#and also I would rather be engaged with intellectually/ about my fic than have things tossed at me via anon

[gggoldfinch]

Aw it's too bad that it made you more put off by Munch. It was a pretty weird moment seeing all those anons come in. Don't stop loving him though. Munch is a great character and you wrote him beautifully. Even if you don't ever write for him again, I hope those comments didn't make you dislike him

Oh no I def still love his character dgmw!!!! I’m not put off by him, just some minor aspects of the fandom. He’s still my darling angel. I just need to separate fanon from canon & my personal perception. I’ll put a more longwinded response under the cut:

In my experience after a decade+ in fandom spaces, sometimes fanon can muddy the waters of fandom portrayal and water-down canon, and with an especially nuanced & subtextual & canon-heavy character like him, I personally don’t really wanna be influenced by other people’s perceptions and opinions, you know? I personally perceive his depiction to be a very nuanced and intellectual one, and enjoy engaging with his character in such a way, rather than just like… smut fodder…

Ofc people have a right to do whatever they want with any character, but in this instance, on my blog, I realized I didn’t want to veer too far off from what I’ve established in my head to be his characterization. Plus, like I said in the tags of that prev post, I’m not a request blog, and also I feel uncomfortable with posting nsfw things if they’re not from my own brain/ if I find them to be too ooc/ if they aren’t to my taste. I had to backtrack a lot and kinda feel weird about it still.

And also I’ve just genuinely never been so bombarded with asks like that and I was just very overwhelmed by all the facets of the situation tbh. No hate obv,,, this just… isn’t the blog for that.

So yeah. That was what that lil breakdown was about the other day lol. But rest assured I still love the big weirdo!

And also thank you for your kind words ❤️

[insteading]

So, I'm newish to fandom, right? Though I'm not new to being obsessed about particular shows, my last rounds of obsession came when the blogosphere was still a thing, and that's where my blathering about it in the tags energy went.

I get that "Positive feedback only on art and fic" is a way of extending support to artists and writers who make things for free! (I also have ascertained that we don't have the same norms for meta / nonfiction, which I find fascinating AF. Is it that meta's commitments are more explicitly intellectual, and that we therefore expect and accept a level of critique we wouldn't where fic and art are concerned?)

The caveat I've been seeing "Except where racism is concerned-- we call out racism ..."

We don't. Not universally, not consistently. And I'm going to bet calling out racism when that calling out actually happens is a comparatively new fandom norm, and there are some people who dismiss it as a form of moralism. My point here is:

Fandom norms aren't eternal, and (this is my blogosphere training talking)

Re: "ship and let ship," you like what you like, but what you like is culturally influenced. Subtracting the wrinkles from someone you're drawing comes from somewhere (and it's not always "I'm drawing an AU in which these guys met in high school"). Drawing someone as skinnier than they are comes from somewhere. (I'm thin. The number of times IRL someone has attempted to force-team me into bonding over snarking on someone for their fatness is substantial and not cute.)

The norm of "If you don't like it, use the back button" means if I nope out of your fic in chapter 7 because I just read a sentence in which Stede's eyes are blue, and that has been a pretty reliable proxy for racism, you will never know why I stopped engaging. You won't know that I stopped reading because your Ed can't read-- a detail that you think is canonical but that has been disproven multiple times in the show. You might think life intervened. No. I have three hours of commuting and a ridiculous amount of reading time. If I didn't finish a fic there is a reason why. Maybe you're happier not knowing it. Meanwhile I'm thinking: if we were actually friends, I would be working up the courage to talk to you about it, because Blogosphere Years Ago I promised that I would not let pointing out racism, fatphobia, ableism be the sole responsibility of POC, fat people, and people with disabilities.

I get that it's stressful to be called out. Hell, it's stressful to say "I have a problem with this" too! But I've also seen people do absolute master classes in responding to a gentle callout without defensiveness, and with changed behavior, and it made me better at in-person conflict to witness. One of my blogosphere lessons is: Preferring harmony over growth isn't neutral. It's culturally white, and it has costs (mostly to the people who don't share the cultural positioning of the majority).

So yeah: part of what makes me sad about the back button norm is that I think it reinforces a producer / consumer relationship between writers and readers. If I can't tell you when I've got a problem with something, and you can't tell me when you've got a problem with something, that's a hard limit on the extent to which we can know each other. (Also: because I write meta rather than fic, it is absolutely within tumblr norms for you to tell me my take is bad, even if it's not within fandom norms for me to say "I love this fic except for X.") And as someone who made enduring IRL friendships from my blogosphere days, I find that a bit saddening.

[anghraine]

Okay, breaking my principles hiatus again for another fanfic rant despite my profound frustration w/ Tumblr currently:

I have another post and conversation on DW about this, but while pretty much my entire dash has zero patience with the overtly contemptuous Hot Fanfic Takes, I do pretty often see takes on Fanfiction's Limitations As A Form that are phrased more gently and/or academically but which rely on the same assumptions and make the same mistakes.

IMO even the gentlest, and/or most earnest, and/or most eruditely theorized takes on fanfiction as a form still suffer from one basic problem: the formal argument does not work.

I have never once seen a take on fanfiction as a form that could provide a coherent formal definition of what fanfiction is and what it is not (formal as in "related to its form" not as in "proper" or "stuffy"). Every argument I have ever seen on the strengths/weaknesses of fanfiction as a form vs original fiction relies to some extent on this lack of clarity.

Hence the inevitable "what about Shakespeare/Ovid/Wide Sargasso Sea/modern takes on ancient religious narratives/retold fairy tales/adaptation/expanded universes/etc" responses. The assumptions and assertions about fanfiction as a form in these arguments pretty much always should apply to other things based on the defining formal qualities of fanfic in these arguments ("fanfiction is fundamentally X because it re-purposes pre-existing characters and stories rather than inventing new ones" "fanfiction is fundamentally Y because it's often serialized" etc).

Yet the framing of the argument virtually always makes it clear that the generalizations about fanfic are not being applied to Real Literature. Nor can this argument account for original fics produced within a fandom context such as AO3 that are basically indistinguishable from fanfic in every way apart from lacking a canon source.

At the end of the day, I do not think fanfic is "the way it is" because of any fundamental formal qualities—after all, it shares these qualities with vast swaths of other human literature and art over thousands of years that most people would never consider fanfic. My view is that an argument about fanfic based purely on form must also apply to "non-fanfic" works that share the formal qualities brought up in the argument (these arguments never actually apply their theories to anything other than fanfic, though).

Alternately, the formal argument could provide a definition of fanfic (a formal one, not one based on judgment of merit or morality) that excludes these other kinds of works and genres. In that case, the argument would actually apply only to fanfic (as defined). But I have never seen this happen, either.

So ultimately, I think the whole formal argument about fanfic is unsalvageably flawed in practice.

Realistically, fanfiction is not the way it is because of something fundamentally derived from writing characters/settings etc you didn't originate (or serialization as some new-fangled form, lmao). Fanfiction as a category is an intrinsically modern concept resulting largely from similarly modern concepts of intellectual property and auteurship (legally and culturally) that have been so extremely normalized in many English-language media spaces (at the least) that many people do not realize these concepts are context-dependent and not universal truths.

Fanfic does not look like it does (or exist as a discrete category at all) without specifically modern legal practices (and assumptions about law that may or may not be true, like with many authorial & corporate attempts to use the possibility of legal threats to dictate terms of engagement w/ media to fandom, the Marion Zimmer Bradley myth, etc).

Fanfic does not look like it does without the broader fandom cultures and trends around it. It does not look like it does without the massive popularity of various romance genres and some very popular SF/F. It does not look like it does without any number of other social and cultural forces that are also extremely modern in the grand scheme of things.

The formal argument is just so completely ahistorical and obliviously presentist in its assumptions about art and generally incoherent that, sure, it's nicer when people present it politely, but it's still wrong.

[shipcestuous]

To the anon dealing with hate comments:

Unfortunately, if you're getting a sudden influx of them, it's indeed possible that someone might have shared your work. It happened to me once, when someone put me on a list of "problematic writers" in a certain fandom, complete with screenshots of my fics. Thankfully, in my case, I was apparently not popular enough to "deserve" much more than a couple of rather uninspired insults in my inbox. The whole died down pretty quickly after that, and I can only hope they'll stop bothering you soon, like they did with me.

Anyway, from what you said, it sounds like you're already being very sensible in your reactions: moderating your comments is a very good choice when you know that having them under something you wrote would only upset you, and so is not engaging with those commenters. There's so way to make them stop, not unless you disable comments entirely and wait some time before enabling them again, and I totally understand why you might not want to do that... but they will get bored, eventually, especially if you don't give them the satisfaction of knowing they're affecting you in any negative ways. Just hold done, and know that you're the person behaving in a mature, effective way in this situation!

That said, I can't recommend enough venting to your friends, especially if they're fandom/Online friends or they're otherwise familiar with fandom/online spaces, or even just to people you get along well with in fandom/online spaces. Knowing there's someone out there who agrees with you and supports you goes a long way: even when you do already know you didn't anything wrong, having someone look in from the outside and confirm it to you, as well as listen to you express yourself, can be very validating and even cathartic.

Of course, this is assuming that you have someone in your life who you can trust not to judge you for shipping incest, whether they share your interest or not. I'd never suggest you come out, so to say, to someone when you don't feel comfortable or safe touching the subject with. But people you can be a bit vaguer with and trust not to press you for details, who will hear, for example, "some people are targeting me and my story with hate comments because they don't like the ship I write for", and simply say "wow, those people sound like jerks, they should just mind their own business and leave you alone!", can also be a great help.

Worse come to worse, venting on anon on safe spaces like this blog (btw, thanks for awesomeness, Astrid!) might already be a good first step.

I know this might all sound obvious, but I find that sometimes, "obvious" things are the last ones we think about in these situations. Sometimes we think "oh, yeah, I already know that I shouldn't let the haters get to me, that's a given, but I should focus on more practical things now" but really we only "know" it on an intellectual level and fail to internalize it, while feeling deep down inside us that it would be too "immature" to fully express our emotions and ask someone else for understanding and validation or even just a chance to talk about what's happening in detail.

... also, this is something rather personally that I understand won't work for everyone else, but I think spitefics can be a healthy way to let off some steam. Sure, you should write for yourself and not because you're focusing on what someone else might want or not want from you, but there can be a sense of affirmation and pride in saying "oh, you hate when I write this? You think I should stop writing it? Well, I'll just write even more of it, then!" Don't go gifting these works to the people harassing you or mistagging them so more people will see them, obviously, but they can be a way to turn an upsetting experience into an effort to tap into your creativity and even pamper yourself, putting yourself and what you love first as a shield against the negativity you've been subjected to. One time, I was told there was something wrong with me that I need therapy for and that my writing was a sad waste of talent, all because I'd decided to explore some very dark themes and dynamics in a clearly fictional context, and I used that comment to find the motivation I needed to write an even darker story that I had been considering for a while and post almost right after the first one. And you know what? Working on that second story felt good, because I was putting a lot of passion and care into it, and then posting it was so satisfying, like saying "you know what? You can say whatever you want. You won't make me feel bad about myself. You won't make feel guilty about something I have all the right to do. Take your backhanded compliments and don't let the door hit you on the ass on your way out."

As for why antis do what they do... I think there might be a few different reasons. Frustration in their everyday lives leading them to pose as "saviors" protecting more vulnerable people in online spaces. A need for control or an ego boost because they feel helpless and insignificant in other aspects of their lives. Naivety and an insecurity that brings them to look for "strong," loud people to tell them how to act and what to think and give them a sense of purpose and of being always on the "good side" in the case of the "follower" types. Depending on the fandom, some instinctive feeling of being threatened by other cultures and customs. And then, of course, some of them simply enjoy being bullies.

[x]

Thank you so much, Anon, that's a really helpful response for all of us.

I can't believe you were singled out in a fandom for being a problematic writer, that's awful. The antis truly are incredible. They definitely protected more people than they hurt by doing that (!)/s.

I got a negative comment just two or three days ago (on Wordpress not on AO3) and those kinds of things really do get under your skin no matter how much you understand, on an intellectual level, that the one posting hurtful comments is the one in the wrong.

To work hard on something and then to excitedly post it and to have all of these good feelings about sharing it, only to receive something negative in return, it's rough.

Another thing to remember is, like you said, Anon, the antis get tired and go away, but the works we're all producing endure, and for people who like them and are interested in them, they'll have value forever. A good fic is a good fic forever. Long after the antis are gone, people will be reading and enjoying our stuff. And for every vocal anti there are countless silent lurkers.

And I'm sure there are people on AO3 who don't kudos on certain fics because they don't want their username associated with it, and I'm sure we're all guilty of not leaving as many comments as we wish we had.

[therentyoupay]

ah! i was feeling this feeling recently, too! for those (like me!) who have grown up in fandom through the changing platforms (old school forums, livejournal [rest in peace], personal fansites, FFNET, ao3, tumblr, etc.), i think many of us can agree that the community aspect (i.e., the relationships and support that grow from sharing our common interests) has always been at the core of fandom creation and sharing.

with original fiction, we must create new communities, or build off our pre-existing fandom communities by luring inviting them to join in our original fic journey. even if our original fiction "updates" do not have access to built-in kudos buttons, there are other ways we can build community and opportunities for meaningful engagement (and i say this with the mind of "relationship-building" rather than "content creation," which is another can of worms that is gaining discourse on this site that i won't get into here, although that's DEFINITELY ANOTHER THING TO CONSIDER). also, as someone who pretty much exclusively writes for rare!pairs in fandom, building my fanfiction audiences and my lovely and oh-so-thoughtful authorship community took time, too! 💖 don't be disheartened by any initial slow growth. 💖🙏 building valuable things can take time and persistence! (there is also plenty of meaningful things to say on 'doing things for ourselves', 'it's a marathon not a sprint', yada, yada, but i'll leave that for another thread! 💖✨)

of course, there is always the concern of intellectual property protection, so we can't always be sharing original fiction chapters the same way we would with stories written about worlds and characters we do not own, but perhaps there are other ways to share the journey. 💖

maybe this is a beautiful opportunity to join original fiction writing support groups and connect with other original fic writers?

i also made a post yesterday about how my phd-candidate colleagues and i are CLEARLY of a fanfiction-reading-and-writing generation, and how these decades-long habits transfer into the ways we share progress with each other on our doctoral dissertations, academic journal manuscripts, original book chapters, etc. (although admittedly, my phd dissertation will, likely, not receive fanart 😂)

fellow fandom-writers-turned-original-fiction writers (*cough* @aicosu, @dragonsinparis *cough*), what advice have you????

I forgot how lonely it is to write original fiction.

Where are the kudos? The subscriptions? The comments? The people cheerleading me chapter to chapter? Where are the kind words and compliments and reassurances that what I'm writing isn't complete crap? Where are the unhinged emojis? The asks on Tumblr? Where are my mutuals in my dms apologizing for not reading the latest chapter right away (side note, you know you don't have to apologize at all, right??). Where is the fanart? Where are the recs?

Where is my motivation to keep going?

It's something I've been thinking about a lot, actually, lately. How the experience of writing fanfic is so unique. How you already have an audience, willing and waiting and captive. And that's really it, isn't it? You have an audience. It's almost performative, writing fanfic. It's being on a stage, a one-person show (or two, if you do it with a friend); it's getting live reactions to your performance, it's feeding off the energy of the crowd and informing it back in a feedback loop; it's improvised, sometimes, in almost-real-time. It's building something that you couldn't have built by yourself. A thing that takes on a life of its own.

It's an experience you can't get writing original fiction, and, honestly, not having it is making it hard to write something original at all.

[littlemisslipbalm]

“it’s not that important”

Summary: Y/N is in Harry’s band and one night they have a drunken hook up. One thing leads to another and they find themselves engaging in a friend’s with benefits type of situation. spoiler: it is important

AKA: A friends with benefits to lovers story :) with some angst in there

This is for @stylesharrys fallinharry10k celebration so my trope is friends with benefits! prompt is “you have no goddamn idea what you do to me. when i’m around you, i have no control of my emotions or my thoughts” and the tenth picture ^ i kinda just used it in the beginning to descripe what he was wearing - i got really carried away with this story but the prompt is in there !! lol, not proofread tho but would love your feedback !!!! :) love y’all very much 

oh boy i’ve had this done for agesss but i hadn’t written the smut until today so now we’re here i dont even remember what happens - i vaguely remember not loving the end but I hope yall enjoy

Word Count: 15.4k (longest fic to date) | Warnings: smut, angst, fluff, alcohol consumption? i dont remember but i dont think theres anything too heavy in here.

-

“Hey Harold!” You smile as you easily hop over the side of the couch and settle beside your bandmate.

Harry groans, yet can’t keep the small smile off of his face when he sees it’s you. “How many times have I told you to never call me that?”

Your eyes narrow at his faux glare. “And how many times have I told you, I simply do not care?” 

You reach a hand out and tousle his already disheveled, unstyled brown hair. Despite his lack of styling, his hair still looked perfect. His chestnut hair fell into a middle part when he did nothing to it and you found it endearing. It made him look far younger than he truly was, like a boy you might have pursued when you were in your early days at college. The waves slightly framed his prominent cheekbones and chiseled jaw that was sporting a tiny amount of stubble.

He moves his arm from around the back of the couch to pat at his hair, trying to put it back in its nondescript position you had just messed with. After he’s satisfied, he uses the same hand to push up his glasses on the bridge of his nose. They’re chestnut brown Gucci frames that match the natural highlights in his hair. You can safely assume that’s why he bought them. The lenses are clear, but you know they don’t hold any prescription. He looks incredulously at you from behind them still.

“Nice glasses,” you mention offhandedly as you reach out to the coffee table to grab the drink you had left there earlier.

Before Harry had arrived, you had been taking up residence on the couch, in the spot he had actually taken up. You had ventured to the restroom for a moment and gotten held up in a conversation when asked your preference for the Beatles. Having to defend your staunch stance for the Beatles and against the Rolling Stones, you had gotten swept up into an argument with Adam. He believed that because the Rolling Stones toured for longer warranted them the title of best rock band. While you countered that despite their long touring and production of music, the Stones had a rotation of members. The Beatles maintained the four of them and held such a large impact even though they were barely together for a decade. They were one of a kind, or at least the first of their kind, you’d allow. You weren’t really in the mood for intellectual conversation tonight, so upon seeing Harry taking up your seat, you had told Adam you’d continue the discussion at a later date and returned to your spot.  

“Thanks,” Harry mumbles as his gaze flits around the room. He wasn’t sure if you were actually complimenting him, but he would take it as one either way.

The rest of your friends are all up and about, drinking, talking, dancing. It was the usual house party scene: a relatively intimate gathering, music you all actually liked, some friends of friends feeling slightly out of place. There was no pressure in this type of gathering but still Harry wasn’t necessarily in the party mood tonight. Usually, Harry was the one instigating these types of get-togethers with his friends and bandmates. He liked to be the life of the party, but as the tour loomed closer and closer, he felt some tinge of longing for quiet and solitude. He knew he wouldn’t have much quiet while on the road, which mostly didn’t scare him. He loved the stage and the high he received from performing and the gratification he felt from all the people in the room being there to see him. But there was also that other part of him that liked the quiet, the privacy. As the lack of alone time nudged itself around the corner, he had been hoping to enjoy solitude, or at the very least peace before he was on the road. Some sort of blissful state before technical chaos ensued. When Charlotte, the host of tonight’s soiree, had texted their group chat about tonight, Harry had politely declined. Then came the slew of private texts from Charlotte giving him all the reasons he should come tonight. He tried to say no again, but had shown up after the continued begging from her.

His appearance mirrored his expression, choosing a not perfectly fitted white t-shirt and random trousers rather than picking something he really loved, like usual. You could tell something was up and as his friend you were wondering what was wrong with him.

“Don’t sound so excited, Harry, someone might mistake you for somebody who’s happy to be here.” You stick your tongue into the side of your cheek, gauging his reaction.

“Has anyone ever told you you’re not very funny?” He quips, green eyes flashing to meet yours.

Your banter is probably how the pair of you communicated the best, never really falling into the whole serious side of friendship. You never shared those late night talks about the future or your fears. It was a fun friendship, so you didn’t fancy yourself one of his closest confidants. When it came to music, you and Harry were a bit more serious which formed a sort of paradox because the music you would share with each other gave a far greater insight into your souls than you probably realized. As a member of his band, you would discuss his music and what was going on with that sort of business part. But the sharing and discussion of other music that you did was part of your friendship, even if you didn’t see it like that. Because of the countless albums you had recommended to each other and the specific songs you had made note of, Harry and you knew each other much better than you thought you did. Music connects to something deep inside yourself and you have to like it enough and know the other person well enough to believe that they will also enjoy it to recommend it. As much tongue and cheek that you partook in with Harry, deep down, unbeknownst to either of you, you were that friend he shared his hopes and fears with, through the way he knew best, music.

