#My Little Pony Generation Five

[helenadurazzo]

Send me an ask with one of these numbers and I will share my favorite character and why

1. Hogwarts Legacy

2. Hogwarts Mystery

3. Harry Potter

4. Magic Awakened

5. Twisted Wonderland

6. Percy Jackson

7. Heroes of Olympus

8. Hunger Games

9. Ever After High

10. Monster High

11. Stardew Valley

12. Avatar the Last Airbender

13. Legend of Korra

14. Amphibia

15. Owl House

16. Steven Universe

17. My Little Pony Gen 4

18. My Little Pony Gen 5

19. Disney Fairies

20. Star Vs The Forces of Evil

21. Descendants

22. Zombies

23. SIX

24. Hamilton

25. Miraculous Ladybug

26. Tangled the Series

27. Ghost and Molly McGee

28. Dragon Prince

29. She-Ra

30. Phineas and Ferb

31. Total Drama

[gracefulserpent1207]

I feel like people are forgetting that the SAG AFTRA strikes were not JUST about getting better pay for actors and writers. Another very big benefit of the strikes, that is more overlooked than people care to admit, is protection against AI.

The reason why people overlook the damage that AI does to actors (including voice actors) and writers (as well as many others) is because people just aren't educated enough on it and this is because it is being advertised to be this amazing, technological advancement that will save the economy when it's actually the complete opposite. AI is damaging the economy because it is putting so many people out of jobs. Not to mention the fact that strikes are usually concentrated around getting better pay for people, so when uneducated people hear about the SAG AFTRA strikes, they tend to assume that it's because the actors/writers that are striking are just asking for more money (which they ARE doing and which they have the right to do because the pay they get stinks) and so avoid the other, equally important factors.

There are so many cases where I've seen AI being advertised/used in a "positive" way recently. This included a boy from my college mentioning how he couldn't be bothered to do the homework that had been set, so he just used AI to write his homework for him. Are we really seriously going to allow this to happen? Are we seriously going to allow young people to neglect their education and use AI to fake work for them, getting them target/expected grades that are much higher than what they're actually going to get, giving them false hope?

Another example from what I've seen includes an ad on TV for a new phone that used AI with the camera, and boy did this ad piss me off. Part of the ad sees a group of teens taking a picture, in which they are all frowning, with this phone. They then use the AI included with the camera to edit the picture so that they are all smiling. Why? Was it not easy enough to ACTUALLY smile? If not, was it because they genuinely aren't happy? And if that's the case, should we really be sending a message to TEENAGERS to just hide the fact that they aren't happy and fake a smile instead? Use AI to cover up the fact that you're struggling? No. No we should not.

I know a lot of people reading this probably think I'm reaching or overreacting, but AI does genuinely have a long term effect in these cases.

But I think the most common, most damaging example of people using AI that I've seen is from social media, specifically TikTok but other platforms as well. And this is the use of AI voice filters.

The SAG AFTRA strikes have worked hard to benift actors of all kinds, including voice actors, and the reason I'm drawing so much attention to this fact is because people just aren't getting it into their heads how DAMAGING AI voice filters are for voice actors. Several voice actors have already lost their jobs from being replaced by AI that can replicate THEIR voices, the voices that form part (the most important part) of their identity. Not to mention how damaging it can be for voice actors' dignity to hear their own voice coming from something else, especially considering how this "something else" can replicate within MINUTES what they had to perfect for YEARS. Voice actors put so much effort into getting their voices to be perfect for the role that they're playing, yet AI undermines that effort by imitating those "perfect voices" within minutes. Voice actors actually care about their roles/characters and the fans that love these characters. AI does not. All it does is copy. Yet companies would rather have heartless machines working for them than real life people who actually care about bringing characters to life for fans.

And you wanna know what the worst part is?

Apparently, those "fans" would rather hear AI voicing their favourite characters too.

Because it is YOU (the fans) who create, use and/or like AI voice filters on TikTok/Twitter/Tumblr. It is YOU who cannot accept the fact that your favourite character's VA didn't say the crappy line you came up with at 2am that you commented to them on Twitter, so instead used AI to make the character say it yourself because OBVIOUSLY you're gonna drop dead if you DON'T hear them say that line. Obviously, you can't go on with your life without causing a completely innocent and good person to lose their job AND their dignity for your own entertainment.

Another VERY big issue with AI voice filters is that the majority of voice actors whose voices I have heard being used with AI have specifically said that they do NOT support AI and do NOT wish for people to use AI to replicate their voice. Obviously, some people may not know this, but others do and they choose to ignore it. This does not just go for the people who create the filters. It goes for the people who use and/or show support for it too (such as liking videos that use a filter, etc. ) because you are spreading the use of AI and making companies more aware of it and how easy it is to use, and are therefore causing actors to be replaced. How would you feel if you heard your own voice being used by strangers without your consent for their own entertainment?

So for that reason, I am going to say what most people are just too scared to say:

Fans are just as responsible for the SAG AFTRA strikes for using AI as the companies that have been treating actors/writers like shit for years.

If you have EVER created/used/liked/reblogged/reposted/shared/etc. a video that uses an AI voice filter, please please please PLEASE go back and delete/unlike the video, and NEVER do it again. Do NOT interact with videos using AI voice filters AT ALL. If you get a video on your TikTok fyp, it's not that hard to just scroll past and ignore. If you're still not sure what kind of videos I'm referring to, a good example of a popular AI voice filter that I've seen recently that people need to STOP using is a filter of Luz Noceda (voiced by Sarah-Nicole Robles, who has specifically NOT given consent for AI replications of her voice to be used) and Hunter Whittebane (voiced by Zeno Robinson, who has also specifically NOT given consent for AI replications of his voice to be used) from The Owl House singing She Wolf by Shakira. If you have EVER interacted with this filter, please go back and undo however you interacted with it and spread this message to others.

I'd like to end this "rant post" by saying that I am NOT in anyway an actor/voice actor, but I am an aspiring writer. I remember one day earlier this year seeing something on the news about how companies were considering replacing human writers with AI and how in a certain amount of years, human writers may not even be needed anymore, and this scared the shit out of me because writing has ALWAYS been my dream and I thought my future was over before it had even began.

So in conclusion, PLEASE spread awareness of how damaging AI can be (for actors, voice actors, writers, etc.) and PLEASE make sure to NOT interact with it when you see it being used, unless you are asking another person to stop creating/using/interacting with it. And if you see a VA asking for people to NOT use AI to replicate their voice, just do the bare fucking minimum and respect their wishes. Your life isn't over just because you didn't get to hear Luz and Hunter singing She Wolf. Put the livelivoods of other people before your own entertainment. Thank you.

P.s. I'm gonna tag this post with fandoms that I've seen use AI for replicating voices (to spread awareness), especially if a VA from that fandom has specifically asked for it not to be used. Feel free to reblog and add tags of your own for any fandoms that you think I've missed.

[charmsponies]

I know you can do it, Superstar!!! ✨⭐️✨

MLP custom of Gregory! Based on a pony version of him that I designed a few years back! Yall know Fnaf is one of my most favorite games ever and my favorite character is Gregory!

Made from a bait Romperoonie base. He’s got mostly blue coloration with orange and yellow accents, star motifs all over his body (because he is a Superstar of course) and really gorgeous blue hair ��Sapphire” from shimmerlocks. Would love to do more fnaf customs soon haha!

Rock on, Gregory!

[inkies-art]

Hello! I don’t usually post text posts on this account but my friend said i should ask for requests from you guys since I’ve been struggling to come up with ideas. So im taking any and all requests, i cant promise to draw all of them but id be very appreciative for any!

[solbit-fox]

Not the best photos, but book shop next street had G5!~

Album for drawing (made February 2022) is unexpectedly tiny, just like the ponies are little. It has nuanced detail: somewhat shiny bits on cover, and characters + logos + sparkles have second layer, where lines are repeated. It's so sweet!~ Sadly, front cover is a bit damaged. But I still love the album itself ^_^ It was the only one, laying in corner... then again, our shop is small itself.

And juices! They're made in June, July and August 2023, with 2021 license (they're official but didn't stop doing the thing after Hasbro quit Russia, and Hasbro can't sue anyway). Thankfully there's some art on back, for a few months before we couldn't afford printing everything, now it seems we've solved the problems~

I really wanted the Sprout juice (plus it's my favourite flavour - orange) and searched for it in a few places that weren't so close to our home, and it was wrong all along, haha! Should've gone to the book shop first.

(I know there are more, for example triangle packs and stuff, but unsure if we have them here or maybe it's some other streets/shops...)

I'm happy we found these with dad! And I thank him for gifting me them. ^^

[imthere4yuu]

Tumblr has figured out that I love MLP and will follow artists pretty quickly for their cool interpretations of the ponies so I guess I'm never leaving this niche of the internet ever again, huh?

[ghoulspaws]

INTRODUCTION POST

Name: El/Max/Henry (he/they/she)

Age: 17 (Aug 11th)

British😔 but not a Londoner

Therian wolf , otherhearted ragdoll cat

Main blog @henrybarrow

Roleplay blogs @forrestnashh @mrgeorgebarrow

(Audhd, anxiety & possible OCD)

HYPERFIXATIONS

Chernobyl, Sam & Colby, Ghostbusters

FANDOMS

Sam & Colby, Killer frequency, minecraft story mode, ghostbusters, my little pony, the Royle family, gorillaz, the dragon prince, bendy and the ink machine, splatoon, bullet train, babymetal, yo-kai watch, animal crossing, regular show, five nights at freddys, minecraft, adventure time, a few Disney movies, the owl house, dead end: paranormal park, Nimona, She-ra and the princesses of power, Bluey, task master, generation loss, little nightmares, little witch academia, the haunted house, most haunted, help! My house is haunted, eden, the Mitchells vs the machines, a whisker away, studio ghibli, life is strange, good kid.. did I ever mention I'm really into the paranormal?

If you'd like to be friends lmk!! But YOU HAVE to be 16+ but also less than 20 please😭 Also let me know what our overlapping interests are if any:0

[nicomadeira123]

[dreamstar-moonlight]

One of tbe brilliant things about mlp:fim is that the main cast aren't wayward children or highschool students they're just a bunch of young adults. Like. Twilight is a postgrad forced by her supervisor to go find friends. Apple Jack has responsibility of gaurdianship of her little sister. They're all employed. They pay rent and taxes. Fluttershy has to deal with her deadbeat underachiever older brother who can't seem to move out by himself when she visits her parents. She also has anxiety she hasnt grown out of since high school. Rainbow Dash spends most days getting high and goofing off on her minimum wage job. Pinkie Pie has a culinary apprenticeship and lives with an older couple after she left her small mining town when nobody there was as into psychadelics as her. Rarity balances running her slowly growing etsy fashion bussiness with going on tinder dates with the worst men you've ever seen. They all vote. They have to pick up their own medical perscriptions. These are 26 year old girlies going through first quarter life crisises. So, yea, that fanart of Fluttershy smoking forever weed is highly accurate.

