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all-you-need-is-paul-mccartney · 8 months ago

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Baby It's You (Teen!John Lennon x Teen!Female!Reader)

A/N: Hello! Yes, I'm alive, and yes, I know I haven't posted anything original on this blog in over 3 years, but that's gonna change!

Thank you all for sticking around so long, my life did a 180 about a month or so ago and now I can get back to one of the things I love doing most: giving you all some juicy fanfiction to enjoy!

I've had an influx of enthusiastic followers and readers on my last oneshot ask for more writing, and I will be delivering! I have upcoming Paul and George oneshots underway; but first, I think it's time we show John a little love!

P.S. we'll probably consider this an AU fic since John went to private school, and he is going to school with the reader in this one. Sorry for the lack of authenticity in advance!

Summary: Your friend, John, invites you to the first Fair of the year with the intentions of evolving some spontaneous behaviour within you. You find just the thing there to prove to John just how daring and fun you could be-- and then things go sideways.

WARNINGS: This has been sitting in my notes FOREVER so I wouldn't be surprised if there were typos.

Also, there is a heteronormative behaviour in this fic because of the time it was set in, but I want to disclaim that LOVE IS LOVE and I, in no way, support heteronormative/ anti LGBTQ+ behaviour. Love who you want to love; just be happy doing so<3

Also Also, she is a LONG one like the other oneshot, so I advise you read this when you've got some time on your hands!

Swearing is almost a certainty at this point, but no really mature themes, so a T rating is probably enough for this one.

It was a hot Friday afternoon, at the very end of the school year; and there were hundreds of telltale signs:

The teacher was well over his curriculum and he sat at his desk reading a book in silence, student-made work was no longer strewn about on the walls, the classroom was humid even with everyone fanning themselves and each other; and the students...

You could tell the students were just dying to get home for the summer.

There were five minutes left on the clock, and you sat at your desk packing your things away. You spent the last hour doodling, but you wanted to be ready to take off as soon as the bell sounded.

As you zipped your bag up, you saw a little flash of white in your peripheral, and when you glanced back at the surface of your desk, you noticed a folded piece of paper-- a note!

You looked around briefly, but no one indicated to you where to pass it, so it had to have been for you.

And if the note was for you, then there was only one person it could have been from.

You unraveled the little piece of paper, revealing the question the paper possessed.

"Fair? Tonight? -yours truly"

That evening in particular, the local fair was going to erect itself in the biggest park in town, and everyone at school was going to be there. What better way to blow off steam at the end of a long year of hard work?

You shook your head at his pathetic complimentary close, your eyes rolling to the back of your head so far they almost didn't come back.

The bell rang, and before you could even consider doing anything else with the note, everyone took off out the door, as did you, knowing fully well "yours truly" was going to be waiting for you at your locker.

As you rounded the corner to the hallway your locker was in, you finally caught glimpse of him. He was leaning against it with his arms crossed, one leg over the other as his eyes wandered the other students for your face; and when your eyes locked, his expressionless mouth couldn't help but tighten upwards.

Perhaps his smile was out of kindness, but it was most likely because he was a jokester, and quite frankly couldn't get enough of teasing you.

And now his target was spotted.

He opened his mouth to speak, but you spoke first. "You know how much I hate how you sign these off, right?"

You presented the note in hand adjacent to your head as your face displayed a disapproving cringe, cheeks pink in mild humiliation.

"John, I only ever get notes written from you, so the flowery signoff is unnecessary," you put the note down, pointing at him with a frown.

"That note-passing was so open! You know if the teacher ever caught something like that, he'd make me read it out loud to the class, surely you know I'd die on the spot, and then my ghost will haunt you until you died too!"

His smile only grew wider at your words, almost as if he'd been betting with himself what your response to all of this was going to be.

"Also, you're not even in my last class," you rambled on, "so how you managed to have it smuggled in beats me."

"Oh, come on, y/n, you know you'd love all the attention you'd get out of something like that," he gestured to the paper, and you shook your head before crumpling it into a ball in your hand and tossing it at his head, to which it bounced off, and then was immediately trampled on as other students hurried down the hallway.

The both of you weren't strangers; you frequented playdates with John as children, and then you went to school together, so you basically watched each other grow up. John, for as long as you'd known him, usually displayed confident and sometimes mischievous behaviour towards others that typically you'd find unappealing for a man to display.

"People thinking I'm with you? That is not the kind of attention I'm after."

Not that you ever found John appealing, in any way. He was your buddy; you tolerated his behaviour. That being said, over the years he started lightening up on the harsher jokes with you, opting for more of a platonic flirt more than anything else, finding it was a less harmless way to poke fun at you.

"And the Fair, John? Really?"

The boy shrugged his hands up to defend his suggestion. "What's so bad about the Fair?!"

You rolled your combination into your locker, and he shifted out of the way so you could get into it better once you got it unlocked.

"Nothing's wrong with going to the Fair. Going to the Fair with you on the other hand..." you tisked at him before reaching into your locker to retrieve what binders and books you had left in there. John never used his locker, so he was just waiting on you.

You tossed your bag up over your shoulder once you shoved your books inside, and before John could interject with an if, and, or but, you put your hand up to silence him.

"You left me lost in that fun house--"

"But that was literally ten ago, y/n!"

"Doesn't mean I'm over it!"

You took the lead towards the exit doors, and John followed suit, searching for the right words to convince you to go with him.

"If you go with me tonight, I'll try to win you a stuffed animal,"

"We're doing bribery now, are we?" You smirked, reaching out for the doors and pushing through until both you and John were outside, standing under the sun. It was nice for once for the sun to have been out from behind the clouds.

"Look, you're just always hanging out with your girlies, and I've got my mates, but they're all going to the fair with other people tonight," John started as you both headed to the sidewalk and began to make your way to your place.

"We never really do spontaneous things anymore, just you and I. And, I don't know, growing up a little might have had something to do with it... but it doesn't mean I'm not still your friend, though. I wanna do things with you."

You took John's words into consideration. One thing you really liked about John was that he was passionate, and poetic. You'd seen this reflected in some of his writing before, and he often discussed with you how much he liked music, and how he dreamed that his poems could very well one day soon become songs...

Now, it's not like he spoke the way he wrote, but his thoughts translated to words so quickly and effortlessly, and he, as a speaker, really made you think twice about what he said because he sounded so sure when he spoke.

"... I suppose we have been distant in terms of having fun. I know I won't be able to win an argument with you that studying every other night together is considered 'fun', even though I think otherwise."

You and John both rounded left down the next street, which happened to be where you lived; the benefits of living a block away from school. Your house was coming up, meaning this conversation had to end soon.

"Y/n, of the two of us, it's you who needs to be more spontaneous. Just say yes and come with me tonight."

At this point, you and John had slowed to a stop and were standing at the end of the driveway, facing one another as you pondered whether tonight was going to be spent inside reading and listening to music, or stimulated by exciting noises and lights while you stuffed your face with Carnival delicacies and treats.

"... If I say yes, will I still get my stuffed animal?" You already knew the response as the smile returned to John's face.

You and John made it to the Fair for 6:30, and it was already full of life; children on the rides screaming their heads off, friends competing in mini games like Ring Toss and Balloon Darts, and the smell of popcorn and candy floss swirled through the air.

As you looked around at all of the rides available, you barely noticed John going out of his way to buy tickets for both you and him for the night. When he returned to you, he tried to see if you were looking at a particular ride. "Anything catching your eye?"

"I feel like they have different stuff this year. Like, that one must be new," you pointed to a group a different rides that you'd never seen before. "Let's look around, and if anything looks interesting enough, I say we go for it."

John bought you enough tickets for you both to ride everything anyways, but you two had all night, and nowhere to be the next day, so you agreed to start at one end of the fair, and work your way through it.

The first ride that caught the attention of either one of yous were the Tea Cups.

"Remember the one time I threw up on you on that ride?" You asked John with a little smile, to which he replied without a beat,

"And then I threw up on you and caused a chain reaction with all of the other kids on the ride?"

You both laughed and cringed at the rather unpleasant memory before John kindly took your elbow and pulled you towards the ride gently, knowing full well that your matured stomachs would be able to handle it now, and your moving feet indicated you weren't objecting the idea of getting on.

"We gotta start the fun somewhere, Love. After you," John presented four tickets to the ride operator, and you chose your favourite colour cup to climb into.

"If you just don't spin the cup, we'll make it out of here safe," you warned John with a joking wagging finger, and he saluted to you respectfully as he closed the hatch to the cup and took a seat next to you.

"Don't worry, we won't meet the same fate as last," he grabbed the wheel at the centre of the cup as if to indicate he was going to steady it the whole time, and you were excited to see how well he'd do; and even more excited to make fun of him when he did a bad job.

The ride shot to life, and as the cups began dancing around in different patterns, you watched in amusement as John tried his very hardest to keep the cup from spinning; his attention sometimes turning to you, and he watched as your hair whipped around your smiling face as the ride threw the both of you around.

Your beating heart was building up adrenaline as the ride spun on. You suddenly threw your hands overtop of John's, and his eyes shot up to you, hands going slack on the wheel, and you took that moment to whip the cup around as hard as you could, the world becoming a blur around you, and your energy within escaping in a bound of squeals and giggles.

John couldn't help but join in, your laughter was contagious, and the excitement he felt seeing you having fun made his heart ache a little, but in a good way.

The ride was over much sooner than the either of you would have liked, the both of you combing your fingers through your hair to appear more presentable as your tea cup came to a complete stop. John opened the door for you, and you both continued on on wobbly legs to see what else the Fair had to offer.

After a few carnival games and slow, paced rides, you finally grab John by the wrist after he suggests doing something you'd rather do later so he didn't take off too far.

"I think we should do the Ferris Wheel, John," You dropped his wrist and pointed to the ride in the distance behind him, his eyes following your gaze to it.

"Come along, then," it was now his turn to grab your wrist, and lead you along.

That was one unspoken rule you had with John: he never held your hand. You weren't sure why, and you didn't really care-- you didn't want to hold his hand. You just always settled on the idea John was really committed to the joke about not wanting to get Cooties; and honestly, you respected his devotion to the joke.

Your wait in line to ride the Ferris Wheel was a short one, and your chest filled with excitement yet again as you and John took your seats and the ride operator strapped you in.

As the ride filled with other people, you and John slowly made your way to the very top of the ride, allowing yourselves to take in the view of the Fair that seemed to stretch forever.

"We really should have done this first so we could have seen everything all at once," you said, peering down at some of the unrecognizable stands and rides surrounding you both. One in particular caught your eye, and it was in the shape of a space ship from those cartoons depicting the future.

"We definitely have to check that one out," you pointed to it, and John nodded his head in agreement.

"It seems to be right by the games and food. We'll grab some candy while we're in the area."

"And...?"

"And I'll win you that prize, yeah yeah yeah, I know what I promised."

The Ferris Wheel then took off, and you and John savoured the ride, watching the sun slowly fall towards the horizon, the most beautiful colours painted across the sky.

"I'm glad you convince me to come with you, Johnny. I'm having loads of fun. Thank you," you didn't shout, just loud enough that John could hear, and he smiled at you.

"Like I said, if anyone needs to be more spontaneous, it's you. If I can fix that in any way, I'll take the chance," you smiled back at his words, turning your full attention back to the sky as the ride began to slow, knowing this moment, like everything else, was going to come to an end.

You and John were on a mission to get over to the space ship, passing by a bunch of other rides and games you pointed to and indicated aloud along the way that they were on your To-Do list that evening.

As you approached what you two initially thought was a ride, you discovered that the rocket was actually just a still building. There were two lines entering the ship, and there were a few people in each line.

One of the Fair Staff was walking by, and John stopped him before he went too far. "Hey, what's this one all about?"

"Cosmic Hearts is a matchmaking activity we just added! You're matched with someone of your preference in the other line anonymously, and you both enter the rocket. You spend two minutes in the dark together, and then you leave together when the doors open, revealing who you've matched with. You can also think of it as a two-way Kissing Booth."

The staff member looked at the both of you before adding on slowly, "established couples usually don't use that one..."

"Oh, you must be mistaken, we're not--" John couldn't even correct the guy before he was walking away again. You looked from John, back to the metal space ship. The guys standing in line weren't bad looking at all.

"... I wouldn't mind spending two minutes in the dark with any of them," you thought aloud, noticing that each person in line had at least one unique physical attractive quality.

"Yeah, well I'd be worried they'd be touchy with you. In the dark and all," John huffed, shaking his head at the picture he painted himself, and you bursted out laughing.

"What, so you're my chaperone now? Going in there is knowing full well you're going to have hands all over you. Maybe I want to be squeezed up a little, Johnny, is there any harm in that?"

"I mean," John's face flushed a rosy pink before shutting his eyes and shaking his head again, as if that was going to stop his imagination from doing what an imagination does.

"That's.. not something I want to picture."

"Well look, you don't have to anymore," you took John's arm and pulled him towards one of the game stalls close by. "But you do have to try to win me that stuffed bear. We all know that's what I came for in the first place."

The distraction you set up was a good one. The game you brought John to was pretty much just Balloon Darts but forest- themed. You watched as John tried his very best to aim his darts, but he just couldn't quite seem to make the mark for that bear.

The fifth round came and went, and John was still slapping more tickets down. You knew it didn't help that John was legally blind and flat-out refused to wear his glasses, but you weren't about to start an argument with him over that.

After John used up the rest of his darts from that round, he looked over at you with frustration and he sighed. "Look, I might just need a quick break," John took the tickets from inside his pocket, and placed them in your hand.

"I'm running to the loo, it's just on the other side of the park, just hang out here, play a round... or four... and see if you're a better shot than me,"

"I'm always a better shot than you, Lenny," you called to him as he disappeared in the crowd, waving back to you as if to acknowledge your cocky response.

You went to turn back to the game, but something stopped you. You took a quick glance over your shoulder, and eyed the lineup at the rocket ship. You couldn't believe how good looking the people in the lineup were, you could only imagine what the mystery people in the second line looked like.

And then John's words from earlier became apparent in your head, statement ringing in your ears.

"Y/n, of the two of us, it's you who needs to be more spontaneous."

You furrowed your brow as you thought about this decision you were about to make. The closest lineup to you wasn't long at all, and before you knew it, your feet were pretty much walking themselves up to the line.

There was a girl about your age doing the matching for your line, and she met your gaze after letting the next person in. She grinned, and approached you.

"Hello! Welcome to Cosmic Hearts, do you know how we work?"

"Sort of... I just don't know how the matches are made."

"Oh, it's no worries, we do that all for you! We only really take the girl's request for preference types, and then we match accordingly from the other line. Is there something in particular you want about your match? Looks? Behaviour?"

You raised an interested eyebrow, skeptical about how accurate your preferences would be in terms of the match.

That being said, it was just an elaborate kissing booth, it's not like you were using the stall to find the love of your life-- no, you were looking to prove to John that you could be daring, that you weren't as boring as he maybe thought.

"Look, girl-to-girl here, I trust your judgement in choosing me a good-looking guy..." your voice tapered off for a moment before you added, " I just might want someone who doesn't seem too overconfident."

