#I know they said it was gonna be an interlude from the time period of the children's adventure | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

mindrole · 1 year ago

Text

some disorganized thoughts under the cut because formatting is a mess and for once i feel shame about leaving a mess laying around the dashboard (polite bow)

as you would guess, it is CoM discussion as always. it's quite long, and its partly about the literary parallels from the picture of dorian gray! (but towards the end theres a lot of speculation from my brain and not based on much also, its a mixed bag)

i appreciate any feedback!!!

thinking about it now. i think the obvious combo most people are thinking of right off the bat is

dorian = miwa lord henry = rui basil = shiharu

to some extent, sybil = dita and james = eigha

(though i am almost certain there is no "eigha" in rosemaria, its just shiharu in his full consciousness hamming it up because he's been put in the eigha role by, presumably, some kind if internal rule in rosemaria, some one that seems to block miwa from being mentioned without distorting. it's different from miwa, who seems to be confused and/or dissassociated... its hard to write this post and gloss over details but i will write my thoughts properly eventually. a lot of this hinges on findings in miwa's apartment... idk, either way, this shit is fucking weird)

probably that second part is from me, but. idk. i forgor. and this is probably true and the most direct role assignment there is

but im also thinking... what if it was a mess? since c0e had several possible assignments that could be true at any time, therefore i also feel like this can be true at the same time as the first:

dorian = shiharu lord henry = azuma basil = miwa

hear me out. its not too out there because there's actual evidence to it in the interlude but, you know

we know miwa is obsessed with shiharu. we don't know the nature of this obsession (lol) (lmao), but he keeps hydrangeas in his dressing room apparently (lol). my own guess is that its admiration mixed in with "the fragments are not normal about the haradas (and the utsugis) ever". to have such an obsession form with such little contact over such a short period of time— first report where miwa and taka discuss the eigha recast is dated to february 2018, filming had not begun yet, and presumably miwa hadn't properly met him as a result— is quite bonkers to me. but all fragments are frankly quite mentally ill, who cares, he's in show business too playing a 3D anime boy his brain is absolutely beyond fried at this point.

the interesting thing is that there is evidence that shiharu is obsessed with him too, but in a very different way. is it different...? i don't know, we don't know what miwa thinks exactly so i'm going off of my own mental image. which is miwa admires him for whatever reason, maybe he's exceeded his expectations and can hold his own as an actor for example, who knows. but it is different.

now i said earlier that i was almost certain "there is no eigha in rosemaria". i think it's because if you look at the eigha quotes in the com page, i think they are incredibly strange. eyeballing them they ARE quite chuunibyou. they're very intimidating demon lord-ish. now im not gonna translate stuff because honestly im incredibly wary of misrepresenting the work so i won't attempt to transcribe anything, though given i'll talk about it from my interpretation it's probably fine even without. anyway, when you think about it, this especially is strange:

hey, "eigha", why are you talking about miwa?!! that's clearly miwa isnt it (though i did not notice this until it was pointed out to me...tehepero)!!! eigha should be concerned about dita!! isn't this common sense?! at first, i assumed it was eigha being sentient, reaching past the curtain or fourth wall to possess either actor who portrayed him in an effort to stop ditasword from ending, trapping miwa so he can be dita forever... but it recently dawned on me that the culprit behind miwa teita's attack in july 2018 cannot be anyone but harada shiharu!!!

that's right!!

the reasoning is (not) simple!! it is (not) straightforward, really!!

i was thinking that taka, the original person who played eigha, was probably the culprit... after all miwa had to rush the production on which caused him to be recast right at his final performance. pretty kuyashii. i assumed he snapped, or someone manipulated him, or what i originally assumed about eigha, a fictional character, becoming sentient. no such thing. when you think about it... there is no clearer red herring than this. i am almost certain that he'd be the first immediate suspect in com, as he is the only one who is immediately identifiable as someone with a motive, until you check miwa's phone records and see that he attempted to call someone at the time of his disappearance. it will be him!! i can bet money on this (don't actually come after me for this plz)

that is why i say there's no eigha in rosemaria, just someone playing the part.

here are some pointers about this "eigha"

it seems like at first, he is welcoming of the party, ushering them to the world, as if they were lost lambs... ones rejected by the real world.

eventually probably when it seems like they do not want to stay, and will take miwa back with them, its full mask off (hehe), suddenly its im gonna eliminate you guys to protect this world!!! and such, so he repeatedly attacks them.

but the main issue isn't that they rejected rosemaria. it's that when rui entered, he started to influence "dita" and attempt to extract him. he is his client after all even if he's confused. it means that someone is trying to make miwa leave rosemaria. at this point, there is no bargaining anymore. anyone who attempts to do this is getting BTFO'd.

so really, this eigha's goal is to protect miwa, not dita.

to wrap it back around the literary reference. the subtitle of cell of mirage is the picture of eigha iliner.

here comes the smoking gun. as you may recall miwa had posters of both the tv series and of the latest movie. of course it's different eighas. but the movie poster was strange. the movie poster that had harada shiharu's eigha was strange. ryuu made an observation i took a little too literally for a long time (because im a cute little dummy), until the other day:

according to ryuu's observation, this eigha looks older than the first one.

at any rate, there's no reason to doubt his point of view here. everything in the interlude is a clue put there for a purpose. so my assumption at first was, huh. is he older? is he just very ikemen or something? and was a little perplexed by it. but... this poster... which is in miwa's possession... in his bathroom... the eigha in it is aging!!! the harada shiharu in this poster is aging!!!! that's right!! they wouldn't hire someone that visibly looks older in a movie to replace someone when the movie has continuity with a tv show— and they would probably retouch the poster to hide imperfections (so signs of aging). it is... absolutely aging...

now if we recall back to the picture of dorian gray... dorian's portrait aged in his stead, absorbing all the sins he committed, as a result not only aging but also becoming more and more ugly. he would eventually go on to kill basil— who practically begged him to repent— over it in a fit of anger.

i do not need to tell you that wrath and violence is bad. so i believe that shiharu is the one that attacked miwa that night. but miwa is a fragment, he may have "died" then, but the injury was probably a trifle and he regenerated and maybe retaliated, and somehow the mirage phenomena was triggered as a result whether on purpose or not and both were transported. this is just in laconic really, there's definitely more to discuss about this but for this post this is the info i need. next post i will talk about this properly.

so they are both each other's dorians and basils in different ways. it is assured mutual destruction. also don't forget that ditasword ends with dita sacrificing himself to either kill or seal away eigha (iirc it doesn't say what exactly, but both of them are BTFO absolutely)

now this is going from speculation based on proof to fully filling in blanks that are undefined (so adjacent to fanfic really since there is little evidence) but, he may have confided in shiharu about being a fragment and possibly whatever bad things that came with it, and was wholeheartedly accepted by shiharu=miwa grew attached to him, and eventually when it felt appropriate to do so he told him that he will retire and go away forever. why tell him about his condition and not anyone else closer to him? idk, fragment interacting with a harada moment, lol.

so in this moment, if shiharu had become fiercely overprotective of him as a result to the point where he would attack him and whether on purpose or not get them both sent to rosemaria, if he would go to such an extreme... what would influence him?!! if he is the dorian in this interpretation, then he may have attempted to get answers from azuma, who is absolutely involved in like 20 things at once. like why is miwa retiring? where is he going? if he pointed him in a certain direction, like, "i know a way you can stop it[stop miwa from going away/keep protecting him]." or something like that. that is absolutely making him lord henry... in a very literal sense as he is clearly an antagonistic force who is using miwa and whoever else as pawns. though lord henry introduces dorian to indulgence and depravity just for the fuck of it, because he is a hedonist... much to think about.

conversely! the more apparent reading that comes from just guessing! miwa doesn't age by default so it superficially plays into some of the traits that dorian has, and shiharu who may be trying to protect him from the real world that hurt him, that rejected him[his fragment status], is basil. because remember, dita having pink hair and red eyes is normal in rosemaria. which means miwa is normal too. the real world is not as kind as rosemaria! or something. so i think this was miwa's dream initially (he may have even expressed this to shiharu without thinking) before he came to possibly change his mind as in the encrypted email azuma's assurance that it isn't solely his responsibility implies that miwa feels guilt over the mirage incidents = he is absolutely involved in a great capacity. imo, on top of all that, he may have also wanted to stay because he finally had someone who cared about him genuinely. too late for that, if he tried to talk sense into shiharu it didn't work, he is now in rosemaria with no sense of "miwa teita". it is not dissimilar to how dorian attacked and killed basil, hid his possessions and got someone to "disappear" the body. rui, who is trying to pry into the delusion of rosemaria to bring everyone— including miwa especially— back to the real world, is lord henry.

and these two readings coexist. they are not mutually exclusive. they build off of the exact same sentiment.

P.S. there are absolutely other combis that work with some precursory thought— but i wish there was more information out there...

P.S. P.S. woe upon thee!!!!!!!!

#m #i feel tired and sleepy so if it becomes a little incoherent... soz #e

2 notes · View notes

km1lah · 3 months ago

Text

Part 1.

2 Made For Me : No need to say anything, the 170M listeners on Spotify, top 20 Billboard, Tik Tok trend speaks volume.

1 Superpowers : I’ve been saying this too many times but r&b is BACK. The nostalgia it took me to ugh. The sample of Brian McKnight is just nice, so yes it really feels like 90-00s r&b songs. Pretty intro :)

3 Make Me Forget : Same as “Made for me”, it was released earlier and is a absolute gem

4 30s : yeah, Lord have mercy, what a voice uff. Everything is so great, from the bridge to the harmonies. I love the lyrics, she doesn’t want to be single in her 30s, because what makes it so long for you to put down your knees ? It’s great to talk about this, it reminds us of how marriage can be so important and stressful for some people, especially women (mainly due to society’s, family’s pressures).

5 Revenge : Muni really said “I won’t bust the windows out of your car, I’ll let God take care of everything”. That’s maturity. She can cry, hate but what would change ? Nothing, so let’s just move on. Wow, I want to reach that part of adulthood. I love how she explains that for her, the best revenge is not pettiness but success without ex-partner.

6 Reverse (Interlude) : The song is so... goofy ? Bloop bloop bloop bloop bloop hahaha no but her love of cars is so cute.

7 Bessie : Less r&b, more hip hop okayyy and then the fact that the song is about friendship is so cool. I’d see a remix with Megan, it just feels like a baddie song.

8 Played Yourself : So yes, all men are the same, let’s not fall into their wicked games, I f- with that. It feels so different, the second verse was hitting. I never heard her rap, so it’s really new but she really did her thing.

9 Leave My Baby Tonight (Ft. GloRilla) : Before listening, I was kind of perplexed as to what song I would listen to. First, because it’s the only feat in the album. Then, I don’t listen to GloRilla but I know that she’s a rapper, so I really didn’t know what to expect. But hearing Played Yourself, I now know that it’s not really odd. After listening, guess her part is not so rap, but GloRilla’s one was nice, even her singing part wooow. Such a great collab.

10 Things I Never Said : The beat, wtf (nice wtf). It might be one of my favorite songs on the album, I just love the flow of it.

11 Type Questions : Ugh, it’s the bridge that kills me everytime. The lyrics couldn’t be truer “These days, gotta ask them type questions” because I’m gonna make sure you’re the one for me, I don’t want to be surprised by something you hide from me. Period. The fact that she made this song out of her freestyle over 50 cent “21 questions” when she was invited on Swaysuniverse, and the freestyle SLAPPED.

13 Waste No Time : Her range is so wide whaaat. The song is so beautiful, at the beginning, it felt almost like a disney song, but with an r&b touch, just like Almost There’s remix by Coco Jones. Time really flies, we cannot waste it by arguing over and over again, what a great message.

12 The Baddest : You’re the baddest, they’re the one who fumbled the bag and didn’t appreciate you at your own value. “These boys do not deserve my love” “You really that insecure, it ain't my fault” ugh, yes

14 Ruined Me : already listened to it before.

OVERALL :

Muni Long just proves again for those who didn’t know yet that she is a pure r&b diamond and she has everything to offer us; vocals, writing, melodies, EVERYTHING. Again and again, r&b is so back, Muni Long in the front line. Great album, I really love it. Keep shining Muni <3

#muni long #spotify #album #revenge #Spotify

1 note · View note

princesspastarave · 8 months ago

Text

that 2022-2023 period of time where i thought i was asexual LMAOOOO

“what changed your mind?” awsten screaming at me to gtfu my first time seeing parx like i can’t even make that shit up 😭⁉️

i realized i wasn’t asexual so much as i was traumatized from the guy engaging in k1nk with no aftercare / no asking beforehand and i think it brought back a lot of catholicsm and stuff (“it happened like that because you’re not married” / “you don’t deserve to feel good” / etc)

the asexuality turned into a sex repulsion of never letting myself feel those things which then turned into a fear of my body being perceived in general which i think is why it’s hard for me to go out irl especially alone

but !!! i went to parx alone this week and the religious guilt interlude was literally life changing as someone that was raised with a lot of guilt instilled about my body in general. i think the main thing that stuck with me was the saying that “this shame serves you in no way and the sooner you can identify it, the sooner you can work towards letting it go.”

i grew up thinking my body was something to be ashamed of. that i was not allowed to exist because it inconvenienced other people. not even by the church or my schools but my own mother.

i got my first pair of shorts at 11 years old with one of her friends and the second they left she screamed at me about how disappointed she was to have a “hooker daughter” and that “i should go get raped and die.” her favourite things to say.

every solution in her mind was for me to get raped or die. bad day at work? knock me out unconscious. don’t like my outfit? pray someone follows me home and i “don’t go crying to her about it.”

well guess what ! she said it so many times it manifested itself into reality ! i’ve been followed home and even robbed so many times so much to her pleasure i am already Halfway there !!!!

every adult even other moms i’d go to would just tell me to suck it up and shut up and be nicer “because motherhood is hard” but to raise me to believe my silence or shorts or mere existence was grounds for raping or beating me is fucking sickening because it’s almost 22 years now and i still can’t confidently say no.

this is the best i’ve ever been at setting boundaries. my silence or aversions or redirecting conversations. i have trouble letting myself acknowledge my own limits and it’s something i work on every day.

dating after long term relationships is hard. dating after running away from an abusive mother/partner/etc is really hard. but dating after numerous assaults because you didn’t know they were assaults and still struggle to prevent them is especially hard.

a lot of people take it personally when i don’t have those urges or even let myself think that way. they beat themselves up for the time i am unable to act on any feelings which sucks. but i tell people beforehand to not expect anything from me which i think is a good start.

i read a lot of coping after sexual violence articles and talk it out with friends and write it down and box and dance it out and buy “whore clothes” and even paid for back tattoos to get comfortable with people touching / seeing me and also reconnecting with my physical form but nothing works and i don't know why.

the way he’d throw me around and fall asleep or drive away / send me money after still makes me fucking sick. every day further from it yet i still feel it so close and fresh in my mind.

i can visit graves with people and cry in their arms and whore my trauma out for dinner or a ride home but the thought of 1 person seeing the roses on my back makes me want to throw up and die. it feels too intimate. i'm too vulnerable in that moment what if they pick me up or hit me or make me do all the work again and i get so fucking scared it’s gonna happen again and i don’t know what else to do :/

the way i was never given aftercare after that and had excuses made "it's how i cope with xyz" bitch shut the fuck up "i paid your rent i can do whatever i want" no the fuck you can't you still have to treat me like a fucking person you sicko

the worst times would be when i'd work 5 hours at the mall, commute all the way to the other side of the city for a 10 hour shift at bar, come home make dinner clean and then do all the fucking work in the bedroom after doing it all everywhere else. you'd think i'd finally get held after, right ? right ?????

wrong.

i was not handled with care. i didn't have time to take care of myself my hair got so matted from knots i had to shave it off. i never had time to cook or clean and i was the heaviest i'd ever been. not even from the pregnancy but the stress weight alone.

yeah i lost 40 pounds that autumn and my hair and nails finally started growing again but i miscarried in the arms of a fucking stranger and i'm really freaked out about how you'll react or look at me after you know this because everyone always looks at me like i'm stupid or something or it makes them uncomfortable and i can't even blame them because it's fucking uncomfortable for me too.

telling people it was a rock on my hand is way more palatable than saying it was the other thing. not even for their comfort but for my own.

and it's terrifying because i'm a fucking target for these kinds of things. that's why i ask right away about taxi cab theories and baby plans because if you are on your last love i don't want that pressure on me. if you are ready to build a life with someone go do that. but if you have no feelings and want to whore yourself out with a bunch of girls i'm gonna say go do that too bitch !!

i'm not here to be your first or last love but that doesn't mean i'm here to be some rebound or “one of your girls” do you know who the fuck you’re talking to !!!!

#cw sex talk #cw sa mention #vent post #cw miscarriage

0 notes

florareed · 10 months ago

Text

OK I think poll results are not gonna change at this point so... Rattled Snakes Chapter 1

Hiss

The first chapter of story in eighteen chapters (and three interludes)

Serving under ADVENT as part of the military also meant having no privacy. Mandatory and periodic psionic probing, random living quarters searches, and constant surveillance of communications all times. It’s all about “knowing one’s place” and “learning respect” for some always present, yet always unseen Elders. Should one desire to do something, it had to go through the chain of command, from the “lower species” up to the “psionic species” and relayed using those bio-mechanical chimaeras onto the appropriate superior for the given request. There, it’d be dissected, scrutinised, and lastly, when one was called to the multi-purpose interrogation room for an appointment regarding said request, usually denied. These degrees of denial ranged from a mere verbal scolding which lasted for several minutes to never leaving the room where said denial took place. Even if a request was approved, it was done in the cheapest, least comfortable way possible, just so that one could come to regret even thinking about asking for it in the first place.

For anyone raised outside of this system, it appeared quite horrific, because it was. For those raised within the system, bombarded with propaganda from the moment they left their egg or grew out of their donor’s placenta or whatever other birthing mechanism they had, and with their minds constantly stifled and crippled by an always-present psionic veil, they’d claim it was normal, because it’s all they knew. It’s all they are allowed to know. It’s a very cold, very loveless life. You live, you do as you’re told and when you die someone with different numbers and similar genes would take your place and do your task just as well as you would have had you not died.

When the (still unseen and still absent) Elders relayed orders down the chain of command, down the Codices and the Sectoids, and through those to the rest of the occupying force, it was followed unquestioningly. If the Elders told one to fly, one would be expected to do so even if they lacked the necessary appendages or argumentations to do so. If they were told to eliminate a target, one would be expected to attack it until it was nothing more than slag and ash.

Of course, things were not always carried out as relayed or as expected. Most commonly, when a target was considered dead, it was no longer shot at, or constricted, or poisoned, or puppeted around; there was no need for further offensive action, and the most efficient action would have been to stop attacking them. Goals were always carried out as specified, never surpassing expectations, just meeting them, or less. While this no doubt caused irritation to said unseen and absent Elders, it was expected that, until told otherwise, one should perform their duties until asked to stop.

These were considered quirks of the system. Not features, just small byproducts of it. Much like how microplastics are considered to be a byproduct of anything to do with plastic elements.

“Were” is the key word here.

Because as G-03-4-03324 would come to find out one evening, when the system didn’t exist, one was still expected to follow their last given orders as if it were still functioning. Because after all, that was a quirk of the system, and if the elders told you to fly, you were always meant to reply “how high” even if it was impossible to do so. Thus, an order was meant to be carried out until it was countered by another order. The lattermost order would override the former, and so on, and so on. This is how the several races under the commands of the Elders would live their unfulfilling, shallow, lives.

G-03-4-03324 was what one may call an “average” non-cloned individual of her species. Like the majority of her kind, she was genetically engineered to serve in the military. Humans called them Vipers, despite the fact they resemble Cobras more in physiology due to the presence of a hood capable of flaring from the side of their head. Much like many of her sisters, yellow-orange scales covered most of her body, with a lighter patch running down her front. Like most of her kind, she has two hands (but not two legs) with four long, clawed fingers each. If one were to measure her from the tip of her head and the tip of her tail that she used for locomotion, she’d measure exactly three metres and seventy centimetres. When upright, however, she tended to vary between a metre and sixty and a metre and eighty.

In a sea of similarly coloured, patterned and named alien snakes, she’d easily be lost in the crowd.

There’s one thing, though, which makes her stick out right now, and it’s not the fact she had stopped her task suddenly. Rather than simply going about the path she was assigned to patrol, she is far more focused on making sense of her surroundings and her own thoughts than may or may have not have been possibly healthy for a serving soldier. Up to this point in time, she didn’t think much at all. When one grows up with their thoughts stifled and quite literally moulded like clay, one doesn't tend to think much of anything. But once she started thinking, rather than merely existing, she immediately began to think the only real notable skill she may have is her capacity to think outside of the box as she was doing right now.

