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reanimatedcourier · 4 years ago

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How to Write Indigenous Characters Without Looking like a Jackass:

Update as of December 26th, 2020: I have added a couple new sections about naming and legal terms, as well as a bit of reading on the Cherokee Princess phenomenon.

Boozhoo (hello) Fallout fandom! I'm a card-carrying Anishinaabe delivering this rough guide about writing Indigenous characters because wow, do I see a lot of shit.

Let's get something out of the way first: Fallout's portrayal of Indigenous people is racist. From a vague definition of "tribal" to the claims of them being "savage" and "uncivilized" mirror real-world stereotypes used to dehumanize us. Fallout New Vegas' narrated intro has Ron Perlman saying Mr. House "rehabilitated" tribals to create New Vegas' Three Families. You know. Rehabilitate. As if we are animals. Top it off with an erasure of Indigenous people in the American Southwest and no real tribe names, and you've got some pretty shitty representation. The absence of Native American as a race option in the GECK isn't too great, given that two Native characters are marked "Caucasian" despite being brown. Butch Deloria is a pretty well-known example of this effect. (Addendum: Indigenous people can have any mix of dominant and recessive traits, as well as present different phenotypes. What bothers me is it doesn't accommodate us or mixed people, which is another post entirely.)

As a precautionary warning: this post and the sources linked will discuss racism and genocide. There will also be discussion of multiple kinds of abuse.

Now, your best approach will be to pick a nation or tribe and research them. However, what follows will be general references.

Terms that may come up in your research include Aboriginal/Native Canadian, American Indian/Native American, Inuit, Métis, and Mestizo. The latter two refer to cultural groups created after the discovery of the so-called New World. (Addendum made September 5th, 2020: Mestizo has negative connotations and originally meant "half breed" so stick with referring to your mixed Latine and Indigenous characters as mixed Indigenous or simply by the name of their people [Maya, Nahua].)

As a note, not every mixed person is Métis or Mestizo. If you are, say, Serbian and Anishinaabe, you would be mixed, but not Métis (the big M is important here, as it refers to a specific culture). Even the most liberal definition caps off at French and British ancestry alongside Indigenous (some say Scottish and English). Mestizo works the same, since it refers to descendants of Spanish conquistadors/settlers and Indigenous people.

Trouble figuring out whose land is where? No problem, check out this map.

Drawing

Don't draw us with red skin. It's offensive and stereotypical.

Tutorial for Native Skintones

Tutorial for Mixed Native Skintones

Why Many Natives Have Long Hair (this would technically fit better under another category, but give your Native men long hair!)

If You're Including Traditional Wear, Research! It's Out There

Languages

Remember, there are a variety of languages spoken by Indigenous people today. No two tribes will speak the same language, though there are some that are close and may have loan words from each other (Cree and Anishinaabemowin come to mind). Make sure your Diné (you may know them as Navajo) character doesn't start dropping Cree words.

Here's a Site With a Map and Voice Clips

Here's an Extensive List of Amerindian Languages

Keep in mind there are some sounds that have no direct English equivalents. But while we're at it, remember a lot of us speak English, French, Spanish, or Portuguese. The languages of the countries that colonized us.

Words in Amerindian languages tend to be longer than English ones and are in the format of prefix + verb + suffix to get concepts across. Gaawiin miskwaasinoon is a complete sentence in Anishinaabemowin, for example (it is not red).

Names

Surprisingly, we don't have names like Passing Dawn or Two-Bears-High-Fiving in real life. A lot of us have, for lack of better phrasing, white people names. We may have family traditions of passing a name down from generation to generation (I am the fourth person in my maternal line to have my middle name), but not everyone is going to do that. If you do opt for a name from a specific tribe, make sure you haven't chosen a last name from another tribe.

Baby name sites aren't reliable, because most of the names on there will be made up by people who aren't Indigenous. That site does list some notable exceptions and debunks misconceptions.

Here's a list of last names from the American census.

Indian Names

You may also hear "spirit names" because that's what they are for. You know the sort of mystical nature-related name getting slapped on an Indigenous character? Let's dive into that for a moment.

The concept of a spirit name seems to have gotten mistranslated at some point in time. It is the name Creator calls you throughout all your time both here and in the spirit world. These names are given (note the word usage) to you in a ceremony performed by an elder. This is not done lightly.

A lot of imitations of this end up sounding strange because they don't follow traditional guidelines. (I realize this has spread out of the original circle, but Fallout fans may recall other characters in Honest Hearts and mods that do this. They have really weird and racist results.)

If you're not Indigenous: don't try this. You will be wrong.

Legal Terms

Now, sometimes the legal term (or terms) for a tribe may not be what they refer to themselves as. A really great example of this would be the Oceti Sakowin and "Sioux". How did that happen, you might be wondering. Smoky Mountain News has an article about this word and others, including the history of these terms.

For the most accurate information, you are best off having your character refer to themselves by the name their nation uses outside of legislation. A band name would be pretty good for this (Oglala Lakota, for example). I personally refer to myself by my band.

Cowboys

And something the Fallout New Vegas fans might be interested in, cowboys! Here's a link to a post with several books about Black and Indigenous cowboys in the Wild West.

Representation: Stereotypes and Critical Thought

Now, you'll need to think critically about why you want to write your Indigenous character a certain way. Here is a comprehensive post about stereotypes versus nuance.

Familiarize yourself with tropes. The Magical Indian is a pretty prominent one, with lots of shaman-type characters in movies and television shows. This post touches on its sister tropes (The Magical Asian and The Magical Negro), but is primarily about the latter.

Say you want to write an Indigenous woman. Awesome! Characters I love to see. Just make sure you're aware of the stereotypes surrounding her and other Women of Color.

Word to the wise: do not make your Indigenous character an alcoholic. "What, so they can't even drink?" You might be asking. That is not what I'm saying. There is a pervasive stereotype about Drunk Indians, painting a reaction to trauma as an inherent genetic failing, as stated in this piece about Indigenous social worker Jessica Elm's research. The same goes for drugs. Ellen Deloria is an example of this stereotype.

Familiarize yourself with and avoid the Noble Savage trope. This was used to dehumanize us and paint us as "childlike" for the sake of a plot device. It unfortunately persists today.

Casinos are one of the few ways for tribes to make money so they can build homes and maintain roads. However, some are planning on diversifying into other business ventures.

There's a stereotype where we all live off government handouts. Buddy, some of these long-term boil water advisories have been in place for over twenty years. The funding allocated to us as a percentage is 0.39%: less than half a percent to fight the coronavirus. They don't give us money.

"But what about people claiming to be descended from a Cherokee princess?" Cherokee don't and never had anything resembling princesses. White southerners made that up prior to the Civil War. As the article mentions, they fancied themselves "defending their lands as the Indians did".

Also, don't make your Indigenous character a cannibal. Cannibalism is a serious taboo in a lot of our cultures, particularly northern ones.

Our lands are not cursed. We don't have a litany of curses to cast on white people in found footage films. Seriously. We have better things to be doing. Why on earth would our ancestors be haunting you when they could be with their families? Very egotistical assumption.

Indigenous Ties and Blood Quantum

Blood quantum is a colonial system that was initially designed to "breed out the Indian" in people. To dilute our bloodlines until we assimilated properly into white society. NPR has an article on it here.

However, this isn't how a vast majority of us define our identities. What makes us Indigenous is our connections (or reconnection) to our families, tribes, bands, clans, and communities.

Blood quantum has also historically been used to exclude Black Natives from tribal enrollment, given that it was first based on appearance. So, if you looked Black and not the image of "Indian" the white census taker had in his brain, you were excluded and so were your descendants.

Here are two tumblrs that talk about Black Indigenous issues and their perspectives. They also talk about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people of Australia.

However, if you aren't Indigenous, don't bring up blood quantum. Don't. This is an issue you should not be speaking about.

Cherokee Princess Myth

"Princess" was not a real position in any tribe. The European idea of monarchy did not suddenly manifest somewhere else. The closest probable approximation may have been the daughter of a chief or other politically prominent person. But princess? No.

Here is an article talking about possible origins of this myth. Several things are of note here: women from other tribes may have bee shoved under this label and the idea of a "Cherokee Princess" had been brought up to explain the sudden appearance of a brown-skinned (read: half Black) family member.

For a somewhat more in depth discussion of why, specifically, this myth gets touted around so often, Timeline has this piece.

Religion

Our religions are closed. We are not going to tell you how we worship. Mostly because every little bit we choose to share gets appropriated. Smudging is the most recent example. If you aren't Indigenous, that's smoke cleansing. Smudging is done in a specific way with ceremonies and prayers.

Now, a lot of us were forcibly converted. Every residential school was run by Christians. So plenty of us are Catholic, Baptist, Anglican, Lutheran, etc. Catholicism in Latin America also has influence from the Indigenous religions in that region.

Having your Indigenous character pray or carry rosaries wouldn't be a bad thing, if that religion was important to them. Even if they are atheist, if they lived outside of a reserve or other Indigenous communities, they might have Christian influences due to its domination of the Western world.

Settler Colonialism and the White Savior Trope

Now we've come to our most painful section yet. Fallout unintentionally has an excellent agent of settler-colonialism, in particular the Western Christian European variety, in Caesar's Legion and Joshua Graham.

(Addendum: Honest Hearts is extremely offensive in its portrayal of Indigenous people, and egregiously shows a white man needing to "civilize" tribals and having to teach them basic skills. These skills include cooking, finding safe water, and defending themselves from other tribes.)

Before we dive in, here is a post explaining the concept of cultural Christianity, if you are unfamiliar with it.

We also need to familiarize ourselves with The White Man's Burden. While the poem was written regarding the American-Philippine war, it still captures the attitudes toward Indigenous folks all over the world at the time.

As this article in Teen Vogue points out, white people like to believe they need to save People of Color. You don't need to. People of Color can save themselves.

Now, cultural Christianity isn't alone on this side of the pond. Writer Teju Cole authored a piece on the White Savior Industrial Complex to describe mission trips undertaken by white missionaries to Africa to feed their egos.

Colonialism has always been about the acquisition of wealth. To share a quote from this paper about the ongoing genocide of Indigenous peoples: "Negatively, [settler colonialism] strives for the dissolution of native societies. Positively, it erects a new colonial society on the expropriated land base—as I put it, settler colonizers come to stay: invasion is a structure not an event. In its positive aspect, elimination is an organizing principal of settler-colonial society rather than a one-off (and superseded) occurrence. The positive outcomes of the logic of elimination can include officially encouraged miscegenation, the breaking-down of native title into alienable individual freeholds, native citizenship, child abduction, religious conversion, resocialization in total institutions such as missions or boarding schools, and a whole range of cognate biocultural assimilations. All these strategies, including frontier homicide, are characteristic of settler colonialism. Some of them are more controversial in genocide studies than others." (Positive, here, is referring to "benefits" for the colonizers. Indigenous people don't consider colonization beneficial.)

An example of a non-benefit, the Church Rock disaster had Diné children playing in radioactive water so the company involved could avoid bad publicity.

Moving on, don't sterilize your Indigenous people. Sterilization, particularly when it is done without consent, has long been used as a tool by the white system to prevent "undesirables" (read, People of Color and disabled people) from having children. Somehow, as of 2018, it wasn't officially considered a crime.

The goal of colonization was to eliminate us entirely. Millions died because of exposure to European diseases. Settlers used to and still do separate our children from us for reasons so small as having a dirty dish in the sink. You read that right, a single dirty dish in your kitchen sink was enough to get your children taken and adopted out to white families. This information was told to me by an Indigenous social work student whose name I will keep anonymous.

It wasn't until recently they made amendments to the Indian Act that wouldn't automatically render Indigenous women non-status if they married someone not Indigenous. It also took much too long for Indigenous families to take priority in child placement over white ones. Canada used to adopt Indigenous out to white American families. The source for that statement is further down, but adoption has been used as a tool to destroy cultures.

I am also begging you to cast aside whatever colonialist systems have told you about us. We are alive. People with a past, not people of the past, which was wonderfully said here by Frank Waln.

Topics to Avoid if You Aren't Indigenous

Child Separation. Just don't. We deserve to remain with our families and our communities. Let us stay together and be happy that way.

Assimilation schools. Do not bring up a tool for cultural genocide that has left lasting trauma in our communities.

W/ndigos. I don't care that they're in Fallout 76. They shouldn't be. Besides, you never get them right anyway.

Sk/nwalkers. Absolutely do not. Diné stories are not your playthings either.

I've already talked about drugs and alcohol. Do your research with compassion and empathy in mind. Indigenous people have a lot of pain and generational trauma. You will need to be extremely careful having your Indigenous characters use drugs and alcohol. If your character can be reduced to their (possible) substance abuse issues, you need to step back and rework it. As mentioned in Jessica Elm's research, remember that it isn't inherent to us.

For our final note: remember that we're complex, autonomous human beings. Don't use our deaths to further the stories of your white characters. Don't reduce us to some childlike thing that needs to be raised and civilized by white characters. We interact with society a little differently than you do, but we interact nonetheless.

Meegwetch (thank you) for reading! Remember to do your research and portray us well, but also back off when you are told by an Indigenous person.

This may be updated in the future, it depends on what information I come across or, if other Indigenous people are so inclined, what is added to this post.

#fallout 3 #fallout 4 #fallout 76 #fallout new vegas #fallout 1 #fallout 2 #fallout: new vegas #ozhibii'ige

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threecrowsinatrenchcoat · 3 years ago

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Paint My Spirit Gold

Dukeceit Week Day 2: Green/Yellow

Fans of the YouTubers "Deceit" and Remus "The Duke" Sanders start to suspect that maybe, just maybe, the two of them are more than simple internet pals.

AO3 Link: [here]

Word Count: 2187

Warnings: n/a

@dukeceitweek <3

[ID: A screenshot of a Twitter post by user @CallMeDukie. It features a watercolor-style painting of a snake. The snake appears to be made of melting chocolate, and there is a large bite taken out of its tail. Cherries and jam are leaking out of the snake at the bite wound. The snake's expression of horror is overly-exaggerated to the point of comedy. The caption reads: "liked your snake boi, @SerpenThyme. thanks for the inspo." /end ID]

A notification ding cut Janus off mid-sentence.

“Wow, someone left their cell phone on, so professional,” he said, giving the camera a dramatic eye roll. That someone was him, of course, because he was the only one in the apartment- just him and the running livestream- but that was no excuse not to be a drama queen about it. He finished wiping flour off his hands and grabbed his phone to silence it; but the notification made him pause. He flicked his eyes up toward the camera and gave a slight smirk.

“My goodness, I’m famous,” he drawled. “The Duke himself has graced little old me with some fan art.”

Most of the comments in the chat wanted him to show it, so Janus opened up Twitter to see the full post he’d been tagged in. It was a watercolor painting of the coiled-snake chocolate sculpture- lovingly named Jake by his viewers- he’d made for his YouTube video last week; it was wearing an expression of such comedic horror that Janus had to stifle a laugh. He flicked his phone screen toward the close-up camera on his counter so his viewers could see.

“How kind of you, Remus,” he said. “All of you should go scold him for what he’s done to poor Jake here.”

Most of his viewers would know he was joking- after all, they were the ones to nickname him Deceit when he provided neither a real or fake name for his online persona. They knew full well what he was like by now.

The oven timer dinged. Janus silenced his phone and set it aside.

“And our first batch of cookies is done. You know, why don’t we show the Duke some appreciation?”

[ID: An Instagram post by user @SerpenThyme. The photo is an artistically-framed shot of a stack of sugar cookies with green, yellow, and pink icing. Propped up against the stack is another cookie, with an intricate icing-drawing of an octopus. The photo appears to have been color corrected to have high contrast, low saturation, and a dark vignette at the edges. The Instagram user @OctoDukie is tagged. No caption. /end ID]

“You know, I have often been accused of actually being a little old lady, what with my fondness for knitted jumpers, rocking chairs, and incredibly fucked up murder mystery books. Today I am doing nothing to dispel this accusation, by making soup.”

The studio was dark and empty aside from Remus' workspace. Everyone else had left long ago, even his own brother, which meant that it was officially ass-o'clock in the morning (or, as most people called it, somewhere between 1 and 2 a.m.) But Remus was stuck in hyperfocus, honed in on putting the last touches on a commission that he'd been putting off for weeks. It's not that it was a tough painting- once he'd gotten started, it was actually a very creatively satisfying piece- but man, executive dysfunction could go suck a dick

“French onion soup, specifically. Because while I do like to pretend I am a classy bitch, I am also, regrettably, a lazy bitch with a distaste for anything that takes longer than one bottle of wine to make.”

Remus hated working in silence. It was stifling, almost suffocating. His brain needed noise like his lungs needed air. So when the studio had grown still and silent, Remus had flipped open his laptop and queued up some YouTube videos.

“So we have here three pounds of onions that we need to slice up, pole to pole. You’re going to cry no matter what, so if you have any memories you’ve been repressing since middle school, now is an excellent time to dredge those up.”

And if it happened to be 90% SerpenThyme videos, well. Sue him.

“Now the first rule of caramelizing onions: fast and sloppy is always better than slow and thorough… at least, that’s what every man I’ve ever slept with tells me.”

Remus choked and glanced over to his laptop screen just in time to catch Deceit's trademark smirk directed at the audience just for a moment. It was the deadpan delivery that always got him. Remus could barely hold onto a joke long enough to get through it without cackling mid-punchline, but this fucker could say the funniest shit like an off-hand comment.

He wiped his hands off on his jeans (what use were clothes if you couldn't use them as paint rags?) and pulled his laptop across the table. He typed out a quick comment, citing the timestamp of the joke, and after it was posted, he shut his laptop.

'Cause ass-o'clock was short for "get-your-ass-home-or-I’ll-kick-it" o'clock.

[ID: A screenshot of a YouTube comments section. The first comment is by user TheDuke, and reads: "10:42 wow, rude." The second comment is a reply by user SerpenThyme, and simply reads ";)" /end ID]

Janus plopped down on the couch with a slight groan. He didn’t need to stream today, but he really hated missing days. Besides… he was fine. Really.

He adjusted the camera until he was happy with the framing, and then checked the settings on his streaming software. Satisfied, he started the stream, and watched as his usual viewers rolled in.

“What do you mean I’m not in my kitchen?” Janus drawled, addressing the chat. He glanced around with an expression of faux-shock on his face. “My goodness, when did that happen?”

He chuckled, and then gestured to his surroundings. “Yes, we are in my living room today. If you must know, my closest and most trusted friend tried to murder me today- yes, Virgil, it was attempted murder and nothing less- and I survived with nary a scratch… and a broken foot, but that is beside the point. Anyway, I’m not allowed to stand for long periods of time, and I may or may not be somewhat inebriated by pain pills and couldn’t stand even if I wanted to. So we are cooking from my couch today.”

Janus paused for a few moments to read the chat messages as they popped up. A few get well soon’s, a few theories about the “attempted murder,” Virgil- who moderated his chat for him- vehemently denying the “attempted murder” but otherwise refusing to clarify the event, and a large volume of wtf why are you streaming today, take care of yourself comments, which made him smile. But one particular comment caught his eye, almost lost amid the torrent of an active chat: wait this kinda looks like the Duke’s living room?

“Oh, VampSuga,” he said, addressing that commenter in particular with a slight smirk. “I haven’t the faintest idea what you’re talking about. Anyway, since I can’t reach my oven from here, I thought some no-bake cookies were in order. For these you will need-”

[ID: A screenshot of a Discord conversation. The text reads:

“VampSuga: Ok ok hear me out. Dukeceit.

Starstruck96: who?

IneffableSnek: lmao

FeralBeauYasha: lol

VampSuga: Deceit and Remus Sanders! They’re totally dating. I will die on this hill.

FeralBeauYasha: Isn’t the duke w/ PatPat?

IneffableSnek: no thats his brothers bf

FeralBeauYasha: ohh

VampSuga: Did anyone see Deceit’s stream today? I swear that’s the Duke’s livingroom.

StarStruck96: idk that seems like a stretch

IneffableSnek: no wait i kno what u mean

IneffableSnek: im watching the duke’s old videos and that one where he shows off all his old weapons he’s in a living room kinda like deceit’s

FeralBeauYasha: They were acting all cute on twitter too

VampSuga: DUKECEIT” /end ID]

"Hey guys, been a while since you've seen my face and not just whatever my hands are busy with, when it's within YouTube's terms and conditions I mean. They used to be way more lenient…" Remus trailed off for a moment, then shook his head sharply and plastered on a grin.

"Anyway! In June me and a few other creators did a fundraiser for the Trevor Project, and y'all smashed the goal, so I let you decide what video I'd make this month." He paused, and gestured to the mountain of clothes piled behind him on the bed. "And you had so many juicy ideas to choose from, but you decided to dress me up like a Barbie instead."

