#and she just looks absolutely fucking STOKED like so purely high on life

[didnt-hear-idsb-live-again]

God I’m so fucking miserable

[star-sky-earth]

untitled

bellamy/clarke | PG | 2200 words

warnings: brief reference to past underage (bellamy/clarke), references to pregnancy, references to breastfeeding, mild violence

for the anon who wanted protective!bellamy getting into a bar fight over clarke. i hope you like it!

this is kind of set in my sleep series verse, but this will make sense even if you haven’t read that fic.

<<Just got back with Joe. Have a good night.>>

Bellamy smiles and shuts off his phone, looking up just as Clarke starts to descend the stairs. She moves slowly, clumsy in heels after so long, and when she gets to the bottom of the staircase she pauses, taking a quick breath for courage before she looks up at him. Her hands pluck anxiously at the fabric of her dress, smoothing it self-consciously over her hips, the little swell of her tummy.

“How do I look?” she says, clearly nervous, unsure of herself in a way that she hasn’t been in years, not since they first got together, not since she was fifteen and undressing in front of him for the first time. “Okay?”

He swallows hard at the wave of tenderness that washes over him, heart thudding in his chest, the bloom of desire in his belly shot through with a sharp, protective edge. He should be ashamed of himself. He loves Clarke’s confidence, the attitude she’s gained since being at college, the easy assurance that adulthood has given her, but he can’t deny that something about her like this, the way that she looks up at him with those big, blue, nervous eyes, gets him weak.

After all these years, there’s still nothing he wants more than to take care of his girl.

Bellamy slides his phone into his pocket, reaching out for her, squeezing her hand gently when she interlaces her slender fingers through his. He runs a thumb over her bracelet, the slim silver bangle he gave her when she turned sixteen, then lifts her hand to his lips, dropping a kiss into her palm.

“Beautiful, princess,” he says, mouth against her hammering pulse, letting some of the desire he’s feeling bleed into his voice, a husky edge that gets her blushing, looking away with a half-pleased, half-embarrassed expression. “Always beautiful, baby.”

It hasn’t been an easy few months, for either of them. Amazing, overwhelming, terrifying, exhausting, yes. Sleepless nights crashing into bleary-eyed days and back again, brief glimpses of pure, euphoric bliss interspersed with dark moments of self-doubt, taken from the highest highs to the lowest lows, emotions Bellamy still doesn’t have names for. Joe was born four months ago, fighting his way into the world after a long, difficult labour and an emergency c-section, Bellamy blinking away tears above a surgical mask as he clung tight to Clarke’s hand and they finally watched their son, bloody and screaming, laid on her chest. The first few weeks at home were a blur, both Clarke and Joe doing little more than sleeping and eating, Bellamy hovering protectively over his tiny family, simultaneously proud and absolutely terrified. He’s never seen anything like Clarke during labour, still feels his heart catch in his chest when he lets himself think about it, how strong she’d been and yet so weak at the end, barely able to hold her head up yet still pushing long past the point of exhaustion.

To look at her now, you’d never know. Moving easy again, carrying Joe around on her hip like she was born to be a mother, the angry red scar slung along the bottom of her belly finally faded to a light pink line. Every inch of her miraculous body slowly putting itself back together before his eyes, just a little softer than before, a little more sensitive, her hips a little rounder in his hands, and her breasts…

God. Bellamy gets hard just thinking about her breasts, swollen from breastfeeding and exquisitely sensitive, skin so pale it’s almost translucent, like the finest, softest silk. He’s never been so eager, and yet so terrified, to touch her, and the contrast drives him insane. They haven’t had sex since Joe was born, and it’s got to the point where it’s all he thinks about, angling himself away at night so she can’t feel how hard he is for her, how desperate he is, ready to die rather than feel like he’s pressuring her. Added to all his first-time father worries, his love for Joe like a faucet he doesn’t know how to turn off, he feels like his heart has expanded ten times over and split open clean down the middle, emotion spilling out everywhere, on edge and almost vibrating with a nervous energy he doesn’t know what to do with.

God, and he’d thought he was crazy in love with her before.

They take it slow, their first night out, neither of them able to go more than ten minutes without checking their phones. He’s booked a table at their favourite mexican restaurant, and they both eat an embarrassing amount, practically inhaling tacos after weeks of living off Uber eats, grilled cheeses and the downright suspicious casseroles that Octavia drops off at irregular intervals. Clarke even has a glass of wine, giggly and pink after a year without alcohol, and Bellamy doesn’t know how he keeps his hands off her, so cute and adorable and insanely, distressingly sexy. Even when she was away at college, he’s not sure that they’ve ever gone this long without having sex before, and he’d happily wait another four months if she wanted to, but fuck, he hopes that she doesn’t want to.

After they eat, they wander along the riverfront, stopping to gaze out across the water, watch the light of the moon dappling across the waves. Clarke shivers, her jacket too thin for the crisp spring air, and Bellamy draws her in close, takes a chance and kisses her, slowly winding his arms around her waist. She’s sweet in his arms, and he feels like he’s falling in love with her all over again, a whole new level of love he never knew existed, like living your whole life in one dark room and suddenly opening the window, the warmth of the sun hitting your skin for the first time.

Eventually they end up at a bar, some tiny, half-empty place tucked in between two closed shopfronts, just one disinterested bartender that doesn’t even look up when they walk in. Clarke finds a booth in the back corner while Bellamy gets the drinks, glancing over his shoulder to catch her checking her reflection in her phone, running her thumb over her freshly-kissed lips.

“There you go,” he says, sitting down next to her in the booth, sliding her wine glass over. He puts his arm around her shoulders, leaning in to nuzzle against her neck until she giggles, squirming in his hold. Undeterred, he slides his mouth up to just under her ear, that sensitive spot that makes her swallow down a gasp, her whole body relaxing against him. He swears she smells different than she used to - richer, sweeter, milkier - and he just about stops himself from groaning as he inhales, feeling his cock harden under the table.

A loud peal of laughter echoes across the room, and Bellamy stops when he feels Clarke stiffen, raising his head to see a couple of men at the bar staring right at them, beers in hand. One of them - middle-aged, patchy beard, tribal tattoo winding its way around her rangy arm - lets his eyes drop to Clarke’s chest, and she sits up straight, pulling her jacket tightly around her. The guy leers even more, unabashed, unashamed, even when Bellamy stares him down.

“It’s okay,” Clarke says, putting her hand on Bellamy’s arm. “Leave it.”

Bellamy nods, but it leaves a sour taste in his mouth. He hates it - hates the way that some guys treat Clarke just because she’s a pretty girl, hates the fear that bubbles in his chest when he thinks about what might happen if he wasn’t here, hates the intrusion into their perfect evening, how quickly their joy is dampened, like a pair of scissors snipping neatly through a thread. But most of all he hates this - the way that the light dims in Clarke’s eyes, the way her lower lip trembles as she presses her mouth tightly together, how her shoulders slump to disguise her shape, like there could ever be anything about her beautiful body to be ashamed of.

“Hey,” he says quietly, squeezing her shoulder gently. “You wanna go?”

She shakes her head no, managing a smile, and he takes her lead, doing his best to distract her with conversation, to make her laugh, get her feeling comfortable again. Their luck holds, the men at the bar thankfully staying silent, and soon Clarke is glowing again, staring up at him with adoring liquid eyes, wine glass empty, Bellamy unable to tear his eyes away from her smile, her soft pink mouth.

“You want another drink?” he asks, praying she says ‘no’. ‘No’ now, and ‘yes’ later, when they’re alone and she’s finally in his arms, naked and soft and his. Clarke’s tracing patterns across his hand where it lies on the table, even that delicate touch agonising for how it stokes the flames of desire in his body, threatening to reduce him to ash.

“No,” Clarke says lightly, looking up at Bellamy from under lowered lashes. She bites her lip, reaching up to trail her fingers over his forearm, running her nails over his skin to make him shiver. “Take me home, Bellamy.”

Bellamy’s not proud of how quickly he stands up from the booth, holding his hand out to steady Clarke as she follows, swaying slightly on her heels. He pauses, considering. A year without drinking means that her tolerance is at rock-bottom, and she’ll be miserable tomorrow if she’s hungover when they go to pick up Joe.

“Let’s grab a bottle of water for you, okay?”

He eyes the men at the bar as they approach, letting go of Clarke’s hand so that she can stand a little way away, by the exit but still in his eyeline. One guy has the good sense to avoid his eye, tearing at the label on his beer bottle, but the older man with the tattoo stands his ground, sidling closer to Bellamy as he pays for the water.

“Where do I get a girl like that?” he asks, slurring. His breath is sour with booze and tobacco, but Bellamy doesn’t let himself react, keeping his face carefully blank as he pockets his wallet.

“You mean my wife?” he says evenly, setting his hand down on the bar so that the light glints off the thick silver band of his wedding ring.

The guy snorts, shrugging his shoulders, taking another swig from his beer.

“Lucky man,” he says with a snigger, already laughing at his own joke. “Bet you never go hungry, not with that waiting for you at home.”

