#This one was buried in my drafts and was meant to be posted ages ago. oops.

[shadowkira]

Dungeon Meshi Text Posts:

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[sugar-phoenix]

unfinished rought unedited short story about vampires

alright so the winning vote out of the polls was "yes" so I'm deciding to post my unfinished short story draft here because I'm too impatient to wait until i finish it to post it

My new roommate is a vampire.

How do I know this? Simple.

Johnny Robert-Mulligan told me, about a week after he moved in.

“Now you seem like a respectable man, Daniel, so I'll tell you straight up: I'm a vampire.”

I nodded, thinking that he was joking or high or something.

“I will be having blood packets delivered to me each week. You need not make dinner for two. And don't invite your friends over on nights of full moons unless you want them to be sucked dry.”

We stared at each other for a moment. It was then that I realized that he was being completely serious. And then, he laughed, quite loudly, which scared the wits out of me.

“I'm just kidding, of course,” he said, chuckling.

“Oh, thank God. I thought you were actually a vampire there for a moment.”

“No I am, I am a vampire. I was joking about the full moon thing. That's a werewolf thing, not a vampire thing.”

I only stared at him in shock again.

“Oh, don't tell me you believe in werewolves? Those are completely made up.”

“Well,” I responded, “until five minutes ago I didn't think of the possibility of either vampires or werewolves being real.”

And thus began our odd friendship, of which I learned a great deal about vampires. As it turned out, vampires were a lot less untouchable than I had previously thought.

“Is it true that vampires die from a stake to the heart?” I asked one lazy Sunday afternoon, while we were watching the game. The ads were rolling, and I was eager to take this chance to ask my new roommate more about himself.

“Technically speaking, a stake to the heart could kill anything. You could also kill me by stabbing me, shooting me, running me over, throwing me off a cliff,” Johnny proceeded to count off his fingers. “Anything that would kill you would kill me.”

“Oh, I see. I guess that makes sense.”

“We're not immortal either,” he added, taking a sip out of his Coke can. Although soda did nothing for him in terms of sugar intake or energy, he told me that he had gotten quite hooked on the taste.

“You aren't?”

“No, we're just extremely long lived. I think my great grandfather lived for almost 600 years.”

I let that sink in.

“How old are you, Johnny?”

“I think I'm turning 197 this year.”

I turned to look at him.

“That would mean you've lived through both of the World Wars.”

“Oh yes, I did. I don't remember anything though, I was too young. You see, vampires only reach adulthood at around 150 years of age.” He took another sip of his soda. “You know, come to think of it, my parents might have stolen blood from the opposing sides to keep us fed. I think there was a movement or something. ‘Make The Nazis Paler’ and all that.”

“I see.”

And then the ad roll finished, and we were back to watching the game.

 I neglected to mention that Johnny was roommates with me because we were both enrolled in a local college. I was undertaking my bachelor’s in graphic design, which meant that I was more often than not buried under design projects, the likes of which could run from posters to redesigning entire corporations. Thusly, I would often have myself shut in my room during the busier weeks, specifically midterms and finals.

Johnny told me that he hadn’t decided what his major was, and that he was simply experiencing what college was like. He doubted that he’d have a use for it, to which he told me his mother disagreed, since he would at least need to take a job of some sort and make money, but what was the use if it was only going to last him so long and in about 300 years it would probably become obsolete?

I only nodded and hummed to his explanation. I didn’t quite like thinking about these things. Everything seemed so impermanent when you were a vampire, and as a relatively short-lived human, it was creepy to think about.

Thankfully, Johnny got along quite well with my friends. He didn’t have any friends of his own, which I thought was strange, but it’s possible that he drove them away with his casual talk of things that happened long ago. If you didn’t know he was a vampire you’d probably think he was a freakish nerd of some sort. But because Johnny was my roommate, and because he got along with my friends, they were apt to invite him along with me whenever they had parties.

It was at one of these house parties that Johnny met Cynthia. She was a psych student, and she often twirled her hair around her finger like as if she could will it to curl just by doing so. She always had one or two girlfriends around that she talked to, and rarely did she talk to anyone outside of them. But for whatever reason, she caught Johnny’s eye.

“I think she’s a vampire,” he said to me one day, as I was trying to work with the pressure-cooker in our kitchen.

“Yeah?”  The contraption hissed steam at me, and I prayed it wouldn’t take my eye out. “What gave you that idea?”

“I think—no, I know she’s a vampire. She’s got that quality about her.”

“What quality?”

“Vampire quality. You know, we can sense each other out.”

“I see.” I didn’t particularly believe him, but I wasn’t going to say that either. What do I know, perhaps vampires did have a sixth sense for each other, and perhaps this was what was happening, rather than my initial theory that Johnny had a big fat crush on Cynthia and was secretly hoping she was just like him. Of course, I kept all this to myself.

“Go and speak to her then,” I said.

“What? No. Women must be approached carefully, Daniel, otherwise you risk spooking them away.”

“You speak as though they’re skittish deer. I think you’re just scared of talking to her.”

“Scared? No. I’m simply being strategic.”

I rolled my eyes.

“Strategic, scared. Either way, you haven’t talked to her yet.”

“I will talk to her. Soon. Next chance I get. I plan on it.” I nodded, gingerly lifting the lid of the pressure cooker to reveal the pasta and sauce within.

divider by cafekitsune!

[scarlet-came-back-wrong]

Continuation of quotes from Julie C. Dao post about Now Comes the Mist:

"Something else that has always bothered me is that even though Lucy is dark-haired in the original novel, every single adaptation — whether on TV, film, or the stage — invariably casts her as a blonde or a redhead, as though only a light-haired, unmistakably white woman could be attractive enough to tempt three suitors and Dracula himself. (And it may also have to do with distinguishing her from Mina both in appearance and personality, i.e. brunette = serious, dreamy, and romantic, while blonde or redhead = sexy, unattainable, and alluring.) Anyway, this made the idea of a Lucy of color, specifically an Asian Lucy, even more compelling to me because then I could play with the angle of exoticism. I could lean into her sexiness and desirability, but with this whole new interesting and unique framework.

In 2017, I began to prep in earnest and do research on everything pertaining to Dracula, though I couldn’t start drafting MIST until 2019 because I was so busy with other books. I kept my pet project a closely guarded secret because I was worried that someone else would get to it before I had time to (a well-founded fear, as it turns out!) and also because — even in its earliest and most nebulous form — Lucy’s story somehow already meant a great deal to me.

Step one was to read the source material over and over and over until I knew it like the back of my hand. I am a fussy and meticulous writer, and intimately studying Stoker’s original story gave me more confidence and a sturdy foundation on which to build my own ideas. I charted every bite Dracula inflicted on Lucy, mapped out the characters’ journeys by boat and train and carriage, and took notes on tiny fun details to include that probably no one but other avid Dracula fans will get.

I also did a deep dive into Bram Stoker’s life to understand his inspirations and was fascinated by what I learned, especially the idea that a stage actor — and Stoker’s alleged lover, according to some sources — may have informed the character of Dracula. I read dissertations from Dracula scholars on how the Victorian era shaped the women in the book and their attitudes toward motherhood, and articles on the supposed link between repressed female sexuality and sleepwalking, both of which affect Lucy.

Over the next few years, as I slowly drafted the manuscript, I also:

-Educated myself on the origin of the vampire myth, especially how it is rooted in the persecution of certain peoples and religions

-Studied the footnotes of The New Annotated Dracula, which was a wealth of information that included Van Helsing’s train timetables and Victorian customs Watched documentaries on everything from:

Turn-of-the-century serial killers

Alleged royal vampires in Europe (one of them had a portrait with the original head inexplicably scratched off and repainted, according to X-ray evidence — so creepy and intriguing! Or maybe they just didn’t like their hair? WHO CAN SAY)

How castles and dungeons were built in the Middle Ages

The beginnings of insidious French occupation in Vietnam and the 1787 Treaty of Versailles

Death superstitions and customs throughout the ages (so many interesting ones, including scrambling a corpse’s bones or burying bodies with a bell — just in case, y’know, they weren’t dead yet and needed to ring for help)

Black American cowboys and their role in shaping the American West, especially around the time of the U.S. Civil War

A family who claims to have been cursed by Vlad the Impaler centuries ago and cannot hike, even today, to his castle ruins without some misfortune befalling them! (One of the travelers in their group allegedly fell down the mountain and broke a leg — their version of Vlad is ultra-petty)

Anyway, all of this led to NOW COMES THE MIST, a book of which I am deeply, devotedly, and wholeheartedly proud.

You will meet my Lucy in all of her infinite darkness, melancholy, and yearning hidden beneath the guise of a flirtatious socialite, along with a cast of characters I loved writing, including my shrewd, handsome, and Asian Dr. Van Helsing and my cheerful and courageous Quincey Morris, a Black American cowboy whose fate brings him from the Wild West to an even wilder Victorian England.

MIST follows Lucy’s transformation from vain society girl to vampire, and then the sequel takes her on a journey from the glittering lights of Paris to the snowy Carpathian Mountains, where her destiny comes full circle. And Jonathan Harker fans, I hope you will like what I’ve got planned for him in Book 2, because I have never been satisfied by his portrayal in any retelling or adaptation, either."

[lucifer-is-a-bag-of-dicks]

what the fuck I just found this in my drafts I literally wrote this years ago, like a very significant number of years ago this is old shit

and apparently I just saved it and forgot about it??? anyway I polished it up and now it is here, I have no context and I barely even remember writing it, enjoy!

my apologies for the long post I still can't figure out how to do read mores in the app

edit: some lovely people have unformed me how to use readmores, thank you ~

-----

Jack was starting to wonder perhaps if he'd done something wrong.

It wasn't uncommon for him to accidentally say or do something to upset his wife or daughter, although usually when such an event occurred Maddie would glare at him to express her displeasure, and Jazz would always take the opportunity to tell him in exact detail what he'd done wrong and how to make it up to them (something he was honestly very grateful for).

It must have been something pretty bad this time, because both women wouldn't even look him in the eye.

Jack first twigged that something was off that morning during breakfast, when he sat in the empty chair by Jazz's side and gave his usual greeting, "Hey Jazzypants!"

She ignored his presence completely, steely eyes glued to the wall opposite her, they were puffy and red and Jack wondered perhaps if she'd been crying.

It had been a long time since her problems were easily pushed aside by her father's warm hugs and jovial attitude, he had stopped being able to handle a crying Jazz after she'd turned twelve and countered his attempts at humour by insisting that he 'stop trivialising her distress', whatever THAT meant.

Nevertheless, warm hugs and gentle jokes were the only method he knew and so he wrapped a comforting arm around her thin shoulders, noting that she continued to sit still as a rock, not even glancing his way as he tried to coax a smile out of her.

Jazz didn't say a word as she pushed herself away from her unfinished breakfast and left the room.

It was when he walked down to the lab intending to ask Maddie about Jazz that Jack started to suspect he may have been the one responsible, as it became apparent that the two had seemed to coordinate their punishment for whatever transgression he'd made.

"Hey Mads!" his voice boomed over the noise of his wife's current project. He strained to see through the bright light of her blow torch at the large gun-like weapon on the table. Jack whistled in appreciation is he took in the size of what he assumed was some kind of rocket launcher. "So what are we calling this one? Ooh! How about, The Fenton Spectre 'Sploder!"

Maddie's goggles made it difficult to see what expression adorned her face, but her tensed shoulders and the shaky grip on the blow torch told him that she was most certainly upset about something.

"Mads? Are you alright?" his voice quivered slightly as he took a few steps closer, seeing his wife this tense tightened a coil within his chest. Suspecting that he may be responsible added an extra weight to his stomach that he knew wasn't cause by the breakfast he'd skipped.

The light from the blow torch snapped off and Jack had to blink the bright spots it left behind from his vision, trying to peer through the blotches to find any indication that Maddie was going to acknowledge his presence. It seemed as though she'd looked his way for a moment but before his eyes could clear enough to meet hers she'd looked away again.

Jack watched, puzzled as his wife raised a hand to cover her mouth and catch the sob that ripped its way from her throat, she hadn't succeeded as the sound echoed across the lab and tore its way straight through Jack's heart, causing his eyes to sting and his throat to close up.

He reached a hand out to touch her shoulder, intent on giving her some form of comfort. He'd barely brushed it with his finger tips before Maddie stormed right past him up to the stairs, Jack had to quickly stumble backwards to avoid being trampled.

He couldn't imagine what he possibly could have done to elicit such a response from the woman he loved, but he knew for sure that he must have done something terrible for her to not seek him out for comfort like she did any other time she was upset. He just wished he could remember what.

Jack's shoulders slumped under the dim light of the glowing jars of ectoplasm lining the various counter-tops, he dry-swallowed a few times, trying to push down his confusion and distress before following his wife's light footsteps up the stairwell.

He found her in the kitchen, leaning against a counter with her goggles slung around her neck and her wild red hair loose around her head, abundant with the kinks and tangles Jack usually watched her brush out of it every morning.

"Mads?" Jack said, voice rough and quiet, "Look I... if I did something wrong I-" Jack's apology froze in his throat as Jazz poked her head through the kitchen door, eyes once again glancing right over Jack and instead locking onto her mother.

Neither woman shared a word as Jazz crossed the room and wrapped her arms around Maddie, who desperately grabbed at her daughter in return, burying her face in long red hair as violent sobs wracked her whole body.

Jack, at a loss of what else to do, wrapped his own arms around his girls. Nestling his chin on his daughters hair, he expected the annoyed scoff that Jazz usually gave him for his 'chin noogies', but it never came. Neither Fenton woman pushed him away though, so Jack considered it progress.

Finally, after an age of rocking and sobbing, Maddie's muffled words escaped through strands of Jazz's hair.

"Where is he? W-where'd he go, where'd he go?"

A deep chill coursed through Jack's veins, Danny? Had something happened to Danny? Jack pulled away, a million questions thrumming through his mind.

What happened? Was he missing? Was he hurt? Had he run away, been kidnapped, been kill- no. Jack shook his head violently, running a hand through the shorts strands of his thick hair. No he couldn't be. He couldn't be he couldn't be.

Jack's mouth was on the verge of catching up to his brain, multiple questions bubbled at his lips when he heard a voice echo down the stairs.

"Jazz?"

Jack took a steadying breath and grasped at the counter for support, relief flooding his body as his son rounded the corner and came into view. Danny was fine, Danny was safe. He had been fretting over absolutely nothing.

Then Danny's eyes locked into his.

A number of emotions flickered across his son's face, the first being a brief moment of sheer relief and delight, but it didn't last. Soon, too soon, Danny's dark brows pulled together and his lips curled sourly in confusion before a new expression swept it away. It was one Jack had never seen before.

He felt as though the air had been sucked out of the room, an icy chill prickled up his arms as the sudden wave of absolute horror overtook Danny's face. Jack couldn't tell if his son was about to break down crying or scream.

And then it was over. The tension in Jack's limbs released as Danny's face flattened into an unnaturally blank expression, he dropped his gaze and continued his way over to Maddie and Jazz. Once again it was like Jack wasn't even there.

Danny placed a hand on his mother's shoulder. "Maybe you should do another lap around town, you might find something today." he spoke softly into her frazzled hair.

Jazz looked at Danny strangely, her brother sent her back a glance that must have held some meaning because she then gripped Maddie tightly around the shoulders and led her straight out of the house, and suddenly Jack recalled that he still didn't know who it was that had gone missing.