“No, most people find me hilarious...”

You take a sip of your drink, trying to cover up the sting that his remark actually left. Most of the time you were great at keeping up with anyone’s banter, especially Harry’s, but tonight you weren’t feeling it. His tone had sounded so harsh it almost sounded like he meant it. His features soften when he sees the way your face falls, despite your sarcastic tone.

“‘M sorry. I’m just not in the best mood tonight. Didn’t want to come, but Charlotte…” He shifts to face you, arm retracting slightly around the couch, landing his hand at the edge of your shoulder. His fingers fiddle with themselves absentmindedly, he turns his rings around his fingers and they ever so slightly brush against your shoulder. You don’t mind, you know its his nervous tick that he did whenever he didn’t have something to clink them against.

“Yeah, same here, actually.” Your tuck an out of place hair behind your ear, returning your gaze to Harry, who’s tilting his head at you curiously. “But might as well make the most of it, though. After all, this is our last week before tour starts.” You raise your glass and tilt it towards him before taking a sip.

You really didn’t have a plan, you were just trying to make him feel a little better. It was seldom you saw him so solemn at this type of gathering. He usually was the one bouncing from group to group, entertaining everyone with his dazzling charm and quick wit. Sometimes he would bring a date and spend the night with them in the corner, but that was usually at bigger parties than this. At these types of gatherings you often found yourself talking with Charlotte for most of the night. You were both new additions in the band and you had clicked immediately. You would travel in a pair between different groups and talk with everyone. Sometimes you would tell a humorous anecdote about your life and everyone would laugh wholeheartedly. Your ability to retell a story and make it hilarious every time seemed to be your secret talent. You could make any experience into a ten-minute retelling and it always sounds like the funniest moment of your life. It ranged from your embarrassing audition for Grease as a tween to your supermarket run in with an old acquaintance or B-list celebrity the day before. It didn’t matter what it was, it just always had the entire circle of people laughing and wiping their eyes with joy. You’d laugh a little with themselves, but usually you just had a triumphant smile on your lips for the rest of the night.

He nods, sipping his own drink for the first time since you had settled down beside him. “Well, I’m all ears.”

“What?”

“Give me your suggestions on how to make the most of tonight.”

“Drinking, mostly, was my plan,” you laugh nervously as Harry continues to stare at you intently.

“Mostly?”

“I mean, what do you want me to say? I didn’t think to pack my bouncy castle, my bad.”

He bites back a laugh but lets some air escape his defined nose, before staring with a deadpan face at you.

You like to tease him. You simply liked him. Harry was different from other men you knew. You were pretty sure most people could say that though. Harry was just different. It seemed like no one could not have some sort of affection for him. With the playful friendship the pair of you had, you always skirted the edge of flirtation. But you also didn’t particularly ever want to cross any lines with him. He was the employer of you, technically. He had brought you into his backing band and you wouldn’t do anything to harm that position. As well, at the end of the day you knew Harry. His tendencies and the choices he made.

When you were around him at parties like this, you had to try really hard to keep him at an arm’s length. Because on one hand, you would drink and suddenly the boundaries you put up didn’t seem that important, instead his lips started to look rather inviting, but on the other, you knew that he was extremely emotionally closed off to any relationship that was more than either friendship or a one night stand.

Harry doesn’t give you a response, just swings back his drink. The pair of you sit and drink in silence. Before you know it, Harry and you are five drinks in, finally talking after the second. The pair of you decide to move to the balcony outside and continue your conversation there after the third. After the fourth, you're getting really handsy and by the end of the fifth, Harry’s arm is wrapped tightly around your waist and you're laughing breathlessly into his neck. It looks like he’s just shielding you from the cold night air, but both of you seemed to be enjoying each other’s embrace for other reasons.

Finally catching your breath, you lean back and pant softly as you meet eyes with Harry. His pupils have blown out from the alcohol and dark light. The emerald green barely surrounds the black and you swear there’s flecks of gold or maybe brown in them. Your brows scrunch at the revelation and Harry asks what you’re thinking. You don’t respond, too entranced and drunk to even hear him.

“Oi,” he bops your nose, “What is goin’ on in there, little lady?”

Your hand reaches up and widens Harry’s eye manually. His inebriated state has no qualms about you doing such an odd thing. “Why’s your green not actually green?”

“What?” He asks before moving your hand away from his face, it instead falls to his chest. The pair of you shift until your caged between his body and the balcony’s ledge. You pout as you stare up at him. His skin looks soft and taught over every inch of his face and neck. The urge to kiss him keeps nagging at the back of your mind. The idea keeps creeping up closer and closer and the drunker you are the less likely you are to suppress it.

“Do you want to fuck me?” You blurt out.

“Sure.” Harry isn’t taken aback. He had been thinking about asking for a while, so he was glad you had asked first, made it easier for him.

“Okay, let’s go.”

He takes you back to your place, the pair of you catching a cab the short distance between yours and Charlotte’s flats. No one blinks an eye at the pair of you leaving together. Everyone watched the pair of you sulk all night about being there and only enjoying the other’s company, so they weren’t keen on either of you staying. Charlotte was simply glad the pair of you had stayed for as long as you did.

The two of you walk casually until you’re inside your bedroom. Once inside, Harry throws you on the bed and fucks you. Hard. He’s got you spread out in more ways than you had ever thought possible. He’s got you saying things you had never even dreamed of saying. And he’s got you cumming and screaming more than you could have ever wanted. He enjoys himself as well. He loves the way you feel around him and the way your eyes look up at him while he fucks you straight into the bed. He loves the way you sound whispering dirty things and screaming his name. He loves the feel of your soft skin all over your body as he pushes deep inside you. He loves the way you’re able to rip a guttural moan from him every time he cums. And he cums three times that night. While it wasn’t quiet, he did find that blissful state he had been in desperate need of.

After the third round, Harry feels spent. He brings himself into a sitting position, legs hanging off the edge of your bed. You’re lying in your bed, completely overstimulated, cumming at least twice as many times as Harry. He scratches at the top of his head, his bicep bulging as he folds his arms around himself.

“That was fucking good, Y/N. Just what I needed.”

You can only hum in response.

Then he takes your blanket and lays it over you. After that he begins to stand up, getting ready to grab his things and go.

“You don’t have to go…” your voice raises when you realize what he’s doing.

“Yeah, I do. This was just a one time thing, yeah? I enjoyed it, but you know...”

“Erm, I guess?” You rolled to fully look at him, he was pulling his t-shirt back on now, his marked chest disappearing beneath the white fabric. “Do you really not stay over at your one night stands?”

He thinks about it as he begins with his shoes and his glasses at the same time. “Yes? Usually I don’t know the person and I don’t particularly want to sign an autograph when I leave in the morning. Best to leave immediately afterwards.”

“That was exactly why I wanted you to stay...Shit! No chance you’ll give me an autograph now? Could sign my tit, right next to your hickies.”

He laughs, automatically in a better mood after the catharsis of having sex. It was also a relief for him that you didn’t seem to be weird about the hook up. “Shut up!”

“You’re a twat, Harold.” He groans instinctively at the annoying nickname, not caring about the ‘twat’ part. “But be my guest, you can freeze your arse off while waiting for your cab outside at this hour.”

“Rude..” He mutters, standing in your doorway now. “You wouldn’t actually make your employer stand out in the cold at this time of night. I haven’t even got a jumper. Could get a cold and ruin my voice. ”

“You’re the one who says it’s best to leave immediately. Get on it, mister.”

Your hand makes a shooing movement, but he doesn’t budge. You sigh as he makes a puppy dog face - eyes wide and a puckered pout with his flushed cheeks and lips - playing into your actual kindness, that he knows is somewhere. Your sweetness that you were keeping hidden from Harry right now. Nothing was serious between you so it made sense that you were trying not to let your innate ability to care show as he’s about to walk out on you.

“Ugh, fine. Stop looking at me like that. Just grab one of my coats from the bottom right, they’re all oversized so one should fit.” He doesn’t relent on the face. “And you can stay inside until your cab comes.” You sigh and throw one of your pillows at him. He catches it easily and throws it back, much softer than your throw. “Also never pull the employer card on me again when I’m naked in the bed you just fucked me in,” you call as he looks through your closet.

Returning with a patchwork coat you had thrifted tight over his shoulders, he looks at you seriously, “Yeah sorry about that part. Definitely wasn’t trying to exert my power over you, it sounded better in my head. Meant more like you could ruin my voice and both of our jobs.”

You nod and chuckle slightly, finding how inarticulate Harry could be as an endearing trait. His explanation didn’t actually make it sound better. “The jacket fits.” You say, choosing to move forward from Harry’s weirdness, knowing he didn’t mean any harm from his initial statement.

“Yeah, thanks. I think my cab is here,” He glances at his phone, “So I’ll go...See you?”

“I’m sure.” You smile, “We do in fact work together and will soon be touring the world. Would be a bit weird if I didn’t see you.”

“Right.” He nods and adds a peace sign before he walks out of your sight. You know he’s gone when you hear the door click shut. What an interesting night.

-

Love on Tour had just started and Harry couldn’t lie. He couldn’t keep his mind off of you. You were both his most recent partner and the best he had had in a while. He found himself rubbing over the spots on his neck and clavicle that you had given particular attention to during the night you had shared together. When he went to bed it was your body he pictured to get himself off. So, after the first show he’s beelining to you at the beginning of the after party. He’s got an adrenaline high and he needs a release. You’re the solution. He’s whispering in your ear, asking if you’d like to meet him in his dressing room. Your eyes study his face when he pulls back and they widen slightly when the realization of what he’s implying dawns on you. Then you’re nodding and excusing yourself from a random conversation five minutes later.

Inside Harry’s dressing room, you find Harry already unbuttoning his shirt. He grabs your face and shoves his lips onto yours once you lock the door. As he kisses you he tries to make one thing very clear, “This doesn’t mean anything.”

“Got it.” You begin to finish Harry’s job of taking off his shirt.

He pulls back to look you in the eye, “Are you okay with that?”

“Jesus fuck, yes, Harry, just shut up and fuck me senseless again!”

He listens to you and begins to kiss down your jaw and neck. His open-mouth kisses leave a searing trail across your skin. He settles on a spot at the base of your neck and begins to suck and nip at it with vigor. You set to work on finishing his job of unbuttoning his shirt. Then you pull off your own shirt, reaching behind you to untie the bows at the back. The new skin exposed grabs Harry’s attention and he moves down to suck over the cleavage of your tits. He’s happy to be back with his ‘bosom friends’. You smack his head when he says it and he chuckles darkly, only sucking harder on them causing you to moan louder than you would like.

Once you’re both in only your underwear, you find your back pressed up against the mirror behind the dressing room counter. Harry’s body is nestled between your spread legs as he kisses down your skin. His fingers dance along the line of your thong as he looks up from beneath his lashes for position, you only push his head closer to your heat in response. He laughs mischievously before tugging them down off your hips.

“Missed this pretty little cunt...All I’ve been thinkin’ ‘bout,” He mutters as he begins to latch onto your dripping core.

Your brows shoot up at the thought that Harry’s mind has been stuck on you for the past week. You definitely had thought about your drunken hook up a bit, but hadn’t thought it had left a lasting impression on Harry, you assumed he had that lovely of a night with every person he chose to spend intimate time with. These thoughts are forgotten when Harry’s warm tongue is lapping at your swollen bud. You’re already panting for Harry and now you’re heaving with moans and whimpers leaving your mouth with every lick and nip of his expert mouth.

“Fuck Harry, feels so good,” you whine as his tongue travels down your folds and swirls and dips into your hole.

He moans at your words and the way your legs squeeze at his head. His hands move to spread you open wide to maintain his control and he smirks at the way your body rolls due to the friction of his voice against your pussy.

“Be a good girl f’me,” he growls still pressed against your wet heat.

Your body rolls again as you get closer and closer to your first release. Your bite your lip trying to contain all of the sounds that are trying to escape your mouth. Harry notices the new silence and glances up seeing how you’re trying to behave. As much as he likes you obeying his words, he also wanted to hear how he was pleasuring you.

“Tell me how you feel, princess,” he demands.

“So-so good,” you hiccup as his fingers caress over your folds now as he looks you in the eyes, his lips wet with your slick. He kisses you hard, his tongue diving into your mouth and you kiss back passionately, loving your taste on his tongue.

He pulls back and your hands trail down his chest, swirling around his familiar tattoos and hair that grace his lower torso as you move. He grins, enjoying the feeling of you on him and how he was affecting you.

Soon enough, his cock is finding its way back to your glistening folds, wet with your own liquids as well as his saliva. His mouth waters at the sight. He only pushes into you a few times like this. Then he catches sight of himself in the mirror in front of him and can’t resist. He pulls out and flips you over, your squeal leaving your mouth before you can stop yourself. His dick finds your entrance once again, not wanting to be without the wonderful warmth for any longer than he must.

“Ahhh,” Harry groans when he slips back inside.

Your head throws back on your neck, the feeling of him as well as the sight of him gripping your hair in one hand and your fleshy hip in the other. His rings dig into the skin as he’s able to slam more forcefully in this position. You gasp and whine at his motions. The sounds coming from between your legs are turning you on even more and they seem to make Harry happy too. He picks up the pace and drops the grasp of your hair for a second. Your head falls down as you try to keep yourself up on your elbows.

Gripping both of your hips, Harry growls, “Look at me while I fuck you. C’mon now.”

You moan in response and tear your eyes open to see your reflections in the mirror. One hand goes up to hold onto the mirror to give yourself more traction, causing your back to arch even more. The new position has Harry’s cock slamming into you deeper.

“Fuck!” Harry practically yells and can’t keep himself from landing a harsh slap on your ass. You jump forward at the sting but his other hand keeps the pace steady. He keeps burying himself into you all the way to his base, his balls slapping at your now slick spread thighs. He rubs over the red handprint he had just left on your ass. You whimper and bite your lip, truly enjoying the sensation.

Still staring into the mirror as Harry commanded, your eyes water slightly and Harry makes eye contact with you through the mirror. You smile widely and he grins back. “This feels so fucking good. Your pussy takes me so well. Fuck…” Harry babbles, still pistoning into you. You had noticed how vocal he was the first time you had fucked, but thought it had just been the alcohol. Apparently not. But you didn’t mind, you much preferred it to partners who barely spoke or didn’t even moan. Like how were you supposed to know what was going on in their minds? With Harry, you knew he was having a good time.

A few more heavy thrusts and you felt yourself nearing the edge. Your panting was getting faster, exceeding the speed of Harry’s thrusts and he could also feel you were close. Your cunt began squeezing him tighter so he hooked a hand under your knee and brought it onto the table. He hunched over you slightly and snaked his hand to your clit. “C’mon darling, I know you're close. Can feel that little cunt putting a choke hold on my cock.” He rubs at your clit with the vigor of strumming a quick paced song on the guitar. It’s enough to overtake your senses and the laugh that had bubbled from his words turns into your orgasm moan. You try to muffle it into the arm that is holding you against the mirror to avoid a full on scream because it feels that good. You felt like you were having your first ever orgasm, it felt that new to you.

A few more thrusts and you’ve come down from it, but Harry still hasn’t finished. It’s your turn to be the partner coaxing the other to get off. “Faster, Har. Want you to cum too.” He grunts, picking back up the pace. He had slowed to let you ride out your stay. “That’s it...want you to cum in me. Your cock feels so fucking good.” You whine, meaning every word. He smiles again at you and closes his eyes, focusing on chasing his high. You watch as his smile widens to that open mouth grin, “Fuck,” he almost whispers. And there it is. There’s a twitch in his hips that mirrors his expression and then he’s pulling out and cumming on your back. His voice is now even lower and raspier than before as he babbles how good that was and how tight your pussy was. It was sweet nothings, but extremely explicit and you sighed heavily, feeling a small orgasm wash over you again. His final thrusts and voice pushing you off the cliff again easily.

The two of you take a minute to bring your breathing back to normal and Harry goes to clean your back off.

“So..how do you feel about maybe doing this regularly?”  Harry asks sheepishly as he begins to pull his pants back on.

“Like a friends with benefits kind of thing? Or bandmates with benefits, rather.” You laugh breathlessly at your not really funny joke, but you’re now truly exhausted. From the show and the fuck, you felt thouroughly worked out.

“I guess that’s what it is, yeah.”

“Yeah, sure. Sounds good.”

“You’re honestly so chill, Y/N. It’s fuckin’ hot.”

You laugh and flip your hair dramatically. You’re only in your bra and panties right now and Harry licks his lips, finding your playfulness to be a turn on. “What can I say?” You laugh.

“But like I said before...it’s just sex.” He’s buttoning up his shirt and looking at your reflection through the mirror now. He watches you slip the pants you had been wearing back on.

“Oh, Harold, I know.” On cue, he groans and turns around to face you after fixing his mused hair in the mirror. Interrupting yourself, you turn your back to Harry, “Can you tie this, sorry it’s hard for me to get the -” Harry walks to you without any hesitation and begins tying the silk ribbons on the back of your shirt. “Thanks. Anyway,” you turn to face him when he’s finished and you place both of your palms on his chest. “Trust me, I know you’ve got your issues and I’m not looking to be the girl that tries to change you. I know what this is. I only ask that you let me know when you sleep with other people, because once you do, you won’t need me.” Harry nods and you pat your hands against him. You both smile and go your separate ways when you leave the dressing room.

-

Harry and you fucked almost every night on tour. Sometimes it was right after, on the counter in his dressing rooms. Sometimes it was later in the evening in his hotel room or yours. He stopped leaving immediately after your hook ups. He never kicked you out of his room so he decided it was fine for him to stay in yours. Especially because you weren’t a stranger who would be weird with him in the morning. He also didn’t like trekking through the hotel halls late at night.

The first few times you stayed in the same bed, the two of you stayed on opposite sides of the bed, not touching after you were finished engaging in your sexual endeavours. Rigid bodies against the edges of the mattress. Then one particularly long night, filled with multiple rounds, Harry was so exhausted from his performance on stage and off that he collapsed on top of you. He fell asleep there and you didn’t particularly mind. It felt nice to be slightly compressed and held. He shifted in his sleep and when he woke up he wasn’t upset to find you nestled into his side with his arms wrapped around you. After that, cuddling sort of became part of the routine. After you were done having sex, Harry or you would get up to clean up and bring back waters. Then you would settle in his arms. Sometimes in a spooning position and sometimes you cradled softly into his chest. You didn’t talk about it, it just happened.

One night it was your head directly on top of his butterfly tattoo, one leg thrown over his lower torso and your arm snuggly wrapped around his middle. He liked to pet your hair when you laid against his chest in that way. His fingers would fiddle with the strands and you liked it because he usually took off his rings before he would do it and his hands felt so soft and delicate against you. Harry liked the way he felt when he would hold you afterwards. It was calming to fall asleep against your soft skin and feel your fingertips trace lyrics to songs he wasn’t sure the name of against his own.

No one knew about how your friendship with Harry worked. To the rest of the world, you seemed to be someone who had become another close friend in the band. You were similar to Mitch in many respects. Except for when Harry winked at you during a show, it wasn’t a friendly wink, it was a ‘this song makes me horny and I can’t wait to relieve the pressure by fucking you later’ kind of wink. You knew this because Harry had gone over and whispered it in your ear during a quick break, when you had only looked at him weirdly after he did it.

Before the show tonight, you pulled Harry aside, “So what are we thinking tonight? I feel like I might want to ride you...Haven’t been on top in a while.” In the darkness of the backstage, you crane your neck to take Harry’s earlobe between your teeth. He groans softly and grips your hips to guide them against his for a second. “Sounds fuckin’ fantastic, love.” You twitch back, releasing him immediately at the word. You always told him not to call you that and he tried to reason with you, that it was just something he called people. But you disliked it a lot, adding it to the growing list of rules the pair of you had for the do’s and don'ts of being friends with benefits with each other.

“Harold,” you groan and he steps back at that pet name. While he hated this, you refused to let him put it on the list because it didn’t cross any lines with your physical arrangement. Not that there was any physical list to put it on, it was more of a theoretical list that the two of you would speak of occasionally.

“Sorry.” He says eventually, “Didn’t mean it.” You both laugh.

