#Damn look at that alliteration going I’m off to a great start already

[thecatinthealley]

Welcome to my blog!

Hello folks! You can call me Wraith, and I am an aspiring writer who has taken to tumblr (regardless of its recent horrors that are “app updates”) to write my stories and eventually share them with the community. But before I dive right into posting stories, I’ll give you an idea of my writing experience so that you can better criticize my works.

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I began with Warrior Cat roleplay. I know, right? But everyone starts somewhere. This was the beginning stage of my online writing “career” so to speak, and I began with short, 4-5 sentence replies, though I will say that I had started off “literate” and had never used asterisks to roleplay (as I’d later learned was deemed the “illiterate” style of roleplay). Before the age of spaced captions, fancy lettering, and single-rp accounts came to Instagram, I had forged many characters and made many friends. Unfortunately, most have left by now, as this was way back when I was in sixth grade. I am now a senior in high school.

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But anywho, I roleplayed in the Warrior Cat community for a while before taking a hiatus and moving to Pokémon. Crazy, right? I went from cats to a class kid’s tv show. I will say, though, that that was where the real fun began. It was enjoyable, and I slowly improved my skills in writing. It was around 2014, I believe, when fancy “spacing” came into play. I began to grow into one of the “veterans” of roleplay who remembered when spacing didn’t exist. Although, trust me, I have not been roleplaying for nearly as long as other friends of mine who began much earlier than I did. But when my friends began to leave, and the Pokémon roleplay community began to die out, I integrated myself back into Warrior Cats. This is where I truly began to grow in skill.

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I now lead a well known Clan that I never once thought I would lead, and although its popularity has diminished (due to the dropping numbers of active single-rp WC members), this has been the highest point in my online writing “career.” However, I plan to officially retire from the Warriors community by this coming late spring/early summer.

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Now I am invested in human roleplay, to which I had never before seen as interesting until I tried it. I’ll admit, after roleplaying cats and Pokémon for the longest time, I had never believed that human roleplay could be so much fun. Roleplay has become my hobby, and while I will be retiring from the earlier mentioned community I have been a part of, human roleplay will still remain with me into college. Writing stories with others is just a passion I cannot fully retire from. And thus, I have joined a medieval group run by two of my good friends. It’s outstanding, and I currently have a story arc with a very close friend of mine whom I had actually met in the Clan I currently lead.

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And that, folks, is an introduction to my experience in writing online. As for real life experiences, I have always been drawn to the English subject as it has always been my greatest strength. I’m extremely happy that my teachers have urged me to take AP English classes, as they have truly challenged me to improve upon my craft. Although my bane is mathematics, and ironically, I want to study a science major, my “backup plan” is to become an English teacher, so I guess writing will always follow me nonetheless.

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But, I need your help; your opinions, your constructive criticism, and your ideas for improvement on my part are an absolute necessity. I am not a perfect writer, and I have my flaws, just as everyone else does. I mean, no one can become the next Ernest Hemingway or John Updike overnight. I ask of you to reveal those flaws and to help me overcome them. I will be posting works on this blog, as well as edited roleplays between myself and others (with their permission). I hope that you all offer your services if you would like to and are willing to help me improve upon my craft, for nothing brings me more joy than to write my stories and to delve into the minds of my characters and the worlds they live in.

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From your Cat in the Alley, Wraith.

[mefd19]

Failing Forward PT 2

PT1

Two days out from Port Zoon they paused in the route to hunt and fix a broken wheel. It was good timing, according to Caduceus.

“We should probably make a plan.” Caduceus ladled soup into bowls. Caleb tasted his politely before reaching for the salts. “There are children involved, so we should be extra careful.”

“I think Beau is good with kids,” Jester grinned, “Remember how she was with her brother? It was so sweet, Beau.”

Beau shrugged and tilted her head. “I could help with gathering information I guess. And I mean, I am your first mate, so I’m happy to go in there for you.” 

“Yeah, something tells me the Matron won’t be as receptive to your brand of charm.” Fjord made an apologetic face. “At least from what I know of her she’s very protective of the children, and who she lets near them.”

“Oh!” Veth popped her head up from her bowl. “What if I pretend to be an orphan! I can change my shape and-”

Everyone shook their heads with varying degrees of intensity. 

“The kids aren’t allowed in the business areas,” Fjord explained.

At the same time Caleb said, “It would be incredibly taxing to keep you in character long enough.”

“Listen,” Fjord held up a hand. “I appreciate everyone wanting to help me, but this should be relatively easy. I walk in, I ask about business details as if I’m interested in adopting, find out what Sabien’s interest is. If he’s just trying to pay it forward, so be it and we walk away.”

Caleb set his bowl aside and rubbed his mouth. “You said the Matron is protective?”

“Yes, bless her. One of the good ones, from what I’ve heard. I hope that's true.” There’s a shadow there, under Fjord’s words and behind his eyes. A shadow Caleb recognizes when he looks in the mirror. 

Yasha tilted her head. “Wait, what if Sabien is there? Will he try to kill you again?”

Fjord shook his head. “He’s not in Zoon right now. At least as far as Kotho could tell.”

“So the plan is; you walk into the orphanage and ask about adopting.” Caleb asked.

“Yes, that’s about the long and short of it.”

“And the Matron will be amenable to that?”

For a moment Fjord paused. “Well, alright, maybe she will say no, but-”

“Oh,” Caduceus nodded, “I see what Mister Caleb means.”

“What’s wrong with me asking to adopt a child?” Fjord drew his eyebrows down and spread his hands wide, confused. “I was an orphan myself once, it makes sense I would come back to help another.”

“There’s nothing wrong with it,” Caleb held a hand out. “Nothing at all. It’s very in character. I just think it might be better if you had a partner. Two parents are better than one, are better than none.”

“That’s very good Caleb,” Caduceus smiled and nodded. “I’m sure you’ll be able to find any important information too.”

“Wait,” Caleb stilled, eyes going a bit wide. “I didn’t mean-”

“Suddenly I’m marrying Caleb?!” Fjord yelped, looking between Caleb and Caduceus. “Hold on just a-”

“-figured someone else would-”

“Ok ok ok!” Jester held her hands up. “We get it! Jeez. You guys don’t like each other enough to go undercover together, fine.”

Without missing a beat they both instantly started talking again.

“That’s not what I meant Caleb, I didn’t-”

“-wasn’t trying to push myself into the middle of-”

“-obviously you’re the most qualified because-”

Yasha whistled, low and drawn out. “Anyone else think they’re being weird about this?”

“Definitely.” Beau raised an eyebrow. “You two do make the most sense though, so maybe stow the panic for a second. Fjord’s got the know-how, and he talks good. Caleb talks good when he has to and he can find damn near anything that’s written down.”

“Plus he can pass messages with me,” Veth twirled the copper wire between her fingers before vanishing it back into her dress. “And it makes sense they would be at an orphanage. Newlyweds looking to start their family.”

“You can even use some of your real history in your cover!” Jester grinned and clasped her hands under her chin. “Oh how sweet, a teacher falling for his student!”

Beau grinned as she caught on. “That’s great Jess! Caleb was a teacher in, I don’t know, maybe Alfield? And Fjord went to learn magic after he got burned out working the docks.”

“And they’re coming back here to escape the war.” Caduceus nodded. “Nice and simple, I like it.”

“Great,” Fjord snapped. His cheeks were darker green than normal and he was avoiding looking at Caleb. “Now that you have my life re-written to suit your fantasy-”

“I’m sorry, Fjord.”

Caleb’s voice was so quiet, his face turned away, that it was surprising Fjord heard him at all. But he stopped and looked at the ground between his feet.

Caleb is good at something, after all. 

Fucking up.

---

Caleb’s spell components were exactly as he left them. He ran his fingers over the strange assortment of things, counting and recounting, looking for any sign that they would not perform. Satisfied, he began tucking them away again, updating his internal list of things he should purchase when the opportunity arose. Each small pouch was filled, patted. The drawstring was drawn tight, bringing the smaller compartments together and cinching the top.

“All set?”

Despite what Fjord liked to claim, Caleb did not spontaneously levitate. He was startled, because he thought his traveling companions were polite, and polite people do not sneak up and startle their friends. 

When Fjord stopped cackling to himself he leaned against the back of the cart Caleb was seated in. “Jester said you had some paperwork for us?”

“Yes.” Caleb had to lean to pull his bag out from under himself, muttering under his breath about sneaky green folk making his life harder. “Here, sign this one, make sure it looks alright.”

Fjord took the paper and his hand brushed against Caleb’s for a moment, eyes already flicking over the paper's contents. Caleb clenched his fingers and swallowed.

“This is uncharacteristically brazen of you, Caleb.”

His head whipped up to look at Fjord, eyes wide and throat tight. Did he think- did he know that-

But Fjord’s eyes were soft and teasing, and he tilted the paper at Caleb. “Also wholly unromantic. A marriage proposal by thrusting a certificate for me to sign? My dear we are going to have to work on your acts of love.”

“Oh.” Caleb’s mind was blank. “Er…”

Fjord rolled his eyes and turned back to the paper. “Relax, Caleb, I’m joking.” Then he frowned and tapped near the bottom. “What’s this about?”

Caleb leaned forward and peeked over the edge of the sheaf. “Those are our names, Fjord.”

In response Fjord threw him a look. “Yes, thank you master wizard. Except you took my last name.”

Looking up at Fjord’s face Caleb realized he made a mistake. Or maybe two. But one was definitely thinking it was a good idea to lean into Fjord’s space to look at the paper. He was too close to Fjord, who was looking down at him intensely. It made it hard to focus.

“Is that a problem?” He managed. Fjord’s eyes tightened and he chewed his lip for a moment. 

“I mean…” Fjord thought for a moment. “I suppose it isn’t. Not really? But also, I don’t think we should use my real name. I mean, something Sabien would recognize. Or could be traced back to us later.”

Of course. “Of course. I should have thought of that.” 

Fjord slid down so he was at Caleb’s eye level, resting on the back step of the cart. “Well, I don’t mind taking the name Widogast, but you’ve been using it for a while now haven’t you? That might be getting recognizable too.”

Caleb suddenly thought Fjord Ermendrud unbidden and inhaled sharply. “Probably,” he got out. “We could pick something new?”

“Hmm.” Fjord squinted out, across the fields. “Likely something Zemnian.”

“Why Zemnian?” Caleb frowned at Fjord. Did he think he needed to conform or something? Fjord had a habit of feeling inadequate, he didn’t even reveal his last name out of shame for months. Caleb had thought taking ‘Stone’ for his name would be appreciated, and now Fjord was turning things around on him. Again.

“Well my dear,” Fjord flourished a hand, cluing Caleb in that he was putting on airs. “We planned on staying in the Empire before this dreadful war started. Of course I would take a proper Zemnian name to help me fit in, so I wouldn’t draw so much attention to my beloved.”

“Hmm,” Caleb scratched his chin idly. “I appreciate that you were willing to give up your love of the ocean to be with me. But I think I was secretly thrilled to leave. We probably fought quite a bit about who got to be the martyr.”

Fjord barked out another laugh and Caduceus paused in walking by to turn and watch them. “Too true. But still- when we married we planned to stay in the Empire. A Zemnian name?”

“Gebirge?” Caleb tried. “Caleb and Fjord Gebirge? Or if you would rather have some alliteration, perhaps Felsen?”

“I like Felsen,” Caduceus said with a smile. He walked over to peer at the paper. “Fjord Felsen. Rolls off the tongue.”

After a moment in thought Fjord nodded. “It does sound rather Zemnian.”

“Here,” Caleb flipped through his papers and pulled out another, unsigned. “Let me just-” as he scribbled his new signature. Caleb Felsen

He blew on the ink for a moment, narrowed his eyes as he scanned the rest of the page, and handed it to Fjord. “Your turn.”

This time Caleb tried to keep their hands from touching, but the quill was small and delicate. Fjord’s hand covered his entirely as he slipped the instrument from his fingers. 

Fjord Felsen

“Wonderful,” Caleb pulled the paper away and rolled it up. “Now you are bound to me, my condolences.”

At that Fjord grinned again and rubbed his palm. “Does Felsen mean anything or is it an old Zemnian name?”

“Stone, rock.”

Caduceus’ laugh was loud, startled out of him, and Fjord narrowed his eyes at Caleb. “You sneak.”

Caleb ducked his head, cheeks slightly flushed. Entirely too pleased with himself.

[imagineseclipse]

Spider-Man/Peter Parker x Reader- My peace and Quiet

Listen to: La Lune- Billie Marten

Your head snapped up from the colouring book that you were scribbling in, you narrowed your eyes as you practically crawled over to your tv turning it up to the loudest volume possible as the news reporter flashed onto the screen. Reporting a story that hit you close to home, literally.

Within seconds your heartbeat started to increase as you watched Spider-Man and Iron man fly through the air, defending the city yet again against a crazy creature that was causing chaos you felt your fingers involuntarily reach up to trace the screen gently.

You jumped back slightly away from the tv as a loud explosion boomed through your speakers.

“Jesus Christ”you whispered out, your eyes widening as a sick feeling washed over you. You shut your eyes tight, letting out a shaky breath. In the end you decided to just switch the television off all together knowing that if you watched any longer you would have a panic attack.

You pushed yourself up from your carpet, slowly walking over to your window using your minimal strength to crack it open, letting a gust of wind break free into your room. Your hair blew wild for a second, and then all at once it settled.

Your tired eyes scanned the view in front of you, you lived in an apartment building, on the twelfth floor to be exact. For the time being you were living alone, your mother was abroad taking a well needed break after working endless hours at the local hospital.

You listened to the city below you, listening to the cars and the planes above you, you watched as the evening sky grew darker and darker and this nagging feeling in your stomach just wouldn’t go away.

Soon enough the musky pink sky had been replaced by twinkling stars, the cityscape was really beautiful to you, it had always helped relax you when you were feeling a bit stressed however this time you felt the knot in your chest get worse.

There was something about this moment of silence that was terrifying to you, especially after that news report.

You inhaled once more before taking a step away from the window, retreating back to the comfort of your bed. Just as you were about to throw yourself back onto your mattress there was a crash at your window. A pair of hands wrapped onto your window ledge as you blinked several times, wondering if you were seeing things.

Finally you decided to scurry over to the source of the noise, poking your head out of the open space underneath your window. At first you couldn’t see much because your hair was blowing in your face but when you eventually cleared your sight you groaned with relief at the figure hanging from your building.

“Get in here damn it”you mumbled, wrapping your hand around the familiar wrist, pulling it into the warmth of your bedroom.

When you saw that he was safely sprawled out on your carpet you immediately slammed the window shut, throwing your curtains together for safety.

There were holes burnt into his suit and you could see his wounds, it made you flinch and you weren’t the one bleeding. You positioned yourself down by his side as he panted quickly. You so desperately wanted to touch him, but you were afraid to.

“Hey, I’m okay y/n, I can practically feel the worried look on your face”he spoke out after minutes of a comfortable silence.

“This isn’t a joke, look at you”you shook your head as you leant back on your bed, resting your elbows on your knees. He slowly made his way to the right side of you, almost mirroring your actions.

“What’s gotten you so worked up, you know I’ll be fine”his shoulder touched yours, and his voice was soothing through his mask.

“I-I just thought that you weren’t gonna mak-

“I told you to stop watching the news”he exclaimed, shaking his head.

“Well you’re freaking Spider-Man it’s hard to avoid it!”you raised your voice slightly, he felt butterflies in his stomach after hearing the crack in your voice. He didn’t realise that you cared so much.

Okay, so maybe you had been keeping a small tiny secret, and maybe you had kept your window open for a reason. For months now the famous Spider-man had been dropping by...literally after falling into your window one day accidentally. He decided to make light of the situation by making friendly conversation with you at three in the morning.

After a while he would find himself swinging through the city back to you whenever he could, you were his safe place. However you only knew Spider-man, you hadn’t yet met the boy underneath and this was a mutual decision, he was afraid of danger finding you, if something were to happen to you he would lose his mind. Being in the same room as you was dangerous enough. Sometimes when you were out in the city he’d watch over you, just in case because he knew better than anyone that you can never be too careful.

And you didn’t want him to put himself in danger so you let him stay anonymous, although at this point it was pretty clear that wherever Spider-man was danger wasn’t far behind.

“Do you wanna talk about it?”you asked quietly after your small outburst. He looked down at you through his red mask, watching as you tucked a strand of hair behind your ear.

It was times like these where he was thankful that he was wearing a mask, a small blush creeping up onto his cheeks as you looked up at him once again, waiting for his reply.

“I don’t wanna talk about it just yet, I wanna hear about your day”he answered, nudging you playfully. You hesitated before sending him a sweet smile proceeding to tell him about your day like he wanted.

He could listen to you talk for hours, it was his favourite sound. He found himself getting lost in your words because a second later you were waving your hand in front of his face trying to get his attention.

“Spidey, hey dude”you called out, waving your hand frantically.

“I told you to stop calling me that”he chuckled lightly before turning to face you.

“I asked you a question”you hummed back.

“Oh, yeah go on ask me again you have my undivided attention”he nodded, his full attention on you.

“I mean, not that I have a problem with it because obviously I don’t but I was just wondering wh-why you keep coming back here I mean you’re The Spider-Man and I’m just- well I’m just me I’m sure there are other people you’d rather be with”you started to ramble nervously.

Spider-Man wasn’t expecting this question, in fact for the first time in a while he was speechless.

“I-I uh guess you’re my peace and quiet”he responded slowly. You furrowed your eyebrows in confusion and it didn’t go unnoticed.

He began to talk again, this time you could tell he was being serious by the tone in his voice.

“See my life is pretty chaotic and it doesn’t make sense at all, but you- y/n you’re the only thing in my life that makes sense right now. Everyday I wake up and the first thing I think about is you I always just want to come here and be with you. Before I met you I wasn’t afraid of dying but now I know you I’m scared, I’m scared because I don’t want to leave you alone I don’t wanna die and not be around you”he confessed finally, this had been playing on his mind for months and now that you knew how he felt he could breath properly. It was like a weight had been lifted from his shoulders.

Just before you could tell him how you felt he sprung up off the floor, lifting his hand up to his mask. You followed his actions, jumping up in front of him, but you placed your hand on his stopping him from whatever he was about to do.

Electricity flashed up through his arm as he felt your hand on his.

“Woah woah woah, What are you doing!?”you asked with widened eyes.

“I’m taking my mask off y/n”he sighed as if it was the most obvious thing in the world.

“But we agree-

“Agreement terminated, I want to be with you not just as Spider-Man but as Peter Parker”he revealed as he snatched off his mask before you could stop him, your hands remained in his as you took in his appearance.

He was gorgeous to you, his brown floppy hair fell over his eyes a little as sweat dripped from his forehead there was a small cut situated on his cheek bone but you didn’t mind. His brown eyes flickered down to yours as a small lopsided smile made its way onto his face.

“Peter Parker, I like it”you grinned, not realising that you were falling in love with the same person all over again.

He flashed you a goofy grin before pressing his lips into yours abruptly, sending you stumbling backwards slightly. His arms wrapped around your body tightly so that you wouldn’t fall as you returned the kiss. Of course you would return the kiss. It was short and sweet but to the two of you it lasted a lifetime.

“I don’t want you to go”you whispered after pulling away. He rested his head against yours, tracing his thumb over your own.

“I don’t want to leave”he replied.

“Then stay”you pleaded quietly. He looked down at you once more, this time you noticed the twinkle in his eye. He nodded in response before he watched you retreat to your wardrobe pulling out a hoodie and some comfortable trousers for him to change into.

You rolled your eyes at the sight of his wounds.

“Please just let me take care of those”you raised your eyebrow at your other half.

“Would it make you feel better if you did?”he smirked.

“I feel great already but yes, God yes just let me patch you up besides you can’t actually walk around battered and bruised people will ask questions”you explained as you pulled out the first aid kit from under your bed.

“This is why I love you”he placed a small kiss on your forehead as you began to clean his cuts.

“I love you too, Peter Parker”

“Why are you saying my name like that?”

“Alliteration”you simply stated.

[the-observant-frisbeetarian]

Chapter 1

Meanwhile, Across Town by George deValier

Chapter saved by ocean-babyblues ♥

INTRODUCTION

.

