#Spain in particular is HORRIBLE about this

[ellieslaces]

NOTHING’S GONNA HURT YOU, BABY.

featuring: leon kennedy x fem!agent!reader x ashley graham

synopsis: ashley graham's biggest weakness is attractive people, especially kind, attractive people. she was not expecting to be saved by two of the hottest, kindest people she'd ever met, much less to end up crushing on the both of them

content warnings: harsh language; mentions of violence; tension; lots of flirtatious banter; ashley shooting her shot for an entire fic basically; mentions of reader being bisexual; light smut; kissing (f!f & f!m); one bed trope; forced proximity; no real smut bc idk how to write a threesome :(

notes: takes place on the way back from Spain (technically post RE4R); one bed-ish trope (r&leon share a bed, and a room with ashley); ashley is sort of confused about her sexuality; semi-established relationship (r&leon); really more of a sibling dynamic between ashley and leon (it sounds weird, but its balanced in the actual fic, i promise)

word count: 6.13k (i’m so sorry)

chloe talks: was this entirely inspired by @postersofleon ? yeah, i read this post a week or so ago and i'm losin' sleep over it. so full credits to @postersofleon for the plot! luv their lil' drabble :) also, sorry this isn't more of a threesome fic. if it were a triple female threesome, i could work with that, but add a dick into it, i'm clueless. anyways, enjoy ashley fumbling for this whole fic (luv her, i just can't help embarrassing her shes so cute). also, please appreciate this, i wrote around 80% of this while i was supposed to be studying for an exam. that’s on adhd and procrastination :)

now playing: Nohings Gonna Hurt You Baby; Cigarettes After Sex

It is entirely possible that blondes were, indeed, your weakness. Sure, over the years, you'd come to realize there was something especially alluring about lighter hair - possibly the way it reminded you of the sun, or how each strand looked like spun gold. Although, what seemed to seal your fate was the ever dangerous pairing of blonde hair and blue eyes. Oh, how alluring and damning was the color of icy blue coupled with silvery, silken strands.

For a time, you believed your weakness was encompassed only within your field partner, Leon S. Kennedy. God, how handsome was that agent. Not only handsome, but brave, and kind - awkwardly so, but it really is the principle of the thing. It was painstakingly obvious to everyone, other than Leon it seemed, that you were completely and forlornly in love with him. It seemed you were equally as blind to the evidence that Leon Kennedy was also miserably in love with you.

But the one person who noticed it upon first glance was Ashley Graham. Not only for the clear obviousness of the situation, but because the feeling was entirely, and unfortunately mutual. And it was this girl who also awoke the realization within you that Leon was not the only blonde-haired, blue-eyed person you found enticing.

Though, you were not the only one in this clandestine triad who had an impending weakness for certain types of people. No, you were not, Ashley had an Achilles heel for graciously kind people. Not just kind, but attractive. Not in a shallow or superficial way, but to say more that a person would catch her eye. She had no pre-existing physical type - no particular hair color, eye color, or even height preference. Just that they be kind. And much to the First Daughter's dismay, you were both horribly kind. In your own respective ways, of course.

Leon — as aforementioned — was awkwardly kind, despite how well he meant. He never knew exactly how to word his concern, or how to come about comforting someone. It was usually said in simple phrases such as “you okay?” or in way of one of many snarky comments he had stored in the deep recesses of his mind. Ashley thought he was funny; sometimes.

You, on the other hand, were painfully sweet to her. Always reassuring her that she was okay, and you were going to keep her safe. Field medic, that’s how Leon explained your role in her rescue. You were there to keep her and Leon healthy and in one piece, which you were startlingly good at. Any bruise or cut she procured was immediately treated by your sweet disposition and skilled hands. She liked how gentle you were with her.

So yes, Leon was kind in an awkward manner, and you were kind in a practical sense. And that devastating combination was her inevitable downfall.

From the moment you and Leon found her in that church, she knew she was fucked. Because, how could people look that good while doing the sort of jobs you had? There was no way, no way she would ever be able to form coherent sentences around you two. But, somehow, by some miracle, she got on with you both quite well. Despite the obvious moments of third-wheel-ism because you and Leon were so close.

There where multiple reoccurring occasions where Ashley suspected the pair of you may be together. Or at least fucking on the side. Because no two people who are just partners have that dynamic. The constant tension, the way Leon could be protective or even overbearing sometimes. The way you would rush to his side to patch up his wounds — no matter how small and minuscule they were — after a fight. Sometimes, despite how endearing it could be, Ashley was annoyed. Sure, you two had known each other for an extended period of time and had just met Ashley that day. But, it became so aggravating when you would consult each other without the inclusion of Ashley.

Many times you would apologize to her, expressing how sorry you were for leaving her out of conversations or hypothetical battle plans. It wasn’t that either of you thought she was stupid or couldn’t handle it. No, it was more along the lines that you were used to it just being the two of you. There was rarely ever a third party involved — other than Hunnigan chatting away in your ear pieces of course — in these types of situations.

Ashely was smitten, to put it lightly. She’d made several attempts to quote-unquote ‘shoot her shot’ with Leon. Little comments of how brave he was, how thankful she was for his saving her. Even calling him her ‘hero’ on one occasion or another. His name had posted permanent residence in her vocabulary it seemed.

However, her means of flattery with you was completely different. She was a little more bold with you, seeing as you were more of an open person than Leon was. She partook in the cliche, yet never failing flirtatious mannerisms — simple touches, giggling at your jokes, or simply sticking to your side in dangerous situations. It wasn’t that you didn’t notice, no, you just turned a conscious blind eye to it all. Ashley was a college girl, a sorority girl, a privileged girl. She was probably used to using flattery to get what she wanted, to gain the attention she so desperately thrived on.

Though as your time in the hostile Spanish village went on, you came to realize that it wasn’t superficial, Ashley’s flattery toward you and your field partner. Absolutely not, far from it. You realized after Leon had carried her to Luis’ laboratory and you managed to get the machine working to expel the parasite from her body, that Ashley was totally and completely smitten with the pair of you. She was attached in the worst way. And that would be your inevitable downfall.

Leon was consciously blind to it. Your partner — no matter his selfless tendencies and his awkwardly kind nature — was melancholic. He had a firm belief he was predestined to be miserable. That there was always another shoe waiting to drop. He didn’t deserve happiness, peace, love, a good life. So, he ignored it. He ignored how Ashley was equally as taken with him as she was with you. He didn’t bring it up, he didn’t even act like he noticed. Oh, but you did.

You saw the attachment so clearly by the time the three of you had managed to escape the crumbling island via Ada Wong’s gifted jet ski that Ashely was so attached to the pair of you. She’d offered positions on her own personal detail to you, claiming she could put a word in with her father. Denials were made, kind smiles and the shaking of heads. Too kind of an offer and you liked your jobs, is what you’d told her. That wasn’t at all what you were thinking though.

Post a Hunnigan meltdown over your earpieces, the three of you were told to stay the night in a shabby, rundown little local hotel in a larger town a couple dozen miles south of the village. Still in Spain, still tired, still craving a warm shower. One room, two beds. Great, one of you was stuck sleeping with someone. Ashely offered for one of you to have a bed to yourself, she’d sleep with the other. Not a great idea. You and Leon — having spent many awkward and difficult missions together, so this was not strange to either one of you — decided on giving Ashley a bed to herself and taking the other together

If you’d been alone, oh how your lovestruck little heart would have burst. Sharing a bed with Leon Kennedy, the object of your affection. The sole performer in your wildest — and wettest — dreams. But you weren’t alone. Ashley was in the room, a matter of feet away, in her own double sized bed.

If she hadn’t been — to be vulgar and completely honest — nothing would have stopped you from fucking him then and there. The tension between the pair of you had been growing thicker since your arrival in Spain. It was thick, painfully so, and also horrifically obvious not only to you, but yet again, to Ashley. For the longer stretch of the mission, she’d expected a grand confession at any moment. A breakdown caused by a dangerous situation that ensued a moment of emotional and even physical vulnerability. But, to her dismay and yours, that never happened. Because, above all things, Leon was professional for a lack of a better word. He wasn’t going to allow his emotions to jeopardize the mission.

And so no breakdown of emotional distress and vulnerability played out. No confession of hearts bleeding for the other were cried out. Part of you was glad it hadn’t happened that way. But the larger part of your soul which was dedicated to Leon had wished it had. You longed for the day he realized he needed you too. But, to maintain professionalism and dignity, neither of you made such admissions.

Warm showers were taken in rotation in the tiny excuse for a bathroom. The shower was small and permanently stained with grime, but really was clean as the owner swore. The shower head was one of the older ones from the seventies that made the water come out in a dribble, then a forceful rainfall that hurt your back. The toiletries provided by the hotel were small and cheap, but you were clean. That’s all that mattered.

Sans dried blood and grime, you sat on Ashley’s bed, cross legged as you patched up each one of her injuries. Ashley had been the first to shower, after a fifteen minute debate with the two of you over who should go first. She had a few bandages and exposed scrapes that needed to be re-cleaned. So, with gentle hands you did so as Leon took use of his turn to shower.

“Looks good, no signs of infection so far. But, like I said before, I can’t tell too much without the right equipment.” You reassured Ashely as you finished patching up a cut on her arm and began to put your first aid kit back together.

“Thanks,” Ashley nodded, inspecting her scrape riddled skin. Small bruises and surface cuts were beginning to make their appearance, telltale signs of the brutality the three of you had endured in that village.

“Let me know if you feel feverish or see any swelling. That could mean infection.” You offered, being kind but stern.

“‘Kay,” the girl nodded, smiling up at you as you let out a sigh, leaning back on your hands on the bed.

You looked at her, smiling softly as your head tilted to the side a little. “Need me to kiss it better?”

At this, Ashley’s eyes went wide, her cheeks dusted with pink. You felt a little bad then, you just tried to ease the tension. “S’okay, Ashley. I was just playing.” You laughed, your tone lighthearted as you placed a gentle hand on her knee with an equally gentle smile.

It seemed the touch was worst than the comment. Ashley’s entire face went aflame, her eyes wide, and large as she stared at you. An uneasy ache settled in your chest, uncertainty lingering in the air as your smile faded. The initial shock between the pair of you didn’t last long as the door to the bathroom swung open.

“Jesus, you could’ve left me some hot water.” Leon grumbled as he stepped out into the room, lips downturned and brows etched in an annoyed frown.

The three of you were now paused as Leon’s eyes fell on you and Ashely — or more-so on the hand that rested on Ashley’s knee. Reality seemed to snap into place all at once for you, yanking your hand back and standing up.

“Let me check you out.” You mumbled, clearing your throat as you picked up the first aid kit and took residence on your own bed.

“No, I’m fine. Check on Ashley,” Leon shook his head, damp blond strands sticking to his forehead.

“Already did. Just finished. Your turn, whether you like it or not.” You stated, your tone final as you looked up at Leon, brows raised.

The agent let out a huff of agitation, grumbling something indiscernible as he sat down on the bed beside you. You began to gently inspect Leon's wounds- some small, others more intense. Despite his prior hesitation to be taken care of, he was stoic about it all. He sat still, unmoving, silent as you worked to disinfect and cover each wound with fresh bandages. The silence in the room was loud, startlingly uncomfortable as you patched Leon up.

A quick glance over at Ashley as you finished bandaging a deep cut that you'd quickly stitched up on the field showed her wide eyes. Wide baby blue focused on the way your fingers gently worked, how graceful and careful they were again the alabaster tone of Leon's skin.

