#also i use the term t girl in the loosest of senses

[mxbutchtwink]

Was someone supposed to tell me Laura Jane Grace has her own book or was I just supposed to have a t girl hysteria moment in the Barnes and Noble all by myself

[shurelyasreverie]

Hi! Could you do a oneshot where the reader (male) is thrown to the ocean by some people because he looks like a girl due to his shoulder length hair, the reader doesn't know how to swim but Pyke saves the reader, teaches him how to swim, becomes his friend and he protects him? Have a nice day!

I'm really sorry this plot isn't specifically what you requested! Your request just gave me an amazing plot idea and it sort of took a life of it's own, I hope the final product is still okay with you!

Pyke x Reader: To the Depths

Word Count: 1806

Warning: Physical and verbal harassment based on gender stereotypes (feminine), violence, drowning and swearing. Please read with caution.

Only when you felt the salty wind against your cheek did you fully register where you were. Hauled up to deck by your own mates, their hands everywhere on your body, their grip strangling all your limbs. They laughed as you thrashed against their hold, trying to stand up but they forced your knees onto the splintered timber.

You should've known this was going to happen. You could do your duties as efficiently and quietly as possible, avoid conflict with everyone on this godforsaken ship, and they'll still find a way to make you bait if they wanted to. Pirates were pirates after all, they thrived off destruction, stooping lower than the low for some short-term gain.

“C'mon, won't you give me some attention, lass?” A pirate asked, twirling a lock of your hair. When you jerked your head away he immediately spat in your face in retaliation. Multiple pirates pinned you down.

“We'll take 'em to the depths, aye?” Another suggested to the crew and they cheered in agreement. A pirate searched through your pockets, searching for any valuables and you squirmed. Through teary eyes, you managed to see a figure passing in the distance, a small sliver of hope.

“Captain!” You screamed. The crew stopped. The captain stopped in his tracks and started walking towards you. Looking down at your pitiful form, he regarded the rest of the pirates.

“What's this, then?” The captain looked at one of the pirates leading the harassment. In response, he hesitated, stuttering to explain himself. The captain tutted and you started to wiggle free from some of the hands that were on you.

The captain smirked, his expression darkening.

“You've got t' send the princess off properly!”

The crew cheered as the captain retrieved a ball and chain and your heart dropped. Panic rose within you, making you feel nauseous as you tried harder to run but all hands were on you, pushing your back into the ground. Your limbs were pinned to the floor as the captain approached you, attaching the chained cannonball to your ankle. Through your tears of fear, there were tears of rage. You screamed not only for your innocence but also at the world for your unfair treatment. You screamed at the crew who had wronged you. All of them you damned to hell as they threw you overboard.

You sunk deeper into the sea. You weren't able to get a proper breath of air before entering the waters, your throat was already burning. Reaching down, you pushed at the chain, hoping it'll slip off of your leg and let you swim free. Eyes stinging at the salt, you could see brief lights and movement all around you. The seas of Bilgewater were known for its thriving creatures that attacked and ate many. Hopefully one would take pity on you and feast on you before you ran out of oxygen. It'd be quicker anyway.

But you continued to sink, deeper into the abyss. The waters so dark you couldn't see ahead, the pressure making every limb hurt. Your head was pounding, your pulse was slowing, white spots were fielding your vision. As numbness started to prick at your extremities and spread further up your limbs, you gave up and let your consciousness fade.

You were certain you were on the way to meet your maker. The weight on your ankle had disappeared, you felt a pressure on your chest, lifting you up. Water rushing around you, the pressure of the sea was starting to alleviate, you sensed the world was becoming lighter as you faded further into darkness.

The next sensation you ever felt was a pounding on your chest. Not the pounding of your heartbeat but hands on your ribs, forcing a pulse back into you. A rush of water exited your lungs and you choked it out, turning to your side to cough as you gasped for air. Yet when you finally opened your eyes, you weren't at an unfamiliar looking spirit realm, instead you were back at the all-too familiar docks of Bilgewater.

Looking up, you noticed a man sitting cross-legged, watching you with glowing blue eyes. His lower face obscured by a red bandana, yet when he spoke his voice didn't sound muffled at all. Instead it was deep and gurgling, encompassing you, as if you were back in the abyss.

“Thought you'd never wake,” he stated and you stared at him.

“Did you-” you choked as your voice came out raspy. You coughed up some more water but the man seemed patient enough, waiting for you. “Did you save me?”

He nodded.

“Why?”

“The depths ain't a place for the livin',” he responded.

“I'm only living thanks to you,” you admitted. Not knowing what else to do, you held out your hand to him. “(Y/N).”

