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pregnant-piggy · 3 years ago

Text

Summer Games - three

Blaise Zabini x reader

masterlist

warnings: no pronouns used for the reader,

A/N: I had so much fun writing this part and coming up with all the stupid things! I really hope you like it :)

written for @omgrachwrites writing challenge with the prompts: ‘I can’t have this argument with you again.’ ‘But—’ ‘No, I’m done.’ and ‘Sorry… your hair was in your face… thought I should move it so I could see you better.’

word count: 3.9k

The next morning Blaise awoke before Draco and rather than waking his friend too, Blaise got dressed in silence and slipped out of the room. He walked down to the kitchen, where he found you sitting at the table with a mug in your hands, reading the morning papers.

‘Might rain this afternoon,’ you said without looking up.

Blaise hummed something as he sat down opposite of you and poured himself a cup of coffee. He looked up and studied your face as you read the newspaper. Your eyes scanned the pages quickly, picking out the things worth reading. Blaise watched you for a few minutes until you had finished and looked up at him.

‘What you’re doing?’ he asked when you kept looking at him.

‘Looking at you,’ you smiled.

Blaise chuckled nervously. ‘I noticed that, yeah. But why?’

‘I’m probably not gonna see you all day,’ you shrugged. ‘Don’t wanna forget that pretty face of yours.’

Blaise straightened his back and blinked. ‘Don’t wanna—’

‘Good morning, lovelies!’ Pansy interrupted as she threw open the door of the kitchen and strode in.

Blaise was still turned to you and watched as you hugged Pansy shortly before she sat down next to you. She poured herself some coffee and looked at Blaise.

‘Blaise, stop staring, that’s rude,’ Pansy said and she waved her hand in front of Blaise’s face.

He quickly looked away from you and shot Pansy a nasty look before he turned to his coffee.

‘Pansy don’t bug him,’ you scolded and shot Blaise a kind smile. ‘It’s only morning.’

‘Fine, fine,’ Pansy said and she waved your words away with her hand. ‘I won’t bug him until later this day.’ She took a sip from her coffee and pulled a face before quickly scooping two spoons of sugar in her cup. ‘Where’s Draco?’

‘Still asleep,’ Blaise muttered. ‘I considered hexing him awake, but I still have to sleep here for two nights and Draco with a grudge is not someone you want to sleep next to.’

‘I am not that bad,’ a grumpy voice at the doorframe said. Draco walked into the room and flopped down on the chair next to Blaise. ‘Coffee, please.’

‘Sure, you’re not that bad,’ you snickered as you poured coffee in Draco’s mug.

While Draco drank his coffee, you told your friends what Game today would be. ‘It’s the last day before the winner gets announced. Yesterday while we were at the lake the other half of the teams played games in the fields. Before we set off today we’ll get the ranking so far, so you know what team to beat.’

‘But what are we doing today?’ Pansy asked.

A big smile spread on your face. ‘It’s the best Game of the whole festival. The organisation has put out a big scavenger hunt. It goes through the whole village and we have to solve riddles and collect things. You’ll get a list with things to collect and usually the team splits up in little groups and each group gets a part of the list.’

‘What sort of things do we have to collect? Because I’m really not interested in breaking my back from carrying a lot,’ Draco said.

‘I don’t know,’ you replied. ‘Usually there’s a theme to the hunt. My grandma helps to put it together and previous years she’d tell me what the theme was but she hasn’t this year.’

‘So we’ll just go around town collecting things? Isn’t that boring?’

Your smile faltered a bit and Blaise kicked Draco under the table. ‘Don’t listen to him, he’s a jerk in the morning. It sounds fun!’

You smiled thankfully at Blaise and after Pansy also reassured you that it sounded great, your smile was back on your face, and it stayed there for the rest of the morning.

/\/\/\

The scavenger hunt had officially started. A little earlier the scores of the teams had been disclosed; the Sly Foxes were on top with only two points difference between them and the Red Titans. Next were the Oiled Machines and at the bottom the Raging Angels. But just by a few points so all could change with the scavenger hunt.

The organisation had handed out the lists with the things to collect and the theme had quickly been clear.

Book of Spells … 7 pts

Iron Cauldron … 15 pts

Vial with Sleeping Potion … 12 pts

Witch Hat … 5 pts

Unnecessarily the woman of the organisation had added that the theme of this year’s hunt was ‘magic’ and both Blaise and Draco had had to refrain their laughter at the stereotypical items they had to collect. There was a whole list on ingredients for potions that no real wizard would ever think of using, such as goat milk and rabbit turds. Apparently Muggles still thought of witches as old, weary women in little shacks in the woods.

Blaise and Draco had been teamed up with three other Foxes. Neither of them knew any of the three, but after his little spat with Alysia two days ago, Blaise was more than happy that he wasn’t in her team.

The oldest of their team was Ivanna, a woman of thirty-four with a pale face and sleek brown hair. Despite the heat she was wearing long trousers and a jacket over her shirt. She’d told the rest of the team that she had a little baby of just two months old, so that if she seemed tired it meant she probably was.

The second of the three was the twenty-three year old student Mica. They had a dark golden skin and black, curly hair that had been cut short and dyed blue in the ends. Under the blue bangs lay two dark eyes that glittered with excitement and competitiveness. Mica was a student in London, but they had come back to the town where they’d grown up for the Summer Games.

The last teammate was the very young Raoul. He was the son of the man Draco and Blaise had met the first day of the festival at the stand with the cherry pastries, Hank. Raoul was just eleven years old, but he brought a childlike enthusiasm with him that made everyone in the team energized.

They were by far the youngest team, as all the other teams had the more aged villagers, so they called themselves the Sly Pups. Quickly they set to work and looked at the items on their list.

‘Does this make any sense to you?’ Ivanna asked as she handed the list to Blaise and Draco.

Errn rq srwlrqv … 7 pts

Eurrpvwlfh … 17 pts

Fordn … 9 pts

Fdqgohv .. 10 pts

‘I don’t get it,’ Draco said to the rest of the team and then he whispered to Blaise: ‘You didn’t take Ancient Runes, did you?’

‘No, I didn’t,’ Blaise answered and he looked at the sheet in his hand. ‘But I doubt these are runes.’

Blaise looked around at the rest of the Sly Foxes but they didn’t seem to have the same problems, as they were already heading off. Then he looked at the other teams on the field and realised that from each team one group would stay bent over their list while the others took off. In one of the remaining teams Blaise recognised you and Pansy.

‘You don’t think it’s a mistake, do you?’ Ivanna asked with frowned eyebrows.

‘No, the other teams have it too,’ Blaise said and he nodded to the three groups left behind around them.

‘Wait, this one we can read!’ Mica said and pointed out the first line on the paper. ‘”To understand the magic you must always think three steps ahead.” What does that mean?’

The whole team silenced as they thought about the possible meaning of the sentence. Raoul looked around on the ground as if he would find the answer literally three steps ahead of him. For minutes it was quiet and Blaise’s annoyance grew.

To make his irritation even worse two of the other teams around them, including your team, had found the solution to the weird texts and were now running off the field. Blaise let out an exasperated sigh and he shook his head.

‘It can’t be this hard,’ Draco said.

‘It’s some sort of secret language, but I don’t understand the three steps,’ Mica admitted and they rubbed their temples with their knuckles.

‘My dad taught me a secret language once,’ Raoul said. ‘So we could write each other without my other dad finding out. We changed each letter with the one next in the alphabet.’

‘Of course!’ Mica exclaimed and they took the paper from Blaise. ‘Does someone have a pen?’

Ivanna gave Mica a pen and they turned Draco around to use his back. ‘What are you doing?’ Draco snapped but Mica ignored him as they started to write the alphabet on the top of the paper.

‘Look, it’s actually really easy,’ they said. ‘Each letter is swapped for a letter three steps ahead in the alphabet! Just like Raoul said!’

‘So that would mean that the e in the first word is actually a…’

‘A b!’ Mica completed Blaise’s sentence. ‘So the first word is… book… on… pot—potions! We have to find a potions book!’

‘I’ve got one of those in my bag,’ Draco muttered, but Blaise kicked him softly on his leg.

‘We have to go the library!’ Raoul said and he ran off.

‘Raoul! Wait a minute! Not so fast!’ Ivanna yelled after him and the group quickly followed the little boy.

/\/\/\

Your team had quickly figured out the solution to the weird text and found a potions book in the library, accompanied by a little paper with the next clue. Now you were sitting on the wall around the garden of the library with your team.

On your right sat Pansy and on your left Quincy. Quincy was your grandparents’ neighbour and you knew him very well so you were glad he was on your team. He was fifty-five and he had studied philosophy at the university in the nearest big city when he was younger. You hoped his intelligence would be applicable in the hunt, and so far it had for he had figured out the secret language.

Opposite of you stood Chantelle, the forty-two year old town’s librarian. Despite her being in her early forties she looked much older. She had a wrinkled face and neck and always stared at you with big eyes from behind her thick glasses. Her appearance was deceiving however, because her mentality was as quick as that of a young adult.

The last in your team was a teenage boy only a year older than you and Pansy. His name was Christopher and you had known him since you were a small child and you went to your grandparents in the summer. He had dark curls framing his olive face that was always painted with a bright smile. This time there was something other in his smile too and it only made sense to you after he told you that his boyfriend was in the other team and he desperately wanted to beat him.

‘y/n too,’ Pansy had said and Christopher had raised his eyebrow.

‘Really?’

‘No! Blaise is not my boyfriend!’ you’d cried to which Pansy had laughed.

‘Who said anything about Blaise? I merely said ‘boyfriend’.’

Now you were all looking at the new paper in your hand. The next item on the list was an eurrpvwlfh; a broomstick. Though finding out what the next item was had been easy, the real problem was finding the place where. The text on the paper you had gotten from the person in the library didn’t exactly help you very much.

Where I am is always a mystery.

Over mountains I fly,

Or I cross above the trees.

Down on the ground I rest,

Still and motionless I stand.

Pansy sighed and she threw her head back, closing her eyes as she thought about the riddle. Next to you, Quincy was staring at the text as if that would make him any wiser. Every once in a while he would hum but he didn’t come with an answer.

‘We’re gonna lose our lead like this,’ Christopher sighed as he looked around the street for other teams.

‘Surely we’re not seeing something,’ Pansy said and she tilted her head to the side, looking at the paper from a different angle. ‘No offense, but the organisation isn’t exactly a group of highly intelligent people, so maybe we have to think easier.’

Christopher chuckled and you faked a scowl at Pansy. ‘That’s my grandmother you’re talking about!’ you cried and Pansy just shrugged. ‘But you’re right. I am sure there is something clear that we’re overlooking.’

Chantelle cleared her throat and pointed at the text. ‘Maybe we should take a literal approach. You know, look at the text rather than the meaning?’

‘Here,’ you said and gave Chantelle the paper, allowing her to put her full focus on it.

Down the street you noticed a group of people approaching the library. Running ahead of the others was a young boy you recognised as Raoul. He had a big smile on his face and was waving the list with things to collect through the air. In the group behind him Blaise and Draco were walking together, followed by Mica and Ivanna. They noticed your team and Blaise and Draco waved.

‘Not to put pressure on you, but I really hope you can figure it out now because if we don’t win from Blaise and Draco I will be hearing that for the rest of my life,’ you sighed and Pansy nodded.

Chantelle looked up from the paper and winked at you. ‘I got it.’

Your team cheered and Blaise’s team, that was just about to enter the library, looked around. Upon seeing your team so happy, their faces turned sad.

‘See you tonight, boys!’ Pansy shouted. ‘Losers have to do the dishes!’

/\/\/\

Blaise and his team stepped out of the woods with the broomstick in their hand. The broom was old and twitchy and Blaise had to stifle a laugh thinking of how different the real broomsticks were in the wizarding world.

Again it had been Mica who had guessed the answer of the riddle. Blaise wondered where the team would be if they hadn’t been here. Probably still working on the first puzzle. But Mica had figured out that the first letters of the sentences in the little poem formed the word woods, the place where they had found the broomstick.

Now they only had the next word, fordn, meaning cloak, and a silver pin. It was not much to go on but Ivanna had recognised the pin straight away.

‘It comes from Mrs. Heath’s studio!’ she exclaimed and looked at the little pin in her fingers. ‘It’s what she uses for her dresses!’

Unfortunately Mrs. Heath’s studio lay on the other side of the village and it would take at least forty minutes before they’d get there.

‘Forty minutes?!’ Draco cried and when the team set off he turned to Blaise. ‘Stupid Muggles, why can’t we just apparate?’

‘Oh shut it, Malfoy,’ Blaise said. ‘It’s fun!’

‘I’m gonna curse y/n for making us do this…’

Grudging Draco followed the rest of his team and though Blaise would never say it to his friend, he had to admit that his feet were beginning to hurt.

The Sly Pups passed little houses with colourful front yards, full of flowers and bushes. The main street was silent and all the shops were closed, as most of the inhabitants were participating in the Games and there was no need for the stores to be open. They ran into a few other teams, but none of those had the same list as they had.

After forty-five minutes they arrived at the old house of Mrs. Heath. In the garden there was a little path, past pink flowerbeds and a small pond with fish. Halfway in the garden the path split in two. One side led to the bright yellow front door, the other led to a wooden door with a sign on it that said the Heath atelier.

Ivanna stepped through the garden and knocked on the yellow door. A minute it was silent and then an old lady opened the door. She was wearing an orange with blue flowers dress that reached to the ground and her grey hair hung in a braid over her shoulder. Her lips spread into a smile when she saw the five people at her door.

‘You’re the first ones!’ Mrs. Heath smiled and she stepped out of the door. ‘Come, come, follow me!’

Blaise sent Draco a questioning look as they followed Mrs. Heath to her studio. Your team had been far ahead of Pups, having figured out where to find the broomstick before Blaise’s team even had the riddle. In the forest there had been two brooms already collected, but apparently the Sly Pups were the only ones who had found where the silver pin came from.

Inside the Heath atelier stood four mannequins with colourful robes. Each had a different colour and pattern. There was a dark blue one with yellow stars, a green one covered with red flowers and one coloured yellow with orange and red flames. Blaise snickered at the cloaks; the only one he had even seen wearing such colours was Dumbledore and he couldn’t exactly be called a normal wizard.

‘You take this one,’ Mrs. Heath said and she pulled a bright pink cloak with yellow and green crescents embroidered in it from a mannequin. ‘And also—’ she opened a drawer and pulled out a thin object in the shape of a circle ‘—this one. Good luck!’

Ivanna took the object and the cloak and ushered the team outside. In the garden she handed over the cloak to Draco, who took it with a frown, and looked at what Mrs. Heath had given her.

‘It’s a coaster,’ Mica said, raising one eyebrow. ‘Why would she give us a coaster?’

Before anyone of the team could guess, however, another group arrived at the house. You and Pansy were walking ahead, both with tired and sweaty faces, and the rest of your team seemed just as exhausted.

Blaise waved at you and you gave him a weak smile back as you walked with your team inside.

‘Does anyone recognise this?’ Mica asked and they looked around the team.

Everyone shook their head and they sighed as one. Ivanna brought the coaster closer to her face and examined it. She dropped her shoulders and shook her head again. ‘I don’t know what it is.’

‘It probably has something to do with the next item,’ Mica said and they pulled out the list. ‘Candles. Is there a place here that sells candles or anything?’

‘But what has that got to do with the coaster?’ Blaise asked.

‘I don’t know,’ Mica admitted.

Your team came out of the studio with the green cloak and Pansy had a coaster in her hand. You huddled a little away from Blaise and your team formed a protective circle around the object in Pansy’s hand.

Blaise was standing with his back to your team, but he could hear the whispers. While his team tried to think of a solution for the weird puzzle, Blaise tried to listen to what your teammates had to say. And it seemed like your team had sorted it out as quickly as Ivanna had sorted out the solution of the pin.

‘I know where this is from,’ Quincy said. ‘At Mikey’s they use these coasters.’

‘And that would make sense, because in a restaurant they surely have candles!’ Chantelle added and the rest of your team mumbled approvingly.

Blaise looked around and saw your team leaving the garden and heading for the main street. You caught his stare and smiled enthusiastic at Blaise, making him weak in the knees with the innocent laugh on your face. Butterflies were fluttering through his stomach and he felt bad for eavesdropping on your team.

‘Blaise?’

‘Yeah?’ Blaise tore his gaze from you and turned to his team, finding them all looking at him.

Mica laughed and shook their head. ‘Ivanna said that she knows someone who makes candles,’ they said. ‘I know we haven’t got much time left, but it’s worth a try.’

The scavenger hunt would only last till four, then everyone had to return to the fields, whether they had found all the objects or not. Now there were only thirty minutes left, so they had to hurry.

Blaise looked at his team and thought of what he had heard a minute earlier. If they went to the candle-maker they would never get to the restaurant in time, and that would mean that they’d lose from your team. However, when Blaise thought of you and how happy you’d be when winning, he just couldn’t tell.

‘Sure,’ he said. ‘Sounds great.’

/\/\/\

You were lying in bed, staring at the shapes the lamp cast on the ceiling. Pansy was hopping around in the room, trying to find the pyjamas that she had thrown off this morning. Her footsteps were heavy sounds on the wooden floor.

There was a faint smile on your face. This afternoon your team had been the only one to return with all four of the items on the list. Though that didn’t guarantee that the Red Titans had won the entire scavenger hunt, it did mean that you and Pansy’s team had won from Blaise and Draco’s.

However, there was one more thing that added to your smile.

‘He knew,’ you said and sat up against the headboard of the bed.

‘Who knew what?’ Pansy asked as she was bent over in the closet.

‘Blaise knew where to find the candles.’

Pansy looked up at you. ‘What do you mean? His team didn’t find them.’

‘No, his team didn’t know,’ you said while Pansy took off her shirt and trousers. ‘But he did.’

Pansy neatly folded her clothes and placed them on a shelf in the closet. Then she closed the door and looked around the room. ‘Where the hell are my clothes?’ she mumbled before she looked back at you. ‘How do you know?’

‘He overheard Quincy telling where the coaster came from,’ you said and you lifted the pillow on the bed and revealed Pansy’s pyjamas. ‘He looked at me before we walked away. I could see it in his face.’

Pansy had sat down on the bed and pulled the shirt over her head. ‘So if he knew, why didn’t he tell his team?’ she asked and then a wicked smile spread on her face. ‘He let you win.’

‘He let us win, Pansy,’ you corrected, but even you couldn’t suppress a smile. ‘But yeah.’

‘So that’s why you’ve been smiling so much all evening!’ Pansy exclaimed loudly and you shushed her.

‘Shh! He’s still in the room next to us!’

Pansy rolled her eyes and crawled under the covers next to you. ‘Will you now believe he’s totally into you?’

You turned off the light on the nightstand and lay down, pulling the duvet up to your chin. You stared at the dark ceiling for a moment, thinking back of today. With a smile you took Pansy’s hand and gave it a little squeeze.

‘Perhaps.’

- - - - - - -

taglist

general HP: @harry-pottery-barn @potters-heart @kingalrdy @missswriter @figlia--della--luna@sexysirius @awritingtree @bi-andready-tocry @lilulo-12fanfiction @ananad1 @treestarrrrrrrr @your-hispanichufflepuff @thefandomplace @theeicedamericano @girllety @moonstarrnghtsky @swearingsolemnly @weasleydream @secretsthathauntus @amixedwitch @izzyyy-1 @gryffindorgirl @kitkatkl @catching-the-train-to-hogwarts @nyotamalfoy

MASTERLIST

#summer games #rach's1kcelebration #blaise zabini x reader #blaise zabini imagine #blaise zabini #blaise x reader #harry potter x reader #harry potter imagine #harry potter

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demonologist-in-denim · 4 years ago

Text

Humming to himself, Crowley dusted the rich dark cocoa powder into the soft white flour, and reached for his trusty wooden spoon. Blending ingredients in a mixer tended to create a smoother batter, but Crowley enjoyed the feel of the spoon in his hand, the sound it made scraping the bottom of the bowl, the hands-on experience of turning flour and sugar and eggs into cake.

When the dry ingredients were properly combined, he made a well in the center and carefully poured in the buttermilk, eggs, butter and vanilla. Instead of the usual red food coloring, Crowley added in fresh beet puree – just enough to give the cake a velvety ruby hue. The rich cocoa would cover the hint of earth with a delicate chocolate flavor. The mixture was then evening distributed between three pans and scooched into the oven.

While the cakes baked, he set to work on the frosting. The softened cream cheese and unsalted butter whipped together beautifully. He settled on using far less powdered sugar than the recipe called for, wanting the tangy sweetness of the cream cheese to accent the cake all on its own.

“Would have asked about any preferences in decoration,” Crowley muttered to himself as he applied the crumb coating to the cake, once it was done baking and properly cooled, “but that would have tipped my hand.” Simple yet elegant seemed appropriate. After applying a thick final layer of cream cheese frosting, Crowley piped fluffy buttercream swirls along the rim of the red velvet cake. A soft pile of crumbled extra cake crowned the top, and he tossed more along the side to create a dusting effect.

There was nothing left now except to take the photo.

Which, as fate would have it, turned out to be the difficult part.

He positioned the cake on the kitchen table, and snapped a few photos. Crowley hmmmed to himself. It wasn’t quite up to his standard of food porn. Perhaps he’d take a few more, just to be on the safe side. Until one was suitably flattering. He was still adjusting the cake, playing with the proper angle and lighting for the perfect shot, when Sam and Dean strolled into the kitchen.

For a moment, they lingered at a respectful distance. But Crowley could sense their curiosity like a gathering storm of rose petals, soft yet burdensome.

“Can I help you two with something?”

Disbelief and delight were tugging a one-sided smile out of Sam. “Is – is that for Valentine’s Day?”

Valentine’s Day? Crowley narrowed his eyes at the elegant dessert. Bloody hell, the cake was red and white, wasn’t it? He hadn’t considered that when a bit of carefully applied questioning had disclosed the recipient’s cake preferences.

Crowley mulled the situation over. He couldn’t answer in the affirmative. That would mean he had intentionally crafted the cake as a celebration of gushy hearts and the sweet delirium of – internally, Crowley cringed – love. But he also couldn’t reply with a defensive and definitive “no”. That would only open him up to further, unwelcome inquiry.

He settled for the more characteristically dismissive third option.

“It’s Valentine’s Day?” Crowley steadfastly went back to attempting to capture the perfect photo with his phone. “I don’t bother myself keeping track of that sort of thing.”

Dean eyed the demon knowingly. “Yeah, well, our Netflix recommendations would say otherwise.”

Crowley glowered at the hunter.

“Whatever the occasion,” Sam offered up as his brother idled over to the cake, “that’s professional-grade baking. You’ve got a real talent. The frosting, the whole look? Seriously, I’m impressed.”

The arrow of this flannelled cupid hit its mark. Crowley felt a slight blush of pleasure, despite himself. Casual, unsolicited praise? From Sam Winchester? He seriously contemplated the possibility that Sam had been exposed to some sort of low-grade, poorly-concocted love spell that had bloomed into amiability, or maybe it had been released as a pink mist in the bunker’s common room, and Crowley had unknowingly avoided the worst of it. That seemed like the sort of malarkey that would happen around here on what, apparently, was Valentine’s Day.