Now, back to the discovery she found. She first stumbled upon this discovery of a routine patrol of the outskirts of the base she was stationed, within the remains of the rainforest once known as the Amazon. Of course, it was no longer called that. The river had been rerouted and several species of fish and one species of dolphin had been driven extinct for the sole purpose of rapidly extracting gold out of the riverwater to make electronic components. She had been stationed there following limited combat in City 67 and the need for repositioning to somewhere she was less likely to fail at her objectives since she had proven that “protecting a target” was beyond her capacity, although “landing a shot on a rebel halfway across a city” was in fact, very doable. So combining the best of both worlds, her higher ups decided she was best fit for wandering the now nameless jungle, trying to hunt anything that displeased them.

So when the psionic network went down she was very, very alone. Without any psionics nearby to possibly prevent a complete collapse, she found it was quite simple, really, to figure out that that syrupy, ever-present brain-fog that dulled her thoughts to a mere murmur was indeed, very gone. She paused, as she smelled the moisture, the soil, and the leaves she crushed under her body, stumbling across her thoughts. Staring away into the green, she decided to ponder on its presence, which may have been the first time she willingly set her mind on anything.

Time passes.

And there is nothing. Not even the familiar complacent humming that made her memories feel like something between waking and stasis; a feeling she did not have words to describe. Not exactly a state of suspended animation, but something similar enough where nothing felt quite real enough and logic took a day off. Until that moment, that was, when she realised her older memories felt exactly like that, and the newest one of realising something was awry was about as clear as a holographic projection. This was not meant to be. Why were her older memories so distorted? Why were her prior experiences and feelings so hazy? Something must have happened to the psionic network if it suddenly was not there, anymore.

Following that conclusion, she tried thinking of several minor infractions she had in the past, just to see if there was that mentally painful ‘ding’ that sprouted into being whatever she did. Just to check, to make sure. There wasn’t. Just to double check that the brain-fog was really gone, she decided to recall the one instance where she was called into the interrogation room for “inappropriate behaviours.” In other words, the one instance where she developed an affectionate feeling, whose name she didn’t know or had, for one of her colleagues, despite the conditioning drilled into her from the moment of her hatching.

Of course, had the Psionic network been active, this would have marked her instantly as a liability, since close connections with colleagues tended to bring about reduced efficiencies and increased the risk of an emotional, nervous collapse should one of these close relationships were to suddenly cease to exist. It was always viewed as an unacceptable liability, a dormant error to be smothered before it left the incubator, or the crib, or the placenta, or whatever other mechanism for growing one’s young one may have had.

G-03-4-03324 knew this, of course. It was a tremendously momentous risk. Unfortunately, she doesn’t know better. This was her only memory of failing to comply with the almost impossibly high standards set upon her kind, or the only one where she failed to do so on purpose. So that very same night, not five hours after psionic network collapsed, pestered by mosquitoes that dropped dead as soon as they as much as took one sip from her toxic blood and bothered by the sounds of hundreds of nocturnal animals, she allowed herself to recall the blurry murky memory with her superior, in a conversation that more or less went like this:

“We noticed you were staging at G-10-4-03301 for prolonged periods of time. Your operational efficiency has been reduced by this activity. Is this correct?” One of her prior commanders might have said to her, after they had guided her into one of the few interrogation rooms available within the still rebuilding City 52.

Being incapable of lying and under the rosy impression that this Sectoid general wanted nothing more than was best for her, she answered truthfully: “I have.”

This answer was a mistake.

“We shall not find yourself giving similar looks to your colleagues again,” he muttered purely psionically. Had her superior at the time had lips rather than exposed teeth, he would have most likely licked them in apparent displeasure at having their suspicions confirmed. “We’ll be transferring you elsewhere. Prepare yourself for such.”

Contentment unknowingly fell onto the fifteen-year old Viper’s face as she studied her superior for naught than a second. Had she had the capacity to feel betrayal, she could have very well have felt that. Instead, after shutting down feelings she felt too confused to deal with, she bowed her head slightly and nodded very gently. That same day, went to the cargo bay, disassembled her plasma rifle, and put herself onto stasis inside of the pod with her name written on the outside.

Now, currently, in the present, aged seventeen, four months before she actually had to begin to introduce herself to humans with her actual age rather than a lie claiming she was eighteen, she began emulating one of the behaviours which she had been taught as a surefire indicator of stress: hyperventilating. She found, much like she had been taught, it didn’t help much in calming stress, or anxiety, or any other unpleasant feeling she was experiencing in the moment. If anything, it made it worse. It didn't help that she’d never experienced this feeling before, or the fact that the first new feeling she discovered right after curiosity and amusement was anxiety unconstrained by petty things like “coping mechanisms” or “breathing exercises”.

She must have dropped her rifle at one point between coming across this realisation and coiling herself around the nearest tree in an attempt to snap it in half. Her opponent in this constriction contest, the Shiringa, or caucho tree depending on who and where you asked, was quite sturdy. In a battle of resistance between the constricting power of a seventeen year old alien alien snake and the capacity to resist said constricting force of a fifty-seven year old caucho tree, the tree would likely win every single time.

This didn’t stop G-03-4-03324 from trying, however. She squeezed the tree until her ribs felt like they were going to give out. Watched the world slowly rotate around. Mind spiralling from thought to thought. Emotion to emotion. In this moment of weakness, she admitted privately, to her own self and her mind which was very much her own and not impeded by foreign mental powers, that she could very much wish to stop existing in this very moment. She also admitted (once again, privately, to herself and her unimpeded mind) that it was incredibly tempting to make this happen by biting down on her tail and eating herself from the bottom up, if the idea of tasting whatever detritus she had picked up on her tail filled her with immense revulsion. So to compromise, she hugs her tail, feeling comforted by the feeling, but not by much.

In terms of goals, she admitted, she was very much lost. She had no direction

On purpose, she too admitted once again, she was very much also lost. Did she really have a purpose, if she wasn’t connected to the psionic network?

In managing her thoughts… she recognized that they were a terrible freedom she had no clue on how to manage. But she didn’t want to lose this clarity of cognition ever again.

Amalgamating all of these thoughts, ideas, and emotions she didn’t have the emotional maturity to readily weather, she was left with what she assumed could be described as “concentrated misery”. Sobbing distils it into its purest form. Not tears, none at all. Vipers (as incorrect as that term may be) do not have the necessary organs to produce tears. This muffled cry is more akin to a mixture between a soft hiss and a choked sob, repeating over and over again.

It is a soft cry. The sound produced would be similar to a sort of hiccup produced out of an infant serpent’s hiss. Even if tears don’t form, mucus still builds up in her nostrils, she sniffles a couple of times, leaving a salty aftertaste as she tries to prevent herself from crying all over herself, but fails miserably. On one hand, she never felt more hopeless and terrified in her life. As a matter of fact, she recognizes this is the first time she feels this way. On the other, she never felt more free.

Of course, she could always go back to her base, to her commander, and to the other species of Advent, and to her sisters-in-arms to potentially gain an idea on what to do or how to act or…

But no, she wouldn’t. She couldn’t! To give herself up to willingly be examined in a room she would never leave? She’d literally die.

She dreaded to think what would happen to the others. If she didn’t return… would they have their minds suffocated under a mental shawl again? Would their sense of identity be smothered as it sprung up for the first time in… forever? Or would they be just as independent as her at this given moment?

The tree tightens under her coils. It does not mind, but just in case, it gives a prayer for its well being through the mycorrhizal network it is connected to.

It’s a smart, sensible thing not to return. Staying here, she can keep this newly found sense of not-collectiveness and not-haziness and with the capacity to vividly feel even the small cracks in the wood of the tree she’s is trying to smother and the insects crawling from underneath and the squeezed, pasty moss that she had so rudely squashed underneath. Yes, it’s a very good idea to stay right here, hyperventilating through her mouth, and not moving as much as a single centimetre from this tree she is trying to squeeze the life out of. She knows her commander will likely peer into her mind as soon as she returns and…

No, that’s not going to happen. She won’t let it happen.

Only an idiot would return. G-03-4-03324, was decidedly, not an idiot. So she assumed they would be looking for her out here.

Thus, the intelligent course of action would be to go back to her base, because G-03-4-03324 wasn’t raised stupid and if there’s somewhere her commander wouldn’t look for her is back at the base she was stationed at because that’s something only a stupid, stupid snakelike alien would do. Hopefully, they haven’t thought about this, and this plan would go off without a hitch.

Slowly, very slowly, she felt her body loosen from around the tree. She almost hears the tree sighing, although she convinces herself it was herself letting out a long, withdrawn breath… which she had done. She slowly slithers herself into a position that could be called standing, taking deep, long breaths.

Breathe in, breathe out. It doesn’t mean much to her when she first does it by accident. But then she does it again, and then one time after that, she wonders if humans are really stupid enough not to have tried this at one point in time. ‘Surely’ she thinks, ‘they must be a really incoherent species if they never thought about coming up with this!’ She’d mentally pat herself on her back for such a moment of genius.

She’s not sure what to call this new survival strategy of pausing her breaths, but as soon as she gets back to the base she’s going to teach the others, and they’ll all be so proud of her, and…

She realises the issue with returning to the base now. Her commander did not expect her to be back, didn’t he? Because they never revoked her prior orders, she was expected to remain here, bothered by insects and animals and the occasional crocodile she was forced to poison to remain alive. She was not, however, expected to arrive back to base just to never see the outside of an interrogation room again. Coiling around the tree again seems very inviting, once more.

Right. She may have to rethink that whole thought about “not being stupid from earlier. She stops her breaths from escalating beyond her capacity to control or calm them down.

Then she realises her plasma rifle is gone. It comes like a foreshock of an earthquake, a rough little jolt to shake her before she abruptly realizes just how calamitous the situation got. Her gun is gone? Her gun is gone!? What was she supposed to do now? What was she ever expected to achieve without her weapon? Obviously to spit venomous bile and to pull undesirables with her tongue and to constrict around them like she just tried doing to the tree, but she never, ever liked doing that.

The only times she did was…

…was… why did she even do those things? She knew she disliked them and knew she heard a movement in the bush.

That gets her to hide real quickly. She never hid before, but she gets the gist of it, from her memories of how the rebels did it. Stay behind something, be real quiet, and don’t make a single, solitary sound.

It, whatever it is, slithers across the ground nearby. Long and serpentine, it makes its way through the rainforest floor. It raises its head to observe its environment, catching a glimpse of an otherworldly entity, completely alien to it. It shared with it a form of locomotion and a similar skin type, but nothing more. Whatever it is watches intensely, gauging whether it's a threat or not.

But the green Anaconda, travelling through the jungle undergrowth, quickly returns to its travels. After all, it's already eaten its fair share of young caiman for it to be sated for the following month.

G-03-4-03324 let out a sigh she didn’t know she was holding. The jungle, without a weapon capable of carbonising anything she shot at with, was a truly alien and terrifying environment. Not a place she wanted to be without… her gun! Of course, she wouldn’t want to be in any hostile territory without a tool to defend herself beyond what was provided by her nature. Right now she could feel it: every small plant, animal, and critter was out for her blood. Not only this, but there was no doubt that she was expected to survive here until she was called back, and she didn’t want to be called back as much as it pained her. Maybe the others… no, no time to think about that.

She shakes her head, trying to beat back the repetitive thoughts and the swell of venom pushing against the corners of her mouth. Inadvertently, she makes the feeling worse. Her newly found mind was only focusing on one thing, and that was that she felt defenceless despite having quite respectable natural armoury herself. She felt exposed, not because of the animals, she would admit, despite being absolutely certain that the rodent she saw a moment ago wanted nothing more than the worst for her. No, it was her regional commander.

The one in charge of the psionic incursion on irregular intervals, with the exposed human teeth, glowing torso, ghastly, gangly appearance and grey skin was an alien that only shared the most basic of mobility functions with a human: a Sectoid. She feared him, she realises, finally labelling one of the feelings she was trained only to find on others. She feared him because any meeting with a Sectoid usually meant one had done something wrong, and as of recent, she had mentally noted to have accumulated far more infractions across her entire life in the span of a couple of hours. If he found her, she had no real way of defending herself.

She coiled around him to crush his insides? Mind control.

She sprayed him with poison? Mind control, because not even deadly neurotoxins acted immediately.

She wasn’t going to use her tongue. No way. Tasting sweat and detritus and who knows what else? Gross. It didn’t even hurt anything. But if she used it? Mind control.

So she had to find her gun. She felt almost naked without it. As if a finger had been cut off her. A finger that could shoot out balls of burning hot radioactive plasma, but still. If she missed, it was going to be the same fate as her prior points, if not worse. She’s too far gone to go back while the Sectoid that managed the base lived. She’s thought of too many deviant things now.

Breathe in, breathe out.

That won’t happen. Because she won’t let it happen. If she gets mind controlled then… she’ll claim it was the rebels the ones that set her up to this task. Those dastardly humans, corrupting the minds of the innocent. Everyone knows they did that, because she’s been told as such and she’s seen posters, both holographic, digital, and of such behaviour. Such was the need for absolute control over them to prevent themselves from filling their minds with erroneous ideas such as having their bodies turned into burgers (which, unknowingly to her, was actually happening). She chuckles. Oh, what would she have given for some of those posters right now, to cheer up the green and brown monotony of this place and lift her spirits up by reading about her possible, eventual retirement.

But that all hinges on getting out of here without having her mind read. Hopefully, the Elders will be too panicked by the failure of their network to spend resources and time on things like “mandatory psionic probing”. She’ll get rid of the only witness of her recent thought-crimes and it’ll be smooth sailing from here on out.

So in the absence of her rifle, she scavages around the jungle floor for a long, heavy branch. She’s seen humans swing these things around to deadly effect. But she’s also seen in those recordings do nothing other than loud, comedic sounds. So she judges her chances between killing her Sectoid superior and merely putting them into a state of unconsciousness at a roughly equal chance.

And just in time, too. She feels the unwelcome pressure in her mind as he approaches. She must know she’s here, but not where. Thank goodness, because otherwise… she’d be dead already. Quietly slithering behind a tree, G-03-4-03324 holds her breath and stays very, very still.

She wonders if this is always how the rebels apparently got the drop on other pods. She wouldn’t know. All of the fights she’s seen are because she was called as a reinforcement, or allerted once the Rebels had somehow snuck past.

Maybe she didn’t have to end him. Perhaps leaving him tied somewhere and left to the elements, they’d simply die on their own, and no one would be able to trace the evidence back to her. Haha! Smart. Too smart. Her cleverness frightens her, but she remains stiff, as an unliving vine as detritus crunches under bare, exposed feet. She instantly knows who this is. It doesn’t cross her mind that he shouldn’t be anywhere close to here at all, or heading through the woods silently.

if the humans did it all the time on those recordings they watched on their electronic monitors, there was no way it could go wrong, right? Just one swing and he’d be out, and she’d go back to base and he’d conveniently disappear. So she carefully weighted the branch she found off the ground. It was long, and it had a hefty weight to it, dead leaves and moss growing off it. He didn’t know she was still here. She knew why he was here, and probably knew she would be around here closeby somewhere with his freaky mind powers, but not where. So carefully, vary carefully, as the Sectoid passes by, she raises the branch above her head and-.

She smacks him right on the face as his head begins to glow purple. Then the glow fades as G-03-4-03324 realises she now has just half a branch. The other half is lodged right between the eyes of her general. The alien stumbles back one step clumsily, then collapses backwards onto the detritus.

Her eyes widened. She looks at the stick, then at the other half, lodged into the brains of the grey, wide-eyed psionic. Then back at the stick. It wasn’t meant to go like that. “Uh… uhhhh…”

What, exactly, was she expecting to happen? Of course this wasn’t a projection! It wouldn’t work like that! She’s seen it happen outside of projections and it never happened like that in real life! Even if it did, it wouldn’t have been a permanent solution, he could just freaky mind-power his way out of his bonds… Bitterness builds up inside as she realises her “totally non-lethal” plan wouldn’t have worked. It was always going to end up this way. Carefully, she removes the piece out of his head, and immediately regrets it as orangeish blood begins gushing freely out of the head wound. She applies pressure… to little success. “O-Oopsss…”

She nudges him with the tip of her free hand. He doesn’t stir. Blood gushes forth from the gash in his forehead past her fingers, like a fountain raining -coloured fluid on the rainforest floor, sticking out like those safety-jackets humans used out of the more muted, darker greens of the forest around it. Her hands are coated with the evidence of her crime. Her brain struggles to catch up with what she has just done.

“Oops?” she repeats, before coming up with the only expletive she knows for certain that could be used to express her shock: “oh, fuck.”

She looks back to him. Indeed, the Sectoid is still very much dead. Although… maybe it’s not all as it seems? Maybe, just maybe, amongst the pool of rapidly growing gore, there was a sign of life, a chance of recovery. Surely, the inwards that got turned into outwards still had to work!

“Wake up? Please?” she says, gently slapping his face. He doesn’t move. More orangish blood gushes from the crevice between the Sectoids eyes, covering her hand. She slaps slightly harder, and panicking, grabs his head and shakes it. It makes a scrunchy, unpleasant sound, and she allows it to limply fall back to the ground, bending at an awkward angle. “Ok, maybe not like that…”

She gulps. Air, mostly. A bit of saliva and venom she released into her mouth in an earlier panic, but it’s not like she’s going to suffer for it.

Wait, maybe, she could pretend he killed himself? Humans did that all the time, no? With those tied ropes and jumping off buildings? Yes, that’d be perfect. She could return to base, tell them he got lost, panicked, and offed himself in such a way it looked like he was bashed in the head with a heavy branch. This was it: the perfect plan. And there were vines all around, what is it that humans called them? Nature’s rope? They’d do nicely. She picks whatever vine she finds on the ground. Then, she gives it a couple of twists around the Sectoid’s neck, and with a quick ascent up to the canopy pulling both ends of the vine, she… struggles to make a knot.

How was it again? A twist here and a twist there and pull though this loop?

Oh, nope, that seemed too tight and the body isn’t even off the ground… Maybe a couple of twists and interlocking them? G-03-4-03324 has never seen a basket, but she assumes this is how they’re made. Heave and pull and hea- oh. It’s light now? Why is it light? Why does the vine suddenly carry no weight? Well, she didn’t know, so that could only be a good thing. Descending down the tree, she almost would have been on her merry way…

Almost. Because she wasn’t on her way. The corpse she had helped create was now also headless. The head fell a short distance away from the body, but this definitely didn’t look like any of the scenes of self-destruction she had witnessed. The vine must have snapped the head clean off. This didn’t look accidental at all! It had to be fixed… but how?

Her gaze turned towards the wrist- mounted plasma gun, and she nodded to herself. Yeah, he shot himself. In the head. Four times. Once to the forehead and three times to the neck. Seems plausible. Then bled out all over the floor and herself. Very plausible. High chances of that occurring. He suffered from the joy that kills when he saw her, she’ll say, and he shot himself in glee. She’ll get to leave the interrogation room and hopefully have a boring job for the rest of her very, very long life and hopefully maybe even ascend her rank and have private quarters for herself and be able to learn about the language and culture of her kind and…

She realises that it wouldn’t cut it to claim he offed himself when he saw her. No, no. That would not do. She needed a more compelling cause, a more compelling lie. So… what should it be? Maybe a caiman ate him?

G-03-4-03324 looks at the orange-coloured blood, then at herself. Her hands and even her two-piece plated armour are coated with the stuff. If she considered the thought of potentially devouring her superior disgusting, no doubt those horrible river critters that were out for her blood would agree with her judgement. They only really went after her, because, she assumed, she looked slightly similar to the native reptiles of the area. She felt dumb to have thought of leaving him to the elements, of course it wouldn’t work.

No, she’s sticking with the plan of trying to make him look like he self-destructed. If he was looking for her, well, maybe…

Human music is said to be horrible, no?

She remembers that on the posters and on the thoughts and experiences that were not quite hers but were implanted directly into her mind before she was given a plasma rifle and sent off to serve as a soldier. Blaring, garbled noises. She imagines the music of her kind, if she ever gets to hear it, may be quite more harmonious than that. So maybe… she could say he found some of that horrible, awful thing and in confusion shot himself.

Maybe that was implausible but it's the only thing that came to her panicked mind. It was a jittery thing, jumping back and forth, like an anxious rodent. It's barely coherent at most, but it’s the only instructions she has at the moment.

This place was like how she remembered the back of her hand: memorable, but hazy. She knew of the city nearby, the one where all the victims of the chemical attack wandered off into the jungle and promptly ended up dead. So the city, unlike many claimed by ADVENT, was completely deserted. A real ghost town. She knew that the street she was quickly slithering over, reclaimed by the jungle since the war against the humans ended twenty years ago, may have had an electronics shop here. She remembered the crystalized batteries and the rotten boxes that may have carried equipment long ago. The humidity and the rain crashing through broken windows has certainly done a number on them, though.

