#also even though I know he's in theatre and music and I know he's great seeing noah galvin in a music/theatre capacity/role

[c0smic-horrorwerewolf]

My mom: “You and your dad are so intelligent! Emotionally and socially! You are also both great at picking up subtext, asking questions and understanding writers intent. And best of all you both can explain it all to basically anyone!”

My dad: “I don’t know if in that intelligent..”

Me: “Thanks but… I think your wrong-“

My mom: *internal screaming because her two Nurodivergent love ones are underestimating how good they are at things and the world because they’re to harsh on themselves*

[after-nine-at-the-oasis]

theater camp (the movie) is amazing

[hausofmingi]

spotlight | choi seungcheol

pairing: choi seungcheol x afab reader

word count: 5.6K

summary: You're so excited to get the opportunity to sound design your favorite show, Hadestown. But the new lighting guy really knows how to piss you off.

warnings: 18+, minors do not interact, sound designer!reader, lighting designer!seungcheol, switch!reader and switch!seungcheol, fight for dominance, unprotected piv (don't do that), oral (f and m receiving), semi-public?, munch behavior, head pusher (SORRY IM SORRY), use of petnames (babygirl, sweetie/sweetheart, good girl, baby)

author's note: so hi. if you've noticed i've been gone for like months and months, no i haven't mind ya business. ANYWAYS this was a VERYYYYY indulgent fic bc as you may be able to tell i dabble in theatre. but im not a sound person, maybe one day ill do a fic from an actor perspective but something about being in the booth got me IDKKKKKK. also this would never happen and don't do this it's so incredibly unprofessional. and thank you to my betas, @hausofwoo and T, yall always have my back (and so does neo).

It’s always exciting getting started on a new show. The new people, new creative outlets, new ideas to try. After the last couple years of being a sound designer, you really feel like you found your groove when it came to jumping into a new show. 

This is a theatre you have worked for a few times before; a small one but it paid the techies well and even got you some union points. 

The production manager, Moonbyul, was a longtime friend and had called you in to sound design Hadestown. You had to say yes, of course, to one of your favorite musicals. You had seen it on Broadway a few years before and fell in love with it, especially the production design of it all. 

Moonbyul had also mentioned that they were bringing in a new lighting designer. The last one you had worked with was very lovely, but also an older man that would fall asleep between cues so probably for the best…

At the first production meeting, you were eager to get started and fire off all the great ideas you had for the production, so you wanted to get there early to get all your notes organized. 

You walked into the theatre about half an hour early, expecting to see Moonbyul and Vernon (the stage manager) running around, but they were nowhere to be found. 

You set your stuff down in an audience seat, and head to the stage. It had been a few years since you had been on this side of things, but it always gave you a rush to see the audience from this view; standing center stage. 

Retiring from performing was not an easy choice, fueled by hate and trauma and self-judgement. But when it was time to leave, you found a space in sound design. Being taken under the wing of a longtime mentor, Jihoon, made everything come to you easy and you’ve been hooked ever since. 

Even though the stage is dark, you can close your eyes and imagine the audience in front of you, lights shining, costume sparkling. You hum a few bars of “Flowers” to yourself, slowing your breathing and your brain for just a second. 

BOOM. A bright light cuts through your vision. You hold your hands up in front of your eyes to shield them before you open them. 

“What the heck??” you shout at whoever is in the booth. 

“Sorry, sorry.” says a voice, the light too bright for you to make out a face. “You just looked like you could use a spot.”

“I’m good thanks…” you answer back coldly. 

“Alright, but just know you look great from up here. Made for the stage.” the voice says. 

“Thanks..” you answer under your breath, not sure how to react to the obvious compliment.

The spot shuts off and you blink a few times to adjust your eyesight. Standing in the booth is a figure, a taller man with broad shoulders. But it's still too dark to see his facial features. 

It seems as if he’s just standing there… looking at you.

“Um… can you bring up the house lights?” you ask him. 

“Oh yeah! Sorry..” he responds. The house lights come up a second later. “I’m gonna come down there, hold on one sec!” he says.

You step off of the stage, a little embarrassed you got caught lost in a daydream. You walk over to your stuff, digging through your backpack to get out your Ipad and pencil, if only you could find the damn thing…

A tap on your shoulder startles you and you turn around in defense. In front of you stands maybe the most beautiful man you’ve ever seen. His hair was long, his bangs perfectly framing his dark, deep eyes. And man were those shoulders broad… he could probably pick you up and throw you around a little….

You were staring. 

“Um.. sorry you scared me.” you said, trying to cover up your obvious gawking. 

“No you’re good, I tend to sneak up on people. I’m Seongcheol by the way, nice to meet you.” he holds out his (very large) hand for you to shake.

“___” you respond, and take his hand. You’re too stunned to even move your hand to shake his, but he holds your hand strongly and commands the handshake. 

An obvious indicator that he can take control. 

You shake away that thought, remembering the pact you made with yourself to stay far far away from another showmance. 

Your hand is still in his, and his eyes have not left yours. Has time slowed down?

“Good, you guys have met!” says Moonbyul, walking down the aisle where you guys were standing, Vernon trailing close behind. Seungcheol lets go of your hand and quickly turns around to face them. 

“Ready to get this meeting started?”

The rest of the production team trickles in and the production meeting promptly starts; Moonbyul is not one for tardiness. 

All the designers give their presentations, and this is always so exciting for you. To watch the production blossom from pieces of paper to onstage art is a beautiful thing. You especially love the costume designers concept of using color to show contrast between the human characters and the god characters.

Finally comes Seungcheol’s presentation. He opens up his laptop to a lighting program, already set with the stages dimensions and the set design and presses play. He explains while the lights change from scene to scene, full of color and different gobos to add texture. 

There is obviously a lot of thought put behind this design. He is extremely talented. And hot. 

His presentation finishes and it’s obvious how his shoulders relax. Those broad shoulders. He must not like being the center of attention, you think.

It’s your turn next, so you shake the thoughts of him away before stepping in front of the others with your laptop in hand. 

You are always very prepared, already having the mic plot done and the sound effects downloaded to the board. You are super excited to present your concept for the final song- I Raise My Cup. Having seen the show on Broadway, you have a good idea of how the audience will react to the final scene of the show. Complete silence. So your concept is to have the characters sing this song with no help of the mics, completely acapella and completely raw. 

“But what if the audience claps?” Seungcheols voice shoots through your confidence. 

“They won't,” you reassure. 

“But they might, and then what? We won't be able to hear Persephone and then the rest of the cast will be thrown off for the rest of the song,” he pushes.

“I promise, that won’t be a problem. The audience will be stunned by the heartbreaking ending, they won’t know what to do.”

“I don’t like it,” he says blankly.

Okay maybe he’s not so hot anymore. 

This little shit is totally bursting your bubble, what the fuck? You were so proud of this idea, why did he have to embarrass you in front of the director and entire production team??

“Let’s put a pin in that one. Thank you for that great presentation, let's move on to props!” says Moonbyul, cutting through the tension. 

You take your seat next to Seungcheol, but not before shooting him a piercing scowl. 

He leans over to you once you sit down. “Hey, no hard feelings. I'm just a skeptic, ya know?” he whispers over the presentation. 

“Yeah well next time please keep it to yourself. Some of us are trying to make a name in this theatre,” you shoot back. 

The rest of the meeting is spent with your arms crossed, trying not to melt into the smell of Seungcheol’s cologne, but rather hold steady in your annoyance with him. 

The next day is the first day of rehearsal for the cast, and although you aren’t called, you decide to come in to organize the booth a little bit. 

They’re learning music on the stage, so you open the booth window so you can hear the cast sing. The music of this show is so beautiful, so romantic. It's nice to listen to while you work.

It’s when the actress playing Eurydice starts singing Flowers that you space off, lost in the beauty of the song. If you were still acting, this role would be a dream role for you. Of course you belt this song all the time in your car. 

You start to sing along under your breath, knowing that no one will hear you up here. 

Flowers, I remember fields of flowers, soft beneath my heels

You sing to yourself, imagining a beautiful field laid out before you instead of a 10-year-old soundboard. 

I remember someone, someone by my side. Turned his face to mine, and then he turned away, into the shade. 

In the field of flowers, who pops into your head but Seungcheol. That asshole is so damn beautiful you can’t help but imagine him as your Orpheus. 

The song finishes out with the final notes and you sigh as your day dream dissipates, shaking away the thought of ever seeing Seungcheol in that way and returning back to the box of mystery chords you were wrapping.

Someone clears their throat behind you. You really hope it's Vernon. 

“Didn’t know you could sing?” says Seungcheol from behind you. 

“I don’t anymore.” you reply coldly, not really interested in conversing with him.

“You should, you have a beautiful voice,” he says.

You turn away from him as he comes to the lightboard next to you, hiding your blush. 

“Thanks,” you say, trying not to show too much emotion in your voice.

Silence fills the space as he pulls up a chair and opens up the light programming app on the desktop. You direct your attention back to your cords that connect to god knows what. 

“So about yesterday…” he starts.

“Yeah, that was a dick move,” you blurt out. Maybe not so direct next time.

“Look I get that you’re upset, but I just call them like I see them. I get your idea but I don’t think it's gonna work. What's wrong with a little bit of criticism?” he asks.

You take a breath before you turn to him and give him a piece of your mind.

“What’s wrong is I don’t know what gave you the idea that I asked for criticism. I’ve been working at this theatre for a long time, you’re still fresh meat. Really isn’t a good look to come flouncing in giving everyone unsolicited criticism,” you spit at him. 

You get so worked up that you stomp over to where he is sitting on the other side of the booth. The look on his face is unwavering though, in fact it turns into a smirk as he stands. 

He is easily a foot taller than you, looking down at you without closing the space between the two of you. 

You feel so small. You swear you feel yourself throb.

“Someone’s got their panties in a twist,” he says, still smirking. 

You are stunned, mouth falling open but no words coming out. That sentence has never sounded sexier.

“It’s alright, I’ll be nicer to you from now on, knowing how sensitive you get.” he says, leaning down to whisper in your ear for extra effect. 

And then the asshole just walks away and sits back down as if nothing even happened. 

You’re still frozen in place, in shock at the intense flirting that just happened. 

“So, you said you have worked here for a while, how have you liked it?” he asks, continuing the conversation with no indication of what just happened. 

This is going to be a long day. 

After a few hours of genuinely torturous small talk with Seungcheol mixed with palpable silence, you decide to call it an early day. You got almost nothing done, besides wrapping and unwrapping a bunch of useless cords and clicking on random folders on the sound desktop. 

As you leave, he promises to see you tomorrow and sends you off with a wink that makes your knees weak.

The next day, you get there later than usual. The cast is learning blocking in the dance studio, giving the techies free reign of the stage for the afternoon. 

You’re hoping your tardiness will allow you to avoid the overlap with Seungcheol and you can have the booth to yourself.

But, no luck. There he is, sitting in the rolling chair at the lighting desktop in the sexiest skin tight compression shirt you’ve ever seen. 

You don’t even realize you’re gawking when he turns the chair around. “Like what you see?” he teases.

You come back to your senses at his words. “You wish,” you grumble as you head to your station, hoping to get some work done today. 

You swear you hear him scoff as he turns back to the desktop.

“Blackout!” he shouts down to the set people on the stage, as he presses the “next cue” button. A series of ���thank you blackouts!” follow, in proper theatre etiquette.

You keep quiet though. 

He goes through a few more cues, calling blackout a few more times, and you still don’t say anything. 

“You know, it’s proper manners to say ‘thank you’ when I call blackout,” he points out after the 4th time.

“What do you know about manners?” you grumble under your breath.

He crosses over to you, again smirking, as he says “Enough to know that you need to learn some, baby girl.”

Shocks of electricity go straight to your clit. 

“Don’t call me that, get that stick out of your ass, and fucking leave me alone Seungcheol!” you shout, unsure if you're more angry or turned on or both. 

You grab your stuff to leave in a hurry, all the while he doesn’t move from his spot where he’s standing; just leans against the counter and crosses his arms to watch you angrily throw stuff in your bag. 

You turn to leave, expecting him to apologize for his inappropriate comment. But when you turn to look back at him, all you see is him looking at you with that stupidly sexy smirk on his face. He waves a finger at you before you stomp down the stairs and out of the booth. 

You text Moonbyul and Vernon some bullshit excuse about period cramps and that you have to leave early, before going home and using up all the battery in your vibrator.

Saturday no one is called, so you use this as an excuse to go in and pick up where you left off before leaving in a huff.

Luckily you have keys, so you let yourself into the empty theatre and up to the booth.

It’s really nice to work in the silence of the empty theatre, only the ghostlight lighting the stage. You leave the ceiling light off in the booth, only leaving on the string lights you and Jihoon added to make the space more cozy. 

You put on your headphones and get to work. The music director sent you a recording of the cast singing, so you make sure all your cues align with the music.

You work for about an hour before it's rudely interrupted by Seungcheol lifting one side of the headphones off your ear. You feel his breath on the shell of your ear, sending shivers down your back, before he whispers, “Boo.” 

Jumping out of your chair a little bit, you snatch his hand away from your headphones and turn back around without a word to him. 

“Sorry to scare you,” he giggles. “I just forgot my charger last time.”

You give him no reply, not interested in potentially entering another conversation where you leave dripping.

“Actually, would you mind if I stayed and worked on a few things?” he asks.

Again, you don’t respond. 

You see him shrug his shoulders in your peripherals and sit down in his chair to get to work.

Both of you sit in heavy silence as you work, and the more silent it is, the more you feel the tension rise, with anger burning in your chest.

What is the deal with this guy? Does he like just getting a rise out of people? Why does he feel the need to torture me? What did I even do to him??

“Gum?” he asks, holding out a pack to you.

“What the fuck is your problem?” you shout back.

He looks stunned as he takes a piece out and unwraps it, popping it in his mouth. “So, no gum then…”

“Why do you treat me this way, Seungcheol? It’s fucked up,” you shout, moving towards him to really give it to him.

“Treat you what way exactly?” he asks slyly.

“You just keep saying annoying shit to me, pushing my buttons and pissing me off. But then you make me leave every conversation so turned on that I can’t even think straight. I don’t get it, what is your issue with me??” You shout at him.

He looks at you in silence for a second, his expression unreadable.

“I… turn you on?” he asks.

Oh shit. You may have revealed a bit too much….

“I… what? I didn’t mean to say that,” you stutter.

“Oh well in that case… it won’t mean anything to you if I do this?” 

He stands up and turns to face you, arms leaning against the countertop, caging you between them. You swear you see the veins straining against his skin, bulging out from his thick arms as he moves closer.

He leans in close to your ear, breath fanning down your neck. You’re frozen in place, trying to focus on slowing your breathing. 

“Jump,” he says. And you do, hopping up to sit on the counter. Why did you just obey him??

“Good girl.”

Oh that’s why.

“Now,” he starts, his lips moving all over your neck, so close but not touching as he breathes the next few words onto you. 

“I’m really curious to know exactly what it is I do that turns you on?” one of his hands snakes up the side of your thigh, dipping just slightly under the skirt you’re wearing and playing with the edge. 

“Can you tell me, baby girl?” he says before he licks a stripe up your neck. 

You shudder and lean into him a little bit. It’s over for you now.

“Say the word and I’ll stop,” he says, hovering in front of your lips now. 

You grab his arm to stop him from moving back. “Please,” you say in a desperate voice. 

His lips meet yours, and slowly he starts making out with you. His big lips make it sloppy, but it's so hot you could care less.

He sneaks his tongue into your mouth, swirling around yours so sensually it goes straight to your throbbing pussy. He snakes his hand into your hair, guiding your head with his big hand to deepen the kiss. 

The strap of your tank top falls and before you can put it back, he takes the opportunity to bring it down even more, revealing your bare breast to him. He pinches your nipple between two fingers, lightly twisting it enough to make you whimper into his mouth.

He pulls away after a few seconds, a string of spit connecting your lips. You look up at his large frame through your lashes, breathing heavily. 

And then he does something you don’t expect. He drops to his knees. 

He grabs your ass and forcefully pulls you forward on the counter to access you better. You know he can see the wet spot forming on your white panties, and try to cross your legs out of embarrassment.

“Absolutely not.” he says in protest, snaking his arms underneath your thighs and grabbing them so you’re practically sitting on his shoulders.

He kisses up and down your thighs, not yet touching you where you need him. You whine and wiggle your hips, attempting to bring him closer. 

“Someone really does have their panties in a twist…” he smirks from below you. That little shit.

He barely gives you what you desperately need, lightly kissing your clit through your panties.

“Cheol, please…” you whine, attempting to get him to give you a little bit more. 

“Babygirl, I know you can beg better than that,” he says, lifting his head up. He keeps a finger pressed to your clit as he talks, rubbing in small, torturous circles. 

Your cheeks heat up, probably turning red. You’ve already given in to this annoying shit, there’s no way you’re begging for him. You just whine in response, not willing to give him what he wants. 

“You sure you don’t want to beg for it?...” he questions slyly, while at the same time moving your now completely wet panties to the side.

He gives your pulsing clit a few kitten licks, just enough to give you a taste of what you could have, all while never breaking eye contact with you. 

You whimper at the contact, starting to reach out your hand to grab his head and pull it closer. He knows what you're up to, though, and grabs your wrist, forcing it back to its place on the counter.

“Now try again baby, beg for what you want.” he says, slipping your panties off in anticipation.

You sit there a minute, chest already heaving with desire, dripping all over the counter. 

“Please Cheol, you know how badly I need it. I deserve it after all the shit you put me through,” you say, the words tumbling out of your mouth before you can think about them fully.

He raises his eyebrow at you, smiling that stupid fucking smirk that makes you shiver. “Oh is that so?” he questions.

