#actual forms themselves needed to be like that in order for them to have those keys. it feels disconnected like they wanted big mech forms

[deus-and-the-machina]

given that the ouroboros forms clearly take some inspiration from the Evangelion mech looks, I kinda wished they had leaned more into similar themes. where’s the body horror? the existential dread of existing in a much larger, stranger form? they get their literal limbs chopped off during fights and its just kind of brushed off since they regenerate.

in general I feel like the ouroboros powers were incredibly underutilized in the story after their initial introduction and unlocking. it was just sort of the protags power that made them able to be the protags, but the actual nature of fusing with someone and seeing their memories, being one with them, being essentially a giant monster, well I just wish it was gone into more.

[timmydraker]

Tim calls a family meeting and everyone is assuming he’s got a big case he needs help with, which is alarming for someone who refuses to admit that some cases are beyond him.

So, everyone shows up at the cave only to be ordered upstairs by Alfred. For those who only showed up to make fun of Tim for needing help, this is confusing because case work ain’t allowed upstairs.

All do them figure out quickly that this means it’s not to do with Gotham or Ref Robin, but the man behind the mask.

Bruce and Dick were there first and because Damian is always with one of them, so is he.

Steph picks up Barbara and Cass, with Duke already at home and Jason showing up at the same time as Kate and Lucius.

When they all get into the lounge room used for when people are over, just two doors down from the actual family room, they all find themselves chatting casually as they stave off their own worries or confusion. Some of them try find out if anyone knows what’s going on, but when Alfred and Barbara reveal they have no idea, they give up and make a few guesses but no more.

When Tim finally comes in after Alfred received him, he looks tired.

It’s not usual for Tim to get distracted with work and not sleep for a while, but he will conk out for hours when he decides to and wake up alright.

The bags under his eyes, the redness within them, and the way he looks close to tucking himself into a ball…

Bruce is immediately leaning forward, opening his mouth to make sure his son is okay but Tim just raised a hand to silence him. “Just… just let me speak, okay? I need to do it now or I’m not going to be able to.”

Everyone gives him a nod or look of understanding, making him twitch a smile before inhaling deeply and psyching himself up.

“I have cancer.”

…

Nobody speaks as Tim exhales shakily.

Everyone is staring wide eyed at the young man before them, who just reached the legal drinking age, and trying to asses his physical form for an understanding of what he just said. They’re all trying to gain X-ray vision to see exactly what is hurting him all while trying to convince themselves they heard him wrong.

Tim closes his eyes and speaks automatically, leaning into facts like he always does when he’s freaking out, “I noticed I was getting by more tired and fatigued around last year. My doctor said I have a low white cell count but he wasn’t alarmed as it was still in the normal range. But a few months ago I started to note that bruises were taking far too long to heal and I was getting a lot of pain around my joints and bones.”

He inhaled again, shakier than before at the same time that Alfred sits himself down with a hand over his mouth.

“It’s stage 2 and because of my lack of a spleen it’s going to be a harder process for treatment but fortunately I own a medical company so there’s that at least.” He makes a sort of joking smile that falters immediately, falling into a pulled back frown that comes with someone whose about to sob as he adds, “But it’s also aggressive so I-I don’t know how-how to-fuck-“

Dick and Cass are immediately moving off the couches they are on and catch him as he finally crumbles into himself.

Bruce is next to follow, the stoic man openly crying for the first time in years.

Jason and Damian are in shock, both frozen in place as dread takes over their minds.

Steph is looking out the window, as if staring at some kind of his or deity and demanding an expiration as to why they have to hurt her loved ones so badly. She’s crying, but it’s silent which is all the more harrowing.

Lucius places a hand on Alfred’s shoulder to comfort the elder even as he himself itches to go comfort the young boy who helped him run the company when he was at his worst.

Kate leaves the room to go call Bette, needing her mentor because this is just something she can’t handle.

Duke is sobbing into his hands as he leans into Barbara’s lap. Barbara who is clinging to him like a lifeline as she feels her world shift once again, feeling so angry and confused at how one of them could be threatened like this. Of all the ways they could go out, was it really going to be cancer?

It was a harrowing experience for all of them to remember that they were human in more than just their flesh being able to bleed and be wounded, but for it to grow sick. For it to age and attack itself.

They were human at the end of the day and Tim…

In Metropolis, Clark Kent rushed into the bathroom at his work to throw up as he heard a conversation miles away.

[rinawantstosleep]

𖹭༉‧°𓂃 𓈒𓏸‪‪

bf satoru x fem single mom reader

wc: 1.1k

— a pair of troublemakers residing in your house; both of whom are (unintentionally!) dead-set on making themselves the death of you.

"I don't like your stupid, white hair." 

"And I don't like your boring, brown hair, buddy."

"W-well... well, I don't like your ugly, doo-doo face!"

"Your mama does." 

The two could go bickering like this for hours on end if you let them. What may seem to be a mutually digressive arrangement is actually an oddly adorable bonding in disguise. Satoru and your son put on a front of being annoyed at the other's presence, but you've never seen them apart for longer than a few minutes at a time. They've grown on each other; much like how moss grows on a statue that's been lingering out in the open. An indispensable cycle of life that's truly inevitable. 

"No, she doesn't! She doesn't! She likes... sof- sofis... sofistogated guys."

"You mean sophisticated?"

"Shut up!" 

You'd been terrified that your little one wouldn't have a father-figure to rely on anymore after you divorced your husband. However, it was something you had to do for his sake. The child deserved to live in an environment that wasn't always reeking of alcohol, where he wasn't subjected to the constant, drunk yelling of a pathetic excuse of a father who couldn't get his shit together and lazed around at home all day while you did all the work. If that meant that you'd have to raise him on his own, then so be it. At least he'd be raised properly. Signing those papers was, by far, the easiest decision you'd ever made. 

"I'm not shutting up because a kid in clothes too big for him is telling me to."

"You... you're the one always wearing tight clothes around the house to impress my mama."

"No, that's because I'm ripped. Gotta show off what I've got. And your mama loves that." 

"Oh, yeah? That means you show off your... your - um... ugly, doo-doo face!"

Would you regard it a miracle that Satoru just so happened to stumble into your life around that very time? Well, relatively. Meeting him wasn't something you'd planned, nor anticipated. The kind stranger who offered to pay for your order at a café a year ago has somehow, thanks to quite a romantic sequence of events, turned into your boyfriend; a rock to lean on for when you need the support. And, also, someone that your little one can look up to (with the fun, bonus benefit of the pair getting into silly, childish quarrels nine times out of ten). What is Satoru if not a three-hundred-and-thirty-six-month-old toddler, too? Puts your five-year-old to utter shame with the way he acts. 

"Enough. Baby, we've been over this before. Behave."

"But, mama, he's being a meanie!" "But, babe, he's acting all pretentious." 

The responses come simultaneously: one is high pitched and whiny, and the other is your son. Sometimes, you have to pause and ask yourself how you haven't gone insane yet. It's the love that keeps you from falling apart. How could you ever harbor any other feeling for these two, except for wanting to cherish them? You just... need to work on a pet name that doesn't apply to the both of them at once.  

"I don't want to hear it. Sweetie, finish your lunch. And, Satoru?" 

"Yes, honey-who-loves-me-and-my-'ugly, doo-doo'-face?" He's smirking, snickering, while saying this, the sly bastard. When will the pair ever relent on trying to one-up the other? 

"Why have you got one of my hair ties on your wris- never mind. Don't forget to change the sheets in our room. I'd do it myself if not for the meeting I need to get to in an hour." 

"Yes, ma'am." 

Cue a tiny gasp. 

"But, mama..." The voice of your little one breaks the peaceful silence at the dining table once again. His legs start kicking back and forth - a sign that he's growing restless - from the chair they're dangling off of. He's got a protest already forming up in that head of his. "Toru said he'd take me to the skate park today. And he promised to get ice cream after."

Toru, huh? That's new. You can't help the smile that paints itself on your lips. The two have been getting along pretty well, it seems, contrary to all the bickering they do. That's always nice to know. It's amusing to see the dynamic they've built. One second, they're riling each other up to no end, the next, they've already formed a secret alliance to go out and have fun together. How cute. "Is that so?"

"Mhm! So that means we need to leave riiight after I finish my lunch. Don't get mad, okay?" 

It's the small things like these that warm your heart. Some sacrifices can be made if it's in regards to this adorable (step, even though you haven't married Satoru yet)father-son moment. The sheets are insignificant right now. "Awwh. Of course I won't get mad, baby. It's good for you to want to spend more time with Satoru. Isn't he a fun guy?"

"... maybe." 

. . . 

"Just make sure he's safe out there. Helmet and gear on at all times, no big ramps. And don't let him eat too much sugar. He'll get hyper. Once the rush dies down, he'll get cranky -"

Satoru's arm wraps around your waist before you can finish your sentence, pulling you overwhelmingly close to his frame. Instinctively, your arms move to wrap around his neck, just the way Satoru likes it. Oh, how he wants to just throw everything else out the window and drag you to the nearest room with a lock in place.

"You -" A quick peck to your lips, followed by a nibble on your bottom lip. "- worry -" Another peck. "- too -" Another. "- much." Then, an unexpected bite on the shell of your right ear. "I'd never allow myself to let that little demon get hurt; or hyper."

Large hands wander across the curve of your back, resting firm on your butt. Satoru doesn't want to expose your son to the way he's squeezing your plush flesh with his long digits, so he shifts to have your back pressed against the wall. A perfect opportunity to kiss you - which the man can't help but seize. What else is a smitten boyfriend to do while waiting for your son to get ready and come down from his room upstairs? Lips against lips until one of you pulls away for air. "He's safe with me, okay?" 

"Okay." 

"Atta girl. Now, you go to that meeting of yours. And, tonight, after we both get back- oww."

"Groooss! Don't kiss my mama, or you'll make her ugly! Like youuu!"

"Baby, no. Don't kick Satoru's ankles-"

"I'm saving you, mama."

with 𖹭, rina !!

[monstersholygrail]

Hi…. I can’t share this with anyone in real life, but I just wanted to share with someone that I finally got a tentacle dodo and the knot dodo just came in the mail today and…..

😮‍💨😮‍💨😮‍💨

AHHHWNDJDNDKW, Hey babes!! I’m actually so fucking jealous lol

I am honored that you’ve come here to share such joyous news of your pleasures both now and in the future hehe. I’ve honestly always been super curious about both kinds of dildos and wanting to try them. You’re fr living the dream right now. I bet the different textures and aspects of a tentacle dildo would be just brrrrrrrrrajjekejfkejkf. Legit would need a reboot. And the streeeetch of a knot dildo. Ugh, I’m so well. I hope they manage to drive you absolutely insane and help sate the need to fuck a monster 🙏🏼

And oh, but like imagine an agency run by witches that pays monsters for their cock molds to make dildos and secretly connects the toy to their real cocks. So whenever a human orders one and uses it, the monster can feel everything they’re doing to themselves with the dildos.

Imagine one of the dildos gets really popular at their shop, literally hundreds of orders, leading to the monster never getting a second away from the mind numbing pleasure of being in hundreds of holes, sometimes he’s in more than one at a time which makes him all the more sensitive. The overstimulation is constant. Even when he’s just shooting blanks he can’t seem to stop. Form hunched over and shaking as he cums over and over again, technically untouched even though it feels like he’s actually there himself.

He’d regret having given those witches the mold if he wasn’t having the time of his life, despite any pain.

[bimboficationblues]

so the thing about "read theory" as a mantra: in the social media sphere there is a consistent downplaying of what that kind of commitment actually entails, plus a consistent obfuscation of what exactly the commitment is necessary for.

let's say that you're interested in learning more about specifically "Marxist theory." This, I think, also raises a bunch of questions about what we mean by theory - works of political philosophy, texts on revolutionary and military strategy, political speeches, journalistic or sociological analysis, historiography - these varying things with very different discursive norms and standards of evidence or logic often get rolled into one singular object called "theory." but let's set that aside for now.

you want to learn this for maybe an assortment of reasons, here's a few (non-exhaustive) good ones:

Marxism has been a substantial historical force that has probably had a notable impact on the world around you in some way.

Learning about Marx/ism might offer some level of insight into your current social world that other things are unable to offer.

Many texts - Capital, The Wretched of the Earth, The Second Sex, The State and Revolution - are also world-historical forms of political literature, which is interesting.

Follow-up to 2 - maybe having some level of familiarity with these things will give you the ability to better articulate yourself and participate in social and political movements around you.

generally speaking the Social Media Marxist approach is to tell you to go read off a list of texts of whatever writers the author personally agrees with or whatever works she happens to have read. so you decide to start with the big guy Marx, who is at the top of the list. totally reasonable decision.

however, there are a few contextual questions that might reasonably come up when doing so.

first, it will be clear that Marx did not pop out of an intellectual vacuum; Lenin has a rather popular identification of the "three sources of Marxism" - post-Hegelian German philosophy, French socialism, and English political economy. from my perspective, these are more like three of his main objects of ire (and so in some sense are both influences and also breakages - but not strictly speaking a synthesis), but I digress. so, frequently, in order to grasp what Marx is talking about or responding to, you are going to need some level of familiarity with a lot of additional people: Smith, Ricardo, Malthus, Hegel, Bauer, Feuerbach, Hobbes, Spinoza, Rousseau, Mill, Sismondi. suddenly you are not just learning about the works of one guy, but his attitude towards all the people he relies on for support or aims his criticisms at. and each of those different intellectual relationships is going to be different. sometimes at different times!

second, and relatedly, Marx is not always the most charitable to the people he's criticizing, who were often rival socialists (so there were pretty notable political and personal stakes at work in proving them wrong or diminishing their influence over the movement). the introductory materials to the new translation of Capital also observe that Marx's approach to scholarship is, shall we say, haphazard; often he makes quotes or citations that are not actually representative of what he's citing. finally, many of the people he's criticizing have sort of been rendered obsolete historically *in no small part* due to the success of Marxism as a political orientation in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. so to determine whether Marx is being fair to the people he is basing his critique on, we will have to do some level of intellectual work to check. so now we're not just evaluating Marx's relationship to different thinkers but also the substantial content of each of those thinkers themselves.

third, Marx did not pop out of a social vacuum. all of these different writers didn't just crop up from nowhere but wrote within particular sociohistorical contexts, some of which were rather divorced from the European revolutionary wave, first worldwide financial crisis, and the shifting character of the United States in the wake of the Civil War and the formal abolition of slavery - some of the historical events that Marx was more explicitly engaging with. and the radical liberals, republicans, and socialists Marx criticized all also had their own intellectual and social histories. so now we're getting a little far afield from the initial notion, which was just to read some guy, and getting into the realm of social history, and trying to understand the relationship between world history and the ideas produced within it.

fourth, you are a subject in the world, which is to say YOU did not pop out of a social or intellectual vacuum. you likely bring predispositions, assumptions, biases, and cognitive distortions to what you read; we all do. working through those and trying to note where they're happening - where they might be fine and where they might be problematic - will require a certain willingness to reflect, to write, to take notes, to analyze and self-scrutinize, and to be critical of both yourself as a reader and of the text you are reading. (a nested problem is that we have a truly staggering amount of material from Marx and Engels, and you might have to make certain determinations as to which material is important or worthwhile or more useful, and identify the standards by which you think that - all of which requires a certain reflection on your status as a political thinker).

okay, so consider all that. we started with "I wanna read this one guy," we end with "to really grasp the work of this one guy it's also important to know both preceding and contemporaneous world history, his intellectual influences, and the gaps or silences or errors in his work.” now consider that, if you really want to be able to speak on them with some level of confidence and intellectual honesty, you have to apply approximately the same level of rigor to every other writer on the Social Media Marxist approved list - Lenin, Fanon, Che, Kollontai, Cabral, Mao, Luxemburg, whoever. not to mention their critics, both direct and indirect!

Marx developed his work through an incredibly sustained engagement with enormous volumes of different material; we have entire notebooks of him poring over Max Stirner, or Spinoza, or the political economists, or the empirical observations of English factory inspectors. I'm not saying that you have to do that, or even that one strictly *has* to go down any or all of the first three rabbitholes I identified. Marx was in the somewhat unique position of sustaining himself through the support of Engels and his journalistic work, as a product of being in perpetual exile. that's not the kind of position that most of us are typically in.

the point is not "commit yourself to being a perfect monastic scholar in order to reach perfect truth" - such a thing is probably a fantasy, even if we wish otherwise. the point is that if you think "theory" is worth taking seriously, well, you have to actually take it seriously. if you don’t think it has stakes or utility, that’s fine; different people find different things useful. I think “theory” is not a set of dead letters by canonical authors but produced through social life. but if “reading theory” is a way to clarify and assert yourself as a political subject and agent, to claim some intellectual autonomy and acquire some understanding that you can put into practice in your life, then that’s demanding. it’s not impossible, but it does take real effort and a commitment to study and a certain level of resistance to being dogmatic. otherwise you are just letting yourself be rhetorically persuaded by whatever is in front of you or whatever affirms your biases.

as Marx says in the preface to Capital, Volume I, "I am of course assuming that my readers will want to learn something new, and so are ready to think for themselves."

[mirohlayo]

YOU STOLE IT

( what happens when lando reunites with the girl who stole his first kiss ? )

warning : a bit of jealousy, fluff, lot of fluff

note : i love this okay. i won't write a part 2 so no requests please !!

word count : 4.9k

Lando hasn't always been very lucky in love. While he separated from a failed romantic relationship, he now finds himself alone, surrounded by his friends who are experiencing their perfect love, alongside their soulmates.

This doesn't bother him that much, since he himself admitted preferring to concentrate on his sporting career and thus become one of the best F1 drivers. No girlfriend yet.

But when he has to endure all day long the sweet words that other drivers address to their lovers, when he himself can feel love in the air, it becomes difficult not to think about starting a new chapter, this time here happy and healthy. A chapter that will fill him with happiness, as he has never been before.

Is this decision of not having enough time to find a girlfriend in order to concentrate on sport actually an excuse to hide the pain and despair that is gradually beginning to nestle in his heart?

He tries as best he can to reassure himself, to convince himself that he doesn't need this feeling of being completely in love and devoted to a girl. But when he continues to be the third wheel among the couples his friends form, he comes to desire a relationship more than anything else.

And every time, he can't help but think of this girl. This pretty girl he met during his summer vacation when he was 16. She was divinely beautiful, her shy but bubbly personality made Lando's heart capsize in a unique way, his whole being was alarmed just by hearing her name.

They both had a wonderful vacation, just the two of them together. During these two summer months, they did not let go of each other, spending every day alongside each other. They had become so close and complicit that they proclaimed themselves best friends from their first meeting during a kart race where Lando was racing for his life.

And since that day, they both developed deep feelings for each other. At first it was innocent. And it still is, in fact. They just thought it was a deep friendly connection, that they were just friendly soulmates. That those little stolen smiles and tactile touches were just childish, and just affectionate.

But it turned out that his feelings were ultimately more than that. More than just a friendly relationship. Lando found himself falling in love with you so hard, so passionately that he regretted not asking for your number when you two suddenly said goodbye.

You were his first love. And you still are. He thought that with time, you would eventually slip out of his head, that he would eventually forget you and move on, that it was just a big embarrassing crush from his youth but that he wouldn't think about it anymore growing up.

But that is absolutely not the case. He hasn't stopped thinking about you for 8 years. Every day, even before going to sleep, the only person he thinks about is you, that little girl he was madly in love with before.

He knows it, he maybe denies it a little, but deep down he realizes that he still has feelings for you. Perhaps less intense, less ardent, but there is no doubt that his romantic feelings will double in strength if he meets you again one day.