The man took your hand, shaking it firmly but he didn't reply and looked out to the docks. It was fully night, the line where the sky ended and the sea begun had blurred. You frowned as you went through what you thought would be your final memories. How you were engulfed in darkness, warmth absent and the pressure crushing.

“How did you save me?”

There was a low, rumbling chuckle in response. He took his time, calculating his answer. The man seemed nonchalant but you noticed his eyes cautiously dart to you occasionally.

“I didn't do any savin', I just put you back where you belonged, with the livin'.”

“But how?” You tried to pry. “You only have your harpoon, possibly a hunters knife. How did you reach me in time?”

“I was already in the depths.”

Your head tilted in confusion trying to piece together his ambiguous answers. Was he implying he wasn't even alive? A human just like you? But you looked at his scarred face, how his eyes glowed. How the very essence of the abyss seemed to emanate around him. Perhaps he wasn't so human after all.

Sighing, you stood up, trying to shake off your nerves. You thanked him for his aid, checking your pockets to possibly give him some gold out of thanks. But it was only then you realised, everything you owned was back on that cursed ship. Any change of clothes, the few valuables you had, were all in the quarters you shared with the crew. Without a doubt they would have raided all your belongings and taken everything.

By now the shock had started to leave your body. The cold of the depths had left you and now you were only burning with rage. You didn't deserve any of this. Only a day ago you were living a tolerable life. You thought you had the respect of the crew and captain, rations were decent and the work wasn't so strenuous. Now you had nothing.

“I'll make them pay.”

“Hm?” Your rescuer looked at you with raised eyebrows. You hadn't even noticed that the words escaped your lips, but you looked at him with pure intent. All these years you tried to take the peaceful, high moral ground. Your unfortunate social standing meant you had no choice but to take a life aboard a ship but you tried to maintain a moral code, you tried to give those who wronged you the benefit of the doubt. No more.

“My crew,” you spat out the words. “I did everything by the damn book. I helped them out, I did my part.”

“You a pirate?” he asked. The tone in his voice changed, cautious, a hint of hostility.

“In the loosest sense of the word,” you huffed. “I was on a pirate ship, I helped a crew and worked for a captain but don't group me up with those bastards.”

He nodded thoughtfully. “They wronged you?”

“Who do you think threw me overboard?” You seethed.

“You want them dead?”

The simple question made you hesitate. You had never condemned someone to such a fate before, let alone multiple. The word “dead” held such a strong grip on you, especially now you had such a close experience to it. But you remembered how you were dragged out onto the decks, the jeering faces of the entire ship as they wanted to see you gone. How they strung you along for so many months, using your aid until they deemed it more entertaining to throw you overboard. They used you.

“Yes.”

Like a judge that had slammed down the gavel, you made your verdict and decided the sentence.

“I see,” the man stood up. “And what're you willin' to give for that?”

“Everything,” you replied. Admittedly, you had nothing left to give right now, but you were determined to build yourself back up. For the entire ship to feel just a fraction of the pain you felt. For them to pay for their crime against you and all the crimes they've committed before.

The man looked out thoughtfully. He took out one of the many daggers strapped to him, offering the handle out to you.

“The name's Pyke.”

You felt the name had a special importance, since he was reluctant to tell you before. You almost felt proud that he told you, it was a symbol of trust. You reached to take the knife, fingers curling around the handle.

“A tavern down the docks takes payment in work. You can stay with 'em, they're good people,” Pyke instructed. “I'll find you in the morning. You've got a lot to learn.”

“Thank you,” your were stunned. “But why?”

“Why?”

“Why're you helping me?”

“They've got a debt to pay. All of 'em” Pyke replied. “You're a rare one. Good people ain't easy to come by, even less willin' to do what I do, I'll take 'em when I can.”

“Who are you?” You asked.

“You know me as Pyke.”

“No, more than that. Who – or what – are you?”

“You'll figure out soon enough,” he chuckled, his glowing eyes turning into crescents as he grinned through the bandana. He jerked his head towards his dagger that was still in your hands. “You'll need to learn how to use that well.”

“I already know a couple of tricks,” you admitted. Pyke sent an approving look as you attached the blade to your belt. “And just how exactly do you plan to eliminate an entire crew and their captain?”

Even though you could only see half his face, you could tell how his smile changed. How it became sadistic, wild, his eyes shining with the green light you thought you only saw in the monsters of the sea.

“We drag 'em to the depths.”

[captainchrisfics]

‘Always’

About: Chris Evans and his girlfriend break up so he comes crawling back to his friend’s door, only they’re a little more. They have been for a long time, although it takes a fight and a nasty phone call from a scorned ex for them to realize it.