"Doing okay over there, blondie?” Leon inquired, a small smirk playing on his face as he spotted Ashley's startling gaze on the wounds decorating his skin. He had mistook her fascination of your hands as nervousness of his wounds. But you knew. You could tell what her gaze meant.

"Oh, yeah. M'fine." Ashley recovered very quickly, to your surprise. Well, maybe it wasn't just your hands that had her enraptured, Leon was sitting on the bed, shirtless.

"Alright, hero-boy, all better." You smiled at Leon as you patted his bicep - earning a small, almost inaudible grumble from him - and moving to close your medical kit. You stood, tucking away in your pack and let out a sigh. "’Kay, l for one, am fucking exhausted."

“Yeah, me too,” Ashely murmured, an aura of discomfort still radiating from her. She offered a kind, if not awkward smile to the pair of you before settling into the bed, pulling the overs over her shoulders. “G’night.”

“‘Night,” you smiled, shuffling over to the bed you and Leon were sharing. You sat down on the edge, eyes trained on the back of Ashley’s head — the blonde hair, how it shimmered against the dim light of the single lamp in the room. You felt almost as if you weren’t really there.

“Need me to check you?” Leon asked, snapping you back to reality. You jolted a bit, looking at him from over your shoulder.

“Oh, nah, I’m okay.” You shook your head, clearing your throat as you settled into the bed, flicking off the lamp.

“Okay,” Leon shrugged, getting into the bed too, still in just a pair of pants. Everyone was in the barest of clothing. You in a tank top and underwear — Ashely in the same. It was all you had. All your clothes were soiled with dirt, and grime, and blood.

Thinking of nothing in particular, you laid there, staring up at the ceiling of the dark room. The walls creaked every once in a while, odd drafts filtered in from cracks in the ceiling or from the window. It was too quiet. And it stayed that way for a long while.

“Everything okay with Ashley?” Leon asked, his voice quiet, as not to wake the subject of conversation.

“Yeah, everything’s fine.” You mumbled back, turning your head. He, too, was on his back. Both of you too afraid to face each other in bed, seeming too personal. “Why?”

“Just making sure.” His response was quiet, a little too nonchalant, as if he’d forced it to be casual. “It was awkward earlier.”

“Earlier?” You decided to play dumb, despite knowing that Leon wouldn’t believe it. He was well aware you knew what he was talking about. The touch. How Ashley had frozen when you’d touched her leg.

“Whatever, play stupid.” He scoffed with a half smile — a knowing smile. The bastard. “Just saying, she seems attached to you.”

“Oh, and she’s not with you, her hero?” You bit back with a hint of humor. Your voices were still low, hoping Ashely was asleep — or she couldn’t hear you if she wasn’t.

Leon laughed quietly, a rough scoff sound that echoed in your ears. You smiled at little at that sound. “Whatever you say,”

You frowned, gaining the confidence to shuffle onto your side, facing him as you contemplated what that simple, yet heavy ‘whatever’ meant. “What do you mean, whatever?”

Leon sighed, rolling onto his side to face you too. His eyes, still so blue even in the darkness of the motel room, bore into yours. It seemed he didn’t carry the same awkward feeling about this topic as you did. Or, maybe he did and he just hid it exceptionally well. But knowing him, that didn’t seem right.

“She’s just attached to you. Always at your side, or chatting your ear off. And what the hell was with that earlier?” He continued, brows furrowed in their eternal frown.

“I was patching her up. Making sure none of her cuts were infected.” You half shrugged, trying to play it off as something simple, even though it was so complex.

“She looked like she wanted to kiss you or something.”

“Oh, my God,” you rolled your eyes, trying to push away the way your chest tightened at the though. “You’re so fucking dramatic. She wasn’t gonna kiss me.”

“Okay,” Leon shrugged, his tone final and casually dismissive. Like he was finished talking about it. Like he didn’t believe you but didn’t want to say so.

“She was not going to kiss me.” You pushed, voice quiet yet firm. Your own brows were pulled into a frown, like what he’d said was offensive.

But it wasn’t. Kissing Ashley wasn’t a bad thought. It wasn’t as if you’d never kissed another girl before. The first time you had was in the training program for USSTRATCOM, your training partner who made you realize that all girls don’t look at other girls that way. She was the first, others followed.

Ashley was pretty, very pretty. Tall, pretty lips, and the blonde hair, blue eye thing, of course. Kissing her wouldn’t be so bad, really. It would probably be very nice. But nothing like kissing Leon, though.

“Okay.” Leon said again, shifting to lay on his back again, letting his eyes close. The finality of it all aggravated you. So, you asked him a question maybe you shouldn’t have.

“What if she did?” You asked, eyes narrowed and trained on him. A smile bloomed on your face at the way his eyes opened, his brows furrowing deeper at your question.

“What about it? It’s not my business.” Leon grumbled. But the tone he used made it wound like it was very much his business.

“M’kay.” You nodded, quietly celebrating to the way you’d seemed to have stumped him, surprised him.

For a moment, he didn’t respond. He stared at the ceiling, and you stared at him. It was deadly quiet, the rhythmic sound of Ashley’s breathing the sole sound in the room.

“Did you want her to?” Leon asked, mumbling quietly. His eyes stayed on the ceiling, as if he were afraid to look you in the eye when you answered. Afraid you had an answer he wouldn’t like.

“I dunno.” You admitted, honestly. You didn’t know, truly you didn’t. Kissing Ashely wouldn’t be so bad, but you hardly knew the girl. Not to mention her heavy attachment to you. It could get worse if she kissed you.

Leon nodded, not sure of how to answer your admission. He laid there, your eyes on him as you laid on your side. You wished so desperately for him to kiss you, or hold you, or do something. It was painful, the thought that he didn’t feel the same.

“Would that bother you?” You dared to ask, voice so low it was almost inaudible as you spoke.

Leon was still quiet for a long moment, maybe considering whether to answer seriously or with his usual dry humor. The latter won. “Not something I’d wanna walk in on.”

You scoffed, rolling your eyes. “Why? Because we’re girls?”

“Because she’d be kissing you.” He responding, saying it lightly, like the meaning of that simple sentence wasn’t the heaviest thing you’d ever heard.

Your mind did circles, your heart raced. Did he mean that because you were his partner? Or did he mean it out of jealousy. God, you hoped it was jealousy.

“What do you mean by that?” You questioned, voice apprehensive and unsure.

Leon shrugged, a soft, unintelligible grunt falling from his lips. He didn’t look over at you, his eyes still trained on the ceiling. The nagging feeling that was ever present in your chest worsened. The silence was deafening, painful. Then, finally, he spoke.

“It’d just be weird. It’s Ashely, it’d be weird.” He mumbled, like even he didn’t believe his own answer.

Leon’s words befuddled you, made you frown in contemplation. “Because it’s Ashley? What you mean by that?”

“I mean it’s Ashley. It’d be weird.” He repeated, not clarifying at all. This annoyed you.

Eyes narrowed, lips in a line, you scoffed. “Thanks for the explanation.”

“Anytime,” Leon clipped back playfully. But you were in no playful mood.

You huffed, Leon picking up on your attitude as you sat up in bed. “Seriously, what’d you mean by that?”

Leon let out a scoff of his own, rolling his eyes as he looked over at you. “I mean it’s just a weird thought. You and Ashley. We, we just met her, okay?”

“Oh,” you nodded, wishing you hadn’t jumped to your own conclusions internally. You’d thought he meant it was weird because she wasn’t him. Or maybe that he wanted to kiss you. Not such a simple and obvious answer.

“Yeah,” he nodded, letting out a small sigh to stifle a yawn. “Look, can we get some sleep now? Kinda have a long trip home tomorrow.”

“Yeah. Yeah, sorry.” You mumbled, lying back down on your back, eyes on the cracked ceiling once again.

It was quiet again, the discomfort of silence present once more as Ashley slept in the bed next to yours, and Leon tired to sleep beside you. Your mind buzzed with a thousand variations of the same question: why did Leon actually care so damn much?

“Go to sleep. You think too loud.” Leon grumbled, shifting to lay on his side, back facing you.

“At least some of us think,” you quipped quietly, earning a scoff of a laugh from him before he went silent for the final time that night.

Of course Leon woke up at dawn. The asscrack of fucking dawn. And it wasn’t like he was quiet either. Shuffling of his feet as he stumbled to the bathroom, the sink creaking on. You tried so hard to stay asleep, but your stupid internal alarm clock was ringing too. Oh to be in D.C. where it was still dark.

“C’mon, get up. We need to get moving.” Leon said, his voice somewhat gentle as he rested a hand on your shoulder once he’d emerged from the bathroom, fully changed.

“I’m up. You’re loud.” You mumbled, voice muffled as you pressed your face into the pillow.

“Jesus,” Leon whispered under his breath. “Even Ashely’s up.”

“Good for her,” you nestled deeper into the pillow, hearing a second set of footsteps head toward the bathroom. Less than five short seconds later, Leon yanked the covers from your body, sending a muffled yelp from your lips.

“Up, we need to move.” Leon said again, giving your leg a small shake as you grumbled on about a lack of sleep. His gentleness was gone now, replaced by urgency.

Technically, you were still on ‘enemy grounds’. You weren’t safe until you were back on U.S. soil, and even then there carried a risk with Ashley in tow.

So, with more sour encouragement from Leon, you got up and changed into your now dry clothes. Once Ashely used up her turn in the bathroom, you took yours. And not long after, the three of you were heading back toward the lobby of the shabby motel.

You managed to convince Leon to stick around for an extra thirty minutes for a shitty cooked breakfast in the sad excuse for a dining room where the motel offered complimentary breakfast.

Once full of frozen scrambled eggs, stale toast, and really bad coffee, the three of you were on the move once more. It was tricky, getting home like this. Hunnigan had promised that of you made it to a certain location a few miles north of the motel, there would be a chopper waiting to pick you up. Hunnigan hadn’t failed you yet, so you didn’t doubt her.

“How much further?” Ashley asked, her brows creased, forehead already glistening with sweat as the three of you walked through the winding streets of a small village as you had been for the past few hours.

“Not too much. Tired?” You asked, slowing your steps to walk alongside the girl.

She nodded, wiping her forehead with the back of her hand. Sympathy panged in your chest — Ashley wasn’t built for this like you and Leon were. The two of you had trained for exhausting situations such as these, she had not. You frowned.

“Need some water?” You asked gently, holding out a canteen from your belt. Ashley nodded vigorously, taking the canteen and drinking deeply.

You motioned to Leon to stop for a moment, he frowned, but did nonetheless. You stood with Ashley as she drank, taking a break before going back to drinking the water.

“Thanks,” she smiled, handing the canteen back to you — now half empty. “Sorry, I drank a lot.”

“That’s okay. Can’t have you passing out on us now, can we?” You smiled, taking a sip yourself before latching it back on your belt.

Leon, noticing that Ashely was finished with her break, began walking again. You and Ashely followed, keeping a small bit of distance between you and Leon.

“Hey, I um, I overheard you and Leon talking last night. Not everything, but some of it.” Ashley confessed, her voice a bit hesitant.

“Oh, that so? What’d you hear exactly?” You asked casually, worry springing in your chest.

“Just, I’m sorry because I know you guys have a like, groove or whatever. And I mess it up and I make it weird.”

You frowned for a moment, thinking about her words. Then it hit you — she didn’t hear about the kissing discussion, just the last bit about her being new to the trio.

“Oh, Ashely. You don’t make anything weird. Leon and I… we weren’t talking about you making things weird.” You promised, lips curved downward as you and Ashley walked behind Leon.

“Then why’d Leon say that?” Ashely asked, the insecurity obvious in her voice.

