#and then seemingly tries to run from me for no reason at all while simultaneously telling me we would go out for a few drinks

[max-fewtrell]

.

[didnt-hear-cold-as-you-live]

Can I ask how Hilary was unlikeable (aside from being a woman , I guess, RIP)? This is a genuine question, I'm not a US citizen, but pretty much every criticism I heard about her was "The EMAILS" which from my understanding was just incompetence with technology that republicans overinflated in order to hate on her?

so, she had a very famous tweet that I think sums it up, which said: "how does student debt make you feel? tell us in 3 emojis or less" while she simultaneously she was pretty cagey on her stance of whether or not we should absolve all student loan debt. Just an incredibly out of touch overall vibe, while trying incredibly hard to present as "in touch" and failing miserably, because she didn't actually speak to people like she understood their struggles.

Post-Obama, we as a country were liberal enough to be able to dream bigger in terms of where we wanted our country headed. We could talk about things like a livable minimum wage, universal healthcare, etc, and none of these things felt THAT crazy. We even had a primary candidate running on the concept of universal basic income - which still felt pretty crazy, but we were far enough to the left where it could even be brought to the table. Which, at this point, is crazy to think about. Hillary really dug her heels into the sand in terms of not wanting to play with any of that. She called the idea of wanting universal healthcare "pie in the sky", she wasn't vocally pro-gay marriage until about 2010, which was REALLY insanely late for a lot of democrats, so people didn't trust her, she (iirc, it's been a while) didn't believe in a $15 minimum wage. It felt like her vibe was "things are decent enough under Obama. We will be making absolutely no progress," and this was effectively her campaign message, packaged under a feminist / "first woman president" bow, which felt extremely shallow to many. By the end of Obama's presidency, people on both sides of the aisle felt like he was not delivering on a lot of the things he promised and had growing frustrations about that. So Hillary just absolutely refusing to give in a lot of ways, and running as a bit of a centrist in the climate, was REALLY not it for a lot of people. A lot of people, me included, also REALLY did not like her stance on foreign policy: if 2016 was 2024, her stance on Palestine would've been the same, or worse, than Kamala's. She was just very very very pro American military defense, and it was at a time when people - again, on both sides of the aisle - were just 3000000% DONE with our troops being in the Middle East. She may not have spoken to be this pro-military on the campaign trail, but her positions and actions as Obama's Secretary of State really painted that picture.

Corporate involvement in politics was also a HUGE talking point in this election; a lot of people were seemingly just becoming aware of and frustrated with how politicians were bought and sold by corporations. Supposedly not being this way was a massive part of Trump's appeal - and she, conversely to him, had a LOT of corporate donors, and wasn't against the involvement of them in our elections.

This all became infinitely worse in juxtaposition to Bernie Sanders (a Vermont Senator who ran against her in the primaries), who was about a million miles to the left of her on every topic. Him and his policies laid out next to her just really painted the picture of how centrist she was, and it made her look almost Republican by comparison to a lot of young people. A lot of people blame this on Bernie and hold her loss against him for this reason, and, while that element did contribute and IS unfortunate, I don't think it says anything bad about him in a vacuum.

Hope this helps, tried to be relatively unbiased!

[arlequinelunaire]

Danganronpa Showa: Prologue Part 8

<Prev <<First AO3

"This is wrong!" I then burst out crying, "All wrong! The war was supposed to be over; we shouldn't have to go through this!" "Weren't you in the air force, sonny boy, what sort of soldier descends into a blubberin' mess like this? Hmph, if an American soldier had acted like you just did, not that they ever would, we'd have used their sorry ass for target practice!" Columbird once more snapped. "The fighting and violence will end when America says so! However," he then stated, his voice growing relatively softer, "We are the shining city on the hill, the new leader of the Western world, not some savages in squalor! Therefore, in honor of our great nation's legal and judicial foundations, anyone killing another shall promptly begin a trial to determine the godforsaken murderer". "A trial?" Genpachi chuckled as he remarked, "Awful ironic with you tellin' us to start murdering each other. Suppose you have to cling on to some semblance of civility, don't ya?" "Bah, I won't be taking any backtalk from some limp-wristed, hemp-smoking, lover of speakeasy devil music! All you here will kill, you will go to court, the killer will be found and executed or you will die trying, and you will like it, son!" Columbird went off again. "What do you mean, 'you will die trying'?" Manami asked. Before Columbird could actually answer, he went off on a tangent to me, "Ya see here, Wings Bay-island? This is the professional manner in which a real shoulder conducts himself! Or herself, figures you <Japanese's> cleaning ladies would make better soldiers than your men. Anyway, yes. Should you fail to identify the actual killer in court, they will leave with their FREEDOM, whilst all you who failed to catch him will be executed for your incompetence. Is that clear?!" he got around to his answer. With that, the United States of America declares the Killing Military School Life officially begun! Godspeed, and God bless our glorious nation!" Columbird saluted, before he finally left the Gym. This was... this was really happening. Right now, any of my classmates could turn around and stab me- No, they wouldn't. Firstly, because we were all gathered in the Gym, so anyone who tried would be immediately found out, and secondly- Because I'd been drafted into the air force. I knew what killers were like, and for little I'd known everyone here, I could tell they weren't that sort of people.

"Alright, everyone calm down!" Toranosuke was quick to assume authority. "As if any reasonable citizens of Japan would start killing each other on such flimsy pretense". "Hold on, 'Citizens of Japan'?" Jeanne and Dejan simultaneously pointed out, while Hildegard just flinched. Aoko sighed before she said, "Toranosuke dear, much as I wouldn't want to be a downer... you're being too generous, I'm afraid. I know death, runs in the family after all, so I know seemingly fine people have killed over less than this". As an ex-soldier, I didn't need reminding of that. Deflecting Aoko's words, just like a real politician I guess, Toranosuke resumed, "All of us came to Hope's Peak Academy promised an education that would best hone our Talents. Even- even despite this disruption, as our nation's future Prime Minister and most senior student here, I shall endeavour to deliver on such an education. I swear it". Kagura had to give him a side-eye. "'Senior'? Aren't you the same age as the rest of us?" she stated. Meanwhile, Genpachi burst out laughing. "Yeah, real cute kid, a complete fuddy-duddy like you's gonna teach us all about performing miracles, funeral practice, and being some half-beast freak? Don't make me laugh. 'Sides, fact that yer the 'Ultimate Manager' alone proves you got no right to take charge," he then said, for some reason. Glaring at him, Toranosuke just hissed, "Explain". "Y'ever heard of a little somethin' called mauvaise foi?" Genpachi said. "That's 'bad faith'," Jeanne had to translate. "'Mala fides', if you will," Kanji Iwai felt the need to add. "Right, means 'cause you've spent all this time becoming what society deems the 'Ultimate Manager' that when the chips are down, ya can't think for yourself, see? Already it's clear the normal rules just don't apply anymore, yet you're still clingin' to the old ways like some geezer. Yer head's hopelessly inside the box, or in short, ya can't improvise, kid," Genpachi explained, pointing a finger at his temples. "As little regard as I have for this man's rambling, he does have a point," Fuhito suddenly said, "I fear Toranosuke's meddling in others' affairs may only obstruct an investigation". He sounded like he took it as a given that we'd start killing. Toranosuke was at the point of seething now, "Who are either of you to judge my leadership, given you too only just got here? And isn't stability exactly what we need in a crisis situation? Your philosophy, Sakamoto, seems like it would only accelerate this madness." "Also Sakamoto, aren't you being hypocritical? You're an Ultimate too, remember?" Manami gave a cold glare at Genpachi. Again, Genpachi gave his steely, screechy laugh and said, "Ultimate Jazzman, dollface, world of difference there. Jazz doesn't cling to fogey old tradition, it improvises, it thinks, and it don't care for rules or polite society. I ain't some military brat, with a buncha orders beaten into me till I can't think otherwise".

Next>

[rohitsharma32]

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From PCs to data centers, game control centers to logical supercomputers, and mobile phones to the Web, Java is a go-to language. A few normal purposes of Java are recorded beneath:

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97% of Big business Work areas run Java. 89% of Work areas (or PCs) in the U.S. run Java. 9 Million Java Designers exist around the world. 3 billion cell phones run Java. There are at present more than 5 billion Java Cards being used. 125 million television gadgets run Java. 5 of the Main 5 Unique Hardware Producers Boat Java ME. How does Java respond? Java has become important to engineers by empowering them to:

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[lemonluvgirl]

#9 Drabble Prompt: "We're not just friends.....”

For @peeta-pocket and @pookieh who both asked for #9 

Peeta and I have been whiling away the hours in quiet companionship ever since we got back. 

We’re two burned out shells trying to find a way to breath life back into our fragile casings. We make sure the other eats, and showers, and goes through the motions. It’s not quite living, but its better than what we’d be doing alone. 

Lately we’ve added a new item to the list of things we tackle together. 

Sleep.

Peeta and I have resumed sharing a bed like all those nights where the only things keeping us from cracking under all the pressure was the press of the other’s warm body to keep the nightmares at bay. 

Its familiar. Its comforting. Its confusing. And lately when there’s no subtle breeze to blow the steamy heat that radiates off us as we lay huddled together in the night, its been terrifying. For the both of us. 

But probably for entirely different reasons. 

I worry that the aching, gnawing hunger that settles low in the pit of my stomach each night, no matter how much of Peeta’s delicious food I stuff myself with, is a return to what I experienced with Peeta on the beach during the Quell. I worry that he’ll hear me one night, calling his name not in terror but in longing. 

I worry that I’ll screw everything up between us. Again. 

And Peeta, sweet, unerringly optimistic Peeta, is still fighting off visions of me torturing him, killing his family, taking away everything he’s ever loved. 

He tries to downplay it. But I hear the way he moans my name plaintively in his sleep. I know all his nightmares are about me. 

So I keep my mouth shut, and my thighs pressed together and I pray to whatever higher power there maybe that I can just forget my own selfish desires JUST THIS ONCE. 

Because Peeta deserves my friendship. He deserves whatever part of myself I can spare. I resolve to bury my inconsequential urges. I dig my hands in my pockets whenever he’s around. I try not to stare at his eyelashes. And whenever I get the itch to lean in and kiss him like I want to live inside his mouth and never stop, I bite my tongue and count to 30. Or 40. or 100. Whatever number I have to climb to until the feeling passes .

Its been working out great so far. 

So when he sets his fork down at dinner and fixes me with serious look and asks me, “Katniss, what are we to each other?” I’m completely caught off guard. 

I almost choke on my bite of roasted fessant. 

“What?” I ask, once I’ve washed down the piece of food with half a glass of water. 

Peeta for his part, seems to barely have noticed I choked. He’s still looking at me with that unreadable look that makes me want to simultaneously want to run for cover and also mount him. 

“What. Are. We. To. Each. Other?” He asks again, slowly and deliberately, as if I was a child. 

I’ve begun scowling before I even realize it. 

“Don’t give me that look. Just answer the question Katniss.” Peeta snaps and I have to swallow past the dry lump in my throat. 

I know where this is coming from. Haymitch had made a few comments in passing about how we should just officially move in together since we’re never apart for more than a few hours each day anyways. Not to mention we’ve been spending all our nights together for the past few months. 

Peeta had gotten a strangely pensive look on his face when Haymitch said that. And he’s been weirdly quiet for the rest of the day. 

If I could march over to his house and shoot Haymitch right now I probably would. But it still wouldn’t get me out of this sticky predicament with Peeta. 

He waits, seemingly patiently for my answer. But I’m terrified beyond all reason that whatever I say will be the wrong thing. 

“What do you want to be?” I say finally, deflecting and throwing the question back at him. I can’t deny that my heart is beating faster with fear and hope alike. 

Peeta purses his lips, and his mouth twists slightly. I can see he’s getting upset. 

“I asked you first Katniss. Why can’t you just be honest with me? For once!” He asks, standing up abruptly, he’s breathing hard, when he moves to grab the back of the kitchen chair I know that despite my best intentions I’ve fucked it up anyway. 

I hear him muttering under his breath about how I always lie, and how he can’t trust me. 

Tears roll, unbidden down my face as I watch him try to reign the flash back in. 

“Not real! Not real! Peeta, I’m sorry! Please, please I’ll answer any question that you have! I wasn’t trying to lie to you I swear!” I cry, reaching for him before I think better of it. He catches me around the waist and wraps his thick arms around me, holding me to him so tightly it’s borderline painful. 

His pupils are doing that strange thing where they dilate to pinpricks and blow up huge again. I feel my heart thundering out of control as I stare up at him helplessly. 

I could scream right now, and maybe Haymitch would come running, if he hasn’t already drunk himself senseless by this time. 

I could try to twist out of his hold. 

I could headbutt him. 

The options flow through my mind in flickering images that last about a millisecond before I discard them. 

In the end I do nothing. 

I just stand there trembling for so many reasons while his arms cage me to his strong muscular body, the least of which being fear. 

As debased as it sounds, I can feel my body wake up in ways it only ever does when Peeta is close to me. 

I stare up at him, my lips parted to speak, but unable to find the right words. The only thing I’m capable of doing is lowering my head in shame to hide against his shoulder. 

My touch causes Peeta to shudder. 

“Just tell me what we are Katniss. I can’t take the uncertainty anymore.” He says in an exhausted voice. Its his tone alone that lets me know the majority of the danger has passed. Peeta only ever sounds this tired after successfully fighting off an episode. 

“We’re friends Peeta.” I say weakly, hoping that at the very least this title will be enough to keep with me, but not too much to scare him away. I feel the traitorous tears well up in my eyes again, and only barely manage to choke back my regretful sob. 

Peeta freezes, becoming rigid against me. 

Slowly, very tentatively I feel his fingers reach down to graze my jaw. I tense, waiting for his hands to wrap around my neck, but they never do. Instead he tilts my chin up so that I have to look him in the eyes. 

And I guess he sees more there than I ever intended him to, because the next moment his lips come crashing down over mine. 

And its so strange because even though the force of our kiss is cutting off my air supply, I feel like I can finally breathe for the first time in months. 

I practically sob into his mouth, when he brushes his tongue against mine. 

Peeta pulls away, only for a second,  and I whimper at the loss of his warm lips. 

“We're not just friends, and you fucking know it." He tells me right before he scoops me up and I wind my legs around his waist. 

I sigh at the feeling of him hard against my stomach as he carries me up the stairs to the bedroom. 

“Definitely not friends.” I tell him when he lays me down across the bed. 

[ssahoodrathotchner]

Pictures of You

Pairing: Aaron Hotchner x Fem!Reader

Summary: you lose your memories of the last few years, including the ones of your relationship with Aaron. The rest of the team thinks it’s hilarious.

Word Count: 5.3k

Warnings: memory loss, swearing, some angst, hospital, talk of injuries, team shenanigans and fluff

A/N: okay this was a lot of fun to write bc soft!Hotch rights !! also really wanted to make the team play a larger role in a fic so here we go :)

Masterlist

---

You wake in a hospital bed, Morgan by your side, and a godawful pounding in your cloudy head. With a groan, you try to raise one of your hands to cover your eyes as Morgan’s head shoots up to stare at you with a relieved smile.

“Hey,” he says, catching your hand before you can lift it higher, “Don’t do that. You had a nasty fall, Princess.”

Satisfied that you won’t make any more moves towards your head, he sits back down at your side.

“Should I even ask how you’re doing or…” he trails off when you glare at him. “I’ll go let the team know you’re okay. Boss Man will be happy to hear you finally woke up,” and with that, Morgan is up and out of the room before you can even open your mouth because what.

Shifting around in the bed, you try to gauge just how injured you are, but the soreness in literally your entire body coupled with the haziness in your mind from the constant pain makes you conclude that you’ll leave it to the doctors to tell you what’s wrong. Sighing, you gently tilt your head to the side and observe the various beeping monitors.

The door opens and as you turn to see who it is, your mouth opens in disbelief. There’s no way. There’s absolutely no fucking way. This is fake. This is a dream. Your stomach simultaneously drops and fills with dread. How is this possible?

“You’re dead. You’re dead. We buried you,” you say in a rush, as none other than Emily fucking Prentiss stops by the side of your bed, looking at you confusedly. “Does this mean I’m dead? Are you a ghost?” you wonder out loud, and Emily looks behind her as the rest of the team, except Hotch, file in behind her, seemingly fine with her sudden appearance.

“How are you here, why are you here, what happened? You died. You’re supposed to be dead which means I’m probably dead,” you continue to ramble, frantically looking from at each member of your team and then back to Emily.

“What? Y/N, you aren’t dead. Just like I’m not dead,” she says like it’s the most obvious thing in the world.

“But you are,” you say shakily, chest tightening as your breaths become shorter and shorter.

“Y/N…” she says slowly, softly, “I faked my death four years ago.”

And with that, your ears rush and your mind goes blank. No no no no no no we buried her six months ago, she’s dead. You don’t notice the rest of the team trading glances around you as the world you thought you knew shatters and reforms in your mind.

“No,” you croak, throat suddenly constricting, but Emily only looks at you worriedly, Reid slipping out the door behind her.

“Y/N, can you take some deep breaths for me?” and your head turns to find JJ at your other side, hand on your shoulder. “Let’s breathe, you can do this,” she says, taking exaggerated breaths to demonstrate, smiling gently as you cooperate.

Reid enters, now, followed by a doctor who, immediately upon reaching your side, proceeds to shine a light in your eyes and asks you to complete all sorts of short tests while the team looks on.

“Now, Agent Y/L/N, Dr. Reid informed me that you seem to be having some memory issues, which is normal,” the doctor assures you, “especially with the head trauma you endured. So, tell me what you can remember and we’ll go from there,” he says with a helpful smile.

Fuck. What do you remember?

“Well…” you trail off, trying to pin-point an exact moment. “I remember Emily—Agent Prentiss’—funeral because it was six months ago, but apparently—” your eyes slide over the rest of the team, “—apparently, it was more like four years ago,” you finish slowly.

“And that’s as recent as you can remember?” the doctor pushes. You nod your head. “Well, Agent Y/L/N, it seems that you have post-traumatic retrograde amnesia, which isn’t a surprise, as I said before. My guess is that it’s temporary, and that you’ll recover your memories in time.”

“Any ideas how long?” Emily speaks up, carefully looking at your face.

“With cases such as these, there isn’t a definite timeline or standard procedure for memory recovery,” the doctor explains. “It may help to look at photos or videos and tell stories to try and help Agent Y/L/N heal quicker, but the brain is tricky,” and with that wonderful statement, the doctor turns and exits, leaving you and your team staring at each other, processing the fact that you don’t know when you’ll get your memories of the last four freakin’ years back.

“So, from the research I’ve done, it seems that—” Reid is cut off by the door flying open and Aaron Hotchner, your Unit Chief, bursting into the room with a concerned look on his face wearing a hoodie and jeans.

Morgan tries to grab his shoulder, but Hotch shakes him off as he walks right up to your bedside and grabs your hand. Holy shit. Heat rises to your cheeks instantly and you think your heart might have actually skipped a beat but, you can’t help it, you’ve had a crush on Hotch for ages and he’s holding your hand. But you don’t remember a time when Hotch was so forward in showing concern for one of his agents.

“I’m so sorry I wasn’t here when you woke up, Sweetheart—” you’re pretty sure you’re dreaming because Hotch has never called you Sweetheart. Ever. You’ve also never seen him in anything other than a suit. “—Jessica called because Jack has the flu and then he wanted to talk to me and—”

“Hotch!” Morgan all but yells, interrupting Hotch’s update on Jack, as you stare pointedly at his hand, still holding yours, trying to control the redness growing steadily stronger in your cheeks. What the hell.

“Hotch,” Morgan states, softer this time, “The last thing Y/L/N remembers clearly is Prentiss’ funeral.”

You look up with a weak approximation of a smile, and watch Hotch’s face shift as he comprehends what Morgan said.

“That was years ago,” he says slowly, face hardening into a look you’ve seen too many times when he tries to separate himself from the information he’s received.

Looking down at you, you can’t tell what he’s thinking, so you divert your eyes to his hand in yours. Once he notices this, he gently lets go and you know it’s silly, but you almost reach out for it again. Who knows the next time Hotch will want to hold your hand?

“So you don’t…” he doesn’t finish his question, which leaves you even more confused. Don’t what…?

“Umm. If it’s happened in the last four-ish years, then umm… Then I probably don’t remember it,” you say quietly, apologetically. “Sir,” you add on quickly, not wanting to forgo formalities even if your memory isn’t what it’s supposed to be.

However, instead of nodding, like you thought he would, Aaron Hotchner looks sad which confuses you even more.

“Aaron,” Rossi begins slowly, “the doctor said that talking about what’s happened since then may help Y/N’s memory come back.” Hotch looks up, almost relieved. “So why don’t you tell her something that’s happened since Prentiss’ funeral.”

And with that, Hotch takes a breath before reaching across your body to your other hand and holding it up. Not quite sure what’s happening, you allow him to hold your left hand up in your line of vision and that’s when you notice a fucking wedding ring. On your hand. Which Hotch is holding.

“I’m married?” you screech, looking at the team, who are now all trying not to laugh for some reason. “Who am I married to? Holy shit, what?” you continue looking around. Morgan and Prentiss look like they’ll break into outright laughter any minute. What’s going on?

Looking helplessly to Hotch, who is suspiciously quiet, you don’t have to repeat your question before he is carefully letting go of your left hand to hold his own up next to it and since when did Hotch wear a wedding band? Until you notice the striking similarities between the ring on your hand, and the one on your boss. What the actual fuck.

“We’re married?” you say, whipping your head to the side—ouch—to stare at Hotch, who is looking a little more amused than worried. “What? When? I just…” you can’t even finish your train of thought because your head is spinning so fast.

“Is it really that much of a surprise, Princess?” Derek chimes in. “I mean, you guys have been in love with each other forever,” and with that, he and Prentiss dissolve into a fit of laughter, which they try to smother, but you’re too busy taking in this very new and very interesting life development.

