#Great White Golden Star

[the-monkey-ruler]

Prequel of the Monkey King (2009) 齐天大圣前传

Director: Liang Hansen Screenwriter: Liang Hansen / Li Weilong Starring: He Jiong / Zhang Yishan / Wang Hantao / Li Yang / Lu Nuo / Xie Na Genre: Drama / Comedy / Fantasy / Adventure Country/Region of Production: Mainland China Language: Mandarin Chinese Date: 2009-09-29 Also known as: Monkey King - Prequel / Prequel of the Monkey King Type: Retelling

Summary:

Sun Wukong (voiced by He Jiong) has no father or mother. He is a monkey that jumped out of the stone. With his extraordinary courage and wisdom, Sun Wukong quickly found a place for himself among the monkeys and became the Monkey King leading the monkeys in one fell swoop. However, after witnessing the death of an old monkey, Sun Wukong began to doubt his own existence and significance, and he decided to embark on a journey to find a way to make himself immortal.

Sun Wukong met Patriarch Bodhi and became his disciple. After going through many difficulties and dangers, he finally achieved enlightenment. After that, he came to the East China Sea Dragon Palace and turned the Dinghai Divine Needle into his handy weapon, the Golden Cudgel, and thus mastered powerful power. An accident caused Sun Wukong to break into the underworld by mistake, get the book of life and death from the Lord of Hell, and thus gain eternal life

Source: https://chinesemov.com/2009/Prequel-of-the-Monkey-King

Link: https://www.bilibili.com/s/video/BV1wt411L74u

[forensicheart]

You’re Drunk

Lando Norris x Reader

Summary: Lando gets a call to pick up his not so sober girlfriend

A/N: Not particularly feelings this one but hope you guys enjoy!

Laughing to himself Lando sits on the couch scrolling through his Instagram stories coming across his girlfriends, where she looks to be having a great time with her friends. He replays the video that's been shared and smiles brightly at her drunken giggles as her and her friends stumble down the street. Lando can't help but go to rewatch the video for a third time but before he can an unknown number flashes on his screen. Confusion fills his mind as the phone rings but Lando decides to answer.

"Hello?"

"Lando, hey, it's Y/f/n" This made Lando more confused as he wasn't sure why one of his girlfriend's friends would be calling him. Until he heard your voice in the background. He could hear your small cries as you complained to your friends about being hungry but refused everything option of food they offered you.

"Need me to come get her?" Lando predicted.

"Pleaseeeee, we can't deal with her any longer. She just got us kicked out of the club" Y/f/n pleaded with your boyfriend causing Lando to let out a laugh being requesting your location and hanging up.

-

Pulling up outside the club you'd been kicked out of 30 minutes prior Lando swore you looked even more drunk then you had sounded on call 20 minutes ago. As soon as he stepped out the car you were running towards him with a speed he'd never seen from you. But unfortunately your legs couldn't keep up with your wanted speed and steps before you would reach Lando he watched you fall flat on your face. Holding in a laugh Lando quickly moved to your aid and looked at you with sympathy as you held onto him, tears welling in your wide eyes. Turning to look at your friends Lando simply nodded as a goodbye and they all seemed to let out a sigh of relief as they knew you were no longer their responsibility.

Now Lando had delt with you on a few occasions when you'd gotten a bit too drunk to have any independence but this time you seemed a bit more reliant than usual. After spending close to 10 minutes to even get you into the car and buckle your seatbelt without you unclipping it seconds later and laughing like it was the funniest joke ever, Lando was finally able to hop into the drivers side and begin the drive to your shared house.

The drive back started peacefully, no sound but the quiet hum of the radio as you had seemed to drifted into her own world staring out the window. Well that was until-

"Aeroplan!" You shouted giving Lando a scare causing him to almost slam on the breaks.

"What was that baby?" He asked softly glancing over to see both your hands planted on the glass as you started into the night sky with a child like wonder.

"There's an aeroplan" You spoke matter-of-factly even though as Lando looked into the sky through the car windows he saw nothing but stars littering the darkness.

"I don't see anything baby, maybe it was a star" Lando suggested cautiously but the suggestion still caused you to scoff loudly.

"You must be blind, because- maccas! I want maccas Landoooo" Your interest changed as you saw the golden 'm' in the distance.

-

You'd finally arrived home now after a detour to not only maccas but the supermarket as well to gather some baking ingredients as you were determined to make some cupcakes in your drunken state.

"Baby!" Lando panicked as he saw flour all over the floor. He'd left for one minute to use the bathroom, the kitchen far more spotless than it was now.

"Oopsie daisy" You giggled and when you spun to face Lando he couldn't help but burst into a fit of laughter. Your face coated in the white power, barely a spot of skin uncovered. Lando stepped towards you and took your face in his hands uncaring of the flour now coating his hands.

"Y/n, what have you done?" He asks rhetorically and receives a shrug in response from the girl in question but a sneaky grin never left her face.

"I want to sleep" You decided stepping back from Lando's touch and trying to make your way to the bedroom only to be stopped by Lando's hand grabbing yours.

"No, no, no. Not like that you aren't. You'll get flour all over the bed!" You groaned at Lando's words and wrapped your arms around his waist and nuzzling your face into his neck.

"I don't careee" Your words were both mumbled and slurred and Lando wrapped his arms around you humming.

"I know drunk Y/n doesn't mind but trust me I don't want to be dealing with her when she's sober and see's the mess from tonight's antics, ok baby?" You begrudgingly agreed seeming slightly more sober than you had previously.

"Good, come on let's go shower baby" Lando unwrapped you from the hug and led you to the bathroom by hand.

"Sexy time!"

Ok. Maybe you weren't that sober yet.

[demifiendrsa]

EGOT winning american film, television, and broadway actor James Earl Jones has passed away on September 9, 2024 at the age of 93.

Jones made his film debut in Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove. He received a Golden Globe Award nomination for Claudine. Jones gained international fame for his voice role as Darth Vader in the Star Wars franchise, beginning with the original 1977 film. Jones' other notable roles include in Conan the Barbarian, Matewan, Coming to America, Field of Dreams, The Hunt for Red October, The Sandlot, and the voice of Mufasa in The Lion King. Jones reprised his roles in Star Wars media, The Lion King (2019) remake, and Coming 2 America.

Jones' television work includes playing Woodrow Paris in the series Paris between 1979 and 1980. He voiced various characters on the animated series The Simpsons in three separate seasons. He then was cast as Gabriel Bird, the lead role in the series Gabriel's Fire which aired from 1990 to 1991. For that role, he won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series and was nominated for his fourth Golden Globe Award, this time for Best Actor in a Television Series Drama. He played Bird again in the series Pros and Cons, which ran from 1991 to 1992; that earned him his fifth and final Golden Globe Award for Best Actor in a Television Series Drama. He then had small appearances in the series Law & Order, Picket Fences , Mad About You, Touched by an Angel, Frasier. His role in Picket Fences earned him another Primetime Emmy Award nomination, one for Outstanding Guest Actor in a Drama Series. His later television work includes small roles in Everwood, Two and a Half Men, House, and The Big Bang Theory.

Jones' theater work includes numerous Broadway plays, including Sunrise at Campobello (1958–1959), Danton's Death (1965), The Iceman Cometh (1973–1974), Of Mice and Men (1974–1975), Othello (1982), On Golden Pond (2005), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (2008) and You Can't Take It with You (2014–2015). He was also in various off Broadway productions and Shakespeare stage adaptations such as The Merchant of Venice (1962), The Winter's Tale (1963), Othello (1964–1965), Coriolanus (1965), Hamlet (1972), and King Lear (1973). His roles in The Great White Hope (1969) and Fences (1987) earned him two Tony Awards, both for Best Leading Actor in a Play.

[aphroditelovesu]

Winter Solstice | Yan!HOTD

❝ 🐉 — lady l: Merry Christmas, my dear readers! I wish you a great day and a prosperous New Year! I hope you enjoy this Christmas special with our yandere family from HOTD! Good reading, forgive me for any mistakes and once again, have a great holiday to you ❤️🎄.

❝warnings: yandere themes, mention of death and obsessive and possessive behavior.

❝🐉word count: 1,941.

A long, long time ago, when the Earth was young and the days were short, people looked up to the sky with wonder and awe. They watched the Sun rise and fall over the horizon, its heat bringing life to the earth and its dark nights bringing a deep sleep to the world.

In the ancient realm of the seasons, each cycle marked the eternal dance between light and dark. As winter approached, a whisper spread through nature. Leaves fell from the trees, animals sought shelter and the nights extended, enveloping the world in a blanket of darkness and cold.

It was the time of the Winter Solstice, a magical moment when the Earth seemed suspended between extremes. People gathered around campfires, telling stories of times gone by, sharing warmth and hope amid the impending darkness.

On the eve of the longest night of the year, eyes turned to the sky, waiting for the miracle. Slowly, the Sun began its journey towards the horizon, fighting the darkness with its golden light. The stars twinkled above, bearing witness to the celestial spectacle.

And then, in the most sublime moment, the Sun began to rise, rising majestically into the sky. The colors of dawn painted the landscape, and people celebrated the rebirth of the Sun, knowing that light and warmth would return to the world. It was a symbol of renewal, hope and the continuous cycle of life.

On the Winter Solstice, people came together to celebrate the courage of the light that faces the darkness, remembering that even in the darkest moments, there is always the promise of rebirth and the light that returns to warm the hearts and illuminate the souls ways.

It had always been your favorite time of year, you loved how the snow fell from the sky and painted everything white, the food, the exchange of gifts and most importantly, it was when your whole family was together. You appreciated more than anything the few moments of peace that your family spent during that date, all happy and together. Like a big, loving family.

Having them all together was what you loved most as you grew up. All the disputes, the fights seemed to disappear during this time of year. Your heart and mind were at peace.

The green of the forest and the fiery red of love and passion. Its fabric was as soft as a spring breeze, a harmonious blend of silk and cotton that moved like leaves dancing in the wind. The predominant green was reminiscent of treetops, its hue varying from a lush emerald green to softer nuances, like newborn buds. The waist was accentuated by a deep red belt, as if it were the blush of the petals of a passionate rose. The intense tone stood out, creating a magnificent contrast with the lush greenery, and a decorative bow added a touch of elegance.

Something beautiful and elegant, with both of your family colors. Of the Targaryens and the Hightowers. There was some small, discreet blue embroidery that symbolized the Velaryon, subtle but standing out in its own way.

You turned to your maid who was looking at you with affection, you smiled at her, ''What do you think, Diane?''

She smiled widely, ''You looked incredible, my princess/prince. A suitable choice for a dinner with your family.'' There was a hint of worry in her tone, but you just held her hands and squeezed them gently.

''Don't worry, Diane. Everything will be fine.''

She nodded, ''Yes... Do you want me to accompany you to where the banquet will be held?''

You politely denied, ''No, but thank you.''

A hint of disappointment flashed in her brown eyes, but she just smiled and after a simple bow, she left the room. You took a deep breath and looked at the ring that adorned your finger, a gift from your grandfather, Viserys. He was sick and you swore to yourself that you would do everything to make this dinner enjoyable for him. He deserved it.

Just as you expected, everything was impeccable and your family was already waiting for you. A majestic dining room, adorned with golden chandeliers that hung from the vaulted ceiling, casting soft light on long solid wood tables.

The walls were covered with richly embroidered tapestries, depicting scenes from Targaryen history and grand festivities. The polished stone floor gleamed in the light of the torches that adorned the walls, reflecting the grandeur of the space.

In the center of the room, a long table stretched out, covered in an immaculate linen tablecloth and decorated with wildflower arrangements and heraldry of noble families. Silver candelabras exuded a soft glow, while golden goblets glittered in the dancing light of the flames.

Music filled the atmosphere as skilled musicians played lutes, flutes and harps, entertaining guests with happy melodies and lively dances.

''(Y/N)!'' Your mother's excited voice called out to you and you smiled at Rhaenyra, who quickly hugged you, placing her head against the crook of your neck, ''You look great, sweetheart.''

''Thanks, mom. You look great too.'' And indeed, she did. Rhaenyra wore a dark red dress decorated with gold that fit her perfectly. She pulled back a little and smiled at you.

''(Y/N)! We're here.'' On one side of the table, your younger brothers sat. You looked at Jacaerys, Lucerys, and little Joffrey, who were smiling at you. You kissed Rhaenyra's cheek and went to sit next to your brothers. Or you tried, for that matter.

For you were quickly pulled to the side as Aegon grabbed you and pulled you closer to him, Aemond, and Helaena. You smiled at your aunt and uncles and greeted them.

''Sit with us.'' Aegon asked and pointed to an empty chair next to Helaena who was smiling sweetly at you. You looked nervously at your brothers, who were staring at Aegon with disdain.

Aemond frowned and placed a hand over your shoulder, ''Come, stay with us.'' His tone said there was no room for argument.

Luckily for you, the doors opened and revealed Viserys along with Alicent, both smiling when they saw you. You apologized to your aunt and uncles and quickly walked over to your grandparents, helping Viserys sit down.

''Ah, (Y/N)... You look great!'' Viserys praised you, as soon as he sat down. You smiled at him and kissed his cheek in thanks.

Alicent pulled you into a tight hug, ''My husband is right, you look great. This shade of green suits you very well.'' She murmured and walked away hesitantly, adjusting your clothes. You kissed your face.

''Thanks. You look amazing too.'' She smiled in response and held your hands, squeezing them gently.

After a few minutes of talking to your grandparents, you walked over to your father and uncle, who were sitting next to each other. Laenor smiled widely and pulled you into a tight hug, not wanting to let go. He only let go when Daemon cleared his throat, irritated.

Laenor rolled his eyes and let go of you, staring at Daemon with an iron gaze. Daemon returned the same look and you acted quickly before they fought.

''Happy Solstice to you both.'' You said, twiddling your fingers nervously. Daemon smiled and patted you on the shoulder twice, pulling you into a hug. You hugged him back.

''Happy Solstice, my child.'' Laenor said after you and Daemon parted ways.

''Happy Solstice, (Y/N).'' Daemon said, looking at you softly. You thanked them and apologized as you left them, wanting to greet your other family members. You spotted Baela and Rhaena sitting near your brothers and quickly walked over to them.

''Finally. I thought you would never come and talk to us.'' Baela complained and got up from the chair and hugged you tightly, ''I missed you, cousin.''

You returned the hug tightly, smiling at her words, ''I missed you too, cousin.''

Rhaena cleared her throat and stood up, hugging you as you and Baela separated.

You smiled at the squeeze and said, ''I missed you too, Rhaena.''

Joffrey got out of his chair and jumped into your arms, laughing loudly when you caught him in a tight hug.

''You're getting too big for me to keep doing this.'' You laughed and rolled him over, placing him on the floor. Russing his dark hair, you smiled when he laughed. You hugged Luke, who seemed especially clingy today. Jace also hugged you tightly and wished you a Happy Solstice.

After talking for a while with your brothers and cousins, you went to greet your paternal grandparents. Rhaenys and Corlys were sitting next to Otto, oddly enough, and the three of them looked at you with affection.

''Grandmother.'' You kissed Rhaenys's cheek who kissed yours back.

''Grandpa.'' You hugged Corlys and he hugged you back and complimented the blue details on your outfit.

''Otto.'' You greeted your great-grandfather, who smiled warmly at you. He seemed relaxed and calm, more so than he normally was.

''Shall we have dinner in honor of this happy day?'' Viserys's loud voice sounded in the room and everyone focused on the King. There was a bit of tension about where you should sit, but you chose next to Viserys and Rhaenyra, who shook your hand under the table.

Servants brought silver trays loaded with delicious delicacies. Large roasts of meat browned on skewers, exuding a tantalizing aroma of exotic spices. Tables were adorned with fresh fruit, from crimson apples to juicy grapes, and freshly baked bread that looked like it had come straight from the oven.

Plenty of wine circulated among everyone and soon everyone was laughing and talking. Your heart felt lighter when you saw your entire family happy, getting along for the first time in a long time.

After the banquet, you all went to one of the rooms of the castle, where the gifts were. The exchange went well, you received gifts from everyone individually and you presented them with what you carefully chose. Ser Criston was present and you gave him a gift too, under the watchful eye of your family, a pure Valyrian steel sword. He smiled in thanks and said he would give you a gift later.

When it seemed like the exchange of gifts was over, Otto said, ''We have a special gift for you, (Y/N). From all of us.'' He gestured to your entire family, who looked on expectantly. You took the gift from his hand, a wooden box with gold details, which was well packaged.

As soon as you opened it, all the color in your face disappeared. It was a head, a human head. You felt like you were going to throw up when you recognized the head. Diane, your servant.

''W-What is this?!'' You groaned, the words stuck in your throat as you held the box, your legs shaking as terror invaded your body. Everyone seemed calm, even Viserys.

''This is our gift to you, my child.'' Rhaenyra said and approached you, placing a hand on your shoulder, ''To remind you not to approach anyone.''

''They can't be trusted,'' Alicent began to say, ''Diane couldn't be trusted. Criston was the one who cut off her head and Rhaenyra, Helaena and I cradled her. The choice of the box was Daemon's.''

They looked at you expectantly, as if they hoped you really liked the gift. Your hands were shaking so much that the box fell to the floor, Diane's severed head falling to the floor.

A perfect ending to a loving Winter Solstice with your family, from their perspective.

[gaypirate420]

Haircut //Jasper W. Hale.

Jasper Whitlock-Hale x gn! reader.

Summary: Jasper did a thing while he was in a mood.

Angst/Fluff. Jasper icon by @jasperhaleobsessed

The vampire steps out of the shower, wrapping a towel around his waist. The water dripping down his yellow hair, his pale hand wipes the steam off the mirror above the sink.

Golden eyes stare at his reflection.

Paper white skin decorated with deep scars. His muscles tensed up. He leans over, his hands holding hard on the sink, cracking it slightly.

It hasn't been a great week.

No, it hasn't been a great month. Year. Decade(s).

Since Victoria and her wannabe army of newborn vampires showed up he's been spiraling each day.

Slowly, the glass have been a drops away from spilling.

The memories just flooded his mind everytime he closed his eyes.

They're always there, but they're more vivid this time, he doesn't like this, Jasper knows this cycle too well, he doesn't want to be part of it again.

He thought he was getting better.

Jasper's been pushing you away and he's an idiot for that because he needs you, he needs you so so so bad but Jasper just can't tell you he's struggling. And he doesn't know why that is. Maybe he feels ashamed for being so weak, so broken.

There's a reason why you and him have been together for almost fifty years. You just bring the best of him and make the pain go away. Always.

A smile creeps on his face but it goes away quickly, he sighs and looks at the mirror one more time.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

"Jasper? Sunshine, you in here?" You asked while stepping inside the Cullen's house. The ironey flavor of blood still in your mouth after a successful hunt.

"...yeah." He mumbled from upstairs there was a slight shake on his voice. No waiting for you at the door? No bouquet of flowers? No forehead kiss? No 'Darlin' I missed ya.'?

Something happened. Something bad.

You approached your shared bedroom opening the door slowly.

Your eyes try to process what their seeing.

Jasper was sitting at the edge of the bed, eyes unfocused starring at the locks of hair on the floor. His pale fingers holding a pair of scissors, shaking.

And of course his hair. Short. Cut at random lengths after a fit of raw emotion. Anger. Sadness. Desperation. That's what his aura is filled with.

"Sweetheart..." You called softly and closed the door behind you. The vampire doesn't react to your presence at all, he just looks straight ahead, deep in thought.

Jasper catches on the steps getting closer to him and a gentle hand tilt his chin up gently to make his eyes meet yours. His almost numb expression makes you want to cry. The golden color of his eyes holds no shine, they're dull and empty.

