#and 2. couple of us are hangin on like CHAMPIONS

[whaliiwatching]

other lives and dimensions and finally a love poem…

[queenofbaws]

aw snap, here we go again!

just another quick organizational update from ya gurl: my goals for the immediate future are (1) finish CREEPS: MM&BS, (2) get out a chapter or two of like wringing blood before my brainworms eat their way through my skull, (3) work on finishing the tale(s) of the champion. so if you're someone who's been waiting on any of those projects, i promise...they're comin'. hehehe.

i'm really, truly set on tying up the wips i've left gathering dust this year, so i'm trying my haaaaaaaardest to rein my ever-fleeting attention span in to do just that. i'm tossing a snippet of each of those three above-mentioned projects below the cut for anyone who's interested, and, as always, thanks so much for reading and hangin' out with me, y'all :) you guys are the best, and i hope 2024 is treating you kindly so far <3

of mummy men & bathtub soup

He wasn’t sure why he said it. Brotherly antagonism, maybe, or his pathological need to run his mouth at the worst possible time. Both felt like strong contenders. Whatever it was that spurred him on, the result was the same: As Julia sputtered, trying and failing to remember the story that had pissed her off so intensely in the first place, Conrad opened his mouth and finished the sentence for her.

“…bathtub soup guy?”

BANG!

The basement door slammed shut.

Before any of them had time enough to flinch, to jump, to yell at the sudden noise, the lights went out completely, sending the basement into perfect darkness.

Then there was yelling.

“Is…is everyone okay?” Alex asked a moment later, his voice missing the cool and confident mark by a couple notches.

“I, y…yeah,” Julia answered, and wouldn’t you know it, her fury had gone out like a candle in the wind.

“I’m good,” he said, nodding before realizing, whoops, right, no one could see. It was then, in the nervous stillness of the dark, that he noticed someone had grabbed his hand in theirs, no doubt grasping for him in fear and surprise. He couldn’t say it healed it battered ego, not after he’d been treated like a punching bag all night, but it certainly helped. “What about you, Fliss?”

From somewhere behind him, not beside him, she snorted. “I think I’ll live.”

“I…wait, if you’re there, whose hand am I holding?!”

“Uh, sorry, man. I got scared.” “Brad, for the love of—”

like wringing blood from a stone

“JEEED!”

Jack stopped an arm’s length away from her.

“TRAAAVIS!”

He opened the fridge.

“BOBBYYY!”

After a moment of deep contemplation, he pulled a beer out and shut the door again, using his thumb to pop the cap off. He looked her way once more, but instead of attacking her or grabbing her or plain old saying anything to her, he simply brought the bottle to his mouth and drank.

He watched her as he drained the damn thing, his throat bobbing. Just swallowed, swallowed, swallowed…not stopping until the bottle was empty. Not breathing until he’d finished.

“TRAAAVIS!” Constance yelled a second time, willing him to appear with his gun drawn and lather high.

“Give it another go, why don’t you,” drawled Jack. He set the bottle down in the sink, then braced his hands on the countertop behind him. His eyes kept moving across her face in a way she didn’t appreciate. “Third time’s the charm.”

She drew another breath, but didn’t dignify his taunt by shouting. Instead, she brandished the knife. Dared him with her eyes.

The ghoul just kept leaning back against her counter, though; his fingers left brackish smears wherever they touched. “Go on,” he mocked her, “keep hollering. See who comes running. I’d like to see for myself. Awful curious about it.”

the tale(s) of the champion

Josephine’s attention (and eyebrows) shot up from the desk. Her face had taken on the pallid cast of someone who’d had the bad luck to spot an especially large and hairy spider shriveled at the bottom their morning breakfast bowl much too late for anything to be done about it. Had she been speaking to anyone else, the Inquisitor might’ve thought that was the expression of someone staring their own death in the face, and yet all she’d done was present Josephine with the very probable reality that Hawke had simply bunked in Varric’s room for a single night of her stay.

“…I just figured,” she continued carefully, her words made slow as they crept forward on delicate tip-toes, terrified of tripping another unseen trap, “They were probably catching up after all that time apart, and since they were essentially always sharing space in Kirkwall…” Her voice trailed off and she shrugged.