And then he grins. He fucking grins, and Bellamy doesn’t know how he stops himself from tearing the guy apart with his bare hands. Because not only is this man talking like this about Clarke. Not only is he talking like this about Bellamy’s wife, his best friend, the mother of his child, the centre of his entire fucking world.

He actually thinks Bellamy will laugh too.

Instead Bellamy smiles back, tight lipped and quick, and reaches for the guy’s hand. There’s just enough time to see the look of surprise on the older man’s face before Bellamy’s moving, twisting the guy’s arm up behind his shoulder, pushing him face down on the bar. The other man struggles, but Bellamy’s prepared, increases the pressure just so on the man’s thumb, causing him to cry out, freezing in place.

“Say it again,” Bellamy says, leaning down close, close enough that he can see each individual drop of sweat gathering on the other man’s brow, hear his laboured pants as he tries to breathe through the pain. Bellamy presses again on his thumb, just because he can, the bone threatening to snap, watching as all the blood drains from the guy’s face. “Say it again, I dare you.”

The guy’s friend, Bellamy notes dispassionately, doesn’t make a move to defend his friend, just stands there dumb and dumbfounded, still holding his beer.

“That’s what I thought,” Bellamy says when his opponent stays silent. He lets go, and the man slumps against the bar, breathing hard. Slowly he pushes himself up, rubbing his injured hand and staring at Bellamy resentfully.

Bellamy grabs the bottle of the water from the bar and heads for the exit, putting his arm around Clarke as he swiftly guides her through the door and out onto the street.

“Are you okay?” he says as soon as they get outside. Concerned, he reaches under Clarke’s chin to tip her face up towards him, heart racing as he searches her expression to see if she’s upset. “I’m sorry, I know you didn’t want me to make a big deal of it, but - ”

He’s cut off by Clarke’s mouth against his, her arms winding around his neck as she leans up, pressing her body against him. Stunned, it takes him a moment to react, to kiss her back, but then desire roars through him, the adrenalin of the almost-fight still racing through his veins, heartbeat pounding in his ears, and suddenly it’s like he can’t kiss her deep enough, can’t feel enough of her, can’t get her close enough.

When Clarke finally pulls back, her mouth is swollen, her eyes sparkling and wild. She’s breathing hard - they both are, each breath visible in the cold night air - and she smiles as she teases her mouth against his, Bellamy helplessly following each movement, just as gone for her now as he’s ever been.

“Take me home, Bellamy.”

[96thdayofrage]

I’m not trying to hide my personal beliefs about these people in some pseudo high-minded analysis that purports to be about something else.

If, however, you’re looking for that sort of thing (that is, if you’re looking for an example of an actual hit piece!), you will surely find no greater example than the Harvard Kennedy School’s Disinformation creep: ADOS and the strategic weaponization of breaking news.

As far as hit pieces about the American Descendants of Slavery movement go, Disinformation creep is the one that really aspires to a kind of hang-that-sucker-up-on-the-refrigerator worthiness. It’s Harvard-certified, after all! And gosh, if there were ever an institutional badge with which all ten (ten!) authors of Disinformation creep could dazzle everyone in the rancid social-professional hierarchy they are all so obviously and desperately trying to climb, it’s certainly Harvard U.

But in fact the imprimatur of Harvard on Disinformation creep seems to serve exactly one function: to discourage the reader of the study from considering the fact that what he or she holds in their hands is utterly dishonest horseshit, a bizarre medley of unambiguous lies produced by people (again, ten people!) whose need to bathe in Harvard’s artificial validation seemingly trumped their felt responsibility to adhere to even the most basic and minimal set of ethics and standards in their chosen field of scholarly publishing.

I have literally no idea where to even begin in terms of communicating the enormity of Disinformation creep’s failure. Do you know the GIF where a cat tries to leap from a dresser to a bed and stalls out about midway and just sort of belly-flops onto the floor? That’s how Disinformation creep performs.

It is a monument to unsuccessfulness, and on every single one of its sixteen pages there is evidence of intellectual bankruptcy of the absolute highest order.

The forthcoming official rebuttal from the ADOS Advocacy Foundation does an excellent job at identifying each of these numerous lies and idiocies and countering them accordingly, but I think the report’s grand stupidity and essential hollowness can really be distilled to a single aspect of “Figure 1”.

The above graph from Disinformation creep provides a visual representation of the daily number of tweets “specifically using the #ADOS hashtag” over an 11-month period. These tweets are what the authors use to assert that there is an observable pattern of high Twitter activity within the ADOS ‘network’ around “real-world events” (e.g. MLK Day; Chadwick Boseman’s death; Kamala Harris announced as Biden’s VP pick, etc.), and that the content of the tweets on these days reveals how the “ADOS network strategically uses breaking news events to discourage Black voters from voting for the Democratic party.”

OK. Welp. By including screenshots of some of these tweets in the graph, the authors allow us to see for ourselves the kind of content they supposedly carefully analyzed in order to support their hypothesis. Notably, on August 2, the second largest spike in tweets using “#ADOS” is shown to have occurred. The authors identify a total of ~7,000 posts that day.

Incomprehensibly, the authors used a tweet about a cryptocurrency scam that translates to “‘The question is quickly answered’: many French #teens have dropped out of school, thinking to become [stock] #trader[s] in buying #formation kits. They fell into the trap of #Melius, based in #Dubai and known by other names. L’AMF and #Miviludes are seized.”

In French, “ados” means “teens”. And because the social media staffer at Mediavenir — when they were writing that tweet — slapped a hashtag in front of it, it eventually came to be swept up into Disinformation creep’s “dAtA sAmPLe sEt” despite having literally nothing what-so-fucking-ever to do with the actual #ADOS political movement which Harvard is asking the public to trust that they have specifically and diligently studied.

How does this happen? How does this glaringly and utterly irrelevant tweet manage to be not just included in the dataset but held up as somehow representative of the black-targeted misinformation content dump that the authors claim defines the ‘ADOS network’ on ‘high-activity days’? What about other tweets that include “#ADOS” and which similarly have absolutely no relation at all to the political movement, such as this one, or this one, or this one?

How many of those are part of the daily totals? I know the authors use a bunch of real fancy-sounding, applied science-y jargon in the report to describe their process (e.g .”computational grounded theory”; “structural topic modeling”; “inductive thematic analysis”), but like, despite these apparently sophisticated tools, there is still clearly a presence of laughably irrelevant tweets to be found among the collection of data.

Does it matter? Should it? Um, probably, yeah, if your intent is to not undermine your own work’s quality, to say nothing of your own dignity. More importantly, how did this get through a peer-review process? Who were the peers? Drooling invalids that were instructed to blink if they thought the study passed muster and was ready for publication? Some poor low-tier academic saps who were brought to a dingy basement somewhere in Kendall Square and made to strip down to their underwear while Harvard data experts stubbed out lit cigarettes all over their flesh and barked at them to sign off on Disinformation creep’s patently bunk methodology?

These sorts of scenarios rush in to try and explain the pure absurdity of the report, to fill in the vacuum occasioned by its vast gaping absence of basic evaluation standards in scholarly publishing, criteria that one might reasonably anticipate being insisted upon by an institution like Harvard which openly fancies itself as being like the sacred flame of academia or whatever.

Or maybe not.

Maybe you are actually not surprised at all. Maybe you know that since Disinformation creep aims to portray the #ADOS movement as irredeemably toxic simply because it represents the possibility of actual repair and freedom for the descendants of chattel slavery, Harvard would in fact happily become much more lenient and accommodating in their standards if it helps to kill the vehicle for that possibility.

After all, this is the same institution whose lawyers just successfully litigated the University’s retention of property rights to photographs of slaves following a lawsuit that was brought against Harvard by Tamara Lanier, a woman who — as a descendant of the father and daughter that are pictured — argued that she was the rightful owner of the images.

This is the same institution whose administrative staff just recently reminded the school’s highest-profile black faculty member that he could expect Harvard to extend him about as much freedom and protections in his work as a white landowner would have conferred upon his black sharecropper in the Mississippi delta in 1896.

This is Harvard, after all, and good old-fashioned racism is still very much alive and well in this vaunted cathedral of higher learning.

The hope is, I guess, that outward actions like the school’s appointment of a Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer will distract you from the institution’s complete inward deformities of racial injustice that have defined both its past and present. The hope is, I guess, that Harvard can just kind of jot off one of its total bullshit-y pronouncements of ‘solidarity’ whenever the continued fever of American racism spikes, as if the institution itself has not always been right there helping stoke the fire to its full strength in the body of society. The hope is, I guess (and Disinformation creep proves this), that Harvard will never have to confront a real, organized threat to the fact that the institution pretends not to continue to fatten itself on the misery of ADOS.

But which is why — with the abysmal failure of Disinformation creep — Harvard should be very worried. The timing of such a cack-handed, deeply stupid effort by ten writers united in their ineptness to make ADOS an object of reactionary horror could not be worse for the institution.

Let’s deny the descendants of slaves rights to photographs of their ancestors! Let’s refuse tenure consideration to one of the premiere black intellectuals in America who’s spent his career advocating for black people! Let’s mobilize in dishonesty *against* the movement now trying to secure justice for that very collective!