Remus paused to scroll through his phone for a few moments. "Ah, ok, here we go. Twitter user YoonIsMyCat- oh, BTS, nice- sent in this first outfit. Uh… future Remus, put up the post here somewhere." He gestured vaguely to his right. "Y'all went with either a fuckton more clothes or a fuckton less clothes, which I respect. Apparently this outfit is called…” He squinted at his phone. “Amish chic? I take it back, no respect at all.”

Remus cycled through the outfits his viewers sent in, which ranged from the aforementioned “Amish chic” to “2008 rave attire” to “ok now you guys are just fucking with me” (which consisted of one of those big puffy snow coats, lime green in color; booty shorts with the shrug text emoji across the ass; fuzzy pink boots; and a yellow cowboy hat to top off the whole thing. It was awful. Remus loved it.) The mountain of clothes on the bed gradually became a mess of clothes spread across the floor instead, until there was just one outfit left.

“Ok so Twitter user VampSuga sent me this outfit that I’m gonna call ‘sexy librarian.’ I couldn’t find this exact sweater online, but-” he paused for dramatic effect, before brandishing a sweater toward the camera like a bullfighter. “My boyfriend had something that was close enough.”

Remus hopped up from the bed and switched off the camera so he could change.

“They’re going to lose their minds,” a voice drawled from the doorway. Remus threw his shirt at him.

“Shoo, I’m getting naked.”

[ID: A Twitter post by user @CallMeDukie. It features a selfie of YouTuber Remus “The Duke” Sanders, a Hispanic man with his hair dyed green and styled into a spiked mohawk. He is wearing a yellow knitted cardigan over a black button-up shirt. He is grinning widely at the camera. The caption reads: “my viewers pick my outfits! now live on youtube. go see what i look like as a sexy librarian!” /end ID]

DukeceitStan

first and only dukeceit shipper ig

DukeceitStan

wow there’s so many of you now! Hi!!

DukeceitStan

i want this to be canon so bad omg

DukeceitStan

i mean just look

[image]

how

[image]

cute

[image]

[ID: A series of three gifs featuring Youtubers SerpenThyme, aka Deceit, and TheDuke, aka Remus Sanders. Deceit is a black man with long, dreadlocked hair, and vitiligo patches along the left side of his face. Remus is a Hispanic man with green-dyed hair styled into a mohawk, many ear and facial piercings, and tattoos covering both arms. Each gif is edited so that the highlights are tinged yellow when Deceit is seen, and tinged green when Remus is seen.

The first gif depicts a close-up shot of Deceit’s hands as he carefully decorates a cookie with green and yellow icing. The cookie art he is working on appears to be a half-finished octopus. The gif then fades into a mid-shot of Remus, with his back to the camera, facing a canvas. The canvas is blank, and Remus appears to be laying out paints on a table to his left.

The second gif depicts Deceit seated at his couch, facing the camera. He has many ingredients spread across his coffee table (including oats, cocoa powder, and butter) and appears to be in the process of laying out several more. The gif fades to show Remus seated at a similar couch with a similar coffee table in front of him. The camera is angled slightly downward to better show the myriad of knives spread out across the table. Remus is gesturing wildly with a morning star held in his hand.

The third gif depicts Deceit in his kitchen. He is pulling on a bright, yellow knitted cardigan, and smirking toward the camera. The gif fades to show Remus in his bedroom, seated on his bed. He is holding up a similar-looking cardigan toward the camera and grinning. /end ID]

“Remus, it’s almost two in the morning. Come to bed.”

“I’m coming, sorry. Twitter distracted me.”

“Mm. I can’t believe the bird app is more distracting than I am.”

“You should try harder.”

“Come to bed and maybe I will.”

“Ok, ok, I’m coming. Hang on though, is it cool if I post this?”

“Sure. They figured it out anyway.”

“Sweet. Ok, Jannie, I’m coming.”

[ID: A screenshot of a Twitter post by user @CallMeDukie. It reads: “Dukeceit is canon.” /end ID]

#dukeceit #dukeceitweek #remus sanders #janus sanders #sanders sides fic #kye writes

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alwaysbeliev · 4 years ago

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Stay the Way We Are

Arthur Morgan x Reader

word count: 2,163

summary: It’s been a rough few weeks between Blackwater and arriving at Horseshoe Overlook. You're not sure, but you think a certain cowboy might be realizing what he has to lose, and he doesn't want to lose it.

notes: i haven’t written any reader insert material in a really long time, but i’m playing rdr2 again, and i just wanted something warm and comforting. i hope you like this

~ ~ ~

Horseshoe Overlook was beautiful in the setting sun. The way the sun tinged the clouds pink, the fading bright orange of the top of the mountains, the valley stretching below. You stood on the edge of the rocky precipice, hugging your shawl close to your shoulders in the disappearing light and heat of the day. With the wind against your face, you could almost pretend there was nothing else going on in the world. No Pinktertons, no O’Driscolls, it was almost like you were just camping.

A raucous laugh from behind you startled you. Resurfacing from your daydream, you blinked as the last rays of sunlight fell behind the distant Grizzlies. Another day, another sunset, another night you would live to rest again. Your muscles relaxed and you felt a small smile grace your lips. This was allowed tonight.

Taking a deep breath, you turned away from the darkening view to see your fellow gang members gathering around the campfire. Sean had cracked open a new case of whiskey and was passing a couple bottles out as Javier helped him pour the drinks. Karen was already a full glass in, her cheeks turning red and making your smile spread further. Everyone’s faces were aglow in the strong firelight, all their scars almost invisible in the intense flame. Some sat on the logs, others on the still warm ground, and the stragglers standing behind.

You readjusted your shawl as you made your way over. Mary Beth welcomed you in next to her. Uncle was spouting some fantastical tale about his pre-lumbago days, days you had never seen in your lifetime, and you chuckled at his drama. It took you a moment to realize you were standing beside Arthur. You felt heat rising to your cheeks that had nothing to do with the flames that were 5 feet away from you still.

In the days since Blackwater, you and Arthur had grown closer. You were almost sure something had been there before, but after everything went down and the gang fled, you had noticed him giving you special attention. Through the mountains, he had kept by your side. When you were tired of riding in the wagon, he sat you on his horse, wrapped carefully and firmly in his arms as he guided his horse through the deep snow. He always gave you an extra bread crust, an extra scoop of stew when it was available, a spare blanket, his jacket on one particularly bitter night. You didn’t really want to give it much thought, you had dealt with too much heartbreak already, but part of you wanted to believe that whatever had happened on the ferry made him realize he didn’t want to lose what was in front of him. You still didn’t know the details of that fiasco, but whatever happened had scared the shit out of Arthur, and you weren’t going to press him.

“You going soft, Morgan?” you had teased shortly after the arrival at Horseshoe. It seemed to strike a nerve with the outlaw.

“Jus’ doin’ my part,” he had managed to mumble. He finished rather quickly after that and brushed his hands off before striding away faster than was normal.

The whiskey had made its way around to you. You took it from Mary Beth, taking a long drink that burned down your throat and made you shudder violently.

“Christ,” you breathed, turning to Arthur with the bottle.

“What’s the matter?” he chuckled, taking it from you gingerly. “Is it really that bad?”

You only shook your head, willing the lingering sting to leave your mouth. Truthfully, you hadn’t had anything to drink since before Blackwater. It didn’t warm you like it did the others, and with things the way they were, you wanted your senses about you in the case things went further south. The long pull you had taken was just too much.

“‘M fine,” you managed. With a small shake of his head, Arthur took his own drink before passing it on. Your heart skipped a beat when you watched him swallow. Oh, it’s bad....

Another round of laughter drew you out of your head again.

“You’re full of it,” the man beside you called over. Uncle was insisting he’d told the truth on the opposite side of the circle to uproarious laughter and head shaking. Bill thumped him on the back, calling him an old fool. It was endearing, though, the way the others still encouraged Uncle.

As the laughter died down, the familiar sound of Dutch’s phonograph began to play. Its comforting tone filled the campsite as the crowd began to separate into smaller groups, a few folks heading to their tents to prepare for bed. Abigail led Jack away as the boy asked to stay up with the adults, eyes desperately trying to catch John’s. Karen found her way to Sean’s lap. The Irishman generously wrapped an arm around her waist to keep her from falling. A bottle had found its way back to you. While the chatter began to die, you took another drink, tipping the bottle gently this time and taking a smaller sip.

“Here.”

Arthur took the bottle from you, taking another drink of his own before handing it back. You smiled and thanked him, but merely held the bottle for now. He was flushed, you thought. It was difficult to tell. Between the glow of the fire and the drink, it might be wishful thinking. It was several moments before you realized you were still staring. You quickly turned away as you felt the heat rising in your own cheeks.

Motion in your peripheral had you relieved for the distraction. There, by Dutch’s tent, van der Linde himself had pulled Molly to her feet. They were slow dancing to the music, lost in their own little world, Molly’s hair almost like fire itself in the lantern glow. You watched them, tuning out the conversation around you. It was nice to see them like this. Every now and then, you caught the two of them in a moment made you wonder why they ever fought in the first place. It was clear Molly loved Dutch, and while he was proud and would never admit to anything so soft out loud, you knew he loved her, too.

A soft hand on your shoulder dragged you back to reality again. Arthur was looking at you, amused concern etched in his brow.

“Y’okay?” he asked. Something told you he had already tried getting your attention.

“Ah, yeah,” you said, allowing yourself a slightly embarrassed smile. “It’s just nice to see them not fighting for once.” Arthur followed your gaze before answering.

“They don’t mean nothin’ by it.” Was he trying to reassure you?

“Still. Must be nice to have someone to fight with. Makes you appreciate these moments more.”

There was a long silence as the pair of you watched the couple. Dutch’s hand had found the small of Molly’s back and drawn her in tight, her head coming to rest on his shoulder. They weren’t stepping side to side anymore, only swaying off beat. You could almost feel yourself in that moment. It had been so long since you had danced at all, and never like that. There really wasn’t time for it the way you lived now.

“Join me?”

You reluctantly tore your gaze away from the peacefulness to find Arthur, facing you, hand extended. Sheepishly, you realized he must have asked you another question and were going to have to ask him to repeat himself. As you opened your mouth, however, something clicked in your mind.

“Join you..?” you echoed, heart fluttering.

“Don’t make me ask again.”

“Arthur Morgan, are you asking me to dance with you?”

“Well?”

The cowboy looked...nervous? You had never seen him like this before. You couldn’t blame him, though, you were nervous, too. Hardly daring to break your gaze with him, you gingerly placed your hand in his, allowing him to guide you away from the fire and into a patch of shadows. He moved with the grace of a man who hadn’t asked someone to dance in a very very long time. Maybe he never had. Stiffly, he turned to you, lifting your hand with his and placing it on his shoulder. His hand found your waist as the other gripped your free hand.

For several beats, the movements felt ridiculous. The two of you couldn’t look each other in the eye. Your mouth had a mind of its own, twitching into an awkward smile again and again while you tried to watch your feet and not step on Arthur’s boots. Not that that mattered. Cowboys and mud and all that. Thankfully, it wasn’t just you. In an attempt to do something special, Arthur led you into a spin, but failed to release your waist, causing your shawl to slip off your shoulders and gather in a pile on the dirt.

“Sorry,” he mumbled, scooping it up and trying to drape it over your shoulders again. You felt your heart soften. He was so vulnerable in this moment. He usually oozed confidence and strength, but right now, he was lost. You brushed off his apology, taking his hand again and drawing yourself closer to him. Here, you could at least pretend to be confident.

The movements started to come more naturally now. The fire was dying down, the camp seeming to fade into the background. All you could see were Arthur’s blue eyes, no hat’s shadow to hide under, the few lights around sparkling in their reflection. You could get lost in them. You were getting lost in them.

“So how’re you likin’ things?” Arthur asked.

“They’re alright.” You thought about your words carefully for a moment. “I’m just glad to be out of the mountains. It feels almost safe here.”

“I know what you mean.”

Silence again. The song had changed to something sweeter, somehow slower. Dutch and Molly were having a whispered conversation now. Few people still hung around the dying fire. You were acutely aware of the warmth emanating from the man in front of you, the rise and fall of his chest. You were standing even closer, you realized, your own chest brushing against his.

“What about you?”

Arthur hummed. He seemed to be studying your face, taking it all in like it was the first time in a long time. He looked happy and relaxed, a look you realized you hadn’t seen on him in months, but it somehow made him more handsome.

“From where I’m standing, it’s all perfect.” You swallowed. Hard. He must have noticed how sweaty your palms were despite the evening chill.

“Glad t’ hear it,” you replied. As you watched his face carefully, you felt his hand on your waist shift lower, nearly lining up with your hip before shifting towards your back, gently bringing you flush to him. Nervously, you lowered your arm, hooking your hand over his shoulder from the back instead. This was intimate. This was more like Dutch and Molly.

“Y’know,” Arthur started, “ever since arriving here, I can’t help but wonder what might make this place more perfect. I ain’t the smartest man, so it’s taken me way too long to think of somethin’.”

You were almost frozen, the only movement the continued swaying of your bodies in sync, your eyes wide as he spoke. He really looked like a different man right now. He wasn’t the stoic bodyguard of numerous robberies, debt collections, and other Dutch errands. This was the real Arthur.

“I’m real sorry it took me this long. Any chance you’ll forgive me?”

To an outsider, a romance novelist, this wasn’t much of a confession. He hadn’t even admitted anything. But you knew him. You knew all the glances, the teasings, the special treats and gifts, the attention in the mountains, the flushed cheeks in the past week, how difficult it was for Arthur to open up like this. You knew that for him, this was exposing his belly, being as transparent and vulnerable as he was comfortable being. There was time later down the road for more intimate conversations, you knew, and this, right now, was more than enough.

“I’ll have to think about it,” you said, stopping your swaying to coyly glance to the side. “After all, we’ve only known each other… What is it now, 3 years? That’s an awful short time to know someone.”

He couldn’t help but laugh at that.

“Fair enough,” he chuckled, shaking his head. “Just don’t torture me, now, okay?”

Feeling more content than you had in a long time, you returned your eyes to his and said, “I promise.”

The music continued to play through to the end of the song. Dutch and Molly prepared to return to their tent, but you and Arthur stayed in each other’s arms, swaying to the tune in your heads, simply existing in the moment. This, here, now, was enough.

#arthur morgan #arthur morgan reader insert #rdr2 reader insert #arthur morgan x reader #in which a cowboy barely confesses his feelings #angel writings

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fandom-sheep · 4 years ago

Text

Eret 11 MAY 21

Cat and DSMP Part 1/1

Cat! Goose!

Goose my beloved.

Eret’s streaming very late for me again. So I’m not staying the whole time.

Hello Elaina. Enjoy Goose.

Fundy! Kinda...

Fundy hearing the donations. LOL.

Fundy enters a stream and it starts to scuffed. Scuffed just follows Fundy wherever he goes.

A wild my beloved on the cube.

The Drista stairs.

Wait what. Why is the tower gone?

I have missed some lore.

Ah... it’s part of the nightmare thing.

Eret offering Fundy housing like a good almost adoptive parent.

Sneeze? OH WOW SNEEZE.

Sounds like Fundy about lost a lung. Good gracious.

The bargaining between these two.

Cat, Handsome, said cube was massive

You know what that works.

It’s hard to keep the audio right for Eret’s stream for my headphones. It’s either too quiet or the loudest my headphones can go and my family can hear it.

On stream explosions. Noice.

Wow youtooz. Not super cool. Permission is usually a good thing.

Eret keeps on sizzling.

Getting dirt for scaffolding. Going old fashioned Minecraft for this.

“Why is the Cube kinda hot” cue Eret losing faith in her chats sanity.

Cube go poof.

Oh. Red stone. That’s dangerous.

I like this song. Oh klahoma. Gorgeous song.

Love joy is such a fun band. I want to make a plushy of the cat.

It’s kinda sad that Eret can’t see themselves the way chat and their little fandom sees them. Most all of us think they look fabulous.

Not Arson. Just bombing. A bit of anarchy by the king.

Demolition. Now there’s the word.

Controlled ish demolition.

Ah I’ve almost saved enough channel points for water. Nice. I’m not going to redeem it I’m just going to keep hoarding the points.

Flame Arrow. Nice.

Eret cleaning up the SMP eye sours.

Watch me attempt to sleep to Eret here in an hour or so, but keep getting distracted.

Explosion time.

Someone get ready to clip it.

Bye Bye Cube. Let’s go.

Gotta get a song that fits the vibe.

Hayloft. Time to go poof.

Turning up my brightness just to watch this explosion in the best way possible.

Still wearing the red dress I see.

I hope the music isn’t too loud to get this part muted.

Drum roll...

Drum roll continues...

Drum roll still going...

THERE GOES THE CUBE!

That was so smooth and good looking!

Overall a very good explosion.

Just a little bit of a hole in the other building.

Twitch Pr-

Poor being’s so confused with his hair. Someone help them.

Twitch bleep.

Everyone attempting to give hair styling advice. Everyone’s trying to help the being.

That bird is majestic. I remember seeing that tiktok.

Animals just decided Eret was the animal whisperer.

Yes! Disney Princess Eret fanart! Someone make it, I shall reblog all of it.

Likes to hug cute animals and cute animals like being hugged by her. Nice.

It’s alright. Names are difficult. I have to like put name tags on people to learn who they are. That or name tags on their space (like on campers bunks and door decs on dorms)

It does feel very February. But I’m very ready for summer because that means I get to do my favorite job.

Hooray. I hit 15k points.

Eret trying to prove to us a ponytail won’t work. Like we aren’t going to hype them up no matter what.

Gotta heart in the chat. All Eret’s chat does is hearts and encourage. It’s a lovely place.

Oh Eret forgot his cat ear sub goal. It’s alright I know I forgot.

Pride is next month. Nice.

Oh. We’re almost halfway already. Why does the world spin so quickly?

We forgot a dirt tower. Whoops.

I would wear Eret merch. I like it when people release merch around Christmas. Then I can ask for it as a gift.

Oh it wasn’t a dirt tower.

Just looking at Elaina’s stream in the stream selection screen it like very cozy.

All the way up the Drista stairs.

Look it’s the museum!

Eret’s got most of the builds around there. The museum. The fortress. Nice.

Some things are too historical to remove. Somethings are historical because they are being removed.

Oh no. L’sandburg.

It’s taking over the summer home.

Ah the lore is coming. It just seemed to be too early.

Hello unofficial ranboo Raiders.

Foolish making the awesome tall thingy!

Foolish’s builds are so neat. I want to watch Foolish’s streams more. Maybe just in the background but I start wanting to delayed liveblog and that requires attention.

Oh the giant portal turned out well. Sorry that was the lady’s foolish stream I watched.

Shulkers. The forbidden mob.

Eret with just a pit in the desert filled with llamas. Bones. And discus.

The mansion has been finished?

Alright is better than bad. It’s alright to be alright.

Lucky being not getting tired. I got the Johnson and Johnson vaccine and I was so so tired. I also had just no appetite.

Eret doing an smp tour. And looking at foolish’s builds.

Flickering the switch on the rainbow beacons.

Eret just knowing where everything is.

Kinoko is super pretty. Just for the aesthetic value of the kingdom I appreciate it.

Yeet. Just defenestrated himself out the window.

Oh? Spectator fly over the smp?

That would be really neat to like. Watch in VR. I think I’ve only used VR maybe twice.

Pretty Rainbow beacons.

The nurse who gave me my vaccine hid the needle from me because I mentioned to her that I was afraid of needles. It wasn’t a big deal at all.

30 minutes till I attempt sleep. Woo.

Goose my beloved. Someone make the gif because I’m not quite sure how to make it.

Oh yeah. Goose in Marvel. I hear MCU and think Minecraft cinematic universe. Not marvel.

Ghibli is so nice. It really romanticize small moments of life.

Yeah the characters are all really supportive in Ghibli movies.

Someone subbed for nine months “that’s enough to make a child” -Eret

That mansion is like a maze. I’m so lost already.

Everyone encouraging Eret and telling her she looks pretty. Good.

Eret needs all the hype and encouragement.

Antarctic empties flag. Yeah it does have a similar color pallet.

Michelle! Hello!

Fortress work. Nice.

Do it. I’ll listen the Eret play other games.

I don’t usually watch game play for non Minecraft games. But I’ll listen to it all.

Hbomb and Eret living in the same city feels like two worlds that shouldn’t meet. But it’s awesome that they have.

TOS means against twitches terms of service. Nice. Glad to finally have an explanation of what that means.

Look at our handsome and pretty streamer. All the hype.