Once, not all that long ago, the streets of Hetalopolis were ruled by greed and tyranny. Rival gangs roamed both alleyways and corporate boardrooms. Citizens huddled afraid in their homes, the night belonged to the darkness, and evil held the city in its iron fist. 

Then rose up the superheroes. Humans born with inhuman powers, who chose to fight the dark with the powers of virtue and right. For a time war raged above and within our fair city, the supervillains and the superheroes locked in an age old struggle of right and wrong, good and evil, light and darkness. 

Until finally there rose five. Five heroes from the north who vanquished the ruling villains of the east and drove the remainder into hiding. And the streets became safe once more. The villains faded into obscurity and the heroes found themselves unneeded, discarded, forgotten. Some moved on, took jobs, lived quiet, little lives. Others, unable to reside in normality, clung to their past dreams, their past glory. And for a while, all was well on the streets of Hetalopolis. 

But for some, peace is uneasy, and of those born with power some will always use it for darkness and gain. Evil now lurks in the shadows once more. But where there is evil, good will always rise to fight it, and where there is despair, hope is never far...

"Are you nearly done?"

"...huh?"

"Well, it's just, I mean, I asked you if you'd heard any news lately and you've been droning on for about ten minutes now, it's getting a bit tiresome."

"Some people can't appreciate a good bit of dramatic history."

"Some people don't have three years to stand around chatting in alleyways."

"Fair enough. You want to know what news I've heard? Read your local newspaper. The articles by Arthur Kirkland. He's the only one who seems to have a clue."

"I travel all the way here to the scummiest side of town to speak with you and you tell me to read the newspaper? What happened to the informer, the AlleyCat, the guy who always knows what's going on?"

"You asked. I answered. Go pick up your local newspaper. And remember my words."

"What words, aru?"

The AlleyCat shrugged, threw another handful of crumbs to the dozens of cats that always congregated around his feet. "'... where there is evil, good will always rise to fight it.'"

CHAPTER ONE

.

"Just what do you expect me to do with this?" shouted Ludwig Beilschmidt, chief editor of the Hetalopolis Times, throwing the small pile of paper down on his desk. Arthur winced and prepared himself for an outburst. "This is pathetic. Your last story was just as pitiful, but do you really think I will stand for this twice? What is this even…" The editor in chief picked up the papers again and stared at them incredulously. "'The Perfume Villain Strikes Again.'. That's your headline? No one has even heard of this 'Perfume Villain!' How can he 'strike again' when we didn't even know about the first strike?"

"Sir, he's actually robbed a few bank vaults by now, and I really think…"

"No, you don't think, Kirkland, that is your problem. You used to be brilliant. Your articles about The Nordic Five versus the Sunflower Posse were some of the best I have ever seen. They won you the damn Journalist of the Year award. But no one cares about superheroes anymore. Ever since the demise of the Posse, they're old news. Frankly, your work is slipping. And this," the editor threw the papers back down on the desk again, "Is trash. So get out there, bring me a great story, or I am going to have to think quite seriously about letting you go. Now get out of here and do your job."

Arthur picked up the papers and stormed out of the office, almost feeling smoke coming from his ears. He was fuming. He was furious. He was... he was a god damn writer and he couldn't even think of another synonym that started with 'f'. No wonder he no longer wrote the front page articles. Foul! There's a word. He was in one hell of a foul mood. Arthur stomped past rows of identical desks and identical tapping at keyboards and ceiling length windows that looked down on the sprawling city below. He fell into his chair and threw the papers onto his desk even more violently than Ludwig had done. And Ludwig was a champion at throwing paper angrily onto desks. He could compete in the bloody angrily throwing paper on desks world championship. Arthur was just thinking that at least things probably couldn't get any worse when Francis Bonnefoy, fellow journalist, fashion editor, and fabulously irritating thorn in Arthur's side, spun around from his desk in front, smiled revoltingly, and practically sprawled across Arthur's desk. "Well?" Arthur snarled at him. Things could always get worse.

"Same old bleeding bloody buggery bullshit." Arthur realised he seemed to be a fan of alliteration when pissed off. Francis flinched and sucked in a breath through his teeth.

"Language, dear, sometimes you conjure up the most horrific mental images."

"What the hell does he expect me to do?" asked Arthur angrily, loudly ignoring Francis. "I can't create stories out of thin air! I'm a journalist, not Stephen bloody King! How can I be constantly expected to produce five star, gold material when the most interesting thing that has happened this week is that Miss Katyusha from channel five news busted her top open live on air Wednesday night?"

"And the gossip department is already all over that one," nodded Francis sympathetically.

"Do you know what I mean though?" Arthur was nearly shouting now. "No one else gets this sort of pressure put on them. Look at Feliciano." Arthur gestured to where the Italian food critic was currently sitting ON his desk, making paper planes and throwing them at the sports department. "What has he published, two articles in the last month? And he's not getting called into Ludwig's office every day."

"Well, he is, but for an entirely different reason I think."

Arthur groaned and dropped his head onto the desk. "This is so unfair! What am I supposed to do?"

"Come up with a brilliant story," said Francis brightly. Arthur resisted the urge to stab him in the eye with a pen.

"There are no stories, I've already told you." Arthur spoke through gritted teeth. "The town is running better than it has in years. The supervillains have pretty much disappeared and the only heroes left have nothing to do but get kittens down from trees and help little old ladies cross the street. So, pray tell, where am I supposed to find this brilliant story?"

But Arthur knew where the stories were. He was convinced that the only reason no one cared about superheroes anymore was because most of the popular ones had retired. If only there was someone new, someone fresh and interesting that people could get excited about. And if this new superhero had an adversary, well, there was Arthur's golden ticket to journalism popularity. The glittering awards shows, the lavish dinners with heads of state, the prestige that came with having the rich and famous under the power of his pen. It could all be his again. Arthur already had the villain of his story... true, a rather smalltime, unknown, pathetic villain, but what was good journalism without a little embellishment... so now he just needed the hero. But where the hell was he supposed to find...

"Here's your coffee, Mr K!" Arthur looked up to see Alfred Jones, resident copy boy and coffee maker, stumble towards him like an out of control steam train. Arthur pushed his chair back just in time to avoid the cup that smashed and spilled over his entire desk.

"Bloody blasted hell boy, watch what you're damn well doing! And I asked for tea!"

"Sorry about that, Mr K," said Alfred apologetically, leaning over the desk in an eager, dementedly happy attempt to clean up the mess.

"No," said Arthur, trying to salvage what he could of the soaking papers, "Just leave it."

"I am sorry, honest, I'll get you another one just as soon as I've cleaned this..." Alfred pulled a handful of crumpled tissues from his pocket and used them to wipe down the desk. "Oh man, I even spilled some in your lap, lucky it wasn't actually that hot, here let me..."

Arthur shot out of his chair like a rocket. "Hands, watch the hands!"

"Sorry sorry!" Alfred backed away, hands in the air. Arthur sighed in exasperation. How did they even hire people these days...

"Look, listen, Allan..."

"Alfred," corrected Alfred, sounding a little hurt.

"Yes yes of course. Just... look, just go away, will you? I'm incredibly busy right now."

Alfred's face fell and he nodded. "All right, Mr K, I really am sorry though." He walked away slowly and Arthur grumbled as he turned his attention back to saving what he could from his coffee soaked desk. Francis stared at him through narrowed eyes.

"You are too harsh on him."

"Well he's a walking train wreck with impeccably bad timing. Why did you even suggest Ludwig hire him?"

"Well, look at him. He's so... energetic. And cute. Just look. I mean really, look now, while he's walking away, he's got a really cute butt."

Arthur refused to admit that Francis was right on that last point. He forced himself not to look. "He's a bloody nuisance is what he is."

"He has a crush on you, you know." Francis waggled his eyebrows. Arthur felt himself turn red.

"Don't be ridiculous. And stop bothering me, I'm busy! Don't you have your own work to do? Just look at the time. Oh bugger off!" Francis just laughed as he turned back to his own desk.

Arthur stayed late at the office, trying to work on the dregs of this nonexistent story he had. A small time villain whose power appeared to be a nerve paralysing fume he used to render guards and law officers unconscious. Nothing special, but he had so far managed to make off with a few million dollars worth of diamonds and jewellery. But no deaths, no battles. Nothing much to draw the publics attention. Now if only there was a hero to set out, fight, and defeat the guy... now that would be interesting. That would make a story.

By the time Arthur finally left the office the building was empty, and the dark alley he exited onto was silent and unlit. He'd always hated that the staff exit led to this horribly narrow and smelly and sinister alleyway. It was bad enough in the middle of the day. But at this time of night… Barely paying attention to his surroundings, but walking a little faster than usual, Arthur only made it halfway to the main street before the lane was blocked by two huge men before him. Arthur froze and took a wary step backward.

"Little late to be leaving work alone, isn't it?" asked one of the men unpleasantly, stepping forward as Arthur stepped back.

"Well... uh... you know how it is, deadlines and such..." Arthur turned to look behind him but another man, even bigger than the first two, stepped out of the shadows to block the way. Arthur swallowed the rising fear in his throat.

"Now we don't want to make this any more unpleasant than it has to be," said the third man, cracking his knuckles and making Arthur shudder. The other men laughed as they advanced. "Oh wait... yes we do."

Arthur stood frozen for a moment before adrenaline pumped through his veins and he attempted a brash, futile escape. He was swiftly grabbed by the shoulder and slammed against the wall. One of the men pulled his laptop case from his arm and the other tore his briefcase from his grip before rifling through his jacket. "Wait, no..." Arthur couldn't believe this... it was like it wasn't real. His pulse thrummed hazily in his head. Wasn't this just his bloody luck... right when the damned city was getting safe, he gets mugged in the street. He tried for another escape but received a stunning blow to his cheek for the trouble. The men were laughing. Their hands were like iron. Arthur couldn't escape. He started to panic.

Suddenly, out of nowhere, a red, white and blue tornado descended before Arthur's eyes. A few surprised shouts, a grunt, a flurry of fists and limbs and garish colour and before Arthur knew it the three men were lying unconscious on the ground. He blinked dazedly in surprise and looked up at his unexpected saviour. He wiped his eyes and shook his head, but the strange vision before him remained the same. The man was dressed in an awful blue Lycra unitard, enormous boots that looked like they had been spray painted red, and what looked suspiciously like an old bed sheet tied around his shoulders. He put his hands on his hips and stood before Arthur in an impossibly ridiculous stance.

"Are you all right, fair dams… uh… citizen?"

Arthur squinted. Sure it was dark, and he was a little shaken, but he was fairly sure that the guy standing right before him was… "Alfred?"

Alfred's eyes darted and he laughed nervously. "Who is this Alfred you speak of?"

Arthur rolled his eyes. "Alfred, I know it's you."

"I know nothing of this Alfred. For I, fair citizen, am…" Alfred took a deep breath, thrust out his chest, and tossed his bed sheet behind his shoulder. "America-man!"

Silence. Arthur swore he could hear crickets chirping. "No you're not, you're Alfred Jones, the copy boy who spills my tea every day."

Again Alfred looked around nervously. "I swear, fair citizen, I..."

"Alfred, you can't just take off your glasses and wrap a sheet around you and expect it to be a credible disguise."

"Oh." Alfred deflated somewhat. Arthur tilted his head as he studied him. He didn't know whether to laugh. Alfred almost looked like a little boy playing dress up. A rather tall, oversized, very muscular actually through that Lycra...

"Not thinking that! I mean, uh, so you're a superhero then?"

"Yep!" At Arthur's skeptical expression, Alfred's brave smile fell a little. "Okay, so I've only just started, and I don't have a copyright yet, or a proper uniform, really, or a, uh..."

"Clue?" supplied Arthur.

"I suppose, but hey." Alfred brightened and thrust out his chest again. "Did you SEE the ass kicking I gave those guys?"

Arthur looked down at the unconscious would-be muggers. There were a few superhero wannabes around... those who had a lot of enthusiasm but no actual powers... but Alfred had certainly done a number on the three men. Plus he had a certain something, indefinable, an attitude that made it seem like he really could take on the world. Maybe there was something there after all. Maybe Arthur could work this to his advantage. "All right. Alfred?"

"Yeah? Oh, damn it..."

"Listen here."

"Okay."

"You want to be a superhero?" Alfred nodded eagerly. "So, now I'm just guessing here, you can't fly."

"No."

"You can't turn invisible."

"No."

"You don't have super speed?"

"Uh… no."

"Forgive me for asking, but what exactly is your superpower then?"

"Well, I can do this. Follow me." Arthur picked up his laptop and suitcase and followed Alfred out of the alley, taking care to kick his unconscious attackers in the head as he went. Then he watched as Alfred walked over to a car parked on the side of the road, grabbed it by the bumper, and in one fluid movement lifted it over his head. Arthur raised an eyebrow.

"Super strength. Well that's something. Very well, Alfred Jones..."

"America-man."

Arthur paused only briefly. "As I was saying, very well. I believe there may be some hope for you after all. But first thing is first. We are going to have to do something about that outfit of yours. Now you, follow me." Arthur turned and headed down the street. Alfred hurried to follow. "Alfred."

"Yeah?"

"Put the car down."

"Oh. Right."

Alfred wanted to be a superhero. Arthur needed a story. He smiled to himself. He may have just found the answer he was looking for.

.

Meanwhile, across town…

.

The third security guard fell to the ground, motionless. The masked villain smiled as he passed. No one could withstand the assault of his nerve paralysing perfume. Years of exposure had left him immune, but when others smelled it they dropped like little old ladies who got in his way in the after Christmas sales. With none left to obstruct him, he strutted calmly and purposefully to the locked room at the end of the hall. He held up the key, recently obtained from a helplessly unresisting bank manager, and placed it into the lock. The doorknob turned with a satisfying click and the masked man stepped into the undefended room.

The perfume villain walked over to a small safe on the back table, pressed in a simple five number code, and smiled when the little black door swung open. He pulled out a blue velvet box and held it up to the light, inspecting his nails as he did. He frowned. He'd already chipped one. And he'd only just had a manicure. He placed the box in his exquisitely tailored jacket and turned on his red varnished heel. The steadily approaching sound of sirens did not bother him. He would be gone well before they arrived. He giggled to himself and gave a tiny wave to a security camera as he passed.

"Totally killer. Seriously, that was, like, way too easy. Classic."

To be continued…

.

Next Chapter

Disclaimer: This story belongs to George deValier. Hetalia belongs to Hidekaz Himaruya. I own nothing.

THANK YOU OCEAN-BABYBLUES FOR SAVING THIS CHAPTER!

[latitudesunknown]

Day 51 in Tiny Haven

Today in Tidy Haven: never trust a fox about fine art, catching fauna is my life, and Keke’s concert.

Because Tidy Haven is in a fantasy world where construction works never get stalled, the museum’s extension is already done!

(1) Marie is even more excited about it than I am, which is saying a lot.

Abraham, always the thoughtful friend, has sent some wisdom my way.

(2) If I do a semi-regular newsletter about Tiny Haven there will totally be a column called “Abraham’s Life Lessons“

 But wait, something’s odd...

Look, on the left, staring at me creepily... Rounard is back!

He tells me he’s fallen in love with Tiny Haven (no wonder, we’re awesome), and he’s decided to establish a trading stall here (as it turns out, it’s only partially true, he won’t be there every day).

(3)

And because we’re like family, he obviously will only accept to deal with me.

(4)

Even more excited at the prospect of stepping on his boat than I am at the works of art he’s peddling, I run to the creek and step inside.... a very, very dark boat. “Is that fox going to murder me and bury my body under the floorboards”-dark.

(5) In hindsight, the darkness is most probably to make the forgeries less noticeable. 😒 

(6) I have to say I thoroughly enjoy Rounard’s bamboozling sweet-talk, whoever worked on it is an artist.

The works of art look stunning, so I decide to purchase this one for Thibou:

Seriously. So pretty. I hope later he might sell some of my personal favourites!

Thrilled with my new purchase, I run to the museum to check out the new art gallery, which is, as I suspected, at the top of the stairs.

Of course, right now everything is empty, but even so, this is very impressive.

I swear just looking at this I can hear the sound of my footsteps echoing off the walls.

I manage to locate the only painting there is, and am pleased to see it comes with proper identification (and a little blurb about its creation).

You’d think I would have given the new painting to Thibou, but I actually want to hold onto it for a bit, so I only go see Thibou with a new guppy I’ve fished. The guppy was cute, but as always, Thibou manages to be even cuter.

(7) I read an article the other day where the woman testing the game complained about how Thibou would never shut up, and I’m still miffed about it days later. How dare she. How dare she.

What’s more, catching that guppy finally brings some vegetation to the tiny fish tank, which is lovely to see.

i could stare at them for hours.

In the main square, as promised, Keke is there bright and early, strumming on his guitar.

Nacer’s also there, listening.

(8) lmao

Keke will only accept song requests starting from 6pm, so in the meantime, I go about my day, and thanks to Lili, who had disturbed the ants living on my discarded rotten turnip, I catch...

(9) I’m gonna go with a literal translation here but obviously it’s all about the alliterations.

... a fly! It was buzzing around the turnip, and now that I’ve caught it, I find it so damn weird that I never thought about flies before. Maybe because they’re not what you think of as “cute” critters. But they’re so ubiquitous, I can’t believe I didn’t realize they weren’t around in the game.

I wonder if I’ll be able to catch lizards at some point. They’re neither insect nor fish, but they’re small and lovely... 🦎 And after all, the hermit crab isn’t an insect, and it’s still in the museum!

Talking about fauna, I finally realize there’s another way to check out all the species I’ve caught, and what a breathtaking view!

😍

😍😍

 Better late than never, I guess!

In the afternoon, I redecorate my living-room.

Those fruit carpets remind me of the fruit-shaped place-mats we had as kids, and it actually makes me resolve to go visit my friends’ islands at long last, in the hopes I can get some new fruits and therefore make more carpets in the same theme.

I end my day with Keke’s concert, which ends up being a very intimate affair as everyone else is otherwise occupied.

He asks me how I’m feeling, so I tell him I’m feeling a little blue. Confinement ends in one day, after all, and it’s so weird to think about.

(10) Thank you, Keke.

.

Subtitles

(1) The museum's new art gallery is opening today! (2) Little question, Waffle... You know that thing when the sun disappears and everything gets dark and we get bored? What if it didn't get that dark and we didn't get that bored... Wouldn't it be great? Good night, Abraham (3) My ship is anchored on the north coast. I'm almost done fixing the leaks. A nasty story. (4) I need someone I can trust, someone who's as good as family... (5) And to reach that price, I'm giving you a discount, a rebate AND a cut rate! (6) I could make you pay full price, but I've eaten a delicious peach and I'm in a good mood. (7) Do you think they have a pageant for the cutest guppy... and if they do, d'you think I could get an invitation? (8) I've been told yelling is a great workout for your abs. And also that my neighbours are complaining... (9) You've caught a fly! Touch the mouth of the dodgy fly who takes a shower and goes to bed. (10) OK. Here's something to say goodbye to the blues, rotten luck and shitty moods: Keke's waltz!

[firjii]

Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: Dragon Age II Rating: General Audiences Relationships: Fenris/Female Hawke

Words: 3286

Tags: Pre-Relationship, Early Relationship, Nervous Fenris, Touch-Starved, Touch Phobia, Hands, Lyrium Tattoos, Kirkwall, The Hanged Man

Summary: Confused but encouraged by Hawke’s friendship and desperate to re-learn the habits stolen from him years earlier, Fenris realizes that he craves a surprisingly simple - yet for him, infinitely risky - gesture. Set sometime after when Fenris first acknowledges his feelings for Hawke but long before their first night together.

Woot woot, my first fanfic of 2018 which I’m posting a 1AM because I have terrible impulse control. :D Plain text version is under the cut.

It’s easy to hide it in Kirkwall.

With so many damned scuffles and thieves and criminals, there’s really no point in taking the armor off, even in Hightown. Those who don’t dare to fight him or haven’t seen him in combat notice the armor and respect him all the more. It’s never an entirely bad thing. Most Kirkwallers’ assumptions are both fitting and honorable: he’s a hired bodyguard, a soldier from a faraway regiment no one in the city is familiar with – or maybe just an elite mercenary on assignment. No one questions it. It’s easy to hide it in Kirkwall.

