#and if they say i look like I lost weight and my parents will act pissed with me

[omarfor-orchestra]

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[flawseer]

In your last ask, you mentioned misgivings with Book 10's ending, and especially how it pertains to Winter. I absolutely agree, and I know why, but I wanna hear your thoughts on it, too: What's up with Book 10?

The following is a (very long) examination of my personal feelings with regards to the WoF second story arc finale. While it is based on what is in the text, this analysis will be interpretive and fill in blanks with my own thoughts. Keep that in mind.

Hahhhh... okay. Since mentioning it in my last post I’ve gotten several requests to talk about my feelings regarding the second arc finale. There’s probably no way around it then.

If you haven’t read that last post (it was admittedly very long, and so will this one be), I talked briefly about why I didn’t like that part of the story. I have to warn you now, this will likely be the most negative and dour post in the history of this blog. In a few parts it will sound like I hate Wings of Fire, and I want to say now, while I still have the chance, that I don’t. I love this series, thinking about its setting and characters brings me joy.

I also—very emphatically—want to make it clear that I have no ill will against Tui T. Sutherland. I’ve looked around other people’s stuff a bit and there are a huge number of posts wishing violence upon her or threatening her for doing things to her series that people don’t agree with. That is NOT what I am doing here, shit like that is NOT okay! While I will be critical of her choices, I still respect her effort of bringing this vibrant, wonderful world of dragons to all of us.

Also, obligatory last disclaimer: If you liked the finale, that is okay. You are valid for feeling that way. I’m here to share my point of view, not to demand people agree with everything I say. Just be warned that you most likely won’t enjoy what I have to say. If you don’t think you can handle that kind of criticism, this is your guilt-free opportunity to stop reading.

Otherwise, let's get into it.

CW: Discussion of parental abuse, depression, disease, and extreme acts of violence.

In defense of the finale

Before I start to systematically disassemble this narrative and get lost in a quagmire of negativity, let’s talk a bit about the circumstances that brought forth this part of the story. The plot of this arc was a mess from the moment animus magic was unshackled from the restrictions it had in the first arc, and from then on there was no longer any conceivable way to end this story in a clean way. Sutherland had created an invincible, unbeatable, omnipotent villain; he could read minds, see the future with perfect clarity, and anything he could imagine he could conjure into existence at any time with no cost to himself and no drawbacks. She was likely wracking her brain about how to resolve this impossible conundrum. What we got wasn’t good, but I believe nothing could have been. The foundation was rotting and by the fifth book it couldn’t bear the weight of the plot anymore.

The thing about animus magic in arc 2 is that it is so potent, so all-powerful, and so free of restraint that everyone who uses it also HAS to be a simpleton, or they would be able to break the plot immediately and become god. From the moment Darkstalker broke out of that mountain, he could have said “Any and all spells that are cast with the intention to harm me, interfere with my plans, or do something I don’t consent to will not work, from now on until forever”, and he would have instantly won. The strawberry would have fizzled out. The Darkstalker-blocking earrings would not have been created, and no one could have saved the Icewings. On the flipside, Turtle or Anemone could have said “I enchant the concept of animus magic itself to no longer obey Darkstalker”, and his threat would have been neutered. Point is, powers as potent and easy to use as this really need limitations, or they will quickly eat your plot alive.

I don’t envy the situation Sutherland was in at the time at all. If you’re an author, that kind of thing is a nightmare. It really is no wonder she decided to blow up animus magic for good in her next arc, even if I would have preferred it to get more healthy restrictions instead of killing it outright.

The Darkstalker age regression thing

Everyone has talked this part to death already, but if I am to write a thorough analysis of my feelings regarding this finale, I’m going to have to talk about it as well. I’m sorry if I end up repeating a lot of things you’ve already heard.

This final fate of Darkstalker, to have his memories wiped and be reset to an infant, is really uncomfortable. As far as I am aware, though correct me if I’m wrong, Sutherland said in an interview that she didn’t want Darkstalker to die because, in her view, he did not deserve to. We can debate here about the philosophical question of whether anyone is truly deserving of death, and the merits of “justice” and “punishment”, but in general, Wings of Fire did not seem to have any issues killing off its villains prior if they committed suitably terrible acts. That makes this moment stand out as noteworthy.

Who is Darkstalker then--and if we assume villains can be “deserving” and “not deserving” of death--what about him speaks in his favor, or against? The guy had a pretty crappy childhood, coming from a broken home (there is that inadequate parent theme again). He genuinely loved his sister and felt protective of her, and whenever he liked someone he wanted them to be happy and feel affirmed. The thing that Queen Diamond does to his mother is awful and he is justified in hating her for it. He is also portrayed as rather sympathetic in Moon Rising. When he asks Moon to find his scroll for him and not to leave him, he is not manipulating her, he is sincerely begging for her help. He is stuck somewhere underground, trapped in darkness, in a space so tiny that he can’t move. He remains that way for months, lonely and sad. If you just focus on these aspects, it’s easy to understand why he has so many fans who want him to see healthy and happy.

On the flipside, while he is dedicated to the happiness of his friends, he doesn’t always go for the most ethical way to achieve it. He tries to brainwash said friends without their consent whenever they exhibit behaviors he doesn’t like, or when he thinks he knows better and wants to “fix” them. He has very little regard for other people’s autonomy, lies to his loved ones with alarming frequency, and is unhealthily attached to the idea of power. Those things are certainly not good, but they are his character flaws. These are his demons; everyone has them and they make him a person. If this was all there was to it, he might still be a villain, but I’d argue he’d not be wholly irredeemable.

But there are things about him that take him beyond the pale. Things that go beyond the realm of just being misunderstood, or easily excusable.

He is possessive. He wants Clearsight and Fathom for himself, and for them to listen to him primarily. When Indigo makes it clear she doesn’t like him and cautions Fathom against trusting him, he deceives his friends and traps Indigo in a wood carving, just so he can isolate Fathom from his support network and manipulate him easier. He alters Clearsight’s mind to make her more agreeable and stop her from holding him accountable for his actions; while he thinks he loves her, he only loves an idealized version of her that is wholly devoted to and unquestioning of him. This is why, when he later forcibly overwrites Fierceteeth’s existence to recreate her (which is another horrific thing), he tries to excise the parts he finds undesirable to create a perfect version of his lover. But this caricature he has created in his head is not and can never be Clearsight, which frustrates his attempts.

He is vengeful. Not against people who have actually wronged him, like Queen Diamond. That would be questionable, but understandable. What makes this unacceptable is his frequent targeting of innocent people who just happen to be related to the person who wronged him in some esoteric way. He enchants a secret murder knife that kills random Icewings regardless of who they are or what they think about the Queen, just because the one who took his mother from him happened to share their tribe. He hates Turtle and wishes death upon him in Moon Rising just because he is a green Seawing, like Fathom was. And then there is the big one: He tries to kill all the Icewings who are alive in the present day, where Queen Diamond is long dead and none of them have ever even met her. Even his mother, who suffered from Diamond’s actions the most and has the most reason to hate her, is horrified and calls him out on that one.

And lastly, he is sadistic. He revels in torturing those he hates. He forces his father to disembowel himself, while the latter is fully aware and powerless to resist AND the man’s traumatized daughter is watching. Later he sends a magical plague to kill every single living Icewing sans one.

It should be noted that Darkstalker possesses virtually infinite magical power; whatever he declares, with very few exceptions, will happen. Even if he wanted them dead, he had the power to prevent unnecessary suffering. He could have said “Arctic, fall dead instantaneously”, or “Every Icewing will fall asleep and pass away peacefully,” but he didn’t. He wanted them to feel pain and pass away in the most wretched, agonizing ways he could imagine.

So what he chose to do instead is—and I want you to picture this for a moment—Darkstalker sat down, calmly, and said “Henceforth every living Icewing, excepting Prince Winter and those of hybrid blood, will fall ill with an incurable disease. This disease will cause heavy internal bleeding and make its victims cough up blood and waste away for a few days, followed by certain death.”

This spell does not discriminate with regards to who its victims are. The book glosses over the implications, but imagine the ramifications. Young children are notoriously frail, how many newborns got infected and died because of this? How many families were torn apart because they couldn’t get the magic earrings fast enough? Or accidentally got one earring less than there were family members and had to decide who has to die?

Most of the Icewings were physically cured by the earrings, but an experience like that sticks with you for the rest of your life. Somewhere surely, a dragonet watched as his mother put the earring on him and then slowly wasted away because she didn’t have one for herself.

It’s really easy to overlook how horrific this spell is because it isn’t shown or dwelt on. But the trauma, grief, and suffering it caused must have been immeasurable.

And none of those victims have ever even met the person Darkstalker wanted to get revenge on. None of those deaths meant anything to anyone.

The attempted death toll and scale of the calamity here puts even Scarlet to shame. The ones who come closest to it were Queen Battlewinner and Morrowseer with their attempted Rainwing extermination. All three of those died for what they did. Gives you some food for thought for sure.

Peacemaker’s burden

Despite just airing all of his dirty laundry and declaring him an irredeemable villain, I actually do have a lot of sympathy for Darkstalker still. His story is really sad. He was a child born with an amount of power that nobody should possess, and it corrupted him to the point where it destroyed his life before it began. His parents were always fighting and no matter how good his intentions were, he was unable to understand why he couldn’t hold on to his friends and relationship. He kept making mistakes, then made bigger mistakes to fix those, until his hands were covered in blood and he couldn’t stop anymore. My belief is that, after he wakes up in the present and realizes Clearsight is dead, he loses his reason for living and becomes completely lost in his grief.

Therefore, my opinion is that it would have been appropriate for him to die. If not to punish him, then to finally grant him reprieve from all that rage and pain, and let him rest. I think that would have been a dignified end.

But instead he got turned into a baby. ... And then they decided to magically erase his father’s blood from him? I don’t know what it is, but something about that Icewing erasure makes my skin crawl?

The thing that turns this baby twist from weird into highly unsettling is the context. Darkstalker’s mind is erased, then modified into a new person via animus magic. This is the technique a lot of this arc’s villains used to victimize Hailstorm, Queen Ruby, Peril, Kinkajou, Fierceteeth, and Winter. The same technique is now used again, by the heroes, which is a dangerous thing to have your protagonists do if you want them to remain morally upright.

It is also very reckless, because in almost all of these instances, animus mind alteration has been shown to be very unreliable. The spells seem to wear down over time and are susceptible to partial breaking upon encountering certain strong stimuli. Hailstorm—while trapped as Pyrite—seems to retain trace amounts of his former memories, which is why Pyrite is subconsciously drawn to Winter and clings to him all the time. Ruby is able to ignore half of her conditioning because her familial love for her son partially overpowers the magic. Qibli is just straight up able to reason his way out of it.

The thing to note here is that spells of this nature require a very meticulous approach; you can’t half-ass your reprogramming or the victim will just think their way past it. If you alter someone’s mind, the wording of the spell must be ironclad, lest you risk it wearing down over time and even break.

Luckily we have nothing to fear in that regard, because the spell that created Peacemaker was written by a Rainwing with a total of four days of literacy training. No one better mention the name Clearsight to the new baby Nightwing, or next month is going to be rather interesting.

But that’s just speculation on my part. Let’s assume that, somehow, this spell isn’t as unstable as all the others. Somehow Kinkajou threaded all the needles, and masterfully dodged every conceivable pitfall to pen the perfect incantation, despite having been illiterate just a few weeks prior. This one is built to last and Darkstalker is sealed away really thoroughly, for good.

That is still absolutely terrible and morally dubious, because now you have Peacemaker, who for all intents and purposes is a COMPLETELY innocent little kid, saddled with this huge burden of being the certifiable reincarnation of a genocidal ancient wizard. He’s gonna grow up thinking things like “Mommy gets real quiet whenever the topic of the Icewing tragedy is brought up,” and “Why does Auntie Moon look at me like that? One time she accidentally called me a weird name, who is Darkstalker?” “What is this ‘Clearsight’ name my mind-reading friends from the village found in Mommy’s mind?”

In a village that will be full of mind-readers soon, eventually the secret will come out, and Peacemaker is going to learn what was done to him. A huge, messy load of undeserved baggage was forced onto this completely separate, innocent entity. He will be devastated. Whether he then chooses to forgive them for this remains to be seen. To be honest, he would be well within his right not to, and turn resentful.

Poor kid.

Qibli’s callousness

I love Qibli, he is one of my favorite characters. This happens to be his book, and the fact that I fundamentally dislike half of it makes me rather sad. If anything, I hope this tells you that I’m not just hating on it for my personal amusement. I really wanted to like this. I tried to, and I couldn’t.

Qibli is really weird in this one, to be honest. He is suddenly made to be co-dependent on Moonwatcher, fawning over her every third paragraph, saying how much he loves her, how he is an incomplete and dysfunctional wreck without her, how it physically pains him to be apart from her, oh if only the stars would grant his wish and split the mountains apart so that he may fly to his princess, his muse, his goddess of ebony wit. It gets so old.

And it’s not Qibli. He never acted this clingy towards Moonwatcher. It’s more intense than even Winter gets about Moon, and Winter was actually depicted with a crush on her in book 6. Qibli was always just a supportive element, eager to befriend Moon but never desperate, like he is going to keel over if he is separated from his true love five minutes longer. These very frequent love declarations feel so forced coming out of him. It strikes me like it was just written in service of the love triangle. Maybe if we make him confess his love every four seconds readers will overlook the fact that they had no proper romantic build-up.

You might rightly accuse me of bias. I have previously admitted I am fond of Qibli/Winter as a romantic pairing, on the surface this seems like I am just not happy with my pet ship being blocked by Moonwatcher. But I assure you, I am actually pretty flexible and accommodating even towards pairings that contradict my preferences. I have no issues with Winter/Moonwatcher, for example, because the possibility was properly established and they have good romantic chemistry in Winter Turning. In theory, I would have no problem with Qibli/Moonwatcher either if it was ever set up as an interesting romantic dynamic. But to me, it seems like Qibli is written as a good, supportive friend to Moon for four books, only to pivot hard into “Moon moon moon moon moon moon swoon” at the last second, and it just reads to me as obnoxious.

I got distracted. This section is called “Qibli’s callousness”, and I haven’t even talked about the main part.

Qibli and Winter have excellent chemstry together, whether you read it as romantic or platonic—both of these interpretations have merit and are set up. They’re always the highlight of any scene they’re in. Throughout the story arc you get the impression that these two really get on each other’s nerves, but they bond and grow into really strong friends who bicker a lot but have each other’s backs when it counts.

Then there is a scene where Qibli casually tells Winter that he wouldn’t object if someone wanted to mind-control away some of Winter’s more objectionable traits.

This is genuinely a terrible thing to say to your friend. Like, it crosses a line and ceases to be harmless banter; you’re just telling them that there is something you hate about them so much that you wish they were someone else. Winter actually WAS mind-controlled earlier and felt (and proably still feels) guilty about having attacked Qibli in that state. And now Qibli says “Hey, I wouldn’t mind if someone did that to you again! Hue hue!”

It is awful, BUT I don’t necessarily object to Qibli saying this here. Qibli is in the middle of his character arc at this moment, so he is expected to be flawed. He is making a mistake by thoughtlessly telling Winter this horrid thing, and it seems like a believable continuation of his current character track. This is a reasonable development as long as the plot acknowledges that it’s a mistake.

Spoilers: The plot doesn’t acknowledge that it’s a mistake. Qibli never has a scene after where he reflects upon what he said and apologizes to Winter. When Darkstalker has Qibli trapped in his mountain jail and mind-wipes Qibli’s grandfather into a toddler (hey, wait a minute), Qibli gets visibly disturbed. Like, this is so off-putting to him that he gets queasy and Darkstalker hastily changes the spell. That could have been a great way to bring this back. Like in the epilogue, have Qibli track down Winter and tell him about disturbing baby grandpa theater and how he realized that wiping people’s minds is actually messed up and should have never said that to him.

But he doesn’t. He just lets Winter go, allowing him to believe he is broken and needs magical intervention to be tolerable. It leaves me to think that maybe he’s still okay with it, and fantasizing about rewriting his friend’s mind. Great.

Moonwatcher’s character death

You will find as this goes on that, I get the impression that the second half of this book takes all of the wonderful, endearing characters I have learned to love throughout the story and replaces them with really mean, or stupid, or otherwise inaccurate caricatures.

Moonwatcher’s relationship with Darkstalker gets plenty of setup and development in Moon Rising. You get the sense that these two could be great friends if their circumstances were a little different. It does a great job at making you think maybe Darkstalker is just misunderstood; maybe Moon should free him from his predicament.

Then at the end of Escaping Peril comes the emotional gut punch. Darkstalker actually IS a villain. He callously admits to Moonwatcher that he used his magic to make his own father gruesomely disembowel himself. Moonwatcher is horrified and disgusted that he would do that. There is no circumstance in which something like that would ever be okay. She ends the scene awash in tears because the person she thought was her friend is a murderer and a sadist. This is good, that is a natural reaction to what she was just told.

A few hours from there, in Talons of Power, Turtle finds Moon again and she is completely cool with Darkstalker walking free, despite crying her eyes out after feeling so betrayed earlier. That may seem strange, but this is still good because later, Darkstalker’s mind control plot is discovered. This scene was obviously written to set that up, Moon is mind-controlled into forgetting that Darkstalker could do something that morally reprehensible, and thus forgives him. This is also completely in line with his characterization in Legends: Darkstalker. It’s a kind of stunt he would pull to get Clearsight to shut up about him slipping into villainy.

In my earlier post I alluded to a moment where Moon is set to narrative auto-pilot and says something so rampantly off-kilter that it does irreversible, permanent damage to her character. It happens here, in the second half of book 10. Qibli gives Moon the Darkstalker protection earring, and Moon, somehow, says “I’m not being mind-controlled, Darkstalker really is my friend.”

I get what the plot tries to do here. It’s taking this concept of mind-control and adding a nuance, in an attempt to flesh out Darkstalker and give his character depth. He is ready to control everyone in the world, but for Moon, who is his best friend in this era, he wants her to remain herself. Perhaps this is his attempt at attonement for playing with Clearsight’s mind and driving her away from him. It is very touching in a way, viewed in isolation.

Unfortunately, it does not work with the full context of all the books. Because Moon is in auto-pilot mode right now, her main character trait is “Darkstalker=Friend,” so naturally she would speak in support of him. But this revelation has devastating retroactive consequences. The earlier scene that was written with Moon under mind-control is now altered into her having been in her right mind! She is completely okay with Darkstalker’s admittance to cold-blooded torture and evisceration, within hours of being so shocked by it that it made her cry and ready to denounce him. That is such a quick turnaround it’s giving me whiplash. And what’s more it turns Moon from a principled, upstanding girl into a sociopath who casually accepts gruesome torture and murder if it is committed by someone she likes.

Did Sutherland forget about the scene two books ago, where Darkstalker’s actions were so inconceivably horrid for Moon to learn of that she started crying? It baffles me that this made it into the final version. Her saying she was never mind-controlled makes Moon come off as so awful. This torture-excusing lunatic is not the same kind-hearted and insightful character I followed in all the other books.

Kinkajou’s character derailment

The world is a sad place when I have to question the way Kinjajou is written. Fortunately she is mostly fine, despite her having the biggest excuse to act out-of-character since she’s the victim of a mind-altering spell. Her only real moment of “what!?” comes at the end.

I already talked about her role in casting the spell that regresses Darkstalker into an infant. But I didn’t mention how her being the source of it is questionable in itself.

The clue is in the first paragraph of this section: She herself has experienced the effects of invasive mind-alteration. She was cursed by Anemone in the previous book to be in love with Turtle, and kind of half-struggles kind of not with it, it’s really strange. Turtle is appropriately horrified and acts like really awful things are happening, but then it’s mostly played lightly for some reason. My assumption is that Sutherland introduced this plot point, but then realized how uncomfortable this premise really is and tried to downplay it until the story got to a point where it could get done away with.

But I think the takeaway is still supposed to be that this was a horrid thing to do (which it absolutely is), and that Kinkajou will have to spend a lot of time trying to untangle her real emotions from the fake ones the spell created.

The point is: Kinkajou knows first-hand how awful it is to do something like that to another person. Ideally she should never even conceive of the idea to cast a spell like that, but if we’re really set on this Darkstalker baby thing and it has to happen, she should at least be a bit hesitant about it. And afterwards she should struggle with the guilt of having resorted to it. Not celebrate it and be proud, like it’s funny.

The assassination of Winter’s future

Now we come to the part I’ve alluded to previously; the part where all of these threads converge to utterly destroy one character and drive him to the brink of ruin. Let’s talk about Winter.

Prince Winter is the son of Tundra and Prince Narwhal, hatching in the same clutch as his sister Icicle. He spent his formative years being unfavorably compared to said sister—who easily took to traits that Icewing royalty considers desirable—whereas Winter struggled greatly to embody those same ideals. He was just a little too kind, too merciful, too gentle. As a result he often had to endure abuse from his parents, who made him feel like he was defective.

Because he was young and didn’t have any other frame of reference, he embraced this abusive narrative and began to drive himself with a vigor unreasonable for someone of his age. He scraped and cloyed for every bit of credit he could get, obsessing over advancing up the circle rankings in an attempt to “purge” the wrongness out of himself. To make his parents as proud of him as they were of Icicle.

This never worked. He was always seen as the runt, poised to embarrass the family name. Whatever he did, no matter how hard he strived, there was always something he could have done better.

The only real source of love and affirmation in his life was his older brother, Hailstorm. Where everyone else only saw what Winter wasn’t, Hailstorm embraced his brother despite of his “failings” and was openly affectionate with him. When Winter was with him, it was okay to not think about rankings all the time, and just be himself for a bit. I assume Hailstorm fulfilled a similar role for Icicle as well, which is why both of them love him dearly, and Icicle destroys her own life to bring him back.

Winter also has a fascination with scavengers, possibly because they are small and perceived as useless, like he himself is. He likely feels a kinship with them and observes them being craftier and more adept than everyone else sees them. This is therapeutic for him, to see that a thing can have merit even if no one wants to see it.

