#Worth all the pain and torture it took tbh

[siracethegreat]

Art nouveau style tango of the tek!!!!!!! I spent over 16 hours on this and might explode!! He is very gorgeous to me!!!

[hb-writes]

It's Almost Over

Summary: Mia’s recovering from an illness and wishes nothing more than to have a father who doesn’t care about antibiotic resistance.

Characters: Carlisle Cullen & Mia Cullen (OC)

Content Warning: Nasty-tasting medications (I get shivers just thinking about it tbh).

A/N: Requested - Prompt: It’s almost over. 

750 Follower Thank You Requests are open until April 8th!

Her throat felt better. No longer did it feel as though Mia was swallowing jagged shards of glass each time she tried to speak. She could see in the mirror that all of the tea and soup and rest had done its trick. She supposed the antibiotic had done its trick as well, but Mia tried her best not to think of the thrice-daily routine of swallowing down that vile liquid. 

Her fever was down. Her appetite was returned. Perhaps she should still have been up in her room resting the days away, but her mother hadn’t said a word while watching her pull on a jacket and head outside to join her siblings in tossing a football around the backyard. 

Mia’s whole body slumped when she heard her father’s voice from the back steps. Sure, her mother could permit her exertion when she was meant to be resting, but if the resident doctor, if her father, didn’t think it was appropriate…

“Dad, I’ve taken it easy all day. I’m feeling, oh—”

The orange bottle in Carlisle’s hand spoke well enough that he didn’t need to explain anything, not that his presence wasn’t meant to ward her off a little fresh air, only to remind her of her next dose. 

Mia didn’t truly need reminding, especially not now that she was mostly feeling well. She was capable enough to monitor the clock and take the medicine as prescribed, but nevertheless, she’d become avoidant of the task which Carlisle took very seriously knowing what he did about antibiotic resistance and all. 

Carlisle watched his daughter deflate further, grasping onto the football as if by holding it she would be tethered to the grass, kept in play, and kept away from him and the dreaded medicine. 

They likely could have sidestepped this issue altogether if they had called the primary care physician to request a script for the antibiotic be written for the pill form rather than liquid, but Mia had agreed it wasn’t worth the fuss. She was nearly an adult, after all. She could tolerate a little medicine. She could endure the thick, chalky, bitter liquid for a few days. 

Truthfully, Mia hadn’t minded until she started feeling better. She had been barely aware of the taste in the first few days, more concerned with the pain of swallowing, but now that she was feeling well enough, the ritual taking place every eight hours was becoming tedious. 

Torturous. Intolerable. Unnecessary. Disgusting. Harrowing. Vexing. Repugnant. Offensive.

Mia had come out with a stream of words to describe it in recent days hoping to sway her mother and father from their insisting that she continue with the regimen. Mia had no such luck. Carlisle and Esme were unrelenting in their opinion on the matter. 

“It’s almost over,” Carlisle said when she remained fixed on the grass. He had no true way of knowing that she was considering getting herself lost out in the woods as an alternative, but Carlisle knew his daughter. He could see the hesitation in her. 

Mia groaned, tossing the football to Emmett with all of her strength before moving towards the back steps where her father stood pouring out the pink liquid. 

��Just a few more doses,” he offered. 

“I feel fine though. Can’t we just–”

Carlisle was poised to explain the science behind antibiotics and their misuses, the dangers of prematurely ending a regimen. He even looked a bit excited at the opportunity even though he’d already discussed it several times in the proceeding days.

Mia held her hand out, a silent, yet entirely clear, message of ‘no, thank you,’ offered as she accepted the small dosage cup.

“I know, I know. A full course helps ensure that all of the illness-causing bacteria are killed. Blah blah bl—” 

Mia shivered as she swallowed down the liquid, her whole body convulsing with disgust in response to the vile taste and consistency in her mouth. She traded the dosage cup for the large glass of water Carlisle held out to her.

Carlisle had to smirk as Mia went through the little routine. It reminded him of when she was small. She’d been a terror about taking medicine then, too.

“How many more?” Mia asked after she swallowed down the last of the water.

“Two days.” 

“I’ll finish it,” Mia said as if there was a choice to be had and she was granting her father a grand concession, “but I’m not going back to school until we’re through.” 

“I think that’s appropriate.” 

Mia’s head shook again, a tremor passing through her as she sensed a bit of the lingering taste. Carlisle took the cup from her. 

“It’s the absolute worst taste in the world.”

Carlisle’s face held a smile, but he couldn’t hide the small shake of his head. 

“You think I’m being dramatic?” Mia asked.

Carlisle held up his hand, using his thumb and pointer finger to indicate that he believed she was being a little dramatic. 

“But I shall allow it…for two more days at least.” 

Twilight (We Intertwined) Masterlist

750 Follower Thank You Requests are open until April 8th!

[delimeful]

you cant go back (3)

warnings: panic, miscommunication, trafficking, non-consensual drug use, suicidal thoughts, food, mentions of torture, cliffhanger, these tags make it sound worse than it is tbh  

-

When Virgil first opened his eyes, jerked out of sleep by sharp instinctual alarm, he’d thought for a moment that he was still dreaming.

It was the same face, after all, even with how frighteningly close it was, even with a vastly different expression painted across it. He’d been confused, almost relieved-- had they gotten away after all?-- and then he’d realized just what the Deathworlder had in their arms.

He’d lunged and come up short, forced to watch as the Human kept their arms locked around Patch even as the creature made unhappy little noises he’d never heard from it before. 

It was so small compared to the Human, easily tucked under an arm and managed regardless of protests. Did they have no respect for the deadly grace of the other creatures on this planet?

They’d circled him from a distance, ignoring his warning twitches and outright hisses as thoroughly as they ignored Patch, and all he could do was watch, locked in place, hoping that Human prey drive wasn’t as high as all the rumors said.

And then the Human had left, taking Patch with them, and Virgil had been left to watch their fading heat signature and pray to Seryl that whatever the Human did would be quick. For both of them.

It wasn’t that easy, of course. The Human wanted something from him, badly.

He thought he had a fair idea of what-- or rather, who-- it was.

After all, he’d seen a near-perfect mirror of them, sitting bound and muzzled in their transfer ship’s holding cell where a Human absolutely shouldn’t be. Leond and her Second had been unnaturally gleeful for rotations before Virgil finally found out about the ‘successful pickup’, namely through stumbling across it by doing the routine security and safety checks that he didn’t trust the rest of these idiots to do themselves.

They’d cut him off before he could get to a comm to tell Janus, cornered him in the tight cell block hall, and offered him a deal: his silence for a cut of the immense earnings they would make from renting out a Human to any and all fighting rings.

He remembered the way the Human’s gaze had flickered between him and the others curiously as he argued, the way they’d struggled to bare their teeth derisively at Leond, even through the bars of their muzzle and the haze of whatever they’d been drugged with. It was one of the last things he’d seen before he’d ‘made a fuss’ big enough that his own crew had tranq’d him and ditched him on-planet to die.

“You’re right,” Leond had said, face smooth in the way that meant smug satisfaction for her species. “We haven’t fulfilled our half of the exchange, have we? We took an alien from that planet, so it’s only fair that we leave one behind.”

His limbs had been defensively raised since the beginning of the argument, but Virgil had fought side by side with these people before. They knew how to guard his blind spots, which meant that they knew his blind spots.

The Human had tried to speak through the muzzle, just before he’d heard the discharge sound of a tranq gun too close to dodge. He thought it might have been an attempted warning.

It hadn’t changed anything. He’d been the only one on that ship who’d opposed the Human’s abduction, and as a reward, he was going to be slowly interrogated to death by one of their clutchmates. The level of cruel irony was like something from one of Jan’s stupid operas.

Virgil felt another shudder of exhaustion. Stars, he hoped Janus would get out of there once he realized what they’d brought back. His best friend knew better than to fuck with Humans, and the crew clearly wasn’t going to listen to any interplanetary ethics lectures, so the best thing he could do was skip town. Better to rebuild than fall with the nest.

He hadn’t slept after the Human had left, flipping to his heat sensor vision and watching all night for their return, unable to relax after one of the most unpleasant awakenings of his life. And if it meant he didn’t dream about what could have happened to Patches, all the better.

The next day had come, and the Human returned, wielding that dull stick and asking more angry questions that Virgil couldn’t understand, let alone respond to.

The thing was, given enough time and exposure, he actually would be able to understand the specifics of what was wanted from him.

Like most long-term interstellar travelers, he had a Lator implant, and the more the Human talked at him, the more linguistic patterns and trends would be picked up and catalogued, making it much easier for him to put the pieces together.

Unfortunately, time wasn’t something he had an excess of.

Janus would have figured out at least the basics by now; in addition to being better with words, he’d gotten a more recent, effective upgrade to the implant’s software. Virgil had turned the offer down for himself, knowing that they needed to save money where they could, and figuring that he didn’t really need it. His job was to defend Janus. His First could handle the talking part of their missions on his own with ease, the chatterbox that he was.

It had seemed obvious at the time. A lot of good that logic was doing him now.

The Human said something at him, flashing his bone-white teeth as he spoke. Humans didn’t have guard plates over their mouths at all, and so every time this one turned to him, he felt as though they were either acting sickeningly overfamiliar or that they might lunge forward and try to bite him at any moment. He’d carefully kept his own plates locked, not willing to expose any teeth and have it mistaken for a challenge.

The Human was waiting expectantly. Virgil took a deep breath and replied, the same as he had every time he could, though he doubted Humans had access to translator implants.

“I am not here to harm anyone. I was abandoned here against my will. I can’t understand what you’re saying,” he recited in Guard-tongue, keeping the sentences brief and repetitive for easy translation pattern recognition.

The Human wasn’t extending him the same courtesy, his own sentences long-winded and full of unfamiliar concepts that kept tripping up the Lator programming. References, probably.

There was one Human word that he’d figured out fairly early on: Brother.

Clutchmate, family, the lookalike that was probably long gone by now.

He was almost glad that he couldn’t speak coherently. As it was, he didn’t have to be the one to break the news.

Almost, because the Human was stubbornly finding new and creative ways to freak him the hell out with each visit.

First, they’d figured out fairly quickly that he was slowly starving.

Virgil had flooded his plates right to pitch on their first meeting, and hadn’t been calm enough to stop the defensive reaction since, which had quickly drained what little hydration stores he’d had left. Between the drying out of his plates and the fact that he’d gotten too worked up and blacked out for a moment during an interrogation, his fading health wasn’t exactly subtle.

He’d panicked, because any enemy knowing his weakness was generally pretty fucking bad, let alone an enemy with personal motive and ability to twist that weakness like a knife in the spine.

The Human had verbally freaked out (a regular occurrence) and vanished for a while, before returning to the barn with an entire array of items (not a regular occurrence). They’d set the items out on flat fiber ‘plates’ and then slid them into range with that stupid stick.

Virgil had stabbed a few of them on principle before realizing that this was food, aided by the Human rolling his eyes pointedly-- a derisive gesture, he’d gathered-- and eating something from a plate of their own.

At that point, Virgil had been willing to risk poison. The way he saw it, he either died, or he ate something, and either way it meant stopping the slow, aching pain eating away at the pit of his stomach.

He’d even been willing to tolerate the Human staring at him, since apparently they didn’t have the manners to not watch a stranger eat. Or that wasn’t a thing on this planet. It didn’t really matter.

After a significant amount of time spent using his auxiliary limbs to delicately maneuver Human produce and meats into inspection range, he settled for what smelled the least concerning, avoiding any that smelled or looked too bright to be safe.

(The scrunched-up look the Human had given him after he’d crunched an egg in his throat had been hard to interpret, though.)

Anything he could safely ingest, he’d eaten. After the Human left, he’d even attempted the indignity of trying to lift the bowl of water in range with wobbly limbs, though he’d almost immediately spilled the majority of it all over himself. It didn’t matter, he could pull any and all hydration from what he’d eaten, though he didn’t dare get used to it.

This wasn’t his first time above the nest, and he hadn’t fooled himself into believing that this shocking show of generosity would last. The Human had only done it to make sure that their hostage wouldn’t keel over.

Starvation and dehydration were more-than-effective methods of hands-off torture, after all, and the Human really only needed to give him enough to keep him alive.

The impending mistreatment shouldn’t have shaken him as much as it did. He had the advantage of the Human’s ignorance on how much Chelcerae ate, and his own resilience, developed from years of scraping by on the barest of rations. He was lucky, really, to be one of the species with a water-storing organ.

Still, he spent the night wondering if it was worth it to keep fighting. There was no escape, so wouldn’t it be better to go out on his own terms, before anything truly horrendous could happen to him?

Probably. The real question was: would he have the fortitude to turn down food all the way to a slow and painful death-via-starvation?

He wasn’t sure, and he continued to be resentful of the fact that he even had to make such a choice all the way up until the next day, when the Human walked in with a plate covered in everything he’d eaten yesterday and slid it over to him, simple as anything.

“What?” the Human snapped after a moment of Virgil watching them for any indication of what to do, and he’d hurriedly flickered his heat sensor eyes in hopes of placating any offense. The Human had grumbled indistinctly, but didn’t attempt to remove the plate or even threaten to do so.

The next day was the same. Though the Human continued to try and interrogate and occasionally intimidate him, the food and drink was provided without stipulation or hesitation. It was… strange.

Virgil refused to read into it. Perhaps Humans just had meals so frequently that skipping a single day would be as barbaric as weeks of starvation for Chelcerae. Maybe once the Human had enough of his noncompliance, they were going to feast on his flesh and didn’t want a stringy meal. It was impossible to know.

The generous feeding schedule was nothing, though, compared to some of the other questionable tendencies the Human had.

They traversed the grounds in and around the barn with little wariness, apparently quite confident in their ability to defend themself on the Deathworld they’d grown up on. They brushed insects and plant matter alike off their person with little care for poisons or bites.

Their body language seemed to consist of every threat display in the wayfarer guidebook, and worse, only a quarter of these threat displays seemed intentional. Virgil was constantly tense, attempting to figure out which were intended to cow him, and how to keep his own body language from worsening the damage. Any signal of terrified compliance, even the obvious tremor of his auxiliary limbs, only seemed to prompt wariness and confusion from the Human.

They’d found his helmet and immediately put it on, which had made his fuzz prickle with hope for a moment, before remembering that the reserve battery of the headset was well and truly dead. No emergency translators for the Human, and no upturns in luck for Virgil.

Maybe it was better. Even if the Human could talk to him, he would seem just as guilty for their brother’s disappearance in their eyes. It wasn’t even an accusation he could reasonably defend against; if things had gone differently, if he’d made smarter choices, maybe he could have gotten the captured Human free.

Janus would have managed it. He’d always been a quicker mind than Virgil.

It’d been three days since the Human had found him, and Virgil had barely managed to parse a handful of imperatives and nouns from someone who was basically just yelling the same things at him over and over.

“You can’t ---- the ---- ---------, you ----- --------! I ---- what I ---- and --- ----- to it!” the Human yelled, essentially proving his point. Virgil resisted the urge to let his chin drop down to his collar in exhausted resignation.

It was difficult to focus past the old pains from the fight with Leond, and the new pains from being strapped upright for days on end. Even if he could bring himself to pay closer attention, it wouldn’t make it easier to parse words he had no context for. Lator technology worked best when both parties were exchanging words, or at the very least, when there was more than one native speaker prattling on at you!

The Human inhaled to continue and then froze, prompting Virgil to slink his shoulders up slightly, something that had worked to show his non-aggression once or twice before. The Human wasn’t focused on him, though, whirling around to face the barn doors with their body rigid.

Because he’d never been good at uncertainty, Virgil flicked his heat-sensor eyes open just as another Human-sized mass reached the doors, moving in a predator’s stalk.

Well, he thought as the door creaked open, I’m screwed.

[bookofmirth]

If you have the time/energy I would love to hear more of your thoughts about Az's persona! He's such an interesting character to me, and I feel like most of the theories I see about him centre around elain, and how his behaviour is mate behaviour (the double bond thing). Personally I think azriel has a lot of anger, isnt very open with his friends, and also feels like he has to be the one to fix everything (this comes out with elain but also all his relationships).

Can I just start this off by saying “what the fuck” at the double/true/created bond thing. I’ve seen some WILD shit out there in the fandom, wild. 

I have been writing and deleting and copy/pasting etc. this post forever and I can’t decide how to approach it, so I hope this makes sense! I didn’t pull out a ton of quotes because tbh it’s a lot of work and I’ve read these books???? So many times. And this is tumblr, not comprehensive exams.

I would agree with your characterization of Azriel! 

Anger - this comes out in really inappropriate times, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he turns his anger around on himself. We all know that Rhys described his “icy rage”, and later on his “cruel competitiveness”.

