#When I say we I mean me and the two other people on here who I know appreciate Devious 🖤🥹

[juyeoz]

BABY I — PARK JONGSEONG

Having a crush on Park Jay, your school’s student president, was quite hard. Especially when he was the centre of attention for many girls. However, who would’ve known he was pinning after you this whole time?

PAIRING — friend!jay x fem!reader (ft. sunoo from enhypen and hanni from newjeans)

CONTAINS — fluff, slight angst, somewhat crack, friends to lovers, mutual pinning to an extent, not proofread, mentions of being stood up, and y/n is kind of introverted.

WORDCOUNT — 3591 words

NOTE — first note on this account!!! just wanted to say baby i by ariana grande inspired this it’s SOOO good pls listen on repeat when reading!

Park Jay was the student president of your school. He was helpful, trustworthy, smart, athletic, and nice to everyone who came into his vicinity. 

Obviously, you weren’t the only one who loved these aspects of him. He was well known amongst the male population of your school, but that didn’t mean the girls weren’t head over heels for him too.

Which only meant more competition for you. 

In your eyes, Jay was out of your league. He was way more outgoing than you would ever be, keeping many friends at his side, whilst you kept a small group of friends throughout your four years of highschool. 

“Hello? (Name), what were you going to say?” A voice questioned, bringing you out of your cluttered thoughts.

Your eyebrows perked up in surprise, completely forgetting who you were currently standing before—Park Jay. 

He slightly shook his head as a sign for you to continue your sentence. 

“Uh…” You muttered with your eyes looking everywhere but him. 

“What is it? There’s a meeting soon. I can’t wait for long.” Jay spoke again. His words seemed harsh, but his voice was soft.

“Right, sorry. Nevermind what I was going to say, it’s okay.” You reassured him with an apologetic smile. 

Great, another moment added to your ‘Book of Failures’.

Jay was confused, yet he smiled back at you and left in silence. You hated how perfect his smile was. Everything was perfect about him. There wasn’t one thing you didn’t like about him, however, you were pretty sure that spoke for everyone as well.

He was a perfect guy and you were, well, ordinary. You preferred to keep to yourself and stay away from any judgement, with an exception, of course.

Your best friend, Pham Hanni. She was someone you met during elementary school and someone you would forever trust.

“Let me guess, you failed again?” Hanni questioned from the desk beside you. You sighed at her words as your head hit the surface of your desk.

“I very much did.” You groaned out while Hanni smiled. A hand gently made its way to the crown of your head, caressing the area softly. 

“It will be fine! Everyone gets flustered when doing something like this.” She reassured you, but it wasn’t of any help.

“Do you think I could ever confess? I mean, do you know how many people like him? There’s at least a 1 in 600 chance of him reciprocating whatever my heart feels when I’m around him.”

“Well, you guys are close, right?” Hanni asked, but only received silence in return. 

“Right…?” She said once more.

Silence. 

“(Name), don’t tell me you two barely know each other!”

“No, of course not! We are, well, I don’t know. Could you even call us friends?” You asked, a groan escaping your lips shortly after.

“I mean, what are some of your interactions with each other?” 

“After the project we did together in English class, he would say hi to me in the halls, ask me for help in class, and offer me snacks here and there. However, that is it.”

“I’d say that’s between acquaintances and friends? Right?” Hanni pulled the lollipop she snacked on out of her mouth and pointed it at you.

“That is still a lot though! Probably more than anyone has ever had. I think you might have a chance.”

“Or are you just saying that to make me feel satisfied?” You asked while looking over at her.

“No, seriously! But if your words keep getting tongue tied, I don’t think you’ll have a chance anytime soon.” 

Your brows furrowed at her words as you landed a soft hit to her shoulder.

“Careful, my lollipop! I don’t want to drop it.” She exclaimed, her eyes widening at the treat in her hold. You rolled your eyes at this reaction of hers, it was common from her. You were pretty much used to it.

Your eyes glanced over to the doorway as one of your classmates walked in. Hanni looked at your sudden flustered state in confusion and turned around. 

There was no other reason for you to react this way. Park Jay, the boy you had a crush on, was currently walking through the doorway with his younger friend, Kim Sunoo, beside him. 

“You’re so obvious about it.” Hanni said, turning around to face you again and placing the lollipop in her mouth once more.

“I am not! There’s no way he knows.” You said with your face toward Hanni but your eyes on Jay.

He looked over at your seat—a common routine of his—and waved towards you with his signature smile present on his face. After a brief moment of hesitation, you waved back at him as a small smile broke through your flustered condition.

Hanni looked at you, then at Jay as Sunoo did the same. The two boys made their way to their seats up front and began talking once again.

However, the conversation was completely different than the one they were previously having.

“Seriously, are you going to tell her how you feel?” Sunoo questioned as Jay shushed him. 

“Of course not. Do you think she would even like me back? You’re funny.” Jay said while taking his seat.

“Jay, so many people like you.”

“That’s the point. What if she thinks I’m a player?” The boy asked while reaching into his backpack to grab his notebook.

“I doubt she would. There are a ton of options for you at school, but you decided to pin after a girl who you worked on a project with for two weeks. Two weeks.” 

“And those were the best days of my life. Seriously, I didn’t know someone like her existed in our school until this year. I don’t know how I survived until senior year without her presence.”

“Gross! You sound so in love—”

“Shut up! You’re so loud.” Jay whisper-shouted while covering Sunoo’s lips with both of his hands. 

“I’m sorry. Anyway, please think about it. It hurts to see you interact with her continuously just to not confess whatever you’re feeling.” Sunoo said while removing Jay’s hands from his face. 

“Whatever.” Jay mumbled as their teacher walked in. He would be lying if he said he didn’t believe that Sunoo was right. However, he was too nervous to ruin what you two already had.

The keys jangled in the doorknob’s keyhole as you struggled to unlock the art classroom. It wasn’t normal for classrooms to be locked, not at all, but this one was abandoned. 

Nobody used it anymore except for you. It was your quiet place. A place you went to ease your mind and located on the second floor. So, there was quite a process getting there. 

Giving out keys to abandoned classrooms was forbidden at your school. It was an unspoken rule that all teachers followed. However, your homeroom teacher trusted you. You were an excellent student in her eyes and that was enough for her to make up her mind.

The door clicked shut behind you and you made your way to the isolated desk you always sat at. All you had to do was get some classwork done. It wasn’t anything major, but the library would have been too loud at this time.

After all, it was lunchtime.

The sun shone through the thin material curtains, making your figure cast a shadow over your work. Usually, you sat here because it was the closest desk to the window. You gained a great view at the soccer field.

The one Jay always played on. 

Every time you came here, you constantly had to fight the urge to glance over at them. A little glance always went a long way, leaving you distracted for the rest of the hour. 

Giving in, your pencil movement came to a stop as you looked out the window from your seat. As usual, there were boys playing soccer in the summer heat, however, Jay wasn’t there. 

For a moment, you thought you saw wrong and took a closer look. Yet, you still couldn’t find him. 

You were too distracted to even hear the click of the door opening. Too distracted to even hear the footsteps that made its way to you. But you weren’t distracted enough to miss the sound of a desk being placed beside you. 

“What are you doing here?” You asked in a somewhat low voice. 

It was Jay. The boy you were previously looking for.

“Resting. You?” He replied while laying his head on his arms all while facing you. You avoided eye contact with him as usual. His gaze was too flustering for you. You couldn’t handle it.

“I’m studying.” You said and looked at your blank notebook page. You could feel his gaze still on you. It felt like it could see through you at any given moment. Once again, it was too much for you to handle. 

You needed to get rid of him quickly.

“You can’t be in here. It’s off limits.” You said, still not looking at the poor boy.

“Then why are you here? It’s an abandoned classroom and yet you’re here.” Jay said back. He wasn’t wrong. To be honest, he never was.

“Our teacher gave me permission. I work here often.” You explained as your pencil began to move, writing absolutely nothing but scribbles.

“Me too.” He said, leaving you confused. You looked over at him with a puzzled expression which only left him with a smile. 

“Your eyes are pretty.” Jay said and left your unsaid question unanswered.

His words only made you look away once more as your puzzled expression was replaced with a flustered one.

“What did you mean by your previous words?” You asked, discarding his compliment. 

“Which one? Your eyes are pretty? I mean, they truly are—”

“The other ones.” You interrupted, cutting him off. 

“Oh, Mrs. Jang lets me use this classroom to cool off my head when I get overwhelmed. I was shocked that it was already unlocked when I came. I didn’t know you used it too.”

“We never run into each other.” 

“I see,” he sighed and nuzzled his face further into his arms. 

You could still feel his gaze on you as silence fell upon you both. You were confused. Why did he compliment you? Did he like you back or was he only teasing you? Did he do this with every girl he saw or were you his only exception? 

Which one was it?

“Why do you keep doing that?” Jay’s voice pushed through your thoughts, startling you.

“Doing what?” You asked, still avoiding eye contact with him.

“That,” he began. “You don’t look at me when you talk to me. Do you hate the sight of my face or something?” 

“Of course not!” You exclaimed, catching both of you off guard. 

“I mean, I’m just shy.” 

“For sure.” He teased you.

Silence filled the classroom once more as you tried to do your work. Heavy emphasis on the word tried. 

He was still looking at you. You knew he was and he knew you knew too. 

“(Name).” Jay called. 

The way your name rolled off of his tongue was too much for you. You hated the sound of it. It was a precise pronunciation with a slight ring to it.

You swallowed thickly and nodded at his call, giving him the signal to proceed.

“Do you like me?”

“And then what?!” Hanni exclaimed, waiting for the rest of the story to leave your lips.

“What do you mean?” You asked. Your words only left Hanni feeling dumb.

“Was that it?” She asked as part of her hoped you would say no. However, to her dismay, you nodded your head.

“(Name)? He literally asked if you liked him and you didn’t even reply?!” She said in a loud tone. Luckily, you two were at your house so it was fine for her to be this way. There was nobody to overhear your conversation anyway.

“You blew it. You blew it!” 

She was in distress. After waiting for this moment to happen, she felt like her world officially ended. 

“I freaked out, okay? The bell went right after that!” You said in an attempt to defend yourself. 

“Let me guess. You used the excuse of being late when returning the classroom key and ran out in a haste.” 

“Spot on.” You said with a groan.

“Did I really mess up?” You asked. 

“Is that even a question? Seriously, I don’t know what I’m going to do with you.” Her face went dull as she sighed. You were definitely a handful to take care of. 

“Wait, I have an idea.” She suddenly said and her face brightened up immediately. You looked over at her with a frown. 

“Do you have his number?” Hanni questioned. Hesitantly, you nodded at her words. You only got his number because of the English project you two had to do and would text occasionally, but out of the blue was not the best option.

“Absolutely not! That’s too far.” You said while shaking your head at the idea you had of her possible plan.

“Chillax, it’s not too far at all. It’s better than leaving his somewhat confession hanging in the air.” 

She had a point.

“Fine. What are you going to say?” You asked while giving her your phone. You were nervous for whatever tricks she was planning on pulling, but you handed her your phone regardless.

“You’ll see.” Hanni said and began typing away.

For a while your room went quiet. The only sounds heard were Hanni’s fingers tapping against your phone screen and the wind outside of your window.

“Here.” She said after three minutes and handed you your device. You looked at her, taking note of how she bit back her smile. 

You were scared to see what she did, but you weren’t even able to due to the sudden incoming call. 

“What the hell, Hanni?!” You exclaimed as she only smiled. She ushered for you to answer the call as you did exactly that—after leaving your room, of course.

“Hey.” His voice was soft as usual on the other line. It made your heart beat faster, making you feel stupid.

“Hello,” you greeted back, waiting for him to say whatever he called for.

“Is it true?” 

“Is what true?” You asked. 

What the hell did Hanni even text him for him to ask this?

“You liking me. Is it true?” He sounded desperate. He wanted to know immediately. 

You hesitated on replying. Would it mess everything up, or what? His question back in the art classroom wasn’t something that sounded like he was looking for reciprocating feelings. If you said yes, where would that response take you?

“Yes, it is.” You replied in a somewhat whisper. Jay exhaled harshly, leaving you confused. Did you mess up? Why did he sigh so harshly? What did Hanni put you through? 

You turned around in a rush to open the door. You were nervous. You didn’t want to hear what came after his sigh. Not at all.

You were about to hand the phone back to Hanni, but was brought to an abrupt stop.

“Good.” Jay said. 

“Let’s talk about this in person tomorrow. I don’t want things to escalate on call, okay?” 

You hesitated in replying to his suggestion. Was that a good okay or a bad okay? Was he planning to reject you harshly? Was your friendship over?

“Is that okay with you, (Name)?” His voice once again pierced through your thoughts, bringing you back to reality.

“Yes. That’s okay with me.” You replied and you two said your goodbye before hanging up.

“So?” Hanni asked, waiting for you to explain what happened.

“I don’t know.” Was all you could say before flopping forward onto your bed with a racing heart.

Jay, on the other hand, paced back and forth in his room. You liked him and that was great! However, he didn’t want to ask you out over the phone. That wasn’t romantic at all.

How should he go about this? Should he confess in the morning before class or at lunch in the art classroom again? Should he bring flowers? Of course he should. Many people loved them.

But wait, were you allergic to them? Maybe not if you helped out the garden club leader Yang Jungwon that one day, right? He remembered the moment vividly. 

It was the time he confirmed his feelings for you. The way you smiled at the boy and listened attentively when he explained things to you. Honestly, that should’ve been him, but he had his moments during the English project.

Part of him even thought you liked Jungwon and not him. That was the only reason why he asked you the question at lunch yesterday. Even if the garden club incident happened last month, it still managed to bug him everyday.

At this point, his frequent questions wouldn’t get answered. His best option was to sleep. He could think of everything tomorrow morning. Before heading to sleep he sent you a quick message, letting you know where to meet him the next day. 

Near the garden, fifteen minutes after eight a.m. Easy and possibly romantic.

However, when the next morning came, you stood alone near the garden, fifteen minutes after eight a.m. And Jay was nowhere in sight.

You checked your phone constantly, hoping he sent you a text, letting you know of the change of plans. To your dismay, there was nothing. It was absolutely a ghost town on your phone and also five minutes left until the bell went. 

Were you just stood up by your crush? Most likely. You felt embarrassed. You were completely right about Jay not liking you back, nevertheless, you let Hanni’s words get to your head. Was it her fault? Absolutely not, but you wondered. What if you never gave her your phone at that time? Would you and Jay still be just friends?

A hand grabbed your wrist, halting your movements. You didn’t even get far from the spot you stood at. It was so sudden and scary and their grip never faltered.

You turned around and were, luckily, met with an out of breath Jay. The boy who you had a crush on and who you thought stood you up.

“I’m sorry.” He said while letting go of your wrist and standing up.

“I woke up late, I didn’t mean to leave you standing there alone. I swear of it.” He explained as you listened, avoiding eye contact. 

“It’s fine. What did you want to say?” You asked.

“First off, please look at me when I say all of this.” He pleaded, causing you to slowly look over at him.

“Okay. I really didn’t mean to leave you waiting. I had my alarm set and everything, yet I still slept past it. I couldn’t sleep all night because of this. I was nervous.” 

You remained silent, in which he took as a sign to continue.

“When I saw you text me the other day, I was thrilled. I thought I ruined everything by asking you if you liked me during lunch. Seriously, the way you ran out so suddenly left me worried.” 

“I’m sorry. I was flustered.” You apologised and he shook his head.

“It’s okay. I’m glad I found out you truly did like me though.” He said as a slight smile made its way to his face.

“Do you like me back?” You asked, genuinely. He didn’t say he did. You weren’t sure if he did either.

“What?” He questioned back.

“Do you like me back?” You repeated, hoping it would get through him this time.

“Of course I do. Why wouldn’t I?” He was dumbfounded that you even asked him that. Was it not obvious by his many interactions with you compared to others? 

“Please, don’t say it like that.” You muttered and avoided eye contact with him again. 

“Why not? Does it make you flustered?” 

“Yes, it does.” Your voice was quiet and made Jay’s smile grow bigger.

“I’ve liked you for a while now, (Name). Ever since the English project actually. Those were the best days of my life.” 

“Not even being promoted to student president?” You questioned as your heart beat increased drastically. 

“Not even close.” He said back.

You remained silent at his confession and played with the dirt below your shoes. 

“So, what do you say?” He asked. 

“What do you mean?” 

“Can I be your boyfriend?” He asked again.

“Enough of that!” You exclaimed, softly hitting his shoulder.

“What am I doing wrong?” He was confused. He didn’t even do anything this time. It was a genuine question. 

“Can I, (Name)?” 

He did it again. The way he said your name only left you even more flustered as you let out a mumbled ‘yes.’ 

He could barely hear what you said and only picked up the ‘s’ sound at the end of your word. The boy before you smiled. 

He was glad you said yes. 

“I’m glad.” He voiced out and engulfed you into a hug which you reciprocated. 

The bell finally went once you two began to hug. Those were the longest five minutes in your life, but they were definitely worth it. Hanni and Sunoo were most likely going to have a field day with this new information. 

You could say, they were the ones who made this all happen with their constant pushing, right?

Yeah, most definitely.

© JUYEOZ

ENHYPEN PERM TAGLIST — @miumura @macapunoz @kxppachu

[pumpkinprincess22]

Ok I know there is a very slim chance that anyone will see this and a slimmer chance it will change anyone’s minds but here’s my thoughts on the whole election thing and why it is imperative you go and vote if you are eligible.

You may be thinking Rose you are very open about being British you don’t even have a stake in this election. This is part of my point. How many UK parliamentary candidates can you name? Who were the candidates up for prime minister in the most recent election from the main two parties? When was the most recent UK election?

If you aren’t living in the UK or having a vested interest in UK politics you probably don’t know the answer. Thats ok why should you? Thats why it should concern you how many people outside the US who should have no stake in your elections whatsoever know so much about this one and are scared for the outcome.

I remember being 13 and sitting in the library before registration in November 2016. We didn’t have a full grasp of quite what Trump’s presidency would bring but we knew enough to be worried. I remember being 17 in November 2020 and sitting in my classroom constantly refreshing the BBC live coverage feed to see if they had called the election yet and updating my classmates and teachers on which states had been called for which candidates, all of us nervous for what another four years of Trump would bring. I am 21 now. Five months ago I cast my vote in my first UK general election, one of the most important in years, and sat up watching the coverage with my parents until dawn cheering when my area which had historically been a conservative stronghold was called for Labour. I am terrified for what another four years of Trump will mean. I am old enough to vote now. I wish I could vote in your election so for me and every other non-US citizen who wishes the same for goodness sake go out and vote. Not voting is not an option.

By not voting you may as well hand Trump the presidency now because his supporters will sure as hell go out and vote. You know why my area which has been a Tory stronghold finally lost? Because Reform UK (aka MAGA UK or the raging facist party) split the vote.

The people who voted for Reform UK were largely disgruntled Tory voters who wanted to ‘demonstrate their disappointment in the conservatives’. It’s a rhetoric I’ve seen on here among undecided/ non voters and it won’t work. If not for Reform UK, conservatives would have won in my area. You don’t have the benefit of a multi-party system and if there is vote splitting because of third party candidates you know it won’t fall in Harris’ favour.

The first image shows the votes for the main two/three UK political parties. The second shows the votes for Reform. Reform got more votes (although not parliamentary seats) than the third biggest UK party. More people voted for the raging facist party than the liberals and if that doesn’t scare you I don’t know what will.

So as my mother says go and exercise your right to vote. Eligible voters, you are fortunate enough to have an opportunity to vote in this election for goodness sake do. And encourage friends and family to as well. Organise on the group chat to go to the polls with your friends. Drag your reluctant siblings out of bed to go and vote with you.

This is the most important election of your lives, act like it.

[diremoone]

yakuza! ryomen sukuna | hcs.

overdone trope with this man but here we go again lmao. i’m just writing little drabbles that pop up in my head atp to keep the inspiration going sobs… i need a gallon of coffee

🖤 Yakuza! Sukuna, who’s been involved in yakuza bullshit since his last year of middle school, has a soft spot for you. Most people who went to school with you (who are also apart of his gang) two know that, and they know that unless they want to end up like the Zen’in named Naoya, they won’t fuck with you. You’re untouchable, and the second anyone starts rumors about you (everyone knows they were lies regardless because of your character), they’re moving schools within 48 hours.

Fuck ‘em.

🖤 Yakuza! Sukuna keeps you far away from his gang bullshit as he gets deeper into the darkness and you pull yourself farther away, into the light where he wants you to be. But he knows that even his little sunshine is capable of being mean like him, but it’s tucked away for those that warrant your wrath.

He thinks fondly back to the time you knocked out a couple girls cold with a volleyball for picking on Miwa.

🖤 Yakuza! Sukuna who swears his hands aren’t stained red whenever they’re holding your hands. Whenever he’s with you, he feels nothing like how his gang makes him feel—he feels normal, like that part of him doesn’t exist. And inside the walls of your home, it doesn’t. To you, in those shared moments, he’s just the nice boy you helped get through middle and high school and grew feelings for.

🖤 Yakuza! Sukuna who buys you pretty things with money that isn’t gotten by bloodshed… as much as possible anyway. You aren’t ignorant to where the money comes from, but you’ve done your best to make your wishes clear. And Sukuna abides by them as much as possible.