One day, he and Hailstorm sneak into Skywing territory so Winter can catch a scavenger as a pet. This excursion turns hostile when they are discovered by a roaming Skywing troop and faced with the prospect of capture, possibly execution. In a gambit to save Winter from this fate, Hailstorm mirrors the words of his parents, calling Winter pathetic and useless, so the Skywings will not think of him as a threat and show mercy. His act succeeds in convincing the Skywings, but it also convinces Winter, who does not understand Hailstorm only said these things to save his life. He returns home—believing his brother hated him all along—to face the wrath of his furious family for losing them “the desirable son”.

For all of his life, these themes have repeated themselves and haunted him. “I was born wrong and defective,” “I am unlovable,” “No one wants me.”

A few months after the war ends, Winter is one of the five Icewings enrolled in the newly founded Jade Mountain Academy. Shortly after departing, he unexpectedly returns home, having successfully rescued his older brother and bringing him back. He is made to believe that this erases his mistakes, his mother even pays him a backhanded compliment, an uncharacteristically “nice” gesture. He is promoted to the top of the rankings, finally his parents are proud of him.

But of course it is all a trick. The “adoration” afforded to him was all a ploy. Secretly, his parents abused power and tradition to arrange for Winter’s death. They force him into a lethal trial they intentionally rigged against him, all to finally erase that stain on their family’s honor.

Winter finally realizes the true nature of his parents’ opinion of him. Even when he succeeds, and does everything right, he is still defective, unlovable, and unwanted. He will never be anything else to his family. And so he leaves his homeland, pretending he is dead, resigned to live in hiding forever.

During this time, while at the brink of despair, Winter is able to draw strength from one source: His new friends from the academy. He vocalizes that, for all the abuse he suffered at the hands of his birth family, he fervently believes that THEY would never do anything like that to him. They chose to stuck with him, even when he was awful, and told him he was not hopeless. He was not a mistake; he could be deserving of love.

So naturally, he returns to them; they accept him readily, are willing to be his new surrogate family. When he almost burns to death at a later point, they fear and weep for him. When Qibli sets out to confront his own abusive family, Winter, despite being mind-controlled into a placid potato at the time, feels concerned enough for his friend’s safety to insist to come along (returning the favor of them accompanying him in his time of need in book 7). When Darkstalker’s mind control forces Winter to attack Qibli, he is shown ashamed and guilty of it once the control wears off again.

They bicker and struggle, and make mistakes, they break up but always come back together again. Time and time again the one thing that is always reinforced: When the cards are down, Winter loves his friends, and they love him. They would never intentionally hurt each other, or give up on each other.

I want you to keep in mind how wholesome, and loving, and mutually supportive this ramshackle band of misfits has been portrayed to this point... Because we’re moving on to the arc 2 finale, and it will do everything it can to corrupt all of it and consign Winter to a life of misery.

We arrive at aforementioned scene, where Moonwatcher receives her earring. Just a little bit prior, Winter had learned that Darkstalker unleashed a magical plague onto his people in an attempt to wipe them out. Now here is Moonwatcher, revealing that she is not under any spell, and has aligned herself with this guy willingly, speaking fondly of him as if he was a dear friend who never did any wrong. Winter takes this badly and accidentally breaks a vase; the narrative lingers on this moment and really tries to sell us on how unreasonable Winter’s reaction is, how he is overreacting, but let’s examine that interpretation for a moment.

Moonwatcher doesn’t yet know about the attempted Icewing genocide, but she DOES know about Darkstalker being okay with casting spells to inflict immeasurable torture upon those he hates. WE know that she knows this, so her stance here is already suspect. Yet she goes on to praise Darkstalker and refer to him as a friend. Look at this from Winter’s perspective. This “friend” of Moonwatcher just tried to kill his entire tribe, and he actually succeeded in killing his aunt, Queen Glacier, a person Winter greatly respects. Winter is currently unable to return to his homeland for fear of being branded a traitor. Even if he could return, he knows his obstinate and spiteful family would prevent him from attending the funeral, meaning he is not even afforded the basic dignity of saying farewell to his aunt. The aunt whom Darkstalker murdered by making her vomit her own blood until she withered away in her bed. And here is Moon, absolving the person who did this to Glacier from his appalling actions, despite knowing full well what Darkstalker is capable of and choosing to look away.

I don’t know about you, but I think I can forgive the grieving, emotionally overwhelmed boy for shattering a little pottery after hearing his trusted friend—who held his hand when he was dying—say that the guy who makes people disembowel themselves and wipes out entire countries may be misunderstood and not so bad. I think I would have a similar reaction. In fact, I would never want to talk to her ever again.

There is no way I can read this scene in which Moon doesn’t come off as either an absolute lunatic, or critically stupid and callous. In fact, based on her earlier behavior I half-expect her to get over the news of the attempted Icewing massacre in a couple hours, saying “Eh, it’s kinda bad, but you just have to do these kinds of things sometimes, you know? I’m sure he had his reasons.”

Then there is the part where Qibli makes his off-color comment about how Winter’s brain could really use a good wash. I already went into how it could have worked but didn’t. But with the timing here, we’ve already had Moon spit on their friendship, so as Winter’s other closest friend, it naturally follows that Qibli also craps on his feelings.

Consider the context: Winter comes from an abusive household where his parents forcibly tried to change him away from who he was to purge the “wrongness” from him. When they betray him and he narrowly escapes their attempt on his life, he re-affirms his belief in his friends, and the knowledge that they wouldn’t treat him like that gives him the strength he needs to keep going. But now, Qibli asserts that Winter DOES need to be altered, thereby AGREEING with Winter’s abusive parents, rendering Winter’s affirmation from book 7 erroneous. Qibli WOULD treat him like that if it made Winter less “intolerable”.

Neither Moonwatcher nor Qibli ever make an attempt to repair this rift. Winter is left betrayed and alone.

Stuff happens, and the forces of the Nightwings and Icewings come to blows over Jade Mountain. With his two closest friends having written him off and his support network eroded, Winter relapses into thinking he is worthless, seeks validation in unquestioning patriotism, and realigns himself with his abusive family by throwing himself into the battle. Nobody wants him to, in fact his parents still hate him for it, but whatever. His father dies and his mother blames him for it.

Meanwhile Turtle, Anemone, and Qibli are cooking up a solution to the battle problem. They have the idea to make everyone’s minds connect in a huge empathy wave for a few moments, which I think is a pretty interesting idea for what it’s worth. But then they teleport both armies back to their homes, and the spell sweeps Winter up with them, taking him out of the rest of the finale and bringing him to the Ice Kingdom. The characters say “whoops” but aren’t further concerned with the situation. It’s all a big laugh.

Let me remind you that Winter is currently considered not welcome on Icewing territory. His family, whom he was sent back with, is extremely abusive and vindictive. His friends know this. Said parents have previously arranged for him to be killed, and are still on record as wanting him dead. His friends KNOW this. And now he is alone with them and a gaggle of other royal Icewings who all are extremely pissed off at him for ruining their sacred trial site.

It is very possible that he is being torn apart and mauled by an enraged mob right now. He could be forced into captivity and flayed. Maybe the interim regent is sentencing him to death and getting the rope ready. There is a million different horrible things that could be happening to Winter right now, while he is trapped alone with people who hate him, things his friends would be reasonably able to anticipate. And nobody is doing anything to get him out of there, to suggest bringing him back, even though it would only take a single spoken sentence to do so! They aren’t even concerned!

Then the climax happens, strawberry thing and all, and we get the coup de grâce. After all is said and done, the group decides that Winter is untrustworthy, and that they must protect the secret of Darkstalker’s fate from him, because they fear if he knew he would kill Peacemaker.

Moon, who read Winter’s mind in book 6 and reached out to him about how the “ruthless Icewing warrior” persona in his head is a facade and how she sees he has a gentle and good heart... Moon, who in book 7 finds out about Winter’s secret deal to kill Glory and STILL trusts him, who calls out his bullshit to his face because she KNOWS how kind-hearted Winter is and that he would never resort to murder... Moon who, again, held his hand while he was dying... thinks that the dragon she has reminded of his compassionate nature time and time again would kill an innocent child.

This is disgusting. Moon believing that is so far off the mark with regards to anything this group has embodied or done for any of the last 4 books, that my only conclusion can be that these are different characters. Maybe the Nightwing library collapsed on top of original Moon, and when Darkstalker magiced her back to health she came back wrong or something. I don’t know.

So after all of this, Winter is left alone. He somehow escaped from the Ice Kingdom; luckily there is a timeskip so we can just gloss over the horrible situation he was put in by his friends. He thinks about Jade Mountain. He reflects on everything that happened, how his parents never really loved him... How they hated him so much they tried to kill him... How he despaired, but found solace in his friends who loved him for who he was.... How those friends then betrayed him too and magiced him away... How they didn’t care about what happened to him... And he decides he is done. He won’t bother going back. A few people, probably Sunny, reach out to tell him he is welcome back, but he says “it wouldn’t be fair to other Icewings if an exile took up a bed”. The decision isn’t hard to make, after all there is nothing left for him there. Everyone has written him off, moved on and left him behind.

Kinkajou visits sometimes, tries to stay in touch, but that’s just how she is. Maybe the others sent her to check on whether he’s going to become troublesome. They don’t trust him. Better to keep an eye on him, he might kill the baby.

With nowhere else to go, Winter moves to Sanctuary, a place for rejects like him. I picture him standing there, at the edge of a cliff staring blankly into the distance. He is completely alone; no one wants to go near him or talk to him beyond the bare necessities. He could probably make new friends with the Talons of Peace if he tried, but there is no point. Why should someone like him have friends? It wouldn’t work. They’d just decide he is too inconvenient to be around. Sooner or later they would just tell him to leave anyway. It's better not to try, so he doesn't get hurt again.

And slowly it dawns on him. His parents had been right all along. It was never them, or the others, it was him. He is the problem. The Icewings said it, Qibli said it, Moonwatcher said it. There is just something fundamentally wrong with him.

He is defective. He is unlovable. Nobody wants him. He will never be anything, or have anyone. And so he stands at the cliff, looking over the broken vase fragments of his life... This is who he is. Prince Winter. A mistake.

And quietly, where no one knows or cares, he does the only thing he has left to do... he begins to weep.

As it is written, the tale of Winter is the story of a boy who is told he is wrong for being alive. He closes his ears and tries to keep walking forward, desperate to prove that he is not an error, that he has merit. But this book comes out and it unmistakably says that he doesn’t. He is nothing, and he deserves to have nothing.

And I just cannot accept that.

Why did this have to happen?

I think that the author was really struggling with the ending of this book. I’ve said before how much of a corner she wrote herself into with such an invincible villain. I think she came up with the strawberry idea as a solution to this problem. But as she was writing it, the characters kept fighting her. It was not a natural solution, not a decision the characters—as they were established—would ever make.

So concessions had to be made to force the issue. Established traits had to be bent slightly to make this plot work. The farther she went, the worse it got. The concessions piled up and turned into contrivances. Eventually the characters were no longer acting like themselves. Their bonds got stretched too far and some snapped. It’s a very tragic pitfall that occurs with long-running series.

I think Sutherland must have also been tired. Writing an entire book is a monumental task, and writing 6 connected ones even moreso. She also comes out with these things really quickly. Maybe she was burnt out? Maybe she wanted to be done and her attention lapsed. Maybe that’s why she forgot that Moon knew about the disemboweling. It seems reasonable to believe when you consider that the next story arc would make a relatively clean break from the problems of this arc, especially with regards to the magic system.

But I don’t know what ultimately happened, so I can only speculate. I reiterate, I bear no ill will against Sutherland for writing this. Even if I kind of hate everything about this finale, and very vocally wish it would be different, I don’t want this examination to generate (or reawaken) any hatred towards her, or to attack her personally. I understand the pain of an artist who gets trapped with something for too long and has to find the means, any means, to see it through to the end. I criticize the story, but I could never hate anyone for that.

But for me, I do not consider this half of the book as part of the story. The characters act too unnaturally for it to have happened. So to me, it didn’t. We don’t know what happened, maybe Darkstalker is still out there. Maybe they dealt with him. Maybe what actually happened is my crappy and self-indulgent rewrite of the ending which I will never show to anyone because it would be really embarrassing.

But whatever actually ended up happening, I am sure Winter never ended up at that cliff, pondering how worthless and meaningless his life was. He is currently at Jade Mountain, surrounded by friends who love him, and bickering with Qibli about the correct solution to their advanced calculus assignment that is due tomorrow.

Is there anything left to say?

Probably.

I didn’t talk about Anemone yet. You know, in the epilogue she enchants herself a bracelet that makes her “not be so mean all the time”. I find that creepy. To me it reads as Anemone voluntarily brainwashing herself with magic to erase her negative traits instead of growing past them naturally because she finds them undesirable and wants to work to change for the better. I would ordinarily assume that this is an overreaction on my part, and I’m just reading the scene wrong. But no, we just got through a part where the heroes brainwashing someone is treated as an unequivocal good and worthy of celebration, so I think my reading may actually be spot on. Why are we letting the little kid alter her own brain without supervision? Hello? Tsunami? Someone intervene maybe? This cannot be healthy.

Turtle stands out to me as the one bright spot in all of this. He (and Peril, but she’s mostly out of focus) remain as the only main characters of this arc who don’t have any mind-boggling out-of-character moments or sudden streaks of uncharacteristic callousness. I really like the part where Qibli goes to free Turtle from his captivity and plans to give him an earful about the comically unhelpful messages he’s been sending him. But when Turtle asks if what he did was helpful, Qibli sees how beaten down and exhausted Turtle is, and wordlessly drops his frustration to tell him “Yeah, they were helpful.” That is the true Qibli shining through for a moment, showing that he cares about the well-being of his friends.

Do I hate the pairing of Qibli/Moonwatcher? No. Well, I DO hate how it happened in the book, and how the story tried to assassinate Winter’s character to resolve the love triangle and make it happen. I don’t hate it on principle though. If you are a fan of Qibli/Moonwatcher and want to write fanfics about it, please do! I absolutely encourage you to do that! Maybe you can fix this mess and turn it into something that’s actually properly handled!

Mightyclaws keeps the power that Darkstalker granted him past the finale. That means all the spells that Darkstalker cast are technically still active. Does that mean the Icewings have to wear earrings for the rest of their lives? Do they get sick again if they take them off? Is Peril forever cursed to think of Darkstalker as a cool old uncle and has to somehow reconcile how everyone else thinks of him? How did the Nightwings relinquishing their powers work, do they have to wear the earrings forever too now?

And there is one more thing to mention.

My confession

You may have already intuited this, if you’ve been following the content of my blog. It is very heavily skewed towards the first and second arcs of the series. I would now like to confess something.

When I read the second half of book 10, I found it so disillusioning, Winter’s fate so upsetting... that I put down the series then and there. And I haven’t picked it back up since.

That’s right, I have not read arc 3. I don’t know if that makes me a fake fan. I know pretty much everything that happens in it, the controversial twist at the end, Pyrrhia coming back into the story later, Snowfall getting brainwashed by a piece of jewelry until she cares about a plot that had nothing to do with her or the fate of the Icewings, etc..

It’s not out of malice, or because it’s a new continent. The opposite in fact; I would have greatly prefered a clean break with a new setting—Bug-themed dragons in a slightly more contemporary, developed environment sounds fascinating and full of potential. I don’t hate Pantala or the new characters.

I just... I can’t really do this again. I can’t handle the thought of Pyrrhia coming back post-Darkstalker, with Winter showing up and talking to these guys again like nothing happened, seeming like a different person, joking around with them like his entire character wasn’t dragged through a mountain of manure to make the plot bend a certain way. I think as long as this is the ending that the story is continuing from, seeing that would just make me miserable.

