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palmofafreezinghand · 4 years

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too

It took eternal damnation for someone to love her back. The first time anyone tells Esme “I love you, too.”

content warning: brief mention of domestic abuse and infant death

Wherever she went those three words always seemed to follow. Her parents joked that her first words had been “I love you.” They might as well have been. She proclaimed her love so freely. As a child she whispered it to each star before falling asleep. As a teenager, when sleep became more seldom, she whispered it to each and every sheep. When the feral tom cat who sought refuge in the creaky sheep shed bit her, he was met with, “it’s okay, I love you!” As a child her parents saw it as endearing. “She’s such a sweetheart.” Her mother would coo when she found Esme had tucked flowers into her parent’s shoes. Her father would beam with pride as she offered half her lunch to her imaginary friend. However as she grew her ability to love so freely became a fault in their eyes, as so many of her other qualities did.

She was fifteen when she was first admonished for the three words that had become a staple of her vocabulary. She had said them offhandedly to her father’s farmhand, David Joseph. An older boy who went to school and synagogue with Esme for years. The pair had spent the summer exchanging stories in their spare moments between farm chores. He was the only person who had eagerly listened to all her tales. Not much of a reader himself but, enraptured nonetheless by the fantasy realms Esme had visited and even the tales she made up all on her own. Her mother had told her to stop bothering him with the pointless drivel but he always assured her she wasn’t a bother.

Through the summer he asked her questions about her stories, kept track of plot points and her favorites, he even let her borrow his family’s novels. The enthusiastic reader offered him a listening ear, giving him a chance to escape from his own troubles for a moment. He worked on her parent’s farm to help support his family. His own father had passed in an accident and he was the second eldest son and thus had taken on an immense burden. Esme knew this but she didn’t dwell on it. She allowed him to be a seventeen year old, laughing and dreaming of fairies and far off lands. She teased him about his thick accent, his crush on the rabbi’s daughter, and his irrational fear of chickens.

By the end of summer he had saved a few cents to get her a ‘thank you’ gift. When he found “The Complete Works of William Shakespeare” at a rummage sale he knew it was perfect. The cover was almost torn and it weighed three pounds but it was perfect. He bargained with the seller. In his best print he inscribed on the first page, “a bunch of stories of folks who talk funny from the boy who talks funny.” He wrapped it in leftover newspaper and tucked a few mustard flowers into the twine. It was the most thoughtful gift Esme had ever received. She laughed at the inscription, “God, I love you! Thank you.” She smiled so wide her cheeks hurt and gave him a side hug without thinking. In hindsight it was probably inappropriate, but she didn’t care. Her mother cared deeply.

After Esme had given him the watercolor she had done of his father and the cookies she had made him. Which, she enthusiastically pointed out she had not burned. The boy set off with his last paycheck from the Platts and promised to write to Esme from his new factory job in the city. When Esme could no longer spot his silhouette she left her spot on the front porch. Eager to start her new novels she skipped back into the living room to be met with two disapproving glares. “Esme you’re a woman now you can’t act like that.” Her mother said before her daughter could question.

“What did I do?” Esme asked genuinely.

“I believe you told a boy you loved him.” Her father said coldly.

“And then hugged him!” Her mother added, appalled by her daughter’s carelessness.

“David’s just a friend!” Esme refuted, frustrated.

She had never even thought of her friend in that manner. She had said that she loved him, and she meant it, but with no scandal. And even if she had, her mother had been on a tireless mission to get her married off. So why would she now object if she did mean it like that?

“A proper woman does not tell men she loves them unless she is married to them.” Her mother said. “Matter of fact, she does not tell anyone she is not closely related to she loves them.”

“And what if I don’t want to be a proper woman?” Esme quickly rebuked. Her mother sighed heavily, familiar with where this conversation was headed. This fight had become routine for the mother and daughter as of late.

“Esme.” Her father added. Warning his daughter to not go further with her disrespect but refusing to take a real stance.

Esme took a pause, gathered her book from the coffee table and moved to leave the room before she pointedly said, “A life without love is one I am not the least bit interested in.”

Loving others came easy to Esme, it was how she understood the world around her. If she loved each and every person around her it made their faults bearable. Her mother was critical. Esme loved her and her way of asserting her opinions. Her father was distant and unamused by her ramblings. Esme loved his devotion to his work and his complex thoughts. If she could just give enough love she would never be disappointed again, and maybe she wouldn’t be a disappointment.

However, after that encounter Esme began to watch her declarations. She never loved less she just refrained from speaking the words. Devoted the energy to expressing her feelings in other means. Little gifts, baking treats, helping with chores. It took great strength to control her desire to scream her love from the rooftops, until it didn’t.

After her mother’s speech about ‘proper women’ she had slowly become more excited about marriage. She silently acknowledged it would be years before she would be able to say the words again but when she did it would be wonderful. She never expected an overwhelming romance like Romeo and Juliet. And frankly dying for your love felt a tad too melodramatic, even for her. She was realistic. She would marry a man she most likely did not love, but could grow too, to make her parents happy. She didn’t need a rose by any other name, all she needed was someone who would listen to her thoughts and stories. Yes, a marriage like that she would be able to love she told herself again and again.

To his credit her husband had told her he loved her. Had he meant it? She pondered while cleaning her blood out of her pillowcases. No. In her teenage years she had resigned herself to a life of never saying the word love but always feeling it. Now she realized she was doomed to say the word and never mean it again. Her means of defense suddenly were the weapons used against her. Her cooking, ironing, homemaking were all wrong. The ways of showing love she had cultivated for years were all seen as faults. As her marriage devolved further into a loveless union she became thankful for that fact. She did not love him. She would tell him she did, just like he told her he did. She refused to show him.

When she realized she was pregnant she knew she had no choice. She didn’t love Charles, and at that point had little love left for herself, but refused to let her child be born into a world without it.

She funneled years worth of unused affection to ensure her child was safe and sound. When they were settled she worked to build a world overflowing with love. At the end of the day she would lay in bed and tell her son all about her day at work, what the clouds looked like, or the student’s antics. He would respond with hiccups to funny jokes, and kicked when she sang him lullabies.

She had been told that she was loved before. But she was never loved equally. She had never been told “I love you, too.” Charles had always said “You know I love you, Essie.” Unfailingly a precursor or follow up to horrific violence. When she was young her declarations were never returned by the farm animals, imaginary friends, or her parents. Yet, somehow, in that small apartment away from everything she had ever known she knew for the first time she was just as loved as she loved.

When she eventually met the little boy her first words were “I love you,” and she meant them. He could not say them back but it did not matter. She named him Joseph after the kind young farmhand. Silently praying he would take after his namesake and not his father. Three heavenly days later she whispered “I love you,” one last time. She knew he could not hear her, it had been hours since the doctor’s delivered the earth shattering news. His small body had been cold for some time. She knew as she silently sobbed the three little words it would be the last time she would ever say them. And a life without love was one she was not interested in.

When she awoke as a mythical creature she felt her determination to live without love fit quite well with the horrors the two strange men had described. She quickly discovered that assumption could not be more untrue. She became quickly thrilled by her newfound abilities. The way the sun lit up their skin. The ever changing color of her eyes. The enhanced smell of rain meeting the trees. Amidst horror and tragedy she began to fall in love. Not with a person this time but with life itself. She found great joy in her companions as well. She sat on the edge of her seat as the ancient doctor told her of his travels and of lands she has only read about. Found great thrill in beating the teenager in a race. She felt unadulterated joy as she climbed the tallest trees and hopped from branch to branch in a game of supernatural hide and seek. Laughed freely at the glee on the boys’ faces when they finally found her. She loved them.

She was not truly conscious of the fact until she was deep into transforming the hovel they inhabited. She brought curtains out of storage, fixed the creaky staircase, she made the house into a home. As soon as she acknowledged she loved her companions she knew she would never say the words to either of them. She was partly terrified they would not return her feelings, in any manner. She knew she would be unable to withstand knowing she was simply a guest in their home. Yet, a larger part of her recognized she felt completely and utterly safe and even loved in their tiny home. She did not need to hear the words, for she knew it.

She had ended up building a ‘world overflowing with love,’ but this time, for herself. When Carlisle picked her bouquets of wildflowers after hunts she knew it was a silent declaration. The way Edward would play piano just a little more impressively when she was in earshot. How Carlisle would laugh at a passage in his novel and then silently pass over the book to her to read. The way Edward bounded up the stairs two at a time when he got home from school, anxious to tell her about his day. The way they both listened intently to her own stories. Made a point of asking for her input, even on mundane subjects. How practically giddy they were to teach her baseball. The comfortable routine the three had fallen into. All sitting near the fire in silence, Edward at the piano or sprawled on the floor. Carlisle reading on the couch. Her sketching in the armchair they had moved near the window, simply because she liked the view. Yes, she was sure she was loved and she need not say it.

It was in one of those mundane nights she had that silent realization. She smiled to herself once she realized she had somehow filled her page with sketches of those she loved so dearly. Her son’s little fist was drawn with loose detail and intense care. Sketch Carlisle, drawn with careful precision, was reading just like the real Carlisle, lounged on the couch in the front of her. While Sketch Edward, who was drawn hastily since his counterpart was always fidgeting, was smirking to himself. She smiled as she looked up to find real Edward was as well. He kept his eyes on the piano as he switched out his sheet music as he said, “I love you too, Esme.” She looked back to her page, smiling. What a world of difference that one word made. Too.

#esme cullen #carlisle cullen #edward cullen #twilight #twilight renaissance #twilight fanfiction #tw abuse #tw infant death #i haven't written since march 2020 and the first thing I write is twilight fanfiction #trust me i hate that i did this more than you #hopeless romantic #my stories

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qvid-pro-qvo · 4 years

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Hello sweetie. May I have 7) “I dreamt about you last night.”, 14) “Can I have this dance?”, “I couldn’t live without you.” and “I’m yours, in every way possible.” with Sonny Carisi (I'm heads over heels for that man) with female reader, please. Thanks :) - @reading--mermaid

for @reading--mermaid. sonny carisi x female!reader.

word count: 2240

rating: e for everyone, because a wedding brings everyone together, for better or for worse, but in this case definitely for the better (pretty much fluff! tw: mentions of alcohol.)

For the moment, you remember why you wish you could be an only child.

“You’re bringing your boyfriend. No ifs, ands, or buts about it.”

“You know, when I dreamt about you last night, I completely forgot about the part where you’re absolutely insane,” you comment mildly. Your hand reaches for your glass, and Jane just sighs. “Guess it just slipped my mind.”

“Uh-huh. So he’s coming, then?”

Your sister is glaring at you from across the table, but you don’t look at her, focusing instead on the brunch menu.

“Seems like I might try the scallops today,” you hum, and she just rolls her eyes.

“You’re allergic to seafood, dumbass, and you’re bringing your boyfriend.”

“No, I’m not, Jane.” Your voice is firm, and when she narrows her eyes at you, it’s your turn to give the dramatic roll. “Look. I don’t want to bring him. Barb’s my friend, and I love her, and I’m excited for her, but that wedding is going to be shitshow. The last thing I want is to scare him off because dear old Uncle Phil decides to get too rowdy and Aunt Julia decides to drink two bottles of wine instead of one at the reception.”

“That’s just how weddings work,” Jane counters, and when you open your mouth again to argue, she raises her hand. “It’s a shitshow, but it’s sweet. You’re a bridesmaid, sweetheart. And unless you want one of the bridal party trying to flirt with you all night, your boyfriend is the perfect protection. Plus, I want to meet him!”

With a sigh, you lift up your hand to tie your hair back, your scrunchie forcing the mess into a bun. “You’ve met him,” you say, with no lack of petulance, but Jane just sighs.

“Once. For like, ten minutes, in passing. You’re both always busy, and not only that, but I know Mom and Dad wouldn’t mind meeting the guy that you’re basically swooning over every time you talk to them on the phone. How long’s it been that you’ve been gushing about him? A year?”

That makes your brows raise, and Jane can surely see them even over the menu. “They’re coming, then? For sure?”

“For sure. Uncle Phil paid for their flight. Said he wanted the whole family there, and that means every brother they can manage.” There’s a moment of silence as Jane glances around. The waiter still hasn’t come for your order, and so she busies herself with a drink of water before speaking again, letting you ruminate on the fact. “Just. Think about it. Please? For me?”

So, you do. You think. And while the prospect of Sonny meeting your… eclectic family is terrifying; you can’t help but think that he’s… well. He’s Sonny. And when you think about him meeting your parents, finally…

With a sigh, you put down the menu, interlock your fingers, and when you look up, your sister is flashing her puppy eyes at you.

“Fine. Fine! I’ll ask. And if he’s not busy, which he always is, I’ll bring him,” you relent, just to get her to stop looking at you like that. There are practically tears in her eyes. Immediately she breaks out into a grin, a little cackle added on. “But you owe me the name of your firstborn. I don’t care what David says, sister’s honor.”

“No shit,” Jane returns. You shake on it, making you chuckle. “Easiest deal I’ve ever made.”

Sonny says yes. Immediately. No hesitation. It’s a testament to how fantastic he is that when you bring it up over takeout that night, he seems absolutely delighted at the prospect.

Of course, you try to warn him.

“You might not be available the day of,” you point out.

His response is easy as he takes off his jacket, drapes it over the back of your couch. “If you give me the date, I’ll take time off right now. Liv’ll be fine with it, you know that.”

“My parents will be there,” you warn, and while the moment gives him pause, he ends it with a smile.

“Good.”

Good. Good. To meeting the parents? You want to poke him, see if he’s an alien or something, but he’s still smiling and all you really can do is kiss him for it.

“You know, all of my family is a pain in the ass,” you state bluntly, a last ditch effort. He snorts, and you reach to stab him with your plastic fork, the takeout he brought home not yet opened up and dug into. “I’m serious! It’ll be a mess, okay, and if I can spare you that –“

He just chuckles, reaching to pull you into his embrace. You melt into it – by this point his button down is off, leaving just his undershirt. He smells like home, and you can’t help but sink into the feeling. “Sweetheart, that’s family. Trust me, all right? You’ve met my sisters, you’ve met my parents. It’s about time that I return the favor.”

When he kisses your temple, you’re realizing with a twist of your lips that he’s unfortunately pretty damn great.

“You know, you won’t be able to really talk to me until the first dances,” you tell him, just for shits and giggles, and that earns you another kiss, this one on your cheek, your neck, your jaw, behind your ear.

“But I’ll be able to see you.”

So, it’s done. The car is rented, the hotel is booked, and when the weekend of comes around, and the two of you hop into your car and make the three-hour ride up.

Of course, the wedding is about as much of a pain as you expected it to be.

It should be noted that you love being there for your cousin, and she looks absolutely stunning her gown. It’s not the gown, or your own dress (which is plain and deep burgundy, styled perfectly with a matching lip). It’s not the ceremony, which makes you tear up, as her and her wife seal the deal with a kiss that you hoot and holler at. It’s not the food or the drinks or the venue or anything else that came together for Barb’s perfect day.

It’s the family.

Aunt Julia goes just as hard as you expect her to. Uncle Phil’s jokes are crude, but… inevitably get a laugh from one side of the family or the other. Your nieces are chaos incarnate, and half your time as bridesmaid is spent wrangling the dog that was made the ring bearer, your bathrobe getting caught on every doorhandle in the place. By the time the reception comes around, you’re exhausted and close to tipping over, navigating the intricacies of a big family with poise and grace you’re sure God probably gave you just for that day or something.

It’s a mess.

It’s your mess.

And Sonny, that day? Well. Sonny… is Sonny.

Sonny helps you catch the dog the first time it escapes (and the second time, and the third time). Sonny, due to some last-minute stomach bug, ends up helping out as usher, and makes every single family member he escorts to their row and aisle and seat smile. Sonny, at his place at the table where your parents sit, spends the whole night chatting them up, and you and your sister at the table with the bride and groom, can only watch from a distance.

“He’s crushing it,” Jane tells you. David’s sitting there, too, and he’s also enraptured with your boyfriend. The weariness of the day starts to wear off, and now that the pictures are done the drink in front of you is white wine and your belly is full. “Don’t look now, but I think Dad’s writing the invitations for Thanksgiving.”

There’s a pride that fills you, then. It’s been coming the whole day, but in that moment, you feel like you’re about to burst. You’re grinning, and when he glances over to where you are, well.

“You know what? Let him,” you say, and your eyes don’t leave Sonny as he winks and goes back to his story. “He really is crushing it.”

Soon the meal is done. There’s cake, and laughter, and you watch as Barb shoves her piece into Meredith’s face with unbridled glee. At that point you look around for your boyfriend, but he’s nowhere to be found. Neither are your parents for that matter, and you’re sliding out of your heels so you can troll around, eating cake, looking around for them.

Eventually, though, they come back. It’s in the middle of the first dance when you feel the familiar presence behind you, and his hands move to wrap around your waist as you watch the brides sway together, the rest of their lives ahead of them.

“Just in time,” you tease. “I thought I’d have to go solo out there.”

He turns you, so your vision of the brides is now full of him. You haven’t got to linger on it yet, but right here and now, he looks stunning. While the men in the bridal parties have black suits, Sonny’s is a beautiful navy, with a pocket square that matches the color of your dress (you’re almost ninety percent sure it’s from that lawyer he knows, but you don’t bring it up, kind of hoping he’ll keep the full ensemble). “And keep the world from seeing my awesome dance moves? No way.”

You giggle. The wine, the meal, the end of the day approaching. You’re loose, and he’s smiling, which makes you grin. “Saw you dodging the chocolatey fingers of my nieces and baby cousins,” you point out, and his eyes widen for a second before he glances around, peeks over your shoulder.

“Yeah, just, uh, don’t tell ‘em where I am. I think it’s part of their game to see who gets the most fingerprints on me by the end of the night.”

The DJ announces the end of the first dance, welcoming the bridal parties onto the floor. Sonny lights up at this, and offers his hand to you. “Can I have this dance, beautiful?”

Your smile softens, just a tad. “I thought you’d never ask.”

The music is slow, but not glacial, and Sonny starts it off by holding you proper. Soon enough, though, you’re moving into each other, and your head is resting on his shoulder, the slow sway of the brides what you’re mimicking. It’s gentle, and sweet, and for the moment you allow yourself to close your eyes.

Everything else slips away. All that’s left is the music and Sonny against you. Your dress brushes against your feet, still bare and cold against the dance floor, but nothing can bring you out of this ecstasy.

His voice is low against your ear, almost raspy as the song fades into something new, and the DJ announces the rest of the group can join with their significant others. “You know, I had a good time with your parents,” he murmurs, and you laugh lazily against him.

“I noticed. Be careful, I think my mom was thinking of kidnapping you so you can tell her all the Carisi family recipes.”

“Now those are top secret,” he informs you, seriousness in his tone, and when you pull back to look at him there’s mirth, even with his little pout.

“Obviously. I’ll distract, and you’ll hit the road.”

He laughs now, and it’s easy. It’s like breathing, the two of you. “Right. Well. We did talk about other things, while I was ensuring the safety of my family’s legacy.”

That peaks your interest, and you raise a manicured brow. “Like what?”

For a moment, he pauses. He’s caught, looking at you, under the lights, and for a moment you think he’s not going to say anything at all. But then he leans in, presses your foreheads together, and the world stops.

“I told ‘em… I told ‘em I’m yours, in every way possible. I told ‘em how I couldn’t live without you, and I told ‘em how I don’t want to.”

Your breath catches in your throat, and when you blink a couple of tears fall. “Sonny…”

“I told them, how one day, I’m gonna propose, and I’m gonna ask you to marry me. And I told them, how I really, really, hope you say yes.” His voice is definitely raw, now, and your swallow is tight. “You don’t have to say anything right now. Of course not, I’m not proposing now, but. I just… I need you to know how much you mean to me. How much being a part of your family, how much it means to me. And… I hope you want to be a part of mine.”

The slow music ends. The DJ is cheering now, and the crowd is clapping, and soon something more upbeat starts. But you’re stopped, in the middle of the dance floor, and before you can think you’re pulling him into a deep kiss, pressing up into it on your toes.

When you pull back, your mascara is running. But you don’t care. You couldn’t possibly care less. “If you think I’m saying anything but yes, whenever the hell you ask me, Dominick, I –“

He kisses you again. And when the world fades away once more, it’s because the two of you know that your whole lives are ahead of you, too.