And then he dives in. It’s as if he has been eating your pussy for years, somehow finding the exact rhythm and pressure on your clit that makes the string lights turn blurry. His arms are wrapped around both of your thighs, as if he was trying to choke them out. 

You grab the back of his head with one hand, and start rolling your hips into his mouth, chasing the high that is hurdling closer. He loves it, judging by the way he growls into your pussy, barely pulling away to mumble “fuck yes” before plunging two fingers into you. 

It only takes him hooking them into your g-spot a few times along with flicking your clit with his tongue before you are cumming into him, gasping and not letting go of the tight hold you have on his hair. 

He pulls away, resting his head on the inside of your thigh, breathing heavily as if he just ran a marathon. His plump lips are completely drenched with your wetness. He looks up at you through his lashes, as if you were a goddess.

Oh, it really is over for me. 

“Stand up,” you order.

He questions you at first, but then gets the message when you hop off the counter and drop to your knees. 

He pets your hair, towering over you, but not unbuckling his belt like you so want him to. 

“You really don’t have to, baby. But it’s so sweet seeing how compliant you are.” he says with a slight smirk. 

“Shut up,” you say, all the while undoing his belt. He continues to pet your hair, watching your every move. 

You pull his cock out of his boxers. It's perfect; long but not too long, and slightly curved upwards. He’s definitely a fucking munch seeing how much it's already dripping precum. 

You hover your lips around the tip, kissing it lightly. He hums above you in approval. 

“Now, it's your turn to beg for it.” you tease, pulling away from him. 

He chuckles from above you, fucking chuckles, before grabbing the back of your head with more force than before.

“Oh sweetie, I don’t beg.” he says, before pulling your head forward onto him.

A head pusher? Yeah… But for some reason, this time, it was the hottest thing he could have done. 

You get to work, watching his mouth drop open in pleasure while you work your mouth up and down his length. You cup your tongue around the underside of him, pulling out every trick in the book to try and get the upperhand in this fight.

He’s very obviously enjoying it, moaning loud enough for anyone in the theater to hear and eyes locked into contact with yours. He swipes his other hand through his bangs, which are now collecting the sweat from his brow. God he’s beautiful.

Even though his hand is holding your head down, you still have full control, so you slow down your pace just a little to try another trick. 

You bring your hand up to cup his balls, lightly squeezing and tugging to bring him closer. You feel his cock pulse in your mouth at the added pleasure. 

But nothing could’ve prepared him for your next trick. 

You slowly trail your finger backwards, lightly circling his rim to test the waters. But before you can even think about going further, you hear a gargled moan come from him, and he pulls you off your knees by your hair. 

Your face meets his, foreheads touching, but you divert your eyes down, scared you may have crossed a line.

“Why the fuck are you trying to make me cum before I get to feel that pussy around me?” he asks.

Your cheeks heat up knowing that it worked, filing that info into your head for another time. 

“Turn around,” he barks, but you stay still. You bring your eyes up off the floor to meet his, determined not to let him win the struggle for control. 

“Funny if you think I’m going to let you fuck me from behind right off the bat.” you say, trying to put power behind your words even though you feel so little in his arms. 

“Oh, well then what’s your alternative sweetheart?” he cuts back at you, as if humoring you.

“Take this off,” you say, tugging at his shirt, “and sit down.”

“Hm… but aren’t you going to take anything off too?” he asks, pulling away and pulling his shirt over his head from the back of the neck. 

You get distracted by his toned stomach, your retort getting stuck in the back of your throat. 

He giggles at you again, before stepping forward and grabbing the hem of the crop top you were wearing. 

“How about, we take this off, but leave the skirt on?” he says, dragging his fingers along the bottom of your shirt, waiting for your consent.

You nod at him, and he swiftly lifts the top off of you, leaving you in your skirt and bra. 

He silently backs up into the chair, sitting down and draping his thick arms over the arms of it.

You slowly walk towards him, really wanting to drag this part out, before you lift up your legs to straddle him in the chair.

You hover over his cock, but before you drop down, you make eye contact with him. He’s staring into you, as if looking into your soul, and you stutter your movements, all of the sudden getting nervous. 

It’s as if he senses the nerves, and brings a hand to the small of your back, trying to reassure and ground you silently.

You reach your hands up to cup his cheeks, before leaning in to kiss him. This one is different though, not like the intense one before. This one is slower, tongues just brushing over each other. Kissing like you have all the time in the world.

Your hands tangle in his hair as you slowly sink onto his length, pausing the kiss to moan in each other's mouths. 

As you bottom out, he holds your hips in place, not allowing you to start bouncing. “Just give me a minute, baby. You feel too good.” he sighs out.

You find it endearing how close he already is just from the kiss, and as much as you are tempted to start the game of control back up and just start bouncing, you stay still. 

You press your body against his in anticipation, so that your stomachs are pressed together. He feels so warm against you, and his arms circle around your back as he lets go of your hips. 

You take this as a green light and start bouncing on him, never breaking the contact of your forehead against his. 

He fills you up soooo perfectly, the curve in his cock dragging so deliciously along your g-spot. You can’t help but to speed up, the sounds of his balls slapping your wet pussy fill the booth. 

He’s circled his arms around your hips now, grabbing your ass and basically moving you up and down on his cock without you having to do any work. But even with that, the awkward position makes your legs burn and you start to slow down. 

“You getting tired baby?” he asks, and you nod. “Do you need me to help you?” he asks, to which you nod again. 

He wraps his arm underneath your thighs and picks you up out of the chair as if you weighed nothing. You knew those arms would come to good use. He sets you down on the edge of the counter before entering you again. 

You keep your arms wrapped around the back of his neck as he starts thrusting into you. This angle is different than before, allowing him to directly hit your g-spot every time.

His pace is somehow way more effective at pushing you to the edge than your own pace was, and you find yourself getting desperately close to your second orgasm. 

It’s as if he can read your mind, or it's probably just him feeling your pussy pulse around him tightly, but he smirks to himself. Almost too small for you to notice. But you do notice, and next thing you know he is pulling out and jacking his cock off in between you both. You whimper at the loss of him filling you up. 

“Help me cum and maybe I’ll let you cum again when I get you in my bed tonight,” he breathes out heavily. 

You huff out in frustration, but unfortunately, you are completely under his spell. You reach in between you both and take over jacking him off. Your other hand snakes around the back of his head, pulling it down towards you so you can whisper in his ear. 

“Maybe if you make me cum again tonight, I'll let you fill me up.” you whisper in his ear. 

That sends him over the edge, and he grabs the counter as he stutters in your hands, cumming all over your skirt. 

You giggle as his orgasm trails off. “You owe me a new skirt now I guess.” you say.

He catches his breath before scooping you up into his arms again. “I’ll buy you a hundred new skirts if you suck my dick my like that again.” 

With another giggle, you peck him on the nose. “So, does this mean I won the fight?” you ask. 

“I don’t know what makes you think that babygirl,” he chuckles as he sets you down. 

He hands you your shirt before finding his own. Still a gentleman even when he’s being an asshole. 

A door in the theatre opens, scaring the shit out of both of you. You both scramble into the spotlight room to put your clothes back on out of sight of the huge window.

“Hey guys! I know you’re here! The director just emailed me back with some tech notes.” Vernon yells from the audience. 

“Okay come on up, it's unlocked!” Seungcheol yells down to Vernon from the enclosed room, now fully dressed. 

He pecks you on the lips before rushing out of the room to his seat at the counter. Which you just fucked on.

You scramble to clean off your skirt with a tissue before rushing to your own chair and sitting down. But it isn’t until you sit down that you realize, you’re still not wearing panties. 

It’s as if Seungcheol reads your mind and you both lock eyes in terror. There are your panties sitting in the middle of the counter. 

The door opens and Vernon starts walking up the stairs to the booth as Seungcheol grabs your panties and haphazardly stuffs them in his pocket. 

“Hey guys, glad you're--” he stops in the middle of the sentence. “It smells like dick in here what the fuck??” he exclaims.

You hid your face, scared you might burst out laughing. 

Seungcheol takes the heat for you though, explaining it off as him leaving some leftovers in here overnight.

Vernon takes you both through some notes before leaving, with a peculiar expression on his face. 

Something tells you he has a suspicion, and you might be hearing some rumors tomorrow thanks to the nosy theatre bitches you surround yourself with…

It’s silent for a moment after Vernon leaves, before you both burst out laughing. 

“Okay well that was fun, but I’m getting my chair all wet. Can I have my underwear back now?” you ask after the laughter dies down. 

“Um, absolutely not! I’m keeping these,” Seungcheol says with a wink before turning back to his desktop to finally get to work. 

And later that night, you both get what you promised.

a/n: thank you for reading, and please reblog and leave feedback! 💕

[jillsandwhichs]

Crazy girl, even crazier husband

Chapter 3 to RE Character x Reader Smutshot Collection

Masterlist

Pairing: Fem!reader x Leon Kennedy

Summary: Your husband and you go to the movie theatre to watch a new horror movie but this man just can't keep his hands off of you

Status of your guy's relationship in this oneshot: Married

WC: 6.1k

Type: NSFW

Warnings: Zoowee mama there are so many, Making out, Fingering, Tongue licking, P in V, Sorta public sex ?? , No protection, Biting, He fucks you hard in an employee storage room so enjoy :p

A/n: Hi! Hope you all enjoy. Please check out my masterlist, there's a lot of stuff there. You can get to know me, you can see the rules of my blog and then you can see all of my fanfictions. You'll be able to find the previous chapters to this fic and upcoming ones. You'll also be able to find my Wattpad & AO3. Comments, reblogs & likes are appreciated. Thank you

Window's rolled down, music on low, his hand on your thick thigh, your husband was driving you two to the move theatre in town. They were hosting some new random horror movie and the both of you thought it looked interesting, the idea to go on a date and watch it together randomly came up in a conversation last night. He's often times working so going out like this is rare, but whenever it happens, you absolutely cherish it, and so does he.

You could feel his fingers playing with the end of your skirt, occasionally gripping your thigh, his hand even leaving a mark. This is what he'd always do whenever he was driving and you were with him, he'd get you all riled up, all soaked up, and it's tortuous. The way his hand would slide up beneath your skirt was so painful, not literally, but he never even touched you, that made it painful. And half of the time, he doesn't even end up fucking you til way later or he doesn't at all. Such a man sometimes.

He wouldn't even acknowledge how horny you are either, he just knows, he loves making you feel all good inside just you leave you with nothing.

"We're almost there, by the way." You said softly, gazing out the window at the scenery outside. "Good to know, baby, thank you." Leon responded, his fingers trailing up her skirt again, just to simply not do shit. "Jesus Christ." You whispered underneath your breath, praying he wouldn't hear over the music. He was playing some song by Seether, it's all he ever listens to. You swear you know every song and every lyric by heart. Same with Hinder. This man and his early 2000s rock music, you swear.

The view on the way there was pleasant though. Mostly stores and other useless buildings but aside from that, you could spot tall & wide mountains in the distance. They're all able to be hiked too, you and Leon have done it before but in the summer heat, hell no. Luckily, it's autumn, no need to worry about that. Other than the mountains, the sky was gorgeous. That deep orange tint on the horizon was beautiful, it suited the night perfectly.

"What is this movie called again?" "It's called Smile, I don't know, looked creepy as hell." You spoke. "Yeah, yeah, the trailer was fucked." Leon snickered, one hand on the wheel still. "How much cash did you bring?" "Well, I brought my card, so a shit ton." Leon chuckled, "Using me for my money still, I see how it is." "What? You think there was another reason I married you?" You bit your lip, clearly, you were joking. He dug his nails into your thigh, causing your breath shutter. "Be quiet." He hummed, his teasing tone was deadly.

You couldn't help but let out a small giggle, he never fails to make you laugh. His humor is great, that's something you two bonded over immediately when you first met. You reminisce on that day often. Ever since, your life has been ultimately changed for the better. Leon was genuinely the light at the end of the tunnel for you, hopefully he feels the same way about you.

Just up a few more blocks was the movie theatre. This one is rather large, it was built more recently too. Only four years ago and it's held up well. When it was first built, you and Leon were still dating, now you're married, time flies by so quickly. The both of you have also been there a couple times before, about four times, each time was so nice. Leon really knows how to treat you. Every single date he takes you out on is special in it's on way. He's a miracle worker.

"Just up here." You whispered out, putting your phone in your little white purse that of course, Leon bought for you. He wasn't a poor man, rather wealthy. You don't know all too much about his job, he'd rather save the details, but from what you do know, he's a federal agent whose under the President, now that's saying something. And it all works out amazingly considering his love language is to spoil you with gifts, dates, travels, etc.. He truly never lets up on spending money on you.

"I know sweetheart." He leered, holding your thigh much more lightly now, his grip more gentle. "I'm praying they have sour patch kids." You snickered, Leon hummed at your comment. He's well aware it's your favorite candy... He's definitely spent hundreds on it. "Figured you'd say that." He snorted, pulling into the theatre parking lot. Surprisingly, it wasn't too packed. To your mental math, there was only ten or eleven vehicles, then again, it was a work night.

"Here we go." Leon grunted at he parked, taking the keys out of the ignition. "Grab my wallet for me, will ya doll?" "Yes babe." You replied, grabbing his wallet as you opened your car side door. Leon got out directly after, walking over to you. "Come here." He held his hand out. You handed him his wallet then grabbed a hold of his hand, squeezing it as you walked beside him. He was extremely tall, much taller than you. You were under 5'7, he was 6'2, you rather enjoyed the difference.

That instant hit of popcorn was glorious, it smelt like you'd just entered heaven. There was no one else in the lobby besides you and him, and obviously the workers. Not only did it smell so good, the decor was so retro, you loved the style of it. "I always forget how nice this place looks." You said in awe, loving the late '80s feel. "It is pretty." Leon huffed out before pulling his wallet out, "Go pick out whatever you'd like while I get out tickets." Your husband said deeply, pulling his card out.

You smirked at his words. You grabbed his arm and stood up your tippy toes to get to his ear, "Ask for popcorn please." You were sort of shy, you didn't wanna ask the employee yourself, plus you don't even have money to buy it, so. "I will, go on now." Leon chuckled as he then began to speak to the worker. You nodded, letting go of him and walking on over to the candy stand, they had a lot. But of course, your heart desired the sour patch kids the most, you grabbed them with haste.

You know Leon loves peanut M&Ms, he's always snacking on them, you grabbed a single pack of them for him as well. There was also some warheads in singular packaging, you grabbed ten, five for you and five for him, sour candy is your all time fav. You turned around, gazing over at Leon as he paid for you guy's tickets and the popcorn, you were excited for it. You were a foodie at heart, you could eat, and eat, and eat and never ever get tired of it. That's most likely why 80% of the dates you two go on are dinner dates.

Ambling back to your husband, you handed him the candy, your eyes locking on his. "Good, thank you." He smiled down at you, placing the sweets on the counter. "Good girl for getting my M&Ms." He whispered in your heart, his deep voice making your insides twist up like a pretzel, which was ironic due to the fact there were some in the hot food bar. "Heheh." You giggled, locking your arm with his, waiting on the popcorn.

"Your total is 16.20$." The woman behind the counter stated. Leon swiped his card through the machine, signing his signature too to verify the purchase. You grabbed the popcorn and Leon took your guy's candy, sliding the tickets into his back pocket. "Make it quick doll." Leon said from behind you as you began to butter it up. You loved the salty & savory popcorn, you'd drench it in that tangy yellow butter, but there is a point where it's too much.

Leon set his hands on your waist from behind you, his rough thumbs caressing the little sliver of skin showing from your shirt. You were wearing a tight shirt paired with your skirt, it had been awhile since the two of you went out so you thought it was cute. Despite only little bits of your hips showing, he still showed you he loved it. His nails lightly tickled at your midriff, watching you as you fixed up the food for the two of you. "All done?" "Done." You mumbled, turning around, his hands not moving though.

He leaned down, pressing his lips to your forehead gently before he then simply pressed his forehead against yours, "You're my everything." He hushly spoke. You were honestly caught of guard but maybe he was just in a lovey dovey mood...? "Love you too." You leered, kissing his lips swiftly, not wanting the employees to feel awkward. "C'mon baby, you know that ain't no kiss." He then gripped your chin, his lips settling upon yours for what felt like an eternity. You felt his tounge briskly swipe against your glossy lips, he could definitely taste the cherry.

He didn't go any further than that, pulling away after a few more seconds, "Let's go." He snickered, slipping his hand down your back as he lead you to the room. "You're so fucking crazy." You smacked his abs through his shirt. "Sorry, I just love you, is that so bad?" He acted sort of oblivious. Once again, he's such a man. "It's sooo bad." You dragged out your wording in a sarcastic manner, earning a titter from him. Making Leon laugh isn't too much of an accomplishment, he'll laugh at cat videos on the web.

"Just through here." Leon pushed the door open. The lights were still on too, proving the movie hasn't begun yet, luckily. There was only a couple other people in there, about five, they were all at the front. "Let's get in the back." Leon stated, gripping your hand firmly, "Why?" "Because I said so, be good and listen." He teased. You felt arousal stream over you when he said that, gosh, he's so good. You climbed up the stairs behind him, your hand still interlocked with his as you did so.

You two sat just a couple rows away from the very back, wanting to at least have a decent view of the massive screen. Leon sat down, then you did. "Here baby." You murmured, pulling the two ice cold water bottles from your purse. "Smooth criminal." He joked, taking his and placing it in it's holder. "Their drinks are more than their popcorn, it's ridiculous." You spat out, setting the popcorn in his lap. "Always making me hold it." "Mhm." You giggled. He glared at you, making your heart beat fast. You knew he was playing around but for odd enough reasons, it turns you the hell on.