What a hapless, blinkered, and desperately clumsy bunch of white supremacists over there in Cambridge, huh? Pointy-headed ninnies all cloistered away from every conceivable brutal reality of ADOS life and who all seemingly decided one day that it was their God-given right to root out the seeds of possibility that the #ADOS movement is planting in this country.

This is what the academics at Harvard are doing to help America’s bottom caste as the world around these people skids into the abyss. They are publishing their little ‘scholarly articles��� replete with lies so vulgar and obvious that it stands to reason the authors involved in the writing undertook the project with one single expectation: that they would be able to freely invent whatever filth they wanted to about ADOS and no one would question a word of it simply because the report came out of Harvard.

Indeed it is a direct testament to how much contempt and disdain Harvard has for the plight of ADOS that they would even consider publishing such an obvious clown car of researchers in the first place. Fully six of these goblins have no previously published content that has been accepted into the Web of Science (which, to be kind of crude about it, you can think of as sort of like the IMDb of academics; WoS catalogues the number of citations, and thus, provides the basic metric of impact/importance of research).

In other words, these writers have about as much authority and credibility in this space as a group of elementary school children who were all collected at a rural bus stop, given pencils and notepads and juice boxes and told to ‘write about those baddies in the #ADOS movement’.

Who are these people? Are they just bored? Unloved? And how are they so very bad at what they do?

They should wake up embarrassed.

They were tasked with not even creating but just building upon one already existing lie: that the #ADOS movement is essentially an online factory of misinformation (indeed, the original architectress of that lie is Jess Aiwuyor, and Disinformation creep reads very much like a sad, dull and weird extension of her own body of work, which is essentially one sad, dull and weird neurotic meditation on ADOS).

People paid the scummy little clan of Disinformation creep writers handsomely to gussy up that original lie a little bit — to give it a little slick veneer of scientific observation — and in the end these pedantic cretins who evidently think they are so much smarter than everyone else couldn’t produce a remotely convincing or even vaguely entertaining case.

But of course Disinformation creep failed. Of course it did. And that’s because, at the end of the day, there are only so many ways to dress up what these people are really doing when they write shit like this, which is that they are trying to make the #ADOS movement the scapegoat for the deficiency-ridden politics of the Left.

That’s it.

You can distill the entire genre of anti-#ADOS ‘criticism’ down to that single impulse — that tightly wound coil of emotion, of melancholy that lives at the heart of these people’s obsessive determination to get rid of the movement. For them, #ADOS functions purely as a scapegoat for their own failed postwar utopias and workers’ revolutions. And what Disinformation creep proves is just how completely exhausted the genre already is after a mere two years. How utterly lacking it is in its efficacy.

What it proves is that the harder they try to hurriedly scuttle the most potent justice movement since the Civil Rights era off the scene, the more they manage only to reveal a basic, repugnant truth about themselves: their determination to further dispossess the very people whose suffering and deprivation they all spill so much ink over, and waste so much breath claiming to be so very outraged and heartbroken about. Just look at Harvard.

All Harvard succeeded in doing was exposing itself. It confirmed what’s becoming blindingly apparent about so very many of our elite liberal institutions in 2021: that these privilege farms don’t function all that differently than they did in the plantation days. They just as nonchalantly enrich themselves off the wholesale spoliation of ADOS, and they’ve been able to feign innocence because of a movement-free, symbolism-intoxicated climate that not just permits but encourages such despicable action.

Well, Harvard, the #ADOS Advocacy Foundation has three words for you: We’re here now.

[pissedoffpaganbitch]

Astral Spaces, and How I Met Monsieur

This one's a long one guys, so if you like my ramblings you're in luck, and if you don't, well, I don't know what to tell you, but you've come to the wrong blog. It all sort of just, came out.

I want to talk a little bit about astral spaces, and creating a safe space. I don't know where it is in the astral, but there's some place that one could create anything they want. I don't know that it's actually a place. Perhaps it's an anti-place. Because it's more or less just space. It isn't really lucid dreaming, but I'm not sure that it's astral projection. It's somewhere on the web-work to the higher self.

The first time I found this place, was when Monsieur and I found out that you can certainly push too hard when diving into the realm of metaphysics. He was teaching me how to channel, and really working hard on dine tuning my empathy, so that we can communicate more easily through emotion and energy. And he was also starting to push for my Clairaudience. Note that I hadn't started developing my clairvoyance until well after my clairaudience had established itself. However, channeling was what he considered to be most important.

The thing was that this channeling was insanity for me. My body would get a mad rush, and I could feel every atom in my body vibrating. I was electrified. When I would be tired at the end of the day, I would nearly be shaking. He was telling me that I'm just like him, that it will be Hell for a while, but there will be a point where I break through, we've just got to push for it. So we did, I was completely willing. I was almost certain he was right, we had the same logic with it. But it really was Hell on my body, it was reacting to this in the same way it would react to stress. I could hardly eat, my muscles were constantly tied in knots. I felt like I had five coffees in me all. the. time. But it was fun, I felt so close to him. And I was in the process of really getting to know someone. You know how it is when you first meet someone, and they're really charming, and you can tell that they like you too, but les deux just are getting to know each other. It was like that, and God damn it if I wasn't just delighted by everything he said. When we weren't practising channeling, we would sit there flipping through books, and he would point things out to me, poems he had written, plants he liked, all manners if things really. We would just sit there and talk. And once my clairaudience had developed to the point where I could hear him distinctly from the voice of my own consciousness, he would tell me of his plans. More or less what we were doing. It solidified our relationship, and our loyalty to each other. To me, it was like being asked to go steady. To say the least, I was fucking stoked.

He was terribly smart in his life, and naturally as smart people might, he got bored. So he got to studying the things no one knew anything about. He was an explorer in his heart you see. So he started pondering the questions that have no answers. He had already been having prophetic dreams, and dreams of things that had no place in history. Then he began to notice the energies all around. That everything had a unique life force to it. He began talked to the plants, and getting to know all of the nature spirits. He had ideas, dangerous ideas. About bridging the gap of this world and the next. He had theories about how it worked.

After he died, he thought about it, and he chose to stay here, and see if he could get someone to notice him. To work with him. He thought about it, and tried working with various people, artists mainly, because they are natural channelers of energy, and because they also put out a lot of energy. Energy that he could use to manifest, and make his presence known to them. The last that he was with before me was a musician, with an incredible talent for stringing together words. The musician knew of his life, and read his poems, but didn't know he was actually there. The musician began to get old, and in the process, his mind became rigid. Monsieur knew he had to move on, find another, because it simply was not working. He needed to find someone who put out a lot of energy, emotionally, and I mean a lot. He needed someone as volatile as he was. But also someone who was receptive. I don't know if you live under a rock, but that's fucking hard to find.

Luckily for him though, I listened to the artists music, and loved it. I had terribly complex emotions, but I couldn't quite seem to figure out how to express them. This music was what I used to communicate in a lot of circumstances. In high school I had a panic disorder, and it was fairly unpredictable, we really didn't know my triggers but I would freak out. I speak of this in past tense because I ended up coping so well with my panic disorder that it was no longer a problem for me. However the victory was short lived, as life happened, I won't go into that, and I ended up with PTSD, which effected me in New ways with new triggers. Anywayyy, to get me to calm down if I was in a full panic, my mom would take me for drives in the mountains, and we would play music. My mom has a mild claircognisence that she's never really had to work on, she just knows weird ass stuff for no reason. While driving in the mountains, a song would come on, and she would say, "Listen, someone's trying to tell you something." And the song would be exactly what I needed to hear. This happened nearly everytime, and when it did, I would have incredible epiphanies, and I would feel better than I did before I even had the panic attack. She pointed him out to me even before I knew his words, before I knew he was even there. This, my friends, was the beginning to a long courtship.

I also wrote poetry like mad in high school, which I believe was another reason he found me to be a decent person to work with. I would write upward of ten poems a day, most I felt were good, most other people said were good. I would write a poem in five minutes flat, on a napkin, stuffed into the pocket of my notebook at home. At some point though, I got a phrase stuck in my head. It was a phrase he said, just an utterance. So i wrote it everywhere, my notebooks, the desks, the walls, the bathroom stalls. I didn't have a clue who wrote it, I only knew I did not.

Years later, he still hadn't gotten through to me. But he got his chance. I was talking to my mom one day, about my poetry I think. And that phrase came up. I got a weird feeling, and I knew I had to look up who had penned it. I found his name. And then a face. And with his face came a mad ping. Like I knew him. He was familiar to me. I read one of his poems. And when I did, I was overpowered by memories, visions. I got sucked into another life, my mind completely absorbed. I saw hills, with green grass, the wind blowing over it, bending it down. I felt the wind in my face. I smelled the outdoors, but it didn't smell like the meadowlands I knew so well. I even felt different, surrounded by beauty, but completely alone. When I came back from this thing I was completely stunned. I had never, ever experienced anything like that before. I cried, hard. Actually I bawled. It wasn't a sad cry though, it was the sort of cry that happens when a child falls and scrapes their knee. It was purely shocked. And really, at that time, I had already more the PTSD thing going, and I never cried. I'd seen horrible things, and never cried about any of it. My first thought was always that of survival, aside from that nothing else mattered. I was feral, wild, as I described it in the few poems I wrote in that time. So began the period where I thought I was him, that he was simply a past life of mine. The whole vision was from a personal point of view, mind you.