🖤 Yakuza! Sukuna who has his younger cousin Choso posted as your personal bodyguard whenever you go out, even when it’s just to do some simple grocery shopping. He isn’t taking any chances, this you’ve been made aware of and have accepted. And you’re fine with it, too, considering you grew up with Choso.

But what you don’t know is that there’s already been multiple attempts on your life and your safety. Sukuna isn’t having it.

🖤 Yakuza! Sukuna who gets fed up when you’re on your third date within four months. What pisses him off is that he can’t tell if you’re enjoying the asshole’s time and company or not. But when he sees the man press a kiss to the back of your hand at the end of the date, jealousy rears its head.

The next night, he’s at your front door, dressed in leather and with a spare bike helmet under his left arm.

You answer in a hoodie and black sweatpants, confused and dazed until he says softly, “C’mon, sweetheart. Lemme show you how a man gives a woman a good time.”

Your confusion turns to amusement. “Was wondering when you were going to take me out. It’s about time.”

Sukuna grins and holds out his arm. “C’mon then.”

🖤 Yakuza Husband! Sukuna who ends up putting the ring on your finger two months after that date. You end up signing the papers long before the actual ceremony happens. And to Choso, Yuuji; and all the others that have witnessed your relationship from its first greeting to the ring on your finger, they can only sigh in relief because it’s about fucking time.

… Oh, shit.

Kids.

a/n: the rain and thunder while writing this was a big help lol. it’s been raining for two days now hehe

[bisnes-socks]

i added my thoughts to the takavoltti lyrical analysis here but today i want to talk about why i think takavoltti is one of käärijä's most finnish songs ever.

this got a bit long, so just so you know what to expect going in: what i mean by most finnish is that there are references and tone of voice that are very specific to finland, there is complex use of the finnish language AND there are melodic/musical choices in the song that sound very finnish to me.

okay, here goes.

the dialogue that opens the song is already a sort of key moment to this finnishness of it all. when he says "emmä tiedä, kolisee jos kolisee, mut mun on pakko sit koittaa vetää tosi matalalla" he is doing a bit of a voice but more than that, he is talking in a way that is not quite his. his inflection, the rhythm, those are not natural to him or his dialect. you can hear it particularly when he says "koittaa vetää tosi matalalla". i don't know if it's at all easy to hear if you're not finnish, but it's not.. a serious voice or tone. the other two voices, one of them is modified to be high and the other talks like a sports announcer. the whole scene is quite comedic and it's a very specific genre of comedy that is very finnish indeed. it's also the type of thing he has been doing since always. (EDIT: OKEI MORE CONTEXT IN A REBLOG HERE)

funnily enough, you guys know köpi kallio now, the therapist in skit and autiomaa video? yeah köpi and his long time partner in crime viki are good examples of this type of humour i would say. they have their own podcast/show called viki ja köpi show but before that they were radio hosts and have been working together for ten years. the character voices and the whole vibe of the scene in the beginning of the song is very viki ja köpi to me, very ylex type comedy (yes ylex the radio station who did the ruisrock interview who still isn't back from the war).

and the small comedy bits stay in there through out the song, and they continue to have the same delivery instantly recognisable as comedic.

and that isn't to say the subject matter can't be serious. i think, again, this is something that feels inherently finnish to me. other finnish people feel free to chime in because this is hard to explain, but our culture is one where coping through making light of things is quite normal. and our sense of humour tends to be on the darker side, at least if you compare it to the american style of comedy that has taken over globally. so to make a song about there being too many demands on you and how you have a problem with setting boundaries and agreeing to insane shit, but to do it by interjecting the song with jokes just idk.. it sits in our culture lmao.

i honestly don't know how to explain this better, but quite dark comedic elements like this (after all he gets properly fucked up in the stunts it seems) in a song with a serious subject matter is something we've been doing for decades in this country (juice leskinen, for example) and it is something so loved by finnish people. we love a song that is just fucked up on multiple levels. käärijä is just adding his own style to this cultural history.

okay, onto the language.

the verse opens with "tekevälle sattuu" which is a finnish proverb.

quick finnish lesson: the word sattua in finnish means both to hurt and to happen. the word tehdä means to do but tehdä kipeää means hurting. like.. now that i think about it tämä tekee kipeää = this is doing (me a) hurt is valid and correct finnish lmao.

tekevälle sattuu, the proverb, actually means "things happen to those who do" but he is playing with the different meanings here, because he goes on to say "ain sattuu ku tekee" which can both mean "things always happen when you do" or it can mean "it always hurts when you do". then he goes on to say "ku tekee, ku kipee, ni kipeetä tekee" which is once again playing with words, because kipee here means both pain but also being sick. "ku tekee, ku kipee" would translate as "when you do as if you're sick" and "kipeetä tekee" means that it hurts.

so to recap (i'm not trying to provide a smooth translation, but highlight his wordplay:

tekevälle sattuu = things/pain happen to those who do [things]

ain sattuu ku tekee = shit happens/you get hurt when you do [things]

ku tekee, ku kipee, ni kipeetä tekee = when you do [things] like you're sick [in the head], you get hurt

so this is all to say two things: he's using the finnish language in a very clever way that really only becomes clear if you know the language and all of these idioms and proverbs. and also that he is very good at what he does. it has taken me four paragraphs to explain 13 words.

and he doesn't even end there. "oon yllytyshullu, ain hulluksi yllyn" is more play on words. jesus, jere. okay guys, stay with me.

yllytyshullu i explained in my previous analysis, but recap: yllytys means incitement and hullu means crazy. yllytyshullu is someone who does crazy shit when prompted.

"ain hulluksi yllyn" here he is using the word yltyä which is the same root as yllytys, but yltyä means usually more like.. to intensify. (for example: sade yltyy = the rain is getting heavier, or tuuli yltyy = the wind is picking up)

so to say hulluksi yllyn, he's saying like.. i let myself be incited and/or i always take it to the max, to the point of crazy.

and then he uses very clever rhyming words: "ja tää hullunmylly on kylmempi kylpy". hullu means crazy, mylly means mill, hullunmylly is basically a hullabaloo.

as you can tell, all of this is like bordering on impossible to translate accurately into a smooth translation. and that's just the first verse, but i'd be here all night if i explained the whole entire song 😭

and this to me is a very clear sign that no matter what sort of an audience he has internationally, he's not compromising on his language. and i find that admirable and, as a finnish person, very comforting too. this song is sort of reassuring, like he is reinserting himself very firmly into finnish culture, with the language and the comedy that do not translate very well. 

and if you look at the pre-chorus and chorus, the specific references keep coming: calling him kärtsä (finnish people have a lot of nicknames for him), "hyppää kybäst pommi" the slang use of kybä to mean ten meters, he mentions duudsonit (the dudesons) and he mentions jorvi hospital. all of these feel like he is signalling to a very finnish audience. (also "oon syypää sun hymyyn" could count as a cheek reference, cheek used to be like the biggest rapper in finland).

okay, time for melody and music speak. i only have one simple point here: melodically and musically speaking that has to be the most suomi iskelmä chorus i've heard from him. ever.

you could take that melody and insert it as the chorus to like any song on iskelmä radio. iskelmä is a finnish schlager music genre. kind of impossible to describe but something that finnish people will instantly recognise. the opening, with the piano synth could also open an iskelmä song.

very suomi, very iskelmä.

so.

all of this is why i think takavoltti is about as finnish as it gets. a suomi iskelmä about having serious issues with boundaries that uses clever finnish and paints a comedic picture of a banged up black-eyed käärijä who has dislocated his shoulder but is still showing thumbs up is like.. so much finnish condensed into three and a half minutes.

i know not everyone thinks the song is hilarious but i do. it's both hilarious and very serious and that's how we like it here.

and of course the fact that there is an "ai vittu" in there. we like that too.

[noirvedette]

Chapter One: The Proposal

Satoru Gojo x Reader. (Royalty AU Series)

Synopsis: Wanting the best for your kingdom, you accept the marriage proposal sent by the Gojo empire to marry the new emperor Satoru Gojo. What you don't know is that he has been yearning for you since he came to know of your existence and is determined to make you reciprocate his affections. How far will he go to earn your love? Warnings: Explicit language, smut, slight angst, acts of violence(not between the main characters), war. Author's Note: Hi! This is my first writing on Tumblr and I hope you love this as much as I loved creating it! Honest feedback would be appreciated! Word Count: 1.1k words

Saying that the proposal was unexpected would be an understatement.

The day began like any other. Your two ladies-in-waiting, Miwa and Nobara, helped you dress, after which you had breakfast with your family in the main dining hall.

Being the firstborn of King Maximillian and Queen Eleanora of the prestigious kingdom Aveloria, your entire life consisted of cultivating you into the Queen that your people could rely on.

And here you were, _____ Amiria, at the bright age of only 22, the heir apparent to the throne, encompassing every quality a young royal should have. Not only did you excel in academics and eloquence, but you also thrived in war planning and wielding a sword. Your parents couldn't be more proud of the person you had grown into as they realized that the kingdom would end up in reliable hands.

There was little you wouldn't do for your kingdom. You loved the people, culture, traditions, and everything that made this land your home. Your citizens loved and cherished you, and it felt right that you did your best to ensure they lived a secure and satisfactory life under your rule.

You were discussing your kingdom's alliances and potential threats of war with your father when your emissary, Kento, stood at the entrance to the room.

"Your Majesties," He bowed in your direction before you beckoned him over. "Princess _____ has received a proposal."

"From who?" Your attention remained on the spread of documents on the table, as proposals were nothing new in your case.

Your pen drops from the previously strong grip of your hand when you hear his response.

"The Gojo Empire."

-

Since you turned eighteen, you had received countless proposals from suitors from kingdoms on the other side of the world.

But this was different. This was the Gojo Empire. The ruler of the largest empire the world had ever seen wanted your hand in marriage. This changed everything.

Now that the initial shock wore off, you sat in the drawing room with your younger brother, Heeseung, discussing the various details of the proposal.

"Satoru Gojo wants your hand in marriage. Interesting." Heeseung seemed to ponder. "This is clearly a move to form an alliance."

"That's a quick conclusion. You don't think he wants to marry me because I'm pretty?" You joked, poking your brother in the ribs.

"No, I don't, sister." He deadpans, causing you to glare at him. "Why would he want to marry a sewer rat?"

"You take that back." You laugh as you launch into a play-fight with your brother. The nineteen-year-old tried to overpower you but ultimately failed as you caught him in a headlock.

"Dearest, let go of your brother." Your mother chuckled as she walked in with your father.

Begrudgingly, you loosen your hold on Heeseung, muttering a quick 'only because Mama said so' before you let him go completely.

"Let's discuss the proposal, shall we?" Your father announced as he took a seat. "_____, what do you think?"

"Obviously, it's very beneficial for us. Being connected to the Gojo Empire means having ties with almost every kingdom in existence." You straighten your spine as you speak. "I think we should accept."

"A union will definitely bring benefits, but that's not what I'm asking, my dear." Your father's eyes soften as he looks at you endearingly. "Do you want this? Marriage is not a simple ordeal."

You take a moment to weigh your options. Love and similar nuances were never of importance to your rational mind. Sure, you read a few romance novels here and there, but that was simply for enjoyment. You never expected to experience love and being loved firsthand. It seemed that wouldn't change. Your kingdom and duties were of utmost importance to you.

"I'm sure, Papa." You sigh as you look at him. "As long as Aveloria is happy, I'm happy. We should accept."

"They have asked us to join them for tea next week." Your mother chimes in. "Shall we send an official reply?"

"Yes." You smile at her. "Let's do it."

-

Satoru Gojo. An emperor. A cold-blooded man on and off the battlefield. Revered by those who love him and feared by those who do not.

An absolute fool for you.

He first saw you at the coronation of his best friend, King Jaeyun, five years ago. He was in the midst of sharing a drink with the newly appointed king when something caught his eye.

Someone, he corrected himself.

There you were, laughing with Jaeyun's sister, Claire, looking absolutely enchanting in your emerald green dress. Your eyes glinted in the sunlight, but your smile was even brighter.

Feeling a pair of eyes on you, you turned, making direct eye contact. You smiled at him softly, just for a second, but that's all it took.

Satoru Gojo was a man in love. Not real love, he knew that much. But the array of feelings he felt when beheld by your eyes couldn't be described in any other way.

He had to know who you were.

Later that same evening, he asked Claire to tell him everything she knew about you. She would say it felt more like an interrogation.

_____ Amiria. Heir apparent to the throne of Aveloria. The woman of his dreams.

Since the coronation, he had only run into you once or twice, never making conversation. He thought the lack of interaction would eventually cause him to lose feelings.

How wrong he was.

He did everything he could to forget about you. He spent his time doing his duties and even considered courting other women, but to no avail.

They simply were not you.

Every new detail he received about you from his informants only made him fall deeper. Thoughts of you gripped his mind like a vice, unwilling to let him escape its clutches.

-

Within the Gojo Empire, an unmarried emperor was unheard of. Satoru was the first to break that tradition, facing a small amount of backlash from his people in the process.

As it had become a year since his coronation, he felt ready to look for prospects who could eventually be his wife.

He only had one person in mind. Only one person he truly wanted.

You.

And what the emperor wants, he gets.

-

[buckydeservesthebest]

My pal @tragicfantasy-girl already made an excellent and thorough contribution, but I still want to give my two cents addition.

First of all, it seems to me that saying that “the world has moved past the need for Bucky stans”, is at the very least, a very dogmatic statement on @wenellyb part. Because by its own definition, being a fan doesn't come from the fact that it's “necessary”, it comes from the empathy, sympathy, congeniality one feels towards a certain character. No one can prohibit someone from being a fan and much less their right to express the thoughts and opinions they may have about it, freedom of expression is a basic right.

Secondly, as my friend rightly said, the OP just makes it clear that Bucky fans do need to exist. And not for the sake of fangirling/fanboying but because Bucky is the agglomeration of many (too many) of the worst experiences anyone could ever experience. He was a prisoner of war, he was exposed to decades of physical and psychological torture, he was subjected to CTE during these 70 years which caused him irreparable brain damage and this subject has never been talked about. Bucky is an amputee, disabled and suffers from C-PTSD (a much more severe version than simple PTSD), depersonalization crisis, depression, anxiety and many other mental illnesses. The number of people who can relate to him to one degree or another is overwhelming.

We Bucky stans never try to minimize all the trauma and suffering that Sam and other characters have gone through. Almost every Marvel character suffers from some sort of trauma and of course this is important and should be treated with great respect. But it must be recognized that even within traumatic experiences, there are levels of severity that are based on both the duration and the level of short and long term damage that these experiences entail.

When we say that Bucky is one of the victims who have suffered the most, it is not only because he endured one of the longest lasting and most damaging tortures to anyone's psyche, but also because unlike absolutely every other character, be it Clint, Erik Selvig, Helen Cho, Jessica Jones, Yelena and the other BWs who were victims of mind control, or Isaiah who was a victim of imprisonment and experimentation, Bucky does not enjoy the right to be recognized as a victim of either mind control or imprisonment and experimentation.

Bucky has been actively blamed over and over again (with the exception of Steve of course, and T'Challa) for a situation in which it is perfectly well known he is innocent because he had no agency. Bucky is blamed for the harm his captors caused others, as is the case with Isaiah's “Even your people (HYDRA) weren’t done with me” situation. HYDRA is NOT Bucky's people, they were his kidnappers and enslavers. Because yes, Bucky was a slave of HYDRA, because he was under the total domination of a third party, which is one of the definitions the dictionary gives to the word slave.

I have seen several of the stans complaining about how Sam was mean/unfair or still treated Bucky like he was still the Winter Soldier or like he was responsible for his crimes as the Winter Soldier, which is all untrue by the way.

Yes, Sam did hold Bucky responsible for what he was forced to do as the Winter Soldier, and this on more than one occasion, whether from jokes that aren't funny to serious statements:

"You were stopping all the wrongdoers *you* enabled as the Winter Soldier" Ep 05.

"They cleared the bionic staring machine, and he killed almost everybody he’s met." Ep 03.

"We're not assasins" Ep. 02

And don't get me started on the ableist jokes Sam made about Bucky's condition:

"What’s going on in that big cyborg brain of yours? I can actually see it. I can see the gears turning. Oh, they’re malfunctioning, shutting down. Yep, they’re on fire." "(...) the bionic staring machine (...)" "I get it, why you want me to talk to *Freaky* Magoo over here"

Isn't Sam treating Bucky badly in these situations? Isn't he being unfair by blaming Bucky for what he “did” as the Winter Soldier, knowing full well that he didn't have the remotest control over his actions? Isn't he having a discriminatory attitude with all that ableist banter?

As tragicfanstasy-girl rightly said, Sam's fans hold double standards by getting upset because we don't acknowledge Bucky's treatment of Sam, when they refuse to acknowledge all the victim-blaming and ableism Sam subjected Bucky to. Where is the fairness in this way of reasoning?

To accuse Bucky of treating Sam "badly", just like that, is not only to remove all context from the situation, because “treating badly / mistreating” implies that this behavior comes out of nowhere, for no apparent reason, and that it is generally done with the intention of making the other person feel bad.

That is why I would not use the term “treat badly”, because none of Bucky's behavior comes from malice or bad faith. As my friend rightly said, it comes from the pain, depression, self-loathing of a suffering person. But let's look at the whole context a little deeper. More than anything else, what Bucky did was to express his displeasure and disapproval about Sam's decision to give up possession of the shield (it's what give something means), nothing else.

And here's the kicker, Bucky did NOT criticize or judge Sam as a person, he criticized his specific ACTION/DECISION of giving up the shield. At literally no point did Bucky ever insult him or use derogatory terms towards him or label him as incapable of protecting Steve's legacy, something he originally did agree to do.

And I mean, if we think about it, there ARE compelling reasons for Bucky and anyone else to disagree with Sam's decision, and NOT for the fact of him not wanting to wield the shield, BUT for the act of giving up its possession. Giving up its possession to the museum that the government owns. The same government that has proven to make terrible decisions time and time again. The same government that wanted to have control over augmented people. The same government that confiscated Steve's shield and Sam's wings for being against it. The same government that has proven to be anything but trustworthy and fair.

So therein lies the problem for Bucky (besides wanting to protect Steve's legacy and the emotional attachment he feels towards the shield), the problem is that Sam put the shield in the hands of those who could misuse it, and literally that's where the whole problem with Walker came from.

To summarize (and I apologize if I already said several times), the problem for Bucky was NEVER that Sam had not wielded the shield or that he had not adopted the mantle of Captain America, because he was in possession of the shield for months after Steve's death, and did not wield it, continuing to maintain the alias of Falcon. And that was fine, no criticism of Bucky comes from this fact, but again, from the fact of having ceded possession of the shield to those who could misuse it.

(I mean, even if the shield had been kept in the museum, there was a risk that anyone could steal it and do whatever they wanted with it.)

Everything Bucky said to Sam about the shield was NOT meant to make him feel bad, but to convince him to do something about it, get it back and put it back in good hands, or rather, put it in Sam's hands. Because despite everything, Bucky NEVER doubted for a second that Sam was the right one to wield it and be the next Captain America. Bucky continued to actively support and believe in him, that's why he gave him the shield once they took it away from Walker, and that's why the favor he asked the Wakandans was to make a new suit for Sam.

It's unfair to say that Bucky was a asshole to Sam, when he helped him with his mission to capture the Flag Smashers, even when it was none of his business. Bucky actively defended Sam both in combat, and from the racist attitude of the cops in episode 2, as well as Walker's attempt to intervene in Sam's mission for trying to reason with Karli in episode 4: “he knows what he's doing”.

Again, at absolutely no point did Bucky doubt that Sam was a good and capable man and the right one to carry on Steve's legacy. None of this is “treating badly” if you ask me.

The first thing Bucky did when he met Sam was blame him “You shouldn’t have given up the shield”. No “hello”, no “good morning”, no “how have you been Sam?, when we know that Sam has been checking up on Bucky, and texting him but Bucky didn’t reply. So Bucky ghosts Sam, and only comes back to blame him about giving up the shield.

Besides the fact that Bucky did have reason to express his displeasure about Sam's decision, and as tragicfantasy-girl explained earlier, Bucky's attitude does not come from malice or bad faith, but from pain, guilt and grief.

My pal gave an incredible introspection as a person who has sadly gone through traumatic experiences. These points of view are very, very important because they offer a perspective that people who have not been through a similar situation may not understand.

I cannot speak from this point of view, but I can offer my opinion as someone who lost a very close loved one and who has not yet overcome a grief that has already lasted 3 years. So I can say from my own experience, that losing a close loved one generates a very strong emotional attachment to their belongings and we become very over protective of them, and anything that may represent a lack of respect towards those belongings is considered a very serious offense. It is true that everyone grieves differently, but from what I can see, Bucky grieved very similarly to what I experienced. This is one of the many reasons I can empathize with him. And if I see one of the possessions my loved one entrusted to others being misused or disrespected, I will not hesitate to express my outrage at the person causing the situation. I wouldn't even have the head to greet them kindly first.

When you live a very painful and recent bereavement, the last thing that goes through your mind is to be the kindest person to others, and you just prefer to isolate yourself, you don't want to have to see anyone... At least that's how I lived it...