But as he steps out the door on this blurry, clammy morning – as his breath floats above himself too soon on each exhale and his throat struggles to stave off a strange, wordless noise – he senses change in earnest, or at least the tiny shift in the world that grants room for change. It plagues him, and he must be rid of it now. It’s such a little thing, after all – or it should be.

He wants to remember. He’s only surprised that he wants to remember this. He shouldn’t want to. Its true meaning deserted him long ago. At best, he sees it as a mockery. At worst –

No, there’s no point in admitting that. He left it behind. He left them behind. Kirkwall is far from free, but it’s enough for him. He’s been happy with “enough.”

Until Hawke.

She said things that – things that made him think instead of blame. His thoughts eventually turned into ideas, questions, challenges. A new one – more than a thought, better than an idea, but whose challenge? – drives him to leave the mansion earlier than usual for the day. She’ll be there this time of day. She always is. Varric began the tradition, joking that the middle of the week needed an occasion to bridge the divide between calm dreariness and frantic fighting. She’ll be there. She always is.

Between the armor and the sweltering, salty air, the skin on his hands labors to breathe on this morning. If it’s this warm an hour after sunrise, midday will be excruciating. Yes. Today is a good day to test it. He has a fine, practical excuse in case – just in case she laughs.

His perfect stride alternates between hesitation and hurry as he makes the long march. His steps have a proud bounce through Hightown. He even returns a merchant dwarf’s gruff greeting with a curt nod and grunt. But his feet quiet themselves a little as he descends through the city. His knees stiffen as waves of – embarrassment? – prod him into turning around, or perhaps collapsing like a silly girl or an invalid.

No. He will not go back. The notion has pestered him for two weeks. Hawke’s wit may be ill-timed on occasion, but at least she has a decisive way in most matters. He thought he already had it, too, but there have been too many – irregularities to ignore.

His striding slows to an amble, then a saunter, then a series of pauses punctuated by occasional forward movements. Hawke lies to protect those who have found true love. She loathes slavers. She bankrupts herself giving money to orphans and poor mothers. Granted, she openly defends most mages, but – but she doesn’t act like a mage.

She doesn’t act like a lot of things. She defies his understanding of the world without speaking a word against him. She destroys his doubt with a single smile – and then renews it by assuming that he knows all that she does. But that isn’t her fault. He refuses to blame her for that.

No, she won’t laugh at him.

He walks on, resolve mustered.

It’s a strange little request, really. So many of Hawke’s actions and habits are better suited to great deeds, or at least equal ones – decisions that will reward her in some way, even though she has sometimes refused a reward if the person she aided was deserving. What reward is there in this?

But Hawke is the only one he can ask this of. She is the only one who might –

He wants to remember this one gesture, and not just the meaning behind it. He can wield a sword thrice bigger than any Templar’s. He can crush a bone with his combat maneuvers, the deadly dance he taught himself more from need than desire. He can rip an organ from someone’s very chest without any help from a weapon.

But – but sometimes, his fingers weary of that. He supposes that anyone would eventually. Some men fight because they long to smell the blood. But he never did. There are so many other things in the world. He wants to remember them now.

He finally reaches the shabby tavern’s shabby door. His breath catches one last time, partly from the rank smells within – but partly not.

When Hawke sees him, she grins broadly, warmly, and Fenris almost loses his mettle – but only for an instant. She promptly waves him over to her table with her customary flourish. He clears his throat to hide his cavernous swallow, glad that she is out of earshot to hear the awkward noise that accompanies it.

“The esteemed warrior,” she chirps as he sits down across from her.

“Hawke,” he grunts promptly.

“Varric was just telling me about the –”

Fenris blinks, caught off balance by the dazzling string of alliterations that follow from her mouth, his superb fluency in Common suddenly faltering. “Excuse me?”

She repeats it flawlessly.

“Ah.” He nods. Good, he notes: if she can manage verbal acrobatics like those twice in such short order, the drink hasn’t taken effect on her yet, or else she chose to abstain from it today.

Hawke and Varric gently bicker for a few moments, but their subject eludes Fenris. They both adore sarcasm so much that his reflex is to block out their conversation. He flicks his eyes about. The tavern’s mood is quiet, even for this time of day. Isabela is absent, possibly still sleeping. Anders is rarely here before lunch, if at all. Aveline, of course, is nowhere to be found since this is a tavern and she daren’t risk dereliction of duty so early in the morning. Merrill is poised on a bench on the far side of the room, eager to watch an old lush hone his rodent-killing technique.

Yes. This will do.

He waits for the talk to subside, but Varric is especially long-winded today. Fenris nods several times as the dwarf’s story unfolds. He even smirks once, feeble pretending that he has come here for the talk rather than the company. But finally, something in his face shifts - just a twitch, really, more of an attempt to suppress a sneeze than a reaction to the conversation.

Hawke notices. “And what do you think about it?” she asks him, not snidely but in the bright and eager tone she had so blithely used when they’d first met – her fearless one, since she had used it mere moments after witnessing Fenris unburden someone of a vital organ.

He swallows. His stomach churns and he is immensely grateful that he scarcely ate this morning. His hands, so carefully situated on the table, slowly clench and the spikes of his gauntlets scrape the battered wood – and then he breathes again. “I –” he croaks. “I –” On his second failure, his brow turns to self-scorn as his head jabs downward at an unnatural angle. “I must speak to you,” he blurts.

Hawke’s eyes change sooner than the snap of fingers. Fenris tries to look at her – tries – but is too busy checking for Varric’s reaction. Hawke’s eyes train on Fenris steadily, quietly, searchingly, but without a trace of a demand, not like – not like anyone else in the world.

Varric only smiles and softly squeaks his chair back across the floor as he stands. “I feel like another bowl of the mystery swill. You two go talk about – things.”

For the first time in a very long time, Hawke hesitates. “Varric, I don’t think this is a quick matter.”

Varric raises a jovial hand. “Don’t worry yourselves about that,” he lilts knowingly. “Use my room.”

Fenris pitches a fierce glare and half a sneer in Varric’s direction, but Varric has already made for the barkeep.

They saunter through the main hallway and down the long corridor to Varric’s suite, narrowly avoiding bumping several hung-over residents on the way. Once they reach it, the door scarcely closes correctly.

He moves away from her. There isn’t a reason to – her stance is neutral, her shoulders neither rounded nor squared – but the air in the room seems hardest to breathe in her vicinity.

“What’s wrong?” she asks, neither forcefully nor flippantly.

“I –” He strains for an excuse. He has already forgotten. His eyes scan the floor rapid-fire. “I may have injured my hand when we cleared those spiders from the last cave. I was hoping that you could help me – assess if I need tending from a healer.”

She pauses. Her face is neutral but utterly unfathomable.

He swallows.

She starts to bridge the distance between them.

His shoulders arch back a fraction, but his feet remain staunchly in place.

She stops, noticing it – or perhaps content to stay where she is. “You could just ask Anders.”

“I know.”

“He’s never refused someone in need.”

“But I –” He stops himself. His head droops and he growls into his chest. He paces.

He feels her watching him. He always does – but her watching is simple, honest, not a threat. He can abide it.  

“Your markings,” she murmurs after a moment.

He stops short. “I – yes,” he sighs shortly.

“I’m –”

But he knows the words before she can finish. He glares at her – and then regrets it. He flicks his eyes away and makes for the door. “I apologize. It was a foolish thought.”

She hurries to block him from leaving – her scrawny, underdeveloped, half-starving mage frame blocks him. Him.

He blinks and tries – tries – to look at her.

She frowns. “You’re not a fool.” The words pour from her effortlessly, like water, like the coin she gives away so freely to the poor or the blood she spills to punish injustice and tyranny. Those words are the permission that he sought – and the request. She touches a bare section of his arm – only slightly, only fleetingly, only enough to guide him to a chair at the table.

He settles himself, his knees bent rigidly and his feet curled under the chair – but only to stave the incessant tapping of his toes.

She sits down, across from him rather than next to him, but still close – the closest he has ever been to her in a moment not occupied by combat. “Can you –” She stops uncertainly, points at the gauntlets instead of finishing the question. “Should I –”

“Please,” he blurts with a nod, but then he swallows. Has he spoken too quickly? “I –” he begins. “Yes.” He sighs to himself, barely blunting the edge of the teeming storm collecting in his brow.

She unbuckles the gauntlet, somehow never bumping the armor against his skin or pulling anything too tightly. But when she moves to take it off, it slides across the top of his hand.

He winces, but only in one arm, and only from his forearm down. All else remains still. In Tevinter, too much of his life depended on being able to defer, direct, channel, translate a pain reflex. But still, he winces.

Hawke notices but doesn’t waver. “You never quite explained how you came by armor like this.”

“No,” he mumbles. “I didn’t.” He stares at a lacy snatch of cobweb on the wall, a rug on the floor, anything but her. It happened too quickly, and now he must adjust his plan.

Hawke’s eyes dull half a fraction, but her gaze remains fixed on him, intent, interested, curious. He can feel it. He always does. “There’s nothing wrong with your hand, Fenris.”

His mouth twitches. His eyes flick faster. “No.”

He didn’t care before – not until Hawke came. He wants to remember.

“You could have asked me sooner.”

He blinks, his thoughts already lapsed into a blur despite the short span of time. His pulse twists twice. What did he miss? What did he do? What will –  

He looks at her – he tries. “What?” His voice jigs, both accusation and defense, an unusually high tone that he has forgotten he is capable of and ashamed – an instant too late – that he has displayed.

She chuckles voicelessly, but not – no, not ridicule, not a dare. Something else, but one of the things he forgot. Only a benign exhale ribbons the air.

He waits for the prickling fear to come, but – but she isn’t like that. She only punishes the guilty. She only scorns the deserving.

But still, his eyes dance to the corners of the room.

“I only haven’t said anything before now because I know you don’t like to be asked,” she murmured. “It’s not so easy – refusing. That’s why I don’t ask.”

He rips his hand away from the table. He leans back in his chair. His gloved hand fusses with the bare one, just barely. “Is it so obvious?”

She folds her hands on the table. “When you come, it’s by choice. When you stay, it’s by choice.” She sighs, ragged at the edges, but not – not in anger. “If you want something, tell me. You’ve saved my life more often than I’ve saved yours.”

He stares at the tattoos, unimaginably thin but unimaginably stubborn layers of lyrium spanning most of the length of each finger. He didn’t care before – not until Hawke came. He wants to remember. He wants to. He –

He can’t.

But he does it all the same.

He unlocks her fingers and holds one of her hands fast. He waits for her to pull away or glare at him in surprise. She doesn’t.

He looks at her. His eyes don’t flinch away this time. Green – her eyes are green. He’d forgotten. Where has he seen a color like that? A gem? A potion? Another thing he can’t remember.

She sits as still as a statue, but far from lifeless. Her pulse is perhaps a mite faster for a moment, but hand is patient, her fingers quiet. She doesn’t stare down at the hideous markings. She doesn’t pull away. She doesn’t try to fold his hand within her palms. She only sits there, waiting.

Like a beast slowly stalking prey – but no, it isn’t apt, he scorns himself for thinking it – he lets his fingers move enough that he can line up his hand against hers, palm against palm and finger against finger. It takes a long moment – several, even. And she knows – somehow, she knows – exactly when to raise her forearm when he does his. They each prop their elbows on the table, palms flat against each other – not moving, not twitching. Only resting, the pressure of each arm maintaining the upward angle.

A ghost escapes him – a ghost of a chuckle, more like an exhale of relief, but enough to release the building tension in his shoulders. One corner of his mouth creases upward. Hawke smiles back. The other corner of his mouth raises a fraction. The movement is – unnecessary, strange. But he wants to remember that, too.

His knuckles bend – only a little, but they bend all the same. Slowly, slowly, like an enfeebled old man with rheumatism, his fingers lace with hers. He squeezes her hand – only a little. She returns it. She smiles wider, until her lips part and a slit of her teeth show. She –

He blinks. He frowns. His face is wet. Why? It isn’t fear. It isn’t sorrow. It –

His nerves engage. He remembers, but not what he meant to. He looks down. Three of her fingers are resting squarely on the marks. Three ripples of scalding rise up his wrist. But he has done what he meant to. He came here to face it. He must hold. He must stem it a little longer. One more moment. He must. He must. He can almost see it. He can almost reach it. He almost finds it. The scalding changes to freezing, then scorching, then – sparks? Yes, lightning sparks as strong as the ones in Hawke’s staff when she fights. But also as strong as –

He breaks the contact. He pulls away and stands hastily, his chair issuing a muffled protest against the floor. His gauntlet scrapes the table unmusically as he scoops it up.

“I–I’m sorry,” Hawke falters hurriedly as she stands. “I’m sorry. I didn’t meant to–”

He waves a hand to silence her. Remnants of sharp prickling remain, his untouched hand joining the offended one in sympathy. The marks are angry. They always are if someone touches them. It can be useful in battle – he knows this. It can rouse him to the last fierce blows when his friends are too battered to go on. But it will take hours for it all to quiet down, hours for him to forget the experience sufficiently to be able to think and act rationally again, never mind courteously.

But if he forgets the pain, he might also forget –

He shakes his head – not dismissively, not quickly, but in Hawke’s manner. “No. You did nothing. The blame is mine.”

“That’s not true. You should never say that.”

Her voice is a well of righteous anger. As ever, it overflows from her so much that he can almost see it in the air. She speaks both well and kindly, and he knows it. But he walks away from her. There is nothing more that can be done for now. Even if he does it in stages, he must steel himself against pain again. He must. In time – if Hawke wants more, and he knows that she does, her face is always so plain of motive – even she will be a harbinger of pain. She will bring other things as well – good things, not merely pleasant ones – but it is inevitable. If he wants to be with her – if he expects to ever do more than this –

His eyes shine, partly from pain, but partly something else. “I –”

He swallows. What else can he really say?

“Thank you, Hawke,” he manages. His candor hiccups, but he nods as calmly, smoothly, cordially as ever.

He refuses to look at Varric or Merrill as he leaves the tavern. He refuses to look at anything. He only glides out into the ocean-choked light of day, squinting from the ever-intense humidity. He has lived in Kirkwall for years, and yet he still finds it harder to abide than Tevinter’s heat.

He strains for a moment to catch his breath. He leans against the wall as he adjusts his gauntlet into place. The markings still protest, even against himself. They often do.

But he smiles. Against the enraged, confused nerves in his skin, he smiles. He looks down at the hand that Hawke blessed with a touch. He slowly makes a fist. Yes, he will remember the pain for hours.

He will also remember her for hours.

It is enough. It must be, though it seems like a mild cruelty just now. But – but perhaps it was Hawke’s version of enough –

and that is far, far more than he has ever known.

He makes a quiet fist. He closes his eyes, still warm and wet from the pain – and something else.

A strangled sigh escapes him, the best he can do to hide the one sob he allows himself.

“Thank you,” he whimpers under his breath.

[sabraeal]

Merry & Bright: Chapter 5

The trees better be in another fucking state for how long it takes to walk them.

It’s not like Obi’s watching the clock precisely; his phone is politely tucked away in his pocket, ringer turned to vibrate, and he’s well aware that if he makes any move for it, like family fun-time is not the most riveting activity he’s ever participated in, Kelly Ann will have no compunction about using that axe the unironic flannel-wearing hipster at the front desk handed to them.

But still, he’s got a basic grasp of the flow of time. This is a long fucking walk.

Obi had offered back at the shed to carry the axe -- after all, between the four of them, he’s the one who’s going to be doing the chopping -- but Kelly Ann just gave him a long warning look. It was the sort of glare Clint Eastwood gave outlaws from the other side of town. High Noon played in the background. A tumbleweed rolled past.

Right, yeah. Nothing’s forgiven, they’re just...under truce. Enforced by the sudden and inexplicable comraderie that’s cropped up between Doc and Laila.

Or at least, nearly inexplicable. It is Doc after all. She could make friends with anyone.

They traipse ahead, gloved fingers linked as they crush sticks and pine needles beneath their boots. It’s nice picture: hands swinging joyfully between them, voices half-yelling the words to “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” complete with goofy echoes.

(”We shouldn’t say like Columbus,” Doc says, mouth bowed in a worried frown. “He was a real jerk.”

Laila considers this with a thoughtful pout. “That’s the way I learned it in school though.”

“We could say like George Washington,” Doc offers, and, oh, she is just walking into this one.

“Didn’t he own slaves?”

“Oh!” Doc looks stricken. “Y-yes, I suppose he did...”

“Rookie mistake,” Kelly Ann huffs out, teeth flashing behind her lips.

“Only child,” Obi says.

“Oh yeah.” She snorts. “That’d do it.”)

He should take a leaf out of their book, try to cross the gulf of silence between him and Kelly Ann. Be a bigger man. Show her he’s changed. All that good Chicken Soup for the Soul stuff.

“So,” he drawls, slinking close. “I see things worked out with Coast Guard Cal.”

She throws her head back, and he’s half tempted to quote Gayle at her, you do that enough and those pretty eyes are going to roll right out of your head, missy.

“He’s in the Navy.”

“Wha?” He blinks. “When’d that happen?”

“He’s always been in the Navy, Obi.” She makes a quick, irritated gesture. With her non-axe hand, thankfully. “I’ve been telling you that for years!”

“Huh.”

He mulls that over, shifting the uniform in his teen fantasies from blue to black. Nope, not as good. Maybe he’d have to think about dress whites from now on.

“Really?” Kelly Ann raises an eyebrow, and if people tell him he’s the master of the sarcastic eyebrow lift, then she is it’s grandmaster. Barely an inch movement on that scarred brow, and he feels about two inches tall. “That’s all you’re going to say? No witty remarks about how it ruins the alliteration? Something something dress whites?”

“I mean, it does ruin the alliteration.” He twitches his shoulders, letting the movement hunch him over. “I don’t know, I guess I was just thinking about how I didn’t really see you as the Navy Wife type.”

“What’s that mean.” It’s not a question; she grew up in Virginia Beach too. She knows exactly what he’s driving at.

Still. “You know, married before thirty with a three year old.”

Her mouth quivers at the end, but her frown doesn’t budge. “Yeah, well. It wasn’t the most planned.”

He coughs in surprise. Kelly Ann, make a mistake? He would have thought death would come first.

“You’re behind though,” he tells her evenly. “A real good Navy Wife would have three kids under six right now.”

“Oh, tell me about it.” To his utter shock, she laughs, even if it’s drier than tinder. “This whole PhD thing, really putting a damper on pushing babies out for God and Country.”

Obi nearly trips over a root. “You’re getting a PhD?”

Instantly, the air around them is frigid. “What? Is that surprising to you?”

“No, just --” it feels like he can’t get enough air, like he needs to sit down and catch his breath -- “It’s just weird. I didn’t think we’d both be getting PhD's at the same time.”

“What, and it’s somehow surprising that I’m getting one?”

“Cut the shit, Kelly,” he snaps. Her gaze darts pointedly to where Laila is leaping over a log in front of them.

“Cut the cheese, Kelly,” he amends, giving her a look. “You know that’s not even -- you are definitely not the one that’s a surprise, okay?”

Her eyes slip back to the trail. “Yeah. I know.”

“Let’s be real.” There’s something in his voice he doesn’t like, something dark and rough and ambivalent. He sounds less like himself and more like -- like someone he was once. “It’s real surprising that I made it past twenty, never mind that I’m -- here.”

She’s silent for a long moment, letting the wind and the leaves beneath them do all the talking. Doc and Laila start off on “The Holly and the Ivy,” though it’s clear that between the two of them, neither can remember more than the chorus.

“What happened to you, Obi?” She looks back at him, those wildcat eyes fixing him not with judgement, but with curiosity. “Where’d you go when you left?”

There’s a part of him that wants to tell her, that wants someone in that damn house to know what he’s been through, what he put himself through, because he certainly can’t tell Bob, and Gayle’s an even worse idea, but -- but --

“Oh, you know,” he says breezily. “Away.”

He’s always been so good at fucking up. Why stop now?