Of course, the old relationships, flirts, that he had before were sincere and true. He liked these few girls, that he was even happy in his last relationship. But for all that, it was by stopping this relationship and these flirts that he realized that everything brought him back to you. No matter what girl he meets, the only one who will forever remain deeply anchored in his heart is you.

He knows now that you two were more than friendly soulmates. Well, at least from his point of view. He was absolutely unsure about your feelings, which is why during these summer vacations, he preferred not to tell you anything for fear of destroying such a pure and important friendship in his eyes.

But again, he finds himself thinking about you, about how everything would be different with you. It was by going through all these different relationships with girls that he understood that he had never felt anything as powerful as with you. All these girls don't give him even a quarter of what he felt for you back then. So, how will this feeling change when he has the opportunity to meet you again?

The warm air of Saudi Arabia blows gently through the driver's curly hair. Free practice will begin in a few hours now, so Lando is using this time cooped up in the garage, surrounded by his teammate and his racing team, to discuss about the car.

“Hello Oscar!!” Lando's teammate is welcomed by his girlfriend, Lily, who smiles lovingly at him. The interview with the team is over, and she took the opportunity to spend some time with her boyfriend Oscar. The second driver comes to wrap his arms around his lover, before pressing a kiss to her forehead. Lando scoffs and rolls his eyes exaggeratedly. “Can you do this in private please? In addition to be the third wheel, I have nausea coming on.”

Oscar mocks his teammate, still holding Lily tightly in his arms. “Mate, it’s not my fault you’re a failure in love.” The Brit stops himself from hitting him, before putting on his McLaren cap. “Need I remind you that I’ve been in a relationship before?” He says to him with a completely proud look. “Couple who ended up in a failure, by the way.” He remarks, pointing at him.

“I really loved her…” The curly pauses. “It’s just that there is someone who- no, nothing, forget what I've said” He grumbles and withdraws into himself. Oscar frowns, Lily now concerned about the situation. “What?” She questions him gently.

Lando refuses to face this situation and simply shrugs his shoulders and ends up running away to join Zack further away. He can't say more, he can't talk about this girl who obsesses him. The two lovers look at each other confused by the British's behavior.

Zack smiled as he saw Lando walking towards him. “Are you already tired of feeling love in the air?” He says in order to tease him, which works. “Stop with that, I don’t care if I’m in a relationship or not.” What a lie. Zack knows his driver is lying, but he doesn't bother him more than that, not wanting to make him uncomfortable.

“So, how are things going at Ferrari?” Lando asks to quickly change the subject, not wanting to face another charade about his catastrophic dating situation. The two men then turn towards the Ferrari garage, where they can see the two drivers and the mechanics. "They look like they have a really good car, that's all I can tell you. But that doesn't mean-"

But it's too late, the British Mclaren driver no longer listens to his boss. As the Ferrari mechanics and strategists set to work, he saw among this small crowd Charles alongside a girl. At first glance, he thought it was his girlfriend. But upon closer observation, the woman, who is facing away, has a little shorter hair and is smaller in stature. And her hair color reminds him of her.

The girl he's been hopelessly in love with for 8 years now. But it can't be real, right? Why would you be here at the free practice sessions, and even more so accompanied by Charles Leclerc? His eyes must surely be hallucinating. But that silhouette from behind reminds him so much of you. But he tries to reassure himself. Or rather convince himself that there are so many brown girls in the paddock that he has confused you with someone else.

“Are you still listening to me or not?” Zack's serious voice rang in his ears. "Uh, yeah, sorry..." "You must need some time alone, I think" A mocking but concerned smile takes its place on Zack's face. “Yes, I think I need a little rest, excuse me” Lando smiles at him with difficulty before his boss goes further away.

The driver takes a deep breath. He can't help but look away at Charles and that girl. The more he looks, the more he feels like he's going back 8 years and seeing the girl he loves in front of him. He needs to know. He needs to be reassured and to be sure if this girl is really you.

And as if fate had heard it, the woman disappears from the garage, and seems to be heading to the paddock. So the British guy doesn't miss this chance and almost runs behind her to follow her. A few people give him confused and questioning looks, but he continues to pursue this dark-haired woman who hypnotizes him.

As he gets closer to you, his heart beats harder and harder. He feels like he's going to burst out of his chest and this feeling of stress eating away at him makes him want to vomit. Because he is realizing that he may have found his first love again. His eternal childhood crush.

That all those nights lost looking for you on social medias, trying to find your account and reconnect with you may not have been in vain. That all those nights lost thinking about you for a long time before falling asleep may not have been wasted in vain. That all these memories of you that he replays in his head finally make sense.

So, he goes for it without a second’s hesitation. "Excuse me ?" He speaks a little hesitantly, afraid of ending up with a woman who doesn't know him. But when the girl turns around, her brown hair flowing in the air, her eyes meeting his, Lando's heart skips several beats.

He finally found you.

The look of shock and surprise on your face mirrors Lando’s perfectly. Neither of you knows how to react, so you stay stuck like this for what seems like an eternity. But it is during this moment that the air suddenly seems changed. As if a connection, which once existed, was finally present again. As if an invisible link had finally reconnected between you, and united you for eternity. This change in atmosphere makes Lando's heart beat a little harder.

It seems unreal. So unreal that he thinks he's dreaming for a moment. For years, he never stopped thinking about you. To wonder what had become of you, what you looked like. And here you are now in front of him, more radiant than ever. This supernatural trance finally breaks when you decide to speak.

"Lando?!...Lando!!" You can't help but smile with all your teeth, a smile so sincere and strong. And oh God he suffered so much for the last eight years without being able to admire your magnificent smile. He adores it so much that he dreams of framing it in his memory forever. He knows how weak he becomes every time he gets the chance to admire your smile.

He can't help the big smile that comes over him as well. He feels so many emotions inside him that he feels like he's going to explode with happiness. "Y/n! Oh it's really you, I can't believe it!!" He can't even hide his joy and excitement, which makes you smile more, although it already seems impossible considering your cheeks already tired from just smiling.

“Me either, I feel like I’m in a dream” You admit, still a little surprised. “I didn’t think you were going to recognize me to be honest” You tell him, trying to contain your bomb of joy. “How could I not recognize you, when you are literally the most precious person to me?”

This simple sentence makes you blush violently, as you try to hide your embarrassment. “Uh- well it’s been 8 years since we last saw each other, so I doubt I’m still your favorite person” You laugh sweetly, and the sweet sound melts his heart. “So don’t doubt anymore, because you really are y/n” He addresses these few words to you while looking into yours.

And that's when he realizes how much you've changed. But changed in an incredibly beautiful way. You have kept this divine beauty which never fails to take his breath away. Your sweet facial features, that beautiful smile that he can't help but be obsessed with, and just simply your face that he could gaze at for hours and hours without ever getting tired of it.

You were already very beautiful when you were younger, when you were teenagers. But now you are infinitely more magnificent and resplendent. You look much more mature, and much more feminine. He has the impression of seeing an angel, a goddess before him. And that too has not changed, you remain for him the most beautiful woman he has ever met in his entire life.

The same goes for you. He's grown up so much, he's no longer the immature but adorable little Lando you loved so much before. Now he's a real man. He is more muscular, more virile but above all he has retained this eternal beauty and attractiveness. His beard makes him look a lot older too.

And then his hair. You teased him back then because he had trouble combing his hair. But these beautiful silky and shiny curls make you want and want to play with them, to caress them until they are messy enough for you to style them again.

“I see that my karting races have brought you to the wonderful world of Formula 1” The driver then says in order to hide the fact that he has been gazing at you for a few minutes now. You chuckle, before nodding. “Yeah, it must be said that a certain Lando Norris passed on his passion for motorsport to me” He lets out a little embarrassed laugh before turning his attention back to you.

"But Lando Norris was replaced by his opponent apparently. Bad luck." Lando's eyes land on the monegasque Ferrari driver who joins the conversation, right next to you. His tone turns colder as he stares at Charles. He can't help but feel a pang - or rather a big pang - of jealousy at the idea that you potentially replaced him with the monegasque driver.

Maybe your heart finally fell for Charles? Maybe in the end you always preferred him. He can't get these assumptions out of his head, because they haunt him now and just thinking about them makes him even more jealous. How come you're as close to Charles as you once were to Lando?

"Wow, what a reunion! Y/n told me how you were best friends before" Charles smiles kindly, and Lando seems surprised by his words. “Did she really tell you?” He asks suddenly. You clear your throat, embarrassed by what you told your friend about your relationship with the Brit.

"Yes, she told me so many things about you. That you were her favorite boy - and still are, that she loved spending time with you so much, that she really found you adorable and cute-” “Hey shut up!!” You beg Charles, placing the palm of your hand over his mouth.

Lando feels himself blush violently upon hearing Charles' words. Is this really true? “Do you think I’m cute ?” He teases you gently, but you feel even more embarrassed that you end up pressing your hands to your cheeks to hide the already terribly apparent red color.

"And that's not all, I still forgot lots and lots of things... anyway, I'll leave you, work awaits me again" Charles ends up patting the Mclaren driver on the shoulder, before to give you a smile and walk away.

A silence falls for a moment. The atmosphere has suddenly changed, it's more tense. But tense because you now know that a more than ambiguous and friendly feeling has settled between you. Tension paralyzes you as you fight the urge to jump into each other's arms.

Lando finally clears his throat before looking into your beautiful eyes. “How did you meet Charles?” “I’m a friend of his girlfriend, and she introduced us.” You respond simply, staring at him intently. Until you notice that his eyes no longer support your gaze but attack your lips.

It makes you think of that moment. And it makes him think of that moment too.

He stared intently at your pink lips. He wonders if he can. If he has the right. If he can taste them again. To move his lips on yours, to see if they are as soft as they seem.

To relive this moment. This moment, which is undoubtedly the most beautiful of his memories, and even more the most beautiful day of his life.

-

England was probably now one of your favorite destinations. Maybe because you found your confidant there, your best friend, this boy as adorable as he was immature who dreamed of being a Formula 1 driver. But all good things come to an end, and you already knew that destiny had to separate your paths. That these two months of vacation spent alongside Lando will only be distant but happy memories of your adolescence, and that you will perhaps end up watching him race on TV, being only a spectator and no longer his childhood best friend.

Lando knew it too. He knew that you had to return to your homeland, because after all England was only the destination your parents had chosen for the summer holidays. But his heart was breaking, suffocating at the idea of letting you go, when he had just accepted the fact that you were for him, potentially the woman of his life. You couldn't suppress the feeling of apprehension and sadness, as each minute that passed reminded you of how much time you would miss, passing by at a crazy speed.

Sitting on large rocks on the beach, you both admired the beautiful sunset that was falling on this last day of vacation. Tomorrow, a new chapter would begin. So you wanted to fully enjoy your last moments with your secret lover, because you might never meet him again. Silence reigned, peacefully, while the sound of the insolent waves lulled your ears with a bitter melody. You hoped you could slow down time, or rather extend it, because he seemed so stingy and selfish about giving you a little more to even exchange your unspoken thoughts.

Suddenly, you felt the boy's gaze on you, a gaze so intense that you had to turn your head away to look at him the same way. A mischievous smile appeared on his thin lips, as he opened his mouth to say a few words to you. “You promised me a gift if I won my kart race. I’m still waiting for it, Y/n.” His eyes filled with mischief and impatience, as you remembered the promise you had made to him. He had won his karting race earlier in the day, and you had promised him a gift if he managed to win it. However, you didn't think it would be so easy, since you had secretly chosen a rather... surprising gift.

A kiss. Not on his cheek, his forehead, or even his temple. No, it was more than just a childish, awkward kiss. A real, quick kiss on his lips. You thought about it because, although you sincerely believed in Lando's phenomenal abilities, you didn't think he would end up on the top step of the podium so easily and quickly. And now you're in trouble. Lando continues to stare at you mischievously, still impatient to discover your precious gift. Your brain was no longer able to function, your heart was speeding up. Did you really have to go for it? Take the plunge and place your lips on his?

Lando's impatience and waiting were more evident, while you were still panicking inside. And then, that's when you understood. That there was only him in your heart, and that there was only one chance. Only one life to live it to the fullest, without regretting anything. That worst case scenario, you'll go home the next day, forgetting this stupid promise and action. That in the end, this vacation, this boy, and this kiss, will remain engraved as the most beautiful adolescent chapter of your life, and that you will remember it with full joy and nostalgia.

Then the next second, Lando was surprised to feel a pair of lips on his. The kiss only lasted a short second, yet long enough for him to feel a bunch of different emotions. His heart felt like it was stopping, just as his brain was trying to properly process what had just happened. A powerful, strange but sweet feeling came over the young British man. He had just received his first kiss, and even more so from the girl he loved desperately. As you pulled back to look into his eyes, his looked back at you, confused. But because he understood.

He understood that this was love. That he was destined to remain faithful to you, for the rest of his life, because that kiss was the promise that his heart would belong to you forever.

-

It's been a little over a week now since you and Lando got together. And these last few days have been filled with nostalgia, reunions and above all strong and intense emotions. After the Jeddah race, Lando asked you to spend time together. Finally, he secretly wanted to insinuate that he wanted to spend every minute of his time by your side. Like before, like eight years ago.

He had finally found his childhood crush, the woman he considered the love of his life, and so he wasn't going to let her escape so easily. Especially since this reunion made him rekindle these deep feelings that he had not lost, but balked at because he had come to the conclusion that he will never find you again. However, talking to you again, spending time with you made him feel the love he had for you, but so much more intense, so much stronger and more powerful.

He's never felt like this before with any other girl, he's never seen himself in this state. Completely and obsessively in love, desperate to receive your attention and stay with you. Finding you was a sentimental blow to him, while he found himself lost forever in your heart. Finding you sealed his heart in your hands for eternity.

“It was a great day.” You hasten to say as a pretty smile takes place on your face. The driver looks at you lovingly, as he nods his head in approval. “Especially when I beat you at karting. It was the best moment of the day” He teases you and you stare at him. "I drove into the barrier because you hit my kart with yours. It doesn't count" You try to defend yourself.

“It doesn’t matter, I still won.” He adds as you sit side by side on the warm sand of the beach. “Still as narcissistic as back then” You roll your eyes but don’t hide that teasing smile on your face. “Still the same Lando Norris that you loved so much” He adds, his eyes scanning the horizon in the distance.

You swallow with difficulty, a lump in your throat. “Loved uh…” You whisper to yourself. Raising your head, you are greeted by the sunset. A pretty sunset, the same one that accompanied you on that last day of vacation eight years ago. You can't help but feel this feeling of nostalgia, of happiness.

It's exactly the same pretty frame, and the same boy by your side. It reminds you so much of that beautiful day long ago. Your heart warms at the thought. You finally found the man you love so much, and you couldn't be happier than right now.

The waves play the same melody, but this time the melody is more beautiful. Brighter and strangely romantic. As you gaze at the clouds in the distance, you feel Lando's intense gaze on you. Exactly the same look he gave you back then. Then, as if you were rehearsing the same scene, like a play that you are performing to perfection, you turn around to lock your gaze with his.

And there, that famous mischievous smile takes over his lips. Eight years later, he has the same look, this smile that changed everything. "You forgot your promise again, like back then. I'm still waiting for it, y/n" His words hit you like a bomb. Because they are exactly the same ones he said to you the day you made that stupid promise to him. This stupid gift.

And as if you weren't stupid enough, you secretly thought of the same gift. You internally promised yourself that you would give him the same kiss if he managed to beat you in karting. And he did it, as if he had put all his soul into the race to deserve this surprise gift from you. You feel helpless as the same panic takes hold of you. Everything seems so unreal. This sweet memory will finally happen again.

You see his eyes drop to your lips for a split second. But it's that split second that changes everything about you. Now you know it's for life. That you found the boy of your heart, that you will never leave him again, even if he doesn't feel the same way as you. That you only have one life to regret nothing, and this childhood kiss you have never regretted. So you never want to regret it.

You smile shyly, and without him being able to do anything, you crash your lips onto his. Lando's eyes widen, but he finally realizes what's happening. And he doesn't wait any longer to move his lips to yours. But this time the kiss is totally different. It is no longer innocent and shy like it used to be. It's no longer a little kiss between two teenagers who promised each other a gift.

No, this time it's much more romantic. More intense, deep and passionate. It's so comforting and sweet. This kiss is the fruit of the unconditional love he feels for you. So, he continues to deepen the kiss, his hand delicately cupping your cheek while his arm comes around your waist.

He licks your bottom lip with his tongue before nibbling it gently, letting you completely devote yourself to him. He continues to kiss you passionately, but yet it's not vulgar or crude. It's a soft and pleasant kiss, where only love is exchanged between your lips.

You finally broke the kiss by pulling back, a shy smile matching your pink cheeks perfectly. He opens his eyes, a silly smile on his lips before quickly pecking your lips again. You stay like that for a moment, admiring each other for a long time, love in your eyes.

"I'm so fucking in love with you, baby. Not since yesterday, not since last week, no. Since ages ago, for so long that I've stopped counting." You smile at him tenderly, your cheeks still pink. "Me too, Lando. I've loved you since we first met."

He smiles wider as his arms pull you a little closer to him. "You know, you're the girl who stole my first kiss. And you're also the only girl who managed to steal my heart. My heart has been yours for eight years, since the very moment you took me kissed." You can’t help but giggle, which melts Lando’s heart. “I thought you stopped counting.” He scratches the back of his neck, somewhat embarrassed. “Let’s just say I kept counting because I was desperate to know when I was going to find the woman I love.”

In the meantime he leaned over you, until you were lying on the soft sand. “Every day you were gone was like a bullet in my chest.” “What a romantic, I’m almost going to get emotional” You tease, a mocking laugh coming from you. “Still as teasing as before” He adds, pressing a kiss to your cheek.

"For eight years, you were the only girl who never stopped staying anchored in my thoughts. From our first kiss, my heart already belonged to you, and it will continue to be yours for the rest of my life. I never wanted any other girl but you, and I waited so long for you that I'll never let you go. I love you so much, sweetheart” His words warm your heart, as you gently caress his face with your thumbs. “I’m completely in love with you too, Lan.” And in these last words, he rushes to kiss you again.

You feel like eight years ago, like the two idiots in love who stole their first kiss. Nothing has changed except the reality that reminds you that your love is bound for eternity, and that it will continue to exist because it is deeper and more passionate every day. That this is the present moment, and that your hearts are finally filled with happiness to have been able to find their other half, after so many years of desperately continuing to live without the presence of the other.

[sammylkcho]

Hello

Heard you were doing epic requests...Telemachus x reader, if you already had ideas for this x reader go for it, if not, maybe the reader is a servant at the palace or it takes place after I can't help but wonder. No pressure to actually do this btw, I'm sure you getting too many requests to keep up with.

Have a nice day! <3

Howdy! I liked the idea of the request, and to make it less challenging for me to write, I decided to make Reader a personal (or close) servant to Telemachus

Warnings/Notes: none!

"Prince Telemachus, would you like me to bring up your dinner tonight? The suitors are still eating and helping themselves to numerous trays of food," you informed him in a formal tone, awaiting his response to see what orders he would give you.

Lately, Telemachus had opted to dine in the comfort of his room to avoid discomfort or any comments from his mother’s suitors. It wasn’t exactly proper, especially for him as the prince, since he was expected to accompany their "guests."

You had tried to gently persuade him, following his mother’s orders, not to be discourteous by leaving the suitors to dine alone. In the end, all those efforts were in vain. You understood that the prince had his reasons for avoiding the same table as them.

With your hands clasped behind your back, occasionally fidgeting nervously, you waited for the prince’s reply—even though you already had a good idea of what it would be.