"So... is anyone gonna tell me what's going on?" the jovial tone Jack meant to use came out flat and strained, Danny didn't look even remotely amused.

"I think you should sit down." Danny said quietly. He was no longer meeting Jack's eyes as he pulled out a chair for himself and one for his father.

Jack took the offered seat and prepared himself for the worst, obviously someone dear to Maddie and the kids had gone missing, Jack ran a list of all the people they knew, preparing himself for the worst, it was obvious Danny did not want to tell him what had happened. Perhaps whoever was missing was someone that Jack in particular had been close to? Was that the reason behind the horrified look on Danny's face? Because he'd realised he was going to have to be the one to tell him?

Something in Jack's gut told him he was on the wrong track, but try as he might he just couldn't imagine what else it could possibly be.

Jack kept his eyes on his son as the boy's thin torso straightened up in his chair and his icy blue stare bored into Jack's. Danny took a deep breath, then took several more, eventually he seemed almost ready to speak, Jack didn't rush him.

"Dad... you're dead."

[firstdegreefangirl]

OK, I have no idea what happened to it ((my guess is that the blue hellsite decided it was snacktime and ate the thing)), but ages ago, @kitkat0723 sent me an ask prompting the following: 

May I pleaseeeeee request #11 back hugs and #15 The biggest warmest hugs 

This is my fill for that, in this text post, because Tumblr disappeared the ask when I tried to save it in my drafts. Who knows? Anyway, it got much longer than intended, but I'm chalking that up to that it's technically two prompts, one fic. Heads up, there’s some frustratedDad!Eddie in here. Everything is all good by the end, and it’s nothing too severe, but if that’s not your kinda thing, no hard feelings. Other than that, enjoy!

Eddie’s staring at his hands, wrapped so tightly around the edge of the kitchen counter that he can see his knuckles turning white. His back is strained, muscles pulled taut against the effort it takes to support his head right now. When he flexes his fingers, it’s like he can feel the bones scraping together, hear the grinding echoing in his head.

It’s like a garbage disposal, sucking his thoughts down into its spinning blades. Except that the thoughts don’t go anywhere, and he’s still stuck thinking them.

He’s the worst dad in the world, and his kid doesn’t even have a mom to go running toward.

He can’t believe himself, yelling at Chris, sending him to his room without dessert just because he copped an attitude about his math homework.

(Actually, he did that because Chris kept rolling his eyes and calling his teacher a ‘stupid jerkface.’ Eddie met her at conferences; he might not be wrong, but that doesn’t mean it’s OK to say it out loud. Especially when Eddie told him more than once to stop.)

But it’s been a long day, for both of them. Eddie’s coming fresh off of an 18-hour shift, and apparently Chris had a pop quiz in social studies he wasn’t prepared for. So tensions were already running high before Buck cleared the pizza boxes away, turning the kitchen table into a makeshift classroom. (And honestly, what would any of them do without Buck, swooping in with delivery dinner to take at least one thing off of Eddie’s to-do list?)

Then Eddie had spent 45 minutes trying to remember how to divide fractions. Every time he’d tried to suggest something – anything at all, from “let’s look in your textbook” to “I think you flip one of them upside down – he'd been met with a long-suffering sigh and an eye-roll that would make Anderson Cooper proud.

“Why do I have to do this anyway? Math is stupid, and my teacher is stupid, and I’m stupid, and all of it’s stupid!” Chris would shout, or some variation thereof.

And eventually, Eddie had had enough. Enough of trying to rationalize through it. Enough of Buck looking at him helplessly and shrugging his shoulders because he’s no more useful with fractions than Eddie is. Enough of Chris’ high-pitched whine, the way he flopped back in his chair and groaned. Enough reminding him to use his words, that he’s a smart kid, that they’ll get through this together.

Enough of all of it.

“Fine, you don’t want to do your homework? That’s fine!” Eddie had shouted, pushing his chair back from the table with enough force to wobble it onto two legs. “But if you’re not going to work on this, then you can go put your pajamas on and brush your teeth. No TV and no ice cream until your worksheets are done, I don’t care how long it’s going to take. I’m not doing this with you all night, go to your room!”

Chris had stared at him, eyes wide and mouth agape in shock, before thinking better of it and running off. The sound of his crutches echoing was enough to shake Eddie from his stupor, but when he’d looked at Buck, who was already looking back, concern etched across his face, he’d snapped again.

“I can’t sit there all night and watch him stare at a piece of paper. I don’t want to hear it from you either, OK? Just …” Buck’s eyebrows had pushed closer together, and the anger bled out of Eddie again. His voice cracked as he continued. “Just give me a minute, OK? Please?”

Then he’d pushed past Buck to go stare out the kitchen window, before he could say anything else to hurt someone he loves.

Which brought him to now, clinging to the countertop like the world might swallow him whole if he lets go. Honestly, he’d probably deserve it, for raising his voice at his son and at his boyfriend, all in one breath.

He exhales shakily, screwing his eyes shut against the tears that are threatening to burn hot, salty tracks down his face.

He’s the worst dad in the world, and he sent his kid to his room, and Buck probably left too, and there’s nothing he can do about it.

But he can’t give in to the anger, can’t let it take over the definition of his day. He remembers Frank saying something about that, how it’s maybe not a bad day, just a bad moment that he’s milking all day. And he doesn’t want to do that, especially not where Chris is involved. So he takes another deep breath, and a few more after that.

He’s still breathing slowly, counting every second of air in and out of his lungs, when he feels a heavy, sold weight drape across his back.

He relaxes into the contact, knows who it is before Buck can even slide his arms around Eddie’s waist. Buck holds him tightly, crouches down far enough to bury his face in Eddie’s neck, waits patiently for their breathing to even out until they’re sharing the same rhythm.

Buck stands there, holding him tightly and long enough that Eddie doesn't feel like the world is going to beat him anymore. He holds Eddie until he feels strong enough to let go of the counter with one hand and wrap his fingers around Buck’s where they’re pressing into his stomach. His wrist won’t turn far enough to tangle their fingers together, but Buck lets Eddie hold onto his hand, squeezes back as best as he can when Eddie tightens his grip.

And after a long moment, when Eddie finally turns himself around in Buck’s arms, Buck is still there. He’s there for Eddie to cling to, adjusts his grasp so Eddie can get his hands high enough to wrap around Buck’s shoulders and fist in the back of his T-shirt. He’s there for Eddie to bury his face against Buck’s chest and let out one last long, shuddery sigh.

And he’s there when Eddie leans back, just far enough to see Buck’s face when he opens his mouth.

“Buck, I--”

“It's alright, I know, you’ve had a long day. No hard--” Eddie cuts him off, before he can supply the word “feelings.”

“It’s not. It’s not alright. I overreacted, and I lashed out, and I’m sorry.” Eddie sighs and leans his forehead back against Buck’s shoulder. “I shouldn’t have … I was out of line. You didn’t deserve that. You haven’t done anything tonight but try to help – and you have helped. I don’t know how I’d have gotten through tonight without you. Even if I screwed up royally.”

“You didn’t ‘screw up royally.’” Buck runs his hand up and down Eddie’s back, a hundred times more gentle than he deserves tonight. “You got frustrated, you snapped a little bit, but you backed off before you went too far. Eddie, babe, it happens. Trust me, from having parents who did screw up in a million different ways, I seriously doubt Chris is going to be talking about this in therapy in 20 years.”

“Oh god, Chris.” Eddie rears back again, dropping his hands to Buck’s sides, but not letting go of him. “I … I yelled at him and took away his dessert. Over math homework.”

“Over his attitude toward math homework.” But Buck’s words fall on deaf ears.

“He called himself stupid, and I yelled at him.”

“Eddie, hey.” Buck squeezes Eddie’s bicep gently until he can bring himself to make eye contact. “He’s doing good. I went back and talked with him, helped him get ready for bed. No progress on the math homework, but he’s jammied, and his teeth are brushed, and last I looked, he was working on the latest Captain Underpants book. He was a little worried that you were upset with him, but we talked, and he knows you had a long day, and he was being difficult and --”

“He’s not a difficult kid.” He’s not, truly, and Eddie had long ago promised himself that he’d never make Chris feel like he is.

“Maybe not, but even good kids have their moments. He knows that it’s not his fault, and that we both still love him very much. And you know what?” Eddie hums, but doesn’t say anything. “He asked me to come see if you were OK. ‘Dad must have had a really bad day,’ he said. ‘I think he might need some help with it, but I should stay in here, so I don’t get in trouble again.’”

Eddie sniffles, tears in his eyes for an entirely new reason now. Even after all of the mistakes he’s made – not just tonight, but especially now – he's still got such a sweet kid, with so much empathy, and the biggest heart of anyone he’s ever met. How many 11-year-olds would get yelled at and immediately want to make sure their dads are OK?

He doesn’t know for sure, but he’s willing to be that the number isn’t large.

“I should go talk to him,” Eddie sighs, finally stepping back far enough that he has to let go of Buck.

“I think he’d like that. Want some support?”

Eddie thinks for a moment, then nods. He doesn't know how he’d have gotten through this much of tonight without Buck, and he really doesn’t want to do the next part by himself either. He leads the way down the hall, but Buck catches his hand along the way. This time, their fingers fit together perfectly.

He stops at the doorway to Chris’ room, takes a second to look at his son, lying on top of the covers with his knees bent up to balance his book. He’s completely oblivious to the audience until Eddie knocks gently on the doorframe.

“Hey, Chris,” he starts, then realizes he doesn’t know where the sentence was meant to be going.

“Dad!” Chris sits up and grins. He grins, and Eddie’s heart swells. “Buck said you had a bad day. Do you need a hug?”

“Yeah,” Eddie nods, stepping forward until he can sit on the edge of the mattress. “Yeah, I think I do.”

The next thing he knows, Chris is all but launching himself at Eddie’s lap. He flings his arms around his dad’s neck and holds on tight. By the time he’s done squirming, he’s situated himself on top of Eddie’s thighs, chin tucked underneath his head.

He’s almost too big to be held like this, but it doesn’t matter to either of them as Eddie hugs him right back. One hand lands on Chris’ head, ruffles through the thick curls for a moment before gently tugging him back by the shoulder.

“Hey, you know how I always talk about setting a good example for the people around you?” Chris nods hesitantly, like he’s not sure where the conversation is going. But Eddie does, and he knows that everything is going to be OK. He takes a deep breath and continues.

“Well, I need to do that too. And tonight, that means that I owe you an apology.”

[broadstbroskis]

five times you shared a bed with your best friend plus one time you didn’t | matthew tkachuk

lol so @slimskjei-dy requested the prompt 16. We’ve been sharing a bed since we were little so why is this weird now? from a list i put out a couple days ago to write blurbs for and this spiraled out of control, so here’s nearly 4k.

one

The Tkachuk’s move into the house next door to your family the summer before you start preschool and at the ripe age of three, you are too young to have any idea what going with your mom to drop off “welcome to the neighborhood” brownies is going to mean for your future.

Really, it likely has more to do with the fact that “welcome to the neighborhood” brownies turned into a glass of “welcome to the neighborhood” wine between your mom and Chantal Tkachuk, which turned into a bottle of wine while you and Matthew played in the backyard with Brady’s chubby little baby legs trying his hardest to keep up. 

By the time Keith arrived home from a midday skate session, with your dad awkwardly following behind, babbling about how your mom had just planned on dropping something off quickly but was still missing, their friendship was basically cemented. Chantal and your mom did everything together. And your dads’ friendship didn’t take long to form after that. 

Which meant you and Matty were right there with them.

But neither of you cared. You’d settled quickly into a friendship, just like your parents had, where you’d play hockey with him and he’d begrudgingly play soccer with you, and you both pretended you had no idea what Brady was talking about when he ran to tattle that you were ganging up on him and not letting him play.

There’s countless pictures of the two of you growing up, getting into all kinds of trouble, but then also, of the quieter moments too. Sitting too close to the TV watching movies, eagerly waiting by the door for Keith to come home from a road trip with souvenirs, the naps curled up around each other in one of your beds. 

“The quietest twenty minutes of the day.” Keith continues to joke, anytime one of those pictures resurfaces.

two

You wince at the sound of glass crashing behind you and decide the best course of action is to keep moving forward with your mission to find Matthew. Whichever hockey bro of Matthew’s house this is can take care of that; it’s not your job.

Besides, the room is spinning from the cheap beer and booze you’d been drinking all night since the two of you arrived at this party, and you’re pretty sure it’s a bad idea to go near glass.

You find Matthew in the kitchen, with a few of his St. Louis hockey bros, a couple of them guys that you’re still friends with even after he’d left to go join the NTDP, as well as a few faces you don’t recognize. You slip up into their circle, sliding under Matty’s arm when it lifts to wrap around your shoulders, grateful for the solid body to lean against.

The room is really starting to spin.

“You okay?” He asks, ignoring whoever’s speaking.

“I don’t think I can go home tonight.” You admit.

He laughs. “Text your mom and tell her you’re staying with me. Big Walt and Chantal are at a tourney with Brady and Taryn; nobody’s home.”

“You don’t think she knows your parents aren’t home?” You scoff, but you’re already pulling out your phone and carefully drafting the text, making sure to avoid any spelling errors that might give your drunkenness away.

“Yeah, but she can’t prove what she hasn’t seen.” Matty winks at you and you roll your eyes.

“Is that what you told your mom after you left her a three minute voicemail at 3am last month?” You chirp at him, smiling at the instant laughter from the friends around you and accepting a fist bump from Luke Kunin.

That line of chirping continues for a few minutes, until Matty manages to turn it around on one of the boys, and then it dissolves into a free for all before they’re all just laughing at each other.

By the time the giggling ends, you’re about three seconds away from falling asleep on Matt’s shoulder, and it’s his nudge that wakes you. “You ready?” You nod, joining him in making goodbyes to your friends, and then following him out the door to begin the walk back toward your houses.

The fresh air does some good to sober you up and you feel marginally less dizzy by the time you and Matt make it to his room. He throws you a t-shirt to change into and you fall into bed after changing, waiting for him to join you, eyes shutting the second you feel the bed settle beside you.

three

The night before Matty’s due to leave for Buffalo for the draft, your phone buzzes with a text from him. You’re expecting more of the same that you’ve been exchanging all day with him-in various group chats with your friends, at a barbeque with both your families, when the two of you were chatting with Brady while you hid in the far corner with the beers you snuck while Taryn and your sister were off doing their thing.

It’s not. Let me in the text says, so you shove the blankets down and make your way downstairs to open the door for him.

“Shh.” You tell him. “They’re all asleep.”

“It’s 3am, of course they are!” He whispers back.

“Well so was I until you woke me up!” You start walking back toward your room, knowing he’ll follow.

Matthew doesn’t speak again until the two of you are in your room, the door is closed, and he’s lying on his side to face you in your bed. “I couldn’t sleep.”

“You can’t possibly be nervous.” You whisper back, knowing he’s talking about the draft. He shrugs and you reach your hand out to shove his shoulder down, allowing it to rest there. “Matty.” He blinks at you a few times as you think of what to say next. “You’re gonna go somewhere and you’re going to be great. One of these teams is going to love you enough to draft you and everyone after them is going to be mad they didn’t have the chance to and almost everyone before them is going to be mad they didn’t end up picking you and you’re going to go off to whatever city does and forget all about me back here.”