Her eyes shutter so fast it stings, like he’s caught fingers in the sill. “God, I don’t know why I even bother.” She lets out a long sigh. “I already know the only thing you’re good for is lying.”

“Fuck off.”

“Oh, no, you’re right,” she says, deceptively light. He’d not stupid enough to get his hopes up. “You’re also real good at skipping out on people. Top of the class for that one.”

His hands flex in his pockets. “That’s --”

“Hey!” Doc calls back, all smiles. “I think we finally got to the trees!”

It’s Obi that Laila clings to as they walk back. He’s got the tree hoisted up on his shoulder, lifting it as if it were as light as a kitten, and she prances around his legs, the definition of underfoot. He suffers it with a smile, but Shirayuki has to muffle a laugh every time the girl makes him stumble and he rolls his eyes heavenward, like he’s thanking every Power That Be that he didn’t drop a five-foot fir on a three-year-old.

Kelly Ann’s busy trying to manage the both of them the whole walk -- Laila-girl, you best not get underfoot again and I swear to god, Obi, if you drop that on my child I will make sure you can’t have your own, followed by Obi’s annoyed, I’m being careful, or his less polite, I’m doing a fine enough job of that myself, thanks -- but when they draw up to the shed, Obi dropping the tree off to be cut and wrapped, she lags behind, lingering with Shirayuki by the fence.

Obi’s visible through the door, lifting Laila up on his shoulders, pointing toward the candy display right next to the register. A vigorous debate begins, with they flashing numbers at each other -- Obi starts with one but Laila works him all the way up to three -- and -- and --

She really doesn’t need to be reminded how great he is with kids right now. He just felled their Christmas tree in three chops, biceps straining the thermal of his shirt, and --

And she just doesn’t need to be having soft feelings right on top of the way her body thrums at the memory. She knows she doesn’t just want him -- his body -- she wants...everything.

And she -- she has no idea what he may want from her. Sure he’s said some stuff -- done some stuff when he was drunk, but -- but sober Obi, the person he is ninety-nine percent of the time, hasn’t tried anything, and she --

She’s not stupid enough to think someone means something when they’re drunk.

“Hey.”

Shirayuki startles, eyes darting to where Kelly Ann leans on the log fence beside them. “Um. Hi.”

“So you’re a PhD too?” she asks, in a rough way that’s familiar, that’s nostalgic. A habit that’s been long left behind. “With Obi?”

“Yes.” Shirayuki nods, maybe a little too emphatic. “We’re both in the same lab. It’s, with, um, turtles --?”

“He’s good at it, right?”

She blinks. Kelly Ann’s staring right at her, eyes so pretty, and Shirayuki isn’t sure what to say.

“I mean, he does all his work?” Her hands curl around the wood, only a few shades darker than her skin. “He’s smart, right?”

“Yes. Yeah.” She’s at a loss. “He’s one of the smartest people I know. And he -- he’s really driven. He’s meant to do something like this. He excels at it.”

“Good. Good.” Kelly sniffs, eyes cutting to where Obi is trying to steal some of Laila’s Snickers. “How much did Obi tell you. About everyone.”

Shirayuki shifts, stomach flipping nervously. Kelly Ann has a gift of making every conversation into an interrogation; she can see why Obi and her might not have ever quite ended up on the same page.

“Not much.” She crosses her arms, trying to stave off the chill from the wind. “I’d heard about Bob and Gayle, but -- Obi doesn’t like talking about past stuff. Unpleasant things.”

Kelly Ann barks out a laugh. “Of course.”

“It’s his choice,” she says tightly, feeling heat gather in her cheeks. “He’d tell me if I asked, but...it’s his story, not mine. I’m not going to abuse his trust by forcing him to tell me.”

Kelly Ann’s eyes narrow. “Hm.”

“What happened before doesn’t matter.” She’s surprised to find how much she means it. “He wasn’t perfect when I met him, and he’s not perfect now either, but -- he’s someone I respect and care about. He chooses to be that person every day, that’s what matters.”

“And what happens when he doesn’t?” It’s not accusatory, just a question, though the way Kelly Ann talks makes everything sound halfway to rude.

“He hasn’t yet.”

Kelly Ann shrugs. “Well, if that’s what you think, fine. But there are some people who aren’t going to be all kumbaya, let’s forget anything ever happened.”

Her mouth pulls thin. “Like you?”

She shakes her head, teeth bared in a humorless smile. “No, not me. I don’t trust him, but some people...they never got on.”

“What do you --?”

“Hey!” Obi waves at them, holding up the tree. “Am I going to strap this down on my own too?”

Kelly Ann scowls. “I said I’d pay for the tree!”

“Shouldn’t have slept on it, then!” He looks at her, concerned, but Shirayuki shakes her head and he’s all smiles again. “C’mon, this isn’t heavy, but it sure is awkward.”

“Fine.” Kelly Ann rolls her eyes, but hesitates. “Just...remember what I said, Shirayuki. This isn’t going to be easy.”

A smile pulls at her lips, bittersweet. “I don’t think Obi ever thought it would be.”

[nickireadstfc]

The King's Men, Chapter 1 – Hello Foxhole, My Old Friend

In which the Foxes are introduced to Meat Grinder Neil, Nicky misses an opportunity for a memeworthy Christmas gift, we find out some things about Jean, and Andrew and Neil chill on a rooftop or whatever.

Sounds good? Then it’s time for Nicki to read The King's Men.

Hello hello hello, we’re back! Welcome to the one, the only, the glorious, all-surpassing, awe-inspiring, shade-throwing, capslock-inducing and feels-wrecking finale to this hell of a ride called All For The Game - welcome to The King's Men.

Let’s start at the very front: A cover, as always, says more than a thousand words, and this cover has one clear message it shouts in the faces of those familiar with the series, clear as day and ringing like a bell: IT'S SHOWDOWN TIME, FUCKERS.

Two Exy racquets, one orange, one black, crossed, clashing. The title, half-orange, half-black. Nora Sakavic' name at the bottom, also half-orange, half-black, menacingly laughing in my face like Rumpelstiltskin on crack, glee-drunk on my surely following future tears.

Whee-hee. Let’s fucking go.

(Also, the chapters are getting much longer by this book, so y'all will have to deal with these posts being longer as well. Soz.)

          Even after a semester at Palmetto State University and a couple weeks practicing on the largest Exy stadium in the United States, Neil was still struck breathless by the Foxhole Court.

Neil, my boy, you never disappoint. Even through hardship, bruises and cuts, one thing can always be relied on: Your gigantic boner for Exy. Get a room, you two.

          “It’s time to go,” Wymack said.

          That was enough to make Neil get up, although his battered body protested.

Oh yeah, quick reminder for anyone who might have forgotten (although – why the fuck would you ever): Neil is currently walking minced meat with Trauma Jetlag™, a literal prison tattoo, and #allnatural #naturaleyes #naturalhair #nomakeup #nofilter.

Because of that, he’s obviously not that keen on running into his squad at the moment. Can’t exactly blame the dude.

If I looked like Freddy Krueger with a facial tramp stamp, I wouldn’t go around instagramming selfies either.

Especially when I willingly ran into the arms of the dude who is nationally known for giving out facial tramp stamps.

          Wymack had even locked the office in his short absence. Neil had been in there enough times to know Wymack didn’t keep anything particularly valuable on his shelves. The only thing of any import was Neil’s duffel. (…) On Neil’s first day in South Carolina he had asked Wymack to protect his things, and seven months later Wymack was still keeping that promise. It was almost enough to make Neil forget all about Riko.

Guys, this just in: Wymack is still the best damn person alive. #dicksoutforwymack

The best damn person alive also already warned the Foxes Neil looked like a human punching bag in order to prevent them from having an actual heart attack when they see him. Yay, have fun explaining yourself to them, hombre.

          Matt moved soundlessly for a few moments before he finally managed to choked, “Jesus Christ, Neil.”

          “It’s not as bad as it looks,” Neil said.

This just in: Neil is Veronica from Heathers, minus the 80’s hair-do.

In order to fulfill his self-appointed role as Neil’s mother hen, Matt then swiftly goes and punches newly-arrived Kevin in the fucking face – which is generally a sentiment I can support, although it really is not his fault this time.

          Matt stared at him for an endless minute, then said, “I want to break [Riko’s] face in six places. If he ever comes within a thousand yards of you again –“

Same, Matt. Fucking SAME.

Matt being protective of Neil will never not give me a healthy dose of The Feels™.

One confrontation down, four to go: What do Aaron, Nicky and Kevin have to say to Mr Meat Grinder?

          Unsurprisingly, Aaron was the safest one to look at. (…) Neil gave him a moment to see if he’d ask, but all Aaron did was shrug.

Glad to see the usual amounts of sympathy and care coming from one half of the Minyard Murder Twins.

Although I’m doubting the other half will muster up any more affection.

          Nicky, on the other hand looked absolutely crushed as he took in Neil’s wrecked appearance. He reached out as soon as Neil was close enough and wrapped his hand around the back of Neil’s neck, (…) carefully pulling Neil up against him.

Also, glad to see the usual freaking normal reaction coming from Nicky, aka some goddamn comforting hugs for once in this cold, cold monster squad.

Nicky hugs are the best hugs.

          At least Kevin had the decency to speak in French. “Tell me the master didn’t approve this.”

Every time Kevin still calls Tetsuji “the master”, a little tiny thing inside my heart dies.

10/10 would protect my tiny big ass traumatized son.

          “Riko said he’d hurt us if I change it back. All I can do is duck my head and hope for the best.” (…)

          “How long do you think he’ll let you hide before he forces you to show [the tattoo] off? The press will be all over this (…). He’s trying to get you found.”

Well, duh.

I’m already looking forward to Neil regaining his confidence, and then I’m looking forward to him sassing the absolute everloving shit out of whoever tries to come for him for his appearance and tattoo.

          “He wouldn’t waste his time unless he thinks we really are going to be a problem for his team That means something, doesn’t it? (…) Kevin, you do what you do best and focus on Exy. Take us where he doesn’t want us to go.”

Hell effin yes.

We’re gonna fucking make it to finals, and we’re gonna fucking shoot that dumb Exy ball so hard around those Raven Fuckers’ heads that we shoot the asshole smirk right off Riko’s ugly face.

Yas.

          Nicky looked between them as if making sure they were done, then scooped his gift bags up again and held one out to Neil.

          “Belated Christmas present,” he said, a little sadly.

NICKY LET ME LOVE YOU.

Trust this dude to always bring the sunshine around at the end of the day.

          “I’ve got Andrew’s with me, too. Actually, I got you two the same thing because you are like the most impossible people in the world to buy for.”

Knives, hair dye, black T-Shirts, cigarettes, a coupon for an anger management course,… Andreil gift-shopping ain’t that hard, homie.

But scratch all that - Nicky got them each a winter coat!

This would have been even better if Nicky hadn’t gotten the same coat for each of them, but literally the same coat – because now all I can imagine is Neil and Andrew stuck in one coat like a Get Along Shirt.

If someone makes this into fanart, I will pay you in Ben & Jerry’s. I’m being dead serious.

Four reunions done and the most important one still to go – one road trip to Columbia later:

        “If you’ll sign in, I’ll ring Dr. Slosky and let him know you’re here.”

        (...) Neil was the only one who hesitated when his pen touched the paper. Riko hadn’t let him be “Neil” at Evermore. Every time Neil answered to it on the court, Riko beat him for it. (…) Riko wanted him to know how much trouble he’d caused the Moriyamas with all of his alibis.

Jesus fuck. Is there literally anything he didn’t get beat for at the Batcave of Extra?

Actually, don’t answer that.

Also, hate to be that person again but – shouldn’t he have gotten to that bit of trauma way earlier? Wymack and the Foxes called him Neil so many times already, why is this only kicking in now?

I legit don’t have an explanation and I think it may just be a continuity error. If anyone does have a good explanation, shoot me an ask.

They sit down to wait for Andrew and to everyone’s surprise (including mine), Kevin uses the wait to do something so incredibly out of character my figurative wig was instantly snatched:

Being a compassionate person.

        “I know what he’s like,” Kevin said. Neil looked at him, but Kevin was studying his hands. “Riko. If you want to talk.”

Fucking what.

        It was the most awkward and uncomfortable thing Kevin had ever said to him. Kevin was known for his talent, not his sensitivity. (…) That he tried at all was so unexpected Neil felt it like a balm to every bruised inch of his skin.

Oh my GOD.

HE’S TRYING, he’s trying to make Neil feel better, he just wants to help and to comfort him I’m gonna light myself the fuck on fire I can’t handle this.

These Kevin/Neil feels are ambushing me out of nowhere. I was almost over this dynamic, god damnit. What the fuck.

        “[Jean’s] father owed the Moriyamas a great deal. The master paid those debts in exchange for Jean’s presence on our court. He was property, nothing more. You are the same in their eyes. (…) I know it means he did not hold back.”

Wait – does this mean Jean initially got the same treatment that Neil just had to suffer through?

WELL, FUCK.

Jean Valjean has instantly risen in the ranks of my faves.

SWEET FRENCH SUMMER CHILD. YOU DID NOT DESERVE THIS WHAT THE FUCK.

No wonder he’s a (seemingly) heartless bitch now. Kill or be killed, I guess.

        “Were you ever going to tell [Coach that he’s your father]?”

        “I was going to when he signed me,” Kevin said. “I couldn’t. (…) [Tetsuji] has never raised a hand or voice against Coach before because Coach has never been a real threat to him. I didn’t know if a confession would change things. I couldn’t risk it.”

Kevin :’( protecting and caring for Wymack :’(( just like Wymack protected and cared for him :’((((((

Before I can get too emotional over this, though, the happy Kevin/Neil Honest Conversation™ is cut short by the arrival of everyone’s favourite murder maniac, minus the meds.

(Back at it again with the alliterations, y’all.)

        If Neil hadn’t known Andrew spent the last year and a half fiercely protective and territorial of Kevin, he’d think they were strangers. Andrew treated Kevin to a bored inspection, then flicked his fingers in dismissal.

Apparently, Andrew is not that different off his meds but continues to be a Stony Sinnamon Roll, Too Indifferent To This World, Too Dead Inside™. Well, bummer.

I don't know what I expected, since we did meet him sober before, but I think I thought when he'd be off his meds permanently he'd be... More? I guess? More of a person, I mean. Less walking void, and all that jazz.

Maybe he'll come around. Give the sinnamon roll some time.

Neil and the squad, finally complete again, drive back to campus, and as they get out we get a glimpse of something amazing we'll have more of later this chapter:

It's prime fucking Andreil time.

        [Neil] straightened and turned to find out Andrew had shifted closer. There was nowhere for Neil to stand except up against Andrew, but somehow Neil didn't mind. They'd been apart for seven weeks but Neil keenly remembered why he'd stayed. He remembered is unyielding, unquestioning weight that could hold him and all of his problems without breaking a sweat. For the first time in months he could finally breathe again. It was such a relief it was frightening; Neil hadn't meant to lean on Andrew so much.

ALL-FUCKING-RIGHT.

Alright alright alright. So NOT ONLY is this gay as shit as it is, and Neil is (whether he realises it or not) super fucking in love by this point, but - "Andrew had shifted closer", bitch, what.

Don't you dare tell me that boy isn't fucking infatuated with our favourite runaway drama queen.

In today's issue of The PSU Andreil Times: Heart-Eyed Little Shit Thinks He's Being Sneaky, Fails Miserably. More news on page 19.

When Neil is done waxing poetic about Andrew's ~strength~ and his ~*~unyiedling body~*~, he goes back to his dorm for part 2 of The Matt Confrontation:

        „Neil? We're here when you want to talk about it.“

        „I know.“

Is that... Neil... close to accepting actual help from outside...

Amazing.

        He knew just from looking at Matt that Matt would accept any truth Neil gave him right now, no matter how cruel or unbelievable. He'd done the right thing by going to Evermore; he was making the right choice in standing his ground here with the Foxes. (…) If [what happened] was the only way to keep his teammates safe from Riko's cruelty, it was an easy price to pay.

Okay ya brb while I drown myself in my own fucking tears.

FOX FAMILY. STOP RUINING MY FEELINGS. I'm supposed to be cool and witty here but I can't even do that because I'm just too emotional over this.

And the fun doesn't stop here, oh no.

Are you guys ready?

I know there are some people fidgeting excitedly in their seats right now because they know what's about to come up – the grand finale to a wonderful third-book-kick-off chapter:

The goddamn rooftop thing.

        Andrew turned to face him. „I'll take an explanation now.“

        „You couldn't ask for answers inside where it's warm?“ Neil asked.

Glad to see that even when faced with his (by now Confirmed™) crush, Neil still doesn't lose his sass.

But of course, Neil is not one to keep secrets from his murder boyfriend, and so he tells him of the Christmas Fuckery – which Andrew is decidedly not fucking liking, because of course Neil left Kevin's side and therefore kind of broke their deal.

Whoops.

        „Why did you go?“

        Neil didn't know if he could say it. Thinking about it was almost too much. Andrew was waiting, though, so Neil choked back his nausea. „Riko said if I didn't, Dr. Proust would-“

        Andrew clapped a hand over his mouth, smothering the rest of his words. (…) „Do not make the mistake of thinking I need your protection.“

Okay, but don't you, though?

Neil says it himself later on, and he's entirely correct: Andrew watches everyone's backs, who's gonna watch his?

He may be an expert in back-watching, but even the most back-watchiest back-watcher in the world can be out-back-watched, my dude. And who's gonna come rescue you then, hm? HMM??

Neil fucking will, of course.

        „The next time someone comes for you, stand down and let me deal with it. Do you understand?“

        „If it means losing you, then no.“

SHIT WHAT.

Since when are our boys so damn open with their love declarations?? This was so outta nowhere?? I'm fcukign?? Having a heart attack??

And following that – of course. The one, the only, the iconic:

        „I hate you,“ Andrew said casually. (…) „You were supposed to be a side effect of the drugs.“

        „I'm not a hallucination,“ Neil said, nonplussed.

        „You are a pipe dream,“ Andrew said.

BOY.

SHIT.

IM FCIKIGN FUCKKNGING FKUCKKVMFGNICHNNNKNX

The fact that Andrew thought his feelings (THAT ARE NOW CONFIRMED, I REPEAT, CONFIRMED ANDREW FEELINGS FOR NEIL HAVE BEEN SPOTTED) were a temporary thing, unreal, a side effect of being high out of his mind, is just like kind of, casually ruining my life. No biggie.

No fucking biggie.

Andrew quickly realizes he may have admitted too many feelings though, and in a feeble attempt to save his cold front and fragile masculinity, he throws Neil's keys off the roof, because just giving them back to him normally wouldn't have been Manly™ enough.

However Neil, once more, is able to show us that he can give as good as he gets (innuendo absolutely intended):

        Neil wasn't sure why he did it, but he plucked Andrew's cigarette off the sidewalk and stuck it between his lips. He tipped his head back to meet Andrew's unwavering gaze and tapped two fingers to his temple in Andrew's mocking salute. (…) It felt like a win, though Neil wasn't sure why.

Fucking hell.

These two are going to a) improve this last book exponentially and b) absolutely fucking ruin my life.

Nicki out.

As always: If you like what I do here and you want to help me continue writing fun things for you, please consider buying me a coffee. Every lil bit does absolutely help, getting me through uni and all that jazz. Thanks so much!!

[flightofaqrow]

life

qrow x Lifa Hakon ( @lifahakondotter​ )

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

anonymous asked: It's the first gift you'll ever give your first child. What is it?

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

“my WHAT now?”

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

“alright Ruby said this was supposed to be a riddle and i’m supposed to answer ‘life’. …life would be the first gift i ever give a hypothetical child. please make the demons and everyone gettin’ on my back about the rookie kids go away now.”

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

“No no no, I think they actually mean a gift. Tradition is that the first gift a child receives will nudge the direction of their destiny,” Lifa shook her head as she jumped right into her best I Know What I’m Talking About tone of voice. “When I was born, clan leaders all sent my parents something. A good example is a pair of good boots, to encourage exploration. That said, things like cushions and empty bags are ill fated…Ruby must have gotten a pen or book, she’s very keen of mind.”