You took the sour patch kids bag, ripping it out and setting it on the side of your leg, having it tucked between you and the seat. You'd save your warheads for later. "You gonna eat your candy?" "Maybe later, the popcorn is just fine for now." Leon assured you, taking a couple pieces in his mouth. Understandable. You ate a few pieces of your candy, the taste of them was immaculate, it could never get old.

-

After ten minutes or so of previews, trailers and commercials, the movie finally began. The lights went dark, setting the mood immensely. You could hardly see Leon's attractive face. "Finally." You uttered beneath your breath, taking some popcorn from his lap and eating it. The buttery, salty taste was too good, you practically moaned while eating it. The title card came on screen, the eerie noise playing in the background really suited the film from what you've seen.

At first, Leon wasn't paying too much attention to you, his eyes glued to the screen, he seemed to be into the movie so far. You tried to be, but that desirable burning feeling deep inside you wasn't doing you any justice. You could feel yourself pulsing, the mere thought of him had your panties soaked. He hasn't even done anything to crazy either, that's how good he is. He's such a dick sometimes. You can't even think about it, it makes you want him more. He can a man be so alluring?

As you snacked on your candy, you nearly lost your breath as you felt his hand slither onto your thigh, just as it was in the car earlier. Each one of his fingers caused an electric wave to course through you. The way they'd slightly lift off of your skin as they squeezed it, it was too much. You could feel as his pinky glided underneath your skirt, seemingly getting closer with his entire hand. "Movie is good so far, yeah?" Leon whispered to you, his hand going fully beneath your skirt now. Curse this man.

You didn't even reply, your body just simply reacted to his advances. You spread your legs open as much as you could in the tight chair, which wasn't too much but Leon definitely liked what you did considering he tightly gripped it, gaining a soft whimper out of you. "Look at how you responsive you are..." He murmured, not even glancing at you, making himself seem like he was just casually watching the film. At this point, you could care less about the fucking movie. You wanted his cock inside you. But maybe... His fingers would have to suffice.

"Finger me." You panted, looking at him, desperation plastered on your beautiful face. Leon didn't listen to your pleas, his pinky finger rubbing over your wet panties. That wasn't good enough, it never would be. You wanted him inside you, you wanted him to feel how wet you were for him. "Look how wet I am baby." You muttered. "Mmm, I can feel princess." He grunted, his entire hand planting itself onto your cunt through your undergarments, you whimpered quietly, needing to keep the act up.

"Please..." You gripped his arm. Leon sighed heavily, his eyes leaving the screen, his eyes locking on yours as he gandered down your body, taking the sight in. "So needy." He teased you. "You gonna stay quiet?" "Yes, I promise, please." You begged of your husband, your eyes never leaving his. "Don't make a single noise." He huffed out deeply, his voice husky. He pulled your dripping panties to the side, his index finger gliding through your wetness, causing you to sigh softly, not making a noise though. "Mmm." You murmured, resting your head against his fit arm.

His index finger continues to pick up your wetness, you could hear him sigh once more, "Fuck." He muttered, the sound of your sopping cunt was so fucking good to him. His fingers made their way to your nub, beginning to rub it with ease, a surge of pleasure bursting in your tummy as he did this. He made small yet fast circles on your clit, earning some subtle noises out of you ; Luckily, he didn't hear, the movie was starting to up itself in volume, good for you two.

"Does that feel good?" Leon purred out to you, his eyes shooting over to gaze at you, his eyes in a trance as he watched your face contort just by his touch. "Mhm." You moaned out hushly, your arms wrapped around his fit arm. "Good girl." He whispered, his fingers slapping your clit as they then went back down your slit, your wetness was practically dripping down your ass and onto the seat, sorry to the worker who'll have to clean your mess up...

His finger went all the way down before he then stuck it inside of you, your tightness grasping around it. Leon chuckled at how tight you were, you never fail to amaze him. He pumped his finger in & out of you, so moderately. "Gotta stay silent, remember that." Leon teased you, his thumb going to your clit, now fingering & rubbing you. This two in one deal was going to be the end of you. "Jesus..." You whimpered, your teeth sinking into his arm, causing him to only thrust his finger into you faster.

Your wetness was louder now, each time his finger went back into you, it sounded like a lemon being squeezed. You love biting Leon, he loves it too. One thing Leon especially loves is when he's fucking you, he's right on top of you, making you lose your sense of reality then you just bite down on his bulk shoulder. Gosh, he loves when you do that to him. His entire finger was drenched in your fluids, it was shining due to the bright lights emitting from the ginormous screen projector.

"Keep it quiet sweetheart." He whispered, a light snicker playing off his tongue. He was such an ass. He knows you can't be silent for much longer. He's bringing you closer and closer and closer to the edge. You fear if he keeps going at this rate, you'll cum and scream his name, like always. "It's so- so hard." You stuttered, your nails digging into his forearm fiercely. "Oh, you can do it." Leon praised you, he knows you can't.

As his singular finger continued it's work, you clenched around him even more as he slid another one in, this time curling each finger with every pump. No one in the theatre had noticed, surprisingly. All of them were mindless souls indulged in the film. You also really wanted to watch the movie, but fuck this was so much more needed than to watch some stupid horror flick. His thumb continued to rub your nub, the most sensitive nerve causing your brain to lose track of itself and your stomach to do flips like it's a gymnast.

"Leon... Baby..." You panted out, your hair getting messy from how much you've been tossing and turning your head. He didn't reply. His face was staring directly in front of him, acting all innocent, no one would suspect a thing... Yet he was finger fucking you, making your pussy clench around his fingers more tightly than ever before. His thumb was stroking your clit with pace, he was relentless on it. It was as if he was trying to gain a rise out of you and knowing him, he definitely was.

"Seriously." You whined, pressing your forehead against his upper arm. This man was going to be the fucking death of you.

"What is it?" He calmly said, still not looking at you whatsoever. "Fingers aren't enough, fuck me, I don't care about the stupid movie anymore." You said with an seductive tone. "Fingers aren't enough, huh?" He chortled as he began to finger fuck you at light speed. You instantly closed your legs, stopping all of his movements. "Don't." You squeaked, removing his hand from between your legs. Leon giggled, his hand gripping ahold of your cheeks sternly as he forced you to look up at him.

"You need me to fuck you?" "Yes baby, please." You mooched off your husband. You needed him and you need him at this current moment in time. "Well, where do you want to be fucked? In here? Where anyone could possibly see? In the restroom? In the car-?" "Let's find somewhere, please." You stated loud and clear, fixing your panties and skirt. Leon get go of your face. "Mmm, lead the way gorgeous." He held your hand, following behind you now. It felt powerful to take charge, to tell him this is what you want.

You both jogged down the stairs but acted as normal as possible, acting as if Leon wasn't just feeding into your dirty needs. Pushing open the wooden doors, you looked around and only saw a bathroom and other doors leading to another theatre area. Leon gripped your hand tighter, trying to indicate something to you. You spun around, looking back at the door behind you. "That's an employees only room!" "I doubt anyone is in here, c'mon." Leon laughed quietly.

He wrapped his hand around the knob, twisting it and pushing the door open. All that was in there was a table, some random movie posters and a counter, probably a type of break room. "Dammit, come here." Leon expired, grabbing your waist and pulling you against him. He lessened the space between the two of you as he smashed his needy lips against yours, his moving against yours in a passionate make-out.

Your arms went to his shoulders, holding onto them with care as you set your entire body against his. There was absolutely no stopping between kisses, it was constant. Heavy breathing and kisses were all that could be heard. Leon's hands went from your hips and down to your ass, gripping it hard as he licked your bottom lip, so badly wanting entry. You, of course, granted him exactly that. You moaned into the kiss as he squeezed your ass, slapping it too, he tried to keep it down though. This is technically illegal, so...

As you two made out sexually, he pushed you up against the wall, his hands still beneath your skirt, going from playing with your rear and pussy repeatedly. You'd randomly feel his fingers against your clit for short periods of time. Your nails scratched into his shoulders, you were so into this. Your sense of relief was this. He knew what to do and how to do it to you. Leon's tongue swiped against yours, his practically engulfing yours. He loves doing this.

You slightly stuck your tongue out mid kiss, Leon immediately jumped at the opportunity. He swiped his tounge along yours so deliberately, the sensual texture of it causing your pussy to literally drip more than it was before. Leon then grabbed your chin, tilting it to get a better angle. His entire tongue licked yours, then he wrapped his lips around it, suckling. Your moved your hands from his face and down to his waist, holding onto his shirt for what felt like dear life.

After sucking on your tounge for a few seconds, he pulled away swiftly, pecking you once more and now kissing down your precise jawline. You tipped your head back, allowing him to gain more access. His kisses were so slow and gentle, he really took his time. His heavy breathing was so sexy, it showed how much he needed you. He truly yearned for your presence, your touch, your everything. "You smell amazing." Leon breathed in, giving the end of your jawline a quick nibble. You giggled, kissing his cheek before going back to the same position as before.

Leon smooched down your throat, relishing in your perfume and it's enticing smell. "Mmm, what scent babygirl?" "Honestly..." You began, "I don't fucking know." You chuckled, earning a snicker from him. He licked from the top of your neck and all the way down, leaving a strip of saliva just there. He kissed all along the strip, you couldn't help but whimper, each kiss and every lick was to die for. You couldn't get enough of him. Leon groaned, his hands holding your ass - He couldn't get enough of you.

Making his way down to the middle of your neck, his hot breath sat on that same spot for a few moments before you felt that painfully pleasing feeling of his teeth lightly sinking into your skin. "Fuck." You moaned, your nails sunk into his slim waist. You felt his tongue going erratic on your neck as he continued to bite you. "Leon..." You soughed out, tilting your head to the side even further, wanting him to leave more love bites on you.

Heading you call his name, he pulled away from your neck, he gave you a fast peck before pressing his forehead against yours. "What's wrong sweetheart?" Leon panted, his right hand on the side of your neck where he was just feasting upon you seconds ago. "You make me feel so good." "Yeah?" "Make me feel even better." You whispered, your arms now encasing around his neck, embracing him closely. "Oh babygirl." Leon sighed out, caressing your neck carefully. "I'll make you feel just fine."

Your husband turned around, scanning the room. "Lay down on that table." He snickered, stepping away from you. "Okay..." You giggled, walking over to it. You pulled yourself up onto it, sitting with your feet dangling off. "Lay back baby." Leon hummed out to you, his voice soft. You obliged, laying all the way on your back, your legs bent upwards on the table. You angled your head so you'd be able to watch him. He unbuttoned his black pants, allowing them to drop along with his underwear, revealing his hard cock.

You bit your lip with a giggle. You get so giddy seeing him this way, he's so sexy. "Don't look at me like that." Leon chuckled, placing both of his hands on each one of your knees. "I'll look at you however I'd like." "Oh? Is that so?" "Mhm." You cockily mumbled, placing your feet on his chest. Leon's large hands wrapped around your ankles, rubbing them lovingly as he stared you down. His eyes were lustful, darkness bursting in his iris's. "Look at you." Leon whispered, taking both of your socks off, setting them to the side. "What?" You sighed deeply, your cunt pulsing at his cooing tone.

Bringing one of your feet up to his face, he placed a kiss on the side of it, then on the other one. You weren't into all that feet stuff, neither was he, but Leon will and does kiss you absolutely everywhere. He set your feet back down. Leon's hands went towards your waist, holding onto it firmly as he quickly pulled you down the table, earning a surprised gasp from you. "A warning next time?" You scoffed. "No." Leon responded sternly, being playful with you, per usual.

His fingers trailed up to your panties, locking them into the waistband of them. "I'm so wet." "I know honey, so wet for me, hm?" Leon whispered seductively, never breaking eye contact with you as he pulled your cute white panties all the way off, taking them off of your ankles afterwards. You spread your legs widely for him, the entire view of your core at his service. It was like he was trying to make it not look obvious, but it was so clear he was gazing at you down there. "So beautiful." Leon complimented you, you were his wife after all.

Grabbing his erection, Leon jerked it a couple times, maintaining eye contact with you, only breaking it for a tiny bit to look down at himself. "You have me fucking pulsing." Leon grunted, wasting no time as he swiped his dick through your wetness. You moaned, staring up at him, his tip would stroke over your clit and make your center have an even bigger heartbeat, that's how it felt at least. "I love how I make you get." Leon continued. "All wet, needy, clingy... You're so pretty." Leon shared, kissing your knee again.

You nodded in reply, he was right, he does manage to make you feel all of those ways. "Yeah..." You muttered out.

Without zero warning, you felt him plunge into you with haste, his entire length being grasped around your warm heat. You felt your stomach twist and turn when he did this, it gained a whimper from you, a rowdy one. "Holy shit." You panted out, like a dog on a hot summer day. "Can't wait any longer." Leon cackled, his hands on your hips as he started his movements. Each thrust was life altering. It felt like you were in Heaven with what he was doing. His mouth was sort of open, you could hear his quiet gasps, you were making him feel a type of way too.

You held onto his wrists for stability as he fucked you, his thrusts were causing the entire table to shake, you didn't want it to break or something. "What if a worker hears us? Sees us?" "Well, they'll see a woman being fucked real good by her husband." Leon replied. Could he ever not be snarky? You rolled your eyes, looking to the side, your face contorting as you felt his member reach deeper inside of you. "Don't roll your eyes at me, doll." Leon stated, his hands still on your midriff.

You never looked back at him, your eyes were stained on the other side of the room. Not that you didn't wanna look at him, you just know it'll make you cum sooner, and even make him as well, and you really want to draw this out. His cock moved in and out of you repeatedly, he switched up the pace every other second. One moment he was fast & rough and the other he took it slow & deep. Both ways made your heart beat faster and faster each time.

"Why aren't you looking at me?" Leon groaned out, his left hand groping your tit through your shirt, squeezing it. You didn't answer, you couldn't, you knew if you tried speaking your speech would only be slurred. "Look at me." You didn't listen. You just held onto his arms with more strength, indicating you were going to lose yourself sooner or later.

Although, next thing you know, he stopped thrusting into you. This ticked you off but before you could get a damn word out, you felt the hand that was once on your breast, now pulling your face to face him. "I suggest you start listening." Leon brought himself down closer to you, his body over yours. You nodded your head leisurely, licking your lip, then biting it. His demands were music to your ears. His movements picked up again, but he forced you to look at him. Something about staring down at you as he made you feel certain ways was so convincing.

After a minute, he let go of your face, trusting you'll listen to him now. His hands rested on either side of your head, his dick still surging into your pretty pussy. You felt like there was an imaginary percentage bar of how long it'll take before your orgasm implodes on you, and with each pump, it fills that bar slowly yet surely. "Fucking hell you're so beautiful." Leon moaned, tucking his head into the crook of your neck, his breath could be felt there. "You're so handsome." You added, your hand going up to his hair, playing with it.

You had a feeling he was going to do it, but once he did, it made your core tighten even more than before. His teeth once again made their way into your neck, he bit down on it. "Leon..." You grunted out, your fingers flowing through his soft hair. His thrusts were more slow & deep now, as if he was getting tired or something. It was either that or he was trying savour this special time together. "I'm gonna cum soon." You admitted, your arms going around his head, holding him close to your body.

Leon didn't say a word, he just nibbled on your throat, kissing & licking it every so often. That sharp sting of his teeth was erotic, it made your stomach get closer and closer to granting you that ultimate pleasure - your climax. "Baby... Harder..." You begged, letting go of him and instead grasping the white table underneath you. Once more, hit nibbled your neck, then your slender shoulders, before his face pulled back, going to stare at you again. "Harder?" Leon questioned, his moments all the same. "Yes, please." You tittered, your body so heated up.

Your husband did what he does best - please you. He began to fuck you, it wasn't anything vanilla, no, this was hard. Each thrust was rougher and rougher. Your eyes looked up into his, you could feel that they were watery, you looked innocent, like a doe in front of headlights. Leon looked back at you, his eyes much different. They are loving, yes, but also sexual desire was all behind them, his eyebrows also added onto the darkness of his face. "Don't look at me like that." The man grunted, closing his eyes as he pumped into your tight center.

"No, no, look at me, Leon." You reached up, holding onto his face. Now it was his turn. Leon slowly opened his eyes again, much more coherent than you were earlier. "Yeah..." You murmured, your hands caressing his scruffy cheeks.

Coming onto you was your orgasm, your initial release. You could feel how close you were, each thrust only brought you more and more to the edge. With his dick twitching inside you, you knew he was close to cumming as well. Your stomach was providing you with that all familiar feeling - The feeling of ultimate pleasure. Each time he fucked into you, your breasts would bounce, now that he was going much harder, they didn't get a break. Both of Leon's hands held onto your tits, he continuously squeezed them, he was like a teenage boy with how he was about boobs.

Leon gandered back up from your breasts and back at you, he never realized you were still staring at him. This, oh, it sent him over the edge. Your water colored eyes were like a death trap for him ; In this case, a sexual trap. "Fuck, why do you do this to me..." He grunted as he pumped only a couple more times into your cunt, his seed filling you, you felt the warm liquid shoot inside. "Why would you look at me like that?" Leon moaned, moving into you with short, fast thrusts, wanting to get you finished too.

You didn't reply, instead you just pulled his face down to yours, pressing your lips to his. Leon breathed out against your face, kissing you back passionately. You held the back of his head & neck, relishing in this moment. "Oh I love you." You moaned. "I love you too babygirl." He grunted, his cock still deep inside of you. "Cum for me princess." Leon began, "Have your pussy tighten around me." He stated, his voice husk.