You hesitated, unsure whether or not to say it to her face. That he’d thought you two were going to kiss. After a moment of consideration — and seeing Ashely’s sad, curious eyes — you decided to just say it. Consequences be damned.

“Because he thought you were going to try to kiss me. When he came out of the bathroom last night.” You explained gently, shrugging as if it weren’t a big deal. When it kind of was.

The girl was quiet for a long moment, her brows creased, lips turned downward. She swallowed, looking back at you from where she’d been staring at her feet. “And he meant it’d be weird if I did kiss you?”

“Yeah, that’s what he meant. Not because we’re girls,” you were quick to interject your previous statement. “But because it’s just… that you and I don’t really know each other that well.”

Ashley nodded, walking beside you as you followed Leon along the uneven stone paths. Every once in a while, he’d glance backward to make sure you weren’t lingering behind or somehow gotten lost.

“Okay,” one simple word carried such finality. It shook you — Ashley was uncomfortable.

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to make you feel weird. I just wanted to be honest.” You tried to explain gently but firmly. You didn’t want her to think you were strange.

“You didn’t make me feel weird.” Ashely shook her head, eyes squinting in the mid-afternoon sun as she looked over at you.

You smiled a little, relieved you hadn’t put her off or made her uncomfortable. That really was the last thing you wanted. “Good,”

The three of you continued to walk along, and a little further up, you demanded a break. Leon huffed, claiming you didn’t have time for a break. But the sun was warm and you were quickly running out of water.

So, you stopped for a quick fifteen minutes before setting off again. Leon was walking much quicker than before — dead set on getting to the extraction point before sundown. Which was very much possible as you were a mere four miles away.

There was a chopper waiting, just as Hunnigan had promised. God, you’d mentally decided to name your first born after her, so thankful to finally leave Spain and sit your ass down.

You sat beside Leon in the back compartment of the chopper, all three of you sporting massive headsets to protect your ears. You chatted away with the pilot — a friend of Hunnigan’s named Danny who was funny, and reminded you of the late Mike who died in pursuit of getting you and Leon out of trouble in the village.

With the promise of a good meal and actual hot showers, Danny flew the three of you home. You were busy looking outside the chopper when Leon nudged your knee with his, earning a slightly venomous glare from you before he pointed to Ashley. Who was dead asleep across from you.

The ride back to D.C. was long, around six hours. Most of which were spent talking with Danny or falling asleep, slumped against Leon’s shoulder. Around twenty minutes before you were set to land — you and Leon had been previously discussing what you were doing first, eating, sleeping, or showering — you shook Ashley awake.

The poor thing was groggy and half asleep as you all filed off the chopper and bid goodbye to Danny — whom you’d made a promise to meet up with and have drinks in honor of Mike at his favorite bar he’d mentioned before he tragically died.

A government issued SUV waited for you, instructing the three of you to pile into the back so you could be taken straight to the President, then to testing. Which you put up a damn good fight. Who the fuck cared about testing? You were hungry and tired and dehydrated as hell. Leon shut you up quick though, despite not being happy about the arrangement himself.

Unfortunately, the car ride was around a half an hour. The driver — not as intimidating had he’d first appeared — flicked between radio stations ntil he landed on one he knew was Ahsley’s favorite. (Apparently he’d been the one to drive Ashely to college, so he knew what music she liked).

Much to Ashely’s dismay and deathly embarrassment, the fucking Backstreet Boys were playing. The driver turned it up, also having the knowledge that this particular track was one of Ashley’s favorites.

Unfortunately, you knew the lyrics too. You mumbled along with them, Leon biting back a smile at how ridiculous his own field partner could be.

“You like the Backstreet Boys?” Ashely asked, her cheeks a bit warm as you bopped your head to the beat and hummed along.

“Nah, but don’t be embarrassed.” You shook your head, smiling at the girl who was sitting between you and Leon.

“Music is music, blondie.” Leon agreed, nodding his head with your positive attitude. He looked back over Ashely’s head at you, trying hard not to smile at your antics. God, you could be so stupidly immature sometimes.

“Oh,” Ashley mumbled, slinking down further in her seat as the driver made the final turn and parked the SUV.

Leon exited first, then Ashley, and you to follow up the rear. You and Leon were armed, still charged with protecting Ashely, no matter the fact that you were indeed on U.S. soil again, and at the White House. The President didn’t greet you outside to your surprise, but you were ushered immediately to his office.

There he was reunited with his daughter, the emotional moment making you have to quietly clear your throat because it even choked you up to see Ashley so happy to see her father again.

You and Leon were thanked profusely, promised your compensation and the highest of honors and awards. To which you didn’t really want (except the money, fuck, you wanted the money), but you knew better than to even try to deny.

With that, you and Leon were quickly dismissed, told you were being led to government testing to be sure you really were clear of the parasites. You gave Ashley a quick goodbye smile and hug, Leon giving her a pat on the shoulder, telling her to behave herself.

She looked so unsure, so strange standing in the Oval Office, clothes grimy and blood stained, hair mussed as she watched you and Leon being escorted from the room.

The First Daughter felt a strange sort of emptiness in her chest then, watching you leave. Her brows furrowed as her father spoke incessantly to her about how worried he’d been and how much he missed her. You were agents, assigned to bring her home and leave. No more, no less. So why was she so devastated to see you go?

Of course, you felt a little sad to leave the girl behind. Despite spending only around forty-eight hours with Ashley, you found yourself realizing you’d miss her. Her smile and her comments and her laugh. The way she always asked if you were alright when you should have been doing so to her. How she tried her hardest to defend you and Leon, despite her chronic helplessness.

These things were not spoken to Leon though as you two walked out of the White House together, followed by guards back to the SUV you’d arrived in. But, even though you didn’t say it, you knew Leon felt it too. Somehow, in forty-eight short hours, Ashley had left a mark on you. The both of you. And you missed her already.

“Wait!” You stopped in your tracks, you and Leon almost simultaneously looking over your shoulder to see Ashley running out of the White House after you. She was panting, trying to catch up.

She ran to Leon first, wrapping her arms around his neck, taking the agent by such surprise it made him stumble backwards a bit. Leon wasn’t much of a hugger, you knew this personally. But, despite the action being hesitant and awkward, he hugged her back.

After a few moments — which you knew in your bones were long for Leon — he gave her a quick pat on the back. Ashely took the motion in stride and unlinked herself, smiling at him.

Then, she turned to you. Of course, you expected a hug as well, and you got one. She wrapped her arms around your neck too, you wrapped your arms around her middle, hugging her back with no hesitation. But what you hadn’t expected, was for her to lean back and press a kiss to your lips.

You paused, frozen, eyes wide as Ashley kissed you. What the fuck? She wasn’t a bad kisser, actually. You felt a little bad, not kissing her back as Ashley pulled away, letting go of you and taking a step back. You sort of wished you had kissed her back. But, as the girl stood there, she held no contempt for the fact that you hadn’t. She knew she’d taken you by complete surprise.

“Thank you, both of you. I know I already said it, but thank you for saving my life. It, it means a lot.” Ashely said, her lips — which had been as soft as you thought they were — curved in a sweet smile. Baby blue eyes darted between you and Leon.

Leon who was as shocked as you that Ashley had kissed you with such little hesitation. He was still recovering as well.

Ashely said no more, just offering one last wide smile before turning around and walking away. Her guard — which had followed her outside, running behind her — escorted her. She didn’t even look back, didn’t get a second look at the still shocked look on your face.

“Holy fuck,” you said finally, looking away from Ashley’s retreating figure to look at Leon. He was shocked as well, brows raised as he blinked for a moment.

“Yep, that was weird.” Leon mumbled, nodding as if in affirmation. He said no more, turning around and walking to the SUV, leaving you in momentary silence.

You blinked yourself back to the present, realizing Leon’s comment. You frowned, turning and quickly walking to the SUV as well. “So I didn’t just have a dehydration induced hallucination? She actually kissed me?”

“She actually kissed you,” Leon nodded as he buckled in the SUV, you climbing in and sitting beside him. The car started and rolled out of the parking lot.

“Oh my God.” You said, brows raised, shaking your head. You were unsure of what else there really was to say. You were at a total loss for words.

“Fucking weird.” Leon shook his head, whispering again.

This caused you to look over at him, brows raised. “Why? Because we’re girls?” You brought up your challenge from the previous night, knowing full well you’d get the same damn response.

“No, because it's you.”

You frowned deeper, lips downturned. Oh, you liked a good fucking challenge. “You think I’m like, un-kissable, or something, Kennedy?”

Leon rolled his eyes, exhaustion obviously catching up to him. He looked tired — physically and mentally. “I didn’t say that. It’s just weird.”

“See, that’s not an explanation. Just like it wasn’t last night.” You chided, eyes narrowed.

“Christ,” Leon mumbled under his breath as shook his head, clearly regretting ever speaking in the last five minutes. “It’s just weird to see my partner being kissed like that.”

You took this as your chance, a grin forming on your lips. “By another girl? Or just in general?”

“General.” Leon responded, obviously not caring of how bored it sounded.

“Jealous or something?” You challenged further, lips pulled in a shit-eating grin.

Oh you’d gotten him there. You could tell by the way Leon’s shoulders tensed and his too casual expression that he was, indeed, sickeningly jealous. An idea — stupid, one that may ruin your dynamic — popped into your head.

You turned your body to face Leon in the backseat, grinning as he frowned at your sudden closeness. With no hesitation or moment for him to react, you leaned forward and kissed him. Square on the mouth. It must be a thing for blondes to have really soft lips.

Leon didn’t say a word, didn’t pull back, didn’t move. He just let you kiss him. Which was strange in and of itself. You placed a hand on his cheek, him a hand on the back of your neck. Eureka, he’d wanted to kiss you all along. Fuck yes, that’s all you could think.

Leon was a decent kisser too, a really good kisser actually. You scooched a little closer, allowing him to hold you by the back of your neck, your body relaxed against his as if it were natural to do so.

Was this what Ashely was feeling when she’d kissed you? Absolute elation and joy? You didn’t let yourself wonder too much, getting swept up in the fact that you were kissing Leon. His hand was gentle yet firm on the back of your neck, your hand on his cheek drifting down to rest against his chest. This moment, God you wished it could last forever.

Which unfortunately, it didn’t. You heard someone clear their throat, the driver looking at you through the rear view mirror. You pulled back, cheeks a little warm. You must look like some sort of girl. Someone who got around maybe. First the First Daughter had kissed you, now you were verging on making out with your field partner in the backseat of a government vehicle.

“Sorry,” you mumbled, pulling away from Leon and sitting back on the seat.

Leon scoffed to himself, letting his hand fall from where it’d been resting on the back of your neck. “You’re stupid,”

“Excuse me?” You let out a small laugh. You’d kissed him and he was calling you stupid? What the hell?

“I can’t believe it took you that long to realize.” Leon shook his head, making you roll your eyes. He’d been jealous the whole time. So the comment of how weird it’d been that Ashley would kiss you — and actually had — was exactly what you thought. Huh, you were some amateur detective.

“Shut up,” you smiled, mumbling as you crossed your arms over your chest, sinking into the seat.

“Nope.” Leon shook his head, making you smile wider.