#prompt fill #sonny carisi x reader #sonny carisi #dominick carisi jr #female!reader #law and order: svu #my fic #fluff #tw alcohol #mentions of alcohol

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ofsketchings · 3 years

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flashback ; when she loved me...

Monday 15:24PM 09/08/2021

“I cannot think of anything worse than being in love with someone.” Lettie grumbled out loud to herself, sipping the bitter drink in her hand and sitting back on her sofa, staring at the text conversation between David and herself. What was once her excuse to dress up and throw a party had devolved into assuring him his boyfriend wouldn’t bolt the second he found out about the alter ego he harboured on stage. She wasn’t the best at pep talks on a good day, but pep talks about loving and secure relationships? She had never been in one, never even seen one, so how this was out of her comfort zone. One mention of the word “love” always sent her spiralling back to the time she believed in it, a time where she freely gave her heart away only for it to be crushed in the pretty manicured hands of her first and last real relationship.

Thursday 20:46PM 02/05/2013

Lettie didn’t mind attention, if anything, she basked in it. At sixteen, her rebellious stage had kicked in a hell of a lot quicker and harder than any of the other girls in her grade, hell, in her school. Even some of the seniors would never dare be as outspoken as she was. Perhaps, though, that was one of the perks of coming from a rich family and going to a private boarding school for girls - she could get away with it. Throughout her time at the school, she hadn’t exactly been popular. Sure, she was pretty and self assured, but her wealthy background as the step-daughter of a CEO hadn’t made her many friends. In fact, combined with her personality, it made her public enemy number one.

There was only one person Lettie knew didn’t care about any of that, one person who had only ever been kind - Tabitha.

Tabitha Lomax was a grade above her and beloved by many. In truth, she was perfect; good at sports, smart, obedient and charming to boot, not to mention drop dead gorgeous. The first time she acknowledged Lettie’s presence, she damn near fainted. Smiles in the corridors turned to greetings, then conversations at dinner until one fateful night, the elder asked her to join her on the roof. Happily, she agreed, and that night she had not only her first kiss but the night she gained better understanding of her own bisexuality. Before, she just thought girls were pretty, but now? This was a whole new ballpark.

From then on, the two girls remained in a secret relationship, consisting of sneaking into each others’ dorms and breaking no end of rules just to see each other. Tabitha told her their relationship would not be taken well by the faculty and could even result in their expulsion.

“You may be off the hook,” Tabitha said one night on her way out of Lettie’s room, tucking a fiery piece of hair behind her girlfriend’s ear, “but I would certainly be kicked out… You wouldn’t want that, would you?”

No, she didn’t. And so, her affections were kept to herself in public, shown only around Tabitha’s friends - people they could trust.

Or so she thought.

Because now, here she was, centre of attention and despising it. Everyone was staring, whispering, pointing at her as she made her way through the crowds in search of her girlfriend. Something was off, she knew that from the weird feeling in her gut, but she soldiered on anyway, not wanting to break the promise she had made that she would be there. Tabitha had asked her to attend the senior graduation party the girls threw in secret every year, hiding away from their teachers in the old ballroom across the land, hidden in the overgrown forest. She had denied at first, saying it was only for seniors and she didn’t want to intrude on Tabby and her friends, but all it took was some watery blue eyes and a little begging, and Lettie was binding herself to her unknown fate.

Upon arrival, Lettie had been overjoyed. Her girlfriend was graduating, she would be leaving the school, and they could finally be together without the watchful eyes of their teachers and peers. No more sneaking around at night, no more hushed whispers and quick moments between classes. They could finally be a real couple.

Finding her had been difficult but the second she spotted the brunette, she was practically running towards her. All thoughts of the staring and judging were swept aside as she reached the older girl, a megawatt grin stretched across her face.

“Sorry I’m late, matron was out to get me today, I swear.”

Suddenly, Tabitha looked uncomfortable, and less than pleased to see her. “Oh… It’s alright I just… Didn’t think you’d actually come.”

“Why not?” Lettie tilted her head to one side slightly, a frown pulling at her brow. “You asked me to be here and I promised, so here I am!” She held her arms out and shook her hands, as if to say ‘ta-dah!’. Tabitha did not look impressed, if anything, she looked more upset than she did ten seconds ago. Almost… guilty.

“...Colette, you shouldn’t have come. I shouldn’t have asked you to-” Tabitha’s voice was low, soft, meant to be comforting but something about it made her stomach twist in apprehension.

It was wrong. All of it was wrong. The staring, the whispering, her voice, the guilt, all of it was wrong.

“What’s… What’s going on?”

“Well, well, well, look what the Tabby cat dragged in.”

Patricia was as mean as they came, entitled and vain, she ruled over everyone without a care in the world of what they thought. Love her or loathe her, everyone listened to Patricia Weston. She didn’t have to push her way through the crowds - people just moved, and if Lettie didn’t know any better, she’d say she was floating. God, she hated her.

“You look a little too happy.” Lettie wasn’t sure what part of her face gave the impression that she was happy, but clearly it wasn’t miserable enough for the bitch. “I’m guessing she hasn’t told you yet? Well, don’t let me keep you.”

Slowly, without bothering to respond as she usually would, Lettie turned back to her girlfriend with confusion written all over her face. It only got worse to see Tabby staring back at her with indifference..

“God, you’re so stupid.”

“What?” It was all she could manage to push out of her mouth - it was too hard to breathe.

By now, the whole room had gathered around them, peeking over each other's shoulders and standing on their toes to see the confrontation of the year finally come about. Some girls were filming it on the phones they had smuggled in. Everyone seemed to be holding their breath for the moment the penny would drop for poor little Colette Sharp.

“It wasn’t real, Lettie. Any of it.” At least Tabitha had the decency to mock a sympathetic expression. “Trish didn’t like you, thought you needed to be knocked down a peg or two. I agreed. She said that you were too well protected by your background for the… traditional route.”

The sinking feeling in her stomach continued to weigh heavier the more Tabitha spoke. All the times she had been put in detention or isolation for things she should have been expelled for, all the times she had been let off because of her connections popped up briefly in her head. No wonder everyone hated her.

“So when she noticed that you seemed to like me, she approached me. Of course, I was in straight away. I always thought you were self-involved and defiant and I hated that. I hated you.”

“Stop.” Lettie shook her head, starting to back away instead of just standing there and blinking like a deer in headlights, but the crowd wouldn’t let her. She tried to get Tabitha to stop talking but it seemed that a nod from Patricia was all she needed to continue.

“You were so naïve. You believed me when I said I liked you, you let me do as I pleased, and it felt good. You were at my beck and call, you’d do anything for me. It was fun, to see you practically on your knees for once, instead of holding your influence over the rest of us like some sort of fragile royalty, a spoiled little princess acting out for attention. This time, it was me, I held the power… And you never realised.”

No doubt, the look on her face must have been priceless to everyone watching, enraptured by the real drama going on in front of them.

“You never realised it was fake, and that’s your own fault.”

The mob finally gave way as Lettie stumbled backwards, heart hammering in her ears and the blood rushing to her face. No one caught her as she tripped over her own feet, falling to the floor in her haste to get away. It was all wrong, the laughing, the sneering, the camera flashes. She had to get out of there.

She didn’t spare Tabitha a glance as she scrambled to find her footing, eyes diverted to the floor whilst pushing past people all over again, this time in even more haste and desperation. Her only goal was to get out of that suffocating room, her lungs constricting as she struggled to escape the cruel giggles and shoves from those surrounding her.

It was clear to her that everyone was enjoying this. The Invincible Lettie Sharp, shot down by love. What a sight.

The trip back to her room was too long, too far. Every turn of a corner she would’ve usually taken so carefully, she practically threw herself round, no longer giving a damn whether she got caught or not. Perhaps it would have been better if she was caught - maybe they’d finally expel her? Save her from the embarrassment she was about to go through every day for the next year. Unfortunately, she knew that was unlikely and she spent the night crying herself to sleep while her somewhat-ex partied it up with her friends and celebrated her downfall.

The next couple weeks were pure torture. Everywhere she went she was confronted with the videos and the pictures, the snapshots of the biggest heartbreak of her life. No one had any sympathy for her, no one seemed to care when they could laugh at her expense instead. Slowly but surely, her wayward streak dulled, along with her once-cheerful and humorous personality. She became blunt, fiercer than before and determined to protect herself from further harm.

The ridicule continued until she graduated, everyone remembering the time the biggest rebel the school had ever seen was knocked on her ass and forced to settle down.

The experience was something she swore she would never talk about - it was easier for people to think she simply preferred lazy hook-ups and flirting at bars. People didn’t insist she was broken this way. Even now, eight years later, the very thought of a relationship set a bitter taste in her mouth.

Monday 15:36PM 09/08/2021

She tossed her phone to the side, unwilling to reply to David just yet, and pulled her blanket around her tighter. The documentary Minjoon insisted she watch played in the background but she paid no attention as her thoughts wandered. Who needs love anyway, at least, in the romantic sense? She had her friends. She had Minjoon and Joongki who always made sure she ate because she was truly terrible at it. She had Ezra and Finch, her favourite troublemakers. She had David, someone she knew she could always rely on no matter what. She had Hwan… She didn’t need anything else, anyone else.

Sighing heavily, she picked her phone up from the other side of the sofa and unlocking it, once again typing to convince David the world wasn’t going to end and that his boyfriend really did love him.

Not that she’d really know...

#— ✤ got my hopes up [about]#do you hear that? thats the sound of me breaking my own heart

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tawakkull · 3 years

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ISLAM 101: Spirituality in Islam: Part 27

Shukr (Thankfulness)

Literally meaning gladness felt about and gratitude shown for the good done to one, Sufis use shukr to mean using one’s body, abilities, feelings, and thoughts bestowed upon one to fulfill the purpose of his or her creation: being thankful to the Creator for what He has bestowed. Such thankfulness is to be reflected in the person’s actions or daily life, in speech and in the heart, by admitting that all things are directly from Him, and by feeling gratitude for them. One may thank God verbally by only depending upon His power and strength, as well as upon His bestowal or withholding of favors, and acknowledging that all good and bounties come from Him. As He alone creates all good, beauty, and bounty, as well as the means by which they can be obtained, only He sends them at the appropriate time.

Since He alone determines, apportions, creates, and spreads [all our provisions] before us as “heavenly tables,” He alone deserves our gratitude and thanks. Attributing our attainment of His bounties to our own or to another’s means or causes, in effect thereby proclaiming that He is not the true Owner, Creator, and Giver of all bounty, is like giving a huge tip to the servant who lays before us a magnificent table and ignoring the host who is responsible for having it prepared and sent to us. Such an attitude reflects sheer ignorance and ingratitude, as mentioned in: They know only the outward face of the life of the world (apparent to them), and they are completely unaware of (its face looking to) the Hereafter (30:7).

True thankfulness in one’s heart is manifested through the conviction and acknowledgment that all bounties are from God, and then ordering one’s life accordingly. One can thank God verbally and through one’s daily life only if personally convinced, and if one willingly acknowledges that his or her existence, life, body, physical appearance, and all abilities and accomplishments are from God, as are all of the bounties obtained and consumed. This is stated in: Do you not see that God has made serviceable unto you whatsoever is in the skies and whatsoever is in the earth, and has loaded you with His bounties seen or unseen? (31:20), and: He gives you of all that you ask Him; and if you reckon the bounties of God, you can never count them (14:34).

Bodily thankfulness is possible by using one’s organs, faculties, and abilities for the purposes for which they were created, and in performing the duties of servanthood falling on each. On the other hand, some have stated that verbal thankfulness means daily recitation of portions of the Qur'an, prayers, supplications, and God’s Names. Thankfulness by the heart means that one is certain or convinced of the truth of the Islamic faith and straightforwardness. Practical or bodily thankfulness, according to others, means observing all acts of worship. Since thankfulness relates directly to all aspects or branches of belief and worship, it is regarded as half of the faith. With respect to this inclusiveness, it is considered together with patience, meaning that according to some people, thankfulness and patience are considered as the two halves of religious life.

In His eternal Speech, God Almighty repeatedly commands thankfulness and, as in the phrases so that you may give thanks (2:52) and God will reward the thankful (3:144), presents it as the purpose of creation and of sending religion. In such verses as: If you are thankful I will add more unto you. But if you show ingratitude My punishment is terrible indeed (14:7), He has promised abundant reward to the thankful and threatened the ungrateful with a terrible punishment. One of His own Names is the All-Thanking, which shows us that the way to obtain all bounties or favors is through thankfulness, which He returns with abundant reward. He exalts the Prophets Abraham and Noah, upon them be peace, saying: (Abraham was) thankful for His bounties (16:121) and Assuredly, he (Noah) was a grateful servant (17:3).

Although thankfulness is a religious act of great importance and significant “capital,” few people truly do it: Few of My servants are thankful (34:13). Very few people live in full awareness of the duty of thankfulness, saying: Shall I not be a servant grateful (to my Lord)?, and try their best to perform their duty of thankfulness and order their lives accordingly.

The glory of humanity, upon him be peace and blessings, whose soles swelled because of his long supererogatory prayer vigils (tahajjud), was a matchless hero of thankfulness. On one occasion, he told his wife ‘A'isha: Shall I not be a servant grateful to God? He always thanked God and recommended thankfulness to his followers, and prayed to God every morning and evening, saying: O God. Help me mention You, thank You, and worship You in the best way possible.114

Thankfulness is the deep gratitude and devotion of one who, receiving His bounties or favors, directs these feelings toward the One Who bestows such blessing, and the subsequent turning to Him in love, appreciation, and acknowledgment. The above Prophetic saying expresses this most directly.

People are thankful for many things: the provisions, home, and family with which they have been favored; wealth and health; belief, knowledge of God, and the spiritual pleasures bestowed on them; and the consciousness with which God favored them so they could open themselves to the knowledge that they must be thankful. If those who are thankful for such a consciousness use their helplessness and destitution as “capital” and thank Him continuously, they will be among the truly thankful. It is narrated from God’s Messenger, upon him be peace and blessings, that

The Prophet David, upon him be peace, asked God Almighty: O Lord. How can I be thankful to You, since thanking You is another favor that requires thankfulness? The Almighty responded: Just now you have done it.

I think this is what is expressed in: We have not been able to thank You as thanking You requires, O All-Thanked One.

One can be thankful by recognizing and appreciating Divine favors, for feeling gratitude to the One Who bestows favors depends to a great extent on due recognition and appreciation of them. Belief and Islam (including the Qur'an) lead one to recognize and appreciate favors and thus turn to God in gratitude. One can be more aware of these favors, and that they are given to us by God out of His mercy for our helplessness and inability to meet our own needs, in the light of belief and Islamic practices. This awareness urges us to praise the One Who bestows upon us those favors and bounties that we consume. Awakening to the meaning of: As for the favor of Your Lord, proclaim it (93:11), we feel a deep need to be grateful and thankful.

Everyone is naturally inclined to praise the good and the one who does good to him or her. However, until this feeling is aroused there is no awareness of being favored by someone else, just as fish are not conscious of living in water. Furthermore, these favors may be attributed to the means and causes used to obtain them. If it is blindness and deafness not to see and appreciate the favors we continuously receive, then it must be an unforgivable deviation to attribute them to various blind, deaf, and unfeeling means and causes. The Prophetic statements: One who does not thank for the little does not thank for the abundant, and: One who does not thank people does not thank God, express blindness and deafness to favors and remind us of the importance of being thankful. Such verses as: Mention Me so that I will mention you, and give thanks to Me and do not be ungrateful to Me (2:152), and: Worship Him and give Him thanks (29:17) tell us that it is God Who truly deserves to be thanked, and also remind us of His absolute Unity.

Thankfulness can be divided into three categories. The first category consists of thankfulness for those things that everyone, regardless of religion or spiritual attainment, desires. The second category consists of thankfulness for those things that, although apparently disagreeable or displeasing, reveal their true nature to those who can see them as favors requiring gratitude.

The third category of thankfulness is that kind performed by those who are loved by God and view favors or bounties from the perspective of the One Who bestows them. They spend their lives in spiritual pleasure that begins in observing God’s manifestation of Himself through His favors, and take the greatest pleasure in worshipping Him. Although they are always enraptured with the spiritual delight flowing from their love of Him, they are extremely careful of their relationship with Him. Such people constantly strive to preserve the Divine blessings that have been bestowed upon them, and always search for what they have missed. While they constantly deepen their belief, love, and gratitude along the way toward Him, the “nets of their sight” are filled with different blessings and gifts.

O God! Include us among Your servants whom You love, have made sincere, and have brought unto You. Grant peace and blessings to our Master, the Master of those loved, made sincere, and brought near unto You.

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brasskier · 4 years

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Chapter 3 of my modern AU holiday fic series is up, and this one is the much-anticipated Jewish!Ciri chapter.

Hanukkah 2018, or The One Where Jaskier Conquers Judaism (A Year in Review): When Jaskier discovers Ciri's birth mother is Jewish, he's determined to help her keep in touch with her heritage. He tries - and oftentimes fails - throughout the year to provide her this connection. Maybe he'll finally get it right for Hanukkah.

Find it on my ao3, or keep reading below the cut:

It all began with an offhand comment from Geralt not long before the new year. It was burger night, one of the few nights Geralt was actually around to cook. Most evenings Yennefer prepared dinner, or else they were left with one of the handful of dishes Jaskier could reliably not burn. And when he called into the living room for everyone's cheese preference - cheddar for Jaskier, pepper jack for Yen - Ciri had asked for a slice of American on hers. And Geralt had huffed a laugh, bemusedly muttered,

"That's not kosher." And for whatever reason, the statement attracted Jaskier like a moth to light. Before Geralt knew what was happening he'd flitted into the kitchen, pressed his elbows on the island counter and leaned forward.

"What's not kosher?" It sounded like an innocent enough question, but the shit-eating smirk on Jaskier's face said otherwise.

"Cheeseburgers," Geralt shrugged, returning his attention to the stove. Jaskier raised an eyebrow, dropped his chin into his hands. "Her mother was Jewish. Clearly not that Jewish, though."

"Huh." And that was the end of the conversation, except the wheels were already spinning in Jaskier's head. He knew very little about Judaism, but he did know it was matrilineal, making Ciri, by birth, a Jew. And, just like that, Jaskier had found his new year's resolution.

Jaskier was by no means a religious man. He loved his Hallmark holiday Christmas, but that was about the extent of it. He was certainly not a Jew. But how hard could it be, he figured. If he found a way to celebrate Christmas and Easter without really knowing what he was doing, he could surely find a way to give Ciri a slice of her heritage.

Shabbat seemed like a reasonable place to start. Light some candles on Friday night, take a much-needed break from tech, have some challah. Except, Jaskier was no ordinary parent; he was going to go above and beyond for his lion cub and bake his own challah.

This was mistake number one.

The challah caught fire in the oven. He only had a split second to react before that godforsaken fire alarm went blaring, sending Yennefer trudging down the stairs to inspect the situation. Thank god Ciri's school let out later than the high school. He yanked the charred bread from the oven, sustaining a neat little burn on the inside of his wrist that he'd have to find an excuse to explain away later.

"I'm going to try again," he declared, more to himself than anyone else, his wrist held under the running faucet. Yennefer shook her head, busying herself rummaging through their first-aid kit.

"You're no cook, Jask." She turned the faucet, dabbed carefully at his arm with a paper towel. "Just go to the store and buy one. Ciri won't know the difference." His face fell, and he rubbed at his jaw with his free hand.

"But I will." She spread a glop of antibiotic ointment over the wound, trying her best not to scratch him with vampire-red nails.

"You better not burn the house down," was all she had left to add, smoothing the band-aid over his skin.

The second challah (mistake number two), thankfully, did not catch fire. It did, however, refuse to rise, remaining a goopy mess in the bottom of the pan. Yennefer shuffled back through the kitchen again, presumably just to tease him further. A quick glance at the clock informed him he had just enough time for a third try before Ciri came careening in from the bus. Yennefer not-so-subtly recommended he go to the store yet again.

The third challah (mistake number three) did not catch fire. It didn't refuse to rise, either. Instead, it simply exploded, sending half-baked shards of bread splattering all over the interior of their oven. Geralt was going to kill him. Hell, he still didn't have a challah to show for his labors, and Ciri was going to kill him. With a beleaguered sigh, he shuffled on his coat, yanked his keys from their hook in the foyer, and called up to Yennefer that he was running to the store.