"Hey, sunshine." You whisper softly and cup his face, leaning on your touch and a small gasp leaving his lips, if he was human he'll be all tears right now.

"Oh—it's okay, sweetheart." You whisper reassuringly. The blonde wraps his arms around your waist and holds you close, burying his face on your chest, taking a deep breath and drowning on your comforting scent.

You stroke his now short hair.

"...sorry" He whimpers against your chest trying to find some peace with your touch.

"Why are you apologizing, cowboy?" You whisper softly and caress his face, he can't look at you right now, he feel so ashamed because you're seeing him like this.

"... because— I'm a mess." His voice breaks and he holds closer to you. You just stroke his hair and kiss his forehead.

"...and my hair is ugly now." He added, a bitter chuckle follows. You take the scissors from his shaking hands and brush his hair down.

"May I fix it?" You asked before cutting anything.

"Can you?" He asks hopeless as he closes his eyes, he feels defeated, tired, he just wants to sleep but he can't sleep because of his nature.

"Well... either way I think you'll look handsome bald." You try to lighten the mood and it surprisingly works because his frown turns into a smirk. He nods and allows you to fix his hair.

You lean down to kiss his lips, a tender, slow and gentle kiss. He holds the kiss for longer, the feeling of your lips against his are a great distraction from the memories that are haunting him.

Jasper closes his eyes as you work on his hair. He doesn't know if the silence is dreadful or comfortable.

"Do you want to talk about what happened? I'm very worried about you, don't think I don't notice how distant you've been." You whisper with a serious expression.

He shakes his head slowly, the idea of discussing his feelings and pain being something he is not ready to do just yet. Your touches help in distract him.

"...maybe later, darlin', I'm sorry." Jasper whispers as he keep my eyes closed, focusing on the sensation of your fingers through his hair to avoid a relapse of his previous train of thought. He takes a couple of deep breaths as the gentle movement of your fingers helps him calm down and have a clearer mindset.

"Done." You said softly and clean his sweater from the fallen hair. You take on his image, his new look.

"You look real pretty, Jazz." You smiled, Jasper returned the smile in a much weaker way. He doesn't check himself in the mirror, he trusts you and knows you did a much better work than he did.

"....thank you, sugar." He whispers, feeling a little tired from all this. He holds your hand and kisses your palm.

"Cuddles?" You whisper back, he nods and picks you up to throw you in the bed with him.

He nuzzles his face on your neck, holding you so close to him. He takes a deep deep breath and closes his eyes.

".... you're- stuck with me forever...I'm sorry. You deserve someone better. I'm so sorry, sweetheart." He whispers against your skin.

"I'm happy to have you forever. I don't want anybody else." You whisper back and kiss the top of his head. He smiles weakly and hols you close, nuzzling to you like a needy kitten.

"...and I'm happy I got you too. I don't know who I'll be without you." Jasper closes his eyes and leaves gentle kisses on your neck.

"I love you so much." You whisper.

"I love you more." He answer with a gentle whisper.

"hmmm, I don't think so. I love you more than that." You speak teasingly, he chuckles softly and hugs you tightly.

"I love ya a hundred times that." He answers with a weak voice, like he's very sleepy.

"Well, I love you a thousand times that." You speak with a following giggle, Jasper chuckles and kisses your lips once more.

He's going to be okay. Here in your arms.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

A/N: heyyyy, here's an angsty fic because an idea came to my mind thinking about why did Jasper has such a radical haircut in between movies. And I was like "that's how you cut your hair after a breakdown." Y'know? So here's this, hope you like it, requests are open!

[mermaidgirl30]

✨My, My, Such a Sweet Surprise✨

A/N: I had to write this down real quick after I saw the most gorgeous Joel Miller looking man I’ve ever seen in my life today 🫠 This is a Drabble of what could of been if maybe I talked to the man 🤣

Summary: When you stumble upon a cute little property with a farmer’s market, you get more than you bargain for when you meet the man with honeysuckle eyes and a thick Southern drawl that makes you weak in the knees.

Pairing: Joel Miller x fem! reader

Word Count: 743

Rating: Explicit (18+ Only MDNI)

Tags: Unprotected P in V, cream pie, cute nicknames, flirting

Dividers by @saradika-graphics

It was supposed to be just a quick walkthrough of the little farmers market out in the country. A little Easter egg event for the dogs, at least that’s what you saw on the event listed online. That’s why you were standing in the warm spring air, your Great Pyrenees hooked to his leash, the soft summer dress blowing against your creamy thighs. That’s all it was supposed to be. A fun, relaxing event. That is, until you saw him.

A man that stood over six feet tall, yellow flannel buttoned up against tanned, strong arms, sleeves rolled up so you could see the thick veins that twisted down his forearms, large hands that could do some damage with an axe. And he was so fucking broad. And his eyes. Honeysuckle, warm heaven that clashed with his golden flannel.

You weren’t supposed to keep staring at him, weren’t supposed to even talk to him, but all that came crashing down the moment he walked over and spoke those first Southern drawled words to you, slipping like warm butter right down your tongue and that was it. You were completely fucked.

And that’s how you ended up in the back of his property, caged between his strong arms, your back pressed against an old oak tree, your sundress hiked above your hips, one leg hooked over his broad shoulder, the other clasped around his muscular back.

Your mouths latched together in messy, wet kisses. Your tongues lapped against each other’s in a burning hunger you couldn’t control. His fingers twisted against your messy curls as his thick cock rutted up inside you, the slick sliding down his long length as he stretched you wide and bottomed out again and again until you could barely stand the heat.

His mouth moved to your collarbone, his teeth nipping and sucking as your fingers ran through his tousled curls, your lips parting as the side of your face scratched up against his salt-and-pepper beard as your moans carried to the shell of his ear. You could feel yourself getting closer with every inch of his cock sliding against your sticky walls, the heat building in your spine as you dug your fingers into the back of his neck.

“Go on, come for me, darlin’. Squeezin’ me so fuckin’ tight. Know you’re close. Tell me who makes you feel good, sweetheart. Let me hear it,” he purred into your ear as you felt yourself lose all control the moment he moved his calloused thumb down to your puffy clit and started making slow circles against your burning heat.

“Oh fuck, Joel. You do. You make me feel good. Ahh.” He pressed down harder, quickening the pace of his thumb and cock as he bottomed out inside you, moving to a position where he hit that sweet, spongy spot that made you see stars.

“Joel, I’m gonna-fuck, gonna come,” you whined, feeling your orgasm start to take over as your walls squeezed against his thick cock.

“Fuck,” he growled as his fingers dug into your hips, “that’s a good fuckin’ girl. So good, sweetheart, Goddamn,” he groaned as you spilled your slick all over him.

“Joel,” you cried as you closed your eyes and buried your face into the crook of his neck, feeling white hot heat spill from your center as your body shook through the intense orgasm.

“Mmm, that’s my good girl. Gonna fill ya up next. That what you want, sweetheart? Want my come inside that pretty pussy of yours?” he asked as he sped up his motions, drilling his cock inside you as you felt him bottom out again and again and again.

“Yes, please,” you begged as you moved your forehead against his as he lapped against your crimson cheek.

“That’s what I thought,” he smirked. Once, twice, three more times and he was spilling his seed inside you, warm ropes of come painting your walls as he stilled inside you and moaned into the base of your ear, his ragged breaths blowing hot against your jawline.

“Christ, sweetheart. Ain’t you the sweetest surprise I’ve ever had the pleasure of meetin’,” he smiled against your lips, his mouth brushing up against yours. “Am I gonna see ya again?”

“Oh, yeah. You’ll definitely see me again, Miller,” you teased as he pushed you back up against the tree and pulled your hair back.

“How’s about round two then, darlin’?”

And that’s exactly what you did.

Tags: @mountainsandmayhem @littlevenicebitch69 @keylimebeag @jasminedragoon @rav3n-pascal22 @casa-boiardi @lotusbxtch @amyispxnk @princesatracionera

[moonsaver]

hesperus

The evening star calls home. Ruin is your saving grace.

Tw/Cw; Suggestive/explicit scene, gender neutral reader, implications of religious themes (not great), dubious morals(?), reader is a COUGARRRR (implied), Sunday loves older authority figures (guilty), just guess at this point. Also reader is implied to be like a parental figure to Firefly. OOC because i love making canon characters my own ocs.

Pairings: Stellaron Hunter!Reader x Sunday (romantic), (hinted) Firefly x tb, (platonic) Firefly x reader.

A/n: 5.8k words, i hate this fic, enjoy whatever whatever.

——

“Will you be okay?”

The small girl looks up at you - trepidation and concern visible in her eyes.

“I should be asking you that, lovely.” You smile, gently tugging a strand of hair behind her ear. Her hair was beautiful, in your opinion. You often verbalized how beautiful it looked, mentioning it as silver under a blue moon.

Firefly still had concern in her eyes, dampened by your words, her hand clasped over the middle of her collarbone.

“I'll make it.. I think.” Her determination made way through uncertainty. You hum, smiling at her.

“You will, as shall I. If you ever need, I will be there.”

You wink, making the young girl smile a bit. The small, almost sad smile, still breaks through her worry.

“I've heard they've been on the lookout for us. I'm..”

She didn't have to continue. You already knew. Your hand comes up and pats her head, gently.

“We'll be fine. Go on, my sweet.”

You smile, softly. It seems to melt away the rest of her trepidation.

She takes a moment. Then nods. Worry and uncertainty now embers as determination fires through her eyes.

You wave her off, as she makes her way.

You are being watched. But you are aware.

–———

You hum, swirling the champagne glass in your fingers, watching the bubbles rise to the top, and stick to the edges in clusters.

“Interrupting your break, am I?”

The man beside you laughs, softly. Almost forced. He doesn't respond further.

“I'm guessing your weekends are spent tending to your white coat.”

You tilt your head, looking at him, a small smile playing on your lips. He doesn't bother acknowledging you.

“I give it to the dry cleaners, actually.”

“Ah, busy man. I suppose I should leave you be.”

“..I have an inkling you won't.”

His wings bristle slightly. His halo shines beautifully – a sort of warning that hangs over his head. Sharp edges, blinding gold. Angels crafted to deter the evil.

But you aren't phased. Perhaps it is the alcohol.

“There was a story, I remember. If you're up for it, of course. It's quite old.”

“Ah, an anecdote from your life?”

“I'm not an ancient tablet.”

“I wasn't aware.”

You chuckle, setting your glass down, the glass base clinking as you do.

You take a brief moment; simply to compose and immerse into the present moment. You look over at the man, allowing yourself to shamelessly scan him despite the unreturned glancing or staring.

“Owls and Ravens were once friends. And both had snow-like feathers. As pristine as white clouds on the expanse of a sky.”

His hair is soft, blue and hazy under the warm light of the bar, shimmering the slightest bit. He shifts in his seat, perhaps to get more comfortable.

“They decided, then, to paint each other, since nothing else was there to do. The Raven painted the Owl diligently, in patterns and dots. And the Owl sat patiently through the process.”

His eyes are piercing, golden, yet they rest, conserved and distant.

The alcohol hazed your vision, smoothing out the edges like a loving artist's strokes against the canvas of his visage.

Your fingers circle the rim of your glass, returning your gaze, watching the bubbles clear.

“But when the Raven's turn came, it never sat still. And as the Owl painted, it painted over the Raven entirely, marring it's feathers as black as obsidian.”

“What a shame.”

Your foot playfully taps the side of his, making his leg stop jittering up and down.

“Indeed.”

He hums, his gaze temporarily flitting from your foot to your hand, placed on your knee. He almost acknowledges you.

The background is a warm blur against your view of him, almost as though he's the sole performer on a podium – the light seemed to belong to him, and him only. 

“You have a daughter, am I correct to assume?”

His fingers tap, rhythmically, like patters of rain.

“No, just.. a friend. But I consider her as such.”

“She left in quite a hurry.”

“She did, didn't she?”

“has the dream not been to her liking? In the case something has gone awry, The Family hopes–”

“Oh, you know, kids these days. They see someone they like and skitter like a fool.”

He doesn't seem to take your words in stride. But you smile.

“I see.”

You stretch, spinning in the small loveseat, planting your feet down as you rise,

“See someone you like?”

“Already got a view.”

Sunday finally acknowledges you - his eyes trailing your form as you walk away.

——–

“I love you!”

The voice crackles from the plush toy's broken voice box, as Sunday peers down at it. He doesn't move – idly looking at it, and yet not bothering to pick it up.

He stares, for a few more moments, noting the grime and the tears at the seams. The small stains of probably candy or something sweet sticking to its “paws”. The bear had worn down inexplicably from love. The very love it spoke at every press. And from abandonment. He found himself wondering at the fleeting childhood passing by like a reeling ribbon from a child's hands, as if the bear had been dropped unwillingly, and had not been allowed to reunite with it's owner again. A strange dilemma – not alive, yet full of the most humanly feeling. So full, infact, the cotton burst at the seams, and it's button nose was dull. 

With careful movements, Sunday picks it up, by its collar behind its “neck” [if you could even say it had one]. His hand holds it at a bit of a distance.

“A fan of soft toys, Mr. Dreammaster?’

Your voice teases him. You watch his arm slightly falter, imagining a plethora of emotions on his face you'd love to pull at like strings of a tapestry falling apart.

“..I am the Head, of The Family. The Dreammaster would be–”

“It's alright. I was joking.”

“I wasn't.”

His voice is still, flat. There is no semblance of emotion.

“Feisty, today. Was your toy missing for a long time? Sour about how it looks, hm?”

Sunday breathes out; an amicable replacement for a drawn out sigh. He turns to you, still holding the bear at a distance, staying quiet.

“Now, that is no way to hold a gentleman.” 

You walk forward, and gently grasp the bear in both of your hands. Sunday's eyes flicker to your gloved hands, as though in his own curiosity of your lack of concern in terms of hygiene.

“There. Better. You ought to be respectful to your elders.”

“Ah, yes. My apologies. I should have bowed when you spoke to me.”

He bows slightly in jest, his hand on his heart,

“Hm, that's right.”

Sunday smiles, looking up at you from his bowed state. You seem to pay more mind to the bear in your hands, an array of similar thoughts in your head as you process it's appearance.

“Do you want to take it with you? Who knows, you might come to like it.”

“Please, that's no way to ask someone to get rid of it.”

You eye his non-faltering, feigned innocent smile. He simply closes his eyes and continues smiling.

“Well, turns out it has a nametag. It won't hurt to stitch it up a bit and return it back.”

He hums, watching you fix the bear's little dishevelled bowtie.

And then he clears his throat, catching your attention.

You tilt your head, curiously looking at him.

“Yes?”

Sunday points to his own tie, slightly miffed. You chuckle,

“Well, now. Whoever shall fix that?”

“Perhaps an elder. They know better than I.”

You roll your eyes, setting the bear down gently onto the side, removing your gloves and fixing his tie.

———

“Cozy, cozy.”

Kafka purrs into the phone, the rasp of her voice not blurred by the digital medium, as you stare in the distance at the blue-haired halovian.

“Kafka, I'm gonna have to call you back soon.”

“Just when things were about to get interesting..”

You roll your eyes – she can't see it, but she chuckles, knowing what your silence meant.

“Alright, goodluck. Looks like you'll need it.”

You hang up before she has anything else to say, pulling out a compact mirror, and adjusting your appearance. Just as you snap it shut, a small creak of the loveseat beside you indicates his occasional arrival.

“You're late. And I hoped a man of your stature was more punctual than that.”

You tease, watching his eyes never meet yours. Only this time – you catch it. He swallows, rather thickly, watching his adam's apple bob as he does. 

“I don't recall having scheduled any meetings with you.”

“Oh?”

His reply is curt, almost condescending if you weren't the type to brush it off.

“Seems my last story hasn't melted the ice yet.”

“Not an inch.”

“D'aw, alright. Wanna hear more, lovely?”

His wings – not his ears – twitch slightly at the pet name. You notice the faint rush of blood to the tip of his ears.

He doesn't answer, choosing to be chaste in silence. You huff out a chuckle,

“Alright, drink's on me then. I'll tell you something interesting.”

——

In your travels as a stellaron hunter, you've assorted many into repulsions and desires that draw you in.

To fast thrills, versus the indignancy of a dragging present. You find yourself drawn to the bright lights of a night bar, versus the blinding array of a scorching sun. To shallow connections in lieu of heavy and complex relationships. Attachment would be your downfall. Ruin is your saving grace.

However, you find yourself looking for your repulsions.

The grey haired girl stands in front of you once again, shuffling from foot to foot, her eyes low and shy as her hands fiddle with a stray lock of her own hair. You eye her for a moment, before humming, and gently coax  her to face you by placing an index finger under her chin and raising it up.

“Little bug, what's on your mind?”

“Um..”

“Script not to your liking?”

You watch her mumble under her breath, her face slightly tilting down as she resists the urge to tuck it away again. As she does, you gaze from over the top of her head; a familiar blue haired man walking into the distance, followed by panicked coworkers. It seems he will be amiss once again, for today.

“I couldn't.. tell them.”

“The trailblazer?”

She hums, nodding.

You huff out a chuckle, patting her head.

“You have your chances, do you not? Rest easy, your time will come.”

She visibly relaxes, her shoulders slightly dropping, and her hands leaving the lock of hair to return to her sides. Her eyes are still low, as though scanning the pavement under your feet, as she contemplates. You watch her bite the inside of her cheek before she raises her face again and nod.

There is a fire in her eyes.

It is almost like the Sun.

You are almost afraid of it.

“I'll do it. As many times as I need to.”

You smile, leaning back onto the cold wall behind you.

“We should go shopping after your next attempt.”

You find your jaw clenching after the words slip from your mouth. Your repulsions are your weakness. Yet you still seem to subconsciously seek them out. It's a testament to your human nature.

She nods, smiling at you. She stays in her place for a moment, before she speaks again,

“I could.. ask Kafka to go with you if I don't make it.”

You turn and glance back at your usual spot at the open bar‐empty without you and the man you've been missing lately. Your smile only widens at her perception. Clever girl.

“No need. I'd like some silence anyways.”

She seems a bit unconvinced, as she continues to gaze at you for a brief moment more, scanning you for any deception. Out of worry than any ulterior motives, unlike the woman she mentioned a while ago.

Truthfully, you were lonely. This is what your ruin does to you, regardless of how it saves you. A few conversations lure you into a false sense of companionship, regardless of however brief it must have been, even encouraging you to divulge more than necessary if desperate enough. You find your eyes flitting at anything the colour of pale blue. At anything that glows gold under a light.

You chuckle and wave,

“I'll be fine, honeybee. Go, be on your way, now.”

She nods, smiling at the pet name. 

You find your repulsions carry you elsewhere, the bar fading into the background as you walk the opposite direction, once all spying eyes have cleared. You find your eyes flitting to find him. However, no matter how blessed your vision may be, the absence left behind can only be described, not pointed to. Ultimately, it is your mind that hinges on the assessment of what you have lost, or gained. 

But it seems this time your heart has taken the hit – a burrowing feeling between the slats and the depths of your ribs as though an animal had sprung from it, and left it behind as a husk of what it once was. 

–——

Sunday tuts, his fingers taking a bold graze of your hair, sliding and gently tugging out a lock.

“You ought to take better care of your hair.”

You stay silent for a brief moment, and it's apparent to him aswell that you hadn't expected him to do something so.. casual, considering his formalities. He takes his time to address it in your period of silence.

“I simply noticed and commented on it, no need to look like a deer caught in headlights.”

His eyes flicker to yours for a moment, and avert immediately. You watch his hand fall to his side, his fingers slightly shaking. You can't tease him on it – it would be hypocritical. A slight, excited sort of feeling sparks in your stomach.