Because Crowley found himself saying, “Thank you, Sam,” with actual sincerity. Moments such as these reminded Crowley that he was rather fond of these two boys, after all.

That was the moment Dean ran his finger along the edge of the cake, carrying off a large dollop of frosting from one side. The whole cake just looked so enticing! Dean was more of a pie man himself, but Crowley’s culinary expertise had the tendency to tempt him in surprising ways.

He was halfway to lifting the frosting-festooned finger to his mouth when he caught sight of the expression on Crowley’s face. Sam’s own face was a rotting lemon. Dean’s hand stilled, mouth still open.

“Um,” he muttered.

Dean looked at the offending finger, uncertain of what to do next. He started to put the frosting back where it belonged, thought better of it, looked for a napkin, and reluctantly settled for ashamedly completing the crime by depositing the frosting in his mouth.

Which was a mistake. Because now he knew the cake was friggin’ delicious, and Dean seriously wondered if maybe Crowley could manage his little photo shoot even if there was a slice of the cake missing.

As if he could read his brother’s mind, Sam shook his head in the most supreme disappointment. “Dean.”

“What?! Sorry!”

Reminding himself that murdering one Winchester brother would only end with him being ganked by the other one – though there were certainly times it seemed worth it – Crowley took a deep inhalation, and let it go. Cakes were ultimately meant to be eaten, even if it was by inconsiderate louts and lumberjacks.

“I’ll accept your apology, if you cut everyone else a slice before digging in yourself. I’m sure one of the photos I took before your little indiscretion will suffice.”

“Alright! Cake!” Dean cheered, while Sam just closed his eyes.

Crowley thumbed through the multitude of pictures he’d taken, and settled on the most appealing of the lot. Then he opened up his Bumblr app, and made a new post:

@petrichoravellichor – in honor of your birthday today. Heard from a mutual that you have a particular fondness for red velvet cake. Hope it’s to your liking. – C

He sent the message and image off with a satisfied smile, then set about getting plates and forks, as this cake was obviously not going to survive the interest of the Winchester brothers much longer.

As Crowley was pulling plates out of the cupboard and Dean was cutting into the cake, Castiel wandered into the kitchen, attention entirely given over to his phone. The angel had graduated from texting and emojis to social media and memes, and sometimes he could be found scrolling through Twitter and Instagram with a rapt fascination that would out-fixate even the most plugged-in FOMO-obsessed teenager. There was a chiming sound as he entered the kitchen, as notification of a new post.

“Dude,” Dean was grinning from ear to ear, “Crowley made cake!” He pointed with delight at the dessert.

Cas looked up from his phone, saw the cake, and halted in the middle of the kitchen. He narrowed his eyes, examining the red velvet cake on the table in front of him. Then he looked back down at his phone in consternation. Cas looked at the cake again. Looked back at his phone, and then slowly, he looked at Crowley.

The demon looked from the angel to the cake, his eyes increasing in size as realization dawned.

“Is that – ?”

“Don’t you say one bloody word, angel!” Crowley blustered, a rush of red to his face further colored by the mortification of such abject exposure. “Not one word!”

And before anyone could say anything else, Crowley shoveled a huge slice of not-at-all birthday cake onto a plate, shoved it into Cas’ hand, and quickly excused himself from the kitchen.

“What,” Sam wondered to the startled room, “was that all about?”

Cas continued to stand in the middle of the room, cake in one hand and phone in the other, attempting to come to terms with having inadvertently discovered a fandom mutual was also a real-life friend, and the one he would have least expected. Unsettled, he took comfort in the certainty their shared mutual would appreciate the well wishes on their birthday.

Dean shrugged, merrily flipped the serving knife in his hand, then waved the tip at his brother. “That’s Crowley for you,” he observed, good mood undeterred. “Dude would cut out his own heart and blend it to make red cake batter before admitting to it, but deep down, he’s just a big ol’ teddy bear who wuvs hugs. Speaking of which – you see that giant pink moose Eileen sent you? Friggin’ adorable.”

Dean proceeded to cut a huge slice for himself, leaving a worried looking Sam staring down at the blood-red cake. Then the hunter stepped around a disconcerted Castiel, patting the angel on the shoulder, and strolled out of the kitchen.

***

Happy birthday, Petra! I’m sure you’re tired of your birthday comingling with Valentine’s Day, but when you said your cake preference was red velvet cake, what was I to do? ;)

If you’re wondering exactly why – or even how – Crowley became a member of the in-world spn fandom, you can find out here. This fic will be posted on AO3 in my Tumblr Ficlets after posting on Tumblr.

Image sources here: X

#crowley #spn ficlet #spn fandom #spn crack #spn fanfic #dean winchester #sam winchester #castiel #one of the boys #fandom life #happy birthday #to you!#this was so much fun to write #i *may* have passed along to Crowley #your cake preference #hope you have a great day!

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twokinkybeans · 4 years ago

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FALLEN LIKE SNOW - CHAPTER ONE: PRETTY PLEASE

Written by @jeranasblog and Kinkybeanlien

(moodboard made by @jeranasblog)

After an unfortunate run in with his boss – Tony Stark – and a paparazzi in an elevator, Peter Parker finds himself at the top of a piste, skis attached to his feet and living the trope he has only read about in fan fiction.

Will he only fall flat on his face in the snow? Or will he fall for his annoyingly selfish boss as well?

Notes: Adult Peter Parker, Fake dating, One sided enemies to lovers, No powers!AU, Mutual pining, Sugar daddy!Tony, Sugar baby!Peter, Fluff, Smut and Angst. Smut tags for later: Wet Dream, Dry Humping, Daddy Kink, Mirror Sex, Dom/Sub Undertones, Bondage, Humiliation, Oral Sex, Anal Sex, Fingering, Edging, Lingerie, Dom/Top!Tony, Sub/Bottom!Peter

Read Chapter 1 Pretty Please on AO3!

Ugh. Peter rolled his neck as he stepped into the elevator. He pushed his shoulder back and flinched when he cracked. This internship was a killer on his body. It was fun and educational, for sure, but he really needed to mind his posture. Being hunched over his desk was already taking its toll. If only he could afford a physical therapist… “Babe, hold the elevator, please!” In a reflex, Peter pressed the button to keep the elevator door open and he looked up to see none other than his boss, Tony Stark, rushing for him. His mood soured immediately and he considered pressing the button to close the elevator doors. As much as he liked the work he did, Peter wasn’t very fond of the person he was working for. Wait… Did Mr. Stark just call him “Babe?” When Tony got close to the elevator he shouted. “Close it, close it!” Peter pressed the right button. His boss probably thought he could squeeze in at the last second, but unfortunately for him, that’s not how elevators work. Tony threaded the needle as the door closed, but the sensor picked up on him and Peter snorted when the doors opened again. The young man glanced up and saw a small horde of paparazzi rushing their way. Suddenly, Tony pressed into his space and took over the button, pushing Peter’s hand aside and repeatedly tapping the button as if that would make the elevator doors close faster. Peter scoffed and stepped back, shaking his head and rolling his eyes. “Whoever let them in the building is going to get fired,” Tony seethed. “Maybe your security system is just lacking.” Peter said the words before he could think them through and if looks could kill, Peter would have been on the shiny elevator floor right now. “Mister Stark-!” One of the paparazzi, a young sprite who definitely didn’t look like she was with the gossip magazine her badge claimed her to be from, managed to get into the elevator. The doors closed, leaving the others behind. The elevator slowly started moving down. The three of them stood awkwardly. “I’m not answering your questions,” Tony said quickly. The paparazzi grinned and turned to Peter, who took a small, uncertain step back. “Well, then I’ll just ask your boyfriend.” “B-boyfriend?” Peter stuttered and glanced at Tony wide-eyed. The older man blinked once and wrapped an arm around Peter’s shoulder. The boy’s brows curled up into a frown. “Ah, yes! We prefer the term ‘significant other,’ right, babe?” Tony stared down into Peter’s eyes, a demanding fire in them telling Peter he would lose his internship if he didn’t play along. Peter laughed awkwardly. “Right,” he stammered. “What a scoop!” The young woman jumped once, only to realize they were in a moving elevator. She contained her excitement by almost literally vibrating in her spot. “Tony Stark’s new boyfriend! Or- significant other. What’s your name?” Peter’s lips pulled together in a pout. He sucked at his teeth and stopped himself from flinching when Tony’s hand squeezed his shoulder. “Peter.” “Last name?” “Private.” “Peter Private?” “No, Miss, he doesn’t want to disclose his last name. Duh.” Tony rolled his eyes and relaxed a little, letting Peter’s shoulder go, only to move his hand down to Peter’s back. It was warm and present and Peter wasn’t sure if he was okay with it. It felt strangely good, though. “Fair enough, I’ll figure that one out on my own.” The woman winked and Peter wished he could just disappear. “So, how long?” “Couple weeks,” Tony replied before Peter could protest or give any kind of answer on his own. “I take it you’re bringing him to the annual ‘Valentine’s Ski Charity’ event?” Peter’s eyes went wide. He’d heard about Tony’s infamous parties that he liked to throw in the most expensive places; Tirol in Austria being one of them. The charity event always sounded like an excuse for Stark to go all out and spend bucket loads of money to bring over all his bougie friends to get drunk and have lots of sex. Something Peter would rather not be a part of. “Obviously,” Tony scoffed. Peter raised an eyebrow and tried to keep a straight face, but this was starting to become too much. This man was unreal. He was using Peter. What a dick. Before Peter could explain the truth, the elevator doors opened. The woman from the paparazzi was ushered away by security, but everyone outside the elevator in the lobby could see Tony holding Peter the way he was. The way people in a relationship would hold each other. Oh, God. Peter felt sick. He wanted to run, but Tony closed the elevator doors and asked his AI to take them up to his office. Peter could only stare at his boss with a mixture of fear and anger, feeling the press of his hand still on his back. The ride up is silent. Peter could tell Tony was prepping some kind of grand speech for when they would get up to the office. However, Peter was certain he could kiss his internship goodbye. … When the friendly voice of Tony’s AI announced the arrival at his private office, Peter was frozen, staring at the arm of his boss, which was still wrapped around his middle. Neither of them made any attempts to move and Peter desperately wished he was somewhere else. The uneasy feeling was getting harder and harder to ignore until finally Tony removed his hand from Peter’s back and stepped out of the elevator and into his office. “I’m sorry, Mr.- Peter.” Tony sighed, falling onto the chair behind his desk in theatrical fashion. He looked several years older when the fake smile that he had worn in the presence of the reporter vanished and Peter was plagued by an unwanted feeling of pity. Sure, his boss was a dick, but the discomfort on his face wasn’t pretended. “Could you do me a favor and take a seat?” Tony gestured at the empty chair opposite the desk and, reluctantly, Peter followed the order. This was the time he would lose his internship. He had worked for it since he was in high school and now that dream would crumble into a million pieces due to his inability to keep his mouth shut. The silence was painful. Peter looked at his knees and fumbled with his sleeves. Tony pinched the bridge of his nose. A million thoughts were running through Peter’s mind and he wished he could take his words back. Sure, scoffing at his boss was satisfying for a second, but it wasn’t worth losing the internship. When Tony still didn’t speak after several minutes, Peter got anxious and started to babble. “Look, Mr. Stark. I didn’t mean to insult your security system, but that’s no reason to take away my internship. I didn’t say anything to the reporters, I even played along, so just think about it before you fire me, please?” His voice died away the longer he was talking. “Mr.-?” “Parker, Sir.” His voice was dripping with venom as he called his boss ‘Sir’. “Mr. Parker, nobody said anything about losing the internship.” Fine, he would pack his stuff right away. He didn’t have many things at his desk, but he had to say goodbye to his coworkers at least- Wait, did he understand that right? He didn’t just get sacked? “I’m not fired?” He asked stupidly, staring at his boss with wide eyes. “No, Peter. You aren’t.” Peter didn’t comment on the familiar use of his first name, afraid to go too far so that Tony would change his mind. “But there is another thing I have to ask of you. Of course, there was a catch. Peter was talking to Tony Stark; one of the most selfish people on the entire planet. He would never let Peter get away so easily. “So, I basically told the world that you’re my ‘significant other’.” The painful expression on Tony’s face made Peter even angrier. “And I also said that you would come along to the ski event I’m hosting every year.” “Apparently,” Peter replied dryly, hoping he didn’t look too disgusted. Tony took a deep breath, his gaze fixated on Peter during his next words. “Peter, would you pretend to be my boyfriend during the event? I have to bring a date and we’ll be all over the news tomorrow anyways.” Peter blinked, staring at his boss and waiting for him to laugh. This had to be a joke, Tony would tell him any second now, that he was just kidding. That Peter was fired. But another look at the tired face of his boss confirmed that he was actually serious. “You want me to do what?” Tony’s expression turned painful again. “I want you to pretend to be my boyfriend during the ‘Valentine’s Ski Charity’ event. Pretty please?” Fuck. Peter started to panic. He didn’t want to play Tony Stark’s boyfriend, he didn’t want to pretend that he liked the selfish man, and he definitely didn’t want to go to the stupid event where everyone would spend the day drinking alcohol and having sex with strangers. Hell, he couldn’t even ski. The problem was, he didn’t want to lose his internship either, so the decision was made before he could think too long about the upcoming weekend. “I don’t have anything to wear.” Peter regretted his words immediately after they had left his mouth and he blushed furiously. Tony Stark, billionaire and playboy, was asking him, Peter Parker, for a favor and he could have asked for anything in return. He could have asked for a job after his internship or let his boss squirm with discomfort with hilarious demands. But instead, he had embarrassed himself, indirectly accepting the invitation while admitting that he didn’t have enough money to buy appropriate clothes. “Don’t worry, kid,” his boss said with a big smile which made Peter sick. “We’ll get you something tailored. That’s the least I could do, obviously.” “Obviously,” Peter mumbled, sarcasm dripping from his voice. He hoped he had spoken quiet enough that Tony couldn’t hear it. Of course, the billionaire would take him to his personal tailor. How would it look if Tony spent time with a cheaply dressed person? At least, Tony Stark owed him something. Peter planned to take advantage of this promise. “All right.” Peter sighed, determined to get it over with. “Just tell me when and where you need me.” Tony grinned broadly as if Peter had just saved his day. Well, he probably had. The man tapped his tablet a few times. “I’ll pick you up tonight, 15th street, to take you to the tailor. Just bring yourself, I’ll bring the money.” He chuckled slightly, but the sound died down as he saw the petrified expression on Peter’s face. “Do I even need to ask how you got my address?” “Honey, you work for me. I didn’t even have to hack your phone.” A cold shiver ran down Peter’s spine and he quickly stood up to make his way out. “Don’t call me honey.” The words sounded angrier than he wanted them to. “Okay, okay.” Tony raised his hands to appease him. “Thanks again. I’ll pick you up at six o’clock.” “Goodbye, Mr. Stark.” Peter relaxed when the doors of the elevator finally closed behind him. Why did things like this always happen to him? Now he had to spend a horrible week in the middle of nowhere in Austria in the company of a man he despised. He couldn’t even get home alone if things would get too bad because there was no way he could afford a flight from Austria to the States. MJ would kill him when he would tell her how he handled the situation. The only thing he was looking forward to was the opportunity to learn how to ski. … The elevator doors opened when Peter arrived on the ground floor, and one look at the crowded entry hall was enough for him to feel sick. Everyone was staring at him, the receptionist behind her desk, three men in expensive-looking suits at the end of the hall, even the cleaning staff stopped their work. Not even an hour had passed and the whole company knew of his ‘relationship’ with his boss. He felt like an animal in the zoo, caged in the small elevator and Peter wanted to take a lift back up, if it wouldn’t mean spending time with Tony Stark again. And he could definitely do without that. So, he gritted his teeth, took a deep breath, and practically ran to the exit door. He tried not to listen, but he failed. “Isn’t he the one Tony Stark called his boyfriend? Why is a billionaire interested in someone so normal? Do you think he used sex to get his internship?” Peter heard his own blood rushing in his ears, and he swallowed, calming himself down because he didn’t want to cause a scene. They could say anything, that he is a sugar babe and just wants the billionaire’s money, but he couldn’t stand someone accusing him of getting his internship only because he had slept with the boss. Peter had worked hard for it every day. When he finally left the building, he was trembling, and his breath had quickened. Anger and fear raged inside of him, threatening to take him under and he fumbled for his phone in his backpack. It was all Tony’s fault. Of course, the billionaire would declare him his ‘significant other’ without thinking about the consequences for Peter. And now he even had to go shopping with him like a child that was allowed to buy new stuff with his Dad. The thought made his stomach churn. Tony Stark was a heartless and selfish person, but now it was too late to stay away from him. Peter was relieved when he eventually found his phone. He dialed the number of his best friend immediately. “Peter?” MJ’s voice sounded confused. “Shouldn’t you be at work?” Peter swallowed and pinched the back of his nose. How could he explain the situation? It was already a disaster. “I’m on my way home early. I have a problem.” “So bad, that you couldn’t even wait until you get home?” Now he could definitely hear concern in her voice. “Yes.” “Aight, shoot.” Peter pondered how to phrase it while he was waiting for the subway. He didn’t want all the people around him to know what’s going on. “So, you know my boss?” MJ sighed, and he could practically see her raising her eyebrows in his mind. “Pete, you know I do. You can’t spend a week without complaining about him. What’s it today?” “Hey!” She was right, MJ always was, but he had every damn right to dislike Tony Stark. The man was a plague, a curse, and the world would be better off without the playboy. Today, he had learned to hate the arrogant prick even more. When the subway arrived and Peter got in, he decided to tell it short. He didn’t have much time today because Tony-I’m-the-center-of-the-world-Stark would pick him up later. Brilliant. “You’ll read all over the news tomorrow that I am his new boyfriend.” There were a few seconds of silence before MJ started to choke and furiously coughed into the phone. “Jesus, Pete. A little warning would be nice. How did you manage to get yourself in such a situation?” “It wasn’t my fault,” Peter said defensively. “There were paparazzi following him. He wanted to escape and called me babe, asking me to keep the elevator doors open.” “He did what?” Peter wasn’t sure if MJ believed him. “I don’t know why he did it, MJ. And then there was this woman, and she started to ask questions, and then he wrapped his arms around me, and said I am his boyfriend and that I would come with him to this stupid ski event and-“ “Okay, Pete. Stop.” MJ interrupted his rambling. “Take a deep breath and tell me about it from the beginning. Peter obeyed and tried to calm himself down. He had been on edge for the last hour and becoming hysterical wouldn’t help him now. “Have you ever heard of the ‘Valentine’s Ski Charity’ event?” MJ chuckled. “Sure, Pete. You told me about it several times while you ranted about your boss.” Peter blushed, he didn’t notice before how much he was complaining about Tony, but he still thought it was justified. “When he told the press that I am his boyfriend, the reporter asked him whether I would come to this stupid event, and he said yes. Then he begged me to come along, play his boyfriend and promised me we can break-up afterward.” MJ roared with laughter and if his boss wouldn’t be such an asshole, he might have smiled himself. However, things were how they were, and Peter wished he could disappear for a week for the millionth time. MJ was still giggling, but she regained the better part of her control. “Peter, you can just say no. I don’t think he would fire you for that. Just tell him it’s your aunt’s birthday or something like that.” Peter paused. He hadn’t thought about that before. The fear of losing his internship had apparently switched off his brain and now he could hit himself for that. “It might be too late,” Peter confessed sheepishly while he got off the subway at his stop. “I didn’t react that well.” The silence that followed was uncomfortable. “What did you say, Peter?” He considered hanging up for a moment just to avoid her reaction, but it was better to get it over with while they were just calling. MJ would let him know her opinion anyway and it was easier when he didn’t have to look at her. “I might have told him that I have nothing to wear and now he is taking me to his personal tailor later.” Peter heard a loud thud, probably MJ banging her head on the table and it was followed by a long groan. “Peter.” “I know.” He started to panic, he didn’t want to fly to Austria, he didn’t want to spend a weekend in an overly expensive hotel and he definitely didn’t want to keep the mighty Tony Stark company. “MJ, I don’t want to go.” It was silent for a second and whatever he had expected, it wasn’t this. “You think you’ll lose your internship if you cancel?” “Yes.” “Do you want to lose your internship?” “No, of course not.” “Then stop whining like a child and enjoy the money your boss will be spending on you. Peter, you already said yes. Get over your stupid disgust and keep your promises.” Peter sulked for a second. He knew she was right and he needed to hear that, but it was so difficult to swallow the feelings. Just once, the billionaire should be let down. He should see what it feels like if you couldn’t buy something with money, that the world wasn’t centered around him. But Peter had already agreed, so there was no other option. “Fine, I’ll go. But for the record, I’m going to bug you with all my complaints in the next few days.” MJ snorted loudly. “As if that would make a difference; you already do it anyway.” Hey, that wasn’t fair. “Jerk.” “Coward.” He had to smile a little. At least he knew she would kick his ass if he would fuck something up. He adored his best friend, even when she was bossy sometimes. “Love you.” “Love you, too, Pete. Enjoy the weekend with your Sugar Daddy.” He hung up without saying goodbye. … Peter paced through his room. It’s a few minutes before six and all his mind could focus on was the fact that he was going to go to Austria. With Tony Stark. This weekend. Shit. He looked up the area and as gorgeous as it is, the whole situation was incredibly daunting. The nearest airport is Innsbruck. He figured that’d be important to know, should he need to get away. He got so caught up in his research, that he forgot the time. He can’t help it that Innsbruck is one of the hardest airports to land on because of the steep descent between all the mountains and the heavy updrafts? There are only a couple pilots who can actually fly via Innsbruck because the landing is deemed incredibly difficult and dangerous. That’s nuts! Ah, dang it, he was doing it again. But then, he’d rather think about the awesome videos of aircrafts landing and taking off at Innsbruck Airport than what he was about to do. Go shopping. With Tony Stark. Shit. Peter wanted to wear something at least slightly presentable, but with his measly college student budget, he didn’t have anything that could impress the CEO of his internship company. Who was Peter even kidding? Why would he want to impress Mr. Stark? The man barely glanced at him when they first met all those months ago. Peter looked up to him so much and when they first met, Tony straight up ignored him. He’s an asshole. Right? Popping the news to May was a whole other thing. Peter decided to only give his aunt half-truths, opting to keep the “fake dating” side of the story a secret. She was ecstatic, though. Her nephew was going to Austria for Tony Stark’s charity event! Ugh. She immediately rushed to the set of drawers in the living room to dust off his passport that he barely used and started gathering her inflatable cushion and other items that would make the flight more comfortable. While he appreciated May and everything she did for him, part of Peter wanted for none of this to be necessary. Why did he agree to this again? ... A strange combined rush of excitement and embarrassment washed over Peter when Tony rocked up to the poor student’s apartment building in his gigantic, polished Audi. Mr. Stark roared the engines a few times and Peter wasn’t sure if it was to get his attention or everybody else’s. Peter pretended he didn’t see his neighbors, who were walking their dog, watch him climb into the passenger’s seat of the insanely expensive sports car. He was quietly grateful that the windows were blinded. “Hey, kid,” Tony quipped. “Hey.” It stayed quiet, save for the car rumbling like a hunting lioness. Peter’s mind raced. He was in a car. With Tony Stark. Shit. Everything about this seemed so unreal, like a dream of which he couldn’t decide whether it was good or bad. The smell of the leather interior of the car tickled the insides of his nose and his fingers fiddled with the fabric of his jeans. Why weren’t they moving yet? Why wasn’t Tony driving? What is Mr. Stark waiting for? Oh, God. When Peter finally dared to turn his head to look at his boss, the man was staring back at him over his blue-tinted glasses with his eyebrows raised. “W-what?” Peter managed to stutter. Tony nodded at Peter’s chest and briefly mentioned what it was lacking. “Seatbelt.” ... “So,” Tony said after clearing his throat. The car ride had been silent and relatively awkward up until now. “I read up on you in your files, but you, Peter Parker, are very hard to read in person.” Peter pressed his lips on top of each other, forcing himself to keep looking out the window instead of at Mr. Stark. It’s not like Peter had a solid reply to that remark anyways. “If we’re going to do this, we’re gonna at least have to talk to each other.” “I know,” Peter sighed. He used the palm of his hand to rub his forehead while squeezing his eyes shut. “It’s just a lot all at once, okay?” Peter turned his head to look at Tony, only to find he wasn’t even holding the wheel of the car. It was driving itself. Peter stared at it wide-eyed. Tony cocked his head and showed a toothy grin with only one corner of his mouth curled up. “I like to tinker more than anything.” Great, Peter just voiced how insecure he is about all of this and Tony once again managed to turn the conversation to himself. “Modern Da Vinci,” Peter quoted the news sites, hoping that stroking his boss’s ego would help the situation. “Whoever said that is a liar,” Tony dismissed, tracing the leather of the wheel with his index fingers. Peter couldn’t help but stare at the rough hands and the way they caressed their property. Peter’s mouth went dry. He wanted – no, needed – to remind himself why his teenage crush on the man had crumbled. However, Peter couldn’t help how unfairly hot his boss was, even when he was nearing his fifties. Tony looked back up at Peter with raised eyebrows. “I don’t paint.” “Maybe you should.” Peter could hit himself. What was that kind of an answer? “I mean I could always just throw some grease on a canvas and call it art. Shit sells as long as you’re already rich and call it art.” “A lucrative business.” “Eh.” Tony shrugged. “I’m already surrounded by enough pretentious snobs. My art collection’s completely managed by my secretary.” Peter barely managed to hold in a snort. Pretentious snobs. Had the man never looked in a mirror? Or listened to himself talk? Tony pushed a hand through his hair and shifted in his seat so he could face Peter more easily. “Look, kid, I’m sorry for dragging you into this.” “To be honest, Mr. Stark, I’m not sure if you are.” The words left Peter’s mouth before he could think them through and he quietly sucked in a breath. “What are you implying?” Tony’s tone is slightly threatening and Peter bit his lip with frustration when his body betrayed him, as the blood started rushing to his member. Why was Tony’s authoritative voice so hot? It wasn’t fair. “You called me ‘babe’ in front of all the paparazzi.” “Honest mistake.” “Honest mist-“ Peter pressed his lips on top of each other to keep himself from finishing his sarcastic parroting. “Right.” “I’m not gonna lie, I wouldn’t have called you that if you weren’t as pretty as you are- God!” Tony dropped himself back against his seat and groaned. “I’m bad at this, okay? I figured I’d have a date- someone actually willing- for this stupid event, but I don’t.” Stark straightened his shoulders and glanced at Peter. “And it’s selfish of me to think that I can just ask anybody and that they’ll drop whatever they’re doing to help me. So, if you don’t want this, just tell me ‘kay? I’m big on consent. I’ll just pay some other guy to do this. You’re obviously uncomfortable.” “Stupid event?” “Is that literally all you got from that?” Tony scoffed. Peter squinted slightly but swallowed his snarky reply. Tony sighed. “This Valentine’s event was set up when I was still with Pepper and it’s been an annual thing for over twelve years now. The charity celebrates love.” Tony spoke animatedly, the movement of his hands emphasizing his words. “The event has one rule that I stupidly decided to implement when I was a cocky engaged prick.” He paused, blinking twice. “No donating when you’re single.” “Why not change the rule?” “Cause that’s even more selfish than implementing it in front of all of your single friends when drunk and enforcing it all the years you do have a relationship with a woman you don’t even love.” Tony pressed his lips into a tight, ingenuine smile and faced the road again. It faltered and the tired CEO Peter had seen earlier today is back. “This is one of the events I spend a lot of dollars on because I know how difficult love is. But with that said, I don’t want you or anybody to feel forced into this. Just say the word, kid, I’ll drop you off back at your apartment and I’ll be out of your hair.” It was quiet for a second before Peter’s shoulders relaxed and he eased back into the chair. Tony didn’t necessarily want Peter as a tool to show off. Tony wanted Peter so he could donate to his own charity event. Kind of weird, but not... Bad. It was weird how Peter kept creating images of who his boss is in his head that always ended up being contradictory to the truth. When he was younger his mind deemed Tony a hero. His teen self revered the man as a sex symbol. The first week of his internship was a dream come true and after the “Hi there, Mr. Stark, I wanted to thank you for-” “Don’t have time for you, bye.” incident it all turned sour. His adoration turned to distaste. The man was a selfish asshole to Peter for so long. And now... Now he was telling Peter all of this? That he’s... Good? In a way? It was all so confusing. But at least it made Peter hate the situation less. He knew this year’s charity was for LGBTQ+ youth, so Tony wanting to donate to the cause this badly must mean something. And it also meant a lot to Peter. He could definitely suck up and bask in a week of luxury and wealth and take the rich pricks for what they are if it means Tony pays the charity a good chunk of his cash stack. “So, how long ‘til we reach the tailor?” Peter said, looking straight ahead and trying to hide a smile. Tony didn’t even bother to conceal his happiness at Peter’s remark and sat back to enjoy the ride as well. “Couple of minutes.” … Even though Peter was cautious because he didn’t want to be let down again, he felt himself loosening up to Tony a little more as the evening went on. He couldn’t help it; the billionaire was charming and funny and smart... Peter rarely met anyone who was this easy to talk to. Mr. Stark seemed pleasantly surprised when Peter genuinely laughed at his niche joke about hydraulic engines and Peter even quipped one about thermal physics himself when discussing the clothes they’d be wearing on the pistes. Tony’s laugh was on loop in his brain for the next five minutes the tailor spent measuring each inch of Peter’s body. He made Tony Stark laugh. Something inside Peter stirred when the man behind the till told Tony what the tailored suit was going to cost. The stirring turned into something more when Stark handed the man his black credit card and waved it off. Three months of rent in Manhattan. For a suit. The next store Tony drove them to sold all kinds of winter gear. Peter said he’d be okay with just one outfit, but Tony wouldn’t hear it. Peter had to wear something different every day of the week. There was something about Tony staring at Peter’s body in the skin-tight thermal wear that made Peter turn his lower body away from the billionaire. Because the ‘more’ had turned to ‘even more’ at this point. And Peter didn’t want Tony to see what the tight clothes couldn’t hide. The clothes were starting to layer and pile. Store after store was visited and Peter was only allowed to fit the most expensive pieces of clothing. Cashmere turtlenecks and silk jackets, leather and suede shoes, even soft cotton underwear. Everything Peter would wear and carry had Tony’s money all over it. Peter ended up with multiple outfits for every day of the trip. He was never one for shopping, but Tony’s eyes staring at him, judging him, and his soft lips telling him to make a turn, and complimenting him, had Peter dizzy by the time they left the last store. He could barely contain a thrust of his hips and hold back a moan when Tony placed a hand on his shoulder at the last store as he handed the black credit card to the salesman who just scored the jackpot for his provisional sales percentage. “All for him,” Tony had said. Peter’s tailored suits would be express shipped to their hotel in Gerlos, as would all the ski gear. Once again, all Peter had to bring was himself. It was strange. Peter had to remind himself that Tony was doing all of this for a reason. If Peter feels confident and looks good, he’ll be a better and more convincing boyfriend. He was silently being bribed, Peter was sure of it. No matter how kind Tony may seem, he’s still the ass Peter met that one day. Certainly.