She searches regardless. Decayed papers, swollen wrappers with popped batteries. Box after box, bag after bag. She takes care not to slither on any shattered glass as she goes from one shop to the next, and then to the next. Finally, she finds one radio that appeared to be functional, still within a bag. ‘Human consumerism comes to the rescue, for once,’ she admits to herself. The batteries have leaked all over the inside of their own smaller bag within the larger one, but the radio itself seems intact. It’s one of those old, lithium-powered radios, the kind humans carried over their shoulders, or in their hands, blaring obnoxious sounds… now, for how to power it…

Maybe the plasma pistol? A new story stewed in her head One where her general got jumped by a rebel with a nasty stick, and re-wired the radio to his plasma pistol’s power source to blare their horrid propaganda once the deed was done?

Oh, this story was the most realistic one yet. Now she just had to pretend she came across the scene in shock, smashed the radio, then went back to base after cleaning off the blood. No one would suspect a thing, and she could go the rest of her life pretending she had done nothing wrong! Delightfully clever, even if this was just her first day being able to think her own thoughts

She nodded to herself in delight as she ripped the radio out of her bag, slithering out of the empty streets and onto the scene of her crime. The body stares up at her, as if asking what she’s going to do, and she answers by grabbing the wrist of her now-dead commander, she rips the wrist-mounted plasma gun off.

If a human was watching, they may have been amazed that, in fact, wires and electronics are in fact, a part of alien technology. Even if operated by psionics, power had to be channelled somewhere, and it had to do so through some medium. So disassembling a firearm and dissecting it for wires and its power source was pretty doable, if not slightly time-consuming due to her unfamiliarity with the weapon.

Of course, there was no human watching. G-03-4-03324 would have been most displeased if there was, because the only humans that may have existed around these parts are rebels trying to make off with the alloys and equipment of her base. And also, trying to remove her head. Not metaphorically, like her now-deceased commander, but physically too. Hadn’t an infiltration unit taken a picture of a hangar covered in body parts of her kind and the other species of the allegiance? It was the very definition of barbarism.

Humans were definitely barbaric, so it stood to measure their music would be the same. Once she finishes rewiring everything, tuning down the power of the disassembled pistol’s battery so it doesn't pop the radio like a balloon, she turns it on and…

This… this sounded rather nice, actually. Her brain told her it should be unbearable, but what vibrated through the air right now? Those sounds? They are melodic, almost poetic. Like soft murmurs and a cacophony of sounds that should be unimpressive individually, but somehow aren’t when they work in conjunction. It’s the most bizarre thing she’s experienced.

She finds herself humming with the music, absent-mindedly, as she stares at the radio work.

There shouldn’t be any signal around here, she knew that. This must be a pirate station operated by the rebels, she should do something about it.

But she just listened. Listened and stared at the sounds coming out of the

Maybe… breaking the radio wasn’t such a good idea. She’d take it back. Say it’s a way to monitor for this pirate station, find its source but…

Right now, she’ll just listen. And then head back. Just as she planned.

For just a little while, she’ll be, and allow these sounds to flow through her.

IMPORTANT QUESTION

Double brownie points for anyone who knows what I'm talking about.

#xcom #xcom 2 #fanfiction #wlw #saphic space snakes #lesbian spaces snakes #viper #vipers #viper x-com #xcom fanfic #xcom viper #viper xcom

4 notes · View notes

no-reply95 · 3 years ago

Text

Jealous Guys

Something I’ve been thinking about for a while now is the different ways jealousy manifested for John and Paul over the course of their friendship.

I’m going to look at John and Paul in turn and have a look at some of the key ways jealousy appeared, before, during and after the Beatles period. This will be a looooong post so if you want to go on deep dive keep reading below.

John

Jealousy was something that John acknowledged as a big part of his personality, as far as I’m aware, he only acknowledged his jealousy publicly in terms of his relationship with Yoko but I believe jealousy was a feature of all of John’s major relationships. John’s first real partnership was with Pete Shotton, his childhood best friend, and Pete has outlined how John’s jealousy and possessiveness was a feature in their friendship with them falling out when Pete first started showing interest in girls and with John acting out when Pete started to spend more time with other friends, instead of him, here Pete recounts John’s reflection on this period of their friendship:

“Years later John confessed to having felt acutely jealous throughout that interlude: “I was scared shitless I’d lost you after our fight in science class, when you starting playing with David Jones. I really thought I’d gone too far with you that time.“

Pete Shotton, John Lennon: In My Life , 1983

Pete’s recollections establish a pattern in John’s life of acting out due to a fear of abandonment and losing those who are closest to him so it’s not surprising that once John had formed a strong bond with Paul that would stir similar fears in him.

Below I’ve categorised the groups of people that were the focus of John’s jealousy and have picked one person from each group as an example:

Family - Jim McCartney

Paul’s family was and continues to be a big part of his life. From the outset of their friendship, John was made aware of how important Jim was to Paul and vice versa. John and Paul had to skip school to hang out together because Jim wouldn’t have John in their house initially and John confessed his resentment of Jim’s influence over Paul’s life. It appears that after some time John grew tired of having to contend with Jim for the position of the most important person in Paul’s life, and this culminated in John giving Paul a pseudo ultimatum as John discussed in 1971:

“But Paul would always give in to his dad. His dad told him to get a job, he fucking dropped the group and started working on the fucking lorries, saying, "I need a steady career." We couldn't believe it… “So I told him on the phone, "Either come or you're out." So he had to make a decision between me and his dad then, and in the end he chose me”

St. Regis Hotel interview, Sept. 5, 1971

Friends - Mal Evans

Throughout the active years of the band it was typical of them to refer to each other as their best friends and, given the lives they led, I think the simple fact that no one else could understand what it was like to be a Beatle would have meant they all shared a special bond. However, they all had friendships outside of the band and this was something that could cause issues for John when it came to Paul.

According to Tune In, Mal initially became friends with Paul during the band's initial shows at the Cavern Club then, after a suggestion from George, Mal became a part of the Beatles entourage thereafter. Mal had friendships with all the Beatles, as part of their inner circle, but from his comments it appears John took umbrage with the closeness of Mal’s friendship with Paul:

“Paul would suddenly come in with this circle saying, “This is Magical Mystery Tour, will you write that bit?” And I was choked that he’d arranged it all with Mal anyway, for a kickoff, and had all this idea going”

St. Regis Hotel interview, Sept. 5, 1971

Mal also comes up when John discusses his recollections of the writing of Eleanor Rigby:

“So rather than ask me, “John, do these lyrics—” Because by that period, he didn’t want to say that – to me. Okay? So what he would say was, “Hey, you guys, finish off the lyrics,”... “ Now, I sat there with Mal Evans, a road manager who was a telephone installer, and Neil Aspinall, who was a not-completed student accountant who became our road manager. And I was insulted and hurt that he’d thrown it out in the air”...” There might be a version that they contributed, but there isn’t a line in there that they put in.“

Playboy interview, David Sheff 1980

John’s discomfort with the closeness of Paul’s relationship with Mal was something that wasn’t lost on Mal’s wife Lil:

“He was always at their beck and call. He was a nice fella to have around, so much so that it could provoke little jealousies within the band. When I met Yoko years after Mal died, she said John had told her he’d been very jealous at one point of Mal’s relationship with Paul.”

Lil Evans interview with Ray Connolly, 2005

Love interests - Linda McCartney

Throughout their friendship both John and Paul had quite a few love interests, which (to varying degrees) prompted jealousy between them.

Although John displayed jealousy of a few of Paul’s love interests this was no more apparent than with Paul’s first wife Linda McCartney, which is confirmed by both John’s words and actions regarding Linda and her partnership with Paul:

“"Then Klein informed Lennon that McCartney had secretly been increasing his stake in Northern Songs. ‘John flew into a rage,’ recalled Apple executive Peter Brown. ‘At one point I thought he was really going to hit Paul, but he managed to calm himself down.’ One unconfirmed report of this meeting had Lennon leaping towards Linda McCartney, his fists raised in her face"

Peter Doggett, You Never Give Me Your Money

"Int: When did you first meet her [Linda]? John: The first time I saw her was after that press conference to announce Apple in America. We were just going back to the airport and she was in the car with us. I didn't think she was particularly attractive, I wondered what he was bothering having her in the car for. A bit too tweedy, you know. But she sat in the car and took photographs and that was it. And the next minute she's married him."

St. Regis Hotel interview, Sept. 5, 1971

“I was reading your letter and wondering what middle aged cranky Beatle fan wrote it... "What the hell—it’s Linda! . . . Linda— if you don’t care what I say—shut up!—let Paul write—or whatever.”

"Of course, the money angle is important—to all of us—especially after all the petty shit that came from your insane family/in laws—and GOD HELP YOU OUT, PAUL—see you in two years—I reckon you’ll be out then"

Draft letter from John Lennon to Linda McCartney, circa 1971

"The presumption is a) the Beatles would get together again or are even thinking about it and b) if they got together, John and Yoko split, Paul and Linda split"

John (with Yoko) talks to John Fielding on Weekend World, 1973

"John often speculated on why Paul and Linda remained married while, at the same time, resenting their evident happiness, to the extent that he had Green do a tarot reading to ensure him that Paul and Linda were really secretly miserable and were going to divorce within a year"

According to Fred Seaman and John Green, source

Paul

Of course jealousy wasn't a one-way street in the Lennon-McCartney relationship. Unlike with John, for Paul I'm focusing more on the key people I believe his jealousy, regarding John, was directed to:

Stuart Sutcliffe

John met Stu at Art College and struck up a really close friendship with him. At the point that John met Stu, John had already become friends with Paul so Paul felt threatened when Stu entered the picture:

"When he [Stu] came into the band, around Christmas of 1959, we were a little jealous of him; it was something I didn’t deal with very well. We were always slightly jealous of John’s other friendships.

When Stuart came in, it felt as if he was taking the position away from George and me. We had to take a bit of a back seat."

Paul McCartney, Anthology 2000

"Paul was saying something about Stu’s girl – he was jealous because she was a great girl, and Stu hit him, on stage. And Stu wasn’t a violent guy at all."

John Lennon, 1967 Anthology 2000

"I looked up to Stu. I depended on him to tell me the truth. Stu would tell me if something was good and I’d believe him. We were awful to him sometimes. Especially Paul, always picking on him. I used to explain afterwards that we didn’t dislike him, really."

John Lennon, The Beatles Hunter Davies 1968

Yoko Ono

Of all the relationships I've already discussed, the relationship and jealousy displayed from Paul towards Yoko is probably the most widely discussed in Beatles historiography and general discourse. From the official start of Yoko's relationship with John in 1968 it was clear that Paul resented her presence in John's life and her proximity to the band:

"He even sent them [John and Yoko] a hate letter once, unsigned, typed. I brought it in with the morning mail. Paul put most of his fan mail in a big basket and let it sit for weeks, but John and Yoko opened every piece. When they got to the anonymous note, they looked puzzled, looking at each other with genuine pain in their eyes. ‘You and your Jap tart think you’re hot shit’, it said."

Francie Schwartz, Body Count 1972

"Cause she’s [Yoko] very much to do with it from John’s angle, that’s the thing, you know. And I – the thing is that I – there’s— Again, like, there’s always only two answers. One is to fight it, and fight her, and try and get The Beatles back to four people without Yoko, and sort of ask her to sit down at the board meetings. Or else, the other thing is to just realize that she’s there, you know. And he’s not gonna sort of – split with her, just for our sakes."

Paul McCartney, Let It Be Sessions, 1969

"I told John on the phone the other day that at the beginning of last year I was annoyed with him. I was jealous because of Yoko, and afraid about the break-up of a great musical partnership. It’s taken me a year to realise that they were in love. Just like Linda and me."

Paul McCartney, interview with Ray Connolly, 1970

What are the similarities and differences in the way jealousy manifested for John and Paul?

I think it's obvious but bears repeating that both John and Paul displayed jealousy towards other people who they felt would threaten their relationship so that's central to all the instances I have flagged, Jim, Mal, Linda, Stu, Yoko all posed real or imagined threats to John and Paul's partnership.

However, you'll note that I included more sources to display John's jealousy regarding Paul and that I categorised John's jealousy targets whereas I only pulled out two key individuals for Paul, this isn't to say that John was more jealous than Paul was, as jealousy isn't something you can quantify, but to highlight my opinion that Paul's jealousy regarding John was more targeted than John's jealousy regarding Paul. I think what stands out to me is that, I think generally Stu and Yoko are held up as the prime examples of Paul's jealousy of other people getting close to John, as far as we know, Paul never had significant issues with other people who formed close relationships with John like Pete Shotton, Cynthia Lennon, Magic Alex etc., why was that? I think that Paul was more threatened when he felt that John was replacing him so by bringing Stu into the band (even though he wasn't a musician) and Yoko into the studio (one instance where Paul was especially hurt was when John gave Paul's line in The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill to Yoko to sing), Paul perhaps felt that his place as John's primary collaborator was in jeopardy and that he could lose a partnership that had become central to his self-worth as a person - that, I believe, was when his jealousy was most likely to rise to the fore. John, on the other hand, had a much wider range of targets when it came to jealousy regarding Paul, why was John jealous of Linda? Linda wasn't trying to replace John as Paul's collaborator, if anything she wanted the Lennon-McCartney partnership to be stronger. Why was John jealous of Mal? Mal wasn't a musician, Mal was a huge fan of the band and constantly worked to fulfil their requests, so why was John so threatened by his friendship with Paul? For me, John's jealousy regarding Paul was more than just a fear of directly being replaced, I believe John's jealousy was fundamentally triggered by a fear of abandonment. I think the childhood trauma John experienced, of being left by both his parents, meant that whenever any of his close friendships and relationships were threatened, or he felt that someone close to him may leave him, he would act out. John fell out with his childhood best friend Pete when he got a girlfriend, John hit Cynthia when he saw her dancing with Stu, John was rude to several of Paul's love interests and ultimately John never fully accepted Paul's relationship with Linda because, although he could see that she could offer Paul the family life he always wanted, John didn't want Linda to take Paul away and give him a family that meant that Paul would no longer be able to prioritise John in his life as he had in the past.

Ultimately, we'll never know all the ways that jealousy factored into John and Paul's relationship with each other and those around them, as I'm sure it impacted several relationships in more complex ways than I can articulate (i.e. I suspect jealousy played a part in Paul's initial resentment of Brian but they grew closer over time so maybe Paul's jealousy lessened over time or Brian became less of a threat?). I do think it's important to consider that jealousy was present on both sides and was likely a factor in the breakdown of John and Paul's relationship, the breakdown of the Beatles and was a continued factor in disrupting reconciliations between John and Paul into the 70s and 1980.

#the beatles #john lennon #paul mccartney #john and paul #paul and linda #john and yoko #jealous guy #linda mccartney #yoko ono #stuart sutcliffe #mal evans #jim mccartney #brian epstein #long post #thoughts

80 notes · View notes

essayofthoughts · 2 years ago

Note

for the writer asks: 2, 16, 37, and 49 >:3

2. Go to your AO3 “Works” page, to the sidebar with all the filters, and click the drop-down arrow for “Additional Tags.” What are your top 3-5 most used tags? Do you think they accurately represent your writing habits?

I am going to note - this is heavily weighted by all of those Maximoff fics I wrote. So... they're certainly accurate to my writing history, but I do intend to change it (somewhat) with my fics going forward - though I suspect Character Study, Canon Compliant and Canon-Divergence are gonna remain big ones regardless.

16. What’s an AU you would love to read (or have read and loved)?

I don't know about would love to read but... periodically I return to this one HP fic - the Sacrifices Arc by Lightning on the Wave. It's just... such a good AU, it carries to logical conclusions things JKR didn't, it does some fantastic worldbuilding, it's writing is gorgeous and it has such a good perspective on trauma and healing and free will and moving forwards. It's so good.

It's also really long, so I have to set aside time for reading it.

37. Promote one of your own “deep cut” fics (an underrated one, or one that never got as much traction as you think it deserves!). What do you like about it?

Oh god, uh...

If it's a "deep cut", where I think I got a specific perspective some miss or that it sees something often overlooked in fandom I guess...

Probably my trio of short (as in, two of them are under 1k, short) Bucky Barnes fics? Another's Hand - Bucky's thoughts about the arm, a patient etherized - about Bucky's brainwashing and then Puzzle Pieces about his fragmented memory.

I'm genuinely incredibly proud of all of them and despite leaving the MCU fandom I do get a little thrill when they get noticed again.

49. What are you currently working on? Share a few lines if you’re up for it!

Cheeky cheeky.

Currently I'm working on the two chapters yet unfinished (though each half written) for the Ghost Cass interlude. A snippet:

“You would teach the children?” [Erelwae] asks, as they sip their tea - it’s got a strange mustiness to it this time, a bit like the gnome’s ear fungus tea from when they’d last visited but without the softening influence of mint and chamomile. It is winter, Vax supposes. It makes sense that, with a limited supply of plants, she might supplement it with what she can forage from the caves.

“We’ve had some run-ins,” Vex says, gesturing. “Some of us managed to fall into the Crystalfens and we seem to keep on coming across cases where some idea of how to navigate caves and the Underdark would be useful. So- I was thinking about perhaps asking you to teach me? The language and how to survive below. And in exchange, Vax and I can teach the children Common - perhaps even Elvish, if you want.”

There’s a pinched look on Erelwae’s face but Vax thinks he can guess at the origin of that.

“Elves are shits,” he says, to forestall any response. “But this way, they’d know if any elf is talking about them behind their backs - and what’s being said.”

#rightpastnowhere #fic things #ghost cass #vax'ildan #vex'ahlia #ask game #ask

5 notes · View notes

sinshckled · 3 years ago

Text

━━ ╴- AGUST D, D-2 [ 2020 ] ⤷ LYRICAL STARTERS.

collection of various sentence starters from AGUST D’s second mixtape. - translations were taken from doolsetbangtan, w/ occasional help from genius ; - minor edits were made as to accomodate roleplay needs ; - feel free to change pronouns or wording as to best fit your muse !

cw: angst, depression, mentions of violence, alcohol, lots and lots of SWEARING !

━━━━━━━

TRACK ONE. — 저 달 ( Moonlight )

❝ Fuck, I’m just doing it. ❞

❝ In my head, the reality fights with the ideal tirelessly. ❞

❝ My biggest enemy is the anger inside me. ❞

❝ Sometimes I resent god, asking why he made me live a life like this. ❞

❝ Sometimes I ask myself again, ‘if it was possible to go back, would you ?’ Well, I’ll have to think more about that. ❞

❝ One moment I feel like I’ve easily earned what I have, and the next moment I’m compensated for the fucking hard work I’ve done. ❞

❝ But I’m still hungry, would this be karma ? ❞

❝ That moonlight that shines on me at dawn, it’s still the same as then. A lot changed in my life, but that moonlight is still the same. ❞

❝ Sometimes I feel like I’m a genius. Sometimes I feel like I have no talent. ❞

❝ There would be no eternity for anything. ❞

❝ Being called immortal is fucking overwhelming. ❞

❝ But the adjectives they attach to my name feel too much sometimes. ❞

❝ What can I do, I should just keep running. ❞

❝ What can I do, I should just keep hold of things that I’m grasping. ❞

❝ What can I do, I should just pay back what I’ve received. ❞

❝ If you think you’re gonna crash, accelerate even harder, you idiot ! ❞

TRACK TWO. — 대취타 ( Daechwita )

❝ Don’t forget the old days. ❞

❝ Born a slave, risen to a king. ❞

❝ Rags to riches, that’s exactly the way I live. ❞

❝ I’m sorry, but don’t worry about me ; I have lots to lose. ❞

❝ I'm about to dine on what I know is mine. ❞

❝ Not gonna lie, what a shitshow. ❞

❝ I’ve got no pretensions, just kill ’em all. ❞

❝ No exceptions, I watch you fall. ❞

❝ Who’s the king ? Who’s the boss ? ❞

❝ Everyone knows my name. ❞

❝ All shit-talk, they’ve got no game. ❞

❝ Off with their heads, ah ! ❞

❝ This country's too small to hold me in yet. ❞

❝ Who said time is money ? My time is worth more than that. ❞

❝ I'm so thankful that I'm a genius. ❞

❝ If that’s your reason for using drugs, cry me a river — you’ve just got no skills. ❞

❝ I got everything I wanted, I wonder what else I should have to feel satisfied. ❞

❝ Yeah, what's next ? ❞

❝ Here comes my reality check. ❞

❝ I only looked up ; now I want to look down and put my feet on the ground. ❞

❝ Remember my name. ❞

━━━ MORE UNDER THE CUT !

