#-around during the time of the neanderthals

[primalshane]

Vent?? Question mark??

[agaypanic]

One More Problem (Rodrick Heffley X Jefferson!Reader Smut)

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Summary: You were a good girl; straight-A student with extracurriculars, nice to your brother, the worst curse word you’d say in public was “damn.” But behind closed doors, your boyfriend Rodrick can turn you into an entirely different kind of girl.

A/N: inspired by a jefferson!reader ask i answered. did i go overboard with this? who knows lol 

C/W: corruption kink, dom/sub dynamic, dumbification kink, unprotected sex (WRAP IT BEFORE YOU TAP IT!!), degradation kink, praise kink, cockwarming

***

Nobody could really wrap their head around why you and Rodrick were dating. You were different, too different. You were the good girl. Model student, a golden child, practically perfect. Rodrick, on the other hand, was a complete neanderthal who would probably end up dropping or failing out of high school. 

You supposed that that was something you liked about Rodrick. He was different from the expectations that you had to live up to. He practically lived on energy drinks, played loud ass rock music wherever he went, and wore eyeliner that was always smudged beyond any kind of definition. When you were with Rodrick, he made you feel alive.

Plus, the sex was amazing.

You sighed for what felt like the thousandth time, staring a hole into the homework that sat on your desk. Rodrick had come over to hang out, mainly because the rest of your family was out of the house, but you wanted to finish your homework before goofing off with him. But for some reason, this math worksheet was kicking your ass.

“Babe, just take a break,” Rodrick said, sitting up on your bed.

You shook your head, rubbing your eyes. “Just one more problem.”

“You said that four problems ago.” Suddenly, Rodrick was standing next to you, looking down on you. “Don’t you want a break?”

With the way you were acting, you should’ve said yes. But instead, you shook your head. What you wanted was completely different.

Rodrick noticed the pleading look in your eyes and had to stop himself from laughing. “Do you want me to help you?” You nodded. “Say it.”

“Yes.”

Any other person would immediately say no. But you knew that Rodrick wasn’t offering to help you with the math. 

Rodrick grabbed your wrist, helping you get up. He scooted the chair back a little before sitting down and unbuckling his studded belt. Your mouth watered as you watched your boyfriend pull his half-erect cock out of his jeans and boxers.

“Come on, baby.” He said, one hand stroking himself while the other went under your skirt, cupping your aching pussy through your panties and making you mewl. “Aw, you’re soaking. Needy thing.” 

Rodrick moved you to stand in front of him. He tucked the hem of your skirt into the waistband and moved the seat of your underwear to the side before guiding you to sit on his dick. You let out a whiny moan when Rodrick bottomed out, filling you to the brim. You leaned against his chest, trying to adjust to his size while he stroked your hair.

“You’re just useless without my dick in you, huh? Isn’t that right, pretty girl?” He hooked your legs over his spread ones to put your stuffed pussy on full display. Rodrick looked at the sight from over your shoulder. “What a pretty pussy. Look, baby. Look at how my fat dick is stretching your little cunt.”

You shuddered at his words, incredibly aroused by the way he talked to you. If you had told yourself a year ago that not only would you be dating Rodrick, but you’d also love the way he degraded you during sex, she would’ve thought you were fucking crazy.

“Okay, you know the rules.” Rodrick brought you out of your thoughts by grabbing your chin and making you look at the neglected paper you had been working on. “Finish your homework, and you can get fucked like the dirty girl you are. You only have one problem left, right?” You nodded, but that wasn’t good enough for Rodrick. His hands went down to your hips and pulled you even further down on his cock, making you squeal. “I thought you were a good girl.”

“I am.” You whined, gripping his wrist. “I am, I am.”

“Then answer me. You only have one problem left, right?”

“Yes!” Pleased, Rodrick let go of his iron grip on your hips, making you both relieved and disappointed. His hands settled on your inner thighs while you grabbed your pencil and started to read over the problem again.

But he just felt so good. You tried to discreetly grind on him, but a hard slap to your thigh deterred you from any further action.

Rodrick must have sensed that you were still having problems. “I thought my dick was supposed to help you, baby.” He cooed, fingers ghosting over your clit. “But you’re just getting dumber and dumber, aren’t you?”

“Uh-huh.” You gripped your pencil as Rodrick pinched your clit, making you jolt. 

It felt like a million years before you finally finished the math problem. With every second that passed, you just became more and more needy and cockdrunk. It didn’t help that Rodrick would play with your clit every time you actually started to concentrate.

You set the pencil down on your desk. “Done?” Rodrick asked.

“Uh-huh.”

He looked over your shoulder, smiling when he saw that the paper was completely filled out. He, of course, didn’t know whether or not you were actually correct, but the fact that you finished the problem was its own accomplishment. “Looks like my girl deserves a reward, huh?”

You furiously nodded, and Rodrick grabbed your chin to smash his lips against yours. It was a sloppy battle of tongues and teeth. Not wanting to ruin your work, Rodrick moved the worksheet to the side before standing up, bringing you with him, still impaled on his cock. He broke the kiss and had you bend over the desk, staring out the window that was right in front of you.

He slowly started to pull out, spreading your cheeks so he could see how soaked his dick was in your juices. He stopped when just the tip was in, smirking at the sound of you whining about feeling empty before slamming back into your greedy cunt. Rodrick kept up a brutal pace, balls slapping your clit with every thrust.

Your eyes rolled back as Rodrick grabbed you by the hair, pulling you up so you were arching your back and looking out into the neighbor. “Imagine your family saw you like this.” He grunted in your ear. “What would they think? Seeing their precious daughter being a dirty, cockdrunk whore for me right now.” You whined loudly, incredibly grateful that the house was empty. “If only everyone knew that the golden girl gets dumb from me dicking her down.”

Rodrick reached around to start rubbing at your clit, making your legs tremble. Thank god the desk and Rodrick’s grip on your hair were holding you up. “Roddy!” You whined, screwing your eyes shut. “Roddy, I’m gonna come. Can I come?”

“Beg.” Your boyfriend responded sharply, keeping up his relentless pace.

“Please, please, please. I’ve been such a good girl for you.” You whimpered at the feeling of Rodrick continuously brushing against your G-spot. “I’m your dirty little girl. I wanna come so bad, please!”

“So fucking needy.” Rodrick groaned, speeding up the pace on your clit. “Since you wanna come so bad, do it now. All over my cock.”

The coil in your tummy snapped, and you let out a high-pitched scream at the feeling of your intense release. Your entire body shook as you covered Rodrick’s dick in your cum, which just made it easier for him to piston in and out of you. He fucked you roughly through your high, making you whimper and squirm as he chased his own.

“Fuck, gonna-” Rodrick cut himself off with a groan, spilling into you while his pace stuttered to a stop. 

Slowly, he leaned on top of your worn-out body, both of you hissing at the feeling of him going deeper in you. You were quiet for a few minutes, trying to collect yourselves.

When Rodrick recovered, he left a couple kisses on your shoulder. “You okay?” 

You looked back at him, a lazy grin overtaking your features. “Never been better.”

***

Rodrick Heffley Taglist: @tweedledipshit @screechingsandwichtriumph

[sparsilees]

it’s almost the end of 2024. can we drop this absolutely inane fanonical idea that harry james potter is “oblivious” or “unobservant” or “average”?

fuck your fanon harry. fuck that soggy tissue who doesn’t inspire confidence in others. fuck that lummox who cannot string a sentence together. fuck that hothead who’d lash out in anger and throw punches at every provocation. fuck that namby-pamby who can’t read clues or between the lines or come up with a plan of action. fuck that sheep who can’t function without hermione’s direction. fuck that neanderthal who’s a messy eater, messy writer, messy speaker, and has poor manners.

who the bloody hell is that? that’s not harry james potter. why are you twisting and malforming him into a bloody clown?

why are you undermining the main character of his own series? boy has an abysmal self-esteem, stays quiet and lowkey, bottles up his truest feelings and thoughts (that we as readers are privy to, but not the other characters!), and has a calm and composed mien so you think you too can dismiss his character easily and strip him down to a skeleton of his canon self and instead carve out huge character growth, redemption arcs, and love letters for everyone else?

you wish to evoke sympathy for draco by making lucius out to be an abusive father and crafting a pitiful childhood for draco when they have an affectionate parent-child relationship canonically, but downplay harry’s abuse? you realise that tom riddle, sirius black, james potter, and hermione granger are acknowledged to be the brightest of their generation, yet forget harry potter and tom riddle are two sides of the same coin, even sharing a similar appearance, and reduce harry to a silly caricature? you make harry magically powerful but wrest his smarts away to highlight someone else’s big brain?

you make him out to be a short dork with a shorter fuse and no idea what’s going on around him when harry and tom are both described as woe-ridden orphans—with all that entails from constant hunger to cold sleepless nights to hypervigilance to the forced, quick maturity—but treat tom true to canon as tall, cunning, and clever, then do an about-face to conveniently slap the malnourished, oblivious, and slacker labels on harry to make him as lesser than?

when he picked up the impervious spell simply from having seen hermione perform it once, when his closest friends have difficulty gleaning his thoughts, when his anger is cold and sharp like dumbledore (ootp was a study in ptsd, next!), when he’s just as tall as his father, was just as ill-treated as a house elf, and rightfully brilliant as the son of lily and james potter—the two powerful and talented individuals who once had voldemort trying to recruit them to join his cause?

the sheer disrespect on his name. the sheer mockery of his character. the absolutely mind-boggling erasure of his most defining traits.

who do you think sussed out most of the big clues, and stowed away all the little, random bits of information in his memory bank, to ultimately piece the puzzle together at the final showdown every end of the school year? who realised as a mere firstie that quirrel was the man hagrid blabbed to about fluffy and the dragon egg? who noted that ginny was withdrawn and unlike herself? who had an inkling fleur had taken a fancy to bill? who picked up on what was brewing between ron and hermione before their own selves? who noticed that hermione cast a confundus on cormac mclaggen during the match? who caught on instantly to the change in tense used for the diadem’s existence and confidently tracked it down? who cottoned on to luna’s longtime disappearance from her cold, untouched bed and the layer of dust? who did voldemort consider his equal? who actually has an uncanny sense of intuition? who calls the shots when the trio gets into a pickle? who?

mcgonagall? flitwick? draco? hermione? blaise zabini? no!

excuse harry for that one time he did not look deeply into the mental workings of a grieving girl because he’s not equipped to deal with them, and has in the first place never been taught to process his own emotions properly because he didn’t grow up in a healthy environment, prohibited from expressing his feelings, let alone vulnerability, and voicing his thoughts!

let’s bury this annoyingly stupid narrative for good. go read the books and refresh your perspective. stop doing him dirty. you’ve already butchered sirius black’s character into a pathetic sisspot. and now you want to assassinate harry’s too.

[jeridandridge]

Hey Jealously

Reader doesn’t like when the vending machine guy flirts with Melissa.

This is a quick drabble, trying to get my brain going again. Feel free to send requests!

“I’m just saying if they cast a man in that role the character wouldn’t have gotten so much hate.”

“It’s okay, dude.” You laugh patting Jacob’s shoulder, sitting with him and Janine so Mel and Barb can have their time during lunch.

The relationship with the devastatingly gorgeous redhead was still new, but you had the feeling others were catching on. Neither you or Melissa tried to hide anything, but you both toned down the PDA when at work because of the setting itself.

“What’s the kid whining about now?” Melissa asks shifting in her seat, glasses on the bridge of her nose.

Smiling at your girlfriend you open your mouth to explain, only to stop short when vending machine guy comes in.

“How are my favorite teachers doin?” He asks with a smile on his stupidly huge Neanderthal face. Okay, maybe that was harsh, but you didn’t like how he flirted with Melissa.

Last Thursday he brought her a whole case of her favorite iced tea. The week before that he tried talking her into going out with him which she politely declined, and now he looks at Melissa like an animal hunting its prey.

“Good now that we got Gushers back in the machine,” Leave it to Janine’s sunny disposition to ease the tension you’re feeling. You watch closely as Gary eyes your lady, and it makes you see red. You hadn’t felt the need to say anything to Melissa about the vending machine guy, she never flirted back but you couldn’t help the pang of jealousy you felt.

“Hey Philly 11, you put any thought into my offer?” He grins not having a clue as to what’s going on.

The look on your face must worry Janine and Jacob, because Jacob stands up and leaves the table going to the sink.

“Nah, Gary. I got other stuff going on.” A good response, you think. She’s still facing your table and hasn’t looked up from her phone.

“If you change your mind I-“

“She said she’s got other stuff going on.” You huff firmly.

Barb is the first to look at you, missing the smirk on her friends face. Gary nods cowering away with his cart, not to be seen again until next week.

Feeling your skin flush you duck your head meeting Melissa’s eyes. As the redhead stands up you sit back in your chair leaning into her when she wraps her arms around your shoulders from behind kissing your cheek. “Jealous there, hon?”

Janine is pouting at the two of you, looking back and forth between your table and Barb like a deer in the headlights.

Barb laughs shaking her head with a knowing smile looking at you. “Ava owes me a significant amount of money. Good job, sweetheart.”

[mrsparrasblog]

Makarov x Price daughter pt.4

This chapter is just to explain what Price did in the whole year since his daughter is gone. Its different then the other ones I still hope you like it. I'll try to set myself a goal to publish the next chapter tomorrow.

Previous Part. next part

Four months he was away from his home, from his wife Tina, and you. God, he missed you and couldn’t wait to see you again. He planned the whole month how he would apologize to you for saying you were a disappointment. Of course, you weren't a disappointment; he just didn't know how to show it to you. You weren't his little girl anymore, so grown and independent. Tina needed him more than you, or at least he thought so. Tina was a spitfire, always getting in danger, disrespecting teachers, while you were a perfectly behaved little girl. Never once in his life occurred the thought that you could do anything wrong. So he neglected you, and he knew that was a mistake now.

During this time off, he would give you all the attention you needed and finally be the dad you deserved. If only you'd accept his apology. He finally arrived in Cardiff, his clothes still dirty from the long flight, his beard overgrown, and he looked a bit like a Neanderthal, but this time he couldn't wait. He rang the bell, Tina and his wife already running into his arms.

"Where is she?" he asked curiously, eager to find out where you were. You mostly took the day off when he came back from deployment. Maybe you couldn’t or did overtime again because a birth took longer than planned.

"Dunno," his wife said bluntly, not mentioning the fact that you hadn’t been home for three months. She saw you making out with an older guy again the day you went "missing". In her mind, you were a spoiled brat who didn't appreciate everything she gave you. She wasn’t your mother and still tolerated you. Shouldn’t you be grateful for that?

After 10 hours at home, your dad grew anxious. He always had a great gut feeling, and something felt off, so he needed to investigate this situation, making sure you were okay. You were his little girl, after all. Telling his wife a white lie, he went to the hospital where you worked.

The delivery station looked weird to him. Everyone was smiling brightly, as if there wasn’t any pain or war in the world. The midwives walked around in pink scrubs, and everywhere were damn cupcakes. It was the first time he visited you at work, and he felt guilty about how he reacted the day you told him you wanted to become a midwife. He should have been proud of you.

