#I'm fairly certain that's a thing right?

[pushing500]

Bold to start a fight when you're immediately postpartum, you're relying on your opponent's (already very limited) hospitality to keep you and your new baby alive, and you have a horrendous melee ability.

Brown's religion is a nudist, cannibal, high-life cult. Not sure it'll be the best environment for Wombat to grow up in, tbh, and it certainly isn't helping Brown recover any faster.

A fight on one side, a shuttle crash on the other, a deathly ill newborn baby lingering in the back of his mind... What a day for poor Kwahu.

The sole survivor of the shuttle crash was an Avaloi named Yuki. She's very pretty and looks to be healing up fast, thanks to Kwahu's expert care. Hopefully she'll leave quickly, as her genetic dependency on alcohol might be tricky to manage in a colony that focuses all its beverage-production on coffee.

Of course, once Randy starts he just doesn't stop, so he decided the Jones boys needed a nice psychic drone on top of everything else. Very rude.

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[mozart-the-meerkitten]

If I ever learn to sew I will be unstoppable.

[wolfiewhiskeybutch]

With all of the animosity I am capable of...WHY SET OFF BIG FIREWORKS WHEN THE SUN IS STILL HIGH IN THE SKY?! IT'S NOT EVEN THE 4TH!

It's bad enough I have to deal with this shit on the 4th and at night but jfc it's 4:46 IN THE AFTERNOON

[kubb-is-a-swedish-lawn-game]

does anyone else have a terrible creeping gnawing fear that when you get older or go to college or get a job or try to do anything you're just gonna be so so fucking stupid and behind everyone else for no particular reason. does anyone else feel like they're going to somehow butterfly effect themselves into being an idiot because you forgot what you learned in history class one time? does anyone else feel like no matter what you do you can never try hard enough academically and one day you'll realize that you don't know as much as your peers and it's all somehow inexplicably your fault and you'll never be able to run away from the 40% you got one time on a math exam in middle school

[ev-n-learning]

Duolingo's doing some WEIRD shit right now. Put me Very Slightly ahead in the course again???

When i last checked in with this on tumblr i was at unit 6 of 28.*

I'm now... wait for it... on 12 of 32?!

I don't think that's "new and improved", duolingo. How about old and improved instead... i would like that, at least.

*(czech course, section 3)

[why-animals-do-the-thing]

average United States contains 1000s of pet tigers in backyards" factoid actualy [sic] just statistical error. average person has 0 tigers on property. Activist Georg, who lives the U.S. Capitol & makes up over 10,000 each day, has purposefully been spreading disinformation adn [sic] should not have been counted

I have a big mad today, folks. It's a really frustrating one, because years worth of work has been validated... but the reason for that fucking sucks.

For almost a decade, I've been trying to fact-check the claim that there "are 10,000 to 20,000 pet tigers/big cats in backyards in the United States." I talked to zoo, sanctuary, and private cat people; I looked at legislation, regulation, attack/death/escape incident rates; I read everything I could get my hands on. None of it made sense. None of it lined up. I couldn't find data supporting anything like the population of pet cats being alleged to exist. Some of you might remember the series I published on those findings from 2018 or so under the hashtag #CrouchingTigerHiddenData. I've continued to work on it in the six years since, including publishing a peer reviewed study that counted all the non-pet big cats in the US (because even though they're regulated, apparently nobody bothered to keep track of those either).

I spent years of my life obsessing over that statistic because it was being used to push for new federal legislation that, while well intentioned, contained language that would, and has, created real problems for ethical facilities that have big cats. I wrote a comprehensive - 35 page! - analysis of the issues with the then-current version of the Big Cat Public Safety Act in 2020. When the bill was first introduced to Congress in 2013, a lot of groups promoted it by fear mongering: there's so many pet tigers! they could be hidden around every corner! they could escape and attack you! they could come out of nowhere and eat your children!! Tiger King exposed the masses to the idea of "thousands of abused backyard big cats": as a result the messaging around the bill shifted to being welfare-focused, and the law passed in 2022.

The Big Cat Public Safety Act created a registry, and anyone who owned a private cat and wanted to keep it had to join. If they did, they could keep the animal until it passed, as long as they followed certain strictures (no getting more, no public contact, etc). Don’t register and get caught? Cat is seized and major punishment for you. Registering is therefore highly incentivized. That registry closed in June of 2023, and you can now get that registration data via a Freedom of Information Act request.

Guess how many pet big cats were registered in the whole country?

97.

Not tens of thousands. Not thousands. Not even triple digits. 97.

And that isn't even the right number! Ten USDA licensed facilities registered erroneously. That accounts for 55 of 97 animals. Which leaves us with 42 pet big cats, of all species, in the entire country.

Now, I know that not everyone may have registered. There's probably someone living deep in the woods somewhere with their illegal pet cougar, and there's been at least one random person in Texas arrested for trying to sell a cub since the law passed. But - and here's the big thing - even if there are ten times as many hidden cats than people who registered them - that's nowhere near ten thousand animals. Obviously, I had some questions.

Guess what? Turns out, this is because it was never real. That huge number never had data behind it, wasn't likely to be accurate, and the advocacy groups using that statistic to fearmonger and drive their agenda knew it... and didn't see a problem with that.

Allow me to introduce you to an article published last week.

This article is good. (Full disclose, I'm quoted in it). It's comprehensive and fairly written, and they did their due diligence reporting and fact-checking the piece. They talked to a lot of people on all sides of the story.

But thing that really gets me?

Multiple representatives from major advocacy organizations who worked on the Big Cat Publix Safety Act told the reporter that they knew the statistics they were quoting weren't real. And that they don't care. The end justifies the means, the good guys won over the bad guys, that's just how lobbying works after all. They're so blase about it, it makes my stomach hurt. Let me pull some excerpts from the quotes.

"Whatever the true number, nearly everyone in the debate acknowledges a disparity between the actual census and the figures cited by lawmakers. “The 20,000 number is not real,” said Bill Nimmo, founder of Tigers in America. (...) For his part, Nimmo at Tigers in America sees the exaggerated figure as part of the political process. Prior to the passage of the bill, he said, businesses that exhibited and bred big cats juiced the numbers, too. (...) “I’m not justifying the hyperbolic 20,000,” Nimmo said. “In the world of comparing hyperbole, the good guys won this one.”

"Michelle Sinnott, director and counsel for captive animal law enforcement at the PETA Foundation, emphasized that the law accomplished what it was set out to do. (...) Specific numbers are not what really matter, she said: “Whether there’s one big cat in a private home or whether there’s 10,000 big cats in a private home, the underlying problem of industry is still there.”"

I have no problem with a law ending the private ownership of big cats, and with ending cub petting practices. What I do have a problem with is that these organizations purposefully spread disinformation for years in order to push for it. By their own admission, they repeatedly and intentionally promoted false statistics within Congress. For a decade.

No wonder it never made sense. No wonder no matter where I looked, I couldn't figure out how any of these groups got those numbers, why there was never any data to back any of the claims up, why everything I learned seemed to actively contradict it. It was never real. These people decided the truth didn't matter. They knew they had no proof, couldn't verify their shocking numbers... and they decided that was fine, if it achieved the end they wanted.

So members of the public - probably like you, reading this - and legislators who care about big cats and want to see legislation exist to protect them? They got played, got fed false information through a TV show designed to tug at heartstrings, and it got a law through Congress that's causing real problems for ethical captive big cat management. The 20,000 pet cat number was too sexy - too much of a crisis - for anyone to want to look past it and check that the language of the law wouldn't mess things up up for good zoos and sanctuaries. Whoops! At least the "bad guys" lost, right? (The problems are covered somewhat in the article linked, and I'll go into more details in a future post. You can also read my analysis from 2020, linked up top.)

Now, I know. Something something something facts don't matter this much in our post-truth era, stop caring so much, that's just how politics work, etc. I’m sorry, but no. Absolutely not.

Laws that will impact the welfare of living animals must be crafted carefully, thoughtfully, and precisely in order to ensure they achieve their goals without accidental negative impacts. We have a duty of care to ensure that. And in this case, the law also impacts reservoir populations for critically endangered species! We can't get those back if we mess them up. So maybe, just maybe, if legislators hadn't been so focused on all those alleged pet cats, the bill could have been written narrowly and precisely.

But the minutiae of regulatory impacts aren't sexy, and tiger abuse and TV shows about terrible people are. We all got misled, and now we're here, and the animals in good facilities are already paying for it.

I don't have a conclusion. I'm just mad. The public deserves to know the truth about animal legislation they're voting for, and I hope we all call on our legislators in the future to be far more critical of the data they get fed.

[steddiehyperfixation]

@steddiebingo prompts: college au + crush + bandana | 1.1k words | T |

“Steeeveennnn,” Robin complains, poking Steve's shoulder with her pencil. “This was not the deal.”

Steve blinks and startles as if shaken out of a trance and grudgingly drags his glance over to Robin. “What?”

“You're only supposed to zone out when I'm paying attention and I can only zone out when you're paying attention.” That's their standard deal for any class they share that they're both only taking to knock out some credits and isn't relevant to either of their majors.

“Okay,” he says, “so pay attention.”

“I have been, dingus,” she argues. While this semester's History of Rock course is actually kind of interesting, Robin would still appreciate being able to use some of the precious daydreaming time she’d been promised. “I've been giving you my notes for the last month, at least! It's my turn to zone out now, slacker.”

“Alright, alright. I'm paying attention.” Steve makes a big show of picking up his pencil and writing down what's on the lecture slides, even leaning forward a little to emphasize his focus. “You're free to zone out to your heart’s content.”

Robin doesn't trust him in the slightest.

She enjoys about five whole minutes of spacing out before one Eddie Munson inevitably interrupts the professor to challenge some point and any hope of Steve's ability to continue taking notes for her is lost completely. His attention is stolen the second that ringed hand goes up, focus returning undividedly to the loud, scraggly man who is now standing up in his vehemence to counter the teacher. Steve instantly becomes enraptured by this argument, though Robin doubts he’s really comprehending a single word of it. He even gets this dopey little smile on his face as he watches.

“Oh my god,” Robin groans, rolling her eyes and dropping her chin into her palm in resignation to her fate. Steve is utterly useless when he has a crush. It would be pointless, Sisyphean even, for her to keep trying to snap him out of it; no matter how many times she diverts his attention, it always rolls right back to Eddie.

Robin doesn't know what Steve sees in him. Personally, she finds Eddie kind of obnoxious and thinks he looks a bit like a stray dog that's been left outside in a thunderstorm. But for some reason he has her best friend totally captivated. Even when Eddie sits back down, conceding the tangential debate and letting the professor continue, Steve's gaze still lingers as it always does for the remainder of class, his eyes all dreamy and far away and the very epitome of yearning.

“This is getting pathetic,” Robin tells him when class is dismissed and she looks over to find him still staring. “Just go talk to him already. Make a move. I’m sick of watching you sit here and pine.”

“He might not even be queer, Rob.”

“He wears a black bandana in his back pocket.”

“So? He's all metal and shit, it could just be, like, a style thing. Doesn't mean it's hanky code.”

“Okay, so ask him.”

Steve looks at her like she's gone insane. “I can't just go up to him and ask him if he's flagging.”

“Fine, then I will.”

“What- No, Robin-!”

But Robin is already standing up and marching through the crowd of students leaving the classroom to catch up to Eddie. “Hey, are you flagging?”

Eddie stops short and turns sharply around to face her. “Excuse me?”

“That bandana you've always got in your pocket - is that just a fashion statement or are you flagging?” she repeats bluntly.

Eddie's eyes narrow, halfway between distrustful confusion and a sneer. “What's it to you?”

“Absolutely nothing,” Robin says. “I couldn't care less. I'm asking for my friend, Steve.” She points a thumb over her shoulder, fairly certain Steve isn't too far behind her. “He's the one who's been staring at you like an idiot all semester, and he's just dying to know if-”

“Oh my god-” Steve interrupts, shoulder checking her as he comes up beside her, his face flushed and slightly out of breath like he fought his way here desperately. “I’m so sorry about her.” He gives Eddie an apologetic smile and cuts Robin a sideways glare. “She was dropped on the head a few too many times as a baby and it left her incapable of comprehending boundaries.”

Robin scoffs. “Oh, like watching creepily from afar is so much more respectful,” she retorts.

“I’m not a creep-” Steve rushes to protest, looking hastily back to Eddie. “I’m not a creep. She's making it sound like I'm some sort of stalker or something. I’m not, I swear.”

Eddie laughs, and Steve looks whipped. “It's alright, I don't mind.”

Eddie's wary hostility seems to have faded into something more amused and definitely not uninterested, if the way he's looking Steve over is any indication. Robin subtly nudges Steve with her arm. Time to turn on the charm, dingus, he likes you.

“You just catch my eye, is all,” Steve recovers, regaining his composure and quickly attempting to school his flustered, lovesick expression into a smoother, more intentional smile. “You stand out, you know - in a good way. I like your style, how outspoken you are. You seem really passionate about this music stuff; it's cool to watch.”

Eddie's interest only sharpens, slow grin growing. He considers him for another moment. “Your friend says you're curious about my bandana.”

“Yeah, uh-” A little bit of that flusteredness slips out again, just enough that it could possibly be intentional (or maybe not; Robin’s really not giving him that much credit). Steve chews at his lip, eyes flicking Eddie up and down. “That too.”

Eddie's about to say something in response, but he's cut off by someone shouting his name. There's some blond guy at the end of the hall gesturing impatiently at him.

“Shit, sorry, I gotta run, my band’s got practice right now. But, um.” Eddie searches his pockets and grabs a pen out of his leather jacket. “Here.” He takes Steve's arm, scribbling a phone number onto his skin. “Why don't you call me later and we can talk more, yeah?”

“Yeah,” Steve agrees. He looks mildly starstruck, smiling stupidly at the number on his arm like it's a celebrity autograph or something. “Yeah, for sure.”

Robin snickers. “Oh, he's never washing that arm again.”