At some point in the last couple years, you married Hotch. Which means he knows you like him. And he likes you. You dated Hotch and now you’re fucking married. And you can’t remember any of it.

“…I don’t remember it…” you say sadly, softly and the laughter ceases.

Running a hand through his hair, Hotch takes a step back and shrugs, a small, reassuring smile on his face.

“We’ll figure it out, Sweetheart—” your stomach erupts into butterflies, “—we always do.”

With a sigh, you sink back into the pillows on your bed and stare at the ceiling, head throbbing worse than before thanks to all the new information.

“I just…” you pause to think about your current dilemma. “I just don’t know where to start with all this…Getting my memory back,” you look to Hotch and then the team, unsure of what to do.

“Well, the doctor did say that photos and videos might help. I’d be willing to recount every conversation we’ve had since Emily’s funeral, if you want, including the ones that you weren’t a part of, but were about you or a case,” Reid offers with a grin, and your heart melts.

Slowly shaking your head, you answer, “Thanks but maybe later, Spence. I’m still stuck on the whole I’m-married-to-my-boss thing right now.”

“Trust me Princess,” Derek laughs “I’m pretty sure all of us could tell you about how everything went down like a damn movie.”

“Yeah…” JJ continues with a fond shake of her head, “You guys weren’t very subtle about it.”

Sneaking a look out of the corner of your eye, you catch Hotch blushing and staring down at his shoes before he also sneaks a look at you, meeting your eyes.

“See?” Derek’s voice breaks your gaze. “This is exactly what I was talking about. You guys weren’t subtle and still aren’t,” rolling his eyes, he laughs a little and you can’t help but smile.

“At least they’re married this time around,” Rossi supplies. “No more ‘secret’ glances and yearning,” he says with such contempt you can’t help but laugh as Hotch—Aaron? — lets out a small chuckle of his own.

“Now I just need to remember how we got here,” you say, feeling a little more at ease. Slowly, you reach for Hotch’s left hand, studying the ring the matches your own. “Remember us,” you continue, just to him, and the smile that overtakes his face is the best thing you’ve seen since waking up.

“You weren’t wrong, Morgan,” comes Emily’s voice from the end of your bed. “This is just like a movie. Ugh. But don’t worry, Y/N, we’ll help you sort this out.”

“And I know just the woman for the job,” Morgan adds with a mischievous smirk which immediately makes you wonder about whatever it is he has planned.

“Now as much as I’d love to watch the two lovebirds gaze into each other’s eyes, I actually have plans,” Rossi states, looking down at his watch. “So, I’ll be back tomorrow. Have a good night, Y/N,” he says before waving to the rest of the team and leaving.

The rest of the team makes their own excuses to leave, and you can’t help but feel like Morgan and Prentiss have concocted some sort of scheme to “help” you get your memories back.

Running a hand over your face, you sigh. What now? The sound of someone clearing their throat makes you look up and realize that Hotch hadn’t left with the others, but was instead standing near the foot of your bed, looking somewhat anxious.

“I ummm… I was planning on spending the night here to make sure you were okay, but umm…” he trails off, unsure.

“But since I have no memory of us being together you think it’s weird…?” you ask gently.

“Yeah,” he answers in a sigh. “I don’t want to make you uncomfortable by being here, especially because I know how frustrating and confusing this must be for you…”

“Hotch,” you start, but he can’t hide his wince when you call him that. “Aaron,” you try again. “Yes, this is incredibly confusing and frustrating because Emily should be dead and I didn’t think you had feelings for me at all,” you pause and see him smile, just a bit, “But I’d really like it if you stayed here. With me. Because—” you take a deep breath. “—Because you make me feel safe, Aaron, and I need that right now,” you say gently, not quite sure where the confidence came from, but Aaron’s eyes soften and his smile grows bigger as his shoulders drop in relief. Worth it.

“Then I’ll stay,” he says, and you can’t help the heat that once again rises in your cheeks as he continues to look at you.

You guys are married, dammit. Pull it together.

Averting your gaze, you turn your attention to getting more comfortable in your bed and decide to fuss with the placement of your pillows because damn was your back starting to hurt, but Aaron beats you to it. Within ten seconds of arranging the pillows behind you, he has them perfect.

“How…?” you start to question, but he just raises his eyebrows. “Right. Married,” you say with a shake of your head.

Aaron finally sits in the chair next to your bed and reaches, almost absentmindedly, for your hand before catching himself and stilling. You can see the fight in his mind—he wants to comfort you and himself, but with your memory, he doesn’t quite know where your boundaries are. Taking pity on him, you grab his hand yourself, weaving your fingers together so he knows it was on purpose. Okay so you really just wanted to hold his hand again, but you’re married! You’re allowed. He takes a deep breath and leans back in the chair, turning his head to really look at you.

“How’s your head?” he asks, brow furrowed in what you’ve come to understand is genuine concern.

You pause and consider for a moment.

“Not terrible, but not great,” you say slowly. “It’s like there’s a fog in my mind that I can’t see through. I know I’m missing stuff, but I just don’t know what.”

Aaron gently squeezes your hand, but doesn’t speak yet.

“I want to know what brought Emily back, how we happened, what it was that gave me this fucking injury, I just…” with an exasperated huff, you collect yourself. “I just want to know.”

“Well, Emily should be the one to tell you her part of the story, and as for us,” he gives you a smile “it’s a longer answer, at least for me, so that will have to wait—Sorry, Sweetheart,” he says when you pout. “However, I can tell you about what landed you in the hospital. How does that sound?”

“It’s a start,” you tease, and yes Aaron smiles wider and rolls his eyes.

“We were chasing an unsub, and Garcia had tracked him to a warehouse not too far from Quantico. We went there and—” his voice wavers. You squeeze his hand. “—and the unsub had set explosives around the perimeter of the building. I guess you got too close to him when trying to talk him down and he triggered the whole set.” Aaron sighs, and his eyes are glazed over like he’s reliving this—which he probably is—and there’s nothing you can really do besides let him take his time.

“You weren’t right by any of them, but you were thrown back and had hit the ground before I could even yell at you to stop—not that you would have listened,” he says pointedly with a watery laugh. “You just laid there, Morgan and I carried you over to the medics as soon as the dust settled and they took you away as we cleared the rest of the scene.”

“And the unsub?”

“He didn’t survive the explosion. As soon as we figured that out, we left it to the local PD and crime scene techs.” He looks at you softly. “We came straight here after that.”

“How long was I out before today,” you ask lightly, curiously.

“Three days. Dave had to convince me to go home and shower on the second day.” He looks down before sneaking a sideways glance at you.

“Well I’m glad he did,” you tease, scrunching your nose.

“And I’m glad you’re awake, Sweetheart,” he replies, squeezing your hand.

You laugh and look away before mumbling, “I don’t think I’ll ever get used to that.”

“Get used to what?” he waits a second. “Sweetheart?” Motherfucker. He knows what he’s doing.

“That! I woke up convinced you didn’t have feelings for me at all,” you say with a glare, “and now I know we’re married and you keep being so nice and understanding and calling me Sweetheart and I just don’t know how to deal with all of this!” you finish in a huff.

“I just feel bad that I can’t remember this, us” you add, gesturing between the two of you. “I’m trying and there’s just—” you make a frustrated noise and flop back to stare at the ceiling. “And my head still kind of hurts,” you add softly, almost pouting.

“Oh, Sweetheart,” Aaron whispers. He clears his throat before continuing. “You’ll get your memories back,” he leans forward to stroke some hair off your forehead. “And until then, you know the team and I will do what we can to catch you up and help you remember.”

You push your head further into his hand with a sigh. He runs his hand through your hair a few times before pulling back and you almost whine. You yawn instead. Settling down, you tug the blanket up higher across your chest and turn to face Aaron as he also gets comfortable. He turns on the small television in your room and at some point, you fall asleep holding his hand.

---

You wake to the sound of the door opening, followed by the unmistakable click-clack of heels worn by none other than Penelope Garcia.  

“Rise and shine! Time to regain your memory, lovely Y/N,” she sings, coming to a stop by the side of your bed as you roll over with a yawn.

“Pen—” you groan. “Let me sleep. Please.”

“Oh no, my little profiler. Do you have your memory back?” You shake your head. “Then we need to work on that! And don’t you dare tell me no; my wonderful Derek Morgan and I were up all night making this for you,”

You raise your eyebrows.

“Sadly, not like that. But, we compiled a presentation-slash-video montage for you about what you’ve missed!”

That catches your attention.

“Wha--? How? Penelope where did the footage come from?” you ask, more awake now.

“Well, I may or may not have used security cam footage for a lot of it, but that’s neither here nor there, so, without further ado, I present to you: your life for the past four-ish years!” and with that, she somehow connects her tablet to the TV and you see a picture of the whole team; Penelope then produces a remote from the depths of her purse and then proceeds to the next slide.

Which is a photo of you. And Aaron. Standing by the coffee machine in the office and smiling at each other, clearly unaware that the moment was being documented. The image is embellished with what must be close to fifty moving, sparkly hearts, obviously done by Garcia.

“First thing’s first,” she starts with a flourish. “Your husband!” and as if on cue, Aaron walks into the room, cup of coffee in hand. Much to your surprise, Aaron just rounds your bed to sit in the same chair you assume he fell asleep in, watching the screen.

“What is happening,” you say softly to yourself, looking from Aaron to Garcia and back.

“The doctor said photos and videos might help restore your memory, so who better to put something together than Garcia?” Hotch answers dryly, a small smile flashing across his face. “The rest of the team should be here shortly,” he says directly to Garcia.

“Oh good. I always work better with an audience,” she replies as you continue to process just what the hell is happening since you woke up approximately five minutes ago.

Within a few minutes, your hospital room is overrun with the rest of the team. Sitting, standing, leaning wherever they can find the space to view Penelope’s presentation with you in the middle of it all.

“Don’t you people have jobs?” you grumble.

“C’mon, Princess. Who better to help you remember the last few years than us?” Derek says with a cheeky grin that makes you roll your eyes.

You turn your gaze to Aaron and find that he’s already looking at you in concern.

“If you really don’t want all of us here we can leave,” he says just loud enough for you to hear.

“I just…” you take a moment to try and collect your thoughts. “I guess I just don’t know how to feel about all of this, but you’re all here so— “

“So here we go!” Penelope cheerfully finishes your sentence before turning back to the screen. “As I was saying before, part one of Operation Get Y/N’s Memories Back is all about—drumroll please—our very own Unit Chief, a.k.a. Hotch, a.k.a. loving husband to our very own Agent Y/L/N.”

With a shake of your head, purposefully ignoring the way Derek and Emily are whooping and whistling, you settle in and gesture for Penelope to continue. God, let’s hope this works.

---

It doesn’t work.

Fuck.

Three almost four hours later and nothing has changed for you. However, it’s a lovely opportunity for some team bonding and creating new memories, but you’re still disappointed. It’s not for lack of trying, though. Penelope did a wonderful job of pulling together a presentation-slash-video montage of your life, complete with titles such as ‘Your lovely husband,’ ‘The Miraculous Life, Death, and Subsequent Resurrection of Emily Prentiss,’ and even ‘Badass BAU Babies,’ which was a collection of team photos and news clips of cases you guys had closed in the past few years.

The whole team had gotten a kick out of each section, especially the last one, as Penelope had spared no one in her quest to help your memory; ugly selfies sent in the BAU group chat, embarrassing footage of you tripping up (and down) the stairs to the bullpen—courtesy of the security cameras, Reid doing physics magic and narrowly missing Rossi’s coffee cup, it was all there. But nothing worked, there was no magical ah ha moment where everything came rushing back. If anything, it really was like watching a movie; it didn’t feel like you were the one is all of these clips and photos. Not even Reid’s commentary made you feel any closer than before to recovering your memories.

It wasn’t all bad, though. Penelope had a veritable stockpile of photos of you and Aaron, ranging from the office, to cases, to the occasional night out with the team. Your engagement announcement, wedding photos, freakin’ everything on the two of you and yet, nothing seemed to make a difference to your brain.

The photo on the screen was one of you and Aaron on a case. You were tucked under his arm, snowflakes visible in your hair and his as you look up and laugh at something he said while he just smiles gently down at you. Penelope had put hearts over both your eyes.

“Actual heart eyes! I had to! You guys are so cute!” she basically squealed when the photo came up.

“What did I tell you,” Rossi said teasingly, “Yearning.”

Prentiss and Morgan hadn’t stopped laughing for this entire segment, with JJ and Reid occasionally joining in if there was something exceptionally ridiculous Penelope had included, like fucking heart eyes.

A hand covering your own makes you realize you had spaced out, and you look down to see that it’s Aaron’s hand, wedding band catching the light.

“Anything, Sweetheart?” he asks in a low voice, carefully watching your face.

You shake your head. “It’s like it’s someone else’s life, but I know it’s mine; you’ve told me it’s mine, there’s photographic evidence that it’s mine!” you say in a huff. “It just doesn’t feel like it’s mine,” you whisper, voice breaking at the end. Tears gather in your eyes and you bite your lip to stop it from shaking as you desperately try and control your overwhelming emotions. You can hear the team in the background, strategizing new ways to help you, but Aaron’s face hovers in front of your own, drawing your attention.

“It’s okay,” he says lightly, stroking your cheek with his thumb.

“No, it’s not,” you insist as a few tears make their way down your face. “It’s not, Aaron. What if this is it? What if I just don’t get my memories back?”

Letting out a long sigh, Aaron raises your hand to his lips and kisses your palm before folding your hand into his.

“You will. I know you will,” he says with such conviction you might just believe him if it weren’t for the way he rapidly blinks to keep his own tears at bay.

“Yeah, Princess.” Morgan chimes in from somewhere across the room. “We’ll figure this out, you know we will.”

And with that, you see something click into place in Aaron’s eyes and suddenly, he’s looking at you in such a way that your heart picks up—thanks, heart monitor.

“Aaron…?” you ask cautiously.

“Princess,” he says it so simply, like it’s the most obvious thing in the world. You only have time to raise an eyebrow at him before—

Oh.

Kissing Aaron Hotchner is something you could definitely get used to. His hand comes up to cradle your face as he gently moves his lips against yours. You sigh and can feel his smile against your mouth before he’s tugging your face closer, tilting your head just so and—

There.

It’s like opening a window to let in a breeze. Soft and sure, filling the space in a way that’s all-encompassing without being suffocating.

Like snowflakes falling and settling on his black jacket, like Aaron down on one knee sliding your engagement ring on your finger while you smile so much it feels like your face will break. It’s leaving cups of coffee on his desk during late nights in the office. It’s playing soccer with Jack as Aaron smiles and cheers both of you on. It’s being in bed late at night, falling asleep in the comfort provided by the man you love. Your wedding vows, promising to love him forever.

And you know.

With a gasp, you pull Aaron closer, kiss him deeper, harder, moving your lips more frantically against his. I remember I remember I remember and you think he gets it because he pulls back and looks at you with so much hope it almost breaks your heart.

“When I said I’d love you forever, Aaron Hotchner, I meant it.”

And his face breaks into the biggest smile you’ve ever seen as he laughs in disbelief before capturing your lips with his again, returning the urgency you had kissed him with just moments ago.

Someone clears their throat and you pull apart, smiles obvious on both your faces as you turn to the team who are looking somewhat confused.

“Would you mind enlightening us as to why you two are suddenly acting like teenagers?” Rossi asks, eyebrows raised.

“Well,” Aaron starts, grinning in your direction, “It would seem that— “

“Nuh uh. No way,” Derek interrupts him. “Are you seriously about to say that you kissed her and she magically remembered?”

You can’t help but laugh at his disbelief because what the hell and nod, unable to speak through the giddiness overtaking your body. You remember.

“Ohmygod! You guys!!” Penelope squeals before launching herself into your arms for a hug which she promptly pulls Aaron into as well; he doesn’t protest.

“What made you do that, Hotch?” Reid asks curiously once Penelope has let you and Aaron go. “Did you know it would work?”

“Princess,” Aaron says with a nod towards Morgan. “In Jack’s storybooks, a kiss always wakes the Princess so she and her prince can live happily ever after.”

Okay that’s adorable and you can’t help but aww with the rest of the team at Aaron’s confession.

“Happily ever after, huh?” you say, tugging on his hand. “Who knew you were such a sap, Hotchner?”

Rolling his eyes, Aaron just smiles. “Wasn’t it obvious from Garcia’s presentation? I’ve been in love with you forever, Sweetheart. And besides, it worked, didn’t it?” he says with a smug smile. 

You pull him down for a short kiss before moving back just enough to murmur “My Prince Charming.”

“I can’t believe you guys,” you turn to see Morgan shaking his head. “A literal fuckin’ fairytale,” and then he’s laughing and the whole team, you and Aaron included, are laughing with him because yeah this is pretty surreal.

“I can’t believe you thought I was a ghost!” Emily says once the laughter has died down, her arms crossed in mock-anger.

“Can you blame me?” you retort. “The last thing I remember was burying you and suddenly you’re here? Nope. No way. Ghost. Only explanation.”

“I have to say, Y/L/N, I’m glad you’re back, if only to stop Aaron’s sad puppy-dog eyes every time you called him ‘Hotch,’” Rossi shakes his head. “I don’t know how much more yearning I could take.”

“Hey! Be nice,” JJ admonishes, swatting Rossi’s shoulder. “I think it’s sweet.”

“Yeah guys,” you echo. “Be nice! Don’t think I forgot you two,” you say, leveling Morgan and Prentiss with glares, “and all your laughter when I couldn’t remember that my husband and I were married!”

“Oh c’mon, Princess,” Morgan groans. “It was pretty funny. You were trying so hard not to look completely in love with your husband.”

“In my defense,” you start, “I didn’t know that you guys already knew how much I love Aaron, so excuse me for trying to hide my love,” you say with a sniff.

“Well, it was pretty obvious. Whenever you looked at him or he grabbed your hand, the heart monitor would register an increase in your heart rate by—” Reid starts to ramble but your laughter cuts him off.

“I get it, I get it,” you continue through your laughter. “I’m very in love with Aaron, even when I think it’s a secret, but as Penelope’s presentation so eloquently demonstrated, I’m not subtle and neither is he.”

Aaron leans over to kiss your cheek as the rest of the team continues into a conversation about Penelope’s presentation and how the hell she collected all those photos and videos in one day.

With the attention no longer on you—for now—you smile at Aaron, who smiles right back. He slumps back in his chair with a sigh, and you can’t help but pull him back closer to you.

“I love you,” you say kissing the back of his hand.

“I love you more, Sweetheart,” he replies softly.

Yeah, this is happily ever after.

[teenyweenynightghost]

Fortunate Disaster

Warnings: I haven't written it yet but umm, all of the warnings in the world

Request: Not quite but thank you @victoriadeangeliswifey for your lovely comment on @bimbadiethantorchio 's post.

Word Count: 2.4K

Pairing: F!Reader X Vic

Y/n had been walking around in the rain for hours on end. She was tired, sore and irritated at her circumstance. Only a few hours ago, she was happily jogging around town, enjoying the warm, pleasant weather. A sudden burst of energy had hit her, and she ended up crossing the small area of trees between her village and the next, exploring all the new terrain. Unfortunately, as soon as she crossed, a thundering storm took over the sky and the forest became a no-go.

To make her situation better, the battery of her phone had run out and she was now wandering on an empty street, seemingly leading nowhere.

Y/n walked for a while longer, until a large building started shaping into the horizon. Perhaps it must have been her delirious state, or her rain-soaked lashes, but she swore a dark presence flew around her, sending shivers all throughout her spine.

“Is anybody there?” She called out, the only answer Y/n received being her own echo and a deafening thunder.

She flinched at the sound and continued walking. She could swear that every step she took, every breath she inhaled and every shiver was closely observed by someone. She just didn’t know who.

Getting closer to the cloudy structure, she realized that it was in fact a house, but one that looked straight out of a horror movie. It was tall and painted in dark colors, small windows here and there, as a large metal fence surrounded it.

Y/n had seen creepy movies before, and she knew better than to approach such mansions, but she was desperate, cold and hungry. It’s not like she had a better choice.

Finally having reached the entrance, she scanned around for a bell only to be surprised by the door opening on it’s own. She was definitely not getting out of here.

With a deep breath, she did her best to calm down her wrecking nerves and stepped forwards.

The garden of the castle was truly mesmerising, roses and well-kept bushes everywhere, as a stone alley extended into a labyrinth of trees. She was sure this place would look like a dream during a more pleasant day, but for now, she only focused on moving forward, and hopefully getting some shelter.

She was standing in front of the large ebony door, regretting all the choices that led her to this moment. She closed her eyes and sighed in exasperation, as she grabbed the golden handle and knocked three times.

The entryway opened almost instantly, and she was met with a short, petite girl, looking at her with the most captivating, bright blue eyes.

“Hi! I’m Victoria! Please! Come in!” She introduced herself while simultaneously ushering Y/n inside.

“I’m Y/n, umm, thanks for-for letting me in.” She tried to let out, still frightened by the whole situation.

“Of course! We couldn’t let such beautiful people walk around in that terrible weather.” She chuckled, sending Y/n a smirk.

Y/n frowned slightly, before she spoke up again. “Oh, you have roommates?”

“Oh of course! Three others. But only Ethan is at home.” She smiled, handing Y/n a towel.

“Oh, um, thank you.” The shivering girl mumbled, wrapping the cloth around herself tightly.

“My pleasure! What kind of hosts would we be If we didn’t take proper care of you.” She chuckled, placing a hand on the small of Y/n’s back and leading her towards the staircase. “Come upstairs, you might want to take a warm bath.”

Well, the blonde wasn’t wrong about that. Y/n nodded and let Victoria lead her to the bathroom. As they walked down a dimly lit hallway, Y/n noticed several paintings of people from different eras, however she couldn’t help but note that it looked like four faces kept reappearing over and over again.

She brushed the thought away when Victoria opened a door for her, softly pushing her forward into the bathroom.