Maybe these tests wouldn’t be so bad, now that you had two kisses to think on. One you could only ever remember, and one you could receive a million more of once all this was over.

how you can help Palestine! 🇵🇸

[skitskatdacat63]

Fernando 2012 Chair Lore (source: me)

So I've been thinking a lot about Fernando sitting in this particular chair in the Ferrari garage in 2012 for [redacted] reasons:

Originally I just wanted to find more pictures of it for reference, and then went down a rabbit hole of 2012 pictures, trying to figure out when exactly the chair came to be. There's so many pictures of him in it, and it's so funny to me to imagine them hauling this super villain chair all around the world for him. And so now I'm obsessed with the evolution of it:

Pre-Chair - Australia to Bahrain:

He just had this little stool, well I should say big because it somehow still manages makes him look small. Clearly not comfortable; to paraphrase @sweatyflytrap, it's not conducive to his inner Shakespeare villain monologues

The Chair Appears - Spain

He suddenly now has this, aforementioned, super villain chair. Several things, why is it like this. It looks like a sim chair almost ngl. And then the weird plexiglass support is confusing me, like where did they get that. It furthers my narrative they just had this chair that they couldn't put in a car so they put that clear bottom on it. Anyways yes good, now he has somewhere to brood

The Chair Evolves - Silverstone

Look!! They gave him a booster seat!!!

The Chair is Now Here to Stay :)

I downloaded a truly horrible amount of pics him in this chair, so now you all must also look at them >:)

*he still had the chair in 2013, but I think they took it away from him in 2014 :( Is nothing sacred in this world??? I hope he got to take it home hahaha

[thenukacolachallenge]

some fun facts about Luis and André Peña(his VA)

(from the Nick Apostolides(Leon Kennedy VA) livestreams, because i think Luis is neato and i liked André's performance, especially for a first-time big VA gig!)

UPDATE: NOW WITH TIMESTAMPS bc someone on the part two of this post asked about them lmfao

-André actually auditioned for the Spanish cops that escort Leon to Valdelobos originally, and went through several more auditions before landing the role of Luis Serra. for his first role on a big project like Resident Evil, that's incredibly impressive! (timestamp)

-Both Nick and André did motion capture for multiple enemies, including André calling his "best role" playing a dead body lmao. He and Nick also did mocap for the Verdugos, Salazar's bodyguards! (timestamp)

-Being that it was such a big role, he was very anxious about the game dropping, from the moment he got cast to the day it dropped. He even apparently asked Nick constantly if he had somehow been recast. (poor dude, as someone with anxiety issues and huge imposter syndrome, i feel for him!!!) Nick gives him a very sweet but stern pep talk about how he earned and deserved his role on stream too, it was a cute moment! (timestamp 1: André first mentioning his nerves) (timestamp 2: second mention of anxiety/Nick's pep talk to André)

-André is a big enough fan of the original to remember where all the treasure used to be! i love when people who are fans of a series get to work on it, dude. in addition, he was also very happy with the direction he was given, and felt that he was allowed to explore Luis as a more fleshed out character. (which he absolutely is, and i love it! Luis in the original was so strange and honestly off-putting imo. fucking ballistics lmao) (timestamp 1: first mention of André knowing a lot about RE4) (timestamp 2: more of André knowing the game) (timestamp 3: MORE of André knowing the game lmao) (there are a lot more than just these. dude is a FAN) (timestamp 4: André talking about direction and Luis)

-He refers to the bag Luis is stuffed into as a "Luis burrito", which is hilarious and adorable. (timestamp)

-(Also, not related to Luis, but Nick yells "YEET" when Leon gets tossed into the wall by Mendez, which is fucking hysterical) (timestamp)

-UPDATE: thank you to tumblr user @hamartia-grander for this detail that i completely missed originally! (timestamp)

(transcript: I hope this okay for me to add, but he also said that in the first scene with Leon and Luis, Luis looks away as Mendéz injects Leon with la plaga because he couldn't watch another person be infected by something horrible he had a hand in creating. Which is easy to infer from that scene, but it was nice that it was a conscious decision on André's part, rather than aimless direction.)

-the first scene André and Nick filmed together was Luis and Leon chained up together! and the first line of Luis's that got revealed was when he said to Leon, "I guess you, me... picked the wrong spot to vacation, eh?" Apparently the mocap for this scene was also very awkward for André, which is totally understandable, considering Luis spends 90% of it getting jerked around by Leon or trying to dodge a Ganado without the use of his hands lol. (timestamp)

-André worked very hard to make sure that Luis's accent was as accurate to Spain's Spanish as it could be, which is awesome, especially for someone who doesn't naturally speak that particular dialect. GOOD ACTING, BABEY (timestamp)

-André owns a legitimate Red 9 gun, the weapon that Luis uses in the game. this is a unique gun bc it was manufactured during the first World War, and it's VERY expensive(they can go up to $10k, but André apparently got his for a great deal!). he also has MADE a copy of the RE4 tactical knife Leon uses, and there's a video up on his youtube channel! (timestamp)

-(not related to Luis, but André also mentioned he has adhd! same buddy!!!) (timestamp)

-OKAY NEW STREAM TIME! This begins part four of Nick's playthrough, and André is a guest once more. All the previous facts are from part one, which is the first one André guested on. According to Nick, André learned how to flip a lighter around his fingers just for Luis, which is awesome. (and he shows off by doing so in stream!!!) (timestamp)

-Ashley's VA, Genevieve Buechner, got asked about her reaction to Luis' infamous "ballistics" line and both her and André aren't sad to see it missing from the remake. André himself makes a comment about how this version of Luis is still flirty without coming across as "creepy" about it. (i find the ballistics line from the original annoying, and it was a huge part of why i didn't care for Luis in og re4, so i too am VERY glad it's gone) (timestamp)

-André jokes about Luis breaking the brake on the minecart: "I react so depressed, like.... 'Guess that's it, bro.' 'Hey man, I tried.'" He really does! it feels like a mix of sheepishness at breaking it in the first place, and just very, resigned and depressed lol. (timestamp)

-Sadly, because he hadn't played up to that point yet, he didn't watch Luis' death scene, and therefore didn't have much to say on it :c

-when the cast was asked what kind of pet each of their characters would have, André said Luis would be a cat person, and he'd probably specifically adopt a stray cat, probably one that "adopted" him first. I definitely agree! (timestamp)

i havent watched Nick's last vid in the series yet but this is long enough as it is! im planning on watching some of André's streams up on his personal channel, and some others where he's a guest in, and i may make a part 2 of this :D (update: i did, link at the top of the post lol)

[pensat-i-fet]

Trick...and treat her well (Pedri x Reader) / Halloween '23

Masterlist

Wattpad

After another long day at uni, you just wanted to go home and sleep. Thankfully, the following day was a bank holiday, so you knew you could just sleep in and sort of do nothing all day. But your boyfriend had other plans. Plans that interrupted your own plans.

“What are you doing in bed? Come on! Let’s get ready”, said Pedri, in a too loud voice, when he got to the room. You usually liked how hyper and excited he got by the smallest of things but not at that exact moment.

“Ready for what?”

“It’s Halloween!”

“Pedro, we live in Spain, not America. No one cares about Halloween around here”, you rolled your eyes and laid back down in bed.

“But we talked about going to that party…do you not want to go? I bought us the costumes and everything”.

It was so rare for him to want to go to something like a party that you felt bad saying no. His mood got so much better after being back in training with the team too, and he wanted to celebrate. So you got up and put the costume on, even though you kind of hated it, and you both left for the party.

But it was impossible to concentrate on having fun. Your mind was somewhere else. In all the classes you had to go to, the assignments you had to get done, …it was a bit overwhelming at the moment. People were drinking and that always made your anxiety worse. You didn’t like how hard it was to guess what a drunk person could do next. And when a few of them bumped into you, that feeling only got worse.

“Trick or treat?”, screamed Pedri, making you jump.

“Treat?”

“Here”, he said, offering a bag of sweets and pecking your lips. “Double treat. Just for you”.

You smiled at him but the smile was soon gone when you checked the time and saw how early it was. You had only been there for twenty minutes but it felt like hours.

The only good thing about the party was that Pedri stayed with you the whole time. You definitely didn’t want to be left alone somewhere where there were so many people. You didn’t know who many of them were either. And, even though Pedri was busy chatting and laughing with people, he knew you well. So he soon noticed there was something wrong.

“You ok?”

“Sure”, you answered, trying to smile.

“You don’t look ok. Are you not feeling well or something? Is that why you went to bed earlier?”

“Kind of. But you’re having fun so forget it”.

“No, I’m not having fun if you aren’t too”.

Despite appreciating his kindness, you also felt bad about his reaction. Your mood was not only annoying you, but it was now going to annoy him too. Great. It only made you feel worse about yourself.

“Let’s go home”.

“Pedri, we don’t have to…”.

“We do. I don’t even like parties anyway. You know that”.

“But…”.

“Shh”, he said, placing his index finger on your lips. “You come first always. Let’s go”.

It didn’t take you long to get back home and Pedri told you to go to the sofa and wait for him. He was going to make a drink for you.

“Trick or treat?”, he asked again, this time without yelling.

“Can I have both?”

“Greedy”, he laughed. “You can have this cup of tea I made for you and all these sweets I took from the party”.

“Oh my God”, you said, laughing too. “That’s so much. It’ll take me a week to eat all of it”.

“I might help you finish it”.

“Is this how American kids feel after trick or treating? I don’t even know what to eat first”. “I guess. My only source for it is the movies I watched. And the videos where parents pretended they ate all their sweets”.

“Those videos are horrible. So cruel”.

Pedri sat down next to you and brought you closer to him before turning the TV on and finding the channel you liked. More Buffy reruns were on. Perfect.

“So…wanna talk about it?”

You sighed. Did you want to talk about it? Maybe. But it wasn’t easy to put into words things you didn’t fully understand.

“I don’t know. It’s just…life, I guess. Uni kicking my ass and I just feel very defeated sometimes”.

“Did something in particular happen? Or is it just a general thing?”

“General, I think”.

“That’s…well”, he laughed. “I don’t know if better or worse. I guess if it was just one problem, we could try to fix it but if it’s just a general thing, it’s a bit harder”.

“I suppose it is like that, yeah”.

“What can I do to help?”

You looked at him and smiled immediately. He was always so eager to help. “You’re doing well so far. But I guess just be there when I need you. Talking is helping me right now. And, I don’t know, maybe you could pamper me a bit”.

“So it’s all just an excuse to be treated like a princess, got it”, he joked and your smile became wider.

“I can’t fool you, can’t I?”

[blueberrypancakesworld]

Hello! I absolutely love your take on Ramón Salazar! May I please make a request for him with a reader who is awfully shy and who can hardly find her voice around him? She leaves a note apologizing for her inability to speak up and confesses that she quite enjoyed his company and is looking forward to see him again. Thank you! <3

Unspoken words on paper

Ramón Salazar x fem!aristocrat

warning : fluff, kiss (chaste)

Summary : Weekly long feasts were held at various castles and in the early summer of Spain such a feast took place at the castle of Ramon Salazar, surrounding lords and ladies came but one highborn lady in particular truly found something for young lords. Only the words seemed to fail her when her eyes looked at him, she never seemed to be able to say anything until an idea came to her and she reached for ink and paper.

info : Many thanks anon for the Ramón Salazar request it was really sweet to write this and hope you like it have fun everyone :)

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The letter with the seal inscribed in the dark wax had reached her with longing and joy as she reached for the letter opener and immediately recognized his handwriting.

Finally, after a break in the long winter, spring had come to Europe, freeing the lands of the rich and poor from snow and slowly restoring their colorful beauty, allowing people to go out longer without freezing, the sun slowly regaining its warmth and the mood lifting.

With this warmth also came the announcement and finally the invitation of the aristocrats of the Salazar family to her castle for the week-long festival where the nobles met again, the lords made contracts and agreements and their wives and ladies looked for parties to marry and exchanged the latest news.