Matthew wraps his arm around your waist and pulls you closer to him so you move your hand from the top of his shoulder around to rub at the blade gently. “First of all, that’ll never happen. You’re stuck with me forever.”

You nod seriously. “Somebody’s got to put up with you.”

He pokes you in the side for that one and you have to bite your lip to keep in the squeal of laughter. “Second of all, almost? Almost everyone is going to me mad they didn’t pick me?”

“Leafs got first pick to get Auston! I just don’t think they’re going to regret that!” He pokes you again and you don’t manage to hide the squeal this time. “Matty! Everyone’s sleeping!”

“You should be nicer to me.” He tells you, once you settle down.

“I should be nicer to you? You wake me up at 3am to talk you off the ledge and I should be nicer to you?”

He nods, pulling you even closer to bury his face in your hair. “Always.”

You laugh, the sound muffled into his chest now. “Are we all good now?”

“Hmm?” He says, sounding sleepy already.

“Never mind.” You tell him, rubbing his back again. “Good night, Matty.”

“G’night.”

four

Calgary is a thousand times more incredible than you’d ever imagined. You’d been teasing Matty about being stuck in a frozen wasteland, sending him snaps from sunny gamedays at Mizzou and laughing anytime you get one in return with snow in the picture.

There’s snow on the ground when you arrive in December, fresh out of finals, and still feeling both the mental exhaustion from your exams and the hangover from a day of binge drinking with your friends immediately after they’d ended. You’ll never fly hungover again; the next time you do this, you’ll leave yourself a day of rest between exams and flying up to visit your best friend, since you know you won’t stop drinking earlier.

College is making you smarter already!

Matthew actually laughs when he meets you in the pick up lane, like puts his head on the steering wheel and has to hold off on driving. He gets honked at by the car behind him. “Your laugh is making my headache worse.” You whine.

“So I take it you don’t want the bottle of wine I bought for us to split tonight?”

You look over at him suspiciously. “What kind of wine?”

He laughs again, but softer this time. “Atta girl.”

It’s a red blend, a favorite of the two of you, but a much nicer one than you’ve ever bought before. You let out a low whistle as Matthew places the order for dinner. “Suddenly you’ve got some cash flow and Barefoot’s too good?”

“Hell yeah! Wait until you see what kind of vodka I got for us for Saturday.”

You perk up. “What’s on Saturday?”

“Party with the team before my parents come in.”

You laugh, accepting the glass of wine he pours for you. “You don’t think Big Walt would want to come to the party?”

Matty gives you a look. “I know that’s exactly what would happen and that’s why I told them to come Sunday.”

“Smart thinking.” You admit.

“See, who needs college?” He teases, which settles the two of you into your familiar teasing and banter while you wait for the food to arrive. 

It isn’t too long after dinner and Netflix that you and Matthew are heading to bed, pressing yourself as close as you can to suck up as much warmth that he’s radiating. “Fuck, your feet are cold.” Matty mutters as you giggle and press your toes into his calf.

“Haven’t you missed me?” You sling your leg over his for maximal toe digging, laughing when he jumps.

“I guess.” He says, but his tone says Absolutely.

five

“So what are your plans for after graduation?”Ashley, Sean Monahan’s girlfriend (and soon-to-be fiancee if Matty was to be believed) looks at you during a stoppage of play late in the third.

“God, don’t remind me.” You groan. You’d wrapped the fall semester of your senior year a couple days ago and then taken off to Calgary in what had become your annual post-finals trip. It’d be the last one you ever took, with your final semester of college looming over your head. 

Ashley grins. She’d become a close friend of yours over all your trips to visit Matthew, even flying down to St. Louis last season when the Flames were in town and spending a weekend with some of the other girls visiting you at school afterwards. “Just come hang out up here forever.”

You burst into laughter. “And live where?”

She gives you a look, like it’s the most obvious thing ever. “With Matt?”

“Oh my god, you’re serious.” It takes a full minute for you to recover. Play has resumed, there’s a minor scrum on the ice in front of the two of you but you barely even notice, too shocked by Ashley’s words.

“Why wouldn’t I be?”

“Because why would I ever?”

“Because you already do.” She says, with more patience than you’ve possessed in your entire life combined, and then laughs at the look on your face. “YN, what you two have is so special! To fall in love with your best friend at age three and still feel that way is amazing! If Sean and I can look at each the way you and Matt do after twenty years, we could only be so lucky.”

“We’re not in love.” You deny. “Matty and I-we’re just-we’re not.”

Ashley bites her lip, but doesn’t push it any further. “Alright.” She agrees, and thankfully, the game ends there, so you’re able to just gather your things with her and make your way down toward the family room to meet the boys.

But you can’t get her words out of your head as you and Matthew arrive back to his place and start getting ready to go to bed. You move around each other with a practiced ease, handing him the toothpaste before he even asks for it and accepting the oversized sweatshirt he passes to you, somehow knowing that you’re extra chilly tonight. 

Lying next to him in bed, the same way you have for nearly twenty years, suddenly feels suffocating. You roll onto your side, hoping for some room to breath, but now it just feels awkward; this isn’t how you sleep.

You sit up, ditching the sweatshirt. Maybe you’re just too warm. Lying back and pulling the covers back up does nothing to solve that problem, and actually, you’re shivering, so you sit back up and yank the sweatshirt back on.

“Could you settle down?” Matty mumbles, pulling you into his side the second that you’re flat again. His arm rests on your waist, thumb in the dip of your hip, a position it’s been in many times, but suddenly you think you’re having trouble breathing. You open your mouth to tell him this, but he presses a kiss to your temple and says, “Relax, just sleep.”

You don’t sleep a wink the entire night.

plus one

“What do you mean you’re not coming?” Dylan, a good friend of both yours and Matthew’s, is usually one of the most upbeat people you know, so the sound of disappointment coming throughout your phone actually makes you wince. “YN?”

“I just-” You hesitate. You’d have to leave right now in order to get to St. Louis in time to make the Skills Competitions, and even then you might be pushing it, and things were still weird for you with Matty, as evidenced by how things were between the two of you when he came home for his short Christmas break. And things were weird. Everyone noticed- your families, your friends, Matthew. The two of you had spoken only once since, in the group chat where Matthew had texted an invite to your group chat to come home for the weekend for the All Star Weekend and you’d noncommittally responded wow that’d be awesome. “I’m super busy.” You finish lamely.

Dylan sighs. “Look, YN, I don’t know what the fuck is going on between you and Matt and I don’t really care. It’s not my business. But I know he’d really want you there no matter what’s going on and I know you’ll regret not going if you don’t.”

You close your eyes for a second, taking a deep breath. He’s right. “I’ll see you in a few hours, Dyl.”

“Hell yeah,” Dylan cheers.

By the time you make it to St. Louis, you have to race to meet your friends in your seats and the cheer they send up is poorly timed, but it does make you smile. “Shitty seats.” You accept the bottle of Bud Light someone passes you.

Dylan laughs and points up to the giant platform next to you guys. “He’s going to be shooting from there in a while.”

“Alright.” You nod. “I guess this is acceptable then.”

It’s a good while before Matty and the rest of the guys participating in the Shooting Stars event start making their way up, but it’s nice to catch up with your other friends while you wait. If you got a big cheer when you rolled in, the one that goes up when Matthew walks by is deafening (and boostered by the friends of Brady’s that are sitting right behind you guys). The two of them look over at you guys, grinning already, and you see it in Matthew’s face when he spots you, the smirk softening a little and his eyes locking on you.

You’d read about moments where time stands still but it’d never actually happened to you until now. It’s like the crowd doesn’t exist around you, like you don’t actually need to breathe. The only thing that matters is the moment in time when your eyes meet Matty’s. 

And that moment’s broken by Brady shoving him forward. 

As you watch Matthew throughout the entirety of the last event, you know you’re screwed. You’ll get through this weekend, go back to school, and get over these thoughts by the time summer comes. Everything will be back to normal by the time you see Matty again.

In the meantime, you do your best to avoid him once the Skills Competition ends and you join everyone at the after party on the rooftop bar of the hotel. It’s easier than you think it would be to do. When Matty’s talking with some of your local friends, you find yourself catching up with both sets of your parents. When he starts making his way toward your parents, you excuse yourself to the bathroom. You see him make a beeline towards the bar, so you dart off in the opposite direction, where Brady is talking with a couple of his Atlantic Division teammates and push yourself in between the height of him and Auston Matthews, which seems like a safe spot to hide.

“YN!” Auston grins, throwing his hands up in the air, in a drunken greeting that you’d love to be more lowkey.

You reach up and grab them, yanking them down. “Listen, I know it’s been a while since we’ve last hung out and all, and I know from the way you talk and dress and everything about you that this is a hard thing for you to comprehend, but I’m really going to need some subtlety from you.” Next to him, Mitch and Freddie burst into laughter. “Down low, boo. Down low.”

Auston is laughing as well and you remember that while the times you’ve spent with him have been few and far between, unable to visit Matthew as frequently during his time with the NTDP as you have been in Calgary, they’ve certainly been memorable...so moments like this are unshocking to him, to say the least.

They don’t even faze Brady, who’d grown up with both you and Matthew, and is merely looking at you with an entirely too familiar smirk and a raised brow. “What’s the subtlety for, YN?”

“Fuck off, Brady.” You flip your middle finger up at him quickly but it’s just enough time for the entire group of hockey players around you to pounce. You really should have known better.

“I knew something was up!” Auston grins.

“Nothing’s up.” You deny, very poorly.

“Really?” Brady grins. “‘Cause Matt’s like right there.” He points. “On his way here. So I guess if nothing’s wrong, you can-” He starts immediately laughing when you shove your way out of them.

You think you manage to lose your best friend by pushing through a large group of players and family from the Metro and Central divisions and throwing yourself out the door to the outdoor patio, which is mostly empty, despite the unseasonably warm winter St. Louis has been experiencing. You can see Brady, Auston, and Quinn laughing together through the glass door, but Matty’s nowhere to be found, and you sit down on the closest bench, taking a minute to just breathe.

“You gotta tell me what I did.” The voice scares you, but it shouldn’t, because you really should have known better than to think that Matty wouldn’t be able to find you.

When you look over at Matty on the bench beside you, you can’t think of another time he’s looked this devastated. Maybe that semi-final loss in World Juniors? Maybe? It’s all over his face and you can’t just leave him like this any longer. “It’s not you.” You tell him, holding back tears. “You didn’t do anything wrong.”

“Then tell me what’s wrong so I can fix it!” Matthew says, frustratedly.

“You can’t fix it!” You sniffle, trying to scoot away from him, to give yourself some distance, and feeling the tears start to fall when he closes that space again. “You can’t go back and stop Ashley from making me realize that I’m in love with you, okay? So you can’t fix this and I just-I need some time, Matty! Okay? I need some time!”

“Don’t be fucking stupid.” He breathes, like he’s only just recovered the ability to talk, which, he might have, and you tilt your head to meet his eyes, which puts you in a perfect position considering he’s already leaning toward you.

Matthew fumbles for a second, his hand reaching for your cheek and catching your ear instead with you turning, but he recovers quickly, stroking gently down the side of your face. You gasp, the kiss entirely unexpected, and Matty takes the opportunity to tug on your lip gently before pulling away and you let out a whimper at the loss of contact.

He smirks.

“Don’t be smug.” You shove at his shoulder.

“Don’t be stupid.” He repeats, pulling you closer. “How could you ever think I wouldn’t be in love with you?”

“I didn’t want to ruin us.” You tell him softly. “But I am willing to concede I was wrong.”

Matty grins. “Sure were. Can do this anytime I want now.” He kisses you again, leaving you just as breathless as before.

You suppose, at some point, that’ll start to wear off, but as the two of you trade lazy kisses on the rooftop, you can’t imagine that point ever coming. This is perfection, this is the piece of your relationship you didn’t even know was missing coming together, this is-

-Brady knocking on the window?

What?

You blink again, realizing where you’re at. Still on the rooftop bench, with your arm wrapped around Matty’s neck, your legs draped over his lap, and your face tucked into his shoulder. Matthew’s arms are wrapped around your waist, holding you close, and his head rests on top of yours. Somehow still asleep through all the banging Brady’s been doing. 

“Matty.” You poke him awake.

“What?” He groans, sitting up.

“Brady.” Matthew looks over at the window, where Brady is still gesturing that it’s time to leave, with a very smug grin on his face.  Matthew lifts one hand off your waist to flip his brother off, allowing you to climb off. 

“You couldn’t have answered any of the texts we sent you?” Brady asks, once you step inside, but he doesn’t sound annoyed at all, still looking between the two of you with the biggest grin on his face.

Matthew shrugs. “Must have fallen asleep.”

“Bullshit.”

“You just saw us!”

Brady rolls his eyes, knowingly. “Just kiss her already.”

Matty grins. “Gladly.” And then he’s pressing a heated kiss against your lips, looping his arm around your waist, and it’s all you can do to grip his arm with one hand to keep yourself standing and flip off the crowd around you with your other as whoever’s left at this after party burst into applause and wolf-whistles.

[trillian-anders]

chambers - xx

pairing: bucky barnes x reader

warnings: violence, angst, slow burn

word count: 2.8k

description: post-endgame. Steve Rogers has passed away from old age. The one remarkable thing is that no one knew his heart would be in the condition it was. He was able to save one more life. After receiving his heart, strange things start happening. Including something that would change your life forever. (Inspired by the Netflix series of the same name.)

note: thank you guys so much for being with me for this series, the first one i’ve posted. the first chapter sat half written in my drafts for almost a year before i decided to finish it and post and i’m very happy that i did. thank you so much for reading and i hope to see you on the next one!

if you have any questions about the series always feel free to message me.

xx 

Their names are Allan and Rosa. Your parents who were born, raised, and still live in Philadelphia. Your Mom always in a pair of scrubs and hair in a messy bun before messy buns were even a thing. Your Dad wore glasses and had a fully grey beard, his hair almost fully grey now with age. They taught you how to ride a bike, even though your Mom had been terrified. You remembered your Dad holding the bars over your shoulders and helping you down the street, your little heart beating so fast with excitement.

They taught you to read and write, cuddled under your Mom’s arm as she read you whatever you wanted her to read, pretty covers of books you couldn’t quite understand. Tales of dragons and elves, princesses and epic battles, books on romance. She’d read to you every day. In the hospital unconscious or in your childhood bedroom.

As you grew older and your health problems began to escalate. First heart, then the second. You started enjoying those little things more.

Sudoku with your Dad while he sat next to your hospital bed. Your Mom had a spin with needlepoint that the two of you attempted and your crude flowers sat framed in the living room to this day.

They were always there, all your band recitals, even though you were terrible at the violin. At every science fair. At every school function. They always showed up.

“You were our gift from God.” Your Mother had told you. “We knew you were meant to be ours the second we laid our eyes on you.”

They’d never been able to have children. That’s what they told you and Bucky when you’d gone to see them. They desperately wanted a child, and when they heard about you. How sickly you were. Their hearts broke.

“We thought we’d only have you for a short period of time.” Your Dad was emotional, dabbing his eyes. “We were fortunate enough to have you survive.” No one had wanted you. Not when they thought you were going to die.