To say that Sam was checking on Bucky is a very specific interpretation of the fact that he sent him messages. This could mean many things, not necessarily that he was looking out for Bucky's welfare. In fact, in an interview that was done for the series, where Seb and Anthony were present, the interviewer asked what the content of those messages would be, and Anthony jokingly replied “Hey, did you kill someone?”, and everyone agreed that that was most likely the type of messages Sam sent to Bucky. Actually, this is consistent with Sam's character who tried on more than one occasion to dissuade Steve from his attempts to save Bucky, behaving consistently hostile towards him by making unkind remarks before every little remark Bucky made, always expressing the dislike he felt for him.

So, nobody can't blame Bucky for not wanting to respond to those kinds of messages, which are nothing more than mockery of all the severe trauma he still suffers.

Not only did Bucky actively support and believe in Sam, and never try to express his displeasure at his continued ableist and victim-blaming comments (because unfairly Bucky believes he deserves them), but the plot had him apologize for his own white privilege as well as Steve's. Bucky had to apologize because Steve made a decision (to give the shield to Sam) without considering what it would mean for a black man. It was Steve who put that burden on Sam, NOT Bucky, because he had no say in that decision. If anything, if anyone should apologize for that situation, it was Steve and NOT Bucky.

TFATWS revolutionized around the injustice of racism and how people in the black community can and should be considered victims for that, but it never addressed the issue of the injustice of victim-blaming over all the time Bucky has been held responsible for everything he was forced to do under mind control, and how he also deserves to be recognized as a victim. Sam, Sharon, and everyone gets a pass on blaming Bucky for the harm he was forced to commit, something only HYDRA is responsible for, just because “they too have suffered injustice”. NO, suffering injustice does NOT give you the right to be unfair to others.

Everything, absolutely everything within the TFATWS plot was focused on vilifying Bucky, and making him look like the cause or at least a participant in all the evils and tragedies that have taken place in everyone's lives. “Bucky's people hurt Isaiah”, "Sharon became a criminal for helping Steve to help Bucky", "Bucky was thoughtless for not thinking about what it could mean for a black man to be Captain America". In none of these situations did Bucky have a word.

And talking about Bucky hurting people, I have NEVER seen a Bucky stan talking about how awful what he did to Yori was. He befriended a man knowing full well he had killed his son? What kind of mindgame was he playing.

This is one of the most misguided and out of context takes I have ever read.

There is NO mind game, because all Bucky was trying to do was make amends for the damage done to others that he believes he is responsible for. Yori lost his son and became a lonely man, Bucky couldn't revive him but he could try to somehow fill the void his loss left in his father's life. That's why he tried to spend time with him, tried to be there for him, and his company was good for him. Leah recognized him. Yori already knew that his son had the misfortune of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, ending up being one of the many killed by an unnamed assassin who broke into the hotel where he worked.

Knowing the identity of the person who pulled the trigger brought absolutely NOTHING revelatory or healing for Yori that would allow him to find closure. That's why Bucky didn't tell him, not only because telling him that would only put Yori through a new grief, but because it would prevent Bucky from being able to continue to be there for him. It's because of all this that the scene of Bucky telling Yori the truth is one of the most criticized by fans, BECAUSE IT OFFERS NOTHING HEALING FOR EITHER YORI OR BUCKY.

And please don’t get me started on how they tried to make Ayo the “bad guy”, when Bucky had just broke out Zemo out of prison, the guy who killed King T’Chaka, without thinking about the consequences and the impact on his Wakandan friends.

Again, there is a very pronounced misinformation and lack of context here. Bucky assisted Zemo in his escape, because according to the plot and the writers' logic, Zemo was the only one with the resources to discover the origin of the new super soldier serum and track down the Flag Smashers. The book The Art of The Falcon and The Winter Soldier (which was written by the production of the series itself, which makes it totally canonical), offers more information about the whole issue of Zemo's escape from prison. It is clearly stated there that before resorting to their intervention, Bucky and Sam had already exhausted all other available options, the last card being Zemo. And it is also stated and I quote, “Zemo refuses to help from behind bars, so Bucky assists him in his escape.” This implies that Bucky first tried to get useful information from him, without having to release him from prison, but he refused. So again, according to the plot, Bucky did the right thing by assisting him in his escape because Zemo was the only one who could offer help.

No one ever said that Ayo or the Wakandas were the “bad guys” for wanting to go arrest Zemo, Bucky himself understands how this impacted their pride. And at no time did he refuse to hand him over to them, he just asked them for a little more time, because his intention from the beginning was to return Zemo to prison, and Zemo himself knew it. Ayo understood that, and that's why she gave an ultimatum of 8 hours before returning. Bucky understood it too. That is why he never objected to the Dora's intention to arrest Zemo after those 8 hours.

What we do consider unfair on the part of the Wakandans is the fact that they hid from Bucky the existence of the fail-safe that disconnects his arm, his prosthesis, one that they gave him without any previous condition, without considering that Bucky's ignorance of this fail-safe could be potentially fatal for him, in case he found himself in a situation in which he was hanging for his life by his left arm, and that by pure bad luck something activated that mechanism.

It is because of all this and many many many more things that we Bucky stans continue to raise our voices about all the injustices and mistreatment that Marvel has subjected him to time and time again. Not because we believe he is the only character who has suffered, but because he is the only character who has not been done justice. Because he is the only character within all of Marvel that has been denied the right to be considered a victim, when everyone else can be without issue.

It is alarming how many posts still exist and are still being shared where Bucky is still considered guilty for what he was forced to do as the Winter Soldier, even though it is well known among fans that he had no remote control over his actions. The level of victim-blaming that exists is disturbing. And not only because this is an injustice to the character of Bucky, but because it is also an injustice to everyone who can relate to him in this regard.

These are a couple of comments from a Twitter user, in which the person was affected on an emotional level by all the victim-blaming that was shown on TFATWS as if it wasn't a bad thing. Who knows how many people have been affected by this and we just don't know. “If Bucky is guilty for a situation he had no agency in being mind-controlled, then I, who was not brainwashed, am certainly guilty, even though I had no opportunity to offer resistance.” Do you realize the impact this has on people???

So NO, we will NEVER shut up and stop asking for justice for Bucky, because asking for justice for him also means asking for justice for all those people who can identify with his suffering.

The world has moved past the need for Bucky stans. They serve no other purpose than to write long stories explaining why their characters is the most miserable character, who has suffered the most, has had the most unfair treatment in the world and then forget and dismiss anyone around their character. Let’s not forget how entitled they act whenever there is a big announcement for Sam’s character, and immediately demand the same for Bucky. Even though there are 364 other days where they could do the complaing for their character, they conviently choose the day there is a big announcement for Sam’s character to complain and make demands they have no right to make, instead of praising Sam’s character just once in their life.

And honestly, I don’t even think they really like Bucky as a character because they absolutely refuse to see him as he really is or see the ways their character has grown.

Like Tony Stans before them, and unlike any other fans in the MCU, Bucky stans have the ability to always paint their character as the victim no matter what the circumstances, act as if their character is the only character to have ever experienced trauma in the history of characters. And they absolutely to refuse to see the flaws of their characters or any bad thing they do, They will blame all the bad things their character does on literally anybody BUT the character. They refuse to acknowledge that their character isn’t the only one who has feelings and who has known pain. We are slowly being freed from Tony stans, it’s time for the same thing to happen with the Buckies.

The last strike is that now they somehow came up with the idea that Bucky’s and Isaiah’s stories are somewhat similar. Excuse me but what???

What is surprising to me is that I never see this kind of behavior coming from Steve fans, Natasha fans, Thor fans and so on. Maybe I missed something.

It’s always the same fandoms that decide on one specific interpretation of a character and stick to it no matter what is happening on screen. They insist on Bucky being the one who needs to be taken care of, when Bucky in episode 5, and episode 6 was the one who was taking care of Sam ( getting the suit, helping with the boat, supporting with the flagsmashers). Do you even watch the shows your character’s involved in or do you just live in your headcanon? Do you even realize that you character is making progess and that unlike your headcanons Bucky seems to have more the profile of a nurturer once he starts healing? Bucky still has a long way to go, but have you seen him giving away that notebook? Starting to make amends the right way? Do you not see his progress?

They insist on Bucky being the one being hurt but turn a blind eye when Bucky is doing the hurting. And let’s not even talk about what happens when the other character interacting with Bucky is not White…

I have seen several of the stans complaining about how Sam was mean/unfair or still treated Bucky like he was still the Winter Soldier or like he was responsible for his crimes as the Winter Soldier, which is all untrue by the way. But then they never mention why Sam didn’t open welcome Bucky with open arms.

The first thing Bucky did when he met Sam was blame him “You shouldn’t have given up the shield”. No “hello”, no “good morning”, no “how have you been Sam?”, when we know that Sam has been checking up on Bucky, and texting him but Bucky didn’t reply. So Bucky ghosts Sam, and only comes back to blame him about giving up the shield. And even when Sam tells him he’s upset about the shield being given to Walker, Bucky keeps pestering Sam. And it keeps being that way for a major part of episode 2 and 3. 

And yet I have NEVER seen any Bucky stan talk about how Bucky treated Sam badly during that time.

Do you guys not remember the scene where Bucky apoligize? I just don’t understand, even Bucky understood that he f*cked up, and changed his behavior, why can’t his stans?

And talking about Bucky hurting people, I have NEVER seen a Bucky stan talking about how awful what he did to Yori was. He befriended a man knowing full well he had killed his son? What kind of mindgame was he playing.

And please don’t get me started on how they tried to make Ayo the “bad guy”, when Bucky had just broke out Zemo out of prison, the guy who killed King T’Chaka, without thinking about the consequences and the impact on his Wakandan friends.

Bucky stans don’t even acknowledge the feelings of other characters than their own. They did it with Endgame Steve with blablabla how unfair he was to abandon Bucky, even though Bucky knew Steve was leaving. And they are now doing it from Sam.

I really like Loki as a character but I’m sometimes annoyed at some stans that want to insist that he isn’t a villain, never did anything wrong and even go to the lengths to paint him as a victim when he killed actual people. But usually Loki stans don’t reach the levels of Buckies when it comes to putting on blinders whenever they are thinking about their characters. Most of them acknowledge Loki’s flaws and his wrongdoings and like him anyway. As they should.

Bucky stans need to step aside and leave Bucky’s character to people who really know how to appreciate him, who (unlike them) want his character to heal and be happy and see him as he is, flaws, wrongdoings, mistakes and most importanly who also see his growth. 

Most importantly, leave Bucky’s character to people who know how to tag properly and won’t tag a post that doesn’t even have Sam in it with “Sam Wilson” just to get more traction for their post.

[ivrousae]

✦ Apocalypse

Arguments with ZB1

Hyung line | Read Maknae line version here (on progress.)

- Genre: angst, hurt, comfort, fluff

- Pairings: zb1 x reader

- Warnings: swearing, explicit language, mentions of drinking, etc. ! This writing might be sensitive for some people !

- a/n: someone requested this and i wrote it a while ago..this fic has been ROTTING in my drafts yo😭😭 hope yall like it lol, i’ll write maknae line soon ok

Playlist:

- Jiwoong: Cry - CAS,

- Hao: Anaheim - NIKI

- Hanbin: Understand - Keshi & Seasons - Wave To Earth

- Matthew: Promise - Laufey

- Taerae: Try Again - Jaehyun, d.ear

✧ Jiwoong

- Your relationship with Jiwoong is fine, but there are days when the two of you have your hectic days, and this week is one of them. Jiwoong is busy, making him stressed and often frustrated, and the same goes for you, the whole week would be filled with sudden arguments coming around here and there, and it’s about time that you’ve had enough. “You know, I wish we never-” “Don’t say it, you know you shouldn’t be saying things you don’t mean,” Jiwoong said coldly, cutting off your sentence before you could continue, “Well, what if I mean it?” you forced out a chuckle, “No you don’t y/n, stop it” Jiwoong sighed, piercing your eyes with his strong yet meaningful gaze.

Without realizing it, you were shouting at Jiwoong, releasing all of the emotions you’ve held the whole week, “Why couldn’t you be there? I was there when you were stressed, I was there when you needed me but you weren’t there, Jiwoong? Where were you when I was all alone? Where were you when I needed you the most? Huh?” you said, tears falling from your eyes as you pushed Jiwoong’s shoulder, “Babe…” he slowly said, realizing that he messed up, realizing that he hurt you. Jiwoong placed one of his hands on your shoulders, the other hand placed on your cheeks, wiping off your tears as he kissed your forehead, “I’m sorry, let’s talk it out slowly, yeah?” he said, his tone full of guilt “Give me some time” You stepped away from him, making your way to your bedroom before locking yourself in.

[ read Jiwoong’s text before continuing ]

After replying to his texts, you went out of your bedroom to eat the dish he cooked in the kitchen. As you made your way toward the kitchen, you found Jiwoong lying down on the couch, you sighed, grabbing the plate of food that he prepared and placed it on the table in the living room before sitting down beside Jiwoong, “Hey” you sighed, taking a bite of the food “Hey babe, have you gotten the time you needed?” he asked softly, sitting himself down to sit closer to you, you nodded, avoiding eye contact, “Look, I’m sorry, yeah? I was so carried away with work, that I didn’t notice I was hurting you so much, I’ll be here for you now, so I’m sorry, babe” “It’s fine, I was carried away with work too that I got frustrated, I just don’t want to fight with you again” You looked at Jiwoong who already had his eyes on you “I love you,” he pulled you into a hug, rubbing your back and kissing the top of your head “And I always will”

────────────

✧ Hao

- With the same reason as Jiwoong, you and Hao often fight because one or both of you would get carried away from stress. When Hao is busy with work, and you’d also be busy with your work, the two of you would get sensitive, you’d talk back, and he’d talk back, and then it’d just turn into a big fight.

“Can you not?” Zhang Hao said as he stopped typing from his laptop, his voice slightly raised as his frustration grew “Huh? I was just trying to get something” you replied, it was clear that you were also frustrated and annoyed at that point, “You keep on coming back and forth, I'm trying to work on something, stop being so fucking loud” he spoke out again, his tone filled with anger, “What the fuck, Hao? I’m trying to work on something too right now, I’m sorry for being loud but can’t you say it nicer?” You scoffed, the volume of your voice raising and raising, “No, I can’t say it nicer because you’ve been such a bother this whole time, Y/n.” he shouted “Hao?..” you quietly spoke as his words pierced you straight in the heart “Get out” he firmly said, “Why are you like this?” You said as tears fell down your face, you walked out of the door before slamming it, leaving your boyfriend all alone.

Hao felt a little guilty about his words, but he quickly ignored his feelings and continued with his work, he kept on getting distracted yet again, but this time, it was because of the sobs he heard coming from you in your bedroom.

[ read Zhang Hao’s text before continuing ]

After replying to your text, he went over to the kitchen to make you your favorite drink before knocking on your door “Baby, it’s me” he softly said “What do you want?” you replied, your voice still shaky from crying so much “I want to apologize, I made your favorite drink too” he sighed “Just say it from there, I don’t want to see you yet” you spoke out, Hao took a deep breath, he wanted to see you, but he knew that you needed your space, “I’m sorry, you know how I get when I’m stressed, I’m sure you’re tired of having to deal with me when I get like this babe. I’m so proud of you for being able to be so strong, I’m proud of you for also working so hard, and I’m proud of you for loving me. I’ll treat you better starting from now, so let me hold you, please?” he begged, his voice starting to get shaky mid-way.

As he stood in front of your bedroom door, he saw the door open, showing you with your red eyes, you walked closer to him, pulling him into a hug, and he did the same to you. The two of you hugged each other for a long time before letting go of each other “Let’s get ready to sleep, it’s getting late” Hao smiled, tucking back your hair behind your ears.

“I love you so much” he spoke out, giving your lips a quick peck.

────────────

✧ Hanbin

You had a team dinner after work, but you didn’t tell your boyfriend Hanbin about it because you didn’t think that it would be that big of a deal.

But after the event, you opened the door of your front porch and entered your house late at night. When you walked in, you saw Hanbin sitting down on one of the chairs in the kitchen aisle, his eyes focused on his phone “Hey bin” you quietly said, “Why didn’t you read my messages?” he replied as he looked at you, his voice slightly annoyed and his face straight, his eyes showed mixed emotions, from worried, to anger, to sadness, to tiredness.

You showed a confused expression on your face, “you texted me? I didn’t get the notification I'm sorry” you apologized while checking your phone, realizing that he texted you many times while being worried, “Look at the time, where were you this whole time?” he asked, his tone sounded angry but his volume was still low, “I had a team dinner, I didn’t think that it was a big deal so I didn’t tell you” you replied “Team dinner? You went to a team dinner and didn’t tell me because you didn’t think it was a big deal? Y/n, you could’ve gotten drunk, what if something happens to you? Huh? What if you get hurt, or they do something to you?” he spoke out, his volume getting louder and louder “Hanbin, it isn’t a big deal, I’m here now and nothing happened so calm down” “The least you could do is inform me, is it that hard to text me before hand? It’s already midnight and you just got home a few minutes ago, you know I hate it when you don’t inform me about things like this” he brushed up his hair that was covering his eyes before placing both of his hands on the counter, breaking the eye contact he had with you “Okay fine, I’m sorry, I’m tired right now so just stop making this such a big deal” “This isn’t the first time, y/n” “Oh my god, Sung Hanbin I said I’m tired, leave me alone” You shouted, walking yourself out the door, leaving your boyfriend standing alone.

As you stormed out of your house, you drove yourself to a place that could calm you down, you felt bad for storming out on Hanbin like that, but you were too tired to listen to him, you know he was worried about you, but you still needed time.

You sat down on the bench beside the river, focused on the sight of the night sky before feeling your phone vibrate from notifications.

[ Read Hanbin’s text before continuing ]

You stayed for a few more minutes before driving yourself back home. When you arrived and entered your house, Hanbin rushed over to you before hugging you “I’m sorry sweetheart, I was just worried about you, I didn’t want you to get hurt because I care so much about you and I love you. I’m sure you’re tired so I prepared the bath for you, go clean yourself up and talk with me, yeah?” he spoke softly, placing soft rubs on your back and your head “You didn’t have to do that, Bin” you replied as your chin rested on his shoulders “Well I already did” he laughed “Again, I’m sorry” he sighed “It’s fine, you did nothing wrong” you let go of the hug before rubbing his shoulders

“I love you” he enunciated and pulled you into a meaningful kiss.

────────────

✧ Matthew

Matthew was going out with his friends and he promised to be home by 8 PM, so you stayed up and waited for your boyfriend to come back home. However, it seemed like he had forgotten his promise because the time was already 10.30 PM and there were no signs of Matthew yet.

The time was 00.08 AM and you heard the front door open, by that time, you were already annoyed at your boyfriend who forgot his promise, so you stayed in your room, not wanting to go downstairs and see him. Your bedroom door opened, showing your boyfriend with his black top and jeans, “Hey babe, you’re still awake?” he said lazily as he placed down his hat, you replied with a hum, too frustrated to reply with words, “Forgot I promised to come home earlier, my bad” he said, even with his apology, it seemed like he wasn’t so sincere with his words. “Why did you come home so late?” you asked “I was out with my friends, what did you expect? You could’ve just slept and not waited for me, you know?” he replied “Of course, I waited for you, but then you weren’t home yet and I couldn’t sleep so I continued waiting?” you scoffed “Well I’m home, so just go to sleep and stop being so dramatic” he groaned, leaving you to change in the bathroom.

As he came back from the bathroom, you tried to talk to him about it but he completely ignored you, not wanting to talk to you, “What the fuck Matthew” you sighed, seeing Matthew getting up and leaving the room again.

Matthew, who tried to ignore you, seemed to be struggling when he went downstairs to leave you alone, he tried to distract himself by watching the TV, but he’d constantly fidget with his fingers, or he’d constantly let out a deep sigh, signaling that he had a lot in mind. He gave up on trying to ignore you and quickly pulled out his phone from his pockets to text you

[ Read Matthew’s text before continuing ]

Matthew went back upstairs, knocking on your bedroom door before entering “Babe” he softly said “Hm?” you replied “Can I hug you?” he asked, making you chuckle “Why?” “Look, I’m sorry, I know I was wrong, I just felt tired and I said something that hurt you” he apologized “It’s okay, thank you for apologizing sincerely” you replied, going over to Matthew to hug him “Fuck, I love you so much” he muttered, kissing the top of your head in between your hug

────────────

✧ Taerae

Fighting was never a big thing in your relationship with Taerae. When you guys fought, it was always about something unserious and silly, and there were barely any times where the fight gets BIG.

But the two of you often bicker with each other, especially because you often get sulky with Taerae. This time, Taerae jokingly said something about your cooking, of course, it was a joke, because honestly speaking, he thinks your cooking was so good, but it was natural for the both of you to make joking comments and bully each other from time to time, it’s like your love language with each other. But what he didn’t realize, is that you’ve had a little bit of a long day that day, and you were already in a bad mood before he commented about your cooking. You knew he was just joking, but you were still feeling a little mad, you didn’t feel the best after all.

“Is it that bad?” you asked after Taerae commented on your cooking “Yes” he laughed “I’m joking babe, it’s good” he smiled, patting your shoulder as an apology, but you already felt bad, you showed a sad yet frustrated expression on your face, avoiding eye contacts with your boyfriend “Hey, babe, I was joking, I’m sorry, it’s really good” he apologized again, this time, with words, “Still” you whined “Aw, baby don’t get mad, I’m sorry” he squished your cheeks, but it didn’t make you feel any better “I’m going upstairs, enjoy your food” you rolled your eyes, leaving the table before going upstairs into your room.