But most of all she was there for him, the guest she had seen a few times before she was introduced to him and she had only uttered a pitiful ,,My lord" before her voice left her and she disappeared into the crowd again, but she would not give up this time she might even make it, her heart wanted to come closer to him.

The weeks that remained seemed endless and she had had new clothes tailored, jewelry brought and felt prepared as she looked at the dark blue fabric with the golden embroidery, the necklace with the dark blue gemstone hanging from her neck and the finger in her hand decorated with the finest stitch, ,,I can do this," she murmured to herself and looked at herself in the large mirror before she was in her carriage on the way to her castle a few days later.

Her maids rode the letter for her and tried to ease her nervousness, these human masses were a bit overwhelming but he Ramón seemed to make her heart beat so fast that her throat tightened with overwhelm, knowing how horribly some lords and especially the other ladies talked about him.

She didn't care, she had even stood up for him from time to time, he couldn't help his illness, his family had pushed him to give everything and greatness wasn't all that was reflected in the beauty of his castle but this side of blue-blooded people was merciless, ,,I always found your efforts so heartfelt my lord" she murmured the words she wanted to say to him but this constriction in her throat seemed to get worse the closer they got to the castle.

The last few hours seemed to be the height until she stepped out of the carriage her maids adjusted her dress one last time and she walked up the steps into the entrance the inside was familiar to her the great hall was decorated everything was wrapped beautifully he had outdone himself he truly wanted to be accepted.

She heard herself being announced as well the eyes were on her for a moment and her fingers clutched at her fan as she walked down the steps into the hall and found a few familiar faces at least, old friends from academies and meetings of parents she occasionally took a few of the snacks offered on silver trays and the champagne calmed her at least a little.

Until she heard her friend's voice softly in her ear, ,,The little lord seems to have been watching you for some time…oh here he comes," she said and she followed the older woman's gaze and to her excitement Ramón stood up from his place on the balcony and came down to his guests straight towards her.

Nervousness and excitement her heart skipped a beat as she saw the familiar smiling face, the white washed hair and yet that little smile on his lips, ,,A welcome to see you here my lady it pleases me to see that you have accepted my invitation and to see you here now delights me indeed" he said bowing slightly and with a nudge from her friend she curtseyed and was about to pull away when his hand gently placed itself on hers.

Warmth spread over her body as she spread her fan out and hid slightly behind it, almost flinching as his lips kissed the back of her hand, ,,Thank you my lord," she said so softly she wasn't sure he had heard it but that little chuckle from him told her he had.

She avoided his gaze a little until he seemed to find his courage in a place where he was usually only hurt and asked, ,,Would you accompany me a little?" She didn't utter a single sound but a hasty nod and she heard him laughing as she hooked his arm and continued to hide behind her fan.

Feeling his gaze full of gentleness and excitement, she had put on extra flat shoes and they seemed to be the same size, their clothes were similar in color and she had made it so that she had seen that he had looked at her dress several times, ,,Your dress is truly a sight for sore eyes, you should recommend these tailors to me," he said, trying to put some small talk between them and she only nodded.

He led her further around the room before they both went outside into the rose garden white roses lit golden by the light of the hall his voice of joy and stories reached her again but she barely said more than a few words until the bell announced the night and the highborn began to retire to the castle's assigned guest rooms to continue the celebration tomorrow.

,,I wish you a pleasant night, my lady," Ramón bid her farewell with a final bow and a kiss on her hand as she watched him disappear into the dark corridor before she hurried into her room with a hand on her heart and leaned against the door, relieved and even more attracted, her eyes looking around the room and finding the pen, the small inkwell and paper on the table.

An idea formed in her mind as she sat down at the table, pulled the candlestick closer and began to dip the tip of the quill into the ink the minutes passed hurriedly as she revealed her inner self to him with every word she sang from his arrival, his handsome appearance, how warm he was to her, his kindness and his compliments had made her heart ache despite the fact that she hadn't sighed.

The more she wrote, the more reassured and hopeful she became that maybe he would reciprocate, so they could keep in touch without her stumbling over her shyness, writing the sentences faster and more devotedly until she finished, hoping for another meeting in the next few days.

Looking at the letter for a moment she dropped it once before putting it in an envelope and writing her name on the back before ringing the bell for servants to take it to his Lord Salazar, the time seemed endless as she thought of the two kisses, his snaftiness towards her he seemed glad to have been endured by someone at all.

As she lay down in bed, snuggled into the blankets and pillows and closed her eyes, she felt inside that her heart would beat with his as soon as they met again the next morning and did each other a kindness.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

[someone-you-do-not-know]

uh, i don't know if I can even request, but

fluff about Cupid Romano falling for Spain? ITS STUPD I KNOW

Ask and you shall receive– Honestly though, sorry about the wait! I hope you like this, even if it's not the fluffiest.

Lovino hated this assignment. He hated what he did in general, but this assignment was the worst one as of yet. As a cupid, he was tasked to sort out the affairs of love and hate between humans. When someone was being mistreated, he or one of his brothers were the ones who would help the human understand what was going on, turning them to hate, and when two people were getting a little closer than usual, they were the ones to help them along, turning the budding feelings into love. Lovino hated that part. He hated this strange concept called love, which he had never himself experienced, yet was to force upon others. He often wondered if the humans even liked it, because he was absolutely sure he would not.

Now, this particular assignment was worse than the others. Usually, there was some instructions on who was meant to fall in love or hate with who, but this one time, the assignment was just a red arrow for love, and a name: Antonio Fernández Carriedo. That was the man he had been stalking following for the last month. Lovino swore he really was trying to do his job right, but this man was impossible. Every time Lovino was convinced he had found the right match for him, just as he had nocked the arrow on his bowstring, drawn the bow and taken aim–

He could not fire it off.

It was not as if there was no one to pick from. Antonio, this mortal fool, had infuriatingly many friends. Lovino had considered that loudmouth German, the blonde flirt, the pretty lady, the prissy guy Antonio attended piano recitals for, even that guy Antonio kept getting into fights with.

But every single time, Lovino could not do it. Every time, he thought that it would end in eventual heartbreak and Lovino did not want to ruin a beautiful friendship. So instead, he waited and bided his time.

As he waited, it was hard not to notice how annoying Antonio’s laugh was; he laughed a lot. His hair was always a mess, like he had never learned how to use a comb, and Lovino hated how his knees turned into goo every time Antonio smiled. Antonio was a simple man, and he led a simple life. It would be boring for Lovino to follow him without anything to focus on, so he had begun to make snide comments about the man he was supposed to find love for.

“Are you really that stupid? She’s asking you on a date,” or “If you really hate him so much, you can just stop seeing him, dumbass,” even “Stop falling for these stupid pranks, or I’ll have to do… something!”

Occasionally, Lovino took a break from failing his assignment to see his twin brother, but even then, Antonio was never far from his mind. Antonio’s ugly haircut, horrible fashion sense, and stunning green eyes which would never look at Lovino.

“Lovi, are you even listening?”

No, he had not been listening. “Feli, what the fuck do you want me to say?”

“Ve, I was just saying… are you still working on that assignment? Because I heard some of the others talk about how it shouldn’t take that long for a final assignment – you got yours before I got mine, and I already finished mine. Is your human really nasty, and that’s why you can’t find anyone for him to fall in love with?”

“Shut up!” Lovino yelled, the vehemency of his outburst surprising himself as well as his brother, “He’s not… he’s not nasty. He’s really fucking annoying though.”

“That’s more reason to finish faster, isn’t it? Then you won’t have to see him all the time.”

Lovino felt like an arrow had just plunged itself into his chest. “I’m just trying to do it right, stupid. That shit takes time.”

“Sorry… I just don’t want you to get in trouble for taking too long.”

Lovino did not particularly want to get in trouble either, and it was starting to be embarrassing. Antonio had to fall in love, and it was Lovino’s job to make it happen. Who it was, was not all that important. It was not like he could invoke everlasting love, only induce the beginnings of love – what the humans did with it. So the next time Antonio was hanging out with that blonde girl who always flirted with him, Lovino had made up his mind. He needed to get this assignment over with.

“So, Antonio, are you really sure there’s no one you like?”

Antonio smiled sheepishly, “No, there isn’t. Maybe I’m just not meant for a relationship.”

“I don’t believe that one bit. Maybe you just don’t put yourself out enough.”

“But you know how shy I am.” Antonio teased, there was nothing shy about him.

They both laughed. Antonio was a perfect target, his broad shoulders right in front of Lovino, and all Lovino had to do was let go. Antonio would fall in love with his friend, they would live out a romance of some kind, and Lovino was sure they would be happy for years and years and years. He closed his eyes, trying to imagine it, filling the arrow with good luck for Antonio’s relationship as he accepted that he would never see the human ever again.

“But you know, sometimes, it almost feels like there is. Like someone’s really close, and any second I’ll meet them. That probably sounds really stupid…”

Lovino blinked, his eyes were unfocused. He had not noticed when tears had started welling up in his eyes and running down his cheeks. If he let go, he would never see Antonio again. Never. It was so final in his mind. He hated being around Antonio, but he hated the thought of never seeing him again even more. Seeing Antonio and that girl laugh and joke and smile made something ugly rear its head within him, and all of this felt so sudden. He had spent months and months observing Antonio, looking at him, learning about him, but Antonio did not even know he existed. “… Look at me! Fucking– just once, would you fucking look at me?”

Antonio could not hear him nor could he see him, cupids were invisible to the human senses. Even so, something had made Antonio turn around, facing the direction where Lovino stood with his bow outstretched. He was looking right through Lovino, and the arrow in Lovino’s heart plunged itself deeper in as Antonio saw right through him. Being treated like air, because that was what he was to humans, hurt so much when it was Antonio who did it.

Was this what he made the humans feel? 

He was not sure, but he wanted those eyes to look at him, and that voice to call his name. With a swift movement, he took the arrow meant for Antonio off his bowstring and snapped it against his knee. It broke in two with ease. He could never finish this assignment, and he knew it. The strange uneasy feeling in his gut finally seemed to settle itself with that realisation.

He knew looking at Antonio and never being seen by him would never be enough, but continuing to be air was not enough either. That same evening, Lovino had made up his mind, he knew what he wanted. Ruffling the feathers of his left wing one last time, stretching and folding it, he prepared himself for what would happen next – what it would be like to fall. Sucking in a last breath as a cupid, he tightened his grip around the skin connecting his left wing to his shoulder blade, and said his goodbyes.

…

No longer able to pass through walls, he took a deep breath to prepare himself before ringing the doorbell. He was sure he looked pathetic, standing in his cupid clothing with blood still dripping from his left shoulder blade, but he did not care about any of that. He could barely feel the pain as his wish was turning him human, rapidly disguising his remaining wing. He hoped for the best.

The door swung open, and Antonio saw him.

[lokisbirdofhermes]

Hello Bird! I've been following your content pretty much since I entered the Loki/Marvel fandom like 2 years ago. (you're literally the only author I trust when it comes to regular Loki content, I'm forever thankful for what you do).

I'm in the process of publishing a few things myself and I was wondering if you could give baby ao3 authors like me a tip or two on how to keep consistency when arranging a plot for a story.