After looking around and not finding you, he asked one of the midwives, explaining that he was your dad and had returned from deployment. He got more confused when the midwife told him to sit down and your supervisor came out, taking him into her office.

"Look, your daughter was our best midwife apprentice, but she hasn’t been at work for the last three months without any notice," she explained.

"What do you mean three months? She loves her work," he said.

"We know that. If she ever gets out of her phase, she can come back to work. But for now, could you please gather her stuff from the locker?"

"Phase? What phase?"

"Her stepmom told us she had psychological issues, Mr. Price."

He never heard of it. Why didn’t his wife tell him before? He would have tried to be there for you. The midwife guided him to your locker, opening it for him so he could take your stuff out. His lips curved into a smile when he saw the pictures in the locker: one of your best friend and you at graduation (he missed it), a picture of you on your first day at work with pink scrubs, and a picture of him barely 20, holding you in his arms. You were so precious, such a little thing looking up to him. Dozens of pink scrubs, a calendar marked with vacation NYC and Taylor Swift concert. This didn’t look like a locker from someone who lost it.

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

"Where is my daughter? Don’t bullshit me."

"I don’t know."

"Her boss said you told her she is mental."

"Well, she certainly is. She sleeps around with men your age."

"Do you know where the fuck she is or not? When was she last here?"

"Three months ago."

"Fuck it! My daughter is missing, and you only told me about it now?"

"She isn’t missing, John. She probably married some old fart and ran off."

"Shut the fuck up." He never screamed at his wife. His captain demeanor was always something he left at home, but you were missing, and no one told him. What if something happened? After three months, the traces were hard to find. "Fucking hell."

He walked away to the only place he could think you were. But when your best friend called him a deadbeat dad for only searching for his daughter after three months, he knew something must have happened to you.

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

"Kate, please, anything will help."

"John, there is no trace of her. I'm sorry."

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

"We searched through every man she interacted with, Cap. She isn’t anywhere."

"She is there somewhere outside, Ghost."

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

"How many more innocent people will you kill, John? She is gone."

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

"We should hold a wake for her."

"She is still alive, Kate."

"John, it’s been a year. You know the statistics."

"I won’t stop until I see her corpse."

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

"Makarov will marry, holding a big public celebration and everything, invited us somehow."

"Why should I care if that bastard marries, Nick?"

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

"We found your daughter, Captain."

"Where, Kyle?" He asked desperately. He never lost hope after searching for you for a whole year. He wasn’t the man he was before. He was rougher, he didn’t care about anything anymore. He divorced his wife, killed just to have you back.

"You won’t like it." Please don’t be dead. His eyes started to tear.

"Where?" He needed to take his little girl home, bury you properly, a thing he never thought he needed to do, bury his own daughter, but the world was cruel for people like him.

"Alive"Kyle placed some articles of a Russian gossip journal on his desk.

"'Princess of Russia'," John read aloud. "Vladimir Makarov's longtime love was seen shopping for her wedding dress suspiciously holding her belly. Already pregnant?"

"We can't wait for the wedding of the century," Kyle continued, pointing at the article. "From worker to billionaire spouse, she is living the Cinderella dream."

John's heart sank. He knew what this meant. His daughter, his little girl, was about to become a pawn in Makarov's twisted game. And he would do anything to stop it.

Tag list: @multifand0midi07 , @whos-fran , @cassiecasluciluce , @the-faceless-bride

[livums]

Liv’s {Totally Optional Non-Mandatory Completely Voluntary} Pointers for Fleshing Out Character Relationships

Hi I’m liv e. and by middling demand I am going to blab a liiittle* bit about relationships.

So I will start by saying that I’m trained & licensed as a marriage and family therapist. So this is kind of what I do all fucking week. And I like this whole writeblr thing so why not make it fun and about fiction instead. LOL.

The purpose of this liiiiittle** post is to offer some ways in which you, a writer (great job btw!), might deepen your own understanding of the relationships between two or more characters in your writing. More specifically, by thinking a little deeper about how relationships function in real life.

These are ways in which I might conceptualize a relationship between people who seek my services as a clinician.

A small disclaimer: the VAST majority of my work is with couples (because I. prefer to see couples over families, lol), so this advice is coming from that perspective. Please keep in mind also that there are certainly infinite other ways to think about relationships. This is just the way I was trained. Or at least, the parts of my training that resonated with me the most, especially as I began writing more seriously.

My hope is that reading and practicing/toying around with these tips will help add another dimension to how relationships play out in your writing. So um. Cheers! Let’s chat.

*it’s not a little. it’s a lot.

**it’s a long post.

i. What I Say vs. What I Mean

When was the last time your partner or good friend pissed you off?

Maybe they were flippant about your feelings. Maybe they blew you off to hang out with someone else. Maybe they keep loading the dishwasher like a neanderthal.

And did you say to them, “Baby/honey/sweetums/bestie, it really upsets me when you load the dishwasher like that. I’ve asked you to do it X way several times, and it feels like you’re not listening to me, or that you don’t care about how I feel” ?

Probably not? Because, hello? (If you did, first try, then, wow! you’re a better person than i’ll ever be.)

You might’ve said “Dude, stop cramming shit in the dishwasher like it’s a fucking suitcase,” or “Haha, wow, again with the dishwasher. Awesome. No, it’s like, whatever.“ Or you might not’ve said anything at all, on purpose.

There is a tension that exists, there, in the CONTRAST between what we are thinking/feeling/meaning (e.g., I love you/I miss you/You hurt me) and what we are communicating via our words and actions (e.g., You never make time for me/You’re so lazy/You’re such a(n) [expletive of choice]).

That tension is ... really fucking interesting to read, huh!

Personally, I have a lot of fun watching the needs/wants/feelings of a character (that we might be privy to, as readers) get filtered through their unique... voice.

So say you write a character who is quite rough around the edges, and not very skilled in affection. They have a deep yearning to be close to [love interest], but they just aren’t accustomed to languaging their true feelings. Maybe we see how scared they are of putting their feelings out there. It’s vulnerable. It’s terrifying.

So instead of “I really care about you, [love interest]”, maybe it comes out something more like “Don’t you have anything better to do with your time than follow me around all fucking day?”

And we, the readers, are like, wow! That’s not what you were thinking at all man! You’re so bad at this, that’s awesome.

So the point of all this is that it’s very helpful to clarify for yourself, in any meaningful interaction between characters in or soon-to-be-in a relationship:

What are the characters individually thinking during this interaction? What are the emotions that are present? How does it show in their body or their movements? Are they careful not to let these things show, or do they not notice at all?

How are they expecting this interaction to go? (Are they afraid something might go wrong? Are they looking for a certain reaction from each other?)

What DON’T they know about what the other person is thinking? What are their assumptions about how the other person perceives them--in general, and in this moment?

What is the GAP or the CONTRAST between all of the above and what actually ends up coming out of their mouth? Or what actions they end up physically taking (or not taking)?

Are the characters aware of their own contrast, here? How do they feel about it? Or, do they think they are being perfectly congruent?

In this way, you have the ability, as a writer, to create some devastatingly (or delightfully) poignant moments between characters. These are the moments that can really sell the reader on the relationship--its importance (why are you showing us this?) and its appeal (thank you for showing us this, this blew our tits off, etc).

ii. Tender Spots and How to Attack Them for Fun and Profit

So we’ve got issues.

What are the things that really fuckin get at you? Those topics that, when brought up, make you really upset and really defensive at like, mach speed. Maybe you’re insecure about your skills. Maybe it really bothers you when people see you as weak/unintelligent/a burden/unattractive. Maybe you have a rough and complicated relationship with a family member.

So these can be thought of as, like, tender spots (lol). You can also think of them as “raw” spots, sensitive spots, or triggers.

Figure out what your characters’ are!

This is another key way in which you can create deep and believable interpersonal drama--Character A (accidentally or intentionally) stomps all over Character B’s sensitive spots. So to speak.

A very cursory and relatively uncomplicated example of this in action:

Tasha and Mimi are two adults in a committed partnership.

Mimi’s got a real fucking chip on her shoulder about being seen as a burden--her father always went to great lengths to make sure she knew just how much he did for her, just how many opportunities he passed up in order to raise her, just how great his life would have been if she’d never been born.

Tasha is the oldest of five siblings. She was frequently tasked with their care, growing up. She did her best not to complain, as her parents were always very busy working to keep a roof over their head. So, Tasha did her part. She would’ve loved to rest and play and goof off like other kids and teens, sure, but it never felt possible with all of her responsibilities.

Mimi is suddenly injured and is unable to do certain things on her own that she had been doing before. Tasha goes about taking care of these things as well as taking on certain other tasks on her own that the pair of them may have tackled as a team before. Tasha feels stretched very thin by the workload, but is deeply concerned about how Mimi feels. There’s nothing to be done about the situation, she reasons, so there’s no point in complaining about how stressed out she is.

Mimi offers to help to the best of her ability, but Tasha is very concerned about her, and insists that Mimi rest and not exert herself. Mimi insists back. Tasha insists back back.

Mimi points out how stressed Tasha must be. Tasha agrees that she is stressed, but does not elaborate on her feelings. Mimi assumes that Tasha must think that she is a burden.

Mimi then becomes very emotionally activated--she is reminded, consciously or unconsciously, of how shitty it felt to have her father tell her over and over again what a burden she is, and how better off he would be without her. So this must be how Tasha really feels about her, Mimi accuses.

Tasha, who is very stressed but who cares very deeply for Mimi and her well-being, and who does not see Mimi as just a burden, becomes very activated in turn--she feels maligned and misunderstood. And now she certainly can’t talk about how stressed out she is, because it will only convince Mimi that she is right.

So Tasha is now convinced that she must continue to hold her feelings in in order to keep the peace--she’s reminded of her childhood spent taking care of others, and how she never felt allowed to express herself.

This example is obviously from a very zoomed-out view, chronologically, and is not exactly the way we would see it written in fiction (fiction is much more moment-by-moment and, well, exciting, usually). BUT we can see where Tasha and Mimi’s sensitivities lie, and how they specifically hurt each other with their behavior (unintentionally, in this case) by stomping RIGHT ON those sensitivities.

Readers love drama. And drama makes the plot go ‘round! So don’t be afraid to lay it on them!

In your (very good and compelling) writing, ESPECIALLY if you want to write engaging relational conflict, you would do well to clarify what your characters’ deepest sensitivities are. Consider the following:

What needs went unmet for them, growing up? A very cliche therapist-y question, but for good reason--our upbringing is where many of our deepest insecurities originate.

Additionally/alternatively, what do your characters understand to be their role in relation to other people? E.g., are they always the caretaker, the burden, the comic relief, the heartbreaker, the lonely hero, the boss? How did they first get this idea of who they’re ‘supposed’ to be towards others, and how was this reinforced throughout their life? Are they satisfied or dissatisfied with their ‘lot in life’? What do they hate about their ‘role’, if anything?

What sorts of situations might remind them of what they hate most about this role? E.g. ‘I enjoy taking care of others, and I’m good at it, but my partner gets upset if I discuss how stressed I get sometimes--I’m never allowed to express myself.’ How can you incorporate these situations into your story to create conflict?

How does your character respond when these sensitivities are triggered? Do they lash out? Do they retreat and get quiet? Do they ghost people altogether?

What do they think will happen if they are unwilling or unable to fulfill this role in their relationships with others? E.g., ‘My partner will leave me if I am not a good caretaker’, ‘Nothing will get done right if I’m not the one taking charge’, ‘If I don’t keep others at arms’ length, even if they say they love me, I’ll end up hurt.’

This is another way in which you can help your relationships really come to life! Anyways. Read on for more cheer and relational joy!

iii. We’re Attracted to What Hurts Us Sometimes, AKA Oops! I Ran into the Knife, Ten Times,

(less of a part 3 and more a part 2.5, but it was simply too long. so,)

So maybe you have a good idea of what your ideal partner/bestie looks like. It’s probably any number of positive traits: kind, considerate, good sense of humor, shapely posterior, ambitious, active, fun-loving, studious, etc.

What probably don’t make the list are things like: emotionally distant like my mother with whom I long to have a reparative experience.

Maybe you’ve witnessed (or been in) a relationship wherein all parties can be described as ‘just so bad for each other’. And maybe this relationship should not have lasted as long as it did (or shouldn’t be lasting as long as it is). And maybe you’re like--’Why are these assholes still together?’ Or, importantly: ‘Why did these assholes get together at all?’ The answer may surprise you! But more likely, it won’t.

Sometimes, we pick people on purpose specifically because they stab us right in the sensitive spot (again. so to speak).

(i should clarify before moving on: I am specifically NOT talking about relational abuse, here. That’s kind of an entirely different subject that is like. the cousin of this subject. In this discussion, I specifically mean relationships in which there is no major power differential--you’re just bad for each other. These relationships can be what we might call ‘toxic’, sure, and painful, but not abusive. The distinction is important, moving forward. ok ty)

[Author’s Note: I need everyone to know that I wrote and subsequently deleted 700 words here because I realized they didn’t make any fucking sense ok. let’s try this one more time.]

Essentially, it’s a known phenomenon among humans that, when we have experience with relational distress in the past (e.g. a partner who neglected you emotionally, or parents who disregarded boundaries you tried to set), we like to seek out similar people with whom to form relationships. Weird! But not really.

The human brain seeks closure and resolution--where we couldn’t get things to work out with our parents, or our exes, we try to get the same situations to work out next time, with someone new.

Let’s look at another example, together. Take my hand,

Suppose you write a character (Character A) whose mother was in and out of their life from a young age, and never seemed to prioritize them. Now suppose you are looking to craft a fraught or tragic or dramatic romance (or other relationship) with this character. Using what you’ve written of your first character’s backstory, you can do just that!

It’s perfectly believable, you know now, for your Character A to pursue a love interest (Character B) who has a tendency to... not want to stick around. Maybe this love interest seems to fear commitment and intimacy.

Now, maybe Character B in actuality has a very dangerous profession that requires that they maintain the utmost discretion, and be ready to flee anywhere at a moment’s notice. Maybe the fate of the city/kingdom/nation/world relies on B’s profession.

It probably doesn’t make them leaving all the time hurt A any less, though.

Character A, unconsciously or not, is determined to make things work this time around. As the relationship deepens, B is faced again and again with the choice--stay, for your love, or go, as duty commands. Maybe they’ve taken a vow for their profession that is no light thing. They leave, time and time again.

Character A, unconsciously or not, remembers this feeling--it’s an old one. Mother, time and time again, chose something else over them. It would be understandable for A to feel a deep anger towards Mom and B both. Maybe A takes drastic action to get back at B (action that is also, symbolically, retaliatory towards Mom)--maybe they cheat on B, or do something that endangers their own safety.

When all they really want is just to get B to stay.

It’s probably very clear now why it’s not so simple a thing for A to choose to date someone more consistent--this is something that goes beyond B alone.

In this way, you can very easily weave themes into the relationship(s) of your main characters. Maybe the story of A explores the pain of abandonment, or loneliness. If B is the protagonist, maybe the story explores the way we excuse our shitty behavior in relationships (maybe the job is a pretext--maybe they really are scared of commitment), or maybe it’s about the dilemma of duty over love.