Maybe I will just stay in the parts of the story that I fell in love with. And imagine a version of reality in which Pantala is allowed to exist on its own, where Swordtail was the fourth POV character of arc 3, where Queen Wasp stayed the villain throughout, and Snowfall got her own legends book about how she reformed Icewing society and fixed all the shit that poisoned Winter’s life, so future generations don’t have to suffer through the same stuff he did.

~~~~~

If you’re still with me, thank you for reading this far. I think this is everything I ever thought about the finale of the second story arc, so now I never have to talk about it again. Writing this was difficult. I found it crushing at times. This will probably stand as the only overtly negative post I have ever made on this blog. I love Wings of Fire, and I want to celebrate it. To add to it, not tear it down.

I hope this wasn’t too boring, or painful, or frustrating, or soul-crushing to read through. I’ll see you later, hopefully with a more constructive post.

[httpvomitello]

Call of Distraction *⁠.⁠✧

Donnie / Leo / Mikey

Raph was in the middle of lifting weights in the lair when April’s phone rang. She looked at the screen and grinned.

“It’s (Y/N),” she said, raising an eyebrow at Raph.

He looked over, feigning disinterest as he kept lifting, but April caught the tiny smile tugging at the corner of his mouth. “Whatever, put her on speaker,” he muttered, trying to act casual.

April rolled her eyes but tapped the button, and your voice filled the room. “April! Please tell me you’re free. I’m drowning over here, and I could really use a break from staring at this ridiculous amount of work.”

“Rough day, huh?” April replied, stifling a smile as she noticed Raph trying not to react.

“Oh, you have no idea. I’ve been buried in paperwork for hours,” you sighed dramatically. “I think my brain is starting to leak out of my ears.”

Raph couldn’t resist. “Sounds like someone’s got a low tolerance for hard work,” he grumbled, loud enough for you to hear but keeping his eyes on his weights.

“Oh, is that Raph?” you shot back. “I thought I heard someone grumbling from the peanut gallery. How’s it going, Big Red?”

He rolled his eyes, though he couldn’t help but smirk. “Better than you, apparently. If I had a dollar for every time you called to complain about work, I’d be a millionaire.”

“Yeah? Well, if I had a dollar for every time you were a pain in the ass, I’d be right there with you,” you quipped back.

Mikey, watching from across the room, snickered and whispered to Donnie, “They’re like an old married couple. Look at him tryin’ to keep cool.”

Raph shot his brothers a warning glare before replying to you. “Hey, I’m just saying, maybe if you stopped yappin’ and started working, you wouldn’t be ‘drowning’ all the time.”

“Aw, Raph, I didn’t know you cared so much about my productivity,” you replied sweetly, dripping with sarcasm. “You sound just like a concerned parent.”

April covered her mouth to hide her laughter, watching as Raph’s face turned slightly pink. “I ain’t concerned,” he grumbled, barely able to mask his smile. “Just pointing out that maybe whining about it won’t get the job done.”

“Fair point,” you shot back, tone playful. “But, hey, maybe if you actually visited once in a while, you’d see that I don’t just sit around whining. Not that you’d have the guts to come out of that sewer.”

“Oh, you think I wouldn’t?” he replied, straightening up and putting down his weights. “I’d show up anytime if it meant shutting you up for five minutes.”

“Bet you wouldn’t last five minutes around here without getting bored out of your mind,” you countered, clearly entertained.

“Oh yeah?” he shot back, his voice a mix of irritation and amusement. “Bet I’d get you to quiet down faster than you think.”

“Bring it on, then,” you challenged, laughing. “I’d love to see you try.”

“Alright, alright,” April interjected, clearly enjoying the exchange but finally deciding to step in. “Before this escalates into a full-on fight, maybe we should end the call?”

“Wait, wait!” you cut in. “Raph, come over next time me and April hang out. You know how much I love pushing your buttons.”

Raph froze, his brothers all looking at him with wide grins, barely containing their laughter.

“Uh—" Raph stammered, scratching the back of his neck as he tried to keep his cool, but a blush was definitely creeping in. “Well… maybe you just think you’re good at it. Doesn’t mean I’d let you win.”

“Oh, trust me,” you replied smoothly, “I’d win. Easy.”

Raph was about to reply, but April, stifling her laughter, ended the call before he could get another word in. The moment she hung up, his brothers lost it, laughing hysterically at his barely-concealed fluster.

“Aw, come on, Raph!” Mikey teased, clapping him on the back. “She’s got you wrapped around her little finger.”

Raph shrugged it off, though his ears were definitely still pink. “Shut it, Mikey. She’s just—she’s just annoying, that’s all.”

Donnie smirked, raising an eyebrow. “Sure. And that’s why you haven’t missed a single chance to throw in a comeback, right?”

Raph just grumbled, pretending not to care as he picked his weights back up. But deep down, he was already hoping you’d call again soon—if only so he could have the last word.

[slu7formen]

Girl first of all I want to say that I'm OBSESSED with your writing I love it.

Second of all I would like to make a request about Luke so hear me out.

Luke and reader were in a relationship before he betrayed camp and they were head over heals for each other and then he stole the bolt and when Percy discovers he's the thief the reader is there feeling betrayed and specially heartbroken even though Luke ask her to go with him but she doesn't accept it because she's so loyal to camp and her friends.

Time passed and even if she wants to hate Luke she loves him more than anything. And Luke loves her too so instead of asking Annabeth to escape with him he asks reader and she accepts.

I want to see everything in here fluff, angst, everything you think about.

I hope you like this request and make it real for me because I've been having this idea for over a week.

Okay but I feel so bad ‘cause I totally forgot I had this story FULLY WRITTEN and READY to be published (‘cause I LOVED it), I’m so sorry angel, made you wait a lot more than just a week 🥺, but thanks for reading my stories <3

MDNI. luke castellan x fem!reader

warnings: luke´s a traitor, betrayal, use of yn, swearing, kinda angst (?, KISSING, lil book spoiler

₊˚⊹♡

The crackle and pop of the bonfire filled the air, a comforting contrast to the vibrant bursts of color exploding overhead. The annual fireworks display was in full swing, casting shadows on the faces of your friends huddled around the warm flames. It was a picture of peace, a moment of respite amidst the constant threat of monsters demigod drama.

You stole a glance at the empty space beside you. Luke, your boyfriend, had told you he'd just be back in a minute. A few minutes had turned into an eternity, but you chalked it up to his usual impulsiveness. He'd be back any minute, with his signature smile and an arm wrapped around you.

You knew it.

From the moment you met, you and Luke had been inseparable. You were his confidante, his anchor in the chaos of being a demigod and his messy life. He was your rock, always there to make you laugh, to understand the weight of your heritage in a way no one else could.

The warmth of the fire danced on your skin, but a shiver snaked down your spine. Something felt off. The chatter of your friends seemed muted, replaced by a dull ache in your chest. You couldn’t deny the way you noticed how Luke has been acting lately. So weird and distant towards you the last couple days. You loved him, fiercely and unconditionally. You'd been there for him through thick and thin, especially after his quest left a jagged scar across his cheek and a hollowness in his eyes.

But then he suddenly just, snapped.

A memory surfaced in you , sharp and unwelcome. It had been months ago, a conversation in the darkness of his cabin in a particular cold night. Luke, his eyes filled with a desperate fervor, had confessed his anger towards the gods, his belief that they were cruel and neglectful parents. He'd spoken of tricking the Olympians, joining forces with the Titans to fight for a better life for all demigods.

The anger in his voice, the glint of rebellion in his eyes, had scared you. The scar on his face, a reminder of his failed quest, seemed to burn brighter that night.

You understood his anger. The gods were far from perfect, their neglect and cruelty evident in countless demigod lives. He'd begged you to join him, his voice filled with a desperate hope. But you'd refused, your loyalty to Camp Half-Blood and your friends unwavering. You had spent hours talking him through it as you held his hand, reminding him of all the good the gods had done, no matter how flawed they might be. He'd looked lost at the time, seeking comfort in your touch. You'd thought you'd reached him, extinguished that spark of rebellion.

You really believed that conversation was long forgotten. But there was a reason why you remembered it.

Some movement at the edge of the woods caught your eye. But it wasn't the boy you were expecting. Percy, his face pale and etched with worry, practically stumbled into the fireplace, his chest heaving and his grip tight on Riptide.

A pang of concern shot through you. "Percy?" you called out, concern lacing your voice. You pushed yourself off the ground, walking towards him. "What happened? Where's Luke?"

Percy hesitated, his eyes filled with a storm of emotions. Shit, should he tell you? His silence was a hammer blow to your gut. You knew, with a chilling certainty, that something was terribly wrong.

"What?" you choked out, the question barely a whisper, expecting some kind of answer from the blonde boy, but nothing came from his trembling lips. The air felt dense, with a truth you desperately wanted to deny. You saw Luke getting into the woods with Percy, you saw it. And now, he was nowhere to be seen.

Then, it clicked. A cold, horrifying truth began to dawn on you.

He lied.

Without a word, you pushed Percy aside and started running, towards the woods. Your heart hammered against your ribs, like a trapped bird desperate to escape. You plunged into the darkness of the forest, the path you'd walked countless times with Luke now leading you into the unknown.

"Luke!" you screamed, your voice raw with anger and despair. You wove through the trees, the undergrowth tearing at your camp shirt, but you didn't care. You had to find him, to confront him, to understand why he'd chosen this path, if he chose it, why he'd lied to you.

But with each passing minute, hope crashed over you. The forest grew denser, the silence broken only by the rustle of leaves and the frantic beat of your own heart. There was no sign of Luke, no echo of his footsteps, no smell, no sense of his presence, only the chilling truth hanging heavy in the air.

He was gone.

He had left.

You sank to your knees, the weight of betrayal crushing you as the first tears you ever cried for Luke Castellan, started to fall. The man you loved, the person you'd trusted with your life, had chosen darkness over everything you held dear. He had chosen Kronos over you.

Grief, a cold and relentless serpent, coiled around your heart. And that feeling never seemed to leave.

The year that followed was a blur of sadness and a desperate attempt at normalcy. The silence from Luke was deafening. Not a single Iris-message, not a single sign of the one who once, was your boyfriend.

You knew you wouldn´t be able to return to Camp, at least not for now. Every corner held a ghost of Luke's smile, every sword clang a reminder of his battles and his betrayal. Your friends, the true ones, bless their hearts, tried everything to cheer you up from a distance, but their efforts felt like trying to pick up the pieces of a broken glass in the sea.

You opted to stay home that summer. But even there, away from the prying eyes and hushed whispers, escape from Luke's betrayal seemed impossible. Messages and news found you no matter where you hid. News of Luke leading a rogue army aboard a stolen cruise ship, rumors of him serving as Kronos's right hand while the Titan slumbered – it all reached your ears.

The nights were the worst. The darkness mirrored the hollowness within you. Tears would stain your pillow as you relived the events leading up to his betrayal. You once seemed to dream about seeing him again, and now you only screamed when you saw his face in your nightmares.

The memory of his touch, the warmth of his smile, the nights you spent loving each other with the sheets tangling in your legs, all felt like cruel illusions now. Yet, a part of you, a stubborn, illogical part, still clung to the love you once shared.

And Gods, did you try to keep yourself as busy as possible. You threw yourself into your studies and little courses here and there, seeking solace in facts and logic. You even began working, a boring but well payed summer job. Yet, the pain lingered, a dull ache that refused to subside.

The more you tried to banish these visions, the more vivid they became. You missed him like a starving man craved a feast, a yearning that gnawed at your insides and threatened to consume you. Frustration gnawed at you. How could you still love someone who'd betrayed you so utterly? How could your heart still ache for a man who chose war over you? The questions echoed endlessly within you, a relentless chorus fueling your self-conscious.

How could you be so weak?

These consuming questions were your companions for a whole year. But as the second summer after Luke's betrayal rolled around, a shift occurred within you. The raw, agonizing pain began to dull, replaced by a quiet resolve.

Finally, you decided it was time to take back control again. Camp Half-Blood called, a familiar haven among the storm. You returned a changed person. The vibrant smile that once adorned your face was a ghost, replaced by a guarded expression that spoke about the pain you harbored in silence. The camp's familiar energy felt hollow, a constant reminder of the happiness you'd lost.

Training became your sole solace. You'd disappear into the arena for hours, your celestial bronze sword a blur as you cleaved through training dummies, each swing fueled by a potent cocktail of grief and anger.

Exhaustion became your closest companion too. You pushed yourself to the limits of your endurance, hoping to find oblivion at the bottom of an empty fuel tank. But sleep, when it finally came, offered no escape. You'd dream of him, leading his army of rogue demigods, his eyes filled with a fanatical zeal that chilled you to the bone. And in those dreams, you'd see yourself, standing beside him, not out of loyalty to his cause, but out of a desperate yearning for the boy you once loved, still love.

In the quiet moments, when your friends weren't around, the dam would break. You'd collapse onto your cool and empty bed, tears streaming down your face, a raw, primal sob escaping your lips. The memory of Luke was no joy anymore, it haunted you like a specter.

You hated yourself for the traitorous flicker in your heart, the desperate, illogical yearning for him. It wasn't the war that tempted you; it was him.

You hated how much you missed him.

The scent of rain clung to the humid night air and to you like a second skin as you zipped up your duffel bag. Another summer at Camp Half-Blood loomed, promising a bittersweet mix of nostalgia and pain, but more training. The worst was yet to come, so you needed to be ready.

New York City, with its cacophony of car horns and the anonymity of millions, had become your refuge these past few months. In Manhattan, the memories of Luke seemed to hold less power for some weird reason, their edges dulling with the passage of time. You'd spent the past months in this tiny apartment, the silence deafening compared to the constant hum of life at camp.

Just then, a sharp rap on the door shattered the silence of your apartment. It was past midnight, an unusual time for visitors.

Adrenaline surged through you. Months of living fully alone had honed your senses. You'd become acutely aware of the city's underbelly – the flickering shadows that could hide monsters thanks to the ever-present mist. You'd seen them stalking the streets, stalking you, their true forms hidden to them mortals, an unsettling feeling crawling up your spine whenever their paths crossed yours. They never attacked, but their chilling presence followed you like a phantom.

Grabbing your necklace, you asked, "Yes?"

Silence. You weren't taking any chances. Pulling down at the pendant once, the necklace morphed into your celestial bronze dagger.

You took a step, two. Could it really be a monster? Could it really be some creature trying to get to you, by knocking on the door? With a shaky breath, you cracked the door open just enough to peek through the gap, hiding the dagger behind your back.

The sight that greeted you stole the air from your lungs.

Standing on your doorstep, bathed in the harsh glow of the hallway light, was Luke. His dark hair was windswept, his face etched with a gauntness that hadn't been there before, but his eyes – those were the same eyes that had haunted your dreams for months. They held a desperate plea, a flicker of the boy you once loved struggling to break through the hardened shell of the man he'd become.

“Luke?”

The silence stretched between you, thick with unspoken words and a tangled web of emotions. Time seemed to warp in that hallway, a single moment stretched into an eternity. Luke looked different, yes. The carefree boy you knew had been replaced by a man hardened by experience, his features etched with lines that spoke of battles fought and burdens carried. But his eyes, those brown eyes that had once held a mischievous twinkle, now held a deeper sadness that mirrored your own.

"Hi" Luke finally said, his voice raspy.

You stood speechless, the dagger still clutched tightly in your hand. Years of longing warred with the fresh wounds of betrayal. You wanted to scream at him, to unleash the torrent of hurt and anger that suddenly washed over you. But something held you back, a flicker of curiosity, maybe.

"Um, can I come in?" he continued, his posture pleading despite his attempt at nonchalance.

Jesus. Was that all he had to say? After everything, after what he did, all he could muster was a request to enter your apartment? A tide of anger threatened to drown you. Did he not understand the gravity of what he'd done? Did he not realize the pain he'd caused? But you forced your thoughts down. You weren't a child anymore, throwing tantrums wouldn't solve anything.

"Are you armed?" you asked, your voice flat, devoid of any warmth.

Luke flinched at your question, a flicker of pain crossing his features. "You think I wanna hurt you?" he countered, his tone defensive.

"Last time I saw you," you spat back, your voice laced with bitterness, "was three years ago, and I know your little monsters are keeping an eye on me. The first thing I'm supposed to think about is whether you want to hurt me or not."

He sighed, a long, weary exhale. Unzipping his jacket, he turned slowly, patting down his pockets before turning back to you. His eyes, once alive with mischief and love, were now filled with a desperate sincerity. "See? No weapons. Just me."

You studied him, a battle raging within you. One part of you wanted to slam the door, to let him know that he wasn't welcome. Yet, another part, a smaller, more vulnerable part, couldn't help but cling to the flicker of hope that flickered amongst the ashes of your love.

Finally, after what seemed like an eternity, you stepped aside, allowing a sliver of space for him to enter. "Fine" you said, your voice devoid of warmth. "But you better have a good reason to come here"

Luke hesitated for a beat before stepping inside. He closed the door softly behind him, the sound echoing through the tense silence. He stood there awkwardly with his hands in his pockets, his eyes scanning the room, landing finally on the packed bags besides the tv.

"You're heading back to camp?" he asked.

You flipped the dagger in your hand, and the celestial bronze morphed back into the golden necklace. "What do you want?" you repeated, your voice still sharp, a shield against the emotions swirling within you.

Luke stood awkwardly in the doorway, the once carefree boy replaced by a man burdened by the weight of his choices. His leather jacket seemed to hang heavy on his broad shoulders.

"I…" he started, then stopped, seemingly unsure how to proceed. He cleared his throat, the sound scratchy and unfamiliar. "You look different" he finally managed, the words tumbling out awkwardly.

You scoffed, a humorless sound that surprised even you.

"Look, yn" he finally managed, his voice barely above a whisper, "I wanna talk, okay? I know what I did was wrong. I know I hurt you."

You rolled your eyes, crossing your arms over your chest. "You could say that again."

His fingers twitched at your bitterness, but pressed on. "I came here because..." He hesitated again, seemingly wrestling with an inner turmoil. "Because I-"

Frustration bubbled up within you. This cryptic approach, this lack of honesty, it was infuriating. "Because you what, Luke?" you demanded, your voice laced with a sharp edge. "Because you decided to grace me with your presence after leading a rebellion against the gods? Or maybe because you just wanted to see if I'm still waiting for you?"

You watched his face harden, the vulnerability replaced by a familiar defiance.

"Don't twist this" he snapped, his voice firm. "I came here because..." He took a deep breath, his eyes locking with yours. "Because I miss you, yn. I miss us."

The air crackled with a tension so thick you could almost taste it.

You took a slow step towards him, then another. He took notes of yourself as you did. The way you had grown internally was so intense that he could sense it everywhere. He might have betrayed you, but that only helped you get on your feet stronger, grow stronger. Become the warrior he always knew you were.

Then, in a move as instinctive as it was fierce, your hand lashed out. The slap connected with a stinging crack, the sound echoing through the apartment like a thunderclap. Luke's head snapped to the side, a crimson handprint blooming on his cheek. Shame flickered in his eyes as he scoffed, quickly replaced by a dull acceptance.

He deserved it, that much was clear.

"How dare you?” you spat, your voice shaking with barely controlled fury, "How fucking dare you come back here after what you've done? After leading a rebellion against the gods, after putting everyone we care about at risk? After betraying me?"

Luke took a shaky breath, running a hand over the burning mark on his face. "I'm sorry” he said, his voice low and ragged. "I'm so sorry. I know I hurt you, and I know a simple apology won't erase the pain or fix things. But you have to believe me, I never meant for things to get this bad"

He stepped towards you, his hands outstretched in a placating gesture, but you flinched back, the space between you a tangible barrier. "Don't touch me" you warned, your voice laced with ice.

He lowered his hands, his shoulders slumping in defeat.

“I know you hate me for what I´ve done. For joining Kronos, I-“

"You think this is all about Kronos?" you cut him off, your voice shaking with barely contained fury. "You think the reason my heart has been broken these past years is because you joined a fucking Titan?"

Luke remained silent, the weight of your words pressing down on him like a collapsing mountain. He knew better.

"This is about what you did to me, Luke" you choked out, tears welling in your eyes. "I was with you, all the time. I was your girlfriend! And you betrayed me. You left me alone” your voice broke so hard that you had to take a second to swallow the big gulp that was forming in your throat. “Everyone at camp looked at me after what you did," you choked out. "They either felt sorry for me, or they insulted me, saying that I was still loyal to you, that I was a traitor."

You closed your eyes for a moment, the pain etched on your face a stark reminder of the devastation he'd wrought. "You were the most important person in my life" you cried, your voice raw and vulnerable. "But you? You let Kronos fill your head with empty promises, and just like that, you forgot about us."

The truth felt like a bitter pill to swallow. He opened his mouth to speak.

"I asked you to come with me" he finally whispered, his voice thick with regret. "I gave you the chance to leave with me."

"And even after I said no," you countered, your voice trembling like the finger that was now pointing at his chest, "you still left. You threw me away like shit. And do you know what the worst part is?" Tears streamed down your face, tracing a path through the dust of old heartache. "That as much as I try, I can't seem to hate you."

A sob escaped your lips, shattering the fragile dam you'd built around your emotions. "I still love you, Luke" you confessed. "Even though it's a love that fills me with pain, it's still there. I hate myself because I dream about you, about the way things used to be. But when I don't, I feel like a piece of me is missing."

You looked up at him, your eyes brimming with tears and a raw vulnerability that left Luke speechless.

What had he done?

"I hate myself because I can't help but pray for your safety, even though you never seemed to care about mine. I hate myself because even after everything, I still love you, Luke."

Your heart felt like a shattered kaleidoscope, a million shards of love, anger, and pain reflecting back at you in a distorted reality. You walked and sank onto the couch, burying your face in your hands as sobs racked your body.

Luke, his heart heavy with a remorse sharper than any weapon, watched you crumble. The carefree girl he fell in love with was gone, replaced by a woman etched with the scars of his own actions. Hesitantly, he reached out, placing a hand on your back as he sat down next to you, a gesture of comfort that felt more like a branding iron on his guilt.

"yn” he whispered, his voice thick with emotion, "I still love you too."

You didn't respond, the sobs coming in ragged gasps as your body struggled to contain the storm within.

"I know I left you" he continued, his voice cracking slightly. "And you didn't deserve it. But… I was so lost, so angry. Kronos promised me power, a solution to all the problems I saw. He convinced me that Olympus was corrupt, that the gods didn't care about half-bloods like us. And when you said no, he-, he told me to leave you behind, said that it would be easier for everyone…"

His voice trailed off. Easier for who? Easier for him, perhaps, to sever the ties that bound him, to plunge headfirst into a rebellion fueled by manipulated ideals.

"But it wasn't" he choked out, a tear escaping his eye, carving a glistening path down his cheek. "Every day, every step I took… it was a constant reminder of what I'd lost. The guilt was eating me alive, yn, you have to believe me”. His hands desperately reached for yours, trying to get your fingers to intertwine by placing his over yours.

Tears welled up in his own eyes. "I regret everything. I mean it. I don't want to do this anymore."

You finally lifted your head, your eyes red-rimmed and brimming with unshed tears. Luke looked different to you now, the bravado and arrogance gone, replaced by a vulnerability that mirrored your own.

"Don't want to do what?" you asked, your voice hoarse.

"This” he gestured vaguely to himself, but you didn’t quite catch it. "Following Kronos. Helping him rise to power. It's wrong. I can see that now."