I love your style and how you manage to lay out scenarios so perfectly with just a few key details about each character, I can literally picture things in my head like they're coming out of a movie. It's everything I've imagined and more istg

On another note, I have a prompt/suggestion you might like, tell me what you think:

Heatwave vs. Jotunn genetics

In line with works like Another Girl Another Planet or Scratch My Back, Jotunn Loki makes a comeback with a tinge of enemies to lovers. However in this case, Jotunn genetics force Loki's body to switch into his Jotunn form sporadically and without warning whenever he's feeling extra hot 👀. Mood swings, Heat irritability, and a lot of bickering (We're about to hit heatwave season here in Spain and it's a most fitting scenario for these upcoming months hehe)

I love your work and I'm so grateful to be a part of your community of avid readers!! 💚💚💚

First of all, thank you so much for reading my work. I'm very glad you've enjoyed it.

Wow, that is a neat idea! I don't think I've seen that particular take on Jotunn biology. I think you should definitely run with it and see where it goes. I'd be curious to read it when it's done.

As far as advice goes, mostly what I'm doing when I write fics is trying to align myself as close to "sounding" like the person I'm writing as possible. That comes from having watched Loki in the films and my short stint with his show and trying to emulate his beliefs, mannerisms, and speech patterns. It takes time and practice, but that's really how I do it. If I am struggling to get him to sound right, I take a break and bring up a clip where he's talking and then it usually gets me back on track. I do that with Bucky too.

During the story itself, I take it scene by scene and think "okay, here's a scenario, now how would he react to it?" and then I go from there. Naturally, it's fanfiction and so I can play around with what he'd do since we don't really have a full understanding of how he reacts to his romantic companions (I do not accept Sylki at all and I think it was written horribly, so I don't use it as an example) and we as readers are able to suspend our disbelief enough to enjoy some romance and smut. If you feel him doing something inauthentic, it just means that you're trying too hard to move the scenario or the plot forward, and that's fine. You just recalibrate and figure out which part of what you're writing might be slightly off and then adjust.

My inbox and chat are open, so don't hesitate to reach out whenever you like. We can spitball ideas or just chit-chat, and that is an open invitation to anyone.

Birdie loves you!

[bitchin-beskar]

So I've just utterly tanked my PhD interview, got an extremely bitchy HR email from the people who are meant to be hiring me, and had my mum essentially tell me it was my fault (not really, but that's how it sounded in my mind), so I'm GREAT (sarcasm)

Please tell me your week has been better? I could really use some good news/funny stuff, even if it's someone else's

hello my love!

I'm so so sorry your week has been so horrible to you, even one of those things would be stressful, not to mention all of them combined! my week has been pretty average for the most part but i do have a funny story to share, I hope it can help cheer you up??

so!

without getting too detailed, I'm an english language assistant in spain, and i work at a high school with kids between the ages of 11 and 18, and my job basically revolves around helping these kiddos improve their english

one of my co-teachers decided that since i have a bachelor's degree in creative writing that obviously makes me an expert (it absolutely does not) and so i should do a creative writing exercise with the kiddos to help them practice their writing skills in english

so to keep it simple i decided to have the kids work in small groups to create short stories with 3 main elements (a creature, a place, and a time) that as a class we decided on together. for this particular class, the elements they chose were a cat in a park in the city in the afternoon

considering the other classes chose to write about either 1. dinosaurs in a burger king at midnight, 2. the demogorgon in the high school on christmas night, or 3. giant flies in mcdonalds in the afternoon, i was kind of expecting this group's stories to be more tame in comparison

i was so very wrong

the very first group gets up to present their short story and it goes as follows:

Silk is the most dangerous black cat to have ever lived, and there's a statue of him in the middle of the park. It's said that at 6 o'clock pm this afternoon the cat statue will come alive and destroy everyone if a sacrifice is not made.

The corrupt politicians cannot agree on a sacrifice for Silk the most dangerous black cat to have ever lived, so at 6 o'clock the statue comes alive and begins to destroy everything in his path including all the corrupt politicians.

However, there is a secret society who has decided on the perfect sacrifice of The Muppet (aside: I do not know which muppet. I do not know if they mean one of the canon muppets or some made up muppet. They did not elaborate beyond The Muppet.)

The Muppet is unaware of their destiny to be sacrificed to Silk the most dangerous black cat to have ever lived.

To be continued...

...

when i tell you the room was dead silent for a good thirty seconds before I started clapping, i am not joking. my co-teacher looked at the students standing so proudly at the front of the classroom with newfound horror. their fellow students looked confused, though i do not know if that was because they didn't know how to react or if they were unsure if they'd understood the english correctly

i can only eagerly await to see what kind of other hellish ideas this group comes up with in the future

I hope this helps you my love, and I'm always here if you need someone to rant to!! ❤️

[patchesjam]

hi!! ive never been to spain so i cant really help here but i am polish so let me tell you a few things:

poland sucks - the government is shit, it's cold and dark, everything is expensive and the air quality is horrible

but other than that, it has a lot of good sides!! houses are built better for winter which is a pretty relevant thing now, a lot of young people speak english quite well and are often helpful, food is great and its relatively cheap (especially if your salary is in any other currency than zloty xhdhdj.) clubs and parties are great!!! many polish cities are absolutely beautiful and there are so many things to do!! public transport is also pretty affordable and (to an extent) reliable. it is a very um..particular country and it’s difficult to live in but you know what. it's fun.

also if you ever have any questions you can always dm btw <33 hope that whatever you end up choosing will be a good choice and that you'll be happy with it!!!

sorry this has taken so long to reply too, work ewww.

thank you so so much for all of this, it's so so helpful i really appreciate it! i was a bit worried about the language so thats reassuring (obv id try and learn a bit of polish but im slow with languages!) and i am a massive fan of clubs + parties (and vodka lmao) so that sounds fun hehe.

if i have any more questions i very well might dm so thank you again so so much <3

[ikram1909]

https://www.tumblr.com/ikram1909/752306571926716416/kinda-wanted-spain-nt-members-to-speak-in-gavis?source=share

Whenever I think about Gavi's documentary, I think about how impactful it could be in some way. He's very sincere and I'm not sure I'm ready to see how he approaches everything. Speaking of teammates, perhaps we would have the captains talking about what it was like, but in particular, I would really like to see Le Normand and Rodri talking about it. I believe the Barcelona players will talk because I was with him on a daily basis but I would like to see the perspective of those who were there on that horrible day.

Me too, I'm really excited for it and to see the whole thing from his own perspective and how he got through. Especially since everyone keeps saying he had it really rough in the first few weeks/months so I wonder how he got through it and I think it would be inspiring to other athletes who might have to go through the same in the future. I also want his national team teammates to make an appearance I feel like their perspective would be insightful and I just love how they talk about him in general.

[xtruss]

How a Cuban American Illustrator Sees This Country Today

Edel Rodriguez’s new exhibition, “Apocalypso,” reflects on democracy under threat in the nation that welcomed him in his childhood.

— By Graciela Mochkofsky | May 4, 2023

Art work by Edel Rodriguez.

On a recent, gray morning, I drove with the Cuban American artist Edel Rodriguez in his blue Mini Cooper to the County College of Morris (C.C.M.), in Randolph, New Jersey, to see the latest show of his work, “Apocalypso” (a portmanteau of “apocalypse” and “calypso,” for the often satirical popular Caribbean music). Its theme, he explained, is “the state of the world in the past thirteen years”: horrible, but you can still laugh about it. Rodriguez, who is fifty-one, is best known for his striking editorial illustrations of the Trump years, many of which appeared in The New Yorker, including “After the Insurrection,” in which an American flag waves at half-mast against a dark sky, and which appeared on the cover of the magazine the week after January 6, 2021. (In 2016, a cover for Time’s “Meltdown” series, showing an orange head, with no features except for a yelling mouth and bright-yellow hair, melting away, won the American Society of Magazine Editors’ award for best magazine cover.) The show features Rodriguez’s editorial work, and also a selection of his drawings, posters, book covers, acrylic paintings, and Cuban-cigar-box assemblages.

“After the Insurrection,” which was first published as the cover of the January 18, 2021, issue of The New Yorker. © 2021 Edel Rodriguez and The New Yorker.

We spent some time looking at two drawings, in particular. Initially, they appeared to be different perspectives of the same scene. In one, a crowd of protesting men march toward the viewer, with a domed Capitol in the background; in the other, a crowd of protesting men, this time with their backs to the viewer, march toward what looks like the same building. Only when you look closer do you realize that the drawings portray two very different events. In the first, the men have beards, wear military caps, hold rifles, and wave Cuban flags; a placard reads “Patria o muerte” (“Fatherland or death”). In the second, the men wear maga hats, brandish sticks, and wave American and Confederate flags; the placard reads “Trump.” The first is a portrait of January 8, 1959, in Havana, when the Cuban Revolution deposed Fulgencio Batista and brought Fidel Castro to power; the second is of January 6, 2021, when supporters of Donald Trump stormed the U.S. Capitol, on which the Cuban Capitol was modelled. The drawings are from Rodriguez’s forthcoming graphic memoir, which tells his story as a Cuban immigrant; he summarizes it as “my life between two insurrections.”

The comparison might seem like a stretch, and it is certain to provoke outrage within the Cuban American community. Ever since Castro defined his regime as Communist, the exiled community, which is still mostly resident in the Miami area, has embraced the anti-Communist cause, equating even the faintest progressive policies with the hated regime they had fled. And—ever since President John F. Kennedy refused to offer air support on the day of the botched C.I.A.-sponsored Bay of Pigs invasion, in 1961—for most Cuban Americans embracing that cause has meant embracing the Republican Party. Rodriguez’s illustrations reclaim the community’s grievances, mythologies, and yearnings, and suggest that every Cuban American who opposes the island’s autocratic regime should also be anti-Trump—and these days, by extension, anti-Republican.

As Rodriguez sees it, his art is an expression of his life experience as an exile in this country. Born in 1971, he was raised among sugarcane and tobacco fields in El Gabriel, a village south of Havana. His parents—his mother was a homemaker and his father a wedding and portrait photographer—did not support the revolution, and they were looking for a way to leave for Spain when a different opportunity presented itself, in early 1980. In the midst of an economic and diplomatic crisis, the government announced that Cubans who wanted to leave the island and who had someone to pick them up at the port of Mariel, to the east of Havana, could do so. About a hundred and twenty-five thousand Cubans set off, between April and October, in what became known as the Mariel boatlift. Rodriguez, who was eight at the time, his parents, and his sister were among the Marielitos; his mother had family members in Florida, who sent a boat to get them.

Rodriguez grew up in Miami, the city that Barack Obama later called “a clear monument to what the Cuban people can build.” (The title of Rodriguez’s memoir, which will be published in November, is “Worm,” which was Fidel Castro’s term for the exiles.) For a while, Rodriguez’s father did odd jobs—street vender, painter, construction worker—then he started a small tow-truck business. Rodriguez wanted to be an artist, and, in the early nineteen-nineties, he won a scholarship to study painting at the Pratt Institute, in Brooklyn; after graduating, he got a job at Time, and soon became an art director of the international edition. In 1997, he married Jennifer Roth, an artist from New Hampshire who is a granddaughter of a Holocaust survivor, and the couple moved to a house in New Jersey, where he still has his studio. But, like so many émigrés, he lives in a state of nostalgia for the lost country. “To me, living in Cuba would be a dream. But I don’t think it will happen,” Rodriguez told me. “The immigrant lives like that, floating in the middle, missing his things. There is no solution. There is no perfect ending.”

Trump’s electoral triumph dramatically altered Rodriguez’s view of the country that had welcomed him in his childhood. “I never thought that I’d be fearful in this country, that I’d have to think twice about what to say,” he told me. His idea of America as the beacon of democracy was upended when, a few weeks after being sworn in, Trump imposed what became known as the “Muslim ban,” prohibiting entry to the U.S. for citizens and refugees from seven mostly Muslim countries. “My life mirrored that of many refugees who were seeking asylum in America but had suddenly been barred,” Rodriguez writes, in “Worm.” “How could a country known for welcoming immigrants suddenly turn so xenophobic?” He sensed that democracy itself was under threat, and that led to his likening of Trump to Castro. “Having lived with the propagandistic distortions of the Cuban Communist Party, I was especially attuned to the danger of the government warping reality, and the media’s failure to confront that.”