I keep turning down the stream to hear the show my mama has on because I’m curious about what happens.

Yeah. Backseat gaming can be annoying. That’s part of why I share my thoughts here just in case I do start backseat gaming.

Almost to the sub goal. Hooray!

Ooo food.

No no. I see where they are coming from. Eret does give a bit of cat bus vibes. I can’t explain it but the vibes are there.

Creeper causing issues at the fortress.

Ed Sheepran my beloved.

I should draw more ferrets. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe I’ll draw us doing stuffs.

Actually I kinda want to make a little animatic of some heels walking across the screen followed by a hoard of ferrets. I think it’ll look cool. But I need the artistic ability and the ability to not scream making that.

Woop. Ad time. Off to the void of where ever the ads game me.

OH THE NEW VOID LOOKS COOL!

Bread. Flowers. Ted. Crown. And of course Eret.

We V O I D and get our streamer bits.

Hush the chat is V O I D and the occasional emoji or emote.

The void being centered looks good. Maybe that’s just the symmetry speaking but it’s good.

Oh. We hear the being. The being in void mode. And spooky mode.

Chat just starts yelling corpse.

Hydration. I try to stay hydrated. But I fail often if I’m not doing something active.

Tree!

Casually makes and snags tree.

Eret does read chat often. It’s strange. And it is weird how often it ends up being you.

You can tell I’m a tumblr peep. I may say stuff in chat but I’m fully not expecting or wanting to be noticed by the streamer.

Others hitting darkness o’clock and saying goodnight.

It’s sleep to the stream hours y’all. Whoop.

I need to visit the parks out west. I’ve only really seen the eastern US ones. But I have been to the Great Smokey Mountain park which is gorgeous.

Eret thinking of his friends triggers when naming his cat.

Eret’s builds are so casually pretty. Not like Foolish’s which are intricately pretty. Not like Phil’s or Sam’s which are complicated pretty. All pretty. Just different breeds of pretty.

Alrighty. It’s sleepy hours for me. As much as I love Eret I want to read some fanfiction and daydream a bit before I head to sleep.

Have a good rest everyone and may all your coming meals be delicious.

Wait no is it our turn with goose?

OUR TURN WITH GOOSE!

Eret honey that’s the ceiling.

Cat stream. Cat stream.

Sleepy kitty. A cat cam would be good.

Yeah. That happens with cats. Especially strays.

Goose captured the computer mouse.

Goose straight up chose Eret and Elaina.

Goose really just chose not to leave.

Oh my stream connection is acting sad. But I want Goose content.

I want to draw Goose now.

Maybe I’ll do water color for Goose. I know I tried to do that with Boots (Fundy’s cat)

Hopefully there will be some Goose face screenshots I can see. Maybe I can see him well in the Tiktok.

Artists just violently refusing payment. Sounds about right. The MCYT artists just kinda go “yeah give credit and we cool”

Cowboy cat. Nice.

I want to paint Goose in the cowboy hat.

Hype train! That we are zooming.

Bucket sponge?

WATER BUCKET FROM WET SPONGE! Tiktok people giving all the cool info.

Go Goose. Catch the computer mouse and the screen mouse.

Just sitting here at 11:30 at night getting screen shots of Goose for painting purposes.

Goose please. Look at the camera babe.

My phone is dying. And I can’t charge it and type.

Alright the camera is off the cat. The cat is also blocking the screen.

But no cat on camera means I’m getting some sleep. If I do any of the projects I’ve mentioned I’ll let y’all know.

Have a good rest everyone.

#eret #dream smp #dsmp #dsmp eret #why must this being stream so late #goose the cat #erets cat #delayed liveblogging

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ma-sulevin · 4 years ago

Note

28 from the soulmate list for Chelsea and Staci please?

28. the one where some people can see the red string of fate and follow it to their soulmates.

Chelsea grew up not caring about the red line she could see stretching to the northwest. It never moved, so her mother always told her it just meant her soulmate was too far away for them to really be able to tell.

“Don’t pay it too much mind,” Kelli would say, repeating herself every time Chelsea mentioned it. “It ain’t the be-all-end-all everyone makes it out to be. You gotta find your own happiness.”

It’s not until Chelsea’s grown and getting married to a man that’s definitely not her soulmate that she realizes Kelli said that because she met her soulmate once and he left her alone in the morning with no last name and an accidental pregnancy (“surprise blessing”). It’s not until Chelsea has to move back in with her mother before Robbie signs the divorce papers that she thinks maybe she shouldn’t have listened.

After Kelli dies, in the middle of the spring on her way home from her shift at the hospital, just another victim of a drunk driver, Chelsea decides there’s no point ignoring it anymore. She’s twenty-fucking-eight years old. She’s been married and divorced and lost her whole family except for whoever’s on the other end of the red string.

She sells her mama’s house, sells her shitty half of a shittier duplex, packs everything she owns into her Tacoma with a trailer on the back, and just drives.

She follows the string, hits up motels and shitty diners and rest stops, following the string as it gets brighter and brighter.

It takes days, but finally, she drives into Fall’s End, Montana and she realizes... this is it.

Her soulmate has been in fucking Montana this whole goddamn time.

She parks at the first restaurant she sees and goes inside, hands in her pockets and heart in her throat.

The woman at the bar smiles and is friendly enough, though she’s not really the kind of girl Chelsea might have been friends with back home. She introduces herself as Mary May and says Chelsea can find a room at either the King’s Hot Springs Hotel across the river or the Grand View Hotel up in the mountains, and if she decides to stay, the sheriff might need extra help.

Chelsea gets a room and doesn’t sleep a wink.

She follows her string on foot in the morning because the connection feels close enough. She ends up at the Hope County Jail and almost throws up in the parking lot as her anxiety insists she’s made it this far to find her soulmate locked up in a cell.

She goes inside anyway.

She can’t not.

A woman named Nancy introduces herself and asks if Chelsea’s new in town before she asks if she needs help, and she guides her into the station’s bullpen when Chelsea asks to speak to the sheriff.

The red string gets even brighter as they walk, and Chelsea’s horrified for another few seconds that her soulmate might actually be the sheriff, but as Nancy continues deeper into the office, the red string twists to the side.

And Chelsea stops.

And she stares.

Across the bullpen, a man stares back at her. He’s her height, with dark eyes and hair, a patchy beard on his cheeks and a dumb expression on his otherwise handsome face.

A female deputy stands next to him, looking back and forth between them, and she finally elbows him hard in the ribs.

That pushes him forward, and he crosses the room with long strides until panic rises in her and she takes one step back.

He freezes and stares at her, eyebrows drawing together, as she stares back.

“How can I help you?” The sheriff’s voice makes them both jump, and they turn to look at him. He’s older, almost exactly what she would expect the sheriff of a tiny little town in the middle of Montana to look, with a big mustache and a cowboy hat. He’s smiling, but he glances between Chelsea and the other deputy with a look she can’t decipher yet.

She pulls her shit together and turns fully to face him. “I’m here about a job,” she says, and she’s proud that her voice is steady. “Just got here from Georgia and heard you might be hirin'.”

“Huh,” says the sheriff. “Come tell me about yourself, then. Get back to work, Pratt.”

Pratt, her soulmate, opens his mouth like he’s going to object, but he finally nods instead. He watches her as she follows the sheriff, and she knows he does because he’s still staring at her when she glances back as she shuts the sheriff’s door.

---

He’s not in the department when she emerges from Whitehorse’s office with a brand new job lined up for Monday morning, but she knows now it’s only a matter of time before he finds her again.

She goes back to her hotel and watches TV until she feels like she’s going to burst, then she goes and runs outside until she feels like she’s going to collapse, then it’s back to the hotel.

She should’ve talked to Pratt at the station. Having to wait again after she saw him makes he feel like she’s going to die.

She goes back to the Spread Eagle when it’s time for dinner even though she’s sure she won’t be able to keep anything down. She tells Mary May that she met Whitehorse and she thinks the job’ll work out after all, and then she nurses a beer as she watches the red string slowly getting brighter as Pratt gets closer.

It’s like she can feel it when he gets to the bar, and she can’t stand it. She gets up and goes outside, slipping away while Mary May’s not paying attention, and catches Pratt climbing out of a jeep in the parking lot.

He hesitates when he catches her eye, but he closes the door behind him and tucks his hands into the front pockets of his jeans. He’s gone home and showered, or something, shaved the patchy beard on his face and put on a clean flannel shirt -- because of course he’s wearing a flannel shirt -- and he walks right toward her.

This time she doesn’t step back, and he keeps walking until he’s in her space, looking right into her eyes.

This close, she can tell he’s just a bit taller than her. She’d be taller if she wore heels.

“Hey.” His voice is a little raspy, and it makes her smile grow against her will.

“Hey.” She reaches out and fixes his collar, face warming as he draws in a sharp breath at the touch.

“You come all this way to find me?” He’s smirking, and she hates that she loves it.

She tucks her first two fingers between the buttons of his shirt and tugs him a step closer, and he moves forward like it’s the most natural thing in the world to be in her space. She has to draw in her own sharp breath as his hands settle on her hips, confident and warm.

“Well,” she says, voice nice and steady. “I got tired of waiting.”

She lifts her chin and drops her eyes to his lips, and he gives her what she wants without hesitation. He kisses her, lips warm and dry, and it feels a hundred times better than every kiss she’s ever gotten. It shoots through her, makes her fingers tingle, her head spin, her toes curl. She parts her lips for him and his tongue finds hers, and she lets him pull her the last half-step between them until their bodies are pressed together.

When he finally pulls away, she’s not particularly surprised to hear him say, “Can we get out of here?”

She doesn’t even want him to let her go for them to go inside, and as far as she’s concerned, he can take her anywhere right now.

Why did she believe her mom for so long? She should’ve driven up here the second she graduated high school.

“I have to pay my tab,” she says, and her voice is breathier than she’s ever heard it.

He grins at her and looks at her mouth before he kisses her one more time. “I’ll get it. Get in my car.” He releases her, and she turns to do what he says, because it feels right even when he has to turn back and grab her arm. “Wait,” he says, looking a little embarrassed. “What’s your name?”

She can’t help but laugh. “Chelsea Cooper.”

He chuckles and lets his hand slide down her arm until he can squeeze her fingers. “Chelsea.” She nods, and he adds, “Staci Pratt.”

Staci fuckin’ Pratt. “Hurry up, Stace,” she says. “I’m told you I’m tired of waiting.”

#geronimo-11 #oc: chelsea cooper #x: send me an angel #far cry 5 #staci pratt #My writing

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tahitianmangoes · 4 years ago

Text

Absolution - Chapter 2

Pairing: Micah x Arthur Summary: Micah often felt like he and Arthur were two sides of the same coin. Whether or not Artur shared that sentiment Micah didn’t know but ever since an encounter out west, inexplicably they keep finding themselves pulled back to one and other. NSF W | Not canon compliant Also on AO3 Chapter One

Chapter Two - You Scratch My Back, I’ll Scratch Yours

The new camp was called Horseshoe Overlook, Hosea said he’d been this way before a while ago. It was further east than Dutch had ever wanted to go but right now, it didn’t matter what direction they were going as long as it was the opposite of any Pinkertons still on their tail.

It was a nice camp, away from prying eyes in the Heartlands. Micah himself hadn’t been too far this way before, maybe a couple of years ago with some people he used to run with but he hadn't seen them in a long time… Last time he heard, they were stuck in Sisika penitentiary.

However, the Heartlands it seemed, was infested with O’Driscolls; spilling out of the local saloon, camping out in the fields between where they were and right to the border with Lemoyne. Not ideal but nothing they couldn’t handle, the O’Driscolls were small fry in comparison to what had happened on that boat in Blackwater.

Arthur hadn't said a word since the cabin. Micah didn't know what to say either. Arthur had curled up by the fireplace and slept after their encounter. Micah spent all night staring into the flames until his eyes smarted and the sun rose.

Micah had left Arthur asleep and ridden back to Colter with the supplies he’d found. When asked about Arthur he shrugged. Dutch seemed concerned but he also seemed to recognise that he shouldn’t question the matter.

Since moving to Horseshoe Overlook, there hadn’t been much time to talk to anyone, let alone Arthur. Maybe Arthur was right, they were even now and that was the end of the matter… So why did Micah keep thinking about it, playing it in his mind over and over like one of those flickery, moving pictures that people went to see?

If anything, that night in the cabin had made it worse. He could kid himself that at Gaptooth Ridge, it had been a one off, maybe they’d both just been frustrated - god knows it’s hard enough to get five minutes privacy to take care of yourself when you’re in a gang of twenty other people who always want something from you… But the way Arthur had pushed him flush to the wall and looked at him with intent in that cabin, like there was more to it than just having Micah suck his cock… But Micah didn’t know what and almost didn’t dare ask.

***

"Mr Morgan!" Susan Grimshaw's voice was piercing as she called Arthur from across the camp. Micah looked up from the table where he sat by Pearson's wagon playing solitaire. "One of the girls said she saw your friend Miss Gillis around Valentine..." "Mary?!" Arthur repeated.

Micah’s hat hid his face so they couldn’t see him looking up from his card game. Arthur had been busy since they got to the new camp, everyone had been really, all working to make back the money they lost in Blackwater. But it was rare for Arthur to be in camp during the day. If Micah had meant more to Arthur, he might have thought that the younger man was avoiding him. But he knew that wasn’t the case.

He absentmindedly touched his neck where he now wore a neckerchief to hide the bruises Arthur had left from that night in the cabin, biting and sucking at his skin.

Micah could see Arthur quite clearly from where he sat; he’d changed out of his winter clothes now and wore a sky blue button down shirt that matched his eyes and dark denim pants that fit him well.

Never had Micah heard Arthur's voice so excited, seen his eyes light up so as he said Mary’s name.

"Yes…" Miss Grimshaw said and her tone didn't go unnoticed by Micah, disapproving, which wasn't exactly unusual for Miss Grimshaw - a more sour faced dragon if Micah had met one. "Never did like that girl. Anyway, there's a letter for you by your tent from her." Arthur was about to turn and go to his tent when Miss Grimshaw lay an uncharacteristically gentle hand on his chest, "be careful with her, Arthur. That girl's nothing but trouble."

Arthur didn't humour her with a response. Micah watched him go to his tent and tear open the letter like a present on Christmas morning. He read it eagerly. Soon afterwards he left the camp.

Micah felt his chest tighten and didn't understand why.

A little while later, Micah found Dutch. Dutch was unlike any man Micah had ever met before. He was intriguing, magnetic and left Micah in awe. Despite being only five or six years Micah’s senior, he saw Dutch as an almost fatherly figure.

Micah’s father had not possessed any of the skills or qualities of Dutch Van Der Linde, instead he had been what Micah had soon learned to be a bottomless evil. Nothing Micah, his brother or mother did could change that. He resented his brother, Amos, for leaving when he did but only because he had wanted to go, too… He had just been too afraid.

Micah vowed, when he left his father, that he would never be afraid of a person ever again. People would only ever fear him.

He wasn’t afraid of Dutch, more afraid that maybe he would lose favour with him now because of this ferry business. Sure, no one could have predicted what was going to happen but this was Dutch and Micah’s job and Micah had let him down, in a way. People got hurt and that sort of thing didn’t sit well with Dutch.

Dutch was around the side of his tent reading. Molly O’Shea was inside the tent, she looked annoyed to see Micah come around but truth be told, she looked annoyed whenever anyone took Dutch’s attention off of her, which Micah noticed seemed to be more often than not these days.

They had robbed a train out by Granite Pass before coming down from the mountains. He had seemed pleased with the take but it wasn’t enough. He spent a lot of is time brooding and looking anxious around the camp now.

“Dutch, can I talk to you a minute?” Micah asked. He tried to talk softly to Dutch. He wasn’t afraid of him but… One wrong word could send Dutch into a fury, he’d seen it before when Davey has spoken out of line - it was startling to see Dutch’s face turn dark, eyes completely black, drawing himself up to his full and impressive height, Micah’s never noticed how tall he was until that time, how he was muscular, too. Dutch had bellowed so loudly that his voice echoed. He never lost his cool like that, not in the six months that Micah had been with the gang and Micah didn’t fancy having that same fate.

Dutch looked up from his book, amber eyes narrowed at Micah, “what is it?” He sounded a little annoyed. “Listen… I think… I want to go back to Blackwater and get the money.” “Out of the question,” Dutch said bluntly and turned his gaze back to his book but Micah saw that his eyes didn’t move, he wasn’t reading.

Negotiating with Dutch was almost like a dance - you just have to know the steps.

“Maybe I ain’t makin’ myself clear…” Micah said carefully, “I ain’t tryin’ to rob you. You know me better than that.” Dutch closed his book now with a sigh. “Just what are you trying to do, Micah?” He asked, still sounding impatient.

The topic of the Blackwater money was a sensitive one; while everyone else had scrambled to get out of there, Dutch and Hosea had hidden the money. They had thought that it was too risky to try to get out of Blackwater with it. Micah thought that sounded a little off but who was he to argue with Dutch? Only Dutch and Hosea knew where that money was stashed, Micah didn’t even think Arthur knew - Arthur trusted Dutch wholeheartedly and would never question it. Micah trusted Dutch too, in as much as Micah could trust anyone… But it seemed a little unfair how everyone’s money was hidden and only Dutch and Hosea knew where.

“I’m tryin’ to save you. Save everybody. I’ll go to Blackwater and get the money then meet you all some place… And we’ll be home free! That’s it.”

Dutch’s brow furrowed. Micah watched him intently. He was a well dressed man, and despite being down on their luck, that hadn’t changed about him. His crimson silk vest contrasted with his crisp white shirt, the sleeves of which were rolled to the elbow. The ribbon of his hat mated the vest. Dutch removed the hat to run a hand through the dark tresses of his hair while he thought over what Micah had said.

“Just… Just think about it, boss. That’s all I’m sayin’. The way I see it, we gotta try.” Micah knew full well that Dutch probably didn’t give two shits the way Micah saw it. But it was all part of the dance.

“I…” Dutch started, turning his gaze back up to Micah. He seemed a little at a loss for words momentarily. “I’ll think about it.” he said finally.

Micah let a smile break out on his face, “thank you.” He said, not forgetting that he was still beneath Dutch in all senses of the word and he was definitely not adverse to grovelling if that’s what it took for Dutch to see sense, to let him help and who knows, take over from where Hosea so obviously wanted to leave…

****

Later that night, when everyone else had gone to sleep, Micah sat by the campfire sharpening his knife. From where he sat, he had a perfect view of Arthur’s tent which was, as usual, empty.

Micah let his thoughts wander back to that morning. He wondered who this Mary woman was and how had he never heard of her until now? Was she an old flame? As long as he had known Arthur Morgan, Arthur had never had a romantic relationship, not even an unromantic one - he turned down whores in the saloons, ignored women who complimented him or gave him discount in stores on account of how handsome he was and continued with his sullen cowboy act. Micah had begun to doubt whether it was an act at all…

Just then he heard hooves approaching. Micah couldn't see who it was but he heard Bill who was on guard duty ask: “who goes there?” “Arthur, you dumbass.” Came the reply.

Micah couldn’t help feel his chest tighten again, his heart ripple. Why was he like this?

When Arthur came into view, he had a bottle of whiskey in one hand that he must have taken from the box by Hosea’s tent. As he approached the fire, he smelled like he had already been drinking. Micah didn’t look up but he could see Arthur out of the corner of his eye, hovering around the fire, watching Micah continue to sharpen his knife as if he hadn’t noticed the younger outlaw arrive. Micah didn’t look up or speak because he had no idea what to say to Arthur. Part of him thought that maybe Arthur had been right up in the cabin, maybe there was nothing to talk about.

To Micah’s surprise, Arthur sat down beside him at the fireside. Micah could see that there was something in Arthur’s other hand. A piece of paper. The letter from that morning.

Arthur was the first to speak. “You’re up late.” Micah shrugged, “so are you.”

“I… I was with someone in town… Someone I… Uh…” Arthur trailed off. It looked like it pained him to think about it, let alone say it. “Someone I was courtin’ a long time ago.” Micah let himself smirk. “What happened? She kick you out for the night once you were done?” “No.” Arthur replied, almost hotly, “It ain’t like that. She ain’t like that.”

Arthur’s voice wavered slightly. Micah had never heard him speak so earnestly or even speak this long, he usually spoke to Micah in short grunts like some farmyard animal.

Arthur continued, “she… Well, she was never really right for me. Too good for me. I proposed a long time ago. She turned me down o’ course. We was just kids really.”

Micah didn't say anything, he got the feeling that Arthur didn’t really want his input but rather just needed someone to listen to him.