The Match Girl smiled wide, and gestured toward the door to the spaceship with her hand, pushing it open to let you in. You were the next girl in line, and the boys in the lineup watched as you took a deep breath and moved in.

As you walked toward the threshold of the dark room, Match Girl filled you in on the instructions.

"The other side of the curtain will be your 'contact area', only walk through when you hear the other door close; that'll mean he's inside as well. You'll have two minutes alone together, at which point we will open the central door and let you both out"

Your heart began to quicken. It didn't really occur to you until now that you were about to make out with a complete stranger in the dark, and leave that spaceship hand-in-hand just to prove to John wrong about you lacking in as much fun as he thought.

But this impulsive plan of yours also excited you a lot.

Maybe by the end of the night, you'd be leaving with a boyfriend, and telling John that you told him so.

You took your final step into the rocket, and your heart pounded against your ribcage as it all went dark.

After about thirty seconds of silence, you heard some shuffling from the other side of the curtain, and then a simple, "your two minutes start now," from the staff.

Your heart was beating so loud, you could hear the blood flowing in your ears. Your remaining senses enhanced, provided your lack of vision, and you followed the wall to the right with your hand, past the curtain, and you could feel an immediate change in temperature in the room.

You were much warmer now, hyper-aware of the fact that you were sharing body-heat with whoever the staff matched you with. You had to relay it in your head a few times what this actually meant for you. It meant that the stranger in this room with you was going to get to know you quite intimately in a pretty short amount of time.

This made you think a moment or two about the other party in this situation: The Stranger. What was his story? Was he dared to jump in line by his buddies to get some action? Maybe his story is that he just wanted to have his first kiss to get it just done and over with, or maybe he, like yourself, was just doing it for the Hell of it.

Whatever the reason, you felt you owed it to them to give them a decent snogging.

Your hand continued to drift along the wall before your thumb bumped into another hand. You gasped quietly, knowing you were close to the stranger, just not exactly sure of where abouts until now.

You lifted your hand off the wall at the same time as him, and as to not lose you, he made sure to reach out and take your hand in his gently, seeming more like an offer than a demand, which you took, admittedly rather nervously, especially when his other hand reached out to grab the other hand at your side.

Something was just so thrilling picturing so many renditions of handsome young men in your head, mixing and matching what he looked like based on what you could feel. His hands were larger than yours, and his fingers were calloused.

He played guitar, or bass, or something, and you knew this because John played, and you remember him telling you once that the strings were really hard on the hands, and you could just tell by looking at his hands that he wasn't joking.

You just thought the feeling was such a contrast against your own hands, which were soft and untouched, and you were sure with the way this guy was running his thumbs over your palms, and the pads of your fingers, he was admiring the contrast as well.

You almost wanted to say something to him about it, but he had you stuck in a trance, especially when he let your hands go for a moment to gently feel up your arms for your shoulders. You tried your best not to be too reactive, but you couldn't help the goosebumps trailing after his touch.

His hands moved up, and you felt his fingertips graze the crooks of your neck and then up under your jaw.

Neither of you spoke, this moment too intimate for the silence to break. You and he breathed so shallow, it was hard to even believe there was someone in the room with you.

But there was, and his fingers traced your jawline slowly, one hand deviating up to cradle the back of your head while the other gently traced around your chin.

Your lips parted, your own hands reaching out for his waist so you had some idea of where he was in front of you. Your fingers found his jacket, and as you tightened your hands around the leather, you felt him move a little closer as his thumb finally found its way to your bottom lip.

You felt his breath on your face, and you held your own, squeezing your eyes shut when you realized they had been wide open the whole time.

And finally, after what seemed like too long, his thumb disappeared and he replaced it with his own lips.

The kiss was soft, and not pushy at all, but you were tense like a rock under his touch from how nervous you actually were, and you just kept still.

He pulled away for a moment, and you could feel your face burning. That was not the kind of note you were going to leave on. Whoever this was, he had clearly gotten your attention, and you needed to return the favour.

Your one hand moved up his chest, over his collarbone and around his neck to pull him back down towards you. Your lips came together again, and you felt him melt into your embrace after an unsure second, hands dropping down to snake around your waist and pull you flush against him.

You sighed against his mouth, and he pushed his tongue past your lips, all of your past worries melting away. You were in heaven, so drunk on intimacy that you forgot what you were even doing in there in the first place. You tried pulling him even closer by the jacket, to which he responded by slowly backing you against the wall, one of his hands dropping to your hip, and the other returning to the back of your head like before.

Your hand behind his neck slipped up into his hair, and he moaned gently when you tightened your fingers up in the strands and pulled a little.

"Yes, Baby..." the words tumbled from his mouth lowly, and you felt a chill shoot right up your spine; you immediately froze up, lips separating as the realization hit you. You felt like you were going to faint.

"John?!" Your question was short, but clear, and you felt your suspicions were all too correct when you felt all of his muscles tense up as well at the sound of your voice.

"...Y/n?!" His voice cracked, body frozen in place like a statue. As were you, grip still tight in his hair and on his jacket.

You were speechless-- you couldn't believe the one you just spent the last minute and a half or so with-- the one with whom you spent the most intimate experience in your entire life-- was John.

The gentle touching, the embracing of the heavy silence, the patient behaviour, the soft kissing, the respect of your boundaries, and the feeling of wanting more-- it was all John.

This was the first time in your life you had ever experienced John in a situation where he didn't have the words he needed to speak at his disposal.

But to be fair, neither did you. What would anyone do in a situation like this?

It became all the more real for the both of you a moment later when the doors opened up, the lights around the rocket ship lighting John's face for you to see, and your face for him. You both sported embarrassing shades of red on your cheeks, and John's mouth just hung open in perpetual shock as he took in the fact that it was you.

After a second, you both came back down to earth, and your hands came zipping off each other so fast, John scratching his head nervously and giving you space from the wall, and you folding your arms over your chest and gripping your biceps tightly with your fingers.

You couldn't even look John in the eye, nor could he with you, let alone speak. You walked out the door, John at your side. The Match Girl waited by the bottom of the ramp, grinning ear-to-ear. If only she'd known.

"Pretty good-looking, huh?" She nudged to you with a wink, and you could feel your face grow hotter as you glanced over to John. You made brief eye-contact, and you cast your eyes straight to the ground when it happened.

You were thinking things about John you never would have before had it not been for that stupid snog box.

"Yes," was all you could say, nodding for the most part and squeaking out a soft thank you to her before you turned on your heel, and beelined straight for the women's room, rushing out to John that you were running to the loo without looking back at him.

You were too focused on finding some cold water to splash in your face, and a quiet space to figure out what to do in this situation; the lights and sounds had your head just spinning, and it was too difficult to concentrate.

The women's room was quiet enough, and when you felt you'd splashed enough water in your face, you went and sat in one of the stalls for a while to break down the situation that just happened, and what you were going to do to fix it.

John was your friend. There was no way you were going to let something like this drive a wedge between you, especially if you just had to explain yourselves. You had your reasons going in there, as did he.

You were just hoping this could be something you could both look back on in the future and laugh.

You took a few sobering deep breaths before leaving the women's room. You rounded the corner, not quite sure where to begin looking for John, but you found you didn't have to go far when a rather familiar set of fingers took hold of your own as soon as you stopped.

You glanced over your shoulder and there he was. He'd been waiting for you the whole time.

And now he was holding your hand.

That's new.

"... Can we talk?" you spoke simultaneously, and you both smiled a little. John still couldn't seem to hold your gaze for too long without needing to tear his eyes away and resort to looking at his shoes, yet he still held a firm grip on your hand.

You'd never seen him like this before. It was sobering to see him without so much confidence.

"Where did you wanna talk? Nowhere's really private here."

"... Did you just wanna get outta here?" As soon as the words left his mouth, your shoulders lowered in relief. You both definitely had enough excitement for the night, and when you nodded your head sheepishly, John gave your hand a little squeeze, gestured you to come with him with his head, and you both headed for the Fair exit.

Your stroll down the town streets were quiet. Nothing was said between you two for the first little while, your strides were slow, your destination was unknown, and your hands were still clasped together. You took in the night air, for the sun had dropped below the horizon while you were in the spaceship, and the temperatures were lower.

You weren't too sure yet how John felt about all of that night's events so far, and what he thought of you. Clearly, based on the fact that his hand was still in yours, some opinion of his had changed.

Was he comfortable holding your hand now knowing it was you who shared such an intimate moment with him? Or was he maybe wanting to break off this friendship with you all because of tonight, and hand-holding was the only way he could think to comfort you?

At one point, John's fingers unraveled from yours, and you both slowed to a stop. He shrugged off his jacket and wordlessly draped it over your shoulders before you pushed your arms up into the sleeves. John tried looking you in the eye again, and he swallowed nervously, face going red yet again.

"John, we need to talk about what happened."

"I know."

You took his hand this time, and guided him to the curb, sitting down together. Your fingers left his, and you both planted your hands at the curb at your sides.

There was silence for a moment as the memories of what happened back at the Fair resurfaced in your minds, what you were both feeling for each other, physically and emotionally, in your literal moments of blissful ignorance...

"Okay. I'm just going to put this out there right now. John, I had absolutely no idea that they matched me with you, or that you were even in line, for that matter." You sighed before continuing on, feeling the creep of warmth washing over your face yet again.

"I jumped in line impulsively when you left because I figured if you came back and you saw me leaving the rocket with a guy, I could prove to you tonight that I can be just as spontaneous and daring and fun as you."

You could see the gears turning in John's head when you finished saying your part, and after a second of putting the pieces together, his eyes widened, and then this wide smile spread right across his face, and, to your utter relief, he started laughing.

And it sounded so different compared to all of the other times he laughed around you. You couldn't quite place exactly what was different this time, but you found it to be more melodic than usual; more genuine. It was like music to your ears.

"I uh, I jumped in line for kind of the same reason." You raised a confused eyebrow, so John elaborated a little more, smile faltering a little as he cleared things up.

"Let me explain; If you saw me leaving the rocket with a girl, I was hoping I could convince you to do something tonight a little out of your comfort zone, like I did with that."

There was your Pièce De Résistance: John's reason for being in there all along was to teach you to live a little. And you were simply in there to live.

"Not that I wanted to see you specifically go through with the spaceship and getting felt up the wrong way, per se, but I just..."

John's words trailed off, and you could tell he was struggling to find words again. So, he decided to take this conversation in another direction.

"Okay, look, y/n, I don't want you to be under the impression that I think you're no fun. It's just not true. I adore you. There's just something about seeing you at the peak of excitement that makes me feel warm inside, like a child. I see this in moments you doubt yourself, but you still take that chance and you come out successful in the end, shining with confidence. I wanted to see you tonight with that same glow. And I would have if I hadn't have made fun in the first place that you were such a bore, so I'm sorry."

John dropped his head down after he finished speaking, and you looked at him for a moment, blinking once before reaching out to rub his back.

"Johnny, there is nothing to be sorry about." He turned his gaze to look at you, and you took some long pauses between your sentences. John was patient, eyes watching your face, and hanging onto every word you said.

"Of all the people I could have ended up with in that rocket tonight, I don't think you have any idea just how grateful I am that it was you in there with me, and not some stranger."

You didn't think you could keep it inside forever just what you thought about John's kissing, but you didn't think you'd give up fifteen minutes after the situation, either.

"John, I've kissed boys before, that's no secret between us; but what is is that I've never kissed a boy the way I kissed you tonight, and the attention you were giving back to me, I thought I nearly fell for you in there, and I had no clue it was even you," you laughed a little, the words feeling funny in your mouth, especially when they were for John's ears, only. Those words elicited red faces from the both of you.

"... I never thought I'd ever be nervous looking you in the eye, but to be quite honest, all that comes to mind when I see your face right now is the bubbling of excitement in my chest, and the feel of my legs going wobbly. God, John, would I be crazy to say I want you to kiss me like that all over again?"

You figured if you didn't throw the opportunity out there, you just might lose the chance to experience what you felt again, even if it meant just one last time in your life. But when John remained silent for longer than you hoped, your confidence began to falter. Perhaps John wasn't so comfortable with you anymore.

"... Would I be crazy?" You asked again, this time just above a whisper. John was the kind of person you expected to laugh something like this off. Perhaps he'd tease you for a moment, but ultimately tell you it was no big deal before gently rejecting you.

Instead, his silence indicated something much different. His eyes darted to your lips for a moment, a hand reaching up to hold the back of your head gently as he glanced up into your eyes.

"Love, if you think you're crazy for thinking that, then what I'm thinking must make me completely mad."

Your heart pounded against your ribcage, and John decided not to waste any more time in reconnecting your lips.

At first it was a little strange, his mouth on yours, but it wasn't in any way unpleasant. You found yourself, before long, snaking your arms around John's shoulders as you pulled him ever closer, your chests now flush as he tilted his head to the side to deepen the kiss. You hummed at the contact, but John had to pull away soon after to catch a breath, but he kept your chests flush so he could feel your heartbeat.

The contrast of kissing him knowing full well who he was still didn't change the respect in his movements, and the gentleness of his kisses.

When your eyes met again, you couldn't help but smile nervously at him, biting down on your lip as you noticed his cheeks glowed pink.

"Wow," you sighed.

"I'll say," he responded, one corner of his mouth twitching up into a smirk as the pad of his thumb drew invisible patterns from your cheekbone down your jaw.

That's when your smile began to fall slowly, and John noticed this as he was going to dive in for another kiss.

"What's the matter, Love?"

"... I think I like this too much. I think I like you too much," you said bluntly. The more you and John indulged in what you both physically wanted, the more you realized what you were putting on the line.

"... And is that a problem?" John asked you gently, and you raised your eyebrow, pulling away a little more from the embrace.

"It's a problem because this puts our friendship at risk, John. Every time our lips touch, the harder it is to look at you platonically."

"Then don't look at me platonically anymore," His suggestion was so effortless as you felt his other hand reach up to play with your hair.

"... I never expected tonight to go the way it did. But y/n, the more I think about a situation where it was anyone but me in that rocket with you, the more jealous I'm becoming... The more grateful I am that it was me, too."

John took another moment to bask in the silence before clearing his throat, and looking you right in the eyes.

"My eyes are wider than they've ever been before, and my mind is so clear. Why don't we try dating?" He suggested after a moment of deciding whether to ask in the first place.

"Dating?!" You paused. "John, if anything were to happen to what we have..."

"I know you're scared, y/n. So am I. But... I also believe this can be the beginning of something really great."

John let the hand in your hair drop to his shoulder where one of your hands rested. He gave your fingers a squeeze before he raised your hand to his lips to kiss your knuckles.

"We already kind of go on dates, and now that kissing and hand holding is on the list of things we're comfortable with, we might as well just put a label on it."

John paused for a moment. "It's not like we have to scream it from the rooftops unless you wanted to. But... after tonight, it would be a treat to be able to walk around with my arm 'round your waist and proudly announce to the world that you're mine."

That comment of his made you bite back a toothy grin, but your red face really emphasized how his words made you feel. You were expecting a teasing jab from John, but, surprisingly, nothing came. Just hopeful eyes awaiting your response.

