#anyway. and if i start my one woman campaign to get him the cover of vogue australia? | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

munsonslove · 2 years ago

Note

Hi! I love you writing and I was wondering if you could write a fic we’re Eddie and the reader kinda have like a frenemies vibe going on and then one day they sleep together but Eddie has no idea the reader is a virgin because of people saying stories about her and then they sleep together and he finds out after they did it??

Can I Kiss You?

(18+ only)

a/n: thanks so much for the request, & thank you everyone for 1k followers!!! i’m so happy people are liking my little stories <3 a few notes: reader is dustin’s older sister in this fic, but i make it a point to say that she was adopted, so you can def read this as not white reader still. i also briefly mention the reader’s birth parents passing away when she was very young, so tw for family death. and there’s a part where it’s said that the reader’s last name isn’t henderson (because she kept her original surname after being adopted) so if anyone’s reading this and your irl last name is henderson… just like pretend it’s not for a sec? oh also i hid a taylor swift lyric in here. first person to find it wins! anyways i hope y’all like it!!

summary: Your little brother's annoying DM is always hanging around and trying to bother you. Embarrassingly, you developed a crush on him, you were just too proud to do anything about it.

wordcount: 7.3k

tags/warnings: fem!virgin!reader (18+ and a high school graduate), also adopted!henderson!reader, slight mention of family death, fluff, smut, friends/frenemies to lovers, praise kink, fingering (f receiving), descriptions of masturbation (both f and m receiving), use of pet names (baby, princess), unprotected p in v penetration (she’s on the pill, use condoms irl of course), no use of y/n

“He’s not here,” you deadpan with a roll of your eyes as you open the front door. You weren’t expecting any visitors, so when you heard knocking you were quick to find a makeshift weapon before seeing who it was. Your paranoia diminished when you saw it was merely your little brother's DM.

“I’d be tempted to say ‘how do you know I’m not here to see you?’, but that lamp in your hands has me second guessing myself,” Eddie replies with a laugh, pushing past you to enter your home without permission. “You gonna attack me, princess? Didn’t know you found me that annoying.”

“I’m a young woman home alone, and a lot of really strange things happen in this town,” you explain, setting the lamp back down on the end table. “Sue me for being defensive.”

He shakes off his backpack and tosses on the floor. “Better safe than sorry I guess,” he agrees, though you can hear his amused smirk in his tone. “Why you home alone? Your mom got a hot date or something?”

“Book club,” you correct him while crossing your arms, “And Dustin’s sleeping over at the Wheeler’s.”

Eddie hums in response, licking his lips as he looks you up and down. “Cute pajamas,” he says, winking at you.

At his comment, you realize with a start that your robe had fallen open, and crossing your arms only accentuated the suggestive low cut of your silk nightie. Quickly scrambling to cover yourself and retie the knot, you frustratedly grumble, “What are you even doing here? Dustin didn’t say anything about you coming over.”

He flops down on the couch, kicking his feet up on the coffee table and settling into the well-worn cushions, making himself at home. “He talked me into letting him DM for a campaign, so I thought I’d stop by with my copy of the Dungeon Master’s Guide. He was bitching about only having the Player’s Handbook and Monster Manual, so…” he trails off with a shrug as he leans forward to snatch the remote to the TV from next to his boot.

“Get your dirty shoes off of my mother’s clean furniture,” you scold before physically grabbing his ankles and forcing his feet to the floor. “Can you at least pretend to have manners?”

“I could try, but then you wouldn’t have a crush on me anymore,” he laughs, then hooks one of his fingers into the belt of your robe, pulling you down to be seated next to him. He rests his arm on the back of the couch behind your shoulders, not reacting when you retort with a curt ‘In your dreams.’

You know that logistically you could make him leave- this was your home, after all- but the possibility of him actually going without protest was very low. It seemed like Eddie’s favorite thing in the world was annoying you, and sometimes you find yourself missing the days back when he barely acknowledged your existence. He was originally two years ahead of you in school, but due to him being held back twice he ended up being a part of your graduating class. You didn’t run in the same crowd, in fact you couldn’t have been further out of each other’s social spheres. You were quite popular, invited to many parties, even won prom queen your senior year. Eddie, on the other hand, only showed up at parties to sell drugs, and didn’t attend prom for any of his senior years.

When your little brother entered high school, you worried about him being bullied. You were aware that most of the school’s population were under the impression that Dungeon and Dragons was a devil worshiping cult, and the Hellfire club along with it. Having been exposed to the game for so long thanks to Dustin’s nerdy interests, you knew better than what the propaganda surrounding D&D tried to peddle to the public, but you held concerns that your status-obsessed ‘friends’ wouldn’t be so easily convinced otherwise. Popularity was never something you sought out, it just came naturally to you, and while it was nice always having weekend plans there was no way in hell you were going to let anyone give your baby brother and his friends any shit. If sticking up for your family made the ‘cool kids’ at school not want to have you in their clique, then that was fine by you. To your surprise, everyone seemed to get the message loud and clear that Dustin and his band of misfits were off limits bullying-wise, and you were able to stay relatively well liked by your peers.

The first time you stood up for Dustin, it was a few weeks into his freshman year in the hallway before first period. One of the guys from the basketball team was giving him a hard time, and you marched right up to the meathead jock and shoved him away. You made sure to get your point across that if you ever saw him fucking with your brother again that you weren’t afraid to fight back. The opposing boy cowered away, not expecting one of the most popular girls at Hawkins to so adamantly defend who he considered a ‘nerd’. Word traveled fast, and by lunchtime the hottest gossip was how you sucker-punched Damian Smith square in the jaw outside of Mrs. Hackett’s classroom this morning. It wasn’t true by a long shot, but you found it rather amusing how much the story got twisted when there were so many witnesses. That day was also the first time you spoke to Eddie.

He had cornered you in the cafeteria, and was attempting to use his ‘bad boy, outcast’ demeanor to intimidate you into leaving Dustin alone. Some of the cheerleaders got the attention of their boyfriends, and pretty soon a group had gathered to see why someone at the bottom of the food chain was messing with you. You called them off with a wave of your hand, then took Eddie’s arm to drag him out into the hall and figure out what the hell he was talking about. He clearly had the wrong idea, because he was telling you off about ‘pretending to stand up for the nerdy freshmen’ and how he ‘knew this was part of some elaborate prank’.

He had no idea you were Dustin’s sister. It made sense, you didn’t look all that similar and you didn’t even share a last name. Your biological parents were family friends of the Hendersons, and they died when you were fairly young. You were legally adopted by your godmother, and were raised as a member of the family. Most everyone who you’ve told has tried to console you after learning the truth, and while it is sad that you didn’t get to grow up with your birth mother and father, you know you were lucky to be a Henderson (by love, not by name). Family is family, even if there’s no blood relation, and that’s exactly what you told Eddie. You let him know that he could accuse you of being one of those airheads whose main concern is how many pages of the yearbook they make it on, but that wasn’t going to stop you from beating the shit out of anyone who tried to give your brother a hard time.

With Eddie becoming a close friend of Dustin’s, even somewhat of a role model (much to your dismay), you saw him pretty often. He was always finding excuses to come over, and you suspected it had something to do with his new life mission of bothering you at every waking moment. The two of you didn’t hate each other per se, on the contrary you actually always secretly enjoyed spending time with the metalhead, despite your differences. That being said, your rapport consisted mainly of jestful bantering, constantly trying to have the one-up in the exchange. You both finished high school together, he actually gave you a ride to graduation (not without a snide comment on the length of your dress, prompting a middle finger from you). Now you were taking a gap year before college and he was staying in Hawkins to focus on his music, the plan being to move to Indianapolis when the final member of Corroded Coffin graduated. With the freedom awarded by not attending Hawkins anymore- from both the stressful preparation for another four years of school and the pressure to stick to the status quo- you found yourself spending a lot of downtime with Eddie. You’re not quite sure either of you would readily call the other a friend, but maybe relationship labels were overrated. All you knew was that if Dustin was hitching a ride home, you could count on Eddie’s van being parked in the driveway for at least a couple hours while he berated you inside.

Lately though, the playful bickering between you two morphed into what almost felt like flirting. Eddie seemed to be laying it on thicker and thicker each time he came to see you, as if he was testing the waters for how much he could get away with without you getting upset. What he didn’t know, however, was that you’ve been harboring a secret crush on him for a while now. After actually getting to know him through the excuse of you both caring about Dustin, you came to the realization that he’s not all bad like his reputation.

Eddie switches on the TV, turning it to your favorite channel without asking and setting the remote back down on the table. It’s the little gestures like these that have you falling harder for him everyday. You lose your train of thought getting lost in fantasies of doing exactly this with him, only while being able to call him your boyfriend. You’re ripped back to reality when his arm shifts from the back of the couch to actually over your shoulders. His face doesn’t show any sign that he thinks of this as overly intimate, so you try to not let any reaction show.

Some hours pass this way, and you wonder how long Eddie plans to stay for. You silently pray that your neighbors won’t say anything to your mom about his van parked in the driveway, but even if they do, the tingling you felt in your chest was well worth it- and besides, no matter what she said, you were an adult. Just as you're thinking this, Eddie stands to pick his bag up off of the floor, slipping the books he brought out onto the coffee table, before zipping it back up and holding it awkwardly in his hands.

“I guess I should probably get going,” he says with a shrug, “It’s getting late, and your mom will be home soon.”

“She said they were going to drink wine,” you respond. “You know Claudia, she wouldn’t drive after having even a sip. She’s going to sleep on her friend’s couch.”

“Oh,” he says, his eyes lighting up a little before he purses his lips and looks out the window. “Well, it’s pretty dark out now. I don’t wanna keep you up…”

There’s a brief pocket of silence, neither of you wanting to be the one to suggest what you’re thinking for fear of the other not returning the same feeling. You don’t want your disappointment at the idea of him not staying to be too evident, but you’re not sure how convincing you’re being. Your gaze drops down to his pretty lips, distracted by how he’s biting them, and wishing you could bite them instead. Faintly, so faintly you’re almost unsure if you even really heard it, he speaks your name, bringing your attention back to his eyes. You watch as he gathers the courage for his next words.

“Can I kiss you?”

It’s like time stops. You resist the urge to squeal like a little girl with a crush, but that is exactly how you feel. Slowly, you nod your head before moving your lips to say, ‘Yes,’ though no sound escapes you. He drops the bag, and kicks it out of the way when it lands at his feet before taking long strides toward you. The both of you lean forward, and he tilts his head slightly to make room for your noses. His breath fans your lips as he hesitates to close the distance. Impatient after months of pining, you grab him by the zipper of his jacket and finally do what you’ve been dreaming about for so long.

His lips are as soft as they look, and you conclude that your theory about his chapstick addiction is correct. With as much as he smokes (medicinal or otherwise), he must moisturize them pretty often. He actually tastes very faintly of tobacco, and you remember how he said he was trying to quit and only smoked cigarettes when he was jittery. You wonder if that meant that you make him as nervous as he makes you. The dirty taste was thankfully mostly covered up by a strong minty flavor, and that only makes you wonder even more, this time about if he also obsesses over little detail when he knows he’s going to see you. Whenever Dustin would inform you Eddie was on his way over, you would find yourself primping in front of the mirror, making sure your hair fell in place just the right way and your skin was clear of any blemishes. You even did this before you fully understood your feelings for the man were romantic. Picturing him having the afterthought to pop a mint before driving over to see you had you smiling against his lips.

“What?” he laughs, pulling away from you slightly and raising an eyebrow with both curiosity and amusement.

“Nothing,’ you reply, giggling softly. “Just thinking.”

“Oh? What about?” he asks, leaning in once again to peck you chastely before simply resting his forehead against your and gazing into your eyes. He walks you backwards, back to the couch and sits, pulling you down next to him.

You shake your head, still smiling. Your mind was racing a mile a minute and it was too much to explain, especially when the only thing you wanted was for him to kiss you silly. “Not now. Just come here,” you whisper as you thread your fingers through his hair and push yourself flush against him, ending up fully sat in his lap with his hands gripping your thighs.

You two last like this for a while, (mostly) innocently kissing, just enjoying the feeling of finally giving into temptation. Pretty soon, Eddie’s touch begins to roam, and your hips begin to rock. It was very quickly crossing the line from PG-13 to R. When you feel his cock harden beneath you, you make up your mind about what you want to happen.

“Eddie,” you moan while his tongue circles a bite mark he left on your neck, soothing the sting. He dismisses the sound, lost in his own world as his hands find purchase on your butt, assisting your movements against him. “Eddie,” you try again, shaking his shoulders slightly.

He immediately slides his hands up to a more modest area on your waist, and he lifts his head away from your neck to look at you. His pupils are blown wide, and his hair is wild. “Yeah, baby?” he says, sounding out of breath.

“Do you want to go to my room?” you ask. You can tell by the way he glances back down at your lips, then to your thighs, and finally back up to your eyes, that he knows exactly what you are implying.

“A- are you sure?” he forces out, barely believing what he’s hearing.

“I’m sure,” you confirm. “I’m ready.”

You’re both hurrying down the hallway, nearly tripping over each other’s feet in your haste. The walk to your bedroom is short, but after putting off the inevitable for so long, you can barely wait and have to resist jumping his bones before reaching your destination. Throwing open the door, he ushers you inside and shuts it behind him.

Eddie’s heavy leather jacket thuds as it hits the floor, his shirt being discarded soon after. Your mouth waters at the sight of his tattoos, but you barely have time to admire his partial nudity. He’s on top of you in a flash, pressing you into the wall and kissing you passionately. His curious hands rake over your body, and their wandering loosen the knot on your robe’s belt, causing the thick fabric to open slightly and expose your collarbone. Like a man starved, Eddie’s lips never lose contact with you as he rips the tie from your body, almost making you fall with the force behind it. He steadies you with his hands back on your waist, this time underneath the robe, and you can feel his touch so much better with only the thin silk of your nightgown between you. Shrugging the robe off, he helps you pull it down your arms before tossing it onto your carpet, and the cold air of your bedroom is fought off by his body warmth invading every inch of you.

“Do you want this as much as I do?” he whispers gravelly after parting his lips from yours.

He doesn’t need to clarify what exactly he wants, because you want it all with him. “I do,” you confirm.

He leads you over to your bed, a queen-sized four-poster, still unmade from this morning. You climb on top and turn to face him while sitting on your knees. He looms over you, standing at the foot of the bed with you kneeling on the mattress in front of him. His pretty eyes darken as he looks down and takes in your form.

“God, I like you like this,” he laughs from above you, “Is this what I gotta do for you to shut your mouth?”

“You like my mouth” you shoot back, sitting up to reach him and tangling your hands in his curls. You make a fist, thus pulling his hair slightly.

He grunts as you tug on his locks, but doesn’t let the innuendo in your last comment go. “You do have a real nice mouth,” he says as he swipes his thumb against your bottom lip. Before he can retract his hand, you open your mouth and suck the digit into it, swirling your tongue around the tip while looking up at him from behind your eyelashes.

“Fuck, baby,” he brokenly breathes out.