“Oh, thank you so much! I really don’t know what I would have done If I hadn’t ended up here.”

“Oh no problem, darling. I left some clothes on the table and you can light some candles if you wish to.” She encouraged her, closely examining her face as it lit up at her words.

Y/n had always been fascinated by candles, always wanting to smell every single scent on this earth, and see the wax melt onto paper, tables, and any other surfaces.

As If on cue, Y/n heard Victoria snap her fingers and all of them were now lit. Y/n’s breath caught in her throat as her shoulders lifted up, her eyes widening.

She turned around quickly only to catch a glimpse of Victoria’s rascally smirk, before she shut the door and Y/n was left trembling alone, in a stranger’s bathroom. Perhaps the thought had crossed her mind before, but she had dismissed it until now. There was unquestionably something inhuman about the girl. She didn’t even dare think about her roommates.

A million thoughts ran through her mind as she did her best to deal with each wave of panic. Taking a deeper breath than any before, she imagined all her worries fade away once she exhaled, and continued to blame her creative mind for the thing she’d seen.

She took off all the wet clothes that clung to her body like a newborn to his mother, and got in the hot water.

The warmth enveloped her body at once, and she let out a pleasured sigh as she relaxed further into the bathtub.

She rested there for half an hour, before a loud growl erupted from her stomach. She was starving, there was no denying it, but she was also desperate to cling to the safety she felt in the bathroom. Eventually, deciding that enough was enough, she pushed herself out and grabbed the towel once more, patting herself dry.

Glancing towards the table, she noticed that the only clothes to her disposition were a pair of fuzzy socks, a deep red silk nightgown and a fluffy sweatshirt. Y/n grabbed the clothes and slowly started dressing herself again.

Faced once again with the door, she beat herself up internally and reluctantly opened it, peeking at the hallway to see if anyone was there. Luckily for her, she was all alone. She trailed her steps back to the staircase and descended it timidly, hearing the voice of two people chattering in the living room.

“Ah, there you are!” Victoria’s husky voice filled the room once she noticed Y/n peaking around the corner. “Come here. This is Ethan, my best friend, and Chili, my dog.” She smiled while holding a fuzzy little puppy, who yapped excitedly at Y/n.

“It’s a pleasure to meet you.” Ethan’s modulated voice reached her ears, as he approached her and extended a hand. Y/n brought her own one up to shake his, but instead he brought it to his lips and left a soft kiss on her knuckles.

“The pleasure is all mine.” Y/n smiled, trying to be polite, despite having seen Ethan’s eyes glow red for a split second.

“So, puppy, do you wanna eat something?” Victoria spoke again, an evident smirk on her face as she took in Y/n’s blushed face.

“Yes! I’m starving” The girl chuckled and took a seat across from Victoria, noticing Ethan bringing her a plate of food.

They all stood in relative silence while Y/n ate, too hungry to notice that she was the only one. Having finally finished, she pushed the plate away and wiped her mouth with a napkin, looking up at the people around her.

A wave of embarrassment hit her upon noticing that she was being stared at, practically shrinking into the seat as Victoria got up with a sly grin on her face.

“The rain still hasn’t stopped, and by the looks of it, it could go for hours to come. You wouldn’t mind sleeping here, would you, puppy?” She whispered into her ear, causing Y/n to cross her legs tightly and squeeze her hands in a failed attempt to not shiver.

Victoria only chuckled at her reaction and brushed a wet strand of hair behind her ear, before pressing a soft kiss to her cheek.

“You definitely strike me as a smart girl. You must have guessed we’re not quite human, hm?” The blonde breathed into her ear once more, directing her attention to Ethan, who was biting his lip, a long, white fang pressing into the soft skin.

“Vampires…” Y/n shuddered, recoiling into Vic’s embrace.

“That’s a good girl. So, would you like the guest room or mine. Or perhaps Ethan’s”

At that, a loud laugh erupted from the man in front of us. “Right. I have a book to finish. If you need me, shout out my name.” With those final words, he picked up Chili and left the room.

A deafening silence enveloped the lounge, only broken by the rain drops smashing against the windows.

“You must be tired, princess. How about you answer that question I asked earlier.”

Y/n couldn’t believe that her brain’s instinct was to go with her. The realization that she was in a house with actual vampires perhaps did not yet settle in, because every single nerve of her body was seemingly drawn to the attractive girl who sat right behind her.

“Will you kill me?” Y/n croaked, scratching her own palm so hard she could feel an upcoming bruise forming.

“Of course not. I really hate how the media portrays us these days. We only drink the blood of animals. Humans aren’t nearly as nutritious.” She scoffed, turning Y/n around so they could be face to face.

“Drinking human blood is strictly for pleasurable reasons.” She hummed, looking at Y/n’s lips, while she rested her hands on her legs.

Y/n’s brain completely shut off. All she could focus on was the girl’s cold fingertips touching the insides of her thighs, and her lusty gaze falling right onto her lips.

“I’ll tell you one more thing, though. If you don’t answer my question, again, I’ll have to find other methods to make you speak.” She sneered against Y/n’s neck, her teeth slightly grazing the soft skin.

Y/n shuddered and closed her eyes, turning her face away and enveloping herself with her arms. “Yours.” She mumbled, her jaw being met by Victoria’s lips as soon as the words left her mouth.

Y/n gasped loudly and grabbed Vic’s shoulder, holding onto her as she kept sucking on her skin.

“Good girl.” Victoria croaked, pulling away.

She started walking down the hallway, and Y/n had no better idea than to follow the blonde. Her gaze fell upon her golden hair, illuminated by the chandeliers hung on the ceiling. Two large, golden crosses were hanging on her ears and her slim body was covered with a skimpy, black gown, extending all the way to the velvety floors.

Y/n would be lying if she said Victoria didn’t look celestial. She could stare at her for hours on end if given the chance.

The blonde finally stopped and Y/n bumped into her, lost in her own thoughts. A small chuckle escaped Vic and she turned around, pulling Y/n closer to her.

“You weren’t paying attention, were you?” She quizzed the dumbfounded girl.

“Yes I was.” Y/n responded, averting her gaze to the door in front of them.

“Of course you were…” Vic mumbled, amused, and led Y/n into the room.

It was spacious and dimly lit, a large bed occupying the center of the bedroom, and a million dressers on the sides. Right across from the bed was an even larger mirror, decorated with golden ornaments on the edges.

“Right side or left?” The blonde asked her, turning off the lights in the room.

Before Y/n could answer, she was pushed right on the middle of the bed, Vic standing right on top of her.

“I think this is the middle.” Y/n stammered, inhaling a sharp breath.

“That’s not what I was referring to.” Vic whispered against her skin, lowering her head to be right between her breasts.

Oh. Y/n’s mind was already moving with the speed of light, and perhaps at this point it had completely abandoned her. Unfortunately, Vic was waiting for her response and kept hovering over her skin, no matter how long Y/n waited.

“Right.” The girl finally spoke up, and Vic gave her a satisfied wink.

One of the blonde’s hands slipped off the gown Y/n was wearing, while the other softly cupped her breast. Once the cold air of the room hit Y/n’s bare chest, she shivered and pulled Vic down, so she would be laying on top of her.

It was the last push Vic needed before her mouth was on Y/n, circling her tongue around her nipple. With every sigh and whimper coming from the girl below her, Vic would bite softly into the silky skin, kissing the area afterwards.

“Vic- Fuck!” Y/n moaned when she felt the tip of Vic’s fang pressing into her skin, sending delicious shivers throughout her body.

The blonde continued to explore every inch of her body, pressing sloppy kisses to her skin, soft bites and licks wherever she could, while Y/n grew more and more desperate.

“Please!” She moaned out, spreading her legs, while Victoria grabbed them and held them in place.

Finally descending to her center, Victoria thrusted a finger inside the moaning girl and kept repeating her actions while her tongue circled Y/n’s clit.

“You’re so fucking wet, puppy.” The blonde whispered against her, making Y/n whimper at the vibrations, and added another finger.

It didn’t take long for Y/n to come undone, a soft bite to her thighs being the last push she needed. She came loud and forcefully, her whole body trembling with pleasure, while Victoria stared at her, her dark eyes taking in her delicate features.

“Ethan!” Y/n heard Victoria call out, before the man suddenly appeared in the room, his long hair flying around.

“You think you can take a few more rounds, puppy?” Victoria asked Y/n, caressing her cheek.

The girl did nothing but nod eagerly as her whole body was filled with excitement for what was to come. It’s safe to say, wandering into that house was very far from a bad idea.

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Taglist: @fuckim-so-gay @ginny-lily @messyhairday-me @cheese-toastie-11 @wannabemarlenabutiscoraline @simp-per-ethan

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[headcans-oneshots-and-stuff]

Overworked

Fandom: DC Pairing: Batsis!reader x Batfamily Word count: 3k Summay: Your on your way to be the next C.E.O. of Wayne Enterprises, but the road is filled with challenges and a lack of self-care that your family can’t help but worry about (based on this) Warning: Slight angst and unconciousness, near death experience Requested by a pretty great Anon: Can you do a one shot of future ceo batsis overworking herself with long days and vigilante nights and she’s basically not sleeping or taking care of herself and batfams gotta step in and make her listen to reason.

The cup of coffee had already grown cold, the liquid inside it stale and surely undrinkable, when you reached for it. Hardly the first few drops of the liquid had ran down your throat when you realized the horrible transition it had gone through from the nectar of productivity to the lovechild of tar and sulfur, your face distorting into an expression of utmost disgust as you quickly put it back down and besides the other six paper-cups that were all half-filled at most. You sighed when you realized that it must have already been an hour since you had made - and after completely forgot about - the coffee. It really was a cursed circle that you had been going through for the last eight hours. You made a cup, brought it to your office, drank a bit, forgot about it and realized how horrible it now tasted half an hour or so later and then you took at least another twenty minutes before deciding to head for your next cup.  Was it already time for the next one? No, it could wait a bit longer. You turned your attention back to the screen in front of you - or rather the three screens - and let your eyes fly over all the data and graphs and numbers that you had to have in a presentable form by next morning for the monthly debriefing. This time would be your first time without Bruce on the sidelines and overlooking your work, a fact that made you feel proud at your accomplishment while simultaneously scaring you to the core. You knew that logically it wouldn’t be different than the last two - which you had also done basically solo with Bruce only sitting beside you silently observing - but there was still that internal voice that told you that without your father by your side the board would rip you apart until nothing was left over. You didn’t know what exactly caused it but suddenly you felt dizzy and the letters and numbers in front of you started swimming around, turning into absolute gibberish, the neon-lights of the screen hurting your eyes. No, not the screens themselves, it was the contrast between the brightly lit screens and the darkness that spread out behind them. It was only then that you let your gaze move behind the confines of your office and through the glass doors to the rest of the office space that was completely engulfed in darkness. Now you realized that it wasn’t only that, it was more, there was no soul wandering the floor and no sound beside the ever-so-steady growling of the computer fan and the clicking of your keyboard. “Fuck,” you couldn’t help but mutter when you looked at the clock beside you which already read half past nine. Which meant that you only had half an hour at most before your patrol started. Ignoring the pounding that built up in your head you tried to remember how it was possible for the time to surprise you like that. You had come to work at eight that morning and had spent two hours calling around, checking on contracts and meeting with potential clients, then you had your daily briefing with the department heads - which had extended into almost an hour because Brad from PR really couldn’t get his shit together - then you had to talk to HR about finding a possible replacement for Brad from PR and after you had started working on the numbers. And now you were standing in the elevator on your way to the car park. Did you have Lunch today? No, you had to skip Lunch break for Brad. What about Breakfast? No, wait, you forgot about that too. You rubbed your eyes and felt the need to curse rise again when you realized that you’d have to get right back to the numbers as soon as you had finished patrol which meant that you wouldn’t be able to sleep yet again. What was that? The fourth night in a row? Your only solace was the possibility that you’d maybe finish quickly and get a good one to two hours before you had to be back in the office, but deep inside you knew that it was unlikely. It hadn’t worked the last four nights either. But you’d pull through. There was a light at the end of the tunnel. After tomorrow’s meeting you’d go home at a normal time and indulge yourself in that full meal your stomach had been begging you for, sleep for a full eight hours and maybe even watch a movie if you felt especially crazy. Just for one night you’d really let yourself go. But for that to be possible you had to bite your teeth together and stay on your path.

The elevator arrived at the car park and you quickly rushed to your car and made your way to your apartment which - for maximum efficiency - was only a five minute drive away from the Wayne Ent. Tower, where you quickly rushed into the hidden side room to change into your gear. As you checked the time you realized that you still had a good five minutes before you had to check in with your father and you had to very quickly decide between your two options: quickly eat something or make and drink another coffee. You decided for the second one, but as you made your way to the kitchen counter where your coffee machine stood you caught a glimpse of the unopened stack of mail on the kitchen island and with a sigh decided to just get that over with, effectively ignoring both your previous options.  The letters were rather quickly sorted through and before you knew you were standing on a nearby ceiling and activated your comm. “Y/H/N reporting from area 7.4 in central Gotham.” “Good evening Y/H/N, it’s Oracle, I’ll be your voice in the background tonight,” Barbara’s voice echoed through your ears and after exchanging the usual greetings she quickly gave you the location of a robbery in progress. With quick, experienced movements you jumped over the roofs until you stood on the ceiling of a jewelry which was - luckily for you - made out of glass. There was only a single man in the darkness of the store below you, using a flashlight to clean out the display cases, and he wasn’t especially silent so you used the noise to your advantage as you opened one of the few ceiling windows that were openable and let yourself glide down with a hook. “I think you have to pay for that,” you interrupted the robber who quickly turned around, his face hidden by a black, knitted hat with badly cut out holes for the eyes. He was definitely no professional. The man - obviously panicked - got out a gun with shaky hands and pointed it at you, but before he could even think of shooting you had thrown a batarang and the piece of weaponry landed on the floor too far from him that he could reach it before you. Seemingly not seeing another option the man started charging at you and you just sighed and said: “I wouldn’t do that if I was you,” but by the end of the sentence his fist tried to make contact with your masked face, but you caught his hand expertly and used the momentum to twist it behind his back, grabbing the other one too and with quick movements you had used a pair of handcuffs that you had in your bat-belt™ to chain him to one of the displays before letting him go. “If you’ll excuse me for a second,” you mumbled before walking a few feet away where you told Barbara to contact the police and tell him they didn’t need to hurry. You had just finished the conversation and muted your mic again when the same dizziness as earlier in the office hit you but this time tenfold. It was like the ground was swaying below you and you had to take ahole of a countertop so that you didn’t fall. “Hey, are you okay, you look kinda sick,” the robber asked in an actual concerned voice, but you didn’t answer, instead you quickly used the hook you had attached earlier to let yourself swing out of the window again. “Y/H/N?” Barbara contacted you and you tried your best to swallow down the weakness in your muscles that suddenly seemed to grow over you. “Yeah?” “Bats asks you to meet him on the roof of the Jefferson building down in third.” “Tell him I’ll be there in a minute.” 

You gave yourself another few seconds to collect yourself before you did as you were told and made your way over to the roof of the builduing Babs’ had told you to go to, the dark silhouette of your father’s persona already expecting you there. Like you had done so often before, you started to run towards the edge of the building next to it - the one you were currently on - and made yourself ready to jump, only for your muscles to suddenly give up on you and the only thing you felt next was the rushing of air as you were falling and then the sudden stop and pain in your wrist as something caught you. Bruce quickly pulled you up and even with the cowl you could see the concern. “You okay?” he asked, his voice worried which definitely sounded uncanny in connection with what he was wearing. “Uhm yeah, my legs just kind of gave up on me there,” you tried to wave it off with a chuckle, not wanting him to see that you were frightened to your core. “Y/H/N?” he asked again in that voice he had always used when you tried to sneak out at night and lied when he had caught you. He hadn’t used that voice in so long. “I’m serious Batman, everything is okay, it’s no big deal,” you huffed - now defensive - and stood up with your arms crossed in front of your chest. “It is when you suddenly fall from a roof. What would have been if I hadn’t been there to catch you?” he asked, now slight anger edging through the worry, but you couldn’t blame him. “I’m sorry, okay, it won’t happen again,” you sighed and hoped he would just let it go, especially considering that the dizziness started to return. Along with it came the heaviness of your eyelids that you had gotten used to that somehow now seemed to actively pull you down. You raised your hand to rub your eyes - hoping it would put some more live back into you - but even that slight movement seemed to be too much as the world started swaying again and you felt gravity getting the best of you. Something black started moving in front of you and you weren’t quite sure if you were falling unconscious or if it was Bruce who came towards you to catch your falling form, but it turned out to be latter when you found yourself being lowered to the ground and propped against the end of one of the vantilator shafts of the building with Bruce kneeling beside you. “You’re definitely not okay,” he muttered as he held your face in his hands to get you to look at him. “I’m just a little bit tired is all,” you tried to argue, but your voice was weak and almost started lulling. “When was the last time you slept? Or ate?” You shut your eyes in concentration as you tried to remember. “Wait I know the answer to that one,” you muttered but almost fell asleep, only being kept away when your head started falling downwards, “What did you ask again?” “When was the last time you slept an entire night?” he tried again, this time more specific. “What day is it today?” “Friday.” “Then I think it was Monday,” you whispered since suddenly the loud noise of your voice seemed to pierce your skull apart. “You were on Patrol from nine to two a.m. on Monday,” Bruce disagreed and you almost chuckled. “Yes, and after I went to bed and got a full five hours. That’s pretty good isn’t it,” you couldn’t help but smile almost proudly, your mind starting to fog up with bubblegum coloured smoke that made it impossible to think straight. “And when did you last eat?” Bruce sighed, worry and recognition crossed his face. He himself must have known too well what you were going through. You averted your eyes and looked down at your lap where you played with your hands like an embarrassed child. “Also Monday,” you mumbled and Bruce immediately shook his head. “That’s not okay, you have to take care of yourself Y/H/N, you’re no good for anyone when you don’t.” You weren’t sure if it was only tired paranoia that made you see only disappointment on your fathers face - that ignored all the worry - but suddenly the prospect of having disappointed him, the one thing that you were trying to avoid ever since you could remember, made tears well up in your eyes and your lip quiver, “‘M sorry,” you could just press out before the tears started rolling. Bruce immediately regretted his tone of voice, but he knew nothing he would say now would be remembered by you so he just pulled you up from the roof and started carrying your already passing out form towards the batmobil. “We’ll talk about it tomorrow…”

The feeling of waking up rested was foreign to you, especially since it wasn’t one of your four separate alarms that woke you, and caused you to immediately sit up, only to be pulled back into the mattress. Your eyes flew open and explored your surroundings. The chandelier above you, with rainbow-coloured glass-pendants and the dark blue dealing with the painted stars immediately calmed you again. This room was your childhood bedroom which meant that you were in the manor, which in turn meant that you were safe. For a moment the calm was pretty nice, but then you remembered your case of immovability and looked down at where your wrists came out from under the cover. They were bound by silky bands and a move of your feet told you that the same was the case for them. While you were contemplating ways to get out of the unbelievably good, but still comfortable restraints, the door started to open and you turned as well as you could towards where you smallest (figuratively and literally) brother entered. “Your awake?” he asked in his usual stern voice, but you had known him for long enough to recognize the hidden worry. “Yeah, mind telling me why I’m strapped to my bed?” “Forced self-care,” he stated matter-of-factly and you couldn't help but narrow your eyes. “What?” “You fainted on Patrol, father says you haven’t eaten or slept since last Monday so we took measures to make sure you wouldn’t kill yourself with how careless you are.” You wanted to reply with something snarky, but you were well aware that what he said was probably right. “I’m sorry okay, I just had a lot on my plate, but you’re right and I feel a lot better now that I had some sleep, so you can let me go again,” you tried to smooth your way out of there, but you had the slight suspicion that it was hopeless. “I respect your try but you will not be let go until father is certain that you’re better.”

“But I am better!” you whined and tried yet again to wiggle yourself out of the restraints. Damian just raised his eyebrows unimpressed. He walked over to a chair that was standing beside your bed and as you followed him with your eyes you noticed the shutted curtains and the small gap of light between them. “What time is it anyways?” you sighed and felt surprise when you had to hold back a yawn. “It’s about 8 a.m.” Your eyes widened. That meant you had enough time to get to the office! “Please Dami, you gotta let me go, I have to get to the board meeting,” you begged, starting to wiggle more and more, but to no avail. “But Ukthi, you-” “No you don’t understand! This is my first time alone, I can’t let dad down, I have to be able to pull through with this if I ever want to make it as the next C.E.O. Dad wasn’t allowed a break either.” “Ukthi-” “Damian please, please, I promise I’ll come back right after and take care of myself, but I have to do this if I-” “Ukthi! The board meeting was yesterday. You slept for over 24 hours!” Damian shouted to get you to stop interrupting him and when you realized the weight of his words you sunk back down into the pillow. “What? But I was supposed to…” “Father just postponed it, he didn’t leave room to argue, he also gave you the week off from patrol and work.” If your hands weren’t bound you’d probably sunken your face into them in shame. You tried to hold tears back as you looked away from Damian. “Y/N?” he asked and came closer. “I’m sorry, It’s just- how am I supposed to handle being the C.E.O. of Wayne Enterprise if I can’t even handle little things like board meetings? How am I supposed to take after dad?” “Y/N, you keep on saying how father managed to lead the business on his own, and how you should be able too, but you’re not alone. You’re not supposed to be either. You have all of us by your side for a reason and we won’t leave you alone with this. We’re here for you and you shouldn’t be ashamed to ask for help. We’re family, we love you and we want to support you with all we can. “For now, how about you rest a little bit more and then I’ll let you out of bed to get a proper meal, Alfred made your favorite. After that I’m afraid Father will want to have a word with you.” “Oh shucks….”

[brawltogethernow]

@mirrorfalls​ submitted: Came across this while searching for James Bond’s scrambled-eggs recipe (long story). Your thoughts?

