#and in the film god is absolutely meant to exist and in a beautiful way too

[six-sticks]

honestly I found conclave to be such a moving exploration of faith. lawrence, throughout it all, placed his trust in god and the true intention of the conclave despite his crisis of faith, and despite nearly everyone, including himself, at some point falling into the political game, putting themselves and their ambitions, their doubts, over doing the right thing. so many of the characters have stopped truly examining themselves and their relationship with god. many characters have done horrible things and hold horrible views. which is why benitez's election really does feel like the work of the holy spirit, the way it's supposed to be—choosing the best candidate without any of the politicking the previous contenders relied on. in scripture, the holy spirit speaks through the mouths of men. in the end, god comes through.

[castingmysilver]

I have Thoughts about Guardians 3, and Rocket's arc.

Spoilers of course if anybody watching me here still cares.

--------

A name isn't just a callsign, especially if it's one you chose. A name is part of how you see yourself.

Rocket chose his first name as an act of *hope*, which was then absolutely pulverized. And in that pulverization, he lost every meaningful root he had, and every social link to anyone who could truly understand what he had been through.

Rocket refuses to be a Raccoon.

I don't mean that he just objects to being *called* one. I mean that he feels he *has no common species* at the beginning of the film. Even if he *was* a Raccoon-based prototype, which he doesn't know or believe for certain, he was deeply, fundamentally Changed. When he was modified, uplifted, and *tortured* "for his own good," he became something different than everyone else cowering in his cage. His species and his family was his experimental Batch now. And he is the only survivor.

He had believed that meant they were going to be a part of something beautiful and good and better than himself, and he was willing to serve that goal right up until he learned first that he was worthless to his maker's ideal of that beauty, and then that his family was going to be deleted like a typo out of the grand plan.

His whole life, right up until his near-death vision, he feared that all he was was somebody else's fuckup, wearing the name of a lost dream.

And then that changed.

He began to have hope. Then he made a choice of his own that he couldn't hide from his past anymore: whatever happened, he was going to stand or fall on his own power, and have a shot at making a difference along the way. And then...

He chose to be a Raccoon. To my mind he didn't just discover the name applied, he applied it himself; his kinship was with everything he wanted to save, all the potential experiments, not with his prototype path.

And that is also why it bothered me *much less* than it usually does when they mowed through minions and spared the final boss. Because they made it *Rocket*'s choice, and he chose in confronting his abusive father and disavowed God that *he would be Named by his choice to protect when possible, not just by his rebellion against the pattern set for him.* He was neither an heir of the Father's plan, nor a violent aberration who only existed to fuck it up.

He is Rocket Raccoon, and he's a Guardian of the Galaxy.

[heytherecentaurs]

Of a joy eternal

Venus was a bronze-skinned woman, baked in aestival sunshine, brunette hair like the dark waves from which she emerged, a face set in an expression of intelligent beauty, a freckled starscape stretching across her high cheeks and nose, and her garnet-dark-eyed gaze possessing me with an intentional sensitivity. She wore grains of beach sand on her skin, the diamond-glinting water droplets adorning her chest, small unhurried Tyrrhenian rivulets dripping between her breasts. As she spun to face the fawning sun its rays coruscated in the crystal sea-drops beaded in the dark wisps garlanding her mons Veneris and underarms, and with the sun as a golden halo behind her like a Renaissance saint, her affectionate smile fermented revolution in my blood against lifelong repression.

She smelled of sea-spray and bergamot. Her kiss tasted of limoncello and felt like a eureka as though all my life I had been climbing the Alps and every day before her soft lips touched mine tumbled away, left behind, and in that moment I had reached the pinnacle of what it meant to be alive. She spoke with an accent from a village I had never heard of, but she promised to show it to me. It was a half-day’s drive, she said as she slipped on a chiffon robe, her body a silhouette beneath the sheer fabric when the sun shone through it.

Holding her was already like muscle memory, her body heat branding me, and I smouldered beneath the sublime weight of her, my nerves tenderly burning at her subtlest caress—when I breathed in my body reached out for her in desperate yearning and when I exhaled I shuttered in my chest, despairing my skin leaving hers for even a breath-length. By eventide half-dried sweat stuck us together and pulling away felt too much like betrayal to risk it.

I thought not of Elysium when Venus embraced me. In the dreamland of our summer when we drank wine at every meal and sweetened absinthe on lazy afternoons, I wrote in leather-bound journals of discovering two women—her and myself—of feeling like a woman whole for the first time, and when the sun set at the end of another languid day, we stayed awake in conversation about her chapbooks and my doctoral thesis and our plans for tomorrow and the next day, where we’d sit at the café and sip espresso as the day commenced on the narrow streets. By the dim scarf-draped lamplight she told me of Italian cinema, how filming was creating a language and editing was using it to compose poetry.

And when the air cooled we fell into each other as we plunged into sleep. I dove into the depths of love, filling my lungs with gasps of her affection and intimacy and drowned in the abundance of simple happiness I had known nowhere else but in her embrace. It wasn’t in the Bible but she said the way we sinned praised God; I never believed in Him but if He existed I hope He enjoyed the show. She glorified the womanhood that had set me apart from my colleagues, and in our romance I knew it was right to love her the way I did, to pine in the briefest absences of her touch, to crave her with the absolutism of hungry sexuality like a cultist of her temple desirous for epiphanic ecstasy.

We were more than a summer intermezzo. I had drank the sacrament of her chalice and in this great transmutation tasted wine. I had received revelation divine. I thought soberly of my life though love was a drunken pursuit of happiness, and in the rapture of this most holiest love I found Venus donned my future like an aureole, and in such gilt euphoria I wept; coveting neither endless youth nor riches, I had found the divine god-spring of a joy eternal.

by ro crown

[lesser-mook]

She Said: Hollywood's Humiliating #metoo Disaster

28:00 Absolute Ego-trip, you get rid of powerful men, only for men to still build the skyscrapers you work in anyway, soooooo where’s the W when men are still carrying the team anyway. 

And why is it always W “for women”, like you lovable chumps are a different species or some shit. A W for women is W for everyone lmfao. 

Be careful of divisionary language.  (which I will mention later)

You wanna get more women working in sewers or in Power Plants or Welding? Or the only W for women is when sitting their tush in comfy office seats while men are still one’s actually making the country function on mass doing jobs we don’t even know exist. Hold men accountable at their worst, and we all really need to remember what a Man is at his best while the country’s lights are still on & various other securities have been maintained because of those creatures called “males”, you’re fucking welcome btw.

Better start counting those blessings and be humble, all of us. 

God’s greatest curses to women were the womb and the attention of men, his greatest gift to this day is the honor to deliver life and the fact that men give a single shit about women at the expense of men (Yes I basically said the same thing twice, that’s the point). 

And the fact that that fuck to give is 100% involuntary so even when dealing with women is logically counterproductive in every way, men can’t turn it off and want to want women anyway. 

And you want to know the tragic sick part of that statement/divisionary language I just asserted “ even when dealing with women is logically counterproductive in every way”, that’s only the case- because on a cultural level- You guessed it:

The disconnect is all manufactured/forced/unnatural tension meant to drive you apart and plant the seed to resent resent resent, and you don’t even know why, but the things you read and see tells you that you should. 

(When in reality in a lot of workplaces: it’s chill when people allow themselves to just let the social process flow naturally, and stop second guessing everything.)

When men aren’t having as many families because they’re weighing the risk vs reward of even dealing with the women of their own homeland, that IS  A SERIOUS PROBLEM. And that’s not Men or women’s fault, you point the finger at your culture, society, the village. Why are men walking away? And please list a reason that doesn’t involve disrespecting men or insinuating men are lacking in some way & women are just ahead (came out the womb at 99LVL) because that attitude is part of what got you here, gaslighting around the goddamn issue, making men the issue 24/7, division division division.

The division It’s not natural family, it’s orchestrated. That’s part of the plan baby. 

Women in nature are not counterproductive to a man, you better believe it.

All of this negativity, coaching women to reject advances, be spooked if a man so much as say good morning and planting seeds of resentment in men because women seem entitled while providing next to nothing and ungrateful for shit they don’t even know men die doing on a daily basis.

It’s all orchestrated, it’s not natural. Men and women together is the design, it’s what builds a country to begin with.

This corrosive culture is what you get when people on top controlling what you read and watch- are trying their goddamn hardest to go against the intended design of the universe.

I repeat, that’s the beauty of this film:

  26:25 Before we ask "What If women ran the world-", Look at MeToo's body count, look at the anti-human responses, and see how some women can't handle authority on a small scale. 

Hell look at cancel mobs, Witch Hunts of old victimized women, cancel culture is the creation of women and simulates witch hunts, like what the hell.

A cancel mob is a form of social authority, if you can’t even handle that, why the hell do we think we wouldn’t end up in a war with women in charge? 

So imagine that shit on a National level but you wanna tell me if women were in charge we’d be all Kumbaya? Oh fuuuuuck all the way off, if you think women are these pacifists out the womb you’ve never had to live with more than one woman at the same time in your life.

Strife & ego is a human thing, not a man thing. Women are often just way more subtle about it than men which is why men get reported more on mass.

It’s not that female pedo’s don’t exist for Chris Hansen to catch, they’re just smarter than the male pedo’s lmfao.

36:10 Again, the disconnect in the workplace it's not an accident, that’s the point. The division is the entire point. Not talking to each other, women are being weaponized against men, breaking men like dogs, making men distant from women, that's the entire fucking point. Wake up. A movement for justice became an egotrip, to serve only disconnect. Which hurts women anyway.

That's the punchline.

Social-Engineering, watch those birthrates plummet baby.

Down down down, weaker and weaker country. Weaker superpower, weaker, rival. Awfully convenient for any who’d love to see your land crumble.

Surprised after 50 years your Gov. doesn’t take more steps to encourage more stronger family units & fix the sex disconnect (Because better culture mean better sex relations, means one more step toward better national prosperity), hmm almost as if-.

[otnesse]

Regarding the list:

Snow White is German, and it would have been early into the Reformation, so she could be either Protestant or Catholic. Of course, considering the Evil Queen was... well, a witch, the kingdom Snow White hailed from was technically pagan de-facto thanks to the Queen, though Snow White's praying before bed indicates she definitely retained her Christian upbringing DESPITE the Queen's actions to her.

Cinderella's most likely Catholic due to the region she grew up in.

Aurora, due to the setting, would have most likely been Catholic (it was the 13th century, and thus the Reformation hadn't happened yet).

Ariel: She's most likely a Christian convert due to the wedding at the ending of the film, though whether she's Protestant or Catholic is anyone's guess. I mean, the regalia on the priest during the wedding suggests Catholic, but Catholics don't generally do wedding ceremonies outside of a Church (of course, that being said, Ariel's Wedding story suggests Eric managed to convince the Holy See to make an exception in Ariel's case due to her... unique background).

Belle: I know people say she's Catholic due to being French, but I'm not so sure about that... given how out of place she was with the Villagers and how some of their lyrics in both Little Town and Kill the Beast indicate the villagers are religious, it's actually more likely she's an atheist or at least an agnostic ESPECIALLY given the setting of the time period (it's set during the mid-to-late 1700s in France, and considering Atheism was having a huge foothold during that time ESPECIALLY thanks to the likes of Voltaire and Diderot... yeah. Let's just say Gaston may have had a point when he admonished reading, getting ideas, and thinking as I'd hate to admit, knowing all of that. Besides, she was implied to hail from Paris, and struck me as precisely the type to like the French salons at the time that gave way to the French Revolution). Also doesn't help that the New Adventures of Beauty and the Beast makes it very clear she doesn't even believe in the supernatural, so worshipping God is very unlikely (that's actually part of the reason I dread Belle right now, since I fear she'll become a Jacobin and commit a lot of murder down the line like in real life, even backstab Adam again). Heck, Belle's wedding ceremony in those DP wedding books looked absolutely NOTHING like a wedding of any sort (there wasn't even any evidence of a priest or even a judge.). In case you're wondering what part of that comic I'm talking about:

Bottom left panel. Specifically, "Get hold of yourself, Belle. It's just an old wood. There are no enchanted creatures in the bushes!" Emphasis mine.

Jasmine: Definitely not Catholic, Protestant, or Eastern Orthodox, though she could be either Coptic Christian or Muslim (it's a bit vague especially when an obviously Christian wedding ceremony was used for her in King of Thieves). Of course, then again, she COULD be pagan due to the Hercules and the Arabian Night episode (that, and Genie explicitly mentioning racing Hercules in Return of Jafar).

Pocahontas: She was converted to Christianity in real life around the time she married John Rolfe, though whether that remained the case with the Disney version is left vague (especially considering that one thanks to Katzenberg... wasn't quite respectful of the history).

Mulan: She's definitely not Christian, and in fact it's left vague as to whether Christianity even EXISTED at the time of her film.

Tiana: Protestant most likely, given the few things we do see of her religion as someone pointed out.

Rapunzel: Probably Protestant, since Corona's pretty clearly meant to be Germany, which was largely protestant since the days of Martin Luther.

Elsa and Anna: Unclear, as someone gave evidence towards it both being Protestant and Catholic.

Do you think the princesses like Snow White Cinderella and Aurora are Catholic? As well as Ariel, Belle, Jasmine, Mulan, Anna and Elsa and Tiana? I see some of their images on a cathedral in a movie titled Disney's Descendants.

I could see the classic Disney princesses--Snow White, Cinderella, and Aurora, plus Belle--being Catholic, since they're from European-style kingdoms. Mulan and Jasmine explicitly are not, coming from non-Western cultures. Ariel's not even human, so that's a no. Tiana--actually could be, now that I think about it, because New Orleans is one of the few places in the South where there's famously a heavy Catholic presence, but since I've never watched that one, I don't know if it's at all supported by anything in the movie.

The bishop and cathedral in Frozen suggests that Anna and Elsa could be Catholic, I suppose, but for some reason, I can't shake the idea that they're some variety of liturgical high-church Protestant. Maybe because I assume all Nordic countries are Protestant.

[wizkiddx]

3 hearts broken

I did an angst thing again oops also not proof read double oops

summary: an argument between you and tom, except it takes him hurting someone else for you to loose it

warnings: alot of swearing (im British sorry not sorry) idk anything else except commitment issues?

////////////////////////////////////////////

It was an argument you and your boyfriend regularly had. In fact, it was the only argument the two of you ever had. And especially recently, one that Tom seemed to want to have every day. It didn’t matter where you were on set; in the rental home; out for dinner. Or like now… in the airport lounge.

You were sitting across from each other in a semi-private booth. Tom in his joggers and a burgundy hoodie, you in your black leggings and an oversized tee that actually belonged to your boyfriend. The rest of the place was almost deserted, given the late-night time of the flight. It was probably why Tom felt so comfortable bringing up this touchy subject in a public place.

You were both way past overtired too, owing to the end of a gruelling shoot. All you wanted was to get back to London and get into your own bed. Without an unnecessary fight with Tom.

Unfortunately for you, when you had naively said those exact words, Tom’s overtired brain skipped straight to it being a personal attack.

“I don’t see why you can’t commit to moving in Y/n! We practically live together for filming anyway so-“

“I love you Tom, more than I could ever express. I just… I can’t do this yet. I need… more-“

“More time, I know.” He grumbled, already standing and slinging his duffel bag over his shoulder - as the flight’s gate was announced by the intercom. Had he not already turned his back and started heading along the hallway, you would’ve tried to protest and calm him down. But thanks to his urgency to get away from you… all you could do was sigh. Slumping back against the seat before hauling yourself up and grabbing the bags - that he had helped you with on the way in.

No doubt this would be a long flight.

That it was. Tom had been maturely giving you the silent treatment at the gate, as you were boarding, and finding you seats. You were both in first class, so you had adjacent little pods with a little partition in the middle. It’s standard position was to be lowered however, before you’d even been able to settle into your window seat, Tom had already switched to button to have it slowly slide up.

Real fucking mature.

Thinking he just needed some time to cool off, you rolled your eyes but let him be. Even though you were such a frequent flier, you were terrible at getting any sleep on them. Tom knew this, knew how much you disliked the idea of being hurtling through the air in a tin can. Usually, he’d be holding your hand, entertaining you by watching a movie and providing a shit commentary over the top. Sometimes, when you were both as exhausted as right now, he’d even slide into your chair, having you perch on top of him so you could fall asleep listening to his heartbeat in his chest. Now though? He refused to acknowledge your existence.