The only thing you see in his eyes is pure unadulterated lust, and you feel your belly grow warmer at the thought of what he was going to do about it. He withdraws his hand only to place it on your neck, his palm on the front of your windpipe. He’s not applying any pressure, so you can’t call it choking, but just the implication of such a touch has arousal pooling in your underwear. His thumb is warm and wet on your throat, and when he trails his hand from your neck to the back of your head, the breeze of air on the leftover saliva makes your skin feel cool. Eddie drops his head and his lips meet yours once again, but only just barely making contact. You try to deepen the kiss, but he’s returned the favor of holding onto a tuft of your hair, making it impossible to press against him more firmly without your hair being pulled. He laughs at your cries of protest, but gives in, sucking on your bottom lip and nipping at it before licking his tongue past the threshold of your mouth.

Kissing like this isn’t the most comfortable, what with the springs of your mattress digging into your knees and your neck craning up to be able to reach Eddie, but you could stay in this position for hours if it meant he was going to keep touching you the way he was. The hand not tangled and tugging at your hair was sliding up your side, dragging the silk of your nightie up. He bunched the fabric up in a fist, which caused it to be lifted enough that your cotton panties were on display. You briefly worry about whether he was going to think the underwear you had on was sexy or not, considering it wasn’t silky or lacy like your nightgown was. It was just a simple and comfortable pair of navy blue panties with a white elastic waistband.

While you were busy overthinking, Eddie bent at his knees and kissed down your jaw, releasing your hair to raise the fabric on the other side of your nightie up to the same level, then backed away to pull it the rest of the way up over your head and off your body. You felt a little self conscious, bare chested in nothing but a pair of underwear that wasn’t even sexy. Your arms went to fold in front of you, but Eddie dropped the silk and grabbed your wrists, stopping you.

“Don’t cover yourself,” he whispers, his eyes glued to your body, “You’re so beautiful.”

Blood rushes to your head as you bite back a smile at his compliment. Any anxiety you previously felt about him judging you vanishes, and in its place comes even more need. Eddie tells you to lay down as he softly nudges your shoulder, and you do as he says with no contest. He hooks his fingers underneath the elastic of your panties before waiting for one last head nod from you. When you give the okay and lift your hips, he slowly pulls the fabric off of you, sucking in a breath when your bare pussy finally crosses his line of sight.

He crawls onto the bed and kisses up your torso, starting at your hip bone and making his way all the way up to your clavicle. The hard tent in his jeans rubs against the delicate skin of your inner thigh as he spends extra time marking up your neck, and you get impossibly wetter at the proof of the effect you have on him. When he pulls away, the mattress dips by both sides of your face due to him propping himself up by his arms. His legs bend as he sits up, successfully caging you in, and he takes a moment to just look at you.

“I’m gonna get you ready for me, okay baby?” he says quietly, one of his hands leaving their spot next to your head as he traces his fingertips lightly down the dip in between your breasts, over your belly button, and caresses your dripping slit.

“Yeah, okay,” you mutter out your consent. With your brain as cloudy as it was, you weren’t entirely sure what he was proposing, but you were at a point by now where you would agree to anything.

His middle digit slips easily past the soaked folds around your weeping hole, and he circles the entrance teasingly, collecting your juices before finally breaching, and just his fingertip enters into you. An embarrassing high pitched squeak escapes from your throat, and you raise yourself up onto your elbows to get a better look at what he’s doing to you.

“You wanna watch as I warm you up with my fingers, princess?” he croons at you sweetly. “It’s pretty, ain’t it?”

You take a deep gasp of air as his finger disappears further into you, his hands are bigger and tougher than your own, and the difference is very noticeable. He bends and straightens his wrist over and over, pumping in and out of you with ease, and the foreign feeling is strange yet pleasurable. Another finger slides inside, and he works them into you, opening you up. He’s determined to make the next step after this as satisfying for you as possible.

“You’re so wet and tight, baby. You’re gonna feel so good on my cock,” he practically mewls. There’s a wild look in his eyes, and it only steers you closer to your climax. “You want that, baby? You wanna make me feel good? Make me crave you all the time, even more than I already do?”

His words are slurring together as he rambles on about how perfect he knows your pussy is going to feel around him. For the life of you, you can’t form any response that isn’t loud moaning, but Eddie doesn’t seem to mind one bit. You feel the build up inside of you start, and your entire body tenses involuntarily as you prepare for what you know will be a mind-blowing orgasm.

“Are you gonna cum? My princess is gonna cum?” he asks, and you nod your head to the best of your ability given that the muscles in your neck are locked up. “You’re squeezing my fingers so fucking tight, baby. Show me how pretty you are when you cum. Show me, and I promise I’ll fuck you so good, so right. I’ll fuck you as many times as you let me, and I’ll do it anyway you want. Hard, slow, soft, fast… Just show me how perfect my girl is when she’s cumming around my fingers and I’ll give you what you need”

His promises push you over the edge, and you finish while crying out his name. Literally, you feel moisture leak from your eyes as your head pushes into the pillow beneath you. Eddie leans forward to kiss away the tears, all while still fingering you, helping you to ride out your orgasm for as long as possible.

“That’s it, that’s my girl,” you hear as you start to come back to the world. His hand slows down slightly, more focused on a deep and sensual rhythm, and you feel his hot breath on your temple as he continues to soothe you through your come down. “Did such a good job, sounded so pretty moaning my name, wanna make you make those sounds forever…”

He trails off as he pulls his hand away, and you both stare at his hand and watch how the light reflects off the glistening slick coating his fingers. He plunges them into his mouth, and groans around them at the taste as your jaw drops in disbelief. It was the hottest thing you’ve ever seen. Still recovering from both your shock and intense orgasm, you grunt out in annoyance when Eddie rolls off of you and stands up. You’re about to complain at the loss of contact, until you realize his reason for doing so was to unbutton his jeans. You instantly rise. Your head feels dizzy from sitting up too fast, but you push through the lightheadedness in order to give your full attention to what was about to happen.

Eddie hurriedly moves to yank his tight jeans down his legs, stumbling slightly but regaining his balance enough to not fall, then succeeds pulling down the denim and kicking his legs out of it. His legs are pale- as could be suspected from wearing nothing but full length pants in Indiana- and they look rather soft. You want to reach your hand out and graze his calf to see if they’re as soft as they appear, or if looks are deceiving and his dark wisps of leg hair actually have a coarse texture. There’s no time to dwell on that instinct, as very soon after discarding his pants he follows his boxers with them, and you’re distracted by hair in another area.

Eddie’s cock springs to his stomach when he straightens up from pulling off his underwear. The sight of it both makes you want to spread your legs and squeeze your thighs together, but the choice is made for you when Eddie takes your knee with one of his hands and settles between your legs on the bed. His lips met yours as his shaft grazed your soaked lips, brushing against your clit and causing you to buck up into hip, but your hips are pinned down by his pelvis. The pressure allows some relief, but you crave more.

“Fuck me,” you beg, “Please fuck me, Eddie.” You sound pathetic even to yourself, but you’re far past the point of no return as far as shame goes.

“Do you have protection?” he asks, in between kisses. “I didn’t bring condoms. I didn’t think- I didn’t expect you to actually-”

“I’m on the pill,” you cut him off. “Just fuck me.”

“Oh my god,” he groans, “Are you sure, princess?”

“Please, Eds,” you whine, “I need you.”

“You need me, baby?” he smiles against you while you nod your head. His teeth clash with yours as you try to pull him somehow closer to you than he already is. “I know what you need. I’m gonna give it to you, don’t worry.”

He lifts himself up so that he can grasp the base of his shaft, and slides up and down your slit before he positions the head of his cock to be poking your entrance. There was a stinging sensation as he stretched you out, sinking in slowly inch by inch until you can’t take anymore and have to stop him.

“Too big?” he asks, and the tone of his voice leads you to believe he’s asking this with genuine concern rather than inflating his own ego. He really doesn’t want to hurt you.

“I just need a s- second,” you stutter out while adjusting your pelvis, trying to ease the dull ache.

“Take all the time you need,” he murmurs while pecking you on the tip of your nose. Your hand immediately flies up to guide his lips to your own, and the emotion behind the kiss distracts you from the tenseness you feel, allowing you to loosen up slightly.

“God,” he moans, “you feel even more perfect than I imagined.”

A smug smirk crosses your face and you lift an eyebrow at him. “So you’ve imagined?” you ask, tilting your head and chuckling.

“Don’t act you haven’t fucked yourself with those fingers of yours while calling out my name,” he responds with a challenging look, “I can just picture it now, your sheets all crumpled from you tossing and turning, your hands cramping up but you ignoring it cause you’re so desperate to cum. Tell me, princess, when we would hang out, how long would you wait after I left to run up here and start rubbing this pretty little clit.”

As he tortures you with these (very true) accusations, his right hand snakes its way in between your bodies to start playing with your clit. He touches the nub with the tip of his thumb, applying pressure before rolling it in gentle circles. It’s too much and not enough at the same time.

“I asked you a question, baby,” he says, his lips now moving against your jaw as you focus on relaxing and getting used to the feeling of him inside you. “You gonna be a good girl and answer me?”

His vulgar words combined with his hand’s actions send you a wave of slick arousal, and suddenly you’re ready, and you want him deeper. “Eddie,” you whine, “more.”

“Nuh-uh,” he mutters, not moving an inch and keeping that deviously slow pace with his fingers. “I wanna hear about you touching yourself, princess.”

“Ugh!” you groan, kicking your leg out like a kid throwing a tantrum. “Eddie! It’s embarrassing!”

“No it’s not,” he comforts you, his left hand stroking your cheekbone as he leans down to kiss you sweetly on the lips. “When I’m thinking of you, I like to go nice and slow at first…”

Your breath gets stuck in your throat as you realize what he’s about to do. He’s going to tell you about him getting off to dirty thoughts of you. It should disgust you to know the boy who was teasing you and picking little fights for the past almost two years has been fantasizing about you, but it only gets you going more. You force your eyes open to look at him, and he’s already staring deeply at you, his face showing no signs of mocking.

“I think about those pretty lips, so soft. I think about what they’d feel like on my skin, around my cock.” His unabashed admissions are doing nothing to help with how impatient you’re getting, but his fingers stop circling your clit when you try to slide down deeper onto his dick yourself.

“I know you want it baby, but I’m trying to talk to you,” he whispers, “You don’t wanna be rude, do you? You already wouldn’t answer my question.”

“Sorry,” you whimper weakly, hoping that if you play along he’ll hurry up.

“So sweet for me,” he says as his hand starts up again and he nips at the sensitive skin in the crook of your neck. “I knew you’d be sweet. I knew your tough girl act was a show. All the times you got mouthy and bratty with me, you just wanted to be my sweet, good girl.”

“I take off everything but my panties. And then I lay down in bed, with the fan on cause I get hot. And I start feeling up my stomach-”

He cuts you off with a chuckle. “What are you talking about, princess?”

You bang your head on the pillow and start squirming. “I’m answering your question,” you whimper, “You’re taking too long, Eddie, I need it!”

His fingers circle your clit fast and he finally, finally sinks the rest of the way in you, bottoming out and filling you up so deep and full. “Keep going,” he orders as he starts rocking in and out of you at such a cruelly slow rate. As if reading your mind, he adds on, “I’ll go faster if you keep going.”

“Fuck, Eds,” you moan out in ecstasy, your mind empty and only able to think about his cock and what he’s doing to you. But you want- no, need- him to go faster, so you summon every brain cell you have and force yourself to speak semi-coherently.

“I feel up my stomach til I get goosebumps, and I start massaging my tits and thinking about what it would feel like if it was your h-hands,” you start to stutter as his left hand mimics your descriptions, tickling your abdomen as it makes its way to your chest. “And while I did that, I would spit on my fingers a little bit then stick my hand in my underwear, and I would start rubbing my clit.”

“And you imagined it was me doing it?” he interrupts, now thrusting into you a little harder and a little deeper, his hand massaging your breast before taking a nipple in between his thumb and pointer finger and rolling it gently.

You nod your head, too lost in the feeling to answer verbally. He really started to pick up the speed now, hitting a spot in you that you were never quite able to reach on your own, and it’s so sinfully delicious that you feel like you’re going to black out from the intensity of the pleasure. He feels so perfect moving against you, the velvety skin of his cock merging so right with your inner walls. You chastise yourself for holding out for so long, if you had known how blissful it would be, you would have confessed the day you realized your feelings. The idea that you could have been doing this for nearly a year has you cursing whatever forces that kept you apart, though a bitter voice in the back of your head reminded you it was your own stubbornness.

“Then what do you do?” he urges you on.

“Um, I would stay like that for a little while,” you continue, finding it difficult to get your thoughts out into full sentences, “and then when I was close I would… um, like stop playing with my tits. So that I could use that hand to finger myself.”

“Fuck, princess. The way you describe it… I bet you look so pretty when you’re touching yourself,” he groans, now pummeling in and out of you in a steady, fast rhythm. His eyes keep switching between watching you and being scrunched closed, like he’s trying to focus on making this last but still wants to look at your face. “I wanna see it someday. Will you show me?”

“Yeah, mhm, sure,” you agree, not even really paying attention to what he was asking you due to being too lost in what you were experiencing. Your orgasm was near, and you wouldn’t be able to hold it off for much longer. “Eddie, I’m close,” you warn, your nails digging into his back as your arms tighten around his neck.

“Me too, baby,” he says back. The rocking of his hips combined with the closeness of his face caused his lips to brush against yours in a repeated pattern, and the intimacy of that only builds your climax up faster. “Where do you want it?”

Eddie Munson, the bane of your existence for the past couple of years is asking you where you want him to cum. “Inside,” you answer without thought. “Inside me, Eds, I wanna feel you leaking out of me.”

“Oh fuck. You can’t say shit like that to me. How am I supposed to keep living my life like normal after this?” he whines, “Are you gonna cum for me, baby? I want you to go first.”

As he finishes telling you this, the wire snaps and you feel electricity shoot throughout your body. Your second orgasm is much stronger than your first, and considering how the first one had you nearly losing consciousness, that was really saying something. The shockwaves make you feel like you’re literally vibrating around him, and being able to feel his dick twitching as he released his load into you only added to that feeling. You were a moaning mess, gasping in and puffing out little breaths of air as you hopelessly cry out, ‘I’m cumming, Eddie, you’re making me cum,’ along with assorted swears over and over and over. His grip on your waist loosened as he wrapped his arms around your middle and held on tight, burying his head into your neck as he rode out his own orgasm. He muttered something into your skin that you couldn’t quite make out with it being muffled, but it sounded suspiciously close to, ‘I love you,’ and your heart leapt at that possibility.

After a few minutes, after you both gathered yourselfs, he rolled over onto his back and you cuddled up to his side. Your head rested on his bare chest and your arms hugged around his stomach, pulling him as close as you could.

“So,” he starts, his arms folded behind his head and a crooked grin adorning his face, “was I the biggest you’ve taken, or does that happen with all the guys you bring home?”

You furrow your brows in confusion as you turn your head to look at him. “What do you mean?” you manage to mumble out.

“I mean, how tight you were. And how you couldn’t take all of me at first,” he says, like it was obvious.

“Well, in sex-ed they said the first time usually hurts. This wasn’t as bad as I was expecting though, just kinda stung a little bit at first,” you explain, laying your head flat against him once more and scraping at the nail on your index finger with your thumb.