After nearly wrecking his car in a race against the school bus and almost cracking his head open on the counter in a dash to make it to the kitchen, Jaskier finally had a beautiful, golden-brown challah waiting on the table. Well, actually, two challahs. He wasn't sure if he should get the regular one or the kind with raisins and, not wanting to mess up any more than he already had, he bought both just to be safe.

He wasn't sure the hug Ciri flung herself into when she caught sight of the rolls waiting for her was well-deserved, but he found his voice wavering with the threat of tears anyway as he stumbled through the blessings over the candles. On the bright side, Kiddush was a fantastic excuse for a glass of wine. With a joyful b'tayavon, they tore into the challah. Yen was right; Ciri didn't know the difference.

Purim was early in 2018, on the first of March. This was, admittedly, something he knew very little about. But he did know that there were services for Purim, so he perused Google until he found a nearby synagogue that welcomed non-members. Perhaps it would've been better advised to reach out ahead of time, but Jaskier was never really one to plan in advance.

This was mistake number four.

He dug out one of the suits he reserved for parent-teacher conferences, enlisted Yennefer's help in wrestling Ciri into a sparkly yellow dress with more ties and zippers than Jaskier knew what to do with (mistake number five), and loaded her into the car before heading off. The first thing he noticed upon crossing the threshold was the costumes. A Batman sprinted past him, followed by an Optimus Prime, while a Princess Anna shouted after them. He glanced from the costumed children, down to his dolled up lion cub, and then back up. Fuck. A sympathetic father wriggled away from his wife and approached him, sticking out a hand for Jaskier to shake.

"You're new, aren't you?" He asked, and Jaskier nodded slowly.

"She, uh… her mom's Jewish," he muttered, tilting his head towards Ciri. She beamed up at the man.

"Papa is learning how to be Jewish for me because Momma celebrates Diwali and Daddy doesn't like holidays," she declared, and Jaskier tightened his grip on her hand. He was humiliated enough as it was; the last thing he needed was to explain his unusual family arrangement to a total stranger. The man quirked an eyebrow at her before returning his attention to Jaskier.

"She's a charmer, isn't she?" He laughed before gesturing towards a redheaded little girl around Ciri's age in a Wonder Woman costume. "That's my little girl, Eliana." Jaskier breathed a sigh of relief.

"This is Ciri." She waved up at them with her free hand. "And I'm Jaskier."

"David." Jaskier shook his hand again, not really certain whether he'd already done so. "Well, I think it's awfully sweet that you're trying to learn for her. But for future reference, the kids usually wear costumes." Jaskier wanted to ask whether that applied strictly to Purim or services in general, but didn't care to embarrass himself further.

The service itself was not terribly long, which was a blessing, because it was entirely in Hebrew. Ciri, for what it's worth, seemed more entertained than him, enraptured by the opportunity to make as much noise as possible at the antagonist, Haman's, name. On the bright side, they got plenty of hamantaschen afterwards, and Jaskier was very grateful that he hadn't had the thought to try to bake them on his own.

Jaskier didn't know much about Jewish holidays, but he did know that Passover was pretty important, and that it was his opportunity to really test his mettle. It was perfect; he loved to entertain, and what was a Seder but one big dinner party. Valdo Marx, his distressingly put-together PTA arch-nemesis/band director of his biggest rival high school, had extended him an invitation to his massive yearly Seder, because "it's tradition to invite literally anyone ." Jaskier refused.

This was mistake number six.

The occasion started to unravel when he found out his parents couldn't make it, but he pressed on anyway (mistake number seven). He decided to cook for the occasion (mistakes number eight through twelve), but the matzo balls came out soggy and underdone, he cut himself slicing apples for charoset, the brisket ended up overcooked and rubbery, his potato kugel was a bland, tasteless mess, and he even managed to mess up hard-boiled eggs. No matter, he could surely just go to the store. But then Yennefer texted that she'd gotten caught up in City Hall and wouldn't make it back in time, and Geralt had work that night, and two did not a Seder make.

Jaskier tucked his tail between his legs and texted Valdo to belatedly take up his invitation. Along the way he ran in for a bottle of Manischewitz (mistake number thirteen). At least he'd checked the internet to make sure Ciri didn't need to be in costume for this holiday. Valdo leered at the bottle of wine he shoved into his hands as he shuffled through the door with Ciri in tow. Go figure, on the table sat an array of much more expensive (and tasty) wines.

When it came time to recite the Ma Nishtana , Valdo scanned the room before his gaze settled on Jaskier and Ciri tucked away in the corner.

"Cirilla," he asked, "how old are you?"

"Seven!" She provided eagerly, and Jaskier decided he needed to have a conversation with her when they got home about how it's sometimes okay to lie, actually.

"That makes you the youngest child," Valdo continued. "Go for it." Ciri, very clearly, wasn't all too sure what exactly she was supposed to be going for, and Jaskier's heart sank. "The four questions?" Valdo elaborated, as if that would be of any help. At her continued and increasingly distressed silence, Valdo set his sights on Jaskier. "Tell me you didn't forget to teach her the four questions." (Mistake number fourteen.) Jaskier shrunk back in his seat, guilt drawn across his face. He leaned to the side and whispered into Ciri's ear.

"I'll do it with you, okay?" She rubbed at the tears forming in her eyes with a small fist.

"You're not a kid," she argued back.

"Your Dad begs to differ," he laughed, tracing the transliterated text with his finger. "Come on. Let's do it together." She nodded meekly, and let her voice fall under his as they stiltedly recited the four questions.

Valdo was onto him and his abject failure as a parent, and if he hadn't been already, Jaskier was sure of it when Valdo interrupted himself just towards the end of the Seder and gestured to him.

"My dearest Jaskier here is an esteemed colleague of mine." His words dripped with sarcasm, and Jaskier felt very small. "A fellow music educator." He raised his glass as if making a toast. "Jaskier, why don't you treat us to that impeccable voice of yours and lead us in Dayenu?" He tried to escape, he really did.

"My concentration was in trombone, you know. Not choir, like our marvelous host." Oh, but Valdo insists he has a beautiful voice (which he does , thank you very much.) "I haven't gotten to warm up." No matter, Valdo assures him. Take your time. "I think I might be coming down with something." Well then he should be in bed, shouldn't he, the poor dear, Valdo interjects. Finally, Valdo's uncanny ability to shoot down every last excuse outpaces his capacity to wrack his brain for them. Thank god for the musical notation printed with both Hebrew and transliteration, and thank god for years of sight-reading practice. He hobbles his way through it, and Ciri buries her head in his side.

The Seder is not a total bust. For one, if someone had told Jaskier a minimum of four glasses of wine were in order, he would've converted a long time ago. Second, Valdo is actually a good cook ( damn him ), and his matzo balls are round and fluffy. Third, Ciri found the afikomen and all of Jaskier's transgressions were swiftly forgotten. She was asleep in her car seat before he'd even pulled out of Valdo's driveway. He decides to write the evening off as a wash and vows to do better next year.

Rosh Hashanah is the next holiday to roll around that he thinks is significant enough to bother with. And it's simple enough, right? Some challah, apples and honey, a few blessings? He can surely do that. Hell, how could he mess it up?

He entirely writes off the prospect of baking his own challah and picks up one of those beautiful, braided loaves the day before. Unfortunately, no one at the kosher bakery thought to warn him that Rosh Hashanah challah should be round, so he has to run back to the store and get another one the next morning (mistake number fifteen).

He cuts himself slicing the apples. Again. (Mistake number sixteen.) Perhaps, Geralt warns him, his knife privileges should be revoked. Except, this time, the cut won't stop bleeding. Spending Rosh Hashanah in the ER with Yennefer mercilessly teasing him the whole way through had not been part of his plans. Six stitches later, Yen swings by the grocery store and picks up a pack of pre-sliced apples on their way home while Jaskier slips in and out of sleep in the passenger's seat, and prays Geralt hasn't put Ciri to bed yet.

Ciri is wide awake when he sheepishly steps through the front door, curled up with Geralt on the couch and already in her pajamas. He leans over the two, plants a kiss on each of their foreheads.

"Sorry, princess," he muttered, slumping onto the couch next to her. She smiled, wriggled free from Geralt's arm and pressed against his chest. "So much for Rosh Hashanah."

"It's okay." She tugged at his hand. "Can I see it?" She asked, gesturing towards the bulky bandage wrapped around his left hand. He held it out for her to inspect while Geralt reminded her to be gentle. "Did it hurt?" He couldn't help but laugh.

"It did. Which is why we don't let you use the big knife." And why Jaskier also probably shouldn't be allowed to use it either.

"Who said Rosh Hashanah had to be cancelled?" Yennefer emerged from the kitchen with a plate full of sliced apples, round challah, and honey, shifting onto the couch next to Geralt. Ciri leapt up, elbowing both Geralt and Jaskier in the process, and devoured the plate eagerly. Maybe it wasn't entirely a bust, after all. Just no more apple slicing moving forward.

Yom Kippur is a big deal. Like, a really big deal, and very serious. Jaskier knows it's not exactly the holiday Ciri is looking forward to, but he has to prove he's serious. It's very important. So, he decides they're going to services.

This was mistake number seventeen.

Step one is waking up at the crack of dawn, dragging himself out of bed, and making an entire pot of coffee before he remembers he's supposed to be fasting (mistake number eighteen) and can't actually drink it. Step two requires digging the suit up again and stopping Yen on her way out the door so she can fix his tie. Step three is to rouse Ciri, singlehandedly deal with the inevitable meltdown that accompanies waking an eight-year-old early on a day off from school (mistake number nineteen), and enviously watch her devour breakfast before the inevitable battle of getting her into a dress.

The service is long . It is boring. It is entirely in Hebrew. And it is certainly not designed with hyperactive elementary schoolers (or their starving, restless parents) in mind. After the third time he thinks it's finally ending, only for the Rabbi to launch back into prayer again, Ciri starts to get especially antsy.

"I need to use the potty," she tells him urgently in that whisper-shout that is a trademark of youth. Fine, he can handle that. He shimmies her through rows of enraptured attendees, waits like a sentinel outside the door to the women's room, and then tiptoes back in.

"Papa, I'm hungry." Not exactly something to announce to a room full of people who can't eat, but so be it. Another hushed escape, a quick munch on the Goldfish he'd been smart enough to pack, and then their cautious reentry.

"Papa, I'm bored." There's not exactly much he can do about that, so he shuffled his phone out of his pocket as discretely as possible, makes absolutely certain the volume is off, and passes it off to her. Unfortunately, this is only a temporary solution, and she's squirming in her seat before long. "Papaaa, I'm reeeally bored."

"Just a little longer, lion cub," he assures her. He should've fled while he still had the chance to do so with dignity and grace, but he's sure it must nearly be done, and they can brave it out (mistake number twenty). This is, apparently, the very worst decision he could make. It is not, in fact, nearly done.

"Papaaa!" She's getting increasingly louder, wriggling around with increasing intensity. That heart-melting, will-bending pout of hers is drawn on her lips. This is decidedly not good. "I wanna go home!" That one was loud enough to turn a few heads, which means it's definitely time to go.

"Okay, okay," he attempts to placate her, "we're going now." But it's too late. The tears are coming.

"Now!" That one's nearly enough to grind the whole service to a halt. He does the only thing he can think to do: tuck her under his arm, scurry through the aisle, and run.

He feels dizzy and especially winded by the time they reach the car, and he's not exactly sure why. All he knows is that Ciri needs to please stop crying for a moment so he can catch his breath. It must be a Yom Kippur miracle (do those exist?) when she relents, jerking a hand free and placing it against his cheek.

"Are you okay?" Her voice is so tiny he nearly doesn't hear it.

"I'm fine, kiddo, just gimme a sec." He leans heavily back against the car, Ciri still clung around his chest. The dizziness passes just as quickly as it came on, and he hurries home eagerly, relieved when Ciri dozes in the back seat.

They cozy up on the couch while Geralt mows the lawn outside, and spend the rest of their day off watching a movie - Ciri's choice, which is Moana, no surprise. He's sick to death of the movie but he sings along with every last song anyway. Damn that Lin-Manuel Miranda can write a catchy tune.

Jaskier has all but forgotten about the earlier dizzy spell when the front door clicks open and a very sweaty Geralt parades inside, Yennefer, fresh home from work, on his heel. Which is why he really doesn't understand what's happening when he rises to greet them and the whole room tilts with him. He wavers, eyes squeezed shut and hand pressed against his face in a desperate attempt to will his head to stop spinning. It's no use, and before he can even go to sit back down he's careening forwards.

His eyes fluttered open to a sharp prick on his hand, a high-pitched beep, and a total stranger hovering over him. He startled, fighting to prop himself up in a sitting position, but a firm hand he recognized could only be Geralt's forced him back to the ground.

"The fuck's going on?" He managed to ask, and his own voice sounded oddly far away. He scanned the room for clues as to what could possibly be happening and settled on Yennefer's face just as she shot him a glare that he knew translated to watch your language.

"You passed out, Jask." Geralt, somewhere overhead and out of view. "Hit your head good on the coffee table." Well, that would explain the pounding headache.

"And he is…?" He gestured vaguely at the stranger only visible in his peripheral.

"An EMT, sir," the man supplied, shifting back into view and shining a flashlight in his eyes.

"Ah." He blinked reflexively, wincing at the fingers that firmly held his eye open. "You didn't have to call an ambulance, you know."

"I didn't." Of course Geralt didn't, the man would probably gladly perform an appendectomy in the back of the bar at which he worked. It had to be Yennefer.

"Wasn't me." He considered for a moment if she could read his mind or if he was accidentally saying everything aloud before shakily remembering that he had a betrayingly expressive face. Well, if it wasn't Geralt, and it wasn't Yennefer…

"They taught us at school to call 911 if there's ever an emergency," Ciri casually explained. He couldn't help but smile. His little lion cub looking out for him, it made him feel warm.

"Alright," the paramedic commandeered his attention, helping shift him upright and propping him against the couch. "You're not diabetic, correct?" He nodded, which was a mistake, because silver stars erupted in his vision. "Your blood pressure is a little on the low side and you're pretty hypoglycemic. When did you last eat?" Oh, yeah. Fuck .

"Last night? It's Yom Kippur, I'm fasting…" He felt thoroughly, indescribably humiliated. He tries to be a good dad/surrogate Jew, and this is what he gets. As they say, no good deed goes unpunished.

"Happy new year," the EMT offered earnestly. A bottle was pressed into his hand, and he shakily raised it to his lips and drank without even questioning it. Whatever it was, it was incredibly sweet. "Some fast-acting carbs and a good meal should sort that out, but I'd still recommend you go in, just to rule out a concussion." He sipped some more on the mystery beverage and was fully prepared to politely decline when he felt small arms wrap around his shoulder.

"Fine." The second Jewish holiday in a row spent in the ER, just what he wanted . He was going to start racking up frequent flier miles if he kept it up. And all three of them accompanied him, evidence enough that he'd clearly rattled them. At least the doctor was sympathetic, suggesting he eat a bigger meal later at night next year. (Which was giving Jaskier a lot of credit, assuming there would be a next time.) He typed out sub plans on his phone while he waited for the discharge paperwork, knowing full well he wasn't making it to work the next morning. On the bright side, he didn't have a concussion after all.

Hanukkah was his chance to finally get it right. It was Jewish Christmas, right? And he'd always been pretty good at Christmas, so surely he'd nail this one. He dug around a few shops until he found a menorah he was fond of - cast in gold and decorated with music notes and a big treble clef - and proudly set it on the kitchen counter. He even bothered to watch a few YouTube videos of the blessings over the candles, so he'd nail the melody. Finally, he had to buy gifts. Eight of them. For three people. So, twenty-four gifts. He perused the dollar store, the budget section at Target, and every clearance section he came upon until he'd collected every last gift. Even wrapped them in paper adorned with little menorahs and dreidels.

The first night finally rolled along, and he could hardly contain himself. Ciri, too, was bursting with excitement; apparently Hanukkah was the one holiday her mother ever really bothered to celebrate with her. He wedged the first candle in place, carefully lit the shamash candle, and managed to return it to its spot without burning the house down. He led them in the two blessings without so much as a crack in his voice - plus shehecheyanu, which was reserved for the first night only (if reformjudaism.org was to be trusted, which he was sure it was) - and breathed a sigh of relief when even Geralt knew better than to blow out the candles.

Gift-giving was always one of his favorite aspects of Christmas, so watching his family tear into his tiny presents and enjoying a warm embrace from each was easily his favorite part of the evening. They played a rousing few rounds of dreidel, in which Ciri inevitably won every last piece of gelt. The latkes he'd picked up at the kosher market were delicious, and this time it didn't even take Yennefer to convince him not to try cooking them from scratch. The final piece of the puzzle was the box of jelly donuts he'd hidden away from Geralt all day.

And yet. Something was wrong, he felt like something had to be missing. It made him uneasy. So he finally did what he probably should've done to begin with; he reached out to a Rabbi.

"Are you looking to convert?" He was not prepared for the first question from the Rabbi - an older fellow named Levi with a gentle smile and kind eyes.

"I don't think so. I'm not really sure what I'm looking for. Just to give my daughter a connection to her heritage, I guess." He'd been caught up in the personal mission of it all, but that was truly all that mattered. "We've always kind of been the spiritual-not-religious type, Christmas-Easter only. I was hoping there was something like that in Judaism, but there's so much history. It's hard to keep track." Levi nodded sympathetically.

"Judaism is beautiful because we are more than a religion - we are a people." He smiled fondly. "If you ask me, I don't think there's a wrong way to be a Jew."

"Then how do I know I'm doing enough?" That's all he really ever wanted, was to be enough. For Ciri, for Geralt and Yennefer, for his parents, for his students. "Which holidays do I celebrate? Is it okay if I can't bake my own challah? Do I really need to drag her to Yom Kippur services? Should she be Bat Mitzvah'd?"

"You ask a lot of questions, young man," he chuckled, and Jaskier felt his cheeks flush. "Is she happy?"

"Yes." That was at least an easy question to answer. Every step of the way, as overwhelmed and harried as he was, she was always a constant source of joy (or, at least, most of the time).

"Then there's your answer." There's his answer. Ciri is happy, and that's all that matters. Hanukkah 2018, it seems, was a success.

#the witcher #the witcher netflix #the witcher fanfic #the witcher fanfiction #the witcher modern au #geralt #geralt of rivia #yennefer #yennefer of vengerberg #jaskier #dandelion #julian alfred pankratz #ciri #princess cirilla #geraskefer #holiday fic #fanfiction #found family #jewish!ciri

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cluttermind · 4 years

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CS Father’s Day OS - “Of Love and Fathers”

Rating: G

Summary: A very fluffy Father’s Day one shot featuring Killian’s first Father’s Day!

Read on ao3 here

As usual, Killian woke at the crack of dawn and was at Hope’s side the second she stirred awake. Emma was sure he spent hours watching Hope sleep, hopelessly wrapped around her finger. If it was up to Killian, he wouldn’t spend a second apart from his baby girl. He could watch her curious blue eyes take in the world around her for the rest of his life and never tire of it.

In her nightstand, Emma has Killian’s first Father’s Day card right under the gift-wrapped box containing her gift to him. She and Mary Margret had a few - okay a lot - of laughs while attempting to shop for both Killian and her dad. The thought of buying Captain Hook, the pirate captain from the enchanted forest who spent much of his life in Neverland, a set of power tools nearly killed them. Really, purchasing them for him might have resulted in Killian killing himself. David, on the other hand, had taken up a few too many DIY projects around the farm. And as cliche as it is, Emma thought she’d get him some kinda power tool set thing. Honestly, she got him exactly what he had asked for because really what did Emma and Mary Margret know about power tools other than that David used them and that sometimes (read: often) they were loud. All this to say that Killian’s gift took a much longer time to figure out. Emma’s lucky it was ready in time for today.

Once soft sounds of a fussy baby start seeping through the baby monitor, Emma hears Killian’s gentle coos. “Good morning my little love.”

Emma giggles right along with Hope. Hearing the fearsome pirate captain coo to a baby in the sweetest voice imaginable still made her laugh a little. Slipping out of bed, she grabs her robe from the closet and makes her way to her husband and their daughter. Killian is leaning over the crib, tickling Hope’s belly telling her over and over again how pretty she is while she laughs at the ridiculous faces he’s making.