You lick your lips, and take a sip of your beverage, feeling your senses dry up a bit. The liquid instead burns at the dryness of your throat.

“You're into haircare, hm?”

You reply, ignoring the brief silence and the tension it carried.

“Often. It comes with taking care of my wings.”

“Ah, I see.”

Silence once again. Unlike the pleasant one you two usually shared, this felt different; it felt electric. Thick, a bit suffocating. 

“I like your piercings.”

His hand, previously resting on the counter, subconsciously raises up to fiddle with his earring,

“Thank you.”

You stay silent again, almost inviting in the tension that causes him to graze his teeth against the inside of his cheek, a step away from chewing on the sides of it.

You break the ice first.

“Do you prefer gold or silver?”

“Silver.”

He stays silent for a moment. He's often found his mind wandering when it comes to you – wondering how various adornments would suit you.

“Really? Didn't take you as a silver type.’

“Ah, about me?”

“Who else?”

He felt silver suited you; more than your complexion, he simply felt.. drawn to it. Like the faint glimmering of a moon's reflection on a lake. You were someone who's depths were mysterious, almost alluring to him.

You stay silent, too. The question hangs in the air for a brief moment.

You watch his shaky fingers rub slightly at his nose. You've noticed a lot of things about him. The tips of his nose and ears that turns red a bit too easily. The faint fluttering of his ghostly blue lashes. The twinkle of gold – not just of his halo, but the various imprints of it on him; jewellery, and the woven golden threads of his pristine suit.

His eyes follow to your hand, on the bar's countertop, swallowing thickly again.

It seems despite everything, he's still a fool in the grasp of his shame.

He looks away,

“I prefer gold.”

——

Sentience is a curse, he thinks.

His fingers tap and circle the perimeter of the frail glass, a clink accompanying each one. Waves form on the surface of the shimmery liquid from the small force.

Morality is a cruel beast. Because it is unrecognisable. And it knows you.

It follows you, through your ages. A small, ghastly and putrid thing, akin to a shameful, big animal. Hunched over, following you like a chore. Like a lost, stubborn child. It grows with you. It becomes bolder. It becomes aware. It has your voice. Soon, the mind caves and buckles into the grasp of the dastardly beast, that grows like uncontrolled weed on a substrate. It grows and envelops. And it tells you – can you truly allow yourself to do this? And the answer is never yes. Morality is a curse. A big ugly thing, unafraid to show it's face. It fills the room when silence staves arguments in the form of chastened tension.

Yet he finds himself, almost seeking it out. Searching the cruel shackle of his morality, almost wanting it to shame him into hiding. 

Your place is empty. He notes. He closes his eyes for a brief moment, fluttering lashes coming to a halt. He envisions the faint waft of your perfume, the dainty clicking of your fingers over the rim of the glass, the cheeky tap against his agitated foot. Sunday would find himself already ashamed, if he'd outright admitted he'd actually been staring at you, from his periphery. You overshadow the ugly beast, drawing out a sort of soft, beautiful serenity with a hollow voice, and an elusive persona. 

Angels are, by design, made to stave evil. Somehow, however, it seems he has attracted one. A devil in the form of you. And yet, like a man yet to feel the cold relief of forgiveness on his lips, he wanders aimlessly in his mind, as though in search of you. Sin is unbeknownst, ignorance is plaguing, and yet he revels in it. Even for a moment.

He huffs out a laugh. A novel turn of events. Its his turn to wait for you, isn't it?

Yet it seems easy to do, simply imagining your form beside him once again, telling him another strange tale, either for your own amusement or to reel him in. He disregards the source. His weary face finds an ache, a pleasant one, as it pulls into a faint smile. 

As sentience drives a being to deviate from instinct, his awareness has driven him to exhaustion. Yet you are a double edged sword – a balm for his exhaustion yet endlessly pushing him to caution.

——

“You've been gone too long, haven't you?”

You croon, a cheeky smile on your face, Sunday bashfully keeping his eyes locked to his drink. Despite everything, he cannot meet your eyes.

“I have.”

For the first time, the pastor is of the guilty. The devil has come to exorcise him. But exorcism does not mean erasure of sins, neither does it mean cleanly cutting off the strings that attach one to them. You may as well weave more of these strings, and craftily ground him to you.

“How will you make it up to me?’

You drawl, leaning on the palm of your hand, speech slightly slurred from the alcohol.

“..How would you like me to?”

His gaze is trained on his hand – gripping the fragile neck of the glass with a bit too much force. 

You hum, twirling your own glass, watching the liquid rush and bubble at the edges.

“Tell me a secret.”

He swallows. 

A secret?

“Is that.. truly what you desire?”

“Mhm.”

You take a sip of your beverage. Sunday is relieved, yet almost disappointed.

“..very well.”

He breathes in, and takes a moment to compose himself. His eyes flit to you, a small flicker of boldness somehow making him hover over a line he dares not cross. His gaze wanders to your lips, the slight crinkle beside your eyes, the squish of your cheek against your palm. He eyes your clothing. 

A stellaron hunter.

It was as though he was placing himself as the bait in a trap. As though he was the one caught in the trap. What else could he complain about? Except for that of which he can't admit – his unbecoming is his fault.

His fault for unreeling like a ribbon under your daft fingers. He finds himself wanting to spill like an ink bottle, the surface tension of the liquid keeping it from just flowing over the thick, glass borders.

And he breathes in your perfume. He breathes in the expanse of the night's air. And he spills. He spills so cautiously, so quietly, as though he is afraid of staining his own lips with the tenacity of his words.

He has many secrets. Most of which were handed to him, more akin to an heirloom than an actual personal matter. More akin to a treacherous contract than whispered confessions. How he wishes this was a confession to you, than an unveiling over his disgusting innards.

But you listen, unwavering. A lazy smile still gracing your lips, stained with grapes and understanding. It is as though you were stained in so many ways, his words are unflinchingly simple to you. It becomes a confession, rather than a revelation at the altar of the cartilage shell of your ear.

And you keep it. You keep it like a lost prayer. Like a silent vow. 

“..want me to whisper it to you?”

You return the sentiment, offering a request. It seems you are no guiltier than he innocent. 

———

“Can't convince you, can I?”

“Not at all.” Please don't try, anyway. He lets those words die on his tongue.

You huff out a laugh, a bit forceful, as you look away from him, folding your arms.

“Shit, you don't pull any punches, huh?”

A pang of guilt hits him at the slight hurt in your forced laugh. But he can't be deterred.

Not that you were going to, considering Elio's script. It's on you, really. But you didn't expect it to actually hurt.

You watch the empty audience seats, his back turned to it.

“It's a pity. I wish I could have seen this theatre when it was filled to the brim with people.”

“..it would have been an extraordinary view. It always is.”

“You look forward to it?”

…

“Not anymore.”

You hum, your teeth nipping at the skin of your lips. The quietness of the theatre is exemplified at the rustle of your clothes, as you turn to look at his back. The light of the podium makes him look beautiful. His halo is almost blinding. He looks like the Sun. You'll be lead to your death, at this rate. Wasn't Ruin supposed to be your saving grace? Here you are – disguised as both Icarus and the blinding Sun.

Sunday stands still, a cleancut form, unable to face you. You can stare at his back all day. But the pain resounding in your chest from your heart hurting strings you back into the present. You breathe deeply, and sigh,

“Alright. Goodluck, then.”

With one step forward, you disappear as quietly as you came. It's a trick familiar to your group; as Sunday knows. But even then, he braces himself to greet the empty space you leave behind, his heart sinking further at the loss of your presence. 

———

Sunday finds the shackles of punishment more liberating than death on his knees.

He learns this in isolation. He learns many things in isolation.

He learns how to miss you.

Phantoms and taunts of your words echoing the empty expanse of his empty mind, wafting through the many whispers of the stellaron that plagued his mind. 

His finger twitches upwards, when his lifeless eyes imagine the faint illusion of your affection, grazing fingertips over his knuckles. You hadn't actually ever gotten so physically close to him, but he indulges himself. He imagine the soft sensations of your lips on his jaw, trailing up to ghost the shell of his.

“Miss me, Mr. Dreammaster?”

He shivers at the illusion. Your voice is close yet far; reverberating in the hollow wasteland of his mind like a single thread of gold.

A lot. He wants to say. He swallows the words, and for the second time, the fruit lodges in his throat. To admit is to acknowledge the sin.

“Make it up to me, Mr. Dreammaster?"

A knock. Your phantom, agonisingly so, vanishes like a mist casted away by a gush of wind. But the interruption is far from divine.

Jade, from the IPC. 

——

Like gently settling fog, rumours stagnate over a crowd. The whispers and the hushed words are not elusive to your ears.

Your phone buzzes, but you ignore it. Firefly is accompanied by Silver wolf, you wouldn't have to worry.

As much as your thrills lure you to the lavish party to celebrate the Nameless, your repulsions seem stronger. 

You sip your beverage, tipping the glass up, but your eyes stay on your phonescreen. You hadn't ever texted Sunday, and neither had he texted you. You two hadn't even called. There was no history. It would be as though you could keep your phone open for hours and no one would bat an eye. Even for the most prestigious of those in stature would have to occasionally practise patience when it came to him. Who would you be? The vague, elusive stellaron hunter who's suspected of causing trouble wherever they go? Like a stray piece of pebble that's easy to disregard and kick away, who is he to ever glance at you?

And so you stare, measuring in silence, the strange stirring of feelings in your stomach. You could blame it on your beverage, but you hadn't drank enough really, mainly because you couldn't even bother keeping it down.

Buzz

You blink, watching a notification pop up, and promptly retreat as you click on Sunday's contact again.

He messaged you?

No, it couldn't be. It must be one of The Family's members.

You push yourself off of the wall you'd been warming with your back, and take a small step forward in contemplation, your eyebrows knitted as you stared.

Why would they send you to his office's location?

——

Sunday breathes in, the cool, familiar air of his office hitting the back of his throat as he does.

There is a certain pleasure in ordinary things. 

The patience of a ceramic cup that stays warm with coffee. The smooth crafting of the surface of a wooden desk. The ambience of the air conditioner accompanying the steady scribbling of a pointed tip on paper. The comfort in reclining back in a cushioned office chair. Things he may as well soon never come across again.

He swallows, his eyelids doing little to shield the overhead lighting of his office, but still keeping them closed to simply savor the feeling.

A shadow emerges, obscuring the light from his eyes, casting a shade on his face. It's soon accompanied by the faint wafting of perfume.

“Miss me, Mr. Sunday?”

This wasn't Ena's dream. But for a moment, he could have considered it.

You're leaned over from behind him, watching down at his face as he opens his eyes. He opens his mouth, but decides to stay silent.

Your hand comes up to gently cup the side of his face, your palm pressing beside his eye, fingers reaching the bottom of his chin. Your thumb lingers around the edge of his mouth. You both stare at each other, simply noticing the dilation of each other's pupils.

“It's just Sunday.”

He tells you. There is no animosity, no hostility in his voice. It's almost a whisper, as though he's unsure if you are real. His own hand reaches up, and cautiously, his fingers graze the side of your face.

Your skin is warm. Your relaxed smile widens as he does so. He shivers.

“Savouring your final moments?”

He smiles.

“I am.”

You stay that way for a moment, before slowly leaning back and standing up straight. Sunday gets up from his chair and moves to stand across you.

“Couldn't let me know where you were a little earlier?”

You tease him, but he can sense the slight irk in your voice.

“My deepest apologies. How can I make it up to you?”

You hum, spinning on your heel and walking around his office, fingers grazing the edge of his desk as you walk beside it, and to the front. You turn, leaning on it, your back facing him.

“A secret won't be enough this time, y'know?”

He watches your hand fiddle with a few trinkets on his desk, your other hand supporting you. He makes his way to you again, rounding the desk, and stands in front of you,

“What may help?”

You hum again, but he knows better. You're feigning your contemplation.

You smile, still leaned back against his desk.

“I wouldn't know. Something special before we depart?”

“Hm.. is that so?”

He steps closer, his hands placing themselves right beside your waist on the desk behind you, caging you in. His eyes never leave yours.

“Mhm.”

You smile, looking at him.

He leans in, eyes falling lower, on your lips, as he asks,

“Now, what shall I do?”

His warm breath fans over the lower half of your face, and the small exposed bits of your collarbone.

“Perhaps do as your seniors advise you.”

“Hm? Who?”

You grab him by the collar of his shirt, push off of the table and swerve him, pushing him against the desk as you lean in,

“You can listen, can't you?”

He breathes in, slightly winded at the switched positions.

“I might need guidance.”

You huff out a laugh,

“I'll guide you, so listen well.”

You lean in, your lips almost brushing his, but pull away when you sense he might lean in, his lips stay slightly parted as he watches you.

“You need to be patient, okay?”

He almost doesn't hear you, swallowing as he eyes your lips, his abdomen constricting, feeling something tighten and coil.

“I will.”

You smile. And lean in, testing his resolve,

“Do as I say, alright?”

His lips twitch, and his breath hitches. He waits, agonisingly, as your lips brush against his, but don't press. He whispers out,

“I will.”

.

“Good.”

You finally press your lips against his, and it's as though a river rushes through his veins, as he eagerly kisses you back. His breathing is heavy, his hands unsure as they hold onto your waist, but you're made aware of his desperation as his nails unconsciously dig into your flesh, through the thin fabric of your shirt. You suck in a breath at the feeling, and he almost moans, his wings bristling and tensing as he desperately tries to deepen the kiss, almost panting into it as your tongue brushes against his lower lip, eagerly parting them open.

Sunday can taste the alcohol mixed with your sweet saliva, causing his head to spin a bit, but instead he presses further, his tongue eagerly lapping at every inch of your mouth. You pull away for a moment, but his mouth follows close, kissing the side of your mouth and trailing them down the column of your throat. You breathe in, shivering as you close your eyes for a moment, each wet kiss electrifying and going straight down to your core. 

He mumbles your name against your skin, his tongue laving at a spot before his teeth nip at it, causing you to gasp. Your hands crawl up to the base of his head, one pushing into his fluffy hair and fingers entangling within the strands.

“It's okay.”

You breathe out, but he shakes his head slightly.

His tongue presses against the base of your throat, and drags up all the way to the corner of your mouth, before his lips envelop yours again in a heated kiss. He parts, panting,

“I wanted to see you. Every second I spent there..”

His hands run up and down your sides, feverish at the contact they'd been restrained from,

“I know.” You say, looking at his dishevelled state, your hands coming to rest on his chest.

"I wanted to return to you."

You feel his hands slide down and rest on your hips, his knee nudging between yours, before he slides up further and pushes his thigh at your core, making you jolt for a moment at the contact. His hands stay firm on your hips, almost pressing you down onto his thigh. Your hands clench at the fabric of his shirt as the contact shoots up your spine, making you arch slightly into him.

He breathes in, leaning down, his lips graze the shell of your ear, hot breath coming out in puffs as he whispers,

“I'm yours, aren't I? So go ahead and prove it.”

You smile.

“Alright, then.”

–——

“[Name]!”

Firefly's voice calls out to you, and you smile, looking over her winded appearance.

But you weren't in the state to complain. You looked similar, if not even worse. Your shirt was slightly wrinkly, tie askew, your hair patted down in a rush. You hope no one noticed you wobble.

“are you okay?”

Firefly would be more worried instead of confused if not for the wide smile you've donned. She glances over her shoulder at the bustling crowd, her eyes almost searching for someone, before returning to you.

“I'm alright. Your hair.. seems exciting.”

You comment, and Firefly blushes, patting down her own hair.

“I'll tell you what happened later, but.. we should leave now.”

You nod,

“Silverwolf?”

Her hologram appears without a second's delay, her annoyed resting face almost lovingly familiar to you.

“Yeah, yeah, I heard.”

You both chuckle slightly at her.

The party ends on a positive note.

———

“Quite a pleasant surprise.”

“Greetings, to you too.”

You smile, your virtual form glitching slightly. Although Himeko doesn't disregard you as she does Kafka, she's still wary of you, as are the rest of the crew.

“Settling in well, chicken boy?”

Himeko cuts in,

“What do the Stellaron hunters need now?”

You chuckle, softly,

“Miss Himeko, it's been a while, hasn't it? Regardless, I sincerely apologise, but these questions are solely for Mr. Sunday here.”

Her face shifts, almost unnoticeable, clearly displeased by your words. She sighs, and glances back at the new recruit. The rest of the crew follow her suit.

Mr. Yang's voice flows in,

“Perhaps there remains any unfinished business with the stellaron hunters? It would be wise to address it sooner than later.”

“None of the sort, Mr. Yang.” You reassure, hands neatly folded, as you smile,

“Just a few, simple questions. Think of it as a.. survey, of sorts.”

“A survey?”

Sunday steps forward, facing your hologram directly. You would have blushed if it wasn't virtual.

“3 questions. That is all.”

“..alright.”

You sense his hesitation, slowly melding into trust as his thoughts process. Although relationships between your factors are complex and messy, it is you that's asking him.

“What is your name?”

“..I am Sunday.”

“Where are you stationed?”

“The Astral Express.”

“Are you happy?”

The question makes him hesitate, words stuck in his throat like a grape seed for only a moment.

“..yes. i am.”

You smile. Sunday faintly returns the expression. After a brief moment, you turn to Himeko,

“Kafka will speak to you shortly, Ms. Himeko.”

And you vanish. Just as mysteriously as you'd come into his life.

[pparacxosm]

dearly beloved

(tashi duncan x fem!childhood best friend!reader x patrick zweig; artashi wedding; nonlinear narrative; tw infidelity but then wrong fandom; tw obsessive dysfunctional relationships but then wrong fandom; tw patheticism but then wrong blog; oakland!tashi truthers i’m sorry; florida!tashi truthers ((if there be any)) you’re welcome ! ; uno mentioned twice for some reason; unromantic romance; callow sapphic pining; tw nascent menstruation; y2k teenage girlhood; it’s always patrick zweig at the scene of the crime; ((the crime is unrequited devotion)); tw a little bit of body shaming kind of; but then general tw for excessively derogatory banter; sorrow shared is sorrow doubled; cake shared is just good cake; tw atlanta™)

‘Love is awful. It’s awful. It’s painful. It’s frightening. It makes you doubt yourself, judge yourself, distance yourself from the other people in your life. It makes you selfish. It makes you creepy, makes you obsessed with your hair, makes you cruel, makes you say and do things you never thought you would do. It’s all any of us want, and it’s hell when we get there.

So no wonder it’s something we don’t want to do on our own.

I was taught if we’re born with love then life is about choosing the right place to put it. People talk about that a lot, feeling right, when it feels right it’s easy. But I’m not sure that’s true. It takes strength to know what’s right. And love isn’t something that weak people do. Being a romantic takes a hell of a lot of hope. I think what they mean is, when you find somebody that you love, it feels like hope.’

The Priest, ‘Fleabag’ (2016—2019) Episode 2.6

It strikes you that Tashi Duncan has always had a strange way of talking about her own wedding, as if the whole event is a starstrewn chrysalis. Something transformative, that will make of her an airborne creature, carried off by the lightness of her being.

She looks fucking beautiful, of course.

Sleek and exacting, draped in silk crêpe de Chine, like a white bullet. Tashi Duncan, the bride. Heavenborne starshine, all wrapped in tender clouds, just as she should be.

But then you’ve always thought so.

When she rehearses her aisle walk, golden gazelle legs glissading her across the hotel room carpet, she speaks of herself as if she were a rare and fragile insect.

She says, “I feel my bones changing,” her hands on either arm of the makeup chair you’re in.