Your breath shuttered when he spoke like that. He was so hot, every word he spoke made you feel all sorts of ways. You couldn't help it, even though you wanted to. You kept your lips against his, your tongue intertwined with his as you suctioned his length inside of you. Your orgasm withdrew you from the real world, your eyes practically rolling in the back of your head, surprised you couldn't see your own damn brain. "That's what I like to see." Leon paused his movements, just admiring his wife as she came all around him.

Both of you just sat there, your body felt super limp, you could feel his cock was soft inside of you. Everytime you guy's finish making love, it's like this. It's like the two of you are at a loss for words. You were still wet, you definitely needed to clean yourself up. You looked around the room, analyzing it. There was a paper towel dispenser by the sink on the other side of the room. "Could you please grab me some of that." You asked your husband. "Sure thing." He sighed gently, pulling out of you and heading over there.

Leon snatched up a few pieces of the towel, bringing it over to you. He didn't hand you them, instead he cleaned you up himself. You just watched him, heaving softly whilst doing so. He was a great husband. "Thank you baby." "Course doll." Leon replied kissing your inner thigh before helping you get back on your feet. "I'm not wearing these." You giggled, setting your panties aside. "Give them to me." He held his hand out. You rolled your eyes playfully, giving him your soaked underwear.

Your eyes widened as he sniffed them, the scent wearing off of them drove him crazy. As he pulled his own pants back up, he tucked your panties into his pocket. "Don't move around to much, I don't need your ass or pussy being flashed to the world." Leon chuckled, adjusting your shirt, you nodded in reply. He was right. "Let's go finish whatever time we have left of the movie." Leon whispered to you, his hand on your cheek firmly as he kissed you once more before the both of you made way back.

[dalliancekay]

Singing

I feel, we as a fandom, don’t talk enough about Aziraphale's singing.

Maybe he's not much into whatever pop/rock sensation is currently in most humans earphones*, but we know that he used to be a music tutor and therefore surely knows many great tunes.

On top of that, his music taste isn't as ancient as some might think... yes he likes classical music, but contrary to some opinions of it, not all of it is from 18th century. The symphony (number 5) he buys from Maggie at the beginning of S2 was written in 1937 by Dimitri Shostakovich who had a turbulent life (it being the 1930s AND trying to survive in Stalin's cruel regime).

The piece the Bentley plays for Azi when he asks for music on his way to Edinburgh is one of my favourite pieces of music called Danse Macbre by Saint-Saëns, the opening of which Wikipedia describes thus:

The piece opens with a harp playing a single note, D, twelve times (the twelve strokes of midnight) which is accompanied by soft chords from the string section. The solo violin enters playing the tritone, which was known as the diabolus in musica ("the Devil in music") during the Medieval and Baroque eras, consisting of an A and an E♭—in an example of scordatura tuning, the violinist's E string has actually been tuned down to an E♭ to create the dissonant tritone.

Aziraphale is also clearly aware of the film and the music + songs from The Sound of Music (1965) and Aziraphale, living in Soho as he does, I bet is a great lover of not just drama in theatre, but also musicals.

Therefore it is not a huge reach to conclude he would knows some fabulous songs to sing while making himself a pot of tea and a cup of coffee for Crowley on one the countless idyllic mornings in their cottage. Nor is it a stretch to assume that he loves to sing Crowley to sleep, playing with his hair as he does so, much like we all love to see in art and fics that this wonderful fandom provides.

So my question is, what does Aziraphale love to sing? Is it Maria from West Side Story? Singing in the Rain?

Does he love Jesus Christ Superstar (much like he loves his collection of misprinted Bibles)? Did he and Crowley go see Hamilton?

I also think they would have a huge collection of instruments in their cottage, perhaps even a beautiful grand piano... that, of course, they both can play. *but neither is the Bentley, who plays Queen to Crowley basically indiscriminately, even though he tries to play other things when driving. Whether he tried to play music in his car before the 70s, I'm not sure we know?

[winters-on-the-wing]

if the marauders and company were theatre kids here’s what i think they’d do:

james -> 100% an actor. he always ends up getting cast as the charming ingenu male and people eat it up. he’s filipino. so he’s amazing when he gets cast in musicals especially, because he can sing a heartbreaking ballad like no other.

sirius -> also an actor, but he usually gets cast as the villain because he has SERIOUS acting chops. he brings intensity to roles and he can genuinely terrify people by how realistic he acts. unlike james, he’s better in straight plays than musicals.

remus -> lighting board op. it’s one of the brainiest roles in the theater and he likes that he isn’t seen or perceived by audiences whatsoever, so he gets to do his own thing. he also is astounded by how color theory and different types of lighting shapes really finish a piece of theatre.

peter -> fly rail system. he’s trustworthy (lol) enough that everyone knows he won’t make a mistake and hurt somebody. he secretly loves feeling important while he pulls all the ropes.

lily -> stage manager. she can get a little intense when she has to make sure things get done, but she’s a kind stage manager at the same time, someone who all the actors and crew can trust. but she makes DAMN SURE that the actors respect the crew and that the crew respect the actors and she doesn’t tolerate petty rivalries, even though she herself is in one with james.

marlene -> set construction. she’s very skilled with power tools and she gets shit done. people scoff when they see her with a hammer because she’s a girl, but she can build a platform or a wagon or even a spinning platform twice as fast as any guy can, and she can do it on her own too. surprisingly, she’s a very quiet and independent worker. she loves to party and play around when the work is done, but when something has to get done, she is locked in.

pandora and dorcas -> they are THE costume design and costume construction duo. pandora has the creativity and dorcas has the practicality and resourcefulness to make pandora’s visions come to life. they are very conscious of how vulnerable costuming actors can be, and they take great care to make their costume shop a safe place. pandora draws up designs and concepts and dorcas makes the patterns and together, they sew costumes and spill tea. not a single thing they say during these tea spilling sessions leave the costume shop.

[g3tj1nx3d14]

jayvik headcanons !!

feeding you guys since i’ve been a neglectful poster 😭

SFW and NSFW, NSFW under the warning, spoilers up to act three season two !!! most definitely OOC at some points

SFW

• Jayce and Viktor have developed a secret language of sorts. Random phrases, hand movements, looks, and sounds replace actual sentences when they’re in the lab and super into their work. It’s not intentional, and they can’t even translate what most of it means besides it just… making sense in the moment.

• (I saw this before, I believe on Tik Tok or here but I’m not sure?)Jayce was a chubby ass baby. Actually, a fat ass baby. Ximena takes great joy in showing Viktor baby photos where he just looks squishy. If they argue over text, Jayce thinks he’s hilarious if he texts a baby photos with the caption “this is who you’re arguing with”.

• Jayce is the type to seem like he’s only into mainstream music, but he’s also really the type of guy to A, listen to the songs his mom likes whenever he feels slightly upset, and B, have a random niche band with four hundred followers on Sound Cloud that he’s been obsessed with for years and is convinced will go big. Viktor tends to listen to music without lyrics, typically video game sound tracks or calm beats while he works. I could also, alternatively, see him being very into insanely heavy metal while he carefully works. You could scream bloody murder and you’re not louder than his headphones.

• Viktor tends to be much more socially aware to undertones in conversations than Jayce. While the latter is good at smooth talking politicians due to Mel’s training, he tends to forget that everything they say tends to have a double meaning. Viktor enjoys telling him exactly who was clearly hating him or hitting on him.

• Viktor is a clothing thief. Genuinely so bad. Jayce entered the relationship with fifteen hoodies in his closet and after seven years, he has one on a good day. They’ve become pajamas and Viktor will be genuinely offended if he takes them back.

• Do not watch a movie with these motherfuckers. They’re talkers— at least when they’re at home, Jayce would be mortified to talk in a public movie theatre. But every single time they’re watching a movie in their apartment, they’re pausing it every three minutes to have a ten minute discussion about a random topic, usually vaguely related to the movie.

• Viktor smokes weed. Sure, maybe some would argue that it’s not good for his health, but he’s a Zaunite living amongst the Piltover elite. He needs a joint once in a while (nightly). Jayce enjoys smoking with him sometimes, but he thinks holding it in makes him look cool and ends up coughing his lungs up.

• Trans man Viktor !!! Jayce tried to be helpful and help with his t-shots, but he tends to end up awkwardly looking at the floor while Viktor does it himself and he’s there for emotional support. He doesn’t like needles.

• Viktor can get slightly cold and Jayce immediately tries to bundle him up. He gets extremely freaked out whenever his loved ones get cold due to the lingering trauma of almost losing his mother. Viktor makes sure he turns the heat up in the colder months so Jayce doesn’t spiral, even though he insists it’s solely because of his pain.

•Jayce learned how to massage people properly (read a book and everything) to help with Viktor’s pain. He’s shockingly gentle for someone his size. Viktor finds a lot of comfort in knowing that someone who could easily hurt him is purposely being so, so gentle with him.

okay freaky time

NSFW

• Agreeing with the popular headcanon, Jayce is such a fucking sub. Holy shit. Sure, he does like to top, but he likes to listen, especially with Viktor. He likes getting to drop his responsibilities and working on making sure Viktor feels good and getting praised in response.

• Jayce always thought that he was a vanilla guy, but Viktor called him a good boy once and the praise kink awoke like a damn sleeper agent.

• Viktor has a bad habit of mixing up his lab voice and bedroom voice. It’s not too different, just a bit of a different vibe. It just gets awkward when Viktor means “come here” and pats his desk as in “look at something I’m working on” and not “bend over the desk”.

• Viktor also tends to treat discovering Jayce’s interests like a science experiment. They don’t have a sex tape, they have a sex voice recorder with Viktor recording their adventures in the funniest way possible.

• I genuinely can’t imagine them taking it too seriously. Sure, there’s serious and tense moments, but there’s a lot of silly, soft, intimate moments of them laughing and joking with each other as they make each other feel good.

• In edition to trans guy Viktor, Jayce is an eater. Whenever he tops, he tends to be a service top, and he genuinely enjoys pleasuring Viktor with his mouth. Whenever Viktor’s pain is acting up, Jayce tends to volunteer to “get his mind off of it” by spending literal hours on his knees, lab— many times while Viktor works on lab reports— or bedroom. He gets his head scratched in return.

• The lab is bedroom #2. Tell me these two freaks were alone with each other constantly for seven years in that lab and nothing ever happened in there? Absolutely not.

• Jayce tends to leave a few marks because he likes to bite a bit, but Viktor thinks it’s hilarious to leave obvious ones. Bright hickies, bite marks, stereotypical back scratches, the works. Before their relationship was public, everyone in Piltover was convinced that Jayce was sleeping around, and Viktor found it really, really funny. Seeing Jayce be slut shamed was the highlight of his day.

• Sure, we can all agree that Jayce is a freak, but Viktor is matching, if not surpassing that freak. They’ve tried everything for the sake of science.

• Viktor really enjoys seeing Jayce beg. It’s almost endearing to see a man of such high status on his knees whining.

• Jayce is loud. Like, really loud. Hearing him through the walls is a genuine concern loud. He is physically incapable of shutting up when he feels good.

[liliesof-the-valley]

Singer mc

How do the brothers react to a mc who can sing?

Not proofread, this idea came to me while I was supposed to be writing about a jack of all trades mc but oh well, enjoy!!

─── ୨ৎ────

Luci

Needless to say, he’s so impressed.

He thinks you should show the world this while also wanting to simultaneously have your voice belong to him

I suppose the showing off the talents you have boosts his ego in a way.

I’m pretty sure it’s canon that he’ll listen to anything except techno (I think) and regardless of the style of singing you do (be it opera, more theatre-y or metal) he’ll support you.

To be fair , though, I do think his favourite would be you singing opera

He’ll accompany you with the piano as you sing your heart out to whatever and whatever.

Perhaps if you sing a duet, he’ll join in, who knows?

Mams

Do I love him? Yes. Do I think he may try exploit this? Also yes.

Okay hear me out, once he does find out about your special talent he’s absolutely awestruck, though at first I do think his greed may get to his head.

Plots of how he can record you or help you audition in films/ musicals or how much money he would make if he—

But wait. Once he comes to his senses, he realises…

Your voice should just be heard by him, he is the great mammon, your first after all!

Needless to say, the two of you go to many karaoke parlours afterwards as well as singing whilst driving to nowhere special

Levi

To be fair, I’m pretty sure there wouldn’t be anyone who wouldn’t be impressed by your absolute delight of a voice

Levi thinks similarly, thinking of how many people you’ve sung to and how many people have heard your siren song…

Well, he is the avatar of envy after all, he’s bound to get jealous over something.

Despite his jealousy, it’s quite easy to make him feel better.

How? Easy, sing an anime op. More specifically (if he’s in a reallyy bad mood) sing the opening of hana ruri and he’s grinning ear to ear, brighter than the whole of the celestial realm.

You and him do actually do karaoke and he LOVES how your voice can just…wow.

Expect him to ask for mini concerts with you dressed in cosplay

Satan

He’s intrigued, curious and even more interested in you now.

You can sing? And not just that, this wonderful?

Some demons would take centuries to build up this kind of voice, and you (be with years of practice or being naturally talented) have achieved this skill this quickly? (Remember the perceptions of time are diff guys😭)

he treats this as sort of a science experiment, I suppose—which does mean LOADS OF QUESTIONS.

How high can you go? How low can you go? Do you know that…? Do you—

After this initial stage, he does like asking you to sing to him, especially if he’s in a mood or about to explode and like that, he’s calm again.

Asmo

oh my! You can sing?!

How cute!!

He may ask for your permission to post some videos of you singing, the world deserves to see your beautiful voice and his beautiful face!

Sing to him while he’s getting ready and he feels like the main character

Asmo has a nice voice too so I could imagine a duet between you two

Its so happens that company reached out and asked you two to sing a duet!

Well, at least your getting payed good

Asmo nights now are required to have at least one karaoke portion/place

Beel

You can sing? Cool!

I mean honestly, he’d probably find out randomly

I can imagine him realising your siren-like voice whilst you are singing and cooking

You’d casually be singing to a song from your playlist as you cook and he walks in

His jaw drops because, wow???

Almost forgot about his snack due to the sheer shock of your serene voice

anyways, he does ask you about it, thinking its something you should share with people

Belphie

there’s no way that he wouldn’t make you sing lullabies to him

In fact, that’s probably his favourite thing to hear you sing

Whilst napping together, even if he’s on the verge of falling asleep, it’s nice to hear you singing into his ears, lulling him to sleep

Hm? Belphies having problems with sleeping? That’s a lie first of all he wants you to sing to him

maybe if you sing a lullaby to him he’ll be able to fall asleep better

Come on.. just one, or two, or three, or—

[spaceagebachelormann]

zigmar i come to you humbly on this fine evening with the simple request that you give me some sort of might duck sustenance por favor and muchas gracias

they can be incoherent and stupid and goofy and silly to the max i just need to rotate this little kids like rotisserie chickens in my mind (esp fulton portman and julie)

random miscellaneous tmd thoughts !

✧ warnings: some of them may be ooc ngl

✧ additional info: u got it pookums 😈😈😈🙏 also these can be read as either platonic or romantic (not luis)

✧ m.list — nav.

♡ charlie conway !

the most insane taste in music literally ever

bro goes from madonna to death metal SO FAST

but ngl his playlist is always the best and he always gets to play music whenever u go anywhere

but oh my god he’d love pierce the veil in present day

HES ALSO LIKE SOMEHOW AMAZING AT MATH. but he cannot do science for literal shit

also his clothing style changes js like his music taste

will literally be kurt cobain one day and morrissey the next (hed hate morrissey though)

♡ adam banks !

every team sleepover/event/literally anything could js be a spontaneous hangout is always at his house

it’s because he’s rich and his house is huge as fuck and he has every board game known to man

just do not play uno because a fight always breaks out (charlie is always part of it)

he’s always the one who ends the fight also

he has this very calming presence that’s so nice to be around and him js talking to whoever got into a fight immediately helps calm them down

also weirdly good at comforting in the middle of the night but never during the day??