“Fuck, I shouldn’t have said that” Taerae groaned at himself when he saw you leave, massaging the temple of his head before finishing the food you have cooked him. He wanted to go upstairs and talk to you but he knew you just needed your time, so he let you stay inside your room before he couldn’t hold himself back anymore.

[ Read Taerae’s text before continuing ]

After reading Taerae’s text, you wiped off your tears and went downstairs to see him after you felt a little better, Taerae immediately stood up from the couch when he saw you walking downstairs “BABY” he shouted, running over to you before hugging you and kissing your lips “I’m sorry, I love you so much, please tell me when you‘ve had a long day, okay?” he comforted you before planting one last kiss on your jaw.

[rey-jake-therapist]

There's a lot of discourse around shipping lately, treating the concept of shipping a female character (in this case, Galadriel) with a male character as "sexist". Those who say this kind of thing will argue that shipping is equal to treating the female character as "a side character" for a male character, who would be considered by the shipper as the most important character of the two. For the record, this post is inspired particularly by a Reddit post, but I've read these takes many times.

Excerpt of said Reddit post :

People in this fandom center Galadriels entire character around the men she interacts with. Every time she speaks to a man, there is a group of people who start shipping her with that man. It's not even funny anymore how some people here can't talk about her character without bringing up some guy who she interacted with. And this is especially frustrating because a lot of these discussions push her into the wife role. She is "married to Sauron" she is "married to Adar" the ring she wears is totally an "engagement ring". Even though there are two men who also received rings and I don't see anyone calling their rings engagement rings. And then there are some discussions that are downright disgusting, especially the "the stab she received from Sauron is a metaphor for penetration," and I don't mind discussing that. What I have an issue with is the romanticizing of that moment. Because Sauron also stabbed Celebrimbor, but people don't have an issue calling out how fucked up that scene was. It's almost like people are treating her like an accessory to men, when the show doesn't even do that. One of the strongest relationships in season one in my opinion was her relationship to Miriel. But I barely see people talk about that.

Notice how this person says with their whole chest that they're all for the kinky stuff, but not for the romantic stuff; this screams like a person who reads Saurondriel smut in secret, but clutches their pearls as soon as there are feelings involved because "uh, he's evil !".

To see the whole thread, click here. Notice that there are some very intelligent reactions to this claim, proving once again that Reddit is not completely lost. At least, this sub in particular isn't.

I won't start dwelling on the fact that this trend which consists in claiming that romance somehow diminishes a female character is getting very old, it won't be the subject of this post. Others have already breached this subject in a much more articulate way than I could ever do.

When people say they don't like that people ship Galadriel, it almost always means, "we don't like her being shipped with Sauron, yikes". I mean, let's be real : the most popular ship, is, by far, Haladriel. We're the ones being "sexist" here . Tbf with this person, they mentioned other ships as well so I will give them the benefice of doubts. It's also clear that they can't take a joke, because I never saw any shipper, being Haladriel or else, who was serious when they called Galadriel "X's wife", but whatever.

But even if we were serious, what's sexist about that, exactly ? If she's "Sauron's wife", for example, doesn't that make Sauron "Galadriel's husband" as well ? Why is shipping always called out for making the female character "an accessory to the male character", and never as making the male character an accessory to the female character ?Why is it considered reducing towards Galadriel, but not towards Sauron/Adar/Elrond ? Do the male characters gain somehow more than female characters at being shipped ?

The same question can be asked about the sexualization of the characters : it's always considered "outrageous" and "sexist" to sexualize female characters, even when it's done by women (which is almost always the case, in the context of shipping), but generally okay to sexualize male characters, why ? Because male characters supposedly have "the power" in the dynamics, based on their gender ?

I mean, I just find these ideas very reductive.

Now on the subject of Galadriel always being "connected to male characters". Well, first, sorry, but Galadriel doesn't get to spend much time around other female characters, in the show. And even in the books written by Tolkien, errrrr...?? This person mentions Galadriel's relationship with Miriel, that no one talks about. Well, I would love for Galadriel and Miriel to have interacted more, but the fact is that most of her interactions were with Halbrand/Sauron, in season 1. She indeed had an interesting connection with Miriel, but the show dedicated so little time on it that it leaves not much to discuss, really.

And in season 2, it's even more simple: she doesn't interact with any other female character. There's a female Elf in the company who leaves Lindon for Eregion, but the writers didn't even give her a line until episode 7, and when they did they killed her off 10 sec after she opens her mouth for the first time. If she had a good relationship with Galadriel, we have no other choice but imagining it. So, yes, we discuss Galadriel's relationship with men, because this show is very male-centric. And Tolkien's world itself is very male-centric, as a matter of fact. That the fans, and the shippers in particular, are blamed for that is really something.

I would LOVE for other female characters, albeit non canon characters, to be introduced in the show and to interact with Galadriel. I would LOVE Galadriel to have a female best friend, or even a female rivale, an enemy, a colleague, whatever ! And if I hope that Galadriel will return to Numenor, and I think she will because it was hinted more than once (her vision in the Palantir identical to Miriel's, and Miriel's promise to Galadriel that Numenor will return, which could imply Galadriel's involvement), it's also because I want Miriel and Galadriel to resume their relationship. They'd have much to talk about, it'd be great !

Now I'd like to discuss Haladriel in particular, or more generally, Galadriel's relationship with Sauron. Another thing that bothers me with this discourse is that according to this person and many others, too much importance is given to this relationship, wether it's considered romantic or not. "Too much importance" ? Hello ? It's literally this relationship that led to all the events that followed ! In show!canon, I mean, not in the Tolkien lore. From now on, everything I'll write will be related to the show!canon, unless I specify otherwise.

I find very strange, to say the least, to feel criticized because I talk about Galadriel and Sauron, while the entirety of season was built around their relationship : even before they meet, she's obsessede with him. They meet on the sea, she saves him, they are brought to Numenor, they're thrown in jail together, Galadriel insists he's a lost king, he says nay, then he changes his mind, they fight together in the Southlands, she stops him from killing Adar, he does the same with her, they share a moment in the forest, she brings him to Eregion to heal him, then boom, she learns he's Sauron, they fight, and he leaves. And yes, Galadriel gets to interact with other characters, including Miriel, but c'mon now : the first season of this show has made Galadriel and Sauron's relationship the center of it all. Not just Galadriel, no ! Almost everything she does and says is related to Sauron. Is it our fault ? Is it the shippers fault, if the story was written this way ?

And don't get me started on all the sexual and romantic innuendos, that the tenants of this discourse are always prone to deny. "There was nothing romantic in their interactions !", "They were just friends !", "they were just political partners !". Sure, Jan. These innuendos were definitely present, the sexual tension was always present (and for God's sake, no, it wasn't the actors who wanted to jump each other, it was A-C-T-I-N-G). The writers and the directors wanted the audience to think there was, at the very least, a mutual attraction.

In season 2, Galadriel and Sauron barely interacted but they were constantly thinking of each other, especially Galadriel. Again, is it the fans' fault if they saw that and commented on a relationship that was broken, and yet still very present within the narrative ? Is it the shippers' fault if the writers decided to picture Galadriel as an ex lover in pain because her lover deceived her (or a friend deceibed by a fake friend, if that's how you interpret it !) ? Was it the shippers' decision to doll up an Elf woman as a discount Galadriel, so Sauron wouldn't take a break in his obsession for Galadriel ? No, again, it was the writing.

And actually, it makes sense that the writing spent so much time on this relationship in season 2, and will probably continue in season 3, 4 and 5 even if some of you firmly believe that Galadriel "shut the door" for good on him and will never see him or speak to him again. Because we know, this time from the Tolkien lore, that Sauron never stopped trying to grope to see her and her thought :

“I say to you Frodo that even as I speak to you I perceive the Dark Lord and know his mind, or all of his mind that concerns elves, and he gropes ever to see me and my thought but still the door is closed.”

It was literally the showrunners idea that Galadriel and Sauron must have had a sort of a relationship, based on this quote. Putting Galadriel and Sauron in a situationship was never a second thought !

It was meant to be important in the show, and it will remain important, because if it was what started this particular story told by the show, and it will probably be what will finish it as well.

To conclude : I understand why people don't all like Saurondriel... I understand why these same people don't understand why they are shipped, it's perfectly valid. But blaming the fans, and the shippers in particular, for talking so much about Galadriel's connection with Sauron, is speaking in bad faith, or being media illeterate because the writers WANT us to talk about it.

[canary0]

Scarlet Hollow and Slay the Princess

Okay, brace yourself, we're going full strings-and-corkboard today. Also, there are SO MANY SPOILERS IN THIS POST FOR BOTH GAMES. DO NOT READ IF YOU HAVEN'T FINISHED AT LEAST ONE PLAYTHROUGH OF BOTH.

Now that the disclaimer is out of the way...

It wasn't an accident that we got Slay the Princess when we did, right before the ramp up to Scarlet Hollow's climax begins. Slay the Princess isn't just it's own thing - it's an explicit explanation of the dynamics of Scarlet Hollow. It's a direct metaphor, and may be more than that.

"You are on a path in the woods. At the end of that path is a cabin. In the basement of that cabin is a Princess. You are here to slay her. If you don't, it will mean the end of the world."

There are three forces in both games. We can see that explicitly in Slay the Princess, with The Narrator, The Long Quiet, and The Princess. We can also see it in Scarlet Hollow, with Sybil, Wayne, and Tabitha. Episode 3's tablet spells this out explicitly:

Three wolves, the three forces of the town, surrounding a goat. A sacrifice. That's the Witch, the Entity, and the Scarlets in the context of the vision.

There is a controlling force who tries to convince and cajole and control if that fails, who is immediately suspicious, and while they seem to be against the Princess, they are actually against both forces in play. The force can and does affect the minds of others. It turns people against the other two forces in play. It's friendly, as long as you do what it tells you, but betrays you as well, in the end. The Narrator. Sybil.

A being who is fundamentally disturbing, but whose face is always shadowed and unclear, or outright covered. Despite that, we always see his glowing eyes. He rots slowly as we proceed with the story, eventually rotting away to show his true form, perhaps. He is a fundamentally eternal being, one who cannot be killed permanently. He is reborn into different bodies, over and over. He may represent a "new and unending dawn", eternity unchanging. He also has the most agency of this own, though. He is fundamentally connected to The Princess. There are multiple of him. The Long Quiet. Wayne... or whatever is controlling him.

Then there's a Princess. Feels trapped in a house at the top of a hill, unable to escape unless she is freed by outside forces. A monarch, but actually has the least agency in her situation. Not yet a queen. Despite all of this, she may have the greatest capacity to change, and to change the world around her. Her role changes based on how she's treated and perceived by others. When perceived as a friend deserving of sympathy, she softens into one. When perceived as a harsh being, she is one. She is disturbed by The Long Quiet's appearance, but is inextricably connected to him. The Princess. Tabitha.

Whether Slay the Princess is just a metaphor for what's going on in Scarlet Hollow, or whether these are actual forces that exist in the Scarlet Hollow universe being replicated on a miniature stage is hard to say.

I think, though, that it's hard for me to deny that there is a strong connection between the two games. Perhaps this is why we haven't seen the choice the Mystic can influence yet?

[danidrabbles]

I've been in a real reading mood lately and it made me SO excited to revisit this. Miranda, we've messaged about this before, but I wanted to give it the proper reblog it deserves!!!! (This got a little long. I'd apologize, but as a writer myself I know (hope) it's fun)

Because Dieter and ex-wife!Reader are on my mind all the time. I really like reading about people meeting, but love reading about people and knowing there's history between them, it makes things so bittersweet. Especially with these two because the love is there; you make it so efficiently evident in their "Do you want the truth or a lie?" conversation, and when they admit they think about each other, when Dieter says “I think you worried about what the real truth would be. We’ve got something here and it’s worrisome.” 🥺 It's a quick interaction, but it says so much about them.

As someone who was once a teenager with a crush on David Duchovny, Reader's meeting with Dustin is soooooo satisfying. The way he describes the production of the movie

"Everyone thinks us Hollywood actors just commit to this shit knowing it’s shit but we don’t! I mean not those of us who started at the beginning. We thought it’d be good. Like Jurassic Park, but yanno, we didn’t get Steven Spielberg. We keep getting arthouse fucks. And I like arthouse fucks–don’t get me wrong–but what’s a man with an IPhone know about blockbusters?”

made me laugh out loud.

The interactions between Dieter and Dustin are so fun, too. Their snarking back and forth while discovering they might not be so different after all... You manage to build so much tension between them and Reader in their conversation with her by the door. But then you also pack in gut punches like, “You don’t know. You don’t know me.” “That’s not true.” “Yeah it is. I’m different now. I’m not the woman you dragged around all those years.” and “You love him so much. It isn’t fair. You will love him your whole life if you don’t stop this.” OOF. ouch! It’s all walking that line between fun, comedy and sexy so well.

The smut is so good Miranda... Even on a reread I’m sitting here like 😳

Having Dustin between Reader’s legs, having so much fun with her, while she and Dieter kiss, and the way it goes back and forth between the sensations of something new (Dustin) and something familiar (Dieter) is sooooooo fantastic, I love how you kind of juxtaposed them without ever making one feel less involved in the threesome than the other. Also so good for her (reader insert me) to have her little You used to masturbate to this man. Revelation!!!! (and her getting to say it to him later was so… soft?)

I’m obsessed with the fact that you went there with Dieter and Dustin, too. Like not that I didn’t expect that of you, it’s just that M/M/F threesomes can often be... more on the M/F/M/ side, you know what I mean? When they kissed, when Dustin made Dieter suck on his fingers (As Dieter’s mouth wraps around his fingers, you feel a warm bead of pre-cum drip onto your skin. Damn…) when Reader lays back and tells Dieter “I want to see what you’re like with men,” and they just. went for it. LOVED it.

There’s so much I want to comment on, but instead I’ll give you some passages that made my heart ache…

You know he would do anything - anything - for you if you’d just ask. His love burns like a million suns and you’ll be Icarus in every lifetime. You fool. Kiss another man hard and seek penance in his presence behind you. 

That’s how you taste. He savors it like a wine connoisseur does his wine, running it over his tongue and thinking too long about how to describe it. It is so utterly you, it makes him yearn for another life. 

Some things are so true they don’t need to be confirmed. They just are. The sky is blue and people die, and Dieter is a man who will give you everything because he was once a man who gave you nothing.

“I don’t seem to regret you. Even though sometimes it’d be better if I did.”

It’s so beautiful and so bittersweet. It’s so good 😭 

And some lines that made… other places ache…

Dustin’s fingers are still in you, on you, when Dieter leans down and presses his tongue flat against your clit, greedy with lust. He licks at you around Dustin’s fingers and it feels like too much. They seem to make an agreement, working you at the same time. You cum quickly and this one seems to go on for eternity.

“He wants you so bad. Look—” You feel Dustin’s grin already across your back. “He’s so fucking hard for you. Just as hard as me.”

“Maybe we’ll do it..” he grunts, bottoming out again, “We’ll do you together. You’re tight as hell, but I know we can get you wide. Couldn’t we?”

Your Dustin is lowkey a fucking menace, jesus... Which genuinely surprised me so much!!!! But also the You see Dustin in the hazy peripheral. Lolling your head to the side, you focus on him. He stands at the side of the bed, smiles at you when you catch his eyes. With his cock standing out in front of him like that, he looks a bit unserious. If you weren’t so full of Dieter, perhaps you’d be amused by this. made me laugh so hard.

THE ENDING IS SO FUN??? It’s so creative and I love the promise of more between these three. I’ve attached Dieter to this email for obvious transparency reasons. He says he’d gladly help me carry your canvas (figuratively and literally). made me giggle.

Miranda, this was so fantastic. I said it before but I love the way you work in all these emotions so seamlessly, while never losing any of the sincerity in the process, it's so admirable. Your word choices, your analogies and metaphors, the way you picked such an unconventional relationship for this and made it work... You're an amazing writer, I am in awe of you, and I love this story so much!

three's company

pairing: dieter bravo x ex-wife!reader x dustin mulray rating: e (explicit) tags/warnings: smut, pinv, protected sex, oral (female receiving) *inserts good for her meme*, oral (male receiving), dirty talk, light voyeurism, talk and use of drugs and alcohol (weed & wine), the weirdest situationship you ever did see, a bit of angst, jealousy, fingering, dubious consent (but like, only a tiny bit dubious. the tiniest bit) word count: 16.k+ (don't ask me what happened there) summary: The world is slowly descending into madness all around you, so you decide to give in and go with Dieter to his latest poor decision: a franchise movie filming in England. One night while there, you both sweep another into this odd half-hearted, life-long tryst you've got. a/n: i don't know how i got here but i hope you enjoy it as much as i enjoyed writing it. i could dedicate this to a lot of things but mostly i'm going to dedicate it the red shoe diaries. thanks to david and the horny '90s. also to maria (@sweetly-yours-and-mine) who has spent countless nights working through this with me. you are a gem

“I don’t like the idea of you being alone.”

“I’m not alone.”

“Facetime isn’t the same as real people.”

“Those are bad movies, Bravo. I’m not sure I want to be around those who make them for that long.”

“I know.”

“Actors have never been my favorite company.”

“I know.”

“And I just don’t want to go.”

“I know.”

“I’ll learn to stop answering your calls one day, you know? And then you’ll do everything alone, even a global disaster.”

“I knew you’d give in. That's my girl.”

——

The hotel is a converted English Manor - the very stuff of childhood fairytales and honeymoon daydreams with its Italianate architecture and technicolor green grass. It is warm, inviting, with high ceilings and the soft, consistent hum of human activity as workers scurry around to greet the incoming guests. They filter you in through white plastic tents and stick cotton swabs up your nose before giving you the WIFI password and a room with a stunning view of their expansive, manicured grounds. You don’t have any grounds to look in America, and your studio apartment has been eerily quiet as of late. The pulse of life has stopped in Los Angeles, but here it comes back with an unvarying rhythm.

You don’t like to admit it, but Dieter was right: you are not above loneliness.

The room they give you feels anachronistic, too modern and beige, but cozy in the way all four star hotels aim to be. You’ve got a television, a pristine bathroom that hosts a bathtub and a shower, and enough floor space to move around without stubbing any toes. There’s ample furniture too: a reading chair by the large window, the queen bed, and another chair by the door, which looks like it’s meant only for bags and the stray suit jacket. They’ve given you decorative pillows and instructions not to leave for two weeks - not for any reason.

You lay out on the queen bed and Facetime Dieter. The irony of the situation is too good not to tease him for.

“I know,” he gruffs, picking up your call immediately.

You can’t help but laugh at the misery that drips from his voice. “I’ve always been better at being alone. I think it was you who didn’t want to be alone.”

He runs a hand through his unruly hair and frowns. Even if you won’t take it, you like the idea that he’s only a long walk away now. You give in and shuck off your winner’s ego. “It’s only two weeks,” you assure kindly.

“If I’m good, do you think I can earn a sleepover?” There’s mischief in his eyes, flirtation thick on his tongue. You look askance at him and the dimple in his cheek deepens. “I’m only kidding of course.”

“Ha ha,” you deadpan.

“It’ll be nice after two weeks,” he promises. You know that tone, far off and introspective. It’s not good.

“Just Facetime me when you’re losing your mind.”

“You don’t want that. I’ll be on the phone with you all the time.”

You stare down at the phone, frowning. He smiles, coming back to his body. “I’ll be alright, kid. I always am.”

“Two weeks is not so long.”

“No,” he agrees quietly.

——

Two weeks is a prison sentence.

The room they put you in, while spacious, is merely a cell block now, reduced down to its most basic elements: the bathroom with the shower and the tub, which you’ve used so much it's a miracle your skin hasn’t fallen right off; the bedroom area, with the reading chair by the window; the queen bed, which you stopped making after day four and try your damndest not to fall in before 3pm. You’ve paced the floor so many times, feeling the angry itch of loneliness coupled with a newfound, perpetually lurking anxiety.

“One more day,” he reminds you over the telephone, trying to allay your fears. You hear the sound of his tub running in the background, over the static of his voice, and you wonder what he looks like right now. You picture two week’s more worth of beard growth, the slouch of his back as he sits on the edge of the tub, the pudge of his stomach, and the inciting trail of hair below his belly button. And his naked self. At home he was perpetually nude, and you imagine it’s no different now.

You find your own reflection in the mirror over the sink: sunken eyes, with bags underneath and your flesh taking on a slightly gray cast, the color of isolation.The window sun doesn’t seem to be helping much. You frown self consciously, but try to remind yourself he must be in a state himself; he stopped Facetiming you a week ago, opting for the good ol’ telephone call at least once or twice a day since.

“I’m going out of my mind,” you say as you continue to look at yourself. You lower your voice, vulnerability shared in a hushed, confessional tone. You imagine Dieter again: with that soft concentrated look that pulls his eyebrows together, the one that enhances the lines between them. They called him a curious child and now he’s got the lines to show for it. He told you that. The thought makes you smile at yourself, but you still look so tired.

“Just one day,” he supplies again. He sounds vaguely apologetic.

“I know,” you tell him simply.

“What have you been up to today?” he asks. You hear water come to a stop and a gentle splash follows it. He’s gotten in. “Anything fun?”

“I read, watched a movie. You?”

“I got high and jerked off. So, you know, nothing different than the past thirteen days that you’ve called.”

You scan your reflection in the mirror, contemplating your next words. It isn’t a good idea, but nothing is. “What did you think about?” you ask.

“Lots of things.”