Tom never had such issues flying, he was like a switch that could just choose to fall asleep at any and every point. Which is perhaps why it shocked you to see him still wide awake, staring angrily at the corner of his pod when you went to the loo, hours later. Thinking it was time for a peace offering, on the return to your seat you made eye contact and began to smile softly at him. However, that plan lasted for all of two seconds, since as soon as he realised you had seen him staring, Tom instantly shut his eyes - playing asleep.

He really was being particularly stubborn tonight.

By the time the plane landed, he’d still refused to say anything - and it was starting to really piss you off too. You’d tried to be mature, tried to offer the metaphorical olive branch and he had quite literally thrown it back in your face. So by the time you were being escorted off the plane (first because you were first class), you hung back from your boyfriend, wanting to have your own space.

Which was exactly why you didn’t want to give up your own apartment yet!

The two of you walked across the bridge into the terminal with a good 8 metres between each other. Tom didn’t bother to turn round and check on you, taking purposeful steps as though he wanted to get away.

Thankfully the terminal was quiet, probably due to the ungodly hour in the morning you’d landed at. The halls echoed only with your and Toms footsteps, the echo exaggerating just how far away you felt from him at this point. Still, Tom hadn’t acknowledged your existence, or anyone elses for that matter - the pair of you almost got to baggage reclaim before seeing any other humans.

And that is where it all went wrong.

It was typical, an otherwise empty airport except for you, Tom and a family with 2 girls. 2 teenage girls. 2 teen girls whose eyes widened to almost comical levels at the sight of your boyfriend. You’d seen them from a mile away, but from Tom’s reaction to them - he clearly hadn’t.

In fact, you were such a distance away you couldn’t exactly hear the exchange. But what you saw, had your heart in your mouth.

The girls ran over from the seats their whole family were sitting in, squealing at Tom with that overcited little jump you’d seen so often. Instead of Tom turning to them and entertaining them with small talk and a photo or two - he did the opposite. If anything, he quickened his cadence, looked as though he waved the girls off without muttering two words.

And maybe there was a reason. Maybe they had shouted something really rude at him - but fuck, the chances were slim. One looked ten, and one looked a couple of years older - as you approached, you saw the dejected and shocked faces melt into ones of intense disappointment. The eldest turned and hugged the younger, whose chest appeared to be shaking in a way that meant only one thing. Tom had made her cry.

Just as both the mother and father stood up to rush to the girls, you matched their hurried steps - getting their first.

“Hi, excuse me… “

You felt really awkward but knew you had to do something for these poor girls. And quite possibly for Toms career too. “Are you guys okay?” It took a second or two, but the girls clearly both recognised you too (thank god), throwing nervous looks at each other.

“Are yo-you Y/n?” The younger one asked, bright eyes glazed in tears which broke your heart to see.

“Yeh-yeh I am, what are your names?” You knelt, smiling warmly at the girls, who seemed to chirp up a bit.

“I’m Tima” The eldest spoke first before nudging the other to speak. You waited patiently till the little girl had wiped her eyes before replying.

“I’m Azara.”

“Wow, you’ve both got very beautiful names. Where are you both headin-“

“Can I ask you a question!?” Litte Azara burst out, interrupting you, but in the cutest and sweetest way. You just laughed and said of course, as she twiddled with her thumbs nervously.

“How big is the biggest T-rex?” Her little eyes were so curious and you had to suppress a giggle, seeing how serious it was.

Of course, the T-Rexs in Jurassic world (one of your movies) were all CGI. But Azara didn’t have to know that.

“Oh, they are bigger thanthan the tallest trees you’ve ever seen!”

You carried on your little chat with the girls for five or so minutes, laughing with them and exchanging soft nods with their parents too - who seemed appreciative of your time. Eventually, though, it was the dad who pulled time on the exchange, signalling that the girls had taken up enough of your time. As you stood up, Tima spoke up - after being relatively withdrawn from the conversation.

“You’re friends with Tom Holland right?” You nodded, subconsciously biting your lip to see what she would say. “Can you tell him sorry for bothering him, it’s just Azara was excited, we only wanted to say hi.”

Yeh, there was absolutely no way these incredibly sweet girls did anything to Tom. He was just being a knob.

“Hey, it’s not your fault at all. We’ve just had a really, really long flight, and he’s in a bit of a mood at me - I’m so sorry that he let it out on you.”

That explanation seemed to satisfy Tima with a nod, and with some final hugs you bid the girls both farewell. By this point, the rest of your plane had caught up along the corridors, so it was busier, and you had to fight against the small crowd to get through the airport as quickly as possible. Because you were seething with rage for Tom and could not wait to tell him exactly what those poor girls thought of him.

Unsurprisingly Tom had chosen not to wait for you in the airport at all, instead already hiding inside the blacked-out windows of the 4x4 waiting at the collection point. You marched up to that car angry to the point you thought the whole airport would notice. Yanking the door so hard you were surprised you did no damage to it, you threw your bags in - momentarily ignoring the sight of Tom huddled into a corner, staring at his phone with AirPods in.

But once you slammed the door shut and the driver started the car, you let yourself go.

“Who the fuck do you think you are!”

“Y/n can we just leave it for- “

“You made 2 girls cry!!! You were so self-absorbed in your temper tantrum that you made 2 teenage girls cry. You proud of yourself?”

This time he did look at you, eyes wide and confused - clearly not understanding. So you continued - laying it out for him.

“Those two girls you waved off because you were so busy running away from me? Well the youngest one cried and then the eldest didn’t speak and when she did it was only to ask me to apologise to you. You’re a fucking dickhead!”

“I didn’t mean-“

“Oh god, that makes it all better. You didn’t mean to make them cry on purpose, so it’s fine! God if you’d only said I’d-“

“Fuck off Y/n you’re not being fair, cut the sarcasm.”

“I’m not being fair?!? Because I’m the bad person in this situation, right? I just saved you from a very, very bad headline tomorrow morning because you were too busy giving me the silent treatment.”

“Yeah, well, your the one who doesn’t seem to give a damn about me!”

You scoffed hard at his words, air trapped in your throat that now felt completely stuck. How could he say that? How could he even think that?

As much as you hated showing it, you felt your eyes well up with tears. Because who the fuck did he think he was.

“Now that, that is so unfair. You know exactly my history and why I don’t want to move in yet AND you know just how much I fucking love you. So don’t you dare.”

“You're not convincing anyone.” He spoke quieter, but the venom behind his tone was still there. As the first tear escaped over your bottom lashes, you knocked on the partition to the driver and asked him, in no uncertain terms, to pull over.

“Congrats Tom. That’s three women you’ve broken the hearts of in 20 minutes. Must be some sort of a record.”

And with that you slammed the door shut, abandoned on the side of the road somewhere within Heathrow.

?a part 2? idk where id go from here aha

tagging: @lovehollandy12 @hollandlover19 @thefernandasantana @hunnybunimdun @hallecarey1@cedricdiggorysimpp @msmimimerton @hollandfanficlove @pandaxnienke @crossyourpeter @thegirlwiththeimpala

[lokiondisneyplus]

A review of “Journey Into Mystery,” the penultimate Loki Season One episode on Disney+, coming up just as soon as I paper cut a giant cloud to death…

Journey Into Mystery was the title of the first Marvel comic to feature either Thor or Loki. It began as an anthology series featuring monsters and aliens, but Jack Kirby, Stan Lee, and Larry Lieber were so smitten with their adaptation of the characters of Norse myth that the Asgardians gradually took over the whole book, which was renamed after its hammer-wielding hero(*).

(*) The early Journey Into Mystery stories treated Thor’s alter ego, disabled Dr. Donald Blake, as the “real” character, while Thor was just someone Blake could magically transform into, while retaining his memories and personality. It wasn’t even clear whether Asgard itself was meant to exist at first, until Loki turned up on Earth in an early issue, caused trouble, and Blake/Thor somehow knew exactly how to get to Asgard to drop him off. Soon, the lines between Thor and Blake began to blur, and eventually Thor became the real guy, and Blake a fiction invented by Odin to humble his arrogant son. It’s a mark of just how instantly charismatic Loki was that the entire title quickly steered towards him and the other gods.

But once upon a time, anything was possible in Journey Into Mystery, which makes it an apt moniker for an absolutely wonderful episode of Loki where the same holds true. Our title characters are trapped in the Void, a place at the end of time where the TVA’s victims are banished to be devoured by a cloud monster named Alioth. And mostly they are surrounded by the wreckage of many dead timelines. Classic Loki insists that his group’s only goal is survival, and any kind of planning and scheming is doomed to kill the Loki who tries. But this ruined, hopeless world instead feels bursting with imagination and possibility.

There are the many Loki variants we see, with President Loki, among others, joining Classic, Kid, Boastful, and Alligator Loki. There are the metric ton of Easter Eggs just waiting to be screencapped by Marvel obsessives (I discuss a few of them down below), but which still suggest a much larger and weirder MCU even if you don’t immediately scream out “Is that… THROG?!?!?” at the appropriate moment. And all of that stuff is tons of fun, to be sure. But what makes this episode — and, increasingly, this series — feel so special is the way that it explores the untapped potential of Loki himself, in his many, many variations.

This is an episode that owes more than a small stylistic and thematic debt to Lost. It’s not just that Alioth looks and sounds so much like the Smoke Monster(*), that it makes a shared Wizard of Oz reference to “the man behind the curtain” (also the title of one of the very best Lost episodes), or even that the core group of Lokis are hiding in a bunker accessible via a hatch and a ladder that’s filled with recreational equipment (in this case, bowling alley lanes). It’s also that Loki, Sylvie, their counterparts, and Mobius have all been transported to a strange place that has disturbing echoes from their own lives, that operates according to strange new rules they have to learn while fleeing danger, and their presence there allows them to reflect on the many mistakes of their past and consider whether they want to, or can, transcend them.

(*) Yes, Alioth technically predates Smokey by a decade (see the notes below for more), but his look has been tweaked a bit here to seem more like smoke than a cloud, and the sounds he makes when he roars sound a lot like Smokey’s telltale taxi cab meter clicks. Given the other Lost hat tips in the episode, I have to believe Alioth was chosen specifically to evoke Smokey.

Classic Loki is aptly named. He wears the Sixties Jack Kirby costume, and he is a far more powerful magician than either Sylvie or our Loki have allowed themselves to be. He calls our Loki’s knives worthless compared to his sorcery, which feels like the show acknowledging that the movies depowered Loki a fair amount to make him seem cooler. But if Classic Loki can conjure up illusions bigger and more potent than his younger peers, he is a fundamentally weak and defeated man, convinced, like the others, that the only way to win the game into which he was born is not to play. “We cannot change,” he insists. “We’re broken. Every version of ourselves. Forever.” It is not only his sentiment — Kid Loki adds that any Loki who tries to improve inevitably winds up in the Void for their troubles — but it seems to have weighed on him longer and harder than most.

But Classic Loki takes inspiration from Loki and Sylvie to stand and fight rather than turn and run, magicking up a vision of their homeland to distract Alioth at a crucial moment in Sylvie’s plan, and getting eaten for his trouble. He was wrong: Lokis can change. (Though Kid Loki might once again argue that Classic Loki’s death is more evidence that the universe has no interest in any of them doing so.) And both Loki and Sylvie have been changing throughout their time together. Like most Lokis, they seem cursed to a life of loneliness. Sylvie learned as a child that a higher power believed she should not exist, and has spent a lifetime hiding out in places where any friends she might make will soon die in an apocalypse. Our Loki’s past isn’t quite so stark, but the knowledge that his birth father abandoned him, while his adoptive father never much liked him, have left permanent scars that govern a lot of his behavior. The defining element of Classic Loki’s backstory is that he spent a long time alone on a planet, and only got busted by the TVA when he attempted to reconnect with his brother and anyone else he once knew. This is a hard existence, for all of them. And while it does not forgive them their many sins(*), it helps contextualize them, and give them the knowledge to try to be better versions of themselves.

(*) Loki at one point even acknowledges that, for him, it’s probably only been a few days since he led an alien invasion of New York that left many dead, though due to TVA shenanigans, far more time may have passed.

For that matter, Mobius is not the stainless hero he once thought of himself as. While he and Sylvie are tooling around the Void in a pizza delivery car (because of course they are), he admits that he committed a lot of sins by believing that the ends justified the means, and was wrong. He doesn’t know who he is before the TVA stole and factory rebooted him, but he knows that he wants something better for himself and the universe, and takes the stolen TemPad to open up a portal to his own workplace in hopes of tearing down the TVA once and for all. Before he goes, though, he and Loki share a hug that feels a lot more poignant than it should, given that these characters have only spent parts of four episodes of TV together. It’s a testament to Hiddleston, Wilson, Waldron, and company (Tom Kauffman wrote this week’s script) that their friendship felt so alive and important in such a short amount of time.

The same can be said for Loki and Sylvie’s relationship, however we’re choosing to define it. Though they briefly cuddle together under a blanket that Loki conjures, they move no closer to romance than they were already. If anything, Mobius’ accusations of narcissism in last week’s episode seem to have made both of them pull back a bit from where they seemed to be heading back on Lamentis. But the connection between them is real, whatever exactly it is. And their ability to take down Alioth — to tap into the magic that Classic Loki always had, and to fulfill Loki’s belief that “I think we’re stronger than we realize” — by working together is inspiring and joyful. Without all this nuanced and engaging character work, Loki would still be an entertaining ride, but it’s the marriage of wild ideas with the human element that’s made it so great.

Of course, now comes the hard part. Endings have rarely been an MCU strength, give or take something like the climax of Endgame, and the finales of the two previous Disney+ shows were easily their weakest episodes. The strange, glorious, beautiful machine that Waldron and Herron have built doesn’t seem like it’s heading for another generic hero/villain slugfest, but then, neither did WandaVision before we got exactly that. This one feels different so far, though. The command of the story, the characters, and the tone are incredibly strong right now. There is a mystery to be solved about who is in the big castle beyond the Void (another Loki makes the most narrative and thematic sense to me, but we’ll see), and a lot to be resolved about what happens to the TVA and our heroes. And maybe there’s some heavy lifting that has to be done in service to the upcoming Dr. Strange or Ant-Man films.

It’s complicated, but on a show that has handled complexity well. Though even if the finale winds up keeping things simpler, that might work. As Loki notes while discussing his initial plan to take down Alioth, “Just because it’s not complicated doesn’t mean it’s bad.” Though as Kid Loki retorts, “It also doesn’t mean it’s good.”

Please be good, Loki finale. Everything up to this point deserves that.

Some other thoughts:

* Most of this week’s most interesting material happens in the Void. But the scenes back at the TVA clarify a few things. First, Ravonna is not the mastermind of all this, and she was very much suckered in by the Time-Keeper robots. But unlike Mobius or Hunter B-15, she’s so conditioned to the mission that even knowing it’s a lie hasn’t really swayed her from her mission. She has Miss Minutes (who herself is much craftier this week) looking into files about the creation of the TVA, but for the most part comes across as someone very happy with a status quo where she gets to be special and pass judgment on the rest of the multiverse.

* Alioth first appeared in 1993’s Avengers: The Terminatrix Objective, a miniseries (written by Mobius inspiration Mark Gruenwald, and with some extremely kewl Nineties art full of shoulder pads, studded collars, and the like) involving Ravonna, Kang, and the off-brand versions of Captain America, Iron Man, and Thor (aka U.S. Agent, War Machine, and Thunderstrike, the latter of whom has yet to appear in the MCU). It’s a sequel to a Nineties crossover event called Citizen Kang. And no, I still don’t buy that Kang will be the one pulling the strings here, if only because it’s really bad storytelling for the big bad of the season to have never appeared or even been mentioned prior to the finale.

* Rather than try to identify every Easter egg visible in the Void’s terrain, I’ll instead highlight three of the most interesting. Right before the Lokis arrive at the hatch, we see a helicopter with Thanos’ name on it. This is a hat tip to an infamous — and often memed — out-of-continuity story where Thanos flies this chopper while trying to steal the Cosmic Cube (aka the Tesseract) from Hellcat. (A little kid gets his hands on it instead and, of course, uses the Cube to conjure up free ice cream.) James Gunn has been agitating for years for the Thanos Copter to be in the MCU. He finally got his wish.

* The other funny one: When the camera pans down the tunnel into Kid Loki’s headquarters, we see Mjolnir buried in the ground, and right below it is a jar containing a very annoyed frog in a Thor costume. This is either Thor himself — whom Loki cursed into amphibianhood in a memorable Walt Simonson storyline — or another character named Simon Walterston (note the backwards tribute to Walt) who later assumed the tiny mantle.