“Anyway, her daddy didn’t like me.” Micah scoffed, “what do daddies know?” Arthur smiled weakly and drank from his whiskey bottle before continuing. “Maybe he was right. She weren’t made for this life. Sometimes I wonder if anyone really is…”

Arthur stared into the fire. Micah stared at Arthur.

“Anyway. She left a letter for me and o’ course, I went rushin’ over to her like the prize idiot I am… Knew she’s married now but, well, he’s gone. Pneumonia or somethin’; bad business. So she’s a widow now. Some stupid part o’ me thought maybe this was her givin’ me another chance now we’re both older.”

He stared into the fire sadly and took another swig from the bottle.

“Turns out she just wanted an errand boy, someone to do her dirty work for her… She knew I was fool enough to do whatever she wants. Maybe ‘cause part of me thinks we still got a chance even though I know she ain’t about this life and I ain’t exactly the type to buy a ranch and live honestly… Sometimes I wonder if… If I’m the sorta person that can… Be loved…” Arthur let himself trail off. They sat in silence for a few minutes save the crackling of the fire.

Micah had never heard Arthur talk this way, not to anyone. Part of Micah had assumed that Arthur just didn’t have that in him. A big, brawny brute who was emotionally stunted. But now Micah saw the pain on Arthur’s handsome features and he hurt too, in a way.

“You can't go forcin’ somethin’ if it ain’t right.” Micah said, his voice taking on an alien, gentle quality. It took Arthur by surprise, he looked up at him now. The fire reflected in his eyes. Micah had thought he was more drunk than he looked but the way he looked at Micah told him different.

Micah watched the fire dance in those great blue orbs. Neither of them said anything but Micah knew. Micah knew what was going to happen and he was fully prepared to let it despite the fact that they were in the middle of the camp, despite the fact that if Dutch were to come out of his tent, if Javier who was sleeping just a few feet away was to wake, they’d be seen. But Micah let it happen anyway. He was powerless.

Arthur moved his head closer and they kissed. Arthur let the letter tumble from his fingers into the mud as he reached for Micah, one hand on his face the other he lay almost hesitantly on his chest. Micah reciprocated. He let his eyes close, let his lips move on their own, let Arthur’s tongue slip into his mouth and rub gently against his own so he could taste the whiskey he had just drunk. Micah felt his head spinning, like he was drunk too. All he could hear was the fire crackling, feel the warmth of Arthur’s hands on him and smell the musk from the swell of the younger man’s chest. Consuming. Intoxicating. He brought his hands up, running them through Arthur’s soft, fawn hair and Arthur made a sound, a sigh, a moan that Micah echoed back to him.

And before he knew it, Arthur had pulled away but his hands were still on Micah. Still, neither of them spoke. Micah let Arthur stand and guide him away from the main camp, behind Arthur’s own tent and into the treeline.

Micah was eager to kiss again and Arthur allowed him to once they were a suitable distance from the camp. Micah let Arthur grope him through his clothes, let Arthur’s fingers work at the buttons on his pants and slip his hands inside, palming his already semi hard cock. Micah let out a shaky gasp into Arthur’s mouth, the stubble from his beard scratching his skin, the smell of tobacco on his shirt filled up his lungs.

Micah’s fingers were quick to unbutton Arthur’s pants, too and take his cock in hand. He was hard and Micah could feel it pulse beneath his fingertips, the tip leaked with precum and Micah tugged on it making Arthur growl into his mouth. A growl that sent a pang of excitement throughout his body. Arthur reciprocated and the pair jerked each other, kissing hard, Micah pressing his hips against Arthur’s who rocked his back in response, drawing breathy moans from Micah.

Micah wasn't sure if it was the lust or the liquor or maybe both but he wasn’t going to question it. He also wasn’t going to admit that he had wanted this again, so so badly.

Arthur shifted, spitting on his palm before resting his weight on a tree behind him so he could take both of their erections in his hand and stroke them together.

Micah couldn’t stop himself letting out a guttural moan. It was unlike anything he’d ever felt before. The soft skin of Arthur’s cock against his own, hot and throbbing paired with Arthur’s slicked hand was an unprecedented type of bliss.

Micah’s legs shook and he could barely stand, Arthur let him lean forwards, able to support them both as Micah clung to him, hips fucking into Arthur’s palm as he stifled his moans and swore under his breath each time Arthur’s hand ran the length of his shaft, rough thumb swiped over his slit or reached down to gently tug on his balls.

Arthur kissed him to silence him and soon, Micah found himself rutting erratically, panting into Arthur’s open mouth, unable to concentrate on anything other than chasing his release.

He came in ropes, shuddering against Arthur. Micah’s release served as lubrication as Arthur continued to stroke, his hand in a vice-like grip around both of their lengths, Micah now trembling and whimpering pathetically through overstimulation. Arthur let out a low rumble in his chest as he came too, Micah could feel his cock pulsating against his own as Arthur leant back against the tree, eyes closed, wrapped in euphoria, hips thrusting more shallow now until he stilled.

Arthur let Micah stay leaning against him while they caught their breath. It was definitely the liquor that led Arthur to kissing Micah again, this time almost chastely before he moved away, buttoned his pants up and retired to his cot.

Micah sat on the edge of camp, he could see Arthur curled up asleep on his cot. After the buzz from his orgasm died down, he felt hollow. As much as he had wanted it, he knew he’d made a terrible mistake.

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Fool me three times..?

****

Arthur slept in the next day but Micah had already left by the time he woke. Dutch had approached him after he had eaten breakfast.

“Micah, I know you’re eager to get our money back and I commend you for it, son but it ain’t gonna be that easy.” He said. Micah half shrugged, half nodded. He was exhausted. Dutch didn’t seem to notice, he continued. “I just think… It’s better to chase new opportunities - always more money to be made, this is America after all… I know you got your heart set on the Blackwater money - I did too. But… I just don’t want no one else to get hurt or worse. Y’understand?” “Yes, boss.” Came Micah’s swift reply. “Good,” Dutch said with a hint of a smile. “In that case, I want you to go out scoutin’ west a bit but not too close to Blackwater. See what opportunities you can find. Take young Lenny with you.” “Lenny?” Micah repeated.

Micah didn’t not like Lenny Summers, he was indifferent at best. Lenny was the youngest member of the gang at just nineteen years of age - just a boy. Micah could almost smell the breast milk on the kid’s breath; he was young and inexperienced. They just didn’t suit each other.

But Micah knew it was best not to argue with Dutch Van Der Linde and so found himself riding out back west way again with young Lenny in tow. Lenny chattered and Micah barely listened, too busy thinking of the night before and Arthur, Arthur, Arthur.

They came across a small place called Strawberry, a dry town with not much going on - a lead that there was a man at the post office willing to pay them to sabotage stagecoaches but it was small fry. They needed to make up for all that money lost in Blackwater, all $150,000 of it. A stagecoach wasn’t going to give them that.

Later that day they found a saloon outside of Strawberry and as with all saloons, they also found trouble. Micah recognised someone there, a man he knew as ‘Skinny’. Skinny had screwed him out of money a while back, just after he lost his other crew to Sisika. Micah was the sort of person to hold grudges and so went to ‘talk’ to Skinny.

Lenny warned him against it, which Micah had shaken off - ”you worry too much, kid.”

But maybe this time, the kid was right. Micah had drank far too much whiskey already in a bid to numb some of the confusion he’d been feeling all day in regards to Arthur and whatever the hell it was they kept doing together…

Had he been sober, there may not have been a fight. Had he been sober, he might have been quick enough to escape the law. Had he been sober, he might not have been arrested and thrown in the Strawberry jail.

****

Micah woke up feeling like he'd been mown down by one of those stagecoaches he thought he was too good to hold up. His head hurt and he didn't remember how, when or why he got there.

Micah had been in jails worse than this before - always managed to get himself out somehow. They hadn’t gotten his name and didn’t know he was part of Dutch’s gang so he was sure he’d be let out sooner or later… There was an O’Driscoll in the cell with him who was as drunk as a skunk and blathered on about a banking stage him and his boys were planning on hitting. Micah ignored him for the most part. He was hung over and he could feel that he had a black eye but he wasn’t sure from where.

He found himself slipping into an uneasy sleep.

He was standing outside of the barn again, staring at the peeling red paint. He knew what would be inside if he went through the doors. He didn’t want to go through the doors. He didn’t want to see it again. There was the voice. It was always here. Always screeching at him. “Prove it! Prove it to me, ya yella bellied son of a bitch! He walked slowly to the barn door, laid his hand on the wood, it was warm from the summer sun. He remembered the heat. Remembered how it made the blood smell…

“Do it now! Prove to me you ain’t a pussy like that no-good brother o’ yours!”

He jolted awake forgetting where he was. The O'Driscoll snored on the cold floor of the cell beside him. Micah took a breath. He hoped that Lenny had enough brains to go and get help.

And help came, eventually, in the form of Arthur Morgan.

Micah had been sitting at the window of the jail, leaning his face against the bars which cooled his swollen eye when he spotted Arthur sauntering over to him. He looked like he’d had a haircut and a shave, maybe even a bath. His hair was trimmed now, off of his neck where before it had been longer, his beard also gone. He’d replaced his blue shirt with a black one. He looked good and Micah cursed himself for thinking so.

You can do a lot of thinking in jail and Micah had thought of nothing but their encounter at the camp - what had it meant? Why had Arthur allowed it again if he had said it was nothing before? Micah knew the trail was lonely, men would lay with other men, hell even cattle if that was the only thing available.. But Micah wasn’t the only thing available. Not thirty minutes north was Valentine full of working girls if Arthur wanted to relieve himself. Why did they keep coming back to each other?

“Hello old friend, have a good time, did you?” Arthur asked, smirking as he sidled up to the side of the building. “You gonna get me outta here, Morgan?” Micah asked, a hint of desperation about his tone. Arthur paused before answering, taking the time to put a cigarette between his plump lips, strike a match then light the smoke. “I ain’t decided yet.” “Real funny.” Micah replied, rolling his eyes. “Oh, I ain’t joking, cowpoke.” Arthur replied as he exhaled smoke. “I’ve heard so much bluster outta your mouth the last six months and now I got an opportunity to watch you be silenced.”

Micah’s eyes widened. If he didn’t know better, he’d have thought that Arthur was joking. It seemed like such a juxtaposition to the man he had been kissing just a couple of days ago who had sounded so vulnerable and sorrowful.... “You- you gotta do something!” Micah replied. Would Arthur really leave him to languish here? That wasn’t the Arthur Morgan Micah knew at all. “Why?” Arthur asked, his voice low and rumbling. Micah’s pale eyes met Arthur’s. “I… I thought…” He stammered uncharacteristically and shot a glance back at the O’Driscoll who was still asleep. “I thought, well, y’know..?”

Micah looked at Arthur pointedly. Surely, he hadn’t forgotten the other night. Arthur shook his head quickly. “I told ya, I ain’t gonna talk ‘bout that ever again. Y’understand? It was a mistake.” “A mistake that happened three times? Sure, cowpoke.” Micah found himself saying hotly. “You shut your mouth or I will leave you here to rot, Micah, so help me I will.” Arthur looked away from Micah in the jail cell before saying, “don’t be mistaken, I’m only here because Dutch asked me. Nothin’ else.” Micah didn’t say anything. He glared at Arthur. Hated that he was drawn to him when he was such a self righteous prick almost all of the time.

Arthur used dynamite to blast the wall of the jail away. It was a loud and brash technique that suited Arthur. The lawmen up in the jailhouse were alerted immediately and Arthur handed Micah a revolver to protect himself from what was about to come. Micah didn’t know whether it was because of what Arthur had said, acting like nothing had happened but he suddenly saw red as lawmen descended upon them. Micah found himself shooting up the town as if his life depended on it. Arthur followed him, shouting after him, “what the hell are you doing?! Let’s just get out of here!” But Micah felt rage boiling over inside of him, rage because he had let Arthur do as he pleased and he felt used, he felt stupid. And now Arthur was being sent to save him, smirking at him like he was some little bitch. Micah would have preferred anyone coming to his rescue, anyone other than Arthur. “Have you lost your goddamn mind, Micah?!” Arthur was calling after him as Micah made his way through Strawberry firing on anything or anyone who resembled a lawman. “Calm yourself woman,” Micah spat at Arthur, “we’ll be fine.” “You have really lost it this time!” Micah felt a rush of adrenaline in a gunfight. He didn’t know if others did but there was little else that got him excited or made him feel as alive as bullets whistling past him. He got a thrill out of dodging and weaving, out of hunkering down then waiting for an opening to make that perfect headshot. Maybe it was something he’d learned from his daddy - the only times his daddy’d been proud of him was when he was unloading a chamber of bullets into someone’s chest. Together, Arthur and Micah were a force to be reckoned with - both excellent shots and efficient. They made short work of the lawmen and were able to make their escape. There was a lull eventually, Micah stood in the middle of the small town, chest heaving covered in sweat and blood - some his and some not. Arthur stared at him incredulously. “Come on,” Arthur growled at him, marching over to him as he unhitched his horse, a Missouri Foxtrotter like Baylock only Arthur’s was dapple grey. “Get on,” Arthur ordered, “before I shoot you, too.” Micah let himself chuckle. This almost felt normal. “Whatever you say, sweetheart.” Micah wasn’t worried about Baylock, he was a clever horse who would have returned to camp once Micah didn’t come for him. Arthur mounted up and reached down to pull Micah up too. Micah ignored the sparks he felt at Arthur’s touch.

Arthur spurred the horse onwards and they tore out of Strawberry. There were already reinforcements on their tail; with one hand, Micah held onto Arthur’s waist and with the other he shot at the lawmen. He pushed down all the thoughts he had about holding onto Arthur and being this close to him, close enough to smell him, close enough to press his lips to the nape of Arthur’s neck just to hear him sigh and watch him shiver. “Goddamn maniac,” Arthur snapped at him as they rode past Rigg’s Station, “I shoulda left you to hang.” Micah smirked. That was the Arthur he knew, not the sad drunk at the campfire. “Wouldn’t you get bored without me?” He asked playfully. Arthur grunted but didn’t reply. “That was some good shootin’ back there - gotta hand it to ya, Morgan.” “What was that you pulled back there?!” Arthur called back to him, not letting up on the speed though it seemed like the law was gone now. “Got a bit wild, that’s for sure.” Micah mused, not wanting to have to explain himself. “Wild!?” Arthur repeated, sounding dumbfounded.

Micah didn’t say anything else. He didn’t know what exactly had come over him and he wasn’t about to spill his guts and feelings to Arthur Morgan. Not now, anyway. Maybe if things had been different... If Arthur hadn’t acted like nothing had happened... “You owe Lenny,” Arthur told him sternly, “if he hadn’t found us in time… Well…” “You’ll all be thanked profusely. I promise.” Micah retorted. “You’re lucky Dutch has got your back for some unknown reason.” Arthur said coldly. Arthur slowed his horse down now. Micah still rested his hand on Arthur’s waist, the anger subsided giving way to something else but he didn’t understand it. He felt his chest tighten but different this time. It was dull, it throbbed and ached like he wanted to howl in pain. “Take me back to my camp.” Micah said to Arthur, “it’s at Monto’s Rest.” “You ain’t comin’ back to Horseshoe Overlook?” Arthur asked, surprised. He turned his head to look at Micah over his shoulder. Micah didn’t want to meet his eye. “No. I’ve been a bad boy, Morgan. Dutch ain’t gonna be happy with me. I’ll let him cool off or bring him a peace offering.”

Arthur rode to Monto’s Rest - Micah had set up camp there with Lenny before they went to the saloon. Baylock was waiting for him. Micah slipped off of Arthur’s horse and went to Baylock. There wasn’t much he cared about in life but his horse was one of them. “Hey,” he greeted the Foxtrotter gently and patted him on the muzzle, “what a clever boy you are.”

Arthur hovered awkwardly, not getting off of his horse but not leaving immediately either. He watched as Micah spoke softly to Baylock and fed him some hay: “you must be hungry, boy. Micah looked back to Arthur, puzzled. He’d half expected Arthur to make him walk back to his camp after that performance in Strawberry and he certainly hadn’t expected Arthur to hang around.

Why was Micah’s heart beating so hard in his chest?

“I…” Arthur started and Micah looked up at him, head to one side, “I’m glad Lenny got to us in time.��

Micah saw the flush play across Arthur’s cheeks and his blue-green eyes looked bright, just like they had done before. What was this? Not half an hour ago, he had said he’d leave Micah in that cell, he’d berated him for shooting his way out of town and now… Now he was saying he was happy that Micah was ok?

“Why…. why don’t you stay?” Micah found himself asking and he hated himself for it. Micah also hated how he had to crane his neck to look up at Arthur on his horse.

The night had drawn in now and Arthur’s features were shrouded by darkness but his eyes shimmered as they settled on Micah’s. Micah thought for a moment that he could see Arthur considering his proposition of staying. Whether it was just for a drink or for the night, Micah wasn't sure if he cared, he just wasn't ready for Arthur to leave just yet. Didn't want to be on his own again.

He hated how he became needy around Arthur. He’d been so angry at him but now he couldn’t be.

“I…” Arthur started, hesitating. “I should get back.” He said, looking away as he spoke.

It was all Micah could do but to bite his lip to stop him calling after Arthur as he turned his horse around to leave; it took all his will to stop him begging Arthur to stay with him.

He already felt his neck flushing with embarrassment. What the hell was he doing? This wasn’t him! Simpering after Morgan out of everyone..!

He hated himself more and more and more.

So he rode into Valentine a short while afterwards, drank too much whiskey and fucked the first whore who spoke to him.

The whore wasn’t the best lay in his life but she wasn't bad either. She wasn't Arthur though.

****

Micah woke up in the rented room above the Valentine bar the next morning. Light streamed in through the window and the whore was long gone.

Micah groaned and rolled over. He was naked, still had blood on him from the jailbreak the day before. He didn’t want to think about that or think about Arthur. He cleaned himself up and dressed, going downstairs to the bar. He needed food - he couldn’t remember the last time he had eaten anything.

He ordered eggs, flapjacks and coffee. He sat at a table away from the main doors trying to let his pounding head subside. If he closed his eyes he saw Arthur, saw the blood from the lawmen in Strawberry, saw the peeling paint of the barn door…

“Micah Bell..? I never thought I’d see you again, let alone in Valentine of all places..!”

Micah’s head jerked up and his eyes were greeted with the sight of a well dressed man around the same age as him, tall and slender with a shock of red hair and vibrant green eyes that sparkled mischievously with a boyish charm as they met Micah’s.

“Clinton Jones?”

“The very same! How the hell are you!” Clinton asked, pulling up a chair and sitting at the table beside Micah. Micah found himself uncharacteristically lost for words as he stared into those dazzling emerald eyes. Clinton seemed nonplussed at his old friend’s silence. “Let me buy you a drink! It’s been how many years..?” “Too many,” Micah replied rather bluntly. He was taken aback. Hadn’t seen Clinton since he was a boy. Back then, they had been very close but since Micah took off on his own, Micah had pushed those memories down.

“How’s Emily?” Clinton asked Micah. “Amy.” Micah corrected him, a sudden jolt carved through him like a knife. “She… She passed away.” “Oh. I’m sorry to hear that,” Clinton said, though he didn’t sound it at all.

Micah found himself speechless at being presented with his past so suddenly and unexpectedly. A working girl set Micah’s food down before him and he began to eat, a distraction from having to make small talk with a childhood friend.

“What are you doing out this way?” Clinton asked Micah, watching him attentively. Micah shrugged casually, “jus’ this and that. You know how it is, Clint.” Clinton laughed softly, “been years since anyone called me that. It’s Clinton these days… Or Agent Jones.”

Micah didn’t show that a jolt of panic ran through him. He had known Clinton had been interested in joining the law when they were younger - not wanting to follow a life of crime and urging Micah to do the same. But Micah couldn’t, his daddy’d never let him. And then after what happened out in Ohio there was no going back, Clinton knew that.

“I work with the Pinkertons now, Micah.” Clinton said, almost gently as if he wanted to soften the blow. “It’s what you wanted.” Micah replied, not meeting Clinton’s eye now. Clinton moved a little closer to Micah now, dropping his voice as he spoke, “even me just sittin’ here with you is a risk, especially after what happened with your daddy.” Micah’s eyes darted up to Clinton’s. “I never told no one about you, Micah. I swear.”

Micah stopped eating. Had he not been Micah Bell III, his hands might have shook as he held the cutlery and he might have been worried about just how convenient it was that Agent Clinton Jones of the Pinkerton Detective Agency, former close friend of Micah Bell, just happened to have tracked him down to Valentine, especially after all that chaos he had caused in Strawberry.

Perhaps Micah had not been as anonymous as he had thought back in that small, Strawberry jail.