“Little late to that, isn’t it?” you blurted out.

He took a deep breath, his expression resolute. "yn, there's a reason I came to you. A reason I risked Kronos' trust in me." He paused, his voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper. "Kronos wants me to become his host."

And the world seemed to suddenly stop. You stared at him, the weight of his words sinking in. Your mind raced, trying to process what he had just said. Luke, your Luke, becoming a vessel for the monstrous Titan?

"What?" you croaked, fear coating your voice like frost. Your eyes darted around, searching for a way out, a solution, anything. But Luke wouldn't meet your gaze, his jaw clenched tight, a storm of emotions brewing beneath the surface. "No. No, he can't. It's not possible."

The thought of him, Luke, being consumed by Kronos, twisted your insides into knots.

Luke, however, seemed to gather his resolve. "Yes, it is" he said, his voice low and strained. "There are things you don't know, yn. Things I've done."

A cold dread gripped your stomach, a physical manifestation of the terror that clawed at your insides. Your mind raced, desperate for answers. "Then tell me" you only managed to say. "Luke, what have you done?"

He hesitated, looking around as if afraid someone might be listening. "There's no time now" he finally said, his voice tight with urgency. "But I promise I will explain everything. That's not why I'm here."

Taking a deep breath, he dared to reach out, his hand gently grasping yours, finally. The warmth of his touch sent a jolt through you, a stark contrast to the chilling fear that gripped you.

He called your name, his voice softening. "Come with me" he said.

You only feel capable of frowning your brows in confusion. "Go where?" you asked, your voice wary.

"Anywhere" he said, like a plea. "Let's run away, together. It can be just you and me again"

He leaned closer, the air around him crackling with a tension that mirrored the storm within you. As his forehead rested against yours, a jolt of electricity shot through you. It was a familiar warmth, a spark that had ignited countless stolen kisses and whispered secrets back when your world wasn't teetering on the brink of war. His other hand cupped your cheek, the touch a stark contrast to the turmoil raging inside you. His hand, usually warm and comforting, felt cool against your burning skin, a physical reminder of the distance that had grown between you. Yet, despite the chill, a wave of longing washed over you, a yearning for the simple comfort of his touch.

But reason tugged at you, a voice of caution in the midst of the storm. "But Luke," you stammered, pulling away slightly, "If you escape, Kronos will come for you. He'll come for us, and-,"

"I don't care" he interrupted, his voice resolute, yet laced with a tremor that betrayed his bravado. It was as if he was on the precipice, teetering between defiance and the vulnerability of a man on the verge of breaking. "I'll fight everything that comes for us. And if the war happens... I'll fight. I'll fight for everyone, I’ll fight for you. I'm not losing you again, yn."

His words resonated deep within you, a desperate echo of the love you still harbored for him, a love you thought you'd buried beneath layers of anger and sadness. You saw the fear in his eyes, a fear that you sadly shared, but beneath it, a flicker of something else – a raw, desperate hope. And as you looked at him, a wave of relief washed over you.

The relief of knowing he wasn't entirely lost, that a part of the Luke you loved still existed.

"I love you" he confessed again, his voice trembling.

Looking into his eyes, a storm of emotions swirling within them, the truth resonated with you. "I love you too" you whispered, the words tumbling from your lips like a long-awaited confession.

The world did indeed, stop. The rain, a relentless symphony against the window pane, faded into a distant murmur. The thunders became a muffled echo. In that moment, the only reality was the space between you and Luke, charged with the unspoken electricity of your confessions.

He leaned in further, a hesitant question in his eyes. A flicker of fear danced in their depths, a scared boy seeking forgiveness beneath the warrior's facade. You watched him, a bittersweet ache blooming in your chest.

With a sigh that trembled on your lips, you closed the distance. Your lips met in a hesitant touch, a tentative exploration of a forgotten familiarity. Three years of longing, of unspoken words and simmering emotions, poured into that kiss. It was sweeter than you'd dared to imagine, a warmth that spread from your lips and drizzled down your chest.

Unlike the passionate encounters of your past, this felt different; like kissing him for the first time. Luke's lips moved against yours with a reverence that sent shivers down your spine. He held back, his desperate desire tempered with a respect that surprised you. You knew him.

But then, you yielded. Your lips parted, a silent invitation, and his tongue met yours in a dance as old as time. A full, heavy and angry thunderclap erupted outside, a jarring contrast to the intimacy unfolding on the couch. But you paid it no mind, lost in the whirlpool of rediscovered affection.

Your arms encircled his neck, a desperate hold. He, in turn, cupped your waist, his touch lingering on the curve of your hip as he gently lowered you onto the soft cushion. His body hovered above yours. His lips, however, remained glued to yours, a relentless exploration that spoke of a love both fierce and fragile.

The kiss deepened, a slow burn that threatened to consume you both. You felt the familiar rhythm of his heart against yours, a counterpoint to the frantic beat of your own. It was a melody of second chances, of unspoken apologies and nascent hope.

His hand trailed down your back, teasingly brushing under your shirt, sending shivers dancing across your skin. You arched into his touch, a wordless plea for more. But just then, he pulled away, his breath ragged, his eyes a storm of conflicting emotions.

His voice, a husky murmur against your skin, sent shivers down your spine. "I missed this so much," he whispered, his lips trailing down the delicate column of your neck and the dip of your collarbone. His warm breath mingled with your own, a heady mix of emotions swirling around you.

Your fingers tangled in his hair, the familiar texture a stark reminder of the past you both desperately clung to. He reached for your pulse, slowly sucking in before letting it pop.

"I wanted to feel you every night" he confessed. "Every night, I dreamt of you." His words were a stark contrast to the cold, distant Luke you saw in your dreams, the only vivid memory you’ve had of him the past years.

"Luke" you whispered, your voice barely audible as you tried to speak.

He didn't stop. His hand drifted down your torso, his fingers brushing against the exposed skin of your lower tummy. Every touch felt like a brand, a searing reminder of what you had lost and the uncertainty that lay ahead.

"It was a mistake" he said, his voice thick with regret. "A big, fucking mistake. Leaving you, betraying you-, it was the biggest mistake of my life. My life doesn't make any sense without you."

With a strangled sound, Luke deepened the kiss, his lips moving against yours with a desperation that mirrored your own. You clung to him, a drowning sailor grasping at a lifeline. The scent of leather that clung to him was intoxicating, a familiar anchor in this storm of emotions.

"Luke" you managed to gasp between kisses, a flicker of reason breaking through the haze of desire. You needed more than just words, needed a binding promise, something concrete to hold onto if you were to take this leap of faith.

He stared at you, his eyes a storm of emotions – desire, confusion, and a flicker of something that might have been annoyance. But before he could respond, you pressed on.

"Swear on it, Luke" you whispered, your voice trembling slightly. "Swear on the River Styx” you repeat. Luke’s eyes dart back and forth, from your lips, to your eyes, to filling up with confusion. “I’m not-,” you cut yourself off as you feel your eyes filling with tears again. You bit your tongue before speaking, “I’m not letting you hurt me like this again"

You knew it was selfish, a desperate attempt to safeguard your heart. But Luke was here, finally, after all this time. You craved the warmth of his touch, the comfort of his presence. The thought of letting him go again, of enduring another betrayal, was unbearable. Yet, a part of you, still scarred from the past, craved a guarantee, an oath sworn on the most powerful river in the Underworld. It was dangerous, yes, but did you care?

Did he care?

Luke's expression hardened. The River Styx, held a weight that couldn't be ignored. The river he already bathed himself in. It was a binding vow, a promise etched in the very fabric of existence.

He looked at you, his eyes searching yours for a flicker of doubt, a hint of manipulation. But all he saw was the vulnerability, the fear – a vulnerability born from the scars he himself had inflicted.

"I swear on the River Styx" he said, his voice low and solemn, each word heavy with the weight of the oath. "I swear I won’t ever leave you. I swear I love you. I swear I'll fight for you, for us, with every breath in my lungs."

[echobx]

Twin Flame 2 - pervy!bsf!JJ × pervy!bsf!fem!reader

summary: y/n is indecisive about what she wants and tries to blame JJ

word count: 2.3k

warnings: bratty!reader, angsty feels for JJ, miscommunication ig, lying (to the pogues), smut, talk of mutual masturbation, p in v (unprotected), backshots, orgasm denial

author's note: as promised here's part 2 and bc I couldn't fit all of what I needed in here, I'm gonna do a 3rd one on top... what can I say, I'm a sucker for this man

series masterlist ♡ part 1

   Exchanging used underwear in secrecy. That's the best way you could describe the “situation” you had with JJ. 

   You hadn't really managed to do much that first day, not wanting to get caught by your friends and having to explain it all. Maybe you were both more scared of their judgment for how you two acted than for breaking the rules. They were stupid rules anyway, not holding up any weight anymore after the group finally consisted of two couples, Kiara and whatever it was that JJ and you would maybe, possibly, potentially become. 

   You weren't sure if you wanted more than just hanging out that ended with his fingers up your cunt and yours wrapped around his dick. An occasional make out session if needed, but you weren't picky about it. 

   It wasn't the classic get up. No secret love, at least you told yourself that, because you didn't even know what love was supposed to feel like, never having felt it. You just knew that kissing JJ made your head spin, and you felt nauseous afterward. But not in a sick way, not like when you did after drinking one too many stale beers. No, it was more like your stomach wanted to turn itself inside out and the feeling could only be remedied by his touch, by the feel of his lips pressed against you. 

   There were silent boundaries that JJ wasn't about to cross without asking first, either, but he was also too afraid to pose the question. He looked at you with wonder, more so now than ever before, and maybe that’s why it was so difficult. Before the “agreement” he could make jokes about you sucking him off instead of paying for your weed. Or him going down on you for a pack of cold ones. 

   However, that ease had shifted drastically with the moment you had pulled him into the spare room that day. From then on his whole body was only craving one thing, to hear you try to stay quiet for him and to feel your soft touch around his cock; to watch you watch him as he licked his fingers, cleaning off the last drops of your cum; and maybe even more so, to watch you do the same with him. 

   Head and hand were close enough alphabetically for him already, so it didn't make sense to him why he had such a hard time asking for more from you, and granting it in return. 

   “My parents aren't home this weekend,” you told him while getting dressed, pulling your skirt up but leaving your slip lying damp on his bed. 

   “Is that an invitation?” JJ cocked his brow, and you tilted your head to the side. 

   “Sometimes I think you’re scared of coming inside.” The double entendre didn't get lost on him. 

   “I just mean, we've never done that, is all,” he shrugged. 

   “You've been in my room more times than I can count.” 

   “Not like that,” he shook his head two times, exhaling loudly before getting up and picking up a fresh pair of underwear to put on. 

   “Maybe if you had asked earlier,” you shrugged. 

   “Are we still just talking about the room?” 

   “I don't know, JJ, are we?” you huffed, picking up your purse and walking out on him. 

   Your demeanor had become increasingly harder to read for him, and your growing usage of quips and sarcasm, as well as words he had to look up, wasn't helping either. He knew it was just who you are, not your intention to confuse him more. Yet it didn't help much. 

   The next day, he tried his best to not gaze at you, instead keeping his eyes pinned to the ground to not get lost again. He got lost more and more these days. Thinking about letting you ride him, fucking your throat, bending you over; you name it, he thought of it. He went to sleep thinking about you with a growing semi that wouldn't die down unless you took care of it, and woke up with a boner that grew increasingly more painful. To him, it seemed like the only options would be to just be able to fuck you awake or fall asleep with your tight cunt wrapped around him. 

   “How do you ask someone to go down on you?” your voice ripped him out of his thoughts, but he refused to look at you still. 

   “Why? You got someone new?” Kie poked your shoulder, a cheeky grin on her face, and you smiled politely, keeping the facade. 

   “I wouldn't call it that, we're just hooking up- Well, not so much that either,” you sighed and suddenly all your friends had their ears perked, all but one. 

   “Sounds confusing,” Sarah huffed, her legs draped over John B’s on the couch. 

   “I don't know if it is my fault for not suggesting it or his for not wanting to, I guess,” you roll your eyes. 

   “Maybe he doesn't know how to ask either?” JJ noted, looking up for just a second to see them all look at him for a short moment. 

   “What are you and this guy doing?” Kie inquired. 

   “All we do is make out and then get each other off. We've not even fucked yet, and I'm really starting to question if he just thinks I'm ugly or something. Or maybe I'm just so shit at hand jobs that he doesn't even want to do more,” you complained, and this time JJ stared you down as if you had just announced that you ran over a bunch of toddlers. Maybe even worse, he knew he could find some fucked up excuse for why you would need to run over babies. That was just normal, though, everyone was down bad for their best friend. 

   “Maybe you should tell him that, instead of us,” he hissed, pissed at just the thought that you could think yourself to be not enough to grant the pleasures he wanted to give you, no matter how scared he was. 

   “JJ’s right, for once,” Pope spoke up, oblivious to the tension between the two of you. “Open and clear communication always works out.” 

   “Since when are you such an expert on sex?” JJ huffed, which landed him a kick against the knee by Kiara, and a glare from Cleo, who was playing with her knife. It wasn't a smart move on his end, but he had other things to worry about. 

   “I don't think he knows English as much as he should,” you sighed, finally looking away from JJ, who gulped at the insult.

   John B leaned forward with a mischievous grin. “Don't tell me you're fucking that Italian exchange student.” 

   “What? No. That's not what I meant. And he's so not my type either,” you felt affront to the suggestion. “Also, way out of my league, that one, even if I was interested.”

   “Not fucked up enough for you?” JJ quipped, and you shot him a glare. 

   “Apparently, I like mine dumb,” you hit him back. The tension grew worse with the second, and you knew the only way to get rid of it was to let him ruin you, but you didn't want to give him the satisfaction. 

   “Okay, well, just talk to the guy. And if he doesn't wanna go down on you, let alone refuse to fuck you, drop his balls in a boiling pot of water and then drop him,” Cleo suggested and Kiara agreed with her. 

   “Yeah, and give me his address, so I can put chili powder in all his underwear.”

   The discussion died down after that, but JJ yet again refused to look at you, but this time not because he was too infatuated with you. He was angry, sad, hurt, confused. His chest felt narrower than usual, as if he was having an anxiety attack, but worse. And every time your voice nestled itself in his ear, it got worse, to a point where he pushed his chair back and stomped inside without losing another word. 

   However, you didn't think much of it, knowing how quick tempered he was it would also not be the best idea to meet him inside. 

   When you got home, your parents were already asleep. You got ready, taking a shower and putting your hair up before lying down to sleep. 

   At last your quiet was disturbed by your window being pushed open and the sound of heavy boots on hardwood flooring filled the room. 

   “I’m trying to sleep,” you murmured. 

   “I don't care,” JJ growled right next to your face. “Get up!” 

   “What's your problem?” you hissed at him while sitting up, the tiny nightgown you were wearing made his pants grow impossibly tighter.

   “You're a real bitch. Not saying shit to me and then spilling it all to them? Making me look even worse than I already do? Making fun of me?” JJ was seething, and the fact that you didn't show remorse made it worse. 

   “You don't know what you want!” you yell silently, not wanting to wake your parents. 

   “Has it ever crossed your fucking mind that I'm trying to be respectful here?” You were honestly too stunned to speak. After all, this had only started because he really wasn't respectful, at all. “Don't you think I would've fucked you any way possible by now if it was my choice? Don't you think that it tears me apart on the inside to try and not fuck this up by being me?” 

   “Oh yeah?” you huffed, and he ran his hand over his face, nodding. “JJ, I don't want you to not be you. Why would I want that? If I wanted to keep on masturbating for the rest of my fucking life, I wouldn't have fucking proposed this arrangement.” 

   “Oh-” the realization hit him like a ton of bricks. “Well… you know… so…”

   “Not so good with English, just like I said,” you shook your head and his hand shot out to hold you by your throat, not restricting air, but not letting you move either. 

   “You're such a fucking brat, do you know that?” He dipped his head and forced a harsh kiss on your lips. Your hands came up to his pants, fumbling to open the belt and button before he shoved you to lie on your bed. 

   “You wanted me to come by? Expected it?” He sounded dangerous like that, but you liked it, like knowing that he wouldn't actually hurt you, but just play it enough to please you. Or, just enough to “fix your attitude.” 

   “I don't know what you mean,” you said sweetly as he took off his clothes. 

   “That thing you're wearing,” he pointed at the mesh fabric. “Can see all through that. Not something you put on usually.” 

   “Are you complaining about it?” You didn't quite understand what he was getting at. 

   “Hmmm… no. Take it off anyway,” he ordered, and you did. 

   No matter how much he wanted to touch you, feel the round of your tits in his palms, squeeze them, twist your nipples and suck on them, he refrained. He wanted to punish you for playing with him, more. 

   “Lie down,” he pointed at the length of the bed, and you placed yourself on it, head in the pillows, but he shook his head no. “Face down.”

   First you thought about protesting, but you decided against it, turning around and pressing your head into your pillow while your ass was up in the air, the same way your ex had preferred. 

   JJ smacked your ass, and you winced, the sound being smothered by your pillow. 

   “My parents,” you reminded him quickly, and he chuckled. 

   “You better keep quiet then.” 

   JJ didn't really know what he was doing, he only knew that he needed to do it properly and in a way that would have you begging for more, just for him to deny it then. It was a sick plan by an even sicker man. He didn't praise you, didn't talk to you. Kept comments to himself, like the fact that you were so incredibly wet for him, although he hadn't really done anything to you yet. Or when he pushed inside you for the first time and groaned at how tight you were, the perfect fit for him. 

   His first thrust was torturously slow. He wanted to feel you out, every miniscule part of your insides, and imprint it in his mind. How you whined and begged for him to move faster, and to touch you, anything really. 

   “This is just for me, princess, remember?” he taunted after lying down on top of you, nestled deep in your guts. His hands, one on your neck pushing you down, the other under you, pushing against your stomach to make it even tighter for him. Slow deep thrusts did the trick, but as soon as he felt you get closer, pussy starting to flutter around him, he got up and changed his technique. Going faster, nearly coming already, but he paced himself. 

   “JJ, please. Fuck, please,” you begged as you neared the second attempt. 

   “What? Do you want my cum that badly, baby?” he rasped, and you nodded into the pillow. 

   “Need you.” 

   What you hadn't expected was for him to pull out almost completely, starting to jerk himself off while his throbbing tip was still inside you. 

   “JJ, please,” you were close to tears, needing your release as much as air to breathe, and yet he denied you. 

   “Want my cum, baby?” he smirked like the devil, not that you could've seen by the way he pushed you down.

   “Give it to me, please, J,” you whined pathetically.

   As soon as the words had left you, he pushed inside again, spilling himself into your guts and groaning loudly while his dick twitched, and he fucked his seed deeper into you. 

   Maybe you should've felt more used after, but you understood why he had done it. What you didn't understand was that he left as soon as he was done, only a quick, “I hope you're on something,” before vanishing into the night and leaving you behind. 

read part 3 here

please don't copy and/or post my work onto other platforms! ~e©ho

taglist: @redhead1180 @spideysimpossiblegirl @drwstarkeyy @princessmaybank @ijustwantttoread @kys4-20 @immyowndefender @julczimozart @m2m2m2 @mochimms

[kingdoms-and-empires]

The King's Hound Review

I recently had to go travel and read a few works that I never got around to reading but was interested in.

PLEASE REMEMBER THIS REVIEW IS DONE BY ME AS A READER AND IS MY OWN OPINION.

This means I will review in accordance to my own tastes, how the game caters to me, and what I feel. Do not take my word as gospel, what I may not be interested in or dislike, may be what YOU are interested and love!!!

@the-kingshound

Synopsis:

You are the King’s spouse, his right and left hand, the unstoppable executor of his will. Your name is whispered by enemies and allies with fear and respect alike, some says it’s your arm that bears the weight of the entire kingdom.

They call you the King’s hound. It started as a way to taunt you but it’s not that far away from the truth. Your loyalty is blind, your devotion absolute. The King’s vision is your vision.

Your name will forever mark history alongside theirs.

But for now, you are being shipped to your betrothed, alone and powerless on your way to Camelot.

As the seventh child of the Venegard House, you’ve always had little to look forward to other than an arranged marriage to achieve a political alliance.

That’s exactly why, after your parents lost the rebellion against King Arthur, you were the one sent to him as a sign of newfound peace.

You don’t know what awaits you now, but after you Camelot will never be the same.

Review:

The Good: The project is 18+, and the writing is very well done. It just feels quality. Plus the UI and and dark background are classy. The game is Twine, so you get the save functions of Twine and all that jazz. Anyways, descriptions are well done, the worldbuilding is grounded and helps form the politics in-game. It's thought-out and noticeable. The player customization goes hard and you even get the option to play mute! In The King's Hound, you also find a game that provides the LGBTQ+ demographic and FemMC playing community a welcoming and acknowledging home. The descriptions of the fight scenes and battles (like action set pieces) are good and don't leave you scratching your head. The transitions between paragraphs and pages happen naturally and without breaking pace, which shows the talent of a writer that considers their audience. Also, in regards to the King Arthur mythos and worldbuilding done by the author, i just really appreciate the fact that Camelot is Welsh.

It just gives me an idea of how much the author researched or cares about the mythos to give that respect of origin for the story. I had problems with how King Arthur was being super nice at first, but the author recently stated in a post that Arthur was acting in such a manner because he is deliberately trying to be the opposite of King Uther!

And that in the future, the work will offer more text to reveal that to us, the player.

The Bad: I wouldve liked being able to marry a cousin, niece, sister, or even daughter of King Arthur (or genderbender him) but that is literally my only complaint as a straight dude tryna self insert. The author tells you explicitly that you are marrying the king. If the author decides not to, as is their right and vision, I have no problem whatsoever. I still think the work is well written, and has many elements that i personally fuck with (low fantasy, grounded narrative, adult themes) The fact that i wish the author could change this, is only because i like the work so much. Instead, in this playthrough King Arthur will find that the MC practices

The Ugly: The MAP. But that's only because my history buff mind thinks of the British Isle when hearing these names and when i saw the map it physically gave me whiplash. But youre making your own version of the story, so bully!

The Aftermath: I know this game isnt catered towards me as a straight dude. It is a proud queer game with quality writing, that'd also do really well for the FemMC readers. I would recommend this game to anyone who wants a low fantasy medieval setting, with good writing, and grounded narratives that isn't a straight dude's traditional power fantasy.

Next playthrough, ima be a mute straight girl thatll hoe around King Arthur's court out of sheer spite

^Marci from Dota: Dragon Blood

[pnutbutter-n-j-elyy]

Cover Me

Request: I got a request in my inbox for this fic. A Channie bias had sent an anon request wishing for a reaction. They had shared that they had lost their parents and they are an only child with no one, so there were times they felt alone and wake up feeling empty. I was editing the fic and accidentally posted it- and then deleted it because it wasn't finished thus leading me to lose that inbox request- so I'm really really hoping that they can see this either on my page or due to a repost or something. Because I just want to say that I know in times of suffering words rarely do anything to actually help. But I do know that words can create scenarios that provide an escape- even if just for a few minutes. So I'm hoping this can create that pocket of peace for you; and hopefully bring you a smile. Because I'm more than sure wherever your parents are now that they're smiling; and would love to see you smile back. <3