"I'm not hungry, but thank you," the prince informed you, his tone clearly disheartened and subdued.

You made a visible grimace of displeasure and concern at his words. His demeanor didn’t sit well with you—not that you hated it, but his spirits hadn’t been the same since his argument with Antinous. Each passing day seemed to weigh on him more heavily, especially as the suitors grew increasingly impatient over the lack of a king being chosen.

You bit your lower lip, a tinge of doubt crossing your mind about what to do next. You didn’t want to simply fulfill your role as a servant this time.

Deciding to break that boundary, even if only for a moment, you chose to be Telemachus’s close friend—the one who had stood by his side all these years.

Without needing to say a word, you sat down beside him on the bed. That alone was enough to draw his attention.

The dim light of the two torches flickering in the room seemed to conspire in your favor, casting its glow over the prince’s face. You could see the bruises on his skin, now less swollen—a marked improvement from how they had looked just days ago—and the shadows forming under his eyes, the evidence of sleepless nights spent training or lost in thought.

You remembered those nights. The times you stayed up with him, watching him practice with his wooden sword when you were both still children, or when the two of you would sneak out of the castle. You thought of the moment he had cried in front of you, overcome by the helplessness of not knowing how to rid his home of the men who were taking everything from him—from his family’s food to their dignity.

Maybe it was instinct, or perhaps just muscle memory. As if your body already knew what to do, your hands rose gently to cradle his face.

Your thumb moved softly across his cheek, avoiding the areas where the wounds from his fight with Antinous were still tender.

“We’ll get those men out of here, and they’ll leave your mother alone, I promise.” You whispered, almost afraid that anyone other than him might hear.

Why were you the one making that promise? A simple servant of the castle, tasked with daily mundane duties, with no power except to stand by your prince. You prayed silently to the gods that your words would not be empty, that someday those men would be gone, and Odysseus would return to the home he’d left behind so long ago.

“That.. I swear by the gods, especially by the goddess Athena herself, they couldn’t have given me anyone better than you.” Telemachus murmured.

His voice was just a whisper, so soft that you almost doubted if you had heard him, but the weight of his words filled the space between you with a profound meaning.

Time seemed to pause as you felt his hand, warm and firm, resting over yours. It wasn’t scorching hot or uncomfortably cold; it was just the right warmth, as though it belonged there.

“That punch you gave Antinous must still be giving him a headache. Next time, land an even stronger one for me, but make sure you come out unscathed, okay?” you teased, trying to lighten the mood.

For a moment, something flickered in his eyes before a quiet, sheepish laugh escaped him. You couldn’t help but laugh along.

“With Athena’s strength on my side, I’ll make it happen,” he replied with a newfound confidence, his spirits slowly lifting.

Heat rushed to your face, crawling torturously to your cheeks, and you cursed inwardly, hoping the blush wasn’t too obvious to him.

“It better be. I’d rather not see your face battered again or listen to you complaining while I try to patch you up.” You joked, letting out a soft laugh as he groaned in mock protest.

You treasured moments like these. There were no suitors to humiliate him, no interruptions to break the fragile bubble of peace around you. It was just you and him.

And in your heart, you kept praying to the gods. For Odysseus to return soon. For a way to rid the castle of those men. For these fleeting moments of calm to last just a little longer.

[frownyalfred]

Hi. I'm not a canon purist and enjoy some fanon content very much, but I do think people in the fandom should at least familiarize themselves with the canon content and source material. It's easier to break the "rules" so to speak and experiment with canon when you know what that actually is. I've noticed a lot of fans that are only familiar with fanon criticise content that doesn't line up with what they believe to be canon but isn't. The Red Hood for example. I've seen writers who portray him as the violent criminal he is in much of the canon be completely decimated by Jason fans who only know fanon and the retconned version of Red Hood and completely deny canon even exists and refuse to even glance at the comics. Transformative works are important and playing in the sandbox is for everyone but fandom literally cannot exist without canon. Canon is important and people can do whatever they want with it but they should respect it enough to at least look at it.

Hi anon, I'm going to hold your hand as I say this, and I will say it as gently as I can: This is still a form of canon purism.

We can absolutely agree that readers shouldn't berate or abuse writers for how they choose to portray characters in fic, whether that's a more canon-faithful characterization or a popular fanon version. If readers don't like how a character is portrayed, we should encourage them to hit the back button instead.

I want to draw your attention to some of the words you used in your ask above: "should" "respect" "decimated" etc. Those are some strong words to describe how you think people need to behave, in order to exist in fandom. Of course, there is no fandom without canon source material -- I'm not denying that. But with such a wide and varied canon, the DC fandom has examples of the Red Hood you mention above, AND the "retconned" version you also reference. Both are canon, as in actually, officially, canon. WFA is canon, and that Red Hood looks very different from the Red Hood you describe.

Now, I think your issue is that you enjoy a certain version of canon, and you're frustrated that the fandom doesn't also, as trends ebb and flow, enjoy that canon as much as you do. Again, I want to acknowledge that just because a certain version is popular, it doesn't give folks the right to berate authors for writing a different version. But again, I don't think that's what we're really talking about here. From your ask's tone, I think you're suggesting that people should, in order to participate in fandom, read that older canon, that different version, or as you say, "glance at it" before enjoying or writing the fanon version.

Guess what? They actually, really, really, don't have to. It sounds like you have some issues with judging your fellow fandom members who don't read what you do or reference certain canon. But the magic of this fandom is, you can enter it at any point. We're a big pool, and if someone's entry point is the Lego Batman movie and that's it, that's still valid.

Fandom stems from canon, yes, but I almost never hear people talk about movies, or web comics, or other media when they talk about "required reading." It's always a comic. I really wish people would reflect on that before suggesting it as the one true path to being a fan.

The other thing I don't see asks like these reference ever is the reality that sometimes a fandom outstrips its canon material, and that that's an eventuality in some spaces. Fanon interpretations become popular, and people write about those specific characterizations or scenarios. They ebb and flow, like I mentioned, and some are more canon-faithful than others. Some completely reject canon, and again -- it's still fandom. It doesn't make it better or worse than a more canon-faithful fic. It's just different.

I had a couple asks about this topic a few weeks ago, and I'm assuming you haven't read those or you likely wouldn't have sent me this ask. But in them, I discuss how sometimes we need to suck it up and be unhappy that canon-faithful fics aren't as popular in a fandom at a specific time, and stop punishing fellow fans for writing and enjoying those fics. And we really need to stop shitting on them publicly on Tumblr.

Because often, what you're really saying is that you wish more people would write more canon-faithful fics, and stop writing ones about fanon topics you don't enjoy or think are accurate. And to that, I again say, there is nothing you can or should do to change that behavior from others. If you want to read it, write it, enjoy it, etc, do it yourself. Build the comic-faithful community here, write fics and promote challenges, create a discord channel and discuss your "required reading" there.

We are all writing and reading fanfiction at the end of the day. It is a great equalizer in many ways. My silly Lego Batman fic is just as valid as a canon-faithful rewrite of a certain Batman issue. One is not better than the other, or more deserving of respect. You will never get me to admit otherwise on this blog.

tl;dr: people should absolutely not berate authors who choose to write canon-faithful characterizations. however, there are layers of judgement and disdain many DC comics canon-faithful authors/readers have for their fellow fans that I think we need to examine critically in order to coexist respectfully.

[d-emeter]

The world has gone to hell, but you've found your own paradise (or: apocalypse au with task force 141) — plus-size!fem!reader x poly!141

CW: zombie apocalypse (but no real zombies mentioned lol), allusion to smut but doesn't actually happen yet, soap being a horny bastard, implied age-gap?

HEAVILY based on the bill and frank storyline from the last of us but can be read as a generic zombie apocalypse so no worries if you haven't seen/played tlou! Also different format? Is this something?

Captain John Price who, over the years, has become a bit of a survivalist nut — a prepper, if you will.

Sure, his sergeants make fun of him for it sometimes, but he more than anyone knows the shit that plays behind the scenes, the things governments keep hidden, the threats that loom every damn day — so he'd rather be safe than sorry when the world inevitably goes to shit. He's almost smug about it when it does (he hadn't calculated in the zombie aspect of it all, but still)

Unfortunately for him, however, he and the rest of 141 are deployed when outbreak day comes around. More and more cities are bombed by the hour, the population dwindling by the second, and in the week that follows he and the boys are amongst those assigned to evacuate the smaller towns and villages and escort the citizens to quarantine zones — that is, until the QZ's are full and they're under direct order to execute those that didn't make it in.

Now, Price's moral compass has been skewed for some time now. He's done some stuff during his years serving — man or woman, guilty or innocent, it hadn't mattered to him then. It doesn't now, either.

What does him in is the tear that rolls down Soap's cheek when Price shoots the mother and child his sergeant couldn't bring himself to ("Aren't these the people we're 'posed tae protect, cap?")

He convinces his task force to desert that very night (they'd been hesitant, but in the end, they'd follow their captain to hell and back). They gather as many weapons, ammo and MRE's as they can get away with without being caught, and they're off into the night.

Price brings them to his home — a big, old house inherited from his grandparents somewhere in a small, sleepy village. He had spent the better part of his time on leave preparing the house to be self-sufficient should the need arise: generators on solar and wind power, water filters, a chicken coop and a garden set up in the backyard (that, and enough weapons to supply a small army in the garage)

They wait until this village gets evacuated, too, so they can claim it for themselves before raiders come around. They fence off a section of the town, set up traps and cameras, anything to ensure no unwanted visitors can enter, infected or not.

It's their own form of paradise, in a way. (the house has enough bedrooms to give them all their own — they end up in eachother's more often than not)

One day, you fall into their lives — literally. You've fallen into one of their traps, a literal hidden hole in the ground, and within a few minutes you hear the creak of a gate, multiple sets of feet and the unmistakable sound of a gun being loaded ("I'm not infected!" You yell from your hole before they can lay eyes on you, certain they'd shoot you on sight if you didn't)

The first thing you see is the barrel of the gun leering over the edge, before you see its owner — a man with a beard and the most intense eyes you've ever seen. He keeps his gun pointed at you while he makes you recite the alphabet, forwards then backwards, all with your hands held before you to ensure you weren't twitching. You pass his test, it seems, and a ladder is lowered into the hole.

Once you're back on the surface, you see it's not just the man with the beard — there's four of them in total, each looking more terrifying than the last, all muscle and bulk and having the ability to snap you like a twig should they feel the need. There are still guns pointed at you as you explain your situation and simultaneously beg for your life — you were with a group travelling to the nearest QZ, you're the only one left now ("Please, I didn't mean- Please don't hurt me, I'll be out of your hair before you know it — I won't tell anyone about this place! I haven't eaten in three days-")

John and Simon were hesitant at first, but their sergeants manage to convince them to let you inside, offer you some food before sending you on your way again (Soap had been frothing at the mouth a little the moment he had laid eyes on you — sure, they had kept eachother... satisfied, but "Cap, when's the last time any o' us felt the touch o' a lass? 'N such a pretty one at that..." and Price knows he can't deny them when Gaz leans over to whisper how prettily you had begged for your safety, surely it'd do no harm?)

Your eyes widen a little when the scary man with the beard tells you to come with them — your hunger ends up winning the battle with your brain as it tries to convince you that following four big male strangers into their fenced home is not a good plan.

You expected a dented can of beans and maybe a cup of water, so you're definitely more than a little surprised when they usher you into a bedroom with an ensuite, telling you to go take a shower (Soap wanted to follow you into the bathroom, mumbling something about wanting to double check for any bite marks. Ghost had to hold him back by his shirt)

You nearly cry when you feel the stream of hot water on your skin, and feel like you're in some sort of fever dream when you see the clean clothes laid out on the bed for you — granted, they're men's clothes, but anything is better than the rags you had on before.

You start to wonder if maybe you died and are in some sort of weird state between worlds when you come back downstairs to a table that's fully decked out and beautifully presented plates of food.

All of them turn to you immediately and you have to do your best not to falter under their stares (you don't notice the flustered little cough Price lets out at the sight of such a pretty creature in his shirt — god, maybe Johnny was right, it had been a while since he's had a woman, and such a young, plush one at that)

One of them — the one with the darker skin and the prettiest face you've seen in months — is the first to jump into action, hand on your lower back as he ushers you into a chair.

You're convinced you're dead when you bring the first bite to your lips — God, that's good. (Johnny nearly chokes on his food at the small moan you let out. Simon remains stoic, but damn him if he didn't feel a spark of heat in his gut at the sound)

The men start introducing themselves while you're shoveling food into your mouth. The man with the beard — John, you now know — explains that they're all ex-military. Through bites of food, you do your best to introduce yourself as well. You tell them your story, they tell you theirs (well, Johnny and Gaz do, mainly. The one called Simon still hasn't really said a word to you, and you can tell John is a little paranoid about sharing too much information with a stranger)

As the night progresses, there's a shift in the air. Kyle leans in a little too close while brushing a crumb away from your lip, and John lingers behind you a little too long as he refills your glass (you pretend not to notice the sound of his deep inhale as he leans over you).

John insists you don't have to help with the dishes, so you wander into the living room and are immediately intrigued by the piano standing there. Johnny joins you on the bench, thigh pressed against yours as you play with the keys. Simon — or 'Ghost', as you noticed the others called him sometimes — leans over you from behind, and your breathing nearly stops (Simon knows he's too close, but so what if he wants you to accidentally brush against his abdomen?)

Once it's all said and done, you try not to let your disappointment show as you prepare to leave. Much to your surprise, it's Simon that grunts something to you, speaking the first words he's said that night. ("Stay. F'r the night. 'S not safe out there.")

John keeps a heavy hand on your shoulder as he leads you back to the bedroom you were in earlier. It's his, he tells you, but he can stay with one of the others. ("Are you- Are you sure? I can take a couch, or-" "'M sure, love, good night's sleep 'll do you good. Give me a yell if y'need somethin', yeah?")

With that, he leaves you to it, shutting the door behind him. Fuck, that bed does look inviting, and you can almost hear your vertebrae begging for a soft mattress. As you get ready for bed, a thought enters your mind. It had... been a while.

Is what you're about to do a stupid decision? Maybe, but you figured if these men had wanted to hurt you they would've done it already, and you'd be lying if you said that all their touches and affection weren't having an effect on your panties.

You yell out their names from the room, and the four of them are there within a second, though they all falter at the door as they take in the sight before them — you're sitting in the bed, covers pulled up so the only thing visible are your bare shoulders and arms, and it's immediately clear what your intentions are.

Soap, once again, has to be held back by the scruff to prevent him from pouncing on you immediately. John, instead, is the first one to actually enter the room, sitting down on the bed and carefully bringing his hand to caress your cheek while asking if you're sure about this (he'd rather not admit the way he shuddered a bit when he made contact with the soft skin of your face)

Your answer is immediate, you've made up your mind — on one condition ("I'm not... a whore, or anything. I don't sleep with people for food or shelter or anything, just- if we're doing this... I'm staying. For a while.")

Simon nearly laughs at this — funny how you think they would have let you leave otherwise.

[thewriteadviceforwriters]

Creating Compelling Character Arcs: A Guide for Fiction Writers

As writers, one of our most important jobs is to craft characters that feel fully realized and three-dimensional. Great characters aren't just names on a page — they're complex beings with arcs that take them on profound journeys of change and growth. A compelling character arc can make the difference between a forgettable story and one that sticks with readers long after they've turned the final page.

Today, I'm going to walk you through the art of crafting character arcs that are as rich and multi-layered as the people you encounter in real life. Whether you're a first-time novelist or a seasoned storyteller, this guide will give you the tools to create character journeys that are equal parts meaningful and unforgettable.

What Is a Character Arc?

Before we go any further, let's make sure we're all on the same page about what a character arc actually is. In the most basic sense, a character arc refers to the internal journey a character undergoes over the course of a story. It's the path they travel, the obstacles they face, and the ways in which their beliefs, mindsets, and core selves evolve through the events of the narrative.

A character arc isn't just about what happens to a character on the outside. Sure, external conflict and plot developments play a major role — but the real meat of a character arc lies in how those external forces shape the character's internal landscape. Do their ideals get shattered? Is their worldview permanently altered? Do they have to confront harsh truths about themselves in order to grow?

The most resonant character arcs dig deep into these universal human experiences of struggle, self-discovery, and change. They mirror the journeys we all go through in our own lives, making characters feel powerfully relatable even in the most imaginative settings.

The Anatomy of an Effective Character Arc

Now that we understand what character arcs are, how do we actually construct one that feels authentic and impactful? Let's break down the key components:

The Inciting Incident

Every great character arc begins with a spark — something that disrupts the status quo of the character's life and sets them on an unexpected path. This inciting incident can take countless forms, be it the death of a loved one, a sudden loss of power or status, an epic betrayal, or a long-held dream finally becoming attainable.

Whatever shape it takes, the inciting incident needs to really shake the character's foundations and push them in a direction they wouldn't have gone otherwise. It opens up new struggles, questions, and internal conflicts that they'll have to grapple with over the course of the story.

Lies They Believe

Tied closely to the inciting incident are the core lies or limiting beliefs that have been holding your character back. Perhaps they've internalized society's body image expectations and believe they're unlovable. Maybe they grew up in poverty and are convinced that they'll never be able to escape that cyclical struggle.

Whatever these lies are, they'll inform how your character reacts and responds to the inciting incident. Their ingrained perceptions about themselves and the world will directly color their choices and emotional journeys — and the more visceral and specific these lies feel, the more compelling opportunities for growth your character will have.

The Struggle

With the stage set by the inciting incident and their deeply-held lies exposed, your character will then have to navigate a profound inner struggle that stems from this setup. This is where the real meat of the character arc takes place as they encounter obstacles, crises of faith, moral dilemmas, and other pivotal moments that start to reshape their core sense of self.

Importantly, this struggle shouldn't be a straight line from Point A to Point B. Just like in real life, people tend to take a messy, non-linear path when it comes to overcoming their limiting mindsets. They'll make progress, backslide into old habits, gain new awareness, then repeat the cycle. Mirroring this meandering but ever-deepening evolution is what makes a character arc feel authentic and relatable.

Moments of Truth

As your character wrestles with their internal demons and existential questions, you'll want to include potent Moments of Truth that shake them to their core. These are the climactic instances where they're forced to finally confront the lies they believe head-on. It could be a painful conversation that shatters their perception of someone they trusted. Or perhaps they realize the fatal flaw in their own logic after hitting a point of no return.

These Moments of Truth pack a visceral punch that catalyzes profound realizations within your character. They're the litmus tests where your protagonist either rises to the occasion and starts radically changing their mindset — or they fail, downing further into delusion or avoiding the insights they need to undergo a full transformation.

The Resolution

After enduring the long, tangled journey of their character arc, your protagonist will ideally arrive at a resolution that feels deeply cathartic and well-earned. This is where all of their struggle pays off and we see them evolve into a fundamentally different version of themselves, leaving their old limiting beliefs behind.

A successfully crafted resolution in a character arc shouldn't just arrive out of nowhere — it should feel completely organic based on everything they've experienced over the course of their thematic journey. We should be able to look back and see how all of the challenges they surmounted ultimately reshaped their perspective and led them to this new awakening. And while not every character needs to find total fulfillment, for an arc to feel truly complete, there needs to be a definitive sense that their internal struggle has reached a meaningful culmination.

Tips for Crafting Resonant Character Arcs

I know that was a lot of ground to cover, so let's recap a few key pointers to keep in mind as you start mapping out your own character's trajectories:

Get Specific With Backstory

To build a robust character arc, a deep understanding of your protagonist's backstory and psychology is indispensable. What childhood wounds do they carry? What belief systems were instilled in them from a young age? The more thoroughly you flesh out their history and inner workings, the more natural their arc will feel.

