#I want to learn more about this ~fiction corner

[ir-abelas-vhenan]

I've been thinking a lot today about how easily people condemn Solas for making the choices he did or for so regularly refusing the help and love his friends or a romanced Lavellan extended to him and how that's a very easy thing to do from behind a screen in a fictional game where you are able to (with very few exceptions) curate a world in which your allies are loyal and your decisions will go the way you'd like them to.

And yeah, it's a game and that's kind of the point, but if I were to look at it a little more deeply (and who am I kidding, I got back on this website exclusively to process the aftermath of Veilguard) I'd say that there's so much to be found in wondering if the protagonists in any of the other games would have fared better in similar conditions.

Apparently I can't stop making long posts, so buckle in.

What would Morrigan have become in a world where the Warden never stumbled upon her cottage with Flemeth, if she never got the chance to see more of the world and decide what she wanted out of it? With just her mother (who, coincidentally in this Solas-y discussion is also kind of Mythal) and no support, who is to say what she would have unleashed upon the Korcari Wilds one day when the confines of her cage became too much?

What about Leliana? She, too, suffered at the hands of a very controlling abuser who tried to convince her that one lifestyle was all that her future held. What do we think she would have become if not for a chance meeting in Lothering with someone who could help her face down the woman that molded her?

Fenris, a character MANY people are just fine with was incredibly ready to kill a mage on sight if need be, no questions asked. Where do we think his story goes if he doesn't have someone in his corner early on enough in the game? If he doesn't get caught by Danarius, he's almost certainly going to end up on a murder spree, and he doesn't even have Justice whispering in his head to do it.

Cullen. Just all of him. It's an absolute miracle he hasn't snapped by the time you encounter him in Inquistion, and even then you get the benefit of intervening at a critical point in his story several times over.

Almost every other character could face this analysis and I think we'd reach a result that suggests perhaps the only thing keeping them lovable is your playable character's investment in their well-being.

Enter Solas. We don't meet him when he's twenty to thirty something and on the precipice of falling down a dark path. He's been there for literal millennia already, and with the exception of one close friend he's been alone. And not even Felassan is enough because of the years Mythal had prior to that friendship to make Solas exactly who she needed him to be.

I've had shit friends before that aren't just good at isolating people, they're naturals. I barely made it through high school with my mental health in place (in fact, looking back, it almost certainly wasn't). When you think you've got a true friend and they need something of you, it's so easy to blindly follow them because you think your love is enough to mark someone's soul as trustworthy. Solas doesn't learn that lesson until it's too late, and even when he does he can't turn back: the spirit that was once Wisdom has been exposed to several of the worst ancient elves to ever exist and now he has to stand his ground rather than let it all fall, because that is what Pride would dictate. Admitting that the person you gave your love and labor and time to is a monster is hard. And he was alone.

Give me Morrigan after centuries with her mother. Show me Leliana after the years have become a blur and the only voice whispering in her ear is Marjolaine's. Show me the innocent mages that don't make it through if all Fenris has for years and years and years are the scars Danaris left him and the means to make more. Show me Cullen if he stays in a chain of command under a Knight Commander who knows exactly what he fears and holds it over his head for so long he forgets what it was like to be an excited kid begging the templars for training because he just wants to keep people safe.

We get companions in these games who are broken by the time they're twenty. Solas has spent thousands of years in servitude to a cause of a woman he believed to be his only friend. He doesn't know who he is without her influence, anymore, only exists physically in the first place because she asked it of him and then asked again and again and again. He doesn't have a witty band of merry fools to pull him out of that cycle. He has Felassan, but he has him during war after war after war in the hopes of freeing others from the very situation that torments him.

Trauma from war affects everyone touched by it, nevermind the fact that Solas is actively responsible for saving the lives of thousands and feels each life like a weight around his neck because maybe he can save them like he cannot save himself. We should always be worried about the people trying to do the most good. Who is looking out for them? Why are they so determined to help others? Could it be that it's something they wish others had done for them?

Solas certainly feels comradery with Felassan from working together to free slaves from the very people he helped put in power because Mythal told him it would be okay only to leave him with the pieces, but even the Solas that Felassan knows has been turned into an attack dog shying away from the touch of the very person it desires to be near above all others by the time their relationship forms.

The fact that Solas is able to try and show the Inquisitor who he is at all is a miracle as far as I'm concerned, a sign of a peaceful spirit of Wisdom who loves knowledge for the sake of it finally sensing that there might be a chance to embrace its nature again.

Yeah, if you give him what he has come to expect from people with power, if you let near-absolute power over the masses corrupt you, he's going to bristle and try to shut your inquisitor down.

But if you show him even the smallest bit of kindness? If you treat him like the starving wolf he talks about and feed him instead of fighting him? God, it shatters his entire existence.

It's called a cycle of abuse for a reason. Finding friendship, finding the love of your long-ass life can be the first step in realizing there's better out there. But the time it takes to learn that? When you're too weary to even reach out for help in the first place and afraid of every kind word or gesture because you've never known such tenderness (on a platonic OR romantic level, both matter so so much) before?

Part of the compelling tragedy of Solas is that it's almost Orpheus-like how he knows what he has been made into and still cannot stop himself from yearning for more, from turning around to see if just this once something has changed. You can't convince me that he hasn't spent years hoping that someone will hear the legend of the Dread Wolf and see it for what it is, a leash the Evanuris created for Mythal's whipping boy to ensure that even if he ever escapes them, the people he fought to save will hate him. And I cannot blame him for the shock and terror that consumes him when he realizes someone finally has.

You give me any of dragon age companions after the amount of time Solas spent under Mythal's thumb without your character's intervention and you tell me how that looks.

You tell me if they're able to change at the first sign of something that feels too good to be true.

And then, I want you to tell me they're any less worthy of trying to save, especially when you know how good their best can be.

Solas might be hard for some fans to love, but it's only because he serves as the perfect representation of the beast we are all capable of becoming when the love that sustains us, assuming we receive any at all, is laced with poison.

The journey out of that place, out of a literal prison of regret, is brutal, and I'm thrilled that even with the many things about Veilguard I'm still struggling with, we have the chance to let Solas try again with the help of those who love him not because he never fell down, but because they believe in the beauty of a future where he gets back up again.

[connectingsparkingwebs]

Another thought I’m finding fascinating is the idea of [a verse like this and then] [its] Rand’s next life. Like - was thinking, if Rand does get killed or die, probably the wheel would bring him back right away? And just, that as a situation, someone born into the war being ongoing, because their past life died, with whatever everyone is doing and trying to do without them. People looking for them.

-Could even have multiple lives that way, maybe different people finding them.

(I’m sure someone has written this, because someone has written everything in this ~trope set up, but just, thinking about it.)

[mj0702]

The other Bronze – Pt. 3

For all the patient waiting people (like @valewosomtb) and my Bubs (I'm proud of you and always will be ❤️)

And please remember - this is pure fiction... so it doesn't need to make sense 🤣

You wandered the streets of Barcelona gotten lost a long time ago but not caring to open google maps.

“Seriously Luce.... kicking me out so you can... probably get some” you mumble to yourself rounding the next corner.

The next thing you knew was that you were sitting on your Ass with a beautiful girl across from you, looking just as baffled before starting to talk to you in spanish. You made the international known sign for “I don't understand” by shrugging your shoulders as you try to push yourself up again.

“Ehrm... damn... what was the spanish Word for English...” you mumbled to yourself before looking at the woman “Inglés?” you ask embarrassed

“Of course” the woman said laughing as she stood up herself offering you a hand “I said I'm so sorry, I wasn't watching where I was going”

“Oh god no, I wasn't looking... I... kinda got lost and am too lazy to open maps” you say before you wince as you push yourself up from the pavement

“Are you okay? You look like you hurt something” the woman asked concerned

“Yeah I'm good” you wave off, knowing fully well you weren't good. You definitely sprained your wrist – if not worse. Ugh – your sister will kill you. Such an inconvenience.

“Are you sure?” the woman asked you again this time with a little insistence

“Yeah, I'm sure – you speak very clear english for a spanish person” you said and tried to change the topic

“Oh I'm not Spanish – I'm in fact German... we learn english in school” she winked

“Oh German... now that's interesting” you muse, a smile tugging on your lips

“And why's that?” the woman asked

“I... don't know... I thought it would be nice to say that” you rubbed the back of your neck smiling embarrassed.

The woman laughed loudly “At least you didn't make any bad jokes about us not being funny... that's a plus” she winked before looking at you “Where are you from?”

“Born in Aberdeen, raised in Berwick-upon-Tweed... generally speaking – I'm from England” you grin

“What brought you to the most beautiful city in Europe then?” the Woman asked smiling softly

“Visiting family... Y/N by the way... I thought I should introduce myself before you declare me as unpolite” you continue to grin as you offer your left hand for her to shake

“Left Hand? You english People really are something else” she smiled before taking you're offered Hand “Caroline... friends call me Caro”

“I may or may not have sprained my wrist – that's the reason for the left hand... but yes, we're also something else... so tell me... Caro... what brought you to Barcelona” you tested the waters by using the Womans short name

She smiled “Feeling bold, are you? Assuming we're friends and using my Nickname without even asking”

Again you were thrown off guard by her forwardness “Ehrm... I thought if you tell me something like this, I... could just... you know – use the information”

This time the Blonde laughed freely “Don't sweat it... it's okay... Can I... maybe interest you in drinking a coffee with me?”

“Like a date?” you said confused

“More like a “I'm sorry I ran into you and put you on your ass” coffee” the blonde smirked

“In that case... I'll pay for yours, you pay for mine... I also put you on your ass” this time you smirked

“Deal” the blue eyed girl said smiling “I know a small coffee place not far from here if you're interested”

“Sure... lead the way” you said, your sprained wrist momentarily forgotten. That's until you wanted to put your hand into your pocket. Suddenly you got painfully reminded of your small incidence as you winced for a second.

“You are very gullible, you know... I could be a serial killer” the blonde said smirking

“It's statistically highly unlikely that two serial killer run into each other and then go out for a coffee” you shrug nonchalantly while the blonde laughed out loudly.

You arrived at the small coffee shop, which was a cute one. A little hidden away from the bigger streets, it immediately got calmer and quieter – for the first time since you touched spanish ground, you allowed yourself to breath. Caro took you through an Archway into a beautiful courtyard where she pointed to a little – tiny even – shop with three or four tables. You stopped in the middle of the courtyard and slowly spun around taking in the beauty of this place. The sandstone Walls looked like they could tell endless stories about colourful festive evenings, calm mornings and lovers.

“It's beautiful, isn't it?” the blonde German asked quietly

“I couldn't find the right words to describe this beauty even if I tried” you whispered back still looking around in awe.

“Let's get this coffee and you can stare some more” Caro teased but her voice still soft before she walked towards the little shop, greeting the Owners like they were family.

You sat down at one of the tables while still staring around, waiting for your new found friend to return. There was wild Ivy growing up the walls at some places making it even more mysterious and beautiful. Your companion joined you at your table smiling brightly.

“I gather you're a regular?” you grinned at her nodding towards the Shop

“What gave it away?” Caro laughed “The greeting or that I know there's a Coffee Shop so well hidden that not even many Barcaloneans know of its existences?”

“The Greeting and the fact that I didn't order anything...” you mused smiling “... and yet there are two cups of coffee being prepared”

“Good observation skills, I'm impressed” the German smiled “The owners are former Neighbours of mine... they helped me a great deal when I first came to Barca a few years ago and I still come around every time I'm in the area to say hi”

“That's nice... that you still come here to say hi” you say softly “... friendships like this are important... now... what am I getting?”

“I assumed you're a “Cortado” girl...” the blonde winked

“Huh... come again?” you asked confused

“Cortado... the best you could compare it to is a Latte Macchiato... It's an Espresso with milk... “ the German explained “Just... never call it Latte Macchiato... it's a Cortado”

“Got it... Cortado” you say serious, trying to pronunciation right as you repeat the spanish word

“Sounds good” Caro grinned as your coffee gets served by an elderly Woman “Gracias Nana” the blonde grinned graciously

The two of you drank your coffee in silence before starting to talk about nothing and everything at the same time. You really enjoyed the time with the blonde, who was very easy to get along with. She was funny, witty and light-hearted. You shared a few good laughs while she also taught you some real spanish (unlike Mapí did) so you would at least be able to order your coffee the next time on your own. In her company you absolutely forgot the time – which resulted in also forgetting your “engagement” with Keira.. and Alexia... and Lucy... and Mapí. As the sun started to set you realised that you might talked longer with the German as you planned – and that your Phone was dead.

“”Ehrm... I really have a good time... I REALLY do... but... what time is it?” you asked embarrassed after you checked your – very VERY – dead phone.

“Just before 6pm” your new friend answered with a glance at her watch

“Uh oh” was the only thought on your mind which also made it out of you verbally “How far is that football place from here?”

“Camp Nou? About 30 Minutes, why?” Caro looked at you confused as you try frantically to restart your Phone.

“I'm dead... I'm so SO dead.. my Sister is going to kill me” you said panicking “I was meant to meet her at Camp... Nope at 3”

“Yeah.. you might be a little late for that” the blonde said awkward “Come on... I can either get you an Uber or I deliver you – and take the blame... or should you rather go home?”

“Ehrm... I don't really remember where “home” is” you confessed embarrassed, rubbing the back of your neck.

“Camp Nuo it is then... come on” your new found friend said smiling already standing up.

You follow suite standing up rummaging in your pocket pulling out the 20 Euros that Lucy gave you putting it down on the table

“Leave it... it's covered already” Caro said grinning pushing the 20 back into your hands.

“But..” you said dumbfolded looking at the bill in your hand

“Mauro and Valeria are family... it's on the house” the blonde winked and started to walking away after yelling a goodbye towards the elderly couple.

You stumbled after her trying to keep up “But we had a deal”

“Next time” the german waved off already a few steps in front of you her mobile in her hand ordering an Uber.

You just needed to wait around five minutes for a car to pull up and Caro opened the back door

“Your chariot awaits, my lady” the german grinned waiting for you to climb into the backseat

She gave the driver the destination and you were on the way towards Camp Nuo. As the Uber pulled up you immediately spotted a small group of people.

“I'm so dead” you mumbled as you saw one of them roaming in front of the group a mobile phone in her hand before it makes the way to her ear to just be brought back down seconds later

“Let me guess.. the one trying to call you is your sister?” the blonde german smirked at your frozen like state pushing you out off the car following closely behind

“Can we just drive off a...” you started but got interrupted by loud angry yelling

“Y/N BRONZE!!!! ARE YOU FUCKING SERIOUS???!!!”

“Bronze??” Caro asked confused “As in Lucy Bronze?”

“My sister” you mumbled quietly as you took cover behind the blonde

“Oh my god” the blonde whispered shocked

“Is she coming over??” you asked from behind her not daring to look

“She tries... other people holding her back... is that Alexia Putellas?” your new friend mumbles back standing frozen in place

“Probably” you whispered “You seem to know players... is Keira Walsh in that huddle somewhere?”

“I think so... I mean I'm not sure” the german answered lowly

“I call out for her and you have to tell me if someone reacts, okay?? KEIRA????” you yelled from behind Caro hoping that Keira was still around

“Yep... someone just looked over” your german friend said as Keira looked over

“Good.... can you bring me over to her without Lucy noticing?” you questioned

“Ehrm... this is Lucy Bronze we're talking about.... I don't think there's anything that goes unnoticed by her” Caro mumbled back

“You give her too much credit” you rolled your eyes behind the taller woman “Okay... maybe you could distract her and I run over to saftey – namely Keira”

“How should I distract a world class defender? Have you seen the stuff she pulled off at the Worldcup??”

“Ask her for a Autograph or something... go fangirling” you said pushing your friend forward.

“Absolutely not” Caro said shaking her head “Ooooooh... they're coming over”

“Okay...” you said panicking “You go left, I go right”

“You do realize that they have zero intrest in me, right?” she asked you raising an eyebrow

“Damnit” you swore quietly

“Cariño” you suddenly hear behind your human shield “would you mind stepping around this nice woman”

“No” you mumbled now grabbing Caros shirt

“Cariño” Alexia said but you heard her warning tone “I promise Lucia won't hurt you”

You peeked around your human shield to see Lucy a few feet away flanked by Ingrid and Ona and her face showed pure fury. Alexia stood right in front of Caro and you acting like a mediator.

“It wasn't my fault, I swear” you rushed out but stayed behind the german

“I didn't say it was but we were very worried” the spaniard said calm “now please step around that poor woman who you roped into this”

“Her name is Caro and she's german” you said still not moving from behind her

“Hola” Alexia said to your friend not sparing her a second glance “Do not make me get you out from behind her”

You reluctantly step around Caro standing now next to her your head hung low

“Thank you” the blonde spaniard said before she grabbed your wrist pulling you away a bit

“Alexia please” you digged your feet into the ground trying to stop the unievitable “She'll kill me and it was really an accident”

“She won't kill you stop being so.. dramático” Alexia said calmly as she pulled you over to where the others were standing.

You looked back over your shoulder towards your new friend who had a sorrowful look on her face waving slightly before turning around ready to leave

“Wait” you called out to her “I still owe you this coffee... Alexia please... One minute, okay”

Alexia stopped and let go of your wrist turning around to you

“You can't out run me... even if you try...” she warned you

“I just want to make sure there's a chance I can pay back my depth” you rolled your eyes

You quickly walked back to the german pulling out that 20 Euro bill scribbling your number down pushing it into Caros hand

“Call me... when I charged my phone again” you smiled then turning around walking back to the waiting Barcelona captain

“Wise choice not trying to run” Alexia said smiling slightly

“It's not like I would come very far” you shrugged nodding towards the bunch of football players standing a few feet behind Alexia

“True... now come one – you have to explain quite a bit” the blonde smiled encouraging at you pulling you along towards the small crowd

“Do you actually know what I just went through???” Lucy yelled the second you were close enough “I thought you.... I don't know... got killed or laying dead in a ditch or something!!”

You stepped behind Alexia hiding behind her. You knew your sister loved you to death so her yelling at you was bad

“Lucia” Alexia warned noticing how it effected you “We said no yelling... explain what happened Cariño”

You shook your head taking a step back just to feel someone cutting off your escape route. When you looked around it was Keira who had a blank look on her face

“It was really an accident Kei... I swear... Lucy gave me money and said I should go to the next Starbucks... I didn't want google the route, so I got lost and just wandered around... I met Caro because I ran into her and put her to her ass so I wanted to apologise by buying her a coffee and she said she knew a nice place and so I went with her... it was a really cute place and I forgot about time and when the sun set I checked my phone to see it died” you said talking one mile an hour trying to convince her that you didn't want to cause trouble on purpose.

Keira took a deep breath listening closely to your rant before holding up a hand

“Bitsy do you realize how much you had us worried... I mean I'm used to you wandering off but you don't know this city – as beautiful as Barcelona is, it can be dangerous... you don't know where to go and where to stay away from... hell Bitsy you don't even speak the language” she said and you saw that Keira held herself back

“I really didn't mean too” you answered sadly looking down

“I know... but that doesn't make it any less scary for us” the englishwoman said quietly before engulfing you in a bear hug.

“Will she kill me?” you mumbled into Keiras shoulder as you hugged her back

“No” the englishwoman chuckled “she probably handcuff you to herself... or bring back the dino-harness”

“Ugh... please don't let her” you groaned being remembered of one of the most embarrassing things Lucy ever done to you

You were about 10 when Keira took you to Lucy who was playing in Lyon at the time. They decided it would be a good idea to go with you to the park so you can power yourself out. Needless to say that you indeed used the whole park – much to the dismay of Lucy who had her first ever panic attack because she lost you. After that incident she immediately bought one of these kiddi-leashes to keep you in check. And not only did she make you wear it when you three were out in privat – oh no... she'd made you wear it when she went to training. So the first time you met worldclass players like Wendie Renard, Amandine Henry or Dzsenifer Marozsán you were strapped in a kids harness which had a dinosaur design – to be exact a dino whose biting his own tail - with a leash attached to its back. Looking back now it was probably the saftest – but also the most embarressing - option for you since you would have definitely wandered off exploring Stade Gérard Houllier and probably have gotten into trouble somehow. So you spent a whole training being tied to post next to the pitch solmley to the fact that Keira had something else to do and couldn't take you with her.

Now as Keira hugged you tightly and brought back those memories which resulted in you pressing your face into her shoulder. Just as you got comfortable against Keira you got ripped away from her embrance and found yourself at the receiving end of another tight hug.

“Never EVER do that again, Bubs” your sister mumbled into your hair “You can't just disappear like that... I was so SO scared”

“I'm sorry, Luce” you mumbled back thankful that she got over her initial angryness

“Are you okay? Nobody hurt you, right? Who was that woman?” Lucy fired question after question as she pushed you backwards to take a look at you

“I'm good Luce... really” you said hiding your slightly swollen wrist “That woman was Caro... I ran into her and she helped me getting here”

“You can't just go with strangers, Bubs... I thought I drilled that into your head back in Lyon” your sister said and looked at you somehow helplessly

“It wasn't like I knew where I was or something” you rolled your eyes “She seemed nice and she really helped me”

“Cariño” you suddenly heared behind you again and it made you jump a little

“Hm?” you hummed carefully turning around facing Alexia

“Are you really okay?” she stared down at you and you knew that she knew.

“Yes... yes I am” you tried to sound convincing but your voice betrayed you at the end

“Oh my god, you aren't” your sister exclaimed “Tell me.. you did get hurt, didn't you?! Is it bad? Do you need an ambulance? No wait... I drive you... Ona... get the car – we need to go to the hospital and you need to translate”

“Lucy!” you yelled “I'm fine... no ambulance, no hospital... calm your tits”

“You know you were never good at lying, Bitsy” Keira grinned “And if even Lucy picks up on it, then it's a really bad attempt”

“I'm not lying” you pressed still hiding your injured wrist

“Are we stretching the truth again then?” Keira asked knowingly

“Maybe” you said, looking down starting to kick the pavement embarrassed

“Show me immediately” Lucy demanded and already started to inspect your face moving her hands down to check your shoulders

“Keira” you whined trying to get away from your sisters prying hands

“Lucy stop it... it's her left wrist” the englishwoman rolled her eyes

“How did you... outch Luce” you started as your sister grabbed your wrist making you hiss out in pain

“You're not as sneaky as you think Bitsy” Keira grinned

“But I... Ow Lucy... that hurts man” you said bewildered before your sister put a little pressure on your wrist which hurts a LOT

“You tried to hide it very well – yes you did” Keira chooed and pinched your cheek “But not well enough for me or Alexia”

“Why would you hide something like this, Cariño?” the barca captain wanted to know

“You saw how she reacted and she didn't even know I was injured... OW!” you said nodding towards your sister while Lucy was prodding your wrist

Alexia delicatly took your hand out of Lucys hands and inspected it closely turned and stretched it carefully. You hissed at some of the movements even trying to pull away at one turn but one stern look from the blonde spainard made clear that you wouldn't get away

“It hurts” you mumbled as you tried to pull away again

“I bet” Alexia said quietly still inspecting your wrist “Looks like a sprain but to be sure you need some... radiografía”

“I need WHAT?” you squeaked shocked and scared at the same time

“Ona... what is radiografá” the spainard asked her teammate

“X-Ray.. you need some x-rays” the young catalonian said

“HA” Lucy exclaimed in a “I told you so”-tone

“Nooooo” you whined and JUST stopped yourself from stomping your foot

“Come on Bubs...” your sister said lovingly as she laid her arm around your shoulder and pulled you towards her Cupra “... I heard the spanish hospitals are quite an experience”

“Keira” you whined begging looking at her with big puppy eyes

“I'll meet you there okay?” the englishwoman said reassuring

“Excuse me... I'm there with you, you don't need to whine for Kei” Lucy said accusing

“But Keira knows everything about me... you're like a piece of swiss cheese sometimes” you said embarrassed

“I know EVERYTHING about you” your sister exclaimed outraged

“What's my blood type?” you raised an eyebrow

“Red” your sister shrugged as she opened the back door of her car for you

“Nope... uh-hu... I won't let you take any responsebility or make any medical decision when your answer is “Red” as a blood type” you shook your head fast

“Bet Keira doesn't know either” Lucy rolled her eyes looking over towards her fellow england teammate

“AB positive” the blonde said before entering her own car

“Seriously??” Lucy exclaimed throwing her arms up in annoyance

“I'm driving with Keira” you said quickly trying to get into her car

“You're not” your sister grabbed your shirt pulling you back “Stop being a child and get in the car”

“Then I want to ride shotgun” you said stubborn

“Ona is riding shotgun” Lucy said calm

“Ona is what?” the short woman asked confused pointing at herself

“You front” Lucy pointed at her girlfriend “You back” she pointed at you

“Why?” you whined again

“My Cupra has a lot of buttons – you will push all of them and probably break it” your sister explained

You huffed offended but climbed into the back of the sleek black car.

“Fucking finally” Lucy sighed and rolled her eyes after she closed the car door

“Be nice... she's upset” Ona said over the roof opening the passenger side door climbing in

“I'm upset too” your sister mumbled getting into the driver seat and started the car to drive you to the hospital.

The drive only took 15 minutes but for you it became nearly unbearable. You hated hospitals – with a passion. You had to spend some time in hospital when you were about six years old due to a burst appendix and since that time it was a mission to get you to put a foot in said buildings. It took Keira a lot of bribing to get you to visit Lucy when she had her knee surgery. That's how bad it was – you wouldn't even enter a hospital for visiting others.

“Come on, Bubs... let's get this wrist checked out” Lucy said softly as she leaned in the open car door. You didn't even noticed the car came to a halt before being deep in thoughts what could go wrong with a simple check-up. They could discover something worse and will keep you in there and probably maybe surgery and something goes wrong and you're going to die on that table. You decided right there and then you won't enter the hospital – there was a high risk of dying and your life just begun.

“Bubs?” your sister tried again seeing you spiraling, your forehead showing wrinkles you keep biting your lip your eyes staring into nothing

“Let me... you know how she gets about hospitals” Keira said softly arriving just in time to see you in distress “Get her checked in, I'll get her in there okay?”

“Kay... thanks Kei...” Lucy sighed then looking at Ona sheepishly “you need to help me... these forms are probably in spanish”

The short catalonian grinned “Aren't you around long enough to know basic spanish by now?”

“Speaking it... not reading it” Lucy mocked her girlfriend

As the two Barca players entered the hospital to get you checked in for your wrist Keira slipped into the backseat of Lucys car right next to you.

“Hey Bitsy” she said quietly trying to get your attention laying her hand carefully on your knee

“I don't want to go in there, Kei... I'm going to die” you said in a monotone but slightly panicked voice

“You're not going to die” the blonde chuckled “They'll do the same as Alexia did, test your ability to move in different directions then decide to take some.... how did you always refer to x-rays when you were younger?”

“Bone pictures” you mumbled

“They will take some bone pictures see that nothing is broken, then either put a simple bandage or a splint on it and we're out again – if you're good, I tell Ona to tell them to give you the good painkillers” Keira tried to walk you through whats most likely to happen.

“But if they discover something wrong with my wrist and they want to do surgery and something goes horribly wrong and I die on the table?” you looked at your comfort person horrified

“Not going to happen, Bitsy... It's just a simple check... and you have too much movability for it to be broken... it's just a sprain, okay?” the blonde englishwoman smiled reassuring

“You promise?” you mumble leaning into Keira

“I promise... now come on... your sister already came out the entrance looking for us three times now” Keira smiled at you

“She should calm her tits...” you rolled your eyes annoyed

“She was so worried, Bitsy... her session today was shit because she felt one guilty for kicking you out and two she was scared that something happened to you... I know you're a big girl now and you definitely can look after yourself but this is still a unknown city to you and honestly Bitsy – if you take a wrong turn you could end up in a very bad area and get killed”

“I really didn't mean to worry you...” you mumbled ashamed

“I know... but cut her some slack... she loves you to bits... she would do everything for you – always have and always will do” the englishwoman smiled while opening her side of the car taking your right hand into hers pulling slightly for you to follow her

“Took you long enough” Lucy whispered so only Keira could hear her

“We're here, aren't we?” the fellow english fired back a little annoyed

“Ona is talking to the nurses if there's anything they could do to get us through faster... I know every minute spend in here she's more likely to bolt” Lucy talked quietly always having an eye on you as you clutched Keiras hand hard.

“She's scared... she's convinced they'll take her in for surgery and she's going to die” the blonde explained as she let you squeeze her hand to the point where it became numb.