Word Count: 3,638

Warning(s): There’s a makeout in this fic. Nothing I would particularly classify as nsfw, but just a heads up.

Requested By: Anonymous! Thanks for sending this in, I’m always happy to write reqs. Another thanks for being patient with me. x

My phone rang. 

I was done for the day, just for the record. My bra was off, my feet were up, my wine was in reach, and my favorite trashy reality t.v. show was on. 

Then my phone flashed, turning that dark grey color it does when there isn’t a contact picture. But instead of an unfamiliar number, there was a contact name. Chris’s Gf. 

Now, I know it was rude not to save her contact with her name. Granted I couldn’t even be bothered to type out ‘girlfriend,’ almost as if she was dispensable or something. But, in my defense, I genuinely couldn’t remember what it was when Chris made a group chat to plan an introduction dinner with all of his friends from back home. You’d think it’s a very significant thing, all the girls he brought to Boston at one point or another did, but anyone who knew Chris also knew he tended to jump the gun. 

She’d managed to stick around for a few months though, so I really should’ve learned her name. Thankfully, when my thumb made contact with the green circle, there wasn’t a need for pleasantries since she was already screaming at me. 

“It’s all your fucking fault, you know,” she spit into the speaker. Her audio was kind of grainy, like she was talking through her car’s bluetooth. Plus, I could barely hear her over the blaring horns and sirens of Boston’s all too familiar traffic. I could imagine her manicured claws wrapping so tight around her steering wheel that her knuckles turned white as she snarled, “Chris doesn’t have any more fucking time for anyone else because he’s too busy fucking you.”

“Woah, woah, woah,” I started, buying time for my brain to catch up to her mouth’s pace. “We never-”

“Oh, don’t fuck with me,” she cut me off, laughing cynically. “I know about you two, he told me months ago. Told me you were only friends now though, so I’m not sure what to believe at this point.”

“But we never did anything since he met you!” I defended, my voice coming out more loud and shrill than I’d intended. I sighed in an attempt to compose myself. “We are friends,” I stressed, calmer now. I started pacing nervously as I pinched between my eyes.

“Oh,” she said dramatically between gritted teeth. “That’s where you’re wrong, with this whole innocent little ‘friends’ thing.”

And, while I’m sure she’d felt like I was finally trapped in the corner, right where she wanted me, that’s exactly where she’d lost me. Because the whole ‘friends’ thing was exactly that to me, innocent. Platonic. Sure, I enjoyed the kind of relationship Chris and I had when we were both single and looking to have a little fun, but we also respected our boundaries and other partners enough to call it quits. Never had either of us crossed that line.

“Whatever you want to call it. It’s not that to Chris at least,” she continued to seethe, “it’s why he can’t have a real relationship. I’m sure it’s true for you too, with your boyfriends. It ended because he’s got one foot in the door and the other out of it. You’re always standing in the way, it’s your fault.”

Leave it to this girl I barely know, in the loosest sense of the term, to read me like an open book, like she knew everything between my covers. Things I hadn’t even written yet.

“I…” I stumbled over explaining myself. “I-it isn’t like that,” my shaky voice stuttered, not even able to convince myself. It isn’t like she knows me or my relationship with Chris. It isn’t like he cheated on her. It isn’t like I’ve ever tried to hold him back in any relationship, let alone theirs. 

But it isn’t like that was what she was accusing us of. It isn’t like my doorbell didn’t ring, a heavy, steady knock reverberating. It isn’t like there wasn’t a deep voice, one as familiar as my heartbeat and scratchy from being strained in a yelling match, asking to come in. It isn’t like I couldn’t imagine the deep blue of his bedroom eyes, twinkling between these sultry dark lashes, like that thought didn’t spark an insatiable fire in my stomach that snatched every bit of air in my chest. It isn’t like either of us were surprised.

“Bet that’s him now,” she hissed, as if she hadn’t struck me already. Hadn’t poisoned my thoughts, making me feel simultaneously sick to my stomach. “You two deserve each other.” She scoffed before hanging up.

“I’m sorry,” I confessed to my home screen, half-hoping she’d hear it anyway. Probably to relieve my own guilt, this terrible feeling completely repressing my lungs. So that was why I couldn’t breathe.

She planted this seed, this terrible, rotten, famine-inducing sort of seed, in the bottom of my stomach. It latched onto me, expanding roots I’d trip over and growing until its branches coiled around my heart and constricted my lungs.

Then Chris rang my doorbell again, calling out my name. Rambling, probably under the impression that he was the only one who could hear anyway. Saying that he’s sorry he didn’t call first, but he was stressed. He had this tension he needed me to relieve, and that made for some of the best nights.

I tried to talk, but it came out as a cough.