“Shut up, Robin,” Steve hisses, his cheeks tingeing pink again. Eddie laughs and Steve manages a sheepish smile. “I-I’ll call you,” he confirms again as he turns to leave, grabbing Robin by the arm and dragging her with him before she can embarrass him any further.

“You better,” Eddie calls after him, and Steve looks over his shoulder just in time to catch his smirk and farewell salute before he too turns and bounds off in the opposite direction.

Robin digs her elbow into Steve’s ribs, grinning smugly at him. “You're fucking welcome,” she says.

[chronically-ghosted]

i'm empty without you, so come grow within me

AO3 Link | main masterlist | Joel Miller Masterlist

rating: explicit (18+)

pairing: joel miller x f!reader

word count: 9K

summary: with winter approaching, joel takes stock of what he wants and what he has in his life. he wants you, but he's not quite sure he has you, not in a way that only a life in Jackson can afford. joel's an old-fashioned guy, so he's looking for an old-fashioned love . . . if he can only remember how to do it right.

inspired by the songs 'why don't we just dance' by Josh Turner and 'the kind of love we make' by Luke Combs, this fulfills a request from @handsomehelmet for my 1k celebration (creativity struck and now i'm going to make it everyone's problem)

warnings: the nastiest thing i can possibly imagine which is romance and sincerity, some willie nelson lyrics, established situationship, no age of reader specified, body insecurity, feelings of unworthiness/shame, survivor's guilt, blatant disregard for old man knees by eating pussy on the floor, unprotected piv, a teenager bullying fully grown adult to quit being stupid.

a/n: i know everyone gets into a tizzy when Joel doesn’t name what Tess is to him in front of Bill and while there probably was a heaping amount of guilt that accompanied that omission, i wonder if it might be a bit more complicated: he simply couldn’t name one thing because she was all things to him. A friend, a lover, a guide, a support system, a protector, a partner. So he says it the best way he can: “she’s mine.”

come see what else we've done to celebrate 1K followers

By the fourth bag, all you can think about is a warm shower. 

A chance to scrub away the dirt smeared on your arms, your neck, probably your face. You’d brought your own work gloves to bag fresh dirt for the greenhouse, but the longer you work, more sprinkles of dirt find their way down the lip of your gloves. You can feel it against your palms, under your nails. The cold winter air lurks beneath the crack of the door, stifled from invading by the artificial heat provided by the generator just outside, and it stifles you too with its oppressive weight. You’re fairly sure the dirt on your forehead has turned to mud, sweat and damp earth encrusted on your dry skin. 

By the sixth, you doubt your shoulders will ever move again without popping. 

You know Joel’s already do. 

Never a particularly chatty man even in his best moods, the greenhouse had become stuffy with heat and silence, both you and Joel too lost in the work to find the energy to even fake idle chatter. But, knowing this about Joel and a certain degree yourself, silences with him were never a bad thing. That was one of the things you enjoyed most about being with him; you two could do your own things together. Many snowy days were spent with him stretched out on the couch, reading, and you working on writing your sheet music on the floor, his knee hovering over your shoulder with your back to the cushions – spent in total silence, and they are some of the fondest memories you had since coming to Jackson and falling into the third and final piece of the Miller-Williams household. 

Like with the end of the world, you weren’t sure how you got there until everything had fallen into place around you; Joel and his adoptive daughter had been just another group who were taken in by the town of Jackson . . . until they weren’t. Ellie was just another foul-mouthed kid who had seen too much and had too much taken from her . . . until she wasn’t. Joel was your occasional patrol partner and a fellow Willie Nelson fan. . . until he wasn’t.

Until that unmistakable line, one that seemed to be lost on a global scale beneath the blood and the gore and the grief, had been crossed when he asked you out for drinks and the both of you knew the evening wasn’t going to end in a nightcap. 

And then you were partners, even outside of patrol. Partners in re-enforcing a weakened part of Jackson’s outer walls. Partners in cooking, attempting to recreate an enchilada recipe Joel only vaguely remembered from a Tex-Mex hole-in-the-wall fifteen minutes from where he used to live in Austin. Partners when it’s snowing heavily outside and there’s not much to do except to read and, well . . . Joel was a fantastic partner in that.

Joel Miller was a great partner for a lot of things. He worked diligently, quickly and, unless the conversation was started by someone else, silently. 

He, in short, was not someone who was easily distracted.

Which, in combination with your own exhaustion and a desire to scrub the first layer of your skin off with a loofah, is why you feel a flare of annoyance when you look up and see him staring off into the distance. His fingers loosely grip the handle of the shovel, his palm resting over the curved point, Joel’s expression is nearly unreadable, except for the small crevice between his eyebrows. He stands, fixated on the greenhouse wall, as if watching the blurry Christmas lights from the town square, suddenly oblivious to the work you two have been doing for the past hour and a half. 

“Joel.” Nothing. “Joel!” 

You raise your hand to smack him on the leg when, without looking down, he asks:

“When was the last time I took you out?” 

“What?”

His weight shifts, holds the shovel by one hand now. You catch a sliver of frustration in those deep brown eyes as he looks at you. He wears what you and Ellie secretly refer to as his “pouty-mouth”, a classic expression when he isn’t getting his way about something but won’t draw attention to the fact that it annoys him.

“Tell me about the last date I took you on.”

You huff, standing up with a pop in your hips. Your knees are aching from kneeling on the cold winter ground and your skin fluxes between overheating under your jacket and stiffly frozen on your extremities. 

“Joel, c’mon, be serious. We’ve got three more –,”

“I am being serious.” Dumb-founded, you watch as he digs the tip of the shovel into the ground with a hollow chunk. Crosses his arms and continues to frown at you like you just suggested doing away with the Christmas holiday entirely. “We’ll get to this, but I want you to tell me right now what we did on our last date.”

You roll your eyes, humoring him. “Fine, I don’t know what crawled up your ass, but okay. On our last date, we . . . we did . . . you took me to . . .”

It’s your turn to frown. He raises a petulant eyebrow and it’s eerie how many times you’ve seen that exact expression on Ellie. 

“Okay, fine, so it’s been a while. We’ve been busy – we’ve all been busy with the winter season coming. All of Jackson has been out battening down the hatches. What does it matter if we’ve let things slide a bit?”

He doesn’t answer immediately, quiet in his Joel way. He glances out through the blurred greenhouse glass and maybe he was actually staring at the string lights hung over Jackson’s square. Normally, you didn’t mind being unable to dissect his every expression, every sigh, every carefully wielded silence, but when it came to you and his feelings about you – feelings that were always implied in those silences – you wished you had a little window, some hint, as to what rumbled on behind those earth-dark eyes. 

Joel drums his fingers on the handle of the shovel, unease rolling through his body as he shifts his weight. 

“Matters some,” he tells the ground. “With the holidays comin’ around . . . matters for Ellie – her first winter here in Jackson. Matters for Tommy, with that new baby of his . . .”

“Your nephew,” you supply as much as prod. Sometimes the only way to get an honest answer out of him was when he was just a bit pissed off and less guarded. Instead he just nods, gloved hand on his hip, thick jacket widening his already confounding broadness.

“It matters because it’s important. To me. It’s important to me.”

He meets your gaze and you’re struck full force again with that feeling like you drank too much of the Tipsy Bison’s shitty whiskey too fast. Same feeling that couldn’t be drowned even with the Tipsy Bison’s shitty whiskey when you shared a drink with him for the first time. When you managed to laugh when he bet you a whole day of stable cleaning duties that Willie Nelson and Chris Stapleton survived the apocalypse somewhere in a shack in Tennessee. Joel Miller was disarmingly funny when he wanted to be.

And even worse, disarmingly sincere.

You take his gloved hand in yours. You feel the sensation of his fingers threading through yours but not the heat you’ve grown so accustomed to. 

“Alright, then. What do you want to do about it?” You ask quietly, to the upturned collar around his neck, his green flannel peeking out from behind the zipper of his jacket. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed but there’s a lot of snow on the ground so that makes our options for date night kinda limited.” You scrunch your nose at him because you like to see the light in his eyes bloom when you do.

He chuckles, a rumbling sound, and he drops his forehead against yours, fingers tightening their grip around yours. Suddenly in your throat, your heart pounds. He’s never this affectionate in public. Maybe it’s those miraculously blurred greenhouse glass walls. 

His breath smells like that peppermint toothpaste that came in last week, infused with the warming-coil smell from the greenhouse. 

“Dunno yet.” He admits. “I’ll think of somethin’.”

“No ideas yet?” You raise your eyebrows against his forehead and he grins, shaking his head.

“Not yet.” 

“Then can I make a suggestion?”

“‘Course.”

“We finish bagging this dirt, then head home for a shower. In a really sexy way, obviously.” 

He huffs, smothering a laugh, and quick as lightning he kisses you on the cheek. But in the same movement, steps away and grabs the shovel again. You don’t have time to react to the fact he just kissed you for the first time outside of the four walls of his house before he’s scooping up dirt. You drop to your knees to pick up the bag again, your legs already weak.

“We both know you’re going to pass out on the couch the second we’re home.”

Your voice is steadier than you feel, as you look up at him. His face is flushed and that worry line between his eyes is gone. 

“You got me pegged, Miller. You got me pegged.”

Two days later, he stands in the middle of his living room, hands on his hips, surveying his handiwork. All of the furniture has been pushed to the far ends of the room, up against the walls or against the staircase out in the hallway. He’s kept the overhead lights off and put the standing lamps in the corners, bathing the room in a despondent glow. He thinks, after a quarter of a century never even entertaining something like this, it might be interpreted as romantic. He hopes you’ll see it that way at least. 

He hears it now, in his head, even though she’s out in the disconnected garage, snug and warm as he could have possibly made it – you worry too much, old man. 

Ellie knows there’s something going on between you two. Hell, the entire town has cottoned onto whatever this is; you’re often seen leaving his house early in the morning, and he’s been seen on occasion strolling up to your house with flowers. It’s not new, it’s not a secret, but it is . . . it just is and that’s about as far as he’s gotten. 

He hasn’t had you over for dinner with Ellie in that very specific way that very much needs to happen, as it often does when there is a new presence added to an established dynamic – as Maria often reminds him. But that almost feels like presenting your head on a silver plate to Ellie to either sniff with disinterest or tear into – both terrifying scenarios, even though they seem unlikely. Ellie does in fact seem to like you very much, as her riding teacher and occasional greenhouse buddy. But would she continue to like you in the context of you being one half of “You and Him” as a pair? Together. As a couple . . . of people who are seeing each other, whatever that means in a world filled with the most aggressive form of fungus imaginable. 

This life in Jackson, this fragile second chance to remember and rekindle his own natural instincts, is too precious to bet on a question like that. 

So he doesn’t ask it. At least not out loud. 

That’s one of the things he likes so much about you: his silences aren’t entirely indecipherable and often are encouraged by your own. Except this silence about this particular thing doesn’t feel like one of your shared, comfortable moments and instead it’s encroaching rapidly into avoidance. 

Standing in that greenhouse and seeing the string lights over the town square reminded him of a long ago Christmas, dancing with his favorite person under a Christmas tree, and how good it made him feel. How special it made him feel. All these years later, safe in a way his body has almost forgotten, there’s an urge he has to share that feeling, to recreate it under entirely different circumstances, with someone new. Someone else. To not try and fight the smile that constantly threatens to buoy up every time he’s around you. 

It’s foreign, that feeling in his chest, but it’s not entirely alien, at least not of late. 

He knows he’s white-knuckling it because he knows firsthand how painfully quick it can all be gone. Taken away. Left and buried by a black river while the world burns.

But he’s worried he’ll crush it with how tightly he holds on. How hard he begs a silent universe for it to last just a little bit longer. 

His knees ache, his left shoulder goes tight when it rains, his body is not what it once was, but his mind is still there, still clear, and he remembers how romance used to feel, where it used to reside in his younger body, and as he stares out at the cleared room, listening to your footsteps overhead as you attempt to follow his vague instructions to “make yourself feel pretty” (because you already were to him, even covered in dirt and sawdust), he thinks this feels like the old world. An old world romance. It’s foreign, that feeling, but for the first time in a long time he doesn’t want to hold it at arm’s length.

“Joel?” You call from the top of the stairs, your voice tentative and cautious. But not cautious like you peeking around a corner to look for clickers. But cautious as in unsure, doubtful. You are a woman made up of a lot of things, with foundations unlike he’d ever seen before, but doubt is not a part of you. You never doubt him. 

“Yeah, baby?” Your nerves make him nervous and he futzes with a lampshade while waiting for you.

“Are you done down there?” 

He has to breathe slowly through the fluttering beneath his breastbone before he can answer. “Yeah, baby, all finished. You can come down now.”

“Okay . . . but you can’t laugh.” Him, laugh at you? There’s the instinct to smother the faint grin that spreads out across his mouth, but he told himself he wasn’t going to fight whatever came across his face tonight. If you see it, then you see it and he’s come to accept that. 

(Maybe even want that.)

He shakes his head, his only pair of nice boots (a thank you from a former rancher when Joel fixed his family’s heater) clicking on the hardwood floor as he stands at the bottom of the stairs. You must be hiding behind the wall because he can’t see you. 

“I’m not gonna laugh, sweetheart. Why d’ya think I’d laugh?” 

Silence faces him at the top of the stairs, and then:

“Because quite frankly I forgot my tits could look like this and I don’t know how to feel about it.” 

The snort that comes out of him is a poor attempt to muffle the chuckle. He thumbs the wood finial at the top of the bannister. 

“Can’t remember ever having any complaints before and I don’t think I’ll have ‘em now, no matter how they look.” 

“Whatever, Miller, you’re just a horn dog.” 

He rolls his eyes, fingers rubbing anxiously together at his side, as if he could tug the fluttering out of his chest. He leans on the other foot, the one with the bad knee, to adjust the slightly uncomfortable tightness in his jeans. A dark swirl in the second step of the stairs has become wildly interesting.