You sniff, eyes flicking over every part of her. She is so close, bent over you, but she’s blurred at her edges on account of your gushing tears. You’re weeping. “Your bones?” you all but wail, face twisting in sorrow as the tears sluice harder.

Your left eyelash dangles wetly halfway off your eyelid.

You’re melting like a fucking witch, because her dress reveal came before the setting spray, and now your palms are soused in foundation. You keep wiping your face to keep from bemiring the butteryellow satin of your bridesmaids gown.

You weep more than Pam, as Tashi floats around the room.

She is radiant as sunlight on water.

Tre and Tevin holler, spirited, scattering around the room in all directions, like a great empire has collapsed. Okay, Tashi! they whistle, We see you!

And you weep and weep.

And now, her amber knee, faint scar, peeks from the slit in her silken, sweeping skirt and knocks against yours.

Her arms are lithe and lustrous and they bracket you within the amalgamated cloud of her meticulously curated Big Day fragrance. She floods your body.

She’s nodding softly. She is haloed by bloodwarm morninglight. You feel too pathetic to even be looking at her. You feel worse, even, when her delicate fingers coast poetic down your arms, and she takes your hands into hers.

“Hey,” she says softly. Squeezes your fingers. The flesh of her soft and fragrant as rosepetals. Her smile unfurls like a star going nova. “You’re crying so much,” she laughs.

“Of course, I’m crying,” you choke out, a watery gasp wafting her gorgeous face. “Pauline hates me.”

Tashi spares a glance over your shoulder, where her makeup artist is leaning against an ornate dresser, chewing the edge of her thumb and seeming generally engrossed with her phone.

“Oh, honey,” Tashi’s manicured thumbs caress tender circles over your knuckles. Then clicking her teeth softly, “You are making her do her job twice.”

“Oh God,” you sob, your head dropping heavily onto the crushed velvet cushion of the chairback. “Don’t get married.”

Tashi's smile turns soft and commiserating.

“Babe.”

“T.”

Tashi places your hands gently in your lap. She swivels your chair so you’re facing the vanity mirror.

The sight of yourself festers your misery like rotting flesh. You look like a smeared oil painting. Your lashes clump like eldritch spiders. Your face is smeared and swollen and gleaming wet. Your lower lip trembles.

Tashi glows behind you in a tragic pastiche of a solar eclipse.

“I can’t do this,” you blather past the clot in your throat. Mucus bubbles from your nostrils and trickles to your mouth. You swipe at it. You sniff again. “I’m gonna mess up your wedding.”

Tashi’s warm, slender fingers trace your collarbones. In college, you used to give each other lymphatic drainage massages.

“You’re gonna make my wedding.”

This makes you tear up again, in earnest.

The tissue of your nose is raw and sore. You moan a broken lament. Her thumbs drift in gentle ellipses along the slope of your shoulders. Her warmth seeps into you.

“Do you remember what you said to me,” Tashi asks, “When I got engaged?”

You swallow, coughing around a flower of phlegm. She leans down, resting her cheek against the top of your head. Her hair spills over your shoulders in velvet sunbeams.

You blink at her reflection. Her eyes wash you in tender flame.

“‘Dear God, please, no’?”

It is staggering, at thirteen, to stand over a limp, bloodstrewn body.

You are traipsing through the halls, summoned by weeping, and, when you peek into the loo, the dense miasma of sweat and antiseptic is pervaded with something stannic and fetid.

Tashi Duncan, splayed across the tile of the corner stall, clutches her tummy with death’s desperation. The athletic uniform of Blue Vista High garbs these young girls in floaty skirts of daisy white, which Tashi now thinks is fascinatingly deplorable.

Unfamiliar and unprepared, her eyes gleam with tears. Her heart pummels in her chest to the same faraway thunk, thunk rhythm of the tennis balls striking the clay courts outside.

The world seems to have turned against her. Her clothes are drenched red, and her body is betraying her. Tashi, twentyone months your senior, is a late bloomer. Here is her inaugural encounter with the inevitability of womanhood.

So, you encounter this horror film tableau. Tashi Duncan, bloodstrewn and splayed. You don’t feel nausea or concern or anything. You’re thirteen. You’re mildly reproachful, if anything.

“Um,” you say, a bit too loudly, “I have a tampon. If you want?”

“I want to play tennis.” She writhes. “My match is in twenty minutes.”

You swing your backpack off your shoulder, clutching it in front of you and digging clumsily into the front pocket. “Well, you need a tampon.”

“I’ve never…” She seems halfcoherent. You don’t have great faith in her ability to sweep across a court. But she catches the tampon with an easy agility when you toss it over.

There’s an odd, blithe immediacy to girlhood. You drop to your knees and play gynae. You introduce yourselves somewhere there. Your hair’s pretty; Where did you get those pins on your bag?; Do you think Mr Cleven’s kind of cute? Yeah, no, me neither; Is it in yet?

“Aw, what?” you whine at her insistence you disrobe and give her your clothes, “For how long?”

“Like,” she gestures frenetically with her hand, “Twenty minutes.”

You hum, ambivalent, but doff your skirt. And they get anal about you guys jumbling formal uniforms with athletic uniforms, so she takes your shirt, too, and you wear hers, the navy nylon collared tee with the Blue Vista crest stitched to the breast.

You sit pantless on the toilet seat, reading her Princess Diaries paperback.

She wins her game, apparently.

Her mom drives you home. She brings a fleecy pair of Tashi’s Powerpuff Girls pyjama bottoms, which fall past your ankles. Says, call me Pam, honey, when you say, thank you, Mrs Duncan.

You keep her shirt, and her pants, and you still smell her womb.

She hits you up on AIM that night.

Mr Cleven is cute, she sends. He looks like Dawson Leery.

Then, But he’s THE WORST !!!!!!

And then, TLC or Destiny’s Child?

And things go from there.

When Christine McVie starts crooning for mercy, you think you’ve officially had your fill.

You have taken bridesmaid, like you took best friend before that, like you will one day take doting aunty to their gilded brood.

At times, it feels like there is no limit to what you can take.

But the very concept of a First Dance feels like a vaudeville satire portending a dire omen. You refuse to dance into hell—you just can’t do it. And you can’t watch them squeeze your heart to bloodpulp between their flush, swaying bodies.

Though you suppose that may be symbolic. Beginning as the end.

Hot red spilled upon her white regalia. Will she still let you splay and clothe her? Or does such proprietary now fall within the purview of his husbandly duties? All set to ‘Say You Love Me’.

You take it all. On the chin, lying down. You take it. You take four consecutive champagne flutes to the gut. You take deep breaths. You take yourself out of the girdling throng of devoted onlookers as the music starts. You take no prisoners. You take your leave.

You are weeping again.

You try to catch your tears as they fall. You think you owe Pauline that much.

The veranda is lit by scattered amber lanterns and the weeping moon. Each stone pillar stands sentinel to the maelstrom of revelry within. Things are hushed, here, but so much colder. You miss her warm fingertips against your skin. You miss everything. Shadows stretch across the tiled floor in languorous arcs.

You smell the sea.

You find a dark corner and sink into it, bracing yourself on the balustrade as you crouch to your haunches. Your body aches with the force of your suppressed sobs. Your shoulders tremble and your heart mewls with anguish.

You miss the sound of footsteps, so the voice does surprise you.

“One wedding that’s a funeral.”

You laugh, sort of. Damp and congested. You try to daub the tears away. “Ha,” you sniff, “Yeah, no, I—“

You stop.

It doesn’t seem the least bit real.

Let’s leave aside the fact that he’s The Ex Boyfriend. He shouldn’t even exist in this fucking stratosphere anymore. And that’s why he seems elusive, ghostly, even now. Emerging from the shadows like a demonic apparition.

You know Art and Tashi don’t really talk about it. They have a peace to protect. You cannot say the same of yourself.

Because in the unbroken silence of your dreams, there is a whistle. A sharp, clear necklace of sound, tightening around your throat, tugging forward. And even earlier, at the ceremony. A malevolent spirit in the room seemed to say, I won’t be ignored. And here he fucking is.

A horrid little laugh builds up in your throat, until you can’t keep it down any longer.

You laugh. It comes out like a savage chortle. Patrick stills, five feet away from you. His eyes are sad, a little surprised, and, yes, repelled.

Repelled by you and your laugh.

Suddenly, all you feel is helpless anger. You’re angrier than you’ve ever been, angrier than when they were together, angrier than when Art swooped in to take his stillwarm seat, angrier than all those times you had to be quiet and eat humble pie. You’re furious that the woman you love has jettisoned her last name, like a shorn chrysalis. And you’re livid that you have to deal with this asshole, this piece of shit pretty boy you’d thought you’d seen the last of, who is standing in front of you, on this moonlit veranda, trying to share in your mourning. He’s fucking insane.

So you say it, out loud, but not too loud, because you don’t want to make a scene. You certainly don’t want Tashi to see him.

“You’re insane,” you scoff, gaze vast and glossy with shock, “You’re fuckin’ insane, I knew it! I knew you were fuckin’ insane! I told her you were fuckin’ insane.”

You’re surprised at the viciousness in your voice. The blue in his eyes has become washedout, almost white. You can see tiny red capillaries blooming around the iris in the dark.

To his credit, Patrick has never left you hanging in your ferocity.

His brows are hoisted in defense. He gestures wildly into the reception hall, “I’m fuckin’ insane? He’s fuckin’ insane! And he’s marrying her!”

He’s all big words and movements like this is fucking Seinfeld.

You upheave yourself to a tremulous stand. “You’re both fucking insane,” you say darkly, though, at the moment, you feel a bit deranged.

Your vehemence startles him a little. Something imperceptible changes in his mien. Like he’s standing straighter. His eyes shine like glass. You’re bizarrely reminded of those National Geographic documentaries where lions size each other up before a fight.

But then his shoulders slump, and he nods, and you are almost incredulous at his patheticism. “Okay,” he breathes. He seems tiny. “You look nice.”

You blink, shifting.

You clear your throat. “Thank you. You don’t.”

And he doesn’t. He’s wearing a T-shirt and athletic shorts. And he looks vaguely showered for once, but there’s still something faintly noxious in the air he emanates.

“Yeah, well,” he shrugs, “I wasn’t gonna dress up for a wedding I wasn’t invited to.” A pause. “That’d be weird.”

For a moment, you are sure you tripped on a rock out here, and cracked your skull open on a pillar, and all of this is a stage play happening in the most masochistic corner of your mind. You have never been so disbelieving of his inanity.

“Oh, yeah, that’d be weird!” you say, eyes still wide and marginally manic. “That’d be crazy, for sure. If you dressed up for the wedding you weren’t invited to.”

He fills in the blank there—always could, for his part—that he’s shown up to the wedding. He gives a feeble chuckle. He looks awkward, really, which is… fucking something.

“When are they gonna cut the cake?” His voice is small and tentative like a child’s.

“You’re not getting any, you cow.”

He looks sincerely wounded at that, his eyes casting downward, and it borders on pitiful. But the sympathy stirred feels like a small lashing, like punishment for your lack of decorum. There is something contemptuous in that pitifulness.

You know an athlete’s body is his wound.

But you can’t bring yourself to say sorry.

You just lower your hackles with a visible exhale, which he seems to recognise as safe treadspace.

“Why are you crying?” he asks.

You snort. “Why are you here?”

He connects those dots, too, the perceptive bastard.

He clears his throat, hands in his pockets, rolls back and forth on his feet.

He stares at the ground. “You gotta say a speech?”

“Yeah, but I probably won’t.”

The ocean rushes. Luther Vandross thumps faintly from beyond. First dance is over, apparently.

Patrick peers up at you, like he’s debating saying what he’ll say next.

“Wanna go get a drink?”

Tashi jumps on the balls of her feet. Her waifishness is often a screen hiding an impressive amount of energy. PE is competition in its purest form. Every time she manages to wrest the ball from the opposing team she feels invincible. She is invincible. She dribbles the ball quickly, ponytail swishing in the air as she runs towards the goalpost.

From the corner of her eye she registers movement. She’s always hyperaware of her surroundings. That’s why she notices you sitting down in the stands, two other little girls (in the way that a year—which is all the time sundering you two—can feel like a decade when you’re fourteen) on either side of you.

One of your friends doles out UNO cards, and it is clear it is the other who had suggested this place of loitering, because she has her gaze trained conspicuously on a boy in Tashi’s class.

Tashi pivots. Makes a pointed throw. The ball goes past the goalkeeper into the net. Her team cheers. She checks to see if you have borne witness, but you are too busy stewing over your dealt cards.

She runs over to you. You look up when you hear her barrelling up the steps of the bleachers with a haste that makes them shudder.

She slides in between you and Vidya, who is unperturbed on account of her intently watching Anshu Morya pretend two basketballs are his tits and siring great gales of laughter from his audience of other fourteen year old boys.

Tashi slips a lanky arm around your shoulder.

“Hey, you,” she says, “Why didn’t you come say hi?”

You feel weird and diminutive and caught in a weird way, because Essence is looking upon her from your other side as though she is a seraph who has descended and deigned to grace you with her presence.

(Essence is in under13’s tennis, where it is wildly regarded that the girls who do under14’s tennis are the coolest people ever).

“Uh,” you drawl dumbly.

“You’re my friend now,” she squeezes your arm, pulling you closer to her side, “You have to say hi.”

Tashi seems to preen beneath the attention of these little girls, with a poise remarkably incongruous for fourteen. It feels a stark juxtaposition to the girl you’d seen, wailing, wet, and splayed in her own nascent womanhood.

You’ll come to think this a lot. Tashi Duncan, the impenetrable infanta. She tries not to show any inkling of vulnerability, if she can help it.

That’s why you always remember. You’re always recalling that blood.

And so part of you that is purely little girl thinks, I saw her first.

Even though Adidas singled her out as showing great promise. Even if Patrick Zweig won her number, and Art Donaldson, in some primevally spurning way, will have her as his bride. It was you who saw her, truly saw her, for the first time. Weeping in her own carmine deluge in a girl’s bathroom stall at Blue Vista High.

And, if you saw her first, shouldn’t you get to keep her?

You cannot bear to see her be wed.

What you’d really said, when she told you she was engaged, was a frayed and hollowed: Congratulations.

Dear God, please, no came later. It came clawing rotten from your throat like the undead, while you curled in on yourself yourself like a woman wounded, in the dark, beneath your covers.

“Dear God, please, no,” you’d whispered, lachrymose.

Your first dream, as it were, takes place on the shore of Virginia Key Beach, twenty minutes south of your neighbourhood in Allapattah.

It doesn’t look real, though.

It’s more like a film set.

That could be due to the fact that you haven’t been home in a year or due to the fact that Tashi is there, and she hasn’t been home in longer.

But you know it’s Florida because the air’s so thin and friable in California. Like the sun hasn’t fully seeped through. You know it’s summer because there’s crickets chirping in the trees behind you.

It’s dark, but the moon is bright, and, without looking, you know Tashi is just behind you, sitting on a rock halfsubmerged in the water. You’re sitting in the water right by her. You can feel her presence on your arm as you lean back. You guys are stripped to your bras and panties, like you always were. Her hair is curly.

There might have been more happening; you have a vague impression that there was talking at some point in this dream, but the details fade in the minutes after waking up. What you do retain is distressing. 

You are saying something when you are suddenly supine, and you see that Tashi is atop you, straddling you, though you cannot necessarily feel any weight of her. She doesn’t even feel warm. Her skin against you isn’t a temperature, it’s a sensation. Buzzing, like the vague shock of an electric socket.

“Hi,” she says, her voice low. 

And you’re about to say something, and then you are silenced. You wake up soon after your lips meet.

The dream haunts you for a week, until you go to a party and find a boy and kiss him instead.

The dream is not a revelation, not by a long shot, but you had thought they were a thing of girlhood. And, too, you thought Tashi was impenetrable to such things as your little desires. You’d thought, for a wretched moment, that you could be normal about a beautiful girl.

And you’re usually better at controlling yourself.

You usually can go about your day without suddenly remembering the image of Tashi leaning in.

When you do find a boy that Saturday—a short, slight, facetious glasseswearer named Noel, who prides himself on being a silent, occasionally witty observer the same way you do—you talk with him and laugh with him and kiss him and feel the world right itself. Nothing has changed, and nothing will change, if you can just get a fucking grip.

You go another few weeks without incident, until there’s another dream.

A few others.

Tashi chalks up your odd behavior to anything from exam season to homesickness. You let her.

No one knows about these dreams, with one exception.

Patrick Zweig figures you out embarrassingly quick.

All it takes is one night on the town, the three of you. A couple hours watching you replenish and rotate her moscow mules and vodka sodas and ace pineapples with a surgeon’s precision. Like forecasting weather. And he feels sure enough in his conclusions to corner you as you’re emerging from the putrid bathroom of the dive bar and say, “You got it bad for Tashi, don’t you, kid?”

You are on the drunk side of tipsy, at this point, and you blink a few times before you remember to zip your fly and respond.

All you come up with, for your part, is a weak, “Sorry?”

Patrick smiles. It doesn’t seem particularly mean, but you don’t presume to know him well enough to bet on it.

“I’m just saying,” Patrick says slowly. “Seems like you like her an awful lot. Kid.”

Your gaze goes bonehard. You don’t like him. You don’t like that you can smell his nausea-siring wintry cologne. You cannot conceptualise the scent, but it can’t be natural. He is so pretentious, he probably has it shipped from Marseille or somewhere.

He’s cracked open your ribs and plucked a raw nerve, just to watch you writhe. And there’s that obnoxious little smile, only half his mouth. Though not outright hostile, it’s not friendly.

You open your mouth. But you are so furious, you’re unable to speak. What’s more infuriating, Patrick patiently waits for you to find your words.

“Well,” you say, steadying your feet like you’re prepared to brawl this guy, “What are you gonna do about it?”

“Not a goddamn thing.”

And you must look surprised, because Patrick laughs.

“May these be the worst of our days.”

The pub is a dive, just a short stumble from the wedding venue. The air is dense with the acerbic musk of piss and spirits, danker than the worst of times. It’s a visceral contrast to the beauty of the union, and it’s one of which you both feel deserving.

You sit on a slightly cracked stool at the mucky wooden bar. You nurse a beer, and a broken heart, and Pat is on his third scotch in as many minutes. The bartender keeps giving him these nervous glances.

He gurgles out a pfft as he tips his glass to you, “Yeah, and the best of theirs.”

You regard the middle distance with a sort of weary disgust. A miserable guilt. You know what he’s portending. It’s all downhill from here. But you cannot deny that these are not unkind heights from which to fall. Garlanded by intricate golden sconces casting pristine white marble awash with warmth and love. You two cannot wish them ill in a way that even means anything.

“Fuck, they’re so happy,” you moan, “We suck.”

You feel your lungs grow achy. You are drowning in selfpity and selfpity’s lesser endearing cousin, envy. Patrick seems to bear it better. He releases a noise. A laugh maybe; a bitter, bloodaddled thing.

“Hey, I think the one of us wearing the bridesmaids dress places significantly lower on the Ultimately Fucked Over scale.”

He spins his glass around on the sticky tabletop. The scraping sound makes you envision ground bonematter.

“This colour wouldn’t suit you,” you mumble, swinging your beer idly by its neck.

Patrick’s brows seem to knit at this.

“Yes it would,” he grumbles.

“I always hated you.”

He quirks a brow, looking at you askance.

“I don’t think that’s true.”

You make a face. “It is.” Your eyes close for a moment, as though envisaging which set of words would spurn him best. “And he’s better for her than you.”

Patrick’s mouth parts into a slackened smirk. He laughs again. “And you think you’re better for her than both of us.”

“Yes, I do.”

“Always the bridesmaid…” he singsongs.

You feel your skin heat with something sore and cloying.