“Thanks.” Micah said. “That’s what friends are for - helpin’ each other.” Clinton said with a smile, “maybe you could help me, Micah..? ‘Parently, there’s a bunch of people out this way - outlaws - just robbed a ferry in Blackwater and then a train owned by Mister Leviticus Cornwall. Maybe you heard about it?”

“Can't say I have.” Micah replied smoothly, picking his knife and fork up again and resuming his breakfast, “you know me, Clint… I ain’t really one for reading the newspaper.”

That wasn’t the answer Clinton had wanted as he moved his head further still, his smile diminished but still playing on his lips like someone who knew they had a royal flush in poker. “Listen, Micah. I don’t wanna be coy. Dutch Van Der Linde is a wanted man and I want to help put him behind bars.” Micah shrugged, slurping at his coffee in a purposefully obnoxious way. “I think think I’ve heard o’ him but… I’m afraid I can’t help you old friend.”

Micah went to stand now and Clinton followed suit. “Micah!” He followed Micah to the doors of the saloon rather desperately now, “Micah, I know you know somethin’. You was seen with Van Der Linde out west. Now I came to you without tellin’ no one because I still… Well… We was close once.”

Micah hesitated as he walked to the hitching post. “We was.” Micah conceded, not looking at Clinton now. “Long time ago now, Clint. Long time ago.” “Don’t mean that it didn’t happen or that it didn’t mean anything.”

Micah let his hat hide the expression on his face. He hadn’t thought about Clinton Jones for twenty years. Many people had come and gone since then.

“Clint…We was kids.” “I don’t wanna have to resort to blackmail. I thought, maybe you’d still have some sort of fondness left… Thought you’d want to help an old friend out - you scratch my back, I scratch yours?” Micah turned back to Clinton now. He searched his face not knowing if he could trust him. When could you ever trust a Pinkerton?

“They’d still be interested in you after what happened in Ohio, you know. They got your daddy but as far as I know, that bounty’s still out on your head.” “Clint-” Micah started, shaking his head. “I won’t tell ‘em a thing, I swear… If you help me, Micah. I can guarantee your freedom. And money, too - Dutch has a pretty price on his head.” Micah’s face stayed stony. Clinton reached into his inside jacket pocket and held out a sheet of paper to Micah. It was Dutch’s bounty poster. Micah took it without looking at it.

“Just think about it, Micah. I’ll be in touch.”

#morbell #rdr2 #micah bell #arthur morgan #red dead redemption #writing

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the-awkward-outlaw · 4 years ago

Note

Hi! I wanted to request something where the gang enjoys a thanksgiving or Christmas together?? :-)

Honestly, Anon, I’m surprised I got to this before Thanksgiving or Christmas. Anyways, here you go!

Masterlist

Read on AO3

Holidays are a rare thing for the gang to enjoy because the lifestyles they live prevent them from doing so. Most of them don’t get much more than a “Happy (whichever holiday). Same goes for birthdays.

However, Dutch and Hosea feel that Christmas is an important holiday that needs celebrating. Not because of the religious factors, but because it’s a holiday about love and unity. The gang needs to be reminded that they all care about one another sometimes.

Most of the planning goes to Hosea, and he often has to remind Dutch to help out. He doesn’t mind though because when Dutch does get down to plan, he puts his whole heart into it.

No matter where the gang is located, everyone pitches in to try and decorate camp without drawing too much attention.

Arthur and Charles cover the hunting bit, gathering turkeys or geese for Pearson to cook.

Although Pearson’s knowledge of different kinds of food are pretty limited, he made sure years ago to learn a good recipe for roasting birds on an open fire. Everyone appreciated it immensely.

However, it wouldn’t be Christmas if Lenny and Sean didn’t pull a trick on Pearson. One year Pearson was making stuffing. He turned around for two seconds and his bread was replaced with corn meal. He didn’t realize it until half the bird was stuffed and then he had to pull it all out. He shouted himself hoarse at Lenny and Sean, but they were too busy laughing to care.

Abigail will usually take Jack and a disgruntled John to town to buy some sweets, and if there’s enough money, maybe even some baked goods. There was one memorable year where John snuck away from them to play poker. He won a decent hand and used it to buy a double layered cake. An extremely rare treat.

Tilly surprised everyone her first Christmas with the gang by baking a pie in Pearson’s dutch oven. It was so good she’s required to make them every year. Most of the gang agrees it’s not Christmas without Tilly’s pies.

Karen and Uncle oversee the liquor supplies for Christmas Eve and Day. Uncle always pulls his usual trick of going into town, saying he’s going to buy more booze, but then he’s always found passed out in the saloon. Usually by Arthur and John who always give him an earful and sometimes a good kick.

Grimshaw is a near terror the week leading up to Christmas. She flaps around camp and shrieks even more at the girls to get the place spick and span. By the time Christmas Eve comes, just about everyone, including the men, are about ready to shoot her. She makes it up by giving out some of the best gifts.

Speaking of gifts, everyone’s very limited on what they can give simply because of money and availability. A rule was decided years ago when the gang started to get big that no one would give a gift for everyone. Instead, drawings were done and each person was assigned to give a gift for one person. It was Arthur who gave Mary-Beth her first real journal to write in.

Grimshaw however is the only person who gives a gift to everyone. Dutch will usually give her a portion of the camp’s funds to go (usually after she argues with him about it) and then she goes into town with Tilly to buy everything.

As far as decorations go, there’s usually a wreath hung up on Pearson’s wagon and mistletoe hung up somewhere. Lenny and Karen usually avoid that spot like the plague while Uncle and sometimes even Swanson will hang around it. Molly usually finds herself beneath it, hoping for Dutch to meet her under it. He usually does.

No one really thinks about getting a tree as they’re too much hassle, but a few days before Christmas, one will just appear sometime in the night when everyone’s asleep. It was a real mystery the first year it happened until on Christmas Day, Trelawney strolled in, looking his finest. He made the slightest comment about the tree, trying to be sly, but everyone knew he’d done it. He’s done the same thing every year and everyone lets him think he’s being sneaky.

When Christmas Eve comes, Pearson will lay out a huge dinner featuring the turkeys and geese. He also makes a mountain of mashed potatoes.

Candles are laid out around camp and lit, which brings a lovely light to camp.

When the food’s gone and everyone’s stuffed with second helpings of Tilly’s pie, the entire gang gathers around the campfire and sings songs and shares stories.

Javier always tells the same story of Christmas in Mexico. How his sister would make small stuffed toys for children throughout the entire year and then he would go with her every Christmas Eve and give them to the children of his village.

Charles will talk about his father, though very briefly. Christmas was not a big thing in his mother’s tribe as they didn’t celebrate it, but his father would always take him out of the tribe for a few hours every Christmas Eve and they’d watch the stars on clear nights or they’d go and make snow figures.

Before bed, Dutch will usually ask Reverend Swanson to read from his bible about Christmas. However, Swanson is usually too drunk or will come up with an excuse not to do so. Arthur and Hosea are the only ones who know that his bible is fake, that it really hides his supplies of morphine. That doesn’t stop Swanson from reciting a scruffy rendition of the story, even though he sometimes gets it wrong. No one minds though.

On Christmas Day, everyone wakes up with Grimshaw’s gift nearby. She likes to surprise them with the gifts. Most of the time, the gifts are things they need but they’re nicer quality, such as new clothes. That was how Arthur got his blue striped shirt. It was a gift from Grimshaw after his father’s shirt finally fell apart. He liked the blue one much better, mostly because it never belonged to his father.

On the year when Abigail was pregnant with Jack, John received a miniature cowboy figure that looked surprisingly like him. He got so annoying with it that it disappeared. No one could confirm it, but it was suspected Abigail hid it.

Pearson and Mary-Beth work together and make a big breakfast in his cast-iron pot, putting scrambled eggs, boiled potatoes, green onions, sliced peppers and other ingredients into a big cake-like structure. Strauss got haughty about it his first year and called it the mountain-man breakfast. The name stuck much to his dislike.

After breakfast, the gang gathers around the tables and exchanges gifts. Sean will make fun of everyone’s gift, but he’s the most excited to receive his own.

Lenny and Hosea almost always receive a book. One year, Dutch was giving to Lenny and he gave him an Evelyn Miller book. Lenny never read it nor did he want to.

Micah’s the only one who never joins in the festivities, but Arthur and John got him for it. John was assigned to gift him, so he and Arthur went to the market and found a large fruit stand, which was selling pumpkins left over from the season’s harvest. They found the oldest one (this was a few weeks before Christmas) and they left it out in the sun for days on end until it was beginning to rot. They punctured a small hole in it so that bugs could crawl into it.

When Micah opened his box with the rotting pumpkin, everyone laughed except for him and Dutch. He tried lifting it from the box but the stem ripped the top part of the pumpkin off, revealing the insects inside it. He spent the remainder of the day pouting on the outskirts of camp.

By nightfall, most of everyone is drunk and singing loudly. Karen is usually pulled away by Sean, but Abigail and John almost always get into an argument. Usually in regards to John being a less-than-satisfactory father to Jack.

Jack is by far the sweetest member. Days before Christmas, he begs Abigail to go into town and they buy small bundles of flowers (or they go pick them themselves depending where the gang is located at the time). Jack makes a flower crown for everyone.

Bill says he hates the crowns, but he secretly loves them. He wraps it around his hat, which hides his hair that he’s slicked down with hair pomade. He tries to look a little nicer every Christmas but usually gets made fun of for it by John and Arthur.

Dutch will always end the celebrating by telling everyone how much they matter to the gang, how life could be a lot worse without their efforts.

Everyone goes to bed feeling good about themselves and their situations.

Arthur will usually stay up later than anyone else, watching the stars if they’re not hidden behind clouds. He feels a certain fondness towards everyone (except Micah) on these nights, but often wishes he had someone special to share them with.

#rdr2 fanfic #red dead fanfic #arthur morgan #Van Der Linde Gang #awkward asks

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wildeoaths · 4 years ago

Text

LGBTQ Book & Film Recommendations

Hello! As someone who tries to read widely, it can sometimes be frustrating to find good (well-written, well-made) LGBTQ+ works of literature and film, and mainstream recommendations only go so far. This is my shortlist.

Some caveats: 1) I have only watched/seen some of these, though they have all been well-received.

2) The literature list is primarily focused on adult literary and genre fiction, since that is what I mostly read, and I feel like it’s easier to find queer YA fiction. Cece over at ProblemsOfABookNerd (YT) covers a lot of newer releases and has a YA focus, so you can check her out for more recommendations.

3) There are a ton of good films and good books that either reference or discuss queer theory, LGBTQ history and literary theory. These tend to be more esoteric and academic, and I’m not too familiar with queer theory, so they’ve largely been left off the list. I do agree that they’re important, and reading into LGBTQ-coding is a major practice, but they’re less accessible and I don’t want to make the list too intimidating.

4) I linked to Goodreads and Letterboxd because that’s what I use and I happen to really enjoy the reviews.

Any works that are bolded are popular, or they’re acclaimed and I think they deserve some attention. I’ve done my best to flag potential objections and triggers, but you should definitely do a search of the reviews. DoesTheDogDie is also a good resource. Not all of these will be suitable for younger teenagers; please use your common sense and judgement.

Please feel free to chime in in the replies (not the reblogs) with your recommendations, and I’ll eventually do a reblog with the additions!

BOOKS

> YOUNG ADULT

Don’t @ me asking why your favourite YA novel isn’t on this list. These just happen to be the picks I felt might also appeal to older teens/twentysomethings.

Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe

Clap When You Land by Elizabeth Acevedo - poetry.

Felix Ever After by Kacen Callender - trans male teen protagonist.

Red, White & Royal Blue

Simon vs the Homo Sapiens Agenda

The Gentleman’s Guide To Vice And Virtue

The Raven Boys (and Raven Cycle)

> LITERATURE: GENERAL

This list does skew M/M; more NB, trans and WLW recommendations are welcomed!

A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara. One of the most acclaimed contemporary LGBTQ novels and you’ve probably heard of it. Will probably make you cry.

A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood. Portrait of a middle-aged gay man.

Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh. M/M affair, British student high society; definitely nostalgic for the aristocracy so be aware of the context.

Call Me By Your Name by André Aciman. It’s somewhat controversial, it’s gay, everyone knows the film at least.

Cronus’ Children / Le Jardin d'Acclimation by Yves Navarre. Winner of the Goncourt prize.

Dancer From The Dance by Andrew Holleran. A young man in the 1970s NYC gay scene. Warning for drugs and sexual references.

Dorian, An Imitation by Will Self. Adaptation of Orscar Wilde’s novel. Warning for sexual content.

Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe by Fannie Flagg. Two wlw in the 1980s. Also made into a film; see below.

Gemini by Michel Tournier. The link will tell you more; seems like a very complex read. TW for troubling twin dynamics.

Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin. Another iconic M/M work.

Lost Boi by Sassafras Lowrey. A queer punk reimagining of Peter Pan. Probably one of the more accessible works on this list!

Lie With Me by Philippe Besson. Two teenage boys in 1980s France.

Maurice by E. M. Forster. Landmark work written in 1914. Also made into a film; see below.

Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides. An expansive (and long) novel about the story of Cal, a hermaphrodite, by the author of The Virgin Suicides.

Orlando by Virginia Woolf. Plays with gender, time and space. Virginia Woolf’s ode to her lover Vita Sackville-West. What more do you want? (also a great film; see below).

Oscar Wilde’s works - The Picture of Dorian Gray would be the place to start. Another member of the classical literary canon.

Saga, vol.1 by Brian K. Vaughn and Fiona Staples. Graphic novel; warning for sexual content.

Stone Butch Blues by Leslie Feinburg. An acclaimed work looking at working-class lesbian life and gender identity in pre-Stonewall America.

The Holy Innocents by Gilbert Adair. The basis for Bertolucci’s The Dreamers (2003). I am hesitant to recommend this because I have not read this, though I have watched the film; the M/M dynamic and LGBTQ themes do not seem to be the primary focus. Warning for sexual content and incestuous dynamics between the twins.

The Animals At Lockwood Manor by Jane Healey. Plays with gothic elements, set during WW2, F/F elements.

The Hours by Michael Cunningham. References Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway. Probably a good idea to read Virginia Woolf first.

The Immoralist by André Gide. Translated from French.

The Song of Achilles by Madeline MIller. Drawing from the Iliad, focusing on Achilles and Patroclus. Contemporary fantasy that would be a good pick for younger readers.

The Swimming Pool Library by Alan Hollinghurst. Gay life pre-AIDS crisis. Apparently contains a fair amount of sexual content.

What Belongs To You by Garth Greenwell. A gay man’s coming of age in the American South.

> LITERATURE: WORLD LITERATURE

American and Western experiences are more prominent in LGBTQ works, just due to the way history and the community have developed, and the difficulties of translation. These are English and translated works that specifically foreground the experiences of non-White people living in (often) non-Western societies. I’m not white or American myself and recommendations in this area are especially welcomed.

All Boys Aren’t Blue by George M. Johnson. The memoirs and essays of a queer black activist, exploring themes of black LGBTQ experiences and masculinity.

A People’s History of Heaven by Mathangi Subramanian. Female communities and queer female characters in a Bangalore slum. A very new release but already very well received.

Confessions of a Mask by Yukio Mishima. Coming-of-age in post-WW1 Japan. This one’s interesting, because it’s definitely at least somewhat autobiographical. Mishima can be a tough writer, and you should definitely look into his personality and his life when reading his work.

Disoriental by Négar Djavadi. A family saga told against the backdrop of Iranian history by a queer Iranian woman. Would recommend going into this knowing at least some of the political and historical context.

How We Fight For Our Lives by Saeed Jones. A coming-of-age story and memoir from a gay, black man in the American South.

In The Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado. Another acclaimed contemporary work about the dynamics of abuse in LGBTQ relationships. Memoir.

Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo. Contemporary black British experience, told from the perspectives of 12 diverse narrators.

> POETRY

Crush by Richard Siken. Tumblr loves Richard Siken, worth a read.

Diving Into The Wreck by Adrienne Rich.

He’s So Masc by Chris Tse.

If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho, trans. Anne Carson. The best presentation of Sappho we’re likely to get.

Lord Byron’s works - Selected Poems may be a good starting point. One of the Romantics and part of the classical literary canon.

Les Fleurs du Mal by Charles Baudelaire. The explicitly lesbian poems are apparently in the les fleurs du mal section.

> MEMOIR & NONFICTION

And The Band Played On: Politics, People and the AIDS Epidemic by Randy Shilts. An expansive, comprehensive history and exposure of the failures of media and the Reagan administration, written by an investigative journalist. Will probably make you rightfully angry.

How to Survive A Plague: The Inside Story of How Citizens and Science Tamed AIDS by David France. A reminder of the power of community and everyday activism, written by a gay reporter living in NYC during the epidemic.

Indecent Advances: The Hidden History of Murder and Masculinity Before Stonewall by James Polchin. True crime fans, this one’s for you. Sociocultural history constructed from readings of the news and media.

Queer: A Graphic History by Meg-John Barker. It’s illustrated, it’s written by an academic, it’s an easier introduction to queer theory. I still need to pick up a copy, but it seems like a great jumping-off point with an overview of the academic context.

Real Queer America by Samantha Allen. The stories of LGBTQ people and LGBTQ narratives in the conservative parts of America. A very well received contemporary read.

The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson. Gender, pregnancy and queer partnership. I’m not familiar with this but it is quite popular.

When Brooklyn Was Queer by Hugh Ryan. LGBTQ history of Brooklyn from the nineteenth century to pre-Stonewall.

FILMS

With films it’s difficult because characters are often queercoded and we’re only now seeing films with better rep. This is a shortlist of better-rated films with fairly explicit LGBTQ coding, LGBTQ characters, or made by LGBTQ persons. Bolded films are ones that I think are likely to be more accessible or with wider appeal.

A Single Man (2009) - Colin Firth plays a middle-aged widower.

Blue Is The Warmest Colour (2013) - A controversial one. Sexual content.

Booksmart (2019) - A pretty well made film about female friendship and being an LGBTQ teen.

Boy Erased (2018) - Warning for conversion therapy.

BPM (Beats Per Minute) (2017) - Young AIDS activists in France.

Brokeback Mountain (2005) - Cowboy gays. This film is pretty famous, do you need more summary? Might make a good triple bill with Idaho and God’s Own Country.

Cabaret (1972) - Liza Minelli. Obvious plug to also look into Vincent Minelli.

Calamity Jane (1953) - There’s a lot that could be said about queer coding in Hollywood golden era studio films, but this is apparently a fun wlw-cowboy westerns-vibes watch. Read the reviews on this one!

Call Me By Your Name (2017) - Please don't debate this film in the notes.

Caravaggio (1986) - Sean Bean and Tilda Swinton are in it. Rather explicit.

Carol (2015) - Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara are lesbians in 1950s America.

Clouds of Sils Maria (2014) - Hard to summarise, but one review calls it “lesbian birdman” and it has both Juliette Binoche and Kristen Stewart in it, so consider watching it.

Colette (2018) - About the bi/queer female writer Colette during the belle epoque era. This had Keira Knightley so by all rights Tumblr should love it.

Fried Green Tomatoes (1991) - Lesbian love in 1920s/80s? America.

God’s Own Country (2017) - Gay and British.

Happy Together (1997) - By Wong Kar Wai. No further explanation needed.

Heartbeats (2010) - Bi comedy.

Heartstone (2016) - It’s a story about rural Icelandic teenagers.

Henry Gamble’s Birthday Party (2015) - Queer teens and religious themes.

Je, Tu, Il, Elle (1974) - Early Chantal Akerman. Warning for sexual scenes.

Kill Your Darlings (2013) - Ginsberg, Kerouac and the Beat poets.

Love, Simon (2018)

Lovesong (2016) - Lesbian and very soft. Korean-American characters.

Love Songs (2007) - French trio relationship. Louis Garrel continues to give off non-straight vibes.

Mädchen In Uniform (1931) - One of the earliest narrative films to explicitly portray homosexuality. A piece of LGBTQ cinematic history.

Maurice (1987) - Adaptation of the novel.

Midnight Cowboy (1969) - Heavy gay coding.

Milk (2008) - Biopic of Harvey Milk, openly gay politician. By the same director who made My Own Private Idaho.

Moonlight (2016) - It won the awards for a reason.

My Own Private Idaho (1991) - Another iconic LGBTQ film. River Phoenix.

Mysterious Skin (2004) - Go into this film aware, please. Young actors, themes of prostitution, child ab*se, r***, and a lot of trauma.

Orlando (1992) - An excellent adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s novel, and in my opinion far more accessible. Watch it for the queer sensibilities and fantastic period pieces.