You think about how other relationships were sometimes desperate to hear their partner express their love for them and you believe you’re grateful for the simplicity of your arrangement. The term relationship regarding what you and Harry were doing was also in the ‘don’t’ category on the list. If either of you were being honest, there should be no need for a list and you should be questioning yourselves why you felt the need to set boundaries if one part of it was physical and the other part was your friendship and job. If it truly was just physical why were boundaries constantly needing to be set and followed? But right now honesty was not in the cards.

-

After the show Harry gets delayed with press or fans or something that you don’t really care about. You barely read the text that he sends, only caring about the ‘sorry got held up’ and the ‘be there in thirty’.

You let yourself into his room and wait on the bed, flipping through your phone, completely unbothered by the rest of the world. When you hear a knock on the door, you don’t think twice about getting up and opening the door. You only realize your terrible mistake when it’s Mitch and not Harry standing at what you’re also just realizing isn’t your door, but instead Harry’s.

“Shit!” you say under your breath as Mitch looks at you confused.

The room is dark behind you because Harry would have just entered and gotten down to business. He might turn on a side lamp, but you hadn’t felt the need to have light on while you waited. Forgetting all of that, you had just gone to the door and opened it.

Mitch tucks some of his hair behind his ear as he stares at you. “Is Harry here?”

“Er..No?” It comes out as a question. You rub the back of your ankle with your foot, feeling nervous.

“Is he actually not here or?” Mitch trails off, narrowing his eyes at you.

“No, no he’s really not here. I’m waiting for him, too.” You rush your words, but try to remain calm.

“You have a key to his room. And you’re waiting in the dark.” He says. They’re not questions and you’re not sure just how guilty you look.

“Yeah!” You try to come up with a non suspicious response, hoping there’s a way to still salvage your’s and Harry’s secret, “He gave me his key because he wanted to talk about something and I kept it dark because my eyes always hurt after shows. Kind of like a migraine.” You scratch at your head and smile, trying to convince Mitch. He seems to believe you as he nods slowly and opens his eyes more.

There’s a little bit of an awkward silence and Mitch shifts his weight between his feet, looking at you still. Just as you're about to invite Mitch to come wait inside with you, Harry steps out of the elevator and begins to walk down the hall. His key card is already in hand and your eyes widen. Harry’s expression mirrors yours when he realizes Mitch is standing outside of his door and that you are standing with him. “Mitch!” Harry says, placing his hand on Mitch’s shoulder and sliding his key card into his back pocket with the other. Mitch turns to Harry without seeing him put away the other key card and you look at the pair of them.

“I was just telling Mitch how you gave me your key card so we could talk about...that thing.” You interject, flicking the lights on in Harry’s room as casually as possible. Harry shoots you a look about how you couldn’t come up with an actual reason for being there. You shrug your shoulders helplessly.

Mitch looks between the two of you and feels some weird tension and he’s not sure if it's always there and he’s just noticing or if something is going on right now.

“Yeah, well, I came to stop by to talk about the riff in Canyon Moon. Something is wonky with it.”

“Oh! Sure,” Harry nods to Mitch and then glances at you, “Y/N, we can talk about that other thing later. It’s not that important anyway.” His tone is so casual and nonchalant. You stare at him, thinking he can’t be serious. You had been almost sure he would send Mitch away, but instead you were being kicked to the curb. When he doesn’t say sike or anything of the sort, you nod. “Okay,” then you mumble a ‘good luck’ with figuring out the problem with the song. Mitch walks in the door, but Harry’s eyes stay fixed on your figure retreating down the hallway. He watches you disappear and is only pulled from his thoughts when Mitch calls his name from the couch in the room.

After reaching your floor, you key into your room and get ready for bed. Just as you’re about to drift off to sleep, completely alone for once in a long time, there’s another knock. This time you check the peephole, a habit you realized you were going to have to get better at. It’s Harry. You open the door and walk away immediately once he’s entered the room.

“Why are you here?”

“Thought we could still...” He follows you into the room, trying to make out your face in the darkness.

“I’m not in the mood anymore.” Your tone gives away your annoyance. You couldn’t hide that you were mad at Harry for sending you away. It made you feel weird. The way he did it so easily made you feel like you were extremely disposable and unwanted.

“I’m sorry,” he sighs as he lays down beside you. You turn to face him when he places a hand on the small of your back. You’re face to face and your noses are almost brushing. It’s not really possible to see each other’s features, but after months of hooking up you knew each other’s faces pretty well. You could reach out and pinpoint all of Harry’s freckles and moles on his face and neck right now and be correct. He could likely do the same. The theory is proven correct when he reaches out and his hand dances down your cheek. “Just thought it would be less suspicious if I didn’t get rid of him. Couldn’t make him wait either…”

“I know,” your voice is small and soft, just above a whisper, “I forgive you.” You scoot closer to him and Harry instinctively wraps his arm around you, bringing you tightly into him. You sigh into his neck and he shivers at your warm breath on his slightly clammy skin. When you lick your lips, they brush lightly against his skin. He laughs at the feeling, so you decide to press an intentional kiss to the hollow in his neck. In response, he presses a kiss to your hairline, his lips slightly chapped after the concert.

The kisses are tender, filled with that thing neither of you dare attribute to anything the two of you did in the dark. The word you told him time and time again to not call you. So is just about every touch and word that has been exchanged in this room since Harry entered it. You fall asleep wrapped up in his arms, a soft smile resting on both of your faces. Neither of you seem to mind that you didn’t actually have sex tonight or anything even close to it.

-

When you wake up you feel especially well rested. You shift around and realize your bed is empty besides you. It depended on the day, but it was always a toss up between Harry being there when you woke up or not. However, lately, you had found it was usually the former. You would linger longer and so would Harry in each other’s rooms, lounging in each other’s embrace under the soft glow of the morning light peaking through whatever windows the room had. Today you were cold at his absence. Then you look up and realize you aren’t completely alone. Harry is standing at the end of your bed, staring down at his phone, smiling.

“Hey.”

You wait for his reply, but he doesn’t look up from his phone. “Hey, Harold,” you repeat. His head snaps up, a grimace on his face at the name. He slips his phone in his pocket and ruffles his hair. “Hey.” He finally responds. “I’m gonna head out.”

“Okay.”

Neither of you seem to find it necessary to talk about what happened last night. Harry definitely seemed a little off to you this morning, but you try to shake it from your thoughts. There was no reason to be upset with him being quiet. He didn’t owe you anything, you hadn’t even slept together last night, so if anything it was weird he stayed as long as he did.

It was the second night at the Forum in Los Angeles. This means no travelling necessary. No day off either, tomorrow you’d have a day off before the third and final show at the venue though.

Harry and you were talking normally at the venue, mostly about the setlist - him and Mitch had changed something for whatever reason last night, which was fine. Your banter was to a minimum, but you were trying to convince yourself that nothing was off. Even though it felt like something was different, you couldn’t place your finger on what it was, so you thought it was best to ignore it.

When Harry is about to go out on stage, you don’t pull him aside and when he introduces the members of the band to the audience, he doesn’t say anything fun or silly about you. He doesn’t wink or come up to you at any point in the performance. It’s so unusual the rest of your bandmates are giving you funny looks. Charlotte looks at you from across your keyboard in a way that she’s asking if you’re okay. You shake your head at everyone trying to signal that you’re fine.

Mitch goes over to Harry and whispers in his ear to check in with him, Harry looks at him with a bright smile on his face and says “of course, why wouldn’t I be?” Mitch looks between the pair of you, thinking back to last night and how weird the pair of you were being then. Maybe it dawns on him then what might be going on between the two of you, but if he did, he wouldn’t mention it for a long time.

You falter a bit on your back up vocals tonight. You’re trying to give it your all, like always, but for some reason your voice isn’t sounding the way you want it. About halfway through the show, when your voice comes out the exact opposite of how you would like, Harry finally gives you a second glance. His face practically emotionless, save for the single arched brow. He’s concerned, but not concerned enough where he would go over to you. He just doesn’t understand why you keep missing the right note tonight. You make a shake of your hand to say I don’t know either. He just shrugs and turns back around to continue the show, his lively smile returning while he turns his head.

After the show, Charlotte, Sarah, and you are all checking in, going over what had happened during the show in general. They’re both worried about your voice and you’re simply trying to tell them that it was just an off night. Nothing was wrong. As long as you told everyone else that, then it might turn out to be true.

“It’s fine, maybe I didn’t get enough sleep last night,” you fib, having gotten more sleep last night than most other nights on this tour. They both nod, seeming to take that as a reasonable answer.

Then Charlotte gets quieter as she whispers to the three of you, “Did you guys notice anything weird with Harry? He was super lively, but he barely interacted with you, Y/N, which is so unlike him...”

Sarah nods while you look skeptically on. Sarah adds, “He kept looking up to the boxes, too. More than usual at least. I don’t know though…” She trails off and you cross your arms over your chest, not really enjoying the conversation topic. “I mean, what do you think, Y/N?” Sarah adds.

Your eyes dance between the two women, your fellow bandmates, your friends. You sometimes wished you could share with them what you were doing with Harry. The secret was fun, but it’s also nice to be able to share with your girlfriends about the guy you’re seeing, even if it is a casual thing. The friendly gossip of it all is something fun to share, but sadly that was another thing you couldn’t do. You sigh, “You never really know what’s going on in his mind, y’know. He’s just Harry.” Your response is half-assed at best. You figure they’ll both give you shit for the non-answer you just supplied, but instead someone else speaks for them.

“I am in fact, just Harry.” He says and you swivel around to find yourself almost chest to chest with him. Charlotte laughs while Sarah simply smiles. Your eyes are huge as you stare up at him and you hope your blush doesn’t come out too strongly after being caught talking about Harry by himself. “Enlighten me on when I was being ‘just Harry’ though?” You bite your lip and take a step back from him, forming more of a line with the other women. He shrugs when no one offers a response, laughing lightly.

“Oh and Y/N, I can’t talk about that thing again tonight, I’ve got-”

“A date?” Charlotte asks, trying to understand why Harry was acting a little different tonight still. The part that Sarah had mentioned about him looking up into the boxes had given her the idea that he might have plans with someone after the show. Harry scratches his head, his hair slightly wet with sweat right after the show. He’s taken off his coat so he’s just in the almost completely unbuttoned, sweat soaked shirt he had been wearing underneath. It sticks tight to his skin and you can make out all the muscle lines that hide beneath the fabric that you usually get to caress. Your eyes flit from his body back to his face when he speaks again.

“Erm, I wasn’t going to phrase it like that...but yes, I suppose, it’s a date.” He says finally, he avoids your eye contact and you look at him very confused, trying to hide the hurt. He shoves his hands in his pockets trying to look and sound as casual as possible and ignore the strain he sees on your face. Is that what had held him up yesterday? Making plans with someone else? And he hadn’t told you until now? The past twenty four hours stung a little bit more now that you knew why Harry was being so distant. It simply felt icky finding out this way and it didn’t even seem like he was going to tell you it was a date.

“Okay,” you say simply and walk away. You hear Charlotte asking him details about his date, but you try actively not to hear any of it. Sarah watches you walk away and sees the way you wrap your arms around yourself to comfort you. She feels a twinge of sadness as she watches the scene unfold, seeing something she hadn’t realized was there before.

Harry doesn’t text or call you that night. You hang out with everyone else for a little while in Charlotte’s room before heading to bed, saying you think you need an early night tonight. Before you’re able to walk out of the door, Mitch stops you. “I heard Harry blew off whatever conversation the two of you have been trying to have again. Just wanted to tell you I’m sorry.” You try to smile but it comes out as more of a grimace. There is no conversation Harry is blowing off, it’s simply you. “It’s fine. Like he said yesterday, it’s not important.” Mitch nods, but still looks at you with concern. What he had seen last night, then on stage today, and what Sarah had told him about your interaction after the show it all strung together in his mind. It didn’t seem unimportant at all. But he didn’t know how he could tell you that. He felt like he should talk to Harry about the way you looked when you left Charlotte’s room tonight, but he didn’t know how to bring it up to him either.

You don’t realize you’re crying until you're in the elevator, and it’s slowly rising to your floor of the hotel. You’re only one level up, but it feels like an eternity in there. You already weren’t a fan of elevators, but this ride felt impossibly worse. The walls are all made up of mirrors and you see yourself in the reflection, but you don’t exactly recognize the girl in there. Your eyes are tired from the show, dark circles already formed. Your hands are aching, clenching and unclenching on their own accord. Your body is slumped against the back wall, likely leaving a slight imprint from the smoke residue and dust on your clothes. Worst of all are the tears running down your face, smudging at your makeup, the black mascara you had applied dripping down in sinister raindrops against your skin. The sad girl stares back at you as you sniffle slightly, confused at what you’re seeing. “Why are you crying?” you ask yourself, your voice creaking and then breaking at the end as you struggle to get out the word ‘crying’ before a sob wracks through you. You roll your eyes when your reflection offers no explanation for itself. You laugh at your own patheticness and try to shake the feelings you’re experiencing.

Inside your room now, you flop on the bed and stare straight up at the ceiling. Your arms spread to your sides and your legs lay limply below you. You think about every night before last, every night since the tour started. Every night where you weren’t alone, where you were with Harry. Your mind flits to last night, how Harry’s lips had ghosted over your skin after his apology. How you had told him you forgave him and it had felt so peaceful, so simple. It was all so easy. Thinking about him and the things the two of you did together brought a smile to your face, unbeknownst to you. When you realize it’s there, your face drops immediately, deciding not to think about Harry.

But trying to not think about Harry makes you only think about him more and what you think about him now most definitely doesn’t bring a smile to your face. You’re thinking about him out on his date with some person you chose to learn nothing about. Maybe out of fear of what is happening right now. By knowing nothing about the person, you can’t compare yourself to them. Can’t see what’s different about them that would make Harry go out on a date with them. But it doesn’t matter who they are or what they look like because at the end of it all you know one thing for certain. They’re not you. You correct yourself, you know two things actually, because you also know that Harry chose to be with them instead of you tonight.

You fall asleep with tear stained cheeks that night and absolutely nothing positive on your mind. You want to sleep but know it only brings whatever is bound to happen tomorrow, which doesn’t seem very promising.

-

It’s noon when you wake up and you wake to a knocking on your door. You grumble and throw a sweatshirt over your body to hide the underwear you slept in. Not remembering your new habit, you swing the door open without any hesitation to find Harry. He looks wide awake and happy, the way he almost always looks, a fresh beautiful flower of a man. You look at him groggily, “What are you doing here?”

“You weren’t answering your phone.”

“Because I was asleep?” You tilt your head and look at him incredulously. “What about this,” you gesture to your appearance, “looks like I just went for a 3 mile jog for fun and I love the morning?”

“Can I come in?” He ignores everything you just said and enters the room when you leave the door to get back in bed. You often did that with him, you don’t know why, but when he asked to come in the room it was just simpler to let him in then say anything. He knew what you meant.

He sits at the edge of the bed as you reclaim your spot in the middle of it, tucked slightly under the covers, but still sitting up. “How was your date?” You try to sound nonchalant and it seems to work. Harry doesn’t notice your tense figure, but you notice how he tenses up when you ask.

“Good…Her name was-” You don’t let him finish, you already know the answer to this next question and you don’t need her name in order to ask it, “Did you fuck her?”

He’s silent, green eyes staring straight at you. You meet his gaze, your eyes almost burning holes into him. His eyes are begging you to not make him answer the question, he doesn’t want this to end, even if he also didn’t want the commitment he had felt himself exhibiting the other night.

When he had come to your room the other night after Mitch had almost caught you, he knew he shouldn’t have stayed. He didn’t want you to feel bad so he had come to apologize, but when the pair of you didn’t have sex, he should have left. But he didn’t, he stayed and it wasn’t for you, it was for himself. It was for him to hold you in his arms because he liked to. But when he woke up the next morning he knew he needed to leave. Solely cuddling wasn’t part of your arrangement together. It’s probably on the list of don'ts that the pair of you had. So after he realized the line he had willingly crossed with you, he quickly sent a text to Jeff who had tried to set him up with a model they were acquaintances with the night before - the reason he had gotten held up. Harry had initially declined, not very interested in seeing anyone else but you. But looking back on that choice in the light of day seemed to solidify what this relationship was - a relationship - and Harry didn’t like that. The commitment wasn’t part of the plan, so he told Jeff to set that date up for after the second show at the Forum and give the woman a ticket. That’s why he was smiling at his phone the morning after only cuddling with you, that’s why he didn’t joke around with you during the show, and that’s why he wasn’t in your bed last night.

You watch him expectantly, silently waiting for his answer, your veins cold as ice. He finally starts his answer and he wants to make it clear that it wasn’t as good with the other woman, but he’s not sure how to work that part in. He’s not sure how to explain to you it meant nothing if your arrangement also apparently meant nothing. You barely even let him get in a sentence. “Yes, but it was just a one time-”

“Alright.”

“What?” He doesn’t understand what you mean when you nod your head and cut him off.

“I told you at the beginning, Harry. Tell me when you sleep with someone else because when you do this is over. It doesn’t matter if she’s the love of your life or a one night stand. I will not be a backup plan, so if you’re able to find other people to sleep with, you don’t need to be sleeping with me.”

He sits in silence for a moment, his jaw dropped open slightly. He’s unable to keep it shut as his mind races about what to say. “Are you mad with me?”

“No, I’m fine. This was just sex. Charlotte will be happy that I’ll be going out with her more.”

Harry’s brow furrows as you shift away from him on the bed, grabbing your phone and beginning to flick through it. You feel numb and you’d like to not think about why.

“Are you sure you’re okay?” He asks because he does care about you, worry is written all over his face. He just can’t commit, not now.

“What would I be mad about, Harry?” You look up and your eyes widen at him, silently asking him to truthfully say why you should be so upset about this revelation. You always knew it would eventually come to an end, you just hadn’t expected so soon. You hadn’t known the last time would be the last time and it broke your heart even if you knew it shouldn’t.

He shifts to reach his hand out to touch your exposed knee. You move away from him and he sighs, looking exasperated. “I- I don’t know. It just seems like we should talk about this.”

“You didn’t even think it was necessary to tell me you were going on a date last night, so I think it’s best if we just left it at ‘it’s fine, see you around’.”

He spreads his hands out across the sheets, examining his rings and painted nails thoroughly. You’re right, he doesn’t really want to talk about this. Well, more so, he’s conflicted. He would like to talk enough that you want to continue your arrangement but he doesn’t want to talk about feelings or emotions. Even if he has those feelings and emotions, they’re just not part of the things he’d like to talk about. “But-” You set your phone down at his first word, “Were you even going to tell me you fucked someone else today if Charlotte hadn’t asked you if it was a date last night? Would you just have come to my room tonight and acted like nothing had changed?”

“I would have told you.”

“Sure.”

“I swear I would’ve. I would never break a promise to you.”

“But you would make a decision that affects the both of us without telling me until afterwards?” Your voice breaks a little and you beg yourself not to cry right now.

“I thought you said this was just sex?”

You laugh humorlessly, in disbelief, “Of course it’s not, Harry! And it hasn’t been for a long time and that’s why you got scared and went and fucked someone else.” He looks at you blankly, unsure what to say, knowing you’re right. You continue, “But I also told you at the beginning of this, that I wasn’t going to try to change you. So this is me not trying to change you.” You sigh when he still says nothing, his expression completely unreadable, even to you. “Why couldn’t you have left it at ‘it’s fine’?” You say finally, barely above a whisper.

He blinks a few times after your final question. He flexes his hand one more time and then stands up from the bed. He adjusts his clothes and stares at you. You feel helpless, but you’re still trying to look pulled together, even after your outburst. You stare back. A thousand words floating through your heads, all the things you want to say and likely never will.

“I know, I’m…” he pauses, trying to get himself to say it, but he can’t. He can’t admit that he’s completely ruined whatever messed up paradise you had created together. “I’ll see you later.”

The apology or lack there of hangs in the air as he walks silently out your door. You don’t move, you barely even blink, still staring at the spot he had just occupied. Your breath finally escapes you, a large sigh. Then some nervous laughter. It was over...just like that. But things like this, left like this are never really over.

-

It’s awkward for a good amount of the rest of the tour. You hang out with your bandmates more and Harry rarely ever comes out with them after the shows. He either hangs out with Mitch on his own or is going out with random people he knows on the road. You and him speak, but it’s never a lot or about anything relatively meaningful. It’s not the fun back and forth of before or the fiery heat of sneaking around. You try to be normal with him, act like his casual friend and bandmate.