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

Nearly a year ago Emma was feeling particularly miserable to the point that Killian, at times, wanted to stab himself with his own hook just to stop her from screaming at him for just about everything. If she wasn’t testing his patience, she was throwing up or crying which hurt him in an entirely different way.

After a particularly grueling morning, Emma took the day off from work. In the quiet solitude of an empty house, her mind was clear enough to recognize what might be going on which, of course, led to more crying. Because they hadn’t talked about this. Because she wasn’t sure they were ready. Because she wanted this so desperately. Because part of her knew that in their conversations about the future, the unspoken meaning of “we” was “us and our children.”

So she took a test. And it was positive. And it took every fiber of being to not run down to the station and shower Killian in a million and more kisses.

When Killian got home that night, Emma was waiting for him in the living room with a pale yellow gift bag which might have confused him if he wasn’t so happy to see her smiling at him.

“Are you feeling better, love?”

“Much better,” Emma said, handing him the bag. “I have a surprise for you.”

Killian kissed her cheek as he took the bag from her. He pulled out a small white onesie with a blue anchor on it and read the text out loud. “Daddy’s little sailor?” He asked. Then it hit him and his eyes met hers. “Swan are you pregnant?” Killian asked softly, his voice barely a whisper as tears pooled in his eyes.

Emma nodded. “We’re having a baby.”

Killian swept her up in his arms, careful not to hurt her with his hook, and spun her around. When her feet touched the floor again he kissed her. She could taste his tears against his lips. His hand was still clutching the small item of clothing. “We’re having a baby,” Killian repeated. “I’m going to be a Papa.”

----------

“A shilling for your thoughts, love?” Killian’s voice pulls her out of her thoughts. He was cradling Hope, who was clutching Killian’s hook with her tiny hands, in his arms.

“I was just thinking about how wonderful you are with her.”

Killian grins, dipping his head to press his lips against Hope’s temple. “I never thought it was possible to love someone this much.” Hope’s wide eyes watch the way the morning sunshine dances on the shiny silver of Killian’s hook that now dons a rubber pink protector to keep Hope from hurting herself on the end of it.

Emma wraps her arms around his waist from behind, resting her cheek against the back of his shoulder. “Happy Father’s Day, Killian.”

Killian is genuinely confused. “Happy what?”

“Father’s Day.”

“Are you making up holidays now, Swan?”

Emma released him from her arms and moved to step in front of him to figure out if he’s joking with her or not. He’s not. “Have you never heard of Father’s Day?”

“No.” Killian sighs. “I never had a father worth celebrating.”

Emma tries to remember celebrating in years past but the first few Father’s Days here she spent alone with Mary Margret and David and when Killian came into her life he’d cover for them at the station so they can spend the day together. This time, a new deputy was covering so that Killian could enjoy the day as well.

“Well,” Emma starts, “remember when we celebrated Mother’s Day? This day is yours, babe. You’re a wonderful father and we love you so much.” Emma turns to Hope, tickling her belly. “Isn’t that right Hope? We love Daddy very much.” Hope giggles in response, causing Killian to smile.

“Daddy loves you too my little starfish.”

Emma kisses him softly. “We’re heading to my parents for a barbecue around 3 but the whole morning is yours. We can do whatever you want.”

Killian raises an eyebrow at her. “Whatever I want?”

Emma rolls her eyes. “Aye, Captain.”

He looks at Hope. “Want to spend the morning on the Jolly, little starfish?”

They spend the morning on the Jolly, enjoying some brunch and the sea breeze while the ship remained docked. They walk Hope around the whole ship as Killian talks incessantly about the ship and his adventures and Emma listens, enraptured as always by the way Killian tells a story (even ones she’s heard multiple times). He’s a real-life storybook character albeit with a more indecent past with the women he’s seduced and the people he’s killed and stolen from. She finds it amusing how he skips over those parts when he’s talking to Hope.

Truthfully, Killian’s biggest fear is still what Hope will think of him when she finds out. It’s impossible to hide his past when it’s written in Henry’s storybook. As many times as Emma reassures him that Hope will love him not matter what because he’s her daddy and she’s his starfish and he is absolutely brilliant with her, Emma knows this fear will be something he lives with for a long time.

Time flies as Killian recounts his adventures and soon it’s time to head over to see her parents. Henry, Robin, Regina and Roland beat them there and Henry and Roland are already sparring with David by the time they park the car. Mary Margret fawns over Hope, complaining that she doesn’t get to spend enough time with her beautiful grandbaby and Killian nearly frowns when she’s no longer in his arms. Robin greets Killian with a clap on the back

“I think it’s time for presents!” Mary Margret squeals after they have dinner on the back deck. Henry leaves with her to grab everything. Somehow the two of them manage to carry everything to the table and both David and Killian blush furiously.

“Mine first!” Henry says, handing David a large wrapped box. Inside was a new saddle blanket for David’s horse in Northeastern University red and white. After a bear hug from his grandfather, Henry handed Hook a red gift bag. “Happy Father’s Day, Hook.”

It took Killian a second to process what was happening. He would’ve cried if he didn’t have a reputation to maintain. “Thank you, mate.” Inside was a dark grey t-shirt with white and gold lettering that read “Northeastern Dad.” Pulling the shirt out of the bag and reading what it said, pushed Killian over the edge, a single tear slipping from the corner of his eye. He quickly stood and pulled Henry into a tight embrace. “Thank you.”

“Mom got a Northeastern Mom one when we were moving in. I thought it was time you had a matching one. Now you can both look equally embarrassing when you’re moving me in in August.”

Killian chuckled. “Don’t give her any -”

“That’s a BRILLIANT idea!” Emma squealed.

“Ideas.” Killian sighed as he finished his sentence, still smiling brightly at the family he now had, the family he had always wanted but never believed he deserved.

“Okay okay. It’s my turn.” Emma said. David opened the set of power tool things and proceeded to explain what he would use each tool and feature for. Finally, it was time for Emma to give Killian his gift. It was a small wrapped box, only slightly larger than the size of Killian’s hand. In the box is a pocket sundial. Since Killian refuses to wear a watch, Emma thought this would suit him more. It’s solid brass and with his name engraved on the outside and a photo of him and Hope from the first time they took her to the Jolly on the inside. “Happy Father’s Day, babe.” Killian looked up from the sundial to see Emma holding their daughter. His heart was suddenly filled with more love than he ever believed was possible for one man to feel.

Robin rested his hand on Killian’s shoulder. “Happy Father’s Day, mate. Isn’t it the best feeling in the world?”

Killian grinned at his friend. “Aye. Happy Father’s Day.”

Roland gave Robin a handmade card, which was quite possibly the most adorable thing in the world, and a new set of arrows that were hand painted fun colors (which were clearly a joint effort between Regina and Roland).

Mary Margret, as a joke, had t-shirts that said “Hot Dads of Storybrooke Crew” on them made for David, Robin, and Killian which elicited howls of laughter from all three of them when they opened them at the same time. Their last names were on the back, like a jersey, and their numbers reflected the order in which they became fathers - Nolan 01, Locksley 02, Jones 03. The rest of them roll their eyes at the men’s now even more inflated egos. Seconds after opening them, the “Hot Dads of Storybrooke Crew” plans to wear them together at Roland’s next soccer match. Town summer soccer matches turn into mini festivals with all different food being sold for fundraisers, music and dancing for the kids, and adult beverages for the parents.

Hope was fast asleep on the drive home and Emma was barely awake herself while Killian drove. He put Hope to sleep while Emma showered and got ready for bed. She read a bit of a book Killian had recommended to her while he did the same afterwards before climbing into bed.

“Emma?” Killian asks, rolling on his side to face her.

She knows by the look in his eyes that this is moving in a more serious direction. Killian clearly has something on his mind. Emma sets the book down and turns on her side to face him “What’s on your mind, Jones?”

Killian's hand rests on her hip. “I uhm -”

Not often does Killian get flustered, but now he was blushing furiously. “Talk to me, babe.” Emma cups his cheek, her thumb stroking soothingly.

“Have you thought about having another baby?” Killian whispers.

“Maybe.” Emma grins. “Have you?”

“Aye.” Killian returns her smile.

“And do you want another baby?”

Killian kisses her softly. “Aye, love.”

“Me too.” Emma rests her forehead against Killian’s. “Watching you with Hope has been the most incredible thing in the world, Killian. I love you with all my heart.”

“I love you, too. Always. To the end of the earth and time.”

#cs ff #cs fanfic #CS fic #Captain swan #killian jones #captain hook #emma swan #baby hope #of love and fathers

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sleepykittypaws · 4 years

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J.J. Jamieson Interview

A writer, producer and former network executive, J.J. Jamieson, has produced movies for Hallmark Channel, including all three Graceland movies (Christmas at Graceland, Wedding at Graceland and Christmas at Graceland: Home for the Holidays), and is now working with Bounce TV, writing both their 2019 original, Greyson Family Christmas, and this year’s Marry Me This Christmas, starring Brandon Jay McLaren and Gabrielle Graham.

Ahead of Marry Me This Christmas’ December 6th debut on Bounce (also available On Demand in Canada on December 8th), Jamieson was kind enough to take the time to talk from his Santa Monica home about what makes Christmas moviemaking special, and how Bounce’s latest holiday entry came together despite a global pandemic.

Q: How did you get involved in moviemaking?

A: I’m originally from Princeton, N.J. and way back in the late 1800s (laughs), I joined NBC as a page and eventually became an assistant in the movies and miniseries department, as that just happened to be where there was an opening, and then stayed there for the better part of a decade, eventually becoming a creative executive.

When I left NBC, I moved out here [to California], because show business is what I felt like I should be doing, and this is where show business is. I became a producer and worked for a variety of different companies, and sometimes for myself, and because movies and miniseries were what I knew, I occasionally worked on TV movies including—much to the horror of my children—one called Spring Break Shark Attack (laughs). You gotta pay the bills, right?

But, whatever you’re doing, my goal as a producer is to always to do the best with what you’re handed. Sometimes that turns out better than others, but the work is always the work, and you have to find that something that makes every project special.

A: How do you go from producing Spring Break Shark Attack to Hallmark movies?

Q: A friend of mine, Michael Larkin, a very accomplished creative producer, was working with Hallmark and said they needed a producer, someone to be the network’s eyes and ears on the ground, for a movie (Wedding of Dreams), and he couldn’t do it, so he said if they were really desperate, they could hire me (laughs).

Hallmark makes so many movies a year, their executives can’t be on set for the, usually, six weeks it takes to make them—three to prep, three to film—and then the edit, so they need someone on set to make sure everything is in alignment with the aesthetics of Hallmark.

…So, I did one movie with them, and then three more movies after that.

Q: What’s different about working on a Hallmark movie?

A: I’ve worked on a lot of different types of TV shows and movies, and have never been involved in anything else where there’s this fantastic love of the genre. People just love these movies.

I was shooting something in Tennessee, and struck up a conversation with this cop who was just sitting in his car, blocking the street while we were shooting outside, and he asked what we were filming, and when I said it was a Hallmark movie, his response was, ‘Oh, I love Hallmark movies,’ and I was thinking, ‘Really? You do?’

But he was serious. He was a fan. I think there are just a wide variety of people that these movies appeal to. Much broader than most imagine.

I think there’s comfort in the fact that when you sit down to watch, you know what you’re going to get. You’re going to get a happy ending, you know it’s all going to work out, and ‘What’s wrong with that?,’ as my niece, who is also a fan, said to me once.

When I think about why Hallmark movies are so popular, I think of a conversation I had once with a friend of my wife’s, an MBA, a very accomplished woman, and she watches these movies. When I asked her, ‘What is it about Hallmark movies that you find so enrapturing, when there’s usually so little conflict?’ She said to me: I don’t need conflict. I’ve got enough stress with the kids, stress with my ex-husband, stress at the office…I don’t need more stress. I want to sit down and watch something devoid of stress that feels good for the soul.

I think that’s the key, and I think it’s what Hallmark has tapped into, and the competition to emulate that is just fanatical, particularly with the Christmas movies.

Q: What do you think of the explosion of Christmas movies across the dial?

A: People want to be in this game. When every other cable channel’s ratings were falling, Hallmark was the only one going up. They were doing something right. They had tapped into something. Which I think is why Lifetime wants to do the same thing. I don’t think they have quite captured it, yet, but there’s also Netflix, doing it in a little bit of a different way. And then all these other channels, too, what, a dozen now? More? Producing their own [holiday] movies.

I’m shocked there’s not a saturation in the market, actually, because they keep on trying to spin that same wheel, but the appetite is obviously there, and I think there’s room, especially when you’re trying to do something a little bit different.

Q: How did you go from producing, to writing and producing, or in the case of Marry Me This Christmas, just writing? Are you a producer who writes, or a writer who also happens to produce?

A: It’s really a very different skill set, writers tend to be more introverted, more comfortable in front of a computer screen, because that’s mostly what writing is, just you in front of your computer, creating a world. Producing is more a job of management, making sure everyone shares the same vision of what the network wants.

To be a producer, is to be a generalist, and I guess I’m a generalist. I’m not a musician, but I can have a conversation with a composer and know enough to talk about what elements of a score I think a scene needs. I’m not a director, but know enough to see a scene and say, ‘Let’s try one that’s less big,’ or whatever. I’m not a cinematographer, but I can see where we might want to try a few more lights, so we don’t lose the actor in a scene.

Being a producer is an incredibly humbling job. One of my favorite parts of being on set is the first day. It always reminds me why I came out to Hollywood to do this. You’re surrounded by a team of experts, all of whom are brilliant at their specific job—the hair stylists, the makeup artists, lighting, sound…Every single one of them knows more about their jobs than I ever will, and you feel humbled by that. It makes one appreciative of the collaborative aspect of this art form. It’s nobody’s movie. It’s not the writers, or the producer’s, or the executives’, or even the director’s or actors’—every movie is a product of everyone who worked on it, and it’s all our movie.

I had a good friend who went from being a creative producer to being a line producer (NOTE: a line producer’s role is usually to manage the budget and act as an on-set human resources department; someone who puts out the inevitable fires that come up during filming), and I asked him, ‘But don’t you miss the creative side?’ And he said to me, ‘It’s all filmmaking. We’re all filmmakers and it’s all essential.’ I thought that was a lovely sentiment, and a testament to the overall teamwork nature of filmmaking. The people signing the checks in accounting are just as important as anyone else, because you can’t make the movie without them.

So, to finally answer your question, I think I’m more of a producer that also writes. A producer who spent enough time working with writers to get story ideas made, so that the idea of writing things myself began to feel realistic. And, so far, my record of giving my ideas to other writers, versus just me writing my ideas myself, has a pretty good percentage of getting things into production. The way I look at it, at least this way I have no one to blame but myself if something doesn’t work.

Q: How did you get involved with Bounce TV? And, for those like me who didn’t know Bounce even existed until last year, can you share a little about the network?

A: Sure, and you’re definitely not alone. Bounce is a sizeable basic cable and broadcast network, based in Atlanta. They’re in 94 million homes. They’re not in all markets yet, but that’s part of their mission, to increase their penetration and increase awareness.

I got involved because a good friend of mine that’s a talented producer and former Turner executive, David Hudson, moved from Santa Monica to Atlanta to oversee original programming for Bounce. His background is more in unscripted programming, so when Bounce decided they wanted more TV movies, he reached out to me and the first thing he said was that he needed a holiday picture for that same year.

Greyson Family Christmas was originally Greyson Family Thanksgiving. He gave me the premise—a family lives next door to each other, one more conservative, one more liberal, and the daughter brings home her white boyfriend for the holidays—and he needed a script. Given that it was so specific, I thought it would be easier if I just wrote it, which I did, and then worked as a producer on set during the shoot in Baton Rouge.

Q: Greyson Family Christmas ended up being one of my personal favorite movies of last season, and one thing I liked is that it was a little bit different. It wasn’t just a broad comedy or a straightforward holiday rom-com with little conflict.

A: Thank you, and we did try to make it about more than silliness. We wanted it to be light and fun, but also to say a little something about some of the very real things we wanted to address about race and family.

And we got so incredibly lucky with our cast, who were just amazing. Part of the trick of making a movie that has a lower budget, is doing what you can afford to do, and doing it well. Not stretching beyond what that budget allows. And we were very aware of that during production. With that incredibly short schedule—we shot Greyson in 12 days—and tight budget, you have to be.

Look, I know you can’t please everyone with these movies. I mean, some people hate Dickens and Hemingway—and I’m not saying Greyson is that, but I was really pleased with how the movie turned out, and think we had a great group working on it to make that happen.

We didn’t have a ton of money for publicity beyond the promos that aired on Bounce—no billboards, or things like that—but the cast was great at promoting Greyson on social media, and even with the tight timeline and everything else, it ended up being the highest-rated original movie in the history of the network.

Whenever you make a movie, you try to make it the best you can, and how it performs is really out of your hands in a lot of ways, but it sure is nice when you haven’t let down your network, and it was doubly important for me, given my friendship and fondness for David Hudson, who my kids all call Uncle David.

Greyson Family Christmas will be re-airing this December, so I really hope even more people get a chance to discover it, because it really was a labor of love for me, and the network and, really, everyone involved.

[NOTE: Bounce currently has encore airings of Greyson Family Christmas scheduled for December 6th, 11th, 18th and 24th.]

A: The latest Bounce original holiday movie, Marry Me This Christmas, debuts on December 6th, which you also wrote. Tell us a little about the movie, and the process of filming it during a global pandemic.

Q: I didn’t produce this one, mostly due to COVID, [which is also why] it was shot in Canada.

Tonally we were trying to go for something more like a dramedy—some comedy, but some real bit of business going on in the story.

I actually wrote this one a couple of years ago, not as a Christmas movie originally, and the whole idea is born out of the one joke at the end at the end of the first act, where she comes in to the pastor and says, ‘I know we haven’t known each other long, but you’ve become really important to me, and this may sound crazy, but I really want you to marry me,’ and this guy who has had a huge crush on her is all excited and says ‘Yes, yes,’ and her response is, ‘Great, my fiancé will be thrilled.’

That’s the joke, and it’s silly. It’s a dad joke, really, but the whole movie was built out from there, and as silly as that idea is, we wanted to explore what would really happen if this young pastor fell in love with someone engaged to someone else. To try to make believable, and be about something.

Q: Was that inherent element of faith something that came from you, or a direction from the network?

A: This was all my own. I was raised Catholic, and grew up going to church every Sunday. My sons then went to Catholic School, so religion has kind of hung over my life like the cloud of dirt over Pigpen. (laughs) I mean, if I wasn’t going to hell before, I probably am for that line, right? (laughs, again)

Anyway, I really was interested in this notion of trying to be a good person playing against the other qualities of our human nature. Sometimes our hearts are drawn to do certain things—not bad or evil, just being human beings, not little boxes of saintliness. To me, the essence of the story was putting that around this character whose actual job it was to be a good guy, but on the other hand he’s also a man, wrestling with the nature of love, and finally coming around to a greater sense of understanding than he had at the beginning.

We are all supposed to act with a sense of service and self-sacrifice, but on the other hand, we’re not utterly devoid of self. To be a human, even a human in service of God or goodness, doesn’t mean you’re also not supposed to fall in love with that same, almost religious, fervor, which is what I hope he realizes at the end. And it’s all a lot more ambitious than that ‘ha, ha’ dad joke of the premise.

I hope this movie is for everyone, not just people of faith. That’s why I put in there that the best friend is an atheist. That a pastor and someone who doesn’t believe can still be friends. That [the non-believer] is still this supportive friend, and a good guy.

I was also very deliberate in that I didn’t want our pastor to pray for God’s help and receive it in a [direct] way. There’s a scene in the chapel with the Bible, and I wanted it to be very clear that you’re not going to just get the answer to your problems [divinely], you have to figure out those sorts of matters yourself.

Q: How did the pandemic effect production?

A: Well, COVID has trimmed the number of original productions at Bounce in 2020. The plan is to increase our original movie production, and that’s been at least temporarily waylaid by all the [fallout] from COVID, but we did want to have at least one new movie for the fourth quarter… and knowing how well last year’s original holiday movie did for them, there was definitely the sentiment of, ‘Let’s do another Christmas movie,’ so it was a conscious and deliberate effort to make that happen, despite the pandemic.

