#Maybe hes an inventor | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

joycrispy · 2 years ago

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One thing I love about Crowley --never stated, but consistently shown-- is that he is, at heart, an engineer.

I have a few different things to say about that. Let's unpack them.

As the Unnamed Angel, we see his designs for the Pillars of Creation are millions of pages long, comprised of cramped text, footnotes, diagrams, schematics, etc. It's very...Renaissance polymath, in the way it implies a particular intersection of artist and inventor.

Also: in the naked romanticism with which he views his stars.

We already knew he made stars, but in s2 we learn that he did NOT sculpt each of them by hand. He designed a nebula ("a star factory," he says) that will form several thousand young stars and proto-planets, and all --aside from getting the 'factory' running-- without him lifting a finger. We also learn that these young stars and proto-planets stand in contrast to those made by other angels, which are going to come 'pre-aged.'

...I'm reminded of Hastur and Ligur's approach to temptations. Damning one human soul at a time, devoting singular attention to it over the course of years or decades, and how that stands in contrast to Crowley's reliance on, quote, 'knock-on effects.'

Ligur: It's not exactly...craftsmanship. Crowley: Head office don't seem to mind. They love me down there.

Hm.

I'm also reminded of the M25.

The M25 may not be as grand as a nebula (sentences you only say in GOmens fandom...), but LIKE his nebula it's an intricate, self-sustaining engine that does Crowley's work for him, many times over. Again.

That's some pretty neat characterization --and so is the indication towards Crowley's disinterest in victimizing anyone tempting individual people. It takes a considerable amount of planning and effort (and creeping about in wellies), but in accordance with his design the M25 generates a constant stream of low-grade evil on a gigantic scale.

Cumulatively gigantic, that is. Individually? Negligible.

But no other demon understands human nature well enough to parse that one million ticked-off motorists are not, in any meaningful way, actually equivalent to one dictator, or one mass-murderer, or even one little influential regressive. That's the trick of it. Crowley gets Hell's approval (which he NEEDS to survive, and to maintain the degree of freedom he's eked out for himself), and at the same time ensures that any actual ~Evil Influence~ is spread nice and thin.

It's some clever machinery. And he knows it, too:

The Unnamed Angel and Crowley are both proud of their ideas.

(musings on professional pride, Leonardo da Vinci, the crank handle, and 'the point to which Crowley loves Aziraphale' under the cut)

In the 1970's Crowley gives a presentation on the M25, projector and all, to a room full of increasingly impatient demons. Maybe the presentation was work-ordered; the 'can I hear a WAHOO?' definitely wasn't.

Before the Beginning, the Unnamed Angel can barely contain his excitement about his nebula. Aziraphale manages a baffled-but-polite, "....That's nice... :)"

11 years ago, Hastur and Ligur want to 'tell the deeds of the day,' and Crowley smiles to himself because (according to the script-book) he knows he has 'the best one.'

(Naturally, his 'deed' has nothing to do with tempting anybody, and everything to do with setting up a human-powered Rube-Goldberg machine of petty annoyance. Oodles of 'Evil' generated; very little harm done.)

Hastur and Ligur don't get it, of course. That's also consistent.

Nobody ever knows what the hell he's talking about.

It didn't make it on-screen, but, in both the novel AND the script-book, Crowley was friends with Leonardo da Vinci. The quintessential Renaissance polymath. That's where he got his drawing of the Mona Lisa --they're getting very drunk together, and Crowley picks up the 'most beautiful' of the preliminary sketches. He wants to buy it. Leonardo agrees almost off-the-cuff, very casual, because they're friends, and because he has bigger fish to fry than haggling over a doodle:

He goes, "Now, explain this helicopter thingie again, will you?" Because he's an engineer, too.

(It is 1519 at the latest, in this scene. Why the FUCK would Crowley know about helicopters, and be able to explain them, comprehensively, to Leonardo da Vinci?

...Well. I choose to believe he got bored one day and worked it out. Look, if you know how to build a nebula, you can probably handle aerodynamics. And anyway, I think it's telling that this is his idea of shooting the shit. 'A drunken mind speaks a sober heart,' and all. He probably babbled about Aziraphale long enough to make poor Leo sick)

Apart from Aziraphale, Leonardo da Vinci is the only person Crowley has any keepsakes or mementos of.

Think about that, though. Aziraphale's bookshop is bursting with letters, paintings, busts, and personalized signatures memorializing all the humans he's known and befriended over 6000 years (indeed: Aziraphale has living human friends up and down Whickber Street. He's part of a community).

Crowley doesn't have any of that. It's just the stone albatross from the Church (for pining), the infamous gay sex statue (for spicy pining), the houseplants (for roleplaying his deepest trauma over and over, as one does), and this one piece of artwork, inscribed, "To my friend Anthony from your friend Leo da V."

To me, at least, that suggests a level of attachment that seems to be rare for Crowley.

...Maybe he liked having someone to talk shop with? Someone who was interested? Someone engaged enough to ask questions when they didn't immediately understand?

...Anyway.

There's also the matter of the crank handle.

This thing:

This is one of the subtler changes from the book. In the book, Crowley knows Satan is coming and, desperate, arms himself with a tire iron. It's the best he can do. He's not Aziraphale; he wasn't made to wield a flaming sword.

The show, IMO, improves on this considerably. Now he, like Aziraphale, gets to face annihilation with what he was made for in his hand. And it's not a weapon, not even an improvised one like the tire iron.

He made stars with it.

[both gifs by @fuckyeahgoodomens]

If you Google 'crank handle,' you'll get variations on this:

Crank handles have been around for centuries. Consisting of a mechanical arm that's connected to a perpendicular rotating shaft, they are designed to convert circular motion into rotary or reciprocating motion.

Which is to say they're one of the 'simple machines,' like a lever or a pulley; the bread and butter of engineering. You'll also get a list of uses for a crank handle, archaic and modern. Among them: cranking up the engine of an old-fashioned car... say, a 1933 Bentley. That's what Crowley has been using his for, lately. But he's had it since he was an angel and he's still, it seems, very capable of it's angelic applications.

Stopping time. For instance.