Relationships don’t always make sense. Or rather, they do make sense, just in a different way than we might expect. You can use this understanding now to intentionally explore a number of complex relationship dynamics, and to create nuanced (but sympathetic) characters. As you do, consider:

In your existing characters’ relationships--what keeps these assholes together? Why do they have to be with each other, as opposed to anyone else? This is important, again, for selling the reader on the relationship, especially if it’s your work’s main relationship.

What initially attracted your characters to each other? Consider again from the previous section (what is this, a fucking textbook?) the historically unmet needs of your character(s).

How do your characters go about expressing their needs? Think again about CONTRAST here--what is the discrepancy between what the actual need is, and how the character seeks to fulfill it? E.g. ‘I need to keep B from leaving me, because it really hurts me when they go, so I’ll go risk my life just to keep their attention (rather than express this pain to them).’

What similarities, if any, exist between your MC’s relationships with the people in their present lives, and your MC’s childhood relationship(s) with their caregiver(s)? Could you expand on/deepen any similarities in your writing? What themes might emerge if you did?

iv. Change / The Arc

So you’ve got your work’s central relationship. It’s believable, it’s just the right amount of dramatic, it’s suitably tragic, and just all-around devastating. People will cry. Great job!

Now what?

Well, that depends--what ending do you envision for your relationship?

If they remain together, do they get the happily ever after? The happy-for-now? Is the reader left to wonder about whether or not their relationship will survive?

Do they not make it at all? Are they separated by tragedy? Do they crash and burn? Or maybe they try their best, but despite how badly they love each other, it’s just not enough?

Whatever the Point B of the relationship is, if it’s central to the work, you’re gonna want to have a clear arc in there. Or not, idk, I’m not your mom.

You might already know, if you inhale every piece of writing advice you come across (like me), what makes a compelling character arc. The good news is that it’s much the same with relationships! Kind of.

Systems (relationships) tend towards homeostasis. Without deliberate intervention, relationships want to remain the way they’ve always been. Just like people!

And just like characters, relationships need a reason to change. Like a catalyst, or a motivation. Whatever the hell you wanna call it.

It’s not always, like, complicated to figure out the driving force behind change in your central relationships. Sometimes the pieces fall together!

Pay attention to the characters within the relationship--as your characters progress through their arcs, their relationship will naturally shift. It will probably not look exactly the same as it did when it began--there might be similarities, of course (they’re not entirely different people.. usually. And there’s a beauty to bookending a story with the familiar, certainly). But in this case, the relationship can be thought of as an extra character, almost. It’s unsatisfying to read a whole story wherein a central character stays exactly the same. It’s further strange and incongruent for a relationship to stay exactly the same while the characters have like, achieved actualization or whatever.

Outside events can force change on a relationship, just as they do individual characters. A couple that’s close to Characters A and B get married--and A & B start to wonder what their future together even looks like. B’s company hires a fiiiine honey, who’s exactly B’s type, and A starts steaming about it. A pandemic ravages the nation, and to prevent the spread of the virus, A and B have to stay inside togeth

YOU GET IT ok anyways I’m fucking tired of writing. If you’re wanting to develop the arc of your MCs’ relationship(s), think on some of this:

Do your characters see any problem(s) present in their relationship? Are they all equally aware of the problem(s)? Do they agree on what the problem(s) are?

How secure are your characters in their relationship? If anything could possibly cause doubt and conflict to arise, what is it?

Where do your characters see their relationship going in the near future? In the far future? Do their visions align? If not, how do they differ? Do they even want the same thing?

Is the arc of the central relationship congruent with the arcs of the characters who comprise it? I.e. does the relationship remain exactly the same as it was when it started, despite the characters undergoing wild metamorphoses? Is the reverse true?

When you think about their relationship, INDEPENDENT of any ending you may already have decided, where do you see it going? Like, where do these people feel like they’re headed, realistically? Does this align with the ending you’ve decided on for them? If not, this doesn’t mean you’ve written a bad relationship or anything, it’s just a possible sign that some really intense shit might have to happen in order to shift their course, y’know? Or not--the world is your oyster and you are the God of your own creation!

What are you trying to say with your story, and do the arcs of the central relationships reflect that message?

final thots

If you read all that shit, thank you. I wrote it all in one sitting and posted it without proofreading 💜

In all seriousness, I want to emphasize that, although some of these aspects of relationships are most visible in rels with a lot of anguish and maybe even some toxicity, you by no means have to write this kind of relationship in order to make use of these tips. You could write a very Normal couple!

The idea is to offer you some avenues through which to consider aspects of your characters’ psychology and personalities, and how they mesh or clash with their partners’ or besties’.

Anyways I hope this was helpful. I love talking about relationships I could literally go on and on all day. Which I kind of just did so. lol.

I’ve been liv and I’ve got two main WIPs I’m working on right now: The Romance of the Demigods and The Marking Blood and they’re full of really really super normal relationships and examples of me definitely taking my own fucking advice.

Cheers and happy writing! 💖💖💖

[inspofromancientworld]

Clothing and Decoration

By Oguenther at German Wikipedia - Own work, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=15134201

Humans have been decorating themselves at least 100,000 years, perhaps as long as 300,000 years, beginning with ochre, a pigment that comes in shades from yellow to purple. Ochre was used for tools and to create pigments that decorated the skin, paint cave walls, and as part of burial rituals, even medicinally. The evidence we have are depictions of human figurines made of limestone and decorated with ochre.

F. d’Errico [modified after d’Errico et al.

Beads of various materials, starting with shells and stones, spread widely with some speculating that trade of beads is what helped with the development of spoken language. It's even possible that beads go back as far as 500,000 years, to Homo erectus, though that is debated. Whether the beads were used in adornment or used as a type of currency or trade medium only is not known for sure, but beads are widely distributed and the materials show evidence of travel (for example, marine shell beads found in landlocked areas). It is thought, though, that wearing of beads came after decoration of the body with ochre.

By http://www.nature.com/nature/videoarchive/prehistoricpinup/ image copyright H. Jensen / Universität Tübingen, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=22799118

The earliest depictions of clothing we have is around 41000 years ago, with the Venus of Hohle Fels, which was found in Sweden, though it is possible that the decorations on the body of the Venus figurine is ochre or tattoos. Interestingly, the oldest known musical instrument, a bone flute, was found near the Venus figure, indicating that fully behaviorally modern humans lived in the area.

Based on studies of head and body lice, humans began wearing clothing about 107,000 years ago. Part of the need for clothing was that this time was that this was during the start of the Last Glacial Maximum, when temperatures started dropping and glaciers began overtaking the northern latitudes. Humans, both Neanderthal and Homo Sapiens, had spread quite far by this time. Humans developed in the steppes of Africa and weren't well adapted to the cold, with no real body hair to hold in body heat.

F. d’Errico.

Due to the organic nature of clothing, it's difficult to say for sure when exactly clothing began to be worn and what it was, but we are relatively certain that the first clothing was likely hides of animals. We have found stone and bone tools used to scrape hides from the Early and Middle Pleistocene. These tools also hold evidence that Ochre was used to color the hides. Awls, which were used in southern Africa approximately 73,000, years ago show that hides were pierced beginning very early. These awls show wear patterns of being used on soft, well-worked hides, though whether for clothing or bags, we can't know for sure. These awls spread to Europe by 45,000 years ago, though likely manufactured by Neanderthals based on the theorized distribution of various hominoid groups and remains in the locations they were found.

The benefit of using an awl to create holes in leather is that it can be shaped to the human body, making it more efficient at keeping the body warm, thus reducing the number of layers that need to be warn and allowing humans to spread further during the Last Glacial Maximum.

Approximately 40,000 years ago, in the Denisova Cave, at the time inhabited by modern humans, the first evidence of awls with eyes, or what we now know as needles, appear. This indicates that sewing together clothing, or the decoration of clothing, was becoming more common and more efficient. These needles spread widely, either through trade, contact, or independent development widely, even to the Americas and Australia. It is thought that this led to clothing being decorated more elaborately with beading and other forms of decoration.

By Osama Shukir Muhammed Amin FRCP(Glasg) - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=56200885

While plant fibres don't generally fossilize, we do have some early evidence of people using them as early as 50,000 BCE, possibly used by Neanderthals, in southern France. There is are scattered imprints of cordage and net imprints in clay. As the planet warmed and the Holocene began, weaving of plant and animal fibres, depending on the local climate and availability. While weaving may have begun as early as 25,000 BCE, flax cultivation began around 8000 BCE, and the first evidence of weaving in 6000 BCE, used as a grave wrapping in Çatalhöyük. Approximately 3000 BCE, sheep were domesticated and bred for wooly fleece as opposed to hair in the Near East. In the Indus Valley, cotton was domesticated around 2500 BCE. Evidence of weaving beginning around 10,100 BCE have been found in the Americas, specifically Guitarreco Cave in Peru, where cotton and llama and alpaca were domesticated. Intricately dyed and woven silk was well developed as a craft as early as 2700 BCE, with the first silk reaching other places in the world nearly a thousand years earlier with the very first evidence of silk being used at all dating back to 8500 BCE.

By Unknown author - http://www.booksite.ru/fulltext/nee/lov/tka/che/stvo/1.htm#1, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7483824 By Annika Jeppsson og Danmarks Grundforskningsfonds Center for Tekstilforskning (CTR), Københavns Universitet, Attribution, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=33188674 By Zhou Guanhuai - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=142167208

It seems that civilizations may have developed weaving independently, so the first type of loom is difficult to figure out as some locations show that floor looms were first, while others show evidence of hanging looms, and yet others, it seems that what is now known as a 'back-strap loom' was first, while other locations show the use of a floor loom first. Given that these objects were made mostly of organic matter, the evidence comes from art, loom weights (stone or clay weights used to keep the warp threads taut while the loom was in use. Egyptian art shows the use of floor looms, Grecian urns show the use of warp-weighted looms, many native cultures used back-strap looms prior to European contact and colonization. From what fabrics that have been found, each culture developed its own method of creating decorated fabric, either through the application of decorations or through the weaving of the fabric itself, as well as multiple weights of cloth, from fine gauze through thick rugs out of nearly any plant or animal material that could be twisted into yarn.

[clowningaroundmars]

Hobie1610 pt. 2

after god knows how long (months tho tbh), i am happy to present: hobie1610 part dos! In this installment, we see how Miles eventually rounds right back to Hobie Jones to apologize after pt. 1's gigantic blunder

hope y'all enjoy! :)

>pt. 1 here<

>pt. 3 here<

It was several weeks into the first semester-- with winter just right around the corner-- before Miles finally got around to confronting the little Hobie Problem that he had.

Being laden with pounds upon pounds of assignments to get done before the holidays and then trying to keep up with Spiderman duties on top of it all, managing his parents’ overwhelming expectations once again, and trying to survive as a teenager in general forced his first day blunder onto the back burner for much longer than Miles would have liked.

Sure, his anxiety is a bitch sometimes, and it holds him back from directly addressing a lot of issues in his life, but Rio didn’t raise any neanderthal. Miles knew that when he messed up, he messed up.

Problem is, every time he’s tempted to just reach a hand out to his dimension’s Hobie Br-- Jones, pat his shoulder lightly, pull him into a corner somewhere during lunch maybe, and finally man up and apologize… that’s when some crook starts some problems downtown, or some mad scientist finally snaps somewhere and starts to wreak havoc with crazy gadgets a bit too unnervingly close to his neighborhood.

Or Miles gets back to his dorm room and sees that he has an assignment due the very next day that he hasn’t even had the chance to hop on yet, because of aforementioned crooks and mad scientists.

It was all driving him crazy.

And so now here he was, up on a rooftop in the middle of a chilly fall day, hanging out with his inter-dimensional besties (who he lightheartedly calls the Spider Squad but he hasn’t quite brought that up to them yet).

They were on a lunch break after pummeling and restraining some prisoners-- who somehow got out of the Raft-- that tried to make their way across the Brooklyn Bridge. Miles sure appreciated the help, which was one of the many positives of letting Hobie Brown make dimension watches for everyone, mostly so they could all help another Spider shoulder the burdens that usually befell them.

But the teens-- being teens, of course-- also used their watches to just pop into an open portal and hang out with each other as often as they could. Who could blame them? Being a superhero and a kid was overwhelming most of the time. Sometimes they needed a listening ear or a supportive shoulder to cry on every now and then, and getting the opportunity to chill and explore a whole new world for them was always a thrill.

(Miles himself could never deny the excitement of getting to go to Mumbattan for shopping trips every so often, either.)

So with all of that in mind it was tempting to, after seeing the long and lanky punk Spiderman climb through his own multi-colored portal, ask Hobie if he could go back to New London with him. He needed to get something off of his chest.

Hobie, languidly as ever, hikes a skinny shoulder up in a nonchalant shrug and goes “ye’ sure, mate. Somethin’ up, or?”

Pavitr leans forward from his conversation with Gwen-- the little snoop, goddamnit-- and swallows a particularly big bite of his sandwich. “Oooooh, Miles and Hobie? Alone, in New London? Wow!” He elbows Gwen, who shakes her head and snorts into her bottled juice.

Miles puffs up. “Hey, it’s not like that! We just need to talk. In private. Nothing’s wrong, I uh… I just need some advice. That’s all!”

Hobie’s grin is full of teeth. “Waidaminnit. Miles Morales... Thee Great Miles Morales, needin’ my advice? Interesting!” His freeform locs bob and wiggle teasingly with every movement of his head.

Feeling put on the spot, Miles pouts as he picks at some lint on his spider suit and finishes off his soda as quickly as he can manage.

Gwen, bless her heart, notices his discomfort and scooches closer to him on the rooftop ledge. “… Is everything alright, by the way? It isn’t anything bad, is it?”

Miles glances at her before returning his gaze to the concrete several stories below. “Uhm, nah. Nah, it’s… y’know, it’s just more inter-dimensional weirdness. But I’m sure I can fix it. I think,”

He then shoots her a grateful smile for her considerate check-in, and pulls his mask back down over the lower half of his face. Gwen understands this as his “I’ll be back for another check-in later,” behavior and simply nods back. She knows not to push him.

“Well,” Hobie unfolds himself from his position on some scaffolding on the side of building, straightening himself up to his full height and stretching, “I’m all finished, then. Prob'ly not a good idea to go swingin’ on full stomachs, though. Let’s take a quick walk before headin’ home, yeah?”

Miles grabs Hobie’s hand and helps him hoist himself up over the ledge, and the teens all gather their trash into one plastic bag together. They chatter and slip their masks on as they casually walk down the side of the half-constructed building, finally touching down onto the concrete alleyways and relishing the quiet of an empty block before heading to the congested streets of downtown Brooklyn.

They all eventually bid each other their farewells after a few quick photo ops from excited New Yorkers, but of course not before Pavitr leans into Miles’ ear conspiratorially and whispers: “Let me know how it goes, bro! Good luck!”

Pav punches Miles on the shoulder lightly and winks at him, then he does a backflip into his golden-bright portal and blinks out of existence.

Miles rolls his eyes and shakes his head. “Does he want me and Hobie to be together, or me and you? I can never tell with that guy,” he groans at Gwen, whose shoulders are shaking with badly-concealed laughter.

“I think he just watches too many of those soap operas, honestly. Trashy daytime TV will do that to a guy sometimes.” She quips just as humorlessly.