“You were a frail thing.” Your Mother said, “You looked like you were at deaths door, but when I first saw you and you grabbed my hand so tightly… We knew you were a fighter. And we wanted to fight with you.” And they did. Every step of the way.

Every surgery.

Every new hope.

Every failure.

It was theirs too.

Not just yours.

And when you were a kid you resented them for it. They didn’t understand that you didn’t want to go outside. They didn’t understand that you didn’t want to get out of bed. You grumbled and groaned as your Mom rolled you out into the sun. The wheelchair after your surgery, she painted it a bunch of different colors and sat you in it in the back yard. The sun poking through the trees and warming your skin while she gardened, and you acted like it didn’t help.

They were always so unwaveringly optimistic. This next surgery would be the one that cures everything. This next surgery will be the one that sticks.

It wasn’t easy explaining them the situation. With Steve, Zemo. All of it and at the time, the less they knew the better. But it didn’t stop them from worrying. So it made sense that when it was all over, you spent a little time at home. A nice little break from the stress of the constant running. The looking over your shoulder.

You’d waited until your bruised face healed, until you were cleared by Bruce. Then you went home.

Your Mother cried when she saw you, Dad hadn’t gotten home from work yet. She gripped your cheeks and lay kisses on your face, pulling you into a tight hug before leading you inside.

The three of you ordered pizza from your favorite place. Cheese fries and soda. You talked to them about your biological parents. Who they were. What just happened to you. But trying to explain time travel seemed a little difficult.

“So… there’s more than one… universe?” Your Dad, trying to put the pieces together.

“Yes, but they’re all interconnected. Like… every decision is a fork in the road, so choosing ‘yes’ leads you down one path while choosing ‘no’ leads you down another and it infinitely splits off from there.” He nods before shaking his head.

“How long do you think you’ll be able to stay with us?” Your Mom asks.

“A week or two at least.” You pick at a fry, “Bucky is going to come get me whenever I’m ready to go.”

Bucky. They remember Bucky.

“The real brooding guy?” Your Dad asks. “He looks like he needs a drink.” You laugh,

“Yeah, that guy.”

You helped your Mom with her garden. You went to work with your Dad for an afternoon, taking money at the register of his barbershop. Grocery shopping was nice. Doing something so normal and mundane after a while. Getting apple cider donuts from the Amish market and browsing, picking out a good watermelon and barbecuing. Something you felt like you’d taken for granted for so long before.

“Hey, how are you?” You stepped inside, away from the noise of your cousin’s birthday party. A small backyard barbecue with just family, an iced sheet cake on the kitchen counter with candles waiting to be lit.

“I’m doing alright,” His voice, you hadn’t realized how much you missed it. “Sam is riding my ass about this paperwork, but it’s just about done. How are your parents?”

“They’re good.” You sigh, leaning against the wall. “They’re happy to have me back.”

“I’m sure.” There was silence for a beat,

“I miss you.” Both said at the same time. You laugh, “We spent so much time together in those last couple weeks… I thought this break would be nice, and it is, I love seeing my family and being here, but…”

“I wish you were here.” Who knew he’d be such a softie? You hum,

“You could always come down when you’re done with that paperwork.” You look out the sliding door to the back yard. “I’m sure my parents wouldn’t mind.” He lets out a chuckle.

“Maybe, I’ll think about it.” You tug your bottom lip between your teeth.

“Have you ever seen the liberty bell?” You can hear him shift on the other line, getting comfortable.

“Can’t say that I have.” You could hear the smile on his face.

“You should come see that at least,” You hear him hum, “Maybe get a cheesesteak, see a couple of museums.”

“That doesn’t sound half bad actually, I just might have to.” You pick at the polish on your nails.

“Wanda tells me that you’re having trouble sleeping.” A heavy sigh. “What’s going on?” Silence.

“I’ll be fine.” But you knew he wasn’t. Being back in the chair, going through that again, even if it was for a short period of time. I was setting him back.

“Have you talked to Tom about it?” His therapist. Another sigh, so no. “Bucky…”

“I know. I know… I’ll talk to him about it this week.” Your Mom steps through the sliding glass door with your Aunt.

“We’re about to do cake.” She says. Telling you to get off the phone without telling you to get off the phone. You nod.

“I’ve got to go, but please don’t forget to take care of yourself. Take a shower, talk to your therapist, and then come see me. Promise?” You can hear Bucky move on the other line.

“I promise.” A grin on your face.

He showed up the weekend after. Hair a little shaggy and beard unshaven he stepped out of his car and into your arms. The hug much needed, giving you a little rush of happiness. A comfort in it.

He looks so tired. Talking to your parents over dinner. Just exhausted. And you know he hasn’t been sleeping. If the bags under his eyes were anything to go by, he hadn’t slept much since you left a week ago.

“They like you.” You tell him later, sitting on the edge of the bed in the guest room. “You don’t have to sleep in here,” You offer, “They won’t care if you slept in the same bed as me.” It’s not 1940 went unspoken but was there. He sighs, rubbing his eyes.

“I’ve been a little restless,” He admits, “I don’t want to wake you up.” You roll your eyes, standing and holding your hand out to him.

“Come on.”

Your bed was a full size. Not as big as the beds at the compound but just about the size you’d had when you were sleeping in the Hydra facility in Austria. Which means you’re snuggled up face to face, looking at each other in the dark.

“I think it would be good for us.” You reason, “I think we need some closure.” He stares at you for a moment,

“That’s what Tom said too.” You shrug, your hands clasped together. “I just don’t even know what I would say…”

“I don’t know either.” You whisper into his hands. “Steve was leading me this whole way and the focus had always been on him, but… I was Peggy’s kid too.” And she had to give you away too. She had to lose a child too. “I think this would be really good for me.” He nods against the pillow.

“Okay.”

“We can go?” He sighs, fingers brushing your cheek.

“Yeah, we can go.”

Steve was buried next to Peggy. With her until death and far after. He was a traditionalist after all. The flowers felt silly in your hands as you lay them on the two graves, lush with flowers of admirers… tourists. You throat so dry and your nerves getting the better of you.

This wasn’t the Peggy that was your Mother. This was a different Peggy from a different universe. But it didn’t erase what was in your DNA. Your biology. You feel a tie to her. In more ways than one.  

You’d done more research on her. Who she was. What she stood for. You talked to Sharon. Your cousin. She talked to you about how Peggy was really into female empowerment. She supported her when she wanted to join the CIA. She supported her through everything. And you wonder for a moment what it would have been like to grow up with Steve and Peggy as your parents. That legacy. If you’d lived long enough, would you have joined SHIELD? Would you have fought the same way they did? Against the injustice they saw in the world?

Yes, you think. You would have. Because even with a different hand dealt in life you still found your way back here. To this very moment.

“Hi, Mom.” It felt strange, talking to nothing, but it wasn’t really nothing was it? “I uh… I’ve been thinking about what I would want to say to you… how I would even… talk to you like I did with Dad and I know it probably wasn’t easy to let me go.” You swallowed roughly, tears already pooling in the corners of your eyes, “I know it wasn’t easy, but I just want to say thank you. I… I’m going to live a long and happy life here, where I might not have survived before. I found something that makes me truly happy, like I didn’t even know… that I was capable of any of that…

but I know it’s from you. Not just from Dad.” Your hands are shaking, and you wrap your arms around yourself. “I think that we kind of got lost in that a little bit. He’s Captain America, the golden boy… American hero that he is, no one even cared that I was your daughter… I just want to thank you for everything you’d done for me… and the person you let me become.”

It felt strange, talking to the grey stone. But relieving. Tension in your shoulders dissipating. There was also a slight emptiness, never being able to meet her. Never being able to talk to her. “I wish I could have at least talked to you,” A sigh, “At least once.”

But they’re always with you, right?

“Are you okay?” Bucky rubs your arms and you lean back into his chest, he wraps his arms around you, resting his chin on your shoulder.

“Yeah,” You sigh, “I think it’s your turn.” Your hand rubbing his forearm that lay across your chest. He stiffens slightly, you were sure he was anxious, he pressed a kiss to your cheek. “I’ll give you some privacy.” You stepped away from him, holding his hand until you were too far out of reach, taking steps away from him to reach the car, leaning against the passenger door.

Bucky looked back at you, you giving him a little thumbs up and a soft smile. He sighs, turning back to look at the stones in front of him. Steve’s name carved out in the granite. He remembers being here before. Carrying the casket. Sore and upset. He remembers you sitting, not too far away. In a wheelchair, recovering from your surgery still, but there to pay your respects to the man who saved your life.

He remembers that day as being very difficult. His fists clenched and angry. Sam had been trying to calm him down all morning, but it had been hard. He couldn’t deal with the loss. He just couldn’t.

It feels like a lifetime ago now.

He swallows, “Steve…” He felt a little ridiculous. “I’m angry that you left me.” He lets out a deep breath. “I was angry… that you left me. I was angry that you left me and didn’t tell me the real reason why…” His fists were tight now. “I would have understood, if you had only told me… I wouldn’t have thought that you didn’t love me enough, I wouldn’t have thought that you didn’t care.

Steve, I… I loved you so much for so long that I didn’t see anything else ever happening. I always thought we would be together, as friends or not. It was hard for me to come to terms with the fact that you didn’t see it that way. It broke my heart to bury you. I didn’t think I had anything else and if it wasn’t for Sam I…” Maybe wouldn’t be here. He squeezed his eyes shut, taking a deep breath and trying to gather his thoughts.

“She’s incredible, Steve.” He could feel your eyes on his back, knowing you looked at him with worry. “She’s so intelligent and kind, she’s strong… I would have left you for her too.” A rough joke with a watery laugh, “It’s easier to say now, looking back that you made the right decision. But at the time it was almost impossible to reason… I just… I wanted to let you know that I love her.” He felt the tension melt from his shoulders, “And I’ll take care of her pal… Thank you for bringing her to me.” The granite felt warm from the sun as he rest his hand on the headstone. “Thank you for everything you’ve ever done for me.”

He met you at the car, standing close, resting his hands on the roof of the car, caging you in. Your eyes fluttering closed as he pressed his mouth to yours. A soft and slow kiss. You sigh, wrapping your arms around his waist, the hug much needed. The emotional turmoil finally settling. A comfortable silence.

When you pull back, he looks down on you, a soft smile, red eyes.

“Are you ready?” You hum,

“To leave or to move on?” He shrugs,

“Both?” You return his smile.

“Let’s go.”

You couldn’t help but feel like, when you sunk into the passenger seat and let Bucky drive you away, that you were leaving that part behind you.

You hadn’t had another memory of Steve since actually sitting and talking to him, there was a little emptiness there that hadn’t been before, soothed over with the fact that you felt changed by this. Your hand was in Bucky’s, over the center console, his thumb running over your wrist. He brought your hand up to his lips, pressing a kiss to the back of it as you pulled out of the lot and onto the street.

“I think we need a vacation.” He sighs, his eyes a little red rimmed still from the emotional toll of the day. You nod,

“Where should we go?” A side smile,

“Wherever you wanna go baby.”

[calacuspr]

Calacus Weekly Hit & Miss – Carl Nassib & UEFA

Every Monday we look at the best and worst communicators in the sports world from the previous week.

HIT – CARL NASSIB

“I hope that one day videos like this and the whole coming out process are just not necessary," said Carl Nassib, the Las Vegas Raiders’ defensive end after revealing that he is gay.

In making his admission, during Pride month no less, Nassib becomes the first active National Football League player to come out publicly.

Nassib added: "I'm a pretty private person so I hope that you guys know that I'm really not doing this for attention. I just think that representation and visibility are so important.

"I'm going to do my best to cultivate a culture that's accepting and compassionate."

He followed up with a written message admitting that he had “agonised over this moment for the last 15 years” and it was only after he received so much encouragement from family and friends that he decided to go ahead.

“I am also incredibly thankful for the NFL, my coaches, and fellow players for their support,” Nassib wrote. “I would not have been able to do this without them. From the jump I was greeted with the utmost respect and acceptance.”

Nassib is also donating £100,000 to the Trevor Project, a suicide prevention service for LGBTQ youth in America, a creditable gesture which highlights his understanding of the struggles many young people face.

Amit Paley, CEO & Executive Director of The Trevor Project, gave thanks to Nassib for his generosity and said: “The Trevor Project is grateful to Carl Nassib for living his truth and supporting LGBTQ youth. Coming out is an intensely personal decision, and it can be an incredibly scary and difficult one to make. We hope that Carl’s historic representation in the NFL will inspire young LGBTQ athletes across the country to live their truth and pursue their dreams. 

“At a time when state lawmakers are actively trying to restrict transgender and nonbinary youth’s participation in school sports, this news should serve as a clarion call for greater LGBTQ inclusion in the locker room and on the field.”

Of those who have admitted that they are gay in the past, Michael Sam came out before being drafted into the league in 2014, but never played a regular season NFL game.

Roy Simmons, who played for the Giants and Washington in the 1980s, was one of a number of players to come out after retiring. He told the New York Times in 2003 that he did not feel safe announcing that he was gay while he was in the NFL.

“The NFL has a reputation,” he said at the time, “and it’s not even a verbal thing – it’s just known. You are gladiators; you are male; you kick butt.”

Hall of fame quarterback Warren Moon revealed that gay players had long been a part of the NFL. He tweeted: “As long as they helped us win and were great teammates- their sexual preference was never a issue..

“We live in a different time now where diversity is much more accepted. Cheers Carl, and I hope this lets other athletes know, its OK to say who you are...”

The Raiders tweeted: “Proud of you, Carl” while club owner Mark Davis played down the significance of the announcement and said: “He’s a Raider. If he’s happy, I’m happy. It takes courage. I thought we got to the point where this wasn’t (a story). It doesn’t change my opinion of him as a man or as a Raider.”

The NFL was swift to offer their support for Nassib with Commissioner Roger Goodell saying: “The NFL family is proud of Carl for courageously sharing his truth today. Representation matters.

“We share his hope that someday soon statements like his will no longer be newsworthy as we march toward full equality for the LGBTQ+ community. We wish Carl the best of luck this coming season.”

NFL Players Association executive director DeMaurice Smith added: "Our union supports Carl and his work with the Trevor Project is proof that he -- like our membership -- is about making his community and this world a better place not for themselves, but for others."

Certainly 20 years ago, Nassib’s announcement may have ended his career based on the macho culture within the NFL locker rooms but the fact that his shirt was the top-selling NFL jersey on its network after his announcement according to sports apparel retailer Fanatics.

Nassib is now a poster boy for a new era in American Football and it is to his credit that he is embracing the challenge.

"I do not know all the history behind our courageous LGBTQ community," he added, "but I am eager to learn and to help continue the fight for equality and acceptance."

MISS – UEFA

The football community has been largely united in support for the LGBTQ+ community recently, from European players donning rainbow laces and calling out blatant acts of homophobia.

However, UEFA have been criticised for not explicitly challenging or condemning homophobia during Pride month.

German captain Manuel Neuer’s decision to wear a rainbow-coloured armband was initially banned by UEFA before they quickly changed their position.

UEFA then last week rejected a request to illuminate the Allianz Arena in Munich with rainbow colours during the EURO 2020 Group F match between Germany and Hungary.

There was suspicion that the proposal was a response to new Hungarian legislation, which has banned the promotion of homosexuality to those under the age of 18.