“We…” Chris trailed off. I could almost see him, kicking at my stoop with his hands shoved deep in his pockets. Hands I wanted tangled in my hair, roaming along every one of my body’s curves. Biting his chapped lips anxiously. Lips I wanted on mine, teeth I wanted leaving marks on my neck for the next few days. 

“We broke up,” he said, no sign of anything other than frustration. Frustration I wanted him to take out on me, so desperately, burying me between my mattress’s springs.

I opened the door, although I wasn’t sure if I was ready to let him in. Still grappling with the shell-shock from his ex’s phone call, I smiled. “I had a feeling,” I told Chris, but I wasn’t sure he took it how I meant it.

Just by the way the corner of his lips turned up in a smirk, he had me. He leaned against my door’s frame as a chuckle reverberated from deep in his chest, right where I felt that glint in his eye tugging at my lust. “She called you?” Chris asked incredulously, thick eyebrows taking off as he stared at the phone in my hand. “Fuck, I knew she was crazy, but…” he trailed off, shoving his hands into his coat pockets. He shrugged and said, “Saves me the breath, I guess.”

And still, Chris took more from me.

His lips were on mine in moments, kissing me with such a force that the two of us stumbled into my living room. Chris kicked the door closed behind him and I pushed him back into it, grabbing his coat’s lapels to slow our velocity. He tore off the layer and his t-shirt so I crash-landed into him anyway.

My fingers crawled up every bump and curve of his torso, inching excruciatingly slowly over the soft, bare skin I’d missed. I relished in every goosebump my scratching nail elicited from his porcelain chest. When my hands finally reached his neck, I wrapped my arms around Chris and pulled him impossibly closer. I wasn’t about to let him go again any time soon. 

Chris groaned with satisfaction against my bottom lip, tugging the sensitive skin between his teeth. His hands found my ass, hesitating on the curve like he was properly appreciating it before slipping down to the bottom of my thighs, encouraging me to wrap my legs around his waist.

I missed this, if I’m honest. The way our chests rose and fell in complete sync with one another, hands roaming familiar territory, every part of each other dancing together as if we’d rehearsed countless times before. By this point, I suppose we had. 

Chris carried me to the couch and sat so I was straddling him. Our hips began digging into one another, frantically trying to find the friction we knew all too well between our clothing. His hands slipped up the hem of my shirt and suddenly I became too aware of how little was separating our bare chests, just this one piece of fabric. One of Chris’s old shirts, in fact. The reality of how close we were to being so close again, only to have hundreds of miles and surely more pointless commitments to other people keeping us apart, it was painful.

He continued to kiss me, hungry and longing as if he’d been deprived, as his cold fingertips teasingly traced underneath my chest. So close, again. But, as much as the passion pooled in the pit of my stomach, there was a horrible, tugging guilt that started to drain me.

“Chris,” I whined, only the word came out more like a breathy moan as I tore my lips from his, like pulling two magnets apart.

“Hmmm,” he hummed, pressing his lips along my jaw and down my neck. Instinctively, I craned so he could have better access and I almost didn’t want to say anything at all as badly as I needed to keep grinding my hips against his. Chris’s hands tightened on my hips, urging me even more.

It would’ve been so much easier to drown myself in Chris. To let his scent, the expensive vanilla cologne and crisp mountain air and something that smelled indistinguishably from what my home, replace all of the air in my lungs. To let the sensations surround me, his beard scratching my collarbone and his calloused fingertips digging into my hip bones, so hard I hoped I’d have bruises of his fingerprints in the morning. 

Like jumping into a frozen lake, he shocked every one of my nerves awake. I gasped, taking in all the air I could as if I’d just broken the water’s surface after a deep dive.

“Chris,” I repeated, sterner this time. He retracted, resting his hands on the small of my back while giving me this awful look. These anticipating, wide puppy-dog eyes with his swollen lips stuck in a pout and his eyebrows hanging low. Chris was the poster boy of concern. I almost wanted to tell him to forget it, that we could keep going, but I had a feeling even he couldn’t satisfy the aching in my chest. I needed something else.

“She was right, Chris,” I admitted so quietly that, if we weren’t close enough for each of our breaths to be borrowed, I think he might not have heard me. My forehead met his shoulder and I watched his chest deflate with a sigh.

“She doesn’t know shit about how I feel,” he growled. His arms tensed around me and I knew I’d brought back the emotions he was trying to leave at my front door. I realized he’d had a similar conversation to the one I did, and he knew it too. In a moment of steely anger, he felt completely foreign to me.