“Baby, just come down here. I’m not gonna laugh. Promise.”

“I’m gonna hold you to that,” you grumble, still out of sight. “I know where you keep your feral child and I will not hesitate to let her loose on you.”

Joel nods, grinning faintly, still focused resolutely on the whorl in the floor. “That’s a real big threat from someone who –,”

The words die in his throat.

In fact, he’s quite sure he won’t be capable of speech for a very long time. 

That foreign feeling – that feeling he’s worked for twenty years to suppress – is ignited in his chest. 

You walk, no, maybe you float down the stairs in the most stunning red dress he’s ever seen. It’s definitely not yours – he knows every inch of your closet because he had inspected it studiously when you offered to keep some of his clothes at your place and he was trying very hard to delay putting a handful of his belongings beside a woman’s things in a move that felt heart-stoppingly domestic. 

No, he has never, ever seen you in this dress. 

Come to think of it, he’s never seen you in any dress and you were entirely correct that your tits look wildly different. Fantastically different, but –

“Maria didn’t have any heels that fit me to go with the dress,” you announce airily, your chin up. But your eyes dart over his face as if looking for something you need to find. “But it’s fourteen degrees outside, Joel, and I’m not doing whatever this is in just socks because that’s ridiculous so you’re just going to have to deal with the boots.”

The Boots. The ones you wear while crushing clicker skulls and tending the stables. They still bear damp spots from where you tried to clean the blood and dirt from the leather.

It’s rather incapacitating how arousing he finds this particular combination.

So much so, he doesn’t realize he hasn’t said anything in a full minute until you bark at him, a cold tinge of panic in your voice.

“Joel!” His eyes snap to yours. Of course, you’re fucking beautiful – your eyes seem bigger, cheeks pinker, mouth wet – fucking Christ, where did you get make up? 

“Say something!” Those rosy lips drop down and to his horror, you’re upset. “Please!”

“B-baby, you look . . .” He doesn’t mean to grab your entire ass in one hand; he just wants to feel as much of that velvet on your skin as possible. You stumble into his arms, another something that is so unlike you, as he tugs you forward. Bends his lips to your ear to discover how fast you’re breathing. How fast your pulse races in your neck. The shudder that breaks the rigidity of your body when he brushes his mouth, the short bristles of his beard, against your skin is no surprise; you told him exactly what that sensation does to you in no uncertain terms the first night he ate you out on the table of your kitchen. “You look incredible.”

Your fingers bite into his biceps. Push back out of his arms, despite the obvious warmth in your cheeks. You level his arousal in a single glare. “Joel, I asked you not to tease.” 

Tommy once told him he was a pain in the ass to be around sometimes because he displays every negative emotion as anger and so it’s damn near impossible to figure out whatever it was he was so bent out of shape about.

Sadness as anger.

Shame as anger.

Guilt as anger.

Fear as anger.

With your fingers balled up, it's the tremor in your fists that gives you away. 

He had genuinely intended this to be a quiet night away from the cafeteria, away from the Tipsy Bison, away from anyone else. He wanted you all to himself and in his greed, he didn’t see it until he saw it in your eyes. 

How vulnerable being pretty made you. How vulnerable privacy made you. 

How being vulnerable made you so deeply, deeply afraid. 

Almost as afraid as he was. 

Without a word, he turns to the record player, strategically hidden behind the couch and puts on the carefully selected record. The silent scratches for a moment before –

Your eyes widen as Nelson begins to sing his most beautiful love song (in Joel’s humble opinion). Your shoulders slacken, hands lose their grip, you blink up at him in total bewilderment. You aren’t an indecisive person, you’re quick as a whip, rarely confused – so this befuddled look on your face is kinda cute. 

Tucking that rare look on your face away for another time, Joel wanders to the center of the room, in the heat of the light from the fireplace, his good boots clicking over the wood. He opens his arms, hand out to you.

“Let’s try something new tonight.”

I'll always be with you for as long as you please

For I am the forest but you are the trees

The decision you make is a visible one. 

Your palm is warm, weighted as it slides over his. This time his hand respectably settles on your waist, then on your low back when (to his surprise) you come closer. He’s delighted to watch you smile at him, distantly aware of the stretch of his own on his face. 

Willie strums on his guitar, crooning softly, the sound warm and deep. With the weight of you against his chest, that feeling crackles like the flames over the wood logs in the fireplace. You drop your head, turn your cheek, and just before you come to rest on his shoulder, he sees your smile slide into a smirk.

“New, huh? What’s new look like for a sixty-five-year-old man at the end of the world?” Even with teasing, your voice is soft and sweet, the soft powder of cinnamon. Slowly, as if not to startle either one of you, he leans his chin against your forehead.

“You n’ I’ve been burning both ends, keepin’ the lights on. New to us is having a goddamn break.” His voice is low, meant only for you, and in the tremble of his deep bass, the words elongate in his mouth. He brings your intertwined hands just under his chin and when that goes well, he tightens his grip around your back, drawing you flush against him. It reduces the dancing to more of a sway but Joel can’t find a single thing to complain about. You gently tap the pad of your middle finger in the hollow of his collarbone to the beat of the song.

I'm empty without you so come grow within me

For I am the forest and you are the trees

And the heavens need romance so love never dies

“‘N ‘m only fifty-six, jackass.” 

You grin, twisting in his grasp, rub your nose on his chest to wrap your arms around his neck. He clutches to your back like a key finding its lock. 

You'll be the stars dear and I'll be the sky

And should any of this find us let them all be forewarned

That you are the thunder and I am the storm

“This is nice, Joel,” you murmur in his ear. The backs of his arms are growing warm by the fire. He presses his lips to your exposed shoulder, unsure of what to say, or what not to say, only nodding. He closes his eyes, trying to hold this moment forever in his memory. The soft flare of your waist, the winged-spread of your ribs, beneath his hands brings him back into your arms.

"Yeah?" Quiet, into your skin as if to muffle the question entirely, to muffle the unsure wobble in his voice. "It's good?"

He feels you nod beneath his chin, the smell of fresh soap escaping from the back of your neck, and the clamp around his throat loosens. He breathes, unimpeded for the first time all night, a low exhale taking the tension from his body as the air leaves his lungs.

Relief. A sinking down into the moment, into your arms.

You chuckle with your cheek against his chest and he feels the vibrations down to his stomach.

"Yeah, Joel, you did good. Really good." With the hand he holds in the air, you rub your thumb over the knuckle of his thumb, soothing. It used to bother him you could read the lines of his emotions as well as you read a book, as well as you write your own name, effortlessly, as if you had been given a guide no one ever thought to show him. But now, now that you understand how much this means to him, that you know he needs to be told he made you happy, it's more than relief. It's an unburying – a resuscitation of pieces of himself (seed-like bone fragments) that he thought had long since died in the soil of his ribs. "Thank you. I needed this."

He wants you to see the whole of him. Lift up an antiquated silver plate and show you the dents and scratches in his reflection. When you kiss his cheek gently, the hope floating in his chest flares, a solar explosion with tendrils that reach into the blackness of space and it asks him, what would you do to keep her?

Everything. Anything.

He shuffles closer, feels the warmth of your body lined up against his, the clean scent beneath the edge of your jaw blooming in his nose and throat. The hope hums, pitches dark like the forest floor in the rain, and grows teeth. His want for you digs into his skin and evolves into a needy, unsatisfied thing.

“Where’d you get this dress, hm?” He asks, lips half an inch from your shoulder. It falls and rises, never catching on your skin as he plays with the fabric. He runs his palm up your spine, the velvet coming with him, and watches as the swell of your thighs and the tease of your ass is revealed. Dirty old man. “‘N who do I have to kill to get you to keep it?”

You laugh into his neck. He wonders if you’re intentionally twisting his curls at the base of his neck to send sparks of arousal down his spine or if you are completely unaware of the cause of his insanity. Your hands are littered with scars and calluses and every time you touch him, he could melt through the floorboards.

“They found it in some strip mall and were actually going to strip it down for material. But Aaron at the sewing center owed me a favor and you said wear something nice, so . . .” You thumb the lip of his collar, your fingertips brushing the knot of his spine every time you drag your fingers back and forth. 

And I'll always be with you for as long as you please

For I am the forest and you are the trees

He knows you well enough to know that something lingers in your mind, but even after all this time, even after what he’s seen with you, been through with you, the things he’s done to you – he isn’t quite sure if he has the right to ask. 

Instead, he squeezes you. He means to do it just with his hands, but ends up swallowing you in his arms. 

Your mouth is pressed up against his chest when you finally go on. 

“It just seems silly to keep, Joel.” 

The high he’s been riding on all night falters, since you first walked down those stairs to him. Your eyes are wet when he pulls back and cups you by your cheek. He stops swaying with you.

“Why’s that?” 

There it is, that all too familiar flicker of fear. You can’t look at him, despite his every touch, his every glance pulling you into him, to be near him. 

“Because other people should have it. They should have a chance to . . .” 

You withdraw your head from his hands, his thumb brushing your jaw as you retreat. He might actually lose a piece of himself if you let go now, but instead you clasp his wrists in your fingers. You stare at your hands and his between you, as if this whole thing between you could solidify at your feet, finally real. 

Willie has stopped singing, only that musky drone on an empty track.

“Someone else should have a chance to feel pretty, to feel this way, because it shouldn’t be wasted and I’m afraid – I wonder if –,”

He knows he’s being a bit too rough when he takes your jaw and straightens your gaze to him, but his heart might fly out of his chest before he has a chance to say anything. His stomach turns, not knowing he’s not at the peak of a roller coaster drop, that he’s standing on solid ground, even if it swims under his feet.

“What you feel is not wasted.” A murmur, stern, as steadily and as serious as he possibly can be.

That feeling aches in his chest and you haven’t even gone anywhere. You haven’t left . . . yet. “What this is, is not wasted time. I spent twenty years wasting time, looking for something that wasn’t there, and with you . . . I can’t say I’ve found it –,”

“Why? Why can’t you say you’ve found it?” Your grip around his wrists tightens, eyes hard. “Why can’t you name it, Joel?”

“Can you?” He pulls his hands out of your grip and you let him go. “How can you ask for what you want when you can’t even ask to keep this dress?” 

“Because I don’t deserve it!” It’s not silence that follows; it’s emptiness. You face away from him, pressing the heel of your hand into your brow bone, teeth slightly bared. Your arm bars across your stomach like you are literally holding in your guts. Finally, you lift your head, the few scant tears on your face sparkling in the firelight. “I don’t deserve you, Joel. I don’t deserve any of this. Ellie, the way she . . . I’m here, warm and happy, acting like the fucking world hasn’t ended. Playing house, playing pretend. Pretending like I’m your –,”

You swallow the words caught in your throat, gaze leaping away from him. At your side, your hand trembles again. 

Oh, honey, the shit I’ve done . . . 

With wide, wet eyes, you watch him approach. He doesn’t look at you, instead seeing exactly where he’d like to put his lips on your stomach beneath the fabric. 

“Then what do you want, hm?” There’s a fold in the front of the dress and he runs his fingers along the edge of it. “We can’t fix it. Can’t go back ‘cause there’s nothin' to go back to. I don’t care what you had to do to get here, right here, with me because I’m so fuckin’ glad you are. I’m not pretending, not wasting my time, never was. ‘Cause you’re right.” 

Your hand over his stills his endless roving and then it stays, scarred hand over scarred hand. Your gesture says something to him, something so meaningful he has no idea how to put it into words. He swallows his attempt and instead, slowly, drags both hands over your hips, where they stay. Heavy against the velvet. 

You rest your own against his forearms, neither pulling him in or pushing him back. 

“I was right about what?”

His eyes flick to yours and maybe it’s presumptuous, maybe he really is an old man afraid of his feelings, or maybe living this long – despite everything that ever tried to make it otherwise – living this long has granted him the privilege of knowing with perfect clarity what you’re thinking when you look at him like that. How he wants to whisper it back to you and he decides he will the next time your skin is warm and tacky, body helpless beneath his. 

Your eyes shamelessly track the brush of his tongue against his bottom lip.

“That you’re mine. Just like I’m yours.” 

The hands at his forearms glide up to his chest. The rims of your irises have gone a bit blurred, a bit unstable, and you can’t decide whether to look at his mouth or his eyes.

“Joel?” Suddenly breathy, all begging, pleading.

“Hm?”

“Get me out of this fucking dress.” 

When your lips crash into his, his entire world narrows down to where on his body, yours touches: 

your rough hand cradling his cheek, the other fisting the collar of his shirt. His fingers digging into your skirt, the heat from your thigh nearly driving him to tear straight through the fabric to get to you. Your sweet, perfect mouth smeared against his, lips puffed pink, nose to your cheek. 

That warm, wet cunt he thinks he can feel through his boxers, jeans, the dress and your underwear. 

It’s not enough. 

The cry you let out is some mangled mix of a moan and his name when he licks the soft supple skin behind your ear and nips your earlobe.

“Baby, please – please – bedroom, we have to–,”

He grunts his disapproval at your words, overwhelmed by the scent that makes his mouth water as he stains the column of your throat with wet, humid kisses. 

“Joel, c’mon, honey, just upstairs –,” 

The last flickering tiny speckle of logic in his brain fights with itself; take your right here or haul you over his shoulder – which isn’t great for his back and, quite frankly, he intends to spend most of the night on his knees. 

First option it is. 

You mumble in confusion, eyes shut, chin brushing the thread of gray curls on the top of his head as he purposefully sucks a bright hickey into your collarbone, one hand cupping your breast, the other pushing you backwards. You go willingly, of course. 

Until the backs of your legs hit the couch and there’s nowhere else to go. In the stumble, your dress rides up even higher and those thighs he’s actually lost sleep over appear to him. He drops to his knees, hands like meat hooks as they squeeze your waist, pulling that warm cunt even closer to him over the edge of the couch. You groan when he pushes the skirt up even higher, practically to your tits, as he explores your outer, then inner thighs with soft strokes of the back of his hands. He presses his nose to the crevice between your thigh and hip and inhales. 