~~

But did you find James Bond’s scrambled eggs recipe?

In this article, Scocca laments his inability to find accessible, lighthearted superhero comics suitable to read with his young son, while also demonstrating a mysterious aversion to looking at DC and Marvel’s lines of comics for children, which is where the accessible, lighthearted superhero comics suitable for reading with young children are. He wants his elementary schooler to be able to safely have the run of all superhero media so he doesn’t have to touch the yucky baby books.

This is not an industry-wide crisis. This is just one dude who got paid to write an article where he accidentally exposed one of his personal hangups.

The child headed toward the trade paperbacks of Marvel and D.C. superhero titles on the side wall […] a few steps in front of me. […] Is he with you? a clerk asked me. I said he was. You know, the clerk said, we have a kids’ section. The clerk gestured backward, at a few shelves near the entrance. I said, Thanks, we know and tried throwing in a little shrug, as the kid kept going.

You can’t just turn a seven-year-old child loose in a comic-book store to look at the superhero comic books. […] My seven-year-old really wanted to see that last Avengers movie […] that is, he wished it were a movie he could see, but he understood that it was, instead, a movie designed to scare and sadden him—a movie actively hostile to people like him.

They have a children’s section. Because comics are a medium suitable for stories for everybody, and they are sold in comic book shops, which have sections, like bookstores. You can use this organization to find books that you know in advance are suitable for children. What goes in that category is determined by industry professionals. This area will be bigger the bigger the shop is. These comics are not lower quality that titles from the main lines. They are actually slightly better-written on average.

Your local comic book shop has considerately wrapped Empowered in a plastic bag, so your child will not be drawn in by a colorful superhero and accidentally read a graphic scene. If you think your kid might find a memoir about internment camps upsetting, it is your job to notice them picking up They Called Us Enemy and read the blurb on the back before you let them have it. This comic adults are meant to read is in a comic book shop because that is where comics are sold. Not every public place is supposed to be Disneyland.

Movies have ratings systems. If you do not want your child to watch a PG-13 movie, you will find that most superhero cartoons are for children. They are about the same characters. Some are quite good! I really enjoyed Earth’s Mightiest Heroes. Your child may like Avengers Assemble. At least I think that’s right. I’m always mixing those titles around.

This is a deeply weird bias for Scocca to casually demonstrate, because he identifies in the article that real childishness is striving for empty maturity.

He compares an old comic,

[…]a 1966 Spider-Man comic in which Spider-Man meets, fights, and defeats the Rhino; participates in a running argument between John Jameson and J. Jonah Jameson about his heroism; buys a motorcycle; breaks up with his first girlfriend, Betty Brant; flirts with Gwen Stacy; and reluctantly agrees to let Aunt May take him to meet her friend Mrs. Watson’s niece, Mary Jane.

and a new comic,

[…]a 21st century comic book in which Thor, brooding in a Katrina-destroyed New Orleans, beats up Iron Man. He also yells at Iron Man a lot about some incomprehensibly convoluted set of grievances, including involuntary cloning, that he believes Iron Man perpetrated against him while he was dead(?), and then summons some other Norse god from the beyond somehow for reasons having something to do with real estate. I think. Where the 1966 comic is zippy and fun and complete, the whole contemporary one is muddled and lugubrious and seems to constitute a tiny piece of a seemingly endless plot arc—simultaneously apocalyptic and inert.

and concludes that the edgier comic is actually less mature. This is true. (This is not news about mediocre comics.)

It also has nothing to do with either comic being child-friendly, the article’s nominal thesis, except in the sense that ASM #41 (yes, I eyeballed that from that summary, yes I am just showing off now) is better written, making it more everyone-friendly. It also has practically more space dedicated to word balloons than art and is about a college student juggling girl problems and a part-time job with a tyrannical boss. But the immature one, as Scocca points out, is dour.

These are both teenagery issues, separated only by quality. It’s true that lots of new comics published by the big 2 are bad in the specific way Scocca describes here, taking themselves too seriously and hauled down by associated stories instead of buoyed by them. Some are not! Some titles from these companies’ main continuities are zippy, contained, and child friendly. Give your child The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl! Or if you like vintage comics so much better, why don’t you…buy some?

The books on the kid’s rack are good and fun and totally suitable for parents to read with their children without wanting to scoop their eyeballs out. Scocca cites the Batman ‘66 comics as the brightly colored, tightly written all ages solution to his problem about sharing superhero stories with his son. My local comic shop stores this title in the kid’s section. I am glad that Scocca’s does not, as he seems to have a peculiar aversion to looking for comics to read with his son there.

Scocca cites Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse as a superhero movie he could watch with his kids. (I was surprised when this line made it sound like he has several. I don’t want to assume the other one isn’t in this article because they’re a girl, but I very much am assuming that.) Great! Go to the kid’s section and look for Marvel Adventures: Spider-Man. It’s a fun, zippy title directly inspired by ITSV where Miles, Gwen, and Peter superhero together. It’s much more tightly written than most of the various Spider-Verse comics, which are ambitiously messy ubercrossovers. You may not want to give those to children because they include murder and so on, but also you just have the choice between the two as an adult reader deciding how much continuity you want to deal with. Adventures is one of the only titles I would buy on sight before corona. The kid comic rack is a reliable place to take a break from How Comics Get Sometimes regardless of how old you are.

This article makes me feel quarrelsome. Maybe it’s that it doesn’t seem like exploration of a single idea so much as a loosely grouped bundle of things to kvetch about. Maybe it’s that the experience of getting into superheroes that Scocca describes experiencing, projects his seven-year-old son will experience, and from which he extrapolates a metaphorical microcosm of the history of the genre is completely alien to me.

Comic books [and] comic-book movies—are […] trapped in their imagined audience’s own awful passage from childhood to adolescence. A seven-year-old has a clean […] appreciation of superheroes. They like hero comics because the comics have heroes: bold, strong, vividly colored good guys to fight off the bad guys and make the world safe.

But seven-year-olds stop being seven. […] They become 13-year-olds, defensively trying to learn how to develop tastes about tastes.

The 13-year-old wants many things from comics, but the overarching one is that they want to prove that they’re not some seven-year-old baby anymore. They want gloomy heroes, miserable heroes, heroes who would make a seven-year-old feel bad. (Also boobs. They want boobs.)

Not because of the boobs line, although that does illicit an eyeroll that this gloomy thinkpiece is fretting over preserving the superhero experience of little boys who resemble the little boy the writer was while casually dismissing everyone else. I was one of those unlikable little seven-year-olds with a college reading level and the impression that maintaining it was the crux of my worth. I only read Books - distinguished media you could club someone with. I have a formative memory of pausing, enraptured, in front of a poster for Spider-Man 3, preparing to say that it looked pretty cool, and being beaten to the punch by my mother making a disparaging comment about how the movie was trash. It wasn’t out yet, but it was a superhero movie. That meant it was for loud, brainless children.

That was the total of my childhood experience with superheroes, excluding being the unwilling audience to incessant renditions of “Jingle Bells, Batman Smells” that left me wondering why in god’s name Batman’s sidekick was named Robin. I certainly never visited a comic book shop. I got into TvTropes, which got me into webcomics, which got me following David Willis, who got me into Ask Chris at ComicsAlliance, which led to me rewarding myself for studying like a demon for the AP tests with three volumes of Waid’s Daredevil, pitched as a return to the character being colorful and swashbuckling. I was seven…teen.

This is of the same thread as Scocca’s point that immaturity is running from childish things. It leaves me baffled that he doesn’t follow that maturity is embracing them.

I will disclose here that while I think it was dumb I had to overcome my upbringing’s deeply embedded shame associated with enjoying arbitrarily defined lowbrow media and children being childish, I think it’s fine that I was allowed largely unchecked access to technically age-inappropriate content. In my limited experience, content small children are too young for is also content they’re too young to understand, so it kind of just bounces off of them, and what actually ends up terrorizing them is unpredictable collages of impressions that strike out at them from content deemed perfectly child-friendly. I would not forbid a seven-year-old I was in charge of from seeing an MCU movie unless I had a reason to believe that specific child would not take it well. These are emotionally low-stakes bubblegum films. It will probably be easier to socialize with other kids if they have seen them.

But then, when I picture being in charge of a hypothetical child, I usually imagine this being the case because they are related to me, and the pupal stage in my family strongly resembles Wednesday Addams. ALL children love death and violence, though, right?? This isn’t a joke point. I know it looks like a joke point.

The MCU thing seems especially weird in light of the article’s particular focus on Spider-Man, which is the kiddie line of the MCU, even if they refused to waver from their usual formula enough to get a lower rating. Though I am more inclined to describe it as “preying on the young” than “child-friendly”.

(MCU movies are increasingly dubious propaganda, but I would not judge them in front of a child who wanted to watch them for that reason, just in case this led to them partaking of them without me the second they were old enough to and then they grew up to run a blog about them while our relationship suffered because they didn’t feel like it was safe to talk to me about their interests…Mom.)

I tried to overcome the philosophy of letting anyone read anything while compiling this handful of mostly-newish superhero recs for the road that anyone can read. (Handily, I have been in spitting distance of being hired as a comic shop clerk enough to have thought about it before):

For actual children:

Marvel Adventures Spider-Man (the new one is reminiscent of ITSV, the old one is more like 616) any DC/Archie crossover, Archie’s Superteens The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl (for bookish children who think they’re too good for comics and adults afraid of the kid’s section) Teen Titans Go (even if you hate the show) Superman Smashes the Klan

For teens:

Ms. Marvel Young Avengers (volume 2) Unbelievable Gwenpool Batman: Gotham Adventures Teen Titans Go (the tie-in comic based off the old show was also called this)

Here are a bunch of relevant C. S. Lewis quotes.

[shyficwriter]

Temporary Home: Chapter 1

Guardians of the Galaxy fanfic | Reader x Guardians (With Yondu and Kraglin!) Guest starring Nick Fury and Maria Hill

Summary: The Guardians have pissed off some really dangerous people and need to lie low. Apparently your home is the perfect place to keep them, according to Fury.

Part 2 Here

Author’s Note: This will be multiple chapters, I already have so many scenes for this in my head. I hope you guys like it!

Word Count: 6,610

You had been called into a sudden emergency meeting one afternoon, and walked in expecting to be sent on perhaps an urgent but still run-of-the-mill mission, or briefed on a sudden change to an existing case. You didn't expect to essentially become the babysitter for eight aliens. Well, one of them was human, but still.

You waited in the briefing room with five other agents and Maria Hill. One of your fellow agents, you thought her name was Stacy, tried asking what the meeting was about, and Maria would only reply to wait for Fury, and that he should be there soon.

Admittedly that made you a little nervous. It wasn't often that you didn't get any information before a meeting, but you tried not to think too much into it.

Fury arrived a few minutes later followed by six people you had never seen before.

Two of the men looked normal enough- that is to say, human- but they were the only two. One with red hair and another with strange tattoos on his neck. Then there was a large shirtless greenish/greyish man with what looked at first glance to be many swirly red tattoos covering his body. He had what you thought was a raccoon holding a wooden doll sitting on his shoulder, until the raccoon jumped down onto the table and you saw that not only did the raccoon walk upright, but the "wooden doll" was actually alive, and walked around as well when set upon the table. The other man was a rough looking type, and he was as blue as the sky with what appeared to be a red metal mow-hawk. There were two women with them as well, a taller green one who looked like she could kill you without blinking, and a smaller paler one with antennae who actually looked kinda scared to be there, as she was all but hiding behind the larger shirtless man.

Now, with your line of work you were of course aware of the reality of aliens, but these were actually the first you'd seen up close other than some of the Skrull people Fury worked with.

This group, however, seemed a little... dysfunctional. The red haired man said something snarky to the raccoon, and to your surprise the raccoon spoke back, saying something equally snarky in return before snapping at the red haired man's hand. The man then mimed smacking the raccoon across the room only to then be smacked in the back of the head by the green woman, earning snickers from both neck-tattoo guy and the blue man.

Fury loudly plopped a folder on the table and looked at the group sternly, prompting them to silence. He then turned to you and your fellow agents. "You're probably wondering why I called you all here." Not waiting for an answer he continued, "In simplest terms, we need to provide sanctuary for this lot because they went and pissed off some very dangerous people, and the Nova Corps urgently insists that they need protection."

An agent to your right, you didn't know his name, spoke up. "Then why aren't they hiding them? Why pawn them on us?"

"This is their way of hiding them. Earth is considered primitive by the rest of the galaxy's standards. We have virtually no contact outside this planet, and Nova figured this would be one of the last places anyone might look. Buy them some time to diffuse the situation with the people after these guys before they blow them to pieces."

For seemingly no reason, the red haired man then flicked the raccoon, only to fall on his ass when the raccoon lunged at him, receiving many annoyed looks from the rest of the group.

The same agent spoke again, confusion on his face. "Pardon me, but why is this Nova Corps putting all this effort into hiding... them?" The inflection was clear. What was so special about these dumbasses?

Fury, after witnessing the buffoonery, pinched the bridge of his nose. "Well, in addition to them being idiots." He punctuated the sentence with a sharp look toward the group, making the man and raccoon attempt to straighten up. "They've also managed to save the galaxy on more than one occasion. Nova is understandably less than willing to see them come to deadly harm. This is where you come in. We can't keep them here, so we need agents who can house them until everything blows over. Now, we're considering dividing them them among the five of you-"

"Wait! Whoa whoa whoa! You never said we'd be split up! We're a team! You can't split us up!" cried the red haired man. The rest of the group seemed agitated as well, and started to argue with Fury.

You heard a couple agents to your left whispering that they were in no way going to house any of them, and you couldn't help but agree as you watched the scene in front of you.

The blue man had the red haired man by the arm, irritably telling the younger to "Calm down, boy!" as the red haired man tried to pull away, yelling and pointing at Fury about how "This wasn't the deal!" The green woman was also yelling at the red haired man, something about having no choice if they wanted everyone to be safe, as the neck-tattoo guy just stood there, almost as if he didn't know whether to be angry or sad. The woman with the antennae looked even more frightened, now burying her face into the chest of the large tattooed man while he simultaneously patted her head comfortingly and somehow also managed a deadly look at your director. The raccoon had now hopped back on the table to comfort the little wooden creature, which was now crying, soothing it and saying, "It's ok, buddy, I'm not gonna let them separate us, I promise. Look at me, it's gonna be fine."

That's all it took, and you cursed yourself.

You rubbed a hand down your face. Damn it. "I'll do it." you said, voice raised just loud enough to be heard over the commotion.

Loud enough to capture Fury's attention. He turned away from the now quieting group and shared a brief look with Agent Hill. "What was that?"

You sighed, a voice in your mind yelling at you to reconsider. "I've got a place. Out of the way." Wait, what the hell are you doing? "I can take them." No. Turn back! It's not too late! "I mean, people will have to double up in the bedrooms, but I have the space to take them all." Dammit! What's wrong with you!?

Fury nodded. "Where do you live?"

"In the interest of security, sir, I think that's a conversation best had in private."

Fury smiled. "Good answer."

***

After Fury dismissed the other agents and discussed the whereabouts of your home and its security, he surprised you by declaring that you'd all be leaving within the hour.

You were taken a bit aback, having assumed you'd have some time to prepare, but agreed, assuming that time must be of the essence. Preparations could be made as you went, you supposed.

The ride to your home was a bit awkward, to be honest. Fury split the group between your car and a larger black SUV that he would be driving. In your vehicle you transported the red haired man and the green woman, who's names you learned were Peter and Gamora, along with agent Maria Hill in the front passenger seat. You assumed she had been assigned to ride with you rather than Fury for security purposes, but you didn't ask. Fury transported the rest, which you were sure would have been an interesting ride to say the least.

Your journey, however, was quite quiet. Peter kept trying to make conversation, but it never went much further than a couple-word answers from you or Maria. Reason being that you honestly just didn't know what to say, and you weren't exactly the most open book, and you'd never known Maria to be much of a conversationalist while on the job, though you two usually got on pretty well together.

Your home was an old double storey stone farmhouse set in the countryside, miles away from the nearest house, and even further away from the nearest town. The back of the property was a decent sized lot that emptied into a forest that also shielded around the sides, and at the front there were hedges and tall trees blocking the property from the sight of nearest road. It was easy to miss if you didn't know where to find the drive path that turned off the main road and winded up to the house. For all intents and purposes, to any average person taking a country drive, it was as if it wasn't even there, lost among the vast amount of trees.

Therefore, when you did finally arrive at your home a good bit later, you were more than surprised to find three black vans already parked in your drive. You were first alarmed, worried that somehow your location had already been compromised. You stayed behind the wheel for a moment, unsure of what to do, until you looked in the rearview mirror to see Fury and his lot exiting his vehicle. You looked to Maria in confusion.

"Yeah, there may be a bit more you need to be briefed on." she said in reply to a question that hadn't left your lips, smiling apologetically.

You got out of your car, followed by the rest of your passengers, and walked over to Fury who was standing in front of his passengers as they stared up at their new (hopefully) temporary lodging.

"What's going on here?" you asked when you reached him, gesturing to the men coming out of your house.

"Slow workmanship. They should have been done and gone 30 minutes ago." Fury said flatly, gazing at a man who nodded apologetically to the director and spoke into his walkie for his men to wrap up.

"Fury-" you say, your tone unamused.

"Agent Hill was supposed to brief you on the way over." he said, looking past you to Maria with a raised eyebrow.

"I considered that it might be better to wait until we reached the destination, sir, rather than inside of a moving vehicle, considering."

Fury half nodded as if in agreement, then turned to look back at your home. "We already scoped your place out a week ago. You're right, it was nearly the perfect place."

"Excuse me?" you say, eyes widening in confusion and surprise. What the hell did he mean he had already scoped it out a week prior? You had been under the impression these people had just been spontaneously dropped in Fury's lap.

"Your home," he said as if that would clarify things. "We had already looked into it, and other than needing a few adjustments, it was the perfect safe house to hide them."

"You- How-" you sputtered. You took a moment to gather your thoughts. "You mean to tell me that this was all already decided before you ever called that meeting?"

"Of course. It would have been irresponsible to drop them off at the first place we found."

"Then why call the meeting? Why the damn charade if this wasn't really my choice?" You were fighting not to raise your voice too much, but it still came out irritated. You threw an accusatory glance at the group, who were clearly listening in on the conversation, not like you had been quiet enough for them not to hear if they hadn't been. "Were you lot in on this?"

Peter held up his hands and shook his head defensively, as did a few of the others. You only narrowed your eyes and turned back to Fury as he spoke.

"Oh, you always had a choice, I just wanted to make sure you'd be willing." Fury said calmly, only now turning to look at you. "I knew you'd say yes."

"How could you possibly know I'd say yes!?"

"Well you did, didn't you?" You could almost hear laughter in his voice. The fucker practically seemed pleased with himself. You could feel your blood boiling.

"Oh yeah? How do you know I won't take it back after this stunt?"

Fury turned back to watch the vans turn around to exit the drive. "You won't. I know that well enough."

"How can you be so sure?" you say defiantly.

The Guardians look to each other worriedly. What if you did take it back because this Fury guy pissed you off? Would they have to be separated? Would they have to find a whole new planet to hide on?

Yondu eyed you as you asked your director how he was sure you wouldn't take back your offer, expecting him to say that he would be paying you too much to refuse, but he didn't expect the answer that actually came out of Fury's mouth.

"Because you offered with asking how you'd be compensated, and you still haven't asked. That, and I read your face like an open book." He now grinned as he looked at you, saying much softer, "You don't have it in you to turn them away."

You felt your face grow hot and you stuttered a bit before looking up at the sky in defeat, sighing at the darkening clouds beginning to gather overhead, a testament to your torment, to be sure. "Fine." you say. Suddenly remembering what he said, you looked back at him, "What did you mean by adjustments?"

Maria smiled at Fury as she placed a hand on your back and guided you towards the door. The other's followed.

"I know this seems like an intrusion, but we promise we didn't hurt anything. We simply added a couple beds, stocked the pantry, and updated the plumbing and wiring."

"The plumbing was fine," you grumbled, "and I was working on the wiring."

"Your home is just over 200 years old. The plumbing might have been fine when it was just you here, but now you'll be housing eight other people. I think you can understand why we would consider improving it." Fury stated, almost like a reprimand to your stubbornness. You eye him, wondering how he could know how old your home was, but you supposed he knew that the same way he knew where to find your home a week before you ever told him where it was.

Because he was Fury.

Looks were exchanged among the Guardians as they entered the home behind you, surprised to hear of the age of your home to see it in such nice condition. Though, if you had been living here they supposed it shouldn't have come to much surprise that you would have cared for it.

The front door opened up to a large hall featuring a staircase to the left. On either side of the entrance were two more doors.

Maria lead you all through the door on the right into the kitchen to briefly show they had stocked the pantry with some foods they, The Guardians as you heard them referred to as, were used to, to make the transition to Earth foods easier. They would be making bi-weekly supply drops to your home to keep the pantry stocked to feed all of them, but the food would soon be coming only from Earth, as it would be both expensive, and a possible security risk to try and keep importing foods from outer space.

You all then exited the kitchen and travelled up the stairs while Maria explained that everyone's bags had already been placed in the rooms based on what they assumed would be the correct sleeping arrangements. Of course, everyone was free to switch it up at their discretion. Once at the top of the stairs you instinctually step forward and reach up to pull the string for the light, as the hall was a bit dim due to the fading light outside, but you find it missing.

"Where the hell did-" you think softly out loud, looking up to see the whole fixture had been changed. The light then came on by itself and embarrassingly resulted in you startling in surprise. You turn to see Fury grinning slightly while shaking his head, his finger still near a switch that definitely wasn't there before you left the house that morning.

"Man, they weren't kidding when they said you Terran types were primitive, eh Pete?"