Eddie stops moving and is quiet for a good thirty seconds. You start to feel a trickling of doubt, and become anxious that you somehow said the wrong thing. He reaches up to take your hand in his, effectively stopping your nervous finger picking and stealing your attention. When you glance back up at him he’s staring at you with wide eyes and an open mouth.

“Princess,” he says slowly, like somehow you were the one in this situation not making any sense, “You’re not telling me that was your first time.”

Oh. You suppose that was a pretty important tidbit of information you withheld that he probably would’ve liked to have known before you engaged in intercourse. In your defense, there was no reason for him to assume you weren’t a virgin. You only graduated high school the year prior, and during your time at Hawkins you never had a serious boyfriend. Even when you were being crowned prom queen, your date to the dance was James McKenna, and he came out as gay the week after graduation before moving to New York. Sure, you were privy to the rumors thrown around in the boy’s locker room about what you did to this guy under the bleachers and what you did to that guy at Skull Rock, but there was no more gossip surrounding you than the average cheerleader.

“I’m sorry,” you apologize, suddenly feeling guilty for not being completely transparent. “I guess I just thought you knew, or like, would be able to tell?” you say, your intonation changing to a questioning lilt by the end of your sentence.

He starts blinking his wide eyes frantically, his head shaking in disbelief as he tries to think of what to say. That self conscious dread from earlier starts to sneak it’s way back in, and you begin having second thoughts, worrying if he- like your high school friends- thought it was weird that you waited to have sex. He must have noticed the fear in your eye, because he held you tighter against him and comfortingly rubbed up and down your forearm.

“It’s nothing bad, I promise,” he says, speaking quickly. “I guess I just assumed. I mean, you were so popular. Everyone wanted you, anyone would have been lucky to have you-” you smile and blush at his words- “And those guys on the basketball team were always bragging and telling stories-”

“If a plate of spaghetti grew legs and started walking around, those guys would claim that they fucked it. Why would you listen to that noise?” you interjected, your annoyance clear.

He held his hands up in defense. “You’re right, I don’t know why I believed any of that crap. I know you have better taste than that. I mean, you like me, so that proves you have a much more sophisticated taste in men.”

“Sophisticated is one word for it, I guess,” you mumble while rolling your eyes, before sitting up to grab your nightie from the foot of the bed.

“If you weren’t active, why were you on the pill?” he questions you while rubbing your back.

“I’m a grown woman. I figured it was going to happen eventually, and I wanted to make sure I was ready when it did,” you answer distractedly as you work on turning your pajamas the right side out.

Eddie hums in understanding but is otherwise quiet as he watches you redress yourself, except for a cheeky wolf whistle when you need to bend over to pick up your panties. Once you're covered up again, you turn around to see him staring at you in amusement.

“What?” you ask with a smile, climbing back onto the bed and throwing a leg over his thighs, settling onto his lap. The tips of your noses brush against each other as you see that gleam in his eyes you recognize as him trying to stifle laughter when teasing you. “What is it?” you repeat, shoving him gently on his chest before looping your arms around his neck.

He shakes with silent laughter then leans back to quirk a brow at you. “A plate of spaghetti?” he asks. You grab a pillow to hit him in the head with, but drop it when you’re tackled and pinned down, giggling and kicking your feet as he kisses up your collar bone.

#eddie munson x reader #eddie munson x you #eddie munson fanfic #eddie munson smut #stranger things x reader #stranger things x you #stranger things fanfic #stranger things smut

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angelamajiki · 4 years ago

Text

PAIRINGS: Father! Yandere! Enji Todoroki x Daughter! Reader

CW: yandere, incest, soulmate AU, fluff, slight angst, nsfw, kissing, praise kink, virginity kink, size kink, bathroom sex

A BNHarem Collab!

AN: my longest piece to date! the prompt this month was sex work, so i decided to stretch the prompt and do sexual slavery. wanted to go for a softer version of daddy endeavor, so please enjoy <3

5.2k words

The mark on his wrist was one that was shared with yours. Enji had given up on finding his soulmate, deciding that his career and legacy were far more important than some silly marking on another’s body. Love was something he thought he could go without. But when he saw your bright eyes gaze up at him, your chubby hand wrapped around his index finger, his heart had fallen hard—such a sweet, gentle thing. No traces of fear, of disdain, of disgust for him as a human being. Just pure curiosity and unconditional love. His heart leaped for his little girl.

Enji was determined, then and there, that he would never fail you, not like he forgot the others.

Oh, what plans he had for you, his precious princess. He couldn’t wait to spoil you, to marry you and start a new family once you were old enough. Rei realized this as well. Her youngest daughter, her last hope at salvaging her broken family, was to be had by her husband. The thought frightened her, especially after seeing the adoring look in her husband's eyes when she saw him cradle you for the first time. It was so unlike the stoic nature he held for the other children when they were born, only caring to see that they were healthy before leaving off back to his agency, never giving them more than a fleeting touch. It was nothing like when he held you, snarling at any nurse who dared to take his soulmate from the grips of his arms.

Something that had Enji’s conviction more so than his career was something to be feared. Your mother swore to herself that she would not let her husband ruin you.

Once he fell asleep with you tucked in the crook of his arm, a social worker came and collected you to be sent to a foster home and be set up for adoption. It was better than falling into the hands of the monster of a husband.

After the death of Touya, the pair decided to have one more child in hopes of fixing their broken family, but Rei now knew it was for naught. Nothing could save them know, especially now that Enji had nearly burned the building down when he discovered that his little girl was gone, just hours after he had finally found you.

Rei alerted the commission as well for your protection, that utter bitch of a woman. They very well couldn't have the number two hero caught in an incestuous bond with his daughter, now could they. All information of your whereabouts was hidden from him, blacklisting him from working with any foster children, lest he loses his hero license. Enji may have lost you for the time being, but his patience grew as he did. They couldn't keep him from you forever. You'd be reunited one day; he knows it.

The first time he saw you again was when you were fifteen. It was your birthday and the day he had become the number one hero officially, plenty of reason to celebrate. Usually, he would have taken the time to sit near the rose bush he planted in your honor in his courtyard on your birthday, renewing his vows to find and love you to the best of his ability. Enji took great pride in keeping your memory alive with the bush for his beautiful little rose gone too soon from his grasp. But there you were, mere meters from him.

The foster home you stayed at took you out for dinner when he was meeting with Hawks after the billboard awards. Your eyes were unmistakable, a perfect cerulean just like his own. He was so close, yet so far. My, how you had grown since he saw you. Unlike him, you bore your mark proudly on your wrist, not ashamed to admit to the world who your soulmate was. Not like you actually knew who it was anyway.

Enji was prepared to leave Hawks at the table; a new flame lit under his ass, one far more exhilarating than the thought of being the number one hero. He was up and on his way to speak to you before Nomu attacked him. Damn villains, they'd pay for separating the two of you once again. But his conviction only grew stronger. It wasn’t hard to find you after that; he knew what city you were living in. Instincts lashed out at him, demanding that he go sweep you up and hide you away. No, no. That would make you frightened; he can't have that. He’ll watch from the sidelines, waiting until you were of age to make a move. He was curious to see just how life as a foster child was treating you.

Growing up in the foster system had been a nightmare from hell for you. A cursed child is what they saw you as when your skin sprouted flames every time it was touched by the human hand, burning everything and everyone who came in contact with it. From the moment your quirk manifested, you were an outcast, an untouchable, unlovable freak. Someone destined never to feel the touch of their new parents, their lover, their soulmate.

It wasn't long before you realized that you would remain in the foster system until you aged out. Who would adopt a child they couldn't hug when they cried, hold their hand when they crossed the street, snuggle up to when it was chilly outside? Any potential parent was taken aback by your quirk once you reached for the warm touch of mommy and daddy, only to singe their hand or burn a hole in their shirt.

You learned quickly that your touch was something to be feared, that you were something to be feared. You supposed that’s why you looked up to him so much. So much so that you thought about him late at night when the loneliness seemed to drown you in the sea of your insecurities.

Endeavor was the only one who could understand you, understand your quirk. If only your soulmate mark could match him, maybe you feel the warmth of another human being without hurting or mauling them with your power. Abrasive he may be with the media, but there something about him that was so comforting and endearing to you. In your eyes, he was simply misunderstood, a gentle giant amongst the mass personalities of the other pro heroes.

Watching his interviews brought you comfort when you were lonely, his merchandise made you swell with pride and confidence, and his posters on the wall reminded you that you were never alone. It was a silly crush, but it made you feel better about your miserable life.

You even got to see him on your birthday! Well, not exactly. You happened to be in the same restaurant when your foster parents took you out for your birthday. It was apparent that they just felt bad for you, having looked after you for 15 years only to still have custody of your sorry ass. You were almost certain that they were going to kick you to the curb the morning of your 18th birthday.

Too bad they never had the chance. That fate would have been much kinder than the reality you faced now.

Once the Paranormal Liberation Front had effectively ripped society up by the roots and let the tree of life rot for the world to see, your foster parents packed their shit and left the country while you were at school. You’d been alone in the world ever since and were snatched off the streets, ready to be sold into slavery by the villains of the world. Your quirk was the only thing keeping you from being bought like a bitch from the auction floor.

Enji, on the other hand, was more than eager to do just that. After his public smear campaign by his allegedly dead son, he was dead to the world, finally abandoning his family for good in hopes of finding his beloved daughter. His life was dedicated to searching for you, having managed to track you down through his vigilante work. He likes to lie to himself and say that he’s continuing to fight for the greater good, but Enji does it just to have the chance to see your sweet face again. There wasn’t much to go off of, but he’d rather see his fiery end than to give up. That's how he found you at the auction.

⋆﹥━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━﹤⋆

Another auction night was approaching, which meant another night of humiliation and being displayed like a slab of meat for a crowd of degenerate wolves. Your quirk was the only thing keeping you from being sold; no one wants a fucktoy they can’t touch. It reduced you to physical labor for your captors, but you were better fed because of it. That didn’t mean they still didn’t try to sell you.

After being stripped down into nothing but a collar, leash, and a muzzle, you were brought to the stage and shoved in front of the ravenous, roaring crowd. You could feel their stares seep into your bones, the grime from the floor on your bare feet only adding to the overwhelming sensation of disgust you couldn’t even begin to describe.

The crowd’s excitement was raucous, jeers and shouts echoing off the halls of the underground auditorium. Masks covered their faces for the sake of privacy lest a vigilante break-in and hunt them all down. Even in the lawlessness of the world, heroes were still crawling everywhere to trail after even the slightest scent of villainy. Doesn't mean they’ll win, but hey, the death of a hero is just the same as the auction was to them.

“Up next, a darling girl with a fiery quirk!”

That was your cue. A handler had a fierce grip on your leash, giving it a few tugs for good measure as the crowd laughed at your stumbling. The auctioneer began to list your qualities and physical attributes, including your quirk.

“And she’s a virgin!”

Added for good measure, the crowd fell silent after listening to the abilities of your quirk. You couldn't hate it anymore; it's what was keeping you from being someone’s onahole until the day you kicked the bucket.

“Can I get $10,000?”

Ah the starting bid. The silence was relieving. Just a few more moments and you'd be off that damn stage.

“No? Going once, going twice, going-”

“One million.”

A booming voice came from the back row, the depths of the shadows to further hide the masked man who just bought your life. Why did it sound so familiar?

“Outstanding! One million dollars for the young lady!”

“Going once.”

It couldn't be.

“Going twice.”

This can't be happening.

“Sold for one million!”

No!

You were supposed to be unwanted, just like you have been your entire life! Yet some mysteriously familiar man outbid the entire auction for little ol’ you.

“Off the stage, bitch.”

The handler snarled, yanking you off the stage and causing you the fall and bruise yourself in the process.

“Watch it!” He spat, picking you up by the roots of your hair. “The merchandise needs to be handled carefully before reaching the customer. Let's hope he doesn't mind some bumps and bruises. For your sake.”

“That won't be necessary; I'll be taking her as is. Immediately, if you will.”

The mysterious man stood had already made his way backstage and behind you, standing formidably over your stark form. Your hair was released, dropping you back to the floor.

“Excellent, sir! I’m more than happy to get this welp off my hands.”

A brief exchange was made while you recovered on the floor, shaking in fear as the situation weighed heavily on your already broken self. The handler took the money and returned to the back room, leaving the two of you alone together.

The stranger crouched down to you and extended a hand to brush the stray hair out of your face, touch remaining tender and gentle when you flinched harshly.

“My poor girl, what has the world done to you?”

His coat enveloped your body as he scooped you up in his arms. The scent of him comforted you more than you would have liked to admit. Teakwood and coffee grounds filled your senses as he held you flush against his chest, leaving the auction house with a renewed sense of vigor.

You were placed in the backseat of a car before he dressed you in simple pajamas.

“Rest. You deserve it.”

⋆﹥━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━﹤⋆

At some point in the car ride, you let yourself fall asleep only to wake up in a cozy king-size bed wrapped up in a soft blanket next to a warm fireplace. The false sense of comfort lulled you for a few moments before your situation hit you like a ton of bricks. The anxiety you'd had known your whole life had finally kicked back into gear, forcing you out of bed and into the rest of the house.

It was daybreak, the sunlight slowly trickling in through heavily curtained windows as you walked through the halls and into the kitchen. The man was standing over the stove, sans mask, dressed in a wife-beater and his pajama bottoms. It couldn't be-

“Come in; breakfast will be on the table in a moment.”

Now you were certain.

“Who are you?” Your voice barely above a whisper. “Why did you buy me at the auction?”

A deep, rumbling chuckle flowed from the man.

“I think you know the answer to that, little one.”

His focus was retained on the meal in front of him. “I’ll explain myself over breakfast. Now sit.”

You couldn't help but feel compelled to obey him. While sitting, you took the time to honestly look him over for the first time in your life. Never did you think you would be so close to your childhood crush in such a domestic setting.

He had noticeably greyed but still possessed a majority of his red hair. Muscles were still taught and budging, but he had grown a little bit of a belly. Endeavor was as handsome as ever, aged like a fine wine that you couldn't wait to sip on.

The food was placed in front of you as he took the test next to you.

“Eat and have some water. Then we’ll talk.”

Once again, you obeyed him without question and refrained from eating like a rabid animal. It wasn't even a question, so much so that it is evident that you hadn't had a decent meal in a long time. You were still muscular from the labor you did for your handlers, though.

And Enji liked that about you. How resilient you were, he loved that you inherited his strength but still possessed Rei’s gentle nature. Not that he wanted to credit that woman for anything, but he couldn't deny the obvious. You were his strong, beautiful little girl who had to endure so much because his bitch of a wife decided to separate you from him.

But he was here now, ready to give all his love and protection to his only love. It took everything in his power not to swoop you up from your seat and hold you in his arms until his last breath.

Enji watched you eat, pride swelling in his chest at the thought that you liked his cooking. He couldn't help but wonder what your favorite meals were as well. There's certainly all the time in the world to get to know his little girl now that he had you. And he was never going to let you go.

Your breakfast was devoured quickly, both out of desperation for a real meal and answers to your questions.

“Why did you buy me from the auction?”