“Is there anything I can do?” your sister asks her ex-girlfriend getting a little concerned herself

“Hold her? Tell her you won't leave” Keira said simply and the second she finished Lucy was out of her seat, crouching in front of you

“Come here Bubs... just like old times” she smiled at you before prying your hand off Keiras and pulled you forward so you had to stand up. She then sat down in your place and now pulled you down into her lap holding you tightly

“I've got you Bubs... you know I won't leave and everything will be over quickly” your sister mumbled into your hairline as you laid your head on her shoulder getting tired after your long, eventful day. You were just about to close your eye for a long needed nap as a nice looking young woman with light blue scrubs and a white lab coat called out your name

“y/n?” the doctor called out and Lucy nudged you slightly as Ona made the doctor aware that you were infact there

You slipped of Lucys lap but didn't move until your sister pushed you forward always having her hand on your back.

“I think Ona should come too... I don't speak spanish and yours is probably shit...” you mumble tiredly

“I'll let you know that I speak excellent spanish, devils spawn” your sister growled back but you heared that it held no bite

“You're probably not even able to order a coffee” you spoke quietly as you followed the doctor

“I can even order an apple pie on the side” Lucy smirked at you – knowing it would ease your nerves a bit since this is the only thing you always find the most important to learn first.. how to order food - as she pushed you through the door of the trauma room closing the door behind you so your exit was blocked and you couldn't run off.

It went just as Keira promised you and nothing bad happened. The woman palpated your wrist in several different places moved it around a bit and decided to take some x-rays to be sure. After three failed attempts to take some pictures of your wrist without Lucy in the room the nurses begrudgingly allowed your sister back in the room. The moment Lucy stepped in your line of sight you relaxed and held still for the few minutes it took the nurses to take the x-rays. It wasn't really your fault that you panicked when they told you – in spanish of course – what they wanted you to do and you got “slightly” irretated when they just grabbed your arm. At least you didn't bite anyone this time. Now you were seated in the trauma room again waiting for the doctor to come back to review your pictures and tell Lucy what her treatment plan was who then would tell you. The woman looked at the pictures closely before speaking to your sister.

“You have a really bad strain.. nothing broken, just really really badly sprained wrist... you'll get a splint for now and as soon as we're home we'll ice it” your sister told you softly holding your good hand.

“Okay” you said carefully not trusting the process

“You're going to be okay Bubs” Lucy soothed you “just a splint and we're on our way home, okay”

“Do they have cool colors?” you asked quietly

Lucy turned towards the doctor repeating in spanish what you just asked

“Which color do you want?” your sister asked you

“What are the colors of Real Madrid? White and Gold if I'm right, right?” you grinned wide at Lucy who looked betrayed

“Hell to the no” Lucy exclaimed outraged “In no way you enter my home in these colors... what a disgrace”

“White and gold?” you asked the doctor directly but she just looked at you bluntly so you decided to take a different approach

You stood up – slowly so your sister wouldn't think you're trying to bolt – going to the door, opening it and yell from the top of the lungs for Ona. The small Player came sprinting down the hallway coming to a skittering halt in front of you

“Yes?” she said a little panicked

“What's white in spanish?”

“Blanco, why?” the blonde spainard looked at you confused

“And gold?” you smiled at her

“Oro” she looked even more confused than before and it didn't help that Lucy groaned behind you

“Blanco and Oro, sí?” you turned around looking at the doctor grinning from ear to ear

“Sí” the doctor grinned leaving the room

“I can't believe you” Lucy exclaimed throwing her arms up in defeat “using my girlfriend for your pettiness”

“What just happened?” Ona asked getting more confused by the second

“She wants a splint in the colors white and gold...” Lucy groaned

“That are Reals colors” Ona exclaimed shocked

You just sat on the bed grinning widely as the two women in front of you started a discussion in spanish. Soon the doctor came back with a white splint with gold around the edges showing it to you

“Tanto?” she looked at you

“Ehrm... sí?” you answered unsure looking at Ona for help

“Sí muchas gracias” the spainard smiled politely

You got your split fitted to your wrist and with a description for some – apparently very good pain meds courtesy of Ona – you leave the hospital with your entourage of three world class football players.

“See Bitsy... nothing bad happened... I’m proud of you for not bolting” Keira smiled warmly as you crossed the car park.

“Yeah Bubs... I’m actually REALLY proud of you... I know it’s somehow a big deal for you but you took it like a champ” Lucy also smiled widely as she kept her arms around your shoulders keeping you close to her side

“Real colors, I can’t believe it” Ona mumbled next to Lucy “and I helped... what’s next? Sitting in the Real section at the El classíco?”

You laughed at Onas antics “Get used to it, Batlle... you’ll get used and abused from me until there’s nothing left to squeeze out of you” you laugh

“Welcome to the Family”

Now it was Lucy who burst out laughing with Keira following suite also laughing heartwarming. Onas face showed pure horror as you four reached the cars.

[lovystar]

❝ A PRINCESS’ WILL ❞ ; BADA LEE

synopsis──after an assassination attempt, the queen invites the very best fighters from across the land to compete for the great honor of protecting you, the princess.

content──bada lee x unnamed fem!oc (reader). princess!reader, soldier under disguise!bada. currently unedited, pls be nice lol. fictional combination of medieval european and korea’s joseon dynasty aspects bc im not too concerned about making it realistic. incorrect pronouns (when not in bada’s pov). this world is matrilineal bc I said so. bada's a flirt. eventual smut w/ switch!bada.

word count ── approx. 5.4k

───

YOUR MOTHER’S STRONG HOLD—on the country, on the castle, on her children, and on you in particular as the oldest—was suffocating. You were destined to rule over millions, and your mother would not let you forget it. You had to be strong, caring for your people but unforgiving to others. That’s how she ruled. She’d shape you to be the same queen she was, and she’ll drill it into your head herself if she needs to.

Your pride would never allow you to say this to her face, but you supposed that she did a good enough job. The people loved her: she kept them safe and fed, gave them more than enough to start caring beyond their necessities and seek self-actualization, to flourish in the arts. She wasn’t very popular among foreign lands, and you might even go on to say that they feared her. She was often fair when wronged, but very rarely did she ever pardon those wrongs. She has never, in the time you've been alive.

Once, when you were very little and you were still taking lessons with some children of noble descent, you heard them repeat a saying they’d learn from their parents:

“Loving are her eyes, beauty bestowed, but fear the night the Hawk catches you lurking near her nest, lest you desire your entrails be fed to the eyas nights on end.” 

They spoke of their Queen with reverence and adoration.

Her way of ruling worked well for many years; you got to live a life of peace and prosperity the entirety of your childhood. Not many other kingdoms can say the same.

On top of your queenly history lessons and politics and mathematics and the sciences, she wanted you to be good at protecting yourself. While she has acquired the most apt Royal Guard, a future queen must still be able to hold her own. She ordered only the best archers and swords to teach you, and you were…decent, at it. The years of practice successfully stuck some things into you: how to hold a sword and a bow and arrow, which body parts to target, how to be light in your feet (this one was specifically useful whenever you wanted to leave the royal palace).

In your defense, your natural sensibilities were drawn to something else entirely. You’d always say reading was a more sensible passage of time. You would spend hours upon hours lounging in one of the library nooks or on a blanket in the palace gardens, surrounded by the pastel of the flowers.

You were in that garden when the assassin took a knife to your throat.

You lived, but it scared your mother terribly. Surprising—since you’d never known her to be a person who had any fears. In your mind, it could only mean two things. One, she loved you to some extent—she might just have a weird way of expressing it. Two, someone was threatening her bloodline and consequently, perhaps more importantly, someone was threatening her throne.

And she will not let that happen in her lifetime.

───

It has been two weeks since your throat was sliced open. Two weeks since the doctor instructed you to minimize strenuous activity and if you could, stay in bed as to not open the stitches.

‘You don’t know how lucky you are,’ the doctor has told you every day after your daily checkup. You know this, of course. Had the knife gone any deeper and had your court ladies not been around the corner, you’d be dead. It was, however, a hilarious thought that someone would bring a blunt knife to an assassination.

Your mother didn’t think it was funny. But in your delicate state, the anger in her eyes had never been funnier, and it pained your throat whenever you’d attempt to laugh.

“Will you stop it? The doctor spent hours on those. What will we do if they scar?” You rolled your eyes in response and she scoffed. “Glad to see you’re as genteel as ever, it’d be a shame if you had lost that lively nature of yours.” It sounded sarcastic, but she meant it. She did not want you to be passive. In her mind, that would only led to you becoming spineless and spineless Queen can't rule. You ignored her words, instead gesturing for one of the maids to bring you a cup of water.

“I’ve arranged for the competition to take place tomorrow, do you think you’ll be up for it?”

You furrowed your brows, “Competition?” Your voice came out roughly. The stitches began to itch.

Your mother groaned, “Please refrain from speaking, but yes, competition, have you not been listening to me? The best soldiers and eligible men have been traveling from across the nation for some time now. The men will fight and we shall see who is best equipped to protect the Crown Princess.”

“Must—” you coughed, “must we make them fight? Can’t we just pick one?”

“Just pick one?” She looked into your eyes incredulously, “You must have hit your head and injured your intelligences if you think I’d let just any one person be in charge of you. You must have the best.”

“Yes, Mother.”

“Very well.” She nodded once, “The doctor has cleared you to attend so rest, you will be awakened bright and early tomorrow!”

She walked out of the room and left you to your devices. You sighed. You allowed your court ladies to help you out of your daily garments, clean your wound, place the ointment and replace the bandage.

You repeated the process in the morning, placing a necklace over the bandage, ensuring it is not too tight but stays in place. You prepared for the days’ events, and after a couple of restrained breaths, you walked out of the room with your court ladies in toe.

───

Bada Lee spent her childhood just outside the place. Her family had raised generations of soldiers, many of which served in the Royal Guard. That was, until her father was dismissed and demoted to being a simple guard in the rural countryside. He had dedicated his entire life to the Queen and it was a shock to everyone when he’d been told of his dismissal. Up to his last breath, he’d grow angry whenever she’d asked him why. Why did we leave? How could a loving Queen throw us away as if we were nothing? She’d been upheaved from the City, and littered some place where she’d have to fight if she wanted anything to come from her life. Well, fight harder than she’d have to in the City.

Still, she knew that it didn’t matter where she was. Whether in the Capital City or the countryside, external expectations would have her be a wife and a mother soon after. She watched her mother suffer under these conditions, watched her neighbors, and the change in her friends’ nature as they came of age and were married off. They were all unhappy.

She’d be damned if she was destined to a miserable marriage. But above all, she’d be damned if she dies a nobody. Just another woman, forgotten by history.

Nope. That’s not her.

Growing up, she loved watching her father and brother train. She’d try to join, but her father would quickly push her away. She would try day after day, but it couldn’t be helped. So she turned to making her own sword out of a fallen tree branch. She’d copy their movements, the placement of their feet and how the air would rest in their lungs and rush out with the lunge of the sword—well, the lunge of the stick for her. Her brother agreed to train with her, but in his teenage years, he grew resentful of her talent. He decided to begin training a different skill, archery, but soon enough, he realized that this too came naturally for her. Over the years he turned to different combat skills, only for Bada to overpower him again and again. One day, he stopped helping her at all.

It was a cold winter when the sickness spread across the countryside. It was the sickness that took her father and it was the sickness that took her brother. The town had to develop a new burial site due to the amount of people that died at the beginning of the season. Death didn't relent there; people continued dying and dying until that site was full with bodies.

By the time her family succumbed to their sickness, there was nowhere to put them. For days on end, her only company was their cold bodies. She had placed them in a separate room, putting as much distance as she could. As the winter grew colder and she stared at the makeshift tomb’s door, she realized she depended entirely on them. As it stood, she was nothing, less than nothing, by herself. It was a matter of time before someone hunted her down, a young woman without any male relatives left and tried to turn her into a sellable thing.

She’d be damned.

In a feat of fear and anger, she grabbed her brother’s clothes and changed into them and styled her hair as he would. She looked into the small mirror, surprised to see that her crazy plan might just work.

But she needed to make people think it was her that died.

The day the town hall proposed a mass burial, she changed her brother’s clothes into her own and loosened his hair from the top knot it was in. She shaved his beard, feeling disgusted at the act and with herself for feeling the need to do this. She pushed through: this was about her survival. She reported the bodies, and snuck into the site later that night. Sure, she would be shamelessly taking her brother’s identity from this day forward, but that did not mean she would bury her brother in anything other than his clothes. She did not want that karma. Plus she could afford to lose one of the five hanboks.

The next day, she watched anxiously as they buried the mass of bodies.

She should’ve felt terrible about her relief once they were under the soil, and she did, she would miss them. At some point during the week she lived with their corpses, she forgave them for any bad they did to her. She could only think of the good things now, her father’s jjigae and her brother’s light banter.

She did feel bad, but at the same time, a weight had been lifted. She wouldn’t need to get married now, she could pursue something, she could walk around at night without a chaperone and she could talk to people without worrying about being seen as vulgar.

Yes, under her disguise, she was finally free.

───

Lee Bada had been Lee Hae for a year by the time the Queen requested all eligible soldiers to report to the Capital City. Her commanding officer recommended her to go as one of the top soldiers under his command. She has managed to climb her way through the ranks, demonstrating her strength wherever she went.

Nobody knew the Mother of the Nation had called them to the palace, but if only the strongest were allowed to go, then Bada was going to make sure she was at top.

It was strange being back in the Capital City and even weirder to see the inside of the palace when all she’d known before was its gates.

Bada stood in line with the rest of the soldiers in the palace’s courtyard, towering over some of them. Her back maintained straight, her head held high, as the Crown Princess approached the Queen. She bowed to the queen and sat down next to her. Bada controlled her facial expressions, but her feelings couldn’t be helped. The Crown Princess had made the soldiers wait under the sun, and now she had the audacity to look bored. Despite being so far away, she could see the way you whispered into one of your court ladies’ ears and how they covered their mouth. The laughter showed in their eyes though. In contrast, your attempt to cover your giggle was lazy, your hand falling from the front of your mouth before you could control your expression once more. Bada wanted to scoff. Had you no decency? Before Bada’s bitterness could grow further, the Queen began speaking.

“Welcome, loyal soldiers and citizens. I have invited you here today to compete for the highest honor of joining the Royal Guard and protecting your Crown Princess.” Her open palm gestured to her side, where the Princess sat gracefully. “It is a title that comes with great responsibility, and requires skill, power and loyalty. It would please me for each of you to partake and serve your country in the process. If you wish to stay, please take a step forward.”

Each of the four hundred soldiers took a step, the sound booming through the courtyard. Bada did not look to see if any citizens had stepped forward.

“I am so glad! The competition consists of a six stages with different ‘games.’ You must accumulate enough points in each stage to successfully move up to the next one. Today, we shall begin the first stage. You must ride out into the woods and bring back a rabbit that has been trapped and hidden. There are only two hundred rabbits.” the Queen paused and with a clap of her hands, “Go!”

───

“I don’t get the point of this game,” You stated without looking up from your book. “They’ve been out there for hours and no one is back yet.”

“Patience, daughter,” the Queen responded, “There must be a basis to being a good protector, is there not? Wouldn’t you say that enduring long distance and persevering in the woods is a good baseline?”

“You are so creative, Mother,” you sighed into your book, “You can come up with such fantastical scenarios.”

“So you would rather have someone who doesn’t know how to endure long distances riding and persevere in the woods?”

You didn’t respond.

The first to arrive was a seasoned soldier. He had been part of the Royal Guard for more than a decade, and was known for his hunting skills. The second person caught your mother’s attention. One tall and broad-shouldered man rushed through the Palace gates with 4 rabbits hanging from his horse with a robe. He dismounted, grabbing the robe, throwing it on the ground and bowing before the Queen.

“Seowol from the Southern coast, your Royal Highness.”

“Seowol?” Your mother questioned, “It is a pleasure to make your acquaintance. I do believe you were only supposed to take one rabbit.”

“I wanted to secure a strong position, your Highness.” He remained in a bowed position, looking down, his arms stiff along his body.

“Certainly! Please follow eunuch Jinho to the bathroom and a change of clothes. You’ll be called when everyone has arrived.” He looked up and nodded, and quickly did as instructed.

The court ladies swooned over the man once he’d walked away, but you hardly moved.

“Did you see the way he looked at you? Oh!” the young lady fanned her hand. You chuckled, amused by the younger girl’s reaction.

“The way he got off his horse and showed the rabbits, he was so cool!”

“And handsome! Don’t forget handsome!”

You rolled your eyes at that one, “He wasn’t even that handsome.”

“So you do think he was handsome!” They all laughed, having caught something in your words.

“Listen to me, I said he was not all that handsome.” You repeated, “I’ve seen better.”

They gushed, trying to get you to elaborate, but your mother was beginning to look at you sideways. You thought it was better to stop then. With the light hearted fun you were having with your ladies, you forgot all about the dull ache of your throat. The reason you were having this ridiculous competition in the first place. The truth was there was something about Seowol that disgusted you. You couldn’t quite place it, it could be the abruptness in his movements and the way he threw the rabbits on the ground, or perhaps the coldness behind his eyes. A mindless cruelty to innocent beings.

Returner after returner, it was the same and they started blending into each other. They’d rush through the gates, and present the robed rabbit in front of the Queen before they bowed. They announced their name loudly, as if shouting would make the Queen remember them better. The cook would take the rabbit and disappear to the kitchens.

That was, until number 73th entered the yard. The sun was beginning to set, leaving the sky in a canvas of lovely purples and pinks. You didn’t notice him at first, but soon your ladies began to whisper. This particular soldier entered calmly, and only one hand on the horse’s bridle. A small ball of white highlighted by the black of his uniform. As he got closer, you saw that the white speck of fluff was the rabbit. He cradled it on his left arm, making sure it didn’t jump or fall. Once he’d reach the stage, he dismounted carefully. You noticed his height, and for the life of you, you couldn’t figure out how his shoulders managed to look both broad and slender at the same time. He came closer, bowing deeply before your mother and to your surprise, he began to approach you.

He was quickly stopped by your mother’s guards blocking his path.

“Please, your Royal Highness, let him approach,” You surprised yourself. For the past two weeks, you were scared you were growing paranoid of strangers and people in general. The fear was earned to some extent, you had just been attacked, but you were even more afraid that you’d grow to be scared of everyone, everything, and never come out of your bedroom ever again. Though, now, as you look over at your mother to let the stranger approach you, it seemed this fear wasn’t going to be an issue after all. You were going to be okay. In a lower voice this time, “Please, Mother.”

She rolled her eyes discreetly, waving her hand. “Let him through.”

The guards retracted. The man moved closer to you, and he bowed. You noticed the smoothness of his jaw, the curve of his lips and the pretty way his lashes decorated his pretty brown eyes. He was pretty. So much so you held your breath when his eyes finally met yours.

“My Princess.” He smiled, “For you.”

Oh.

Someone behind you gasped, and you were glad for the noise because that way he might not be able to hear the beating of your heart.

“May I?”

You nodded, despite not knowing what you had agreed to. The man walked even closer to you, and you unconsciously leaned forward. He placed the bunny in your hands, and you searched for his lingering fingers through the white fluff. He retrieved far too soon. You wanted to touch him for some reason. You wanted him to get close again and you wanted him to call you, once again, his prin—

“And what might your name be?” Your mother was not amused.

“Soldier Lee Hae, your Royal Highness.” He addressed his queen but his eyes never left yours.

“Lee, huh? You do know that was your dinner, correct? You won’t have dinner?” Your head snapped to your mother. She could not possibly!

“As long as my Princess is content, my stomach shall never be empty.”

Your head snapped back at him, a slightly ajar mouth. The corners of your mouth lifted slightly, but a sharp pain in your neck scared any adoring feelings away. The stitches tugged on your skin, and you brought your hand to your neck.

“Very well, no dinner. You may sit down, Soldier Lee Hae.”

───

Well, that was fucking stupid. Bada groaned, grabbing her stomach. She just had to give that damned rabbit to the Crown Princess, didn’t she? Even now, hours after dinner and well into their resting time, Bada could not decipher why she chose to spare the rabbit.

You had just looked so beautiful, and before she knew it, she was right in front of you. And as she remembers the look on your face when she gave you the bunny, your parted lips and your widening eyes as you looked up at her, Bada realized she only regretted her choice slightly.

There was no denying your beauty. Everyone knew that while you might be the Crown, you were also the prettiest bird in the eyes of the people.

But Bada couldn’t get distracted. She came here with a purpose. She was going to join the Royal Guard and bring back honor to her family. You might have been eye candy, but it didn’t change the fact that you represented what Bada lost, what she never realistically had a chance at.

It killed her. It killed her that they had a woman King and yet every other woman was still viewed as inferior. Did the only women that mattered lived in the palace? You got to be trained, you got to study the books—why couldn’t they? Why was it that she will need to pretend to be a boy for the rest of her life to feel free?

Could it be helped? Would you be different from your mother?

Her mind turned to her selfish thoughts. Perhaps she could use today’s events to her advantage. She could grow closer to you, on purpose this time, and perhaps that’d help her on the long run. She’d earn her position, of course; that was nonnegotiable.

The hunger grew furiously as she got lost in her thoughts. She couldn’t take it any longer. She got up, quickly wrapping the tight cloth over her chest. She hid a small knife on the inside of her left wrist, a security measure, though she was unlikely to need it. She grabbed something to cover herself with and left the small room she’d been provided with.

She was lucky to finish stage 1 where she did. When the last of the 197 soldiers that would pass on to the next stage arrived, they were well into dinner. The Queen had stated that for the remaining stages of the competition, only the top half scorers would receive a sole bedroom. Everyone else will sleep in the Great Hall. She reasoned it was to keep up the morale and ramp up ambition. It certainly did motivate Bada though. She did not wish to sleep uncomfortably among the stinky men. It was so weird, Bada knew they showered and mere hours later, a musk would develop around them.

She walked towards the kitchens as quietly as she could. Once there, she rummaged through the shelves, searching for something that was not a raw vegetable.

“Please, please, please…” She murmured to herself, and in her desperation, she did not hear the footsteps coming from the side entrance.

“Who is there?” A voice resounded. Bada froze, quickly kneeling down and hidden under the shelf. Fuck! “As Crown Princess, I command you to reveal yourself!”

The Princess? What was she doing up this late?

Bada had hoped that it was a younger staff member also searching for food (someone she could try her charm on), a simple guard (someone she could try to relate to and proclaim guard-to-guard solidarity), hell, she’d even hoped for a thief (someone who was even guiltier than she was). But the Princess? The Princess was someone she could not face. Perhaps for more than one reason.

As discreetly as she could, she crawled towards the end of the shelf. Across from here, there was a long table she could hide under and right across the table was the entrance.

She could make it.

If only she hadn’t run directly into the Princess’ feet.

She landed on her knees, and dread filled her head. She hung it in shame, some hair coming loose and framing her face. So this is how she would die, huh? With nothing to her name, a mere soldier title that she didn’t even earn herself. She would die without a legacy, without—

“Is that you, Lee Hae?” Your voice sounded extra sweet under the moonlight. “How come you’re out here at this time?”

She wanted the earth to open and swallow her whole. But there was no getting out of this.

“Princess Royal, please forgive my shamelessness.” She did not look up, still on her knees. “In my hunger, I forgot my place. I beg for your forgiveness.”

There was a long silence after Bada finished talking. Should she have said more? She was already on her knees, what else could she do to humiliate herself in front of the Princess?

“You’re telling me my contentment was not enough for you?”

Bada lifted her head quickly, only to realize too late you were mere inches away. You were so close she could count each beauty mark, each freckle on your face. She’d kiss them if you’d let her. She shook her head. Stupid Bada, concentrate on not dying!

“That isn’t it at all, my Princess.” She shook her head violently, to which you chuckled in response, lifting your hand to cover your mouth.

“So you’re a liar, then.”

“No, no! I am not, my Princess,” Bada opened her palms, “I will admit that as earnestly as my heart believes a smile from you is all I ever need to survive in this world, my earthly body persists in imprisoning me with cravings. I sincerely did not mean to succumb to my hunger.”

You watched the young soldier as they hung their head once more. You thought Lee was…funny. Funny in a very lovely and forward way that you couldn’t help but want more of. You brought a hand closer to her face, fingers lifting her chin.

Bada allowed the princess to lift her face, flushing at the contact. She could feel the heat rushing to her face, and it embarrassed her that you could have this effect on her. How you made her lose composure.

“Look at me,” you stated. Your head followed the brown eyes as they moved, trying to get them to look at you. “Soldier Lee, look at me.” You said it firmly this time around. Finally, the person in question did as asked. Big eyes looked up at you, begging for something you weren’t sure you could give.

“You know, Soldier Lee, you are the prettiest man I’ve ever met.”

Oh.

Widened eyes and dropped jaw, “I—”

‘I am not a man,’ she wanted to say. She almost did, and the fact that she nearly gave herself away scared her. She had never come this close to telling someone the truth. Not on impulse nor consciously. To the Princess no less! She was a mess. She’d better get a hold of herself if she intends on making it through.

Bada had proven that she was good with words, and here you were, leaving her stunned. You enjoyed it, maybe a bit too much. Abruptly, you stood up, leaving the soldier down on her knees. You offered a hand, and it was like a spell being broken. She took it. She gathered herself and she was back into the charming and highly trained voice. Your curiosity for the soldier grew as you watched; there was just something that screamed constraint in the way Lee spoke, but for now, you chucked it up to the respectability rules of the Queendom.

“I am sorry for interrupting your night, your Highness. I will take my leave.” Bada turned, but was quickly stopped when you grabbed her wrist.

It surprised both of you. As a noble princess, you had been taught from a young age that nobody but appointed servants get to come in contact with your skin. Yet here you were—two for two.

“Well, actually,” you began, “I’m here because I did not want you to go to sleep hungry.” You let go of Bada’s wrist, and she already missed the warmth of your skin on hers. It had been such a long time since anyone had touched her outside of training.

You signaled for her to follow you. She did, and you guided her to a small table on a corner. A small, white towel covered something and when you lifted it, Bada’s eyes widened. A golden serving tray filled with dishes.

“I ordered something be cooked for you,” you said, hands fidgeting, “I’m afraid it’s probably cold by now. I would’ve tried to get you sooner but my Mother kept me by her side much longer than I expected.”

“I—Thank you, your Royal Highness.” Bada bowed, stomach rumbling and mouth watering. “Thank you.”

“Please, you don’t have to do that.” You said quickly, “You were kind to me, and I couldn’t let my mother punish you for it.” You moved to pick up the tray, glaring at Bada when she tried to hold it for you instead. “I can do it! Plus, I know a spot.”

You walked gracefully, quickly, without spilling a single thing on the tray. Bada was amazed. The both of you stuck to the sides of buildings, remaining in the shadows. Bada anxiously looked around; what would people think if they saw her with the Princess? What rumors will they spread, and how much will they cost her? Her life?

“Through there.” The door was covered with greenery, and Bada could not see the door.

She moved closer to you, whispering into your ear, “where?”

She genuinely couldn’t see it.

You shivered. You could faintly feel her chest against your back, and the warmth it radiated.

You shook your head.

“Here, hold this.” You passed the tray to Bada, making quick work of the hidden door. You opened it and walked through. You moved the vines for Bada, she bent down and met you on the other side.

“Wow…” She gasped. It was a beautiful space, filled with colorful flowers and a pond, four trees on each corner. There was a small house, and Bada doubted it was more than just a bedroom and a bathroom.

“It is the old gardener’s place, but he died and it became abandoned.” You said, placing the tray on the wooden ledge in front of the small house. “The new gardener had a family, so he understandably needed a bigger space.”

You giggled nervously, and Bada found herself loving the sound. She got so lost in your voice and the pretty flowers that she nearly forgot how hungry she was. Nearly.

Bada sat down next to you.

“It’s beautiful.”

“I know!” She said excitedly, your eyes sparkling with joy, “Mother thought of destroying it and building something else but I just loved it so much, I wouldn’t let her. I begged her to let me have it for days, she agreed eventually and now it’s my little place! Very few people know about it; my Mother, the new gardener, my lady-in-waiting, you…”

You finished shyly, smiling at Bada before quickly looking away. Would it be too forward of her to grab your face and make you look at her?

Yes, she decided, yes, it would be.

Her stomach growled.

“Oh,” You gasped, “Please eat! I didn’t mean to make you wait.”

“Please, eat with me.”

“No, no, I ate quite well earlier,” you said, “and you didn’t!”

“I don’t want to eat by myself,” Bada said, “Princess, eat with me, please.”

“I’m telling you I won’t,” refusing her once more, “I'll force feed you this meal myself if you don’t start eating soon.”

“Is that a proposition?” Bada smirked. Your cheeks grew warm against your will.

“I only mean… I want you to eat, you have gone hungry because of me. I don’t want you to be hungry any longer.”