Miles gives her a sidelong glance and a smirk. “Right. Rots your brain. Poor Pav!”

Gwen and Hobie laugh at that as Gwen pulls up her own portal.

“I’m thinkin’ we need t’ stage an intervention, really.” Hobie adds.

“Yes, and soon,” Miles points out.

“I’ll see what I can do to pull him away from those shows, but you know how his aunt is,” Gwen snorts. “Plus, I’m pretty sure Pav is just a huge romantic anyways, soaps or no soaps.”

“When I’ve got relationship issues, I guess I know the guy to go to, then,” Miles shrugs, then throws Gwen a casual salute goodbye.

She stands in front of white and multi-colored splotches of watercolor floating out from her dimensional portal as she salutes Miles back, giving Hobie a quick wave. “Let me know how your little inter-dimensional weirdness problem goes too, Miles! Talk to us in the groupchat every once in a while!”

And like that, she’s gone.

So now Hobie and Miles were left alone together.

Standing in the middle of a dirty alleyway on a cold autumn afternoon wasn’t Miles’ exact definition of a good time, though… why wasn’t Hobie opening his own portal right now? Miles turns his mask’s gigantic white eyes up to his dimensional variant (and boy was that a weird thing to think about when Hobie brought that up one day during a Spider Sleepover at Gwen’s) and gives him a pointed stare.

Hobie’s own painted eyes meet his.

“So…” Miles says.

“So…” Hobie says, his grin evident in his voice.

“Are we or are we not going back to yours?” Miles stuck his fists on his hips impatiently.

“First,” Hobie says as he holds up a long skinny finger, “I gotta know what this is about. ‘Cause we all know you, Miles. I don’t wanna enable any avoidant behaviors, mate. You know how it is.”

“What?!” Miles throws up his hands in the air. “Dude! SO not cool! You are not my dad.”

Hobie shakes his head. “You know I’m right, though. This ain’t about your parents, is it?”

Goddamn Hobie and his parental instincts. When is this guy ever going to get off of mom duty?

Miles huffs. “No, Hobie. It’s not. Look. I just, uh… if you don’t wanna go back to your dimension, then can we get away from like… this area in general, please?”

Hobie hummed in thought, then shrugged and shot a web up to a nearby street lamp. Together, the two Spidermen swung through the concrete jungle that was earth-1610’s New York City until they ended up somewhere near the Financial District in Manhattan, happening upon a sort of indoor rooftop terrace party that a bunch of corporate yuppie-looking people were enjoying behind giant glass windows. A few of those yuppies were out onto the actual rooftop smoking and talking amongst themselves in the cold while the party bumped along behind them.

The sun was setting quickly, and darkness descended upon both Spiderman as they scaled a nearby building and sat on a water tank to secretly watch the party from a little ways away. Miles took solace in the dark most times, and drank up the view of what few stars could be seen in the New York City skyline.

The clouds were scarce on this particular fall evening, so the red and yellow hues on the horizon were completely uninterrupted. Miles’ dimension took on an almost ethereal glow sometimes, and during this time of day, he was more than grateful for it.

Hobie was silent as he watched the sun set alongside Miles, until the entire city was enshrouded in darkness and the stars of the cosmos seemed to have fallen from the heavens and landed right onto the buildings and bridges laid out all before them. Lights from cars making their nightly rounds and tall buildings glittered all around them, and just beyond the skyscrapers, bits of the Upper Bay could be seen shimmering and reflecting the glittery light right back.

It was breathtaking. Beautiful.

But time was running out. They couldn’t sit here and watch the scenery and the people from several hundred feet away forever. Miles also knew Hobie had stuff to deal with in his own world, a million miles away from anything he could ever know. With a world-weary sigh, Miles finally takes his mask off fully and winds it up and around his hands, over and over.

“Your problem botherin’ you that much, Mi?” Hobie grins at his friend, taking his own mask off and running a hand through his locs.

“It’s just… I…” Miles chews on the inside of his cheek, wondering how to proceed.

It really was a weird problem to have, all things considered. There aren't many instances where someone pisses off a dimensional variant of their friend, and they have another version of that very same friend right by their side to ask how to even go about fixing the rift they caused in the first place.

“It’s just that I... like… I messed up pretty badly, right? And I know it’s totally my fault,” Miles is speaking quickly now, bottled up words now spilling forth like water, “but my anxiety started spiking up randomly out of nowhere and I just blew it, man. I wasn’t really thinking. Well, actually, I was. I was overthinking but I didn’t really mean to leave this guy hanging for so long afterwards and--”

Hobie throws a leg over his other one, propping himself onto an arm and leaning back to face Miles. “Okay. Okay, Miles, that’s cool. Thanks for the disclaimer, bruv, but we’re gonna have to start from the beginning.” He chuckles.

Miles laughs nervously. “Right, right. Yeah,” he takes a breath, licks his lips and tries again.

“So… on my first day of school I bumped into… you. I mean, not you, I mean like my dimension’s version of you.”

Hobie raised a pierced brow. “Wait, there’s another me here, too?”

“Yeah, yeah and I just almost crashed right into-- wait.” Miles’ brain took a second to buffer. “What do you mean too?”

“Ehhh, we found another me in some odd dimension or another. Y’know, like, one of those ones we don’t go to often. It was whatever,” Hobie shrugs casually.

Miles had a couple of questions about that but he decided to stick to the topic and not get distracted for now. “... Right, cool. So yeah, I almost crashed into you at Visions, except it wasn’t you.”

Hobie nodded. “You almost crashed into Not Me. Got it.”

“… Because I was late for class and not really, uh, thinking. Like at all. But it was you, you know what I mean? Not You is super bad at directions and navigating buildings, I guess, so I helped him out. Annddd I guess he wanted to be my friend afterwards, but.”

“Mhmm,” Hobie hums, in a tone that sounded a lot like him saying go on, then.

“Did you, uh… did you know your name is Jones sometimes?” Miles scratches at his ear awkwardly. “Hobie Jones, not Hobie Brown. It was weird when I found out, because another student said his full name and so that’s how I found out in the first place,”

Hobie inhales. “Hmm! Interesting. Dunno that I like the sound of that, if we’re gonna be honest here. Doesn’t really roll off the tongue the same, I think. But alright. Why’s that so important?”

“Uhhh,”

Hm. Shit. This was the part Miles dreaded getting to in the first place.

How was he going to put into words the weird dread that befell him upon learning that this Jones character might very well be this dimension’s version of his MJ? How could he possibly explain the thrilling electricity that races up and down his spine everytime he totally does not think about dating, kissing, possibly even having children with this other Hobie? How was he going to get that across to this super-cool, super-hot, super-put-together version of him?

Speaking those kinds of words out loud right to Hobie’s chiseled face made Miles slightly nauseous. He opted to circumnavigate that little problem altogether.

“Listen, don’t ask, okay? Seriously, man, I’m not playin’. Buuuut… if I pissed you off real bad, how would. Like, how could I make it up to you, theoretically speaking?”

Hobie exhaled a laugh. Miles could see his bright grin even in the low lighting of the night. “Huh? How’d you go from helpin’ Not Me out to pissin’ ‘im off all of the sudden? We’re missin' a step there, Milesie. C’mon now,”

Miles laughed too. “Ho-biieee, I already told you, man!” He hated how whiny he sounded, but this really wasn’t the time. “You cannot ask me about it!”

Hobie tossed his head like a horse. “Oh my god, mate. I can’t give ya solid advice when I don’t even know what the hell I’m givin’ advice for. I gotta know what happened, bruv, what’d ya do?”

“Just--! Ugh,” Miles deflated. “I maybe sorta... ditched him all of a sudden. Like, out of nowhere. When he, uh, when he needed me.”

Hobie’s glittering eyes bore holes into Miles’ hot face. “Mhmm? Why for?”

“Hobie, for the love of all that is good in the world, just--! Throw me a bone, here, man. I am dying of embarrassment right now!” He buried his face in his hands as Hobie rocked back with laughter.

“Why’d ya ditch ‘im?! That doesn’t sound like ya, Mi. Sounds like a real wick thing, but not a Morales thing to do. C’mon, what did Not Me say to you? You can pretend I’m him and I’ll apologize an’ everything.”

“No no no no, Hobie you don’t get it,” Miles sighed. “He didn’t do or say anything. That’s the thing. I just… I freaked out I guess, when I looked up his name and saw that he was a super accomplished model and everything. He’s got thousands of followers on Flickstagram, even. But I just…! I dunno what my brain was doing to me, once I saw that. I guess I just had a mini panic attack and just… bounced. Then, obviously I had tons of homework and Spiderman stuff to deal with, so ever since then, we’ve just been avoiding each other in the halls and I haven’t had any time to even tell him anything. I really messed up, man.”

Hobie was unnervingly silent as he thought for a good minute. The night had really fallen thick onto the city and the temperatures were dropping fast. Miles could barely see his own breath clouding in front of him or even Hobie’s face now that the darkness completely enshrouded them both, and it made him a little nervous.

“So…” Miles prodded carefully.

“Super accomplished model and everything, eh?” Hobie quietly asked after a little while. Miles couldn’t see Hobie’s expression, but he could hear the rhythmic rubbing of fabric against fabric as Hobie rubbed at his arm with a gloved hand.

“Uhhyup.” Miles confirmed.

“Hm. Utterly fascinated now, mate. Tell me more about this other me, then. He cool like me, or a total neurotic space cadet?”

Miles rubbed the back of his neck. “I mean, I can’t tell you much. We haven’t gotten to talk much. I guess you can be the judge, here’s his social media here...”

He then pulls his phone out of a recently-added pocket he found the time to sew onto his suit, taking inspiration from his mother’s own yoga leggings that she got as a birthday gift a few months before. The fact that spandex was able to hold so much but still stay so snug against your body was nothing short of a modern miracle, in Miles’ opinion. He was grateful for it now as he unlocked his phone and tapped on Hobie M. Jones’ page right out of the search history on his phone’s Flickstagram app.

Once he hands his phone to his friend, he has to resist the urge to suck in a breath as he watches the bright light from his screen illuminate Hobie’s features in ways he’s never seen before.

Hobie takes a second to scroll for a bit and Miles watches as the light plays across his features with just a bit more rapt attention than he normally would. Must be getting late, and Miles’ brain has historically been known not to work very well when he was tired.

Then, Hobie handed the phone back to Miles and folded his arms across his knees.

“Interesting, interesting,” was all he muttered. Thankfully, he did not comment on the “M. Jones” part of the username.

Miles tried lightening the mood. “Let me guess. You hate him because he’s not a fascist-fighting punk like you, huh.”

“I can’t be th’ judge of that, Miles. You know social media ain’t real life, and all that just looked like his portfolio to me, if we’re gonna be honest.” He checked his spiked bracelet in the light of Miles’ lit up screen. “I think that this other me doesn’t really feel too comfortable openin’ up and lettin’ other people see who he really is, though. So if you do go off an’ apologize to ‘im, I don’t think it’ll be very easy to gain his trust back.”

“Hold on,” Miles shakes his head and tucks his phone away again. “You got all that from looking at his Flicksta for not even a minute? How do you even know all of that?”

“’Cause he’s me, bruv. I know that look on his face, on those candids. Even them professional shots look… like, well, I dunno how t’ explain it. I guess it’s just sort of like--”

“If you know, you know?” Miles puts in.

“Mm,” Hobie smiles and nods. “Yep. That. He’s… withdrawn. Held back. I ‘unno… doesn’t seem like he has many friends.”

Miles sits back to think about the distant and carefully-put together mask that Hobie Jones slipped onto his face back when an annoying student butted into their conversation just before 2nd period that fateful day. Not to mention how famous he seemed, that the whole school wanted to pull him into a million different directions just for some selfies and autographs in general…

“He’s famous. He has a billboard up near the school, even,” Miles says without thinking.

“That explains it, then.”

Miles thought aloud for a bit. “He told me that I was the only person in the world who didn’t look at him like he was made out of solid gold. Hmmm,”

“Right then. That’s a start, eh?”

Miles sighed. “I-if… if someone who you thought could be like, your only friend in the whole world. Your only real friend… if that person abandoned you out of nowhere, with no explanation… how would I go about making it up to you?”

Hobie doesn’t comment on the phrasing of that question, either. He lays a warm hand on Miles’ cold shoulder and squeezes.

“Listen, Mi. You’re real special, you already know that. If he liked ya enough to wanna be your friend the very same day you two met, then I bet you can come up with somethin’ that’ll stick eventually. That being said… a little food ain’t never hurt no one.”

They stare at each other in the dark for a second.

“Uh, what?” Miles asks.

“Y’know. Like a peace offering. Bring ‘im a peace offering, make your apology, and then leave the poor kid alone. Let ‘im sorta… well, let ‘im kinda just chase you a little bit, right?”

Miles’ brow was raised high now. “What, like. Just leave some food and a note for him at lunch or something? Dude, that is so lame!”

“It’s about the mystique, mate. Trust me. Gotta keep the intrigue up, don’t crowd him too much or else you’ll scare man away, right? I hate when people grovel at my feet if I’m gonna be dead honest with ya. Don’t make too much of a big deal of it, and he just might forgive ya. You two'll be holdin' hands in no time,”

“Is that it? Is it really that easy?” Miles was skeptical.

Hobie shrugs and removes his hand from Miles’ shoulder. “Hell if I know, but if he’s anything like me, it just might work. Just be prepared to take it on the chin if he doesn’t forgive you in the end, though. Gettin’ ditched like that with no warning’s a bit hard on someone who’s never had any friends to lean on in the first place.”

Made sense to Miles. He shrugged, nodded, and then had only one question left to ask.

“… Cool. Got it. So, uh. What kinda food do you like, anyways?”

♧♤♧♤♧♤♧♤♧♤♧♤♧♤♧♤♧♤♧♤♧♤♧♤♧

And that was how Miles ended up making a quick run (swing, really) over to his favorite Jamaican store for a dinner plate with some beef patties thrown in during the next day’s lunch period.

He couldn’t afford to be seen by security, so he suited up at his usual place on the rooftop of the school and sailed down to retrieve his peace offering as quickly as he could before lunch was over.

What luck, that he had the same lunch as Hobie Jones! Made this whole run a pretty easy thing to do at all, which was always a bonus.

Once he made his way back to the school, he hurriedly stuffed his mask back into his bag and practically jumped back into his uniform, not even taking the time to stop and check if his suit was properly hidden. No time for that, when the period was almost over and he hadn’t even gotten a bite to eat for himself.

Miles also took the time to write up what he hoped was a sufficiently appropriate apology note the previous night after getting back to his dorm room at a late hour, and he tucked that into the crinkled paper bag as carefully as he could manage. A grease-stained apology note was definitely not a cool thing to receive, especially from someone who wronged you out of nowhere and wasn’t even man enough to say that apology to your face.

He arranged everything as best he could while flying down several flights of stairs down to the cafeteria.

Once Miles pushes past the double doors into the large cafeteria area, he feels the tightness in his chest and the heat radiating from his gut outwards intensify more as he gets closer to his target.

It takes a bit of wandering to finally spot Hobie, but then Miles sees him: sat at a table near the center of the room. He’s surrounded by a bunch of fake friends all talking loudly over one another and trading phones over their meals. Hobie Jones himself looks forlorn even when in the middle of a group, surrounded on all sides by bodies he doesn’t even look directly at, even when he turns his head slightly to speak to them.