In a statement posted on social media, UEFA defended their decision by saying: “UEFA is proud to wear the colours of the rainbow. It is a symbol that embodies our core values, promoting everything that we believe in.

“Some people have interpreted UEFA’s decision to turn down the city of Munich’s request to illuminate the Munich stadium in rainbow colours for a Euro 2020 match as ‘political’. On the contrary, the request itself was political, linked to the Hungarian football team’s presence in the stadium for this evening’s match with Germany.”

The major of Munich, Dieter Reiter, was one of many who saw this as a missed opportunity from UEFA and he had hoped that the illuminations during the match would “send a visible sign of solidarity” with Hungary’s LGBTQ+ community.

The Germany and Hungary game finished 2-2 and summed up the mood from the footballing community perfectly towards homophobia and UEFA’s decision.

A pitch invader took to the field with a rainbow flag as the Hungarian National anthem blared out around the stadium, while Leon Goretza celebrated his late equaliser for Germany by running over to away fans and making a heart gesture with his hands, conveying the simple message that homophobia will not be tolerated.

Undoubtedly, UEFA have not a strong and clear position regarding homophobia throughout the EURO 2020 tournament.

Earlier, during Hungary’s opening Group F game against Portugal in Budapest, a set of Hungarian fans were seen holding a sign that read “Anti-LMBTQ”.

UEFA had an opportunity to react instantly to confirm the LGBTQ+ community as equals in society and in football but its delays had the result of many feeling unwelcome.

It took five days for UEFA to release a short statement on their website on the incident and no action has since been taken against Hungary.

The delay meant the message was not instantly dismissed, which suggests UEFA do not take the issue seriously enough.

Joe White, a spokesperson for the LGBTQ+ fans group 3LionsPride, has criticised UEFA’s messaging. In a statement, he said: “UEFA will tout themselves as supporters of equality and rainbow-wash their brand when it suits them, but rarely proactively engage or make improvements for LGBTQ+ people involved in the game.

“LGBTQ+ people across the game are not able to enjoy football when they have to face hatred in stadia and online.

“It’s clear that UEFA once again has its head firmly buried in the sand and is no ally of the LGBTQ+ community. Until UEFA start taking serious action against discrimination, the beautiful game is once again allowing its ugly side to rear its head.”

The rainbow symbol in football stadia reassures to LGBTQ+ individuals watching EURO 2020 that they are welcome in football. It demonstrates that attitudes towards homosexuality are improving within the sport.

Without the rainbow, particularly during Pride Month, those messages are lost.

Germany has led a continental call for greater LGBTQ+ unity throughout football. In the days following the UEFA Allianz Arena rejection, officials across Germany ignored the guidance, as stadia in Frankfurt, Augsburg and Nuremberg, as well as in Belgium, joined Munich by lighting up in rainbow colours.

Elsewhere, UEFA sponsor Booking.com, will use a rainbow outline in all of their pitch-side adverts for Round of 16 matches, including Holland’s game against the Czech Republic in Budapest.

Ahead of the tie in the Hungarian capital, Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte said that Hungary has “no place in the EU,” unless they retract their homophobic laws.

UEFA have demonstrated that the rainbow symbol will not be universally accepted in football, which is hardly consistent with their own claims to be pro-LGBTQ+.

The inconsistency shown by European football’s governing body during Euro 2020 underlines the fact that they have a long way to go to regain the confidence of the LGBTQ+ community.

Perhaps it is time for UEFA to go back to the drawing board and come up with a consistent policy which allows freedom of expression in the promotion of sexual equality.

[i-imagine-my-doctor]

Beautiful Trauma | Eleventh Doctor

Pairing: Eleventh Doctor x Reader

Requested: No

A/N: I haven’t written in AGES but I found this in my drafts, so I thought I’d post it xx

I still have a Twelfth x reader request in my inbox that I HAVE written I just don’t know if I like it enough to post. Please let me know if you’d like to see it! And apologies to the anon who requested it so long ago!

Retelling of Rings of Akhaten. Title of this fic comes from a P!nk song I highly recommend! (although it doesn’t have much to do with the fic)

xxx

What a fragile, broken thing he is.

He scares you more times than you would like to admit. There’s darkness under that boyish exterior. When he snaps his anger burns like a thousand suns, and you see twisted blackness ooze from the cracks in his soul. He doesn’t bat an eyelid when he murders the one who crossed the line— his line. His rules. And he smiles.

And then he forgets. He is the man who forgets. Because he has to.

How can he do it? Keep living? After everything he’s done and seen?

“I watched as time ran out, moment by moment, until nothing remained. No time. No space. Just me!” his voice cracks and he sinks to his knees. His body trembles, re-living every one of his memories one by one as the old god rips them from his mind. He sees them all. Indescribable beauty: starlight, soft lips, breathless laughter, s/c hands on his body— suddenly fade and shatter into agonizing depictions of murder, fire, blood. Nothing but blood on his hands. He shakes them furiously over his coat, not caring if it streaks the deep purple. But the tweed’s color remains; the blood stays.

When it’s all over, the sun god shriveling and screaming and dying, it takes every ounce of his strength to keep from collapsing right then and there. A life this long is not meant to be remembered. He’s moments away from shattering into a million pieces, from falling apart and maybe never able to put himself back together again.

But somehow, he stands. He can’t recall how he made it back to his TARDIS, throwing the doors closed behind him and running. The damage has been done, and it’s inescapable.

—

One who’s been through so much and so taxing a life certainly would have such darkness in their soul, you decide.

By the time you find him, it’s already night. You hear shuffling coming from the library; when you peek inside you see him sitting by the light of the fireplace in one wall, his head bowed, anguished cries muffled behind his hands.

He feels the opposite end of the couch dip with your weight, but he makes no acknowledgement. He’s shaken, afraid, ashamed of being vulnerable.

But God, he needs you more than anything right now.

“Doctor,” you murmur; you slide your hand lovingly up his back.

He can’t help but lean into your touch. Your other hand you slide tenderly under his chin. Eyes flicking over his face, you marvel at the man before you. He’s warm, he’s alive, he IS a good man, you think. He hates himself, he feels so worthless. 

You love him so much.

Gently you turn his face so he reluctantly meets your soft eyes, filled with nothing but love. “I’m here for you.”

What can he do?

He breaks. He comes to you, as a scared, lost little boy might. His head bowed, he shuffles onto your lap, curling himself up small like a child. He wraps his arms around you tight and buries his face against your neck.

You’ve never seen him like this, so trusting of one person.

So you hold him. So tightly your arms are trembling with the effort. You press your lips against the soft skin of his forehead, and cradle his head against your chest. You close your eyes, your heart ready to break and burst out of your chest at the same time.

“Please,” the sound is barely audible, a watery whisper against your collarbone. ‘Please’, he begs, you know not of what for.

“Okay,” you breathe, your lips dipping to the shell of his ear. “Okay,” you say.

What more can be said?

[doubledeaky]

Life is Beautiful

Joe Mazzello x Female!Reader

A/N: Hi, everyone! So, this is my first imagine and I’m super excited and a little nervous to share it with you all. I’ve been wanting to post my writing for a while so I’m biting the bullet and finally doing it! I actually wrote the first draft of this piece at 3 am while half-asleep so you know it’s got that sleep-deprived passion already baked into it! Warning, this is super fluffy and came out a little cheesier than I intended but I’m still proud of it. Alright, hope everyone enjoys! Feedback and requests are much appreciated! :)

word count: 2,154 words

warnings: mentions of mental illness and suicide

Your eyes darted drowsily from the right side of your living room to the left side of your living room. You’d been sat on the couch for some time; how long, you didn’t necessarily know. After work, you’d retired your fake smile and allowed the numbness hibernating in your body to emerge and settle in every corner of your being. You don’t even remember at what point in the evening you had begun crying, your mind was in a thick fog of sadness. The couch had come to know you better over the past two months, seeing as you rarely left its comfort during your free time. The television in the corner was on and Three’s Company played, but you weren't watching. Your phone had been ringing steadily all evening but you didn’t have the will to answer. You slumped in your seat and stared at the ceiling while the ringing noise that had made itself comfortable in your ears slowly drowned out any surrounding sound, including the familiar jingling of keys and a door being opened cautiously. Joe was home; he greeted you as he strode into the living room but you never shifted your gaze to acknowledge him. He sighed and ran a hand through his hair before retreating into the kitchen. Your mind registered his presence but everything else was having a hard time putting on a front for his sake. Today was just one of the worst among a string of bad days. Days like this were more prevalent in your life now than they had ever been and it scared you. You still didn’t acknowledge Joe when he walked back into the living room. The part of you that was fully aware and conscious didn’t want to chance a look at your husband, you knew his expression would break your heart and you didn’t know if you could bear the weight of his gaze today. Joe was the one to finally break the crippling silence. 

“Y/N, what’s wrong? You didn’t even acknowledge me when I walked in. Why have you been so distant?” His words pulled you from your comatose state and you could sense the tinge of anger laced within them. It took everything in you not to wince or cower; he had a right to be angry and you had no reason to make him feel guilty because of that. You had been distant; his words held true and maybe that was what made fresh tears stream down your face. You didn’t want to face the reality of your situation, it was easier to dwell within it. Your voice was weak when you answered him.

“I don’t mean to be, Joe. You know that.” You tried to sound reasonable, like you believed the words coming out of your mouth. Joe, however, didn’t buy it and pressed further. 

“Why have you changed so much, Y/N? You're not yourself, I don't even recognize you anymore.” That stung and you couldn’t help the choked sob that escaped your throat. Joe immediately regretted his words and attempted to inch towards you cautiously, almost like a human approaching a wounded animal. You felt his presence before you but you didn’t dare meet his eyes.

“Look, Y/N, I’m sorry I-” you interrupted his apology as you stood, meeting his eyes for the first time this evening. He looked worn, his red and teary eyes mirrored your own. You drew in a deep breath, terrified the anxiety swirling in your gut was going to spill out beyond your control. 

“No, you're right. I have been distant; I’m not myself. I’ve been putting on a show for months now. I can’t keep pretending, Joe. I can’t keep pretending I’m not miserable because it helps you sleep better at night. I can't keep pretending because it’s convenient. I’m so fucking sad, Joe. I’m lonely and I feel it to the point of madness. God, it’s too much, I just wan’t it to stop. Why can’t I make it stop?” At this point in your rambling, you had been reduced to a pile on the floor, your body caving in on itself, attempting to retreat from your own existence. Joe followed you to your position on the carpet, took you in his arms, and rocked you softly. Your skin burned from the contact, it was the first time you had felt pleasant stimulus in weeks and you sobbed. You had missed this, you missed being with Joe. Even though he had never left, you had. Someone you didn’t recognize had been taking your place these past few months and it felt like you were finally reuniting after being apart for years. Joe felt it too and he relished in the feeling of you pressed against him, this was a step in the right direction. Any contact you both had shared over the last few weeks had been empty. Joe interrupted with a sad voice, still clutching you like he’d lose you again if he didn’t

“You don’t have to feel this way, Y/N. I would do absolutely anything for you and you know that. Why haven’t you told me?” he all but sobbed into the crook of your neck. What was left of your heart disintegrated, this wasn’t what you wanted for him. The guilt in your chest rose and settled at the front of your mind, this is why you never said anything.

“I’m sorry, Joe. I just don’t want to worry you or stress you out. I just want you to be happy. I’m supposed to be your partner not your child, you shouldn’t have to take care of me when I fall apart. I don’t want that for you, it’s not what you signed up for.” You explained and Joe had to restrain the absolute heartbreak he felt, all he wanted was to take care of you, to see you happy. 

“Y/N, baby, don't you see? I’ve been miserable right along with you. I know you don’t want me to worry but I can’t help it when I know you feel like this. God, I haven’t been able to eat I’m so worried. Your happiness is my happiness, Y/N. It’s my job to make sure everything is rosy, sweets. No matter what you may believe to be true, you aren't my burden, if anything I’m yours. I don’t know how you do it, babe. I just wan’t you to be okay.” He says through a cracked, wet voice. He was facing you now, trying to read your features for anything familiar. You can’t help the grin that cracks your somber facade, his saccharine sweet words always brought you back from a slump. God, what had you done in your previous life to deserve a man as amazing as Joe. Your first instinct was to embrace him and who were you to deny nature. You buried your face in the material of his sweater and he returned your gesture with even more passion. Joe cheered internally, he finally saw the woman he loved emerging from the dark

“You’ll be okay, my love. I’ve missed you so much.” he says attempting to hold back the tears that threatened to spill. You couldn’t help but sob at his words, you had missed yourself too. The rest of the evening was spent this way, enveloped in each other’s warmth. It had been a feeling you missed and you wondered how you'd gone so long without it. You both fell asleep entangled amongst the sheets and one another, like so many of the nights you’d both shared before. The only difference now was that you drifted to sleep looking forward to the morning sun seeping through your window, washing you and Joe in a warm glow reminiscent of a Renaissance painting. Your last moments before a much needed sleep overtook you was the familiar sound of Joe’s breathing and a warmth returning to your heart. 

Three Months Later-

Recovery hasn’t been easy and you didn’t expect it to be. Three short months ago you had experienced your lowest point and the way up has been slow and tasking in all aspects. Despite humble beginnings, your recovery has been beautiful, you feel whole again and it’s a state of being that you missed dearly. You had finally found yourself again and your pride shone bright in everything you did and Joe had been witness to it all. The change occurring in you before Joe’s eyes was like night and day. He finally had his girl back, you were all there. The woman he had fallen in love with had finally returned. The woman who was extraordinarily kind, unbelievably funny, and effortlessly beautiful had finally come home. Joe had a rejuvenated energy and similar to yourself, he felt whole again. He was grateful for every step of the process; he was grateful for the endless tears, sleepless nights, and screaming matches, it was worth every setback and hopeless thought. It’s a hell he would go through everyday if it meant you were happy. 

For you, life had finally begun to fall into place. You were living the life you’d dreamed of since the tender age of fourteen. It was a feeling like no other but throughout the process you felt there was still something missing, it was a feeling you couldn’t shake. It was a feeling that didn’t dwell within you long because life always has great timing when something is meant to be. Life is funny like that. 

Pregnant. The plus sign in the little window of the test was blurred behind your tears, your tears of joy. You were pregnant. Your body couldn’t even register the shock it was feeling. The excitement and happiness that was bubbling in your system almost expressed itself as a scream. You cried silent, happy tears and couldn’t help but do a little cheer in the privacy of your shared bathroom. You couldn’t wait to tell Joe. The family you’d always longed for was phasing into existence and your body hummed with joy. 

You heard Joe before you saw him. He dropped his bag to the floor and you heard him call out for you. You exited the bathroom; test hidden behind your back and a big, goofy smile plastered on your face. Joe became aware of your presence and gave you a confused look, cocking his head and giving you a grin. 

“What are you up to? Have you been crying?” he asked suddenly concerned and as he takes a few steps towards you, your smile only grows. 

“What?” he says curious as to what you have planned. You silently bring the test from behind your back and hold it out to him. Seeing the positive test is all Joe needs and without warning he’s picking  you up in his arms and holding you tight. 

“No way,” he all but shouts, grinning like a mad man. You can't help the tears and watery laugh that escapes you. 

“You’re going to be a dad, Mr. Mazzello,” you say, waving the test teasingly in his face. He grabs your face gently and kisses you hard with a passion you’d grown so accustomed to you felt it even when he wasn’t around. 