Then Chris’s shoulders sagged as his grip on me softened and he reached for me, resting a heavy hand on my cheek. Chris lifted my head so I’d looked at him. Him and his drooping eyebrows, chiseled frown lines, and those blue eyes, gentle as a lake in the morning and just as glassy. 

“She doesn’t know shit about us,” Chris insisted, still bitter, but with all of the conviction he could muster.

“It doesn’t matter, she’s still right. We can’t keep doing this,” I bit back, matching his sincerity’s strength. “Every other guy I’ve ever been with,” I tried to confess, but then I saw my reflection in his crystal-clear eyes. I realized exactly what I was about to do, the can of worms I’d nearly opened, and I couldn’t.

I turned from Chris, partly so I didn’t have to look at him, but mostly so I didn’t have to watch him looking at me. His hand fell from my cheek and hit his thigh with a defeated thud. My eyes darted to the ceiling, blinking back tears. My chest shook as I tried to suck the words on the tip of my tongue back down with every breath.

“They left you wanting more?” Chris said, sucking on his teeth. “Left you wanting someone else specifically?” he laughed dryly. The corner of his mouth tugged up in a smirk, but there was nothing light about the look in his eye, like someone else was pulling the strings.

I jumped from his lap, like he’d just passed an electric shock through me, and pulled my shirt back down. “No,” I objected. With the way Chris looked at me, leaned back casually and watching me with his eyebrows playfully raised as I paced with crossed arms and a furiously shaking head, I had a feeling I was only trying to convince myself.

“She told me the same thing,” he began tentatively. “That I’m not ‘emotionally committed to her’ as if that makes any sense,” Chris paused to roll his eyes. “And then once she left me, I was driving over. I didn’t even feel sad about the breakup, I just wanted to be with you,” he elaborated.

Chris stood and took a couple of his long strides toward me. He gripped my shoulders, just enough to stop the pacing path of the wind-up toy I’d become before I wore a hole through my carpet. “And then I realized what she meant,” Chris admitted, buying time before he finished with a deep breath. He pulled me close to his chest. “I realized that I was waiting for this, to be with you. I always do.”

“No,” I repeated with more fervor, shaking myself from his embrace.

“No?” Chris echoed incredulously. His eyebrows knitted together as he crossed his arms, taken aback by my objection.

“No!” I shouted, running my anxious hands through my hair as I continued to pace on the opposite side of the coffee table. Out of his arm’s reach. “This isn’t what this is. We’re friends, Chris. This isn’t how friends work,” I spoke in a quick staccato.

“We aren’t just friends. It’s how we can work,” he pleaded his case, trying to emphasize his point with wildly flailing hands. “You said it yourself, she was right.”

“And you said she didn’t know anything,” I shot back in a low tone with narrowed eyes. My steps halted as my eyes pierced daggers into Chris. He was still flushed from earlier, hair disheveled wildly from my hands raking through the dark locks as well as his own nervous ones now, but he still made a decent target. 

“And, if we aren’t friends, what am I to you then, Evans? A booty call, maybe? A rebound? Really, which is it? Because, as much as you’ve ‘always’ wanted to be with me, you always seem to get bored and run back to L.A. to find someone else!”

His whole being, from his eyebrows to his shoulders to his spirit, sank. My words weighed heavy on him and, as good as it felt in the moment to pin all of my anger and confusion onto Chris, it wasn’t worth the way he’d looked at me. Like he was so insulted I would even imagine that he thought so little of me. 

“That isn’t fair. You know that’s not what I meant,” he faltered. His mouth opened and closed, a total fish out of the water. This wasn’t in our element, Chris never came here for a fight. He came for love, or at least the closest thing he could get. Actually, I gave him all the love I had. Always. But that was the problem, that I never seemed to get any in return.

Again, I stopped to scrutinize Chris. I’m not sure what I was hoping to find between his naked chest heaving with ragged breaths and those soul-baring eyes that conveyed nothing less than heartbreak. “You are so much more to me,” he professed, his voice level and imploring me to believe him. “I want us to be so much more.”

I collapsed onto the couch, knees weakened with a declaration of adoration I’d been dreaming about for the longest time and a fraction of my emotional exhaustion taking a physical toll. I wrung my hands in my lap, choosing to watch my fingers slide in and out of my other hand’s gaps instead of looking Chris in the eye.

My couch creaked with a sudden added weight as one massive, calloused hand wrapped itself around both of my own. “Want a drink?” Chris asked in a refreshing change of pace. His eyes darted to my nearly-empty glass of rosé from earlier and the bottle accompanying it.

Instead of giving him the satisfaction of serving me, I pulled my hands from his and refilled my own glass. I passed it to Chris before taking the whole bottle into my lap. We both took long sips, trying to force each other to break the thick silence between us.