He must have used just about all the energy he had at once, simply to get my attention. And I missunderstood. But it was something. He got through to me on a personal level, and in the process he established some kind of psychic connection, because I was receptive to him. I really liked that poem, it had struck me perhaps deeper than the musician had before.

After that, it was nearly undeniable that he was there. He would communicate with me, through music mostly, and then through my thoughts. But they sounded a lot like my own thoughts. So i still was under the impression that I was just channeling an energy from a past life. However he became clearer to me and clearer. Until I could no longer deny that he was separate from me.

This is when we really began to work with each other. Hard. And he was certain that I could come to be the one who completes his work. I myself I'm not entirely sure that I will. I think it may take lifetimes. But he pushed for it, and I was ready. I loved it. The thing was that he pushed me so hard that there was a recoil type effect. I had a sort of survival reaction to this, as I was saying before, I was predisposed to survival, and my body was reacting to this as though it was some foreign stress. It happened when I learned about his death. He hasn't told me how he died, and so I looked into it. He was upset by this, and that sent me into a reaction of sorts too. We echoed off of eachother, and it was not a good outcome.

I got a lot of distress from him after that for hours. He couldn't communicate with me either. His energy was whirling out of control, and there was absolutely no clarity with it. So i did the only thing I actually knew that I could do. And I basically astral projected, but I can hardly say it was that, because it felt more as if I was going inside. One thing was certain, it was that I was not exactly in this world, I was where he was. He had been going through flashbacks of his death, a particularly slow and painful one. He had literally no control. He couldn't speak to me, or move. So i took him up, and slung his arm around my shoulder. I took him to a safe place, one that I created. One I thought he would like. And I laid him on the bed, his hair damp with feaverish sweat. It was there we lied together, trying to convince each other that no one was going anywhere. It was the first time I had seen him scared.

This was our first astral home. It was just a room, but the room was beautiful, with wooden furniture, flowers on the tables, and high ceilings, big windows through which the light shines in.

The next day we woke up, still emotionally bruised from the night before. Feeling like crap, I went back to sleep. I was woken up later that morning to a dove that came and landed on my window, right above my head. It was a message for both of us from my higher self. The mourning dove is a symbol that love cannot grow in the presence of grief, that one has to heal to move on. Which basically meant that he had to let up on me, or he would destroy us both.

It became a deeper relationship after that. He showed me more love, but still encouraged me in our work, continuing to develop my senses, but fighting off every strange spirit he thought would interfere with me. A love between us grew, like a vine. He had always been affectionate before, but now it was deeper. We were equals. He showed me a fierce passion which I had never seen on any other. There was a sense of always wanting to be near, always wanting to touch, to speak, to assure me that he was here.

There have been a few times, where, busy with school, I would forget to pay him any mind. And he would sneak into my dreams, and remind me that he's here, and that he's not going anywhere. He would remind me how I felt about him.

Eventually he made a place for me as well. I think as a response to the kindness I had shown to make him a place to sleep, to sit in the sun in comfort and peace, and read, recover. He made it the way he believed I would like it, and in the process, he one upped me. It was not just a room, this place, it was a house. An upstairs, down stairs, kitchen, living room, master bedroom, master bathroom house. Sleek and modern style to boot. The decoration style was simple, but as a whole the place was cpmplicated, saturated in tiny details.

It was after that when we decided to make something together. Imagine the vastness of the place. This one has an outside, a few rooms, which will have beautiful details in them. It will be both simplistic, and elegant by the time we get done with it. It will be ours.

Wow you made it!

Muddy and Monsieur

[parabellum-rpg-archive]

Congratulations, Polly! You’ve been accepted to play Violet Costello. Please make your page and send it in within 24 hours.

Admin note: I LOVED the part where Violet sort of scoffs at the idea of a marriage between Luca and Paisley because, in her experience, it did not work out. This was some seriously good writing. I’m gonna go cry over Violet and Leon’s failed marriage, brb. - Admin V

CHARACTER DESIRED

Violet Costello

DESCRIBE THE CHARACTER IN YOUR OWN WORDS

For a long time Violet Moore went along with the narrative that had been written for her. Beautiful, successful, admirable parents had a charming, lovely little thing of a daughter, one that had the fire of her enigmatic father along with water from the force of nature that was her mother. Special, they said, when the dark eyed baby was born. Gifted, they told her, when she could spell nearly every word in the English dictionary by the age of ten. A real talent, they admired when she mastered the fouette by the age of fourteen. Destined for great things, they prophesied when she scored a 1580 on the SAT and guaranteed her acceptance into Juilliard. There was a collection of words: brilliant, ambitious, lovely, well spoken, promising… Throughout her youth it felt as though each of those words were written into her skin, cutting into her flesh to create the young woman they all expected her to be. She’d pushed, and shoved, and twisted, and contorted until she fit the mold that had been formed for her. She was good at pretending, good at smiling, and nodding, and excelling. At playing the part and making those around her proud. It came with ease, and perhaps that was why she eventually gave up on it. She despised how unchallenging it was. Violet was bored with the role, tired of the image, and altogether uninterested in where that particular path led.

She’d been told what to do, and who to be her whole life that Violet had never taken the time to explore what she wanted and needed from this fateful miscalculation called life. She craved the adventure of her father, and the importance of her mother. She yearned for the unruliness of her father, and the lethal nature that her mother carried into the courtroom. She wanted calamity, and exhilaration, and the chance of failure. And she knew it wouldn’t come at Julliard, she knew it wouldn’t come at any college, or any alternative plan her parents provided in a panic when she announced she wouldn’t be attending. Whatever it was she was looking for would be found beyond the confines of the words that had been written for her, and in an attempt to capture her desires Violet left everything behind.

It turns out the real world is only exciting if you know the right people. Working odd hours at dive bars and diners was only exciting for so long. Lewd comments, and wandering hands could only be excused a number of times, and with nothing to apply herself to, Violet found she had very little drive. Why show up for the graveyard shift if there was an underground concert she’d heard about from her dealer? Why wake up before noon if she’d stayed out until four in the morning in pursuance of a thrill. She struggled to hold down a job, and her savings account was growing emptier and emptier as months turned into a year, and a year turned into two. She’d succeeded in finding that discord she’d been searching for, but Violet would be lying if she said something wasn’t missing. And she hadn’t known what exactly that was until Leon Costello walked into the doors of The Alibi Room, bringing with him the smell of gunpowder and money. She watched him, noticed the way the room resettled to accommodate the man, and when he sat down at the bar, glancing her way, eyes dark with the promise of proper exhilaration, her mother’s warning rang through Violet’s head like a bell. “You steer clear of those Costello boys Violet Cynthia Moore, do you understand me? They will tear you limb from limb.” And she was counting on it as she made her way to where he sat, and leaned over the bar to ask what it was he wanted. And as they say, the rest was history.

She’d never known life until him. She’d never known the pure ecstasy with which moments could pass until he was pulling her in tight as she joined him on the roller coaster of his existence. He was dangerous, yes, but it was the world that he introduced her to that really drew her in. He lit a fire between her ribs, stoked it with oxygen that he pumped into her lungs until she was consumed by the flames. Being with him was breathless, and only then did she understand what she had been searching for. He opened the door to endless excitement, and she threw herself past the threshold with abandon, falling into him and his reality with a readiness that could only end in chaos. But she didn’t care, and at the beginning Violet only wanted to know and understand every aspect of this new and thrilling world she found herself in. And she did what she does best– excelled. Again, she found something to attach herself to, something to work for and obtain except this time it was what she wanted, a mold that shaped to fit her form instead.

She was so blindly infatuated, and so thoroughly invested in achieving her need to thrive that it was alarmingly easy for the woman to strip away the ethics society had readily equipped her with. Violet shed yet another expectation with a frivolity that combined the recklessness of her father, and the moral ambiguity of her mother; it was easy for her to accept the ruthlessness when the stimulation left her with an addicting buzz. It wasn’t easy to learn, to train, to master the skills of a killer, but when the time came to pull the trigger she did it with ease. Perhaps the heartlessness had always been there, lying dormant or going unnoticed, or maybe it was forged out of pure will, either way, Violet embraced it along with the Costello name.

If they’d taken the time to pump the breaks they might have seen the glaring faults, and the wide spread cracks that riddled the foundation of their relationship. She might have been able to recognize how jealousy had seeped beneath her skin, how her possessiveness was out of bounds. But it was all speed, all delerium, and it didn’t take long for their ride to reach the end of the tracks, and with it’s halt the pair descended into a toxicity that poisoned everything that had once been so alluring. The very attributes that had kept them bound together, clawed and tore at them until their relationship with a mangled mess of what it had once been. They were hot and cold, on and off, screaming or hardly speaking, fighting or fucking, and when there was nothing left, and nowhere left to turn, they finally called it quits. But even then, Violet had formed a deep seeded loyalty to the family whose name she still bore, and like hell if Leon would change that. She had accepted a position among them years ago, and though she had relinquished her claim to the crown, Violet Costello was as dedicated to the blood as she had ever been.