"If you're so confident we'll flourish romantically... then I'm with you, Johnny. We'll give it a go. But under one condition!"

John looked at you expectantly.

"You win me that damned stuffed animal tomorrow night, Lenny."

Now it was John's turn to grin, his arms curling around your body and pulling you into a warm embrace as he mumbled "deal" into your ear.

You were once again surrounded by leather, the crisp night air, the single dim beam of light from the streetlamp, and the faintest scent of whatever John's body wash was.

But most of all, you we're surrounded by young love.

You finally supposed that by the end of the night, you did end up leaving with a boyfriend, and telling John that you told him so.

You just had no clue you could kill two birds with one stone the way you had.

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

A/A/N: I really hope you guys enjoyed this! I've had it in the works for LITERALLY four years now, and I am just SO glad it can be out in the world now.

PERMENANT TAG LIST

@culturefiendtrashqueen

@cowgorls

(Pls message if you want to be added/removed from my permanent/oneshot/chapter fic tag lists!)

#the beatles #john lennon #john lennon x reader #paul mccartney #paul mccartney x reader #george harrison #george harrison x reader #ringo starr #ringo starr x reader #x reader #fem reader

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crowleyholmes · 10 months ago

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hi there chris! since the new year is approaching rapidly, i wanted to ask my favorite creators (that includes you! i love your art!) how they look back on their 2023 tumblr year and which blogs made them happy to be here. i am very happy to follow you and hope you'll have a great 2024! 💘

Hiiii omg this is so sweet and means a lot to me, thank you! 🥺💕

I've been meaning to do a little end-of-the-year shoutout/love post for some of my favorite blogs, so I hope you don't mind if I use your ask as the perfect excuse!

I've had many fun years on tumblr, but this one has been extra special. Falling into the Good Omens fandom and meeting all of you amazing people has made this year so so SO much better than it otherwise would have been, so here are some special shoutouts (apologies, I'm sure this will get long, things like this tend to get away from me, so I'll put it under a read-more)

@majortomyourcurcuitsdead SASHA can you believe I was going to just send you an anon telling you that I think you're cool and leave it at that. Can you believe it. WELL thank Somebody you had your anon turned off and I had to expose myself in your dms because it feels like we just instantly connected about like 20 different things and haven't stopped talking since sskjdfhs anyway I'm so happy I met you you're so fun and so clever and so talented and so enthusiastic and I've only known you for like. What 2 months?? Ish? But I already love you so much <3

@lineffability !!! Line you are so *struggles to find words* you're just great is what you are okay. I feel like you are what happens when somebody takes a big cup and puts six shots of love, chaos, sunshine, talent, fun, and enthusiasm into it, generously sprinkles intelligence on top and gives it a good stir. I don't even remember how or when or why we started talking tbh? But your creativity is so inspiring, and some of my favorite tumblr-moments of this year have been 'yes-and'ing with you about one thing or another in a very >:3 manner hahah so! my point is! i love you lots <3

@dontbotheraziraphale Teeeedddd you're wonderful, I vented at you one time and then we talked for like 2 hours and at the end of that 1 conversation I already considered you a friend - and not just in that "tumblr mutuals who talk 1 time are my friends" kind of way but like. Genuinely. You're so kind and so fun and every time we talk it's such a good time ily a lot my bro my buddy my man <3

@crikey01 Tallulah HI I also completely forgot how we started talking but I remember connecting the dots that you were the one who painted those INSANE black and white and gold oil paintings and the way my jaw dropped like?? BRO you're so talented I admire you so much! And I love that we bonded over stopping each other from masochistically checking certain peoples' blogs... 😂 Anyway you're so sweet and fun and ily lots <3

---

The list could probably go on but you four are the people I've talked to most on here and you're the tumblr chat boxes I never close but always just minimize and y'all better see this as the ultimate internet declaration of affection that it Clearly is >:D 💕

---

And here are some more shout-outs because I just HAVE to.

Apologies, I know I've already tagged a bunch of you recently in a mutuals appreciation post but. This is my official thank-you-for-2023 post and I just have a lot of love for you all okay sorry feel free to ignore this <3

@rowan-ashtree (i'll text you back soon I promise I'm sorry I just haven't had the brain-space recently ssjkdfh) @crawley-fell (we've never talked but i love you from afar :')) @ineffabildaddy @llokilaufeyson @actual-changeling @saryasy @hyperfocusthusly @beccibarnes @rainbowcrowley @thesherrinfordfacility @goodoldfashionednightingale @wibbly-wobbly-blog @highlyillogicalandroid (i see your data obsession and i agree <3) @tortugay @foolishlovers @stargazing-crowley @gingiekittycat @weasleywrinkles @bildads-shoes @finleycannotdraw @bowtiepastabitch @heytherefluffy @samwwise @nocturnal-birb @athousandyearstime @angelsdiningattheritz @most-normal-eccles-cake-ignorer @jedthesecretdreamer @wraithee @hydrangeadangea @southfarthing @frodo-baggins @mobius-m-mobius

#asks #2023 reflections #personal #friends and mutuals and others appreciation post <33

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nburkhardt · 1 year ago

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Their first date is during fall.

It’s several months of learning each other, becoming actual friends and dancing around each other. They go through spring together figuring out their new normal, summer brings genuine friendship and fall is beginning to look like the start of love.

Eddie’s the one to ask, being the first to admit feelings and being the brave one between the two of them.

His hands were shaking, felt like he was sweating through all the layers on him. His eyes wide and determined, hopeful. “Go on a date with me? Please?”

Steve’s heart beats fast as he stared at him, a jolt of pure hope and joy went through. “Yeah, yes Ed, I’d like that.”

The date is simple, something easy for them. The both of them don’t need anything extreme, simple is enough.

A pumpkin patch had just opened the week before and Eddie has seen Steve staring at the pumpkins sitting on someone’s front lawn a few days before asking him on the date.

Watching Steve’s eyes light up at the entrance, it makes Eddie’s heart beat faster.

They walk around, holding hands and picking out any pumpkins they both like. Eddie grabs a few small ones while Steve ends up with one big enough to crave, along with a few small ones too. They pass on the corn maze, ride a tractor together with an older couple and their grandchild, listening to the driver give out facts about the farm and pumpkins.

Eventually they end up sitting on a haystack, holding hot chocolate listening to the chatter around them while watching the sunset, not talking just enjoying being next to each other.

Some day in the future, they’ll be here again where Steve’s the brave one and proposes to Eddie.

Woah hey, look at that. I was a little high and thought of pumpkins and steddie. And here we are :D Btw we’re ignoring time periods and homophobia and all that okay? Just enjoy the sappiness.

Permanent tag list under the cut

@spectrum-spectre @itsfreakingbats @mysticcrownshipper @artiststarme @thereindeerlady @justforthedead89 @ronniescontinuum @freyaforestafay @littlewildflowerkitten @gregre369 @zerokrox-blog @flustratedcas @carlprocastinator1000 @marvelmwah @solliesolesito @navnae @i-less-than-three-you @grimmfitzz @estrellami-1 @strangersteddierthings

#steddie #steddie fic #steve x eddie #nburkhardt writes #stranger things fic #Steve Harrington #eddie munson #stranger things #sappy #idk I think Steve would LOVE pumpkin patches #Eddie does too but not as much as Steve #their second date is painting the tiny pumpkins while sharing apple pie #posting yet again late at night my time 😅

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nimmie-nugget · 1 year ago

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Hii! I have a request for Mha ✨️

What if Fuyumi adopts a kid? And they can go out and do a bunch of fun things like playing at the park and getting ice-cream. :D

~Fuyumi x Child Reader~

Reminder: drink water and eat a full meal! Turn on dark mode if it’s currently night where you live~ wouldn’t want ya eyes to hurt right?~ —go to your profile and press the icon that’s on the VERY right, then click “General Settings” and scroll down a bit till you see “Color Palette” and there should be a few options for ya there!—

Note: AHHHHHHH MHA SHALL NOW BE INTRODUCED INTO THIS BLOG!!! 😆 I’m gonna be honest- I got so excited while writing this! 🤩 Enjoy! <3

P.s Fuyumi might be ooc considering this is my first time writing her 😓

Edit: guys it’s been like months how r ppl liking this 🤯⁉️ but u do u 😼💪

(this is more of a FNAF blog now, tho I’m on a hiatus for a few more days but if u into fnaf and u like seeing C.C art then YUPPPYYYYYYY)

Masterlist

Main Masterlist+Introduction

Fuyumi=Red, Y/n=Pink, Teacher+Ice cream worker=Black or White (depending on your Color palette)

it’s been a while since Fuyumi has adopted you. She was always busy with work and other things you did not need to know but she still made room for you, but half of the time it’s either your uncle Natsuo, Shoto or your grandpa babysitting you. Usually ends up with Natsuo. You’ve visited your grandma at the hospital one too many times and you wonder why she’s there, she isn’t hurt or anything right?

You were currently in school playing with your friends until your teacher made an announcement “ok everyone! Y/n will be leaving early today so say your goodbyes!” The teacher beamed, all that was heard were ‘awes’ and ‘bummer’ and ‘lucky…’ eventually everyone got over their little tantrums and said their goodbyes. You were guided towards the office as Fuyumi came in sight, you ran towards her wrapping your arms around her torso with your head buried in her stomach and you felt soft hands touch your head as you looked up making eye contact with Fuyumi “Hi mom! How was work?” You say excitedly. She smiled at you as she ruffled your hair “Y/n, sweetie! Can you give me a few minutes?” ��Ok!”

Time passed by and Fuyumi was done talking with the staff. Both of you got in the car as you questioned“Mom, why did you pick me up from school early?” Fuyumi smiled at you again. “Well~ I though maybe me and my cute precious daughter can have a day out with just the two of us!” There were stars in your eyes showing you were indeed excited but you also got embarrassed at her statement of ‘my cute precious daughter’ “mom!!!” Fuyumi giggled as it seemed time passed by so fast that you two were already at your destination. Fuyumi and you got out of the car and we’re walking towards the play ground.

“Ahah! Mom come play with me!” You tugged at Fuyumi’s shirt wanting her to go down the slide with you. “Ok! Ok!” The both of you giggled as you were placed onto her lap, you put your arms in the up as you and Fuyumi slid down “WEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!! Let’s go again!”

Now both of you were getting ice cream.

“Y/n which one do you want?” Fuyumi said pointing to a bunch of popsicle flavours displayed onto the ice cream truck. “I want chocolate!” “One chocolate ice cream with sprinkles please!” You beam at the fact that she remembers you like ice cream with sprinkles “alright one chocolate ice cream coming right up! Anything for you ma’am?” You proceed to chant the word ‘chocolate’ as the other two speak. “Ah! Yes I would like vanilla if it’s not a bother!” “One vanilla ice cream coming right up!” Fuyumi paid for the ice creams and you guys went for a short walk.

“This is the best day every!!!” You laughed and Fuyumi joined in the laughing with you. “Be careful with your ice cream! It’s melting!” Fuyumi said as she wiped your mouth with a tissue as you just smiled towards her.

Both of you were finally back home as you were being carried in Fuyumi’s arms “mom?” Fuyumi hummed in response. “Can we ever go out like this again someday?” You say getting sleepy by the time Fuyumi responded you were fast asleep. She giggled and kissed your forehead “of course.”

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fandxmslxt69 · 8 months ago

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CLEM'S BIRTHDAY HANG OUT!!

Hello friends!

As March comes to an end (my birth month wooo) I thought it would be a fun idea to have a little hang out during the last week! So from March 25 - 31 we are PARTYING !

Sort of!

My askbox is open to all sorts of silly dilly fun time! This is my first little hang out so PLEASE BE KIND TO ME i'm just a silly girl who wants to make friends and have some fun! I'm also hoping this might get me back into writing!

Yes, the poster is all Loki NO HE'S NOT THE CENTRE OF ATTENTION!! Here's a little info I guess (I am just winging this as we speak, it is not very thought out):

Rules & Info

The event will run from 03/25 to 03/31 - you can send in as many asks and hang out as much as you would like!!! No I will not kill you if you drop a hello in my askbox start of April - to be honest, I love friends so I won't ever turn anyone away

You can stop by my askbox to say hi, share some thoughts (or thots...) tell me anything, or play a game! (will talk about that in a bit)

Anyyyyoneeee is welcome I don't care if we aren't mutuals or we don't even talk, STOP BY AND SAY HI :D If you are rude or disrespectful in any way, I will kick your butt and break your nose.

This is a positive, fun zone. I just want to have my fun and mind my business, please don't be trying to cause problems. I'm a relatively small blog so thankfully no one really looks my way but I've had some bumps in the past.

THIS IS MY FIRST TIME DOING THIS AND IM LITERALLY GOING TO DIE FROM NERVES SO BE PATIENT WITH ME OKAY

Games:

Fuck, marry, kill - send me any three characters that you want me to decide a fate for....oh my god please don't make me kill anyone I love dearly....

Blurbs!! - send me a little prompt/kink/thought & a character and I will try SOOOOO HARD to put out a little itty bitty something of writing! Like 500 words or so!! Can be fluffy or smutty. Angst is not allowed unless its just a LITTLE sad and with lots of fluffy stuff after

Character Association - tell me about yourself and let me give you a character. This is literally my favourite game ever, and I swear I'm super good at it

Book Recs - tell me your reading vibes/popular tropes you like and I will give you FIVE (not one, not two, but FIVE!!!) book recs because I like talking about books. If you show up talking about non fiction, then sorry but I am not your gal at all.

Chat - Come talk!! Come chat!! Come say hi and giggle with me about anything!! Come be crazy with me over narratives and themes and character arcs!!! Tell me about school or your day, your OCs, latest WIPs or anything currently on your mind!

Okay that's all I could come up with but literally any and all games are free game. I am keeping this as chill and lowkey as possible.

Characters/Fandoms:

You guys already KNOW my vibes and what I'm around and what I'm not, so feel free to send anything! I float around Marvel/DC (just send in any character and if I don't vibe with it I'll just let you know or leave it unanswered), I think it's obviously I'm Oscar Isaac obsessed....um. Pretty much anything. It's free game and I'll put my foot down if I'm down okay with something or don't want to answer :D

I'm..about to tag some friends...if that's okay...

@divine-knight-hand @romanarose @sarahscribbles @lokischambermaid @lokisgoodgirl @sailorholly @in-som-niyah @fictive-sl0th @mischief2sarawr @saturn-rings-writes @superficialdomina @planetwaynez...and I can't remember anyone else now I'm sorry LMAO

KISSES EVERYONE <3

Clem

PS: If you're worried whether I'm comfy or not or familiar with a character or not, just send it in anyway and we'll figure it out from there!

#if i did not tag you its either im going to harass you on discord or i forgot or im worried you'll think im crazy #which i may be a little bit but not entirely #kisses everyone (panicking going to throw up)#clem talks <3 #Clem's Birthday Hang Out #<- NEW TAG !!!!!!!!!!!#when this finishes maybe I'll finally get to updating and revamping my masterlist!!!!!!#jason todd #loki laufeyson #moon knight #dc #dick grayson #marvel #oscar isaac #joel miller

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domaystic · 2 years ago

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Domaystic 2023 is back!

link to bigger image: click here

[Image description: a blue clothes hanger with clips where socks are drying under the sun; among the socks the word domyastic is separated in three parts and hanged as well. On the right side: the list of 31 prompts and 5 alternatives.]