(This is conjecture on my part, but, I like to imagine that Crowley has the ability to stop time for the same reason I can --and should-- unplug my computer before I perform maintenance on it. Time and Space are a matched set, after all, and in his designs in particular, one feeds into the other.)

I know everyone has already said this, but: I REALLY LIKE that when he needs to channel the heights of his power, he does so not with a weapon but with a tool. Practically with a little handheld metaphor for ingenuity. One from long-lost days when he made beautiful things.

(And he loved it. Still loves it --he incorporated that metaphor into the Bentley, didn't he?)

Let Aziraphale rock up to the apocalypse with a weapon: he has his own compelling thematic reasons to do exactly that. Crowley's story is different, and fighting isn't the only way to express defiance. And if you've been condemned as a demon and assumed to be destructive by your very nature, what better way than this?

He made stars. They didn't manage to take that from him.

Neither Crowley nor Aziraphale are fighters, really --they have no intention of fighting in any war. They'll annoy everyone until there's no war to fight in, for a start. But between the two, if one must be, then that one is Aziraphale. Principality of the Earth, Guardian of the Eastern Gate, Wielder of the Flaming Sword... all that stuff. Even if he'd prefer not to, it's very clear that Aziraphale can rise to the occasion, if he must.

Crowley was never that kind of angel. He wasn't a Principality. He doesn't have a sword.

...And yet.

It's Crowley who protects. He's the one who paces, who stands guard, who circles Aziraphale and glares out at the world, just daring anyone else to come near.

In light of everything else I've said here, I think that's interesting.

Obviously part of it is that Aziraphale enjoys it and, you know, good for him. He's living his best life, no doubt no doubt no doubt. But what about Crowley? What's driving that behavior, really?

Have you heard the phrase, 'loved to the point of invention'? Well, what if 'the point of invention' was where you started? What if where you end up involves glaring out at the world, just daring anyone else to come near? What is that, in relation to the bright-eyed thing you used to be?

What do we name the point to which Crowley loves Aziraphale?

...Thinking about how an excitable angel with three million pages of star design he wants to tell you all about...becomes a guard dog. Is all.

#good omens #ineffable husbands #aziracrow #Crowley #Aziraphale #good omens 2 #good omens meta #unfortunately I do not have trains of thought #only long meandering strolls of thought #sorry about it #anyway tl;dr Crowley is a nerd #also I have a strange emotional attachment to the idea of 1500's Crowley...#...facedown in a pile of Mona Lisa sketches; drunkenly info-dumping about Aziraphale #and Da Vinci is just like. 'Ahhhh mio amico Antonio. You fucking simp.'

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1800titz · 1 month ago

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The one where Y/N and Harry are neighbors in an apartment complex, he's got a bunny called Snuggles, he makes softcore porn spanking people (it's a REALLY LOUD HOBBY), and Y/N has definitely called the police for a domestic disturbance next door.

HI FRIENDS. The council has spoken, so here is the first part of the lovingly-dubbed spanko fic. This series will be early access, so— parts go up on patreon first, then they come to tumblr 3-ish weeks later (but if you wanna get ahead, the second part is already up on patreon). Reader insert, emotionally a slowburn, and basically a garbage fire I'm pouring my deepest, darkest desire into as a coping mechanism :p If you liked TDIAG, you'll probably rock with this one. As always, feedback/reblogs massively appreciated <3 WEEEEEEEE okay bye

ᴄʜᴇᴄᴋ ᴏᴜᴛ ᴛʜᴇ ᴘᴀᴛʀᴇᴏɴ ᴍᴀꜱᴛᴇʀʟɪꜱᴛ : ᴍᴀɪɴ ᴍᴀꜱᴛᴇʀʟɪꜱᴛ

CONTENT/WARNINGS: miss girl misconstruing consensual kink for domestic violence (oops)

WC: 7.8K

Harry’s face is the reason average men have developed a phenomenon called personality.

Historically, it was faces like his, at the very least, that ignited adaptation— this wasn’t an overnight implementation, after all. Men don’t move that fast. There’s a long-lasting, brutally destructive record there, and a tale as old as time itself. Before charisma had to be manufactured in the absence of a devastating jawline, there was the high-cheekbone aristocracy, and its counterpart, what’s known today as the “he’s actually really nice” faction. The beauty privilege inventors; the bedroom-eye monarchy; the symmetrical syndicate of a resting smolder—

And the rest of everyone else.

Rumor has it that the first comedian was a man who watched another guy, who had eyes like wet chrysocolla and really broad shoulders, turn a casual glance into an entire bloodline’s origin story. Maybe the first poet sat next to a man wearing the skin of divine nepotism— and the only defense strategy was to pick up a hobby that spoke less in pretty, heart-shaped lips and more in words like love’s trembling hand doth trace its name upon thy skin. New seduction ritual: implemented.

Basically, the survival mechanism goes like this: if you’re competing with bone structure sculpted by an empyrean chisel, a mouth worthy of oil paintings and crumpled love letters, and the kinds of dimples that were engineered for the sole purpose of emotional damage (Cupid’s attempt; two, little exit wounds, the perfect pair of injustices parenthesizing his smile)…

And you’re lingering in the shadow of those attributes? Operating on a deficit? Well, then. There’s a little more work left to be put in.

If you’re lucky, you’re tall, or you’re well endowed in the basement, or both. If you’re none of those things, you’re banking on a gift with a musical instrument, or you’re coping with the weight of your wallet. You’re getting into niche, esoteric interests you will impress upon every woman that steps foot into your orbit to stand out, or you’re polishing up your comedic abilities. The thing is, society has evolved to the point where this compensation is the foundation to procreation. The foundation to function. And the kind of men with faces like Harry, who got in line not once, but twice when God was handing out genetic privilege (the overachieved extra credit projects), just get to sit back and let the world unravel at their feet.

Men like Harry don’t need personalities because they already look interesting enough. When you’re the kind of pretty that inspires love songs and ill-advised tattoos, you don’t need wit, or pockets lined with green. It opens doors (and legs) with such minimal effort that it may as well be as simple as breathing. The quiet space in a room bends around you when you become the focal point by existing, incidentally magnetic.

It’s pretty unfair, to say the very least.