You shot the raccoon an offended look before Fury reminded you that they had updated your wiring. You blushed and looked at the new switch suspiciously, wondering how they managed to rewire your house so quickly without destroying the walls, but resisted the urge to sarcastically accuse him of witchcraft lest you give these 'Guardians' the idea that you were actually scared of electricity. Not that you cared what they thought, or anything.

Maria motioned to the first door on the left of the landing, and said to you that they naturally assumed it was the one you slept in, as it appeared to be the only one currently being inhabited. You nodded that she was correct and she continued, opening the door and informing you that they had added an extra bed and had placed Mantis's bag inside. She pointed to the woman with the antennae, indicating that's who she was referring to.

You silently nod again, a gesture that you were accepting of this arrangement. Of everything else they had done, this was one of the lesser intrusive things, next to the pantry. The woman seemed like one of the least annoying of the bunch, so you weren't going to argue. Could be worse. They could have put the raccoon or the dude with red hair in there.

You didn't see, but Mantis let out a sigh of relief at this knowledge that you weren't going to be angry about sharing your room with her. Her mood immediately brightened, convinced she was about to make a new friend.

You peeked into the room as the others pushed forward with Maria. Inside was your wooden framed single sized bed, only now pressed against the right side of the room from where it had previously been centered beneath the window. A new bed had now been set up on the left side of the room, opposite corner from your own, to leave clearance for the attic door. This bed was a black metal framed single, already fitted with grey and white sheets.

You naturally assumed Fury's team decided to add similar beds to the other rooms while also making use of the remaining beds that were already there, and so you didn't follow the others to see. You didn't really care to see, hadn't been in those rooms much in years for a reason.

You just crossed your arms and leaned to rest back against your doorframe and watched on as Maria sorted them into the rooms and Fury took to standing in the corner opposite of you, watching everything.

Fury's team had apparently placed the belongings of the blue man and the man with the neck tattoos in the room directly across from your own, and you learned their names were Yondu and Kraglin, respectively.

They placed the large man, raccoon, and wooden child all in the room further down at the end of the landing on that side, and you learned the large man was called Drax, the raccoon was Rocket, and the tiny wooden child was Groot. Something twisted in your belly seeing the little wooden child shyly peek into the room from atop Drax's shoulder, but you forced it down. No time to think about who previously owned that room right now.

The raccoon could be heard complaining, "You're seriously gonna make me sleep in a crib?"

The twisting came back, and you looked at Fury, ignoring the snickers and banter from the raccoon's friends as they both teased him for his misfortune and told him to get over it.

"We might have taken advantage of some furniture in the attic." Fury said, shrugging.

"It was locked." you say, your eyes narrowed. How would he even know to look up there? Did they literally go through your entire house when they 'scouted' it?

"So was the front door."

You sigh bitterly, only eyeing him in response.

"Is there a problem?" Fury asked, not altogether sincerely.

You shake your head and break his gaze. "It's fine."

Directly across from the previous room, Maria informed the ones you now knew as Gamora and Peter that that's where their belongings had been placed, Maria stating that they hoped they weren't being forward in assuming the pair were a couple. Gamora only nodded and said it was fine, while Peter gave her a cheeky grin that made her roll her eyes. Them being in that particular room meant you'd be sharing a wall with them, and with the knowledge that they were a couple you hopped it wouldn't mean you'd wind hearing any... 'special' noises at night while you were trying to sleep.

Once everyone knew where they'd be sleeping and seemed happy enough with the pre-arranged sleeping arrangements courtesy of who you were now mentally dubbing Intruder Fury, neck tattoo man-Kraglin- looked at Maria and asked where the restroom happened to be.

You lowered a hand from where it had previously been crossed over your chest and rapped twice on the wall, getting his attention, and pointed to the only still closed door to your left, centered in the wall across from the opening to the stairs.

He nodded in thanks, seeming slightly embarrassed that he had forgotten that this was, in fact, your house and not Intruder Fury's or Co-Intruder Hill's.

Fury gave you an unimpressed look that you read as, "Use your words." and you spoke up saying there was another bathroom downstairs if anyone else needed it. Peter spoke up saying that he could use it, and so you nodded your head towards the stairs in a "come on then" gesture and lead him as well a couple others downstairs to point where it was, down the hall towards the back of the house, past the kitchen. It was the only door at the end the hall that could be seen from where you stood, so he couldn't miss it.

Maria and Fury met you at the bottom of the stairs behind the rest of the Guardians, sans Kraglin of course.

"We trust everyone will settle in nicely," Fury said, turning a pointed look at the Guardians as he said "and will be on their best behavior." This earned a few nods from the group and he then turned to you, adding almost jokingly, "Would you like to finish the tour?"

You pointed towards the kitchen and spoke flatly, "Food's in there, so is laundry," you pointed towards the bathroom Peter had disappeared into, "Shower and toilet's in there," you pointed upstairs, "Sleep's up there," you opened the door to your left, the only room not yet explored that you were willing to open, and pointed inside, "Sitting room is in there. Watch TV, read, knock yourselves out."

Fury spoke first. "I get the way we went about this situation may seem less than ideal to you, but I assure you there's no need to be testy."

"I have every right to be 'testy.' You couldn't have just asked? If you really somehow already knew I'd say yes than why go through all-" you waved your hands around, trying to find the words, "You had to go and be all... you?!" There was an edge to your voice that drove the message. He had manipulated you, if that were even the right word for it. He had this all planned out in advance, made you a puzzle piece, you fell right where he said he knew you would, and you were meant to what? Smile about it?

"I could have," he conceded, looking thoughtful, "But that's not how I do things."

"You shook your head. You're a real piece of work, you know that?"

Fury only nodded once in response before asking, "Do you have any further questions?"

You look out the door window briefly to see the clouds had gotten much darker. "Looks like rain, director. Better hurry, wouldn't want you to get wet." The edge to your voice got sharper. Fury simply nodded with a half smile. Message received. Get out.

The Guardians, who hadn't gotten your hint to go shoo off someplace, remain stood in the hall, glancing at each other awkwardly. It surprised them that a man like Fury, and the way he seemed to be, would be seemingly so cool with the way you were speaking to him.

You spoke again as he reached for the door. "See you tomorrow. Ottawa case, right?"

Fury stopped. "Actually no. You won't be coming in tomorrow."

You blinked. "Excuse me?"

"You've been moved off that case to this one, we won't be shipping you off to Canada. In fact, you're off all further cases for the foreseeable future."

"Am I being punished for something, sir?" you ask, the edge still not having left your voice, but it was now softened by confusion.

"No." Fury replied, "If anything, consider it a vacation."

"I did not ask for a vacation, sir." you say, trying to bite back the irritation in your voice. "I have no desire to just stay home."

Maria looked at Fury with a 'told-you-so' expression, stating to him that she had known you wouldn't have taken this well.

Fury looked at you firmly. "You're due for one, and we need someone to stay and guard them. You already live here, they're staying here- Two birds, one stone."

Your face hardened in indignation. "So I'm a babysitter now? Look, if you're retiring me just say so."

The Guardians still stood there awkwardly, Kraglin finally coming down the stairs to quietly join them, eyes wide and wondering where all the tension had come from. Maria tilted her head toward the sitting room, hoping they might get the hint. They did, awkwardly backing into the room, not wishing to interrupt your argument with Fury.

"You're not being retired-"

"Good. Then I can keep working. There's literally no reason why I need to stay home."

"You haven't taken a vacation in five years." Fury said, the authoritative tone in his voice rising, "This isn't a request. It's an order."

Peter then exists the bathroom, saying "What did I miss-" and almost shrinking back inside when he notices his friends are gone and the tense looks between you and Fury. Mercifully, Agent Hill gestures him to the sitting room and he sidesteps his way past while you ignore him, too focused on trying to burn Fury with your eyes.

Knowing you had no options and could make no further arguments, you angrily yielded. "Yes, sir." you say bitterly.

"That's better. If you need anything you know how to contact me or Agent Hill." With that he bid you goodbye and opened the door.

It was now beginning to rain outside.

"Warned you about that rain." you snarked as he made his way out the door.

***

Agent Hill looked at Fury as they entered his vehicle, the rain coming down harder now.

"Stubborn as hell, that one." Fury remarked, turning his key in the ignition.

Maria agreed, but also stated she thought this might be good for you as they drove away.

***

You stood there in the hall for a good moment before Gamora asked if everything was ok from the doorway of the sitting room. You looked at her, and she went on to apologize for their intrusion in your home but also said they were grateful you allowed them to stay.

She started to say something else, probably was going to be more apologies border-lining on 'please don't change your mind,' but you raised your hand and cut her off, "Don't worry about it. It's not you guy's fault he's an asshole," you say. You look at her and you can see she is tired, probably both from lack of sleep and worry. You try to be more gentle. "Look, it's fine. Just... settle in. I know it's late, but there's food in the kitchen if you guys are hungry, I'm- I'm gonna go clean something." You break eye contact and head into the kitchen, sure there was at least a plate or glass in the sink you could tend to.

Sure, enough, once you got to the sink you noticed a few dishes from the morning, and so you turned on the tap. You decided cold water was good enough, not feeling like waiting for the immersion to heat up, but you turned the knob for the hot water anyway out of habit. Realizing you had thrown the old dish rag in the laundry without replacing it, you allowed the water to run while you searched the drawer for another.

You heard footsteps entering the kitchen as you returned to the sink, and assume someone must have finally decided they were hungry. Not turning to greet whoever it was, you absently run the cloth under the tap to get it wet- only to immediately rip it back with a, "g-OW! Damn! Fuck!"

You doubled over, holding your burning hand.

"You ok? What happened?"

You look up, squinting through pain, to see Drax had asked the question, standing in the doorway with Mantis and Gamora, the little tree child sitting on her shoulder.

You breathed. "Yeah. One of those fuckers must have turned the immersion on and left it." You straighten yourself, your hand still smarted but you knew it'd be alright, and turned off the tap with the dishrag. "I'll check it out."

You exit the kitchen through the other door at the far end of the room to check the hot press to the right of the cellar door behind the stairs, intent to turn the immersion off, and bitterly wondering just how long it had been left on for. However, once you opened the door your immersion was nowhere to be seen. You stared in confusion at the new pipes that now ran straight through the floor into the cellar before noticing a note taped to the back wall that only said "Upgraded to boiler. Check basement. ♡ Maria."

You narrowed your eyes and opened the cellar door, already pulling out your phone as you descended the stairs. You quickly located this new boiler fairly quickly. It was cylindrical in shape and black in color, and much larger than your previous heating unit, probably why it was now in the cellar. You dialed the phone, the first word out of your mouth when you got an answer was simply, "Why?"

***

The other guardians in the sitting room had also heard your swearing and peeked out of the room just in time to see you walking very cranky-like across the hall. They looked at the three standing in the kitchen doorway and they only shrugged in response to their quizzical glances.

Curious, and hearing you walk down the stairs, Peter and Kraglin tiptoed over to the Cellar door to see what was going on, standing just off from the door. They caught bits of your end of the conversation.

"Why?" ...

"Well, yes I can understand that, but-" ...

"Well you could have warned me! I just about burned my hand off!" ...

"Fine. How does it work?" ...

"No, I'm not going to-" ...

"Yes, I know they-" ...

"You know what, I'll figure it out. Bye."

They hear you start to climb the steps and scurry back to the sitting room, not wishing to make it apparent they were eavesdropping on their new host.

You re-enter the kitchen and grab a glass of milk to soothe your nerves, seeing as it was now raining buckets and you couldn't be bothered for a walk as you would have preferred.

You sit at the table and look to see the three still standing in the doorway. You raise an eyebrow. "You alright there?" Thinking bizarrely that they must be shy you gesture towards the pantry. "Food's over there if you're hungry."

Drax merely shrugged and took up the offer, guiding Mantis over with him, but not before accepting Groot from Gamora.

Gamora stepped towards the table and took a seat across from you. "I couldn't help but notice you seem less than happy about this arrangement, I'm sorry-"

You cut her off once again. "Don't be sorry. I already told you it's not your fault Fury can be a dick. It's just a lot of new all at once and I wasn't expecting it. You're fine." You take another sip of milk, finally realizing what it was that she was actually afraid of. "You don't need to be scared that I'll send you back or anything."

She actually seemed to relax a bit. "Thank you. If there's anything-"

You set your glass on the table and fold your hands. Sentiment made you uncomfortable. "Look, as long as you guys clean up after yourselves and don't destroy my home, we're fine." Looking for a change of subject you said, "Why don't you introduce the rest of your friends. It couldn't hurt to get to know you a little."

Gamora smiled slightly. "Well, that's Drax and Mantis." she said, pointing to the two who were now coming back to sit down with their snacks. "And this is Groot," she added once Mantis sat the child on the table.

You smiled. "Cute little bugger, isn't he?"

"I am Groot!" he said excitedly, taking a bite of a food you didn't recognize. Must have been one of those outer-space types.

"Hello, Groot. How are you?"

"I am Groot."

You raised an eyebrow. "Um.." Maybe he misunderstood you?

Before you could ask again, Drax speaks up. "That's all he can say. He means he's ok."

"Oh." You nod slightly and take a sip of your milk, bemused. "I see."

The four of you conversed for a little bit. You learned that Drax liked knives, and he seemingly took everything very literally. Mantis was sweet, and she was convinced you two would be friends. She also said she was excited to share a room with you, because it would be like a sleepover. Gamora gave you a smile that seemed to say "forgive her," but you honestly weren't too bothered. It was almost sweet. Before you could ask about Gamora though, she stood up and asked if you'd like to meet the others.

You shrugged and nodded, placing your now empty glass in the sink before following her out to the sitting room where the other men were.

You walked in and saw Peter sitting in an armchair listening to a music player, seemingly ignoring the other two men as they stood looking weirdly at the TV. The blue man tilted his head at it, a hand to his chin in thought, while the other waved his arms slowly in front of it saying, "I dunno. Maybe it's broken?" He looked ridiculous.

You stifle a laugh and asked, "What are you doing?"

They turn to you, the blue man speaks. "Tryin' to figure out how to turn on this Terran TV of yers. Rat says they're motion activated, but nothin' we do is workin.'"

You give him a strange look. "Motion-? No- You just use the remote."

Then you hear a snickering and find it's coming from the raccoon, perched on the back of the couch. "Rocket." Gamora says in a mix of scolding and accusation, and he starts laughing harder, jumping down on the cushions to retrieve the controller from between them. "You guys looked so stupid! Ahaha!"

Yondu glares and Kraglin snatches the remote, flipping the television on and raising his hands in an annoyed "There we go!" gesture, sharing an annoyed look with Yondu at Rocket.

You motion to one of the game controllers on the coffee table, stating they'd want to use one of those if they wanted to actually watch something, as the first controller only turned the TV on.

Before you could offer to show them how to use Netflix, Gamora started introducing the remaining guardians.

Peter removed his earbuds and greeted you, standing to shake your hand, only to be shot down by you saying there was no need to be so formal, keeping to yourself the fact that despite working for Fury, you hated formal with a passion. He held up his hands and sat back down. "No problem there. We're probably the least formal people you can get." he said with a smile. You didn't see, but Gamora gave him a warning look that kept him from putting his feet up on the table.

The other two men and the raccoon seemed to agree with Peter, and nodded their greetings to you instead when introduced.

"Say, just curious, but how come it's just you living in this big ol' house by yerself?" came a question from Yondu.

You probably should have expected that question, but you didn't like it all the same. You were trying to decided if 'Don't worry about it' would be too rude of an answer when Peter notices the change in your expression and adds his own question out of fear that Yondu had offended you in some way. "How long have you been here? Fury said this place was old."

You chose to answer Peter's question instead. "Grew up here. House has been in the family since it was built."

"Oh. Cool." said Peter.

Not looking forward to any more possible questions about yourself you looked up to the clock and found your way out.

"Well, it's nearly ten, I think I'll turn in early." you say, excusing yourself.

Just then a loud thunderclap sounded and you heard a squeal from the kitchen.

"Kid scared of storms?" you ask, looking to Gamora.

The lights go out. You hear a scream.

"Nah, but apparently Bug is." says Yondu.

Realizing he likely meant Mantis, and that Mantis was your new roommate, you sigh. "I'll get a flashlight."

The lights flickered back on.

"Nevermind."

Everyone pretty much decided to go to bed after that, Mantis shyly shuffling into the bedroom a few minutes after you to retrieve some items from her bag and coming back dressed for bed as you scrolled through Tumblr, having already washed up and dressed for bed.

She crawled into her bed, pulling the covers up to her chin.

Thunder cracked again and she whimpered. You honestly felt a little bad for her.

"Do... does this happen often?" she asked.

"The storm? No." you answered honestly. "It'll be over soon. Just try to sleep." You stand up to turn the light off but pause, turning back to the curled up form on the bed opposite of your own, your face softening. "Would you like me to leave a lamp on?"

Mantis nodded.

You click on your desk lamp before turning off the overhead light and crawling into your own bed. You heard her say goodnight to you from across the room.

"Night," you return, turning toward the wall.

They were an odd lot, a bit dysfunctional, but you decided they were ultimately harmless. 'This whole ordeal will be over before I know it,' you thought as you closed your eyes.

You'd find out soon enough that you thought wrong.

[ellieswhoreeee]

The Two of Us. pt 2

authors note; thank you guys for the support, it really means a lot to me! Im glad you guys liking the story so far! Anyways, here’s part two! Also, i’d like to apologize in advance for any errors or if something doesn’t make sense. English isn’t my first language so i’m sorry if there’s something wrong :)

Endgame pairings: Ellie Williams x fem! reader.

Warnings: Violence, marijuana, swearing, ect.

———————————————————————

It really hurt seeing them together.

You felt the disappointment, the hurt and the jealousy as they simply talked. Though you know there was a deeper meaning behind their seemingly innocent conversation. You know more than anyone about them. Being one Ellie’s best friends is both a blessing and a curse.

She smiled, looking slightly flustered after Cat whispered something in her ear, and you couldn’t help but clench your jaw at that.

It was a troubling sight, really it was. Everything seemed so off. Like it wasn’t real. But it was. Ellie was laughing with the cool girl who can do tattoos, one of your friends. God, it really felt like you were getting jabbed in the heart over and over again.

But you had no right to jealous at all. She wasn’t yours to be jealous about.

Cat looked around, making sure nobody was looking- but held eye contact with you for a moment before she leaned in and kissed Ellie on the lips. That’s when you finally looked away, continuing to fix Gemini’s saddle.

Gemini was tied to the fence by the barn and was close to the fence. Other horses lined up beside his right side. Today’s group was getting to leave for the morning. Earlier than usual.

Mondays are rough.

“How long have they been together now?” Jesse asked when he walked over to you as you were packing up for patrol. You turned to look at him so you could have an actual conversation. He looked directly into your eyes, almost as if he was trying to figure you out. Jesse was someone who could see everything with one look. You kinda hated him for knowing so much about how you felt about Ellie without telling him much about it.

“…I wanna say 2 months, but we both know it’s been longer than that.” You replied with a frown, continuing to distract yourself by finishing to prep Gemini for patrol.

“Y/n, could you stop looking so miserable? It’s starting to bum me out.”

You chuckled lightly, finally stepping away from Gemini and decided to lean against the wooden fence beside your horse. Jesse decided to the same, and he leaned against it with you. You looked down at your hands, deciding to pick at your cuticles just so you wouldn’t look at the couple. “Why don’t you look just as miserable as me? Didn’t Dina break up with you? Again.”

“Ouch, you really know how to turn on certain emotions.”

“I’m serious. Like, i haven’t been broke up with, yet here i am…” You paused, you stopped picking at your cuticles just to look across the street, where the couple was. Happily minding their business. Ellie and Cat were talking and laughing sweetly. Again, with that pain in your chest. “Utterly heartbroken.”

Jesse patted you on the back, it was his way of comforting you since he had no idea how else to help. “It won’t get easier. One moment you think you’re stronger than whatever you’re feeling but then… you realize it doesn’t matter how good you hide it. If you keep on hiding it, the pain will get to you before you can express those feelings properly.”

“I’m gonna be honest Jesse… I have no idea what you mean by that.”

“Of course you don’t…” He mumbled with a laugh. Again he patted you on the back and pushed himself off the fence. “Think about it clearly.” He then walked off, somewhere towards Maria and some other adults.

Again, you and Gemini were left alone together.

You couldn’t help but think about what Jesse brought up earlier. What did he mean by that? You’re not sure how to process what he meant. Either you were completely clueless- or Jesse tried to be all wise but failed.

“Y/n! Come over here.” You heard Maria’s voice, which broke you from your trance. You left Gemini tied to the post as you walked over to Maria and some other people. Mila and Benji smirk at you as you walk closer. Mila and Benji are your close friends and have been for a while. Though you haven’t seen them lately because of work. Everyone is extra busy lately. Mostly.

“Look who finally decided to join us.” Benji remarked as he wrapped his arm around you once you were close. He pulled you closer and walked towards Maria’s table that was used for placing maps for patrol.

You pushed him off of you gently and made a grossed out face at him. “You really stink, Benji. When was the last time you took a shower?”

Benji only smiled and raised his left arm up to smell his armpit and his clothes too. “It’s my natural musk, all the ladies love it.”

You and Mila looked at each other simultaneously. It was as if you were on the same wavelength. Both of your rolled your eyes at him. “As a lady, i will be speaking for everyone when i say you smell nasty.” Mila exposed truthfully while crossing her arms on her chest.

“Hold up, you’re not a lady, you’re a brute.”

“Oh, i’m the brute? You haven’t taken a proper shower in weeks. Jumping into lakes and rivers don’t count.”

“Says who? It’s more natural,”

“More like nasty.”

You ignored the two bickering idiots and moved closer to the table where Maria was. “What were you thinking Maria?” You asked, looking down at the map of the area. It stretched out for miles.

She looked up at you. “Have you ever done the urban trails? It leads up to the dam checkpoint.”

You shook your in response. “I haven’t. Do you want me to take that route? You should pair me up with someone who’s done that trail then.”