It was a complicated question, but you wanted a simple answer.

“I’m your soulmate.” His wrist was on display as he reached across the table to hold your hand.

For the first time in your life, you felt safe. Your one, shining hope was meant to yours and he wanted to be yours. You didn't even question how he knew at all.

His touch was warm and slightly rough, but it was welcome all the same. Even though your skin was lit aflame at his flesh against your, he paid it no mind. He was built to take your quirk, to take you.

“Endeavor…”

“Please, call me Enji.” His thumb rubbed over the palm of your hand. “I’m sure you feel better after having something to eat.”

“Why don't you go take a bath? It’ll help you relax, I can take care of your dishes.”

It was strange how insistent he was on taking care of you, but you can't say you don't enjoy the attention. He seemed to care for you in a way that went beyond caring for a partner, or in your case, a soulmate. But who were you to judge? It wasn't like you had a lot of experiences to use as a comparison.

Making your way back to the bedroom, you took the time to study the house you were in. A traditional, well-kept home, it practically looked like it was untouched. And maybe it was; buildings and homes fully intact were hard to come by these days, let alone ones that were clean and warm.

Enji seemed to lull you into an instinctual sense of safety, even though he bought you out of slavery. Just because he was your soulmate didn't mean that he had good intentions for you, but somehow, his presence alone filled a void in your heart that you had forgotten was even there.

Once you made it to the bathroom connected to the master bedroom, you drew yourself a bath just like Enji had instructed you to do. It wasn't the wisest decision to let your guard down like this, but the man already had plenty of opportunities to fuck you up by this point.

The water was warm and inviting when you sank yourself into it; you couldn't remember the last time you had warm water to clean yourself with. It made you feel light and hazy, slipping into a headspace you had long forgotten—a place of safety and comfort.

Three raps on the door pulled you from your haze as Enji entered the bathroom with fresh towels. Despite the fact that he had already seen you naked, the intimacy of the situation only left you feeling more vulnerable than ever.

“Let me help you.”

He kneeled next to you outside of the tub and pulled a lavender chamomile shampoo from the tub’s shelf. There was room to protest, but you couldn't find yourself willing to do so.

Water was poured over your head before he started a lather in your hair, gently scrubbing your scalp for a while. Even this simple touch made you shudder, it was a long time since you last felt the warmth of someone’s touch. And everything about this man was warm, for you at least. His words, his touch, his heart.

Conditioner was added to your hair as well before he moved onto washing your body. The scrub was gentle across your skin, his hand following after it to help keep the suds from rising too much. Strong hands massaged your back and your neck, both of which needed the much-deserved relief.

“So tense.” He murmured, mostly to himself.

There was a comfortable silence shared between the two of you as he massaged out all the knots and kinks that had built up over the years with your handlers. His touch should have made you flinch but you found yourself pressing into it. A small moan escaped your lips as he worked through a particularly tender spot on your neck.

“Are you enjoying this?”

His lips ghosted your ear as warm breath tickled your cheek and neck.

Your face flushed with a fiery warmth from a combination of the steam, your embarrassment, and the man whispering sweet nothings in your ear as his hands worked at your tired skin.

“Let me help you relax, sweet thing.”

Enji picked you up momentarily to slot himself behind you in the tub. Placed on his lap, you gasped when you could feel his erection hard against your back. Fear started to trickle into your veins as you squirmed slightly, attempting to get out of his grasp.

“Shhh, it's alright, you're okay.” His hand made its way to your throat and rested there gently, stroking over your artery with his thumb. “I’m not going to hurt you, sweetheart. Let me show you how much I've missed you.”

His touch made you feel alive, feel wanted for the first time in your life. You couldn't help but whine when his other hand made its way down your body, gently groping your breast as his lips were pressed to your ear.

“Do you trust me to take care of you?”

His fingers toyed with your nipples, obviously skilled.

“Do you trust me to make the sweetest love to you?”

Another whine caught in your throat as his hand went further, cupping your sex in his much larger hand. He kneaded gently, pressing a soft kiss to your temple when you writhed in his grip.

“Please! Enji-”

Shushing you gently, Enji’s thumb made its way to your clit to stroke in small circles.

“How does that feel, sweetheart?”

You were used to touching yourself, but oh God it never felt like this.

“Good!” You managed to choke out in a wanton moan. “So good! Enji, please, I need-”

A warm pair of lips sealed over yours, silencing you once again. Enji knew how wrong this was, to take advantage of you like this without revealing the truth. But he wanted at least to just once to have you in his arms willingly and eagerly. He wanted to kiss you breathless, listen to your cries and feel your nails dig into his skin as he gave you all of himself without a fight from you. He can worry about revealing himself to you later.

The rough pads of his large fingers started to apply pressure to your clit as his middle finger slipped into your tight hole under the water.

“Don't worry, little one. I'll give you what you need.”

Soft kisses were trailed along your cheek and hand that was on his that was still holding your throat tenderly. Finger pumping in and out of you, Enji whispered sweet praises to you as he felt your hole clench around him.

“Doing so well for me, sweetheart.”

Your breathy moans and whines only served to harden his cock. He felt like a teenager all over again, closing to cumming just from the sound of your voice.

Another finger slipped into your tight core, careful not to overwhelm you too fast. It was obvious you'd hadn't been touched before, not even by yourself. You felt full but greedy for more of his touch.

“Deeper, Enji! Please, can you?”

You were babbling at this point, writhing in his lap as he fingered you nice and slow with thick digits. Enji hummed as he pressed further into, curling his fingers into your G-spot.

Your cry was loud as he began to abuse your most sensitive spot, fully squirming in his arms as tears of pleasure breached your eyes. The sensation was too overpowering for you, making you thrash and arch in his arms.

“Shh, you're okay, sweetheart. You're okay; I'm right here.”

His fingers continued to stroke in a curled fashion, thumb still circling over your twitching clit. Enji kissed you again, deeper and more fierce as he began to fuck you earnestly with his fingers.

“Cum for me, darling.”

Squealing, you gripped his forearm and cried helplessly into his mouth. The build was slow and intense, allowing your orgasm to wash over you in waves of pleasure rather than a blinding, quick light.

“E-Enji!” You wailed. “Enji!”

You shook in his arms, holding onto the larger man for dear life as you experienced your first orgasm. It seemed like Enji knew your body better than you did.

No words were exchanged between the pair of you, but you could feel the tension of your desired hanging thick in the air. This man was going to take your virginity, here and now.

Enji removed his hand from your throat and between your legs in order to maneuver you to sit facing forward in his lap.

“Are you ready for me?”

His honesty made you flush even more. Biting your lip nervously, you hesitated to answer. Were you ready? It wasn’t like you had much of choice; the man could very well take you by force if he so chose to. But you felt safe in his arms, safe with him.

“Let me help you, my love.”

Warm, large hands gripped your backside as he held you steady above his cock. Your hand reached down to line yourself up with his throbbing sex, lowering yourself down on it slowly.

It burned in the best way, stretching you out fully as you pressed your forehead against his chin.

“Good girl, taking my cock so well, darling.”

A pitiful whine left your throat at the praise, hands gripping the forearms that held you in place.

“Can...Can you hold me?” You whimpered. “Please?”

Enji’s arms enveloped you and pulled you flush against his, tucking your head into the crook of his neck as you continued to lower yourself onto his cock. Your breath tickled his ears, making him groan lowly once he bottomed out inside of you.

“Such a sweet girl you are, taking all of me on your first try.”

Another whine responded for you as you ground your hips down on his.

“E-Enji.” You whimpered his name over and over again like a prayer. “Enji!”

“Be still, little one.” Hands back on your hips, holding you in place near the tip of his girthy length. “Let me take care of you.”

Hips in place, the man began to thrust up into you slowly, holding you tight as he stood up from the water. You only gripped and nuzzled yourself into him further, letting out sweet whines and whimpers into his ear while he thrust into you.

Your back was placed against the cool tile of the wall when he tilted your chin up to meet his gaze. Even in this position, he was still at least another head taller than you.

“Look at me when I make love to you.”

Through wet eyelashes, you gazed up at his eyes and let your mouth hang open as he rolled his hips into yours. His eyes shut briefly when he moaned, hissing at the feeling of your wet cunt hugging his cock so well.

“You were made to take my cock, little one.”

Arms reached up to wrap around his neck as he thrust into you, taking his time to make his strokes slow and deep. His hips were flush against yours when you asked him, “Kiss me, please? I want all of you Enji.”

Your bold proclamation stunned him for a moment before yielding, placing a deep kiss and a hot tongue against your lips.

His thrusts became faster as he kissed you with more passion and vitality. For an old man, he certainly had his stamina up to par. Your fingers thread through his red and grey tresses, tugging him closer to you gently as you moaned shamelessly into his mouth.

The pleasure in your core was more intense, fiercer this time around as his thrusts became hard and fast. The sounds of both of your moans and skin slapping against skin echoed off the tiled bathroom walls as the both of you felt your orgasms coming.

“Enji, fuck!” You whined, beginning to squirt on his fast-paced cock. “I-I’m cumming; I’m cumming!”

“Cum for me, princess.”

With a choked sob, you creamed yourself all over his cock, which continued to pound into your hole before he groaned your name and came deep inside you.

Nothing but the sounds of the water sloshing and your labored breathing could be heard as you both came down from your highs.

After a moment of rest, Enji pulled out and wrapped you in a towel before laying you gently on the bed. A towel was wrapped around his own waist as he looked at you fondly, brushing stray hairs out of your eye sight as he sat next to you on the bed.

“I must ask, how did you end up at the auction site?”

What a loaded question, but the intimacy you two shared allowed for it.

“I was kidnapped off the streets after my parents abandoned me when the prison break happened.”

He sighed gruffly and took your hand in his.

“What utter fools, tossing aside a beautiful rose such as yourself.”

His thumb traced over your soulmate mark. You still had yet to know how he knew before ever meeting you.

“It's alright; I never considered them my family. I just wish I could have met mine, but at least I met my soulmate.”

A crinkled smile adorned his face.

“You've done more than meet them.”

What could that have meant?

“I’m your father and your soulmate, little one.”

A rock hit the pit of your stomach as you retracted your hand from his.

“That isn't a funny joke, I'm serious.”

“So am I.” His hand was quick to snatch your back. “What could I possibly gain from lying to you?”

“P-Prove it.”

“Our soulmate marks, I saw yours the moment you were born in the Hosu hospital before my wife separated us all those years ago. I can recite your birthday if you'd like me to, for good measure.”

Fuck, he really wasn't lying. A lump formed in your throat as tears sprung in your eyes.

“Why would you do this to me?” You whispered, barely even able to hear yourself.

“Because I love you. I love you so much, sweetheart. Ever since I saw you for the first time in the hospital, my entire life has changed because of you. All I ever wanted was you.”

Enji was quick to shush your cries, using his free hand to wipe your tears away.

“Will you forgive me for being selfish?”

The disgust and horror filled everyone of your senses, especially when you came to a realization that he was everything you've ever wanted.

What came out of your mouth next stunned the both of you.

“You can apologize by begging on your knees and cleaning me up with your tongue, Daddy.”

TAGLIST: @tomurasprincess @bonesoftheimpala @sightoru @cxnicalsweetheart

#yandere endeavor #yandere endeavor x reader #endeavor x reader #endeavor #enji todoroki x reader #yandere enji x reader #yandere enji todoroki #yandere enji todoroki x reader #yandere my hero academia #my hero academia #my hero academy fanfiction #my hero x reader #yandere boku no hero academia

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myckicade · 3 years ago

Text

Prompt: Ok so we all know Coco is touch starved, and would be clingy af in a relationship. What about Coco x wife!reader, while she’s trying to do basic errands/chores and Coco is her shadow?

A/N: I’ve been waiting for this one. I really have. Hee hee. I just adore Coco. <3 . This piece sort of follows the story of the last two Coco x Reader pieces I have written, but it will stand-alone, just fine. And, I swear, these things just have a mind of their own. I can continue to apologize for length, and content, but, in the end... I let the story tell itself. ;) . <3 .

As a warning, I come from Vermont, where we have a plastic bag ban. Last I knew, California was the first state to have one. I don’t know how that would translate to Santo Padre, but… When I mention fabric bags, I mean reusables, and the ban is why. ^^;;;;.

Title: Worthwhile

Teaser: He’s a little rough, your Coco, foul-mouthed, and quick to anger. Untrusting, and bitchier than a woman, on his best day. But, once you have his love, you have it. All of it.

“Okay…” you murmur, slowly, eyes scanning over the paper in front of you. Fifteen items, nothing crazy. Shouldn’t take you more than an hour, tops, and that includes travel to and from the store. “I think I’ve got everything we need… And, specials included your beer, and those little frozen cream puffs.”

Beside you, Coco groans, deep and guttural. “Fuck, I love those things.”

You giggle, but keep reading. Your man is too damn cute. “Feminine products.”

“Do those count as special?” Coco genuinely sounds thoughtful, as he steps up behind you, where you are leaning over the counter top. He wraps his arms around your waist, chin coming to rest on your shoulder. “Kinda’ a necessity, ain’t they?”

Tipping your head, you glance to your husband. Seriously. This man is a treasure. “Why don’t you run for political office?” you tease, pleased when Coco chuckles.

“Yeah, my record’ll look great, on the campaign trail.”

You shrug. “You can tackle pink tax, and tax evasion, at the same time.”

Coco grins, and steals a peck off your lips. “What else you got on there, muñeca?”

“Hmmm, let’s see…” You turn back to your list, tapping the pen against your lips, thoughtfully. Spying the next item on it, you try not to let out another giggle. He’s not going to like this one. “Letty asked if we could have that cauliflower pizza thing for dinner, tonight.”

As expected, this groan is decidedly not from food lust. “Fuckin’ vegetarians. When the hell is she gonna’ get over this shit?”

“It’s just a phase, Coco,” you remind him, for the… Well, honestly, you’ve lost track. It started shortly after the wedding, Letty’s change in diet, and you’re still not convinced the two aren’t related. You’re just not entirely sure how. But, two months in, and she’s still looking healthy, so you won’t send up any alarms. “It’s very popular at her high school, right now.”

Coco scoffs, disgusted. “When the hell’d she start copyin’ other people, anyway? My girl ain’t no follower.”

The words send a shot straight to your heart. He’s a little rough, your Coco, foul-mouthed, and quick to anger. Untrusting, and bitchier than a woman, on his best day. But, once you have his love, you have it. All of it. The love he has for Leticia is the greatest proof. They may carry on like cats and dogs, but when push comes to shove, there is nothing they won’t do for one another. My girl. It brings a warmth to your soul, and a smile to your lips.

You shake it off, enough to formulate a response. “She’s figuring out how to be her own woman. Trying new things.” You shrug, not wanting to make a big deal of it. You were Letty’s age, once, of course. And, a girl, to boot. Some things, Coco just won’t be able to understand. “It’s a process.” He hums, still disgruntled, but doesn’t push out another word. “You want anything else?” you ask, holding up your list. “I’ve gotta’ get going, before I run into the football widows.”

Before you can even take a step away, Coco tightens his arms around you. “You sure you gotta’ go, though?” he asks, leaning in to brush his lips against your neck. “With the house all to ourselves, like this?”