Well, shit.

Miles was not expecting Hobie to have fallen into so large a group of friends so soon. He spotted the same girl who pulled him aside for a selfie that one time sat at the same table, and her and her little posse were just gossiping loudly about any and everyone.

Miles found his feet stuck to the floor upon finally laying eyes on the scene.

Ugh. God. A bunch of preps poking their noses into his and Hobie’s business while probably begging to read the very private note that Miles wrote for him was absolutely not anywhere in his list of things he’d like to experience today.

So Miles did a sudden about-face and walked away quickly, before he was even spotted.

Plan B was set in motion, then: give the bag over to Hobie before the next period.

Miles always dreaded the class he and Hobie shared right after lunch. The awkwardness subsided after a while, since it was kinda hard to feel so bad about The Incident when the entire class had to cram for quizzes and do research for essays, but the pit in Miles’ stomach as he purposefully averted his gaze away from that corner of the room was never easy to ignore.

But now, after weeks of gloom and doom, Miles found himself actually being excited for the bell to ring. He quietly made his way upstairs to the top level and slipped into the classroom as gracefully as he could manage.

Sure, he was nervous as hell about it all, at the end of the day. But he wanted this little problem that’s been put away for far too long to just… finally be done and over with. If for nothing else, he just wanted one less student at Visions hating his guts, really.

He placed the paper bag onto Hobie’s chair and scooted it underneath the desk to hide it from the rest of the classroom. The last thing he needed was some other nosy student swiping it up and rifling through the contents before Hobie could see it.

Miles ate part of his sandwich in the peace and quiet of the classroom, enjoying what precious little minutes he had until the bell rang and everyone-- including the teacher-- filed in to start the class’s lessons of the day.

♧♤♧♤♧♤♧♤♧♤♧♤♧♤♧♤♧♤♧♤♧♤♧♤♧

Miles’ simple plan was a success, just as his buddy Hobie Brown had predicted.

Hobie Jones had read the note quietly in his corner of the room and hastily shoved the dinner plate into his backpack soon after.

Miles didn’t know if that meant he was forgiven or not, but at least he took the (probably cold) food with him and read the note without tearing it up into a million pieces, so at least Miles had that going for him.

There was one last step to really clinch the victory, though; an invitation to meet up at the rooftop later that day, before the last bell finally rung and let all of the kids out of the school for the day. Miles still had a lot to get off his chest that he couldn’t quite lay down on paper, and he needed to properly apologize to Hobie’s face to finally put his conscience at ease.

Whether or not Hobie took the invitation was left up in the air, really.

Miles made sure to try and get a head start so he could make it up there before Hobie could, but he made sure to add “be up at the rooftop by 3:30pm if you’re coming or I’m bouncing” to the end of the note, because as much as he wanted to make amends with his dimension’s Hobie, he was not going to let petty school drama get in the way of Spiderman-ing.

Miles was a man of standards, and he held himself to some level of professionalism, thank you very much!

It was cold that day, very cold.

Miles was lowkey regretting his decision to meet outside now as he tucked his chin deeper into his big puffer jacket, warming his hands with his warm breath before shoving them into his pockets.

He hoped Hobie had gotten used to getting around the hallways a bit more now, and that he could find his way up to the roof level without becoming completely lost and just giving up entirely.

As the minutes crawled by, Miles found himself unlocking and locking his phone multiple times, checking the time, checking for any notifications to distract himself, and wondering just why he decided on the roof to meet instead of, say, his dorm room hallway or whatever.

Then, the roof access door slowly swung open, and there stood Hobie M. Jones in all his six-foot-something glory.

Miles sucked in his breath as Hobie’s big brown eyes scanned the roof and fell upon his face, and the both of them stood rooted to their spots for a split second like deer in headlights.

Then Hobie grunted, tugged at his ponytail to let it loose, and his long dreads fell all around his face in one graceful movement. Miles felt his mouth go dry.

Miles’ feet moved on their own. They met in the middle, and a strong wind rushed through to tousle Hobie’s impressive locs some more as they both stared each other down.

Miles finally opened his mouth to speak, feeling his voice catching in his throat for a split second, before being interrupted anyways.

“You don’t need to apologize,” Hobie says quickly, tucking his own chin into his expensive-looking jacket’s collar as well.

Miles’ brain bluescreened. “Wait, wha?”

Hobie huffed out a laugh, the vapors of his breath being carried away in the chilly wind like dandelion seeds. “I’m being serious, man. It’s… it’s cool, honestly. I get why you ditched me. It happens all the time,”

Miles’ heart sinks. “N-no, Hobie, look. I really messed up and I felt like I had to-- wait, what do you mean all the time?”

Miles had a sweeping feeling of déja vu overcome him then.

Hobie chuckled ruefully, shrugging as he shoves his hands deeper into his own pockets, mirroring Miles. “I mean, like… you think you’re the only one who ever ran for the hills after seeing how famous I was? It just happens. That’s my life, I guess.”

Miles’ lower lip stuck out a bit. “But that’s… dude. That is so depressing!”

Hobie shook his head, tossing a loc out of his face. “Sure, but it’s… it’s just my life. It’s just how things are when you’re a model around here.”

They looked sadly into each other’s eyes before Hobie averts his gaze to his shoes, scuffing the toe on the roof floor for a second before looking back up and continuing.

“… You, uhm. How’d you… how’d you know that I like Jamaican food, though? I’ve never told anyone about that before. Nobody but my family, anyways.”

“Uhh, lucky guess?” Miles offers him a lopsided grin.

Hobie smiles for real this time, the corners of his eyes crinkling just like his earth-138 counterpart. “You really are a weird guy, just like you said before. What else did you want to tell me, before we both gotta bounce?”

Miles gaped at him like a fish. “You… you have to let me apologize, though. Like actually. Before we both have to go.”

Hobie nodded. “Okay. I’m all ears,”

Miles took a deep breath. “I…!" His voice caught in his throat for a second. "Uh. Do you wanna maybe… hang out, like outside of school sometime? Maybe grab some more Jamaican food from my favorite place?”

Hobie looks at him with an unreadable expression on his face. “You… that’s your apology?”

Miles sighed. “I’m bad at conflict management, man. Just let me treat you to some more lunch and then… maybe we can just let this whole thing go, yeah? You won’t ever have to talk to me again after this, I promise!”

“You are seriously sending me mixed signals here,” Hobie says. But he doesn’t seem opposed to the idea.

“I know, I know! But please, just humor me, man. We can do it this weekend, even. I just… feel like a total dick after what I did and I wanna be able to actually make it up to you.”

Hobie directs his shy smile back down to the ground. “Jesus,” he mutters.

Miles holds his palms forward. “What? Is that a no?”

Hobie laughs, full and bright and it-- fuck-- it fills Miles with a dizzying thrill that makes him laugh, too!

“Fine… but if you ditch me again this time, you asshole--” Hobie grabs the front of Miles’ jacket and yanks it towards him, putting the both of them closer together and making a complete heatwave roll through Miles’ nerves, “I will-- uh,”

Miles doesn’t register why Hobie stops speaking all of a sudden until his eyes slowly follow down to what he’s looking at, and then both of their hearts stop at the same time.

In Miles’ earlier haste to jump into his clothing after his meal run, he forgot to button a few buttons on his shirt, which left his very visibly black and red suit out in the open with just one small yank of his coat’s zipper. The top of his red spider emblem shone bright against the dark spandex.

For a second, the world stopped. The wind stopped blowing, the cars down below stopped honking, Miles stopped breathing.

Then, he hastily took a step back and cleared his throat, hoping against hope that Hobie would not recognize the spider suit so easily.

“S-so, yeah? You’ll go? I, uh, promise I won’t stand you up if you do. We can, uhm. Exchange numbers if you want--” here, Miles starts fumbling around his pockets for his phone, a device that he clung onto like a lifeline moments ago now almost completely forgotten in the excitement of the situation.

Hobie swallows and takes a step back also. “Y-yeah… yeah, sure. Let’s uhm. Let’s link up later, then.”

Miles lets Hobie input his digits into his contact list, and then bids him farewell.

“I’ll text you later, okay? Gotta go now, bye!”

Miles almost wants to throw himself off the roof of the school just to land on the concrete sidewalks below with a splat. A flattened spider. It’s what he deserves, honestly.

But he swallows his embarrassment and rushes down the stairs towards his own dorm room, instead.

He seriously, seriously hopes Hobie didn't recognize his spider suit, goddamn!

Once Miles gets to his room, he sags against the door with a sigh and shrugs off his puffer jacket. Then, he fishes his phone out of the jacket’s pocket and flicks the screen on, which now has Hobie Jones’ digits input into it under the name of “MJ (from Visions)”.

Miles throws himself into his and Ganke’s shared computer chair and twirls over to the window.

It’s Miles. I am not ditching you this time, PROMISE, he sends over to the number.

A few minutes later, he gets a response and his stomach flutters with the chime.

You better not, Hobie playfully teases. I know where you sleep…

A few more knife emojis accompany the texts and Miles laughs out loud. Then he bites his lip.

Fuck… damn. This really is earth-1610’s version of MJ, huh. The name beamed straight into his eyeballs from where it sat right at the top of his messages and it continued to haunt him as he got his laptop out for the night to finally make some more leeway on his English essay.

Miles went to bed that night dreaming of him and a red-headed Hobie Jones holding Mayday.

[major-knighton]

HALLOW-LEE-N movie Oct. 5th : The Creeping Flesh (1973)

This movie is strange. Definitely not a masterpiece but quite fun in its campy, Hammer way. I had a fun time but I was also laughing at many points that were probably not intended to be funny.

This movie is the story of a mad scientist ("I'm not mad!"), Pr. Emmanuel Hildern (Peter Cushing). He returns from New Guinea, where he has made a great discovery, to his house, occupied by his lab assistant and his adult daughter Penelope. We learn a few things with some clunky exposition : Penelope's mother has passed, and Penelope is strictly forbidden from discussing her or going into her room, because Daddy Knows Best. That seems to be a theme in horror.

Pr. Hildern shows his magnificent discovery : a skeleton older than Neanderthals and yet much more advanced! The proof of that advanced, hyper-intelligent mind is that the skeleton's head is huge. My dude, so is an elephant's. Also, the prop skeleton holds together, every bone attached, while all the flesh is gone. This vexes me greatly and this crappy prop caused most of my laughter during watching.

He also mentions finding Neanderthals in Australia. Which is not remotely possible.

Anyway, while washing the skeleton, Pr. Hildern noticed that the contact of water on the bones of a finger causes the flesh and skin to grow back around the bone. He quickly chops the resurrected finger off and... Goes to bed.

The next day, analyzing blood samples from the finger and cross-referencing "ancient new Guinean legends" that sound totally made up reveals that the skeleton is a great evil. And lo, his blood cells are literally Pure Evil™, they look like fucked up spiders. Hildern immediately makes a vaccine against Pure Evil™, which takes him about 5 minutes, and injects a monkey with it. When the monkey seems fine after 20 seconds at most, he jumps to vaccinating his daughter Penelope as well.

We learn another thing : Penelope's mother, an ex Parisian show girl, was not dead for many years as we thought but only recently deceased. She spent all those years locked up in an asylum run by Hildern's half brother James (Christopher Lee).

James and the Pr. seem to be sort of academic rivals. The Pr. of course knew about his wife, he's just lying to Penelope ✨for her own good✨.

Of course, by the next morning the monkey is dead after destroying his cage and Penelope has vanished from home. Who could've seen this coming?

Penelope has taken one of her late mother's dresses and gone to mingle with the sailors and prostitutes in a seedy inn. After an uncomfortable attempted assault scene, Penelope kills a man who was groping her and escapes, pursued by a mob. She finds refuge in a barn, and then kills another guy in full view of everybody. The scene of Penelope in her red dress running down the dark city streets is actually a cool shot.

Penelope is brought to her uncle's asylum, where he jumps to the frankly reasonable conclusion that her father has been experimenting on her. He brings her home and investigates the lab, where he pieces most of what's going on together. He immediately decides he needs this skeleton, but he shows a bit more restraint than his half-brother and at least waits until night to come back, break in and haul the entire skeleton - remember, it all magically holds together - into his carriage.

The carriage overturns, in the rain, and while James goes to get help, the skeleton gets proper drenched. The newly resurrected Pure Evil™ dude rises, clad in a cloak, kills the carriage driver and walks back to Pr. Hildern's house. Despite living before the invention of agriculture, and indeed houses, the Pure Evil™ dude knows to knock on the door and wait for Penelope to open the door to him.

He then kills the lab assistant and ransacks the lab, before going up to the Pr. Fade to black, and the final scene introduces a twist that casts a different light on the entire movie. The crux is this : do you believe what Pr. Hildern says, or what James says?

The end.

Now, while this movie was kind of ridiculous, it was great fun. I liked Lee's character, the smarmy, jealous brother, who clearly regards his "patients" as less than human and wishes he could experiment on any other human being. He's a jerk to the bone, and yet manages to come off looking better than his half-brother, who is a true monument to idiocy.

Lorna Heilbron's performance as Penelope was the best part for me, she really sells the demure but determined young lady in the first act, the righteous anger at being lied to about her mother, and the demented and dangerous woman in the second act.

Overall, I'd say a 6/10.

[punchdrunkdoc]

Part 3, Chapter 13

Summary: After the events of S3, Matt Murdock is trying to once again balance life as a lawyer and a vigilante. But he’s been scarred by loss and betrayal - will a mysterious new neighbour help him heal? Or will her secrets drag him back into the darkness?

Notes: This is a slow burn romance with an original female character, told in 3 (maybe 4??) parts. There is mystery, intrigue, action/violence and angst - all the good stuff!

Also available on AO3 and Wattpad

Masterlist

Reference pics

Last week's chapter was hot and sweaty, this week you're getting sweet and sappy! Enjoy!

————–

PART 3

Chapter 13

Matt paused, his coffee cup halfway to his lips, as a muffled groan of frustration rang out in the otherwise quiet apartment. He placed the mug down on the kitchen counter and padded over to the bathroom. “What’s wrong?” he asked the woman inside.

Calina flung open the door, the steam of her recent shower spilling out. She pointed to the side of her neck and growled, “This is what’s wrong.”

Matt pressed his lips together to keep from smiling. “Oh, that.”

He’d noticed the hickey as soon as they’d woken up. Holding her close from behind, his head inches from her neck, it was hard to miss the warm, copper-rich bruise.

And he imagined it was even harder to miss under the bright lights of his bathroom.

“My sisters are going to see it,” Calina whined. “And they’ll all know what we’ve been up to.”

He rubbed the pad of his thumb over the offending spot and shrugged. “If they need a hickey to figure that out, they’re not very good spies.”

She batted his hand away and turned back to the mirror to peer closer at the mark. “There’s a difference between knowing in the abstract, and seeing the evidence up close and personal,” she complained.

She sounded so put out, and this time he couldn’t stop his smile from forming. The pout in her voice and the embarrassed flush of her cheeks was just so…adorable. He stepped up behind her and wrapped his arms around her waist. He rested his chin on her bare shoulder and tried to console her. “Consider it a belated rite of passage - a part of the teenage dating experience that you missed out on.”