He does his best to do the same, but it’s difficult for him. He doesn’t know how to talk to you anymore. He misses being with you, but can’t bring himself to fix it. He doesn’t do much to right his wrongs with you. He also doesn’t even know what he would want if he did apologize. It scared him to think about the step that came after ‘sorry’ so he saved himself the trouble and never did that part either. One night he texts you: “I’m trying, it’s just hard.” and that’s it. You don’t give him a response, he doesn’t need one. You know he’s trying and he knows you know.

Near the end of the tour, he comes out with the rest of you for drinks one night. Only Mitch is between the two of you in the booth, so you feel closer to Harry than you’ve felt in a long time. The group of you are chatting and having a good time. You somehow get onto a story from when you were still in college. You explain how you had narrowly avoided getting Chlamydia right before your Christmas break junior year. You act out the conversations you imagined would have happened at all your Christmas events if you had indeed gotten it. Your impressions of your mother, father, and sister have everyone laughing the most. Harry is shaking with laughter from your story and you smile at him in appreciation when he says, “That is the funniest story I’ve heard in a long fucking time.”

The rest of the night goes really well, for the most part. No one bickers or is short with each other. Everyone is laughing and drinks are flowing. Eventually Mitch gets up to go to the bathroom and you feel Harry slide back into the booth closer to you after letting Mitch out. Your hand had taken up residence next to your thigh, resting on the vinyl of the booth. You sense something next to it now and notice Harry’s hand is resting close beside it. He shifts his hand closer when he sees that you’re looking down at it. He’s almost touching you and you look up to his eyes, wondering if he’ll close the distance. He makes an imperceptible shake of his head, but you know what he means. As you’re about to shift your hand so that your pinky connects with his, Mitch returns and your head shoots up to his figure. You instantly remove your hand from the vinyl and shift closer to Charlotte. Harry gets up, but doesn’t sit back down once Mitch is settled. He instead walks off to get another drink, risking one last look at the table where he makes eye contact with you, but he doesn’t come back. Mitch informs everyone that Harry went back to the hotel because “he was tired” after Harry doesn’t return and Mitch gets a text. You roll your eyes, sure that you saw him slip out of the side door with a woman he found at the bar after he had gotten his drink. If that’s what ‘tired’ looked like on Harry, it was fine.

You start to speak to Harry on a more regular basis after that night out. It’s not funny or lighthearted. It’s just ‘I saw this song the other day, thought you might like to listen’. It went back and forth, it wasn’t everyday but it was something. The last text between the two of you before you began sharing songs again was his ‘I’m trying it’s just hard’ text that he had sent randomly one night. Then after one of you would listen, you would see each other at sound check and mention the song and what you thought about it. It can be noted that it was Harry who sent the first song.

For Harryween, Adam couldn’t be there. He has some family emergency the day of and doesn’t come with the rest of you to Madison Square Garden or the hotel you were staying at. Thankfully, Charlotte also plays keys and you can play bass. The band had to shift around some things on stage and make minimal changes to the setlist since you weren’t rehearsed on the covers Harry was doing. You spent the whole day running through the chords of those songs with Mitch, trying to memorize them so you didn’t mess it up during the show.

It was weird because for Harryween the setlist was switched up a little from the regular set for Love On Tour. Harry was playing the entire new album as well as half of the first album, Medicine, some of his other unreleased stuff, and about six covers, including old One Direction songs. It was going to be a long show and a challenge for you.

Before the show, Harry pulls you aside, to a dark corner backstage, and your mind flits back to the last time you had been in this type of position. The last time he had called you ‘love’, the last time you bit his earlobe - which always drove him crazy, the last time he ground his hips against yours, those and more and you had no idea that it was the last. By then you had already had sex with Harry for the last time, kissed his lips for the last time. It made your heart race to be so close to him and so alone once again. But it’s nowhere near the same as it once was. You shake the memories from your mind and look up expectantly at him.

“Have you got this?” He asks seriously, tone concerned. Of course it’s a music question, nothing more. Like it always was now.

“Yeah, of course.” His stare is unwavering and you try not to falter from it.

“I can get someone else to cover tomorrow, it was just such a short notice today. You know bass really well too, it made sense.”

“I’ve got this. Seriously, don’t worry, Harold.” You pat his chest lightly and for once Harry smiles at the sound of your nickname for him. You had stopped using it after the end of your arrangement. It never felt right to use when you were talking about music, and that was about the only time you had been talking. In this moment though, it felt right. His warm, large hands held your upper arms as you stared up into his big eyes. You missed staring into them, the shimmering emerald of his irises were constantly intriguing. You instinctively reach up to move back a curl that has fallen onto his forehead. He doesn’t shy away from your touch and continues to smile down at you.

“Y’haven’t called me that in forever.” He grins, his lips a shiny pink from the lip balm he had on.

“No, I suppose I haven’t. But where was the groan? The whole point is to annoy you.” You smile coyly. He tips his head back and laughs, releasing your arms from his grasp as he laughs wholeheartedly.

Then he does a soft groan, a playful sound, “How was that?”

“Eh. I’ll give you a four out of ten. Not enough emotion behind it.” You slide from the area the two of you have been occupying and make your way onto the stage to start dealing with the bass you would be playing. You hear Harry call out to you, “I think I deserve at least a five, maybe even a six!” You turn back for a second to look at him with an unimpressed expression and shake your head no. He laughs again and you hear him even when you walk out onto the stage. You smile to yourself as you pick up the bass.

When he introduces the band, he waits to talk about you last. “And sadly this evening Mr. Adam Prentergest, our usual fabulous bassist, was unable to attend our fancy dress party! However! Our lovely Y/N L/N is also a superb bassist and was kind enough to step into his place. - Anything to add?” He saunters across the stage to you and you laugh kindly, feeling at ease in this part of the stage even though you were usually on the opposite side and further back from the crowd. You nod at Harry and he leans his portable mic towards your lips. You wet them quickly and eye Harry before turning out to the crowd. “Just please go easy on me if the bass sounds a bit wonky. It wasn’t on the job description that I’d be playing songs I didn’t know, with a few hours notice, on not my main instrument.” You say this in a kind of list format, holding up your fingers as you tick off all the ways that this was out of your comfort zone. You scratch your head dramatically after you’re finished and the whole crowd laughs and cheers. The rest of your bandmates chuckle along and Harry nods and smiles at you.

“You’ll do great, love.” He leans into your ear and says without the microphone. Then he winks and turns to go back to the center of the stage. You press your lips together to contain your smile, both happy and concerned about the flip your stomach just did.  

The show is going great. Harry is killing it with the crowd. Everything is electric. You’re entirely focussed on your bass playing, but Harry has been coming over every so often to do something fun or have you tell a joke.

“She’s truly the funniest person I know! And I know a fair amount of people I think.” Harry says as he walks over to you have you tell another joke. Mitch has been looking at you and Harry interacting all night and he’s sure that it isn’t your different position that has him coming over and talking to you so much tonight. Something has definitely changed once again. First the pair of you were always together and having fun, then it was silence and stolen glances that neither of you realized you were taking, now it was back to the beginning.

“That’s because you think puns are part of the top tier levels of comedy.” You say easily, “Here, I can guarantee Harry will love this and the rest of you will likely groan.” Then you stop and act as if you’re thinking for a little, everyone’s waiting expectantly. “Sorry, thinking...Well, I’ve got some skeleton puns I could do, they’re very humerus or y’know classic vampire ones..eh but those ones kind of suck. What do you think, Harry?” You look out at the crowd, face deadpan, as Harry laughs beside you. You roll your eyes playfully and push him back to the center of the stage. Leaning into your own mic now, you say, “I told you.” That’s when everyone laughs. Harry throws another look at you over his shoulder and laughs a little more, his smile wide and eyes bright.

A little over half way through the night, it’s time for ‘to be so lonely’. You already knew the bass chords for it before today and you were confident in yourself by now. It wasn’t as hard a song so you were happy for the little break. This song allowed you to not be looking down at the notes you had stuck to the floor in front of you. Harry’s voice comes in after Mitch’s intro and you watch the way his lips move against his mic. You laugh a little as you watch the crowd yell the first “arrogant son of a bitch” line. You used to not particularly like when people did that, but after it had ended with Harry you had started to enjoy it a bit more. Having those people yell the words you couldn’t, but truly felt about him sometimes, was cathartic. Tonight you weren’t angry with him, but you enjoyed the energy in the room when everyone said it. We’ve all got our own ‘arrogant son of a bitch’ that we want to scream at sometimes. Tonight yours wasn’t Harry for the first time in a long time. The song moves along and Harry takes the microphone off its stand, he walks towards your side of the stage. When the lyrics get to:

“I miss the shape of your lips, your wit, it’s just a trick, this is it so I’m sorry”

Harry isn’t looking at the crowd, he’s looking straight at you. You don’t understand the way he’s looking at you. Or maybe you don’t want to understand it. This song, its lyrics, explains Harry really well. You saw the relationship you had with him in the words. Maybe not precisely, but a part of it was in it. Harry had unknowingly foretold your lives with his words. You know he has trouble connecting and committing, you know his issues, and you accept them. But you knew what had happened between the two of you was far more serious than meaningless sex and you knew Harry couldn’t bring himself to be that serious. He ran off and that was fine, but the face that he couldn’t even apologize hurt you the most. But the song lays it all out for you, he’s not one to be able to apologize quickly. The fact that he looks at you and means the apology he sings in the song for you, it’s a big step, but it’s not enough. The banter, the technical apology, it was all a good start, but it’s just that - the beginning. If Harry wants to make things better with you, a lot more needs to be discussed. So when you sing backing vocals for the following chorus you mean the words for Harry completely.

“Don’t call me baby again, you got your reasons, I know that you’re trying to be friends. I know you mean it, but don’t call me baby again it’s hard for me to go home and be so lonely”

His eyes flick to you again and see your lips moving around the words as you play the bass. He sees the emotion in your face and understands what you’re saying. It’s hard for you to go to your room at night and be alone while he’s out with someone else. It’s hard for him to act like everything’s all fine and perfect, back to normal, because for you it isn’t really. He can’t call you ‘love’ and tell the world you’re funny and expect it to be enough. He can’t sing his sorry that was initially for someone else to you and expect you to accept it. And he knows it, too.

After the show everyone decides they’re exhausted and need to rest before tomorrow. You all planned to celebrate the whole day and you knew it was going to be a wicked Halloween. Knowing this, you’re surprised with the knock on your door after about an hour of being back at the hotel. You’ve given up the habit you had once hoped to cultivate and swing the door open haplessly. Truly having no idea who to expect, you are still surprised to find the man standing before you.

“Mitch.”

“We need to talk.” He stares down at you, his shoulders slumped from tiredness.

“Come in,” you usher him in when you hear the urgency of his voice. He saunters in before you and you close the door. You move to the small couch in the room and sit down. Your hands gesture for him to sit as well, but he shakes his head. He stays standing and brings a hand up to smooth his hair back on the right side. His eyes staying on the floor and flickering up to you every so often.

“What is going on with you and Harry?”

“What do you mean?”

“Oh come on Y/N. You’re seemingly best friends with him for a good portion of tour, then you’re barely on speaking terms for the second half, now you’re joking around again. What is going on?”

You sit there in a stunned silence, “I don’t know what to say.” Your arms go to hug your body, feeling anxious about being confronted about this topic.

“Were you seeing each other?” His voice is soft, eyes taking in your body language and knowing it’s a difficult topic.

“I wouldn’t put it like that…”

He holds back the ‘I knew it’ statement because of  how sullen you look, b..ut in his mind all of the pieces he had watched unfold came to fit in a perfect puzzle. He decides to sit beside you when you don’t say anything else.

“We were having sex,” it felt weird to say it out loud, no one but you and Harry had actually known, “But it ended. I don’t know what today was...but it felt different than how it’s been.”

“Why are you so sad if it was just sex?” He places a hand on your shoulder and your tear-filled eyes meet his. “Oh…” He knows why.

“I’m sorry, Y/N.” You sob at his apology because he’s not the one who should be at your door apologizing. You sniffle and lean your head into his chest. He takes you into his arms and holds you as your cries become muffled sounds in his shirt.

You cry without words for a few minutes, Mitch coos some soothing words, his voice soft and kind. He was always a good shoulder to cry on for all of your bandmates, he was extremely strong and you made a mental note to thank him thoroughly when you actually were capable of forming coherent thoughts. “I’ve never told anyone before. It feels so weird even saying it out loud,” you say as you pull back from Mitch’s embrace. You're thankful his shirt is black, no tear stains can be made out.

“Do you want to talk about it?” He asks gently, gauging your reaction. You wipe at your eyes and nod.

Taking a deep breath, you decide to start from the beginning. “Do you remember the party Charlotte had a week before we left for tour?”

Mitch nods and his eyes widen at what you’re saying as he remembers the night. “It started back then?” He’s unable to contain his incredulous question. He had suspected something, but hadn’t thought it had been going on for that long. He was truly astounded. You nod, “Well sort of,” then you go on to recount the last couple of months. All the way up until the Forum shows. “That night, when I opened Harry’s door and it was you standing there...Harry and I didn’t have anything to discuss. It was just…” Mitch nods again. He hadn’t spoken much since you had gotten into the story, wanting to let you be in charge of what you were saying and believing he could probably ask questions at the end. “Then the next night he blew me off for his date with that model and I cried in the elevator because I knew what was going to happen next.”

“So that’s when it ended?” Mitch asks when you don’t speak for a rather extended period of time.

“Yeah, the next morning he came over and I asked if they had sex and he said yes so I told him it was over.”

“But I don’t get why he went out with that model. He had told me she wasn’t his type the night before…” Your eyes shot up and looked at Mitch. His eyes widened when he realized what he said.

“What?”

“When we were talking about Canyon Moon, he mentioned that Jeff had tried to set him up with some woman but he had declined. Said he wasn’t interested. I don’t get what changed between then and the next morning.” He figured it was best to put all the cards out on the table right now. You’d be going your separate ways for a while, now that the tour was over and he had seen how unhappy both you and Harry had been over the last part of the tour.

You shift your leg to have it folded beneath you as you continue to stare at Mitch. “He came over after you and him had your meeting,”  you say quietly. Mitch hums, waiting for you to continue this time.

“He apologized for choosing you over me to talk to. Then we slept together, but we didn’t have sex...I think that’s what wigged him. It had felt too real, sleeping in the same bed with me without having sex beforehand made it feel like something more than just two people fulfilling needs.” Mitch nods and sighs heavily. He looks around the room and then back to you, taking in your full appearance. Again he feels terrible for you, how he had felt the second night at the Forum even though he hadn’t known the full story yet. “Now we’re here.”

“Tonight, it felt like he was trying,” Mitch finally said and you smiled sweetly, thinking back to Harry’s behavior. No matter how far from him you were, all those good feelings you associated with him never went away.

“Yeah, it’s been getting better. He texted me once saying he was trying. Then he came out with us one night and it almost seemed like that would be the night he’d apologize, but then he didn’t. Then we started sharing music with each other again. Then tonight… was tonight. It’s just confusing. He’s confusing.”

Mitch smiles sadly and brings you in for another hug and you’re actually so thankful he

showed up at your door. It was your first time telling anyone all of this, because Harry didn’t even know how you felt about some of these things. It felt amazing to be heard and to be told it was okay to be feeling like this.

Pulling back, Mitch says, “He’s definitely different. But his differences are what make him special and that’s why I think he clings to them even if they sometimes can hurt other people. The fact that he’s trying is a good sign. I hope he can find it in himself to make it right between you two because I had never seen either of you happier than when you were apparently together. Especially those few weeks leading up to Los Angeles. Sarah had kept asking me why Harry was so smiley back then. When I had asked him, he had just said “have you ever found something and realized you wanted to keep it with you forever?” I had no idea what he had meant, but I feel like he meant you now.”

Your awestruck at what Mitch has just told you. He was right about the first part about Harry trying to change, but the last bit, that’s what had left you speechless. You turn your body to face the rest of the room and put your chin against your hand as you think.

“Mitch...I have to go.”

He understands what you mean and you walk out of the door with him. He walks down the hall to his room and you walk quickly past the elevator and opt for the stairs. Before you know it you’re running up the stairs, taking two at a time even though you’re not the most athletically inclined. You can’t stand to wait for the elevator and your mind is racing.

You knock on the door that is Harry’s after reaching his floor. It swings open and reveals a confused and sleepy Harry. Thankfully he’s still fully dressed because that would have been a whole other problem you would have if he hadn’t been. You push past him and walk straight into his room without any invitation. He follows behind you, still unsure of why you’ve come here.

“Have you ever found something and realized you want to keep it forever?” You ask him, repeating the words Mitch had just told you.

“Pardon?”

“You told Mitch that about me before we ended things. If that’s how you felt, why didn’t you do what you said?”

Harry sighs as the words register in his mind. The memory of when he had smiled at Mitch so giddily and asked the vague question, his thoughts only of you as he asked it. The shit-eating grin he had plastered on his face after Mitch had looked at him confusedly flitted across his mind. As well as the way he had gone to his dressing room and had a quickie with you after that conversation.

“It’s not that simple…”

“It is, Harry! Why can’t you just be honest with me for once?”

“Okay, fine. You want me to be honest?” you nod at his harsh tone. The two of you standing only a few feet apart. “You have no goddamn idea what you do to me, when I’m around you, I have no control of my emotions or of my thoughts. I pushed you away because I didn’t like feeling out of control. I got out because what had started as a fun time had turned into me longing to be with you every waking hour. I found myself not caring what we did as long as I got to hold you and be around you, but that wasn’t part of the plan.”

“Plans can change, Harry.”

You step closer to him and he meets your eyes. He had left his music playing softly on his phone before he had opened the door so now as the two of you stared at each other, he must have been playing his Etta James playlist because her voice faded out of the song “I’d Rather Go Blind” and straight into “A Sunday Kind of Love”. Harry had shared her At Last album with you over the Christmas holiday of last year and you had decided to listen to her entire discography afterwards, so you knew the songs. The transition was a little too on the nose and you wondered if Spotify ever listened to your conversations.

His emerald eyes examine your face and take inventory of your features, measuring whether anything had changed since he had looked at you this close up. Your hand goes up to cup his cheek and he nuzzles into it, dropping his head closer to you ever so slightly and closing his eyes at the feeling of you.

“I am sorry,” he whispers earnestly as he reopens his eyes.

You can’t take your eyes off of him even if you tried. He looks so soft in the moment, so vulnerable in this light as the music swells in the corner of the room. Etta sings about how she needs a love that is going to last as the pair of you inch yourselves closer together.

“I forgive you, Harry,” you whisper back.

He nudges his head further down and your lips finally press together, slotting back together after months apart. Your lips are eager to press back against their favorite companion. You oblige them, but pull back for a second, just far enough to say, “I will always forgive you, so long as you tell me when you’re scared so we can work through it together.”

He nods, “I promise to never let you go again.” Before taking you back against his lips and gathering your body up in his arms. His lips missing yours just as much.

-

[winterscaptain]

intellectual guesswork.

Aaron Hotchner x Gender Neutral Reader

a/n: another ajf update that requires absolutely no context to enjoy! i love you all so much. send some extra love to your favorite writers this week :)

one quick thing - if you’re on my taglist, please consider dropping a reply or a reblog! i love to see what you all think, and it encourages me to keep going :) it’s also getting a bit long, and i want to make sure my mutuals and people who engage are seeing everything - tumblr sometimes has a hard time with a lot of mentions. 

words: 1.6k warnings: none!

summary: “ignorance of the law excuses no man - from practicing it.” - addison mizner. au!may 2008

masterlist | a joyful future masterlist | ajf faq | taglist | what do you want to see next? edited: january 12th, 2021

You all settle into one row. Aaron’s on the end beside you, looking very sharp in a crisp black suit, his favorite Rolex, and a settled kind of confidence you’ve only seen in him a few times. It’s like he’s in his natural habitat. 

Aaron’s record as a federal prosecutor speaks for itself, of course, but you’ve never seen him in action. As often as they can, the bureau’s leadership sends him in as an expert witness. This time, the case happens to be one of yours. The judge hasn’t required a sequestration for Aaron, so you get the treat of sitting together in the courtroom. 

He’s scoffed and mumbled snide remarks under his breath all morning. You’re just itching to see him get up on the stand and give this joker an education. 

Emily leans over, whispering in your ear. “I promise you’ve never seen anything like this before. Hotch is going to rip this clown to shreds.” 

You stifle a laugh and look over at Aaron. He heard her. Leaning toward you, he murmurs, “All my JD does is collect dust. When I use it, I’d like to enjoy it.” 