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

“yeah she is, but she musta been wrong because people are still gettin’ on my back,” he’s irritable and anxious at best after this whole discussion. hackles up and teeth bared, not giving a damn about tradition any more than he has at any other point in his life.

“…even under your terms, frankly, i still like how open the life answer is. best i could hope for outta someone like me, and aside from that, kids don’t need to be tied to any stupid destiny. let ‘em chose their own.”

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

Lifa slid over to sit close to him, her thigh pressed against his in a silent gesture of support. The subject of children was one even her dedicated parents couldn’t shield her from since the beginning. How drilled the word was into her mind, inked on her skin, carved into her bones. Heir. And she could never turn away like he tried.

“It’s not about ties or expectations.” She prompted gently, taking the end of her braid and very delicately tickling his ear with it to make sure he knew this conversation didn’t have the weight it seemed to. “It’s about showing them how much you believe in their potential. If the universe deigns to do itself the favor of gaining another Branwen, a father like you is a gift enough. I mean— you don’t care in half measures, Qrow. This theoretical, hypothetical, probably just a fairy tale child will never doubt they’re wanted with you. Best gift that could ever be given; the certainty of love. That’s why your girls are so damn unstoppable.”

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

and yet the weight of this topic to her is one qrow has known from the moment he found out who she was… is. how responsibility ties her hands, her hair, weaves into her life and the branches of her family tree. her scooting ever so closer, inching, worming, trying to get beneath his skin and plant subtle seeds only sends red alerts to flush his skin. support and gesture that such enthroned shackles don’t transfer to him scratch his face when this whole conversation is unwelcome fancy in the first place, and are seen only as coaxing feminine wiles.

he’s too sensitive to other people not to hear hope whether it comes with expectation of fulfillment or not. it’s a game he plays with the world itself far too often not to recognize.

but he bites it all back, clenches his jaw so hard he’s surprised his teeth don’t crack. she’s trying to be considerate of his discomfort, trying to be soft enough to meld with his blades and spikes, and it’s the only thing that keeps him from proving he can do more than try to turn away completely and not even look back, that he can and so frequently does care in halves, quarters, ounces and teaspoons when he so chooses. if he didn’t know how to prioritize, compartmentalize, his heart would bleed all over the whole of Remnant until he had nothing left.

but he does choose Lifa, for at least half, when she’s near, which is why he bears her coddling and hears her out, if nothing more.

and he would put a child at the top of the list, which is exactly why he can never afford one.

he’s already sworn himself to bigger purposes, and to throw that into question burns him to the very soul. and she knows that. she knows about Salem, about how he still works for Oz, dedicates his whole life to the shadows so that other people can live in the light; people like Raven can return to the tribe, people like Lifa can return to her village, people like his nieces can grow up on a nice homey island and go to school. and if she knew him at all by now, she’d know how that sacrifice is how he shows his love, the best option he has for playing the shitty hand he’s been dealt, and that discussing how hypothetically nice of all the things he could possibly have, but isn’t meant to, and so chose to leave behind, just hurts.

she’s just being your friend. she doesn’t mean anything by it; you’re just a mess.

he swallows hard, drags his hands through his hair, and forces himself to find words and deliver them with nothing more than his usual shredded speech instead of spitting the things he’d rather not fight about right now.

“that’s… all sweet of you to say. kinda what i meant with the life thing. but i guess some solid sign ‘a belief in potential makes sense, far as gift givin’ excuses go,” actually, all that effort, all the pain and anger dulled down just makes his tone fall flat entirely, “don’t get confused, though. those girls are my nieces, and they’re somethin’, but they’re Tai’s daughters. Summer’s daughters. Raven, for what she was there for Yang. and they’re their own. sure, i taught ‘em some stuff and look after ‘em, but that ain’t fatherhood. look, i get you’re trying to be nice, but don’t discount their family, and don’t overestimate me.”

he should go. he really should just not care and go. before Lifa starts caring too much.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

Lifa could write her life in alliterations if she set her mind to it. Sacrifice, servitude, sovereignty. Failure, fortitude, fight. Leader. Lover. Life. She let her hair go but slid her hand under his cape, as smoothly and naturally as a dewdrop following the vein of a leaf in the brush of a foggy morn. Her fingers began to wander the pathways of his spine, one of her stories known only to her, a pleasant tickling sensation meant to unknot and ease anxieties away. “Life is the first gift we give our children, sure. But the second is their name. You can call it silly superstition, but my people believe a name has great meaning and it can never be chosen lightly. It draws in what it represents, for good or ill.” She was drawing a tree. She began with the roots at the small of his back as she went on, words rolling off her tongue in a tale she had been told on the knee of a mother who was with her in her lessons, when she could no longer be in body. “When I was born, all the doctors told my parents I would die.” Lifa suddenly leaned her head against his shoulder, starting to build the trunk of the tree, her fingers wandering up and down the middle of his spine. “And folktales say a child too impatient to be born will beget a rule of rashness and impulse. If I couldn’t wait to be born at the right time, I’ll never know when to do anything properly. But my mother never let me go and my father never stopped praying for me to make it to just one more sunrise. No matter how much the world and everyone on the outside insisted there was no chance, that they were only making themselves vulnerable to more pain, they hoped.” Branches, stretching towards the heavens the very same way they both did. Qrow would be carried away on a breeze to a place she might never go and Lifa would stay, rooted with her face towards the sun. To the moon and stars. Waiting for another sunrise. Waiting for the winds to carry him back. “Lifa is an old word. Destiny. Fate. Time. It’s a proverb more than it’s a name and over history, it turned into the word life.” With that, she reached her other arm around and she was holding him. Rooting him beside her. “We’ve struggled since we began, Qrow. I think that’s who we are. We were born to fight and it hurts. And it’s fucked up. But we do it because we know that it’s worth it for love. Our families, our homes, a legacy we believe in– you are not just a passing shadow in a story and you’re confusing the word faith with overestimation. You can try to squeeze these things down into a comfortable light weighted size with words like nice and I guess and your shrugs and turning your back on it, but that won’t change that you’re important. To them, to me…Mattering doesn’t begin and end with what you can offer people. You matter. That’s it, that’s the whole sentence.” Lifa took a breath and slowly, carefully withdrew from him so she could rise to her feet because this time, she would rob him of the chance to walk away first for his own good. “Now, I know you have places to be, people to charm, all that handsome vagabond hero stuff, so I won’t ruffle your feathers with the feelings talk anymore…Besides, I’m not worried about not seeing you again. I’ll always find you if you shirk finding me. Give the girls my love.”

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

the first thing she does after all that effort is bring that scathing touch even closer - loving. intimate. steady. all the things he told her time and again he never wanted nor could return in anything but fleeting post-coital afterglow. he should have gone, shouldn’t even have humored this at all. and yet he’s so shaken he can’t even shake her off. so angry and overstimulated with nothing to lash out at, his fists tremble while still clutching at his scalp.

to scorn her would be cruel. to say what he’s feeling would be weak, and it’s not as if she ever leaves much room for him to have his say when she gets like this, anyway. his heart has always been different, inside out and backwards and broken. all at once too big and far too small. he brings nothing but pain and misery, even as he sits here trying to keep it from exploding all over one of the few partners he has left.

he can hardly bear the conversation, the questions, the proximity. she no longer softens herself to meet his edges, but cuts into him with her own. he always admired Lifa’s ability to blaze forward in her pursuits - beautiful, destructive, and unforgiving as the bare sun itself, but right now, he’s the one left burned in her path of brazen relentlessness.

so he does what he always has when people stop listening to him and start trying to explain things he doesn’t want to hear - when the tribe would berate him and call him a curse, when his classmates would laugh at every fall of misfortune, when Raven wants to leave and Summer wants to fight and Tai can’t decide whether he wants him around or gone, when Yang pushes beyond her strength and Ruby reaches beyond her years -

he shutters himself deep into the collapsing building of his soul and waits for the storm to pass, keeping himself from adding to the calamity until it quiets and he can get back to work.

etched tracings mean to soothe nerves, but it does nothing when removal of the irritant must come first; her fire thrown over his alcohol soaked, flammable and too frayed-endings merely flare into a painful scorch throughout and beyond and below his flesh that no amount of depressants in his system can dull.

qrow already holds his head, and now he buckles forward to elbows on knees, clamps his eyes shut, trying desperately not to just throw up right into own his lap, yet in doing so he only opens up the canvas of his back even further.

he has always found her voice a better balm than her hand, and he tries to listen, but he can’t hear or comprehend much through the sloshing in his head and the ringing in his ears and every flight instinct in his whole body blaring. names and meanings, yeah, that’s how he got his too. rash and untimely, that sounds about right. Lifa means life, great, now his own words are being thrown back in his face.

she says you matter, but he doesn’t believe it for a second, because her actions right now speak so much louder.

she thinks she can stay grounded while he flies free, yet she draws roots on his back and cements him in place with her arms while her flights of fancy float around the room. she tries to tell him to have faith, but calls him out for the lifestyle he chooses, the handful of things he can actually do right, the image that gives him the few shreds of pride he has, and comes dangerously close to mocking him over it. she sits here next to him this whole time not giving a damn about his comfort, his agency, every agreement they had to never bring feelings into this at all. he tried to humor her with this conversation regardless, offered that delicate trust over sensitive topics once more, but this time she quite effectively shattered it by twisting the realm of far-off possibility into things so personal it’s suffocating.

she admits outright to her willingness to track him down, stalk him if she has to.

and she will have to.

because after today, he’s going to need a very long string of drunken nights to blur and warp this memory between now and when he might ever be ready to see her face again.

[thinkingaboutsanfrancisco]

Well shit...I’m glad to know we’re on the same page.

Truly. If I weren’t restrained by this seatbelt I’d honor him with my standing ovation, but since I am I settle for a continuous ardent nod. I’m not surprised that he agrees with me, but fuck does it feel nice to hear a conviction I’ve held for a long time verbally justified by someone outside of the gates of my own tumultuous conscious without their own regret dampening it. All of the details I always ruminate over, S delves into and elaborates on them with such precision, casting upon them the rare tone of honesty and understanding we both know a majority of society continuously refuses to afford us degenerates since, like he said, they’re far too caught up in their broken ideals to dare spare us the empathy despite that, despite our different methods, we all aspire to the same fucking dream. I don’t even know why they deem it necessary to enter the conversation if they’re only going to pollute it with righteous ignorance, but if I entertain the analysis further, it’ll piss me off and...I’d rather not knock the smile off my face. 

It’s great to be heard.

It’s so relieving that this Parliament drag is celebratory...until he changes the fucking subject. 

“Wait, yo, you use Reddit?! Gimme your username. I’m gonna add you.”

What? No you aren’t---who said I even have one?!

I mean---I do and I have since July of 2012, but that doesn’t garner it up for grabs. His brazenness of the unspoken etiquette is second to the fact that stalking the site doesn’t necessitate an account. That’s one of the beauties of it, honestly, to search and find a thread that answers a very specific and niche question and enjoy the luxury of reading all of the other perspectives and experiences. Sometimes I want to remember that question but sometimes it’s so stupid and minor that the answer’s enough to satisfy me, so I don’t bother logging in or using my regular browser to remember it when I’m searching for something else.  Who is he to say that stalking is not all I do? 

 “I…don’t have an account. I just observe the site, y’know.”

And I hoped that would be enough for him to take the hint and not press on it, but he doesn’t. Instead, he rhetorically asks why I don’t have one before practically demanding that I make one right fucking now and, for so many reasons, fuck no. The real life anonymity of it is what drew me to it in the first place. I love being able to talk without worrying about dragging the weight of my real name or image or anything else around like you have to do on every other flashy social media site nowadays. For once, I’m not Jason Dale Kelley: Lance and Deirdre’s exhausted, depressed, rotting social pariah of a son who you should avoid with a ten foot pole. No, I’m just a couple of letters and numbers and, if you get onto my profile, I’m just another guy named Jason somewhere in the world with stories, opinions, and thoughts...history that I don’t want to give up as J. Not like there’s anything too incriminatory, but who the hell knows what he could conjure about me from the scattered fragments I’ve dropped about my personal life. He presents it so innocently too: so we can trade conspiracy theories...as if I’ve ever had one to trade to begin with. Clearly, I’ve gotten used to them in the middle of a deal, but I’d rather not worry about logging in and finding him linking me to a theory to debate when I’m trying to forget about my existential dread and worrying if that’ll set him off. He doesn’t even know my real first name and now he wants access to almost three fucking years of my life? I've broken my boundaries enough already as it is, but this is where I’m drawing the line.  

“Tempting, but…I think I’ll have to pass since…I don’t know how. Not exactly on there too often, so uh…I believe it’d be a waste to make one.”

Not my best lie, but I’m not exactly sure how else I can tell him I don’t want to without risking offending him too much. Skirting around it in itself is already bad enough because, with the way he laughs and shakes his head, he damn well knows that I can make an account in my fucking sleep, but at least he takes the hint and throws his handle out there for whenever I decide to crack the unfathomable mystery. 

Conspiracyking with a k, for alliteration purposes. 

I wish I could pull out my phone and look it up to find out if it’s a legitimate account or if I narrowly avoided giving myself up for nothing, but...the car’s jerked quicker than how he jerked the most insightful conversation I’ve ever had with him and made it about fucking Reddit; a careless dive right into one of the most crowded parking lots I’ve ever seen. Eventually, he finds a spot, the locks pop, I stuff an eight ball in my jean pocket and we’re about get out...when it suddenly dawns on him that I might have a fucking issue getting in. 

Should’ve thought about that before you brought me here. 

“Don’t worry, I got it covered.” 

Luckily for him, I ‘renewed’ my fake near the end of last year because I got tired of staring into my hollow, broken, fifteen year old sneer and worrying if it’d pass. While I never got caught, I used to get a lot of scrutinizing stares and snarky uncertain comments that instill the fear in me that I didn’t look eighteen, much less nineteen like I’d initially made myself. My dark circles and puffy eye bags were probably the only thing that got me by until I hit a growth spurt last summer that made me look less gawky and frail overall, so I used some of the cash I’d saved up to capitalize and it paid off. I’m rarely double checked for cigarettes now, so I pass for eighteen, but I’ve never tried 21...

S cackles, asking me how much fakes go for nowadays instead of taking the hint again, and...fuck it. This shit’s going both ways now. 

“You’d have to tell me that ancient figure for me to give you a proper comparison,” I retort as we shut the doors and start our walk towards the building, when I realize that I’m going to have to drop the sarcasm because he does need to know that there is the annoying possibility that I might not get let in, “But probably. Got it done online and paid around 300 bucks for it. My nicotine habit wouldn’t let me get away with anything less, but it was well worth it since it’s got all of the proper holograms and scans. It hasn’t given me any problems before so I honestly forget about it, but you might wanna chill out with the J name ‘til I get in. Don’t think that letter appears anywhere on it.”

[vivaciousyellow]

y: neverwhere by neil gaiman

...or actually, rather, nevermore of the-raven-by-edgar-allen-poe kind because guess what ya bitch is feeling downright feistily angsty what’s new? this isn’t. 

dear victoria,

i binge ate today.

it felt worse than usual because i’ve been trying really hard lately to watch what i choose to put into my body and at what quantities. and not to mention i’m already rather devastated about my thinning hair. am i being vain? i need nutrients nutrients nutrients nutrients nutrients

someone just chop all my hair off 

maybe i’ll be so compelled to get more angular cheeks and chin due to the unflattering amount of exposure i’ll stop eating for a bit

late last fall, i began wondering what it would feel like to just make the cut. a cut. the excuse i recited to myself in objection was that the only access to sharp things i had were the dirty ass communal kitchen knives. and i was too anxious to go to the 100 yen shop and have to ask to buy my own. and i was too scared to do anything with my hair clippers (also from the 100 yen shop, aka the best place on earth, aka heaven, aka i should be investing in items that are of the most excellent Made In Japan quality because sustainability but you know what the things in there are so high qua you wouldn’t believe your eyes ten million firelies it’s less than one wholeass USD). 

i confessed to david in the winter that i didn’t know how to feel happy anymore

but at least now i understand why people might want to feel pain

i shouldn’t have started the day eating two packs of ramen. now im about to end the day with two. but fuck, the bag of cheerios i downed in the interim with my litre carton of milk is wreaking mild havoc. last time i drank four cups of milk i was in fifth grade, reading a book by the huge bay window of our first home, my parents’ personal prototype of the American Dream. and honestly, i didn’t even mind getting diarrhea for it. it was in the late afternoon, just a smidge past golden hour. mom and dad had gone out, it was just my sister doing unrelatable teen things in her room. there might have been a CD player involved? was i sitting on the pastel purple stool or was i reclined into the lazy boy chair? was i happy or just content?

anyway, it was the perfect time to overdose on lactose and whatever, the milk was delicious. #yolo beaches

even tho it was skim. lmao i just needed to drink water but opted for tasteless murky bullshit instead. and now i can’t tell if i want to shit my pants because of lactose intolerance or because of my seminar class on wednesday. 

so, this is the one year anniversary of my first depressive episode since the social worker in high school called me troubled. i’m so scared this monstrous sense of hopelessness and dread is reviving itself upon the fertile ground of unresolved issues i’ve seemingly kept ready for it, so tip top swanky spanky new.

why can’t i do better? why am i throwing this tumblr irredeemably back into the dark times of angsty xanga-livejournaling (victoria, hee~elll~lllllpppp)? am i even allowed to snarkily refer back to those ‘dark times’ when i’m only vicariously living through my own blurred memories of my sister typing secretively away on her old ass chonky laptop as she sat wrapped in darkness and metal chains, dressed like a chinese-knock-off emo grunge kid?

i can say that because she literally got most of those clothes and necklaces from china i swear

excuse my pathetically unrecognisable attempt at edgy humour, all i can think about is how that one fleeting whimsical thought i had earlier about self-induced vomiting is becoming increasingly substantial. 

i feel like the protagonist in neverwhere by neil gaiman. but like only in the sense of a very loose interpretation on what similes are supposed to accomplish and based on a very loose interpretation of what the book was about.

1. like i’ve become unrecognisable and/or easily forgetable but to myself so like i see the world (read: my body) going on and operating as usual, but like i know i’m missing something (read: me? my place in the world? what?)

2. or like suddenly, i’m being forced to navigate a slightly and increasingly very off version of the world that i’d never been exposed to before where that world is my reality of mood fluctuations that are very confusing but, ultimately, of mild uncertainty. are fluctuations, quantum measured in uncertainty? 

3. oh physics? wherefore art thou? 

4. have these vague, inaccurate references to the plot piqued your interest? please say yes because it’s a great book. even though i told myself i was gonna focus on WOC writers. so much for that. 

5. dammit, ying, smh.

i wonder what my various overblown quotidian fears look like. you know, people have been doing inktober themes, very inVentively visualising various mental illnesses. (give me at least one instance of alliteration per post or give me death)

but im too scared to face mine. 

i’ll just keep eating instead.

happy spoopy season.

-ying

..of course with love but am i even capable of love cries in rolling my eyes at myself can’t even see those damn irises anymore

or should i say

nevermore

[elizabethschoices]

The Freshman, Book 4, Chapter Four: My Thoughts

So like, why bring luggage in the place if you were just gonna leave the next day? Seriously, save the arm work and just grab a few clothes to wear to bed and then to get dressed in the next morning. I’m either efficient or lazy.

So we’re going to go to a club, and apparently we gotta get there early because it fills up fast. Chris says we just had lunch, but then James explains that it’s in Manhattan, which is two hours away, more with traffic. Which means we gotta go now.

Someone texted James, and he got all frowny-faced. Who is it? Is it Yasmin? Some other chick? MOFO WE JUST BROKE UP LIKE?!?!

It’s his friend Teddy (Let’s have a game on the Teddy Picker) and apparently ol’ boy is trying to make it big in comedy. He invited James to open mic night. Apparently James has to rain check for poor timing. And I’m sitting here like bruh, fuck the club let’s go have a laugh.

I’m up for some comedy. Aww, Chris mentioned Tyler. I miss him! He’s always been a sweetie and a good friend. I wonder how he and Abbie are? Hopefully the exact opposite of Zack and Brandon.

Yay, we’re gonna go see a show! I’d much rather go to stand-up than some stupid club that’ll be jam-packed with too many people.