[k-eilonwy]

decided to get back to my roots for a bit and tackle redesigns of my all-time favourite mlp G3 dream team : 3 these five have shaped my early 2010s and helped me to grow both as an artist and storyteller (i started writing silly little fanfics and my own take on the then-hypothetical G5 based on G3 and these five characters in particular), so they have, and always will have my entire heart.

i came up my own kind of au version of G3 and here are some of my small headcanons for each character!!

Rainbow Dash:

her parents are Parasol (G1 pony) and Barnacle (G1).

she is the oldest (and the tallest!) of the five.

she is a major fashionista and diva, but with a hint of adventurousness and even ferocity behind those eyes. Dash is a fan of all things beautiful, be it bright colours, grand celebrations, and more down-to-earth values.

naturally, her craft is related to rainbows - she draws them with the special paint she makes herself, and it's a very rare knowledge among the Ponyville citizens (Unicornia's rainbow-creating magic works on the same basis as Dash's paint, she just makes it without the unicornian magic involved).

oftentimes she is the voice of reason for her friends.

in her free time she designs clothing in collaboration with Sew-and-So and funds/runs fashion shows.

isn't the biggest fan of sweets (thinks it spoils her figure and coat).

absolutely adores rainy weather (cause rainbows).

is a sap for romance and cheep romantic novels.

Spike:

was born in a dragon tribe living far from pony societies.

was born wingless and with water-based powers, while most dragons breathed fire and had wings, so he's an oddball amongst the common dragons.

the dragons were supposed to work with pony royalty/leaders and protect them. The way the dragons chose did it was passing a test of obtaining a very rare flower only meant to be gifted to the royalty - the Royal Everbloom, a flower which was near impossible to maintain/grow but could bloom for forever.

Spike failed to pass his test of safely delivering the Royal Everbloom back to the tribe, failing to protect the flower from a bad storm so it withered under hard rain. However, Wysteria noticed Spike struggling to keep the flower safe just outside her cottage and brought them both inside - nursing the poor dragon and the flower back to health. It suddenly bloomed under her care, so by the old tradition, it meant that Wysteria belonged to royalty.

cue the events of Princess Promenade pretty much the same as they went down in the original as Spike played the role of mentor and royal advisor to Wysteria. She still rejected the title in the end, proclaiming that Ponyville didn't need royalty to govern over them and that she was no more special than any other.

Spike is humbled (and charmed) by her worldview and decides that he rather enjoys the simple life of local ponies - besides, he has grown deeply devoted to Wysteria and doesn't want their friendship to end, so he parts with his tribe and lives with the purple gardener in her little cottage.

he greatly helps Wystie with gardening - his water-breathing powers come in handy while working with plants! He finds that even if he doesn't breathe fire like "normal" dragons, he still can make his abilities work in other fields.

he is often the brains of the group - his exotic dragonic upbringing is a great contrast to the ponies' more down-to-earth worldviews.

is a vegetarian (idk if all dragons in this universe are or it's just him, but-).

is a big fan of literature of all kinds, especially poetry.

generally is a huge nerd and is prone to rambling about his favourite subjects. Not the most outgoing person, more of an introvert, especially in contrast to most ponies (that's why they match their energies with Wysteria so well).

absolutely adores Wysteria, they are something of platonic soulmates/life-partners. Can be very protective of her, even though he is usually non-threatening/pretty chill (he is her personal dragon guardian!)

Wysteria:

her parents are Blossom (G1) and Salty (G1).

Petal Blossom (G2) is her maternal older cousin.

Wysteria took to gardening and flower arrangement since early years from her mother. Participated in a lot of local fair gardening competitions through her fillyhood and won the majority of them (the trophies are kept at her parents’ house). 

moved out from her parents’ house once she had managed to save up enough money to purchase a small but neat cottage at the edge of the woods; it is located near Ponyville, but quite far from its centre. Pinkie, Minty and Dash like to visit their bestie and her dragon friend on weekends and each time together they plan some really fun activities. 

during spring and summer seasons, Wysteria lives off selling flowers and bouquets at Ponyville’s biggest market. Once autumn hits however, she and Spike stay at one of their three closest friends’, Pinkie, Minty or Dash’s, house until next spring - each year they stay at a different pony’s house. Wysteria and Spike help out with chores and share household duties during their stays, but even regardless of that their friends are simply happy to let the two live with them.  

Wysteria is socially anxious and quite solitary, content with keeping a limited circle of friends to spend time with. Akin to Snufkin she requires a lot of “alone” time away from others, that’s why she likes living so far from the town. However she is very dependable and very very kind, so a lot of ponies confide in her.

hates. weeds. so. much.

often feeds stray and forest animals coming to her cottage. Is fond of bunnies and birds the most.

Pinkie Pie:

her parents are Cotton Candy Snr. (G1) and Slugger (G1). Is a twin sister to Cotton Candy Jr (G3).

Pinkie runs a gift shop along with Minty, her bestie since fillyhood and a life-partner.

works as a party planner as her second job - generally just love celebrations and organising events.

she is a natural leader and is able to make even opposing groups come and work together. Sociable and easy-going, pretty chill to be around.

isn't easily scared and usually doesn't believe things she can't see with her own eyes or try out.

has a MAJOR sweet-tooth: her sister runs an ice-cream cafe, so there's that.

has a "supernatural" ability to come up with a solution to almost anything, - using Pinkie's squink (basically just squeezing her eyes tight and thinking long enough).

is drawn to photography and films.

Minty:

her parents are Minty Snr. (G1) and Steamer (G1). Ice Crystal (G1) is her maternal uncle.

everyone's favourite disaster-monger.

works in a gift shop alongside Pinkie. Generally can't function well without her supervision lol.

Clutzy and socially anxious, but in a different way than Wysteria, Minty is obsessive, hyperactive and makes up for her awkwardness with her pony-pleasing attitude. Enjoys helping others out, it makes her feel important.

can't sit still for long period of time, needs an outlet for her excessive energy.

collects SOCKS.

winter is her favourite season; it reminds her of warmth and companionship of her friends huddled close by the fireplace. Exchanging gifts and stories. Making others smile.

is surprisingly good at checkers.

is claustrophobic, hates being limited.

doesn't enjoy reading that much, but rather likes picture-book illustrations.

[cottonlemonade]

When He Babysits His Niece

word count: 1278 || avg. reading time: 5 mins.

pairing: post-time skip!Atsumu x chubby!Reader

genre: fluff

warnings: a whisper of spoilers

synopsis: Atsumu finally has the opportunity to hit on you

The Official Version of Events

You stood in line waiting for your turn. It was a pleasant midsummer afternoon and your usual way home brought you through a little park. Children were yelling and laughing as they zipped in and out of couples going for a stroll or people walking their dogs.

A playful breeze tugged at your hair when the elderly woman manning the dorayaki cart told you she‘d have to prepare a new batch and it would take a moment. As the batter sizzled away on the hot stove you fished your phone out of your pocket.

With your mind on the movie night you had planned with your friends that evening, you checked the takeout menus of your usual places to see what you could be in the mood for when suddenly a little black haired blur in a pink tutu over jeans wooshed by and hid behind you, giggling wildly.

"Uhm, hi.", you said, uncertainly.

The little girl gave a tiny bow, said "Hello.", before grabbing another handful of jacket and hiding her face in the folds.

You scanned the people nearby, trying to make out someone who belonged to the child.

"Where are your mom and dad?"

"Kobe."

Well, that might present a problem. This was Osaka.

"Did you come with friends?"

The little girl shook her head at this absurd idea.

"No, my uncle."

"Kaidaaa!"

A young man, visibly distressed, jogged along the path, craning his neck left and right, calling the name over and over.

The girl, obviously “Kaidaaa”, giggled again and hid around the corner of the cart, her bright blue sneakers still very visible.

You waved the young man over, pointing subtly to the mischief maker.

When he reached you, he doubled over, catching his breath and with the most relieved expression you had ever seen on a person he just said, "Ya take Hide and Seek way too seriously."

"Yer just real bad at playin‘.", the little girl said matter of factly and with an added shrug bit into a steaming red bean bun the cart lady must have snuck to her. You pressed your lips together to stop yourself from laughing at the man's offended look.

“I really like your tutu.“, you said to make conversation and Kaida smoothed it out proudly.

“It‘s for my birthday.“

“Oh, it‘s your birthday?“

“No.“ Wow, this girl gave anyone a run for their money. “My birthday was last week, but uncle couldn‘t be there so we celebrate this weekend.“

“Ah, I see. That‘s very nice of him.“ The guy gave you a half smile, obviously very satisfied with himself.

“He got me a scooter!“, she told you excitedly, “And the wheels glow in the dark!“

“That‘s so cool!“

“Well, I wanted to getcha a pony“, her uncle said, picking his niece up like a cat and dangling her in front of him, feet swinging like a pendulum while she still nibbled on the rest of her dorayaki, “but yer dad said something about that being impractical.“

Uncle and niece made a tsk sound and said “so lame“ in unison. It was obviously a thing between the two of them.

“How many did you want, dearie?“, the elderly lady asked while she generously spread the thick dark red paste between two fluffy pancakes.

“Five, please.“, you said, then quickly raised your hands and added, “They‘re not all for me! I‘m having some friends over later.“

The guy set down his niece. “Too bad.“, he said with that half smirk again, “I was gonna ask if ya wanted to join us for some ice cream.“

You felt your heart do a little flip at the prospect. You couldn‘t remember the last time you got flirted with, let alone by anyone nearly as handsome as him.

When the lady handed you the paperbag with the pastries the guy said, “Ya think, I could get yer number? We could get some ice cream tomorrow?“

His niece got very bouncy at the idea and put her hands together in a plea, giving you the biggest puppy dog eyes.

“Please excuse her.“, the guy said, putting his large hand on her face and pushing her gently behind him which she found hilarious, “She doesn‘t get fed anything otherwise.“

You laughed and after a second thought nodded. Once you put your number into his phone and paid the lady, you waved goodbye to the both of them, grinning from ear to ear.

As you walked off you heard her ask, “Did I do good?“ and when you turned around he quickly swooped her up around the middle and carried her away as if she didn‘t weigh more than a pillow, calling over his shoulder, “I‘ll call ya later, byeeee!“

________________________

What actually happened:

“How come ya don‘t have a wife?“, Kaida asked as she linked a dandelion with a daisy, “Is it because yer hair looks funny?“

Atsumu stopped in the middle of braiding her ponytail.

“Oi, yer on real thin ice, pipsqueak.“, he said threateningly, his desired effect somewhat diminished a second later by the flower crown she placed on his “funny lookin‘ hair“.