“B-baby, the windows,” you swallow thickly, slurring like you’re drunk, grabbing at his shoulders like you’re trying to steady yourself, or turn him towards the windows. “I mean – the curtains, baby, the curtains are –,”

“It’s a fucking blizzard outside,” he explains tersely with his eyes still closed, as if irritated to have a conversation instead of focusing every ounce of concentration he has to the heat and smell beneath your black panties. He drags his teeth over the elastic band around your hips and makes you whine his name for an entirely different reason. 

You don’t make him stop or wait when he tugs those panties down your hips. In fact, you help, lifting your hips, the irises of your eyes so wide and black, you look halfway out of your mind.

Good.

He gathers the skirt he was once so fond of and stuffs it into the cushions behind you. You watch him as he moves, eyes half-lidded, finger scraping your bottom lip. Around his ribs, your knees dip back and forth, moving targets, like he’s forgotten why he’s here and needs reminding. 

His big paw, the size of which makes you feel indescribably small, catches your knee and stills it, gaze dark and heavy. Do not test me right now. You try not to moan. 

“Can’t believe I’m going to let you fuck me with my boots on,” you whisper airly, watching with delirious fascination as he puts one of your slender legs over his shoulder. His mouth is actually watering at the sight of your damp curls. 

“Not gonna fuck you. Just gonna eat your pussy. You’ll know the difference.”

“Semantically, it’s the sa-a-me thi-ng, Jo-e – ah, Joel!” 

His tongue up inside you turns you into a whiny, high-pitched, feminine mess. He eats like he does everything else: diligently, quickly, and silently. 

Until you bury your fingers in his ash-flecked curls and tug. 

That first deep, loud moan ripples through his body, rolling him up just off his heels, his crotch seeking some kind – any kind – of friction. 

The feel of his mouth humming against your cunt has your eyes rolling back in your head. “Please, oh fuck, please –” 

You are a grown woman. You should not be making these noises. 

You also shouldn’t be using a man’s face to get off . . . but you do it anyway.

“Tha’s it, baby,” he mutters when your hips grind against his face. His nose catches your clit and around him, your thighs wobble. “Use me, fuckin’ use me.” 

His grip around your calf over his shoulder turns rough and he knows he’ll bruise you, but fuck, the thought of you walking around town with a mark in the shape of his hand where everyone can see —

He briefly lifts his grip from your thigh to adjust his iron-hot cock in his jeans. From his view over your cunt, it doesn't seem like you noticed, or even saw him leave your skin. He watches you writhe, try to capture your breath, eyes crammed shut as your hips rock almost without your control. He takes a chance to lick the musky dampness from his upper lip when your cunt rolls back from his face a fraction of an inch — and then he sinks in again.

Call it age or the fact that you both are here at the end of the world, but the first night he ate you out, you told him exactly how and where you like it, unabashed and in control and honestly it’s the hottest thing he can think of in recent memory. 

He would have written it down on the backs of his eyelids if he could. 

He follows it to the letter.

“Joel – Joel, baby, please don’t stop –,” You buck and moan beneath him as he spells out your instructions with his tongue along your cunt. He dots the i’s with a tap of his tongue or a lick on your clit. Just inches above his head, your chest heaves, your fingers locked into his curls, gently pushing him closer to your puffy pussy as if he’d ever waste a drop of what leaks out of you. 

With a flat-tongued brush against your suffering clit, you arch off the couch, your sighs now verging on desperate, high and whinging, because it’s just not fair how good he makes you feel. He can feel your foot curl against the planes of his back, the rubber heel heavy, your mouth open and wet, with your eyes locked on the ceiling as you try to ride out your humming orgasm with a semblance of control.

“Look at me.” 

No other man has ever been able to make you come with just his mouth, you told him once.

And no other man ever will. 

It’s sweet, the way your eyes soften briefly when you lock eyes with him, crouched between your thighs — before your head tips back, lips wrenched apart in a silent scream, and you come, as hard as he has worked for the flush of slick down his chin.

There’s goosebumps on your thighs, he notes. He rubs his thumb against your raised skin and you shudder, head rolling against the back of the couch.

He’s already feeling a slight twinge of shame at the noise his knees will inevitably make when he stands, but for now he’s content watching you glide down from your high, his head against your knee, shoulders still stretching your legs open wide. 

To his delight, you manage to laugh, your hand draping over your eyes. You can see the shine of the dull light all across his lips, his chin, his nose and you have to close your eyes. He should make you lick it off him, but not tonight.

“Top marks, Miller, as usual,” you mumble, “but the threat of voyeurism really deserves the extra credit.” 

He grins. Still waiting for your breath to slow, he wipes his mouth with his palm and slides the leg over his shoulder down in between his own thighs. Propped up on one knee, he begins to unlace your boot. He holds your calf like it’s delicate as he gently drags the boot over your heel. 

He’s just as reverent with the other side. 

And then your boots, the pair, sit at the end of his couch, like they were always meant to be there. 

His heart, easing down from its own thunderous beat, squeezes and that feeling, that strange-not-so-strange feeling, the one that dictates practically every action with you, dribbles into his veins. 

You open one eye. A flutter of lashes, coy and playful, the curve of your mouth guarding a hoard of secrets.

“Now, Joel Miller . . . will you take me to bed?” 

It’s a question. A request. Your eyes, as dark as ever, on his warm his chest, all the way down his spine. You’re asking, politely, for a thing you both know he would never, ever deny you. 

He cannot lose you, he just can’t. 

He stands and, yes, his knees crack and pop, but he regains stability when he toes off his only good pair of cowboy boots. He nods, grinning, and offers you his hand.

The walk, half-run up to his bedroom is something his brain designates as not important enough to store away. 

Instead, it languishes in the way you stretch out on his mattress before him, ass in the air, knees spread over his blankets and arms sliding through crumpled sheets towards the headboard. 

The room is dark, the only light fighting its way through the downpour of snow comes from the lamp posts that dot the street outside. But the veil of snow warps the light and everything in the half-darkness is doused in blue. 

The shadowy, blurred curve of your shoulder, blue. 

The spread of your fingers on his mattress, blue.

The swollen bottom of lip of your mouth —

“Joel.” 

The snow falls so fast and hard, it patters against the windows and the sides of the house. It’s the only thing he can hear over the pounding of his heart and the short breath in his lungs. He stares at you, soaking his blankets in your scent and slick, and you stare right back in utter and total silence. 

You sit in the center of his bed, bare for him beneath the velvet dress that is red like blood, your patchy white socks at complete odds with your smeared make up and the fucked-out look in your eyes. But there’s something else there too. 

Something softer. Gentler. 

You reach out a hand to him and he goes to you, like always. The instant your skin touches his the instinct to fuck you hard until you’re bruised and crying evaporates. He doesn’t think you want that anymore either. 

No, you need — 

“Joel, please come here. I need you.” 

You need him.

The mattress squeaks when he settles one knee and then the other on top of it, his fingers stroking your ear, brushing the tips of your hair, while he kisses you with an ache that is not physically manifested. Instead, it resides —

“I love you,” you whisper. 

You pull back infinitesimally, just enough that your eyes are all he sees. 

A patient silence hangs from the ceiling. The sound of snow falling. Of baited breath. The scratch of your fingers against at his beard —

“I love you too.” You smile and his body is no longer big enough to contain his heart. “I feel like I’ve always loved you. Is that strange?” 

Your gaze traces the same path your fingers take when you think he’s sleeping; it runs over his nose, his forehead, his eyebrows, the plush curve of his lips. Like you can’t believe he’s there with you. Like you can’t believe he’s real. 

That feeling — that feeling he had been fighting because it always was the only thing that would ever really do him in — is love. He loves you. 

He loves you.

And you love him. 

Didn’t think they told stories like this anymore, not in a world like this. So maybe, for once, Joel Miller just got lucky. 

“No. It’s not. Just be sure you mean it.”

He can't tell if the glow in your eyes comes from within you or it beams out of him. “Every word.”

Eventually, he sheds you of his favorite dress of yours, your only dress, and he lays you back, fully bare in the nest of his blankets. In the corner of his bedroom, the heater hisses like the wind from a purple storm, the static crackle of warmth hovering in the air. You watch, with eyes that shine like stars, as he pops apart the pearl-snaps holding his shirt together. 

And then his white undershirt goes next. He used to worry what he looked like, until he found someone else who had done exactly what was necessary to survive. 

When he goes to unzip his pants, you sit up, hair mussed and the hickey he gave you earlier throbbing like a dream. 

“I wanna do it.” 

He lets you unbutton his jeans, slide the zipper down, at the edge of the bed, but your hands are shaking, your breath stunted.

“I’m fumbling like a teenager,” you huff, a small, flustered smile on your face. “It’s like I’m nervous, but what is there to be nervous about —,”

His mouth pressed up against yours creates the most beautiful silence of all. 

How do you want me, you ask him and he thinks, all the time. But he takes you both under the covers and settles in next to you. He positions one leg over his hip and immediately you know exactly what he’s asking for. Quick as a whip, you are. 

There’s a rustle of covers, the bed slats squeaking, and then he’s nearly nose-to-nose with you. You kiss him again, maybe nervous still. 

He disconnects, when you slip between his legs and take his thick, leaking cock in your hand. 

“Baby, wait, do you need — I know it’s a lot — I’m a lot –,”

He can’t fathom why he’s so nervous either. But you chuckle, shake your head, smile at him. 

“Don’t need anything but you.” 

Your leg wraps tighter over his hip, knee up to his ribs, as he sinks inside you. The palm wrapped around the back of your knee grips roughly only once.

This is true silence. The instant where the world goes muted, everything distant and muffled, when he’s first buried deep in your heat. 

Your fingers thread through his curls and suddenly all sound is cranked up to an eleven. Your rapid, stilted breathing, the groan of the bed, your soft smothered moans, or are those his? —

“Fuck me, Joel.” 

Eyes never leaving yours, he does. 

Your fingers dig into his skull, nails biting, hand wrapped around his neck to hold yourself steady as he thrusts up into you. He thumbs your stiff nipple, half of his hand still grasping your ribs. 

You meet him thrust for thrust, a slow steady pace that draws sweat to his hairline and endless gasps from his mouth. But your gaze stays strong, never falters. Your hand slips to his shoulder, to stabilize just a bit more, but then it's on his chest, twisting his chest hair and he thinks he feels that sparkle of sanity, of rationality, any restraint to hold back crack and shatter between the clench of his teeth. 

“Goddamn–,” 

He rolls, taking you under him and demanding a faster pace. You push your hand against the headboard, the bed knocking against the wall in rhythmic, hypnotic thuds. 

He thinks you hiss his name before you bite down his shoulder. 

The sharp shock of pain lights up his brain, channeling the sudden awareness that he liked that so fucking much all the way down his spinal cord where it presses hot against his groin. 

He lifts up onto one elbow, skin sweat hot and sticky as it splits from yours. 

“Tell me what you need to come,” he pants.  

You whine again, your throat dripping sweat, but that’s not an answer. Knowing he has about a half-a-dozen to a dozen good grinds before it puts too much strain on his back, he uses every single one of them to drag you to the knife’s edge. 

“What–,” grind, “do you need –,” grind, “to come?”

The wail you let out nearly makes him come on the spot. Your eyes have that same, out-of-this-world, off-this-planet unfocused gaze, any sort of language impossible. You plead with him in the silence. A silence loaded with damp moans, grit teeth, and skin against skin against skin against skin against skin. Best sound in the world, as far as he was concerned.

You arch until he lifts above you and, taking the hand that was by your head, tuck it down between your legs. You let him grasp around with spread fingers where you are wet, where his cock rocks into your body, watch as that pulls him apart faster with dark eyes, before pressing his thumb against your clit. 

There, you say without words. There is where I need you.

Once, twice, he circles – he can feel the tightness in his back already settling in, his jaw fixed and locked, his body battling the two overwhelming sensations of dull pain and fierce, wild pleasure – and you hit your release and you soak him in it. 

He falls then too, falls just as hard and as fast as you, the chronic pain he holds in his shoulders, his neck, his back, his knee fleetingly gone in the rush of heat that branches out of his body from his groin and it feels divine.

When he lies on top of you, face buried in the curve of your neck, the heat from your humid skin warming up the breath in his lungs, the throb of your body matching his, his mind wiped clean, the thought occurs to him:

It’s not silence he’s found with you, it’s quiet. 

It’s peace.

Eventually, some awareness seeps back into his trembling body and he rolls off of you, but takes the curve of your jaw in his hand as he goes. He can’t settle into the pillows because he can’t stop kissing you, love bites occasionally against your lip, as if where his body fails, he proves his love for you won’t end so easily.

Eventually, you press your fingers into the base of his skull and, like a reset button, he groans and drops onto his back. 

Eventually, the quiet returns. Only soft noises, murmurs of existence outside of this perfect little room, fill the space. 

Eventually, he falls asleep with you curled up next to him. 

He knows you love waking up in bed together, but he also knows you love fresh coffee even more. 

Which is where Ellie finds him the next morning. 

He nearly adds too much ground coffee to the pot because he’s distracted, lost in thought about the way your curves looked in the bright morning light, when the back door slams open and a little creature made of entirely scarves, mittens, and an oversized purple jacket stomps into his kitchen and clomps its snowy shoes on the rug. 

“Joel, we gotta go!” She’s a little breathless, red-cheeked too as she unwinds the scarf around her head and her face is revealed. “We don’t wanna miss it!”

“Miss what?” Joel asks, this time carefully measuring how much water the pot needs. 

His question is not met with her usually buzzy chatter. Instead, she’s stopped undoing her scarf and just stares at him like he’s been beamed down from another planet. 

He realizes all too late that he’s still in PJs at 9AM (basically a sign of another apocalypse), he’s making more coffee than just for himself, and he’s smiling. 

Shit.

“Ellie, um, I –,”

She rolls her eyes. Her scarf is flung off her neck and she starts yanking off her gloves, her plucky attitude back, if not a bit smug.