“Oh fuck you.” Your eyes roll as well as they are able without you getting vertigo. “I fucked her last.”

His smile grows like a burgeoning parasite. His head is still hung between his shoulders, but he peers up at you through the dark veil of his lashes.

He tongues the inside of his cheek like he’s suppressing laughter, like he now thinks it wouldn’t be kind. “No kidding.”

You frown at this, at his amusement.

“What, you don’t think I fucked her?”

Patrick shrugs. Hums vaguely.

“Wow.”

“Not in, like, a homophobic way, or—“

“Wow.”

He snorts.

“I’m sorry.”

You shake your head. “You’re not.” You swig a mouthful of beer, relishing faintly in the acrid aftertaste. “And I’m not either. Fucked her after you broke up, licked you clean out her pussy, you’re nothing.” You stand up and close the distance between you, stumbling into him, your forehead thunking against his as you draw the word out childishly. Nothingggg-uh.

He chuckles noiselessly. “Oh yeah?”

You straighten clumsily, leaning back, but you’re still stood between his open legs, and you brace your hand against his thigh. “Yeah,” you say.

Patrick narrows his eyes at you. He inhales a breath with an air of the long since victorious.

He gives it a moment before he says it. You’re lifting your bottle to the seam of your lips.

“I fucked her two months ago.”

You slam the green glass against the bartop, eyes wide as canyons as you turn to look at him, your forgone sip dribbling down your chin. “What?” you enunciate sharply.

He leans back in his chair, raising his hands as if shirking blame. But something wicked gleams in his eyes.

You scoff. “Bull. Shit.”

He tilts his head to the side, resting an elbow against the bar, his gaze flickering between your face and the beer trickling down your neck.

He shrugs. Hums.

Your eyes search his face frenetically. Your fingers claw into the flesh of his thigh. “He doesn’t know?”

Now, something like guilt manages to sniff him out. He glances off obliquely, his throat working around a swallow. His expression is hard to discern. Swimming between guilt and a strange sort of defiance.

“Wow,” you drawl protractedly. You’re almost impressed. “You’re an ass. You said that because you wanted to make me feel bad, you wanted to one up me, like you get points for fucking her—“

“A game that you started, by the way.”

“Hey.” You lean into his space again, finding his eyes with a sniper’s determination. “Hey. You’re a piece of shit.”

His jaw works against his skin.

“Uh-huh.”

“No, you are. You are, and you know it.” Your nails embed themselves in his thigh, your other hand coming to place a finger in the hollow of his chest. “Because no matter what,” your voice is low and gravelly now, “You’re done. You’re out. I’m in.”

You lean back to look him over, as though admiring your work, but he only wears a plaintive, resigned sort of smile.

“You think that’s better?”

His voice is so soft as to seep like smoke down your spine. Your nails unearth themselves from his skin. You have not drawn blood, but morning bruises would not startle him.

A long few moments pass.

“This is what you do now, you’re all profound?” you murmur.

He shrugs, a rueful simper on his mouth. “Eh,” he hums dismissively.

You sigh. Remove your hands from him and stumble back onto your stool.

“You’d look like shit in this dress,” you say, at length.

“Maybe.”

You tip your beer into your mouth, even though it has run dry.

There’s a bit of a moue on your face. You trace the sticky outlines on the tabletop, focusing intently on the grooves. “I look amazing in this dress.”

“You’d look amazing out of it.”

Your brows furrow. You look up at him. “Dude, what?”

Patrick blinks. He seems genuinely surprised.

“Aren’t we gonna…?”

“No, what? Why would you—?”

“Oh, I just—“

“What?” Your face is skewed confusedly.

“Because we—“

Your phone trembles against the bar.

“Hold on,” you say, and then, grin growing, “Darling Ms Duncan,” you croon melodically as you hoist the device to your cheek.

Her verdant meadow laughter on the other end. “Donaldson,” she chuckles. You can hear the vague commotion of the festivities ensconcing her.

You frown.

“Don’t hurt me, Starshine.”

“You missed your speech.”

You gasp, your voice going all light and airy the way it does when you’re feigning guilt. “What?” you drawl, “No…”

Tashi cottons on, and you can hear her teasing smile as she indulges you, “Oh,” she hums in fauxsympathy, “Oh, yeah, uh-huh.”

“No way,” you grouse softly, “I’m so sorry.”

“Come back before we cut the cake,” says Tashi, “Where are you, by the way?”

“Oh, I’m in a bar, you won’t believe who I ran into.”

“Who?”

Patrick steels to alertness in front of you, shaking his head in abject alarm.

You smile.

“Patrick Zweig. I think we’re gonna have sex tonight probably. Compound our sadness. It’ll be really pathetic.”

Patrick looks at you like you’ve walloped his puppy.

Tashi is silent on the other end. You know well the firm, seraphic way her face has set in anger.

“That’s not funny,” she says, and it occurs to you that, if what Patrick’s told you is true, then it really isn’t funny.

You bite your lip. “Oh.”

“That’s—“ she takes a breath; you can picture the heat wash off of her. She can be very purposeful with her emotions. “Hey, listen,” her voice has softened, “Please come back.”

“Okay, Ms Duncan.”

“Come back and eat the cake, you chose the cake.”

A simper slithers over your lips. “We chose the cake.” Your husband was somewhere sticking his prick in a green juice, you don’t add. “It’s kind of our cake, in a way.”

“Well,” Tashi hums, unconvinced, but you can hear her smile.

“Yeah, I’m coming, worry not, my dear. Save me a dance.”

You drop the phone.

Patrick is still looking at you like the apocalypse has been announced.

You roll your eyes.

“Put your dick down, she didn’t believe me,” you say. “Because you showing up to her wedding would be crazy.”

He chuckles dryly, but you do not miss the relief in his bones.

He cocks his head wryly, “Not really, considering…”

You stand up again, elbow leaning on the bar, your temple against your knuckles as you gape at him, sort of mystified. “You’re not bullshitting me,” you say, the corner of your open mouth quirking up incredulously, “Like actually.”

Patrick shrugs. “Yeah.”

“Where?”

“Atlanta.”

“Fuck!” You smack your hand down on the table, looking around as though to share in your disbelief with a makebelieve audience. “And since then, have you…? With anyone?”

“Dude, that was two months ago,” he says, like you’re a bit slow, or perhaps like he’s offended by the notion, “Yes.”

You click your tongue. “Ah, shit. You should’ve said no. Would’ve sucked you off, seen if I could taste her.”

Your hip ghosts absently against his spread open knee.

“You can still try,” he offers.

You shake your head, stifling a smile. “Nah.”

“God, we’re the worst.”

“You’re the worst.” You let your smile divulge itself.

“We should get married.”

“Fuck no.”

Patrick lets himself look putout by this, eyes going downcast. You’ve always thought his smile—really his whole face—looks vulnerable, like soft bread. He looks like the perfect sad boy, the victim rather than the perpetrator.  

“Oh,” says Patrick.

You hit him in the arm. “Don’t do that. You know it’d suck.”

��I don’t think so, actually,” he muses.

“What do we have in common? Like, sincerely. Besides her. You can’t build a marriage around a person who isn’t in the marriage.”

He makes a face as though to say this is an evidently incorrect statement. He gestures vaguely in the direction of Art and Tashi’s wedding venue.

That gets a laugh out of you.

“Oh, you pathetic asshole.” You steady yourself on his thigh again, this time with your fist. “No one has mentioned your name once today.”

You know it’s a low blow.

He returns your smile, though his is sad and weird again. They’ve all forgotten about me, it seems to say, Maybe you’ve forgotten about me, too.

Ugh, you think. Fucking Patrick who can’t stop being fucking neglected by everyone.

You clear your throat softly. “See? You don’t wanna marry me.”

Patrick lets out a depleted sigh, like he, too, is not so thrilled with the notion. And you’ve heard better proposal stories. He looks like a Labrador who’s figured out he has to go to the vet. He kicks the edge of the barstool with his sneaker.

“I do. I still do. That was fucked, but I still would.” He looks angry and lonely and resigned, and a little happy too, weirdly. “We should have one of those, ‘by the time we’re thirty—’”

“Thirty?”

“Fifty.”

You like how quickly he bends, in that moment. It has you picturing flower arrangements. But you narrow your eyes, a wry gleam to your smile.

“I think I’ll still have a shot, at fifty.”

“I won’t,” he says, with the smile of the recently condemned.

“I think you will, actually.” You regard him sort of pensively. And maybe it’s a bit clinical. “I think age is gonna humble you. And then you’ll be fifty and grey and, like, penitent. Plus fifty’s still virile, generally. And I’ve heard good things about your situation down there. Just—“

You push off the bar, your fist leaning down more heavily on his thigh as your other hand comes up to his forehead, as though checking his temperature, before sweeping upwards and pushing his hair back. You’re on your toes—further on your toes, considering the heels—assessing his hairline closely, your nose grazing his forehead and your hips certainly slotted between his.

Patrick makes an insincere attempt to push you off. “Hey, what—“

“Did your maternal grandfather have hair?”

He hesitates, “What, my mom’s dad?”

“Mhm.”

He feels that breath against his brow.

“To this day,” he shrugs, “But he’s an asshole.”

“That’s good news.” You lean back.

“That my gramps is an asshole?”

“No, the—“ You gesture to his hair again, “That’s how you know, I think. If you’ll bald. Is your maternal grandfather.”

“You think? Didn’t you do health science?”

“Didn’t you do fuck all and doesn’t everyone hate you?”

He seems unharmed, if enchanted, by this persistent claim.

He points again in the general direction of the wedding beyond the brick wall of the bar.

“They may hate me. You don’t hate me.”

You follow his finger like everything between you and that marble dance floor will collapse, and you will be given a clear view of that proprietary, knowing way Art Donaldson holds her as they dance.

You look back at him. “You really seem to believe that. It makes me concerned.”

“For me?”

“No, for myself. I don’t like that I’m putting out such false vibes.”

He is charmed by this verbiage.

He laughs, like he’s still unconvinced. “Okay.”

He holds it against you, of course.

He doesn’t do a goddamn thing, as promised, but he holds it against you.

Patrick doesn’t like the college parties, but he manages. He doesn’t like feeling like an interloper, really. Doesn’t like that Art and Tashi have this fully functional ecosphere in which he cannot take root—like he’s some sort of invasive strain of alien vegetation.

As soon as he can, Patrick excuses himself from the purgatory of social interaction with whichever set of strangers Tashi calls her friends. He extricates his arm from around her waist and catches your eye as he goes to stand, mimes taking a drink, and watches with relief as you narrow your eyes but push out of your chair and head toward the bar. You order four shots of something.

“You’re lasting longer than I thought,” he says as soon as he’s close enough to you. He takes one shot—vodka, he thinks as it slides down his throat—then another from the bar top. “You were making that face, though.”

You scowl up at him. You know exactly what he’s talking about. “I was not.”

Patrick snorts. “If that helps you sleep at night. I know I won’t be sleeping.”

He bites his lip and does a crude mimicry of delivering backshots with his pelvis, his hands holding an imaginary set of hips, and you suddenly feel beset with a strange nausea. You defeatedly slide toward him another one of those shots.

“What’s the point of her having you as a friend if you aren’t going to support us?”

“I bought you three fucking shots,” you say. You quickly throw the last one back before he can get at it, because, by now, you at least know Patrick well enough to know he’s nearly about to make a grab for it. 

He grins. “Kid, if Art had won that game, I’d make my pass at you ten times over.”

That’s enough to turn the nausea into chunder, and you quickly push past him and book it to the bathroom as it blooms up your throat.

You see your tendons as racketstrings, as you crouch over the toilet.

Taut and crossed over one another inextricably.

He’ll always have that over you, the tennis. You never had the tenacity for it. But it means he has a whole other way to upset her, too.

You take comfort in the fact that Tashi is quick to stand and take you into her arms when you reappear, halftorn, wrung out. She’s happy to take you back to your room, and nurse you for the night.

Patrick doesn’t begrudge. He’s fine to let you have your little pleasures. She’s still his, is the thing.

You’re confused about the Art Donaldson of it all.

He has a warmth in his eyes. And a mischief and a validation. He’s like Patrick, in that he watches—he watches very closely. But where Patrick has always seemed content, in this strange, visceral way, to take what he can get, Art feels like he’s waiting for… something. He’s sort of always fighting with Patrick, but they’re taking care of one another, strangely. He has this weird, symbiotic desire to know more about Tashi and Patrick’s relationship, which—well—you’d be canting to pass judgement.

Grey, grey skies out the windows of Tashi’s dorm room. It’s the most neutral space for you all. Bundled in jackets and hats on beer runs. Fingers freezing as you sit on the floor and play UNO, bumming and trading all of Patrick’s cigarettes because it’s all you can think to do. It rains all day. Patrick tucks his fingers under Tashi’s thigh, kisses the corner of her mouth.

Art has a cold, passes it on to Patrick, and now you’re all incubating it in this cloistered space that soon becomes littered with used tissues and cough drops and tornopen packets of TheraFlu.

Patrick is glad to help no one feel left out. He announces as much—I don’t want you guys to feel left out—with this quizzical simper, as Tashi places down a wild drawfour and declares blue. And maybe she’s doing something foul and saccharine like looking right into Pat’s eyes when she says that.

“I don’t think you have any blues,” says Art, sliding four cards from the deck, wearing his own quizzical simper. “I think you just want us to think you have blues, I think you’re playing smart.”

You can tell by the way Patrick grips his beer bottle that he thinks Art is flirting with her.

There seems to be an odd, prophetic thought you two share.

If the two of them—Tashi and Art—were to get married, they would have golden brown babies like Renaissance cherubs while you and he sat in the dark with the rest of the godless degenerate art.

So, in some way, perhaps, you’d seen it all coming.

When Patrick picks up the phone, shoves it between shoulder and ear, and takes the sorelyneeded, sweetyolkdripping, heavily hotsauced bagel sandwich out of his mouth so he can mumble, “Yeah?” he does not expect the first words across the receiver to be,

“Hey, you fuck. I have your shit.”

Patrick rolls his eyes and takes a large bite, craning over his open palm to keep egg and cheese off his Puma shirt. This is a time when brands like Puma still want Patrick Zweig wearing their shirts.

“Uh-huh,” he says.

“You know, this feels like Christmas. Do you know that? This feels like Christmas day for me. You think you’re this special boy who can have whatever he wants. You’re bullshit. The bell tolls for thee. Your ex, I should note, has bent over and spread her cheeks for me.”

And you feel a way, about the coarseness of your words, the fissures in your mouth. But this isn’t about demeaning Tashi. It’s about flaying him.

“Dude.”

“Her beautiful, soft, floralscented cheeks.”

Patrick hangs up on you, which feels like how you imagine the President feels after election day.

You wait for him to call back.

It’s less than a minute before your phone shudders. He puts you on speaker.

“Are you done?” he says.

“Dude,” you say, “Never ever. Never ever ever.”

“How much for shipping?”

“Fuck you, coward, you’re still in town.”

There’s a revolting, wet sort of noise as he chews. And it is between these chews that he says, “You want to see me, then? Make sure I’m miserable?”

“I don’t need to see you to make sure you’re miserable, your whole life is miserable,” you say.

Patrick chuckles, the sound garbled by his food. It’s not the noise that makes you recoil from the receiver. You are more disgusted at the prospect of him being fed. Okay, sure—you, in your sadism, have been picturing him gaunt and desolate on the floor. And perhaps you are unmoored by how coherent and gutful he sounds now.

It’s harder to hide sorrow in your eyes. Maybe you do just want to see his eyes, and make sure.

“You’re real classy, kid, I think I’ll miss you most of all,” he swallows. “Where d’you want to meet?”

When you return to the reception hall, the cake is still unsevered and the music has gone slow. Otis Redding, ‘These Arms of Mine’.

Tevin keeps a clammy hand on your midback, the other slackly holding your fingers up.

You’re blinking brine from your eyes and sniffing shallowly. Tev’s giving you a chary sort of look, slightly frowning. He clears his throat.

“If things don’t work out with Lainey, I could marry you.”

But he doesn’t sound too keen on the idea. Which you think is a bit comical, because you've smelled his room, and you've seen him in braces, so, ostensible case for grooming aside, even you're not so desperate.

Still, you squeeze his shoulder lightly through his blazer. You clear your throat, roll your eyes. You let this child sway you side to side, and think of yourself at seventeen, varnishing Tashi’s toenails and daubing them clean with mephitic acetone. Over and over. Trying every colour. One time, you forgot to open a window, and the fumes had you two flaked out on the carpet.

“That’s nice, Tevvy, how’s that promposal coming along?”

In the bar a dozen minutes off campus, you slide the sloppily taped Amazon box across the table.

A microcosm of his pathos condensed into 18 x 12 inches. Each item in isolation meaningless, but altogether painting an intimate lithograph of a man discarded. All tender and immiscible.

Jacket. Toothbrush. Edgefrayed leather wristband. An old iPod with cracked plastic. A pack of cigarettes, crushed and reformed. A small bottle of aftershave. A few crumpled receipts. Unbranded notebook. Expensive fountain pen he probably stole from the bank. A plastic cardholder and a wallet, both empty. A pack of gum.

It feels a bit stupid that Patrick should come all this way for a couple knickknacks. You could have just let him Venmo you for the shipping, and it may have hurt his pride all the same. But you take pleasure in knowing that he was hoping you wouldn’t be the one to meet him here.

“How’s Tashi?” he asks.

You give a small, malicious laugh.

The predictability dissolves none of the abject carnal rapture there.

Of course it’s why he came. He wants to know all about your (singular) dear Ms Duncan. He still has a glimmer of faith that she will change her mind. Even though you both know the girl well enough to know that’s not a thing she does too often.

If you hated him, you would tell him that Tashi is thriving. Healing like a child of God. She’s a new woman, never better, can’t wipe the smile off her face.

But maybe you don’t hate him that much after all.

“She’s a fucking wreck. Moping, crying in the lecture halls, shouting your name in the rain. It’s pathetic.”

A twinge of a smile crosses Patrick’s face, the petty bitch.

“You know I meant her knee,” he says, then takes a sip of his beer.

You cross your arms on the table, then retract them with a wince once you feel how sticky the wood is.

“I don’t know,” you say while rubbing some gunk off your elbow. “I don’t know that, Patrick. You know I think you’re a raging assface.”

Patrick raises his eyebrows. “Have you guys ever fucked?”

His faith, glimmer as it may, is not without its fractures. He has a needling, bonechewing suspicion that this may be the last time you two ever see one another, that you occupy the same orbit. So he thinks he’s allowed to ask.

You just glare at him in cold annoyance. Probably fantasising about smashing his beer bottle over his head. Patrick is familiar with the expression.

“Patrick, please don’t talk to me that way.” There’s violence in your voice that’s probably not just aggrieved feminism.

He knows you’re a woman mutilated about Tashi. He considers saying something even shittier, but what’s the point? You’re not a threat to him anymore. He’s out of the running.

“Fine. Have you guys ever made love?”

Before you can bite his head off, he raises his hands in defense.

“Not trying to be disrespectful, or suggest you have casual pussy and not committed long term lesbian relationship pussy. It’s just… if I figured it out.”

There’s a moment of quiet.

“And, y’know, if she’s single and clearly in a bad place, maybe it’s worth… taking advantage.”

You are at once shocked and maybe even appreciative of his forthright shittiness. It gives you slight confidence, despite yourself.

Call him oldfashioned—or, well, remarkably progressive—but he’s rooting for you kids.

You’re both the perfect combination of hot and insufferable. Stupid and insane.

He knows you weren’t lying; Tashi probably is a wreck. It sometimes makes his tongue go metallic, the thought of her rendered so still and helpless. Maybe it’s better he only got a glimpse of that anguish.