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loveforpreserumsteve · 5 years ago

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Begin Again (Mortician!Steve and Baker!Bucky Modern “Moving On” AU)

Ten:

Growing up in a funeral home had some downsides. One of which being no one wanted to hang out in a house where deceased individuals were stored in the basement before being disposed of. Apparently, it was creepy. Something that Steve never quite understood. Perhaps if he hadn't grown up in a funeral home, he'd find it creepy too. But who really knew. And although Steve had had only one friend and had been just fine, he still hated seeing Eddie go through the same loneliness that he had.

After all, Steve had assumed that with the rise of people interested in true crimes and other morbid curiosities, they'd find it endearing.

Another thing that Steve hated? Not being able to sleep in. It had been one of Steve's biggest pet peeves growing up. So, when Eddie trudged down the family staircase to the kitchen in his pajamas only to grunt at Steve, he understood. Understood and he simply poured Eddie a steaming mug of coffee.

"Dad rope ya into working?" Steve questioned, taking a drink of his own coffee.

"Eh," Eddie noncommittally answered. His face scrunching up in disgust at the black coffee. Crossing the kitchen, he made sure to scratch Vinnie between his ears. Grabbing the Oreo coffee creamer from the fridge, he shuffled back over to his mug on the counter. Steve couldn't help but snicker a little.

Rolling his eyes, Eddie deadpanned, "Eat me."

"Ooh, you kiss your mama with that mouth?" Sam, the funeral home caterer, mocked as he entered the kitchen from the family entrance with a stack of casserole dishes.

"Nah," Eddie took a drink and playfully corrected, "I kiss your mother with it."

Setting the dishes on the counter, Sam started unpacking the oven-ready prepared food. Amused, but feigning offense, "You better not be disrespecting Darlene Wilson like that."

"I don't hear her complaining." Always more arrogant when he was tired, Eddie simply shrugged a shoulder and suggested, "Better get used to calling me, 'Stepdad.'"

Pleasantly surprised by that, Sam turned to look over at Eddie. Appraising the teen as he nodded. Then, he looked at Steve and accused, "He gets this from you."

"Please," Steve scoffed. Hiding his smirk behind his floral mug, Steve argued, "He gets it from Nat."

Just staring at Steve for a moment as he thought of a rebuttal, Sam pursed his lips, finally conceded, "Fair."

Weakly raising his mug in victory, Eddie shuffled back over to the family staircase to head back upstairs. Not that anyone could blame him. With it barely being eight in the morning, Steve knew it wasn't an ideal time to wake up on a Saturday. Sam simply turned towards the wall oven, that had already preheated -- thanks to Steve. One of the upsides to morning services was Sam's French Toast Bake.

Just smelling a hint of the cinnamon sugar caused Steve's mouth to water. Exaggerating the whiff, Steve teased, "If you and Nat weren't perfect for each other, I'd propose right here and now."

"Well, you know what they say," Sam placed the glass dish into the oven, "Best way to a man's heart is through his stomach."

"That's funny, I thought the best way was on his dick."

Choking on his coffee, Steve looked over at the funeral cosmetologist, Wanda. Crossing her arms along her chest, she quirked a brow and smirked at Steve. Clearly amused by how coffee nearly shot out of Steve's nose at the surprise of her comment. Although Wanda had worked at the funeral home for years, she always found it funny how Steve reacted to crudeness. Which was probably why she kept making them.

Setting down his mug, Steve grabbed a napkin and started wiping his face and blowing his nose. Still coughing all the while, Steve cleared his throat and complimented Wanda, "You look nice."

"It's the same black dress I always wear," Wanda waved off, further entering the kitchen to pour herself some coffee. Giving Steve a side glance, she smirked, flattering Steve, "You look nice, as well."

"Thank you," Steve blushed, running his hand over his beard to smooth down the hair while also running his hand over his classic, plain navy-blue sweater. Dusting imaginary lint from his gray slacks, Steve asked, "When did you get here anyway?"

"An hour ago," Wanda answered, using the Oreo creamer as she questioned, "What about you?"

"Half hour ago," Steve took a careful drink of his coffee. Gesturing over to Vinnie, Steve teased, "Someone didn't want to wake up."

"I know exactly how that is," Sam confirmed, making sure that the five casseroles for the reception were ready to go.

Playfully, Steve rolled his eyes and said, "They're kids. Let them sleep."

"I know that," Sam answered with his own eye roll. The grin that accompanied it showed that he was still in a good mood as he thought aloud, "Which reminds me. I need to ask Eddie if he can babysit next Saturday."

Brows furrowing, Steve crossed his arms. Thinking about Sam's three sons from a previous relationship and how much the seven year old and five year old twins loved him, even referring to him as Uncle Steve. So, he offered, "Why don't I do it? The boys love me."

Pressing his lips together, Sam purposely didn't look at Steve. Sheepishly, Sam explained, "Nat and I were kind of hoping that you would be… getting out there…"

"Sam," Steve sighed, clenching his jaw in hopes of controlling his annoyance. Even though he was pretty sure that Wanda and Sam could hear the annoyance sprinkled in disappointment with simply saying his friend's name.

Taking on a more teasing tone, Sam asked, "Aren't you tired of three-wheeling?"

"Leave him alone," Eddie announced, entering the kitchen once more. Now dressed in a pair of khakis and a black sweater. His auburn hair still messy though as he reassured Sam, "He's happy."

Quirking a brow at Steve, Sam gave Steve's appearance an assessing glance. He must have seen something though because he didn't debate the subject anymore. Instead, taking out the French Toast Bake and placing it on the counter to cool.

Changing the subject, Sam asked, "When's the service?"

"Ten," Eddie, Wanda, and Steve all answered.

Amused, Sam blinked at the three of them and teased, "You definitely all need to get lives."

"I have a life, thank you," Wanda defended herself. Turning on her heel, she carried her mug into the business side of the house. Effectively ending the conversation. Steve really needed to take notes on that.

"So," Sam started, directing his attention to the teen. "Ya busy next weekend?"

"Date night?" Eddie assumed. Sam nodded and Eddie worried his lower lip with his teeth before disclosing, "I was actually invited to a movie night."

"My man!" Sam exclaimed, holding his hand up for a high five. Giving Steve a pointed look, in a, See?!, way.

Steve rolled his eyes. Then, it occurred to Steve, "So, looks like you're still in need of a babysitter."

"Looks like it," Sam agreed, weakly sighing in exasperation. All the while, Steve beamed. Especially once Sam started cutting the cooling breakfast treat. Plating a large slice for Steve, Sam playfully advised, "Don't let it go to your head, Rogers. I'm mostly agreeing because I know that I can pay you with food."

Happily taking a bite of the French Toast Bake, Steve closed his eyes and groaned. Around another bite of the delicious breakfast, Steve teased, "Let's go to Vegas. Get married. Right here and now."

"You only use me for my kitchen expertise," Sam winked. Tapping his finger against his chin, Sam suggested, "We need to find you a man who can cook."

"Or who can bake," Eddie muttered into his coffee.

A shit-eating grin broke across Sam's face as he asked, "A baker? Anyone in particular?"

"What? There's a secret society I don't know about where all bakers know each other?" Steve good-humoredly mocked.

"Bowling league, actually. We meet on Tuesdays," Sam gave as good as he got. Playfully rolling his eyes before redirecting his attention to Eddie, "So, who is it?"

"The guy from What's the Batter With You," Eddie slyly disclosed like some biddy over tea.

"You went to What's the Batter With You? Without me?!" Sam questioned, turning back to Steve. Placing his hands on his hips, Steve was reminded of being a child under Sarah's disappointment. All Sam needed to do was start tapping his foot while he waited for Steve's answer.

Gesturing towards Eddie, Steve defended, "We were celebrating Ed getting a D on his anatomy test!"

"You got a D?!" Sarah questioned, standing on the last step with her hands on her hips.

"Steve needs the D," Eddie muttered, narrowing his eyes at his brother. Still scowling, Eddie said louder, "It was a really difficult test."

"You have a tutor," Sarah exclaimed, wide-eyed. Heading for the coffee machine, Sarah asked, "Were you even going to tell us? Or were you just going to try and forge a better grade like Cliff used to?"

"Hey! I'm not like Cliff!" Eddie exclaimed, crossing his arms along his chest. Steve couldn't help but nod, agreeing that Eddie wasn't nearly as bad as their older brother. Until Eddie argued, "I'm worse. I take after Steve."

"Hey!" Steve scoffed, playfully glaring at his kid brother.

"I mean, you should see the way he gets all dopey around attractive guys," Eddie kept talking as though Steve hadn't protested at all.

"Trust me, I know," Sam good-naturedly rolled his eyes. Chuckling, Sam clarified, "First time that we met he was so flustered that he just stared at me, slack-jawed."

"I did not," Steve waved off Sam's comment, even though he was blushing. Especially when Sam reenacted the expression with jaw dropped unattractively open and wide-eyed.

"You should've seen him with the baker," Eddie chuckled, doubling over in his laughter. One hand clutching his stomach while the other held onto the counter top.

"Shut up," Steve complained while Sarah gushed, "You met someone?!"

Rolling his eyes, Steve grabbed his mug of coffee and left the kitchen. Following the hallway and pushing the door open to enter the business side of the house. Passing the dining room that had tables set up for the reception after the funeral. Passing the casket display room to find nothing out of place, Steve peeked into the parlor room that was set up for the service. He found Wanda there, putting some finishing touches on the woman. A Mrs., Steve looked to the side where an old photograph and floral wreath stood, proclaiming, Margaret "Peggy" Carter.

Just another Saturday.

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howling-harpy · 5 years ago

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No question about it

Pairing: Winters/Nixon Rating: G Word count: 3454 Summary: Loose lips sink ships prompt fill: “Dick and Lew have been a couple since the end of the war, pretty much married but keeping it quiet. When Ambrose interviews them in the '90s, he 100% fails to notice. ” Disclaimer: This is a piece of fiction based on the HBO drama series and the actors’ portrayals in it. This has nothing to do with any real person represented in the series, and means no disrespect. In this universe there is also a historian who interviews the men of Easy. He shall be called Steven.

Steven was excited for this project. His previous book on paratrooper infantry had been a success as well as a lot of work, and after all that he had thought he was done with the subject. Only he had been wrong, since after accidentally running into a reunion his interest had been completely captured again, and here he was.