“Would you feed me then?” Bada’s eyes looked down at yours, “If I asked you to?”

You cleared your throat, eyes meeting. “Forgive me, soldier, if I’ve come across in a certain light. But I will never feed a man with two capable hands of his own.”

Bada saw the intensity in your eyes, and how they refused to look away from her hers. She leaned closed, eyes growing dangerous the longer she stayed fixated on you.

“You say ‘a man with two capable hands’ but what if I wasn’t a man? How can you be sure that I am?” Bada brought a hand closer to you, “How do you know these work?” She had gone crazy. In your gaze, she had forgotten herself.

Still, in the back of her mind: if she wasn’t in disguise now, would you feed her then?

You finally broke eye contact, looking down at Bada’s hand. It surprised you how much you wanted to hold it, it surprised you even more when your body started reacting to it. A simple hand with long fingers. A calloused hand from days spent training, yet unlike the hands of the men you’ve encountered. Their hands didn’t bring this strange feeling to your stomach. You mind showed you images of these very hands moving along your body; from the nape of your neck, down your side and in between your—

You scoffed, and then chuckled, “Please don’t be ridiculous, soldier Lee. Now, eat, the food is getting colder by the second.”

Bada covered her feelings with a laugh. She was relieved you ignored her impulsive questions, and at the same time, your response left a bitter taste in her mouth. You were just being nice this entire time? Was there really nothing else in your lingering touches and loving eyes? They were childish questions, but it stung nonetheless. She sighed internally; she couldn’t possibly be getting this close now. It was normal to a certain extent, she had the tendency to develop crushes all the time. Sure, developing one in the Princess would complicate the 'get close to you and advance her career' plot, but she was already here.

All her crushes have faded with time, and this one will too.

Bada finally began eating and she was grateful to you once again. She said so, with cheeks full of food and complete disregard for rules. Rules, you had both broken some many of them already, why start caring about them now?

[euphemiaamillais]

favourite crime - coriolanus snow

coriolanus snow loves you… but when he learns that he’s being sent back to the capitol—well, he can’t have any loose ends left back in district 12.

dark possessive!coriolanus snow x district 12!reader

cw: 18+//dead dove do not eat!!!//snuff//mentions of loss of virginity//mentions of murder//coriolanus snow’s disgusting inner monologue//murder//strangulation//piv sex//mentions of guns

reader discretion advised!! i do not condone any of these themes, this is merely a work of fiction

IB: @shellxrls

when you’d first laid eyes on private snow at the hob, you never would’ve thought you’d end the night with your lips wrapped around his cock. no, you were a good girl. you didn’t do things like that, and certainly not with strange men in darkened corners. but coriolanus was different. he made your core burn with desire, and your heart skip a beat every time his icy eyes flicked over you.

you spent many evenings with him—friday nights especially—legs spread, letting him touch you in ways you’d never known before. he liked that you had been a virgin; the thought of corrupting this stupid little district girl and turning her into his whore. you belonged to him now, and he’d have you whenever he pleased. you were nothing more than a hole to fill his desire with.

you were head over heels for him—so when he told you he’d been given a discharge to return to the capitol, he’d thought his pretty little doll would be delighted for him. you’d had fat tears streaming down your cheeks, mascara running—you’d worn it just for him, to look pretty—clutching at his arms and begging him to stay.

you couldn’t leave district 12, no. you didn’t belong in a place like the capitol.

the way you were begging was so pathetic; getting on your knees, weeping, voice strained with frustration. he couldn’t believe how he’d done this to a girl—lucy gray was never like this. when he’d left her for you she’d simply resigned herself to singing not-so-subtle tunes about how much of an asshole he was. well, at least before he killed her.

you were different. you were his little doll. his and his only. that’s why you had to return to the capitol with him—he’d have packed you into his bag if there had been enough room. it was a shame they didn’t allow for pretty whores to travel with the peacekeepers.

‘please, coryo,’ you cried out, hands clutching at his trousers. ‘don’t leave me, i- i love you!’

your attempts at flattery were ridiculous, but in a way he knew that you did love him. he didn’t love you, exactly. he loved knowing that he possessed you, that your heart entirely belonged to him. but he could never love a whore from the districts—especially not 12 at that.

‘is my bunny sad that i’ll be going home?’ he cooed, clutching your chin with his large hand. you were so small. he could break you if he wanted to…

‘mhm. gonna miss you so bad, coryo,’ you gazed up at him with wide-eyes—they looked so innocent as they glistened with the tears of your upset.

‘gonna miss your cock, and your tongue…’ you sighed wistfully. ‘gonna miss riding you and having you fuck me full of your cum.’

your lips are turned into a pretty pout, and he wonders then and there whether or not he should get his cock out and shove it past them. make you drink up his seed one last time. or perhaps he could bend you over his bunk and put a baby in you—then you’d always have something to remember him by.

no—that would make you a loose end. and he can’t have loose ends. you can’t know that he shot the mayor’s daughter because she pissed him off too much—or that his songbird, lucy gray, now lay somewhere at the bottom of the lake by the cabin.

he decides he can spend one last night with his little bunny. just one night. but then he’s clearing up loose ends. you’d never assume what he had been planning, no, you’re far too dumb to understand that. you see the good in everyone; and that made his chest burn with fury. how could you be so fucking innocent?

‘bunny…’ his voice trailed off. you nod, awaiting him to tell you something, anything—did he love you too?

‘i’ve got an idea. one last special night, just the two of us, hm? down at that cabin by the lake,’ he stroked your cheek. how sweet you looked like this, all red in the face. ‘i’ll give you a night worth remembering. let you sit on my face.’

you gave him an eager smile, and he knew his little bunny was just too stupid to know she was falling into his trap.

—

this was where he’d killed lucy gray, too. that had been a cold, rainy day. just like this one. you’d been so easy to lure into his trap; meeting him by the hanging tree in your prettiest dress—one with tiny pink flowers that came just above the knee. you’d even tucked a flower behind your ear. how sweet.

you couldn’t wait to spend your last night with coryo. you’d been singing all day, and practically skipped to meet him with a little bag full of some food and your toothbrush. you’d flung yourself into his arms, not caring about the consequences of being caught with a peacekeeper. he’d be gone by tomorrow morning anyways.

the walk to the cabin had tired you out considerably, and so you clung to coryo like a pathetic little bunny, letting him lead the way. you’d miss clutching his biceps, feeling the taut muscle beneath his shirt, the way his dog tags slapped against your face as he pounded your cunt raw.

he delighted in the way he’d get to have you one last time, tonight. that at some point, the only thing warm in your body would be his cum, leaking out of that tight cunt of yours. even though you were stupid, he did have to admit that your willingness was something he adored. the way he could just fill you up at any time, and in any hole—you never complained.

he’d corrupted you, watched you bleed as his big cock stretched you out that first time. he loved the way your eyes swelled up with tears and you begged him to stop—‘it hurts, coryo!’ you had clawed your nails into his back. ‘too big!’—but he didn’t stop. he knew you had to learn to take it, and that you did. you had such low self-esteem, you would practically grovel at his feet everytime you so much as made him frown. you’d do anything for him, and that was the way he liked it.

complete control.

the cabin was warmer than the tender breeze outside, and you were so grateful to get in there, shivering in your little dress. coryo had dressed more appropriately, in his day clothes, and he watched as you shivered. god, you were so helpless.

he set his things down, and when you had laid down on the bed to rest your eyes for a while, bundled up in the ratty old blanket, he checked under the floorboards. there it was—one last gun, wrapped in a green cloth. if you tried to run, he’d use it on you. he’d deliberated over which way to kill you, which way wouldn’t damage that pretty little face of yours.

he thought that one simple shot to the chest would do it—it would be instant too. but he wanted to watch the life drain out of you, watch as you whined and begged for him to save you. watch how your brows would furrow and your eyes would grow wide with fear and realisation that you were just another loose end to him. he’d never loved you. he’d loved the control.

but coriolanus had also debated choking you out—maybe he wouldn’t remove his cock from your throat while he fucked it, and pinch the tip of your nose so you’d stop breathing. how pretty you’d look, trying to take his cock and at the same time, fight for your life. he’d shoot his hot load down your dead little throat once you’d stopped breathing. a reminder that you were his, and no one else’s.

no, he couldn’t let you live.

he shut the floorboards when he heard you stirring—you must’ve fallen asleep. how sweet. in a few hours you’d go to sleep one last time—but it would be an eternal slumber. he wanted nothing more than to bring you back to the capitol and make you his little whore—you couldn’t be his wife; think of the shame and embarrassment that would bring. but you could be at his every beck and call, be there to relieve any tension he had. it was just so unfortunate that he wasn’t allowed.

he’d put your body to rest with lucy gray’s, down in the lake to let your pearly white bones be the fishes’ dinner. he couldn’t bury you out in the woods; they’d find you there, one way or another. instead, he’d let them think you’d just disappeared. people disappeared out in the districts all the time. especially stupid little girls. who would care if a pathetic runt who took peacekeeper cock vanished? he doubted you had many friends, and your parents were both dead.

you wouldn’t be missed.

it was some time later that you woke, and your stomach grumbled. coriolanus was sitting in the rickety old armchair, carving what looked to be a spear with his pocketknife. you watched his muscular arms move back and forth as he stripped the stick of its bark. something about his strength made your thighs burn.

you got up, bare feet cold against the wooden floorboards, and peered into your bag. you’d made enough food for the evening; you had even splurged and gotten yourself a precious block of cheese. you figured it was only appropriate, what with it being your last night together and all.

he looked up from his makeshift weapon—though it wasn’t all that, really—and gave you an award-winning smile. your heart leapt at his sweetness. you couldn’t believe he wanted to spend one last night with you.

‘you’re so pretty, bunny,’ he remarked, watching as you laid out the food.

there was bread, a few flimsy butter knifes—you’d not be able to defend yourself with those; besides you were just so weak. you’d even snuck a bottle of wine at the market when the peacekeepers weren’t looking. you wanted it to be special, to send him off happy and thinking of you.

your chest twinged with a heavy sadness. you wished you could go with him, follow him to the capitol and maybe, stupidly, marry him. you wanted to be his forever. you’d give him lots of children and they’d have white-blonde hair and icy blue eyes. you’d make sure he was satisfied every day, and cook and clean and whatever he required of you.

but you were to remain here, in district 12. marry a man covered in coal who worked himself to the bone in the mines. have skinny little babies who starved from the lack of food, struggle tooth and claw just to put dinner on the table every night. your time with coriolanus had been your only taste of luxury, of richness. he’d told you how in the capitol, there were buildings that reached the sky, and that every night people would feast on the finest food from the districts. you were reminded, with your own hunger pangs, the sacrifice that you had to make.

no, you’d never be good enough for him. future president of panem.

‘coryo, come eat,’ you said, standing proudly beside your food which you’d laid out neatly on the table.

he obliged—he was hungry, after all. he’d not eaten since last night. the food looked tolerable too, and the bottle of wine tempted him to be more considerate. just so his little bunny wouldn’t be suspicious. he doubted you were clever enough to figure out his intentions anyways.

‘i hope you like it,’ you remarked meekly, sitting down beside him and beginning to devour the food.

he opened the bottle of wine, and although it was completely uncivilised, he took a large swig. it was terribly sour, not like the good stuff they had in the capitol. he reckoned you’d never even tasted real wine. how pathetic.

‘how lucky did i get, with my little bunny,’ he smiled, stroking your head fondly.

‘i’m the lucky one,’ you said in your saccharine tone. he wanted to roll his eyes—you were so sickeningly sweet. ‘you’ve been so good to me, coryo.’

‘yeah?’ he asked. he liked how much you sought to stroke his ego. it made his cock hard the way you were just so utterly desperate to please him in every manner.

‘mhm,’ you said, chewing on a piece of bread. the cheese made it taste so delicious; sweet and creamy.

‘does bunny like the way i always give her whatever she wants? fill her up with my cum just like she asks?’ he watched as your cheeks burned red with abashed shame.

‘coryo…’ you whined, pressing your thighs together.

he loved the way you were already squirming, just from the mention of being fucked. what a fucking slut. he bet you had soaked through your panties, just waiting from him to bury his cock deep inside you as you whined for him to go harder. he’d show you harder. perhaps he’d wrap his big hands around your tiny, little neck, and squeeze too hard. god, you’d look so pretty with the air sucked out of your lungs, gasping and panting as he filled you up one last time.

‘oh bunny, don’t tell me you’re wet already?’ he cooed, standing up from his chair.

whatever, he didn’t really need to eat anyways. he couldn’t possibly be hungry when he’d been feeding himself with the own sick ideas in his head. food could wait—he’d need to tend to his little bunny first.

you nodded dumbly, clenching your thighs as the slickness pooled in your panties. you couldn’t help it, it was your last night with coryo. you wanted him more than anything else, more than you ever had done before.

‘p-please,’ you whimpered pathetically.

‘does bunny want me to fuck her? make her cum?’ he laughed, stroking your smooth arm. you were so warm. so full of life.

‘mhm, yes,’ you moaned, slipping one hand between your thighs to rub at your aching clit.

seeing this, coriolanus yanked your hair, causing you to gasp and sputter. how dare you touch yourself? you were his! his to have and do as he pleased with! you felt a few tears spring to your eyes, and he laughed, seeing how stupid you looked, weeping because he pulled your hair. he wondered how much you’d cry when he squeezed at your airways; watching them constrict between his big hands.

‘you know my rules, bunny,’ he clucked his tongue in disapproval. you glanced up at him, his icy eyes singed with coolness.

‘i’m sorry, sir,’ you replied. that name made his cock stir. he couldn’t keep himself from devouring you for much longer.

he dragged you from the chair and shoved you down against the bed. you were giggling and gasping like a little fool—it made his blood boil. you wouldn’t be laughing when your heart pumped with its last beat and your legs went still.

‘be a good girl, bunny,’ he commanded, trapping one leg between your thighs to stop you from grinding against the mattress.

you watched as he unbuckled his pants—he was never one for dawdling, preferring to get straight to the point—and eyed his bulge hungrily. you wanted to use your mouth on him, feel him stretch your lips out and fuck your throat as you gagged on his length. you’d miss how big he was—so big that you often ached for days after he fucked you.

he cupped your chin in his hand again, and pressed a kiss to the corner of your jaw. he had no intention of being gentle with you, this final time. you were merely his to use for pleasure. a little fuckdoll to fill up with his cum.

you moaned as he pulled his boxers down and his cock sprang free. you would never get used to the sight of it—the huge, throbbing thing. you couldn’t wait to have him bury it inside of you, feeling it nudge against your most sensitive spots.

‘need you, coryo,’ you panted. ‘need you in me.’

you pulled your panties off, feeling your own slickness pressing at your inner thighs. coriolanus grabbed the base of his cock with one hand, and pushed you down against the bed with the other. he wanted to take you like this, so he could watch the life drain out of your eyes, one last time.

‘gonna fuck you so good, bunny,’ he mused, hiking your dress up and sighing at the sight of your wet cunt. he would miss it, he did have to admit. what a shame it wouldn’t get wet for him anymore in a few hours. but if he couldn’t have you, nobody could.

‘mhm,’ you gasped as he pressed the tip of his cock at your sopping entrance.

god, you were so pathetic. so wet for him, so fucking desperate for his cock. he knew you probably wouldn’t have even let anyone have you, after he left. but he couldn’t bear the thought that somebody could take advantage of you, coax you into their bed and let them bury their cock in you. no, your cunt was his only. nobody else could dare touch his bunny.

he groaned as he pushed himself all the way in, feeling your walls stretch around him. you were still so tight, even after all the abuse to your hole with his big cock, the way he stretched you out, you were still tight as the first time he’d had you. you didn’t complain as much anymore though, not like you had that first time—weeping for days after with the dull ache of being fucked.

coriolanus began to thrust, grabbing your hips with firm hands, bucking into you with lusty vigour. your tits bounced in your dress, and you couldn’t help but gasp and mewl each time his cock bucked into your tight hole. his cock throbbed, feeling you clench around him, the way you sucked him in with your slick want.

he’d never forget this night. the last time he’d have you. the way you were so utterly perfect.

‘taking me so well,’ he grunted, watching as you moaned at the pleasant feeling of his big cock burying itself deep inside you, brushing against your cervix.

‘harder,’ you gasped, clutching at the sheets. you wanted to know you were his.

coriolanus couldn’t resist this, of course. he wrapped your legs around his waist, and plunged himself deeper into you. his balls were slapping against your perineum now, and the cabin filled with the reverberation of skin against skin.

you kept gasping and begging as he drove himself into you. you could feel yourself edging closer—you’d been so wet the whole way here, you were soaking at the thought of him having you one last time.

it was beginning to piss him off, though, the way you were being so loud. normally, he loved it, your moans letting everybody know how well he was fucking you, branding you as his own with his cum. he wondered what you’d do if he choked you right now—would you attempt to run? if you did, he’d get that rifle and shoot you. he couldn’t risk having you running about district 12 when somebody else could get their hands on you.

no more loose ends, he reminded himself.

he reached his free hand out, caressing your cheek, and then trailing them down to your neck. you giggled as he wrapped his fingers around your neck—it was so little that his whole hand could fit you inside of it. he’d choked you before, and so you didn’t assume anything of it. he pressed lightly, and you let out a sigh, body humming with want.

‘good girl,’ he mused, pounding you with his cock at the same time.

you let out a pretty moan, pussy clenching just right around him; he couldn’t help but grunt at how pleasant it was. you’d probably still be tight for a few hours after he kills you. maybe he’d fuck you again, but you wouldn’t be warm, or wet. just cold. he decided against it. he’d fill you up with his cum just as the life drained out of your eyes.

he pressed harder, and you feel your breath catch in your throat. it hurts, and you glance up at him with a worried look, eyes stretching wide. he doesn’t pay heed to this, and merely keeps thrusting, moving your hips closer to his to hit at a new angle.

he saw your breathing go rapid, and your eyes dart about the room in panic. poor bunny. he really didn’t want to have to kill you, but you can’t be his forever, and how can he accept that? if you’re dead, you’re nobody’s but his. especially since he’ll fuck his cum deep into your stiffening body; you’ll have part of him in you forever.

he could hear the sounds of your vocal chords straining as he clasped tighter at your throat. it would be a shame that you’d be left with a rosy imprint of his fingers around your neck, but it made him smile a little, that you’d be branded with his mark until you rotted.

‘coryo!’ you whimpered, clawing at his chest.

‘shhh, be quiet, bunny. take my cock like a good girl,’ he murmured, slamming into you.

it hurt—the way he was crushing your neck, your tendons beginning to strain around his touch. it felt like there was no air left in the world; you were beginning to grow tired, your breaths haggard.

‘p-please,’ you felt tears spring to your eyes, and watched as he laughed, a maniacal grin creeping across his lips.

he shook his head, grunting as your walls contracted around his cock. he was so close, but you were being a bitch and taking too long to die. he clamped down on you harder, causing a gasp to escape your lips. you couldn’t speak—your hands were clawing about desperately, legs flailing about.

you were terrified—what was he doing?! why did he want to hurt you? just minutes ago he was telling you how much he wished you could come back to the capitol with him and be his wife. he wanted to dress you up like a pretty doll and make you grow fat with his children.

‘don’t cry, bunny,’ he laughed, watching as your legs stilled.

you were so tired. it felt like there was no blood in your legs; they grew stiff and numb. your head spun.

‘you’re all mine bunny, forever,’ he smiled as your body grew limp.

you were terrified—eyes beginning to lose their shine, lips trembling with fear. you couldn’t feel your arms now, or the way he was bucking into you. his thrusts were slower now—he was close. watching the life drain out of you made his blood course through his veins with a delicious speed.

you mouthed out a ‘why’ as your body went completely frail. in one last act of betrayal, your cunt gushed around him as he squeezed your neck; airways completely constricted. your lips were beginning to blue now, and he frowned—he had really liked how plump and red they were when you sucked him off.

coriolanus felt himself finish; cock shooting thick loads into your still-wet cunt. he couldn’t help but grunt as he spurted himself into your pretty hole. the way you’d finished just as your heart had stopped beating and your lungs had given out. your final breath wasted on cumming. you really were a whore.

he ran his hands over your body, frowning at the ugly ring around your neck. at least he didn’t have to deal with your blood. that would’ve been so fucking messy. having to mop it up, and the way you would’ve screamed. at least you couldn’t scream when his hand was clamped around your neck.

when he pulled out, he watched with sick delight as his cum spilled out of your pussy. the thick, pearly loads trickled down your thighs. your limbs would be pliable and floppy for another two hours, but he couldn’t bring himself to fuck you again. that was too far, even for him.

he looked at your face, which was stretched into one of fear. your eyes were still, but wet with the tears. so were your cheeks—they still retained that innocent rosiness which he so loved.

he wished lucy gray had looked so pretty when he’d killed her. she’d screamed when his bullet pierced her chest cavity, and she’d bled all over his jeans as he’d held her. you were so docile, even in death. you’d given him one last thank you when you’d came, and he knew you’d be his forever.

darling, dearest, dead. the words rang clear in his head. he’d read them in an old novel. they were fittingly appropriate for the situation. it was so sad that he had to kill you, but it was a bitter and necessary pill to swallow. he had to return home to the capitol, marry that bitch livia cardew, and set his sights on what mattered most.

you were just a little doll he’d had his fun with on his summer vacation—you were just a poor district girl. what did you matter? nobody would miss you, and when he became president, nobody would know that he’d watched the life drain out of three pathetic girls.

that would be terrible for his image. he did what needed to be done. his pretty bunny would be his forever, and he’d secure his place in the world.

no more loose ends.

[chenlesfavorite]

[TEASER] love in the dark. lee haechan

— summary : you love haechan, you truly do, you wish to be with him till death do you part though your families aren't fond of each other and he can't officially court you, your meetings are always secret. but everything becomes complicated once your parents tell you that you're promised to a complete stranger.

— pairing : haechan x fem!reader

— genre : angst, forbidden romance, secret relationship, arranged marriage

— extra : regency era, oneshot/imagine, open ending

— author's note : it's my birthday and I promised I would upload an imagine... didn't say if it was gonna be the entire thing tho so here's a little teaser for it <3 the full imagine will be released once I'm back from my break :)

— teaser word count : 851 (final w.c will have around 3-4k)

reminder that this is pure fiction and not an actual depiction of how they act.

The ballroom is glittering under the golden shine of the grand chandelier hanging above, the violinists playing a melody fitting for the current waltz unraveling. Gowns twirling around as the gentlemen lead their ladies with grace.

Amidst the setting, you feel out of place, your heart weighing you down with the secrets you keep inside it. Your feet are moving along the rhythm of the waltz, but you're buried inside the garden in your mind.

Your eyes are drawn to the figure standing in the corner of the ballroom, his fingers delicately wrapping around the glass filled with the finest wine as his eyes that know your secret follow your every step.

Though you have not exchanged any words with him the entire evening, the tension was present and you know who the figure is. One might say you know him like you know the back of your hand.

The young gentleman you’re dancing with notices your breathing switching to a heavier pace, making your distracted self quite visible. “Lady L/N, are you feeling well?” The gentleman could not resist but ask, his expression carrying concern.

“Ah, I’m well. I just seem to be a little out of it as I’ve been on my feet all evening, pardon me.” You reply, your lips curling up into a smile as you do not wish to worry the gentleman.

Putting on a quick smile is no hard work for you, after all, you have learned the practice of masking your true feelings and intentions. But one person could see through that very easily and he was still watching you from the corner.

As the waltz draws to a close, the figure watching you makes his leave by going up the stairs. You are more than sure he’s going to the balcony. You politely curtsy to the gentleman who just danced with you and you excuse yourself from the ballroom floor, slipping through the sea of people.

At last, you reach the balcony, the cool breeze of the night hitting you and of course, your guess is right. He is here.

You did not think he would come tonight, especially considering his family did not receive an invitation to the ball due to your families not being fond of one another. But alas, that was stupid of you to even ponder about, after all, wherever you are, he will be there too.

“You should not be here, Haechan.” You say in a quiet tone, approaching him with a voice that carries the slightest anger in it, mixed with worry. “And yet,” He steps closer to you. “Here I am.” That cocky smirk appearing on his face, that smirk that just makes you want to hit him.

“You did not receive an invitation!” You exclaim, though by the looks of it, Haechan just did not seem to mind nor care, this is just a game to him. A game that he loves to play. “You think too little of me if you believe an invitation could keep me from you.” He replies, his voice a soft murmur. The moonlight cast a glow over him and his eyes showed a glimmer of mischief.

You step back, the railing of the balcony pressing against your back— your breath catching in your throat. “Haechan, if anyone were to see us— if they were to know you are here—”

Your words are cut off and a light gasp escapes your lips as he holds onto the railing, trapping you in between his arms. Your eyes lock onto his, his stare sending a shiver down your spine. “Let them see, let them know,” He whispers in your ear, his low tone sounding alluring.

“I care not for their gossip, nor for the rules of society. I care only for you.” Haechan leaves those words lingering in your mind as he starts to look directly at you. You narrow your eyes, a light scoff coming from you despite the red color rushing to your cheeks. “You think this is just some grand jest, don’t you? Do you have any clue of what you risk— what we risk?”

Haechan lets out a chuckle, his breath warm against your cheek. “Risk? I risk nothing. It is you who risks everything.” He pauses before continuing. “Your reputation, your family’s pride, their plans for your future... and yet,” His voice softens. “Here you are.”

Your heart starts to pound heavily in your chest, the anger in you battling with something deeper that was inside of you, something so dangerous. You search his face for any signs of seriousness behind that smug facade of his.

You lightly push him away as you clear your voice. “I shouldn’t be here. I shouldn’t have followed you.” You say, turning away from him as you start to head for the doors of the balcony.

“But you did, you smile and dance for the others but you always come back to me because you know your heart belongs to me.” His voice fades away as you rush back inside the manor, the heat becoming very evident on your face.

[TO BE CONTINUED]

[lets-try-some-writing]

I have observed several types of fic writers, and so for kicks and giggles, here they all are. Each of them scares me for different reasons.

The Prepared And Ready To Publish™:

Several documents dedicated to worldbuilding, planning, cross referencing, character lists & traits, plot twists, and then the actual fic document.

Dedicated to the max to creating a rich world. Probably knows more about the niche thing than you ever will. 100% could have written a thesis and chose to do fic instead (or did both at the same time).

Created a masterpiece and promptly vanished off the face of creation before coming back in with another banger to crush souls and save fandoms.

Their arrival is akin to the birth of a new era because they never fail to somehow make a niche ship popular, make a headcanon fanon, or otherwise give so much depth and interest to a character or setting that whatever they have devised is largely accepted as gospel by their readers.

They either use a high end writing program or wordpad. There is no in-between.

Mysterious. Very mysterious. Reasons for this mysteriousness vary between fics and authors.

100000/10 would be friends with them if I could. Legendary writers. But also they scare me because ??? What void offered you such power ?????

The Baby Writer:

All vibes and loosely strung plots.

It may not make the most sense, but good gracious the dedication is there.

Notable lack of comprehension when it comes to characters and places, but it's bad form to not leave a kudo because it takes guts to post anything in fandom.

They are still figuring things out and their grammar or formatting (possibly both) is probably a mess, but they've put heart into their work.

Sweetest rays of sunshine who want to be involved and are eager to learn the ropes.

The fandom's young ward or despised new arrival (depends entirely on fandom popularity and age).

8/10 would happily offer advice to them. Just can't read their work for too long without wanting to throw it into grammarly. The fear factor comes in the form of the miraculous misuse of fandom terminology. (Yeah it's tough bud, the fanon is wild. But goodness that term/canon word does NOT mean what you think it does.)

The Smut For Your Soul:

Meticulously plans the smut with all the loving care of a sculptor.

Somehow plot got involved.

Miraculously, they managed to not include an iota of plot and it has somehow managed to work.

Headcanons abound and cuteness and or angst lurks merrily behind every corner.

The tags mean everything and nothing at the same time. They are but faint guides to the fae wilds ahead. Tread lightly.

Has a mountain of unfinished WIPs that will follow them to the grave or emerge ten years after conception to grace whatever fandom spawned the idea.

The fandom thanks them for their service, although often that praise is late or hits like a freight train.

???/10 I personally avoid smut but I have friends who write it so it really depends. Terrifying because you never know who falls into this role of writer. It could be anyone. Normalcy is a mask poorly adorned for the sake of conforming to The Great Machine.

The Angst Lord:

Has a million slightly different ways to hurt their blorbo. Each are somehow more horrifying than the next.

The embodiment of the iceburg videos seen all over the net. Ask one question and you shall unravel and scheme of torment so great you shall regret having dared to speak up.

Has dozens of WIPs or unwritten ideas that they claim they will return to.