Strive For Nuance

One of the biggest pitfalls to avoid with character arcs is resorting to oversimplified clichés or unrealistic "redemption" stories. People are endlessly complex — your character's evolution should reflect that intricate messiness and nuance to feel grounded. Embrace moral grays, contradictions, and partial awakenings that upend expectations.

Make the External Match the Internal

While a character arc hinges on interior experiences, it's also crucial that the external plot events actively play a role in driving this inner journey. The inciting incident, the obstacles they face, the climactic Moments of Truth — all of these exterior occurrences should serve as narrative engines that force your character to continually reckon with themselves.

Dig Into Your Own Experiences

Finally, the best way to instill true authenticity into your character arcs is to draw deeply from the personal transformations you've gone through yourself. We all carry with us the scars, growth, and shattered illusions of our real-life arcs — use that raw honesty as fertile soil to birth characters whose journeys will resonate on a soulful level.

Happy Writing!

[writingwrongwjc]

First Date With the Munson Boy

Eddie Munson x Reader

Warnings: maybe slight angst for a second otherwise all fluff!!

“Should I wear this one or the red one?” You look past yourself in the mirror at Steve and Robin lying on your bed. Steve looks up hastily from the magazine but gives no response. Instead offering a lost expression

“Why are you even going on a date with this guy again?”

Robin props herself up, throwing the nearest object she can find toward Steve.

“Dude you can’t just say stuff like that.”

“Why not? I’m being honest he’s kinda… well he is a freak.”

“He’s... sweet.” You say, swinging around toward them; making sure your dress swishes as you do so.

“Plus I could make fun of you for so many girls… Linda!” Robin Chimes in.

“Okay, glasses Linda? That’s not fair becau-” Steve begins to ramble but you interject before his poor excuses can manifest themselves.

“You guys! You are no help.” You throw your hands in the air, flailing the dresses as you move.

“Red.”

“Red!”

They both say in unison. Given their struggles with finding love, and your growing irritation you opted for the white dress.

“Mmm it’s classy.” you quip, leaving the room to put on the dress.

How you met Eddie is a story you’d rather not share with them just yet. Although Steve and Robin are your best friends they don’t exactly know about your habitual love for Mary Jane. They know you’ve smoked before, even trying a little for themselves when drunk and adventurous. You have just been embarrassed to admit that you enjoy the little herb, and many of the outcasts that come with it on a consistent basis. One such outcast is the man who started to sell it to you in the first place, Eddie Munson. Town Outcast, drug dealer, and according to neighborhood moms; occultist! After you started buying from him more the two of you started to hang out in those woods more consistently, even when you didn’t want to buy, but knew he’d be back there.

“We can’t keep meeting this way.” He’d say one day, cocking his head with a gentle smile.

“No? Then maybe you should take me out somewhere?” You cocked your head back at him with a slight of mischief on your face.

So now, you stand in your living room all dolled up to go out with the Munson boy.

“He’ll be here any second you guys need to leave! Go!” You shout, pushing Steve and Robin out the front door; giggling as they shuffle through at the same time.

“Have fun!”

“Don’t get murdered!”

“Oh yeah. Use protection!”

Not even a minute later Eddie pulls up in his beat down old van blaring some Iron Maiden song. Rather than allowing him to retrieve you from the house you meet him at the curb so that your parents don’t berate him about where he’s taking you and what his intentions are. He stumbles over his own feet in an effort to reach the van door before you can.

“Your chariot awaits you.” He bows, hand still on the door, eyes lingering on your form for a moment. “You uh, wow.” He says, shaking his head in disbelief releasing a huff of air. “You look amazing.”

“Oh thank you,” you say blushing at his genuine comment. He shuts your door hard, galloping over to the driver’s side, jumping into the seat. The music is now at a comforting volume rather than its usual roar.

“So, where are you taking me?”

“I was thinking we could hit some takeout, then drive out to the quarry and have a bit of a soiree?” Eddie seemed unsure of his idea now that he’s presenting it to you.

“Who knew you were a romantic Eddie!”

“I just, I thought that the stars would be brighter out there, and… you wouldn’t have to actually be seen with me.”

The street lights lit up the sadness glistening in his eyes, although he hid it well under his vibrant expressions and smiles toward you as he spoke.

“If I didn’t want to be seen with you I wouldn’t go out with you, dummy.” You jabbed him in the side in order to lighten his mood.

“I yearn for adventure! There’s no adventure in a drive in. Just making out before you're ready.”

He laughs vibrantly fidgeting with the rings on his fingers as he palms the steering wheel. Quicker than you thought that you would, you arrived at the quarry with takeout cheeseburgers in hand.

Eddie parked at the edge of the water away from the main road. As romantic as it truly was, Steve's words popped back in your head for a moment: “Don’t get murdered.” Not that Eddie would hurt you, just the fact of how dark it is way out here and the colorful history of the area. It's peaceful, but in an eerie way. While you’re thinking about how eerie it is Eddie got into the back of his van to grab a blanket.

“Here it is! Only the finest silks for a lady.” He approaches you staring into the darkness. “Oh. Are you okay?”

“Yeah. Yeah! It’s just dark out here. Spooky.” You wiggled your fingers at him when you said the word spooky. You take the blanket from him and turn to find a spot while he turns on some music.

“Okay so options, killer options by the way. We have Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, Dio, Slayer. Oh I have my guilty pleasure prince tape! Or, behind door number three, surprise mix! I have no Idea what’s on this one, I think I was high when I made it or it’s like one of those things where we listen to it and a quest starts”

He holds up each cassette tape like a salesman attempting to get your buy. You couldn’t help but admire his features, complimented so well by a nice leather jacket, cleaner, sturdier than his usual jacket but it suits him so well.

“Door number three, Surprise me! Now come eat, it's getting soggy!”

“Oh one more thing!” he leans into the van once more sliding the cassette into place then reaching to grab something. The first song on the surprise cassette is certainly a surprise to you. Africa by Toto.

He holds up a small hand rolled joint with a crooked grin on his face.

“We’ll save it for dessert!” you say as he sits beside you on the blanket warming the brisk air.

“Oh I thought I was gonna have something else for dessert.” He looks you up and down, biting his lip slyly. Not sly enough, you push his face away from you.

“Eddie! Who do you think I am?”

Rather than taking your shove for what it was he threw himself to the ground with haste feigning injury. Making you burst into laughter from his theatrics. Sitting up again he looks at you with puppy’s eyes.

“I meant Ice Cream, freak. We can go get some ice cream!”

“Oh yeah sure you did, but I’ll hold you to that now.”

After stuffing your mouths and talking a bit in between, Eddie lights up the joint offering you the first hit. You can feel his eyes on your lips as you draw in the smoke. His gaze is soft and his eyes dart across the entirety of your face. As you go to hand him the lit joint you hear a crackle in the woods beside you. Reacting with instinct you gasp harshly scooting your body closer to his, dropping the joint onto the blanket.

“Oh. shit.”

“Shit. Sorry.”

The two or you scramble to pick it up and snuff out the embers, tangling into one another while doing so. Your arm is now hooked around Eddie’s bent leg and his arm under yours, hand resting on the tops of your knees. The tension between the two of you is palpable but you both laugh off what just happened, especially since the weed is now settling into your system.

“You’re honestly such a mage.” Eddies says out of nowhere.

“Huh?”

“I was just thinking if you were a class in D&D it would be mage.”

“I have no idea what that is.” You say looking at him confused but eager to learn more.

He takes the time to thoroughly explain the D&D classes and other game mechanics you didn’t fully understand but thoroughly enjoys the enthusiastic expression on his face while he explains something he loves.

“Basically, they’re very versatile in their magic, like you. Pretty, funny, smart, it's all magic!”

“So would you be a bard then, because they play instruments?” The glow leaves Eddie's eyes and his expression drops, pouting his bottom lip out slightly.

“Well, they play lutes and stuff, it's not the same.”

“I mean sure it is, your electric guitar is just a way cooler version of a lute.”

“There’s more to it than that I’m more of a rogue.” He stands up, broadening his shoulders, with an over dramatic sneaky look on his face.

“Whatever you say, oh great D&D expert!” You hop onto your knees fanning your arms up and down at him. “I dare not question thee. Forgive me my Lord.” Sarcasm thickens with each word.

“I’ll forgive you, fair Lady. Stand!” Eddie poses himself as a king making his decree. “On one condition!”

You stand to your feet with a bit of a wobble, choking back a giggle as the song that is playing ends and the song Hungry Eyes comes on.

“That is?”

Suddenly the air shifts. No longer do you feel playful, but a tickle of anxiety. Nothing surrounds the two of you now. Eddies searches for words to say but can’t think of a royal decree. He crosses his arms loosely.

“Man I suck at this.”

“Or you're distracted.” you offer up walking closer to him until your hands meet his shoulders. The leather cold under your palms. He lets his arms unfold, grabbing you by the small of your back.

“Yeah that’s-” He trails off nervously. You can feel his shaky warm breath amid the cool autumn air.

“Next time I want to go to the most popular spot in town.”

“Next time?” He smiles.

“Yes next time, dummy.”

You slide your hand onto his jawline and then to the base of his neck, burying your fingers into his mess of brown hair. He leans forward slightly, pausing just before he kisses you allowing you to direct the moment. You pull his head closer to yours, your lips crashing together sweetly. His lips full and passionate yet not hungry for more instead satisfied in the moment. You linger in the kiss allowing passion to blossom. When you pull away you linger close to one another, Eddie’s deep brown eyes locked onto your’s, his cheeks are full of color, and his lips forcing themselves upward.

The sweet silence is finally disrupted when you speak up,

“Did you know this mixtape is full of love songs?”

He says nothing, instead stifling laughter as he pulls away from you unable to hide his expression.

“You did, you sneak! Surprise, door number three my ass!”

“So how bout that ice cream, my lady?”

Authors Note: Steddie and Stucky Fics are coming soon! I know I write a lot of x reader but I am workin on others as well!!

[babe-a-yaga]

What was done to Isseya is one of my personal biggest upsets with this game. I loved her in Last Flight. She's a genuinely interesting, complex character, and given the themes of mistakes and regret present through Veilguard, it makes TOTAL sense for her to make an appearance! What makes no sense at all is for her to be reduced to a two dimensional villain with no clear motivation who's just...doing exactly the thing she fucked up in life? Except worse? I'm gonna summarize the events of last flight for the folks who haven't read it;

The first griffin Isseya put through the joining was already blighted in battle, and dying from it. Quickly. Griffins are extra sensitive to the Blight and any attempts made to join them resulted in the animals going berserk and tearing themselves, and anyone else in range, to pieces to get away from what was now in their veins.

In a well meaning, but misguided effort to save one of the animals she loved, she used blood magic to alter the griffon's mind, to convince it the Blight in it's system was just a regular cold, and it didn't need to fight it, then put it through the joining.

It worked, but it changed the griffon. Made it stronger, fight harder. More difficult to handle. The griffon ultimately went out in a spectacular blaze of glory, and people didn't know what she did, just that she did SOMETHING, and that griffon did ten griffons worth of damage on it's way out.

The fourth blight was far worse, far longer than any of the blights we have witnessed first hand. I think it lasted like 15 years? And it was going badly for Thedas. They ordered Isseya to do what she had done to the first griffon again as a last ditch to stand a chance at I *think* Starkhaven (it's been a little bit since I read last flight, so I'm sketchy on dates and what battles were fought specifically when). She hated doing this, but it was orders, and it was exploit this handful of griffons or watch the world die. She's a warden, she signed up to stop the blight at any cost. In war, victory. In death, sacrifice.

By the time her brother Garahel slays Andoral, she's had to blight a number of griffons, and the constant blood magic use has massively accelerated the blight in her own body. Her brother garahel is this golden haired pretty boy beloved by everyone who looks upon him, and Isseya looks so much like a ghoul at this point people are uncomfortable being in the same room as her. Even though this is completely due to her service to the wardens.

Then, the remaining joined griffons start going mad. And then it starts to spread to the other, non-joined griffons. In using blood magic to convince the griffons the blight was just a disease, she had caused it to become one. A contagious one.

It's one of the most interesting examples of how dangerous blood magic actually is we ever see. We're just told over and over "blood magic bad, slippery slope to killing people. Bad. Even if you use your own." And we never really see explicitly why it's an inherently dangerous form of magic until this.

Back to Isseya though. Garahel's lover's Griffon had a clutch of eggs sired by Garahel's Crookytail. Isseya, knowing there was no stopping what was now in motion with the griffons, set out to do her one last act of penance. She took, and purified those eggs, hid them in a ward that kept them in stasis, so that they might only hatch once the griffons were gone, and this disease had died with them, so they might have a chance. And then she hid the clues to their location, and begged that whoever find them not let them be used by the wardens again.

And then she went on her calling.

These are not the actions of a villain. Isseya EMBODIES the warden principal of sacrifice. But it isn't glorious battle rewarded by a quick death alongside an archdemon for her. It's death by inches, by blight, knowingly and willingly accelerated in her own body to stop it from consuming the world. Sacrificing her ideals, the animals she loves, her brother, Garahel. Isseya gives it all for the wardens, to end the blight, and is not thanked for it or remembered kindly.

And she did everything she could to seed the slightest bit of hope, that both in spite of her and because of her, griffons might return to the world, as free creatures.

Her Veilguard arc feels like really egregious character assassination, and I wish she had been given an ounce of the sympathy that other characters had been given. It made sense for her to be here, thematically, mistakes and regret, and good intentions still leading to bad ends, but she deserved the same opportunity for forgiveness and/or redemption that Solas, Mythal, Cyrian, even Illario got.

Isseya was done dirty by Veilguard.

[sweet7simple]

Mech Pregnancy and Protoform Development of Gestating Sparklings

Here is what I have compiled on Cybertronian "reproduction" from More Than Meets the Eye, specifically the Holiday Special and Volume 5:

Holiday Special:

So this would be the protoform development for a forged sparkling and it lends support to that, if Cybertronians gave birth to their own Sparklings, then they would likely be an egg-like form (yes, I know it's not actually a sparkling, but can we all agree that Swerve is strangely well-informed on protoform development for forged Cybertronians?)

So what would slide out from the gestation tank has no discernable features yet and still needs hours if not days before the protoform resembles an adult Cybertronian, but I still don't have an answer for the size of this thing - at what point does it reach its full size? Cybertronians before the war went to academies, so what point does the protoform receive an education instead of having relevant information jammed into its brain module right before deployment like a MTO cold construct?

(More under cut)

But, let's be honest, I am going out of order here. Let's go to Volume 5 where we encounter a hot spot of re-ignited sparks on the moon:

So this is being constructed cold.

And this is forged - as well as the official story for how cold constructed bots were made, which apparently differs from the truth. Here is the truth for how cold constructed sparks were actually formed:

So all cold constructs were made from the matrix - but what if they did come from igniting healthy sparks to make new ones?

What if you used the energy of two sparks to create an entirely new one and that sparkling attached itself to a parent spark for some time before it dropped to a gestation tank (this is common in fanfiction and I love it so much, it makes the most sense)? As these two orbs of immense power and life resonate with one another, creating waves of energy that can be interpreted as pleasurable for the interfacing bots, excess energy could gather itself into a separate orb that borrows the life code from both parents, becomes randomized, and this creates a new life code for a separate entity. It stays in the spark chamber for a period of time - I don't know, decoding or storing energy or something, I am very bad with electronics - before dropping down to an artificial gestation tank.

And this is where the valve/plug comes into play if you so desire because now we have the issue of, where is the spark going to go? It needs a protoform. It needs the materials to make a protoform. It also needs liquids.

Cybertronians seem to live off energon and anything you can make from energon, but there have been references and images in the comics of Cybertronians have oil as a waste product, so they need a separate compartment for oil away from their energon tank and they also are said to have (in fanfiction, at least): oral solvents, lubricant, transfluid, optic fluid, etc... All those will require their own compartments and they will all have either been diluted from the energon or will have an origin in a separate liquid that isn't mentioned. Let's keep in mind that they will also need some sort of oil for their hinges and their nanites for upkeep.

So I believe these gestation tanks are where the Sparklings develop their egg-like protoform with all these liquids that they themselves can't make yet, and I think they get what they need from nanite colonies as there is no umbilical cord (not unless you want the bots to have belly buttons). I like to think of them as nannyites - nanites that, once a protoform hits the gestation tank, have latent codes that becomes active and now have protoform-related tasks versus whatever tasks they did beforehand. The nannyites will likely take these resources from the carrying parent, everything from fluids to energon stores to living metal that the nannyites will adapt or make compatible for the sparkling.

So this carrying parent suddenly has fewer nanites colonies themselves, a thinner layer of living metal, and depleted storages of fluids.

Hear me out, hear me out: Valveplug interfacing helps the carrying parent because transfluid will contain necessary materials for the protoform.

I am going to take it a step further and say that it is that first shot of transfluid into the gestation tank during spark and valveplug interfacing creates input that electronically signals to the receiving parent to gather the excess energy from the spark play via centripetal force like a satellite and that force signals the excess energy to turn on life codes it recycled from both parents and create its own life code. That transfluid inside of the gestation tank also turns on those latent codes for the nannyites to get the compartment prepared. It's that first dose of necessary materials and every dose of transfluid after that is stored in the gestation tank for the protoform.

Which brings me to the idea that I have seen on AO3 where bots go into heat:

What if a mech goes into heat as a way to store transfluid from their partner?

I am largely talking out of my ass here because I don't know anything about how machines work, but I know there are a lot of hormones and signals and work that goes into human pregnancy.

The downside of this is that, if all bots were once forged and now they are, let's say, "birthed", then these constructs would be artificial: the gestation tank and the fertile centripetal force with its satellite sparkling and the interface array with its gestational passage and the nannyites and the transfluid. These would have to be constructed cold and surgically added, and you would have to create codes that turn on these cascading or stacking protocols (I don't know the correct computer term for when one event triggers another event triggers another event and so on) and you would have to manufacture filters and tanks and lines for the creation of gestational lubricant and transfluid.

This is just me rambling because I can't stop thinking about all this, but I am not ready to write a mechpreg story.

Please talk to me about Cybertronian reproduction, I am not normal about this.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Enshittification isn’t caused by venture capital

Picks and Shovels is a new, standalone technothriller starring Marty Hench, my two-fisted, hard-fighting, tech-scam-busting forensic accountant. You can pre-order it on my latest Kickstarter, which features a brilliant audiobook read by Wil Wheaton.

Many of us have left the big social media platforms; far more of us wish we could leave them; and even those of us who've escaped from Facebook/Insta and Twitter still spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to get the people we care about off of them, too.

It's lazy and easy to think that our friends who are stuck on legacy platforms run by Zuckerberg and Musk lack the self-discipline to wean themselves off of these services, or lack the perspective to understand why it's so urgent to get away from them, or that their "hacked dopamine loops" have addicted them to the zuckermusk algorithms. But if you actually listen to the people who've stayed behind, you'll learn that the main reason our friends stay on legacy platforms is that they care about the other people there more than they hate Zuck or Musk.

They rely on them because they're in a rare-disease support group; or they all coordinate their kids' little league carpools there; or that's where they stay in touch with family and friends they left behind when they emigrated; or they're customers or the audience for creative labor.

All those people might want to leave, too, but it's really hard to agree on where to go, when to go, and how to re-establish your groups when you get somewhere else. Economists call this the "collective action problem." This problem creates "switching costs" – a lot of stuff you'll have to live without if you switch from legacy platforms to new ones. The collective action problem is hard to solve and the switching costs are very high:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/29/how-to-leave-dying-social-media-platforms/

That's why people stay behind – not because they lack perspective, or self-discipline, or because their dopamine loops have been hacked by evil techbro sorcerers who used Big Data to fashion history's first functional mind-control ray. They are locked in by real, material things.