He already had a good chunk of the Easy Company men’s anecdotes and stories, and based on those alone Steven knew he definitely wanted to work them into a proper historical publication, and it would feel all the more powerful with personal testimonies. He just couldn’t quite believe that he was here, about to talk to those two men everyone had mentioned in pretty much every story with nothing short of absolute admiration and dedication. Mr. Winters wasn’t an easy man to get to know. Sure, he was polite and pleasant, but as someone trying to dig deeper Steven had quickly noticed that the man wouldn’t spill the beans to just anyone. They had so far talked only on the phone, but even like that Steven had gotten the feeling of being put in his place by a gentle yet strict grandfather whenever he tried to pry into things that apparently weren’t his business yet. But as time went on, Steven had slowly won the man’s trust and assured him he intended to do right by the men – that was the part Winters had been really concerned about: his men. And now finally, Steven had managed to culminate enough trust to be invited here, into the man’s own home. The farmhouse was a thing Winters had been working on for many years as a side project and finally near retirement sold his house in the city and moved there permanently. Steven had driven two hours from the airport to get there, and by the time he turned his small rental car to the driveway the upcoming meeting had turned from distant to palpable. It was a forest green two-story house with a large porch, surrounded by apple trees and garden roses, then vegetable patches and rows of corn, a small potato field and sunflowers. Years of hard work was evident, and the operation looked like it had spread with time and become more and more ambitious. Steven parked his car, gathered his research files, notebooks and tape recorder, walked up to the porch with it all and rang the doorbell. A dog barked somewhere in the house. Steven could hear its paws on hardwood floors as the animal was the first one to get to the door, but only a moment later he heard a familiar voice ordering: “Tom! Basket!”, and then the door opened. Winters had hunched down in his old age a bit but he was still tall, his hair was the colour of faded copper, the remains of once no doubt flaming red, and his pale blue eyes were clear and sharp behind his glasses. He was already smiling when he opened the door knowing who to expect, and he gave Steven an evaluating once-over. “Hello, Steven. Nice to meet you in person, please come in,” he said and stepped aside. Steven smiled, excited and nervous, but in a good way. “Good day, Mr. Winters, thank you. It’s an honor to finally meet you.” “Please, drop the formalities, this is my home and I’ll have none of that here,” Winters said, waving a hand. “Did you find your way here alright?” Steven shook off his jacket and put it in a hanger. “Yes, thanks to your instructions. It was a drive, but the way was easy. You have a beautiful house.” “Thank you. It’s been under a lot of work for a long time. Please, come to the kitchen, we’ll have coffee and something to eat.” Steven followed. The house was warm and cosy inside, carpets on the floor and curtains in the windows, and as he followed Winters down the hallway, he got a glance into a living-room with several overflowing bookcases, a plush couch with embroidered pillows, and a fireplace with two armchairs in front of it. When they passed the staircase to the second floor, Steven had a fright when Winters suddenly slammed his hand against the railing and called upstairs: “Lewis! Don’t be rude, we have a quest!” Steven had been too busy being impressed with Winters and had completely forgotten that Nixon lived with him. He didn’t beat himself up too much about it since he had only spoken with Winters who had also invited him, and Nixon hadn’t spoken to him or agreed to be interviewed. They continued down the hall to the kitchen, a huge space that had the dining room joined to it. There’s already coffee brewing and the small kitchen table had been set for three. “Please take a seat and do whatever you do with those things,” Winters told him while gesturing at his tape recorder and continued to the fridge, where he took various plates out on the counter. Steve spread out his notebook and set up the recorder in the middle of coffee cups and dessert plates. On the other side of the table was apparently Winters’ place with a stack of photo albums and folders of other mementos next to his cup and plate, and Steven felt a tremor of excitement go through him. “Can I help you with any of that?” Steven asked, tearing his eyes from the stockpile of material. Winters had piled up plates and trays from the fridge on the counter and was holding a plate of sandwiches and another of cookies, and now threw Steven an appreciative look, probably actually meant for his mother for installing manners to him. “Sure, if you want to. I’ll get the coffee. Also, there’s a pie in the oven.” Steven got up and carried plate after plate to the table. “This looks amazing, Major, but this is also way too much,” he said and actually meant it. There were cookies, cinnamon buns, little sandwiches, cupcakes, and apparently an apple pie still in the oven too. “Nonsense,” Winters said, “and I meant it about the formalities. Just Dick is fine, especially since you plan to pry into my life.” “Oh, no, it’s just research, and anything you don’t want to disclose you can just say and I’ll –” Steven stopped abruptly when he looked at Winters, saw his smile and twinkling eyes and realized he was joking. Steven laughed nervously. “Yes, well. Casual, then.” The coffee was ready, and Winters picked up the pot, brought it to the table and poured it into three cups. “Casual is the best way to go. I know this must seem like a big thing to you, but to me it’s just how things were. It was a job, and it was over forty years ago. It calls for little fanfare,” he said. Steven sat down and picked up his pen. He had to scribble that down to remember it later, since he knew fully well he himself couldn’t treat any of this as just a job or a casual thing no matter how much it was so to Winters. Steven also glanced at the third coffee cup for the other man living there, who had yet to show himself, but decided not to ask. “So. What do you want to start with?” Winters asked, mixing milk and sugar into his coffee. “Um… Anything you’d like. I’m planning on writing about everything from beginning to end without focusing on any single event or operation. I’d like the full picture. A personal testimony,” he said. “Beginning, then,” Winters said, “that was in 1942.” Steven turned the tape-recorder on, and they started about paratrooper training. Winters talked generally about physical training and equipment, occasionally side-tracking to talk about his fellow soldiers, friends and acquaintances he had made, and Steven interjected only with specifying questions. The thing that actually interrupted them was when the egg timer went off. “That would be the pie,” Winters said and got up. The smell of simmering apples, cinnamon and sugar spread into the kitchen as soon as he opened the oven. Winters brought the pie to the table, setting it down in the middle and tossing the oven mittens to the side. He supported himself on the edge of the table and lowered himself back to his seat. “Now, where were we?” he asked. “Uh… You were telling me about utilizing airborne infantry in Operation Overlord,” Steven answered. Even despite his excitement he had gotten distracted by the pie. “Ah, yes. We were all qualified paratroopers at this point of course, we knew our function, but an actual campaign has so much more attributes to it and there’s no training for those. We didn’t know when or where we were going, or what our mission after landing would be, so – “ he paused suddenly, eyes turned to the door and a new kind of smile spread on his face, lines around his eyes drawing deep. “Look who decided to finally come down.” Steven turned around just in time to see another elderly man entering the kitchen. “Yeah, don’t think too much about it. I’m here for the pie,” Lewis Nixon grunted, brown eyes narrowed at Winters as he came in. He had thinning silvery hair he had combed neatly back, heavy grey brows and white stubble covering his cheeks. He had a reserved look on his face, but he still nodded to Steven in acknowledgment before sitting down next to Winters. “You should have come sooner. Your coffee must be cold at this point,” Winters said. “Oh well, I’ll drink it anyway,” Nixon replied nonchalantly, already reaching for the steaming pie. “You know what the old maids say, cold coffee makes one more beautiful.” Winters’ smile stretched into a grin as he watched his friend piling his plate with pie, then with cookies and cinnamon buns and a singular cupcake, “like you ever needed any help with that.” Nixon took a sip from his coffee cup and glanced at his side, clearly pacified. Wrinkles on his forehead and between his brows smoothed, and when he spoke to Steven he sounded considerably less bristled. “So, you’re here about the war? Has he ranted about our first CO to you yet? Because if you ask about him, you’ll get enough material for all your little tapes,” Nixon quipped to Steven while he mixed sugar into his black, lukewarm coffee. “We talked about him some,” Steven said. Winters had let his feelings be known but hadn’t ranted per se, probably still holding back on that front, as it suddenly occurred to Steven. “Would you like to make a contribution?” Nixon’s lined face was soft and his cheeks slightly droopy, but his brown eyes were suddenly sharp while he simply kept stirring his coffee. “No. Like I said, I’m here for the pie, and I’m not going to answer any questions. So you can turn that recorder off for as long as I’m here.” “Certainly,” Steven said easily and did as he was asked to. Recording was a privilege that he hadn’t always enjoyed anyway, and he had a feeling that if he wanted anything out of Nixon it would be on the man’s own terms anyway. Winters sighed at his friend’s attitude and shook his head but didn’t comment. “We were just getting to D-Day,” he said. Nixon snorted. “Oh great, the worst day of our lives.” “It wasn’t the worst day, Nix.” “You’re right, it was only the worst day of our lives so far. It got steadily worse from there.” “That’s not true,” Winters said, leaning closer to his friend, close enough to bump their shoulders together. He sounded comforting, gentle and warm in a way true friends apparently did after spending most of their lives together. “The next day was a good one. I saw you again, for starters.” Nixon visibly softened at that, gave Winters a yielding look and ceased with his comments, taking a bite of a cinnamon bun instead. “This is good,” he said with his mouth full. Winters smiled, the corners of his eyes crinkling. “Anything for you.” Steven watched them from the other side of the table, pen and paper ready now that recording had been denied of him. What he could pick up on was that Winters and Nixon had been on separate planes during the Operation Overlord and been uncertain of each other’s fates for the entire night and most of the next day. He couldn’t even imagine what that would feel like, being sent on such a dangerous mission separately from your best friend and then not knowing if they were okay for so long. “You didn’t see each other at all while in Normandy?” he asked. Winters refocused on the subject again. “We did, but at that point the invasion was on the way and we were moving tanks to the beach.” He paused to think about something. “That was the only time during the war we were apart, right?” Nixon had his mouth full of pie and he quirked his brows as Winters spoke to him. He nodded heavily, swallowed and smiled slightly. “Someone had to keep eye on you.” Winters leaned back in his chair and gazed at Nixon proudly, a look that he favoured the most when he spoke of the men he had served with. “You did, didn’t you? You kept me sane,” he said warmly, then pointedly added: “Despite your best efforts on the contrary.” Nixon accepted both the praise and the needling with a self-satisfied smirk and a quirk of one heavy eyebrow. “You love me and you know it.” Winters scoffed and smacked Nixon on the arm with the back of his hand. “Just eat your treats and behave yourself, would you?” Steven sensed a natural opening and seized the opportunity with a question: “What was your role there, Mr. Nixon?” Nixon turned to him again and gained that same slightly grumpy seriousness he had entered the room with. “I was the S-3, the intelligence officer. I started as a platoon leader at Toccoa but was quickly transferred to the battalion HQ where I spent pretty much the rest of the war.” Steven took notes. He already knew about Nixon’s job since he had already been praised by several other members of Easy he had already talked to, but personal testimonies where why he was here in the first place. “So you oversaw most of the operations?” “I oversaw all the operations,” Nixon corrected grimly and took a hefty bite out of a frosted cupcake, which somehow didn’t make his displeasure any less stingy. “I observed, listened, scouted and planned. I was always aware of everything that was going on around us and kept everyone up to speed.” “Sounds like a lot of responsibility,” Steven said. Nixon shrugged. “Sure.” For a beat or two Steven waited for him to continue, but he was quickly realizing that Nixon wasn’t going to say a single thing more than necessary. Steven tried to not take it personally as Nixon wasn’t the only man who had refused to talk about the war, but it was starting to look like he really was there only for the various pastries. He glanced at Winters who was taking slow sips from his coffee with a glance to his friend every now and then. Steven tried to be tactful. “It sounds like there was a lot going on behind the scenes.” Apparently it was the wrong thing to say. Nixon’s jaw tightened and his upper lip twitched, baring a side of teeth for a moment before he averted his eyes. “I was in the line,” he said, almost snapping. “I might have been a drunk who never fired his weapon, but I was there with the rest of the troops. That’s the spot my work was done in, not in some nice, safe office miles from the action.” Steven took notes. He had to admit that being snapped at by a veteran of Easy Company and Major Winters’ best friend wasn’t the best feeling in the world, but he was starting to understand Nixon’s reasons for not talking about the war much. “May I quote you on that?” Steven asked. Nixon snorted. “No!” he grunted, then seemed to mull it over some and added: “But make sure you get it right. I was there the whole time. I was in the line.” “Of course,” Steven said. Winters reached over to lay his hand on Nixon’s back, whose tensed-up shoulders slumped under his touch. “It’s already there, Lew,” he soothed, hand rubbing his friend’s back. “You know that I think the world of you. You were always there for me, always by my side, reassuring and comforting me. Do you think I’d agree to talk to anyone about that time and let them leave you out?” Nixon let out a deep sigh. He turned his eyes towards the ceiling and just breathed for a while, then hunched forward and leaned on the table with his elbows, eventually turning his gaze to Winters who never stopped rubbing his back. For a long moment they sat like that, completely silent but clearly communicating with their eyes alone. Steven didn’t want to interrupt the moment. There was a deep intimacy between the men opposite from him, something deep and strong that they had built during their decades together, and even despite being an outsider Steven felt the warmth of the bond. “May I ask how long you two have lived together?” Steven asked. The moment came to an end. Winters let his hand drop and both men leaned on their own seats again. “Since… 1946, I think?” Nixon answered but glanced at Winters for confirmation. “Yes. We moved to New Jersey then,” Winters continued, “we lived there for less than a year though. Lew’s father discovered and disapproved of us, so we left, moved around a bit but finally settled down here in Pennsylvania.” Steven nodded as he scribbled down notes. “And you stayed together the whole time?” “Well…” Winters started, drawing the word out, “it wasn’t anything we decided or talked about. There just… Simply wasn’t any question about it. We both felt very strongly that we needed to be together, and that’s what we did.” “We’ve always been together since -46,” Nixon added, “that’s forty-five years.” Steven made a note of that. “It must be nice to be such good friends,” he said. Nixon and Winters exchanged a look. “Yep.” “Sure.” There was another natural pause, and once again Steven glanced at the pile of photo albums Winters had readied. He was absolutely dying to get a look at those, to put faces to names and make comparisons. Winters had also told him he had kept meticulous diaries, and things like that were an absolute goldmine to a historian. “Are those all the documents you have?” Steven asked, pointing at the stockpile with his pen. Winters shook his head. “Oh, no, those are simply the photos I have. There’s a whole pile from the regimental photographer as well as photos the men have sent me, personal and from reunions and such. My diaries are not here.” “May I take a look at those? That would be most helpful,” Steven asked. “Yes, certainly,” Winters assured. Next to him, Nixon had relaxed and shaken off the previous gloom. His brows quirked with new mischief and suddenly he grinned. “You have always been the archivist of us. With those glasses you’d make a fine librarian too, Mr. Winters.” Winters gave Nixon a clearly warning look over the rim of his glasses, but Nixon just smirked back at him. “Yeah, keep that up. See where we end up,” he teased, and Winters gave an exasperated huff and rolled his eyes. “You didn’t keep any mementos or souvenirs, Mr. Nixon?” Steven asked. Nixon shook his head. “Nah. I got rid of most of it a long time ago. I got rid of my uniform and everything pretty soon after I was discharged too.” He got a wicked look in his eyes again. “What I do have are my letters, from that time and after too. They take up several shoe boxes, but maybe I should bring those down and read some. He might not talk much but you’d be surprised by some of the stuff my darling soldier boy here can – “ “Nix!” Winters cried out, snatched the oven mitten from the table and swatted Nixon with it. Steven focused on his notebook to hide his smile. He could only hope to be such good friends with someone someday.

#winnix #band of brothers #loose lips sink ships #mun ficci

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crossbows-and-moonshine · 5 years ago

Text

Let The Flames Begin (Chapter 17)

(Chapter 1) (Chapter 2) (Chapter 3) (Chapter 4)

(Chapter 5) (Chapter 6) (Chapter 7) (Chapter 8)

(Chapter 9) (Chapter 10) (Chapter 11) (Chapter 12)

(Chapter 13) (Chapter 14) (Chapter 15) (Chapter 16)

What are you guys thinking of the flashbacks I keep putting in? Do you like them? I really like putting young Daryl in here and also times where the boys interacted with Charlene before all of this.

Are you guys liking this story so far? I’m loving writing it, to be honest.

Some flooof for you lovelies.

---------------------------------

“Wait in the car,” Daryl grumped, glaring at his brother. Merle just snorted holding his hands up in surrender. He had just finished a brief 3-month stint in jail and Daryl felt like he was a fucking caretaker. Having to make sure he behaved himself so he didn't go back. That and also, he really didn't want Merle to harass the girl in the store. He hated when Merle would go in there with him, watching as Merle flirted shamelessly with her, said all kind of crude fucking shit to her. It made him so ashamed of being a fucking Dixon.

“Don't worry little brother, I’mma stay right here,” he grinned, grabbing a little bag of coke out of his pocket. Daryl clenched his jaw, shaking his head as he hopped out of the truck and slammed the door. The few months his brother had been away were peaceful. He felt bad for feeling some sort of relief when his brother was in prison, but it was the only time he could just chill the fuck out and not be bailing his ass out every five minutes.

He walked into the store, his eyes glancing over to the counter and seeing the girl. Charlene, that's what he had learnt her name was just the week before. His friend Billy’s sister was apparently friends with her. She didn't look happy today though. Usually, she looked cheery even without smiling but today she looked troubled, worn down. There were dark rings around her eyes and she looked tired. He had found out a lot of shit from Billy's sister who loved to talk about anything and everything. He hadn’t even mentioned the girl but since she was friends with her, when he went to see Billy, he would end up hearing about her. He knew she was having a hard time since her preacher dad had become a drunk. She was working numerous jobs to keep the house and pay the bills by herself.

He felt nervous as he looked at things he didn't really need. He always did this. He only came here for her. Every time she smiled at him, said anything to him, it made him feel a little less worthless. He knew it was pathetic, that this was what his life had resorted to. Fucking going to the store for no reason so the sweet pretty girl would smile at him. He walked further through the aisles, grabbing some potato chips and some other snacks he didn't really care about. He couldn't see the counter from where he was but then he heard his brothers booming voice and he stilled completely.

He swallowed thickly as he walked around and saw Merle at the counter, approaching the pair warily.

“Ya heard this Daryl? Some fuckin’ loan sharks came in and took a bunch of their shit last night. Threatened her,” Merle seethed, turning to look at his brother with his wild eyes. Daryl's own eyes widened a little, looking to Charlene. She looked so fucking sad and stressed and he frowned. The thought of assholes like that in her house, intimidating her like that, it sent a surge of rage through his body.

“They hurt ya?” he rasped, making her eyes turn to him. He hadn't actually ever spoke to her before now and she was a little shocked. She shook her head, running a shaky hand through her long wavy brown hair.

“No. They just pushed me around a little, took some of our stuff. They said if I didn't have the money by the end of the week they were gonna break my knee caps,” she lamented, looking spooked.

Daryl's jaw clenched as he looked to his brother. He was shocked to see his brother just as mad. It seemed that despite his constant harassment and the girl's constant rebuffs, he still didn't like the idea of her being hurt. Men hurting women was something both he and Merle could never stand by.

“How much ya owe?” Merle asked, scratching the scruff on his chin as he looked at her. Her face flushed as she looked down toying with her hands. Daryl had no doubt it had been her father that took out the loan, he doubted the sweet little preacher's daughter would even know who to get that kind of loan off. Her dad might have been a preacher, but he had lost his fucking way by a long shot.

“$3000,” she whispered softly. It felt like the air left his lungs and he scrunched his face up. That was a lot of fucking money to get together by the end of the week and he wasn't stupid enough to think she would be able to do it. She was fucked. And now he was gonna be sat there worried that some assholes were gonna come and break her tiny little body.

“Ya don't need to worry about it sugar, alright? Me and my little brother here will take care of it,” Merle grinned as he slapped Daryl on the back.

“We will?” Daryl muttered warily, side glancing at Merle.

He knew whatever his brother was planning would be something he wanted no part of and most likely, very fucking illegal.

“Yeah, we will,” Merle said firmly, shooting a brother a look.

“No guys, I can't drag you into this mess,” she sighed as she shook her head. Daryl just wanted her to stop looking so fucking sad, it made him miserable.

“It’s fine. We’re used to this kinda shit. Just don’t worry ya pretty little head about. We’ll fix it,” Merle declared proudly. Daryl wondered just why the fuck he was going to these lengths to help her. Then he remembered his brother wanted to get in her pants and he was no doubt trying to score points.

Later that night Daryl found himself sat in his truck across the street from the girl's house. She didn't know he was there and she wouldn't find out either. He had been at home and he couldn't settle, worrying that some more guys would come and hurt her somehow. The deep need to check on her, to protect her from harm, it was too strong as it ran through his veins and before he knew it, he was here. He lit up a smoke as he watched carefully out of the window, waiting for any sign of trouble. This went on for days, Daryl sitting outside her house all damn night, falling asleep in his truck. Every morning he would wake and high tail it out of there before she fucking caught him. That shit would have been embarrassing.

Merle had not disclosed his plans to Daryl. He had told him it would be best if he didn't know. Daryl was part relieved he didn't know what the fuck his brother was up to and part worried. He knew it was something bad. Either way, Merle suddenly had a bag of fucking money and Daryl found himself driving to her house again. Only this time his brother was with him. As they pulled up though they saw another car parked outside. Daryl tensed and he knew his brother did the same as the truck came to a stop.

“Got ya gun?” Merle asked tensely, glancing at him. Daryl nodded, glad he had brought it with him. They got out and as they approached the house, they could hear yelling and Charlene crying.

Merle opened the door, aiming his gun at some asshole in the living room. Daryl was right behind him and he aimed his gun at the asshole that had Charlene pinned to the wall by her throat. She was sobbing, her whole body trembling and Daryl swallowed thickly. He was so used to her being so happy all the damn time, seeing this side to her was disturbing.

“Ya gonna step away from the girl now. We got ya shit, so fuckin’ leave,” Merle sneered, glaring from one man to another. They were big fucks but they wouldn't be a match for a few bullets. Merle’s spare hand was holding the duffel with the money in and the guy not pinning Charlene smirked as he looked at it. Daryl couldn't take his eyes off the other prick though, his hands on her like that, making her fucking cry.

“Ya got two seconds to get ya fuckin’ hands off her ‘fore I put a bullet ‘tween ya damn eyes,” Daryl growled, his voice was low and downright menacing as the other guy looked at him. He must have seen the rage behind Daryl's baby blue eyes, seen that he wasn't fucking lying, because the man let her go and took a step back.

Daryl breathed a sigh of relief. Every second he had seen that asshole touching her like that, it was chipping away at his sanity. It made him care less about being a better man. He would gladly murder this prick and do the fucking time for it with how he had upset the girl. Merle tossed the bag at their feet but made no move to lower his gun. He didn't know what heat they were packing and they weren’t about to get caught with their asses hanging out. One of them crouched, opening the bag and quickly assessing the money.

“Nice doin’ business with ya sweetcheeks,” one of them smirked as they both left. One of them purposely barging Daryl’s wide shoulder as he went past. Daryl snarled, about to lunge at him, cave his fucking face in like he wanted to, but Merle gripped the back of his neck, making him still instantly.

“Easy now brother,” he warned, waiting as he felt Daryl relax the tiniest amount. He let him go then and Daryl rolled his shoulders, trying to will away the rage that was flooding him. Charlene wiped her eyes with a sniffle, looking at them incredulously.

“You didn't have to do that,” she whispered with a shaky voice, trying to calm her nerves as she held a hand over her heart.

“Told ya we’d take care of it and we did. Let us know if they give ya more trouble,” Merle grinned, like nothing had happened. Daryl was still tense and he was glad they got here when they did and not a second later.

“Can I...can I do anything? Do you want a drink, or maybe dinner or something? To say thanks?” she asked, looking from Merle to Daryl. He looked away from her wide eyes and how they looked at him, making him feel all kinds of fucking funny. He didn't like it.

“We’ll take a rain check sugar, maybe tomorrow,” Merle said, patting her shoulder a little before he moved to the door. Daryl followed his lead, wondering why Merle wasn't taking her up on her offer, knowing they had no food at home. He wasn't sure how he felt about his brother doing something decent and then not accepting anything in return right away, it was weird as fuck.

Daryl was closest to her since Merle was already at the door and before he knew what was happening, she was walking over and wrapping her arms around his middle. He went tense, completely rigid as his brain tried to register that the pretty girl from the store and diner was touching him. He awkwardly pat her back, unsure of how to react. Did he hug her back? What if she didn't want him to, to touch her like that? What if she smacked him, told him to stay the hell away from her? He was in his damn head so much that before he had decided what to do, she was pulling away and hugging Merle. Merle smirked at him over her shoulder, licking his lips suggestively and Daryl bristled, looking away. It didn't just make him uncomfortable that his brother would do that when she was innocently hugging him, but it made him mad as fuck.

“Thank you both, come by tomorrow. I’ll make you something nice, maybe a pot pie or something,” she said with a little smile, looking over at him once again. He nodded, looking away. He was scared if he looked at her for too long she would call him out for staring at her.

The dinner never happened, because the next day Merle got arrested for armed robbery. Daryl was mad as all hell. That was how his asshole brother got the money, that was his grand plan? Robbing a fucking store? He never mentioned it to Charlene. That she was the reason why Merle went away, because he had helped her. But he knew she knew. She didn't look at him the same after that for months until his brother was released early for good behaviour. It only made him more mad at his brother. That every time he went to see her, needing to see that smile, needing to feel a little better about himself, it wasn't there. She barely smiled, she wouldn't even look him in the eyes. She felt bad that it was her fault and Daryl had fucking suffered for it.

When Merle was released, he had his head up his ass about the fact she still wouldn't sleep with him. He had made comments to Daryl about how she owed him, and that “the bitch could at least suck my dick. Got fuckin’ arrested for helpin’ her.” Daryl had broken his brother's nose that day, and he didn't regret it for one second. One thing he did notice was the fact his brother didn’t ever say a bad word about her in front of him again.

Daryl drove around aimlessly as the memories swam in his mind. They were trying to find a gas station, not only because the truck needed fucking gas, but because a map would be pretty helpful right about now. He wasn't familiar with this part of Murphy so he had no clue where the fuck to go. So he just drove around hoping for the best before the gas ran out.

“Stop the truck Daryl!” Merle said urgently, making him slow the truck to a stop and look at him worried.

“What is it?” he asked, looking tense. What the fuck had his brother seen? Was it a group of the dead again? Living people?

“That fuckin’ can of spam ain’t agreed with me,” he grumped, rubbing his stomach as he checked for his gun and hopped out of the truck.

Daryl rolled his eyes and shook his head. So now they were stopped in the middle of nowhere whilst his brother ran into the forest to take a shit.

“Don't go far!” he called out the window after him, making Merle wave dismissively as he jogged and disappeared behind the trees. Daryl had no intentions of asking if he needed him to go with him to keep an eye out. He didn't want to stand there whilst his brother had the shits. Besides, Merle was that loud Daryl knew he would hear if there was any trouble. Anyone in a ten-mile fucking radius would hear it. He needed to stretch his legs and he opened the door, getting out and shaking his legs out a little. He stood leaning against the open door with his bow propped against the side of the truck, fishing his smokes out as he lit up. Charlene watched him for a minute before she scooted over to the driver's seat, sitting sideways so her legs were dangling out of the truck, right next to him.

She lay the side of her head against the headrest and closed her eyes and Daryl watched her carefully as he exhaled. She was grimacing again and he didn't know if it was the cramps or something else.

“S’wrong?” he asked warily, looking as she cracked her eyes open and looked at him.

“My head. Since I hit it, I keep getting bad headaches,” she sighed, closing her eyes once more, the light was only making the headache worse. A jolt of guilt shot through him knowing it was his fault. He had concussed her and she was still in pain because of it. The gash had started healing but the bump and bruise were still there. He didn't really know what he was doing, before his brain figured it out, he was already rubbing her head. His thumb stroked the skin next to the bump soothingly like it might take the pain away, repair the damage he had caused, and his fingers were buried in her soft hair. He tried not to think about the way it made him feel.