They are controlled by passion and emotion and can and will insert their own complicated situation into a fic.

Almost nothing is off limits.

Arrives to the fandom ready to brawl and somehow ends up respected or feared. They often stare in bafflement as they end up unscathed and watch angry comments fly toward the arguably innocent shippers.

Generally some of the nicest people who happen to enjoy inflicting The Horrors upon someone fictional.

'10/10 would befriend and promptly regard like a wild racoon. Offerings of angsty ideas yield delightful commentary. But also I need to prepare myself for anything they say because O U C H my SOUL.

The General Writer:

Fluff, cuteness, possibly a delightful touch of angst and pure unbridled creative simplicity.

They may not have the most brutal or soul wrenching tale, but they always manage to write something that someone, somewhere, desperately needs.

Devastatingly underrated and deserves far more praise for their contributions to the fandom.

Produces some of the softest of scenes and the most touching of interactions between characters in a contained, careful crafted, tale.

Introducing new ships or family dynamics in such a tasteful manner that brain chemistry can easily be altered.

Arrives to the fandom as a lurker and shows their appreciation through their work. Oftentimes, they are very quiet and go unnoticed.

INFINITE/10 Love these writers, honestly a gift to fandom. The sheer level of dedication to producing fluff is astounding and scary all at once.

The OC X Canon:

Has so many ships and headcanons that it's astounding.

The lore development rivals IDW and Lost Light combined. All the kudos to them for putting their souls into their characters.

The dedication is mind boggling.

They put up with so much crap they could be in MMA Wrestling if the verbal assaults translated into physical strength.

Has so many adjustments to lore and whole AUs devoted specifically to creating a perfect world.

Skilled in the extreme (or not) at integrating their ocs into canon.

Arrives to the fandom not intending to make ocs. Leaves with seventeen leashes for their new abominable creations. Is loved or hated by literally everyone, sometimes for no reason.

6/10 perfectly lovely people but very niche in their interest and thus not everyone's cup of tea. Scary because that level of sheer willpower is meant for demi-gods.

There are more types of writers, but these feel like the big overarching ones. Which kind of writer are you? :D

[covenha]

Synopsis: Sunoo realizes that his love language is acts of service. Pairings: sunoo x fem!reader Genre: fluff! so much fluff I got cavities from writing this WC: 1356 Warnings: mentions of academic stress and insomnia a/n: I had fun writing this one, really had to destress from all the studying I've been doing these past few days so this fic is a lil self-indulgent whoops. anyway, this is also a work of fiction so don't forget to touch some grass after reading! lmao jk but as always feedback and reblogs are always deeply appreciated! and requests are open so if you guys want me to write something lmk :))

Sunoo can admit, he always felt like he was pampered.

It’s not like he didn’t like it. Heck, he enjoyed the feeling of his members being attentive to him. The way that Jay cooks meat just the way he likes it. The way that Jake lets him get away with mistakes in his grammar because it’s just “part of his charm.” Or, the way that Jungwon always let him have a few bites of his sweets even though Sunoo definitely said he didn’t want to order one of his own. 

Which is why it was such a refreshing feeling to be with you. He never really knew what his love language was until he met you. So here are the three times that made him realize his love language was acts of service.

It was late at night, midterms were coming up and things were not looking up for you. With so many enzymes to memorize and so many cascades to internalize, if you had to look at one more diagram with arrows one more time, you were simply going to go clinically insane. 

“Why won’t this get in my head?! Who even named these stupid enzymes? Argininosuccinate synthetase? Sounds like something Elon Musk would name his child.” You bonk your head with your notebook, clearly on the brink of insanity. 

“Hey,” Sunoo’s soft voice cuts through your inner monologue. “You doing okay? Is it the krebs cycle again?” You sigh.

“There’s just so much to study for, I don’t think I can cram it all inside my goldfish brain.” You pout at the notes scattered across the desk in the room. 

“Hey, babe, you don’t have a goldfish brain. C’mon, you’re one of the smartest people I know.” Sunoo starts to get up from his lying position on the bed. 

“You don’t have to get up, Sun. I can manage this on my own, just need to whine about it first.” You give him a little smile while shrugging your shoulders. 

Sunoo drags the bean bag chair at the corner of the room and sets it right beside you. 

“Okay, we have a few hours before your exam. We can work with this. We just need to mix some active recall into the review!” Sunoo beams up at you as he lay in the bean bag, notebook in hand. 

And for the rest of the night, and well into the morning, Sunoo helps you study for your godawful Chemistry midterm. The look you had when you got back your results, passing your midterms exams with the brightest smile on your face, he just knew that he had to protect that smile.

One thing that Sunoo learned about you quickly was that you loved to drink matcha. Sure, to him it tastes like grass, but he liked mint chocolate things so who was he to judge? You loved going to this cafe two blocks from your apartment, it was owned by an old Taiwanese couple who immigrated a couple years ago. You were one of their longest regulars. So it was quite upsetting to find out that they were closing up shop for good.

Ever since that cafe closed, you have tried looking around for the next best matcha but, sadly, none have come close to beating their matcha latte. One month into the search and you had all but given up on your matcha latte dreams. That was until one day you woke up to the smell of green tea in your kitchen. 

“Sunoo? What’s that smell?” You nose around the hallway leading to the kitchen. 

And much to your surprise, a glass of green goodness is being served up on the kitchen island. 

“Sunoo? Is this what I think it is?” You ask in surprise at what you see. You go up to him and hug his side. He throws his arms around your waist, hugging your form. 

“Well, I know you’ve been looking for a matcha latte replacement and haven’t found one yet, so I decided to do a little digging. Asked for their recipe and tried to make it myself. I hope it tastes okay.” He mushes his cheek against your head then smiles down at you. 

“Sunoo, you really didn’t have to do this….” You look up at him. You felt all warm and fuzzy. 

“Well, I can’t have my little girlfriend go for too long without her matcha latte. She’s gonna start tweaking.” He teases. You just poke his cheek and decide to taste his drink. 

You knew that whatever it tasted like, you were going to love it anyway. But one sip of the green drink and you felt your heart soar at the familiar taste. 

“Sunoo, this tastes amazing!” You look back at him with a surprised look in your eyes. 

“Really?”

“No, really! Like it tastes just like how they make it. How did you pull this off? I’m actually so impressed right now you don’t even understand.” You keep taking sips of the drink, savoring the green tea goodness. It feels like an old friend has come back from the dead.

“Well, I actually found the son of the owners and emailed him asking for the recipe. I really didn’t expect to hear anything back from him but he surprisingly gave in.” He smiled. His heart felt like it could burst from the compliments you gave him. 

“This is too much. You didn’t really have to do all this for some silly drink that I like, noo.” You put down the drink and hug him. 

“But I wanted to. Really, if it means seeing you happy I’d go to Taiwan myself and ask for their recipe.” He kisses your cheek. You sigh at this. 

“You’re just the best.” You hug him tighter. He beams at this and you guys revel in each other’s warmth. 

It was going to be “one of those nights” you feared. Sleep had yet to take over your body despite the many hours of tossing and turning in your shared bed. Sunoo lay beside you, soft snores and even breaths coming from his side of the bed. Deciding that you were not going to be sleeping anytime soon, you get up from the bed and head to the kitchen. 

You trudge towards the kitchen and grab a glass of water. You look up at a clock to check the time, 2:37 AM. You decide to do some cleaning up in the kitchen to pass the time. As you are wiping down a surface in the fridge, Sunoo’s voice startles you.

“y/n? What are you doing up?” You jump a little as Sunoo makes his presence known. He notices this and softly apologizes. 

“Couldn’t really sleep. So I decided on kitchen duty.” You motion to your gloved hand wiping down the fridge shelves. “Sorry if I woke you up. You can go back to bed. I’ll finish up in a bit and try to fall asleep again.” 

He silently walks up to you hugging you from behind. Then he mumbles something into your hair that you don’t quite catch. 

“Noo?” You ask him to repeat himself.

“Wanna go get some ice cream?” 

So that’s how you end up buying ice cream at a convenience store at 3 AM. As you guys walk back to your apartment, Sunoo looks down at you happily snacking on your ice cold treat. Your ruddy cheeks from the cold autumn breeze nipping at them, your tired eyes from the lack of sleep, and your hair haphazardly thrown into a bun. 

“What is it?” You ask him, noticing how silent he is.

“Nothing.” He shakes his head. 

“Is there something on my face?” You motion towards your face. 

Sunoo just smiled at himself, telling you that there was nothing on your face. And as the two of you neared the entrance to your apartment he mulled over some thoughts. Even though he was munching on some mint chocolate ice cream, which he could argue was one of life’s best delicacies. He thought that maybe, no surely, he liked being the reason you smile a whole lot more. 

[booksandabeer]

Ramblings on Fandom: Peggy Carter, Steve Rogers, Delusional Shippers, and Alleged Misogyny

So with the release of Season 2 of What If…? emotions are once again running high, the outrage is outraging, and people are up in arms about the whole Captain Carter situation. While I do think that some reactions are a little overblown, even needlessly aggressive in tone to the unfortunate detriment of their otherwise convincing arguments, I share the confusion and frustration about the sudden centering of a long-dead & never excessively popular character, the sidelining of the Steve-Bucky friendship, and the as-inexplicable-as-it-is-total exclusion of Sam Wilson as Captain America. However, I’m not here to talk about the show because (1) I haven’t watched this season and have no plans to (why waste time torturing myself with something I know I’ll hate?) and (2) other people have already written dozens of metas about it, so what could I possibly add at this point.

What I do want need to talk about (lest I explode) is something that has irritated me for a long time and that is now happening again: Every time someone even mildly criticizes Peggy Carter, expresses doubts about her suitability as a heroine, or even just questions her disproportionate importance to the franchise post-EG, inevitably a certain section of fans will come out of the woodwork to immediately throw around accusations of misogyny and yell about how we’re all just a bunch of delusional Stuckies who are mad that she got "in the way" of our ship. Sigh.

This is gonna be a long one, so I’ll put it under a cut. Rant incoming. You've been warned. If you don't want to read, simply keep scrolling.

First of all, let me state very clearly that I’m not debating the existence of misogyny and sexism in fandom spaces—or in the media from which these fandoms originate. At all. It exists, it’s a thing, I’m not denying that. Which is exactly why it frustrates me endlessly to see these accusations thrown around as a gotcha! argument to shut down any and all critical debate around a female character. All it does in the end is escalate rhetoric and radicalize attitudes.  

In the case of Peggy Carter, specifically her treatment by Stucky shippers, I’ve always found 'misogyny as a motive' to be a largely unsubstantiated accusation.¹ Now, I neither presume nor do I want to speak for the entirety of Stuckynation, so I will not claim that there aren't corners of the fandom where people discuss her in ways that I find off-putting and deeply unserious, but I will say this: If you genuinely believe that disliking one (1) fictional female character equals “hating all women” and wanting to suppress and marginalize their presence in fiction and real life alike—then I think we need to take that word away from you until you’ve learned its true meaning.

You might also want to ask yourself how exactly reducing a female character to a mute trophy wife or a heroine who has to act out her love interest’s recycled storylines helps your feminist fight.

As for the “getting in the way of your ship” part of the argument. Very simply put: No character can get in the way of something if there never ever was “a way” to that something to begin with. “Being mad” implies that there was a reasonable expectation that wasn’t met, a substantive hope that was crushed. Now, I’ve said this before and I’ll gladly say it again a million more times: No Stucky shipper in their right mind ever truly thought that there was even the slightest chance that Marvel Studios owned by the Walt Disney Company would allow Steve “Captain America” Rogers and Bucky “Winter Soldier” Barnes to be canonized as an explicitly romantic pairing in their billion dollar franchise. Be serious. That was never in the cards. I wish we all lived in a world where it was, but we don’t, and it wasn’t. The best we could ever hope for was for Steve and Bucky to get a good, satisfying, in-character ending. And if, in Steve’s case, that would’ve included hints (or more) about a possible rekindling of his, uh, aborted romance with Sharon—then so be it. But we never got any of that. The characters never got any of that. Instead they sent Steve into 1950s suburban hell, literally trapped him behind a white picket fence, and condemned him to a life of passivity and lies, all so he could be married to a woman he barely knew a long time ago in a completely different world; who built and ran a top-to-bottom Hydra-infested organization, but apparently never noticed that there was anything wrong with her life's work. For decades. Great. As for Bucky—well, we’ve all seen the devastatingly grim-faced, utterly lonely, and deeply sad version of him that was presented to us in TFATWS. Happy endings all around, I guess.

So. Am I mad that Steve didn’t get to ride into the rainbow-colored sunset with Bucky at the end of EG? No. Because that was never going to happen anyway. Would I have been mad had he ended up with Sharon or another female character in the 21st century? Also no. Granted, I wouldn’t have been ecstatic about it, but mad? No. But am I mad that Steve ended up with this specific female character under these specific circumstances as presented in canon? Fuck yeah, I am.

The thing is: I personally believe Steve and Peggy to be fundamentally incompatible when it comes to the way they view the world and their respective places in it; their morals and values; their capacity for compassion and empathy; their ability and willingness to compartmentalize, compromise, and collaborate with people and institutions whose ethics and/or politics do not align with their own. I have a real hard time believing that a relationship between these two (or worse, a hasty marriage) could be either happy or long-lasting.

I don’t believe Peggy to be inherently evil, I don’t hate her, I simply think she operates within a different moral framework than Steve (and even genuinely believes it to be a righteous one).² Your mileage may vary, but I personally happen to find that framework reprehensible, even indecent, and ultimately dangerous. After all, over the course of the 20th century, we have seen exactly where that kind of “the ends justify the means” brand of pragmatism leads—over and over again. Not to mention that the people who use this line of argument to defend characters like Peggy (or real-life politicians for that matter) never seem to want to look too closely at who gets to define what "the ends" are in the first place and who decides when they've finally been met.

(Never. The answer is never.)

And to be clear, there is absolutely nothing wrong with depicting, and even centering a narrative around a morally (dark)gray character—oftentimes it’s actually the more interesting option—but you cannot at the same time claim that they are purely good and should be only admired as such when their actions literally tell an entirely different story.

So, no. I will not accept Peggy Carter as the shining aspirational heroine that the MCU so badly wants to sell her to me as—while simultaneously continuing to reveal things that paint an increasingly darker picture of her character. And I will certainly not celebrate seeing one of my favorite characters of all time—whose defining trait was that he couldn't ignore "a situation pointed south"; who used to fight for the little guy and against the establishment; who once said about the very organization that Peggy Carter helped build that it was so corrupt, it all needed to go—rendered morally inert for some hollow happy ending that may as well be a conservative’s wet dream full of false nostalgia for an America that never really existed. I cannot find it in me to be anything less but mad about that.

But that does not make me a misogynist. It does not make me a delusional shipper. It makes me someone who looks at what the MCU has been telling me about Peggy Carter for years now—over and over again—and takes it at its own word.

--------

¹ If you’ve actually read a a fair number of Stucky(!) fanfics you will have noticed that the reverence afforded to and "page time" devoted to her character and her relationship with Steve is somewhat disproportionate to anything that's backed up by canon—well, up until EG, where she was suddenly reanimated as The Great Love of Steve’s Life—and in my experience, it's highly unusual for any fandom to put so much (mostly) positive attention on another character, let alone a potential love interest that is not part of the endgame ship.

² I also want to emphasize that if you love Peggy and she's your fave: good for you! I genuinely have no beef with you. People can agree to disagree. All I ask for is that we maybe stop willfully ignoring the less savory aspects of her character. You don't need to pretend she's perfect to justify your affection for her. I LOVE Steve, and yet I have no problem conceding that he is FAR from perfect.

[princessvisionary101]

💘❤️‍🩹 Nuada x Disowned Human Princess reader who her parents and her sister neglect her.

Part 2 of ?

Summary: Your father wants your older sister to be the perfect queen to the Bethmoora clan. Your sister wants everything to be perfect for her. Your mother never wanted anything much. You however, want to know why your sister’s dream guy, or elf in that matter, wants your attention and your presence to himself.

@meowiemari @ccruzmoon @kitty-chan33 @ozzyynka @helios-dios-del-sol @fictional-hooman @philiasoul @bluebear142077 @personofyou @shiranai-atsune @all—that—jazz @ynskywalker1 @izzyshima @cora-witch @moodyblueberrytree @ajourneytobeweightless @the-lonely-abyss

Part 2 my people! Let’s make this a good one!

While you two were walking in the hallways of the palace, you wondered if you could find many books about the Bethmoora clan.

Now don’t get it wrong, you didn’t want to learn the Bethmoora clan’s history because of some strategy or something to use against them, but learning more about other beings than just other humans was enough to dream about exploring the outside world.

Ϛ⃘๑•͡ .̫•๑꒜ℒℴѵℯ❤

Seems as though the advisor was a little concerned about what you were thinking. Probably curious instead since it’s been a long while since anyone showed pi Now don’t get it wrong, you didn’t want to learn the Bethmoora clan’s history because of some strategy or something to use against them, but learning more about other beings than just other humans was enough to dream about exploring the outside world. Who could blame him since he is the one who was technically force to guide you somewhere away from the important “royal meeting”.

“So your highness” he started but you hold up your hand quickly. “If you want you can just call me (y/n). Everyone back home usually doesn’t say your highness only for specific reasons.” You said before walking a little faster to catch up to him. “Oh? A may I ask why do you receive disrespectful treatment as though your title does not exist? Surely your parents must be furious about this sort of mishap with the servants I presume?”

You looked down while walking a little slower than usual. He had to slow down a bit to see your frown better.

“No I’m sorry.” You said while looking up at him with a small smile. “The clan may have seem to have good respect to their king and his children, but mine do not serve the same purpose but just to fetch me food and books from the library.”

“Ah I see then.” He stops in front of the library doors and turns to you in a look you can’t recognize. “Then please forgive me if I seem to have been shown to displease you in any way.” “Oh! Not at all!” You said waving yours hands in front of you while trying to choose your words carefully. “You were great help to me and great company as well! Thank you for showing me where the library will be at.” You both bow before he leaves and you went inside the room where still the knowledge you wanted to see can be found.

The library was very quiet and looks to be taken care of just like yours from back home. It seems as though it was used a lot , account of the books piled up on the tables and the many shelves that look almost like you were in a maze. It was messy, but it made you felt at home with the place you leave through the books filled with fantasy, drama, romance and surprises at every corner in every page.

And speaking of surprises in every corner-

“Can I help you human?” A baritone voice said that sounded more of a command then a question. You turned around and spot a elf with long white hair and a frown that makes it obvious you weren’t welcomed here.

“I’m sorry if I’m intruding you sir.” You bowed with your head hung low. You never got over the habit of apologizing to many people who deemed you as a nuisance. You have your sister to thank for that. “My name is Princess y/n and I am here to spend my time here while my family finishes a meeting. I’m very sorry again for intruding.”

You couldn’t tell if he was upset at you or looking at you at all since you still had your head hung low. Maybe he’s wondering what kind of Princess “hung her head low to a elf no less?”

Huh…he thought so too.

“We’ll I’m not allowed to join them while they discuss about important matters, especially with the king of your clan.” You responded, having no trouble sounding more reserved towards the gentleman who didn’t seem to be displeased at your presence nor didn’t seem to want to dismiss you from the library.

“Very well then,” he says sitting down at the chair across from you while you raise your head and see him walk to the table you are occupying and picks up a book from the table, “then I’ll just continue reading from this book while you bid your time reading from the others. I do recommend though that you don’t cause any disturbance that might upset the librarian.”

He states right before glaring at you with a very look of distrust. You can’t seem to read him that well. He doesn’t seem to have any problems with you staying but he also seems to be annoyed with you around. It’s a continual battle of whether to please him by departing and finding a new place to spend you time or just to stay and be quiet. Since technically you don’t know the place well, it shouldn’t hurt to stay quiet and just find a book to read; especially since he seems to already look irritated by just feeling your presence.

“Alright” You responded, “but I do really mean it about me leaving the room if I’m bothering you sir.” you then pick up a random book from the nearest shelf and start to read. He glances up at you before continuing to read his book.

You both end up reading in silence while the sun was shifting from the afternoon to later mid-day. You would occasionally pick a different book when you finished yours and start reading with a small smile upon your face. It seemed like forever ago when you would go to your library and read books that had questions that you wish to know. For example, you were curious about how pirates act nowadays or if there was really a treasure island for pirates to roam and search of.

While you were busy reading a plot twist in your book, you failed to sense a pair of eyes watching you from time to time when you scrunch up your nose or when your eyebrows furrow during a chapter of the story.

Once you found a stopping point, you raise your head to see those pair of eyes looking at you from across the table. It freaks you out at first because usually the looks you get are either in disgust or in denial of your heritage of your family. In this case, you couldn’t tell what he was thinking of what he felt about you.

“May I ask why you are staring at me sir?”

He closes his book and lays it on top of the table before he crosses his arm on top of them.

“Why aren’t you with your family in the dining room discussing with the king? Normally, most humans are with him trying to have an alliance with our people, especially princesses who generally aren’t found in a library to waste an hour.”

You looked down embarrassed by his remark targeted to you, well it would sound so, and closed your book so that you can try to focus on this elf man across from the table.

“Well for starters sir, my family have always left me out of their conversations, especially when they go on their outings when they have time to get together. I do try to talk to my maids or the butlers, but most of the time I see their displeasure in talking to me. This led me to see that I don’t fit into anyone’s expectations of a good daughter or a great princess in their eyes.”

You looked at him and was surprised that he seemed to pay attention to your words. How long ago did someone look at you and listened that same way this librarian was?

“And are you ok with the way you are treated? It doesn’t sound like you enjoy feeling ignored or disrespected by others, including your own servants whom you have the control over if I’m correct.”

“Maybe so” You responded with a genuine smile at him, “but I rather someone talk to me or like me not because they have to, but because they desire to do so.”

Before he could respond, a servant walks to him and whispers in his ear in the language you couldn’t understand before seeing that he probably is about to leave you alone. He walks with the other elf, and they start to chatter behind your back. It seemed suspicious since the servant kept glancing at you from time to time and the man would have a small frown every now and then. Their conversation probably isn’t a good one you thought. He comes back and takes the books he had in his arms, and you already notice that it’s a sign that he is about to leave.

“Oh! Are you needed elsewhere sir? I’m sorry to take much of your time if you were supposed to leave soon!” You stand up but he stops you before you did anything else strange.

“It is nothing that you should worry about, but yes, I am needed somewhere. However, my servant also told me that the meeting is done, and you are asked to meet your family at the dining room where the king is at.” He gives his servant the small stacks of books for them to put away before strolling over to you with his hand extended in your direction. You got confused for a bit until he chose to grab your hand and leave a gentle kiss on your palm. You never felt so flustered at the fact that a man, let alone a prince had left the touch of his lips linger on your hand before raising his head at your level.

“I hope you have a wonderful time here in the library and I would like to extend my gratitude for your honesty and kindness.” He then leaves you alone at the table, feeling bewildered at his change of attitude, and you start to wonder if what you said to him made him had a different view towards you. You don’t think about it even when you walk out of the library doors, and you hope that the way he talked to you wouldn’t be the last time someone treated you that way. It has been forever since someone didn’t mind your presence.

You’ll probably come to regret that thought once you realize what you’re really in for.

(Hello! Thank you so much for reading chapter 2 of the disowned princess reader x prince nuada silverlance. Now to keep my message short, I have been busy trying to work but currently I've been fired since I couldn't work full time and now I got time to myself :3 I also just started college, but since I got less homework, I will be trying to make more fanfics on this blog, including trying to finish this series which I come to enjoy.

I thank you all for enjoying the first chapter and I hope that ya'll continue to read and share my fanfic by reblogging it! See all of you soon and have a wonderful day!)

[madhatterbri]

New Addition | W.O.

Summary: Hi can you do a Will Ospreay x Reader. Where the reader is married to Will Ospreay and reader goes to Forbidden door with their son to watch his match against Swerve. But even Will lost the reader tells Will that they are expecting Baby #2?

Requested by: @sunrise28sblog

Taglist: @plentyoffandoms @hotgirlgraps

Pure Fiction

"Dada.... Lost?" A tiny boy asked in confusion. His fingers scratched through his sandy blonde hair. His other hand rubbed his sleepy eyes. Their son, Henry, stayed up late to watch his dad lose.

Y/N couldn't believe it herself. Her husband lost to Swerve Strickland for the AEW World Championship. Will Ospreay cried in the corner of the ring. His friend, Kyle Fletcher, was doing his best to comfort him. "Yeah, baby, he did,"

Henry raised his hands to signal to his mother he wanted to be held. Once she lifted him up, the boy buried his head in her shoulder. Soft sobs rocked his tiny body. The boy hated to see his daddy lose.

Y/N walked towards Will's locker room. People backstage apologized to her for Will losing. She thanked them. Henry slowly started to calm down. Soft hiccups were the only way Y/N knew he was awake. By the time they made it to the locker room, he was snoring softly.

Y/N placed him in his stroller. She handed him his favorite stuffed animal and covered him with a blanket. Henry squirmed to find a comfortable position. Once he found one, he was fast asleep.

Will opened the door to the locker room quietly. He learned never to wake up his sleeping son. The Cerebral Assassin smiled at his wife and kissed her. He dropped to his knee to check his son. "He doing okay, darling?"

"A little upset, but he will live. You know he doesn't like to see when you, you know," she answered. Will smiled sadly and stood up.

"I wanted to have two belts. It would have looked really good on me, you know? Made the family look like an unstoppable force," he sighed and placed the belt down on the table.

"Well, it isn't all so bad. You are just going to have two of something a little more exciting," she spoke nervously. Will turned her head to look at her. A small gift box was in her hands.

The wrestler grabbed the white box and untied the green ribbon. Y/N swore her breathing stopped the moment he opened the box. One of his famous handsome smiles appeared on his face. It was as if the loss no longer mattered to him.

The now expecting father of his second child pulled out the sonogram picture. He couldn't believe it when he saw Y/N's name on the top corner of the picture. This was real. All the times they talked about having another for little Henry to play with.

"No way, love," he smiled. "You mean this little man is gonna be ..... Does he know?"

"I wouldn't ever tell him before you. The whole world would have known then," she answered with a smile.

Will wrapped his arms around her and pulled her in for a kiss. "Two kids is better than two belts. Thank you for this,"

[charlottesbookclub]

like real people do (alistair x reader) 💜💜

Summary: honestly there's no real plot, just pure fluff. Alistair tries to adjust to having a human mate, and he's trying really hard 🥹

Warnings/Tags: gn!reader, mention of skipping a meal (not intentionally), mentions of eating, Alistair being awkward and a bit rude lol, basically just pure tooth-rotting fluff, but as always, let me know if I've missed anything!

Words: 1,634

Author’s Note: me, writing a twilight fanfic in the year of our lord 2024? it's more likely than you think. uhhh yeah I have no real explanation for this except that I have stumbled back into my Alistair obsession and I just wanted to write a cute little something for him. I don't think this is my best work, but at least it made me smile, so that's something. honestly I have no idea if there's anyone else out here reading fanfic for an incredibly minor twilight character, but if there is, I hope you enjoy whatever this is! I was thinking of making this a little series of Alistair trying his damndest to figure out human stuff, so do let me know if you have any interest in that. but okay I'll stop rambling now - enjoy! 💖

            A message pinged through on your computer, and you looked away from your work for a moment, pulling up the chatbox. It was Lucy from the front desk: 

hey – someone’s here to see you

who?

hard to describe – and i’m having a hard time getting his name

You chuckled softly to yourself, having a sneaking suspicion you knew exactly who it was. Odd that he would willingly put himself in a situation that forced him to speak with other people though. Your laughter turned into a small frown as you considered the fact that something might be wrong. You and Alistair hadn’t been together long, but you knew about his aversion to others well enough to wonder what could bring him into proximity of the possibility of needing to engage in small talk.

be right there

You pushed back from your desk and hurried down to the lobby. Lucy was obviously waiting for you to arrive, and she met you with a mildly panicked look, gesturing with her head toward the tall man standing awkwardly in the corner of the lobby. Thanks to his heightened senses, he had noticed your arrival long before Lucy, and was already striding across the floor toward you at a pace that was just barely slow enough to be considered human. You made a mental note to ask Carlisle to gently review normal human behaviors with him. You just managed to give Lucy a quick thumbs-up to indicate that you knew the tousled man before he bustled the two of you back toward your office.

“Alistair, what the hell?” you asked as he ushered you inside and closed the door behind him.