Y/N only really registers it passing— in fleeting, peripheral moments when the space bends around him and her eyes glue, almost like an accident. A brief sighting here and there, like a rare animal caught between the trees—seen but not acknowledged, because staring starts to feel like stepping into something too raw, too deliberate.

He’s always moving. In motion, slipping past. Glimpses of wide shoulders cutting through the communal pool, water slicking over musculature in a smooth tide and then rivulets, droplets sticking against sun-warmed skin. A silhouette in the elevator at the end of the hall, head bowed. Sorting through crinkled envelopes between his massive hands with a ruckle between his brows.

He’s got the kind of face that suggests he should be gently perched on the edge of a marble fountain, carved in alabaster. A cherubic thing. Rosy-mouthed, haloed by damp curls that tuck around his ears in perfect, artistic disarray. The kind of beauty that feels vaguely mythological, like he should either be blessing crops or luring unbeknownst sailors to their deaths. A visage that belongs on domed Renaissance ceilings.

Y/N breathes. Her pulse feels like it’s rattling a little. It makes her head feel a little gooey when he’s stood in front of her.

And here he is, holding a package in one hand, water still beading at his collarbone from a morning shower, damp curls dripping onto the fabric of a lived-in, vintage T-shirt. The tragic failure of modern existence is that a man like this— who should, by all logic, be strumming a lyre on the edge of a celestial fountain— has instead been doomed to wander the mundanities of the human condition. To swipe through his mail. To stand in front of her door and say things like “Think they swapped our mail again” in that perfectly unassuming, relaxed tone, like his very existence isn’t actively offensive to the concept of mediocrity.

His singular flaw? That one, teeny thing?

He’s a horrific neighbor.

Abysmally inconsiderate, in fact. Maybe, one of the worst people Y/N has ever had the pleasure of sharing a paper-thin wall with.

The thing is, under all normal circumstances, eye candy is a desirable next door tenant, to catch those scarce glimpses of and swoon over. But Harry? He’s dangerous. An illusion gilded in beauty that sits in this achingly so, lazy way. It’s an excellent cover for someone who— based on volume alone— should be legally required to sublet a soundproof chamber instead of an apartment. Beauty privilege, remember?

Instead of spending his days spreading divine harmony and whispering sweet nothings into the ears of poets, her tragically beautiful neighbor has chosen a different calling. One that involves subjecting Y/N to an auditory experience that can only be described as an unholy, unprovoked act of sonic terrorism against anyone who possesses functioning ears.

While he may look like the patron saint of soft lighting and tasteful nudity, he lives like a man who has never once considered the presence of neighbors. Evidently, the universe operates on imbalance.

It’s not surprising that he fucks. Nor is the frequency, given— everything. It would be more surprising if he didn’t, which, statistically, seems impossible. It is the sheer volume at which he fucks and the blatant disregard for customary noise ordinances.

Y/N has had the great misfortune of gaining intimate knowledge of Harry’s extracurricular activities through nothing but flagrantly inconspicuous, unsolicited proximity. She is now, against her will, deeply familiar with the sound of his bed frame against the wall. With the low, gravel-thick groan that spills out of him before everything goes quiet, the sharp gasp from whoever is tangled up in the sheets beneath him. The pornographic chainlink of yes, yes, yes, as if to lyricize the tempo of a wrought iron headboard ramming against hollow drywall. She’s a victim to secondhand moaning; a hostage to the unchecked libido of a man she’s not even screwing.

The young woman isn’t sure who he’s sleeping with, but based on the sounds, they either really, really like whatever feat of Olympian-endurance he’s performing on the other side of the wall, or they’re being held at gunpoint and doing an exceptional job of faking it. It’s loud. A predictable regularity. Enough to make her consider downloading white noise apps and investing in a stronger liquor cabinet.

And every morning, after nights filled with thumping and gypsum-dulled dirty talk— horny monologue hour, hardly softened by an overworked, underpaid layer of rental-grade plaster— and the occasional bass-heavy indie rock soundtrack, he leaves his apartment looking criminally rested. Peaceful. Unbothered by the absolute railing he has just put someone (and the walls) through.

For all his divine aesthetics, Harry fucks like he’s trying to earn a standing ovation. With the kind of dedication to performance that suggests he thinks there’s an awards committee waiting outside in the hallway to hand him a trophy when he’s done.

Y/N doesn’t know what’s worse—the rhythmic, wall-shaking thump of his bed frame, the low, muzzled stream of just incomprehensible enough to stay offensive murmurs, or the fact that he has the audacity to look well-rested when she sees him the next morning, while she lurches past him like a woman who’s been spiritually waterboarded by the full-scale resonance of his sex life.

Y/N has tried— earnestly tried— to ignore it. To mentally downgrade him from disruptively attractive to something more manageable, like guy-next-door cute. But Harry is simply too loud to be ignored.

And not just in volume— though, yes, he operates at a decibel that insinuates he believes “inside voice” is an urban legend. It's everything. The way he takes up space. The way he stretches his arms over his head and his shirt rides up, exposing a sliver of toned stomach like some kind of aesthetic oversight. The way his lips pull into a smirk when he's amused, a single dimple pressing into the smooth skin of his cheek.

The worst part? He doesn’t weaponize it. Just… exists, as if he entirely lacks self-awareness for the unrelenting power he yields with pure aesthetics.

Perhaps the only thing more dangerous than his unregulated evolutionary favoritism is the lack of object permanence it causes. Inspires. Because at the end of the day, despite how polite, how deeply-gnarled in neighborly niceties, The Incident from last month still exists, but miraculously manages to melt into her every time she’s face to face with him. Like a static buzz settling into the way her composure thaws away.

His most notable sound pollution, to date, spilled in the form of audible rejection on a rain-drenched afternoon, dripping through the drywall in a dissent-rusted chain. Stop. No. Please. It was a voice she didn’t recognize. A voice trying to be firm but not entirely expecting to be listened to. It sounded so defeated, like a cry and then a high, sharp whine in response to whatever distinctly lower-pitched murmurs the insulation muzzled. All velvet-dipped tones swallowed by the structural integrity of a shoebox apartment.

Y/N is the last person to dig into others’ preferential depravities, nor does she have the mental bandwidth to file through the archives of a borderline stranger’s hedonisms, but her stomach had twisted up like one of those coiled, abstract sculptures that fits on a bookshelf, and she ended up on the couch with her cellphone tucked to her ear.