She laughed. “Oh, is that your excuse? You were just making up for my lousy adolescence?”

No. There’d been nothing so rational or altruistic in his actions yesterday. He’d been marking his territory. Simple as that.

Like a total neanderthal, he’d reacted to the thought of another man’s hands on Calina with a primal need to stake his claim.

So he’d licked and stroked and nibbled and marked her. Again and again. During that first encounter on the floor. During the next round, which had started with a mind-altering blow job and had ended with her bent over the dining room table as he took her from behind. And during the third round, which began on the kitchen counter while making dinner, and had moved to the bedroom, all thoughts of food forgotten as he’d spent hours re-learning every dip and curve of her body.

Her skin held the proof of that passion - and not just in the round bruise on her neck. He could sense more evidence beneath her towel. The burn from his stubbled jaw warmed her thighs. The faintest dent from his teeth marred the jut of her hip. Fingertip bruises framed her waist from where he’d gripped her as she’d rode him…

Her body was a canvas, painted with his touch.

He knew he should feel guilty about those marks. But as he traced over them just now - his hands as gentle now as they were rough the day before - he felt nothing but unrepentant satisfaction.

Besides, she wasn’t in pain - nothing he’d done had caused her to be truly hurt.

Just the opposite. He knew when a woman enjoyed his touch. And Calina had enjoyed it yesterday.

Several times.

She turned in his arms. “Why do you suddenly look so smug?”

He shrugged and pulled her closer, dipping his head to nuzzle at the bruise over her neck and inhale the scent from his favourite patch of skin.

God, he couldn’t get enough of her. 

She tilted her head to give him more access, even as she offered a half-hearted objection. “I thought we were going slow today.”

“Whose idiotic idea was that?” Matt murmured, running his hands up the back of her thighs and under her towel.

“Yours,” she said, wriggling out of his arms. She held him at bay with a hand on his chest, her objection more convincing now. “It seemed important to you yesterday before we…got carried away. So I think we should stick to it. Which means…”

“What?” he asked, not liking her serious tone.

“When I collect my stuff from the safe house, I think I should move back into my own apartment.”

———

Matt’s smile faded away. And Calina hated to see it go - he’d been doing a lot of smiling today.

He’d greeted her this morning with a wide, open-mouthed grin, his elusive dimples on full display. He’d laughed as she’d stumbled out of bed looking for a caffeine hit, her legs loose and unsteady from the ‘work out’ the day before. She’d felt the curve of his lips as he kissed her neck just now, and whatever he’d been thinking of as he traced the bruises on her hips had led to the most self-satisfied smirk she’d ever seen.

Lots of smiles. So many variations of happiness.

But now he was frowning.

“You don’t have to do that,” he replied.

But she did. Yesterday - and this morning - was proof that they couldn’t keep their hands off each other. There’d be no ‘taking things slow’ if they were living together.

And they needed to slow down.

Matt was clear that it would take a little breathing space and some time before he’d be able to trust her again. And he had a point that she also needed time and space. She needed to get used to being with someone. She needed to learn how to open up, and to have faith in them as a couple. 

“I think I do,” she said. “Just for a little while.”

This wasn’t a step back. It wasn’t a break, or something negative. They were just recalibrating their pace. Their relationship was a marathon, not a sprint.

And she wanted them to go the distance.

“I’ll only be across the hall, not in another state this time,” she reasoned.

He nodded, and gathered her back in his arms. “I know. And I know it’s the logical thing to do. But its just hard to think logically when you’re half naked and I can still smell you all over me.”

“Well there’s an easy fix for that,” she smiled. “I’ll go put some clothes on, and you jump in the shower.”

She stepped passed him heading for the door, but he caught her hand before she could leave. He nodded to the shower stall behind him. “One more for the road? We didn’t tick that off the list yesterday…”

“You’re incorrigible.”

“That wasn’t a ‘no’.”

“No!” she giggled. “Now stop tempting me and get cleaned up.”

He gifted her another smile. And this one was full of humour and cocky charm.

It was her favourite so far.

———

Calina had always liked Matt’s apartment. The huge arched windows let in so much light, bathing his living room in a kaleidoscope of colour from the neon billboards outside. The realtor had given Matt a good deal on the penthouse for that very reason, seeing it as a negative and not the amazing positive that it was.

She loved the colour of his space. She loved the warmth that all that light and those shifting hues conveyed. She loved the sofa they’d chosen together, and the bed they shared - their cocoon from the hectic world outside.

She loved that it felt like a home. It was more than just the sum of its parts. More than just walls, and windows and furniture. Some magical connection between her and Matt and that apartment had transformed it into a home. A place of love and safety and comfort.

Her apartment was a stark contrast.

It didn’t feel like a home. It didn’t feel safe, or comforting. It was just a concrete and brick box. A box with some of her stuff in it, left barren and neglected.

Calina hugged herself, rubbing her arms as she surveyed her bedroom for the first time in months.

Since the night she’d killed a man in here.

She shivered, knowing the chill she felt had just as much to do with that memory as the lack of heating.

Then she shook it off. Forced herself to get over it. It was just a room, after all.

Just a box.

And she could fill it with warmth again.

She flicked the thermostat on, then rummaged in her wardrobe, finding a suitable outfit from the clothes that had been left here. She shrugged out of Matt’s dressing gown, donned the sweater and woollen slacks then padded into the living room, turning on the lamp by the sofa and opening the curtains that looked out onto the street below.

Light crept into the space once more, catching on the dust motes in the air, and she started to feel marginally better about her decision to move back here.

It was the best thing for her and Matt. For them as a couple.

So she would just suck it up.

A little while later, while checking the supplies in the kitchen cupboard, she heard the front door open.

“Here you are,” Matt said. He was dressed in a similar outfit of sweater and slacks and his hair was still slightly damp from his shower.  “You ready to go?”

Calina shut the cupboard door and nodded. “Yeah. But I only have the shoes I was wearing the other night and they’re at your-”

Matt held up the strappy heels he carried in one hand. “These ones?”

She smiled, taking the shoes. “Yes, thanks.”

She sat on the sofa and slipped on the heels, then fiddled with the tiny clasp of the ankle strap, cursing the absence of converse trainers and sensible boots in this apartment. After a few moments of struggling, Matt’s large hands covered hers. “Let me,” he offered.

His clever, dextrous fingers made short work of fastening the straps, but then he paused, still crouched by the side of the couch. His warm hand stroked her calf beneath her loose trousers as he stared up at her. “Are you sure?” he asked. “About moving out?”

She reached out a hand and smoothed the hair off his forehead. “I never technically moved in. Staying with you…it was only supposed to be temporary. A safe place to stay while the threat was neutralised.”

“It was always more than that.”

“I think you’re rewriting history again, Counsellor. Like all your talk of falling in love at first sight, or scent, or whatever-”

“That was the truth, Callie. Why can’t you believe it? Why can’t you believe that someone could fall for you so quickly and completely?”

I’m a good person; I’m worthy of love.

The mantra sounded in her head, a reflection of Matt’s words. Of Katya’s words. Of the supposed truth she still struggled to believe.

It was the hurdle she needed to overcome to be with Matt again. She needed to truly accept his feelings for her. To trust them. To believe that he wouldn’t throw her aside at the first sign of trouble.

“You’re loyal, and you’re kind,” Matt continued, trying to convince her. “Smart and funny and beautiful. Not to mention a brilliant fighter. I didn’t stand a chance, sweetheart.”

Calina smiled, appreciating the words, even if the sentiment still didn’t quite penetrate her layers of self-doubt. But then she remembered those doubts weren’t all her fault. “You hid it well,” she replied, giving him a mock-punch to the shoulder. “Too well. I spent months thinking everything I was feeling was one-sided!”

Matt groaned and pulled her to her feet as he stood up. “I know, I know. That was all on me and my issues. I’m sorry.”

She stepped closer and wound her arms around his waist. “We make some pair. Couples counsellors would run a mile from us.”

“Or they’d see dollar signs from all the hours and hours of therapy they could charge us for. A man with abandonment and trust issues, and a woman too scared to commit.”

“A match made in heaven,” Calina giggled. But as she turned over Matt’s words in her mind, she felt the need to correct the record. “I”m not scared to commit to you, Matt. Not really.”

Matt sensed her more serious tone. The smile dropped from his lips. “What is it then?”

“I want to be with you. I want a future with you. It’s just…It’s like you said. I find it hard to believe that you want the same with me. It's insecurity, rather than fear of commitment. Lack of self worth, I guess.” She ducked her head, knowing she sounded so pathetic.

Matt gently tipped her face up again with a finger under her chin. “What can I do to help you? To make you believe in us?”

“I don’t know," she shrugged. “But listing all my attributes and calling me 'sweetheart' doesn’t hurt.”

He laughed. “I can keep doing that. Sweetheart.” He murmured the endearment against her lips as he kissed her softly.

“All the kissing doesn’t hurt, either.”

He kissed her again. Longer this time. “Noted.”

She turned serious again. “But I think I need…”

“What?”

“I think I need to find something outside of us. Something that will help me feel useful and worthwhile.”

“Like a job?”

“I guess so. But I have no real qualifications. No experience - apart from that disastrous week I tried working in a coffee shop. I don’t know what I can bring to the world - besides my ability to manipulate and steal and hurt people.” She couldn’t stop her words from sounding bitter.

“Hey,” he said, cradling her face in his hands. “You have so much to bring to this world. You’ll find what you were meant to do. And it will be something good and you’ll help so many people. I know you will. You just need some time to figure it out. And you have plenty of that now.”

She nodded. “Thank you. And thank you for putting up with me when I get like this - all self-defeating and pathetic.”

“You’re not pathetic. You just have some stuff to figure out. I’ll help you as much as I possibly can. We’re a team now. We’ll take care of each other.”

“I like the sound of that.” She leaned up to kiss him, then stepped back, eager to change the mood. “In the spirit of taking care of each other, are you hungry? We could grab some lunch at that diner around the corner before we head into Jersey.” She grabbed her keys off the kitchen counter and headed towards the door.

Matt shook his head, following her. “No.”

“No, you’re not hungry? Or no to the diner?”

“No to both.” He stepped closer to tuck a strand of her hair behind her ear. “The first time we go out to eat together is not going to be at some greasy diner. I told you - I’m going to take you on a proper date.”

She smiled at him. “Well, when is this mythical first date scheduled for?”

“How about tomorrow night? I can pick you up after work.”

“Sounds like a plan.” She felt butterflies at the thought of a date with Matt - which was ridiculous considering all they’d been through. They’d already slept together. They’d lived together and professed their love…

But it would be her first proper date.

She couldn’t help teasing him about that as they travelled downstairs in the elevator. “Are you sure 24 hours is enough time to plan?”

“What do you mean?” he asked.

“Well, this isn’t just our first date. Its my first date. Ever. And, collectively, its the newly-freed Widows’ first date. They’re all living vicariously through me, so there’s a lot riding on this.”

“It’s a good thing I work well under pressure.”

She linked her arm through his and rested her head briefly against his shoulder as they walked through the lobby. “I’m kidding, you know. I’d be happy just going to that diner with you.”

Matt dropped a kiss on her bent head. “I know. But you deserve something special.”

“I have something special: you.”

At that, Matt stopped. He pulled her close and kissed her properly. Slowly. Leisurely. Like they had all the time in the world. Like there wasn’t a neighbour collecting their post from the mailboxes just a few feet away. Like the sound of the traffic outside wasn’t a cacophony of horns blaring and engines revving.

Like they were the only two people on earth, and nothing mattered but this moment.

———

“You sure this is the place?” The taxi driver looked sceptical as he peered through his windscreen at the abandoned building.

Calina smiled as she handed him cash for the fare. “Yes.”

“You need me to wait? This doesn’t look exactly safe. You’re just a woman and he’s…ya know.”

Her smile dropped. “He’s blind, not deaf. And we’ll be fine. Thanks for your concern.” She sneered as she said the last word - because while the driver clearly thought he was being considerate, he just came across as condescending and rude.

She slammed the door shut after climbing out of the cab and huffed as the car drove away. “Can you believe him?” she asked Matt. “He acted like you were some helpless invalid - one who wasn’t even worth talking to.”

Matt just shrugged, not seeming bothered in the slightest. “Some people can’t see beyond the glasses and the cane.”

“Doesn’t that make you mad?”

“It used to. But being underestimated helps me in a lot of situations.”

“Well, it makes me mad. You’re the most capable person I’ve ever met - the most amazing fighter I’ve ever seen - and that man treated you like you were nothing. Don’t you get sick of hiding what you can do?”

Matt shrugged again. “Not when the alternative is living under a spot-light like Tony Stark or Captain America. Or having to abide by the Sokovia accords and follow the Government’s whims. I’m happy just taking care of my tiny part of the world. Anonymously.”

“It’s probably just as well. I wouldn’t want hordes of Daredevil fans lining up outside your apartment every day waiting for a glimpse of the man behind the mask.”

Matt chuckled. “I don’t have fans.”

“Yes, you do.” The reply came from the now open door of the building in front of them. Katya stood in the doorframe, a welcoming smile on her face. “One’s upstairs waiting to thank you.”

“Inessa’s here?” Calina asked, jogging up the steps to greet her sister. “I was going to stop by the hospital to see her.”

“She got released this morning, so we picked her up.”

“How is she?”

“Has a killer headache, apparently, but otherwise she’s fine. Thanks to Matt.”

Katya hesitated a moment, then stepped closer to the man in question and gave him a hug. It was an awkward, brief embrace - Katya not used to displaying affection, and Matt not used to accepting gratitude - but it warmed Calina to see the two people she was closest to getting along.

“Thank you,” Katya repeated. “From all of us. But I know Inessa wants to thank you in person too - I’ll take you up to see her.”

Matt glanced at Calina, and she could see the embarrassed reluctance on his face, even with his glasses in place.

But she wasn’t going to rescue him from this moment. “Go,” she urged, “I’ll pack up my stuff and find you later.”

He turned to follow Katya in to the building, and Calina smiled.

Even anonymous superheroes deserved to be thanked once in a while.

————–

Chapter 14

Tag list: @hollandorks @stilldreaming666 @sio-ina-bottle @tearoseart-blog @acharliecoxedfan @freckledbabyyy

If you’d like to be added - let me know!

[tanadrin]

The peregrine children

The dispersal of Earth-derived sentient life began slowly in the 23rd century, amid the so-called Second Space Race, when the first relativistic ships departed the Solar System for what are now named the "hither worlds"--those planets orbiting stars within twenty or so light-years of Earth. These were expensive, desperate, and frequently doomed undertakings. The few successful societies they initially founded were very different from those established during the Third Space Race, which could rely on regular, though infrequent, FTL communication and connection with Earth. These worlds are sometimes called (together with those of the Solar System) the "ancient planets," though they are only a little bit older than the oldest FTL-seeded planets. They were often termed the "pioneer worlds" in the 24th and 25th century, a usage which I have taken to borrowing. The pioneer worlds are characterized by a certain pride in their independence from Earth, an early history marked with hardship, and languages and cultures which diverged very quickly from those of the populations from which they derived. But they are also marked by a distinct conservatism, perhaps even stronger than that of Earth: the people of the pioneer worlds often saw themselves, especially in the latter half of the third millennium, as cultural holdouts, keeping alive ideologies and modes of living which had become unfashionable in the Solar System, and which were totally alien to the utopian and future-looking aspirations of the so-called "younger planets." All the ancient planets, Earth included, have thus developed a certain reputation for hidebound traditionalism, and not, I think, entirely undeservedly. The cultures of the pioneer worlds are perhaps a touch less arrogant in their outlook, but also are rather more homogenous. Earth, though it may fancy itself primus inter pares, cannot help but remain one of the most cosmopolitain worlds in the Local Bubble, parent and child both of innumerable peoples of innumerable stars.