“What a truly awful system,” he muttered to himself, clearly continuing a rant he was already halfway through rather than answering your question. “I mean really, how many idiots should I have to go through to see my partner?” You just crossed your arms and leaned back against the edge of your desk, a bemused smile starting to fight its way onto your face. You knew it was no use interrupting him until he had gotten everything out. “’Would you like something do drink?’” He parroted Lucy’s question mockingly. “No I bloody well would not – unless you’ve got a few bags of blood stored away back there,” he retorted to this fictional Lucy sarcastically. “Zounds, how hard is it to just point me in the right direction and leave me in peace?” His words faded into muttering and soft curses in a version of English that hadn’t been spoken for hundreds of years.

“Alistair,” you said quietly, breaking him out of his monologue. His talking to himself had seemed strange at first, but the more you learned about his life before meeting you, the more it made sense. He had been his only company for so long and was only now slowly adjusting to speaking with other people again. You, however, found it incredibly endearing and hoped he didn’t break himself of the habit completely. 

His focus snapped to you instantly when he heard your voice, and he started murmuring apologies that you quickly brushed off.

“Alistair, it’s fine,” you assured him, sending him a warm smile and softly placing your hand on his forearm. Touch was another thing that was coming back to him only slowly. You had learned to proceed cautiously, gently, making sure he knew that you were about to touch him before making contact. The words stilled on his lips as his eyes focused in on the place where your warm palm met his cold skin.

“Alistair,” you said quietly after a moment of letting him adjust to the contact. His eyes traveled back up to your face at the sound of his name on your lips. “Is something wrong?”

“I—no,” the words tumbled out awkwardly, and you could almost see him trying to say three different sentences at the same time. If he still had blood under his skin, you were certain he would be blushing. Knowing that eye contact made conversation even more difficult for him, you flicked your eyes down toward your hand still on his arm, gently pulling it from where it hung limply at his side. You cradled his large hand in both of yours and began tracing mindless patterns on his skin, hoping this would give him enough of a reprieve to gather his thoughts. He took a deep breath and tried again. 

“Nothing is seriously wrong, but I— well I… worried about you.” This instantly caught your attention, and you looked up again almost without thinking, only to find his ruby eyes gazing back down at you with a softness you were just beginning to recognize.

“Alistair, I promise, I’m just fine,” you assure him.

“But… well… I noticed you didn’t eat breakfast this morning.” You tilted your head, wondering why that was such a cause for concern that he would willingly subject himself to the horror of checking in at your work.

“I was just running a little late and didn’t have time to make myself anything,” you explained, hoping that would ease his mind, “there’s always snacks in the break room, so I figured I’d have something when I got here.”

“I understand, but humans in your age group are supposed to eat three balanced meals per day, with the addition of one to three snacks. Lack of nutrients can result in many deficiencies, which in turn can lead to side effects like headache, dizziness, and trouble concentrating.”

You couldn’t stop the smile that was growing on your face as you listened to him recite this knowledge as though he had memorized it straight from a Wikipedia article. However, you seriously doubted Alistair’s ability to navigate the internet, since Carlisle had only recently convinced him to try using a flip phone.

“Where did you hear about this?” you asked, trying to remain serious and stifling the giggles that were rising in your throat.

“I’ve been reading Carlisle’s medical texts,” he responded with a furrowed brow, “I want to make sure I understand all the risks and ensure that I am prepared for every eventuality.”

If you hadn’t been completely in love with him yet, this would have undoubtably sealed the deal. He may be awkward and eccentric and even difficult at times, but he was trying so so hard to care for you in the best way he knew how. Although the whole situation was still incredibly amusing, you simply couldn’t bring yourself to laugh at him, even if it was all in affection. Instead, you raised yourself slowly to your tiptoes and planted a soft kiss on his cheek.

“Thank you for thinking of me,” you said as you lowered yourself back onto your heels. Your chaste kiss seemed to have frozen him for a moment, as he stood there completely still, his soft squeeze of your hand the only indicator that he was still present in the room. You let him recalibrate, and as he came back himself, he made a soft exclamation as though he had just remembered something. Reluctantly releasing your hand, he swung a small backpack off his shoulder. 

“I brought you some breakfast,” he explained as he pulled a jumble of containers out of the bag and placed them on your desk, “I tried to make sure I balanced all the proper nutrients to ensure you wouldn’t suffer any adverse effects from not having eaten this morning.”

You busied yourself with looking at all the containers of food to hide the tears that were welling in your eyes. You had never had someone care for you so completely like this before. Unfortunately, your plan didn’t work, since the awkwardly yet earnestly prepared food only brought more tears to your eyes. You had never expected that strangely cut fruit, mangled pancakes, and soggy cereal sitting in its own milk would make you cry with joy, but the amount of thought and care that had clearly gone into each piece of the meal was about to reduce you to ugly sobs.

You could feel Alistair watching you intently as you opened each of the containers, seemingly trying to gauge your response. When he couldn’t bear it any longer, he finally broke the silence. 

“If you don’t like it, I—I’m happy to go out and buy you something. I haven’t had human food in so long and even—even then I didn’t actually prepare it so I tried reading some of Carlisle’s recipe books but I think I still didn’t get it right—” 

“Alistair,” you didn’t normally like to cut him off, but you refused to let his anxious rambling sew any seeds of doubt in his mind. “It’s absolutely perfect – I can’t wait to taste it all!”

Alistair beamed at you then, a rare sight, but a welcome one.

“I just have one question though,” you said, and he looked at you quizzically, waiting for your inquiry. “Can I give you a hug?”

Confusion turned to elation on his face, and he spread his arms in assent and anticipation. You threw yourself on him, wrapping your arms around his neck as you wiped away a few escaped tears. His arms closed around your back hesitantly, like he wasn’t quite sure what to do with them, but his uncertainty seemed to fade as you melted into his grasp, and he wrapped you even more tightly in his embrace. 

Both of you were smiling when you finally pulled away. You settled into your desk chair and motioned to Alistair to pull up another. He sat just close enough that your knees could touch as you surveyed the feast before you. 

“What do you think I should start with?” you asked him.

“Maybe the pancakes? I’m rather proud of those.”

[gigabyte-flare]

He Comes Alive (Part 3)

Part 1 Part 2

Summary: As you settle into your new routine working for Leon, one day he decides to take you on a nice hike where the two of you make a gruesome discovery.

Word Count: 4.9k

Pairing: vampire/plagas!Leon Kennedy x fem!reader (afab)

Disclaimer: This story is a work of fiction. Actions depicted in this story are not condoned in real life. You are responsible for your own content consumption. If any of the following warnings trigger you, please read at your own risk. Minors do not interact, this story is 18+ only.

Warnings: Biting, blood, gore, murder, unprotected p in v, masterbation, oral (m and f receiving), stalking, pet names, kidnapping, breeding kink, blood play/kink, age gap, DEAD DOVE: DO NOT EAT [More warnings may be added in future entries]

This part does contain a graphic depiction of an unalived individual. Reader's discretion is advised.

A quick reminder that I no longer do tag lists

While at first you had been nervous about not meeting Leon’s expectations, you find yourself looking forward to getting up each morning to get ready to work at his house. Before you knew it, a couple weeks had gone by, nestled into a nice routine as October rolled in. Like Leon had told you that night at the gas station, he had you painting, cleaning sawdust off the furniture, holding stuff while he took measurements; stuff you could clearly handle. Each day, he’d hand you a $100 bill from his wallet. At first you’d argue that he was paying you too much, you had agreed on $10 an hour, but he’d insist the extra $20 was a bonus for doing such a good job. You found it impossible to make him budge on this, so you stopped arguing with him about it.

A part of you wonders if Leon just wants the company; out in public, he was quiet and usually kept to himself, but when he was working at his house with you? An actual chatterbox. You learn that he is a retired federal agent of some kind, having come back from a mission in Spain and deciding to retire early in a remote, quiet part of the country. He originally wasn’t planning on buying a fixer-upper, but he told you how he fell in love with the scenery up here.

“It’s only going to get better,” you tell him as you’re painting a wall in his kitchen with a paint roller as he works on installing new cabinets, “wait until the leaves start changing. You’ve never seen anything like fall in New England, I promise.”

Then, to your surprise, Leon began to ask about you. You tell him how you had been forced to go to college for accounting and dropped out when you finally couldn’t take it anymore, much to your father’s disapproval. You watch Leon’s face grow serious as you tell him about how hard your father is on you.

“You really need to stand up for yourself, sweetheart,” you must have heard Leon tell you a thousand times now.

“I know,” you reply, “but he just wants what’s best for me. He just has a weird way of showing he cares. I promise he’s not a mean guy.”

You continue to tell Leon about your family until Leon finally interjects, “Not to change the subject, but can I ask you a personal question?”

You stop mid-roll with the paint roller, looking over at him as he finishes installing another cabinet door, “sure. Shoot.”

“Got a boyfriend?”

Your eyes widen, your breath catching in your throat; that certainly wasn’t a question you expected him to ask. Leon must see the look of shock on your face, because he immediately starts apologizing.

“No, no! It’s fine!” you assure him, collecting yourself, “no, I don’t. I casually dated a couple guys when I was in college, but nothing serious.”

“Can I ask another personal question?”

“Sure!”

“Are you a virgin?”

The butterflies in your stomach immediately start in, your face turning beet red as you attempt to compose yourself to answer his question, “y-yes… I am. I guess you could say I’m picky. I want my first time to be with someone special.”

Out of the corner of your eye, you see Leon smile at you before focusing his attention back on the kitchen cabinets, “there’s nothing wrong with that, sweetheart.”

Him calling you sweetheart was nothing new, you had gotten used to the nickname but this time, he said it with very clear intention and it shot straight into you, causing your clit to pulse in arousal. You try your best to ignore it.

“Can I safely assume you’re not a virgin?” you ask him, trying your best to just focus on painting the wall.

Leon chuckles, clearly amused by your question, “no, I’m definitely not. You could say I’m quite experienced in the matter.”

You weren’t surprised, especially considering Leon is 15 years older than you, a fact you often forgot because Leon was just so easy to talk to and get along with. Your mind begins to wander, imagining Leon being the one to take your virginity, how good he must be in bed with all the experience he has. You immediately shake the thought, ashamed you’re thinking such lewd thoughts when he’s right there. In an attempt to distract yourself, you look around the kitchen as you roll paint onto the wall, your eyes settling on a calendar Leon has hanging on one of the walls, which jogs your memory of a town event coming up.

“Has anyone told you about our annual Harvest Festival?” you ask, turning your attention back over to Leon. 

“No they haven’t. What’s that?”

“It’s more like a carnival than anything, it’s an event we’ve had going in town since… 1947 I think… 40 years now, just celebrating the harvest and the coming of fall. There’s carnival rides, livestock and most importantly, food. You should check it out if you get a chance. It’s the last full week of October.”

“Maybe we can go together and you can show me all there is to see,” Leon replies as he hoists another cabinet onto the wall.

Your heart skips a beat at his response, “i-if you want to go together… we certainly can.”

“I’d love to go with you.”

“O-Ok…!”

Leon finishes getting the cabinet up, brushing his hands together before looking at his watch, then to you, “let’s stop for lunch, sweetheart.”

You finish painting the section of the wall you were working on before looking over at Leon, giving him a nod of acknowledgement as you set down the paint roller. You watch as Leon grabs stuff out of the fridge to make sandwiches: bread, lettuce, tomato, mayonnaise, onion and what had to be the rarest roast beef lunch meat you’d ever seen. Despite that, Leon made killer sandwiches, so you always look forward to having lunch with him.

Plus you were, you know, having lunch with Leon.

He sets the sandwich stuff down on a clean spot of the kitchen counter, turning to you, “go ahead and get comfortable in the dining room. I’ll bring the sandwiches in when they’re done.”

“Sounds good, I’m just going to hit the bathroom first, though,” you reply as you walk out of the kitchen. 

You pass through the dining room, out into a hallway, you walk by what you assume is the basement door on your way to the bathroom. You do your business and come back out, noticing on your way out that the basement door is padlocked shut. 

“That’s odd,” you say to yourself as you stop and look at the padlock. 

You look around the door but you don’t see any sign of the key, not even on the small table that’s next to the door, which is even more odd. You then make your way back to the dining room, where Leon is already eating his sandwich, yours set in the other seat at the small dining table. 

“Why’s the basement door padlocked?” you ask as you take a seat at the table.

Leon finishes chewing, nodding in acknowledgement of your question before he speaks, “there’s a lot of personal stuff down there, files and junk. Because I used to work for the government, there’s some classified files down there, too. I keep it locked just so that stuff stays safe.”

“Ah ok, that makes sense, sorry for prying. I just happened to notice it when I walked by, that’s all,” you reply before taking a bite of your sandwich.

“No need to apologize, it’s only natural for you to be curious.”

You take this quiet moment eating lunch together to really admire Leon, but discreetly. Today, he is wearing a tight fitting black t-shirt, which only accentuates his muscular body. Your favorite part of him, however, had to be those beautiful blue eyes. You constantly find yourself lost in them when you talk to him. 

He suddenly makes eye contact with you, giving you a playful smirk when he notices you checking him out. You squirm in your seat, your heart racing as his ocean gaze seems to peer straight into your soul. There is no denying it now: you are hopelessly in love with Leon Kennedy.

“Mom, Dad! I’m home!” you call out as you walk into the house from the door that leads to the garage.

Your mother looks over at you from the kitchen sink as she does the dishes, “hey there, sweetie! How was your day?”

“It was good!” you reply as you hang up your purse and denim jacket in a small closet next to the garage door, “I painted some of the kitchen walls while Leon got the new cabinets up.”

“Hmph!” you hear your father from the living room where he’s sitting in his recliner, watching the news.

You watch your mother let out a heavy sigh as she shakes her head. Looking to you, she mouths ‘ignore him’ before focusing her attention back on doing the dishes.

“It smells amazing in here, what are you making for dinner, Mom?” 

“Pork roast with potatoes, onions and carrots, sweetie. Figured that’d be a nice meal for a crisp day like today. Go ahead and relax, sweetie, I’ll call you down when dinner’s ready!”

About an hour and a half later, true to her word, your mother calls you down for dinner. At first, you all eat dinner in silence as your father reads the newspaper. An ad for the annual Harvest Festival catches your eye, reminding you of your conversation with Leon earlier that day.

“I was telling Leon about the Harvest Festival today,” you say, pointing out the ad in the newspaper.

“Oh, that’s right! Is he going to go, you think?” your mother asks.

“I think we’re actually going to go together,” you reply, your cheeks immediately start to turn pink as you shift in your seat.

“So, what? Are you seeing him now, is that what this is about?” your father growls, his eyes glaring at you.

“Wait-- what? No!”

“How old is he?” your father asks, his tone still angry.

“He’s… 36…” you reply, trying to avoid your father’s gaze.

“And you’re 21. Absolutely not, you’re not going with him and that’s final. In fact, you’re going to call him right now and tell him you quit--”

“Mick, you’re being ridiculous!” your mother cuts him off, slamming her fork down onto the table.

“I’m trying to protect our daughter! There’s a 15 year difference between them, that’s not acceptable!” your father argues back.

“Mick we’re 10 years apart, how’s that any different? She’s an adult, she can make her own decisions. How many times do I have to drill that into your thick skull, Mick?”

Your father grumbles, angrily stabbing his fork into the pork roast and taking a bite, aggressively chewing.

Your mom shakes her head, looking back over at you, “I’m sorry sweetheart. You absolutely can go to the festival with Leon,” your mother looks back over at your father, narrowing her eyes at him, “right, Mick?”

You watch your father roll his eyes before responding, “yes, dear…”

A couple days go by after you got into that argument with your father, but thankfully it’s business as usual. You wake up early as usual, getting yourself dressed and eating breakfast before you head out the door to go to Leon’s house. As you drive down Hemlock Drive, you notice the bursts of color on the trees changing into their autumn colors. It wasn’t quite peak foliage yet, you reckon about another week or so before that happens.

You park your car in its usual spot in front of Leon’s house, climbing out and approaching the front door. You simply open the front door and walk inside; Leon had told you that you were always welcome and didn’t need to knock. Upon walking in, you see Leon’s got his leather jacket on and that he’s packing a backpack.

“Whatcha doin’?” you ask, trying to look to see what Leon is up to.

“Good morning, sweetheart! Figured we’d do something different today; you deserve a break for working so hard,” he replies as he continues packing the backpack.

“Like… what?” 

“I was thinking we could do the Basin trail today, especially since the fall colors are starting to pop up. I’ve heard people in town talk about it and wanted to see it for myself.”

You swallow hard, your anxiety immediately heightened, “you… do know there’s something in the mountains that’s been attacking hikers… right?”

Leon stops, turning to you, giving you a confident smirk before opening one side of his jacket to reveal a gun holster hanging from his torso with a 9mm handgun tucked inside.

“I’ll keep you safe. I promise.”

You give him a nervous nod, “i-if you say so…”

Leon gives you a reassuring smile before returning his attention back to finishing packing the backpack.

“There, bags are all packed and ready to go. I even made us sandwiches so we can have a little picnic in the mountains, doesn’t that sound nice?” Leon asks as he zips up the bag before handing it to you.

You grab the backpack, slinging it onto your back as you watch Leon grab the other backpack off the floor, slinging it over his shoulder as he gives you a wink, “ready to go, sweetheart?”

You follow him back outside, watching as he locks up.

“Are we taking your bike?” you ask as you look over to his motorcycle.

“No, we’ll be taking the Jeep,” he replies as he walks off the porch, turning to go to his Jeep parked on the side of the house; you follow close behind him.

He walks up to the passenger’s side door, opening it for you. You climb inside, slipping the backpack off your back and setting it onto the floor of the Jeep, as Leon climbs into the driver’s seat, putting on his seat belt. He turns the ignition and the Jeep comes alive with a low purr as you put on your own seat belt. 

“I hope Metallica is ok,” Leon says to you, smirking at you as he shifts the Jeep into first gear and starts driving.

As if on queue, ‘Master of Puppets’ begins to play. Metal isn’t exactly your thing, but the tune is undeniably catchy. As Leon drives you down Hemlock, you watch, almost hypnotically, as he shifts the Jeep from one gear to the next. The first thing you notice is you feel every single bump in this road; you find yourself grabbing onto the Jeep’s roll bar above your head to steady yourself. You think you hear Leon chuckle under the loud purr of the Jeep. 

Once on the main road, the ride was a little more steady, but not by much, you reckon that is just how Jeeps ride since this is your first time in one. Your gaze shifts from Leon’s hand on the stick shift, to out your window, watching the pops of color in the trees pass by, the sun finally cresting over the mountains. You suddenly feel Leon’s hand caress your thigh, causing you to jump a little as you look back over at him. He gives you a playful wink, his hand returning to the stick shift. 

Before long, he pulls into the trailhead for the Basin trail. The Basin is a rock formation formed by thousands of years of water running through it, first formed during the ice age; the erosion from the water making a natural, crystal clear pool. Parking the Jeep, he climbs out, putting on his backpack as he walks over to the passenger’s side, opening your door and letting you out. Setting out onto the trail, the two of you walk side by side, taking in the scenery as the two of you make small talk about what’s the next agenda in Leon’s house, the weather and even the upcoming Harvest Festival. You do mention your argument with your father, causing Leon to shake his head.

It doesn’t take long to come upon the Basin itself, you hear Leon let out a soft ‘wow’ as he approaches the large fence blocking off public access to the pool of water. You stand next to him, leaning up against the fence to admire the Basin. You’d seen it before, but it had been years since the last time you saw it; it is still just as beautiful and mystifying as you remember. 

“Cool, huh?” you ask.

“Very,” Leon replies, as he tries to nonchalantly reach over and snake his arm around your waist.

You feel yourself blush, but you let him, feeling him pull you closer to him as wraps his arm around your waist. For a few minutes, the two of you admire the Basin in silence, the sound of the water rushing in creating a sense of clarity. There is no doubt in your mind that you love Leon, and you’re starting to sense he feels the same way, or at the very least is attracted to you. From the corner of your eye you see Leon turn to you, a subtle smile forming on his lips.

“Can I kiss you?” he suddenly asks.

At first you weren’t sure if you heard him correctly, it takes you a moment to process it but when you do, your heart immediately starts racing. Turning to him, your face undoubtedly beet red.

You swallow hard, working up the courage to answer him, “y-yes… you can.”

Leon doesn’t hesitate, he shifts himself so that he has you pinned to the fence with his body, his hands gently cupping your face as he leans down, pressing his perfect lips against yours. It doesn’t take long for him to deepen the kiss, his tongue slipping in to explore your mouth. You do the same, your tongues dancing around each other as Leon’s hands trail from your face, over your torso before finally resting on your waist. Meanwhile, your hands run through his blonde hair as you softly moan into the kiss.

The sound of a wolf’s whistle startles both of you. Leon stops, turning around to find two college aged boys, undoubtedly from Plymouth State University, staring at the two of you, snickering before they move on, walking in the direction that you two had come from. Leon lets out a frustrated sigh.

“We should get going, we can continue this later,” he purrs, looking back down at you and winking.

You nod as the two of you walk away from the Basin, Leon’s arm once again wrapping itself around your waist to keep you close. The two of you hike in silence, enjoying the sounds of nature. Unfortunately, the moment is soured when a powerful odor hits you like a ton of bricks, stopping you in your tracks.

“Do you smell that, Leon?”

“I do… I unfortunately know that smell anywhere. It’s the smell of death.”

You pace around, trying to ascertain which direction the smell is coming from, “you don’t think… it’s one of the hikers… do you?”

“Could be a large animal, but we better check it out, in case it is one of the missing hikers. I think it’s coming from this way,” he says, gesturing off the trail.

As you both start heading off the trail, into the woods with you taking the lead. The odor is becoming stronger and stronger as you go further away from the trail, a clear sign you were heading in the right direction. Coming up over a small incline, you see what you were hoping not to see at the bottom, a person. You immediately cover your mouth and nose with your shirt, the stench at this point overwhelming. As much as you don’t want to, you get closer, being careful not to slip and fall going down the incline. Leon catches up with you, still following behind you.

As you get closer, you can see the person is lying on their side, their skin an eerie white. From what you can see, the person has bite marks on their neck, much like what was described on the other hiker that was found. You look all around the person for anything that can identify them, your eyes finally settling on a ring that’s on their middle finger, your heart immediately sinking. You recognize the ring as your class ring, which can only mean one thing:

It’s Nate Dion.

His plan couldn’t have worked out any better. Not only did he successfully win over her affections, which he wasn’t concerned about, but stumbling upon the body in the woods was no accident. He led her to the body. He wanted her to see what he is capable of, how powerful he is, how he can provide for her. Obviously, she doesn’t know this, not yet anyway. Now is not the right time to show her, or to give her his gift. 

Unsurprisingly, she threw herself at Leon upon the realization that it was the chief’s son. And, of course, he would hold her, smirking down at the body as she cried into his chest. Now, they were back in his Jeep, driving back into Oakvale to the police station. He looks over at her, seeing how she lays her head against the passenger’s side window, her arms wrapped around herself. His jacket is draped over her shoulders. Reaching over, he rubs his hand on her thigh to reassure her. She places her hand on top of his, squeezing it in acknowledgement. 

“It’ll be ok, angel, we’re almost at the police station,” he says to her. 

He turns his attention back onto the road, his hands gripping the steering wheel like a vice as he struggles to get his primal urges to breed under control. Finally he pulls up on the Oakvale police station, parking in one of the spots and killing the engine.

“I’ll go in and let them know what we found, angel--”

“I’m coming with you. Please don’t leave me alone, Leon…”

Looking over at her, he gives her a gentle smile, “of course, let’s head inside together, then.”

He gets out of the Jeep, walking around to let her out of the passenger’s side, immediately wrapping his arm around her in a protective gesture as they both walk inside the police station. Both of them walk up to the reception desk.

“We need to see Chief Dion,” Leon commands, resting his free arm on the counter as he glares down at the receptionist.

The receptionist pushes her glasses up off the bridge of her nose, “I’m sorry, Chief Bob’s currently in a meeting--”

“Please! It’s urgent, we found Nate…” his angel suddenly blurts out, the panic clear in her voice.

“What!” the receptionist exclaims, looking over at her, “is he…?”

“Yes, he’s dead, just like the other hiker they found the other day,” Leon replies.

The receptionist immediately picks up the phone, dialing a number, “Chief, Leon Kennedy and Mick’s daughter are here, they’re saying they found Nate…”

The receptionist hangs up the phone, looking at his angel, then to Leon, before continuing, “he’s expecting you, please go through the door on the left over there. His office is the first one on the right.

“Thank you,” Leon replies before he walks over to the door in question, his arm still wrapped around her shoulders.

Upon walking through the door, Leon finds the Chief’s office, walking in with his angel in tow. As soon as they enter, his angel lifts her head to address the Chief. 

“I’m sorry, Chief… he’s… he’s…” his angel begins, but then immediately breaks down sobbing. 

Leon wraps both his arms around her, trying to comfort her, “he’s dead, Chief Dion.”

“God…” Chief Dion says, looking to the floor, his eyes darting back and forth in disbelief before looking back up at Leon, “if I pull out a map, can you point out where you found him?”

Before Leon can even answer, his angel replies, “I can Chief…”

“R-Right… I’ll be right back then.”

Leon watches as Chief Dion leaves the office. He coaxes his angel over to a bench on the opposite side of his desk, sitting himself and her down as he holds her close, running his hand through her hair to love on her; to entangle her into his web even more. Leon buries his nose into her hair, inhaling her scent deep before placing a gentle kiss on the top of her head.

Before long, Chief Dion comes back out with a map of the trails in Franconia Notch, rolling it open to show his angel, “sweetheart, can you point on the map where you found Nate.”

Leon watches her turn her attention to the map; she ponders for a moment before pointing to a spot just off the Basin trail heading West, “right about here…”

“Off the Basin trail?” Chief Dion says, perplexed as he takes the map, looking at it with an eyebrow raised, “how on Earth did he end up over there?”

Shit Leon cursed mentally, he hadn’t thought about where he had originally grabbed him from, no matter, it’ll be fine.

Leon watches Chief Dion grab his transmitter, pushing the button to speak into it.

“Attention all units, I need Police, Fish and Game and EMT at the Basin trailhead immediately. Nate has been located. He’s… he’s dead…”

Chief Dion turns his attention back to Leon, “would both of you be able to stay here until I get back so we can collect a statement?”

“Of course, Chief, not a problem at all,” Leon replies, giving the Chief his best, kind smile.

“Thank you, I won’t be too long. Hang tight,” Chief Dion replies as he leaves the office, heading out the door to the receptionist area.

Leon wraps his arms around his angel even tighter, adjusting himself so that she could relax in his embrace. He watches her intently as her breasts rise and fall with each breath she takes. He can’t help but smile down at her.

Once we’re done here, I’ll bring her back home, and make her a nice dinner. Then I’ll continue where I left off earlier. It shouldn’t be very difficult to get her into my bedroom and--

“WHERE IS HE?!” a male voice shouts from the receptionist area, breaking Leon’s thoughts.

“Mick, you can’t go back there! Get back--!”

The door suddenly bursts open, an irate man charging through and coming into Chief Dion’s office.

“You…” the man practically growls as he looks down at Leon, “you son of a bitch!”

“Dad, what are you--”

“What were you planning on doing to my daughter?! Lure into the woods so you can have your way with her and then ditch her somewhere?!”

Leon rolls his eyes as he stands up, coming face to face with his angel’s father, Mick, noting how his face is red in rage, “what are you talking about?”

“Working on the house my ass! What the fuck are you doing dragging my daughter out into the woods alone with you?!” Mick continues, “I knew something wasn’t right about you!”

“Dad come on, please stop!”

“No! I am doing what’s best for you, this guy needs to fucking go!”

Mick suddenly comes at Leon swinging, landing a couple punches into Leon’s stomach before Leon is able to dodge them. Leon is unphased by the punches Mick did manage to land. Mick continues his assault, one punch missing and going straight through the sheet rock in Chief Dion’s office. Mick takes a second to shake his hand off before he continues to launch punches at Leon. It is taking everything in Leon not to snap and attack Mick with the full force of his abilities.

Leon, finally having enough of Mick’s mindless flailing of his arms, curls up his fist and punches him directly in the center of his face, breaking Mick’s nose instantly. Leon watches as blood runs out from his nostrils, his pupils dilating as the smell of blood goes straight to his head. He can feel his fangs descend and he fights off the urge to feed as Mick tries to get his hands around Leon’s neck. Leon reaches up, trying to grasp Mick’s hands to pry them off, however he’s too inebriated by the sight and smell of blood to be able to pry him off. 

Chief Dion and several officers come through the door, the officers grabbing Mick from behind and managing to get his hands behind his back to handcuff him. Leon rubs his neck with one of his hands, looking down at his other hand, seeing faint signs of his black veins. He’s able to finally get himself under control, the black veins disappearing without a trace and feeling his fangs retract. 