She tensed at first, not expecting it, but she didn't dare open her eyes. She knew if she did he would freak out and recoil from her like she was poisonous. So instead she kept her eyes closed and relished the feeling of him stroking her head. It was comforting and helped a little with the pain. Daryl kept glancing at her, unable not to as usual. What he would give to be able to just kiss her right now. Ain’t gonna happen asshole. Ever. He huffed to himself, tearing his eyes away from her, wondering why the fuck he always did this to himself. He clearly liked to torture himself. He wasn't sure how long he stood there just rubbing her head, it didn't feel long enough by any means, but suddenly his brother came through the trees. Daryl dropped his hand quickly, not wanting Merle to see and say something in front of her. She opened her eyes and gave him a little smile but he just looked away, making her frown. He gestured with his head for her to move up and she complied, getting back in the middle as Daryl got in, Merle following suit on his side.

“Fuck, I ain't ever eatin’ that shit again,” Merle snorted, looking like he felt a little better now. Daryl shook his head shooting an amused look his brother's way as he pulled out once again, driving down the road. They had barely even got anywhere when the truck made a few weird noises and then suddenly stopped.

“Aw, c’mon man!” Daryl yelled, hitting the steering wheel in anger.

“Fuck sake. Looks like we ain’t gettin’ to that gas station yet,” Merle grumbled, wiping a hand over his face.

“We need to get out, go on foot. We can find some other cars, syphon some gas. Ain't leavin’ my fuckin’ truck and bike behind,” Merle huffed, as he opened his door. Daryl glanced to Charlene and she looked so miserable and fed up. He knew she wasn't looking forward to leaving the truck, once again being without any safety at all. They didn't have a choice though. They would have to leave the truck temporarily in search for gas so they could get to the gas station grab a fucking map, and hopefully get to Atlanta.

Daryl grabbed his pack and bow before hopping out, standing there as Charlene got out after him.

“It's gonna be alright,” he said gruffly, not sure why those words left his mouth. It wasn't like he had the gift of knowing the fucking future but he said them anyway. She looked up at him, giving him a weary smile, it was better than nothing.

“I hope so,” was all she said, a small sigh leaving her lips as they started walking. He wondered when the bullshit would end. When they would finally catch a fucking break and not have to do this bullshit all the time. It occurred to him that they wouldn't ever catch a break, this was it now. This was the new world. At some point in the future, there would be no gas left at all, and there would be more of the dead, no fucking food. His mood rapidly turned sour as the three of them trudged down the road, hoping to find a vehicle to get some gas.

Taglist; @risingphoenix761 @daryldixonandfrogs @arlaina28 @divadinag @keeperofwonderlandus @jodiereedus22 @easnuppa @fand0m-fiend @txladyj-blog @walkingdead-dixon

#daryl dixon #daryl dixon fanfic #daryl dixon fanfiction #daryl dixon imagine #daryl dixon writing #twd #twd fanfiction #twd fanfic #The Walking Dead #the walking dead fanfic #Merle Dixon

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seeroftodayandtomorrow · 5 years ago

Text

A Musical Affair

Summary: Blaine’s life has been shaped by scandal. Now his livelihood and, it sometimes seems, his sanity depend on him being as inconspicuous as possible. But a group of unusual friends cause his resolve to totter, and a beautiful singer might shatter it completely. Historical AU

Chapter 6

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Blaine approached his former home slowly, cautiously, as he would a wild animal. Even from the outside, it didn’t look the same anymore: now that he didn’t live here, didn’t belong here anymore, the mansion looked more imposing, more forbidding. Like however he was dressed, whoever he was, it would never be good enough.

It was not to be helped, though. His curiosity was simply too insistent: he had to know why Sebastian had asked to see him. What, after that overwhelmingly awkward and embarrassing first meeting, they could possibly have to say to each other. He was not without trepidations—he had not forgotten how he had felt after that first meeting, and as little as he knew Sebastian, he would not put it past him to invite him just to mock him.

When the butler opened the door, Blaine remembered Kurt’s words about how Rachel’s butler would look at him—like something the cat had dragged in. It seemed to be a look that every butler had for every visitor.

“Yes?” the butler asked, only it was longer, more a “yeees?”, accompanied by a look down the butler’s long nose that seemed to ask, “What would someone like you want here?”

“My name is Blaine Anderson,” Blaine said, pulling himself together. After all, he had dealt with dozens of butlers, albeit in a position that was very different from the one he was in now.

“His lordship awaits me.”

He was led into a parlor and told to wait. It was the same parlor his mother had used to receive visitors in, but her carefully chosen furniture had been replaced. Blaine wasn’t sure he liked the new décor. Sebastian didn’t have bad taste, but the new pieces were rather ostentatious and very obviously expensive. Besides, he had liked the room the way it was before.

The place of honor above the fireplace, where as long as he could think his father’s portrait had hung, where, he had been told, every current Earl’s portrait had hung since his great-grandfather had bought the place, was instead occupied by a tasteful landscape. Blaine supposed it was possible that his father’s portrait was upstairs in the gallery and Sebastian’s was still in commission, but somehow, he doubted it. He had a feeling the new Earl didn’t give much for tradition.

He didn’t have long to view his surroundings, as after only a few minutes, Sebastian entered the room.

“I’m very happy you’re here,” the young Earl said after they made their bows.

He gestured at the elegant settee and himself sat down in a fauteuil before the fireplace. “I’ll ring for tea, shall I?”

Blaine smiled and agreed, thinking to himself that there was nothing to see of the over-confident, even arrogant man he had met at the ball. Here, now, Sebastian came across as nervous, insecure and not quite at home in his own house. He also did seem at a loss at what to say just as much as Blaine.

They were almost silent except for a few polite remarks about the weather, until the tea came. Even then, Sebastian took his time stirring sugar into his tea, then taking a sip before he finally spoke.

“I’m very glad you came,” he then repeated. “I’ve been…regretting the way our first meeting went. And I’m sure that you’ll agree with me when I say that…the way this meeting went would best be forgotten.” He smiled, and Blaine couldn’t help but smile as well. In that, at least, Sebastian was right.

“But…I’ve been thinking, and I would like to get to know you. As my brother, not…you know, what I proposed earlier, of course.”

“I would like that too,” Blaine said softly. “My only brother died when I was very young, and I’ve always wanted siblings.”

“Well, no chance of that with a father like this, really. I can’t imagine any woman wanting to bed him more than once, for all his wealth and status.”

Blaine gave out a surprised laugh. It was what he had always not quite allowed himself to think, and he knew it was mostly true: an heir and a spare, and then, to his mother’s relief and satisfaction, his father had sought his pleasures elsewhere.

“So we do have that in common,” he said softly. “We do not like the man who sired us.”

“No,” Sebastian said vehemently. “If…you want to hear it, I had wanted to tell you about him. And us. It might—not excuse, but explain—my initial coldness towards you.”

“I’ll listen,” Blaine promised. He was intrigued. This Sebastian was a whole other person than the one he had so briefly met at the ball.

“The Earl married my mother when she was very young. He was, I understand, a man of strong appetites who wasn’t used to accepting no for an answer, and she was very religious and had grown up without much contact to men. So he persuaded her to elope with him to get what he wanted, but he must have planned to leave her from the beginning, for the wedding was in secret, without guests or any witnesses but the priest, whom he bribed to burn the marriage certificate. My mother was very much in love with him, so she let him decide everything how he wanted, just so he would marry her.”

Blaine nodded. He had wondered how such a clandestine marriage had been possible, but he could imagine a naïve young girl under the spell of a sophisticated older man, who was an Earl on top of that. Even if that Earl was his father.

“He took a house in the country for them,” Sebastian continued, “far away from anyone they knew, saying it was their honeymoon, and that later they would return to the city and he would introduce her to his family. But after a few weeks, he—left. And didn’t come back.”

“I’m so sorry,” Blaine said. It seemed like the right thing to do, even though he had had no part in his father’s actions and no words could atone for them. “What did she do?”

Sebastian laughed bitterly. “What could she do? By then she was expecting, and she was still so in love with him that she waited for him far too long, keeping the house much longer than she could afford. Then she went back to her parents. But she couldn’t prove she was wed, so they disowned her. Finally she went to live with her sister and her family. This is where I grew up. But we were….kept as little more than servants, and were always reminded we were dependent on their charity. They did not let me go to school—my mother taught me—and after my mother died last year, they made it very clear I was not welcome there anymore.”

Blaine was silent. He had noticed that Sebastian did not disclose how he had survived in the time between his mother’s death and his inheritance. He would not ask. He could imagine it had been hard, and would be hard to tell.

“So—when I met you, the first thing I felt was resentment. I felt that you had had the upbringing that should have been mine, and been prepared for the title that I am now bearing. I’m sorry. I can imagine that with a father like that, your childhood cannot have been easy.”

“He was mostly away,” Blaine said with a little smile, “but—no, it wasn’t.”

For a while, they were silent. Blaine took one of the delicate little sandwiches offered and noticed that Sebastian had apparently kept their cook. He was glad and promised himself to visit the kitchen on his way out. But the silence lasted longer than expected, and after a while, he made himself ask.

“My lord, what do you want? Why did you ask me to come?”

“First of all, I’d like you to call me Sebastian. I…do enjoy being an Earl, but you are my brother, and if possible, I’d like us to be friends. I…need your help.”

Blaine was taken aback. If he was honest, he had expected some kind of motive in Sebastian’s surprising invitation, maybe a bribe or even a threat in order to keep him silent about what had happened at the ball. Sebastian’s tale of how he grew up had made him change his mind, but he had not expected him to ask for help.

“I was not brought up to be an Earl. I don’t know anything about…anything, really. I don’t know about etiquette, or managing an estate, or even how to properly receive guests. I’ve managed so far by coming across as cocky and arrogant and being above these things, but I don’t think it will take long for people to realize that it’s a front.”

“Wait, you’re not cocky and arrogant?” Blaine teased. He wasn’t sure if he could take the liberty to do that, but he wouldn’t want to spend a lot of time with Sebastian if he couldn’t. In a way, this was a test.

But Sebastian laughed. “Oh no, I am. I’m afraid that won’t change. But I’d like to know the rules of society before I decide I’m above them.”

He grew serious again. “I’d like you to teach me, if you would. I’m willing to pay, or…whatever you want, really. If you’d like to move back here, for example—there are rooms enough.”

Blaine went home contemplating Sebastian’s amazingly generous offer. It was tempting to escape his grandmother’s watchful eyes by moving in with Sebastian—and they couldn’t even say anything against it. He’d be officially employed as his lordship’s private secretary, a position which he was rather over-educated for, but which was still honorable. A lot of his problems would be solved—he’d have employment with someone who could perhaps become a friend, if not a brother, he’d be out from under his grandmother’s nose, and he’d have the liberty to more often see Kurt.

But—would he really? He’d be an employee in the house that once was to be his. He might get his old bedroom, but would know Sebastian occupied the master suite. He did not, as such, begrudge Sebastian the title and the wealth, not after the life he had led and the stipulations Blaine knew came with both. He didn’t want that life back. Sebastian was welcome to it.

But to be a guest—a servant of sorts—in the house that had once been his home, was a little too much.

There was another reason he would probably decline the offer, and Blaine was caught between a smile and a wince when he thought that this reason had a lot to do with Kurt.

He hadn’t forgotten Kurt’s reaction at the thought of taking money from anyone, nor his own resolution to become independent from his grandmother. And was taking money from Sebastian really so different than taking money from Grandmama? Especially since he would only nominally be a secretary, really performing a service he would gladly do just for friendship’s sake, and maybe the occasional taste of his former cook’s excellent cooking.

He’d never stand on his own feet if he kept taking money from his relations, be it grandmother or brother.

So he would write those letters, using his connections to get a positions in which then, hopefully, he could prove himself, prove that he was something more than a spoiled Earl’s son.

He wanted to be as independent-minded as Kurt. He wanted to be—God help him—someone Kurt could be proud of. And if, in the process, he could be someone he could be proud of himself—well, that would be a nice change.

#klaine fanfiction #fic: a musical affair

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pretty-prince-lulu · 6 years ago

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Roma is a dick

Omega and Halo got married :)

but over the course of that week, Roma proved that he is a dick.

That’s probably bad form at someone else’s wedding.

You know what makes it worse form? Roma already had a girlfriend.

Who he did not consult!

Roma has the polyamorous trait. this is fine!

what is not fine is that Roma doesn’t give a fuck how his partners feel about that, and doesn’t seem to discuss it with anyone or disclose it to his partners. On top of this, Roma is a legitimately horrible person. Almost a dangerous kind of horrible. I do not like him at all.

Roma is also a death knight, and it wouldn’t surprise me if he was a wee bit empathy challenged. I THINK that class gives a social penalty, actually, but I can’t check right at the minute.

That’s a problem, when you already have all the social motility of a pair of wet underpants.

These factors combined mean that he is on an eternal bicycle of finding a new lover (all girls so far, but he is bi according to his kinsey number on his psyche tab), but having the previous lover ditch him for not even discussing that first. He is, thus, never satisfied with any of them, because he only has One.

Though, honestly, not that he didn’t dodge a bullet ditching Lourdes. Lourdes is Liah’s daughter, and is only VERY MARGINALLY less unstable. They are not nice people. I do not know what he is doing.

Elsey, by contrast, is a pink kitty sugar bean and I love her. That is a good choice. I mean, not for Elsey, but it’s a good choice.

He pretty much always has this debuff, assuming he’s retained ONE relationship at least.

honestly roma this would ALL be resolved with actual fucking communication. TRY it you hatful of assholes.

but poor communication? real sad to watch, but not -dickish-. Roma, however, was already on my shitlist. This was due to another PREVIOUSLY ON DRAGONBALL Z, as follows.

Roma attempts to flirt with Soraya (one of my favorites). This does not go well. Roma does not TAKE this well, because he’s a Nice Guy (tm) evidently. Insults escalate, because apparently his dick just can’t be denied.

By now I’m thinking, ‘you fucking idiot. She’s almost fully cybernetic. You’re toast’.

(Also shout out to Solia, making the world’s stupidest observation to a bird)

Unfortunately, I am less right about that than I want to be, and it’s cyborg girl who wears it.

Fucking why? I’ll tell you why

Death knights get a ‘Hate’ buff, which apparently, along with making them spiteful fuckholes in general, jacks up their armour rating and damage dealt by, like, a lot. Soraya has no magic- she’s just a gardener and an animal tamer.

I’m sure you feel like a big man, you fucking asshole.

Death glaring continues. Somehow, I feel like Soraya knows she’s really the one who won where it counts, in the measure of not being an empathy challenged arsehole.

But at least some vindication comes.

For reasons I don’t understand, he levels up 3 times at once.

I feel like something extra dickish is about to go down.

Ah.

So now I have to cheer up Elsey. GREAT.

At least Nivea is another terrible choice, and comprehensively out-dances him in the ‘talking to others and being a person’ measure. I’m hoping for pain here.

OH SHIT AND I GOT IT

four hours. FOUR hours!

That’s a world record, people. And now Roma has NOBODY except his own hand. All is as it should be.

Except unfortunately he has at least 3 children coming from the -first two-, but small silver lining, he fucked things up with Nivea way too fast to plant any seeds.

Way to go, you absolute dickhole.

(Though he and Lourdes are going to have at least 2 kids. Pray for me.)

#rimworld

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zephfair · 7 years ago

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Day 3 Bleach ficlet Grimmichi

Day 3 of the 30-Day AU Challenge

Day 3: Robot AU

More fluff and silliness. Rated T for language (at this point just assume ANY fic with Grimmjow is going to be rated at least T for language)

I honestly don’t know anything about robots but I wanted a silly little meet-cute so here, have an unconventional matchmaker.

*****

Ichigo hummed a little as he climbed the stairs even though his arms were full of grocery bags. It had been a good day. Classes were going well; his grades were high; his part-time job was good; he even found time on the weekends to spend out with his friends.

Yep, he pretty much had it all. There was only one thing that marred the peaceful monotony of his days.

And that one thing was the reason he stopped humming when he started down the hall. He wouldn’t say he tiptoed past the door of the other apartment on the top floor but it was a near thing. He shot a dark scowl at the battered wooden door but he couldn’t get a hand free to flip it off like he usually did.

It was the only way he could vent his frustration without making any noise.

He had to sit down several of the grocery bags in the hall before he could unlock his apartment and open the door. He took a couple steps inside and promptly tripped over something. He swore as he twisted his body and caught his balance before falling.

“Dammit Mr. Roomba, are you trying to kill me?!” As soon as he said it, Ichigo regretted the loud tone. He glanced involuntarily at the shared wall but there was no response, and he breathed out a sigh of relief.

Then he had to deal with the tiny robot vacuum still butting up against his Converse. His next sigh was rueful. “I’m sorry, Mr. Roomba. I shouldn’t have said that. It’s not your fault you’re just doing your job and I’m a clumsy oaf. Am I in your way?”

Seeming to accept the apology, the Roomba whirred away from him, and Ichigo turned to the kitchen. He put away the perishables then remembered with a start the bags still in the hallway. He stuck his head out and looked both ways as if expecting a rush of traffic before grabbing them and shutting his door.

Hell, how he hated always walking on eggshells when he came home during the day. He’d grown up in a house that rang with the loud antics of his wacky father, and even his sisters had learned they had to speak up to be heard. He was used to being himself and making as much noise as he wanted.

The landlord really should have warned him about the dick living next door because he’d never have taken the place, despite its unreasonably low rent. Although now that he thought about it, the landlord had looked a little pale when he’d led Ichigo upstairs and Ichigo hadn’t questioned his almost whispered voice.

Huh. After two months, maybe he needed to go have a little talk with the landlord and find out exactly what all he knew and hadn’t disclosed.

Ichigo had met his new neighbor the very morning he was moving in because the big blue shirtless asshole had barged into his living room and started shouting. Ichigo had assumed he was being robbed by a burglar who had no concerns about stealth. Ichigo had first shouted back then the douchebag had taken a swing at him and it had all gone downhill from there.

Ichigo was still thankful he hadn’t moved the furniture in yet because the resulting brawl would have probably broken something.

When they’d fought for a good ten minutes and Ichigo was ready to just let the freak take all his worldly possessions, the dude rolled off him and starfished on the floor. And started laughing.

Ichigo had pushed himself up on an elbow and looked incredulous. “What the actual fuck is your problem?!”

“You’re new here.”

“No shit. What gave it away?”

“Because everyone else knows to leave me alone during the day.”

“What? Do you think you’re a vampire or something?”

“No, I just work all night so I have to sleep during the day. You’ll get used to it.”

“Why the hell should I have to get used to it?! It’s your problem!”

The dude had just rubbed at his ear dramatically. “Are you always this fucking loud?”

“Yes, yes I am,” Ichigo realized he was shouting but he couldn’t stop. “You just broke into my apartment and tried to beat me up and why? Because I woke your sorry ass up? Well get used to it, bitch!”

The dude stared at him through narrowed, intense blue eyes. “Don’t call me a bitch, bitch. And quit being so loud. Or I’ll make life very difficult for you.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah.” The dude rolled and got to his feet, shaking out his long arms. “And the name’s Grimmjow. You are?”

“Seriously pissed off,” Ichigo said and scrambled to his feet.

“Nice to meet you, Seriously Pissed Off. You’re not too bad at fighting, actually. That was the best workout I’ve had in a while. You ever get in the ring?”

“No, I haven’t done any formal training in years—what? Why? What are you doing?”

“Trying to be a good neighbor.”

“It’s too late for that,” Ichigo informed him dryly.

Grimmjow shrugged then stepped closer, right into Ichigo’s personal space. Ichigo held himself motionless, unwilling to step back and give in to the intimidation tactic. He was also incredibly aware of just how much pale skin he could see over rock hard, cut muscles.

“Just keep the noise down and don’t wake me up during the day. And we’ll be fine.”

“Or what?” Ichigo looked up into his eyes and scowled.

“You don’t want to find out.” Grimmjow bopped his nose—fucking bopped his nose—and walked out, shutting the door quietly behind him.

So of course Ichigo didn’t obey.

His dad, Chad and Uryu were already booked to help with the move that day and they managed to get all his things into the new apartment by sundown. Ichigo bought them pizza as thanks, and he even got a good night’s sleep in his new bedroom.

Then he got up and promptly turned on some music as loud as his Bluetooth speaker would go. He sang at the top of his lungs, he slammed the cabinet doors, he danced as he made himself a breakfast smoothie in his new blender.

And when Grimmjow started banging on his front door, he yelled, “Can I help you?”

“You’re not the only one seriously pissed off now, dickhead!” the door didn’t dampen Grimmjow’s shout.

“I’m sorry, I can’t hear you over the sound of my awesomeness!”

“You dirty goat fucker.”

“Excuse you, I’m not dirty!”

“Turn off the fucking music!”

“No!”

With one more loud bang that rattled the entire door frame, Grimmjow left.

Ichigo reveled in his hard-won victory and spent the day organizing his new place. He’d settled into bed that night with his computer when it started. The unmistakable feedback noise of an amplifier. Then the whump-whump of a bass guitar. Followed by the crash of a cymbal.

Oh hell no. Grimmjow wouldn’t fucking dare.

But he would.

The impromptu jam session went through three songs before Ichigo could stand it no longer. He stomped over to Grimmjow’s apartment and beat on the door. The asshole had the audacity to finish the song before he opened the door.

He was shirtless again, or still, and he leaned insolently in the door frame, one arm over his head, probably to better display his muscles, Ichigo thought wildly. He was wearing only tight jeans with strategic rips all over the thighs and a thick silver choker. It was a look, and it worked for him.

“Well, hello, neighbor. Is there something I can do for you? Do you need a cup of sugar?”

Ichigo’s temper flared from the brief respite his lust had offered. “No I don’t need a cup of sugar, I need to fucking sleep!”

“Aw, do you have insomnia? I can offer you a glass of nice warm milk.” The way Grimmjow’s lips twitched made Ichigo break out in a sweat.

“You are such an asshole,” Ichigo told him and Grimmjow just smiled slowly.

“Tonight’s my night off so I have some friends over. You’re welcome to join us since you can’t sleep.”

“I can sleep, I want to sleep, but I can’t sleep because of all the damned noise!”

“Yeah. Sucks, doesn’t it?” And Grimmjow shut the door in his face.

Ichigo’s shout of rage was lost in the noise of raucous male laughter and a ba-dum-tish on the drums. He stormed back to his apartment, slammed the door and put the pillow over his head.

The feud had lasted the rest of the week. Ichigo made as much obnoxious noise as he could in the morning before he went to class at nine. His schedule kept him on campus most the day and then he usually went straight to his job so he figured Grimmjow was probably already awake when he got home. He tried to be loud anyway, just in case.

Grimmjow apparently worked all night but got home around four in the morning. Ichigo knew that because that’s when all the commotion started. It sounded like he was attempting to build another room on to his apartment if the noises were any indication.

Ichigo would lie awake staring at the ceiling until he forced his tired body out of bed at his usual 7:30.

This was no way to live.

It wasn’t until the following week that Ichigo had a night off from work so he went to dinner with Chad and got home earlier than usual. That was when he ran into Grimmjow leaving the building for work. Ichigo thought he’d accidentally run into the brick building front when he realized the hard surface under his hand was warm.

He looked up into amused blue eyes. “Enjoying your feel?” Grimmjow asked.

Since it was already there, Ichigo’s hand squeezed his pec again. “It’s okay,” Ichigo said weakly.