��I can’t believe it. We’re having a baby,” he says, pushing fallen hair from his face as tears slip from his amber eyes. He's smiling wide with an almost blinding intensity and it’s a sight for sore eyes. You cherish it, praying it never leaves the factions of your memory. Joe falls to his knees, placing both hands on your lower stomach. There is no bump present but the thought of the baby growing within you has his body thrumming with excitement. He is in complete awe at the woman before him. The woman who had gone from her lowest low to her highest high with such grace and poise. You were his heaven on earth and he hoped you sensed that. He hoped his love for you was evident in his every action and in every word he spoke. As he held your form, he felt that God had crafted this moment in the sands of time, it was a scene that envied any romance film. Joe had been in and seen many films, but none that moved him as much as the one you and himself were starring in. He grinned up at you, rising to his full height to plant a kiss on your lips. 

“I love you. God, I love you,” he whispers so delicately you knew it was only meant for you. You hold him tightly, words failing to accurately convey the measure of love you held for him and him alone. The rest of the evening is spent this way, wrapped in each other’s embrace, similar to most of the nights you share. Only now, you both wait with bated breath for the day when the sun will seep through your shared bedroom window and shine on your family of three, washing you all in a yellow glow and reminding you of how beautiful life can be. 

[cinderacequeen]

I feel like I haven’t been posting in awhile. At first i wasn’t posting much because was because I was too busy reading fanfics. Plus I have 100+ drafts to reblog and I’ve been procrastinating on them. However, now I don’t feel like posting or reblogging anything because I’m not really in the right mindset to.

This is going to be very emotionally heavy, but I need to get all of this out, even if it won’t make me feel any less heartbroken than I already do. 

My precious cat, Reddy, had passed away Sunday morning and I’ve been just an emotional mess since then. My brief moments of happiness are few and far between, no matter how much I try. My mind goes right back to him. I’ve tired myself out from crying so much, but sleeping comfortably now is next to impossible since my mind is reeling with grief, guilt, and what-ifs.

I’m still in disbelief that he’s gone. No longer will I wake up to a begging white and tan furball jumping on me in the morning or waiting for me at the top of the stairs, begging for treats. No more cuddles or scaring me half-to-death with his random chirping meows as I’m concentrating on something. No more purrs and rubs as I groom him. No more sleeping next to me at bedtime. No more begging for a piece of food or whenever he hears a can, thinking it’s tuna. No more hiding whenever people come over or when I vacuum the house. No more visiting me in my room before going back upstairs. 

All of that is gone now.

And we can’t get another cat (or any other animal, for that matter) since we can’t afford vet treatments.

So I’m left without one of the things that helps me out when I need it for a long time- at least until I can get my own place which, again, won’t happen for a while.

I feel like I’m partially responsible for Reddy’s death, even if it’s probably not (good luck convincing me otherwise; I’m stuck in a loop of guilt). I should have saw the signs earlier. It started with what seemed like a swollen paw that I figured might have been a sprain. 

Of course, since we couldn’t take him to a vet, it was just a mere speculation. Then things got worse since the beginning of this month, despite foolishly getting my hopes up (I need to stop doing that; the disappointment and heartache is getting to be too much) that he was seemingly getting better when the swelling was going down a bit.

I thought Reddy was just tired from having to hobble around on three legs and was trying to conserve energy for healing since he started laying around more than he usually did, but it soon became clear that something more serious was going on with him when he stopped eating altogether and started losing weight (after spending a week babysitting a tiny kitten, I just thought it was just my mind playing tricks on me). I hadn’t noticed these things until about a week ago. Shows how vigilant I am.

I had talked to my cousin about it Saturday and was told that since he was 13 years old, he might have not been able to eat solid foods (she had a cat who had been going through the same thing, though idk if she also meant the swelling paw) and should be upgraded to senior cat food. 

Not once had this crossed my mind, which just makes me feel all the more dumb and guilty. I tried feeding Reddy baby food, as was suggested to me, but by that point, he was too weak and wouldn’t or couldn’t eat. I wish I would have realized far sooner, because I feel like he basically starved because I was too idiotic to realize what he needed and didn’t understand what was going on with him and didn’t take his age in consideration. I don’t even know if that’s why he passed or if it had something to do with the swelling paw and it’s been making me feel more anxious. I really hope it wasn’t because of the former.

Regardless, I feel like he suffered because I was too inattentive and stupid.

Heck, I had chose to leave for awhile because I was too stressed out with worry to stay in the house for much longer. I had just left him for my brother to look after while I was gone, thinking it would be okay while I try to calm down. Of course, I only ended up being emotionally distant and even more frantic, especially with each phone call to update me on Reddy and worrying if I’ll get the one I dreaded the most. I then returned home with the food I thought would help Reddy get better. I didn’t get to feed him much, though. I horrifically realized that t was far too late and he was almost too far gone.

I was able to be with him during his final moments but part of me wishes I hadn’t, especially since his frail appearance and weak meows that became quieter and quieter as his time swiftly ran out and how he looked afterwards will forever be haunting my memory. I try not to think about it, especially when trying to sleep, but it’s really hard. 

I couldn’t leave him, though. He deserved so much love and I gave him plenty of it until the last second.

I can’t touch another cat now since it will just be a grim contrast to how Reddy felt...especially with how cold he was after he took his last breath and how the light eventually went out in his eyes. 

Thankfully, our landlord was kind enough to allow us to bury him in the backyard. It was certainly better than the alternative if we couldn’t. And he so did not deserve that kind of treatment. I would have been so mad.

I felt so helpless to him and frustrated that we couldn’t have gotten him the help he needed. I loved him so much. He had formed a special bond with only me. He had even snuggled with me after I had my surgery, which I bet helped me recover a lot faster. I was chosen by him and I felt so blessed.

But now I won’t be able to experience that same amount of love for a long time. 

I miss him so much.

[talkingtomyselfabout]

Opening My own Pandora’s box

It’s been two weeks since my last post, and what a two weeks it has been. I buried my grandmother yesterday; I attended her funeral and said a goodbye or sorts to my last living grandparent.

It’s been a wave, or wavelength, up and down, quickly and slowly, radio waves to gamma rays and back again.

I have always believed in my intuition and have faith in the signals and signs I receive from the universe. Some might call it supernatural in some way, I don’t know what I call it but there have been countless instances in my life where I am certain of the connection that I have, that give me warnings or premonitions of what is to come. For many years, I have written many things, created ideas about blogging, vlogging, podcast, radio stations, all of which I did not pursue out of fear among other things. However, this blog, what really moved me some three to four months ago to really buckle down, chuck the fear out of the window was this recent pandemic and the belief that when it comes to death a lot of people have no idea what to expect, and I have experienced it a few times, might provide some insight or help to those that need it. I drafted several pieces on death, and the experience of grief and bereavement, all left incomplete, the latest draft was written in as early as March, then my grandmother died on April 6th.

My grandma suffered a fall and was admitted to hospital where she stayed many days and returned home, at that point I thought, I’m prepared, I remember when my Godmother lost her mum, she had suffered a fall as well, the doctors and staff and the time telling the family to prepare themselves for the worst because when falls are suffered by the elderly some are not able to recover the trauma and death sometimes following seemingly healthy who have what many consider small falls and spills. Yet Grandma came out, at 92 she was alright, yet she wasn’t in addition to her age she was also asthmatic and returned home with that wretched virus.

However even with this news I refused to accept the possibility of death, my grandma was different you see, her aunt lived to be over 100, she walked and carried herself in with strength and forbearance that meant this plague would not end her life, call it hope or delusion, I don’t know but in this, her death was unacceptable to me.

I was nothing like my other reactions to death in the past, I mean my great aunt died in January from the same plague, and when my grandfather died some 21 years ago,

(this was them, my Grandma and Granddad when they were young)

I was only 10 but the grief and sadness was different, I witnessed his last moments and accepted death and a normal part of life, grandparents die, many peers did not have grandparents. Even my Nan (my maternal grandmother) spent most of my life preparing us from when she would not be here, she would often say “when I am gone”. She, my Nan died when I was 19 in her sleep (she knew it was coming, she told me 2 days before it happened).

So here we are, in the experience I thought I knew enough, that I could happily give advice on what to expect, well proves I still have much to learn, and life has much to teach. It took perhaps 10 years for me to reach a place of functionality where the loss of my Nan was concerned, but I honestly thought, grief, I know it, I can do it, complete the process, I’ve mastered it because I did it with my nan it would be the same, can you believe my arrogance?

My Nan was a woman who I adored and knew without any doubt that she loved me unconditionally as I love her unconditionally.

(Me, my Nan and My Mum)

You know as a child, I only her swear once, when she called me a bitch because, in my childishness and selfishness, my actions made her vulnerable and put her health at risk, it was a lesson I would never forget and taught me a lesson in actions and consequences that I doubt my parents could have beat and she did it all without raising her voice. And even so, I knew that she loved me unconditionally, which was her way, she loved everyone unconditionally, her children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, her extended family, her friends, even after bad behaviour, or disappointing choices she loved everyone.

My experience with my grandma and by extension, the rest of my father’s family was a different story altogether. I wasn’t always sure that my grandma loved me in the same way she did her other grandchildren. What every love I did feel, was tainted with expectations and conditions, praise for a test score, end of school report. I taught myself that the only way to have my family’s love was through academic achievement, a prestigious role or job, correct behaviour, that I was not lovable unless I was successful because we never spoke about much else. I remember how vindicated I feel when I finally finished my degree and could prove without a doubt that I was worthy of love, what followed was anger and resentment, which caused me to distance myself from them and my grandmother, which sometimes fills me with regret.

I am listening to and exploring the works of Louise Hay and what she says about affirmations and learning to love yourself and what stands out for me is her words about having sympathy for our family’s childhoods. They did the best that they knew how to do, while they did not give me what I wanted or felt I needed, there were some experiences of kindness and laughter. I remember how happy my grandmother felt when she discovered that I quite by accident developed a love for two of her favourite musicians Frank Sinatra and Nat King Cole and she showed me her favourite songs and played them for me, and I told her which songs I liked. I remember her asking me about my job when I worked at Wimbledon and her talking about the matches she remembered and sporting events she liked to attend (ascot for one and my telling her I worked at Cheltenham races a few times).

I didn’t know that I loved my grandmother, not as much as I did, I didn’t know that she loved me, I wasn’t certain, as much as I knew my Nan loved me. My vision was obscured by the pain of resentment and rejection, but my remembrance of what moments we shared, I acknowledge that she did, and while attending her funeral yesterday sharing in the grief and in the loss, I finally felt that I belonged.

I like Pandora have a box where the Cohen family and most of my feelings towards them were kept, over time I added to it, pouring plenty of pain, resentments, anger, envy, and bitterness into it over time. I’m on my journey, I know have some really hard work ahead of me, but I’ve only now realised that there at the very bottom, small and fleeting like a small flickering light is hope.

[rosheendubh]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waltharius

The strange paths this journey takes me on...I'd forgotten all about this gem of Medieval Saga-hood. In uniting Gwen's unique segment to my most beloved of Germanic myths, a clash of two adored heroines I've always dreamt of uniting has finally taken form. Gwen as a young woman, coming of age, educated in a 460-470s era decaying Rome, convent and hospital style, beneath the tutelage of an Alexandrian or Byzantine physician (still need to pump Arthurian Romance for an adequate prototype to borrow on that--and found it. See the Gold Boobs post...and the Lycurgius Cup), and an abbess...who happens to be the retired, incognito version of Gudrun.

~

A Queen Like No Other...

We’re guiessing, maybe some time frame from about 465 to 475 or 480AD...

The last surviving daughter of the Gepids, exhausted of the world, had sought her peace, retiring to a nunnery in the waning decades of Rome’s twilight,  The massacre of her brothers, Gundahar and Hagano, to the combined forces of Atila and Aetius, was a tragedy instigated first by Brunhilde's vengeance, betrayed by Sigfrid, the only man Gudrun had ever loved, and who hadn’t the honor to stand up to her mother on the night Gudrun had been presented to him, and claim his love for wild Brynhilde. The closure had been all Gudrun’s though, serving her butchered sons by Atila, to their own father, lighting his hall on fire, and watching his men roast, drunken in their excess, celebrating the demise of the Burgundi, retching and choking as Gudrun regaled them the  ingredients of their foul feast while they suffocated on smoke and flame. It wasn’t till some years later, when her tears left her dry, no more grief to spare.  Beloved Swanhild, her only daughter by Sigfrid, convulsed, dying in her arms, trampled to death because of a weak husband’s faithlessness. Her daughter’s broken body was a sack of shattered shells. For all the sorrow Gudrun sustained, it was then her heart had turned to a hard, bitter stone.

Harsh and cynical, she’s always attuned to Old Grim, his One-Eyed Shadow following her, even into the cloisters of the convent, the retreat of the Christian God by which she sought to elude Wotan.  Duty still goads though, meaningless distractions the women find to occupy themselves, like taking in the daughters of barbarian nobles. Providing some means of trade, education, or dowry to unfortunate girl-children of widows and orphans, left bereft in the tumult of a dying Empire.

Gwenafyr ferch Edern of the Cawnr.  Aeternus, her father styles himself here, in these old weathered palaces where men still cling to archaic Latin, trying to dilute the jarring utterances of tribal chieftains who now retain titles of legate and prefect. The young girl put into her charge is a tribulation.. Spoiled, barbarian royalty, her people inhabit a rock sitting in gray waters at the end of the earth. She tasks Gwen with the most menial of novice chores in the convent, enforcing a lifestyle the strictest of ascetics would have found withering. And Gwen, lonely, angry, resentful of her father abandoning her to such mistreatment, lashes out.  Which impresses Gudrun, who approves of the girl's spirit and determination.  Her inherent recalcitrance, it seems. She'll need it one day, to face the world she will eventually inherit. For Gudrun--god's rune--can See.

The gifts her Lord of mead, madness, brilliance, and Vision endowed long ago, before she knelt in obeisance beneath a cross, a broken and sorrowing soul back then. What she sees upon this girl is the shadow of her One Eyed Keeper, a fate of darkness, and a hope so bright, of something into the future Gudrun thinks even Old Grim shies back from, just a little. Courage of mind and heart burning from young Gwenafyr's eyes. Gudrun, in her final, parting defiance to the curse Wotan holds upon her days, steals her nights in a deluge of rotten memory, intends, against all odds in this failing chaotic time, to raise this child, just on the verge of her adolescence, a few years short yet, into a queen such as the world will never forget. A woman to leave her mark upon a future. Where others have failed, she might, just might, open up something of hope, a path leading out of the thorns bleeding these dark times.

Where better, than Britannia, when she returns to her island at the edge of the world. "But first...first, girl," Gudrun explains into the furious gaze of this hoyden, "before you learn to serve a land, you must learn what it is to serve beggars."

And so commences Gwen's education in the halls of Rome's old crumbling libraries, and the stench filled corridors of the charity hospitals. Reciting Latin, Greek, the Gothic parlance of Gudrun's tongue, Gwen ministers remedies from the texts of classical physicians long turned to dust, their words and knowledge leap from scrolls crusted and protesting the sun of a world much different than the one once gracing the mirages still glimpsed amid decaying plazas, toppled pillars, and bramble thick fields.