Because it wasn’t just the kind of sound that prickled at her nape, but curdled deep in the belly of her, heavy and rotting.

(“Um, hi, I think my neighbor is— hurting someone.”)

But the thing is, standing with her door cracked now, Y/N thinks there needs to be at least one, obnoxiously visible character flaw to remind her and offset the audacity of his aesthetics, because up close, it’s so much worse.

Anything— an overinflated ego, a questionable tattoo, a personality cultivated exclusively from Joe Rogan podcasts. But no. Harry is polite— painfully so, armed with the clean-shaven jawline of a man who has never known an awkward phase and the kind of infuriatingly natural charm that makes all rationale and reason puddle off into awed oblivion.

“Hey,” he says, cradling the package in one palm, curls wet, one rogue lock clinging to the crest of his cheekbone in a way that would look deeply artificial on anyone else. “Think they swapped our mail again.”

The level of allurement at which he functions should come with a warning label, so it’s a little tough to keep The Incident afloat when he just… waterlogs it with simple, blissfully unaware presence. In these types of situations, all that buoys is the vague, internal monologue reminding her that she’s been gawking wordlessly too long to be considered socially acceptable.

Her taller neighbor (significantly taller; really, Y/N thinks— it’s as if he collected hallmarks like they were on conveniently timed clearance) blinks. He��s still holding the package out. Y/N blinks back. Batting her lashes shakes something, as if warding off gnats off in a plume of smoke. Slowly, she accepts the misdelivered offering, and unease creeps into the soft spot between her rib bones and her organs.

Despite the way the man has embedded his existence so deeply into her thoughts— honestly, so much so that he may as well be paying rent (she should be getting compensated for the unpaid mental labor)— Y/N doesn’t actually know Harry.

She knows his name is Harry. H-A-R-R-y, always inscribed in all capitals, besides the cacographic tail end of the lowercase, curving Y. She’s given up on trying to understand why whoever the post office sends insists on treating their mailboxes like interchangeable suggestions rather than fixed addresses. She knows that their mail, through some act of bureaucratic sabotage, somehow manages to interchange between 9B and 9C with unsettling regularity.

She knows he fucks. A lot. So regularly that at this point, it’s practically a statistical impossibility that his celibacy record stands longer than a sparse handful of days. She knows that he wears the face of a misplaced effigy, with a halo’s worth of plausible deniability— the kind that should be mounted to an Italian plaza centerpiece, or live frescoed, immortalized on a high ceiling between Corinthian columns. She knows she called the police on him last month, so she needs to ball her resolve in her arms when it spills apart like unrolled toilet paper—

There is one truth Y/N must latch on and cling to in these tragically catastrophic stand-offs (probably… entirely one-sided, given that the opponent to her poor mettle and overactive nervous system is just… standing there, breathing, entirely oblivious of his innate talent to dilate pupils and cause momentary amnesia), and that truth is this: no superficially aesthetic veneer of deception can shell-up reality.

And the reality is that Y/N does not know this man, and so no cherubic façade, neighborly niceties, or feigned self-unawareness can suppress that he may as well be an entirely different person behind closed doors.

It’s months down the line that the irony will hit her— that yes, undeniably, Harry is almost a direct, walking contradiction behind the assumed sanctity of a closed door— that no pleasantries or seraphic, unassuming dimples can soften the obscenity of his pastimes. Hobbies include: vinyl collecting, long walks, and ensuring that an attitude adjustment sticks. But that’s months down the line, and right now?

Right now he’s just her obnoxiously loud neighbor that, according to probable cause (and the recording of the phone call she made to the emergency hotline, stored somewhere in the 911 archives), may or may not take no for an answer. Which is the biggest tragedy of all, in her opinion.

“Thanks.” There’s a little bite there to the word, there. Enough for him to clock it— for something to flicker along that lazily charming smile, like a gossamer-thin, bewildered film over the surface of his expression.

Harry pauses, almost like he wants to say something (probably to acknowledge the awkwardly apparent dissonance going on), but then he just… doesn’t.

“Okay,” as the man breathes, the breadth of his shoulders swells up, thick muscle rising up under the cotton fabric (not quite pulled taut— not anywhere besides the span of his shoulders— but enough for the shape of his pebbled nipples to poke through the material). Y/N chews into the gummy-smooth skin along the inside of her cheek. Honestly, it’s unfairly disarming; his low voice, his stupid face, his hard nipples prodding through the tee. With his dewy meadow eyes glued onto her, her resolve wobbles like a flimsy stilt house on the coast in a hurricane. “Have a good one.”

He ducks his chin (a subtle period on the uncomfortable pause, a formal seal on his exit) at the young woman, still holding the parchment-wrapped package she’s been awarded as if solidified into a stone-encasement of the position. Y/N blinks. Harry turns.

With a final glance toward his retreating back, the girl closes the door. As her fingers tighten around the package, her knuckles bleach from the strain. It’s either that or punch drywall, and quite frankly, she’s been paying too much in rent to consider remodeling and too many fees in the form of involuntary eavesdropping to afford a fracture in the (poorly constructed) noise barrier. She tucks the chainlink back onto its track as the door clicks shut and resigns herself to another unfortunate truth: Harry is so dangerously attractive that not only is she almost certainly going to think about this moment later, but she will be reminded, every time she’s shepherded into close proximity with him, that when God packages something up in 6 feet of limited-edition facial topography and artfully tousled curls, no amount of unsought aural pornography and creeping suspicion can stop a cosmic nepotism baby from dismantling her concentration.

The last thing Harry expects from a disgruntled herd of bleary-eyed, sock-shuffling renters— a crowd caught somewhere between sleep-deprived and half-dead— is small talk.

Half these people have a look that suggests they contemplated burning alive before choosing to evacuate, and the other half probably wish they decided to wear real pants to bed. Tonight, Harry falls into both categories. With the fire alarm still shrieking from the guts of the complex and the blinking glow of blue and red in the corner of a tar-black night, the briefs hitching high on his meaty thighs is almost… poetic. Cinematic, at the very least. Like a scene from an experimental indie film focused on the gradual dissolution of dignity.