“What the hell is your problem, Mick?!” Chief Dion exclaims, his voice filled with disappointment. 

“I am just protecting my daughter,” Mick replies, his angry gaze focused on Leon.

In that moment, Leon knows one thing for certain:

The father needs to go.

Part 4

[vvatchword]

In Defense of BioShock Infinite

Although I had preordered BioShock Infinite with all its bells and whistles, I did not actually play it until January 2023. And lordy, I had me another Experience with a capital E. How the hell a bunch of urban Yanks could capture my experience as a queer democratic-socialist atheist struggling with her roots as a rural evangelical-cum-fascist is kinda magical, honestly. As to the game itself, it didn’t hurt how good it looked—the kickass skyhook gun battles—that novel setting—the complex characters—that delicious historical setting—that bloodthirsty critique of America—and to top it all off, they had pulled yet another Cassandra. Hell, speaking of which—not only was the game fun, it was fucking smart. It was intelligent, memorable, and meaningful in a way I hadn’t experienced in video games for years.

Now, back in 2013, when I had realized that I would be spoiled for Infinite, I left the BioShock fandom. After completing the game, I headed to Tumblr to re-engage, wagging my whole body like an excitable golden retriever, only to discover that BioShock Infinite was remarkably absent, and when mentioned, brutally derided. 

“I hate BioShock Infinite and all my friends do, too,” someone said in the tags under a post. 

I was utterly befuddled and deeply sad. I wanted to talk about BioShock Infinite! I wanted to dig into it, uncover unexpected ideas, learn new things, talk shit, make new friends—the full fandom experience. And instead I kept stumbling into hateful diatribes and super-charged disgust.

Obviously, I first looked at myself and my own judgment. Had I missed some obvious problem or misread some theme or dialogue? This wouldn’t be the first time I’d snapped down on a hook. But the more I thought about it, the angrier I got.

There are two parts of BioShock Infinite that are unquestionably terrible: the fridging of Daisy Fitzroy and the false equivalence of violence between haves and have-nots (lol what are the have-nots supposed to do, ask nicely?). Additionally, one could look at the use of real Native American tragedies as tasteless. Personally, I do not—in the same way that I don’t find it tasteless that real war victims were used as inspiration for Splicer deformities. This is what really happened; this is commentary on events that really happened to real people. 

At this point, I’m sure I don’t have to explain why two of these themes are Unequivocally Bad. 

Anyway, I thought that perhaps these were the reasons BSI had been condemned to Super Hell.

I was wrong.

How Criitcsim Werk

This wasn’t the fandom I’d made friends in over 2010. Hell, this wasn’t the fandom of 2013. This was a fandom made up of Babies. They were making their first coltish stumblings into media criticism and with it, dredging up the same brain-dead bullshit from Tumblr circa 2008.

Suddenly I was brought face to face with people who seemed to think that if a character couldn’t be likable or good that the story itself couldn’t be likable or good; that one bad element means the story is unsalvageable (lol u pussies); the implication that one is bad for liking it; the destructive juvenile insistence that media accurately measures its fans’ moral qualities en masse like an astrological sign. This goes far beyond simple like or dislike and plunges head-first into Puritanism: praying loudly on street-corners instead of quietly in a dark corner where God might hear you.

At one point I had a kid go off about how they wouldn’t take time to understand Booker DeWitt’s perspective because he had (fictionally) taken part in a genocide. (That same person said the Native American element had been employed for shock value, a thought that sometimes keeps me up at night, because it is legitimately one of the dumbest criticisms the game has ever received.) At another point I saw someone acting personally offended that (fictional person) Dr. Suchong’s (fictional) data was being stolen (in a fiction) by a (fictional) racist who would (fictionally) take credit for (fictional person) Suchong’s (fictional) inventions “while calling him slurs”. Sure, a better question would have been, “Why would the creative team opt to do this” rather than assume intentional racism from a Jewish creative director with an in-office multi-ethnic team in the year of our lord 2013, but why not handwave the choice with prurient moral dismay so your audience won’t beat you to death with bats? 

It was as though fans were treating these completely fictional characters as real people whose personal gods had opted to torment them, and that their tormentors merited the kind of censure that psychopaths should receive. As I hope all of you understand, this is fucking madness.

More than once I saw people posting about hating the studio or the creative director in ways that seemed intense, unreasoning, and excessive—notably an “I Hate [Irrational Games creative director] Ken Levine” stamp (rofl the more things change amirite). People get so performatively moralistic about it that I started wondering if I missed something big along the way. Was there some secret Voxophone I missed swearing fealty to baby Hitler or some shit?

Double Standards

At the same time, I was utterly confused. BioShocks 1 and 2 both featured some absolutely ghastly bullshit based on real-life horrors and a thick mix of complicated human beings—many of them victims who have become monsters. The fact they are grounded in historical tragedies is a huge part of their appeal. Hell, I don’t think those games would have had half their meaning without World Wars I and II and the threat of a third.

A gay man who feels so cursed by his orientation that he is incapable of intimacy and systematically destroys his ex-lovers—including the man he loves the most. A Korean who survived Japanese occupation and a Jewish Holocaust survivor repeat the violence and traumas exacted upon them and their people, subjecting a new generation to agonies unthinkable. Chasing the shadows of Bolsheviks, a Russian citizen becomes the brutal tyrant that he loathed. A rich lawyer with an easygoing drawl designs a concentration camp and systematically harvests hundreds, if not thousands of political prisoners, selling them out to medical testing for a quick buck.

But a Native man who destroys his own people and class to ensure his own survival and social acceptability is too far? This character is where people drew the line, so much so that the entire game is disavowed? Hell, if you’re just talking about Booker (rather than Comstock), he doesn’t have anywhere near the largest bodycount. If we were to judge on the metric of human misery alone, Booker wouldn’t even hit the top ten. 

Keep in mind that the most-discussed BioShock game on Tumblr is BioShock 2, and that one of the biggest fandom favorites is Augustus Sinclair—the easy-talkin’ Georgia lawyer who sells your character into horrors past all human comprehension, as he sold hundreds before and after you. Sinclair is a motherfucker so vile that BioShock 2 gives you no choice but to murder him. But Sinclair is also pleasant; good-looking to some; spends the whole game making sweet love to your ear; is one of the only true positive experiences you experience in a horror story. Unlike DeWitt, a man who is brutal and awful from step one, Sinclair is smooth and sweet. Unlike DeWitt, Sinclair’s victims are faceless, completely fictional, and carry no political or social baggage.

People fuckin’ ship this guy with Subject Delta, his explicit victim. He’s usually described as a squishy cinnamon roll. In most fanfiction, he often gets to escape to the surface and fuck Delta while helping raise Eleanor as Dad 2. It is rare that I find fanfiction that acknowledges his monsterhood in all its glory. In fact, I can only think of two.

Literacy Comes in Levels

My problem with the over-the-top hatred of BioShock Infinite is along the same lines as my confusion at Twilight and Harry Potter hate: there is so much worse out there (how much do the haters actually engage with media if they think this is that bad—yes, even considering the shitty creators themselves!), the hatred far outweighs the sin committed (in BioShock’s case, the truly bad bits are not central enough to derail the larger narrative), people don’t seem to hate it so much as they want to be seen hating it, fans want to enforce an unspoken rule hating it (bitches this is poison. Stop this), and there’s something about the hate that stinks of poor reading comprehension.

A great metric for general literacy is the newspaper. In journalism, you’re writing for the lowest-common denominator, which for years here in the USA has been about a fifth-grade reading level (about 10-11 years old, for my non-American readers). The AP posted an article a couple years back about how the general reading comprehension of Americans needs to be dropped to a third-grade one (8-9 years), and baby, I’m here to say it’s true. 

Most of the problem is that the American education system is shitty as fuck. The rest of it is from an extremely American disdain of intellectualism and the arts. People are not taught how to interpret art or literature—a difficult and subtle skill which involves accepting such truths as “multiple contradictory readings can exist and yet be simultaneously correct”, “the author can be a complete tool and still be right about things”, “the author can be a great person and still write horrifyingly incorrect bullshit”, and “worthwhile works can be ridiculously long and it really is your fault for not having an attention span”. 

Media criticism must be learned through trial, error, asking questions, confidently swaggering into a public space to announce your brilliant insight only to have your ass handed to you (usually by your older self ten years later), being willing to admit you swaggered confidently into a public space to state bullshit and then amending your bullshit only to produce more bullshit, and otherwise making a complete and utter cock of yourself. We are taught to fear and flee pain and failure, despite the fact this is how we learn and improve. Because we judge our value by whether or not we are “smart,” we are afraid of displaying that we don’t know something or might be mistaken–better not to try at all than to reveal ourselves to be fools. And yet the best way to learn is to crash up against someone else and be proven wrong!

American parents are terrified of hurting their children to the point that they spare them cognitive dissonance of any kind, disavowing difficult art—without any appreciation for the fact that art is how we provide safe spaces to explore key human experiences, better preparing us to face those difficult subjects when there are real-world consequences (sex, gender and social expression, grief, violence, predation, illness, interacting with people of different ideologies, whatever new issue is pissing off some smooth-brained old motherfucker somewhere). 

If parents and teachers aren’t teaching us how to interpret art, we’re probably never going to develop the skill at all, or crash unsubtly into it in a piecemeal fashion (hello it me). Another unfortunate side effect is that these readers tend to be blitheringly superficial: they are literally intellectually incapable of reading deeper than the uppermost layer of a text. The curtains are always blue.

And let’s not forget the role moral performatism plays in media criticism, which although faaar from new, has reached hilarious levels in the age of social media. What’s important isn’t understanding something, it’s finding something to symbolically burn at the stake so everyone knows God loves us: please keep loving me, please don’t hurt me, please don’t throw me on the fire—for performatism is not for outsiders. We long for human connection so fucking much that it’s more important to destroy what might point out our fallibilities than it is to let ourselves stand in the furnace and burn out the dross.

What do you think the point of BioShock Infinite was?

Emotional Machines

Let’s face it. Human beings give a lot more credence to how something makes them feel than they do its complex invisible reality. We are not logical creatures; we are emotional ones. Our logic is too new a biological mechanism to override something as powerfully stupid as our primal lizard brains.

Knowing this, let’s take BioShock’s most popular characters. The first two are Subject Delta and Jack Wynand, the protagonists of BioShocks 2 and 1, respectively; and why not? They’re the characters we play. In the first two BioShocks, whether or not you kill Little Sisters determines the ending you receive. In other words, Delta and Jack can only be as “wicked” as the players are. 

How do people want to see themselves? As good. What do people want to see around themselves? Good. (What is “good”? Uh, well,,,,,,) What do they want? Simple moral questions with simple moral answers. And in the first two BioShocks, what is moral is obvious: don’t kill little girls. It’s actually kind of insulting once you say it out loud.

In-fandom, Jack and Subject Delta are almost never painted as murderers or monsters, but as victims and heroes; I saw someone musing about putting Subject Delta on a “gentle giants” poll and I nearly choked on my own tongue. I only saw that musing because someone put Subject Delta and Jack in a “Best Fathers” poll. Nobody in-fandom really considers the “evil” or “complicated” endings as canon choices, despite those versions being fully understandable alternate readings, with a story that doesn’t make sense without them. (I don’t believe Burial at Sea is necessarily canon; in fact, I would bet good money that it is a huge middle finger lol, mostly because a number of brain-dead motherfuckers won’t take unhappiness for an answer.)

Most fandom art and writing is gentle, sweet, good: the symbolic healing of the damaged, the salvation of innocents, the turning of new leaves. These things are not just saccharine sweet—they tend to be unrealistically sweet. Now, far be it from me to demand these works cease. There’s a reason they exist. People write them because they need hope and happiness; I have enjoyed them greatly myself and intend to enjoy them in the future. But if y’all get to have your dessert, I demand the right to have my dinner.

The Colours Out of Earth

Let there be media where the opposite can also be true: where everything is unbelievably complicated and unforgivably fucked-up. Let there be characters who slide slurs into their speech without thinking. Let there be characters who destroy themselves in a thousand different ways, not all of them obvious, some of them horrifying. Let there be well-meaning people struggling with all their mights to do what is right only to destroy everyone around them and then completely miss the fact it’s all their faults. Let there be wickedness painted as goodness, superficial appearances accepted over essential and inherent values, denial of change and transformation, failure to accept that what is old must die and what is new must live, human stupidity and short-sightedness and cruelty in all their flavors. Let’s smash it all together and see how it plays out. 

Oh, badly? No shit! But “badly” isn’t the point. How does it play out?

Let there be a world of gradients—a place I can float from color to color, hue to hue, value to value, while attempting to figure out where, why, how, and by whom they transform—to taste concepts in a hundred different ways, test their textures by a hundred different mediums, insert them into a hundred different contexts. I need to understand why I feel the way I do; I need to understand morality in all its hideous, fragmentary glory. For I have been sold to a ideology of blacks and whites, and let me tell you: it prepares you for nothing, and it will always destroy what is most precious about human life.

I can no longer believe in a world where what is lost always returns, because that world does not exist. I have a reflexive need to come to terms with Finality: what I have lost, what I have destroyed, what will never return, what will never be better. I have a reflexive need to understand Transformation: what I am now, what is as of the present, what has risen shambling from the ashes, what turns to gaze upon me in the darkness. I need to understand what is wretched about me as much as I need to heal myself. How can I heal if I can’t understand how I have hurt and been hurt? 

I need to shine a light in the dark. Not to remodel it, not to destroy it—because I also can’t believe in a world where the wicked is destroyed forever—but to behold it, to learn from it, to view my own impact upon it, to accept how it has become a part of me, to learn how to do my best (because that’s all one can do). I must learn to love people more than causes, I must learn to love people rather than the act of winning, I must learn to love people rather than battle. I need to stand in that endless black with the lamp off and my eyes closed, letting the agony roll over me, burning with a fire that throws no light, rolling back and forth from an intense self-loathing to a fury at a society that destroys what is most valuable because it didn’t make them feel the way they wanted.

The Unforgivable

I believe that there are only two differences between Booker DeWitt and his equally cursed cohorts.

In the Hall of Whores: The Unmarked Slate

First, unlike the previous two games, where you enter the world as a tabula rasa and might roleplay as what you perceive as a good person, you are explicitly put into the shoes of a monster, and nothing you do can save you.

With other shitty BioShock characters, you are passively watching other people, and you are able to hold yourself apart. Sure, everyone else is crazy as fuck from using biological Kryptonite, but you’re too smart to end up a crazy fucking asshole like them! Sure, you are now technically a mass murderer, but those fuckers deserved it, damn it! 

“Look at this crazy bastard!” you say, rolling your eyes at the Steinmans and Cohens and Ryans and Fontaines. “It sure is a great thing I’m not a crazy bastard!”

You are able to escape acknowledging that you, too, in certain circumstances, might be the crazy bastard. You are being challenged to stand in the body of a person who has committed unforgivable sins. Imagine if you yourself committed those sins. Imagine what sins you have already committed. Imagine what brutalities you cannot take back. Imagine what horrors you have wreaked just by breathing.

“Ahhhh!” said players, probably. “What do you mean I’m not allowed to be good?”

Because that’s what the game was designed to do. Because “good” is a fucking cop-out and if it’s how you live with yourself wait until you find out you’ve been doing horrifying bullshit all your life without question. You can be evil by association through no fault of your own.

Original Sin

Second, the plight of Native Americans is a sin that non-Natives will always carry, and the socially conscious are aware of this even if they don’t know how to put it into words. The state of affairs being what it is, it is unlikely that First Peoples will ever be treated humanely, much less have their land returned. They must struggle for scraps of what is rightfully theirs while we lounge on their corpses. We cannot help but benefit from their destruction; we are made unwitting partners with our forebears; we steal the fruits of their lands and make mockeries of their faiths and identities. We have destroyed part of what made this world fascinating and unique and most of it can never be returned. Even if everything were to be made right tomorrow, their genocide is a sin that we will carry until we die, because the only reason we could be here at all is because they were killed. 

The obvious solution stands before us, but the powers that be are so much greater than we that we are effectively powerless, and achieving anything less than total restoration smacks of anticlimax. 

This is unbearable.

How can one think of oneself as a good person if one sees the good that must be done, but cannot achieve it? If one’s actions are meaningless? Goodness without action is pretension.

We are all Booker DeWitt. We have all set fire to the tipi. We swept the ashes away, we ignored the sizes of the bones, we built a CVS on their graves, and then we made statues and holidays commemorating Native Americans like the world’s cheapest “Thinking of You” card. We have de-fanged them, transformed them into cardboard cutouts, and set them up as cute little side characters in our sweeping American dream.

Booker is not a man. Booker is America and Americans—and America and Americans are monstrous: one part hypocrisy, two parts incessant violence, three parts constant peacocking, and four parts dumb as a stump.

The Monsters We Make

Outside of the message about “choice,” an enormous part of BioShock’s thematic ensemble is the creation of monsters. How are monsters created? Who or what is responsible for creating them? What do the monsters think made them the ways they are? Can a monster be saved? How? Is it enough to acknowledge you did wrong and want to be a better person?

Maybe most people are aware on some instinctive level of what facing one’s own monsterhood means. No one wants it. It’s not fun. It hurts. It’s embarrassing. It’s destructive. It’s admitting you don’t have it all together and might never, ever—that despite your best actions, you can have it horribly wrong at any point. In an age where we demand moral perfection, it demands vulnerability: you must admit that sometimes you’re the racist, the transphobe, the sexist, the nationalist, the classist, the homophobe, the violent, the wrong, the dumbfuck. 

Human beings are not built to be moral; human beings are built to survive. We so rapidly learn how to deal with our contexts at such young ages that we don’t have the time or capabilities to question why those contexts are the ways they are or why it is demanded we perform the ways we do.

In a very real way, BioShock Infinite demands vulnerability of us. It demands you look in the mirror and see what is monstrous in you—how you have been created—manufactured—a tool, a machine, a trained animal. It asks you to recognize that you can be a monster simply by association. And if we can’t look into the mirror and truly acknowledge that monsterhood, we run very real risks of becoming or enabling those monsters in one way or another.

Worst of all: perhaps monsterhood isn’t optional. Perhaps the monster was inside of us from the very beginning. It’s not a matter of if you become a monster, but when, under what circumstances, by whose hand. What is more, believing the “right” moral stances will not save you. Monsterhood can afflict anyone, in any ideology, any political stance, in any social movement, in any faith. The only element that can save you is to truly love other people, and even then, you can fail, for there can be states where there is no winner and ways to misread how best to treat another person.

Environment and Society: Context Will Not Be Denied

BioShock 1’s original ending is Jack-as-monster, regardless of how many children he saves, regardless of your feelings as player. He passes through the gauntlet of Rapture, but he has supped of its poison. And he wasn’t poisoned when he entered Rapture the second time—he was poisoned the minute he was conceived. He was born of it. He had no hope of ever escaping it—he never could have—he’d never had a choice to begin with.

No matter what choices you make in BioShock Infinite, Elizabeth will always kill you. Why? Because she has seen every world—every context—every limitation—every boon. And there is no way to stop what has been; there is no way to undo what has been done. The minute you have committed to a decision, you have split the universe; there is no telling what kind of person it will make you. In fact, there’s no telling which of your decisions will matter at all. Only Elizabeth can see because she is the unlimited future: your offspring stands before you, judge and jury, and you will have no choice but to accept her verdict, for despite your name, you are incapable of controlling how you are interpreted. 

Elizabeth sits across from you in the boat and stares without blinking. She sees a million million similar Bookers. Some are a little bit taller, some a little bit shorter, some a little heavier or lighter. Some more-resemble one grandparent or another. They have different colored ties. This one blinks when rain hits him in the eyeball. That one took a brutal beating back on the airship and one eye is swollen shut. That one can’t stop shaking; this one is unable to speak at all; one hasn’t yet lost hope, although even he doesn’t realize it.

They all lowered the torch to the tipi.

The baptism determined Comstock; what determined Booker?

Why Booker Is

In BioShock 1, characters are often stand-ins for larger concepts. Thus Ryan stands in as Ayn Rand’s Objectivist Ubermensch; Bill McDonagh as Andrew Ryan’s conscience; Diane McClintock as the citizenry of Rapture; Captain Sullivan as law and order; Frank Fontaine as the truest expression of Objectivism in its distilled form.

Who is Booker? Most importantly: why is he?

Booker is a fictional character with a brutal background based on historical events, alternative and true. Booker might be Lakota; Booker might have undergone forced Anglicization; Booker might have been ripped from his parents; Booker is a product of violence, perhaps literally. Booker is American exceptionalism distilled. Booker is the past in constant judgment of itself, unable to live with itself and unable to die. Booker destroys what is best in him and around him in exchange for belonging. Booker has sold the future to absolve his sins. Booker has sold his daughter because he is a fictional character in a work of fiction who needs to be propelled.

Booker is a shell, a sluice, an environment. Booker is the broken shape you are meant to fill, horrified. His internal shape should torture you as it has tortured him: the messy slaggy soul of a shitty tin soldier.

Does Booker take the baptism and become Comstock? If so, it might be his second one. His last name literally means “the white.” His first name can mean “author.” It is most likely his second name: an attempt to rewrite himself. And when he was unable to rewrite himself the first time, when the cognitive dissonance boiled at the edges of his skull, he found there was only one way to cleanse himself the second: to remake the world entirely. To force transformation on everyone else. To take vengeance on a world that could never love him, never want him—to create a world that has no choice but to love him. If he can’t change the world’s mind, he’ll change the world.

Note what he opts to do: to take the fight to the environment–to the unyielding universe.

Context Is Everything

It is no mistake that BioShock Infinite occurs in 1912: the sinking of the Titanic is often credited with ending an unfettered optimism, a period when the Western world believed technology had brought the human race into a golden age. With World War I—which would follow a mere two years later—came modern warfare and all the horrors thereof, not the least of which was the realization that humans had created a kind of war that could destroy the entire world. World War I also seeded the rise of the United States: much of the wealth of warring Europe—itself fat on the blood of subjugated peoples and stolen lands—would rattle into America’s coffers.

It is also no mistake that BioShock 1 directly follows World War II. With WWII came a heightened terror—that this war is not the last war, that there will never be an end to war, that war will go on expanding and expanding until it has consumed us all. World War III would not be denied: prettily packaged in the ideals of its children, it simply followed the utopians down to their underwater tombs. According to BioShock 1’s original ending, World War III is not a matter of if—it’s a matter of when.

But even more important than the history in the BioShock games are their settings. Mute leviathans, Rapture and Columbia determine all of your behaviors: from where you can exist in space to all of your desires and goals to how you choose to present yourself to how you opt to behave. Isolated in extremism—whether that extremism is the crushing depths of the ocean or the unbearable lightness of the air—most of their power is that they simply cannot be escaped. You can’t outrun them. They are everywhere. They are everything.

Like Lovecraft before it, BioShock acknowledges the greatest horror of all: you cannot escape your context. Your context does not only involve your immediate surroundings. It is also historical; contains zeitgeists from various cultures and subcultures; is filled with pressures both personal and impersonal, human and nonhuman. Many of these forces can hurt you. Many more can destroy you. What you do to survive depends very much on where, when, and with whom you must live.

Human beings are not built to be moral.

The Death of the Future

In the film Operation, Burma!, a soldier asks Errol Flynn: “Who were you before the war?”

“An architect,” says Flynn.

Who were you? Because that “you” doesn’t matter now. That “you” is irrelevant. So you’re an architect. What the war does to you; what these deaths mean to you; your past, your education, your loves and desires and forward motivation, the you that could have been outside war, the you that slogs alone into the brutal future—all completely irrelevant. Your forebears don’t care so long as you can bleed. 

Children are the manufactured tools of their creators—helpless before the enormous strength of their elders and the zeitgeists that enclose them, poisoned by their parents’ insecurities and flaws, utilized like weapons regardless of the cost—often with great love.

Consider something more than the traumatized culture: consider the society filled with traumatized children; consider the traumatized society. Consider channeling children through that trauma over and over and over again, if you can. Poisoned—poisoned—poisoned—all of us poisoned. Poisoned by those who loved us most. Poisoned by the people we trusted. Poisoned by the people who meant to make a better world.

I believe it is notable that creative director Ken Levine is Jewish; I have read from multiple accounts that the European Jewish diaspora was uniquely traumatized from the Holocaust and passed that trauma down upon their own families. I sometimes wonder if he saw that firsthand.

The fathers eat sour grapes; their children’s teeth are set on edge.

Choice: Player Expectations and Entitlement

For players who experienced BioShocks 1 and 2 with their multiple endings (Good, Bad, and “ok bye then I guess” respectively), it must have been jarring to suddenly reckon with being a monster. How often I see players grousing that nothing they do will change their wicked pasts! These players completely miss that the only meaningful choice had already been made, that it had nothing to do with the player at all, and even if they had been there, DeWitt was still unforgivable. The only way to go on was to bow out and allow the future to redefine herself.

Nobody was ready for that shit. 

Like it or not, BioShock 1 had set a precedent. Not everyone’s going to read up on creator intentions. If any keyword came blaring through the noise, it would have been “choice.” Most players only recognize choice by the ability to make it, not the absence of it, and most of them weren’t equipped to recognize that its lack was the point. The meaningless choices were commentary, and they were as much about the player as they were about DeWitt himself. Not every choice will be meaningful, will it? And there will be choices you make that will be momentous, but they will seem very small when you make them.

Because most players had experienced what they thought was a basic moralistic tale in the first two games, and would see Infinite not as reflection upon America’s destructive personality, its obsession with a meaningless Good/Bad duocracy, and the infinite, cyclical nature of violence, they saw Booker’s death as corrupted artsy claptrap.

“I did the good schuut,” they say. “I want the good schuut end. Where happy end??? Where treat :(”

Bitch the future is here. 

Time to die.

It’s Not Me, It’s You

Generally I despise essays that end with, “But the real fault lay with the clueless motherfuckers who played the game!” Often, if enough people complain, there’s something to it; the message has been obscured somehow. Details or explanations weren’t clear or intuitive enough, some mechanism isn’t working somewhere, some character needs to talk more or less, some setting needs to be transformed. O artist: stop whining and get cracking. If everywhere you go smells like shit, it’s time to look under your shoe. 

But sometimes it’s true that a piece of media is on a level folks aren’t equipped for. Think of every literature and art class you’ve ever had, if you’ve been fortunate enough to have one. There’s always someone scoffing in a back row, like here are all these jokers making more of something than they should. Similarly, some of you have been arguing with me this entire time, saying: “I just wanted a video game. I just wanted to shoot something and feel better and instead I get this bullshit ending that makes no sense.”

First of all, smart bullshit (and even fucked-up attempts at smart bullshit! Hi BioShock 2) gets to exist on this Earth along with Gmod and Roblox or Schuut Big Tits 84 (there are 84 tits and you must shoot them all. They explode into smaller tits) or whatever-the-fuck-else you think is a worthwhile gaming experience. Second of all, miserable bullshit also gets to exist, and what did you fucking expect if you played through either BioShocks 1 or 2? When you hear a football player quavering out in the darkness for his mom to pick him up, how’d that make you feel? What did you think was going to happen to Jack after pounding back the entire Plasmid library, the cancer cocktail that explicitly destroys the fuck out of its users? Third of all, if you missed the smart bullshit going on in BioShock 1 and didn’t think BioShock Infinite might be larger in scope in more ways than one, that’s on you. Fourthly, if you were simply satisfied with saving like, 15 kids from a violently-perishing city of thousands and call it good, I mean… is that really where your thoughts end? Are you really that fucking small?

It’s Not You, It’s Me

You ever meet those motherfuckers who talk shit about Shakespeare or modern art? And you’re just left there staring with dead eyes at this poseur who mistakes playing devil’s advocate for intelligence, cheek resting on your fist, thinking about the fanfic you’re writing, wondering who it’s for, remembering that all your smut-writing friends get ten times the viewers, and considering throwing yourself in front of a bus.

Yeah, there’s a personal element to this: the fact that BioShock Infinite is the kind of art I like and long for and want to make myself, the fact that the game was successful and yet the studio was closed, the way its DLC was so rushed that the story plopped out like half-baked mystery meat—realizing that the same forced rush was at 2K’s behest for BioShock 2, as well, and wondering how good art can ever be made in this unforgiving capitalist hellscape. The game was weirdly niche and I’m not 100% sure I’ll ever experience anything quite like it again. And with the whiners in this fandom, the loud ones controlling the narrative, some fresh brain-dead exec in some brain-dead publisher might be like: “We must keep it safer and simpler for these fuckin babby adult!”