Hours drag, roll away into months. Months turn with the seasons into years. One, then five. A decade. And finally...finally she may just be ready. To return. Claim a king. Claim a nation.

Gudrun mourns her parting--Gwen, transformed into the daughter fate cheated her when Swanhild was trampled by Eomer's men, rage wrought upon charges of adultery never born truth. Wotan has marked her. A presence Gudrun never hesitated to speak of as their affection deepened in the years. Gwenafyr never seemed bothered. Upon her island, women are goddesses, mortal embodiment of immortal dream. What has she to fear from a shade skulking at the edge of vision?

Merely curious, Gwen's irony and ruefulness have become her defense into maturity, education of reason and science shaping how her student views the foibles of humanity. There's nothing of the virgin philosopher though, Gwenafyr all too aware of the world's temptations and luxuries, and perfectly obliging to hedonism. In moderation. But she would have made a terrible nun. Because there's also nothing of fear in her. What traditions steeped her childhood in that far north country before she'd entered Gudrun's convent, they left an indelible mark, as deep cloven as Wotan's shadow upon Gwen's wyrd. A child of queens before queens--gods and men alike, heroes all of them, to be molded by the guidance of their women. Gwen knows her worth. And she will not be restrained by warlord, priest, bard. Or God. Unless the word of God, a god, rings with truth and compassion.

Gudrun's heart warms with pride, and something she has long denied. That minuscule softening deep inside, where she buried many years ago, the raging grief of so many deaths. Sorrow again, loss, as the ship leavens, creak of oar and plank, its hull buoyed by the current of the Tiber. The price of love.

Gwen approaches the rails, reaching for a final glimpse of her world these last 10 years. Sadness, inevitable at their parting, hangs heavy in Gudrun’s mind. The uncertainty breaking through the excitement animating Gwen’s clean lined face when she seeks Gudrun across the distance of the widening waters eases some of the weight of her sorrow, realizing just then, how much she has meant to her young charge. Gudrun nods to her farewell as the ship glides further from the dock.  Her blessing and confidence in that bow of her head.

It's enough. Her breath catches, the shade about Gwen hovering, cast back by the brightness, not only in the sudden joy shining in the younger woman's eyes, but her spirit. Blazing. To Gudrun's Sight it's a corona that washes out the image of the ship, passengers milling around Gwen--so bright, Gudrun feels the world sway.

She catches herself, shaking her head to clear it, swallow air to still the gallop of her pulse. A small wave of her hand reassures the concerned glance of a food vendor from his stall. So bright, into the threads of the future sometimes illuminated by this curse. Gwenafyr's spirit shimmers, dew drops along spider-silk lit by the sun, her strand dancing with the warp and weft of time. And always, around her, shadow of Grim's talons trying to grasp her light. Until another ray, lancing brilliance, tangles the dark claws away. That second soul always with her, hearts vowed in every life.

Her laugh is purely internal. *Plug it, Old Man. She's never been yours, and never will be.*

His voice isn't sound so much as as sensation. The draft of heat from flame. A wash of fire in the air, heaviness like a brewing storm, pressing thick in the wind. *No. But I am hers, when she wants. And want,* the voice a sigh in the dark, *she will.* Sensuous, it wraps around her, shivering caress down her spine.

Curse the bastard. This ecstasy he commands, how longing not felt for years can awaken her dried husk of flesh, sagging breasts and wrinkled thighs warming with forgotten urge.

*Soon daughter. Soon.* Gudrun hopes whatever passes for his incorporeal eye, the one observing the world, he can see her scowl, plain across her brow.

*Easily. That's why I always favored you over Brynhilde. She worshiped until she hated. You...you hated from the first. My mead deepened your bitterness, Gudrun. But recall, you never denied my gifts. Neither will she.*

*No,* Gudrun finds herself humoring him like they're a pair of old lovers. *But she may take your gifts and turn them into something even you never anticipated, Old Man. She cast Andarvi's Horde from curse to blessing, easing the lives of our poor. And his ring, when finally melted down, became...* At this she does let her dry chuckle escape, hearing, feeling a flabbergasted god's very mortal consternation.

*...became her set of surgical instruments.* Gudrun isn't certain, but she thinks Wotan might not be a little pleased. *Walkryian.*

"She's no harvester of the dead, Old Man. Let her be." Her pointed defense rings sharp in the silence of a deserted square lying along the route she’s chosen. A reluctant fountain bubbles from an eroded sculpture of Venus cuddling Eros in her lap.

*Change, chaos, wrecker of order, I am. Even gods can be no other than what our nature dictates, Gudrun. Her line has always drawn me, at these crossroads of fate. Darkness. Light. She possesses both destruction and rebirth.*

"And she fears neither, Old Man. Nor does she believe in your wyrd."

*Enlightenment,* his utterance, a breeze stirring, sweeping the detritus of the streets in her wake.

"I believe the word she used was...*wealwian*," Gudrun counters.

Silence. So profound, for a moment, she thinks she's actually offended old One Eye. Until, faint at first, a building crescendo of laughter, thunder, waves, and wind in her mind, fills her sense with his joy.

*You’ve done well, Gudrun.* A father, proud of his daughter. She abides his praise, burying her annoyance.  He accommodates the capriciousness of human nature with the ease of a child, even when his acolytes deliberately stray, denouncing him, evading his sight.

*A queen like no other. She will invite the end of an age. And seed a new dawn. Where hovers hope, her dream still waits. But it will take shape, in time.*

The air ripples, waves breaking upon the shore of  mind. Ebbing, a veil thins between universes. Ghostly, coalescing from a fog. A man, lean of limb, hair like russet leaves in autumn sunset, elegant in height, dressed in foreign garb. Shirt and vest, trousers cut to the knee--strange to an eye accustomed still, to the swathes of robes donned by Latin magistrates,   But the trappings of the desk at which he’s hunched, intent upon his writing, a candle burning against shadows, are recognizable luxuries, despite the span of time between Gudrun’s present, and this future she into which she peers. 

His hand, furious as the speed of a river flowing from restless thought. *The tree of Liberty...*  The syllables a garble of incomprehension. She recognizes their rhythm if not their sound. It’s the magic of poetry. Wotan’s gift. Gudrun has known bards in her lifetime. Gundahar crafted verse of such beauty, hearts broke, and serpents sighed in slumber. She knows well, this passion bleeding into ink, soaked into a parchment she’s never witnessed, fine white sheaves, smooth, blank medium where his vision pours from his crippled hand. His ravenous mind.

A door latch releases. Gudrun,  peering into dream, sees a woman, young, slight-built, her apparel too, strange, curves of bust and waist fitted into drab gray, but the trappings accentuate feminine proportions of limb and torso, while skirts, floor-length and layered, conceal the line of leg. What odd tastes must dictate fashion in that foreign time. The woman turns from hanging her outer-wear upon a coat hook.  A cloud of black waves crowns her head, tresses bound into a careless chignon. Her eyes, dark, deepened by her sharp-boned, vivid features, linger upon the man.  Full of a suffering even Gudrun, in her cynicism, far removed from this moment yet to come, finds hard to bear.

The man’s hand slows in its frenzied scribbles. Stills. He leans back in his chair, stealing himself, it seems, to meet the young woman’s gaze.  The look, passing between them, long in its silence, conveys what Gudrun has lived, of yearning, tenderness, and despair.  And she knows, sure in her bones, certain as Sigfrid’s love once filling her lost youth, it’s the woman’s strength and courage which embody everything blooming of hope and truth, testimony from this conflicted scribe. Every bard and poet harbors some tortured secret. Even the intellectuals. That’s the only pearl which Gudrun ponders as the scene dissolves, froth of waves merging back into the vast sea.  Her present, this mundane world, dusk descending upon the abandoned plaza, tucked away in its maze of streets in a city fallen into ruin. Rome. Once the Queen of the World. 

And Gwenafyr ferch Edern--destined to become a queen like no other other. Whose progeny, whether they thrive or perish, will leave their mark upon dreams undiscovered.

*There once was a dream that was Rome...*

[endemictoearth]

Do This: List all the things you’re currently working on in as much or as little detail as you’d like, then tag some friends to see what they’re working on. This can be writing, arts, gifsets, whatever. 

@ghostcat3000 tagged me in this at @aspiringpolymath, but I’m answering here, bc most of my ‘currently working on’ stuff is MMFD related. *DEEP BREATH* Are you ready for this? ‘Cause I’M NOT

NOTE: ‘Currently working on’ means I a) have started and b) on occasion open the text file and re-read it, change 2-3 words, and close the file again (usually every couple of weeks). I just put everything on here because it’s both more and less overwhelming than I thought, somehow? 

MMFD stuff:

About Town - Classic me, I post part one with every intention of getting part two out asap and then ??? Don’t give up on me or it, plz

Ask Her Out - Actually don’t want to give too much of this one away, at least, not more than the title does (I will say that I have Simmy say “Well, well, well . . .” in fics, well, too much. But it DOES seem to be his signature phrase)

Battle of Who Could Care Less - Basically, it could be done, but I have these drafts of set lists for both bands and I think about writing a final chapter for the the actual Battle from time to time

Day After Valentines - Rae trying to scoop up discount chocolate at the corner shop without anyone seeing--DO WE THINK SHE DOES?

First Time fic - I feel like I might have exorcised this idea with my Five Times fic, but I haven’t deleted the file yet, so who knows

Fanfic fic - I started my own version of the ‘reading smut with a stone face, reading fluff with hearteyes’ prompt ages ago, and I like the IDEA, but I don’t know if the fandom needs another one (@bitchy-broken‘s version is great!)

Hot Desk Redux - Okay, John Finnemore wrote this amazing and perfect episode of Double Acts, which is two people working 12 hour shifts, sharing the same desk, so they meet twice a day. I really want to do a version with Finn and Rae (only the roles are kinda reversed). I will finish this, but it might not be until 2019 or so

Last Christmas - Yep, still want to finish this multi-chapter that nobody asked for

Mad Spaced - The one that’s probably closest to finishing of all my big unfinished things, but mainly I just keep overwriting this one *ahem* scene

Memento Mori - Depressing thinky vignettes about mortality (FUN)

MMFD 1930 AU - STILL ON THE LIST

Number prompts - A text file with the ones people sent me that I started but never finished. I mean who knows, but nobody hold your breath 

Portrait - Based on a picture glimpsed in the background of a scene, I don’t know if this one will ever be posted

Sound Spice - I’ve always meant to finish a Part 2 to this one . . . 

Stand Up fic - An awesome person gave me a prompt like two years ago and I started it and have tinkered with it, but who knows

Twice in a Lifetime - Catchy title and a good 1000 or so words, but might never see the light of day

Ultimate Fake Relationship - Fun fic with some elements I personally haven’t tried very often. But this is one I want to finish-finish before I actually post anything sooooooooo

Under the Tunisian Moon - This one is technically finished, but I sorta promised a coda/epilogue and I still toy with doing that. I’ve started it (ofc) buuuuut, y’know . . . 

Non MMFD stuff:

Miranda hotel fic - Possible shenanigans at the Hamilton Lodge

Untitled Arthur fic for Cabin Pressure - I ship Martin and Arthur, against the tide of Martin and Douglas shippers, and there’s not a whole lot of Skipthur fic out there

There is one non-fic original work I’ve been churning away at for over a year, but haven’t made much headway recently (like ALL of my stuff, unfortch . . . )

So, there we have it, a more or less faithful narrative of all my dealings with Mr. Fic-ham. There IS an MMFD fic I started wayyyyyyy back in the day, and had someone beta read it (honestly can’t even remember who it was that far back--I don’t think they’re still active in the fan-dem) and they said, “It’s good, but I don’t know if it’s realistic” and I thought I had DELETED THE FILE, but apparently I had just buried it in a subfolder. So, maybe that too?

Tagging (WITH ZERO PRESSURE): To reiterate: I just listed ALL my wip, but if you’re only really working one or two things that you’re excited about, feel free to be as brief or longwinded as you want. Since I already tagged you above, @bitchy-broken and, like I said, ONLY IF YOU WANT TO @kneekeyta @madfatty @how-ardently @slitherouter @emmatationsforall @flirtmcgirt @my-mad-fatuation and ANYONE ELSE who sees this and wants to weigh in with what they’re working on (just tag me, ok?)

[warriorgays]

I’m about to share something really personal about why I’m in this fandom and why I write what I do. I’m going to ask that people not reblog it, just on the off chance it spreads too far, because it has to do with my professional life. Under a cut because it got long.

I’m a history grad student. I don’t do academic history; I focus on how history reaches the average person, through museums, archives, historic sites, new media, and the internet. This summer I had an internship with a fairly prestigious institution in my field, which I won’t name, and had the opportunity to research in their collections and to write a post for their blog. I was delighted to find that in their collection were several items related to gay men, in particular, who served in WWII; a collection of letters written to a civilian, which included at least one love letter and another that was pretty clearly about a friend’s struggle with his queerness, as well as a collection of photos of different men, including one where the subject had used the word “gay” to describe himself, albeit in that kind of vague sense the word still had in the mid-20th century.

I wrote a blog post including these documents, and one other, a picture of a military drag show that didn’t single anyone out. The first time I sent the post out for review, the social media team told me I had to cut the first two documents because we couldn’t risk the men’s families identifying them and being insulted that we had stated/implied they were gay. At this point I was ready to give up, because I couldn’t do the post without those documents; however, two queer full-time employees basically took me under their wing and told me they would help get it passed. They gave me the language I needed to argue my case, and had other high-ranking employees weigh in.

My post went through four more rounds of edits. All told, I believe nine or ten people weighed in. I added several clauses clarifying my language to make it less strong, basically saying “but that doesn’t make these guys GAY” in a dozen different places, until the post was more than twice as long as they originally told us to shoot for. I made almost all of the edits that were recommended, except two - I refused to change “gay neighborhood” to “gay-friendly neighborhood,” which was accepted, and I refused to cut a quote from the letter, although I added in a few more no-homos surrounding it. (I’ll also say that all of the documents in my post are currently publicly available via the institution’s website, although they require a little bit of digging to find.)

All of this happened over two weeks; the longest it ever took for me to get a reply was four days. Friday July 28th was my last day at my internship; I had submitted my final final draft (hopefully) the day before and received no response. I emailed the social media team the following Tuesday and was assured things were moving along and I would get an email ASAP with any updates. I emailed again today to see what was going on, and got a response from the director of the department I worked in, telling me that my blog post wouldn’t go up, because the institution is altering their policy about personally identifiable information and making it more strict, so my post has been rejected. The decision has nothing to do with my writing or my research.

I don’t know what this means. I don’t know if it means the photos and the letters will be taken off the public sites, or if researchers will have to sign a release to view them - or if it just means that they’ll keep LGBT content in the collection, but we’re not allowed to talk about it.

The first time I thought the blog post wasn’t going to happen, I messaged a friend on here about how upset I was. I full-on sobbed for almost half an hour, and it caught me off guard. It was never just about the work I had put into the post, although that’s not insignificant. This was going to be my first real public project, and one that meant so much to me. When I realized I was gay at the age of 15, I freaked out. What saved me was finding a list of LGBTQ people throughout history, realizing that I had a history and a community and that I wasn’t alone. I had never learned that any of the people on that list were queer in my classes, although I had studied several of them, and I had never seen anything about LGBTQ people in museums or history books I had access to.