* Also, in one scene you can spot Yellowjacket’s helmet littering the landscape. This might support the theory that the TVA, the Void, etc., all exist in the Quantum Realm, since that’s where the MCU version of Yellowjacket probably went when his suit shorted out and he was crushed to subatomic size. Or it might be more trolling of the fanbase from the company that had WandaVision fans convinced that Mephisto, the X-Men, and/or Reed Richards would be appearing by the season finale.

* Honestly, I would have watched an entire episode that was just Loki, Mobius, and the others arguing about whether Alligator Loki was actually a Loki, or just a gator who ended up with the crown, presumably after eating a real Loki. The suggestion that the gator might be lying — and that this actually supports, rather than undermines, the case for him being a Loki — was just delightful. And hey, if Throg exists in the MCU now, why not Alligator Loki?

* Finally, the MCU films in general are not exactly known for their visual flair, though a few directors like Taika Waititi and Ryan Coogler have been able to craft distinctive images within the franchise’s usual template. Loki, though, is so often wonderful to look at, and particularly when our heroes are stuck in strange environments like Lamentis or the Void. Director Kate Herron and the VFX team work very well together to create dynamic and weird imagery like Sylvie running from Alioth, or the chaotic Loki battle in the bowling alley. Between this show and WandaVision, it appears the Disney+ corner of the MCU has a bit more room to expand its palette. (Falcon and the Winter Soldier, much less so.)

[jaskierswolf]

Flaming Desires

Summary: In a world where soulmates are connected through their kinks and sexual desires, Geralt and Jaskier decide to try out something new in the bedroom. Luckily for both of them, Geralt is a firefighter.

Rating: E

CW: No sex but lots of sexual content, wax play, dom/sub vibes, general hoey vibes, mentions of sex work.

Part three in this AU, part two written by @geraltrogerericduhautebellegarde. Your turn babe 😘

Also shout out to @kuripon for beta-ing

________

Dreams; they were going to be Geralt’s downfall. On the menu this week was wax play, something that hadn’t even realised he was into, but he just couldn’t stop dreaming about it. Jaskier had taken the week off filming for his OnlyFans page, so it wasn’t a video, and yet Geralt couldn’t see an ordinary tea light without getting hard. Normally, that wouldn’t be a problem but Jaskier had arranged a date that evening so the two of them were sat in Jaskier’s kitchen with the lights down low, and a tacky christmas candle holder sat in the middle of the table.

And Geralt couldn’t stop watching the flame, the tiny pool of molten wax at the base of the wick. It was ridiculous but he had to sit on his hand to stop himself from reaching for the candle and dipping his fingers into the wax. He’d never had this problem before. He was a firefighter for god’s sake, fire wasn’t sexy.

“Jask?”

“Yes, darling?” Jaskier cocked his head, a coy smile playing on his lips.

“Are the candles a you thing?” Geralt asked, groaning as he tried to ignore his erection and eat his food but it was persistent and he was feeling particularly horny.

His soulmate just chuckled, never breaking eye contact as his lips wrapped around his fork. The bastard then had the audacity to moan softly, licking his lips in a way that was unfairly seductive, and Geralt was about two seconds from clearing the table and having his way with Jaskier right then and there.

“Don’t even think about it,” Jaskier purred in a low voice. “I have plans tonight, and I will not have you ruin them by being a brute.”

“Fuck you.”

“Spoilers,” the musician trilled, winking as he sipped his wine. The liquid stained his lips red which only made him look even more irresistible.

“I regret introducing you to Doctor Who,” Geralt groaned.

“No you don’t, you love me,” Jaskier giggled.

“You never answered the question,” Geralt reminded him gently, “Candles?”

His soulmate hummed, tongue swiping across his lips, as he tilted his head. Long fingers danced along the rim of his wine glass, and his blue eyes twinkled in the candlelight. All in all, Jaskier looked ethereal, something out of a painting, a fairytale. He even had the name to match, Jaskier, Buttercup, Dandelion. Geralt’s beautiful flower; gorgeous and deadly.

And completely insatiable.

“I thought they were a you thing?” Jaskier asked slowly.

Maybe they were, or maybe they’d ended up in some weird kinky loop through the soulbond… which Geralt had finally admitted existed. There was just no way it was some kind of coincidence. When he was feeling intolerably horny, there was Jaskier lying on his bed at the end of work, dressed in the prettiest stockings and Dandelion’s make-up. When he was feeling in the mood for just a good nature documentary and cuddles, Jaskier would turn up at his door with two onesies and a bag of takeout. They were just in sync, almost every day.

Geralt had never had someone in his life that had understood him like this before and it was completely exhilarating-- terrifying, but exhilarating. His brothers teased him about it relentlessly, and they were both careful about telling people how they really met, but Geralt had never been happier.

Even if he was discovering kinks he never knew he had.

Wax play… really?

“Well, fuck.”

Jaskier frowned, scratching absentmindedly at the scruff that was beginning to grow. He preferred to stay clean shaven for Dandelion, but in between videos he got lazy, and Geralt would be the first to admit it was a good look on his boyfriend. “Did you want to?”

“Yes,” Geralt said, probably far too quickly. “Yes,” he repeated more slowly as he felt his cheeks heat up, “but I don’t know how.”

Jaskier’s hand cupped his cheek, fingers caressing his jaw as they fell away. “I’ve done research. Do you trust me?”

“Always.”

“Well, that’s a lie. You wouldn’t even let me chop the vegetables,” Jaskier teased.

The memory of Jaskier’s cack-handed attempts at prepping the veg made Geralt shudder. The knives had been blunt and Jaskier had narrowly avoided a trip to A&E. “I trust you,” Geralt said again, grinning at his boyfriend, “just not with things that could kill you.”

“Fire kills,” Jaskier reminded him, “or didn’t my insanely pretty firefighter boyfriend forget?”

“I won’t let the house burn down, Jask.”

His soulmate giggled. “Can you imagine that phone call? ‘Hey, Eskel, It’s Geralt. We almost burnt Jaskier’s flat down playing with candles in the bedroom.’” Jaskier’s tone took on a gruff growl as he mimicked Geralt’s voice.

And that was it. Geralt stood up and pulled his soulmate into a kiss before he could protest, the taste of shitty red wine still on his lips. Jaskier moaned into the kiss, his fingers digging into Geralt’s hips and they both stumbled to the bedroom, dinner promptly forgotten.

In Jaskier’s bedroom were a few candles, plain looking, and yet Geralt felt a whole new wave of arousal. They were actually doing this, and Jaskier had apparently prepared. He was pleased to see a small bucket of water in the corner of the room and the fire blanket from the kitchen. There were times that he forgot that Jaskier and Dandelion the sex worker were the same person. Jaskier was a professional, and he took everything they did very seriously… and Geralt fucking loved him for it. He felt safe when they played like this, and it even gave him the confidence to submit to his soulmate. That hadn’t happened very often before Jaskier.

Geralt squeezed Jaskier’s hand as he pulled him over to the bed, cupping his cheeks as they kissed lazily, neither in any real rush, until Jaskier pulled away. He was smiling softly at Geralt in a way that made his heart flutter, as if there was any doubt how much Geralt loved him.

“Take off your shirt, love,” Jaskier told him, pressing a final kiss to Geralt’s cheek before getting up to fetch the candles. “I ordered a soy candle, it’s meant to be good for beginners. Cooler burn rate, but you will let me know if it hurts too much? We can stop at any time, just say your word,” Jaskier started to ramble, a nervous habit that Geralt found so endearing.

He pulled off his shirt before crossing the room to press his lips to the nape of Jaskier’s neck and his arms wrapped around his boyfriend’s middle. “Stop worrying, Julek.”

“Oh,” Jaskier hummed.

“I trust you,” Geralt reminded him.

“Hmm, I love you,” Jaskier murmured, spinning in Geralt’s arms and capturing his lips in a kiss. “Okay, right, on the bed.”

“Back or front?” Geralt asked, but he already knew the answer. He always seemed to know, but Jaskier liked to verbalise it so Geralt let him, especially as this was a new kind of play for them.

“Front please. Thank you, darling,” Jaskier smiled warmly as he struck a match, the soft golden glow from the flame lighting up his face beautiful, before he lit one of the candles.

Geralt did as he was told, propping himself up on his arms whilst he waited for his soulmate. He closed his eyes and let his mind drift, focusing on the soft melody that Jaskier was humming under his breath. There was a tingle of heat itching under his skin, and he was pretty sure his boxers were a mess in his trousers from the way his cock was aching. He had no doubt he was already leaking, but he did his best to stay still, resisting the urge to rut against the mattress. Jaskier would tell him if he were allowed to do so.

“Oh look at you, absolutely perfect, pretty as a picture,” Jaskier cooed.

His cheeks burnt, and he had to bury his face in his arms. Geralt loved the praise, but he was easily overwhelmed by it, in a good way, mostly. He still struggled to believe that Dandelion, his crush for so long, was now his boyfriend - no - his soulmate, that the videos were and always had been practically made for before either of them knew.

Jaskier pressed a kiss to his shoulder, and he hummed, letting his boyfriend know he was okay, and then Jaskier’s fingers were in his hair, scraping against his scalp. The sensation was nearly too much and he moaned, the sound muffled by his arms. Jaskier chuckled as he pulled Geralt’s hair into what felt like a ribbon, and then Geralt felt his boyfriend’s hands run down the length of his spine.

“Fuck,” he groaned.

They’d barely started and already he felt like his entire body was on fire. He felt heady with arousal and his cock was aching to be touched.

“Ready?” Jaskier asked, his voice sounding as wrecked as Geralt felt.

Geralt just grunted, and then, at Jaskier’s stern silence, mumbled a ‘yes’. He shivered as he felt Jaskier’s breath against his skin, gasping as Jaskier swatted his arse. The room was silent apart from the soft singing of his soulmate, and Geralt could do nothing but wait patiently, or rather impatiently.

Until…

“Cock!” Jaskier spluttered, his words swiftly followed by a resounding thud.

“What the fuck?”

He bolted upright, still feeling a little spaced, but he recognised the smell of carpet burning and it was enough to cut through the fog in his mind. Jaskier was sitting on the floor, legs sprawled and the candle had fallen onto the rug, catching on the synthetic fibres.

“Jaskier!” he growled, snapping his boyfriend from his shock.

“Oh- oh fuck!” Jaskier scrambled for the water bucket.

The fire didn’t last long but the mood was killed. They both just stared at each other across the singed rug, until Jaskier cracked a smile and they burst into laughter. Jaskier couldn’t stop apologising in between fits of giggles, pressing his face into Geralt’s neck to hide his embarrassment. Despite the almost torturous week of wet dreams prior, Geralt could only chuckle as he held his boyfriend close.

They would just have to try again another day.

[latte-fairytaekwoon]

Ateez: Your Relationship Being Outed

Kim Hongjoong:

Your companies had warned you that Dispatch had been keeping an eye on you two, hoping to get incriminating evidence that you two were indeed dating. After, sitting down and properly talking, your managers asked you both what you wanted.

Hongjoong and you looked at each other. You were both afraid, but knew for sure you wanted to go public with the relationship, you wanted to be able to be seen in public together.

"What do you think?" You asked your boyfriend, wanting to make sure he'd be ok with it.

Hongjoong smiled at you as his hand reached for yours.

"If it's ok with you, I'd like to go public about us."

And that's exactly what you two did. A few days later, you were prepared. Knowing full well Dispatch sent photographers your way, you both took a deep breath before linking hands together and walking out the building with your faces exposed. You two even waved and smiled at the cameras, having no fear or shame about your relationship, knowing deep down your fans would be happy and supportive about it.

Park Seonghwa:

This all started because a certain idol was hitting on you too much for Seonghwa's liking. You kept telling him you'd take care of it and not to worry about it.

"But how can I just stand there and pretend to be fine when they're eyefucking you right in front of me?"

He had enough one day. So when he saw said idol approaching you to bother you again, he spun you around and kissed you right in front of them and whoever else was around, warning the idol to back off from you.

And soon the idol's tweet about you two dating was spread like wildfire.

"I told you I'd take care of it, but no. You had to go jealous boyfriend mode and out us like that." You were stressed about this too much.

"I'd say I'm sorry, but I don't regret anything." Seonghwa confessed.

He hugged you from behind and slowly swayed you side to side.

"We'll get through this together ok? Don't worry. Our fans will understand."

Jeong Yunho:

Since the beginning, Yunho wanted to make your relationship public. He adored you and knew Atiny would be ecstatic to know you two were dating. Fans often shipped you two for God's sake.

"I don't know Yunho....." You always told him.

"Why not? Don't you love me enough to let the world know?.......are you ashamed of me?"

You could hear his voice break and it killed you.

"Of course I love you! And I'm proud of you! But I'm scared that it might affect our careers and we'd be forced to leave each other."

Yunho wiped the tears that spilled out from your eyes.

"Nothing will ever break us apart. That's my promise to you." He kissed your forehead and gave you a reassuring smile.

And he spilled the news the only way he could: ANEWZ.

"This just in: there are rumors going around that Jeong Yunho and L/N Y/N are dating....." He looked at the camera and smiled.

"Indeed the rumors are true. "

Kang Yeosang:

Yeosang and you often snuck out at midnight for dates. Sure it was tiring, but seeing each other made you forget about your hectic schedules, the constant shove of cameras in your face, the pressure to be the perfect idols. None of that existed when you two were together. You were just Yeosang and Y/N.

Soon enough, a photo was leaked by a sasaeng. You both woke up to articles about the leak all over the internet. Yeosang quickly went to see you, wanting to make sure you were ok, although he was on the verge of crying too at the thought that you'd be forced to break up.

Karma has its ways though, fans supported you two and condemned the sasaeng for violating your privacy. Fan sites even were created just for the two of you. It was an overwhelming amount of support.

Yeosang couldn't be happier, even if his members liked to tease him about you any chance they got.

"Here's an easy one: what's Yeosang's favorite thing in the whole world?" Yunho asked the question he picked out from the box at one of their fanmeets.

"Y/N?" Wooyoung snickered, making everyone erupt in laughter as Yeosang got embarrassed.

Choi San:

San was another one who didn't felt the need to keep your relationship a secret.

"I wanna show you off to the world!" Was what he often said. But of course, you knew that was only half of the truth.

"And I also want other people to know you're taken and not try to take you away from me like they do." There it was. He was possessive and often wanted to out you two so others wouldn't hit on you so much.

He got the opportunity while he was doing a VLive. He was happily chatting away until a lot of comments kept asking him if you and him were dating, making him confused. He saw his phone and someone sent him a leaked photo of you two kissing on one of your dates. He was shocked to find out this way and didn't know what to say, but gathering his courage, he took a deep breath and finally spoke up:

"Atiny, I have someone to say.... it's true. I am dating Y/N. I fell in love with them and I'm really happy with them.....I hope that you can all understand..."

Comments flooded in, telling him not to apologize and encouraging him about the situation. He started crying at the beautiful messages.

"Thank you so much...you guys really are the best....also let me take this time to say..."

Wiping his tears, he looked dead straight at the camera:

"Y/N is mine so none of you other idols try to take them from me. I know who you are!"

Song Mingi:

Mingi and you tended to be very careful about your relationship. You wanted to just date peacefully without anyone bothering you two or having it become a topic for people discuss. And you thought you took good measures.

Apparently not good enough since an employee at one of your favorite cafes outed you two. They posted a picture of you two.

"This is bad." Mingi tried to remain calm.

"No it's not.....it's inconvenient. But not bad." You tried assuring him.

"Yes it is! What if our companies deny it? What if they force us to break up? What will I do then Y/N? I can't live without you."

You knew you had to be the strong one here for both of you, but you couldn't. You simply held Mingi tightly, sobbing and not wanting to let him go.

Your agencies decided to hold a press conference addressing the rumors about you two. They asked you two to be present, which made you even more afraid. But to your surprise, they confirmed your relationship and threatened legal action against anyone who spread malicious words about you two or violated your privacy.

Mingi and you stood there stunned, wondering if it was a dream or not. But you two were so happy that you could be together after all. You guys waved and smiled at the press, making your first public appearance as a couple.

Jung Wooyoung:

You both adjusted your face masks one more time, making sure that you were unrecognizable.

"How do I look?" Wooyoung asked you as he faced you.

"I don't know. I can't see your face." You snorted.

Even though his face was covered, you could tell he was not pleased with your answer and was giving you his stank face.