Lack of communication - yeah, when has he had a heart-to-heart with anyone in this series? When he does, it’s not about making himself feel better, or sharing his own feelings. It’s to be of service to someone else. All the IC have described trying to reach out to him in their own ways, and not being successful.

Needing to fix things - yes! I see this as his need to be of service. He’s always the first one to jump into work. It took Mor hundreds of years to get him to go to Rita’s, right? He’s a workaholic in a world with no labor laws. He always wants to be the one in charge of gathering intel, of finding people, or fixing problems. I think this is closely tied to two things: his lack of self-worth, and his anger. If he can stay busy enough and work hard enough, he can prove his worth to other people, if not to himself. This is why he loses it when Rhys or Feyre tell him that he can’t handle something. 

Funny thing, but people who have followed my blog since early 2017 know that I shipped moriel hardcore. I just loved it. I wrote so much meta and fanfic. A lot of the arguments that I see now remind me a lot of arguments people used to make about moriel - and it makes sense! Az’s behavior around both Mor and Elain are eerily similar. So I thought I’d compare his behavior towards them because that can tell us about his character!

To me, his treatment of Elain (and Mor) comes down to two things:

What his mother and Mor suffered (and he was unable to prevent), and

His lack of self-worth due to abuse 

Azriel and Mor didn’t know one another very long before she slept with Cassian and was left brutalized by her family. This happened when they were all in their late teens, which is not long after Azriel was tortured by his brothers, rarely let outside, and rarely got to see his mother. At the same time that Azriel sees his mother treated so poorly, he then feels intense guilt and rage at what happens to Mor. It’s enough to make him overreact in the future, any time that Mor (or another female) is in danger. So here are a bunch of examples of him being overprotective of Mor and Elain. But mostly Mor.

In acomaf, Azriel has the audacity to tell Mor no, that she can’t go to the human lands (chapter 41)

“I fought in the War, you will do well to remember-”

“No,” Azriel said again, refusing to break her stare. His shifting wings rasped against the back of his chair. “The would string you up and make an example of you.”

At the end of acomaf he is still highly protective of Mor

Azriel’s head lifted from where he was sprawled in his own blood, eyes full of rage and pain as he snarled at the king, “Don’t you touch her.”

Mor looked at Azriel - and there was real fear there. Fear - and something else. She didn’t stop moving until she again kneeled beside him and pressed a hand to his wound. Azriel hissed-but covered her bloody fingers with his own.

Then in acowar, of course, he explodes at the High Lord meeting after Eris says that Mor dresses like a slut:

Azriel stopped.

Eris gasped for air as those scarred hands loosened. As Azriel turned his face towards me-

The frozen rage there rooted me to the spot. 

But beneath it, I could almost see the image that haunted him: the hand Mor had yanked away, her weeping, distraught face as she had screamed at Rhys.

And now, behind us, Mor was shaking in her chair. Pale and shaking.

And of course in acowar Azriel goes with Feyre to rescue Elain. This ties together all of his issues with Mor and his mother. IMHO, Azriel sees Elain as a second chance. He saves Elain in a way he failed to save Mor, and so he begins to transfer his need to protect and serve onto her.

Azriel’s refusal to let Mor assist in dangerous situations is similar to how he says no, Elain cannot help.

Azriel stiffened, an outright sign of temper from him as he said quietly, “There is an innate darkness to the Dread Trove that Elain should not be exposed to.”

*Note that it’s an “outright sign of temper” - not an outright sign of protectiveness, or caring, or concern, or worry. 

If being protective of another character is “mate behavior” or sign of a mating bond, then Azriel and Mor would be mated. There is far more evidence of him being overprotective of her than of Elain. So while we know that mates are protective (naturally!), Azriel’s protective tendencies are coming from something else - a combination of his failures to protect his mother and Mor.

In acofas, what Cassian jokes is Az being a stickler for manners in forcing everyone to wait for Elain, Rhys explains as being related to Azriel’s mother - not Elain or Cassian.

Rhys took a bite, gesturing with his knife for me to eat. Let’s just say it hit a little close to home. At my beat of confusion, he added, There are some scars when it comes to how his mother was treated. Many scars.

Again, it seems all well and good that Az was thinking about being polite, but Rhys tells us that it’s because of Azriel’s mommy issues! Which are understandable and important, but a clear example of Azriel trying to make up for poor treatment in one woman by overreacting around another.

In the acosf POV, when Az questions why he wasn’t mated with Elain (and he can smell bonds so wouldn’t he smell his own?) it’s not so much about Elain as the fact that he feels he did everything right this time. He saved the damsel. He was of service. Elain is safe and healthy and she seems much more amenable than Mor ever has. So what did he do wrong? This is the source of his anger, combined with his loneliness and desire for a shiny lovely mating bond of his own. 

When we think about Azriel’s motivations, it comes down to service and self-worth. He sees his main value or purpose as saving others from harm, and when he was barely into adulthood he failed in that duty for the two most important women in his life. Hence his need to overcompensate around Mor, and now Elain.

[2lim3rz]

THE HATE OF LORGAR [40k FANFIC] [LORGAR X READER]

This has been sitting in my head since April, so it's about time I wrote it!

Lorgar really didn't deserve some of the shit he got tbh, he just needed a better life. Anyways..

WARNINGS: Self-flagellation/harm , Lorgar's moods are pretty flip-floppy

You were a Remembrancer aboard the ship that held the Primarch of the Word Bearer's themselves, Lorgar Aurelian. You didn't know much of the other Primarchs, just that not many of them were... least to say, much fans of your job title.

But it was your job. You had been selected by thousands who were desperate for the position you were in. You had worked your literal and proverbial ass off. On the ship, you lost some of your flow at the complete master-crafters of the various historical arts. You felt incompetent, a mere toddling child amongst some of them.

Did you back down? No. You were close to it once, but some other Remembrancers and even a couple of the Astartes helped your courage. Even though you couldn't fathom why, as one the Astartes clearly held some form of disdain for baseline humans and had a sickly sweet charming voice. Most of the Word Bearers were very charming with their words, but his always had an undertone you never liked; yet given his rank, you couldn't do anything about it.

Of course, his help was the entire reason of why you were Lorgar's personal Remembrancer. Or.. that's how it began. Your meetings getting more frequent despite both of your myriad of duties to attend. You both found excuses. You both grew to know each other. Maybe that's why you paced in worry in the massive in-between hall of his grand room. Two doors on either side, one leading to the ship and one to his room. Maybe that's why you paced, the tip of your thumb in your mouth as you gently gnawed.

You felt his hate. You felt his grief. In fact, you felt all of their grief and hate. Even the most terrifying of the Word Bearers aboard the ship almost seemed to shake. Lorgar, and in turn the Word Bearers, felt as though they were an extended family.. so when you heard the news.. Monarchia was attacked. What was the galaxy turning to if the Ultramarines was turning against them? You took a shuddering breath. You wished you could have gone, but you just couldn't keep up with the Astartes, that was fact and he convinced you of that. So you were here, waiting for Lorgar to come and share his feelings and whatever else happened in the day. For your tradition.

Thoom, thoom, thoom, thoom. You heard his steps. Your head lifted, thumb drifting away as you wiped your hand on your clothes. He was coming, that was clear from the weight of the steps. Your instincts screamed at you, however, at how quick they were. At the clash of something hitting the metal wall. In the distance, a low sort of howl from a grieving beast. Oh, how lucky you were that you pressed yourself against the wall due to the sheer force the doors slammed open. One giving a horrible groan as if it cried out.

You felt your heart drop. His once shining armor was covered in grizzly ash. From his ear was caked blood. The man's eyes was wide and terrifyingly feral, tears had carved rivers in the ash smeared on his face. The already perpetually overwhelming feeling of being near a Primarch grew tenfold at how terrifyingly heavy his breathing was.

"Lor..Lorgar?" you hesitated, feeling as if you couldn't breath. Like a predator, his head snapped towards you. All before he fell to his knees, a sob causing a roaring racket in the silence. Stumbling one step forward, followed by another, you rushed towards him and fell to your own knees, clinging to his hand. "Lorgar! Lorgar, are you- What happened?"

He wasn't looking at you. It was as though you could have disappeared and he wouldn't have noticed one bit. His once beautifully clear eyes were almost glazed in a trance. Tears still falling steadily, his face slack. It was a grimly pretty sight, in the same way one would admire a sad painting. You knew you could not get to his mind when he was so emotional, recalling how he got when you not-so-politely stated how Kor Phaeron didn't deserve his rewards for what was clearly abuse to the Primarch you adored out of all the rest (despite not really meeting any others quite yet).

So it was silence you both dwelled in. Silence that shattered as Lorgar lunged. A roar bellowed from his lips as he tore forth one of the massive doors off its hinged and slammed it against one of your favorite murals on the wall. One of the many dedicated to the Emperor of Mankind, your favorite because it was Lorgar's masterful work. You wisely screamed in fear, stumbling back from the crumbling debris.

"He murdered them all." you thought his eyes were wild once. You thought once that you had seen a feral light in his eyes when he was angry. You thought you would see grief. Sad, sad grief in those eyes. Instead, there was only anger. A roiling blaze in this tear-filled orbs. His ash covered face torn asunder in a snarl. "He killed them because I was right! I was right and he murders millions for it!" your ears hurt. Oh, stars they hurt so bad at the force of his screaming. Letting go of his hand and covering your head, your back slid against the wall as he slammed his fist against the crumbling facade of the Emperor.

"All this sacrifice! All of humanity's blood spilled, all of my blood spilled! And this is what we get?! The moment I tell him the truth, I am spat upon and treated as a mutt!" the Primarch screamed to the air before snapping towards you. Your vision blurred as your own terrified tears emerged. It was as though he had to remember you were there.

"You write the truth, and nothing but the truth, right," never before had your name felt so terrifying. The way he snarled it in his question. You knew he wasn't angry at you and yet you felt so scared. Hiccuping, you frantically nodded, not trusting your words. "Write this. Let the galaxy know He forced the Word Bearers to kneel. He forced me to kneel. He allowed Gulliman to murder entire cities of innocents. All because the Emperor wishes to live a lie."

Just as soon as he spoke those seering words, his eyes staring so deeply in your eyes you swore he could melt you from within, he whipped away. Stomping heavily towards his room. Instincts within screamed at you to turn away. To run when Lorgar was so volatile. He was always emotional and you adored the fiery passion he showed for things.. but sometimes it was too overwhelming, like now. Perhaps some inane part of you figured you could still offer comfort.

So you followed him. Watching from the doors that closed behind you as he took off his armor. If it was any other day, perhaps you two would have traded jokes. If by traded jokes, meant you joked about as he sheepishly stammered his way through it. An unseen side of the Primarch, really, was that he always seemed to stumble his words around you. But not now. Not now as he barely bothered to don a robe before going low onto his knees again, hanging his head low.

You jolted, surprised as he spoke a low order and a man emerged with a large bowl that he seemed to struggle holding. Dark powder emerging in the air as he quickly sat it upon the ground and skittered away. It was as though you were invisible in your terror as he withdrew a long glittering object that was clearly barbed. A whip of sorts.

"Lorgar....?" your whispered voice almost echoed as he splayed his hands across the ground. His tears were back again as he silently dragged one large hand into the bowl of black powder.. no, it was ash. The ashes of Monarchia. The other hand lifted the whip and you covered your mouth with a shriek at the horrid crack it made. How Lorgar hardly winced.

"LORGAR!"

You were shocked, you knew this. But you couldn't move. You could barely breath as you watched Lorgar perform the wretched flagellation. Somehow, you broke your grim reverie to stumble forward, nearly knocking the bowl of ashes away as you threw your arms around his neck with him finally being low enough for you to do that.

The whip was so close to hitting you, but that didn't matter as he stopped. You could feel the hot blood and sweat making your sleeves and skin sticky. You were sobbing into his neck, clinging tighter. "Stop! Stop, please! Just stop!" you pleaded. You had no right to order a Primarch, but you couldn't stand to watch whatever wretched ritual was happening. He was hurting in his grief for Monarchia, but there was no right for him to hurt himself for whatever wrongs the Guilliman and the Emperor did.

Silence passed between you, Lorgar feeling limp in your arms as his own breath hitched twice before a sob broke forth. You heard the rattling clank as he let go of the torturous whip and clung to you as though you were a lifeline. "He forced them to kneel..." the Urizen whispered in another whimper "He looked at m..me with such hatred. At my sons as though they were not worth the dirt beneath his foot, the spit in his mouth."

You opened your own mouth to speak, but he continued. One large and bloody hand stroking yours as you felt a tremble wrack his body. The power of it shook you and it took all your might not to go into blubbering sobs of your own. "I hit Malcador. I hit Guilliman, my own boot-licking brother." a low snarl began to enter his wavering cry "I hit him. And.." he murmured your name, pulling you back so he could look you in the eye.

This was not your Lorgar. Your Lorgar was smiles and stammers. Your Lorgar had a serene focus about him as well as an intensity when he spoke. This man torn asunder with grief and anger was not yours. "It felt satisfying." it seemed to hurt him as he said this "It did not give me joy but I was satisfied at the Sigilite's pain." you trembled at the whispered words.

"Ven...vengeance is not worth the effort, Lorgar.. you.. you've said this-" "This is no longer vengeance, this.." for once he was lost for words, trying to grasp for one before a hiccup tore through his throat with the faint repetition of how the Emperor forced him to kneel. "Just.. please, Lorgar.. Look at me.. Look at me.." you murmured gently, pulling your hands away from his neck to cradle his face. You knew you would cringe later at the sight of the blood and ashes covering you, but for now you were here.

"He does not see the truth.. all I have spoken is the truth.." it was then you saw what was wrong. He was growing lost. If there was the one and only thing you appreciated of Kor Phaeron and the rest of the Word Bearers, it was they they helped Lorgar stay on track. They were more of his family than anyone could have been.. Kor Phaeron more literally even if he was the worst parental figure you could think of.

"It's.. it's not okay what he did, Lorgar.. but please, get cleaned. This isn't healthy." you stroked his ashy skin as he leaned his head against your hand. Closing his eyes and taking a deep shuddering breath. "You are right. There's much to do and.. and my Legion needs their Primarch." that wasn't what you meant. Everyone needed a break sometime or another, Lorgar especially right now. "Y..yes.. they do.." you mumbled after him. If he wanted to work, you would let him work. Anything to stop him from his self abuse. Anything to help comfort him, you would do.

[the-slasher-files]

ok so hear me out. taking jason’s hands and slowly, gently kissing his fingertips, knuckles, wrists etc and just being Soft. he deserves Softness, y’know? and tbh i want to know what michael would do if you tried this with him

YES yes yes!! Fucking love soft Jason and hand kinks so this is perfect! Sorry it’s a bit longer than I wanted up I think it is worth it all... Enjoy :) Also what is with the severe lack of Jason hand pics???

MASTERLIST

JASON AND MICHAEL REACT TO S/O KISSING THEIR HANDS

JASON VOORHEES

The sun peaked through the evergreens and aspen trees making wonderous shadows on the cabin floors with a golden glow. Little bluebirds chirped and sung their songs as the crows cawed loudly calling for their master to give them corpses to feed on. Soft breathing filled the room, and you stirred awake, slowly opening your eyes to morning light, and the trees swaying in the breeze brushing against the old glass of the cabin windows.

Carefully rolling over to your side you saw your gentle giant tangled in the sheets beside you, he was so peaceful, so grounded. He reminded you of a fallen log in the forest, quiet, still, large and almost sinking into the bed like the muddy soil. It was a rare sight seeing him asleep before or after you. Jason was laying on his back shirtless, head on the pillow and mouth slightly agape breathing gently, his one hand lay on his chest as the other is almost clutching the sheets beside him.

You smiled taking in his soft presence, reaching for his large hand, brushing your fingertips along the back of his hand and down long thick fingers. Feeling every scar and rough patch of skin, tracing shapes into them. Jason’s eyes fluttered open at the soft touch, no matter how long he was with you a gentle touch still made him a little jumpy. Turning his head your eyes locked together, pulling a small smirk out of him, every morning waking up with you was his heaven.

Jason brought his free hand to embrace your jaw, so large it almost completely covering half of your face. Moving it slowly down your features as you kissed his wrist and palm, he melted under your love and kindness to him. Taking his thick wrist in both of your small hands you pulled his hand back, just examining it, every scar telling a different story, and every finger different from the last. Some were completely smooth with scars showing no trace of fingerprints, some were calloused with a jagged nail sticking out, others you could feel the bone threatening to break the skin.