Big Tech critics who attribute users' moral failings or platforms' technical prowess to the legacy platforms' "stickiness" are their own worst enemies. These critics have correctly identified that legacy platforms are a serious problem, but have totally failed to understand the nature of that problem or how to fix it. Thankfully, more and more critics are coming to understand that lock-in is the root of the problem, and that anti-lock-in measures like interoperability can address it.

But there's another major gap in the mainstream critique of social media. Critics of zuckermuskian media claim those services are so terrible because they're for-profit entities, capitalist enterprises hitched to the logic of extraction and profit above all else. The problem with this claim is that it doesn't explain the changes to these services. After all, the reason so many of us got on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram is because they used to be a lot of fun. They were useful. They were even great at times.

When tech critics fail to ask why good services turn bad, that failure is just as severe as the failure to ask why people stay when the services rot.

Now, the guy who ran Facebook when it was a great way to form communities and make friends and find old friends is the same guy who who has turned Facebook into a hellscape. There's very good reason to believe that Mark Zuckerberg was always a creep, and he took investment capital very early on, long before he started fucking up the service. So what gives? Did Zuck get a brain parasite that turned him evil? Did his investors get more demanding in their clamor for dividends?

If that's what you think, you need to show your working. Again, by all accounts, Zuck was a monster from day one. Zuck's investors – both the VCs who backed him early and the gigantic institutional funds whose portfolios are stuffed with Meta stock today – are not patient sorts with a reputation for going easy on entrepreneurs who leave money on the table. They've demanded every nickel since the start.

What changed? What caused Zuck to enshittify his service? And, even more importantly for those of us who care about the people locked into Facebook's walled gardens: what stopped him from enshittifying his services in the "good old days?"

At its root, enshittification is a theory about constraints. Companies pursue profit at all costs, but while you may be tempted to focus on the "at all costs" part of that formulation, you musn't neglect the "profits" part. Companies don't pursue unprofitable actions at all costs – they only pursue the plans that they judge are likely to yield profits.

When companies face real competitors, then some enshittificatory gambits are unprofitable, because they'll drive your users to competing platforms. That's why Zuckerberg bought Instagram: he had been turning the screws on Facebook users, and when Instagram came along, millions of those users decided that they hated Zuck more than they loved their friends and so they swallowed the switching costs and defected to Instagram. In an ill-advised middle-of-the-night memo to his CFO, Zuck defended spending $1b on Instagram on the grounds that it would recapture those Facebook escapees:

https://www.theverge.com/2020/7/29/21345723/facebook-instagram-documents-emails-mark-zuckerberg-kevin-systrom-hearing

A company that neutralizes, buys or destroys its competitors can treat its users far worse – invade their privacy, cheap out on moderation and anti-spam, etc – without losing their business. That's why Zuck's motto is "it is better to buy than to compete":

https://www.trtworld.com/magazine/zuckerberg-its-better-to-buy-than-compete-is-facebook-a-monopoly-42243

Of course, as a leftist, I know better than to count on markets as a reliable source of corporate discipline. Even more important than market discipline is government discipline, in the form of regulation. If Zuckerberg feared fines for privacy violations, or moderation failures, or illegal anticompetitive mergers, or fraudulent advertising systems that rip off publishers and advertisers, or other forms of fraud (like the "pivot to video"), he would treat his users better. But Facebook's rise to power took place during the second half of the neoliberal era, when the last shreds of regulatory muscle that survived the Reagan revolution were being devoured by GW Bush and Obama (and then Trump).

As cartels and monopolies took over our economy, most government regulators were neutered and captured. Public agencies were stripped of their powers or put in harness to attack small companies, customers, and suppliers who got in the way of monopolists' rent-extraction. That meant that as Facebook grew, Zuckerberg had less and less to fear from government enforcers who might punish him for enshittification where the markets failed to do so.

But it's worse than that, because Zuckerberg and other tech monopolists figured out how to harness "IP" law to get the government to shut down third-party technology that might help users resist enshittification. IP law is why you can't make a privacy-protecting ad-blocker for an app (and why companies are so desperate to get you to use their apps rather than the open web, and why apps are so dismally enshittified). IP law is why you can't make an alternative client that blocks algorithmic recommendations. IP law is why you can't leave Facebook for a new service and run a scraper that imports your waiting Facebook messages into a different inbox. IP law is why you can't scrape Facebook to catalog the paid political disinformation the company allows on the platform:

https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/

IP law's growth has coincided with Facebook's ascendancy – the bigger Facebook got, the more tempting it was to interoperators who might want to plug new code into it to protect Facebook users, and the more powers Facebook had to block even the most modest improvements to its service. That meant that Facebook could enshittify even more, without worrying that it would drive users to take unilateral, permanent action that would deprive it of revenue, like blocking ads. Once ad-blocking is illegal (as it is on apps), there's no reason not to make ads as obnoxious as you want.

Of course, many Facebook employees cared about their users, and for most of the 21st century, those workers were a key asset for Facebook. Tech workers were in short supply until just a couple years ago, when the platforms started round after round of brutal layoffs – 260,000 in 2023, another 150,000+ in 2024. Facebook workers may be furious about Zuckerberg killing content moderation, but he's not worried about them quitting – not with a half-million skilled tech workers out there, hunting for jobs. Fuck 'em. Let 'em quit:

https://www.404media.co/its-total-chaos-internally-at-meta-right-now-employees-protest-zuckerbergs-anti-lgbtq-changes/

This is what changed: the collapse of market, government, and labor constraints, and IP law's criminalization of disenshittifying, interoperable add-ons. This is why Zuck, an eternal creep, is now letting his creep flag fly so proudly today. Not because he's a worse person, but because he understands that he can hurt his users and workers to benefit his shareholders without facing any consequences. Zuckerberg 2025 isn't the most evil Zuck, he's the most unconstrained Zuck.

Same goes for Twitter. I mean, obviously, there's been a change in management at Twitter – the guy who's enshittifying it today isn't the guy who enshittified it prior to last year. Musk is speedrunning the enshittification curve, and yet Twitter isn't collapsing. Why not? Because Musk is insulated from consequences for fucking up – he's got a huge cushion of wealth, he's got advertisers who are desperate to reach his users, he's got users who can't afford to leave the service, he's got IP law that he can use to block interoperators who might make it easier to migrate to a better service. He was always a greedy, sadistic asshole. Now he's an unconstrained greedy, sadistic asshole. Musk 2025 isn't a worse person than Musk 2020. He's just more free to act on his evil impulses than he was in years gone by.

These are the two factors that make services terrible: captive users, and no constraints. If your users can't leave, and if you face no consequences for making them miserable (not solely their departure to a competitor, but also fines, criminal charges, worker revolts, and guerrilla warfare with interoperators), then you have the means, motive and opportunity to turn your service into a giant pile of shit.

That's why we got Jack Welch and his acolytes when we did. There were always evil fuckers just like them hanging around, but they didn't get to run GM until Ronald Reagan took away the constraints that would have punished them for turning GE into a giant pile of shit. Every economy is forever a-crawl with parasites and monsters like these, but they don't get to burrow into the system and colonize it until policymakers create rips they can pass through.

In other words, the profit motive itself is not sufficient to cause enshittification – not even when a for-profit firm has to answer to VCs who would shut down the company or fire its leadership in the face of unsatisfactory returns. For-profit companies chase profit. The enshittifying changes to Facebook and Twitter are cruel, but the cruelty isn't the point: the point is profits. If the fines – or criminal charges – Facebook faced for invading our privacy exceeded the ad-targeting revenue it makes by doing so, it would stop spying on us. Facebook wouldn't like it. Zuck would hate it. But he'd do it, because he spies on us to make money, not because he's a voyeur.

To stop enshittification, it is not necessary to eliminate the profit motive – it is only necessary to make enshittification unprofitable.

This is not to defend capitalism. I'm not saying there's a "real capitalism" that's good, and a "crony capitalism" or "monopoly capitalism" that's bad. All flavors of capitalism harm working people and seek to shift wealth and power from the public and democratic institutions to private interests. But that doesn't change the fact that there are, indeed, different flavors of capitalism, and they have different winners and losers. Capitalists who want to sell apps on the App Store or reach customers through Facebook are technofeudalism's losers, while Apple, Facebook, Google, and other Big Tech companies are technofeudalism's great winners.

Smart leftism pays attention to these differences, because they represent the potential fault lines in capitalism's coalition. These people all call themselves capitalists, they all give money and support to political movements that seek to crush worker power and human rights – but when the platforms win, the platforms' business customers lose. They are irreconcilably on different sides of a capitalism-v-capitalism fight that is every bit as important to them as the capitalism-v-socialism fight.

I'm saying that it's good praxis to understand these divisions in capitalism, because then we can exploit those differences to make real, material gains for human thriving and worker rights. Lumping all for-profit businesses together as identical and irredeemable is bad tactics.

Legacy social media is at a turning point. Two new systems built on open standards have emerged as a credible threat to the zuckermuskian model: Mastodon (built on Activitypub) and Bluesky (built on Atproto). The former is far more mature, with a huge network of federated servers run by all different kinds of institutions, from hobbyists to corporations, and it's overseen by a nonprofit. The latter has far more users, and is a VC-backed corporate entity, and while it is hypothetically federatable, there are no Bluesky services apart from the main one that you can leave for if Bluesky starts to enshittify.

That means that Bluesky has a ton of captive users, and has the lack of constraint that characterizes the enshittified legacy platforms it has tempted tens of millions of users away from. This is not a good place to be in, because it means that if the current management choose to enshittify Bluesky, they can, and it will be profitable. It also means that the company's VCs understand that they could replace the current management and replace them with willing enshittifiers and make more money.

This is why Bluesky is in a dangerous place: not because it is backed by VCs, not because it is a for-profit entity, but because it has captive users and no constraints. It's a great party in a sealed building with no fire exits:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/14/fire-exits/#graceful-failure-modes

Last week, I endorsed a project called Free Our Feeds, whose goals include hacking some fire exits into Bluesky by force majeure – that is, independently standing up an alternative Bluesky server that people can retreat to if Bluesky management changes, or has a change of heart:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/14/contesting-popularity/#everybody-samba

For some Mastodon users, Free Our Feeds is dead on arrival – why bother trying to make a for-profit project safer for its users when Mastodon is a perfectly good nonprofit alternative? Why waste millions developing a standalone Bluesky server rather than spending that money improving things in the Fediverse.

I believe strongly in improving the Fediverse, and I believe in adding the long-overdue federation to Bluesky. That's because my goal isn't the success of the Fediverse – it's the defeat of enshtitification. My answer to "why spend money fixing Bluesky?" is "why leave 20 million people at risk of enshittification when we could not only make them safe, but also create the toolchain to allow many, many organizations to operate a whole federation of Bluesky servers?" If you care about a better internet – and not just the Fediverse – then you should share this goal, too.

Many of the Fediverse's servers are operated by for-profit entities, after all. One of the Fediverse's largest servers (Threads) is owned by Meta. Threads users who feel the bite of Zuckerberg's decision to encourage homophobic, xenophobic and transphobic hate speech will find it easy to escape from Threads: they can set up on any Fediverse server that is federated with Threads and they'll be able to maintain their connections with everyone who stays behind.

The existence of for-profit servers in the Fediverse does not ruin the Fediverse (though I wouldn't personally use one of them). The fact that multiple neo-Nazi groups run their own Mastodon servers does not ruin the Fediverse (though I certainly won't use their servers). Not even the fact that Donald Trump's Truth Social is a Mastodon server does anything to ruin the Fediverse (not using that one, either).

This is the strength of federated, federatable social media – it disciplines enshittifiers by lowering switching costs, and if enshittifiers persist, it makes it easy for users to escape unshitted, because they don't have to solve the collective action problem. Any user can go to any server at any time and stay in touch with everyone else.

Mastodon was born free: free code, with free federation as a priority. Bluesky was not: it was born within a for-profit public benefit corporation whose charter offers some defenses against enshittification, but lacks the most decisive one: the federation that would let users escape should escape become necessary.

The fact that Mastodon was born free is quite unusual in the annals of the fight for a free internet. Most of the internet was born proprietary and had freedom foisted upon it. Unix was born within Bell Labs, property of the convicted monopolist AT&T. The GNU/Linux project set it free.

SMB was born proprietary within corporate walls of Microsoft, another corporate monopolist. SAMBA set it free.

The Office file formats were also born proprietary within Microsoft's walled garden: they were set free by hacker-activists who fought through a thick bureaucratic morass and Microsoft fuckery (including literally refusing to allow chairs to be set for advocates for Open Document Format) to give us formats that underlie everything from LibreOffice to Google Docs, Office365 to your web browser.

There is nothing unusual, in other words, about hacking freedom into something that is proprietary or just insufficiently free. That's totally normal. It's how we got almost everything great about computers.

Mastodon's progenitors should be praised for ensuring their creation was born free – but the fact that Bluesky isn't free enough is no reason to turn our back on it. Our response to anything that locks in the people we care about must be to shatter those locks, not abandon the people bound by the locks because they didn't heed to our warnings.

Audre Lorde is far smarter than me, but when she wrote that "the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house," she was wrong. There is no toolset better suited to conduct an orderly dismantling of a structure than the tools that built it. You can be sure it'll have all the right screwdriver bits, wrenches, hexkeys and sockets.

Bluesky is fine. It has features I significantly prefer to Mastodon's equivalent. Composable moderation is amazing, both a technical triumph and a triumph of human-centered design:

https://bsky.social/about/blog/4-13-2023-moderation

I hope Mastodon adopts those features. If someone starts a project to copy all of Bluesky's best features over to Mastodon, I'll put my name to the crowdfunding campaign in a second.

But Mastodon has one feature that Bluesky sorely lacks – the federation that imposes antienshittificatory discipline on companies and offers an enshittification fire-exit for users if the discipline fails. It's long past time that someone copied that feature over to Bluesky.

Check out my Kickstarter to pre-order copies of my next novel, Picks and Shovels!

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/20/capitalist-unrealism/#praxis

[thelastofhyde]

the likeability paradox.

pairing. joel miller x fem!reader

synopsis. joel miller is not a man who strives to be liked, with a chip on his shoulder and a scowl on his face, until his world is flipped on its axis when the pretty young thing living under bill and frank's roof, with an irritatingly unwavering smile and the literal sun shinning out her ass, says those five damned words: i don't like you, joel.

warnings. no use of y/n, enemies to lovers, slow burn ( i have several oneshots planned for this couple ), unrequited love ( except you will never catch joel miller admitting he feels anything beyond grief, hunger and exhaustion ), pining, poor communication no communication, no seriously joel is down bad it's actually disgusting and highkey 🚩toxic🚩 but luckily red is your favourite colour, sunshine!reader, grumpy!joel aka canon joel, kinda perv!joel ( if you squint ), implied queer!tess, undefined age gap ( reader implied late-20s ), descriptions of canon-typical violence, smut ( oral- f receiving, fingering, degradation, panty stealing, hair pulling, dirty talk, dubcon due to intoxication, joel kinda gives her a wedgie at some point and honestly i don’t know what i was hoping to achieve with that, discussions of a lacklustre sex-life pre-apocalypse ). reader is a) hinted at being shorter than joel but it’s not central to the plot and b) described as lithe but the meaning intended is graceful, not thin!

word count. 12.9k

hyde’s input. half-way through, the regret of choosing to write this from joel's pov started to settle in but lmao i was too far in to not commit to the bit. don't come at me for the fact the timeline or events may not seem plausible with canon, i just wanna write this silly little depraved fic about joel in peace :( anyway, enjoy my first attempt at writing for tlou, forming a prayer circle rn in hopes that this doesn't flop because i will cry and you will hear about it

read on ao3. series masterlist. next chapter.

Distaste is not new in the life of Joel Miller.

In particular, one that is loaded, aimed and fired directly at him. He is not a likeable guy, often by choice and rarely by accident. The years of pain from a bleeding wound have now scarred over into nothing but an empty shell of the man that once was, from a world that no longer is, and he’s tried little to fill himself back up.

If anything, he’s made himself more empty.

Rid himself of feelings, that which saves him the weakness of appearing sympathetic. Discarded the need for luxuries, for which he’d scarcely cared for prior to his world ending. Lay to rest what was left of the optimist inside him, leaving behind the danger of hope for it to rot with the rest of the infected.

An apocalyptic world brings out all sides of man that one would never dare to engage with in normal civilisation. Joel learned swiftly that he was built to endure, quick to evolve and adapt to the new world order. The man who once worked his hardest to keep the peace among his neighbours, smiling that little bit wider on days he’d catch them scowling to themselves in hopes of brightening one part of their day for even a simple moment, would be at odds with the man who wears a heavy layer of enjoyment when met with the scowling glances and the hushed voices, all the watch out for that Miller guys passed between cowardly members of FEDRA and the keep away from Mr Miller's lawns spoken harshly from mother to child becoming music to his failing ears.

This plague of fear-driven dislike keeps him alone, how he likes to be, no one to lose and nothing to be taken. Somewhere along the years the idea of safety in numbers has morphed into an illusion, something people say and never truly mean, to distract themselves from a reality more bitter than a snowstorm: in times of survival, people become deadweight.

“So that’s all I am to ya, huh? Dead-fucking-weight?” His brother’s voice still echoes in that damned space he calls a home, weeks or months or years since the day he’d departed for something else, somewhere else, leaving Joel to do what Joel does best: endure.

Somehow, silence was easier than telling the man he’d taught to tie a shoelace, to shave his beard, to tune a guitar that he was the deadweight, doomed to drag all those who remained too close down into his pit of despair.

She was an exception, his Tess, buried 5-feet-under in her own swell of darkness, nothing but the tips of her fingers stretched out above her head to feel the sun upon her skin and keep her from going that last foot deeper. They’d made a home for themselves in one another, one where he keeps them fed, and she keeps them safe, and neither of them keeps the place clean.

She never asks for more, and he never offers it, both content to survive without the weight of affection smothering them. Contrary to the belief of any misfortunate soul who’s encountered the pair within the quarantine zone, she is the one who holds the leash, tugging Joel along close by her heel and keeping him from wandering off into the wild to surrender himself to a feral lifestyle.

Which lands him here, sat at a table playing happy family, each time he dares to snark out a few words being met with the sharp kick of Tess’ foot against his shin.

“... And then,” Frank struggles over a cough, so excited in his story-telling that he fails to separate taking a breath from taking a sip of his wine. With a roll of eyes and a disapproving grunt, Bill’s no more than two seconds away from clapping down on his back, urging the other man’s wind-pipes to unblock and welcome back airflow. “Otis dragged his muddied self over the whole house. We were finding paw-prints for days!”

Joel's unamused, too keen to think of what a nuisance that would be. As if incapable of feeling the buzzing energy of disinterest, the German Shepherd drops its head further up his lap, begging for a morsel of anything that sits atop the table.

“Which means I was cleaning paw-prints for days.” Bill, the only one at the table besides himself who wears the looks of a cynic, grumbles out before shovelling what remains on his plate into his mouth.

Frank is quick to shush him.

“I’m sorry, again, Bill,” he doesn’t mean to break eye-contact from the mutt at his thigh, but the voice calls to him like a siren calls to a ship in the night, like a flame dances and seduces a moth into its brightly burning touch of death, a spotlight in the dark which promises- or threatens- more light to come. “I’d no clue there was a storm coming till we were already a good few miles away, and there was nowhere to take cover to wait it out.”

There you sit, parallel to him.