She crawled into his lap and posed for a silly selfie he immediately uploaded to his socials, joining the many - many - previous pictures just like this one.

Putting his phone away again he snuggled her closer and together they relaxed in the shade of a tree for a while. Then he suddenly perked up.

He watched you walk past them and get in line at a street cart a little further down the path.

This was perfect! For weeks he had been trying to get your attention! But no matter how cool and stoic he looked while stretching for his morning runs or how often he exposed his abs when pretending to wipe sweat off his face after a jog, you never noticed him. To be fair, he had gotten a bunch of other admirers this way but he had his eyes set on you so what did he care?

A plan quickly formed in his mind.

“Hey, Kai. Do me a favor?“

“No.“, she mumbled, curling up against his chest.

“Come on. Whaddaya want? Name yer price.“

“Can we order pizza for dinner?“

“I was gonna cook for ya, princess.“, he said with a definite pout in his voice.

“That‘s why I want pizza…“, Kai noted coldly.

He sighed. “Fine. Pizza.“

“And fries!“

“And fries.“, he muttered absently. Atsumu didn‘t take his eyes off you, all but biting his lips at how good your curves looked in those jeans. What he wouldn‘t give to put his head on your soft pudgy tummy after a long hard practice.

“Throw in some gummibears and ya‘ve got yerself a deal.“

They shook on it and Atsumu detailed his plan. She listened excitedly.

____________________________________________

> once you’re dating, Atsumu slips Kaida snacks and money whenever she calls you “aunt”

> Osamu tells the story of the dorayaki cart at every family gathering and eventually at your wedding when he is making his toast as the best man

> Atsumu asked Kaida 100% to help him with his proposal

> Kaida is the flower girl at the wedding

> later she will loudly sigh how she so wishes for a little cousin since her parents don’t plan on giving her a sibling

(Atsumu: “YES, OF COURSE WE’LL GET YA A COUSIN!”, you: “We’ll think about it.”, your husband: “So it’s a yes.”, You, laughing: “I’m thinking, Tsumu!”)

> he’ll “borrow” Kai even more often from then on to show you what a great dad he would be and eventually Kai gets her wish when you and Atsumu walk in at Christmas holding your twins

a/n: thanks to @makkir0ll for spinning the post story headcanons out of control, so I just had to add some! 🌟

[helenadurazzo]

I have done some HP rewrites in the past and want to expand a bit into some of my other interests that I believe could have been better

[pparacxosm]

sigh like a chime

(postcanon!patrick zweig x infant halfsister’s au pair!reader; idk either man; came to me in a dream; title from the sound of music let’s all act shocked; major tw for suicide talk; tw depressive behaviour; tw disordered thoughts about eating; tw vague implication of alcoholic dependency; patrick zweig is generally not doing so hot; like at all; tw strained father son dynamics; tw grown adults projecting childhood trauma onto a baby; warning you now: this is a long one !! ; make a day of it; atp coexisting; lily donaldson being a weird little girl ™; tw airports during holiday season; whoever came up with the headcanon that patrick was late for his circumcision and it got cancelled i owe you a kidney; so cw smut obviously; cw religious ((Christianity, specifically Catholicism + Judaism briefly)) motifs; tw splicing of said motifs with the aforementioned smut; tw vomit)

“It’s not that I’m not happy for him,” Patrick tells Tashi, “I really am, you know I mean that.”

He paces her kitchen impatiently, running fingers through dark, dishevelled hair.

At such times, he still looks like the boy wonder sprinting carelessly across electric blue asphalt, eyes shimmering, as if he were part of that riot of colour. Some of his athletic maturity is replaced with the facetious, callow mannerisms of a hungry novice who wants to skip the necessary steps. Who wants to swallow experience and spit out the bones.

Tashi straddles a stool at the vast marbletop island. She’s pattering away like bulletquick rainfall on her MacBook. She doesn’t even spare him a glance.

Patrick makes an effort to rein in his temper. He drops into one of the stools. He swivels left and right and cranes his neck, staring up at the coffered ceiling moulding.

“It’s almost Christmas, Patrick. Go home.”

I am home, he wants to say, but that would be revolting and stupid and he doesn’t even really mean it. Art and Tashi aren’t home for him. Nothing is. And he likes that, he likes being a nomad.

Lily clicks in like a pony. Lily—well, Lili, Lieselotte—is also the name of his little sister. He likes the coincidence. The trick of the mind he can perform, imagining an alternative family. 

Family is just being nomads together.

“Hey, I told you no tap shoes inside,” Tashi says, eyes still swimming through the pixelmire of her computer screen.

Perhaps Patrick ought to feel flattered by her attention at all. His familial woes are just as perturbing to Tashi as Lily fucking up the flooring with her ball changes.

Patrick’s still quashing his irritation. She doesn’t even fuck him, anymore. He actually doesn’t fuck much of anything at all, of late. What with how tired he is all the time, how his flesh and bones deplete with each exertion. In a way, that’s her fucking him. But it’s also just the scorn of getting older.

It gets harder to shoulder things. His patience corrodes quicker. He should lean forward, take that laptop, and lob it across the room. She’s not even wearing those stupid bluelight glasses she’s supposed to be wearing.

“Do you just not care about anything?” It’s a petulant attempt at stoking her, but it’s too meandering and abstract to really matter, let alone take effect.

She doesn’t respond for a whole five seconds, still typing, and when she does, it’s a distracted whisper of, “What?”

Her power over him is such that she can afford to be so blindly condescending. But it still stings.

He groans into the air, and it’s such a thundering sort of noise that Lily spares him a weirded out scowl on her way to the pantry. “Do you really want me in Germany? I’ll sit on my ass and start drinking beer again all day, Coach.”

Three years into their partnership, he often uses her title to signal his annoyance.

Tashi sighs like she’s disappointed. Not disappointed that he’s trying, but the fact that he’s making such meaningless, childish stabs at it. Instead of just going for it. As in, yes, smashing her MacBook over his knee and yelling pay attention to me! She’d respect that more and he knows it.

But, anyway, she lowers the screen halfmast and looks at him. “Are you jeal—”

“I’m not jealous of the baby.”

“Okay…”

“But he’s sixtyfive, Tashi! It’s ridiculous.”

Tashi does something between a scoff and a laugh, shaking her head. She rolls up the sleeves of her sweater and narrows her eyes at him. “And how old did you say the new wife was?”

“Thirtytwo, Tashi.”

Tashi laughs properly now, dropping her head and dragging her thumb and forefinger over her lashes. Patrick smiles at her amusement, albeit at his expense.

“That is pretty ridiculous.” She looks up at him again, clearing her throat, “Don’t try to bullshit me and pretend you don’t still drink beer.”

He wants to contradict her, but he decides he wants to make her laugh more. “He met her because she was his masseuse for a hot stone treatment.”

Tashi sputters, her giggles spilling everywhere, and she’s waving her hands like she’s calling timeout.

“And then he calls me,” Patrick continues, before miming a phone to his ear and straightening and dragging his voice down like an anchor with an affected distinguished rumble, “And goes, Son, I am moving back to Germany. I have love again.”

“I have love again!” Tashi wheezes, her elbows thunking on the marble and her face falling into her hands. Her shoulders are shaking with laughter.

“Like it’s a fucking disease.”

“It is.” Art’s voice still manages to quaver delivering a glib oneliner. Maybe because he doesn’t mean it. Patrick’s willing to chalk it up to his brisk stride as he enters the kitchen. Always a fucking pep in his step these days, the fucking asshole.

Patrick doesn’t turn his head. He feels a sharp instance of vertigo when Art’s hand lands on his shoulder. But both the touch and nausea are gone as soon as they arrive, and he passes off the motion of his own hand going to grab Art’s fingers as a scratch to his nose. Tashi’s too busy wiping her tears away to have noticed that, thank God.

“Oh my God, please tell him,” Tashi cackles, still gathering lost breath as Art slides her bluelight eyeglasses onto her face and enswathes her body with his, caressing her arms with his knuckles.

“He knows,” Patrick says dismissively, even though that’s a lie. He hasn’t told him.

“What do I know?”

Tashi recounts the story with the engaging enthusiasm of what Patrick is beginning to recognise as schadenfreude. But even that is still a salve, and he feels a little foolish for forgetting its effect. Not just the laughter, but all of this. He wishes they would just throw him a bone and let him stay for Christmas. He feels like a dying dog made to live too long. He offered to dress up as Santa, but Lily herself informed him that she’s far outgrown such folly and resents his assumption otherwise. She’d kicked him in the shin with the metal plate of her tap shoe. He’d let her.

Art’s smile quirks up at the image. Mean old Mr Zweig laid nude across a spa bed, cock jumping for the meek masseuse.

“Bet he slipped her eight grand to fold the towel a little lower,” Art mumbles into Tashi’s hair, the strands buttery against his lips.

She makes a face at this. She raises her hand to swat his arm reproachfully.

But Patrick only chuckles. Spares a glance over his shoulder to where Lily is sprawled on the couch, gripping the handles of her shockproof iPad case with the focus of a pilot at the yoke of a plane, her little head swallowed by a pair of AirPod maxes. Turns back and looks up at Art with a conspiratorial smirk.

“Probably had her stroke his dick with two hot stones,” he murmurs.

Tashi thinks that’s even less funny. But Art thinks it’s even more funny.

He laughs very loudly and does a less than polite impression of an old German bastard wincing and coming.

“Ah—” he hisses, “The next one up my bumhole, yes?”

It sounds like a botched Hitler lampoon, and it’s ostensibly a caricature he’s done many times before. Sometimes, they spend whole days just wading through their ancient morass of shared memories and inside references and running gags. Sometimes, even now, it's just easier that way.

Patrick laughs so hard he falls out of his chair.

They do let him stay for dinner.

It feels like they’re mocking him, but he’s hungry. So he stares into the middle distance and listens to Lily spiritedly declaim facts about deep sea turtles. She keeps surreptitiously slipping Brussels sprouts from her plate onto his. It wouldn’t be his place to mention it. And, for her part, she quaffs down her mashed potatoes like an endurance test. He tells her they’re not going anywhere. She kicks his shin again and he’s pretty sure she should have taken those shoes off by now.

He watches every gentle graze of Art and Tashi’s limbs and shoulders.

He sighs and chews his sprouts until his jaw aches.

There are worse things in his head to beat himself up with than wishful thinking.

“What’d Sassy say?” Art asks as he uncorks a Montrachet.

The corner of Patrick’s mouth quirks up almost imperceptibly. Like the reflexive twitch of a bad muscle. But he can tell Art discerns it by the way he starts to chuckle preemptively. That grin that spreads across his face like fire on dry grass.

Patrick huffs. “She said she hopes the baby chokes and dies.”