🎶ON THE ROAD AGAIN!🎶

By the time we get to Soho, it’s late afternoon and walking through the streets. Judging by how Zig and Zack (lmao alliteration buddies) are talking about how casually everyone is dressed, I sense a premium clothing option coming up. Yaaay.

😒🤑😟

So we get to the club and apparently it’s some kind of secret shit because James knocked and then a god damn eye slit opens up. They want a password.

Hello, The Freshman, allow me to introduce you to some bullshit trope we used in Rules of Engagement.

The password is given and literally WHAT THE FUCK WAS THE POINT?!?! WE WEREN’T EVEN GIVEN THE DAMN PASSWORD.

Whatever. Now we’re in the club and Teddy is on stage now. He was kinda hot until I lifted my iPad up a bit and actually looked at him.

Also, I don’t care what your joke is. If it ends with the punchline being ‘floundered’ then your joke isn’t fucking funny. Oh god is this guy gonna flop? Are we gonna have to act like we think he’s hilarious?

Apparently Teddy is actually pretty funny. I’ll believe it when I see it.

This game stresses me out sometimes. So we ditched a club for a comedy show and missed his show? Or did he finish it out and we got to see the rest? I’m lost and a detail-oriented person, Pixelberry.

Yeah, I’m not a fan of yours, Theodore.

So if we’re good friends of James, what is Teddy? Absolutely none of these options, that’s what. Whatever, I’m single so I’ll flirt. He’s *shudders* easy on the eyes.

Yeah, no, I take it back. He’s not hot and he’s damn sure not funny. His jokes are old and stale, and I can’t actually hear his delivery so it’s technically not applicable, but in my head that sucks too. He’s a god damned Amy Schumer.

I like him more when he’s not trying to be funny. We shake hands and then he squeezes into the booth. Together we all watch other stand-up artists perform, and then the emcee asks if anyone else wants to perform.

MC volunteers Zack (heh puns sort of whatever Tyler would appreciate it) who says he’s not that funny. I think he’s pretty humorous. Zig is probably funnier though, tbh. But Vasquez gets top marks.

(“Top marks for not tryin’!”)

Chris is such a Mary Sue, omg. Knock everyone’s socks off? Who says that? Ngl, probably me at some point.

God dammit MC I can’t be funny on command. I’m just a salty bitch. Oh fuck I brought the joke book no. This dumbass thinks a fucking joke book will woo the crowd who came for funny shit, not stupid, unoriginal stuff THAT SOMEBODY ELSE CAME UP WITH AND EVERYONE ELSE KNOWS. I hate my MC.

Ohh, roasting. My area.

I. Love. Zig.

The group is okay with it so we head onto the stage. Thank fuck she’s not gonna read out jokes from the book. I’d have deleted the app, s2g.

Yet implies we’ll be roasting ourselves. Well that’s no fun, having self-awareness. Breaks up her narrative without actually developing the character!

They say intelligent people have a hard time finding love. They say the same thing about assholes.

We’re gonna roast Zig because I’m sure there won’t be any ties to my failed relationship with James because that’d just be too hard.

Someone should pull MC off the stage because this is not funny at all. Ever noticed that when you try to do humor, you aren’t funny? But when you’re not, you can be hilarious?

Jfc so what you’re the Deborah of the group also what happens if you’ve named your MC Deborah? #NotAllDeborahs

I wear low-riding jeans, thank you very much.

Not funny, 0/10, thumbs down, DO. NOT. RECOMMEND.

Zack decides he’ll get on stage and I hope he’s actually funny. I don’t have high hopes. It’ll probably turn into a meltdown about Brandon and the single life.

FUCKING HELL THIS IS A CURSE NOT A GIFT

Sad music and talk about being single already. Fucking A, man. Hopefully it perks up.

No audience would say 'tell me about it’ about this shit, you cannot fucking play me Pixelberry.

I gotta lay off Louis C.K.

Zack has probably from the minute we met him been all about Brandon. What does he actually like? Idfk. Outside of Brandon, who is he? His entire story arc seems to revolve around crushing on Brandon, being in a relationship with him, struggling with long-distance with him, and then finally missing him post-breakup. I’m ready for a change, Zack.

Also, I came for comedy, not for Slam Poetry.

OH MY GOD THIS JUST TURNED INTO ONE OF THOSE OBVS FAKE TUMBLR POSTS WHERE EVERYONE CLAPS AT THE END

I hate this book.

Can it end? Please?

Do I want to go to Club Fuse? No, I want the chapter to end.

Is Teddy seriously trying to give us tips? Or wanting to collaborate? Or an experienced guy wanting to get some tips from two people who don’t know the field? Idk anymore, man. This has turned into some Full House type shit.

MC spots a red pantsuit and lmao Hillary Clinton, 2k16. Kaitlyn is calling us now. Honestly, despite previously not liking her all that much because of Book 3, I’ve cooled off a bit. She’s pretty cool for the most part. And I think this book would be ten times better with her in it full-time. We’ll see what happens when we get to her.

Again, wtf was the point? We got her approval on the outfit that I’m not going to buy, big fucking whoop. No new information was presented. No drama bombs. Absolutely nothing to forward the story in any way. This is all just filler content. This is just a bullshit story for money and not for the sake of telling a god damned story. I’m legit considering not reading this book any longer. But I need diamonds, so I’ll do it anyway. Doesn’t mean I’ll waste my time reviewing it.

We’re sticking to our old clothes.

I’m ready for this chapter to be over. I’m not even trying anymore. Ugh.

We get to the club and flirt with Teddy a bit, he bullshits with Zack. Asks for roasting tips. Hm. I am pretty fucking good at it.

He leaves. Another pointless conversation. MC says he’s into Zack? Good god shoot me. Teddy was screaming 'fuck me MC’ but nooo, we’re gonna turn it on Zack because why the fuck not, not like my MC is single, right?

I hate, hate, hate this book.

It’s great 'cause he’s fucking friendly, idk.

Also, MC, fuck off. He’s heartbroken still about Brandon so stop pushing him to someone else. He needs to fucking heal and he can’t do that by just “moving on” all of a sudden.

Zack says Teddy is into us. Fucking obviously. And of course this moron is gonna say he’s into both. I truly hate my MC. The boys come back with drinks. Fucking give me twenty, I wanna die.

And now we get the 'Zig is bi’ drop which would be fine if we weren’t talking about Teddy who is not fucking hot.

MC wants to go dance. Fall down and get trampled then, bitch. Ugh. I am so salty right now. Sorrynotsorry.

I am not wasting diamonds on Teddy. Let someone else grab him, idgaf. And great, throw Zig at some one-off character instead of me, someone who is single and also the main character.

Zack starts panicking because there are too many people and didn’t he happily go mosh last book? Whatever. I’m happy we’re out because the club wasn’t our scene.

We eat hot dogs for dinner and chill out. We start singing. Someone throw us a dollar or something. Or shoot us. I’m open to all kinds of things.

End chapter. I’ll consider reviewing the next one tomorrow, since I’m a week behind it but also very much hate this book right now.

[nothingbutimagines]

Passionate Kisses (Tom Holland)

Pairing: Tom Holland x Reader, Cole Sprouse x Reader Warning: Cursing Summary: Tom comes to visit you at work on the day you have to film a set of scenes with your co worker, Cole. A kissing scene to be specific and Tom gets a little jealous. Author: Dizzy A/N:  Another Cole and Tom fic! Thanks so much to the cutie who asked for this saying, “omg i just read your "i dont wanna be your man" imagine with cole and "tommys girl" its so good!!! ive recently been watching riverdale and i was wondering if tom (holland) visited y/n on set of riverdale, the day y/n and cole has a kiss scene? while tom watches tom gets a little jealous because it looks real and passionate and even more jealous when he sees how close you and cole are after shooting?? thank you i love your imagines omgg😍😍😍”

Masterlist Request Any Of These

You laughed and rested your head on Cole's chest as he stumbled over his line.

“I'm sorry! It's a hard line! There's a lot of alliteration.” He apologized with a chuckle.

“Everybody just take five!” The director announced as you and Cole walked off set, playfully shoving one another as you made fun of him.

“Get your shit together, Sprouse.” You said, “I can't keep laughing through my lines.”

“Well I'm sorry if it's a rough line to say before you're trying not laugh while kissing your best friend.”

As you were about to reply, two arms wrapped around your waist. You quickly turned around to be face to face with Tom, who was smiling widely.

“Tom!” You cried, wrapping your arms around his neck. “What are you doing here?!”

“I thought I'd come visit you at work. I heard you're shooting a big scene today.”

You pulled away and moved so you were facing both Tom and Cole.

“I am. Well, Cole and I are, actually. We have the biggest and most awkward scene to shoot today.” You explained. “Chucklehead over here won't stop laughing during it though.”

Cole laughed and raised his hands in mock surrender. “Hey, I'm trying my best. It's hard not to fuck up.”

“What scene are you two working on?” Tom asked as the end of your short break was called.

“You’ll see.” You said with a wink as you and Cole linked arms and walked to set.  “Okay, Cole, get it together. This is no time for joking. The sooner we get this done, the sooner we can all go home.”

Cole rolled his eyes with a smile. “I know, Y/n. I’ll try my best.” He promised as you got into your positions.

“And, action!”

“You know that you’re the best thing that’s ever happened to me, right?” Cole said softly, leaning close to you, his eyes never leaving yours.

You nodded slowly and put a hand on his chest with a sigh. “I know, but-”

“No ‘buts’, just trust it, trust the things you’re feeling, the things that I’m feeling for you.” He said with such passion, it seemed as if it was real. “Just trust me.”

He leaned in slowly, just as you started to do before your eyes fluttered closed and his lips brushed against yours. He wrapped an arm around your waist before his lips connected with yours and you kissed with such a great passion that if no one knew you were acting, they would’ve thought you were truly in love with Cole.

You pulled away, as spoke softy. “I do.”

“Cut!” The shout made you and Cole pull away from one another and face everyone else. “Great work! You both did a great job today!” The director continued to speak before letting you both go.

You walked off set with Cole, his arm around your shoulders as you both talked.

“High five, man! We fucking did it.” You said, holding your hand up.

Cole gave you a quick high five and smiled. “Do you want to go grab a bite to eat? I'd love to get to know that boyfriend of yours.”

“Oh, shit. I can't. Me and Tom already have dinner reservations. How about tomorrow?”

“I think I could do tomorrow. Depends on what time though. I have a big date.” “Oh really?”

“Yes, really. You sound surprised that I even have a date. What? Did you want me all to yourself?” Cole joked.

“Oh, most definitely. You're mine and only mine.” You said dramatically as you caught sight of Tom. “There's Tom. I have to go, but I'll see you tomorrow.”

“Of course. Remember to ask him about dinner. Have fun.” Cole said, pressing a quick kiss to your cheek before you did the same, something you did as a platonic gesture.

“Thanks. I'll see you later!” You chirped as you walked to Tom, a big smile on your face as you walked up to him.

Tom had an odd expression on his face that you couldn't decipher. He wasn't mad, but you couldn't tell what he was feeling.

“Babe, what's wrong?” You asked as you followed him to the car.

“Nothing. I just didn't realize how close you and Cole were.” He mumbled, almost incoherently.

“Aw, is someone jealous?” You asked, watching as a light blush dusted his cheeks.

“I'm not jealous. I just like it when my girl is my girl and my girl only.” He stated in a matter of fact tone as you climbed into the car.

“Oh, come on, Tom. It was just a joke.” You said, putting a hand on his thigh. “I'll always be your girl. Cole's just my best friend is all.”

“Does he really have to kiss you and do you really have to kiss him back?”

“Tom, it's not like we're making out.”

“You made out with him today and it looked pretty damn real.”

You giggled. “I was acting, you know, like what we do for a living?”

“Did you like it?” Tom asked, jealousy raging inside him.

“Of course not. It was like kissing my brother.” You replied with a smile. “Seriously, Tom, you have nothing to be jealous about.”

You ran your hand up and down his thigh in a teasing fashion. You would never tell Tom, but his jealousy was starting to get you bothered.

“Y/N.” Tom groaned.

“What?”

“Would you quit it? It's hard to be upset with you turning me on like you do.”

Let's just say you never did go to dinner.

[bluewatsons]

Nathaniel Rich, James Ellroy, The Art of Fiction No. 201, The Paris Review (Fall 2009)

Interviewer: You were away from Los Angeles for twenty-five years. Why’d you come back?

James Ellroy: One reason--Cherchez la femme. I chased women to suburban New York, suburban Connecticut, Kansas City, Carmel, and San Francisco. But I ran out of places, and I ran out of women, so I ended up back here.

Interviewer: Did you miss the city?

James Ellroy: While I was away, the Los Angeles of my past accreted in my mind, developing its own power. Early on in my career I believed that in order to write about LA, I had to stay out of it entirely. But when I moved back, I realized that LA then lives in my blood. LA now does not.

Interviewer: What’s wrong with LA now?

James Ellroy: I fear the sloth, the disorder, and the moral depravity. It makes me want to hole up in my pad for days on end.

Interviewer: And what about the LA of the fifties has a hold on you?

James Ellroy: A lot of it is simple biography. I lived here, so I was obsessed with my immediate environment. I am from Los Angeles truly, immutably. It’s the first thing you get in any author’s note; James Ellroy was born in Los Angeles in 1948. I was hatched in the film-noir epicenter, at the height of the film-noir era. My parents and I lived near Hollywood. My father and mother had a tenuous connection to the film business. They were both uncommonly good-looking, which may be a hallmark of LA arrivistes, and they were of that generation of migrants who came because they were very poor and LA was a beautiful place. I grew up in a different world, a different America. You didn’t have to make a lot of dough to keep a roof over your head. There was a calmness that I recall too. I learned to amuse myself. I liked to read. I liked to look out the window. It’s rare for me to speak about LA epigrammatically. I don’t view it as a strange place, I don’t view it as a hot-pot of multiculturalism or weird sexuality. I have never studied it formally. There are big swathes of LA that I don’t even know my way around today. I’m not quite sure how you get to Torrance, Hermosa Beach, Long Beach. I don’t know LA on a valid historical level at all. But I have assimilated it in a deeper way. I had lived here for so long that when it became time to exploit my memory of the distant past, it was easy. Whatever power my books have derives from the fact that they are utterly steeped in the eras that I describe. LA of that period is mine and nobody else’s. If you wrote about this period before me, I have taken it away from you.

Interviewer: What did your parents do?

James Ellroy: My mother was a registered nurse. She worked a lot. At one point she had a job at a Jewish nursing home where movie stars brought their aging parents. She was fluent in German, and when the patients spoke about her in Yiddish, behind her back, she could understand them. She was a big reader of historical novels, and she was always listening to one specific Brahms piano concerto—I remember a blue RCA Victor record. I have more memories of my dad. He was a dipshit studio gofer, a big handsome guy, a scratch golfer. He worked for a schlock producer named Sam Stiefel. He was always snoozing on the couch, like Dagwood Bumstead. He was a lazy motherfucker. God bless him. He was always working on some kind of get-rich-quick scheme. This is what my dad was like. I’d say, Hey, Dad, we studied penguins today in school. He’d say, Yeah? I’m a penguin fucker from way back. Dad, I saw a giraffe at the zoo today. Yeah? I’m a giraffe fucker from way back. That’s my dad. My dad was a giraffe fucker. He said to me once, I fucked Rita Hayworth. He said that he once introduced me to Hayworth at the Tail O’the Pup, circa 1950. I would have been two years old at the time, but I don’t recall it. He said I spilled grape juice all over her. I never believed that he had worked for Hayworth, but after his death I saw his name in a Hayworth biography. Sure enough, for a period of time, he was her business manager.

Interviewer: You have said you dislike profanity, but you use it a lot.

James Ellroy: I learned it from my father. He was raucous, profane, and freewheeling. I say fuck routinely—my generation is the first generation to say the word routinely, across gender lines. I love slang. I love hipster patois, racial invective, alliteration, argot of all kinds.

Interviewer: What was your childhood like before your mother’s death?

James Ellroy: I don’t remember a single amicable moment between my parents other than this--mother passing steaks out the kitchen window to my father so that he could put them on a barbecue. I had my mother’s number. I understood that she was maudlin, effusive, and enraged—the degree depending on how much booze she had in her system. I also understood that she had my father’s number—that he was lazy and cowardly. There was always something incongruous about them. Early on, I was aware of the seventeen-year age gap. When I knew her, my mother was a very good-looking redhead in her early forties. My father was a sun-ravaged, hard-smoking, hard-living guy. He looked significantly older at sixty than I do now. Everybody thought he was my granddad. He wore clothes that were thirty years out of style. I remember that he had a gold Omega wristwatch that he loved. We were broke, and then all of a sudden, one day, the watch wasn’t there. That broke my heart.

Interviewer: In My Dark Places you describe a sense of foreboding not long before your mother’s murder. Where did that come from?

James Ellroy: Near the end of January 1958, my mother sits me down on the couch. She’s half blitzed, and I can tell. She says, Honey, you’ve never lived in a house before, so we’re going to move to a nice little town called El Monte, in the San Gabriel Valley. I sensed that there was some other, more sinister reason we were moving to El Monte, but I still haven’t figured it out. I think she was running away from something, or someone. We go out there, and it was very upsetting. It was a dirty little stone house with a single bathroom. It was half the size of the apartment that we had in Santa Monica. Five months later, I come back from a weekend with my father. He put me in a cab at the El Monte bus depot. The cab pulls up to my street, our little stone house is on the left, and there are men in brown uniforms and gray suits standing around. And right then, I knew it, my mother was dead. I knew it in that moment. Someone said, There’s the kid. A cop got down on my level and said, Son, your mother’s been killed. I swooned. My field of vision veered off in one direction. But I didn’t cry. I started calculating. I began performing almost immediately. I loved being the center of attention. The cops took me to our neighbor’s garage, and they took a photograph—often reproduced—of me standing in front of a workbench. I was goofing, mugging and making faces. The El Monte police chief was dispatched to pick up my dad. Of course, he was the first suspect. At the police station, they sequestered my dad and me in separate rooms. They gave me a candy bar. When they finally let my dad out, I ran to him and put my arms around him. We went back to his pad on the freeway bus. I recall a stream of cars going by with their lights on in the opposite direction, and I forced myself to cry for just a few minutes. I remember thinking that I should. I was already at a great emotional distance from my mother’s death. When I got back to my dad’s crib, I immediately fell asleep. I woke up on Monday morning, June 23, 1958, and I swear to you, the whole world seemed light powder blue, like a ’56 Chevy Bel Air.

Interviewer: It sounds like you were in a state of shock.

James Ellroy: It technically could have been a state of shock. I had a nervous breakdown much later in life, and I’m still subject to panic attacks; big swells of emotion and anxiety, an aging person’s unsuppressable fear of catastrophe and death. All I can tell you is what went through my mind at the time. I couldn’t express my thoughts about my mother, because my relationship with her was too compromised. I thought, I got what I wanted. My mother is dead. Now what do I do? I felt death all around me. For a period of some weeks, my dad was very permissive. I began to wonder how much time he had left. I’d stay up late watching TV, waiting for him to come back from sporadic all-night accounting jobs—if indeed he wasn’t out fucking every woman who’d let him. I began to read mystery books--the Hardy Boys, Ken Holt. My father would buy me two of these things a week. I could read the damn books in four or five hours. I started stealing them when I was ten years old. At the time I had no creative outlet, no indication of genius or a literary gift. I was fearful and occasionally violent, physically outsized, and out of my mind. But I knew right then that I had discovered a secret world.

Interviewer: Were you lonely in those years?

James Ellroy: Yes, but I enjoyed junior high. That’s where I began to perform for the first time. I was a provocateur. I gave oral reports on books that I had invented in my head. I’m a huge kid, I don’t do well in school, I’m girl crazed, and I’m already peeping in windows. Here we are in this cheap apartment, no air-conditioning, and an unhousebroken dog. One block away, a bunch of Tudor mansions. They’re there, and I’m here. I want the girls, I want the family life, I want something that isn’t malodorous and fucked-up.

Interviewer: Is your voyeuristic impulse related to your need to write and tell stories—to go into the lives of fictional characters?