The downy rabbit nestled in his arms, coiled more like a floccose ball than a living animal, is the sartorial maraschino cherry— it pulls the look together. Emergency Evacuation chic. He looks about as disheveled as the rest of the congregation; bedhead, sleep still dusting at his half-mast gaze, keyring slipped over his middle finger and his phone cradled in the same hand (though, Harry thinks wryly, no building-wide emergency couture quite tops the tighty-whitey socks-and-sandals combo that the guy up ahead of him is rocking). There’s sparse chatter going on all around him, a kind of background drone that fades into the wail, but he doesn’t have any intention to engage. Despite the unplanned slumber party and the potential opportunity to trauma-bond, he can’t really find it in him to start ice-breaking and sharing life stories. There’s a time and place to build community with your neighbors— half-dressed in a parking lot at three AM isn’t one of them.

Instead, he stands in the midst of the mass, dead-silent as if still calibrating. It takes him a while to notice the young woman a few feet ahead of him— long enough that the cool air has settled over him in a coat. Her bathrobe wraps tight around her, cinched pink terry-cloth. He doesn’t recognize that she’s a familiar face until she turns enough for him to see her side profile, her phone screen casting light and painting shadows in the crease of her furrowed brow as she sniffs. Thumbing over the device, Y/N turns back over her shoulder.

The longer he stands there, creaking into a more-awake rendition of himself as the faint chill cuts through the grogginess in his skull, the more the silence marinates into impatient restlessness. Stretching like old gum. She lingers in his periphery, shifting from foot to foot as if nursing the same restive itch. Once again, his neighbor twists to the side, rocking onto the balls of her feet and then back down onto her heels. A huff spills from her lips as she turns her phone off and tucks it up under her upper arm, crossing them. It’s not cold enough for the air to bloom with her breath, but the exasperation in it is audible. Maybe because he’s managed to seep closer.

“—Wonder if someone just pulled it.”

At first, Y/N doesn’t acknowledge the statement, as if she doesn’t recognize the remark is directed at her. And then, the presence behind her— not pressing uncomfortably close, just distant enough to notice— has Y/N turning her head over her shoulder. She double-takes.

Harry’s in a new light. Still abysmal to her train of thought, already weak on its tracks given that the drowsiness from being rudely awoken in the middle of the night still has her lingering in a dull, cotton-wrapped awareness. But now, he’s a fraying shape; sleepy and half-nakedly soft. Hair a masterpiece of sleep deprivation— the typically styled ringlets on his head sit mussed; whatever shape (she assumes the usual— somewhere between windswept and enticingly intentional) existed yesterday has gone rogue, erased by his pillow. What’s left is a tousled disarray. He’s in another tee, once again pulled snugly over his shoulders, and he’s cradling what could be a live, fuzzy animal, but more resembles a balled fur stole, its potential face tucked into the nook between his muscly upper arm and his chest. Despite the ridiculous assortment of this particular wardrobe showcase, that’s not what catches her eye most. Y/N sucks in a breath.

Considering a fair share of the evacuees around them teeter on the brink of public-indecency, it shouldn’t throw her guard off as much as it does, but all she can manage in such close proximity with Harry’s thighs is to blink wordlessly. It’s not necessarily his thighs so much as the way they’re denuded— not the way his trousers sit on them so much as their entire lack thereof. It’s the way his lower region is only covered up by a pair of jet-black briefs, clinging like a second skin, riding ridiculously high and ridiculously low. High enough that the only place her eyes can focus is the (chewy) musculature, slightly sun-bathed from all those hours spent in the residential pool, dusted with hair. Low enough that a sliver of skin peeks from between the waistband and hem of his shirt, hitched up just a touch on one side. Enough to hint at a sharp dip of a mostly concealed V, where muscle sinks in a hard line along bone. A tease of whatever workout routine he’s committed to. Beside the rigid line chiseled in there, an inked, leafy stem climbs (a set of mirrored layers that she’d observed on him, supine on a pool chaise).

Basically, it’s the type of thing that should legally classify him as a walking thirst trap.

With the crowd sporting bedtime fashion, some covered only in the most legally vague sense of the word, it leaves Y/N wondering: if most of the people decided to haphazardly vacate their apartments by only tossing on the most minimal attire— if opting to add to their garb in any way— what did Harry add? Did he wear the cream-toned tee to bed? Just the Calvins? Both? Or was he entirely bare, only sloppily throwing on whatever was left discarded by the side of the bed? Does he sleep naked?

With all these sordid thoughts clouding up the forefront of her mind like a thick plume of fog, she can’t find words through alphabet soup and the vague mental images of Harry’s bare skin tangled by sheets. To make it better, he’s just staring at her, like he’s expectantly waiting for her to respond. What was the question?

Y/N blinks again. “What?”

“The—“ Harry bobs his head towards the cluster of emergency vehicles, olive eyes oscillating to the apartment complex and back onto her, “fire alarm. I wonder if someone just pulled it.”

If ever the universe was to humble Harry from a breathing renaissance painting, half-clothed and half-asleep would be the time. He could be knocked down to whatever status a man up front is bearing, clad in a questionably classy fusion of tragic, high-cut cotton underwear, socks, and suede, open-toed sandals. Somehow, though, it’s worse that his bedhead, for the most part, still leaves the tendrils curling in lazy, untamed waves. That his nakedly-beguiling thighs, strong and sculpted with muscle, look like they’re meant to pry knees wide. It’s mortifying—

“Then, they’d be an asshole,” she murmurs, her own gaze raking out and lingering on the building. The words come out clipped with exhaustion, and then that pause lingers again.

Harry hums. She chances another glance at the furball curled to his chest.

“Snuggles,” Harry supplies, raising one arm a tad from where it’s caged to support the animal. The motion is enough to jostle the thing, and it tucks its face out, twitching its nose. With careful precision, the man moves one hand out from the cradle— the one not clutching his keys and his phone (by the way, casually dwarfed by the sheer size of his palm and cupped, lengthy fingers) to skim his pointer along the Holland lop’s dangling ear. “He’s a bit delicate and has some strong opinions on sudden, loud noises. Not a fan of fire alarms, as it turns out.”

The young woman hums noncommittally, eyes snaking back off to the polychrome strobe.

