my bone marrow as  the Resident Evil 3 equivalent, but I have probably played this game through thirteen or fourteen times at this point. Life is short and yet the strings of fate tug us the directions they will.

10. Resident Evil 5: Again, this is menu music. No save rooms at all in this game. Anyway I have no inherent memory of this song because I’m sure I’ve talked over it while upgrading my M92FS to 100 bullet capacity 110% of the times I’ve played this game. Exempted from higher echelon of rankings on these technicalities, but still A POOR PERFORMANCE INDEED for Not The Best Resident Evil Yet Paradoxically The One That’s Given Me The Most Joy In My life.

9. Resident Evil, Dead Aim

: Wow I almost can’t believe I don’t remember this despite playing this game enough to write a speedrun guide for it. Well, that was the style at the time. As was a bloated zombie corpse boss, I suppose (long before Left 4 Dead, those copy cats), whose weak spot was its exposed brain which, halfway through the fight when you’d done enough damage, would pop out and dance a sprightly jig on its brainstem every time you shot it. With the whisper of wind and rain and single intermittent synth I feel like I’m living in a cyberpunk future and not a game whose protagonist’s “””cajun””” accent is as questionable as its presentation of the antagonist’s gender.

8. Resident Evil, Umbrella Chronicles

: Hey now, weird bit of the creepy-freaky bass here kind of does put you in a certain headspace, but it’s not the headspace i remember of this game, which was basically unplayable in co-op for the final 3rd because a failed QTE would result in a hunter slicing away half your health. Good for an Into the Breach playlist to keep you focused on the action and stop you from trying to play it while also binging a Netflix show about werewolves that you didn’t really like anyway, and splitting your attention between visual mediums is just getting Good Pilots Killed.

7. Resident Evil 2: Ominous. Maybe TOO Ominous at points. Aren’t save rooms about being safe? I guess we could argue that because the save room reflects the lacuna of safety  BING BONG piano is the Try Hard version of video game music asking “you scurred yet?” Perhaps a novice mistake from a first-time director who would go on to do so many great things (well, RE2 among them, no lie). In a way, this fits with Rookie Cop Leon S. Kennedy, and anyway it’s so over the top I’m kind of okay with it. Most innervating when first heard on your way to equip a cowgirl costume for fast-firing six-shooter action. Guns suck, and cowboys too, but both are okay if we experience them in the abstract sense. This is what culture teaches us. Fan the trigger.

6. Resident Evil 4: A surprisingly gentle one, considering the series turn towards action from which it would never recover. I am transported to the early minutes of a horror movie where the audience knows something the protagonist doesn’t about the terror that’s about to befall them while they blithely pick up a desiccated nudie mag in an old shed on a haunted property they inherited from their estranged uncle, more focused on the “ballistics” before them than the axe murderer crouched in the shadows of disused farm equipment behind.

5. Resident Evil 3, Nemesis: More languid riff on 2. Strings get you shivery, and no more than a single BONG per two measures proves that save room music is as much about the notes you DON’T play. Two bongs to scare, but one bong to keep you on your toes, disallowing you from getting *too* relaxed by the soothing bleeps and bloops as you combine the 3 Gunpowder As you just found to make sure you have enough ammo to pistol-juke the so-called unkillable Nemesis. You’re not coward, but that doesn’t make you brave. Discretion is the better part of valor, they say, but that’s not taking into account that non-discretiony valor rewards you directly with a faster-firing pistol with critical headshots. :3

4. Resident Evil 1, Vanilla: Gentle, plucky strings make you question your memory, more familiar with later revisions than you are this one. How often was I in this place? Or does its primacy belie its immediacy? If I went to the strange, pointless closet around the corner from this medicine save room, would I find a broken shotgun I expect there, a round of magnum ammo, or simply the ghost of discarded aspirations masking as memories. I recall a time when it felt like time was enough, but then again, this was back when anything sub-three hours would get you the infinite rocket launcher, regardless of how many First Aid Sprays you used.

3. Resident Evil 1, REmake: High fidelity version of RE1’s gentle strings remind you of simpler times when your worst fears were zombies resurrecting into scarier, faster zombies with claws. What we wouldn’t give to go back to those days, and maybe tell ourselves not to take out so much student debt. Listening to this sends a pulse of gentle energy through my shoulder blades that makes me think “relaxation,” though I’m not sure my body understands the meaning of the word. A respite in trying eras, there is no association with the tension of shaving 15 minutes off your time to be competitive. “Safe Heaven,” they call it; a theme for a place that is not our own, but should be.

2. Resident Evil 1, Director’s Cut: Wow I did not expect music box chimes and tones stirs something ancestral in my blood. I’ve played the Director’s Cut far more times than the original RE1 and this is like coming home to a big house where I enjoyed an idyllic childhood, but I now know every box is filled with the creepy knife doll from Onimusha. Though these senations are foreign to me, something about them inspires a thirst for a homeland I never knew.

1. Resident Evil Code Veronica: The absolute chillest. In life, paths may wind, but the ultimate  The strings are tickling your spine. You’re so relaxed you feel like oiling your ponytail, and you could even take a nap in Steve Burnside’s arms without reflexively gagging. When you hear this, you are at peace, and the world seems like a place that can be kind. Truly, the Code is Veronica.

and don’t forget to vote in our poll on whether or not we’re playing Claire A or Leon A tonight!

[toast-the-unknowing]

lydia-st-james tagged me in a writing in review meme, which, man. That takes me back. I haven't done one of these in ages.

Main take-aways: 1. 2017 was the year of the long-ass fic titles, apparently. 2. It only took ten freaking years but I can mostly write romance without dying of embarrassment. Mostly. 3. Ten years has not been long enough to teach me how to start something and just finish it already before starting twenty more things. Seriously, there are so many stories that I started this year that I keep thinking ya'll have read already and then I remember that no one has read those because I haven't finished them yet. Oh well. Maybe 2018 will be a year of extraordinary personal growth and self-discipline. Spoiler alert: it won't be.

Anyway. These are the things that I've published so far this year.