“Get your girlfriend up too. They’re lighting the big tree in town square in an hour. I know she’d be pissed if she missed it.” 

So definitely caught. Time to be “The Adult” here and put it out on the table. 

“Don’t call her that.” Joel eyes her. Coffee percolating, he grabs a slice of bread and Ellie’s favorite jam. “Makes it sound like we’re fourteen.” 

She frowns at him, classic “pouty-mouth”. 

“I’m fourteen — rude. But seriously, and I say this because I care, get over yourself. Call a spade a spade. You’re dating her, fucking her–,”

“Ellie!” 

"– and you make gross ga-ga eyes at each other when you think I’m not looking."

She slides into the seat at the island in front of him as he pushes the toasted bread with jam across the marble to her. She takes a bite, chews with her mouth open, and shrugs. “That’s a girlfriend, dude.” 

Joel turns back to the eggs that might be burning, his shoulders hunched and fist tight around the spatula. Hate it when the kid is right. 

He salvages what he can of the eggs, plates them along with two strips of bacon on two plates, and balances a mug of coffee on each. He tries to salvage some of his dignity with a glare. 

“When you’re older, you’ll see some things just don’t need labels.” 

At that, she rolls her eyes again and snatches up the last strip of bacon from the folded, greasy napkins. “Whatever, you dork.”

Argument soundly lost, he gathers up the plates and heads back up stairs. She’s still mumbling to herself as he goes. 

“'Girlfriend', pfft . . . much better than fuck bunny!” She yells to no one in particular.

You hear the entire conversation from bed, the door cracked open enough for the sound to travel. Muffling a giggle, you snag his white shirt from the floor and draw it over your head. You should probably be more embarrassed that Joel got caught in his Walk of Shame, even if it was to his own kitchen to make breakfast. But . . . you’re just not. 

The smile is still on your face when his footfalls approach the door and he sticks his head into the room.

“Sounds like we’re busted,” you smirk. 

Joel almost chuckles. “'Bout as busted as you can be.” He hands you one plate and sits on the end of the bed with his own. He takes a low, slow sip of coffee and you follow him. The eggs are nibbled at and the bacon is perfectly crunchy.

“So . . . girlfriend?” 

He rolls his eyes. “Not you too.” 

“I mean," you slip the plate and coffee onto the bedside table, then hug the sheets around your knees, "I agree with you on the bit about labels. It seems silly. And not wasteful silly. Just . . .”

“Silly.” Joel’s eyes are as dark as his coffee, warmer than it too. “Doesn’t really capture the whole thing, does it?”

An apocalypse and a half later, and a boy’s sweet eyes on you can still make your stomach swoop. 

“No, it doesn’t.” 

“Then what do you wanna say, if people start askin’?”

You bite your lip, eyes up in faux-thought. “Truth be told, I'm kinda partial to fuck bunny. Cute like with a little tail and ears —,"

The groan from Joel and subsequent head shake makes you laugh enough for you to take pity on the old guy. You crawl closer and his eyes slip from your face to where the sheet tucks under your knees. But a hand on his cheek returns his gaze.

"I like what you said last night." Your smile is soft, pleased. "That I’m yours. Like you’re mine.” 

Joel’s warmth bleeds from his whole frame as he leans in close to put his mug on the bedside table, then leans in closer still to you. He drags his nose over your bare, exposed shoulder, in a way that is sweet and sensual all at once. He stops with a kiss on the hinge of your jaw. 

“I like that too. I like saying that you’re mine.”

Ignoring the shiver that rockets up your spine at the low hum of his voice, the flutter of his lips barely against your cheek, you tuck an errant curl around his ear and it immediately springs back up again. You smile and he smiles back, a youthful shine in his eyes.

“Wherever you are, I am too.”  

Listen to: I am the forest by Willie Nelson

[paintedwritings]

Leaving For A Mission

Pairing: Azriel x Reader (She/her pronouns used)

Word Count: 3.5k

Summary: Azriel and his mate before he leaves on a mission and the anxiety that comes with it.

Warning/Notes: There's kind of adult content, not too much. I don't really know what I'm doing. This is my first time ever posting anything that I've written. So sorry if it's bad, just trying to put myself out there. Thank you for any feedback.

Check out part 2!

✩☽✧✩☽✧✩☽✧✩☽✧✩☽✧✩☽✧✩☽✧✩☽✧✩☽✧✩☽✧✩☽✧✩☽✧✩☽✧✩☽✧

Taking a deep breath, Y/n stood patiently behind the rest of the Inner Circle as they began their farewells to the shadowsinger. A ritual of sorts, before the spymaster of the Night Court left on what –she had been told– would be a fairly simple mission to the Mortal Lands.

Despite the supposed simplicity of the mission, the Inner Circle always made sure to say proper goodbyes to each other. Just in case, Rhys had said to her once. 

It made sense, truly, but it didn’t lessen her growing fears for the man, for her mate. Gods, she still wasn’t used to that word, she had only known about the bond for about three weeks, and this was Azriel’s first mission out of the Night Court since then. To say she was a nervous wreck would be the understatement of the century.

Sure, she had known Azriel for close to a year now and he had gone on hundreds of missions in that time, but now it felt different. It felt closer. Like now she wouldn’t be able to separate herself from the situation if things were to go awry, she was entangled in a way that took root deep within her.

Y/n had no idea how she was supposed to act, is she allowed to be worried, to feel a hollow cleaving in her chest that grows tenfold as the minutes tick by? Would he be expecting her to act a certain way, would she disappoint him?

 The two of them hadn’t accepted the bond yet, were still getting to know each other on a more intimate level. They had been friends before she knew about the bond, and not much had changed in the short period of time. She would be lying to herself if she thought his absence, of any kind, in her life wouldn’t send her into a whirlwind of unwanted emotions and grief, though.

Perhaps, that scared her the most. How much she had grown to care for the shadowsinger in a few short months, and how it had only deepened in the past few weeks. 

She could feel herself falling deeper and deeper into him, into their bond, but it didn’t matter how close the ground came to her, she couldn’t stop the inevitable impact. She didn't want to stop it.

They–she– had wanted to take things slow. He had been so kind about it, understanding that this was all still very new to her. When she had asked to move slow, her mate had merely smiled at her and assured her that he was fine with whatever pace she was most comfortable with. Her anxiety nearly extinguished with the sentiment.

Azriel had known about the bond for quite a while longer than she had. He had wanted to wait until she felt that glowing tether on her own, though. So, he had patiently waited and they had become rather close in the first few months of meeting one another. 

He had helped train her in Valkyrie training, had joined her nearly every night in the library, the two of them reading their own novels, or reports, deep into the night. Simply basking in each other’s presence. He always brought her trinkets from other courts he’d visit, or take her down to the bakeries of Velaris to try her favorite sweet treats, claiming he wanted to try them himself, though never actually doing so.

Truly, she shouldn’t have been so caught off guard with the realization of their mate bond, every interaction they had ever had only emphasized what they had been to each other, she had just been too caught up in her past to look towards the present, at what had been right in front of her.

Three weeks ago was when everything had changed. 

Y/n had been awoken in the dead of night, half-asleep and delirious from dreams of dusty texts and haunted libraries, by small, dark tendrils of shadows. Very panicked shadows. They had all but dragged her out of her bed, not even giving her a moment to collect herself, or throw a robe on over her near-non existent nightgown. 

Pulling her out of her door and down the hallway before she could register the cold wooden floor beneath her small feet or the way the hallway had been entirely consumed by writhing darkness.

His shadows had led her to a door, his door, she had recognized almost instantly, pushing and pulling at her to enter. 

Had she had even a moment to think, she would have noticed the door had already been cracked open, and that the unnatural darkness of the hallway seemed to be being fed by that very opening. She would have realized that the shadowsinger never left anything in such disarray, had never so much as forgotten to close a door behind him, let alone leave it unlocked.

But, she hadn’t had a moment, because she could hear something coming from within the room. Something that sounded so foreign to her fae ears she hadn’t even realized what it was before she barged into his room, his shadows leading her straight to– what she assumed– was his bed in the center. 

Suddenly, she thanked the shadows for being with her in that moment, she had never seen anything made of pure obsidian darkness, she never would have been able to navigate his room without their small jabs and urgent pulls.

And the noise she had heard, a noise that cast her bones, her skin, her very being into an icy oblivion, was Azriel. 

A whimper.  

A small, clipped sound that kept repeating, over and over and over–

Y/n needed that sound to stop, it set her entire being on edge, made her want to find and slaughter whatever had caused the noise to come from the Spymaster of the Night Court. One of the most feared fae in all of Prythian.

Climbing onto the bed, her hands splayed in front of her, she searched for him, for his warm and constant presence she had become so accustomed to. 

“Azriel?” She whispered, doing her best to avoid startling him, a feat she wasn’t sure possible if his shadows were any indication. Surely they had tried to help him? To wake him from whatever nightmare seemed to be causing such distress? Why had they come to get you? Surely another member of the Inner Circle, his family who had known him much longer than you, would have been a better option.

Her hand met with cold, scarred skin. His hand.

She didn’t realize in her panic the mistake she made, that she should have tried calling out to him, again.

Within a breath the world tilted on its access, the all-consuming darkness seemed to disappear, leaving her with a dark, but plain, view of the bedroom she had somehow found herself in. 

Cold steel pressed against her jugular, a warm trickle of blood cascading down her throat, a shadow chasing it as if it could make the small injury disappear all on its own. She didn’t dare move, afraid she may accidentally slit her own throat.

Dark, nearly black, eyes stared down at her, one large hand clasping both of hers above her head, teeth no more than a millimeter away from her face. 

Gods.

This. This was the terrifying spymaster of the Night Court. No wonder so many fae, old and young alike, trembled at the mere mention of his name. He had moved within a moment's notice, perfect precision, snarling at whoever dared come into his room while he slept. He must keep knives within reach, cauldron, she had been too rash in her attempts to help him.

Despite her current position, she couldn't help but find the male before her so achingly attractive. Who would have known that having an Illyrian warrior threaten death would be such a turn on? No. Not just any Illyrian warrior, Azriel.

Well, there had to be something so severely wrong with her, because she could feel herself getting wetter as the moment passed slowly, could only imagine the arousal that had permeated from her, the pout of her lips as she waited to see what would happen next, waited to see what he would do to her next.

But, within it all there hadn’t been a lick of fear. Azriel could have slit her throat if he’d wanted to, but instead he stayed pressed against her, pressing her body so thoroughly in the bed that she didn’t know where he began and she ended. His hard, very naked, chest aglow with a slight sweat, his intoxicating aroma infiltrating her senses so completely, she can't help how her eyes roll back. Her fingers twitching absently as they lay pinned above her head, feeling his rapid pulse beating against her skin. Her nipples pebbling against her dark nightgown, hitting his chest at the deep rise and fall of her labored breathing.

Then, as if the fog cleared, recognition flared behind his eyes, his hand dropped hers, the knife being so swiftly discarded she couldn’t help that small noise that escaped, the nick already healing over. 

“Y/n,” a choked, broken sounding rendition of her name falling from his lips as he pulled off of her entirely, leaving her feeling far colder than mere moments before. He didn’t go far, though, sitting back on his knees at the end of the bed.

“I’m so sorry, I didn���t–”

Sitting up, her legs not coming anywhere close to the end of his massive bed, she couldn’t help the instinct to feel at her throat. His shadows had wound their way through strands of her hair and around her wrist, almost as if trying to soothe her, but, why not their master?

“It’s alright,” she spoke softly, doing her best to calm the shadows all around her. One danced along her arm, following a tattoo that represented her dedication to the Night Court and its people, a smile blistering on her face as she ran her opposite hand over it.

If she had looked away from the small shadow she would have noticed Azriel staring at her, his breaths still laborious, still being tamed. He had never seen anyone look at his shadows like she did, as if they were pets, a part of a family that would falter without them, not some terrifying representation of all the hardships he had had to endure in his long life. He wished he could commission Feyre to paint the image before him.

Y/n– his mate, sitting on his bed in nothing short of a slip, leaving very little to the imagination– speaking soft, carefree words towards his shadows, towards him. He didn’t think she knew exactly how his shadows worked, but he’d rather keel over than stop her menstrations of calming, coaxing coos.

He was trying desperately to ignore the lingering scent of her arousal in the air, trying to ignore what that could mean, what could have caused it.

“They brought me here,” she finally spoke, her eyes meeting his, at last. “They seemed… worried about you,” quickly she amended, “I was worried about you.”

“I’m sorry,” he said once more, some of his dark curls falling forwards as he cast his gaze down. “Sometimes the nightmares– they leave me unable to control them entirely, I didn’t mean to wake you.”

He felt her move, her lavender and frost-chilled scent enveloping him wholly, he didn’t dare look up as she pressed her knees against his. Her small hands coming up to cup his cheeks, soothing one of her thumbs along the bone.

His breathing faltered for the second time that night. She had never touched him so bravely, as if she had every right to.

Azriel wanted to tell her that she did have the right. That she could touch him whenever and he would bask in whatever small amount of affection she’d willing give him.

“Do you want to talk about it?” Her voice sounded small, as if she were just as affected by their skin touching. As if, just maybe, she could feel the warmth radiating through the bond he had tried so desperately not to force on her.

Shaking his head, he clasped the hand that still cradled him like he was something precious, something worth holding onto. His eyes finally met hers once more, his tongue darting out across his lips, wetting once, then twice.

Her eyes tracked the movement, memorized it, her own tongue darting out against her will. His eyes snapping to the movement. That’s when she felt it.

He watched her eyes widen, her breath catch suddenly, her grip on his face tightening just a fraction, holding herself to him, afraid that letting go would mean toppling off the edge of this world.

“Az–” she began.