The last thing Harry expects from his neighbors during a mandatory, middle-of-the-night evacuation order are pleasantries. Between the slouched postures, the collective, dead-eyed aura of suffering, the general degree of resentment perfuming the air, and the visible internal debates over whether a hypothetical fire is worth enduring the cold, it’s safe to assume morale is at an all time low. Which brings him to his next point— there is, Harry suspects, something about him that fundamentally offends his neighbor.

Not inherently because she’s not talking to him. Naturally, the theory has no relevance to her lack of enthusiasm at the moment.

There’s a clause to life that he learned as a little kid, an absolute truth that the motto “water off your back” was created around, and this clause is that not everyone will like you. There’s really no gentle way to chew on that one, but it’s a fact Harry has long come to terms with. Jealousy, misery, even a simple case of personalities repelling like mismatched magnets— all things that can cause someone to decide you’re just not their cup of tea. Incompatibility could very easily leave your existence grating someone down to the molecular level. And you can never please everyone— that’s another piece of that truth he had to gnaw on before he decided that he was going to spend the rest of his life marching to the beat of his own drum.

Apparently, something about this tempo scrapes at some highly-sensitive nerve of hers like a dull knife on a chalkboard.

It’s an intuition thing, really. There hasn’t so much been a sharp, substantial instance so much as there’s been instances. Little, creeping things; the way her eyes ward when he’s close, despite the way they hover; the tone she seems to reserve for him, not outwardly rude, but suspiciously close to some awkward admixture between tolerating jury duty and being held at gunpoint. There’s more, among those, too— the suspiciously long pauses that sit like preludes to every response she gives him. The way her gaze flickers off avoidantly.

And those last two aren’t flustered mechanisms.

Harry knows he is, according to conventional, societal standards, attractive. He’s no stranger to reflective surfaces, nor is he unaware of the way actual strangers look at him. Ogle. Gawk.

It was a burgeoning metamorphosis he became acutely aware of between awkward kidhood and the place he’s at now. First, all lanky angles of uncertainty, only half-grown into his features, when his bones had made up their mind but the muscle and skin over them hadn’t quite decided what they wanted to be yet. Then, it was almost overnight. Everything began stretching into place and ubiquitously working in his favor. Eyes lingered, heads turned…

It’s safe to say he knows nervous girls. Boys. The lack of eye contact, or on the polar opposite hand, the blanking, empty stares and the silent beat as their response time glitches and their mouth tries (and fails) to keep up with a short-circuiting nervous system. Not everybody is able to stay the most suave version of themselves interacting with someone they find sexually attractive— his firsthand experience involves not only being on the receiving end, but on the giving end, as well. Granted, the aesthetics boost had given him a sense of confidence that buried his inhibitions down, so it’s been a long while since the last time he tripped over himself in front of someone that made his dick sit up and pay attention, but—

The thing is, Y/N doesn’t glance away like staring at him rapidly dissolves her thoughts in a static haze. She doesn’t take long pauses because she’s floundering over the next word. She doesn’t even look at him in a way that insinuates she’s worried he’ll nip her or something, she’s just so utterly…

Closed off. Disinterested. Like his presence is a jury duty evaluation and she’s wriggling in her seat, waiting to talk about her views on jury nullification.

In fairness, it could very well be a me-not-you thing— the awkward shuffle through their interactions, the severe deficit of enthusiasm. Those communication patterns could very well be sound across the board… in another universe. There are footprints that lead him to the massive elephant in the room, and those footprints spell the vague shape of it didn’t used to be this way.

Sure, Harry contemplates, if she was a miserably unpleasant person that holed up in her apartment with no interest in corresponding with another human being, he’d get it. If she’d given him the idea that something about him rattled her down to atoms the first time he ever said hello to her, he’d get it. But she used to smile. Coyly, almost, he’d go as far to say— one finger away from twirling a lock of hair around her pointer as she talked to him. The kind of simper that accompanies a giggle from a barista handing his drink over across the counter, eyes honed. She used to lean onto her door frame when he handed off a stack of envelopes that got misplaced into his mailbox, or hung back with her eyes wet and lively as she stood at his doorway and handed off a package.

What’s more is that his history is marked by drawing more people in after he opens his mouth, than turning them away. He’s arguably likeable— not in an arrogantly self-absorbed way, but strictly based on track record. He’s befriended too many older ladies (who sparked up chatter with him in grocery stores unprompted, mostly), and gotten slipped too many drinks (on the house) from bartenders to believe otherwise. Generally, his existence tends to fall into the category of charming rather than grating.

When he considers all of this, his analysis only leads him to one conclusion— there is something about him that suddenly, fundamentally offends his neighbor.

And it’s with this hypothesis that Harry clears his throat, hesitates, and prods, with just a moment of lull after she’s turned back away from him, “If I’m misreading this, feel free to tell me to piss off, but— did I do something?”

The young woman pivots back over her shoulder, blinking, almost as if she’d forgotten he was behind her at all.

“…What?”

Harry shrugs. The motion coaxes Snuggles to lift his head again. “I don't expect us to be friends, but I also don't want to be the person you actively avoid in the hallway. If I've done something to make things weird, l'd rather fix it than pretend I don't notice."

For a long second, Y/N doesn’t say anything. Just batting her lashes up at him, features lax, like she’s processing the earnest directness behind his words and letting them settle. And then her face twists.

Ooh— okay. Ruckling brow bone, lips tugging down, the nearly incredulous burst of air she expels as she turns her prickling face away—

She scoffs, muttering something strangely close to, “can’t be serious,” under her breath, and Harry’s eyes pensively narrow just a smidge. Enough to be entirely imperceptible as he drinks in her body language. That’s an indicator, if Harry’s ever seen one.

“You know what, Harry,” she says after a moment (now her arms are caging defensively, that’s an interesting touch), “…I just don’t really …appreciate how you treat women, to be honest.”

Of all the responses Harry had been anticipating, curiously honed on every word, that was— not the one. His dark canopy of lashes sweeps over his eyes as the admission lands and… knocks him off kilter, just a bit. His brows relax, then furrow up as he mulls the statement over, buffering.

He sounds a little bewildered when he says, voice much more soft-spoken, “…Sorry?”