Listed in chronological order of publication, with one exception:

new worlds for the weary, new lands for the living Okay, so, I don't know if anyone else thinks of any of their stories this way, but I have a very small handful of fics that are my heartsong fics. I don't think of them as being stories. I think of them as being thousands of words of meta and criticism and gushing and character love and, just, me, pouring my heart out over some aspect of canon that is important to me, and then maybe if I'm lucky, I trick people into reading it and thinking it's a story.

Yeah. This is one of those. I started this story before I had even finished Blue Lily, Lily Blue, which is not a thing I do. I always finish canon (to whatever extent canon exists at the time of my joining fandom) before I start writing. But I wanted so badly to write about Adam and Ronan and how I felt about their relationship that I couldn't wait.

This was something like a five month writing process all told, and I'm really happy with the end result. The moment where Ronan smears ink on Adam's face, in particular, I'm very proud of. I'm proud of that whole fight scene, really, but that moment is such a strong visual, and I'm not generally great at creating those.

don't think about how much it will hurt God, I still hate this title, but I do love this fic. It exists because I had been toying around with a canon-divergent AU that I quickly realized was going to take a shit-ton of work and not actually be that interesting. I ditched the AU, but there was one scene I liked enough that I didn't want to give up on it (Ronan trying to provoke Adam into punching him and then holding his hand while wondering wtf he's doing), and I realized it could pretty easily be made canon-compliant and given the legs to stand on its own.

I briefly considered tagging this as "preslash if you consider fighting and bad decisions to be flirting, which if you ship pynch, you probably do," and then I considered how poorly that would match the tone of this story. I am very happy with the tone of this story. It was hard to write, and I think it's hard to read, and it's a better story for it.

the more we move ahead the more we're stuck in rewind NO ONE ON EARTH READ THIS FIC BUT I DON'T GIVE A SHIT I LOVE IT. There are so many, many, many things in this fic that make me happy: -Clarke being an unholy mashup of my sister and talldecafcappuccino -"You thought that there was an intersection of sentimentality and camp that Miller wouldn't be interested in?" -Just, Murphy. All of Murphy. -The Inseparable, Indestructible Blake Siblings (which is when the Blake siblings are at their best, fuck you, canon) -"Do you ever worry that we're going to turn out to be warped people with unhealthy relationships/Honestly at this point I'm counting on it." -the whole scene where Raven friend-dumps Clarke -Monty taking "gas grass or ass" too seriously -Nate's stupid "you know what they say about those guys with Bigfoot" t-shirt (I would wear that t-shirt)

Like, I know why this story wasn't successful as an item of fan culture. And I acknowledge that there are weaknesses in the writing. But I still fucking love it.

so familiar, like an old bedtime song Ugh, this was called "came in quiet with the rain" right up until the very second I published it and then I changed my mind and I still regret it. Never second gues yourselves, kids. (Either way: "Raising Cain" is a good Adam/Ronan song.) I wrote about half of this on a whim and then shoved it in a corner waiting for inspiration for the longer story that I thought it was meant to be a part of. Then I was sitting around on Adam's birthday/my birthday weekend, a little tipsy in the middle of the day, and I decided, nah, this can be a standalone. I'm not kidding myself that it's great literature but I think it does what it sets out to do well.

The Fake Geek Boy Job This is a rare example, for me, of coming up with a title first and writing the story around it. So that was fun. I was so, so, so happy with the response to this fic. I've written case fic before, but I'm not good at heists, and I was really worried that the way I handle the heavier plot elements here – basically cutting around them and explaining all of the offstage action through snarky banter – was going to feel like cheating. Like, there's probably a version of this story that's 20k words longer and is twice as good, but it would have taken ten times as much work. It seems like people understood the plot as it stands and didn't feel robbed, and it was such a relief to hear that.

Where Everybody Knows Your Name IT IS THE PROUDEST ACCOMPLISHMENT OF MY ENTIRE LIFE that there are only two fanfics on AO3 tagged with the relationship tag "Quark & Jake Sisko" and I wrote both of them. Though I fully admit that "Everybody Comes to Quark's" is the better story of the two. This one feels like the first half is from one story and the second half is from a different story and neither of those two stories is complete, per se. But love a lot of the individual lines, character moments, etc. Also, just, any times spend with my beloved ridiculous giraffe boy Jake is good time.

faith, hope, all that bullshit This is the best thing that I have ever written that is based on a typo. And...I don't really know how to talk about this fic beyond that. It took something like seven months of on-again-off-again work; I am super grateful to Pynch Week for giving me the kick in the pants to finish it. There were so many things that were challenging about this – I hated everything in life the entire time I was writing Matthew. Plus trying to write all the characters as being a little older and more mature and their relationships as having progressed. But it was worth it because there are so many moments in this fic that just are still living in my head, even though I've put the fic down.

I think my favorite scene of all is the Christmas Eve scene, partly because I love Declan and partly because I love the "fucking Cain ruined it for the rest of us" exchange. But from a craft point of view I'm proud of that scene a lot. The first scene is its own contained story with beginning/middle/end; the Christmas Eve scene is what makes the proposal scene the beginning of a longer story, and it happens without the POV character understanding that it's happening. I'm pretty happy with how that all turned out.

People really liked the wedding scene, which is gratifying and totally baffling. That scene was murder to write. I don't even want to plan my own wedding, now I got to make one up for someone else? Of course, I mean. I cheated, because I didn't actually write the reception. Maybe the lesson here is if I don't even want to write a scene then for sure no one would want to read it?

Word on the Street This is another one, like The Fake Geek Boy Job, where I think there's a version of the story that's twice as good and eight times as long and a hundred times more work to write; I'm satisfied with my version. Also, I think the longer version is much more serious, whereas this is a comedy and I am happy with it as a comedy. Adam maybe comes off a little poorly, in the way that comedy characters sometimes come off dickish/rude/sociopathic. But it makes me laugh and honestly if I make myself laugh I'm happy. (That's not to say I'm never going to write the epic tale of how Ronan becomes Greywaren – I know what the first line of it is – but it's a real low priority).

come out of the cupboard, you boys and girls OKAY I WROTE THIS IN LIKE LITERALLY TWO DAYS AND YOU DO NOT UNDERSTAND HOW HAPPY THAT MAKES ME. Even just writing something of this length usually takes weeks if not months between when I start it and when I finish it. This was like a dirty little fling, and as someone who never has dirty little flings either in life or in writing, that was a fun change of pace.