Fingers snapped in front of her, pulling her out of her thoughts. Everyone stared directly at her, how long had she been zoning out? Seven pairs of eyes, each varying in degrees of understanding and out-right laughter, waited for you, having obviously missed whatever had just been said. And then, she looked into his golden pools of hazel, an emotion she wasn’t quite ready to acknowledge staring back at her as she took all of him in. Strapped to the nth degree with all kinds of daggers and weapons, his leathers buckled and placed deliberately on his generous figure, and his blazing siphones glimmering with dark, unforgiving power. He looked lethal.

And delicious.

His eyes darkened as the thought races past her defenses, ramming straight through her side of the bond and into his. 

Oh, cauldron-boil her. 

She still, clearly, had a lot of work to do when it came to keeping her mental shields up.

Now everyone was looking between the two of them, seemingly too afraid to move or say anything in fear that it would cause y/n and Azriel to jump each other’s bones here in front of everybody.

Cheeks heating, she squealed, “I’m sorry, what?”

Cassian, the one responsible for the finger-snapping, looked amused. His chaotic energy seeming to burn alive from within him. It had been no secret that Rhys and Cassian had known about her bond with Azriel, more than delighted that their brother had found someone he cherished. 

Because Azriel did cherish her, in more ways than she could comprehend. Everyday he showed her how much he cared for her, how much he would do to make her happy, to keep her safe.

They had gone on multiple dates since she discovered their bond, but they had yet to do anything other than talk to each other, learn each other. And, she wanted to learn about him, she wanted to know everything.

Her face warmed, a small smile lighting her face at the thought.

A crooked smirk graced the Commander’s features, a smirk that promised teasing and jokes at her expense, one that made it clear he knew exactly what she was thinking about.

Cassian opened his big mouth, likely to poke fun at her.

“We just thought you might want a moment alone with Az before he leaves,” Rhys cut in smoothly, effectively earning a glare from his red-siphoned warrior. Rhys merely gave him a look, one that seemed to say ‘We’ve been in this situation, too’. Effectively shutting whatever maniacal thought had been about to jump off Cassian’s tongue.

“Okay.” She whispered, hands clasping before her nervously. 

Then it was just the two of them. 

Standing a few feet apart, neither quite sure how to handle this situation. She wondered if he felt what she did, if he could feel her worry and her desperation for him not to go. 

It was selfish, she knew that. 

It didn’t stop it from being true.

He closed the space between them in an instant, his toes touching hers, the only part of him touching her.

“Are you–” He seemed to search for the words, “I will be back in three days, I swear to you.” He settled on. 

Y/n smiled at him, doing her best to calm his nerves. She would be here, safe and not putting her life on the line– unless one counted coming up with a plan to tie all of the General’s shoelaces together– he would be in far more danger. She needed to do this for him.

Taking a breath, she laced her fingers with his, somehow managing to step even further into him, into her mate.

She wanted him to know that she would miss him, desperately, that she would be counting down the minutes until he returned to her, that she would worry about his safety and well-being relentlessly. She allowed each feeling and thought to travel to him through that golden string tying him to her.

Rhys had said that they always say goodbyes in case of tragedy, she didn’t want him to leave without knowing how she felt.

Lifting her other arm, she looped it around his neck, dragging the foreheads against one another. A sharp twitch of his wings the only indication that she affected him as much as he affected her.

His eyes bore into hers as she spoke softly, for only him to ever hear, “Please, come back home to me safely.” A plea.

A small, sad sound came from him as he wrapped both of his arms around her middle, their chests flush against each other. “I will, I promise.” His lips gracing her forehead. Gods, she wanted him to kiss her, had been dreaming of what it would feel like to have his soft, cool lips caress her own. Or to have his scarred, beautiful hands run along her skin.

It wasn’t enough, she knew he couldn’t really promise her his safety, though hearing him do so did ease her warring anxiety slightly, but she wanted more. Needed more.

“When you return, will you spend three full days with me, just the two of us?” She pouted, “To make up for leaving me in such a distressed state,” he hummed at the teasing lilt in her tone, an uncontainable smile encompassing his face.

“How about we double it, just to be safe.” Her smiled matched his own.

“Deal.”

Before she could second guess herself, she placed a chaste kiss upon his left cheek, feeling him stiffen in surprise before melting at the sentiment. There must be something in the air, she thought, because she couldn’t help herself from kissing his right cheek, then his forehead, his nose, even his chin. Trying to calm her beating heart, to soothe the bond within her that screamed to never let him go.

As he set her back down to her feet, heart in her stomach, she knew it was time for him to leave. He must have felt the dread, too, because he didn’t step away from her. 

Cauldron, why was this so difficult? She already missed the way his warmth cradled her. How would she possibly be able to get anything done while he was away, he had already taken over her thoughts, and he hadn’t even left yet.

Before she could take that final step back, he grabbed her once more, softly, before bringing her forwards and connecting his mouth with hers.

A gasp escaped her, her hands flying to his leathers, grabbing on for dear life as she melted into him. 

He tasted like pure bliss. His mint breath and cedar scent taking complete control of all her senses.

One of his hands cradled her cheek as he kissed her, his mouth soft, but firm as he coaxed noises out of her she hadn’t even realized she could make. He kissed her like his life depended on it, like he was starving and she was all he could eat, all he could ever need. 

His other hand found its way into her hair, pulling gently to guide her mouth more securely against his own, a groan tumbling out of him. 

She burned, her body, her soul, she wasn’t sure how she ended up with her legs around his waist, or her hands in his dark curly locks, pulling and massaging, but there they were. 

Devouring each other shamelessly in the middle of the House of Wind’s foyer. 

She mewled as his tongue darted between her lips, swiping past her teeth and dominating her fully. She couldn’t get enough, her body seemed to have a mind of it’s own as she began grinding slowly on him, trying to claw her way into his body, his soul, anything to keep him from leaving her in this moment.

“Fuck,” he said breathlessly, “You’re so fucking perfect.” he nipped her bottom lip, a quick flick of his tongue against it one last time as if he couldn’t help it.

A cough came from behind them, jolting Y/n so thoroughly that she would have toppled over if not for Azriel’s iron-clad grip on her hips.

The snarl that left the shadowsinger would have sent any lesser fae running for their lives. But, Rhys, as put-together as always, merely smirked at his Spymaster.

“Sorry to interrupt,” He winked at the girl slowly dying of embarrassment in her mate’s arms, “but it’s time to head out.”

Azriel managed a small, choppy nod before setting Y/n down one last time. A quick kiss to her head, the last goodbye he could offer before he disappeared within his shadows. 

Leaving his mate and his heart behind.

[prokopetz]

why do you think indie metroidvanias specifically take so long to make, and is there a solution that you'd like to see them go for? (i know that would likely mean a compromise of some kind, but like, you know)

The reason why is fairly obvious: the classic metroidvania formula makes it very easy to fall prey to unintentional scope creep and is a positive nightmare to QA.

Non-linear progression gating based on precision platforming challenges where the player's basic moveset is constantly changing means every little thing needs to be rigorously tested in every part of the gameworld, carefully checking every room with every combination of abilities the player could conceivably possess for a wide range of failure states.

Is there some combination of abilities that allows the player to get into this room, but not out of it afterwards? Is there some combination of abilities that allows the player to do things in an order you didn't expect? Does that variation in sequencing in turn create situations where the player can end up somewhere without an ability you had assumed was required to get there? And so forth.

Even once you've got everything tested, it's not over. Every tiny change during development, even as small as adding or subtracting a couple of percentage points from the player character's jumping height or walking speed, can potentially have a domino effect that introduces a whole new set of failure states. It's not a pretty picture!

As for solutions, the one most solo or small-team metroidvanias end up adopting is to put a damper on the exponential QA explosion by linearising progression. If you haven't flipped the right switch or visited the right room, the door simply doesn't open, the progression-critical cutscene simply doesn't trigger, and so forth. Even big-name metroidvanias often make judicious use of this one: for example, Super Metroid has certain doors in the early game that just arbitrarily will not open until you've collected a couple of specific items from the game's combat-free introductory area.

The trouble with this approach is that if you use it to the extent that's necessary to keep your QA responsibilities at a manageable level for a small team or solo developer, you functionally end up with a linear, level-based platformer that makes you walk from one level to the next. Whether this disqualifies a given title from the "metroidvania" label is a demarcation problem I'm not interested in litigating, but folks who expected a more open world experience are quite understandably going to be disappointed.

The approach I'd prefer more indie metroidvanias take is to keep things under control by limiting their scope. Not ever damn thing needs to be the next Hollow Knight; many classics of the genre can be completed in well under an hour with good routing even without employing modern speedrun tech. Similarly, some of the best indie metroidvanias are those with the smallest maps; Alruna and the Necro-Industrialists, probably the best example of open-world map design of any metroidvania published in 2024, has a map that's scarcely twenty by twenty screens, and its routing is downright fiendish.

(One of my perennial probably-never-gonna-happen projects is to design a full-featured metroidvania targeting a two to three hour casual playthrough whose entire map can fit on a single screen while remaining at a vaguely playable zoom level, in the style of titles like 1 Screen Platformer.)

[inhonoredglory]

Aziraphale’s Choice, the Job Connection, and Michael Sheen’s Morality

Update: Michael Sheen liked this post on Twitter, so I'm fairly certain there is a lot of validity to it.

I’ve had time to process Aziraphale’s choice at the end of Season 2. And I think only blaming the religious trauma misses something important in Aziraphale’s character. I think what happened was also Aziraphale’s own conscious choice––as a growth from his trauma, in fact. Hear me out.

Since November 2022 I’ve been haunted by something Michael Sheen said at the MCM London Comic Con. At the Q&A, someone asked him about which fantasy creature he enjoyed playing most and Michael (bless him, truly) veered on a tangent about angels and goodness and how, specifically,

We as a society tend to sort of undervalue goodness. It’s sort of seen as sort of somehow weak and a bit nimby and “oh it’s nice.” And I think to be good takes enormous reserves of courage and stamina. I mean, you have to look the dark in the face to be truly good and to be truly of the light…. The idea that goodness is somehow lesser and less interesting and not as kind of muscular and as passionate and as fierce as evil somehow and darkness, I think is nonsense. The idea of being able to portray an angel, a being of love. I love seeing the things people have put online about angels being ferocious creatures, and I love that. I think that’s a really good representation of what goodness can be, what it should be, I suppose.

I was looking forward to BAMF!Aziraphale all season long, and I think that’s what we got in the end. Remember Neil said that the Job minisode was important for Aziraphale’s story. Remember how Aziraphale sat on that rock and reconciled to himself that he MUST go to Hell, because he lied and thwarted the will of God. He believed that––truly, honestly, with the faith of a child, but the bravery of a soldier.

Aziraphale, a being of love with more goodness than all of Heaven combined, believed he needed to walk through the Gates of Hell because it was the Right Thing to do. (Like Job, he didn’t understand his sin but believed he needed to sacrifice his happiness to do the Right Thing.)

That’s why we saw Aziraphale as a soldier this season: the bookshop battle, the halo. But yes, the ending as well.

Because Aziraphale never wanted to go to Heaven, and he never wanted to go there without Crowley.

But it was Crowley who taught him that he could, even SHOULD, act when his moral heart told him something was wrong. While Crowley was willing to run away and let the world burn, it was Aziraphale (in that bandstand at the end of the world) who stood his ground and said No. We can make a difference. We can save everyone.

And Aziraphale knew he could not give up the ace up his sleeve (his position as an angel) to talk to God and make them see the truth in his heart.

I was messed up by Ineffable Bureaucracy (Boxfly) getting their happy ending when our Ineffable Husbands didn’t, but I see now that them running away served to prove something to Aziraphale. (And I am fully convinced that Gabriel and Beelzebub saw the example of the Ineffables at the Not-pocalypse and took inspiration from them for choosing to ditch their respective sides)

But my point is that Aziraphale saw them, and in some ways, they looked like him and Crowley. And he saw how Gabriel, the biggest bully in Heaven, was also like him in a way (a being capable of love) and also just a child when he wasn’t influenced by the poison of Heaven. Muriel, too, wasn’t a bad person. The Metatron also seemed to have grown more flexible with his morality (from Aziraphale's perspective). Like Earth, Heaven was shades of (light?) gray.

Aziraphale is too good an angel not to believe in hope. Or forgiveness (something he’s very good at it).

Aziraphale has been scarred by Heaven all his life. But with the cracks in Heaven’s armor (cracks he and Crowley helped create), Aziraphale is seeing something else. A chance to change them. They did terrible things to him, but he is better than them, and because of Crowley, he feels ready to face them.

(Will it work? Can Heaven change, institutionally? Probably not, but I can't blame Aziraphale for trying.)

At the cafe, the Metatron said something big was coming in the Great Plan. Aziraphale knows how trapped he had felt when he didn’t have God’s ear the first time something huge happened in the Big Plan. He can’t take a chance again to risk the world by not having a foot in the door of Heaven. That’s why we saw individual human deaths (or the threat of death) so much more this season: Elspeth, Wee Morag, Job’s children, the 1940s magician. Aziraphale almost killed a child when he couldn’t get through to God, and he’s not going through that again.

“We could make a difference.” We could save everyone.

Remember what Michael Sheen said about courage and doing good––and having to “look the dark in the face to be truly good.” That’s what happened when Aziraphale was willing to go to Hell for his actions. That’s what happened when he decided he had to go to Heaven, where he had been abused and belittled and made to feel small. He decided to willingly go into the Lion’s Den, to face his abusers and his anxiety, to make them better so that they would not try to destroy the world again.

Him, just one angel. He needed Crowley to be there with him, to help him be brave, to ask the questions that Heaven needed to hear, to tell them God was wrong. Crowley is the inspiration that drives Aziraphale’s change, Crowley is the engine that fuels Aziraphale’s courage.

But then Crowley tells him that going to Heaven is stupid. That they don’t need Heaven. And he’s right. Aziraphale knows he’s right.

Aziraphale doesn’t need Heaven; Heaven needs him. They just don’t know how much they need him, or how much humanity needs him there, too. (If everyone who ran for office was corrupt, how can the system change?)