“You’re killing me, Sas.”

It’s December eighteenth at JFK. Patrick feels like a fucking sardine. Everyone is everywhere. The emetic odour of tarmac and jet fuel embues him. His fingers are red and stiff and so tightly coiled around the stainless steel handrail of the escalator that he thinks they may just pop off like caps. There’s an acetous chill to the nighttime air, and he probably should’ve worn more layers, but the sweat on his back is already soaking through the thin fabric of his shirt. He doesn’t mind. It’s better than being late.

Patrick’s dad used to enforce punctuality like a jailhouse warden. Saskia knows that.

He has his phone tucked to his ear against one shoulder.

His sister’s voice across the receiver sounds warped and liminal. His stomach is grumbling.

“You’re fucking me, Sas, you’re fucking me right over,” Patrick says. “What’s in Brazil?”

“Well, warmth, for one.”

“What about me?”

Saskia laughs. That loud, tocsin laugh she used to do when he’d wet the bed. “You boycotted the christening, Brutus.”

“Why would I fly to Germany to watch a baby take a bath?”

“Why are you flying to Germany now?”

Patrick’s teeth are on edge as he schleps his weighty duffel toward the terminal. He fishes a cigarette out of his windbreaker pocket and shoves it through his lips. He wants to spark it, even though Tashi’s psychologically tortured him into quitting, and he’d get thrown out for sure. There’s a line of security guards at every corner, and he’s seen the German Shepherd sniffer dogs.

He chews on the cigarette instead. Grinds the tip between his molars to get that stark jounce of nicotine even if it’s mostly tobacco and paper.

Saskia is saying something in his ear, and he’s only halfpretending to listen. His eyes are fastened straight ahead, singeing holes into the back of a woman’s head. Her hair is pulled into an absurdly tight ponytail. And he is so taken by the movement of the strands as it bobs with each step that he is only dragged back to reality when Saskia says his name loud enough to stab his eardrums.

He blinks. “What, bitch?”

“Paddy, I’m sorry, but I can’t do it. I don’t wanna throttle the little shit. I’m pushing forty and I cried because he bought it a fucking babysize tiara.”

Patrick closes his eyes, inhaling deeply through his nose. He swallows a bit of that tobacco wad on his tongue. He nearly gags. He belatedly catches that a couple of security guards are looking at him with some suspicion. He holds up a finger as if to say, sorry, and turns around to walk away.

Saskia’s still on the line, and she starts singing something, though he doesn’t understand why. He has to hold the phone a good foot away until she shuts up.

“Wh—” he scoffs, pinching the bridge of his nose. “What am I supposed to do?”

“Hey, maybe you’ll get along with it.”

“Unlikely.”

“Maybe you’ll get along with dad.”

“Un—fucking—likely,” he retorts.

He ducks into a corner of the empty terminal and drops inelegantly onto a hard plastic seat. He is hyperaware of the sweat fumes under his arms, the way his track pants cling too snugly to his thighs.

“Actually, hey,” Saskia says, and he can hear her perking up. He imagines her in a hammock in Rio. She’ll burn so bad. No earthly SPF could ever keep her from shedding like a crimson serpent. “She has this au pair.”

Patrick glances up at the TV monitor over his head.

Departures to Berlin 23 30, it reads, flashing jarringly in red LED lettering, accompanied by a blinking graphic of an airplane taking off.

He makes a noncommittal grunt. “That tracks,” he mumbles.

“I’m saying you don’t have to be lonely,” says Sassy, “Make friends! She’s nice. Bit young.”

“Reckon dad’ll try to knock her up next?”

Saskia laughs herself to piggish snorting. The bigeared little boy within him, tugging at the pantleg of his sister’s pyjamas for attention, is vaguely mollified by that laughter. Albeit at his expense.

He should spend the flight feeling guilty for not getting a gift for the baby, but he listens to a true crime podcast instead.

They’re talking about a young girl who was found unconscious by the side of a road. The truck driver who spotted her was a little drunk at the time, and he was afraid that if he called the cops he’d lose his job, so he just moved her body further up the road where someone else could find her.

Apparently, she was still alive, but the truck driver thought she was already dead.

It’s not certain if she would have made it, had he done The Right Thing, but maybe it would've made a difference.

“He should've just called the cops and driven away,” one of the hosts says.

“If you’re reporting an accident, you can’t just remove yourself from the premises,” the other one replies.

“Well no, but if you report a homicide—“

“Same thing. Also, how can you just leave a person bleeding by the side of the road?”

“Was she visibly bleeding?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

Patrick closes his eyes and leans his head back. The clouds roll by like lambhide.

He can picture it clearly, driving away from this fucking mess, leaving a body by the side of the road. He’d do it if he could. But he thinks he’s the body.

He shudders with a pang of cold. He doesn’t know why this image sticks. It’s like ghosts, floating in between the clouds.

Saskia texts him. Suffocate the baby with a pillow. Also delete that text. And that one.

And he, the body by the side of the road, doesn't say anything.

The plane jostles a little in a patch of turbulence. They descend into Berlin at eight in the morning.

His knees hurt from keeping them bent at an angle for so long, his ass is going numb. He should feel sorry for himself, being alone like this.

As he deplanes, a few fellow passengers glance in his direction, their noses wrinkling. He can’t tell if it’s the bitter rot of cigarette between his teeth or his sudor stench or his mouldering heart.

People converge in the baggageclaim like a throng of cattle. Patrick shoulders through. Swallowed up and spat out and alone again.

No one pays anyone any attention. Everyone is hurrying to make this flight or get to the next. When Patrick finds a men’s room, he realises he should be glad for that. In the reflection of the large mirror above a long stretch of white porcelain sinks, he can see shadows like cosmic abysses under his eyes. Some of the veins in his arms—which are sticking out from under his sleeves like pythons—are slightly swollen and purple.

His duffle bag bangs against his hip as he shuffles onto the tarmac and joins the taxi queue.

Berlin greets him with an onslaught of sleet.

His bones rattle like clicking spoons in the cold. He’s cursing under his breath and trying to remember the last time he was sincerely back in Germany.

Not just a brief cut across for a match, a layover, a hamfisted excuse to see his sister.

He was probably nine.

Patrick lumbers up the walkway to his father’s home. It looks like it’s been shoveled already today but has endured several hours of snowfall since. That and—well—he guesses his dad’s playing humble now.

Sas had dubbed it a latelife crisis. But it’s not shabby. In fact, it’s nice. It’s no limestone portico. Far cry from the august Georgian Revival mausoleum he and Sas gleaned their nascent wounds in.

Lili gets a Hallmark ass two story colonial, strung with Christmas lights. Deep green door, ornate bronze knocker, festooned with a wreath. The doorbell echoes through his empty bones like a deathknell.

His teeth chinkle like coins as he waits.

When the door opens, he releases a protracted, puerile whine. “Fuck.”

You’ve never been cause of such overt disappointment.

It’s almost flattering.

But your smile quickly metamorphoses into a grimace.

His shoulders are drooping and he looks liable to topple facefirst to the snowswathed gravel at any moment. His eyelids keep fluttering, like he’s fighting a losing battle against the urge to just shut down.

“Is this the right house?” he groans, pained and shivering.

You’re marginally certain this is your boss’ son and not a homeless vagrant.

Either way, you’re nodding emphatically. “Of course it is.”

In the kitchen, he stands in the corner like a newly housed stray. Hands tucked into his armpits and chin touching his chest as he watches you spark up the cooktop through snowdappled lashes.

The powdered creamer, as you pour it into the teacup, reminds him, too, of snowfall. You keep flicking him conspicuously concerned glances.

“So you’re Patrick…” you say, spooning sugar.

He clears his throat and hums in a way that says, yeah, I’m not too thrilled about it either. His head is bowed, his eyes fallen shut, and he’s swaying vaguely on his feet. He looks like he’s making devotions. The kettle sings.

His fingers are bonetight around the cup and saucer. He lifts the cup and presses it to his cheek, like leaching the warmth from the ceramic. When he sips, you’re reminded of cats lapping milk.

There’s a moment of silence, and it’s awkward. And then he sneezes—once, twice. His throat clicks.

“Uh… tennis,” you try, folding closed the box of Five Roses.

The steam plumes up and curls around Patrick’s face, flushed and sallow. He clears his throat again, his eyes unfocused. He glances toward you and knows he should reply, but the only thing that comes out is a damp, congested sniff.

He wipes his nose on his sleeve. “Tennis,” he repeats, the word muffled by the cup still pressed to his lips.

You nod slowly, rapping your knuckles rhythmically against the counter. “Wimbledon,” you say then.

Patrick scrunches up his face as if he’s in pain. He’s trying to force some simulacrum of synapse action in the conversational skills faculty of his brain.

“Yeah,” he manages. He takes another gulp of tea and tries to clear his throat again. It hurts. Everything hurts. He hurts.

You nod some more. You can’t help but think that this feels a bit like a tennis game. You and he, volleying oneword utterances back and forth. “Impressive,” you offer, cocking your brows at him.

“Thanks,” Patrick mutters.

He does actually want to be witty. And he does actually want to be charming. And he wants to make a good first impression. But right now he wants to sleep, preferably through a few decades. Certainly, the last few of his father’s life. Which, speaking of,

“Hey, where is the bastard?”

He glances around, as if to see his father lurking in a crevice somewhere. You raise a brow. Could it be an affectionate nickname? Perhaps. But you’re starting to connect some dots.

You smile like you’re trying not to provoke a sabertoothed creature. But Patrick can see in your eyes that he’s amusing you, which he doesn’t mind. Of course he doesn’t mind.

There’s a vast window above the counter, pictureframing an expansive, snowshrouded back garden that, knowing his dad, is probably a rigorously manicured viridescent green in the warmer months. How warm do things get in Germany these days?

He squints against the luminous white splay as you point beyond the glass. There’s a distant brown pinprick that lets him know this property is larger than it seems. Larger than it needs to be. But the kid needs frolicking room, he guesses.

“He’s in the den,” you say.

Patrick throws the rest of his tea back like a shot, placing his cup and saucer onto the counter with a twinkling thunk.

“Alright, then let’s go.”

“My balls are gonna freeze off before we even get there,” Patrick hisses.

Every step forward sends his feet an inch deeper into the snow, and you watch him shake out his running shoes with displeasedness. You laugh at him, and he turns back to face you, and he makes this face that could either be a smirk or an indication of great turmoil. You are struck by his ability to wear that lopsided grin in his current circumstances, to look at you like that. Well, like what? You don’t know.

It’s just that the scarf and wool peacoat you’re wearing make you look like a well-loved heirloom doll. He can see the faintest wisps of your breath in the bitter air. Your smile is so kind and so warm, he thinks, smiling wider.