Nah bitch nah. Naaaah. Cry some more while I enjoy me my fucking dinner. I’ll eat it while making loud smacking noises and keeping unbroken eye contact. Come here. Let’s look at each other. It’ll be like Lady and the Tramp but we want to punch each other. What truer form of love can there be here in the modern world?

I keep having to remind myself that this response isn’t new. I keep having to remind myself of my place. I keep having to remind myself why I write, why I read, why I like to experience art to begin with. It’s not for the reasons other people do it. Oh, I want the same emotional release as everyone else, I want the same rollicking plots, I adore the same tropes. I seek out everything and anything for a good time; I’ll read Moby Dick today and a smutty 5,000-word abortion with the world’s most suspect grammar tomorrow. I don’t give a shit if it’s low- or high-brow; there are all kinds of ways to have fun and there are all kinds of ways to engage with art, and lord knows I’ve done my share of smooth-brain criticism. The problem is that I’ve always wandered off by myself, sunk into an all-consuming reverie, on tracks that no one else ever seems to be on, and then looked up to talk excitedly about something only to realize I’m alone. And whose fault is that?

By the same token, maybe I haven’t talked enough. Maybe I spend too much time with my mouth shut. Maybe I haven’t stood up enough for things that are worth our time, worth talking up, worth setting on pedestals.

I tell you, BioShock Infinite will stand the test of time. It’s too good for this. It’s too good for you, warts and all. Some of you will grow to understand that; some of you won’t; many of you will shrug and go on with your lives (and this is fine; it is only a video game). But I’ve truly not seen anything like it. I can’t believe a mainstream video game was allowed to be so fucking brutal about the American juggernaut, and what’s more, that it sold like hotcakes. Plus, I can’t think of any works in recent memory that have struck me so close to my own heart. No creative work has made me start beating a monster’s face into a washbasin for ten hours only to lift her by the scalp and see my own eyes looking back.

Look into those eyes. See your own stupid impulses pouring out. Your own stupid excuses, your violences, your sins—your claws, your teeth, your costumes, your hilarious attempts at interpretive dance. The beast doth protest too much.

O, monster—behold thyself—and tremble.

[stellamalonesolaria]

BTS Kim Taehyung X Reader X Jeon Jungkook FF | see through me | oneshot

pairing: model!kim taehyung x fangirl!reader. slight jungkook x reader. slight jimin x reader.

genre: obsessive love au, angst, age gap au

warning: minors dni as the post contains: violence, sexual violence, gore, foul language, drugs usage, nsfw: nipple play, masturbation, cock sucking.

word count:

11,419 words 62,280 characters

what was i listening to: click here

author's note: have not proofread, kindly ignore any sort of grammatical or spelling error in the story. hope you enjoy this fic.

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At the benevolent age of nine, when kids continue watching their favourite cartoons, you’re introduced to fashion magazines by your best friend Evie who has been dreaming of becoming a model before she could even learn how to walk and because of her you’ve been obsessed with dresses ever since.

At the age of ten, while you’re trying out the new clothes bought by your mom, who appears to have the exact opposite taste in fashion as you, you’re also scrolling through one of the newly released magazines. As you go through the pages covering the latest articles containing information about some of the finest designs in the world along with their creators, you stumble across, a young model, who looks like he’s in his late teens, absolutely captivating your attention with his beguiling style and looks. You glance at the far-end corner of the page, locating his name, as you read out loud ‘Kim Taehyung.’, a name that would be inscribed within your heart for life.

At the age of eleven, when the young model turns legal, you read a tabloid on your mother’s phone, stating how Kim Taehyung, the person you’ve started admiring, will start out his career as an aspiring actor. You read the comments on the web article praising him for his aspiring acting venture, some even thirsting over him due to his swoon worthy looks at such a vulnerable age. Some calling him their daddy, perplexing you with the fact that he’s a father of so many girls. A smile forming on your delicate features as you now fantasise him appearing on television now.

At the age of twelve, you’ve collected many pictures and photo cards of your beloved then-model now-actor Kim Taehyung. You have your first celebrity crush as your cheeks turn a scarlet shade of red whenever his scenes come up on the netflix show you binge watch with your mother in which he’s starring. Your parents think how adorable you’re with your little crush on the prominent figure in the entertainment industry right now.

At the age of thirteen, your best friend Evie confesses her crush on the aforementioned actor, you feel a pang of jealousy that day, realising that the feelings you harboured for the actor are more than a mere crush your parents like to title your adoration for him. You return home and decide to keep your love a secret from your parents and Evie, fearing they’d not understand if you did tell them.

At the age of fourteen, you’re exposed to the dark web, your other friend Jason introduced you to the site saying that he found hard core porn on here. At first, you were skeptical of dark web but with your growing infatuation with the actor and the multiple posters and collages of his cut out pictures on your wall, all the fan fictions on tumblr not being able to satisfy your increasing thirst for him, the urge to have him, you have had to resort to this mystic side of the internet now. You’ve found over a million shirtless pics of him on the dark web but you seemingly want more. As you surf through the illegal webpages, you find an ai generated porn site, which contains nude pictures of celebrities created by artificial intelligence. You now feel perverted as you shamelessly enter his name onto the search bar, as the site automatically and quickly generates your favourite’s naked photos. You feel yourself growing hot, your fingers sliding inside your panties as you masturbate by rubbing, slapping and inserting fingers inside your core. You curl your fingers inside your vagina while thinking of Taehyung, your walls perfectly grasping over your fingers. Oh how you wish, the fingers pleasuring your cunt were not yours but his instead.

At the age of fifteen, you’ve saved enough money to bid for Taehyung’s hair strand on an illegal auction site. You’re sold his hair strand at the cost of 10,000 dollars, exceeding your budget but you’d never back down when it comes to him, you’ve compulsively rewatched his shows and movies over a hundred times and even cursed out his female co stars on internet forums for establishing such a close relationship with him. You’ve also targeted the actresses he was being shipped with by sending them death threats so you’ve had to have his Dna with you, even if it’s through a hair strand, at any cost. You use your dad’s credit card to pay for the highest bid you entered, transaction going unbeknownst to him.

At the age of age of sixteen, your obsession dies down after being sued by the actresses for cyber bullying and your grades falling down. You’ve to momentarily stop fan girling over the charming actors to excel in school. As time goes on, you lose interest in Kim Taehyung, slowly letting go of your obsession and after a while, you’re being confessed to by a sweet boy, Jimin, whose feelings you start to reciprocate due to his compassionate and tender nature. His facial characteristics are remarkable as well, he could easily start out his idol career with his angel like voice gifted to him by almighty. You both start dating immediately after the confession, going on little dates where you doll up yourself by caking your face with makeup, adorning yourself with pearls accentuating your beauty, taking his breath away. Few weeks into the relationship, on the auspicious occasion of Christmas, you both share a sweet kiss under the mistletoe, your lips quivering due to the adoration jimin pours into passionately kissing you, gently moulding your soul with his, serenading your soft plump lips with his love filled pecks. Your relationship with him seems to be going well, however, a few months later, as your friend Evie gets her first modelling gig for a colossal fashion corporation and Jimin gets into coaching for bagging the top universities, his eyes set on Wharton, you also get busy with your studies, slowly drifting away from him, it hasn’t affected you much at first as you both called each other frequently. Gradually, those calls have also become infrequent, leading to you becoming distant from him, this ultimately resulting in frustration due to festering of unresolved skirmishes. You both started to hate each other with time due to improper communication problems in your relationship with him. Many weeks have passed by with you and him holding grudges against each other over every fight you both have had in the past. Now with your seventeenth birthday approaching, you’re planning to sort things out with him and be the reasonable one this time for the sake of your birthday. You plan to text him to meet you soon but you’re taken aback when he texts you first asking you to visit him in the evening. The following evening, you go meet him in the park, chirping because you’re happy he’s the initiating to resolve your conflicts with him and he does the exact opposite, contrary to what you’ve hoped for, he breaks up with you instead, you fall on to the ground, kneeling down, as those words leave his lips with no hesitation, you spiral into a melancholic state as tears pool near your eyes, silently wishing for the earth to rip into two halves and swallow you whole. This is like a dagger plunged through your heart, you let out a shriek, a painful whisper of the aching heart Jimin left you with, you watch him leave you in doldrum, you get up on your feet, trying to regain strength to walk back to your place, after you’re done crying for him in the park. Few days have passed since the heartbreaking separation from your beloved, which has still left you burning and ceasing into ashes as the pain is too much to endure.

Your friend Evie visits you during a short break from her modelling career, seeing you in a devastatingly pathetic state because of Jimin, she gasps, “Y/n babe who died?”, she asks concern evident in her tone, “Jimin broke up with me.”, you respond your voice croaking as a faint whisper, “Oh no honey, we need to revamp you. That piece of shit is not worth your cries, oh no honey, I’m here for you, I’m so sorry for being so late.”, she comforts you as she coos into your ears, her words feel like a lullaby because her voice starts to soothe you down and ease your aching heart, “Thank you Evie”, you say sincerely, “Always here for you baby, you know what’ll cheer you up? Love Marathon on Netflix!”, she chirps trying to distract you via a drama, in which, your once beloved star Taehyung acts in as the second lead, “Sure”, you give out a small smile to her as she sets up a laptop in front of you and plays the first episode of the drama. Few hours later, Evie has fallen asleep on your bed while you’re watching the show’s sixth episode in which Kim Taehyung’s character is trying to convince the female lead into choosing him instead over the main male character after a messy breakup with the male lead. You watch him attentively as he says, “I promise if you choose me I’ll treat you much better than he ever did, please-“, to which the female lead responds, “Eun suk-ah, I love the male lead and I think I always will, even if he has hurt me or broken my heart countless times, I don’t think I’d be able to ever get over him.”, Taehyung sighs as he hears her, “You know what, you love him but you deserve to be with someone who makes you feel loved as well and not just leave you because you’re going through a rough patch, you deserve someone who is willing to fight for you no matter what.”, he says as you feel his eyes directly staring into yours through the screen as though he’s directing these words towards you with sincerity glinting in his eyes, his words deeply resonating with you which feels like a warm embrace to your soul, you feel like he’s hugging you figuratively with the words that leave his mouth, still staring into your eyes via the screen, he continues, “don’t give up on love because of one bad experience, you’ve me, always did, come back to me, I’ll heal you, you deserve all the love there is in the world.”, your heart skips a beat, Kim Taehyung slowly enveloping your senses again, your tears dry up as you feel a jolt of excitement, you pause the show as you get up and search through your drawers to find his hair strand which you had bought a little while back from the dark web, you gently whisper to him through the screen, “I’m never giving up on you Taehyung. I deviated from my love for you for a while but I’m back on track baby. You’re the first person who has ever taken my breath away. You’ve completely taken over me.”, you say as you feel an intravenous thrill within you, slowly, reviving the feelings and rush your ten year old felt when you first looked at him.

At the age of seventeen, you’re hell bent on becoming worthy of Kim Taehyung, you have seen a path after so long, you’re determined to make him all yours one day and for that you’re now willing to go to any extent and your first step being making yourself perfect. You try to achieve academic excellence first while you graduate high school. You’ve decided to get into Harvard and for that you over exhaust and over work yourself. You don’t sleep, don’t breathe, don’t eat, don’t socialise or do anything, you completely and solely focus on studying economics and your extracurricular competitions to get into Harvard with three months to your graduation. You study 22 hours a day and the rest of the 2 hours you participate in debates, you barely sleep a wink on the weekends, your only motivation being him and that is more than sufficient for you. You have finished your syllabus worth of four years in two months, you’ve excelled and aced in all the extracurricular competitions and activities you participated in, it was hard but you’ve a long way to go to get him. You’ve completely cut off contact with Evie due to your hectic study schedule, Harvard being your goal. You’ve exams this month and you’ve to score full, not even one mark should be deducted so that you could graduate with honours. You revise well, studying for 23 hours and sleeping for one hour only everyday. You keep yourself hydrated so that you do not pass out after so much work. You appear for your exams, trying to not even have one mark deducted from the perfect score you keep on aiming for as if your life depends on it, and it does, Kim Taehyung has become the sole reason you breathe this damned oxygen. Time passes by as your result day approaches, on your result day, your score card is handed to you, you compulsively open the sheet only to be faced with brimming disappointment after you see five marks being cut off, crushing your aim of achieving full marks. You’re devastated, and you’re panicking, life is unpredictable and you need to be ready with a plan B if you ever in your life have to draft a plan to achieve something and you’ve learnt this the hard way after the break up with Jimin, hence you’ve a back up plan ready although your breath still shortens and you still are paranoid but there is a way to still be on track to your way to Harvard; a recommendation letter from your professor, facing only one challenge though, the professor seems to despise you for some reason. The following day, you go upto the professor’s cabin requesting for him to pen you down a recommendation letter but he profusely declines, you raise an eyebrow, of course he wouldn’t budge like that, one think you’ve learnt from your past mistakes is to never back down, always keep on scheming, like the one time, even at the expense of 10,000 dollars for Taehyung’s hair strand, you have had gone to hell and back to earn that and now that Taehyung is the one at stake, what would you not do to get him, you’ll give up your life to get him. You hike up your skirt revealing your milky thighs, willing to seduce the professor if that is what it takes to help you go to Harvard, you unbutton your top, your cleavage visible enough to make any man walking by grow hot. You move towards your professor, showing off your collarbones and cleavage, letting him get a sight of your pink lace panties, “Do reconsider Mister Walter”, you say in a seductive tone, beads of sweat form on his forehead. You unbuckle his belt and go onto suck his cock that springs out of his pants as you pull his pants down. An hour passes by, you come out of his office, correcting your white top and bra to hide the hickeys covering your breasts, you’ve had slept with the professor, losing your virginity to him. You look at the recommendation letter, a step closer to the man of your dreams. You plaster a smile on your face as you read the letter. You apply to Harvard with all the accumulated prizes, grades and now the recommendation letter, confident you will get in.

On the day of the announcement of college application results, your mom drives you to the public library to get a print out of the Harvard letter. She reviews the printout as it comes out. She falls to the ground as she reads the words on it, tears escaping her eyes, you think, she must’ve been crying tears of happiness but your face falls down as you read the email. Harvard has rejected your application. You scream in agony, you’re frustrated, you tear the paper and crush it under your feet. It cannot be possible right? Tears brim down your face as you laugh in disbelief, you mom gets up on her feet as she comes to hug you trying to console you, “It’s okay baby, you can apply to another college, not getting into Harvard doesn’t equate to the end of the world okay?”, she says. Yes, not getting into Harvard would not be the end of the world but not getting Taehyung would kill you. You look at her and say, “do you not have a building you can donate to have me get into Harvard”, she looks at you and then laughs, “If I did, I wouldn’t be working a desk job, honey, I know you worked hard for this but there’s more to life than this, plus, you’ve the will, will can move mountains.”, she says as you roll your eyes not believing her words, you haven’t given up yet, no you would not, you try to come up with back up plans to get into Harvard, maybe a drop year could help. You get into the car with your mother as she drives you back to your place. On the way you notice, that the usual road to your place is under construction so your mother pulls back and onto another lane, with a little effort, even though she has taken a different path, but it’ll guide you to the same destination. Suddenly you’ve an epiphany, there are other ways to get Taehyung, plus getting into Harvard would’ve been an easy way to have him and you like challenges, the harder it becomes to make him yours, the more you start to yearn him, strengthening your love for him. As if luck is on your side, suddenly a pamphlet flies on to the glass pane of your window, you lower down your shades to obtain it, the advertisement/poster reads, ‘CASTING AUDITION FOR A KDRAMA FEMALE CHARACTER’, your brain devising and unlocking another route for you to obtain Taehyung i.e. to get into the same acting industry as him. You review the details on the poster, it has provided you the information on the venue and the audition dates a week from now.

“I want to be an actress!”, you announce startling your parents, “What?”, you dad asks with a puzzled look on his face, “I want to go audition for the female character role in a kdrama”, you state as he still looks at you confused, you hand him the pamphlet, “Drive me there on Wednesday.”, your dad thinks you’ve lost your mind but relates it to you trying to cope with the rejection you faced from Harvard a while ago. He reluctantly agrees.

Wednesday has come,

you’re done hiking your skirt to a level where your underwear is blatantly visible to everyone, you cake your face with makeup, you straighten your hair and get your nails done. You’re all set for the casting audition. Your father has a disproving look on his face as he sees your attire but chooses not to say anything since you’ve turned the legal age. He drives you to your destination, it is an amphitheatre and there is a long queue with many girls who are dressed in a similar clothing as you, they’re wanting to chase after fame while you chase after Taehyung, you guys are pretty similar but with different wants and needs after all. Hours pass by, you keep on retouching your makeup, you mentally prepare yourself, trying to look luscious and confident. Your name is called after what feels like an eternity, you correct your hair and enter the casting room. As you enter the hall with the casting director seated behind the judgement panel, he looks at you and whispers something to the lady. She laughs a little looking you up and down while you choose to ignore the duo. They hand you the script and ask for you to read from it. You pour your passion and emotions to it, remembering why you got into acting in the first place. They look pretty impressed by your acting skills or so you think. You bow down to them feeling successful as the lady says to you, “We’ll call you to let you know whether you’ve gotten the part or not”, this excites you as you hum on your way out of the hall. The other girls think you’ve got the part looking at how you brim with ecstasy.

Days pass by but you receive no phone call, you’ve attempted to call the casting director a few times but again heard no response from them. This disappoints you as you panic. Your mother sees you in this painstakingly position, “Y/n I think you should apply to other universities now.”, she states, “We cannot keep on supporting your rendezvous for life”, you look at her with a frown, “Just a few days before they call me, I promise they will call.”, you mother just shakes her head and leaves. A week later, after calling them a gazillion times, you go to the amphitheater, to see the lady who was present there when you took the audition that day. You run after her as she notices you coming towards her, she’s panic stricken. You slow down your pace to ease her out. You bow down to her as she nods her head in acknowledgment. “Why did I not receive a call?”, you ask with a burning heart. “That means you were not eligible for the role.”, she says with a nervous face, “The look on your faces said otherwise the day I auditioned”, you say not believing her words which annoys her. “Maybe it’s the problem with how you look, you do not fit the beauty standards, your nose is too big and your jaw is too broad.”, she says in the most condescending way ever, fuming you but you choose to remain silent, you bow to her one last time and head out. You come back home after hailing a taxi. Your mother looks at you as you enter, “Welcome home.”, she says, you ignore her greeting and go upto your room, you know your parents won’t provide you with the money needed for plastic surgery, yes, you’ve been considering plastic surgery, you’ve to look like you’re worthy of Taehyung as well, your brain never stops working, you’re determined to achieve any height to get him to be all yours.

You pack your bags the very same day and announce to your parents that you’ll be living independently from now on, they look surprised and ask you the reason behind such a hasty decision, you just bow to them and walk out.

There's

the red zone in Busan, miles away from the city you’ve had been residing in, which operates a prostitution ring, you’re headed there to earn money for the cosmetic surgeries you want to get done.

You catch the first train to Busan. You reach the brothel where your now colleagues are residing. You greet one of the older women there who has a disgruntled look on her face as she views your face. She invites you inside and hands you a lingerie that you need to wear at all times. Your nipples are visible through the light material, your milky thighs look radiant exposed like that, the only thing that’s properly covered would be your core, your butt is half visible for the men to walk by and get a good look. The rule at the brothel is simple, the more men you’re able to lure to your bed, the more money you make but there’s a rule that 50% of your income must go to the older lady who just handed you the laced lingerie as she is the head here. You stand leaning on the door of your assigned room as you wait for men to enter the red light area. After a while, a man comes in, ladies trying to seduce him, he ignores them all as he lays his eyes on you, you’re beautiful, he comes near you and gently rubs your nipples, you think you’ve captured your first prey, your first client who is decent looking and not that old but he soon leaves you feeling empty as he enters the room beside you, all that nipple play for nothing, you grunt in annoyance. Your first client turns out to be an old geezer who frequently visits the brothel, the second old man you’ve sex with, but anything to get your goal, The old man fucks you relentlessly, but you ensure that he has a wrap on while he does that. Time flies by, as more men visit your room to fuck your brains out. You earn a lot of money but half of what you get goes to the older lady, annoying you, you’ve still not accumulated enough money to fund your surgery and weeks have gone by. You start to bear grudges against other ladies who increasingly taunt you since you’re able to bed more men than them and you also grow tired of the older lady who takes away majority of your money and keeps it to herself. This happens for two more months before you snap, you cannot wait any longer, so you barge into the olden lady’s room who seems to be taking a nap on her bed. She is able to afford a beautifully decorated chair next to her thanks to the money you earn. You tip toe to the place where the chair is kept. You slowly lift the chair up and using all your force you start hitting her face with it. You’ve gone berserk as you keep on shoving the lady’s face with the wooden chair, brutally killing her. She doesn’t even get the time to scream to save her life as you not so helplessly kill her. You drag her body to the bath tub, and run the tap over her face, washing the blood off of her. You wash your hand and mop the floor with bleach leaving no blood stains, you also wash the bed sheet containing the lady’s blood with bleach. You then subtly open the safe in her room with a key that she always holds, even while sleeping, you quickly grab the money and jewellery kept in the safe as you run away with the money out of the brothel.

You hide your face with a black scarf so that no one identifies you from Busan, especially the men whom you’ve slept with. You’re on your way to Gangnam, the capital city of plastic surgery. You go to a goldsmith and sell off the gold jewellery in exchange for a lot a money.

You’ve researched enough about plastic surgeons in the city and there resided many to help you out with getting prettier. You phone one of the numbers inscribed in the phone book containing all of plastic surgery clinics’ numbers. The receptionist picks up your phone, giving you a slot for your appointment tomorrow. The following morning, you get ready with the money in a black bag. You head out for your appointment to the designated office of the surgeon. You arrive before your appointed time. You plop yourself on the velvet couch in the waiting area as you look at the clock waiting for your turn. You yawn a bit getting tired waiting when suddenly the receptionist calls out your name. You get excited as you tread one step closer to making Kim Taehyung yours. You enter the doctor’s cabin. It is evident that the doctor himself has gone under the knife with his alluring features and facial harmony. You take a seat in front of Doctor Kim Seokjin as he looks at you, scanning your face, trying to formulate a facial correction plan in his mind.

"

So Ms Y/n, what are your worries?”, he says in a gentle tone. “Doctor, my nose is too big, my jaw is too broad, my eyes feel droopy and my boobs they are too small. I want to feel pretty.”, you say genuinely, Jin looks at your face once again as he hums. He takes out a notepad and starts scribbling on it, “I understand where your concerns lie Ms Y/n but these are a lot of procedures so they will cost a lot and you’ll have to maintain a certain diet and exercise regularly if you get them done or you’ll relapse to your old form in a desolated manner.”, he says administrating you a mixture of medicines for you to consume after the procedures are done. “Okay Doctor Kim, so when can i come for these surgeries now?”, you ask to which he responds, “In a week, I will have to analyse your facial features and then accordingly operate on you.”

A week passes by, you’re sat on the velvet sofa yet again waiting for your turn to come. The receptionist once again announces your name for your meeting with the doctor but this time you’re led to an operation room. You’re asked to change into a loose hospital attire. After you’re done changing, you’re asked to lie down on the stretcher prominently placed in the middle of the operating room, you adhere to their instructions and position yourself horizontally on the bed. Doctor Jin comes in wearing his surgical mask and cap and a robe as well. While preparing the surgical apparatus, you’re informed that you’ll be undergoing ‘Rhinoplasty, buccal fat removal, double eyelid surgery as well as breast augmentation surgical procedure’. You’re given a hefty dose of drugs to make you have a deep slumber while the doctors and surgeons operate on you.

Post surgery hours are critical for any patient and you’re no exception to it. You’ve bandages wrapped around your face and your chest. A nurse tends to you as you lay down on the bed assigned to you. The nurse gives you medicines. You’ve paid for the surgery beforehand so you need not worry about the after care that follows. You’ll be subjected to bedrest for almost a month before your body starts healing the scars and recuperates the changes on your face and body. You’re under 24/7 supervision of the doctors till then.

A month flows by quickly, you bow down to doctor Seokjin for his services as he nods in return. You go to the place you’ve rented for a while. You go up to your room’s washroom to look at your new face endearingly. A pretty face surely does make everything better. You take a day off and rest as the following day you’ll return back to your hometown and meet the amphitheater lady again.

The following morning, you wake up, admiring your ‘fixed’ face in front of the mirror. You’re all set to leave for your hometown. You catch a train from Gangnam back to your residential area. You get inside a cab as soon as you depart the train station, you guide the driver to the location of the amphitheater.

Once you reach the venue, you step inside the multipurpose hall. You’re not surprised to see the lady sitting on a chair reviewing forms for another casting audition for another project. You go upto her and wave your hand in front of her face to grab her attention. She looks at you, her focus entirely on your being now. Her eyes widen as she recognises you and the altercations you’ve made to your face and chest as her eyes ogle at your enlarged breasts. “So you were saying shit about my face, how it is the reason as to why I was disqualified, so, I corrected it”, you say with a bizarre grin on your face, almost scaring off the lady in front of you. She regains her composure from petrified to one who is succumb to all kinds of weird because she works in a theatre and art is weird, precisely. “Oh honey, you still won’t get the role”, she looks at you pitiful even though she seems quite impressed with your persistence to become an actress, unbeknownst to the real cause of your actions, “Why not?”, you squeal disappointment evident in your voice, “I’m willing to go to any lengths to become an actress, I’m determined and ambitious, I promise.”, you try to persuade her but she just has a sympathetic frown directed towards you, “I’ll be honest with you, I appreciate your sincerity but darling, it wasn’t just your face, your connection matters too, the one who usually gets the acting role needs to have a reputable background and a wide network to help fund the production unit if ever required and clearly since you hadn’t even been to college, no matter how persistent you are, no director will choose you, that’s the bitter reality”, she states it in a sad tone, desolating any chances you’ve had in acting, of course, you’ve known how important connections are, precisely why you wanted to go to Harvard, you look at her while your brain is racing to find another solution to help you achieve your goal to have your beloved man all to yourself, that is until, the lady continues, “Although there is a way, you can broaden your contacts”, you look at her with glint of hope in your eyes, “What is it?”, you ask desperation visible in your voice, “The Movie Mafia”, she states simply, “Movie mafia? like the underworld gangsters who fund the films in exchange of sexual appeasement?”, you ask as she just nods, “How do I meet them?”, you ask and she just slouches her shoulders as an indication that it’s for you to discover. You sigh and bow to her as a token of gratitude for opening another way for you.

.

You know you’re willing to do anything so you log into dark web, memories from when you have had been fourteen and masturbating to Taehyung’s pictures, fresh in your brain, you feel blood rushing to your cheeks at the thought of it. ‘Focus Y/n’, your brain screams at you and you internally scold yourself for getting distracted at the thought of Taehyung. You open a web page on the dark web which discusses the movie mafia, you enter your query—inquiring their location, you wait for a bit before you receive a text notification from a stranger on your messages who is requesting for money from you in exchange of the movie mafia’s address. You immediately oblige to his condition and send him the amount asked by him. He sends you the location in return. You immediately hail a cab so that you could go to the prescribed venue.

Upon reaching there, you stumble across a dark valley, your instincts directing you through the alley, your gut tells you that you’ll find the ‘movie mafia’ there. You find a small door engraved within the walls, as you’re about to open the door, a small voice startles you, “What are you trying to do”, the voice states, “I want to get in and meet someone inside.”, you respond, “I see”, that’s all the voice says before the person, who’s had been previously talking to you, kicks open the door, “there you go”, he says, “Thank you”, you say smiling ear to ear.

You enter via the door to see a few men arm wrestling, while few of them doing coke and a few of the others fucking women out in the open. Your attention is solely focused on the only one who stands out from them, presumably, the leader.