Terry Pratchett (in the Discworld book, Small Gods) is scathing of God, organized religion, and the corrupt people religion empowers, but he is sympathetic to the individual who has real, pure faith and a good heart. In fact, the everyman protagonist of Small Gods is a better person than the god he serves, and in the end, he ends up changing the church to be better, more open-minded, and more humanist than god could ever do alone.

Aziraphale is willing to go to the darkest places to do the Right Thing, and Heaven is no exception. When Crowley says that Heaven is toxic, that’s exactly why Aziraphale knows he needs to go there. “You’re exactly is different from my exactly.”

____

In the aftermath of Trump's election in the US, Brexit happened in 2018. Michael Sheen felt compelled to figure out what was going on in his country after this shock. But he was living in Los Angeles with Sarah Silverman at the time, and she also wanted to become more politically active in the US.

Sheen: “I felt a responsibility to do something, but it [meant] coming back [to Britain] – which was difficult for us, because we were very important to each other. But we both acknowledge that each of us had to do what we needed to do.” In the end, they split up and Michael moved back to the UK.

Sometimes doing the Right Thing means sacrificing your own happiness. Sometimes it means going to Hell. Sometimes it means going to Heaven. Sometimes it means losing a relationship.

And that’s why what happened in the end was so difficult for Aziraphale. Because he loves Crowley desperately. He wants to be together. He wanted that kiss for thousands of years. He knows that taking command of Heaven means they would never again have to bow to the demands of a God they couldn’t understand, or run from a Hell who still came after them. They could change the rules of the game.

And he’s still going to do that. But it hurts him that he has to do that alone.

[mahmahmahmysharona]

When you and Bob try to stay away from each other and fail miserably.

(Bob Reynolds x Avenger Reader) Part 4/?

Part 1 // Part 2 // Part 3

Over the next few weeks, you found yourself falling apart. Not enough for everyone to notice, but enough for you to feel it.

You missed him. You missed your friend. And unfortunately, now that you knew you loved him, Bob's absence hurt you.

Maybe you did something wrong. Maybe you didn't. Bob is a complicated person with a complicated past. Perhaps he just changed his mind about wanting to know you.

You found yourself staying in your room to avoid accidently coming across him (you didn't need to bother: Bob was also hiding out in his room for the same reason), and this raised questions from the others. But you shrugged them off, not wanting to spill your secrets and worries when it looked like they might not even matter anymore.

Things aren't helped by the fact that Bob was getting worse. Not that you witnessed it, but the others made sure to mention it to you. He seemed more agitated, more careful than usual. He was talking to himself again. He was jumpy, too. It scared you. You wanted him to be okay.

Finally, you could both stand to be in the same room again. But there was little eye contact, and only conversation when necessary. ("Can you pass the milk?") You hated it.

If you had more courage, you would have told him that you couldn't stand him not being around you, and how unfair it is to lose someone just when you realised you loved them.

You would happily pretend not to if it would make him come back to you.

Things came to a head one afternoon when Bucky and Walker came to blows. Walker, resorting to pointing out the flaws of other team members in order to defend himself, ended up using Bob as collateral damage, calling him "the world's worst house pet."

Bob was standing right there. Walker didn't mean it. It was a cheap shot. But Bob took it personally. You should see his his fists curl up and a sadness wash over his eyes. He slipped out of the room, unnoticed by the others in the chaos of the fight.

You were furious. Raging. If you couldn't help Bob like you used to, you could sure as hell still stick up for him. You crossed over and knocked Walker to the ground, slamming your fist into his nose.

Walker yelped, but he fought back. He always fought back — you made him promise never to go easy on you in training, so why should he now?

The fight lasted a good while, and the others even got bored and wandered off. Eventually, you both called it quits, somewhat unsure of who actually won. But you were fairly certain he got the message you were trying to send.

Afterwards, you headed back to your room, your cheek scraped and jaw bruised from the scrap. You were about to go inside when you heard a crack from across the hall. Bob.

You rushed inside his room without knocking. He was pacing the floor, rubbing his wrists together. Talking to himself. To him. Behind him, a fist-sized patch of the wall crumbled inward.

"Bob," you said, stepping forward. His fist wasn't bloody — he doesn't get injured as easily as you — but he looked shaken. When he saw you, he stepped backwards. God, it hurt you to see him look at you like that.

"Please, don't come any closer," he said. "Something's happening to me."

The tremor in his voice and the self-hatred you felt even from where you stood was enough to make you move towards him again. "You're upset, that's all," you said. "Ignore Walker, he was just heated. You were in his eyeline, and you're an easy target. He was out of line."

"Except he's not out of line," Bob said. When you reached out for him, he shifted away, suddenly alert. He told you again to stay back. It was the worst he's been in a while, and he didn’t know what would happen to you if you touched him.

"I'm here with you," you told him. It's the best you could do if he wouldn’t let you go any closer. His eyes were red with restrained tears.

He continued, "I'm the most useless person here, and even if I weren't, I'd be the most dangerous."

"I don't believe that. I don't believe it for a second."

"None of you are safe with me."

"I'm safe with you, Bob."

He looked at you. You could practically hear his heart splintering into a thousand pieces beneath his ribs. "How can you be sure?"

You once told him that if he ever got lost, you'd find him. You'd crawl through your worst memories to bring him back. He was lost now, right in front of you, and you needed him. He needed to know you trusted him, that you'd give him everything on blind faith alone, because you believed in him.

You reached out, grabbed him by the shirt, and pulled him into you. You kissed him. His body stiffened under your touch, but he didn't pull away. Your lips moved against his, trying to say a hundred things without speaking at all. I'm safe. You're safe. We're safer together.

You kissed him for god knows how long, until you needed to come up for air and you heard him choke out, "I—I don't know if I can—"

But he could. You knew he could. You took his arm and wrapped it around you, holding onto him for dear life as you did so. His hand hooked onto your shirt and grasped the fabric tightly. A lifeline. He was coming back to you, out of the darkness.

"Don't let go of me, okay?" you told him, your lips grazing his mouth again. He nodded, tightening his grip on you. You kissed him, and his time, he kissed you back. At the feeling of it, you became undone. Suddenly, it was you who needed to be held. You'd never felt like this, and it was almost too much. Between kisses, you heard yourself begging him, "Don't let go of me.”

He held you firmly, and when he pulled away to speak, his voice was calmer. He pressed his forehead against yours, lips skimming your own as he said, “I won't.”

And he didn’t. He didn’t even when you had to pull away from the kissing for good, dizzy and breathless. When you finally looked at him again, he was flushed, his nostrils flaring with loaded breaths. But he was calmer. He was back. And more importantly, he was holding you steady. Weren’t you supposed to be supporting him right now?

“Are you okay?” you asked.

“Yeah. …How did you know to do that?”

“Honestly, I didn’t know if that would do anything. Worth a shot.”

He caught your eye, and before you knew it, his thumb was touching your cheek, just below the fresh grazing.

"Did you have this before?" he asked.

"I beat the shit out of Walker. I'll admit, he got some good punches in."

Finally, he laughed. Then you. When you both regained yourselves, you worked up the nerve to say something — something you’ve been wanting to say since that day in the elevator.

“Bob…” you began. “I’m not sure I can be your friend anymore.”

His first reaction was one of hurt, and it’s one you’re far too used to seeing on his face. But once he understood what you were saying, he nodded.

“I don’t think I can either.” You felt his hands tighten at your back, and he whispered, “I'm going to ruin this.”

“No, you won’t. And even if you wanted to, I wouldn’t let you.”

“How can you be sure?”

When the words landed, you both caught each other’s eyes and smiled. Right before you pulled him down to you, your lips meeting again, and the world disappearing once more.

Next time: When it’s yours and Bob’s first time…twice.

Tag list: @purplefluffycows @i-shall-abide @avengersinitiative2012

[blackkatmagic]

Hi! I think you've mentioned finding canon!Obi-Wan a fascinating character and that a lot of people miss a lot of stuff about him, can you expand on what your favourite parts of his character are or what you like to explore in him?

Tbh 'fascinating' is probably vastly overstating things - he's never going to be my favorite, but I like the canon version of him a lot more than the fanon version that's so common. I also definitely think people...mh. Flanderize isn't quite the right word, since it's not just his canon traits that get exaggerated, but. woobified, basically. Fandom very clearly tries to fit him into a certain mold, and I just personally don't think it really fits.

To me, Obi-Wan is sharp and fairly aggressive once he's encountered something/someone in his way. He's stubborn and a bastard and competitive, and he fits in just as well with Bane and the rest of the bounty hunters in that arc as he does with the other members of the Jedi Council. He's also self-assured and humble but not in any way shy or retiring. He can be very grumpy when things don't go his way, and he's snarky, almost cutting, even with allies. He's ruthless when it's necessary, and overprotective of the people around him, and he has a tendency to be morose and pessimistic when things go wrong, though he always keeps going anyway. He thinks he knows how people are going to act and can be too set in his beliefs about others, and he's kind but he's not exactly gentle.

Just - I think he's so much more interesting than a lot of fandom gives him credit for. And I am aware that fandom tends to make complex characters more one-dimensional, but god, Obi-Wan gets it so bad.

Also, if I hear one more person call him a twink I'm going to end up on the news.

[maniculum]

Medieval Scorpions Effortpost

So yesterday I reblogged this post featuring an 11th-century depiction of the Apocalypse Locusts from Revelations, noting the following incongruity as another medieval scorpion issue:

The artist, as you can see, has interpreted "tails like scorpions" as meaning "glue cheerful-looking snakes to their butts".

Anyway, it occurred to me that the medieval scorpion thing might not be as widely known as I think it is, and that Tumblr would probably enjoy knowing about it if it isn't known already. So, finding myself unable to focus on the research I'm supposed to be doing, I decided to write about this instead. I'll just go ahead and put a cut here.

As we can see in the image above, at least one artist out there thought a "scorpion" was a type of snake. Which makes it difficult to draw "tails like scorpions", because a snake's tail is not that distinctive or menacing (maybe rattlesnakes, but they don't have those outside the Americas). So they interpreted "tails like scorpions" as "the tail looks like a whole snake complete with head".

Let me tell you. This is not a problem unique to this illustration.

See, people throughout medieval Europe were aware of scorpions. As just alluded to, they are mentioned in the Bible, and if the people producing manuscripts in medieval Europe knew one thing, it was Stuff In Bible. They're also in the Zodiac, which medieval Europe had inherited through classical sources. However, let's take a look at this map:

That's Wikipedia's map of the native range of the Scorpiones order, i.e., all scorpion species. You may notice something -- the range just stops at a certain northern latitude. Pretty much all of northern Europe is scorpion-free. If you lived in the north half of Europe, odds were good you had never seen a scorpion in your life. But if you were literate or educated at all, or you knew they were a thing, because you'd almost certainly run across them being mentioned in texts from farther south. And those texts wouldn't bother to explain what a scorpion was, of course -- everyone knows scorpions, right? When was the last time you stopped to explain What Is Spiders?

So medieval writers and artists in northern Europe were kind of stuck. There was all this scorpion imagery and metaphor in the texts they liked to work from, but they didn't really know what a scorpion was. Writers could kind of work around it (there's a lot of "oh, it's a venomous creature, moving on"), but sometimes they felt the need to break it down better. For this, of course, they'd have to refer to a bestiary -- but due to Bestiary Telephone and the persistent need of bestiary authors to turn animals into allegories, one of the only visual details you got on scorpions was that they... had a beautiful face, which they used to distract people in order to sting them.

And look. I'm not here to yuck anyone's yum, but I would say that a scorpion's face has significant aesthetic appeal only for a fairly small segment of the population. I'm sure you could get an entomologist to rhapsodize about it a bit, but your average person on the street will not be entranced by the face of a scorpion. So this did not help the medieval Europeans in figuring out how to depict scorpions. There was also some semantic confusion -- see, in some languages (such as Old and Middle English), "worm" could be a general term for very small animals of any kind. But it also could mean "serpent".* So there were some, like our artist at the top of the post, who were pretty sure a scorpion was a snake. This was probably helped along by the fact that "venomous" was one of the only things everyone knew about them, and hey, snakes are venomous. Also, Pliny the Elder had floated the idea that there were scorpions in Africa that could fly, and at least one author (13th-century monk Bartholomaeus Anglicus) therefore suggested that they had feathers. I don't see that last one coming up much, I just share it because it's funny to me.

*English eventually resolved this by borrowing the Latin vermin for very small animals, using the specialized spelling wyrm for big impressive mythical-type serpents, and sticking with the more specific snake for normal serpents.

Some authors, like the anonymous author of the Ancrene Wisse, therefore suggested that a scorpion was a snake with a woman's face and a stinging tail. (Everyone seemed to be on the same page with regards to the fact that the sting was in the tail, which is in fact probably the most recognizable aspect of scorpions, so good job there.) However, while authors could avoid this problem, visual artists could not. And if you were illustrating a bestiary or a calendar, including a scorpion was not optional. So they had to take a shot at what this thing looked like.

And so, after this way-too-long explanation, the thing you're probably here for: inaccurate medieval drawings of scorpions. (There are of course accurate medieval drawings of scorpions, from artists who lived in the southern part of Europe and/or visited places where scorpions lived; I'm just not showing you those.) And if you find yourself wondering, "how sure are you that that's meant to be a scorpion?" -- all of these are either from bestiaries or from calendars that include zodiac illustrations.

11th-century England, MS Arundel 60. (Be honest, without the rest of this post, if I had asked you to guess what animal this was supposed to be, would you have ever guessed “scorpion”?)

12th-century Germany, "Psalter of Henry the Lion". (Looks a bit undercooked. Kind of fetal.)

12th-century France, Peter Lombard's Sententiae. (Very colorful, itsy bitsy claws, what is happening with that tail?)

12th-century England, "The Shaftesbury Psalter". (So a scorpion is some sort of wyvern with a face like a duck, correct?)

13th-century France, Thomas de Cantimpré's Liber de natura rerum. (I’d give them credit for the silhouette not being that far off, but there’s a certain bestiary style where all the animals kind of look like that. Also note how few of these have claws.)