The sun rests lower in the sky as time carries you all into the late noon, its rays a beacon of light bursting out just behind your head, painting you in the glow of the golden hour and staining a mockery of a halo above you. It hurts his eyes, this brightness that you so easily bask in, forcing him to squint and deepen the frown on his face.

You catch him with his sights on you, at some point, and the smile you meet his scowl with has him cursing at the sun, and the moon, and every star that sits between.

The threat of a great war looms in the air as you rush to rise up and help clear the table of the remnants left behind- none of which Joel can account for, mouth too keen and body too starved to skip out on enjoying the mundane luxury of a fresh, home-cooked meal. The battle ends swiftly as you surrender to Bill’s hardened stare, and Frank’s disapproving head-shakes, and Tess’ own plan of action to simply force you down back into the seat you’d been sat in- the one you always sit in.

“You, sit. No one should have to clean up the food they made.”

They get no fight out of him when they insist he’d done enough catching the so-called food.

Silence casts its shadow over the table, dampening the light and smothering you both in a mockery of greyed tones- truthfully, it is the disappearance of the sun behind a large cloud that causes such a thing.

Being alone, with you, is something Joel’s never mastered. The affliction of your presence is so much greater when there’s no one else to balance out your natural shine- the kind that has his head spinning and his cock aching-, no one but him.

Were he not a sick bastard, he’d try harder to not make you sad.

Something bumps his hands, ripping him out of his moral self-condemnation. The dog meets his gaze, eyes a widened mess of puppy-dog pleading that punctuates its existence with an impatient whine.

Just like your owner, he finds himself thinking and not saying- never saying-, yet to find your bark.

The ball’s a sticky mess of slobber and dirt, and Joel touches it all the same, throwing it up in the air once, then twice, before tossing it across the yard. He’s slumped back in his chair by the time he registers the dog’s departure, a ball of dark fluff bouncing its way across the garden, and all the man can think is fuck, he’ll be feeling the effect of that throw on his shoulder come the morning.

The pain is not enough to stop him from tossing the ball again, and once more, and then yet again, sending the dog in a never-ending loop of chase, grab, retrieve- a parallel to his life of wake, survive, sleep.

“He likes you,” you never leave things the way he wishes them to be, bursting his bubble with the vocal reminder of your presence.

As if on queue, prompted by your addressing of it, the dog drops its interest in Joel, and the ball, and the chasing, tail wagging uncontrollably by the time it reaches your side. Standing on its hind legs, it collapses the front of itself into your waiting lap, and Joel watches how you wrap your arms so easily around something that could cause you harm.

To envy a creature that licks its own shit off its ass is a new low for Joel.

“Thinkin’ he might like ya more, Sol.” The nickname rolls off his tongue with ease, the safer option than uttering your name, a vice and virtue he’s only permitted himself in idealistic fantasies that play out in his own troubled thoughts.

“Most people do,” whether you mean to make it seem like you’re degrading his very existence or not, he’s unsure, but it rouses a chuckle out of him.

He takes note of how you don’t protest the name he’s branded you with, not like how you’d fought tooth and nail against it every other visit he and Tess have made.

“You’ve got a whole load in common, you know? I think that’s got something to do with his fascination-”

“How the hell’s a man like me got somethin’ in common with a four-legged mutt?” There he goes again, making that smile slip down your cheeks with a simple use of his voice. It helps as much as it hurts, frown loosening up and eyes no longer strained beneath the bright shine of your visceral optimism.

“Well, you’re both... hairy,” he restrains himself from reacting, washing down a laugh with the help of the dregs of wine that lay collecting at the bottom of his glass. He’s let his appearance grow more rugged over the past few months and your noticing of this brings an unwanted warmth to his aching bones. “And have the most kickass women in your lives to stop you from dying.”

He’s interested to know what life would be like under your protection.

Discovering the answer brings the threat of pain, and loss, and an openness to vulnerability he can not afford himself, so he takes the safer option: “‘S easy stayin’ safe when you live in this fantasy land. Doubt your mutt’d last any longer than a day out in reality.”

With you as its protector.

He doesn’t say it and, still, it somehow hovers in the space between you both, a heavy, syrupy implication that slips down your throats and threatens to suffocate you. He watches you choke on it, coughing on his cruelty and feigning it to be a simple clearing of your throat. Your eyes glue themselves on the dog, delicate fingers smoothing over the well-groomed hairs down its back.

Survival has turned him into a man who knows when to seize an opportunity, and this is one he takes with both hands, basking in the simplicity of staring, watching, observing you without the crime of being caught.

But I could keep you safe.

He toys with the danger of uttering such a thing aloud. It’s not the first time he’s thought it. Truthfully, he’s unsure when it first nestled its way into his mind.

His memory, which ails him more than it aids him these past years, would have him believe it was way before the dog had even appeared, back when it was just Bill, Frank and you. A few whiskeys in and a campfire lit for you all to gather for warmth around- why you’d all chosen to sit out in the gardens on a winter’s night Joel remains unsure of to this day-, it was Frank who’d prompted the question. “Where were you all when... this started?” Tess went first, braver than most people he knows, sharing stories of a version of herself he’d never meet.

He never imagined her working in a bank.

Bill, with reluctance, took the next step, keeping his account factual and to the point. “Was shit-faced drunk and getting my stomach pumped.” He’d been quick to skim over the story of the young nurse who’d guided him to safety out the hospital, losing her own life in exchange for his survival. She was barely out of school. “I knew her dad, bit of an asshole, but boy, was he proud of his baby for graduating.” Frank couldn’t let him swim too deep in his thoughts, afraid a current of guilt would trap him and drown him in the depths of it, and so he raised his own voice and began his tale.

Joel had always been a good listener. Being a single parent to a teenage girl required him to be, or so... she would have had him believe, nights at the table set for two spent listening to the playground he-said-she-said gossip. Years later and he at last prefers things this way, a rare gem of safety found in the act of saying nothing and hearing everything- that his hearing will allow. All this to say, he’d tried his best to pay attention to Frank’s impassioned retelling of his heroic misadventures that had lead him to the unintentional arms of Bill.

But you weren’t smiling.

He watched you, you watched the dancing flames, face stoic and drained of that natural shine his eyes had only just started to be able to gaze upon without the threat of being blinded by such light.

The desire crept up on him like a tiger to it’s prey, hiding in the far off bushes until the opportunity to strike presented itself and the feeling lunged for Joel’s back, gripping him in its claws and piercing his ribcage with its gnashing teeth. With each bite, it plagued him with the delusions of a wandering mind, imagination left free to run laps around his head with visions of you from another life, another time, another set of people gathered round a dining table. He’d wanted to hear about the ones you’d lost, and comfort you with all the things he hated hearing (“You’ll keep ‘em alive, in spirit and memory!” “Those we remember never truly die!”). He’d needed to bend a knee and swear a vow to be the one to stand between you and death, to fight for your survival on your behalf. ‘Could keep you safe. There, then, the thought did cross his mind.

He’d washed it down with a swig of lukewarm, flat beer.

“-Could fix it, you know. I’m good with my hands.”

He almost chokes on his own breath.

I'm good with my hands, it swims in circles round his mind, replaying and echoing off the walls of his skull. And he knows- oh, how he knows- that he’ll be replaying it in those moments of solitude for the next few nights, weeks, months- however long it may take till he forgets the way such thought-provoking words sound on your lips.

“What?” The question leaves him harsher than he intends, drawing an enemy line between you both with the foul sound of it. In the corner of his eye, he swears he sees you flinch backwards, physically recoiling from the disdain-filled bullet he fires in your direction.

The mutt in your lap retreats, hackles rising as it turns to face Joel once more.

He sees it, in the dog’s brutal protectiveness over you, this similarity you claim exists.

“Your watch, it’s broken.”

“Hadn’t noticed,” he’s retreating into his own space now, mentally and physically, scraping the legs of his chair against the ground as his mind works to strengthen those walls that threaten to crumble so often in your presence. “Don’t need ya to fix it.”

You pull a face, brows furrowing and lips pouting. Confusion.

“Don’t you want to know the time?” You ask, as if time could ever be relevant in a rotten world where down is up, and up is down, and Joel Miller is not the overprotective father to the most delicate creature the god he’d stopped believing in had gifted him, just to force him to watch as life snatched her away.

“I don’t keep it for the time.”

You smile, and this one’s a killer, piercing straight through the cages of his ribs to carve itself into his withered heart.

The German Shepherd relaxes with the rebrightening of your aura, shaking out the tension from its body before sauntering its way back over to Joel, ball in mouth and tail wagging excitedly, as if it hadn’t just contemplated having its first taste of human flesh.

He’s throwing the toy in a matter of minutes, enjoying the repeated run and retrieve game, and the renewed silence that comes along with it. Nature sings its tune with rustling leaves, cawing crows, and pounding paws. It’s almost so easy to leave your offer, your words, his broken watch in the rearview mirror of this otherwise pleasant afterno-

“Ooh, so there’s a story to tell!” You’re blinding him with your excitement, lithe limbs leaning forward in your own chair in an attempt to reach closer, table between you be damned. “I’ve never heard any of the Joel Miller backstory, this should be-”

“I get that likin’ everyone is your thing, but would’ya give it a rest?”

Nature falls silent.

Skies grow dull.

You juggle sadness.

There’s a crash that comes from within the house, followed by the unmistakable sound of Tess’ sailor mouth, cursing whichever delicate dish she’s broken into smithereens with the help of her accident prone hands. The dog’s lain itself down upon the grass, ball between it’s paws as it begins to bite, and chew, and break it under the pressure of its canines.

Joel wonders what the mutt’s practicing for.

“Sure,” then, with the return of your voice, all sounds resume, harmony upon planet earth once more. Only, the gates have been shut in his face and Joel finds himself forced to watch as everything unfolds from the outside, an unwelcome visitor forced out into exile with the fungal freaks and the inhumane. “But you’re wrong. I don’t like everyone.”

“‘S that so.” His eyes roll. The hole he’s dug for himself sinks deeper, casting you higher up on the pedestal Joel will always be wiling to place you on.

“Yeah,” you’ve risen out your chair, gifting him the view of how the fabric of your dress dances above your knee, a final twist of the knife in his heart that he lets you pierce his flesh with each time he surrenders himself to your existence. “I don’t like you, Joel.”

The hours come and go, but your words linger like a bad tattoo, shamefully engraved into his skin and banning him to a life of noticing the horrendous thing each time he passes by his own reflection.

We’re staying, for tonight. Tess had called the shots, and he’s been learning not to argue when she gives him one of her stern looks, biting down on the comments he’d wanted to make of the dangers of being out of the QZ for too long, which would likely earn him nothing but a shrug and the reminder that they both were off duty the following day

The nights are beginning to grow darker as winter grows nearer, leading Bill and Frank- mostly Frank- to excuse themselves to bed, bidding the two visitors with a final reminder to make themselves comfortable in whichever room they can find. If only Joel could remember which door leads to yours.

The two women in his life remain awakened, passing a bottle of wine between each other as you both converse back and forth, catching each other up on one another’s life, satiating that craving for mundane gossip.

Tess recounts the scandal of the poor boy who’d been caught sleeping with a FEDRA agent’s wife, you whisper that Frank and Bill had been fighting again recently. The memory of being ambushed by raiders- now dead raiders- comes to life once more with the help of Tess’ voice, while the promise to uncover what exactly Bill and Frank were hiding from you as of late is sealed in your words.

At some point, he lays himself to rest atop the couch, legs stretched out and arms crossed over his chest, ignoring the squeeze of the fabric over his forearms as the too-small flannel struggles to contain the muscles forged by the need to survive. At another point, he’s lulled to sleep by the lullaby of your mingling voices, a safety blanket draping itself over his tired body and enveloping him in the comforts of having that which he struggles to care so little for, so near him once more.

-N’t tell me you’re a virgin.

The words are muffled as the man slips back into consciousness, a frown coming to rest on his forehead as he battles against the demons urging him awake, the nightmarish memories of car crashes, and soldiers, and so much red chasing him away from the sleep he longs for so badly.

A protest rings true in his head and his ears.

Was gonna say. Knew you were young, but not that young.

It’s the sound of your laughter that awakens him fully, saving him from the tortures of his own mind.

“God, no! me and my ex, we... a few times. It was alright, I guess. I just, yeah, there’s not much to miss.”

He’s unwilling, unable to reopen his eyes, curling in on himself as he rolls over onto his side. A groan slips past his lips, one he’s hoping Tess and you will dismiss as nothing more than the sleep-filled rambles of a dreaming man.

Neither of you make any acknowledgement of him.

“Not much to miss?! Sweet Christ, you’re breaking my fuckin’ heart.” He’s learnt over time the common traits of a drunken Tess. Each word becoming an exclamation, curses becoming more frequent, and that irritating habit she’s picked up of imitating his own accent. There’s no need to bother opening his eyes, Joel’s already sure he’ll find his companion with flushed cheeks and glassy eyes. “I’d give up a hand for some head!”

You must do something, pull a face or shake your head, for the sound of Tess’ renewed shock fills the room. He wonders, as the sound bounces off the walls, how late into the night it’s grown.

Late enough that the cicadas singing outside the window are now accompanied by the hoots of an owl.

“You’ve got to be shittin’ me.”

“It bores me!”

“It bores you!?”

The couch beneath Joel creaks as he shifts once more, turning his back on you both as the ability to contain his laughter grows harder with each word you exchange and each gasp Tess gives. The last thing he needs is to be caught eavesdropping on your sex life like some dirty old pervert.

The crueler part of his mind replays your voice, I don’t like you, and the knife twists in his guts this time.

You like Tess. Love her, even. It’s been that way since the first time you’d met the duo, eyes giving one look over the woman before the smile on your face grew even wider, voice as sweet as honey sighing out Finally someone with a pair of boobs, I’m bored of the sight of my own. Joel’d gotten caught up in the thought of how he’d never tire of such a sight that he’d failed to acknowledge your greeting towards him, catching just the moment you drew your outstretched hand back to your side and offered him an understanding smile.

Maybe that was the moment you decided you didn’t like him.

“Must not have been doin’ ya right,” The bottle of southern comfort is working its wonders on the older woman, accent growing further and further from its true nature with each glass she nurses. Joel hears the faint sound of ice smacking against glass and knows it must be yours. You’ve always struggled with liquors, slipping as many ice cubes as you can manage into a glass in hopes that they’ll eventually melt and water the alcohol down. It’s oddly endearing that you think no one has noticed. Because he has, he always notices the little details that surround you. “This fella of yours.”

Joel has no right to despise the idea of you and some fella.

He does so, regardless.

“Well,” he imagines the shape of your meek smile and the way you shrug your shoulders. “We were each others firsts.”

“That’s no excuse! Trust I left mine cryin’ into her pillow the first time I went down.” Tess and he have a silent agreement to never speak of the nights Joel would take refuge on their beaten-up couch while Tess indulges herself between someone’s thighs in the bedroom. No discussing the sounds she pulls from her concubines, no addressing the wet patches left behind to stain their shared sheets, and definitely no speaking on how his hand winds up stained in his own cum.

You scoff and follow it up with a saccharine laced giggle, so sweet its bound to rot your teeth if you even attempt to hold it in. “What, are you offering your services?”

tThis he likes less than the image of you with some fella, the thought of having to lay upon a mattress on which Tess has raised you to heaven on while he once again remained locked out in the dark leaving his skin crawling with unwarranted rage.

“‘As sure as I am that you’re sweet all over, ‘fraid to tell you I like my women a little older than you.”

He knows he should do the same, should lust after those women his own age who shoot him carnal looks in the streets of the QZ. It should be skin his own age that he longs to taste, and eyes who’ve seen as much as his own he wants to stare into, and lips as cruel as the ones he owns that he fights off the urges to kiss. But he can’t, and he won’t.

And you’re the one to blame.

You, with the glow of a thousand suns. You, with the hands that tend to flowers instead of corpses. You, with the gentle nature he’d have to spend the rest of his days fighting off every other living thing just to protect.

His own self being the first he’d need fight.

Joel wonders what he’d missed in his hours- if it had even been so long- of rest, how the playground gossiping dissipated into reminiscing the pleasures of supple flesh and the sins of unfulfilling lovers. Sleep steals him away once more before he can find the answers.

The next time he awakens, he’s drowning in a plight of cruel memories, a cold and brutal ocean of faces, places, and traces of the ephemeral sentiment of happiness he’d possessed once upon a time, back when the price of letting one’s guard down was not so high.

He’s learnt, with time, that losing her comes in waves. Some small, meaningless little things, that ripple Joel’s surface and coast gently over his dirt ridden skin. Others, tsunamis. Big, angry, all imposing. They’re born in ground-shaking explosions of grief, building speed, and height, and weight the closer they grow to crashing over him.

Amidst the passing of time, he’s tried to keep himself busy in his awakened hours, to keep his mind occupied and avoid thinking about her too much. But the waves always come back, no matter how hard he tries to fight them or swim away from them. They catch him off guard, crashing over him when he least expects it. In the middle of a raid, lost in thought and standing ten inches deep in grime, blood, infected, and suddenly the weight of her absence will hit him like a ton of bricks.

The currents grow more violent whenever he closes his eyes.

This evening, it had been a minuscule wave, yet it’s damage still leaves him with sweat slicked skin. He reenters the land of the living choking on his own fear and shooting up-right, hardly registering his surroundings till his feet hit solid ground. The gentle, barely-there croon of a Sinatra record punctuates the room alongside the dim glow of a lightbulb which flickers with the threat of expiring and leaving naught but the moonlight to wash over the dark of the night. Across from him is Tess, nursing a half-emptied cup against her chest and wearing tired eyes. Snoring comes from below him, where Joel finds he’s a mere foot away from having stepped upon the sleeping dog, curled in on itself and laying soundly by his side.

You take up no space of this room.

Neither the dog nor the drunk pay him any mind as he pushes up onto his creaking knees, stretching out his limbs in a fight to undo the tension in his aching bod. Languid steps carry him out into the hall, where he freezes under the self-questioning of where he’s going.

There are three answer to this: where he should, where he could, and where he would.

He should find himself a bedroom, perhaps be ostentatious enough to rid himself of those stale clothes and let the warmth of running water wash away the sins he’d committed throughout the day. A good night’s sleep, atop a mattress where springs do not dig into his back and the sheets are clean as could be, it would do him good.

He could head towards the kitchen, quench that thirst that he’s awoken with, cottonmouth and a headache to go with it too. Perhaps he’ll find himself something to eat, indulge in the luxury of readily available food just this once, he’s sure Frank wouldn’t mind. Bill definitely would, but that’s not something he’ll need care about when he’s miles out and heading back to the QZ.

He would try find you, open whichever door it is that leads into the haven that must be your bedroom. He imagines its clean, and organised, and smells of some syrupy lavender that is bound to nauseate him as he smothers his face into your bedsheets, eyes shut, and mind relaxed, the threat of those violent waves no concern to him as he anchors himself with an arm around your warm skin. Skin he’s never felt, yet he stands firm in his belief it must be the most soothing thing to touch, as gentle and inviting as the heart it keeps safe within it.

I don’t like you, Joel.

Those words stop him from trying.

He tells himself it’s for the best.

With a mind of their own, his legs have made the choice for him and deliver him outside the opening to the kitchen. He swallows down a gulp of his own saliva at the prospect of a glass of water. The door’s already half-opened, and Joel nearly thanks Christ for it as the fear of waking anyone with the squeaking of the handle is eliminated. The darkness of the night encompasses the room, even with the moon’s shine reflecting off every surface it touches: the counters, the knife stand, the metal drawer handles, the refrigerator.

The refrigerator.