There’s a lot of trails, so there are at least 10 or 15 trails you’ve never done before. These type of trails are the longer routes. The reason you haven’t done those routes is because Tommy isn’t that confident in you to take on the longer routes.

But now it was different, not only are you older but more capable of handling yourself more than anyone.

“You’re right…” Maria paused, she was thinking, trying to slowly put some pieces together. “But there isn’t anyone on duty right now who knows the trails that i can think of.”

Jesse’s head perked up at what she said, smirking at you from across the table. He was right next to Maria like always. She trusts him a lot because he was also a natural leader. “Actually, Ellie knows that trail.”

You instinctively felt your heartbeat start to speed up, and your face started to warm up at his insinuation. You knew what he was doing. “Ellie and Dina are already planning on running their routes on chestnut drive. I can take a group and we’ll figure it out together.” You intervened, giving Jesse a look that said, ‘shut up’.

“No, Jesse is right. You and Ellie can take the urban trails. It’ll be much faster with you two clearing that area. We can’t send a group to one trail- especially not now when we’ve been getting reports of infected in the southern territories- the opposite direction of urban trails.”

You sighed, knowing that her words were always final. You scratched the back of your neck- feeling an inch. “I’ll go let Ellie know. Jesse talk to Dina.” You give him another glare and just he smiled, sending a wink your way.

You turned around, looking over at where Cat and Ellie were still talking. Lately, things have been awkward between you two. It may have something to do with the fact that you maybe- just maybe that you were avoiding her.

It didn’t really matter, Ellie hasn’t noticed anything differently anyways. Or so you assumed.

“Ellie!” At the sound of your voice she quickly turned away from her girlfriend. She dropped Cats hands and fully turned to face you. Her full attention was now on you. But of course, you didn’t notice that either. “Assignments! Let’s go, kiss your girlfriend goodbye and get your ass on shimmer!”

It was getting easier to hide your feelings, even your distain for the couple and how you felt about Ellie.

“Fuck… Alright, just give me a minute!”

You gave her a thumbs up, and turned away. You walked towards your horse, seeing Jesse waiting there for you. He must have finished talking with Dina. He held out a hunting rifle and a shotgun towards you. He looked between both guns. “Which one do you prefer?” He questioned.

You smiled, looking at both guns. “Quite the tough question, Jes.”

Ellie walked up behind you, looking right over your shoulder. She was so close to you. Your breathe hitched lightly as she observed both guns. “I think you’re more of a rifle girl. It suits you more than a shotgun.”

Jesse grinned, and his eyes sparkled for a moment when you looked at him. He then nodded, agreeing with what Ellie had said. “That settles that then.” He held the rifle for you to take, which you did. Jesse then passed the shotgun to Ellie.

With the help of the sling, you tossed the rifle over your shoulder. Ellie was staring at you, trying desperately to get your attention without having to say anything but you were occupied with Gemini once again. She sighed, and decided to just start the conversation.

“So… Where have you been lately? I haven’t seen you around, not even in the mess hall.” Ellie hesitated but walked over to Gemini’s mane. You were by his saddle, and when you stared into her eyes it felt like it was only you and her. Instinctively, your eyes trailed from her eyes to her lips. You couldn’t help it. She was so close. Ellie shyly looked down at her hands as she continued to mess with Gemini’s mane. “I’ve uh… Missed hanging out with you. We still haven’t finished our halo campaign.”

You bit the inside of you cheek, and decided that laughing nervously would help ease your nerves. “Yeah, i’m sorry about that. I asked Maria for more assignments since… You know, i have nothing better to do.”

Ellie wanted to say something but held her tongue. She wanted to say something to continue your conversation but you interrupted her instead. “Listen, Maria wants you and me to handle the urban trails. Pretty sure we have to replace Danny and Axel at the dam checkpoint …”

“You and i,” Ellie corrected suddenly, making you stare at her in disbelief and confusion. She gave you a smirk. “You said ‘you and me’ but that isn’t proper grammar.”

You rolled your eyes playfully at her. “Fuck off, Williams. Did you even listen to a word i said?”

“So, we’re back to last names? Since when?”

“Since you decided to be a grammar queen, you dick.”

“Woah! Language, there are children around, L/n!”

“The only child i see is you.” You replied with a happy smile on your face. You and Ellie climbed on your horses and waited by the gates. Ellie continue to talk to you like nothing was wrong- well, not like she knew if there was something wrong anyways. You kept stuff to yourself.

You missed this. You missed hanging out with Ellie. You just… Missing having her by your side, kicking the worlds ass together but now… Ellie was with Cat. Her relationship put a wedge on your friendship. You felt farther away to Ellie then ever.

Everything has changed. Which sucked because you weren’t sure how to deal with the changes. It was all going by so fast. You just wished everything was different. It was selfish of you but… You didn’t care.

“Y/n, you with me?” Ellie snapped you out of your thoughts. She looked back at you as the gates opened.

You nodded. “Always.”

[parkers-gal]

hey honey! how are you doing?

i was wondering if you could write something where the reader is either tom or harrison’s sister, around 19-20 years old, and she hears her brother talking bad about her behind her back and she gets distant towards them and her brother realizes how much he’s missing out on (her first boyfriend and stuff like that)

sorry if it’s long or if you don’t wanna write it lol it was just an idea!!

don’t be sorry! i loved this! also doing pretty good :-)

i didn’t really understand what was in the ending parentheticals so i hope this is what you wanted!

wc: 1.7k

—

Being the established girl in a group of four boys meant a lot of things. Often, you were confused as a girlfriend to whichever boy you were accompanying, aside from your brother, of course. There was a lot of territory that came with being close family-friends with the Holland family. Especially since your brother used to be Tom’s assistant. It was expected, though, because they had been close friends growing up, especially since being in the same grade. 

You were younger, which meant you were in between ages for the twins and Paddy. You didn’t consider yourself too young for them, though, and found yourself in the presence of the boys for most of your time. 

Today, however, you were with your friend Aisha, walking around the shops. She had to leave unexpectedly early, so you parted ways. You came into the house quietly, setting a few things as you silently made your way into the kitchen. It wasn’t actually your house, but you practically spent all of your time there anyways. You heard voices coming from the den. Though you knew it was wrong, you halted in announcing your arrival, choosing to listen in on what they seemed to be joking around about. 

“Finally got ‘er off your back, huh mate?” You heard Tom’s voice, followed with joined laughter from everyone else. Your mind wandered, thinking maybe Harrison had a girl he was interested in, though he never brought that up, so you stayed quiet to hear more. 

“Yeah. Out with Aisha or whatever.”

Your eyes widened as the realization dawned on you. You purse your lips and think not to assume anything just yet. 

“That her only her friend?”

“Honestly,” Harrison laughs in agreement. “Mum said to be a good older brother but I’m tired of playing babysitter.” They all laugh again and you will yourself not to burst into anger — or worse: cry. “She’s gotta grow up or something.”

“Mate.” Tom snickers. “She needs a life. The boys are a tight circle; can’t let no baby sister in on that.”

“Yeah,” Harry’s voice pops in. “Who else would we spill disgusting secrets to?” They laugh seemingly in universal knowledge. 

“Anyways,” Tom settles down. “Good thing we finally got the superior Osterfield alone, for once.”

You abandon your station near the kitchen door and speed walk out the other swing door. You pick your bags up quietly, making for a quick escape as your tears attempt the same. You’re almost done putting your shoes on when Sam comes down the stairs, brows furrowed while he wipes his damp hands on the front of the shirt. You curse in realizing he was probably in the bathroom. 

“Y/N? Everything okay?”

“Uh…” You glance to the hallway that leads to the kitchen, wearily hoping nobody comes out. “Yeah, just uh… forgot I had to do something. I’ll see you later.”

You quickly make your way out of the house, shoving everything into your car while you can, starting the engine with great speed. Sam was in the middle of saying something else to you on your wait out, but he never got around to finishing because you were already out of the door. 

He didn’t mention anything to the boys, trusting that you were okay and that you did actually have something to do. 

That night, you tried not to cry yourself to sleep in your small apartment, one you shared with Aisha. When you woke the next morning, she wanted to go to the skating rink for some fun, so you agreed, eating breakfast before showering. You spent the entire day there, really, and let your phone in a rented locker, ignoring the texts from a few of the boys asking if you wanted to come over for a movie and some pizza. 

When you did have the chance to reply — over five hours later — you gave them scarce replies in the main group chat, apologizing without much sorrow. From their end, they shook it off, knowing you probably just had other plans that specific day. The five of you were planning on going to the golfing course tomorrow, so you’d get time together then. 

But they were wrong, because you cancelled on them, simply stating that “golf isn’t your mood, today.” They’d accepted that, but Harry knew that was bullshit, because half of the fun of golfing was competing with you.

They tried not to think much of your absence while they were on the field, but it was weird and awfully quiet without you. They’d figured it might be different throughout the week, but they were still wrong. You were with other people throughout the week while you could be, and it only made it worse for the boys because you were posting it all over your social media. Not in a flaunting manner, but just for the aesthetics. They didn’t find it very pleasing, though. 

Harrison knew something was off, knew you didn’t normally just start ghosting people unless you had a real reason. He intended on figuring out what that reason was, and Tom was hell bent on learning it too. They drew up a plan to get you to come over, telling you they had a few of your missing things. You complied, figuring you’d have to face them at some point. 

Strolling up to the house for the first time in ten days, you opened the door as casually as you could, only to be met with four pairs of eyes staring in your directions from seats in the open living room. 

“Uhm,” You cleared your throat. “Where’s my stuff?” Tom wordlessly points to a bag on the head of the couch, and you pick it up wearily, sifting through it while you hummed. “Thanks, I’ll just take this and get out of your hair.” 

“Well, wait-” Tom stands abruptly. “Why… why don’t you hang out for a bit?”

“I mean… do you want to?” The tone in which you speak catches him off guard for all of ten seconds before each of the boys are nodding their heads.

“Of course we do.” Harrison smiles and you nod wearily. 

“Okay.”

However, you don’t make any move in settling down for the long run, and Tom huffs. “What’s going on here?”

“What do you mean?”

“You’re avoiding us!” Harry concludes. “Why?”

You clear your throat, looking at your feet while your tongue clicks. “I, uhm, I heard you guys talking the other day.”

Harrison raises his eyebrows as a silent message for you to elaborate a little.

“You said you were tired of babysitting me, so I gave you guys some space.” They all physically defeat and you begin to defend yourself. “I just thought it’s what you wanted! You don’t have to explain.” You’re unknowingly beginning to tear up, and they all know it before you do. 

“I think we should talk.”

“No, I- uhm…” You glance out the window to your car. “I should really get going.”

“No!” Harry pleads with you. “We just… we miss you.”

You stop short in your tracks, turning around slowly. “Well I don’t really think you get to. Not after what I heard.”

“That’s not fair, Y/N/N, and you know it.” Harrison’s stern with you, and you can feel the tension beginning to set nicely like a creamer. 

“None of this is really fair for me, so why should it be fair for you?” You point a finger up in their direction while you shrug offendedly. “I mean, if you’re gonna say one thing don’t act like you don’t mean it.”

“But we didn’t,” Harrison says. 

“Really, we didn’t. It was a stupid thing to say.” Tom adds on. 

“Yeah, we’d never say it knowing you were there.”

“Oh, but you’d say it if I wasn’t around?” You’re making this more difficult, you realize, but you don’t much care, because when feelings get hurt, things get difficult, and you’ve come to terms with that. 

“That’s not what I meant.” Harrison crosses his arm. 

“No, but that’s what you implied.” You jab him back with your next words. 

“Stop making this hard.” He’s reminding you of what things were like when you were young and arguments were regular. 

“I’m not the one that started this.” You huff angrily, hand finally gripping the handle of the front door, swinging it open and slamming it harshly with an “I’ll see you all around.” 

Tom blinks, glancing to Harrison in question on what to do next. Harrison sighs and so does Harry. 

“I saw her leaving that day she heard you guys.” Sam speaks calmly, almost nervously. “She was- uh… she was crying.” “Oh jesus.” Tom groans, hands running through his curls. “We made her cry, Haz.”

“I know, I know.” He speaks hastily. “C’mon, I know what to do.” He picks his coat up, opening the front door as the rest of the boys follow him out. 

You’re coming home that night after spending the rest of your day at the country club with some friends. You’re alone, of course, expecting to eat dinner with Aisha, though the two of you normally dine separately because you’re always with the boys and she’s always with her girlfriend. Things are different now, though. 

As you open the door to your flat, you expect to find it dark and empty, but you’re met with your favorite take out meal and four very sorry boys, a large teddy bear sitting on the couch for you. You drop your bags and glance at each of them. 

“What’s all this?”

“We’re really, really, really sorry.” Harrison steps forward with an apologetic smile and three DVD disks in his hands, all of your favorite movies. “But me especially. I love having you around… even if you are my baby sister.” You slap his arm playfully and he laughs. You let a smile creep onto your face at his demeanor. “We really missed you this past week.”

You nodded, fiddling with your fingers. “It just… hurt. You broke the one rule I thought…. The rule I thought we all swore to keep.”

“I know.” He sighs, looking at the boys as everyone says it simultaneously. “The circle before yourself.”

You’d seemingly all established it during your first all-nighter as a group of five. You vowed to put them before your own silly ego or public facade. Obviously, some things are harder for others.

“Can you ever forgive me?”

“Can you ever forgive us?” Tom speaks up, eyes deep.

You smile softly, voice laced with feelings. “Of course I can.” You don’t miss the smiles that break out onto their faces, and when everyone comes in for a group hug, they know things are going to be okay. 

read the spinoff! - circles before yourselves - rule #2

[realcube]

'you're..you're wearing that-' he hesitated, swallowing the lump forming in his throat, 'for me?'

navi | taglist | nsfw part two

summary ➵ on your first date with tamaki, he’s already wondering why you romanticise a guy like himself

content warning ➵ reader wear make-up, a dress and the accessories pictured above, very insecure! tamaki, mild angst & fluff

credit ➵  thank you to @suneater18​ for the request and the pics belongs to hippieartesanatos

the moonlight penetrated through the sombre clouds which waved overhead, creating a picturesque night sky for you to admire on your date; as if the heavens were smiling down upon you, congratulating you for scoring such a nice guy.  

well, at least, that is what you would’ve thought if your date was sooner to start. currently, you were shuffling on a park bench, fidgeting with your phone as your eyes flickered between the screen and the gorgeous sight above you, anticipating when your date will finally arrive so you can admire it together.

however, twenty minutes had passed since nine o’clock — the time you had both agreed to meet each other at — yet you were still sitting alone, tamaki no where to be seen. what make it even worse was that he was ghosting all your messages and calls. 

perhaps it was the first-date jitters speaking but there was a voice lurking in the back of your head, whispering that you have been stood-up. however, you were too ashamed to just get up and leave now, so you figured that you may as well call your friend and ask them to join you.

your eyes burned with tears which you choked back as your fingers worked on their own to search your contacts for your friend’s number. there was a part of you that believed you were being to hasty but you truly couldn’t bare to just sit here and act ‘hopeful’ any longer. with shaky hands, you tapped your friend’s contact as your thumb hovered over the phone icon.

“(y/n)!” 

you froze upon hearing your name called from a distance, your immediate reaction being to whip your head around to see who — or what — was in such desperate need of your attention that they were willing to yell your name from half-way across the park. 

and of course, it was none other than tamaki amajiki himself; dashing towards you at full-speed in a torn suit, muddy shoes and..his hair seemed to be unevenly cut. he wore a determined yet petrified expression as he came hurdling in your direction, a single stray tentacle dragging behind him as he ran.

a smile of both confusion and relief tugged at your lips, the pads of your fingers dabbing lightly under your eyes to rid of any puffy skin or dampness while simultaneously ensuring that you wouldn’t mess up your lashes or eyeshadow. 

“tama! you’re here!” you squealed, your hands automatically clasping together in excitement as he approached the bench, about to fall into the seat beside you due to how tired he was but pausing as he watched you spring to your feet and open your arms for a hug. his lips slowly curled into a weak smile, his expression softening and he didn’t waste a single second before throwing his arms around you, pulling you in for as tight of a hug that his worn biceps would allow him to.  

despite the fact he reeked of an ungodly amount of body spray, you still basked his embrace since this is the moment you spent the last three hours or so preparing for. you were quite shocked at how shabby he looked but you decided against questioning it, out of courtesy. but on the bright side, it really made you feel better about the outfit you had spent hours styling, yet you were still not completely sure about.  

tamaki suddenly pulled away from the hug so he could fall back onto the bench, letting out a hefty sigh and momentarily zoning out in order to catch his breath. you weren’t too sure whether it was appropriate to giggle or pout at the sight so you chose to not do either and instead, just awkwardly stand and stare at him.

a sharp inhale was all tamaki needed before he was finally able to sit up slightly and bow his head, folding his hands to you before blurting out, “i am so sorry i’m late, (y/n)!” and before you could even get a word in, he began his breathless explanation, “i got a small tear in my shirt and mirio said he’ll fix it but he made it even worse. then nejire said she’ll style my hair but she only knew a few male styles and said my hair was too long and before i could say anything she was chopping away at my hair-- and somehow mirio’s dog got ahold of my suit and it made the tears even worse! i was so stress and y’know when i’m stressed i stress-eat, so i began eating fish snacks and before i even knew what was going on, it was nine o’clock. so i ran here as fast as i could and i tried to manifest tentacles to help me move faster but it turns out i didn’t eat enough fish snacks so i only have one tentacle and i can’t even move it properly- look!”

the fact he said all of that in seemingly one breath left you stunned in place, with you eyes fixated on his rapidly moving lips until they instinctively shifted onto his single tentacle, laying dejected by his feet until it started squirming around. however, that was all it seemed capable of doing — squirming. 

“uuh,” you hummed, trying your best to stifle a snicker as tamaki was clearly in genuine destress. “it’s fine, tama! i was a bit worried that you wouldn’t show but it doesn’t matter, you’re here now so let’s focus on that.” 

your words somewhat calmed him down as his shoulders visibly relaxed, his red eyes tearing off the concrete ground to meet your kind gaze. a slight gasp escaped his lips as he noticed how gorgeous your make-up was, but before he could utter a compliment, his eyes went further downwards as he tried to process the whole of your outfit.

his cheeks immediately burned red at the sight; your stunning purple dress, shimmering heels and matching crystal accessories which were evidently worn to complement his own aesthetic. a certain piece which he was drawn to, was the golden, gemmed ear cuff you wore with pointed tips to form a similar shape to his own ears — one of his biggest physical insecurities.

“you look..” tamaki mused, momentarily cutting himself off to think of a word that would do you justice, “perfect.” his voice was hushed, hardly above a whisper but you were still able to make out what he said and a sheepish grin crept onto your features.

“thank you, baby!” you chirped, perking up slightly and giving him a little twirl, causing a burst of red to explode on his cheeks which he was quick to try cover with his hands. it was moments like these when he wished that hoodies were first-date appropriate, that way he could just sink back into his hood and pretend he doesn’t exist.

“you look really nice too.” there was nothing wrong with a little white lie every now and again. however, it wasn’t even said with the intent of being a lie as you secretly thought that the scruffiness kinda suited tamaki, like, he looked badass! like your prince charming who accidentally fell into a ditch.

your compliment didn’t help the increasing temperature of tamaki’s cheeks either, causing him to slump farther back in his seat as he muttered garbled speech under his breath. it took a good few seconds but eventually he was able to peer at you with a single eye through the inbetweens of his fingers,  “a-and i like your little ear cuff thing.

everything he said only widened your beam and make you feel more giddy, to the point where you were practically bounced in place, “thanks, tama! i saw it and immediately thought of you, so i bought it.” you stifled a squeal at how observant tamaki was being, praising all the small details of your attire which you thought would go unnoticed. “i decided to wear it today because remember how you showed me the tie you bought for our date?” you explained, vaguely gesturing at said tie which hung in tatters around his neck, “yeah, so, i thought we could match.”

it took him a few moments to process what you just said and while his brain was running on overdrive, you were met by his rapid blinking and frozen stature. having known tamaki for a while now, you knew how this was a fairly common occurrence when was truly stunned by something, so you allowed him some time in silence to consolidate. 

“so..” he started, trembling hand dropping from his face and onto his lap so you could see his whole bashful appearance. his gaze seemed to be trained on the floor, until he finally looked up to reveal the twinkle in his eyes, “you’re..you’re wearing that-” he hesitated, swallowing the lump forming in his throat, “for me?”

the thought that you were ashamed to be with him was something that constantly taunted him from the back of this mind. you were heavenly in a way that his words simply could not describe, though that didn’t stop him from trying. it was beyond him how a person as divine as yourself would even give him the time of day; let alone insist that he was beautiful, leave encouraging notes in his locker, comfort him when he shows even the smallest sign of being upset, give him praise on all the thing he was insecure about and so much more.

when he looked in the mirror, he did not see what you see. he viewed his ears as creepy and not a feature he should put on display, hence a part of the many reasons why he’s so fond of his hood. but here you were, all dolled up in his favourite colour just to showcase that you were with him. your ears decorated with pretty cuffs that made them look a similar shape to his, at first glance.

when he’d walk beside you through the corridors of the school or under the shade of the trees in the park, he’d feel the eyes of jealous passersby burn holes through his skin; despite the fact you weren’t even dating him yet, people just hated seeing a guy like himself by your side, apparently. 

he stopped eating before meeting up with you so he wouldn’t have any weird manifestation that could draw attention to himself. he started wearing his hood up at all times so people wouldn’t judge him for his elven ears. he refused to touch you just in case people thought you were dating and became envious of him, which would quickly turn to hatred. 

so why would you want to look like him? why would you want people to know that you are on a date with him? why did you act proud to be with him?

you quirked a brow at how confounded he sounded, thinking over your answer with a hum; you wore this outfit for tamaki and yourself because you thought it was pretty and it suited you. however, it didn’t take a genius to figure out that there was no need to give tamaki the full truth right now so instead you allowed him to enjoy his rare surge of confidence by replying with simply, “yeah, for you.”

you weren’t going to be surprised that he was flattered, by now you were well aware that tamaki held all your opinions on him in high esteem so that’s why you always tried to be as nice to him as possible — that, and it was just in your nature to be kind towards him when he’s been nothing but respectful to you back.

however, what you didn’t expect was to hear faint sobs from behind his hands and watch as crystalline tears poured escaped from the inbetweens of his fingers, racing down the back of his hands. “tamaki..” you murmured, reluctantly taking a seat next to him to wrap your arms around, rubbing comforting circles in his shoulders like you usually did when he was sad. although, you weren’t even completely sure that he was disheartened by your statement. 