"Hahaha, very funny. Now come on. I wanna get there before too many people show up."

The date seemed to run by so smoothly. Since most individuals were wearing masks anyway, no one batted an eyelash at you two or found anything suspicious. You two could sit on a bench and Wooyoung felt comfortable enough to wrap his arm around you. Then you felt him stiffen and release his hold on you.

"Woo? What is it?" You asked him, noticing his shift in behavior.

He didn't answer you but simply stood up and walked over to a man sitting by himself near a fountain. By his walk, you could tell Wooyoung meant business.

"So who sent you? Dispatch?"

The man reddened, thinking he had been sneaky at his attempt to film you two.

Wooyoung smirked.

"I'll make your job easier for you. We'll just tell the public ourselves. That way you can just leave us alone and not stalk us. Have a nice day."

Wooyoung walked back over to you and you asked him what was that about.

"I hope you're ready baby. Cause we're coming out."

Choi Jongho:

It all spilled out cause Jongho had been working as an MC for Music Bank. His co-MC was overly flirty with him, and though he remained unfazed by her gestures, people still decided to ship them together. He absolutely hated it.

"Are you not even a tiny bit upset as well?" He asked you.

"Actually no. I know you only love me and they're just being a thirsty hoe. And it is funny to watch you whine about it." You couldn't help but find his reactions adorable.

Jongho had enough though one VLive when so many people were commenting things about his supposed relationship with said idol.

"Stop asking me how she is. I don't know what she's doing cause I'm not dating her! I'm dating Y/N!"

He gasped when he realized that he outed you two, right in the middle of a VLive.

Your agencies quickly put out a statement, confirming the related and apologizing for Jongho lashing out in anger, saying he was just stressed about things. But fans understood and supported you two.

"I still can't believe you told the whole world." You said to him the next time you saw him.

"Oh relax. Think positive. Now I can hold your hand in public without worrying about cameras."

Gifs not mine. Credit goes to their respective owners.

[someone-worth-racing-for]

Carlos was just meant to be Lando’s first F1 teammate, they bring out the absolute best in eachother!!! Couple of weeks ago I saw this thing you posted where Lando was asked about the first time he experienced that F1 could be cruel and while he has had that from the outside with like fans and haters and stuff commenting, he never had that from inside cause he and Carlos have really been building a team together! I remember Nico Rosberg talking about the mindgames Schumacher would play with him like not ever recognizing his existence or simply occupying the bathroom till 1 minute before quali when he found out going to the bathroom was part of Nico’s ritual. This is so common for drivers but Carlos and Lando have really been there for eachother, all openness on set ups, data, sitting on pitwall adivising on a track that’s never going to be on the calender again so nothing is for personal gain.. im going to be such a sad mess when they seperate and with 3 races to go it’s weighing heavy ): What is comforting though is that they have had such an undeniable impact on eachother that they will probably never forget the great times they’ve had, I hope ... this turned way more rambley than intended but hey Lando encouraged us to talk about our feelings and frankly they’ve personally violated me bt divorcing 😂

Hey anonym! Btw have I already told you that I love you for those messages you sent in my inbox, because I really do! ❤️

I totally agree with you that they both brought out the best in each other and them becoming team mates was probably the best thing that could have happened to both of them, but also to the team.

And yes, in my eyes Carlos was the best possible first team mate for Lando – they were really meant to be together, because they both needed each other.

Oh God, I have never heard about these stories about Nico and Michael before. I have to admit that I’m not the biggest Nico fan, but if the stories are true, then I think it was pretty unfair from Michael. But that’s only my opinion, maybe some would say it was clever from him to weaken his team mate like that with his mindgames. I don’t know, I’m just not the type of person, who would do something like that and take my whole energy in affect someone in any negative way. Instead I would focus on myself and keep my energie for something good, I don't know.

And I also think that’s how Carlos and Lando think and work, they both don’t seem to me like they would do something like that neither. And I also believe that one day destiny pays back to you such things – I don’t know, I’m just too soft for doing something like that.

I really don’t want to say that Lando wouldn’t be the same, talented driver he is now without having Carlos as his first team mate, but I think his way to where he is now would haven been way harder, more difficult and maybe also longer, if he should have had a team mate, who would have also played mindgames with him.

I think Lando counts to the kind of people who develop in a working, peaceful and harmonize atmosphere way better than in a toxic one.

But I bet not only Lando has enjoyed and benefit of their time together. For Carlos Lando was really some kind of little brother, he could watch out for, teach and show him new things. He really seemed to like that. Carlos has taken Lando by his hand since the very first day and will only let it go again after the last race this year.

And people saying that Carlos was only funny as long as he was together with Lando is nonsense in my eyes, because Carlos didn’t become funny at the beginning of 2019 and will stop being funny with the end of this season. He was always funny and he will also stay funny, we were just not able to see it before, that’s all. Lando, like he has already said once in an interview himself, had just helped Carlos to show the world what a funny guy he actually is. That’s all and such things do really annoy me, I’m sorry.

Lando and Carlos just understood the meaning to be team mates. They were there for each other and so also for the team to develop. When they helped each other, they also helped the team so. If they wouldn't have harmonized like they have, I bet McLaren wouldn’t be like where they are at the moment.

And I also love that quote Henrik has said about these two once – that whenever they do some kind of challenges or have to film something he just let them do, because they are such a great team. Things always turn out to be funny in the end, because they are actually just two friends fooling around with each other.

I think the best example is the ‚snack wars‘ video from last year, when they were actually meant to rate the food, but while just being themselves and fool around they forgot about it and also no one of the team remembered them about it, because they just let them do. They interact so natural and familiar with each other – it’s a really beautiful thing to watch.

I bet there will be many tears by the last race (and not only from my side here). It will be heartbreaking to watch, even when it will only be a good-bye for being team mates. I really hope they will be able to keep this precious friendship they are sharing, even when it will be difficult with being in different teams and also with the virus..

But I think in the end no one can bring the memelord bois apart and especially no one can take those memories away from them anymore. They will always be able to look back at the great time they had with a smile on their lips.

And we were all blessed to watch these moments ❤️

[gumnut-logic]

Living on an island in the middle of the ocean had Virgil fairly used to birds. There was a colony of Kermadec Petrels on Mateo that he liked to keep an eye on since apparently, they were ‘native and uncommon due to past ecological interference in the area’ and Mel had glared enough at his father to let it sink in…particularly when they were building their backup generator over there. The fact the little island had nearly been blown up by the Hood had given him nightmares for weeks. A firm discussion with Kayo and a change to the WASP protocol had been enacted since.

But so close.

There were the lone albatrosses that occasionally visited, their vast wingspan visible far above the island. Virgil had been known to just sit and watch them until they disappeared to the horizon or behind Tracy Peak. There was something so calming about them.

Of course, then there was the time a huge gull had taken up residence in the pool…while Gordon was in it. There was such a ruckus at that, even Virgil had been dragged out of bed. Alan had been eating breakfast when the bird landed and had caught a good chunk of it on film. One sodden, screeching aquanaut tangling with a much put out gull provided entertainment for Christmases to come.

But this? This was unprecedented.

Thunderbird Two had been left on her runway overnight due to a small fault in her module retrieval system. No module meant no wheels and a ticked off pilot. He had lowered number four to the tarmac at 2am and used a pod to push it into the hanger, but Two had to stay outside.

Gordon had not been happy and Four couldn’t deploy without help from Two at this point, but at least the craft had been safe inside overnight.

Two on the other hand…

Virgil crawled out of bed at 6am, drowned himself in coffee and stumbled out into the morning.

Fortunately, the weather was blue sky and the wind almost non-existent. The palms were still and the foliage on either side of the runway was just lighting up as the sun slowly crept over the horizon beyond the villa. It was all quite beautiful.

It was a relief. With the exception of last night, the last week had been full of nasty weather. Not enough to stop a Thunderbird launch, but dark, grey, windy, wet and depressing.

Virgil took a moment and let his shoulders drop and closed his eyes. Okay, he was overreacting. He was tired. Yesterday had been hell and the fault had appeared just as he was finally able to leave the last rescue site. It meant a crawl back to Tracy Island and Gordon stuck in the module and his ‘bird the entire way.

The vitriol over comms hadn’t helped.

If they had been near land, he would have paused to collect the aquanaut out of the module, but the rescue had been in the middle of the Pacific and it was pitch black and, god, he just wanted to go home.

The fact he was separated from his brother by a comline that could possibly be muted was a reassurance of his sanity.

Did he mute it?

No.

But the possibility was there. It really was.

It was over. He was home. The morning was beautiful and he should be able to fix the problem easily enough.

The petrels over on Mateo were squawking up a storm. A glance in that direction and, yes, the sea eagles were out looking for breakfast.

Living on the Island was a twenty-four-hour nature documentary sometimes. Without the editing.

Two was exactly where he left her, squatting on her struts. He took a moment to just stop and gaze at her. It wasn’t often he was able to see her outside without having to dash to or from an emergency.

She was lit up by the sun, her green hull glowing with its satin shimmer. Her big number two emblazoned and glowing on her tail. He was able to appreciate just how big she was and just how beautiful.

His heart swelled with a little pride and, if he was to admit it, blatant affection.

She was just perf-

He frowned. What the hell was that?

A white glow on her front windows where there should be no highlight with the sun this low on the horizon.

He took a step sideways, moving the angle of reflection.

You have got to be kidding me.

He didn’t have his uniform on, just his service harness, wrist remote over his flannel and an old pair of jeans. He was planning on using his onboard tool kit and killing two birds with one stone by checking the equipment at the same time.

He ran to the hatch, lowering it without thought and waiting impatiently for it to rise up into the cabin. The moment he could, he dashed forward to his pilot’s seat.

Across the forward windows was sprayed a large splat of white something.

Virgil’s brows cut a furrow into his forehead that almost cleaved his skull in half. If the white mess wasn’t so huge, he’d think a bird had eaten Grandma’s cooking and had a bad night. But it was massive. The streaks spread over several windows.

If Gordon had used paint on Virgil’s ‘bird as a prank, fratricide was a possibility.

Grabbing a safety line, Virgil hooked himself in and raised the hatch. Lips, pursed he climbed out onto Two’s hull and lowered himself down to her windows.

It was bird shit.

One massive bird shit.

It encompassed plexiglass and cahelium hull and was a spray of at least a couple of metres across.

How the hell? Anger was frozen as his brain attempted to account for how it got there.

It wasn’t there last night. Hell, if it was, there was no way he could have missed it. So, it had to have happened overnight.

The problem was, as far as he knew, there was nothing on Tracy Island big enough to do such a thing. Except maybe Gordon. Anything was possible with Gordon.

Gordon. Yeah, it had to be Gordon.

Climbing back into his ‘bird, he hunted down enough cleaning equipment to remove the mess.

Once it was cleaned up, he turned to the task he had come out there for and fixed the faulty retrieval hydraulics.

-o-o-o-

Virgil had mostly forgotten about the issue by lunchtime. Having his ‘bird out in the sunshine gave him the opportunity to air out her life support systems and do some general cleaning. He even got one of the bots to hose her down and climbed out and polished up her windows and external lights. For an hour or two he lost himself in the job, his mind wandering over yesterday’s events and processing as his hands worked on familiar surfaces.

Gordon wandered out onto the tarmac at one point to check on him. His fish brother may claim to be carefree, but if one of them wasn’t acting normally, he was known to chase them up or alternatively poke and prod if they weren’t responding in a Gordon-acceptable manner.

“Hey, Virg, whatcha doin’?”

It was yelled up as Virgil was hanging almost upside down above Two’s port wing polishing his third number two for the day.

“Cleaning.”

And yes, that was an arched eyebrow from his little brother. He couldn’t see it, but he could hear it. “You gonna wax and polish your entire ‘bird?”

“Just the important bits.”

“You do know we have bots for that.”

“Yes, Gordon.”

“Then wh-“ A wet splat interrupted his brother. “A-aaaargh!”

Virgil spun so fast, his safety line shifted and he found himself falling forward and off the edge of the wing.

Hanging in mid-air only gave him a better view.

Gordon stood on the tarmac, face absolutely disgusted, somewhat distraught and covered in white bird shit.

Continue reading on Ao3

[100keepingit100]

Nicolette

Profession: Clinical Social Worker

Years keeping it 100: 33 years

WHO IS JESUS TO YOU?

To me Jesus is love personified.  When I think about what he’s done for me; dying for me, my sins, just the fact that when he was on earth he showed us what it means to be compassionate & to really be loving to others & just seeing what he’s done in my own life, I know that I am loved.  After years of really not understanding what that meant, just knowing that there’s someone who loves me unconditionally, it really means a lot to know that I serve a God who is love.

HOW DID YOU BECOME CONVICTED JESUS IS THE REAL DEAL, THAT IS WHO HE SAID HE WAS?

Ok so I have two parts. So the first one is, I remember back in 2000 when my father kind of walked out of my family’s life & we were in such a bad situation at that time.  We all knew the Lord, we all new Jesus, I knew him from a child growing up.  I can honestly tell you that looking back, I don’t know how we made it through.  When I really think about it, I can attest to the fact that he [Jesus] was there for us, in many ways.  When he said “I will never leave you or forsake you,” that verse really became real to me.  Just looking back at every moment where we had a lack, he made up the difference.  Every time I felt as if I didn’t really know what to do, he always provided & always made a way.  And so that really cemented my understanding of who he was as a provider.  The Lord really keeps & satisfies, even in the midst of hardship.  

And the second thing is, I remember watching The Passion of the Christ for the first time in movie theaters.  And movie that really broke me.  Like I said, I was saved at a young age & I knew Jesus.  But, to see what he actually did, on that magnitude that was never filmed before, it really hit home; the sacrifice that he really made for me.  And so I really was convicted at that point to really understand that he is was who he said he was.  That he really came to die for our sins.  And he committed to that for us.  

WHY DO PEOPLE NEED JESUS?

People need Jesus because people are lost & people are in sin & people need a way out.  And Jesus is the only answer.  We were all born in sin & shaped in iniquity.  We were all basically on our way to hell.  We didn’t do anything other than be born to be sinners because of what Adam did in the beginning.  But, Jesus made a way by dying for our sins & rising again so that we can have eternal life if we can accept the truth of the Gospel, that he came to die for our sins & cleanse us.  I feel like many of us feel like we can do without him, but in the end, it doesn’t really matter what your life looks like.  We are all sinners.  And until you believe in Jesus you will not be able to see Heaven, you will not be able to see Jesus, you will not be able to claim eternal life.  And so we need Jesus.  We need salvation.  We need the Lord & savior.  There is really no way around that.

WHAT IS THE ONE THING ABOUT JEUSUS YOU WISH EVERYONE UNDERSTOOD OR KNEW ABOUT JESUS?

That he really, really loves you.  You know we’re living in a world where love can often times be transactional or we only love those who love us because it’s easy.  And Jesus when he came to earth & died for us, while we were yet sinners he died for us.  And that’s love.  To really love someone & sacrifice for someone knowing they don’t want you, knowing that they don’t know you exist or even care; that magnitude of love, that magnitude of compassion where he sat with sinners & ate with them no matter who criticized & who said a bunch of evil things about him because of it.  He made sure to note to us that his love was completely going across the board.  There’s really no condition behind his love.  He is absolutely love personified.  There’s nothing you can ever do to make him stop loving you.  Nothing you can ever do.  The Bible says that all are called to repentance.  There’s nothing you can ever do to make yourself not good enough to come to God because he will always accept you.  I think that’s the beauty of God himself because God is love.  His very essence is love.  And Jesus is love.  His compassion that he has for us.  Just knowing that he can identify with our own needs, our own struggles because he went through it when he was here on earth.  So he knows & understands what we go through.  And knowing that everything that we do he knows about & he still loves us anyway.  I think that is something I really want to stress to people because we’re living in a world where it’s just easy to just push someone to the side.  It’s just easy to abandon someone for not believing in your principles.  Or to even feel as if you’re not wanted for whatever reason.  But there is a God in Heaven, there’s Jesus, his son, who is the very epitome of everything that love stands for.  That’s what I really, really want people to understand.  

[qqueenofhades]

If Cursed had asked you, a medieval historian, what to do, what would you have told them?

Ahaha. Ahaha. Hah. Full disclosure, I know/knew absolutely nothing about the show apart from reading this horrible article, but methinks, enough to get a sense of it. And even without the author of this article wildly making up their Blackadder version of history (as my dearest and oh so correct @oldshrewsburyian​ put it yesterday), the quotes from the actors/producers/etc are just... they are just.... SO BAD.