It’s open, a blue light shining out of it and illuminating anything it its proximity. A subtle beeping noise rings from it, and suddenly Joel’s back in his thirties, dead-beat yet well-intentioned brother stealing the food off his own plate as he beckons his pre-teen daughter back into the kitchen.

Keep leavin’ this open and it’s a job you’ll be gettin’ this summer, not a dog.

She never lived long enough to get either.

He catches something move beneath the artificial light. Cautious at first, it’s all the more startling to find the object of his ire and the embodiment of his desire stood leaning back against the countertop, a glass full of orange liquid pressed to a mouth that parts and welcomes in the sugary sweet delight.

“Why aren’t ya sleepin’?” The words rasp out his throat, catching and scratching on the parts of him that still yearn for something to wet his tongue with.

Beneath the light, you shrug. “Could ask you the same thing, Texas.”

He curses Tess for teaching you such a nickname.

He curses himself more for the way you saying it twists up his insides.

You’re teasing him, smile a little looser and eyes less focused than he’s used to seeing. Whether you’re tipsy or simply delirious with exhaustion, Joel remains unaware.

He grunts, daring to take a few steps further into the kitchen. The door behind him closes over and gives the illusion of the space becoming smaller, tighter, more compact.

“I asked first.” You laugh, at him. Full on chest-rumbling, hand over your belly, head thrown back- so abruptly it nearly crashes against the corner of the opened cabinet door. The corner of his mouth is curling upwards before he can catch himself. He hopes the refrigerator light shows less of him than it shows of you. Bare legs, and messed hair, and pointed nipples all on display for his undeserving eyes. “‘S so funny, huh?”

“Nothing, nothing,” he successfully fights off the urge to follow the drop of orange juice that spills down the side of your mouth, over your chin, down your neck, disappearing beneath the collar of your dress. Perhaps he is not as successful as he believes. “Just never heard the Joel Miller say something so childish. You’ve usually got your panties all in a bunch if someone so much as looks at you for too long.”

You make way as he inches closer, sliding yourself over to rest against the island counter. A fragrance of things he can’t quite pinpoint, but enjoys nonetheless, wafts in his face as he travels down the path to the sink. Uncouth and unbothered, Joel opens the tap and cups his hands beneath the stream of water.

“You know there’s a cupboard full of glasses right next to you, right?” You call out behind him as the man brings water to his dry lips, splashing and just about guiding his head beneath the stream. The thirst does not budge. He hums an acknowledgement of you, yet continues with his method.

By the time he switches the water off, you’ve made yourself busy, back facing him while you work at something atop the counter, a consistent chop-chop-chop filling the silence that settles between you both.

“iIm making soup,” you state, like there’s nothing quite more logical you could be doing at whatever-o’clock in the morning it is. “Make sure you take some with you when you leave. Tess said she’s been fighting off a cold the past few days, need you to keep her warm and fed for me.”

Would you do the same for him, if you knew he’d been the one to catch that damned cold in the first place? Four days of just about coughing up his lungs, and not a single soul- not even his Tess- had offered soup, nor warmth, nor sympathy. He’d not needed it, until now, when he hears you gifting it to someone else.

I don’t like you, Joel.

Of course you would do the same. Not because you care, nor because doing otherwise would way heavy on your conscious, but because you’re nice. Nice in a way he’ll never be, has never been. Patient, welcoming, comforting, warm. All words that spring to mind when one thinks of you. They violently oppose the closed-off, angry, dark cloud that had rolled in years ago and casted it’s shadow over Joel’s entire persona.

He straightens his back, weight shifting from one foot to another as he contemplates you from behind. The sway of your dress as you move has him in a trance, beckoning him closer before he can even realise he’s taken a step. His hands drip water onto the floor in a rhythm, the record player sings in the distance as a reminder of Tess and your sweet out-of-tune humming fills the empty kitchen with a brightness greater than the moon, but that’s not what Joel hears.

I don’t like you, Joel.

I don’t like you, Joel.

I don’t like you, Joel.

I don’t like you, Joel.

Over and over, you taunt him without even trying, nailing the words into his head and heart, impaling him with your sweet condemnation. You’re not the first to say it, to his face or otherwise, yet you’re the first to evoke such a reaction out of him, to leave a lasting impression hours after you’d declared such a thing.

And, suddenly, Joel’s angry. At you, at himself, at the sound of that damned knife in your hand slicing down onto the chopping board. The fog of his ire blurs his vision, rendering him to move blindly through the night.

Only when he finds himself looming over you from behind does his vision clear.

A hand meets the curve of your hip and you gasp, leaving Joel to wonder if it’s because the shock of his cold, damp touch or, simply, because it’s his touch. Without a thought spared, he firms his grip, fingers squeezing tight enough he feels your flesh bulge between each one, a bruising promise Joel gifts you.

You may leave your marks emotionally, but Joel’s will always be physical.

“Why,” he pulls in a breath, loading up the will to keep his voice a low rumble, a quiet disturbance in the night for no ears but your own to hear. “Don’t ya like me?”

If not for the pause in your practiced movements, knife stilling midway through slicing a carrot, he’d believe you’re unaffected by his proximity. “Why do you care?”

He scoffs, “I don’t.”

“Hmm,” this hum is far less delightful than the way you’d been following along to whatever melody Tess was playing in the living room. “Sure sounds like you do.”

“Yeah, well, I don’t,” he insists, and he swears he almost feels the way it only digs deeper the hole he’s created for himself.

Joel knows he cares. It’s been burning at his skin and itching on his mind since the moment you’d welcomed yourself to a little bit of unfiltered honesty, dropping the perfectly poised and eternally polite mask you’d worn since the moment he’d first met you, an attitude he loathes as much as he anticipates surrounding himself with it each time he’s tugged along for the trek to Bill and Frank’s.

What Joel doesn’t know is why he cares. There’s nothing to be desired about him, no traits to respect and certainly no looks to admire. He’s near crafted his entire being in a way that makes sure of this, the more undesirable his presence is, the less likely he is to be approached, be it by other people or fate itself.

Maybe there was a part of him that had wrongfully imagined you being the exception.

Instead, you’re stood barefoot in the latest of hours, knife working away the vegetables in front of you, dress sticking to skin beneath his damp hand, and you don’t like him.

Not one bit.

Joel grabs at your hips harder, his free hand curling round the shape of your left forearm. His feet shuffle forwards, until there comes a point where one would struggle to make out where you end and he begins. His chest pressed to your back, his muscular legs trapping your soft thighs, his forehead digging into the side of your head so intensely it threatens to shatter both your craniums and leave nothing but dust made by bones blown into smithereens.

He inhales, and finds you don’t smell of lavender.

“For the record,” he watches your movements over your shoulder, entranced with the back and forth sawing of the knife through unidentified vegetables. ‘S just like how I sliced that raider’s throat, he thinks, and instantly regrets it. No part of him should ever be compared to you. “I don’t like ya either.”

He’s lying through his teeth, hoping you don’t notice.

The knife never ceases its movement. Back and forth, back and forth. Chop, chop, chop. Blurs of greens, and oranges, and more greens cover the counter before you. It’s oddly soothing, this repeated and unbroken pattern, reminding Joel of times he’d found comfort in the mundaneness of cooking a meal after an emotionally exhausting day. Perhaps, this has the same affect on you, a momentary lifejacket to keep yourself afloat amongst the waves that haunt you awake.

The hand on your forearm travels, mind of its own, drawing up the shape of your shoulder with featherlight touches that contradict the way his nails dig deeper into the the skin you hide beneath the waistline of your dress.

“That’s not news,” you must think he’s blind to the hitch in your breath when his fingers slip over your pulse-point.

It’s his turn to respond with a hum.

“You only like yourself,” words more untrue have never been spoken before the man who’s every moment is spent drowning in his loses. His wandering touch halts. “A little selfish, if you ask me. but, that’s just what I think.”

This strikes a nerve. Fury commands his hand into a fist and fingers find themselves tangled in the tresses of your hair. The realisation of how surprisingly soft it feels barely finishes registering when he’s pulling on it, dragging your head along with, till it lays flat on his puffing chest and your eyes stare up at him. “D’ya know what I think?”

Even upside down, your beauty is striking.

“No, unlike you I don’t care what you think about-” Joel tugs on your hair once more.

“I think you’re a brat. A silly little girl who thinks she can smile and get away with murder.” You could. He’d forgive you as you soak your hands in the blood you draw from him. Knife in the heart, bullet through the brain, bat to the face, he’d slip away easily from this life if only to have you smile as he goes.

“You’re hurting me,” you whine, Joel growls.

Animalistic, beastly, a rabid animal sinking its claws into its defenceless prey. His gaze dances over your features, catching himself before he can sink deep into your captivating eyes, tracing the shape of your mouth, slipping down the peaks of your collarbones.

Your dress- red, a colour Joel Miller will no longer associate with bleeding wounds and stained weapons- sits tight on your chest, squeezing the swell of your chest beneath the fabric, and gives away all your secrets.

“You like it,” he speaks in awe, unable to pull his eyes off the two stiff buds that poke against the red fabric.

“No, I don’-” Dampness follows wherever his hand goes, fleeting as he makes the journey around your waist and up your side, crawling higher and higher to where he can feel your heart beating from within your chest. “Joel.”

He retightens his grip on your hair, aiding you with the way your curve your spine and force yourself deeper into his uncaring, ungentle, enamoured touch. Whoever Joel had been in a past life must have moved mountains or performed miracles to grant him the luck to be holding you this way, the fingers he’d gifted with nothing but the cocking of guns and the feel of his own pulsating lust now expertly tweaking at one of your stiff nipples, all thoughts of the fabric scratching at your sensitive skin dissipating into the abyss as he realises you’re enjoying the pain.

“Heard ya, earlier, in the living room,” at the time, he’d been mortified to be overhearing such intimate words between you and Tess. The blood that insists on rushing to his crotch now wants you to know, to hear the admission of guilt be spoken from his own mouth. “ Talkin’ bout your past.”

He doesn’t specify.

He doesn’t need to.

You give away your shock with parted lips, widened eyes, frozen eyelashes, pupils staring up at him like a wounded fawn he’s about to take his first bite out of and, hopefully, it won’t be the last one.

“Tess turned you down,” the hand on your chest switches sides, donning your other breast with some much needed attention. His hand must still carry residue of the water, for you gasp and shut your eyes in the shock of his touch, your own fingers shooting up to scratch at his wrist. Near convinced you mean to push him away, the pressure against his hand that pushes deeper into his unholy affection has him realising otherwise. “I wouldn’t.”

You say nothing. Joel pulls harder.

“Too bad I’m-” You cut yourself off as he presses himself closer to you, your poor hips bound to awaken with bruises from the counter he’s got you pressed against. With a distance so small he can hear your teeth grind, Joel watches you like a hawk. The twitch in your brow, the flutter of your eyelids, the bobbing of your throat as you silence what he imagines would be an otherworldly kind of moan, a whine he’d let kiss his ears and wind up poisoning himself with the torture of it replaying in his head each waking moment till he kicks the bucket, once and for all. The want to see you fall apart evolves into a need. “Too bad I’m not offering you the chance.”

Joel Miller is a hot blooded man, at his core, weak to emotions and vulnerable to the warmths of flesh. With notches on his bedpost and a tally of lives beneath his belt, he sees little wrong with taking what he needs.

“Who said anything about an offer?”

The descent to the floor is far from graceful, with bitten back groans of pain as clicking noises resound throughout the room while his joints bend and break in an effort to get him where he needs to be, where he’s needed to be for far longer than merely this exchange on kitchen grounds: on his knees for you.

A part of him would prefer it if you weren’t wielding a butchers knife.

The other part wishes you were facing him, eyes full of that repressed anger, hatred and discontent you likely harbour for him as you point the blade down at him and threaten to paint the floors with his blood. You’ve yet to do that, and so he takes it as his queue to progress.

Smoothing his hands up your legs, he admires the landscapes of your body from this angle, with legs that seem longer than any tree in the Amazonian jungle and curves with peaks that resemble the mountains of the Himalayas. Arriving at the top of your knees, the hem of your dress both welcomes and conceals his touch, inviting him into the wonderful world it hides beneath it yet denying him the privilege of feasting his eyes on your paradise, an island of safety amongst the open ocean of his mind.

Your breathing is measured, precise, too rhythmical to be natural, the subconscious action now turned into a practiced routine you mean to maintain nonchalance with. Perhaps you’re yet to realise that, while he may remain indifferent to those that surround him, Joel knows how to read people. And, right now, you’re a whole novel of lust, awaiting for someone to open up your pages and drink in every lyrical prose you promise to tell.

Joel finds purchase mid-way up your thighs, hands sliding around to the front of them to grip the buttery smooth skin and ground himself in the reality he kneels before.

You breathe in, you breathe out.

One knee buckles, ever so slightly, the weight of you collapsing into his welcoming hold. He revels in the feeling of supporting you, in every meaning of the word, thumbs not even waiting on a command from his consciousness to begin soothing your tingling skin with a gentle back and forth movement to match the knife in your hand.

Inhale, exhale.

Your legs straighten once more, a hand of his winds its way back out from under your skirt and shoots up to grab your free one, dragging it down his pits of desire.

“Hold,” he’s parched all over again, mouth drier than the Texan wastelands on a hot summer’s day. All he can do to survive is peel up that infuriatingly soft, red fabric of your dress, skin unveiling itself to his hunger struck eyes. With the skirt bunched up, he shoves it into your awaiting palms, pinning your hand against your own waist. “Don’t move.”

Where he expects protest, he receives more breathing.

Lace covers your skin, a delicate shade of a colour his eyes can’t quite distinguish in the dark of the night. One flicker of his sight to the very core of your body and he notices it, that tell-tale sign that you’re enjoying this little display of attention, despite what your measured breaths may have him believe. A wet patch, your wetness. The stickiest, sweetest of honeys that only a woman like you can possess, and a man like him should never bare himself witness to.

Curiosity gets the better of him- one day, Joel hopes, this will get him killed- and his touch is reaching for the lacy fabric, fingers digging themselves into the waistband of your panties and around the fabric that covers your right asscheek before curling his hand into a fist, tugging upwards.

In and out, shaky breathing comes from above.

The lace pulls tight on your delicate skin, no choice but to nestle itself in the slit of your cunt as two pretty soaked lips peak out from each side. A heady smell he can only begin to describe as stiflingly sweet, tongue-tingling tanginess hits his nose. He makes sure to take a deep breath, letting the blood rush straight to his head- the one that sits packed uncomfortably in his tightened trousers.

Delectable as sin, you keen back into his fist, back curving ever so slightly. There’s a tremor in the hold you have on the fabric of your dress. Joel basks in the visual affect he’s beginning to have on you, no need to doubt if the fabric of your underwear rubs at your likely aching clit. He wonders if the sting of the lace digging into your skin hurts. He thinks it must hurt.

His fist curls tighter, pulls higher.

“Ah,” at last, a ripple in your surface. Though you still wield a knife, the carrot you’d been failing to chop rolls off the counter and onto the floor, lost somewhere in Joel’s peripheral vision.

“Shut up,” he grunts, like it doesn’t make his balls throb to hear you whine. “People are tryin’ to sleep.”

You scoff, and for a moment you seem to have rediscovered your composure. “Tess is drunk as a sailor, and the old men could sleep through nuclear warfare.”

“‘S that an invitation to see how loud I can get ya,” he’s still caught in the way you mold against the lace, slickened skin carrying a reflection of the moonlight. This, he thinks, is what all them poets were writing about in their prose of love and beauty. “Or a challenge?”

“It’s an invitation to stop lecturing me on volume control,-” you catch yourself, he realises, right before you can gift him some nickname a sweet girl like you would never use. Asshole, dickhead, bastard, he’s heard them all and, still, he wants them on your tongue, in his mouth, condemning him for all the brutish, oafish ways he masks his obsession for you.

As coquettish as it may be, painting a picture worthy of a front-page on some Playboy magazine, the sight of lace becomes a nuisance he no longer holds the patience for. So he strips you of it, hand moving to pull the garment down, down, down the length of you, till it hits your ankles. He awaits no movement of your own, taking it upon himself to lift each of your feet individually out the leg-holes.

It’s merely impulse that has him shoving the soiled lace into his back pocket, though he’s sure he’ll make use of them on lonely nights.

“You’re drippin’,” his proclamation is ego-driven, pride swelling in his chest as he takes in the full sight of your bare heat. The view is a little obscured from behind you, but with the right amount of tilting of your hips at a certain angle and the widening of your legs, he’s bound to sit front row and centre for your private show. “‘S actually a little pathetic, sweetheart. Is it 'cause ya like it when men get mean wit’ ya?”

He can imagine the way you’d roll your eyes at his words, and it has him thinking about how you’d look with your eyes rolling back for different reasons, reasons he’s about to gift you.

But first, he curls one hand around your ankle and tugs the limb along as far as he wants it. Much better, he now faces no blockage in the path up to your slit, freely letting his wandering hands ascend to his newfound heaven. Perhaps he’ll revisit the life of gospel, if you promise to be the altar he prays before.

Cool fingers to warm skin, you swallow a gasp a little too late for Joel to not notice as he drags the tips of his middle finger up the length of your slit. Soft, puffy lips part for him, until he presses against that special button that’s bound to turn on your engines.

Rolling his finger over your clit a few times, he refamiliarises himself with the female anatomy, with your anatomy, memorising each soft bump and meaty lump he finds along the way.

It happens so suddenly, and unwillingly, the way his mind switches to thinking of Tess. He wonders what exactly it is she does to those poor things she sends home on shaky legs, where she even begins to touch them. Joel imagines she makes use of what she has and starts with her fingers.

So he does the same.

Working over your slippery wetness, he coats the tip of his middle finger with it, till he finds what he’s been searching for: the gateways to your heaven, your entrance. He breaches your walls with that single digit and somehow that’s enough to have you squeezing around him so tightly he wonders if blood still manages to flow to his digit.

Two, three, four pumps of his hand and he’s introducing his pointer finger too, pressing them both into you to witness the ways you mould around this wider stretch, the lips of your cunt a pair of cushions his knuckles collide against each time he fucks his fingers in.

“So now you shut up. ‘S the matter, huh?” He’s contradicting himself and he doesn’t even care, too busy focusing on curling his fingers inside you, delighting in the feel of that spongy tissue they press against. “Am I too borin’ for ya?”

“You’re the most infuriating man I’ve ever- Oh!”

A tongue meets skin.

The knife clatters onto the counter.

You lurch forward.

His hand pulls you back.

“Tess was right, ya know?” He can still taste you on his tongue, nothing more than a simple lick over your slit and your salty pleasure already seeps deep into his veins, staining his very being with the memory of his new favourite flavour. He pulls his fingers out, slipping them up to your clit. Three little taps to the pulsing bud- tap, tap, tap- and he’s slipping them into his mouth, tongue working overtime to clean up every last drop of you that coats him. “That boy of yours wasn’t doin’ ya right.”

The common sense that screams at him to not feel envy over some ex-lover, someone who was likely barely even an adult at the time and no longer appears to be around, is no match for the green eyed beast that commands him to tell you, without using words, that he can do better- touch you better, protect you better, fuck you better-, if you’d just let him.

‘Could keep ya satisfied.

That’s a new thought, one he’s never needed before yet never wanted more, a burning ache to be worthy of your trust, affection, lust. He’ll never forget the first time he thinks it, mouth salivating at the sight of you.

“Is this the part you say some cheesy line straight out a porno? What ya need is a man, a man like me!” The softness of your giggle is still sharp enough to cut through the tension. God, it’s never sounded sweet, and Joel finds himself freely smiling into the darkness, yet still too stubborn to laugh at the deep voice you attempt to imitate him with.