The Dragon's Nest Avatar: The Last Airbender is, in my eyes, basically a perfect television show, and it's a lot harder to write fic for something that you think is well-written/complete on its own, because where do you and your fanwriting fit in? As such, this was a challenge, but I'm pretty happy with it. Alchemicink, for whom this was written, mentioned being happy just from seeing the "intergenerational friendship" tag, and I gotta say I was happy just from getting to use that tag. And any day you get to write Toph stomping around yelling at people is a good day.

while we're on the subject, could we change the subject now So credit where credit is due: lydia-st-james gave me the prompts here and put up with my intermittent screeching as I was working on it. It took me a while to get it all done, but I wrote literally 13k words of this in the first four days, which is bonkers; I'm usually much more of a percolator in the early stages of writing. As such a lot of the outlining process is lost to the sands of time. I don't remember making an actual decision to set this in LA; I think my subconscious realized before I did that this was going to be a story about loneliness and depression, and, fairly or unfairly, I associate loneliness and depression with the city of Los Angeles. In any case, it gave me lots of opportunities to throw shade at LA and I'm always down for that, and I've loved hearing people respond to the specificity of the location.

It's funny to me that people are responding to this one so strongly because I don't generally groove on fake dating; I’ve never written it as a trope and I always find it hard to swallow as a reader. I wonder if there's something to be said for writing tropes one is somewhat critical of. Though I don't think, generally, it works out when people write a thing they actively hate. It's a theory I'm tinkering with, anyway.

[wanderingthroughwickford]

Thank you! My responses are super long (especially for M asdflkasdfjkasdf) so most of them will be under a cut.

A – How did you come up with the title to [insert fic]?

Since no fic was specified, I think I’ll just go back through some of the ones I’ve got up on FFN. Most of them are pretty self-explanatory, to be honest. ‘Eternity’ is so named because Myrtle is stuck at Hogwarts, in her teenage form and mindset, for, well, eternity. ‘And Then There Was One’ (a probably discontinued Hunger Games/Nancy Drew crossover) is also fairly obvious; it’s the Hunger Games so it’s inevitably going to come down to one person, and I also couldn’t resist shoehorning in a completely unnecessary reference to And Then There Were None since it’s also based off a mystery series. ‘Unstained’ refers to Wiress’ promise in the game to not ‘stain’ herself by committing murder in the games, and if I ever write its sequels they’ll follow the ‘Un’ formula – I’ve always intended the final fic in the prospective trilogy to be called ‘Unchained,’ but we’ll see if I ever get there.

I think the one that actually gave me the most trouble coming up with a title was ‘Goodbye,’ a Pirates of the Caribbean one-shot I wrote way back in 2009. I couldn’t seem to come up with a clever enough title for the fic, until I asked my mom for help and she suggested simply ‘Goodbye.’ I decided that in this case, less was more, and so the title stuck.

C – What character do you identify with most?

The ones that I’ve written for, I guess this means? I suppose I’ll have to go with Myrtle and Wiress. Although they definitely both have more tragic lives than I do, I still put a lot of myself into them – I outright headcanon Wiress as having Asperger’s Syndrome and being uninterested in romance, so I find her quite easy to write in that way, and a lot of her moralistic, somewhat self-righteous attitude at the beginning of Unstained (which she’ll eventually grow out of, fortunately) draws a lot from how I now see myself as having acted as a young teenager. Her somewhat morbid obsession with past Hunger Games and their victims has roots in my own (sometimes borderline depressing) fascination with shipwrecks such as the Titanic and Lusitania. 

Myrtle I headcanon with some sort of unspecified mental illness, or at least deep insecurities and oversensitivity, and having trouble making and keeping friends. Her friendship with Murcia draws on some of the tentative friendships I had with girls in older grades, and – though this didn’t come through in the story for various reasons that would take a whole other ask to explain, and which I’m not entirely satisfied with but anyway – I definitely see Myrtle as having had a complicated crush on her, but never fully recognizing or accepting it for what it was because she wasn’t raised in a time or a society where girls loving other girls was normalized. Which, again, big part of my teenage years. Plus, the social awkwardness, introversion, and anxiety that both girls have is something I definitely relate to in general.

F – Care to share a favourite hurt/comfort fic?

Oh boy, that’s a tall order as there are so many, but the two that jump to mind immediately are Intersection by yadon/Copernicus Jones/Jake-Marshall and Pity the Child by Tanglepelt/Bookworm555. Intersection holds a very special place in my heart as it was written by my friend Leanne, featuring one of her favorite Ace Attorney characters, Jake Marshall, interacting with my OC Denise Swallow. Pity the Child was written by my friend Becca and involves two more of my faves – America and Latvia from Hetalia – having heartwarming interactions. Both are very good fics.

M – Got any premises on the back burner that you’d like to share?

Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahhahahahahahahahahaha

Well

It’d be easier to list fics I’ve actually completed than fics that are in various stages of planning

But if you insist

(This is the super LONG part and gets a little emotional towards the end) 

The fic that I’d most like to complete within the foreseeable future is ‘Unstained,’ my story about Wiress’ Hunger Games. I’d say it’s about half-finished now, and I haven’t updated it in almost 4 years. That might change in the future; I’d like to get at least a few more chapters done this summer, but I don’t think it’s humanly possible to get it finished before I leave for Ontario, and then I’ll be so busy for a solid year that I doubt I’ll be able to write anything. And that’s not even counting the two prospective sequels I’d like to write. But even finishing this fic would be a major life accomplishment for me, as it’s one of those that I’m proudest of.