He tells you this as casually as if you’ve asked him his name. You are so achingly lonely and this is so embarrassing, but you can’t help it. You know he’ll let you. Hell, he’s probably been waiting weeks for this. Years.

“Do you ever think about me?”

There’s a short, considerate pause. “Do you want the truth or a lie?”

“A lie.” You worry your lip between your teeth.

“Oh, never.”

You laugh, relieved. “I thought you were going to say something different.”

“Hm,” he hums, “I don’t think that’s the truth. I think you worried about what the real truth would be. We’ve got something here and it’s worrisome.”

“You sound like my mother.”

“Mine too. She thinks inviting you was a terrible idea but she wants you to know she’s thinking of you.”

“Mine hates you.”

He grunts. “Suppose I deserve that, don't I?”

“I think this is the first time in history that you diverted phone sex with talk like that.”

“I’m getting older, wiser,” he jokes. Then, “Do you think of me?”

“Do you want a lie or the truth?”

He considers it for a moment. “The truth. Hit me with it hard, baby.”

“Oh, a lot more than I should.”

——

The rapt sound of knuckles against your door incites an excitement in you that you haven’t felt since childhood. You jump from the bed, uncaring of the state of yourself, hungry for the news that awaits on the other side.

A kindly British man tells you that the quarantine has been lifted and that there will be a party and dinner for the cast and crew in a couple of hours. Formal wear is encouraged but not required.mYou spend the next few hours undoing what’s been done by isolation: the bags under your eyes; the unkempt room, with the fetid smell of loneliness wafting over everything; the living out of your suitcase and the wrinkles on your best clothes. You find an iron in the closet and shave your entire body.

Dieter stops by your room while you’re in the middle of getting ready. He sits quietly at the edge of your bed, watching you in the mirror with that dazed look in his eyes. He wears the ugliest goddamn housecoat you’ve ever seen, but he’d smiled so wide at the door that you’ve forgiven him for it.

“You’re excited,” he observes. His fingers fiddle with the sunglasses in his hands. “I thought you hate actors.”

You try to steady your hand as you bring the eyeliner up to your eyelid. “I don’t care what they are, as long as they can hold a conversation,” you mumble.

“I can hold a conversation. Maybe we ought to stay here and celebrate with each other.”

You look at him in the mirror, trying to figure out if he’s serious or not. You can’t tell. “You’re kidding.”

He shrugs. There’s a distant look in his eyes, as if he’s thinking too hard about something.

“Are you high?” you ask him.

“No, but I’m thinking maybe I should be.”

“Cheer up, boy scout. You’re the one who wanted to do this goddamn movie.”

He lets out a defeated sigh and falls back into the mattress with a groan. “I’m going to kill myself.”

———

He doesn’t kill himself, but he looks like he’s still weighing the prospect of it as you take your drink from the bartender.

Dieter suffers no one lightly, and you have a feeling the personable strawberry blonde in front of him isn’t exactly his crowd. You smile over the rim of your drink, enjoying seeing him squirm for once. Everything seems to come easy to him–except this. He’s never been very good at socializing when he doesn’t want to.

“That your boyfriend?”

You turn your head and find Dustin Mulray. You feel a hint of your teenage self come back to you as you look at him, struck wordless. It’s nothing as strong as the love that had you tacking up posters with his face on it to bedroom walls, but something vaguely akin to it. You’re happy to find it manifests itself as a friendly smile instead of love confessions. Perhaps it’s helped by his appearance: In his infinity scarf and beige knitted sweater, he reminds you more of a homely professor than a Hollywood movie star. You think: Movie stars! They’re just like us! while shaking your head in answer.

“No,” you tell him, “He’s my ex-husband.”

“Ah. That’s my ex-wife with him. Marriage is tricky, isn’t it?”

He takes a seat next to you and orders a drink. The bartender sits it on a napkin for him and he turns to you, his blue-green eyes awaiting an answer. You hadn’t thought he would want to talk to you, not really. You’re used to being invisible at events.

“I guess you could say that,” you reply.

“Are you working on the movie?”

You remember what Dieter told you to say if anyone asked: “For legal purposes, yes. Art coordinator #3.”

This amuses him, drawing out a smile. “That title come with pay or would you say it's just an internship?”

“I guess you could call it an internship.” You smile back at him. “Why? You think you could pull some strings and get me a paycheck?”

“I think I’d do you one better and get you a better place of employment. Have you read the script?” This makes you let out a genuine laugh. He brightens, smiling a little wider. “What? It’s the truth! Everyone thinks us Hollywood actors just commit to this shit knowing it’s shit but we don’t! I mean—“ He looks over the crowd, lowering his head closer to yours conspiratorially. “—Not those of us who started at the beginning. We thought it’d be good. Like Jurassic Park, but yanno, we didn’t get Steven Spielberg. We keep getting arthouse fucks. And I like arthouse fucks–don’t get me wrong–but what’s a man with an IPhone know about blockbusters?”

“Ah, I feel you but I can’t quite reach you from here.”

“No, I bet not.”

There’s something simmering in that line. If you didn’t know better, you’d figure it was a light flirtation. Surely not.

“I liked your early stuff better,” you confess.

“Me too. But those were the glory days and now I have alimony and child support to pay. How about him?” he nods in the direction of Dieter. “You get half his ass in court?”

You shake your head. His candor, although surprising, is refreshing. “No, no big payout. We’re amicable.”

He clicks his tongue in awe. “I envy the bastard but I can’t say I didn’t deserve my lot.”

“You haven’t even finished your first drink and you’re already gonna confess your sins?” You raise a curious, teasing eyebrow. He hangs his head and laughs.

“You married an actor. Don’t we all wear our hearts on our sleeves?”

“Mm, not mine,” you shake your head. “It seems he saved his emotions for the silver screen.”

It’s Dustin’s turn to raise his own curious eyebrow.

“How cozy.” You look over your shoulder to see Dieter standing in front of your chair, his fingers reaching out to the back of your chair. He looks…jealous.

“Dustin, this is Dieter,” you introduce them. Dustin sticks his hand out and Dieter plays nice, shaking it with a passing grin.

“Nice to meet you,” Dustin mutters. Dieter nods his head. “Yeah, you too. I was actually coming over here to steal her away for a moment. If she doesn’t mind.” He looks over at you, expectant. There’s a bite to his words you don’t like at all. How fucking rich, you think bitterly, remembering all the times you had to sit by while he shamelessly flirted with half the fucking world.

“She does mind,” you respond. The sharp finality of it makes even Dustin cough awkwardly.

Dieter looks taken aback. “Okay,” he mutters, looking between the two of you. He nods again, as though he’s drawn some conclusion. “Alright.”

You watch as he walks away to the other side of the room. Looking back at Dustin, you give him a rueful grin. “Sorry. And here I was, talking about how amicable we are. Exes of the year.”

He raises his glass. “To us pitiful people and our pitiful crash and burn marriages.”

You clink your glass against his, fighting the urge to cry or kill Dieter. “To us.”

—

The dinner table arrangement is unforgiving for Dieter. He’s sat next to Dustin at the far end of the table, with yet another red headed actress to his left. Unlike the talkative one, this one is in a state of brooding and continually huffing at everything he says. You’re slightly more lucky, sat at the other end, sandwiched between Dustin's ex-wife and the director.

He watches woefully as you chat with the ex-wife, nodding your head along politely. You were always such a good listener, even with the worst people. He frowns. He had changed his outfit between the party and the dinner, opting for a classier open dress shirt. He had seen the look in your eye when you had opened the door for him earlier, and figured he could use all the help he could get now that he’s undoubtedly pissed you off. He had hoped that they would’ve sat him next to you so you could talk. He’s even wearing that cologne you like. Or used to like. He doesn’t know anymore.

“So, like what—you usually get along with her or…?” Dustin asks him, following his eyeline right to you. Dustin brings the cool champagne they’ve served to his lips, his eyes too burningly curious as he gazes at you.

Dieter tries not to be possessive. He saw it in your eyes, heard it in your tone: that sharp, angry disappointment that you’re so used to delivering him. You don’t like when he gets like that. Not that he has much. This is a relatively new side effect he’s required since the divorce. He shrugs lazily, pushing the sunglasses up his nose. “I don’t kiss and tell.”

This earns him an even laugh. He looks over at the older man, frowning. “What?”

“I see magazines with your face all over it, man. C’mon, we all kiss and tell, even if we don’t want to.”

Dieter bites at the side of his cheek and considers him for a moment. “Look you and your wife-“

“Ex-wife-“

Dieter nods, uncaring. “Sure, your ex wife — you both like to talk a lot.”

“I’m just trying to figure out if I can make a pass at her or not. Make it easy for me. I don’t want to have to suffer this entire shoot because you’ve got some weird shitty thing going on between you. I don’t step on kept grounds….Well, not anymore,” he adds.

“How noble,” Dieter says wryly, “She’s not mine to answer for. Besides, it seems like you were already doing a good job at making a pass earlier.”

He fights down the petulant child inside of him, biting at his lip instead of wearing an all out pout. Through the concealed tint of his sunglasses, his eyes soften at the sight of you across the room. He can almost feel the crack in his heart as he considers the fact that you might have actually liked talking to this man.

Dieter knows one day it’ll come, the moment when you find yourself in a serious relationship with someone else. Most of the time he thinks he’ll be okay — that it will affect him like it must but it won’t ruin him entirely — but sometimes, like right now, he worries he’ll get on his knees and beg you not to do it. You don’t deserve that. He hates himself for the greed he feels, how he can’t ever just let you be happy. He doesn’t want to be like this dick, taking and taking from his ex-wife, all while he noses around and wets his dick in anything that will let him. He never wants to embarrass you like that. Not again. Never again.

Chugging the last bits of his drink, Dieter looks over at the man. Dustin looks back at him, nonplussed. It takes herculean strength to say the next words.

“She doesn’t like men who are crude or too direct, but to be frank, I think you can’t really fuck up with her. She likes you and always has.” Dieter casts a glance in your direction again, feeling mischievous. He smirks, letting himself have this one. “Well, since you were last relevant, that is.”

Dustin laughs the burn off, shaking his head. He touches Dieter’s shoulder in a show of faux friendliness. “We’re in the same shitty franchise now, bud, so welcome to the club,” he whispers, just low enough for him to hear.

Dieter raises his empty glass to Dustin with a forced grin. Feeling defeated but comforted by the fact that he’s now got something to separate him from that asshole, he raises his hand to the pretty waitress for another drink. To celebrate.

But he truthfully doubts there will be much to celebrate.

He fucking hates Hollywood.

—-

Truth be told, Dieter didn’t plan on doing this tonight. Getting high. He planned, if he was being honest with himself - and he is trying, at his most introspective more now than ever - to be doing you. Had he invited you on the vacation just to fuck you? No, but ignobility inevitably follows in the tracks of his nobility. It was written between the lines, something you both had hinted at over the past two weeks. But now you’re somewhere else. There's a lot of rooms in this hotel. Maybe you’re in your own. Maybe not. Dustin had looked like he was going to devour you at the bar earlier tonight, so probably, you’re doing him in his room.

Or do you bring men back to your own place now? He doesn’t know.

Dieter would blanch if he wasn’t so high. He sits in the middle of the decorative couch, staring at the ceiling with glazed eyes, and he tries to imagine a different version of your last phone conversation.

When you asked if he ever thought of you when he touched himself, he’d tell you the truth. Because you like the truth. He’d say: all the time. More than he should. Really a sickening, depressing amount because he misses you, especially lately. New York is a terrible place to be these days; death permeates everything and nothing seems as right as it used to. Even loneliness feels worse, no longer poetic or artistic but just lonely. It's less like Al Pacino on the set of the Godfather and more like Michael Corleone, sitting alone at the empty dining room table. Days stretch on and on, and he’s hungry for life that has halted so he paints terribly, insecure of even hobbies. What else is he supposed to do but play with himself and remember poignantly that he had once been married to a lovely sort of woman who would’ve made it all better, if only he hadn’t fucked it up?

Well, he doesn’t think about that last part so much. It doesn’t really make for good masturbating material.

He wasn’t sure he was going to survive the pandemic before they asked him to do this movie. And of course he asked you along when they had. It’s the only way in the world he could ask for your help: through omission of truths and beating around the bush. He wonders if you might take pity on his soul again and let him crash with you for a while, just to wait the rest of this out together after the movie wraps. If you really are fucking Dustin, it might make things tense but not impossible. He’ll learn to live with it. He’ll have to. What else is he going to do? Go back to this moment in time and stop you?

Perversely he wonders if Dustin is not the first man you’ve fucked since the divorce. You’re not his last but he wishes you were a lot. It’s been nearly two years and he’s forgotten what you feel like, what you taste like. It’s miserable. When he touches himself and thinks of you, you’re like an apparition, some Franksteinian woman built of fragmented, hazy memories. All he remembers was that the last time wasn’t nice and that you didn’t cum. He couldn’t make you, something about you being too sad or too angry. It was a shame, because he’d always imagined the two of you would’ve gone out with a bang.

This thought makes him smile, but it doesn’t last for long. There's nothing funny about your divorce, not really. He broke your heart tediously, and now you’ve got to tell people that it wasn’t just one thing but many things. He knows that. An unanswered phone call. That waitress in Vegas who he flirted with so unabashedly your mother thought he was cheating on you - along with half the internet and for a brief moment, yourself too. The apartment in New York he bought and moved into without asking you. That art house opening he missed, the one you’d asked him continually throughout the week to set time aside for. So many things—the seven sins and just a few more to top it off.

He wasn’t really surprised when you had asked him for a divorce over lunch one day. You didn’t even live together at the time - the New York apartment became more permanent than he had originally planned for - and you looked so tired, like you were drained of life, overwrought and quiet. What surprised him was the fact that you hadn’t done it sooner. The knowing that you had tried against hope was not an easy one for him to reconcile with for a long time after that. Even in that moment you had developed a sort of halting lisp as you pushed the statement out, as though your own body protested it. He remembers that better than the sex.

You had waited for him to get better and he never did, so you both took your chicken salads with a side of failed marriage that day, and now here you are. Dieter sighs, feeling the familiar pangs of remorse.

“Whatever drugs you’re on must not be very good because you look miserable.”

Dieter lifts his head off the back of the loveseat, straining his eyes to make out the shape that’s hovering in his doorway. His brain catches up with him before his eyes do, and the distinct mumbling voice of the figure comes to him. Dustin.

Shaking his head, Dieter laughs, relieved. “I was thinking.”

Dustin takes this as an invitation to cross the corridor. As he comes closer, Dieter finds he’s in more casual clothes - perhaps even sleepwear - clutching a bottle of wine in his hand. If this is a peace offering, Dieter will take the olive branch. He’s so goddamn pleased you’re not fucking this guy, he might even kiss him.

“You want a joint?” he asks him, straightening on the couch. Suddenly it’s not so hard to be magnanimous, not with the sheer euphoria of you not having betrayed him (is he allowed to call it that? Probably not, but there’s no word quite so apt). He feels he might even be smiling, but he can’t be sure. He hopes so.

“God, please,” Dustin groans. He sits the bottle of wine on the table and rubs his hands together eagerly as Dieter lights the one he’s been puffing away at.

“I figured you were the one with the goods,” Dustin says around a cloud of smoke. He looks over at the open door, nodding at it. “We should close that, huh?”

Dieter shrugs. He thought he had closed the door, truthfully. “Probably should. I think I saw a kid here,” he says. Neither of them get up.

Dustin passes the joint to Dieter. He takes another hit when he gets it because fuck it, this is a celebration. “What, she didn’t want you?” he can’t help but ask.

Dustin laughs mutedly. “I don’t know. I figured by the way you reacted at dinner that I better not try. And there's that thing with my wife.” He shrugs. “I’m always fucking that one up. I thought I should just wander around and see where the night takes me.”

Dieter rests his head back against the couch again, nodding sympathetically. “Mm, I understand. Me too.”

“What’d you do?”

“The better question would be what didn’t I do.”

“Did you cheat?”

Dieter turns his head. “I don’t know. I didn’t fuck anyone else while we were together but she said I might as well as have. And I guess she’s whose opinion really matters, isn’t it?”

Dustin mumbles an agreement. “I fucked a lot of people,” he confesses. “Even the divorce lawyer.”

“And she still talks to you?” Dieter asks.

“We’ve got a kid.”

“That’s right. She told me that, because she likes to talk.”

“Hey don’t be a dick. Yours does too, you know? That’s what women like to do—talk. And they like to be listened to.”

Dieter narrows his eyes. “Is that what you were doing at the bar? Talking?”

Dustin nods. “Yeah. Listening, too.”

“I listened.”

“But you didn’t like what you heard.”

Dustin says this more as a statement than a question. Dieter looks back to the ceiling and pinches his eyes closed, too high. “Mm,” he mumbles. “I’m just so happy she isn’t fucking you right now. I really thought she would be there for a second and it was making me sick.”

Dustin huffs out a laugh. “I take it you never shared?”

“What do you mean ‘shared’?” Dieter asks. “Like wife swapping? No. We seemed to have left the practice in the sixties.”

“Not necessarily. Threesomes?”

“Have you done that?”

Dustin shrugs, smiling unashamedly. “Before we got married, of course,” he tells Dieter. Then, “And a little after too.”

Even with the high, Dieter can’t help but feel curious about the arrangement. “With men?”

“Sure. It wouldn’t have been fair with just women. That was the rules, anyway. Why? You’ve never been with a man?”

“A few. That’s not what strikes me as odd. You just didn’t strike me as the type.”

“I wouldn’t say I was, but fair is fair. And it can be nice. Interesting.”

Dieter rolls his eyes. “Gay sex is gay sex, no matter how you cut it. If you’re about to tell me it doesn’t count, I’m gonna laugh.”

“I didn’t say it wasn’t. I just like there to be a girl there too.”

The information weighs heavily on Dieter’s drug induced state of mind. He finds himself beginning to laugh. “Wait a minute, are you trying to talk me into a threesome? Is that what this is? Are you trying to seduce me, Mrs. Robinson? That’s what the wine is about, isn’t it?” He points to the bottle in question, and everything suddenly seems much too funny.

Dustin begins laughing too. “No! The wine was for something. I just couldn’t figure out what”

Dieter ignores him. “Your…your wife hates me,” he manages to hiccup out, “And mine? She—“ She hates me too. This thought makes the laughing come to a slow halt. That’s right. She hates him too.

“I bet she’d do it,” Dustin supplies, soft chuckles still emitting from him. “They can surprise you like that sometimes.”

Dieter shakes his head, his smile more soft, almost sad. “Not with me. I pissed her off. I was thinking I’d try with that waitress downstairs but she’s young and I’ll for sure hate myself for that later.”

“Don’t do that. Your wife really will hate you for that,” Dustin advises. “Take it from an expert. Just call her. Apologize.”

Dieter shakes his head. “That won’t work. It’ll just make her more mad when she realizes I’m high.”

Dustin considers this. “Maybe. I don’t know. Let’s go to her room. Do it in person.”

“You can’t go,” Dieter tells him evenly. It’s not often he’s the voice of reason — even less so when he’s high — and this dynamic is beginning to make him feel out of sorts. He wants to shut his eyes and sleep this off, but naturally — because he is who he is — he will follow this train of thought through with Dustin.

“Why not?” Dustin smiles widely, catching his stride in the conversation. He speaks more animatedly, bringing his hands into the mix for emphasis. “She doesn’t want to fight with you in front of me! And she can see we’ve made friends. That’s progress! She’ll like that.”

Dieter considers this. He does want to show you he’s sorry — really.

“You just want to fuck her,” he says to Dustin. He’s too high to be angry, even if he really wanted to be, but he is suspicious.

When Dustin doesn’t respond to that, Dieter narrows his eyes. “You do!” he accuses, acutely horrified by the idea.

Dustin looks at him, a smile playing across his lips. “C’mon, aren’t you a little curious to see what it’d be like?”

“No. And besides, even if I was, I don’t think she would. She’s not…I don’t know, I don't know how to explain it.” Dieter pinches up his face, stuck for the right words. “She’s not a prude by any means, but I don’t think she would.”

“Would you? If she did?”

Dieter doesn’t consider the question, only beats around it. “She wouldn’t. I know her.”

He watches as Dustin rises from the couch. “Let’s just go ask her.”

Dieter jumps up, feeling sobriety sneak up on him. ��No!” he says, horrified.

But Dustin has snatched up his bottle of wine and began to make his way out into the corridor before Dieter can stop him.

So crumbles the olive branch.

—-

When you see Dustin standing at your door, holding up a bottle of wine with a goofy grin, you think it's a sign from the Heavens above. No more Dieter, that’s what it tells you. He’s ruined your life for a decade now and it’s a cause you’ve got to accept is a lost one. A new man is here and you’re lonely, and you didn’t even have to go search this one out. You smile, open the door a little wider.

But then you see Dieter shuffling down the corridor, brown eyes blown wide. Dustin looks over at him with a grin and you realize with a sinking feeling that this wasn’t what you imagined it was. You don’t know what it is, to be exact, but you’re sure it’s not right.

They look up to no good, with glazed eyes and Dustin’s too wide grin. You close your door just a smidge when Dieter shoulders to the front. He smiles apologetically, and you instinctively hold out a hand to keep him steady. But he’s steady, in no risk of tumbling forward. He puts his hands over yours before you quickly take it away. He looks stung but you don’t care.