TRACK THREE. — 어떻게 생각해? ( What do you think? )

❝ What do you think ? ❞

❝ Whatever you think, I’m sorry but I don’t fucking care at all. ❞

❝ I’m sorry but I don’t care at all about how mediocre your life is, or about the fact that you can’t escape the shithole after failing. ❞

❝ Thinking that my success has anything to do with your failure… you’re fucking great at being delusional. ❞

❝ Your sense of humor is so so. ❞

❝ The fact that you're fucked is your fault, no-no? ❞

❝ We conquer it all, one by one, like we’ve been doing all this time. ❞

❝ All of you go fuck yourself, huh ! ❞

❝ The brats that boast about their money, you have to wonder how much they could've actually earnt on their own. ❞

❝ Bragging about money looks cute now. ❞

❝ We’ll go serve in the military when the time comes. ❞

❝ I hope all those bastards who tried to get a free ride by selling our names shut their mouths up. ❞

❝ At this point, I don’t have to know. ❞

❝ I don’t fucking care. ❞

❝ While this will be my last gift, this as well is luxury for you. ❞

TRACK FOUR. — 이상하지 않은가 ( Strange ) ft. RM

❝ Everything in dust, do you see ? ❞

❝ Well well well…❞

❝ Everything in lust. ❞

❝ Someone please tell me if life is pain. ❞

❝ If there’s a god, please tell me if life is happiness. ❞

❝ A big system that’s called the world ; They insert conflicts, wars, or survivals. ❞

❝ Capital injects morphine called hope with dream as collateral. ❞

❝ Wealth creates wealth and tests our greed. ❞

❝ In the world, it’s only the two, black and white, that exist. ❞

❝ In the endless zero-sum game, the end is entertaining to watch. ❞

❝ Polarization... the ugliest flower in the world. ❞

❝ It’s been a long while since truth got eaten away by lies. ❞

❝ Who would it be that benefits the most? Who would it be that gets harmed the most ? ❞

❝ The one who isn’t sick in the world that is sick gets treated as a mutant, isn’t it strange ? ❞

❝ The one who has his eyes open in the world that has its eyes closed — now they make him out to be blind, isn’t it strange ? ❞

❝ The one who wants peace, the one who wants a fight — each taking each end of the ideology, isn’t it strange ? ❞

❝ There’s no correct answer, isn’t it strange ? ❞

❝ You think you’ve got taste? Oh, baby, how do you know? ❞

❝ For god’s sake, everything's under control ! ❞

❝ However much money one has, everyone is a slave of this system. ❞

❝ At this point, even you wouldn’t know. ❞

❝ Oh baby, what’s your name? ❞

❝ But still, life goes on, somehow, just like this. ❞

❝ Everyone, in their own chicken coop, says they’re okay. ❞

❝ In the world where a dream has become an option… there’s no correct answer, that’s the answer. ❞

TRACK FIVE. — 점점 어른이 되나봐 ( 28 ), ft. NiiHWA

❝ And yet, would it have been better to not know the world? ❞

❝ Perhaps I’m gradually becoming an adult. ❞

❝ I can’t remember what were the things that I hoped for. ❞

❝ Now I’m scared. ❞

❝ Where did the fragments of my dream go ? ❞

❝ Though I’m breathing, it feels like my heart has broken down. ❞

❝ Yeah, to talk about now, it’s about becoming an adult who finds it only overwhelming to grasp onto a dream. ❞

❝ I thought I’d change when I turned twenty ; I thought I’d change when I graduated. ❞

❝ Sometimes, tears suddenly pour down with no reason. ❞

❝ Whatever it is, it doesn’t matter anymore. ❞

❝ Living, for just one day, without any concerns... for just one day, without any worries. ❞

TRACK SIX. — Burn it, ft. MAX

❝ I see the ashes falling out your window. ❞

❝ There’s someone in the mirror that you don’t know. ❞

❝ And everything was all wrong ; so burn it till it’s all gone. ❞

❝ Let’s go back to the past days, to the times that destroyed me. ❞

❝ After having a taste of success, how am I different from the me of back then ? ❞

❝ Let the old me burn. ❞

❝ I wonder what would remain in the end ? ❞

❝ The weakness, hatred, loathing, and even rage — Them, too, are rather futile. ❞

❝ Be careful of the word ‘beginner’s mindset’, don’t be afraid. ❞

❝ Whether it would become a blazing sun or the ashes left behind after being burnt — always, the choice and decision is yours to make. ❞

❝ I hope you don’t forget that giving up decisively also counts as courage. ❞

TRACK SEVEN. — 사람 (People)

❝ What kind of person am I ? ❞

❝ Am I a good person ? Or a bad person ? ❞

❝ I’m just a person, too. ❞

❝ Everyone would fade away and be forgotten. ❞

❝ People change — like I have. ❞

❝ There’s nothing that lasts forever. ❞

❝ Everything is just a happening passing through.❞

❝ Mm… why so serious ? ❞

❝ If you get hurt, what about it ? ❞

❝ Flow along the way the water flows ; maybe there’s something at the end. ❞

❝ A special life, an ordinary life, each of them on their own. ❞

❝ It’s all good, it’s all good. ❞

❝ Things don’t always go as intended ; Discomfort is something everyone has to withstand. ❞

❝ The repetition of dramatic situations sometimes makes life tiring. ❞

❝ People are like that. ❞

❝ When it’s not there, you wish it was ; when it’s there, you wish it wasn’t. ❞

❝ Who said that humans are the animals of wisdom ? To my eyes, it’s obvious that they are animals of regret. ❞

TRACK EIGHT. — 혼술 ( Honsool )

❝ It’s time that I fully face myself. ❞

❝ After finishing a shower, I detoxify myself with alcohol. ❞

❝ Perhaps it’s the alcohol that puts a period at the end of the day that is blurry in my memory. ❞

❝ I’ll just worry about tomorrow’s work tomorrow, fuck I don’t care. ❞

❝ I don’t really reach for snacks because I feel like I’d throw up if I did. ❞

❝ Since it’s getting to my head, let’s be honest about my life. ❞

❝ Oh yeah, money, fame, wealth, trophies and stadiums — sometimes I’d get scared of them. ❞

❝ I thought I’d party every day when I become a superstar, but the ideal is slapping the reality in the back of its head. ❞

❝ Well, it doesn’t matter anyway ; Tomorrow will come and go again. ❞

❝ I, who’s like this, and you, who’s like that… we just endure through the day, I guess. ❞

TRACK NINE. — Interlude : Set me free

❝ Set me free, knowing that it won’t go the way I want. ❞

❝ Set me free, knowing that it’s not what I want. ❞

❝ Set me free, I’m floating freely in the void. ❞

❝ Set me free, these days, I feel melancholy for no obvious reason. ❞

❝ One day, I crawl on the floor ; On another day, I fly high in the sky. ❞

TRACK TEN. — 어땠을까 ( Dear my friend ), ft. JW of NELL

❝ Still, as ever, I miss you, and I miss you. ❞

❝ Still, as ever, the memories of us together circle around me. ❞

❝ Maybe, if I had held you back then… no, if I had stopped you back then… ❞

❝ Would we have remained friends ? What would have it been like ? ❞

❝ Dear my friend, how are you doing ? ❞

❝ I, well, am doing well, as you probably know, yeah. ❞

❝ Dear my friend, I’ll be honest. I still fucking hate you. ❞

❝ I still remember the old days, when we were together. ❞

❝ “With the two of us, even the world is nothing to be afraid of” ; We used to say that, and now we walk on completely different paths, damn. ❞

❝ We, who had big dreams, were young, we were only twenty. ❞

❝ Would it be that you’ve changed, or was it me ? ❞

❝ I hate this flowing time, I guess it’s us who’ ve changed. ❞

❝ Hey, I hate you. Hey, I don't like you — Hey, even as I say these words, I miss you. ❞

❝ When I saw you for the first time in a while, you had become a completely different person. ❞

❝ There was no way to bring you back, and you became a monster.❞

❝ The you I used to know is gone, and the me you used to know is gone. ❞

❝ I know that it’s not just because of time that we’ve changed. ❞

#rp memes #rp starters #sentence starters #lyric starters #agust d #suga #bts #rp prompts #roleplay memes #roleplay prompts #✦ ʃ — out of stars ; ◜ooc.◞ * ⋆#✦ ʃ — ◜memes.◞ * ⋆#✦ ʃ — ◜original.◞ * ⋆

81 notes · View notes

ditttiii · 4 years ago

Text

Enchanted To Meet You || 5.5 || JK’s Interlude.

Banner by: @thebannershop

◈ Summary: No one ever told you that you had a soulmate or—soulmates, for that matter. Humans don't have soulmates, but shapeshifters do. What are you supposed to do when the seven members of the worlds biggest boy band turn out to be your soulmates—only for you to realise that they aren't even human

BTS is on a hiatus and ARMY thinks they are completing their mandatory military service. You believe that too, at least you did until you realised that you had adopted them and that one way or another they were gonna live with you—as Hybrids because apparently, you all are soulmates.

◈ (Hybrid AU // Soulmate AU) (Fluff // humour // smut // angst // eventually NSFW) (NC-18) (Ot7 x Reader) (slow burn)

◈ series master-list

◈ Word Count: 2051

◈ Warnings: Maybe one curse word? PG-13 (sfw)

You're the debt that brought me back to my life 너는 내 삶에 다시 뜬 햇빚 The Second Coming of My Dreams as a Child 어린 시절 내 꿈들의 재림 I don't know what this feeling is 모르겠어 이 감정이 뭔지 Is this a deceitful dream? 혹시 여기도 꿈 속인건지

Jungkook hates quite a few things in his life at the moment—hates having to hide from his soulmate, hates that he has to pretend like he was just a rabbit and not a living, breathing human too, however more than anything else he hates himself.

God, he despises himself now more than ever. He had hurt you, made you cry, made you fear your own home. He was supposed to be someone you felt safe with, and yet he almost gave you a heart attack today.

Jungkook at the moment feels like a fraud, a sham as he gazes at you—looks at your peaceful, sleeping face. Small, warm puffs of breath hits his head and he feels his fur move under the soft force.

‘Tingles’, He thinks.

He feels your warm presence cocoon him as his body heat mingles with yours. Here, curled beside your sleeping figure like this, he can't help but curse himself. His self-loathing at an all-time high, as he thinks back to what had happened a few hours ago.

He knew it was a possibility, knew that it could happen.

The chance of you coming home suddenly and catching him in his human form wasn't an improbable one.

Jungkook, though, couldn't stand it anymore. It wasn't like he would have died if he hadn't shifted, but being a rabbit all the time wasn't the most comfortable feeling ever either.

His bones ached, and his muscles were sore because of the prolonged shifted state.

He also wasn't used to being in his animal form for an extended duration of time. He'd usually shift back after a few hours, and so this wasn't a problem he had been aware of before.

The feeling of staying shifted for days on end had him feeling claustrophobic. It was the kind of claustrophobia he thinks he would experience if he was locked inside a too tiny box with his limbs wrapped awkwardly and uncomfortably close to his body.

Suffice to say it wasn't the most comfortable state of being.

His plan was to make use of the few minutes while you were out shopping to shift back to his human form and just stretch. He hadn't planned on staying like that for longer than maybe ten minutes. But when he had shifted-back the relief—oh god, the relief was almost intoxicating.

It's potency so concentrated, he had ended up groaning out loud as his eyes rolled to the back of his head.

The numbing, constant aching of his bones and muscles, more than anything else, had left him feeling exhausted for the last few days. The pins and needles feeling when he had shifted back was enough to send him tumbling down onto the floor, as his unsteady feet refused to hold his weight.

Jungkook had been practising boxing with his trainer before all of this had happened. He also had a black belt in Taekwondo—the very principle of which was to harness an indomitable spirit. He was fit, active, athletic and buff. Staying shifted for extended periods into a form so much smaller than his human one, was borderline torturous at times.

Jungkook simply did not know how he was supposed to hold back.

He had many qualities that he was admired for, but iron like self-restraint wasn't exactly one of them. Maybe, more like the lack, thereof the aforementioned, self-restraint would be more appropriate.

Jungkook wasn't born talented. Not like the rest of the band members. As a student, he wasn't really the brightest pea in the pod either, his math skills are still nothing to boast about.

What most people saw was the end product, the final result that would come out after Jungkook would spend hours, days—months, perfecting it. He had said it before, but in reality, he wasn't as perfect as his stage persona portrayed him to be. While BTS's Jungkook was perfection personified, with his precise dance timings and on-point vocal notes, Jeon Jeongukk struggled.

When Jeongukk had first joined BTS, he had been more of a dancer than he was a singer. He had never, ever had the assumption or even the hope, that he would be chosen as the main vocalist. When he was rejected during the auditions for Superstar K, the talent show, Jeongkook was heartbroken.

It wasn't something he had ever talked in-depth about to ARMY, but his confidence in his vocal skills had taken a hit that day. He had chosen his then idol, IU Noona's song, and had sung it for weeks, perfected every single note until the feel of that vibration, the beat of that rhythm had synced to his very pulse.

But he was rejected, cast out before his audition could even be broadcasted.

He till date can't fully understand why bighit, let alone seven fucking agencies, had thought he was worth their time. Maybe it was fate playing its card and bringing him together with his soulmates, or it was just a coincidence—he didn't know why and probably never would.

He knows that it wasn't exactly a necessity for all of his soulmates to be idols, you clearly weren't. He knew precisely how lucky he was, and was therefore so utterly thankful that he could share his passion and love with all of his soulmates.

Yes, All of his soulmates, you included.

Jungkook isn't a snooper, not really. Sure, he has always been curious by nature, and his maknae persona only fuelled that image, thus overtime making him seem more like the baby in the group—but no he wasn't a snooper.

He knows how much he values his personal space and, so would never deliberately try to breach upon someone else's but you—god you, made him do things he would never choose to do before.

He hadn't wanted to, or well maybe he did want to, but he definitely didn't mean to. It wasn't like he had been planning to check your laptop folders.

No, because when just stretching hadn't quite fully loosened his body, he had thought he'd do a quick dance routine and get the blood flowing. How was he supposed to know that he would find BTS songs, their songs, his songs on there?

He shouldn't have been surprised, but he still was. Their fandom was pretty big, and the chances of a college girl listening to their music were pretty high. You were part of the demographic that they aimed and catered most towards, so it was to be expected, but it still caught him by surprise.

Dressed in one of your loose hoodies and a pair of loose pyjamas, he looks at the screen.

His breath still hitched in his throat as his eyes widened, glossy, doe-like large and oh so so curious.

His grip on the back of your chair slips, as he stumbles before getting a hold, and slowly sinks down onto the empty seat. Thinks about how you have probably spent hours pouring over your medical texts in the same exact chair, and that makes him feel closer to you.

He has been curled around you, has slept with his face literally pushed into your cleavage, but somehow the simple act of sharing a space that you spent a lot of your time in, sends his heart racing as a small smile overtakes his lips and he bites them to stop it from spreading entirely.

He fails, of course, he does.

He clicks on the folder titled 'BTS' and watches a list of sub-folders pop up on his screen. His heartbeat rises—thuds and beats strong enough that he feels it in his ears, in the back of his throat, in the wrist that touches the table as he glides the mouse across the surface.

His palms feel sweaty, and he feels this anxious feeling pool somewhere deep in his stomach, as his gut squeezes. It feels like his conscience is telling him something. That he shouldn't be doing this. This feels like something dangerous, but something he desires. The folder the screen displays the apple to his Adam.

You? his forbidden fruit.

His breaths grow shorter, as he unconsciously tries to be as quiet as he can be and leans forward to look at the vast array of songs you had. As his eyes rake over the meticulously named albums with their years after them written in brackets, he almost chuckles.

He isn't surprised to see that you were anal about categorizing your songs too. From what he had observed of you in the last few days, he would be more surprised if you weren't.

His finger glides over the scroll wheel of the mouse, as he reads the titles of the songs. Every single song they had released was on there—Official and covers.

Every. Single. One.

Whether you were just a really dedicated ARMY or it was because of the soulmate bond, he didn't know, but it doesn't matter to him what the reason was.

Because there they were, he and his hyungs splayed all over your computer screen. Their photoshoots all lined meticulously year after year, their random pictures that you had probably picked up from twitter or weverse grouped by year and then there were screenshots.

Screenshots of tweets, weverse, certain parts of interviews of theirs, that you had ever liked were all there. It was fascinating, surreal, insane to be able to see himself and the hyungs through your eyes, the eyes of their soulmate.

Somewhere, between finding you in that shelter, to now living with you, he had stopped thinking of you as human, as someone different.

Yes, you weren't quite the same as he was, but he didn't care anymore. Because you loved him, you cried for him, you laughed with him and more than anything else you completed him. Filled his aching, longing soul with love until it overflowed and he felt full, content—sated. His thirst for your presence quenched, for once in all his life.

However, the realisation that he had found his last soulmate hadn't fully sunk in yet. He couldn't even imagine what the others must be feeling right now, he was sleeping curled around you and, yet all he wanted to be was closer, it was this all-consuming feeling that kept pulling him under, dunking him in its depths.

The crazy part was he didn't even mind it anymore, he would drown in the deepest depths if he could feel your hand pulling him closer in there, your lips locking with his as you breathe air into him, save him, make him yours.

Kami, he wanted you to make him yours, mate him, mark him.

He knew it wouldn't happen anytime soon, you didn't even know they were your soulmates. Sure, you liked them as artists, but what teenage or college girl didn't have a favourite band? They could very well just be a passing fascination for you at this point, a fleeting interest, a secret guilty pleasure before you move on with your life.

Wasn't that how fame usually worked? It was eager, intense, loud until it suddenly wasn't and one was left with a gaping hole in their heart, that they aren't ever able to fill after.

Jungkook didn't want that, he didn't want that for his hyungs either. It was something he had figured out years ago. He wasn't about to let this fickle, fleeting fame catch him in its lusty claws.

He would give this life his all, pour literal sweat, blood and tears into it, but once his extended contract ends, he will step back.

He will bow down low as the curtains close for the stage of 'The Golden Maknae' and, the path paves for Jeon Jeongkook. The boy who had come from Busan with a heart full of hopes and dreams and had ended up achieving and getting more than he had ever even imagined or hoped for.

He would be thankful to his fans, to his company, to his Hyungs, to this industry, for taking care of him and letting him fly under their warm protection, but he would be done. As the curtains fall close, the mask will slip, and he'll turn, and you will be there.

You with your bright grin and glimmering eyes would look on at him proudly, and he'd kiss you, hold you and know that he didn't want fame because he had you.

And you were all he had wanted for as long as he can remember.

After all, you are the cause of his euphoria, a home with you his utopia.

Filling in the plot, adding it the finer details.

Since the taglist is pretty long now and I can’t continue to keep them all in my comments, I will be putting the taglist up here from next chapters onwards. Tumblr is glitchy and some of you might not be notified so I am sorry about that. However, if you are a regular reader and have left me feedback time and time again, whether it was a comment or an ask with your thoughts on this story, I’ll tag you down in the comments since I know you definitely do read the work and appreciate it and I am so grateful for your support.

Thank you for reading 💖

860 notes · View notes

angrylizardjacket · 3 years ago

Text

dirtbags // 2: Lola

Summary: High school AU, 1984, Winter. It’s hard to make friends when you’re the new kid starting halfway through Junior year, but slowly Lola seems to be making a few. It’s much easier to have a rumour started about you, especially when you tend to make questionable choices at parties, but that’s much less fun.

A/N: 8173 words. Lola’s dad is the MVP, trust me. i meant to put this out a week ago whoops!! also im allowed to reference my own Queen oc as a treat. @bluehourmotel, @misscharlottelee and again, interludes are A Softer World quotes.

[ m a s t e r p o s t ]

the best revenge is living well. the second best revenge is fire ants.

The fact that after being in town for a total of two weeks, Lola’s closest friend is the gas station attendant a full fifteen minute drive away from her house is kind of sad. Not that she’s disappointed to be Mick’s friend, he’s got a dry sense of humor but a good heart and he’s refreshing honesty, but she’s been at this new school for about a week and a half, has already made out with at least one person, has possibly convinced said-person’s cousin that she’s trying to corrupt him, and started to make a name for herself - whether it’s good or bad is yet to be seen -, and yet Mick Mars, nineteen-year-old gas station attendant, apprentice electrician, and aspiring guitar player is her closest friend.

But she’s always been kind of terrible at making friends her own age.

“You have lost all respect from me,” Mick told her on Monday morning after the party, over the counter of the gas station as he’s ringing her up for her smokes and iced coffee before she went to school, “you could have picked anyone to mack on at that party, and you chose Tommy fuckin’ Lee?”

“He was nice to me, what was I meant to do?” Lola declared, realizing too late that that statement revealed absolutely too much about herself to a near stranger. Mick, however, just gives her a flat look.