As for this wedding, Violet has absolutely no hope of it working out. This bright idea of using marriage as a form of peace was enough to make Violet laugh. From her experience, it would only expedite the unraveling and they’d have a war on their hands faster than anyone could have predicted. But she’s counting on it, hoping for it really. After all the Sinclair’s don’t stand a chance, and some high stakes, and proper danger would be exciting. If only she didn’t have to see her ex-husband at the wedding, Violet might have even considered it a happy occasion.

WRITING SAMPLE

The steam filled her lungs as the water pounded into Violet’s skin in a gentle massage against her tired limbs. She dipped her head back, eyes closed, and breathed deeply, slowly, calmly. The water slid down her body in rivulets, falling pink against the white tiled floor. With her eyes shut the darkness gave way to memory, and the night’s events played against her eyelids as vivid as the moment they happened. She saw it clearly, even felt the moment of panic again, the moment where she knew she’d screwed up, that she’d miscalculated, assumed too much. He’d reached under his desk, for a gun no doubt, and she remembered something Leon had told her: if she hesitates, if she freezes, if she allows unexpected circumstances to stall her, then she would die. It was as simple and vastly complicated as that. She knew it was true, she remembered it the way he said it with such easy conviction, but that didn’t really matter in the moment. It was just a reflex, and whether or not her muscle memory responded with a quick enough reflex could only be determined in the moment. As it turned out, it did. She leapt behind the door, and slid towards the wall.

Water filled her mouth and Violet ran her hands through her hair, tugging at the braids. She remembered the brief pause, her deep breath, before one, two, three, four, five shots were fired, riddling the door with holes. She waited, holding her breath, gun drawn. The water rushed over her face, softly drowning her.After the fifth shot there was silence, and she swiftly dropped to the floor, lying flat on her back, pistol aimed at the approximate location of his head. It would only buy her a split second, and when he came around the door, gun raised, he wasn’t looking at the ground, of course he wasn’t, and that moment was all she needed. She released her breath, and her trigger finger twitched. The warm spray of blood on her face, the lifeless crumple, like the strings of a puppet had been cut. Violet threw her head forward, out of the water and sucked in the steam laden air.

It was too thick to breathe, and the woman reached turn the shower cold. The coolness cut through the humidity, and the sudden rush of cold water riddled her skin with goosebumps. Her heart leapt into action, and she remembered the moment of thrill, the wave of adrenaline, the challenge to turn on a dime, to make a choice in an instant, and to reap the rewards of winning. A sudden laugh escaped her, brought forward from the lingering exhilaration. The job was done. And Violet was reminded that greed was no man’s ally, and that you never get away with it, not with the Costello��s.

[camorrsthorn]

Hi, I'm kinda new here, and so I mostly have just seen the art of your OCs? (Which is awesome, btw.) But I was wondering if you could give, like, a basic outline of who they are and maybe their universe? (Bc worldbuilding is ALWAYS cool.) Thanks! (And again, love your art

aaa thank you!! i have. a lot bear with me lmao but. i’m gonna put this under a cut because Oh Dang That’s Too Many

video game ocs: holy moley that’s a lot

tarris, relic, kharza gra-durza, serindil, riandil, vhesryn, saaji and zhakka are all from elder scrolls!! 

tarris is a bosmer thief/assassin who’s actually real bad at fighting and is probably half magpie, don’t wear jewelery near her she will Have It

relic is a bosmer vampire who is an asshole. he’s awful. he knows magic but mostly likes to Stab. he exists in the same world-state as tarris and kharza and probably a few others 

kharza is an orc warrior who’s like the only lawful good character i have, whoops. she sometimes turns into a werewolf and mauls people but that’s a minor character flaw. she’s a big gay

serindil is an altmer mage!! very very much a glass cannon. they were with the thalmor embassy in skyrim until they... sort of defected?? they’re still an ass tho

riandil is a bosmer scout!! he’s from eso so i’m not sure exactly how he fits into the world state, but he’s a big ball of sunshine. he likes very very bad puns and responding to altmer supremacy by acting real stupid until THEY look stupid. he’s great

vhesryn is a dunmer assassin but he’s also a big ol’ dick. he’s a vampire too but mostly a dick. his hobbies include being an asshole and stabbing people, also dancing

saaji is a khajiit thief and very pure good person. she;s good. she’ll steal your things but she’s good she’ll prolly give em back. really just wants a warm spot in the sun, very very tired of almer

zhakka is a redguard warrior and former pirate!! i love her. she scowls a lot and looks grumpy but she’s grinning inside just all the time. you know those people who say the most ridiculous funny shit with a totally stoic face?? that’s zhakka

spring and bishop are from fallout

spring washington is Soft. she’s a soft soft person. she likes plants and photography, but also she was her school’s boxing champion pre-war and won trophies for shooting, and likes to keep a switchblade on her at all times. met her husband when he had to drag her off some creep. she just wants to make the world a bit brighter!!

bishop is. bishop. he’s my courier and he’s??? the worst. he’s obnoxiously lucky and knows it, and very charming despite the amount of times he puts his foot directly in his mouth. he’s good at heart but also does what seems good/fun/cool at the time??? “hey bishop when is the last time you washed” “i dunno when did it last rain” “i don’t want to travel with you any more”

i have a whole lot of dragon age ocs bear with me

rasha tabris is Angry. i once described her as a wildfire in a very pretentious thing i didn’t post but it’s apt!! she stayed with the wardens because duncan was the reason she could kill vaughn, and the reason she wasn’t killed for it. she died fighting the archdemon because there was no way she was trusting some human, and died spitting and cursing

katia brosca’s main personality trait is Spite. people told her she could only be this this and this because casteless, so she did absolutely everything she could to prove them wrong. a lot of her loudness and bravado is a front to protect herself, but not all of it

hildr aeuducan’s middle name is duty. she does the job she’s got to do, and does it well. she doesn’t really Do sentiment?? and she’s never once but her own opinions over what’s best. she left behlen on the throne despite. everything

cian mahariel is Ridiculous. they spend half their time in trees despite having broken at least one bone on every part of their body falling out of them, and are Always Smiling

niketas surana lives on his nerves. his skills include flinching, stammering, going beet red if anybody looks at him for too long, and falling a little bit in love with anybody who’s nice to him. he’ll very very gladly swallow all his fear to protect people though, and repeatedly put himself between templars and scared younger mages while still in the tower. would die for jowan, frankly

vinnora lavellan is a sweetheart!! she just wants to be nice to everyone, and frankly deserves better than she got. she never wanted to be inquisitor, but figured she could at least use the position to help people who needed it, and tried to

noah shepard is my only real mass effect character worth talking about!! she’s a Delight and i love her. she’s paragon to her core, and goes out of her way to help people or offer a shoulder, but she’s absolutely not afraid to speak her mind or tell assholes to get fucked. she’s very very tired and full of guilt and regret. please let her sleep

d&d ocs!! are they ocs technically. i’m counting them i love them

dáithí lathlaeril is a half elven wild magic sorcerer and the only one i have actually played!! they’re half of a set of twins born to a high elven noblewoman and her human husband. they accidentally burned down their family library after overhearing their mother agree to essentially disinherit them, and have been an adventurer ever since. they have Lots of emotions always, and swing between “i’m inherently superior to all of you and also have cool magic” and “oh god i’m the worst i’m pathetic is my magic even good” and it’s terrible. please give them a hug. their name is pronounced DAH-hee

dáimhín lathlaeril is the other twin!! she left home to go be a bard but attracted an archfey with her singing, and wound up a warlock. still pretends to be a bard tho. she’s obnoxiously charming and knows it, and is WAY more relaxed and happy go lucky than their twin. she’s still pretty prissy tho. her name is pronounced like DAH-veen. also she’s not a girl, she’s nb!! like her twin. “finch that wouldn’t happen” haha what i can’t hear you

zeerith is a drow rogue!! he had just the worst life but is So Good at pretending he didn’t. what do you mean he’s almost certainly traumatised and emotionally messed up, he’s smiling, see?? trust him. he really really hates killing and would much rather talk his way out of trouble, but isn’t at all above hurting people to defend people?? also he’s very handsome and charming, focus on that. no don’t ask him if he’s ok. very very prone to talking someone to death if given half a chance

most of my actually original characters are from the same world!! it’s tag is “untitled a” because i don’t have a name for it yet lmao. there’s also a bunch of gods to go with these guys but i don’t even have names for them yet so lmao

fionn is prolly currently my most developed character from it. he’s an elf, which is fairly rare, and a magic user, which is rarer. he doesn’t care tho. he’s an ex-soldier who deserted after some very bad stuff happened, and he’s just trying to keep his head down. the god of luck and fate took a shine to him tho, so that’s not going too well. he uses his magic to make people think he’s much better at playing music than he is, but he could do Very cool things. he won’t tho