He appreciates you joining him on his doormat pilgrimage. A better guy would tell you that, but he just turns around and keeps footslogging.

Together, you trudge forward across the sprawling, sleety landscape.

The door to the den is unlocked.

Patrick casts a glance back at you before he pushes it all the way open, hitting the opposite wall with a hollow bang.

It creaks a little on its hinges as it opens into a long corridor. He takes a step in first.

“Hello?” Patrick yells, his voice lilting. “Armed robbery. I have guns and knives and… bombs. Got your pretty nanny.”

You feel the little smile on your face quavering with amusement as you close the door shut behind you.

The floors are clad in dark oak panels. The walls are lined with copper sconces. There’s an ostensibly hideous and probably hilariously expensive rug in the middle of the floor and Patrick makes a show of wiping his shoes clean on it. 

“Sure as fuck not taking this thing,” he mumbles, digging his hands into his pant pockets. 

He glances toward a long sideboard on the side of the corridor. It’s laden with antique trinkets and mahoganyframed pictures, and he reaches out to prod at an ivory figurine sitting at the edge.

You stay in silence for a few moments, looking at him. 

Then, the faint creak of footsteps comes from upstairs, and you both look up at the ceiling. Seconds later, it fades to your right, and, soon enough, there appears Rupert Zweig. Cashmere jumper, tapered joggers.

There is no denying the family resemblance. And if the way Patrick’s eyes narrow as his father descends the staircase is anything to go by, he is not gonna wanna meet—

“There you are,” says Rupert, corners of his eyes crinkling. He stops at the end of the hall, hands in his pockets. The two regard each other like snipers. You have the sharp sensation you shouldn’t be here, but where would you go?

Patrick clicks his teeth wryly. “Here I am.” His hands are also in his pockets. Their deportments are uncannily kindred.

You think Patrick shouldn’t be so putout by that. Rupert Zweig is a handsome sixtyfive. Tall and broad and still in trim, despite most his days being ornamented by cognac and cigars. His silvery hair sheens like tinsel, and has not thinned much to speak of, if at all.

You figure maybe they’ll hug, as Rupert approaches. You know Rupert to be a hugger. But he only claps Patrick’s shoulder, and Patrick’s bones look like they’ve been swapped for concrete, and he watches his father give him a once over, like surveying an old car.

“I hope things are well with you,” Rupert says. Which isn’t strange paternal commentary. But his voice is tinctured with a concerned edge at the overall impression that his only son has been dragged along the pavement by the tail of a motorbike and then beaten with sticks to boot. I thought things were better, now, he’s really saying.

You think it’s concern, anyway. You, too, know Rupert to be quite concerned, and caring. But Patrick takes it as scorn.

He wears a bitter smile. “Things are peachy, Pa.”

His nostrils flare, he shifts his shoulders. Like he wants to shrug his father's hand off, but is keeping still for the sake of seeming mature.

And then it happens. A pule from the ether like the resounding stroke of a viola.

You perk up. “Oh! I’ll go—“

“Yes, dear, she’s with Giselle in the drawing room.” Rupert’s eyes crinkle, a kind brush of his fingers to your elbow.

Patrick—you glimpse, as you shuffle past him and out the passage—looks furious. And a bit queasy.

In the drawing room, Patrick stares at Giselle’s hands. She’s twisting her emerald engagement ring around her finger. The stone is big as a pebble, its facets winking.

He doesn’t let himself look to where you are. On an ivorycoloured foam playmat on the ground, doing something that is causing the baby to squeal and giggle like a strident string of bells and clap her pudgy hands together. He can hear the yarn of drool gurgling from her gummy mouth.

An angeltopped pine tree scintillates with fairy lights in the corner.

Giselle is slender porcelain. White sweater, skinny jeans, milkblonde hair. She crosses her legs at the ankles, knees to the side, like she’s the fucking queen of England. She is polite to varying degrees of genuineness.

“Lili’s so happy to see her big brother.”

Patrick’s knee shudders violently. Cut the shit, Giselle, he wants to spit.

But he knows he won’t. He doesn’t feel he can. Maybe it’d be easier, if she really was just some nympho naif. Then he could call his dad a perv and move on.

But no. Giselle is three years his junior but tenfold his put-togetherness. There are two infants in the room, and neither are her.

The room is so warm and well lit. There are bookshelves teeming with hardcover tomes whose rapiersharp corners look ostensibly untouched. A globe of the world, a framed Picasso original. Baroque vases and potted ivies and the permeating waft of jasmine and rose and leather.

It’s an intimate microcosm of his father and Giselle’s interwoven lives. Their very fumes amalgamate. And then there’s that puny thing, gossamer flesh, babbling like a brook. He doesn’t look. He can’t.

When his dad walks back in, Patrick is on his feet like a springing coil.

“You’re welcome to stay here,” says his dad, handing Patrick a set of keys.

Patrick shakes his head and feigns remorse. “Nah, Sas asked me to water her plants, so.”

Rupert looks like he’s going to say something, but decides against it.

“Right,” he nods and reaches into his pocket, retrieving a slim silver case. He flips open the lid, revealing a neat row of hand rolls. He plucks one between his long fingers. Patrick would say no, if he offered, but resents his father’s lack thereof enough to head for the door.

You think he’ll say bye to you, or maybe offer just a parting wave, but he doesn’t.

You hear him and his dad at odds like a cobra and a mongoose in the hall. You daub tender kisses onto the fleshy pink soles of Lili’s feet. You discern misty fragments of Patrick’s scathing whispers.

“... newage, hippie bullshit... nice guy act... fucking sweatpants... —christen the baby! What the fuck are you doing christening the baby? You never even took us to temple!”

However Rupert responds, on the other hand, is vaguely inaudible. It’s just a deep, cautiously placating rumble of syllables. 

You hear a bit more mumbled venom before the door creaks open and slams shut.

“He thinks he’s got everyone fooled, but I’m fucking onto hi— where is your alcohol?”

Patrick’s disembowelling every cabinet in his sister’s kitchen. On all fours like a hound rooting in the snow. He can hear the hot waft of tropical winds from Saskia’s end of the receiver. Crash of surf. Squawking birds. The staticky tempo of Brazilian phonk in the background.

“Ugh, Paddy,” Saskia mumbles like she’s disappointed.

He tears the fridge door open so fervently, the cord comes loose from the socket. There’s nothing there but bottled water, yoghurt, and salad dressing. He makes a strangled noise of agony into the ear piece.

“Saskia May,” Patrick groans with a sonnet’s desperation, resting his head against the icy fridgeshelf, between the organic grassfed butter and the handcrafted balsamic glaze, “I know you may be in a fucking beachside cabana right now, dipping Portuguese cock into your piña colada with the little umbrella in it and then sucking it off, but it is late here, and it is winter, and I am dying.”

“What do you mean you didn’t see the baby?” she asks.

“No, well, I saw her, just…” Patrick’s withdrawing all her earthenware now, “I just didn’t look.”

“What, like the fucking Basilisk?”

“Sassy, for the love of God, tell me you’ve left even a drop of liquor in your home.”

Saskia laughs, and he can hear the chime of ice. “Did you meet the au pair?”

Patrick stumbles back to the stillopen, halfway gutted fridge. He identifies with it. He sticks his head back in. “She thinks I’m a mess.”

“Wow, what a stupid whore,” his sister laughs. As everything, it is at his expense. He’s in emotional arrears, but it’s okay. It’s all okay.

He hears Saskia’s inbreathe. Marijuana? Probably. He doesn’t mind her lungs. He doesn’t mind that she’s always been more beautiful than him. He doesn’t mind that she’s warm in Rio. He knows it’s harder for her. She never got to be Rupert’s little princess. He wants to protect her in that asinine way baby brothers think they can protect their sisters. In that asinine way Patrick Zweig thinks he can protect everyone.

“Have pity on me, Sas.”

She directs him blindly like a game of Marco Polo. He wades through the ransacked bombsite he’s made of her kitchen. Avocados rolling across the slate floor. Spilled milk, which feels symbolic.

He unearths the bottle of Gordon’s dry gin from under the sink. Holds it aloft like a holy grail.

Patrick can’t remember the last time he set foot in a church, if such a time has ever occurred. Part of him expects the parishioners to take one look at him and know he doesn’t belong, for them to demand he leave.

For the things he has done, the things he has felt, the things he has wanted. Certainly for the things he cannot bring himself to believe.

He is struck by the towering stonework of the cathedral. The wooden cross in the apse is immense. Behind it, stained glass windows paint the icedover morning in vivisected coloursplays. Soft motes of sunlight waft in shafts from the ceiling.

He never thought he’d see the day—the Zweigs done up in their Sunday best. His mother would laugh herself to tears.

Rupert’s broad shoulders are ramrod straight, his argent hair slicked back handsomely. Giselle is wearing a ribbed knit dress in eggshell. Princess Lieselotte—finally, a worthy heir—is wearing a knit tunic dress embroidered with blooms, a scallopcollared ivory shirt underneath, and a crocheted woollen baby bonnet.

They look like an affiche for Norman Rockwell.

At first, he’s still trying not to meet the Basilisk’s gaze, but then he gets this disarming glimpse. The peonypink hue of her. Her comically outjutting little ears. Gibbous blue eyes, lapping up the world through cornyellow lashes. Those are Giselle’s. But the rest…

Unlucky little shit, Patrick tells her telepathically. And now he is looking straight at her, like the spell has been broken. He needs to let her know he’s onto her, and her bullshit doting father. You look like dad.

But what that means is she looks like Patrick, too.

He watches you hold her in your arms, rubbing your nose against hers.

Giselle had had you press Patrick’s shirt—his father’s shirt; of course he didn’t pack a buttonup—for him this morning. He was only kind of embarrassed. But he sat carefully in the car, leery of creasing your hard work. 

The linen of your skirt reaches your ankles. You’re wearing this creamcoloured slouchy knit turtleneck, and you’ve got a little lacy chiffon infinity veil halfway canopying your hair. Patrick is pleasantly amused by all this fabric. All the things he cannot see. Because of God, or the cold, or God and the cold.

The Zweigs find their pews, stopping frequently to greet their fellow churchgoers, and whisper inquiries after names Patrick doesn’t know. He shakes half a dozen hands if he shakes one, introduces himself as ‘Rupert’s son’ more times than he can count.

You, too, are pleasantly amused. Because Patrick is notably discomfited. You fish your little pewter cross necklace from beneath your collar. You hold it between your fingers and out toward him like an exorcist.

“He can smell your fear,” you whispergrowl, fauxominous. Lili giggles all saliva in your arms. That’s the voice you use when you pretend to be the babyeating ogre. She takes the cross between her tiny teeth. Patrick watches. You smile. “And so can she.”

Patrick looks at you for a moment, feigning indifference. “They’re both smelling how little they matter to me.”