James Ellroy: Those impulses are one and the same. I already had the massive creative will. Now the performer in me is starting to act up. How do you stand out as a kid with no gifts at all? How do you enact your estrangement, your alienation, your self-loathing, your feelings of oddness and being unloved? The status quo at John Burroughs Junior High School was Jewish, so I shouted, Heil Hitler. I’d say, Bomb Russia, I hate JFK, fuck the liberal hegemony. Of course, I never hated anyone, and most of my friends were Jewish. I got significantly crazier. I joined the American Nazi Party while I was at Fairfax High School. I painted swastikas on the dog’s water dish. I always had a flash roll. My dad would give me a twenty-dollar bill to go to the store. I’d steal the food and I’d bring him change for a ten. I watched The Fugitive religiously on TV. If you’ve seen the original run of the series, it is all about sex and dislocated men and women. They drink highballs, smoke cigarettes, and sizzle for each other every Tuesday night at ten. It was everything that I wanted.

Interviewer: You claim to be ignorant of contemporary pop culture, but it seems that you were completely immersed in it as a boy.

James Ellroy: I was, but back then I didn’t know what it meant. I just felt compelled to read, go to crime movies, and watch crime television shows.

Interviewer: What does it mean to you now? Why is crime an important subject in American fiction?

James Ellroy: We’re a nation of immigrant rabble. A great rebellion attended the founding of this republic. We’ve been getting into trouble for two-hundred-and-thirty-odd years. It’s the perfect place to set crime stories, and the themes of the genre—race, systemic corruption, sexual obsession—run rife here. In a well-done crime book you can explore these matters at great depth, say a great deal about the society, and titillate the shit out of the reader.

Interviewer: You’ve said film noir hasn’t influenced your writing, but you watched a lot of it in your formative years—and you say you were born and raised in the heart of film-noir culture.

James Ellroy: I dig film noir. The great theme of film noir is, You’re fucked. There are a few very fine films--Double Indemnity, Sunset Boulevard, and, of course, Out of the Past. Robert Mitchum sees Jane Greer in Acapulco, and he knows. She sees him, and she knows. He’s passive, inert, but very resourceful. She’s murderous and altogether monstrous. He just wants to forfeit to a woman, to give up his masculinity. She wants to be enveloped in her masculine side. They each want the other. When film noir is deeply about that, it can be very powerful. But noir is overexposed now. I’m over it.

Interviewer: You’ve called Dashiell Hammett “tremendously great” and Raymond Chandler “egregiously overrated.” Why?

James Ellroy: Chandler wrote the kind of guy that he wanted to be, Hammett wrote the kind of guy that he was afraid he was. Chandler’s books are incoherent. Hammett’s are coherent. Chandler is all about the wisecracks, the similes, the constant satire, the construction of the knight. Hammett writes about the all-male world of mendacity and greed. Hammett was tremendously important to me. Joseph Wambaugh was immensely important, too. He is a former policeman whose view of LA perfectly dovetailed with my minor miscreant’s view of LA. I also loved the quickness, the ugliness, the assured fatality of James M. Cain. That giddy sense that doom is cool. You just met a woman, you had your first kiss, you’re six weeks away from the gas chamber, you’re fucked, and you’re happy about it.

Interviewer: How did you do in high school?

James Ellroy: I did poorly, and I had an unimaginably dim social sense. I was horrified when the civil rights workers were killed in Mississippi in ’64, but I made light of it in school. I knew it was wrong, but I had to be superior to the events themselves. You can see this in my books. There’s the reactionary side of me as well as the critique of authority, the critique of racism and oppression. Back then, though, I possessed no social awareness.

Interviewer: Did you graduate?

James Ellroy: No. I flunked the eleventh grade and got expelled. I decided I wanted to join the marine corps, because I wanted to be a shit kicker, which I certainly was not. I did not want to go to Vietnam, I never thought about Vietnam. I had a vague desire to shoot guns. My father’s health was deteriorating ever more rapidly—he started having strokes and heart attacks—and he let me enlist in the army.

Interviewer: How long did you last?

James Ellroy: If you think I’m skinny now, at a hundred and seventy pounds, picture me at a hundred and forty. I got shipped out to Fort Polk, Louisiana. Flying bugs all over the place. Right away, I went from being a big egotistical bully to a craven scaredy-cat dipshit. My dad had another stroke the first week I was at Polk. I got flown home to LA, in my uniform, on emergency leave. Two weeks later, he had yet another stroke. I got flown back again, just in time to see him die. His final words to me were, Try to pick up every waitress who serves you.

Interviewer: Is that when you started writing—after your father died?

James Ellroy: The first thing I did after he died was snag his last three Social Security checks, forge his signature, and cash them at a liquor store. From ’65 to ’75, I drank and used drugs. I fantasized. I swallowed amphetamine inhalers. I masturbated compulsively. I got into fights. I boxed—though I was terrible at it—and I broke into houses. I’d steal girls’ panties, I’d jack off, grab cash out of wallets and purses. The method was easy--you call a house and if nobody answers, that means nobody’s home. I’d stick my long, skinny arms in a pet access door and flip the latch, or find a window that was loose and raise it open. Everybody has pills and alcohol. I’d pop a Seconal, drink four fingers of Scotch, eat some cheese out of the fridge, steal a ten-dollar bill, then leave a window ajar and skedaddle. I did time in county jail for useless misdemeanors. I was arrested once for burglary, but it got popped down to misdemeanor trespassing. The press thinks that I’m a larger-than-life guy. Yes, that’s true. But a lot of the shit written about me discusses this part of my life disproportionately.

Interviewer: Aren’t you responsible for this? You’ve written a lot about this period, and you frequently talk about it in interviews.

James Ellroy: I’ve told many journalists that I’ve done time in county jail, that I’ve broken and entered, that I was a voyeur. But I also told them that I spent much more time reading than I ever did stealing and peeping. They never mention that. It’s a lot sexier to write about my mother, her death, my wild youth, and my jail time than it is to say that Ellroy holed up in the library with a bottle of wine and read books.

Interviewer: Still, writing couldn’t have been exactly in the forefront of your mind at the time.

James Ellroy: But it was. I was always thinking about how I would become a great novelist. I just didn’t think that I would write crime novels. I thought that I would be a literary writer, whose creative duty is to describe the world as it is. The problem is that I never enjoyed books like that. I only enjoyed crime stories. So more than anything, this fascination with writing was an issue of identity. I had a fantasy of what it meant to be a writer--the sports cars, the clothes, the women. But I think what appealed to me most about it was that I could assume the identity of what I really loved to do, which was to read. Nobody told me I couldn’t write a novel. I didn’t live in the world of graduate writing schools. I wasn’t part of any scene or creative community. I happened to love crime novels more than anything, so I wrote a crime novel first. I didn’t buy the old canard that you had to start by writing short stories, and only later write a novel. I never liked reading short stories, so why the fuck should I want to write one? I only wanted to write novels.

Interviewer: Did you feel that your period of homelessness and delinquency was giving you experience that you could turn into a novel?

James Ellroy: If I did, it was false. The real education I had was from the books I read and TV shows and movies I saw. When I watched a film or read a book, I was engrossed. I learned in an unmediated way. I didn’t know what I was taking in—I wasn’t thinking about theme, content, or style—but I took it all in.

Interviewer: You started caddying at golf courses near the end of that period. Did you think you needed the stability of a paying job in order to write?

James Ellroy: What happened was that I quit drinking. I knew I couldn’t write a novel as long as I drank or used drugs. And I was on fire with a sense of urgency. A buddy took me to an AA meeting, and I quit drinking in June of 1975. I continued taking uppers and smoking weed up until August 1, 1977. That’s when I really got sober. I started writing a year and five months later, in late January of 1979. I was not quite thirty-one.

Interviewer: Did you have an idea for a novel? Or just the general notion that you wanted to write one?

James Ellroy: I concocted a story idea. A friend of mine at the country club had taken a job as a process server. He asked me to come work for him. He said it was fun. So I went out as a process server and looked for a couple of witnesses that we never found. It was like being a private eye. I was a big guy in a suit. I started to plan a novel about a guy who gets involved with a bunch of country-club golf caddies, who does some process serving, who grew up at Beverly and Western, who was a tall, skinny, dark-haired guy with glasses, all of which is me. But he was an ex-cop, which I am not. I invented a nice arsonist—a psychotic, anti-Semitic firebug named Fat Dog Baker. I knew a caddy who was called Fat Dog who slept on golf courses. That’s Brown’s Requiem. It’s wish fulfillment, it’s crime, it’s autobiography. But it’s mostly a work of imagination.

Interviewer: How, after fourteen years of telling yourself that you were a writer, did you actually begin to write?

James Ellroy: I was on the eighth hole at Bel-Air Country Club and I said, Please, God, let me start this novel tonight. And I did. Standing up at the Westwood Hotel, where I had a room. Using the dresser as a desk, I wrote, “Business was good. It was the same thing every summer. The smog and heat rolled in, blanketing the basin; people succumbed to torpor and malaise; old resolves died; old commitments went unheeded. And I profited . . .” Native talent—who knows? I sat down and did it—and I had it. The beast was loose. I felt like I had created myself entirely out of sheer will, egotism, and an overwhelming desire to be somebody. All of a sudden I knew what I was going to do for the rest of my life. I haven’t stopped since.

Interviewer: What did you learn from your early novels?

James Ellroy: When to use first person versus third person. How to set a scene. Where to put a line break or a new paragraph. How to write an ending. How to develop a tragic sense of the world. Where to put a love scene. When to stress autobiography. When to realize you’re actually not that important.

Interviewer: What inspired you to write Killer on the Road, a novel told from the perspective of a homosexual serial killer?

James Ellroy: Killer on the Road is the only book I ever wrote for the money, because I needed some dough. It was my first large advance, ten grand. In part, I was influenced by Thomas Harris’s brilliant Red Dragon—to me the best pure thriller I’ve ever read. With Killer on the Road, I deliberately set out to shock. I wrote it in four months. It’s the only one of my books that I regret.

Interviewer: Why is that?

James Ellroy: It’s a good book, but I had a hot date with Elizabeth Short—the Black Dahlia victim—and I wanted to get to her fast. The Black Dahlia had been building inside of me for a long time. I became obsessed with the Black Dahlia murder case shortly after my mother’s death. I didn’t openly mourn my mother, but I could mourn Betty Short.

Interviewer: Why did it take so long for you to turn to the Black Dahlia case in your writing? It’s your seventh novel, after all.

James Ellroy: Because I thought for a long time that the success of John Gregory Dunne’s novel about the Black Dahlia, True Confessions, would preclude a successful publication. That’s a wonderful novel, but it doesn’t truly adhere to the facts of the Black Dahlia murder case. Mr. Dunne calls the Black Dahlia “the Virgin Tramp.” Elizabeth Short becomes “Lois Fazenda.” When I took on the murder for my novel, ten years later, I adhered to the facts of the case more than Mr. Dunne did. His book is phantasmagoria. My book is a much more literal rendering of the truth.

Interviewer: How did that book change your career?

James Ellroy: It liberated me. It was a best seller, I was earning a living as a writer for the first time, and I was exponentially more committed to creative maturity. I’m the most serious guy on earth, but I can bullshit with the best of them, and I play to my audience. There’s a concept in boxing that you fight to the level of your competition. You’re in with a big guy, you bring the fight. You’re in with a bum, you do just enough to win. But if you get lazy, then you put yourself at risk. I’ve always come to fight, from the very first page.

Interviewer: You do certain conventions of crime fiction particularly well. How do you go about writing a great interrogation scene?

James Ellroy: You have a good deal of information that needs to be conveyed to the reader. There has to be reluctance on the part of the suspect to give up that information. There has to be a level of coercion and guile in the interrogator. It has to be physically interesting. You have to be on the side of the interrogator, but at the same time you have to identify with the victim, and experience his horror at encountering official brutality. I’m thinking of a scene in White Jazz when Lieutenant Dave Klein is beating on some black guy who’s handcuffed to a chair. Klein says, I’m not enjoying this, but you’re not getting out of here unless you talk. But, of course, Klein is enjoying it. Most importantly, the scene can’t go on too long. It has to be fast.

Interviewer: Why do your interrogators always beat their suspects with phonebooks?

James Ellroy: Two reasons--they don’t leave marks and they don’t hurt your hands.

Interviewer: Some authors say that their characters are flesh and blood. Other authors say that they are puppets that the author moves around on the page.

James Ellroy: It’s disingenuous when writers say that they have no control over their characters, that they have a life of their own. Here’s what happens--you create the characters rigorously, and make clear choices about their behavior. You reach junctures in your stories and are confronted with dramatic options. You choose one or the other.

Interviewer: You take great pleasure in making your characters commit heinous acts, yet at the same time you rail against immorality. Is there a contradiction here?

James Ellroy: I can describe depravity without being depraved. I wrote My Dark Places, a memoir about my own slimiest actions, but I’ve refrained from such actions for many years. Breaking into houses was a thrill, peeping was a thrill. But these practices need to be curbed and regulated in order to ensure a safe society. There has been a great deal of chaos in my life, and there remains chaos in my creative life, so I crave order. This is what the superstructure of the novel allows me—ultimate authority in the creation of an ultimate order, even as I describe flagrant disorder in wondrous detail.

Interviewer: Are you religious?

James Ellroy: I’m a Christian. I’m a proponent of Judaism, and I see Judaism and Christianity as the through-lines of the rule of law in world history. I love the Reformation. I am of the Reformation—that moment when you stand alone with God. More than anything else, I am an enormous believer in God, the God who saved my wretched, tormented ass so many times. I feel that I have a responsibility to portray the spiritual, religious aspect of life. I hate squalor. I’m always astonished when people come up with the nutty idea that my books are nihilistic. I try to show the result of immoral actions--the karmic comeuppance, the horrible self-destructiveness. I explicate the dire consequences of historical and individual misdeeds. What happens to you when you do not know that virtue is its own reward.

Interviewer: How do you begin writing a novel?

James Ellroy: I begin by sitting in the dark. I used to sleep on the living-room couch. There was a while when that was the only place I felt safe. My couch is long because I’m tall, and it needs to be high backed, so I can curl into it. I lie there and things come to me, very slowly.

Interviewer: What happens after the sitting-in-the-dark phase?

James Ellroy: I take notes. Ideas, historical perspective, characters, point of view. Very quickly, much of the narrative coheres. When I have sufficient information—the key action, the love stories, the intrigue, the conclusion—I write out a synopsis in shorthand as fast as I can, for comprehension’s sake. With the new novel, Blood’s a Rover, this took me six days. It’s then, after I’ve got the prospectus, that I write the outline. The first part of the outline is a descriptive summary of each character. Next I describe the design of the book in some detail. I state my intent at the outset. Then I go through the entire novel, outlining every chapter. The outline of Blood’s A Rover is nearly four hundred pages long. It took me eight months to write. I write in the present tense, even if the novel isn’t written in the present tense. It reads like stage directions in a screenplay. Everything I need to know is right there in front of me. It allows me to keep the whole story in my mind. I use this method for every book.

Interviewer: Your outlines resemble first drafts. Is that how you think of them?

James Ellroy: I think of the outline as a diagram, a superstructure. When you see dialogue in one of my outlines, it’s because inserting the dialogue is the most complete, expeditious way to describe a given scene.

Interviewer: Do you force yourself to write a certain number of words each day?

James Ellroy: I set a goal of outlined pages that I want to get through each day. It’s the ratio of text pages to outline pages that’s important. That proportion determines everything. Today I went through five pages of the outline. That equals about eight pages of the novel. The outline for Blood’s a Rover, which is three hundred and ninety-seven pages, is exponentially more detailed than the three-hundred-and-forty-five-page outline for The Cold Six Thousand. So the ratio of book pages to outline pages varies, depending on the density of the outline.

Interviewer: Is it important for you to have a steady writing routine?

James Ellroy: I need to work just as rigorously on the outline as I do on the actual writing of the text, in order to keep track of the plot and the chronology. But once I’m writing text, I can be flexible, because the outline is there. Take today. I woke up early, at five-thirty. I worked for a couple of hours, took a break for some oatmeal, shut my eyes for a moment, and went back at it. I was overcaffeinated, jittery-assed, panic-attacky. Sometimes I go until I just can’t go anymore. I flatline and need some peace.

Interviewer: Do you write at night?

James Ellroy: I write some nights, and I edit at night. I write by hand. I correct in red ink. When I’m close to finishing a book, I will write more and more, because I’ve got finishing fever.

Interviewer: Does it matter where you write?

James Ellroy: No, but this pad is perfectly outfitted. Some people find my place appalling. It’s too neat and clean. Nothing’s out of place. If you look in my clothes closet, you’ll see that everything is arrayed by fabric, style, and color. I’ll do anything I can to simplify my life.

Interviewer: Where does this obsession with order come from?

James Ellroy: Chaos in my early life, fear of incapacity and death, an attempt to control my overweaning emotionalism, my Beethovenian drives and lusts. I’ve become more single-minded as I’ve gotten older. My subsidiary obsessions have fallen by the wayside, with one big exception.

Interviewer: Women?

James Ellroy: Of course.

Interviewer: What happens after you finish writing a book?

James Ellroy: I go over it, editing fifty pages a day. I send it to a typist, who enters the changes. Then I proofread it once, make some more additions and subtractions. At that point, there are two sets of corrections. In copyediting, I continue to make small changes. Every opportunity that I have to reach perfection, I take.

Interviewer: What do you do once you have a draft that you’re happy with?

James Ellroy: I show it to my agent, Nat Sobel, who is a stickler for the logic of the dramatic scenes. He makes certain that each character’s motivations and actions are sensible. I’m a perfectionist. I go to great lengths to get it all right. It’s the biggest challenge I face when I’m writing. If you’re confused about something in one of my books, you’ve just got to realize, Ellroy’s a master, and if I’m not following it, it’s my problem. You just have to submit to me.

Interviewer: How do you conduct research for your novels?

James Ellroy: There was no research required for my first six novels. I made the stories up from scratch.

Interviewer: What about The Black Dahlia?

James Ellroy: The LAPD will not let civilians see the file on the Dahlia case, which is six thousand pages long. When I started working on the novel, I was still caddying. I was living in Westchester County and realized that I could get, by interlibrary loan, the Los Angeles Times and the Los Angeles Herald-Express on microfilm. All I needed was four hundred dollars in quarters to feed the microfilm machine. Man, four hundred bucks in quarters—that’s a lot of coins. I used a quadruple-reinforced pillowcase to carry them down from Westchester, on the Metro-North train. It took me four printed pages to reproduce a single newspaper page. In the end the process cost me six hundred dollars. Then I made notes from the articles. Then I extrapolated a fictional story. The greatest source, however, was autobiography. Who’s Bucky Bleichert? He’s a tall, pale, and thin guy, with beady brown eyes and fucked-up teeth from his boxing days, tweaked by women, with an absent mother, who gets obsessed with a woman’s death. It wasn’t much of a stretch.

Interviewer: Did you conceive of all four books in the LA Quartet at once?

James Ellroy: No, it was only when I decided to write The Big Nowhere that it became a quartet. Thus, the last three novels—The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential, and White Jazz—were linked more closely with one another than with The Black Dahlia. My intention was to recreate the world that my mother lived and died in, as an homage to her, a conscious address to her, and a sensuous capitulation to her. I wanted to tell big love stories, big crime stories, and big political stories. I wanted to honor Elizabeth Short as the transmogrification of Jean Hilliker Ellroy. Whenever someone asks me what the LA Quartet books are about, I say, Bad men in love with strong women.

Interviewer: What kind of research did you do for the extended sections on the homosexual underworld in The Big Nowhere?

James Ellroy: I was influenced by a bad William Friedkin movie from 1980, Cruising. It has a great premise. There are a string of homosexual murders in the West Village and Al Pacino is a young, presumably heterosexual cop, who goes undercover and is tempted by the homosexual world. What an idea! Hence, The Big Nowhere. A cop in LA in the fifties gets assigned to a homosexual murder case and becomes aroused by the men he’s investigating.

Interviewer: After the LA Quartet, you said you wanted to go in a more “mainstream” direction. I wonder what that word means to you.