“If I don’t go,” you start, as Coco’s touches gain intent, becoming teasing kisses. Damn him. It feels nice, you won’t lie, but there are other things on your mind, right now. Priorities.

You’re just… having trouble remembering what they are.

Oh. Yeah. Shopping.

“If I don’t go, we won’t have anything for dinner.”

Another kiss, accompanied by a barely-there swipe of tongue. You shiver, and Coco moves his lips to your ear. “We can order in,” he whispers, breath so invitingly warm against your skin.

Oh, this asshole.

“And, what are we supposed to have for breakfast, tomorrow?” you try, again. “Half an Eggo, and a pack of Skittles?”

Coco cuddles you closer, again. “Ain’t you never heard about livin’ on love, baby?” Some of his smoothest work, that is. And, it’s almost convincing. Almost. You can imagine the afternoon ahead, if you give in. Your clothes will come off, and won’t be back on until the last second, before Letty walks back through the front door. By that time, you’ll be too tired to roll your ass off the bed, let alone go grocery shopping. And, you promised Letty you’d talk Coco into that cauliflower pizza.

“Great as that sounds,” you agree, preparing to capitalize on the truth. You ease yourself away from Coco’s stubborn hold, and give him one more smooch, just to soften the blow to come. “I don’t think Letty will appreciate the sentiment.”

A third groan. You must be going for a record. “C’mon, (y/n).” Oh, he’s whining. It’s so cute, it’s unreal. “We’ll find some place that delivers that rabbit food shit.”

Unfortunately for Coco, you’re already grabbing your bag. Lucky for you. You’re still two seconds from giving him what he wants. (He just doesn’t need to know so). “I’ll be back in a while.” God willing. “If you think of anything else, call my cell.” You rush out the front door, and don’t look back. If you see the look on your husband’s face, you know you’re as good as done.

Well, what the shit? Coco stares at the front door as it closes, you on the wrong fucking side of it. His arms are at his sides, palms turned toward the ceiling. That went so well. He kind of can’t believe you just walked away, like that. Left him alone, and wanting. In your big, empty house.

He probably should have volunteered to tag along, instead of just chasing you off.

Fuck.

Glancing around, Coco tries to find something to do. Something to clean, at the very least. But, that’s the trouble with having moved in with you, after the wedding, he supposes. Ain’t nothing to tidy up. Not that the three of you don’t have possessions. They’re all just in their proper places. Probably Leticia’s doing, in the end. He’d had a long talk with her, before the move, that she absolutely has to keep her shit where it belongs. Your house isn’t like their house. There aren’t burn marks in the carpet, or gouges in the coffee table. Dishes go in the damned dishwasher, not left to pile up on the counter, or in the sink. Beds get made. Laundry gets folded, and put away. No more wrinkled heaps in the clothes basket. So far, the kid’s been doing good. Real good.

Coco, though? He’s never felt so unnerved in his life.

It was different when he just visited. Spent a night or two, here or there. He’d almost felt at home, then, stupid as it sounds. At home, with the knowledge he wasn’t staying. But, now? Now, the reality has settled in, and he feels so-so… out of place. There’s so much he’s struggling to adjust to.

You have a purified water system installed under the sink, where Coco is used to buying bottled water.

You have a dining room, where Coco and Letty are used to eating on the couch.

You have an extended cable package, whatever the fuck that is.

You kind of have it all, here, certainly by comparison to what Coco is used to. The best of everything. Which really makes him wonder – not for the first time – what the hell you’re doing with a dirt-poor biker for a husband? You’ve had this conversation, on multiple occasions, and you’ve explained yourself, every time. But, this time… This time, you’re not around to give that speech. You’re not around to hold him, and kiss his face, and reassure him in a way that only you can. No, you’re at the grocery store, shopping for Coco, and his kid, which was apparently a better offer than staying home with him.

Oh, nope. Nope, he’s doing it, again. He can feel it. You love him, he reminds himself. You’ve got his ring on your finger, his last name, and – God-willing – his baby in your belly. By choice. All by choice.

Coco takes a deep breath, in. Lets it back out, slowly. Tries not to get sick, for all the nerves coming up to greet him. He wraps one arm around his own torso, free hand moving up to cover his mouth.

Fuck, he hopes you get back, soon.

You let out a deep sigh, as you park your car in the garage. Oh, it is so good to be home, at long-last. Talk about Old Home Week. You’d run into everyone, and his brother, at the grocery store. Shopping had taken nearly twice as long as you’d meant for it to, and you just know Coco must be losing his mind, by now. You hate to think about it, in such terms, but, sometimes… Well, sometimes, Coco reminds you of a new puppy. You can’t really leave him alone, without some kind of separation anxiety creeping up on him.

Ah, well. At least he isn’t ripping down the drapes, and shredding the couch cushions.

You blink. Well. That you know of.

Shaking your head, you climb out of the car, mentally preparing to unload armloads of bags. Maybe, if you really, really try, today will be the day you can finally get all twenty bags in, in one trip.

Right. And, shortly thereafter, you can have both forearms set, and casted. Be a real turn-on, in the bedroom.

You’ve managed to grab half a dozen bags, when the door to the mud room opens. “Hey, don’t grab too many!” Letty warns, as she comes hopping down the steps. “Let us help!”

Glancing up, you smile. For having had such a rough start, Letty can be a sweet girl. You know she gets that from her father. “Well, thank you,” you reply, resting a few, fabric handles onto her outstretched hands.

Letty grins, lowering her hands to her sides, before leaning in. “Did you talk him into it?” she whispers, conspiratorially.

You snicker, and whisper back, “He isn’t getting a choice. He’s outnumbered.”

“Yes!” Her hiss of victory is hardly subtle, catching Coco’s attention as he pokes his head out the door.

“You two plottin’ against me, again?”

“Yes,” you and Letty reply, in unison, leading you to erupt into a fit of giggles.

Coco is all grins. “’Course, you are.” He strides closer, he and Letty dancing around one another as she moves into the house. You lean into the car, and retrieve a few more bags. If Coco’s out here, he might as well assist. He’s peering into the car, once you stand back up, and lets out a low whistle. “Damn, (y/n)! You buy out the whole store, or what?”

“Hardly,” you reply, dryly. You hold up your hands, offering Coco the bags. “Here you go.”

“Oh, don’t mind if I do.” Thankfully, your hold on the bags is solid. Instead of grabbing the groceries, Coco’s hands are suddenly groping all over you. One hand is settled firmly at your ass, the other sliding into your hair, at the back of your head. He wastes no time diving in for a slow, deep kiss, and, damn, does his timing suck. He could have at least let you put the bags down, first. The contact makes you tingle, and has you regretting your decision not to stay home. Coco pulls back, after a few seconds, and hums. “Mm. Best delivery ever.”

You can’t help the small snort of amused laughter that leaves your throat. “Good try, Coco,” you praise, easing back far enough to offer him the bags, again. The look of disappointment on his face is just pitiful. “I’m not banging you in the garage.”

He has the grace to mock gasp. “I’d never!” It’s a crock, and you both know it. He looks too amused to be repentant, and you look too aware to be angry. You just raise your hands, slightly, in a third offer. Coco sighs. “All right. All right.” He takes the bags from your hands.

“Thank you.” You grab another load for yourself, rounding the open car door to follow Coco’s lead, into the house. One more trip for each of you, and you should have it covered. So much for only buying fifteen items.

Coco might be right about buying out the store.

Watching from the dining room, Coco has a good view of you and Letty unpacking the last of the groceries. Damn kid, she’d thrown him out, about ten minutes prior.

“Less groping, more helping, Coco,” Letty had warned him, after he’d tried to pin you against the sink.

It had been his last warning. Now, he’s been banished. Not the worst thing in the world, not really. Over the last few weeks, he’s really learned that there are some tasks he’s not so fond of. Pruning roses… Yeah, he’s pretty sure you’ll never let him do that, again. And, hey, nobody told him what to fill the bird feeder with. Unpacking groceries goes on that list, somewhere between line-drying laundry, and a streak-free mirror. He’s not sure why. Goodness knows, it makes him feel like a kid at Christmas, most times. Since being with you, though…

Since being with you, he feels like he’s taking advantage of something.

Yes, groceries are a strange place to let that feeling land, but he can’t help it. Coco’s been responsible for feeding himself since before he cares to remember. The only time anyone provided his meals was during deployment, and half that shit barely passed for edible. You, though… You keep the house stocked with more food than he’s seen anywhere, outside of a corner market. Letty always has options to take to school, and there’s a nutritious dinner on the table, almost every night. (Some nights, he actually does win the battle for delivery). If Coco goes on a run, you send him along with snacks for the road. And, yeah, he kinda’ likes that. He also likes the energy bars you picked out for him, last week. Something with cherries, and dark chocolate. He wonders, for a second, if you picked up any more. Come in handy during his mid-week trip outta’ town.

Coco blinks. Then, he does it again, just for good measure. That’s it. That’s what’s so fucking weird about this whole thing.

It’s you.

Okay, no, it’s not you, you. But, it’s you. It’s you, taking care of him. It’s you, seeing to his needs. Letty’s needs. It’s you, being his wife, his partner. It’s you, slotting into the place of role-model for his teenaged daughter. Welcoming them into your home. Not treating it like it’s your home. It’s you, being so fucking perfect for him, it’s taken his mind all this time to catch up with reality.

Coco doesn’t get perfect. Perfect doesn’t want him.

Except, now, it does.

Before he knows what he’s doing, Coco strides into the kitchen. He doesn’t wait for you to put the box of pasta in the cupboard. He just takes it from your hand, ignoring your confused look, as he tosses it onto the counter.

“Coco!” Letty admonishes, but it’s no use. He’s already lifting you off the floor, arms around your perfect backside. The kid gives a long-suffering sigh, he hears it, but pays it no mind.

Nothing – nothing – is going to keep him from holding you in his arms.

Your own arms go around Coco’s neck, and you smile down at him, surprise still lingering in your eyes. “Uhm… Hi, there.”

Coco grins. “Hey, muñeca.” Leaning up, he pecks you on the lips.

“Can I help you with something?” you ask, to which Coco shakes his head. Closes his eyes, as your fingers play in his hair.

“Nah. Got all I need.”

Pulling a package of mixed vegetables from the half-unpacked shopping bag, Letty rolls her eyes. You two… God, you’re gross. Coco always has his hands on you, no matter what you’re trying to do. It’s a wonder you don’t carry a damned fly swatter around. Actually, it’s a wonder you ever accomplish anything. He’s always smooching, and smiling, and snuggling at you. It’s disgusting. It’s pathetic.

It’s so damned cute, it’s sickening.

Really, Letty’s enjoying seeing Coco so happy. Like, genuinely happy. Not the false pride he carries around with his kutte. He’s more relaxed, nowadays. He drinks less, and he spends more time at home, both of which mean he’s not hanging around with those skanks at the clubhouse. He eats more, he’s healthier… Nothing to complain about, there.

And, hey, she has no complaints about you, either. You’re pretty cool, all-around. A woman who takes care of herself, and her family, and doesn’t bitch about either one. You’re not using Coco for money, or status, none of the shit she’s always been worried her father would fall into. There aren’t arguments, every night, not even between herself and Coco, as of late. No hostilities, nothing to avoid the house over. Just good dinners, and movies, and a new fish tank in her room. (Okay, so, you’d earned some major points with that birthday gift. She hadn’t actually expected to get one, when she’d mentioned it). For the first time, she understands what a peaceful, happy family feels like. It feels nice. It feels like home.

Glancing back to where Coco now has you perched on the counter top, stealing the most syrupy-sweet smooches… Letty can’t help but smile. Home is A-okay by her.

The sound of the air conditioner humming in the bedroom usually lulls you right to sleep. Tonight, it’s just providing you with white noise, a low background track to your thoughts. You don’t mind, not really. It gives you a few minutes to reflect on the day that’s just ended. To plan your day, tomorrow. To weave your fingers through Coco’s hair, and listen to him breathe. That, alone, makes it worthwhile.

Coco has been asleep against your shoulder for nearly an hour, now. Your arms are wrapped around him, comfortably, his own around your waist. You’d urged him up to bed, after he’d fallen asleep on the couch, his head in your lap. He’d snoozed from the middle of the movie, to the end of the nightly news report. Letty had tsked, and complained that no one had any business, whatsoever, in falling asleep during Zombieland. (How he’d stayed asleep was still a wonder to you, both, for how hard you’d been laughing at Tallahassee). With your fingers in his hair, Coco had been blissfully unaware for a couple of hours.

Glancing down, you take in the sight of your husband’s sleeping face. He looks so damn peaceful, the kind you’d outright murder to preserve for him. Coco’s still struggling with sleep, and relaxation, even though you’d hoped it would ease up, once your nuptials had passed. Most of it, you know will never go away. Anxiety doesn’t have a magic wand, or some perfect little on/off switch. And, all things considered, today wasn’t a terrible day. You’d been able to leave the house, with minimal panic on Coco’s part. Granted, it had taken extra time to get the groceries put away, and dinner made, but… You understand, as much as you are able to, that Coco needs the reassurances. It doesn’t cost you anything to carve a few moments from the day, every here and there, to give him what he needs.

Okay, so it did cost you that first batch of pancakes, this morning. They’d burned on the stove, and set off the smoke alarms, when he’d insisted on a dance through the living room. But, Coco loved the song you’d been playing on your Spotify, so there was really no denying him.

Oh, and… Yeah, you’d missed that phone call from the bank, the week before. Your husband had slipped up next to you, on the porch swing, and snuggled you to within an inch of your life. An easy fix, and you still got the business loan, but…

And, sure, you’ve been late to work, on numerous occasions. Coco has a habit of sneaking into your morning shower. And, after that… Well, hell, you own the company. It’s not like you have to explain to the boss that you’re late to your shift, on account of baby-dancing. (Fucking forums).

Point is, you’re more than happy to take care of Coco’s emotional needs. It may take you an extra hour to pay your bills. Daily tidying may have become every-other-day-if-you’re-lucky tidying. And, your ass may have gone numb, tonight, while he slept on your thigh. During which time, you could have loaded the dishwasher. Taken out the trash. Any number of tasks that have been neglected, in the name of Coco. They can wait.

Leaning in, you press a tender kiss to your husband’s forehead, before settling back in, and closing your eyes. Yes, chores can wait. Work can wait. The whole world can hold it, with both hands. So long as you’re around, Coco’s well-being will never have to take the back seat.

P.S. If Coco denies it, he’s full of it. He fucking loved that cauliflower pizza. Fucking vegetarians, indeed.

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#mayans m.c. fanfiction #mayans m.c.#coco x reader #coco x you #coco cruz x reader #coco cruz x you #johnny coco cruz #anonymous request #fanfiction requests #ask box fic

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innuendostudios · 3 years ago

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youtube

I was invited to give a talk on GamerGate over Zoom in early 2021. I've long been frustrated that there isn't a good timeline of GG and its origins on YouTube. When people ask "what the hell was GG anyway?" they often get referred to my or Dan Olson's videos on the subject, but both of them were made while GG was ongoing, and presumed a degree of familiarity on the part of the audience. There was just too much to say about what was already happening to spend time getting the audience up to speed, and it was safe to assume our audiences had enough context to follow along. But time moves fast on the internet, and many people who now care about such things weren't there while it was happening, and are lacking the necessary context to follow the better videos. For a long time, I've only been able to direct them to RationalWiki's timeline, which is excellent but so exhaustively comprehensive that it's likely to scare off first-timers.