sabre is also an elf, but she’s a thief and very happy about it. she’s tiny and literally always ready to fight. she’ll fight anyone. she’ll Win against anyone. don’t fight sabre she jut doesn’t stop. she’s got a pretty strict Code tho, and won’t steal from anyone who can’t afford it, or fight anyone who can’t fight back. technically steals to give to the poor but also keeps a lot. she worked for that ill gotten gold!! she’s one of the two people who got “chosen” by the twin gods of the hunt, which she’s pretty stoked about. she’s got a tattoo honoring one of the twins

zarifa is the captain of an as-yet unnamed ship, and a totally legitimate merchant sailor. no pirates here absolutely not haha what’s that officer nope no illegitimate goods either, trust her. she’s got a good heart but also she’s pretty practical, and ensuring her own survival and the survival of her crew trumps morals every time. she’s the “chosen” of the god of the sea, which is an incredibly mixed bag

sylvie pike is zarifa’s first mate, but not nearly as professional. she likes to have fun, and insists on dragging zarifa with her. she’s got a much thicker accent than any other member of the crew, and makes it impenetrably thicker when she wants to be difficult. she’s not as good at overcoming her conscience as zarifa is

billie shaw is possibly my oldest current oc, holy shit. they’re kind of the odd job person aboard the ship, and also sing shanties and (badly) play the accordion. has a big big soft spot for kids. also hates shoes. what the fuck billie. put some boots on you ridiculous human being

sara tillman is possibly the only ordinary person on board the ship. she’s the ship’s doctor, despite being easily the youngest person aboard, and despite having only ever operated on her family’s farm prior to being hired. she’s got like ten siblings and loves all of them very very much

there’s also a handful of others from this universe who aren’t nearly as fleshed out yet, other than the gods, but they aren’t fleshed out!! “finch neither are any of the people you’ve talked about” [sweats]

[hexwritesthings]

hint of sin

Original Story

Rated: M for it being an entire lemon

18+ because it is lemony. Read under the cut

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“You taste divine.”

Her sex was pulsing against his tongue with every stroke, the tip gliding against the smooth slit between her thighs before pushing inside of her slickness. That familiar taste coated his tongue, a sweetness that could only be found in the highest nirvana--a nirvana he reached when he was with her. 

That luscious mouth parted as pleasured noises left her throat, a song that rang over and over in his mind. Her hand lifted to cover her mouth, to stem the noises just like that one time, but he swiftly snatched it about the wrist tightly, pulling away from his treat while a gasp of protest left her. “Don’t cover your mouth; I want to hear you,” he ordered in a low voice, the huskiness growing the more he drank her in: that delicate, beautiful body that was bare only to him and him alone.

When he pressed his mouth against her soaking sex once more, her hips bucked, her fingers clutching the bed sheets as his name left her in a strangled cry: “Ryuu~”  

The dragon shuddered at how delicious his name sounded on his lover’s lips, spurring him to feast more on his treasure, to ravish her as she shamelessly begged for him, as that beautiful body writhed at the sensations only he could rouse inside of her. “Please,” she whined to the air, her pants and whimpers becoming louder the deeper he thrust his tongue to touch that spot only he knew. 

Fuck, he loved it when she begged. 

Ryuu pulled back, molten gold irises rising to gaze at the flustered face of his beautiful apple, his strong, rough hands pressing against her thighs. “Ringo...wider,” he commanded huskily, nudging gently to show what he meant. Panting, Ringo obeyed, her legs parting wider for him to move over her, pressing his clothed erection against her core. The male brunette rolled his hips roughly, feeling Ringo’s juices soak the fabric over his crotch, burying his face against her neck with a groan. Ringo shuddered beneath him and Ryuu pinned the girl’s wrists to the bed as he nibbled the delicate column of her neck as she keened in ecstasy. Her hips rising to meet his, Ryuu dragged his tongue against the red marks adorning his treasure’s neck. Raw, primal desire spiked inside of him at the sight of them, at how any other male will know she is taken. 

“Ryuu…” Ringo’s voice was hoarse, a soft breath against his cheek and the dragon male lifted his head to gaze at her. 

His cock all but throbbed at the sight. 

Ringo’s expression was one of pure desire, her cheeks flushed a cherry red, hazel eyes hazy and swimming in absolute love; her lips were swollen from his kisses and parted ever so slightly as her chest heaved against his. She looked absolutely delirious with passion that Ryuu all but nearly lost what little thread of control he had left. “Babygirl, don’t give me that look. I won’t be able to resist you.” Oh, was it the truth; the more delirious her expression, the harder he got. 

Ringo’s hips bucked against his and Ryuu was certain she could feel his length throbbing within his pants. “Ryuu, please.” 

Fuck, he can’t resist her when she pleads with him in that sultry voice. “You want it that badly?” he hummed, leaning in to drag his tongue up the length of Ringo’s neck, feeling her angle her head to give him easier access until his teeth caught her earlobe and wrenching a moan from his lover’s lips. “Beg for it. I want to hear you say how much you want it.”

Giving another rough grind of his hips, Ryuu all but relished in the high-pitched, breathless cry leaving his girlfriend’s lips as Ringo squirmed underneath him. “Ryuu, I want it. I want you, please--ah!” she cried out once more as Ryuu released her wrists in favor of one hand snaking to press against her back and the other sliding down to stroke her dripping core. “P-Please, give it to me! I want it so much, Daddy, I’m aching,” she whined, her hips rolling so deliciously against his hand. 

God, she’s so...good. There was no other way for Ryuu to describe how ravishing his Ringo looked, begging for him and submitting to him so sweetly. Calling him by the pet name solely reserved for their intimacy all but made his pants so unbearably confining that Ryuu pulled his entire body away to strip off his clothes one at a time--first his shirt to bare his muscled torso to freeing his length from his pants after undoing his belt and dropping the garment along with his boxers to the floor and kicking them away. Molten eyes took in the state of his apple, from her marked neck down her flushed torso, to her parted thighs displaying her drenched sex--all for him. Hazel eyes drank him in and Ryuu could swear Ringo’s folds pulsed as soon as her eyes fell to his erect length. “I love seeing you all wet, Ringo, and just for me,” Ryuu murmured before he returned to hover his body over her, the tip of him kissing her folds. 

His body was absolutely aching for hers and the close proximity of their naked bodies broke whatever tether of restraint the dragon male had as he leaned his head to ghost his lips along the length of his beloved’s petite body. He was primed and ready and knew that she was as well from the shaking breath with every heave of her chest, her breasts tempting him as they moved. He closed his mouth over one generous mound, groaning against her flesh and Ringo arched, her back off the mattress and pressing against his lips. Yes, she only reacted this way with him, to where her body shuddered with his actions. Ryuu grabbed his length, guiding it to Ringo’s entrance, before he pushed himself inside with one rough snap of his hips.

The ecstasy of Ringo’s scream echoed off of the walls, her insides wrapping so tightly--so hot--around his girth that a low, guttural groan rumbled from Ryuu’s throat. He didn’t need to wait, not when her body was singing just like his; he pulled back until he was almost out, only to slam back into that place deep inside of Ringo that had her screaming his name. Ryuu pressed his body close to Ringo’s, one hand clenching around silky locks of her chocolate-colored hair while the other snagged her leg at the knee to set it against his hip. Their lips met in a frenzied, desperate kiss as Ringo’s fingers of her left hand dug into Ryuu’s back, causing him to groan against her mouth at the sting, while her right hand traced along the tattoo adorning his arm. Ringo’s mouth parted against Ryuu’s and the dragon male wasted no time in thrusting his tongue inside of his girlfriend’s mouth, twisting around hers, as his hips slapped against her own, thrusting his throbbing length as deep inside of her waiting body as it could go. His mind was in a haze, focused only on Ringo, centering on how her insides squeezed his length with every intend to milk his meat for every drop of his seed. 

The kiss broke between them when Ryuu thrust harder inside of Ringo, a loud moan ripping from her throat as her head was tossed back against the pillows, her fingers dragging down his back in such a stinging pain that Ryuu shuddered. No, he wasn’t going to falter; not when his body craved his soulmate’s with every fiber of his being--a craving hers undoubtedly returned. Their lovemaking was frantic, primal, with the lovers raw only to each other in this room, in his apartment, where eyes were not upon them; where they could be in their own world and want no one and nothing else but each other.

“You make me fall to pieces, babygirl,” Ryuu managed to say between groans, his lips latching to the junction between her neck and shoulder. He bit down, intending to leave a mark darker than the others, his mind completely void of everything and anything else but the sensation of Ringo shuddering and writhing against him. This hickey will look good on you, he thought in his haze.

“So fall…” Ringo purred, her voice throaty from her pleasured cries reaching the dragon’s ears. Ryuu’s length throbbed, close to the imminent release, as Ringo banded her arms around him. “Fall to pieces...deep inside me.” 