So, I reached out to a friend of a friend, Thomas Michael [of Fella Films], because Canada had lower COVID infections and a rich film community, and he became our partner and producer. There also [had to be] a little extra money for COVID protections, and [filming] took a few extra days just due to safety protocols for the cast and crew. Plus, our cast is entirely Canadian, due to restrictions.

David Hudson and I, working as a consultant for the network, were looking for holiday movies, or rom-coms we could spin into a holiday movie. We were even looking at stories to develop into full scripts, and we just weren’t finding what we’re looking for, so I said, ‘Look, this has been sitting on my shelf, it’s available, and I’m a cheap date.’ (laughs)

Q: Hallmark, in particular, has said casting Black actors in Canada is difficult, was that an issue you experienced?

A: I will say it was a question raised, because that’s not our usual production [location]. And working with Thomas Michael, we moved towards Ontario, because they do have a larger pool of Black Canadian actors, just because they have a larger Black population overall.

After some [research], we all felt very comfortable with the talent pool, and I think we once again got really lucky with our cast. These guys were just all really great. We did a read through, and I was just choked up by how good they all were.

They might not have the same name recognition of some of the actors in Greyson, like Stan Shaw or Robinne Lee, but they’re all working actors. Brandon Jay McLaren, our pastor, is working on the new Turner and Hooch series, and I worked with him on a TV pilot 10 years ago. Gabrielle Graham, our female lead, has been a regular on two Amazon Prime series, [The Expanse and 21 Thunder].

I really hope people will respond to them, because I think they did a great job with the characters.

Q: How did Marry Me This Christmas end up with Megan Follows, best known as Anne of Green Gables, directing?

A: Once we had the determination to do it in Canada, we began looking for a Canadian director, on a pretty tight timeline. Our producer had a [working] relationship with Megan, and she has been directing more and more. We reached out to her and she responded well to the material, and I think got what we wanted to do with it.

She and the cast were terrific. And I think we just got lucky it turned out as well it did, given all the circumstances.

Q: There was talk there might be a Greyson Family Christmas sequel, was that idea a casualty of COVID?

A: Unfortunately, yes. We had a story worked out for a wedding, but with COVID and the difficulty in production, the soonest we’d have been able to get it on the air was spring or summer 2021, and that’s a long time to wait for a sequel. But I like to think of Maya and Trent, and the rest of the Greyson family, living on happily, safely and healthily, nevertheless.

Q: Bounce is a network geared towards an African-American audience, does the fact you’re not Black come up when writing these stories?

A: Definitely. Especially in the first movie, Greyson, which really digs into more sensitive and deeper matters of race, having this white guy from New Jersey writing the movie was a little unusual, as I’ll be the first to admit.

I mean, when you’re telling a story, you are always putting yourself into characters unlike yourself—teenage kids, the 75-year-old grandmother—and trying to do it in a way that resonates and feels authentic. But, yes, I got help from people of color. Particularly for Greyson, where I was on set, the cast was extraordinarily helpful, making changes and making sure the voice was right.

I will say that where the characters in Greyson succeed, in respect to race, I give all the credit to the actors, who inhabited those characters and made them their own, and if anything feels a little off to an audience, I take the blame for those shortcomings.

In that movie, where I was a producer, and in my Hallmark movies too, I made an extra effort to hire and fill out our teams looking beyond the first resumes we received, because if Bounce can’t be supportive of the black filmmaking community, who can? We really did try to hire a crew that was reflective of America’s demographics.

For too long, in this industry primarily driven by white men who have the tendency to hire other white men, that wasn’t the case, so you have to be open to the person who has 7 credits but might not have had the same opportunities, versus someone who has 35 credits, and not just pick the default. To undo that unconscious bias. I’m sure I’ve been guilty of favoring people with longer resumes, instead of saying we need those diverse voices that are more reflective of society at large. It’s something I hope to keep working on, because I think it makes the final product better as a result.

Q: What do you hope viewers take away from Marry Me This Christmas?

A: As a filmmaker there’s always something fun anytime you have an idea in your head and it ends up on screen for other people to see, so I’m just excited for it to air and hope people like it.

Bounce wants to be in that arena, making holiday feel-good movies, but maybe doing something a little bit more. Yes, it’s a rom-com at Christmas, but I think it’s a little bit of an alternative to all those other kinds of movies, and you might get something you don’t expect. A little present under the tree you didn’t realize was there. I hope it brings just a little extra joy for the holiday.

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yobaba30 · 5 years

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This.Is.Fucking>Brilliant.

On Sept. 1, with a Category 5 hurricane off the Atlantic coast, an angry wind was issuing from the direction of President Trump’s Twitter account. The apparent emergency: Debra Messing, the co-star of “Will & Grace,” had tweeted that “the public has a right to know” who is attending a Beverly Hills fund-raiser for Mr. Trump’s re-election.

“I have not forgotten that when it was announced that I was going to do The Apprentice, and when it then became a big hit, Helping NBC’s failed lineup greatly, @DebraMessing came up to me at an Upfront & profusely thanked me, even calling me ‘Sir,’ ” wrote the 45th president of the United States.

It was a classic Trumpian ragetweet: aggrieved over a minor slight, possibly prompted by a Fox News segment, unverifiable — he has a long history of questionable tales involving someone calling him “Sir” — and nostalgic for his primetime-TV heyday. (By Thursday he was lashing Ms. Messing again, as Hurricane Dorian was lashing the Carolinas.)

This sort of outburst, almost three years into his presidency, has kept people puzzling over who the “real” Mr. Trump is and how he actually thinks. Should we take him, to quote the famous precept of Trumpology, literally or seriously? Are his attacks impulsive tantrums or strategic distractions from his other woes? Is he playing 3-D chess or Rock ’Em Sock ’Em Robots?

This is a futile effort. Try to understand Donald Trump as a person with psychology and strategy and motivation, and you will inevitably spiral into confusion and covfefe. The key is to remember that Donald Trump is not a person. He’s a TV character.

I mean, O.K., there is an actual person named Donald John Trump, with a human body and a childhood and formative experiences that theoretically a biographer or therapist might usefully delve into someday. (We can only speculate about the latter; Mr. Trump has boasted on Twitter of never having seen a psychiatrist, preferring the therapeutic effects of “hit[ting] ‘sleazebags’ back.”)

But that Donald Trump is of limited significance to America and the world. The “Donald Trump” who got elected president, who has strutted and fretted across the small screen since the 1980s, is a decades-long media performance. To understand him, you need to approach him less like a psychologist and more like a TV critic.

He was born in 1946, at the same time that American broadcast TV was being born. He grew up with it. His father, Fred, had one of the first color TV sets in Jamaica Estates. In “The Art of the Deal” Donald Trump recalls his mother, Mary Anne, spending a day in front of the tube, enraptured by the coronation of Queen Elizabeth in 1953. (“For Christ’s sake, Mary,” he remembers his father saying, “Enough is enough, turn it off. They’re all a bunch of con artists.”)

TV was his soul mate. It was like him. It was packed with the razzle-dazzle and action and violence that captivated him. He dreamed of going to Hollywood, then he shelved those dreams in favor of his father’s business and vowed, according to the book “TrumpNation” by Timothy O’Brien, to “put show business into real estate.”

As TV evolved from the homogeneous three-network mass medium of the mid-20th century to the polarized zillion-channel era of cable-news fisticuffs and reality shocker-tainment, he evolved with it. In the 1980s, he built a media profile as an insouciant, high-living apex predator. In 1990, he described his yacht and gilded buildings to Playboy as “Props for the show … The show is ‘Trump’ and it is sold-out performances everywhere.”

He syndicated that show to Oprah, Letterman, NBC, WrestleMania and Fox News. Everything he achieved, he achieved by using TV as a magnifying glass, to make himself appear bigger than he was.

He was able to do this because he thought like a TV camera. He knew what TV wanted, what stimulated its nerve endings. In his campaign rallies, he would tell The Washington Post, he knew just what to say “to keep the red light on”: that is, the light on a TV camera that showed that it was running, that you mattered. Bomb the [redacted] out of them! I’d like to punch him in the face! The red light radiated its approval. Cable news aired the rallies start to finish. For all practical purposes, he and the camera shared the same brain.

Even when he adopted social media, he used it like TV. First, he used it like a celebrity, to broadcast himself, his first tweet in 2009 promoting a “Late Show With David Letterman” appearance. Then he used it like an instigator, tweeting his birther conspiracies before he would talk about them on Fox News, road-testing his call for a border wall during the cable-news fueled Ebola and border panics of the 2014 midterms.

When he was a candidate, and especially when he was president, his tweets programmed TV and were amplified by it. On CNBC, a “BREAKING NEWS: TRUMP TWEET” graphic would spin out onscreen as soon as the words left his thumbs. He would watch Fox News, or Lou Dobbs, or CNN or “Morning Joe” or “Saturday Night Live” (“I don’t watch”), and get mad, and tweet. Then the tweets would become TV, and he would watch it, and tweet again.

If you want to understand what President Trump will do in any situation, then, it’s more helpful to ask: What would TV do? What does TV want?

It wants conflict. It wants excitement. If there is something that can blow up, it should blow up. It wants a fight. It wants more. It is always eating and never full.

Some presidential figure-outers, trying to understand the celebrity president through a template that they were already familiar with, have compared him with Ronald Reagan: a “master showman” cannily playing a “role.”

The comparison is understandable, but it’s wrong. Presidents Reagan and Trump were both entertainers who applied their acts to politics. But there’s a crucial difference between what “playing a character” means in the movies and what it means on reality TV.

Ronald Reagan was an actor. Actors need to believe deeply in the authenticity and interiority of people besides themselves — so deeply that they can subordinate their personalities to “people” who are merely lines on a script. Acting, Reagan told his biographer Lou Cannon, had taught him “to understand the feelings and motivations of others.”

Being a reality star, on the other hand, as Donald Trump was on “The Apprentice,” is also a kind of performance, but one that’s antithetical to movie acting. Playing a character on reality TV means being yourself, but bigger and louder.

Reality TV, writ broadly, goes back to Allen Funt’s “Candid Camera,” the PBS documentary “An American Family,” and MTV’s “The Real World.” But the first mass-market reality TV star was Richard Hatch, the winner of the first season of “Survivor” — produced by Mark Burnett, the eventual impresario of “The Apprentice”— in the summer of 2000.

Mr. Hatch won that first season in much the way that Mr. Trump would run his 2016 campaign. He realized that the only rules were that there were no rules. He lied and backstabbed and took advantage of loopholes, and he argued — with a telegenic brashness — that this made him smart. This was a crooked game in a crooked world, he argued to a final jury of players he’d betrayed and deceived. But, hey: At least he was open about it!

While shooting that first season, the show’s crew was rooting for Rudy Boesch, a 72-year-old former Navy SEAL and model of hard work and fair play. “The only outcome nobody wanted was Richard Hatch winning,” the host, Jeff Probst, would say later. It “would be a disaster.” After all, decades of TV cop shows had taught executives the iron rule that the viewers needed the good guy to win.

But they didn’t. “Survivor” was addictively entertaining, and audiences loved-to-hate the wryly devious Richard the way they did Tony Soprano and, before him, J.R. Ewing. More than 50 million people watched the first-season finale, and “Survivor” has been on the air nearly two decades.

From Richard Hatch, we got a steady stream of Real Housewives, Kardashians, nasty judges, dating-show contestants who “didn’t come here to make friends” and, of course, Donald Trump.

Reality TV has often gotten a raw deal from critics. (Full disclosure: I still watch “Survivor.”) Its audiences, often dismissed as dupes, are just as capable of watching with a critical eye as the fans of prestige cable dramas. But when you apply its mind-set — the law of the TV jungle — to public life, things get ugly.

In reality TV — at least competition reality shows like “The Apprentice” — you do not attempt to understand other people, except as obstacles or objects. To try to imagine what it is like to be a person other than yourself (what, in ordinary, off-camera life, we call “empathy”) is a liability. It’s a distraction that you have to tune out in order to project your fullest you.

Reality TV instead encourages “getting real.” On MTV’s progressive, diverse “Real World,” the phrase implied that people in the show were more authentic than characters on scripted TV — or even than real people in your own life, who were socially conditioned to “be polite.” But “getting real” would also resonate with a rising conservative notion: that political correctness kept people from saying what was really on their minds.

Being real is not the same thing as being honest. To be real is to be the most entertaining, provocative form of yourself. It is to say what you want, without caring whether your words are kind or responsible — or true — but only whether you want to say them. It is to foreground the parts of your personality (aggression, cockiness, prejudice) that will focus the red light on you, and unleash them like weapons.

Maybe the best definition of being real came from the former “Apprentice” contestant and White House aide Omarosa Manigault Newman in her memoir, “Unhinged.” Mr. Trump, she said, encouraged people in his entourage to “exaggerate the unique part of themselves.” When you’re being real, there is no difference between impulse and strategy, because the “strategy” is to do what feels good.

This is why it misses a key point to ask, as Vanity Fair recently did after Mr. Trump’s assault on Representative Elijah E. Cummings and the city of Baltimore in July, “Is the president a racist, or does he just play one on TV?” In reality TV, if you are a racist — and reality TV has had many racists, like Katie Hopkins, the far-right British “Apprentice” star the president frequently retweets — then you are a racist and you play one on TV.

So if you actually want a glimpse into the mind of Donald J. Trump, don’t look for a White House tell-all or some secret childhood heartbreak. Go to the streaming service Tubi, where his 14 seasons of “The Apprentice” recently became accessible to the public.

You can fast-forward past the team challenges and the stagey visits to Trump-branded properties. They’re useful in their own way, as a picture of how Mr. Burnett buttressed the future president’s Potemkin-zillionaire image. But the unadulterated, 200-proof Donald Trump is found in the boardroom segments, at the end of each episode, in which he “fires” one contestant.

In theory, the boardroom is where the best performers in the week’s challenges are rewarded and the screw-ups punished. In reality, the boardroom is a new game, the real game, a free-for-all in which contestants compete to throw one another under the bus and beg Mr. Trump for mercy.

There is no morality in the boardroom. There is no fair and unfair in the boardroom. There is only the individual, trying to impress Mr. Trump, to flatter Mr. Trump, to commune with his mind and anticipate his whims and fits of pique. Candidates are fired for giving up advantages (stupid), for being too nice to their adversaries (weak), for giving credit to their teammates, for interrupting him. The host’s decisions were often so mercurial, producers have said, that they would have to go back and edit the episodes to impose some appearance of logic on them.

What saves you in the boardroom? Fighting. Boardroom Trump loves to see people fight each other. He perks up at it like a cat hearing a can opener. He loves to watch people scrap for his favor (as they eventually would in his White House). He loves asking contestants to rat out their teammates and watching them squirm with conflict. The unity of the team gives way to disunity, which in the Trumpian worldview is the most productive state of being.

And America loved boardroom Trump — for a while. He delivered his catchphrase in TV cameos and slapped it on a reissue of his 1980s Monopoly knockoff Trump: The Game. (“I’m back and you’re fired!”) But after the first season, the ratings dropped; by season four they were nearly half what they were in season one.

He reacted to his declining numbers by ratcheting up what worked before: becoming a louder, more extreme, more abrasive version of himself. He gets more insulting in the boardroom — “You hang out with losers and you become a loser”— and executes double and quadruple firings.

It’s a pattern that we see as he advances toward his re-election campaign, with an eye not on the Nielsen ratings but on the polls: The only solution for any given problem was a Trumpier Trump.

Did it work for “The Apprentice”? Yes and no. His show hung on to a loyal base through 14 seasons, including the increasingly farcical celebrity version. But it never dominated its competition again, losing out, despite his denials, to the likes of the sitcom “Mike & Molly.”

Donald Trump’s “Apprentice” boardroom closed for business on Feb. 16, 2015, precisely four months before he announced his successful campaign for president. And also, it never closed. It expanded. It broke the fourth wall. We live inside it now.

Now, Mr. Trump re-creates the boardroom’s helter-skelter atmosphere every time he opens his mouth or his Twitter app. In place of the essentially dead White House press briefing, he walks out to the lawn in the morning and reporters gaggle around him like “Apprentice” contestants awaiting the day’s task. He rails and complains and establishes the plot points for that day’s episode: Greenland! Jews! “I am the chosen one!”

Then cable news spends morning to midnight happily masticating the fresh batch of outrages before memory-wiping itself to prepare for tomorrow’s episode. Maybe this sounds like a TV critic’s overextended metaphor, but it’s also the president’s: As The Times has reported, before taking office, he told aides to think of every day as “an episode in a television show in which he vanquishes rivals.”

Mr. Trump has been playing himself instinctually as a character since the 1980s; it’s allowed him to maintain a profile even through bankruptcies and humiliations. But it’s also why, on the rare occasions he’s had to publicly attempt a role contrary to his nature — calling for healing from a script after a mass shooting, for instance — he sounds as stagey and inauthentic as an unrehearsed amateur doing a sitcom cameo.

His character shorthand is “Donald Trump, Fighter Guy Who Wins.” Plop him in front of a camera with an infant orphaned in a mass murder, and he does not have it in his performer’s tool kit to do anything other than smile unnervingly and give a fat thumbs-up.

This is what was lost on commentators who kept hoping wanly that this State of the Union or that tragedy would be the moment he finally became “presidential.” It was lost on journalists who felt obligated to act as though every modulated speech from a teleprompter might, this time, be sincere.

The institution of the office is not changing Donald Trump, because he is already in the sway of another institution. He is governed not by the truisms of past politics but by the imperative of reality TV: never de-escalate and never turn the volume down.

This conveniently echoes the mantra he learned from his early mentor, Roy Cohn: Always attack and never apologize. He serves up one “most shocking episode ever” after another, mining uglier pieces of his core each time: progressing from profanity about Haiti and Africa in private to publicly telling four minority American congresswomen, only one of whom was born outside the United States, to “go back” to the countries they came from.

The taunting. The insults. The dog whistles. The dog bullhorns. The “Lock her up” and “Send her back.” All of it follows reality-TV rules. Every season has to top the last. Every fight is necessary, be it against Ilhan Omar or Debra Messing. Every twist must be more shocking, every conflict more vicious, lest the red light grow bored and wink off. The only difference: Now there’s no Mark Burnett to impose retroactive logic on the chaos, only press secretaries, pundits and Mike Pence.

To ask whether any of this is “instinct” or “strategy” is a parlor game. If you think like a TV camera — if thinking in those reflexive microbursts of adrenaline and testosterone has served you your whole life — then the instinct is the strategy.

And to ask who the “real” Donald Trump is, is to ignore the obvious. You already know who Donald Trump is. All the evidence you need is right there on your screen. He’s half-man, half-TV, with a camera for an eye that is constantly focused on itself. The red light is pulsing, 24/7, and it does not appear to have an off switch.

#the apprentice (tv program)

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dpillustrations · 5 years

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A Discourse on Communication and Storytelling Part II: The Idealization of Nihilism

In my previous post, I outlined the flawed narrative structure of the conclusion of Game of Thrones. I focused primarily on Daenerys and how her story did not communicate effectively what Benioff and Weiss were wanting to accomplish with her, i.e. her becoming “Mad Queen” Targaryen. I then asked what it was that they did communicate through her story. Here is where I would like to begin.

As an artist and visual storyteller, I have become exceedingly grieved and disgusted with a lot of the stories in our entertainment today. Every one of my favorite shows one right after another ended in disappointment for me. I asked myself, why? Why were all these amazing shows, many of whom have exceptional talent working on them, crashing and burning, in my less than humble opinion? I believe the answer is multi-faceted, but I am going to zero in on one aspect for the sake of time and my argument. In short, cynicism and a nihilistic world view have poisoned the storytelling landscape.

I mean I get it. You only have to open your social media or major news page and you can find tons of reasons to bemoan the state of our society, our country, and the world. I understand the disappointment, the bitterness, the seething rage – I get it! I have felt it myself! I know precisely how everyone is feeling because I am feeling it too. I know that feeling of being utterly useless to help or stop any injustice or wrong from happening. The struggle is real.

However, the struggle is not all there is, and I believe that is the crucial thing to remember because something much more sinister than our own despair is happening, which is that we are coming to love our despair. Our bitterness and anger is becoming a part of how we are defining ourselves every day. Suddenly instead of these ideas and attitudes being recognized as the poison that they are, we drink it like it is sweet nectar. And to me that is exceedingly more grieving than feeling negative emotions in of themselves. We all feel negative emotions, we all feel the pain of life to one degree or another. This is a part of life, but to actually redefine and look upon those attitudes and thoughts as beneficial, glorious, and wise? That is the truly terrible thing.