Pariah (2011) - Excellent coming-of-age film about a black lesbian girl in Brooklyn.

Paris is Burning (1990) - LANDMARK DOCUMENTARY piece of LGBTQ history, documenting the African-American and Latine drag and ballroom roots of the NYC queer community.

Persona (1966) - It’s an Ingmar Bergman film so I would recommend knowing what you’re about to get into, but also I can’t describe it because it’s an Ingmar Bergman film.

Picnic At Hanging Rock (1975) - Cult classic queercoded boarding school girls.

Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019) - By Celine Sciamma, who’s rapidly establishing herself in the mainstream as a LGBTQ film director. This is a wlw relationship and the queer themes are reflected in the cinematic techniques used. A crowd pleaser.

Pride (2014) - Pride parades with a British sensibility.

Rebel Without A Cause (1955) - Crowd-pleaser with bi coding and James Dean. The OG version of “you’re tearing me apart!”.

Rocketman (2019) - It’s Elton John.

Rent (2005) - Adaptation of the stage musical. Not the best film from a technical standpoint. I recommend the professionally recorded 2008 closing night performance instead.

Rope (1948) - Hitchcock film.

Sorry Angel (2018) - Loving portraits of gay French men.

Talk To Her (2002) - By Spanish auteur Pedro Almodóvar.

Tangerine (2015) - About trans sex workers. The actors apparently had a lot of input in the film, which was somehow shot on an iPhone by the same guy who went on to do The Florida Project.

The Duke of Burgundy (2014) - Lesbians in an S&M relationship that’s going stale, sexual content obviously.

The Gay Deceivers (1969) - The reviews are better than me explaining.

The Handmaiden (2016) - Park Chan-wook makes a film about Korean lesbians and is criminally snubbed at the Oscars. Warning for sexual themes and kink.

The Favourite (2018) - Period movie, and lesbian.

Thelma And Louise (1991) - An iconic part of LGBTQ cinematic history. That is all.

The Celluloid Closet (1995) - A look into LGBTQ cinematic history, and the historical contexts we operated in when we’ve snuck our narratives into film.

The Miseducation of Cameron Post (2018) - Adaptation of the YA novel.

The Neon Demon (2016) - Apparently based on Elizabeth Bathory, the blood-drinking countess. Very polarising film and rated R.

The Perks of Being A Wallflower (2012) - Book adaptation. It has Ezra Miller in it I guess.

The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) - No explanation needed, queer and transgressive vibes all the way.

They (2017) - Gender identity, teenagers.

Those People (2015) - They’re gay and they’re artists in New York.

Tomboy (2011) - One of the few films I’ve seen dealing with gender identity in children (10 y/o). Celine Sciamma developing her directorial voice.

Tropical Malady (2004) - By Thai auteur Apichatpong Weerasethakul. His is a very particular style so don’t sweat it if you don’t enjoy it.

Vita and Virginia (2018) - Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West biopic

Water Lilies (2007) - Celine Sciamma again! Teenage lesbian coming-of-age.

When Marnie Was There (2014) - A Studio Ghibli film exploring youth, gender and sexuality.

Weekend (2011) - An indie film about young gay love.

Wilde (1997) - It’s a film about Oscar Wilde.

XXY (2007) - About an intersex teenager. Reviews on this are mixed.

Y Tu Mama Tambien (2001) - Wonder what Diego Luna was doing before Rogue One? This is one of the things. Warning for sexual content.

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inactive-maelstroem · 2 years ago

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All of my favorite media is either incredibly mainstream or so obscure it's hard to find fan content about it, and brokeback mountain (2005) somehow manages to be both.

If it's a podcast, it's either the Magnus Archives or something literally titled "who shat on the floor at my wedding". If it's a show, it's either Star Trek or Soviet scifi about some teenager and his robot doppleganger that gives me trans vibes (no one's watched it, ever). If it's a book, it's either Fellowship of the Ring or a children's book I read in a local library that has like a hundred copies in the whole world.

And Brokeback is both because everyone recognizes it. Everyone knows (vaguely) what it's about. But how many actually understand it and love it? How many see it for what it is instead of thinking of it as "the gay cowboy movie" or "the movie that started gay rep"? Not many. Which sucks because I want people to draw fanart of it and write dumb little ficcy fics about Alma going to Five Guys or whatever and make AUs. I want lore deep dives and analysis posts. I want beanposting on main. It doesn't matter that it's a serious movie, we already did that to Breaking Bad and GOT. Aaaand post

#whew #stream of consciousness #btw yes i love alma #brokeback mountain #five guys

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artificialqueens · 5 years ago

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wild flower, chapter one (shalaska) 1/10 - freyja

A/N: Hi! This is my first time posting here, so please be gentle! All I know is that no one was going to write my shalaska cowboy AU for me. Also if anyone is interested in betaing… please. Let me know.

🌼

“Wild women are an unexplainable spark of life. They ooze freedom and seek awareness, they belong to nobody but themselves, yet give a piece of who they are to everyone they meet. If you have met one, hold on to her, she’ll allow you into her chaos, but she’ll also show you her magic.”

🌼

Alaska has always been fascinated with bandits.

Bandits, criminals, gangs - anyone with a bounty on their head. Not that the bounty or even the criminality of it all attracted her - no, it was the freedom.

Alaska has also always been wealthy.

These two constants do not go well together.

As a child, the contrast was easier to navigate, as her only duties were her lessons, and the rest of her time was spent however she wanted to spend it. Her wildness was enacted through imaginary horses and people to shoot, drawing from the tales of her father’s friends from the West. She had grass stains on her skirts constantly, and although her mother berated her for her unladylike play, it could be chalked up to just that: play.

As she got older, the contrast was too much. She was in polite society, she needed to find a husband, and she was the lady of the household. She had to give up one, wealth or freedom, and only one made sense to let go of. It wasn’t a hard choice, anyway - she’d stopped believing in running wild on the frontier somewhere around her mother’s death.

Which is why, when her father tells her she’ll be visiting her uncle in Colorado for the summer, the thrill she might have gotten as a child is absent in the place of a sickening dread that sits in her stomach like a dead weight.

“He’s invited you,” he’d said to a stunned Alaska over breakfast one morning. “And I thought you could use the fresh air - God knows this city is starting to smell now that it’s thawing.”

Alaska had pressed her lips together, frowning at him. “I don’t–”

“I told him you would love to go,” her father had interrupted, raising an eyebrow. “This is a great way to find someone wealthy to marry, since the options here clearly aren’t up to your standards.”

The snide comment hadn’t gone past her, and she’d lapsed back into silence, unable to argue and tell him that her ‘standards’ won’t ever be met, so tough luck. That wasn’t an option, especially considering her father’s newspaper wasn’t selling as much now that the war was over.

This visit is her last chance to find a husband wealthy enough to make it worth it, and she knows that she needs to return to her father with a ring on her finger.

Now, she sits on the train to Coady, heart heavy with her resolution. She looks out the window to take her mind off of the sick feeling in her stomach, clenching her fist in the folds of her skirt. It’s easy to get lost in the pale browns and greens of the plains, easy to feel comfort in the mountains that look blue in the distance. It’s easier to think that maybe she’ll find a man she really loves if he comes from a place that looks like this.

She nearly laughs at herself. Unlikely.

🌸

Alaska has been in Colorado a week, and there has been no mention of a ball, or even of a dinner. She hasn’t seen another person besides her uncle and his servants - and even then, it’s mostly been his servants. If it isn’t mealtime, her uncle is locked in his office, going over papers and sending out letters at least twice a day.

Alaska has picked up enough of the servants’ whispered gossip to understand that his plantation has been slowly going under in the eight years it’s been since the war, and her uncle has now been reduced to scraping the bottom of the barrel for his income. She isn’t sympathetic - it’s deserved.

Things, however, are getting a little boring.

She sighs, turning over in bed and staring at the stars through the large window in her room, the wind blowing the linen curtains in a hypnotizing manner. Three months of nothing, and she won’t even get a husband out of it.

No husband. She allows herself a moment to pretend like it was a possibility, something like longing trapping itself in her throat.

She’s just closing her eyes to sleep when the sound of a horse galloping towards the house makes them shoot open, a man shouting her uncle’s name as the horse’s hoofbeats slow to a stop.

“Thunder!” the man bellows. He begins pounding on the door, each knock seemingly louder than the last. “Philip Thunder, get your ass out here!”

Alaska slips out of bed, heart pounding, and kneels beside the window. She’s at a decent enough angle that she can see the man clearly, his horse standing a few feet behind him. It’s hard to see in the darkness, but it’s clear he isn’t a gentleman, with a dusty gallon hat on his head that shields his face and a dirty jacket to match. There’s a long rifle hooked onto his horse, and her eyes widen at the sight.

The door swings open, and her uncle emerges with a lantern, looking hunted. “Be quiet!” he snaps in a hushed whisper, and Alaska has to strain to hear him. “You’re going to wake the whole household.”

“They know,” the man says simply, ignoring her uncle. He has a thick accent, and it’s jarring next to her uncle’s harsh New York vowels. Her uncle’s arm sags at the news, lowering the lantern so that their faces are barely lit. Alaska hisses in frustration, narrowing her eyes to try and read their expressions.

“Needles?” her uncle says, voice even quieter. Alaska risks poking her head out the window a little bit in order to hear better, holding her breath in fear of being caught.

“No, the fuckin’ Pope,” the man sneers. “Who the fuck else?”

Her uncle’s response is drowned out by the locusts buzzing in the trees. There’s a long period of silence, and Alaska can hear her heart beating in her ears, adrenaline running through her veins in response to listening to a conversation she shouldn’t. What the hell was going on?

“So?” the man prompts, stepping closer to her uncle. “What do you suggest we do?”

There’s a pause as her uncle visibly takes a breath. “Come here tomorrow at supper,” he says, voice a little stronger now. “Bring Solomon. We can make a plan then.”

“Didn’t you hear me? Needles is onto us, which means–”

“I know!” Her uncle snaps, posture stiffening. “Trust me, I’m well aware. I can’t make a plan right now. Give me a day, and we’ll discuss the rest tomorrow. I promise we’ll get out of this.”

“If we don’t,” the man says, voice low, “Needles isn’t the one you need to watch out for.” And with that, he steps back, walking back to his horse. “Expect us at six,” he says as he swings up on his horse, and with that, he gallops away, leaving a trail of dust in his wake. Her uncle stands there for a long time, staring in the direction he went even after he’s no longer visible. All Alaska can hear is the locusts’ chirping.

Her uncle, finally, turns to go inside, and she ducks under the window sill as the lantern light swings over the side of the house. She listens as he opens the door, muttering something incomprehensible, and shuts it behind him. The stairs creak as he returns to his room, and she doesn’t let herself relax until she hears his door close quietly.

She sags against the wall, brushing the hair sticking to her face away and plucking at her nightgown, battling the humidity and her own sweat. She looks at the bed, but she doesn’t think she’s going to be able to sleep, not with the heat and certainly not after what just happened.

It was a gang. It couldn’t be anything else - it wasn’t any sort of legal business, judging by the other man’s appearance. Her uncle was dealing with bandits and criminals, probably to help him out of whatever debt he’s put himself into in order to keep this place afloat.

A fission of excitement runs through her even through the fear and apprehension, and she can’t help but think that at least something is happening. Even if it’s putting everyone in the house’s lives at risk.

You can’t trust a bandit. They’re lawless, and the law exists for a reason: to keep people sane. Who knows what these men will do to her uncle if this Needles ends up finding them?

Who knows what Needles is going to do to them if he ends up finding them?

The thrill is fading away now, giving way to real fear. This is real. Bandits are real, but they’re not like what Alaska dreamed them up to be as a child. They kill people, innocent or not, and they steal whatever they want. They live like animals and call it freedom.

They’re all these things, and they’re coming to dine with them at her uncle’s like they’re family friends.

Alaska is definitely not getting any sleep tonight.

🌼

Dinner is awkward.

It’s spent in silence, the dirty, roughed up men clearly unsure of how to behave at a proper dining table and her uncle silent with embarrassment over it. There are four of them, all with scruffy beards and pistols on their belts, with the clear leader sitting to her uncle’s right.

One of the men coughs, and Alaska jumps at the sudden noise.

“Jesus,” she mutters to herself, ignoring her uncle’s sharp look and instead setting down her fork. She looks at Philip, plastering as pleasant and unassuming a smile she can muster over her face. “May I be excused?”

The leader of the group, Cassidy, slumps in relief. “Thank God,” he says loudly, and she recognizes his voice as the man her uncle had spoken to last night. “We can get some business done.”

Her uncle gives him a disbelieving look, and Alaska tries to look like she doesn’t have a clue as to what he’s talking about. Cassidy raises his hands in silent apology, and her uncle sighs, rubbing his eyes. He looks stressed out of his mind.

“You can go, Alaska,” he says, having lost any sense of decorum with Cassidy’s language.

Alaska nods at him, and then she’s out of the dining room in a second.

She slips out the door with a quiet notice to one of the servants, intent on walking her anxieties out around the grounds and hoping that she’ll tire herself out to the point of becoming calm. With half a mind to ride a little before the sun sets, she decides to head towards the stables, well away from anything happening inside the house.

Expecting to be alone once she reaches the stables, Alaska nearly screams as she runs into a woman leaning against one of the stalls, petting Poundcake’s nose.

“Jesus!” Alaska yelps, and the woman snaps to attention, hand at her hip in the blink of an eye. She lets her hand hover there, eyes wary as she stares at Alaska.

“I’m so sorry,” Alaska says, raising her hands up in apology. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”

The woman frowns at her, seemingly confused. Her hand drifts away from her hip, and Alaska’s eyes follow it, briefly distracted by the tight pants she’s wearing. It’s scandalous, and Alaska is beginning to understand why.

“I really didn’t mean to interrupt,” Alaska says into the tense silence, forcing herself to tear her eyes away from the woman’s hips and to her face.

“Interrupt?” The woman asks, still frowning. She’s relaxing, however, and Alaska feels strangely gratified by it.

“Your stable work,” Alaska says. “You’re the stablehand, right?”

The woman’s eyebrows twitch up before her lips twist up into a smirk. The expression suits her. “Right. Well, I’m not bothered.” She gives Alaska a clear once over, her smirk only growing. “Not at all.”

Alaska feels a flush crawl up her neck, her dress suddenly feeling a little warm. “Great,” she says, awkward. “I came - I just needed to get out of the house.”

“Let me guess: a man?”

Alaska snorts, even as the reminder makes something unpleasant churn in her stomach. “More like several.” The woman just smiles, revealing a small gap between her teeth. It’s strangely endearing. Alaska quickly shoves the thought away, afraid of it leading to more dangerous ones, and instead takes the opportunity to examine the woman’s strange outfit.

She looks more like a cattle rustler than a stablehand, with her wide brimmed hat and dark overcoat, but Alaska supposes things are different out west. Her hair is down, reaching the middle of her shoulder blades and blowing attractively in the wind. It’s so dark that, when paired with her dark hat, her face appears almost ghostly.

She’s beautiful, with her high cheekbones and plump lips, but there’s something about her that puts Alaska on edge.

“What?” the woman says, tilting her head. “Is there something on my face?”

“You’re beautiful,” Alaska blurts out, and then her heart stops. “I mean no, wait, no, I mean–”

“What’s your name?” the woman cuts in, and Alaska grabs onto the question like a lifeline.

“Alaska,” she says in relief.

“Pleasure,” the woman says, smirking again. There’s a brief pause before she lets out a huff of laughter. “You really don’t know who I am, do you?”

Alaska laughs. “Knowing the stablehands isn’t exactly my priority,” she says, allowing her own smirk to come through. “But now it seems like it should have been.”

The woman smiles slowly, her expression softening. Alaska feels something flutter in her stomach at the thought that she may have caused the shift. “You sure know how to flatter a girl,” the woman says. There’s a moment in which she just looks at Alaska, eyes darting across her face. “Sharon Needles.”

Alaska’s heart stops, smirk falling off of her face in an instant. “Needles?” she repeats faintly, even though Sharon had been perfectly clear. “You’re Needles? I thought–”

“I was a man?” Sharon says archly, annoyance flickering across her face. “You’re not the first.”

“Your poster,” Alaska says slowly, feeling incredibly stupid. The stablehand? Really? “It was hanging at the train station.”

Sharon sighs, eyes rolling up to the sky. “Stupid,” she mutters, seemingly to herself, and then, louder: “I’ll never rob an artist again. Those bastards have no fucking money and an eye for detail.”

“I don’t know, that chin is pretty memorable,” Alaska says before she can think about it, and there’s a second of frozen shock before Sharon starts to laugh.

“I like you,” Sharon says approvingly. “You’ve got balls.”

Alaska really, really shouldn’t be flattered. “Thanks,” she drawls, and she takes a step back. Her sense of danger is heightening, despite Sharon’s calm and her surprising humor. With the stories Alaska had heard, she had pictured bandits to be no-nonsense men with hearts of steel, cold blooded killers and thieves that were too good to be caught. Sharon doesn’t seem to be fitting any of those descriptors.

She should really run, warn her uncle while she still has some time. But some sick part of her is intrigued, attracted to this woman, and she can’t bring herself to shout like she should.

“Why are you here?” she asks again, even though she already knows the answer.

“We have some business with Mr. Solomon ____” Sharon says, and it’s like a curtain’s been drawn over her face. The twinkle in her eyes has turned into something like a spark of anger. “He’s been plotting something, and I intend to nip it in the fucking bud.” She shifts a little, her coat moving to reveal a leather holster at her hip. It feels like the air gets twenty degrees colder.

Alaska feels like she can barely breathe. She takes a step back.

The ‘Solomon isn’t here’ gets caught in her throat, another part of the sentence catching her attention. “‘We’?”

A slow smirk spreads across Sharon’s face. “Oops,” she says. “I’ve always had a hard time keeping secrets.” And quick as a rattlesnake, she draws her pistol and fires it once into the air. Alaska flinches violently at the sound of it, breath coming in strange stutters as adrenaline rushes through her. A responding gunshot sounds somewhere in the distance, along with growing shouts.

Alaska runs.

She flies up the hill, Sharon’s laugh chasing her like some sort of nightmare, whoops and hollers echoing off of the valley walls from all directions. She’s halfway to the house when a horse suddenly shoots past her, and she trips over her skirt in shock, falling to her hands and knees with a painful jolt. She looks up to see Sharon riding it, heading somewhere to the left of the house.

It’s stupid to feel betrayed. She’d talked to Sharon for less than ten minutes, and Sharon hadn’t even tried to hide who she was. Hell, Alaska had given her the only lie she told.

It’s stupid, and Alaska shoves the feeling aside. There are more important things to be worrying about.

She scrambles to her feet and keeps running, ignoring the temptation to flee the other way.

She bursts into the house, turning and slamming the door shut behind her, locking it. She turns to see her uncle, Cassidy, and the other men all emerging from the office, guns drawn and looking hunted.

“Alaska?” her uncle says, frowning. “Did you see something out there?”

“No,” she lies, because she can’t tell him that she was too fucking entranced by Sharon Needles to do anything. “But I heard something.”

“We all fucking heard something,” one of the men snaps, referring to the sound of pounding hooves, and distant shouts surrounding the house.

“Jesus Christ,” Cassidy says, pointing his gun alternately between the windows and the door. He sounds accusatory, like he blames her uncle for what’s going down, and Alaska finds herself half agreeing.

She shouldn’t be here. They shouldn’t - her uncle shouldn’t have invited her here when he was at risk. It was - it was wrong. Anger boils up within her, and it feels better than fear, so she grabs onto it. “What were you guys even doing?” she cries.

Her uncle looks at her, wide eyed. He looks guilty, but Alaska is far past forgiveness, not when gunshots can be heard just outside the house. “I’m sorry, Alaska,” he says, brow furrowed. “I didn’t think it would get this out of hand.”

“You had wanted criminals over for dinner,” Alaska snaps. “How can you - how - ?” She’s tripping over her words, just like she always does when she’s upset, and it’s only making her angrier.

Her uncle grimaces, but before he can respond a sudden pounding on the door has everyone falling into a tense silence. The hoofbeats have stopped - it’s completely silent. They all point their guns at the door.

“Open up, motherfuckers!” a voice shouts.

Someone shoots the lock off, and the door slowly swings open. They all wait with baited breath. Cassidy steps forward, lining his gun up. Alaska takes several steps back, nearly going into the office, breathing so hard she feels like she’s going to be sick.

There are two beats of silence.

Her uncle frowns, gun lowering a little in his confusion. “Wh–”

Two deafening shots echo from the windows on either side of them, shattering the glass, and two of the five men drop dead. Alaska can’t help the scream she lets out, flinching wildly.