Grimmjow chuckled, a low dark rumble that went right to Ichigo’s groin. He leaned down to Ichigo’s ear and said, “You wanna let go so I can get to work?”

“Sure,” and Ichigo let go and stepped back. Then he saw what Grimmjow was wearing and he laughed out loud before he could stop himself. “What is that?! Why are you wearing Winnie the Pooh scrubs?”

“Because my Snoopy ones are dirty?”

“I mean, why are you wearing scrubs at all? What, are you some kind of nurse or something?”

Grimmjow just leveled a look at him. “Actually, yeah, I am. I work nights in the pediatric unit at the hospital.”

“Yeah, right,” Ichigo scoffed. “Someone who looks like,” he waved up and down, “is really a nurse.”

“That’s fucked up and kinda sexist, Seriously Pissed Off. Rude,” Grimmjow brushed past him and down the steps. “I’ll have you know the kids love me.”

“Because you’re at the same maturity level!” Ichigo called after him. Grimmjow just raised his middle finger and didn’t look back.

The encounter had left Ichigo filled with regret and shame because he normally would have never, ever spoken to someone like that. He greatly admired anyone in the medical profession—except his father but that was for myriad other reasons—and anyone who dedicated their lives to helping kids was amazing. It was an overworked and underpaid profession.

It was just that Grimmjow was so damn annoying and even if he did nurse sick kids all night, he was still a dick during the day.

Of course it did make sense why he was grumpy when he didn’t get his sleep. It was a stressful job.

But he could have explained that to Ichigo to start with instead of brawling on his living room floor.

God, Ichigo felt like such a jerk.

The revelation led to him sneaking past Grimmjow’s door from then on and an end to all his noisy shenanigans. Grimmjow hadn’t retaliated since.

It was also unfair that the reason for his ire was so damned attractive, although Ichigo would never admit that to anyone but his roommate Mr. Roomba.

“You’re the only one who understands, Mr. Roomba. I know I can trust you to keep my secret,” Ichigo called out as he set a pan of water on to boil.

The cleaning bot had been a gift from his family because his father said he didn’t want his son living in a pigsty and he knew exactly what kind of filth young men were willing to tolerate and no son of his would be forced to share his home with all the vermin and insects that were sure to infest a dirty hovel. Yuzu just fretted in a kinder way and offered to come over every week to clean up. That had made Ichigo accept the gift instead.

He’d found the little bot to be an excellent roommate because it was no maintenance, it actually did a great job on the floors and it listened to him when he felt the need to talk out loud. Its periodic chirps and beeps were welcome, and Ichigo actually felt heroic when he had to occasionally rescue it from being stuck under a cabinet or wedged behind the toilet.

Since his friends were reluctant to come over after he’d regaled them with stories of his feud with the Blue Bully, Mr. Roomba was his confidante. And it didn’t judge. He hoped.

Ichigo was preparing vegetables and chicken for a stir-fry when heavy knocks sounded on his door. He glanced at it and froze. He wasn’t being loud, for pete’s sake, but that sure had sounded like Grimmjow’s beating.

“Open up, Seriously Pissed Off,” came Grimmjow’s voice.

“It’s Ichigo,” Ichigo announced as he flung the door open.

“Huh. I think the other name suits you better,” Grimmjow said.

Ichigo fidgeted. He’d almost forgotten just how attractive Grimmjow was up close. And unfortunately, he couldn’t forget just how much of an ass he’d been to Grimmjow. So he promptly made it worse.

“Did you need something or was I being unreasonably loud with my boiling water?”

Grimmjow raised an eyebrow. “You can be as loud as you want. I’m off tonight. But did you notice that you’re missing something?”

For some reason, Ichigo’s hand immediately clamped to his back pocket where he kept his wallet, and he flushed when Grimmjow smirked and said, “Didn’t lose your pretty ass, did you? Want me to check for you?”

“So what am I missing?”

“A sense of humor, for one,” Grimmjow said. “And also your best friend.”

Ichigo’s mind flashed to Chad then Uryu as he repeated, “My best friend?”

Grimmjow stepped to the side and a familiar whirring sound came around him and zoomed toward the door. Mr. Roomba stopped for a second beside Ichigo, beeped twice, then hurried into the living room.

“Mr. Roomba, what is that? What are you doing?” Ichigo blurted then realized what he’d just said and addressed Grimmjow’s growing grin instead. “What the hell did you do to it?!”

“I made it better,” Grimmjow said smugly.

“No! No you didn’t!” Ichigo raced after the Roomba which was merrily bumping its way around the room. “Mr. Roomba, get back here!”

“Let the little guy have some fun, Ichigo,” Grimmjow was laughing now as Ichigo tried to grab the Roomba but it continued to whir just out of his reach, for all the world looking like it was showing off its new attachment.

“You taped a knife to it, you stupid idiot! I can’t believe you did that!” Ichigo jumped over the back of the couch and used a pillow to try and smother it.

“Well, it came bumping on my door and wanted to be left in. It looked lonely and defenseless.”

“Oh my god, it’s a sweeper!”

“You talk to it like it’s alive.”

Ichigo glared up at Grimmjow who now had his phone out and was recording his chase.

“After it got done with my kitchen, I thought I could return the favor. He looks so much tougher now.”

“But now I can’t catch him without stabbing myself!”

Grimmjow shrugged. “Not my problem.”

“Oh my god!” Ichigo threw up his hands then jumped back onto the couch when Mr. Roomba tried to bump affectionately into his ankles like it normally did. “It’s going to kill me!”

“Eh, at worst it’ll be a flesh wound. And I can always bandage you up.”

Ichigo stared at him and Grimmjow stared back. “Was that you...being nice to me?”

“Tch.” Grimmjow turned his phone off and didn’t look up.

Ichigo knew he should seize the opportunity, but he really, really didn’t want to. He sighed and did it anyway.

“I’m sorry,” he said and cleared his throat. “I’m sorry I was such a jerk and so loud, and I’m sorry I made fun of you for being a nurse. I think it’s pretty great, actually. My dad has a clinic, so I know it’s hard work, and I admire you for it. I shouldn’t have said what I did.”

Now neither he or Grimmjow was looking at each other. “It’s fine. You’re not the first one.”

“But I shouldn’t have said it. And I shouldn’t have been so disrespectful about being loud so you couldn’t sleep.”

“And I shouldn’t have burst in here looking for a fight the first day you moved in,” Grimmjow offered.

“Well, okay,” Ichigo said.

The uncomfortable silence was finally broken by a bright chirp and then three beeps as Mr. Roomba tried and failed to go under the recliner and ended up stabbing the upholstery repeatedly.

“Holy shit!” Ichigo yelled and went after it.

“Holy shit!” Grimmjow yelled and broke down cackling. He fumbled to get his phone back out. “Make it do that again!”

“Ow, fuck!” Ichigo finally cornered it and grabbed Mr. Roomba from behind to hold it up in the air. Its tiny brushes whirled and whined as though it was upset that it couldn’t continue its stabbing rampage.

“Come on, Mr. Roomba, let’s get this off of you!” Ichigo glanced at Grimmjow who was grinning. “Sometimes I think it’s a little possessed but it’s a good...friend,” he finished weakly and glanced up to see the grin widen.

“Well if you’re ever looking for a real, live, human friend, I was serious about getting in the ring with you. A buddy of mine has a gym, and I’m always looking for a good workout. After seeing your moves with Stabby, I think it would be a great fight.”

“It’s not Stabby,” Ichigo scowled and Mr. Roomba beeped again.

“Sorry. Mr. Roomba. He really did do a nice job on my floors.”

Ichigo looked from Grimmjow back to the Roomba and its knife. “If you ever want to borrow him, you can. As long as he doesn’t come back with any other deadly weapons.”

Grimmjow gave Ichigo a slow once-over from head to feet and back up again. “I was actually asking to borrow you for the evening. But if you need to bring a chaperone, I’m sure he’d be happy to find something to clean.”

Ichigo’s brain froze. Then Mr. Roomba’s motor groaned and it let out a series of frenzied beeps. “Oh. Oh, okay. I was, uh, just making dinner.”

“Smells good,” Grimmjow said. “How about we eat here and then head over to the gym?”

“Sure. That’d be...sure.”

Grimmjow stepped closer and the rest of Ichigo froze. He tilted his face up as Grimmjow stood right before him and leaned down. And with a quick motion pulled the tape off Mr. Roomba’s back, letting the knife fall to the floor. He bent over and picked up the knife then straightened, still in Ichigo’s space.

“There you go, Mr. Roomba. All disarmed and safe,” Grimmjow backed up and smiled at Ichigo’s expression. “Should I come back in half an hour?”

“Sure.”

With a last look at Ichigo’s mouth, Grimmjow left.

“Holy shit,” Ichigo breathed after he shut the door and leaned against it. “He just asked me out. Unbelievable.”

The Roomba whirred in his arms and reminded Ichigo to put it down. Then he patted its cover. “Thank you, Mr. Roomba. I can’t believe you did that.”

Its light blinked, then again, and Ichigo would have sworn it looked like a wink.

NOTE: Ichigo’s attachment to his Roomba was partially inspired by a Tumblr post I saw a long time ago about a woman calling hers Roomba-san. It took off from there.

I warned y’all I can only write fluff and silliness these days. ...Oops, did I forget to warn you? THIS IS THE WARNING THEN. I suck.

* Uh, just in case I need a disclaimer, I do not own or have anything to do with Roombas so please don’t come after me with a C&D.

#my fic #my 30 days #grimmichi #bleach fic #fluff and nonsense #AU fic

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poeticsandaliens · 7 years ago

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Paper Airplanes

Rating: R

Pairing: Stella Gibson/Jenny Shepard

This is a companion piece to Laws of Motion, which you can find here.

I apologize in advance. I was all set up to write a happy ending, but apparently my muse wasn't having it. Consider this one of two endings—in this one, Jenny is dead. One day, I'll write a second ending to Laws of Motion with a very different tone. You can choose which one is your canon, but regardless I threw NCIS canon out the window years ago.

AO3 Link: http://archiveofourown.org/works/13250826

She reads it in the daily paper— NCIS Director Jennifer Shepard dead— and for a moment feels insulted that no one called her earlier. No one could call her about it, of course. She preferred it that way. Stella understood privacy better than anyone, and she would hate for their liaisons to be Jenny’s downfall from such a delicate position. She didn’t agree with how institutions politicized their employees’ sex lives, but she was painfully familiar with it. First and foremost, she and Jenny were their jobs. Jenny was her job even before she was herself.

The waitress glides over to her booth, asks if she wants the usual—black coffee, sugar on the side. Stella presses her lips together and wills herself to speak. She orders an Irish coffee but really just wants a shot of whiskey. Maybe two. Maybe five. If the waitress is concerned she doesn’t show it. She’s a nice girl, maybe nineteen, gazes at Stella every Sunday morning with quiet curiosity. They don’t know each other’s names, and that’s how they prefer it—strangers exchanging kind words.

“It’s a shame,” the young waitress says, clunking her coffee on the table. Her brown eyes gesture to the newspaper headline. “That woman was a fucking legend.”

Stella raises one eyebrow. She meets the girl’s eyes. “Was she?” She can’t stop the twitch in her lip, the click of her heel against the diner’s hardwood floor.

The girl shrugs. “I read about her this morning too. I mean she isn’t a celebrity icon or that kind of legend, but she did some amazing things.” A pause. “They said it was a house fire.”

“Bullshit.” Stella snaps the paper shut and drops it on the table. “She wouldn’t have been that callous.”

They have sex in the sitting room of Jenny’s Georgetown home, with a pistol lying on the coffee table. She scoops up the paperwork they disturbed and shuffles it back into a neat stack before she tucks her head between Stella’s thighs. When they go to bed, Jenny checks twice that her toaster, coffee brewer, and floor lamps are unplugged. She climbs into bed naked and slides her Glock beneath her pillow.

The waitress flinches slightly, narrows soft eyes at Stella, and her mouth drops open for a moment. She closes it, but her eyes are still wide as saucers. “You think she was murdered?”

“Assassinated,” Stella corrects, sipping her coffee, “but yes.”

She nods shakily and walks away, and Stella finishes her shot of coffee and whiskey in a single gulp. A pang of guilt strikes her, whether for speaking so sharply or too openly she can’t decide. Jenny had always been secret—not private in the way Stella was, but secret. She couldn’t disclose half of what her job entailed for security risks; she was cautious to the point of paranoid; she appeared and vanished from Stella’s life over and over again without warning. She was a spy at heart, and Stella had found that thrilling. It hadn’t bothered her because Stella preferred the intimacy of silence to the exchange of secrets, and this way she’d never had to say much about herself.

“I have to catch a plane early tomorrow,” Jenny mumbles hoarsely, her cheek smushed into the pillow.

Stella rolls over in bed to face her. “What time?”

“Six am.”

“I’ll drive you,” she says without hesitation.

“Are you sure?”

Stella nods. “I wake up early anyway.”

She doesn’t ask where Jenny is going. Part of her imagines Jenny as a grim-faced James Bond; another part of her sees the woman who kills James Bond—someone had to; he was always a liability). She’s not sure which side she’s attracted to and which side unnerves her a little bit. Perhaps it’s the attraction itself that’s so intimidating, but Jenny is the first person she’s ever slept with who unnerved her. Jenny is also the first person she’s slept with more than once in near twenty years.

When the waitress comes back, she’s carrying another Irish coffee and a shot of straight whiskey. “You look like you need it,” she says with an apologetic half-shrug.

“Thanks,” Stella mumbles. She wonders what exactly in her appearance suggested she needed more alcohol. She was spotless when she walked into the joint this morning, dagger-sharp heels clipping the tile floor, but she feels utterly unraveled. As if someone pulled every thread loose from her shirt, then combed her hair backwards. When she picks up the coffee, her hand trembles.

The waitress just stands there, wringing her hands together and watching Stella drink with anxious eyes. She catches Stella’s stare, curly brown hair obscuring her face. Her foot scuffs the ground.

Stella cocks one eyebrow. “Yes?” she says, and it sounds rougher than she intended. “Don’t be afraid to speak your mind,” she adds, “whatever that may be.”

The girl seems to relax a bit. “Did you know that woman? The Director of NCIS, or whoever she was?”

“Whatever gave you that idea?” Stella almost allows a half-smile to cross her face. She’s flattered someone assumes she knew Jenny. She didn’t, not really, or so she tells herself—she has no business being utterly distraught. They slept together three, maybe four times. Of each others’ lives, they knew intimate details with no context. She knew Jenny’s scars, the reminders of her trials and every story behind them, but she’d be damned if she knew Jenny’s favorite color, or where she grew up.

“You talk about her like you knew her. How she’d never be so callous.”

Stella sighs. “I met her a few times. She’s intense, smart, has a retort for everything.” She pauses for a moment before confessing, “I wish I’d known her better.”

“Total strangers are the only people you can really be honest with, because you’ll never see them again. It doesn’t matter if you fuck up, because there’s no relationship to destroy.” Jenny chuckles darkly. “Maybe not with the details of my job, but the personal side of things.”

It’s too true. She flashes back to every stranger who spends a night in her bed. Every stranger who knows the intimate details of her body and nothing else. She wonders if Jenny counts as total stranger anymore.

“What’s your name?”

The question takes her by surprise. The anonymity between them is comforting for her, and she always assumed it was comfortable for this girl as well. She’s a student; her life is casually and quietly uprooted the way lives are at age nineteen. Stella is only a constancy day-to-day, a friendly stranger.

“Detective Superintendent Stella Gibson,” she says at last. The world is filled with friendly strangers. It’s short on friends. “Just Stella.”

“I’m Charlotte.”

Stella cracks a wan smile. “Good morning, Charlotte.” She takes a tiny sip from the cup of whiskey on the table. Perhaps Jenny Shepard’s death inspired Charlotte to have a real conversation with the woman in the Met uniform who turned up every morning for coffee. Perhaps Jenny Shepard’s life inspired the woman in the Met uniform to respond.

Jenny undoes the buttons on her uniform one by one. She’s not inclined to tear them open, rush the evening. Stella pushes their glasses of wine across the coffee table with one hand, with her foot shoves Jenny’s tiny suitcase away from the couch. They’ve been here all of an hour. They used to travel for work, stay in hotels and have wild sex on sheets owned by a stranger. One day, familiarity kicked in; now when Jenny comes to London she stays in Stella’s flat and knows which drawer holds the silverware.

She drapes her coat over the couch as Jenny unclasps the lingerie behind her back. Their lips are so close they can smell the bottle of wine they shared minutes before. There’s something uncomfortably intimate about being freed of a uniform. The same intimate as knowing where someone stores their silverware, touching their hair, kissing them chastely as they walk in the door.

Charlotte disappears into the kitchen, and Stella takes a deep breath, closing her eyes and sinking into the booth. Her phone buzzes on the table. The number is American, and for a second Stella thinks it’s Jenny, flying in on a moment’s notice and asking for a ride. Then the newspaper catches her eye.

“Gibson.”

“My name is Ziva David, and I work for NCIS. Tell me why your number is in our dead director’s phone.”

Well, that’s one way to begin a conversation.

“Jenny was a friend of mine.”

“First name basis, I see,” comes the cool reply, and Stella winces internally. She wants to maintain her privacy, but she also wants to demand answers from these people on the grounds of her relationship with Jenny—friendly strangers, friends, overseas acquaintances phone-fucking at three AM after gut-wrenching cases.

“May I ask what happened to her?”

“House fire. Who are you?”

“Detective Superintendent Stella Gibson. Why would you call me unless you were investigating Jenny’s death?”

“You’re Stella.” It’s forward, matter-of-fact. She wonders what her name means to Ziva David, to Jenny when she said it aloud. She’s surprised Jenny spoke her name to anyone at all. She can’t decide if it’s a pleasant sort of surprise.

“Yes, I’m Stella,” she replies, wondering what that’ll get her into.

“She died in a shootout in an abandoned diner in the desert.” This time the voice is tinged with a little bit of sympathy, and Stella swallows the feeling that she’s being pitied.

Silence.

“She took down the four men who attacked her.”

So Jenny died like a movie cowboy—good, bad, and ugly all in one heart, and the sand swallowed her bones. That doesn’t make Stella feel better. It’s shame, she muses, that the desert is ugly, empty, not a place you’d like to look your last. It’s a shame four men with firearms wasted a woman like a paper airplane.

She glances at the quaint establishment around her and catches Charlotte bringing scrambled eggs to an elderly couple. “Thanks,” she says into the phone, setting it on the table. Charlotte catches her eye and offers her a smile. She ought to get to know Charlotte a little better.

Her phone buzzes again, and this time she hesitates before picking it up. The Call ID reads a line from the Met. She breathes a sigh of relief—she’s not sure what she was expecting, maybe another call from NCIS, maybe Jenny’s husky voice she always imagined was a little bit immortal. An entity that manifested in long distance phone calls and never truly disappeared. Shaking her head at such wishful thinking, she picks up the phone.

“Gibson.”

“Another woman is dead. We think it’s the same killer as all the others.”

Violent misogyny, learned rage, aimless revenge against the inevitably unfair world. “Serial offender,” slips off her tongue. Men wasting women like paper airplanes.

“We’re sending a car for you, ma’am.” He doesn’t have to ask where.

“Thank you.” She hangs up and sets her cell phone on the table.

#stella gibson #jenny shepard #ncis #the fall #stella x jenny #tw: character death

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thechasefiles · 5 years ago

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The Chase Files Daily Newscap 9/13/2019

Good Morning #realdreamchasers. Here is your daily news cap for Friday, September 13th, 2019. There is a lot to read and digest so take your time. Remember you can read full articles via Barbados Today (BT), or by purchasing a Weekend Nation Newspaper (WN).

PROJECT DELAYS WORRY MONITORING COMMITTEE –BERT is staying ahead of the curve.The special monitoring committee of the Barbados Economic and Recovery Transformation (BERT) programme is still concerned about the delay of a number of projects that were intended to boost the economy. During a press conference held at Solidarity House yesterday, co-chair of the committee, Toni Moore, said the group would be paying special attention to those projects, and the effect any further delay could have on overall growth. There have been delays in the Sandals Beaches, Sam Lord’s Castle, Blue Horizon and Hyatt Centric Hotel projects. Moore, the general secretary of the Barbados Workers’ Union, said the group was otherwise extremely satisfied Barbados had met all targets for the period April to June, as set by the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Yesterday’s report, the third by the monitoring committee, showed the country’s foreign reserves were a healthy $938 million, way ahead of a target of $893 million. In addition, Government’s primary balance stood at $253 million, yards ahead of a proposed target of $125 million, while this administration had only spent $88 million on transfers to public institutions, way below the $104 million allowed, and the arrears of public institutions stood at $185 million, leaving plenty of wiggle room from a target of $284 million.(WN)

BUSINESS LEADERS NOW RUN CBC –In an apparent shift in corporate direction at state broadcaster CBC, two business figures have replaced former CBC broadcasters as chairman and deputy at the helm of a new board.David Leacock, scion of business pioneer Leo Leacock is the new chairman, appointed by the Minister for CBC Senator Lucille Moe, Minister of Information, Broadcasting and Public Affairs. Leacock, senior director in the Leacock family group of businesses, succeeds Melba Smith, a former CBC general manager who returned to the corporation as chairman in June 2018, after the Labour Party’s election victory. Smith lasted just a year of her three-year term, resigning last June. The new deputy is Sharon Christie, a Certified Management Accountant, and CEO of the Kensington Court Group, a distributor of food, frozen products, and office equipment. Christie replaces Sharon Marshall, a former director of news and current affairs and television news anchor, resigned as deputy chair in July. Leacock and Christie’s appointments took effect on Tuesday. The other members of the board appointed by Senator Moe are Sonia Mullins, Peter Boyce, Brian Clarke, Government Senator Dr. Crystal Haynes, Lee Rose, and Paulette Royer. Chief Telecommunications Officer Clifford Bostic and Sandra Phillips, Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Information, Broadcasting and Public Affairs are the Government’s official representatives on the board.(BT)