“You need higher standards.” He doesn’t seem too phased by her. Lola takes this in stride, and nods, agreeing with a sigh.

“What time do you finish work?” She asks, changing the subjects quickly as she’s pulling out a bill from her back pocket, “dad said he’s happy to let you have a look at that weird light switch that doesn’t do anything that I was telling you about.”

“I finish at ten tonight, I’m working a double,” he groans at the very thought of it. Lola gives him a sympathetic look, and tells him to only come around if he’s up to it, otherwise leaving it for another day.

That’s the day that Lola realises the whole school knows about her and Tommy at the party, that she has Art with Charlotte before lunch, and also that Charlotte can’t look her in the eye.

Tuesday the school realises that she’s not just Lola Who Gives It Up For Free At Parties, but that she’s Lola The New Girl and that they don’t know anything about her beyond that. There’s a guy in her wood working class with long black hair and a dangerous smile that winks at her; she flips him off, knowing all he cared about was knowing if the rumours were true. She’s got AP French last period with that ginger from the party who wouldn’t stop laughing, Eileen; she’s a lot more serious, sober. The cheerleader, Heather, won’t stop giving her these weird, calculating looks.

Wednesday there’s a new rumour, that she was expelled from her last school. The population of the school hasn’t decided what exactly they think she was expelled for yet. Turns out she has English with that guy from her woodworking class, he just hadn’t turned up for their lesson on Monday; he sits at the back like Lola, in the other corner, and the teacher calls him Nikki in a tone like she’s already disappointed. Lola can see why, he fell asleep at his desk. Art last period with Charlotte; she still barely looks at Lola.

Thursday. Heather asks in AP French if Lola’s heard what everyone’s saying about her; her tone is sweet and dangerous in equal measure and Lola doesn’t trust what’s about to come out of her mouth. The new rumour is that Lola was expelled for sleeping with a teacher; something about the glint in Heather’s eye is cruel, and Lola asks her sweetly if she’s more jealous of Lola or the teacher. That shuts Heather up fast, and Eileen’s cough behind them sounds more like she’s trying to hide a laugh. But it still gets to her; Lola focuses so hard on ignoring the girls gossiping loudly about her at their station behind her in Home Economics that she burns the apple danishes she was attempting, and she throws the burnt pastries, and the tray they’d been cooking on, into the bin until she realises her mistake and sulkily fishes the tray out again. Thankfully, the teacher didn’t notice.

Friday, and Lola hasn’t paid much attention to Vince, whose house she’s been to but who she hadn’t properly met until their classes had P.E at the same time; he’s in the year below her, but still manages to sidle up to her while they’re both waiting for their teachers to prepare the field for whatever torture they’re masquerading as physical exercise today. She tells him to fuck off; there’s something about the way he conducts himself that she doesn’t like, like he’s putting on a show of being shallow and vain and the life of the party. Instead, Vince’s voice goes quiet and he tells her that Tommy’s a good kid with a good heart -

“You give this speech to everyone you caught making out at your parties, or just me, ‘cos you think I’m a bitch and I’m gonna hurt one of ‘your bros’?” She snapped, lip curling, and Vince’s brow creases into a frown, “I’m not his fucking girlfriend, we made out a little, you don’t have to act like I’m going to break his heart, so piss off.”

A moment passes, and he appears to don his shallow, playboy mask when he asks her slyly if the rumours are true. She shoves him hard enough that he skitters back a few feet, and Lola earns her first after school detention.

The thing is, she and Tommy are already on the same page about this, it was a what happens while drunk at a party stays at that party. Or at least, it’s meant to. Either way, Charlotte’s protectiveness, and Vince’s... attempt at protectiveness was unwarranted. Maybe it’s because Tommy, for whatever reason, has started hanging around Lola at lunch.

She doesn’t sit in the cafeteria like the rest of them, or even on that little section of the roof the intimidating pack of punks, rockers, and smokers have found a way to get to. Lola sits against the fence near the science building, close to the carpark that’s always open for some stupid reason, as though she’s contemplating bolting.

“Don’t you have friends?” Lola’s tone is kind of hard, and perhaps her words are on the nose, and a little cruel, but it’s Wednesday, and this is the third day in a row he’s found her and spent the entirety of lunch with her. They don’t speak much, Lola smokes and picks apart whatever her dad’s latest cooking experiment is before she eats it, and Tommy practices twirling his drumsticks.

“I have friends, do you?” Tommy responds, more than a little defensive, rubbing at his brow where he’d just managed to hit himself mid-drumstick-twirl, taken aback by her question. Lola gives him a flat look. “Someone told me you were expelled from your last school,” Tommy’s gaze shifts to the carpark, to the last car and it’s telltale rocking and fogged up windows.

“They say why?”

“Nah,” Tommy shakes his head, scowl softening as he gets back to practicing, “it true?” Lola’s picking out and eating the apple chunks from the slice of pie her father had packed for the day, still watching the car with the mildest of interest. She shakes her head. Tommy hums noncommittally. They spend the rest of lunch in silence.

“He keeps hanging out with me!” The following afternoon, Lola gripes to Mick on his smoke break after she gets out of school for the afternoon.

“You keep hanging out with me,” Mick points out, peeling the label off of a bottle of soda.

“And?”

“I don’t tell you to fuck off.”

“Yeah? So?”

“Because,” and Mick heaves a heavy sigh, like it pains him to admit, “we’re friends, Lola,” but he pauses and amends, “God knows why.”

“Fuck you, I’m a delight,” Lola huffs, and pulls her oversized denim jacket tighter around herself to ward off the chill of the afternoon breeze. If this were pretty much any other state, they’d be knee-deep in snow; thank God for LA, snow’s pretty for five minutes before it’s a pain.

“Do you tell him to fuck off?” Mick asks pointedly, as if exhausted that he has to spell it out for her. Lola’s quiet, but her answer’s clear. Mick clears his throat with a cough. Lola’s scowl deepens.

She brings it up to her father that night.

“Do you reckon Tommy’s trying to be my friend?” She asked, gaze intense as she focuses on slicing apples into little cubes. Leo, her father, who was kneeding a blend of spices into a ball of dough that would end up being a pie crust, paused.

“The kid who has been hanging out with you at lunch?” He thought for a moment, “the one from the party?”

“I told him it was nothing serious-” Lola tried, exasperatedly cutting the apples a little rougher, but her father’s warm, gentle laugh cut her off.

“Yes, I think he’s trying to be your friend,” he told her, which Lola hadn’t exactly wanted to hear, but the information was easier to digest coming from him than it was coming from Mick, “he obviously likes you -”

“But I told him -”

“I know, you told him it wasn’t serious, but dear, that doesn’t mean he likes you less as a person - you’re a very cool cat, I can see why he’d want to be your friend,” he gives her finger guns, and Lola can’t help but laugh softly at his attempt to be hip.

“Christ, dad,” Lola huffs, smiling fondly, but he’d managed to cheer her spirits considerably.

“I burnt my danishes today,” Lola’s voice goes quiet as she goes back to focusing on her task, and her dad makes a noise of intrigue, “got distracted and crisped the whole tray.”

“You’ll get ‘em next time; just fifteen minutes, remember?”

“Fifteen minutes, no distractions,” Lola agreed, almost by rote, thankful that he doesn’t ask about what had distracted her. She can still hear the whispered gossip and giggles that had come from the cooking station behind her in Home Economics.

Her dad knows that her peers think she was expelled from her last school, but she keeps her mouth shut about the fact that today they’d decided it was because she had relations with a teacher; he knows almost everything about her, but he didn’t need to know about a whole school calling her a slut. He’d blow it out of proportion, and it isn’t getting to her since she knew for a fact it wasn’t true.

They finish the apple pie with it’s rosemary and lemongrass crust in good spirits. The flavours don’t go together as well as Leo had hoped, but it’s another step closer to the perfect apple pie he’d been trying for. Leo packs her two of the leftover slices for lunch, as a not-so-subtle hint.

On Friday, Lola hands Tommy a plastic container with a piece of apple pie, with a rosemary and lemongrass crust in it.

“Is it poison?” He asks. Lola doesn’t look at him, picking the individual apple pieces out and eating them one at a time.

“The crust tastes weird if you eat it with the filling,” Lola’s voice is flat as she explains instead of answering, “but the apples are sweet.” She eats another cube of apple, then breaks off a corner of the golden, perfectly cooked crust, now cold and stiff from spending the night in the refrigerator.

“Why are you giving me this?”

“Eat it or don’t, I don’t care,” Lola tells him, hunching further in on herself; like this, she can’t see the way Tommy’s expression has broken out into a smile.

“Thanks Lola,” but the smile is evident in his voice, confirming all of her suspicions at once. Tommy took her at her word when she said the rumours weren’t true, even if the rest of the school believed them, so Lola supposes she’s actually okay with the fact that her second ever friend in the entirety of California is the marching band geek in the year below her who she made out with at a party once.

Also maybe she’s just kind of terrible at making friends.

you and me baby! we are the future! and the future is bleak.

“Wait, you’ve never met Nikki Sixx?” Tommy asked, sitting patiently with his back against the fence, his hand resting on her knee as she fills in the the nails of his left hand with black sharpie, “didn’t you go to his gig the other week?”

“I didn’t know anyone,” Lola pointed out, and Tommy makes a thoughtful noise.

“You’d love him, he’s so fucking cool,” he assured her, which made Lola give pause; Tommy also thinks Vince is fucking cool, and she wants to throw Vince out a window, “he was the one on bass.”

“The one in the leather pants?” Lola couldn’t help but smile at the memory; she’d appreciated it at the time, and could appreciate it now. Tommy, however, rolled his eyes.

“The girls love the leather pants,” he gave a quiet sigh, before adding, almost to himself, “wish I had leather pants.”

“Leather pants would look good on you,” Lola pinches at his thigh for a moment, and goes back to filling in his nails. missing Tommy’s pleased, flustered little smile.

“You know Freddie paints his nails like this,” Tommy says instead, changing the topic of conversation.

“Freddie?”

“Mercury. From Queen; you know Queen, right?” And he sounds kind of skeptical, like if she doesn’t know them, they can’t be friends anymore. Lola pauses again, her hand soft on Tommy’s where she’s filling in around his ring finger’s cuticle.

“I wanna climb John Deacon like a fucking tree,” she mutters, which startles a laugh out of Tommy, his hand jerking up to cover his mouth, making Lola leave a black line against his knee, through the rip in his jeans. When she looks up at him, however, her eyes are shining with mirth, “come on, man, you must have seen the video of them performing in Montreal last year!” And she licks her lips, watching Tommy’s blush grow steadily darker. After a beat, Lola bursts out laughing, shattering the tension and shifting to sit beside him, idly doodling on her own hand with the marker as Tommy shakes his head with amusement.

Lola starts humming Back Chat to herself, and Tommy leans his head back against the wire of the fence, listening for a moment.

“You and Charlie would get along great too,” he considers, and Lola doesn’t stop humming, nor does she look to him, “she likes Roger, but probably just because she thinks he’s pretty.” Lola can hear his eyeroll without even seeing it, and she’s not sure why, but she files that information away in the back of her mind; she’d never gotten an especially shallow vibe from Charlotte, but there was a uncertain undeniable appeal to Roger Taylor’s pretty-boy charm.

“Didn’t his girlfriend leave him for Bowie?” Lola asks mildly, barely pausing to speak between humming notes.

“Rocket Mercury?”

“Her name’s Rocket?” Lola snorts, finally looking at him, and Tommy’s lips twisted into an amused grin.

“Her name’s Ash, but everyone calls her Rocket,” he says, like he’s in the know, and Lola stays quiet, nodding and trying not to laugh, “and yeah, I think so, she’s been with a few people since him I think; Bowie, this girl from this English band Hawkwind, Elton John maybe? Or someone around him I think.” Tommy nods, and Lola’s kind of intrigued as to why he knows so much about Queen’s drummer’s partner, but something else has caught her attention.

“A girl from Hawkwind?” Tommy doesn’t seem to notice the way Lola’s voice has softened, or how her expression has dropped to something carefully neutral. She’s drawing a little flower on the knuckle of her thumb.

“One of their dancers, Stacy, maybe?” Tommy’s own tone is light, like he doesn’t even realise Lola’s hanging onto his every word regarding this one little detail about a woman she doesn’t even know, “was kind of a scandal, but it was years ago; she’s Freddie’s sister after all, maybe it’s genetic.”

“Genetic?”

“Liking girls and guys, you know?” And he pauses. Lola’s frozen beside him, the marker pressed hard against her skin, breath caught in her throat. He throws it out so casually, so easily. Her hands are shaking. The words so kind when he says them, so unlike what she’s used to hearing. Tommy’s already moved on to the next thought. “actually, I’m not sure if Freddie’s like, legit her brother, but anyways, she and Roger are back together; I’m glad.” As if a sixteen-year-old’s opinion on a rock legend’s love life mattered, “he seems happier with her, all his best live shows were when they were together.”

“I’d kill to play half as well as him,” it’s almost wistful when Tommy says it, interrupting Lola’s thoughts, his gaze trained on the sky, as if imagining he’s on stage himself. Lola lets out a long, quiet breath, recentering herself as she looks to him.

“You wanna play drums?”

“I can play drums,” Tommy tells her like it’s the most obvious thing in the world, “but not nearly as good as Roger Fucking Taylor, can you imagine?” But Lola’s more focused on the -

“I thought you just played in the marching band, can you play, like, full -” and she sits forward, gesturing like she’s tapping on a full drumkit, eyes shinning. Suddenly, in the face of her rare, unrestrained smile, Tommy feels himself growing nervous, like he’ll let her down if he’s not actually as good as he thinks he is.

“I’ve got a kit in my garage,” he admits, and Lola pauses, letting her excitement simmer, as though realising it had gotten the best of her, breaking her cool and aloof facade.

“That’s cool as hell,” she does add, however, and Tommy beams.

“Thanks,” he mumbles, all flustered at even the slightest praise, “man, you’d really like Charlie, I know she looks all fancy and intimidating, but she’s a real softie inside.”

“You are really pushing hard for me to be friends with your cousin,” Lola notes, giving him a sidelong glance, and Tommy’s nose scrunches up, caught out.

“She thinks you’re trying to corrupt me,” he grumbles, “but if you guys met she’d know you’re not.”

“I am corrupting you,” Lola smirks, “next week I plan on peer pressuring you into smoking.”

“I’ve smoked before!” Tommy’s up in arms, like the implication that he hasn’t done something as low-level cool as smoking offends him.

“Dude I was kidding, I gave you half my cigarette yesterday,” Lola reminds him, and the bell rings.

While Lola was more than happy to let sleeping dogs lie, it appeared that Charlotte was not, and less than two days after her conversation with Tommy, Lola finds herself sitting by Charlotte’s side in their shared art class.

It’s the last class of the day, and Charlotte’s the one who sits by Lola. There’s no preamble, barely acknowledging the decision, just opening her notebook and focusing on the theory the teacher had already started to jot down on the whiteboard.

When they’re given free time, however, to work on personal projects, Charlotte opens her sketchbook and sharpens her pencil, and without looking at Lola, begins speaking quietly.

“Tommy thinks we’d get along,” Charlotte sounds completely innocent and perfectly harmless, but Lola remember how Charlotte had looked at her, part deer-in-the-headlights startled at the realisation, and knee-jerk protective fury, at Vince’s party when she realised who Lola had been kissing.

“So I’ve heard,” Lola doesn’t look up, but Charlotte’s pencil stills on her paper. After a beat, Lola turns to see Charlotte giving her a curious look. Propping her head up on her hand, Lola gives a thin, amused smile, “he also thinks I’d be good friends with Nikki Sixx; was he the one you yelled at, at the gig?”

Instead of being flustered or going red at the mention of the moment, Charlotte’s expression lights up, as if the idea somehow delights her, and slowly she’s nodding. All her earlier reservations and hostility was quickly leaving her.

“Yeah, actually I told Nikki you reminded me of him, actually -”

“I remind you of Nikki?” Lola’s grin widened, and she shifted to face Charlotte further.

“He’s kind of a tool -” Charlotte blurted after a moment of contemplation, and Lola’s eyebrows raised in amused surprise. Charlotte’s quick to backtrack, “I mean, I’m not saying you are- well, I don’t know you, but I mean, Tommy -” Charlotte frowns at that, expression falling as she considered quietly, “actually, I mean, I love him, but he’s not the greatest judge of character; he thinks Nikki hangs the stars, despite never really speaking to him,” she pauses and heaves a sigh of realisation, “that probably why he thinks so highly of him -”

“I thought they were friends,” Lola’s genuinely surprised, given how kindly Tommy had spoken of him.

“Half the school is terrified of Nikki, half seems to be in love with him; Tommy’s in the second half.”

“And which half are you?”

“I’m the only person who seems to think he’s just kind of a pest,” Charlotte’s response is surprisingly mild, as if she doesn’t quite believe what she’s saying.

“He’s talented, though,” Lola offers, and Charlotte looks back to her, as if brought from her own thoughts. There’s a pause, a lull. Lola puts down her pen, and turns more fully to Charlotte, stretching her arm out over the desk, and resting her head fully on it, like a particularly smug cat stretching out in the sun. Charlotte is slower to put down her pencil, but does so after another moment, pristine fingernails drumming against her sketchbook for a moment.

“He was talented,” Charlotte agreed, thought it sounds like she doesn’t quite want to, “my ex actually got me into his kind of music, he was a fan of Nikki’s too; I’d tell Nikki I enjoy his music but it’d go straight to his ego,” and she casts Lola a sidelong look, lips stretched into a smirk, which Lola returns.

“I am a little bit of a tool,” Lola finally admits with a self deprecating grin, and Charlotte shakes her head.

“You’d fucking love him,” Charlotte tells her, with a strained, sort of resigned huff of laughter, like the concept of them meeting was a little bit horrifying, and already exhausting.

“You like his kind of music,” Lola circled back around to quickly, “never pictured you as a hard rocker, you’re very...” and she trails down, looking at Charlotte’s pristine cheerleading uniform, and thick, black tights, the only thing protecting her legs from the Winter air. The blonde shifts a little uncomfortably under the scrutiny, brow furrowing.

“I know,” Charlotte says flatly, crossing her ankles, far too self aware in the moment, “you expect me to just be listening to nothing but Abba and Madonna all day?” She sneers, suddenly haughty again, and Lola licks her lips, intrigued; she can tell she’s pushed a button, and debates for a moment if she wants to press it further.

“Not all the time,” Lola said, sitting back up slowly, “but I mean, I’m kind of partial to Does Your Mother Know, there’s no shame in loving Abba,” she shrugs, and Charlotte lets herself visibly relax.

“Never pictured you as an Abba fan,” Charlotte actually grins.

There’s a distinct lack of hostility in the air between the two girls by the time the class ends, after spending the entire class gushing over various bands across a surprising range of genres, and Lola quickly finds she appreciates how wrong her initial impression of Charlotte had been.

As they’re leaving for the day, or well, Lola’s leaving, and Charlotte’s heading to cheer practice, the conversation lulls as Charlotte grows thoughtful.

“Hey, just... Tommy’s kind of a hopeless romantic,” and even as she speaks, she knows Lola’s growing irate at Charlotte’s hesitant tone, “and honestly, the girls he goes for usually don’t... they don’t usually give him the time of day, and he obviously thinks the world of you, I just don’t want you to -”

“I’ve told him that I don’t want to date him; he’s the one who keeps hanging around me,” Lola’s own tone appears to surprise Charlotte, now that she understands the root of the other girl’s protectiveness, “we’re...” and the word catches in Lola’s throat for a moment, knowing that speaking it makes it true, “friends.”

Lola glances at Charlotte out the corner of her eye, and sees the way Charlotte’s lips twist into a pleased little smirk.

“I was just making sure.”

love is stupid. happiness is admitting we aren’t better than stupid.

Leo Fields, thirty-nine years old, owner of soon-to-be-named Leo Diner’s in suburban LA, a graduate of the Culinary Institute of America, who worked in the luxurious Parker House restaurant in Boston and quit after ten years there, including three years as Sous Chef and one year as Head Chef, only to open his own 50s style diner a mere ten minutes away in Salem, has and will always claim his favourite food is Easy Cheese.

Once, a long time ago, Lola had asked him why.

She’s asked him a lot of things, why he’d left his high-end restaurant to essentially flip burgers, why he kept his hair long, what his tattoos meant -

Lola’s eight, sitting on the counter and swinging her legs while Leo was crushing garlic to add to their dinner, his hair tied back into a large bun atop his head.

“People will try and tell you that just because something is expensive, fancy, or higher class,” Leo had rolled his eyes exaggeratedly at that, putting on a voice to make his daughter laugh, “that it’s better; they are wrong. If something brings you joy, it is better than all things that do not bring you joy, no matter how fancy the things you don’t like are,” he’d told her very seriously, “better is not real, better is what you believe; better for you means healthier, and that’s real, but when people use better to mean good, they mean that it’s good in their mind, and maybe you agree, but maybe you won’t.” And he scrapes the garlic into the pan and oil cooking on low as he then began dicing onions.