James Ellroy: I realized that I had taken the police historical novel as far as it could go. I had written a series of masterworks about LA, so I decided to do the same thing with full-scale America. Hence, the Underworld USA Trilogy--American Tabloid, The Cold Six Thousand, Blood’s a Rover. Most of all I credit Don DeLillo. Mr. DeLillo’s novel Libra was published in ’88. I was astounded by it. The book detailed the JFK snuff, largely through the eyes of that horribly persistent loser Lee Harvey Oswald. I said to myself, You can’t write this book—DeLillo got there first. He had created the entire metaphysical worldview of the Kennedy assassination. Jack Kennedy was responsible for his own death. His death was no more than the world’s most overglorified business-dispute killing, on a huge geopolitical scale. I was kicking myself that I didn’t come up with this idea first. And then, very slowly, I started to see that I could write a trio of novels, placing JFK’s death in an off-page context, with a giant social history of the United States to follow. When Knopf was slated to publish American Tabloid, I sent Mr. DeLillo a copy in advance to thank him for the influence. I included a thank-you note, telling him that I would attribute his contribution in all my big interviews. I got a very nice note back from Mr. DeLillo. He sent it on March 4, which is my birthday. It was 1995, but he incorrectly dated his note 1955, which seemed appropriate. He praised the book, and that was that.

Interviewer: Why, after American Tabloid, did you interrupt the trilogy and turn to a new form—the memoir?

James Ellroy: I was forty-five and very happily married. I was living in New Canaan, Connecticut. Life was good. For Christmas one year, my wife got me a photograph taken of me by the Los Angeles Times at the time of my mother’s death. She had it framed. She said, Do you remember this? And all of a sudden—boom. It was like a little knife to my heart. I thought I had locked my mother away after The Black Dahlia. A month later, a reporter for the Pasadena Star-News told me he would be seeing my mother’s file, as part of a piece he was doing on unsolved San Gabriel Valley homicides. Immediately the opportunist in me said, I have to see my mother’s file and write a piece about it. GQ gave me the assignment. I visited the unsolved-homicide unit at the LA County sheriff’s office, and I met Sergeant Bill Stoner. We joked around a little bit and talked about other murder cases. I realized that I was avoiding looking at the file. Finally, he showed it to me. I looked at the pictures first. They weren’t terribly shocking, perhaps because I’d lived with the event mentally for so many years. Then I read the police reports and saw immediately how I would write the book. I knew that it would be my autobiography, my mother’s biography, and Bill Stoner’s biography. I knew I’d get a significant advance. I knew each of the book’s sections would begin with italicized addresses to my mother. I knew that we would try to find the killer. I knew that we wouldn’t find the killer. I knew we were going to get a lot of publicity, and that it wouldn’t help the case. The book would be about my journey to reconcile with my mother. And all of this came about just as I had thought it would.

Interviewer: How did Stoner become so central to the book?

James Ellroy: Because, like me, he was driven by a chivalrous notion of saving women in jeopardy. I identified with his emotional maturity, his intelligence, his resignation. He’s worldly, in the sense that he has a great knowledge of people, but he’s not in the least sophisticated. He says “excape” rather than “escape” and “eyetalian” rather than “Italian.” He has horrible taste in books and movies. But, God, does he know people. You don’t see that often.

Interviewer: For a novelist’s memoir, there is remarkably little about your own experience as a writer.

James Ellroy: That would be irrelevant to the main narrative, which was my mother and me. I did not want the book to be a discursive autobiography. I fear self-absorption as a writer. The book had to be about something more than me.

Interviewer: Has anything new happened in the case since the publication of the book?

James Ellroy: No. Bill Stoner and I continue to get phone calls, but nothing of real merit.

Interviewer: Is your mother as present in your life now as she was when you were writing the memoir?

James Ellroy: There is a quotation from Dylan Thomas that I think of often, “After the first death, there is no other.” He was writing about the firebombing of London, but for me the first death will always be my mother’s. She’s with me still, but no amount of effort will allow me to touch her concretely. I have fulfilled my moral debt to her to the best extent that I could. I have granted her a mythic status through my work. The price for that is public exposure. I am a gloryhound, I’ve always wanted to be famous. She never sought these things. I have a need to refract myself through her, and I owe her a deep spiritual debt.

Interviewer: There’s a line at the end of My Dark Places where you write, “She was no less than my salvation.” Salvation from what?

James Ellroy: From the horrifying, lustful, self-destructive aspects of my masculinity. She’s always there in the wings going, Ha-ha, you dipshit, you exploited my death, and now you’re doomed to have women kick the shit out of you the rest of your life. She also represents a powerful negative example. She’s an alcoholic, I’m an alcoholic. She never got sober, I did. She was a woman of the American fifties with appetites, and was harshly judged for indulging them. I would daresay that she indulged her appetites with a great deal more dignity than I have. I was a man in the sixties and seventies, and I got to drink and fuck with an abandon that she never dreamed of.

Interviewer: You’ve called yourself “the greatest crime novelist who ever lived,” and it’s difficult to think of another living writer who presents himself as aggressively as you do. How important is it for a writer to have swagger?

James Ellroy: You want swagger, look at Norman Mailer. I don’t go around beating people up. I’m just James Ellroy, the self-promoting demon dog. It comes naturally to me. You call it swagger, I call it joie de vivre.

Interviewer: You did say about Blood’s a Rover, “This book is going to be better than War and Peace.”

James Ellroy: Tongue-in-cheek. Wink, wink. The highest compliment ever paid to me was by Joyce Carol Oates. You know what she called me? The American Dostoyevsky. Stop right there, I’ll take it. Ultimately, I’m impervious to criticism. The ass kicking I got by a lot of critics for the style of The Cold Six Thousand was a real motherfucker, but I stopped reading the reviews. You can’t start thinking that critical consensus is a guarantor of quality. This is something I feel very strongly about. I remember that when L.A. Confidential went to the Cannes Film Festival, a critic from The Hollywood Reporter wrote a negative review. He just didn’t think the movie cohered. But by then all the other critics had loved the film, and this guy at The Hollywood Reporter had to join the club, so he included L.A. Confidential on his list of that year’s best films. The irony is that I think much of what he wrote in his original piece was actually dead-on.

Interviewer: L.A. Confidential marked a significant change in your writing. You adopted a “telegraphic style”—extremely short, clipped sentences. How did you come to this?

James Ellroy: When I handed in the novel, my editor told me I had to cut more than a hundred pages, without altering the thematic emphasis or shifting any of the specific scenes. Because the story was violent, and full of action, I saw the value of writing in a fast, clipped style. So I cut every unnecessary word from every sentence. I wrote White Jazz, the direct sequel to L.A. Confidential and the last book in the Quartet, in the first-person style, and in a normal, discursive voice. But it didn’t seem to fit the main character, Dave Klein—a fucked-up, racist cop bombing around black LA in ’58, who inexplicably gets hooked on bebop. I saw that if I eliminated words from his speech, I would develop a more convincing cadence for him--paranoid, jagged, enervated. I reverted to a more normal, albeit still terse style in American Tabloid and My Dark Places, but then I went back and did an extreme telegraphic style with The Cold Six Thousand.

Interviewer: Do you think the extreme style of The Cold Six Thousand was a success?

James Ellroy: Helen Knode, my second ex-wife, is my best friend and the greatest Ellroy scholar on earth. Helen said to me, Big Dog, it’s a great book, but it’s too difficult. As a reader, you want less style and more emotion.

Interviewer: Did she tell you that before it was published?

James Ellroy: Yes. I ignored her.

Interviewer: It seems as if most sentences in that book are four words or fewer. It’s been called minimalistic.

James Ellroy: Minimalism implies small events, small people, a small story. Man, that’s the antithesis of me. Telegraphic means straight sentences—subject, verb, repetitions with slight modifications. The book has flaws. It’s too long, and the style is too rigorous for such a complicated story—the JFK assassination and its aftermath, the plotting of the Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy assassinations, Howard Hughes’s takeover of Las Vegas, all told through the overlapping stories of three morally compromised and traumatized men desperately in love with strong women. It’s a big picaresque mess, and too demanding a read. But the stamina of it is sui generis. If you get it, you get it. It might not be your favorite of my books, but you can appreciate its scope, its audacity. I try to write books that no one else would have the balls to write. They require the reader’s intense concentration. Most writers, as they age, write shorter and tidier. My books are getting bigger and more stylistically ambitious. And my style will continue to evolve.

Interviewer: In Blood’s a Rover, as in many of your novels, several of your main characters undergo extreme shifts of allegiance—from fascistic reactionary, say, to Castroite leftist, and sometimes back again. Why?

James Ellroy: I wanted to dramatize the seismic shifts that took place during the sixties and seventies. I wanted to show the positive effects of ideological transformation. So I have two right-wing-toady assassins who can’t live with the horror of their misdeeds, chiefly the assassination of Martin Luther King. They are two men who embrace revolution, driven by a hope for redemption and by the women in their lives. It’s a more hopeful book than the others in the trilogy. As a character says at one point, Your options are do everything or do nothing. This novel also displays my greatest diversity of characterization. Karen Silfakis is a mother and a revolutionary. Marshell Bowen is a homosexual black man who goes undercover for the FBI. These characters think about their actions and analyze what they mean. They’re not afraid to write down their thoughts. There are a lot of diary entries and correspondence that give us different perspectives on American history between 1968 and 1972. It’s all about conveying the complex, ideological nature of that era.

Interviewer: When you’re writing about vast political events, do you have a particular political agenda in mind?

James Ellroy: No. I do have a complex relationship with authoritarianism. I’d rather live in a society that errs on the side of authoritarianism than a society that errs on the side of permissiveness. Try telling that to a woman and see if you get laid. But in my fiction, the two major arch-villains are authoritarian, reactionary conservatives; Dudley Smith, a corrupt LA policeman in the LA Quartet, and J. Edgar Hoover in the Underworld USA Trilogy. And the overarching moral voices of the trilogy are Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King.

Interviewer: Where did you get the idea to introduce document inserts—FBI transcripts, tabloid copy, police reports—between chapters?

James Ellroy: Sometimes I need to get outside of the perspectives of the characters in order to convey information that they don’t know, and offer occasional editorial comments and historical facts in a compressed, direct way. That’s where the document inserts come in. It’s also a great excuse for me to write copy for Hollywood gossip rags.

Interviewer: As far as literary influences go, Confidential magazine seems a big one for you.

James Ellroy: I loved Confidential. Along with the Lutheran Church, it’s probably the biggest cultural influence of my life. Who’s a homo? Who’s a nympho? Who’s got a big one? Who’s got a small one? Who fucks people of color? Who’s getting head at the Griffith Park john? Who’s a muff diver? That shit was important to me then, and it’s important to me now.

Interviewer: You like to read your work before an audience. How do you prepare for the performance?

James Ellroy: I semimemorize the passage so that I can stand at the podium and share eye contact with the audience. I read shorter sections with as few differentiations in dialogue as possible. Never go long. Never try the audience’s patience. Never put in something too plot deep. Never hem, haw, pause, or do anything that isn’t dramatically effective. How many times have you seen people go for forty minutes, lose it routinely, wet the page, cough, fart, belch into the microphone, say “um,” and do everything short of take a shit on stage. It’s deadening. I walk in and situate myself. I hunker down and read something outrageous. Something with race, class, dope, sex, insane language. I read a section about rug burns—that’s when you’re fucking on a rug and you scrape your knees. Do you want to hear some candy-ass artiste saying, Oooooh, I’m an artist, my characters do things that I didn’t intend? Or do you want to hear about rug burns and get some yucks? I don’t read for more than fourteen minutes, tops. Then I answer questions for twenty minutes. Afterward, you don’t short-shrift anyone—you talk to everybody. You scope out the women. You have a gas. You’re happy, you’re grateful, you’re God’s guy.

Interviewer: You claim not to read books anymore, yet you seem extremely well-read. How do you account for that?

James Ellroy: There are big gaps in my literary knowledge. I’ve never read anything by Faulkner. I haven’t read anything by William Gaddis or James Baldwin. I tried to read True History of the Kelly Gang by Peter Carey, because I met him, but I didn’t buy his style. I tried to read a Cormac McCarthy book and thought, Why doesn’t this cocksucker use quotation marks? I picked up another Cormac McCarthy book and saw that there were six or seven consecutive pages in Spanish. I didn’t know what it meant. My name isn’t Juan Ellroy, OK?

Interviewer: You’ve been criticized at times for being racially insensitive. Why do you think that is?

James Ellroy: Critics want racism, and secondarily homophobia, to be portrayed as a defining characteristic, rather than a casual attribute. Racist language uttered by sympathetic characters confuses hidebound liberals. Who gives a shit?

Interviewer: Are your books received differently abroad?

James Ellroy: I’m a god in Europe—the dominant American writer of our time. And that’s no shit. America is the cultural top of the world, and my books are viewed in Europe as realistic critiques of America—at least by those Europeans who worship and loathe America equally and wish they were Americans and wonder why they’re not the height of culture for the entire world. I sell more books in France than in America.

Interviewer: You’ve talked about your competitive instinct. Who do you feel you’re competing against?

James Ellroy: No one. I’m only fighting myself. I have a duty to God and to the people who love my books, and that is to get better and better. At this stage of the game, I’m entirely self-referential.

Interviewer: Is posterity important to you?

James Ellroy: It is. I don’t want to die. And I’m not going to.

[vivaciousyellow]

re: furiously happy, but replace happy with --

“anxious and wanting to, but consistently failing to actually, puke so now it’s just a family of gremlins playing that really intense korean version of dodgeball in my stomach but like there’s a family feud they’re subconsciously trying to resolve by invoking amity through the sense of nostalgia this childhood game inspires and so everyone’s simultaneously passive-aggressive and aggressive-aggressive, weaponising words into insults and rubber balls (heh) into, well, harder balls (heh) armed with the force of momentum and you know what, it’s just a lot to deal with”

dear victoria,

i have something to confess.

there’s been this small emotional, mental, psychic parasyte that’s been steadily and persistently gnawing at me, but at a pace where i can maintain the integrity of the the rest of my body whilst this thing resides in the shadows, sustained by my weakness, guilt, anxiety.

i feel like prometheus!!!!

not sure i’m doing making the best metaphorical argument here.

i’ll start from the beginning.

early last month, this solicitor from softbank, an atm/verizon/internet service provider type, rang my doorbell. i readily opened the door. i don’t know why. i could have easily just not. my guard’s been let down, living here. that healthy bit of Chicago suburbia paranoia has basically vanished.

mostly.

i mean i still look behind my shoulders for ghostly nightmares, but otherwise, real live human beings don’t seem so scary anymore. everyone’s so kind and patient and understanding to this stupid gaijin. just that, any idea of any sort of interaction between me and them makes me shit my pants sometimes all the time. the sentence structure thereof suggesting that perhaps i am not a real live human being. has the imposter syndrome gotten that bad?

but anyway, so like. i opened the door. short paragraphs of japanese landed superb uppercuts into my soft winter belly. something about my current internet service. something about slower internet speed. something about me nodding yes in puzzled agreement because i seek to be constantly agreeable, relatable, and “no” is a syllable my tongue gets stuck on. something about can i come in? i said yes again? something like he thought he should ask, me being a single lady living alone. i do remember specifically using my pshhh-nawwww-u-gud-bruh laugh in response.

he had such an amiable, jaunty air about him. what a damn good salesman. or am i just that weak against any little bit of nice, smiley one-on-one communication?

fuck.

i’m pretty sure i mildly disassociated as he was talking. he was explaining how softbank was better, and how the transition between jcom and softbank would be seamless. he even asked if i would like him to call jcom on my behalf to tell them i was switching services.

wait you know what. i think it was only around this time when i realised he was a salesman. the original narrative i had, i guess, just immediately imagined was that jcom was getting absorbed into softbank and he was here to tell me about the company-wide Big Change that had just happened and that softbank was now just taking inventory of jcom customers.

am i just that slow creative and imaginative?

but, at this point, i felt like i had already ventured so deep into this interaction that i couldn’t get out. more so, i was so overwhelmed by the torrent of chumminess he was directing at me. like his affability was a weapon. wait, actually, combining the former water-inspired metaphor with the latter simile, i was like an evil witch of the east meeting her demise at the hands of a young japanese male dorothy, who was splashing lethal niceness onto my defenseless body.

i had completely written myself off as having become the newest victim to this brilliant corporate strategy of exposing mostly socially anxious, always afraid, and recently depressed potential customers to friendly, conversational, energetic salesmen. suddenly i was calling their regional hq or something to confirm my personal information. and then suddenly i was saving his number into my phone. all the while, making light conversation about my unusual, very not legit phone number (another headache), my early bird sleeping patterns, his opposite night owl lifestyle. to make the - unprompted! (really putting myself out there you know) - explanation for said early-bird-ness, i made the bold assertion in embarrassingly broken japanese that i ran every morning. he left with the promise of calling me again to set up more details.

after he left, i immediately panicked.

first, wowowowoowowowow i sustained a prolonged conversation in japanese! in which i spoke about 5% of the time. but still! he asked me questions and i answered! audibly! and we laughed over the realisation that i probably had a lot i didn’t understand. but he understood that i didn’t understand and even said aloud for me what i was thinking -- is it that feeling of ‘you don’t even know what you don’t know?’

eye contact.

mutual wry chuckle.

second, in replaying the interaction a dozen times in five seconds, i began to panic specifically about needing to run everyday now to make up for this oral contract i made to him that i have been and will continue to run. wow, i should do that too, so healthy!

then, it finally hit me what just happened, as i stared at the copy of the contract he gave me. the absurdity of it all, including my reaction, is still hitting me.

i could have just said no.

or just give one of those small, apologetic smiles while shaking my head “no” and closing the door.

or just not answer the door in the first place.

instead, it’s been a month. he’s called five times personally. they’ve called four times from the company phone. softbank has stuffed my mailbox three times with thick letters labelled “important.” someone came personally to my door this past saturday morning. and he came personally again tonight. and i’m sad this didn’t perfectly follow a neat 5-4-3-2-1 pattern.

in return, i’ve let the phone go to my non-existent voicemail seven times. i’ve outright rejected two of those calls. i’ve had three anxiety attacks. and of course, i now never answer the door.

there’s this incredible guilt. you know, cuz he was so nice! he spent so much time and energy coming to my door, explaining things to me. and i gave him a false hope, an empty promise. i played him, going so far as to demonstrate how i successfully saved his phone number. then it was resentment at how unreceptive they were being to my diligent, patient, faithful, very clearly very rude ghosting. i’ve very quickly made this very small circle back to guilt.

hm hold on.

if there are only two points, can it even be called a circle? 

but circles don’t even have points so.

#thirdgradegeometry:)))))))))))))))))))

i’ve been only just barely surviving the cringe attacks from flashbacks of all the interactions i have with classmates and professors at school. each conversation, however brief, protracted, intimate, and/or engaged indiscriminately torments me like a schoolyard bully who comes in an inclusive variety of shapes and sizes whose lunch money equivalent is emotional labour. for myself.

and i’ve been really trying to snap myself out of my march-april depressive funk. and i really feel like i’ve been mentally doing that butt wriggle you do at the start line of a track meet when you’re readying yourself to make that dash into productivity, positivity, and...pretty good vibes? (i’m a serf in the great fiefdom of literary devices that is alliteration). i downloaded furiously happy by jenny lawson. because i’m so in love with the idea of overcoming those emotional pitfalls if not just out of sheer spite - and also with her authorial voice. it’s hilarious. and i’m halfway through! but while i’m trying so hard to pretend, each time i fail to assert myself to softbank and finally let them go, becomes an unfixable dent in my “pretend you’re okay!” facade. and i don’t know how to be okay with that.

and so, i don’t know how to even begin imagining me answering their calls without hyperventilating.

but he was literally waiting outside my apartment complex today so i’m not sure if i’m ever gonna leave my room again. if my professors ask, i’ll just chalk it up to 2 kool 4 skool. just another arrogant american with questionable work ethic?

i’m thinking i’ll write a card rejecting their advances. and then if i see a softbank salesmen, i’ll chuck the letter at them and run in the other direction.

and i’ll even end it with

much love,

ying