Hello! This is THE post for DOMAYSTIC 2023 :D

Domaystic is the combination of “domestic” and “May” and it's a prompt event run on May based on the domestic trope: anything inside, outside, beside the house or that has that normalcy flavor of everyday life.

If any of these prompts inspire your muse, please, don’t hesitate and join!

Text prompts

01 Housewarming 02 A stash of... 03 List 04 Packed lunch 05 Learning something new 06 Under the same umbrella 07 Stained clothes 08 The things in that drawer 09 Mistaken identity 10 Bath 11 Volunteering 12 Crisis 13 Taking turns 14 Parade 15 Junkmail 16 Sleeping habits 17 Marked date on calendar 18 Discount at favourite store 19 Police at the door 20 In the nearby park 21 Handmade gift 22 S/o on the local news 23 Small couch 24 Secret language 25 Misdialed calls 26 Sounds from above 27 Passage through a fence 28 Recycling 29 Lottery 30 Feeling of doing nothing 31 Midnight snack

Alternatives

A. No, no, don't lift it! B. There's a ... in the room! C. Stop the car, now! D. Look, I made it work! E. Oh, I can't wait to do it!

Text prompts in German: click here Text prompts in Spanish: click here Text prompts in Italian: click here Text prompts in French: click here

Lots of text under the cut!

General rules and guidelines

All fandoms or original content are welcome.

Any kind of media is welcome: fanfiction, fanart, fanmixes, puzzles, diy art, quizzes, podfics, edits, fic recs or whatever it is you feel like doing. That’s all good.

No restrictions in ships, size, min/max word count or the language you want to write into.

As last year, feel free to mix the domestic prompt with anything you like: more drama and lots of crying? YES! The thrill of an investigation for the disappearance of your characters’ fave socks? YES!

There's one prompt for each day for a total of 31 prompts + 5 alternatives with an exclamation point at the end (predictable!).

You can share your work on any platform you like. If you share it on tumblr and tag the blog, I’ll reblog it.

Combine more prompts together? That’s fine but I will reblog the entry only once here on tumblr.

Combine these prompts with another event? Fine too.

You don’t have to do all the prompts to join the event. Do the ones you enjoy.

The event is consistently checked upon during the month of May, but in case you want to share your creation at a later date, you can. I just reblog on a lower pace after May is over.

As for the reblogs, last year I gave myself a bit of an headache, so this time I’d like to try it this way: once the day of the corresponding prompt comes, people will post their work and then I’ll reblog it when that day comes for me too. Does it make sense? I hope so. I’ll miss the world clocks but let’s just trust each other.

AO3 collection

The domaystic2023 collection is open from May, 1st: click here - all the info and prompts are also on the profile page of the collection.

In your tumblr post I ask you to:

Mention the blog in your post @domaystic - tracked tag: #domaystic2023

State clearly the fandom name or if it is original content

State clearly if it is sfw or nsfw

State clearly which prompt you used

In case of lengthy posts, use the “read more option”: ctrl-shift-k on rich text; [[*MORE*]] on html (remove asterisks)

Please, TAG PROPERLY. If there are any trigger warnings, I will base my own reblog on your tags so, please, take even a moment longer to carefully tag it. I hope all participants to stay safe in this event.

Here’s an example:

blablabla my story is beautiful, look @domaystic !

#domaystic2023 #day1 #[extraA - E if alternative prompt is used] #[fandom name or oc] #[sfw or nsfw] #[trigger warnings that I get from your post] tw

If you have any question feel free to send an ask, inbox is always open. :D

Hi, @thebigbangblogproject can you reblog this?

#domaystic #domaystic2023 #post about the event #domestic trope #prompts #multifandom #prompt event #prompt list #fanfiction #fanart #edits #I hope all the essential infos are included ò_ò #edit of the 1:15pm NOPE I typed some link wrongly ... now everything should work ouch