13th-century England, "The Bodley Bestiary". (Mischievous flying squirrel impales local man’s hand, local man fails to notice.)

13th-century England, Harley MS 3244. (A scorpion is definitely either a mouse or a fish. Either way it has six legs.)

13th-century England, Harley MS 3244. (Wait, no, it’s a baby theropod, and it has two legs. (Yes, this is the same manuscript, that’s not an error, this artist did four scorpions and no two are the same.))

13th-century England, Harley MS 3244. (Actually it’s a lizard with tiny ears and it has four legs.)

13th-century England, Harley MS 3244. (Now that we’re at the big fancy illustration, I think I’ve got it — it’s like that last one, but two legs, longer ears, and a less goofy face. Also I’ve decided it’s not pink anymore, I think that was the main problem.)

13th-century England, MS Kk.4.25. (A scorpion is a flat crocodile with a bear’s head.)

13th-century England, "The Huth Psalter". (Wyvern but baby! Does not seem to be enjoying biting its own tail.)

13th-century England, MS Royal 1 D X. (This triangular-headed gentlecreature gets the award for “closest guess at correct limb configuration”. If two of those were claws, I might actually believe this artist had seen a scorpion before, or at least a picture of one.)

13th-century England, "The Westminster Psalter". (A scorpion is the offspring of a wyvern and a fawn.)

13th-century England, "The Rutland Psalter". (Too many legs! Pull back! Pull back!)

13th or 14th-century France, Bestiaire d'amour rimé. (This is very similar to the fawn-wyvern, but putting it in an actual Scene makes it even more obvious that you’re just guessing.)

14th-century Netherlands, Jacob van Maerlant's Der Naturen Bloeme. (More top-down six-legged guys that look too furry to be arthropods.)

14th-century Germany, MS Additional 22413. (That is clearly a turtle.)

14th-century France, Matfres Eymengau de Beziers's Breviari d'amor. (Who came up with that head shape and what was their deal?)

15th-century England, "Bestiary of Ann Walsh". (Screw it, a scorpion is a big lizard that glares at you for trying to make me draw things I don’t know about.)

I've spent way too much time on this now. End of post, thank you to anyone who got all the way down here.

[nerdygirlramblings]

the omegaverse brain worms won't leave me alone

previous

A slightly stale smell wafts out when you open your room. It gives the space a neglected air. It doesn't feel like yours anymore, even though your absence was brief. The room you once occupied in your family home now has cribs for the new twins. You don't know where you belong. How could things have changed so much so quickly? You're adrift, unmoored in a sea of your emotions.

Your bag thunks against your bed when you drop it, the hollow sound echoing your inner turmoil. Things haven't felt right since you and your parents had The Talk. You want to get another perspective, so your next stop is the administration building. Adam's been talking up the pack since you joined the team, but you know he'll be brutally honest if you ask, and his experience with military packs is insight you crave.

Just as you're about to head out you spy the jumper you'd borrowed from the team weeks ago. You snag the hem, dragging it towards you. Enveloped in the warm, fresh scent, you feel a little better. A little more you. The jersey is armor of a different sort for your battered soul.

With your omega whining constantly, you know a decision about joining the 141 pack has to be made soon. You either need to take a leap of faith or start seriously looking elsewhere.

Adam glances up from his computer as you come down the hall, smile plastered on his face. "You came quick! I just sent you the message."

Your steps falter and you glance across at him. "What do you mean?"

He raises a brow. "What do you mean what do I mean? Mission request from Laswell just came in. The guys are back and making their way over, and I just sent the message to you. Isn't that why you're here?"

With the team on their way, you can't ask Adam what you want, but he doesn't need to know that. Not yet. You resolve yourself to finding another time to corner him. For now, you paste a smile on and respond, "Just a happy coincidence. I actually came by ta thank ya."

His head tilts a bit to the left, and he raises a brow. He's smiling, but his scent belies his confusion. "Another thank you? What for this time?"

You merely beam at him and pull up the recent photos on your phone. You flip it around to show him the photo you took just this morning, holding Grant in one arm and Amelia in the other. "Turns out Dad was heading to the birth centre as I got in. If I'd stayed here, I would 'a missed it." You don't even try to hide the joy in your voice.

He squeals like you knew he would and pops up from his chair. He skirts the desk, arms open to embrace you. "Oh, honey! I'm so happy for you. I know how much this means for you." He squeezes you tightly to him when you hear a throat clearing behind you.

Yelping, you push back from Adam sheepishly, chuckling behind you. He glares peevishly over your shoulder at whomever is there. You're fairly certain you recognize the restrained laughter. Your suspicions are confirmed when you peer behind you to see your team in the entry.

"Ye look good, lass. Cozy," Johnny says. There's something running under his words, a subtext you don't have the vocabulary to make sense of. "Wha's got ye smilin'?" he teases, as if you don't know Price told the team the good news. Still, it's a chance to try and make this transition back into team dynamics normal. To ignore the reason you weren't with them is because Ghost, who is standing back behind everyone else but whose gaze damn near pins you in place with a look you can't decipher, just came off his rut. Which your omega reminds you you'd help him with next time if you joined the pack. A trickle of fear and wave of desire hit you at the same time. Thank god you put scent blockers on before you left home.

"It's the new pups," you tell them, voice surprisingly steady, taking your phone from Adam and holding it out.

You're smiling as they react appropriately. Johnny coos, "Lookit the bairns!" while Price grins at the picture. Ghost grunts, and Gaz hooks his arm around your shoulder, saying "Congrats, Ren! More siblings to dote on."

You have no idea what you've done to them with just the sight of you holding the babies. The smell in the small space shifts, deepens. There's a hint now of brine, clean clothes, forest greenery, but before you can figure out what it means, Adam quickly ushers you all into the conference room where it feels like the air conditioner is on blast. You shiver and hunch a little more into the borrowed jersey.

Laswell's already up on screen side-by-side with a series of photos. "Good, sit. We'll get started," she says as everyone files in. This is your first time joining a 141 mission, and you stand for a moment, unsure of your place here. Captain Price is at the head of the table with Ghost to his right (fittingly). Gaz is on a computer near the screen, and Soap takes the seat next to the leftenant.

Laswell must notice your hesitation and says, "Why don't you take a seat next to Gaz, Ren, so you can see some of the raw data." Once you're seated, she begins. "This is Albert Spinner," she says, highlighting an image of a man in his mid-forties or maybe early fifties. There's a little grey streaking the light brown hair at his temples, and its cut is professional. There are slightly visible laugh lines around his eyes. There's no context for his height, but he's of average build. He's not overly fit or heavy. This is a man who takes care of his appearance. It's clear in the crisp lines of the dove grey bespoke suit he's wearing. Nothing off-the-rack would fit so nicely.

He looks like the kind of man your parents would be friends with if they had a little more money.

"He's a known gun runner, but the man has shell companies for his shell companies," Laswell continues. "His front-facing persona is philanthropist entrepreneur. We've never been able to pin him down, but I got word he'll be in London next week at a charity auction. There's another know smuggler going to be in attendance." The screen flickers to another man, younger but in worse shape. The matching tracksuit looks expensive but doesn't sit as well on him as Spinner's suit does. He's not going grey, but his forehead looks large. Receding? He's a little heavy around the middle, the tracksuit pulling tight across his stomach. "Thomas Arella. Not as clean as Spinner. Not sure how he got an invitation as even his cover is dirty. Runs guns but covers it with shady loans. He's a big fish in a small pond, but Spinner runs with the big boys."

She pauses as all this information sinks in. Before she says anything, you're fairly certain this is going to take some improv skills. A charity auction isn't going to have an assets to recover; Laswell's going to want intel.

"What I need is to send in Ren, and one of the betas as her chaperone, to distract Arella." Through the screen, Laswell looks directly at you. "How are you at concealing your scent?"

You're stunned for a moment to be addressed directly and mutter, "Okay, I guess. My Dad taught me some things after I presented."

Laswell's nodding as you talk. "Good," she says, "because I need you off your scent blockers. He's a sucker for a pretty face, and if your omega can entice him, he'll be completely off his game and vulnerable. Then whoever's with you can clone his phone, and hopefully we'll get some hard intel on Spinner."

next

series masterlist | main masterlist

~~

taglist: @sirbonesly @z-wantstowrite @thriving-n-jiving @cecelia97 @theycallmevalen @boogeysmoth @cryingpages @riley13 @luxylucylou @lucienofthelakes @ilyztwo @chaosundcoffee @lostintransist @thegreyjoyed @honestlymassivetrash @thebumbqueen @maliamaiden @mordacioust @bina-passion-fruit @kittygonap @wanderingoperator

[starlit-sanguine]

Random assorted Obey me headcanons.. PART 2..✦

Part 1 here <3

Diavolo:

Most of his smiles are out of politeness when he's around nobles and other people of status, though you can tell he's irritated from the way his eye twitches or his jaw clenches when his allies bring up politics or some other important topic, all of his Smiles are reserved for you, and the people within his circle ♡

The prettiest eyes ever, they're this enchanting shade of Gold that look like pools of honey when they hit the sunlight. They hold this sense of wonder whenever he talks, ever the curious one as he's still learning about human customs and how they work, speaking of humans; Always looking for you or Solomon within a room, excited to speak to either of you! if you're together? even better because he would love to see how you interact!

His coat has to be sewn often because when he's bored in meetings he'll play with the golden buttons on the sleeves and they end up falling off due to the constant fidgeting and tugging... Barbatos really needs to get him some kind of toy because he's tired of accidentally pricking his hands with the sewing needle.

FANGS, not really visible unless he's laughing or smiling at one of the brothers dry jokes or escapades. He's quite embarrassed by them because he thinks they make him look silly.

Stretches a lot, and when his back makes a snapping noise he always gets a little kick out of seeing Lucifer in specific, grimace. He never noticed until one day he stood uo to grab something from his office, and his shoulder cracked, and Lucifer immediately scowled and raised a brow, still standing in his designated place in the school council office; Diavolo noticed this and quirked a brow, Lucifer was never this expressive usually? So he did it again and the demon had to look away in disgust, and now the future king of the devildom pulls this shit all the time just to see his friend get grossed out.

Barbatos:

Has this really cute habit of tilting his head when he's confused, he doesn't mean to, its just his nature. But its so out of character for him, which is probably why its so amusing to Solomon and Diavolo... mostly Solomon. He and Luke will be reading up on a recipe and it'll mention an ingredient he's never heard of.. causing him to tilt his head and hum a questioning "hm?"

Also has pretty eyes, This verdant green that stands out against the rest of his features (apart from his hair that I'm jealous of), They also glow in the dark, which scares the everloving soul out of anyone in the room with him. His eyes are also reflective like a cats))

At Diavolo's meetings he keeps his tail wound around his leg, ready to put anyone in their place. No one will speak up to the future king of the devildom when his right hand man has glowing eyes, a pratical weapon around his leg and a charming yet threatening smile that he uses on people to shut them up.

Gets along well with the brothers, but mainly Lucifer, One night whilst Diavolo was hosting a gala, Lucifer couldn't take the overwhelming.. everything that was the ballroom, so he snuck out to take a small de-stress walk, that's where he caught Barbatos sat by the piano- also destressing for a minute- and they sat together for awhile as he played a few notes as he talked, about the devildom, Diavolo and maybe opening up slightly. Lucifer thinks about that moment often, and how he knows things about Barbatos that many will never know.

In his rare downtime he likes to read, finding the world of fiction to be interesting. Especially fantasy books written by humans because he likes to see how wrong they were about certain things.

Simeon:

A really fast walker, unintentionally taking huge strides as he makes his way through the halls of RAD, always has to stop every few minutes to let Luke catch up to him, He's only a baby!! he can't walk that fast!!

Fairly clusmy, Once he was at a convention and someone asked if a spelling error in TSL was actually a hidden meaning for something and he just shrugged and said in his sweet voice, "No, I just could not spell the word correctly so I went with it ahaha"... yeah the fandom was furious for weeks.

Walks with his hands behind his back, mimicking Lucifer. It started at a meeting with MC, Beelzebub and Luke and Diavolo and Lucifer were discussing the whole Cerberus incident, and Simeon felt out of place with his casual stance, so he held his arms behind his back to try and look stern, it just kind of stuck..

Has this stupid flirty on and off thing with Solomon, talking to the sourcerer with a teasing tone to his voice and smiling whenever the Wizard retorted with some innuendo that definitely shouldn't be repeated out loud. Should the Angel be making dirty jokes with the human? no. but will he stop?... also no

the prettiest smile in the whole cast, makes everyone smile back due to the amount of positive energy that the Angel radiates, he just wants everyone around him to be happy, bringing joy is his job after all.

Solomon:

The most charming voice, complimented by his pretty eyes and stupidly cute smirk, he wants you to know that his attention is fully on you, that despite all his pacts and in all the years he's been alive, that you're the only one that truly matters.

Easily jealous, he won't show it but there'll be signs, his grip will tighten on your shoulder, or his eye will twitch in annoyance, he barely gets any time with his beloved apprentice! now someone's trying to shorten it??! He thinks not.

For the love of the stars above he cannot sit normally, cannot sit with his legs together otherwise he might go insane. The worst man spreader known to man, also has an awful slouch when he's deep into his work.

His eyes shimmer when they hit the moonlight, they look dead in the sun, just a stone brown with nothing to add to it, but when the moon hits them there's this explosion of colour, Within the grey split brown of his sectoral heterochromia lay splices of blue and green, touches of his past humanity that he's lost touch with.

Has piercings that match Asmo's. Collarbones are adourned with a pretty silver bar with pearls holding them in place, and his earlobes are pierced and usually decorated with earrings that dangle and show off some of his personality that hides behind his smile.

Luke:

I only really have one for him!! and its that he loves the rain, due to memories with Barbatos and Mammon from the walk they took, (referencing a memory card) His favourite flowers are hydrangeas also due to this memory!