“Hey kid,” he says sheepishly. His eyes seem to be asking you something - saying something - but you’ve long lost that way of communicating. You frown, slumping against the doorway.

“Make friends?” you ask, nodding back to Dustin.

Dustin nods his head, unaware or — more likely — too high to be aware. “He’s being a good boy,” he vouches.

“I’ve been good,” Dieter echoes. He tries another grin and that easy charm of his, but none of it works. You fold your arms over your chest.

“Listen, I’m a little tired and—“

“I’m sorry. I know what I did earlier was shitty. I don’t know why I do things like that. Don’t shut me out. Please.” Dieter pouts. The sincerity of his words punches you in the gut, and makes you angrier somehow. Like it’s mocking, even though you know it’s not. He seems to sense this and he continues talking. “I know I don’t own you like that. I had no right. None at all. And I’ve been meaning to say it to you all night. And I know you’re thinking ‘this prick is high.’ I am. I’m really high, and I can’t deny it, but I’m sorry too. I was sorry even before I got high. That’s why I got high.”

Dustin giggles behind Dieter. You look over, feeling pangs of annoyance for him too. Now that he’s not your knight in shining armor he’s just some asshole in kahoots with this asshole. “That’s terrible,” he huffs out. Dieter glares at him over his shoulder before you’ve got the chance.

“I’m sorry,” Dieter tells you again, pleadingly. You shake your head.

“You’re always sorry. That was always the problem.”

“I know! God, I know.”

“Ask her if she wants some weed,” Dustin whispers.

“And I suppose you smuggled that in?” you ask, straightening yourself up. You feel motherly, glowering at him like this. You want to wring his neck. This wasn’t supposed to happen. He was supposed fuck you, make you feel eternal and sexy. But no. Now you’re so matronly, standing there in your PJs, frowning so hard wrinkles are mapping their permanent home in the places your face creases.

He nods guiltily. “But you knew that! I’ve talked about it all week.”

“Yeah but—“ you wave your hands in the air. “It all adds up with you. It’s..”

“The little things,” he finishes sadly. “I know.”

“Why do you know so little if you know so much?”

Dustin coughs suggestively behind Dieter and Dieter turns around swiftly. “No,” he tells him sharply.

You furrow your eyebrows. “No, what?”

Dieter shakes his head dismissively and Dustin shrugs, looking around aimlessly. He’s trying hard to contain a laugh or a grin, you can tell. You hate that Dieter is making you a bitch in front of him. You could be fucking him for God’s sake, but you’re just annoyed.

“Go to bed,” you tell them.

“Well that’s the idea,” Dustin counters, his lips drawing upwards. Dieter looks pallid.

“It wasn’t,” he tells you. “I swear. I came here to stop him from asking!”

“Asking what?” you say, exasperated.

“For a threesome,” Dustin says simply, like it’s nothing at all. “Though I can see now that’s probably not in the cards. And it wasn’t really asking for one, just a hypothetical.”

You look over to Dieter. He looks down at the floor, like a kid in trouble. “Dieter,” you scold.

He shakes his head. “I didn’t want him to ask. I told him—I said you wouldn’t. I didn’t even want to suggest it,” he mumbles helplessly. “That’s not what this was supposed to be at all, kid. I swear. I just wanted to say sorry and…I don’t know.”

You don’t know whether to believe him or not. “But you talked about it?”

“Hm?” Dieter raises an eyebrow.

“The threesome? You were talking about having one?”

“Yeah, but not like—it wasn’t locker room talk. Not really. He just started talking about it and asked if you would and I said no—“

“How do you know I would say no?” you huff. “You don’t know. You don’t know me.”

Dieter frowns. “That’s not true.”

“Yeah it is,” you nod. “I’m different now. I’m not the woman you dragged around all those years.”

“I never thought of you like that.”

“Well, still, yes,” you say, feeling angry and stung and in a desperate need to prove him wrong and spite him all in one go. It’s such an ugly feeling and it’s not right, but you can tell the words take him by surprise.

“Yes?…” he asks. “Listen, I get that you’re angry, but you don’t have to do this.”

“No I want to,” you say. “If that’s what you want, what he wants, I want it too. If that’s what you’ve come for, then you’ll get it.”

He shakes his head. “You’re angry and you’re not thinking straight. You’re…being mean. And you’re only going to piss yourself off more, I think, and then you’re going to be mad at me because I drove you to it.”

You shake your head. “No. I think I’m being quite nice. I’m standing here telling you I want you to fuck me. I want him to watch. I want him to fuck me and you to watch. Whatever perverse things you cooked up together, let’s do them. If you’re going to make me mad, then I’m asking that you have the decency to fuck me too.”

Dieter struggles to compute the information. You do too. You hate him. You love him. You are so high strung and pissed and you’d do anything to be touched. Let him prove himself, goddamnit, or let him be damned jealous. Either way, you get fucked. Everyone's a winner or only you are. You don’t give a shit.

Dustin seems altogether pleased by this, clapping a hand onto Dieter’s shoulder. “I told him you might surprise him.”

“Mm hm,” you hum. You do not break eye contact with Dieter. He nods his head, resolving to trust you—or to go along with it. It doesn’t matter, just so long as he doesn’t question it.

When he steps forward, you put your hand up, blocking him. “First the weed.”

He lets out a soft sigh and stays put for a second, looking as though he wants to say something more. He’s wise enough not to in the end.

As he rounds the corner, heading back to his room, you finally glance back up at Dustin. He smiles softly. “You don’t have to do this,” he tells you. “I really was just to get some fire under his ass. I mean, I’m not against it, but if you’re just doing it because you’re pissed—“

You cut him off with a hard look. “I want to,” you say resolutely. “And I am pissed. So be it. Men start wars for less.” You shrug. He looks amused and you feel something arise in you, up alongside the anger — arousal. Desire. Something. He smiles handsomely. The grayish scruff on his cheeks bodes well with his aged features.

You do want to fuck him. That’s freeing information. Propping the door open wider with the kick of your foot, you nod him in. “C’mon. Get in here before I change my mind.”

The dichotomy between his laughter and the intensity of the fight you just had with Dieter makes you smile despite yourself.

“Wouldn’t want that,” he responds with a wink.

He brushes past you with his body and you fight the urge to suck in a shallow breath at the sudden casual contact. As he moves into the room, he pulls you away from the door with him, gripping at your shoulders. He doesn’t let you stay back and wait for Dieter like some lost puppy.

You look at him, eyes wide, and he hands you the wine in his hand. He is so unserious that it’d be plain endearing if it hadn’t been a source of annoyance a moment before. You watch as he wets his lips and looks down at yours. There seems to be a pregnant pause, eyes searching yours for an answer to an invisible question. You think of Dieter, of all the sex you’ve not had since the divorce, and how hurt he seemed when you pulled back from his touch. You love him so much. It isn’t fair. You will love him your whole life if you don’t stop this. You heed your mother’s warning too late and you kiss Dustin hard on the mouth. He takes some of your grief with a practiced tongue, kissing you deeply until you’re interrupted by a cough in the corner a few blurry moments later.

Dustin smiles, holding your face between his hands. “The weed,” he remarks. Dieter nods. He looks a little hurt, a little angry, a little betrayed—looks like he’s always made you feel, and you are not surprised it doesn’t make you feel any better.

You love him. You fool.

You shake Dustin off and Dieter hands you the joint with a forced grin. “It’s strong,” he warns softly as he lights the end. As you inhale, Dustin comes to stand behind you. Dieter’s eyes watch as his arms snake around you. He plants wet kisses alongside your neck and Dieter worries his bottom lip between his teeth.

Dieter reaches out to you, touches the wrist you’ve risen to put the joint in your mouth. His calloused fingers try to reach across burned bridges and you aid him, handing the joint back and reaching out to him too. His baggy sleep shirt is easy to take between your fingers. He takes a hit and then comes closer to you, pressing into you.

When he kisses you for the first time, you think of an ouroboros. Whole and eternal, destruction and rebirth. Your mother hates him when she once loved him. He knows your birthday and the way you like your coffee in the morning. You don’t know what he did yesterday. He doesn’t know your friend’s old cat died and that you’d been to two weddings before COVID hit. He tastes familiar and feels strange against you, unreal and vivid. You open your mouth and he slides in his tongue. The kiss isn’t like the one with Dustin; he does not explore you as much as he remembers you.

Dustin and Dieter pass the joint between them. When you feel the loss of warmth behind you, you turn curiously, detaching from Dieter’s lips. Dustin goes to abandon the joint on the table by the bed and Dieter’s hot mouth presses kisses alongside your neck. You wrap your fingers in his hair and you can't help but moan when he tongues alongside your jaw. Dustin’s eyes spark with delight at the sound.

You look down at the wine bottle still in your hand and hold it up. Dustin takes it from you, grinning. “I forgot to tell you it was my gift. I’ll open it. It’s good, aged to perfection,” he comments.

He searches your bedside for a glass and finds a crystal one beside the water vase that they gave you earlier that week. He looks down at the bottle in his hand and frowns. “Fuck, I forgot the wine opener.”

“Call the desk,” Dieter says against your skin.

You turn your head back and begin kissing him again, humming an agreement against his lips. Dustin shuffles behind you as you return completely to Dieter, your lips ghosting over his. He licks into your mouth and grasps at the back of your neck, keeping you attached to him as you begin the dance backwards to the bed.

The weed gives you a cloudy feeling, enhancing the warmth of his fingers and lips on your skin, but erasing any inhibition that would make you embarrassed to be doing it in front of another man. You like the idea of it, actually, that there’s some stranger - albeit a familiar one - standing somewhere in the room as Dieter’s fingers lift up your sleep shirt and dip beneath the hem of your underwear. Your ass presses against the edge of the bed and you feel his erection against your thigh. You moan carelessly, tugging at his hair, and he exhales into you, the line between pleasure and pain thin and delicate as he rushes to do what he’s afraid Dustin will get to first if he doesn’t.

Dustin hangs up the phone and looks at the two of you on the bed, a surge of desire filling him as he watches. You’ve got your legs open and Dieter’s got his hands down your underwear and he can see it all from this angle. You’re making delicious, breathy moans and Dieter’s arm muscles flex as he works them out of you. There’s a wet spot on your underwear and he wants nothing more than for Dieter to take them off so he can see more of you.

He watches a while longer, captivated by what makes you tick and what kind of a lover Dieter is. It's kinda like hotel porn that he’s had on repeat the past few days, but live. Before he can get out the request for Dieter to take your underwear off, or wait for the inevitability of it, there’s a knock on the door. He rushes to answer it, holding the door open only enough to take the glasses and the bottle opener. He mumbles a quick thanks before shutting the door on the confused worker.

Dieter enters you with a thick finger and you let out a loud uninhibited moan around his kiss. As Dustin attempts to open the wine he smiles, thinking of the young man who was just outside the door. He likes that you aren’t afraid; he’s always found that attractive in women.

“Here,” he says, pouring the pinkish liquid into three separate glasses. Neither of you look at him, so he repeats it again, this time with more command in his tone. You look so thoroughly kissed when you look up, red lipped and swollen, that it makes him ache, and Dieter’s wild haired annoyance is charming in its own way. He hands you both a glass and you take it with a shy smile. Dieter is less pleased, but takes it anyway with a soft ‘Thanks.’

Dustin watches as Dieter wipes your slick from his fingers with a pang of envy, swallowing down the wine. This isn’t something he’s made a habit of doing often— watching people fuck, threesomes — but he had felt that it wouldn’t have been right to do without Dieter. Truthfully, he had had every intention of going to your room by himself before he had peered into Dieter’s open door. The sight of him sitting there, staring up at the ceiling like he had been doing, inspired sympathy. He hadn’t been entirely truthful about that with Dieter, but what he’s learned over the years about sex is that some little white lies must be told sometimes.

A part of him feels guilty, knowing his own ex-wife lies somewhere in this hotel, probably brewing in her own anger. But he’s leaving her alone. That’s what she asked of him, isn’t it?

“So, any rules?” he asks, abandoning this train of thought before it crashes.

Dieter unwraps himself from you, sitting on the edge of the bed like you are, and shrugs his shoulders. You both look at each other. Dustin feels like an outsider, intruding on something too big and personal, but he doesn’t mind. A bit of self-flagellation mixed in with pleasure was always how he did his sex best, and there’s nothing quite like sleeping with two people very much in love during a pandemic.

“Dieter said you’ve never done this before,” he says, looking at you. “Is that true?”

You nod your head. “What do you mean by ‘rules?’”

“Well, I guess it’s a bit different because no one is with anyone here, but sometimes there will be requests people make to ensure no one gets their feelings hurt. For instance, you might not want me to cum inside of you or enter you at all. They’re for safety too—consent, boundaries.”

“I see.” You look down at your glass of wine, thinking. “I don’t really have any rules. Maybe just use condoms.”

“Are you sure?” Dieter whispers, tugging at your shirt sleeve. He leans in closer, says something Dustin can’t hear. You shake your head. “No, it’s fine. I don’t care if you do that,” you tell him. He seems surprised by your answer.

Dustin can’t help himself. “What’d you ask?”

Dieter shrugs his shoulders. “Just about how she feels about us.”

“Do you have any rules?” he asks.

“Don’t cum in her first.”

You look at Dieter quizzically and all he provides is a shrug that says nothing. Dustin nods his head. “That seems easy enough: condoms, don’t cum first.” He swallows down the rest of his wine and sets the glass aside.

You twirl the liquid around in your own glass, smiling faintly. “I can’t believe I’m gonna do this,” you say.

“Me either,” Dieter replies. He sits his glass, half finished, on the nightstand.

“I’m feeling high,” is your next sentence. Dieter seems to grimace.

“You’re in the wrong state of mind,” he tells you.

You shake your head. “No. I made up my mind before I got high. I want to be fucked,” you tell him, voice plain and even. “If you don’t want to fuck me, I’m sure I’ll be okay with just him.”

Dieter shakes his head adamantly, cheeks beginning to red. “I—I do want to. I always want to. I just want to make sure you’re not doing something you’re going to regret later.”

With a smile, you tell him teasingly, “I won’t regret it later. Not if you do it right.” You offer him a teasing wink that draws out his dimple. He leans forward and presses a chaste kiss on your lips, too romantic and sweet to be good for your soul.

You decide then that this will have to be less Dieter focused if you want to last. “Lay on the bed,” you say to him. He nods his head, prying off his house shoes. You look over to Dustin, who stands awkwardly at the head of the bed. He smiles again with that charming Hollywood grin that age hasn’t dimmed in the slightest, and you grin back. “I want to kiss you again,” you tell him directly.

“That can be arranged,” he says, dipping onto the bed.

Dieter lies back against the heap of pillows at the headboard, his knees spread apart to make a spot for you. Dustin guides you there slowly, his body pressing into yours until there’s nowhere left to go but into Dieter. He kisses you deeply, hands strong and warm and unfamiliar in an entirely exciting way as they bunch up the fabric of your sleep shirt and expand over your skin.

Dieter doesn’t touch you, even though he badly wants to. Part of it is heartbreak and disbelief, and the other part is erotic fascination—watching you come apart like this, at another angle, is undeniably doing something to him. You are so pliable under Dustin, so easy for him, like you’ve waited your entire life to be like this. Maybe you have. Maybe he never paid enough attention—maybe in all your thousand little, subtle ways you had once alluded that you’d like to be this way. Maybe if he hadn’t been such a prick, he could’ve made more rules, one like ‘Don’t enter her at all’ and ‘Don’t kiss him like that because I know once upon a time you kissed me like that and I screwed it up, and I’m sorry. I’m sorry I couldn’t be a better husband. I’ll be a better friend, just don’t kiss him like that.’

But then again maybe not. That’s a mouthful and you’re high and he’s high. Maybe it would be just like this. It’s just that he loves you. It’s an odd kind of love, but it’s real. Dustin has his tongue down your throat, his exploratory fingers beneath the fabric of a sleep shirt, but Dieter loves you. The fool.

Blissfully you are unaware of the pity party Dieter throws for himself behind you. He is a body, a springboard for desire and heat, as you surrender yourself to lust the way you never really have before. You do draw up some comparisons, unable to help yourself.

Dustin is grittier, all command and surrender. He is an electric taste of the illicit, some faraway fantasy made palpable. Dieter is your ground zero, vivid and stormy. He is what yesterday was. You read somewhere once that when you have a child with a man, their genes have the ability to change your own. Though you and Dieter have no children, you feel like something irrevocable like that happened — that you carry a part of him in your genetic makeup. It doesn’t make Dustin worse for it. In fact, it makes him better, an exotic vaccine into your very tired bloodstream. You deserve it. You deserve it so much, and you practically beg for it, mewling as Dustin kisses his way down.

“I bet you taste like heaven,” he mumbles warmly into your skin, licking a teasing strip over your midriff. You watch, mouth agape, heart beating wildly in your chest. Dieter tilts your chin up, directing your attention towards him, feeling impossibly greedy now. He kisses you languidly, tonguing lolling gently against yours, making it lasts forever. Your mind is in a haze, the slow, sensual turn of your tongues lighting a fire in your belly as Dustin uses his own on you. He trails lower and lower, warm and wet, fingers drawing down your underwear and then—

“Fuck,” you say, gasping out the word. You surprise yourself. Dieter captures the word in his mouth and groans in soft appreciation. You glance down your body, your knees hanging loosely over Dustin’s shoulders, watching his warm tongue pressing against your clit. It’s a sight to behold, the way his pink tongue flattens over you. His large hands grip onto your legs, holding you apart as your back presses into Dieter’s front. You feel his semi-erection nudge into your back.

Dustin spends his time with you, teasing you lightly with his tongue at first, learning the careful intricacies of your body. As you run your hands through his unruly bed hair, the tip of his tongue dips into your opening experimentally. He looks up to you, blue-green eyes searching for approval. You buck against his face, desperate, full of want and drugs and something indescribable but undeniably exciting. Ambition. Want. Joy. You used to masturbate to this man. His nose grazes against your clit and he laughs as you struggle. It is warm and bubbly, and you feel it all the way down to your bones.

You tug his hair so hard that he sends another noise vibrating through you: a low, half pained, half aroused groan.

Dustin brings his mouth back to your clit, grazes it gently with his teeth. “Oh,” you say, your head drawing backward, falling into Dieter’s shoulder. He watches you, his dark eyes fixed. He presses his lips onto yours like time hasn’t changed anything. You bask in it, give yourself over to the fantasy with the ease he’s offering it—you kiss like lovers, familiar and intimate, an unformidable duo in sex where you weren’t in marriage.

Dieter doesn’t leave your lips as he says, “I never got to see this sort of thing from this point of view. You’re so goddamn pretty.”

His hands tease up your sides, fingers drawing closer to your chest. “Is he making you soaked? Just like I used to?” he asks, his voice a low drawl. You arch up, bringing your lips up to his. He slots his mouth over yours, pressing into you roughly as his fingers find a pebbled nipple through the cloth of your night shirt. As he scraps over the top of it with the pad of his thumb, you draw your eyes closed. The heady scent of Dieter surrounding you mixed with the intoxicating feel of Dustin pressed against your cunt is almost too much to bear. Almost. You moan against Dieter’s lips again as Dustin’s tongue works you, and Dieter smiles, nodding. “Oh baby, he’s gonna be like me. A pitiful, helpless fool for you. Aren’t you?” he says, looking down the valley of your body to the other man.

Dustin grunts wordlessly against you and your hips fail you again, pressing up into the vibration. Sensing this isn’t the end of lack of control, Dustin presses a hand against them, pinning you down. As he licks you open, spreads your folds with the warmth of his eager tongue, you feel on fire, the sensation reaching every part of your body. He’s good at that. He’s lapping and lapping, his strong nose meeting your clit at just the right time each time he comes up.

“He’s so fucking good,” you say helplessly, uncaring of who hears. The drugs make you uninhibited, looser. You meet Dustin’s eyes as he takes your clit into his mouth again. He is sucking lightly and you try to roll your hips into him, but he presses down, a silent no. “Fuck, you’re so—good at that. Oh my god.”

Dieter pinches your nipple between his fingers, humming softly at the sight before him. “You’re gonna make me jealous, baby.”

Dustin’s mouth grows more focused, intent. You feel your orgasm drawing up, coming closer and closer. You open your eyes, blown wide with desire, and focus on Dieter. He kisses you softly again, bringing his hand up to your other breast. Dustin sucks your clit into his mouth, his fingers digging into your soft flesh, and your hardened nipple scraps against the warmth of Dieter’s palm. It's all so right. You cum then, toes curling into the sheets, body going rigid beneath the touch of them both. Dustin doesn’t stop; he laps up your want greedily and Dieter draws up his head to watch. His eyes darken, full of desire and what you assume is a begrudging respect.

After you’ve ridden out your orgasm on Dustin, Dieter huffs out a soft laugh. “He wants to fuck you,” he tells you, thumb swiping affectionately across your cheek. Dustin, unable to let that one go, presses a kiss to your inner thigh and muffles a laugh against your skin.

“Bravo, you’re so jealous it’s making you stupid. She knows that,” he says, nuzzling his face against your inner thigh. “Of course she knows that.”

“M’not jealous,” Dieter denies evenly. When he looks down at you, brown eyes too kind, you half believe him.

You break the eye contact and smile appreciatively down at the man between your legs. A finger you’d locked in his hair now swipes across the bottom of his shiny lips. He takes it into his mouth, wetting the pad, and you say, “You aren’t a very good team. I think it’s important to be a good team.”