FOUL PLAY –With tensions rising among dissatisfied workers at the Grantley Adams International Airport over not being given the five per cent pay increase accorded to public workers last year, the National Union of Public Workers (NUPW) has requested an urgent meeting with the airport management in an attempt to have the matter settled. This morning, Deputy General Secretary of the NUPW Wayne Waldron revealed that his members were becoming increasingly restless and that both sides needed to get back to the bargaining table soon before things escalated. “We made the request last week and we are anxiously waiting for a response. The workers are in a bad mood and they are at the stage where they feel that they will demonstrate how they feel. They are really being frustrated but I can’t tell you they are going to strike tomorrow or next week. What I can say is that they are at that breaking point,” said Waldron, confirming earlier reports by Barbados TODAY that the workers were considering industrial action. Last month one source close to the development explained that while the workers are under a statutory arrangement, to the best of their knowledge, all employees of Government-owned entities are entitled to the increase, yet they have been “unfairly omitted”. However, a credible source explained that GAIA Inc is not a statutory corporation but rather a company constituted under the Company’s Act, which happens to be owned by Government. In addition, it was revealed that airport workers have received several increases within the last ten years, during a period when public servants received no pay hikes. It was also noted that given the airport’s plans to privatize its operations, workers were already asked to “hold strain” until that process is completed. “Within the last ten years, workers at the airport have received 21 per cent increase, during a period that the public service was not given any. So, you can’t have a case where you are getting increases when government workers are not and then demanding the increase when they are,” the source said. However, this morning Waldron contended that persons were conflating the two issues and in fact, any increases that the workers have received were monies owed them for a long time before. “People don’t understand the history and apparently somebody is of the notion that they [GAIA workers] have gotten more than the public service. But they only got what was owed to them and because the airport was late in adjusting the amounts over the years, the impression is that they got something extra. It is simply a lagging process but somebody is not understanding and came up with this idea now that they don’t deserve the five per cent increase,” he said.Waldron further argued that the GAIA administration is conveniently using the company argument, as over the years airport workers were never allowed to negotiate separately from Government workers. “When we tried in the earlier years to negotiate separately from the public service, which would justify even higher increases, they always tell you that you can’t give the airport workers more than what the government workers were being offered, although it is a company. Now they want to change it and say they don’t want to deal with what the Government is offering. So they are moving the goal post all of the time. When the company is making a big profit, they don’t want to pay increases above Government and when things are now tight, they want to constrain the worker,” said the NUPW spokesman. He further stressed, “They are discriminating against these poor airport workers. When you compare the salary of an engineer at the airport to one at the Ministry of Transport and Works (MTW), the one at MTW is better paid. It is discrimination pure and simple.”(BT)

WATER EASE – As the country continues to battle a severe drought, the Barbados Water Authority (BWA) has turned to Ionics Freshwater Limited to increase its water pumping capacity by 50 per cent. Additionally, Minister of Energy and Water Resources Wilfred Abrahams today revealed that a new pumping station has been commissioned in St James to help carry water to the dry taps of Barbadians in the northern parishes.During a press conference at his Country Road, St Michael headquarters this morning, Abrahams admitted that the BWA was grappling with drought conditions, which have led to several water outages across the island. And with a forecast for lower than average rainfall for the remainder of the year, the Minister disclosed that the prohibition period which was scheduled to end next month had now been extended to November 30. He acknowledged that the island-wide water outages being experienced were as a result of aging infrastructure, a lack of maintenance and the prolonged drought, which had served to form an “a perfect storm”. Abrahams said he was especially disheartened to hear about the complaints from Barbadians regarding the regular outages and the level of discomfort they were causing. He revealed that the state-owned entity had joined forces with Ionics to help provide a better service to households. “To address the water issues and the water shortages we have had to commission some more water from Ionics’ desalination plant. So Ionics is now supplying an increased amount of water into our system,” Abrahams said. “This started a couple of months ago, but it is not a matter of simply flicking a switch. Infrastructure had to be put in place to get the water from Ionics to where it needs to go. We had to change certain valves, we had to employ and install certain pumps [and] we had to upgrade pumping stations. “If Ionics down Spring Garden produces twice as much water as it produces that is all well and good, but that water needs to get from Ionics at Spring Garden into the same reservoirs that are being affected and then on to the customers,” the minister added. Dr. John Mwanza, the technical advisor to the Board, said Ionics was contracted last May. He said while the existing plant capacity was 27 000 cubic metres per day, or around six million gallons a day.“[Capacity] has been expanded by an additional 50 per cent so we’re getting an additional three million gallons,” Dr. Mwanza revealed. Minister Abrahams said the newly commissioned pumping station at Trents, St James would help in pumping some of that water to several communities including Kewland, Redman’s Village, Melrose, and Welches in St Thomas; White Hill and Mose Bottom in St Andrew and Chimborazo, Lammings Housing Area, Braggs Hill, Sugar Hill and Spa Hill in St Joseph. However, he warned the BWA was expecting bursts with the increased water being pumped through aging pipes. “This station will improve the volume of water flowing to the taps of residents along Highway 2A…Now we are commissioning this today, this is at the end of a long period of installation and testing and retesting and trying to balance so from today that water is going to go in the system with the intent of alleviating the areas I just mentioned. “I just want to warn the public [that] if you start to send more water down old pipes, the pipes are going to burst. We expect that we are going to have some bursts in the initial phases as we try to rebalance the water,” Abrahams said. He also disclosed that four new pumps would be made available to handle the added capacity. At the press conference, the minister also gave his assurance that the BWA’s Customer Service department would be improved. Abrahams said it had been brought to his attention that some persons had received shoddy treatment from the BWA’s customer service personnel as they sought to report complaints. He said a four-hour meeting was held yesterday to address the issue and he was confident persons calling into the BWA would see improved customer service.(BT)

CLEANING STARTS AT SHERATON – Less than 24 hours after being shut down by the Ministry of Health officials, the food court at Sheraton Mall was abuzz with activity. But instead of a busy flow of patrons purchasing food at lunchtime, employees and hired workmen were hard at work as the first day of a mass industrial cleaning exercise got underway. Food stalls in some cases were totally disassembled, cleaning agents were all over the food court and the restaurant apparatus was out of place. General Manager of the mall, Kelly Stoute declined to comment on the developments or to provide more clarity on the nature of health issues or indicate when the mall’s food court would be reopened. In addition, Barbados TODAY was informed by management that media workers would not be allowed inside the food court. Health officials have also been silent on the matter since Wednesday and Chief Medical Officer, Dr. Kenneth George directed Barbados TODAY to a press release issued today. The decision to close the popular food court was reportedly taken in response to mounting violations that mall management had left unattended after continuous environmental checks by the Environmental Health Division since September 4.(BT)

DOUBLE DIVIDE –Two vendors who ply their trade at the Parkinson Memorial Secondary School have protested the Board of Management’s decision to erect a double perimeter fence, claiming it separates them from less-well-off students. Grace Lovell, who told Barbados TODAY she has been selling snacks and beverages to the student body for eight years, claimed that the students who do not have the means to buy from the school canteen turn to her for their lunch. She said: “Some children come to school with $10 to pay bus fare and still buy something to eat. “So, the canteen provides a service for the children, but they are too expensive.“They are only looking at one side of the story, probably about getting rent or whatever the case may be, but every time we come to sell at lunch they put up a double fence, as you can see. “The children complain and they go to the headmaster and complain about the prices. “So, when we come they do not want us out here at lunchtime, but you still have to look at the children.” Lovell said that she sometimes provides free meals to students who do not have the means. She said: “I gave a child breakfast and lunch for a whole term which is three months. “Sometimes they come to me for bus fare, they want something they are short of money. “So, you have to look at the average child, a poor child because every parent [does] not have money to give a child to pay for that lunch which is $15 or $11. You can get a doughnut for $2 and a drink for $1.50.” The vendor said she discussed the matter with the board chairman. Despite having to ply her trade outside the compound, she boasted of being an insider at the school of 1,000 students. “I had spoken to the chairman. He stopped here last year September and told me he heard about Grace because I donate to the school when they have graduation although I am outside. I do anything and I am not on the inside, I am outside. “I spoke to him and I explained the same situation to him about the students not having enough money to buy lunch. I told him if he put up the double fence if she could [speak] to him because [he had] to look at all the vendors and the canteen and see what the canteen selling and what the other vendors selling and then we could work with something like that. He did not say anything. “I spoke to him last week when the double fence went up when term started back and he told me you have to look at the person that is in there that is paying the canteen fee and have the contract; and furthermore, the persons that inside may have to come out and he was not interested. “So, you would have to do what you got to do when you have children and bills.” But Lovell said she will follow the school’s wishes not to sell at lunchtime. She said: “I sell on mornings and evenings, but it is the lunchtime period that I would not be able to sell because they have up the double fence.” The other vendor declined to be named but joined Lovell’s comments and said she even offered to pay the school to sell on the premises. She said: “I offered to go and pay them a little something to be in there and they still did not agree with that. They never got back to me, they never said anything.” I am willing to pay something, donate to a club, a game – netball, anything – [to] no [avail].” The vendor, who told Barbados TODAY she has been plying her trade at Parkinson since 2000, also claimed she provides free lunches to disadvantaged students at the Pine high school. She said she should be allowed inside the school to sell meals, snacks and drinks to the student body. She, too, said she would follow the school’s request not to sell anything at lunchtime. But she added: “If we have to keep running around so all the time what sense does it make? We should be inside everyone can make a living. “The canteen cannot provide for 1,000 and some children in an hour, it is a waste of time.” Parkinson Memorial Principal Ian Holder gave Barbados TODAY a tour of the double fence around the school compound but declined further comment.(BT)

BASELESS – Wild and silly imaginations. That is how Minister of Agriculture and Food Security Indar Weir has described concerns by the Democratic Labour Party that acres of plantation lands formerly owned by defunct insurance company CLICO, would be sold as residential property by Government. In fact, the Agriculture Minister has said, that those lands and many others would be dedicated to agricultural development as Government attempted to reverse ten years of DLP “inactivity” in the vital sector. “I don’t know how you could turn agricultural land into a [residential] development without first involving the Ministry of Agriculture. We have a Chief Agricultural Officer who is highly trained and makes informed decisions on these things before they even reach Town Planning,” Weir told Starcom Network’s Down to Brass Tacks’ Wednesday programme. “If the information is being skewed in any way that the CLICO land is being sold and people are going to subdivide them and all of that, I think the conversation is way ahead of what it should be, because the worst thing we would want to do as a people is to make wild and silly imaginations and come to conclusions on things on which we have no basis.” On Wednesday, the DLP’s spokesperson on agriculture Andre Worrell expressed “deep concern” about the recent announcement that the lands could be used for infrastructural development at a time when the country desperately needed to reduce its food import bill. “We are urging the Government to have some discussion and to be open and transparent with the people of Barbados on their plans for the CLICO plantation lands in St John, St George, Christ Church, and other areas. We are urging farmers not to sit idly by and let these lands be sold,” he said. In response, the Minister noted he was always keen to engage the public but did not have an ‘appetite’ for people who “have a belief and are attempting to turning it into reality”. Instead, he declared Government was preparing to revive lands which are currently growing ‘river tamarinds’ in the Belle, St. Michael, Harrison’s Point in St. Lucy and the Scotland District to significantly improve the bounty of the sugar industry and other crops. “I am simply giving the calm assurance that we are doing everything we can to bring the lands under the BAMC under production. We are also working with the private farmers… of every single type and class, so that when we look to bring back agriculture to its rightful place in Barbados, we will have a situation where all of those lands that are currently growing river tamarinds will be back into production and the process is starting this month,” Weir declared. “We are starting by cleaning up Harrison’s Point and going to the Belle where we are going to remove those river tamarinds and put it at Port Vale Factory to be used as burning stock when the factory is grinding during next year’s sugar harvest and we are planning to start the crop on time next year.” He stressed that part of reviving sugarcane production would coincide with the restoration of eddoes and increases in yams and sweet potatoes. “I am trying to reverse this whole ten years of inactivity and inertia and only God knows how I feel about having to say this, but it is the reality. This isn’t one, two or three years of work. This will equally take us all of ten to 15 years,” Weir said.(BT)

CHARACTER CERTS HINDERING JOBS – The closure of the Police Certificate of Character Office is causing headaches for several Barbadians, in some cases hindering them from finding work. And what is adding to their woes is that no one seems to know when it will be reopenedCruising Island Musicians is contemplating its next move after being unable to get the certificate for ten musicians.Stephen Cox, one of the managing partners, said the company recruited musicians from all over the world to work on cruise ships.“Currently, I have ten crew members from Barbados who have been offered contracts to work on board cruise ships to start in three weeks. They made the appointments, which were confirmed, and they went, only to be told that the Police Certificate of Character Office is closed until further notice,” he said. When contacted on Tuesday, Assistant Commissioner of Police Richard Boyce said they were encountering system problems, but were working assiduously to have them rectified as soon as possible. He asked the public to bear with them.“Everything has gone computerised now, so we’re working on everything. One thing leads into the next; it is not a one-off operation you have to do. It is a holistic operation that involves different steps. Even if you try to correct one [issue], another step has to go which is not functioning correctly; so that is the problem. We hope to get it resolved any minute now,” he said.(WN)

TWO CHARGED –Two St Andrew men have been remanded in connection with this island’s latest murder as well as a number of other criminal charges. They are 24-year-old Kevin Andrew Haynes, of Jordan Road, Belleplaine and 20-year-old Nathan Anthony Gaskin of Walkers.The two are accused of murdering 22-year-old Rahim Ward between August 23 and 30 as well as causing serious bodily harm to 21-year-old Deshawn Ricardo Clarke on August 23 while at Walkers, St Andrew. Haynes and Clarke are also facing charges of possession, possession with intent to supply, possession with intent to traffic and cultivation of 76 cannabis plants on August 24. The accused appeared before Magistrate Ian Weekes in the District ‘D’ Magistrates’ Court today where they were not required to plead to the indictable charges. They will make their next court appearance on October 9. (BT)

SENTENCED REDUCED – The Court of Appeal on Wednesday set aside a 15-year sentence imposed by the High Court on manslayer Toneal Omar Walrond for the death of 60-year-old Evans Burnham. Burnham, formerly of Black Bess, St Peter died at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital on July 8, 2011, following an altercation in which he sustained a fractured skull and other injuries after being hit in the face several times with a piece of wood. Walrond, of French Village, St Peter was charged with the murder which is said to have occurred sometime between July 1 and July 8, 2011. In February 2016 he pleaded guilty to the lesser charge of manslaughter. In June 2017, using a starting point of 20 years, Walrond was sentenced by Madam Justice Michelle Weekes to 15 years in prison. However, after being credited with the five years 334 days spent on remand prior to sentencing, he was ordered incarcerated for another nine years and 21 days. Through his legal counsel Marlon Gordon who appeared with attorney-at-law Kashka Mottley, the manslayer appealed his sentence on the basis that it was excessive. In handing down a decision this morning in the No. 1 Supreme Court, Acting Appeal Court judge, Madam Justice Margaret Reifer said while the three-member panel who heard the appeal is of the view that the sentencing judge took into account the relevant principles and facts, “We are nonetheless in agreement with counsel for the appellant, that all the circumstances of the facts of the case were more in line with a starting point of 15 years.” Outlining reasons for the decision the judge stated that the mitigating features of the case “dominated” the aggravating factors. She pointed to early guilty pleas which she explained are in the public’s interest since they avoid the need for a trial and save victims, witnesses and often family of the victim, from having to give evidence of “often traumatic events or from reliving the events” and achieving closure. “The appellant’s early guilty plea, co-operation with the police, sincere expressions of remorse, the acceptance by the court and the parties that there was no evidence of planning or premeditation, the fact that the appellant was not armed with a firearm or intrinsically dangerous weapon, but in the face of aggression by the deceased, armed himself with a piece of wood that he found within reach, provide powerful mitigating factors,” said Justice Refier. The Crown, she said, did not appear to accept self-defense as a complete defence but it was still a consideration in the sentencing. In a statement to police Walrond said he went to Burnham’s home to collect some money. Instead of paying him, Burnham, he said: “Take up a chair and hit me”. The two men then fought and it was during that time that Walrond took up a piece of wood and hit Burnham, “round he faces more than once”. Burnham fell and Walrond said he helped him into the house, got ice from the refrigerator and handed it to him. After that, he said he panicked and left the house by car. “It appears that the Crown accepted on the facts outlined and the analysis of the aggravating and mitigating factors, that the deceased was the aggressor, but their case was, that the force used was disproportionate and excessive,” said the acting Court of Appeal judge who added that the evidence of self-defense even if it was rejected by the jury was still a mitigating factor “There is no evidence that the trial judge considered self-defense as a mitigating factor even if excessive force was used. “It is against the backdrop of all the matters reviewed . . . that we are of the opinion that the sentence was excessive and find a starting point of 15 years more acceptable than one of 20 years. “In view of the premises, the appeal is allowed. The sentence of 15 years imprisonment imposed on the appellant is set aside. The court substitutes a sentence of ten years . . . to run from the date of the original sentence . . . full credit for time spent [on remand] of 2,161 . . . given,” Justice Reifer said as Chief Justice Sir Marston Gibson, Court of Appeal judge Madam Justice Kaye Goodridge and Senior Crown Counsel Olivia Davis, who appeared for the Crown listened on. (BT)

MORE TIME ON REMAND FOR MAN ON GUN CHARGES – The man who allegedly shot through a woman’s bedroom window, at Beckles Avenue, New Orleans, St Michael three weeks ago injuring her in the right hand, has been remanded for a further 28 days. Raheim Colin Forde, of 10th Avenue New Orleans, St Michael appeared before Magistrate Kristie Cuffy-Sargeant today, two days after Chief Magistrate Christopher Birch remanded him to HMP Dodds. The 26-year-old bar owner is alleged to have caused serious bodily harm to Sheron Matthews on August 23 with intent to maim, disfigure or disable her. It is further alleged that on the same day he unlawfully and maliciously engaged in conduct that placed Jumaane Matthews-Ifill in danger of death or serious bodily harm. Forde is also facing charge of using a firearm without a valid licence. He was not required to plead to those indictable charges nor to a charge that he dishonestly assisted in the retention, removal or disposal of a motorcar worth $28,000 belonging to Ross Clarke between December 5 and 12, 2018 knowing or believing it to be stolen. He will make his next appearance before the No. 2 District ‘A’ Magistrates’ Court on October 10. Also appearing in that court on that date before Cuffy-Sargeant is 36-year-old David Omar Norville, also of 10th Avenue New Orleans. He is alleged to have unlawfully assaulted Jumaane Matthews-Ifill on August 23. He has pleaded not guilty to the charge and remains on $1,000 bail. (BT)

BURGLARS PLEAD FOR MERCY – Two St Thomas women who robbed an elderly couple in their home while armed with a piece of wood and a knife have pleaded for leniency in sentencing and even offered to pay thousands of dollars in compensation to the complainants. While attorney-at-law Samuel Legay urged the High Court judge to be as lenient as possible in sentencing his client, Tiffany Cortia Arthur, the convicted burglar’s co-accused Carol Ann Veronica Roett pleaded for the same consideration. Arthur, 34, of Content Land and Roett, 41, of Dunscombe, are currently on remand awaiting their fate on a December 28, 2010, aggravated burglary charge. They had pleaded guilty at a previous sitting in the No. 5 Supreme Court to entering the house of Ian Pickup and stealing a camera, wallet and a handheld video game belonging to him as well as three necklaces, a lighter and two rings belonging to his wife Donna Marie Henderickson. At the time the burglars were armed with a piece of wood and a knife. In making sentencing submissions before Madam Justice Pamela Beckles recently Legay disclosed that his client was a “vulnerable” young lady at the time. He said a statement to police, indicated that her mother had passed and she had been burdened with a funeral expense bill and she also had a young child to take care of. “Not knowing at the time . . . how to deal with this mountainous bill and dealing with her child, she became desperate,” Legay revealed. “I believe that in dealing with issues of death it affects persons differently, and Arthur was no different and she sought, by any means, to get this bill paid,” the defence attorney added. He said her guilty plea and her cooperation with police were in her favor. “Her intention [was] to get this matter over and done with because on reflection, a great mistake had been made. And so as a result of that she became very remorseful, she wanted to apologise to the virtual complainants. “With that background, I want to appeal to the court to be as lenient as possible towards Arthur because I do not see the name Tiffany Arthur synonymous with criminal activities,” Legay told the High Court judge. He further submitted that if it was the position of the court that a custodial sentence should be imposed, “And I am not asking for that, at least, the very least of the sentence would be my humble submission.” Legay put forward a starting point 18 months to two years in prison. “Given the passage time, things have changed. My client has been consistent. She has not gotten herself involved in anything else and therefore I believe she needs to be given that opportunity to remain in that light,” he added. The defence attorney said: “From then up until now the accused has no previous convictions. She has kept herself clean. The accused is not a criminal; this which she did is out of character, but out of bad company back in 2010 she has found herself before this court. Therefore my submission is that the court is very lenient towards her. “I don’t believe Arthur is a criminal,” he said adding that Arthur was willing to pay the complainants $15, 000 in compensation but needed time to pay the amount. Roett, who represented herself, also urged the court to show her leniency saying that she had not been in trouble with the law for over a decade and had a young child. She too submitted that she was willing to pay compensation in the sum of $15,000 if given the time to do so. However, Senior Crown Counsel Olivia Davis told the judge that a starting point for the sentencing of the convicted women should be 16 years. She pointed to the aggravating factors saying that the offence was planned and took place at night while the property stolen was both high in value and sentimental. The prosecutor also reminded the court that substantial force was used during the commission of the offence, which resulted in significant injury to the victim Ian Pickup, and that a weapon was also involved. “This offence has had a negative mental effect on the [elderly] couple. When everything is considered the mitigating factors of Arthur will weigh heavier and result in a lower sentence than the sentence of Roett but the Crown submits that the starting point should be 16 years and the appropriate deductions be made,” Davis stated. The two women will reappear before Justice Beckles on November 21 for sentencing. (BT)

GUYANESE ON INDECENT ASSAULT CHARGE REMANDED – Strong arguments by attorney-at-law Mohia Ma’at that the grounds put forward against bail are “all without merit” were not enough to keep his client from spending 28 days on remand. The submissions, came after Dhanpaul Dudhnauth, a 48-year-old farmer, from Industry Hall, St Philip was not required to enter a plea to the indictable charge that he indecently assaulted a minor. The accused, who is a Guyana native and has been living here for the last 26 years is alleged to have committed the criminal act on May 9. Prosecutor, police constable Victoria Taitt put forward the serious nature of the offence as the main ground for her objections against bail stating that the child allegedly involved was six years old. That minor, she submitted, needed protection from the accused. Constable Taitt added that there was a likelihood that the accused may re-offend if granted bail. However, Ma’at stated that his client was a good candidate for bail as he had never been before the law courts of Barbados and was a father of two. “He has been here since 1992 and has never been charged . . . walks the straight and narrow . . . and as it stands now the allegation before the court is just that, an allegation,” Ma’at told Magistrate Kristie Cuffy-Sargeant. The defence attorney disclosed that Dudhnauth had surrendered himself to the police after getting a phone call. “Yes, it is a serious offence . . . but this matter is in the District ‘A’ jurisdiction and the accused resides deep in St Philip,” said Ma’at who argued that the chances that the two parties would cross paths were unlikely. “The likelihood of any interaction between the minor, father or mother is virtually non-existent given the proximity. He is in the east and she is in the west, so interference is null and void. “The likelihood that he will re-offend has no merit. He has not reoffended, he has been charged. He received immigration status, he would not have gotten that if he had [a record], so that is a testimony to his character,” Ma’at said. “The grounds put forward are all without merit,” the attorney added as he urged to court to grant bail with any conditions it saw fit. That application was denied and the accused was remanded to return before the No. 2 District ‘A’ Magistrates’ Court on October 9.(BT)