“Your Honor, the prosecution would like to call our expert witness, Supervisory Special Agent Aaron Hotchner, to the stand.” 

He takes a breath and rises, buttoning his suit jacket and crossing the courtroom. His presence commands respect and everyone in the courtroom seems to shrink before him. 

The prosecution’s questions go over smoothly, and the defense attorney stands with an unreasonable amount of confidence. 

Emily leans over. “He thinks he can get Hotch with at least one of these questions, and he might. But just watch.” 

You nod, taking everything in. 

“So you’ve stated that it was your profile of the killer that led you and the police to my clients door that night.” 

“Behavioral analysis was a factor in our investigation, yes.” 

Without hesitation, the attorney follows up. “And was behavioral analysis also a factor in the Olympic Park bombings case in Atlanta?” 

“Yes, it was.” Aaron’s eyes and tone never waver, no hint of arrogance or cheek. 

“And was that suspect you identified,” the attorney asks, far too aggressively, “Richard Jewell, ever convicted of the bombings?”

The prosecution objects, and you watch Aaron. Every part of him observes the proceedings with an outwardly detached interest, but his eyes are alive - strategizing and anticipating. It’s like you can see the wheels turning as the lawyers bicker. 

 The judge ends the squabble. “I’ll allow it.”

Aaron, now with permission, answers simply, “No, he was not convicted.”

“Because he was innocent. Your profile led you to the wrong man.” 

Oh, give me a break. It takes everything in you not to scoff and you can feel Emily’s eye roll.

“Jewell was not the perpetrator, but if you look at the real Olympic Park Bomber, Eric Rudolph, you’ll see that our profile was dead-on.” 

Dead-on indeed, Aaron. 

“Well, how about we look at the Baton Rouge Killer? Your unit said that he was white and living in the city. He was Black and from the suburbs.”

Aaron’s eyes narrow and you feel Spencer shift beside you. Emily shakes her head. “Don’t worry,” she whispers. “He always recovers, never in the way you’d expect.” 

“How do you know?”

Emily’s face pulls into a little smile. “I’ve read the transcripts. Hotch is terribly clever.” 

“You said that Dennis Rader, the B.T.K. Killer,” the attorney continues, “was divorced and impotent. He turned out to be married with two kids.” 

JJ huffs, and you hear her whisper to Spencer, “Can we quit with the sermon?” 

His lips turn up. “Just wait.”

Dave leans over and stares them down over Derek. Stop talking. 

All of you look down at your hands like chastised children, but your gaze floats back to Aaron right away. 

The prosecution objects again, this time on the grounds of preaching. The judge forces a question, and the attorney turns back on Aaron.

“Having been wrong on those cases, isn’t it possible that you were wrong about Brian Matloff?” 

“No.” Your chest squeezes. He’s completely firm in his denial. 

How does he do that?

“Fact is,” the attorney continues like Aaron didn’t speak at all, “behavioral analysis is really just intellectual guesswork. You probably couldn’t tell me the color of my socks with any greater accuracy than a carnival psychic.” 

“Objection!” 

Her outburst is unnecessary. Aaron has a plan. His eyes track to you as if to check in. Are you paying attention? 

If you weren’t watching before, you’re certainly watching now. Always. 

“Withdrawn.” 

“Charcoal grey.” His flat assertion makes you gasp and you immediately cover your mouth with your hand to stifle the sound. 

The attorney turns around. “Well, look at that,” he exposes his socks to the court, and they are, in fact, charcoal grey. “He got one right.”

Aaron’s not finished. “You match them to the color of your suit to appear taller. You also wear lifts and you’ve had the soles of your shoes replaced. One might think you’re frugal, but in fact, you’re having financial difficulties.” 

You do your best to school your expression and remove your hand from your mouth. Checking down the row, you see six smirks watching the witness box. 

“You wear a fake Rolex…”

And you’d know. 

“...because you pawned the real one to pay your debts. My guess would be to a bookie.” 

Is he smiling?

“I took this case pro bono.” There’s tension in Mr. Charcoal Grey’s voice. You can hear it behind the false confidence and it pulls a smile from you. “I am one of the most successful criminal attorneys in the state.”

Hotch continues, completely bypassing him. “Your vice is horses.” There’s definitely a little smile on his face now. “Your Blackberry’s been buzzing on the table every twenty minutes, which happens to be the average time between posts from Colonial Downs. You’re getting race results.” Your smile gets wider, and Emily grabs your hand. 

“Just watch.”

“And every time you do, it affects your mood in court, and you’re not having a very good day.” There’s something that looks almost like concern on Aaron’s face, but you know it’s nothing if not facetious. He’s ripping this poor man to shreds without changing a single thing about his presentation.

I love - 

Don’t finish that thought. 

Why not?

Remember how he’s freshly divorced?

I know, but have you seen him?

“That’s because you pick horses the same way you practice law -” 

You lean forward and Emily follows, her thumbnail between her teeth. 

The final blow. 

“- by always taking the long shot.” 

If this was any other setting, you’re sure the entire team would be on their feet, shouting and jeering. But alas, you’re in court, so you settle for a wide smile and a suppressed laugh. Amused brown eyes meet yours from across the room and you shake your head just the tiniest bit. I can’t believe you.

His lips twitch. 

“Well, you spin a very good yarn, Agent, but as usual, you’ve proven nothing.” He’s just trying to recover something, anything left of his dignity. He fails, miserably. 

“If I’m not mistaken,” Aaron says, his eyebrows raised just a little, “the results from the fifth race should be coming through any minute.”

Just then, his Blackberry buzzes on the defense table. “Why don’t you tell us if your luck has changed?”

You raise your hands to your face to cool the rising heat in your cheeks. 

“Your honor, this is - “

The judge takes matters into his own hands. “What do you want me to do? Either show us your Blackberry or cut him loose, counselor.”

Hotch and the defense attorney share a loaded look. It’s a battle of wills. 

Aaron wins. 

“Nothing further.”

+++

When you all leave the courthouse, you practically latch onto Aaron’s arm, completely floored. 

“How did you do that?”

He laughs and Derek jumps up beside him, shaking his shoulders. “Come on, Hotch. That was incredible.” 

“Why have a law degree if you aren’t going to use it?”

+++

He offers you a ride home later that evening and you take him up on it. You’re both still in the car, idling in front of your house. 

“That really was impressive today,” you admit, your eyes on your hands.

You can feel his soft smile rather than see it. “Thanks. I know it didn’t quite go the way we wanted as far as the case itself, but there’s more to come.” 

“It’s never as bad as it looks in the first couple of days.” 

“Exactly.” He sighs. “Thanks again for being there today. It’s…” his lips twist as he thinks, “nice to have the team around.” 

You reach out, squeezing his forearm before immediately letting him go. “Of course. We’ll always be there for you. Plus, there’s nothing better than watching you tear blowhard lawyers to shreds in a court of law.” 

“I’m not sure that’s exactly how it went.” 

“You’re kidding!” You laugh. “That’s just what happened. The man left without half his soul! You absolutely tore it from his body.”

The pair of you quiet, and you move to get out of the car. He stops you with a hand over yours as you unclip your seatbelt. “Really. Thanks for being there today.” 

“I can’t emphasize this enough - it was my pleasure.” 

Enough of a pleasure as it was, his smile in the dark of the car is the best part of your day.  

+++

tagging: @arganfics @quillvine @stxrryspencer @agenthotchner @wandaswitxh @hurricanejjareau @fics-ilike @ange-must-die @ughitsbaby @rousethemouse @criminalsmarts @shrimpyblog @genevievedarcygranger @ssaic-jareau @good-heavens-chris-evans @davidrossi-ismydad @angelsbabey @gublergirls @writefasttalkevenfaster @venusbarnes @hotchsflower @micaiahmoonheart @ogmilkis @thatreallyis-americas-ass @marvels-agents100 @hotchslatte @risenfox @mrs-dr-reid @captain-christopher-pike @joemazzello-imagines @pinkdiamond1016 @sebbybaby0 @pan-pride-12 @hotchlinebling @lee-rin-ah @sunshine-em @word-scribbless @jdougl-love @sageellsworth05 @nohalohoseok @giveusbackourbucky @writerxinthedark @bauslut @yourlovelynewsbian @sparklingkeylimepie @aili28 @kingandrear @reader4027 @spnobsessedmemes @rogers-mouth @dreila03 @forgottenword @aaronhotchnerr @ssa-morgan @hotchnersgoddess @buckybau @phoenixfyre374 @sana-li @tegggeeee @abschaffer2 @ssacandi-ass-prentiss  @dontkissthewriter @ellyhotchner @lotties-journey-abroad @mrs-joel-pimentel-23-25 @laneygthememequeen @ahopelessromantic @violentvulgarvolatile @andreasworlsboring101 @mooneylupinblack @ssareidbby @violet-amxthyst @bwbatta @roses-and-grasses @lcvischmitt @capricorngf @missdowntonabbey @averyhotchner @mandylove1000 @garcia-reid-lovechild  @cevanswhre @colbyskoalas @qvid-pro-qvo @jeor @spencers-hoodrat @infinity1321

[cleverthylacine]

I don’t write A/B/O, but I do write a lot of Transformers fic, and while I am writing a 400K+ series of alt-historical fiction and political intrigue, there is a lot of porn in it, much of it not involving humans at all. Some of it takes place before humans existed.

But the thing is, I’m writing it in English. I don’t speak Neocybex and neither do any of my readers. So I don’t worry about the etymology of a word like “masochist”, because the characters aren’t speaking the same English I’m writing in, anyway. The last time I used that word in one of my fics, it was in a scene that took place over four million years ago, and they were definitely speaking the Iaconian dialect of Neocybex. But I can’t write that, and you couldn’t read it if I did.

It’s fun to make up new words for things, particularly if you like linguistics. Fic writers, fantasy/sf novelists, and fantasy/sf media creators all do it.

But it can also be self-indulgent and even obnoxious to readers who don’t enjoy that sort of wordplay, and I think it’s especially so in porn, where people might want to engage emotionally rather than intellectually with the writing.

In general, readers who aren’t also conlang fans tend to like new made-up words for concepts their language does not already have good words for, but don’t like having to memorise new words for things they already understand.

I’ve made up a bunch of “Neocybex” words for relationship styles that don’t line up neatly with the English language, but i do enjoy that sort of thing. I don’t feel the need to make my readers learn a new word for a simple concept like “someone who gets off on pain.” (Neocybex might very well have different words for people who like the pain of humiliation more than the pain of being whipped, but no-one would appreciate that infodump in the middle of an explicit spike-in-valve scene.)

While I don’t write A/B/O, it seems to me like using the made-up words we have all agreed on the meaning of would be kinder to the reader than expecting them to learn a new set of words that mean the exactly the same things that they’ve already learned one set of made-up words for.

And even in alternate universes that do use English, realistically, their version of the language probably isn’t the same as ours. I grew up in West Virginia and live in California and I don’t speak English the same way in both places--and there are a lot fewer differences between the two states in the same country and year than there are between a society with two most common biological sex classifications and a society with six. So it’s all still translation.

Re post #707482977991573505: “haha try writing in a alternate history canon that diverged at such a point that there's no reason to believe they had EITHER a marquis de sade or a baron von sacher-masoch” The Crystal Dragon France of Kushiel’s Legacy manages quite nicely with its own house vocabulary (although “anguiset(te)” denotes not only submission and masochism but a rare, specific, and culturally-venerated neurotype.)

--

[bao3bei4]

kpop music videos that gave their fans sexual brainworms

OR accidental fetish pop and its fringe fanbase: meditations on gendered desire 

large warning here: i am someone who has been into kpop for the past 10 years. however, i have always been an extremely casual fan. i do write fic, but not rpf. if any of that makes you not want to hear me talk about kpop rpf (or you don’t want to hear about it in general), please keep moving.

anyway, obviously pop is corporate, soulless, and manufactured. but sometimes some truly bizarre shit gets past the committees and destroys a generation. these are their stories.

the video that started this is all is got7’s just right, released july 10th, 2015.

yes that’s all 7 members of got7 (one is out of frame) shrunken down for your viewing pleasure. they live in your room and tell you you’re just right. 

this sheer fetish power of this video is nerfed only by how utterly sexless it is.

they’re styled like and dance like this. it’s a totally unironic sendup of the seminal work that preceded it by four years, “what makes you beautiful” by the white kpop group “one direction.” the chaste energy of the whole thing makes you legitimately wonder if the good people at jyp have just never heard of microphilia. (during a dramatic reading of this piece, here a friend interjected seriously, “i think it’s korean culture not to talk about things like this, fetishes in the workplace.”)

it’s for the best, honestly, though because the actress in the music video is lee ja in, who was 11 when the video was shot. considering that the members themselves ranged in age from 18-23 at the time, i think it’s actually very impressive that we only have to cancel one. 

you receive absolutely no prizes for guessing that it’s jackson wang we’re sending to social justice prison. why’d he do this? no one asked. 

at any rate, got7 fans, or “gans” (they actually call themselves igot7s which is too twee for me), have much to think about here: all 7 very small members of got7 sneaking into their room, possibly weird age play, and jackson wang eating a very large cake.

let’s see what they actually did. 

twitter was actually very tame. the most charged thing i found was (unsurprisingly) from a bts fan (“ban”). i don’t actually know what it means, but i think it means something.

so, of course, i turned to the internet’s last bastion of free speech, where you can say whatever the fuck you want and receive cheers, or as the kids say, “kudos.” that is, i read fanfiction. 

for those of you who don’t know your herstory, i started my journey at Asianfanfics.com, where, at the time of writing, there were 12,067 got7 stories. i want to start this by saying that i think feminism won, because someone was paying real human dollars to advertise their irene/wendy fanfiction on a banner ad, which is quite possibly a win for women for everywhere. 

anyway, Asianfanfics.com’s search engine sucks ass (i kept on finding stories about different combinations of bts members worrying about their weight and being reassured by another member that were entitled “just right”), so i decided to look through all got7 stories written between july 2015 and december 2015. 

but, alas, not a single got7 microphilia fic to be found. 

also, some genre commentary while i’m here: i think the stories i respect the most are the “[y/n] is a ordinary girl who’s assigned to be got7’s manager! can she make them into superstars? as sparks begin to fly, can she keep it professional?” like fuck yeah that sounds like a kickass dating sim. it almost definitely already is one. i salute all the teens around the world for buying into the fantasy of dating a boy band member that they themselves sell you. 

however, i don’t think i respect the “[member a] and [member b] are mafia/jocks and nerds/college students/high schoolers” concepts. in my opinion, the whole fantasy of boy band member is their personas, their hidden real personalities, their celebrity, and the show business setting. find a different intellectual property if you wanna write about school. i even respect the “yugyeom drank girl juice [not estrogen] and turned into a sexy girl” story more, because at least it knows exactly what it wants, and also because they’re all still boy band members. well, band members. shout out to yugyeom. 

so, anyway, i looked elsewhere. at the time of writing, archive of our own only had 11,645 got7 stories, but it does have a better search, so it effectively has more. as an aside, i think it’s so funny, and mildly disorienting at first, that archive of our own separates the “music & bands” section from the “celebrities & real people” section. boy band members aren’t real people. 

the first problem i encountered is that only 20 or so stories were written within a year of just right’s release. absolute cringe gans. don’t you care about your boys? there were zero stories tagged “vore” or “microphilia” either. stories containing the word “tiny” that were rated either “explicit” or “mature” were all normal (“normal”) size fetishization rather than, you know, just right. 

however, i learned my lesson from twitter. i realized that what had happened was that watching this video had created sleeper agents, just waiting for their activation phrase. that activation phrase? bangtan boys. and yeah, lo and behold, there was one! unfortunately (fortunately?) it had nothing to do with got7, let alone just right, so i’m not going to talk about it.  

basically what i learned is that this video may have actually been very normal, and my brain has just been destroyed by being too online at a young age. 

however, there are plenty more videos in this genre. i present to you exo wolf, a banger from may 30th, 2013. i say banger, because in a comedic inversion, it’s actually fucking terrible. 

this video is pretty self-explanatory in terms of why it might induce certain responses. 

let’s get the formalities out of the way. this video, the member who’s getting cancelled is kai. he has braids in this video :/

also skating on thin ice: xiumin and chen. guys what was up with the whole exo-m thing? like, we’re gonna have a cpop subgroup, but it’s going to be part chinese members and part korean members that we’ll give a chinese name? unsurprisingly, the three exo members who have departed from the group are all chinese. they weren’t able to stand the microaggressions probably. but xiumin and chen remain uncancelled as an official chinese apology for five thousand of years of on-and-off invasions of korea. sorry guys that was kinda fucked up. our bad! 

anyway, there are basically three avenues for exo fans to take: 1) humans with wolfish characters (usually wolf pack dynamics, which even wolves themselves don’t fucking use so i think all of you should shut up. the real omega here is your brain), 2) werewolves (duh), and 3) wolves with human characteristics (i.e. standard furry fare). 

exo themselves let all these possibilities exist at the same time, superimposing them over each other, which is very woke and egalitarian of them. let’s see what the people decided. awoo.

Asianfanfics dot com had many stories in this vein. i feel very validated that this time i was able to correctly predict a fetish. that said, briefly returning to my earlier comment regarding alternate universes: it’s intense psychic whiplash reading about these vampires and werewolves, and going okay okay luhan is a vampire this that whatever, and then seeing the actual real performance photos the author attaches at the bottom of each chapter. bro i forgot these were actual people.... it breaks immersion so bad... i’m sorry, i just can’t believe that any of these dancing boys are having weird vampire sex with wings or whatever. 

archive of our own also had many stories in this vein. and i think there are some important difference between the two sites worth talking about. 

first of all, i think the higher engagement rate of archive of our own really enables some of the authors to get super bold. it makes Asianfanfics.com seem a little quaint, actually. like the wordcounts are waaay longer, for one. it’s uncommon for a story hosted on Asianfanfics.com to be more than a few thousand words long (most of them could easily be published in the new yorker), whereas some of these archive of our own people have written full length novels about if the members of exo were werewolves. i guess it’s just intensely demoralizing for the aff.com crew to get, like, three comments per story. 

the second big difference is that i’m noticing more common themes between the ao3 crew’s writing. like stan intertextuality, or plagiarism, or whatever, but they seem to be implicitly engaging with each other’s characterizations, storylines, and tropes. i think it is because they probably all follow each other on twitter. (i have been active on twitter for three weeks now so i am an expert on fanfiction twitter.) 

anyway, like not that i am a particularly big gan (cannot even list all the members), but these people seem to have reached a very specific consensus on how jackson wang, for instance, would react in a variety of situations that really surprises me? if i were to sit down and write a got7 story, i think the fuckboitude, the douchebaggery is a big part of his charm. not to be nationalist or anything, but for god’s sake, he’s from hong kong. but these people have him as very sensitive, lots of protective instincts. not that i understood what anyone on aff.com was doing with his character either, but they did all seem to be doing different things. “kudos” to that, i guess.

but: exo. wolf. i searched the “wolves” tag. this filtered the list down from 33459 stories to 52 stories. and the “wolves” tag was very different from the aff.com “wolf” tag. for the most part, aff.com liked stories where a member was a wolf (usually shapeshifting), feral boy, lots of y/n, lots of y/n dating a feral boy who is secretly a wolf. 

ao3 really, really, really likes alpha/beta/omega stories. sorting by the most popular stories, only five on the first page weren’t a/b/o. and one of them was a cis f!baekhyun story, so i think the intended effect was communicated. anyway, let’s talk about some of the themes. 

first of all, i’m disappointed. today’s bonus cancellation is of ao3 “wolves” writers. why the fuck are you drawing so heavily from european wolves?? there are wolves in asia!! you don’t need to keep giving their packs and ranks weird latin names. i will kill you. i hate italy. korea literally has a native wolf. i hate all of you!!! if you want to write caucasian wolves go watch that dumbass cw show!!!! my god. 

the second theme (the first one was white supremacy) is that no one wants to be a wolf who fucks. i think that we need a sex positivity movement, or something, for omega rights. like, are all of you doing okay? you’re queering misogyny by inventing new genders to oppress. another level to “no one wants to be a wolf...” is the “who fucks” part. there are so many consent issues. and not even in like, a sexy intentional way? in a “i genuinely do not think this author understands how their writing comes off” way. unfortunately i am sensitive to untagged sexual coercion, and there was a lot of that.

at any rate, the aff.com wolves were at peace with being wolves, very self-actualized. the ao3 wolves know that every minute they spend alive on this bitch of an earth is suffering, and also sex.