I realize an hourlong lecture isn't necessarily helping matters, but the first 20-or-so minutes of this video are my attempt at streamlining the timeline such that people can be up to speed on the most important stuff fairly quickly. The rest is talking about what it all meant, how it prefigured the Alt-Right, and using it to better understand digital radicalization.

This video was made with the help of Magdalen Rose, who edited the slides to the audio while I was laid up with a back injury. Go sub to her channel! And please back me on Patreon.

Transcript below the cut.

FUCKING VIDEO GAMES? FUCKING VIDEO GAMES. THEY MADE DOZENS OF PEOPLE MISERABLE FOR YEARS OVER VIDEO GAMES! NOT EVEN FUCKING VIDEO GAMES, FUCKING ARTICLES ABOUT FUCKING VIDEO GAMES. THIS IS WHAT PASSES FOR LEGITIMATE GRIEVANCE. ARE YOU KIDDING ME WITH THIS SHIT??

Hi! My name is Ian Danskin. I’m a video essayist and media artist. I run the YouTube channel Innuendo Studios, please like share and subscribe.

I’m here to talk to you about GamerGate, and I needed to get all that out of the way. I’m going to talk about what GamerGate was and how it prefigured The Alt-Right, and there are gonna be moments where you’re nodding along with me, going, “yeah, yeah I get it,” and then the sun’s gonna break through a crack in the wall and you’ll suddenly remember that all this is happening because some folks - mostly ladies - said some stuff - provably true stuff, I might add - about video games and a bunch of guys didn’t like it, and you’re gonna want to rip your hair out. By the end of this, you will have a better understanding of what happened, but it will never not be bullshit.

Also, oh my god, content warning. Racism, sexism, antisemitism, homophobia, transphobia, rape threats, threats of violence, domestic abuse - I’m not going to depict or describe at length any of the worst stuff, but it’s all in the mix. So if at any point you need to switch me off or mute me, you have my blessing.

Brace yourselves.

Some quick prehistory:

In 2012, feminist media critic Anita Sarkeesian ran a Kickstarter campaign for a YouTube series on sexist tropes in video games. And, partway through the campaign, 4chan found it and said “let’s ruin her life.” And a lot of the male general gaming public joined in. And by “ruin her life” I’m not talking 150 angry tweets including dozens of rape and death threats per week, though that was a thing. I’m talking bomb threats. I’m talking canceled speaking engagements because someone threatened to shoot up a school. I’m talking FBI investigation. The harassers faced no meaningful repercussions.

And in 2013, Zoe Quinn released Depression Quest, a free text game about living with depression. They received harassment off and on for the next year, most pointedly from an incel forum called Wizardchan that doxxed their phone number and made harassing phone calls telling them to kill themself. The harassers faced no meaningful repercussions.

(Also, quick note: Zoe Quinn is nonbinary and has come out since the events in question. When I call Zoe’s harassment misogynist, understand I am not calling Zoe a woman, but they were attacked by people who hate women because that’s how they were perceived. Had they been out at the time things probably would’ve gone down similarly, but on top of misogyny I’d be talking about nonbinary erasure and transphobia.)

Okay. Our story begins in August 2014. The August that never ended.

Depression Quest, after a prolonged period on Greenlight, finally releases on Steam as a free download with the option to pay what you want. In the days that follow, Zoe’s ex-boyfriend, Eron Gjoni, writes a nearly 10,000-word blog called The Zoe Post, in which he claims Quinn had been a shitty and unfaithful partner. (For reference, 10,000 words is long enough that the Hugos would consider it a novelette.) This is posted to forums on Penny Arcade and Something Awful, both of which immediately take it down, finding it, at best, a lot of toxic hearsay and, at worse, an invitation to harassment. So Gjoni workshops the post, adds a bunch of edgelord humor (and I am using the word “humor” very generously), and reposts it to three different subforums on 4chan.

We’re not going to litigate whether Zoe Quinn was a good partner. I don’t know or care. I don’t think anyone on this call is trying to date them so I’m not sure that’s our business. What is known is that the relationship lasted five months, and, after it ended, Gjoni began stalking Quinn. Gjoni has, in fact, laid out how he stalked Quinn in meticulous detail to interviewers and why he feels it was justified. It’s also been corroborated by a friend that Quinn briefly considered taking him back at a games conference in San Francisco, but he became violent during sex and Quinn left the apartment in the middle of the night with visible bruises.

Off of the abusive ex-boyfriend’s post, 4chan decides it’s going to make Zoe Quinn one of their next targets, and starts a private IRC channel to plan the campaign. The channel is called #BurgersAndFries, a reference to Gjoni claiming Quinn had cheated on him with five guys. A couple sentences in The Zoe Post - which Gjoni would later claim were a typo - imply that one of the five guys was games journalist Nathan Grayson and that Quinn had slept with him in exchange for a good review of Depression Quest. Given the anger that they’d seen drummed up against women in games with the previous Anita Sarkeesian hate mob, #BurgersAndFries decides to focus on this breach of “ethics in games journalism” as a cover story, many of them howling with laughter at the thought that male gamers would probably buy it. This way, destroying Quinn’s life and career and turning their community against them would appear an unfortunate byproduct of a legitimate consumer revolt; criticism of the harassment could even be framed as a distraction from the bigger issue. Gjoni himself is in the IRC channel telling them that this was the best hand to play.

The stated aim of many on #BurgersAndFries was to convince Quinn to commit suicide.

Two regulars in the IRC, YouTubers MundaneMatt and Internet Aristocrat, make videos about The Zoe Post. Incidentally, both these men had already made a lot of money off videos about Anita Sarkeesian. Matt’s is swiftly taken down with a DMCA claim, and he says that Quinn filed the claim themself. (For the record, in those days, YouTube didn’t tell you who filed DMCA claims against you.) Members of the IRC also reach out to YouTuber TotalBiscuit, who had been critical of Sarkeesian and dismissive of her harassment, and he tweets the story to his 350,000 followers, saying a game developer trading sex for a good review might not prove true, but was certainly plausible.

This is where GamerGate begins to get public traction.

Zoe Quinn is very swiftly doxxed, with their phone number, home address, nudes, and names and numbers of their family collected. Gjoni himself leaks their birth name. The Zoe Post, and the movement against Quinn - now dubbed “The Quinnspiracy” - make it to The Escapist and Reddit, which mods will have little luck removing. The Quinnspiracy declares war on any site that does take their threads down, most vehemently NeoGAF. People who defend Zoe against the harassment start getting doxxed themselves - Fez developer Phil Fish is doxxed so thoroughly, hackers get access to the root folder of his website.

In what I’m going to call This Should Have Been The End, Part 1, Stephen Totilo, Editor-in-Chief at Kotaku where Nathan Grayson worked, in response to pressure not just from The Quinnspiracy but an increasing number of angry gamers buying The Quinnspiracy’s narrative, publishes a story. In it he verifies that Quinn and Grayson did date for several months, and that not only is there no review of Depression Quest anywhere on Kotaku, not by Grayson nor anyone else, but that Grayson did not write a single word about Quinn the entire time they were dating.

In response, The Quinnspiracy declares war on Kotaku. r/KotakuinAction is formed, which will become the primary site of organization outside of chanboards. The fact that their entire “movement” is based on a review that does not exist changes next to nothing.

Some people start to see The Quinnspiracy as potentially profitable. The Fine Young Capitalists get involved, a group ostensibly working to get women into video games but who have a Byzantine plan to do so wherein they crowdfund the budget and the woman who wins a competition gets to storyboard a game, but another company will make and she will get 8% of the profits, the rest going to a charity chosen by the top donor. 4chan becomes the top donor. They like TFYC because the head of the company has a vendetta against Zoe Quinn, who had previously called them out for their transphobic submission policy, and he falsely accused Quinn of having once doxxed him. 4chan feels backing an ostensibly feminist effort will be good PR, but can’t resist selecting a colon cancer charity because, they say, feminism is cancer and they want to be the cure to butthurt. They also get to design a character for the game, and so they create Vivian James, who will become the GamerGate mascot.

Manosphere YouTubers Jordan Owen and Davis Aurini launch a Patreon campaign for their antifeminist documentary The Sarkeesian Effect and come to The Quinnspiracy looking for $15,000 a month for an indefinite period to make it, which they get.

In what will prove genuinely awful timing, Anita Sarkeesian releases the second episode of Tropes vs. Women in Video Games, and, despite not being a games journalist and having nothing to do with Quinn or Grayson, she is immediately roped into the narrative about how feminists are ruining games culture and becomes the second major target of harassment. Both she and Quinn soon have to leave their houses after having receiving dozens and dozens of death threats that include their home addresses.

After being courted by members of the IRC channel, Firefly star Adam Baldwin tweets a link to one of the Quinnspiracy videos and coins the hashtag #GamerGate. This is swiftly adopted by all involved.

In response to all this, Leigh Alexander writes a piece for Gamasutra arguing that the identity that these men are flocking to the “ethics in games journalism” narrative to defend no longer matters as a marketing demographic. Gaming and games culture is so large and so varied, and the “core gamer” audience of 18-34 white bros growing smaller and septic, that there was no reason, neither morally nor financially, to treat them as the primary audience anymore. Love of gaming is eternal, but, she declared, “gamers,” as an identity, “are over.” Eight more articles contextualizing GamerGate alongside misogyny and the gatekeeping of games culture come out across several websites in the following days. GamerGate frames these as a clear sign of [deep sigh] collusion to oppress gamers, proving that ethics in games journalism is, indeed, broken, and Leigh Alexander becomes the third major target of harassment. These become known as the “gamers are dead” articles - a phrase not one of them uses - and they make “get Leigh Alexander fired from Gamasutra” one of their primary goals.

Something I need you to understand is that it has, at this point, been two weeks.

Highlights from the next little bit: Alex Macris, a higher up at The Escapist’s parent company, expresses support for GamerGate; he will go on to write the first positive coverage at a major publication and cement The Escapist as GamerGate-friendly. Mike Cernovich, aka “Based Lawyer,” gets GamerGate’s attention by mocking Anita Sarkeesian; he will go on to hire a private investigator to stalk Zoe Quinn. GamerGate launches Operation Disrespectful Nod, an email campaign pressuring companies to pull advertising from websites that have criticized them. They leverage their POC members, getting them, any time someone points out the rampant racism and antisemitism among GamerGaters, to say “I am a person of color and I am #NotYourShield”; most of these “POC members” are fake accounts left over from a previous, racist disinformation campaign. Milo Yiannapoulos gets involved, writing positive coverage of GG despite having mocked gamers for precisely this behavior in the past, and gets so much traffic it pulls Breitbart News out of obscurity and makes it a significant player in modern conservative news media.

[Hey! Ian from the future here. This talk mostly addresses how GamerGate prefigured the Alt-Right strategically and philosophically, but if you want a more explicit, material connection: Breitbart News took its newfound notoriety to become, as its Executive Chair phrased it in 2016, "a platform for the Alt-Right." That Executive Chair was Steve Bannon, who threw the website's weight behind The Future President Who Shall Not Be Named, and, upon getting his attention, would then go on to become his campaign strategist and work in his Administration. So, if you're wondering how one of the central figures of the Alt-Right ended up in the White House, the answer is literally "GamerGate." Back to you, Ian from the past!]

In what I’m calling This Should Have Been The End, Part 2, Zoe Quinn announces that they have been lurking the #BurgersAndFries IRC channel since the beginning and releases dozens of screenshots showing harassment being planned and the selection of “ethics in games journalism” as a cover. #BurgersAndFries has a meltdown, everyone turns on each other, and the channel is abandoned. And they then start another IRC and things proceed.

It goes on like this. I’m not gonna cover everything. This is just the first month. It should be clear by now that this thing is kind of unkillable. And I worry I haven’t made it obvious that this is not just a chanboard and an IRC. Thousands of regular, every day gamers were buying the story and joining in. They were angry, and no amount of evidence that their anger was unfounded was going to change that. You could not mention or even allude to GamerGate and not get flooded with dozens, even hundreds of furious replies. These replies always included the hashtag so everyone monitoring it could join in, so all attempts at real conversation devolved into a hundred forking threads where some people expected you to talk to them while others hurled insults and slurs. And always the possibility that, if any one of them didn’t like what you said, you’d be the next target.

To combat this, some progressives offered up the hashtag #GameEthics to the people getting swept up in GamerGate, saying, “look, we get that you’re angry, and if you want to talk about ethics in games journalism, we can totally do that, but using your hashtag is literally putting us in danger; they calling the police on people saying there’s a hostage situation at their home addresses so they get sent armed SWAT teams, and if you’ll just use this other hashtag we can have the conversation you say you want to have in safety.” And I will ever stop being salty about what happened.

They refused. They wouldn’t cede any ground to what they saw as their opposition. It was so important to have the conversation on their terms that not only did they refuse to use #GameEthics, they spammed it with furry porn so no one could use it.

A few major events on the timeline before we move on: Christina Hoff Sommers, the Republican Party’s resident “feminist,” comes out criticizing Anita Sarkeesian and becomes a major GG figurehead, earning the title Based Mom. Zoe Quinn gets a restraining order against Eron Gjoni, which he repeatedly violates, to no consequence; GG will later crowdfund his legal fees. There’s this listserv called GameJournoPros where game journalists would talk about their jobs, and many are discussing their concerns over GamerGate, so Milo Yiannopoulos leaks it and this is framed as further “proof of collusion.” 4chan finally starts enforcing its “no dox” rules and shuts GamerGate threads down, so they migrate to 8chan, a site famous for hosting like a lot of child porn. Indie game developer Brianna Wu makes a passing joke about GamerGate on Twitter and they decide, seemingly on a whim, to make her one of the biggest targets in the entire movement; she soon has to leave her home as well. GamerGate gets endorsements from WikiLeaks, Infowars, white nationalist sites Stormfront and The Daily Stormer, and professional rapist RooshV. And hundreds of people get doxxed; an 8chan subforum called Baphomet is created primarily to host dox of GamerGate’s critics.

But by November, GamerGate popularity was cresting, as more and more mainstream media covered it negatively. Their last, big spike in popularity came when Anita Sarkeesian went on The Colbert Report and Stephen made fun of the movement. Their numbers never recovered after that.

Which is not to say GamerGate ended. It slowed down. The period of confusion where the mainstream world couldn’t tell whether it was a legitimate movement or not passed. But, again, most harassers faced no meaningful repercussions. Gamers who bought the lie about “ethics in games journalism” stayed mad that no one had ever taken them seriously, and harassers continued to grief their targets for years. The full timeline of GamerGate is an constant cycle of lies, harassment, operations, grift, and doxxing. Dead-enders are to this day still using the hashtag. And remember how Anita had nothing to do with ethics in games journalism or Zoe Quinn, and they just roped her in because they’d enjoyed harassing her before so why not? Every one of GamerGate’s targets knows that they may get dragged into some future harassment campaign just because. It’s already happened to several of them. They’re marked.