“We’re supposed to be friends,” I snapped first, hating how my voice broke. 

Chris choked on his wine as he laughed. “Friends who fuck each other senseless sometimes?” he inquired, raising a thick eyebrow. “We’ve been more than that whether or not you want to realize it.”

“But friends,” I insisted, unwavering. “That’s the only solace I’ve had, seeing you with other girls, knowing that we had boundaries. That we aren’t supposed to have feelings like this so I could ignore them and assume it wasn’t mutual. You aren’t supposed to make me wait for you, over and over again, and then claim to have wanted me this whole time.”

Chris allowed me to ramble without interruption. Instead of waiting to talk, he only listened. With one arm wrapped around my shoulder and the other hand tight around his glass’s stem, he allowed me to get it all out.

“You could’ve just had me, Chris,” I raised my voice, hating how defeated the crack in my voice sounded. It was shrill and as removed from myself I ever felt, like the words were coming out of someone else’s mouth. “So I don’t see why you expect me to believe you ever really wanted me in the first place.” I turned into Chris’s side, burying my face in his shoulder in an attempt to seek some comfort. As much as I hated him in that moment, Chris always seemed to be my soft place to land.

“I know that now,” he said in a breathy sigh. “I’m sorry, darling, I had no clue you felt like that,” Chris said, words laced with a saccharine honesty that begged me to believe him. Then his chest rumbled with a reverberating, cynical laugh as he added, “If it’s any consolation, I had no clue I felt like this either.”

He’d caught my attention. I tipped my chin up to rest on his shoulder, looking at Chris with a new clarity. He was just as confused as I was, drowning and tumbling in an unexpected wave of new emotions.

“Honest, I didn’t… I don’t know if this makes any sense,” Chris stuttered, shaking his head. “But it didn’t click until I was driving over here. I realized I was doing exactly what she accused me of, always running to you. Comparing her to you. Wanting every girl to be you.”

Then he saw right through me with those eyes, as clear as a crystal ball I could nearly see our future in- or, at least, the one Chris envisioned. He’d pinned his heart right onto his sleeve. “You don’t know how fucking stupid I feel,” he said with a gritty laugh, “for wasting so much of the time we could’ve been spending together.”

He reached out and tucked a lock of loose hair behind my ear, palm hovering over my cheek before deciding it was a safe place to rest. His thumb stretched across the soft skin, wiping a tear I hadn’t realized slipped out. “Darling,” he sighed with a new tenderness, “I don’t want to waste any more of it watching you cry. I want to be with you, always, as long as you’ll have me.”

I laughed and it felt good, like it lifted some of the heaviness from my chest. My hand found the crook of his neck. I could just barely feel his pulse beating hard underneath the soft, warm skin. I looked at him through long lashes as I realized the utter beauty of this man sitting before me, inside and out. I thought I knew him before, every corner and crevice, but Chris was bearing a new part of his soul to me. “Me too,” I mumbled. 

So painfully slowly, Chris began to lean in, like he was giving me one last chance to back out. Like I hadn’t given all of myself to him, in every way possible, a long time ago.

When his lips met mine, just like they had so many times before, something was inexplicably new. Different from the desperation usually lacing our love and the bittersweet excitement of knowing it could end at any moment. This was patient, this was Chris telling me he’d wait as long as he had to for another kiss like this. This was him promising himself to me and me alone, pressing the vow from his lips to mine. This was grateful and accepting, giving and vulnerable in a way that we’d never been before. A way I hoped we’d always be.

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[biofunmy]

Can Virgil Abloh Fit in a Museum?

CHICAGO — There is one room in “Figures of Speech,” the Virgil Abloh exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, that vividly demonstrates how his aesthetic principles, emotional range and commercial ambitions all cohabitate cozily.

On one wall is an Inez & Vinoodh triptych of a young black child playing with Louis Vuitton items, from Mr. Abloh’s first ad campaign as the artistic director of Louis Vuitton men’s wear design. The most striking is the middle image, in which a girl wears a psychedelically colorful sweater with a “Wizard of Oz” theme — is draped in it, actually — with small, fragile origami paper boats strewn at her feet. Her left arm is outstretched and she’s gazing off into the distance — it’s beatific.

But step to the other side of the room and see these photographs anew. On the floor in front of you will be a sculpture of a sort, an array of 16 numbered yellow markers, the kind used to denote the location of evidence at a crime scene. (What’s not on any information card is that 16 is the number of shots a Chicago police officer fired at Laquan McDonald in 2014, killing him.)

On the floor, there is tragedy. On the wall, there is hope.

It was also striking just how many people stepped right around the ghost on the floor — barely noticing it, if at all, as they snapped photos of an ad.