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superbecky · 10 months ago

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Light Fight

Chara: "Frisk, who put you in charge of the lights?!" 😠

Kris + Frisk: "..."

~~~

I can't believe I am finally uploading this! ;w;

This was one of the hardest drawings for me in a while to finally get to finish. I don't care that we are in the new year now, this was supposed to originally be uploaded before then, so I am counting this as my December post!... Which means... I have to try to also upload something else for this month! :'D

Moving on... so I decided to re-design and draw Kris again. The last time I had (at least publicly) was in 2018, so it has definitely been some time. I debated whether to show their eyes, and I ended up just going with "yes" cause I liked the energy it added to the art. But man, if I thought just getting the time to finish and finally upload this was hard, let's talk about just sketching the stupid thing. Drawing characters interacting like this is always tricky (for me at least), so I was stuck in the sketching phase for such a long time. Regardless, I finally finished and that is all that matters! Happy (late) Holidays! 🎄

>Please do not re-post or use my work in any way without my permission! Re-blogging is ok. Thanks!<

#undertale #undertale fanart #deltarune #deltarune fanart #kfc gang #frisk #chara #kris #frisk and chara #undertale family #undertale frisk #undertale chara #deltarune kris #christmas #its ok they eventually got untangled #luckily toriel was there to save the day

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mostlysignssomeportents · 4 months ago

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Kitchensink callithump linkdump

On July 14, I'm giving the closing keynote for the fifteenth HACKERS ON PLANET EARTH, in QUEENS, NY. Happy Bastille Day! On July 20, I'm appearing in CHICAGO at Exile in Bookville.

With just days to go before my summer vacation, I find myself once again with a backlog of links that I didn't squeeze into the blog, and no hope of clearing them before I disappear into a hammock for two weeks, so it's time for my 21st linkdump – here's the other 20:

https://pluralistic.net/tag/linkdump/

I'm going to start off this week's 'dump with a little bragging, because it's my newsletter, after all. First up: a book! Yes, I write a lot of books, but what I'm talking about here is a physical book, a limited edition of ten, that I commissioned from three brilliant craftspeople.

Back in March 2023, I launched a Kickstarter to pre-sell the audiobook of Red Team Blues, the first novel in my new Martin Hench series, about a forensic accountant who specializes in unwinding tech bros' finance frauds:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865847/red-team-blues

One of the rewards for that campaign was a very special hardcover: a handmade, leather-bound edition of Red Team Blues, typeset by the typography legend John D. Berry:

https://johndberry.com/

Bound by the legendary book-artist John DeMerritt:

https://www.demerrittstudios.com/

And printed by the master printer JaVae Berry:

https://www.jgraphicssf.com/

But this wasn't a merely beautiful, well made book – it had a gimmick. You see, I had already completed the first draft of The Bezzle, the second Hench novel, by the time I launched the Kickstarter for Red Team Blues. I had John Berry lay out a tiny edition of that early draft as a quarter-sized book, and then John DeMerritt hand-bound it in card.

The reason that edition of The Bezzle had to be so small was that it was designed to slip into a hollow cavity in the hardcover, a cavity that John Berry had designed the type around, so that both books could be read and enjoyed.

I offered three of these for sale through the Kickstarter, and the three backers were very patient as the team went back and forth on the book, getting everything perfect. Last month, I took delivery of the books: three for my backers, one each for John DeMerritt and John Berry's personal archives, one for me, and a few more that I'm going to surprise some very special people with this Christmas.

Look, I had high hopes for this book. I dote on beautiful books, my house is busting with them, and I used to work at a new/used science fiction store where we had a small but heartstoppingly great rare book selection. But these books are fucking astounding. Every time I handle mine, my heart races. These are beautiful things, and I just want to show them to everyone:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/doctorow/albums/72177720318331731/

As it happens, the next thing I'm going to do (after I finish this newsletter) is turn in the copyedited manuscript for the third Hench novel, Picks and Shovels, which comes out in Feb 2025 (luckily, I had enough time to review the edits myself, then turn it over to my mom, who has proofed every book I've written and always catches typos that everyone else misses, including some real howlers – thanks Mom!):

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels

Of course, the majority of people who enjoy my books do not end up with one of these beautiful hardcovers – indeed, many of you consume my work exclusively as electronic media: ebooks and (of course) audiobooks. I love audiobooks and the audio editions of my books are very good, with narrators like Amber Benson, Wil Wheaton, and Neil Gaiman.

But here's the thing: Audible refuses to carry my books, because they are DRM-free (which means that they aren't locked to Audible's approved players – you can play my audiobooks with any audiobook player). Audible has a no-exceptions, iron-clad rule that every book they sell must be permanently locked into their platform, which means that Audible customers can't ditch their Audible software without losing their libraries – all the books they purchased:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/07/25/can-you-hear-me-now/#acx-ripoff

Being excluded from Audible takes a huge bite out of my income – after all, they're a monopolist with a 90% market share. That's why I'm so grateful for indie audiobook stores that carry my books on equitable terms that Audible denies – stores like Libro.fm, Downpour and even Google Books.

This week, I discovered a new, amazing indie audiobook store called Storyfair, where the books are DRM-free and the authors get a 75% royalty on every sale:

https://storyfair.net/helpstoryfairgrow/

Storyfair is a labor of love created by a married couple who were sickened and furious by the way that Audible screws authors and listeners and decided to do something about it. Naturally, I uploaded my whole catalog to the site so they could sell it:

https://storyfair.net/search-for-audiobooks/?keyword=cory+doctorow&filter=any

These books are DRM-free, which means that no matter who you buy them from, you can play them in the same player as your other DRM-free audiobooks. You know how you can read all your books under the same lamp, sitting in the same chair, and then put them in the same bookcase when you're done with them? It's weird – outrageous even! – that tech companies think that buying a book from them means that they should have the legal right to force you to read or listen to it using their technology exclusively.

If you let your Storyfair audiobooks touch your Libro.fm audiobooks, they won't get cooties! Audible is like a toddler that won't let their broccoli touch their peas – only that toddler is also a rapacious monopolist that keeps 75% of every sale.

The fight for fair audiobooks is one of those places where the different parts of my professional life cross over: activism, digital media, art, writing the web, and breaking down complex technical subjects for a mass audience. I've just signed up to a six-year project to combine all those facets in a structured way, in collaboration with Cornell University.

Cornell just named me as their latest AD White Professor-at-Large. This is a six-year appointment that involves a series of week-long visits to Ithaca to lecture, run seminars, meet with colleagues, collaborate on research, and do community performances:

https://adwhiteprofessors.cornell.edu/

We've tentatively scheduled my first visit for early September 2025, to coincide with the Ithaca Book Festival, and we've got big plans, roping in multiple departments at Cornell, the local alternative school and local colleges, doing talks at the fair as well as at the university, and (we hope!) squeezing in a stop in NYC on the way home for a day at Cornell Tech. I'm so excited (and honored) to be working with Cornell (and getting a chance to visit Moosewood Restaurant, whose cookbooks taught me how to cook!). Watch this space.

Authorship has always been a political act, but never moreso than today, with waves of book-bans sweeping the country. One of the heroes of those bans is Maggie Tokuda-Hall, who made headlines when she publicly excoriated Scholastic for demanding that she remove references to racism from her kids' books in order to make them more palatable to reactionaries:

https://www.npr.org/2023/04/15/1169848627/scholastic-childrens-book-racism

Tokuda-Hall has stepped up the fight, co-founding Authors Against Book Bans, an org that provides training and support for author/activists so they can fight back against book bans at library board and city council meetings:

https://www.authorsagainstbookbans.com/

Authors Against Book bans is looking for members! I signed up last week, within seconds of having Tokuda-Hall give me the pitch when we ran into each other in Oakland at the Locus Awards. Are you an author? Sign up too! They're especially interested in branching out beyond YA and kids' authors (though they want those kinds of writers, too!).

Book bans affect us all. Even if you personally are never stymied when you visit your library and discover the book that you want to read has been removed by a swivel-eyed loon with terminal groomer-panic. The bans sweeping our country mean that our neighbors and loved ones are being denied literature by these cranks. There are people in your life who are losing out on the possibility of a life-changing literary adventure (which is why the far right hates these books – they want to be sure no one encounters the ideas between their covers).

The realization that you have to live in a society with people who are harmed by injustice, even if you personally escape that justice? It's the whole basis for solidarity.

Americans are living through a multigenerational project of stamping out solidarity and insisting that we only ever view ourselves as individuals, with no stake in the plights of our neighbors. That's how the US got the most expensive, least effective health care system in the world. And even if you are in the vanishingly tiny minority of Americans who are happy with their health care, you live amongst people who are being killed by the system around you.

The health system is a perfect example of how monopolization drives more monopolization, and how that comes to harm the public and workers. Health consolidation began with pharma mergers, that led to pharma companies gouging hospitals. Hospitals, in turn, engaged in a nonstop orgy of mergers, which created regional monopolies that could resist the pricing power of monopoly pharma – and screw insurers. That kicked off consolidation in insurance, which is why most Americans have a "choice" of between one and three private insurers – and why health workers' monopoly employers have eroded their wages and working conditions.

A new study in American Economic Review: Insights puts some quantitative spine in this tale, tracking the relationship between hospital mergers and skyrocketed health-care prices:

https://harris.uchicago.edu/news-events/news/consolidation-hospital-sector-leading-higher-health-care-costs-study-finds?itid=lk_inline_enhanced-template

The researchers investigated 1,164 acute-care hospital mergers, finding that while the FTC only challenged 1% of these, they could – and should – have challenged 20% of them, based on the agency's own criteria for merger scrutiny. The researchers blame the rising costs of hospital care directly on these mergers, and point out that Congress has historically starved the FTC of the budget it needed to investigate these mergers. The annual additional costs to the American people from these mergers exceed the entire annual budget of the FTC.

It's not just hospitals: the entire investor class is hell-bent on spending their way to monopoly. Nowhere is that more true than in AI, where hundreds of billions are being poured into bids to attain permanent dominance through scale. Writing for their excellent AI Snake Oil newsletter, Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor inject some realism into the AI scale hype:

https://www.aisnakeoil.com/p/ai-scaling-myths

Narayanan and Kapoor challenge the idea that throwing more data at large language models will make the better: "With LLMs, we may have a couple of orders of magnitude of scaling left, or we may already be done." They are skeptical that this can be fixed with synthetic data (whose use is limited to "fixing specific gaps and making domain-specific improvements"). They also point out that if returns from data slow, then returns from adding more compute or making bigger models might also be throttled.

They reserve their most skeptical take for "AGI" – the idea that LLMs are going to achieve consciousness. This is a fundamentally unserious idea, one that they unpack in detail in their forthcoming book:

https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691249131/ai-snake-oil

One thing I'm hoping for from the book is some analysis of the material usefulness of AI hype – what purpose does the hype serve? I mean, obviously, hype is useful if you're looking to suck up investor capital, or flip an investment to a greater fool. But there's a specific character to AI hype: namely, the claim that AI will displace labor, which is really a claim that a bet on AI is a bet on the increasing wealth of capital at labor's expense.

In other words, AI is a bet on oligarchy. In America, that's a pretty safe bet, and the odds just got even better, thanks to a string of brutal Supreme Court decisions that legalized bribery, banned most regulatory enforcement, and made being alive and unhoused into a crime (Poor Laws 2.0):

https://prospect.org/justice/2024-06-29-whos-gonna-check-supreme-court-chevron-separation-powers/

But amidst all those gimmes to the rich and powerful, there was one notable exception: the SCOTUS ruling on the Purdue Pharma bankruptcy. Purdue was the family business of the Sacklers, a multigenerational dope-peddling dynasty that went from super-rich to stratospherically rich by kickstarting the opioid epidemic with their blockbuster drug Oxycontin.

The Sacklers sold mountains of Oxy the old fashioned way: by lying. The lied about its efficacy and they lied about its safety, and they helped kill hundreds of thousands of Americans. Eventually, this caught up with them, and Purdue lost a bunch of court cases and was forced into bankruptcy.

That's where things get gnarly: the Sacklers took the already-sleazy world of elite bankruptcy to a whole new level, with a set of breathtakingly sleazy maneuvers that ensured that their case would be heard by the one judge in America who would let them off the hook:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/11/justice-delayed/#justice-redeemed

That judge was Robert Drain and the Sacklers were the blow-off to a long and shameful career in public "service." The Sacklers incorporated a subsidiary in White Plains, NY (in Drain's turf) precisely 181 days before filing for bankruptcy, then claimed that this empty small-town office had been the company HQ for more than six months. Then they hid machine-readable metadata in their filing that tricked the court's database into assigning the case to Drain:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/07/hr-4193/#shoppers-choice

The reason the Sacklers were so horny for Drain? He was a notoriously generous source of "nonconsensual third-party releases." These would allow the Sacklers to permanently end every lawsuit against them without having to declare bankruptcy. Instead, they could take their (ruined, hollow) company through bankruptcy, throw a small fraction of their personal fortunes into the pot, representing fractional pennies on the dollar of what they owed to their victims, and walk away with tens of billions and eternal protection from any future suits.

In other words, they could stiff their creditors and keep the loot. Which is exactly what Robert Drain gave them – before retiring from the bench to get a two-orders-of-magnitude pay raise at a white-shoe firm that specializes in representing corporate mass-murderers like the Sacklers.

That's where it would have ended, but for a surprising ruling from the Supreme Court, which threw out the nonconsensual third-party release deal and put the Sacklers back on the hook to pay the victims of their many, many crimes.

As ever, the best source of analysis and explanation for elite bankruptcy shenanigans is Adam Levitin of the Credit Slips blog:

https://www.creditslips.org/creditslips/2024/06/purdue-pharma-decision-a-big-win-for-mass-tort-victims.html

Levitin has a prediction for what's going to happen next. He rejects the predictions of Sackler apologists, who say that this is going to add years or decades to the already too-long wait for compensation that the Sacklers' victims have endured. Instead, Levitin says that the Sacklers will almost certainly transfer billions more from their personal fortunes to the settlement pot and beg for consensual releases from their victims. In other words, they'll go from dictating terms to asking for them.

So the settlement will stand, but it will be larger, and victims who don't want to take it won't have to – they'll be able to sue. In other words, this ruling "does not prevent deals in bankruptcy. It just changes the terms of what those deals."

This has implications for other mass-murderers and corporate criminals, like Johnson and Johnson (who tricked women into dusting their vulvas with asbestos):

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/01/j-and-j-jk/#risible-gambit

And the Boy Scouts of America, who let pedophiles abuse children for decades:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/05/third-party-nonconsensual-releases/#au-recherche-du-pedos-perdue

Both J&J and BSA carved out nonconsensual third-party releases in the mold of the Sacklers' deal, and both briefed the Supreme Court, warning that if the Sacklers were forced to pay what they owed, J&J and BSA's victims would also be entitled to far larger sums. Go ahead and threaten us with a good time, why doncha?

The Sackler decision is a real bright spot at a dark time for corporate impunity. It's always nice to see big corporate bullies getting a bit of a comeuppance. Another one of those comeuppances was just delivered thanks to a classic fatfinger error.

A Microsoft engineer accidentally released the sourcecode to Playready, the company's flagship DRM product:

https://borncity.com/win/2024/06/26/microsoft-employee-accidentally-publishes-playready-code/

Microsoft's DRM doesn't do anything to protect the interests of creative workers or even the companies that employ them. As a Microsoft rep admitted on stage at a presentation in 2006, the purpose of Microsoft DRM is to prevent small startups from entering the market, ensuring that Microsoft and its "rivals" can safely divide up the world without worrying about disruptive competitors:

https://memex.craphound.com/2006/01/30/msft-our-drm-licensing-is-there-to-eliminate-hobbyists-and-little-guys/

I was there that day and reported on the remarks, prompting both Microsoft and its rep to furiously deny that they'd ever said this, despite multiple witnesses who heard it. This was just a couple years after I gave a viral talk at Microsoft about why the company shouldn't use DRM:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/18/greetings-fellow-pirates/#arrrrrrrrrr

By 2006, it was clear that the company was all in on DRM, and today, DRM is the centerpiece of Microsoft's anticompetitive strategy, and Playready is the centerpiece of Microsoft's DRM. The source-code leak is doubtless going to give rise to lots of grey-market tools for stripping DRM from all kinds of media:

https://security-explorations.com/microsoft-playready.html

You love to see it! Now I'm doubly looking forward to this summer's security conferences, including Defcon, where, for the first time, I'll be emceeing the charity poker tournament to benefit EFF:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/06/betting-your-digital-rights-eff-benefit-poker-tournament-def-con-32

This should be very fun – and funny – especially given how little I know about poker (I have been specifically selected on that basis, for the comedy value). Every player gets a custom EFF poker-deck, and the winner gets a treasure chest filled by EFF board member Tarah Wheeler, including "emeralds, black pearls, amethysts, diamonds, and more."

I like to close these linkdumps with something fun and uplifting, and I'd planned to end things with the poker-tournament, but then my pal Raph Koster announced that his game studio Playable Worlds had dropped its first announcement of Stars Reach, an open-world MMO like no other:

https://www.raphkoster.com/2024/06/28/announcing-stars-reach/

Raph is a legend in MMO design circles, whose credits include Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies. He wrote the definitive text on how games work, A Theory of Fun, that's does for games what Understanding Comics did for comics:

https://www.theoryoffun.com/

Stars Reach is stupidly ambitious. It consists of truly open worlds, modeled to an absurd degree of fidelity:

We know the temperature, the humidity, the materials, for every cubic meter of every planet. Our water actually flows downhill and puddles. It freezes overnight or during the winter. It evaporates and turns to steam when heated up. And not just our water — everything does this. Catch a tree on fire with a stray blaster bolt. Melt your way through a glacier to find a hidden alien laboratory embedded in the ice. Stomp too hard on a rock bridge, and watch out, it might collapse under your feet. Dam up a river to irrigate your farm. Or float in space above an asteroid, and mine crystals from its depths.

The game is fundamentally a climate story, whose lore has humanity seeded around the galaxy by a powerful alien race called the Old Ones, only to have humans bust through the planetary limits of every world they were given. Now the Old Ones are giving humans another chance to try smarter ways of sustaining ourselves on new worlds, with the aid of powerful robots call "Servitors."

Because this is a Raph Koster game, it's got a bunch of extremely satisfying play dynamics:

A classless skill tree advancement system, where peaceful play matters just as much as combat

An intricate player-driven economy where players can craft their way to fame and fortune

An accessible yet deep combat system, where you can choose whether to play using action aiming or more forgiving homing shots or lock-on targeting

In-world player housing that lets you build and customize your home and form towns… and enough room for everyone to have a house

A single shardless galaxy, with both space and ground gameplay… in fact, you can build that house on an asteroid, if you want

The ability for a group to govern a planet, and define its laws, whether you want a peaceful home or a PvP free for all

Stars Reach is not playable yet, but the company's looking for gamers to give them feedback and steer the development:

https://starsreach.com/

OK, that wraps up the week's links. I'm gonna get one more edition out on Monday, god willin' and the crick don't rise, and then I'll be off for a couple weeks. Enjoy your summer!

Support me this summer on the Clarion Write-A-Thon and help raise money for the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop!

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/29/pasticcio/#professor-at-large

Image: James St John https://flickr.com/photos/47445767@N05/40894047123

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en

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orpiknight · 1 year ago

Text

OrpiKnight's FAQ FAQ

For the Neil Gaiman Tumblr FAQ

GO S3 was announced! Will you be updating the FAQ still? Yep! :)

--- Who? Vel (blog OrpiKnight)

Why? I'm excited about Good Omens 2, I was looking through the Asks on Neil Gaiman's blog anyway, and I like having a constructive outlet when I'm going through so much information. And there were a lot of repeat questions. I mainly made it for me and my friends for reference, but then decided to go ahead and throw it out into the Tumblr void, too.

*Are a lot of these questions really frequently asked? Well, this started out being called a "QnA" doc because I was compiling the Asks. Then everyone kept calling it a "FAQ". So I rolled with it. It keeps up with the current Asks as much as possible, though. (I have no way of knowing how many times he gets asked some questions. That's for his inbox to know.)

Will you be actively updating it with new questions/answers? Yes. I update in batches now, every month or so. For my sanity. *When I update things, I usually put the new questions at the bottom of their section, even if they might fit next to something else in it better. This is just to make new ones easier to find. Later on I might reorganize them.

Can you put it in a Tumblr post? No. It's too much information, it can hang out on docs (which is 30+ pages). I'm pretty sure I would hit a word limit if I put it on here. Or break my dash. Or accidentally delete it. *You don't need a Google account to access it. I have tested this signed out on non-Chrome browsers. (I use Firefox btw)

You missed some Asks. Yeah... there is no way I could get all of them. I had to draw the line somewhere.

Some of the questions are strange. Don't I know it. Edit: But I do like to put in all sorts of questions. Sometimes there are things that don't even occur to me to ask that Neil says he gets constant questions about (like the ice cream/ice lolly). Sometimes there are things that I don't realize need clarifying (like "two consenting bicycle repairmen"). One person can ask a creatively specific question that other people are quietly wondering about. I also like the funny ones.

I found an error (typo/link not going to where it's supposed to/accidentally wrong info/etc.)?

But seriously, it's okay to message me to let me know. It's very helpful.

Can I have shared editing access to your document? No.

About the fanfiction thing... Please end my suffering. (And Neil Gaiman's) Edit: I should probably clarify that I do like fanfiction.

I have personal opinions. Please be nice to me.

Can you add or change this, that, or whatever? I work irl, am usually tired, and don't have much time to constantly edit every little thing. Unless you're Neil Gaiman himself asking, it's likely I'm just going to leave it how I organized it. And I mean that in the politest way possible. Speaking of, if you would like to help me out at all with things like bills, medical costs, and food— here's my: Venmo: @ajgvel Ko-fi page (It says you're giving me ducks on there! :D)

It's not expected of course. Regardless, much love to everyone, and thanks for making a space where we can all have fun together about something we enjoy. ♡

Find me on Bluesky: OrpiKnight

#good omens faq #OrpiKnight #okv

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kiiwiigii · 1 year ago

Note

Hello I'm a new follower and found your blog through @lack-lust-3r and @alecvolturiswifeforever and I'm officially in love and obsessed. I wanted to request a little something in my head that live rent free. What alec and his mates relationship would look like if they had a 24/7 d/s dynamic (like outside the bedroom). Little things alec does everyday to remind the reader of his command. So very light BDSM but not like smutty something a little fluffy with its hint of spicy. I hope that makes sense lol I suck at this.

My dumbass just realized that this is more of a headcanon thing. And luckily for you, this is kind of how I view Alec in general. SO. Here we go. I hope you enjoy!!

Dom/Sub Relationship Headcanon - Alec

Alec is extremely possessive.

The first thing he did was give you a Cartier Love Bracelet with his name inscribed on it.

And since the only way to put it on or take it off is with his help, it never leaves your wrist.

He also doesn't like it when others get too touchy-feely.

That's HIS job.

And he does like to touch you.

Constantly.

His hand is usually on your lower back when you're walking or standing together.

If you're lucky, he'll hold your hand instead.

And his hand is on your thigh while you're sitting down for a movie night.

Or hell, even better he pulls you into his lap.

And his hand travels back down to your thigh with a squeeze.

Which is usually the case.

He has a look just for you to tell you to behave.

Mostly reserved for serious moments, such as trials or meetings.

You might get the look if you've pushed him to his limits.

And sometimes you might like to push those limits.

Which always ends up with you being called "brat" in the bedroom.

And if you've displeased him enough, it doesn't always end up in a good fuck.

Sadly for you.

You're still learning your limits.

And Alec finds it quite funny actually.

Not that he'll tell you or anything.

But I digress.

He likes to pick out your lingerie for the day unless he wants to be surprised.

And yes, you wear lingerie every day.

It's his favorite thing to see you in.

And he thinks you deserve to feel sexy every day.

There are always exceptions to the rules of course.

Mainly when you're not having a good day.

Like it's that time of the month or you're not feeling good.

Like every healthy Dom/Sub relationship there are limits, and he respects them.

Most importantly he makes sure that you're okay with whatever you're both doing.

Communication and trust is key.

{Masterlist} // {Request Guidelines}

Taglist: @alecvolturi @belladonna-xox @lack-lust-3r @pawspurpaw @pooka167 @rosedpetal

Wanna be notified when I post a new fic? Ask to join my taglist!

#alec volturi x reader #alec volturi #reader insert #alec volturi headcanon #ask and you shall recieve

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satuguro · 1 year ago

Text

*ೃ࿐ BLUE MONDAY

[ ACT III: KNOWING, WANTING ]

ethan landry x reader

#SYNOPSIS— you facetime someone first and you hate it, ethan can't tell when you're joking or serious, and you really hate richie's style.

#CONTAINS— murder!, gore!!!!, satire (!!), familial issues (implications of abuse), mentions of anxiety/ptsd, richie x reader (heavily one sided), stalker behavior!, fake dating, richie (yes, he needs his own warning), suggestive content

#AUTHORSNOTE— i'm so sorry for such a late update and the lack of activity on my blog, my mental health took such a plummet.

ACT I, ACT II, ACT III

the low hum of the computers in the radio studio and the soft sound of music paying through the control room speakers were the only sounds you heard as you spun around in your chair. a clean spotify playlist— something you weren't supposed to technically use for radio, but your station manager used it, so who cares? — played soft music on air as you waited patiently for your last song to end.

humming softly to yourself, you scrolled mindlessly through social media, taking in the last few days of relaxation you had until you finally began with you and ethan's little plan.

reluctantly date richie. gather information. get the fuck out and give it to the police.

and if all else fails? well, you'd kill him (something ethan was surprisingly not that disturbed with. talk about sibling rivalry.).

you hadn't spoken to either of them ever since sunday, when you and ethan formulated your little plan at an aesthetically pleasing botanical cafe.

the music came to a slow end, and you paused the playlist before turning on your mic. "that was my last song of the night. remember; variety hour with blackmore university radio's music manager— which is me, if you've been paying attention —is every thursday from 9 to 10. good night, new york." and with that, you returned the radio on auto play, allowing it to bleed into a few promos.

the radio and studio office was dark at this point, lacking any form of life other than you. with an entire radio station being led only by college students, it was common for everyone to be gone by the time 6 pm hit.

but you were a bit of a masochist. so here you were, doing your mandatory radio show in the ambiently lit studio and office of your station. it smelled of soft lavender from the plug-in wall scent one of your co-workers put up, and the only lights came from the lamps and soft yellow light that was put in to replace the fluorescent white that you swore made days go by longer.

your headphones were over your ears, one of them pushed back behind your ear to allow yourself to hear the outside world (you had to be cautious nowadays). pulling your tote bag over your shoulder, you locked the studio door behind you and closed up the station. and as you walked down the dimly lit stairs to the exit, you half listened to the echoing of your footsteps as you shut the door behind you.

fall was your favorite season. not just for the fact that the weather was a perfect mix of not too hot and not too cold, or that it was the last few months before you fell deep into procrastination due to the lack of sunshine, but it was because it was always so beautiful. red and browns, yellows and oranges, all painted on once-green leaves before they fell.

the crunching of the leaves below your feet as you began to walk back to your dorm was soothing behind the autumn playlist (which you had carefully curated, of course) you were listening to. and it would've gone on like that for the entire walk home. the same walk you did every thursday without fail, when barely anyone was out and about on campus and when it was only you and whatever weather there was that evening.

but you could feel someone watching you.

as though someone had poured water down your back, your skin prickled and the hair on your body stood up as your walking suddenly came to a stop. pushing your headphones down around your neck, you dared to look behind you.

nothing. nothing but the darkness of the rest of the campus, barely lit by the flickering street lamps. the light from the lamp you were standing next to bled into nothingness, revealing practically nothing to your eyes.

your hands dug into your pockets as you grabbed your phone, swallowing thickly as you dared to stare deeper into the night. deeper into the darkness you stared.

and then you dared to turn back ahead of you, walking with a stride quicker than how you usually walked. step by step, shoes crunching in the leaves as you briskly walked, keeping your chin up in faux confidence, as though you weren't hearing another pair of footsteps walking in the same exact pace you were.

and then you came to a sudden halt.

and you heard the extra footstep from someone that certainly wasn't you.

and you began to walk faster. step. step. step. feeling those heartless and emotionless eyes staring in to the back of your head much like you had stared at the back of your father's head. hungry. blood thirsty. desperate to feel the warm crimson on your skin.

you could hear them breathe. heavy and warm, excited and thrumming with adrenaline because it felt as though you were paying attention to them. you were finally reacting to them in the way they wanted you to; by running away in fear.

you pulled out your student id card, slamming it against the card reader before opening the door to your dorm building and shutting it behind you, chest heaving as you tried to compose yourself.

you went to the elevator, slamming on the button to get you up to your dorm room.

your feet walked briskly on the hallway as you made a beeline for your dorm room, hands trembling as you found yourself disassociating, barely showing any emotion at all if it weren't for your shaking hands. but as you were pulling out your key, you saw the flower on the ground.

lilies of the valley. your favorite.

looking up and down the hall, you grabbed it hastily and you unlocked the door, shutting it behind you and letting out a breath. staring down at the flowers, you pulled out a single note with a heart drawn on it in crimson red ink.

"fuck," you breathed, shaking your head as you walked into your room and locked it behind you, throwing the lilies into the trash as you swallowed thickly.

who else could have done this? who else in your life was most likely to follow you like a predator stalking its prey, waiting for the perfect moment to strike?

richie.

he was stalking you. richie was fucking stalking you.

you grabbed your phone, scrolling before you found a contact, clicking facetime on it and waiting patiently as you tried to clam the harsh beating of your chest. once, it rang. then twice. then three times, and you almost reached over to hang up, if it weren't for the face that the little sound came out of your phone speaker, signaling that he actually picked up.

"hello?" ethan said, his face squished by his pillow as he peered into the phone screen. "you actually called me. i never took you for a facetime person, but uh—"

"is richie there?" you hissed, almost scared to raise your voice as you paced your room frantically. your hands moved on their own as you took your ring off of your finger and began to run it over your knuckles.

back and forth. back and forth.

"no, i don't think so— what's going on?" ethan sat up in his bed, voice hushed low as he looked down at you. you were moving— he could see it —and he looked haphazard as he stared at you through the phone. protectiveness striked at his chest again as ethan gripped his phone tighter. "y/n, what's going on?"

"ethan, he's stalking me," you hissed, panic evident in your tone as you tried to compose yourself.

back and forth. back and forth.

"i— i was walking home from work and i swear to god, e, it was him. and he probably left these fucking flowers at my door too." you flipped the phone camera to show ethan the trashed flowers. "i'm not having second thoughts or anything, but if i have to deal with his stalking it's honestly just gonna be a pain in my ass—"

"you're not having second thoughts?" ethan ran a stressed hand through his hair, breathing out a heavy exhale. "jesus, y/n, if i were you i wouldn't even pull through with this shit."

"good thing you're not me then, huh?" you swallowed thickly, walking to your bed and throwing yourself onto it, letting your back hit your mattress. raising your phone so that ethan could see your face clearly.

you hated facetiming people.

"okay, that's all," you stated, as though letting him know that his brother was a stalker was just the most casual thing in the world. "i'm hanging up now."

"w—wait!" ethan said hurriedly right before your finger pressed the bright red button. face dusted light pink, ethan looked over your (once again) unreadable face. "can we.. stay on call?"

"no." you blinked. "why would we?"

"because i'm basically sleeping in an apartment with a stalker-murderer!" ethan hissed, voice coming down to a harsh whisper as the sound of the apartment door opening and closing rang in his ears. "i don't want to be, like, attacked in my sleep or something."

"he's not gonna attack you when quinn is there," you stated bluntly, finger still hovering over the big red button. "even if he does suspect something. you'll be fine." and you almost pressed the red button again. almost.

"y/n," ethan groaned, letting his free hand cover his face. you were so stubborn, so brutally honest, and yet ethan found himself not even minding it as he practically pleaded for you to just stay on call with him. "just.. just stay with me for a bit, okay? promise you can hang up once i fall asleep."

you narrowed your eyes at him. "do i look like a guard dog to you?"

"you basically act like one."

you stared at ethan, practically challenging him silently as he stared right back at you with those warm hazel eyes. "please?" he added, making you suck in a breath as you huffed.

"..fine."

an appreciateive smile spread on the boy's face as you set your phone down, murmuring a half hearted, "i'll be back," as you went to do your skincare routine and get ready for bed. "don't die," you added before you shut your room door behind you.

bad joke.

you washed your face, letting your hands move slowly down your face as you let out a long sigh, feeling your continuously tense shoulders relax. staring at yourself in the mirror, you found your face blurring into the background, melting into your bathroom walls, features seeping into the tile, melting into the grout.

you stared at yourself in the reflective one way mirror, face blank, pupils constricted as your reflection stared back at you. it felt like you were floating far above your head, unable to anchor yourself in the present.

the voice of the detective felt like someone was speaking to you from underwater. his voice was so garbled, so muffled, you could barely comprehend it. “y/n. you have to at least say something.”

but what was there to say? that you mashed up your father’s brain and liked it? that was a bit straightforward. and only a little bit too guilty.

what were you doing? you were putting yourself into the same position you were in those few years ago; a position of danger, playing a victim just to feel the satisfaction of watching someone’s life melt from their face. and that satisfaction didn’t come with any kind of remorse, because it took a special kind of person to make you want to see their brains on the outside rather than the inside.

you were regressing. maybe you really weren’t over what had happened to you. maybe you never would be, and you felt tour skin prickle at the thought, your hands gripping the sides of your sink as you stared at your mirror.

“your mother says you were protecting her.” the detective leaned in, putting his arms on the table in front of you both. his gaze weighed heavy on you, and you could feel him scan you like a file; taking in how expressionless you were, how even after everything that had happened, you didn’t shed a single tear. “was your father abusive, y/n?”

and that made your eyes snap towards his, cold and cunning, staring at him, unblinking. but if you peers too closely, focused too much on the emotion behind your eyes, the exhaustion of living, you could see that you had every reason to feel nothing for what you had done. you had every fucking reason to smash your father’s head in.

the door to your bedroom shut behind you as you walked back into your room, throwing your shirt over your head and grabbing one to sleep in. "hello?" ethan's voice came through your phone, your breath hitching when you realized he waited on call the entire time while you disassociated in the bathroom. just another day.

"hey." you made yourself comfortable in your bed, hands coming together under your head as you laid it down on your pillow, staring at your phone right next to your bed. an awkward silence followed for nearly five minutes, the only sounds coming from your breathing and ethan's mild shuffling. your eyes had fallen shut as you listened to ethan's breathing through the speaker.

"are you scared, y/n?"

the question, the sudden break of silence didn't make you move. you only kept your eyes shut, silently manifesting for the sweet arms of sleep to clamp around you. you hummed in response, pretending to think, but you knew how you felt. how this exact situation made you feel like you were 16 again, killing your own flesh and blood for just an ounce of freedom.

you hadn't broken at the seams yet. you were still here, breathing, eyes shut, on a phone with some boy you had taught how to smoke only a few days ago.