“Fuck!” Cassidy shouts, making an aborted attempt to go towards one of the bodies before remembering that he still needs to be on his guard. “Jesus shit!”

The door is kicked open suddenly, making Alaska jump. The woman that stands in the doorway is tall, with sharp features and an amused smirk. Alaska recognizes her from the other poster that had been beside Sharon’s, the unusual name catching her attention more than Sharon’s.

Detox.

“Where’s Solomon?” Detox says, pointing right back at Cassidy.

He doesn’t answer, and she takes another step forward. “I said–”

“He’s not here.” Sharon steps out from behind Detox, gun drawn and smug smirk still firmly in place. “He’s smarter than that.”

“Surprising,” Detox says, and Sharon snorts. She hasn’t bothered to raise her gun, and Alaska wants to scream at her uncle or the other man to do something.

“He wouldn’t be the annoyance that he is if he wasn’t.” Sharon says before pointing her gun at Alaska’s uncle almost lazily, like it had been an afterthought. It makes Alaska’s blood boil, both at Sharon’s arrogance and her uncle for feeding into it by being an idiot.

Sharon glances at the right window and jerks her head.

A shot rings out, and Cassidy’s last man drops nearly instantaneously with a cry of pain, and Alaska jumps again, unable to keep herself from squeaking, a little. It’s a harsh reminder of the steel trap that Sharon has them in, and Alaska hates that she needed her memory jogged.

Two women slide into the house through the windows, one hispanic and a little heavier, and the other white and stick thin, face covered in freckles. They both wear their hair in two braids, honey blonde and brown respectively, and they both look like they’re having the time of their lives.

“Alright,” Sharon says, using her gun to talk like an extension of her hand. Her blasé tone is disconcerting, and Alaska shrinks further into the office. “You’ve got two choices: tell us where Solomon is, or,” she holds up her gun and shrugs.

Both Cassidy and Alaska’s uncle remain silent, Cassidy staring Sharon in the face and her uncle twisting around to look at Alaska.

She wills him to turn back around, to stop drawing attention to her already mediocre hiding spot, but he starts to mouth something instead, nodding his head towards the office. After two times, she understands: burn it.

“What are you doing?” the woman with brown braids asks, voice harsher that Alaska would have guessed.

Sharon looks at her for the first time since she’s entered the house. Alaska feels frozen under her stare.

“Alaska!” her uncle snaps, and it works: she snaps out of it, adrenaline flooding her body and moving as quickly as she possibly can.

She steps back into the office and slams the door shut behind her, locking it with shaking hands. Terrifying shouts and bangs immediately start as soon as the lock slides into place, but they’re muffled, and Alaska knows she has limited time to do what her uncle needs before they find a way in.

She turns to the desk, eyes moving from place to place without direction before finally landing on the map lying across the desk, ink marks scattered all over it. She rushes to the desk to pick it up, and after a moment of examining it, she knows that what her uncle needs her to do is destroy it.

It’s a map detailing the location of a camp, presumably Solomon’s, and possible escape routes and alternate locations. If Sharon got her hands on this, the camp would be completely fucked. She would win whatever rivalry is going on between the two gangs with ease, and Solomon and her uncle would have no chance.

Alaska reaches for the lantern to burn the map in, but she hesitates. Would it be terrible if they got the map? It would end the rivalry, and it isn’t like her uncle isn’t already in as much danger as he could be in. He isn’t living in this camp, and Alaska couldn’t give a fuck about Solomon or Cassidy.

But does she want Sharon to win?

She stares at it, doing her best to memorize the map and the twisting ink paths. Keeping the map whole isn’t an option, but she thinks - she needs to have some leverage, here. If something should happen to her, who she wants to win regardless, she needs to have something that makes her useful.

She isn’t nearly as familiar with it as she’d like to be when a thud suddenly rattles the door to the office, making her jump nearly ten feet in the air. The door thuds again, the hinges rattling, and Alaska starts folding the map so that it can fit into the lantern, shoving it into the flame just as the door flies open and strong hands grab her from behind.

Alaska screams, kicking and trying to hit her assailant with her elbows.

“Jesus Christ,” someone hisses, and Alaska thinks she recognizes the voice as Detox’s. She flings her elbow back again, newly desperate, only to have it caught by one of Detox’s hands. Detox grabs her other arm as well, and Alaska’s arms are soon twisted around her back in such a way that she can’t move them no matter how hard she tries.

It’s utterly terrifying, and Alaska can’t help but let out a little sob as Detox forces her out of the office and into the parlor, where the brunette woman with the twin braids has Cassidy on his knees. Her uncle is nowhere to be seen.

“Where is–” she starts, voice growing into a shout, but Sharon cuts her off, her own tone surprisingly heated.

“Bastard got away,” she says, scowling. “I’m not sure how, considering how many of us there are, but he’s fucking gone.”

“Thank God,” Alaska says, relieved. She ignores the feeling of being abandoned. One of them had to get away, had to be able to get the law. It just happened to be him. “Thank fucking God.”

Sharon’s eyebrows shoot up. “That’s no way a lady should speak,” she says, and the blonde woman snickers. Alaska glares at her.

“I’m not exactly going to give you the respect of polite society,” she snarls. “Now let me go!” She jerks fruitlessly at Detox’s grip, and Sharon laughs, coming closer. Alaska wants to hurt her, wants to make her feel as scared and angry as she is right now.

“We can’t let you go,” Sharon says, fake pouting. “Sorry. But your uncle had you do something in that office, and with him gone, you’re our only shot at finding out just what it was.”

Alaska falls silent, unable to think of a comeback that won’t put her at risk in one way or another. She needs to know something to prove herself too valuable to kill. But because she knows something, she’s going to be taken away. She’s stuck between a rock and a hard place, and Sharon is both Charbydis and Scylla.

Alaska settles for glaring at Sharon, who only grins back. Alaska does not think about how the gap in her teeth still makes her stomach flutter.

Sharon turns away, smile fading in favor of a more serious look. She looks at the brunette woman. “Morgan, shoot Cassidy. We need to leave.”

“What?” Cassidy splutters, eyes wide. Alaska is surprised to see him reduced to such a mess. “I don’t–”

“Shut up,” Sharon sneers, walking over to and kicking him in the stomach. He curls in on himself, wheezing, and Alaska winces in sympathy. “We don’t need to hear your side of the story. I’ve already heard three different girls’, and frankly, I’m exhausted.”

Morgan suddenly pistol whips Cassidy across the face, and he drops like a brick, groaning. She spits on him.

“Make it quick, Morgan,” Sharon says sharply. “The law’s already crawling up my ass as it is, and Thunder’s gonna return with the entire fucking Union.”

“No problem,” Morgan says, and she shoots him twice.

They’re not kind shots - one in the knee and the other in his stomach. The scream he lets out raises the hair on Alaska’s arms, and she feels a terror like she’s never known before. She thinks briefly about jerking away and running, but she feels rooted to the spot, staring down at Cassidy’s writhing body. Not like she’d actually escape Detox, anyway.

Another shot makes her jump, and Cassidy falls limp. “I said make it quick,” Sharon says, tucking her gun back into her belt. Alaska hadn’t even seen her move.

“I missed,” Morgan shrugs, but she doesn’t sound apologetic about it.

“Sure,” Sharon says doubtfully, but there’s a strange affection in her tone that undermines any reprimand. Her gaze suddenly lands on Alaska, and she’s back to smirking. “Excuse her,” she says. “She hasn’t been out in a while.”

“Rude,” Morgan snorts. She tucks her two pistols into their holsters, spinning them as she does.

“We need to go,” Detox says. Alaska tries not to cringe away from the voice close to her ear. She wants to retain at least some dignity.

“You’re right,” Sharon says. “Sorry. Got distracted.” She winks at Alaska, and Alaska’s stomach squirms with hatred and an unwilling attraction. She blames her childhood fanaticism.

They exit the house quickly, swinging up onto their horses, Morgan and the other woman speeding away immediately. Detox and Alaska still remain on foot, Alaska’s arms beginning to go numb with how far they’re strained behind her.

“Detox,” Sharon calls from on top of an enormous black Friesian. “She can go with me.”

“What? Why?” Alaska asks harshly as Detox leads her over.

“A little bonding never hurt anyone,” Sharon answers, smirking. Detox swings Alaska up behind her with an alarming ease, and Alaska balances herself, nearly falling off immediately.

Sharon looks at the house and then at Detox, and as Alaska is debating the pros and cons of sliding off the horse and running, she says something that makes Alaska’s blood run cold.

“Burn it.”

“No,” Alaska breathes. But something in her can’t wait to see it in flames.

Sharon eggs her horse into a gallop just as the flames catch onto one of the windowsills, and Alaska stares at the house until she can’t anymore, the orange of the flames burned into the backs of her eyelids.

Loss and relief shouldn’t be felt so soon after one another.

#rpdr fanfiction #sharon needles #alaska thunderfuck #detox icunt #morgan mcmichaels #shalaska #lesbian au #cowboy au #wild flower #freyja #tw murder #tw guns #tw violence #tw kidnapping

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introvertguide · 5 years ago

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Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969); AFI #73

The next film for review is one of my very favorite Western style films, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969). This is an incredible film that is directed by George Roy Hill and stars the charismatic colossi Paul Newman, Robert Redford, and Katharine Ross. The film won four Academy Awards including Best Editing, Best Cinematography, Best Score, and Best Song. The AFI ranked the male duo #20 on the 100 Greatest Heroes list and the movie was ranked the 7th greatest western despite arguably not really being a Western but a semi-biography that is set in the Old West. As American as this film is, it actually did the best at the BAFTAs where it won 8 awards from 9 nominations and swept the major awards including Best Film, Best Direction, Best Actor (Robert Redford), and Best Actress (Katharine Ross). Before singing any more of the accolades for the movie, let me break down the plot. Of course that means...

SPOILER ALERT!!! THIS MOVIE IS GREAT AND DESERVES TO BE WATCHED AND NOT SPOILED!!! STOP READING AND WATCH THE FILM IF YOU HAVEN’T ALREADY!!! IT IS GREAT TO WATCH FIRST AND THEN COMPARE TO HISTORY AFTER SO GIVE IT A TRY!!!

The film is set In 1899 Wyoming, and begins with a quick sepia toned introduction to the characters. The major players are the quick talking Butch Cassidy (Paul Newman) and the quiet and short tempered Sundance Kid (Robert Redford). The color corrects and the two are riding together back to see their gang and it turns out that one of the other men wants to take over. Butch wins in a fight for the gang leader position by cheating along with the help of Sundance keeping the others at bay. Butch retains his job but he does like Harvey’s idea to rob the Union Pacific train. This robbery takes place with a comical interaction between Butch and an accountant/safeguard named Woodcock. The robbery goes well and the two celebrate at a whore house while watching the local sheriff try to enlist men for a posse.

This is the end of act 1 and it is punctuated by a musical number. This happens throughout the film. Butch rides a bike around to try to impress the lover of Sundance, Etta Place (Katharine Ross), after stealing her away in the morning before the Kid wakes up. It is quite unusual and stands out from the rest of the film as Butch is not the love interest of the woman and the bike does not show up again. The music number is “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head” by Burt Bacharach with an almost Benny Hill style circus outro. It really exemplifies the experimental nature of the film as the scene would likely have been cut today.

The train robbery went so well that the gang tries it again, but this time everything seems to be going wrong. Woodcock is coincidentally guarding the safe again and one of the passengers starts mouthing off. Butch is able to get into the safe car, but the safe is much thicker forcing him to use a bunch of dynamite to break it. He uses too much and blows up everything sending paper money blowing around in the breeze. To make matters worse, another train pulls up releasing a posse hired by the owner of Union Pacific. This posse kills two of the gang and chase Butch and Sundance into the mountains and the two can’t seem to lose them. They finally are able to jump off a cliff into a river and escape back to Etta. The two are worried that the posse is still coming so they take Etta and go to South America. Cue the end of act 2 so we have a fun musical travel montage.

This is a travel montage shown through sepia tone still photos of the three going to New York and seeing the town before catching a boat south. Again, the music is far out of place for the genre and only works because of the overall experimental feel of the film. It is a very short interlude in slide show format and carnival music, but it does the trick and brings the group to Bolivia.

On arrival, Sundance is not impressed at the conditions. They try to rob banks and are at first held back because of an inability to speak Spanish. Etta teaches them and the two men rob banks becoming known as Los Bandidos Yanquis (American Bandits). Here is another music interlude of all the successful robberies set to pleasant choir music that sounds like something out of an industrial instructional film, which tells the audience the mood is again about to change. After a while, Sundance becomes paranoid because he sees a man that looks like the leader of the posse that drove them out of America and the two decide to go straight and get jobs guarding the payroll instead of robbing it. Unfortunately, the are held up on their first job and Butch is forced to kill which he reveals he has never had to do before. Butch wants to have one more big score and Etta heads back north, sensing trouble with a return to crime, while Butch and Sundance complete a “jungle robbery” of the payroll.

The robbery is a success and the two take the money and the mule to carry it. This is a mistake because a local kid recognizes the brand on the mule and tells the police who also inform the Bolivian military. This is bad news for Butch and Sundance as they are pinned down in a small church by what seems to be a hundred Bolivian men. Butch makes a run for the ammo but both are shot in the attempt and it seems there is no way out. The two continue to banter about going to Australia after leaving Bolivia, but they both know they are done. They load up their guns the best they can and run out into the massive volley of fire and the frame freezes not revealing the final fate of the two. Roll credits.

This seems like a strange way to end a movie, but it mirrors the unknown fate of the real Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. The whole movie is pretty historically accurate as far as what is known about the lives of the three main characters, but the musical interludes and the quippy dialogue make the film feel much more fictional. The movie is also split into definitive chapters with music breaks so it really has good pacing. Fine visual story telling.

There is a strong connection between Paul Newman and Robert Redford, which is apparent throughout the film. Paul is the amiable people-person who likes to talk and be friends with everyone while Robert liked to keep to himself and was all business. It just worked well. Director George Roy Hill used this dynamic again when he had both men star together in The Sting, which was even more successful and garnered 7 Academy Awards. A great connection and an example of a cinematic “bromance” in which two lead male characters act almost like a married couple.

The film seems to be strongly inspired by the works of Sergio Leone like A Fist Full of Dollars; For A Few Dollars More; The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly; and Once Upon A Time in the West. It takes the western film and gives a more complicated plot, more stylized cinematography, and great soundtrack. The Leone films were shot in Italy and didn’t have all the restrictions that American films had in the 60s, so Hollywood looked to these films for content ideas when the Hayes code was finally replaced by the MPAA rating system in 1969. The major difference was American film makers had access to big name Hollywood actors and the actual American west. Also, Leone hired Ennio Morricone who used period piece instruments to give each character a theme while Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid was scored by a hipster and then shot in a way to try and incorporate the music.

In American film history, the year 1969 was very experimental with the Civil Rights movement and the “free love” hippies affecting the box office draw at the same time. The former group preferred a more realistic filming approach while the latter wanted a more psychedelic fantasy. Many of the films blended both and America ended up with The Wild Bunch, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Midnight Cowboy, and Easy Rider. It was a year of genre mixing and experimentation that makes for some fascinating film watching. Really embodies the turmoil of the country and the new age of Hollywood films.

So should this film be on the AFI 100? Of course. It was experimental, influential, fun, and fascinating. It was perhaps the first “bromance” in Hollywood and a well established part of Americana. It also showed that context is completely unnecessary for a song to work in a film. Would I recommend it? How could I not? It is one of the few films that I have seen more times than I can count and still have not had to check the time while watching it. It is fun from beginning to end (sometimes weird, sometimes funny, sometimes dramatic action) and gorgeous to look at. It is a little anachronistic and abrupt with the music interludes, but engaging and enjoyable throughout. Definitely a film on the list that is more than just a time capsule or a lesson in film making (although it is that as well).

#paul newman #robert redford #katherine ross #butch cassidy and the sundance kid #westerns #1969 #hollywood #introvert #introverts #bromance #best song #Oscar winner #afi films

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fortey · 4 years ago

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Nic Cage vs Zombies the Comic

If you want to appreciate how Nic Cage vs Zombies would work in comic book form, here’s the script for the first issue.

Nic Cage vs Zombies: Issue 1

The point here is to be the most intense thing anyone has ever seen or imagined seeing. This story exists for one purpose - to convince you the world can only be saved by Nic Cage.

PAGE 1

Panel 1 - long panel across the top 3rd of the page

Nighttime in Chinatown. The street is crowded despite the rain. Shops are crammed tight together and signs in different shapes of pink and red and yellow neon advertising restaurants stand stark against the black of the night. Cars and bicycles go up and down the street, as do pedestrians with umbrellas. Paper lanterns are strung from one side of the street to another in criss cross patterns

CAPTION: Chinatown.

Panel 2 - tall panel, the left half of what remains on the page

A figure stands at the mouth of an alley in a long coat and rumple cowboy hat. His back is to us and he is hallowed by the massobe, pink neon sign of the DRAGON COURT Chinese restaurant. The people on the street pay him no mind.

Panel 3: - identical to previous panel on the right on the page

The figure crosses the street towards another alley on the side of the Chinese restaurant

PAGE 2

Panel 1 of a three panel bar across the top

The figure sidesteps a scooter the splashes him from a puddle

Panel 2:

The figure makes his way down the alley. A single bulb at the end draws him in

Panel 3:

close on the hand knocking on a thick steel door under one of those sliding peep hole things.

Panel 4 of another 3 panels across the center of the page

The peep hole slides open. Eyes gaze out.

Panel 5:

The door is open and the cowboy hat-wearing figure is silhouetted as he enters.

Panel 6:

The door is closed. The rain pelts down

Panel 7 of another 3 panels on the bottom

Side view of the figure as he walks down a dim, concrete hall lined with pipes. He is still cast in silhouette so we only see his shadowy proflle

Panel 8

The figure is heading down a staircase.

Panel 9:

The figure from behind in a basement. The quarters are close. Water drips from apipe. There is a bulb on the ceiling. Our figure is in the foreground, a black shape.

SHAPE: Uh… hey.

PAGE 3

splash page, one single panel

Our figure is in the foreground but the focus is not on him. In the center of the hall before another door is a hulking beast of a man. It is the ALBINO. He is 7’4” tall, think The Mountain from Game of Thrones but pale white and smooth hairless. He wears leather pants and no shirt, but he does have on a leather apron. At his hip is a holstered meat cleaver. And on his massive bald head is a bike helmet with a GoPro affixed to it. His eyes are pale blue and his jaw is thick.

SHAPE: Nice apron.

PAGE 4

Panel 1 of a two panel spread on the top third of the page.

The Albino takes hold of the handle of a huge wooden door and pulls it open. From the cracks, golden light spills out.

ALBINO: HMMM.

Panel 2:

Our shape stands in the doorway, He is a black silhouette against golden light that spills out like the sun itself was in the room on the other side of the door.

Panel 3 spreads across the entire middle third of the page

The room beyond the door is like Shangri-La - it’s a casino but no ordinary casino. The room is enormous with massively high ceilings. There are wall sconce torches and dozens if not hundred of patrons at all manner of tables. Everyone is dressed formally, and suspended from cords Cirque du Soleil style are wait staff who descend from the ceiling. There are dozens of gaming tables and everything is gold and silver. There are statues lining walls and it’s basically the fanciest damn place you can imagine

Panel 4 is the bottom third of the page. Finally we see the shape’s face. It’s Nic Cage. We’re medium close on him as the door shuts behind him.

NIC CAGE: Nice.

PAGE 5

Panel 1 - this is the top half of the page, so only two panels total here.

Cage descends a small staircase, handing his coat and hat to someone in a tux. Servers on lines descend from a bar that is suspended above the entire room. They bob up and down like spiders here and there.

Panel 2:

Cage passes by tables of gamblers. People are pushing unusual items across tables, placing bets not with money but with things like jewels, a fossils, strange bundles of papers and curious, rare knick knacks. A 4 piece string band plays on a stage to the side

PAGE 6

Panel 1 of two panels across top of page

Cage, from behind, in foreground as he approach a set of double doors set into the wall. It is guarded by two identical women in matching suits and sunglasses on either side of the door. The only difference between them is that they have the opposite side of their heads shaved, so that the side facing out has long,shoulder-length straight black hair hanging down and the side facing in, towards each other, are bald. The women have dark skin and wear sunglasses.

The doors look to be carved from solid jade. They are ornate and carved with dragons and Chinese lions.