“I use all my fancy training and knowledge to make foods I think are better, but now I get to also serve them with a smile, and I get to talk to the people I’m giving the food to, get to know them, let them know they’re welcome here,” he tries to smile while his eyes are watering from the onions, almost finished cutting them. “People in my old fancy restaurant didn’t want that, they wanted you to think they were better than you, and if you thought their food wasn’t good, that’s because you’re not fancy enough, and you’re not welcome here.”

“But that’s wrong,” Lola said with a slight frown, looking to her father for confirmation, and after he wiped his eyes with the back of his hands, he beamed.

“Exactly,” he nodded and scraped the diced onions into the pan too, moving easily about the kitchen to pull mince from the refrigerator, “people liking something different to you is actually great; if everyone in the world liked Easy Cheese, we’d never be able to buy it!” And Lola laughed at that, the example making it easy for her to understand his point, “but making them feel bad for liking those things, that’s bad; that’s why I have my hair long, why I have my tattoos, they’re part of who I am, they’re part of my family’s history and where I come from, and I like them. If someone else is rude to me because of them, then I know right away that’s not someone I want in my life. People like to think they’re better than other people for stupid reasons sometimes.”

“Like if they’re fancy or not?” Lola asks, and Leo gives her a fond smile and nod.

“Like if they’re fancy or not.”

Leo’s not sure if Lola even remembers this, but he does. So when Lola, seventeen years old, standing in the kitchen, eating a ham and Easy Cheese sandwich after school, tells him that Charlotte, the girl in her art class, Tommy-from-the-party’s cousin, complimented her jacket, the pin-and-patch-covered, black, denim, proto-crust-punk, heirloom he’d loaned to her since she’d asked to wear it when starting a new school, and had barely gone a day without it, he can read into her smile even when it’s hidden behind her sandwich.

“Sounds like she has good taste,” Leo leans his hip against the counter top, legs feeling the warmth of the oven where he’s got a loaf of herb and garlic bread baking away.

Lola spends a full twenty minutes enthusing about Charlotte’s taste in music, eyes bright and tone animated. He only interrupts her to hand her a packet of prosciutto and a bundle of asparagus, so she could help him prepare for dinner, but it doesn’t slow her down, hands working quickly, while Leo boiled potatoes and simmered some garlic in butter on a low heat.

Both Lola and Leo know why Lola’s been so hesitant to make friends since moving, and she knows he’d never push her into friendship, but Lola also knows it hurts him to see her lonely.

“Hey dad, I’ve been meaning to ask you,” Lola says after a long pause, finally taking a breath after she’s finished recounting her day to him, “you know Queen, right?”

“Do I know Queen?” Leo jokingly scoffed, “Lola, I’m the one who introduced you to Queen.” He reminded, and Lola gave a small smile, but her heart wasn’t in it; she wasn’t usually nervous, but talking about this sort of thing still made her heart race a little. Seeing her hesitant expression, Leo’s own softens, and he turns down the potatoes to turn his full attention to her, “what about Queen?”

“I didn’t know Freddie’s sister was with the drummer,” Lola starts, fiddling with the final piece of asparagus. She’s quick to follow it up before she can chicken out, “and I didn’t know... she’s like Bowie, and Fred, and... and me, you know?” Lola finally wraps up the final vegetable and places it on the glass baking tray with the rest, before she looks to her father who was watching her pensively, hoping he understands what she’s trying to say.

“That’s little Rocket Mercury you’re talking about, isn’t it?” He asked as a smile stretched across his lips, “I heard that about her, I always thought she was so cool, she worked on Spinal Tap, you remember I took you to see Spinal Tap a few months ago?”

Lola’s heart eases in her chest at his words, his warmth, the way he seems to reflect positively on the news. While Lola knew she didn’t have anything to worry about, since the whole reason Leo had taken her and moved across the country was her mother’s less-than-kind reaction to the news of Lola dating a girl, the memory of it all still made her nervous.

Leo’s entire face lights up, and he makes a loud exclamation, like suddenly remembering some vital information, snapping Lola out of her dwelling.

“How have I never played you any Dusty Springfield?” He announces, picking up the glass tray from the table and placing it to the side, “I’ve got some of her records in my collection,” the oven timer goes off and he asks Lola to watch the potatoes so they don’t overboil while he takes out the bread and puts the asparagus in, “Dusty’s like you too; she’s a pop-star from the sixties, lovely voice, told the Evening Standard she liked girls and boys all the way back in nineteen-seventy.” He says as he sets the timer for the asparagus, and Lola wraps her arms around him from behind, if only to hide how wide she’s smiling.

“She pretty?” Lola asked, grinning against his soft, woolen sweater. Leo gently pet her hands where they were wrapped around his middle, giving a warm laugh.

“Very; it’s no wonder girls and boys liked her too.”

Lola had never seen her father flinch in the face of change, and for that she would always be grateful for him. The only time she’d ever seen him lose his cool was when he’d come to her defense against her mother’s bigotted views; apart from that, she’d never known anyone more willing to go with the flow.

Take last week, for instance, Mick had taken Saturday off from the gas station to go look at the fixture Lola had mentioned not seemingly connected to anything. Leo had finally had the red and white, checkered floor installed earlier that week, and the booths had been reupholstered over Thursday and Friday in a shiny, inviting, deep peach, to compliment the warm aesthetic completed by the pleasantly sunny walls.

One of the many things about Lola is that she know when people look at her father, they never expect him to be the embodiment of sunshine; six-foot-something, built like a tank from doing a majority of the manual labor around his diners on his own. His traditional, Hawaiian tattoos were on full display today, across his chest, arms, and legs, wearing a singlet and shorts despite it being the middle of winter, after spending all morning hauling an industrial freezer into the kitchen, with what little help Lola could offer. He wears his long, wavy black hair in a ponytail down his back; the only thing that ever betrayed the warmth of his personality was the crows feet by his eyes, the laugh lines around his mouth, and the kindness in his eyes themselves.

Leo Fields, teddy-bear in the body of a GI Joe, took one look at Mick Mars, the weary, rather scrawny teenager with barely any face visible for his long, shaggy, dyed black hair, and gave him a bright smile, ushering him inside. He introduces himself, and immediate asks what kind of music Mick listened to.

“I fucking hate Kiss,” Mick had said immediately, knee-jerk hostility, the way he was shifting his weight from one foot to the other being the only giveaway to how intimidated he felt.

“They can be a lot some times,” Leo had shrugged, gesturing to the jukebox, “I’ve already put a few of my favourites in, you wanna see if anything catches your eye?” Mick moves quietly, as if afraid to make a noise, even stepping in combat boots he barely makes a sound, and Leo makes mention that he’s going to freshen up, and that Lola knows what switch needs to be looked at.

“Hendrix?” Mick says with a hint of pleased surprise, right before Leo leaves, and Lola’s father gives a nod.

“Put it on, man, turn it up loud; it’s Electric Ladyland in there, right?” And at Leo’s question, Mick nods. Leo gives a delighted thumbs up, and heads upstairs to the flat above the diner.

“That’s your dad?” Mick asks, voice low after Leo’s disappeared, hitting play on the Jimi Hendrix record. Lola’s sitting on the counter, swinging her legs; she knows looks like him, same face, same long, dark hair, same copper complexion, it’s usually the staggering difference in their respective physicalities that seemed to trip people up, so his confusion wasn’t a surprise.

“That’s my dad,” Lola agrees, with a slight nod, looking around the warm and inviting diner that still smelled like new vinyl from the seats. She’d light a candle or two later.

Lola knows the rumours going around town about the diner, about how it’s owner was a chef, about how it’s hopefully going to serve better food than the last owners, but also how everyone knew very little about the new owner beyond that. It made her giddy, like she had a secret, to know that her father was capable of blowing their expectations out of the water with his food alone. Back in Salem, Leo’s was known for restaurant-quality food at, well, diner prices. All the fries were hand cut, there was always home made pie or slice or cookies on sale, the beef patties were made with real mince and mixed with Leo’s special blend of herbs and spices, and fish was delivered fresh, daily.

Lola knew her father knew what it was like to be discriminated against based on his looks, and how hard he’d fought to prove his skills as a chef, so in turn, he hired based on attitude and experience, and trying to give those who may not have had a fair shot an opportunity. Leo had always paid well, treated his workers with kindness, and tried to give everyone the benefit of the doubt. The diner had only ever made a modest profit, despite it’s popularity, but it had never been about the money for her father.

Back at Lola’s old high school, if you were popular, you looked for a job at the mall, but if you were an outcast, a loner, or a stoner, you applied for Leo’s; her dad had the ability to bring out the best in people, no-one wanted to disappoint Leo.

Her dad would never go anything as gauche as brag, but he has always prided himself on the quality of his diner and his food, glad to be putting his years of training and experience to use for people who’s appreciate it.

Mick clears his throat, snapping Lola out of her thoughts.

“Light switch?”

Mick thinks the switch probably connected to an exhaust fan the previous owner had removed, which baffled both Lola and Leo, seeing as how they’d had several exhaust fans installed, and the idea that this place had it’s one removed is unthinkable; how had they ever gotten the smell out?

After, Leo invites Mick up to have a look through his record collection, to recommend some for the jukebox, while he attempted a maple and walnut soufflé.

The moment Mick mentions he wants to join a band, Leo lights up, peppers him with questions, what type of music he likes to play, his influences, what type of band he’d like to form. Seemingly unused to the overwhelming interest and positivity regarding his aspirations, Mick is almost startled into being forthcoming, and quickly warms to Lola’s dad.

While the soufflé’s in the oven, the three of them sit on the roof and smoke, while Leo reminisces about seeing Cream live, a few months after Lola was born, and how he’d swaddled her in his concert shirt, only for her to take a liking to it, and had used it as a blanket up until she started daycare. At hearing this, Lola ducks her head to hide her smile, knowing she still had that shirt, though it was more hole than shirt at this point, hanging in her cupboard.

Occasionally, when she looks to him, Lola sees Mick regarding her with confusion, and okay, maybe she can understand why; he knows her to be reserved and dry, but with Leo, she’s outgoing and talkative and smiles so wide he can see her teeth. There’s barely a hint of her aloof façade around her father, and as Mick spends more time with him, it’s clear he can see why.

“Mick’s cool,” Leo announces with a grin when Mick himself has left, putting foil over the leftover soufflé for later, while Lola washes the few dishes and is more than happy to agree with him.

They spend Sunday decorating the diner, making it look less sparse with photos and hanging and various bits of music and pop culture memorabilia, while the jukebox blared rock and roll. A few people pass by in time to see Lola and Leo in an air guitar competition, but neither of them really care. Leo’s looks more like home by the time the sun goes down.

there will always be someone better than you. but on the bright side, who cares?

Eileen sits next to her in AP French during the entire last week of school for the semester. Everything she does seems so perfectly calculated, this change in seating included, but she refuses to acknowledge it. Heather clicks her tongue, clearly annoyed that Eileen had taken the seat she had previously vacated the day Lola staked her own next to it, and judging by Eileen’s innocent little smile, that alone made it worth it.

Lola tries not to pay too much attention to Heather, pretty, mean, and popular, almost the exact stereotype Lola had assumed Charlotte to be before she’d actually befriended her. They only have French together, but Heather keeps watching her, Lola sees it out of the corner of her eye, but her glare has become more speculative, more thoughtful as the weeks have passed, and Lola’s not quite sure what to make of it. Whatever scathing personal attack Heather’s probably working on is her business, she doesn’t know shit about Lola, so Lola tries not to care.

Once Eileen sits next to Lola, the glare comes back in full force anyhow.

On Thursday, the last AP French lesson for the semester, Eileen offers Lola a stick of spearmint gum, and it feels kind of like a test. Lola takes the gum anyways, and Eileen smiles at her, surprisingly genuine.

“You’re Charlotte’s friend,” Lola says, and Eileen’s smile widens.

“You’re the girl who kissed her cousin,” she says. Lola’s whole expression falls, mouth flattening into a thin, unamused line, ready to go on the defensive.

“And?”

Eileen shrugs, says nothing more on the subject, instead, glancing at Lola’s hands.

“My mom would kill me for wearing black nail polish, but it looks so cool on you,” She says, and Lola bites back a jaded response about her own mother, looking to her own hands, and the fresh and shiny coat of polished she’d applied the night before.

“Your mom kind of sounds like an asshole, if black nail polish is enough to get her riled up,” Lola says, without even thinking about how harsh the words sounded, but once the words are out, she adds, “and I know from asshole moms,” for good measure. Internally, she’s berating herself; if she talks about her mom, she’s terrified that she’s eventually going to answer questions about her mom, like where she was, and why Lola hates her.

“She’s just a perfectionist, and I don’t think black would suit me anyhow, so it’s not really an issue,” Eileen responds, as if she barely cares that Lola implied her mother was an asshole, and Lola lets herself relax a little, “I’m partial to a french tip,” Eileen holds out her hands to show her own manicure, the pale pink and white practically gleaming, obviously salon done.

“I coloured Tommy’s nails with sharpie,” Lola says while looking at Eileen’s elegant fingers, and Eileen actually huffs a laugh at that.

“I saw; he’s very proud of them.”

Something in Lola’s chest tightens at that; Charlotte seemed to be a good enough judge of character, and she liked Eileen well enough, so that, for now, was good enough for Lola.

Perhaps that’s why Lola had taken so long to actually speak to Nikki Sixx, despite both Charlotte and Tommy being adamant they’d get along, Charlotte’s proclamation that Nikki was kind of a tool held her back.

It’s not that she doesn’t know who he is; she’s figured out the guy who sleeps through her English classes, is trying to make an acoustic guitar in shop, and who is part of her music classes - once she’d decided to show up to those - is the same person she’d seen on stage in leather pants back at the pub. The guy who Charlotte had yelled at. A tool. Apart from the week the rumours had started circulating about her, he never paid her much attention, so she never felt the need to introduce herself. If he was a tool, she could leave him well enough alone.

Until the first day of the Winter break, apparently. Though for the record, he was the one who spoke to her.

There were technically two music shops in the local mall, a ten minute walk from Lola’s flat above the diner; she’s glad to be close to the CBD, but it also means she can’t justify asking her dad for a ride when it would take her less time to walk than it would for him to find parking.

But Monday, December 27th, was absolutely fucking freezing.

The mall itself is teeming with people looking to spend the money they’d gotten over the holiday period, and the workers had already taken down the gaudy Christmas Tree that had sat in the middle of the food court.

Lola was there at her father’s behest, sticking up and handing out flyers announcing New Year’s Day as Leo’s grand opening, and that they were hiring. She gives everyone at the food court a flyer, sticks up several in various locations, and thinks about heading back to the food court for a second round, to catch any newcomers, or anyone she may have missed, when she spots the music shops.

Bass and Treble were owned by the same people, however Treble seemed to be geared towards more classical music, with pianos and violins and flutes and all manor of orchestra-esque instruments available, while Bass seemed to be committed to rock and roll.

Nikki Sixx finds Lola crouched in front of the display of sheet music on sale in Bass.

“Lola, right?”

Lola stands so fast at his voice that her head spins, but she tries not to let it show. She’s on alert when she looks at him, tense, already scowling, which only deepens when she sees who it is.

“Nikki Sixx,” his name is not a question when it leaves her lips, but he seems pleased rather than concerned, that his reputation apparently preceded him. He nods, and looks over at what she’d been examining.

“Anything good?” He asked, and Lola looks over her shoulder at the display. She’d been seriously considering a book of Elton John’s hits for piano before he’d come along.

“Still deciding; why?”

“No reason,” he shrugged, taking his time to look nonchalantly at the various amps nearby, “you look like you’d be into this sort of thing,” he notes, acting all smug and coy and weird; Lola rolled her eyes, but didn’t answer.

“You were at my gig, we’re you? Hanging out with that guy from the gas station, right? Mick?” Something about his tone had Lola on edge and defensive.

“You guys were okay,” she says flatly, making it clear as she can that that’s barely a compliment; Nikki, however, smile widely.

“Glowing review, I’ll add it to our poster,” he smirks, before he finally looks her over, gaze zeroing in on the flyers in her hands, “speaking of -” and he snatches one, not that she’s protesting, that’s another one she doesn’t have to get rid of. Nikki’s reading the flyer and frowning, while Lola lets her attention wander to the various keyboards they have on display.

“Where’s this?” Nikki pipes up, sounding genuinely interested, while Lola’s idly playing scales with one hand on the closest, off keyboard.

“A few blocks away,” Lola still hasn’t quite gotten the hang of the town’s geography, “across the road from The Kings Hotel, where I saw you play -”

“The old MacCready place?”

“It’s Leo’s now,” Lola says, arms crossed, sitting low in her hips as she regards Nikki, and the way he’s going over every little detail of the poster, “Charlotte says you’re a tool.”

“Charlotte just hates that she likes me so much,” Nikki doesn’t even miss a beat before answering, and when he looks up to catch Lola’s reaction, his grin is all teeth. Lola can’t help the slight smile she wears as she takes in his response.

“I can see why,” Lola’s not quite sure what she’s going for with her own response, but it comes out more teasing than cutting, and there’s something in Nikki’s eye, or in his smile, or maybe it’s in his easy laughter, that has her heart beating weird in her chest.

A moment passes between them, a shift in the tone, the energy of the interaction as Lola drops her immediate hostility; she’s been doing that a lot lately, but she tries not to dwell on it. It’s now she gets a proper look at him, at his ripped jeans and all black, leather jacket, hair sprayed to high heavens like he’s about to join Poison; he looks unkempt and mean, and Lola’s kind of really into it.

They’re checking each other out, sizing each other up, and they both seem to find something in the other they like, because Nikki’s grinning at Lola when gaze meets hers again, and she’s smirking right back.

“Take a picture, it’ll last longer,” she tells him, hip cocked for a moment before she saunters past him, knocking into him with her shoulder purposefully. When Nikki stumbles back, he huffs a laugh, and Lola calls over her shoulder, “Leo’s is hiring by the way, Leo himself would probably love a fucker like you.”

#nikki sixx #tommy lee #mick mars #the dirt #motley crue #motley crue imagine #nikki sixx imagine #tommy lee imagine #tommy lee & oc #the pack #lola&charlotte #charlotte & lola

11 notes · View notes

mrs-dr-reid · 4 years ago

Text

She Used to Be Mine

(A Criminal Minds Fic)

Pairing: Spencer Reid x Female!Reader

Summary: The reader finally left her scum of the earth boyfriend of a year and a half, and she finds out she’s pregnant with his baby when the team gets done with a case. She lets out her frustrations about the whole situation during an open mic night at a bar, not knowing the rest of the team is there, too, and has to explain what’s been going on with her.

Genre: Oof, this is some painful stuff here, buddy. Maybe a little fluff at the end? I dunno.

Warnings: Minor language, mentions of abuse, mentions of an unhealthy relationship, brief allusions to doing the do, mentions of unwanted pregnancy, slight mentions of normal Criminal Minds stuff

A/N: I’m gonna apologize in advance for this one, guys. I’ve had “She Used to be Mine” from Waitress stuck in my head for like two days, and this came to me in a dream last night, so allow me to write out my brain vomit and slap it on the internet. Enjoy. Just a note, I have never seen or listened to Waitress in its entirety, I just know what this song is about and am writing this solely based on that one song. (Also, Y/S/N means “Your Sister’s Name”. If you don’t have a sister, make one up if you’d like)

Word Count: 3514

———————————————————————

Y/N didn’t know how she let this happen. She kept telling herself that she was going to leave him. That their situation was only going to get worse. That if she didn’t get out of there soon she could potentially die, and she never did. She had gradually been transitioning more and more of her stuff out of the apartment and into the trunk of her car to make leaving easier, and she had packed up all her things of value into a suitcase and kept it stashed in the hall closet ready to go just in case, because the Lord knows he never even gave it a second glance. Then finally after two months of delaying the inevitable, a blow-out argument and a handful of shattered beer bottles finally gave her the push she needed, and she slammed the door of his apartment behind her and never looked back once while dragging her suitcase down the stairs and out the door of his building to her car.

Luckily Y/N’s older sister Y/S/N also lived in D.C., and she was more than happy to let Y/N stay at her place until she found somewhere for herself. Y/N didn’t even know how to tell the rest of the team about the breakup, but she was glad she wouldn’t have to cover up bruises with makeup and lackluster excuses anymore. Y/N decided to let them profile it out for themselves because she didn’t want to waste anymore time, energy, or thoughts on her ex ever again.