Starring:

"But when we got into filming and the brutality, the mud, the bugs and the blood, I thought, 'I'm not sure I could handle this in reality'.

"I have a feeling I'd get sick and die pretty quick."

"I'd be dead," adds Frank Miller, very matter of fact.

"I mean it was a time of wild plagues and disease and they didn't have much use for people who do the kind of stuff I do."

Ah yes, medieval life. Mud, blood, bugs, and death. “Times of wild plague and disease,” unlike today, where we never have a problem with plague at all. And I’m sorry, the medieval world had no use for artists??? What are you even SMOKING MY DUDE MY BRO MY PAL (and if you don’t know this, WHY ARE YOU MAKING A MEDIEVAL SHOW SUPPOSED TO BE “ACCURATE?”) Have you LOOKED at ONE SINGLE MEDIEVAL MANUSCRIPT? HAVE YOU WALKED INTO A MEDIEVAL CATHEDRAL AND LOOKED AT THE STAINED GLASS WINDOWS? LOOKED AT ANY JEWELRY? ANYTHING?????

(Okay I gotta pace myself, there’s a lot to yell at here and it’ll take a while.)

"If I was living in that time, I think I would want to be a witch but you would stink," Devon Terrell, who's taking on the role, laughs.

As would most people, with a lack of basic sanitation and plumbing which meant human waste was often thrown out close to where you lived.

"And I like a good fairy tale but I wouldn't say I was longing for a time that was much less scientific. I'd probably get killed for heresy or something. I'm not great with authority or religious oppression and that sort of stuff. So, yeah, I don't think I'd fare too well."

There’s just... I don’t know where to even.... /SCREAMS

(And I even cut out the especially face-palming quote from the article about “thousands of people burning for heresy” in the 11th/12th century. “Much less scientific,” well, Roger Bacon’s brazen head just called AND IT THINKS YOU’RE A MORON, DEVON.)

The woman playing Morgana Le Fay talks about your life being “very short” and getting drowned as a witch and whatever Bad Guy Du Jour talks about having no dentists or medical care. We get the picture: they.... really did not do their homework. I’m not sure they even touched Google. So basically, we’d need to start by burning everything down and then asking if really, truly, do we NEED to make this adaptation. There are EIGHT THOUSAND MILLION GODFORSAKEN RETELLINGS OF ARTHUR/THE ROUNDTABLE RIGHT NOW. NOBODY NEEDS ANOTHER ONE! EVEN FOR WHATEVER PSEUDO-FEMINIST TAKE YOU SEEM TO BE TRYING TO PUT ON THIS ONE! ENOUGH! ENOOOOUGH! THINK OF SOMETHING DIFFERENT! THERE ARE SO MANY MEDIEVAL ROMANCES OUT THERE THAT DON’T GET MADE!!!

For example, you know what I would suggest? Bisclavret. Where is my lavish beautifully designed historical-medieval-fantasy queer werewolf romance, I ask you? (Answer: just like that novel I stumbled upon yesterday that decided to make some random Vatican maidservant into Cesare Borgia’s ~truest and purest love~, y’all are too cowardly to do it right.) YOU KNOW WHO WOULD LOVE THIS? THE GAYS! THE GAYS WOULD LOVE IT, PATRICIA! We have a central queer love story (Bisclavret and the king). We have a distinct physical and geographical setting (12th-century France). THE GODDAMN THING WAS WRITTEN BY A WOMAN! (Marie de France.) We could develop the character of Bisclavret’s wife and give her backstory and into a sympathetic and complicated but ultimately redeemed antiheroine, blackmailed by the male/patriarchal/heterosexual villains of the establishment, if y’all REALLY want to get into some subversive queerfem medievalism and not your little weaksauce Nimue in her polyester corset. We could LITERALLY MAKE A QUEER MEDIEVAL WEREWOLF ROMANCE WRITTEN BY A WOMAN!!! HOW ABOUT THAT YOU DINGDONGS?!!

You could decorate the sets beautifully by, I don’t know, LOOKING AT THOSE MEDIEVAL ARTISTS WHO SUPPOSEDLY DIDN’T EXIST. You could bring in other medieval monsters, such as walking corpses, and have brawny young men beating them to death with shovels (as various medieval chroniclers matter-of-factly report on). You could do something besides the TIRED ASS “superstitious peasants think woman with vague evidence of a personality must be a witch!!” You could ground your story in the vivid and colorful politics of 12th-century France and the underground queer life for people in Paris (MAKE PETER THE CHANTER THE FROLLO-ESQUE VILLAIN, I’M JUST SAYING!) EXPLORE THE METAPHOR OF QUEERNESS VIS A VIS MONSTROSITY WITH BISCLAVRET THE WEREWOLF! You could STOP ACTING LIKE GAME OF THRONES IS HISTORY AND “DIRTY PEOPLE IN TUNICS GETTING KILLED MEANS IT’S MEDIEVAL!!!”

/takes a deep breath

But alas. As established, they are Cowards. So, if we absolutely HAD to be lumbered with another goddamn Arthur adaptation:

STOP ACTING LIKE SOME RANDOM VAGUELY 12TH-CENTURY SETTING IS ~tHE hISToriCAl ArThUr!!~ IF HE EXISTED IT WAS IN LIKE 5TH-CENTURY POST ROMAN BRITAIN AND A) WE ALREADY HAD THE TEDIOUS BIG BUDGET “ACCURATE KING ARTHUR” WITH KEIRA KNIGHTLEY DRESSED IN WHATEVER THAT WAS, I’M GAY SO I’M NOT COMPLAINING THAT MUCH BUT ALSO ACCURATE MY CYNICAL LESBIAN BACKSIDE!

....where was I...

Ah yes. Post-Roman 5th-century Britain is A VERY DIFFERENT SETTING from the random-ass mishmash of “medieval” tropes you people seem to want to throw in. Or ANOTHER IDEA: junk the idea that “King Arthur” is ever going to be a remotely accurately represented historical concept, and just make it lavish, fantastic, magical, dark, and compelling without yoking yourself to the fuckin’ BORING ASS “must add mud and blood and suffering and misogyny for More Realism!” It’s FANTASY, TREAT IT LIKE FANTASY AND NOT HISTORY LIKE “A FAIRYTALE!” HOW ABOUT THAT IDEA?!?! AND MAYBE STOP ACTING LIKE YOU HAVE PRETENSIONS TO “tHe wAy it ReALLy wAs” because we have established YOU DO NOT!!!

(God Game of Thrones is the WORST, and you KNOW they’re doing this trying to be GoT-lite, and I.... /mutters incoherently)

OR MAKE ANY OTHER OF THE ARTHURIAN ROMANCES IF YOU REALLY HAVE TO DO A CAMELOT STORY! THERE ARE LIKE EIGHTY MILLION OF THEM! PICK A SIDE ONE WITH CHARACTERS THAT YOU CAN DO FRESH RATHER THAN THE ARCHETYPES THAT HAVE BEEN DONE TO DEATH!!! ACTUALLY ASK A MEDIEVAL LITERATURE EXPERT AND A MEDIEVAL HISTORIAN FOR ADVICE BEFORE YOU GET THIS FAR AND EMBARRASS YOURSELVES!!! (OR MAYBE SEVERAL OF THEM!!) ACTUALLY ACT LIKE REPRESENTING THE PAST AS A FULL AND COMPLEX AND BEAUTIFUL PLACE AS WELL AS A DARK AND DANGEROUS ONE CAN STRENGTHEN YOUR STORY AND DISPLAY HUMAN EXPERIENCE MORE ACCURATELY! RATHER THAN “HURR DURR DARK AGES” BECAUSE I AM TIRED!!!

TIRED!!!!

...Anyway. I clearly handled this well. Whew.

[themilky-way]

the motive {loki odinson}

gif credit: astouract

pairing: loki odinson x female! reader

summary: he takes pleasure in the way you react to his words. it’s a fun game up until you’ve had enough, and everything he’s wanted is sitting before him. based on the morning by the weeknd.

warnings: was supposed to be hella implied nsfw but i guess i got soft halfway through BUT i redeemed myself so ha 😼. anyways, minor nsfw themes and language, so caution. tiny, TINY angst oops. we kinky in dis one 

author’s note: i started school again so getting more works done will take a bit longer but i’ll try to write as much as i can! anyways hope this satisfies y’all 😌

-------

it had started out as a joke. a fun little game that would bring him some sort of entertainment during his stay on earth. and while it did work fairly well during the first few weeks, he never thought it would transition into this-whatever the hell this was.

loki was cunning and devious; it was part of his nature that would never cease to exist within him. he enjoyed causing some trouble here and there if it meant he kept a molecule of sanity. so when thor suggested he stay with him at the avengers tower, he thought he might explode. living in a humongous multi billionaire house with the people who wanted him dead? it was a set up. it had to be.

for loki, the first few weeks had been tolerable. he’d wake up in his assigned bedroom, fix himself a mediocre breakfast once the kitchen was empty, and then scurry up to a quiet place. he discovered that he could do as he pleased whenever the compound was free of residents, and since the avengers had much bigger threats now, he didn’t have to worry about them spying on him. it was false freedom, but he could live with it.

when he’d have such luxury, he would sometimes walk down to the common room to settle with a good book. sure, it may appear to be a boring pastime, but it wasn’t as if loki was going to throw an exuberant ball without tony’s permission. not that he was a man- dare he say god-of seeking approval, but it was common courtesy, for odin’s sake! he had morals he needed to follow, thus requiring him to partake in hobbies that would not get him in trouble.

however, when he came across a particular mortal one night, the values he sought after vanished. it’s as if they never existed at all, and once again the laws of time and space defied him. you were there, taking up his entire field of vision in just an oversized t-shirt. could it be your partner’s? loki questioned. it most likely was, yet he found himself hoping it wasn’t. in that moment, it didn’t help that his mind had stopped functioning. when you stepped into the kitchen, the shirt hiking up slightly with every step, his body didn’t allow him to look away. his novel was discarded far away on the couch, and his hands searched for some type of cloth to grip. it was here, with your body bent over and curiously searching through the refrigerator, that his carnal instincts heightened. then, his knuckles turned white when you finally noticed him.

“oh fuck, hi,” you gasped. the glass bottle you were holding dropped, but it knew better than to actually hit the floor. seconds after catching it, you turned to look at the stranger in front of you. “didn’t see ya there.”

loki tried-really tried-to think of a good reason not to bend you over again, on that lovely kitchen counter your fingertips were dancing on, and take you right then and there. perhaps it might seem a tad bit rude? would such an action be impolite? the right answer was yes: it was absolutely all of the above. a first date is necessary to win the heart of a lady, and then a couple more to build a friendship. the relationship would come naturally, with given time, of course. in his head, the god was scoffing at how eager he was to win this clumsy, beautiful creature. he was one who took what he wanted-whenever he wanted-and didn’t look back. but loki was confined to the dull walls of the compound, and apparently so were you. he needn’t worry, for time had joined his side once more; he’d get to know how sweet you could taste, how your mouth would mindlessly shudder out his name, and the man couldn’t be more thrilled.

“are you able to speak?”

the simple question reached him, and when he searched for the source, he came face to face with you. you were standing in front of him, in all your delicious glory, and it almost broke him. still, he was deceitful; you couldn’t know that. “of course i speak, you fool,” loki shot back.

“okay, well, you didn’t answer me back there,” you pointed out. your hands were neatly clasped behind you, excitedly rocking back and forth on the heels of your feet, when you extended a hand for introduction. your name confidently slipped out, giving loki the most tender smile anyone could offer him. “pleased to meet you, sir.”

sir. the name stirred something up inside him, and he wasn’t able to tell if he’d accidentally let out a moan upon hearing it. did you know how innocent you sounded? how ravishing you appeared right now-with the soft skin of your thighs drawing out the patterns he so wished to kiss, or how the outline of your bosom prominently showed itself through your clothes. he stopped himself, though, before he could cross the line between observant and creepy. the last thing he wanted was to make you feel uncomfortable, having had the same dreadful feeling for far too long during his lifetime.

“don’t call me that.” the hand you were holding out was covered by his own. the handshake was quick, not too harsh or loose, but just adequate. he said his name, and he found himself missing the feeling of your skin against his.

“why?”

“because it’s not for you to say.” a lie. a very well calculated one, at that. he may be properly forged in the art of deception, but right now he wasn’t quite sure he passed the test. if he could grant permission to any woman to use the term of endearment, it’d sure as hell be you.

“alright then,” you mildly laughed. “i’ll just have to find a name i can call you.”

after that, loki realized that his source of happiness ultimately came from you. he enjoyed the unlikely bond you both had, one that formed because of the god’s inability to keep it in his pants. it was awkward at first-with everything you did or said locked in his mind wherever he’d go-but the confidence he always carried with him returned at one point.

today, loki never forgot to let you know what you did to him. this was it. the game he sought after since his inherent arrival at the tower. this was the adrenaline, the crazed connection he’d been hunting for centuries. it ignited something-between the two of you-whenever loki’s mouth would hover over your earlobe, whispering just how agonizingly slow he could take you. he never mentioned how he’d go about doing it, leaving you to wonder which part of him would fulfill the deed. oftentimes, loki didn’t even have to say anything. if he was feeling particularly shy that evening, and the team was all there, all loki would do was pat his knee. if you want to, if you really need to, you can finish on my leg. the simple image of it would have your hand between your legs that night.

“loki, what the hell.” you found him inside your dorm one particularly rainy night, lighting the candles you kept on either of your nightstands. “i keep my door locked for a reason, y’know. and stop wasting my candles.”

“i can’t help myself, darling. they smell quite lovely,” loki smiled. it was sincere, adoring even, and the way he took comfort in your tiny space brought a light tug to your stomach. you stayed still as you watched his tall form stride over to you. a small breath caught in your throat when loki peered down at you, and he caught it. he knew what he did to you, and he gained a new sense of pride at just how quickly he could make your knees go weak. his thumb and index fingers suddenly-gently-lifted your chin higher so your eyes could lock together. his own searched for something as if to look for the answer to his next question.

“you’re aware this isn’t just strictly physical, right?”

quite frankly, you were not in the loop even a little bit. “what?”

the tiny whisper made him want to carve out your lips with his own, slow, and taunting, and hard. he refrained for the time being. “think hard on it. there’s no rush.”

“no, i get what you meant. it’s just” you shook your head, prompting loki to let go of his grip. “i dunno. i thought you didn’t catch feelings, let alone for me.” loki let out a hearty laugh which forced a goofy grin onto your face. you liked seeing him like this. happy.

“i’m not stone cold, darling. you’re the only one i’ve ever had an infatuation with, though. well done, you seem to have captured my heart,” he joked. you giggled with him as you lightly shoved his chest, but loki caught your wrist before you could take it back. the kiss he brought to the inside of it had you swooning. a childish, girly feeling, yet you couldn’t care less. the both of you stayed there for a while and casually chatted until it was time for loki to head out. that night, you hardly got any sleep.

-------

ever since then, loki acted as if he didn’t remember it. he went back to his cocky self, not that you minded, but some simple recognition would’ve been nice. the days lapsed as they did before: loki doing everything in his divine power to make you ache for him. it worked, no matter how hard you avoided it, but soon you stopped trying. your body demanded for loki to touch you. to give you more than a simple brush of his lips to your wrist, yet he gave you anything but. and so you set out to change that.

it was the late hours of the night, with your team comfortably dispersed amongst the common room. movie night was in full effect, and no one had the intention of looking away from the gory film that was currently playing. you were seated next to wanda, the man you wanted painfully too far away from your reach. he didn’t have any clue you were angry with him, nor were you going to tell him. he was a thoughtful man, he’d figure it out.

you blinked away only to be met with his gaze. it was sharp, hungry. he looked you over as his tongue dipped out to run along his lip, biting it once he finally saw what he wanted. you’d be lying if you said it didn’t arouse you. of course it did; the poor man would rail you straight into this couch right now if he got the chance to.

you looked away, fearing vulnerability, and somehow managed to make it to the end of the marathon. you all said your farewell’s and deparated to your designated corridors, and just when you were about to close your door, a hand stopped it.

he pushed himself inside without much resistance from your own part. you stepped back and allowed him to close it, suddenly feeling a bit small. he looked at you then, the hunger replaced by confusion.

“is everything alright?” he inquired. no it’s not. you won’t shove two fingers into my mouth and tell me how good i’ve been.

“is everything alright-” you scoffed, “no it’s fucking not, loki.” you ran your hands through your hair and looked down, finding the decorative tiles on your floor quite intriguing.