Then I have at least three fics about my Ace Attorney OC, Denise Swallow, which I’d like to write, though they’ll probably all be one-shots. Two of them are partially written, one isn’t even started yet. One of them would be a brief overview of the few times she met Dahlia Hawthorne, the infamous culprit who ended up murdering her brother. Another one, the longest and weightiest of the three, would involve her meeting Phoenix Wright and Maya Fey, who channels the spirit of her brother so that she can properly say good-bye. The last one would involve her meeting up with Dahlia’s sister, Iris, and coming to some sort of closure there.

A lot of my fic-writing is taking a backseat to a much more personal fic-universe-of-sorts that I’m working on, involving practically all of my favorite fandoms thrown together into an incredibly complicated storyline. It’s completely self-indulgent and not something I’d really want to share a lot about here, but one of the major plotlines I’m constructing in it would involve a villain-to-anti-hero redemption arc for Lucy Bauer from Agents of Shield. I’ll admit that I have toyed, very briefly, with the idea of converting this into proper FanFiction if and when I ever complete it, but that’s honestly very unlikely because 1) I’d have to remove it from its crossover context, 2) I’d have to insert it into either AoS season 5 canon, which hasn’t even been filmed yet, or an alternate version of season 5, and 3) it seems completely implausible within the story’s canon. Plus, there’s the inevitable ‘no one would read it’ problem. 

In the past couple months I’ve considered writing an And Then There Were None Hunger Games AU, as well as a brief oneshot about Soldier Island being haunted by the ghosts of the ATTWN victims, but I’m very unlikely to do anything with those. There’s still my Nancy Drew Hunger Games AU left unfinished, but if I get back to that, it’ll be entirely as a way to blow off steam, rather than to try and write anything especially good. Just today I was attacked by the idea of writing a Lord of the Rings fic about Aragorn returning Boromir’s arm braces to Faramir and telling him how his brother died, but again, just a passing fancy that I’m very unlikely to write.

And that’s just the tip of it. There are so many FanFiction ideas I’ve considered writing and abandoned. The 8 fics I have up on FFN are the few lucky ideas that actually came to fruition, even though a good deal of them are unfinished as well. I’m honestly amazed that I was even able to finish ‘Eternity,’ or get as far as I have on ‘Unstained.’ I have an X-Men Evolution fic up that was originally supposed to be a multichap of 10-15 chapters, and it hasn’t been updated since 2011. When I was in high school I planned out a whole series of Pirates of the Caribbean fics chronicling James Norrington’s life, from childhood until his death, but I only ever got the first chapter of one written and never posted it. (Partially because I sort of balked at the HUGE amount of research I’d planned to do on 18th-century naval life for that fic). I’d like to go back to this one idea I had for a Hetalia fic, a series of one-shots about times in which the characters have wished they were humans rather than nations, but again, research would be necessary and it’s so draining.

That’s the problem. I love thinking up ideas and planning stories and having them finished, but at the end of the day, the act of writing itself is such a chore for me. And I hate that. I wish I could write effortlessly, like I used to as a kid, but I haven’t been able to do so since I was 12 or so. Which, coincidentally, is the time my depression started to majorly set in. I don’t know if the two are connected, but I can’t help but wonder if mental illness robbed me of a pastime that I dearly loved, and of countless fics I could have written by now.

(I know this is long and cheesy and overemotional, but cut me some slack, it’s almost 1 am) 

O – How do you begin a story – with the plot, or the characters?

You know, this is strange, because when I first saw this question I thought, of course I start with the plot, who would just say “I want to write a story about [character]” without even having any idea of what the plot would be yet? And then I realized that that’s exactly what I do – start with a character I want to write about and come up with a plot based off that. In fact, most of my stories aren’t even plot-driven much as just general looks into the lives of certain characters.

Y – A character you want to protect

Hah, it seems like the characters I want to protect and the characters I end up putting through torture are exactly the same. The two that jump to mind right away are – my sun and my stars and everything, the one and only APH Latvia, and my precious ghostly daughter, Myrtle Warren (Moaning Myrtle). And yet I endlessly read fics in which the former, and wrote a fic in which the latter, suffers. Whoops.

[caritov]

Scandal 6x01 recap

I’ve always wanted to do one of these. And since I am on vacation (sort of) and I have time, I’ll do it for my current obsession, Scandal.

Uhm, why are you talking about marriage, Quinn? 

BOOM. Glad that’s out of the way, since I knew it was coming.

Maybe it’s all the fires that are destroying my country right now, but wouldn’t that explosion create one, since it’s in a forest? Guess not.

Yay!!!!!   It’s back!!!   

One county determines who’s the president? The US election system is weird.

“Last call. Anyone who still needs to vote should go right now. Just because we’ve already won Virginia doesn’t mean you shouldn’t cast your ballot”. So true. I love Olivia.

Argh. Fitz is back. Did not miss him.

Uhm... What the hell was that? (Jake looks miserable, poor thing) (Vanessa, I love your new face. Does this mean you get to be a real character now? That would be awesome)

Charlie is there? Tell me Charlie, when you were out there killing and torturing people, did you ever imagine that you would be one day working on a political campaign? This is so weird.

Haha Olivia does not have patience with Charlie.

Oh no. Sad things to come.

Damn but they love to drink on this show.

This is the saddest thing ever. Come on Mellie, be rational, be calm, be objective. 

“One of the greatest set backs on political history?” “The comeback king?” What? Am I forgetting something? What set back? Or is it something we don’t know yet? Maybe it became known that the shooting was a set up? Nah, I’m probably just forgetting something.

Aaaaand of course Mellie  responds by being Mellie. Of course.

I hate seeing Liv like this :(

“Mellie needs you” “The only person that can see her through this is you”. ALL THE MELLIVIA FEELS. And oh, look. Olitz interaction that I don’t hate.

Olivia is so amazing and I love her so much. She only takes like a second of comfort and gets back right into it. 

OMG Jake what did you do to that poor woman?! lol

So Jake left? Well, that’s not suspicious at all!!!

Sad, sad, sad.

More sad, sad, sad. Like, what an incredible difficult call to make. 

But it’s sort OK, because then we have Mellivia and it’s a thing of beauty. I mean, LOOK AT THEM

Who would’ve of thought they’d get here with all their history? I JUST LOVE THEM SO MUCH!!!!