that's what mattered.

"are you?" you asked, dodging the question easily.

".. yeah." ethan sighed, the sound loud through your phone (he needed to move away from the phone just a bit, but you didn't feel like telling him that yet). from his side, he laid on his back on his bed, eyes set on the white ceiling above him as he spoke to you, someone emotionally stunted (he would never say that out loud, a it would be hypocritical of him to do so), about how he was feeling. "i think i've always been scared. of richie, i mean."

you stayed silent, your eyes slowly opening as you looked at your phone. the waver in ethan's voice, the way he almost felt ashamed to tell you how he felt.. he was being genuine. "what has richie done to you? to make you scared of him, i mean."

ethan's jaw clenched, eyes unblinking towards his ceiling. staring. gathering memories he had tried so desperately to forget, but every time he saw richie's face, he could only remember them. "he was always the more popular one. him and quinn— i was like.."

"a nerd."

"rude, but true." ethan sighed slowly. "one time, during middle school, i snitched to my dad that richie had brought a girl into our house —he was in high school, mind you —and i couldn't sleep because they had been fucking in his room. and that lack of sleep made me late. my dad doesn't like it when we're late." he breathed in shakily. "a few days later, after my robotics club, i was walking home and a bunch of high school kids drove up next to me and, uh..."

your brows furrowed. ".. beat you up?"

"yup." ethan popped the 'p', breathing in deeply before exhaling again. "and i saw him. richie. sitting in the back seat of the car just watching as these teenagers more than half my size beat me up to a pulp. and he smiled at me. as though i deserved to have my torso bruised and my face slammed on the concrete in the 7th grade." ethan chuckled humorlessly, his laughter quickly fading. "point is.. he always gets what he wants."

he sounded so.. defeated. years and years of being tormented by your own blood made him so afraid to speak up; to the point where he didn't even feel like doing so anymore.

you didn't know how to respond.

".. you're still up for killing him?" you asked, voice slightly unsure due to the fact that ethan had just casually spilled some of his trauma over the phone to you, who was half asleep and barely coherent at this point.

"i wish it didn't have to be this way—"

"no you don't."

"what?" ethan blinked, brows knotting together in confusion as he looked at his phone in disbelief over your words.

"you don't mind that it went this way. because you hate him." you sounded so factual. so casual, as though the entire situation was a case you could easily dissect and observe from a far. "and he's done a lot of shit to you and others. the people he's killed. the people he's manipulated. people like richie don't deserve anything." your words became sour, laced with the poison from the past.

"how do you do that?" ethan asked you.

"do what?"

"be so calm in this situation. this is dangerous shit— y/n, you're willingly putting yourself in danger."

you swallowed hard, weighing your words in your head. "it's because i don't want anyone else to die like his victims did. and i," you blinked, "i want to get them their revenge."

"by killing him?"

"if i have to." a beat. "are you still okay with that?"

was he okay with that?

ethan didn't know. he had been walking through the entire week as though he was nothing more than a ghost— eating and drinking to survive, speaking only when spoken to, living his days out of fear because if his brother had been killing people, when would he turn on his siblings? when would richie kill quinn, or chad, or mindy, or tara, or sam, or him?

he didn't want to tell the police and had his brother escape from their confines the next day.

ethan sighed. "if i'm helping you, then yes. i am." a beat of silence, as though his thoughts were overcoming him, as though he was weighing his options in his head. he knew you were perfectly content with the silence over the phone (as you probably didn't want to be on the phone with him for so long in the first place), but ethan wasn't like that. he wanted to talk, but about what?

he wanted to talk to you.

he wanted to know you.

"if we're going to be working together, don't you think we should know each other more?" and his question came out as such a pure example of simple curiosity, simple human want to know of someone simply for the sake of knowing someone. to walk past one's walls and know the little facts about them.

you were not one to let people do that. you were not one to let someone simply know you, because your mind didn't work that way. it felt off, it felt odd— the idea that ethan wanted to know you before the shitshow began.

"you don't have to get to know me."

"i want to know you." ethan's breath hitched. "nothing like.. personal, or anything. just like.. what's your favorite season?"

"well, that's really pushing it." you heard his small chuckle on the other end, your eyebrows softening ever so slightly at the sound. "it's autumn. and yours?"

"spring." ethan blinked up at his ceiling. "i like the rain. the smell of petrichor— a lot of people hate it but i just.. don't."

you hummed in acknowledgement, turning your head towards your phone. "favorite color?"

"forest green. and yours?"

"greyish blue. like the kind that appears at dusk when there's fog over the ground." you felt your body relax a bit; the questions were fortunately far more shallow than you thought they would be. ".. are we gonna do this until you fall asleep?"

"if you don't mind," ethan murmured softly, shifting gently in his bed.

"what if i do mind? i do have shit to do tomorrow, you know," you muttered under your breath.

and ethan would've felt pretty bad by your words. you were always so brutally honest yet so horribly awkward (it was painful to watch at times, he had to admit), but there was one particular question weighing on his mind ever since he picked up your call. one that you had easily deflected moments before. "y/n, you didn't answer my question."

your brows furrowed. "what question?"

"aren't you scared?" ethan swallowed thickly, eyes spacing out as he stared at his ceiling, at the darkened abyss of his room. "for your life, for your friends, for anything?"

were you?

you didn't want to be honest with him. you didn't want to tell him that in all honesty, you were terrified. terrified of losing the friends (that was a strong word for it) you barely had, of losing the small bit of family that was still speaking to you with faux smiles and condolences even though they were under the impression that you were an unpredictable woman.

and unpredictable women terrified them.

but your emotions were always increasing tenfold with every passing hour, the thoughts being so jumbled up and so strong that you had simply learned to drown them out. to continue on with your life with your tornado of thoughts and no one to speak to and no one to look for because you were used to doing this all on your own.

you had dealt with it on your own before. you could deal with it again.

but rather than lie to ethan's face, you found yourself confessing much like a sinner to an angel. "i am. i'm terrified, ethan." and that was all.

your fingers flew over your keyboard, the past year of having to write essay after essay finally paying off as you typed furiously into your laptop.

evelyn campo murder 2020

evelyn campo murder cambria california

evelyn campo case

you had only found a few articles on her murder, most of them not even mentioning the girl's name, much less many details about her case (unless you counted grim retellings of the crime scene). there was only a brief mention of a possible suspect (the man you had a date with in literally a day), but other than that, nothing. the police had no leads.

"why isn't there much on her murder?" you asked, scrolling down an article with a frown on your face.

ethan sat next to you on your bed, peering over your shoulder as your eyes scanned your screen. jesus, you read fast. "quinn told me that her parents wanted to keep it under wraps," he murmured, only catching glimpses of the article's words. "but i heard they got some private detectives on the case, too."

"sounds like small town gossip."

"oh, that's cause it was." ethan's eyes landed on one quote from the article as your scrolling finally came to a stop. adam's apple bobbing at the sight of it, he read, '.. found stabbed an approximate 78 times ..' the sheer strength and passion, the excitement richie must've had when he killed evelyn made his stomach sick. and ethan would've easily puked over the side of your bed if you didn't speak to him, breaking him from his stupor.

"hey, stay with me."

and just like that, ethan did. his mind was brought back to the present.

"right. sorry." you oculd feel his breath fan gently over your neck as he continued to look over your shoulder. "if we find the fingertips of his current victims, we can connect him to her— evelyn's —murder."

"maybe he kept them." you looked at ethan, confusion written over his face at your words. "it's just a guess, i dunno. but if evelyn was richie's first victim, then he might have kept parts of her. like a—"

"trophy. oh, this is so fucked," ethan muttered under his breath, moving to lay horizontally on your bed, the situation at hand easily driving him to exhaustion as he stared at your ceiling.

"we should first find out who his most current victims are, if possible. see if anyone our age has gone missing in our university or nearby universities." you looked down at ethan, whose face laid near where you sat. "if we can't, then we need to find those fingertips."

"right."

a beat.

"richie's working, yeah?" you asked ethan, who nodded as his doe eyes turned to you.

"yeah. he can't really be anywhere but work right now.” a hint of a smile graced his features. “i stole a look at his scheduling. he’s probably knee deep in papers right now.” he saw your eyes flash over in worry, the glint disappearing just as quickly as it arrived, and ethan knew. he simply knew that ever since richie gave into his impulses and followed you home, you were on edge.

you were just good at hiding it. good thing ethan was a little bit too observant when he wanted to.

"y/n, he's working." silently reassuring, ethan gazed at you, reading your indifferent face, searching for any more sign of fear or worry, but it was gone. you had gotten rid of everything before it could show even more.

"right." you looked away from ethan, feeling his stupidly innocent gaze still lingering on your as you looked back at your laptop. if you were to meet with ethan anywhere else but your dorm, richie surely would've gone out of his way to see. at least in the safety of your dorm room, you could shut the blinds and lock the door and be sure of your safety.

"what're your guys' plans tomorrow?" ethan asked you, finally allowing your to move on from the indirect topic of your emotions.

you shrugged. "no idea. i never texted him first— that's embarrassing."

"you seemed fine with calling me first last night."

"i never said that wasn't embarrassing." you rolled your eyes, almost hearing the stupid small smile that graced ethan's face at your words.

a minute passed in silence, the only sounds being your typing as you tried to build your list of articles on evelyn's murder. you had a grand total of 5 articles; better than you thought, but not as much as you would've liked.

he shifted umcomfortably in his seat, the dead silence only a bit too awkward for him. "shouldn't you know your plans, though? just in case he, uh," ethan clears his throat, raising his brows knowingly. he didn't want to say the word; but you already knew what he was implying.

"kills me?"

"well, yeah."

"he's not going to kill me," you shifted uncomfortably in your seat. "not yet, anyway. i'm too close to mindy; if i suddenly go missing after a date with him, mindy will find out for sure."

ethan's lips twitched into a small frown, hazel eyes darking with turmoil as he listened to you. "evelyn was my neighbor, y/n. she literally lived down the street from me; he's unpredictable—"

you almost winced at that word.

you could feel them all staring at you. whispering harshly, practically pointing at you as you stood at the doorway of your aunt's house, hands clasped together in front of you. your mother believed that having you locked up in the room of your new shared apartment in new york was unhealthy; and maybe she was right. for once, she had your best interests at heart, only you knew the outcome of her plan to assimilate you back into society under your shiny new last name.

"she's unpredictable," your aunt hissed as she talked to your mother, shamelessly looking you up and down as though you were some freak of nature, ignoring the clouded look over your eyes because you were barely keeping it together as it was. "you saw what she did, didn't you?"

luckily, you barely reacted.

"i know that, e."

"you know," he sat up in his seat, moving to sit next to you, facing the opposite way with his long legs splayed out on your bed, "after he was questioned by the police, he'd come home as though he had just come home from work or something. and he'd," he let out a sigh, "talk about it. like it was something so fucking casual."

"around you?" your eyebrows raised at that.

"no, never around me. but he would around my dad." contempt laced ethan's tone as he continued. it was hatred, but there was something underneath it that was something akin to jealousy, you realized. ''he'd tell him everything. what they asked that day. the leads he thinks they have— and he almost sounded proud that he was their only suspect."

"can i ask something?" you shifted to face your body towards his, your legs lightly touching his side. "if you were so sure that richie was the killer, why didn't you say anything?"

"because my dad worked for the department. so richie had an in." there it was again, you noticed; that familiar contempt. "and even though wayne bailey wasn't a part of the case, he upheld richie's innocence."

you blinked. "your family is fucked."'

"oh, i know."

"do you think you're the same way?"

ethan's eyebrows raised at your blunt question. he would've laughed in your face at your honesty if it weren't for the fact that you were dead serious. you stared at ethan, almost unblinking, expecting an equally honest answer back. "oh, you actually want to know?"

"yes?" you frowned a bit, tilting your head to the side a little. "did you think i was joking?"

"maybe?"

your brows knotted together. "i'm not joking, though."

"well, i know that now," ethan groaned, cheeks dusting pink out of slight embarrassment. "i haven't been diagnosed with anything other than like.. seasonal allergies and peanuts. maybe my moral code is a little messed up because i told you last night that i'm willing to help you kill my brother if i need to," his hands moved as he fell deeper and deeper into his ramble, "so maybe? the answer is maybe."

you listened to ethan ramble intently, watching his hands move as he spoke, as he ranted his jumbled thoughts in his mind to you. and in any other circumstance, you would've found ethan bailey annoying. he talked too much, couldn't handle silence, and had a way of going back and forth on things.

but you didn't mind ethan. he was tolerable.

you liked tolerable.

"or maybe the answer isn't maybe and i need to see a therapist. because i don't particularly feel bad for trying to put my murderous sociopathic brother in jail — not as much as i probably should, by the way — so the answer might be a yes, but for the sake of my sanity the answer is still.." ethan's string of words died in his throat when he realized he had been rambling for a good minute now.

you seemed like the type to interrupt someone who was speaking far too much and far too fast in a short period of time, but you hadn't said a word.

you were listening to him. staring (albeit a little creepily; had you blinked yet?) and observing ethan as he spoke too much about an uncomfortable topic to try and get rid of the unsettling feeling in his chest.

ethan cleared his suddenly dry throat as he stared into your eyes (for someone who hated to socialize, you held eye contact a little bit too much sometimes). "the answer is still a maybe," he managed, officially finishing his ramble. offering you a tight lipped smile, he added, "i rambled."

"you did." you replied.

"i'm sorry i did."

"nothing to be sorry about. i don't mind it." you stared at him for a little longer, blinking before turning back to your laptop, failing to notice the way ethan's face turned a prettier shade of red at your nonchalance. "when richie and i are out on our date, you should look for any ids or items he may have kept from his victims."

"right." ethan focused his attention to the task at hand, ignoring the way your prior words seemed to echo in his mind. how could he be thinking so deeply about such a thing when you were acting as if it was nothing? you were just a nice person; there wasn't more behind your words. "you should try and be out with him for a good few hours just to give me time."

"a few hours with richie. sounds great." you clenched your jaw, your fingers stopping on your keyboard. but they were still thrumming on your thumb, each finger tapping your fingertip in an undisclosed rhythm. "any pointers? like anything he may like in a person that'll make him," your nose wrinkled at your words, "not want to go home?"

"he likes you as you are already." ethan paused, biting his bottom lip gently as he reevaluated his words. "actually— he likes girls who he can't really have. like sam?" he rolled his eyes as he remembered their hellshow of a relationship. "he pined after sam for like a year just because she was dating someone before they got together."

ethan avoided your gaze as he looked at your laptop screen. "you know when he listened while we pretended to have sex? how he waited," from his peripherals, he could see your expression sour with anger at his words, "until you 'orgasmed'," ethan made faux quotations with his fingers, "before he left?"

"yeah." the memory of richie's shadow under ethan's door made a sick feeling broil in your stomach. and that feeling only grew when your mind came to a horrible assumption. "you don't think richie's interest in me grew after that night.. do you?"

ethan finally looked at you, his jaw clenched in anger and protectiveness as he nodded once. and that alone made your face fall in horror.

richie partly wanted you because it meant he deemed you 'forbidden' territory. because he believed ethan was interested in you first.

you groaned, letting your upper body fall back on your bed. "your brother's disgusting," you stated, staring at your ceiling.

next to you, ethan sighed. "i know."

you stood stiffly as you stared at the black dress you wore. in any other circumstance, you would've been comfortable with how you looked. you had styled your hair and this was one of your many black dresses that fit your features well, and to top it off, you wore a heart locket necklace and had your bag over your shoulder.

but knowing what you were getting into, it was hard to stay completely confident. you had basically shoved more of your strongest emotions into the deep dark hole in your mind just to keep yourself sane, but you couldn't even deny the sickening feeling in your chest that seemed to grow with every passing minute.

you still had no idea what richie's plans were. maybe it was something boring, like a movie then dinner. or maybe a walk in the park that would eventually lead to your death.

all you knew was that he would pick you up at 7 pm. that was all richie texted you, and now it was 6:45.

15 minutes.

"hello?" ethan's voice on your phone made you snap out of your thoughts, jaw clenching as you looked at yourself one last time, making sure not a hair was out of place just to keep up the facade.

you had called him again. at this point, you were wondering if you were lacking self respect for yourself, choosing to continuously call ethan during times of high stress in your shared situation.

you really needed to stop calling first. it was getting embarrassing.

"hello." you looked at your phone, watching as ethan tried (and failed) to set up his phone on his bedside table. you had been in a call for 30 minutes now, and while most of the conversation was honestly just ethan talking and you replying with short comments, you didn't mind it too much.

"are you, uh," ethan swallowed hard, "ready? hasn't been back since work so i'm guessing he's on his way to you now."

"i'm ready to get this over with, if that's what you mean." you set your phone up on your table, thankful that anika and mindy were out on another one of their movie dates (mindy was a little too excited to watch evil dead rise), so you could speak without interruptions. you sat on your desk chair, showing the upper half of your body to ethan, who was sitting on his bed, his back laid back on his head board.

but when he saw you, dressed up and looking a little bit too nice for his shitty brother, ethan sat up. throat running dry like it always seemed to and cheeks heating up, he managed an almost shy smile as he looked at you. "you look.. nice."

"thanks." a pause. "do i not usually look nice?"

ethan's eyes widened in shock (and slight fear). "i didn't say that! i just haven't known you for that long and i've only seen you like a handful of times but i swear you always look nice! you just look especially nice tonight. for richie." his nose crinkled in disgust at the thought.

you were all dressed up for his brother. and while the entire situation had made ethan throw up almost daily and feel far too many negative emotions that he didn't know how he felt anymore, he knew one thing as he looked at you, sitting so casually as though you weren't stopping ethan's train of thought.

he was jealous. and worried. and feeling far too protective over you, someone who could definitely handle everything on your own.