“hey, woah, look at me. tell me what’s wrong, sweet.”

“that. that’s what’s wrong, loki. it’s the way you can tease me whenever you want, and call me sweet names and expect me not to react. you give me nothing to work with, for fuck’s sake!” a couple tears ran down your cheeks unbeknownst to you, but loki was quick to hold your face in his hands. his thumb wiped the drops in quick, tender-like motions and he crumbled at the way you focused on him.

“i’m sorry, darling. my intentions were never meant to bring you harm, much less sorrow. how can i fix this?”

“i need you to, fuck i-” you took a couple of breaths. “i need-want-you to touch me. to make me feel good, in all the ways you know how.”

loki chuckled quietly, a proud, defiant smirk curving along his lips. “is that what this is about? why, you could’ve just asked. no need for a tantrum.”

rolling your eyes, you tried to look away from him, but his hands began traveling to the curve of your neck, a lonely thumb parting your lips. he pried your mouth open and slipped it inside, letting the noise hidden in the back of his throat escape when your tongue wrapped around him. “is this what you wanted?”

your own luscious moan filled the room, and you felt his thumb push harder against your tongue.

“use your words, angel.”

an enticing gasp. “yes, sir.”

[nvalentino]

𝐭𝐰𝐨 𝐚𝐠𝐚𝐢𝐧𝐬𝐭 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐰𝐨𝐫𝐝 {𝐬𝐢𝐥𝐯𝐞𝐫 𝐬𝐜𝐫𝐞𝐞𝐧 𝐬𝐰𝐞𝐞𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐚𝐫𝐭𝐬} • 𝐧𝐢𝐜𝐤𝐲 𝐯𝐚𝐥𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐨

𝐧𝐨𝐭𝐞: this is my way of putting the story of two against the world into my own style and fixing things that bug me about the game. This is in no way meant to diminish the writer’s work, but everyone has different taste. 

𝐰𝐨𝐫𝐝𝐜𝐨𝐮𝐧𝐭: 2k+

Movies have always been my escape. A way to distance me from a crumbling economy and stressful days at work- something simple. There’s nothing quite like mindlessly inhaling popcorn in the dark, alone with no one to judge you. All the while staring at an enormous silver screen for two hours straight. I love that it’s a world away from my own. 

My town’s movie theatre isn’t much, but she’s got character. Sat on the corner two run-down cross streets, her paint- peeled walls crawling with thick vines and the crooked marquee sign whose lights don’t work has almost become a second home. So when I heard she was hosting an all-night crime movie marathon, I’ve never bought a ticket faster in my life.

When I show up to the theatre, there’s a line wrapped around the block and they’re all dressed as mobsters, Femme Fatales, wise guys... these are my people. I look up at the marquee, which reads: ‘FILM MARATHON: ALL NIGHT GANGSTERS.’ 

My heart nearly jumps from my chest. I’d been waiting all week for this, for my break. I finally reach the front of the line, and I’m greeted by Murray, the owner of the place. I think he’s been hunched behind that ticket booth since Bogart ruled the box office. 

“What’s a looker like yourself doing here alone on a Friday evening?” It’s always the same. No matter how many times it seems I show up in his lobby- Murray always forgets me. It’s lovely to know I’m so memorable. 

“Are you ever alone when you have the characters on screen?” I keep my tone light and teasing. Can’t be cruel to Murray- bit like roundhouse kicking a puppy.

“You look familiar, you a regular here?” Ah, there it is. Scratch my previous statement, I’m at least a little important. Guess all those hours spent in front of him’s paying off.

“That I am.” I rest an arm on the counter, an even smile on my face. Murray leans closer, getting a better look at me. I’m all too used to all his antics by now, and smiling is the easiest way to get alone.

“And your name is?” Can’t have everything in life, I suppose, and, as lovable as he is, he hasn’t been all there for the better part of a decade. 

“Murray, it’s me, {Y/N}.”

“Oh, right,” he smiles, straightening back to look me over. “Why didn’t you say so? You know my eyes ain’t what they used to be.” I have to hold back a laugh, but it’s easily covered with a large grin. “I didn’t take you for a fan of gangster movies.”

This time, an amused scoff passes my lips. Resting my hip against the counter I feign an offended look, “It’s like you don’t even know me anymore, Murray. I love gangster movies.” 

“So do I, kid. The slick-talking, the high drama, the whirlwind romances.” A wistful look crosses his eyes, like that of a family member flicking through family photo albums reminiscing about the old days- then his face clears up. “Speaking of romance, where’s your date?”

Talk about beating a dead horse. I nearly always turn up alone to the movies- no matter how much I’d like to have someone to bring. But I come the same way each time- all by myself. “I just told you. I fly solo. I don’t need a wingman. Besides, why bring a date when you have the company of the beautiful people on the big screen.”

A look of concern washes over Murray’s face- something much unlike anything I’ve seen on him before like he was deep in thought. “Fair enough. A movie star will be your date tonight, then.”

“Exactly,” I laugh. “Now, can you let me in?”

“Can you show me your ticket?”

I reach into my pocket, eager to get inside so I can buy a box of popcorn and soda. But my pocket’s empty. Oh, god no. I reach into my other pocket. And to my absolute shock, there’s nothing inside but lint and a cracked phone. Instantaneously, I’m checking everywhere: coat pockets, shirt pockets, back pockets- each and every one of them like the last: empty. My heart sinks- I lost the ticket. Only me. I nervously read my surroundings. A line of impatient movie-goers behind me, an elderly ticket-take in front of me, and a sign in big bold letters that hangs above him. Tonight’s showing: Sold Out.

“Your ticket, please?”

“Oh, god, Murray- I-I can’t find it,” my hands glide over every pocket again- desperately trying to find some trace of the ticket.

I feel a lump burning in my throat and a wet gloss beginning to coat my eyes. If losing my ticket wasn’t bad enough- feeling the burning stares of the long line behind me is tipping my scale. “I’m sorry, dear. I’m not sure what I can do. We’re all sold out.”

My eyes fall to my feet as murmurs sound from behind me, doing my best to hold back the disappointment and embarrassment boiling over. “Right. My fault.” My cheeks feel hot, my entire body’s burning. I can’t believe it. A week’s worth on excitement drained out of me in a matter of seconds.

Just as I take a step away from the counter- Murray calls my name. “Hold on. Maybe there’s something I can do.” I turn around, and Murray looks at me with a sceptic’s eye. “You really want a date with a movie star tonight, do you?”

“Yes. Please, I can’t tell you how long I’ve been looking forward to this.” My pride’s the last thing on my mind, focusing solely on pleading with the man in front of me.

He reads my expression, seeming to gaze straight through me, and then he straightens out his vest. “You’re positive?”

“Murray, I’ve never been more positive about anything in my life.” Okay, drama queen- dial it back a bit.

“Very well.”

“One of my customers cancelled their reservation last minute. And they were very important. From Hollywood. You can take their place if you’d like.” And with those words, my face is overtaken with joy.

“Wow, Murray, thank you so much.”

Murray retrieves a golden ticket stub from the booth, and it sparkles underneath the glow of the marquee. He rips the stub in two and hands me the other end. Something in his eyes sparkles like he knows something that I don’t. “Choose your adventure wisely, kid. It’s almost showtime.”

For a moment, I’m captivated by the ticket- the grumbling line behind me forgotten. Admit One has never felt so... special. I stride past Murray, toward the doors to the lobby, the sweet smell of salted buttered popcorn pulling me inside.

But when I waltz inside, everything about the rundown movie theatre is different. The sticky floors have been replaced by slick velvet carpeting. A grand staircase sits where the pinball machine used to be. Thick red curtains have replaced the shredded B-Movie posters. And the people around me are dressed like they’re from a ball in the 1920′s. This room alone could buy all the places I’ve ever lived. This isn’t my theatre. The dimensions aren’t even correct. I’m either hallucinating or this is all a dream. Either way, I’m spooked. I’ve got to get out of here.

I pivot back to the door and yank at the handle. But it won’t budge. I can feel my heart bursting from my chest. Everything feels so real- there’s no way I’m dreaming. I wrap both hands around the handle this time, clutching the ironclad door. But it’s completely seals shut. Okay. Don’t Panic. There has to be an explanation. For why... for how... for how I’ve been magically transported to a movie palace from the early twentieth century. Just hearing myself think that makes me light-headed. This can’t be real.

I turn around once again, and in my delirium, I see a sharply dressed man eyeing me from amongst the crowd. His angelic smile looks like it’s worth a million bucks, and his eyes are like none I’ve ever seen in person. The colour of honeyed whiskey and unbelievably sharp. This only happens in the movies. He only exists in the movies. One of the crime flicks about the Roaring Twenties. But I can’t place exactly which one. With a sly wink, he confidently turns away from me and moves through the crowd.

Intrigued, and left with little other options, I follow him. But he’s elusive. I walk faster, but the faster I walk- the further away he seems to be. He reaches for an expansive, gold-plated door. And before I can even call out to him, he’s on the other side of it. Oh, come on.

I hurry my pace, clumsily weaving my way between the other guests until I reach the door myself. Without so much as a thought, I pull the door open and step into a buzzing room packed with boozy patrons dancing to the boisterous symphonies of Broadway jazz. I watch in amazement as women in sequin flapper dresses do the Charleston with men suited up in black tuxedos. Unless I’m mistaken, I’d say I’ve just stepped foot in a rowdy speakeasy from the jazz age.

Am I dreaming? I must be dreaming. I pinch myself. Ouch. Not dreaming. I turn my attention to the crowded bar, its customers getting tipsy on saccharine highballs. If there’s one thing I need right now, it’s a glass of something strong. I move swiftly to the stool studded counter.

“What’ll it be?” The bartender, a bow-tie clad man whose greying hair is slicked back from his forehead, asks.

“Oh- uh, what are my options?” He points to a chalkboard behind him, which has the names of several drinks etched into its surface. Fuck. I should’ve paid more attention to the drinks featured in all the movies I watch because I have no idea what any of these mean. 

“She’ll have a Gin Rickey with a dash of syrup.” The words come from behind me, saving my breath. “And I’ll be having an Old Fashioned, old-timer.”

The mystery man pulls a glistening silver case from his jacket pocket as the bartender begins synthesizing our drinks. He flips open the case revealing a handful of perfectly rolled cigarettes inside. How do you talk to a man from an entire century ago? Especially one so... gorgeous. Don’t reference memes. Easier said than done.

“Care for a smoke?” He flashes that five-star smile at me again as he retrieves a matchbook from his coat. I shake my head- mind racing. Don’t mess up, don’t mess up, down mess up...

“Where am I?” Way to go- not crazy at all. Definitely, something a completely normal and functioning human being would ask. 

“You don’t know where you are?”

You’ve fucked up- own it, but try and keep your stupid contained. You’re supposed to be wooing him- not scaring him off. “Not exactly.”

The man ignites a match, the flicker of a flame painting his face in moving shadows as he lights the cigarette. He returns his silver case and the matchbook to his jacket pocket. “You tell me your name and I’ll tell you where you are.”

“{Y/N}.” So far so good. My mind is still reeling- eyes combing over every inch of the room- trying to find a sign, anything, to prove that this is all real. “I’m dreaming. Aren’t I?” The sudden sensation of being spun around takes over my body.

“If this is a dream, I don’t ever want to wake up.” I feel my cheeks warm at the words, at least one of us is articulated. “The names Nicky. Nicky Valentino.” Nicky brings my wrist to his lips, pressing a kiss to the top of my hand. I swear I can feel my soul departing

“Charming as you may be, I’m not from here-” my already jumbled sentence gets interrupted by the bartender. He places the candied, kaleidoscopic drinks before us. Nicky slips the man two bills, then looks at me with those mischievous hazel eyes.

“Cheers.”

I hesitatingly clink my glass with his and place the cold drink to my bottom lip. I take one sip and my mouth contorts with the overwhelming taste of tart. “Right- so as I was saying.” My tongue feels dry, tight as I glance around the room once more. Think, think. 

“Doesn’t take a wisehead to know you ain’t from New York.” Even with my own tense posture, all his words hold a lilt of teasing.

“Yeah. But I don’t think I’m supposed to be here.” What do you even say? ‘Hey, I’m not just out of state, I’m out of century.’ I don’t know how that’d go over, but I’m imagining not well.

“Of course you’re supposed to be here,” it’s a good thing I’m not standing because the look on his face is enough to buckle my knees. “You’re the person of my dreams, and this is my dream, right?” His honeyed and soft words do loosen my shoulders- but I can’t help my tangled mind.

“Okay. How can I explain this... I’m not even from your...” Right words, right words. “Your... dimension” Could be better. 

“So, like from upstate?” I have to hold back a scoff- he’s a total dork. Nicky coyly grins to himself, expression morphing into one I’ve only ever seen on a silver screen. “Can you pinch me? ‘Cause now I know I’m dreamin’.“

The tightness in my shoulders dissipates as I laugh at the remark. If there’s one thing he’s exceptional at- it’s being annoyingly charismatic. “I’m still not sure I can explain this right. Do you like going to the movies?”

“Yeah. I like the ones about wise guys, car chases, and the ride or die sidekicks.” Fitting.

“W-well... it’s- it’s... it’s like everything became a... a movie for me.” How in the world do you word this? “You’re like a-”

“A movie star?” I nod, and he considers this like it isn’t the slightest bit absurd. He exhales a thin stream of smoke from his lips then chases it with a sip of the Old Fashioned. “Listen, if it’s a movie, you gotta know some things. This movie is fast, it’s dangerous. Until about five minutes ago, all I wanted was the entire world and I wanted it all to myself.”

“And now?”

“Now I still want the world. But I want it for two.” Between the alcohol and the compliments, my head is spinning in the best way possible. Nicky was right: if this is a dream, then keep the damn lights off.

“That’s very poetic of you, F. Scott.” Everything about him is magnetic, drawing me closer with each word. I can’t help myself but lean in.

“You forgot my name already? It’s Nicky.”

Lord, he’s definitely a dork. “No it’s- never mind.” Nicky places his hand into the pocket inside his coat and pulls out a thin black jewellery case.

“I want you to have something.” He cracks open the case, and inside sits a breathtaking diamond bracelet with enough shimmering carats to blind me. It’s excessive. It’s perfect.

“Nicky, what is this?” I train my eyes on him, trying my best to get a read on him, but he’s impossible. 

“Do me a favour. Just try it on.”

“I can’t... I’ve only just met you. And-” 

My argument is cut short with a raise of his eyebrows, “I’m a movie star, right? So why not play the part. You can’t take it off soon as you finish your drink.” I let my eyes fall back to the case, combing over the bracelet.

“I may never finish my drink.” The words tumble past my lips with little thought- nearly catching myself off guard with the brashness.

“I’m counting on it.” I watch as Nicky removes the bracelet from the case, fingertips brushing my skin as he cuffs it delicately around my wrist.

“So, what’s your game, Nicky?”

“My game?” He seems confused by the inquiry, but I can’t think of a reasonable time someone would fork over something so expensive to a total stranger.

“Yeah. What do you want from me?” Nicky stares at the strand of diamonds that fits perfectly around my wrist. I suddenly feel off- like I’d overstepped an unspoken boundary. “It’s a fair question considering five minutes after meeting me you’re giving me diamonds. Usually, guys wait to the third date for that.”

“I’m setting my price.”

“Your price?” Baffled by the words, my eyebrows knit together, “your price for what?”

“Leaving it all behind.” Shoulders dripping, I scan over his face. He’s just as unreadable as before. What does it mean? Leaving it all behind. Nicky only offers a warm smile, like he can read mind and in his eyes, I catch a glint of sincerity behind the bravado. “Now, if you’ll excuse me. I have somewhere to be.”

“You’re kidding?” I scoff.

“We’ll be in touch. I guarantee it.” I can’t even protest, Nicky gets up from his stool and walks away. 

“No, Nicky- you’re not- you can’t leave me with this bracelet!” My protest is futile, falling to deaf ears. He’s already a third the way to a far door. “Nicky!” But he either can’t hear me or doesn’t want to hear me. “Damn it!” Once again, Nicky eludes me as he finesses his way between guys and dames.

This time, I’m not letting him get away from me. I leap out of my seat, and the barstool nearly crashes to the floor as I hurry after him. I knock into a couple in the throes of a drunken kiss, interrupting what would have been a perfect moment. I collect my footing and peer ahead. Nicky is more than halfway now.