That is the perfect summary of Mellie!

“I’m sorry I lost”. Olivia, honey. I know you are The Formidable Olivia Pope, but I’m pretty sure an election campaign is a team effort. 

VARGAS WAS SHOT!! I was spoiled for it but I thought it would happen later? After he assumed as president?

Marcus! Hi! Does the White House get all his press secretaries from OPA? 

Jake!!! Always nice to see you!!!! And you got there late. Please, please, please, please don’t be involved in the shooting. PLEASE.

Always nice to see Abby being the boss. Even if it’s a bit much. But wait. Wouldn’t that agent know that she is the president’s chief of staff? Why was he resisting her?

Charlie does not care, lol (I love how much Charlie just does not care)

“I voted for him”. YOU VOTED FOR HIM????????? 

You... voted.. for... the... other... guy? Hahahahahaha. I don’t know why I find this so funny, but I do!!!!!!!

He is right though.

Mention of James! :(

A simple “he’s dead” would’ve been enough, but OK.

Damn this is sad. Didn’t he have like 100 kids?

Did... did she just take her phone? Cold

Ugh, David and his stupid jokes. Again, the US election system is WEIRD

“The reality is Mr. President, the next president of the United States is who you say it is”. Wait. Does this mean that Fitz has to, like, make a decision? Because I don’t think that he can.

Oh, oh, oh, Rowan!!!  That familiar feeling of excitement, fear, happiness, and dread whenever he appears. I love this character. And I will never get tired of his monologues. And look at him, working! The fact that he not only ran a super secret operation but that he did that while being a paleontologist? For real? Wow.

He is so cold. “You are better”, “How could you be so weak?”, “That streak of weakness, that crap that allows anyone through, see, that’s why you lost”. #fatheroftheyear

“I am very smart prey, trying to help my species survive”. I do love that line.

Come on Olivia. Really? He reminds you that he is your father, gives you facts that are plausible or even true, and creates a story that kind of makes sense. HE DID THE SAME THING WITH JAKE AND JERRY AND HARRISON’s MURDER. You cannot believe him! Come on!!

“I offered you San Benito and you turned me down. That cost you the election” I WANT TO KNOW THE STORY BEHIND THAT!

“You see that?” Do you mean Cyrus evil face? Because I do:

Uhm, Huck? it actually is quite different to stage a shooting without intending to kill a pretty much unknown governor and KILLING THE PRESIDENT ELECT!

Teddy! You still exist!

Awkward... Let’s move on. I’m not good with confrontation (yes, not even TV confrontation)

All the love for Vargas’ wife. Or widow, I guess  :(

“Not until I’m ready”. Well, if you mean ready to make a decision, that’s probably never.

“He isn’t dead until I say he’s dead”. ARE YOU KIDDING ME? It is nice to know that you can always count on some things. Some things never change. One of those? Fitz is the worst and can not deal with a crisis.

I live for Liv praising Mellie.

“What proof do you have?”

Just show him this:

Evil Cyrus. Come on, it is Fitz. He will welcome any excuse to avoid making a decision.

Is Charlie a gladiator now? Because yes please!

Wait, is Mellie living in the White House? After the divorce? While she is running for president? Isn’t that weird? Is the public OK with that? Wouldn’t that be considered electoral intervention from the current government? Or is that not a thing on the US? Should I just suspend my disbelief?

While I do love Mellie lecturing Fitz and being honest, it is getting old.

Not being power hungry does not equate being a good person. And Olivia and Mellie are power hungry and they are good people. White hats and all. At least I think so. Wait. Is Mellie the only person on this show that hasn’t kill anybody? Ah no, there are a few others.

“Me wanting power is like a drowning man wanting a bath”. Ahh, poor, poor, poor you. All that power and just having to use it. Having the burden of the presidency. AHHHHH there are so many wrong things with that sentence!!! I HATE YOU FITZ.

Aww. I do love it when they get along. :)  

“I want it” YES YOU GO GET IT!!  (And that means you still have to make a decision Fitz, no outs)

Olivia, I think you need to sleep. How long have you been functioning with no rest? And probably no food? And I’m guessing you no longer have Jake for comfort and to take care of you. Seriously. Olivia needs to rest. She also needs Jake.

I love how she says “Olivia Pope” like that’s enough to open any door. Because it is.

That... cannot be enough to convince you.

Another Olitz scene that’s kind of OK.

Of course you wanted her to be right. Then you wouldn’t have to choose.

“I figured if you were right, my choice would’ve been made for me”. Ha! And like always, he asks someone what he should do. The man is incapable of making a decision. He’s gonna have to now. 

So Fitz chose Cyrus because he didn’t want to fix another election. Ok... so he decided the future of his country based, completely, on what HE wanted and was feeling? Did he ever even considered, I don’t know, the good of the country? I’m not saying that the good of the country is Mellie (well, it is) but did he even thought about it? I don’t know, I don’t like Fitz, I may be overly harsh with him, lol.

“I’m handing you the most beautiful thing in the world. I’m handing you America”. Yeah, whatever. Sometimes, as a not US citizen, watching this show is no fun.  

Marcus and Mellie! OK, I’m going to choose to believe that Marcus volunteered to give the news to Mellie, because she deserved to hear it from Fitz. But Marcus wanted to be the one to tell her because he cares about her. Can these two get together already? Mellie deserves someone nice to love her!

Propose?! WHAT?! 

THESE BEAUTIFUL MURDERERS TORTURERS PSYCHOPATHS ARE GETTING MARRIED! THAT’S SO SWEET!

“You wanna murder her or you wanna marry her? haha, love that both options are plausible.

Fitz pronounces Francisco surprisingly well.

Oh, so that’s why Quinn was talking about marriage.

This is weird. The president, a republican, is giving a speech about his former chief of staff and next president, now a democrat? Ok...

... Did that burned hand put Quinn in a romantic mood?

Olivia, it is never that simple!