Panel 2

The women wordlessly pull open the doors for Cage. Inside is a single table with three people seated at it, and some other elegant furnishings. The people are ways from the door and not terrible detailed by they are TEDDY SOLSTICE, a young, dark-skinned man in his 20s who has a wooden box about the size of a loaf of bread on the table before him. MRS. LUMBERG, a very rich, very elegant woman in her 40s sits before a manilla envelope and LAO CHE-FUNG, a Chinese man in his late 70s who is very decrepit and somewhat sinister. Behind Che-Fung is a beefy man in a suit, his bodyguard, who stands next to a large, tarp-covered object. Though we can’t sea it, it is the man-sized cage that holds a zombie.

Panel 3 of a two panel spread in the center of the page

Cage shakes hands with Teddy Solstice over the table.

TEDDY: Welcome, Mr. Cage.

NIC CAGE: Teddy, please, it’s just Nic. How are you this evening?

TEDDY: Very well, Mr. Cage. And you?

Panel 4

Nic Cage clasps the white-gloved hand of Mrs. Lumberg.

NIC CAGE: I am so much better now that I see the lovely Mrs. Lumberg is here!

MRS. LUMBERG: Flattery gets you everywhere, my dear Nicolas. Do sit down.

Panel 5 of two panels across the bottom of the page

Nic Cage has taken his seat, and Teddy Solstice now sits also.

NIC CAGE: Sorry for being so late, parking is a nightmare. Good to see you as well Mr. Lao. Do we have stakes?

Panel 6

Nic Cage sets a small, glass jar with a cork stopper on the table. Inside are teeth. Human teeth.

NIC CAGE: Elvis Presley. Or his teeth, at least. Clone yourself the King of Rock and Roll or just make a necklace.

PAGE 7

Panel 1 of three panels on the top of the page

Centered on Teddy Solstice hold open the box before him. There is a fist-sized rock within, dotted with what looks like yellow glass or gems. They glow very softly in the grey stone.

TEDDY: The largest pallasite meteorite yet discovered on Earth with this degree of radiance.

Panel 2

Centered on Mrs. Lumberg as she pulls files from the manila envelope. They are property deeds.

MRS. LUMBERG: The deeds to the childhood homes of Ed Gein, Jeffrey Dahmer and Charles Manson.

Panel 3

Centered on Lao Che-Fung. He is simply sitting still, looking old and decrepit, lifting a hand to gesture to the bodyguard. Behind him, on his left is the bodyguard and the tarp-covered structure.

LAO CHE-FUNG: While your tokens are rare indeed, I would be remiss if I did not say I had expected something more...

Panel 4 One full panel encompassing the rest of the page. The body guard has pulled the tarp and we now see what appears to be a human-sized aquarium. Inside, restrained with shackles as ancient as Lao Che-Fung himself, is a zombie. It’s flesh is ragged and dusty old looking, like leaves on a plant that is on the cusp of death. It is insanely thin, bones are visible beneath its flesh, and it wears only one item - a simple jade necklace on a silver chain about its neck. One of its eyes is milk white but the other is all too sharp and alive, staring out at everyone.

ZOMBIE SFX: NNNNGGHAAAAAGGH!!!

The others are not visible in this panel, except for a partial view of the bodyguard to one side. When Lao -Che-Fung speaks, his words come from off panel.

LAO CHE-FUNG: … unusual.

PAGE 8

Left panel of two panels on top of the page.

Panel 1: Nic Cage has stood from his chair and looks shocked. Mrs Lumberg clutches at her chest in that offended, old lady way. Teddy Solstice looks terrified.

NIC CAGE: What the hell is that?!

Panel 2: Lao Che-Fung has still not moved at all, looks like he may as well be asleep. He is sitting in the foreground at the table, with the zombie visible behind him.

LAO CHE-FUNG: Do relax, my friends, there is no danger. In a game where money is no motivator, I had expected perhaps one of you could say you had brought to the table an item of value on par with my own. Please, behold the abomination of Emperor Li Hahn, cursed to live beyond death.

Panel 3 of a two panel spread in the center of the page

Close on Nic Cage’s face with an arched eyebrow.

NIC CAGE: I’m sorry, my blood sugar must be low. Did you just imply that this is a zombie?

Panel 4 on Lao Che-Fung, his expression still set and unmoving, like he just doesn’t care.

LAO CHE-FUNG: Indeed, Mr. Cage.

Panel 5 of a three panel spread across the bottom of the page. This one just focuses on the shocked face of Mrs. Lumberg.

Panel 6 is framed exactly the same, the shocked face of Teddy Solstice.

Panel 7 is framed the same on Nic Cage, only with a wry smile now.

NIC CAGE: Huh. Well, that’s funky. Can’t say that I’ve ever seen one of those before.

PAGE 9

Two panels across top of page. The first panel focuses on Lao Che-Fung who, for the first time, has changed his expression to the barest hint of a smile.

LAO CHE-FUNG: Emperor Li Hahn is the only of his kind in the world.

Panel 2: Nc Cage looks considering, sitting back in his seat.

NIC CAGE: Well, and don’t get me wrong, this is very far out stuff, but I’m not sure why I want a zombie. I mean, it’s rare, sure, but what can it do?

Panel 3 of two middle panels focuses on Teddy Solstice

TEDDY: Carry luggage?

Panel 4 is Mrs. Lumberg, holding a gloved hand to her nose.

MRS. LUMBERG: It smells atrocious.

Panel 5 of two bottom panels goes back to Nic Cage

NIC CAGE: It does! It’s like beef jerky in a toilet on a hot day. Or like -

SFX OF DOOR CRASHING IN: THUNK!

Panel 6: The door has been kicked in and a DETECTIVE stands front and center with uniform cops streaming in behind him, guns drawn. The detective is holding a warrant.

DETECTIVE: Mr. Lao Che-Fung, this is a warrant for your arrest!

PAGE 10:

Long panel down the left side of the page. One of the uniform officers is at the zombie aquarium looking freaked out. The poker players are still seated and caught off guard. The detective stands at the edge of the table.

DETECTIVE: We’ve got you on charges of operating an illegal gambling facility, trafficking in antiquities, rare and endangered animals and -

COP: (Interrupting detective): Detective Mills, what the hell is this?

Panel 2 is the top half of what remains of the page. The uniform officer is at the aquarium and the zombie is focused on him as the officer reaches for the latch on the door.

COP: My God, what are you doing to this man?

LAO CHE-FUNG: Detective, please, you must not do this!

Panel 3 is focused on Detective Mills as the uniform officer has the latches open. Mills has his gun trained on Lao Che-Fung

DETECTIVE: You better think twice about telling me what I must do, Lao. I’ve had enough of your crap over the last 6 years, and this is the final nail in your coffin.

LAO CHE-FUNG: Please, Detective! I beg you, you have no idea -

PAGE 11 SPLASH PAGE!

One giant panel of madness. The door has burst open, the zombie has leapt on the uniform officer. The others in the room are reeling back, the poker table is in the process of being knocked as the officer falls on it, the zombie atop of him, its yellow teeth crunching into the officer's neck, blood exploding outward like a fountain. Nic Cage and Lao Che-Fung are to the right side of the page, Teddy, Mrs. Lumberg and the Detective to the right with the zombie and the dying officer front and center.

The zombie’s attack is bestial, like a cat pouncing on a mouse. Its body is lithe and thin, but ropey with muscles.

COP SCREAMING SFX: GAAAGGGHHH!!

ZOMBIE SFX : GRRRRK!

PAGE 12

Large panel across the top of the page. The zombie is now feasting on the bodyguard as the Detective and two other officers draw firearms. Mrs Lumberg is on her butt against the wall, Teddy Solstice has stumbled back and steadied himself on a small cabinet. Lao Che-Fung is scuttling back to a folding partition where we can see the barest hint of a door hidden. Nic Cage has leapt back. A massive fountain of blood is spurting up from the bodyguard.

MRS LUMBERG: AAAAHH!!!!

Panel 2 across the center of the page

The detective and two uniform officers open fire. The zombie lifts its head in a snarl as holes riddle its body.

GUNSHOT SFX: BLAM! BLAM! BLAM!

DETECTIVE: Jesus!

Panel 3 of two panels on the bottom of the page

Teddy Solstice pushes past the cops for the door as Lao Che-Fung escapes out a back door. The zombie is on its feet Here the detective aims point blank at the zombie’s chest and fires

GUNSHOT SFX: BLAM!

Panel 4 is the zombie. Its snarl turns to a very slight but noticeable smile. Its chin and chest is soaked in blood.

DETECTIVE: Mother of God...

PAGE 13

Another large panel on the top of the page. Behind the zombie, the officer is back on his feet. The red blood from his neck has soaked his uniform, but the wound is now spiderwebbed in angry, black veins that run up his face. His expression is vacant.

DETECTIVE: Officer Riley?

Panel 2 is one half of two panels in the center of the page. Riley is now fury as he lunges at Detective Mills, who is caught off guard.

Panel 3 is the second half of the middle scene. Riley is on top of Detective Mills and has sunk his teeth into the detective’s face, biting his cheek, lip and nose.

DETECTIVE: JESUAAAAAAGHHHHH!!

Panel 4 is the full panel across the bottom. Emperor Li Hahn is on one of the uniform officer’s and the bodyguard is grasping Mrs. Lumberg’s leg. Only one uniform officer remains standing along with Nic Cage.

MRS LUMBERG: Help me, please!

PAGE 14

This is 5 small panels across the top of the page, like a pure action sequence, all close ups.

Panel 1 shows Mrs. Lumberg as the bodyguard bites into her ankle.

Panel 2 shows the officer tearing a strip from Detective Mill’s face

Panel 3 shows Emperor Li Hahn biting into the next uniform officer

Panel 4 shows Detective Mills with black veins spreading all around his ruined face wounds

Panel 5 is just zombie teeth splattering blood and gore

Panel 6 is in one of two panels in the center of the page. Nic Cage has edged to the door where the final officer fights with Li Hahn. The officer is reaching out to Cage.

OFFICER: Hel...p!

Panel 7 is Li Hahn literally pulling the throat out of the officer.

Panel 8 is the first of three frames across the bottom. Nic Cage runs from the room, so we see him head on with the door behind him. He has a spray of blood across his face and he’s in the casino proper now. He’s in a dead run.

NIC CAGE: EVERYONE REALLY NEEDS TO NOT BE HERE!

Panel 9 is the casino in chaos. Detective Mills and Riley follow Cage out of the room, both dripping blood and gross and looking horrifying.

Panel 10 is other officers rushing to the scene, patrons running wild

PAGE 15

Panel 1 of two panels across the top of the page. The second officer, who asked Cage for help, lunges at one of those Cirque du Soleil waiters next to Cage

Panel 2 is Cage smashing the jar of Elvis teeth upside the zombie’s head as he pulls the waiter away with the other hand. Shards of glass and teeth fly to one side along with dark blood. The zombie’s face is busted pretty badly.

Panel 3 of two panels that make up the rest of the page, so they’re each two thirds of the page long, give or take. I want the height here for what’s about to happen. Cage and the waiter reverse bungee up to the catwalk ceiling bar.

Panel 4 is Cage and the Waiter now suspended from the ceiling. The bar up here is glass with a steel grate floor, and a grate catwalk that leads away to a door. All the wait staff are on these reverse bungee cords which are attached to mobile rigs that let them scoot around the room. Minor detail, but they’re up there on the ceiling.

WAITER: What the hell is going on?!?

NIC CAGE: Zombies, man.

WAITER: Who the hell brought zombies to a casino?!?

NIC CAGE: Old Chinese man.

WAITER: Are we safe up here?

PAGE 16

Panel 1 of two panels on the top of the page. Nic Cage and the waiter are interrupted by a new waiter rolling up to the bar, clutching at the edge of it with one of the two zombified twin door guards on his back, biting his skull.

NIC CAGE: Oh man…

Panel 2 is the waiter pointing to a door set into a wall at the end of the catwalk

WAITER: That leads into the kitchen, we can get out there.

Panel 3 of two panels across the center of the page is Cage running down the catwalk with the waiter behind him.

Panel 4 is another wait springing up to the catwalk. He is zombified, and latches onto the waiter’s leg.

WAITER: AAAAGHH!!

Panel 5 of two panels across the bottom is Cage turning. A second zombie server, a woman in a tuxedo shirt soaked in blood, has sprung up on the waiter’s other side.

Panel 6 is Cage grabbing the waiter’s hand while the new server is biting down on the waiter’s shoulder. The first is still eating the leg.

PAGE 17

Panel 1 is a long one across the top of the page. The waiter’s arm comes off in Cage’s hands thanks to the zombie eating his shoulder. The waiter is falling off the catwalk under the weight of the two zombies eating him.

Panel 2 of three panels in the center of the page. Cage is just holding the arm still as the barest hint of the waiter is visible, falling from the catwalk.

Panel 3: Cage looks at the hand and arm he’s holding

Panel 4: Cage tosses the arm

Panel 5 is another long panel, showing a long shot of the whole scene. There is chaos on the floor as people scramble and fight, while above on the catwalk, Cage runs for the door. This is all seen at a bit of a distance to fit it all in, so it’s more the silhouette of Cage running, while small figures fight below.

PAGE 18

Panel 1 of three panels across the top of the page. Inside the kitchen, with Nic Cage bursting through the door from the catwalk beyond. Staff inside are busy prepping food, dressed in typical kitchen whites.

Panel 2: Cage rushes into the kitchen past stoves and cooks.

NIC CAGE: OUT! EVERYONE REALLY NEEDS TO GET OUT NOW!

Panel 3: From Cage’s perspective now, as a handful of cooks and a dishwasher lean back to look down the way at Cage with silent, confused expressions.

Panel 4 of two center panels. A zombie waiter lurches through the kitchen door.

ZOMBIE: UNNNNGHH!!

Panel 5: The zombie grabs a cook and bites his arm. The cook screams.

COOK: AAAAAGGGH! AAAAGHHH!!!

Panel 6 of three panels across the bottom. Cage grabs a meat cleave off of a nearby cutting board.

Panel 7: Cage’s arm cocks for throwing, the blade of the cleaver glints

Panel 8: Cage’s arm is fully extended, the Cleaver is in flight

Page 19

Panel 1 of two panels across the top of the page: The Cleaver spins like a ninja star, the background is just a blur

Panel 2: The cleaver hits dead center, embedded right between the zombie’s eyes and splitting its head like a super gross melon.

Panel 3 of two center panels: The kitchen staff are all in the exact same position as when they first leaned back to look at Cage on the last page, still silent but now they all look totally shocked. When Cage speaks, it comes from the bottom of the panel as he is not visible and this is his view of the kitchen staff.

NIC CAGE: RUN!

Panel 4: The kitchen staff bolt for the door and Cage runs with them.

Panel 5 is one large panel at the bottom.

Nighttime in Chinatown. The street is busy despite rainfall - the neon lights and paper lanterns give it life and there are pedestrians with umbrellas and cars filling the streets, minding their own business. The restaurant staff are bolting in all directions Cage is running into the street. To his side, dangerous close, is a Chinese food delivery guy on a scooter. They’re about to collide but haven’t done so just yet.

Page 20

Panel one is the full panel across the top of the page. Cage and the delivery boy collide. The delivery boy is JEFFREY, a kid of about 20. He’s wearing a helmet and a red jacket with the dragon logo of the restaurant on the back. His scooter is one of those e-bike types, with a little basket on the back for holding orders. He’s a skinny kid, with brown hair and a bit of a dork appeal to him.

NIC CAGE: OOF!

Panel 2 of two center panels: Nic Cage is splayed out on the wet street. The scooter is overturned, Jeffrey is down next to it on his side

JEFFREY: Gah…

NIC CAGE: Not..good…

Panel 3 is Nic Cage getting to his feet, looking over at Jeffery

NIC CAGE: Hey, kid, are you alright I’m really -

JEFFREY: Nic Cage!

Panel 4 of two on the bottom is Cage offering his hand to help Jeffrey up.

NIC CAGE: Yes, actually. But also sorry. But listen, we have to -

JEFFREY: Oh my God, I love you! Like not in an insane way. Face/Off is such bad ass movie! Can I shake your hand.

Panel 5 is Jeffrey taking Cage’s hand as Cage pulls him to his feet.

NIC CAGE: You can! You are! But hey, we really have to go.

JEFFREY: We do? Why? Where?

PAGE 21

This page will be 6 even panels, three on top and three on the bottom

Panel 1: Cage is holding the handlebars of Jeffrey’s scooter

NIC CAGE: Is this yours? Give me a ride to my hotel and I’ll tell you all about it.

Panel 2: Jeffrey looks unsure. This is a side view with him in the foreground and the restaurant behind him, so you can see his jacket and the restaurant have the same logo.

JEFFREY: I don’t know, Mr. Cage. I have to get back to work soon, this is my delivery scooter.

Panel 3: Someone in a tux, one of the gamblers, runs screaming from the restaurant as Cage takes his position on the scooter

SCREAM SFX: AAAAAAAGHHHHHH!!!!!!

NIC CAGE: I think you’ve probably got the rest of the night off...uh… what’s your name?

Panel 4: Jeffrey gets on behind Cage, another person runs from the restaurant.

SCREAM SFX (maybe a little bit smaller and seeming to come from deeper in the restaurant): NOOOOOOO!!!!

JEFFREY: Jeffrey. Hey, what’s going on?

Panel 5: Cage is tearing off down the street, as fast as one can tear off on a double-occupied e-bike scooter. Behind them, the sound of sirens approaches, and more screams

SIREN SFX: WEEEE-OOOO WEEEE-OOOO WEEEE-OOOO

SCREAM SFX: AAHHH! AHHH! HELLLLLLPPPP MEEEE!!

NIC CAGE: Zombies, Jeffrey. Zombies are going on.

Panel 6: rear view of the scooter vanishing into the distance, and in the foreground, a pair of zombies, one the kitchen staff guy who was bit and one the cirque du soleil waiter who helped Cage, are shambling into the street.

PAGE 22

One panel of two across the top of the page here. A long shot of a fancy hotel with a curved laneway leading to the front door. Cage is driving up with Jeffrey on the back of the Scooter.

Panel 2: Cage tosses the keys to a valet as he heads to the big glass doors of the hotel. Jeffrey is following but looks very confused and lost.

Panel 3 is one wide center panel of Cage entering his hotel room, key card in hand, with Jeffrey following behind. It’s a nice looking hotel room, but nothing out of the ordinary. It’s what you might expect a movie star to stay in. The far wall is a giant picture window with the curtains drawn.

Panel 4 of three across the bottom of the page. Jeffrey is standing while Cage is holding a phone to his ear.

Panel 5: Close on Cage as he talks on the phone.

NIC CAGE: Marty, it’s Nic. Listen, I need a flight home. Things got weird here.

Panel 6 is a wider shot. Cage has a remote control in his other hand and has turned the TV on. There is a shot of a flaming zombie and the chyron reads “CHINATOWN PANIC”

NIC CAGE: Marty, I need you to listen carefully. I saw a zombie tonight. It ate about a dozen people and now everyone in Chinatown is dead I think. I would like to go home.

PAGE 23

Panel 1 is a large panel across the top of the page. Jeffrey is looking shocked, checking out the mayhem on the TV. Cage is pacing the room talking on the phone.

NIC CAGE: Look at your TV, Marty. It’s the walking dead. I killed one with a meat cleaver and I bungeed to a ceiling bar and I just came here to relax before the opening. This is not relaxing.

Panel 2 is one of three long panels that make up the remainder of the page. Nic Cage is chewing his nails while Jeffrey is glued to the TV which depicts the tiny image of a zombie biting someone.

JEFFREY: Uh, Mr. Cage.

NIC CAGE: Jeffrey, please, I’m on the phone.

Panel 3: Jeffrey is plastered to the TV. Chinatown is on fire.

JEFFREY: Mr. Cage, look at this! I live on 14th Street, that’s like 10 blocks from here. My girlfriend is home with her brother! I have to get to them!

Panel 4 is Nic Cage holding up a finger to shush Jeffrey.

NIC CAGE: Jeffrey -- wait, what? Marty, how the hell did they shut the airport down already?

PAGE 24

Two panels one on top of the other to end this issue Panel 1 features Jeffrey turning away from the TV and instead taking hold of the curtains. Nic Cage is still on the phone.

NIC CAGE: If I die here, Marty, you’re fired.

JEFFREY: Mr. Cage…

Panel 2 on the bottom of the page. Jeffrey has thrown open the curtains and he and Nic Cage are in the foreground, from behind, looking out. The view out the window is the bulk of the panel. Normally this would be an amazing view looking down from a decent height at the city at night. Instead, it shows a scene that could be mistaken for the end of the world. Fires burn in numerous places, including one massive fire in the distance that we can assume s Chinatown. There are helicopters in the sky, and small fires all over the place. In the near distance there’s even a flaming zombie walking down a street.

NIC CAGE: Marty, I gotta go.

#comics #horror

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