So he’s been ousted, that’s fine. That doesn’t mean you need to dump the baby out with the bathwater. He knows she needs someone.

You sigh. “I’m getting a drink.”

You stand and walk toward the bar. You return with the same beer he’s drinking. He wonders if you got it just because it’s the cheapest, or if you actually like it.

“We never did anything,” you say, picking at the moist label with your thumbnail. “Well. We did everything. But not that.”

Patrick nods. “There’s time.”

“She’s hurt.”

“She’d be lying down.”

She is lying down.

The sky goes gold in Allapattah.

You’re by her desk, looking over her colourcoded portfolios and notebooks and Stanford paraphernalia and assorted photos and inspirational posters. You smile amusedly as you trace your finger over a WINNER cheer banner and a Never Give up, Give 100% Instead! placard.

“Mom says stay over for dinner,” Tashi mumbles, rifling through a Teen People. “Should I ask for ‘Writing’s On The Wall’ or ‘Fanmail’ for my birthday?”

“Mmm...”

You pick up her Girl Scout badges, look them over.

“Put them back in the same order!” Tashi warns, unable to help herself. But she’s spent a lot of time sorting them.

You look up. You give her a blithe, nervous smile.

You shuffle to the bed and knee onto the mattress, collapsing into her. The two of you an interwreathed coalescence of tepid girlskin.

“I have ‘Fanmail’,” you mumble into the skin of her neck.

You hear Tev and Tre roughhousing like dogs in the living room.

She gets you alone in a small, ornate sidehall before the ceremony.

She slides her arms around your shoulders and hugs you tightly. Her skin is soft, balmy and fragrant as summertime honey. The flowery milk aroma of her hair imbues you.

“You remember Ozymandias?” she says, withdrawing and placing her palms upon your shoulders. There is a conspiratorial twinkle of glee in her eye.

“… The poem?” Your brows draw in with a vague scepticism.

Your throat is still fleshtender with the sobbing. Your eyes moist and caustic. But your makeup, for Pauline’s part, looks great. You’re determined to maintain your ramshackle semblance of civility for as long as possible.

Tashi kneads your skin. “Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”

She clasps your shoulders and spins you around so your back is against her, and you stumble shakily to keep your strappy gold stilettos off her satiny white train. Her arms slink back around you, her thumb caressing the faint protrusion of your collarbone. You feel the sly grin on her lips as she creeps her fingers beneath your hair, sweeping it away and pressing her mouth softly against the gossamertender skin beneath your ear.

“That’s what I’m going for,” she whispers, making a flourishing sort of gesture with her hands in front of you, as if mapping the splay of a billboard. “A grand, glorious, eternal, and yet ultimately doomed endeavour. Something that stands tall and proud, resplendent and beautiful, but, in time, all turns to dust and fades into nothing but a vague memory.”

You shudder with laughter, the bare skin of her chest heated against that of your shoulderblade.

“What?” Tashi giggles softly against the shell of your ear.

“Nothing,” you grin, shaking your head.

You like, in fact, the tender morbidity of her words. That there is a melancholy in her hope. This union, like any, may well be ephemeral. Tashi Duncan, your romantic realist. You hope those are her vows. Wouldn't that throw the kid for a loop.

At the altar, you set your gaze heavenward, determined not to weep once more. This way, the sorrow has nowhere to fall but back within you. And so you do not even see her, as she flows down the aisle and embarks upon her ethereal odyssey.

You don’t think you’d have even been able to take it, anyway.

To bear witness to her metamorphosis under hallowed eaves.

But you feel it. The transience of power. Nothing beside remains.

Pam drives you two to Virginia Key Beach every Sunday after service at the COGIC. You are dithering, at first, about shucking off your clothing. The sea is such a vast, living thing. Nothing like a poky stall in the school bathroom. But, by week three, your Sunday best is sandstrewn, and you and Tashi are giggling things of cotton panties and training bras and seawater.

The waves feel giant and warm.

It fills your mouth and nostrils. The ocean envelops you. The water lifts you up. She mounts your back and drags you under. You laugh so hard you choke a bit, coughing up salt. She laughs even harder as she slaps your back unhelpfully. Her head is bent over yours, ducking to check that you’re okay, but she’s still simpering impishly. The next wave pulls you under and your lips brush against her lips, almost by accident.

You hear her small, hiccupy gasp.

You can feel the way her fingers scrabble against your shoulders. She sinks her little nails in. That Thursday, you had painted them blue.

You lie in a nest of towels afterwards, exhausted and depleted, like children after a bath.

You reach out with your hand and take a few of her wet curls between your fingers.

“When I’m tennis famous, I’m gonna marry Justin Timberlake,” she murmurs, resting her head on her arm, still panting.

“Can I be your flower girl?” you say, running your fingers through her hair.

You were a flower girl at your aunt’s wedding last Summer. You found the job so enchanting. All the doting gazes, the petals between your fingers. It doesn’t occur to you to want for more, at this time.

“You can be…” she mumbles, peeking at you over her arm. “Everything.”

It’s a strange, untenable idea, a thing not named. There are things you cannot be.

But you understand completely. “You too.”

“I wanna be a butterfly,” she hums to herself. “And fly away.”

Your lips twitch. “With Justin?”

Tashi’s face glows a little. “With you.”

Like all Floridian nights, the one of the wedding is humid. You can picture the way the feathery curls along Tashi’s hairline will start to rouse. You can picture, too, the way Art Donaldson’s stupid nose will caress that soft hair, how he will breathe her in. You don’t much want to picture anything beyond that.

There is so much moonlight to see by. It spills across Patrick’s skin in soft luminous beams.

The sand is damp between your bare toes, the satin of your dress growing wet beneath your bum. You are ensconced by a warm, saline squall.

The sea laves the shore like a hungry tongue.

The cake is a pistachio sponge, bedaubed with rosesuffused cream, the layers laden with a tart raspberry treacle, and the frangible ivory of white chocolate. You filch two slices, wrap them in monogrammed serviettes. A&T. Awful and tragic, he had joked bleakly as you clumsily took off your shoes on the foreshore. Agonising and traumatic, you’d offered. You went back and forth like this for a bit.

Patrick’s cigarette gilds his face in a copper glow. His eyes are trained pensively on swathes of sea foam.

Your phone garbles between your feet. Hums—bleary, melancholic—with Amy Winehouse.

And now, the final frame. Love is a losing game.

The cake is good. The cake is fucking amazing. You’d said that, at the tasting. Fuck, this is amazing, had been your honeyed moan. It was enough for Tashi to make the decision. You feel bad, now, lapping frosting off your fingers in her absence, your sugarcoated teeth.

Patrick blows the smoke away from you, disperses the acrid cloud with a fan of his hand. The wind will waft, though; sweep some of that fetor back to you. And all you do is breathe.

Selfprofessed, profound…

Patrick spares you a glance. Then does gawping a doubletake.

“Fuck, you’re not crying.” He sniffs deeply, his hand swiping roughly the wet skin of his cheek.

Your eyes widen.

“Oh, shit, did we start?”

He breathes a dilapidated, spitladen laugh, scrubbing harsh his cheeks with his fingers.

The heavy rivulets keep cascading. Washing his skin.

“Yeah!” he scoffs wetly, sweeping his wrist beneath his nose, sniffing again.

You stifle a rueful simper, wiping your fingers off on the napkin. “Ah, fuck, sorry.”

He gives another watery laugh.

“You’re a dick,” he grins.

And then you’re grinning too, though your brows quaver with concern, “No, oh my God, sorry! I cried a lot earlier.”

He’s shaking his head, freshets of tears still trickling down. “You’re an ass, I can’t believe—“

“I’ve never seen you cry,” you smile, something like wonder misting your eyes.

He chuckles, his cig singeing down, the smoke pirouetting upwards.

“No one has.”

You beam, but your shoulders tense with guilt. “Fuck!” you giggle, rumpling the serviette and resting it in the sand, shifting where you sit, and straightening as if centring yourself. “I’m sorry, I’ll do it now.”

“No, you won’t. You’re laughing.”

You laugh loudly, dropping your forehead to your hoisted knees.

“That’s closer than you think!” you say.

Patrick takes a deep, terminal drag of his cigarette—the ember coruscating violently—before extinguishing it in the sand beside him.

“Fuck,” he whispers, dipping his face into his shirt collar and using the fabric to swipe at his nostrils, snivelling more.

Then his shoulders fall. Elbows resting on his knees, hands falling slack between them.

The song starts up again.

For you I was aflame…

The ocean whispers soft susurrations against the beachfront.

You are struck, suddenly, by his silverveiled visage. Your gaze strokes the slope of his nose, the arch of his cheekbone. You are so enthralled by this wet gleam of his milky skin. There’s something about that; about his unencumbered tearflood and the faraway joy of the party.

Before you can stop yourself, you move in.

Your noses bump. There’s a moment where your teeth clack together and Patrick makes an annoyed noise, but it’s quickly replaced by something that sounds more like pleasure as he turns to fit his mouth against yours more easily.

You taste his tears and mouth and tongue. His hand comes to cradle the back of your neck. Your blotchy eyes flutter closed. You dig your fingers into the sand and close your fists around it. You taste the smoke and the cake and the oceanfront. It’s all a bit warm and desperate.

You think of the seaspray, the burgeoning goosebumps on your arms. You think of your mouth, mollified against his own, his hot spit on your gums, his tongue, hotter still, stroking yours. How he tips your head back so your jaw can fall further, so there is more of you available. You think of mouths. Of course, you think of Tashi’s mouth. Her smile in the mirror.

There’s a poignant tremor to Amy’s voice, as she sings,

Memories mar my mind.

And you are struck by this phrasing. And this is, perhaps, why and when the tears find you. And the sobs come soon after.

Patrick pulls away with a damp little noise.

“Oh my God.”

You’re weeping. Your shoulders start to tremble with spasmodic sobs, and you are bawling. Your face swims hot with a mire of tears and snot. He is not overtly repulsed. Well, you would not know for sure, because you cannot see him. But you feel him shift a little closer, and put a hand on your bare shoulder, his palm flushed and calloused. He gives you a few resigned pats.

“This is not what I wanted, for the record,” he says, unbothered by your head falling against his chest. “Because now I’m gonna feel like shit. Thinking, wow, was the kiss so shit that it made her cry like a baby?”

You lift your hands and cover your face, sobbing harder.

“Which,” Patrick continues, thumb caressing idly the sweat-tacky skin of your shoulder now, “I know that’s not it.”

A beat.

“Do you wanna tell me that’s not it?”

“That’s not it,” you blubber, smearing mucus off your lips.

You pull away from him dragging your hands down your face. When you look at him, you’re sure you look a sorry sight. Tender with despair, all messy, smeared, and febrile. You sniff shallowly.

“You were right,” you say weakly, “It’s not better.”

“What’s not better?” His voice, you note somewhere in the miasma of your sorrow, is uncharacteristically kind.

Your lip quivers, “I’ll have to be there when he puts a baby in her.” Your face has twisted in anguish and you are wailing once more, sobbing loud and earnest.

Patrick blinks at you, “Jesus.”

But he pulls you closer again. Turns your body, in fact, so you are leaning back into his raised lap and he is halfway cradling you like a baby. You weep into his shirt, painting it wet and viscid, and the scent of his awful cologne only makes you sadder.

“Oh my God,” Patrick says again, rubbing up and down your arm, and he sounds a bit amused, which is a little fair. “He might not,” he offers.

You snivel loudly and pull back, swallowing your sobs and casting him a disappointed glower.

“Yeah, ok. He probably will.”

You fall hard against his soaked front again, whimpering feebly. Patrick looks down at you.

“Hey, we can do that, too,” he offers now, in a pick-yourself-up sort of tone that juxtaposes so fiercely with the proposition he’s actually making, you nearly laugh. “We time it right, they can be the same age. Then we’ll put ours in the same school as theirs, and teach ours to just fuckin’ decimate the shit.”

And now you are laughing. You’re still teary and frail so it hurts all the same as a sob, but he can see you’re smiling, so he continues,

“Just everything. Fuckin’ grades, boom. Sports, boom. Instruments, boom. Our one’s gonna play two cellos, a piano, a guitar, and an oboe, all at the same time. He’ll use his fingers, toes, and dick,” says Patrick, and he sounds utterly sincere and emphatic, even as he’s sort of smirking now, because you’re laughing even harder. “And we’ll tell him to bully theirs, too. Every day just ‘oh you’re a piece of shit, you’re ugly, your parents’ marriage was doomed from the beginning’, and their fucker’ll be like ‘no I’m not’ and ‘fuck you’—”

You’re tickled, too, by the voice he puts on to imitate these fictitious children. How he talks all low and churlish like he’s instead caricaturing a worldweary pensioner.

“—and ‘I wish you weren’t so much cooler and better than me, and didn’t fuck my girlfriend, and my mom’.”

You make a face.

“Don’t make it weird.”

“Alright, fine. He won’t fuck her,” Patrick concedes, “That’d be fucking legendary if he did, though. But he won’t.”

You are, again, charmed by this, by how easily he yields. It makes you think of a nursery and fresh, boneless toes.

You rest your face on the wet of your weeping on his chest, and you feel a bit humiliated. But this isn’t so bad, as far as humiliations go.

“What if it’s a girl?” you croak, your words halfway muffled by where your cheek is squashed against him.

“Even better.”

“Where would we live? I don’t wanna go to New York, I don’t have the fortitude.”

The worst of your sobbing has waned to stillness, but he’s still rubbing your arm.

“We can shack up in the Midwest. Somewhere chill.” His leg starts shifting beneath you, and you think he wants another cigarette, but he doesn’t move. Instead, “Omaha?”

You shrug. You hated not being in Florida, but still. You shrug. “Sure. And what’ll you do? Coach? Or become like a blue collar fuckin’…” you trail off vaguely. “I can’t even picture it.”

“I always wanted to be a fireman.”

“That’s sexy.”

His laugh, when it sounds, echoes through his chest like there’s a cavern where his heart should be. Which you don’t think is such an unthinkable idea.

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah,” you nod. You clear your throat. “Especially because you could die at any moment. So if we end up hating each other, I can just wait for you to die in a fire, and, that way, I don’t have to murder you. Then our kid doesn’t lose both parents at once.”

He pauses as if considering this. His leg shifts again. “Fuck,” he murmurs after a while.

“Sorry.”

“No, don’t ruin it.”

You clear your throat again. “And a dog,” you say.

“Fuck, yeah, a dog,” he says in his most New Yorkian fashion. Like a traveling salesman who needs you to look at this vacuum and do it quickly. It’s pretty funny. “It can eat theirs.”

You make a reproachful sort of noise. “Not everything has to be—“

“Okay, fine, yeah, just a dog,” he cedes again. The nursery, in your mind, is astralthemed. “Just a dog for the two of us. And our Nobel Prize winning child. I’ve always wanted one named Bagel.”

You think he can somehow hear your mildly scathing New York musings.

“A kid or a dog?”

“A dog.”

“We can name the dog Bagel,” you shrug, as though agreeing to dinner plans, and the tender pulse of a postweep migraine begins to encroach upon you, like the waxing sea. “Can we name the kid Bagel?”

“No.”

The song is still on loop.

Five story fire as you came…

You think of Patrick in sootscuffed bunker gear and a fireman’s helmet.

“Bagel Zweig,” you mumble wryly, your skull beginning to thump with the ache of your patheticism.

Patrick laughs. Lifts you off his knees, unceremoniously but not unkindly, and begins to rifle in his pockets for his Camel pack.

A sudden bout of cheering sounds from the reception, flashing taunting beams in purple hues. You wonder what the fuck they have to be so happy about. You sigh. Perhaps, too, did people cheer, at the mortal fall of Ozymandias. You think about that. That loss of power. That loss.

[scarletlizzard]

This One's For You

Parings: Elizabeth Olsen x Female Reader

Tags: smut, fluff, fingering

a/n: Little short one shot of you and Lizzie at the Golden Globes. Thanks for reading!

"Sweetheart.. I've missed you so much.." she licks her lips after she speaks, her emerald eyes peering down at you.

You giggle, watching as she takes another step closer. Lizzie presses the front of her body flush against yours. You feel the lace of her white dress rub against the exposed areas of skin on your body. Her hands, those hands that look always look so soft and delicate, rest on your hips. Her grip is strong as she holds you against her. You feel her fingers trail along your arm, making your body shiver. Lizzie smirks at the sight of it.

She always loved watching how worked up you would get over the slightest touch. She loved how well your body reacted to hers, how it was so clear you needed her. Lizzie thought about it constantly.

"It's only been a couple hours, Lizzie.. you need to get back before they start wondering where you are," you say with a smile, keeping your voice low to a whisper.

"I don't care how long it's been, darling. I need you every second.." she leans down, letting her red stained lips touch your ear, "..of every single day. I can never get enough of you, you know that sweetheart.." you can't help the small moan escape your lips as you feel Lizzie take two steps with you, letting your lower back hit the cold porcelain of the sink in the small bathroom.

It had only been a few hours since you had seen Lizzie, but she felt as if it were a lifetime. You had to admit, you felt the same way. The two of you had to get ready separately for the Golden Globes, as no one truly knew you were together. The rumors had been swirling for a while, and the headlines were eating it up.

"Y/N Y/L/N and Elizabeth Olsen seen holding hands on set.."

"Elizabeth Olsen seen leaving Y/N Y/L/N apartment in NYC.."

"New pictures of Elizabeth and Y/N in LA!"

"From castmates.. to friends? Lovers? Read more to find out!"

Neither of you were ready for a big reveal, to burst the little (somewhat) private bubble the two of you had been living in. Although, recently, you had told her you were ready, but Lizzie said she wanted to stay in the bubble. You were fine with that because you knew she was the one for you. "It's okay, baby.. I promise. I love you, and I know you love me. Let's just have fun.." You were in no rush.

So the two of you showed up separately to the awards show. Lizzie arrives first in a form-fitting white lace dress that flows out towards the bottom. She was walking the carpet, posing for the cameras and doing a few little interviews, when she saw you walk in. You had caught the attention of the cameras immediately, but the only attention you were focused on was hers. That's why you had picked a green dress, fit to hug all your curves in all the perfect places. Lizzie stumbled through her interview, not being able to keep her eyes off of you.. or the man next to you.

You and your co-star were nothing but that. You really weren't even friends, but your agent said it would be great publicity for the movie and to keep the rumors at bay. Lizzie knew ahead of time this would be happening, but watching him lead you down the carpet with his arm entwined with yours, laughing at his jokes and posing with him for pictures, set something off inside of her.

Which lead you to this moment.

As soon as the first commercial break had happened, you looked across the room to Lizzie, who was already gazing at you. She tilts her head, a small smirk on her face as she watches you blush from such a simple act. So you stood and followed her into the maze of the enormous building, letting her grab your wrist when you were far enough away from everyone, and into a small bathroom away from the chaos of the show.

"Lizzie.. they're going to announce your category any minute now. You don't want to get caught with your hand up my dress, do you?" You bite your lip, looking up to her with pink cheeks. She smirks at your words, letting her hands do just that. You feel her hands on your waist, lifting you onto the sink. They move down your thighs through the slit of your dress, lifting it over your hips.

It's her turn to let out a moan, cursing under her breath. "No panties? You're so naughty, Y/N.." Two fingers run up and down your folds, painfully slow. "You did this just for me, didn't you, sweetheart?" The older woman says, looking down at you with darkened eyes. "You knew this would happen, huh? You wanted this to happen.." Her fingers tease your entrance, letting one slip easily inside of you.