OK, so that’s it. So who killed Vargas? Rowan? Cyrus? Someone else? I have no idea. I hope we won’t have to wait until the end of the season (series?) to find out. Was Jake involved? (PLEASE no, that would make cero sense after last season). Hopefully we’ll get more of Jake next episode, and I want to know where Olake stands. Was Olivia terribly mean to Jake during the campaign? She probably was. Poor Jake. I want more Jake (and Olake but I am not holding my breath for that)

[fafnir-the-golden-dragon-blog]

DotD Chapter four part two, year two: trial and error

WARNING: this chapter contains minor violence, I hope you all enjoy!

Jake had known that he wouldn't succeed on his first attempt. What he hadn't thought about, was what he would do with the failed clones. The answer was obvious, but he'd doubted he could do it. He'd have to kill them, there was no other way. Most of them were deformed to the point that it would just be torment to let them live, and yet he didn't have the guts to kill them. They may have just been screaming piles of mush, but they were also still Palmela, and he couldn't kill them because of that. He had briefly thought about having Haruka do it, they'd probably have absolutely no qualms about killing the poor hunks of goop (they were a sociopath after all) but he couldn't ask for their help. He had managed to avoid suspicion from Chō and Haruka so far (for the most part) and really didn't want to straight up tell them what was going on and ask them to kill some clones for him.

No, that wouldn't do at all, and yet, he found himself doing just that. On one day, approximately a year after he'd finished setting up and started cloning, he'd run out of room. There were too many failed clones, and he didn't have any room for more. He had been backed into a corner, the many deformed creatures that only slightly resembled Palmela swarming him, when he finally gave in and called Haruka for help. They answered right away, as if they'd known that he was in danger. "What is it Jake?" Haruka answered, their deep, monotone voice, sounding slightly urgent. One of the clones grabbed Jake's ankle, causing him to yelp slightly.

"Jake, are you okay?" They had dropped their usual facade of indifference, and sounded incredibly concerned. Jake pulled his ankle back, and backed away as far as he could, until he felt a solid wall against his back. "Y-yeah I just-" he whacked away one of the screeching creatures. "-I need help." Haruka sounded as if they were preparing to leave. "Alright-" they paused, and Jake could hear them pulling on a coat. "-where are you?" They asked, their urgent tone once again being covered by their filter of monotony. Jake froze. His terrified brain refused to cough up the address to the building. It took a moment, but he did remember his location. "I-I'm in the abandoned building. The one j-just by the edge of the city. It used to be an apartment building," he said frantically as the creatures advanced even further upon him.

He tried to fight back, he knew he could, he was physically strong enough. And yet his mind held him back. Many voices swarmed his head each time he tried to fight these monsters. 'Don't fight!' 'Why would you hurt them? They're him, remember?' 'What are you doing? You love him! Do you not care?' It was giving him a headache, and making his strong body feel like jelly. He hadn't noticed he had dropped his phone, or that he hadn't heard any sort of response from Haruka, but the thought occurred to him that he didn't know if they'd come to save him.

He briefly thought-'I hope so' before the creatures finally overtook him. He fell limp as they attacked, smothering him with their goopy bodies. Just as Jake saw black swimming at the edges of his vision, the creatures were thrown off of him. He sat up, coughing and sputtering until he was sure that he was okay. When he finally looked up from his lap, Jake saw Haruka standing in front of him, covered in grey goop, and looking as if they'd just been told something awful. He figured that wasn't too far from the truth. Their central eyes were closed, and they held their chainscythe in their hands. They opened their eyes to look at him, and he felt oddly as if he were about to be murdered. He gulped audibly.

They were obviously angry. "Jake," they started, their anger just barely being hidden by their usual monotonous tone. He looked up at them, and realized that they really did look like they were going to kill him. They took a step forward. "What-what the hell are you doing?" They asked, their anger breaking through as they dropped their weapon and gripped the small boy by the shoulders with all of their six hands. All eight of their eyes were focused solely on his single brown one as they repeated their question.

"Jake, what the hell are you doing?" Their anger was less explosive, more contained. Jake assumed that was what made them so scary. Jake gulped loudly once more, before deciding to just get it over with and tell them. "I-I was cloning P-Palmela," he said, instantly recoiling as he realized how stupid he probably sounded. Haruka sighed, but pulled away. Jake sighed softly in relief, but quickly flinched when he saw Haruka's face. Their face seemed to have an odd shadow over it, made even more sinister by the black blood splattered all over them. And as soon as that creepy expression was there, it was gone. With a sigh, they turned away from Jake. "I should've known," they said softly, as they allowed their weapon to dematerialize.

Jake was shaking, and felt tears prickling in the corners of his eye as Haruka turned to face him once more. Their expression looked vaguely of that of regret. "Jake, promise me you'll stop this," they said, their tone hard and cold. Jake wrapped his arms around himself to eliminate the chill that had settled upon him. "I'm serious. Nothing good can come of this. It won't make you happier. It won't bring him back." Tears were now flowing freely down Jake's cheek, and he brought up a furry hand to stifle a sob that threatened to escape his throat.

Haruka knelt in front of Jake, and he felt one of their hands gently wipe the tears from his face. They seemed to realize that their words had hurt him. Maybe they really did feel after all? "Jake," he looked up at them. "Please, stop this. Promise me you'll stop this," their voice was trembling ever so slightly, as if they were going to start crying right along with the small boy. Jake shook his head. "I-I just want him back," Jake sobbed, having been unable to contain the pitiful sound any longer. Haruka sighed, and moments later, Jake felt all of their arms envelop him in a gentle hug. He felt one of their hands gently rubbing his back, and another softly running through his curly hair. It was a few minutes before they spoke again. "A-alright. I won't-I wont stop you, just....I don't like this but, just tell me if you need me to kill any more failed clones okay?" Jake nodded from where his face was buried in their shoulder. "A-are you gonna tell Chō?" He asked shakily. Haruka pulled away and nodded solemnly. "She deserves to know," they said, their voice back to its usual emotionless tone. Jake nodded. "Th-that's fair." Haruka released him, only one of their middle hands remaining on his shoulder. "Is-is Chō here?" Jake asked softly. Haruka shook their head. "I didn't want to bother her. Plus, you were in trouble, I could tell it was urgent, and we can't have you dying anytime soon," Haruka said with a smile. Jake's eye went wide. He had never seen them smile.