(sigh) Let’s take a breath.

Now that we know what GamerGate was, let’s talk about why it worked.

In the thick of GamerGate, I started compiling a list of tactics I saw them using. I wanted to make a video essay that was one part discussion of antifeminist backlash, and one part list of techniques these people use so we can better recognize and anticipate their behavior. That first part became six parts and the second part went on a back burner. It would eventually become my series, The Alt-Right Playbook. GamerGate is illustrative because most of what would become The Alt-Right Playbook was in use.

Two foundational principles of The Alt-Right Playbook are Control the Conversation and Never Play Defense. Make sure people are talking about what you want them to talk about, and take an aggressive posture so you look dominant even when you’re not making sense. For instance: once Zoe leaked the IRC chatlogs, a reasonable person could tell the average gater, “the originators of GamerGate were planning harassment from the very beginning.” But the gater would say, “you’re cherry-picking; not everyone was a harasser.”

Now, this is a bad argument - that’s not how you use “cherry-picking” - and it’s being framed as an accusation - you’re not just wrong, you’re dishonest - which makes you wanna defend yourself. But, if you do - if you tell them why that argument is crap - you’ve let the conversation move from “did the IRC plan harassment?” - a question of fact - to “are the harassers representative of the movement?” - a question of ethics. Like, yes, they are, but only within a certain moral framework. An ethics question has no provable answer, especially if people are willing to make a lot of terrible arguments. It is their goal to move any question with a definitive answer to a question of philosophy, to turn an argument they can’t win into an argument nobody can win.

The trick is to treat the question you asked like it’s already been answered and bait you into addressing the next question. By arguing about whether you’re cherry-picking, you’re accepting the premise that whether you’re cherry-picking is even relevant. Any time this happens, it’s good to pause and ask, “what did we just skip over?” Because that will tell you a lot.

What you skipped over is their admission that, yes, the IRC did plan harassment, but that’s only on them if most of the movement was in on it. Which is a load of crap - the rest of the IRC saw it happening, let it happen, it’s not like anybody warned Zoe, and shit, I’m having the cherry-picking argument! They got me! You see how tempting it is? But presumably the reason you brought the harassment up is because you want them to do something about it. At the very least, leave the movement, but ideally try and stop it. They don’t, strictly speaking, need to feel personally responsible to do that. And you might be thinking, well, maybe if I can get them take responsibility then they’ll do something, but you’d be falling for a different technique I call I Hate Mondays.

This is where people will acknowledge a terrible thing is happening, maybe even agree it’s bad, but they don’t believe anything can be done about it. They also don’t believe you believe anything can be done about it. Mondays suck, but they come around every week. This is never stated outright, but it’s why you’re arguing past each other. To them, the only reason to talk about the bad thing is to assign blame. Whose turn is it to get shit on for the unsolvable problem? Their argument about cherry-picking amounts to “1-2-3 not it.” And they are furious with you for trying to make them responsible for harassment they didn’t participate in.

The unspoken argument is that harassment is part of being on the internet. Every public figure deals with it. This ignores any concept of scale - why does one person get harassed more than another? - but you can’t argue with someone who views it as a binary: harassment either happens or it doesn’t, and, if it does, it’s a fact of life, and, if it happens to everyone, it’s not gendered. And this is not a strongly-held belief they’ve come to after years of soul-searching - this is what they’ve just decided they believe. They want to participate in GamerGate despite knowing its purpose, and this is what would need to be true for that to be ok.

Or maybe they’re just fucking with you! Maybe you can’t tell. Maybe they can’t tell, either. I call this one The Card Says Moops, where people say whatever they feel will score points in an argument and are so irony-poisoned they have no idea whether they actually believe it. A very useful trick if the thing you appear to believe is unconscionable. You can’t take what people like that say at face value; you can only intuit their beliefs from their actions. They say they believe this one minute and that another, but their behavior is always in accordance with that, not this.

In the negative space, their belief is, “The harassment of these women is okay. My anger about video games is more important. I may not be harassing them myself, but they do kind of deserve it.” They will never say this out loud in a serious conversation, though many will say it in an anonymous or irreverent space where they can later deny they meant it. But, whatever they say they believe, this is the worldview they are operating under.

Obscuring this means flipping through a lot of contradictory arguments. The harassment is being faked, or it’s not being faked but it’s being exaggerated, or it’s not being exaggerated but the target is provoking it to get attention, which means GamerGate harassers simultaneously don’t exist, exist in small numbers, and exist in such large numbers someone can build a career out of relying on them! It can be kind of fun to take all these arguments made in isolation and try to string together an actual position. Like, GamerGate would argue that Nathan Grayson having previously mentioned Zoe Quinn in an article about a canceled reality show counts as positive coverage, and since Grayson reached out to Quinn for comment it’s reasonable to assume they started dating before the article was published (which is earlier than they claim), and positive coverage did lead to greater popularity for Depression Quest. But if you untangle that, it’s like… okay, you’re saying Zoe Quinn slept with a journalist in exchange for four nonconsecutive sentences that said no more than “Zoe Quinn exists and made a game,” and the price of those four sentences was to date the journalist for months, all to get rich off a game that didn’t cost any money. That’s your movement?

And some, if cornered, would say, “yes, we believe women are just that shitty, that one would fuck a guy for months if it made them the tiniest bit more famous.” But they won’t lead with that. Because they know it won’t convince the normies, even the ones who want to be convinced. So they use a process I call The Ship of Theseus to, piece by piece, turn that sentence into “slept with a journalist in exchange for a good review” and argue that each part of the sentence is technically accurate. It’s trying to lie without lying. And, provided all the pieces of this sentence are discussed separately, and only in the context of how they justify this sentence, you can trick yourself into believing this sentence is mostly true.

So, like, why? This is clearly motivated reasoning; what’s the motivation? What was this going to accomplish?

The answer is nothing. Nothing, by design. GamerGate’s “official” channels - the subreddit and the handful of forums that didn’t shut them down - were rigidly opposed to any action more organized than an email campaign. They had a tiny handful of tangible demands - they wanted gaming websites to post public ethics policies and had a list of people they wanted fired - but their larger aim was the sea change in how games journalism operated, which nothing they were asking for could possibly give them. The kind of anger that convinces you this is a true statement is not going to be addressed by a few paragraphs about ethics and Leigh Alexander getting a new job. They wanted gaming sites to stop catering to women and “SJWs” - who were a sizable and growing source of traffic - and to get out of the pockets of companies that advertised on their websites - which was their primary source of income. So all Kotaku had to do to make them happy was solve capitalism!

Meanwhile, the unofficial channels, like 8chan and Baphomet, were planning op after op to get private information, spread lies with fake accounts, get disinformation trending, make people quit jobs, cancel gigs, and flee their homes. Concrete goals with clear results. All you had to do to feel productive was go rogue. In my video,

How to Radicalize a Normie, I describe how the Alt-Right encourages lone wolf behavior by whipping people up into a rage and then refusing to give them anything to do, while surrounding them with examples of people taking matters into their own hands. The same mechanism is in play here: the public-facing channels don’t condone harassment but also refuse to fight it, the private channels commit it under cover of anonymity, and there is a free flow of traffic between them for when the official channels’ impotence becomes unbearable.

What I hope I’m illustrating is how these techniques play off of each other, how they create a closed ecosystem that rational thought cannot enter. There’s a phrase we use on the internet that got thrown around a lot at the time:

you can’t logic someone out of a position they didn’t logic themselves into.

Now, there are a few other big topics I think are relevant here, so I want to go through them one by one.

MEMEIFICATION

So a lot of interactions with GamerGate would involve a very insular knowledge base.

Like, you’d say something benign but progressive on Twitter.

A gater would show up in your mentions and say something aggressive and false.

You’d correct them. But then they’d come back and hit you with -

ah shit, sorry, this is a Loss meme.

If I were in front of a classroom I’d ask, show of hands, how many of you got that? I had to ask Twitter recently, does Gen Z know about Loss?!

If you don’t know what Loss is I’m not sure I can explain it to you. It’s this old, bad webcomic that was parodied so, so, so many times

that it was reduced to its barest essentials, to the point where any four panels with shapes in this arrangement is a Loss meme. For those of you in the know, you will recognize this anywhere, but have you ever tried to explain to someone who wasn’t in the know why this is really fuckin’ funny?

So, now… by the same process that this is a comics joke,

this is a rape joke.

I’m not gonna show the original image, but, once upon a time, someone made an animated GIF of the character Piccolo from Dragon Ball Z graphically raping Vegeta. 4chan loved it so much that it got posted daily, became known as the “daily dose,” until mods started deleting every incident of it. So they uploaded slightly edited version of it. Then they started uploading other images that had been edited with Piccolo’s color scheme. It got so abstracted that eventually any collection of purple and green pixels would be recognized as Piccolo Dick.

Apropos of nothing, GamerGate is a movement that insists it is not sexist in nature and it does not condone threats of rape against the women they don’t like. And this is their logo. This is their mascot.

If you’re familiar with the Daily Dose, the idea that GamerGate would never support Eron Gjoni if they believed he was a sexual abuser is so blatantly insincere it’s insulting… but imagine trying to explain to someone who’s not on 4chan how this sweater is a rape joke. Imagine having to explain it to a journalist. Imagine having to explain it to the judge enforcing your abuser’s restraining order.

Reactionaries use meme culture not just because they’re terminally online but also because it makes their behavior seem either benign or just confusing to outsiders. They find it hilarious that they can be really explicit and still fly under the radar. The Alt-Right did this with Pepe the Frog, the OK sign, even the milk glass emoji for a hot minute. The more inexplicable the meme, the better. You get the point where Stephen Miller is flashing Nazi signs from the White House and the Presidential re-eletion campaign is releasing 88 ads of exactly 14 words and there’s still a debate about whether the administration is racist. Because journalists aren’t going to get their heads around that. You tell them “1488 is a Nazi number,” it’s gonna seem a lot more plausible that you’re making shit up.

MOVE FAST AND BREAK THINGS

Online movements like GamerGate move at a speed and mutation rate too high for the mainstream world to keep up. And not just that they don’t understand the memes - they don’t understand the infrastructure.

In an attempt to cover GamerGate evenhandedly, George Wiedman of Super Bunnyhop interviewed a lawyer who specializes in journalistic ethics. He meant well; I really wish he hadn’t. You can see him trying to fit something like GamerGate into terms this silver-haired man who works in copyright law can understand. At one point he asks if it’s okay to fund the creative project of a potential journalistic source, to which the guy understandably says “no.”

What he’s alluding to here is the harassment of Jenn Frank. A few weeks into GamerGate, Jenn Frank writes a piece in The Guardian about sexism in tech that mentions Anita Sarkeesian and Zoe Quinn. In another case of “here’s a strongly-held belief I just decided I have,” GamerGate says this is a breach of journalistic ethics because Frank backs Quinn on Patreon. They harass her so intensely she not only has to quit her job at The Guardian, for several months she quits journalism entirely.

Off the bat, calling a public figure central to a major event in the field a “journalistic source” is flatly wrong-headed. Quinn was not interviewed or even contacted for the article, they were in no way a “source”; they were a subject. But I want to talk about this phrase, “fund a creative project.” Patreon is functionally a subscription; it’s a way of buying things. It’s technically accurate that Frank is funding Quinn’s creative project, but only in the sense that you are funding Bob Dylan’s creative project if you listen to his music. And saying Frank therefore can’t write about Quinn is like saying a music journalist can’t cover a Bob Dylan concert if they’ve ever bought his albums.

And we could talk about the ways that Patreon, as compared with other funding models, can create a greater sense of intimacy, and we also could comment that, well, that’s how an increasing number of people consume media now, so that perspective should be present in journalism. But maybe it means we should cover that perspective differently? I don’t know. It’s an interesting subject. But none of that’s going on in this conversation because this guy doesn’t know what Patreon is. It was only a year old at this point. Patreon’s been a primary source of my income for 5 years and my parents still don’t know what it is. (I think they think I’m a freelancer?) This guy hears “funding a creative project” and he’s thinking an investor, someone who makes a profit off the source’s success.

The language of straight society hasn’t caught up with what’s happening, and that works in GamerGate’s favor.

In the years since GamerGate we have dozens of stories of people trying to explain Twitter harassment to a legal system that’s never heard of Twitter. People trying to explain death threats to cops whose only relationship to the internet is checking email, confusedly asking, “Why don’t you just not go online?” Like, yeah, release your text game about depression at GameStop for the PS3 and get it reviewed in the Boston Globe, problem solved.

You see this in the slowness of mainstream journalists to condemn the harassment - hell, even games journalists at first. Because what if it is a legitimate movement? What if the harassers are just a fringe element? What if there was misconduct? The people in a position to stop GamerGate don’t have to be convinced of their legitimacy, they just have to hesitate. They just have to be unsure. Remember how much happened in just the first two weeks, how it took only a month to become unkillable.

It’s the same hesitance that makes mainstream media, online platforms, and law enforcement underestimate The Alt-Right. They’re terrified of condemning a group as white nationalist terrorists because they’re confused, and what if they’re wrong? Or, in most cases, not even afraid they’re wrong, but afraid of the PR disaster if too much of the world thinks they’re wrong.

ACCOUNTABILITY AND CONTROL

A thing I’ve talked about in The Alt-Right Playbook is how these decentralized, ostensibly leaderless movements insulate themselves from responsibility. Harassment is never the movement’s fault because they never told anyone to harass and you can’t prove the harassers are legitimate members of the movement. The Alt-Right does this too - one of their catchphrases is “I disavow.” Since there are no formalized rules for membership, they can redraw boundaries on the fly; they can take credit for any successes and deny responsibility for any wrongdoing. Public membership is granted or revoked based on a person’s moment-to-moment utility.

It’s almost like… they’re cherry-picking.

The flipside of this is a lack of control. Since they never officially tell anyone to do anything but write emails, they have no means of stopping anyone from behaving counterproductively. The harassment of Jenn Frank was the first time GamerGate’s originators thought, “maybe we should ease off just to avoid bad publicity,” and they found they couldn’t. GamerGate had gotten too big, and too many people were clearly there for precisely this reason.

They also couldn’t control the infighting. When your goal is to harass women and you have all these contradictory justifications for why, you end up with a lot of competing beliefs. And, you know what? Angry white men who like harassing people don’t form healthy relationships! Several prominent members of GamerGate - including Internet Aristocrat - got driven out by factionalism; they were doxxed by their own people! Jordan Owen and Davis Aurini parted ways hating each other, with Aurini releasing chatlogs of him gaslighting Owen about accepting an endorsement from Roosh, and they released two competing edits of The Sarkeesian Effect.

I say this because it’s useful to know that these are alliances of convenience. If you know where the sore spots are, you can apply pressure to them.

LEADERS WITHOUT LEADERSHIP

One way movements like GamerGate deflect responsibility is by declaring, “We are a leaderless movement! We have no means to stop harassment.”

Which… any anarchist will tell you collective action is entirely possible without leaders. But they’ll also tell you, absent a system of distributing power equitably, you’re gonna have leaders, just not ones you elected.