“i’m sorry.” you spoke in a hushed voice, leaning in close to his neck until your nose brushed against his skin, resulting in him tilting his head so it rested upon yours. “are you okay?”

“please don’t apologise.” he croaked, stifling his snivels to try show that he wasn’t upset. “you did nothing wrong. in fact, you’ve done everything right. i’m the one who’s been messing up.” he felt your hand ghost over his own and without a second thought, he intertwined his finger with your own, freeing his other palm to place it on your shoulder and exposing his pale, tear-stained face is the process. 

“i know it’s hard but you should tell me what’s on your mind, tamaki.” you hummed, gently caressing the back of his hand with your thumb and planting a kiss on the damp skin of his cheek. his cologne was still suffocating strong but if you were to die, it would ideally be while cuddled up to him, under the celestial night sky. 

opening up had never been an easy task for tamaki; especially about a subject that concerned his physical appearance and emotions. but there was a knot in his chest that would simply come undone when he was with you. he couldn’t explain it, but all the barriers and walls he had established to avoid getting his feeling hurt or heart broken would come crashing down whenever he was with you. perhaps it was a familiarity, maybe it was your reassuring presence or might just be pure love and adoration. 

either way, he found him himself babbling on about anything and everything that bothered him with little regard for his own pride or secrecy, he voiced every thought that came to his mind in the moment. he told you just about it all — all his problems and insecurities —and you listened, offering him encouragement whenever he’d cut himself off, saying something along the lines of, ‘i-i’ll stop now, i sound silly’ or ‘you’re probably tired of hearing me prattle on’. though, of course you didn’t want him to stop until he had gotten everything off his chest as it was a rare sight for him to talk for such lengths at a time so the last thing you wanted to do was discourage him.

“i just..” tamaki stammered, coming to the end of his passionate ramble, “don’t understand why you want to be seen with me, let alone wear those.” he raised his shaky hand from your shoulder to gesture to your ear cuffs, “don’t get me wrong, they look cute on you, but i just don’t get why you’d want to have ears that look like mine.”

“because yours are beautiful!” 

he winced at the compliment and at how sincere you sounded, “well, i’m glad you think that, (y/n).” he muttered, not even having to finish his statement as the dejection in his voice made it obvious that he did not view himself in the same light. his gaze dropped to his feet which were shuffling uncontrollably,  “i don’t know why i’m making such i big deal about this. aren’t you annoyed?” 

your let go of his hands only to slip them around his neck and pull him into your embrace, you felt him tense up in your arms but slowly allow himself to relax his cheek onto your shoulder. “i’m not annoyed, baby. i get what you mean and it’s horrible that you feel that way.” all tamaki could do would tick his tongue in agreement. 

“i know i tell you this all the time but i honestly think you’re so attractive, inside and out. i was so excited when you agreed to date me, i could’ve died of happiness on the spot!” you chirped, momentarily jerked your head backwards so you could peck the tip of his nose, giggling as he scrunched his face up cutely at the sudden touch.

your angelic laugh rung through tamaki’s head, forcing his lips into a smile as he gawked at your adorable action. “i love you..” tamaki uttered, raising his voice ever so slightly to ensure that you heard what he said, “so much.” thanks to you, his sobs were now just mere sniffles into the crook of your neck. 

you inhaled sharply, eyes-widening at his words; you would’ve never thought he would be the first on to say ‘i love you’, but you were far from disappointed, in fact you felt yourself melting further into his touch.

you felt his grip on you tighten, his breathing slowly retuning to it’s regular pace as he squeezed his eyes shut, cancelling out all his other senses so he could focus on the way your body felt against his own. 

he wanted to be confident. he wanted to take pride in himself for you. he was tired of restless nights filled with tears due to his worries berating him for simply existing in your presence. 

it wasn’t going to be easy but he needed to start acting on everything you said. because eventually, it wouldn’t just be for you, it’d be for himself.

and of course, it didn’t go unnoticed by you when he started wearing his hood less often, when he began holding his head up higher as he walks by your side, the way he now shoots warm smiles at people who try to glare at him.

and five years later, how he didn’t bat an eye at deadly glare that the waiter — that had been subtly flirting with you all night — shot at him as he got down on one knee, in front of the whole restaurant. 

[theres-an-impulstor-among-us]

I give you a lot of angsty requests, so here, have a fluffy one!

Among Us: Through some glitch, a round generates with no impostors. For the first little while everyone is really on edge and trying to accuse each other, but they soon realize that nobody is dying and relax, although they're still very confused. Everybody does their tasks as normal, but instead of completing the last task, they all build a big pillow fort under the admin table and just take a rest for a little bit, hanging out and laughing over previous games and just being together without the tension of possible death and betrayal over their heads. Many stories are told, many "bodies" of friends knocked over in pillow fights are "reported", and many memories are made, before they finally decide to end the round! 💙

okay so this request was MEGA detailed so i didn’t get to every single part of it but i hope this is just as good lol

also bring on the angst I DARE YOU /lh

…

A weird feeling in his stomach, Etho presses the emergency meeting button, teleporting everybody to the table. Once everyone is assembled, Etho realises something strange.

“Okay, there’s been no deaths,” he says slowly.

“Wh- Seriously?!” Tango gasps. “That round lasted, like, twenty YEARS! Half the tasks have been done!”

Etho frowns. “Nobody’s seen anything suspicious, or…? No venting?”

Everybody shakes their heads.

“Okay… I guess we’ll skip, then. Everyone keep an eye out, though.”

When the meeting comes to an end, Etho trots after Tango as the latter heads towards weapons. “Hey, Tango? Does something seem a little off about this round to you?”

“Yeah. We’re a bunch of idiots who can barely play this game on a good day - except you, of course,” he adds, “but it’s definitely weird that we went that long without a single kill. The imposters must be really slow for some reason.”

Etho considers this. “Maybe. I’m not convinced.”

He leaves Tango’s side and peels off into navigation as Tango keeps going. After finishing his download, he goes back up and does his task in O2, before heading back to cafeteria to finish wires.

After this, he realises there still hasn’t been a body reported so he catches Astro as the latter enters cafeteria. “Hey, Astro. Can you hit the button for me?”

“Oh, sure.”

Astro presses the emergency meeting button, bringing everyone back to the table. Etho’s suspicions are confirmed when he sees that everybody is still alive.

“Okay, I’m sorry to call you back here, but we need to talk,” Etho says. “There’s something wrong with this round and we may have to abandon it.”

“What do you mean?” Skizz asks confusedly. “What’s wrong with it?”

“It’s been over three minutes and there’s been no kills or sabotages. I apologise if I’m not correct, but I just have a feeling that there’s something wrong. If you’re the imposter, please raise your hand now.”

Nobody moves.

“This isn’t a trick,” Etho adds. “I’m sorry if I’m ruining someone’s imposter round, but I’m genuinely a little concerned that the game has gone wrong.”

“I’ll support you on that,” says Tango. “Etho knows about this stuff. If he’s worried about the game glitching out, I’ll take that seriously. I’m not the imposter, but if anyone else is, I’d advocate coming forward just to make sure nothing’s wrong.”

After a moment, a chorus of murmurs comes from the others, all confirming that none of them are the imposter.

“Okay, so it seems the game has glitched and generated a round with no imposters somehow,” Etho says. “No need to panic; if we all finish our tasks and win the round, it should take us back to the lobby like normal.”

“But do we have to do that, though?” asks Impulse. “Tasks are almost done and there’s no imposters, so why don’t we just hang out a bit, without the threat of death?”

“I’m down for that,” says Endless unexpectedly. “I’ve always wanted to build a pillow fort in admin. The table looks perfect for it.”

“You mean out of pillows like these?” Joker holds up a pillow that he seemingly pulled from out of nowhere. “Hey, Skizz?”

Skizz turns. “What’s u-”

Joker whacks him in the face with the pillow.

“GAAAH!” Skizz shrieks, tripping over his own foot. “What the hell?!”

Clutching the pillow by its corner, Joker doubles over with laughter. “Oh my gosh, your FACE!”

“Okay, that’s it. Imposter or no imposter, I’m gonna murder you.”

Skizz snatches the pillow out of Joker’s hand and swings it at him, but Joker dodges and takes off running down the hallway towards storage, giggling like a child. Unable to help a laugh of his own, Skizz pursues him.

“Where did he even get that?” snickers Tango.

“Same place I got mine,” Endless says, holding up an identical white pillow. “Medbay.”

Brody tries to hold in a laugh. “Endless, I’ll give you a high five if you hit Tango with that pillow right now.”

Endless considers this for a moment.

Tango gives him a warning look. “Don’t. Endless, I swear to-.”

He cuts himself off and ducks as Endless swings the pillow at him, but before he can do it again, Endless brings it back round and whacks him in the side of the head, causing him to let out a yelp.

Laughing uncontrollably, Brody holds up his hand for a high five, which Endless gleefully gives him. “I like this,” he says happily. “I feel cool.”

“Endless, you’re starting something you can’t finish,” Tango warns.

“Then you finish it,” says Impulse unexpectedly, appearing out of nowhere to hand Tango a pillow of his own.

A grin slowly spreads over Tango’s face.

Endless blinks. “Oh. I’m in trouble.”

On the other side of the room, Etho glances sharply over as he hears a THWACK sound and finds Tango and Endless whacking each other viciously with pillows. He chuckles to himself and continues looking through the game’s code.

After a while, Brody approaches him. “Hey Etho, we’re gonna go build a pillow fort in admin. You should come join us.”

“Thanks, but I gotta work through this code.”

“You can do that in the lobby later. C’mon, we’ve got a once-in-a-lifetime thing here. This glitch will probably never happen again. Let’s have some fun on this map while we have the chance.”

After a moment, Etho nods and lets Brody take him into admin, where Mrs Tango and Astro are already piling cushions in the middle of the room.

“Is this what we do when we think the game might’ve gone wrong?” Etho chuckles. “Build pillow forts?”

“I mean, we may as well,” Brody responds. “Right? What else can we do?”

“Finish our tasks and end the round.”

“Where’s the fun in that, though?” says Astro from the floor.

As Etho opens his mouth to respond, Joker bursts into the room and dives behind Etho, who spins round to find Skizz skidding to a halt outside admin. “Where is he?!” he snaps, panting heavily. “I’m gonna kill that idiot!”

“What’s going on?” Brody demands. “Who are you talking about?”

“JOKER! He said my mohawk looks like a dead bush!”

Relaxing, Brody rolls his eyes. “Oh no. How terrible. He’s a MONSTER. We’d better throw him out the airlock right now.”

“Sarcasm duly noted,” Skizz huffs. “Where IS Joker, anyway?”

Brody jerks his thumb over his shoulder. “Hiding under the admin table.”

“Brodyyyyy!” comes Joker’s muffled voice.

Skizz walks into the room and takes note of the group of people setting up the pillows and blankets over the top of the admin table. “So what’s going on here? Boy scout sleepover?”

“Yup,” Astro responds with a grin. “Do you have a problem with that?”

After a moment, Skizz shakes his head. “Nope. Can I borrow a cushion to hit Joker in his stupid face?”

“No,” says Astro firmly.

“Can I suffocate him in a blanket?”

“Absolutely not.”

“Can you relax and stop being a stupid schoolteacher for ten seconds?”

“Not if it means letting you try to kill Joker.”

“C’mon, I’m not ACTUALLY gonna kill him,” complains Skizz. “There’s no imposters this round, remember.”

“Mhm.”

Within five minutes, everyone is huddled under the blanket fort over the admin table, using a rusty lantern as a light source. It’s fairly roomy inside the makeshift tent, but the ten people are still sitting fairly close together.

“So now what?” Brody asks after a while. “Are we gonna talk about something?”

“How about we discuss what kind of dead bush Skizz’s hair looks like?” Joker asks innocently.

Skizz responds to this by whacking Joker in the face with a pillow, knocking him over backwards.

“Oh, report the body!” Tango yelps with a grin. “Skizz did it! Skizz did it!”

This causes the whole group to laugh, even Etho. After many rounds of chaos and suspicion, it’s nice to be able to joke around and relax a bit.

“How does it feel, huh?” Skizz smirks. “How does it feel to be hit with a taste of your own PILLOW?”

“Honestly, I deserved that.”

“Yeah you did.”

Joker yanks Skizz down next to him, grinning. “Shut up.”

A short pause follows this.

“This is the only round we’re gonna get like this, isn’t it?” asks Evil.

Etho nods. “Should be. Why?”

“Dunno. It just feels nice to just hang out with you all as a group and be happy. I love you guys so much.”

“I hate you,” Endless murmurs. “I hate you all.”

Immediately, the two people on either side of him grab him in a simultaneous hug. “Well too bad, cuz we love you,” Astro responds with a smile. “Grumpiness and all.”

A low groan comes from Endless, but everyone can see the hint of a smile on his face.

Etho sits back against the wall and gazes around at his friends. Mrs Tango is resting her head on Tango’s shoulder. Astro and Evil are still hugging and teasing Endless. Brody and Impulse are quietly chuckling together about something. Joker and Skizz have fallen asleep with the tops of their heads touching.

Even though Etho isn’t with anyone in particular at this moment, he still feels connected to his friends. He’s alone but he’s not lonely. And that’s a rare thing for him.

This group really is his family.

[ot3]

i watched red vs blue: zero with my dear friends today and i was asked to “post” my “thoughts” on the subject. Please do not click this readmore unless, for some reason, you want to read three thousand words on the subject of red vs blue: zero critical analysis. i highly doubt that’s the reason anyone is following me, but hey. 

anyway. here you have it. 

Here are my opinions on RVB0 as someone who has quite literally no nostalgia for any older RVB content. I’ve seen seasons 1-13 once and bits and pieces of it more than once here and there, but I only saw it for the first time within the past couple of months. I’ve literally never seen any other RT/AH content. I can name a few people who worked on OG Red vs. Blue but other than Mounty Oum I have NO idea who is responsible for what, really, or what anything else they’ve ever worked on is, or whether or not they’re awful people. I know even less about the people making RVB0 - All I know is that the main writer is named Torrian but I honestly don’t even know if that’s a first name, a last name, or a moniker. All this to say; nothing about my criticism is rooted in any perceived slight against the franchise or branding by the new staff members, because I don’t know or care about any of it. In fact, I’m going to try and avoid any direct comparison between RVB0 and earlier seasons of RVB as a means of critique until the very end, where I’ll look at that relationship specifically.

So here is my opinion of RVB0 as it stands right now:

1. The Writing

Everything about RVB0 feels as if it was written by a first-time writer who hasn’t learned to kill his darlings. The narrative is both simultaneously far too full, leaving very little breathing room for character interaction, and oddly sparse, with a story that lacks any meaningful takeaway, interesting ideas, or genuine emotional connection. It also feels like it’s for a very much younger audience - I don’t mean this as a negative at all. I love tv for kids. I watch more TV for kids than I do for adults, mostly, but I think it’s important to address this because a lot of the time ‘this is for kids’ is used to act like you’re not allowed to critique a narrative thoroughly. It definitely changes the way you critique it, but the critique can still be in good faith.  I watched the entirety of RVB0 only after it was finished, in one sitting, and I was giving it my full attention, essentially like it was a movie. I’m going to assume it was much better to watch in chunks, because as it stood, there was literally no time built into the narrative to process the events that had just transpired, or try and predict what events might be coming in the future. When there’s no time to think about the narrative as you’re watching it, the narrative ends up as being something that happens to the audience, not something they engage with. It’s like the difference between taking notes during a lecture or just sitting and listening. If you’re making no attempt to actively process what’s happening, it doesn’t stick in your mind well. I found myself struggling to recall the events and explanations that had immediately transpired because as soon as one thing had happened, another thing was already happening, and it was like a mental juggling act to try and figure out which information was important enough to dwell on in the time we were given to dwell on it.

Which brings me to another point - pacing. Every event in the show, whether a character moment, a plot moment, or a fight scene, felt like it was supposed to land with almost the exact same amount of emotional weight. It all felt like The Most Important Thing that had Yet Happened. And I understand that this is done as an attempt to squeeze as much as possible out of a rather short runtime, but it fundamentally fails. When everything is the most important thing happening, it all fades into static. That’s what most of 0’s narrative was to me: static. It’s only been a few hours since I watched it but I had to go step by step and type out all of the story beats I could remember and run it by my friends who are much more enthusiastic RVB fans than I am to make sure I hadn’t missed or forgotten anything. I hadn’t, apparently, but the fact that my takeaway from the show was pretty accurate and also disappointingly lackluster says a lot. Strangely enough, the most interesting thing the show alluded to - a holo echo, or whatever the term they used was - was one of the things least extrapolated upon in the show’s incredibly bulky exposition. Benefit of the doubt says that’s something they’ll explore in future seasons (are they getting more? Is that planned? I just realized I don’t actually know.)

And bulky it was! I have quite honestly never seen such flagrant disregard for the rule of “show, don’t tell.” There was not a single ounce of subtlety or implication involved in the storytelling of RVB0. Something was either told to you explicitly, or almost entirely absent from the narrative. Essentially zilch in between. We are told the dynamic the characters have with each other, and their personality pros and cons are listed for us conveniently by Carolina. The plot develops in exposition dumps. This is partially due to the series’ short runtime, but is also very much a result of how that runtime was then used by the writers. They sacrificed a massive chunk of their show for the sake of cramming in a ton of fight scenes, and if they wanted to keep all of those fight scenes, it would have been necessary to pare down their story and characters proportionally in comparison, but they didn’t do that either. They wanted to have it both ways and there simply wasn’t enough time for it. 

The story itself is… uninteresting. It plays out more like the flimsy premise of a video game quest rather than a piece of media to be meaningfully engaged with. RVB0 is I think something I would be pitched by a guy who thinks the MCU and BNHA are the best storytelling to come out of the past decade. It is nothing but tropes. And I hate having to use this as an insult! I love tropes. The worst thing about RVB0 is that nothing it does is wholly unforgivable in its own right. Hunter x Hunter, a phenomenal shonen, is notoriously filled with pages upon pages of detailed exposition and explanations of things, and I absolutely love it. Leverage, my favorite TV show of all time, is literally nothing but a five man band who has to learn to work as a team while seemingly systematically hitting a checklist of every relevant trope in the book. Pacific Rim is an incredibly straightforward good guys vs giant monsters blockbuster to show off some cool fight scenes such as a big robot cutting an alien in half with a giant sword, and it’s some of the most fun I ever have watching a movie. Something being derivative, clunky, poorly executed in some specific areas, narratively weak, or any single one of these flaws, is perfectly fine assuming it’s done with the intention and care that’s necessary to make the good parts shine more. I’ll forgive literally any crime a piece of media commits as long as it’s interesting and/or enjoyable to consume. RVB0 is not that. I’m not sure what the main point of RVB0 was supposed to be, because it seemingly succeeds at nothing. It has absolutely nothing new or innovative to justify its lack of concern for traditional storytelling conventions. Based solely on the amount of screentime things were given, I’d be inclined to say the narrative existed mostly to give flimsy pretense for the fight scenes, but that’s an entire other can of worms.

2. The Visuals + Fights

I have no qualms with things that are all style and no substance. Sometimes you just want to see pretty colors moving on the screen for a while or watch some cool bad guys and monsters or whatever get punched. RVB0 was not this either. The show fundamentally lacked a coherent aesthetic vision. Much of the show had a rather generic sci-fi feel to it with the biggest standouts to this being the very noir looking cityscape, which my friends and I all immediately joked looked like something from a batman game, or the temple, which my friends and I all immediately joked looked like a world of warcraft raid. They were obviously attempting to get variety in their environment design, which I appreciate, but they did this without having a coherent enough visual language to feel like it was all part of the same world. In general, there was also just a lack of visual clarity or strong shots. The value range in any given scene was poor, the compositions and framing were functional at best, and the character animation was unpleasantly exaggerated. It just doesn’t really look that good beyond fancy rendering techniques.

The fight scenes are their entire own beast. Since ‘FIGHT SCENE’ is the largest single category of scenes in the show, they definitely feel worth looking at with a genuine critical eye. Or, at least, I’d like to, but honestly half the time I found myself almost unable to look at them. The camera is rarely still long enough to really enjoy what you’re watching - tracking the motion of the character AND the camera at such constant breakneck high speeds left little time to appreciate any nuances that might have been present in the choreography or character animation. I tried, believe me, I really did, but the fight scenes leave one with the same sort of dizzy convoluted spectacle as a Michael Bay transformers movie. They also really lacked the impact fight scenes are supposed to have.

It’s hard to have a good, memorable fight scene without it doing one of three things: 1. Showing off innovative or creative fighting styles and choreography 2. Making use of the fight’s setting or environment in an engaging and visually interesting way or 3. Further exploring a character’s personality or actions by the way they fight. It’s also hard to do one of these things on its own without at least touching a bit on the other two. For the most part, I find RVB0’s fight scenes fail to do this. Other than rather surface level insubstantial factors, there was little to visually distinguish any of RVB0’s fight scenes from each other. Not only did I find a lot of them difficult to watch and unappealing, I found them all difficult to watch and unappealing in an almost identical way. They felt incredibly interchangeable and very generic. If you could take a fight scene and change the location it was set and also change which characters were participating and have very little change, it’s probably not a good fight scene. 