Everybody stops doing what they do as they hear their leader speak in a hoarse voice, “Who are you? How did you get in here?”, he asks, you ignore his questions as you look at him, “I want to become an actress”, you say as you grin at him, weirding him out, “Ok and?”, he says curtly, “Make me one”, you simply say as you take the seat beside him, reducing the proximity between you two, “Why the fuck would I do that?”, he spits, you start undressing, you unbutton your blouse, revealing your bra, as you go onto unstrap your bra, you say “Because I’m hot as fuck”, you say as you throw your bra away on the ground, now sitting topless in front of him, the other men stare at your breasts shamelessly, some even drooling a bit while the leader remains unfazed, “I’ve seen hotter bitches than ya’, that too natural ones, I know silicon implants when I see ‘em”, he says making you frown, “Is that so?”, you simply whisper, “Now get the fuck out of here before I fucking shoot your head”, he says and you do not comply, you will not give up, your will is enough to move mountains, “I’ll do anything, I’m determined to become an actress, I’ll fucking even clean up your dirty laundry and help you out with whatever fucking business you have, I’m willing to cross any boundaries, go to any lengths as long as it promises my acting career’s stability.” you say as the leader raises an eyebrow in amusement, “Anything?”, he says softly, “‘Kay, Jaemin, take her and teach this whore a lesson.”, he says, you’re ready for whatever life throws at you because you’ve only one destiny i.e. Taehyung and you’re willing to mortgage off your soul to the devil for this. Jaemin proceeds towards, as he picks you up on his back unannounced, you immediately clutch on his hair as you bite his ear off with force, astonishing both him and the leader, blood oozing out of his earlobe as he puts you down in panic, you spit out his flesh from your mouth, “Anything.”, you say, answering his question. The leader shoots Jaemin on spot, “Hanbin and Lee Know, don’t disappoint me”, as the leader says this, you see a man approaching you, while the other surprises you by grabbing your exposed breasts, this maddens you, you kick the man who has his hands over your breasts in the stomach, you notice a screwdriver in his pocket, which you swiftly take out, this doesn’t go unnoticed by the other man who is standing in front of you, he plunges forward to punch you in the face, you’re able to dodge his attack, you then smack his head, which annoys him, meanwhile the man who held your breasts, comes out in front of you and slaps you and kicks you in the stomach, you fall down and start laughing as the other man grabs you by your hair while the sexual offender keeps on slapping you, you stab the other man’s hand with the screwdriver, you insert it and then rotate it while it is in his skin, the man screams in agony, loosening his hold on your hair, you then stand up quickly and punch the sexual offender in the face as he falls down on the ground due to the brute force, you kick his filthy hands that touched you without your consent repeatedly, you then gauge his eyes out with the screw-diver, laughing maniacally, the other man who was too busy catering to his injured hand now comes to you, to save his colleague but before he does that, you slip to his behind and then stab his neck, killing him on spot. Your moves have impressed the leader while you continue tormenting the disgusting man who touched you, you neuter him with the bloodied screw driver. , the leader silently spectates it before shooting the latter.

.

The leader’s three men died humiliatingly after being defeated by an insane woman. “I believe you now woman”, the leader says, “‘Tis Namjoon, welcome to the club”, you smile as he introduces himself, “Y/n, sorry about the three men by the way”, you say as you bow to him, “Don’t mind them”, “So now you’ll make me an actress?I’m ready to do anything.”, you ask, he nods his head, “But under one condition, you’ve to successfully complete this mission for me, then i’d make you a star.”, he says, you nod happily, “Okay what’s the mission? I can go now!”, you say hastily, “Calm the fuck down. You’re not trained for it yet, Sang-min, here will train you for a month before your mission, if you achieve what I’ve planned for you, consider yourself as a successful movie star in the entertainment industry”, he spits to which you oblige.

You step inside your assigned dormitory where you’ll be living with Moon Sang-Min, an actor himself, who’ll train you for your mission a month later as well as help you improve your acting skills and PR behaviour.

The next morning, you’ve water splashed on your face at 3 am, you shriek, only to see Sang-Min sitting on your bed with bucket in his hands, he picks you up from the bed and throws you onto the floor, “The fuck man?!”, you say clearly fuming, “your training starts now”, he says nonchalantly, you immediately regain your composure as you stand up straight. He instructs you to run fifty kilometres and you comply, you run around fifty kilometres in two hours, doing anything to get Kim Taehyung. He engages you in intense warming up and workout sessions, you both hit the gym and use the gym machineries to strengthen your muscles and core, you also do boxing with him as he teaches you new moves and orders you to perform them on him. The next thing he does is take you to a shooting ring, where he teaches you as to how to shoot and hold the gun, you’re startled by the loud noise at first even though you’re wearing noise cancelling headphones but gradually as each bullet pierces through the target board, you get used to it. The next thing he does surprises you, he torments you by tying you to a chair and beating you to pulp and then instructs you to escape this set up, you first are unable to but then he teaches you various techniques to help you get out of miscellaneous scenarios. You’re then expected to learn all forms of swimming methodologies and you’re forced to learn taekwondo moves on the same day as all this. At last to give you a peaceful closure to this rigorous training he put you through, he trains you in the field of acting, introducing you to various forms of articulation of emotions on your canvas of a face. You both call it a day as you step into the shower for a quick bath and are expected to fall asleep in five minutes at 1 am during night time.

The

next day, Sang min again wakes you up at 3 am. Gradually, as weeks pass, you get used to this hectic and intense indoctrination. Your inculcation ranging from getting drowned, electrocuted, shot to becoming a black belt in taekwondo, running hundred kilometres in half an hour, mastering swimming techniques and learning how to act gracefully while maintaining a good reputation online and how social media management would be the most effective way to become a leading figure in the industry to expand your influence over the general public, you learnt all this thanks to the tutelage provided by Moon Sang-min.

A month has passed by and you haven’t even felt it pass by so quickly as you were too engaged with getting ready for the mission. You pat yourself on the back as you get one more step closer to your destination (being Kim Taehyung).

“I see ‘em muscles on you.”, Namjoon says honestly, “Kudos to Sang-min for training me”, you say as you smile sheepishly. Namjoon guides you to a secret room where there’s a screen and a projector, he takes out a stick as he signals for one of his henchmen to turn on the projector. The white screen has an image of an old man on it. Namjoon points his stick at the old man. “He’s your target”, he says, you listen to him intently as you scribble down the details he narrates to you regarding the mission. “You’ll be seducing this man as a hostess of our club to the VIP room where you have to tie him up to a chair and electrocute him.”, he says, “Sounds easy”, you state, “‘Til you hear about his tight security, he could be having sex with ya’ and have his men watch it. Your fight is not against this old geezer but actually against the army of men he roams around with. Can I rely on ya?”, he asks, now sounding serious, “Absolutely!”, you chirp, this man doesn’t scare you, in fact, if it took for you to defeat his gigantic swamp of pics to get Taehyung, you’d exactly do that.

You’re wearing a black satin dress which hugs your curves and accentuates your cleavage, bringing prominence to your enlarged breasts. You’ve applied ample amount of makeup on your face, lastly putting on a cherry red lipstick to make yourself look enticing. You wear a gold pendant to put emphasis on your slender collarbones. You’ve hidden a laser tag, rope and a small gun under your dress. You also have liquid phosgene and chloroform in small bottles in case of emergency. You’re taken to the host club via a black jeep. You retouch your makeup and hair before entering as a hostess.

Time flies by, while waiting for the old geezer, your target. He finally arrives after what seems like an eternity to you. You roll your eyes but after the amazing acting sessions by Sang-min, you’re able to masquerade your bored expressions with the one that is usually possessed by a seductress. You walk up to the man, purposely swinging your hips to draw attention to your ass, you see him surrounded by ten bodyguards and seven ladies. You serve drinks to his men, out of which, only five seem to accept the drinks offered by you. You get noticed by the old man whose attention you intended to grab, by serving drinks to his men. He invites you over to sit on his lap, you smile at him enticingly as you lean down, making him have glimpse of your nipples through your exposed cleavage window, you sit on his lap and start stroking his dick, he starts growing hot, you guide his fingers to inside your dress, he plays with your clothed nipples, now wanting to lick and suckle on them as well, he removes your sleeve off one of your shoulders, you gently hold his hands and your fingers point upstairs, showing him the VIP room where he could have you whole, he licks his lips and asks his men to follow you and him to the exclusive room, unbeknownst to the smirk that’s slightly playing on your lips as you’re able to successfully lure him into the room.

As you’re about to enter the luxurious VIP room, the five men whom you served drinks suddenly faint and fall down onto the floor, the other men get alert while you’ve to quickly jump into action so you immediately put a cloth sprayed with chloroform over the old man’s mouth causing him to faint, you immediately tie him up with the agility and speed you acquired through the training, as soon as the other five men who were tending to the fainted men, get up and look at you tying their boss, they set into attack you. One of the guys tries to punch you which you dodge gracefully as you form a full circle with your leg and kick his leg causing him to fall down on his knees due to the incinerated injury, the second man then approaches you with a gun, you kick the gun out of his hand as you electrocute him and cause him to faint, you kick the first man again, now in the balls and then shoot him in the head, killing him on spot, the third and the fourth men attack you at the same time, you’re able to successfully escape their punches while you attempt to kick their stomachs and punch them in their face simultaneously, you shoot them as well, killing them on spot, the last standing man, jumps at you, causing you to fall down, you both keep on rolling over each other, trying to gain dominance over the other, then you suddenly grab his hair and feed him the bottle of phosgene, killing him on spot as well. Namjoon arrives a while later while you’re looking at your freshly manicured nails. Namjoon looks at how you’ve successfully accomplished your task and then pats your back, you look at him while he does that, “I don’t want felicitations, I want to act.”, you state with a poker face, Namjoon nods his head and says, “Tomorrow morning, meet me in the same hall as the day we discussed your mission”, you nod in return.

The following morning, you dress up extra as you’re excited to finally come miles closer to Taehyung. You can’t wait to achieve your goal and as you become closer to your aim, your heart starts failing due to overloaded excitement and thrill.

Namjoon is seated on one of the black chairs wearing a suit, he looks at you as you enter the room, you sit on the seat beside him. “So what now?”, you say excitedly, he takes out a picture of a young man in front of you, “You’re going to seduce him now.”, he says, you frown at his words, “Is this another mission?”, you ask, he shakes his head, “No, sleeping with him will make you a star”, he says, “So I just have to sleep with him?”, you innocently ask, he again shakes his head, “If only it was that easy, you need to record yourself sleeping with him and then blackmail him to cast you in one of his projects.”, he says, surprising you, “I’ve to record a porno now?”, you say slightly fluttered, “…and use that as your ticket to K-entertainment industry.”, he finishes speaking. “Where do I find this man though?”, you ask, “You’ll know soon don’t worry sweetheart.”, he says.

And you do get to know where you’ll locate him, you’re now sitting right next to him at a bar as he’s looking at scripts of his future projects. He is a director after all. You’re wearing a revealing red dress, your cleavage prominently visible, your milky thighs exposed to the man. You’re just waiting for the workaholic to notice you. Although he is known for sleeping around but right now he’s too engrossed with his work. You’ve to somehow distract him from his work. What a perfect plan to incorporate your ideas as well. Your glass slips out of your hand, spilling juice on his glasses, he is bound to look up at you now, but to your surprise, he still doesn’t, that’s when you come up with an impromptu plan to clean his glasses, you suddenly tap on his shoulders, he looks at you stunned by your beauty, you then speak to him, “Kind sir, may I wipe the juice droplets that trickled down to your glasses?”, you ask politely, your voice soft, he melts as he slowly complies to your request, you flash a smile to him while you take his glasses in your hand and wipe them using your handkerchief. You both then engage in a conversation at the bar, where he’s telling you how his name is Jungkook and that he’s a director and you’re telling him how you’re an aspiring author, your inspiration being L.J. Smith. He seems pretty into you by now. You stare into his eyes before capturing his lips into a small sweet kiss which he reciprocates, his lust, clear as crystal. You both make out till you reach out of the club, he phones his driver to get his car, you both silently walk up to his car, where he helps you sit. He kisses you there as well in the car, his spectacles sometimes clashing with your nose bridge making you chuckle. you reach his apartment and as you’re about to enter, he stops you. He makes you remove your dress in front of him in the corridor before letting you in his house, he also ensures that you have kept your small purse outside his door. After this, he pounces on you like a beast, devouring you. He puts his glasses on a night table in front of the bed in which he’s about to take you in wholly. After you both are done with your intense love making session, with his hickeys painted all over your body, he asks you to leave, that surprises you a bit but you do as he says, you get out of his apartment and step into your dress outside his gate.

The following morning, Jungkook receives an email from an unknown sender, he immediately opens the mail out of burning curiosity but that turns out to be his biggest regret ever as he’s met with the video of him fucking you on the bed. In one of the scenes, he’s seen snorting coke through your ass while actively spanking your ass, if the media gets a hold of this footage, it would ruin him, which he fears the most. The only thing most astonishing about this entire incident more than the sex tape was the fact that you were somehow able to film the sex even-though all your stuff had been barricaded outside his house. He wonders as to how you’ve done the deed and then he notices his spectacles on his nose bridge, he fucking yells out your name as realisation sinks in, you spilled the juice on his glasses on purpose, in order to blackmail him with his sex tape where he’s doing drugs the wolf way. He immediately responds to the email, wanting to meet up with the sender, who he thinks is you, and he turns out to be right, as you sit in front of him, wearing a red lipstick, still looking hot as ever. “What the fuck do you want, woman?”, Jungkook questions panic lacing in his voice. “I lied about being an aspiring author, I wanna be an actress! You’re a hot shot director.”, you say, Jungkook now understands you, the likes of you who desperately want money and fame, he’s disgusted by girls like you who use deception to actively climb up the ladder but he has no choice but to submit to your qualms as you hold an integral piece of evidence that will destroy his career. “Okay, the first thing today I’ll do will be cast you in my new project, Cha eun woo is the male lead.”, he says as you frown, Jungkook notices the saddened expression on your face, “You don’t want to work?”, he inquires, “I’ll be honest with you, I actually don’t want to act”, you say truthfully as Jungkook looks taken aback by what you just said, “Then why the fuck are you blackmailing me woman?”, he asks as a scowl forms on his face, “fame is not what i want”, you say as jungkook raises an eyebrow wanting you to continue, “there’s someone I want for whom I could go to any extent, cross whatever lines that exist between us, just so that I could one day make him mine.”, you say as you think of Taehyung, Jungkook doesn’t understand what you say that is until you take out a small plastic bag out of your pocket containing Taehyung’s hair strand, you carry it everywhere with you as a token of your undying love for the aforementioned man, “This is actor’s Taehyung hair strand, I bought it when I was fourteen via dark web.”, you state, surprising him, “You love Taehyung?”, he states now even more amused by you, “I think what I harbour for him surpasses love, he has become the sole reason of my existence.”, you state with fire blazing in your eyes, Jungkook notices how your soulless eyes finally show emotions at the mention of Taehyung, now it wouldn’t be just pure blackmail motivating him to get you to work with Taehyung but also his own curiosity to get to know you better. “Come tomorrow, I’m planning to replace the villainess of my tv show in which Taehyung is starring, I think you’d be a perfect fit for the character”, he says, “Why not the main female lead?”, you question to which he smirks before replying, “Taehyung’s current girlfriend is playing that role alongside him now.”, as these words leave his lips, you feel a pang of jealousy within your heart, in fact, your soul set to arson by the revelation of this fact, looking at your current expressions, Jungkook taunts, “did you really think he’d go on in his life without dating anyone? did you never consider this being a possibility?”, he snarks, you roll your eyes, “it stings a lot I’d admit it but even if he was married, that wouldn’t stop me from making him mine so what even is a girlfriend in front of me?”, you retort, Jungkook looks surprised as he raises his hands in surrender.

The following morning, you wake up at 4 am, grooming yourself, getting ready, it takes you 5 hours to get ready and you still don’t feel like that is enough, you’re finally going to be meeting your destination, the person who has owned your heart ever since you’ve been ten. You wear the most expensive dress there is in the closet, you keep on screaming out of sheer excitement and nervousness, you haven’t eaten a thing since morning as this is the least you can do for the man who has had your heart stolen by him, your soul belongs to him, you solely only belong to him, the entire long drawn journey, finally bearing fruitful results, you grow overwhelmed with emotions as you’re nearing him. You’ve fainted five times already at the thought of meeting him. This is your condition before even meeting him, what would even happen when you meet him.

Hours pass by, as you reach the sets of Jungkook’s ongoing project. The d-day has finally arrived. You’re gonna meet the king of your soul, your body, your heart heck your everything.

Moments before the grandeur meeting. You finally see him, your soul which was aching for even a glimpse of him is now taken abode to heaven. Your heart thirsting for even a glance of him gets quenched when you finally see his features. God has carefully crafted in the formation of this handsome man, his features absolutely breath taking, his eyes, a beautiful shade of light brown. Fireworks explode in your chest as you fall to your knees at the sight of him, that is, until you see him with his supposed girlfriend but not for long. Jungkook comes near you as he helps you stand up while your soul burning with envy looks at the woman as an involuntary scowl forms on your face. That woman seems familiar to you. Where have you seen her before. You keep on pondering and that is when it clicks you. The man you’ve been desiring since most of your childhood is dating your childhood friend Evie?!. This is a shock to you, how did she even bag him is what you wonder. Suddenly, Taehyung’s eyes are directed towards you, your hearts skips a beat as you stare back into his beautiful and mesmerising eyes. Taehyung leaves his girlfriend to come talk to you. As Taehyung’s approaching you, Jungkook whispers into your ears, “He doesn’t like women who immediately jump onto him so you might want to curb your urge to just fuck him here.”, he says while you tune it all out because you’re in your own world because of Kim Taehyung. “Hey, you’re new here!”, he says smiling at you, you keep on admiringly staring at him before you’re pulled out of the trance as he waves his hand in front of you, “Oh i’m sorry, yes I’ll be playing the new villainess here.”, you internally scream as you’re talking to Taehyung live in action.

“Now kiss!”, Taehyung moves forward to kiss Evie, but as they’re about to kiss, you scream, you make others think that it’s impromptu method acting but all you’re trying to do is not let them kiss, this is when Evie notices you and recognises you, she’s a bit surprised by your ‘sudden acting’. “Bravo acting”, Jungkook praises you as you bow to him, then Taehyung comes to you and as he’s about to come to you, you intentionally slip on your heels, causing for Taehyung to hold you by your waist to prevent your fall. You both bore into each other’s eyes, feeling an electrifying spark, your breath shortening due to him being so close.

“Cut!” The cast wraps up for the day, “You did well”, Taehyung smiles at you feeling something between you spark, “So did you”, you reply honestly. “Can you give me your number?”, he asks, your heart starts racing hard, “Sure”, you smile at him, you jot down your number on a paper and give it to him. He smiles at you and then proceeds to leave with that whore.

You secretly follow Taehyung as he’s with Evie, he hands the note with your number to her, you’re so confused by this but you choose to ignore his actions as you’re more focused on admiring him. Taehyung goes to his apartment while Evie is alone, this is also the night, you’ve set up to have Taehyung break things off with Evie immediately because you know you cannot stand to see them together anymore.

You dial in Moon Sang-min’s number on your phone and tell him to come with his car, he follows your word and arrives with his car, you get in and push him out, “Do what I told you to do”, is what you say him before he nods and goes Evie’s way.

“Hello”, Sang-min says to Evie, she gets startled by his sudden appearance, “Hello Oppa”, she says blushing profusely, of course she is attracted to him, Sang-min subtly puts his arms around her waist as they continue talking as someone captures their meeting, unknown to her. That someone being you, you post their interaction via Dispatch on Jungkook’s instructions.

An uproar is caused in the morning, multiple death threats sent to Evie by Sang-min’s fans, which you think she deserves, you hum happily, as you learn about the hate she’s receiving.

You get a text from an unknown number, the text reads, “Hi Y/n babe, I missed you so much, please text me when you read this, It’s Evie, Let’s meet up, I kind of need you right now.”, you immediately respond back, agreeing to meet up with her. You wear the second most expensive dress in your closet to visit her.

She’s looking at the ocean while waiting for you in a cafe’s balcony, the café that is owned by Jungkook. As soon as she sees you entering the café, she waves at you. You go towards her. You take a seat in front of her as she motions to speak, “I’m so sorry we haven’t been in contact for so long!”, she apologises genuinely, “it’s okay”, you smile at her as you say that. You both talk about how your lives have had been while you’ve been away from each other, you lie about your life though.

Hours pass by, as you both catch up, that’s when Evie strikes up her concerns with you, “You know Y/n I’ve been getting so much hate ever since someone pictured my harmless interaction with Sang-min oppa and you know I can stand all that hate but this one hurts because even Taehyung is mad at me now.”, she says, surprising you, “Has he broken up with you?”, you say barely being able to hide your happiness, “Noo ew; we’ll never break up, in fact we’d get married.”, she says, this turns something in you as you offer her brown sugar to add to her coffee, which she happily complies with. “You know Evie, while growing up even I’ve had a huge crush on Taehyung”, you say as it surprises Evie now, “Is that so?”, she says, “Yes, things get messy when a simple crush blurs its lines with desire, passion and undying love for the person”, you say confusing her, “How so?”, she asks, “Crush is something you can get over, the love I’m talking about transcends peak obsession, you know where you blur the lines between good and evil for the one you love.”, you say explaining to her, she still doesn’t understand but gives you a small smile, “That’s cute but whom do you love that way.”, she asks curious, “Taehyung”, you simply reply while sipping onto your coffee, her face gets rubbed off of any smile on her face, as she slowly loses her consciousness, slowly diving towards death, wholly because of the poison you did add to the brown sugar sachet before handing it to her. There stands no one between you and Taehyung, you’ll ensure no one does.

The next morning, the entire nation is in splits after the devastating announcement of your childhood friend’s murder orchestrated as a suicide by you due to online bullying and harassment she faced online when she has had been alive. You grab your purse before heading out to Taehyung’s place as you know he’d be the most devastated one by this news and you stand corrected, he’s crying, he’s spiralling down into doldrum but worry not he has you to nurse his broken heart, you offer your fake condolences to him and then console him, feeling a bit envious because of Evie’s death impacting him so much but whatever at least there would be no more hurdles between you and him now.

You and Taehyung have been getting pretty close now, especially after the day Evie left this world’s premises. You’ve always offered him a reliable shoulder to cry on. Taehyung is slowly forgetting about Evie and getting over her death as you fill up the empty holes in his heart. Taehyung is gradually falling in love with you, he spends all his time with you, even on the sets of the show you’ve been taken in as the female lead by Jungkook now after Evie’s passing. He loves all the moments he has spent with you as he replays your conversations with him all over in his head again and again, he cherishes you and is planning to confess soon to you.

The day Taehyung confesses to you, you feel so mellow and gentle, you’ve a song written for him by a famous singer, Keara Graves, you sing the song to him as your response to accepting his confession. You both get into a relationship moments later. Your plan has effectively worked well, you’ve come a long way with everything, you’ve to pat yourself on the back for never giving up and going through hell to obtain the man whom you call very much so yours now. You have had known that meeting someone during their vulnerable period makes them get attached to you and that is what you did with Taehyung, you waited for him to get vulnerable, strike at the right time and then win his heart.

This has been quite a journey for you, you’ve learnt a lot about yourself and how much you can do for this man you’ve promised to love forever in this life time. You’ve achieved your goal successfully. This feels unreal to you but then you remember you’d do anything to have him even if it means putting your life at stake and you did do everything you could to have him. You’re in love with this man, there’s no denying that, you’ll always love him no matter what happens and you’ll ensure he never leaves your side nonetheless.

This is the love story where you relentlessly love him and go to any extent to get him to become yours.

This is your story of loving him and how love and will can move mountains, just like in your case.

Thinkin' 'bout the day when we first met The way you made me feel and how you left What I wouldn't give just to be more To be someone that you hold and you adore Look at my eyes See what you mean to me Feel the beat of my heart I need to believe that I could walk through fiery burning love But you still wouldn't feel the heat Feel the heat It burns in me But you see through me I could walk through fiery burning love (you see through me) I could walk through fiery burning love You always know exactly what to say To pull me in before you walk away But I don't wanna go through this again To act like I'm okay just being friends Look at my eyes See what you mean to me Feel the beat of my heart I need to believe that I could walk through fiery burning love But you still wouldn't feel the heat Feel the heat It burns in me But you see through me I could walk through fiery burning love Oh now, I'm calling out I don't have the words to say Maybe in another life it could be another way In another life you'd stay Look at my eyes See what you mean to me Feel the beat of my heart I need to believe that I could walk through fiery burning love But you still wouldn't feel the heat Feel the heat It burns in me But you see through me I could walk through fiery burning love (you see through me) I could walk through fiery burning love

~Keara Graves.

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the end

[ar3s-r4t-qu33n]

Idfc if he's real or not, he's still worse written than Eddie. Also the problem is in his fans that are making him no guilty, innocent baby and always refering that Coyle/Eddie/Everybody else im outlast are the same. And if you think it'll work, try to compare Walker (with PTSD after war) with Franco (who is just a sicko). Anyway Barbi's simps are way more agressive than any other fans when you say something bad, what's a fact, about a grown ass man. I feel like those people are just little kids who are getting upset after school and shouldn't play the game ;) When I see all those comments with "He'S mY PoOkIE" I'm getting sick... Ya'll should get a brain

Guys look!! I got one!!

You don't deserve a response, because if you were old enough to be playing Outlast, you would be able to figure out that shaming people for (checks notes) liking a fictional character in a horror series? Is plain stupid.

It would also serve you well to maybe do some spell check before you come into my asks like this. I'd take you more seriously if you maybe drafted this one more time, but here we go:

First of all, you don't know me. You can check out my like, five posts and see that only two of em are Franco related and none of them baby him. In fact, I don't think I've seen a post yet by anyone who says "Franco is a sweet, innocent baby who did no wrong" because... That's the point. He's interesting BECAUSE he's done shit wrong. We are playing Outlast. Everyone is complex and awful and interesting. Just because not every post is marked with a little footnote that says "oh by the way everyone, Franco is a bad, bad man 🥺 I don't support his actions, I'm not a Franco defender, I just wanted to draw him being silly 🥺" doesn't mean we're all out here claiming he's a saint. The fact that he's a fucked up lil guy is why we like him. I feel like that's a given with all Outlast characters? But that's just me after being a fan of this franchise for years now, idk, being able to step back and analyse a community to see what they enjoy about something is quite a fun and easy task, I recommend giving it a try instead of coming into "loser nobody who has been on Tumblr for like a week's" asks to complain to me like I can put all the Franco fans in the corner until they learn to interpret characters the way you have decided is objectively correct.

But even if they are "babying" him and apparently ignoring that this is the Outlast series and Franco is a character from Outlast... Oh no! What horror! Someone is misinterpreting a VIDEO GAME CHARACTER what a terrible and unique crime!

Franco "just a sicko" Barbi was abused and neglected by his father, his mother was murdered, and he only ever received affection after he killed someone. But yeah, he was just born fucked up whereas every other Outlast character earned their trauma and the right to kill the player. What a senseless and just untrue take and I'm sure you know that, you just want to complain because that's all you people like to do. You want to feel morally superior over someone because you don't understand why they feel the way they do instead of just moving on and ignoring them like any other sensible adult would. Because who's actually getting hurt if some people think Franco is their lil Pookie? Is it you? Does it cause you psychic damage? Because last I checked, this is the internet. We are responsible for ourselves, so unless somebody is actually hurting anyone...

Block the Franco tag. You are brave enough to type out this whole message to a stranger online and act morally superior because comparing which video game character deserves the right to kill you is THE most mature thing in the world, so you're definitely brave enough to block the tag and move on.

You are responsible for what you see online, but ESPECIALLY on Tumblr, it is so so easy to hide content you don't want to see, and mind your own business. Quite frankly, I don't care if I come across as aggressive here. You came into my asks about a tag/fandom you clearly aren't in trying to act like you're better than the rest of us. That's pretty damn aggressive, wouldn't you say?

This is Outlast. A game about fucked up guys doing fucked up shit, and we love them for it. If that is too much for you, if the mommy issues gangster is too crazy for you but Eddie and Trager and Knoth and Coyle are completely fine, no questions asked? I don't think this series is for you. Sexual horror is a staple of Outlast. Childhood trauma is a staple of Outlast. You can't be shocked when people respond to a new character in a video game they like.

YOU are not better than me because you like Chris Walker and I like Franco Barbi. I can't believe you need to be told this, we are all in the same uncomfortable freakshow cesspit that is The Outlast Fandom, no one is morally good. No one is better than anyone else. You cannot claim moral superiority over any character because at the end of the day, I can point to Wernicke and say with my full chest that he is objectively the worst because he's a literal nazi, and what then? Are you going to tell me that Franco is worse than a nazi? The debate is over, in the list of "who is the worst of these awful people", Wernicke wins hands DOWN. The point is null because EVERYONE SUCKS HERE!!! THAT'S THE POINT!!!!

Is that enough for you? Or are you gonna keep harassing people through your alts or getting your friends to do it? I can go alllllll day, baby, you ain't making me feel bad about my interests in the O U T L A S T fandom, dear GOD, this is ridiculous. Don't fucking condescend me, telling me to "get a brain" you don't KNOW ME, I am a stranger to you, why do you feel comfortable coming onto my blog harassing me about a video game character? That's not a good look for you and now it is immortalised here. Anonymous or not, you still did this. Whoever you are, you typed that out and sent it to a random person you do not know and felt comfortable enough to do so.

That's weird.