He wanted so badly to hold back, to make his submissive lover plead for him to give her that sweet release, but her words all but were flames that cleaved him. Her words stoked the flames and Ryuu went as fast as humanly possible, the bed creaking with the vigor, Ringo’s cries growing louder, louder, louder--

Her body spasmed, her juices drenching his length as her insides clutched him greedily to where Ryuu could no longer hold back; his hot seed burst forth, coating Ringo’s womb and filling her to the brim as his hips stuttered, emptying him. Panting heavily, Ryuu brushed his lips against Ringo’s, the lovers sharing a passionate kiss. “I love you, Ringo,” he murmured against her lips, sharing one breath with her as she whispered back, “I love you too, Ryuu.”

Ryuu moved his hips once, only once, his body coming to life once more. “Let me be inside of you a little longer...I can’t get enough of you…” he groaned--before surprise overtook him as Ringo managed to push him onto his back, straddling him. Panting, she pushed sweaty strands of her hair from her face, her expression switching from a sultry submissive to an aroused seductress. Fuck, it was such a sight to behold and it got him harder than before.

Ringo leaned in close, her lips ghosting against Ryuu’s as the dragon dragged his hands down her body to grip her hips as she began her slow torture, riding him. He wanted so badly to thrust upward, to make his girlfriend scream once more, but Ringo felt so fucking good atop him, riding him, that he was at her mercy this time. He needed this, needed her, and for the life of him, he did not want her to stop. 

  “Fuck...Rin--” A grunt ripped from Ryuu’s throat, his fingers digging into the sweet flesh of Ringo’s hips as her succulent body writhed sensually in rhythm to his, drawing him closer and closer to that nirvana. It was thrilling to see Ringo believe she dominated her dragon, but Ryuu was all too happy to oblige his girlfriend giving her body to him so lusciously by returning the favor in kind. Still sensitive to their previous round, it didn’t take Ryuu long to climax inside of Ringo again, the petite female arching as her body trembled above his, their juices mixing inside of her and dripping onto Ryuu’s throbbing length and slicking Ringo’s inner thighs. 

But no, their hunger for one another was not even close to satiated, their passion unrestrained in their love for one another.  

They weren’t going to finish any time soon tonight.

    Bonus Aftercare Fluff:

    “Your thighs are bruised. I’m sorry.” The apology left Ryuu in a soft voice, his hand sliding against Ringo’s inner thighs, feeling the tender flesh flinch when his fingers brushed against the bruise. Ringo curled close to the male brunette, nuzzling her face into his chest. “Ryuu, I’m fine. You know that I love when you don’t hold back,” she murmured, pressing a tender kiss along his collarbone. Once the two had worn themselves out, they remained close together underneath the blankets, Ryuu holding Ringo close. 

Shaking his head, Ryuu pressed a kiss to Ringo’s forehead, brushing strands of her hair from her face. “Do you want to take a bath?” he asked softly, smiling faintly when Ringo all but wrapped her arm tightly around him. He reclined onto his back, Ringo’s arm across his chest as he gently stroked her skin. “I’ll take that as a later, then.”

    Ringo smiled back, tilting her head up to look at her boyfriend with that adoring shimmer in her eyes and Ryuu couldn’t restrain from pressing a brief, gentle kiss against his girlfriend’s lips. “I love you, my Ringo,” he murmured. 

    “I love you too, my Ryuu,” replied Ringo, her index finger gently ghosting against her lover’s lower lip. 

    He’d planned a more romantic way to ask, but the words left Ryuu’s lips without a second thought: “Move in with me.”

    Surprise etched her features as Ringo blinked. “Ryuu? What are you…”

    “Move in with me, Ringo,” Ryuu repeated, his gaze fixated intensely on those hazel orbs he loved so much. “I love you. You’re my everything. I think about you every single day, worrying that you’re safe and happy. I want to be with you...forever.” Ryuu gently brushed his fingers along the curve of Ringo’s cheek affectionately. “Stay by my side, Ringo.”

It was a few heartbeats of silence before Ringo all but jumped to embrace Ryuu, burying her face against his shoulder and nuzzling where his tattoo began. “Is this really happening?” she asked softly against his skin and Ryuu wrapped an arm around Ringo, his free hand against the back of the petite girl’s head. “Need me to ask you again?” he answered, to which his girlfriend let out a laugh.

“When do you want me to start moving things in?” That answer he wasn’t suspecting, but Ryuu’s heart was soaring all the same as he nuzzled his face against Ringo’s neck.

“After you graduate.”

“I can work with that.”

“I know--and now, I can’t wait for it to come soon.”  

[followingkale]

Lets Talk About Hot Brown.

I got my first job in coffee kind of by accident.

My Mom was in line at Second Cup at Carlingwood Mall and was eavesdropping on the two girls working, talking about job interviews for later that afternoon. She texted me immediately, knowing I wasn’t happy in the current job I had, telling me to go drop off a resume as soon as I could. I obliged, and a few days later had my first training shift.

I was given one three hour shift a week for the first month or so of me being there. That was all the time I was given per week to prove to my then manager that I was worthy of being scheduled more, that I really wanted to learn and be there and impress her. It was totally foreign to me, food service and really getting to have a conversation with the people I served, but I quickly got good at it, and with time was one of the core members of the team there.

My coworkers were wonderful, and the owner loved me. They split me between the Carlingwood branch and the Rideau centre branch, so I was commuting between the city, working with different people, making shitty lattes fucking around with little barista rats I’d befriended.  

I quickly learned that baristas come from all sorts of backgrounds. There are die hard lifers who live for coffee and the culture around it. There are part time students who just want something on the side. Old retired ladies who want something easy to kill time a few days a week. Little hipster arty rats who are drawn to the buzz of working in a café. People with absolutely no direction, who fall back on coffee because of the simplicity and how its not as stressful as working in a real restaurant. Everyone had a different story, completely different ways of spending their paychecks at the end of the day.

I spent my days serving the mall walkers and befriending all the other staff of the mall. I came to know everyone because everyone flocks to coffee, I couldn’t walk a loop of that mall without running into someone to talk to. It was a simple time, and I still look back on it fondly.

From Second Cup I transitioned to Illume Espresso Bar, the epitome of a hipster’s haven.

Chalkboard menus with leather couches and jazz music, local art scattered on the walls. Gluten free, dairy free, egg free, sugar free pastries littered the display case, catering to every dietary need under the sun. I spent my afternoons making soups, packaging homemade salad, delivering coconut cream lattes to people’s tables, leaning on the counters while watching the inhabitants of Welly West meander idly by.

Illume was different. I remember the first afternoon I spent in that café was probably a year before I worked there. I took the bus down to Wellington in the dead of winter, and sat with a notebook at a long table by the window for the entire afternoon. Binge drinking soy lattes, I felt very comfortable there. It was an exceptionally quiet place, and working there had me bored to tears working full shifts by myself, regardless of being able to enjoy the silence from time to time.

It was too good to be true though, about a month and a half into my time there, I woke to an email from the owner telling us that unfortunately the café was to be closed. As disappointed as I was, I knew it didn’t quite feel like a long term fix, that I was waiting for something real to come along next.

From there I began kicking at the doors of Bridgehead. I had known from a young age that I always wanted to work for Bridgehead, and the fact that my at-the-time partner was already working there, I knew it would be my turn next.

I applied three times before getting an interview, and it broke my heart to have to turn down the gig. I was offered a job at the location in New Edinburgh, and I knew I couldn’t get there for 6am opening shifts despite wanting this more than anything.

I burst into tears after I turned down the offer over the phone, but I was still determined. It wasn’t for another few weeks that I got another offer from the location at Kent and Slater, and I was offered a full time contract that guaranteed me my weekends off. Upon telling Jenn Noseworthy at the end of my interview that Erin Cobb from Beechwood had offered me a job with her less than a month ago, she had me scheduled in to work the next day.

I was so stoked to finally get to work and train with people that looked at coffee as a craft, that had access to training facilities and the resources to really get their staff excited about the industry. I lived and breathed Bridgehead core values before I even worked there, and finally getting to work in that environment had me so psyched for life. I was working in a community based hub, every location scattered around the city, giving me ties to so many people and neighbourhoods. I had so much pride to say I worked for Bridgehead, and it felt good to be part of the community. I represented a company that believed in supporting local businesses, believed in ethical farming practices, cared about their environmental impact, supported their staff well, and was looked at so fondly by the city they sprung up from. Bridgehead was an institution, an empire that had sparked so fast and spiraled like no one had expected.

It didn’t take long to network from within, and since the beginning I’d had an in. My first shift at Slater I met the second in command of the entire company, who my at-the-time partner had worked with alongside for some time at the warehouse. She was quick to shake my hand and tell me how wonderful it was to finally meet me.

I was always one to say yes to picking up shifts at other stores, so my Bridgehead network began to splay out rapidly. I knew people all over the city, there was so much cross contamination of bridgehead staff that knew people from my high school who knew people I went to college with. Almost every single person I met in Bridgehead had a mutual of some sort, and I got to know and befriend and love so many different people.

I spent my mornings up at the crack of dawn to ride my bike into the middle of the business district, to run around in chaos serving people in suits all day. My boss was insane but had a heart of gold. I worked with the most bizarre team of centretown rats, spending our nights together going on bike ride pub crawls and dancing to obscure music no one knew at house parties at Tom Allans every other weekend.