Dieter places a hand on your arm, more of a phantom touch than a grip, but you know it’s a stroke of possessiveness. You glance back up at him, cupping his cheek in your palm. “Dieter likes men,” you tell Dustin, not looking away from Dieter. “He’s not playing nice now and I think it’s a shame because I bet you taste just like me right now. And I know—“ your gaze drops down to Dustin, your voice velvet “—how much this dearest ex-husband of mine likes the taste of me. Have you ever kissed another man, Dustin?”

Dustin bites at your bait, smirk growing wide as his body stalking up yours. “Of course. I looked like a God in the ‘90s. Everyone wanted me and I wanted everyone,” he jokes, his warm hands flattening against your torso. His legs rest behind your thighs as he sits upwards, and you can see the tent of his erection against his sleep shorts. The black of them does little to conceal the full outline, and you thrill at the idea that he’s probably not wearing any underwear beneath the fabric.

You’re not one for getting starstruck - not anymore, anyway, a Los Angeles resident for years and the ex-wife of a star - but the fact that you used to masturbate to this man in front of you is something you still can’t shake. It occupies your mind, the way you had rewinded scenes from his raunchy, made for tv erotica over and over. Even now, many years later, you can still picture it: his younger frame pressed behind a blond woman, fucking into her in haste, his hands all over her and his thrusts rough. It was incredible to you back then, placed in some seedy location like an alley. Public and animalistic—the stuff of paperback romance novels. You remember the way he tugged her shirt upwards, how in the heat of the moment he grasped at any part of her he could get. A black bra and a long skirt, the bra pushed askew, going higher and higher with each thrust, and the skirt gripped onto, used for leverage as he pushed into her from behind. The VHS that hosted the scene had been passed from friend to friend in your college days, until someone’s VCR had eaten it. You feel a bit excited to know you’ve got the real thing right here. You think about telling him.

But it’s not about you, not now; it’s about Dieter. You widen your legs, make room for the ‘90s heart throb to slip between your body and come closer to the man you’ve dedicated your life to. In this moment you can admit as much. Dieter’s got his cock pressed against your back, and you know he would do anything - anything - for you if you’d just ask. His love burns like a million suns and you’ll be Icarus in every lifetime. You fool. Kiss another man hard and seek penance in his presence behind you.

Dieter stiffens as Dustin presses closer and closer to him. You shift to accommodate them, moving your body up, guiding Dieter along. He holds you close like a shield but doesn’t protest when Dustin’s lips press into his.

Dustin tastes of earthy vineyards and you—like sweetened strawberry wine and the familiar palette of tangy and acidic that’s blessed Dieter’s tongue many times over. That’s it, he thinks with a smile against Dustin’s generous lips. That’s how you taste. He savors it like a wine connoisseur does his wine, running it over his tongue and thinking too long about how to describe it. It is so utterly you, it makes him yearn for another life.

He plunges his tongue so deeply into Dustin’s mouth, it threatens to gag them both. But it doesn’t. They’ve both got their party tricks, after all. Dieter’s kiss grows hungry and suddenly there’s no space between any of you. You are a perfectly molded puzzle, fingers on skin, in hair, tongues swiping against lips and chests, and there are deep guttural moans exposing what the erections do well to show.

You know Dieter wants this, can feel his evident excitement press into your back. You happily welcome the warmth of Dustin’s firm body pressing impossibly close to yours. Dieter wets his bottom lip and squeezes you reassuringly, a habit from other life slipping into this new one.

You alternate kissing one another, creating a new taste on your warm, eager tongues. It is perfect. Dustin’s hands gingerly fumble over your chest, not focused or intent but curious, and Dieter’s allow it. The possessiveness has translated into something entirely more agreeable, and these men work together like lovers.

Your fingers grip at Dustin’s muscular shoulders, trail lower and lower over the slope of his chest down to the dip above his shorts. The path is slow and arduous to your lust riddled brain. He grunts against your collarbone, his hot breath fanning over you, and you go lower still, taking the shorts with you.

Dieter’s eyes trail the same place yours do, his chin tucked into your neck; you share the same view of Dustin: the red weeping head of his cock as it bops against his toned stomach, eager to be touched and licked and surrounded. Dustin sighs hotly against you as you press against him - against it - and Dieter swipes his tongue behind your ear. It is heaven, the way Dieter and Dustin feel against you, combined like this. You want them both. You need them.

You wrap your hands in Dieter’s curls, let him support your body as it rubs frantically over Dustin’s. Dieter peppers kisses alongside your neck and whispers, “God, you’re so fucking hot. God, I was so fucking lucky—“

The rest of it is lost against the shell of your earlobe. Some things - even the kindest, most genuine things - are better left unsaid.

Dustin emits soft, urgent moans as his cock catches between your bodies. The tempo of your shared thrusts grows quick, more focused, and he is close, on the very brink of letting go. You knit your brows, watch curiously and excitedly as he draws closer. You think of it: A hot spurt, just for you. Dieter holds up your sleep shirt, seeming to expect the same.

But then Dustin stops, his thick fingers rough and tight against your skin as he stills your movements. In the morning you’ll be bruised, a thought that thrills you. “Not yet,” is what he says in explanation, leaning his forehead against yours.

Dieter laughs softly, some terrible joke about bad endurance dying before it rises to be heard. He’s on his best behavior. Dustin tastes of you, of him, and you’re all naked and you’re so happy, so pliant. You lean against him like he’s someone you can lean on, and he swallows the serenity of that thought silently. Dieter is a half guilt, a perpetual bleeding heart, and you are his salvation. He knows it doesn’t work like that, can’t, but sex is not about what is real and logical. That’s why you were always so fucking good at it; it was beyond the both of you, and somehow a language you spoke best together.

He should feel worse about Dustin. Perhaps it’s because you want it so bad, or maybe it’s because he’s so horny, but the inclusion of him feels less intrusive than before. This is not your marriage bed - it’s been lost to the cruel seas of time - but it feels like a union, and Dustin plays a curious part. Not the voyeuristic onlooker, but the active participant, his glistening cock hot and heavy against your beautiful stomach. It should make Dieter sick. It did, thirty minutes ago. But now it makes him hard, wets his mouth. The bastard is good looking.

What can he say - you have always had good taste.

You turn your head and lick into Dieter’s mouth, redirecting your attention. He turns you between their bodies, pressing you into him as he kisses you feverishly. Dustin assists him, holding you against his body like Dieter had been doing before, only upwards. Dieter draws back and lifts the cotton sleep shirt over your head. He takes advantage like Dustin hadn’t been smart enough to, wetting your nipple with his warm mouth and tweaking the other between his fingers. You squirm, pressing your hot cunt against his stomach. He feels too clothed suddenly, having been denied contact because layers. You help him take off his shirt and Dustin helps you take off his pants. You waste no time wrapping your hot hand around him and tugging loosely.

His mouth finds your nipple again and you wrap your fingers into his unruly hair, jerking him off slowly as he kisses and sucks at your bare chest. He knows you’re already dripping, seen it on Dustin’s glossy lips when he got done with you, but this is his body remembering you and he can't stop. He remembers the way you got when he licked at you like you were the last scraps of his final meal on earth. How desperate and needy you became, just as desperate and needy as him. His hand travels down your stomach, straight down to your cunt, and he palms the wet heat of you into his hand. Dieter relishes the way you gasp into his mouth as the heel of his hand finds your clit, a smirk on his lips and a sentence like, “That’s it, baby,” coming out against you.

He fingers your entrance teasingly and finds you devastatingly wet. This is heaven, he thinks, the wet stickiness of you on the pad of his finger and your hot breath on his lips. You dig your nails into his shoulder, shut your eyes against the sensation of one of his fingers entering you. Dieter is ground zero. In your Garden of Eden, Dieter was there, at once Adam and the serpent. This is the apple. How delicious it is to be fucked, how perfectly human. Of course they’d turn on God for this. Cover up with leaves and be terrified of the whole earth later. Bleed and cry. Divorce. Whatever. This is worth turning back on perfection for. Poor Eve. Poor you.

You rub yourself against his hand and Dustin takes one of your breasts into his hand, watching. Dieter is so focused on the squelch of your juices and the way his finger - fingers now, two, and you stretch so perfectly for him - enters you that he doesn’t even mind. You’re no pissing contest, he sees that now—you're the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen. He swallows your moans and tries his best not to cum. Your grasp on his cock is so loose and it’d be so embarrassing to cum on your stomach when the tugs are nothing, and besides this is about you. So he focuses on trying not to.

“Condom,” you mutter, your lips landing on the side of Dieter’s mouth. Dieter nods his head but doesn’t pull back from you. He watches, enchanted, as your hips move against his hand. He can feel your orgasm build in the way you clench around his fingers, the penultimate pressure too much to bear. When you come, its with a shudder, your body tight and rigid above his as you ride it out. Dieter is so high and so in love with you, and he’s so sick about it that all he can do is laugh earnestly, even though what he wants is to ask you to marry him again.

Dustin is touching you all over with his hands, palming your perfect breasts, and you’re arching farther and farther back. Dieter can hardly bear the sight—not because of the jealousy—but because he’s deathly afraid this is it for him. You’re the best thing he’s ever had, and he knows he can’t think that way. You had a good run—you’re great friends now—but God, you married him in Vegas and you used to sketch his nose with careful affection onto canvases you kept for yourself. Who’s gonna sit in your studio now? Who’s gonna take up space in your heart, make you smile over the canvas as you work? He would weep if you didn’t look so pretty and sated, leaning into Dustin the way you are.

He kisses you hard on the mouth just to get rid of the thoughts, and then he kisses Dustin too, grabbing roughly at the back of his hair the way he hasn’t ever with you. It’s not kind, but Dustin doesn’t seem to mind; he moans gruffly, absorbing nothing but the desire behind it.

Your hands explore Dieter’s exposed skin as they kiss, warm and gentle, unconsciously fingering the scar he got as a child. You know the map of this body. When his hard cock bops against his stomach you take it in your hand again. Before he has time to think, you put him in your mouth.

“Fuck,” he mumbles against Dustin’s lips. They stop kissing, looking between them at the sight of you. Dustin is so considerate, so much better than Dieter has ever been. He moves aside your hair, kisses against the curve of your spine. All Dieter can do is think about not cumming. He feels bad about this, wishes he could gather enough strength to think about your hair and things like that. But your mouth is warm and you take him in with expertise, bobbing in a rhythm he wouldn't dare break. Up, down, the tip of your tongue running alongside a vein, back up again. He’ll cum like this. You look up at him through your eyelashes and he touches the top of your head with unspeakable tenderness. Cum, you beckon, but he won’t. Can’t.

Where is that goddamn condom? How can he make this last forever?

He pulls back from your lips smiling an apologetic grin when you at him, surprised. You seem to understand, a devilish little smirk playing across your glossy lips. He wants to kiss you, but even that feels dangerous right now. He thumbs your lips instead.

“Condoms,” he tells you softly. You nod your head.

“In my bag.” You point over to the corner of the room. Dieter pads off to get them.

Dustin’s hands sneak between your thighs and you sigh when he finds your entrance, the tip of a finger rubbing the spot Dieter abandoned. You’re so wet and you want it so badly. He presses his lips against your shoulder and you feel the heat of his breath against your goose pimpled flesh. As you loll your head against him, he slides a finger in. You scratch the back of his head and nod frantically.

“You’re so tight.” He nips your skin and then licks at you with a desperation you’ve only experienced in Dieter. You like being wanted this badly. You lift your hips and ride his finger, squeezing around him. So tight, right. He laughs and you feel that too. “You like being talked dirty to, don’t you? You’re being so good, riding my finger like this. I can’t wait to fuck you. To feel you around my cock like this. And I bet he’s thinking that too.”

You both look over to Dieter as he unwraps a found foil and takes out the condom. You sigh; Dustin’s thumb finds your swollen clit. “We’ve got to make him cum in you, but I don’t think you’ll find that hard. He wants you so bad. Look—“ You feel Dustin’s grin already across your back. “He’s so fucking hard for you. Just as hard as me.”

Dieter strokes himself through the protective sleeve as he watches the two of you. You feel the familiar sensation of heat spreading low in your belly. When Dustin dares to enter another finger into you, you gasp, feeling full and stretched and yet not full enough. He spreads his fingers inside you, preparing you. You tug at his hair and make eye contact with Dieter.

He smiles lopsidedly, suddenly boyish and more handsome than he’s ever been. You think he looks happy for you—so pleased that you’re pleased, with a glint in his eye. Maybe it’s the drugs. You don’t know. Maybe he is happy that you’re happy. He was always better at saying he loved you than he was at showing it, but you suspect that this is his showing you. Love. Maybe it spills over in divorce, just another cruel thing you’ve got to cope with.

When Dieter comes back, he presses a condom into Dustin’s thigh. You are at the edge of another orgasm, everything perfectly in place — the sensation of Dustin’s thumb, the way his breath hits your skin, the idea that Dieter is watching you—but he denies you it, interrupting. You go to protest, whine, but he doesn’t give you a chance.

Dustin’s fingers are still in you, on you, when Dieter leans down and presses his tongue flat against your clit, greedy with lust. He licks at you around Dustin’s fingers and it feels like too much. They seem to make an agreement, working you at the same time. You cum quickly and this one seems to go on for eternity. You squeeze Dieter’s shoulder. The other condom package falls loosely onto the bed as Dustin uses his hand to keep you steady, your knees weak from the pleasure.

You tug at Dieter’s hair to make him stop. Dustin seems to know instinctively, leaving you feeling empty when he takes his fingers away. His slick covered fingers rest on your hips as you tell them both, breathlessly, “I can’t do another one. It’s too much.”

Dieter shakes his head in protest but Dustin takes the information in stride. He’s too good at this, moves through the motions with ease, improvising quickly. He extends his slicked fingers to Dieter. Dieter, who has been so focused on you, looks at them quizzically, unsure of what they mean. Then he seems to get it, hard features smoothing out in realization.

He looks at Dustin, and it’s not like with you. He's focused, not icy or angry but so intent. It’s not a loveless gaze, per se, but it is devoid of love; filled not with something warm but something hot.

Dustin’s cock presses into the small of your back. As Dieter’s mouth wraps around his fingers, you feel a warm bead of pre-cum drip onto your skin. You bite at your lip. You’ve never seen Dieter with men before, and this new side of him excites you—like unlocking a new door in a house you’ve had for ages. He puts on a show for you, bobbing like you did on him. Dustin’s fingers seem to be an extension of yourself. You shudder as Dieter tongues along them, and Dustin rubs himself helplessly against your backside.

“I want to see what you’re like with men,” you say to Dieter, your voice barely a whisper. But Dieter hears you and his eyebrows perk in interest. This is a long unanswered question to something you’ve never been brave enough to ask. You’ve always known that he’s been interested in men — that he’s had sex with them — but you’ve never really questioned outright about what it was like. It felt equal parts too personal and hurtful; you didn’t want to know what it was like with other people before you. But everything seems different tonight. You want to know badly, like he’s got secrets that could be your salvation hidden in him.

You slip from between them, lying against the pillows. Before filling the space, Dieter looks over at you. His brown eyes implore you for a sign and you nod your head.

He’d asked you earlier, when Dustin asked about rules, if you’d be alright with them touching each other, maybe even entering one another. You hadn’t expected it to get to that, so it had been easy to say you didn’t mind. In fact, you had figured Dieter only said it as a means to scare you away from the idea. And now that the notion is not only on the horizon, but a reality, it comes just as easy to say yes—maybe even more so.

He stalls, hesitating, so you nod again, laughing. He smiles. Your ex-husband is a startlingly beautiful man like this, looking so openly vulnerable. He’s physically and emotionally naked and you’ve waited decades for it.

Dieter and Dustin kiss each other like men do, aggressive and dominating, neither willing to lose the good fight just yet. You feel your interest piqued, watching the way their fingers touch each other. How they tug and grip, search for purchase all over. Dieter is much rougher with Dustin than he’s ever chanced to be with you, with bruising kisses and bruising touches. When he grabs the man’s cock, it is with an ugly dedication, fast dry and quick tugs. Dustin hisses the first time but doesn’t protest. In fact, he thrusts his hips unashamedly into Dieter’s closed fist, licking into his mouth with a degree of delight. They tug at the back of each other’s heads of hair and eventually Dieter gives way, falling back to allow Dustin to mount him.

Dustin searches for the condom on the bed, his chest rising and falling heavily in an attempt to grasp at long denied air. You watch through heavy lids as he slides the latex onto himself. He’s circumcised, pink and swollen at the tip. Drips of pre-cum have made him all glossy and you bite your lip watching him struggle to line himself up. When he gets the latex down to his base, he smiles a satisfied smirk. He doesn’t look at you. If he notices you staring, he doesn’t mind at all. This is his favorite play, and he’s an actor after all.

Dieter’s knees knock apart to accommodate his frame—a body you’ve begun to notice with quiet admiration in your desire. He’s broad, much broader than he’d been in his youth, and he’s got muscle all over now, whereas before he’d been lean and lanky. He’s hard and tight and as he begins to rub himself against Dieter, you’re taken with the way his skin stretches over the plains of his back, his arms, his stomach. Dustin is in impeccable shape, perhaps one of the only men who can claim he’s doing better now than he was in his youth. Gone is the boyishness, replaced with a heady, sure masculinity.

Dieter seems to relinquish his fight happily now, soft growls emitting from his lips. Dustin presses down into him, and while most of what they’re doing is obscured by Dieter’s legs, you can imagine it well enough: the steady, erratic thrusts of Dustin’s cock rubbing against Dieter’s. There’s a sheen of sweat on them both and Dustin buries his head in Dieter’s neck. He licks at the places you had once, and it is nothing but erotic little huffs from them both.

“You’re…” Dustin begins, but falters off. He lifts himself up, repositions, bracketing Dieter’s head between his strong arms. Dieter’s eyes are pressed closed, his dark features etched with pleasure. All they do for a while is rub against each other. You feel like an intruder, like something stopping them from getting where they need to be. Maybe you are.

You dare to speak: “Aren’t you going to touch each other?”

Dieter looks startled. He’s red in the cheeks, the exertion of their movements and the heat of his desire making him flush. He taps Dustin on the arm, making the steady roll of his hips slow until suddenly it’s nothing. It’s all quiet for the first time in minutes.

They both look at you with intent eyes. But Dieter is the first to take charge. “You should fuck her,” he tells Dustin. Dieter looks at you, questioning.

“But—“ you protest. Dieter shakes his head.

“It’s okay,” he says. “Later.”

Dustin has no qualms about the interchanging of you and Dieter. You notice that he's notably gentler with you than he was with him, though. He crawls to you, kisses you chastely—as if testing the waters. There’s nothing necessarily erratic or rough about what he does to you. He looks between your spread legs and fingers at your entrance once more, circling the area teasingly. You groan in anticipation and his head falls to your chest. He takes a taut nipple into his mouth as he plunges his fingers inside of you, pushing them against your front wall. As you sigh heavily, he moves his wet mouth to the other nipple.

You turn your head, catch Dieter’s fixed gaze. He reaches out his hand and you lace your fingers together. He’s touching himself through his condom, stroking softly. You want to devour him.

Dustin takes his fingers from you, and you look back at him. Before you can plead for more he says, “I’m gonna enter you now.” You nod, wordless.

He gathers the slick from his fingers and coats his latex covered cock with it. As you squeeze Dieter’s hand, Dustin lines himself to your entrance. His kiss is soft, barely a kiss at all, and he enters you, inch by careful inch. He feels so overwhelmingly right, snug, puncturing something decidedly primal inside of you when he bottoms out.

“Oh, fuck,” you groan hotly against his shoulder. He manages a small laugh, running his lips against your cheek. “Go hard,” you ask. He hasn’t moved yet, stays still inside of you. You think of the way he was with Dieter.

“I don’t know if I can. I think I’ll…” He swallows. “I know I’ll cum.”

“Please,” you beg. You dig crescent shaped nail marks into ass and he smiles teasingly, running his warm tongue against your sensitive skin. He presses so intimately into you, your nipples scrap against his chest. It feels so good. Everything does.

“He said no,” he answers, looking up to meet your eyes.

“He’ll give me anything I want,” you say. Dieter’s fingers leave yours then, and you look over. You think you’ve made him mad but he’s only repositioning himself, coming closer to your bodies. He doesn’t say anything.

Some things are so true they don’t need to be confirmed. They just are. The sky is blue and people die, and Dieter is a man who will give you everything because he was once a man who gave you nothing.

“Oh, I’m sure,” Dustin mumbles, finally drawing back. You nod your head, encouraging, but he doesn’t go harder. He moves in the same way he did before, experimental and slow. When you look at him, imploring silently, he shakes his head. “But a rule is a rule, baby. ‘Sides, I think he’s making me get you ready. Your husband is a bit of a pervert. He’s touching himself, watching me stretch you open with my cock.” Dustin presses his lips into yours. Against you, he mumbles, “Did ya know he likes to watch? Bet he likes to hear too. You—“ Dustin pushes back into you, stopping himself, and the squelch of your juices adds to the effect. He smirks. “—You’ll get fucked. Just not by me. Not yet. Maybe I’ll fuck him while he fucks you. Maybe we’ll do it..” he grunts, bottoming out again, “We’ll do you together. You’re tight as hell, but I know we can get you wide. Couldn’t we?”