Resting your palm on his, the tips of your fingers only reached to his second knuckle and you watched in fascination as he folded over his fingers on yours. Pulling his hand to your soft lips you kissed every scar, every finger and traced the wound in his palm. Jason just watched as you worshipped him and wished that he could tell you just how much he loved you.

To him his hands were disgusting, a symbol of everything bad he had ever done, whatever he touched seemed to die by them, and then there was the excruciating painful memory of seeing his hands scratch and claw through the water to the light before he died. But to you they were everything that made him Jason; Skillful, delicate, trusting, reliable. He could create anything with those hands and he could take away just as easily with them. A delicious combination of brutality and altruism.     

MICHAEL MYERS

Rain fell slowly in the dark night, only being seen by streetlamps and on house windows. There was no moon, no stars just the caliginous dark engulfing the town of Haddonfield. A golden glow illuminated the living room from the standing lamp to your right curving over the couch where you sat, reading your book, quietly. The clock on the wall seemingly becoming louder with each tick as you just tried to concentrate on the words of the yellowed pages, you were looking at them but it just looked like a foreign language. Somewhere you knew screams were howled through the night and blood was pouring from some pour souls throat, and yet somehow you missed him, craved his hands on you.  

Growing tired you contemplated going to bed without him, as you did a hundred times before. Sometimes Michael never came home until sunrise, but the bed just never felt right without him letting his large figure encompass your small body. Instead you decided you run yourself a hot bath waiting for your mans return, leaving the doors unlocked and the lights on for him, even though he could see perfectly in the dark.

Easing yourself into the steamy water now sloshing around you, warming your body and hitting the parts you didn’t even know were cold. Moaning as you settled in, tension fleeing your frame and sinking further and further into the water, head resting against the cool tile and eyes closed.

It wasn’t long until the door creaked open slowly, there he was. Observing you as rain and blood dripped on the tiles from his night out. His dark eyes met with yours as you softly smiled at him, but fear started to well up inside you, after kills you were just his next piece of prey.  

Silently he approached you, hovering over you with a head tilt, surveying your naked body and the steam that left it. Droplets of scarlet fell into the hot water around you, and with one swift motion he pulled his pale mask off throwing it on the counter; His brown hair fell loosely around his chiselled features, allowing you to see his scars and two different colored eyes.

Kneeling down to your level unzipping half of his coveralls freeing his muscular arms and torso, groaning as he did it, either from soreness or the steamy air around him. Michael smoothed his rough cold hands against your chest and arms, smearing the blood he had chased for, it bloomed around you in the water and made it murky.

His hands became a kink for you from the beginning of your cruel relationship, they were so large compared to yours, one of them could almost wrap completely around your throat, the cool veins and tendons in them were animalistic in nature making you want everything they could do. Michael’s hands alone had devasted the town and he held that with pride; not only could they maim and torture, but they were so skillful like a perfected craft, delicate in their movements betraying the forceful grip. They have made you feel pleasure like no other along with pure pain.

Slowly you took one of his large hands from the water and gently grazed it along your lips, feeling every scar and vein, bringing the kisses onward against his knuckles and tasting the copper and devastation. Michael was tense and not once left his cold gaze from your warm one, it felt good to have someone slowly worship him but he rather just take you roughly and his way. The other hand shot up to be placed around your throat tightening and forcing you to be still, while the other pulled away and tucked itself between your thighs. His eyes saying you want to try that again?    

[sometimesrosy]

I guess last episode was the final straw for you? Was the whole past season just slowly deteriorating or was there one moment or scene or something that just ruined it? Sorry about all this, it really sucks that this show had such a chance to pull through and just didn't.

No actually. Final straw for me on a show is when I stop watching it. Sometimes those final straws have nothing to do with the show but with, say, my dish company dropping HBO (GOT) or my not being able to watch on a certain night. More often the final straw is an accumulation of issues in the narrative.

Like, when I figure out that there’s an “issue” with a show, I then keep watching it, to make sure I’m right and “find evidence” for that interpretation. I put that in scare quotes because if I’m not writing meta, the finding evidence is just seeing a scene and going, “yeah, no.” 

So I guess that did happen with Madi’s story. But since it’s the last episode, I’m going to keep watching because I want to see what they’re going to try to do to pull all those dropped narrative threads together.

And I also can’t analyze the car wreck unless I see where all those wreckages land and which ones blow up and which ones make it out of the mess.

Everything was going fine until Bellamy came back.

Or, well, everything was FIXABLE until they brought Bellamy back and never attempted to bring the Bellamy, Clarke or Bellarke narrative back. 

I just need to see what happens until it is no longer fixable for me. Even if they give Clarke some sort of happy ending through some cheap reversal (another reversal) I suppose it’s no longer fixable for me. They murdered Bellamy’s character with a brainwashing and gave up on him. Then they tortured Clarke’s character by sending her right back down that hell of love=death that she climbed out of in season 6. 

It looks like they’re going to make it worth it for Raven and Murphy and Miller and Jackson, but they’re going to make Clarke sacrifice EVERYONE she loves and then herself.

And this is NOT the bittersweet ending we were promised. This is an outright tragedy for the hero and the secondary hero, and THAT’S who we’re supposed to identify with. But somehow, NOTHING Clarke did made anything better, NOTHING she sacrificed was worth it. She NEVER achieved her goal of being the good guy. Bellamy NEVER achieved his goal of peace or living a good life or protecting those he loved. 

BUT, let me get to the end and see what they consider a “bittersweet” ending is.

I like this story, The 100. The abrupt about face from it being about Clarke, and her relationship with Bellamy, and how they save humanity in the apocalypse, to it being an ensemble show about those who used to be the secondary characters, and relegating the heroes down to just part of the ensemble, means that they stopped telling their narrative. The only one who’s had a consistent narrative is actually Murphy. Maybe Indra, although she has much more this season than usual. Raven’s story has been floundering the last couple of years. Octavia has faded as a character this season and gotten kind of blandified. Echo is just a Strong Female Character (and that is not a compliment.) Emori’s character was good though. 

Except for Raven (who lost her focus before this mess,) it seems the closer the characters were to Bellamy and/or Clarke, the less their narrative was consistent.

Even so, it was enjoyable to watch the ensemble stories. Each separate episode was good. But as a whole, they didn’t have the narrative backbone. 

This show was always told around the center of the duo protagonists, Clarke and Bellamy. Bellamy saved Clarke and Clarke saved humanity. The head and the heart. The leaders of The 100, doing it “together.” By removing the focus from Clarke and Bellamy, they lost the backbone of their story. Backbone. That’s JR’s word. And that’s what we saw. 

TBH my first worry that they were not just wrapping up the side stories and building backstory was Bellamy’s episode on Etherea. Everyone was happy to see him, but the story was boring. It was a straight action piece and had no connection to the long term narrative or anyone else in the show. It did not convincingly show his brainwashing, but showed a vision of his mom and then expected us to think that’s all that was needed. It was a cheap reversal, not character development. 

I still thought they could get things back, but they never did. And when they killed him, and had Clarke do it... for nothing... with no emotional weight to the scene and no resolution to Clarke and Bellamy’s relationship, the head and the heart, the backbone of the story except, “so much for ‘together’,” that was bad.

There were STILL possibilities to bring it back around, and I was waiting to see if they took them. Then Madi went to sacrifice herself, and yes that was in character, and Clarke lost her, and she ended up being tortured by Cadogan simply to see his daughter again and Clarke found her totally, permanently paralyzed.

I get it. We want Clarke flattened. We want everything to be taken from her and we want her to be responsible for ALL the death and ALL the trauma and ALL the destruction...

Why again? Why is she to blame for all this? When all along all these things were being forced upon her and she was trying to make the best of things andn choose the best of bad choices and keep everyone alive and she sacrificed herself again and again and to allow them all to survive? WHY? For her choices to be WRONG all this time and for her to lose everyone? Because she loved Madi too much? hmph. 

Okay, let me see how it all ends up to see the “message” they are trying to send, their moral of the story, but I honestly don’t see how they can pull back from this madi storyline.  the only way is another cheap reversal with a deus ex machina from some magic aliens or “and then she woke up” from some anomaly trip or fear simulation. Those are valid endings, but they are never really satisfying because it doesnt’ work the story through a deserved ending but places it on top of the story being told as a way to get out of a mess the storyteller got themselves into. 

Oh also. That ‘inside man’ should have been Bellamy, not dumbass Levitt, with the fake love story. I mean rushed. Listen I HATE the “i fell in love while torturing you/being tortured by you” story. That is messed up. There is no resonance for that relationship. 

Listen. I’m trying not to analyze too much because I need to know where they’re going with all this in order to analyze it, since they are no longer following the story they laid out for six seasons.

I was trusting they’d get back to the story until they brought Clarke and Bellamy back together and then they killed the heart of the story and the brain is now functioning without a working heart (coincidentally the exact state of Emori’s health right now,) and tore the backbone out of the narrative.

If there was more than one episode left I probably would be done, because I’m not into torture porn. And if there’s no transformation with the pain Clarke is going through then it’s just torture.

So now what? I don’t know. But they screwed up their story. I’ll get back to you when I process the finale.

[cto10121]

The bad Shakespeare takes keep coming, I see. This one had the cleverness to couch itself as a personal narrative (makes it much more interesting, tbh). But as bad Shakespeare takes are my bread and butter, my boon and bane, mamma mia here we go again, with Merchant of Venice.

“But those who thought the play was irredeemably antisemitic were, the consensus went, vulgar and whiny—​and, completely coincidentally, they were also Jewish, which somehow magically invalidated their opinions on this subject.”

I’m glad (is that even the right word?) this author found scholars that don’t think this play is anti-Semitic, but my experience with scholarship has been way more mixed than that. Suffice to say, this is literally all the play is known for these days, and views of the play as anti-Semitic are everywhere (Rosenbaum even had a hot take that since the Nazis liked it, it must be anti-Semitic). Didn’t know Harold Bloom thinks this play is anti-Semitic, though. That in itself is a bit of a red flag, as Bloom is a notoriously poor reader of Shakespeare.

“[I]n Merchant, Portia unhappily fulfills her father’s requirements of her suitors, while in Il Pecorone, the lady enjoys drugging her suitors and robbing them blind. By removing this detail, Shakespeare removed the suggestion that malicious schemers come from all walks of life.”

Or, by removing this detail, Shakespeare removed the clear and abhorrent sexism of his original source that turned a woman robbed of her autonomy by her father’s will into a criminal. It’s almost as if you’re damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

“Dr. Lopez, one of the most respected physicians of the 16th century, had indiscreetly revealed that he once treated the Earl of Essex for venereal disease. The earl took revenge by framing Dr. Lopez for treason and arranging for his torture; while on the rack, Dr. Lopez “confessed”—​though “like a Jew,” as the court record states, he denied all charges at trial, while the attorney for the Crown referred to him matter-​of-​factly as “a perjuring murdering traitor and Jewish doctor.”

This is a very twisted account of the Lopez affair and Essex’s motives in going against him, at least to my understanding. For context, Lopez was accused of receiving loads of money from the King of Spain to poison Queen Elizabeth.

According to Stephen Greenblatt, in Will of the World: “Essex had tried some years before to recruit Lopez as a secret agent. Lopez’s refusal—he chose instead directly to inform the queen—may have been prudent, but it created in the powerful earl a very dangerous enemy. After his arrest, he was initially imprisoned at Essex House and interrogated by the earl himself. But Lopez had powerful allies in the rival faction of the queen’s senior adviser William Cecil, Lord Burghley, and his son, Robert Cecil, who also participated in the interrogation and reported to the queen that the charges against her physician were baseless.” Lopez apparently had been taken bribes from various sources, and confessed (freely? under torture?) “that he had indeed entered into a treasonous-sounding negotiation with the king of Spain, but he insisted that he had done so only in order to cozen the king out of his money.” Weird.

Greenblatt isn’t a historian, though, and Essex was indeed an asshole to Lopez, (and for what is worth, I feel Lopez was innocent; I just get those vibes) but so far I can find no other source that Essex actively framed Lopez. Most likely he did some sleuthing, dug up some questionable, compromising stuff, and tried to blow a hearth flame into a firestorm.

“After all, the historical record gives Queen Elizabeth a cookie for dawdling on signing Dr. Lopez’s death warrant; her doubts about his guilt even led her to mercifully allow his family to keep his property, not unlike the equally merciful Duke of Venice in Shakespeare’s play.”

Again, Lopez had powerful allies (doesn’t get much higher than Burghley), and again, re: Greenblatt: “According to court observers, Elizabeth gave Essex a tongue-lashing, ‘calling him rash and temerarious youth, to enter into a matter against the poor man, which he could not prove, and whose innocence she knew well enough.’” A cupcake, then?

“And it is of course entirely unclear whether this trial and public humiliation of an allegedly greed-​driven Jew attempting to murder an upstanding Christian, rapturously reported in the press with myriad antisemitic embellishments, had anything at all to do with Shakespeare’s play about the trial and public humiliation of a greed-​driven Jew attempting to murder an upstanding Christian—​which Shakespeare composed shortly after Dr. Lopez decomposed. Most likely these things were completely unrelated.”

Nearly all the major Shakespeare biographies and articles I’ve read literally and explicitly talks about the possible influence of Lopez’s execution on Merchant of Venice and names it as an inspiration: Greenblatt, (he even headcanons that Shakespeare watched the execution!) Bate, Ackroyd. That’s how Horn managed to ping my BS radar something awful—because I had read about it, many times, even if it was mentioned in passing. It’s solid, legit Shakespearean academic fanon. The sarcasm is really unwarranted, and childish besides.

“It was damned hard to hear the nuance while parsing lines like “Certainly the Jew is the very devil incarnal,” or “My master’s a very Jew; give him a present, give him a halter,” or explaining what Shylock meant when he planned to “go in hate, to feed upon / The prodigal Christian.”

The first two are the fool’s, Lancelot’s, lines, I think. As for Shylock’s hatred toward Christians, while ugly, it’s entirely understandable given the Christian characters’ treatment of him pre-play and during it (Antonio spitting on Shylock’s gaberdine and then asking him to borrow money from him is called out by Shylock himself for its sheer hypocrisy). It also fits Shylock’s character as an unassimilated Jew, resenting Christian hypocrisy and racism.

“The actor began the brief soliloquy that every English-​speaking Jew is apparently meant to take as a compliment: ‘I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? . . . ​If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?’

“Wait, that’s the part where he’s more human?”

[…]“Sure,” I told my son, game-​facing him back in the rearview. “He’s reminding us how he’s like everyone else. He’s a normal person with normal feelings.”

My son laughed. “You seriously fell for that?”

[…] “What do you mean?”

“Shylock’s just saying he wants revenge! Like, ‘Oh, yeah? If I’m a regular human, then I get to be eee-​vil like a regular human!’ This is the evil monologue thing that every supervillain does! ‘I’ve had a rough life, and if you were me you would do the same thing, so that’s why I’m going to KILL BATMAN, mu-​hahaha!’ He’s just manipulating the other guy even more!”

And then the crowd applauded, Harold Bloom cried, and the mayor gave the author’s six-year-old son a gold medal for his Brave Hot Take. Honestly, this was the most unbelievable part of the essay I’ve read. Unless this kid has been reading academic essays on MoV that posit this exact same interpretation (“Shylock was just using humanistic rhetoric to justify his ~bloodthirsty revenge!”), this one’s for a fake Internet stories anthology. Shylock may be a dour, miserable pain in the ass, but he is no Barabas, an actual anti-Semitic caricature—he has a character, and a recognizably human one, and the play bears it out that he is right in his anger.

“I reviewed the other moments scholars cite to prove Shylock’s “humanity.” There were two lines of Shylock treasuring his dead wife’s ring, unlike the play’s Christian men who give their wives’ rings away. But unlike the other men, Shylock never gets his ring back—​because his daughter steals it, and becomes a Christian, and inherits what remains of his estate at the play’s triumphant end.”

Er, this is a non sequitur—that last has nothing to do with the first. The point is, Shylock doesn’t give away his ring; the fact that his daughter stole it means nothing to his treasuring it. It may be proof of the play’s marginalization of Shylock (which accurately if sadly reflects real-life systematic marginalization), but not his humanity. Shakespeare just doesn’t do backstories, even for major characters, so it is significant that he gave Shylock a wife/beloved in the first place.

“Finally, scholars point to the many times Shylock explains why he is so revolting: Christians treat him poorly, so he returns the favor. But for this to satisfy, one must accept that Jews are revolting to begin with, and that their repulsiveness simply needs to be explained.”

This makes absolutely no sense at all. If one accepts Jews are inherently revolting, then no explanation need be given for when a Jewish character acts revolting! The racist accepts the revolting Jewish characterization without qualm. The fact that the play insists on his grievance is significant.