I was doing well in Bridgeheadland, and after a month and half of employment it was already being suggested to me that I consider applying for training on the management team. I was learning so much training with Harriet at Slater, getting to then train new staff, taking on more responsibility.

In February of  2016, I applied for a transfer shops as much as it broke my heart. I was over Slater, I was tired of the constant rushes and the same customers every day. The Fairlawn Plaza location was set to open beginning of March, and seeing as I lived right across the street, it seemed silly to not transfer over. Harriet and the team were sad to see me leave, but understood that my time had come.

Fairlawn quickly became the most at home feeling job I’d ever had. I got to meet a brand new team, open a brand new shop, and help set the tone of the store and the staff as someone coming in with moderate Bridgehead seniority. I got to run coffee tastings with new staff, complete the follow up bar training, babble about proper espresso calibration and how different milk temperatures affect the taste of the coffee. I sensed that I could shift the attitude of the team and the day, purely by coming into work my best self, feeling good, getting everyone else psyched, and I reveled in that.

I had the best team at Fairlawn, and there was not a single member on the team that was not comfortable coming to talk to me, we were all on an even playing field, we were all such good friends.

August of 2016 I was offered the chance to enter the management apprenticeship program at one of the new locations opening up that fall. My district manager had been hinting I apply for months, and my name had been buzzing about management meetings for some time. After a meeting with my potential trainer, and getting involved with scoping out the new location, I turned down the offer. I had been with Bridgehead for just shy of a year, and I knew I wasn’t ready to step up to that plate yet. I would have been the second youngest employee to ever go through the manager apprentice program, and I’d felt like I’d been pushed into it too fast. I was beyond flattered, but told them to give me a few months to mull it over properly and make the right decision. In the end, the timing was never right, and I don’t at all resent not choosing to advance further in the Bridgeheadworld.

I loved the pace of that shop, with the speed of rushes and the layout of the bar, it was like it was built for conversation. I look back at all the people I’ve met, and I look back on all the conversations I’ve had with nothing but admiration.

I loved hearing what brought people in for coffee, because people are drawn to it for so many different reasons. How people take their coffee is such a personal question.

You get the people who could care less about the taste, and are there entirely for the dependency on caffeine.

The ones who are there purely for work, that use the café setting as their out of home office.

The social drinkers, who use coffee as a setting for awkward first dates and catching up with friends.

What I call the pretentious coffee twats, who sit and order their pour overs and admire the contrast of floral and fruity tasting notes that the bean produces.

Everyone is drawn to coffee for a different reason, or different combination of reasons.

I learned just how much total strangers would open up about their lives, just if you give them the chance to. The stories people have told me purely after being asked “so where are you off to?” or “tell me something good about today”.

There is hardly an era of professionalism needed in the barista world, since the stereotype is generally obscure young people hyped up on caffeine. Every single person who comes into my shop I get to greet like a friend, asking them how their day is, probing for any sort of communication.

Whenever I get a chance to talk with someone who is also passionate for coffee, I instantly get excited, hearing all the reasons why they’re personally drawn to it.

Every barista has their own spin on how they brew coffee and pour drinks. The element of craft, especially when texturing milk and espresso calibration is so important I cannot stress it enough. You treat every drink you make as the first coffee the person you’re serving to has ever had. If your milk is stretched too much and over heated, with expresso dosing too little and pulling too long, that’s going to be a fucked up drink. That very well could be that persons first latte, and after having a shitty first latte they’re likely not going to order one again, since they’ve been jaded by shit coffee.

Any time I’ve gotten to make someone’s first drink like that I take it with such personal pride, for I am the one giving them their first experience of the specialty coffee world. My skills demonstrate exactly what specialty coffee can or cannot be.

I get so much gratification when someone comes in wanting the perfect drink and I make it for them effortlessly. Perfect example. I had a woman come into Bridgehead a few months before I moved to Alberta. She asked me at the cash register if Bridgehead makes a better cappuccino or a flat white. I told her simply that it depends on who’s working, that as much as we try to standardize, some people still have better strong suits in certain areas than others. I went on to promise her that I could make her an incredible flat white.

So I headed over to the counter and started making her drink. I finished my pour with a flourish, leaving a rosetta shining on the surface of her drink. She took a sip and smiled at me, complimenting the perfect temperature and milk to foam ratio. I stood there beaming, trying and failing to not let my ego get the better of me.

I want that every time a customer comes into my shop, I don’t need to hear the physical compliments every time, but I want their expectations to always be fulfilled.

Working in coffee, I get the chance to make peoples day with a two-minute interaction, hundreds of times a day. I have the chance to establish a connection to total strangers, to build a relationship and have the potential to impact their lives, even as silly as it sounds.

I’ve met some crazy people, and have had some crazy experiences through the people I’ve met through my jobs in coffee.

 I’m a glorified drug dealer, but I use it to my advantage. Cafes are a hub, a hub for interaction and community and comfort. I want you to always feel at home coming to see me, to trust me for a drink as well as for a conversation. I’m serious when I say I want to hear about your life, where you’re going, and how you’re really feeling today.

People that have their coffee for here are a special kind of people. Most baristas usually bitch and moan about the people that linger in the café, accumulating dishes for them to later wash. I’ve always respected the people that stay awhile, that understand the value of taking a moment for themselves to indulge in something warm, read a book, write awhile. It’s a living room that’s not yours, so I respect those who are comfortable enough to make a space their own for the afternoon.

Human beings like to feel rushed, to feel panicked and in a hurry. We feel important when walking down to road holding a to go cup of coffee, that we have more important things to do than idly sit in a coffee house and sip our lattes from a mug like a chump.

I so love the people that make time for their coffee, who come, sit, sip, watch, read, and think.

There are fewer places I feel more at home than in the confines of a café, and spending the first summer in four years not working in a café has really made me keen to come back home and find my new niche. I’m keen to find a new place to call home, with new coworkers to befriend, new customers to learn the stories of and memorize their orders.

With distance, I’ve learned how much the industry means to me.

This summer, for the first time in my life, did I get the chance to buy a bag of ground coffee. Since I was 18 I’d worked in the industry, and had been comped free beans and free coffee whenever I worked, there was never a need to BUY coffee for home.

Sitting in the Snowdome Café in Jasper, Alberta, sipping a flat white while cradling the first ever $17.00 bag of medium roast coffee I’d bought in my adult life, I so looked forward to brewing my first cup at home.

And it became such a routine for me, such a silly little thing that brought me so much calm when I first settled down here. I’d wake up, assemble my aeropress while boiling water in a pot on the stove, and wait. Wet the filter, scoop the coffee, fill the chamber, wait, and then plunge. And there I’d sit, feet tucked under my legs while curled up on a camping chair on the deck outside the common room. Sometimes with company, sometimes in silence, I’d watch the mountains breathe. Sometimes it was sunny, sometimes it rained, sometimes it snowed, but most mornings on that deck with a mug of coffee is where I wanted to start my day.

There was so much change happening in my world, I had so little to rely on for pattern and routine, that cup of coffee became the rock I needed to start my morning.

I’d reach a point of drinking in the evenings, where all that tipsy Kayla wanted to do was make coffee and teach people about it. I’d stumble over to my pantry, assemble the aeropress and start to babble, brewing coffee for all my friends, yapping about acidity, versus aroma, versus body.

I don’t just love coffee like the “DON’T TALK TO ME UNTIL IVE HAD MY COFFEE” people, its always been so much more to me.

I’ve found a type of work I’m passionate for and I love doing.

I’ve found a hobby through coffee, something to continue to learn about, trying to perfect my own ability.

I’ve met some of my closest friends through coffee, as well as some of the strangest people I’ve ever met.

I’ve learned about caffeine and stimulants through coffee, how society romanticizes being tired and how caffeine dependency is toxic.

I spent 6 months of my barista life totally dry, drinking decaf, to prove to myself that I do not rely on coffee for its caffeine benefits.

I’ve learned to be a leader, how to shape and train others, developing my own personal leadership and delegation styles through coffee.

I’ve enriched my flavour pallet, learning how to taste and sip and cup coffee.

I’ve learned how to turn my stress into something efficient through coffee, and how to work with it as opposed to against it.

I met my partner through coffee, through the social networking hub that is a coffeehouse. He met me for our first date after a shift with me coffee stained and sweaty after one of my more stressful Bridgehead days.

I owe so much to coffee, it has been such an influencer for the person I’ve grown into, and sparks such passion from my core.

My last shift at Bridgehead was harder on me than I thought it would be. I’d had the title of Barista for so long, I wasn’t sure what to call myself anymore. “Hi I’m Kayla I’m a barista” was my thing for four years, and now all of a sudden I’d lost that token term for myself.

I knew when I left though that it was far from over, I knew I would be back, I knew I had more to learn, more people to meet.

I’m anxious to see where I’ll choose to go with this drive of mine, because I know this is something I care so much about.

Will the theme of hot brown follow me throughout my life? Or is this just some quippy trend, a chapter of my journey?

I suppose we shall have to see, but in the meantime if you need me I’ll be watching the mountains drinking coffee from a yogurt container awaiting the day I get to pull shots again.