But I was caught off guard by how attached I was to these men, and how responsible I felt for them. One of the men in the collection died in 1964; it’s very possible he was never out to anyone beyond his lovers and his friends. Another died in 1997, but he was old, poor, black (although he apparently was able to pass in public), and lonely, and his few friends couldn’t afford a funeral; he was buried in a potter’s field. The other two were never identified beyond their first names.

And maybe they would have disliked their letters and their photos being paraded around in public, that’s fair. But I felt... I felt good, taking their happiness, their love and friendship for each other, and making that a part of history, knowing that it had to be kept secret at the time. And I feel kind of sick knowing that these documents aren’t being suppressed because they’re damaging - they don’t contain SSNs, they aren’t evidence of a crime, they don’t contain any lurid details - but because their families might be ashamed or affronted at them being perceived as gay. It feels like they’re being shoved in the closet all over again, because being called gay is still that much of an insult. In 2017, a public history institution can’t insinuate that someone is gay without undeniable proof. Which means, to some extent, that 90% of pre-Stonewall LGBTQ is off-limits.

Sometimes, I admit, I feel silly about writing fanfiction. I feel like I’m pouring too much history into something that, in the end, is just a harmless diversion. I feel awkward at putting so much detail into the lives of “real people” instead of finding the stories of real LGBTQ people and writing those instead. Maybe that would be a better use of my time. Maybe, in the end, it would do more good.

But... it’s so hard. I don’t want to write academic texts for only academics to pass around. I want to do history for the people, because that’s what matters to me, and that means I can’t load myself down with queer theory that people don’t understand, and that I have to couch every word so it’s not Too Much, and already, already, I am tired and angry. Because this is what happened when I had allies, and when even my “opponents” were nice allies who aren’t homophobic, who genuinely think my writing is good but just think we have to be careful. This is what happened even having LGBTQ mentors who have been putting up with this shit for years!

It broke my heart going through these documents. There’s a line in a letter where one man, writing to his friend, talks about how he’s going to get married to a woman because he prayed hard enough that he’s not interested in men anymore - and how he went out with his boyfriend (though he doesn’t use the term) one last time, and how the boyfriend promised to wait for him in case he changed his mind. Another time I was talking to one of the gay employees about how I wished we had the other side of the exchange, especially the one involving the man who died in the 60s, and he said “It’s a shame, but you can bet his family burned the letters as soon as they saw them.” Even with no evidence, there’s one man in the photos who’s just... his sense of humor leapt out at me from the page, and on the back of one he had written “26 and loving it! Gay as hell still”, and I want so badly to know his story, to the point where not knowing, never being able to find him, feels like an unhappy ending itself.

I found out barely an hour ago that the post isn’t happening, so undoubtedly I’ll feel less dramatic in a day or a week or whenever. But at the moment... I’m grateful that I have fanfiction. I’m grateful I have characters I relate to and identify with, and whom I can turn into the people I need them to be, and I’m grateful that I can give them happy endings. I’m even grateful that they’re based on real people (even though I don’t write them as the real people) because that makes them real enough that they can stand in for the people I’m not allowed to talk about.

I’m sure people are going to ask to read my blog post and/or see the documents themselves, because I mentioned they were on a public site. I’m sorry that I don’t have an answer just yet. I very strongly do not want this to result in any attention from the institution and I don’t want my full name to be attached in any way, so I’m still mulling over how best to deal with the situation. I think the most likely result is that I will end up sharing the links to the documents, with certain conditions. I’ll think it over and let you all know by the end of the day tomorrow. If you got this far, thank you.

[josephsciuto2]

THE KINDNESS OF THE HANGMAN

  Many years ago, over forty years ago, on Christmas night, I gathered with my friends from Parkchester at our favorite bar, “The Golden Note.”

  We drank and celebrated as we listened to Nat “King” Cole sing “The Christmas Song” for the hundredth time before his voice would fade away, once again, into the oncoming New Year.  The Yule theme wouldn’t be heard again until the following year.  Yes, back then in the stone ages, the Christmas season began on the day after Thanksgiving instead of Labor Day (or earlier) as it does now.

  Jimmy was the bartender at the Golden Note that night. He was young.  Before that night, I assumed that he was in his early twenties.

    Exceptionally good-looking with straight blond hair parted on the side, Jimmy’s hair barely touched his shoulders and fell down slightly passed his ears. He was a soft-spoken, amiable guy and everyone liked him.

    At times, I used to think how great it would be to be Jimmy, especially since I was such an ugly little teenager.  How nice it would be to have girls look at you and say, “Wow! He’s a good-looking guy. I wonder if he has a girlfriend?”

  The Golden Note, for all practical purposes was an old man’s bar. It was dark, with the stench of stale beer buried so deep inside the stainless wooden bar that it would take a nuclear explosion to rid the place of the smell.

  Across from the bar, there were booths with torn, green leather cushions.  At any giving time, you might find a regular patron comfortably asleep across the bottom cushion of one of the booths with his head resting on a folded jacket that was used as a pillow.

  We were all teenagers at the time, and even though most of my friends were eighteen at the time, which was the legal drinking age back then, I was still a couple of years below the legal age, but that was of little consequence back then in the Bronx.

  At about 3 in the morning, we decided it was time to go home.  The group decided to leave Jimmy an extra big tip, which at that time was probably thirty-five dollars split among six of us. He was exceptionally grateful, and he bought us all one last drink.

  We were the only ones left in the place, and Jimmy joined us at the end of the bar with a drink of his own.

  Someone asked him, if he had done anything special on Christmas Eve.  Jimmy replied, “No, I just stayed home and watched TV. I like it that way.”

  “So, nothing at all?”

  “Yeah, just stayed home, watched TV, and had a few beers. Ever since returning from Vietnam, I prefer the quiet and uneventful.”

  The war in Vietnam had ended just a couple of years previously and none of my friends, who were all too young to be drafted, had gone to Vietnam. We got our news about the war from the newspapers and the TV coverage. Jimmy’s confession came as a shock to us. He didn’t look much older than most of us.

  “No, I’m plenty old to have been drafted. Just turned twenty-seven.”

  “And what was it like?”

  “Scary,” he replied as his eyes drifted to another time.

    He transformed his arms and hands into a makeshift automatic rifle, which he pointed toward the floor.

  “During one firefight, I remember shooting a dead Vietcong soldier over and over again.  It wasn’t until my sergeant pulled me away that I realized that I just shot like forty rounds into a corpse.”

    Jimmy unwound his arms and hands, looked up, shook his head and smiled a haunted smile.

  Ten years later, sitting at one of my favorite bars, Mirabelle, on the Sunset Strip, I drank a cold, refreshing beer.   I occasionally looked up from the newspaper I was reading and glanced admiringly at Ava, the barmaid, a Czechoslovakian beauty who, at 41, made the young, aspiring starlets walking along the Strip and sitting at the tables at Mirabelle look positively plain.

  The gentleman sitting next to me asked me if there was any “new news” he should know about. I simply shook my head and replied, “The same old shit.” He was in his mid-thirties, with long straight hair coming down past his shoulders and sported a bushy mustache.

    The man was soft spoken and drinking a coffee, which I assumed he brought with him from the table where he probably ate dinner. Ava put a fresh beer in front of me, and I asked the gentleman if I could buy him a drink to go with the coffee.

  “No,” He replied as Ava refilled his cup of coffee. “ I haven’t had a drink in nearly ten years, since I went on a five year binge after coming back from Vietnam. I was there for about a year and a half and saw virtually no action, even though I went on routine patrols throughout my whole time there.”

  He paused as he took a sip of his coffee and looked straight up and into the mirror behind the bar.

    “Just before I was going to leave Nam, we were out on just another routine patrol and we were suddenly ambushed by the Vietcong.  For what was probably no more than five minutes, we were in a firefight.

  All I remember was shooting wildly into the jungle straight ahead of me during the entire time. When it was all over, there were dead and wounded soldiers from my company spread out all around me.

    “I didn’t have so much as a scratch… just the smell of gunpowder, sweat, and the cries of my wounded comrades,” he continued.

    He took another sip of his coffee and repeated, “And that was all the action I saw over there.”

    Ten years later, sitting at table #27 at the Palm Restaurant in West Hollywood I listened to Hal Goodman tell me some fabulous stories about the entertainment business.

  Hal was short, maybe 5 feet, 5 inches tall with broad shoulders and short, gray hair. He had worked in the industry close to fifty years and, for most of that time, Hal worked as a comedy writer for Johnny Carlson.

  Like me, Hal was also from the Bronx.  He told me when he was about eleven-years-old, his mother forced him to take violin lessons.  He said he never felt so embarrassed as when he had to walk through the neighborhood holding that stupid violin case. But his mother meant well, he said, and he still loved her.

  Hal was soft-spoken, extremely gracious, and I don’t know if there was a mean bone in his body.

    After a few minutes, we got off the subject of the entertainment business and discussed the upcoming Presidential election between President Clinton and Senator Bob Dole. We both agreed that it would be very difficult to beat President Clinton, especially with the economy so strong.

  I felt that the only advantage I saw Senator Dole had was his war record.  Hal reminded me that it didn’t matter much when Clinton beat President Bush, a war hero, and that most people of voting age today were not even born when World War II ended.

  Hal, to my surprise, told me he served in the army during World War II. The army and Hal just didn’t seem to go together.

  Hal was so easygoing and kind that it was hard for me to picture him holding a rifle, nevertheless aiming and shooting at another human being. He told me that during one fierce battle with the Germans everything suddenly went dark and he was knocked unconscious.

  When he woke up, the dismembered bodies of his friends were scattered all around him. The Germans had dropped a bomb on them and he had no idea how he survived. He was wounded, and airlifted to an army hospital, which would become famous in the following days when General Patton visited wounded soldiers.  The mercurial general went on his famous tirade against a soldier suffering from post trauma stress.

  Hal reiterated that he did not see Senator Dole getting any boost in the polls for his military service, and he went on to tell me a very funny story about Red Skelton.

    A few years later, while sitting in a chair in the backyard of a friend’s parents’ home in Beverly Hills, Lisa’s stepfather, Henry, picked up a copy of one of Goethe’s books and started reading it in very fluent German. He remarked, “When you read it in its original German it sounds so much better.”

  Having Goethe read to you in German during a yard sale is a rather surreal.  And to answer your next question…yes, they do have yard sales in Beverly Hills.  But I cannot imagine you getting the best deals.

  Henry was an optometrist and, on a few occasions, I accompanied my wife to see him for her annual checkups. He was quite enthusiastic about his profession, and there was never a time I went in which I didn’t learn some fascinating facts and stories about the eye.  For instance, he had recently seen a patient suffering from an eye infection and, after a number of failed attempts to get rid of the infection, he did further tests and discovered the patient’s infection was actually syphilis.  Syphilis of the eye…now that is something I never even knew existed.

  I tried not to imagine where that individual’s eyes had been, or more likely where his hands had been when he unknowingly spread the virus from his hands and into his eyes. Thankfully, he was cured and hopefully learned not trek too deeply into dirty places.

  Henry was thin, with gray, bushy hair and was occasionally frazzled from too many patients.  He wore glasses and without knowing anything about him, you would assume that he was a doctor, a researcher, a scholar, or a professor.

  In fact, he was all of the above. He was born in Cologne, Germany, and at five-years-old, he witnessed the rise to power in 1933 of Adolf Hitler (Talk about a deranged and syphilitic mind).

  Henry unfortunately was born Jewish, and he and his family were uprooted from their home in the lovely city of Cologne and relocated to a ghetto at Lodz, Poland.  Shortly after the forced relocation, he received a one-way, fourth-class train ticket to Auschwitz where he was separated from his family and would never see them again…

  Amazingly, Henry found the strength to survive while almost everyone around him succumbed to the gas chambers, starvation, experiments, hangings, a bullet to the head, and disease. Henry was one of only 19 German-speaking Jewish boys to survive the concentration camps.

  Henry Oster died two weeks ago. He lived to 90-years-old, and most people would agree that is a nice long life.

    I can’t help thinking how many years is “just” compensation for the torturous childhood he was forced to live: The stench of death and disease that surrounded and engulfed his youth.

  Ignorance will argue that at least he made it, whereas six million others died.

  Henry made the most of that time.  He donated his time to the Thalians, a charity to help people with mental problems.  He spoke at conferences around the world about the Holocaust at many venues ranging from local Los Angeles schools to the Holocaust museum to events in Europe.

  This man, who had arrived in the United States with no money, no education, and unable to speak English, let nothing hold him back.

  After all, he survived the Nazis.  Every day of his life was a victory…a slap in the face to the brutality and inhumane culture that this syphilitic ideology produced.

  In 2014, Henry Oster published a book titled, “The Kindness of the Hangman” that was a harrowing retelling of his very early childhood in Germany, his re-location in Poland, and finally his long-term internment in the hotel Auschwitz where many checked in and only a few rare cases were allowed to checkout.

  After reading the book, I had the pleasure to carry on a lively correspondence with Henry about the book.  We talked about his torturous experiences as a child and as a young teenager.

  He was a treasure trove of information and insights.  There have been many books written on the Holocaust by survivors and historians.  By 2014, however, very few living survivors of the Holocaust remained.

  Henry answered all my questions truthfully; even though with each answer, I could still feel the pain and isolation he felt some 70 years after. The suffering, torture, and pain went to bed with him each night and woke up with him each morning.  I suspect that it gave him no relief during his sleep, either.

  In our last correspondence, Henry emailed me to congratulate me on a book I just had published. We talked about the current world situation, and I asked if he saw any parallels between the current world situation and what he went through some 70 years ago.

  He said he was disgusted by what was going on in Syria and Yemen, but what was most troubling for him was what was going on in the United States.

  The anger, bigotry, and racism right here in his adopted and beloved country was more like what he heard back in Germany as Hitler consolidated power. It saddened him greatly, and he wondered what would become of this moment in time in ten or twenty years from now.

  A few nights ago, I was asleep when my son, Bogie, a handsome, debonair feline decided to jump on me and use me as a trampoline. I woke up, desperately trying to catch my breath as the big fur-child feigned his innocence.

  I patted his head and looked across at the TV, which my wife had left on. A young girl, maybe 4 or 5, came toward me from the screen. She was dirty, her clothes torn, and her hands pressed against her tiny ears.

  She was screaming as the Syrian army bombarded a village of innocent civilians. I had seen images similar to this over the last decade and I thought to myself, “Well, maybe if she is lucky enough to survive, she might not remember any of this.”

    Then, I thought about Jimmy, the stranger at Mirabelle, my friend Hal, and my friend Henry.

  I couldn’t help but laugh at the stupidity of my hope that the little girl could escape the terror of her life.

  If she is lucky enough to survive, that moment in time always will be with her, buried deep inside her soul.  One day, it finally will emerge, screaming and shrieking, before it goes quiet and voiceless…if she lives that long.

  The terror will haunt her for the rest of her life, whether she lives to be 90 or only for another day.

  Yet, somehow, I’m sure that Henry Oster is watching over her, telling her that she is not alone.

    REST IN PEACE, my dear friend, Dr. Henry Oster.  Your courage, your generosity and your kindness have left the world a better place.

A CURIOUS VIEW: “THE KINDNESS OF THE HANGMAN” THE KINDNESS OF THE HANGMAN Many years ago, over forty years ago, on Christmas night, I gathered with my friends from Parkchester at our favorite bar, “The Golden Note.”