“We listened together as Shylock went to court to extract his pound of flesh; as the heroine, chirping about the quality of mercy, forbade him to spill the Christian’s blood as he so desperately desired; as the court confiscated his property, along with his soul through forced conversion; as the play’s most cherished characters used his own words to taunt and demean him, relishing their vanquishing of the bloodthirsty Jew.”

YMMV, but to me there are no cherished characters in this play. That’s the whole point! Everyone is so mired in this dreary capitalist materialism that denigrates genuine human connection into mere transaction. Everything to these characters is money, money, money (and class), or at least tainted by it. Shylock is simply the most overt (and honest) of the lot. Love relationships, religion are impoverished; Portia and Bassanio are scarcely more suited than Portia and her other suitors. Shylock and Antonio are Jews and Christians in-name-only: They are capitalists first and foremost. Portia is a smarter, more likable Karen. Lancelot isn’t funny. Jessica is okay, but her leaving her father is framed as a asshole moment at least in one instance. Portia is probably the most lovable, but she has her asshole moments too. There are no truly awful characters, but you don’t need to demonize and dehumanize your whole cast into two-dimensional racists just to make a point.

Merchant of Venice is not the best of plays. It is one of Shakespeare’s experiments, a proto-problem play before his Jacobean era, using dark comedy and a slight bent of farce to explore and elucidate social issues, racism and discrimination, chiefly. At least it tries, anyway. Taming of the Shrew is the first proto-problem play done completely farcical, which at least makes it compelling in a slapstick-satire way; Merchant is much more sociologically astute, but also more dull and coolly distant even from its own concerns. I don’t blame anyone, much less Jewish people, for not liking the play or thinking it a masterpiece. I myself don’t, though for reasons that have nothing to do with the usual ones. I like what Shakespeare was trying to do and I think he did some things very well. It has ambition and thought. But I feel like for most of it Shakespeare was on writing autopilot while mentally looking around for something a bit meatier to adapt and develop. It’s a jogging-in-one-place play; he has a couple of those.

In sum: Author argues for complicated play’s anti-Semitism, ends up just saying the racist slurs by the flawed/asshole Christian characters made her and her son uncomfortable (feat. A distorted and even misleading account of the Lopez affair). Plus some internalized anti-Semitism to sort through, methinks.

[bngtanah]

Unpredictable | VMIN

summary: vmin’s temwork is legendary

part of the EXPECTATION! oneshot collection.

pairing: jimin x reader x taehyung genre: pwp(smut) words: 3.1k warning: smut, fwb(?), threesome, unrealistic sex tbh, oral (m+f), after care (the barest amount), unprotected sex, double penetration, anal, mentions of alcohol. a/n: yeah idk what this is but...i wrote it and now you guys have to deal with it too lmao.

You let out a gasp as they gently push you onto your back. Taehyung and Jimin both follow you into Taehyung’s bedroom like wolves stalking their prey. Your gasp turns into soft moans as they bombard your body with kisses from every direction. Anticipation fills your body as you think of what’s about to happen between the three of you. You had been friends, plus more, with both of them for long enough to know that they could definitely hold their own in a one-on-one session, but there was something almost magical about how well they worked together.

Kneeling at the end of the bed, Jimin pressed butterfly kisses on each of your feet, sending tingles throughout your body.

Just inches above, Taehyung nipped at your stomach, smirking when goosebumps started to appear after every flick of his tongue. Your back arches, causing your torso to rise off the bed just slightly and he leaned over you, his hands on either side of your torso.

You tensed when Jimin moved onto one of your legs, leisurely leaving a trail of kisses from your ankle up to your inner thigh. For a brief second you think he’s going to move onto the sensitive flesh at the apex of your thighs, but he pulls away and reroutes his attention to your other leg. Your eyes briefly meet and when you see the smug look on his angelic face, you know he plans on torturing you tonight.

Taehyung inflicts his own form of torture when his mouth moves to the valley of skin between your breasts, purposely avoiding kissing your actual  breasts, before delicately kissing your collarbone. He finds a home there, biting and licking your skin until he pulled back and pressed a kiss to your lips and then your neck. 

You realize at that moment that they must planned this. Some sick kind of payback for leaving them horny and frustrated when you decided to spend the night entertaining the flirtations of a group of boys that weren’t the two of them. You weren’t really surprised; they always got like this when you made them jealous. You would be lying if you didn’t admit that you enjoyed it when they did.

Despite the pleasure pulsing through your body, you somehow managed to use one hand to grip Jimin’s hair while using the other to grab Taehyung’s darker locks. You give them both a tug and immediately two sets of intense eyes are staring up at you.

“What’s wrong?” Taehyung is the first to speak, that trademark smirk on his face.

“You two are doing this because I didn’t give you enough attention when we went out?” You arch an eyebrow at them.

"We have no idea what you’re talking about, do we Tae Tae?.” Jimin protested, throwing an innocent glance to Taehyung as he stroked your inner thigh.

“I think you do.” You answer.

“Looks like our girl is feeling guilty for leaving us, Jiminie.” Taehyung teased and shifted his body so that he was beside you.

“Yeah she is. Maybe she regrets ignoring us all night after all.” Jimin grinned at his friend and moved to occupy the space on your other side.

“I told both of you I didn’t want to go out and yet you forced me. You got exactly what you deserved.” You glanced back and forth between them.

“What do you think, Jimin? Should we give her what you wants?”

“I don’t know, I think it would be better if she felt a hint of what we were feeling first.”

You roll your eyes when they share a wicked grin, only to gasp happily when they both dive for a breast at the same time. Your nipples harden as they suck on the dark brown buds and send a surge of pleasure to each mound. You feels herself grow wetter when their erections press into your thighs and you subconsciously spread you legs, hoping one of them will put your out of your misery.

Neither of them do, instead Jimin lets go of your breast and moved down so his head was between your legs. Though it isn’t exactly what you had been hoping for, Jimin eating you out is the very next best thing.

As Jimin devours your pussy, licking and lapping at your tender flesh, You glance at Taehyung silently watching you inhale with laboured breaths.

 “Are you just going to watch or are you going to come up here?”

Taehyung responded by kissing you heatedly, his tongue tangling with yours. You moan into his mouth when Jimin latches onto your clit and sucks on it repeatedly. Once again Taehyung grabs one of your breasts and your kiss grows even wilder until you pull away to catch your breath.

You give him a pointed look and Taehyung immediately knows exactly what you want. He moved quickly so he was kneeling in front of your face and maneuvered himself so his cock is above your head, grunting when you grab his ass with one hand and wrap your mouth around him.

“Oh, Fuck...” Taehyung growls as his back arched and his eyes roll beneath his lids. It didn’t matter how many times you gave him head, it always feels like the first time every time you wrap your lips around him. The possessive part of him always wondered how you got to be so good at it, how many men before him got to experience your heavenly mouth but the rest of him was just glad that he and Jimin were the only ones enjoying your oral skills these days.

You have to shut your eyes as well when Jimin’s lips move up and down your slit before lapping up the arousal that dripped from you. He snarled, sending vibrations through your inner walls and you tighten your thighs around his head. Jimin continued to lick, kiss, and lap up your wetness, gradually finding his way to that certain spot he knew would make you erupt.

Higher on the bed, You deep throat Taehyung, using your hand to cup his balls. Wanting him riled up, You pull up until your mouth his only wrapped around the tip of him before taking him fully into your mouth again. You do this several times, enjoying the growls and grunts that fell from his mouth.

You let out a loud moan of your own when Jimin hits the spot that sends sparks dancing behind your eyelids and you are pushed over the edge, climaxing hard against his face. Your moans send vibrations to Taehyung’s cock and he feels his balls clench tightly just before he comes as well, his release spilling into your mouth and down your throat.

Once he comes down from his high Taehyung collapsed next to you, a toothy grin on his face.

Jimin pressed one more kiss to your folds before he crawled up your body and pressed a kiss to your neck. Despite your recent orgasm, you find that you feel just as hot as you had been before they got started.

“Can you take me now  or do you need more time?” He asks softly. Jimin was always so caring and emphatic, as much as he wanted you, he was willing to wait for you to be ready again if you needed him to.

“I can take you to heaven and back Ji,” You replied just as softly, touched by how considerate he was. Both of them were actually, which had surprised you initially, considering their reputations. But you quickly learned that they were both more than eager to please when it came to you.

“Okay.” Jimin smiled before pushing himself deep inside of you. He paused for a moment, wanting to savour the feeling of you two joined together. After a while he moves cautiously, pumping in and out of you at a steady pace.

“Oh...” You moan when your eyes meet and you see the passion burning behind them. Never one just to spectate, you move your hips against his, making sure your bodies brush against each other every time they met. Wanting him deeper inside of you, you hook your legs around his back and exhaled with relief when his cock was buried inside you.

Jimin grunted every time he thrust into you and your inner walls clenched tighter around him. Soon it became more difficult for him to push inside of you and he knew it wouldn’t be long before you came.

You moan in time to his grunts, their pace growing faster and faster. With a gentle finger you turn his face so he was looking down at you and wrapped your arms around his neck to drag him down for a passionate kiss, unable to resist the siren call of his pillow soft lips. Jimin return it eagerly until you pulled back for air. Your head fell back when Jimin bucked up inside of you, going even deeper than he had been before.

When your eyes meet again you’re almost taken aback by the emotion you saw in them.

“You feel so good, Y/N. I can never get enough of you.” He whispered as his hips moved faster and harder.

“I’ll never get enough of you either,” You respond just before your climax hits. “Jimin!” You cried, your hot walls clenching tight around his probing shaft as he thrust inside you hard and quick, expertly claiming your body as his. 

A few more thrusts was all it took for Jimin to fly over edge with with you, spilling himself deep inside of you. Once your breath leveled out Jimin pulled out of you before rolling back onto his side of the bed. Before You had a chance to catch your breath, Taehyung moved between your legs and plunged inside of you, replacing Jimin. “It’s my turn now.”

Unlike Jimin’s more leisurely pace, Taehyung did the opposite and slammed into you frantically. You latched onto him and hissed blissfully, loving this side of him no matter how much it stung. The feeling of him rutting inside you was well worth the momentary pain, and you were mostly used to this by now. In fact, the last time the three of you had been together, Jimin was the more frantic one while Taehyung took his time, it pleased you that sex with them was anything short of predictable.

You wrapped your legs around his waist and he pushed deeper inside of you. His pace was fast, much faster than Jimin’s and he was happy that the familiarity you two enjoyed allowed him to be rough with you at times.

His pace became so frenzied that it covered his body with both your and his own sweat. He moved a hand down to your clit and stroked, smirking when you twitched against him. You braced yourself as another orgasm crept closer and closer, your walls quivering and clamping tightly around Taehyung’s shaft.

“Y/N!” He yelled out his nickname for you as he came and your walls milked him dry.

“Uhhh…huh…” You whined into the darkness, and curled your toes upwards. “Yess!” You rasped, and snapping your eyes shut, your chest heaving with strained breaths as the spring that had coiled within you released and your pent up juices coursed freely down both of your legs. You writhed; your thighs quivering as your walls squeezed tight around his thick shaft, holding him deep inside you while you rode out your hot orgasm.

“I like it when you two get jealous” You giggled and stroked Jimin’s cheek while brushing back a few dark locks from Taehyung’s forehead.

“We know.” Jimin admitted with a nod.

“And that’s why we came up with the plan to get you as aroused as possible the moment we got you back home.” Taehyung revealed with small smile.

“Seriously? That’s what you two were thinking about while you were brooding in the corner?” You asked, slightly indignant as you shifted underneath Taehyung’s body.

“Yeah,” Jimin shrugged as he pressed a kiss to your wrist. “You knew what you were doing. Letting all those sleazy men buy you drinks and whisper in your ear.” Jimin’s lips twitched with anger just slightly while he spoke.

“And you know how much we hate that. Don’t you , Y/N?” Taehyung stroked your breast, groaning when your walls tightened around him.

“I might have an inkling.” Turned on, You stretched your arms above your head and gazed up at both men lustily. “So what do you plan to do with me now?”

You frowned when Taehyung pulled out of you and rolled onto his back.

Jimin shifted to his knees and pulled you onto his lap so that his erection was pressed against your thigh, somehow still aroused. You grumbled with frustration when he did nothing but smile at you and then glance at Taehyung over your shoulder. You could hear the younger man fumbling around with something behind you, though Jimin kept your attention on him so that you didn’t turn around to look. The sound of a bottle being capped made your eyebrow jump upward and Jimin pressed a gentle kiss to your lips before you had the chance to ask what they were planning.

“Are you ready, Tae?” He mumbled against your skin and looked behind you once more, the sadistic grin on his lips making your legs tremble with anticipation. When the pad of Taehyung’s thumb gently slots between your ass cheeks to softly caress the skin of your perineum, spreading a salve of cool lube against you, you know exactly what they’re planning.

“Yeah.”

Almost as if they practiced, Jimin slowly lowered you down until Taehyung’s cock was pressed against the opening of your ass. You gasped loudly and immediately tensed up as he slowly entered you, his intrusion eased by the healthy amount of lube spread over his cock.

“Relax for me baby,”Taehyung whispered in a sultry voice against your skin. Inch by inch he  carefully pushed himself in, until you finally relaxed against him. Once he was fully seated inside of you, you moaned softly loving the fill of him snug inside of you. After giving you a few moments to acclimate to the familiar but undoubtedly shocking sensation, Jimin gently pushed you back until Taehyung wrapped his arms around from behind you so your back was resting against his chest as much as it could. The moment you're situated, Jimin in front of you, his face hovering mere centimetres above your lips.

You tremble the moment you realize you’re pressed between your two best friends, friends that were devoted to you in every possible way. Your legs spread and you welcome the feeling of Jimin thrusting inside you once more. You always felt the most complete at moments like this, like the three of you were connected in a way no one else could understand.

A loud moan tumbled from your lips when both men started to move. They moved slowly, obviously showing concern for any discomfort you might have been feeling and while you appreciated the consideration this wasn’t your first time at the rodeo and their careful movements soon grew to not be enough for you. “Harder,” You plead breathlessly.

Immediately both men start to move faster, moving their hips against your in a coordinated rhythm.

“Oh fuck!” you whimper as you pull Jimin tighter to your chest.

"That's it, Y/N." Jimin sighed as Taehyung pushed in and out of you, feeling every push because of the section of flesh that separated them.

The more they moved, the louder you moaned, you could already feel you skin beginning to become marked and two pairs of hands groped and moved over your body but you didn't care. The pleasure you were feeling at that moment was more than worth it. Your body begin to tense and the coiling feeling deep within your center grow impossibly tight, causing you to reach forward for Jimin’s hair and backward to grab onto Taehyung's bicep to hold on for dear life, a tell tale sign that you were barreling towards your third orgasm of the night “I-I’m comi-” You muttered, barely able to force the words out of her throat before your head spun round and round and your gaze locked onto the ceiling of Taehyung’s bedroom as you felt yourself become undone. You felt like you were floating, but somehow grounded at the same time. A deep, body-shuddering tingle resided between your legs.

First Taehyung, then Jimin followed suit, releasing themselves into you and filling you to the brim before they finally came down from their highs. Jimin was the first to move, pulling away from your body and once again falling back onto his side of the bed. Taehyung is the next to come back to reality and much like his counterpart he carefully he lifts you off his cock and places you between himself and Jimin before lying down in his own spot.

You were the last to open your eyes or move, still exhausted after everything that’s happened tonight. You shift slightly and winced, immediately regretting that action and drawing the attention of the men on your sides.

Without giving you a chance to say no, both men get up and disappear into the apartment, searching to make some attempt to alleviate your pain. Jimin was the first to return with a small warm towel to wipe down your tired and sensitive flesh, once he’s finished Taehyung was kneeling next to you and motioning for you to lift your arms so that he could dress you in one of his over sized sweatshirts. One he knew you enjoyed wearing.

 “Thanks.” You smiled at them.

“You’re welcome.” They reply simultaneously.

They return your smile and return to encompass your body. You rest your head on Jimin’s chest, your lips curling further upward when he wraps his arm around your waist and strokes your back. Taehyung sidled up next to you and spooned against your back, gently kissing your neck and shoulders all the while whispering sweet words of how perfect you were to both of them in your ear. Your lips parted to respond and reciprocate all of Taehyung’s kinds compliments but Jimin pressed a gentle finger to the cleft of your lips before you had the chance. 

“Shh, get some rest, we took a lot out of you.” He advised and placed his palm against your chin “You can tell us how great we are in the morning, preferably with breakfast.” He giggled and honestly wish you had the energy to argue with him. But you didn’t and it only took seconds for you to lose the battle your were fighting against sleep, drifting off into serene unconsciousness with your favourite boys covering over your body.