Chan x Gn!Reader Angst (Established Relationship)TW: Mentions of Death and Loss

I sort of wanted to make this kind of based off the song "Cover Me" by SKZ. When Rockstar was first released, I remember pressing play right at 12am when it dropped- and when Cover Me played I began to cry. Even without understanding the lyrics at the time I could hear the vulnerability of a searing kind of sadness. And it immediately became one of my all time favorite songs- if not tied for favorite along with Hellevator. Pain is a universal thing- but each and every person's experience with pain and grief is a unique experience. And even just through the sound of the song I think it was touched on beautifully. Because in those times everyone looks to be covered...So if you're the kind of person who like to relate stories to music- then I'd recommend giving Cover Me a listen.

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The night enveloped your apartment, thick with silence and shadows.

It was a quiet yet constant reminder of what you’d lost - your parents, their laughter, the warmth of their hugs. Their words. Lectures. Things you may have taken for granted in the moment but wished more than anything now you could be a part of once more.

Being an only child, that ache felt sharper, more isolating than it would be for most. Especially on mornings like this, the weight of loneliness is suffocating. And it didn't help that you had barely been able to get to sleep the night prior.

You had woken up today with a heaviness in your chest, a reminder of the emptiness that followed you like a relentless shadow. In a desperate attempt to escape it, you turned on your phone, scrolling through your playlists until you landed on Stray Kids.

Chan’s voice, the soothing anchor in your sea of sorrow, filled the room as you pulled up an old livestream.

As you listened to him laugh, joke, and share stories with fans, a bittersweet smile tugged at your lips.

In real life or online, he had a way of making everything feel lighter but even his comforting presence couldn’t always chase away the ghosts of your past.

More often than not they just provided a temporary escape.

In the midst of his laughter, you felt tears well up and blur your vision.

You missed your parents terribly today. You wanted them to be here, to share in the little things in life, your favorite moments - the way the moon shone outside, how it painted everything in silver, the memories that had been exchanged in moments that you had never known were going to be your last.

You felt the loss like a physical weight, the ache in your heart mirroring the brightness of the moon outside.

You choked on a sob, wishing someone would hear your cry, wishing for that warmth, that comfort that embrace that acted as a panacea to the worries of life.

And just as you thought you’d crumble under the loneliness, you felt a familiar warmth envelop you. You hadn't even heard him come home. but now Chan was there, arms wrapped around you from behind, his chin rested softly on your shoulder.

"I heard you crying," he murmured, his voice barely above a whisper, thick with concern. "What’s wrong, love?"

The warmth of his presence grounded you, and you leaned back into him, seeking the comfort of his body against yours. "I miss them so much today," you confessed, the words spilling out in a rush. "It hurts."

He tightened his hold, his fingers tangling gently in your hair. "Thats only normal." he said, his voice filled with empathy. "I’m right here, love. Know that I'm here."

You turned to face him, the moonlight illuminating his features, making him look ethereal. His eyes were soft yet filled with understanding, and it felt like he could see right into your heart.

"I don’t know how to cope with this sometimes," you admitted, your voice trembling. "Some days are harder than others. And I don't know why some days I don't think about it at all. Why can't all days be like those days?"

He brushed a thumb across your cheek, catching a stray tear. "You’re allowed to grieve. And it's not a linear thing. You'll have those ups and downs. Just know that whenever the pain feels too much, I’ll be here to help you carry it. I'll always be willing to help you carry it."

As you leaned into him, the tears continued to fall, but this time, they felt lighter. The vulnerability in the air was palpable, but so was the warmth of Chan’s love. His presence was a cure, easing the sharpness of your sorrow.

You settled into the rhythm of his heartbeat, the soft rise and fall of his chest soothing your racing thoughts. "You make me feel less alone."

Chan nodded, understanding the depth of your feelings albeit a few simple words. "I’ll always be that someone for you. You’re never alone, even in your darkest moments." His voice was steady, a reassuring anchor amidst the storm.

Then he kissed your forehead softly, wrapping you in a cocoon of warmth and safety. You felt the tension begin to ease, his soothing presence wrapping around you like a protective blanket.

"Let’s watch the stars together," he suggested, pulling you up gently; then leading you toward the backyard.

You stepped outside, the cool night air brushing against your skin. You settled into the grass, Chan sitting beside you as you gazed up at the stars. "Look at how beautiful they are," he said, pointing out constellations. "I'd like to think that maybe your parents were allowed to hang some up for you as a lasting gift, hmm?"

You took a shaky breath and spoke. "I think they would have gifted me moonbeams..." You said quietly, looking at the full moon that lookes so fat and bright- as if you could reach out and grab it. "They always knew I loved the moon."

You laid back and Chan laid back with you in the grass, the blades tickling the back of your neck as a soft breeze blew past.

In the quietness, you heard Chan start to hum softly- and then sing.

"Dari ireoke nunbusineun bamen..." (On nights when the moon shines this bright)

You closed your eyes and let Chan's voice travel through your ears.

"Why do I feel so lonely in this night? Saebyeokbarameun mabeobilkka?" (Is the dawn breeze magical?)

In that moment, surrounded by the stars and moon wrapped in Chan’s voice you let your tears fall silently.

It hurt. With every beat of your heart you felt that strain.

"Yeah, I tried to hide away from all the sorrow and pain. But little did I know that I was going insane. The sun will always be there waiting after the rain."

And this moment only made you realize ever so much that the pain of loss would never fully fade.

"I can't take it anymore, what should I do?."

Your tears were hot as Chan intertwined his fingers through yours. Squeezing them lightly.

"Oneureun moreun cheok nungama jwo..." (Today, pretend not to notice and close your eyes)

You opened your eyes looking up at the silver moon. Wondering if they could see you, hear you. Acknowledge that pain you were harboring.

"So cover me now."

Please. Please.

"Cover me now."

You swallowed continued to stare at the moon and let your eyes trace over the stars as well. Leading you to the person beside you.

"Dari ireoke nunbusineun bamen.Nuga jeo bicheul garyeojugil oechyeo." (On nights when the moon shines this bright. I cry out, hoping for someone to cover that light)

His eyes were closed, a few tears of his own falling; letting you know that he felt for you too. That someone was out there, willing to help with that burden of pain.

A burden you had long since gotten tired of carrying.

"Bami eoneusae kkeuchi naneun najen Ttaseuhan bicheul naerijjoeneun bicheul."  (During the day, when night finally ends. I accept the warm light shining down)

A burden you no longer had to carry alone.

Since you had finally found your cover.

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@abovenyx @wolfs-archive @oddracha

@iyeeeverydee @parisanmorovati @seungmincenteric

@panbish-1209 @fxiry-vtt @sseawavee

@shuporanporang @amarecerasus @softkisshyunjin

@whoa-jo @meanergreener @rikibun

@ayyonoona @shinywombatcrusade @y4yayael

@skzstan12345 @mariteez @allys-reads

@jazziwritesthings @skzstannie @yongbokkiesworld

@kkkeopi @neverendingstay @moony-9

@minsungsthirdwheel @everlastingspring143 @joyofbebbanburg

@leezanetheofficial @tr-mha-fan @bubbly-moon

@night-storm7 @missmajdastark @axel-skz

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[kitkat238984]

Stupid Cupid

Summary: Only your dear friend, Dante, would be the one to get so tired of your obliviousness to one another's love that he'd force you both to go on a blind date.

And how do you two return the favour? Well, it's an eye for an eye, right?

Notes: This one's not all that good to be honest.

5426 words.

“Y/N”. 

You glanced up from your phone at the clean-cut man with brown curled hair and a neat goatee sat under his chin. You raised an expecting eyebrow at Dante who leaned his weight on his hands against the table you were sitting at, leaning over and towering over you. 

“Can I help you?” you asked, ending the tense silence. 

“Tyler likes you”.  

Not this again. 

You sighed and went back to scrolling through Instagram. 

“No, he doesn’t”. 

“How would you know that?” 

“I just do”. 

It was his turn to sigh and drop his head, deciding to sit down on the chair opposite you. He knew there was no use in convincing you - he’d tried countless times - yet he still thought that maybe one day you’ll be all like “Oh my god, really? I’m going to give Tyler a biiiiig kiss!” 

At first he made little comments like “stop flirting, you two” whenever you both were laughing at something and simply having fun. 

Then it was the suggestive winks and nudges which were attempts to direct your attention to one another in a more romantic light (which was obviously to no use). 

He once made a remark about how you never date anyone or ever have a boyfriend and you promptly came out saying, “It’s hard to date when I’m head over heels for Tyler”. You’d responded so casually that the Martin brother had almost laughed it off, but he quickly realised what you'd just admitted to. 

Why weren’t you embarrassed? Was it sarcasm? You didn’t acknowledge your response at all, not even a single movement to indicate how you were feeling. 

This all led him to that moment. The moment where he spent every waking hour tormented having to watch the both of you as clueless and ignorant as the other, like children lost at the grocery store looking for your parents. 

“Why don’t you just ask him?” he asked for maybe the fourth or fifth time this week. 

“Nah I’m good”. 

Of course that was your response. Of course you acted like you didn’t care. Of course you wouldn’t be willing to even take a chance, to believe one of her friends, one of Hook’s closest friends. He considered giving up, but for some reason he felt like he was their cupid, the one to shoot the arrow for two of his very good friends. 

“Alright then”, he replied. 

You expected Dante to declare that the end of his attempt to make a fool out of you, however, he still hadn’t left the table and continued to stare at you, almost trying to study you. 

Feeling the eyes piercing into you, you looked up from your phone again, them not having left the screen for the whole encounter. 

“I don’t mean to be rude, but when are you going to stop?” you asked, tired of being asked the same questions religiously. 

“Stop what?” 

“Trying to make me and Tyler a thing”. 

Dante rolled his eyes and shook his head in comprehension. Did you even hear yourself? 

“When you both realise you’re in love with each other”. 

“How many times do I have to tell you? It’ll never happen. He’s not interested”. 

You wanted to enjoy your lunch in peace and apparently that wasn’t going to happen here so you stood up and started collecting your things. He never meant to annoy you; he wanted quite the opposite, trying to make you happy with the person you’d liked for so long, but the frustration from not being able to get through to you was starting to drive him crazy. 

“I give up. I can’t do this anymore. I just can’t with you. You’re impossible!” 

You gaped at the hypocrisy, taking offence. 

It was true. You had a uh… shy liking towards the hooded man who mostly kept to himself, ‘shy liking’ being a major understatement. You were very good friends… that’s all… and that was your problem. You didn’t let it get the better of you hence why you constantly brushed it off whenever Dante brought up the subject. It was easier to ignore the feelings and let everyone live their happy single lives than pine over a stupid boy like some teenage girl. 

“I’m impossible?! Try talking to a guy who’s never shown any interest in you and then have another friend insist that he’s crazy for you”. 

You turned your back to him and walked out of the catering room in an attempt to find a more private space to finish your lunch. 

So that ‘s what the problem was, huh? Hook just wasn’t showing enough interest in you. 

Dante sat there, head in hands, desperately trying to think of his next approach. He knew he should stop pestering you because he didn’t want to damage the friendship you’d made over the years, but he was way too committed to the whole stupid cupid act to give up then. 

He’d have to speak to Hook. 

— 

“Y/N likes you”. 

Similar to how you were before, Tyler was hunched over his manspread legs, staring at his phone, his posture and hoodie being his only recognisable properties as his face was almost completely hidden by his hood. 

“Yeah, right”, he replied, eyes not leaving his phone. He, too, had experienced countless of Dante’s naggings. 

Dante - who was standing directly in front of him - crossed his arms and readjusted his footing, knowing this conversation would be as hopeless as all the others. 

“What makes you think that she doesn’t?” 

“She likes Ethan Page”. 

Wha…? Where the hell did that come from? 

He was quick to respond. “She doesn’t even talk to Ethan Page”. 

“All the women here like Ethan Page”. 

“...alright then”. 

As quickly as the conversation had started, Dante Martin walked away, unable to understand what exactly had just happened. 

Had she ever even spoken to Ethan Page? 

He got to the end of the hall and stopped dead in his tracks, finally realising that Hook had just been trying to cause confusion so he’d leave. Great. Very clever. 

He twisted his head to glance at his friend who was looking back at him, a smirk spread across his face which turned into a snicker as he went back to concentrate on whatever was on his phone. 

This would take a lot more effort than he was currently putting in. If he really wanted his two friends to be happy, he would have to be a lot smarter than simply telling them the truth. Apparently, honesty was not as reliable as it should be. 

— 

You were inside the locker room, doing some quick stretches before your upcoming match, Dante standing a few feet in front of you, but this time not to convince you of Tyler’s feelings, strangely. 

“I’m not going”, you said straight. 

“It’s only a little blind date. My treat. It’ll help you get your mind off Tyler”. 

He knew he was pushing his luck asking you to agree to go on a date with a complete stranger, but it was vital for her to accept for his dastardly plan to go ahead. 

“I don’t need help, but I do need to go to my match”. 

You attempted to pass him but he swooped his body in front of yours at the last second second, preventing you from leaving. You could have sworn this was classed as harassment. 

“Just one date tomorrow. If you’re still not happy after twenty minutes then text me and I’ll call you pretending there’s an emergency so you can leave”. 

You really did not want to go out on a date as there simply wasn’t any time for it in your schedule. Didn’t he know you had a very successful wrestling career to keep up? Perhaps if you had more time to think about it, you would have come to understand that Dante was hiding some sort of trick up his sleeve, however, in a rush to get to your match which was starting in 15 minutes, your brain took in every word at face value. 

“Ugh fine. One date. But I swear, if I turn up and he’s holding a bouquet of red roses and uses the words ‘ladies first’, I’m doing a 180 and sprinting out of there”. 

His lips turned into a victorious smile. “You won’t be disappointed”. 

Now it was Hook’s turn. 

— 

Hook would be easy to convince. Dante knew exactly what would sway him. 

“Heeeyyy how about a date tomorrow night?” 

Hook was taken aback by the question and stared with a shocked look plastered over his face. 

“No no no!” Dante scrounged for a clarification. “Not with me, dude. With a girl I know. It might make you feel better”. 

The questioning look he once gave had now been shaken off. “Fuck that”. 

“Come on, I’m paying for the whole thing. And if you don’t like it I’ll take you to a strip club and pay for everything”. 

Hook considered his options very briefly. A blind date that could potentially turn into love, and if that fails, he gets a chick’s ass to make the ‘heartbreak’ all better. Works either way. 

“When and where?” 

Dante mentally smirked in deviousness and satisfaction. He knew he had won. 

— 

You only had thirty minutes to get yourself ready for your date, so heavy makeup wasn’t exactly an option like it usually would be for going out. You chose to wear a F/C satin mini dress that hugged your waist, kept up with stringed straps that tied on the top of your shoulders. You decided to show yourself off a little and not take the modesty approach you normally take with your baggy hoodies and leggings you wear around backstage. 

Your date would be in for a treat, that was for sure. 

You took a taxi to the restaurant Dante told you to be at and sprayed yourself with perfume a couple of times and made sure you looked presentable before opening the door to the place. You might as well try and make some sort of an effort. 

You knew that you weren’t meant to be excited about this date - and honestly, you weren’t all that much - but you thought about what Dante had told you about trying to get over Hook. Maybe it was time you got yourself out there and date someone because your chances with him weren’t exactly looking good. 

“Hi, I’m Y/N L/N. I’m supposed to be meeting someone”, you told the lady who greeted you. 

“Of course. Someone’s already paying for your dinner tonight, correct?” 

You nod. “Right this way”. 

You weaved around tables of seemingly happy couples (you didn’t know about their personal problems) and past booths of families with rowdy children until you were stopped at one of the tables for two. 

Your eyes travelled from their chest that leaned forward into the table and his elbows resting on the surface, to the ties of their light grey hoodie, one being twiddled with his fingers. Then you saw the sharp, well-defined jawline that had quietly driven you crazy for the past 3 years. Your eyes finally reached his cold ones that peered into your own. 

He must’ve been as surprised as you were. 

You thanked the lady and sat down opposite to Hook, who swiftly scanned your body before it was hidden by the table. With any luck, he’d be able to get a closer look later. He figured it was best if he didn’t mention that he could’ve gone to a strip club, not wanting to put you off, and ultimately preferring the date over anything else. 

“This…” you began. “...is definitely not what I expected”. 

“Can’t say I’m complaining”, Tyler said, glancing at the only part of the dress visible to him which just so happened to be where your breasts were. Coincidence? Could have been, but probably not. 

“Did you know about this?” You ignored the butterflies that flew in your stomach caused by his teasing and leaned into the table slightly as to whisper your question. It wouldn’t have made a difference, of course, as no one around you would have cared why you were here. 

“No. Dante told me to come here for a blind date”. 

Dante, you sneaky prick. 

“He said the same to me!” You avoided the few strange looks that were shot across to you for raising your voice. “So uhh what now?” 

You tried to cover the blush that had risen in your cheeks with a hand, having no knowledge whether it was actually effective or not. 

“Make the most of a free dinner I guess”, Tyler chuckled, making you feel a lot more comfortable about the situation. “You’d better be hungry because we’re going for the most expensive of everything. Let’s bleed him dry”. 

You thought it was hilarious that Hook wanted to take advantage of Dante’s good deed, even if it was plastered in deceit. You wanted to believe he was joking about ordering the most expensive options, but you wouldn’t put it past the man to take the opportunity for the upper hand, and you certainly wouldn’t say no to a good meal. 

“I can get behind that”, you took a look at the menu, immediately spotting your choice of weapon. “I think the seventy dollar steak has my name written all over it”. 

“That’s the spirit”. Your eyes met in sync and you found yourselves unintentionally exchanging smirks. 

“Seriously, though. What steak is that expensive?” 

“Good ones”. 

“It better be”. 

Throughout the night, the two of you - not only having drained your friend’s bank account - had more fun than either ever had before or could ever imagine. You somehow ended up playing footsies under the table and the occasional knee collided with the roof of it, resulting in some snobby couple next to you giving you both disgusted looks, glancing at your legs. They must have thought you were trying to pull off some Fifty Shades Of Grey shit. 

You decided to order a sharing dessert platter which was a lot more romantic and cliche than you’d anticipated, which was bizarre for you because you absolutely despised all of the date cliches. They just made you cringe and they got boring after experiencing the same things time and time again. 

And why was this time different? Because you were with Hook. You were with Tyler. You knew him and you knew he didn’t give a crap about giving you a bunch of flowers or trying to please you by being someone he’s not. All he cared about was that he was happy, you were happy, and you both were having a great time. That’s all you needed. 

After eating one of the chocolate dipped waffle pieces and stopping yourself from moaning in delight at the amazing mouthgasm it gave you, Tyler sent you an amused look. 

“What is it?” you asked, licking the chocolate that dripped onto your fingers because you didn’t bother trying to act classy by using one of the skewers. Elegance was overrated. 

“You have chocolate all around your mouth”. 

You immediately began to lick your lips, imagining how much of a child you must have looked. 

“It’s still everywhere”, he snickered at your frustrated face as you tried to lick it all away. How much chocolate could be on your face anyway? 

You gave up and reached to grab a napkin when Hook’s hand grabbed your wrist so you couldn’t lift it to your mouth. The entire time, practically peering into your soul. 

“What are you doing?” you asked him. 

“What would you do if I licked the rest of the chocolate off so you don’t have to?” 

You felt your heart thump and you felt it might leap out of your chest, the inflamed feeling of the skin contact on your wrist rapidly circulating around your entire body. 

“Didn’t take you to be a guy who’s into food play”. You enjoyed teasing him. He let out yet another low chuckle and released your wrist, you instinctively rubbing the area he was holding, only now realising how tight his grip was and how much you enjoyed it. 

“Here”, he said whilst grabbing the napkin you were originally reaching for and wiping the chocolate you’d missed around your mouth. It was sweet. Cliche but sweet. 

After finishing your meals, you decided to share a taxi to the hotel you were both staying at, and spent the entire five minute journey talking about how blind you both had been. 

“So basically, you’re so cool that I mistook it for you simply not being interested in me?” you asked, finally realising where you’d gone wrong all this time. 

“If that’s how you want to see it. I always knew you had a thing for me”. 

“Oh fuck off”, you laughed off, playfully nudging his arm. “You were as oblivious as I was”. 

“Maybe. But you didn’t make it easy”. 

“I didn’t make it easy? Maybe if you’d looked at me every once in a while then you would’ve seen me looking back”. 

Tyler set a small smile and wrapped an arm around your middle, pulling you closer, his hand fitting perfectly in the crescent of your waist.  

Screw seatbelts, right? 

“It doesn’t matter now”, he told you. “And we can thank Dante for that of all people”. 

You did feel a little guilty for not believing Dante for all the times he told you that Hook was into you, which sounded like you were back in high school and your friends were gossiping about their latest crush that were ‘totally into them’ - except they weren’t. 

“We’re getting revenge on him, right?” you ask. 

“Oh, yeah, baby. No doubt”. 

— 

Dante was thrilled that you hadn’t messaged him to get you out of the date with Hook - not that he thought you would once you’d seen who your blind date was. So when Collision came about, he was ready to tease you both and gloat at how right he’d been all along. 

The first person he crossed paths with was Hook who was sitting on the steps that led to the backstage entrance to the elevated seating. As per usual, he had his earpods in and was snacking on a bag of chips. He’d probably benefit from going outside once in a while. 

He looked to see who had sat next to him, tilting his head upon greeting his friend, Hook’s mind going over the plan you and him had formed at the door of your hotel room before you uh… got to know each other a little more than you already did. 

“So…”, Dante began with a sly grin formed upon his face. “Did you like her?” 

Hook looked away, scrunching his face in the process. “She was alright I guess. A bit awkward. Personally, not my type”. 

Dante’s face dropped, all previous hope completely drained away. 

How? He was fucking in love with her the other day. What the hell happened? 

“But you said you liked her”. 

Hook’s face twisted in confusion. “When did I say that? I’d never even met her”. 

Oh no. Oh shit. This can’t be happening.  

With a long sigh, Dante’s hands covered and rubbed at his face, hoping that what he thought might have happened, didn’t. 

“Please say we’re both talking about Y/N”. 

“Y/N? No. The woman you set me up with. What was her name again? Dalia or Delia or something like that”. 

An frustrated groan left Dante’s throat and he leaned back, ignoring the jabbing feeling in his back from the stairs. 

“I set you up with Y/N, man. What the fuck happened?” He wasn’t shouting, but there was a clear element of bitterness behind his words. 

“I wish it was Y/N. At least then my date wouldn’t have tried to call the cops”. 

Dante didn’t think his face could fall anymore, yet somehow he managed it. He was speechless. As much as he wished he could get up and leave, pretending none of this happened, he needed to know more. 

“Tell me. What. Happened”. 

Hook was unfazed by the irritation in his friend’s voice, and he casually continued eating his chips whilst retelling his version of the night’s events. 

“Well, you see…”, he started, shuffling to make himself more comfortable. “The waitress took me to the table and I was there for like five minutes, man, and she didn’t turn up”. 

Dante rolled his eyes at his impatience but continued to listen to his story. 

“So like I turned around and saw a woman sitting at a table by herself so I must’ve been at the wrong table, and I went over to her, tried my best to be the gentleman I am but she was like… being a bitch”. 