I think “generic” is really just the defining word of RVB0 and I think that’s also why it falls short in the humor department  as well.

3. The Comedy

Funny shit is hard to write and humor is also incredibly subjective but I definitely got almost no laughs out of RVB0. I think a total of three. By far the best joke was Carolina having a cast on top of her armor, which, I must stress, is an incredibly funny gag and I love it. But overall I think the humor fell short because it felt like it was tacked on more than a natural and intentional part of this world and these characters. A lot of the jokes felt like they were just thrown in wherever they’d fit, without any build up to punchlines and with little regard for what sort of joke each character would make. Like, there was some, obviously Raymond’s sense of humor had the most character to it, but the character-oriented humor still felt very weak. When focusing on character-driven humor, there’s a LOT you can establish about characters based on what sort of jokes they choose to make, who they’re picking as the punchlines of these jokes, and who their in-universe audience for the jokes is. In RVB0, the jokes all felt very immersion-breaking and self aware, directed wholly towards the audience rather than occurring as a natural result of interplay between the characters. This is partially due to how lackluster the character writing was overall, and the previously stated tight timing, but also definitely due to a lack of a real understanding about what makes a joke land. 

A rule of thumb I personally hold for comedy is that, when push comes to shove, more specific is always going to be more funny. The example I gave when trying to explain this was this:

saying two characters had awkward sex in a movie theater: funny

saying two characters had an awkward handjob in a cinemark: even funnier

saying two characters spent 54 minutes of 11:14's 1:26 runtime trying out some uncomfortably-angled hand stuff in the back of a dilapidated cinemark that lost funding halfway through retrofitting into a dinner theater: the funniest

The more specific a joke is, the more it relies on an in-depth understanding of the characters and world you’re dealing with and the more ‘realistic’ it feels within the context of your media. Especially with this kind of humor. When you’re joking with your friends, you don’t go for stock-humor that could be pulled out of a joke book, you go for the specific. You aim for the weak spots. If a set of jokes could be blindly transplanted into another world, onto another cast of characters, then it’s far too generic to be truly funny or memorable. I don’t think there’s a single joke in RVB0 where the humor of it hinged upon the characters or the setting.

Then there’s the issue of situational comedy and physical comedy. This is really where the humor being ‘tacked on’ shows the most. Once again, part of what makes actually solid comedy land properly is it feeling like a natural result of the world you have established. Real life is absurd and comical situations can be found even in the midst of some pretty grim context, and that’s why black comedy is successful, and why comedy shows are allowed to dip into heavier subject matter from time to time, or why dramas often search for levity in humor. It’s a natural part of being human to find humor in almost any situation. The key thing, though, once again, is finding it in the situation. Many of RVB0’s attempts at humor, once again, feel like they would be the exact same jokes when stripped from their context, and that’s almost never good. A pretty fundamental concept in both storytelling in general but particularly comedy writing is ‘setup and payoff’. No joke in RVB0 is a reward for a seemingly innocuous event in an earlier scene or for an overlooked piece of environmental design. The jokes pop in when there’s time for them in between all the exposition and fighting, and are gone as soon as they’re done. There’s no long term, underlying comedic throughline to give any sense of coherence or intent to the sense of humor the show is trying to establish. Every joke is an isolated one-off quip or one-liner, and it fails to engage the audience in a meaningful way.

All together, each individual component of RVB0 feels like it was conjured up independently, without any concern to how it interacted with the larger product they were creating. And I think this is really where it all falls apart. RVB0 feels criminally generic in a way reminiscent of mass-market media which at least has the luxury of attributing these flaws, this complete and total watering down of anything unique, to heavy oversight and large teams with competing visions. But I don’t think that’s the case for RVB0. I don’t know much about what the pipeline is like for this show, but I feel like the fundamental problem it suffers from is a lack of heart.

In comparison to Red vs. Blue

Let's face it. This is a terrible successor to Red vs. Blue. I wouldn’t care if NONE of the old characters were in it - that’s not my problem. I haven’t seen past season 13 because from what I heard the show already jumped the shark a bit and then some. That’s not what makes it a poor follow up. What makes it a bad successor is that it fundamentally lacks any of the aspects of the OG RVB that made it unique or appealing at all. I find myself wondering what Torrian is trying to say with RVB0 and quite literally the only answer I find myself falling back onto is that he isn’t trying to say anything at all. Regardless of what you feel about the original RVB, it undeniably had things to say. The opening “why are we here” speech does an excellent job at establishing that this is a show intended to poke fun at the misery of bureaucracy and subservience to nonsensical systems, not just in the context of military life, but in a very broad-strokes way almost any middle-class worker can relate to. At the end of the day, fiction is at its best when it resonates with some aspect of its audience’s life. I know instantly which parts of the original Red vs Blue I’m supposed to relate to. I can’t say anything even close to that about 0.

RVB is an absurdist parody that heavily satirizes aspects of the military and life as a low-on-the-food-chain worker in general that almost it’s entire target audience will be familiar with. The most significant draw of the show to me was how the dialogue felt like listening to my friends bicker with each other in our group chats. It required no effort for me to connect with and although the narrative never outright looked to the camera and explained ‘we are critiquing the military’s stupid red tape and self-fullfilling eternal conflict’ they didn’t need to, because the writing trusted itself and its audience enough to believe this could be conveyed. It is, in a way, the complete antithesis to the badass superhero macho military man protagonist that we all know so well. RVB was saying something, and it was saying it in a rather novel format.

Nothing about RVB0 is novel. Nothing about RVB0 says anything. Nothing about it compels me to relate to any of these characters or their situations. RVB0 doesn’t feel like absurdism, or satire. RVB0 feels like it is, completely uncritically, the exact media that RVB itself was riffing off of. Both RVB0 and RVB when you watch them give you the feeling that what you’re seeing here is kids on a playground larping with toy soldiers. It’s all ridiculous and over the top cliche stupid garbage where each side is trying to one-up the other. The critical difference is, in RVB, we’re supposed to look at this and laugh at how ridiculous this is. In RVB0 we’re supposed to unironically think this is all pretty badass. 

The PFL arc of the original RVB existed to show us that setting up an elite team of supersoldiers with special powers was something done in bad faith, with poor outcomes, that left everyone involved either cruel, damaged, or dead. It was a bad thing. And what we’re seeing in RVB0 is the same premise, except, this time it’s good. We’re supposed to root for this format. RVB0 feels much more like a demo reel, cutscenes from a video game that doesn’t exist, or a shonen anime fanboy’s journal scribbling than it feels like a piece of media with any objective value in any area.  In every area that RVB was anti-establishment, RVB0 is pure undiluted establishment through and through.  

[malachi-walker]

Happy birthday, Mal! I love your fics, they evoke so much emotion in me and have made me cry many a time. I don't often reread fics, but i've reread multiple chapters of Rhythm and Blues because they're stuck with me so much. You capture the emotional pain of their trauma and the catharsis that comes with their growth so beautifully. You also write some brilliant meta and just consistently post some fantastic thoughts. Also your love for swords is very appreciated. <3 have a lovely day!

First of all, my apologies for not replying sooner. I was making my mind up about something that would definitely require the use of a read more and thus necessitate dragging myself to desktop (which I hate because my laptop predates the dinosaurs.)

But seriously. Thank you so much. This is honestly one of the sweetest comments I've ever gotten and definitely made my already pretty sweet bday even better.

So about that read more. In honor of you, @metalesbo, my friends @n7punk and @jem-jarrett and everyone else who sent me well wishes or just really loves my work... Here's the opening section of the next chapter of R&B. Enjoy. It's a long one.

Adora Eternia is about two months shy of her fourteenth birthday when she first realizes she's in love with her best friend.

Though--if asked--she would hasten to explain that it wasn't when she fell in love. But trying to pinpoint the exact moment is an exercise in catching mist: the more she tries to grasp it in her hands the more it spreads out and covers everything. It just is: pure and simple and very, very complicated.

It's the beginning of December and the whole town is covered in a thick blanket of snow. Winterfest will be here in a few weeks, so to help out the kids who want to get gifts for their friends the Right Zone administration has shuffled around the groups that usually take their monthly trips on the third and fourth Sundays of the month to double up with the other two. As part of group three, she and Catra got the first week (the other three members of their crew are week two folks anyway and thus outside the reorganization.)

It's still kinda weird to think that: their crew. For so long, it was just Catra and Adora. Adora and Catra. One unit bound together, just them against the world. But there's also something nice about being part of a small cluster, their "scrappy little lone wolf pack" as Catra had once put it with a wry grin before Lonnie shoved her over with an, "Excuse you, I'm a great people person when I'm not busy making sure you idiots haven't set yourselves on fire!"

They all got a good laugh out of that one.

But regardless, the holidays are coming up and this is the first year that any of their group has felt like actually doing anything for it, aside from wrangling together a sleepover and seeing if they can convince the kitchen staff to slip them some leftover eggnog.

They made each other promise not to go too extravagant and keep each person's gift to ten dollars or lower. Even though their quarterly stipend has increased from three hundred to four hundred to match with inflation over the past eight years, it still isn't a whole lot for three month's worth of expenses, especially when they also have to budget regularly for clothes to keep up with the seemingly endless growth spurts.

There's also the usual budgetary concern of keeping her and Catra's first aid kit well supplied...

Adora shakes her head to dislodge the intrusive thought and continues marching onward through the snow. This trip is a good thing. She won't let all the awful realities of their life taint it.

With so many kids running around and wanting to shop on their own to surprise their giftees, Right Zone had to negotiate with both the local police and whatever other civic authorities they could get ahold of to come out en masse and keep an eye on them all. The kids had still come with their usual teachers, of course, but doubling the load and also splitting up was a logistical nightmare. Which is just a convoluted way to say the town is positively crawling with uniformed officers, off duty members of the fire brigade, emergency personnel, and other such authority figures quietly keeping watch and making sure no one tries anything.

Adora knows that somewhere in the press of bodies, Grizzlor's busy wrangling two new "brats" (seven and nine, respectively, and definitely not friends.) Somewhere, a certain Magicat is probably grumbling over the indignity of being forced to wear shoes and kicking every snowpile she can, like she can send a direct message to whatever cosmic force is responsible for her current frustration.

On an ordinary month she and Catra--being old enough to be allowed a bit more freedom to do what they want--would buddy up to watch each other's backs while they did their shopping. But this isn't an ordinary month, so once they'd each gotten gifts for the other three they'd split up on opposite ends of Main Street with an agreement to move clockwise to avoid running into each other. Afterwards, the entire group would rendezvous at the small clock tower in the park a block over before heading back to Right Zone.

Ten dollars wasn't a lot to work with, but Adora had done her best: a new stress ball for Kyle, some moisturizing oil for Rogelio since the early winter shed had wiped out his supply and he'd been too busy to pick up some more, a twelve pound kettle weight for Lonnie now that their shared exercise routine was getting a bit too easy for her... Utilitarian choices, to be sure, but she's been paying attention and that has to count for something.

Catra's the difficult one, of course. Partly because Adora doesn't want to just get her something practical, but also because they share nearly everything between them already. About the only thing that is definitively off limits is Catra's guitar, and she's told Adora enough about her time with Tao over the years that Adora wouldn't even ask. Beyond that... Well, there's a reason why most of Adora's day off hoodies have small strands of orange fur stuck to them.

Still. I want to get her something that's hers. Something she'll like. Something she doesn't have to share with anyone, not even me.

In the end, she nearly walks past it. In one of the artisanal shops that dot small towns like liver spots, she finds a display of hand stamped necklace pendants, with a design sheet beside it. There are a lot of the usual nature designs and such, but the one that catches her eye is a treble clef with the five staff lines bleeding out from it. They ring the edge of the pendant in a half circle, and scattered haphazardly along the lines are the other music notes.

The lack of proper order would drive Adora insane. She understands that it's just meant to look pretty, not be an accurate representation of musical notation, but still... She knows her own (broken) brain well enough to know that.

It suits Catra, though.

"Hey," Mismatched eyes looked down at Adora as her head draped backwards over the back of their desk chair, the throbbing behind her left eye threatening to escalate into a migraine. "Guess I don't have to ask how the composing's going."

"It sucks," Adora groused back, sitting up and gesturing Catra over. She jabbed at two particular spots with the half chewed off eraser end of her pencil, two hard jabs each, like she was filing a complaint. "Most of it is just what I'm going for, but these two places here... They aren't sounding right. I've been going back and forth over structure all afternoon, but nothing I do helps."

"Hmmm..." Catra stroked her chin and nudged Adora over so she could sit on the arm of the chair (they'd never gotten around to requesting a second, mostly because Adora didn't want to risk Shadow Weaver suspecting they were getting too chummy.) "Got any scratch paper?"

Adora pointed to the pile of half crumpled notebook paper she used when making adjustments and Catra snorted. "Ok, dumb question. Just let me see here..."

Grabbing a pen, she quickly inked a fresh set of staff lines and copied the notes Adora had already put down, making sure to leave space to work. Glancing between the two, she drummed her fingers on the desk, playing along in her head.

"Hmm..." Catra murmured, worrying at her lower lip with a fang in a manner that was... Oddly distracting. "Ok, how 'bout this?"

Adora jolted, tearing her gaze from Catra's face to look at the sequence of notes scribbled onto the scratch paper. She paused, brow furrowing as she played them over in her mind's eye. It was a little unorthodox, veering away from the path she had carefully laid out... But also blending well with the next part. Almost like the notes took a quick detour and then lead the listener back to where she wanted them.

"Yeah..." Adora replied thoughtfully, the tension all over her body starting to smooth out. "Yeah, that could work."

"Awesome. Let's take a look at the next part."

They ultimately ended up spending several hours going over the entire piece, sussing out every place where Adora was having even the slightest niggle of unease. She didn't accept all of Catra's changes and Catra didn't push the matter, but the ones she did...

They felt right. More right than they had ever felt when it was just Adora running circles around herself.

When they finally finished up she looked over at Catra, tail waving sedately in that way it got when she was simultaneously engaged but relaxed, and asked, "Umm... Do you want to learn with me? I like doing this."

'I like making music with you.'

Catra paused, looking over at Adora searchingly, almost like she couldn't believe the question had come up. No matter how many years had passed between them, that look never really went away, and every time she saw it Adora's chest ached in a way that was hard for her to process.

"I'd like that."

Catra's composing style is very different from Adora's. More wild, more willing to bend and break the rules if it means maintaining audience engagement, but there's always an underlying order to the chaos. To her surprise and pleasure, Adora found herself learning just as much from Catra as Catra was learning from her. Their styles brought out the best in each other.

The jingle of a bell kicks her out of the memory. Mind made up even though it's nearly double her budget, Adora scans the stand of necklaces for the one with the treble clef pattern.

It isn't there. Adora swallows down the disappointment, though she can't help the sigh. Of course. The town was well aware of the large population of music students a short drive away and catered to them accordingly. But there are also dozens of kids out on the street tonight. It isn't that big of a surprise that the design sold out.

Not surprising, but disheartening nonetheless.

She's just begun to turn away when a voice calls from the back. "Hang on a sec there, little miss."

Adora jumps, but remains where she is as a large Taurian man with a massive snow white beard trundles out from a door behind the counter, wiping his hands on his apron. "Was there a particular design you were interested in?"

Adora points at the treble clef, hope rising. "This one. But it looks like it's already sold out."

"Hmm..." The man scratchs at his chin. "Well with Winterfest coming up, I'm out of blank pendants-"

Adora's shoulders slump.

"-But," The man continues with a smile. "I can double stamp it onto the back of another. Ordinarily I'd charge extra for that, but it's my fault for not ordering enough blanks. Rookie move. Besides, it's the holidays. Now would that be all right by you?"

Nodding frantically in case he changes his mind, Adora scans the other designs, quickly alighting on one in particular. "That one!"

"The claw marks? Bit of an odd combination, but the customer is always right," The old man winked as he reached out to take the necklace from her. "My jig and press is in the corner over here if you wanna watch."

Adora was glad he specified, because as nice as the man seemed there was no way in hell she was going into a back room with a stranger. But she stood next to the window beside a display of miscellaneous knick knacks and puzzles, watching him carefully place the pendant in a cushioned stand to avoid damaging the already printed side and tighten it into place before moving beside the machine.

"You're gonna want to cover your ears," He tells her, patting the machine with one massive hand. "Had to switch to a steam press when the arthritis caught up to me. Used to do it all by hammer. This boy's okay, but he gets loud."

Adora nods, glad for the warning when he bellows "Clear!" and the machine's hammer comes down once, twice, three times with a sound like the ringing of an enormous bell. Once the machine is stopped and carefully turned off, the old man removes the pendant from the press and hands it over to Adora for inspection. "What do you think? Does it pass muster?"

Adora runs her fingertips over the impressions in the metal, memorizing the feel of it, the leftover warmth of the impact. "Perfect."

"Good. Now let's get you rung up."

Counting the five dollars she attempted to surreptitiously slip into the tip jar (the old man winked as he turned back around, so stealth fail) Adora went very over budget, but the others would have to put a gun to her head for her to admit it.

Besides, it's Catra. They already know she's the sole exception to all of Adora's carefully maintained rules.

With everything finished, she continues trudging through the snow toward the park, breathing a sign of relief as she moves away from the shopping district and the people thin out; no one wanting to go to the park in the middle of such bleak weather. Angling around a clustered group of bare trees, she spots the small clock tower in the distance, as well as the figure already standing beside it. Grinning, Adora picks up the pace a bit until she can see Catra clearly and--

Her breath catches.

Since her only experience with this kind of thing has been through books, Adora always expected this moment would be more dramatic. Like back to back in the middle of a fight, or eyes locking from up on stage. Something spectacular, like fireworks, lime explosions, like the feeling of playing a song without a single mistake for the first time. It's always seemed like such a big deal in the stories, and in a way, it is.

Because there's Catra, lost in her own world as she gazes up at the streetlight that's just come on, her left hand extended to let the snowflakes fall into her palm and the light catches the orange of her fur just right to make a blaze of color against the black of her coat. She looks so small, standing in that space all alone on a cold winter's night, but Adora knows deep down that she could never be that small, not when she's Catra, not when she means so much...

Pretty much everything about the past hour--about her entire life since they met if she's being honest--snaps into crystal clear focus.

Oh. I get it now. I'm in love with you.

It's a bad idea. Adora knows that. Shadow Weaver is enough of a menace while believing Catra is simply her roommate, her sometime tool--and Catra had ended up being all too right about the torture not stopping, even after years of Adora trying to direct Weaver's attentions away from her. If the evil old bitch figures out Adora's feelings run deeper, so much deeper...

Her heart beats double time. This whole thing is an unmitigated disaster.

But it's still the best worst thing that's ever happened to her.

She must make a noise, because Catra's ear twitches in her direction, snapping her out of that distant contemplation. She turns her head and looks at Adora, lips curling in a lopsided grin. "Hey, Adora. Wow, you look like you've seen a ghost."

Adora blinks, coming back to herself and mumbling the first excuse that springs to mind. "... Just cold."

"Well no shit. C'mere."

When she closes the distance Catra glances around warily, making sure they're the only ones around, before reaching up and retying the scarf around Adora's neck, patting it once when she's done. "There. I know I make it look good, but you don't have the advantage of fur like me."

Adora looks down at the thin AC/DC t-shirt that Catra's wearing beneath her half open coat, the line of her collarbones and neck, and makes a snap decision. "Is it okay if I give you your present now?"

Catra blinks, a little thrown by the non sequitur. "I mean... Sure? Do you want me to give you yours?"

"I'm good with either," Adora shrugs, trying to ignore how fast her heart is beating, how much she wants to do this before this moment slips away. "I just want to."

There's a long moment of silence as they each examine the other, equally searching. What Catra's looking for, Adora doesn't know. She isn't sure she wants to know.

"Okay."

Breathing deep, Adora reaches into her pocket and pulls out the necklace on its leather cord. Careful to keep the pendant hidden in her hand, she passes it over, fingertips sparking as it's taken. Catra brings it close to her face, running her fingers over the four parallel slashes on the side facing her.

"Why the claw marks?"

Adora laughs, nervous butterflies positively rioting in her stomach. "Because you're a badass. Duh."

"True," Catra smirks, flipping it over and squinting at the other side. "And this?"

"Badass, loves music with all your heart. Not mutually exclusive concepts," Adora says, trying not to give away how much she thinks about this, how much she wants to take that hand in hers. She settles for a playful shoulder bump instead. "Plus we all know you're secretly a big softie."

"Excuse you, I am all sharp edges," Catra giggles, lightly elbowing her before transitioning into a soft little smile. "... Just not with everyone."

Oh God oh God oh God. That smile will absolutely be the death of her.

Swallowing past her horrible awareness of that softness, Adora asks, "So you like it?"

"I love it. Good luck ever getting me to take it off," Catra laughs, then frowns, flexing her fingers. "Hands have gone a little numb, though. Help me put it on?"

Adora.exe promptly crashes to desktop. But she still somehow manages to move, helping Catra hold back her mane so she can slip the leather cord over her head and tuck it beneath her hair. If she hesitates a moment too long in letting go, at least Catra only shoots her an amused glance. "How's it look?"

"Great," Adora manages to croak out, trying to swallow past the sudden dryness in her throat. "You look great. Umm... Happy early Winterfest, I guess?"

"Well, I'm gonna hold onto yours a little longer," Catra laughs, playfully sticking out her tongue before reaching out. "C'mere, you big dork."

Adora shuffles closer, mind and heart both screaming as Catra draws her into a hug, nuzzling her head against the side of her neck. A little whisper. "Thank you."

Adora swallows again, even harder. "You're welcome."

Between them, the necklace rests, the music side pressed right up against Catra's heart.

----------

Fun fact: the shopkeep is based off a cool old dude selling machine pressed necklaces I ran into at a Scottish festival when I was 13, and he made such an impression I never forgot him. Anyway, happy Valentine's! Have a Big Gay Realization!