[anjanettexcordonia]

Ties That Bind

**Trigger Warnings** 

DARK DARK DARK 

-NSFW/Mental Health/Violence/Rape Minimal fluff if any at all tbh. 

***If you are sensitive to any of these please do not read. 

Pairing: Liam x MC, Liam x Riley, Drake x Olivia 

Word Count: 4,189 (I know its forever long but its worth it in my biased opinion) 

This is my first time writing any kind of fiction. I was inspired by all of you amazing writers! I received positive feedback on this chapter so I’m hoping you all like it too! Its very dark and very very twisted. I can not emphasize it enough. 

**READ WITH CAUTION**

Excuse any grammatical errors or misspellings. 

This will be a six part series. I do not have a timeline for when I will post. (I’m a mom & work full time) 

Disclaimer: All characters belong to Pixelberry.

“Riley it’s time to go, My Queen.” Liam yells from the first floor of their quarters. “Drake & Olivia are already almost to Lythikos with our children and we are still at the palace! Let’s goooooo my love!”

Riley & Liam were preparing to head to their Valtorian Estate for a night before heading to the United States for a week long excursion at their Biltmore Estate in North Carolina. The Biltmore was their American private residence. Left to her after the death of her mother. They went twice a year just the two of them. Their children had never stepped foot on the property. Much less America. Riley hated America. She used the country only to satiate her needs. Her father and sister never visited the Biltmore Estate. Her father primarily lived in his penthouse in New York. Her sister never left their childhood home in the Hamptons. The Biltmore was hers to do with as she pleased. 

Riley and Liam make their way down to a blacked out Cadillac Escalade waiting for them in the Royal private exit of the garage. 

“Liam, let’s call Drake & Olivia one more time before we get to Valtoria. You know after tonight we won’t be communicating with anyone for a full week.” Riley winked at Liam. 

My God this woman is my everything. How did I survive without her? Liam thought. 

Liam pulls out his iPhone and scrolls to Olivia's name and hits call. 

“Yes your majesty,” Olivia purrs into the phone.

 “Hello Liv, just checking on the kids. You and Drake know Riley and I will be incognito for a week. Remember if it’s an emergency reach out to Hana and Maxwell. Do not contact us unless it’s literally life or death.” Drake yells through the phone, “Li we do this twice year every year since the first little squirt you two brought home. We got this. By the way what exactly do you guys do in America that you’ve never told us?” 

“This trio is a joy. They are perfectly fine. Uncle Max is on his way with Auntie Hana. This should be a Mary Poppins nightmare.” Olivia chuckled.

“It’s just our special time. Not as King and Queen of Cordonia but as husband and wife. That’s all.” Riley replies. Liam squeezing Riley’s thigh at her smirk, knowing full well that wasn’t exactly true. 

“Tell our babies we love them, and take care of and protect them while we’re gone. Don’t let Max feed them too much sugar. They will never sleep!”

Always,” Drake softly spoke, “Uncle Drake and Aunt Livvy are going to show them how fun we really are!” Ellie squeals in the background at her Uncle. 

Liam & Riley end the call with a sigh of relief. This trip was going to be catalyst. They both knew they were coming back to Cordonia forever changed. 

Three hours later Valtoria came into view. The sun was beginning to set over the cascading waterfall behind the large castle. Riley and Liam had been catching up on last minute emails before they arrived. They had an understanding between each other that during their two weeks a year no work was allowed. No cellphones other than 1 for emergencies only. No laptops no tablets of any sort. They completely unplug. 

Bastien stopped the suv in front of the large estate. Liam hopped out running around to hold the car door open for his wife. HIS Queen. 

Gladys met them outside the door. 

“Your majesties” Gladys dipped into a low curtsy. 

“Hello Gladys” Liam replied. Is everything ready for our stay tonight and departure in the morning?” 

“It is.” Is there anything else Your Majesty requests?” 

“No thank you Gladys.”  

As they walk towards the entrance of the large French Gothic style castle, Liam scoops Riley into his arms bridal style and walks her across the threshold. 

“Good night everyone. Gladys have our usual chicken tangine, apple butter bread, balava & chocolate cake left in the kitchen. Everyone is excused for the rest of the night.”

Gladys nodded her head at her King’s command and curtsied as he walked up the grand staircase. 

“Thank you, Gladys!” Riley yelled down at her. 

Gladys and Bastien both knew what that meant. Get out now. Do not come back until sunrise under any circumstances. Gladys and Bastien were the only two who knew. And also who knew why. 

Liam carried his bride to their suite. Their bedroom at Valtoria was protected. They had it modified during their engagement. No one was allowed entrance. Gladys was the only person granted entrance for 2 hours to clean after each visit. And only under the watchful eye of the Queen herself. This belonged to them. They maintained this room. Not staff. Not like the palace. 

The entrance of the door was built almost as a panic room. A large heavy blast proof door protected the entrance. A Handprint scan of both the King and Queen were the only way of access to their master suite. That entire room was reinforced. It was safe. Nothing and no one was coming through to hurt them. If they ever needed protection, this is where they would bring their family. For now, it wasn’t for their family. It was a source of healing and triumph. It was terror and torture. It was love and pain. 

Most of the other service members believed they were simply paranoid. Ruling a country you had a right to be paranoid, is what they told themselves when they walked by the master suite. Some were curious about what was behind that heavy steel door. No one ever attempted to sneak peek. They knew better. No one could explain it, as the king and Queen were very kind and fair people, there was a vibe or an energy that everyone could feel from them. It was uncomfortable. Sometimes there was no emotion from either of them. Hollow blank stares & flat monotone voices. That rarely happened. And when it did, their week vacation was close. Whatever they did during those 2 weeks out of the year made them better each time. 

🍈

Liam flashes his million dollar smile down at his wife as they enter. His manhood already dancing in its confines. They enter their bedroom and swiftly close the door.  Their bedroom in Valtoria is for them. And them only. No one including their children are granted access. And for good reason. The master suite of Valtoria has a large four-poster bed. Above the bed hung a large medal bar suspended from the ceiling with leather arm straps. arm and ankle straps hung from each corner of the bed. The walls were adorned with shelves of Belts, gags, riding crops and rope. There were shelves of weapons large & small daggers and swords. 

The walls were a deep maroon. It was still exceptionally regal but with a darker contrast. This is not a place most people would be comfortable walking into. Most people except the King & Queen of Cordonia. 

Liam kicked the door shut with a force that made the door trim rattle. He tossed his Queen on to the bed, climbing on top of her. He pulled her full lips into his mouth and breathed her in. He could never get enough of her. How did he survive without her? Without her touch? Her voice? Her scent? He never needed anyone except her. Only her. Forever her. No one could calm him like she could. She was his safe house and his haven. He could do things with and to her no one else could understand. Her crystal blue eyes darkened into the depths of the ocean only for him. He knew her. He was her. They were one. Not only in marriage but spirit and soul. They were connected. 

Riley stared up at her husband taking in every perfect feature and every invisible flaw, only flaws she could see. Only flaws she could love. She understood him. She never had to ask why. She was never afraid. It was Game, Set, Match the first time she locked eyes with his deep dark painful eyes. She could sense him before she ever knew him. Her long honey blonde hair pooled around her head as she sank into his fiery kiss. He was the only man she ever willingly kissed. The only man she allowed to ever touch her body. He worshipped her. He was her breath. She couldn’t breathe without him filling her lungs. He filled the deepest parts of her. Parts only he knew existed. Parts that were created not born. Evil. In every sense of the word. 

Fourteen Year Old Riley. 

“Mother, why are you crying?” Riley watches her mother standing in her large walk-in closet pouring herself another drink. 

“Just go away Katherine Riley.” Ashley sighed. Riley could her the sadness in her voice. Usually her mother just ignored her. 

“Mother I..I.. I think it’s best we all stay at school for the summer this year.” 

“I SAID GO THE FUCK AWAY! WHAT DONT YOU UNDERSTAND ABOUT THAT?”

Riley felt the sting of tears in her eyes and she quickly turned to walk away. 

“Wait Katie” Ashley sighed. “It’s time we had a conversation. You're old enough now & after the things you’ve seen and heard throughout your life, it won’t come as much of a surprise to you, I believe.” Riley turned around. Eyeing her mother not sure what to make of this conversation. 

“Your father & I had what you would call an arranged marriage per se. People of our status in life, it’s not uncommon. We dated some. A short while I suppose. Coming from the families that we do it’s important to ensure that our wealth will always continue to grow, we married after a few months of dating.” Ashley took a long sip of her gin & tonic. “To our parents' delight. Not ours. Not mine.”

“Immediately after we married things changed. I was a virgin & I wasn’t ready yet. I wanted to love my husband first. He stole that from me in the most horrific of ways. And you were the product of that. When I look at you, that’s all I see. I see violence, blood and stolen innocence. Each of your siblings were the products of the same. Violent and brutal attacks. Each time left me broken. After the last assault he shattered my pelvis and ruptured my cervix. I can no longer bear children. That’s all each of you are to me. Your father is evil. An evil which you’ve never known. Next time he will kill me. I’m leaving tonight.” 

Riley stood stunned. Trying to wrap her mind around what this woman in front of her has told her. She couldn’t understand. She knew her father tortured her mother. She had her the screams and the slams at night. She saw the blood stained carpets and walls in the stairwell in their Hamptons beach house. She knew her father was evil. All too well. Ashely has no idea the hell her children had been going through. He tormented them as well. He would sneak into her room in the middle of the night when the screams finally ended and watch her. Her brothers never spoke of their trauma but she knew it was there. 

“Can we come with you Mother?”

“No.”

“Can you wait until after my birthday? It’s tomorrow Mother?” 

Riley wasn’t sure why that memory had flashed through her mind. She furrowed her brows in confusion. 

“What is it Riley?” 

“I was thinking of the night before he killed her. Random I guess.” Liam leaned down and kissed her forehead. 

“My King” Riley sighed, holding his forearms in her grasp. 

“Yes My Queen?” 

“Are we prepared for our return to the estate?” She asked, leaning into to bite his shoulder as he hovered over. 

“We are. Our gifts are already waiting for us. They were delivered this morning. They are being fed and groomed as we speak my love. I’m ready for our warm-up before the real work begins.” 

Riley’s stomach groaned. 

“I’m ready. We can eat when we’re finished.” 

🍋

Liam pulled Riley to her feet. He tugged her top above her head. He was thankful she wasn’t wearing a bra. He leaned down taking a taut pink nipple in his mouth, swirling his tounge until it was a hardened peak. He showed the same attention to the other nipple. Riley pulled Liams t-shirt over his head. She always worshipped her playground. She licked her way between each sculpted ab. Liam gripped her hair as she slid his sweatpants to the floor. She leaned on her knees engulfing his engorged length in her mouth while she swirled her tongue all the way down his shaft.  She slowly eased him out of her mouth and stood back up. 

“Fuck Riley” 

“I just needed to taste you my King.” 

Liam bit his bottom lip as he pulled her sweatpants down. Leaving her lacy black thong on her hips. 

They walked hand in hand to the large bathroom. The bathroom sleek and modern. Liam felt the warmth of the heated floors on his feet as he lifted his Queen into the tub. He grabbed a bottle of baby oil off the counter. He poured a generous amount into his hands and covered Riley’s body in oil. He gently lifted her from the tub carrying her back to the bedroom. He climbed the small steps on to the bed standing on the mattress. Riley lifted her arms into the arm straps suspended from the high ceiling. Baby oil kept her skin protected and also made it more of a challenge for them. 

Once she was firmly secured into the arm and ankle restraints with only the medal bar for her to grip onto, Liam stepped off the bed. 

“My Queen, what pray tell interests you tonight?” 

“Torture me Liam” 

“As you wish my Queen, safe word?” 

“Celeste My King” 

Liam smirked at her chosen safe word. Oh Celeste will know who her king is too when we’re finished with her. Won’t she my Queen? 

Liam grabbed a riding crop from the wall and smacked Riley hard across her bare ass. Thong still in place. Riley winced as she heard the crack of the crop against her slick skin. 

“Please my king” 

“Shut up, you don’t speak until I tell you to open your filthy mouth for me” 

Smack. Smack. Smack. 

Liam pulled a small dagger from the bedside table. The handle adorned with red rubies in the shape of W & K. King William Constantine Rhys & Queen Katherine Riley Vanderbilt Rhys. 

He ran the dagger along her torso up to her neck tracing old subtle scars. 

“Open your mouth baby” Liam whispered. 

Riley opened her mouth. She could feel her core pooling. Moisture threatening to drip down her thighs. 

Liam slid the dagger over her flattened tongue flipping it over in her mouth. He slid the dagger down her chin to her throat. He pressed the dagger more firm into her skin causing her blood to bubble to the surface. He sliced gently to her belly button. Riley wincing in pain but loving the feel of cold dagger dragging down her flesh. 

Liam knelt to his knees and clasped his mouth around her nub. Still holding the dagger against her thigh as he gripped her. He dragged the knife across her sex and sliced her underwear in two. 

Liam delved his fingers into her sex as hard as he could. He swirled his tongue around clit. Liam pumped and curled his fingers in out of her fast and hard. His rock hard length dripping precum. 

More Liam Don’t stop.” Riley screamed. 

Hearing Riley scream made Liam abruptly stop completely. Fingers still inside her, Liam pulled his head back to look up at her. 

“Did I tell you to speak?” 

Sliding his fingers out, Liam grabbed the crop and slapped it hard across her dripping pussy. 

“You speak when I say. Next time I won’t be as calm with you.” 

“Fuck you Liam” Riley screamed, Venom dripping from her lips. She was seething at his refusal of her release she so desperately needed. 

Riley covered in welts from the crop and dried blood across her torso, Liam unhooked each restraint. 

“What the fuck Liam? We aren’t finished playing.” 

Liam slapped her hard across the face with the crop. Riley’s head falling to her shoulder. Fire burned in Liams eyes as he watched the blood drip down the corner of her mouth. Riley reached for the dagger as Liam crashed his mouth onto hers. Riley could taste a mixture of copper and salt on his tongue. 

Riley dragged the dagger across Liams thigh drawing a bit of blood. She reached the hair on the nape of his neck and pulled hard. Liams neck snapped as she slid the dagger across his jugular. 

She dragged the dagger across his chest, ripping his chest open watching the blood drip down his chest to his abdomen. 

Liam has enough. He needed her now. He had everything he needed from her. He pulled her into his taking the dagger from her and throwing it on the floor. The slight scabs that had formed from the congealing blood on her sternum ripped open with friction of their bodies rubbing together. Liam slammed Riley into the bed. He grabbed her ankles and spread her as far as apart as he could before slamming his hard cock into her waiting center. 

Riley screamed in pain and satisfaction. Her manicured nails digging into back as deep as she could grasp him. 

“I’m not holding back My Queen.” 

Liam pumped into her hard and fast. He put one hand on her stomach pressing down, the other hand securing her leg as he continued to massage her walls. 

Riley ran her fingers across the dripping blood mixed with sweat. She slid her bloody fingers into her mouth eyeing Liam. 

Liam leaned his head down and licked the blood pooling between her breasts and crashed his lips into hers. He felt Riley’s wall fluttering knowing she was close. His cock tightened as she came underneath him. Liam wrapped his hand around her neck and squeezed as his thrust became frantic. Riley’s eyes were wide seeing the power and fire in his eyes. 

Riley tried to say Celeste. She couldn’t breathe. He was choking the life out of her without even realizing it. He was pumping hard concentrating on his thrusts as his cock disappeared in and out of her glistening walls. 

“I. can’t. let. go. Riley.” Liam spoke between breaths. 

Riley understood. He physically couldn’t let her go. Even if he did kill her. It wasn’t malice or hate. This was raw pure love. This is what he needed from her. From his wife. And this is what she needed. She needed him to bring her to the brink of life and pull her back at the same time. This was them. 

Liam found his release deep within her. He released her neck right as everything went black. Riley’s eyes fluttered open with a satisfied grin on her face. 

“I love you so much my Queen.”

“I love you Liam.“

They laid together on their white silk sheets breathless. Both of their minds running towards the following week. 

“We should get cleaned up my love. We’ve made quite the mess I suspect.” Liam whispered. 

They both slowly rose from the cloud like confines in a state of stupor.

They made sure to always have white sheets to see every drop they spilled from each other. They’re bodies marked from each other’s carnal pleasure. A release unlike any they’ve shared with anyone else. 

“My King you did well. Let’s leave the sheets for tonight.” 

“Very well my Queen. I’m not finished with you yet. We will have a week before our next release.”