Yeeeaaahhh Dante didn’t believe that for a second. Hook being a gentleman? Some woman being a bitch for no reason? He wasn’t buying it. 

…what did he do to that poor woman? 

“And what exactly did you say to this woman?” 

“Literally all I said was ‘this is awkward’ and she agreed, asked what I was doing and said her husband would be back any minute. Like, I swear she was alone the entire time I was in the restaurant. If she didn’t want to date me, she should’ve just said rather than coming up with some stupid fucking excuse like she didn’t know who I was”. 

There was no way this was actually happening. He wasn’t this stupid… was he? 

Dante wasn’t actually sure on that one. He knew he was a quiet, furtive man who usually kept to himself, and that he was incompetent enough to not realise how infatuated you were with him, but was it really that bad that he would harass a random woman in a crowded restaurant? Probably. 

“Oh and the whole time I was there? No sign of any husband. Fucking lame excuse”. 

Dante rubbed the corners of his eyes hoping he’d wake up from this strange dream he hoped he was having. 

“So you left after that, right?” he asked. 

“Sort of. After I tried to kiss her”. 

The relieved sigh midway through was cut short and Dante thought he might have forgotten how to breathe, but sucked in a breath whilst shaking with anger. 

“Why the hell would you try to kiss her if she said she wasn’t interested?!”

“Her story was bullshit, man! I thought she was playing hard to get but she tried to slap me”. 

“Tried?” 

“Obviously I wasn’t going to take that shit. Bitch was crazy. Where’d you even get her?” 

Dante ignored his question - baffled by the complexity of the situation - and asked one of his own. 

“And you didn’t see anyone there you knew?” 

“Nah, man”. 

“Got it”. 

He now had a new mission - to find you and ask why you’d bailed out on the date. Hook’s story was far too in detail to be made up, and - in hindsight - he should have expected you to not turn up to the restaurant without any warning. 

He didn’t turn back when Hook asked where he was going. He kept walking at his fast pace until he saw you outside the locker rooms, chatting to Anna Jay about God knows what. 

He didn’t care. He didn’t care what you were talking about or even if either of you were talking when he walked right up to you and asked, “Why didn’t you go on the blind date?” 

You shot him a look of shock and confusion causing Anna Jay to leave the both of you alone, much to your dismay. 

“What are you talking about? I did and he didn’t show”. You crossed your arms and leant against the wall behind you, not thrilled at his interruption. 

“That’s not possible because the person I set you up with was there and said that you never showed”. 

“Well then we must have missed each other because I was there for ten minutes and he didn’t come”. 

Dante felt dizzy with the number of times he’d rolled his eyes that day. You and Hook were just as impatient as the other, not bothering to wait a minute longer before declaring the unlikely as fact. 

“What, so you just left after that then? Was that it? You didn’t even call me to tell me he wasn’t there?” 

“Hey, I was going to wait. Ain’t no way was I going to skip out on dinner. I just got… distracted”. 

Dante narrowed his eyes in suspicion. He could tell by the way you bit your lip and averted your eyes that you were hiding something. 

“Distracted how?” he asked, slowly. You struggled to hide the smirk that begged to show on your face. You were relishing in the thought of lying through the skin of your teeth to him. 

“I may or may not have been given a few… suggestive glances from a man a few tables along from mine, and I may or may not have met him in the restroom, and I may or may not have let him do me in front of the mirror… turns out he was married… ” 

This was far worse than what Dante could have imagined, especially after the harassment story he got from Hook before coming here to find you. The both of you were going to get the biggest scolding of your lives and he planned to end the tension between you there and now. 

“You had sex with a married man?” You nodded. “Did his wife not try to find him?” 

“No. We were gone for like twenty minutes and I don’t even think she got up from the table”. 

“But I would’ve thought you of all people wouldn’t stoop to such-” 

Dante’s thoughts stopped him in his tracks and all the pieces of the puzzle very quickly came together. 

The woman with the missing husband. The harassment. The married man with you for a while. It all made sense now. You must have entered the restaurant first, went to the back with the man, then Hook arrived and bothered the woman so she didn’t have an opportunity to look for her husband, and because he was with you, Hook thought she was lying. 

In a twisted way, Dante was satisfied that he managed to solve the mystery like Sherlock Holmes as he now understood where you’d both gone wrong and could empathise slightly with both predicaments. That wasn’t to say he wasn’t utterly infuriated. After all, you were thick as shit and somehow slipped out of each other’s arms once again by some coincidence, but he could work with that now. 

Without another word, Dante grabbed ahold of your wrist and began dragging you through the twists and turns of the backstage area, dodging and weaving through the many people rushing to get things ready before showtime. He was focused on his mission like Tom Cruise. He’d acquire many characters trying to pair the two of you together apparently. 

You, however, could only think back to that mind-melting moment two nights ago when Tyler had grasped the exact wrist being held now. It was nothing like the grip that gave you that tingly feeling throughout your body, but you could still imagine. 

You were pulled into one of the large entry hallways and came to register Dante’s plan when you caught a glimpse of the very person you had just been thinking about sitting on the steps. 

So antisocial. 

You let out a small yelp when flung in the direction of Hook, but you managed to catch yourself on the railing. Hook, now noticing the both of you, sent out sceptical looks before putting his stuff on the step next to him and pushing himself up to stand beside you. 

“Alright”, Dante led, glancing back and forth between you both. “I didn’t think it would come to this, but now we have to talk about how you destroyed some happy couple’s marriage”. 

You expertly acted like you didn’t know what he was talking about just so he could keep going to see how long you’d be able to carry the lie out for. Oh, how pleased you were. 

“I set this blind date up for the two of you and the fact that you by some means ruined a nice relationship instead and not see how smitten you are for one another is beyond my comprehension. You’re both insufferable”. 

“It couldn’t have been that good of a marriage if he was willing to have sex with me”, you chimed in. Why not make it a little worse? 

He continued to rant about his own struggles and how he’s tried to help this entire time but neither of you care blah blah blah. In all honesty, you forgot he was talking a few seconds into his rambling. 

You felt a touch on the small of your back before curling around your waist like it had done in the taxi and you turned your head, making instant eye contact with Tyler who you’d been texting non-stop since that night. You weren’t officially official by any means, but you could tell you were only a few intimate moments away from it finally happening. You did things that night. Beautiful, magical things. 

You reciprocated his affection with your head resting on his shoulder, Dante not having caught on to you as he was too busy pacing back and forth, ranting about how bad he felt for the ‘married couple’ you destroyed. 

“This was worth it”, you whispered close to Tyler’s ear. He didn’t meet your gaze but he did break into a small smile. 

“This was only meant to be a little matchmaking. How could it go so horribly wrong?” Dante finally turned his attention to yours and Hook’s close proximity. “And here I am freaking out because you’ve fucked up and you can’t even keep your hands off each other… oh… you’re messing with me, aren’t you?” 

You gave him a wide smile and nodded, making yourself more comfortable against Hook’s side. 

This time when Dante’s face dropped for the millionth time (it had practically fallen on the floor now), it was in shame, disbelief that he actually fell for your lies. It made no sense. He helped you get together and that’s how you repay him? In that moment, he finally accepted that there was no way he would ever understand the way you both functioned. 

Hook, taking advantage of the stand-still the three of you were in, slipped his arm away from your waist and intimidatingly strutted toward the Top Flight guy, coming almost nose-to-nose with him. You all knew he was joking when he fisted the top of Dante’s hoodie and said in a low grunt, “Next time you try and fuck with me or Y/N, we can take this to the ring. Understood?” 

Oh, that was hot. 

You heard the Brooklyn accent in his threat and it drove you crazy; you were melting at his feet with how flustered you were. 

“Yeah yeah I get it, man. Don’t worry”, he replied, brushing off his hand. “I’m just happy my plan worked”. 

“I’d apologise to you but you did meddle in something that you shouldn’t have”, you told him, pleased you were able to get your own back on him. 

“It was either that or wait for you both to get stupidly drunk to confess”. 

You squinted and shared a similar look with Tyler. “Actually, I would’ve preferred that”. 

Hook nodded in agreement. “Yeah, I probably would’ve been down for that”. 

“Why, though? You know what? It doesn’t matter. I won”. He raised his hands in the air and turned to walk out the door before you could say anything more. 

In the doorway, Dante thought he might try and edge another word in there and give you a smug ‘your welcome’, but when he turned toward where you two were standing he uh… decided otherwise and gave you some privacy instead. 

…

…

…

…you guys were already having a heated make out session. 

He wasn’t exactly about to interrupt that. He got people together, not watch them thrive. 

Strolling through the ins and outs of backstage, Dante felt sort of lost, like his only source of entertainment whilst waiting for a match or an interview was gone. Who would he set up now? 

Then he saw her. 

“Hey, Kris!” he called, receiving a warm smile in return. “How do you feel about a certain Orange?” 

THE END. 

[shaunamilfman]

new years day

Summary: "You've shared a New Year's kiss with your best friend Lottie Matthews every year since you were eight years old– it's practically tradition at this point– but something feels different about this one. As much time as you spend agonizing over the state of your friendship there's still no place you'd rather be than helping her clean up the morning after her party, but does she have to keep looking at you like that?"

A/N: did someone say childhood best friends to lovers?

You were five years old the first time you met Lottie. You were pretty nervous starting kindergarten and had cried the entire way in, but you'd quieted right up when you saw her. Your eyes caught from across the room and you couldn't resist the urge to walk over to her and join whatever game she was playing. The two of you have always gravitated around each other, even then. You'd never met before, but you slot together like you'd always known each other. 

You were eight the first time Lottie Matthews kissed you at midnight, the very first time you were allowed to stay up late enough to see it. It was only on the cheek, mind you, but you still counted it as your first kiss. You weren't quite sure what she was on about and immediately tried to wipe it off your cheek, but she didn't seem to care. You'd find out later that she'd misunderstood a conversation she overheard from one of her parent's friends, but the tradition stuck nonetheless. 

“After all,” She'd claimed when you were 14, ”There's no relationship in my life more important than you. Why would I want to waste good luck on a stupid boy?”

Which brings you to today: New Year's Eve and the 10th anniversary of your initial kiss. 

…

You hum in acknowledgment as she continues to speak, her words flowing in one ear and out the other. You weren’t quite sure what she was saying, you’d lost that particular plot a long time ago. Her voice was pleasant enough you suppose, but you weren’t sure what her name was. You remember her telling you it, but you hadn’t considered it important enough to remember at the time. You hope it doesn’t come up, that would be pretty fucking awkward. You laugh at the thought, making her grin widely at you. Oh, did she just make a joke? You wonder idly. She seems mighty pleased with herself regardless.

You make a surprised noise at the sudden weight in your lap, wrapping your arm around Lottie’s legs to shift her into a more comfortable position. Lottie grins happily down at you as she throws her arm around your shoulder and leans her head against it, bringing her face far too close for comfort. You look over to continue your conversation but find yourself talking to thin air. The girl you were talking to seems to have left at some point since Lottie came over. Weird, You think with a shrug. You wrap your arm around Lottie’s waist as you relax back against the chair, closing your eyes as you rest your head back.

You can almost feel Lottie’s eyes burning into you despite not being able to see her. You hum in question but she doesn’t seem to feel the need to answer it, continuing to stare all the while. You open your eyes to look at her but she makes a noise in protest as you try to turn your head away so you decide just to sit there. She can look if she wants to, you suppose. It’s not like she hasn’t seen you looking much worse many a time. You grin at the thought, remembering the time she’d watched you slip and fall into a puddle. It had seemed so humiliating at the time, but you still remember the way her body shook as she tried and failed not to laugh at your expense.

“What’s so funny?” Lottie murmurs, poking you in the cheek with just the tip of her nail. Your grin widens at the act, biting at her finger playfully when she tries again. Lottie gasps as she draws her hand to her chest feigning injury. You roll your eyes fondly, she could be such a baby sometimes. You tell her what you just remembered as she laughs softly.

“Wasn’t so funny when you hugged me,” Lottie complains teasingly.

“What’s a little mud between friends?”

“Between best friends.” Lottie corrects, oddly serious for the joking conversation you’ve been having. You hum in acknowledgment. Obviously.

“Say it?” Lottie asks quietly. You give her a curious look but agree easily enough.

“Between best friends.” You say quietly, looking up at her seriously. Lottie just smiles, breaking the tension between you as she leans away from you to sit up higher in your lap. She peers over your head, patting your shoulder excitedly as she catches sight of the time.

“Almost midnight,” She explains as she climbs out of your lap and tugs you with her. You stumble into her, almost taking the both of you down, at the sudden movement but Lottie manages to catch herself on the edge of the table. You hear the faint sounds of her laughter as she drags you through the party to the rest of your friends situated lazily around the TV waiting for the ball to drop.

You see Jackie and Shauna sitting oddly close to each other with Jeff nowhere in sight. You vaguely remember him storming past you at some point during the night but didn’t give it much attention. You can’t help but notice the nervous glances they keep exchanging. You nudge Lottie excitedly as you nod your head in their direction. You wondered if they were ever going to realize what everyone else already saw. Lottie rolls her eyes fondly as she squeezes your hand tighter. Some people were just so oblivious.

You eyed Lottie a little nervously as the countdown began, always a little afraid that she’d find someone else she wanted to kiss more at midnight. She's been your New Year's kiss as long as you can remember, but you've been waiting for the year she finally decides it's too childish and wants a real kiss. You certainly weren't going to be the one to make that choice. As pathetic as it sounds you'd willingly take her in whatever form she was willing to give you.  

Lottie looks a little amused at the uncertainty on your face, pulling you closer to her as the seconds slowly ticked by. She rests her hand on your hip as she leans in, your faces are just inches apart and you almost shudder at the feeling of her breath. As everyone starts screaming and cheering in the new year you quickly cross the distance, meeting Lottie in a gentle kiss. She pulls away all too soon, but she has such a gentle and loving expression on her face that you don't mourn it too much. 

You can faintly hear the rest of the party cheering in the background in their own states of reverie, but you're focused fully on Lottie at this moment. How could you not be when she’s looking at you like this, the way she does in only your most secret dreams? Lottie’s been your best friend since you’ve known what a friend was and she knows everything about you; Everything but this, your most hidden secret that you dare not speak aloud even to yourself. You don’t remember when you fell in love with her the first time, sometimes you think you must always have been.

Lottie smiles softly at you, sliding her hand up your back to pull you in for a quick hug. She pulls away to hug your other friends, cheering along as the new year begins. You just barely manage to tear your eyes away from her as you start celebrating with an amused-looking Nat. Nat had a tendency of looking at you weirdly as if she knew something you didn’t, but even she was too caught up in the reverie for her typical knowing glance.

…

Your very favorite part of her New Year's party was always getting to tell everyone to get the fuck out the second Lottie looked the slightest bit tired. Lottie would always be silently appreciative, hovering behind you until everyone left and she could drag you upstairs to go to bed. You and Lottie had fallen into bed with each other like usual, never able to resist the urge to be apart for too long at a time. She holds you so tightly against her like always, every inch of your bodies pressed against each other as if she’s afraid you’d disappear if she didn’t.

The first time you wake up it’s to the all too familiar feeling of coldness; You sigh as you start feeling for the edge of the blanket, knowing that Lottie has once again stolen it from you. You gently pry the edges of it out of her fingers, careful not to wake her up. You’re not quite sure how she manages to hold you so tightly against her and hog the blanket at the same time, but you’ve always found it a little impressive nonetheless. Lottie’s arm tightens around you reflexively in her sleep at the movement, but you're more than willing to let it happen now that you’ve recovered your blanket.

You rest your hand on top of hers, gently lacing your fingers together. You know Lottie would happily let you hold it while she was awake, her being the one to grab for your hand more often than not, but you still felt slightly guilty holding her like this. You wonder if Lottie would be upset if she knew how much time you spent imagining that your relationship was just a little different. You love being Lottie’s best friend, you really do, but you spend a suspicious amount of time imagining what it would be like to kiss her for real one day. You’ve started dreaming about it recently, never safe from your burning desire to be with Lottie. You shut your eyes as you let the feeling of Lottie’s breath against your neck soothe you back to sleep

The second time you wake up it’s to Lottie Matthews shaking you awake, her face hovering close to yours as she grins down at you. You groan as you gently push her face away and bring the blanket up to cover your eyes against the light. “Go back to sleep, Charlie” You complain sleepily, her childhood nickname slipping through in your exhaustion. You silently curse her need to always get up at the crack of dawn as you hear the soft sounds of her laughter, muffled though they may be. Your hands tighten around the edge of the blanket in a slight panic as Lottie starts tugging it away from you. You fight valiantly but Lottie’s got the advantage of standing over you as she finally pulls them off of you. You sigh as you look blearily up at her. “Hope you're happy now.” You mutter, holding your hand out as you let her pull you into a sitting position.

“I made us breakfast,” Lottie says with an unfamiliar expression on her face. You fake a grin as you try to hide your wince. Yay. Lottie waits impatiently on her bed as you get ready, dragging you down the stairs to the breakfast of champions: runny eggs and burnt toast. You turn your head to hide the way you gag at the texture, honestly counting yourself lucky she didn’t burn the house down with you in it during the process. You once watched her burn spaghetti, you’ll take progress wherever you can find it.

As you choke the rest of your breakfast down you watch Lottie as she moves around the kitchen, already starting to clean the mess everyone has left in her house. She always wanted to clean up after her parties before the staff came back because she felt guilty about making them clean it up for her. There was always the worry about them telling her father about it if they had to clean it, but both you and Lottie doubted Mr. Matthews would care enough about something Lottie did to come home and tell her off about it. Lottie would always assure you that she doesn’t need your help cleaning up, but it wasn’t like you were going to leave your best friend cleaning the whole house by herself, especially after New Year's as it had a history of getting more trashed than usual in the process.

You can’t help but notice her excess of nervous energy, and you wonder what that's about considering it was just the two of you: you can’t fathom a reason you’d ever make Lottie nervous. She looks over at you and quickly looks away when she sees you staring back at her seeming oddly shy. You shrug it off, deciding you’d let her come to you about it in her own time even if it was noticeably weird.

…

You grumble in frustration as you take a rag to the kitchen island for the third time, cursing under your breath as you try once again to scrub the stickiness off. You weren’t sure who spilled something all over the table and just fucking left it to dry, but you would be having words with them when you found out. You were positive Misty would know, and the thought of finding out was the only thing keeping you calm as you scrubbed and scrubbed at the island. As pathetic as it sounds you nearly cry out in joy when you finally get the island clean: your arm was really starting to sting from the repetitive motion. 

You look up from the island for the first time in a while to find Lottie leaning up against the kitchen counter staring intently at you, the corners of her lips quirking up. You scoff as you see her, gesturing down at the island you just cleaned. “You weren’t going to help me? How long have you been here?” You ask, a little miffed.

“You seem like you had it handled,” Lottie says, shrugging her shoulders lazily. She watches you carefully, eyes never leaving you despite her laid-back demeanor. 

“Did I?” You roll your eyes, tossing the now dirty rag at Lottie's face as you walk back into the living room. You laugh softly to yourself as you hear her squeal in surprise as the rag smacks her. You start working on picking up the cups littered across the floor to the beautiful sounds of Lottie’s outrage as she stalks in after you. She gives you her best imitation of a glare as you smile innocently up at her. Lottie sighs as she looks away. Lottie was a girl of many talents, but staying upset with you was never one of them.

You can’t help but smile as the two of you make quick work of the living room, working around each other like a well-oiled machine. One of the many things you like about being with Lottie was how she always seemed to anticipate your needs, tossing you a new trash bag before you even realized yours was full being a prime example. The two of you move fluently around each other, so used to the other that you truly think you could see her without looking. 

You sigh in relief as you finish picking up the living room, the bulk of the cleaning nearly done. Lottie had cleaned up outside while you were working on the kitchen which left you with the sweeping. You’d checked the other rooms downstairs, always fearing stragglers wandering off, but thankfully no one had gotten into them this year. You shudder in disgust as you remember having to clean up one of the downstairs bedrooms last year, truly a low point in your life. The things you do for love.

You listen absentmindedly while you sweep up as Lottie trails behind you and talks about all the things you missed at the party last night. You didn’t find a lot of it of any particular interest, who’s cheating on who seems to be the vast majority of it. You weren’t quite sure how Lottie came by some of her gossip, but it always seemed weirdly accurate regardless so you’ve learned over the years that it’s better not to question it. You visibly perk up at the sound of your friend's name, eagerly listening as Lottie talks about Jackie’s apparent breakup with Jeff just in time to kiss Shauna at midnight.

“Guess that’s why he stormed off.” You comment wryly, shaking your head in amusement. Lottie grins, tilting her head in acknowledgment as she pries the broom from your hands to finish sweeping the floor. She shoes you away when you try to grab back for it, choosing to instead regale you in the rest of the drama she’d witnessed at the party. You were almost in awe, honestly. She always seems to make so much more time out of the same couple hours you were at the party than you did: you’d think she was there for days as much recon as she seems to have gathered. I’d sure hate to be on her bad side, You think as you listen intently.

Lottie’s always been the prettiest girl you’ve ever met, but there was something especially captivating about her in little moments like these shared just between the two of you. Lottie was practically glowing as she spoke a language that only the two of you could understand, so full of inside jokes and references that you often left your other friends confused about what you were even talking about. Lottie has a way of making you feel like the only other person on Earth when she talks to you, the only one that could ever possibly mean something to her. It was a heady feeling, one that you think you’ll never get used to. You consider kissing her for a long moment as the two of you make eye contact, and for a split second you think she might want the same thing as her eyes glance toward your lips, but you glance away as you find something to busy yourself with instead.

…

You wrinkle your nose in disgust as you drag the trash cans out to the curb, trying your best not to breathe through your nose. You make a hasty retreat the second you're able to, walking back into the house in the hopes of finally getting to collapse on the couch. You groan at the sight that greets you: Lottie Matthews' long limbs sprawled across the only comfortable couch the Matthews own. You eye the other couch in resignation, knowing from experience how stiff and uncomfortable it is. Lottie slowly turns her head to meet you, and judging from the slight smirk on Lottie’s face you know she’s done this to you on purpose.