It was logic, wasn’t it? Nothing more, nothing less? If one of her own friends from her life before (before all of this madness, before the Anchor, before Haven, before being pushed out of the Fade) had shown up on her doorstep out of the blue, she would’ve insisted on keeping them close. It only made sense!

Not to Josephine, it seemed. “But Varric’s quarters are so small,” she said in a voice more suited to, perhaps, finding out the crown Prince of Starkhaven had been assassinated. “Oh I certainly hope you’re wrong about that, Inquisitor, I hope she found other lodgings if she did in fact stay the night…I can’t imagine there’d even be room for two people in his quarters…Andraste, they would’ve been right on top of each other the whole time!”

[rustedhearts]

GQ: 12 Rounds with Steve Harrington

Aug. 14th, 2001

by Charlotte Cooper

Former middleweight boxing champion Steve Harrington sat down with GQ Magazine to dish on the reason behind his retirement, his bloody past in the ring, and his twelve year relationship with wife Libby.

I arranged to meet the brooding boxer at a cafe in West Hollywood. The Harringtons settled into a quiet community in California after the birth of their daughter, Jane, in 1997. They're spotted by paparazzi running errands and attending events for fellow famous friends looking like a pair of models.

Today, Harrington cruises up to the cafe in a fiery orange Pontaic GTO (after the interview, I googled the car: a 1969...fat money, Harrington.) Donning his infamous black Ray-Bans, a white t-shirt, and a pair of loose jeans, he walks to our table on the patio like he used to walk into the ring: a confident stride, a professional pokerface.

CC: Steve, it's lovely to meet you.

SH: Yeah, you too.

CC: Are you a big coffee guy?

SH: Huge. I hate these hipster places, though—I don't want anything with a fancy name.

CC: Black coffee for you then?

SH: Yep.

He did, indeed, order a black coffee—iced, the largest size they offered—and, to my surprise, a blueberry muffin. He mumbled something about his wife scolding him for not having enough fiber in his diet as he picked at the sugared top.

CC: Mind if we get started then?

SH: Why not?

CC: I had a fun idea for us. I'm limiting myself to 12 questions. 12 rounds—12 questions.

SH: Clever.

CC: Thank you, I hoped you'd think so. Okay, to start, what's life looked like for you lately? What have you spent the summer doing?

SH: Uh...just hangin' out, really. Libby, my wife, and I have been spending a lot of time with our daughter outside. We've traveled a few places, seen some landmarks. Was that a 2-in-1 question or 2 questions?

CC: I think we can call it a 2-in-1. That sounds lovely, what landmarks have you seen?

SH: I think you're gonna use your 12 up pretty fast. Uh...we saw the Grand Canyon, Mount Rushmore—total waste of time, by the way. Couple a' stone heads. Bullsh*t.

CC: The Founding Fathers weren't your cup of tea?

SH: Nah. Just a couple of old a**holes on a mountain. Nothing special.

CC: What about Libby, any place she favored?

SH: God, anywhere with a f****in' library, and she's over the moon. Bookstores, too.

CC: That's right, she was a librarian, wasn't she?

SH: Still is, though she might not work in one. She's workin' on something special, I won't say too much about it.

CC: I look forward to hearing about it! Does she have a favorite library?

SH: We went to Scotland for our honeymoon, she spent the first afternoon in a musty library somewhere in the country. I lost her in a bunch of Shakespeare manuscripts.

CC: Wow. She's dedicated to her craft.

SH: Yeah, that's true. Shakespeare c**kblocked me, though.

CC: Damnit, Shakespeare.

That got Harrington to laugh. I think I'm the first person to get Steve Harrington to laugh in an interview. This is going on my headstone.

CC: Now, down to some serious matters, and why we're all here. Tell me about the retirement.

SH: Not much to say. Just somethin' I had to do.

CC: You had a pretty gruesome injury in the tenth round of the O'Malley fight in '99. Did this have anything to do with your retirement?

SH: Yeah. Pretty much everything to do with it.

CC: Tell me a bit about that.