The dawn crept through they’re tightly drawn curtains. Riley stretched reaching for her husband but found his side of the bed cold. Riley slowly rose from the bed. Still naked and marked from their endless night. Riley made her way to the shower to find Liam soaking in the tub. 

“Join me?” 

Riley slid in front of him feeling the sting from her open wounds that covered her body. 

“We have a long flight to states in an hour. Are you ready for this Riley?” 

“Liam It’s time. It’s time to take off our masks and savor the tastes of revenge. Of freedom.” 

“This is our last time. We need to take our time with them. Please don’t make it too quick like last time with Madeline.” 

“My king, I take offense.” Riley huffed. “I gave you the release you craved with Madeline. Her life was a sweet release for me.” 

An hour later the King and Queen bordered their private jet to American hand in hand. 

Biltmore Estate

“I can’t believe I’m doing this for these twisted fucks. Fucking monarchs just get to do whatever they want with whomever they want.” Anthony muttered to himself. 

Anthony was the groundskeeper. He took care of everything for his King and Queen during their stays. And they paid him handsomely. He primarily resided at the estate to maintain the grounds as well as the estate itself. The estate held many secrets that he was tasked to solely hold. 

“Please” a raspy voice called out. 

“Shut up Celeste. Your King is on his way.” 

Celeste let a muffled cry as she heard the bars slam shut. 

“I’ll be back to get you cleaned up when I’m finished with Ashley and Amelia.” 

The private jet landed at the airport in Raleigh North Carolina. Liam and Riley made their discreetly to an SUV meant to take them to their estate. 

“Your majesty King Liam” Anthony bowed. 

Liam rushed in. “Hello Anthony, you are dismissed. I’ll need the keys to the Bowels please. Our gifts are secure and ready I presume?” 

“Yes your majesty, they have been cleaned, fed, and await you. I will take my leave now.” 

Riley waited in the suv until Anthony left. She couldn’t maintain a stoic facade during their times away. She spotted Anthony’s car pull away from the estate headed to the servants quarters. Riley rushed out and straight to Liam pulling him into a lustful kiss. They made their way to the nicknamed Bowels, a cellar that has been retrofitted with cells. They hold Liam and Riley’s victims as well as their aggressors. 

“Wait Liam, why is Anton here?” 

Riley looked on the computers outside the cellar doors in the security room. They were only supposed to have 3 women. She didn’t understand. What was Liam up to? 

Liam smirked. Suddenly a loud knocking was coming from the front doors. They glanced down at the monitors. Riley’s eyes widened when she saw the fiery red hair standing in front of the cameras. 

“Liam uh where are our children? Please...” 

“Riley. They are with Max and Hana in Lythikos. Leo will be there soon to help with them as well.  Don’t worry my love. Now to explain about Drake and Liv. They needed to see the truth. About them, about us. I’m ready to share parts of our true selves with the family we created.” 

Riley nodded. She was not in a teaching mood. 

“Private now Liam.” 

“What Riley? What’s the problem?” 

“The problem? How can we be US with them? I’m not here to teach them how to become sociopaths like us Liam. Fuck.” 

“Relax baby.” Liam only used the baby pet name when he was confident in his prowess. 

“Fine. They better not fuck this up and I’m not holding back.” 

The two couples made their way to the cellar door. Liam held Riley’s hand while he unlocked the door. The electronic key and palm scanner both sprang green in sequence. Drake and Liv quickened their breath. 

“We have a ritual guys if you don’t mind standing back. And you can join if you like.” Riley calmly stated. 

Liam and Riley stripped naked. Liam pushing Riley against the cellar door in a hungry kiss. Liv admired the marks and scars the two in front of her were covered in. Some old, some new. She was intrigued. Drake’s breath quickened. They joined their best friends in the nude. Liam and Riley glanced behind them noticing Liv and Drake in the same fashion. None of them faced with the pain they had felt at sometime or the other. The abuse. The abuse that twisted them into who they were. Not who they had become. 

The door opened. Celeste gasped seeing her half brother, sister in law, the scarlet duchess & the commoner walking through the door naked. Celeste had no idea what circle of hell she was about to enter. Nor that there were others destined to meet the same fate she would soon come to meet. At the hands of her King and his Queen. 

“Hello Cece” Liam laughed in a voice unrecognizable to the others in the group yet all too familiar to his wife. 

The demons have come out to play.

[mountain-man-cumeth]

Think Piece, MCU Bucky Barnes and Muriel

I’m not making this post to attack anyone and its not gonna be about whitewashing, I think alot of people made much better posts about that.

Lets forget for a second that devs based him off of Bucks, (but since thats what they said, I’m going to use MCU Barnes since they clearly tried to give Muriel a raccoon seb stan look, altho i cant find the original post so that may have been some kind of a mandela effect): MCU Bucky Barnes was tortured and brainwashed to assassinate people, a horrible experience that took all of his agency and even almost caused him to kill his best friend. You know who wasn’t brainwashed to forget his best friend and almost kill him tho? Muriel. He was blackmailed. Also sucks, but Muriel -to some degree- chose to execute people to assure Asra’s safety. Taking that away from his story erases half of his personality.

Their damage is NOT the same, their pain is NOT the same and their personalities also vastly differ. So quite frankly if we’re going on the basis of intense eyeliner, buff dudes squad the fictional character of Muriel has about as much common as Drogo from GoT (tv show) as Bucks from MCU.

Do I think it’s racist to headcanon Muriel as a non-kazakh actor in a hypothetical live action? No, tbh, Kokhuri is fictional and they could be a number of different ethnicity mushed together. But maybe, maaaaaybe its worth wondering why we immediately think of MCU Bucky when we see a buff broody character whose skin colour is ‘ambigious’ and not, say, Wesley Snipes’ Blade or idk Dom from fast and Furious.

[hatsukeii]

Have I been inactive? Yes.

Am I tired? Very.

Should I apologise? Yes, I’m very, very sorry.

Is this going to be a short fic? Uh very possibly tbh sorry.

Will I get over my writer’s block anytime soon? Probably not.

Will I still write with writer’s block in an attempt to get rid of it? Yes.

Should you expect this to be good? Please God no I don’t want to disappoint.

Purely self indulgent Akaashi angst I thought of on a moving bus because my phone was dying but my laptop wasn’t.

Day 67 // Akaashi Keiji x Reader

Word count: 1.8k+

Trigger warnings: mentions of suicide, schizophrenia, cursing

Summary: Schizophrenia/ˌskɪtsə(ʊ)ˈfriːnɪə/ a long-term mental disorder of a type involving a breakdown in the relation between thought, emotion, and behaviour, leading to faulty perception, inappropriate actions and feelings, withdrawal from reality and personal relationships into fantasy and delusion, and a sense of mental fragmentation.

“Keiji.”

“Hi, (Y/N).”

“How are you doing today?”

“Pretty okay. I had a test earlier, currently praying I didn’t fail.”

“Trust me sweetie, you’ll be perfectly fine! You’re smart, algebra is a breeze.”

“I sure hope so too.”

What day was it? Ah, yes, day number 67. Disapproving looks were sent towards Akaashi, students whispering amongst themselves as they inched away from him. He was an outcast in their eyes as of now. However, no one understood the situation fully, which only meant there was nothing anyone could do about it.

“Is he crazy?”

“What’s wrong with him?”

“He needs a therapist.”

Ignoring the judgemental comments, Akaashi continued his conversation with you, a hand holding his head up as he dreamily stared at you sitting at the edge of his table, a warm smile plastered on your face as usual.

“If I ace this test, are you gonna let me put you in drag makeup?”

Seeing you roll your eyes, he snickered to himself, a tiny grin spreading across his face. 

“Sure, only if you ace it though!”

“Yo Akaashi!”

The familiar voice boomed from behind him, causing everyone’s heads to turn. Slapping a hand on his kouhai’s shoulder, the boisterous third year stared everyone down. Second years snapped their heads back to their textbooks, whispering to each other, obviously intimidated by the sudden appearance of Bokuto.

“What are you guys staring at, huh? Mind your own business, nosy little shits.”

Eyeing the spiker, Akaashi slowly turned around to face him. Seeing Bokuto was the other thing that made him smile. The way he easily raised Akaashi’s spirits was greatly appreciated by the setter. Bokuto was the only person Akaashi trusted enough to tell his rather complicated issues to. Taking a glance back to the front, you were gone, all traces of your existence vanished in the turn of a head. Furrowing his brows, Akaashi’s eyes darted from seat to seat, but found nothing. 

“Hm? Where did she go?”

Sensing his distress, Bokuto sighed, pulling him up by the sleeve of the setter’s school jacket. 

“It’s not getting any better?”

“What do you think, Bokuto- san?”

It pained Bokuto to see his kouhai like this. Akaashi went through way too much in the past few months, he didn’t deserve any of this. The constant and ongoing torture that was his mind, with a side of verbal bullying from classmates that didn’t understand, now that was too much to handle. Despite all that, Akaashi continued to live on, carrying the insults and grief on his back, and Bokuto respected him for that. Calling out bullies for being insensitive was the least he could do for his best bro. He would hold himself back whenever he saw Akaashi staring off into the distance, or conversing, waiting until he stopped to approach him. He understood this was the only way his kouhai could meet her. He watched as Akaashi shoved everything into his bag messily, worksheets crumpling under his laptop, pencil case still opened as pens spilled out into the backpack.

“Are you taking your meds?”

Akaashi was silent as he hauled the heavy bag onto his shoulder, but Bokuto already knew the answer to that question. He had not been taking his meds, although his doctor had urged him to do so. The professionals have explained to him multiple times before, his condition wouldn’t get better unless he took his meds, and cleared his mind off the root of the issue. However, that simply didn’t work with Akaashi. Telling him to clear his mind of the root would be equivalent to telling him to let go of one of the only people he truly, shamelessly cared about. No way in hell was he going to do that. For months, he had been emptying out his bottles of pills into the bin, acting like he took the medicine. That somehow fooled everyone in his family. They were stupid for thinking that he was okay. Shaking his head, Bokuto pinched the bridge of his nose between his fingers, concerned for Akaashi’s wellbeing. The two walked out of the classroom, pushing through the crowd of bustling students that were all keen to get out of the school as soon as possible.

“You wanna go out to the arcade after school? That might help you wind down.”

Frowning, Akaashi looked at the floor, fiddling with his fingers as he shook his head slightly.

“Therapy, my mom’s on my ass for it.”

A couple of students walked past the duo, snickering as they pointed at the black haired male. It was obvious what they were laughing about as they pretended to speak to air, making exaggerated movements every three seconds, before splashing a bottle of water all over Akaashi’s uniform.

“Oi, what the hell?”

“Bokuto- san, leave it.”

“But they can’t just m-”

“I said, leave it.”

Grabbing his hair, Bokuto groaned in frustration, before slamming his hands back down to his sides, slouching down and continuing to walk down the stairs to the entrance. He didn’t understand how Akaashi could deal with this. It must be so gruelling and depressing for him to have to deal with assholes like them that simply wouldn’t take the time to understand someone’s struggles. Akaashi’s mental compass was strong, so strong that he had never yelled at anyone, not even when he was a victim of their actions. It wasn’t that Bokuto minded sticking up for his kouhai, in fact, he was more than happy to do so. He just wanted Akaashi to speak up for once and not let shit like this go unnoticed.

Akaashi, on the other hand, he really could not give less of a shit. So what if he spoke up? He wasn’t going to get better anyways, no one would listen to his explanation. Fukurodani was a simple school. If you were seen as a misfit, you would get bullied. If you were seen as popular, you would get bullied. If you were seen as anything that wasn’t average, you best bet your ass you would be bullied for it. However, he swore that he would do whatever he could, take whatever punishment, or bullying, or insults that came his way, anything just to be with you for a bit longer. Anything to see that precious smile again. Fanning his shirt, the two parted ways eventually, Bokuto going to the arcade, and Akaashi going to his therapist.

“So, Akaashi, are you getting any better?”

Dr. Yuma pushed his glasses up, awaiting for his response. The teen fiddled with his fingers, seemingly nervous. How was he going to explain this? Should he just tell him the truth? If he did, the doctor might have his parents monitor him even more strictly, he might be forced to take the pills, maybe even have more frequent checkups. Part of him wanted to get rid of this, move on with his life, stop the bullying and so. However another part of him wanted to stay like this. At least he was still able to talk to her. He had close to no friends, all of them left after he started acting like this. The only one that stuck around was Bokuto, and he was forever grateful for that. Talking to you was like an escape from reality, bringing him back to better times, even if others couldn’t accept it.

“Yeah, kind of.”

Smiling to himself, the therapist jotted that down into his notebook, before continuing to consult his patient.

“So, how’re you doing? Do you still see or think of her?”

Looking at the floor, Akaashi bit his lip nervously, racking his brain for something to say.

“I still think of her. That hasn’t gotten any better. I can’t get her out of my mind. I can’t sleep, I can’t eat, I can’t focus. I could’ve helped her, there was something I could’ve done, if only I had known about her depression. I... I could’ve helped her, there was a chance at saving her and I blew it. I see her once in a while, most often times at school. People look at me like I’m crazy when I’m talking to her though.”

Nodding his head slowly, Dr. Yuma continued to journal everything into the notebook.

“Well, according to my assumptions, you should stop seeing her about now. Are the meds not working?”

Akaashi’s eyes widened, cold sweat gathering on his neck.

“Akaashi... are you not taking the meds?”

Giving up, Akaashi looked at the therapist, eyes desperate and teary.

“I’m not getting any better and I don’t want to either. I want to stay with (Y/N), even if it’s not real. People can stare, they can laugh, I don’t care, I just want to stay with her. I have no friends as of now, they were all too weirded out by the thought of me suffering from schizophrenia. Apparently mental issues aren’t accepted into friend circles. What do I have to lose anyways?”

Completely breaking down, tears flowed freely from his eyes as he stared at his shaking hands. Akaashi shook violently, choking on his salty tears as Dr. Yuma looked at him sympathetically. What the hell was he thinking? Not taking his meds? Troubling his therapist every week with his worsening symptoms? He was selfish towards everyone that awaited his recovery from this disease. His family, Bokuto, his team, all of them. However, did he really want to recover? Would having schizophrenia be worth it, as long as you were still by his side? He wanted to see your smile again, the way you teased him, poked fun with him, the way you kissed him, held him, he felt selfish for wanting it all back, but you could really blame him? He was just as ready to kill himself as you were a few months back, Bokuto was right, this, along with the bullying, was too much for him to bear. Thank God for Akaashi being able to hide his emotions, at least he wouldn’t be troubling Dr. Yuma any more than he already is with his schizophrenia. 

“Akaashi, buddy, you’re going to have to get over her death sooner or later. This is going to affect your life greatly if you don’t and that will become far too troublesome to deal with. You need to start taking the pills and recovering, or the consequences will be quite negative. It’s not your fault, she never told you about her suicidal thoughts, you couldn’t have done anything.”

Eyes blurry from the tears he shed, Akaashi looked straight at his therapist, irises dull and hopeless as tears continued to roll down his numb cheeks.

“It’s bad enough that I couldn’t stop her from jumping, at least let me have fake hope that she might still see me. Please, Dr. Yuma, let me do that for myself.”

Setting down his notebook, Akaashi was able to take a glance at whatever was scrawled messily on the page.

June 20, 2020

Day 67, patient is not showing any signs of improvement. 

Heavily blames self for the suicide of significant other.

Rejecting help.

Not taking meds.

Reminder: Need to inform parents of situation.

Patient should come back again with family for day 68 checkup tomorrow.

Tags:

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Eh I guess I like writing stuff about mental issues lol my writer’s block is partially gone for now:D Hope you like this thing<3

[sambergscott]

i'd wait forever and a day for you

summary: post-trying // jake is on an undercover mission and amy thinks she’s pregnant. 

(you should read this just for the last line tbh)

Her period is late.

At first, she attributes it to stress. Jake is on a major undercover operation and while she is an incredibly proud, supportive wife, she knows how dangerous the situation is. He’s a great cop -- one of New York’s finest, in both senses of the word (...he’s hot) -- and he was so excited about getting this assignment. And she’s excited for him -- really, she is. But with updates filtering through to Captain Holt at a snail’s pace, it’s impossible not to worry about him, where he is, what he’s doing, whether he’s safe. Her cycle was shot to hell when he was in Witness Protection in Florida and it is entirely possible that history is repeating itself. 

Four days pass, Jake is still undercover and her period still has not arrived. She tries to blame Hitchcock’s God-awful Zika cologne disrupting her cycle again until she remembers that both Hitchcock and Scully have been off work all week with food poisoning. She even Googles why is my period late?, quickly closing the tab and deleting her browser history when the first result that pops up is pregnancy. 

There’s no way she’s pregnant. She refuses to even consider it for a second. 