She holds her hand up towards you, wiggling her fingers in a mocking wave. Your eyes narrow at the sight, turning Lottie’s smirk into a wide grin as you cross the room. Lottie’s fingers flex against the couch as she grips it firmly in expectation of you pulling her off life you usually would, but you find yourself far too tired to fight over it today. Instead you simply just climb on top of her and lay down, resting your head on her chest. Lottie makes a shocked noise, tensing slightly in surprise.

It wasn’t that the position was unusual for either of you, but you knew that Lottie was just expecting more of a fight. Lottie looks down at the top of your head in suspicion but seems to accept it as she wraps her arms around you without protest. The two of you lay together in comfortable silence, legs intertwined as you melted into each other. You smile against Lottie’s chest at the slightly anxious movements of her fingertips against you before she finally gives up the fight, never able to resist keeping her hands away from your hair when it’s close enough to touch.

The feeling of her fingertips massaging your scalp lulls you into mindless bliss, so the sudden sound of her voice makes you jerk slightly in surprise. “Y/N?” Lottie asks quietly. You hum in acknowledgment, eyes sleepily blinking open. “You were looking at me earlier.” You laugh in your confusion. Looking at her?

“I look at you all the time, Lottie.” You say, not understanding what she’s getting at.

“It was different, this time,” Lottie admits slowly, as if seriously considering every word she says. “It’s been a different kind of look for a while, hasn’t it?”

You stiffen, your heart practically beating out of your chest. Your mouth feels strangely dry all of a sudden, and it takes you a few tries to say “Different?” Your voice cracks halfway through as an expression of your unease, making your face burn in embarrassment.

“You looked at me like you were thinking about kissing me,” Lottie says softly, pulling her hands off of you to lay them limply on the couch next to her as she speaks. “It would be okay if you did. Want to kiss me, that is.” She says with a tinge of anxiety, rushing the words out as quickly as she can.

She lays her head back against the couch, eyes facing the ceiling to avoid your gaze as you shift up onto your knees to look at her. You rest your weight on one hand as you grab at her chin with the other, wanting to see how serious she looks. Lottie’s face was flushed, looking up at you unsurely as she let you move her around. “I do,” You admit. “Want to kiss you.” Lottie grins widely in that special way you’ve only ever seen directed at you. Lottie slides her hands up your arms to rest against your shoulders as she tugs you down toward her, meeting you halfway as she eagerly reciprocates your kiss.

After a long moment, Lottie pulls back to lean against the couch, laughing breathlessly as she pulls you back down on top of her. The two of you stay on that couch for a long while as you enjoy exploratory touches to the background noise of gentle sighs and quiet laughs. You don’t think you’ve ever been as happy as you are at this moment, fingers tracing the edge of Lottie’s skirt as you tentatively nip at Lottie’s neck. Lottie curls her fingers in your hair, making you moan against her neck at the accompanying sting as you allow yourself to get fully lost in the moment.

You sigh contentedly as Lottie gently rubs her fingertips across your shoulder in a gentle caress, tightening her arm around you as she tries to pull you even closer. You laugh quietly, getting louder at the predictable pout on Lottie’s face. The two of you had retreated to her bedroom after a while, even that couch was only comfortable for so long after all. You’d flopped down on your back the second you’d reached her bed and Lottie had predictably wrapped herself around you, but it didn’t seem like it was close enough for her still. 

Selfishly you enjoy how desperate she always seems to be closer to you, always eager to let her consume you completely. Lottie finally just climbs on top of you, covering you completely as her weight presses you down into the bed. The world’s most comfortable weighted blanket. Lottie hums happily as she intertwines your legs and rests her head under your chin. You wonder idly if her legs are dangling off the end of the bed, but you figure that that’s her problem anyway. You close your eyes as you wrap your arms around her, curious about what you could possibly dream of now that it’s become your reality.

…

You always dreaded the first day of class in January more than almost any other day, but you found that you didn’t mind all that much today. You and Lottie lean heavily against each other in the cafeteria like usual, the giggling and flirty glances the only thing marking a change in your usual dynamic. Your other friends seem over it already, but none of them seem all that surprised about it. The only negative reaction you’d gotten was caught out of the corner of your eye as you watched a grumpy-looking Van hand a smug-looking Nat money. Your eyes narrow slightly at the sight, but you decide to confront them about it later. You're far too busy being disgusting with your girlfriend to care too much about it now.

[ann4zw]

My Perfect Girl.

N/a: Let's start with an apology. Because English is not my native language and I know there can be a lot of mistakes in English. I would appreciate if you could inform me about this error.I've written a thing or two before, but this is the first time I've written something like this and it's about Hayden and one of his characters. I've never written anything NSFW either, but I hope you like it, kisses from Ana. (⁠｡⁠•̀⁠ᴗ⁠-⁠)⁠✧

Content warnings: NSFW content!! Sam Monroe x reader, mention of drugs (marijuana), explicit sex, characters of legal age.

You were returning from a long walk to clear your head. Before leaving the house, you had a heated fight with your parents. Immersed in a sea of emotions, you found yourself weighed down by the overwhelming weight of being constantly underestimated. His weakened self-esteem reflected the lack of recognition from his family, who inadvertently focused more on expectations and demands than on his true qualities and efforts dedicated to them.

Every benevolent act you performed seemed to disappear in the shadow of family demands, without receiving the praise and recognition it deserved. The constant pressure left you immersed in a feeling of devaluation, as if the light of your achievements were constantly dimmed by the incessant noise of demands.

The bitter melody of lack of recognition echoed in his heart, even as he struggled to provide support and care to those around him.

In the middle of this tumultuous path, his eyes met those of Sam Monroe, his dear neighbor, who was on the porch of his house smoking marijuana. The moon cast a soft light over the scene, and when their eyes met, Sam gave a small wave in his direction. With nothing to lose, you decided to get closer, you didn't want to go home anyway.

"Are you humble enough to share the dram?" he asked, staring at Sam with a smirk as he leaned against the porch. He replied with a sarcastic smile, "I didn't think Miss Perfect was into that kind of thing," but he eventually gave in and shared the joint.

"Perfection is overrated, don't you think? Sometimes we need to escape the pressure and just live." You with a yellow smile as you took the joint to your mouth and took a light drag, you feel Sam watching you as you do so.

"True. Life is complicated enough. Sometimes a break is all we need." Sam responds by changing the direction of his gaze to the moon.

As you share light-hearted laughter and thoughts, the initial tension between you melts away. Sam, more seriously, asks, "What about you? What brought you here on this complicated night?"

You hesitate for a moment but end up deciding to share, once again, what do you have to lose? "Family, expectations... I feel like I'm always trying to meet their demands, but it's never enough."

Sam looks at you in a way you can't decipher and says. "I understand."

The conversation flows smoothly, and as the joint is shared, a deeper connection is established. You suddenly feel Sam's hand caressing his face, and then you turn your face slightly so you can meet his eyes, oh, those eyes...

"You're so..." he seems to get a little lost for words but ends with "beautiful." you feel a slight fervor on your face when you hear the praise coming from Sam, before you can respond he speaks; "I could kiss you right now." he said with an amused tone as he tucks a strand of your hair behind your ear.

"Then kiss.." I take the courage out of my ass to say that but I'm glad I said it.

Heart racing, hands shaking slightly. I look into Sam's deep eyes, feeling the electric energy between us. With a playful smile on his face, he leans towards me slightly, capturing my lips softly. The kiss starts out soft and tentative, but soon turns into something more intense and passionate. Sam's hands lightly cup his face, while I surrender to the moment, feeling the warmth of his touch and the sweetness of the kiss. It's a magical moment, where the world around you disappears, and you find yourself immersed in the intimacy of this special moment.

Your breathing gets deeper as Sam's kisses send goosebumps across your skin. You feel enveloped by a wave of desire, an intense fire burning within you. With a shaking hand, you caress Sam's face as he continues to explore every inch of your neck. Every touch, every movement, seems to electrify his body, making his senses seem to be on edge, completely surrendered to the overwhelming passion of the moment. Whispers of pleasure escape your lips, and you feel completely enveloped by this intense connection with Sam. The world around you disappears as you give in to the pure emotion of the moment.

With a quick movement, Sam traps you between him and the balcony, holding tight to your waist, while lowering his lips to his neck. You rest your hand on the back of his neck, lightly pulling his dyed black hair, feeling his body react with heat and fervor to the hot kiss that Sam places on his neck. His every touch is like a flame that ignites his skin, taking you to a state of ecstasy and complete surrender to the fiery moment you share.

Your breathing gets deeper as Sam's kisses send goosebumps across your skin. You feel enveloped by a wave of desire, an intense fire burning within you. Every touch, every movement, seems to electrify your body, making your senses seem to be on edge. Whispers of pleasure escape your lips, and you feel completely enveloped by this intense connection with Sam. The world around you disappears as you give in to the pure emotion of the moment.

Sam suddenly stops the kisses, and you look at him with a confused look. "We can't do that here, pretty." he says. You have a great idea and look at him with a mischievous smile. He soon returns the smile, curious about what is going on in your mind, and his eyes shine brightly as he waits to find out what you are planning.

With a quick, purposeful movement, you grab Sam's hand and pull him towards your house. As soon as you enter the main door, you hear murmurs coming from the kitchen, where your parents are busy with some activity that you don't even care about. Sam understands the situation and gives you a knowing look, smiling with admiration for your determined manner. Without hesitation, you lead him to his room.

As soon as they enter the room, Sam acts quickly by pressing you against the door and sharing a passionate kiss with you. You can feel his warm, calloused hands smooth your ass and then give them a firm squeeze. You push him gently, leading Sam to the bed.

"What's the plan now?" Sam asks, giving him a curious look.

You respond with a mischievous smile, "Well, I guess we'll make this moment even more interesting." Kneeling in front of him, he adds, "What do you think?" Sam picks up on the suggestion and returns the look with a mischievous smile, understanding perfectly. With agility, you unbuckle Sam's belt, taking his cock out. It was bigger than thick, it was red and with pulsing veins, which only increased his desire to shove it down his throat.

You then place his red head on your lips, sucking it like it's candy. Sam's loud moans fill the room as he throws his head back. With confidence, you welcome him completely into your mouth, making skillful back and forth movements, intensifying the connection between you while maintaining eye contact with Sam, you watch him moan, with his mouth half open, his forehead sweaty. You just smile, thinking if that's all for you.

Sam moans praise, saying: "Such a beautiful girl, such a delicious mouth..." When he tries to put his hand on his head to maintain a rhythm, you intensify the suction, forcing him to place his hands on the bed for support. and avoid collapsing in the face of the intensity of the moment.

Sam's chest rose and fell, his moans echoing in the room, you increase the suction even more and begin to massage his sensitive balls as well. "Pretty, I'm going to cum.." Sam's moans took on a desperate tone, he needed to cum. Sam began to moan his name repeatedly, increasingly euphoric, as if the words were a visceral expression of pleasure. The room echoed with your moans, he tries to push your head so you can let his cock free from your mouth but you hold your thighs tightly, feeling hot ropes of sperm in your throat, you swallow everything that Sam pours for you, without stop sucking him even more, even though he has already cum..

"honey, that's too much." He moans loudly from overstimulation as you continue working with his sensitive cock, he tries to push you away but he is out of strength from his recent orgasm. “pretty, I don’t…” a loud moan escapes his lips as he tries to stammer out the words. "I can't take it-" his breathing becomes even faster as he moans even louder, giving rise to his second orgasm. You insist on taking him until the last drop that comes out of that beautiful cock.

When you're sure you've done it, you slowly back away as you watch Sam recover. He looks at you with a mischievous smile on his face. "My God, you're perfect," Sam said with an amused tone and a hoarse voice, revealing a mixture of surprise and admiration. In response, you smile and go on top of him, fishing his lips in a wet kiss, sharing the taste of your own cock and cum with him. “You taste so good,” you say in a whisper as you continue to kiss Sam, sucking and biting his lower lips. Sam ran his hands over your body, taking off your clothes while you enjoyed his mouth with the best kiss you've ever tasted.

"I think mine comes from making you moan, don't you think?" He says with a smile, laying you down on the bed, climbing on top of you and running his tongue over your nipple, sucking it like a baby in search of your breast milk. Brushing his dick against your soaked entrance, he lifts his head to look at you and says, “Ready?” He asks with a horny smile, before you can respond, Sam shoves his entire length into your hungry hole, making you scream in a loud moan, the stretch giving you a pain that makes you arch your back. "Oops, it slipped.." he says with an amused tone. "I-Idiot.." you moan and he runs his finger across your lips. "Be quiet, pretty, you don't want your parents to come here, do you?" Sam teases and you remember that your parents are home, damn it, you completely forgot about that, but you have something more important to think about right now.

He immediately grabbed her hand and began to thrust hard and fast, dragging his tongue down her throat to her breasts and sucking them. Sam took his hand and lifted his head to lick his ear, speaking very softly in his ear. "Okay, pretty? I can do this all day." In response to his provocation, you let out an extremely loud moan, Sam covered your mouth and spoke. "Noisy bitch." He says with a mocking smile on his face. Sam kissed you, groping your breasts and pinching your nipples, making you shudder.

"Ah, pretty", he says between moans, "You're a complete mess, so perfect... my perfect girl."

He pulls you into a wet, dirty kiss and you whimper, drooling on his lips, your eyelashes fluttering as they touch your clit.

"Taking my dick so well with that perfect pussy.." He kisses you on the neck, giving light hickeys, never stopping to thrust hard inside you, reaching your sweetest spot, it doesn't take long for you to feel a familiar sensation in your core. "Sam.. I'm going to cum!" You say with a moan, your back arching as your chest rose and fell. Sam, upon hearing his words, pulls your legs to rest them on his shoulder and starts thrusting uncontrollably, making you scream even more, the impact noise of the meat hitting each other was loud and echoed throughout the room. “cum for me, perfect girl, pour your delicious honey on my dick” He says teasingly in your ear, he knows the effects it has on you. As you feel the knot in your core break, you moan Sam's name as you spill your cum onto his cock, after a few thrusts, Sam does the same to your pussy.

After the moment of ecstasy, Sam collapsed next to him, the bed serving as a silent witness to their shared emotions. Both tried to catch their breath, their sweaty bodies revealing the intensity of the encounter. The room, which had been too noisy, was now filled with silence, just the subtle echo of intertwined breaths, as tiredness transformed into a comforting feeling of shared intimacy.

Sam's gaze finds his pussy, which was dripping with both of your cum, and a smile forms on his lips. “Look at this,” he says looking at you, his lips find yours tenderly, he holds your chin gently. "You're perfect," he says, each word filled with appreciation. The intimacy of the moment transcends words, leaving only the sweet melody of shared connection in the air. "My perfect girl." , gently stroking your abdomen as he strokes your hair.

Sam looks at you with a smile after the shared moment. "Do you always have that amazing smile after a moment like that?"

"Maybe it's your ability to bring smiles." You respond jokingly.

Sam laughs softly, appreciating the answer.

"Well, I can only thank you for the inspiration. How do you feel now?" He asks and you reflect on the moment, expressing your feelings. "Like I'm floating on clouds, what about you?"

Sam shares the same sentiment. "The same. I think we managed to create something special here." Both recognize the uniqueness of the moment.

"Definitely."

As you enjoyed each other's caresses, a sound of footsteps echoes down the stairs, making you quickly look at Sam.

"Sam, you locked the door didn't you?" Sam looks at you confused, and for a brief moment, you share a look of mutual surprise.

"What? I thought you locked it."

[girlfriendsofthegalaxy]

tuesday again 9/24/2024

you might be wondering “is my dear friend tumblr user girlfriendsofthegalaxy still unemployed?” the answer is yes. take this cat off my hands please i don’t think he’s causing the unemployment but he certainly isn’t helping

listening

via Wendy @dying-suffering-french-stalkers, Huoy Meas' ប្រគល់ក្ដីស្នេហ៍មកខ្ញុំវិញ. figuring out what this incredibly zippy Cambodian rock song is named and what it's about was really difficult bc spotify is a bane upon this earth and won't let you fucking copy-paste and OCR was not working on the Khmer script. i ended up listening to the first couple seconds of each of her songs on apple music, and finally figured out this roughly translates to Give Me Back My Love and is about begging a fuckboy for closure.

via the spotify discover weekly, Night Club's Pretty Girls Do Ugly Things. all Night Club's songs sound the same so if you like one, great news! i had this song on for a full gregorian hour bc, i am only a tiny bit ashamed to say, i was storyboarding a The Man With No Name fancam to this. i think it would go pretty hard.

Smoke you like a cigarette Choke you like a lariat Fatalistic tourniquet Do you want more?

-

reading

thank you mackintosh.

i did not Adore any of these comics from the library. i sort of enjoyed Night of the Ghoul, a one-volume TPB by Scott Snyder and Francesco Francavilla. i think ive blogged about this before but every once in a while i'll get a bee in my bonnet to read some horror comics even though i am a giant baby about horror movies.

Night of the Ghoul is about how you can't save your dad from PTSD but also about a lost horror film and also about the extremely dad behavior of tracking down every scrap of info about an auteur. there's also a monster.

the subtle art changes from present day to the remains of the film to the non-film flashbacks are well done, imo. the cover screams mignola but the inside pages are really fun pulp nonsense. i love a piece of genre writing that rolls around and delights in being a piece of genre writing.

im doing my level best not to get sucked into tiktok but i DO love watching this lady revive antique nail polish and look for dupes for shades from like the 20s. she found an almost exact dupe for a shade produced during wwii which is crazy insane to me!!!

-

watching

The Asphalt Jungle (1950, dir. Huston), it's a very painterly heist noir. i even like Sterling Hayden in one of the more prominent roles, even though i think he generally has the appeal of undercooked dough.

much like Fritz Lang's M, it presents the criminal element of the city as its own class with its own reputation and reference systems. it got in some trouble with the censors for having a VERY clearly laid out heist plan and execution. it's also got the babiest Marilyn Monroe in one of her earliest roles

this was such a gloriously messy movie. everyone is such a fucking mess. this woman only known as Doll is heartbreakingly, head over heels in love with Sterling Hayden's character. she's a little flighty and bumbling and silly, but determined! they're constantly orbiting the gravitational weight of her desire for this man and desire for a real life with this man. and that's just one subplot! she has maybe five minutes total screentime! she should have gotten a supporting actress oscar!!! everyone acted their fucking hearts out and it was so much fun to watch!

-

playing

monument valley is in the netflix games library this month (i don't actually know what their liscencing agreements would even look like, they and the studios they worked with were very tightlipped about that when they were rolling this out three years ago) but i assume it's going to be on the service for a while. i have never played this game, which makes me feel a little bit like a bad gamer. you can tell it's ten years old from some of the color and texture choices, but WOW did literally everyone take inspiration from this game.

this is the platonic ideal of a phone game. i get why everyone went insane about it and there was a brief boom of geometry-based puzzle mobile games. it is MUCH much harder now to get people to pay money to play a game that has a planned endpoint and planned number of levels, so netflix is a good home for it.

i was often frustrated but always delighted. the level below involves making something happening that made me genuinely gasp out loud in glee. well worth the annoyance of downloading the netflix app and scrolling through the poorly labeled and poorly sorted carousel of games.

great retrospective, a bit about how you need to have tiny teams go off and just kind of fuck around and bring weird stuff back, and a lot about how they actually designed the levels

The end result had a pixel-perfect axonometric aesthetic that not only went hard on its references to Dutch master artist and printmaker Maurits Cornelis Escher, but also dug deep into classic video game design, going right back to early arcade machines and 8-bit titles. Each of the ten levels is like a piece of fine furniture, built with invisible dovetail joints and inlaid with marquetry, stuffed with secret compartments and little design flourishes. Gray cites the world of theatre and stage design, as well as graphics, as important keystones in the way the levels were constructed. ‘Ken would always talk about flower arranging, and how you frame a silhouette of a level on the screen,’ he says.

-

making

update on the Phantom Menace fabric: pinked the raw edges and threw it in the laundry again with a very large quantity of vinegar. 50% poly was too high for it to really do anything, which is interesting. it didn’t lessen the seam edge effects either, which is a little annoying bc the seams were so gigantic and that’s a good chunk of fabric to lose. i am going to buy a camp shirt pattern at some point when i have money again but for now it goes in The Box

also! thrifted a pack of o-rings for jars for a dollar and finally put my grains etc in my pretty jars. they’re going to live in the pantry but today they live out on the countertop

[charlieg1rl]

𝐀 𝐒𝐇𝐈𝐅𝐓 𝐈𝐍 𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐖𝐈𝐍𝐃 (𝐇𝐘𝐔𝐍𝐉𝐈𝐍'𝐒 𝐏𝐎𝐕)

(𝐘/𝐍'𝐒 𝐏𝐎𝐕)

𝐇𝐖𝐀𝐍𝐆 𝐇𝐘𝐔𝐍𝐉𝐈𝐍 𝐗 𝐑𝐄𝐀𝐃𝐄𝐑

𝐂𝐎𝐋𝐋𝐄𝐆𝐄!𝐀𝐔 𝐒𝐎𝐂𝐈𝐀𝐋 𝐌𝐄𝐃𝐈𝐀!𝐀𝐔

𝐌𝐀𝐒𝐓𝐄𝐑𝐋𝐈𝐒𝐓

𝐒𝐄𝐑𝐈𝐄𝐒 𝐌𝐀𝐒𝐓𝐄𝐑𝐋𝐈𝐒𝐓

𝐇𝐖𝐀𝐍𝐆 𝐇𝐘𝐔𝐍𝐉𝐈𝐍 𝐌𝐀𝐒𝐓𝐄𝐑𝐋𝐈𝐒𝐓

𝐖𝐎𝐑𝐃 𝐂𝐎𝐔𝐍𝐓: 𝟏.𝟑𝐊

The drive back to Y/N’s apartment was quiet—too quiet. Hyunjin kept glancing over at her, trying to read her expression, but she seemed lost in thought. He couldn’t blame her. The evening had gone smoothly, all things considered, but pretending she was his girlfriend in front of his parents wasn’t something either of them had expected to be doing when they agreed to this whole arrangement.

His mother had been easy enough—sweet, open, always happy to meet someone new—but his father? His father had been the real challenge. Hyunjin could still feel the weight of his father’s scrutiny during dinner, the way his eyes had followed every interaction between him and Y/N. It was like he was silently assessing the relationship, trying to figure out if there was something real beneath the surface of their story.

The weird thing was, even though everything was supposed to be fake, it had felt surprisingly natural. Y/N had played the part well, almost too well, and his parents had taken to her almost immediately. But what had really thrown him off was how comfortable it had felt to have her there with him. Like they’d done this a million times before. Like they were a real couple.

It shouldn’t have felt that way. It was supposed to be an act.

But every time he looked at her tonight, every time she laughed at something his mom said or rolled her eyes at one of his dad’s pointed questions, Hyunjin had felt something strange settle in his chest. Something unfamiliar. Something dangerous.

He stole another glance at her now as they pulled up in front of her building. She looked tired, leaning her head back against the seat, her eyes half-closed. But even then, she still looked... good. Too good, really. Hyunjin clenched the steering wheel a little tighter, silently cursing himself for even thinking that.

When she unbuckled her seatbelt and turned to face him, her soft voice broke the silence. “Thanks for tonight. I didn’t completely embarrass you in front of your parents, did I?”

He smirked, shaking his head. “Not at all. You did great. Better than I expected, actually.”

The moment the words left his mouth, he realized how they sounded. She raised an eyebrow at him, pretending to be offended. “Better than you expected? Wow, way to boost my confidence.”

Hyunjin let out a small chuckle, though inside, he felt a strange flutter in his chest. Why had he even said that? “I mean, I knew you’d do well,” he explained, trying to backtrack. “I just wasn’t expecting you to charm my mom so easily.”

He wasn’t lying about that. His mom had adored Y/N, practically pulling her into the kitchen after dinner to ask about her studies and fashion design. Watching them talk like old friends had felt weird—almost surreal. But in a good way. He just wasn’t sure why it felt like such a big deal.