♡ lester averman !

he would watch full house religiously prove me wrong

his favourite character is obviously joey because they are one in the same

everyone on the team and their mother has been forced to watch full house while he’s been at their house/vice versa

he can also cook like. decently well !! it’s not something he’d prefer to do but he will for his friends if they’re tired or smth

♡ fulton reed !

this little shit

he is so unbelievably competitive over the smallest things it’s actually insane

typa guy to race u to see who can get to one side of the room first and start genuinely tweaking if he doesn’t win

at sleepovers he refuses to fall asleep first even if it’s just by a few minutes

he could be dead to the world but still have his eyes open cause he refuses to let u win (unless ur his s/o cause he might consider it that way)

♡ connie moreau !

she is definitely a theatre kid idc

her favourite musicals are probably grease, hairspray and heathers

she likes female main characters!!

everytime she gets into a new fandom she immediately starts thinking abt what it’d be like a musical and probably wanted to be a composer at some point

would 100% beg to use the aux on a road trip and then blast hamilton loud as balls

she wholeheartedly believes six is a top tier musical and she will DIE on this hill

(fun fact i’ve met andrea macasaet <3)

♡ guy germaine !

modern day guy would’ve loved basic white girl music

“life is too short to pretend to hate taylor swift” —him

also 100% a britney spears girlie. and nsync and every stereotypical white girl artist

but i wholeheartedly believe britney would be his favourite and he has her whole discography on cassette, cd, vinyl, u name it he has a britney spears collection

also his ass is NOT straight 💀 i’ve never met a straight man who listens to britney spears

♡ julie gaffney !

lowkey a regina george multitude if she wasn’t kinda. yk. a bad person

she’s a mix of cher and regina

everyone at the fancy ass boarding school literally loves her because she’s calm, smart pretty nice etc etc she’s just a really great person to be around

shes that one student who has every assignment finisher a week early, all a’s and 100% in every subject WITHOUT being mean abt it!!

her ass is friends with the whole student population and knows every well and knows all the drama but won’t tell everyone if she thinks it’s too personal (it’s it’s random petty nonsense she tells the team)

♡ ken wu !

secretly rlly good friends with julie but nobody knows even though they do not try to hide it at all

literally wander the halls talking abt whatever just for everyone to be like “y’all are friends???”

also this man secretly loves lana del rey

him and julie will sit on his bedroom floor and literally tell him the most insane and jaw dropping gossip she heard that day while lana is playing in the background

everytime someone asks his favourite lana song he says grandfather please stand on the shoulders of my father while he’s deep-sea fishing on did you know that there’s a tunnel under ocean blvd to fuck with them

♡ dean portman !

is actually very very good at math!!

he was a tutor for the 9th/10th graders for a bit to get volunteer hours and also cause he just likes doing math

you’d expect it to be like doing homework with ur dad and the poor kid is in tears while deans like “WHATS NINE. TIMES TWO.” but he’s actually surprisingly patient

if he’s explained something a few times and they still don’t get it he’ll just try it a different way until they get it and work them through the problem

has rlly strong relationships with the 9th and 10th graders cause of this and is essentially their older brother figure

the amount of 14/15 year olds that he’s given relationship advice too is insane (id be one of the 14 year olds probably)

♡ luis mendoza !

his type is secretly quiet girls cause he finds them rlly interesting and likes the thought of them being happy around him but quiet around everyone else

he’s like yes girl be urself with me

it all stemmed from the girl he liked in 8th grade who helped pick up his pencils when she accidentally knocked his pencil case out of his hand (she was a quiet nerdy girl)

like a whole year later and he’s still trying to rizz her up 💀

he’s one of those guys who takes forever to lose feelings

the girl is actually good friends with him btw

♡ dwayne robertson !

i feel like he is fucking AMAZING at baking

his icon is dolly parton and he heard berry pie so he immediately learned how to bake

if someone he knows has a birthday he either bakes the birthday cake or brings them something he made depending on how close he is with them

and holy shit it’s the most amazing thing u will ever taste and nothing will ever compare

yes he’s one of those guys who will go on an 18 minute tangent on how amazing dolly parton is if someone talks shit about her (same i love dolly)

[nerdanel01]

Here's an ask about Agnes and Emmrich that I hope leads to a slutty little drabble: we know Agnes has fantasized about Emmrich, but is the reverse also true? What would that look like for Emmrich? When would it have happened in their relationship: before or after she left? How awful did he feel about it?

*laughs nervously* the short answer is… a lot?? And in the most Catholic way possible??? 4k+ below the cut very NSFW

9:48 Dragon

Though he would never admit it to Agnes, the truth of it was, Emmrich found the opera to be just fine. Catching a performance with Agnes was a lovely way to spend an evening, but by no means did that make Emmrich himself any kind of aficionado. It was Agnes’ avid interest that first brought him to the theatre, and Agnes’ continued fervor that kept him coming back: he went, not to see a performance, but to see her —so engaged, so happy.

This opera, in particular, he was finding impossible to enjoy. Agnes had practically begged him to take her to The Marriage of Figaro, and by the title alone, Emmrich had thought it would be innocuous enough. Another light, romantic comedie, like the Donizetti works of which she was so fond. 

It was most definitely not that. If the opera was humorous, Emmrich found it to be a dark, almost sadistic kind of humor. The plot centered around the titular servant Figaro and his bride-to-be, Susanna… and their escalating attempts to prevent the master of the house, Count Almaviva, from asserting his droite de seigneur. Emmrich could not fathom how it was that Agnes could so breathlessly throw herself into a plot that all too well reflected what little he knew to be true of her own conception; of the cruelty and the violent torments Agnes’ mother had suffered at the hands of her father. And yet, she seemed unperturbed.

As if that were not bad enough, he could not help but feel (irrationally, of course) that the entire premise of the opera was pointing an accusing finger directly at him. Agnes was not his servant, of course—she was far more than that—but he could not help but feel that his longing for her shared a similar, lecherous undertone to Almaviva’s licentious pursuit of Susanna. Certainly he held professional power over Agnes, as the Count did Susanna; the fact that he was often reluctant to wield it did not wish that fact away. And just like the Count, his advantage of age he held over Agnes was… considerable. 

And so, by the second act of the opera, Emmrich had more or less mentally checked out of the performance entirely. Pleasant as the music may have been (when it was not pulsing, throbbing, thrumming with anxiety; imminent danger; repressed sexual desire) Emmrich found his eyes wandering across the theatre: at the orchestra playing below, at the audience seated at the level of the stage, at the wide balconies where even in the dim performance light he could make out figures packed in the seats. He had never been a particularly devout man, but sometimes, when the mood was just right, being in the opera house reminded him of the most peaceful moments he’d ever spent in a Chantry. He would give Agnes that: there was something special about all these people—strangers—gathered in the dark, assembled in the worship of a great piece of art. It was peaceful, to look upon all those dark faces. Something almost holy about it. 

Which made what Emmrich saw next all the more upsetting. 

As the adolescent servant Cherubino took to the stage, preparing to sing his invented love song for the Countess Almaviva (with whom, Emmrich had gathered, he was hopelessly infatuated), movement drew his eye to the theatre box opposite his, on the lefthand side of the stage. 

At first Emmrich blinked, resisting the impulse to shake his head—surely he was seeing things? Were they—? They couldn’t be—! And yet, they were: cozied up in a balcony box all to themselves, a young woman had snuck her hand into her companion’s lap and, by the white flash of her arm in the dim light, Emmrich could tell she was pumping that hand up and down quite enthusiastically. Though her date had taken care to conceal his lap from view by fanning his performance program wide across his legs, it was all too clear exactly what was going on from the open-mouthed, slack expression on his face and the way he was tilting his head back against the chair. 

This late in life there was not much that could still shock him, but Emmrich’s jaw fully dropped. At first he merely sat there, stunned, staring… before his senses returned to him, and he snapped his eyes (wide with disbelief) back to the action on the stage, thoughts an absolute whirl. What should he do? Agnes’ attention was fixed on the stage, deeply engrossed by the drama unfolding (though he still could not really understand why); he did not want to draw her focus to the absolutely debased act that was happening just across the room. Should he excuse himself? Rise from the box and alert one of the theatre’s ushers? Was this even something they were trained to deal with?

Perhaps they had stopped; perhaps he had imagined it. But when Emmrich let his eyes slide, as innocuously as he could manage, back to the opposite box, he saw not only that their public affair failed come to a conclusion, but that the man had thrown his arm around the woman’s shoulders, and was rather obscenely squeezing at her breast over her bodice. 

´Andraste have mercy!’

Never in his life had he witnessed such indecency, and as one of the most senior members of the Mourn Watch, his presence had been requested at some extremely indecent parties hosted by the noble class. His face was burning with shock and embarrassment. Trying to get ahold of himself—hoping that if he ignored it for long enough, they would cease or (Maker’s breath!) reach the natural conclusion of such affairs and settle down. He turned back to the stage, watching over Agnes’ shoulder at the scene playing out in the Countess’ bedroom, the teenage Cherubino, all hot-blooded and virile, singing at center stage:

“You women who know what love is, Look and tell me if it is within my heart?”

Truly, they were no better than teenagers, those two nobles in flagrante delicto across the theater. Certainly if he, Emmrich, had endured the past three years of his increasingly inescapable (and increasingly inappropriate) desire for Agnes, they should have been able to keep their hands off of each other for three hours. 

And yet, as if summoned, he felt the tickle of those depraved imaginings in the back of his mind. He watched the stage at Agnes’ side, over her shoulder; his eyes slid away from Cherubino to trace the delicate black lace of the blouse she wore over her bodice—the woven pattern of the fabric offering a rare, tantalizing glimpse at the bare skin of her shoulder, her collarbone, her neck… the tops of her breasts, straining against her bodice as she took in the aria with ecstatic, rapt attention.  

“Let me tell you what I am feeling: It is new to me, and I cannot understand it.  I feel affection, I am full of desire, A desire both delightful and miserable…”

He wanted to brush tenderly at the lock of raven-black hair that had escaped her chignon, curled and coiled charmingly tight by the summer humidity. He wanted to lean in close, to breathe hot against her neck, to take the lobe of her ear between his teeth.

“I sigh and lament without wanting to…”

Intrusive thoughts of what it would be like to pull off his dress gloves, to put his hand on her knee. To draw, slowly, inch by inch, her skirts up over her leg, revealing calves clothed in deliciously sheer stockings, the clips and straps of the garters that kept those stockings secure… to round his hand around her knee, for fingertips to creep past the band of her stockings and along the soft skin of her thigh…

“I tremble and I throb without knowing why…”

…and climb higher. To find her swollen? Wet, already? Slick with anticipation at the promise of his touch—

—and at once, the sudden, mortifying tightness in his trousers brought Emmrich back to reality. He pulled the inside of his cheek between top and bottom teeth and bit down hard, trying to anchor himself with the pain and will away his arousal. Agnes, thank the blessed Andraste herself, kept her eyes glued to her opera glasses; she did not turn to see, and so he did not have to excuse, the flush across his cheeks and his ears, nor the far more conspicuous evidence of arousal tenting his trousers. 

He did not know what would be worse: if Agnes assumed, rightly, that it was her own presence that had pitched him into the throes of desire, or if she assumed, wrongly, that it had something to do with Cherubino, a woman in men’s clothes playing as an innocent, virgin, teenage boy on the stage below them. 

“Though I find peace neither day nor night, Still, I cannot get enough of the feeling.”

Inconspicuously, taking a queue from the deviant across the theatre, Emmrich laid his paper program over his lap. Focused his eyes on his hands. Picked idly at his nails, willing away his desire. 

Knowing pettily, venomously, that if he happened to encounter the couple in the opposite box on his way out of the theatre that evening, he would do everything in his power to trip them on their way down the opera house steps. 

But of course, in the sudden throng of activity as the curtain fell and the theatre emptied, the offending exhibitionists were nowhere to be seen. Probably gratifying themselves further in the powder room, Emmrich thought with disgust (and though he would never admit it to himself, even under pain of torture or death: envy.) 

He wanted nothing more than to get back to the Necropolis, to put the evening and the terribly obvious handjob and horny little Cherubino behind him. But when Agnes threaded her arm through his and tugged him towards the champagne bar, he was as incapable as ever of refusing her—though he almost certainly should have. Though he knew it was ill-advised, he tried (and failed) to put the memory behind him with drink. By the time he had finished his second glass, Agnes was still sipping politely at her first. 

But all the drink in the world could not break the spell of her beauty. In the walk from the opera to the bar, more tendrils of hair had shook loose from her bun, and the flyaways curled like tender pea shoots around her head. He loved her most like this, he thought, when the facade of perfection and rigor and discipline she worked so hard to maintain began to fall away. His eyes lingered too long on the crimson print her lips had left on her apricot-colored coupe glass.

Desperate to shake himself out of it, Emmrich confided in her, at last: “Nessa, you will not believe what I witnessed at the theatre tonight.”

She lifted her glass to her mouth, and her bright grey eyes met his, full of curiosity and innocence. “What?”

But he was not even sure how to politely say it. He licked his lips, a wry, disbelieving grin tugging at his mouth as he told her at last, “A noblewoman in one of the balcony boxes opposite ours… manually stimulating her companion under the cover of his paper program during the second act.”

Agnes’ eyes widened; she set her coupe down forcefully enough for the glass to clink on the table top, covering her mouth politely as she coughed up the drink she had accidentally inhaled in surprise. 

“You saw what?”  

A lovely, delicious color was rising in her cheeks, red to match the stain on her lips. 

“Should I repeat myself?” he asked, full of dry humor. “Believe me, I was not sure myself, but when he started groping her over her dress that more or less quelled any lingering doubts I had in my mind.”

Agnes lifted her glass to her mouth once more, her eyes boring holes into the table before her. Whispered, lowly, “Andraste have mercy.” 

“That’s exactly what I thought!” Emmrich said, pleased to see her scandalized, to have his own reaction to what had transpired mirrored and confirmed. “I mean, really. It would have been perfectly easy for them to step deeper into the recesses of the box, into the cover of darkness where no one could see them. But did they? No, and I do not believe for a minute that is because concealing themselves did not occur to them. I think they wanted to be exposed. To be witnessed, to be seen.”

But as he continued to speak, Agnes’ blush receded. She watched him, too keenly, over the rim of her glass; she was neither as outraged nor as scandalized as Emmrich wanted her to be. Needed her to be, to draw a line: to stand in firm opposition to the Agnes he had all too readily conjured in his mind: the fictive siren that would gasp at his touch, that would part her legs all too willingly for his hand, without regard for the risk, without a care for who might see them.

“It bothered you quite a lot, didn’t it?” was all she asked him, softly, probingly, when at last he had finished his tirade.

He blinked at her a couple of times. His fingertips found the stem of his third glass of champagne, and he spun it back and forth between forefinger and thumb. “Well—yes,” he managed, at last. A terrible, traitorous heat rising in his cheeks, in his ears. “Did it—does it not bother you?”

Agnes only shrugged and offered him an indifferent smile. “I did not see it,” she said, at last, “engrossed as I was in the music. I am sorry, however, that you found it so distracting.”

“You think it was merely distracting?” Emmrich prompted, in a state of disbelief. “Not… not shameful—nor disrespectful? To the performers, to the rest of the audience?”

The blush had returned to her cheeks. With a nervous smile, she confessed, quietly, “Perhaps I am not as disciplined as you.” She was not looking at him now, staring into the fizzing depths of her coupe glass. “Perhaps… I understand how easy it is, to be suddenly overcome. By the music, by… by desire.” 

Obscene scenarios clamored for attention in Emmrich’s mind. An arched back, a cry of pleasure—how beautiful she would look, how desperately he wanted to see her overcome, to be the one responsible for bringing forth such pleasure and desire within her—!

Without looking at him, Agnes lifted the glass to her mouth and drained the rest of it in a single sip. Placing the coupe down with something like a grimace, she raised her hand, motioning for the waiter to bring her another. As soon as he did, she took a second generous gulp.

“But enough of that,” Agnes said at last, reasserting her control over herself, redirecting the conversation. “What did you think of the music?” she asked, then teased him: “The parts of it you were not too distracted to pay attention to, that is.”

The music? She was just going to drop that explosively erotic phrase into the conversation, and then she wanted to talk about the music? Emmrich fumbled for something intelligent to say. “I thought the basso who sang Figaro had a very fine voice.”

“Oh, did he not?” Agnes effused; and then she was off, chatting a million miles an hour about everything she knew about that particular Rivaini singer, his training, the roles he had performed in other venues, the lyrical quality of his singing. Emmrich nursed his champagne, happy to simply listen to her as he fought to subdue the heat in his face.

By the time they returned to the Necropolis at last it was late, the halls silent. Agnes had held his arm the whole way back—not, he feared, out of affection for him, but out of concern that he had drank too much, that without her support he might stumble and fall. He had drank too much, which was both embarrassing and most unbecoming. Worse still, the drink had done nothing to dispel the ludicrous fever those idiots in the opera had set in his blood; it had only fanned the flames. When they had reached the door to his bedroom, Emmrich had stopped for a moment, hovered awkwardly in front of Agnes as he debated, then decided against, pressing a grateful kiss to her brow. He did not think, in his current temperament, he could manage to keep it appropriately chaste.

Indeed, as soon as the door had closed behind him and he was left to his privacy, all the intrusive thoughts he had fought in the theatre and the in the bar and on the long walk home returned to him, tormenting him: the light rasp of his nails along the inside of her thigh; the fine hair of her legs standing on end in the wake of those touches; the damp warmth of her smallclothes as he’d push them aside; her anxious little whisper, aroused, anticipatory, cautious: “Emmrich, your nails…” and how he might respond, lips brushing against her ear, “I will be most careful with you.” Throbbing and freezing and burning like poor Cherubino, like a young man a quarter of his age as he imagined her wetness, the slickness of her beneath his fingertips as he circled her bud—

(There was nothing for it now but to see it through. Only one way to truly relieve himself, to exorcise the thoughts that haunted him so at last he could rest. Hastily, inarticulate drunken fingers stumbling over buttons, he unfastened his trousers and dropped onto the edge of his bed.)

—her parted lips, the little hitches in her breath, the pleasure sounds she would try to stifle as (carefully, so carefully, true to his word) he would slip middle-and-forefinger deep into her hot wet heat—

(Ragged edge to his breath like torn parchment as he closes his hand around himself and begins to stroke. Delicious tightness in his core, feet arching against the floor.)

—placing a kiss on her neck. Breathing hotly against her ear. Agnes’ hands trembling, her opera glasses shaking in her hands as her satisfaction builds, mounts; a keening cry; the way her back would snap, her hips driving his fingers into her, grinding against the palm of his hand—her cunt tightening reflexively around him—

(Free hand white-knuckling, twisted in his bedsheets. A gasp and low groan as fist tightens over the slick head of his arousal. It’s rotten, it’s foul, it’s wrong in a thousand ways to imagine her this way—but it feels much too good to stop.)

—would she follow him back after? Rise before the curtain had fully fallen, before the applause had concluded, racing with him back to the Necropolis, creeping into his room? The blush of her face in the champagne bar: “Perhaps I know how easily it is to be overcome by desire.” To hold her in his arms, to kiss her in this room—! Loose the buttons on her blouse and slide the lace past her bare shoulder, bare neck, bare clavicle… lifting her skirts, sinking into her—

(“Hha—ahh! Nessa—!”)