Your smile widens.

Patrick—who has never endured a mass—takes his cues from the brush of your shoulder on when to stand, when to sit, and when to supplicate himself. The priest oscillates from English to Latin and back again. Seemingly on a whim. When Patrick fumbles trying to find the right page for the hymn, you tilt your book slightly so he can read along. 

He thinks the rosary looks good where it dangles from your lithe, supple fingers. Looping and weaving through your pretty knuckles like drops of blood. 

You are flawless in your devotion.

You slip to your knees with a fluidity that makes his tummy fasten.

You sing quietly and sweetly and when you turn to Patrick to wish peace upon him, your grin is so sweet and earnest it takes a moment for him to contend with that blessing.

Everyone falls down to the hassock again and Patrick is beginning to find the rhythm of the whole affair. At least enough to let his thoughts maunder and his body be at mercy to the motions.

It’s soothing, in its way. He can almost understand it. What blessed relief in lifting your human pains to be scoured clean.

The priest closes out the sermon with a few nice words about Jesus. Guy’s birthday’s coming up, after all.

Patrick leans forward a bit to glance at his father’s fingers, tapping on the dry leather of the psalmbook.

In the photo, little Lili is wearing a white linen nightgown that mantles her whole, like a tiny tarp. His dad cradles her, and everyone’s standing around a marble pool. He can see Saskia off to the side, hosting a very conspicuous hangover behind her mask. You’re in the picture, too. Apparently, you had been Giselle’s doula, in the beginning, and you just ended up sticking around. Which he finds more than a little strange. Patrick often sees life as a series of measures to get further away from his family.

On the edge of the photo, he can see the broad back of a becloaked man, plashing his fingers the water.

Patrick feels an inkling of discomfort at the sight of that man.

“She still sleeps in that dress, actually,” you say, rocking the babe.

The wallpaper of Lili’s room is printed with pale pink linework of woodland creatures. He’s straddling the vintage nursery rocker—a plush weathered lamb; it used to be his and Saskia’s—and his knees are hiked comically high on either side of him, his slacks riding up his ankles.

Patrick stares at the baby girl in this framed photograph. She looks too small—almost tenuous—underneath the white shift. Her eyes are flushed and still wombswollen.

“What’s the point?” he asks, trying to imagine that man softly slooshing water over her boneless head.

You smile. “It’s to protect her.”

“Protect her from what?”

You lower Lili into her French Provençal style woodcarved bassinet.

You look up at him, eyes flitting over his face. “Shame, I guess.”

It doesn’t quite make sense. A fullimmersion baptism means commitment. You have pledged yourself to God. You are bound to follow His laws. Shame is essential to these laws. Isn’t it?

You don’t know why he’s still here. Giselle is taking her Sunday nap, and Rupert’s playing solitaire or reading Guy Sajer or something in the den. Lili, too, is dead to the world. You need to do the laundry. The laundry room is too strait for him to be lingering, leaning against the doorframe, interrogating you. He likes watching the linen of your skirt gather at your feet as you crouch to the floor, depositing the armfuls of bedding into the mouth of the washing machine. All that fabric.

“It’s a different kind of shame,” you try to explain. “I can be ashamed of myself, of my body.”

“Why are you ashamed?”

You roll your eyes. “I don’t know. I’m alive.”

“Alright. And this helps?”

“A little, yeah. It takes you out of your body. Then returns you to it. And you feel brand new. Like you belong to Jesus.”

You laugh a little at the concept, but he can tell you treasure this belonging, deep down.

He walks toward you, taking the empty wicker hamper from your hands and setting it aside. “You shouldn’t feel ashamed in the first place.”

You shrug, noting his proximity. “It’s probably good to feel shame from time to time.”

He doesn’t say anything to that.

He doesn’t ask you if you feel ashamed right now. Face smushed against the top of the palpitating washing machine. If you said yes, he’d be unhappy. If you said no, he’d be unhappy.

He’s happy, now, hiking your skirt up around your waist, shucking your gauzy tights halfway down your thighs. Best not to ruin it.

So he doesn’t ask if you’re ashamed. He doesn’t ask if you’re a virgin. He does ask if you’re on birth control, and furrows his brows as his strong hands caress the flesh of your ass.

“Why not?” he laughs, dragging the beige skin down his rigid cock, rubbing the deep blush head against your hirsute pussy and bending over you. “Isn’t that shit free here?”

He burrows his head beneath your sweater, kissing your back through the cotton of your longsleeve. He doesn’t search for more bare skin, just keeps a good grip on that which he has, fingertips digging into the flesh of your hips.

He fucks into you and feels your body shudder around him with the jostle of the machine.

He doesn’t ask of shame or chastity or how long Giselle and Lili usually nap for, how far his dad is into The Forgotten Soldier. He does, however, feel it necessary to ask,

“Feels good, right?” Even though you’re drooling against the zinc and your hoarse groans are rivalling the churning noises. You roll your eyes but they stay there, your lashes fluttering.

“Yes,” you pant, clutching the edge of the machine. “It feels good.”

He bends over you, pinning you, elbow to elbow, his chin resting on your clothed shoulder. Your veil slips off your head and drapes around your neck. He quickens his pace. “It’s fucking big, isn’t it?”

You turn your head to look at him. His eyes look like they want to fuck your eyes. His mouth hovers over your drooling mouth as if to kiss you. The shaggy hair of his crotch abrades your tailbone.

“Verdict’s still out,” you say, voice quavering, and you let him lave your tongue sloppily with his.

His sister has a guestroom, but he sleeps in her bed. Reads her Audre Lorde and Laurie Colwin. Uses her toothbrush. God, she’d kill him. But he likes the transgression of violating her space. He doesn’t use her vibrator, or anything. He finds it, but he doesn’t use it.

He has his few ways of having people. So he’s always taking what he can get.

That’s why he fucks the nanny in the laundry room, and lets Art’s kid bruise him with her tap shoe, and sits on the kitchen tile drinking Saskia’s gin.

He has to hold on to the granite countertop, as he straightens from his haunches. His back is a wreck, but the ache is nothing compared to the relief and vindication and victory he feels. He can’t say for sure what the prize is. Maybe it really was just your pussy, and that’s where this all starts and ends, which is fine. The feeling of winning is so rare and precious and precious and rare and, as he unscrews the cap and raises the bottle to his lips, it’s as if he’s just slain a mighty monster.

He places the little tiara he’d filched from Lili’s room on Saskia’s mantel.

He’s less than compos mentis come Christmas Eve.

He lays in Saskia's bed for a bit, inhaling lime and ambergris, trying to figure out what to do with himself. He checks his phone: No Service.

He sighs and tumbles out the sheets like a rockslide. He figures he might as well go for a run before the blizzard clocks in since there’s nothing else to do. His feet already feel numb and damp. Everything has felt numb and damp the whole time he’s been here.

Running buzzed probably isn’t his smartest idea, but it doesn’t feel like his worst one either.

Patrick frenetically tugs two pairs of thermal leggings on. The radiotor whirrs but the house is still arrestingly gelid. He pulls on his sister’s comically inflated neon orange down jacket.

He looks at himself in the mirror.

“Oh, fuck yeah,” he whispers.

He loots and pilfers some mittens, goggles, and a neck gaiter from Saskia’s closet. She could never take to professional athleticism, but she’s a reasonably devout runner, and is partial to a halfmarathon or two most years. Which means free activegear for Paddy. He walks to the front door and slips on his dank shoes.

He steps outside once he feels decently covered head to toe, a skill he’s found refining itself as the week has shouldered past him.

Patrick strides the roadside briskly for almost a mile. His legs feel halfway atrophied, so he gives them time to warm up. The neighborhood seeps into copses of snowdusted forestry. He feels the beauty of the landscape flicker through him like a spark.

He starts jogging.

He has no mapped course, no mile time to hit. He just wants to move forward. For once. His goggles fog up with entrapped bodyheat crowning the cold air but he doesn’t fix them. The compressed insulation of his clothes, the whirring thump of his shoes to the tar—it engenders a strangely hypnotic effect. He realises, only after miles have elapsed, that he's forgotten to turn any music on. He doesn’t need it now.

He comes upon a clearing in the trees that discloses a river he hadn’t recalled.

He abates to a walk before stopping completely and removing his goggles. 

He knows a breathtaking scene when he sees one. That was never his problem, the discernment of the good thing. It was never even the obtaining of it. It’s that—well—if Sas actually had left plants for him to nurture, they’d be dead by now.

But anyway. The river.

Snowfall has burgeoned somewhat, but light is still breaking through. The sun reflects tenderly off the surface of the frozen water as if it’s all being illuminated from beneath the ice.

Patrick swears he can see evidence of a current still rushing below, but he can’t be sure that’s all too possible at these temperatures.

He tries to take a picture for posterity (or Lily; she’s ‘into vistas’ lately), but all the light is so strange and coruscating. Hardly anything can be captured in earnest.

Patrick takes a deep breath and closes his eyes.

He pulls his gaiter down and doffs his hat. Allows his florid skin a few moments to feel the glacial squall, the moist sting of melting snow. He thinks he’s missed this weather, harsh as it may be.

He takes the opportunity to check his watch, vaguely hoping the GPS tracker’s been running. And hope seems to count for something here.

4.7 MILES

A surge of accomplishment and anticipation shimmers through him. He grins, breathless, at the thought of being able to tell Tashi that he’d done a cool ten miles. And the prospect of being able to eat a guiltless meal is emerging as an actual possibility. 

Patrick gears back up and begins to walk again in the direction he came. He takes advantage—always taking advantage, always taking what he can get—of the trodden path he’d made in the road. The surer grip of his shoes.

His head starts feeling strange as he’s walking. As though it’s sloshy inside, like the dirty snow he sees on the curb. But he pushes forward and chalks it up to temperature. Picks up the pace again. 

He finds himself less mesmerised by his own footfalls now and slips his AirPods in. Slips inside the eye of his mind. His sister used to have a ‘(What's The Story) Morning Glory?’ CD. Patrick’d scratched it, probably. He hopes Oasis can get back together some day. It's not so hard to reconcile. Mostly, anyway.

About a mile into the returning trek, Patrick feels his legs suddenly get heavier. He’s felt as much before. He assumes he’s just hitting the wall. It’s a little early for him, at such moderate mileage, but he knows inclemency and altitude can do things to a body.

He’s deliberate with his strides as he proceeds. He wants to be sure that his torpid legs are parting with the ground. 

It’s around the two mile mark that his spine rattles with an odd enough sensation—sharp, like an incision down the length of it—to bring him to a stumbling halt.

Patrick’s clumsily reaching around and groping at his neck and back the best he can through his layers. It feels almost like someone has poured water on his skin. Soused him like a baptism.