It wasn't like their usual creepy smile either, it was gentle, caring, like a mother looking at her child. Jake decided that it didn't much suit them, but it was.....nice. Haruka sighed, the smile fading just as quickly as it had appeared. "I'm going now. Try not to get yourself killed okay?" They asked. Jake nodded.

They left, giving the chimera a final glance before exiting the abandoned hotel. Jake wiped away his tears, and prepared to continue his task.

Chō was terrified when she was told what Jake was doing. She was worried about his safety just as much as Haruka was-if not more, they were a sociopath after all-and she did her best to talk him out of it. She discovered that he was rather stubborn. Jake refused to stop, no matter how much she talked to him. After a while, she just gave up. And so, she did her best to visit him, and provided comfort to him when Haruka had to kill failed clones. She knew it hurt him, she could feel the internal pain radiating off of him in waves to the point that she would start crying right along with him. This one particular day was like any other-Jake was busy cloning (which he shouldn't have even been doing in the first place) Elaine was busy (she had recently gotten a new girlfriend), her dad and his boyfriend were out on a date, and Haruka was at their castle of a house doing God knows what.

She knew better than to bother anyone, she was after all, way smarter than anyone ever gave her credit for. So, with a resigned sigh, she stood from where she lay flopped on her bed, and decided to go out. The teenage girl pulled on a pair of shoes and grabbed the bag she knew contained her cell phone(pink and covered in butterflies just like everything else she owned) and headed out the door. It was a fairly nice day, with spring having just come and all, and Chō felt an odd excitement that only ever came at that time of year. She loved the spring, it was after all, when all of the butterflies started to come out.

As she was enjoying this lovely weather, she found herself wandering over to the small park by her home. Due to spring having come, all of the trees and flowers were starting to bloom, painting the sides of the small path in the park with lovely shades of blues, reds and purples. She found herself almost intoxicated by the lovely smells of the springtime, so much so that she ran directly into someone. The person made a soft squeaking sound, and turned around quickly, wide eyes shifting rapidly. Chō took a minute to actually look at the small girl. She was short-probably only a tiny bit taller than Jake-with very dark skin which was littered with freckles. Her curly white hair covered one of her eyes, but the one that was visible was almost completely white, save for some parts.

Those parts appeared to be swirls of many colors, and sprinkled with stars. Chō was breathless, unable to look away from this girl's beautiful face. The girl made a soft sound of alarm, snapping Chō out of her odd trance, and making her remember that she'd just plowed this poor girl over. "I-I'm so sorry! I didn't see you there!" Chō said, reaching a hand out to help the girl off of the ground. She didn't move. The girl's head whipped around for a moment, before facing Chō's general direction. "O-oh, i-its okay," said the girl. Her voice was soft, gentle, no louder than the flapping of a butterfly's wings. Chō stared at the girl-who was still sitting on the pavement-and wondering why she hadn't taken her hand. "Do you want me to help you up?" She asked, realizing that being too loud might startle the girl away.

And Chō found that she really didn't want that. The girl's visible eye went wide as she finally looked up at Chō. Although, it still seemed.....off center. "O-oh! Y-yes, thank-thank you," the small girl said. She then proceeded to hold out her hand, only to retract it with a look of fear in her colorful eyes. It was then that Chō realized: this girl was probably blind. Upon realizing this, Chō took the girl's hand in her own, and gently pulled her up. She made a soft squeaking noise as she struggled to stand properly. Chō helped her steady herself, only then noticing why the girl was having trouble standing. The brunette hadn't taken the time to look at the rest of this-rather beautiful-girl, and took a few moments to do so. She wore a jacket, almost resembling a suit jacket, with a fancy collar and buttons all the way down. Under that was a blue dress that stopped above a pair of hooved feet.

On her head, the girl wore a scarf-which Chō recognized as a hijab-which covered most of her hair. The girl made a soft sound as if she were going to speak, but quickly stopped. Chō's attention snapped back to the girl's face, which was blushing rather heavily. The taller girl quickly realized the problem, and released the other's hand. The girl took it back gratefully, and gently placed it in her pocket. Chō then realized that this was indeed awkward, and she should do something to fix that. She settled for introducing herself.

"Uh, my name is Chō, what's yours?" She said, her voice back to being loud and high-pitched. The girl seemed startled, and her eyes snapped to Chō's face. "M-my name is S-Serice," she said, so quietly that Chō almost didn't hear it. She smiled, and then realized that this girl-Serice probably couldn't see it. Upon realizing this, Chō decided to take a bit of a risk. "I'm smiling at you," she said softly. Serice's visible eye went wide, and her face flushed. "O-oh! I-I'm so sorry! I-I-I can't see," she said, stuttering rather intensely. Chō placed a pudgy hand on the girl's shoulder. "It's okay, I know. I just wanted you to know that," she said softly. Serice's very colorful eye seemed to focus on Chō for a moment, before she turned away and started to walk away. "I-I'm sorry, I-I h-have to go," she said, sounding legitimately sad to be leaving. Chō's brows furrowed, but she didn't try to force the girl to stay. "Okay. Hey, do you wanna be my friend? I'm sure my friends would like you!" She said excitedly. Serice's freckled face flushed, and she stared at the ground for a moment before nodding. "Yes, I think I would like that," she said with a small smile.

Chō gently patted her head and said goodbye. Serice smiled softly and walked off, possibly never to be seen again. Chō just stood there, trying to process what had just happened. She had just met a beautiful girl who seemed to be a little sweetie, she had a feeling that Haruka would appreciate hearing this story.

And so, she promptly sprinted off in the direction she knew would lead her to Haruka's home. It took her roughly ten minutes to reach Haruka's castle of a house. The house itself was massive, and looked like the type of place you'd see in movies about vampires. The massive building was made of dark cobblestone and had many floors with many windows, and roofs made of crimson tiles. A tall, sharp metal fence circled the property to keep out any intruders from the rich Minori family's castle. But no vampires lived there, only spiders. Spiders who got very angry at being mistaken for vampires. Chō walked up to the gate, and pulled out her cell phone, clicking Haruka's contact to call them and alert them to her presence. They didn't answer, and instead walked right out of the house's large front doors.