Art work by Edel Rodriguez. People on a Tank with Guns and a Cuban Flag.

In November, 2016, he drew Trump’s head as an orange meteor with a yellow tail, hurtling toward the Earth. He posted that image, and several others, on Instagram, and granted permission to anyone who wanted to print the images as posters and march with them; many people did. A few years earlier, he had been working on a series of illustrations about isis which culminated in the image of a militant brandishing a knife in one hand and his own head in the other. When the Muslim ban was announced, Rodriguez redid the image, with Trump wielding a knife in one hand, and the head of the Statue of Liberty in the other. The German magazine Der Spiegel published it on the cover in February, 2017, under the title “America First.”

An image depicting the beheading of America’s preëminent symbol of freedom by a sitting American President attracted a lot of attention, and Rodriguez was widely interviewed. Not all of the attention was positive: he was attacked on social media. A vice-president of the European Parliament found it “tasteless.” So did Rodriguez’s mother, who still lives with his father in Miami, where Rodriguez has some eighty relatives—many of them, like his mother, are conservatives. “When did you decide to become a cheap artist, criticizing the President of the United States?” she asked him. They didn’t speak for weeks.

But severed heads, and machetes, are everywhere in his work, a product, he says, of a childhood lived in the Cuban countryside. (His mother butchered chickens and goats in their yard in El Gabriel.) The show at C.C.M. includes a chicken head on a pike, painted with coffee on paper; an acrylic painting in a cigar box of the heads of four migrants piled on a sailboat; a crowned head lying on a bloody knife, on the official poster for Joel Coen’s movie of “Macbeth”; and more. “These images have been in my head my entire life. I’ve been drawing them since I was a teen-ager,” Rodriguez told me.

“Most of my work starts from where I was born,” he said at a presentation, in 2017. “The graphics of the revolution got ingrained in my head—how you communicate powerful messages . . . We were all raised to be pioneers for the revolution.” The revolution’s aesthetics, stark and maximalist, remain an obvious influence in his art. At the same time, “humor is very important,” he told me. “If you make someone laugh, they’ll slightly go to your side. If you figure out how to share your ideas with humor, you can change people’s hearts.” And this, he told me, is also a legacy from his past. “In Cuba,” he said, “you laugh at things because there is no solution. You are laughing at the ridiculousness of the whole thing.”

One thing that many people in this country can’t understand, he told me, is the growing support among members of the Latinx community for Republican candidates with strong anti-immigrant platforms—how they “can be racist, or anti-gay.” Just a few years before Trump came to power, support for conservative politicians had started to wane among Cuban Americans, leading to an almost equal number leaning Democratic as Republican—largely a result of the fact that the younger, U.S.-born generations were increasingly progressive. But, in 2016, according to exit polls, fifty-four per cent of Cuban Americans in Florida voted for Trump (compared with twenty-eight per cent of Latinxs nationwide); in 2020, according to the Pew Research Center, nearly six out of ten registered Cuban American voters nationwide identified as Republican, and more than half approved of the Trump Presidency.

“Cuban voters have ebbed and flowed toward the Republican Party,” Mark Hugo Lopez, the director of race and ethnicity research at Pew Research, confirmed. “That trend has recently gotten stronger,” Ada Ferrer, the author of the 2022 Pulitzer Prize-winning book “Cuba: An American History,” told me. Ferrer, who is also Cuban American, is still trying to find “a satisfactory explanation” to why “the most recent arrivals” from the island, those who came in the past fifteen years, “have become so Trumpist.” Cuban Americans in Florida have also become strong supporters of the state’s conservative governor, Ron DeSantis. Rodriguez thinks that many “Cuban American voters will vote for anyone who speaks strongly against Communism and promises to destroy the regime back on the island. This is their top voting issue. It’s all theatre, but the Republican Party does it very well, and the Democrats fail miserably at it.”

He also believes that the center is salvageable, and that, as he told me, “this country is much more in the middle than the extremes.” His fears for democracy, however, persist. As he writes in his memoir, “The decision to leave my country changed my life, but it wasn’t my decision. I was tossed about, like a boat at sea, by the winds of history. After many years, I had come to terms with my life as an American. Now I feel at the mercy of those winds yet again.” ♦

[sixty-silver-wishes]

one thing I love about johanna is she’s a subversion of the classic ingenue!! like Yeah she’s a pretty girl who sings to birds while locked in a house with a creepy old man, but her character doesn’t shy away from expressing what sort of toll that actually takes on a person. maria bilbao does such a good job in the revival portraying her; her movements and expressions make her seem almost like a scared animal. anthony is the one bit of innocence and good in this world of people literally and figuratively consuming each other, and johanna is so broken and panicked that we don’t know if it’s him that she wants, or what he represents. after all, he’s named after a particular victorian author- anthony hope. and as we’ll see, johanna is prepared to cling to hope with Teeth. sweeney and lucy started off idealistic, but were broken by turpin’s lust and abuse of power; lucy was “beautiful and virtuous,” and todd was “naive.” lovett will murder and manipulate to get the life she wants. toby is so desperate for a loving family, he’s driven completely mad when he finds what the one person he thought cared for him has done.

johanna was taken from her father when she was just one year old, and is sixteen during the events of the show (it’s been fifteen years since sweeney was sent to australia). all she knows, and all she’s ever known, is turpin and how horrible he is. she says, “you mustn’t think me a fool, but my reticule never leaves my side; it’s the only thing my mother gave me-” her most prized possession is the one thing that signifies she once had a life outside of turpin, even if she was too young to remember it. she takes comfort in the birds because they’re just as trapped as she is- she pleads with them, “teach me to be more adaptive,” because she’s losing her ability to cope with every passing day. so when anthony comes into her life, he represents hope, and an innocence that she lacks out of a need for survival. she’s willing to marry him immediately, because he represents that escape. he’s not just an escape from turpin, either- he’s a sailor, which, to her, means he can take her away from london and everything it represents in this show altogether- to the pearls of spain to the rubies of tibet, from the dardanelles to the mountains of peru. for her, anthony means there is something beyond the cage she is trying to force herself to adapt to- because before then, she had no other choice. and in the scene in fogg’s asylum, we see that anthony- as good and heroic as he is- cannot kill, because he is the embodiment of innocence.

johanna, however? she’s lost her innocence long ago.

ok I've never listened to the full show of Sweeney Todd, just the movie soundtrack and Joanna is breaking my heart, her panic and anxiety and paranoia and willingness to marry the first man she can without knowing his name just to get OUT OF THERE

Anthony is like "wow she's lovely :D" and Joanna is like "TURPIN IS IN MY WALLS HELP ME"

it's much less naive than I thought and much better for it and very fucking sad

[otogariado]

augh sick and tired of the way poc always have to explain to white people not to villify characters like alma or ming like yes they clearly made shitty shitty decisions as parental figures but its not as simple and black and white to brand them as irredeemable abusers. YES being sympathetic characters doesnt excuse the horrible things they did YES the children under their care had to suffer through a lot of trauma YES they need to apologize to the people they wronged and the people they wronged do not owe them any sort of forgiveness.

but what you don't understand is that these films about poc generational trauma and these characters in particular are meant to be uplifting and hopeful to poc because guess what? a lot of poc get jackshit from their birth families. these movies and characters are a way to give poc some closure about the messed up things we have to endure when it comes to our cultures being heavily community- and family-oriented, most often than not to a fault. they are supposed to show us that it is not impossible for poc elders to learn and better themselves despite how shitty they've been and to show that poc families can heal together from generational trauma. by branding these characters as horrible, irredeemable monsters you are stripping these movies and characters of their core themes and hopeful messages to poc who had to suffer very similar experiences to the movies' protagonists.

i am not here to excuse any fucked up IRL people's behaviour, that is not what this post is about. at the end of the day you have to understand that these movies' protagonists weren't "forced or guilted to forgive their abusers". these movies reflect a very specific, very real part of poc families where there is a lot of nuance and conflict amongst traumatized children who suffered from generational trauma who still hold onto that hope that maybe one day we can patch things up with our families even if it seems impossible. these movies are for those who wish their family had the same degree of open communication and willingness to change. to those whose families have mistreated them but still can't bring themself to hate their families wholly. it IS fucked up, but that is the reality.

movies like encanto and turning red show the other side of this reality, the side that is more hopeful, uplifting, and provides us with a sense of closure. it is not impossible to communicate and heal together, but for some of us it is a luxury we can't easily achieve.

please do not treat these movies and their antagonists as simple black and white media without nuance to them.

disclaimer that i am only one poc out of countless and that other poc may disagree with me—i am no authority on this subject. but this is my take on it. also, i am neither chinese-canadian nor colombian, but filipino. the culture i am part of shares heavy similarities with both due to being an asian nation who got heavily colonized by spain, and that is how i can relate and that is my context when making this post.

[eponymous-rose]

Please don’t reblog, thanks!

[cw: parental death, cancer, grief - nothing new or concerning about me, just working through some stuff!]

I still don’t really feel equal to reflecting on Mom’s death, to the point where I regret that I haven’t been able to offer support to the truly heartbreaking number of friends who went through the same thing in the year and a half since it happened to me.

But I was thinking today about how my dad mentioned in passing that his and Mom’s song was “My Romance”, which is an old standard. I don’t even know the origin of the song, or the context in which it was first performed, but the general gist is that the singer progresses through a list of elaborate and/or expensive things that their romance does not need: “My romance doesn’t need a castle rising in Spain/Nor a dance to a constantly surprising refrain”. In fact, the signer continues, the only thing their romance needs “is you”.

But one line in particular keeps getting stuck in my head lately, the climax of the song: “Wide awake, I can make my most fantastic dreams come true.”

Mom and Dad were realists in their relationship - it was both of their second marriages after disastrous first marriages, both were in their late thirties, and both were going in with eyes open. My mom in particular was aggressively practical - when she was first diagnosed with ovarian cancer in February of 2020, she privately told Dad that she’d read the statistics and knew that one in five husbands left their wives after that kind of diagnosis, and she didn’t want to cause him the kind of suffering sticking around would involve. She told me later that Dad very earnestly told her that it would be the greatest honor of his life to stand by her side to see this through. I don’t think any of us knew how horribly fast things would progress - in five months, she was gone - but in that time there wasn’t a day he wasn’t at her side, and she said her goodbyes to everyone the day before she died so that last morning would belong to the two of them alone. It wasn’t just a great love, it was a deep and abiding friendship underneath the passion. Respect and a joyful sense of responsibility to each other.

And I think I truly appreciate now what a terrible, wonderful honor it is to be the recipient of that kind of unconditional love. Everything that I am comes with that beautiful gift, and I can only hope to be brave enough to recognize it and continue to express it to everyone I care about.

I’d experienced a few different flavors of grief before this one - my very close grandparents, a good friend, childhood pets, a difficult aunt. But this was all-consuming, and it took me a while to work out why. We all become slightly different (or very different!) people around others in our lives - the you of the workplace isn’t the you of childhood friends, that kind of thing. And who I was with Mom was a reflection of her in so many ways, and that version of me was someone I liked very, very much, and that version of me was instantly annihilated.