He tells himself he needs a second to breathe. Starts walking again. Eventually feels very marginally centred enough to pick up the pace. His knees feel like cinderbricks. Dense and angular. But he should be capable of making it home. Or at least determined enough to do so. He’s seeing houses again. He can’t be more than a mile out.

He’s thinking of raiding Saskia’s toiletries and snorting her cornucopia of bathsalts when a billow of abject nausea rolls through him. He’s stumbling again.

He moans vaguely with turnsickness. The trees are blurring together.

He sways.

Sidesteps jerkily over the curb into a stark white alloy of fresh and shoveled snow.

Doubles over.

Dissolves to his knees, bracing himself on his palms. All fours again.

He maintains this position for several minutes. He’s heaving in and out forcefully with his eyes screwed shut. It feels a bit prayerful. He’s praying to be made to vomit. Just wants to feel better and move on and he’ll never touch his dick again, he prays. Which isn’t true, but need it be?

Things go sloshy again, and warm, this time. Overwhelmingly warm, actually. He flounders in the wet, rips off his gear, and uses his bare hands to grab handfuls of snow off the ground and push it onto his face. The heat feels like bloodshed.

Patrick tears off his jacket. Patrick lays his entire body facedown in the snow. Everything is numb and damp.

“Oh my goodness, Patrick?”

One imagines the voice of God to be a little less frantic.

He’s confused by how weak his muscles feel when he tries to push himself up. How he only sees lucent whiteness when his eyes flicker open. Shit, is this it? He thought for sure he’d end up at the other place.

“Jesus Christ, I thought you were dead!”

Oh, alright. So not yet. Not yet, and certainly not Heaven. Close, though, with how relieved you sound. He is the body on the side of the road, and you’ve stopped to triage him instead of driving off. He squints up at you. Floral puffer. Scarf and muffs. You look like a fairytale illustration.

His blood’s gone cold in his extremities, and he’s mumbling, “Sorry.”

“You’re a mess.”

There it is.

For your part, you don’t sound malicious, or anything. You say it like a forgone conclusion, a fact of the matter. The way a person in an Ionesco absurdist play would say, oh, it looks like I’m wearing pants right now.

He tries to make a stab at indignity. Like maybe if he denies that he’s a mess, that should suddenly make him clean. What blessed relief. But all he manages is a whimpered grunt of protest.

“What happened? Were you attacked?”

Patrick shakes his head, suddenly aware of just how wet he is.

“Patrick, tell me.” You sound concerned, but not in pieces. He knows this is all coincidence. That you simply happened to be driving by. But the fact that you’ve found him prone in the snow, the fact that you knew to call his name, knew it was him who’d ambled to the woods and buried himself in the ground like a coldblooded mountain climber, like a defiant zealot, staring into Earth, his back to God, taunting you with his dickish solipsism—he thinks all this should terrify you. He isn’t dead. Not yet. But maybe he’d already made up his mind. Perhaps you’re just picturing him as another baby. Something small and soothable. “What happened? Do you need to go to the hospital?”

Patrick shakes his head again and takes your assistance in getting up. All his things are gathered in your arms.

“You’re soaked, Patrick. What were you doing in the snow?”

He looks around and feebly brushes some of the debris off of his leggings and thermal pullover.

“I... I don’t know? I’m pretty sure I started feeling sick, and then I got hot, so I took all my shit off,” he explains. He’s all nonchalant about it, too.

At first, he won’t tell you where his sister’s house is. You’re going all Nuremberg on him, like he really is a baby who will drop the knife if you tell him no sternly enough. But he soaks through the polyester of your passenger seat and grins and defies you. It’s like he’s challenging you to take him back to his dad’s. Like he’s a kid acting up in school for attention.

It takes a while. You circle the block twice. Then he sees the way his fingernails tinge cobalt, and thinks of how disappointed his father’d be. Concerned, you allege, but he doesn’t buy that.

Still, he confesses like a sinner.

He asks you—as you stand on the concrete steps to the quaint, Tudorstyle home, and he holds his cap in his teeth and fishes the keys from his pocket—not to hold the state of the place against Saskia. He says there’s a lot of damage he can do in a week. He’s always making a mess. Messing things up. Has he messed you up? He doesn’t ask, but has he?

He’s even sorry for fucking you. He doesn’t tell you that, either. And he’s about to do it again. But he is sorry. That has to count for something.

You stink. Not in a really bad way, not in a noticeable way, but the stale perfume and deodorant have turned into a cool film against your skin, trapping your sweat and guilt and other gross things which you’re too tired to name. You’ve been out buying gifts all day. You’re always so last minute. You feel like you might fall asleep on Saskia’s couch.

News says blizzard’s on its way. News is all choppy static pixel kaleidoscope, too. Even if you left right now, you wouldn’t make it home before the roads got dangerous.

You’ve heard enough hypothermia horror stories to know he should be taking a shower right now, warming himself up in increments. And you’ve heard enough suicide horror stories to know you’d be wrong to leave him anyway, after how you’ve just discovered him.

Was she visibly bleeding?

He doesn’t look like he’s about to call it quits.

On the contrary, he looks relaxed, calm, selfpossessed, sitting on the arm of the couch, one knee drawn up, cigarette dangling between fingers. Also his cock is out. He’s naked.

Has he already made up his mind?

How many times has he lain like that, in the snow, lucid about his slide into the abyss? 

He finishes his cig and takes a knee by your feet. Your bare feet. You shouldn’t have taken off your shoes. They stink.

You try to tuck your feet under you, but he reaches out and grabs your ankle and tugs like you’re the baby.

“What happened to your leg?” you croak, your voice a little fraught.

His thumb keeps brushing up and down the arch of your foot, like trying to ease your tension. He leans back and looks down, past the leavening weight of his dick, to the navy bruise bloomed through the hairs just below his knee.

You watch that Cheshire cat smirk spread his mouth apart. “Violent tap dancer.”

You do kind of wish he wouldn’t do the whole slapping your pussy and calling you a good girl thing. It feels weird and Freudian and it even makes you feel kind of guilty.

Not because of his stupid uncut Jewish cock all swollen against his thigh, nor the virgin’s innards mangled in a manger at this very moment two thousand years ago. You know that’s not how you measure innocence. There’s something idiotic about that, something primeval and pathetic, something no one should be proud or ashamed of.

It’s just that he doesn’t seem fully committed to the pastiche.

He spits a thin globe of saliva right onto your clit. His fingers sweep through your coarsehaired folds. Slow, methodical, like a cartographer mapping the world with his compass and pen.

Then, he raises his fingers and strikes them down against you. You flinch, you whimper. He groans straight into you.

“Good girl. Good girl.”

And it's hot, sure, but he could stand to be crueler.

You’re this nice twentysomething with no real bearing on his life. You pray. You care. You wipe his sister's shit. He suspects he didn’t take your virginity, but he could easily imagine he did, if he wanted to. That he’s teaching you something. This could all be a lot more plastic and pornographic.

But it isn’t. Not really.

He climbs over you, all over you. He’s all over you like the flu. He wants to crawl inside of you, burrow and fester. His knee is pressed between your thighs and he’s breathing into your neck, his head tucked under your chin. His nose is the colour of raspberry syrup and he drags the cold tip of it up the column of your neck.

He smells like smoke and snow. Like sweat and musk and something stale and dry.

You crane your neck with a piercing cry when he bottoms out. He cracks your hips open like a lobster claw. You feel his fevered heartbeat thumping through your body. He seems to think the heat of your flesh is enough to warm and cure him.

“You’re going to catch a cold,” you slaver into his hair.

“I don’t get sick,” he assures you, puffing throatily. “I never get sick.”

He licks Saskia’s bathsalts from the swollen underside of your tits. You gather palmfuls of warm water and pour them over his freckled skin, watching it bloom florid. Are you clean now? Are you shameless? Has the stink gone? Sort of.

Maybe, for a second there.

But Christmas day seeps in like another reek. You feel bad when you catch whiff. You feel the stroke of midnight in your bones, and you think you can hear Carol of the Bells. You feel especially bad, because you’re holding onto his shoulders and fucking yourself on his unhewn cock, the bathwater swashing tepid around you. And he licks the silver crucifix in the dewy valley of your breasts into his mouth, and sucks on it, and looks at you like he’s trying to make a point. He sees you frown.

The pendant glints between his teeth as he says, “Don’t worry, He’s not paying attention. It’s His birthday.”

And you duck your head to laugh.

The water ripples. He wraps his arms around you in a halfway embrace, halfway detainment. You can tell he is worried you will find your morals and leave him cold.

But you won’t.

He’s big enough that he won’t just slip out of you, even in the water. You’re all steamdizzy, eyes halfmast. You watch rivulets of condensation dance down the tiling.

Are you really about to fall asleep on this man’s cock in his sister’s bathtub? Perhaps. There is something grounding about his heavy presence in all four corners of you. You feel that mollifying pressure in your head. Your hands scrabble and slip all over the skin of his shoulders. You kiss all these droplets off his skin.

“I think I’m about to throw up,” he whispers in your ear.

You pull back and sigh. He does look quite waxen and wheyfaced. You feel bad. You were starting to think that you alone could break the fever.

Your knee knocks against the tub. He has to tug himself out of you. He clambers out of the water, puddles splashing everywhere. He slumps to the ground like marmalade, his arms drape the toiletseat, his head in the bowl. Runnels drip off him and sop the bathmat. He spits and heaves. Then he retches. There is nothing solid to the bile. When was the last time he ate something? His viscera slops out of him and into the water. The gin scalds twice as sore on the way up. He sounds horrifying. His lips drip with mucus.

He feels your soft, moist flesh against his back. Your arms around his toned middle. You feel his ribcage tremble against you.

He feels the bone of your chin against the crown of his head.

Patrick knows this is all very repulsive. He's not sure why you're holding him. Maybe you're picturing a baby again.

“What would you get me for Christmas?” he murmurs, his heavy breath echoing around the toilet bowl.

You can smell his puke.

“Um— well... you know, Giselle actually—”

“No,” he grunts stubbornly. “I mean, if you could get me anything, what would you get me?”

“I don’t know,” you say, pressing your wet breasts against his wet back. The humidity is starting to disperse, the trickles cooling off. You do get sick. You get sick quite frequently, actually. This will definitely make you sick. He’ll be gone soon enough, and that’s probably for the best, but who will hold you in your ailing?

“Come on, babe.”

You drag your fingertips down the hair on his abs until you reach the thatch between his legs. “I don’t know… A hot stone massage?”

And it’s cruel and stupid and funny—it’s something only a few people would ever understand. He and Art and Sas and Tash and you. Maybe Lili, one day.

You and Patrick burst into laughter at the same time. He chuckles until he’s wheezing. The sound of it catches in his throat like a fishbone. This is what constitutes a happy moment for him.

“That’s perfect,” he mumbles into the shitter.