you tilted your head a little as ethan ended his short ramble. "ethan, i was joking."

"oh." ethan nodded, clicking his tongue as he tried to play it cool. "right."

lightly glossed lips curled up slightly, revealing a small smile. "thank you." your hands pulled your ring off of your finger. you let it run over your knuckles; back and forth. back and forth. the heated metal (you hands were and it was only a little disgusting) moved easily over your skin as you tried to calm yourself.

9 more minutes.

"y/n," ethan said, making your eyes focus again. "be careful, okay?"

your mouth opened to protest, but ethan continued on.

"and i know you said you could handle it," he said pointedly, making you shut your mouth, "but i want you to be careful."

three loud knocks at your dorm door made you jump, hand closing over your ring and curling into a fist as your steady heart began to pound loudly in your ears.

he was here.

"i have to go." you grabbed your phone, voice lowered down as you looked at ethan one last time. and for a brief moment, he saw just how worried you were. "you know the plan. be careful." and with that, you hung up.

the door to you and mindy's shared dorm felt far away as you walked out of your bedroom, shoving your phone into your purse before opening your dorm door. richie stood outside with a single orchid in his hand, its petals pristine and white as he held it. sleazy eyes traveled down your body, as though he was silently taking in your every curve, every exposed area of skin. and not even caring to seem the least bit subtle, richie took his time traveling back up to your face, his cold eyes watching you with interest.

as though you were some unpredictable toy for him.

"you look beautiful," richie murmured, making you force a smile as you tilted your head to the side a bit. shutting the door behind you, you looked him up and down; an open button up black shirt with a white shirt inside and some black jeans. the lack of effort in his style was infuriating— why did you have to dress up but he showed up as though he robbed old navy?

"you look.. good," you managed, unable to keep your honesty at bay as you managed a tight lipped smile. your lackluster response made you want to walk back into your dorm and lock it, but richie only chuckled at your response.

"nothing else?" he asked, handing the orchid to you. "i got you another flower."

another flower. you tried to hide your disgust at the confirmation that richie really was your stalker, instead taking the orchid with a tense hand. as you took it, richie began to walk down the hall of your dorm building, ready to lead you out.

"thanks," you stated, walking next to him and reluctantly allowing him to take the lead. wary eyes watched him, taking in the way he seemed to have perfect posture, how pleased he seemed in himself, as though his mere presence was a blessing to you, and the way he was staring right back at you.

observing. watching, pupils almost dilating as he took in how perfect you looked under the fluorescent light of the hallway. richie could feel his heart pounding, adams apple bobbing as he took a moment — just a moment — to admire his date. his date. the phrase rolled off of his tongue quite nicely.

you immediately averted your eyes back to the hallway in front of you. "so," you began, ignoring the way his eyes felt on your skin, "you were pretty enigmatic about this whole date. i almost thought you'd kill me or something." the dry humored joke fell from your lips before you could stop it, and yet you kept your eyes focused on the hallway in front of you, barely a reaction on your face as blood rushed through your ears. as you both began to take the elevator downstairs, you heard richie laugh.

even his laugh sounded ingenuine.

he stood next to you, arm pressed against yours, a little too close for comfort in the empty elevator. "just wanted to keep it a surprise, that's all." richie's eyes traveled to your hand, watching as you rubbed your ring subconsciously, a lopsided smirk appearing on his face. "are you nervous for our date?" he asked.

eyes blinking, you looked up at him confusedly. "no," you said with a tilt of your head, "why do you say that?"

"because," richie said, looking down at you with a mischievous smile, as though he was always one step ahead of you. "you've been rubbing that ring of yours ever since i arrived. i'd call it a," he thought for a moment before clicking his tongue, "nervous tick." a knowing glint appeared in his eyes, and suddenly you felt a wave of sick paranoia wash over you.

you immediately stopped rubbing your ring, your head turning back to the closed elevator doors in front of you both. your distorted reflection stared back at you from the steel of the elevator doors, and it was as though you realized just how trapped you were. there was no going back from this plan.

again, you began to subconsciously rub your ring. and richie continued to watch.

#AUTHORSNOTE— i'm actually soso sorry for the long update & the cliffhanger, but thank you for reading!

#TAGLIST— @cham9ions , @netey6m , @mskitkatbubbles , @onlyangel-444 , @cyueksims , @tisthedamnseason69 , @helpimgoinginsanehaha , @anthemabby , @clemenscove , @vanillawhale , @lanascinnamongirll , @rhaenyra4ever , @shebreathedherlast , @datingspiderman , @marurubahbah , @taetae123094 , @kn1n3 , @nox222 , @ch9mpi0n , @ooyuhgetitig4

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zelda-cooper · 8 days ago

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Morgana Macawber Curiosities and Headcanons (My AU)

This is a more comical blog (or almost) and these are Headcanons that I took for my AU, if you disagree or don't like it, that's fine, you can say your Headcanons in the comments or make your own blog with it. And a bonus: This blog is an improvised Halloween special, so it's focused on Morgana and a little bit of her family. Thank you and enjoy the blog. ^^

Hello, everyone! Here I am writing a quick blog to end the Halloween-themed month!... And also because the Bushroot blog will be a little late, because I still need to organize the itinerary (yes, I write itineraries for blogs, but it depends on whether it's more complex or not). But, well... This blog will be divided into topics, not many, because it has to be quick, but these are the main Headcanons that I thought of. And just to let you know, I have a specific Headcanon that I've already mentioned and I'll post the link for anyone who wants to see it. Enjoy! ^^

Morgana's True Form

Vampire + Witch + "Frankenstein"

We've already picked up on a curiosity about the character herself, which, well... Speaking of Morgana's kinship and lineage, which is... F#CK1NG CRAZY - Her family on her father's side is mostly "common" wizards and monsters, like her father (who I changed to "Spellow Mawcaber, because it sounds better and I think it suits him) who is a mix of a wizard and Frankenstein, which is why she has a greenish appearance and different eyes. Her family on her mother's side are more "aristocratic" and rich monsters, most of them vampires and, if we were to remake the episode "Fungus Amongus" (SUS), the family that appears in this episode is her mother's side (it's no wonder they're portrayed as cannibals), while the ones in "Monsters R Us" and "Hot Spells" are her father's side (most of them, at least, because there's one or two who are cannibals). And before you ask, Morgana here has vampire fangs, but they are retractable. Think of Marceline when she shows her fangs and you get the idea.

By the way, linking one Headcanon to another. :D

Witch Age vs Human Age

Speaking here of the average age of Morgana... She would be, at most... Eh.... 206 years old or less?... Yeah, that number is good... And I know that, compared to the average age that a human lives (which is, at most, MAXIMUM, about 100 years), but it's because witches and vampires born that way (like, biologically) have a higher average age than normal humans, that is, they age very slowly. Think about fantasy stories with Elves, they are usually portrayed as beings that live for many years or that are immortal (or almost), so they have a different reasoning about time than normal humans. In the case of my AU, Vampires and witches live 200-300 years at most. And... Yeah... If you think that Drake, Launchpad and Gosalyn can die before her... You're right... but she's not immortal, so... Even if it takes a while, she can meet them again in heaven...

Okay, moving on to a less morbid Headcanon/curiosity!

Chefs and Witches are Similar

Okay, the title of this Headcanon is weird, but you'll get the idea. And it ends up fitting with Morgana's dream of having a restaurant. Now let's compare witches and chefs.

- Both look for ingredients for their recipes and potions.

- Both keep their knowledge in books (in this case, spell books and cookbooks).

- They both cook in cauldrons (in a way).

- Sometimes they wear hats that represent their profession.

- And some of their recipes and potions are disgusting or absurd.

I'm not kidding about this last one, because there are certain recipes that are very gourmet, with some animals that are incredibly edible. Just to give you an example... Lizards, insects, pigeons raised for consumption, spiders, bats, crocodiles and octopuses (some of these are eaten RAW). Then you can even understand why Morgana, in the original series, makes "strange" foods. But, in the case of my version of Morgana, her food is normal, don't worry.

Good with Weapons, Bad with Magic

Another funny curiosity that has a bit of background context in the series. In this case, one of the characteristics often used in comedy for Morgana is that she is not a "good aim" with magic, this is shown in "My Valentine Ghoul" and "Just Us, Justice Ducks" (at least, as far as I remember now... -3-). But in "My Valentine Ghoul", at the end of the episode, it is shown that Morgana managed to handle DWD's Gas Gun and hit ND's machine. I ended up talking about this with my friend once and then I joked "Oh, she's bad with magic, but if it were with guns, she would enter the Olympics!". So this Headcanon kind of came up... She could even buy a wand (like Harry Potter) to try to improve her magical aim, but... First of all, it's expensive, it's literally a dragon heart (and considering that dragons are rare, it won't happen...) and secondly, the only wands that she and her father have are damaged or don't work anymore.

But if her arcane focus was on a shotgun, you can believe that Negaduck wouldn't be alive in "Malice's Restaurant" or "My Valentine Ghoul".

Fear of Butterflies

Here's a joke I thought of, but when I researched more about butterflies... Her fear was justified... I won't elaborate too much, but... Besides the fact that butterflies' faces up close are too ugly, their diet and the transformation from caterpillar to butterfly is disturbing... If you want, research... But it's at your own risk, don't come crying to me about trauma later.

Morgana and Gosalyn as Mother and Daughter

Now, one last cute curiosity to end this blog and it's a relationship that wasn't explored much in the series, but that I really wanted to see. In our AU, the relationship between Morgana and Gosalyn is closer and, as the title itself says, it's like they're mother and daughter. After all, the reason Drake considered meeting someone is so Gosalyn could have a mother figure. Morgana truly sees Gosalyn as a daughter, she accepts the little girl's ways and hobbies, not trying to repress her (like a certain person named Binkie). And Gosalyn, in turn, becomes more well-behaved and acts more cute with Morgana, liking the witch's eccentric ways and wanting to know more about the reality of her "future mother".

Final Considerations

Well, that was Morgana's blog of Curiosities and Headcanons, I hope you liked it! If you want, you can comment or tell me your Headcanons as much as you want, I would love to hear them. That's it! BYE!!!!

#darkwing duck #darkwing duck au #ducktales #darkwing duck purple union #drake mallard #morgana macawber #morgana #halloween #headcanon #curiosities and headcanons #gosalyn waddlemeyer #gosalyn mallard #gosalyn #morgwing

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duckprintspress · 8 months ago

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Round Table Discussion: Grammar Pet Peeves

Today, March 4th, is National Grammar Day! Last year, we celebrated with six of our favorite grammar quirks. This year, we’re going to the other end of the spectrum: we had a conversation with our editors and blog contributors about grammar things we hate. They may be technically correct, but that doesn’t mean they don’t make us crazy. Eighteen people, many anonymous, contributed to this discussion.

Dangling Modifiers

boneturtle: Dangling modifiers, hands down. Even when I can decipher what the writer meant based on context, it viscerally hurts me every time. When I am editing I have to stand up and take a lap around my apartment when I hit a dangling modifier. Remind myself that I am here to help. Learn more about dangling modifiers.

Commas

anonymous: Commas are not difficult! Commas end phrases. Full stop. That’s all they do. Is a phrase necessary to the grammatical coherence of the sentence? if the answer is yes, no commas because that phrase hasn’t ended. If the answer is no, commas! comma hug that bish if it’s the middle of a sentence. The difference between grammatical and informational is whether or not the sentence makes sense without the phrase.

Examples:

The man who ordered the six double anchovy pizzas claims to have a dolphin in his pool.

You need “who ordered the six double anchovy pizzas” because you need to identify which man you’re talking about. The world is full of many men.

The ancient Buick, which Madeleine purchased via Craigslist, belched black smoke whenever she pressed the accelerator.

We don’t need to know how Madeleine purchased the car for the sentence to make sense. You don’t even meed “Madeleine” for the grammar to make sense. Therefore, hug that phrase!

(a comma on each side of the phrase) or give it a dramatic send off with a comma and an end punctuation. (i could go into conjunctions, too, but those are a little more complex, and if you were taught them properly, i understand not getting the comma use 😂 )

Prepositions at the End of Sentences

Tris Lawrence: There was a dictionary (Merriam-Webster? Oxford? idek) that posted recently on social media about how the rule about not ending a sentence with a preposition came from English scholars trying to make English line up with Latin, and that it’s totally okay to do it… and I’m just wanting to point to it to yell THIS because uhhh trying to rework sentences to not end in a preposition often creates clunky awkward things (my opinion, I recognize this).

D. V. Morse: Ending sentences/clauses with a preposition. Well, not doing that is supposed to be the rule, but depending on the sentence, it can be a convoluted mess to try and avoid it. Winston Churchill famously told someone off after they “caught” him breaking that rule, saying, “This is the type of arrant pedantry up with which I will not put.” (Yes, I had to look that up.)

Pronoun Confusion

anonymous: I hate playing the pronoun game when reading. I hate it in life when someone comes up to me and tells me a story involving 2 people of the same pronouns and stops using names halfway through, and I hate it while reading too. Nothing makes me fall out of scene more if I don’t know who just did/said what. Use names. That’s why we have them.

Nina Waters: epithets. If I know the characters name…why? Also, when people use “you” in third person writing. There are times I’ll allow it as an editor/times when I do think it’s at least acceptable but not gonna lie, I absolutely hate it.

anonymous: My pet peeve … I read hundreds of essays in a given month for work, plus a whole lot of fanfic for fun. A rising issue that I have noticed in both places is incomplete sentences (lacking subjects, typically). I think it’s because people rely on Google’s grammar checker to tell them if something is wrong and…Google doesn’t check for that apparently. I’m increasingly convinced that my high schoolers simply weren’t taught sentence structure, because when I ask them to fix it they almost universally say some variant of “I don’t understand what you’re asking me to do.” Therefore, it might be punching down a little to complain about it. I’m not sure. It does drive me nuts though. Lol

“Would Of”

Neo Scarlett: Not quite sure if that falls under grammar, but I hate hate hate when people use “should of” instead of should’ve. Or “would of.” It just makes my toe nails curl up because it may sound right, but it looks wrong and is wrong.

Semi-Colons

Shea Sullivan: I saw a list punctuated by semicolons recently and that made me froth at the mouth a bit.

anonymous: I think any editor who’s worked with me knows that I have a pet peeve about using colons or semi-colons in dialogue. Or really, any punctuation mark that I don’t think people can actually pronounce. Semicolons can live anywhere that I don’t have to imagine a character actually pronouncing them.

English isn’t Dumb!

theirprofoundbond: As a former linguistics student, it bugs me a lot when people say that English is a dumb or stupid language because it has borrowed from so many languages. What people mean when they say this is, “English can be really difficult (even for native speakers).” But I wish people would say that, instead of “it’s dumb/stupid.” Languages are living things. Like other living things, they adapt and evolve. English is basically a beautiful, delightful platypus. Let it be a platypus.

Dei Walker: I remember seeing somewhere that English has four types of rules (I’m trying to find the citation today) and everyone conflates them. And I guess my pet peeve is that everyone treats them equally when they’re NOT. There are rules but not all of them are the same – there’s a difference between “adjectives precede nouns” (big truck, not *truck big) and “don’t split infinitives” (which is arbitrary).

And, because we couldn’t resist, here are some of our favorite things, because when we asked for pet peeves…some people still shared things they loved instead of things they hated.

Oxford Comma

Terra P. Waters: I really really love the Oxford comma.

boneturtle: me: [in kindergarten, using oxford comma]

teacher: no, we don’t add a comma between the last two objects in a list.

me: that’s illogical and incorrect.

anonymous: I will forever appreciate my second grade teacher’s explanation of Oxford comma use: Some sentences are harder to understand if you don’t use it, but no sentence will ever be harder to understand because you do use it. Preach, Mrs. D

anonymous: I am definitely Team Oxford Comma. I even have a bumper sticker which says so

Other Favorites

Shea Sullivan: I adore the emdash, to every editor’s chagrin.

Shadaras: zeugmas! I think they’re super cool!

Shea Sullivan and Hermit: I use sentence fragments a lot. Fragments my beloved.

English Grammar vs. Grammar in Other Languages

anonymous: so in English my favourite thing is the parallel Latin and Saxon registers because of how that affects grammar, but in Japanese my favourite grammatical thing is the use of an actual sound at the end of the sentence to denote a question, as opposed to how in English we use intonation? Also how in Japanese the sentence structure requires reasoning first and action second in terms of clauses. So rather than go “let’s go to the cinema because it’s raining and I’m cold,” you’d go “because it’s raining and I’m cold, let’s go to the cinema.” (My least favourite thing is the lack of spaces between words in the written form but that’s purely because I find that level of continuous letters intimidating to translate.)

I also love how Japanglish in the foreign communities in Japan starts to develop its own grammatical structure as a way of situating yourself in this space between the two languages. It’s used as a call-sign of belonging to that specific community, because in order to make some of the jokes and consciously break the rules of English or Japanese grammar and/or choose to obey one or the other, you’re basically displaying your control over both/knowledge of them. Like, the foreign community in Japan is often a disparate group of people with multiple different native languages who are relying on their knowledge of at least one non-native language but often two to signify their status in the group as Also An Outsider and I think that’s really interesting.

Nina Waters: Chinese and Japanese both drop subjects, and Chinese doesn’t have like… a/the… Japanese doesn’t have a future tense… Chinese kinda sorta doesn’t have tenses at all… (these are not pet peeves, btw, I love how learning a language with such different ways of approaching these things reshapes my brain). Chinese also doesn’t really have yes or no.

There’s a joke somewhere on Tumblr about that, though I actually think it’s about using “a” versus “the,” like, someone was giving a Russian speaker a hard time after they said “get in car” and they were like “only you English speakers are dumb enough to feel this is essential why would I be talking about getting into any random car of course I mean our car wtf.”

anonymous: on the subject of other languages, epithets are also something that happen differently in other languages. In French repeating a word (names included, and sometimes even pronouns) is considered bad writing. As in, way more than in English. Going by how grating the English translation of the Witcher books was to me when the French one was fine, I’d say it’s the same with Polish, at least. It’s also very interesting how brains adapt to writing styles in other languages.

What are some of your favorite and least favorite grammar quirks, in English or in the language of your choice?

#national grammar day #duck prints press #writing advice #grammar #writeblr #writing pet peeves #grammar pet peeves

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