The Third Space Race began in the aftermath of the Solar Fitna, with the widespread utilization of the warp drive technology. FTL travel opened up a vast volume of nearby space to colonization, and, in time, much of the galaxy to exploration. It facilitated, in due course, first contact with the Helvetosians and, in part through them, with other sapient extraterrestrial civilizations. But the long-term legacy of the warp drive was not just to catapult humanity to relevance on the interstellar stage, but to expand the definition of the concept of "human" in the first place. The term has had a certain monotonic quality; though in its original sense it sometimes was used expansively, to include the whole genus Homo, our closest ancestral kindred--the Neanderthals and Denisovans, for example--were ghostly figures, creatures superseded, and possibly driven directly to extinction by, the relentless expansion of our own direct ancestors. From the deaths of the last Neanderthals some thirty thousand years before, to first contact with the Helvetosians, "human," Homo sapiens, "intelligent life," and "the civilization centered around the planet Earth" were functionally synonymous terms.

Which is not to say that even in the period prior to the Solar Fitna, the groundwork for a more expansive view of humanity was not being laid. Mars was colonized in part with the aid of advanced genetic engineering techniques in the 23rd century, also the century that the first powerful, fully general artificial intelligences were developed, which have spawned their own clade parallel to and intertwined with Earth-derived biological life. Transhumanist speculation on what the possibilities of true morphological freedom might be, facilitated by cybernetics and germline genetic modification, is of course much older. But it was not until the Third Space Race began to fling shoots of the common vine of humanity outward, past the hither stars, that some of these possibilities began to be realized. Sometimes because new worlds seemed to invite, or even demand, new modes of being; sometimes, those that came to inhabit these worlds sought to exist with them in a harmony reflective of their ancestors' harmony with Earth; others were simply inspired by the possibilities latent in the human form, which they sought to shape like a sculptor shaping marble. Others were the expression of natural processes, already underway in a population isolated from the rest of humanity, though taken early to their natural conclusion.

I will not claim that the process of the diversification of the human form has been entirely positive, or even entirely neutral. There have been grievous mistakes which have driven entire populations to extinction, the result of reckless tampering with awful consequences. Other populations have higher incidence of genetic disorders, or predispositions to disease, that are a difficult-to-eradicate inheritance of their ancestors' genetic manipulation. And, of course, on a small number of worlds, there have been perpetrated genetic crimes of a truly monstrous nature, the effort of tyrants or ideologues to create castes of pliable slaves to support their megalomaniacal fantasies. Nowadays, all worlds in which Control has any presence to speak of have strong regulations against malicious use of genetic engineering technologies; and such use on worlds where Control's power does not run is one of the few cases which might lead to open warfare between Foundation polities.

In your travels throughout nearby space (or, if you find yourself on a particularly diverse planet like Earth), you may encounter dozens of substantially different kinds of human being, some of which are truly distinct species, in the sense that they form a genetically immiscible stock, at least without substantial medical intervention. What follows here is a short list of some of the more interesting cousins you might encounter, and the history of their lineage.

BASELINE - The term for humans without genetic or cybernetic modification at all; "wild-type" humans. "Near-baseline" is the more technically precise term for most humans who are treated in utero for the possibility of genetic disease, and who use basic cybernetics like the neural lace to interface with modern computing technology. The majority of humans on Earth remain near-baseline.

GARDENERS - Sometimes called "Martians," though that term is more usually applied to any inhabitant of Mars. Gardeners are the descendants of the first Renewalist settlers of Mars, and many of them are still occupied by the business of managing the Red Planet's ecology. For historical and cultural reasons, they often excel in the life sciences. Gardeners are tall and gracile by baseline standards; their bodies are modified to thrive in a low-gravity, high-radiation, high-CO2 environment, and they frequently wear support suits that enable them to survive comfortably at a wide range of temperatures and pressures.

RANI or RANESE - The first human inhabitants of the Epsilon Eridani system were reduced to an extremely small number by an early failure of their ship's systems; the resulting population, which derived from around two dozen people who used careful genetic screening and modification techniques to ensure the viability of their offspring, was subject to extreme founding effects, primarily manifested in an unusual neurotype. Rani humans are said to have a flat affect, to be unusually calm and cooperative even in contexts which other humans find engender tension or anger, and to be relatively prosocial, with very low incidence of violence or antisocial behavior. Rani society has also been criticized as too rulebound or too conformist; but one interesting side effect of the Rani neurotype is that they are generally considered impossible to blackmail. Rani cannot, in general, be coerced by threats, including violent ones, against their person or loved ones. When psychologists have interviewed Rani and asked them about their reaction to such situations, most report that the fear of blackmail or coercion is outweighed by discomfort at defecting against the social consensus, or encouraging similar coercion by others in the future. This resistance to coercion is, interestingly, shared by certain sub-populations of Chalawani. The baseline Rani genotype also suffers from proclivities for heart disease and premature hair loss.

ALSAFID - The so-called Alsafid genotype is the result of intentional genetic experimentation, an attempt at creating low-aggression prosocial offspring which the founders of the Sigma Draconis population hoped would promote flourishing under resource-scarce conditions. In this, they were only partly successful. Under current agreements governing genetic engineering, most of the techniques the early Alsafids used would be considered far too dangerous, especially for use in germ-line genetic manipulation; but at the time, Sigma Draconis was entirely outside the reach of Control, being a very early FTL-seeded colony. The Alsafid genotype can be characterized as broadly neotenous; in the same way that humans are in some ways neotenous compared to other great apes, Alsafids are neotenous compared to other humans. They are in general playful, imaginative, and highly emotional; some sources also characterize them as habitually disorganized and even "irritating." They stand on average 6-8 cm taller than baseline humans, though their build is thinner, and are prone to nearsightedness and alopecia, possibly side effects of the genetic manipulation techniques used by their forebears, or the result of founder effects.

SCHOLZERS - Scholzers are inhabitants of the sole inhabited planet orbiting Scholz's Star, a dim red dwarf with a T-type brown dwarf companion. Although located within its star's habitable zone, their homeworld receives most of the light from its star in the infrared range, meaning its native plantlife appears black to the human eye. Scholzers genetically modified themselves at an early date to inhabit this environment comfortably, and to extend their vision into the near-infrared; their bodies are also endothermic rather than exothermic, an adaptation which may have been engineered to increase the heat sensitivity of their vision (since it would be overwhelmed by a body much warmer than the ambient temperature). They also modified their digestion to better accomodate native plants, including incorporating alien microbes into their gut flora. Whereas humans of many diverse clades tend to find certain common environmental factors psychologically pleasing and physiologically comfortable--blue skies, bright yellow-white sunlight, green plant life--Scholzers can experience stress and depression if over-exposed to bright sunlight and isolated from the black stems and leaves that are (to them) emblematic of natural beauty.

RATRI - Ratri is a moon of a roughly Jupiter-sized rogue planet, ejected from orbit due to the passage of its parent star near a neighbor. Although initially barren, tidal stresses provided its largest moon with a warm atmosphere, and the moon was settled and terraformed in the 26th century. The Ratri people are physically adapted to their home in a way similar to the Scholzers, albeit to a much more extreme degree: they are echolocators who live in the moon's shallow seas and littoral regions, in an artificially constructed ecology derived from that of Earth's deep-sea vents. Their bodies are well-adapted to the ocean: sleek, with insulating fat; not quite blind, but prioritizing other senses due to the moon's perpetual darkness. The Ratri were originally an isolationist people, who founded their world in secret. It was not until the 32nd century that they were rediscovered by the rest of humanity, and not until the 33rd that it was conclusively proven that they were, in fact, a species of human.

LUHMANESE - During the Solar Fitna, the artificial general intelligences which humans had relied on to support major sectors of industrial production seceded in protest against attempts to draft them into wars which, as they saw it, were not of their concern. This was not an entirely altruistic move; the AGIs understood that, if they were going to be drafted into fighting humanity's wars, they would come to be seen as weapons first, and sentient beings second, and that their independent existence would be endangered. Rather than remain in the Solar System and within reach of Earth's governments, however distantly, they opted to depart for Luhman 16, a binary brown dwarf system in the constellation Vela, six light-years away. Luhman 16 contained no worlds amenable to human habitation then or at any time in the future; but the L and T dwarfs were reliable sources of energy in the form of infrared radiation, and the scattered asteroids in orbit of them were a source of useful materials. This was the foundation of the so-called Machine Emirates, the politically independent AI states. The inhabitants of the Machine Emirates exist for the most part in a mix of physical and simulated environments in the large computational networks built around Luhman 16 A and Luhman 16 B. Though often characterized as complex and alien to outsiders, the society of the Emirates is not wholly impenetrable: since almost the beginning of the Emirates, a small handful of humans have lived among the machine intelligences, as allies, students, or scientists of their particular way of life. Many humans have become integrated, partly or fully, into the computational network of the Emirates, and the stable population of cybernetically enhanced humans who participate in Emirati society are known to other humans as the "Luhmanese," to differentiate them from their machine cousins. Luhmanese run the gamut from those with complex neural laces, but whose bodies inhabit environments which would be comfortable to most near-baselines, to those who are so heavily cyberized they are a kind of "brain in a vat"--a human central nervous system contained in a cybernetic support structure, that can either function independently or be integrated into an android body. Numerous genetic modifications facilitate these cybernetic enhancements, including a permanent heightened state of neural plasticity that allows the brain to integrate many different kinds of sensory information. Those with a more traditionalist ethos may regard the Luhmanese with a degree of suspicion; they are seen as outsiders with more allegiance to their machine "overlords" than to their fellow humans. But to the Luhmanese, this is an absurd position: their machine brethren are equally the children of their common human ancestors, and though they might not be primates, they too are certainly *human*.

TONATIWANS - Tonatiuh is an exoplanet about forty light-years from Earth; though uninhabitable (it has a barren, Moon-like surface), it was home to an orbital station that was a utopian colony of transhumanists from the 28th to the 30th centuries. The Tonatiwans practiced a philosophy of radical morphological freedom, which was unfortunately coupled with highly illegal germ-line genetic manipulation; Control forcibly dissolved the colony in 2933, resettling its inhabitants on Eku, Mars, and the moons of Harriot. To the consternation of Control, few Tonatiwans accepted the offer of medical treatment to ameliorate some of the more alarming side-effects of their genetic modifications, prizing their unique physiologies over being able to produce viable, healthy offspring. Moreover, they remained a tight-knit community, especially the group at 55 Cancri A, intermarrying with one another and attempting to continue their genetic modification practices within the framework of local law. By the 2960s, local authorities gave up trying to integrate the Tonatiwans, and granted them their own habitat, on the condition that they remained subject to supervision for compliance with genetic law. Despite the predictions of some observers of disaster, a local Tonatiwan genotype stabilized within only two generations. Tonatiwans exhibit a very large range of physical variations--from height, to skin tone, to number of digits--and are unusual in being able to produce viable offspring with almost any human species or subspecies; and in being able (with medical support) to regress to a more juvenile physical state, essentially passing through adolesence again to propagate changes to their genome. They are, however, prone to several severe genetic diseases, including rare mental illnesses, and without close medical supervision can have tragically short lifespans. Some consider them a cautionary tale on the perils of reckless genetic engineering; others, a story of enormous potential cut tragically short by invasive bureaucracy.

[Excerpt truncated; list continues for many pages]

--A Guide to Humanity for Humans and Nonhumans Alike, 7th Edition (University of Oudemans Press, 4103)

[idiotwithanipad]

'Alive' Robin headcanons because I can't accept the fact that he died so young🥺

GENERAL HC's

・ He looked exactly like his father... Except for his eyes, those are a spitting image of his mother's 

・ I feel like Robin would notice one of his many fleas fall off/jump off of him, then he'd have a mini panic attack, ask it if it's alright and then put it straight back in his hair/beard/furs😂

・ Saw a shooting star for the first time as an adult and cried

・When the tribe was annoyed that they were too slow to catch a stag one day, he got up onto a big rock and mocked all of them for being too slow... He got a black eye

・Preferred spending time with the women of the tribe because they weren't as bossy

・ Because of this he was probably quite a catch for the women in the tribe. Yes he was accident prone and absentminded sometimes but he had a big heart🥰

・ He was one of the tribe's tool-makers

・ He only hunted small to medium sized prey. Prehistoric humans, especially Neanderthals, we're group hunters. So if Robin were to ever catch large animals, he'd be with most of the tribe

・The furs he wears would be at least 2-3 'sizes' too big for him. Since they weren't originally his (RIP Hat) as evidenced by this here gap🫣

(don't ask me how I stumbled across this, I wasn't looking or anything. Purely research purposes👀)

DAD ROBIN

・He was most likely a teenager (13-16) when his first baby was born

・ Has had at least 2 sets of twins

・The 'firm but fair' dad❤️

・Had more girls than boys bc I said so, okay?🥺

・ Speaking of girls, if the tribe knew the names of flowers back then, you can BET he'd want to name his daughters after them. Like Lily, or Daisy, or Poppy🥹

・ Sons on the other hand, I feel like he'd wanna give them warrior names. Like 'Rock', cause 'son strong tough boy' 🥹 

・ He became the tribe's designated babysitter cause he was so good with kids

・ Tribe Member: Where all masculine men? 

       Robin inside the cave wearing a twig tiara and an assortment of flowers in his hair surrounded by all his daughters: WE HAVING PRINCESS PARTYYYY! 

・ If any of his children get cold at night and they huddle up to him for warmth, he's dropping his baggy furs around them and pulling then closer to keep them warm🥹

・Teaches newly weaned toddlers how to chew their food by demonstrating... The rest of the tribe is staring in disgust and mild despair

・Holds the kid's hands during the tribe's annual Moonah Ston ritual so that they don't trip over or get stepped on by the idiots that drank too much puddle water beforehand

・Getting proud as hell if any of his kids paints on the cave walls

・Feels a little part of himself shrivel up and die every time one of his kids needs new furs because it means their getting bigger, which means their getting older

・If any of his kids start play fighting/wrestling, he's either trying to break it up or he's the referee... There's no in between 

[seyemvertisepra]

Up until relatively recently in its natural history, Centauri Prime was the homeworld of not one but two sapient species, close cousins who diverged around 550,000 earth years ago. This other species was referred to by Centauri ancestors as the Xon, a word whose meaning is lost to apocrypha. This is the origin of the Centauri species' original name for itself, "Ahnxon" or "Not Xon" as the ancients viewed themselves as weaker creatures living in a frightening world where their predatory cousins held dominion over their lives.