SH: I mean...one minute I'm on my feet pounding a guy, the next the lights are off. It was just...noiseless. Totally silent...other than this ringin' in my ears.

CC: What do you remember next?

SH: Waking up in the hospital. Libby was just screaming. I've never heard her scream like that. I think she thought I was dead or something.

CC: To be fair, all of America thought you died in that ring.

Here, Harrington picked up his coffee and took a long sip. He looked off toward the busy road, the cars whizzing by.

SH: You seem to know a bit about it.

CC: My father's a big fan.

SH: Ah. Yeah...I guess. She doesn't like talking about it.

CC: That's valid. Do you?

Though Harrington hadn't been in the ring professionally in half a decade, he seemed as big and wide as ever. His shoulders were massive when he shrugged them.

SH: Not particularly, but...it's been easier to. I don't know, not fightin' anymore...my body feels different, I feel different.

CC: A good different?

SH: I guess.

CC: Do you miss it?

Again, a look off toward the road. I got another ghost of a smile.

SH: Sometimes. But...I don't regret retiring when I did.

CC: Some people in the sports industry claim that you faked the injury because you knew you were going to lose that fight. What do you have to say to that?

A real laugh this time. Two laughs in one interview? This was going down in the history books.

SH: I'd say I bet they'd never say that to my face.

CC: I, for one, saw that match, and can confidently say you weren't faking a thing.

SH: Think my brain bleed would say the same thing.

CC: How many concussions would you guess you had during your career?

SH: Psh...probably more than I even know. Some of those headaches were probably concussions and I just didn't know. I think our 12 round question thing’s done for.

CC: I think so, too. How did Libby feel about all that, the concussions?

SH: Back then? She was a nervous wreck all the time. I really...I really put her through the wringer.

CC: But she stuck by your side. You guys are very dedicated to each other.

SH: Yeah. She's the strongest woman I know.

CC: Did she ever try boxing for herself?

SH: Oh, absolutely not. I taught her the basics—right/left hook, jab, block—but she'd never step foot into the ring.

CC: Too much blood?

SH: Seeing what it did to me. What it did to our family.

CC: The O'Malley fight really altered the course of your life.

SH: I guess. But sitting in that hospital bed, I didn't even have retirement on my mind.

CC: What was on your mind then?

SH: Oh, I wanted to get back out there. I was ready to...maybe prove myself, I guess?

CC: You wanted revenge?

SH: Yeah, that's the word.

CC: For the injury?

SH: It wasn't so much that. I've got nothin' against O'Malley, by the way. He's a fair fighter, he did exactly what he was supposed to do.

CC: Then why the need for revenge?

SH: I guess because...the injury put me in a position where I couldn't take care of my family. I couldn't provide for them. And that pissed me off.

CC: I see. All the frustration, it was because you were immobilized.

SH: Yeah, I guess. And I had f****in' memory loss, so that pissed me off—forgetting sh*t you know that you know. My little girl was still a baby, too, so...it was hard.

CC: You take pride in being able to care for your family.

SH: Yeah. They're all I got.

CC: So when was the moment you decided to retire?

SH: I think...when I couldn't pick my daughter up. I couldn't lift anything heavy, and even though she was this tiny little thing...she was too heavy to move.

CC: That must've been heartbreaking.

SH: I wanted to see her grow up more than I wanted another championship belt.

CC: Yeah, you've got—what?—fifty of those?

SH: Eh, you stop keeping track.

CC: Before you go, I'd like to ask some lighter questions, reminisce about your glory days.

SH: Sure, go for it.

CC: Do you have a favorite match?

SH: Uh...not really? If I had to choose, probably the St.Jude's match with Munson. It was fun, just sparring around the ring with a buddy.

CC: You and Eddie Munson took the 90s by storm.

SH: We were just havin' fun.

CC: Still friends?

SH: Oh yeah.

CC: Lastly, what are your guilty pleasures right now?

SH: Well, I gave up smoking. A direct order from the missus. So, I eat a lot to replace it.

CC: Have a favorite snack?

SH: Honestly, I love Pringles. The pizza ones.

CC: That's a good choice. Well, thank you so much for meeting with me, Steve.

SH: Hey, thanks for makin' the time.