"Fuck.. we-we shouldn't," you pant out, moving your hand down to her wrist. Your grip tightens, willing her to stop. "You said you weren't ready, if we get caugh-" your words are cut short by Lizzies lips pressing firm against your own. Your fingers loosen from her wrist, signaling for her to continue. She smiles against your mouth and adds a second finger inside of you. As she picks up the pace the kiss becomes heated, your hands finding themselves on her body, desperate to be as close to Lizzie as possible.

"I don't care, Y/N. I can't stand another moment seeing you with him.. you are mine. Fuck, let the whole world know," Lizzie parts to speak, and you see the desperation in her eyes, how intense every single word she spoke was. Her fingers curl inside of you, making you lean forward to bite her shoulder, hoping to subside the moans wanting to escape. Red lipstick stains begin to trail up and down your neck, and you don't care. All you can think about in the moment is her.

Lizzie. Lizzie. Lizzie.

The way her fingers feel pumping in and out of you, the way her soft lips leave sloppy kisses on your skin, her strong grip holding you up as you fall apart in her arms.

"I'm yours, Lizzie.. oh fuck I'm gonna-" your moans are cut off by her lips crashing against yours again. Her fingers curl once again, causing your lower stomach to burn in the most pleasurable way.

"That's it, sweetheart.. be a good girl. Cum for me. Let everyone know in this fucking building who you belong to.." her voice is low as her fingers continue to pump in and out of you. You follow her instructions, letting your body relax as a wave of pleasure takes over. She lets you ride out your orgasm, slowing her pace as you come down from your high.

"That's it, baby, that's it... good job... good girl... my girl.."

She whispers sweet words to you until you've caught your breath, letting you rest your head against her chest. After a quiet moment, the two of you take an inch back from each other, both of you letting out a quiet laugh at the others state.

Your dress was halfway up your hips, red lipstick staning your neck and lips. Your face was a shade of red, hair a mess. Lizzie was no better standing in front of you with messy hair, bite marks on her shoulder, and dress falling down at her arm. Before either of you could say anything, a loud knocking sounds at the door, causing a sigh to fall from Lizzies lips. You giggle and bring your hand up to her check, rubbing the pad of your thumb along her face softly.

"Ms. Olsen? Are you in there? It's almost time. They need you at your seat." You hear her assistant speaking from the other side in a somewhat panicked voice.

"No worries, I'll be right out," she calmly, before helping you clean up the best she could. After you were taken care of, she adjusted herself, putting on some more lipstick. She turns to you, a gentle look in her eyes and a warm smile on her face. "I meant what I said, Y/N. I am ready.. I want the world to know you're mine.." Lizzie whispers, leaning forward to peck your lips.

You look in her eyes, seeing nothing but love and care. So you nod with a happy smile on your face, reaching up to wrap your arms around her neck and kissing her once more. "Now go and win your award," you smile, parting from her. Lizzie only smiles wide and kisses you again.

"I've already won." You roll your eyes at her cheesy line and playfully slap her arm, watching as she leaves the bathroom. You stay for a moment and look at yourself in the mirror, realizing you had never seen yourself so happy. You were literally radiating.

"And the Golden Globe goes to... Elizabeth Olsen!" The crowd erupts in cheers and applause, the most noise coming from you. You're standing across the room, watching as she takes the stage in front of you. Lizzie looks out into the crowd, a smile on her face as she stares at you and only you.

"Wow! This is, this is unbelievable truly.. thank you to all the other actresses in the category. You're all so amazing. Thank you to the cast and crew.." Lizzie thanks a few more people before stopping to look at the award, and then back to you. She took in your tearful eyes and your joyful smile, the way you were the only one in the room still standing with your hands together on your chest.

"... and most importantly, I'd like to thank the person who supports me the most, who pushes me every single day. The woman I couldn't possibly live without.. the woman I love more than anything in this world. Thank you so much.."

You think she's done, and your heart is already racing at her words and the way she's looking at you. You know everyone in the room can tell who she's talking about. Neither of you cares. But then she holds up the award and says,

"This one is for you, Y/N."

Proclaiming her love for you in front of the world.

[the-monkey-ruler]

Yellow Emperor's Sword (2012) 春光灿烂之欢乐元帅

Director: Li Huimin Screenwriter: Zhang Tan / Gu Man / Zhu Yili / Fan Xiaotian / Xu Shalang Starring: Charlene Choi / Gillian Chung / Leo Kee Ku Genre: Drama Country/Region of Production: Mainland China Language: Mandarin Chinese Date: 2012-01-07 (Mainland China) Number of episodes: 48 Single episode length: 45 minutes Also known as: Happy Marshal of Brilliant Spring / Happy Marshal IMDb: tt2473962 Type: Reimanging

Summary:

This is a mythical and legendary comedy. In the ancient East, there was a beautiful village rich in "celestial silkworms", and everyone lived a leisurely life in a paradise. Tmall Girl (played by Zhong Xintong) escaped here because she stole the elixir of Taishang Laojun (played by Han Zhenhua). When she discovered such a fairyland, she became greedy. She put herself into Miaomiao's body and planned to occupy the village. Taibai Jinxing (played by Guo Jinan) came to Zhujiajiao to chase the cat demon, and was rescued by a piglet during a fight with the cat demon. In order to repay the favor of saving his life, he let the piglet sneak into the owner's body and become a human for one day, and named him Zhu Tianshuai (played by Leo Ku) ). Little Dragon Girl (Charlene Choi), who came to the world to repay her kindness, met Zhu Tianshuai and mistakenly thought she was his benefactor and fell in love at first sight. The cat demon is almost exhausted due to the loss of the golden elixir. She drains the blood of the villagers to replenish her physical strength, and the villagers whose blood she has sucked all become her minions. Seeing the cat demon wreaking havoc, Little Dragon Girl and Zhu Tianshuai decided to get rid of her...

Source: https://tv-1.chinesemov.com/tv/2012/Happy-Marshal

Link: https://www.iq.com/album/%E6%AC%A2%E4%B9%90%E5%85%83%E5%B8%85-2018-19rrh76hed?lang=en_us

[sauronsgirl]

An Elvish Love

Gil Galad x Elf F!Reader

Warning: smut 18+

You are nervous. Even if he is your husband and has been nothing but kind and loving towards you, he is still the High King. You don't want to disappoint him. It's your first time and you want to please him.

-Do not worry Y/N. Our King is kind and patient and he loves you. It won't change because you are a virgin. In fact, I'm sure it will please him. says Galadriel with a soft smile.

-You really think so?

-Absolutely. Now go and don't worry if you are not ready he will understand.

-Thank you Galadriel.

You leave your best friend's room to go to yours, where you know the High King is waiting. Deep down you know he won't pressure you into anything, but still a part of you is insecure and want him to be pleased. You take a deep breath and enter the room.

Your husband is waiting by the window, looking at the stars lost in thoughts. He looks ethereal with the moonlight on his face, still wearing his golden robes and his crown. He is beautiful. And he is yours. The High King turns around when he hears you and smiles.

-Meleth nin. You're here. I've missed you today. he says.

-I've missed you too vero. Busy day as always?

Your husband sigh and you see the tension in his body. Immediately you join him on his side of the room and take his hands in yours, comforting him. He smiles at the geasture.

-Tell me about it, it might make you feel better. you say softly.

-I don't want to trouble you with such problematics matters. No, it's kind of you to offer but I would like to be with you without talking about the kingdom.

-Okay, well I actually had an idea while coming here. you say blushing.

-Tell me. I'm intrigued.

-I though...well since we have been married for quite some time now... well could...consumate our union. you say shyly.

The High King smiles at your shyness and you can see he likes the idea. Very much.

-I would love nothing more than lay with you my love, but are you sure? I don't want to pressure you. he says.

You wrap your arms around his neck and kiss him swilfty.

-I'm more than sure vero. I really want you.

-In that case, I will happily give wife what she wants from me.

The High King leans down to kiss you softly. You moans and put your hands in his longs brown locks. One thing leading to another, it's not long before you are laying naked on the bed, with Gil Galad between your legs. He makes you see stars two times with his tongue and fingers before entering you slowly with his cock.

It hurts at first, but with his preparations the pain soon turns into great pleasure.

-Oh my king... don't stop please.. you whisper in his ear as he moves at a steady pace.

-You're taking me so well Y/N. he praises you.

He kisses you passionately as you grab his hair and back to hold him close to you. That way you feel him much deeper and you are about to come.

-Ereinion I'm going to... you moan in pleasure.

-Let go for me my love. Let me feel you come around me.

You climax at his command, your vision going white in extasy. Your release triggers his and the High King groans in pleasure as he spills his seed deep into you.

You return to reality as your husband pulls out and lay at your side breathless. You are feeling sore but in a good way and really tired.

-Was...was it good for you? you ask him blushing.

-My love, it was more than perfect. I've loved it and adore you more than any word could express it. replies your husband smiling kindly.

He takes your left hand in his and kisses the back of it. You blush then yawn making him laugh.

-Sleep my love, you did so well for me. I'll be here tomorrow morning.

You fall asleep with a smile. You had nothing to fear at all. In fact, you realize now what you've been missing in these last few months.

[my-secret-shame-but-fanfiction]

Private Dances [3]

Club!Blue Jones X F!Reader • Rating: 18+ pals Masterlist• ao3• want to be tagged? • ko-fi • request info • series masterlist •

A/N: A massive thank you to the amazing @midgardian-witch for being so wonderful and proofreading this nonsense AND for hyping me up AND saving my ass with switching tenses (why am I like this?) Another huge thank you to the epic @lonelyisamyw-0love for tipping my ko-fi, this series is especially for them💚

Warnings: overuse of italics, sub!Blue, there's some power dynamics in here because reader is a dancer (but like Blue is so lovesick), swearing, oral (f! receiving), Blue being a little shit, please let me know if I've missed a warning.

There are 5 main ‘stars’ in the club: Peach, Trixie, Songbird, Sweetie Pie, and Crystal. Crystal is usually the favourite but is currently in Blue’s bad books for reasons unknown to the reader. Reader is a backup dancer that Blue has named Lion.

Word Count: 3329

A Great View of the Hall

This was going to be a problem. 

Scratch that. 

More than a problem.

You stare at the half open garment bag hanging on the back of your door as if your glare could fix a hole in time and space. 

Blue held stupidly lavish events every three months or so, a big excuse to close the club to all save those who were ready to pay big bucks. And boy, were there a lot of clients willing to throw their cash around. 

Shows, and food, and gambling, and drinks, and everything dialed up to fucking eleven. 

All the staff’s outfits were new, usually fitting some theme that Blue had chosen on a whim, and none of the dancers ever got to see what they were going to be wearing until it was literally time to get dressed. Not that that was a problem. That was normal. Routine. The same as always. 

The problem was your outfit. Your dress. It was fucking blue.

There was only one unspoken rule every time he threw these fucking events, and that was that the main stars: Peach, Trixie, Songbird, Sweetie Pie, and Crystal, were the only ones in blue. Not you. 

Gorski must have given you the wrong dress. There must have been some kind of mistake. You shake your head, trying to shake yourself free of the vice like grip of anxiety that was taking hold of your heart. 

Simple fix. Simple. 

You grab the garment bag, zip it back up and leave your small room to find the Madam. She was, unsurprisingly, busy. Helping others fix their costumes, all a dark purple, directing others into position on the floor or stage behind the scenes. The doors had already opened for the ‘exclusive’ guest, the party ramping up into full swing. 

She tuts when she sees you, “What are you doing? You’re not ready?” 

“I was given the wrong dress.” You swallow, seeing some of your fellow back up dancers out of the corner of your eye in their wine purple corsets and short frilly shirts.

Gorski frowns at you, unimpressed. “Not another one.” She mutters under her breath, almost too quiet for you to hear. “Let me see.” 

You hold the bag out to her and she tuts again, not even bothering to open it. “Here,” she flips white paper card tied around the hanger's neck, ‘Lion’. “This one’s yours.” 

“No, it’s-”

“Mr Jones oversaw your clothing. I am not having any more arguments about outfits today.” She says, her voice clipped. She only ever used ‘Mr Jones’ when she was stressed and pissed. She turns to raise her voice curtly to another dancer before looking back at you. “Any other problems?” 

Despite the pause she gave you it was clear she would only accept one answer.

You manage to bite your tongue and shake your head.

“Good.” She dismisses you with a wave of her hand, waiting until you are nearly out of the backstage rooms for her to call after you, “and hurry up!”

. 

The dress is long, almost trailing on the floor, with a slit on the left side that ends just before the fullest part of your hip. There is an ornate chain holding both sides together at your upper thigh, a tiny golden lion dangles from the chain, it’s just enough to keep the dress from exposing you while you walk.  Which is a small blessing as there is no way you can wear any underwear without it being on show. 

You growl deep in your throat, your mind replaying snippets of your last encounter with Blue. His arms around your waist as he practically sobs into your stomach. 

This must be some kind of twisted punishment, a way to put you on show in front of everyone. It wasn’t like you could outwardly disobey him in front of clients and his goons, there was no way you would be able to wrap your fingers around his throat, squeeze, and make him crumble. 

You check your makeup in the small mirror and adjust the dress. It’s a bright, royal blue, with a plunging neckline and small over the shoulder straps. The material is soft, comfortable even. And you hate it. Hate that part of you likes it. Hate that he picked it. 

Hate, hate, hate it. 

At least you could maybe blend in with the ‘stars’, they’d be in the exact same dress and colour. 

. 

Somehow you manage not to scream profanities the second you walk into the club. The music is loud, the stage occupied while others serve drinks to the patrons, seated and watching. There are some talking in booths, girls in their lap pretending to be interested in their conversation, while others gamble with dancers on their arms, egging them on. 

All of them are in the same dark purple. Which isn’t surprising. 

The problem is Trixie, the first star you spot. Her dress is shorter, the neckline a queen ann cut, and the colour is a dark navy. You see Peach next, her dress the same as Trixie, then Songbird and Sweetie Pie. All of them dressed in mirror images of each other. You stand out sorer than a thumb. 

Exactly what you would like to not do. 

The realisation makes you freeze, the anxiety from before growing monstrously and taking root, fixing you to the floor. You’re going to be sick, you’re going to-

“Ah, Lion.” Blue grins wickedly as he snakes his hand around your hip and pulls you close to his side. “I was looking all over for you.” 

You glare at him. If looks could kill he’d already have bullet holes in his chest. 

He chuckles at your stare. “Feisty as ever,” he brushes the tips of his fingers along your jaw, pressing softly against your chin to tilt your head to the side so he can place a soft kiss to your cheek. “Behave.” He whispers, his breath hot against your skin. 

The underlying threat is there, clear as night: or else. 

You plaster the fakest smile on your face, practically a sneer, and his grin widens. 

“Oh, much better Lion, much better.” He nuzzles into your neck for a second, the briefest touch as he breathes deeply and sighs contentedly. 

You stiffen as a flush of heat runs along your skin from where he touched you, racing downwards. 

“Come, I’m just speaking with some old friends,” he guides you to the table, slightly secluded from the main hustle and bustle, but still with a good view of the stage. He keeps his arm around you, his fingers playing with the little lion on the chain.

Somehow you manage to resist the urge to slap his hand away. 

There are three other men seated, two you recognise as regular patrons of the club. Highrollers, dangerous. The third you’re not familiar with, but his suit is sharp and his eyes are vicious. 

To your surprise there are no other dancers at the table, no one doing their best to fawn over any of these men. You swallow, the anxiety sharp as it cuts in deeper. 

Each of them has their own guards, a far distance away but obvious to spot and surely ready to snap into action at a moment's notice. 

This was all very, very not good. 

Still, you manage a polite, and pretend sincere, smile as Blue introduces you to them. Astonishingly, all three stand to greet you, take your hand as you offer it to them (Blue subtly flicks your arm to remind you, whispering a brief ‘manners’ into your ear) and kiss the back of it. 

Blue keeps an oddly reassuring hold on your side, only letting go to push your chair in for you when you sit. The place where his hand rested is oddly cold without his touch. 

He sat as close to you as he physically could, draping his arm over the back of your chair as he continued to talk with the other men. 

After a few minutes his hand began to wander, moving slightly to stroke your upper arm absentmindedly and seemingly not noticing the little shiver that ran through you at his touch. 

You wish you were paying more attention to the conversation going around you, wished you could. 

His touch was more than distracting, maddening. The infuriating way he drags the back of his thumbnail over your skin in a lazy stroke. The stupid little smile that was plastered to his face whenever he nods to the conversation, his eyes glittering. He must know what he’s doing. He had to. 

You gave him little sideways glares, doing your best not to completely scowl at him. Frustration burned hot along your veins and you clenched your hands into fists under the table, pressing them into the edge of your seat. 

A waiter came to deliver fresh drinks, moving quietly and quickly as he places the glasses down in front of Blue and his ‘friends’.

“What do you want, Lion?” Blue’s velvet soft voice caught you irritatingly off guard. He smiled when you didn’t answer straight away, enjoying the little dance of confusion on your face. “To drink?” He leans towards you, still smiling. 

“I…” you swallowed, unsure of how to answer, if this was really some twisted game he was playing. 

His grin widens, seemingly appraising you for a moment before he  looked up to the waiter. “Lion’ll have something sweet, just like she is.” 

You were going to hit him. 

One of the men chuckled, he had dark eyes and a full beard and was sitting directly to your right. “Sweet is she?” He leaned slightly closer to you, placing his elbow on the table. “How sweet?” 

He gave you a sugary smile that perhaps could have been charming in another situation. 

Blue’s gentle touch on your arm tightened, pulling you towards him a fraction. 

The other man chuckled politely at his reaction, “What? You can’t expect me not to want a taste. You’re practically flaunting her to us.” He gestures as he speaks, his hand a hair's breadth away from touching your cheek. 

He’s lucky in that respect because you’re pretty sure he would have lost a finger or two if he’d actually made contact. 

“Am I?” Blue smiles, all teeth. 

The man chuckles lightly, but swallows, a hint of uncertainty in his voice the next time he speaks. Subtle, but there. “Well… yes.”

Blue waits for a moment, just letting the others' words hang in the air. He blinks twice, shaking his head a minute amount. Such a little gesture shouldn’t feel so… vicious. 

Your stomach twists, a feeling that had started to fade into your memory. You’d forgotten how dangerous he was. With all the things he’d let you do, the power he’d let you have over him, it had become so easy to fall into that false sense of security. 

You lean slightly into Blue, resting your head on his shoulder and threading your fingers through his, forcing him to loosen the grip on your shoulder. 

He looks down at your face, his eyelashes practically kissing his cheeks. There’s an oddly soft expression that passes over his eyes. There for a moment before it’s gone. 

He looks back to the other man, his tone lighter this time. “What’s wrong with a little showing off?” 

It’s almost as if the whole club breathes a collective sigh of relief.

“Nothing.” 

All four go back to their conversation as if nothing had transpired. 

The waiter brings you a bright pink cocktail that’s too sweet. But you slip at it anyway to save the poor man from Blue’s ire.

.

You attempt to slip away during Trixie’s big performance, while Blue is saying polite goodbyes to the gentleman at the table as he sends them off with other girls.

But he keeps your hand firmly in his the whole time. 

It’s only then that you notice someone at the far side of the club, their gaze on you like a sense of creeping dread. It’s Crystal.

At first you think she’s scowling at Blue, until realisation dawns that it is in fact you that she is looking at. 

The expression is so fierce that at first you can’t take notice of anything else. It’s only later that you realise she was wearing a dark purple dress.

“Trying to escape?” Blue’s voice makes you jump. He’s leaning close, his lips practically touching your ear and grinning. 

You frown at him. “Trying to.” You look back to the side of the club, Crystal is gone.

He laughs. “Silly little Lion.” 