Despite her absolute certainty that her uterus is as empty as it’s always been, when Rosa invites her for drinks with her new boyfriend, Amy opts for a non-alcoholic beer. 

“I’m driving,” she explains at Rosa’s raised eyebrows and swiftly changes the conversation. She finds out that Rosa’s boyfriend is a mechanic and they hit it off when she took her motorbike in for repair. She talks about Jake, about how he’s her favourite person in the entire world and how much she misses him (A Lot). He asks her what it’s like dating a cop and how to deal with the person you love putting themselves in danger every single day, which makes Rosa blush. Amy has never seen her blush before. 

“It’s difficult,” she says truthfully. She hates seeing her husband hurting and being thrown in prison for crimes he didn’t commit and having guns pointed at his head. It’s why she instated the short-lived ‘no dating cops’ rule, before Jake kissed her and she decided screw it. “But it’s worth it. When you really love them, it’s worth the pain. Every second.”

“That’s what I thought,” he responds, looking at Rosa the way Jake looks at Amy. 

She finishes her drink (which is so not as good as its alcoholic counterpart) and gathers her coat and purse. “I’ll leave you two lovebirds to it. See you Monday,” she directs at Rosa and “it was nice to meet you” at her boyfriend, who she has a feeling might be sticking around for a while. 

She opens up her Messages app and types out a full paragraph to Jake about how she met Rosa’s boyfriend before him and how he’s really nice and makes her blush! Rosa Disz!!! Blushing!!! She adds a gif of Jonathan Van Ness saying “can you believe?” and is about to click send when she realises his phone is on his nightstand where he left it before his mission and puts her phone back in her pocket in dismay. 

Once home, she gets changed into one of his NYPD t-shirts and climbs straight into bed, crying herself to sleep. 

She wakes up bright and early the next morning, a feat that is made significantly easier when there is no super cute husband to snuggle with. She showers, pulls on leggings and one of his plaid shirts and gets started on her Sunday Chores. Dancing around the apartment and pretending the mop is a microphone stand is a lot less fun on her own and she overcompensates, making herself dizzy and throwing up in the toilet she just cleaned. 

Without thinking, she finds herself at the bodega on the corner, staring at the selection of pregnancy tests. She grabs three of the safest looking ones and bites her lip when the guy congratulates her as she pays. She’s wasted hundreds of dollars on pregnancy tests thus far and she knows she’s definitely wasting money on these ones too. She doesn’t need congratulating for making poor financial decisions and being bad at making babies, but she thanks him anyway. 

Back at the apartment, she dumps the paper bag on the kitchen counter to deal with later. She makes a cup of tea, calls her mom and fills in The Times crossword. The paper bag screams out to her the entire time. 

Reluctantly, she removes the boxes from the bag, fully intending to put them away in the back of the bathroom cabinet, out of sight. 

A niggling voice tells her to just open one and find out. 

She has the box open and the test in her hand when her phone buzzes with a text from Holt informing her that Jake is safe and the mission is going well. 

She drops the test like it burnt her skin. 

Jake. She can’t do this without him. If she is pregnant, she’d never forgive herself for finding out without him, for stripping him of that moment they’d been dreaming of forever. 

She’s waited this long, she can wait a few more days. And she’s probably not pregnant anyway. 

She ends up waiting two more weeks. 

It’s torture. 

She’s throwing up almost daily, crying in the break room for no apparent reason and her damn period has still not come. All symptoms which could be explained away by a lack of Jake Peralta and stress (due to missing the aforementioned Jake Peralta). 

Rosa corners her in the ladies bathroom and asks if she wants her to run out for more pregnancy tests.

“I already have some at home.”

“And?” She prompts. “Did you take them? Are you pregnant?”

“I don’t know.” She tries to play it off as no big deal, but Rosa knows her pretty well these days. 

“You’ve been trying for nearly a year, there’s a chance you are finally pregnant and you haven’t taken a test?”

“I can’t -- I want to -- Jake --.”

“Oh,” it dawns on her. 

“Yeah,” Amy sighs. “I’ve been staring at the tests every night but I just can’t. Not without him.  He’d be devastated.”

“He would not be devastated if you were pregnant, Amy Santiago.” 

“You know what I mean. He’d want to be have been there. I want him to be there.”

“I guess he needs to hurry the hell up and catch the bad guys then.”

He must have heard her because, hours later, the elevator door opens and there he is, exhausted and still in his weird undercover clothes, with the biggest smile on his face. 

She practically throws herself at him and, yeah, maybe she kisses him in a not-very-work-appropriate way and maybe some of the perps in the holding cell wolf whistle and maybe Charles is crying, but he is home and she can finally take those pregnancy tests. 

Holt allows her to clock out early (she makes a mental note to buy him a glass of Charbonnay the next time they go to Shaw’s) and Jake excitedly tells her all about the case, barely taking a second to breathe.

“Sounds fun, babe,” she says when he gets to the part of the story when he handcuffed the bad guys and then made out with this super hot chick in front of all his co-workers. 

“It was awesome,” he confirms. “What about you? What have you been up to? I missed you so much.”

“Aw,” she smiles, rubbing her hand over his thigh as he drives, “I missed you so much, too. As for what I’ve been up to, I’ve mostly just been kind of sick.”

“Really?”

“Mm-hmm. I... um... actually think I might be pregnant.”

He swerves suddenly, nearly crashing the car. Ignoring the cars around them honking, he focuses on his wife. “Pregnant?”

“My period is nearly three weeks late, I’ve been throwing up and I’ve been extra emotional,” she debriefs him. 

“Right. OK.” He takes a deep breath. “Have you taken a test?”

“I bought three but I couldn’t take them without you. It’s kind of been killing me.”

“Yeah, I bet,” he laughs, pulling over in front of their apartment. Neither of them move. “We should probably take them now.”

“Yeah,” she agrees. 

“You nervous?”

“Yeah,” she says again. She’s lost count of how many negative tests they’ve seen, how many times she’s felt that familiar crushing disappointment. The thought of going through it all over again... 

“I understand. We can wait, if you want. Or we could rip the band-aid off, let the scab bleed all over the place. I’ll hold your hand.”

There’s this reassuring look in his eyes that she’s seen a million times over from back when they were newly-assigned partners and he was reassuring her they would solve a tough case to that time on the roof of 397 Barton Street when he said he always knew she was going to be his boss to his speech at Hitchcock’s (second) divorce party when he told her that they are a family and that they can take whatever ‘next step’ she wants because as long as they’re together, he’s happy. 

Because it’s him, she nods. “Let’s do this.” 

The wait for the timer to go off seems longer than ever. She squeezes his hand so tight she thinks she might cut off the circulation, but he doesn’t complain, just keeps talking about how they’ll be fine, no matter what the result. 

The timer eventually goes off and she picks up the test and starts crying immediately. 

Jake hugs her tight and she can feel him crying too and this is so crazy and insane and good. 

“We’re having a baby,” he says in awe and it’s the best thing Amy’s ever heard. 

“We’re having a baby!” She repeats, half-laughing, half-crying. 

She yelps as he lifts her up and spins her around their tiny bathroom before kissing her tenderly. 

“I can’t believe this,” he exclaims when he pulls away, rubbing his hand over his face, “can you?”

“Nope.” She grins, kissing him again.

[ajcrwl]

so, I watched two episodes of The Watch... IT’S SO BAD.

It attempts to be a really shallow comedy at first, but in the second episode becomes this weird drama/triller.

Vimes is BAD. What the fuck is up with his face??? It just won’t stop moving. And the way he’s portrayed is far from some sort of Clint Eastwood character and is more like a.. clown? I am so upset.

Lady Sybil is a vigilante now? WHY? I absolutely can’t make sense of her character, who she is and what is she doing. We just don’t know! But somehow she’s everywhere.

The Watch is kind of underwhelming tbh. Angua? Small and troubled. Carrot? Tall and troubled? Cheri? Not a dwarf.. and troubled.

Lord Vetinari... I’m not even sure if still a Lord or a Lady now?? Oddly left a feeling of a big puffed aristocrat, so I feel like this portrayal would’ve actually been better for Lady Sybil.

There are actually competent magicians??? Who do magic as their job?? Outrageous.

They killed Detritus with arrows???!! Possibly to save the show’s budget, although it’s too late to help with the Librarians face. Goblins are really just some Star Wars creatures, aren’t they? And Death.. Well, there was no budget left to buy a skull not to mention animate one, so just deal with this weird pair of glowy eyes under a hood, which also make him look like a Star Wars character, but maybe a robot this time.

I don’t remember all the secondary characters from the books, but even I can tell that they just took the names and slapped them on some random people they made up for the show.

The story? OH GOD. IT’S PAINFUL. Everyone is tortured by something, Vimes most of all. Thanks to the worst choppy editing which is so characteristic of American TV we get to re-live parts of Vimes’s “dark and troubled” past. It’s the criminal kind of “dark” and, unless I missed it because I was cringing this hard, there was not a single word about poverty.

In other words, THANKS, I HATE IT.

I’m so glad there are only two episodes out, I would’ve made myself to sit through all of them had there been more. It feels like a waste of time, and it is exactly that. You could watch it as well, but trust me, reading even a single random page from Pratchett’s books is way more worth your time than this.

[trensu]

Episode 27: The One where I Want to Punch Basically Every Sect Leader in the Face. Repeatedly. With a Chair.

And we start off back in the rain, AKA OUR ENDLESS TEARS

Wwx is like, do you remember our promise?

And lwj flashbacks TO THEIR LANTERN SCENE FROM THE ONE WHERE LWJ FINALLY SEES THE LIGHT

WE GET TO SEE LWJ’S PRECIOUS BABY FACE AS HE FALLS HEAD OVER HEELS IN THAT FLASHBACK

IT HURTS SO GOOD

Wwx: i wished to stand with justice and live without regrets. But tell me now, who’s strong, who’s weaker? Who’s right and who’s wrong?

Lwj: wei ying! 

Oh god, his voice! HE’S DISTRESSED

Wwx: is this the promise we pledged our lives to keep?

THEY BOTH LOOK SO HEARTBROKEN RN

Oh, look, lwj is doing the deathgrip of gay yearning on bichen again. We haven’t seen that in awhile AND I WISH WE WEREN’T SEEING IT NOW

Okay, but for real, how can lwj look so hurt here when the actor is literally doing nothing with his face??

I know i’ve mentioned that before, BUT C’MON, HOW?? HOW DOES THAT EVEN WORK??

Wwx: my only regret is that i didn’t stop the jin clan who took living people as bait

I REGRET YOU NOT TAKING DOWN THE JIN CLAN TOO

WE COULD’VE AVOIDED SO MANY PROBLEMS IF WE’D JUST KILL OFF 90% OF THAT CLAN, OMG

And now wwx is all, i missed my chance to protect wen ning before so now i MUST leave to save him

BC WWX IS THE BEST MOST HONORABLE PERSON IN THE WORLD

Oh no

Oh noooo

He’s pulling out his demon flute. We’re gonna get THAT SCENE

Wwx: lan zhan, if i finally have to fight them, i’d prefer to fight with you

Wwx: if i am doomed to die, at least i can be killed by you. That would be worth it.

HE SAYS THAT BC HE TRUSTS VIRTUOUS LWJ TO STOP HIM IF HE REALLY IS IN THE WRONG

AND I AM SCREAMING IN PAIN RN

BC LOOK AT LWJ’S FACE

HE’S LISTENING TO HIS SOULMATE TELL HIM THAT HE WANTS HIS DEATH TO BE AT HIS HAND

Oh god, he’s doing the bichen deathgrip again

He tears his gaze away from wwx and turns to the side TO LET THEM ALL GO PAST

EYES LOWERED AS HIS HEART BREAKS INTO A MILLION PIECES

HE’S CRYING OH GOD HE’S CRYING

THERE ARE TEARS GOING DOWN HIS FACE, OH GOD WHY IS THIS HAPPENING

HE DIDN’T EVEN CRY WHEN HIS HOME GOT BURNED AND HIS FAMILY WAS MISSING AND/OR DYING

And now he drops his umbrella to the ground AS HE TRIES TO DROWN HIMSELF IN THE RAIN

*HYSTERICAL SOBBING*

THEY PACKED ALL THAT HEARTBREAK INTO THE FIRST 6MIN OF THE EPISODE, WTF, SOMEBODY STAB ME

And after all that emotional torture we get Plot Stuff happening

Blah blah wwx at the burial mounds blah blah sect leader banquet blah blah

Ugh, gross, they’re letting the idiot sect leaders talk again

They’re all blah blah wwx is evil blah blah he murders ppl blah blah we hate him blah blah

SHUT UP YOU BUNCH OF WALKING HUMAN-RIGHTS-VIOLATIONS

This whole part here is so difficult to watch. They’re literally just trash-talking my PRECIOUS SUNSHINE BOY

Jc, lwj, and lxc look visibly uncomfortable with what’s going down and they kind of sort of tried to defend wwx but they didn’t present a united front or hold their ground

Instead they let yao and ouyang run their stupid mouths

Anyway

Here’s little itty bitty bits of almost wangxiantics in the middle of this mess

Jgs: yeah, jc, i know wwx is your trusted bro and all but idk if wwx actually respects your authority. Do something about it, maybe

Lwj: *subtly glares at jgs*

And then everyone joins in on dragging wwx’s name through the mud bc apparently that’s the hot new thing in the cultivator world

If you look closely while this is happening, you can see that lwj legit GRINDS HIS TEETH with how much he’s holding back. MY POOR BB HAVING TO SIT THERE AND LISTEN TO EVERYONE DISPARAGE HIS SOULMATE

Jgs: wwx totally doesn’t respect you, jc, my bro. Everyone here heard him say how much he thinks you suck or whatever

Lwj: No I didn’t.

OOOOH, LWJ IS ANGRY AS HELL

HE’S OUTRIGHT GLARING AT JGS 

Jgs: what??

Lwj: i never heard wei ying say that, nor did i see him disrespect clan leader jiang

HANGUANG-JUN I LOVE YOU, LOOK AT YOU DEFENDING THE LOVE OF YOUR LIFE, I’M SO PROUD OF YOU 

And ugh, disgusting, jgy steps in to be all “oh, well, wwx said so many awful things that day, who can possibly remember the specifics?”

Lwj visibly swallows here, as if he’s choking back a response, and his lips are all pursed. 

HE’S FURIOUS. HE’S ROILING WITH IMPOTENT ANGER, WHICH IS THE WORST KIND OF ANGER, TBH

That’s all the wangxiantics we get from that terrible awful sect leader banquet

THOSE SECT LEADERS NEED TO GET PUNCHED IN THE FACE

LIKE, A LOT

WITH A CHAIR

OR A TABLE

YOU KNOW WHAT, LET ME JUST TAKE BICHEN AND BEAT THEM ALL WITH IT

OR BETTER, YET, I’LL USE BAXIA. I WON’T EVEN CUT THEM UP. I’LL JUST BEAT THEM WITH THE BROAD PART

*ANGRY YELLING*

Oh, wait a minute. Wait a minute! 

This isn’t a wangxiantic

But it is an EPIC MOMENT that should be commemorated.

Because here we get…

*drum roll*

MIANMIAN BEING A BOSS

Jz: blah blah wwx kills our people indiscriminately blah blah

Mm: not indiscriminately

Mm: indiscriminate is not accurate

And everyone around her is like, confused and offended because they’re assholes

Mm: in this specific case, if the overseers did abuse the Wen prisoners and kill wen ning, then what wwx did was not “killing indiscriminately”

Ouyang: nah, the overseers said they never abused/killed anyone

Mm: OF COURSE THEY’D FUCKING SAY THAT. THEY DON’T WANT TO FACE PUNISHMENT, YOU IDIOT

(okay, she didn’t call him an idiot outright or swear, but it was totally there in her tone of voice and also ouyang is an idiot so there)

Mm: you all think you’re so smart and voice your opinions so loudly

Mm: I SECEDE FROM THIS BULLSHIT. FUCK THE JIN CLAN AND YOUR STUPID CLAN POLITICS

And she throws down her jin robes and mARCHES RIGHT OUT OF THAT SHITHOLE WITH HER HEAD HELD HIGH

MIANMIAN PLEASE MARRY ME

Lwj watches her do that and two seconds later follows her out bC HE RECOGNIZES BADASSERY WHEN HE SEES IT (and also she defended the love of his life)

And that badass moment ends

But the banquet of idiots keeps going

The jin clan needs to learn how to shut the fuck up

God, they just go on and on and on

Why are they torturing me like this

OH WAIT, WE’RE OUTSIDE THE BANQUET HALL NOW

We see lwj and mm standing together on a terrace, talking to each other

BUT WE DON’T GET TO HEAR WHAT THEY SAY TO EACH OTHER AND THAT HAUNTS ME TO THIS DAY

WHAT DID THEY SAY

TELL MEEEEEEE

Oh, side note to let you all know this direct quote from nmj - “that girl really has a backbone.”