I’m a foot from the couple before a hand circles my wrist, spinning me on my heel to find a man already a few drinks deep. “Where you goin’, sugar?” His breath reeks. 

“I-I... gotta,” his fingers are curled into the bracelet. “Let me...” I wrench myself free from him, stumbling back into another drunken couple standing behind me, “go.”

As Nicky’s hand wraps around the door handle, I take off, leaving the man and couples in my rearview. Just as I get within spitting distance, he pushes the door open. I reach out for him, grabbing a hold of his wrist before he can take another step. Feeling my grip, Nicky spins around to face me. The door slams shut behind him. A brash grin enveloping his face.

“You’ve done good, kid.”

“What do you mean? Was this some kind of test?”

“If it was, how do you think you did?”

“I’m not sure the type of person who wants to test me is the kind of person I want to be around.” Nicky lays his eyes on my hand, which is still tightly gripping his wrist.

“You sure about that, toots?” Instantly, my skin goes hot from embarrassment. I quickly retract my hand from his. He’s so frustratingly sauve.

“I’m- I’m sure.”

“Hold on, I didn’t say you should let go.”

“You didn’t need to.” Nicky inches closer to me, interlocking his fingers with mine.

“{Y/N}, I was only teasing. I don’t want you to let go.” He grasps my hand as if letting go would mean he’d lose a part of himself, a lifeline. “In my world, the less people you keep close, the less chance you have at getting hurt. But... you’re not from my world, right? So maybe there’s room for an exception.”

I squeeze his hand tighter, our hands clasped together in an unspoken devotion. I look up into Nicky’s eager eyes, and then at his lips before asking, “you want me to be your exception?”

“That’s right.” Nicky lets go of my hand and turns away from me. “Follow me.” He pushes the door open, enthusiastically walking into another sizable group of strangers outside. As I follow Nicky out of the room, he’s gone from sight. And so is everyone else. 

I’m back in the movie theatre lobby- my movie theatre. The place is completely empty, and an eerie quiet has set over the room. I pace a few steps until I’m smack dab in the centre of the room. And now that I’m back to my world, I’m already longing for the adventure promised by the other. And my hand’s feeling awfully empty. So is my wrist. The bracelet. Fuck. I’ve had the damn thing for forty seconds and it’s already been nicked.

“Is someone going to explain all this to me? What the hell is going on?” Then, a hand taps me on the shoulder. “Whoa!” I yelp, startled at the other presence in the room. “Murray! Jesus, you nearly gave me a heart attack.” 

“What’d ya think, kid?”

“The movie. What’d ya think about my movie?”

“Murray! You knew about all- all this?”

“I know what goes on in my theatre.” Murray momentarily looks down and polishes a brass button on his coat. “I’ve been showing movies for the better part of my life, and I know when I see a movie star. You, my friend, are a movie star. The question is: are you ready for your close-up?”

“What... what do you mean?” Everything is hitting me at once. That really wasn’t a dream.

Murray inhales with pride as he observes his theatre. “There are many theatres in this joint, all playing crime films from the great American eras. You’ve been fortunate enough to see the trailer for one, but did it suit you?” He places a hand on my shoulder, and we walk to the entrance of the first theatre. “Is the ostentatious world of Gatsby’s New York, of raucous speakeasies and illegal rum-running in the roaring twenties your adventure?”

He turns to look at me, kind eyes shining with expectancy. My heart rate jumps at the question, giddy for the prospect of adventure but anxious for the consequences. No movie is perfect. “I can just... be a part of it?”

“For now.”

“What about this world? The real world?”

“You wouldn’t be here if you didn’t want to escape. Besides, who’s to say what’s real and what’s not.” Murray smiled a wistful and weathered smile. Like what I pictured a clock would smile, full of known and unknown. “What’d you say, kid?”

 He’s right, I’d be fooling myself if I said otherwise. I want this- I think I’ve always wanted something like this. With a calming breath and a final look around the theatre, I nod. “Yes.”

“Very good, your co-stars are waiting inside.” Murray steps aside, gesturing to the door. “Enter whenever you feel ready.” 

“No time like the present.” I take another deep gulp of air, trying to silence my screaming heart rate. I’m not dreaming. This is real.

“But remember, this is a cinema: once the movie begins, there’s no rewind button.” Thanks, no pressure. I’m nervous, to say the least- but this is what I’m supposed to be doing. I proceed into the movie theatre entrance, its double doors awaiting my arrival. I push open the doors and walk into my starring role.

Lights. Camera. Action. Two Against the World.

[stoplookingatmeblog]

twenty-one

1.

It was around that time that all my friends went to work in different chapters of what you can call ‘the filming industry’. P-G shot beer adverts which used some kinds of robotics to get the right shot, flip the bottle right, and then slept with this girl who offered him a paid internship in managing pretty much everything on sets of a bunch of movies, ads and whatnot. My own mother, finally getting out of the convenient but unemancipated housewife life, got a job in supervising the shoot - making sure the costumes were right, the scenography, all that stuff. It was pretty much, you could call it, the time of Life On Set Then - everywhere you went, ads, movies, Netflix series, all of it wrapped up in fake police ‘do not cross’ kind of tape, horses and knights from our beer-bottles riding the streets, and the catering busses with food that was (mother told me) ‘absolute horeshit’. Whatever. The time was of living in a reality created for money, by money, with money, because of money, giant heaps of money, distributed unequally (of course) to all my student friends who didn’t even need the money except for that feel of ‘life on their own’.

I didn’t have a job. Before not working, I worked a couple of cafes, restaurants and the like. That was the vibe. I hated it. Each time I began working in one of these places, I ended up sleeping with someone (first time a guy, and then a girl or woman that was honestly too old for me) and that I hoped marked the end of relationship with gastronomy for me. So I didn’t work, deciding not to decide what to do next, not putting myself on the road to one kind of future or another. I didn’t want life to go anywhere directed. I thought about writing but then I thought about the seriousness and stiffness of writing, whether or not it’s a purely natural act, all that, and decided on trying to squeeze the last drops of childhood (it was adolescence, but adolescence is really a final sigh of childhood) and live what was left of the kid-life to the fullest.

I was twenty-one years old. 

A group of friends convinced me to go with them surfing (on my parents’ money), to Victoria, a place which location doesn’t really matter, except that I thought, and still do, that the spot is an actual a piece of heaven on earth. A nearly imaginary point on the increasingly smaller map of this melting planet. My age, too, was melting away like icecream - not having a job and surfing in Victoria, like a teenage pimple, some place that popped up and presented itself in its complete and vulgar form and purpose that you initially didn’t believe and then wept after at that airport because you could never come back. It was an actual speck of heaven on the map. 

Even though everyone was younger than us - four of us, me, P-G, J, and Stone (the last one, a tired intellectual I could never get tired of, except you could see he was really both bored and exhausted by being born and living as himself. And his nickname surprisingly not derived from the astronomical amounts of weed he smoked but his actual god-given surname (which he thought of changing, because of his father) - even though everyone who came to Victoria was younger than us by something like three or four years, we surprisingly didn’t have trouble at least getting along, and at most sleeping with girls there. It was even more grand in that way, even if absolutely not true, when you saw yourself in their eyes as someone older and somehow experienced, who somehow kept going on, and somehow knew what was going on. The same lie made most of us, (excluding me, as I mentioned) get a job around that time. In movies and advertisements, with no creative input or control, but like actors that nobody knew about, playing their own invented parts backstage.

I was twenty-one years old and completely aware of both how small and how big that was. I knew about the kinds of things I probably should be doing and that’s why I sometimes did them, for a minute putting my feet into that creek too, but most of the time staying at the bank and just watching. I knew what being twenty-one meant, so I decided to sit back and watch it.

My friends all surfed a lot, which would normally bother me because I did it only for the first week of our month-long stay, but quickly dropped it and decided to stay at the beach and read, and drink and look at some really beautiful girls who passed me by, and for once enjoy that stranger-life. By the second week, after seeing in a restaurant a shirt with a ‘SeXsurfing ‘00’ inscription on it (‘00 being the year we were born, which made us inspect our parents’ lifelines to check for the possibility that at that time some of them were in Victoria), and in the twenty-one-year-old drunk epiphanius inspiration, all four of us decided that we would lead the ‘SeXsurfing ‘21’ lifestyle, not thinking about the ‘42 and the ‘63 and all that shit. 

I wasn’t the most successful one when it came to girls, but I can say that the stories I had with them were the most absurd and worthy of telling. Even though it was J who (and he too asked himself why in the world that was) was able to talk with someone new every evening, somehow perhaps betraying my unwanted by nonetheless existing monogamous attachment, I slept with only one girl over the course of the last week, picking her up (or perhaps her picking me up) through a conversation about our shared borderline-sociopathic or rebellious outlook on reality. That was very twenty-one. 

Our first meeting (like every meeting since) was going to one of the three tourist shops on the beach and stealing something. And that too was very twenty-one. We were rich enough (our parents were) and far away from home enough to do all that. And we were both young and beautiful enough to want a mugshot we could keep from an arrest by a Victoria Police County Jail or whatever it might have been called. We were never caught but we did steal something every day, and then get drunk in the evening, and then fuck in the night. While my friends had these singular, although beautiful, encounters I would drunkenly burst into the closed restaurant with my temporary girl-friend, steal absolutely vile icecream from the fridge, and then play chess with her on the hotel rooftop at four AM. 

The four of us were twenty-one years old and born in the year 2000 which in the same way made sense - our lives were easy to calculate, clearly-definededly started, and even if they had to end with no thing coming back or being repeated, the twenty-one points we scored didn’t mean anything except the joyride and experiment, and meaningless game that it was. We were taking our shot at living, taking our shot at playing, and even when we didn’t win, it still didn’t mean anything. We lived on our parents’ money, or on advertisement money, or cafe-sleep-with-someone-there-and-then-leave-because-you-don’t-need-money money, all of it a mystification, but that those twenty-one years led to nothing we suddenly did not care. 

Well, and then being woken up by the police, although surprisingly not because of the icecream dream but for the crime of sleeping in a hammock on the dunes which (I learned) was territory of both the military and part of some natural park.

What made me go home with something in the end were the conversations we had at that time, and in particular the conversations with Stone. Like me, Stone had a feeling of injustice done to him by his family, not having a real father and hanging down on the tired gray hair of our housewife mothers and all, and it made us connect on a level we didn’t with either P-G or J, who were most often busy surfing or thinking about the jobs they had or would one day have, and the girls they met that weren’t my girls so I didn’t care that much.

Stone kept affirming that both of us (although him in particular) were in possession of superior intelligence, which I instinctively tried to discourage him from saying (because I didn’t like sucking my own dick like that), but nonetheless accepted as at least potentially or partially true. In my case, it was not intelligence that me connect with Stone but some kind of a shared understanding of what was going on, that we were twenty-one and what that meant, like a filthy two-pigeon flock of pigeons flying above the waves, knowing the fact of the creature swimming underneath the surface. I thought, and still do, it had to do largely with coming from an unhappy or non-existent family, which really makes you understand that all you do, with even the most meaningful and beautiful things, is just this game that you play but holds no particular meaning beyond it. That and that love, no matter how beautiful or true, can slip away from you like shit. 

‘It is completely lonely’, he said one night as we chugged down the bottles of beer drunk rich kids left behind running away from the police - bottles half-empty to me and I think half-full for him, but I still haven’t quite figured that one out, ‘Because you never really see things the way the rest of them do, and each conversation almost the same, you begin to think the only way to be is to be alone’

I agreed. I usually did, being aware that he was slightly more intelligent than me.

‘Back when I was in the Institute, they told me I would have problems with getting out of relationships with people what other people get from other people because what I want is to be understood and that is problematic when you think you want it but also think it’s impossible to ever understand anything’

I too thought you could never understand anything, but had a sense he perhaps only said it to keep me on the same page. Stone chugged down another half-full beer and kept talking. I stayed silent, in part because I would probably say the same things he did.

‘When I was seventeen and worked in a factory, I gained a sort of awareness of how my life would look like’

‘What kind of a factory?’, I asked

‘A cake factory, I would work in the hot section and pull out cakes out of the oven and then fill some of them with cherry, and some of them with apple-cinnamon. And then, because I was seventeen and my work was fundamentally illegal you could say, they’d let me work in the cold section in the night, and I applied sugar coating on these doughnuts, you know’

‘Yeah’

‘And then wrap them up in plastic covering, you know’

‘Yeah, yeah’

‘when the coating was dry, and send them to another section of the factory. And so over and over.’

‘So, what does your life look like because of that, do you think?’

‘I don’t know…’, he took a puff from one of the cigarette butts we found that night in the ashtray, ‘... I guess working in the factory was a kind of almost psychedelic experience that really made me aware what my attitude towards suicide is. You’re young, and you step into that thing, and you do those things because you want to, you don’t need to. Well, you might need to but the need is still your choice, it isn’t honed into your life like… Like I recognised at some point that each cake I filled with the stuffing or coated was an expression of the same kind of thing I did when I smoked weed (a lot), or drunk (a lot) or had sex. That, ultimately, I would never be able to not think about it.’ 

‘I mean, I think the position we are in - if I understand you correctly - of being relatively well-off - I mean our parents - would make you unable to really plunge into anything that you’re doing, right? Because you ultimately don’t have to do anything, like, really, like here, you always sort of treat it as a game’

‘Not even a game’, he said, and the sun was already slowly creeping up the mountain in front of the shop where we were sitting, ‘But just not a challenge. Because of our intellect, both yours and mine, the only challenge you really face is whether to continue being or not, and the rest is just, you know, stuffing these cakes. But that decision, you know The Myth of The Sisyphus?’

I did.

‘Yeah, so that decision you have to and always will have to make fundamentally alone. And so either go and work - work in any kind of way and do those things and hand them over to others to complete them and you don’t really ask questions (but we can’t do that, neither you nor I) or you step out of the factory and face the living sun, like you’re definitely going to feel after we leave this place, and decide whether you’re more happy alone or with others, or whether you want to keep on handing things to others or not, and all that.’

‘I mean this is the reason I think people shouldn’t have children - I’ve written a piece about it, you should definitely read it - because it’s kind of like juggling with a hot potato and handing it to someone else, so that they have to confront these questions, instead of you, but what you really do is give up.’

At that point I don’t think I understood his cake factory metaphor or didn’t want to believe that I did in the fear that it wasn’t very profound.

‘So what do you think you’d like to actually do?, if you could pick anything at all?’

‘I don’t know’, again inhaling another cigarette butt and handing one to me. And the sun almost rolled its own boulderous weight to the top of the mountain. ‘I think I would like to have a family, especially since meeting May (he was the only one of out SeXsurfing quartet with a girlfriend), I started thinking that maybe I can, and I’m recognising this, give someone something that my father never gave me, hoping to do it right this time’

‘Yeah, I mean that’s literally the ending of my book - have I told you already I’ve written a book? - that the main character thinks he can do it right this time and he of course fucks it up, but I don’t know if I still think that. You know, life is sometimes surprising.’

‘Exactly’, he exalted the smoke, and the sun, previously rolling up the mountain to sunrise, seemed to have fallen back again to the bottom of the mountain, and began its journey anew. 

‘I mean, when I was seventeen I worked in a factory…’

‘What kind of a factory?’

‘A psychedelic cake factory’

‘What does that mean?’

‘I worked in this factory and I worked in the hot section and my job was to take the cakes out of the oven and then pump them full of acid, or pot, or sex, or anything you could get your hands on. I guess it was illegal, but then again I was seventeen so my work was all fundamentally illegal.’

‘Where did the cakes later go?’

‘Later? Well in the factory I sent them to another section that I never really saw, but later later to homes, parties, rich people who really wanted to try the kind of stuff their kids were taking, I guess’, he chuckled, ‘It’s interesting, I wonder if my father ever tried one. Maybe in some alternative universe or something. Maybe he ate it and became like me, and dropped everything and went to work in a factory and in that reality they stuffed the cakes with shit like cherry and coated them with sugar, you know, maybe that was the right reality, and later he dropped that job, and went outside of the factory, and made the choice and threw himself under a bus or something.’

‘The right reality. 

Maybe.’

2. 

Lou from the restaurant (the SeXsufring tshirt we found was in that restaurant) was the kind of man you’d always want to be. We travelled to him for dinner hitchhiking from the beach, in twos, usually P-G and J, and then me and Stone, around seven, or all together if we could sit in the trunk of the car when we travelled in one of the rich-kid rented cabrios, and you would feel the day (same day, every day) a winding road under our feet (like gods, treading on forever) cutting through the mountains and the sunset rolling his boulder somewhere and when you finished eating you’d lie down on the warm good night asphalt with a can and listen to music on one of our phones and wait for someone to take you back to the beach. 