My own piece entitled: 美 which is the Chinese pictogram for “beauty”.

Now let us dig deeper into what I mean. If you recall from Game of Thrones Season 4 where Tyrion tells Jaime the story about their cousin Orson Lannister. He describes how in his simpleness, Orson would crush beetles all the day long, and Tyrion became obsessed with divining why Orson was doing this. He felt there had to be a reason, that there had to be some meaning behind what he was doing. Obviously, this story is an analogy. What Tyrion was really expressing was the aged old question, what does it all mean. I will paste the discussion below:

Tyrion: [...] In any case, I found nothing that illuminated the nature of Orson's affliction or the reason behind his relentless beetles slaughter. So I went back to the source. I may not have been able to speak with Orson, but I could observe him, watch him, the way men watch animals to come to a deeper understanding of their behavior. And as I watched, I became more and more sure of it: there was something happening there. His face was like the page of a book written in a language I didn't understand, but he wasn't mindless, he had his reasons. And I became possessed with knowing what they were. I began spending inordinate amounts of time watching him. I would eat my lunch in the garden, chewing my mutton to the music of "kun kun kun". And when I wasn't watching him, I was thinking about him. Father droned on about the family legacy and I thought about Orson's beetles. I read the histories of Targaryen conquests. Did I hear dragon wings? No, I heard "kun kun kun". And I still couldn't figure out why he was doing it. And I had to know because it was horrible, that all these beetles would be dying for no reason.

Jaime: Every day around the world, men, women, and children are murdered by the score. Who gives a dusty f*** about a bunch of beetles?

Tyrion: I know, I know, but still it filled me with dread. Piles and piles of them, years and years of them. How many countless living, crawling things smashed, dried out, and returned to the dirt? In my dreams, I found myself standing on a beach made of beetle husks stretching as far as the eye can see. I woke up, crying, weeping for their shattered little bodies. I tried to stop Orson once.

Jaime: He was twice your size.

Tyrion: He just pushed me aside with a "kun", kept on smashing. Every day. Until that mule kicked him in the chest and killed him. So what do you think? Why did he do it? What's it all about?

Jaime: I don't know.

This here is a perfect encapsulation of what I have observed in so many of our stories of late, stories which by their very nature are asking that aged old question, what does it all mean. Benioff and Weiss have just expressed it with a heavy hand here, while other writers and artists have a more subtle approach.

To make it clear what I am talking about, I want to draw a parallel between Tyrion’s story and what happened with Daenerys Targaryen. In this story, the audience is Tyrion – we are drawn to the story of Daenerys like Tyrion was drawn to the story of Orson. We were enraptured by her struggles as a character and divining the meaning of her story just as Tyrion sought to know the why of Orsen’s actions with the beetles. I mean isn’t that what we do as fans? We love going online and theorizing with other fans about what is going to happen, why it is going to happen, observing all the details of the plot and character arcs. We love seeking things out!

I cannot remember where I heard it, but it was in something I watched where they pointed out that audiences love to discover things on their own. They like being able to feel like they figured out something, that they found out something the writer had hidden or perhaps may not have been aware of. There is excitement in exploring the story, just as Tyrion was enthralled with understanding the truth and meaning behind Orson’s beetle slaughter. Yet what happened after all of Tyrion’s study, observations, ruminations, and questions? What happened to us the audience when we came to the end of Daenerys’ story? What happened to all that time and effort spent in watching, theorizing, and discussing? Despite Daenerys’ struggle as the underdog in her own story suffering abuse and pain - despite the awe of witnessing dragons coming to life from dormant eggs - despite all the lessons Daenerys learned as a ruler through her mistakes - all of it came to nothing. Just as Tyrion never divined the meaning behind Orson’s senseless slaughter, so we came to the end of Game of Thrones, having gained no beneficial understanding by our journey. Mad Queen Targaryen. Jon kills her. Orson gets killed by a mule. All the world burns. Beetles die for no reason. The End.

Tyrion: So what do you think? Why did he do it? What's it all about?

Jaime: I don't know.

Game of Thrones isn’t the only show with these problems. In the FX show Legion, David Haller, the protagonist of the story, is suddenly twisted to become the show’s villain. He’s been Daenerys Targaryen-ed.

Trish Walker from Jessica Jones Season 3, also Daenerys Targaryen-ed.

This one is from a movie (it isn’t only in tv shows) and it is a little more subtle, but Professor X in Dark Phoenix was suddenly twisted as this arrogant douche who was controlling and manipulative - the “idol” of the X-Men school brought low. The “idealistic delusion” of Professor X as a heroic leader unveiled to show us the true frailties underneath! *GASP*

As you can see within the very fabric of Benioff and Weiss’s writing, nihilism pervades. It isn’t just in Daenerys’ story, but scattered throughout the stories of Game of Thrones - i.e. how Jaime Lannister went from redemption story to dying under a pile of rocks. Yet not only is nihilism pervading, but it is being romanticized, like there is something profound and powerful in its telling - like we are achieving some enlightened ideal in heralding its tenets. Many storytellers, not just Benioff and Weiss, have become just like that whole scene where Tyrion goes underground and discovers the dead bodies of Jaime and Cersei. Observe how the whole sequence was filmed in excruciating reverence, as we watch Tyrion walk through one ruin to the next. It is is a sobering moment, almost holy in how it is filmed - Tyrion’s silent pilgrimage as he approaches the thing he has dreaded most...

Remember how I mentioned in my previous post that every aspect of the cinematic arts is communicating something? The dialogue, the lighting, the way something is framed, what is shown vs what is not shown, the music, the colors, etc. I would encourage you to rewatch this scene and pay attention to how Benioff and Weiss are wanting you to feel as all these elements are spun together. And when Tyrion does finally arrive, after seeing Jaime’s golden hand amongst the rubble, Tyrion expresses a kind of ritualistic act as he removes the stones one by one, uncovering the truth. Oh, the existential dread! Tyrion weeps and thrashes in the horror and pain of it all! Woe, woe, woe! How powerful, how terrible, how divine!

Observe the way Jaime and Cersei are orchestrated here. Despite being crushed by an onslaught of incredibly heavy stones and rocks, they are pictured here in peaceful and reverent positions - something akin to a Renaissance painting. How does that make you feel when you look upon it? The gentle, diffused white light, the atmosphere of ecclesiastical reflection - it is romantic, is it not? It is showing a glorified ideal! Behold the profundity of the nothingness!

Do you see what I mean? There is this glorification of showing the meaninglessness of life, of uncovering “the truth” that this life is full of ugliness and pain, of unmasking our delusions, of showing that there is always “someone behind the curtain”, our idols become monsters, our heroes become villains, it was all a lie, it was all a sick cosmic joke - and this is what empowers us and makes us wise. Oh, look how discerning and insightful we are as we reflect back to you the despair of a twisted humanity!

Me to Writers about how they believe their cynical worldviews are working in their stories:

Now, I am not at all saying that stories cannot speak to the ugliness of this world, because there is truth in ugliness. There is pain, suffering, dread, brokenness, disillusionment, bitterness, anger, hate, and a myriad of dark and terrible things. I am not saying we should only tell feel-good stories where everyone lives “happily ever after”. No, what I am pointing out is an attitude that many storytellers have towards that ugliness. All artists have an obligation to speak to all truth, but there is huge difference between telling a story about ugliness vs making making that ugliness seem romantic. There is a difference between showing how life feels arbitrary and meaningless vs saying life is meaningless and arbitrary. There is such a big gap there.

So, I speak to all storytellers now: you are not profound for making statements about the despair of reality. You are not wise. You are not enlightened. It is easy for anyone to despair. It is much more difficult to rejoice in the face of that despair. It is easy to grow in bitterness and disappointment, much more difficult to believe in hope in the face of that disappointment. It is easy to observe ugliness, much more difficult to discern the beauty underneath, within, and despite it. And so that is what it really comes down to – it is easy to write a story like Daenerys “Mad Queen” Targaryen. It is easy to have her twist her own ideals and dreams into the dying screams of a burning city. It is easy to tell a story where someone falls than it is to tell a convincing and realistic story of redemption. It doesn’t require any work – nihilism is the lazy man’s philosophy. If all is meaningless, if nothing truly has any value, than that means you hold no responsibility to anyone or anything. It means you do not have to change the way you are doing things, that you can coast, lay back, and just watch the world burn. You can pat yourself on the back for being “woke” and not falling for the opiates of the masses. You don’t have to do any soul searching. You do not have analyze your own world view or assumptions. You don’t have to work at trying to understand what life truly means or try to find the purpose amidst all the chaos. There is no truth except the truth of nothing, therefore you are free to do nothing without guilt or shame. Nihilism is one big fat existential cop out!

Therefore, I say to all artists, storytellers, writers, showrunners, and creators – stop dishing out this crap for audiences to eat and get off your lazy asses and get to work!

#my thoughts #game of thrones #daenerys targaryen

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mayquita · 5 years

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Call Me (23/?) - It’s a Matter of Love

Hi again! As usual with this story, I changed my mind and I’m going to split the next chapter into two parts, first because otherwise, it would be super long, second, because I think the two parts work well as independent chapters and, finally, because I can post it earlier.

Thank you, everyone, for all your support, thanks for all your kudos, likes, reblogs, reviews and comments. It means the world to me :)

Special mention to @saraswans and @onceuponaprincessworld for your help, your suggestions and for always believing in me and supporting this story.

Summary: Emma loses her phone after a chase, but she finds a phone in a cafe just when she needs it most. Killian forgets his phone in a cafe when he is about to take a flight to Ireland. Killian makes a call to his own number hoping someone answers on the other end of the line. What will happen when Emma is the one answering the call?

Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4Chapter 5Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8Chapter 9 Chapter 10Chapter 11 Chapter 12Chapter 13 Chapter14Chapter 15 Chapter 16Chapter 17 Chapter 18 Chapter 19Chapter 20 Chapter 21 Chapter 22

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Chapter 23 - It’s a Matter of Love

Killian Jones loved Emma Swan. He had come to terms with that irrefutable fact for a while now. It was useless to deny it when he could feel it in all the fibers of his being like a warm feeling at times, making his stomach flutter or like a flow of sensations burning through his veins up to reach his heart in other occasions. But it was one thing to accept it and quite another to express it, at least with words.

That spiral of feelings had begun to set in early, maybe even from those first days when they were separated by an ocean and he hadn't even seen her face. What at first had been only a barely perceptible sensation was gradually increasing, causing a whole series of physical reactions in his body to anything related to Emma.

He had felt the need to pronounce the three words aloud for the first time just after his breakdown a few weeks ago. Back then, he had decided to hold them back, waiting to find a more appropriate, unique occasion, or waiting for the time to pass and for their relationship to take hold. Or simply waiting for Emma to confess her feelings. After all, she had been the one who had led all the steps of their relationship until now, right?

There were times when he found his need to pronounce the three words more manageable, moments in which his heart fluttered subtly as a reminder of his feelings. Those moments were interspersed with other occasions where the intensity of his feelings was such that he found it terribly difficult to keep his mouth shut, the words pushing hard and struggling to get out and be heard.

Usually, the little details were the ones that caused a more subtle reaction, like a warm sensation invading his body, and an imperceptible I love you caressing his lips. Sometimes those little moments caused a much more powerful reaction, catching him off guard, words burning on the tip of his tongue.

They spent almost every weekend together, most of them in his apartment, regardless of whether he had to work or not. On those occasions, it was usual for him to wake up with that warm feeling washing over him, not only on a metaphorical level, but also in the most literal sense of the word, with Emma's naked body entwined with his own.

Sometimes he managed to keep that warm feeling at bay, enraptured by the features of her sleepy face, by the soft smile she gave him before she even opened her eyes, or by her bright gaze through her half-closed eyes. Other times, though, the smile turned into a naughty smirk, the glint of her gaze giving way to a blazing fire, and her body burning against his. He was unable to keep his mouth shut in those amorous encounters, but he reserved the precious words for another, even more special occasion. Instead, he always tried to demonstrate his devotion to Emma using other ways.

His hands caressed every inch of her skin. I love you.

His lips and tongue savored every corner of her body. I love you.

His gaze bore into hers as he slipped inside her and let himself be enveloped by her warmth. I love you.

The moment both reached sweet release the words were momentarily forgotten, both his body and his mind too consumed by passion, leaving him unable to elaborate any rational — or even irrational, for that matter— thought.

That need to express his feelings out loud was a constant whenever Emma met Little Leo or talked to his nephew and niece through the screen. Somehow, the image of Emma interacting with children caused his heart to melt in the process. He would remain enthralled at times, simply observing their interactions, without bothering to intervene. It was easier to observe without being seen when they kept video calls with his family. Another thing very different was to stay spellbound during the Sunday brunch while Emma interacted with little Leo. That had earned him more than a joke from David and several dreamy glances and speeches about true love from Mary Margaret.

Emma was a complex woman, of that he was sure. He found it particularly enthralling when she decided to expose — or he managed to discover — some of the peculiarities that made her unique. There had been glimpses of her incredible potential back in Ireland, when she had revealed some personality traits over the phone. Now, after more than two months dating her, Killian was more aware than ever that beneath all those layers, behind that facade of a tough girl, there was a gem waiting to be discovered, waiting to show all its splendor.

Her attributes were not only limited to the physical aspect —her natural beauty was undeniable — not even to the features of her personality he was so attracted to. She was bloody brilliant in everything that she set out to do. She was much more than a simple bail bondsperson. She seemed to have an innate ability with all kinds of technologies and was especially good with website design, although she insisted that she had only taken a few classes a few years ago. She was a natural. Or maybe he was totally biased. No. She was really good, Will and Belle agreed with him.

She had taken seriously his suggestion to improve the Jolly Cruises website, taking advantage of every moment she had free to grab her laptop and work on a more innovative design. He could stay entranced for hours just watching her work, a concentrated expression, her lips slightly pursed, a small crease between her brows while staring at the screen as her fingers moved nimbly around the keyboard. She exuded an aura of efficiency and professionalism worthy of admiration, even though she was sitting on his couch in his living room. And the best part was that she was doing it simply because he had suggested it, without expecting anything in return. How could he not love such a wonderful person as Emma was? Again, the words burned in his throat as he watched her. His lips remained sealed, though and so they would until he found that ideal moment or until Emma got ahead of him, as usual.

Friday, September 1, 2017

"We should go for a walk." Belle suggested, pointing to the exit with the pool cue she was holding.

Belle's words seemed to distract Will, failing in his attempt to hit his balls. "Bloody hell woman, do I have to remind you that we're on the same team?" He complained, a sullen expression on his face. For all answer, Belle arched an eyebrow in an unimpressed way. "It's almost midnight, we're playing pool and our glasses are still half full, why should we go for a walk?"

Killian chuckled quietly before pushing himself up from the stool and headed towards the pool table. "My turn." Ignoring his companions, he bent over the pool table, adjusting his position to get a better aim.

"I think it's an excellent idea. Going for a walk, I mean." This time it was Killian who lost his goal due to Emma's unexpected words, the white ball sliding down the green baize without even going near none of his balls. He raised his head as he shot an inquiring look at his girlfriend. She grinned at him as she put one arm around Belle's shoulders in a gesture of complicity.

It was a special night, the beginning of the long weekend since they would be celebrating Labor Day the following Monday. They were in one of their favorite bars, like every Friday night, carrying out one of their established routines lately. They used to go for a drink, play pool, darts or just hanging out together, enjoying the good company. The Nolans joined them on some occasions, when David's shift allowed it and they managed to find a babysitter for Little Leo. It was not the case this time, so that left only the two remaining couples.

"We haven't even finished the game." Will protested, both his voice and a scowl implying his obvious reluctance to leave the bar.

"Oh come on!" Belle rolled her eyes as she approached her boyfriend and pulled the pool cue out of his hands. "I'm doing ourselves a favor. We're losing, buddy."

"May I ask the reason for that sudden interest in going for a walk in the middle of the night?" Killian cocked his head to the side as he cast a curious glance at the two ladies.

"It's a long weekend." Emma shrugged. "And your schedules are clear for tomorrow morning, due to the holiday. We are in no hurry to go home.”

"I'm the one who makes your schedules, so she's right, I checked it." Belle added. "Besides, even though we’re already in September the temperature is still warm at night. We should take advantage of it before the cold arrives."

"And we're near the harbor, there's a good night view of the city from there." Emma looked at Belle with a conspiratorial gesture as she raised her hand for a high five.

Despite Will's initial reluctance, it was a fact that he was incapable of denying Belle anything. And neither did he to Emma, of course, not when both of them were being so convincing in their arguments. Resigned, Will took the contents of his drink in a single gulp and after casting one last glance at the ceiling, he reached out his hand pointing to the exit.

That's how they ended that night in early September, walking along the docks enjoying the warm temperature and the good company. Maybe the fact that they were a little bit intoxicated caused their inhibitions to disappear, or maybe the reason was that they were comfortable with each other. It was as if a feeling of camaraderie enveloped them, as if he had returned to the old days, when he was just a child, before everything went to hell, when one of the lads came up with a mischief and everyone else in the group decided to follow him, when it seemed that, despite all the miseries that could haunt them, they still saw the future as something promising, full of possibilities.

They felt like children that night, when Emma and Belle decided to use the pier as a catwalk while he and Will acted as photographers using their respective phones. She was radiant, her face illuminated by her bright smile and a special glow in her eyes. She swayed suggestively without a care in the world, sharing knowing looks with Belle as they posed for them.

His heart swelled as he filled his My Swan album with new content and watched Emma in awe through the screen. It was incredible how the lonely, guarded person he had first met had blossomed into the wonderful woman he had before him, so carefree, so affectionate to Belle, so happy.

As he held the phone in his hands —the device that had brought them together — an almost irrepressible desire to shout from the rooftops his love for Emma came up suddenly, the depth of his feelings struggling as never before to be revealed. He had to restrain himself, though, waiting to find another —more private— moment to confess his feelings. But he found it increasingly difficult to bite his tongue when his whole body was humming his love for her. Soon, he promised himself as he captured her captivating smile once more and kept it in the space reserved for his most precious memories.

Monday, September 11, 2017

That unique moment never seemed to come, though. The first days of September brought an unusual activity to Killian's business, everyone seemed to want to go sailing taking advantage of the last vestiges of summer, before the fall came irremediably. Emma, on the other hand, had gotten a difficult case, an extremely elusive jumper. Catching him had become a challenge, although determination was Emma’s trademark, so Killian was convinced that she would get him sooner or later.

They were so busy that they usually only had time to share brief moments together and both of them used to fall down in bed —together— with no time for much more. At least sleep was something they could do at the same time, and if nothing prevented it, in the same bed, Killian's.

However, their time together was about to be reduced even further when a unique opportunity for his business arose. A group of friends had decided to enjoy the last days of their vacations together by sailing the seas, so they proposed him to rent the Jolly Roger for a small route along the coast that would last several days, which would provide him a substantial increase in his profits. They had expressly indicated that they wanted his ship, no other of his small fleet, so Killian had no choice but to accept the proposal and prepare to travel with them. The possibility of entrusting one of his employees with the task of captaining the expedition did not even go through his head, in any way he was going to stay away from his precious ship and remain oblivious to what might happen.

He had been tempted to reject the business opportunity though. The incipient profits and the fact that Will would accompany him as his first mate were not enough incentive, especially considering that he'd have to stay away from Emma for several days. You better get used to it, his inner voice kept reminding him. You will have to travel to Ireland soon and stay there for several months. Without her. He dismissed those ideas almost at the same moment they appeared in his mind, ignoring the tug of uneasiness that settled in his stomach every time that kind of thoughts began to haunt him. They would have time to cross that bridge when they reached it.

In the end, it was Emma who practically made the decision for him. She had gotten a clue that placed her jumper in another state. True to the determination that characterized her, she didn't hesitate for a moment to follow that hint and go after him, even if it meant traveling hundreds of miles away. After all, he would be sailing, wouldn't he?

Have Will and your clients already arrived?

Not yet, in half an hour.

Knowing you, I'm sure you've left the ship as good as new, all shimmering, polished wood and immaculate sails.