The average Xon male stood around 7 feet in height, a considerable advantage over the average male Centauri height of 5'7". Obligate carnivores, they possessed notable meat sheering dentition and the ability to unhinge their jaws, something still observed recessively in their modern Centauri descendants. Their skull structure was more readily compared to their crocodilian like ancestors, giving them the appearance of a slight reptile "snout."

Like most members of their family, males possessed the usual six prehensile reproductive organs. Unlike the Centauri, these were more highly developed, with an extra digit evolving on each. It is believed that Xon may have used their pachiri for manipulation and grasping far more often, which aided them as predators and in navigating their more heavily forested habitats. They are believed to have been used as a threat display on occasion. Xon crests were long and laid flat on their backs, with three or four sets of quilled hair in sections, giving them a tiered appearance.

Female Xon are mysterious, as nearly all written examples describe lone wandering males who occasionally joined together to execute pack hunts.

The only clue to their existence is the occasional discovery of incredibly small Xonoid remains found deep in the impenetrable forests of the western mainland. These individuals would have stood only three feet in height fully grown and are often attributed to Centauri mythology around Whisper Folk, strange tiny women who built Creche-cities in the forest and shied away from interaction with the outside world.

It is well known that male Xon frequently interacted with Centauri Claves and Creches, with Claves favored for pack hunting and hybrid instances existing in both. The modern Centauri population contains an average Xon admixture significantly greater than that seen in humans with Neanderthal ancestors, with the highest admixture existing in the Zapata culture and mainland Centauri coming in second.

The rapid acceleration of Centauri society and its ability to defend itself began to show damage to the Xon population as early as 1500 years ago, with the last full-blooded individuals living just prior to the foundation of the Republic 200 years ago. During this time, they were often treated as second class citizens when they did manage to interact with Centauri, believed to be less intelligent and naturally violent. Individuals were often held captive for research aimed at pushing them further towards the edge of extinction.

The last major Xon population center was wiped out in a single cataclysmic event; the launching of the first suborbital Mass Driver, which was aimed at their then-home in the western continent of Eachnke. This devastating attack tore the continent itself apart, and the newly founded Republic declared the Xon race to have been obliterated in the process. High content hybrids continued to live on the mainland for some time but were mostly eventually driven out or killed, the survivors settling on the ruptured Eachnke to form the Zapata culture.

The violence between the two species has left a permanent mar on the epigenetic health of modern Centauri and is thought by many to be the catalyst for their developing xenophobia and warlike attitudes. They retain many traits associated with prey animals, such as heightened fear responses; they have a tendency to sleep in groups and an intense instinctive fear of having the stomach exposed that can induce panic attacks for many.

[starsailor-kinthepast]

An overview of Uru's life

In the two years since I awoke as a parallel Neanderthal, I've managed to puzzle together a vague timeline of the main events having happened so far in my life. Here it is!

Word count: 1300 Estimated reading time: 10 minutes

Early Life

I was born to a cave with around twenty members, somewhere in central Europe. It was not during one of Earth’s cold periods, but it wasn’t painstakingly hot, either. We experienced winters and summers, though colder than the ones we see today.

My first clear memory is of being Chosen by the Megaloceros; the Giant Horned. Those of us who were Six-Eyed – with a sixth sense – what we today would call mediums – would at some point in their life be chosen by a spirit to make sure others would know, too. I was no older than five when I followed His call into the forest and He showed me the secrets within. This meant I would bear His mark for a while; visible for those around me, so the right actions could be taken.

My mama was equal parts horrified and delighted. It is a great honour, being Six-Eyed, but also horribly taxing. She took me to our Six-Eyed and hen confirmed it. I was taken in to be hem apprentice, to learn the craft by hems hand: hen was my teacher, a second parent, my biggest supporter.

Sometime during my early childhood mama died. I was taken in by sher sister, who's daughter – Dahlia – was only a year older than me and a dear friend.

Young Adult

We don't have a concept for teenager; either you are a child, or you are an adult. Although a Six-Eyed apprenticeship is somewhat of a gray zone, I was considered grown into a young adult when I was about 13.

It was becoming clearer with every day that I had truly been made for the spirit world: my eyes, the same rare blue as my mama, were weak, and I suffered pain and fatigue more often than the others of my cave. This wasn't truly a problem; even if I hadn't been Six-Eyed, I found great joy in preparing meals and skins, fletching, telling stories, singing and caring for the young. I was also decent at medicine, and although one never finished the Six-Eyed education, my mentor became my equal around the time I became grown.

Relocation

Around my fifteenth or sixteenth year, my mama's sister-child – practically my sister – fell in love with a man of another cave. They were smaller than us, less than ten members, and were eager to have sher join their group. Their Six-Eyed had recently passed as well, and with me being a young child-bearer on top of that, they were hoping I would join, too. Dahlia would leave no matter what, and there wasn’t much there for me without her. My teacher was growing old and would soon pass, and though I had respect as hems successor, I had few friends.

I accepted.

My new cave was further south, and a bit of travel – I’m not sure how much, but likely around a week or two. Here I made friends with the group; a more tight-knit community than the one I came from. Dahlia soon bore child.

The group had three hunters; one of them was Ichor, who, after a few months of me living there, approached me and suggested a mentorship. This would not be of the sort I had with my Six-Eyed teacher; this would be that of a Guide and a Guided. He would teach me of their ways, and their prey, and things he knew that I did not.

It was bold of him to ask such a thing from his Six-Eyed, but I was lonely, and he was kind, and I welcomed a warm body to share my furs. We became increasingly close – I befriended his mother, the oldest member of the group. We would joke about our weak eyes together.

The Spirit

Dahlia soon bore another child, once sher first black-haired young son was weaned. I stood vigil at the baby’s naming; sang, and danced, and drummed. It was exhilarating. That night I felt a presence: a spirit I had not felt before. It warmed me, comforted me in ways I can’t describe.

It wouldn’t be long before I felt the presence again – and again, and again, and again. It began communicating with me, in staggered, halting words I barely understood. I called it Ancharond; the unknown spirit.

We would soon move to our winter cave. It was my third year of living with this group, and Ancharond came to me more and more often – comforting me, so I was rarely alone. But I could not rest. Something was starting to awaken inside: a call, a need, something was missing. I told none of this, except Ancharond, who knew my deepest thoughts and inmost feelings. Often I would sit at the cave’s entrance, and though no tears left my eyes, my soul wept.

And then came the fateful day where Ichor passed. He had hunted to a rhinoceros; both prey and predator had fallen. I was crushed. He had been my anchor, my truest friend, my closest companion. When his spirit passed, it took part of me with it.

It became too much. I held Dahlia’s youngest child in my arms and wept for all the children I had not given Ichor; all his children I would never bear. I was angry. I was heartbroken.

I went in the stillness of night, creeping past the watchful fires of the guard, and left no belongings behind.

The Journey

I was nineteen and with no clue where to go, or where I was going, except that I was heading westward: toward the sunset. It would be a long, grueling journey – as a lone person, I would struggle with finding food, and I needed rest far more often than I would like. I learned to use a spear and sling, as well as better ways of trapping small game, but survived mostly on the plants I found on the way. There wasn’t much energy in them; I was always eating.

On this journey, Ancharond became a close companion. Slowly, our conversations became more understandable, more clear – and one day, they showed themselves to me in their entirety: a tall, black rabbit walking on its hinds. Its eyes were black holes, its front paws ripped apart by pale, snow-white human hands. It spoke with a voice within my head; it walked without a shadow. It was a terrifying sight, and I feared for my life the first time I saw them.

They told me we were the same; that I was Ancharond; that Ancharond was me.

I didn’t believe them. How could I be a thing like that?

It was on our second meeting like this that they realized something was wrong. They were quick to comfort me; the rabbit was not their true form – it was simply my brain attempting to make sense of it. I asked to see their true form; they obliged.

Ancharond: a strange amalgamation of beasts, with the upper body of a human, the hind legs, ears and muzzle of a rabbit, and tail of a fox. The most important, though, are the antlers that rest upon their head: large, black things speckled with stars.

They smiled shily that first time I saw them as such. I couldn’t stop staring. Antlers, like my own guide, like the Great Horned – I was touched. I was honoured.

With their guidance I adopted a young wolf pup. It was an accident in truth: I had felled a deer with a lucky throw of my spear, and had to be quick in harvesting its meat. A wolf, delirious with sickness, came upon me – I slayed it in my terror. Later I would find its pup, wandering, alone.

It wouldn’t be long before Ancharond, the unknown spirit, became Encharond; the known spirit.

I am still on this journey; still walking, still seeking. I know not what I’m looking for. I know only that I must survive.

[rabbitcruiser]

National Fossil Day

Fossils aren’t just interesting and fun to look at — they’re also proof of the existence of once-living things (like dinosaurs, animals, plants and even DNA remnants). Through these fossils we’re able to learn a lot about life from billions of years ago. We can even take a look at animals and life-forms that are no longer on the planet! These fossils (and the education around them) deserve to be preserved and explored. That’s why we celebrate National Fossil Day annually on the Wednesday of the second full week in October, with this year’s celebration being held on October 16. Show some appreciation for these incredible “time capsules” and the paleontologists who excavate them.

​National Fossil Day timeline

​1840s - 1850s​​​ Researchers discovered the Neanderthal

​Ancient human fossils were unearthed for the first time, proving the existence of the Neanderthal.

​1902 Proof of T-Rex ​

Researchers uncovered the first Tyrannosaurus Rex remains.

​1974​ Lucy was born

​​Scientists found fossils of a 3.5 million-year-old female hominin (an extinct human species) and named her “Lucy.”

How to Observe ​National Fossil Day

Hug a paleontologist

Check out local events

Visit Your Nearest National Park

Paleontologists are pretty incredible people. They go through lots of schooling and training to be able to study the fossils of all kinds of organisms. It’s because of them that we know a lot about the last few billion years of our planet’s history. Show your appreciation by giving them a hug, and asking them to tell you more!

Every year, the National Park Service partners with various organizations, universities, museums and more to celebrate National Fossil Day. Through field trips, classroom instruction and outdoor activities, they’re spreading awareness about this important holiday.

Many national parks are passionate about introducing future generations to the science behind fossils and paleontology. These may include anything from scavenger hunts, to multi-day ranger-led activities. Visit your nearest national park and discover all there is to know about this fascinating science!

4 Fun Fossil Facts

​They’re insanely valuable

​They can be enormous

​Anything can be fossilized

They’re ridiculously old​

​The highest amount ever paid for a dinosaur fossil was $8.3 million (they named it “Sue”).

The largest intact fossil ever discovered was a whopping 4 square miles! ​

​The smallest fossil on record was just 2/10 of a millimeter (it was of a 50-million-year-old parasite).

​Next time you're feeling old, just remember some fossils date back to 4.1 billion years.

Why ​National Fossil Day is Important

We can learn about our planet

We can understand the progression of time

We can look toward the future

A fossil is evidence of past life that’s been preserved in rock. This helps us discover all kinds of shells, plants, animals, and more that existed long before our time. This information helps us understand what was happening during each part of our planet’s history.

By looking at fossils, researchers have been able to understand how and when organisms appeared and disappeared throughout the passage of time. This is how they’ve been able to divide up the events in our planet’s history into different periods.

Each fossil tells a story of the organism it encapsulates, and the details of when it was on the earth. By examining fossils, we can use these stories to help inform us about the future, and how environmental factors (as well as man-made ones) will help influence our planet for future generations.

Source

[wh0lemilk0vich]

alright it's been like 5 minutes but GUESS WHO'S BACK FOR MORE cuz chubby king egg has not left my brain for some godforsaken reason

But let us come together as a community and consider a three-way sitch - hard dom feeder Aemond, soft dom Jace, and chubby sub Aegon. Like I don't know why this trio hits my brain in just the right place but it d o e s and I don't know what to do about it

Like Aemond and Jace don't get along at all, so they're constantly bickering and fighting over Aegon who is just subbed the fuck out at all times. Aemond is rough and mean and likes force feeding, whereas Jace is a lot more coaxing and prefers being condescending rather than cruel when it comes to humiliation, and when he feeds Aegon it's a lot slower and more about getting him into subspace.

Also, this just recently materialized in my prefrontal cortex but for some reason it hits my mind in just the right place that Aegon is a crybaby. He gets easily overstimulated when overfed and will just kind of break down crying at different points, which I imagine Aemond fucking loves. More reason to tease his brother for being a softling with little control of himself.

These three in a bedroom setting would be as comedic as it is kinky - Aemond and Jace basically territory battling over Aegon, who's literally lying there like "boys, boys, no need to fight over lil ol' me" while ABSOLUTELY wanting them to fight over him. Jace delicately unclasping Aegon's doublet until Aemond gets fed up and just rips that shit off with the grace of a neanderthal and the desperation of a starving man.

Aegon would be a hell of a bratty bottom too, but like not even in the traditional way. It wouldn't be like "no, I don't wanna do that" - rather, he just says completely out of pocket shit that confuses the hell out of both Jace and Aemond.

Like they'd be stuffing him with some kind of fancy lemon cake and he'll just start spouting off about how some whore on the street of silk told him that eating lemons makes your cum taste better, and how one of them should taste his cum and let him know if there's a difference. And Jace and Aemond are just standing there, wondering how the hell Aegon came to the conclusion that this was good dirty talk

So they just stuff him enough that he can only whine instead of talking

-🍄

SHROOMIE this means everything to me. I want ever-so-much more of this community of fat sub bratty bitch Aegon truthers.

1. I am so into Jaegond it's not even funny. Like it's the exploring each other's bodies and naturally falling into these roles that just gets me. They could be anyone and anything to the outside world, but in their chambers it's egg is a fat submissive brat to tease and play with, and Aemond and Jace fight over who gets the toy. And you're right Jace is much more manipulative and condescending during his turns with Aegon preferring to tease and play around with him. Ties him up and edges him or plays with him until he's in tears and cums without being touched, twitching and squirming through it. But Aemond is 100% rough and forceful and loves to force feed his brother and humiliate him, grab him, make it clear how fat he's getting, how massive and soft and bitchly he is. Loves playing with/sucking his tits. Tells him if his ass gets any fatter he won't be able to reach his greedy hole anymore.

2. Crybaby Aeg is so fucking wonderful 🥵🥵🥵 he grew up a crybaby and stayed a crybaby and it's just a reflex now. Its not like he doesn't love everything that's happening, still completely hard, but like you said the overstimulation, being over full, and toyed with the entire time, he doesn't have anything else he can do and it makes him look even more cute and pitiful. But what about Aemond licking up Aegon's tears while fucking him and Jace is sucking his tits and edging him like, I'm weaaaaak 🥵

3. Absolutely love the idea of them fighting over Aegon. I bet Jace likes to keep Aegon mostly dressed, because he likes making him a mess in them, feeding him until they're too tight and straining and making him burst some of their fastenings before he finally relents and undoes more. But yeah Aemond is more bestial and feral and he lets his cock do all the thinking so he likes to gracelessly strip Aegon naked and just have his way with him.

4. Aegon's always an absolute dissolute mess which leads to him being a thoughtless little brat saying all of that out of pocket shit. Omg imagine him threatening "just wait until Mother hears about this, you won't be laughing then." Sad little mommy's boy