POLLARDS CHOICE A BACKWARD MOVE – Fast bowling legend Sir Andy Roberts has questioned the timing of Kieron Pollard’s appointment as white-ball skipper and argues that sacked one-day skipper Jason Holder was not at fault for the West Indies’ wretched one-day form in recent years. In fact, the outspoken Antiguan believes that neither Pollard’s appointment nor the acquisition of a new head coach will have any impact on the Caribbean side’s fortunes, as the fundamental problem lay in the dearth of quality players available.“A captain is only as good right now as the players he has,” Sir Andy told the Mason and Guest radio cricket show. He added: “I have no issues with what they’re (Cricket West Indies) trying to do but I’ve always said that the least problem we have is the coaching, our biggest problem is to find players. “It doesn’t matter who you have as head coach – if you could bring the best head coach in the world today with the players that we have you’ll be getting the same results because the coach does not go on the field.” CWI announced Monday that Pollard would take over from Holder and Twenty20 skipper, Carlos Brathwaite with immediate effect. Also, the regional governing body said it had formally begun the recruitment process for a new permanent head coach, to fill the role currently being performed by ex-West Indies batsman Floyd Reifer on a temporary basis. It was Pollard’s elevation to the ODI captaincy, however, which made the headlines. Age 32, the Trinidadian has not played a single one-dayer in the last three years. Further, he boasts an unflattering batting average of 25 with the bat from 101 ODIs with three hundreds, while taking 50 wickets with his slow medium at nearly 40 runs apiece. “He’s [32]. [When] the next ODI [World Cup] comes around he will be 36, 37. We should be looking to get good players [around 23]. As usual, we’re always looking backward,” Sir Andy pointed out, adding that Pollard should have been given the captaincy five years ago when Holder was appointed. “They should have made him (Holder) understudy to Pollard [back then]. Once they gave him (Holder) the captaincy and they stuck to it, then I don’t see the reason to go back to Kieron Pollard now.” Holder failed to win a single series during his tenure and also oversaw West Indies’ worst-ever showing at a World Cup last July, when the side finished ninth of 10 teams with just two wins. Sir Andy said CWI should have persisted with the 27-year-old Holder but afforded him the benefit of an experienced coaching staff. “What are they basing Jason Holder’s captaincy on? Results or tactics on the field? If we’re going to be building and looking towards the future, I think you should stick with a younger captain who is in there for three, four years,” Sir Andy contended. “What they should have done is give him (Holder) the experience that is required with the coaching staff. That’s what they should have done. Are they blaming Jason’s captaincy for the results we’ve been having? If we don’t have good cricketers, those are the results we’re going to get. It doesn’t matter who is in charge as captain or who’s in charge of coaching. “I think our problem is that we’re not developing good cricketers – there is not enough pressure placed on players for personal development and I’ve been saying that for the last 10, 15 years. If these guys don’t take the opportunity to develop themselves, we are going to be stuck where we are.” (BT)

BOXING LACKS PUNCH – One of this country’s most decorated amateur fighters, Junior Greenidge, says boxing is down and almost out and the Barbados Boxing Association (BBA) has run out of ideas. Greenidge, 39, the winner of a Commonwealth Games bronze medal in Manchester in 2002, told Weekend Sport that boxing was at an all-time low and he is willing to spearhead a revival, but the corporate sector has to come onboard.“Boxing badly needs help and it hurts me to see that little is happening in the sport. I am looking to target the blocks because those boys can be easily trained. I know amateur boxers cannot receive monies but can collect development funding so they can buy their vitamins and gear.“The standard of boxing has sunk and I think someone like me has to play a role in reviving it because I know what it takes to win medals and produce champions,” he said.A passionate Greenidge said that if a facility came to fruition, he could have former world-rated boxers Floyd Mayweather Sr and Roy Jones Jr coming to Barbados as technical advisers to launch the fight programme here.(WN)

WELL DONE – Festival Designer of the Year Kevin Small’s Fifth Element Mas walked away with the lion’s share of prizes at Saturday’s Crop Over Awards Ceremony. The band leader and his team took home nine prizes at the end of the event held at the Daphne Joseph Hackett Theatre, Queen’s Park. The National Cultural Foundation (NCF) presented more than 100 prizes to top performers and contributors of this year’s festival. Band leaders, masqueraders, senior and junior calypsonians, visual artists and volunteers were all recognised for the roles they played in staging a successful festival. Awardees, along with specially invited guests, were treated to an evening reminiscent of the major moments of the season. There were live performances by Junior Monarchs Quon, Shontae and The Mighty Bit Bit; Calypso Monarch Classic, Tune of the Crop winner Leadpipe and a video presentation of Mikey’s winning Soca Monarch performance since he was overseas. Video clips of all major events for the festival starting with the Bajaramas to the climax on Grand Kadooment Day were also shown. Minister of Creative Economy, Culture and Sport John King congratulated the awardees and thanked corporate Barbados for their continued support of the festival. “A celebration of this nature at the end of every season is paramount as we take a moment to acknowledge, reward and laud your commitment to this festival and the aspiring journeys along the roads to success. We applaud you…” he said. Chairman of the NCF Board Glyne Harrison who played on this year’s slogan Crop Over Correct said it was a successful season since there were a number of areas in which they got it “correct”. “By the end of the festival, we were pleased to say we got the buy-in from young to old, saying they were Crop Over Correct … We also got our coverage correct this year and we were able to take our stories and our news to the wider world. It’s something that we need to continue to do because Crop Over is bigger than Barbados,” the chairman said.(BT)

POMP & PAGEANTRY - The Miss Universe Barbados 2019 pageant was awesome! The entire production was flawless, swift and highly professional. At 10:33 p.m. on Saturday night at the Hilton Barbados, a beaming Shanel Ifill was crowned Miss Universe Barbados 2019. The 20-year-old University of the West Indies student won the hearts of both the judges and the crowd to beat a field of eight other delegates. Shanel was impressive throughout the night both in her swimwear and her beautifully designed and fitted evening gown. Her smarts came to the fore as she answered both questions posed to her on the big night. The deciding question asked to the top three contestants was: “What current global situation would you lend your voice to as Miss Universe and why?” Shanel’s response: “There is so much going on in the world right now but I would definitely have to lend my voice to the fires that are happening in the Amazon. Some 26, 000 fires rage on in the Amazon and that is literally 20 per cent of the world’s oxygen system not only decimating the forest itself but there are tribes that live within the forest that has been completely decimated. They are like gone. They can’t be found; it caused genocide on some of the tribes. So I feel as though, for me, that would be where my purpose would lie…” The crowd erupted with cheers and screams of approval both during and by the time she had ende She graced the stage with her presence for the announcement of the winner as the top three contestants stood nervously awaiting the final result. Prior to pageant night, all nine delegates would have been interviewed one on one and those marks would have contributed to the final score. First, runner-up went to Beviny Payne who well-deserved to be in the top three. She looked splendid in her green evening gown as well. Payne is the perfect choice to perform the duties of queen should Ifill be unable to do so. The second runner-up was Hilary Williams who also won the People’s Choice Award.That award was well justified as the crowd clearly loved her. The Top 3 were chosen from a field of a Top 5 which was named earlier in the night after a question-and-answer segment. The other two contestants in the Top 5 were: Alexandra Ortiz and Jeunessa Banfield. Miss Photogenic went to Kristen Asha while Jeunessa Banfield copped Miss Congeniality. The pageant production was nothing short of excellent. There was full use of multi-media throughout the night. Presenter for the night Media Specialist Gaynelle Marshall did a fabulous job keeping things flowing. The Director of Media Relations and PR made comments and smart remarks that were clearly designed to keep the contestants calm and focused. The pageant was held before a packed audience that included Minister of Education, Technological and Vocational Training Santia Bradshaw and other dignitaries. All on the Miss Universe Barbados team, led by National Director Brian Green, should take a bow for what could only be described as a top-notch, world-class show staged on this small rock. (BT)

110days left in the year Shalom! Follow us on Twitter, Facebook & Instagram for your daily news. #thechasefiles #dailynewscaps #bajannewscaps #newsinanutshell

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gaiatheorist · 7 years ago

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The drugs don’t work. (For me.)

This is a weird one. Awake at midnight last night, I did what I do, and browsed the news. My disrupted sleep is partly due to the brain injuries, and partly ‘just’ the situation I find myself in. There’s the potential for some well-meaning but insensitive soul to suggest warm milk, no screen-time, ‘meaningful’ breathing, and the plethora of other things you ‘should’ do when you can’t sleep. Nobody has suggested sleeping tablets to me, yet, but there’s a whole internet out there, is it my melatonin, my seratonin, my magnesium? (I don’t know if magnesium has anything to do with anything, apparently it can impact on the binding of the vitamin D I’m probably deficient in, though.)

Can’t sleep? Take a ‘Kalm’, or a ‘Nytol’, or Valerian root, or Mankuna honey in warm milk, or something from Gwyneth Paltrow’s weird range. Lavender worked really well for someone’s auntie Gladys, and so-and-so swears by chamomile tea. I’m making fun of myself, there, because if there’s a herbal/holistic remedy, I’ll try that before the ‘chemical’, synthesised alternatives. (’Chemical’ in quote-marks, as a nod to Tim Minchin, who rightly points out that ‘Everything is chemical, EVERYTHING.’) That tendency to stick to herbs, essential oils, and food-based medicine, rather than prescribed medicine infuriates my son, it would do, he’s studying Chemistry, he understands the ‘hard’ science stuff that baffles me. He’s 20 in a few weeks, and he’s been to the doctor four times in his entire life. Fucithalmic acid drops for conjunctivitis when he was a baby. I finished the course, and then treated with eyebright and breastmilk, he’s never had a re-occurrence. Septic tonsillitis in 2010, treated with Amoxcycillin, of course he couldn’t tell the doctor whether he was allergic to Penicillin, that was his first course of antibiotics, ever. Back down, I didn’t home-school him, and he was allowed to watch TV, he’s had all of his routine immunisations, and the optional extra Meningitis one. (That the doctor didn’t know whether he’d had, but I did, because I knew which year it started being offered as a routine school-age immunisation.)

The kid implicitly trusts ‘modern’ medicine. Most people, who don’t run around in tinfoil hats, calling consumer conspiracy on everything, trust modern medicine. That’s what I’m wrestling with this morning. (Not literally, I’ve pushed the patient information leaflet to the side of my pack of antihistamines, so I don’t get frustrated about opening the box at the ‘wrong’ end. Apparently they’re set that way for right-handed people, and you can avoid opening the ‘wrong’ end of the pack by feeling for the braille, I don’t know.) What I’m over-processing is the “Antidepressants work!” news stories. There’s no reason at all for me to over-process it, the first line in one of them was something along the theme of “Antidepressants work for patients with a diagnosis of depression.” Case closed, I don’t have ‘depression’, my current ‘unfit for work’ certificate states “Stress related problem, previous SAH.” (I’ve abbreviated ‘Subarachnoid Haemorrhage’, because my GP spelled it wrong, I don’t suppose he’s written it as many times as I have in the last 3 years.)

What I’m pre-planning butting heads against is that DWP, PIP, and ATOS are highly likely to point out that I’m not ‘on’ anti-depressants. That’s fine, they can do that, there is no diagnosis of depression anywhere in my last 3 years of medical notes, I can point to the page where the Workplace Well-being doctor has reported “Gives a clear account of herself, and, to her credit, is not depressed.” (If they’re referencing the ‘Depression?’ on my admission notes following the haemorrhage, I’ll politely point out that what the ex actually said to the medics was “I think she’s got depression, but I don’t know if she’s on anything.” I tore into him about that, when I was in my angry/confrontational stage, and he was in his confused/traumatised stage. Unkind.)

It’s great that antidepressants work for some people, I wish those people all the goodwill in the world, dragging oneself through the mire of poor mental health is draining, if there’s a chemical lift that helps, use it. What I’m mindful of is that the medics have never found a dosage of this-or-that that worked for me. I have episodes of low mood, sometimes very low mood, but they pass. I make them pass, because I cannot exist in that state, in that state, I’m barely functional, forcing myself to ‘go through the motions’, it’s soul-sucking. There are lots of days when I just-don’t-want-to, I know my own pattern, and, although I’ll allow myself the odd ‘off’ day, three-in-a-row is my trigger-point. I had three-in-a-row a couple of weekends back, so presented to the GP, because ‘failure to seek or follow medical advice’ is also a flag-of-concern in me. If he’d prescribed, I would have taken the pills, I had the proof of low-income entitlement to free prescriptions in my bag, just in case.

He knows me, he’s been my GP since I was about 14, as much as I’m just one more in a sea of faces to him, he actually remembered that they’ve tried me on pretty much every SSRI and antidepressant, with very limited effect. A bit like the dodgy Johann Hari, I ‘revert to baseline’ within months on any antidepressant, and they either have to increase the dosage, or, once they hit the median lethal dosage bar, switch me to another variant. Antidepressants don’t work on ‘me’, because, for the majority of the time, it’s not depression. (Yes, there’s the resistance-in-me to being in that foggy-vague don’t-care state, but, if he’d prescribed, I would have taken them, and tried to monitor myself closely, through the “I can’t feel my leg, but it will probably be fine in an hour or so.” episodes, that are scary enough when you ARE fully lucid. The third, inoperable aneurysm is sitting in an area of brain governing the majority of my motor function, as well as the blood supply to my retinas being impacted upon my the surgery to the second aneurysm, sucks to be me.)

‘On paper’, I probably ‘should’ be depressed. That being the assumed-case, a year on antidepressants ‘should’, theoretically, stabilise me, maybe they’ll throw in a bit of CBT, to make me magically forget that, on top of everything else, I nearly died, and now have brain injuries? Yeah, I’m pulling my socks up, and person-ing up, but I do still have lumps of metal where there used to be functional brain cells, that’s not going to go away, or ‘get better.’

At some point, I don’t know when, I’ll be called in for a DWP ‘work capability assessment.’ I’m not looking forward to that one bit, and I expect that the same person who ticks the box to say I can lift an empty box will also query why I’m not on antidepressants. I need to not be a smart-arse at that point, and question how they’re a qualified doctor AND a manual handling of loads assessor. I also need to remember to state verbally, and ensure it is recorded, every time an action or activity causes me distress or discomfort. I’m going to end up losing my voice. Have that, CBT practitioners, one of my ‘behaviours’ is not-disclosing discomfort or distress, so I don’t upset other people.

I’m rambling. I’m awaiting my PIP tribunal date, where I will likely be asked why I’m not on antidepressants. I’m awaiting my DWP ‘work capability assessment’, again, I’m likely to be told, by a box-ticker that I’d be ‘all better’ with a dose of Prozac. (Prozac brand-name now expired, it’s generic fluoxetine, and my last experience of it had me on 60mg/day, with little impact, they can’t put me on a higher dose than that, due to my BMI.) I’m also waiting on an appointment with Neuro-psychology, I have tried very hard to self-manage the brain injuries, but the cognitive fatigue and disturbed sleep still persist, there’s an ironic chuckle, there, because a lot of the side-effects of my brain injuries are also consistent with depressive traits. I know the difference in me, and ‘trying’ me on antidepressants would be similar to bashing a ganglion with the family bible, just a distraction technique, and a fairly dangerous one, at that.

What I’m wary of is the powers-that-be taking the headlines and research about the efficacy of antidepressants as a one-size-fits-all silver bullet against all-that-ails-everyone. Antidepressants have limited effectiveness on me, I have no diagnosis of depression, they’d be as well giving me sugar-tablets, or something to prevent testicular inflammation. If I had a diagnosis of depression, I would have given up on the systems-and-processes already, as a demonstrable number of people have, some permanently. Not-all-antidepressants are suitable for ‘all’ people, I had to advise my own GP that one variant he was ‘trying’ me on, nearly 10 years ago, was linked to suicidal and self-harming ideation. That’s specific to me, I’m a historical self-harmer, standard ‘not all’ disclaimer here. There are myriad noted side-effects with antidepressants, I’ll throw in ‘weight gain’ as an example, even if there’s no underlying eating disorder, whacking on 3st in 2 years, like I did is hardly a confidence-boost for a person who is already experiencing low mood. The side-effects are probably under-reported, between the depressive state of there being no point, and the cloudy sheep-sleep of ‘it does not matter’, some people just won’t report. Throw in the dismissive “It could be worse!” lines some doctors are still fond of when people who do report are sent away as neurotic, and the reporting is further compromised.

Antidepressants DO work, very effectively for some people, and I’m genuinely pleased that a bit of a chemical crutch helps them to live, rather than just existing. My concern is that these articles will be taken out of context, and that the flavour-of-the-month SSRI will be seen as a magic wand. (No, head, ‘they’ are not going to fortify the tap-water with fluoxetine, to make us all immune to depression, that’s silly.) Mental health services are stretched way beyond capacity, and ‘modern life is rubbish’, the fabled increase to MH services is a nonsense, it’s superficial, the new intake of ‘Improving Access to Psychological Therapies’ practitioners will probably start going off sick themselves very soon. (I have a friend who’s VERY disturbed, recently allocated for talking therapy with a girl just out of college, that would have been potentially harmful for both of them, so he discontinued. The intervention has probably been recorded as completed and successful.) Antidepressants are very effective for some people, but, in others, they’re a sticking plaster over an arterial wound, I’m worried that some people, who really do need more than a pat on the head, and some ‘magic medicine’ are going to be very badly treated. If there’s a perception that Prozac is panacea, some people will be very badly harmed by it.

If the drugs work for you, that’s great, I’m not here to demonise them. There is nothing wrong with taking the right medication for the right condition, nothing at all. My worry is that it becomes a blanket-catch-all, a first-resort, and that some people will slip through the net, disappear off radar, and not have different, underlying conditions, that depressive symptoms coincide with addressed.

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trendingnewsb · 7 years ago

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How Did President Trump Do on His Physical? Its Complicated

The numbers don’t lie, unless they do. After much resistance and under increasing pressure, President Trump’s White House this week allowed Rear Admiral Ronny Jackson, the White House doctor, to release results from a physical examination.

How’d Trump do? Well, that’s tricky to answer. Trump’s opposition and the media have been asking two fundamentally impolite questions for years: Is he fat? And is he nuts? As a candidate and as president, Trump has accused his opponents of mental and physical illness. Normal presidencies tend to release medical records to journalists who cover that beat. But last year wasn’t a normal campaign, and this hasn’t been a normal presidency.

Whether the president is healthy has consequences on the stability of the nation, but that knowledge has been hard to come by. Complicating things further, the answers to those impolite but salient questions aren’t, it turns out, straightforward—for anyone, not just a president.

At a long press briefing on Tuesday, Rear Admiral Ronny Jackson ran down the numbers and took some squirmy questions. Trump, 71 years old, is 6 feet and 3 inches tall, Jackson said, and weighs 239 pounds. That’s … convenient. Doctors have a suite of responses teed up for an overweight man in his 70s, but those numbers muddy the swamp. Apparently Trump reported a height of 6’2” at one point, but the most recent height and weight give him a Body Mass Index just one tick below “obese.” Medically speaking, the president is merely quite overweight. (If you believe the numbers Jackson gave, that is. If you don’t, we’re basically done here, because there’s nothing else to evaluate.)

This week’s issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association, by coincidence, dedicates an entire special section to obesity. Its point is that those rigid standards for BMI might not tell the whole story. It might be possible, for example, to be obese, BMI-wise, but still have good cardiorespiratory fitness; conversely, someone with low CRF might be more likely to face health problems than someone with obesity. Physical activity levels and other factors confound all the data, as does age. “It’s definitely a work in progress,” says Catherine Forest, medical director at Stanford Health Care in Los Altos. “The determination is based somewhat on body mass index, but it’s more complicated. If you have elevated cholesterol and you have diabetes, your risk is multiplied. If you smoke cigarettes, your risk is multiplied. If you don’t exercise, it’s multiplied.”

OK, good questions there. The president doesn’t smoke, doesn’t drink alcohol, and he doesn’t have diabetes—Jackson reported his hemoglobin A1c, a measurement of blood sugar, as 5 percent. That’s in the normal range. Trump’s blood pressure and heart rate are in the normal range, too. The president’s EKG and heart function were normal, and tests also showed that Trump’s carotid artery had no blockage.

But: The president by most accounts doesn’t exercise—playing golf three times a week doesn’t count if you ride the cart. And his cholesterol, especially the cardiovascular disease marker low-density lipoprotein cholesterol, is above 140 even though he takes a statin drug to lower it every day. He also takes a daily low dose of aspirin, also thought to be protective of the heart. His cardiac calcium level was high, a risk factor for coronary artery disease that freaked out a few cardiologists. Jackson said the president had “nonclinical coronary atherosclerosis.” Other physicians said, basically, wait what now?

The key to figuring this out, probably, is to not get too obsessed with the technical distinction between “overweight” and “obese.” That’s a public health-type way of distinguishing among populations. But we’re not talking about a population here. “I would think that if he’s close to a BMI of 30, he probably has a significant amount of excess fat,” says Xavier Pi-Sunyer, an endocrinologist at Columbia University and co-director of the New York Obesity Nutrition Research Center. “The question is, is his excess fat subcutaneous, or does he have a lot of intra-abdominal, intramuscular adipose fat? Those are significantly more dangerous.”

In other words, if all your fat is just underneath your skin, OK, maybe that’s cool. But if it’s around your vital organs and gunking up your liver, that’s not cool. “If you want to be more personalized, you probably want to do a few more studies to see where the fat is in the individual,” Pi-Sunyer says. That’d probably mean an MRI, which Jackson didn’t mention.

Cardiovascular health was only part of what Jackson tested. He performed, controversially among the Twitterati, a test called the Montreal Cognitive Assessment. It looks dumb—a series of very basic questions, like, “can you tell which one is a lion and which is an elephant,” or “draw ten minutes to 11 on a blank clock face.” Kindergarten stuff (here’s a PDF), and Trump aced it.

To be clear, though, the point of an assessment like this one or the “mini-cog” some physicians use is to check basics, not evaluate whether someone is qualified to be president. The MoCA is a screening test—you do it to see if a person needs more testing later. “That test is specifically looking for certain types of cognitive dysfunction. It doesn’t test for depression or other kinds of mental health disorders,” says Joseph Ouslander, a geriatrician at the Schmidt College of Medicine at Florida Atlantic University and executive editor of the Journal of the American Geriatric Society.

Even if a MoCA shows mild impairment, Ouslander says he might not do anything for six months or a year, or he’d wait to see if a patient or family members complained about memory lapses or other problems. (It’s like invoking the 25th Amendment, except for family dinners.) That might not be ideal. “Actually, executive function is one of the first things that’s in decline with dementia,” says Forest. “Their memory might be OK, but their ability to make good decisions is in disrepair.”

Which does hint at a bit of a then-what. Washington conventional wisdom remains that Ronald Reagan was suffering symptoms of cognitive decline in the later years of his presidency, and was protected by his staff and his wife. No doctor or medical records have confirmed that, but even the existence of the rumor hints at the degree to which a committed White House could deal with a medically compromised president. After all, Woodrow Wilson’s wife Edith became de facto president after he suffered a stroke—though it’s hard to imagine that sort of breach of constitutional succession today.

By Jackson’s account, the president got a more than full work-up. He had a colonoscopy in 2013 that was normal—no polyps—which means that no doctor needs to go near the orifice with which the president has indicated some familiarity until 2023. His neurological screens were normal, but Jackson didn't say if he'd looked at Trump's gait and balance, but the president did get all his recommended vaccinations. The kind of screening questions that Forest and Ouslander might ask on a wellness visit about depression, connection to family and friends, elder abuse, or help with shopping or finances seem non-operative for a POTUS.