The spider walked quickly up to the gate and unlocked it, allowing Chō to enter. She allowed them to escort her silently into the house, and up to the second floor, to the room she knew as theirs. Chō wasted no time flopping down on Haruka's bed, which was large, and covered with a thin, black blanket. Next to one of their fluffy, red pillows sat a small stuffed spider, which a much younger Haruka had named "Mr. Leggy." Chō smiled fondly at the stuffed creature, and pulled it into her arms as Haruka moved to sit beside her. She smiled up at them, and they simply stared blankly at her. Chō wasted no time, and sat up-Mr. Leggy still cradled carefully in her arms-and started to tell Haruka about the events of her day so far. "Haruka!" Her high-pitched voice rang out, catching the attention of said person beside her. "Yes?" They asked, their usual monotone no longer sounding bored, but slightly interested. That's just how they were with Chō. "I met a person that I think you'd like! She was super cute and seemed really nice!"

Haruka raised an eyebrow at the excited woman beside them. "Oh?" They said simply, signaling for her to continue. "She was super short and had these really pretty eyes. Her name is Serice and she said that she'd be our friend! I think we should tell Jake too, she might be able to be his friend also," the brunette said excitedly. Haruka smiled at her, a soft, loving smile. "Yes, I think that would be good. I would like to meet her also," they said with that same smile.

Chō's smile widened, making the chubbiness in her cheeks even more obvious than usual, but something about it was so very cute. That day she had decided to wear a soft purple lipstick, which was quickly smeared on Haruka's face. Chō had leaned over, and kissed Haruka on the cheek. They laughed softly, leaning into the woman's pudgy hands on either side of their face. Chō couldn't help but giggle too. Haruka seldom smiled, so seeing them laugh was like a rare treasure that was only uncovered once in a lifetime. Of coarse, they did smile more than once in a lifetime, but to Chō that's what it felt like. She smiled even more when she felt all six of Haruka's thin arms wrap around her in return. Chō loved when Haruka was affectionate, but it's not like that was rare between them. Chō gently kissed them, and she just couldn't help but smile. In that moment, everything was okay. Even though they were horribly worried. Even though the Corrupts were still out there, searching for Jake. In that moment, as Chō and Haruka were together, it seemed as if everything was okay.

A/N: damn so we got some mama bear(TM) Haruka AND a new character, nICE

[ryanmeft]

Patriots Day Movie Review

Peter Berg starts off strong, spending the first half hour or so of his film focusing on the lives of the victims of 2013's Boston Marathon bombing, and yes, on those of terrorists Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, whose stories, like it or not, are essential for the film to work. Unfortunately, he quickly becomes less interested in the quiet personal moments of those who suffered, and more in recreating the ensuing firefight. This he does with aplomb, but the news at the time covered the car chases and pyrotechnics in detail, and I felt more than a bit robbed of a chance to get past the action drama and deeper into who was affected and how.

The story itself is straightforward: the Tsarnaev brothers, played respectively by Themo Melikidze and Alex Wolff, plant two bombs in backpacks at the finish line of the marathon, and then attempt to reach New York to bomb Times Square as well, hounded by real-life police and FBI agents, including Jeffrey Pugliese (J.K. Simmons), Richard DesLauriers (Kevin Bacon) and Commissioner Ed Davis (John Goodman). Their victims include newlyweds Patrick Downes and Jessica Kensky (Christopher O'Shea and Rachel Brosnahan) and father Steve Woolfenden (Dustin Tucker), all of whom eventually lose limbs. Others who are later drawn in to the murderous rampage are Dun Meng (Jimmy O. Yang), who is taken hostage when his car is hijacked, and MIT officer Sean Colliers (Jake Picking), who stands up to the bombers with tragic results.

Berg draws immense tension and empathy out of parts of these stories. The most effective is that of Meng, whose ordeal after he is kidnapped left me actually breathless; imagine being trapped with two wild animals who could decide to kill you at any moment. In the cases of Meng and Colliers in particular, it can be hard to watch knowing the film accurately recreates their role in the events. The two actors who will likely find themselves most underrated for their work are, of course, Melikidze and Wolff, who dared to take on the roles of the bombers. Tamerlan is seen as a psychotic, a man for whom religion provides an easy excuse for clear tendencies toward violence and murder. The younger brother, Dzhokhar, seems to have some wires crossed in his head; he calmly asks Meng for a music jack right after the two brothers have just killed four people. I recall news reports at the time bringing up the possibility that he had a developmental disability, and Wolff seems to be playing him with a hint of that, as he seems only dimly aware of the real consequences of his actions.

Sadly, the other victims are quickly shunted off-stage in favor of the action. Berg is a lover of recreations, and in "Deepwater Horizon" this paid off emotionally, as it was the only way we were ever going to get an approximation of what happened inside that oil platform. Here, though, we saw all the "juicy" parts on the news, and I came to the theatre hoping to learn more about the humans. Perhaps most galling is the replacement of many real police officers with Mark Wahlberg's fictional Tommy Saunders. So many were involved that a composite character may have indeed been necessary. The issue is that he's a walking cliche, with Wahlberg simply transplanting the laziest of "renegade cop" tropes into the character and then topping it off with a few overwrought speeches that seem to have taken a small army of screenwriters to create.

"Patriots Day" purports to celebrate the everyday heroism of the common man, yet repeatedly does the opposite by punching up the drama and passing on chances to focus on ordinary people. Every interesting decision Berg makes is offset by two or three others where the subtlety that could have provided us a new perspective on familiar events is set aside, and I left feeling like I'd seen a very good recreation of a news report that failed to do the story justice.

Verdict: Average

Note: I don’t use stars but here are my possible verdicts. I suppose you could consider each one as adding a star.

Must-See Highly Recommended Recommended Average Not Recommended Avoid like the Plague

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