[charmsponies]

Camping 👍👍👍

[does-it-introject]

QUEUE CHECKLIST

[pt: Queue Checklist /end pt]

... will get updated every once in a while! Also hidden below the cut due to the amount of requests!

In the queue waiting is:

17776 / 20020 (by Jon Bois)

Minecraft (Game)

Chicory: A Colorful Tale

Murder Drones

Subnautica (Franchise)

Danganronpa

Jujutsu Kaisen

Dungeon Meshi

Mass Effect (Series)

Danger Days: The True Life Of Fabulous Killjoys

Lord Of The Rings

Fallout 4

QSMP

Transformers

Amphibia

Sk8 The Infinity

Hermitcraft

Owl House

Creepypasta

Life Series

Once Human

Star Trek (Franchise)

Bluey

My Hero Academia

VTubers

Skibidi Toilet

Demon Slayer

Ride The Cyclone

Dandy's World

Robert De Niro

Neon Genesis Evangelion

Poppy Playtime

How To Train Your Dragon

Komi Can't Communicate

Madoka Magica

Deadlock

Full Metal Alchemist (2003)

Mandela Catalogue

Overwatch

Voltron Legendary Defenders

Good Omens

The Walten Files

Chainsaw Man

Outlast

Spookys Jumpscare Mansion

SCP Universe

Class Of 09

Remnant: From The Ashes

Full Metal Alchemist: Brotherhood

Arcane

Hiveswap

Warcraft Universe (WOW, Warcraft, ...)

Friendsim

Inscryption

Starcraft (Franchise)

Vocaloid

Still Wakes The Deep

Roblox

Riverdale

Hazbin Hotel

Red Dead Redeption 2 (RDR2)

Monster High

Doom 64

Into The Spiderverse

Spider Gang (Music Collective)

Silent Hill (Universe)

Helldivers 2

The Magnus Archives

Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU)

DC Cinematic Universe

My Demon (Kdrama)

Needy Streamer Overload

Stardew Valley

Honkai Star Rail

Hellpoint

Alien vs. Predators

Cookie Run (Franchise)

OneShot

Critical Role

Castlevania

Markiplier Cinematic Universe

Gravity Falls

Palworld

Stray Kids (Kpop)

Soul Eater

Bendy And The Ink Machine (Universe)

Shakespeare

Ace Attorney

Kid Icarus

Slimecicle Cinematic Universe

Signalis

LGBTQ+

Kancolle

Loop SMP

Parkour Civilization

Warframe

Jacksepticeye Cinematic Universe

Sherlock BBC

Dimension 20

Friends (/factives, not the show)

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2012)

Tiger X Bunny

Just Shapes And Beats

Puyo Puyo

Tale Of The Nine Tailed

Wuthering Waves

Alter Ego (Mobile Game)

Warhammer

What Remains Of Edith Finch

My Little Pony

Rabbit And Steel

GrayStillPlays

Magic The Gathering

Epic The Musical

Azur Lane

Magical Girl Raising Project

Nevermore (Webtoon)

Destiny 2

Numbers

Remnant II

Vermintide I and II

Mr. Robot

Severance

Sailor Moon

Eddsworld

Kingdom Hearts

Dead By Daylight

Arknights

Kamen Rider

Ni No Kuni

Arrow (TV Show)

Nimona

RWBY

I'm The Grim Reaper (Webtoon)

Welcome To Demon School Iruma-kun! (Mairimashita Iruma-kun)

Call Of Duty

Plants Vs Zombies (Original Game)

#Actually Plural (The Tag)

The Concept Of Math

The Evillious Chronicles

Cry Of Fear

Kingdom Hearts

Family Members

Resident Evil (Franchise)

Lego Ninjago

Five Nights At Freddys (Rerun)

Umbrella Academy

Professor Layton

Helluva Boss

I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream

Zenless Zone Zero

JoJos Bizarre Adventure

Steven Universe

Warrior Cats

Fight Club (Rerun)

Bojack Horseman

Battle For Dream Island

Spongebob Squarepants

House MD (Show)

Team Fortress 2

RanFren

Colors

Land Of The Lustrous

NomNomNami Games (Collectively)

Pressure (Roblox)

The Amazing Digital Circus (TADC)

The Coffin Of Andy And Leyley (TCOAAL)

Ic3speak (Band)

Baldurs Gate 3

Ensemble Stars / Enstars

Star Wars (Franchise)

Kirby (Franchise)

The Batfam

Tokyo Mew Mew

The Beatles

Osomatsu-san

Undertale AUs (generally)

Apps (like, on the phone)

Welcome Home

Dead Poets Society

Zero Day

Voices Of The World

ContentSMP (by DoctorR4t)

BigTop Burger (Show)

The Hunger Games

Doors (Roblox)

Percy Jackson

Shin Megami Tensei

Lucifer (Show)

[danjaley]

Links to Simsxolove's Hair and Accessories

(EA Hair Age Conversions, BGC Hair, Accessory hats, some Clothing. Not covered are Sims and Wall-Art.)

This creator is no longer active for Sims 3 and their cc-posts have been deleted. This is a directory to their downloads. There are no previews in this post (it's long enough as it is). There are previews included in the downloads though, and it's mostly EA meshes.

This directory will most likely get updated in the future.

The links called "Dropbox" and "Mega" lead to the original creator's uploads.

Some files are backuped in this SFS folder (by @parystrange), these are named "SFS Pary". Links to my own backup folder are named "SFS Danjaley". This one only has files I couldn't find elsewhere. If any of the links get broken in the future, let me know, so I can provide a backup.

*Polygon warning: A user alerted me to high polygon counts on the following hairs: All IP BGC Hairs; CF MSS RoSweet; CF Store Fun Flower. These may have happened by merging morphstates. In general, the meshes are EAxis and therefore within the game's recommended dimensions. For alternatives, see here.

Abbreviations: A: Adult, C: Child, P: Toddler, F: Female, M: Male, U: Unisex. WA: World Adventures, UNI: University Life, SHT: Showtime, MSS: Mastersuite Stuff; BGC: Basegame Compatible

Original Dropbox Parent Folders

Hair, Clothes, Accessories (The folders Lots, Houses, Poses and Posters have been deleted)

Individual Sets

Basegame Compatible Hair and unaltered Store Content

(As far as could be found:)

Generations: Mega

University Life: Dropbox

Late Night Female Hair: Mega

Late Night Male Hair: Mega

Seasons Female Hair: Mega

Master Suite Stuff: Dropbox

Surf's Up Sun and Fun (Store Set): Dropbox

High End Loft Female Hair: Mega

Katy Perry Female Hair: Mega

Decades Female Hair: Mega

Movie Stuff Hair: SimFileshare

Island Paradise*: Dropbox

Island Paradise Part 2*: Dropbox

(Warning: All IP hairs have five-fold polygon counts due to an error in the conversion process.)

EA Hats converted Hair-to-Accessory

"Smoke 'N Mirrors": AU: Side-Cap, Knitted Basegame Beanie / AU+CU: Cat, Back-Cap): Dropbox

Knitted Hipster Beanie: Dropbox

Pompom [Toddler] Hat for AU: Dropbox

"Updated Hats + 2 Bonuses": Aviator (All Ages), Panda (All Ages); AF: Hippie Flower Headband, Bouffant Bun Headband, Mastersuite Bow: Dropbox

"Dehairified Hats for Kids": [Link broken and I couldn't identify the content]

"Hanky Panky" Accessory Hats. AU: Cowboy Hat, Military Cap, French Beret: Dropbox

Beanie by Nouk: Box

"Hats 8)" AU Baker Cap, Top Hat, Diesel Baseball Cap: Dropbox

"Misc. Hats": AU: Super Skunk Hat, Baker Cap, Baseball Cap, Diesel Cap, Top Hat AF: Mysterium Hat AF+CF: Side Bow; AU+CU: University Beanie. Dropbox

"Misc" [Backup of the last two Hat-Sets mixed together because I couldn't find the links first]: SFS Danjaley

Hair Edit Adult

Katy Perry Cookie Hair Edit (AF): Dropbox (See also here)

EA Hair Conversions Adult to Child and Toddler

Toddler+Child Conversions (Store Hairs. CF: Side Ponytail Chic, Pop Star Hairstyle, CM: The Roaring 20s, Knitted Beanie; PF: Side Ponytail Chic, Killer Curls; PM: The Roaring 20s): Dropbox

"4 Conversions" Store Hairs. CF: Pompom Hat (Panda), The Blake, Pert Pixie, The Alana: Dropbox

"That Boy"/ More Conversions. Hair AM to CM. Store: Duck's Tail, Little Louie, The Duude, AMB: Romantic, SHT: Blown Back Gel; UNI Beanie Loose: Dropbox

"4 More Hair Conversions" Hair AF to CF. SHT: Performer, UNI: Braid Band, Side Pony; MSS: RoBow. Dropbox

"Easy Peasy" Store Hair AF to CF: Bewitching Bun, Killer curls, Wilderness Braid: Dropbox

"Cheeky Monkey" Store Hair Conversions Pt. 2: Store Hair AF to CF: Over Shoulder Braid, Side Swept, Sitcom Style, Valley Girl. Dropbox

"Little Miss" / Store Conversions Pt. 1: Store Hair AF to CF: Braided Band, Hello Angel, Derby Delight, Modern Braids, Bountiful Beret, Dolly Darling, Bound Up Bows: Dropbox | Derby Delight Hat fixed (enabled all 4 channels): SFS Danjaley

"Random EP Hair Conversions Pt. 2". AM to CM. SN: Long Wavy, UNI: Fly Bangs. Dropbox

"Random EP Hair Conversions". AF to CF. SN: Bob Bangs, Princess Hair, Elegance, UNI: Braided Bun, Cheer Short; SHT: Ponytail Emo. Dropbox

"Pastel Crayons": AF to CF. Store: Brassy Lassy Bob, Can't Stop Cool Hat, Fortune Teller, High Bun; IP: Waterfall; MSS: RoSweet*; Basegame: Low Ponytails. SFS Pary |

"Snow Angels": AM to CM and PM IP: Wetmess; Store: Finsout, Loose Curl, Practical Curls (PM). SFS Pary

"Petite Princesse": Store, AF to CF: Dramatic Ponytail, Almost There Hair; CF to PF: Hello Angel, Braids and Roses: SFS Pary

"Snowfall": AF to CF Store: Funflower*, Wavy Bob. SFS Pary

"Toddler Conversions EA Textures": AF and CU to PF/PU Store: Pompom Hat Bear, Wavy Bangs, Wild Bed Head. SFS Pary

Clothing

"Polyamorous": Four edited Diesel Stuff Jeans: Dropbox

Hellokittysailormoon Leggings: SFS Pary

Adventuretime Leggings: SFS Pary