[Read more about Virgil Abloh on his career and the MCA exhibition.]

This midcareer retrospective of Mr. Abloh’s work turns on unanticipated juxtapositions — visual, sociopolitical and even structural. As an artist, he’s a light-touch conceptualist, his work a series of small disassemblies and reassemblies. Mr. Abloh trained as an architect and was Kanye West’s right-hand man for several years before branching out and becoming a fashion designer for Louis Vuitton and his own line, Off-White; a D.J.; a visual imagineer for other clients; and a collaborator with Nike, Ikea, the Red Cross and others.

He is the standard-bearer for the internet-speed globalization of haute post-hip-hop style, suggesting that the chasm between taking a marker to your shoes and ending up the head designer at an iconic fashion house may not be as vast as it once seemed.

That he has achieved so much so rapidly is its own provocation, one amplified by “Figures of Speech.” It is his first museum exhibition, and fundamentally it asks how a museum — by practice, a static institution — can capture and convey the work of someone who moves quickly, has prodigious output, and who isn’t nearly as preoccupied with what he did yesterday as what he might do tomorrow.

HIP-HOP, STREETWEAR, SKATEBOARDING AND GRAFFITI are all art practices born of resistance, and by the time Mr. Abloh found them, they were eking their way into institutions. More than any of his generational peers, he has applied their disruptive urges in new contexts.

His art is about besting capitalism — from within. He has a just-make-it ethos; the essence of his work is process as much as product. In a 2017 lecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design — published as a book, “Insert Complicated Title Here” — he focused on “shortcuts,” about how changing an existing thing just 3 percent is often enough. “I’m sure that you’re trying to challenge yourself to invent something new, trying to be avant-garde,” he told the students. “Basically, that’s impossible.”

For Mr. Abloh, there is no art practice outside the mode of consumption. You sense that for him, the sneaker in the store (which costs you money) and the picture of the sneaker in the store that goes on Instagram (which costs you time) serve effectively the same purpose.

That same blitheness is at work in “Figures of Speech,” curated by Michael Darling, which gives equal weight and space to Mr. Abloh’s most meaningful work and his loosest-conceived projects. Perhaps most jarringly, the space given over to his signature work — his fashion design for Louis Vuitton and Off-White, his various sneaker prototypes for Nike — is rather small.

In the second gallery, clothes hang on racks that make it tough to appreciate the unusual details — whether in terms of silhouette, or design in-jokes — that Mr. Abloh has made his stock in trade. At the end of one rack are some prototype Vuitton pieces with a strip of paper attached that reads “LEWIS VUITTON,” an intriguing in-house tweaking of a design lineage that could also fit in at a group exhibition at a Bushwick art gallery. (Such garments were never actually produced.)

Later, a grid of Abloh/Nike prototype sneakers has been set at ground level. Presumably artifacts like these are what draw many people to the exhibition, but the presentation minimizes their importance and their strengths.

There is a kind of exhibition that’s effective for work like this, something more process-focused that shows the inspiration and the innovation side by side — a display of tools, techniques and gambits.

In places here, that happens — mentioning Calder on the wall text next to a mobile-like sculpture made of pink insulation foam, or pointing out the Caravaggio that was referenced in his earliest clothing line, Pyrex Vision. But some are obscured: the oversize version of the clear CD case Mr. Abloh designed for Kanye West’s “Yeezus” album is missing any mention of Peter Saville, a mentor of Mr. Abloh’s, who did something similar for New Order.

BORROWING IS IN MR. ABLOH’S DNA, and one of the unlikely pleasures of this exhibition is the way he freely absorbs the work of others. One wall is completely wheatpasted with posters of the Chicago rapper Chief Keef wearing a Supreme T-shirt, photographed by Ari Marcopoulos — it all clings to the wall like a proud stunt, one of several places where Mr. Abloh imports a vernacular context into the museum setting. Similarly, there are works made of concrete cast to resemble outdoor benches that would be manna to skateboarders.

Mr. Abloh also applies that mode of creative direction to his own emotions. In one case, he displays some of his gold and platinum paper-clip jewelry (by the celebrity jeweler Jacob Arabo), made-real versions of pieces he once fashioned for himself out of actual paper clips, an aspirational nod to the luxury rapper chains he never expected to be able to afford.

Just across the gallery from those pieces is one of the show’s most convincing arrangements. On the left is Mr. Abloh���s D.J. setup — austerely beautiful wooden speakers (by Devon Turnbull), glimmering CD turntables (by Pioneer DJ) — presented as a shrine. And hanging on the wall to the right is a cease and desist letter from the United Nations chiding Mr. Abloh for using its logo on fliers for D.J. gigs.