Y/N’s laugh pulled him back to the present. “Your mom was nice. I think I liked her. Your dad’s a bit more... intimidating.”

Hyunjin nodded. “Yeah, he’s a tough one. But he liked you. Trust me, he wouldn’t have asked all those questions if he didn’t.”

He could tell she wasn’t fully convinced, but he didn’t push the matter. His dad’s approval was hard to gauge, but he had a feeling Y/N had passed whatever unspoken test his father had put her through.

When she shifted in her seat, wincing slightly, Hyunjin’s attention snapped to her feet. She was rubbing her ankle, clearly in pain from the heels she’d worn all night.

“Still hurting?” he asked, already knowing the answer.

She sighed, glancing down at her shoes. “Yeah, these heels... let’s just say I’ll be throwing them into a fire the minute I get home.”

Without thinking, Hyunjin unbuckled his seatbelt and stepped out of the car. His feet moved before his brain could catch up, his instincts taking over as he walked around to her side and opened her door.

“What are you doing?” she asked, her voice tinged with confusion.

“I’m carrying you,” he said simply, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. She gave him a look that was somewhere between surprise and amusement, and Hyunjin could feel his pulse quicken.

“Hyunjin, I’m fine. I can walk,” she insisted, but he could hear the tiredness in her voice.

“Come on,” he coaxed, leaning down slightly. “Your feet are killing you. Just hold on.”

Before she could argue, he scooped her up in his arms, cradling her against his chest as if it were the easiest thing in the world. She let out a small yelp of surprise, her arms instinctively wrapping around his neck.

“Hyunjin!” she protested, though there was laughter in her voice. “This is ridiculous. I can walk!”

He ignored her, smirking down at her as he started walking toward her apartment building. “You’ll thank me later.”

The truth was, Hyunjin didn’t know why he was doing this. Why he’d gone out of his way to make sure she didn’t have to take another step on those heels. Why carrying her felt so... natural. He told himself it was just because they were friends, that he was being considerate. But deep down, he knew it was more than that.

As they walked, he became hyper-aware of the way she felt in his arms—the warmth of her body pressed against him, the soft scent of her perfume, the way her face rested near his shoulder. It was intimate. Too intimate for a fake relationship, but he didn’t pull away. In fact, part of him wanted to hold on longer.

When they reached her apartment building, he carefully set her down on the ground, making sure she was steady before letting go. His arms ached slightly from the weight, but the weird part was... he missed it. Missed holding her.

“There you go,” he said, stepping back slightly, his hands still hovering near her waist, just in case. “Safe and sound.”

“Thanks, Hyunjin. You didn’t have to do that,” she said, her voice soft, almost shy. She was looking up at him with an expression he couldn’t quite place, and it made something twist inside him.

“I couldn’t let you suffer,” he replied with a shrug, trying to play it off like it was no big deal. But it was. He didn’t know why, but it was.

For a moment, they just stood there in the cool night air, staring at each other. The silence wasn’t uncomfortable, but it was heavy—charged with something neither of them seemed willing to acknowledge. Hyunjin’s heart pounded in his chest as he searched her face, trying to figure out what was going on in her head. Was she feeling it too? That strange pull between them, the line between fake and real starting to blur?

“You okay?” he asked quietly, his voice softer than usual.

“Yeah,” she replied quickly, breaking eye contact and looking away. “I’m just... tired.”

“Understandable,” he said. “It was a long night.”

When she turned to unlock her door, Hyunjin felt a strange sense of disappointment wash over him. The moment was slipping away, and he wasn’t sure if he wanted it to end. But this was all fake, right? He shouldn’t be feeling like this.

“I guess I’ll see you tomorrow?” she asked, her voice hesitant as she looked back at him.

“Yeah. Tomorrow,” he replied, though his mind was elsewhere.

Tomorrow. They would go back to pretending, back to the routine of faking their relationship. But something had changed tonight. He wasn’t sure what it was, but he knew one thing for certain: this didn’t feel fake anymore.

“Goodnight, Hyunjin,” she said, offering him a small smile.

“Goodnight, Y/N,” he echoed, watching her step inside her apartment.

As the door closed behind her, Hyunjin stood there for a moment, staring at the empty hallway. His heart was still racing, his mind spinning with thoughts he didn’t want to entertain. This was supposed to be fake. A simple business arrangement. But as he made his way back to his car, he couldn’t shake the feeling that something had shifted between them tonight.

And that scared him more than he was willing to admit.

𝐏𝐑𝐄𝐕𝐈𝐎𝐔𝐒 | 𝐌𝐀𝐒𝐓𝐄𝐑𝐋𝐈𝐒𝐓 | 𝐍𝐄𝐗𝐓 | 𝐓𝐀𝐆𝐋𝐈𝐒𝐓

tags: @estella-novella, @beccasmecka

[jenneyquinn]

the psychology of pacifica northwest

c/w: mentions of abuse, generational trauma, me being a yapper

i don't know if this ever has been brought up previously in the gf fandom, but i've always been intrigued by the pacifica and the bell from northwest mansion mystery. sure, it does get mentioned in journal 3 when dipper makes the allusion that her parents treat her like a butler but i think it goes deeper than that...

maybe i might be looking too deep into it, but that bell and how pacifica reacts to it doesn't sit right with me. i used to major in psychology when i started college and took a psychology course in high school, and if there was one thing i remember from the subject was the experiments—specifically, pavlov's classical conditioning (that one with the dogs, the food, and the bell).

if pacifica reacts to the bell in such a fearish state, to the point where she does whatever her parents say as long as they don't ring that bell, it could only mean that they truly were abusive to pacifica for years before the events of the show took place. and as much as i hate to admit this, but the northwests' abuse on pacifica must run deeper than disney would allow.

for instance, if pacifica was exhibiting behaviours her parents found unaccepable to their standards, they would simply punish her straightforwardly. the thing that confuses me is when preston and priscilla brought the bell into the mix—or why they thought it would be a better way of exerting discipline to their daughter (my first instinct is to assume that they would be more sneaky about their abuse, but then again, they're rich, so it's not like they need much of a reason to be this intricate in the first place).

surely, it had to have taken some time, though. perhaps, one day, they tried to introduce the bell while disciplining pacifica, and when she disobeyed further, they would punish her promptly.

to sum it up, pacifica's parents instilled the act of classical conditioning onto their daughter by the following:

unconditioned stimulus (us): the punishment (abuse)

unconditioned response (ur): fear

conditioned stimulus (cs): the bell

conditioned response (cs): fear

so, after thinking about all this, only one thought has stuck with me the entire time when it came to pacifica northwest:

her parents didn't only treat her like a butler, they used pavlovian conditioning to discipline her. they treated her like a dog—some sort of lab subject than a daughter.

it's so messed up.

and to think that these thoughts were running through my head ever since i learned about classical conditioning. now, with the release of the book of bill, and this is not a website, pacifica is more of a tragic character than the show has put onto her.

her character arc begins to lean towards themes of generational trauma and postcolonialism. pacifica feels the weight of her ancestors' wrongdoings heavily (in a subconscious level, of course), but at the same time, she feels helpless—which is as equally as screwed up as how her parents treat her. i mean, pacifica is only like what? twelve? thirteen? obviously too young too feel that much guilt in her subconscious.

i can definitely see her resenting her parents as she grows up, wanting to become as independent from them as possible; not that i can blame her. sure, she was able to overlook her parents' faults in weirdmaggedon, but i don't think she'd be really able to forgive them unless if they themselves put an effort to becoming better people (which i personally believe is a lost cause).

ideally, i hope that pacifica's future is filled with a full sense of self-realization—that she could be absolutely capable of finding self worth beyond money, vanity, and whatever materialism offers. also being married to dipper, but even if she doesn't—i just want this poor girl to be happy, damn it.

[infernal-house-demon]

Hey, so for anyone thinking about starting T, I know there’s a lot of info and warnings about side effects to consider, but it also really helps to hear from actual trans folks too! It felt super intimidating to me when I started but it’s been great so far. I’ll share the changes I’ve seen after one month under the cut for anyone who is interested! (For reference I’m on the lowest dose of the gel)

First change I noticed was my smell! I wouldn’t say my BO is worse or anything, I just smell a lot different when I sweat and I do find myself sweating a bit more

Fat redistribution! It’s very subtle so far but my face is definitely changing. My cheeks are less round and my chin is a bit more defined. I can’t tell as much with the rest of my body bc I wasn’t that curvy to start with

On the note of fat redistribution, I’ve actually lost some weight. This is probably far more specific to me and genetic factors but it is something I’ve noticed.

Attraction. I’m still very much bisexual and into women and non-binary people, but my attraction to men has skyrocketed. Especially like big, burly, hairy men. That or femboys, there’s no inbetween lol.

In general starting to find masculine qualities a lot more desirable. Considering getting a packer which is not something I thought I would like before. I think the act of transitioning is allowing me to open my mind more to what I want.

Sex drive. Holy shit this is the biggest change. They are not joking about the T horniness. It can be quite distracting at times which is really the only downside I’ve experienced. Even still, I prefer how I feel now to how I did before.

Slightly more breakouts. They warned me about seeing acne in the first few months, but honestly I don’t feel like it’s been that bad. Plus it’s a little affirming because it means the hormones are working! Again this is one that’s probably specific to me

Assertiveness. I know they warn you about the potential of becoming more aggressive, but as my doctors told me, it’s actually more that you have a lower tolerance for bullshit. Obviously if you do become genuinely aggressive/very angry you should get your dose adjusted. But for me it’s just been making me slowly more assertive in a way I like. It does mean I occasionally have to hold my tongue about things so I don’t say something I’ll regret. But this has been a huge plus for me overall.

Mood/crying. I would say my mood has been better overall. Probably because I feel very affirmed in my gender as I start to change. I also have moved out of my parents’ place and am living on my own so I imagine that has helped too. I’ve heard some people say they can’t cry as much and I have experienced a bit of that. When I’m reading or watching something my eyes might well up but they don’t roll tears. The only time I’ve cried since I started on it was when I injured myself (unrelated) and had a panic attack. But I can’t say for sure if it’s the T or it’s just that I am happier and have better coping skills than I used to. I will say it’s not my immediate stress response anymore, but I don’t feel like my emotions are pent up or anything.

Voice. This one is hard to say for sure because I had a cold recently that opened up my chest register a little more. Any changes are very subtle so far but I do find my resting pitch seems lower than when I started (I’ve been trying to do those “this is my voice day x on T” videos to track it. I’m terrible at remembering)

Cycle. My period has been coming a bit later each month and the pain seems to be getting a bit less intense. Again this one will be very specific to the user.

Bottom growth. Only a very very small amount. I only noticed because I was watching for it. What I’ve experienced more so is increased sensitivity which I feel is a positive.

Most importantly: I’ve been very very happy! I get occasional dysphoria but oftentimes when I look in the mirror I just smile because I can see myself becoming who I want. I feel more confident, I feel hot, and I really truly love myself through each step of the journey.

Obviously there’s a lot to consider, but if you feel like it could be something you want to try and your health is in a place where you can do so, do it! I am lucky to have a great clinic working with me who were very informative (and helped me apply for coverage when I didn’t have insurance!). I’m happy to pass along any online resources they’ve sent me if anyone is interested. Remember, you can always stop if you decide it’s not right for you or you’ve achieved the changes you want to see. It’s a personal journey and it’s entirely up to you. I found it all overwhelming when I was first considering it and I wish I would have had more people to talk to about what it really feels like. Hopefully this can help demystify it for anyone who is curious about what it’s like. We all deserve to craft ourselves into the person we want to be. 🏳️‍⚧️

[wrenteen75]

CHAOS DREAMING!

SYNOPSIS: aurora henson cannot stand economics. . . the summer before her junior year only highlights this when she crosses paths with a seemingly rebellious group of boys from welton academy, mixed about at a fine arts camp they’ve been shipped off to. little does she know, they’re fighting to rewrite their lives, too—which inspires her to live a little on the edge before she goes back to her all-girls boarding school next fall 𝟅𝟈

author’s note! you can find part three here! also—so happy this fic is coming into its own :') dabbling with the mix of literate & social media au has been so fun

PART FOUR — CLANDESTINE

ENTER AURORA HENSON. . .

The girl had been sprawled out in the grass, unable to sleep and unable to stop thinking. She’d been here in Vermont for a week now—and through new friends, rebellion, and creative bursts, she couldn’t stop herself from wondering more about Charlie Dalton.

Neil meant all the best for Aurora by introducing her to his friends, but the meeting only drove the girl towards insanity.

It was crazy of her—she didn’t know Charlie, and she certainly didn’t have a connection with him.

She couldn’t.

Hell, she could barely have that with herself. What made her think she’d be capable of having that with someone else?

She sighed.

The wind picked up, the leaves rattling above her smaller frame. A few fell down, landing in her hair and sticking to the fabric of her sweater. It didn’t matter if it was summertime—if the wind was blowing, she’d wear long sleeves. That’s how it worked.

Too lost in her own loneliness, she lacked proper focus as someone creeped up behind her, their feet rummaging through the grass as they ascended the hill. Spooked by the sudden noises, Aurora found herself jolting from her spot, relieved to see Neil approaching her.

His hair was a mess, and she assumed he couldn’t settle down, either.

“You scared me,” she mumbled.

Neil smiled, taking a seat across from her. He pressed his back against the tree trunk. “Sorry, Rora.”

“All good,” she answered. “Can’t sleep?”

“Nope,” Neil said. “Charlie’s been keeping us up.”

Aurora’s eyebrow furrowed. “Oh,” she muttered.

“Oh?” Neil repeated her response back to her, eyeing her expression through the darkness of the summer evening. There was something there—he could sense it.

Aurora blinked. “What else am I supposed to say?”

“I dunno,” he mumbled. “Sympathy would be nice.”

She exhaled. “I’m sorry that Charlie is keeping you and your friends up. There, is that better?”

Neil laughed. “Much better.”

There was a slight hint of humor in their conversation, though Neil was catching onto something he wasn’t sure Aurora knew about yet. Or, maybe she knew, but found comfort in hiding it—hoping he wouldn’t find it.

She and Charlie were more alike than he thought.

They both carried this hefty self-guilt, though Charlie covered his with pride and sarcasm. The two had only shared one conversation—the clandestine introduction under this exact oak tree, where Aurora realized there were more people out there like her.

Perhaps that scared her. Perhaps she was intrigued by Charlie, but wouldn’t admit it due to her parents and the weight of expectations—both academically and emotionally.

Neil kept all of this in mind as he spoke to the girl, curious and prepared to crack the case. “You look busy,” he said.

“Hm?” Aurora hummed.

“There’s something going on inside your head,” he reiterated. “What’s up?”

Aurora had forgotten how well Neil could read her.

After years of friendship, it was expected by now, but it shocked her nonetheless. The blonde exhaled tiredly. “I came here to discover my passions and finally break free. Meeting your friends—it showed me I wasn’t alone in that, you know? That scared me. The idea that there’s so many of us with the same passions, but we can’t act on them.”

Neil hummed. “How is that scary? Wouldn’t it be the opposite? To know you’re not alone, wouldn’t that give you some sort of hope?”

“I mean—I guess so?” Aurora hadn’t thought of it that way, not until now. She’d been so pessimistic.

“Look,” Neil eyed the girl. “I get it. I know you. We’re all here for the same reasons. I think you should take that and run with it, yeah?”

“How do you mean?” She asked.

“You know what I mean,” he replied cryptically. “Make connections, get to know people, break free. Don’t stay holed up in your shared bunk with a journal in your lap. Who knows, a conversation or two with the right person might just reveal new information.”

Aurora’s heartbeat quickened. Neil knew too much.

“You’re a pain,” she joked quietly.

He chuckled. “Yeah, yeah.”

THE NEXT MORNING. . .

It was a dreary start to the day. Aurora was drowsy, her legs covered in bug bites from the constant grass-sitting. She itched at them as she tossed and turned in her bed, the other girls in her bunk seemingly dispersed amongst the Vermont campgrounds.

In the short, solemn silence, she reached for her phone. Birds chirped outside—a sense of hope and confidence surging through her veins.

Her fingers grazed over the rings of her journal as she picked her phone off the dresser, the metal cool to the touch. Biting at her lip, she unlocked the screen and typed aimlessly, her thumbs trembling over the keyboard.

[roxygen22]

Still Here (Chapter 10)

Summary: Picks up after your steamy confession that you love Timothée in return.

C/W: NSFW-ish beginning (minors DNI); parent with terminal illness

Catch up on previous chapters here.

Timothée trembled on top of you, barely able to support his weight on his elbows as he came down from the high of his climax.

"You do?" he asked, his tone revealing an air of disbelief.

"Yes. I've known with certainty since the day we went to the lake. I thought I had pushed those feelings aside a long time ago, but obviously the embers never died. I've just been too scared to say it, like that would somehow save me from heartbreak if you change your mind."

He rolled to your side and propped his head up on his hand so he could still look at you. "I haven't changed my mind in 12 years, [Y/N]." He traced your jawline lightly with his fingertips. "Believe me, I have tried many times over the years to convince myself otherwise. You're stuck with me."

"Promise?"

Timothée nodded, nuzzling his nose against your ear. "Can I hear you say it again?" he whispered.

"I love you, Timmy."

His lips crashed down onto yours in response. His free hand landed on your hip, his fingers making indentations in your flesh as he pulled your body to press up against his. This ebb and flow of passion continued throughout the night. When the two of you were finally spent, Timothée clung to you in his sleep as if he were afraid you would disappear.

You stirred when a ray of light from the window hit your face. Waking up next to Timothée after a night of lovemaking was something you had yet to experience. As teens, you were never afforded the opportunity. You took advantage of the chance to take in the features of his peaceful face. In many ways he looked just like he did all of those years ago. The same recognizable jawline, sharp nose, and mop of dark curly hair. But there were subtle differences that you found yourself falling in love with. Laugh lines. Crow's feet. A tiny scar next to his nose. You wondered what story was behind that and made a mental note to ask him later. You found yourself hoping that you would get to stare at this face for the rest of your life.

Your thoughts were interrupted as Timothée began to stir. His eyelids fluttered open, and he smiled as his eyes focused on you.

"Good morning, beautiful," he said, his voice still thick and gravelly with sleep. He pulled you in for a quick kiss.

"Morning." You smiled and sighed.

"Penny for your thoughts?"

You gently shrugged. "I wish I could give you back all the years I wasted."

"Everything happens for a reason, love. The past is the past. What we can do, though, is have fun making up for lost time." He gave you a suggestive look and squeezed your thigh. He acted like he was about to lean in for another kiss, but stopped just short of your lips. "But first, breakfast."

You took in the view as Timothée threw off the blanket and walked naked to the kitchen. You wouldn't mind seeing that for the rest of your life, either.

<><><><><>

After enjoying breakfast in bed, the two of you got dressed and Timothée drove you back to your parents' house. Needing to get back to check on his dad and work in his shop, he dropped you off in front of the house.

Before you got out, he asked, "Hey, why don't you and Madison come over for dinner this evening? Dad would love to see you again and meet Madison. And it would mean a lot to me."

You paused to think through your calendar. "Sure, we can do that. Text me later about the time and what I can bring." You kissed him on the cheek and hopped out of the truck.

Madison was sitting on the couch in the living room when you walked inside. She crossed her arms and glared at you. "Where have you been?"

You found the juxtaposed roles amusing, but tried your best not to show it. "We watched a movie at Timothée's house and fell asleep." Not exactly a lie, but she didn't need the full truth, either. Madison narrowed her eyes at you, but she was satisfied enough with the answer to return to her book.

Your mother watched the entire exchange and covered her mouth to stifle a laugh. You walked past her to the kitchen with a knowing smile on your face. She followed you and asked, "Sooooo, how was your night?"

"Well, like I said, we watched a movie at his place and fell asleep." You laughed nervously and blushed.

"Mm-hmm. I wasn't born yesterday, child."

"It was....good. Really, really good."

She smiled. "Good. You needed to get some."

You scoffed. "Mom!"

"What?! Like I said, I wasn't born yesterday. I called it as soon as he said y'all were going to his place instead of out for dinner." She grinned.

"ANYWAY. Timothée invited Madison and me over to his dad's house for dinner tonight," you interjected, trying to change the subject.

"Must be getting pretty serious if he's bringing y'all home to meet the family," she quipped.

"It's not like I've never met Mr. Chalamet before," you replied insolently.

"Perhaps. But Madison hasn't."

You opened your mouth to rebut, but quickly shut your jaw with a click. She was right, though the realization did not come as a shock. "You're stuck with me" resonated in your head. Timothée was all in at this point. You ducked your head and smiled.

<><><><><>

You returned to the Chalamet's property later that evening with a bottle of wine in hand and daughter close behind you. Timothée met you at your car to give you a chaste kiss and Madison a hug. "Come on inside," he said as he guided the two of you up to the porch.

Mr. Chalamet was waiting at the front door with open arms. "[Y/N]! So good to see you again," he exclaimed as he closed the hug. "And who is this?" He looked at the girl who had half-hidden herself behind Timothée's leg.

You stepped back from the hug and waved her over. "Madison, come meet Mr. Chalamet." You heard him gasp slightly as your daughter revealed herself.

"She looks just like you did as a girl."

"That's exactly what I said the first time I saw her, too," Timothée agreed, setting a hand on Madison's shoulder in reassurance.

She looked up at you in disbelief. "Is there anyone in this town who didn't know you as a kid?" All of you laughed.

Unable to stand for long, Mr. Chalamet returned to his armchair in the living room. You accompanied him and caught him up on the highlights of your time in California while Timothée stepped away to put the finishing touches on dinner. Once Madison helped him set the table and bring out the food, the four of you took your places. Soon you were all reminiscing and laughing at the stories Mr. Chalamet told of Timothée as a boy. You could tell, though, that he was getting tired by the time dessert was served. You and Madison cleared the table while Timothée helped him back to his armchair, then joined them in the living room.

You knelt down in front of him and held his hand. "This has been lovely, Mr. Chalamet. Thank you for having us over."

"Oh, sweet girl. I'm so glad you are back." He nodded past you at Madison, who now stood by Timothée. "You've done a good job with her, my dear. Timothée talks about her all the time."

"Oh, she makes it easy." He gave you a soft smile.

"Will we be seeing more of the two of you, [Y/N]?

You looked at Timothée and smiled before looking back at his dad. "I hope so." You sandwiched Mr. Chalamet's hand between yours and squeezed before standing to leave. Madison shyly waved at him and followed you out the door. Timothée walked the two of you to your car and opened the door for Madison. Before he opened yours, he leaned down to give you a kiss.

"Thank you for this," he said quietly.

"He...seemed to be in good spirits."

"Today was a good day. Those seem to be happening less frequently. He rallied because he wanted to see you two."

You reached up and cupped his cheek. "I see now why you said this would mean a lot to you. I didn't realize he was so..." You were at a loss for words.

"Sick? Yeah. I know it may have seemed a bit premature for this, but I wanted to have, uh..." He looked up at the sky and cleared his throat to will the tears away.

"A family dinner?" you guessed.

Timothée looked down at you and nodded. "I know this is fast and you wanted to take things slowly, but there may not be time and I didn't want to lose the chance to be surrounded by the most important people in my life, those still with us at least. I can't explain just how badly I wanted my dad to meet Madison, especially. I know she's not mine, but I...I love her so much already."

"I know." You wrapped your arms around his neck and pulled him to you. He rested his head in the crook of your neck and cried.

<><><><><>

Chapter 11

Masterlist

Tag List: @croatianprincess, @bluizh, @jindongdongie, @groovyqueer