The next day at work, the entire team immediately picked up on a change in Y/N’s demeanor, but none of them acknowledged it and let Penelope present their latest case in Madison, Wisconsin without so much as a questioning glance towards her. Well, everyone but Spencer, that is. He had his head cocked like a confused puppy while squinting at Y/N the entire meeting. Emily had to snap her fingers in front of his face at least twice to get him to pay attention again, which made Y/N a little nervous, because she really didn’t want him to confront her, mainly because she knows it’s impossible for her to lie to him.

They got on the jet, and once they were in the air, Y/N suddenly felt really nauseous and made a mad dash for the bathroom, making everyone turn to shoot a confused and worried look in that direction. Once she slammed the door shut and locked it behind her, she threw open the lid of the toilet and had at it. After she had finished, she flushed away the vomit and reasoned that she probably had something past its date for breakfast that morning and brushed it off.

Throughout the whole case, Y/N had random bouts of nausea and had to excuse herself during really important stuff to go and find the bathroom. She even had to run out during a suspect interrogation leaving Emily to talk to the perp, and had to leave while they delivered the profile to avoid losing her lunch and crappy bullpen coffee all over the suspect and the local cops. The whole team was worried for her, but she insisted she was fine and kept working, much to Spencer’s chagrin, but he just let her do what she had to do, because he’d learned to not mess with Y/N when she’s on a roll the hard way.

After they had caught the unsub and saved the would-have-been victim, Y/N found herself fighting back her own tears as she comforted the poor, traumatized girl, which was weird because that had never happened before. Once the team had packed up and got in the SUVs to head to the airfield, they had to stop at a gas station right before they left the town. Y/N grabbed her wallet and said, “I gotta take a bathroom break before we get out of here,” and both JJ and Emily nodded before she got out of the car and went into the store.

Y/N went straight for the pregnancy tests and grabbed a box of three before heading to the counter and paying, because she had a hunch she needed to prove. She went to the bathroom, and took all three once she locked herself in a stall. She set them on top of the toilet paper dispenser thing and timed two minutes on her watch. Once the two minutes were up, she took a deep breath and grabbed the tests. Y/N almost passed out when she saw that all three read “positive”, but that’s when she realized her period was a couple of weeks late.

After that realization, she smacked her head against the wall of the stall, because she knew exactly how she’d gotten pregnant: Her stupid, lowkey abusive, borderline alcoholic ex had somehow convinced her to go with him to a sports bar to meet his stupid, annoying, borderline alcoholic friends and watch some sports game three weeks ago, they’d both gotten decently drunk, and she woke up the next morning with a killer hangover and without clothes.

Y/N took a picture of the tests on her phone in case someone on the team profiled it out of her and she needed receipts, then threw them in the little stall trash can before getting out of the stall, washing her hands, and going back out to the SUVs. JJ and Emily shot her looks as she climbed into the car because she was gone for a while, but they just assumed it was #1 and #2 and didn’t say anything.

She was silent and stared out the window the entire flight back, which didn’t go unnoticed by Spencer, who left his beloved jet couch to plop down across from her at the single seater table. She stopped looking out the window and saw him doing his signature awkward smile, which made a small smile spread across her face before she said, “Hey, Spence. What’s up?”, so he said, “Are you okay, Y/N/N? You’ve been throwing up all week, and I don’t think that’s all that healthy.”

Y/N sighed and said, “I’m fine, Spence. I probably just haven’t been eating as much as my body would like me to, and the bullpen coffee agitated my stomach. I’m totally fine,” then reached across the table and grabbed his hand before saying, “Thank you for worrying, though. I appreciate you a ton. You know that, right?”, making him smile and say, “Yeah, I know. You’re welcome,” before getting up and going back to his couch, Y/N’s smile growing a little wider as she watched him go.

Once the team was back at Quantico, Y/N plopped down at her desk and started doing her paperwork, but Hotch came out of his office and said, “That was a rough case, everyone. The paperwork can wait until tomorrow, call it a night for now,” so Y/N shrugged and grabbed her bag off the floor and headed to the elevator, holding it open for everyone as the team piled in while expressing their relief at the early night.

Flash forward to the weekend, and Y/N is hanging out with Y/S/N (who is the only person who knows she’s pregnant) at their favorite bar in Logan Circle. It was open mic night, and Y/N decided that the best way to get her emotions out was to do a song. There was a piano, and she’d thankfully memorized how to play “She Used to Be Mine” from Waitress when she went on a musical theater kick. So she calmly sipped on a Shirley Temple and talked with her sister while she waited for her name to be called.

After about four people did what they wanted to do, the lady running the show called out, “Up next, Miss Y/N L/N who will be playing the piano and singing a song for us!”, so Y/N stood up and walked onto the stage before sitting down at the piano and adjusting the mic. She said, “This song is called ‘She Used to Be Mine’ from Waitress,” before playing the interlude and starting to sing:

“It's not simple to say

That most days I don't recognize me

That these shoes and this apron

That place and its patrons

Have taken more than I gave them

It's not easy to know

I'm not anything like I used be, although it's true

I was never attention's sweet center

I still remember that girl”

What Y/N didn’t know is that the team get-together Penelope organized she declined attending to hang out with Y/S/N was taking place at that exact bar, and they were at a booth right near the stage watching her performance. Penelope had instantly grabbed Derek’s arm in worry when Y/N had announced the title of the song, and when questioned about it, she said, “That’s probably the saddest song in the whole musical! In the show, the main character Jenna’s abusive husband takes all the money she’d been saving for the baby she didn’t want to have, and she sings this song because she feels like she’s lost complete control of her life and doesn’t know who she is anymore,” making everyone exchange looks before looking back at the stage to watch Y/N perform:

“She's imperfect, but she tries

She is good, but she lies

She is hard on herself

She is broken and won't ask for help

She is messy, but she's kind

She is lonely most of the time

She is all of this mixed up and baked in a beautiful pie

She is gone, but she used to be mine”

Y/N kept singing, and as she did, she felt just like Jenna did in the musical: critical of herself for allowing a person like her ex to keep her locked in their relationship for way longer than she should have, and scared because she was going to be a mother, and no way was she allowing her scumbag ex to be a part of her son or daughter’s life.

“It's not what I asked for

Sometimes life just slips in through a back door

And carves out a person and makes you believe it's all true

And now I've got you

And you're not what I asked for

If I'm honest, I know I would give it all back

For a chance to start over and rewrite an ending or two”

Spencer could hardly believe what he was hearing. If he had an inkling that she might be pregnant before, this all but confirmed his mind that she was, but she’d have given anything to not be, which broke his heart a little. He took another sip of club soda (designated driver), and kept watching Y/N as she sang her heart out:

“For that girl that I knew

Who’d be reckless, just enough

Who gets hurt, but who learns how to toughen up

When she's bruised and gets used by a man who can't love

And then she'll get stuck

And be scared of the life that's inside her

Growing stronger each day 'til it finally reminds her

To fight just a little, to bring back the fire in her eyes

That's been gone, but used to be mine

Used to be mine”

JJ let out a tiny gasp at the “man who can’t love” line, and she whispered, “I knew she was covering bruises up. Why didn’t she tell us?”, but nobody had an answer for her. As Y/N sang the last part, all of her emotions came crashing down on her, and she barely made it through without bursting into tears:

“She is messy, but she’s kind

She is lonely most of the time

She is all of this mixed up and baked in a beautiful pie

She is gone, but she used to be mine”

Y/N was met with a standing ovation, and when she stood up to take a bow, her blood went cold when she saw the team sitting at their booth with heartbroken looks on their faces. She pretended she didn’t notice, then went to sit down with Y/S/N again, doing her best to avoid making eye contact with any of them, especially Spencer.

Y/S/N noticed the team staring at them, and she said, “Hey, Y/N/N. I think your friends from work want to talk to you,” which made Y/N let out a tiny groan before saying, “Fine,” and getting up to go over to the team’s booth. She put on a fake smile and said, “Hey, guys! I didn’t expect to see you here! How’s your night been?”, but she could tell her attempt at dodging the bullet didn’t work because Penelope was still about three seconds away from crying.

Y/N let out a sigh, then said, “Okay, fine. I can explain everything. I broke up with my awful boyfriend, apparently I’m pregnant with his kid, yes I’m keeping it, and no I am not allowing him to be a part of this baby’s life because he was horrible to me and that wouldn’t change if he had a child,” leaving the entire team speechless.

Emily said, “Why didn’t you tell us? We could have done something to help you!”, so Y/N burst out, “Because I was embarrassed, Em! I was embarrassed that I let it get that far, and I didn’t want anybody to know. The only person I told about any of this is my sister because I’m living with her right now until I can find my own place, because I used to live with my ex,” making a single tear fall down Penelope’s cheek, and Spencer look at her with an emotion in his eyes Y/N had never seen before.

Everyone else shot her looks of both sadness and encouragement, so she nodded before going back over to her sister and saying, “Can we go home now? I think I’m all partied out,” so Y/S/N said, “Yeah, sure! I’ll pay our bill, you can go wait in the car,” making her nod and grab her coat before walking out the door, doing her best to avoid eye contact.

A few hours later, Y/N was hanging out on the couch at the apartment catching up on paperwork after her sister had gone in for a shift at the hospital when her phone started ringing. She picked it up to see that it was Spencer, which confused her because he’s more of a text kind of guy. She answered and said, “Hey, Spence. What’s up?”, so he said, “Hey, Y/N/N. Can I come over?”, which made her say, “Yeah, sure! I’ll text you my sister’s address and apartment number, and I’ll stay close to the door to buzz you in,” before they bid their goodbyes and hung up.

About fifteen minutes later, the buzzer went off, so Y/N got up and pressed the button before saying, “Spencer?”, earning his reply of, “Yeah, it’s me,” so she said, “Come on up. The door’s unlocked,” before letting him into the building. Spencer came in the door, and before Y/N could even say anything, he snatched her into a tight hug and buried his face in her shoulder. Y/N didn’t really know how to react at first, but she accepted the hug and nestled her face into Spencer’s neck.

Spencer said, “I’m so sorry we weren’t there for you,” so Y/N released her grip on him and said, “No, I’m sorry I didn’t let you guys be there for me. I let my pride get in the way, and I definitely paid the price. I promise I won’t hide things from you guys anymore. It helps no one if I’m not honest with you,” which made Spencer smile at her.

Y/N said, “Can I get you anything? Coffee?”, so Spencer said, “Yeah, coffee sounds great,” making Y/N smile before saying, “You take your cream and sugar with a little coffee, right?”, and she heard him let out a slight chuckle as she went into the kitchen. She put on a pot of boiling water, then grabbed out everything she needed to make Spencer a cup of coffee as well as her favorite green tea, because she knew that she’d receive a lecture about drinking coffee while pregnant from her favorite boy genius and she didn’t want to deal.

Y/N got two mugs out of her cupboard, and after she fixed everything up, she brought the mugs into the living room where Spencer was sitting on the couch. They sat and talked about life for a while until Spencer finally said, “So... when did you find out?”, so Y/N said, “When we stopped at that gas station for a pitstop in Madison. I bought three tests, then took them in the bathroom. All three of them were positive, and while it shouldn’t have shocked me, it did,” making Spencer nod in understanding.

He was silent for a little bit, then he said, “Are you sure you’re gonna keep the baby?”, so Y/N took a long sip of tea before saying, “Yes. At the end of the day, this baby is still 50% me, and I want to give them the best life I can when he or she arrives. It may be the byproduct of one of the worst periods of time in my life, but that doesn’t mean I’m not gonna take this little blessing in disguise for granted,” and rubbing her tummy.

Spencer smiled and said, “Henry’s gonna be really excited about having a playmate,” making Y/n say, “I don’t doubt it,” before chuckling slightly. There was a comfortable silence for a moment or two, then Spencer cleared his throat before saying, “This is probably the last thing you want to hear after everything you’ve been through, but... I love you. I think I’ve loved you since May 21, 2009,” making Y/N’s eyes widen before she said, “That’s a week after I joined the team.”

Spencer said, “I know. I know, and I’m sorry for not telling you sooner. If I had, you wouldn’t have ended up with... him, and you wouldn’t be pregnant with his kid, and you wouldn’t have had to suffer at his hand for all that time without any of us realizing it, and...,” but Y/N put her hand over his mouth and said, “Spence, I’m gonna need you to shut up and listen to me for a minute, okay?”, making him nod and say, “Okay,” slightly muffled by her hand.

Y/N removed her hand, then said, “Spencer Reid, if you’ve loved me since May 21, 2009, I have to admit that I’ve loved you since May 22, 2009. The only reason I ever said yes to that... douche nozzle is because I didn’t think there was any chance in hell you’d be into me. Now that I know you have feelings for me, the only thing I’d want to change is instead of my ex being this baby’s father, I’d want it to be the scrawny boy genius I was lucky enough to be desk neighbors with,” making Spencer’s eyes well up with tears.

He scooted closer, and brought a hand up to Y/N’s cheek before whispering, “Can I...? Would it be alright if I kissed you?”, so Y/N whispered back, “Yes,” and Spencer leaned in before gently touching his lips to hers in one of the softest kisses she’d ever been given. Y/N’s hands found their way into Spencer’s hair, and she held him closer while scooting into his lap, making him smile against her lips and wrap his other arm around her waist.

When Y/N pulled her lips away, she rested her forehead against his and said, “When this baby arrives... If I asked you to be their father figure, would you do it?”, so Spencer’s eyes welled up again before he said, “You can ask me right now,” making Y/N smile. She said, “Will you be this child’s father figure?”, and Spencer said, “Absolutely,” before kissing her forehead and pulling her closer to him.

When Y/S/N got home, she stopped in the living room and had to pull out her phone, because Y/N and Spencer were fast asleep on the couch. Y/N was sprawled over Spencer’s chest and her face was nestled in the crook of his neck, and Spencer’s arms were draped loosely over her back to keep her close. Y/S/N took a picture of the adorable scene, then grabbed a blanket from the wicker basket they kept by the couch to drape it over their sleeping forms. As she walked to her room, she whispered, “Sweet dreams, Lovebirds,” a smile on her face as she did.

———————————————————————

Tag List: @agenthotchner, @hurricanejjareau, @xgoldentigerlilyx, @therestisconfettis, @less-intelligent-spencerreid, @aryaarathornson, @thomasgibsonfan01

Let me know in the comments if you want to be added

#criminal minds #reader insert #one shot #dr spencer reid

59 notes · View notes

sunfloweradoring · 5 years ago

Text

the one where five become four

masterlist

Hey everyone! I just wanted to say a huge thank you to everyone that has been following my writing recently, it’s absolutely insane to think nearly 300 people have read a couple of them! It means the world to me, so thank you <3 K xxx

word count: 2.7k

The boys had been on tour for a matter of months now; I couldn’t actually remember the last time I physically saw Harry. However, what got me through the lonely nights and long hours we couldn’t speak to each other was the knowledge I had - knowing he was doing what he loved and enjoyed above all else. There was only a few weeks of tour to go before they would all be home and with the people who loved them.

Everyone seemed just that little bit extra excited at this tour break because Zayn was to be getting married in this interlude. Perrie had kindly asked me to be a part of the wedding party, meaning me (along with many others of her close friends) had been beavering away back home, rigorously planning away from the wedding that seemed to be speeding towards us faster than we could process.

It made me so happy to see her so looking forward to the marriage - it was evident how she felt about him; and I couldn’t help but think about what it would be like for my own wedding. This year would be mine and Harry’s fifth together, and it only encouraged the small flame of excitement within me. Of course we’d spoken about marriage and the future we could have together, but he was yet to pop the question. I knew that it was definitely something I could do myself, but there was something in me that really wanted it to be Harry that asked me to be his wife - for the rest of our lives.

I didn’t mind though, I was beyond happy where we were in our relationship currently. I felt so lucky to be a part of his hectic life and I loved to hear all the tour stories each time we got to sneak in a phone call or text.

He really was the love of my life.

I couldn’t contain the smile that was threatening to come across my lips as I dialled Harry’s number and patiently listened to the dialling tone.

“Hello, love.” Harry’s gravely tone greeted me. Almost instantly, a frown took over my features as I pulled the phone away from my ear to quickly inspect the time. I’d been careful to leave my call late enough in the day to avoid waking him; yet his voice sounded like I’d done just that.

“Hiya, baby.” I gently responded. “Did I wake you up? I thought it was the afternoon or something there?” I questioned, leaning my body back against the pillows of our bed, my right hand absentmindedly stroking over his side of the bed as I spoke. There was a brief amount of shuffling on the other side of the phone before he spoke again.

“Y-yeah, it’s like three or something.” He replied. Now I was a little concerned. It really wasn’t like Harry at all to be so blunt on our phone calls - especially after so many weeks apart. Perhaps he was just feeling the distance particularly hard today, or recording hadn’t quite gone as smoothly as hoped.

“You alright, Haz?” I was careful to keep my voice soft and smooth to prevent him from detecting my concern.

“One sec,” Harry quickly replied before I heard his voice again, this time, though, at a distance from the phone. “Mate, I’m on the phone,” There was a muffled response from whoever ‘mate’ was. “No, I don’t wanna keep talking about it. We’re all in the same boat, here, I think we’ve talked about it enough for one day, don’t you think?” There was a brief moment of silence before: “You still there?” I hummed in response, now completely confused as to what was taking place on his side of the the phone.

“Baby...” My voice was met with a loud huff.

“Zayn’s thinking of taking a break.” He suddenly said. “He said he’s feeling too pressured and wants to go home for a week before coming back and continuing the tour.” Whatever I was expecting to be wrong, it certainly wasn’t anything like that.

“What?”

“He said we’ve been doing this almost nonstop for years and that he needs time to go home and breathe.”

“Oh my god.” I muttered, hand pushing the hair from my face. “Have you guys been talking about it all day? Is that what you just said?”

“Yeah; he just announced it at breakfast this morning and then just kinda shut himself in his room. He missed all the recording we were meant to be doing today. I don’t even know if he’s gonna come to the show tonight.”

“What are the others saying about it?”

“Liam and Niall seem to having some sort of existential crisis about it. But honestly I’ve never seen Louis so angry before in my life.” As he spoke his words seemed to become more and more strained.

“And you?” I spoke after he finished.

“What about me?”

“How do you feel about it?” His sniffles told me all I really needed to know but he did speak up after a minute.

“God I feel so conflicted.” His tone was a mixture of frustration, sadness and pure disappointment. I didn’t speak, allowing him time to continue. “This is like... the best thing that’s ever happened to me; this opportunity to go around doing things I love in different parts of the world, meeting fans, you know? And yeah, of course I understand the pressure he’s going on about; we’ve been putting out an album basically every year since X-Factor, but at the same time, it doesn’t feel like a chore - it’s something I want to do. It’s something we all want to do!” Pause. “Well, I thought we all wanted to do it.” He added quietly. I really felt at a loss for words. I’d never heard Harry sound so manic before and I worried what would come of this new situation.

“Are you coming home?” I asked.

“N-no. Well, at least, I don’t think we are. I think it’s just him.” Another silence came over the phone. I really didn’t know what to say to him that would make it any better. “Baby...” Harry trailed off.

“Yeah?”

“Can you come? I just... I just really need you here right now.” I could hear him feverishly fighting back tears.

“Do you want me to come?”

“Yeah...” It almost sounded like a child, desperately calling for the comfort of his mother.

“Of course I can, my love. I’ll get there as soon as I can.”

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

I managed to get a late night flight out that same day, getting me in the next day, early morning for his timezone. The hours on the plane seemed to pass at a snail’s pace; I couldn’t contact Harry; I couldn’t see if there was any news about anything for that period of time - only fuelling my anxiety at the situation.

Finally, though, the plane landed and I was able to get into the airport, through immigration and retrieve my bag without too much delay. My knee nervously bounced against the floor of the car the entire ride towards the hotel. Harry had already notified the reception that I was to be arriving, so they gave me a key to the room without trouble. I almost ran to the lift, pressing the button about four times; as if it somehow sped up the process.

I scanned the numbers on the walls next to the doors as I made my way down the corridor; I was pretty sure that this entire floor was dedicated to the boys and their extensive team, but I wasn’t about to waste time knocking on a million different doors. As I came closer to the end of the corridor I could hear shouting from inside room 803. I quickly glanced down at my phone, open on the text Harry had sent me with the information for the hotel.

‘Mine is 803, they should give you a key but I’ll leave it open for you xxx’

I huffed out a breath, pulling my small suitcase to a stop as I reached out for the door-handle. Before I could pull it, however, the door swung open and a red faced Niall was stood in front of me.

Since 2011 Niall had become one of my best friends. A part from Harry (obviously) he was the one I was closest to in the band. We shared many things and I’d often been the one he called for advice on girls, or even held him (in a purely platonic way, of course) as he cried about his most recent heartbreak. He’d also been my shoulder to cry on in the times Harry and I experienced a particularly tough fight and was always willing to help both of us out in any way he could. His surprise to be met with me was evident in the way he spoke my name.