“Well, was you who said it,” his mouth finds it’s way back onto your soaked heat, taking his time to work his tongue up the length of it, his saliva mixing itself in a nasty cocktail with your wetness. He imagines the air is cold against your skin, and that you like it, memory of those hardened nipples hidden beneath the fabric of your dress. “But if ya insist.”

Diving in head first had always been his style, from his first lover to his last, and to now, knees aching on the kitchen floor. The tip of his tongue dances round your clit, tantalising you to grind your hips to the rhythm of his sinful touches.

Licking into you, he’s reminded how much he enjoys that swelling in the chest that only comes from bringing another pleasure.

He’d not been a perfect lover, far from it, but he’d liked to believe at one point he’d been trained by experience that only comes with age, years of touching wrong and kissing badly to learn the right ways to make those he shared a bed- or a counter, or a backseat, or a club bathroom- with see angelic white as they writhed and squirmed under his touch. You’re lucky to have him now, matured by past lovers and broadened by age, with all the knowledge he needs to open your eyes to how a man pleasures, kisses, loves.

He’s out of practice, sure, with recent years adding notches to his belt that were merely frantic, unexpected, barely undressed run-ins with strangers, in strange places, cock barely getting a moments affection before he’d be spilling his seed and tucking it, limp, back into the confines of his trousers and locking it away beneath a zip.

What a perfect excuse you are, for Joel to remaster the arts of lust.

It’s messy, wet dripping down his chin and staining itself into the stubble of his growing facial hair. It’s noisy, his mouth openly groaning depraved joy into your warmth as you sing him a song of sweet euphoria, slowly building towards that crescendo on the horizon. It’s animalistic, barely human as he revokes all earthly needs such as rest, and food, and socialising, his mind, and soul, and heart, and cock all screaming in unison to spend whatever remaining days he shall possess on his knees before you.

And all the while you writhe and wriggle, some times running away from him touch, other times rutting so far back into him that you threaten to suffocate him somewhere between your warm thighs, and sugar-sweet cunt, and the two well-rounded globes of your ass.

His only saving grace is that he can’t see you.

Hearing your pretty whines, and hand-muffled moans, and heavy intakes of breath is enough to curse him for the rest of his waking days, condemned to wander the wastelands of earth knowing the noises you make on the brinks of pleasure, with a touch-starved man satiating his hunger for flesh and blood with the sugary sins of your soaked cunt.

Burrowing deeper into you, his consciousness rips through the fog of his lust to curse out his perversions as the tip of his hooked nose bumps against the puckered entrance of your ass. It does nothing to stop him tearing his tongue away from your clit, flattened as he drags it over the expanse of your cunt, and over your taint, and up the crack of your behind.

“N- Ah,” You can’t deny him while sounding so eager for more, the tip of his tongue now circling your back entrance, mimicking the treatment previously given to your little pearl. “No, don’t, not there.”

Next time, he thinks, we’ll try that next time.

Sights returned to his previous desires, he works to rip out every sigh, and every whine, and every dirty little song you’ll grace him with. The sound of whatever record Tess has put on in the other room becomes a safety blanket, dousing you both in the warm protection of not being overheard.

And, then, he does it, he makes the ultimate mistake.

His eyes flicker to the left and he finds himself faced with the stove that sits within Bill and Frank’s- and, by an extension he does not enjoy to remember, your- kitchen. There’s little that’s remarkable about the appliance, just your standard, everyday oven that he’s sure you’ve spent countless hours cooking up those comforting meals he’s come to anticipate each time Tess tells him they’re due a visit.

Except, the oven door is made of glass.

Glass which now paints the most pornographic masterpiece for no eyes but his own. You, with a hand gripping the island’s counter like your life depends on it, and the skirt of that goddamn dress he’s envied all evening for the way it got to rest against the warmth of your thighs now bunched up in your tight grip, and your head thrown back, curving your spine in a way that has him wondering about the other ways he’d be able to bend and break you beneath his touch.

And then there’s him, down on his knees like a devotee laying himself down to worship his goddess, face burrowed in the space between your legs, mouth devouring you from behind with the help of his hands, the same ones that had strangled a man less than a day before and reigned fire down on countless others for years, that now grip the meat of your thighs to pull you back onto him, fucking his tongue into your sopping heat.

The image will haunt him more than the face of any man he’s killed.

“D’ya touch yourself, Sol?” You don’t answer him, but that’s okay. In a sweet change of pace, Joel Miller’s perfectly fine with talking enough for the both of you. “Yeah, bet ya do. Late at night, right? Once you’re all alone in bed. Ya seem like the kind who can make herself scream.”

You back into him, smothering him under the weigh of your body. Becoming his holy grail, he drinks from you like it’s the key to eternal life, and what a way of living this would be, time disregarded as nothing but meaningless while your bodies melt together in the heat of passion.

Fucking his fingers back inside, he becomes frantic beneath the need to make you cry, fall completely apart with only his hands to hold you together. “Let me do the honours this time though.”

You don’t scream, can’t scream, hand over mouth muffling whatever profanities and theatrical proclamations he rips from within you with the stroke of his agile tongue, the only muscle of his that’s yet to develop aches and pains. He imagines that will no longer ring true once he awakens past sunrise.

He’s unsure how much longer he works his tongue over you, slipping and sliding through the liquid pleasure, but it ends with fingers tangled in his hair, pulling him away and tilting his head up.

You’ve never looked more holy, moon casting it’s shine around you, eyes glossed with unshed tears, lips parted and swollen from the pressure your own teeth had bitten down on them with. Your expression, he can’t quite read. Not sad, not happy, not mad.

Your eyes catch on something, abandoning his own for something closer to the floor, to which he follows and finds exactly what you’re staring at: the evidently dark patch that now stains the front of his jeans.

The discomfort of trekking back to the QZ will now be tenfolds worse in the stains of his own pleasure.

“Joel...” his name is nearly a beg, a prayer, an invitation. Hand still in his hair, you tug, pulling him upwards off the ground. Legs open wider and back arches deeper, a seductive sight that your body pleas for him with.

He swallows a groan, knees alleviated at last from the floor, and presses himself against you once more. Strong arms crush you in an embrace, pulling you back into him as his head slips to rest against your shoulder. He’s capricious with the way he lets himself litter a few wet kisses over your neck, breathing in the smell of you.

“That,” you grind back into him, a torturer who takes his aged body as her victim and toys with his barely recovered cock, the cum in his trousers sticking uncomfortably to his skin. He pulls tighter on your body, grounding himself in the weight of it against his own to find the sanity to finish his sentence. “Shouldn’t have happened.”

Joel hopes no one awakens as he slams the door on the way out of the kitchen.

People once spoke of how the only certainties in life were death and taxes but, nowadays, the words don’t ring as true and the guarantee of life with taxes has morphed into something else entirely; a reality where death and time go hand in hand. As sure as tomorrow will arrive, death will come too, eventually. Not today, however, and Joel Miller finds himself stood throwing a ball back and forth for a dog.

It chases and retrieves, trailing it’s happy self all the way back to him only to spit the ball down at his feet, siting and waiting to repeat the process once more. There’d been a time where this is all he’d wanted: white picket fence, dog in the yard, home-cooked meals filling a house with warmth.

That dream seems so far away now, even as he stands within it.

He cracks his back, huffing out a groan. “No, not again. My back’s fucked as it is, buddy,” with no one around to witness, Joel lets himself crouch down onto his knees- both popping obnoxiously as he does so- and rakes his hand over the German Shepherd’s head. It whines and makes an attempt to nudge the ball against him, protesting in the only way it can. A scratch to the ear does the trick to distract the animal, to which it tilts its head and forces itself deeper into his blunt nails. “Not so bad, are ya? Huh?” Never in a million years did Joel think he’d be talking to a dog when him and Tess had set out for their routinely visit to the Bill and Frank’s. Never would he have thought that would be the least shocking event to unfold on this trip.

He hears you before he sees you.

“You planning to make your knees familiar with every surface of this place, Texas?”

He tries to rise, he truly does, but the four-legged foe he’d been petting mere seconds ago betrays him the instant it catches sight of you, charging past him and knocking him over in the process, ass to floor and head to sky.

The world above is a storm of greys, clouds swallowing one another with a looming threat of danger on the horizon and not a lick of the sun’s warmth seems to make its way through.

So instead, it sends you.

Peering over him from above, hair a tangled mess, eyes a wreck of under-bags and sleepless tears, the collar of your jumper lowered just enough at this angle that he can see a tease of cleavage, you radiate a brightness like no other, more dangerous to his naked eyes than UV rays could ever be. He’s squinting again, frown etching itself on his forehead with the threat of becoming permanent soon. A few more years and his face will be nothing but frown lines and crows feet. At the very least, he considers, I’ve survived long enough to wrinkle.

The smile above him is worth a million laugh lines, a kindness laced within it that matches perfectly with the hand you hold out. When he does nothing but stare at it, you wriggle your fingers, enticing him to take a hold. He does most of the work, truthfully, but you play a part in pulling him back to his feet. Upright once more, he can’t help but bask in the way he’s able to physically look down on you.

“Thanks for tiring him out,” you’re the first to talk. You’re always the first to talk, and he curses you for it. “Won’t need to walk him as far tonight.”

A queasy feeling overtakes him at the thought of you walking the dog alone at night, nothing but the moon to light your way. He’ll need to remember to tire the dog out next time he visits. “No problem, thanks... for feeding Tess and I.”

“No worries!” You’re so kind, so good, smiling at him with a cheerful chirp in your voice. He can’t wrap his head around how you can bring yourself to treat him this way. “Oh, actually, that’s why I came out here, I was looking for Tess-” Of course you were, when would you ever be looking for him? “Hold on!”

You shoot off back inside so quickly that Otis just reaches the doorway by the time you return. With an idle pet to his head as you pass by, Joel once again sees, in the way such little affection can have the dog so elated, that resemblance between them you’d spoke of. In your hands, you carry an array of containers full of food- soup- each filled to the brim.

“I wanted to give you these, before you guys leave,” you’re explaining yourself, and Joel wonders if it’s nerves that bring you to need constant babbling to fill any gaps of silence. He can’t imagine how he could make you nervous and therefore that thought is quick to be discarded. “I know the journey up here and back can be long, consider them a token of my appreciation towards you both for-”

“Why don’t ya like me?” he cuts you off.

Pathetic, he knows, but he can not stop himself, a deer caught in the headlights of your brightly burning, too-good-to-be-true, too-pure-to-be-fake personality.

You show no signs of hearing him, smile unwavering as you continue to hold out the boxes to him. “There should be enough to last you a few days, if you watch your proportions.”

It’s too much for him to handle- the food, the smiles, the sweetly glistening eyes-, and Joel just has to know, needs an answer before the heat of his confusion consumes him entirely in its flames and leaves nothing but his smoking remains.

So he tries again, louder.

“Why don’t ya like me?”

“And I’d probably say you’re best to heat it up, especially for Tess,” you ignore him, again, lips stretching what can only be described as uncomfortably wider. “Winter is sure coming in faster than last year, isn’t it?”

He grabs at your arm, fingers curling round the swell of your bicep as he speaks through gritted teeth, "Answer me." Like a frightened dog backed into a corner, he bares his teeth and yells his bark.

"For someone who doesn't care,” you try his patience, knowingly or not, and his grip tightens. You don’t flinch, welcoming the sting of his blunt and bitten nails against your flesh. “You sure do talk about my opinion a lot."

"Answer the damn question, girl.”

“Or, what?” You’ve got him there, he’ll admit, holding no real plan as to how to punish your silence. “You gonna give me the same treatment as last night?”

Had he known you’d be so unabashed to mention the events on the kitchen floor so flippantly, as casually as one would speak about the weather, he’d never have dared to get on his knees. Truthfully, he’d not given things a second thought, disregarding the later for the now, living in the moment with caution thrown to the wind over what the morning would bring. Perhaps he’d hoped you’d been intoxicated enough to dismiss the memory as a nightmare, maybe he’d wished you’d keep away from him to free him of the volatile grip you have on his soul.

Instead, you stand tall, proud, eyes fiercely staring back at his own as you challenge him to retaliate, mock you with none of those saccharine smiles you hide harsh tones behind.

Joel says nothing.

“How about this, let’s make a deal, like the ones you and Bill make.” Inching closer, crowding in on his space and forcing him to take note of the smell of freshly cleaned clothes mixed in with your own fragrance. Clean, warm, inviting, scents he’d never given meaning to before now. “You get me something, I’ll tell you what you want to know.”

He grunts out a response, hands meeting his hips as he juts out one knee, the shifting of weight between feet a perfect distraction to the rising tension in his worn-out jeans. “What d’ya want? ‘Cause if it’s somethin’ like a gun, think again. I ain’t messing with none of Bill’s strange politics on you havin’-”

“A dress.”

“A dress?” The statement has him quirking his brow, burning questions swimming in the depths of his eyes as he stares back at you.

“Yes, and don’t look at me like that!” It’s hypocritical, he believes, for you to berate him for the looks he sends you when all you do is cast stones his way with your gaze yet shake him to his very core each time you smile. “I need a new one, my favourite one got ruined whilst making soup.”

Unaware he’d even began to lean closer, Joel’s quick to recoil, as if your words are bullets and his skin the target you hit on the bullseye every time.

“Joel!” his name resonates from somewhere in the house.

Neither of you dare to break eye contact. Again, his name is yelled. This time, he manages to identify Tess as the owner of the voice. Habits have him used to running to her whenever she calls, but habits have never been caught between the choice of Tess or you.

His feet remain glued to the ground.

Tess yells once more and, though you speak up, you don’t dare look away. “Think you might be needed inside, macho man. Your missus is calling.”

“She ain’t my-”

“You two just gonna stand and stare at each other all day, or will you help a woman out already?” Tess enters the scene somewhere behind you, a blur of her familiar shape standing out the front door.

Only when your head spins and he no longer finds himself lost in the black of your eyes does Joel take her in completely, hair clearly damp and complexion a little paled by her hungover body. In her arms, she struggles with the weight of a folded table. You approach first, he follows, his two hands aiding in carrying it out into the front yard as you retighten your grip on the boxes of soup in your arms.

“I should probably,” laying the containers down on the now unfolded table, you fidget with the sleeves in your hands, eyes downcast with something he can only read as guilt. He decides he much prefers the fire they hold when you berate him. “Go check on the food, before it burns.”

You’re in the door and out his sight before he can so much as ask you to stay.

Tess and him hit the road by noon. Earlier than predicted, later than he’d wished for. The bite of cold already marks the air, despite the sun breaking through the clouds and heating the world with its rays. He walks a little ahead, feigning ignorance to the repeated coughing coming from Tess and wracking his brain for answers.

Answers to why he’d never noticed how hoarse she’d been sounding till you pointed it out. Answers to what awaited them both upon returning to the QZ. Answers to when will be their next chance to visit the safe haven Bill’s created. Answers to why you don’t like him.

I don’t like you, Joel.

It motivates him to walk quicker, faster, racing to put as much distance between himself and that damn kitchen floor, miles upon miles not enough to rid him of the dull ache in his knees that goes hand in hand with the throb within his too-tight-jeans. If he were alone, he’d break out in a sprint. but Tess is here, he’s not alone, and home will simply have to wait on the passing of time to drag him back to it.

Till then, he needs to find a dress.

[protagaster]

Hi, I don’t know if someone has asked this already but I just wanted to know how everything started in you au?

Why is Penelope the one fighting in war while her husband is at home?

I know is a warrior!penelope au but i would like to know how that works in your story?

I also really like your take in the au it’s so cool!

Hello my friend! Thank you so much for taking the time to ask about the details regarding the AU :)! It makes me very happy to see you interested!

It's recounted with a bit more detail in the prequel (titled 'A King with no Queen') but here is the main gist of it.

Buckle up, it's gonna be quite a ride:

First things first, everything starts off exactly the same as it does in the Iliad. Paris chooses Aphrodite as the most beautiful of the Goddess', leading to Aphrodite taking Helen away from her home and husband (Menelaus) and forcing the mortal woman to be with Paris. From there, just as it goes in Homer's tale, Menelaus and Agamemnon force all of Helen's past suitors to fight with them in the war against Troy; this is because of an oath Odysseus himself proposed in order to keep the peace regardless of who Helen chose to be her husband, quote: "all the suitors should swear a most solemn oath to defend the chosen husband against whoever should quarrel with him".

Everything progresses as it does, with all of our favorite Greek heroes, including Odysseus, fighting in the war. This is where things begin to swerve for the AU.

That first year of war the men actually succeed in sneaking Helen out of Troy's palace thanks to their cunning and spies. They place her on a tiny ship that would sail her back to Sparta as quickly as possible and spend the night celebrating in their hidden camps without a care in the world. Unfortunately, the Trojans were quick to notice Helen's disappearance. While they were unable to keep her from leaving Troy, they decided to settle their seething anger with the next best thing. That night, while the Greek armies were full and drunk with merriment, the Trojans sneak into their camps thanks to the information provided by their [the Trojans] own spies. Right then and there the Trojans attacks.

This leads to the Greek men getting horribly injured, to the point where almost all of them are no longer fit for war. In exchange for Helen, the Trojan armies kidnap most of the Greek heroes (Menelaus, Agamemnon, Diomedes, just to name a few) and keep them alive as a warning and form of ransom against Greece and the Gods who support them. Odysseus, who was speared horribly in his shoulder, was spared from capture only thanks to the relentlessness of his Ithacan men.

Only a small handful of men are both spared from injury and allowed to continue to fight (Achilles and Patroclus to name a couple, that detail is just for you @somereaderinblue). The rest, by order of the Gods themselves, are forced to return home as they are no longer of use for combat.

Odysseus, Eurylochus, and the rest of the Ithacan army that was drafted return to Ithaca. Despite the damage they have received, things look hopeful and the future appears to be bright.

However, Greece still needs an army.

This is a timeline where, by Hera's orders, the Gods slowly work to give the women of Greece more autonomy by allowing them to partake in activities one thought to be only for men. Two of the Gods working hardest to meet this goal are Ares and Artemis, who have collaborated to teach women the art of combat and bearing arms.

Ares, who has never been in his parent's good graces, is in extra trouble now due to agreeing to support the Greeks on Hera's request but then turning around and supporting the Trojans upon Aphrodite's say. Hera declares that the only way to make it up to her is by drafting his eligible female warriors (those of age and with enough skill and experience to survive) to fight in the men's stead.

This includes Penelope, who had passed his trial back when she was still a young Spartan Princess and in turn became Ares' personal pupil (look at Warrior of the Heart if you would like more details). With a combination of Ares' order and Helen's plea, who feels the war is all her fault and wants to learn to fight in order to save her husband, Penelope is forced to leave behind Ody and Tele (a girl in mine and Blue's AU) in order to fulfill her duty.

That's how our version of the Warrior Penelope AU came to be! I'm sure you all know what happens from there ;)

P.S - Here are a few fun facts, not at all relevant to the AU, but still I wanna share em:

Hermione, Helen and Menelaus' daughter, actually snuck herself onto her mother's warship in order to join them in saving her father

The only reason Clytemnestra agrees to save Agamemnon is to kill him herself once they return home, since he still sacrificed their daughter before he and his men headed off for war

Patroclus was surprised when he saw Penelope for the first time. After how much Ody spoke of her, Patroclus had assumed for a time that she was a mere fiction of his imagination, a coping mechanism to keep himself sane (thank Blue for this one!)

On #3's note, Patroclus, Helen, Clytemnestra, and the rest of the Greek army immediately saw the similarities between Penny and Ody when Penny refused to shut up about how amazing her husband is and how much she longed to see him again