—with her legs wrapped tightly around his waist, her hands clawing across his back for purchase, enveloped in the smell of her, by her warmth… here, in the privacy of the bedchamber, where she would not have to hide her pleasure sounds but could pitch his name upon them like a storm-tossed ship, scream it as she reached the height of her pleasure—

Tension in his body snapping white-hot, shooting sparks through his limbs and coiling in his core, Emmrich held the back of his hand firmly against his mouth to stifle his own obscene, satisfied groan as he spilled into his hand. He came so hard it left his toes curling; thighs shaking; short of breath.

The next day, he did not arrive at their study until nearly noon. 

He had woken hungover, head pounding, light-sensitive. But that discomfort was nothing compared to the agonizing guilt and shame that washed over him when he recalled the events of the night prior. Why couldn’t he have minded his own business? He should not have let what he saw in the theater get under his skin; it was inconceivable to him in the sober light of morning that he had thought telling Agnes about it was a good idea. Had he really used the words ‘manually stimulating’? How uncomfortable had he made her? He recalled how quickly Agnes had changed the conversation, cringed at how long he had lingered over it. Fighting through the hangover to shower and shave did nothing to cleanse the pervasive filthiness he felt. 

He could not remember the last time he had attended Chantry service—but some habits were difficult to break. Seeking even the slightest reprieve of absolution, he left the Necropolis shortly after dawn, heading towards the Chantry in Nevarra City. But even among the incense and the singing Mothers, he could not escape from his regret, the Canticle of Threnodies echoing among the vaulted ceiling in accusation:

Marvel at perfection, for it is fleeting. You have brought Sin to Heaven And doom upon all the world. 

He had something beautiful—a partner to stand by him, to protect and care for him—and he was going to spoil it, desecrate it as thoroughly as the Tevinter Magisters of old had corrupted the Golden City of the Maker. Every lurid imagining he indulged in, he knew, brought him closer and closer to doing irreparable harm to the thing in his life most precious to him. 

When at last he returned to the Necropolis, Agnes was already in the study, waiting for him. The smell of lavender oil was thick in the air; she must have spent the morning cleaning, a task which he had repeatedly told her she need not take upon herself, and one to which she repeatedly insisted upon undertaking nevertheless. Now she stood at one of the tables with Wilfred at her side, watching him with scrutiny as he clumsily tried to grind down some fresh herbs, his bony hands struggling with the mortar and pestle. 

She looked up at him the minute he entered, her bright eyes full of anticipation—and was that a hint of concern?

“Where were you?”

Beaten down by his excessive drinking and shame alike, Emmrich did not have the willpower within him to lie. “In Nevarra City. I attended Chantry services this morning.”

Agnes smiled, like it was a joke. “No, really, where were you? You missed breakfast. I was not sure you’d want to eat after last night, but I saved you a bit of toast, just in case.”

Emmrich took a deep breath, following the slender line of her arm to the table near the hearth, where four slices of toast were stacked on a plate beside an artful dollop of jam and a pat of butter. Though his stomach still felt wretched, he knew eating would probably help. “Chantry services, really,” he repeated, again, in answer to her question, his tone resigned. He walked to the table, tore a slice of toast in half and lifted it to his mouth without bothering with the  ornamentation of butter or jam—he did not think his stomach could endure the grease nor the sweetness. “Thank you, dear, for saving me something to eat.”

“Seriously?” Agnes asked. Emmrich did not have to look up to know the look of incredulous disbelief on her face. It was plain by the tone of her voice.

Emmrich chewed through the dry toast, swallowed. His stomach gave a discontented growl, awakening at the prospect of food. “Quite seriously,” he answered at last. “Though I am far from the most devout among the Mourn Watch, old habits are difficult to shake. Every once in a while, it’s like an itch that needs to be scratched.” Not that the debasement and self-flagellation he frequently associated with Chantry service had done him any particular good this morning. 

Agnes gave a low huff of amusement. Without needing to be asked—knowing, as she knew him so well, that the toast would go down easier with a bit of tea to help it—she crossed the room, cast iron teapot in hand, and bent before the heart to suspend it over the fire.

“So did it?” she teased him. “Scratch your itch?”

With her back turned to him, she did not see the ugly grimace he made, the way his lips curled into a frustrated scowl at his own lack of discipline. Nor did she see, blessedly, the way his eyes were fixed upon her: her narrow waist, the pert swell of her backside as she bent over the fire. 

“No, I’m afraid not,” Emmrich said, tearing his eyes away to stare at his toast. “Not this time.” He recalled to himself the verse from Threnodies, repeated it in his mind, beating himself against it until it obliterated the image of her (legs spread, back arched) that had begun to resurface in his mind:

Those who had once been mage-lords, The brightest of their age, Were no longer men, but monsters.

[wedgiestoriescollective]

The Senior: A Night in a Hotel Room

(The last Re-Upload)

Chase and I continued our interesting relationship after the events that took place after the choir concert. But the holidays are always a busy time, even during school. I had projects to complete and so did Chase, our daily routine of me giving Chase’s underwear a pull died down for a bit. I did get him a couple times. One time during a break at our choir practice, I yanked his American Eagle trunks up his butt when we were alone in the church's library. Oh man, that was so hot. His jeans were so tight that day, and he was wearing a maroon sweater.

He looked like the preppy guys I'd always jack off to that I wish I could wedgie, and here I was. wedgieing him. What made it even better was that he liked it, and I knew it.

               Before the holiday break I got to wedgie him one more time. Chase had recently joined the speech team, and I was also on the team. I’d like to believe that he joined the team so that he would have more reasons to spend more time with me, but it probably was one of many reasons. He did a great job in the musical and participating in speech is like participating in judged theatre. So, the cast members and teammates encouraged him to join, so he did. As a member of the team, we were required to work the tournament that our school would host. But Chase was also very good at playing the trumpet so during the day of the tournament he wasn’t available because he earned a spot in the All-Region Band. So, he stopped by near the end of the day and his job for the day was to deliver flowers that we were going to put on the table with the trophies for the awards ceremony. He texted me to help him bring them in. I met him at the loading dock as he was pulling in. Now, the wedgie that I gave him as he was getting out of his front seat was a unique one. He got out and I somehow managed to just grab the waistband without digging for it. His Blue and Red stripped American Eagle boxer briefs went right up his ass. I tugged his leg holes past his dress pants waistband, and as the tug reached its height I said “sup”, and immediately snapped his white waistband to his back.

               “Come on” he said, surprisingly annoyed with his wedgie.

               “What did you expect? You asked me to help” I said.

               “With the flowers?” he asked as he was walking to the trunk of his car while simultaneously picking at his underwear. At this point I'd wedgied him so often that he no longer would go out of sight to adjust himself anymore. He would just pick outright in front of me. I found that hot. It was unexpecting how hot I found that to be.

“Well, sorry I'll hold off on the wedgies, I got those”. I lifted a box of flowers and walked with him into the auditorium. We were alone as we were arranging the flowers, but since the stage was so big and the curtains were down, we had no way of knowing if anyone else was there. So, it wasn't the best time to try to give Chase another wedgie. We continued working quietly getting everything all set up.

               I didn’t see Chase until after the holiday break. We texted each other though, he was very good at keeping the text conversation going. It wasn’t all about wedgies. We discussed books and movies that we were both currently reading or watching. Our families. He was very present to listen to my problems. At the time my high school theatre department were prepping auditions for that years play competition. This was the closet that theatre departments in high school got to competing with one another like sports teams do. The point of the competition was to take a play, any play and cut it down to no longer than 50 minutes. My theatre teacher took this play very seriously, taking a lot of time for us to read the play in class, analyze it and audition for roles. There were 16 people in the class and only 7 roles. There was a specific role in the play that I thought I'd be right for. The role required for the actor to be able to play a young prince who may or may not have had an affair with a prince from another country. The point of the role was that you never knew for sure if the characters were gay or not. I was obsessed with the idea of possibly getting the chance to play this role, I memorized scenes, I actively participated in discussions about the play in class. I made it obvious to my theater teacher that I really wanted the role. Being in the cast for this specific play in the theatre department basically marked you as someone who is a top actor in the school.  I knew I was good, but there were a lot of other guys in the department that were older and talented too. But the other kid that was my age in the theatre class Micah, was in the competition play last year and he had the experience and could very well be cast in this role. It shouldn't have bothered me as much as it did, but Micah was the top of our class, and he participated in theatre because it was something that he could put on his college apps. His family were very devoted Christians which isn’t a problem except for the fact that he would argue that the role I wanted wasn't a homosexual. He would argue this because he knew that if he was cast in the show that it would be in that role and he clearly felt that it was against his religion, so he was trying to find a reason to be able to play it.  I’d say I was straight, but I knew that I wasn’t. But this role spoke to me, especially at that time and if I got it, maybe it was the reason that I needed to give myself permission to accept myself. I really wanted that part.

               The weekend that the cast list was supposed to be posted, my speech team was away at a speech tournament six hours away from home. The prelim rounds went okay on that first day and Chase and I were placed in the same hotel room for the night with twin brothers that were specifically on the debate team. So, that night after the speech kids were done with their rounds, the debate kids were going to remain there till late. The hotel room had two beds and since the twin brother debaters would obviously sleep together in one of them, I was going to sleep with Chase in the other. And not only that, I was going to get to spend a lot of time alone with Chase in a room with a bed

               When Chase and I got back to the hotel room, I went ahead and took a shower. We had a long day of traveling and both Chase and I had been in suits all day. I brought my sweats and tank that I would sleep in the bathroom with me and showered. When I got out of the bathroom with my sleep clothes on there was Chase, standing at the closet in only his boxers. He was hanging up his suit, after taking everything off. Though I've wedgied Chase a lot, I had never seen him without his shirt, and staring at him from behind I immediately noticed the smoothness of his shoulders. Chase wasn't muscular in the sense that he looked like a Calvin Klein model, but he was close. His butt in those boxers were very nice as well. The boxers were navy blue, obviously American Eagle because there were multiple Eagle logos al over them. He turned around,

               “Hey, my turn’ he said.

               I must have not been hiding my looks of intense lustful admiration because his lips slowly curved to a smirk, and he flexed his chest and hell.  He didn’t have a six pack, but his chest was hot, nonetheless. He didn’t have a lot of hair, but there was some that formed a line from the bottom of his belly button to the top the waistband of his boxers. This was the first time that my thoughts went to the possible size of his dick under those boxers. I can't remember for sure, but I was probably hard. Chase started to walk across the room.

               “I know what you're thinking, don't do it” he said as he walked by me to go into the bathroom. I quickly turned around after he walked by me. He stopped walking and turned his head slightly.

               "You can’t help it can you?” he said.

               “I guess not” I replied as my hands slowly gripped his boxers.

               I tug slowly. This was my first time giving a wedgie with the other guy not wearing pants. The more I tug the more I see Chase's ass. It was firm and the more his boxers went up his butt, the harder my dick got. I drop his boxers and gently tap both of his checks with my hands.

               “Enjoy your shower" I said.

               “Thanks” he said walking into the bathroom.

               He stayed in there for about ten minutes. When he came out of the bathroom, he had pajama bottoms with multiple XBOX logos on it. He was still wearing the same boxers that I had just wedgied, but the only way I could tell was that he was sagging his pajama bottoms slightly. But I only had a moment to observe that because he ran at me and jumped on me on the bed.

               It happened very fast. I can’t remember the specifics. But we were basically wrestling, He was the senior and he was obviously a lot stronger than me, but I gave it my all wrestling wise. He pinned me in headlocks and to the ground. He was a lot stronger. But Chase and I had different end goals. His was to pin me to the ground, mine was to pull his boxers up his butt again. I got his boxers a couple of times in the struggle, but not enough to really count the wedgies I gave him legit. But there was one moment when I ended up on the top of his back. My ass was sitting on his head, and I had to have been tea-bagging Chase as I gripped his boxers in both of my hands. I was also fully hard by that point, and there was no way that Chase didn’t know because my bulge was bulging into his shoulders. But his boxers were in my hand, and I started pulling. Pulling with all the strength possible. Chase was moaning but from pleasure or pain I couldn't tell. I successfully pull one mare strong pull and I heard a slight ripping sound. I snap his boxer’s waistband onto Chase’s back, and I roll off him.

               “Fuck, man that was the best wedgie yet” Chase said standing up with his hands in his,

butt fixing his boxers. I stayed laying on the bed breathing heavily.

               “Damn man, you sound like we just fucked” he laughed.

               I laughed that off, at at that moment a feeling of intense shame came over me. I hadn’t cum but I was close. What did those feelings mean? Why do wedgies turn me on? How can I keep this up? It was clear after today that I had extreme lust towards Chase. After seeing his body, smacking his ass, and wedgieing him like I just had.

               “Everything alright man?” Chase asked as he sat down at the front of the bed. But before I could say anything there was a knock on the door.

               I went and answered the door, and it was Lexi. She was one of the strongest actresses in the theatre department. A shoo in for the lead role in the competition play. She was texted the cast list for the competition play and wanted me to see it. I didn’t get the part… or any part in the play. Micah got the part. Lexi said that she wanted me to know because she didn’t want me to have to wait until Monday to see the cast list myself, but I think she wanted to tell me because she was (and still is) a world class bitch. I walked back into the room and crushed, I just started crying, I had never been more disappointed. I didn’t get the role that spoke to me and my true sexuality, and here I was crying in front of the only guy that I had ever had strong feelings for. Chase was very nice. He asked me what was wrong, and when I told him he didn't try to console me. He was just quiet as I laid down on the bed,

               I must have cried myself to sleep because one moment the lights were on, and the next they were off and there was an arm around my shoulder. It was Chase's. I looked over at the other bed and saw that it was still empty. The twins weren’t back yet. I twisted my body around and there was Chase, with his eyes wide open staring at me. He said nothing and we continued just looking at one another. I wanted to kiss him, and I was positive that he wanted to kiss me. But we didn’t kiss. But what I did feel was a hand gently placing itself around my groin. Chase's hand was over my sweatpants, and he slowly put his hand into my sweats and then, into my boxer briefs. Upon impulse I reached in a removed his hand from my pants. But still staring at him. I let go of his hand. I then proceeded to stick my own, hand in my pants. I gently surrounded my dick with my fingers, and then slowly started lifting. and lowering my dick. I did this while continuing to stare at Chase. Chase decided after a couple moments that he would follow suit. He lifted the covers and stuck his hand in his boxers. We continued touching ourselves while still looking at one another. This was a new experience for me, jerking off with someone else in the room. I found it to be a very exhilarating experience. Someone else looking at me and jerking off too. I couldn't see his dick, and he couldn't see mine. That seemed to make it even hotter. We tried to keep rhythm with each other. I don’t know how long we did this, but I do remember that we didn’t climax at the same time. Chase came first, and I followed about ten seconds after. There were no words spoken during or after except for our moans. After we were done, we put the covers back on and just laid back down in bed together. I started crying again, but it was weird. There was so much sadness in my tears, but also a little comfort in the fact that in that singular moment that I was not alone. I cried gently but was surprised to feel Chase's arms wrap around my body, holding me tightly. We laid there spooned into each other. He was there holding me tightly not letting me go as slowly drifted off to sleep.

I think back to this night often. We were both in the closet at the time, and we were both not ready to admit to ourselves that we had these strong feelings. We just had this strong night together. if we were able to let ourselves be open to each other that night, maybe we would have gone farther in our sexual explorations. I did wish I kissed him that night. I wished that I let him touch me, blow me. I wish I could have seen his whole naked body, and that he could see mine. That night was more than just a wedgie fetish. But regardless, I am still grateful to what we did that night because it was a part of my story, and it was truly one of those moments when I realized that I could be attractive, that I could be desired, and that I won't always have to be alone.

[whileiamdying]

All the Films in Competition at Cannes, Ranked from Best to Worst

The twenty-two films that premièred in the 2024 festival’s main program offered much to savor and revile.

By Justin Chang May 26, 2024

The seventy-seventh annual Cannes Film Festival came to a startling and joyous conclusion on Saturday night, when the competition jury, chaired by Greta Gerwig, awarded the Palme d’Or, the festival’s highest honor, to “Anora,” a funny, harrowing, and finally quite moving portrait of a sex worker’s madcap New York misadventures. It was startling because the movie, though one of the best-received in the competition, had not been widely tipped for the top prize, which seldom goes to a U.S. film; with “Anora,” Sean Baker becomes the first American director to win the Palme since Terrence Malick did, for “The Tree of Life” (2011), thirteen years ago. And it was joyous not only because the award was bestowed on a worthy and remarkable film but because Baker used the occasion to deliver the best, most eloquent and impassioned acceptance speech I’ve ever heard a Palme winner give.

Reading from prepared remarks, Baker singled out two other filmmakers in the competition, Francis Ford Coppola and David Cronenberg, as among his personal heroes. He dedicated the award to sex workers everywhere, a fitting tribute from a filmmaker who has put their lives front and center, with drama, humor, and empathy, in movies like “Starlet” (2012), “Tangerine” (2015), and “Red Rocket” (2021). He tossed some exquisite shade in the direction of the “tech companies” behind the so-called streaming revolution—including, presumably, Netflix, which came away as one of the night’s big winners; its major acquisition of the festival, Jacques Audiard’s musical “Emilia Pérez,” won two prizes. And, in a moment that drew rapturous applause, Baker delivered a plea on behalf of theatrical films, declaring, “The future of cinema is where it started: in a movie theatre.”

I was fortunate to see all twenty-two films in the Cannes competition on the big screen, projected under superior conditions in houses packed with fellow movie lovers. It’s my hope that, when these movies are released in the U.S., as the great majority of them likely will be, you will seize the chance to see them on the big screen as well—even “Emilia Pérez,” which Netflix may not keep in theatres for long, but whose bold dramatic and stylistic risks have the best chance of winning you over if they have your undivided, wide-awake attention.