“Hey.” He cleared his throat, rubbing his palm roughly against his face. “I guess you’ve heard, then?” He asked, stepping to the side to allow me to enter the room, seeming to have forgotten about his departure of the space.

“Yeah.” I nodded in sympathy, reaching out to rub a soothing hand up and down his arm.

“I just can’t fucking believe he could do this.” Harry came into my view as Niall spoke, his eyes red rimmed.

“He’s just stressed, I’m sure he’ll come round. Just let him go home for a few days and cool off.” I suggested, walking towards Harry to pull him into a hug.

“Let him go home?” Niall repeated.

“She doesn’t know, Niall. She’s just got here.” Harry speaks, voice croaky.

“Don’t know what?” I asked, keeping my arms around Harry’s middle as I pulled away enough to look up at him.

“He’s gone.”

“Gone?” I spoke Niall’s words again, looking between the two men in the room in utter confusion. “What do you mean he’s gone?” Harry pulled away, taking my hand to lead me towards the sofa in the room as Niall pushed the door closed and followed us. Harry and I sat, legs touching, on the sofa as Niall sunk down into the chair opposite.

“Well you know that I said he just made the announcement at breakfast yesterday?” Harry asked, leaning back in the cushions, arm slung over the back of the furniture behind me. I nodded, urging him to continue. “He just stayed in his room pretty much all of yesterday; he spoke to Lou before the rest of us left for the show, he didn’t come, even though he said he would.”

“He was gone by the time we got back.” Niall finished.

“Oh my god.” I breathed, my head falling into my hands. “Well what the hell does that mean?”

“We don’t know.” Harry replied. Both men looked in a right state; I wouldn’t be surprised if they told me neither of them had a wink of sleep last night. Both of their hair, usually pretty immaculate, was now roughly sticking out every which way as if they’d been pulling and pushing at it in frustration.

“Has any of his family said anything?” I asked. “Perrie?”

They shook their heads in reply, looking down sorrowfully. Suddenly the door was pushed open and one of their body guards walked in.

“Sorry to interrupt,” He started, shooting me an acknowledging nod. “There’s been some... developments.”

“What developments?” Niall asked.

“I think you should just come into Liam’s room, there’s a meeting.” He said, refusing to say anything and standing to the side of the door, watching the three of us.

“I’ll stay here.” I offered, watching Harry and Niall get up.

“No, come.” Harry said, holding his hand out. I took it, following him as he pulled me towards him, his hand at the small of my back as we were led by Niall out of the room. Collectively we muttered a ‘thanks’ to the man holding the door open as we went to the room three doors down.

“One sec,” I said, feeling my phone vibrate in my back pocket. “I’ll meet you in there.” I slipped it out, giving them an encouraging smile and nod before answering it - not looking at who the caller was. “Hello?” I was answered by someone crying out my name. “Perrie?” Harry stopped, reaching out and grabbing Niall’s arm to stop him continuing into the room as they both spun around to watch me.

“It’s Z-Zayn.” She continued to cry.

“What’s happened? Has he made it home?” I asked, exchanging a worried look with Harry. As I spoke, Louis, Liam and their tour manager emerged from the room, all standing and watching me.

“What’s going on?” Liam whispered. Niall quickly explained.

“He just texted me. He said he’s back in London, but he said that was it. He wasn’t going back. The band is over for him. And so are we!” She hiccuped between each sentence, her explanation laced with sobs. My heart seemed to come to a juddering holt at her words.

“The band’s over? What do you mean? You’re over?”

“He’s called off the wedding!”

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

I sat in Liam’s room next to Harry as their tour manager explained the situation. “So he’s quit?” Louis asked after what felt like an eternity of silence between the seven of us. It was evident in his ton and body language it was taking every fibre in his body not to rage.

“What the fuck?” Niall cried, face falling into his palms. His shoulders were shaking, showing us that his tears were falling. Liam moved to sit on the arm of his chair, pulling him into a hug, but it was clear he himself was fighting tears.

“And he’s broken up with Perrie?” Liam confirmed, looking between me and their manager. We both nodded.

I was absolutely stunned. I didn’t know what was going on. The last twenty four hours and been a rollercoaster, a whirlwind, going from one thing to the next in what felt like a flash.

“Christ... I can’t believe this.” Louis said. It hadn’t gone unnoticed to me that Harry remained silent. I turned my head to look at him; he seemed to be in a sense of shock. I gently squeezed the hand that was in mine.

“Haz...” I prodded quietly, my other hand rubbing up and down his thigh gently.

“Can we go?” He croaked, averting eye contact.

“Um... I think we’ll be right back.” I spoke up, standing and waiting for Harry to follow. The other seemed to have an unspoken understanding; all feeling this sense of numbness and loss. We made our way back to Harry’s room in silence. I pushed the door shut behind us, watching cautiously as Harry went straight to the bed and almost fell onto it, his gaze staring up at the ceiling. I slowly approached him, laying beside him without a word. Both of his hands were sort of cupped around his mouth, eyes welling with tears.

“Come here, baby.” I whispered, pulling his body into mine as he let out a choked sob. His head rested on my chest as I wrapped him in my arms. Soon more sobs escaped his mouth, morphing into an almost continuous cry as his body shook. “Shhh, my love, it’s okay. You’re gonna be okay. Just let it out.” I spoke gently into his hair as I kissed the back of his head. With each passing moment my heart was breaking more and more. Never had I seen him like this and it saddened me to no end.

About half an hour had gone passed where he had uttered no words or sounds. “Thank you,” His voice was hoarse and muffled into my jumper.

“What for, my darling?”

“For coming, for being here. For just... being you.” He whimpered. I sniffled, a couple of my own tears falling from my eyes.

“Of course.” I replied, squeezing him gently. “Of course.”

Neither of us knew what was going to follow this day; would the band continue? Would this be the end of the road for all of them? All I did know was that as long as Harry and I were together, we could weather any storm thrown our way, because we loved each other, supported each other, unconditionally.

#harry styles #harry styles imagine #harry styles angst #harry styles fluff #harry styles x y/n #harry styles x reader #harry styles x you #one direction #one direction imagines

256 notes · View notes

cntrspll · 4 years ago

Text

this is a love letter to my own fic

hi hello hey, this is an essay about my own fic and the feelings i have about it. fic can be found here.

i am going to try so hard to keep this organized but i don’t know how well that will work soooo let’s go!

on the fic overall:

i just... like magnus. i think he is a fan fave for a reason, but i think there’s a lot of missing discussion of his post-canon situation and the development thereafter. when i finished listening to balance for the first time (in february-ish this year, i think?), i remember being super frustrated with where parts of the fandom had landed their focus. this isn’t an uncommon fandom thing, and i totally get where it comes from. some characters are just super relatable and a lot of fun to write about and have like absolute piles of stuff to unpack, so it’s totally fair that some characters get more focus than others, but where i felt that some of my faves got a lot of fandom focus, others... didn’t.

so this fic was in part an attempt to rectify that, because i wasn’t finding the unpacking of magnus and his emotional / mental state that i wanted. that being said, there are a couple fics that i did draw a little bit of inspiration from, the biggest probably being patterns of migration by goodnicepeople. the depiction of magnus as this big strong dude who also has these quiet vulnerabilities that he doesn’t like admitting to people is like, in part just really accurate to canon, but also something that i really wanted to see explored more, and i didn’t find a whole lot of other fics that fit that, so in part i just wanted to set out to put a little more into that.

also, like, i work in food service, and we are in a pandemic, and i moved in the middle of this year and i started hrt this year and have been dealing with the fallout of coming out and just kind of everything, and this fic was a really good way of just like, distracting myself from everything and sitting down for a little every day and thinking about something else and not so much about everything that was happening around me. so there is a good part of this fic that is just like, me coping with everything and trying to reorient myself a little. and it worked pretty well for that!

on process:

ok first things first, this was never meant to be 133k long. when i first sat down to write this, it was going to be a handful of snapshots set across [undetermined amount of time here] of magnus dealing with isolation and insomnia, and it was only meant to be like, maybe a 20k oneshot? that obviously did not happen. i think my original estimate once i accepted that this was gonna be multichaptered was like 60-70k, but then the chapters started getting longer with each one i finished, and then i wanted to add in an interlude, and then i decided i needed an epilogue, and here we are.

i’ll talk about this in other sections too, but as i wrote, i just kept finding more and more things that i wanted to talk about. i was also in the process of relistening to balance i was writing, and i kept running into little things that happened over the course of the show that i was like... oh shit! and that would inspire another scene or an interaction i wanted to write or something i wanted to focus more on, and the whole thing just kept getting more and more and bigger and bigger.

i’ve said it like 50 thousand times now, but i have never written anything this long before. i tried really hard to be regimented about the way i did it, because from the beginning i knew this was going to be an emotional journey for me to write, but i knew that if i let it slide for a week or so then i would never finish it. so to get through it, i wrote almost every day for a minimum of an hour. the process that i’ve found works best for me when i’m writing is using word sprints, putting on some music, and then forcing myself to tune out of social media and everything else for 25 minutes. i try to do between 750-1k words in that time period, then the site gives you a five minute break, during which i usually check twitter or fact check if i need to, and then i go back in and do another sprint. this works really well for me because i wasn’t trying to hit a specific word goal in any given day, just like... trying to sit down and write. i also tried not to guilt myself too much if i missed a day, or if i only did one sprint instead of two, or anything like that, and that’s kind of what helped me get through the whole monster without instantly dropping it as soon as i had another idea.

on mental health and recovery:

so one of my big personal pet peeves in fiction is the idea that trauma recovery is like, a one time single event deal. like, someone has this big horrible thing happen to them or they have some pressing mental health issue and then someone else walks in and they have one conversation and bam, everything is fine. i was exposed to a lot of [fan]fiction when i was younger that kind of supported this kind of narrative, and i get that there is a certain sort of wish fulfillment thing to that, but it also sucks, being an adult and having Problems(TM) and knowing that it absolutely does not work like that.

so when i set out to write a fic about trauma and mental illness and recovery, i felt kind of a responsibility to not fall into that trap and write it like, okay and then magnus and taako talk about it and taako’s like hey dude you’re depressed but it’s okay and then magnus doesn’t have nightmares anymore. also, because this is taz and the canon of like, historical accuracy is complete bullshit, i can put therapists and psychiatry and psychiatric medications in my fic and no one can tell me i’m wrong and it doesn’t exist. elevators exist, so i can make ssris and anti anxiety pills exist.

but also, magnus as a character is not going to jump into that right away. it is canon fact that he doesn’t like accepting or asking for help with stuff like this, and yes there are a couple big moments where he does, but like i bring up a couple times in the fic, mental health struggles are a big jump from like, a physical fight using swords and axes and shit. and this i think is really accurate to a lot of people’s struggles with mental illness, just taking that first step and admitting that you don’t feel okay, and that you need someone’s help to deal with it. that’s super super scary even to admit to like, your closest friends.

so that’s why magnus kind of shies away a number of times from some of the conversations that people try to start with him about mental health. taako and carey and lucretia and pretty much everyone else approach him at some point about opening up about this stuff, but he pulls away because admitting that kind of vulnerability to someone else is super scary, even if you’ve maybe admitted it to yourself already.

i also wanted to make sure that at the end of the fic, he wasn’t magically better. this is something else that i think people kind of forget, like... trauma and the problems that it causes don’t go away just because of therapy and medication. those things help, they help you reform the ways you think about yourself and about the world, but they don’t change the struggles you’ve been through or the sometimes biological problems that are causing whatever issue you’re having. and i remember reading a lot of fic when i was a kid where someone would be depressed, and then they’d fall in love and get magic dick or something and then they’d never be sad again, which... isn’t great.

but at the same time, i didn’t want it to end on this note like, oh everything is still bad even though he worked so hard to open up and get help, because that sucks, too. so it was really important to me that the fic end on a hopeful note, like, magnus isn’t cured. he still has bad days and bad weeks and sometimes he is just as low as he was before, but he also has like, normal days, which is something that i think you kind of forget can even exist when you’re depressed, or when you’re dealing with any mental illness. but like, i really wanted it to be obvious that things did get better and even if he’s still coping with it and it’s not going away, he’s okay. he’s gonna be all right.

on an unreliable narrator:

this kind of plays into some of the mental health stuff, but one thing that i love about taz that i really wanted to play into with this fic is the idea of limited perspective. griffin does some really cool fucking things with this, specifically in relation to the ipre and the big reveal in the last lunar interlude, with the idea of like... a character can only know the things that they know. like, magnus knows that there is a picture of him depicted as a red robe, and barry knows that they’re all red robes, and taako knows that they found the umbra staff next to a red robed skeleton and that the umbrella spelled out lup at one point, but none of them necessarily know all the things that the other person knew, and none of them know all the things that lucretia knows or that fisher knows or junior knows, etc etc.

unfortunately, just because the pace of the story picks up so much in that last lunar interlude, there isn’t a whole lot of space to explore that like, disconnect between all these facts that they each have as individuals. and given the perspective of mental health and the way that plays into your perceptions of yourself and your perceptions of other people’s perceptions, i really wanted to delve into like… magnus’s misunderstandings.

this is not a strictly straightforward unreliable narrator situation, but i did bring in some elements of that. i really wanted to explore the disconnect between how magnus sees and how everyone else sees him and his issues. there are also a couple moments where he flat out completely misinterprets their intentions, which unfortunately i didn’t delve into as much as i wanted to so they ended up mostly being fun easter eggs for, uh… me? i guess?

one of those moments is the scene in ch 4 where barry and magnus are sitting in the kitchen and barry starts to ask magnus something. magnus assumes it’s going to be about his mental health, and that this is barry stepping up as representative for everyone else to talk to him about it, but it’s really meant to be a precursor to their conversation in ch 6 where they talk about barry and lup and marriage and proposals.

magnus gets a little perspective on this later, i think in ch 7(?) where he’s thinking about how maybe their lives don’t completely revolve around him and he’s missing some of their perspective. but like, they all have their own shit going on, and they all love him and they’re worried about him, but also, barry is thinking about lup. lup is thinking about taako. taako is thinking about lucretia. lucretia is thinking about davenport, and davenport is thinking about his own issues, and so on and so on and they’re not all just like… waiting to pounce on magnus the second he shows weakness.

a lot of that plays into the hypervigilance of ptsd, too. magnus is very aware of any perceived threat, and he sometimes treats the people around him as threats, when all they’re doing in reality is thinking like, man i wish he didn’t live out here by himself all the time.

on a more meta note, i also have a tendency to make every character i write just like, a super good judge of character. i don’t think magnus is that, and i really wanted to lean into that. magnus does not read intention super well, even when that intention is genuinely good.

on the ipre and their relationships:

so i… really don’t write gen fic a lot. even when i do, it is almost always tinged with a little bit of background shipping, and there is some of that in this, but whereas in most fandoms i end up being a multishipper, for some reason with taz i’ve ended up pretty much only caring about the canon ships (sorry…). that being said, the platonic relationships in taz (and especially in balance) are some of the most compelling and important fictional relationships that i’ve ever encountered. like, they are just really well fucking done.

this being the magnus love letter that it is, i really wanted to focus on magnus’s distinct relationships with every member of the ipre crew. i don’t know how obvious this is in the actual narrative, but with the exception of the interlude and the epilogue, the story is broken down into one chapter for each member of the starblaster crew (in order, magnus, taako, merle, davenport, barry, lucretia, lup). i did this specifically because it was really important to me that i dive into all of them and their particular issues. i didn’t quite get the deep dive with merle or davenport that i would’ve liked to, but hopefully in the future i’ll get more time to explore that.

anyway, in case it isn’t obvious, lup is probably my favorite fictional character literally ever in any media created by anyone in the history of time. i say this only because a lot of this fic was set up to build to the conversation between her and magnus in ch 8 out on the mountain where he finally opens up for the first time. there are some really incredible unexplored parallels and relationships in taz (unexplored mainly because like, where would it even fit in canon), and while some of them are super self indulgent (ie, lup and mags, barry and mags), i really really really wanted to dig into those a little more. things like the conversation where taako is talking about everyone brushing over his trauma to rush to forgive lucretia, or lucretia talking about trying to learn to love writing again and recognize happy moments, davenport almost admitting that he’s not completely sure about stepping back into the family in his former role… i could write an entire fic on any of these, really.

but ultimately, this being a magnus fic, i tried to filter those conversations through a perspective of two things: first, how does this affect magnus and his mental health journey, and second, what can magnus do to help this. those scenes where magnus is trying to help someone with something and they’re like, backhandedly helping him are some of my favorite interactions in the fic.

the other thing i really really really wanted to explore that i never see enough of in fic is magnus and carey’s relationship. carey is canonically magnus’s best friend, and yet in fic i feel like she gets pushed to the side a little in favor of the starblaster crew. which i get, they’ve got a hundred and ten years of shared trauma, but also, travis flat out states that carey is magnus’s best friend, so… i mean, there is also a little bit of self indulgence here, because i am also a man who is exclusively best friends with lesbians, but you know.

that being said, i really wanted to emphasize that relationship in particular, which is why carey doesn’t have her own dedicated chapter and instead kind of slides in and out of each one and slowly helps magnus along the way. her personality i also feel is like, the exact kind of thing that magnus needs to push him into accepting / asking for help and moving towards recovery.

on real life parallels:

ok, i swear to god i did not intend to make this a holiday fic posted during the holidays. i started writing this in june, and again, it was only meant to be like 20k and not necessarily entirely set during candlenights. that kind of happened, anyway? candlenights just seemed like the best vessel to get all these characters whose post-canon situations i wanted to explore into the same room, and i finished the first draft around mid october and i wanted to give myself plenty of time for editing, so it honestly just ended up coincidentally aligning with the holidays. go figure.

that being said, isolation ended up featuring pretty heavily in this fic. that i think is to be expected to a certain degree given the nature of mental health and recovery and blah blah blah, but i probably unintentionally ended up leaning into it a little more because like… this year. and the holidays tend to be a time that a lot of us feel really isolated, and this year especially, but one of the big things for me this year is that like, all of my friends live out of state. the closest one to me is still a good 2-3 hour plane ride, which i am absolutely not risking. i had like a hundred plans to go see people and do things this year, and those obviously got cancelled.

probably the biggest one of those things was seeing a friend who i have kind of started a new years tradition of seeing, but we ended up calling that off out of safety considerations, of course. and it sucks! it’s not fun! i also moved out this year and i have my own place and in june i was really hoping that things would be okay by now and i could have all my friends come in from out of town for new years and that didn’t happen. and i wasn’t intending for this fic to be a kind of wish fulfillment of like, here’s my new place post-[saving the universe / coming out and becoming a real person], let me show my found family around my hometown and let’s make new holiday traditions together now that we’re no longer [fighting the apocalypse / literal children] and everything will be fun and happy and good, but that is kind of what happened anyway. [insert joke here that goes like “do you project your real world problems and mental health issues onto fictional characters or are you normal?”]

but yeah, magnus’s mental health struggles did kind of accidentally become a little bit of a pandemic / quarantine life parallel. i did not mean for that to happen, but it did help me tease out a little bit of what it is that i feel like i’m missing and what i want in the future when things are better, and i hope it helped some other people figure that stuff out too, maybe?

and in conclusion:

i said this a little bit in the final notes in the fic, but i am so so so grateful and emotional over the comments i’ve gotten from some of you. i’ve said it already, but this was such an emotional rollercoaster for me to write. i put a decent amount of my own mental health issues into the stuff i wrote into magnus, and it was genuinely therapeutic and like… super helpful and important. it was also a big struggle, and there were some scenes i came out of feeling incredibly drained and like i needed to not write for a week.

so that being said, those of you who have commented things about how this fic helped you deal with your own emotional turmoil or helped put something in perspective for you, i am genuinely so happy to hear that i’ve impacted you in that way like, at all. that is so incredible to me, and not necessarily what i set out to do, but it means so much to hear someone say that and also to know that someone felt comfortable sharing that with a stranger on the internet. thank you so so so much.

again, this fic means so much to me. the fact that it’s impacted even a handful of people in that way is absolutely amazing. some of the things you guys have said have had me seriously choked up. i am so glad that anyone even took the time to read all 133k of this, let alone that it affected people like that.

i don’t know if i’ll be writing more about magnus in this universe. i would love to! but i’m also super happy with where i’ve left his story. i have plans to explore the calen thing in the future, but only kind of tangentially in a side mention and not fully, so who knows? there is more though, a lot with taako and kravitz and lup and barry and hopefully one day i will find the motivation somewhere in me to flesh out everyone else’s situations a little more, too. who knows!

anyway, i just want to say thanks again to everyone for reading, and even more so if you are reading this dumb essay. you’re super cool.

#txt #fic talk

14 notes · View notes