Killian was on the Jolly Roger's deck, exhausted after finalizing the preparations for the imminent arrival of his clients, but that didn't stop a smile from appearing on his face while reading Emma's text. In response, he took a picture of the deck and sent it to Emma, so she could check it out for herself. He had said goodbye to her —quite enthusiastically —a few hours earlier, since she would begin her road trip the next day. He had dedicated those hours to polishing, cleaning and equipping the ship with all the supplies necessary for the small tour. The result had been quite satisfactory but his considerable physical effort had taken its toll. In addition to his extreme tiredness, he needed to take a quick shower before the others arrived.

I knew it. As good as new. All ready to receive an unexpected visit.

His heart skipped a beat as his eyebrows knitted together in confusion, his fingers sliding quickly through the keyboard, searching for a clue to her cryptic message.

I'm afraid I'm not following you, love.

Look down towards the pier, sailor.

A wave of excitement seized him as he hurried to the railing, his gaze traveling across the pier until he spotted her. She was a vision. There were still a couple of hours for the sun to set, but its rays were doing wonders on Emma, bathing her with their luminosity and endowing her with an aura that made it impossible for him to take his eyes off his girlfriend.

His heart thudded in his chest in anticipation, the desire to hold her in his arms once more before parting humming under his skin.

"Hey there, sailor. Permission to come aboard?" Emma asked, a mischievous smile gracing her face as she began to climb up the access ramp.

A pleasant sensation of déjà vu hit him, taking him to that moment two and a half months ago when Emma first climbed on his ship, the first step of what would be an unforgettable experience aboard the Jolly Roger.

"Uhm, I'm not sure, love, since you keep forgetting my actual rank." As on the previous occasion, Killian leaned his elbow on the railing, resting his chin on his hand as he watched her ascent.

"Oops, I'm sorry. " She said, her tone not apologetic in the slightest even though she accompanied her words with the gesture of pressing the palm of her hand over her mouth. "Are you going to punish me, captain?" There was something almost obscene about the way she moved her lips to utter his range, causing his blood to run burning through his veins heading south.

"Mmm, tempting..." He closed the distance between them, wrapping his arms around her waist, his mouth a few inches from hers. Two could play this game. "But I prefer to know first to what do I owe the honor of this unexpected visit."

"Maybe I wanted to say goodbye again?" She muttered, placing her arms around his neck. Before he could react, her lips were on his in a demanding kiss with the ability to take his breath away and make his head spin. He responded with fervor, lost in the incredible feeling of kissing Emma again when he had already made up his mind that he would not see her for a few days.

Her lips did not leave his as her hands traveled over his body in an almost desperate attempt to remove his clothes. There was something urgent about her movements that made him think that maybe he wasn't the only one affected by their temporary separation.

A flash of lucidity crossed his clouded mind before he surrendered completely to the passion as he realized that they were making out on the very deck of his ship, exposed to anyone who might pass by. He was also aware of his condition after his previous physical exercise. Although reluctant, his lips parted from her enough to seek for her eyes.

"It's not that I'm complaining, Swan, but, uh, if I had known that you would come to visit me maybe I could have freshened myself up a bit." Killian pursed his lips slightly in apology as he pointed to his dirty, sweaty t-shirt.

"Don't care." She muttered, her lips searching his again insistently.

"So, you like a little dirty, eh darling? Good to know." He managed to mumble against her mouth. "But maybe we should take our activities somewhere more private?"

"Okay, take me to your quarters, captain."

The moment they entered his cabin closing the door behind them, he caught her between the nearest wall and his body pressed against hers. His lips began their exploration through the bare skin of her neck and collarbone, while his hands wandered through her delectable curves. The delicious sound that escaped from her mouth did nothing but increase his urge to take her right there.

"I'm afraid I won't be able to take my time with you, love, the clients will come at any time." Somehow, the possibility that they could be caught in this way only increased his arousal.

"I can be quick." She muttered as she unbuckled his belt in a fluid motion, as if to prove her point. "Besides, I may have talked with Will and suggested that he distract any possible client, since we're going to be a little busy." She bit her lower lip while throwing a disarming glance at him.

"You did it, didn't you?" He separated a little from her, watching her in awe. "You're a bloody marvel." He mumbled before capturing her lips with is own again. Somehow, Emma always managed to surprise him in the most unexpected situations, getting his love for her to grow in such a way that he found it increasingly difficult to restrain it. Maybe the moment to utter the words aloud had not yet arrived, but he had half an hour to show his feelings with actions, while their hearts, minds, and bodies generated new passionate memories that would accompany them in the following days apart.

When they emerged to the deck forty minutes later, Will was already there, alone. He gave them a recriminating look as he pointed to his watch.

"You're late, guys. Luckily for you, the clients have suffered a little inconvenience and will arrive in ten minutes, and yes, I say luckily because anyone who looks at your face will be able to figure out what you two have been doing below the deck." He crossed his arms over his chest and pressed his lips into a thin line trying to keep a serious expression, and failing miserably, the amusement written all over his face.

Killian couldn't help glancing at Emma. His friend was right, of course. Despite the fact that they had made an attempt to clean themselves up a bit, her hair still appeared slightly disheveled, her cheeks flushed, her swollen lips drawing a sated smile. He supposed that his appearance wasn't much different, but he couldn't care less.

Emma gave him a look of complicity before addressing Will. "Thank you, Will." The soft kiss she placed on his cheek caused his friend to blush, while Killian caught his bottom lip between his teeth in an attempt to suppress the grin that threatened to form. "See you soon. Take care of him for me, okay?" She muttered before reaching out to take Killian's hand.

"Don't worry, lass, he's in good hands." Will assured with a solemn expression.

"I'm right here, in case you haven't noticed." Why this habit of everyone talking about him as if he wasn't present? "And I'm already a grown man, I don't need anyone to take care of me, thank you very much." He added in a tone that was perhaps too smug as he frowned.

Emma snorted and mumbled something unintelligible that sounded like don't I know it while Will ignored him completely, addressing Emma again. "Good luck with the chase, see you soon." After making a subtle bow with his head he tapped him on the shoulder and stepped away, giving them some privacy to say goodbye.

The time had come to face the inevitable so Killian had no choice but to resign. With their hands entwined, he accompanied Emma until they reached the access ramp. Before descending, she cupped his face in her hands while bringing her mouth up for one last kiss. Her lips moved gently against his causing a warm sensation to spread through his body. "I'm going to miss you." Her whisper caressed his lips one more time before she moved away, starting down the access ramp.

"Even at the risk of sounding cheesy, I miss you already, Swan."

Her hypnotizing green gaze still lingered for a few seconds on his before she finally turned away from him.

"You got it bad, mate." Killian looked away briefly, watching as Will shook his head. " The Swan Girl has truly bewitched you."

He ignored his friend, but his lips curled into a reluctant smile. He turned his gaze back to Emma, who was moving farther and farther away. Suddenly, something fell on him, a kind of cloth. “What the hell, man?” He directed an inquisitive look at his friend.

"It's for your drooling, you know." Will smirked at him before continuing in a somewhat more serious tone. "She’s really good for you. You deserve it, you know that, don't you?”

No, he didn’t know it, he still found it difficult to believe that luck had finally fallen on his side, putting Emma in his path. Killian approached Will, reaching out to squeeze his shoulder. "The only thing I know is that we are the luckiest guys, mate.”

"We are, we definitely are." Will agreed, the wide smile on his face, a clear sign of who he had his thoughts on. An unexpected wave of affection over his friend, his faithful companion, seized him as his heart fluttered at the thought that they, his friends and family could finally see the real Killian, the one who had remained for too long half buried by the burden he carried.

After giving him a frank smile, he looked away to the dock, where he could still see Emma walking. He stayed there a little longer, enraptured, following her movements, reluctant to let her go. An idea appeared in his head at that moment, a kind of bet with himself. If she turns once more before disappearing from my sight, I’ll confess my feelings towards her the moment she returns. He held his breath as his stomach tightened into knots in anticipation as he watched her intently. Just as he was about to give up, Emma turned her head and gave him a bright smile full of promises. That was all he needed.

Thanks for reading. I’d like to know what you all think :)

Since the following chapter was part of the same original idea, its structure will be similar, although from Emma's POV.

@rouhn @couldnthandleit @teamhook @malec4everr @ijustwantyoucaskett-always@kmomof4 @resident-of-storybrooke @suwya @thisonesatellite @lfh1962

#cs ff #cs au #captain swan #my cs writings #call me #mayquita writes #captain swan ff #cs ff au

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searchingwardrobes · 5 years

Text

Someone to Watch Over Me: 13/24

Summary: Emma Swan is ten when she first sees the pair of bright blue eyes watching her from the cracked door of the wardrobe. She thinks it’s just an imaginary friend until sees those eyes again at 16 and 23. Inspired by this prompt: a child is kidnapped and the monster under the bed isn’t happy about it.

Rating: T

Trigger Warning: an attempted rape and violence in chapter two

Words: about 1,700 in this chapter

Also on Ao3

Tagging: @snowbellewells @kmomof4 @whimsicallyenchantedrose @kday426 @winterbaby89 @bethacaciakay @teamhook @thislassishooked @snidgetsafan @delirious-latenight-laughs @jennjenn615 @vvbooklady1256 @mythologicalmango @shireness-says @let-it-raines

Chapter 13: Pieces on a Chess Board

When Emma and her father arrive at Granny’s, she’s surprised to see Killian on the patio as Martha runs around the tables. She frowns at him in silent question, and he bashfully scratches behind his ear.

“I know she’s hungry, I just . . . thought it best if I entered with the Prince at my side?”

Emma melts, her heart breaking a little. He still doubts sometimes that he’s a hero now, and the gossip of the town has clearly wounded him more than he has let on. Emma goes to wrap an arm around him, but before she can speak, her father beats her to it.

“Hey,” he says clapping his hand on Killian’s shoulder, “if they have a problem, they can take it up with me directly. I can’t think of a single person in this town who hasn’t made their own fair share of mistakes.”

“Really?” Killian asks, brow arching in hesitation.

Her father is the one who seems embarrassed now. “Well, what can I say, you’ve grown on me.”

Killian’s expression morphs into his usual easy grin. “I have that effect on people.”

David rolls his eyes, and in that moment Emma’s heart lurches. She can see a resemblance in the gesture between herself and her father, and it’s a bit overwhelming. They all enter the diner together to find that the lunch crowd has thinned by now. Mary Margaret greets them with an eager smile, and Emma feels another pang to her chest with Martha eagerly gives her grandmother a hug. It’s still awkward sometimes calling them Mom and Dad, but this family thing is going better than she could have imagined. If only things with Henry were less complicated.

******************************************************

Ruby gives her old friend Snow a smile as she passes their booth. The curse breaking has brought a lot of confusion, especially in her own life, but at least her friend has her daughter back. After so much sadness and loss, it’s good to see she and David happy with their daughter and even grandchildren. Have 28 years really gone by? Clearly so, and one only has to look at the beautiful blonde (and very pregnant) daughter of Prince Charming and Snow White and her two children for the evidence. Ruby knows it’s a relief for Snow to see her daughter happy, in love, and with a family she clearly adores. She and David even seem to have fully embraced their son-in-law.

Ruby had given her grandmother quite an earful about how she had reacted to the gossip about Emma and her pirate husband. Had Granny forgotten Ruby’s own past? Had she forgotten the terror she had wrought, the blood she had spilled? And her precious Peter . . .

Ruby pauses after refreshing a patron’s mug of coffee, her fingers going to the pendant that hangs around her neck. The one Peter had given her for her fifteenth birthday so long ago, a tiny carving of a sparrow. She pushes the painful memories aside, shoving the token into her blouse. The blouse she has buttoned all the way up to the second button. Her face reddens remembering how she had dressed as her cursed self.

“Could I have another?”

Ruby stops at the sound of the kind voice, and laughs a little at the empty glass before the petite woman.

“That’s your third one!”

“I know, but it’s so good! Whoever thought of drinking tea with ice? It's wonderful!”

Not to mention ice had only been for royalty, and even then only for the most extravagant of parties. “It really is, isn’t it? I’ll get you another.”

Ruby nods to Moe as she leaves the booth, but he barely glances at the waitress, much too enraptured with his daughter. So many happy reunions. So many happy endings. Ruby sighs as she fills Belle’s glass with more ice. What about her ending though? What will it hold?

There hasn’t been a full moon yet.

*******************************************************

“Belle!”

She looks up at the dark-haired man who has just entered the diner, and a smile breaks out over her face as she rises. He envelops her in a hug, and though she never did get his name, she returns it. When he pulls back, he ducks his head sheepishly.

“I’m sorry, I never introduced myself, did I? My name is Jefferson.”

“That’s okay, it was kind of a crazy day. Besides, you rescued me from that awful mental ward.” She turns to gesture behind her. “Oh, and this is my father. Papa, Jefferson.”

Moe rises and shakes the man’s hand. “I can’t thank you enough for what you did for my daughter. I can’t believe Regina had her locked up down their all these years. It sickens me.”

“Well,” Jefferson tugs at his tie nervously, knowing full well his motives were less than pure, “it was the right thing to do.”

“Please, please, sit,” Moe insists, “join us.”

Jefferson accepts the invitation, and slides into the booth next to Belle. He can’t help admiring how lustrous her hair looks tumbling over her shoulders in soft waves, or how appealing her figure is in her skirt and blouse. Even in her filthy, unkempt state, she had been lovely, but now? Now she was absolutely breathtaking. The realization throws him off balance, and he finds himself blurting out the last thing he ever meant to say.

“I have to confess something to you both.”

Moe’s brow furrows, and Belle’s bright blue eyes widen slightly. Jefferson shifts in the booth and clears his throat.

“Um, I just don’t want to mislead you. I didn’t free Belle for purely unselfish motives.” He rubs his sweaty palms together, suddenly realizing he doesn’t want his integrity diminished in Belle’s eyes. But hasn’t he sold most of his integrity already? Hasn’t he already been demeaned in the eyes of the one who matters most – his precious Grace?”

“I wanted revenge on Regina, and I knew that when Rumplestiltskin found out where you’ve been these 28 years that -”

“He would want to get back at her,” Belle finished for him.

Jefferson hung his head. “Yes. I’m so sorry, Belle. Here you think I’m your hero, when really I’m no different than the Evil Queen.”

“I wouldn’t go that far.”

Was that a smile flirting with the corner of her mouth? He shouldn’t be staring at her lips.

“Well,” Moe said, “I don’t blame anyone for wanting revenge on the Evil Queen. You freed my daughter, that’s all I care about.”

“Why did you want revenge?” Belle asked gently.

He took a deep breath, then told them the whole story. About taking that last job from Regina against his better judgment and his daughter’s wishes, about how Regina had double crossed him, then his torture under the curse. By the end, Belle had rested her hand on his forearm, offering him comfort he didn’t deserve.

“And how was your reunion with your Grace?”

He blinked in surprise at the genuine tenderness in her voice. His shoulders drooped. “I haven’t spoken with her yet. How could she possibly forgive me for leaving her? Especially when she has a lifetime of memories with a wonderful family here. She’s honestly better off without me.”

Belle shook her head. “That’s not true. Every girl needs her Papa, believe me.” She shared a tender smile with Moe who reached out to grasp her hand.

“Belle’s right,” the man added, “despite your mistakes in the past, I can tell deep down you’re a good man. You wouldn’t be worried about hurting her if you weren’t.”

Jefferson ran a hand through his hair, making it stand up even more wildly than usual. “I suppose you’re right.”

“And least give her the chance to decide how much she wants you in her life. If you stay away, you’re abandoning her all over again.”

He shook his head at the woman beside him. “Belle, you are full of more wisdom than a soothsayer.”

She shrugged and then tilted her head a bit smugly. “Well, I ought to. I read enough books.”

He liked her confidence. “What about you, Belle? Are you living with Rumplestiltskin still?”

She looked sadly into her glass of iced tea. “I’m afraid not. Rumple claims to love me, but not enough. He loves magic and power more.”

“I’m so sorry.”

She shrugs. “He has his magic, and the curse worked, so now he even has his son. When I left, Baelfire had just gotten there -

“Excuse me,” a voice interrupts from behind Belle, “did you just say Ne-Baelfire was at his father’s house?”

Both Belle and Jefferson turn around to see Emma – the savior herself, the daughter of Snow White and Prince Charming – watching them with a concerned expression.

“Yes,” Belle says, “I was on my way out, but I met Rumple’s son. I thought about staying, thinking maybe Rumple would finally change, but it didn’t take long to see that it was hopeless.”

Emma’s brow furrows further. “Why do you say that?”

“Because I left the minute Baelfire said he wanted his father’s help getting revenge.”

*******************************************************

Every time Rumple hears the door swing open, his heart lurches, thinking maybe Belle has changed her mind. He had given her a key when she left, begging her to reconsider. So far, she hasn’t.

So once again, when the door swings open, he hopes against hope that it’s the woman he loves. It isn’t. But it is the son he thought he might never see again. The son he scraped and clawed to get to. Baelfire stands before him now, jaw firm and eyes ablaze.

“I did it, Papa, I met my son.”

“And his mother?”

“She fell for it. Agreed to every word.”

A sinister grin lifts Rumple’s lips. He had thought his revenge against Captain Hook was complete when he sliced the man’s hand off and crushed Milah’s heart to dust in front of him. Then the man has the audacity to hurt his son, too? Steal what should rightfully be his?

“Good, my boy. Very good.”

#cs ff #canon divergence #childhood sweethearts #magical wardrobe #time travel #someone to watch over me

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bountyofbeads · 5 years

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The Real Donald Trump Is a Character on TV https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/06/opinion/sunday/trump-reality-tv.html

Great analysis by James Poniewozik🤔 To understand the wacky, outrageous, demented mind of Trump is to know that Trump is nothing more than a self-grandized TV character (D-rated).

"To ask whether any of this is “instinct” or “strategy” is a parlor game. If you think like a TV camera — if thinking in those reflexive microbursts of adrenaline and testosterone has served you your whole life — then the instinct is the strategy."

"And to ask who the “real” Donald Trump is, is to ignore the obvious. You already know who Donald Trump is. All the evidence you need is right there on your screen. He’s half-man, half-TV, with a camera for an eye that is constantly focused on itself. The red light is pulsing, 24/7, and it does not appear to have an off switch."

The Real Donald Trump Is a Character on TV

Understand that, and you’ll understand what he’s doing in the White House.

By James Poniewozik | Published September 6, 2019 | New York Times | Posted September 8, 2019 9:00 AM ET |

Mr. Poniewozik is the chief television critic of The Times and the author of “Audience of One: Donald Trump, Television and the Fracturing of America.”

He syndicated that show to Oprah, Letterman, NBC, WrestleMania and Fox News. Everything he achieved, he achieved by using TV as a magnifying glass, to make himself appear bigger than he was.

If you want to understand what President Trump will do in any situation, then, it’s more helpful to ask: What would TV do? What does TV want?

It wants conflict. It wants excitement. If there is something that can blow up, it should blow up. It wants a fight. It wants more. It is always eating and never full.

From Richard Hatch, we got a steady stream of Real Housewives, Kardashians, nasty judges, dating-show contestants who “didn’t come here to make friends” and, of course, Donald Trump.

It’s a pattern that we see as he advances toward his re-election campaign, with an eye not on the Nielsen ratings but on the polls: The only solution for any given problem was a Trumpier Trump.

#trump #trump administration #president donald trump #trumpism #maga #donald trump jr #donald trump #u.s. news #u.s. presidential elections #us politics #politics #politics and government #u.s. politics #republican politics

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let-it-raines · 6 years

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Betting on the Bullseye (Part 4)

Summary: Emma Swan loses a bet that means she has to ask her celebrity crush to be her date to her office’s annual fundraising gala. Killian Jones is that celebrity crush. She expects all kinds of humiliation and for her dignity to be completely lost. What she doesn’t expect is for him to say yes.

Rating: Mature

Found on AO3: Beginning | Current

Found on Tumblr Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

Tag List: @nikkiemms @resident-of-storybrooke @wellhellotragic @profdanglaisstuff @bmbbcs4evr @onceuponaprincessworld @jennjenn615 @mayquita @captainsjedi @captswanis4vr @teamhook@skyewardolicitycloisdelena91 @branlovesouat @dreadpirateemma @kmomof4 @ekr032-blog-blog

Remnants of ocean spray hit him as he drives them away from shore, the salt catching in his eyes while he focuses on the headlights of his boat and guiding them to where he wants to anchor for dinner. He’d wanted to do this during the daylight so that Emma could see the sun glistening on the ocean, but the one time he’d been free during the day had gotten away from them spending it on the beach before Emma mentioned she’d never seen Star Wars.