There it is — reverence and flippancy all together, and a reminder that flippancy can often be a byproduct of reverence.

And yes, Mr. Abloh is in on the joke. A biographical video near the end of the show includes a scene in which he waters, with a hose, the “WET GRASS” rug he made with Ikea. By the gift shop, I spied some tickets on a table that read “Virgil Abloh: ‘Bathroom Pass.’”

Mr. Abloh even folds critique into his work — a rug in the first room is imprinted with an arched-eyebrows quotation from a Four Pins story about Pyrex Vision in 2013. An information slide in the fashion gallery alludes to some unkind things the fashion designer Raf Simons once said about Mr. Abloh: “Simons described Off-White as not bringing anything original to fashion. Abloh immediately responded with the collection ‘Nothing New.’”

When Mr. Abloh is playful, he can be exhilarating — there’s serious joy in the gallery that includes a pile of his Ikea collaborations, which looks as if it were assembled via tornado. When he works in the métier of consumer goods, he understands how to differentiate just enough from the norm to stoke passion. But the pieces here that hew closest to traditional artistic disciplines are the least inspiring.

More than a dozen are marked as having been made in 2019 and as belonging to a private collection. Mostly they are room fillers: grand-scaled billboards, an all-black Sunoco sign sinking into the ground, and so on. Taken together, they betray an anxiety about what type of work might belong in a museum exhibition. They eat a lot of space, but don’t communicate a lot of information.

Mr. Abloh’s best work could fill these rooms several times over, just in a very different fashion. He is a tinkerer. Rather than a simple grid of sneakers, what about a video of him drawing on them, or cutting one up and making something new? Instead of racks of largely obscured clothes, what about the WhatsApp messages between him and his colleagues that led to his creative decisions? For Mr. Abloh, paterfamilias to a generation that understands garments are to be modified, not simply worn, that would have been apt. (The show’s hefty, excellent catalog embraces this spirit, deploying a titillating level of detail.)

As this exhibition is standing there, still, Mr. Abloh is plowing through ever more references on his Instagram stories. What about a screen that displays his real-time preoccupations? The notion that the museum can only hold finished works is an obsolete one.

THOUGH THERE IS NO ROOM for true hands-on interactivity in this exhibition — probably a crowd control measure — at least two works elsewhere in the museum do invite interaction: Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s “‘Untitled’ (The End),” an endlessly replenished stack of paper that you can take freely from, and Ernesto Neto’s “Water Falls From My Breast to the Sky,” basically a divan you can sit on, covered by crocheted nets extending to the top of the building.

But Mr. Abloh still found ways to break the borders of a museum show. Security guards wear limited-edition cool-blue Nike Air Force 1’s that he designed for the occasion. One guard told me he’d been offered $7,000 for his pair. (They’re currently going for around $2,000 to $3,000 on resale sites.) And the exhibition extends into the gift shop, which sells a rotating collection of T-shirts, posters, art pieces and $5,000 gradient-painted chairs — almost everyone I saw bought something.

Millions of people rarely, if ever, experience art in a museum setting. They see it on the streets, in their clothes and sneakers, on the walls around them. The way for art to have wide impact is to set it free — Mr. Abloh understands that his real museum is the world outside these walls.

Capitalizing on his relationships with established brands, he set up de facto satellite locations for the show. At the NikeLab installation next to the Nike store on Michigan Avenue, a few blocks away from the museum, there was an ocean of shredded sneaker bits in the windows and walls. Inside, you could piece together D.I.Y. projects with markers, rubber ink stamps and various embellishments — I filled in a coloring book outline of an Air Jordan Spiz’ike in shades of pink, green and brown, and pocketed a couple of pink chenille swooshes.

Louis Vuitton opened an orange-themed pop-up location in the West Loop neighborhood carrying select items from the FW19 collection. (New York had a similar green-themed one a few weeks later.) The space was filled with life-size (and larger) mannequins that were surprisingly emotional, and wouldn’t have been out of place at the museum.

But perhaps the greatest provocation — the most ineffable artistic moment — came at the main Louis Vuitton flagship store on Michigan Avenue, which was carrying several pieces of Abloh-designed clothing emblazoned with references to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. One varsity jacket had a hand-embroidered patch on the back in the shape of Africa. In this temple of high fashion were clothes that shouted their radical intentions, locating black history at the very center of the aesthetic conversation. It was moving, and also undaunted — a dash of capitalist conceptualism hiding in plain sight.

Virgil Abloh: ‘Figures of Speech’

Through Sept. 29 at Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; 312-280-2660, mcachicago.org. The exhibition will come to the Brooklyn Museum in 2020, after making stops at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta and the ICA Boston.

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