the third theme is the evolution of y/n. y/n, who, in a startlingly woke move for aff.com, is almost always korean, is a girl main character stumbling into love, boy bands, and wolves (i think it’s because aff.com is oldschool kpop fandom, so therefore heavily asian itself in userbase). but y/n is not the main character in ao3 stories. she is the straight best friend. in what i think is a hilarious move, ao3 authors invert the gay best friend paradigm to give the gay main character a straight girl as best friend. she usually calls him “a gay,” she has lots of thoughts on boys, and she knows his sexuality better than he does and before he does. (sidebar: if all the men are gay, and all the women are straight...)

there’s a really fun twist to this, though, because the main character is always a self-insert in fanfiction. but where older fanfiction like aff.com was at peace with this and literalize it via y/n shenanigans, modern fic writers who haven’t finished distangling their complicated relationship with wanting to be a man who loves other men instead simply imbue their main character with their essence. a little voodoo doll sehun, with a lock of y/n hair. 

this creates a deeply ambivalent relationship with gender in these stories. the main character is usually an omega, but one who resents being an omega. their body and its parts is usually described, if at all, as ostensibly intersex (except more offensively), but in practice, these discourses inscribe a trans body. (nb: i think cis writers approach this in a really fucked up fetishizing way, but i hope by this point we know that that goes without saying) it’s incredibly straightforward to read this, and see the underlying desires and fears in a heady cocktail of unfiltered writing that’s deeply confessional. you know when freud had people say whatever the fuck they wanted and figured they’d eventually free associate into releasing their subconscious into reality? yeah. 

okay, and while we’re on the topic, let’s talk f(x) nu abo, released on may 4th, 2010. 

this is a blitzy, maximalist, amped up dance hit that even has its own applause and cheers built in. it’s so fucking annoying, and i love it. 

this song is on here because the second most popular kpop a/b/o story on ao3 is called “nu abo” except it’s about bts. that’s offensive enough in its own right. write something about f(x) (702 works). when will women win the right to have their own self-lubricating holes.

anyway, even though f(x) is probably innocent in all of this, i’m still cancelling amber liu. 

for queerbaiting. who told her to look like ruby rose but hot? and for what? i’m also cancelling her for racism, but that wasn’t in this video. 

moving on to a double feature: vixx voodoo doll and vixx chained up, released november 19, 2013 and november 9, 2015 respectively. this is because while voodoo doll is more formative, i think the fans who write fanfiction today got into kpop more recently, so we are casting a wide net.

anyway, voodoo doll is jam packed with weird pseudo-medical imagery, blood, vivisection, bondage, puppet shit, femdom, sharps, piercings, asphyxiation, dollification, stabbing/penetration metaphors, and a really sick and catchy dance. god that looks like the list of tags on the a/b/o wolf stories. 

for this song, we’re cancelling you, for being way too into this song when you were 13.

vixx voodoo doll made me goth i guess! insert that pic of the your music saved me sign, except it saved me from getting into emo or pop punk probably. 

chained up, comparatively, is much more tame. the only thing of note about it is that there are around 10 completely different chokers and choker looks the members wear in this music video. also they’re singing about being chained up, but that seemed a bit obvious. 

we could argue that voodoo doll is gay while chained up is gay (derogatory); that voodoo doll is queer while chained up is gay; that chained up is a sensitive masterpiece of omega4omega sexuality. but we’re not going to. 

we’re going to talk about what voodoo doll fanfiction was and was not. first, Aff.com had plenty of it. however, i was extremely disappointed to see that much of it did not hew to the spirit of vixx voodoo doll. my god, the voodoo doll becoming the one preying upon you disgusts me. the fantasy of the voodoo doll is that of absolute power. the idea that the doll itself has agency? instantly breaks the fantasy. i’m even not into voodoo dolls and i’m offended. 

i also don’t think it’s part of the voodoo doll fantasy to release the doll. the only story on there that involved Y/N kidnapping vixx members like in the music video was unavailable because the author deactivated their account. come back qxeen what did you see. 

i think this got off track, actually, in that i was mostly wondering why these people imprinted differently onto vixx voodoo doll than i did. like i don’t think you’re supposed to actually like straightforwardly absorb the morals and aesthetics of music videos like it’s propaganda. however, it’s more entertaining if you do. i hope ao3 doesn’t let me down. 

out of the then 5932 works in the vixx fandom (the least out of every group so far, excluding f(x) because they’re women), 59 of them included the word “voodoo” somewhere. that’s 1%. i legitimately can’t tell if that’s high or not. 

after some more cursory reading through the first page of popular results, my big takeaway is that people watched that video and wanted to be tortured and enslaved? but not, like, in a sexy way where the torturing is the point, the way where the point is to suffer bravely and beautifully, to endure the world’s harms like jesus on the cross, and then to fall into the arms of a beautiful boy who may or may not be the one hurting you in the first place. 

there’s a certain predictability to these fantasies. like it’s not even masochism, which would be fun at least, it’s literally just like the desire to be beautiful, even as you suffer. and i do find that a little boring. (but, i mean, you can’t help being a woman!)

sidebar: on chained up. what’s interesting about chained up, is that most of the then 38 “chained up” works (likely because the video has no storyline) are about the members fucking during chained up promotions. no one’s ever actually chained up, but whatever. it’s fine. it’s fine! 

anyway, here, more than ever, the nature of desire is stripped bare. i’ve written before [elsewhere in the unreleased tshirt cinematic universe] on how kpop boys are, through fandom, re-formed as white, or more strongly, i guess, blank slates. it’s really interesting to me how so much of this dynamic of projection is enabled by the fact that they’re asian men. they’re infantilized, feminized vessels; they’re seductive, but childlike, oblivious to their own charms, so nonthreatening; they have uncontrollable desires for sex, they’re scared of sex. and above all else, white women submit themselves to them, insert themselves into them. basically kpop fans tend to rework old school yellow peril and emasculation fantasies to reenact their own desires, often white, often cishet on them. 

what i am saying is that there’s another thesis about forced feminization and its racialized subtext in here. obviously gender is a racialized construct to begin with, but like it’s fascinating to argue that when white women remake asian men according to their own desires, that is, into themselves, they (hopefully) unintentionally echo these old fears about the sexual order.

it illuminates, it seems, the underlying dynamic in the denigration of asian men, which is of course the fear of miscegenation. now, my breathtaking ability to make everything about me aside, miscegenation is interesting because it presents a racial synthesis, beginning to collapse and trouble the artificial designations of purity. so we make asian men into white women, and end up with an unsettling hybrid. i’m sure this has deep implications for me personally.

but i think we already knew that quite a few of these people had yellow fever, so let’s talk about the gender dialectic at play. basically, the above dynamic, of making men into women (whether literally, in body; or subjectively, in mind; or even relationally, as they are objectified into passive vessels for your desire) coexists with the ostensibly converse dynamic, in which the straight women desires to be a gay man. these aren’t necessarily in conflict: it could easily be that these are different writers writing different stories, that both are ways of expressing discontent with existing in a raced, gendered body, or even that the end product of both is the same.

it’s been a while without a picture. all of you now have the legal right to hunt and kill me for making a d&g joke.

anyway, what i want to talk about is how these two fantasies can coexist. that by making a man into yourself, you can speak on your own desire in a passive way. my normal interest is analyzing forced masc fantasies (albeit in chinese opera lol), and they bear little to no resemblance to this kind of fantasy. this kind offers plausible deniability, of course, because wanting things is embarrassing. but also the fantasy isn’t about wanting to be a man, it’s about having no choice but to be a failed one. the gender pessimism running through these stories is palpable. basically andrea long chu wants what wolf fanfiction writers know: everyone is an omega, and everyone hates it.

at any rate, this racialized dynamic is one that i wasn’t sure how to bring up throughout this piece, mainly because there is no definitive way for me to tell the race of any individual writer, beyond just like the clear and present vibes that i receive. but i think it structures a lot of the fantasies contained in this essay. (i felt more comfortable bringing up the gendered dynamic, because it was fairly trivial to find out the current gender of the person writing each story i was reading.) 

obviously we should return to the specter haunting this conversation: the very much alive david eng. i think this sort of argument is familiar to readers of racial castration, especially his chapter on m. butterfly. btw sorry for mentioning that play 2 out of 3 posts on this blog. i have problems.

let’s talk about the parallel imagery between the depiction of gallimard’s final speech and the fanfiction i’ve described above. in it, gallimard makes himself into his own dream woman, dressing in yellowface and robes, the costume of puccini’s original madame butterfly. and he laments his lost love:

there is a vision of the orient that i have. of slender women in chong sams and kimonos who die for the love of unworthy foreign devils. who are born and raised to be the perfect women. who take whatever punishment we give them, and bounce back, strengthened by love, unconditionally.

in that, i see the self insert, and i see the sufferer of vixx voodoo fic. the fantasy that gallimard has about asian women is repeated, this time about asian men and a helpless identification with them. and on some level, gallimard’s women do have something very compelling to identify with: they suggest that there’s a way to endure white male violence without sacrifice, and even more potently, to enjoy it on some level.

but onward to the titular racial castration. eng argues that gallimard’s wilful ignorance of song’s true gender is a psychic castration -- song’s masculinity is diminished so that his own can be enhanced within their relationship. this, eng believes, acts out “richard fung’s contention that in western imaginary ‘asian and anus are conflated.’” this process stabilizes the relationship between the asian man and the white woman: they occupy the same place within the sexual dyad. 

this is, i think, why some people are addicted to writing from the bottom’s perspective. again -- not implying that irl bottoms don’t exist or that bottoms are psychically castrated lol -- but rather that you can fantasize about this ideal asian man that you can come to embody. in kpop rpf, rather than it being between a white man and an asian man (unless someone’s started writing chad future fic), it’s between two asian men. so this transformation is performed. whiteness is always intruding and so i think eng is helpful here to making it visible again. 

this essay isn’t a callout or actual cancellation or anything like that, i do wanna be clear. i guess i just like talking about fantasies, even the embarrassing ones, and where they come from. i think oftentimes in fandom spaces, we write a lot of stories off as idfic, and i think virtually every single one of the stories i referenced to write this fairly uncontroversially fall into that category. but i think calling something an “id” something or the other naturalizes the satisfaction it gives as purely instinctual and unconscious, when i do think there are deeper narratives at play. while i didn’t ever actually reference the base here (sorry), i do think it’s worth talking about how real world power shapes & maintains the superstructure, and thereby our fantasies. 

anyway in conclusion, maybe i was the one with sexual brainworms the whole time.

[cyanide-latte]

I think part of the reason that so many in my generation who grew up with H*rry P*tt*r struggle so much to move on and let it die out, why we take the old TERF's actions so personally, is because it feels like the worst of betrayals.

Not necessarily because it was a cultural phenomenon (it was lbr,) not necessarily because it really did do more to help with American child illiteracy than NCLB (it did, again lbr,) or even that it was so intergenerational in its appeal that it became a bonding point for kids and parents (jury is out on that one I think,) but because the author did something rather unpredictable for the fandom landscape at the time.

She directly engaged with the content her fans made.

This goes back to the dark days of fanfiction. You know the ones. A good many of you have been spared living through them, even if you see the remnant disclaimers on old fics (and maybe even some newer ones) about how the intellectual property belongs to the original creators. Creator engagement with fandom isn't new, and it wasn't entirely new back then, but it was limited. You heard about authors receiving fan letters and answering fan questions during interviews or panels. But that was said to be where it began and ended. [I've personally no doubt there were authors who did engage more than that, prior to all this, but it likely wasn't widely-known.] Mostly, what you saw was either polite neutrality, or the shit that people like Anne Rice and Robin Hobb pulled.

If you don't know what I'm referring to there, do a web search about Rice and Hobb filing lawsuits against fanfic writers (and fanartists) for making fan content of their works. Don't be shocked when you stumble across the quote from Hobb equating fanworks for her stuff to "raping her intellectual property." (I know, I know. It's gross, and it's the reason I refuse to ever read her books.)

Then along came H*rry, and in fast pursuit, the explosion of P*tterfic. And it rocked everyone back on their heels when the author not only acknowledged that she knew there was a lot of fanwork for her books, but said it was cool, that she liked seeing it, and even encouraged the more anxious fans to not be afraid to share their fics and fanart. Hell, I may be remembering wrong, but I think for a while on one of her personal websites she would even give shout-outs and recs to some fans and their creative works? Someone feel free to fact-check me on that one.

But the point is, that was huge, ESPECIALLY when you consider how the books exploded with fame and she was thrust into a giant spotlight. I don't think it was solely her doing that caused creators to become more engaged with fan content, and we all need to grow the hell up and admit [that for all her flaws] Stephenie Meyer did make herself personable to her fans as well, but this was still pretty tremendous and caused a ripple effect.

Also, a lot of us were young when the first book came out, being around the age of the protagonist, roughly. And I think we can all admit without beating ourselves up over it that there were plenty of things we weren't going to recognize as problematic, as classist, racist, anti-Semitism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, hypocritical, or even just as bad writing. A lot of the recognition and understanding of those things wouldn't come for a lot of the readers until they got older, and at that point it becomes very hard to admit to yourself that something you found fun, comfort and community in could be so uninclusive and bigoted and hateful when some of the core points of the book preached the opposite so loudly.

Honestly I'd almost equate it to someone on an abusive relationship of any kind struggling to recognize some of the more abusive behaviors. It certainly felt that way to me after the first time I finished reading book 5.

The first major thing I remember that happened to betray the fans was the author declaring anyone who was classified [through online quizzes] or self-identified as a Sl*the*r*n was clearly a bully and an abuser by virtue of belonging to the house associated with ambition. For a lot of us (me included) that was enough to disenchant and make us begin the lengthy process of divorcing from her and the books. Why should ambition be solely classified as ugly and wrong?

The next huge one I know of is a bit of a divisive split and it really shouldn't be. The stage play fanfic cast a black actress as one of the most beloved characters. When many fans complained, the author's initial response was fine, stating the best actress was chosen. When other fans spoke up asking or debating about the character's canon race, the author decided to give herself some clout by stating on Twitter that that character's skin color was never specified or stated. This was considered a huge victory and a great thing by many POC and ally fans, because didn't the author just state that that meant the intention was always for H*rm**n* to be WOC, and that the fans interpreting her as such was right all along?

Except. No. Not really.

WOC H*rm**n* has always been a fan concept and one of my favorites and yes, the author made a statement that amounts to allowing fans to interpret her as such. But the author has ALSO stated multiple times in interviews over the years that H*rm**n* is supposed to represent her as a girl in school, and what her school experience was like. And I (and many others) don't buy for a second that the author's original intent for a self-insert like that, was to see her as anything but a lens for her younger self that other girls who were bright and bullied could relate to. And what is the author? White. She wrote the character from her own experience as a white person. Let’s not fool ourselves: she was giving herself clout publicly because she knew she was falling out of interest, and it was a calculated move to stay relevant. (Funny thing that, coming from the same woman who damns such behavior in anyone associated with Sl*th*r*n.)

And then of course, the major final straw that broke nearly everyone’s back: all of her openly transphobic behavior on Twitter. If you weren’t already disenchanted, that’s what did it. For a woman who loves to virtue-spotlight herself as a feminist, this sort of thing just drives home how exclusionary her “feminism” is.

But even so, it’s still going to be hard for a lot of people to let go. It’s hard, when so much love and self-identity and sense of creativity and community could be wrapped up in something like this. So many people didn’t realize the problematic shit until they got older, and for a lot of people it took more than one instance of the author’s shitty behavior in the open to drive home the issues. I feel like there’s so much of a push or some sort of perceived pressure within fandom and bookish spaces to denounce H*rry P*tt*r, and while I think more people than not want to, it’s not easy to overcome the sense of betrayal.

So many people felt like the author had given them the greatest validation a creator can give...and then it became clear that her validation only extends so far. A door was opened and people felt welcomed, and then it was slammed in their face. It takes time to heal a wound like that. Please just be patient with one another, and with yourselves.

[ahiddenpath]

Thanks for the Tri response, what do you think of Kizuna?

Well, I can only answer based on the novel. I bought the film, but I still haven't watched it! But I'll try to answer as best I can below the cut. Again, the novel had stuff I love and stuff I didn't, but I think my reaction to this one was a bit more true middle-of-the-road than Tri.

Spoilers for Kizuna.

I want to start by saying that I think my reception of the Kizuna plot was impacted by the state of the world when it was released, which is... continuing today, as I type this. I'm referring to the pandemic, of course. I pre-purchased my tickets for a March Kizuna screening in theaters; it was the first social event that fell through because of the pandemic for me. It's been a difficult period for everyone, and I was not- and still am not- really emotionally equipped to watch Taichi and Yamato lose their partners. I'd rather just leave it for now.

Kizuna is one of those stories where I didn't really enjoy the plot... But I find it inspiring in terms of what I would like to do with the ideas presented. It's amazing fic fodder, and you know I love that!

I do think that, coming off of Tri, where an adult Chosen who lost her partner ends up betraying the Chosen and involving them in her trauma stemming from that loss... Well, it was kind of like... Didn't we... Just... Do this? I have to mentally separate Kizuna from Tri to circumvent that tension, and that's not normally... how sequels work?

As you might know, I was also concerned about Kizuna sort of... demonizing adulthood by showing that the Chosen cannot have their partners as adults, because they've "lost their potential." In reality, adulthood is where your potential begins- you gain agency and go into the world to build your life.

On the surface, that demonization does seem to be what happened- but I don't think that's actually what went down. Taichi and Yamato fight so that the Chosen can experience adulthood and keep growing, instead of locking themselves in Menoa's world of endless childhood with the digimon. So, yay, our heroes think adulthood=good! But then, they lose their partners anyway; adulthood=bad??? But again, signs point to the epilogue still being applicable, so eventually, they will reunite with their partners. It's also directly stated at the end of the novel ("Wait for me! I promise to come for you!").

I think that the novelization didn't really explain the logic behind all of this. Did the kids actually lose their partners because adults cannot sustain a digimon partner? Or was Menoa mistaken? She clearly never figured out how to reverse the loss of her partner, so it's totally possible that she misunderstood the whole situation! And 02 makes the argument that digimon partners will come to everyone when they believe in themselves and follow their true path. We see some of the Chosen struggling with their paths during Kizuna, so maybe, when they find the courage to be true to their wants and dreams, their partners will return.

(For more on this, explained far better and with receipts, check out this wonderful post by Shihalyfie).

I love this interpretations of Kizuna ("be true to self=digimon partner")! But that... kind of... seems like an important thing to leave up to audience interpretation/nuance/reliance on the audience remembering those lines from a show that aired in 2002. Are we not going to talk about that stuff within Kizuna itself, if it's applicable? Obviously, I love Digimon Adventure and 02, but I don't do routine rewatches. It's easy to forget stuff. Or is the fact that "be true to self=digimon partner" isn't directly mentioned within the Kizuna novel enough evidence to suggest that it isn't applicable to the vanishing partner situation? I'm not saying that books have to explicitly explain everything to audiences, but... A little help, please? It's especially difficult to catch subtle nuances in translated works, so I think non-Japanese readers also have that hurdle to contend with.

I'm sure many folks felt upset, and maybe even betrayed, when Agumon and Gabumon vanished. And I get it, I do, even if we know they will return at some point. Like I said, it's something I frankly don't want to watch, but I'm fine with it intellectually (ie, in writing), mostly because it sets up a chance for fanfic writers to explore why they really vanished, and how the Chosen will reunite. Talk about an opportunity for character growth (gimme gimme gimme, lol!!!!).

And that's where I swing around to being happy again. Do you know what happens when canon content leaves stuff open to interpretation? YOU GUESSED IT, FANFIC FANFIC FANFIC! And you can still use canon setting without contradicting anything, awwwwwww yissssssssss. I'm planning a pre-and-post Kizuna fic that I think will really be amazing. I found some concepts of Kizuna really engaging/emotionally charged/exciting, even if I wasn't fully happy with/clear on the execution.

The novel also has this super wonderful scene with Koushiro telling Tentomon a story about candles that I really loved ;_; It was lovely. And seeing the 02 kids thriving and being so happy?! Wonderful. The overall characterization was solid, too, with lots of Chosen proactiveness (my fave!).

I think there was a lot to like in Kizuna, even if I'm not clear on a hugely important plot point (what exactly caused the partners to vanish).