Okay nmj, i’m slightly less angry at you now. I won’t try to beat you with bichen or a table or a chair.

(but now i kinda wish mm would join the nie clan. I think she’d do well there and also i want to see her carry a gigantic saber)

We get some chitchat with the Official Bros™ but idc let’s move on 

(tho i do appreciate the look nmj gives jgy, like, HOW DARE YOU TALK TO ME lolol)

Ooooh, now we’re getting lan fam time

ANGRY lan fam time, uh oh.

Lqr: lwj, have you regretted it? I didn’t punish you when you broke into the Forbidden Chamber bc i thought you’d self-reflect 

Lqr: you shouldn’t have gone to qiongqi way and let wwx go. Should you make one mistake after another?

And lwj is kneeling in front of him this whole time with a blank face

Lqr: what’s the use of getting you to memorize the Great Big Book of Lan Fam Rules?? Tell me, what is rule 52?

Lwj: No association with evil

He answers immediately and without any inflection to his voice.

Lqr: did you forget what happened to your father???

AND WE FINALLY GET A REACTION HERE

Lwj practically gasps and lifts his gaze to meet his uncle head-on

Lwj: my mother, she…!

Lqr: hold your tongue!

And just like that, lwj shuts down again; expression flat and gaze lowered

GOD, THIS CLAN HAS HURT HIM SO MUCH THROUGHOUT HIS LIFE

I MEAN, THEY MUST’VE, FOR HIM TO BE ABLE TO JUST DISCONNECT LIKE THAT

THAT IS NOT THE BEHAVIOR OF A NORMAL WELL-ADJUSTED PERSON

Basically the entire lan clan needs to go to therapy, like, STAT

Oh, i just noticed, lwj has his fists clenched at his sides. He’s clenching them hard, too. I think they’re trembling a bit, actually…

Lqr: i’ve been taking care of you since you were a kid; you’re like my son.i was strict bc i wanted you to stick to the right path and avoid your father’s tragedy

Lqr: that’s what i wanted to say to you. I hope you choose the right path. You may leave.

Lwj still bows respectfully before taking his leave

And i’m sure y’all are wondering, hey trensu, why did you make us endure that angry lan fam time that hurt us deep in our soul?? That wasn’t wangxiantic at all!

That’s where you're wrong, my friends!

It’s actually SUPER wangxiantic bc lqr kept drawing parallels to lwj’s dad the practically whole time

You know, the dad that married their mother who murdered some guy and had the whole world turn against her. 

(Sound familiar?)

The same mother that dad loved with his entire being and did what he could to keep her safe from the ramifications of her actions? By marrying her? And hiding her in the cloud recesses?

YEAH, HE’S EQUATING WANGXIAN WITH LWJ’S PARENTS’ TRAGIC ROMANCE

Bc, you know, that’s a totally hetero comparison to make lol

Oh, now we get to see our favorite Disaster Het be less of a disaster

We’re not going into detail here bc we’re not here for hetero shenanigans, yuck (actually, i’m apparently weak to Pining Idiots of all kinds bc this whole jzx/jyl scene is giving me tender feelings)

BUT

I do want to add that OMG FOR REAL LWJ AND JZX HAVE SO MUCH IN COMMON WHEN IT COMES TO THEIR LOVE LIVES, IT’S FANTASTIC

I NEED 10 MILLION FICS OF THEM COMMISERATING OVER THEIR SHARED DISASTER-NESS

Also, how the HELL did jzx end up being the one who was able to express his intentions clearly? He was all “please don’t go to the burial mounds, stay here with me so i can protect you from all who would want to hurt you”

DAMN IT LWJ, IF YOU’D JUST SAY THAT TO WWX, HE’S UNDERSTAND WHAT’S GOING ON. 

YOU CAN’T JUST BE ALL “COME TO GUSU” WITH NO EXPLANATION

Jzx accomplished this before you did, YOU SHOULD BE ASHAMED.

Huh, okay, i guess i did go into a bit of detail with that hetero nonsense. Oh well.

Now we’re at the burial mounds again with wwx

AND WE SEE A-YUAN PROPERLY FOR THE FIRST TIMEEEEE!!

ANY A-YUAN MOMENT IS BY DEFAULT A WANGXIANTIC, GUYS, TRUST ME.

AAHHHH, WE SEE A-YUAN DO THAT LEG-GRABBY THING HE DOES!!!

HE’S SO CUTE. TOO ADORABLE.

I LOVE YOU A-YUAN

Lol, wwx is all if you don’t let go i’ll plant you like a turnip

And a-yuan plops himself down in the dirt like YOUR THREATS DON’T WORK ON ME, OLD MAN, I LIKE BEING IN THE DIRT

Then he asks wwx for 3 elder brothers and 2 elder sisters, awwww. He thinks wwx can grow them in the garden (like cabbage patch kids!!!)

Plot stuff happens

Blah blah wwx and wq share moment blah blah jc shows up blah blah

Lol

Jc sees that glowing talisman door thing and is like THAT SIGN WON’T STOP ME BC I CAN’T READ

And then whips it down with zidian

Now we get some feelings-laden Yunmeng bros time

A-yuan shows up and leg-grabs jc and it’s ADORABLE

But jc yells at him bc he’s a JERK

Wwx scolds jc and then is a Dad to a-yuan: don’t put your hand in your mouth, you were just touching dirt!

Awww, we get to see jc fight back a smile at this! HE WANTS TO BE AN UNCLE, I JUST KNOW IT.

Plot plot plot stuff happens

More plot stuff happens

And the episode ends with us still in the burial mounds with the yunmeng bros

And you know what, i’m just gonna focus on our BAMF mianmian moment bc quite frankly the rest of the episode either had me in tears of anguish or spitting mad. There was no inbetween. 

I’m gonna end up having blood pressure problems at this rate.

I’m too poor young to have blood pressure problems.

The Jin clan better pay for any medical bills I get because of them, I'm just saying

Return to Masterpost

[isuzukuretsuki]

me before playing blue lions: haha I’m not like ~other girls~ I don’t like Dimitri and I think he’s boring and basic.

me after playing blue lions: I will die for Dimitri.

I finally finished Azure Moon!! Can’t believe it took me 4 damn months to finish this route. Just like with Crimson Flower, I decided to do a very long write up of my thoughts of this route after letting my thoughts marinate for a bit. There will be spoilers for both Azure Moon and Crimson Flower. Also disclaimer: these are just my personal opinions.

Tldr: this route was so fucking good!!!! I jumped ship from being team Edie/BE to team Dimitri/BL faster than Sylvain jumps girlfriends because I enjoyed this route more than Crimson Flower in almost every way possible. The Blue Lions are my KIDS and I will die for each and every one of them. Blue Lions may not be my first route/house, but this is where my heart rightfully lies. 

I guess the first thing I should get out of the way are the negatives. While this isn’t really a complaint about AM specifically and more so the narrative over the entire game... the conflict between Edelgard and Dimitri seems really stupid and contrived. In other games, war happens because the villain is evil. In this game, war happens because the villain is fucking stupid. Basically, I still ain’t convinced that Edelgard’s war was ever necessary LMAO. She straight up nuked the church’s authority and relevancy out of orbit the chapter before the time skip, so she technically already accomplished her goal; why she still feels the need to go on a savage conquest alludes me. 

Speaking of nuking the church’s relevancy out of orbit, that’s exactly what happened to Rhea LOL. Despite all the church goons clamoring every .5 seconds about how they gotta save Rhea, we literally never see her again at all after the time skip, even at the end of the game. It makes no sense why Edelgard would keep Rhea imprisoned and not kill her, especially when Rhea seemingly served no greater purpose to Edelgard and became completely irrelevant in the war phase.

Edie says some mumbo jumbo of “I weighed the victims of this war against the victims of the world and I deem that there will be less victims of war” like bitch, how??? How do you tangibly quantify “victims of this world”. If she means “people who had a shitty life because of shitty society”, then those people are always going to exist because every society has its flaws. Even if you change society, you aren’t decreasing that number because you’re only solving problems by creating new ones (Edelgard’s specialty). Also the mental gymnastics you have to do to be tortured by an evil organization only to team up with said evil organization to take down another organization that, unless I missed something, isn’t even directly responsible for the death of all your siblings??? In both CF and AM, Edelgard comes off as incredibly thoughtless and illogical in her actions and I can’t help but feel that if she had been just a little bit more diplomatic, then maybe, just maybe, she could have found a better solution without starting a bloody war.

This brings me to the god forsaken chat between Edelgard and Dimitri. Dimitri demanding to know why Edelgard started the war only for her to go “it was the only way” has about the same narrative weight as “Riku why did you become one with the darkness?!” “Because I’m the worst”. Instead of bitching about whose ~ideals~ are better, how about y’all sit down and actually discuss what each person wants to accomplish and maybe figure out a way to accomplish these goals without murdering each other over it? Not that I think Edelgard would accept anything BUT murder, but jesus, this is why you don’t leave diplomatic matters to actual children.

Speaking of why you don’t leave diplomatic matters to children, god that Gronder battle. I get that it’s supposed to be an epic showdown between the three houses that mirrored the mock battle pre time skip but... the Kingdom had literally NO reason to fight the Alliance!!! The reasons they provided to justify why the Kingdom and Alliance couldn’t team up at Gronder was so fucking dumb, especially when two chapters down the line, Claude is knocking at our door begging for help. I will say tho, I never knew how much I appreciated himbo in distress Claude until now lmao.

Rodrigue's death was also really poorly done imo. As much as I liked having Dimitri’s father figure be the one to snap him out of his insanity, (I love found father/son relationships...) how on earth are you guys so fucking incompetent that you let this tiny little girl kill Rodrigue??? It doesn’t help that the exact same thing happened with Jeralt and Monica. This... just ain’t it, chief. 

I think the biggest bone I have to pick at AM specifically is... so what the fuck is the truth behind the Tragedy of Duscur LMAO??? They literally blue balled me by dropping the bomb of “Dimitri’s step mom may have conspired in it” ONLY TO NOT DO ANYTHING WITH IT. I assume that the full truth behind the Duscur tragedy will probably be revealed in VW (I hope) because it involves the slithers but it’s highkey ridiculous that the BL goons... never actually find out what really happened, and why. And I get that the story is about them moving on from their trauma and the past, but they should have at least figured out the actual truth behind it so they can get the closure they deserve???

Despite the gripes I have with some of the writing, unless VW or SS is mind blowingly amazing, this route will easily stand as the best route for me, because.... it is kind of is mind blowingly amazing. I wholeheartedly love character driven stories, and this route absolutely delivers in that respect-- the character writing is amazing and is essentially the heart of this story. To think Dimitri and the Blue Lions were the lord/house I was least interested in at first. Even after hearing people talk about what the BL goons and Dimitri’s character arc was roughly about, I was still blown away by just how damn fucking good it was, and this route exceeded my expectations in every way possible. 

When playing CF, I struggled to connect with a lot of the beagles; I didn’t have that problem at all with the BL goons and the route does a phenomenal job at making me actually give a shit about these characters and their problems. Childhood friend squad (+Marianne and Ashe) are easily my favourite characters in this game by a landslide, and the dynamic between not only the childhood friend squad, but all the BL goons, was just so, so amazing. Watching these characters that are seemingly joined by a single tragedy, rise above all their suffering as they grow, heal, and overcome hardship together is just so... MY KIDS... MY HEART..... I really got the sense of not only their shared pain, but also shared intimacy, care, and friendship. Their support conversations with each other had everything; from goofy and fun, to soothing and nurturing, to painful and harrowing. 

The connections that the BL goons have to the pre time skip missions gave part 1 story so much more meaning, and it only gets better after the time skip. I really appreciate that the BL bean boys actually feel relevant to the main story, and that their input and opinions actually mattered. The cast’s struggle to come to a consensus on the best course of action during the war phase made them feel like actual people with opinions, unlike in CF, where everyone was just a mindless passenger to Edie’s not so merry joyride. This also made Dimitri’s arc way more impactful because the narrative actually holds him accountable for the consequences that his behavior/poor decisions had on others. What I also really liked about the war phase is that you could just feel how war torn the kingdom was and how much everything went to shit after the time skip. I felt really strongly to the characters’ sense of hopelessness at fighting a losing battle as they struggled to keep their home land in tact while everything just kept spiraling out of control and deteriorating further. 

So to see the BL goon beans slowly, one battle at a time, turn the tide of the war and push back against the corner they were backed in, was SO fulfilling and rewarding. The battle of Fhirdiad is probably my favourite battle in the entire game because it felt like all the suffering and toiling that the BL goons went through was finally worth it, and just watching the kingdom slowly heal after being liberated was just such a good feeling. This kind of payoff is something I think CF sorely lacked, since tbh, I struggled to celebrate Edie’s victories with her. Though I do appreciate how Edie’s a much more threatening antagonistic force than either Dimitri or Rhea were in CF too bad Edelgard’s boss battle was pathetically easy and Dimitri shredded through her armor like swiss cheese... at least Rhea put up a slightly challenging fight.

I could gush about the characters all day, but Dimitri? He makes this game, 100%. This truly felt like his story and he was the star of this route. On a superficial level, I’m a basic bitch as well as a slut for angsty boys who have trouble talking about their trauma because I want them to rail me. I fucking loved his feral personality it was just so fun to watch and interact with LMAO 10/10 would let him use me until the flesh falls from my bones. His dialogue in this state is just so demeaning, belittling and raw that it somehow comes a full circle and becomes charming I promise I’m not a sick masochist.

I’m also a degenerate and dimileth is my otp. The way the relationship between Dimitri and Byleth develops over the game truly felt like a bond forged over time. The way Dimitri admits that he couldn’t trust Byleth at first because he was put off by the way they could “kill without batting an eye”, to being so elated when he sees them smile for the first time that he’s completely mesmerized when they starts expressing emotion... oof, talk about otp material. I think what really sold me is the way he’s their anchor after Jeralt’s death; their emotional support both in a traditional sense, but also in a darker sense when he declares he will kill anyone so they desire it because their enemies are his enemies. Character A declaring they’d die for character B? Soft shit. Character A declaring they’d kill for character B? A+ romance right there, boys. 

On a non superficial level, Dimitri’s character arc of his fall from grace and subsequent redemption was absolutely phenomenal. Just seeing how far he sinks, how far he goes, only to see how far he climbs his way back up after hitting rock bottom, was such a roller coaster and I loved every minute of it. I also probably like revenge stories more than I care to admit. Dimitri has everything; blood lust, cruelty, obsession, but also empathy and compassion so extreme that it’s his very own innate kindness that drives him into insanity, which is what makes him such a compelling character in my eyes. The extremity of his psychosis was absolutely heart breaking, but despite everything, him making the conscious decision to change for the better and rise up to fulfill his role as king was just astounding to watch. 

I will say though... maybe I have a screwed up moral compass but tbh Dimitri brutally killing imperial soldires didn’t really upset me because... this is war??? That he didn’t even start?? Everyone is killing everyone??? Even if he never went feral, he’d still be killing because his bloody kingdom is being invaded?????? But I digress.

While I think just how damn avoidable everything was kind of detracts from the tragedy of his relationship with Edelgard, I still really loved how steadfast and unconditional his love for her was (after he stops going feral), and you can tell just how much she meant to him every time he spoke of her. I also love how the dagger kind of becomes a symbolic motif throughout the story, and Edie throwing the dagger at him in the final cutscene as a sign of her wholehearted rejection of him was just fucking depressing, but also very fitting of her character. 

I adore the whole overarching narrative and themes surrounding grief and death, befitting of a war game. How, as tempting as it is to constantly keep the memory of the dead alive, there comes a point where you have to move on and not let your life be ruled by those no longer around. The way that the characters react to the death of loved ones and grieve so differently was a huge highlight of the BL squad’s characterizations, which just makes them feel more alive and human. Honestly, no words can really describe just how incredible of an experience Azure Moon was.

Anyway my order from favourite to least favourite BL goon bean boys are: Dimitri > Ashe >/= Sylvain >/= Felix > Ingrid > Mercedes > Annette > Dedue. (I love Ashe/Sylvain/Felix almost equally LOL)

tldr my experience with Azure Moon:

tfw my second best girl is childhood friends with all the best boys in the entIRE GAME and she settles for a guy with a dead wife, daughter, and most likely triple her age :|.

I’ll be finally playing Golden Deer next, which I’m gonna do on NG+ Maddening so.... hope that goes well!!