“You should be,” his neighbor tells him pointedly, her arms still crossed like a defensive barrier across her chest, “Hitting women is wrong. Very illegal for a reason, actually.”

At the mention, his head bobbles back a bit like he’s dodging a smack between the brows with the context-lacking declaration. He’s not quite sure he’s heard her right, eyebrows climbing and eyes widening almost comically. Right, okay. This is… a gross misunderstanding, he decides. When the realization hits him, truly hits him, his knee-jerk response is an incredulous laugh, which he muscles down. Instead, his appalled amusement trickles out like a little huff, corners of his strawberry mouth tugging up. Unfortunately, the reaction only seems to irritate her further, and her forehead crinkles up as her own eyebrows ascend in stunned disbelief.

“You think there’s something funny about hitting a woman?” Y/N presses, eyes steeling into slits, her priorly indoor-voice rising a decibel.

The volume of her statement (and the misleading content) has his otherwise mirthy expression falling into something far more serious. Full of comically flat, grievous denial, like a kid being scolded for spray-painting a concrete wall after being caught with the can in its hand.

“—No,” Harry shakes his head slowly, side to side, “Not at all.”

Cautiously, his gaze slips off to the corner, where a few tenants have turned over their shoulder to gauge the commotion. As the young woman’s head swivels to tail where his eye contact has meandered, Harry realizes that backpedaling is only going to become a feat of incredible verbal athleticism from here. Upon catching the other glimpses from the crowd, slowly turning back to their own conversations, Y/N makes a deadpan sound of amusement before she turns back to face him.

“Oh, what? You’re ashamed now that you’re being called out for it? Good,” she bites, shoulders teetering as she leans toward him and unfolds her arms, pointing her index finger into his direction scathingly, “You should be ashamed. It’s absolutely disgusting to put your hands on a woman.”

This is tragically weighed against Harry’s favor. Here he was, just a half-asleep evacuee, holding his rabbit, clad in only a pair of hardly decent briefs, contemplating whether he should Uber Eats tacos as soon as the emergency exit fiasco were to clear up (might as well, since he’s already awake). Somehow, he’s managed to morph from an unassuming extra to the perceived antagonist.

No, Harry thinks— this wouldn’t be a disaster film; it’s a full blown, poorly-contrived drama with a plot twist even the supposed villain is caught off guard by. The curly-headed brunette chances another glance to the other side now, where more people have not only glimpsed over in brief acknowledgement, but have fully twisted their shoulders to observe the apparent scandal. As much as Harry wholeheartedly marches to the beat of his own drum, at this moment in time, his reputation is shaking in its boots and he’s reached a mental checkpoint called time for damage control.

Weaving sincerity into his tone and shaking his head placatingly as he steps forward— a subconscious attempt to coax her into lowering her volume— Harry tells her, “I don’t put my hands on anybody that doesn’t consent to it first.”

Her face scrunches up.

“I think,” his pink tongue slinks out to wet his lips, “maybe, there’s been a misunderstanding.”

“Oh, I don’t think so.”

“No, I really, really do,” Harry counters, ducking his chin into a nod.

Instead of hearing him out, however, his neighbor, as if fueled by the internal calling to manually dismantle misogyny, one assumed violent criminal at a time, only raises her volume a little more. Exceeding the normal range, definitely steeping in public-humiliation-ritual territory.

“I’m not misunderstanding,” Y/N bites, brows pinched like he’s personally offended her by even insinuating as much, “I have ears, just so you know, and I’ve heard a woman saying no, and please, and stop. So you can drop your good boy act, okay—“

Harry blinks. If not for the character defamation going on and the way Socks-and-Sandals raises his phone out of seemingly nowhere, pointing it into their direction as if there isn’t a potential fire to be filmed instead of all things, Harry would laugh. But there is, and the flash is on, weak along his peripheral edge—

“I know guys like you, I know your type,” Y/N declares, jabbing her finger against him again, this time so close to grazing the area along his chest, right between the tops of his pectorals, just over Snuggles, “and it’s gross that you think because you’re attractive you can walk all over everyone and do things like that to people, and you know what, next time maybe the cops won’t be so nice—”

Ah, nice. Another mystery resolved; one which involved a pair of men with guns in their holsters at his door performing a wellness check and an excruciatingly awkward clarification on impact play, consensual sadomasochism, and safewords. For weeks Harry wondered what had inspired a legal inquiry into his pastimes. Now, staring at the culprit— case dismissed— he can only blink before his brows wrinkle up.

“You’re the one who called the police?” Harry murmurs, a note of soft incredulity soaking the phrase.

“Any sane woman would call the police when she heard another woman being abused—“

“Abused?”

“Yes! Abused! And— and— honestly—“

Before Y/N can launch into another ruthlessly-curated, virtue-plated diatribe, Harry resituates the animal in his grip, unlocking his phone to the homescreen. Then, Safari. He thumbs over it with a careful determination seeding along his downturned, sculpted expression.

“I don’t know what form of assault would be worse,” Y/N chimes, hands climbing up in an exaggerated, universal symbol of exasperation before they fall back to her sides (as if she hadn’t even noticed his attention has been redirected to his phone), “but when someone says no, it means no.”

It only takes a second for her to register that his focus has been rerouted elsewhere, though. Her tone dips indignantly.

“Excuse me. I’m talking to you. And also, while we’re at it, you’re unbearably loud and an unmannerly neighbor—“

Harry turns his phone around. His expression is impressively flat, all things considered. Y/N pauses.

“Typically,” Harry states as her eyes rake over the glowing screen, “I like to be wined and dined before I give a crash course on my preferences, but.”

The image stretched across the illuminated LED sits over her tired gaze as she absorbs it, pupils jittering as she reads, but through the lens of his own profile mirrored back, he can see the moment her righteously fueled demeanor chips.

“I do, like, a… softcore porn type thing,” he admits.

Still, her brows are kinked. Only now, in stupefied doubt. “I— what?”

It’s with a rotting sense of dread curdling in the pit of her tummy that it suddenly dawns on Y/N— the mortified realization that she has succumbed to a horrible misunderstanding.