So was a complex grieving process for all sorts of different things in my life - not only was I grieving my mom, I was grieving the version of myself I could only be around her. I could parcel off little pieces and bring them to light in my other relationships, but the whole was irrevocably shattered. And I was grieving the loss of a kind of innocence with regard to mortality, grappling with the realization that, in a very real way that has nothing to do with fate or destiny and everything to do with cold biology, some of us already have it written in our blood and our organs and our bones how and when we’re going to die.

I was deeply, unfathomably fortunate in that my relationship with my mom was uncomplicated, with no dark secrets, and that nothing was left unsaid in our last perfect goodbye. And also that my brother and my dad and I are just as close as before, but also capable of separating to give each other space to heal and work out who we’re going to be now that such a large piece has been torn from each of us.

So I rode out the darker moments with the help of dear friends, I supported others where I could, and I still walk every single night through dreams where it’s my family without Mom, or it’s my family with Mom, or my Mom isn’t dead but dying. And every one of those dreams, inexplicably, brings peace. When I have sleep paralysis episodes (very rarely these days!) it’s not a demon but a laughing figure in the doorway, teasing me for sleeping in.

And slowly, inexorably, I’ve started feeling good again. I can’t be who I was to her, but I can be the person she saw in the ways that really matter. She used to tell me she lived vicariously through my adventures, and I’ve had so many adventures: standing on the grass at Cape Canaveral during a space shuttle launch, watching a temple sink underwater with fireflies all around, stepping into a ballroom 300 meters under the earth where the chandeliers are made of salt crystals, moving to new city after new city after new city and reinventing myself along the way. And this new job, this absurd new job, is just going to get bigger and stranger and more and more exciting. There will be no shortage of adventures, big and small, not as something to fruitlessly, frustratingly pursue, but as giddy, wonderful side-effects of the act of living.

Wide awake, I can make my most fantastic dreams come true.

[widevibratobitch]

Top 5 Rodrigo moments (either the play or the opera doesn't matter)

i am a dirty cheat so you're getting twice as many and also me unnecessarily justifying each choice because i just dont know when to shut up. im putting it under the read more cut because it's really fuckin long sorry lmao

so in no particular order i guess (except for the first one which is definitely at the very top of my list):

1. play. the entire last scene with Elisabeth. im so boring about it but this is my favourite scene in the whole play. i could talk about it for hours, analyse it line for line, it's amazing. it's his fall from grace, the only moment in the entire play when he's completely emotionally naked and vulnerable - he's not quite like that even with Carlos. it's his last confession, his death rites, it's the defining scene for this character. there's everything there, and on top of all that, there's a delicious sprinkle of some good ol' Fear Of Death. it's amazing and it always makes me ugly cry - also Elisabeth calling him out on his bullshit and him just bluescreening there for a moment... i can't stress enough how much i love this scene (and the relationship between Rodrigo and Elisabeth!)

2. play and opera. The Restate Scene. i don't think i need to elaborate on that lol (mind you, this also involves the beginning of that scene in the play, where Philip is not yet present, there's just Rodrigo and Alba - who's visibly so irritated by this twink's bitching like 'omg you're literally getting an audience with The King Of Fucking Spain because he Specifically Asked For You, maybe you should act a little more grateful, you insolent brat, i swear to god, kids these days smh' because it's just fuckin hilarious)

3. opera. The Auto Da Fe Incident. i do love the play's equivalent of this scene too, i love it so much. but. there is something about him disarming Carlo in public (while that horrible reprise of their fRiEnDsHiP motive plays in the background, screaming crying shaking every time i swear) and immediately after - kneeling at Filippo's feet, presenting him with Carlo's sword AND getting a title upgrade???? right in front of Carlo? Elisabetta? literally EVERYONE??? it's amazing. prolly the worst day in Rodrigo's life (while simultaneously the best day in Filippo's lol).

4. play. the scene when Carlos gives him Eboli's letter and he just fuckin. tears it to pieces lol the moment is just hilarious to me jshsjssgdk

'so you wanna show this letter to the queen?'

'fuck yeah i do'

'ok. may i see it again? just for a sec'

'sure, here you gOH MY GOD'

on one hand it's just hysterical lmao on the other - it very nicely shows play!Rodrigo's controlling nature and the fact that he may love Carlos more than anything, but he still will manipulate the hell out of him. i also love how he yells at him but then immediately softens after Carlos's dramatic display of throwing himself onto the chair and the 'too well I know thou lovest me no more 😔' idk i just love this entire scene a lot. i love them.

5. play. the scene when he convinces Carlos to give him his letters. it's his second scene in the play after the Restate Incident (the first is another scene with Elisabeth that I also really really like). I also love Carlos here a lot, both of them honestly. The fact that Carlos is so preoccupied with Rodrigo having an audience with his dad that he entirely forgets about Elisabeth for a moment. and Rodrigo who's suddenly so flippant and sure of himself and it drives Carlos crazy because of The Implications. Rodrigo, again, getting a little mad at him and not bothering to hide it (i said it before but i love how play!Rodrigo will not hesitate to yell at Carlos when he gets too... uhh... Carlos-ish; opera!Rodrigo is only ever kind and loving with him and while it melts my heart... i do like my man being a bitch). and then the final moment with Carlos throwing himself into Rodrigo's arms, crying, being like 'my father could never make you betray me, could he? not my father, Rodrigo... 🥺😭' and running dramatically away while Rodrigo is left there, standing with that letter in hand, like 😐 what have i just witnessed

6. play. the entire prison scene. This is a stark contrast with his previous scene, which was the emotional breakdown witnessed by Elisabeth. here, he's much calmer. the whole thing is beautiful and heartwrenching obv but there is this one - not even really relevant - line, when he asks Carlos to just. sit down with him cause he's just so weary. and idk it just makes me so 🥺 my man has been through so, so much in such a short time, this scene is the moment when i feel all this tension and the emotional turmoil finally quiet down, and it leaves him fuckin exhausted. he has accepted his fate and he just wants to rest and spend these last moments with Carlos in peace and quiet (and he never quite gets that in the end). also the fact that that stupid Badminton Incident has been weighing on his conscience for so many years, is just. ridiculously heartbreaking. which brings me to my other favourite moment in that scene (there you go, Sofia jrhdksdh).

'yoooo who was that shot meant for?'

'lmao i guess for me 💅'

im sorry but it's hilarious. i always feel so bad for laughing at this but. come on.

also, im honestly a little obsessed with how different opera!Rodrigo and play!Rodrigo's deaths are. the play is definitely more tragic to me because it's so much more abrupt and quick and desperate. Posa genuinely thought he would have more time and it makes me wanna bang my head against the wall. the shot comes before Rodrigo manages to tell Carlos whatever it is he wanted to tell him, as he mentions earlier (this is another detail that's making me go insane, something i will never get over), there is no time for confessions or maudlin words or anything really personal. it's just. bam - too quick - escape - the queen knows all - over and out, bye-bye. absolutely fucking heartbreaking and ive just made myself sad, great.

having said that. opera gets a big big star because it's just so fucking beautiful, and Rodrigo deserved to die peacefully in Carlo's arms, and because there is this one line that absolutely destroys me and it fits Rodrigo's character so well and I actually wish it was there in the play too - the famous di me non ti scordar (and when accompanied by that fucking dio che nell'alma reprise.... fuckin. screaming crying shaking just kill me already).

7. opera. his first scene with Carlo. i don't think i need to say anything about it. it's just the gayest fucking thing and it's so tender and beautiful and dramatic. i love love love it. opera!Rodrigo is also so warm and kind and loving to Carlos from the very beginning, especially when compared to play!Rodrigo's initial 'what the hell Carlos you're being pathetic af rn' reaction. also that fucking duet slaps so much. it's just the best.

for the record though, the play does get a huge star for:

a) The Badminton Incident and the entire story of Carlos and Rodrigo's origin which is fucking hysterical ngl and Rodrigo's reaction to it which is just hilarious too. he's just so embarrassed and wishes dearly Carlos would just stfu <33 (and the - a little too much on the nose lol but still heartbreaking in the end - foreshadowing... damn)

b) that one exchange that goes sth like

"if one tear that gives me relief means to you more than my father's favour--"

"more than the entire world"

it's just. 🥺 but overall. I'd say this scene is much more one of my Carlos-favourite moments in the play than Rodrigo's per se.

8. play and opera. the Not-Really-Killing Eboli Incident. they both happen in very different circumstances in the opera and the play and I love both. the opera is just badass tbh, on both Posa AND Eboli's side ('fuckin kill me bitch, do it, *Joker voice* come on, i want you to do it, hit me, HIT ME'). also Carlo gets to witness this one and i love how this night gets just worse and worse for him lmao also the music is AMAZING, easily my favourite part of the opera (especially the trema per te moment GOD). in the play it's much more horrible though, Rodrigo is a total mess there and he is really fuckin desperate and does not know what to do. opera!Rodrigo doesn't kill Eboli because it's not all that necessary then, because he still has hope and god will inspire him (bless lol). play!Rodrigo doesn't kill Eboli because he can't bring himself to murder her for what he perceives to be his own fault - if someone has to die, it will be him. so it's also THE moment he decides to Do The Deed and sacrifice himself for Carlos (this entire scene is also what basically causes Eboli's change of heart... which ultimately does nothing in the play lol im really not a fan of play!Eboli). granted, play! and opera!Rodrigo's situations at that moment are different; opera!Eboli hasn't really done anything yet at that point and I guess Rodrigo kinda underestimates her then which, well, sucks to be him.

9. play. the scene when he gives Carlos's letters to Philip. i love this scene, i love this cunning, manipulative little bitch so much. i love how he has Philip wrapped around his little finger while still letting him think he's in charge. i also really love Philip's entire Situation here ('you're MY bitch and i want the whole world to know that uwu i love you btw mwah <3333') but this post is about Rodrigo. anyway, it's great (and goddammit, Lerma...).

10. play and opera. the scene with Elisabeth and Eboli in the garden. i love this one for different reasons - in the opera, the che mai si fa nel suol francese trio is, again, one of my favourite few minutes out of those 4 hours of Verdi's masterpiece, the music is fun and the entire situation is hilarious, i love Rodrigo and Eboli's whole dynamic, i love love love it. the more fake-ass smiles from the baritone and the mezzo involved, the better :))))))))) and, yes, im soooo boring about it but. the relationship between Posa and Elisabeth in the play makes me feel so warm inside. she is so excited to see her bestie, and then they do that silly little flirty bit which I always go insane over. i love them. also bonus points for the english copy that i own that has Rodrigo deliver a sick burn on Eboli in that scene, haven't seen that exchange in any other translation. also there's yet another Hilarious Rodrigo Moment there that I love - the moment when he's talking with Elisabeth about Carlos and she says something that mildly suggests she might care about him a tiny bit and Rodrigo immediately jumps up like

'so you wanna see him, do you? if he were here, you'd totally allow him an audience, right? :D'

'wait, what? what's going on'

'too late, here he is, tadaaaaa' *Rodrigo doing jazzy hands while Carlos jumps out from behind a bush, fanfares playing, colourful serpentines and confetti falling from the sky*

***

there. i cant play this game, im sorry. peace and love.

[lacicapatrera]

I'd be so cool if Roma people from other places could add to these type of posts. English speaking discourse sometimes leaves me just a lil bit confused, cause in Spain for example, while "Gitano" can be a slur, it's also, not only the word the vast majority of Roma people use to identify themselves, but also the word many organizations use ("Fundación Secretariado Gitano", or "Gitanas Feministas", come to mind), definitely a word meant to be used by non-roma. I have no authority here, but I'd say... use this info when speaking English, but maybe also check with your local Roma people?

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