“Careful.” 

He bites his lips together, still smiling, clearly overly amused by your reaction. “And why would I want to be careful, hmm?” He brushes his fingers along your jaw. “Maybe I want your claws to come out?” 

There’s a light flush to his cheeks that isn’t from the alcohol, his eyes dark and pupils dilated. 

He lets you look over him for a moment before he squeezes your hand and places it in the crook of his arm. “Come.” 

He glances at one of his guards, gesturing with his head and practically communicating telepathically before he guides you across the room and down the corridor to his office. 

It’s cooler once you’re out from the sea of people in the club, quieter, even though you can still hear the echoing bass of the music. 

You’re not sure why you let him lead you; why you walk in step with him without question. The idea of it alone should be enough to get under your skin. 

“Why am I wearing this dress Blue?” 

“You can take it off if you prefer.” He purrs.

You glare at him. “That’s not what I mean.” 

“What do you mean then?” He raises his eyebrows at you, practically giddy with glee. 

“The colour-”

“Do you not like your dress?” He fakes a look of disappointment, “I’m hurt, Lion.” 

You pinch his inner elbow and he laughs as he flinches a little in surprise. He squeezes your hand tighter in the crook of his arm. 

“You know what I mean, Blue.” 

“I do.” He opens his office door with a little flourish before he ushers you inside. 

“It’s not-” You gasp as he grabs your biceps, pushing your back up against the door and using the force of the push to shut it. 

He kisses you roughly, groaning as he presses himself close to you but breaks it before you even get a chance to react. “You drive me insane, Lion.” He mutters against your mouth. “Insane.” 

He strokes your cheek softly, resting his forehead against yours. “Can’t think about anything if you’re not near me.” He presses his lips to yours again, soft and sweet before trailing down along your jaw and to your neck. 

You shiver, jumping under his touch as he licks and kisses, lightly scrapes his teeth over your skin. 

When you react he groans softly, rubbing the heavily outline of his erection against your thigh. 

Your breathing hitches, your fingers tightening on his shoulders. Your body reacts without your permission, pressing closer and craving more of his touch. 

He leaves a gentle kiss on your collar bone before he sinks to his knees, looking up at you through his long lashes. “Want to take care of you, Lion…” He waits a moment, watching your face intently, seemingly measuring the seconds via the rise and fall of your chest. “Want to make you feel good.” 

Painfully slowly he runs his hands up your calves, pushing up your dress as he goes. 

You swallow as you watch him, how he gazes up at you looking so soft and pliant. Part of you wants to stop him, to force him back and regain control. But another deeper part recognises his submission, realises that the control is already all yours. 

He kisses the side of your left knee, pressing close as he drags your dress higher and higher, the smooth scrape of the fabric leaves goosebumps in its wake. 

He gasps softly as he finally lifts it over your hips, revealing you completely to him. Languidly he runs the very tip of his forefinger down the centre of your mons until he brushes your clit. 

He seems mesmerised for a second as your body jolts under his touch.

You bite into your bottom lip to stop yourself from making a sound, but still your rapid breathing echoes loudly in your head. 

Blue shuffles forward, closing his eyes as he licks a board, flat trail through your folds. He moans loudly, his eyebrows pinched together as he tastes you. Heat pools and twists in his belly, spiralling downwards to his throbbing cock as his movements get bolder. 

He presses his tongue deeper, just teasing your entrance as his licks grow firmer, sinking down to the very edge of your core before working his way back up to your clit. 

Your muscles tense, legs weakening as your body starts to fight your mind for complete control. 

“Blue…” You mutter, your voice strained and desperate.

He groans loudly, doubling down on his efforts as he keeps lapping at you desperately. 

The sound of his zipper being opened barely registers to your ears as he fumbled with it, pulling his cock free in a rush and hastily jerking himself in time with his licks. 

You moan quietly, unable to stop yourself as you grab hold of the back of his head and press him closer. Your hips buck, grinding against his warm, wet and eager mouth. 

Blue whines, his eyes rolling back as you take hold of him. His breathing hitches and he gasps once, a weak Lion escaping his lips in a needy, desperate plea before he swirls his tongue around your clit, sucking it into his mouth before doing back to those long, long licks. 

He buries himself between your thighs, single minded in his need for your pleasure as he rocks and moves with you, his fist a blur on his own length. 

You dig your fingers of one hand into the wood of the door, the other into his short hair, rolling your hips to chase the delicious friction of his sinful mouth. Heat coils tightly in your stomach, your thighs start to shake as he moans and licks, smearing your wetness all over his face. 

This time the moan that leaves you is loud and wrecked, pleasure pulling at every part of you and overriding any other possible thought. 

You tense, shaking as you come, your head thrown back and pressing against the door. 

Blue whines as your sweet release hits his tongue, as your muscles squeeze and quake and flutter on his tongue. 

He jerks his wrist twice, watching your face eagerly as you cry out, and comes a second later, spurting hot thick ropes all over the carpet and office door. Some splashes onto your calves.

He slows his hand in time with the gentle rock of your hips, only pulling his mouth away when you slump back and your grip on his hair lessens. 

He stares up at you with large, dark eyes. The entirety of his lower face shining with your slick. 

Your breathing calms, your heartbeat slowly returning to normal as you keep your eyes closed. 

Blue breathes deeply, glancing down briefly and noticing the drops of his release on your legs. He tuts and leans forward, darting his tongue out to lick your skin clean while simultaneously not giving a damn about the mess on the door. 

You let out a little yelp of surprise as his warm tongue touches your skin, but he places a soothing hand on your thigh, stroking soft circles as he works. 

You’re not sure what to expect when he stands, but it certainly isn’t the soft kiss he gives you while stroking your cheeks with his hands. 

“Come to bed with me, Lion.” He mutters, his voice soft and eyes closed. 

Thank you for reading!

@pleasurebuttonwrites @raven-rk @campingwiththecharmings @alexxavicry @whatthefishh

@romanarose @strangerhands @saturn-rings-writes @lonelyisamyw-0love @queerponcho

@steven-grants-world  @eyelessfaces @angel-of-the-moons @minigirl87 @lunar-ghoulie

@silvernight-m @autismsupermusicalassassin @apesarecuul @reallyrallyauthor @basicalyrandom

@alwaysmicado @mangoslushcrush @marc-spectorr @soft-girl-musings  @spxctorsslxt

@novarosewood

If you'd like to be taken off the tag list please let me know here

[bludhavenbooty]

The Djinn’s Reward (Submission!)

Nightwing had seen a lot of weird things in her career as a supervigilante - aliens, monsters, mad scientists - but at the end of the day, she was a human being and she specialized in stopping human crimes. When the communicator on her wrist pinged a silent alarm at the Gotham Institute of Antiquities, Nightwing leapt into action expecting art thieves.

The break-in hadn’t been subtle. Sneaking in through the broken skylight, Nightwing found the Middle Eastern gallery being prowled by the villainous Baron Geld and his dimwitted minions. The gold-obsessed gangster normally targeted jewelry stores and auction houses, but Nightwing didn’t question what he would want here before ambushing Geld’s muscle. She effortlessly sapped one from behind with an escrima stick, then delivered a kick to the gut and a smack to the skull on the second. The last one got to raise his fist and take two steps forward before Nightwing effortlessly deflected his arm with one escrima stick and drove the but of her other between the thug’s eyes. That left Nightwing facing down Baron Geld himself - a unimpressive dandy dressed like the bad guy from an old Robin Hood movie. He grinned with an annoying amount of confidence, regardless.

“Ah, Nightwing, Bludhaven’s own lady of the night, you’ve grace we humble men with your presence.”

The boyish superheroine spun her escrima sticks, cocked her hips, and smirked at the costumed criminal. “Humble is one way to put it, Geld. You didn’t even bring enough men to make it a challenge.”

“Yes, good help can be so hard to find,” Baron Geld held up a simple glass bottle, taken from the museum display. With a flourish, he pulled out a stopper. “But I think I found a new henchman I can depend on!”

There was a bang and then a cloud of thick white smoke. Nightwing reached for her gas mask, when the smoke impossibly reversed course and seemingly congealed in the center of the room. Dixie stared in shock as the smoke resolved into a figure of a gigantic man.

“Ha ha ha, I’m finally free!” The djinn bellowed with joy. He grinned at Baron Geld. “As I swore centuries ago, I would shower the man who freed me with all the riches of the world. Gold, jewels, a harem of beauties… All of it will be yours, sir!”

“A harem? Great, a harem! Then her!” Baron Geld pointed at Nightwing with a smile of vicious triumph. “Make her my first harem girl!”

Dixie’s eyes went wide. She didn’t know what to do about a magical genie, but she wasn’t going down without a fight! Nightwing clenched her sticks and charged at Baron Geld, determined to grab the bottle. But the djinn snapped her fingers and Dixie fell flat on her face as her combat boots dissolved, along with her uniform and her weapons and her mask. Instead, Dixie now wore a golden belly dancers outfit.

“Are you sure you want her, sir?” The djinn laughed down at Dixie. “She’s a fine specimen of a warrior, but for a concubine-?”

“If you can make improvements, I wouldn’t complain.”

“Wait-” Dixie tried to beg, but the djinn clapped his hands twice and Dixie’s body convulsed with vulgar heat. She starred in helpless confusion as her muscle melted away to give her a slender physique, while her breasts swelled into round globes. Dixie bit her plumping lips as her hair inched down her neck and back. It felt amazing. It felt like an orgasmic full-body massage as a tan spread over her and make-up blossomed on her face.

“Mmmmm, what have you done to me?” Dixie moaned sensually. She didn’t sound like herself. She didn’t fell like herself. It was like struggling to stay awake, stronger than any drug Dixie had experienced.

“Shall she have a new name, sir?”

“Hmmm… Aurora.” Geld licked his lips and stared into her eyes. A chill passed up Dixie’s spine, barely noticeable under the sexual heat. “The first of Baron Geld’s new treasures.”

“Very good, sir.” The djinn clapped his hands again. “Rise, Aurora, and serve your master.”

Dixie blinked and Aurora opened her eyes, feeling her self-righteousness and fear fall away. Hunger and pride took their place. She was Aurora, who lived to please her master, the Baron Geld, as one of his golden treasures.

(Thank you @parasex-jamboree​ for the very hot submission!)

[cambion-companion]

Echoes of Orpheus

I wanted to write. It's been a while! Exploring the idea that after Tav dies, Raphael isn't okay with just letting their immortal soul slip away.

Raphael x Tav!reader (gn)

The Hero of Baldur's Gate they had named you, dragging you time and again back into the spotlight of a fame you never wanted.

Survival.

That was all you had wanted. The will to escape the worm inside your head had evolved and taken on life of its own until you were teaming up with angels, devils, druids and warlocks to take down an Elder Brain.

With glory and infamy alike you had lived.

Just like every mortal, your body grew weak around the soul it harbored and eventually passed on.

Like a gossamer thread, your soul was freed from its mortal coil, slipping into the next world gratefully. You felt light and young, strong again.

Echoes and shadows surrounded you, an inexorable pull drawing you down into unknown space and time.

Stars whirled around your vision, hues of azure and lilac danced and merged to create a midnight sky. Up ahead, you saw a white light and knew that was your destination.

But something was wrong.

The gravitational pull guiding you to safe harbor lessened, another sensation arose. You heard your name whispered behind your ear, turning your head to see only a vast abyss that drew fear into your heart.

A familiar smell, a purple light replacing the white-golden rays up ahead. You willed yourself toward it, apprehension and excitement roiling through your being.

So close now. You reached out and a large hand wrapped around your wrist, dragging you forward with a great heave.

"Raphael." Your first words uttered since your death. In his ironclad grip you felt almost alive again, awakening the tethers to your mortal life. To him.

He wore the crown of Karsus, the source of that purple glow. The silver metal twisted perfectly amongst his sharp horns, his eyes familiar and blazing hellfire-gold.

"Not even a word of farewell?" Raphael did not relinquish his grasp on you. "I taught you better manners than that."

You did not know what to say, shock holding your tongue as you fought to understand how he could interrupt the natural course of your spirit. "The crown." You whispered.

Raphael nodded. "I understand death has not dulled your wit." He intoned dryly, then tugged you a bit further into his plane. "Nor will it succeed in taking you from me. We still have work to do, you and I."

"You have no right to my soul, I made no deal with you."

"Therein you are most grievously in error." Raphael smiles, dangerous and sharp, the touch of his hand becoming more heavy and real with each passing moment you stayed in his presence. "I am your past. I am your present. And I am your future, little mouse. No mortal frailty will alter that law."

Another tug, the draw to him inescapable as it had been in your previous life. Your palm found the front of his chest, pressing until you could feel the fabric of his velvet tunic.

Raphael tucked a finger beneath your chin and raised your gaze to his once more, his tone softening to that familiar sultry purr. "I will give you life anew, more than any god could offer. You were mine since the moment I laid eyes on you, little mouse."

The old nickname sparked a flame within you, defiance and desire. "I will not be trapped in one of your gilded cages, or placed on a pedestal to be drooled over by your incubus."

"There you are." Raphael squeezed your chin before releasing you, a satisfied smirk on his face. "Already coming back to yourself, it seems. And no, dear...you will be put to use, not shelved with my other prizes." He held out a hand. "Now come. Worlds anew wait for us to conquer."

[khaire-traveler]

🦚 Subtle Hera Worship 🐄

Star-gazing and cloud-watching

Making flower crowns

Wearing outfits that make you feel confident

Have a candle that reminds you of her (no altar needed)

Keeping a picture of her in your wallet

Wearing jewelry that reminds you of her

Wearing perfumes with bold yet sweet scents

Have a cow, peacock, or lioness stuffed animal

Having imagery of stars or lotus flowers around

Giving yourself compliments each day; pointing out one thing you like or love about yourself

Support women's rights or domestic abuse survivor organizations

Spend time with loved ones

Be kind to children; play them if offered

If you have a partner, send them a kind message or do something romantic together

Practice standing up for yourself; speak your mind and assert your personal boundaries

Do household chores; upkeep your living space

Take care of yourself emotionally and physically

Show support for any mothers in your life, especially new ones; help out when/if you can

Keep a self-love/self-care journal

Make yourself feel pretty/handsome/attractive; wear makeup, paint your nails, style your hair, wear your favorite outfits, etc.

Take a self-care bath or shower

Learn about astronomy; learn about the different myths behind constellations

Show compassion towards others, especially those who are hurting or in need

Showing compassion towards yourself, the same as you do for others

Prioritize your own well-being

Feed the local birds with bird seeds; bird-watching

Keep framed photos of loved ones; put photos of them on your wall, etc.

Eat pomegranate seeds

Have cow print items; own peacock feathers (been told these can be really cheap, actually!)

Give a kind gesture to a loved one; buying a gift, cooking a meal, baking pastries, etc.

Collect gold-colored items; golden ram horns are also a great symbol (maybe draw or paint this, since it's pretty niche)

Buy a bouquet of white flowers, whether for yourself or a loved one

Add honey to your tea, coffee, or other drink; a good drink to try is warm milk with honey and cinnamon mixed in (better than it sounds)

Start a skin/body care routine

-

I may add more down the line! For now, here's my list of discreet ways to worship Hera. Hope it helps, and take care! 🩵

Link to Subtle Worship Master list

[cryptidclaw]

Star Tigerclaw

Design Notes:

Here he is!!! Tigerclaw based on a white tiger!!! love this design so much ??? omggg

he has his mother Snowstorm's blue colorpoint gene , but he has dark black stripes like his dad Thistleclaw!

Character Bio:

Star Tigerclaw

Straight; Cis Tom; he/him

Age as of 1st arc's beginning: 4 cycles, 4 moons; ~33 Hyrs

Title meaning: -claw =  a cat who is very skilled in battle; they fight ferociously with their claws; may have distinctive claws, most likely extra large or sharp.

Warrior -> Guard Charge -> Second of Thunder Order; he was in line due to being Star Bluefrost's nephew. He was banished for murder and an attempted takeover of the Order.

Leader of Shadow Order; was in no way in line for Shadow leadership, he convinced the Order that he would be their best choice for leadership, as he came from a long line of powerful leaders and he would keep the Order strong after their many recent losses.

Second: Vulturemask; was in line and should have been leader due to being the previous Shadow Leader (Star Brokentail)'s Second and mate.

Mentor: Star Sunfall

Mother: Snowstorm

Father: Thistleclaw

Siblings: Sky; Shine; Shimmer; Lynxstorm

Ex-Mates: Goldenflower; Star Leopardpelt (Political marriage, ended when Tiger died)

Kits: Swift; Brambleflower; Star Tawnyclaw; Mothwing; Tadpolefrog; Star Hawkfrost

Grandkits: Falconclaw; Jaywing; Dove; Dawnpelt; Goldenheart; Flamespirit; Dovesong; Ivythorn; Junipersnow; Dandeliondust

Other notable kin: Star Pineheart (grandfather); Leopardfoot (Grandmother); Sootfur (nephew); Sorreltail (niece); Rainwhisker (nephew)

Character notes: Tigerclaw actually did truly love Goldenflower, and he was actually a pretty good mate and father before this betrayal was revealed. Golden cat divorced him during his banishment and Tiger chose to become mates with Star Leopardpelt soon after as a political marriage, this relationship was loveless and only for political gain and a continuation of their bloodline through their kits.

Character Backstory:

Tigerclaw and Lynxstorm were Thistleclaw and Snowstorm's second litter, their first was one of three kits which all tragically passed due to a premature birth (their names, Sky, Shine and Shimmer were given in reference to the Stars, as they joined them almost as soon as they were born).

Thistleclaw took great interest in Tigerclaw, as he was the strongest, and most alike him out of the pair of brothers. Due to this Tiger was greatly influenced by Thistle, with his father trying to pass on as much of his ideals and attitude as possible. The tom often gave Tiger extra training sessions in the dark forest, or during the night, sometimes White would be included as well though he never went to the Dark Forest (Thistle knew that White would tell on them).

Snowstorm died early on into her sons' apprenticeships and as a result Thistle became even more rash and cruel which only increased the extreme extra training Thistle put Tiger, and sometimes Lynx under. Thistleclaw's cruelty and actions made his sons hate him (they had also noticed how cruel he could be to their mother before her death as well, and hated him even more for it), White stayed away from his father all together, however Tiger wanted to continue training with him to increase his power and skill.

Despite hating his father and denying that he would ever become a cat like him, Tiger took on much of Thistle's teachings, the tom is adamantly anti-outsider and codebreaking and is very bloodthirsty just like his father. Though maybe Tigerclaw never fully believed the anti mixed blood, outsider and adamant code following ideals, maybe deep down he just liked them because it gave him power over other cats, and a seemingly "devout" and "loyal" exterior.

The first cat Tiger ever killed was Thistleclaw, after Thistle's grooming of Spotted was revealed Tiger joined Bluefrost, Lynxstorm and Redtail in assassinating Thistleclaw. Tiger hated his father and despite him agreeing with many of his views, he was horrified by his actions towards Spotted. He had other motives as well, Thistle was a high ranking warrior who used his power to control Tiger for his own gain, Tiger did not want to be anyone's pawn, he wanted the power for himself. After killing his father Tiger realized how much he liked the power in killing a cat, which wasn't all to surprising, but it was all the more reason he was so willing to kill later in his life.

Despite being an obviously bloodthirsty and increasingly cruel cat, Bluefrost refused to believe that her nephew was anything like his father. She desperately wanted to trust her sister's kits, and Tigerclaw was apprenticed to Blue's pseudo father Star Sunfall who Blue was certain would counteract any of Thistle's impact on Tiger. Of course Blue didn't know about Tiger's extra training, nor did she know about his secret lust for power.