The website the tab is set on almost looks archaic, like a kitsch relic— repository archives of a porn blog from the early 2000s. Spankinggram. The page is set onto a profile, something called Rings&Paddles, and the squared image of an avatar slices through the garishly orange palette of the site’s logo. Her gaze sweeps over the vista; a man sitting down on an armless chair, thighs splayed, palm curled over a …hairbrush.

The profile picture sunders off at the neck. It’s a faceless silhouette, but the miscellany of sketches cascading across a forearm and the distinctly chunky medley of rings are… enough—

“Consensually,” Harry— Rings&Paddles, Y/N recognizes, molten heat dripping along the crests of her cheekbones— adds, “No one is being abused.”

In retrospect, the only feasible option to survive this, Y/N decides, is to change her name and move to another state.

Probably something short and vaguely melancholic, one of those names that would look intriguing in all lowercase. A quiet town. Somewhere coastal, maybe. West. No— north. As far north as geographically possible. Perhaps she could get a dog. An older, ratty boy from a shelter. Drive an old car that’s too big with a busted radio. She’ll pretend it’s a benefit, rather than an inconvenience, because she’ll be the fabricated kind of mystique that insufferably enjoys the quiet calm (and rainstorms). A rebranded, movie-clichè hipster, but not unbearable in real life—

“But I understand the concern,” her neighbor says, cutting through the haze as she contemplates what brand of cigarettes she’ll be taking up as a trait of her pseudo-identity. Against all odds, his tone is calm in an all-too-merciful kind of way, “You can look into… domestic discipline, if you’d like. If you wanted to understand a bit better. There’s loads of really good information on the internet.”

For a moment, Y/N deliberates burning alive. If there isn’t a fire licking up her department store drapes, she’s going to set one to avoid bearing the weight of this shame for the rest of her life. Granted, the heat sizzling at her face feels like a flame, enough, both at the way she’s just publicly kinkshamed an innocent man and at the mention of …domestic discipline.

She’s going to cry.

They would be Virginia Slims.

“You— …what?”

The garbled confusion drenching her tone is almost laughable. She sounds it, too; voice pinched and deceptively close to trembling off into a sob. Y/N stares straight ahead, body locked in a fugue state of humiliation as the realization calcifies in real-time. Her shoulders have gone stiff and her spine rigid, posture squeezed somewhere between standing and catatonic. The scale of her miscalculation worms into her skull like a parasite that’ll chew her awake in the middle of the night, years down the line.

For the last month, Y/N has spent every interaction with Harry evasively toeing over eggshells. Floundering over the way his face was sculpted, rather than compromising the integral structure of their acquaintanceship. Somehow, a sleep cycle cut short and the ambiguous suggestion that he had picked up on her avoidant habits was all it had taken to not only slander his (apparently not safe for work) extracurriculars, but probably assure her foreseeable Amazon packages suddenly start going missing.

Now, with a semi-public declaration of his profile pressed out to her face and his name no longer being audibly smeared with accusations, Harry can appreciate the quiet sense of revelation.

His neighbor, on the other hand, looks visibly wrecked. Her entire stance is pulled in tight, like she’s actively trying to make herself smaller, but it’s her face that really gives her away— the way it twists, fluctuating between wide-eyed horror and the dawning realization that she’s just detonated a social landmine at point-blank range. All heat-tinged and shame-doused, the young woman blinks up at him, doe-eyes rounded in apologetic appall and lips parted slightly like she’s still buffering. The combination of words that just left his mouth— softcore porn, domestic discipline, consensual— seem to be wrestling in her brain like tangled Christmas lights, none of them quite fitting together in a way that makes sense and glinters.

“I am sorry about the noise,” he tells her, shutting the phone off and nestling his arm back up under his pet, “I’ll make sure to keep it to a minimum from now on.”

Y/N wilts. With the phone no longer held out into her direction, the way she stays glued to the same spot on the cement— as if mortified into a motionless piece of stone— is ridiculous enough for him to gnaw into his cheek to chew back a bark of laughter. Despite all trials and tribulations, his coping mechanisms never fail.

“You— oh my God,” Y/N whispers. She makes a sound that could be a vaguely pained noise or the byproduct of her soul seeping out of her body. “Oh my God.”

Harry blinks.

“I called the police on you,” she tells him, utter dismay lacing the words together.

“You did, yeah.”

Harry still remembers the blank expression varnished along the officer’s face— the kind of emotionally vacant stare reserved for department store mannequins. The echo of the distant, metaphysical NOPE that definitely rode along his brainstem the moment the curly-haired brunette mentioned “it’s a kink thing,” and the way his partner, hands allocated to his holster belt, started very obviously examining his own shoes.

“I thought—“ Y/N stutters, her wobbling voice sounding squeezed from her trachea, “I thought—“

“You thought you were living next door to a criminal,” Harry supplies. When he tilts his head, a rogue curl flops over his forehead.

Finally, the young woman moves, burying her face in her hands. This will haunt her, she thinks. Forever.

From the corner of his eye, the man can tell that most of the tenants have gone back to their regularly scheduled repertoires of stalled misery. And despite the absolute PR mess her blunder has induced— his eyes wander over her, the way she’s cupping her face like she wants to melt into her own hands and seep off into the pavement— he feels oddly… bad. Not secondhand embarrassed (firsthand, definitely firsthand), but Y/N looks like she’s going to combust. It’s tragic, really. The kind of pitiful that makes him purse his mouth and stare down at her in contemplation.

“Honestly,” his voice cuts through the haze in her throbbing, hot skull, all even-toned sincerity (which is worse, so much worse), “if I was in your position, yeah? I’d do the same thing.”

The admission coaxes her into a horrified peer through the wedges between her fingers. The warmth pressed to her palms feels borderline pyrexic.

“And if that were the case, you’d be the neighborhood hero. So.” He raises a shoulder nonchalantly.

Y/N doesn’t immediately respond. Instead, she soaks in the crime scene, doused in the blinking blue and red.

“I’m not sure neighborhood hero is how I’ll be remembered,” the young woman finally answers, groaning through her hands, and then pressing her fingertips into her temples.

Harry hums. Then, he sighs. “No, you’re right. I’d say misguided vigilante. I reckon it’s a bit better than violent felon, though.”

Y/N makes another sound. This one sounds a little more wounded.

Next part here

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