Also, Yamato in glasses!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I am dead. And also an impartial and level-headed reviewer of media, lol! Thanks for the ask! I hope this was a useful response, I feel like I blathered about nothing xD

Oh, as a final note, I did think it was annoying that Kizuna pushed the importance of growing and looking forward, not behind... And then Toei immediately rebooted Adventure. I understand that the reboot is likely meant to spread Adventure to the next generation, but... Hey, maybe you should take your own advice, Toei, and try something new???? No????? xD xD xD

[faejilly]

Reticence

so a million years ago I attempted to start a Shadowhunters Persuasion AU and I am, unfortunately, never actually going to write it, (I like the original too much, I can’t seem to say anything *else* with it, which keeps bogging me down), but as standalone bits of just me being fond of Regency fic, I occasionally still poke at some of what I wrote. 

Now in Persuasion, Anne Elliot is convinced to call off her engagement to the questionably suitable Frederick Wentworth not because her own future would be at stake, (she mostly doesn’t care about that) but because she would be a drain on his potential... which is such an Alec thing to do, isn’t it? 

So, as part of the fall out from that, I wanted a moment where the person who helped convince Alec to send away Magnus realizes they were wrong. 

aka Maryse is my favorite (and Robert is a hypocrite) & here��s why [fictober #8; prompt list here] 

Alec heard something, a noise not any louder than the faint scratch of Lady Lightwood's pen across her paper as she sorted and responded to her mail, but somehow different nonetheless. He wasn't really curious but he glanced idly up from his book. (It was not as if he was terribly interested in Mrs. Ditchfield's rather melodramatic catalogue of "vanishing public lands" in Idris, but he'd needed a break from his own increasingly banal paperwork.) He closed his book with a snap and leaned forward. Lady Lightwood's back was curved, her shoulders just barely slumped, her head bowed. He'd never seen her look so, so small. He swallowed. "My Lady?"

He saw her startle, the faintest jerk across her back, and a paper he hadn't noticed slid from between her fingers to flutter slowly, gently, toward the floor.

She lifted her head and he felt like he'd been kicked by his horse. He made it half-way across the room before he'd even realize he'd stood, but had no idea what to say after he knelt by her side. Her eyes were damp, her lips just barely parted; he couldn't tell if she'd lost her words or her very breath itself. Her forehead was lined with a frown and he could see a tremble in her hands.

He'd never before seen her composure permit more than a carefully lifted brow or a slight flare of her nostrils, but this. This was so much more than upset. He'd never seen eyes like that on anyone, some terribly dark and potent mix of pain and anger and shame.

A small whisper in the back of his mind, the only part of him that seemed to be able to manage words at all, suggested he'd never seen its like only because he'd avoided all mirrors those first few days after Magnus. Mr. Bane.

He remembered what he'd wished for then: anyone or anything that made him feel less alone.

He reached out a hand, but couldn't quite make himself touch. What if this wasn't? She closed her eyes and leaned into his palm and he couldn't breathe, couldn't think, not now, never again. Her cheek was soft and very faintly damp with tears and there was a flutter of something perilously close to panic in his chest. He hadn't thought she'd let--

"Mother?" His voice was different this time, almost breaking around the word, and he wasn't at all sure what he was asking. She was clearly not all right.

She opened her eyes, and they were still darker and softer than he could recall ever having seen before. She smiled, and he felt the prickle of tears trying to form in his own eyes.

"I am so sorry, Alexander."

She hadn't. She had. He hadn't been Alexander to her since he was a child. But there was something in her voice now, something both warm and melancholy. He swallowed again. "For what?"

"For being too narrow-minded to see that there might be another way for you, that there might exist something better than the path I chose, the one I was stuck on." Her voice trailed off but he could still see her lips still moving. "For much too long."

He didn't. He couldn't, not now, not here, not with this, whatever this was. He grasped desperately at the one word he could almost understand. "Was?"

She closed her eyes again, and his eyes ached watching her spine straighten, her head lift away from his hand, her expression smooth out until it was as still as stone.

Despite the stories of her success when she'd been assigned to an Institute overseas, dead demons and rogue vampire dens shut down, despite seeing her maintain her training, sword-dances before breakfast every day, despite a lifetime watching her oversee her small army of clerks with absolute authority, Alec had never pictured Lady Lightwood in armor.

He had never realized that he'd never seen her without it, not until today.

"You do not have to come for what is about to happen." Her voice was soft, so soft, and his chest still ached from that first shock.

"Do you want me to?" He was helpless, breathless, lost, and he knew she could hear it in the lift of his voice, see it in the too wide opening of his eyes.

She blinked, the barest hint of a shimmer between her lashes. She shook her head, and her fingers almost clenched at her skirt before she shook them loose again. "Yes."

"Then I will."

"Thank you." She took a breath, let it out. She picked up the paper by her feet and stood, one quick flick of her wrist to straighten her skirts. She strode out of the room, and he scrambled to his feet to follow.

He'd passed confused and reached some sort of hapless acceptance by the time he caught up, so much so he didn't even wonder when she stopped and knocked at the door to his father's study.

He didn't think it was his own strange detachment that made it seem a much longer wait than usual before his father's voice came through to the hall. "Come in."

Lord Lightwood was standing in front of his desk, his usual easy small smile missing, his shoulders too tight, his arms crossed in front of his chest.

"No." Alec's mother flicked the letter out of her hand into the space in front of her, and his father flinched.

Alec's head ached, and he missed the fleeting sense of distance that had buoyed him down the hall and into this doorway. He had never considered whether or not his parents had ever been in love; most people's parents weren't. But he had always believed them a team, partners in at least the intellectual sense. Only the look in his mother's eyes had been worse than a banshee's wail and now they were here, and the letter was resting quietly on his father's carpet.

"Maryse," Lord Lightwood finally spoke, and sighed, as if this really was too much to bear. "I am sorry to hear that."

"Did you not realize that that could be my only possible answer?" There was anger there in his mother's voice, but also a lift of true bewilderment.

"If it is because I had not yet talked to you before you received the notification," Lord Lightwood finally let a flicker of emotion cross his face, a hint of a shrug lifting the tension in his shoulders.

Alec's mother scoffed, and his father shut his mouth. "While it is singularly cowardly to request a divorce through our lawyer rather than having the spine to speak to me directly, no. You just saved me from having to temper my words. No, never, and no again."

Divorce. Lawyer? Via letter? It took several heart-beats before it sank in, before he could make the words makes sense. Alec had to curl his fingers to resist a newly discovered desire to punch his father in the face.

"Divorce is not nearly the scandal it used to be." Robert shook his head, still quiet, still calm. "It is not like there is any true impediment--"

"Whose fault is that?" Maryse took half a step forward, her voice loud enough to echo faintly despite the wood panelling and heavy shelves. "I never--" Her voice broke, too sharp an edge to continue.

Alec wondered about the potential benefits of stabbing over punching.

Maryse took a deep breath, her voice steadying. Cooling. "Lady Highsmith may have put off her mourning, but I will not sacrifice our children's reputations so that you may escape your duties."

"Our children are well able--" Robert was still talking, but Alec wasn't listening. He put his hand on the doorframe and bowed his head. Lady Highsmith. Lady Annemarie Highsmith, whose husband had died a little over a year ago. They'd gone to the funeral.

Lady Lightwood had left as soon as it was polite to do so. Lord Lightwood had not.

Alec remembered more, now. It had been odd, but he'd been so young he hadn't realized how odd. Izzy had been so little, practically a baby still, and she'd woken up for some reason. An owl, a scraped branch, it hadn't mattered. She'd crawled into Alec's bed, half awake, half shivering. She couldn't get back to sleep without her favorite doll, the one with the white robes like an Iron Sister. Winasee, she'd sniffled. She'd left it in the small sitting room, the one with the window seat. Alec had gone down to get it and they'd been there, his father and Lady Highsmith. Just talking, but it was the middle of the night, and his father had hurried him back upstairs before he'd asked for the doll, before he'd managed a single word at all.

Alec had spent the night with Izzy, rubbing her back until she finally relaxed enough to sleep, her tiny hand clenched around his nightshirt. He'd fallen asleep to the comforting steady sound of her breathing. They'd rescued the doll before breakfast, and he'd forgotten the whole thing.

"Twenty years." Alec hadn't realized hepd spoken aloud until he lifted his head. His father was blinking at him, eyes wide as a startled rabbit, as if he hadn't even noticed Alec standing there before he spoke. "Twenty years?"

He didn't recognize the heat filling the hollows in his chest, didn't realize he'd stepped forward until he felt his mother's hand on his arm. He stuttered to a halt. He turned to look at her and she smiled, small and sad, and shook her head.

He almost whined aloud with how strongly he needed to disagree with her. Some small deep part of his heart that he had not realized was still whole had just broken to join the rest of the shards and he wanted to howl at that terrible, terrible smile.

But he was here for her support. Not patricide. However tempting.

He took a step back and nodded, though his throat burned and his jaw was too tight. His hands were now clenched so tightly he could feel his nails pressing into his palms.

Lord Lightwood had, if not an appropriate level of shame, the self-preservation instinct to avoid meeting Alec's eyes.

"You seem to think." Alec's mother began again, only a slight shiver down her spine to show how much it cost her. "That is to say, that it appears, from here, that you wish to indulge your own desires while everyone else suffers the consequences. I cannot in good conscience allow you to present that sort of behavior as an acceptable example to our children."

Maryse paused, as if waiting for a protest. Lord Lightwood looked slightly green. Alec felt the tiniest smile caught behind his lips.

"That said, I am not cruel enough to make you maintain this charade of a marriage in private." There was a hint of sharp edged emphasis to that "I", and Alec wondered how long she'd known, how long Lord Lightwood had made her live like this. Alec lifted a hand to touch her gently on the shoulder. She shot him a quick glance, eyes wide and terrified and relieved and sad and he couldn't even tell, really, but it looked very much like his own heart had felt for most of the past four years, ever since he'd driven Mag— Mr. Bane away.

She turned back around, and Alec could tell that something in her posture had eased, just a little. "I will be removing myself and my personal effects from here, the Lightwood family seat, and residing at the Trueblood townhouse in Alicante. You are free to live on your properties however you desire."

Lord Lightwood's face flickered through half-a-dozen almost expressions too quickly to be interpreted, but ended on something approaching cautious relief.

"But let me make one thing perfectly clear." Alec almost retreated a step. He wondered if she'd managed to kill some of those demons with that voice all on its own; it sounded fatal enough. "My personal effects include all access to the Trueblood coffers for anything beyond the care of our tenants. I will not allow my family's legacy to support yours or your mistress' lifestyle. Find a way to pay your own bills."

Alec didn't bother watching Lord Lightwood bleed out on the study floor. He spun around and followed his mother as she swept out of the room.

Once past any possible view from the study she stumbled through the very next door in the hallway, a staging room for the servants. It was barely big enough for two to stand besides the shelves of linens and cleaning products, but still Alec followed, and he shut the door quietly behind them.

Her shoulders were moving too quickly up and down, and he could hear the repeated hitch in each breath even before she lifted her face to look at him, tears just starting to fall from her eyes. "I'm sorry, I shouldn't have made you, you didn't need to see..."

"Shh," Alec cut her off, and slowly reached towards her shoulders. She almost fell forward, and her arms wrapped around him, clinging tightly. He stroked her hair until he couldn't feel her shoulders shaking, until she gave one last sniff and lifted her head from his now thoroughly dampened shoulder. "You have nothing to apologize for, mother."

"That is not at all true." Her mouth twisted into something that was trying to be a smile. "I have hurt all my children over the years, and I think I caused you the most harm of all."

He shook his head a little, but not because he disagreed. He just, he couldn't.

She seemed to understand. Her lips twisted in for a breath before she sighed. "Right now I must apologize for doing that in front of you. I accused your father--"

"Lord Lightwood." Alec interrupted.

His mother blinked at him, her lashes thick and damp and almost sticking together. "He will always be--"

"Not today he's not."

Alec's mother reached out a hand, and laid her palm gently against his chest, right above his heart. She looked at his face, her eyes searching back and forth, but she couldn't quite seem to find the words for whatever she had wanted to say.

She let her hand fall back to her side. "I accused Robert of cowardice, but I was no more able to confront him by myself than he had been able to speak to me on his own. I needed." She couldn't quite manage a shrug, the movement looking more like a shiver through her body.

"You needed someone on your side."

"I was going to say reinforcements." She almost laughed, and still he wanted to cry. "I seem to have approached too many situations as battles to be overcome, rather than difficulties to share."

"I'll always be your reinforcements, mother."

"I have always been on your side, Alexander." She leaned forward now, her voice low and steady, her eyes focused on his. "I did you injury, but it was never my intent. I always thought I was keeping you safe, helping you be strong. I was wrong, and I am sorry."

She leaned back and shook out her skirts. "But that is a conversation for another time. Right now, I need to start packing."

"As do I, apparently." Alec reached back and opened the door behind him, allowing them both to return to the hallway.

His mother paused before shutting the door, head tilted as she examined Alec. "You hate living in Town."

"Not as much as I need to not be here." He offered her his arm, and his next breath felt small and fragile and warm as she took it. "May I escort you to your rooms to freshen up?"

His mother's lips twitched, and her inhale sounded suspiciously like a swallowed snort. "That is an excellent idea, thank you."

"I do try." He started walking down the hall, slow and steady, as if this was just a normal day. As if his world hadn't just shattered to pieces again. As if everything was fine. As if he had some idea what he was going to do tomorrow.

"I love you." His mother's voice was clear and steady and sure.

Maybe some things were better today than yesterday. "I love you too, mother."

[anghraine]

For the ship ask game, Elizabeth/Darcy

Sadly, the long post that got eaten was my original response to this. It had a lot in it, but I'll do my best to remember it.

So! Elizabeth/Darcy is the queen of ships, the terror of the seas, the—yeah, I ship it.

1- What made you ship it?

I don't remember! I was only eleven. I think I considered Mary/Darcy briefly for some reason, but (properly) discarded it. I do remember that I really wanted Elizabeth/Darcy to happen from quite early (I thought Wickham was obviously lying), and partly because of that and partly because of missing things on my first read, I was genuinely surprised that Elizabeth refused him! I thought she'd accept because of her family's situation etc, and then they'd have to deal with their conflicts in marriage.

(This isn't an unusual fic plot, and I myself wrote a fic that was meant to lead to Elizabeth and Darcy having to deal with their issues as a married couple—though I never got to the marriage part—so maybe not quite as batshit as it seems in retrospect, lol.)

2- What are your favorite things about this ship?

There's a lot that I love, obviously. I love the youthful energy of their dynamic, even when it leads to mistakes. They really feel like peers. I love the sense of balance between them. It doesn't rely on everything about their thoughts, feelings, and actions being individually equivalent or even always similar, yet these individual things add up to put them on a par intellectually and morally in a way that is actually pretty unusual for Austen.

I love that they're both clever and truly ethical with a bit of an edge that makes both of them impressive, and both of them very compelling characters in general and together. Yet when they fall in love with each other, they're both rather silly about it.

Despite being borderline ace (and lesbian!) myself, I also enjoy the sexual charge between them. I think that, despite the restraint of Austen's style, it's pretty glaring, especially in the last third or so of the book.

Oh, and I love something that I don't always with other ships. They end up with pretty much everything they could conceivably want out of life, we're assured of their eternal gratitude for their marriage (this is the final line, in fact), they get ... it all. It's not all that common for me to encounter a ship treated so generously by its author, without it feeling forced or saccharine.

But it doesn't feel that way at all (for me). I think there's a reason that it's such a juggernaut in the fandom and people are often so ??? about alternate pairings. You can feel the favor of the narrative itself for them, the way it's so fundamental to the fabric of the narrative that nearly everything in it serves to further the Elizabeth/Darcy plot in some way, yet in a way that makes the novel feel rich and engaging rather than shallow. And at the same time, they have it all! They're smart and hot and good and in love and happy and will never have to worry about money or anything worse than minor inconveniences from extended family, they're going to continue to grow as people, they're—it's so nice and so satisfying in a way that's actually really hard to execute well and it's done so well here.

3- Is there an unpopular opinion you have on this ship?

Many, lol. Despite their immense popularity, I think in some ways that the ship is kind of a victim of it, because there are these inescapable pop culture osmosis ideas of them that just strike me as either reductive or simply wrong. I don't think Darcy is a brooding sexy alpha male romance hero or that Elizabeth is a feisty individualist woman ahead of her time.

I think they're both very much of their time, actually! Darcy is not old-fashioned for the time and Elizabeth is not ahistorically unique. In fact, I would like to see depictions leaning into them as products of their time rather than away (I know of a few, but it's not common in the way I'm thinking, esp given my preference for the 1790s setting).

[gunnerpalace]

Hi! Same anon as the previous one. Tbh, I agree wholeheartedly with you. Y'see I do ask rhetorically,too but i could really accept and understand how and why ppl can be oblivious to IchiRuki, and somehow felt that the 'canon' should suffice, even the most excruciating of all is the fact a number found the ending even acceptable (ships aside, too). Again, I could respect that. But it's my greatest bane when ppl ask 'why' and not be clear they are asking rhetorically because I literally will

provide you an actual answer. And I get it, it’s the reason why ppl find shipping wars toxic and silly. But then again, as human, conflicts are always part of us (partly because as social psych explains so, we are gravitated to the negative for that allows us to change and survive), and the reason why “logical fallacies” are coined in the first place. Human will always debate, and argue about something; the only thing we could change is how we approach the opposing views.

Again, I dont condone any way, shape or form of abuse and harm. In some certain extent, I could perhaps understand it’s much harder for some IH to approach the actual argument being there’s either too much noise, and trapped in their own island between sea of salt. Thus becoming too acquianted w/ few IH who shared the same thought until it became their views as the only truth (see, that’s why its important to have debates! it is what keep us grounded and fair! Just like you said)

Who am I to speak though? I never ever challenged anyone anyways. And as you said, you just have to understand things in every way you could possibly think of–endless ‘whys’. Which is where I agree in your reply the most–this silly fandom wars is just the black mirror to every truth that lies beneath human psyche–the dark and the grimy. Heck, being a psych major is like staring at dark hole–at times, good, but most just plain confusing, revolting even or just heartbreaking.

Sorry it’s been long, but for the final of this ask: let me tell how glad I was with IchiRuki fandom I found in tumblr. It was the saltiest I’ve ever been (im not generally a fandom person anyways) but it’s the himalayan salt–expensive and actually nutritive it really deepened my desire to become wiser in general. And you for your wonderful essays, critiques and whatnot. I definitively would love to talk with you more not only about IchiRuki but the wonders and nightmare that us humans! Kudos!

I have sitting in my drafts a post spelling out my thoughts on “canon” (and thus, the people who cling to it) in that as a concept it privileges:

officiality over quality when it comes to validity (thus violating Sturgeon’s law)

corporations (intellectual property rights holders) over fans, and thus capitalists over proletarians

hierarchical dominance over mutualist networking within fandom

curative fandom over transformative fandom

genre over literary content

plot over characters

events over emotions

It is notable that (1) generally degrades art as a whole, (2) generally advances the capitalist agenda, and (3–7) generally advances the dominance of men over women (as the genders tend to be instructed by society to view these as A. dichotomies rather than spectrums, and B. to ascribe gender to them and make them polarities). These form the sides of a mutually reinforcing power structure (in the typical “Iron Triangle” fashion) designed to preserve and maintain the status quo.

Who really benefits from say, the policing of what is or is not “canon” in Star Wars? Disney, first and foremost. And then whomever (almost certainly male) decides to dedicate their time to memorizing the minutiae of whatever that corporation has decided is “legitimate.”

One can imagine a universe in which fan fic is recognized by companies for what it is: free advertising. (Much like fan art already is.) Instead, it is specifically targeted by demonetization efforts in a way that fan art isn’t. Why? Because it demonstrates that corporate control and “official” sanction has no bearing on quality, and it is thus viewed as undermining the official products.

In the same way, by demonstrating that most “canonical” works are frankly shit, it undermines the investiture of fans in focusing on details that are ultimately errata (the events, the plot, the genre), which is the core function of curative fandom and the reason for its hierarchical structure. The people who “know the most” are at the top, but what they “know” is basically useless garbage. And those people so-engaged are, of course, usually male.

To “destroy” the basis of their credibility, and indeed the very purpose of their community, is naturally viewed by them as an attack.

(This is not to say that efforts to tear down internal consistency within established cultural properties are good unto themselves, or even desirable. For example, efforts to redefine properties such as Star Wars, Star Trek, Doctor Who, and Ghostbusters, for the sake of a identity-politics agenda have largely A. failed as art, B. failed as entertainment, C. failed to attract the supposedly intended audience, and D. failed to advance the agenda in question. Trying to repurpose extant media in the name of culture wars is essentially always doomed to failure unless it is done deftly and gradually.)