I have ranked the movies in order of preference, from best to worst. Here they are:

1. “Caught by the Tides”

Jia Zhangke, a Cannes competition veteran, has long been the cinema’s preëminent chronicler of modern China (“Mountains May Depart,” “Ash Is Purest White”), mapping its social, cultural, and geographical complexities with great formal acumen, and also with the longtime collaboration of his wife, the superb actress Zhao Tao. Jia’s latest work, drawing on an archive of footage shot in the course of roughly two decades, unfurls a story in fragments, about a woman (Zhao) and a man (Li Zhubin) who fall in love, bitterly separate, and have a melancholy reunion years later. It’s an achievement by turns fleeting and monumental: a series of interlocking time capsules, a wrenching feat of self-reflection, and a stealth musical, in which Zhao dances and dances, standing in for millions who have learned to sway and bend to history’s tumultuous beat.

2. “All We Imagine as Light”

As the first Indian feature invited to compete at Cannes in nearly three decades, Payal Kapadia’s narrative début (after her 2021 documentary, “A Night of Knowing Nothing”) would be notable enough; that the movie is so delicately felt and sensuously textured is cause for outright celebration. Winner of the festival’s Grand Prix, or second place, it tells the story of two roommates, Prabha (Kani Kusruti) and Anu (Divya Prabha), who work as nurses at a Mumbai hospital. It teases out their personal circumstances—Prabha’s estrangement from her unseen husband, Anu’s frowned-upon romance with a young Muslim man (Hridhu Haroon)—with a quiet truthfulness that, like the glittering lights of the city, lingers expansively in the memory. (A forthcoming Sideshow/Janus Films release.)

3. “Grand Tour”

The Portuguese director Miguel Gomes (“Tabu,” “Arabian Nights”) delivered some of the most virtuosic filmmaking in the competition—as the jury recognized by giving him the Best Director prize—with this characteristically yet extraordinarily playful colonial-era travelogue. Shifting between color and black-and-white, set in 1917 but full of fourth-wall-breaking anachronisms, the movie tells a story of sorts about a roving British diplomat (Gonçalo Waddington) and a fiancée (Crista Alfaiate) he’s in no hurry to marry. But its true fascination lies in the humid atmosphere and wanderlust-inspiring splendor of its East and Southeast Asian locations, ranging from Singapore and Bangkok to Shanghai and Rangoon. It’s a movie to get lost in.

4. “The Seed of the Sacred Fig”

It’s impossible to absorb this blistering domestic drama without thinking of its dissident director, Mohammad Rasoulof, who recently fled Iran after being sentenced to prison and a flogging. (His appearance at his film’s première made for one of the most emotional moments in recent Cannes memory.) Shot entirely in secret, the story follows a Tehran-based husband (Missagh Zareh) and wife (Soheila Golestani) who are increasingly at war with their progressive-minded young-adult daughters (Mahsa Rostami, Setareh Maleki) during nationwide political protests led by women. The result is a thriller of propulsive skill and blunt emotional force, marrying the muscularity of an action film to the psychological intensity of a chamber drama. (A forthcoming Neon release.)

5. “Anora”

The director Sean Baker is near the height of his storytelling powers with this dazzling (and now Palme d’Or-winning) portrait of a Manhattan strip-club dancer (a revelatory Mikey Madison) who impulsively marries the ultra-spoiled son (Mark Eydelshteyn) of a Russian oligarch. Much comic chaos ensues, some of it pushed past the brink of plausibility, but Baker’s multifaceted love for his characters proves infectious and sustaining, as does his belief that acts of unexpected kindness can redeem even the darkest nights of the soul. (A forthcoming Neon release.)

6. “The Shrouds”

Early on in this elegantly sombre yet mordantly funny new movie, which stars Vincent Cassel, Diane Kruger, and Guy Pearce, the director David Cronenberg, a master of cerebral horror, unveils his latest invention: a technologically advanced burial shroud that allows people to watch a loved one’s body decomposing in the grave. So begins a drolly fluid inspection of classic Cronenberg themes—the deterioration of the flesh, the instability of the image, the paranoia-inducing incursions of technology into every aspect of life—but imbued with a nakedly personal dimension that the director has noted in interviews; the story was inspired by his wife’s death, in 2017, from cancer.

7. “Megalopolis”

In this legendarily long-gestating passion project, which I’ve written about at length, Francis Ford Coppola posits that our fragile, battered civilization is headed the way of the Roman Empire. The grimness of that prospect is unsurprising from a director accustomed to peering deep into the heart of American darkness (the “Godfather” movies, “The Conversation,” “Apocalypse Now”). For all that, the filmmaking here glows with a particularly hard-won optimism, even a welcome sense of play—borne out by an ensemble of actors, including Adam Driver, Giancarlo Esposito, and especially Aubrey Plaza, who fully embrace Coppola’s rhetorical and conceptual flights of fancy.

8. “The Substance”

Sympathetic or sadistic? Feminist or misogynist? Coralie Fargeat’s body-horror bonanza, which won the festival’s award for Best Screenplay, has been one of the competition’s more polarizing hits, which is unsurprising; divisiveness should be expected from a story about an aging actress and TV fitness guru who, desperate to regain her youthful bod of yesteryear, effectively splits herself in two. Whether the outlandish premise (think “The Picture of Dorian Gray” by way of “Death Becomes Her”) and its blood-gushing fallout withstand intellectual scrutiny, there’s no doubting the ferocity of the two leads, Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley, or Fargeat’s sheer filmmaking verve as she pushes her ideas to their sanguinary conclusions.

9. “Motel Destino”

Just a year after the Brazilian director Karim Aïnouz appeared in competition with a surprisingly stiff-corseted English period drama, “Firebrand,” it was bracing to watch him rebound with the competition’s most sexually uninhibited and flagrantly horny title; corsets don’t apply here, and even underwear proves blissfully optional. Set at a seedy roadside motel where the clientele never stops moaning, it’s a feverishly shambling erotic thriller starring three very game actors (Iago Xavier, Nataly Rocha, and Fábio Assunção) in a romantic triangle that plays like James M. Cain with sex toys—“The Postman Always Cock Rings Twice,” as it were.

10. “Emilia Pérez”

A trans-empowerment musical set against the backdrop of Mexico’s drug cartels might sound like a dubious proposition on paper, and, for the many detractors of this genre-melding big swing from the French director Jacques Audiard (“A Prophet,” “The Sisters Brothers”), what actually made it onto the screen was no better. But I was disarmed from the start by Audiard’s quasi-Almodóvarian vibes, his touchingly imperfect embrace of song-and-dance stylization, and, most of all, his three leads: the remarkable discovery Karla Sofía Gascón, a scene-stealing Selena Gomez, and a never-better Zoe Saldaña. All three (along with Adriana Paz) were recognized with the festival’s Best Actress prize, awarded collectively to the movie’s ensemble of actresses; Audiard also won the Jury Prize. (A forthcoming Netflix release.)

11. “Oh, Canada”

After a tense trilogy of dramas about male redemption through violence (“First Reformed,” “The Card Counter,” “Master Gardener”), the writer and director Paul Schrader has taken a gentler turn with an adaptation of “Foregone,” a 2021 novel by the late Russell Banks. (It’s his second Banks adaptation, after the 1997 drama “Affliction.”) In exploring the fragmented consciousness of an aging documentary filmmaker (played at different ages by Richard Gere and Jacob Elordi), Schrader bravely forsakes the narrative fastidiousness of his recent work and takes on grand themes of memory, mortality, and artistic self-reckoning, to formally ragged but sincerely moving effect.

12. “The Girl with the Needle”

This stark and terrifying black-and-white drama from the Swedish-born, Polish-based director Magnus von Horn (“Sweat”) was perhaps the competition’s bleakest entry. Set in Copenhagen immediately after the First World War, it pins us so mercilessly to the hard-bitten perspective of Karoline (an excellent Vic Carmen Sonne), a factory seamstress who becomes pregnant out of wedlock, that we scarcely notice her story shifting in a different, more sinister direction. It’s a bitterly hard-to-stomach brew of a movie, at once hideous and beautifully made, with a chilling supporting turn by Trine Dyrholm as a friend whose interventions turn out to be anything but benign.

13. “Three Kilometres to the End of the World”

The setting of this well-observed but emotionally opaque drama, from the Romanian actor turned director Emanuel Pârvu, is a small rural village where a closeted teen-age boy, Adi (Ciprian Chiujdea), is brutally beaten after being caught in an intimate moment with a male traveller. Pârvu teases out the legal, psychological, and moral fallout with the pitch-perfect performances and laserlike formal focus that have become hallmarks of new Romanian cinema. But, though the movie is persuasive enough as an indictment of small-town religious fundamentalism and homophobia, it proves curiously incurious about Adi’s perspective, to the detriment of its own human pulse.

14. “Kinds of Kindness”

After his Oscar-winning period romps “The Favourite” (2018) and “Poor Things” (2023), the Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos scales back—but goes long—with a sprawling, increasingly tedious compendium of comic cruelty. My favorite of the film’s three disconnected stories, all featuring the same actors, is the one where Jesse Plemons (the ensemble M.V.P., as the jury recognized with its Best Actor award) plays Willem Dafoe’s Manchurian candidate; my least favorite is the one where Emma Stone joins a sweat-worshipping sex cult. The one where Stone slices off her finger and cooks it for Plemons falls—much like the movie in Lanthimos’s over-all œuvre—somewhere in the middle. (A Searchlight Pictures release, opening June 21st in theatres.)

15. “Bird”

My admiration for the English filmmaker Andrea Arnold (“American Honey”) is such that I’m eager to revisit her latest rough-and-tumble coming-of-age story and find that I undervalued it. Arnold is certainly skilled at integrating recognizable actors, which in this case includes Barry Keoghan and Franz Rogowski, into her grottily realist frames, and she has an appealing lead performer in Nykiya Adams, as a twelve-year-old girl who overcomes persistent abuse and neglect. But the story may lose you—as it lost me—with a magical-realist turn that magnifies, rather than minimizes, the tortured-animal symbolism that has often dogged Arnold’s work.

16. “Beating Hearts”

An exchange of insults at a high-school bus stop provides a saucy meet-cute for a good girl (Mallory Wanecque) and a ne’er-do-well boy (Malik Frikah); so begins a raucous and endearing love story for the ages, in which the director Gilles Lellouche, with outsized glee and little discipline, merrily appropriates the conventions of classic Hollywood musicals and gangster flicks. The result is much too long at nearly three hours—the story spans several years, with Adèle Exarchopoulos and François Civil playing older versions of the two leads—but I can’t say I didn’t warm to its rambunctious cornball charm.

17. “Limonov: The Ballad”

Why make a film about Eduard Limonov, the globe-trotting Russian dissident poet and punk provocateur reviled for his pro-fascist sympathies? The filmmaker Kirill Serebrennikov never musters a satisfying answer in this muddled English-language bio-pic, despite an energetically uninhibited central performance by Ben Whishaw and a cheeky panoply of filmmaking techniques—jittery camerawork, lengthy tracking shots—meant to catch us up in the épater-la-bourgeoisie exuberance of Limonov’s revolt. Considering his earlier work, I prefer the rebel-youth vibes of “Leto” (2018) and the dazzling cinematic assaults of “Petrov’s Flu” (2021), both of which also screened in competition here.

18. “Parthenope”

Nearly every new picture from the Italian auteur Paolo Sorrentino could be reasonably called “The Great Beauty,” the title of his gorgeous 2013 cinematic tour of Rome. (It left that year’s Cannes empty-handed, but won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film.) His latest work remains most intriguing for its ambivalent but still sensually overpowering vision of the director’s home town, Naples, from which springs a modern-day goddess, named after Parthenope, a Siren from Greek mythology. She’s played by Celeste Dalla Porta, a great beauty indeed and an empathetic screen presence, though only fitfully does her character seem worthy of this movie’s epic enshrinement.

19. “Wild Diamond”

Another disquisition on beauty and its discontents, this time from the débuting French writer and director Agathe Riedinger. She hurls us the life and busy social-media feed of a nineteen-year-old, Liane (a terrific Malou Khebizi), who has nipped, tucked, and tailored every part of herself to realize her dream of being selected for a hot new reality-TV series. Part influencer-culture cautionary tale, part bad-girl Cinderella story, the movie glancingly suggests the soul-rotting effects of beauty worship, but it falls victim to the trap that Liane is trying to avoid: in a sea of worthy candidates, it doesn’t especially stand out.

20. “The Apprentice”

Donald Trump’s attorneys have threatened legal action to block the release of this drama about his early rise to fame and wealth under the mentorship of the attorney Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong). It speaks to the useless proficiency of Ali Abbasi’s movie that the prospect of such censorship provokes more indifference than outrage. Shot to evoke cruddy nineteen-eighties VHS playback, the movie is well acted by Strong, Maria Bakalova as Ivana Trump, and an increasingly makeup-buried Sebastian Stan as Trump himself, depicted from the start as a sack of shit that gets progressively shittier. It’s not dismissible, but it’s hardly the stuff of revelation, either.

21. “Marcello Mio”

In this trifling meta-comedy from the French filmmaker Christophe Honoré (previously in the 2018 Cannes competition with the lovely “Sorry Angel”), the actress Chiara Mastroianni embarks on a strainedly whimsical personal odyssey to examine the legacy of her late father, the legendary Italian actor Marcello Mastroianni, and her own conflicted place therein. To that end, she spends much of this overstretched movie in “8½” and “La Dolce Vita” black-suited drag as she navigates a roundelay of industry in-jokes; among the French cinema luminaries making appearances are Fabrice Luchini, Nicole Garcia, and, most welcome, Chiara’s mother, Catherine Deneuve.

22. “The Most Precious of Cargoes”

The French director Michel Hazanavicius continues his uneven post-“The Artist” run with this animated Second World War fable, adapted from a 2019 novel by Jean-Claude Grumberg (and narrated by the late Jean-Louis Trintignant). It has an affecting opening stretch, in which a baby girl, thrown by her desperate father from an Auschwitz-bound train, is rescued and raised in secret by a woodcutter’s kindhearted wife. But when the child’s provenance is discovered, stoking local antisemitism, the movie becomes a bathetic wallow in Holocaust imagery, drowned in an Alexandre Desplat score whose every surge turned my heart increasingly to stone. ♦

[allsaiint]

↠ master chief/gender neutral!reader

↠ word count: 1800

↠ chapter one | chapter two

↠ masterlist

↠ description: john has no idea how to date, but he'll try his best.

↠ warnings: potential for out of character | potential for dismantling of canon | gender neutral!reader may change in future chapters

↠ author’s notes: this is based on a mix of game-canon chief and television series chief. take it as you will. if i did happen to use specific terminology to describe the reader, let me know.

-- /// --

The instant John entered the park, he sensed something was different. So late on a Wednesday evening, the only thing playing in the open air theatre was a group of young violinists, no more than high school aged. There were a few people milling about, most likely parents there to encourage the group. Others were gathered on the outskirts, at the top of the coliseum style seats. They were cloistered in twos and threes, their conversations jumbling together over the sounds of the music.

You were the lone exception, standing towards the top of the steps, half-hidden by shadows. John had never seen you before, though there had been a recent influx of newcomers to the Reach. It was mostly scientists, after a mass exodus had left gaping holes in their military programs.

He caught the way your brow furrowed a split second before he realised he had been staring. You shifted back when he tried for a smile, and gave it up as a lost cause. In some ways, the act of interacting with new people still bemused him.

He was surprised, then, to hear footsteps approach, and turned just enough to witness you falter three steps above him. Over the din of the crowd, he could hear the race of your heart, so fast that he was surprised when you managed an actual greeting.

“You’re new to Reach?” 

He had to change tracks at the last minute, turning it from a statement into a question. He had also had no designs to sit, but found himself doing so anyway when you introduced yourself.

You nodded. “I took a job at the USMC. Have you been here long?”

“My entire career,” he answered, and watched close for your reaction. He suspected that you were unaware of who he was, as most civilians were. Few knew what the Master Chief looked like without his helmet on, and a majority were within the USMC.

His suspicion was proven right when you asked, “You’re a Marine, I take it? How long have you been in?”

Something in the way you asked, or perhaps it was the lack of starstruck wonder he was so used to, made him lie through his teeth, answering, “Thirty years, give or take a few.”

Eyebrows raising, you replied, “You look so young, though.”

A product of spending so much time in a suit of armour, he supposed. Instead though, he said, “You look fairly young yourself. What made you want to take a job here?”

Your smile slipped, and you ducked your head to face your knees. “My homeworld was glassed not long ago. I figured here would be the safest place to go, after that.”

“I’m sorry,” John offered, watching the way you began to pick at a split in your lip before, very abruptly, you turned to snap a tie around your wrist. “I heard about it, after I returned from a deployment. I’m glad you made it out.”

“Me too,” you replied with a quiet laugh. “You’re actually the first person I’ve met outside of work here.”

That made John chuckle and over it, he heard the way your heartbeat skipped. “I’m honoured, really.”

Conversation stalled for a few moments, and John could see how you pretended to watch the violinists to make it seem natural. There was a tension in your shoulders that gave away your desire to say something though, and you were rubbing your palm with your thumb. You would press hard in the very centre then relent before looking at John. It was quite nice to know that your nervousness was genuine, and not borne of being in the presence of the great Master Chief.

“Do you deploy a lot?” you asked at last, drawing John from his thoughts. The way you asked was stilted, as though you had dredged the question from the depths of your desire to say anything at all. “It seems like I never see the same face twice.”

“I do,” he agreed, and wondered what to tell you. The people you would deal with most often were the general ranks, those who stood a worse chance of surviving an encounter with Covenant. “I’m between drops, at the moment, but one will likely come in in the next few days. Covenant has been busier than usual.”