You feel Dieter’s fingers but can’t move your eyes away from Dustin’s. They’re greener like this, up close. Dieter trails a line over your body, and then up to Dustin’s, with a lone finger. Dustin turns to look at him and he smiles, nodding. They seem to work without words.

Dustin reaches down to grip the condom as he pulls out of you. You look over at Dieter, half angry and half amused that he could interrupt. You realize what they’re doing almost immediately. Dieter holds open your legs by pressing his palm against one of your knees, and Dustin shuffles, moving back to let Dieter take his place.

His cock probes against your entrance and he smiles down at you like a fool. “Hey,” he tells you evenly, half sober. You ache for him. You clench around nothing as he licks into your mouth.

“Hey,” you respond, overcome. Your fingers wrap around his arms and you notice that he’s got more muscle than before too.

“You want to be fucked?” Although he attempts to make this a question, it is more of a statement. You nod along anyway. He kisses you hard, rough like with Dustin, and he nearly enters you as he rubs himself greedily against your naked warmth, wetting himself with your slick.

“Yes. Hard, like you do with him,” you tell him. He smiles against your lips. You take his cock in your hand, so much more sure with him than anyone, and he slides into you. It feels like homecoming, wet and warm and familiar, your fingers digging into his skin and the smell of sex in the air. He does what you ask, his thrusts sharp, his hips snapping against your hips.

“Dieter,” you pant out, nodding your head. He kisses the side of your mouth sloppily and you smile the best you can. Where Dustin felt right, Dieter feels perfect. You feel like you touch the hem of eternity as he plunges into you with the intensity you requested, uninhibited and giving in the roughness.

He repositions you both in one expert movement, moving to his knees, pushing your hips farther up. This makes you let out a startled gasp; he hits you far deeper like this, his thumbs digging into the flesh on your hips with bruising intensity. You can’t kiss from this position, but it doesn’t matter. He fucks you. Really fucks you.

You see Dustin in the hazy peripheral. Lolling your head to the side, you focus on him. He stands at the side of the bed, smiles at you when you catch his eyes. With his cock standing out in front of him like that, he looks a bit unserious. If you weren’t so full of Dieter, perhaps you’d be amused by this. He doesn’t even touch himself. This makes you frown.

“D—Dieter,” you stammer out.

“Huh?” he grunts.

“Dustin.”

“Mm, what—what about him?”

“Let him fuck me too. Please.”

Dieter shakes his head. “No, you’re mine right now. You’re—“ he snaps into you roughly, the bed creaking. “I’ll suck him off. Or maybe—“ Dieter grunts again, “Maybe he’ll be smart and he’ll get behind me. And maybe he’ll—“ his head drops to your neck, and your head the next part through mumbles. “Maybe he’ll rub against me like he was doing before. But it doesn’t matter right now. Just think about you. It’s all for you.”

You close your eyes, nodding. That sounds fine. Great. Dieter’s finger gazes at your clit and you nod, your hand reaching out to hold his wrist. You always liked to feel the way his forearm moved as he did this to you.

“Cum for me and I’ll cum for you,” he says, and you feel it begin, the stirrings of another orgasm. You think of him, of the way he punctures his thrusts with grunts, how good he feels inside of you, bottoming out like this with measured fury. You like how rough he’s being, like never before. You like this side of Dieter. You like that there is more of Dieter to know.

When you cum, you call out his name. He swallows it, pressing his lips to yours. “Fuck, you’re such a good girl for me. You’ve always been.” He fucks faster into you, his own release on the horizon. You squeeze around him once, twice, and that’s it; he’s filling the condom up and he’s gasping earnestly, amazed and so goddamn in love. He kisses you on the mouth and it’s so genuine. You kiss him back, smiling like a newlywed.

“Dustin,” you say against Dieter’s lips, after a moment. Your chests are both heaving and you're drenched in a thin layer of sweat. He presses his forehead against yours and you smile. “Let me take care of him,” you tell him.

Dieter rolls off of you, collapsing into bed with a soft groan and saying nothing. You take a moment to recuperate, breathing in and out, letting the bliss of this moment wash over you.

“Come here,” you say to Dustin, patting the open space of the bed beside you. He listens, the bed dipping beneath his weight. It takes a lot of effort on your part, but you rise to your knees. You guide him onto his back and he helps you straddle him. For a moment, you just sit there on top of him, looking at him.

“I used to masturbate to you,” you finally admit. This makes him grin. Beneath your cunt, his erection jumps a little.

“Thanks,” he says. His hand palms one of your breasts again. “You don’t have to do anything to me. I can finish myself off if you want.”

You shake your head, grinning. “Didn’t you hear me? I used to masturbate to you. This is a dream.”

Another hand comes up to cup your other breasts. “Are you sure you don't feel too sore? He fucked you pretty good.” You begin to glide your cunt alongside his prominent erection. He sucks in a swallow breath. “Guess that’s a no.”

“That’s a no,” you confirm.

“Just let her fuck you,” Dieter tells him quietly. You smile over at him but he doesn’t see it; he’s too busy watching the way you move your hips over Dustin. Even with a flaccid penis and in a state of post-coital peace, you manage to get to him.

You ride Dustin quickly, grabbing onto his strong shoulders as he tongues your alongside chest, finding your nipples. He groans, the sensation vibrating throughout your body as you follow the motion his hands set for you. A fast up and down, your back arching, taking him in completely and then pushing back so far he nearly falls out.

Admittedly he does most of the work, your legs wobbly and your body tired. But it feels good. God, does it feel good. You like this, being with two men back to back, each of them taking turns. Dustin generously tries to get you to cum again, his fingers sliding between your bodies, but you stop him.

“It’s too much. Just this,” you tell him. You grind down on him to make him feel better about it, and he hums sympathetically around a mouthful of your breast.

You ride him less enthusiastically the closer he gets, both of you too tired and worn. He stops aiding you so much, kissing anywhere he can access: your jaw, your neck, the side of your mouth. He lets your body fall forward into his. It’s a sort of lazy fucking that you do, meeting halfway to create the sharp thrusts that push him closer to climax.

“Cum in me,” you tell him, voice silky against his ear. He knows how tired you are, feels it too. He gathers up the last of both of your strengths, rutting up into you with intent. As he cums, you ride him, curious, taking all he can give. Dieter is too sensitive, can’t stand to move when he cums, but Dustin nods, moaning against you. When it’s over, you collapse into him, hugging his sweaty body. He laughs against your warm skin.

“Thank you,” he tells you softly, so only you can hear. You nod. You lie on him like that for a moment, listening to the beat of his heart. Dieter watches you, his expression unreadable. But he doesn’t look faraway.

You reach out to him with your fingers and he smiles, coming to.

Dustin helps you off of him and you fall between them, sated and spent. He slides off his condom and reaches across your body. “You want me to take yours?” he asks Dieter. Dieter, no longer feeling jealous but merely tired, nods. He hands the man his condom and Dustin pads off to the bathroom. Dieter and you watch this, amused.

“I kinda understand what you see in him now,” he confesses, smiling. He interlocks your fingers and you let him.

“Thank you,” you say, ignoring his comment. You look over at him.

He nods, sincere. “Of course. I assume I did it right?”

“You did it right.”

“And you don’t regret it?”

You shake your head. “I don’t seem to regret you. Even though sometimes it’d be better if I did.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay.”

“I love you.”

You kiss him chastely, even though you know you shouldn’t. “I know,” you tell him softly. “I love you too.”

“Like a friend?”

“No.”

“Like a husband?” he asks, testing the waters. You laugh. Dustin comes back from the bathroom.

“No. Something more than all of that.”

“I can handle that.”

You nod your head. “Me too,” you tell him.

The bed dips from the weight of Dustin once more, and you roll over to your side, cuddling into him. He passes a warm rag to Dieter and he accepts it, cleaning himself. He goes to hand it to you, but you shake your head.

“I’ll take a shower in a little. When I can walk.”

This earns a laugh from them both. Dustin reaches an arm around you, drawing you closer to his body. Dieter, surprisingly, doesn’t mind this; he curls up behind you, too, wrapping an arm around your waist. You’re all so close, and it’s nice. He thinks maybe they might be something to this sharing after all.

“I liked that,” you say to no one in particular.

Dustin hums, fingering trailing over your arm. “Enough to do it again?”

“Maybe. I don’t know. I think the opportunity for this kind of thing only happens once in a lifetime, doesn’t it?”

“I don’t know about that. This is Hollywood, and they love sequels,” Dieter adds, smiling.

“Yeah,” Dustin nods, “That’s true.”

You close your eyes, smiling faintly. “A sequel, then, maybe,” you say tiredly.

In the morning, you do not regret any of it.

—-

A YEAR LATER.

SUBJECT: THREE’S COMPANY, BUT ONLY SOMETIMES from: dustin.mulray@gmail.com

I was at an art show the other day and I saw a painting with your name on it. The guy in it looked a little familiar (they told me it was an old painting, from nearly a decade ago, before you were both famous. Cute). I bought it, of course. Not that I’m in the habit of buying paintings from people I’ve slept with, but it was for charity and it looked good and I’ve got a new apartment that I’ve got to fill, so I thought why not? It cost a lot (good for you!) and because of that they let me wrangle an email address from them to tell you what a brilliant job you did. You did great. Very Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton of you. Anyway, to the point: You weren’t at the premiere of the documentary with Dieter last month. He told me that it's because you don’t like that scene, and I don’t blame you. Neither do I. But I was wondering how you feel about commissioned paintings? And do you think that Dieter would like to come with you to deliver it if your opinion is positive? (He told me I had to ask you that myself, so I think he’d be happy to accompany you if the canvas is too big to carry by yourself). P.S. I’m asking you for sex–a sequel, as it were–but I really would like a painting, too. I’ll spend a lot (not for the sex, but the art. I guess for the sex too, if you’re into that). Love, D. Mulray.

—-

SUBJECT: HOPEFULLY NOT ROSEMARY’S BABY SITUATION to: david.bravo@gmail.com, dustin.mulray@gmail.com

Sometimes I commission art work for people I like and sometimes I make an exception for those I don’t if they pay enough. I’m sure you fall somewhere in those categories, Dustin. But I must warn you: I won’t do dick drawings. I might do a vagina one if the inspiration strikes. I must admit I’ve never had a man ask me for sex over email. Kind of thrilling, like a retro sext but without any of the sexy parts. I’ve attached Dieter to this email for obvious transparency reasons. He says he’d gladly help me carry your canvas (figuratively and literally). P.S. It will cost you. For tax purposes, I hope you’ll let ‘it’ be the art.

—

from: david.bravo@gmail.com to: you, dustin.mulray@gmail.com

Who said divorce couldn’t be sexy?

[al-luviec]

juvie buddies

[123pixieaod]

Inspired by this godly post which unlocked a part of my brain I didn't know existed, and solidly gave me complete and utterly brainrot until I wrote something

A thousand thanks to Lily for her wonderful help :))

"Does Kelly not mind you spending all your time with me?" Daniel asks, because she's Daniel and once she's thought something she can't keep her fucking mouth shut, even if she knows it's trouble.

Max looks up, pausing his set of weights, and blinks at her. Daniel feels her cheeks warm. One day, that mouth of yours will run you straight into trouble, young lady, her mum used to tell her, voice firm. Good girls know when to keep quiet. Daniel used to just laugh at the warning. Her laugh is loud and the opposite of quiet, but she used to know that everyone always loved her laugh.

"No," Max says after a beat and then continues lifting. Daniel hates the way her gaze tracks over him, lingering on the movement of his muscles, the ease with which he lifts the weight. Tawny hair brushed out of his eyes, cheeks dusted warm from the exertion. "Of course not."

"Why of course not?" Daniel asks. She wants to sew her mouth shut. This time, Max didn't look over as he answers.

"Kelly's very secure, she's not like other girls. And besides, she knows you."

It's strange. When Daniel was seven and Michelle eleven, they'd gone rock pool fishing. Michelle had been crouched over a shallow pool of water, her finger delicately brushing the tentacles of the anemone. Daniel had been scaling the rocks, wanting steeper, taller, more.

She'd found the shark first, nestled high at between the rocks, and for a beat she hadn't known what she was looking at. Just details, but nothing collective. Rotting smell. Shrivelled holes where eyes should be. Scales of silver lightning. Rubbery fish picked clean. The flash of bone, pearl white.

Then she realised what she was staring at, and screamed. Her father held her while her mother scolded her. I told you not to go climbing! It's too dangerous, Daniel. Why can't you just be good like your sister and stay by the shallow pools?

And then, later, ice cream. Her dad, beside her, explaining the horror away.

It's just nature, Dani. The waves wash them up, and they get stuck there. They can't get back to the sea, and then the sun dries them out.

They drown on air, Michelle helpfully pointed out, her feet kicking happily as she licked her 99. Daniel just just nodded, ice cream untouched. Every time she closed her eyes, she saw the sunken holes, the rotting flesh.

She hasn't thought about that moment for years, but suddenly it washes back over her. She feels simultaneously both. The child, staring at the carcass, frozen in shock. The shark, burning up in the sun, chocking on air.

"What does that mean?" She asks, and somehow her voice is normal, is fine. She's fine. She's not a girl or a shark. She's stupid and a fool and a gawky, ugly idiot, but she's fine.

Max manages to shrug, even with the 50kg weights. "You know. Just that Kelly knows you. She knows what you're like. And she knows me too, of course."

Daniel swallows. She nods. She hates everything about herself.

"That's sexist," she forces herself to say lightly because if the silence stretches anymore, Max might notice and set his weights down and look at her, and Daniel can't bear that. She doesn't want his eyes on her, taking in every blemish and imperfection. The boyish, ratty clothes she works out in and her curls gone frizzy with sweat and her inked skin, so different to Max and Kelly's pale, perfect complexions.

"What's sexist?"

"Saying she's not like other girls," Daniel tells him, setting down the weights she been doing. Instead, she goes to grab the skipping rope, just for something to do.

Max laughs. Daniel's glad she's turned away. Her cheeks are burning again.

"It's the truth. You, of course, Daniel, are not like other girls either." He says it lightly and ends with a chuckle, as if it's all just a joke. Daniel drags a sweaty hand over her cheeks. Burning, burning, burning.

Apparently, in Max's mind, she and Kelly are the same; both not like other girls. Kelly, with her faultless makeup and wonderful daughter and classy dresses and perfect feminity. One end of the scale. Daniel, the other. Barely even considered "a girl." Always one of the boys, only woman in f1 for a reason.

"Thanks," Daniel says. She wants to make it sound humorous, like she's in on the joke too. Instead, it's too cold; muttered as if she actually gave two shits about the conversation anyway. She has an F1 season to prepare for, she's too busy to care about stupid shit like this.

There's a beat of silence as Daniel stretches out the rope, feeling the plastic flex and give. Then, Max exhaling, the gentle bump of his weights against the floor, the workout bench shifting as his centre of gravity changes. Daniel keeps her back to him, ignoring it all.

"I did not mean it as insult," Max finally says, stubborn. Daniel forces a laugh, turning to give him a smile, all teeth.

"Of course not Maxy. I get that." Voice light and blithe. One of the boys.

She thinks he'll drop it, but instead, his frown only grows. Pinched brows, thin lips, cheeks growing blotchy. Blue eyes regard her, intense and unyielding. She burns from the inside out.

"I've upset you," he says, in that blunt, genuine way only he can do. Daniel barks out another laugh.

"Don't be stupid. You're not important enough to ever be able to get under my skin." She gives him another smile with only teeth. She feels insane. Her mother tells her good girls stay quiet.

"I'm sorry," he tries again, growing frustrated now, "I did not mean -"

"I told you, you didn't upset me," she drops the skipping rope without actually using it. "Anyway, I'm bored. Wanna get lunch now? Or are you still trying to pump those muscle with more testosterone?"

Max gives her one last, searching look before standing. They're almost the same height. She wants to shrink to nothing.

"That is not how testosterone works, Daniel," he says with the air of an overworked teacher. He looks at her with a smile, uncertain but genuine. She laughs, allowing him to move the conversation on.

She walks out of the gym first but holds the door for him. He grins, relieved. His fingers skim hers as he takes it and she lets go. A chill runs through her. Cold like scales, cold like ice cream untouched.

Follow up here!

[overnightheartbeats]

Seeing his grin amused her immensely. Laurel just felt relief all around, especially when each moment they had spent together felt fleeting, feeling like she could lose it from one moment to the next. Still, even if it turned out to be short-lived, she was willing to enjoy it to the fullest. Each smile, laughter, the way his eyes seemed to pierced her soul - greedily, she craved it all.

She caught that glimpse of surprise in his features, and for a second, she feared she had been too honest. But, the satisfaction that followed was much more familiar to her and Laurel couldn't help the smile full of relief that adorned her lips. "Back at the dock, what a smart ship," she mused out loud, wondering if she could take that to mean that he also had not moved on. Even after all this time. It was a second of mirrored satisfaction, followed by that immense guilt that wouldn't leave her alone. All these years, after ruining his life, and he still hadn't moved on? She couldn't help the pang of guilt that struck her. "I would be pleasantly surprised to find our ship back somewhere on that dock."

Even with the semi-hopeful conversation happening, her situation wasn't lost on her. He may have turned a new leaf and his life may look very different than it had all those years ago, but Laurel knew he was still close to his family, thinking back to his cousin stopping by his place and that dinner he went to with his dad. And on her side? Well, her mom still held some influence in her life - something she'd been unable to kick. Laurel's need for her mother's approval still dictated her life to this day. "Well, I was never really good with small talk," she teased, following his lead and taking another drink from her glass. Though, it was much larger than just a sip. Liquid courage? Maybe. Setting the glass back down on the table, Laurel willed herself to look back up at him, meeting those blue eyes she loved so much. Looking at him once more, she reiterated to herself that, yes she was willing to try again. Go all in for him. If her gaze was not communicating that, then one more sip of her drink, and Laurel was ready to say it out loud. Unable to continue dancing around what she wanted.

"You're glad?" she breathed out in surprise. Her realistic tendencies held her down, though a sliver of hope threatened to take over. "New territory is right, yet it feels very familiar. I just can't pinpoint why." Laurel hung to every word, his smile mesmerizing her like it had so many years ago. It felt like a turning point for them - an adult conversation between two people who hadn't seen each other since their teenage years. It was definitely something. Inevitably, a smile broke out on her lips. Pure joy in her features, and that hope from earlier burst through her chest. "Really?" she said breathlessly, unable to contain herself as she stood up from her chair and closed the distance between them, cupping his face in her hands and pulling him in for a kiss.

A laugh pulled from her lips, shaking her head. "Okay sorry, I got carried away. Yes, me too. Well, I had already said that. But, honestly...no pressure. I'm not expecting us to just immediately go back to what we had. More so, I just wanted you to know that I'm still here and I still...feel things for you. So yes, expecting things from each other, I can work with that. We can just take it slow, right?" She felt like she was reaching rambling territory, her nerves were in full display and leaning on being chill and nonchalant to not completely freak him out. "Don't worry, I won't request any girlfriend titles or anything of the sort."

Pat couldn't help the grin that curled his lips at the way her demeanor lightened when he agreed and assured her he would stay another night. It was impossible not to look forward to another night with Laurel, not to bask in every single moment he could with her. It was impossible not to appreciate the flush that came to her cheeks, just like it used to when they were younger and he would wink at her, although this time it wasn't unaccompanied with a roll of her big beautiful eyes.

The dirty blonde was sure surprise crossed over his features, though it was quickly replaced with a sense of satisfaction and relief. She hadn't moved on? A part of him felt guilty for that, but the other part, the larger part, was glad that was the case, because he certainly hadn't moved on from her. His hand came up to run through his hair as he let out a slow sigh. "I don't know about our ship sailing, maybe its back at the dock or something." he offered with a half-hearted chuckle. Despite the fact that years had passed, they were both still in scarily similar situations to the moment he'd been placed behind bars. He was still dangerously entwined with his family and his father's family business, and Laurel was even closer to the law then ever before. Not to mention, her mother would never come around to the idea of her daughter dating Patrick O'Morhan; especially now that the word felon followed his already tainted last name.

Pat's brows rose slightly at her next words, followed by a soft chuckle when she mentioned how it wasn't good dinner conversation. "Better than pointless small talk I guess." he offered with a shrug before he took another sip from his glass and let his light eyes find her darker ones across the table. What did she mean when she said she wouldn't mind if he expected things from her? Was she willing to try again, even with everything seemingly stacked against them? And how did he even go about asking that?

"I'm glad you asked." he settled on, a slight smile taking his lips. "I know it's kind of new territory for both of us, I mean, I never expected you to even still live here." he admitted with a small shrug. "But I," he paused, swallowing the growing lump in his throat that made itself apparent whenever he was attempting to be vulnerable. "I'm open to..." he paused, unsure how to word it. "Expecting thing from each other." he finished with a half laugh.

[frankenbuggee]

Doing an expression chart for Devious and honestly this is my favourite expression and the only one I have finalised for him

So stoic yet still so goofy for a villain. We love him 🖤 I really want to smush his face he looks so cute here 🥹😩

[rainbowtvz]

*grits teeth*

i do not want to discourse here or anywhere anymore but it does kind of affect me as a transmasc bi person when i see shit that indirectly misgenders me and implies that bisexuality is an icky no good word and identity and you have to be bi and gay and bi and lesbian and bi and straight at the same time or support them or you're an evil stinky stinky terf like... hello where am, i

[supersecretnerd]

Ok so these designs are cute as hell, the Internet is just mean

I have too many thoughts about a game I still need to watch