But gods that we were, Lou from the restaurant was the kind of man you’d always want to be. It was always a show, too. He would come by people’s tables (our table in particular, because he knew and we knew), this enormous older man dressed in a white sweaty shirt with eyes that looked blind but saw everything, and told us stories about all that he knew, which was pretty much the town, and the town hall, and the restaurant, and everything. And the girls also came there to eat, and everyone too. And everyone knew Lou from the restaurant.

I always ordered things I could not afford because P-G and J were always happy to lend me money, so I ate octopuses and steaks, and everything was everything you’d ever want to eat. There were half-blind, strangely-speckled cats that roamed under the tables, not even expecting guests’ dinner cat-food enjoying the company, like we did, and there were kid cats and mother cats and they would fight on the backdrop of the white-painted summer trees, and some girls would say the cats’ were really poor and imply their lives were wretched and miserable to which I would reply with something like natural selection and they would say that’s a horrible thing to say and then all of us would bite into the steaks that Lou brought us. 

After P-G  asked him to tell us his version of the legends we heard of from the girls, about his old restaurant, and how someone ruined it and how the paradise moved from Victoria to this new town (I don’t know the name, but it was simply Lou’s town), and it seemed like god himself was telling us the story, dusting it off, driving away the spiders and the snakes, an old book or a chapter in a book that everyone on the beach talked about but it seemed nobody actually heard. Except the four of us.

‘Well so you know I’m really electrician’, he began, ‘but at one moment I tell my wife - let’s build restaurant. So I go to the town hall, here’, and he pointed to a building not ten meters away, ‘and the auction close at 12, I go in at 11:56 and the price is 12000 and I go in and say 60000. So I get the restaurant and everyone crazy and angry at me but I have it.’, I cut out the portion of the steak and chewed on it orgasmically. Everything Lou cooked was good as hell. ‘So I build restaurant…’

‘But not here, right, on the beach?’, P-G, who heard most versions of the story interrupted

‘Yes, the beach. So I build restaurant and first year I make so much money I put it in…’, his broken eyes and mad half-blind english were both looking for the word, ‘like bags, plastic bags, trash bags, and it is so much I count it then in winter, because I have no time in summer. So it is good, so much money, going great. And then in year two thousand and… two thousand just, maybe, I go away for holiday and they call me “your restaurant is destroyed”, I say “no you’re kidding me”, and they say “no, no, they burn restaurant down, come back”. So I come back, and true, the restaurant is destroyed, and you cannot build it again because the law that was there changed so you cannot build now.’, as he was telling the story, Lou’s eyes stayed monotonously bland, bright and staring somewhere beyond. A true restaurateur, he never stopped looking at what was going on at the other tables so at that point he stood up, saying ‘I finish the story in moment’, and went to take care of something in the kitchen.

Then when he finally came back, he said:

‘So where was I now tell me.’

‘Your restaurant was burned down when you were out of the country’, I reminded him

‘Yes. So I move here and build new restaurant, and it is small but people come like before and they even fight for to eat, and they ask “you finished already, let us eat”, and my restaurant again now is doing well, very well, and people come, and still I don’t have space, but people come’

‘And is it going better or worse than in the previous location?’, P-G asked

‘No, there there was more money but here is good. Very good.’, he waved his grubby big hand at all the tables packed with people, girls, others like us. And he laughed with his tongue flying up and down in his mouth in a way some people find repulsive, but to us it was Lou from the restaurant, and Lou from the restaurant could honestly laugh in whichever goddamn way he pleased. 

‘Ok, I’m sorry but I have to go again, the people’, he pointed to the kitchen, ‘don’t know what they do’

Our twenty-one year old quartet replied ‘of course, of course’, in unison and for a while we sat there chewing our steaks, and fish and octopus, and another steak, silently, only saying a couple of words of admiration for Lou from the restaurant, the man you’d always want to be.

‘There are snakes and scorpions here’, P-G told me one time we went to the more rocky part of the dunes near where our tent was pitched. ‘So we have to be super careful, especially during the day. In the night they sleep in their wretched little caves or among the rocks, they won’t bother us in our sleep.’ 

But they will bother us when we’re awake, or when we think we are, but are someplace else, like Lou from the restaurant who went for holidays. You stop paying attention to what is slithering or crawling in the sand and one time as you are looking for a nice and fresh cigarette butt lost in the sand, BAM, and you are dead, like that (Lou’s grubby old hand falling down on the wooden table with a thud).

We were twenty-one years young and on holidays from either a job in advertising or not yet having a job in advertising, and there were girls and waves, and sand, and scorpions, and it was all a joyride so we didn’t really think about that. Well, to be honest, not much could go wrong - another day, like groundhog day, would be more or less the same, always better and better and better. And the shrinking, melting map - warmer and warmer and warmer. 

The worst that could happen, we knew, was the police coming in and chasing us away from the dunes (because it was both military grounds and a national park at the same time). But that wasn’t that bad, after all, it was police in paradise, and we felt so much love for them as we did for the scorpios and the snakes and it was just impossible for them to not love us back.

Well, hen one day it happened. It was after I woke up with her, for the first time in two weeks sleeping in an actual bed, but more importantly for the first time in perhaps a year sleeping with a warm body next to my heart, next to me, in my hands, falling asleep with my lip still in her teeth. I woke up in the morning and having the bare level of awareness of my state, that I must stink and will not be fun to be around in the morning (although the fresh air made hangovers impossible - what can I say, it was paradise), I decided to go back to the our camp on the dunes and sleep off the night in a hammock I usually inhabited. 

There were usually some locals (working in restaurants and the shops I stole flip-flops from) who like devils crawled out in the night and tried to party with the twenty-one year old us, drinking our booze and smoking our smokes, so when the white-poloed guy woke me up like bad sunrise saying ‘Police, wake up, police’, in sly english and a broken smile, my instinctive reaction was to reply with a classic ‘Shut the fuck up, you’re not police’, but after seeing one of them who definitely was police, with a uniform and gun and all, I complied with their request for my ID and let them write me a pink slip of paper demanding a fine so astronomic that none of them could not possibly believe I’d actually pay it. A younger policeman (also not uniformed) asked me what happened to my neck and, explaining a bruise that could only look like a love bite (and indeed it was), I replied that I was bitten by a wild animal (and indeed I was). He said that with that bruise-like love bite and a half-unbuttoned shirt I looked like a ‘star, rock star, you know’, and we both laughed, and I decided none of it was that bad after all. He looked like a ‘star, rock star, you know’, as well, slightly unfashionable but at the same time completely incredible in bluish sunglasses, a pink polo shirt and slightly silver but naturally black hair. In Victoria, the snake, too, was quite handsome, and what he ruined, at the end of the day, was only an hour of my sleep.

I met Lou from the restaurant - he saw some creature, and its wretched work, destroying his restaurant, but his bright, half-blind, all-seeing eyes burned with nothing but love. And mine, slowly but surely, started to shimmer with it too. The days, or the same day, grew brighter and brighter, and the nights drunker and drunker and the driving drunk on the beach got faster and faster, and more and more people fitting into one car, with no winding-road end in sight.

3. 

There was no hangover in Victoria, but going anywhere in the morning was especially difficult, as if the gravitational force doubled, or thriced, or quadrupled.

Stone, who had an admirable ability to make contact with any kind of an alien species of a person (that I really envied), found himself one night in a conversation with a russian maths student (the Russian started university well before the usual age, he was like 17), and when the next day we asked what the two talked about Stone only said ‘I think we are a week away from merging the theory of relativity with quantum mechanics. But give me another bottle and it will be one day.’

The Russian, Stone told us, was one of the ‘exceptionally intelligent’ ones (which Stone, had the habit of identifying and cataloguing into his set of people ‘worth talking to’). The Russian was younger than us - perhaps sixteen or seventeen, as I mentioned which really gave everything he said an additional benefit of seemingly prodigy-like, but also made Stone wonder whether he was a kind of a father-figure to the exceptionally intelligent maths student, that considering leading Stone to the two days later declaration that it was undoable, stemming from Stone’s own desire to redeem his father’s abusive absence et cetera et cetera. 

The Russian was so socially inept, that even I was doing quite well (it was not superior intelligence, that barred me from connecting with others, as Stone asserted). A prodigy, the Russian spoke not just maths and Einstein, but quite good english, french (from my limited knowledge I could confirm also quite good), spanish and bulgarian (which I had absolutely no idea about but he sounded possessed and speaking in tongues when he presented his abilities to us). He could play giftedly most instruments you could think of, but playing, he said, never really excited him. He was one of those kids who know and can do so much they would really rather not do it at all.

Because of our groups’ incidental and unexpected but intense interactions with girls, the Russian treated us with an unjustified reverence, but it was not any kind of envy, with a mind like that you don’t really envy anything except being able to rest from what’s in your head and for once have a good night’s sleep. There is a scene in the movie Beautiful Mind where the main character, a schizophrenic, lays out to a girl he likes, very systematically, astrophysically like, why she should sleep with him. I bet that’s what the Russian would do too in the future.

There is another scene in a movie - Interstellar where a group of astronauts looking for humanity’s potential new home (the map contracting, the world getting small since the year ‘00, now twenty-one, then ‘42 then ‘63, warmer and warmer and warmer), the group of astronauts lands on a planet, of constant, unending sea, sees in the distance what they think is the great mountains of a new found land. After a couple of minutes of advancing towards the mountains, Matthew Mcconaughey says in hollywood style ‘these are not mountains. These are waves’ and the four astronauts have to flee the slowly approaching catastrophic demise of the wave, which, due to a fucked-up gravity on the planet, rose to that catastrophic height. 

At six AM, after one of the exceptionally drunk nights, with the sun already in full swing, and the alcoholic gravity fucked-up in their heads, Stone and J went to catch a wave bigger than at any time of the day. 

While I was sleeping off the night in the hammock, with God knows what dreams, or maybe even no dreams at all, and P-G tossing and turning in the tent, and Stone and J surfing the morning wave, the Russian sat solemnly and alone on the sunrise beach and looked up at the starless sky, wiped clean by one gigantic white star which at that point (he knew, we didn’t know) was so big and close to the contracting map that it sucked out some of the time and some of the space from the air, making the tide rise more than at any time of the day. He knew why that was and we didn’t know but we were looking at the same thing, the earth getting warmer and warmer and warmer, and the wave growing higher and higher and 

And we would sometimes go away from Victoria, to a nearby town where the waves were always bigger and we marvelled at how they whip-cracked, splash-fell and rocked against the concrete-lined shore and drowned the air underneath with all their might, worked it into white foam. He knew and we didn’t, and while we lay down with girls looking into the stars and talking about constellations (only to then laugh about how drunk and absurd it is to think three stars can possibly represent the shape of a great bear or big dipper or any kind of stupid shit like that), The Russian tried to crack the code written in the stars. Looking for a new home for us. The four of us walked the shore and wondered about the origin of colorful pebbles spat out by the lapping magnificent waves, and he could probably tell us everything about each of them, trace lines from each falling star to each stone we cast mindlessly into the sea.

He could explain the shifting realities when the morning came, and why, at seventeen, you have to do certain things and not the others, and now, too, why we did all those things, why we worked in psychedelic factories and sung our hearts out to the bass of the speaker. Why we ran after girls beach-length and back, why we hitchhiked to Lou’s restaurant, why we came to Victoria in the first place, why we had jobs in advertising, why we were twenty-one, but Stone was right about one thing - the Russian was ‘fundamentally alone’

There is another scene in Interstellar, the next one after the giant wave, where Matthew Mcconaughey comes back to the spaceship waiting in the orbit of a water-mountain-these-are-not-mountains planet, discovers that time, tied with an invisible string to the fucked-up gravity) passes differently on the surface of the planet, in its orbit, and in general completely differently back on the contracting earth’s map where he left his children. How old were at the time he left in that movie - I can’t remember, let’s say twenty-one. Having spent only half an hour on the surface, he now plays the received messages from back home and sees his children’s lifetimes growing older and older and older and finally sees them surpassing them in age. He breaks down in tears and I suppose you could say he, too, was ‘fundamentally alone’

The Russian, Stone told us, was taught privately by a tutor who’s line of mathematical origin could be traced all the way to Gauss or someone. He could speak Einstein, french and spanish, and although his tongue got tied in human conversations, one day, as we drank beer on a small patch of grass in front of the local hotel, he proclaimed there was something very important we wanted to tell us. Concluding that the Russian was most definitely possessed by something (you could tell when he spoke bulgarian), we all decided listening would do no harm but at worst would be so incredible that we would not believe it. 

‘You guys are now young and strong and you surf and all, but seriously, you have to do sports’, he began, ‘I don’t mean just any sport but something that really puts weight on your muscles. Like rowing or pumping on the bench, you have to train and now prepare for the rest of your life. And cardio, too, it will save you from heart disease and such.’ - and you can imagine mine, our surprise and feeling of absurdity that a being like that was uttering sentences such as these at that moment. 

And that was it, the only normal set of words he ever uttered in front of us, which in his mouth was not normal at all - this man, trained by Gauss himself, had one recommendation to us and it was to do sports because it will help us to stay healthy in the future. 

In space, the state of weightlessness makes the unused muscles grow weak, and the astronauts have to use the special gym machines installed on their spaceship so that their bodies don’t entropy, and heart is a muscle, too, I think, and I wondered, briefly, after what the Russian told us, if it too can die with no gravity. And it seems that time is a muscle too. It contracts and then it unfolds, it squeezes and releases and lets you breathe and suffocates, and ultimately things seem neither good nor bad but just what they ended up being. Time can definitely die away and fall from you like a dead leaf. Or it can end up a pretty stone under the feet of a giant wave. You don’t feel how it squeezes and unfolds, how it lays you down in a warm bed in the arms of someone you didn’t ever know but who reminds you of everything. 

Matthew Mcconaughey - seeing messages from the future, past, present, now, never, always, and breaking down into tears, his heart breaking from weightlessness.

I was twenty one and I knew what it meant. 

And in a year I would be twenty two, and in another year twenty three, and in three years twenty four. And the astrology girls, going with us skinny dipping in the midnight water, they will disappear somewhere under the waves and start slowly fading away from our lives like an unused muscle.

J loved quoting this one scene from Matthew Mcconaughey's first movie: 

‘You know what I love most about college girls? I get older - they stay the sameeeee age’

And each time he said it, he laughed with the greatest, purest laughter you could find on this now planet.

4. 

‘And I got caught one time’

‘For what?’

‘Well, maybe two, but only one time involved the police. Second time. And that was me trying to steal an album, well, it was called Steal This Album’ - I was lying, although I did also steal that album, but having trouble with the police was for an attempted theft of headphones though that didn’t sound as sexy. And for some reason which made me feel real good I was flirting with the most beautiful girl under the good sun by us recounting our thefts both real or invented.

We both quickly settled that we had some borderline immoral thread running through our veins but drew the line at actually killing someone. We were rich and young enough to say those things and be all sexy about it. We knew we didn’t have to steal but arranged we should do it together and some point (‘ok, why not tomorrow?’) and it was beer first, and then flip flops the next and then another day a pink swimming mattress from the backseat of some rich and young and abandoned rented cabrio. And we took it swimming, drunkenly in the night. Rich and young, and full of stars.

We stepped into the calm sea, small waves, shallow, and took off our clothes, most of them, and took our pink stolen mattress against the waves, her covering small breasts with only her hands, our sociopathic personalities meeting somewhere under ridiculous notions of astrology. We kissed, and that was that. 

The mattress lay once again abandoned (has someone left the rented cabrio just as we left the shore?) where our friends would say it was ridiculous to steal it. We only stopped kissing when she said we have to look for the damn pink abandoned thing (apparently it was rented by one of her friends) after which we dived deep into the shallow sea.

I remembered all those things other than sex best. The kiss in the sea. The conversation about stealing shit, the hand covering breasts. And after sex, the interruptions of it by my taking sips from a big bottle of booze, and playing chess on the rooftop of the place we stole from. 

‘And I got caught one time’

‘For what?’ 

‘Stealing mattresses, and flip flops, and beer, but it was good, the time I did treated me well’

‘How long were you in for?’

‘Hmm I don’t know, around eight decades’

‘Woah, how old were you when you got caught?’

‘Like, twenty-one’

‘Shit, but you say it was good?’

‘Yeah. It was good life’