“I heard rumours that they were looking for something, but couldn’t find it. The Spartans either found it first or destroyed it or something like that.” You snapped the tie on your wrist once, hard. “That’s why they started glassing so many planets— they were really upset, whatever they were looking for.”

It always surprised John to find out how close the rumours turned out to be to the truth. He often wondered who started with the truth, and how long it took the details to be lost. It reminded him of the game he played as a child with the other trainees. One would whisper a sentence from across a room or through a glass, and it was the listener’s job to relay what was said. It had taken him a long time to realise that the “game” was actually training, learning to lip-read. The more serious the children took the task, the better the results were, but not until their augmentations were there ever perfect results.

“Well, in any case,” you said, drawing John from his thoughts again and offering him a smile, “maybe when you’re here, you can come visit me at the aquarium. Since I’ll never be able to find and all.”

With a rough, quiet laugh, John said, “Could see about making that work. Do you have to go now?”

“Should,” you agreed, but lingered where you stood. “I have an early shift tomorrow, and a bit of a ride home.”

Shifting to his feet as well, he said, “Let me walk you?”

“Oh, it’s— I live all the way in Immoria. It’s too much to ask—”

“I don’t mind,” John said, cutting your rambling off with a small smile. He found them rising easier in your presence. “I’d rather be sure you get home safe. Call it paranoia.”

“Well, if you insist,” you agreed, though it was with an air of exasperation. The tick playing at the corner of your mouth indicated that you were pleased beneath that though.

The next bullet train was due in five minutes, and you sidled closer as the waiting crowd grew and closed in. The way you flinched was almost imperceptible when you leaned into John, and your laugh was embarrassed.

“I don’t even like eating in the caf at work,” you admitted, but allowed his hand to stay where it was on  your back. “I don’t care much for crowds since—”

“I get it,” John said as the train came to an abrupt stop in front of you. There was just the one, and it hurtled back and forth across the city twenty-four hours a day. You remained close as the train began to move, curling your free hand into his shirt when someone knocked into you. The culprit offered John a smile full of mock apology that dwindled beneath his scowl, until they shifted to give you your space.

You were busy watching the scenery pass, and startled when John asked, “If you dislike crowds, what do you do at the complex?”

“Oh, they stuffed me into some little corner room with a few other researchers. I don’t really have to deal with too many people. Thankfully.”

“I see. What did you do before this?”

You shook your head. “I travelled around, studying species in their natural habitats, how we affected them, boring stuff like that.”

“It doesn’t sound boring,” John said, and watched your eyes widen as though you were surprised to hear it. If he had to describe it, it sounded peaceful. “If you enjoyed it, it wasn’t boring.”

“Well, fair enough,” you said with a quiet, almost disbelieving laugh. “Do you enjoy what you do?”

“Yes,” he replied on reflex. No one in recent memory had asked him that and, in truth, he was unsure of the truth in his answer. He had never been given the choice to decide if he enjoyed what he did or not.

Something must have shown through in his response, because the look you cast him came with a frown. You seemed to come to some decision or assumption on your own though, and uncurled your fist to lay flat on his chest.

A little too mired in his own thoughts again, John let silence reign after that. He followed you down the street with an absent mind, aware somewhere in the recesses of it that the inattention was unbecoming of the Master Chief. He found it happening with more frequency though, since—

“Well, this is me,” you said. “Thank you for walking me.”

“Like I said, I’d rather know you got home safe,” he replied, taking the building in. It was twenty something stories, but still short compared to most in the city. A pair of doormen stood just inside, prepared to open the doors for you.

You stalled again; it seemed you had something more to say. He heard the pace of your heart increase, and his focus narrowed in on the flicker of your pulse beneath your skin.

“Do you have a data pad, by chance?” you asked after a harsh swallow.

“It’s broken,” John said. His attention turned to your face just in time to register the way it crumpled in disappointment. With more gentleness, he continued, “I’d like to see you again, though.”

The words felt foreign, coming from him. If you noticed, you chose to ignore it when you agreed. John was surprised at how eager you seemed, and found it hard not to let it envelop him.

“At the park tomorrow? Same time?” he said. Again, he was met with eager agreement that made him smile. “Good. Goodnight then.”

Your sharp inhale in response was so subtle that even he almost missed it. Your eyes widened and your throat bobbed before you replied, “Night, John.”

Even you seemed to realise how hoarse you sounded and made to turn away, but not before John caught look of embarrassment flash across your face. He watched you scurry inside, and waited until the door was securely latched before allowing himself the laugh that had been brewing all evening.

[rottenpumpkin13]

(I just watched a musical 😂)

woe, Genesis has been tasked with getting together and directing a musical theatre production of his choice Loveless featuring the entire SOLDIER floor, for an official Shinra fundraiser gala. nightmare scenario or dream come true or both. the show must go on! also, you are incredibly funny and uplifting! :)

• Genesis has been tasked with organizing and directing the annual musical Shinra puts on for the charity gala, which has one of its departments as the actors. This year the roulette wheel landed on the worst combination—SOLDIER and Loveless.

• Rumors say Zack's anguished "NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO" as soon as it was announced was heard from 13 floors down.

• Genesis is being benign and letting everyone choose their parts.

Genesis: Who wants to play the goddess?

*Sephiroth raises his hand*

Genesis: Really? You want to play the goddess?

Sephiroth: It was an involuntary reaction. I don't know why I raised my hand.

Genesis: Too late, you're the goddess.

Sephiroth: But I don't want to play the goddess.

Genesis: If you don't play the goddess I'm going to shave your head in your sleep.

Sephiroth: !?

• Since NONE of the female SOLDIERs wanted to play Rosa, Genesis appointed one of the other guys to the role.

• Cloud walked in at an unfortunate time to deliver some documents from Heidegger.

Genesis: CLOUD. You're perfect for the role of Alphreid. Welcome to the show.

Cloud: Uhh, really? Okay. Who's playing Rosa?

Zack: I am!

Cloud: For fucks sake.

• Angeal was placed in the role of Varvados against his will, the same case for Kunsel, who was bribed with money to play Garm.

• The rest of SOLDIER is tasked with being the stage crew. They have a month to rehearse, something which would've been fine had GENESIS not been the director. He insists on getting a director's chair, and wearing the typical director's beret and scarf while shouting from a megaphone even though he's AT MOST 3 feet away from the stage.

Zack: I thought you said I was playing Rosa. Where's my dress and wig?

Genesis: No, no. Since you and Cloud are playing Rosa and Alphreid, I thought I'd make this the gay version of Loveless.

Zack: Ohhh, I get it now. That's why it's Loveless - G edition. The G stands for gay.

Genesis: No the G stands for Genesis.

Zack: What's the difference?

Genesis:

• Sephiroth wishes whoever sold Genesis the megaphone an eternity in the deepest pits of hell.

*Genesis is standing right beside Sephiroth. Too close, in fact*

Genesis: SEPHIROTH, LETS TAKE IT FROM SCENE 3 IN ACT 1 WHEN THE GODDESS HAS HER BIG MUSICAL NUMBER.

Sephiroth: Genesis I'm standing right here. There's no need to—

Genesis: DON'T QUESTION MY CREATIVE CHOICES.

*Sephiroth grabs the megaphone and smashes it over his head*

• If Genesis were not Angeal's best friend, he also would've choked him with his scarf by now.

Genesis, from his director chair: Angeal, great dancing, but go stage left.

*Angeal goes left*

Genesis: No, your other left.

*Angeal goes right*

Genesis: LEFT.

*Angeal goes further left*

Genesis: Your OTHER Left. Turn around and go right!

*Angeal goes right*

Genesis: LEFT. LEFT. GO LEFT.

*Angeal goes left and violently falls off the stage*

• Cloud wouldn't have agreed to play Alphreid if he had known Zack was playing Rosa. Not because he feels weird playing his love interest, but because Zack is a diva.

Genesis: Alright, Alphreid, this is the scene where you're seeing Rosa again. You're feeling passionate, you're feeling butterflies in your stomach, you're sensing—

Cloud: —Zack's onion breath from lunch.

Zack: Onion soup helps me get into character. Get it, because Rosa has so many layers?

Genesis: Zack, I love your dedication. Cloud, quit complaining. Now kiss, you two.

Cloud: I ain't kissing him with that breath.

Genesis: Kiss!

Cloud: He smells like something died.

Zack: I've never felt more insulted in my life.

Genesis: You're being overdramatic. KISS.

Cloud: Please god no.

Genesis: KISS HIM.

*Zack grabs Cloud by the collar and leans in. Cloud takes one whiff of Zack's breath and immediately passes out*

Zack: I can't work like this.

• Opening night rolls around.

*Angeal approaches Genesis*

Angeal: Zack ate an entire onion and his breath smells like depression.

Genesis: The show must go on.

Angeal: Cloud attempted to knock him out with a broom, but it was a prop, so it broke over his head and he attacked Cloud.

Genesis: The show must go on.

Angeal: Zack sat on him and is blowing his breath in his face as we speak.

Genesis: The show must go on.

Angeal: Cloud has literally passed away.

Genesis: The show must—

*Angeal chokes him*

• Somehow the show does go on. Everyone nails their musical numbers and scenes, all goes well. Until act 4, when Sephiroth forgets his lines.

*During a scene with all the characters*

Sephiroth: To engage in the battle for which I have selected you, I bequeath unto you a....a....uh....?

Genesis, whispering from the edge of the stage: Improvise!

Sephiroth: What? Demise? The goddess killing everyone wasn't in the script.

Genesis, still whispering: No! Improvise the lines!

Sephiroth: Demise to the guys? So I am supposed to kill everyone. Alright then.

Genesis: NO

*Sephiroth unsheathes a sword he wasn't supposed to have*

Cloud: Wait, WHAT?

Sephiroth: The goddess was never merciful.

*He takes a swipe at Cloud and now the two are engaged in an active duel*

Angeal: Guys, this wasn't in the script!

• Angeal dives forward and starts trying to haul Cloud away, who's kicking and struggling. Now Sephiroth veers his attention unto Zack and starts chasing him around with the sword. Zack has no weapon, and is screaming as he dodges Sephiroth's blows.

• Genesis, angered, climbs onto the stage with a ball of fire in hand, screaming and hurtling it at them ("ALL THAT HARD WORK GONE TO WASTE—NEVER BEEN MORE EMBARRASSED IN MY LIFE—SEPHIROTH STOP USING YOUR HAIR AS A WEAPON")

*Kunsel, in a last-ditch attempt to save everyone's dignity, closes the curtain, ending the show*

[lonelylittledot]

Wicked

~ a Wicked scholar's thoughts on the movie

Okay. I had detached myself from any feelings about the movie truly years ago, and so I walked into the movie theatre with really low expectations.

My overall opinion: it was not a bad adaptation. I'd expected to give it 3/10, it turned out as a solid 6.5/10.

Here are just a few things that stuck out to me:

The landscapes - didn't hate them but didn't like them.

The costumes - amazing. Pretty much every outfit slayed. I feel like they could have been even a bit more extravagant, but they were great as they were. - As for Elphaba, I think my favorite outfit was the first Shiz dress and the post-Popular outfit. - Glinda's bubble dress was exquisite, and I really liked her Emerald City ensemble, although I do miss the yellow dress, I feel like it doesn't get enough love

I liked Ariana's G(a)linda surprisingly a lot. Maybe it's because I know she's a huge Wicked fan, but I felt like her love for the source material really showed.

I wasn't really sold on Cynthia. Don't get me wrong, she has a truly fabulous voice, and she absolutely did shine in the big, loud parts - but overall, I wasn't a fan of her versions of the songs. She looked and acted great, though.

Michelle Yeoh, the woman you are. Fantastic casting, no notes.

Jonathan. Oh, dear, Johnathan Bailey. Looks? Hot. Vocals? Gorgeous. Vibes? Flawless. I wish he'd played the role a decade ago, because he does look forty and not college-age, but I think everything else about him truly makes up for it.

Speaking of - I liked that Fiyero got just a few tiny little additional scenes/lines, really helped to flesh out his character more.

Grammar-nazi Elphaba, my beloved.

Listen, I have shipped Fiyero and Elphaba since I was 14. And I'm not going to stop now. I stan them, I loved their chemistry in the movie, I will ship them until the day I die.

The direction on G(a)linda/Elphaba - hella gay. But I didn't quite feel their chemistry, neither friendly nor romantic. It was okay, but didn't blow me away.

IDINA AND KRISTEN???? love love love love my og queens

The movie dragged on. A lot. This is my only really big criticism, unfortunately it's a really important one. I think they could easily have made the whole musical into one 3h long movie, and it would have been much better for the pacing. - there weren't even that many added scenes; and a lot of the additions were pretty good, actually - some were totally unnecessary though. like the guards chasing Elphaba and Glinda and the whole balloon shenanigans? - similarly, many scenes were just unnecessarily stretched out; with the camera staying too long in one place or one moment being dragged out way too long - some of the songs just had slightly longer (like 2 bars?) breakes between the choruses added for no reason

Defying Gravity. This is the same thing as one of the previous comments, but I feel like it deserves its separate mention. The pacing in that scene (or, here, more like a collection of scenes) was extremely off, the song losing all of its momentum by being chopped up into pieces. And the way they made us wait for the iconic vocalization at the end; I honestly thought I'd die of boredom.

Sometimes I felt like the movie couldn't decide if it wanted to be more stage-y and theatrical, and lean into the whole campy vibe, or more cinematic and "naturally" acted; and sometimes it switched weirdly between the two.

There was one single thing that looked way better onscreen than onstage. The Lion cub. In the movie, he looked extremely cute, tiny little adorable darling baby kitten. Way better than the creepy-ass puppet they use in the show.

There were many more tasty little details that I simply couldn't remember/write down, or else I wouldn't have been able to pay any attention to the movie. Once it's available, maybe I'll rewatch and dissect it in more detail (I should also finally watch the 1939 Wizard of Oz, it's a CRIME that I still haven't! I'm sure people who know it well could also see many references in the new Wicked - even I noticed the ruby slippers in Popular, for example!).

Summing up this unnecessarily long rant:

It was not a bad adaptation; although I doubt it will make many people into Wicked fans. At the end of the day, it's clearly a story made for the stage, and even though it was transferred to the big screen fairly well, I think it still belongs in the regular theatre, not the movie one.

[box-dwelling]

So I saw this post talking about how grace is the most tied to Nibbly which makes sense. She hungers for power, sex, food metaphors with dirty girl soup, which said post already discussed. But also Nibbly is kind of the most prominent one in the summoning scene other than wiggly which would make sense if this is Nibblys ending. Especially because grace is consuming the souls of the horny, those who desire sex, those who are hungry for it. Which aligns with Nibblys modus operandi in Honey queen. Those who hunger taste sweeter. Also makes sense as to why Nibbly's apocalypse is basically a happen ending. He has a pretty sweet gig already. Cult of followers, regularly getting fed, he even gets to walk the earth annually. I make sense that he wouldn't want to change hatchetfield that much and he needs to keep some people alive so he keeps getting fed.

So if TGWDLM, BF, and NPMD show Pokey, Wiggly and Nibbly's respective apocalypses then maybe we'll get 2 more musicals for blinky and Tinky.

From what it looks like, the next show in Hatchetfield (which might not be the next Starkid show, I heard they wanted a break) is going to be about Miss Holloway. And who did she explicitly make a deal with? Tinky! So my guess is he's going to be our next apocalypse. Miss Holloway talks explicitly about him in Killer track and also we know there's a ton of time shenanigans going on with her. I'm like 99% certain if they do the Holloway show he's our main villain. They could do a time loop story, that could be fun, or a million other time travel concepts. I think it would be cool if Frank was involved. We know he was friends with Miss Holloway from Daddy and having a toy store owner and collector would be fun as hell to face off against Tinky. I think a Tinky show is also the perfect time to properly address the lore around the split timelines. We have some stuff but we could get more and now would be a great time as presumably the penultimate show.

As for the 5th show, this is understandably more amorphous. But if I'm right we're talking Blinky. I have a few vauge ideas of places it could head. So one is that they could focus on Rose from Killer track. She's a musician so performance is kind of her thing, maybe the band gets big and that deal with celebrity voyerism and spectacle. And hey I'd like to see her more developed. My other theory is linked with his reference in TTTO. So Jack Bauer mentioning "the watcher with a thousand eyes" in that show is an explicit forth wall break. Said watcher is the audience. And that makes me wonder if a Blinky show could lean into that more. Have the audience be Blinky in some way. And of this would presumably be the finale, a forth wall breaking ending could be a good way to bring closure to the fact that this is a split timeline. Or maybe go full TTTO hand have multiple endings the audience gets to choose. Like which ending they want. Maybe one apocalypse does have to happen so the audience gets to choose who's. This is way more speculative though.

As for setting for these two it's complicated. They like to set the shows at a black altar. But there's 5 and all 5 have already been settings. I think either it's completely new or Tinky is CCRP and Blinky is the starlight theatre. It kinda feels like it's stepping on Pokeys toes a bit but they're both more backdrops. I can't see either at the Wayland's (maaaaaybe Tinky because it's where the black book is in NPMD and Miss Holloway obviously uses it but eh) and Hatchetfield high is so clearly the setting for NPMD where as TGWDLM dots about places so much that there doesn't seem to be as definitively a setting. That being said I do think the high school is Blinkys alter and all the others have come through at their alter (Nibbly's being the Wayland's where grace gets the book) so maybe we get another teen show for blinky. But then again Miss Holloway is working at Hatchetfield high too now so maybe her show will be there as well. At the very least I think the finales will be at their set altars. Blinky comes through at the high school and Tinky at the CCRP