(At the same time, this also shows what I was talking about last time, with regard to people seeing whatever they want to see. You will see people complain that Star Trek and Doctor Who didn’t “used to be so political,” which is obviously nonsense. These shows were always political. What changed was how their politics were presented. For example, Star Trek has, since TNG, always shown a nominally socialist or outright communist future, but was beloved by plenty of conservatives because they could [somehow] ignore that aspect of it.)

Of course, almost no one is seriously suggesting that one side of the spectrums outlined above be destroyed, rather merely that a new balance be struck upon the spectrum. But, as we have seen time and again in society, any threat to the status quo, whether that be 20% of Hugo Awards going to non-white male authors or the top income tax rate in America being increased by a measly 5.3% (from 28.7% to 34%… when the all-time high was 94% and for over 50 years it was above 50%) is a threat. This is why, for example, Republicans are out there branding AOC as a “socialist” when her policies are really no different at all from a 1960 Democrat who believed in FDR’s New Deal. (Which they, of course, have also demonized as “socialism.”)

(As an aside, all this ignores the fact that most of the “literary canon” of Western civilization, or at least English literature… is Biblical or historical fan fic.)

And this is when I finally get to my point.

Those people out there who denigrate and mock shippers and shipping, the people who hurl “it reads like fan fiction” as an insult, and so on, are the people who benefit from and enjoy the extant power structure. You will see the same thing with self-identified “gamers” complaining about “fake girl gamers.” Admitting that the hobby has a lot of women in it, and a lot of “casuals,” and is indeed increasingly dominated by “non-traditional demographics” is an affront to the constructed identity of being a “gamer.” They are “losing control.” And they don’t like it.

This exact same sort of population is what the “fanbase” of Bleach has been largely reduced down to through a slow boiling off of any actual quality. Of course they’re dismissive of people who are looking for anything of substance: their identity, their “personal relationship” with the franchise, is founded on a superficial appreciation of it: things happening, flashy attacks, eye-catching character designs, fights, etc.

(What this really boils down to, at heart, is that society at large has generally told men that emotions are bad, romance and relationships of all kinds are gross, and that thinking and reflecting on things is stupid. So of course they not only don’t care about such things, but actively sneer at them as “girly” or “feminine,” which is again defined by society at large as strictly inferior. And this gender divide and misogyny is of course promulgated and reinforced by the powers that be, the capitalists, to facilitate class divisions just like say racism generally is.)

(The latest trick of these corporate overlords has been the weaponization of “woke” culture to continue to play the people off one another all the time. “If you don’t like this [poorly written, dimensionless Mary Sue] Strong Female Character, then you are a racist misogynist!” They are always only ever playing both sides for profit, not advancing an actual ideological position. It is worth noting that there was a push by IH some years ago to define IR as “anti-feminist” for critiquing Orihime for essentially the exact same reasons [admittedly, not for profit, but still as critical cover].)

Which makes it very curious, therefore, that the most ardent IH supporters tend to be women. (Though there are more than a few men, they seem to tend to support it because it is “canon” and to attack it is to attack “canon” and thus trigger all of the above, rather than out of any real investment.) I think there are a number of reasons for this (which I have detailed before) and at any rate it is not particularly surprising; 53% of white women voted for Trump, after all.

What we are really seeing in fandom, are again the exact same dynamics that we see at larger and larger scales, for the exact same reasons. The stakes are smaller, but the perception of the power struggle is exactly the same.

Of course, the people who are involved in these things rarely think to interrogate themselves as to the true dimensions and root causes of their motivations. People rarely do that in general.

Putting all that aside, I’m glad that you have found a place you enjoy and feel comfortable, and thank you for the kind words, although I am not of the opinion that there is anything poignant about the non-fiction I write. It is, as I keep trying to emphasize, all there to be seen. One just has to open their eyes. So, it’s hard for me to accept appreciation of it.

Anyway, don’t feel shy about coming off of anon rather than continuing to send asks. We don’t really bite.

[littlestsnicket]

⭐

thanks!! (this got out of hand, but I had fun thinking about these things :D)

I’m going to talk about “Promise not to lie, but that doesn’t necessarily mean I’ll tell the truth” 

First, this title is ridiculously long, and I clearly remember having one of those, fuck, ao3 will not let me post this without a title moments, but I kind of like it; it works. 

Second, I’ve done this a lot less in this fandom (where as like... i think all of my doctor who fic is like this) but the easiest fic for me to write are the ones where I read a fic and think, well that’s not quite right. And I had read a bunch of Violet is a Snicket fic and none of it was quite right. Which is definitely not a slight on the people who wrote it (a lot of it is really good! it just didn’t jive right with my personal understanding of the characters and themes of the series, and well... a lot of it seemed more influenced by netflix than the books), so I went and wrote my own.

Cut because I went through a nearly 2000 word long fic practically paragraph by paragraph.

“What a coincidence, I was about to make myself some tea,” said Violet. Even though this was an entirely plausible statement, Violet was certain it sounded like a bald faced lie, and she was certain by the way Lemony’s eyebrows drew together, that he thought so too, but he took a second mug from the cabinet above the stove, placed it next to his own on the counter, and dropped in a second tea bag. Violet thought she caught him scanning the room for exits, but it might not mean anything—Lemony did that constantly. She sat down at the worn kitchen table.

I like the idea of characters letting each other get away with lies. And I also think it’s important to asoue--there’s a reading of a lot of things that happen with disguises (like when Klaus and Sunny disguise themselves as doctors, and Madame Lulu, and maybe even Olaf disguising himself as Stephano) where I think there is some vfd *thing* where you are trained not to call people out on lies unless you are certain you have more to gain from doing so than you might gain from playing along and seeing what else happens. That’s not terribly related to this fic, but it’s something I was thinking about when I wrote Lemony letting on to Violet that he didn’t really believe she wanted tea, but going along with it anyway (and then Violet doesn’t even drink the tea (but that’s maybe not super clear from the way I wrote it), so Lemony knows at the end... and of course they are both very observant and spend a lot of time watching people both as a matter of personality and circumstance.)

“Thank you for finding us, Mr Snicket, and reuniting our family.”

One of the things I’ve put a lot of thought into is how characters use names/nicknames/titles. It’s something I became very concerned about when I was writing Twin Peaks fic, and I carried it along to this fandom too. And I really liked the idea of Violet using Lemony in her head but still calling him Mr Snicket out loud until they resolve their relationship. 

“I couldn’t say no to Beatrice,” he responded without looking at her.

And then Lemony half denying that he’s done anything special or admirable. I tend not to think of Lemony as particularly self hating, although I don’t know if it comes across that way (especially in “platonic equivalent of hate sex” but that’s from Olaf’s pov and he sees Lemony in a certain way that is not necessarily accurate). This has more to do with Lemony not wanting to make moral judgements about himself, or really allow other people to commit to making moral judgements about himself. Which could certainly be read as self hating, but I think has more to do with pragmatism and a result of his world view which is very accommodating of moral grayness (except when it very much is NOT at all--like no one is ever all good in Lemony’s head, but there are certain people that Lemony allows himself to think of as 100% bad even though he intellectually knows otherwise).

but she was nearly twenty six now and the guardian of a child; she understood now that nothing, but especially trying to do right by a child, was ever as straightforward to an adult as it was to a young person.

The idea that Violet should be a properly grown up adult for this conversation was very much a reaction to reading other fic. It’s also the only thing that makes sense with my head canons about the timeline of when things happen/books are published. And this is also a sort of reference to atwq where Lemony has the line about children inevitably becoming adults that I am not going to look up. 

“I know you were engaged to my mother,” Violet said.

I’m not sold on this. Violet is Bertrand’s child, and this sounds like more of a Beatrice/Klaus thing to say--it’s so very direct. But (a) given how relatively short I keep my fic, I needed to cut to the chase and (b) this was pretty early in my involvement in fandom. While most of the things I think about Lemony are things I’ve been thinking about since I was, idk, twelve or thirteen (Lemony has ALWAYS been my favorite), I had to flesh out Beatrice, Bertrand, Violet, Klaus, and Sunny a lot to be able to write them.

Then the next bit of dialogue--it was important to me to establish that Violet and Klaus (and Sunny too) had been researching Lemony. And there is a lot of information out there about Lemony. (And maybe the Baudelaire parents have been deliberately keeping their children away from information about Lemony, because the Quagmires are familiar with him in tvv--and the particular way they bring it up makes it seem like general knowledge not something that they discovered researching Olaf.) For one thing, I think the Baudelaire’s (especially Klaus) would research Lemony, but it was also important to me to sort of... balance out the amount of knowledge Lemony has about them.

And then of course, there is the thesis of the fic:

“Violet, I have always believed that genetics are a negligible part of paternity. And somewhat selfishly, if I were to think of myself as a father figure—even in a limited capacity, I would have to admit I was a monstrous failure.”

The idea that Lemony hasn’t already worked through his feelings about having a kid (in the strange capacity that he does) is just ridiculous to me. Like... families of choice is one of the KEY THEMES of the book series he wrote. It’s almost a non-issue. And I think when we see Lemony being completely un-self aware, that’s a deliberate rather than passive act on his part. All that performative grief we see in his narration isn’t something that just happens, it’s something he’s actively doing because he cannot deal with the complexity of his actual feelings. Where as this is something he’s worked through and consciously let himself off the hook for, and can concisely and accurately explain to Violet. Because he’s an adult. And even as a child in atwq, he’s pretty self aware about the things he’s not deliberately lying to himself about. 

He placed one mug on the placemat in front of Violet, although the wood of the table top was so scratched and damaged one would never be able to pick out one more ring of water. 

This might be my favorite thing I’ve written in this fandom, and it just... the thing about not using coasters being a sign of evil. I will never get over that. it’s so perfect. Because, when it comes down to it, evil is synonymous with carelessness. And giving up on the idea that small acts of care are worthwhile. And how that is so core to who Lemony is as a person and what being a Volunteer actually means.

blue gray like the sea during a storm—the same blue gray eyes she saw when she looked at Beatrice, the same blue gray eyes that looked back at her from the mirror.

(a) I wanted to connect the Snickets to the sea--it seemed important, and (b) I have a random and unfounded head canon that the Snicket siblings don’t look at all alike besides having the exact same color eyes--so that is the “Snicket” trait that Violet has as well. 

I already talked about the name thing, so I’m going to skip a head a tiny bit. When I wrote this, it was really important that the fic actually be about something other than Violet being genetically a Snicket--it was the only way to show that it’s really a non issue. So Violet and Lemony talk about the Baudelaire parents and casually refer to them as such without any caveats because that’s the truth. 

“Sometimes, it feels like I didn’t know my parents at all. They had so many secrets, so many things they never told us.”

“I am all too familiar with that feeling. I knew your parents quite well; I would like to help if I can.”

And this is Lemony breaking one of the many negative cycles of vfd involvement. And, despite their genetic relation, Lemony is going to interact with Violet primarily as a friend of her parents, and a someone who fundamentally understands what she is going through in loosing ones parents especially in situation of not really knowing what they were thinking. 

I’m going to skip ahead to the sugar bowl bit because the discussion about moral ambiguity and what the Baudelaire parents would have wanted pretty much is what it is. Lemony is able to give Violet closure that I think she really needed. It’s nice. It’s what I want for her. I think it’s something Lemony knows Jacques didn’t have and needed as the eldest sibling. 

Yeah... there is nothing in the sugar bowl. I am sorry. Those are the facts. It’s also something Lemony is not comfortable telling Violet. He wants to prepare her for disappointment, but she doesn’t have the context to really get it yet. Even though Lemony hints at it earlier (”they would be proud to have raised children who were brave and resourceful enough to barter the location of the sugar bowl for their sister’s safety”). That the Baudelaire’s instinctively understood the real value of the sugar bowl. Also, I was already planning what ended up becoming “To share a kitchen” at this point. The original draft was primarily focused on Sunny figuring out what was in the sugar bowl, and that being something that Lemony wasn’t comfortable telling anyone because it’s something that one has to figure out for ones self. But that ended up being kind of tangential to that story in the end. 

Violet was silent and perfectly still, puzzling over all of this not terribly helpful information, as Lemony finished his tea. 

Call back to Lemony saying “he was so still and quiet when he was thinking through a puzzle”. Because Violet is Bertrand’s daughter. 

“Thank you, at least, for not telling me it is too dangerous for me to know.”

“My track record is far from perfect, but I do make a sincere attempt to keep my word.”

This is a direct refute of Widdershins saying that it’s too dangerous for young people to know what is in the sugar bowl. That was very deliberate. Lemony and Widdershins have some shit to work out. I don’t know that they ever get the chance. (I tend to think Widdershins doesn’t know what is in the sugar bowl. And that is a beginning of the rift between them; they seem close in atwq and Lemony seems so casually disdainful of him by the time he is writing tgg.)

And then the last paragraph is just... Lemony is not and never is going to play the role of a father figure for Violet, but they are a FAMILY in the way that matters--they’re comforted by each other’s presence and the small noises they make when going about their normal habits. 

And that is that!

[introvertllux]

Draft of  Black Clover OC x Zora Story/Fic Finding My Place

Cover constructed by me by the designs of the characters i made through piccrew using the following online creators.

(To create my OC)

1. https://picrew.me/image_maker/196205 by Stawberry 

https://strawberrycreampiefluff.tumblr.com/

https://twitter.com/mrythevixen

(To create and image of Zora)

2. https://picrew.me/image_maker/280380 by domo_ura

Twitter: @domo_ura   

Genre: Romance, Drama, Comedy, Comedy-Drama, Anime, Magic, Fan-fiction

Warnings: 18+, depictions of mental health (depression). (Please do not read, if you may be triggered).

I got the idea to do this character oc bio in the form of a wiki page. Let me know what you think!

Battle ProwessTrivia

Jayne’s favorite things are to spend time in her mother’s garden.

    Jayne loves to draw, write, deep and intellectual conversations, adventures, alone time, and reading.

   Jayne is an introvert.

  Jayne’s love language is quality time.

  Jayne hates small talk, gathering in large groups, conflict, manipulation, cruelty, and insensitive, inconsiderate people.

  Jayne’s favorite colors are Black, Olive Green, and Pink.

    Jayne’s best friends are her Noelle and her aunt Sol.

  Jayne enjoys sweet things.

 Jayne is a very good cook.

Personality

Jayne is an insightful, soft-spoken, reserved, passionate, and mysterious young women who is described as an “old-soul”. Jayne is guided by her deep set of personal values. Her personal values are intensely idealistic and aide in her to clearly imagine a happier and more perfect future for her kingdom.  Though idealistic, she is able to turn her idea into plans and execute the efficiently and effectively.

Though soft-spoken, Jayne has very strong opinions and will fight for what she believes in. She is decisive and strong-willed but will rarely use that energy for personal gain.

Because she is a reserved introverted, “old soul” she finds it challenging to be social. However, Jayne does find it easy to make connections with others as a result of her being to speak in a warm, sensitive language, rather than with pure logic and fact (like her parents).

As a result of Jayne being very insightful, she can a particular knack for see beyond others’ disguises and is able to interpret others’ intentions quickly. Nonetheless, Jayne still values and needs time alone to decompress and recharge, and not to become too alarmed when they suddenly withdraw (sometime for a few days).  

Romance seems to be something Jayne struggles with as she is not very social, and her mother has a huge distrust for men. If she were to enter a relationship, to find someone with whom they truly connect too. Jayne is a very sensitive person which is her greatest weakness. She is highly vulnerable to criticism and conflict. Her unstable emotions frequently conflict with her magic, parents, and friendships. She dislikes her motives being questioned.

Appearance

Jayne is and 17-year-old girl with a slender curvy body. She is short with brown skin and brown- greenish eyes.  She is often seen wearing her set of armor (due to her mother). When she is not in her armor she prefers to be in comfortable clothing. She wears he Ombre hair in in a slick down style with a braid (the braid being an ode to her mother). Her hair is naturally curly and prefers to wear it in a messy or neat bun or curly.

Jayne is beautiful and is considered to be so (unknown to her) due to may fearing her parents. She is called the mysterious beauty by many people.

Biography

Jayne was abandoned and cursed when she was three months old. She was cursed with the inducement curse, causing her to be emotionally unstable. The full affect her curse is set to take place on her eighteenth birthday. The curse will activate her full abilities letting out darkness and chaos, resulting in the destruction of the world. She was found by Charlotte Roselei shortly after Yami had saved her from her curse.

Charlotte raised Jayne in secret only allowing Sol, Yami, and Julius to know that she is her daughter.As a result of Yami respecting Charlotte he been there to help and assist Charlotte with Jayne aide in keeping her hidden. 

Relationships

Charlotte Roselei

Although Charlotte is her adoptive mother, Jayne sees her as her only mother, often addressing her at “mama” or mother. Their relationship is often filled with conflict under the surface of course, especially since Jayne usually avoids conflict. As a result of this, Jayne desires to separate herself from her mother, when she is fully an adult. Because Charlotte is logical she is not very sensitive to Jayne’s emotions. Charlotte often shows Jayne tough love which feels critical and cold to her. Jayne does not share the values as her mother and often rejects them.

Jayne admires her mother’s strength and intelligent. One of her favorite qualities of her mother’s is her stubbornness which she seems to have as well. Jayne dislike her mother’s ability to be honest. She feels that if her mother would be honest a lot her problems would be solved.

For example, she was honest about her emotions she would be able to understand her daughter more. If she were to be honest about her emotions about Yami she would be able to express, her love and gratitude to him for helping with her curse and helping to raise Jayne.

Jayne wants her mother to be happy and believes that once Yami and her get together they can be a family. Jayne enjoys quite moments with her mother, especially in their garden. Though they don’t share many things in common, they both care deeply for one another and are extremely loyal to one another. Although see may not see or realize it Charlotte has been working tirelessly with Yami’s help to find a cure to Jayne’s curse.

Yami

Yami has taken Jayne under his wing and seeing her as his own even allowing her to call him “pops” or “papa” in public. People do not question this due to their fear of Yami. Many speculate it may be due to some type of mentorship between the too. Although he is the exact opposite of her, Jayne cares very deeply for Yami.

Yami is playful, patient and open-minded when it comes to her.

As a result of Yami’s personality he is open and accepting and wants Jayne to everything possible to give them the best chance of learning what they need to know to live in the world. Yami tends not to set hard boundaries for Jayne because he wants her to be able to explore and make mistakes and choose a better way the next time.

Even though his parenting style is less structured than Charlotte’s, Yami has the ability to discipline Jayne if and when needed.

Jayne and Yami conflict seem to steam from his lack of emotional engagement. Yami likes to bond through physical activities which sometimes uninterests Jayne. Just like her mother she would love if her father would engage emotionally with her.

She admires her father’s strength and willingness to accept and treat people equally.Jayne is aware that Yami knows of her mother’s affections towards him and is very annoyed of the cat and mouse game he is playing in attempts for her to openly admit her feelings.Jayne is able to understand inability to share his emotions but still loves him anyways.

Sol

Jayne love her aunt sol. Jayne is able to connect emotionally with her. Jayne always has fun with her aunt anytime she’s around. Sol inspires Jayne to take chances that she normally wouldn’t take. Sol often help give Jayne a little more freedom when it comes to Charlotte.

Julius

Jayne loves her uncle Julius. Their personalities are very similar.  They spend long hours talking and laughing together because their ways of thinking are similar. Jayne takes an interest in his hobby of magic discovers and is happy to see he is interested in her magic abilities. However, they differ socially as Julius is more extroverted and Jayne is not.

Noelle

Noelle and Jayne are best friends despite that not always being the case. They did not get along due to their conflicting personalities. They both bond over their lack of ability to control their magic and the relationships they share with their families. They also bond over feeling like outcast and their crushes.

Asta

Jayne finds Asta to be amusing and hardworking. She values their friendship and hopes that he and Noelle end up together. She admires his hard work and dedication despite his lack of magic.

Zora

Zora at first believes that Jayne is stuck up due to her appearance and decided to take her down a peg. However, when speaking to her he realizes that she is the opposite. They fall in love quickly. Their relationship is intense and electrifying. Jayne highly disagrees with his values and treatment of people who do and don’t abuse magic. She does not entirely write him off as a villain like most. She tries to advise and encourage him to take another solution/route.

Their personalities lead to many of their arguments along with the high disapproval of him from Jayne’s mother.

Battle Prowess

Dark Magic

Reinforcement Magic

Restraining Magic

Abilities

    Enhanced Reflexes

    Immense Durability

    Immense Magic Power

    Ki

  Mana Zone

Equipment

  Grimoire

Sword