That just wouldn’t do.

He’d been remised to see Emma go inside and change out the absolutely sinful red bikini she had on (damn, those were some wonderful tiny pieces of fabric), but he couldn’t let the lass go anymore without watching Star Wars. He’s got various feelings on the movies, ones which he held back, but they’re classics. She can’t have not seen then, so he had to rectify it before he headed off to work that day.

So they’d thrown on some lounge clothes – but he knew that Emma kept her bikini on from the red string on her exposed shoulder from the oversized sweater she had on – and settled into his living room, diming the lights and closing the curtains to watch the movies. They didn’t talk much, not more than him answering questions, but they didn’t have to. She became enraptured with the movies, though she did keep getting up to go get something to eat without caring if she missed some of the movie, and he’d pause and wait for her to come back. Every time she got up and came back, he swears she sat a little closer to him on the couch. For awhile, he convinced himself that he was imagining things, but then her shoulders brushed his and her feet kept bumping into his.

He might have been going crazy, but he was pretty sure that Emma was doing it on purpose. It was like he was an awkward teenager hanging out with a girl while Liam wasn’t in the house, but he is a thirty-two year old man in his own home…with the girl he likes.

Likes.

Loves.

It’s one of those two.

Likely leaning toward the second option the more time he spends with her.

He’s gotten to know her through texts, phone calls, and ridiculous videos, things he never realized could bring him so close to a practical stranger. They’ve become intimate without actually being intimate, and honestly, he kind of prefers it that way. He’s been betrayed and wronged so many times by people who he doesn’t get to know first before fully leaping in, and while this has all been kind of a gamble, he thinks he might have come out on top with a winning hand.

Or maybe he’s getting there.

He had to go to work eventually, the show sending him a driver so he wasn’t driving home in the morning dead on his feet, and he left Emma with the movies. When he came home around six the next morning for a short break between filming, Emma was conked out on the couch, fast asleep with the television still on and her body half hanging off the couch. He was tempted to move her, but he honestly wasn’t sure if she’d want that or if his tired body would be able to. So he’d padded upstairs and gone to sleep himself before getting up four hours later and heading back to work.

His day had been impossibly long, most of the scenes he filmed full of swordfights and running back and forth between sets, but Emma spent her day exploring Santa Monica and asked if he’d be willing to take them out on the ocean when he got home from work. He really wanted to sleep, but he only gets these few days with her. He can suck it up and not be tired.

Turning the key in the ignition, he powers down the boat and anchor it to its spot before walking around to where Emma’s sitting in the sunken seats at the bow, her lips wrapped around the neck of a bottle of beer. Is it ridiculous to think that he’s jealous of the bottle? He thinks it is, but then he remembers how Emma’s lips feel, soft and warm, as well as how they taste, like the red wine she’d had to drink that night along with the chocolate dessert the caterers had served at the Christmas gala. Now they’d probably still be soft and warm, but he’s sure they’d taste like salt and beer, an entirely different yet no less desirable combination.

Maybe more desirable since he truly knows Emma now.

He feels his cock twitch in his jeans, and he has to calm himself, thinking of anything and everything undesirable – artichokes, the workouts his trainer is going to kill him with after taking a week off, Liam and Elsa doing…anything – before settling down on the cushion next to Emma and propping his feet up against hers. He stares out at the darkness of the ocean, which is the smallest bit more blue by the light of the moon and the stars, and he just breathes it all in.

This is his happy place if he’s ever had one, and he likes sharing it with someone else other than his family more than he thought he would.

“This is nice,” Emma sighs before taking another sip of her beer, a drop of liquid running loose and landing on her chin that he can’t help but want to lick…woah, down boy. If he wasn’t driving on so little sleep, he’d take one of those in an instant to try to dull his heightened senses. “You know, I’ve never been on a boat before. I mean, like, I’ve been out to the docks and near all of the sailboats in the harbor, but I’ve never actually been, you know…”

She motions to the water around them, and he chuckles, getting her meaning. “Well, love, you never forget your first.”

“Shut up,” she giggles, reaching back and slapping his chest. “Some people do want to forget their first.”

“Why, love? It didn’t get the boat a’rocking? Waves weren’t made? There were rough waters?”

He accentuates his words with a waggle of his eyebrows and a swivel of his hips, but when he expects Emma to continue her laughter, she doesn’t. Instead her features are focused on the label of her beer, picking at the damp paper and flicking it away. Her immediate change in demeanor worries him, and while he doesn’t want to overstep their boundaries, he can’t help but ask.

“Swan, you okay?”

“Yeah, yeah,” she waves him away before twisting so that she’s facing him, wisps of her hair falling out of her braid, “I was just thinking about firsts.”

“Boat rides?”

“Boyfriends. Or loves really.”

“Oh, um, I don’t…” He reaches up to scratch behind his ear, trying for the life of him to think of something to say. He has nothing. He basically speaks for a living, devouring words on a daily basis, and suddenly he can’t think of his own.

“It’s…I don’t expect you to say anything, and I don’t mean to be Debbie Downer or Emma Emotional or whatever but – ”

“Wait. Emma Emotional?”

“Just go with it,” she laughs, the smallest of smiles tugging up on her lips. “I have a horrible history with relationships. Not a one has worked out, obviously, or else I imagine I probably wouldn’t be here with you…not that this is a, uh, um a – ”

He reaches forward and grabs her forearm, squeezing even as his heart rate picks up. “Go on, love.”

“His name was Neal,” she restarts, shocking him even if he knew where this was going, “and he was the first person to ever love me but at least the tenth to ever leave me if you include my real parents and foster parents and the couple who almost adopted me until they had their own miracle baby. And while all of those things screwed me up, I don’t think anything screwed me up as badly as having someone love me and then just disappear into thin air only to pop up five years later with a wife and two kids who were definitely his and definitely older than five.”

What an arsehole.

“He’s a fool.”

“I know that…now.” She smiles when she says the last part, and like it’s instinct, he wraps his arm around her shoulder and tugs her into his side, holding back so that he doesn’t kiss her temple. “I just – I could never understand it, why people kept leaving me for other people. It’s like I was good enough for a moment and then I did something or said something and just wasn’t anymore.”

“Emma, when people leave us like you’ve been left, that’s not on you.”

“Yeah, but I’m the common factor. That’s got to mean something in the long run. The first person to ever stick around was Ruby and then Mary Margaret and David by extension. And while I know that logically they’re my friends and they love me, this voice in the back of my head that sounds a lot like Neal is telling me that they’re going to leave too. Shit, Neal didn’t even stay with me when he was with me. I was literally the mistress and didn’t know.”

His hand cautiously moves up and down her arm while the boat rocks beneath them. “It’s not your fault he was an arsehole. And your friends, they’re not going to leave.”

“How would you know?”

“They’re smart people. And I know you. No person worth their salt would be dumb enough to leave you.”

She sniffles against him before her hand reaches up to wipe away the stray tears that have fallen. Her head lifts from his shoulder, the loss of heat almost instant, before dropping back down again. This is not the conversation he was expecting to have tonight, but he feels honored that Emma would share with him.

“Me coming to see you is a big fucking deal, one that I’m not even sure how I made. I’m not…I don’t want to come off as weak or insecure because I’m not, but I almost backed out at least ten times.”

He rubs his hand up and down her arm before leaning his cheek against the top of hers. It’s…he can’t believe so many people have betrayed her. She doesn’t deserve that. No one does, but it happened to her.

“I’m glad you didn’t. I’m glad you’re here.”

“I am, too.”

“Thank you for sharing that with me. I feel honored to get to know that much more about Emma Swan. I’m glad that you trusted me with all of that. I know that it means a lot.”

She’s silent for a moment before she twists against him. He thinks that she’s going to move away, but she doesn’t. Instead she wraps her arms around his waist and nuzzles herself into him. He can feel her everywhere, and this time he doesn’t hesitate to drop a kiss to her forehead.

“I’m sorry for bringing the mood down.”

“Don’t be. I promise another night I’ll share my sins and tragedies.”

“What a weird way to say that.”

“I’m actually pretty sure it’s a line in my filming for tomorrow.”

“Wow, can’t even come up with his own lines. Classy, dude.”

“Okay, so one day when the mood is light, I’ll tell you about my messed up childhood and fucked up exes. And then you’ll know almost all that you need to know about me.”

She laughs against his chest, pulling him a little closer as her hair begins to fly in his face, getting caught in his eyes and his mouth. God, how does she have so much hair? It’s like it’s constantly growing.

“Sounds like a plan, Stan.”

“My name is Killian, love.”

“Yeah but nothing rhymes with that.”

He laughs against her head before pressing another kiss there. He wonders if she feels a weight lifted off her shoulder or if she feels heavier. He hopes that it’s the former and that her secrets and past that have been weighing her down fall away into the waves. Maybe he should do the same.

“Hey, love?”

“Yeah?”

“I was the other woman too.”

“Wait, what?”

“Other man,” he weakly chuckles, trying to concentrate and not flounder his words. “It was, well, I said another night I’d tell you, but I can’t not tell you now. You’re important to me, and you’re not alone in any of this. I was twenty-five, had just landed my first big role, and I met a woman, Milah. Beautiful, vibrant, but also married with a child. I just didn’t know it at the time. I found out because her husband worked at my agency. And I almost didn’t care, was almost willing to still see her because I loved her so much, but then I overheard her on the phone talking about me as if I was some plaything.”

“I’m sorry.”

He hears no pity or rage in her voice, all of the things he heard from Liam and Elsa when he told them, Robin and Will too. It was just two words, but she understands. He knows that she does from what she’s said, but he feels like she would even if she didn’t.

“Me too, love. But I think it’s all okay. We’ve done pretty well for ourselves.”

“I mean, I don’t own a boat, but I’ve got a rocking shoe collection.”

“Shoes are obviously better than boats.”

“I think so, too. Are we ever going to have dinner?”

They eat dinner where they are, spreading the food out over the seats between them and devouring it while boats and ships move around them and back to shore. Conversation is much lighter, carefree, and he finds himself nearly forgetting the fact that they began to bare parts of their souls to each other. This week has been one of the best he’s had in a long time, and it’s moving far too quickly for his liking. But right now, sitting with Emma out on the ocean being gently rocked by the waves beneath them, time might as well be standing still.

He docks the boat around one in the morning, his feet dragging behind him and Emma’s arm around his waist as he guides her back to the car so he can drive them home. It’s only a short drive from his house to the marina, and it’s one that he usually walks, but when he pulls into his garage ten minutes later, he’s glad to have taken this route. Emma yawns as they walk into the house, kicking her shoes off in his kitchen and leaving them there instead of neatly placing them on the shoe rack. That’s one of the things he’s learned about Emma this week. She’s messy. It’s not an unbearable messy, but it’s definitely not how he is. It’s probably an aftereffect of living in foster homes for her entire life and being scared to leave a single item out of place, and now that she has her own home, she leaves her shoes places and doesn’t always fold her clothes. He internalized it another way, keeping his neat freak ways, but he’s gotten better about it lately. So no part of him minds when he kicks his sneakers off as well and leaves them jumbled up with Emma’s.

“What time do you have to go to work tomorrow…or today?”

“At nine,” he sighs, the drowsiness really beginning to hit him. “Do you…do you want to come with me?”

Her eyes light up, and it makes him a little less tired. “Really? I can actually come with?”

“Of course. It just means you have to wake up early.”

“I think I can do that.” She takes a step forward, her thumbs reaching and touching under his eyes, and he nearly sighs in relief at having her skin touch his. God, he’s pathetic. “You need to go to bed. You look exhausted.”

“That’s always what a man wants to hear.”

“Yeah, well, you need to hear it.” She pats his cheeks. “Time to go to bed.”

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

He hasn’t been this tired in years.

He wakes up and goes to work. After filming for at least twelve hours a day, he comes home and spends as much time as he can with Emma before crashing for about two hours and doing it all again. He’s used to this kind of a schedule when he’s filming, barely having time for anything but sleeping and eating, but he’s never had someone to come home to afterward. Okay, well, he’s not technically coming home to her. She’s just staying at his home, and he only has three more days with her including today…which is really two because she has to leave on Sunday.

So basically just tomorrow night and a little of Sunday morning.

That’s not a hell of a lot of time.

Really no time.

Shit.

This may very well be the fastest week of his life, and he just needs it to slow down.

But by some kind of stroke of luck and maybe a little bit of a southern California miracle, it’s raining, and every single outdoor scene they were going to film today is cancelled so they’re inside the studio. Emma’s with him today, sitting in a chair off in the corner with Robin chatting away while he films.

None of his friends knew Emma was coming in. Hell, none of his friends even really know about Emma. It’s not that he hasn’t wanted to tell them. He has. But he wasn’t sure exactly how to go about it. They’re friends, and he doesn’t exactly make an announcement to his other friends and family whenever he makes a new friend. That would be…odd. This entire thing is odd, and he’s going to sit down and talk to her about it tonight, especially since Robin unexpectedly showed up on set today.

And because he should have already. He already treated her poorly with the way that he left after their date back in December, and he can’t do something like that to her again. He might not be dating her – but he damn well wants to – but he cares about her. He doesn’t want to hurt her anymore than he already did.

Then Robin had shown up and immediately recognized Emma from the video of her online. He’d given Killian a curious look before plastering a smile on his face and shaking hands with Emma, telling her it was nice to meet her and then promptly asking if he had forgotten that he set up a fan engagement for her. Emma’s cheeks had gone red and her mouth had gaped open like she didn’t know what to say. That’s when he’d realized his mistake and promptly told Robin that he and Emma had been getting to know each other and she was here as his friend.

His phrasing was probably a mistake, too, and while he knows Robin is going to have a hell of a lot of questions when Killian’s done filming, he and Emma seem to be getting along.

That’s good because he’s not sure how exactly the conversations he has to have later are going to go.

When his scene is finishing filming, he walks over to Emma and Robin, who is animatedly using his hands as he talks to Emma.

“ – and he just falls on his arse. We had to ice it, and he was bloody black and blue for weeks. And to be frank, he was the biggest pain in the arse for an entire week.”

“Hey,” Killian laughs, already knowing Robin’s telling her about the time his harness broke on the set of one of his first gigs, “there’s no need to tell the lass about all of my most embarrassing moments.”

“Oh, Killian,” Emma sighs, popping up on her toes and wrapping her arm around his shoulder, “that’s all we’ve been talking about for the past two hours. I know all of your dirty little secrets.”

He shoots Robin a look, and the man simply shrugs. “You’re the one who brought a girl to set, mate. I can’t help that I had to entertain her.”

“You’re a bloody arse.”

“No, I think that’s apparently you.”

Robin barks out a laugh at Emma’s teasing, and he looks down at her to see her lips painted into a smirk while her eyebrow is practically raised to her hairline. She’s a bloody wonder, and he had no idea how nice it’d be to see her joking around with one of his friends. Gods, this week has been like some kind of dream, and he doesn’t even care that he’s the butt of the joke…pun intended.

“You’re being cheeky, love.”

“Again, that’s you.”

She rolls her eyes, and out of instinct, he leans down and kisses her temple. He lingers there for a moment, inhaling her scent, and only pulls back when he realizes that he’s just kissed her without thinking about it…again. Out on the boat last night was different. That was an emotionally charged night. This is a casual setting, and that was casual affection. It was her forehead and not her lips, but still. He doesn’t need to freak her out or make her run by caring too much. He doesn’t dare look at her after his lips leave her skin, but he hears her intake of breath and sees Robin’s questioning look.

“Are you…are you finished for the day? I was kind of thinking we could go get dinner or something.”

“I’ve got two more scenes, darling. Why don’t you walk over to craft services or my trailer and get something to eat? Just show them your credentials card, and you’ll be right jolly.” “Right jolly? What the hell, Jones?”

He laughs before pushing her away. “Go on, Swan.”

When she walks away, pulling the hood of her rain jacket over her head, he doesn’t even realize he’s staring until Robin smacks his shoulder, hitting right over the necklaces he has on so that the metal digs into his skin.

“Bloody hell,” he hisses, looking up to see Robin staring at him with an indignant look on his face, “what was that for?”

“What the hell are you doing bringing your video date here? Really? I know you two kissed and then shagged, but I had no idea that was still going on. Or that you were going to fly her out to California.”

“First of all, her name is Emma, and we did not shag, not that it’s any of your business. She’s a friend who I very much like, and we’ve been getting to know each other.”

“Why is she here?”

“She had to use up her vacation days before she lost them, and she asked if it would be alright to come visit.”

“And you just let her?”

He shrugs. “I wanted to see her.”

Robin studies him for a minute, and Killian tries to hold his gaze without squirming or blinking too much or scratching behind his ear. Robin knows all of his tells, and he can’t exactly hide much from his manager. Never has been able to, especially for how long they’ve known each other.

“Ah,” Robin sighs, crossing his arms over his chest before looking Killian up and down, “you’re in love with her.”

“What makes you say that?”

“It’s written all over your face. I should have seen it sooner.”

“Mate,” he hisses, gulping and trying to control the urge to spill all of his feelings right then and there, “I’m not in love with her. We’re friends. Don’t you have friends?”

He’s a damn liar, but he’s not about to tell someone else before he tells Emma. And he’s not sure he’ll ever get to tell Emma.

“I do. But I don’t kiss them on the forehead and mentally undress them with my eyes.”

Killian takes a step forward, laying a smacking kiss on Robin’s forehead before looking him up and down, making his smile as salacious as he possibly can. “Yeah, well, that’s what I do.”

Emma walks back in at the moment, her hands full of food in what looks like a Tupperware container. She must have run into Beth. The woman is always sending food home with people.

“Don’t tell Liam about any of this.”

“Why not?”

“Because I haven’t, and you know how he gets when I have a new girlfriend.”

“I thought she wasn’t your girlfriend.”

“Piss off. You know what I mean.”

“Hey,” Emma greets, a smile on her face while she balances all of the food, “look at all of this. This woman, Beth, just gave it all to me when I told her why I was here. You want some?”

“Uh, no, love. I’m good. Maybe later. I’ve got to go change in wardrobe. Why don’t you go hang out in my trailer until I’m finished for the day? It shouldn’t be too long.”

They get back to his house around ten that night, Emma still carting around the damn Tupperware containers, while he can’t stop thinking about everything that’s happened today…and since the beginning of December really. It’s going to drive him mad to not talk about it, and he can’t very well let this all simmer inside of him for too much longer.

“What are we doing?”

“I’m putting away this food, but I don’t want to mess with your weirdly organized fridge.”

“No, Emma,” he tugs on her arm until she turns around, her face framed in the light of the refrigerator in the dimness of his kitchen, “what are we doing? You and me?”

“I don’t…I don’t understand.”

“Are we acquaintances? Friends? Something else? Bloody hell, love. Do you want to kiss me again?”

Her lips part and her eyes widen before blinking, her bare blonde lashes moving against her cheekbones while she simply stares at him, a container of lasagna in her hand. Why the hell is he focusing on the lasagna? Why the hell did he just ask her if she wanted to kiss him again?

“I mean…what? Do I – I want to kiss you again.”

“Are you asking or are you saying?”

“S-saying.”

“So I can…”

Emma rolls her eyes before nodding, and he steps forward and cups her face, pulling her into him and capturing his lips with hers, everything that’s been upside down and all over the place this week righting itself as Emma’s soft and warms lips move against his and a whimper escapes her throat, the container of lasagna between them falling to the ground and breaking them out of their trance.

“That was – ”

“So much better than last time.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah,” she smiles, resting her forehead against his, her breath hotly brushing over his lips, “you want to fall asleep on the couch again and then run out of the house the next morning too?”

“Swan,” he hesitates, backing up from her but leaving a hand against her cheek, “I’m sorry about that. I know I’ve apologized until my face turned blue, but I can’t say it enough. I was a wanker.”

“And I was joking. I know that you’re sorry, but we’d just met. You didn’t owe me anything.”

“I owed you more than my exit.”

“Yeah, well, I think you have plenty of time to make up for it.”

He smiles, moving back against her, and then she kisses him again.

#betting on the bullseye #captain swan #cs fic #cs ff

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