A few months into GamerGate, Randi Lee Harper created the ggautoblocker. Here’s what it did: it took five prominent GamerGate figures - Adam Baldwin, Mike Cernovich, Christina Hoff Sommers, Milo Yiannopoulos, and Nick Monroe, formerly known as [sigh] PressFartToContinue - and generated a block list of everyone who followed at least two of them on Twitter. Now, this became something of an arms race; once GamerGate found out about it they made secondary accounts that followed different people, and more and more prominent figures appeared and had to get added to the list. But, when it first launched, the list generated from just these five people comprised an estimated 90-95% of GamerGate.

Hate to break it to you, guys, but if 90+ percent of your movement is following at least two of the same five people, those are your leaders. The attention economy has produced them. Power pools when left on its own.

This is another case where you have to ignore what people claim and look at what they do. The Alt-Right loves to say “we disavow Richard Spencer” and “Andrew Anglin doesn’t speak for us.”

But no matter what they say, pay attention to whom they’re taking cues from.

AD CAMPAIGN

George Lakoff has observed that one way the Left fails in opposition to the Right is that most liberal politicians and campaigners have degrees in things like law and political science, where conservative campaigners more often have degrees in advertising and communications. Liberals and leftists may have a better product to sell, but conservatives know how to sell products.

GamerGate less resembles a boots-on-the-ground political movement than an ad campaign. First they decide what their messaging strategy is going to be. Then the media arm starts publicizing it. They seek out celebrity endorsements. They get their own hashtag and mascot. They donate to charity and literally call it “public relations.” You can even see the move from The Quinnspiracy to GamerGate as a rebranding effort - when one name got too closely associated with harassment, they started insisting GamerGate was an entirely separate movement from The Quinnspiracy. I learned that trick from Stringer Bell’s economics class.

Now, we could stand to learn a thing or two from this. But I also wouldn’t want us to adopt this strategy whole hog; you should view moves like these as red flags. If you’re hesitating to condemn a movement because what if it’s legitimate, take a look at whether they’re selling ideology like it’s Pepsi.

PERCEPTION IS EVERYTHING

One reason to insist you’re a consumer revolt rather than a harassment campaign is most people who want to harass need someone to give them permission, and need someone to tell them it’s normal.

Bob Altemeyer has this survey he uses to study authoritarianism. He divides respondents into people with low, average, and high authoritarian sentiments, and then tells them what the survey has measured and asks, “what score do you think is best to have: low, average, or high?”

People with low authoritarian sentiments say it’s best to be low. People with average authoritarian sentiments also say it’s best to be low. But people with high authoritarian sentiments? They say it’s best to be average. Altemeyer finds, across all his research, that reactionaries want to aggress, but only if it is socially acceptable. They want to know they are the in-group and be told who the out-group is. They don’t particularly care who the out-group is, Altemeyer finds they’ll aggress against any group an authority figure points to, even, if they don’t notice it, a group that contains them. They just have to believe the in-group is the norm.

This is why they have to believe games journalism is corrupt because of a handful of feminist media critics with outsized influence. Legitimate failures of journalism cannot be systemic problems rooted in how digital media is funded and consumed; there cannot be a legitimate market for social justice-y media. It has to be manipulation by the few. Because, if these things are common, then, even if you don’t like them, they’re normal. They’re part of the in-group. Reactionary politics is rebellion against things they dislike getting normalized, because they know, if they are normalized, they will have to accept them. Because the thing they care about most is being normal.

This is why the echo chamber, this is why Fox News, this is why the Far Right insists they are the “silent majority.” This is why they artificially inflate their numbers. This is why they insist facts are “biased.” They have to maintain the image that what are, in material terms, fringe beliefs are, in fact, held by the majority. This is why getting mocked by Stephen Colbert was such a blow to GamerGate. It makes it harder to believe the world at large agrees with them.

This is why, if you’re trying to change the world for the better, it’s pointless to ask their permission. Because, if you change the world around them, they will adapt even faster than you will.

THE ARGUMENT ISN’T SUPPOSED TO END

Casey Explosion has this really great Twitter thread comparing the Alt-Right to Scary Terry from Rick and Morty. His catchphrase is “you can run but you can’t hide, bitch.” And Rick and Morty finally escape him by hiding. And Morty’s all, “but he said we can’t hide,” and Rick is like, “why are we taking his word on this? if we could hide, he certainly wouldn’t tell us.”

The reason to argue with a GamerGater is on the implied agreement that, if you can convince them they’re part of a hate mob, they will leave. But look at the incentives here: they want to be in GamerGate, and you want them not to be. But they’re already in GamerGate. They’re not waiting on the outcome of this argument to participate. They’ve already got what they want; they don’t need to convince you GamerGate isn’t a hate mob.

This is why all their logic and rationalizations are shit, because they don’t need to be good. They’re not trying to win an argument. They’re trying to keep the argument going.

This has been a precept of conservative political strategy for decades. “You haven’t convinced us climate change is real and man-made, you need to do more studies.” They’re not pausing the use of fossil fuels until the results come in. “You haven’t convinced us there are no WMDs in Iraq, you need to collect more evidence.” They’re not suspending the war until you get back to them. “You haven’t convinced us that Reaganomic tax policy causes recessions, let’s just do it for another forty years and see what happens.” And when the proof comes in, they send us out for more, and we keep going.

The biggest indicator you can’t win a debate with a reactionary is they keep telling you you can. The biggest indicator protest and deplatforming works is they keep telling you in plays into their hands. The biggest indicator that you shouldn’t compromise with Republicans is they keep saying doing otherwise is stooping to their level. They’re not going to walk into the room and say, “Hi, my one weakness is reasoned argument, let’s pick a time and place to hash this out.”

And we fall for it because we’re trying to be decent people. Because we want to believe the truth always wins. We want to bargain in good faith, and they are weaponizing our good faith against us. Always dangling the carrot that the reason they’re like this is no one’s given them the right argument not to be. It’s all just a misunderstanding, and, really, it’s on us for not trying hard enough.

But they have no motivation to agree with us. Most of the people asking for debates have staked their careers on disagreeing with us. Conceding any point to the Left could cost them their livelihood.

WHY GAMES?

Let’s close with the big question: why games? And, honestly, the short answer is:

why not games?

Games culture has always presented itself as a hobby for young, white, middle class boys. It’s always been bigger and more diverse than that, but that’s how it was marketed, and that’s who most felt they belonged. As gaming grows bigger, there is suddenly room for those marginal voices that have always been there to make themselves heard. And, as gaming becomes more mainstream, it’s having its first brushes with serious critical analysis.

This makes the people who have long felt gaming was theirs and theirs alone anxious and a little angry. They’ve invested a lot of their identity in it and they don’t want it to change.

And what the Far Right sees in a sizable collection of aggrieved young men is an untapped market. This is why sites like Stormfront and Breitbart flocked to them. These are not liberals they have to convert, these people are, up til now, not politically engaged. The Right can be their first entry to politics.

The world was changing. Nerd properties were exploding into popular culture in tandem with media representation diversifying. And we were living with the first Black President. Any time an out-group looks like it might join the in-group, there is a self-protective backlash from the existing in-group. This had been brewing for a while, and, honestly, if it hadn’t boiled over in games, it would have boiled over somewhere else.

And, in the years since GamerGate, it has. The Far Right has tapped the comics, Star Wars, and sci-fi fandoms; they tried to get in with the furry community but failed spectacularly. They’re all over YouTube and, frankly, the atheist community was already in their pocket. Basically, if you’re in community with a bunch of young white guys who think they own the place, you might wanna have some talks with them sooner than later.

Anyway, if you want to know more about any of this stuff, RationalWiki’s timeline on GamerGate is pretty thorough. You can also watch my or Dan Olson’s videos on the subject. I’ll be putting the audio of this talk on YouTube and will put as many resources as I can in the show notes. The channel, again, is Innuendo Studios.

Sorry this was such a bummer.

Thank you for your time.

#video essay #alt-right playbook #Youtube

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soft-boi-eli · 3 years ago

Note

okay I literally just made this acc bc there's no anon requests and I have an idea that I asked someone else but they turned it down and I'm lowkey embarrassed that they denied my request. I PINKY PROMISE ITS NOT BAD, HERE ME OUT

do you think you can write a lil bit about schlatt ending up having to "babysit" the reader (even though she's dead ass 18 lmaoo) because her parents are strict and don't trust her and they think Schlatt is a good influence because his parents are "🇺🇲🍟🐟🐷" but he's genuinely nice and respectful of other peoples views and opinions (unlike his other family). Basically Schlatt was like "aww hell yeah we're gonna play video games until 4am and watch action movies and be homies there's no parents stopping us" but the reader gets her period and she's just like laying around in misery and schlatt literally doesn't know what to do (bc yk periods are supposed to be a secret shhh) so he looks up what to do when girls get their period so while she's sleeping he just goes out and buys a bunch of stuff for her and its just fluffy (DONT FORGET PLATONIC) and the reader wakes up to all this stuff and its just 🥰 anyways she ends up falling asleep while watching Schlatt play COD.

(the reader is afab and uses she/her pronouns)

This is amazing. I have one other request but I am going to hop right on this one. Also sorry about the anon thing. I'm still newish to tumblr and I have no clue on how to turn it on. I've been trying to but i seriously cant find it. 😭

If this takes a bit I do apologize sincerely.

Pronouns:she/her

Warnings:periods cursing, strict parents.

Schaltt with an AFAB bff reader that he 'babysits'

Your parents. Thay dont know when to let you go.

Teaching you everything about females are supposed to be like this or that. Periods arent supposed to be talked about. They were the strict, bible Americans.

The best way to put it. Periods meant sin. And you were supposed to hide it. You were 18 in their eyes you're still a child. A child that worked 2 jobs just to hopefully live away from them.

But there was that rare day where you had it off from both jobs and could just relax.

That was until you heard there was someone coming to babysit you. You're a perfectly capable 18 year old. Not a toddler.

Yet your parents didn't trust you. You have a bed time of 10pm. And they got a baby sitter just for that.

He was there on time. And he looked you up and down in confusion. "This is who I'm babysitting right?" He looked the same age as you. "Alright. There will be no problem. They'll be in bed by 10pm. They'll have dinner at 6PM. And shower at 8pm." Your parents nodded in agreement and he watched them walk off. Shutting the door he looked at you. "Yeah. No. You are a grown woman and I'm not going to force you to do that. Also you're not paying me. You like call of duty? Action movies?" Perking up you nodded. "Yeah!"

He smirked. "Yeah. You up for a long night of movies and games?"

That day bloomed a friendship. The fourth time he came over you two were like best friends.

But the fifth time you seemed like you were dying. Laying around. Not wanting to play games. Not wanting to watch movies.

He was so concerned about you. Like deadass he thought you were dead his parents never saw the importantace of him learning what a period.

When you said the word period he was confused he searched it up and felt dread. You went through what every momth?! You can have so many symptoms yet nothing to help it?! What the fuck!

"Bro you want anything? Need anything?" You looked at him. He looked so concerned for you. "Heating pack. Dark chocolate. Please." He was quick to nod and start the heating pack.

Looking around the kitchen he couldnt find any dark chocolate and there was a store across the street. "You want strawberry ice cream and dark chocolate?"

The quite yeah was heard and he was off and back the heating pack fully heated and the ice cream that perfect texture. And a huge ass bar of dark chocolate. Along with a huge gallon of three flavored ice cream.

You know the neapolitan shit. You were so confused.

"Movie marathon or watching me play COD?" you thought for a sec. "COD." he nodded and sat next to you.

As you ate the sweet strawberry cream with frozen strawberries. Turns out he was preparing for when you finished you ice cream with the gallon.

When he saw you pint empty and you getting slightly sad he paused the game. In the middle of the campaign. And got you a huge ass bowl of the three ice creams.

You had never seemed so happy. Half way through the bowl you rested your head on his lap. You just wanted to sleep now and that's what you did.

You didnt know that schaltt left once more. Buying popcorn, your favorite candy, he felt embarrassed about this but he took a picture of the pads you use, like brand, size and everything. Got you quiet a few packs of them to be safe. Chips, chicken nuggets, even stuff to make your favorite meal by scratch. Stumbling into the stuffed animal aisle he scarned the shelves.

Finding a huge one with a zipper in it you had mentioned your parents have been trying to take your money and you could technically hide it in there.

Checking out the cashier gave him a weird look. But he didnt give two shits, he literally carried it back to your place. No car to help. He took that mile long walk with the bags and got back right before you woke up. Pads in the bathroom everything set up so it was easy access. And the stuffed snorlax was huge.

Like a fuckin bed huge.

He didnt wake you. Just started up his game again.

When you did wake up you were covered in a blanket, snacks set out in a nice array of candy to chips.

Four drinks. Two waters and one coke with the other being your favorite kind of soda.

Then the heavenly scent that came from the kitchen. And before you could even get up to see what it was schaltt came out two (bowls/plates) of your favourite food.

"You didnt have to do this." He shook his head. "I wanted to. You're in pain and all that shit. You need to relax, keep hydrated, stay warm. All of it. And I might as well take care of my best friend."

I have finished. I do apologize if this isnt fully what you wanted!! And the other person was quite mean. I dont reject unless I fully explain it and tell them gently.

But I hope this is good. I have been quite busy as of late due to it being the first and all.

But yeah. Nearly died today and all. Roller coasters, indeed fun, but sometimes unsafe.

It's all good though had lots of fun at a fair, keeping safe with covid and all, I even got a shiny rock I am very happy.

Anyways have a good day!!

#jschlatt x reader #mcyt fluff #schlatt x reader #mcyt schlatt #mcyt #mcyt headcanons #mcyt imagine #mcyt x reader #mcyt platonic #mcyt x y/n

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bxtchforstyles · 4 years ago

Text

You Better

Harry Styles x CEO!Y/N

Harry's girlfriend is the CEO of Gucci, and it is no easy job, but getting to design her boyfriends suits makes it all worth it.

Warning: minor swearing

Word Count: ~1.5k

gif not mine

"Hi baby," Harry was quick to greet her at the door, planting a small kiss to her cheek. "How was work?"

"Long." Y/n sighed as she took her coat off, hanging it on the hook near the door. "Very, very long. never thought I could go to that many meeting in one day."

Harry loved when Y/N came home, and she loved coming home to him. He was an absolute angel to her, especially when she was stressed and annoyed. Always greeting her at the door with kisses, making her dinner, running her a bath. Harry was everything that Y/N dreamed of in a relationship.

"I have a question for you, love."

Y/N nodded as she followed him into the kitchen, seeing there was a large pot on the stove, most like some type of pasta that Harry loved making for her.

She sat down at the island of the kitchen as he went over to the stove to tend to the dinner, looking back at her occasionally. "Ya know how I have the tour for the second album coming up, right?"

She smiled, "Yes I am well aware that Love On Tour will be stealing my boyfriend."

"Well, that leads me to my first question." He takes a step towards the countertop she was sat at, looking across at her. "I was wondering if, maybe, you wanted to go on tour with me, or at least the American leg of it.

Y/N smiled even brighter this time, "I would love to go with you! I'm sure I can work something out to where I can work virtually for a couple of months."

He was gleaming with excitement, never being able to experience tour with her the last time around because she didn't have much seniority at her job and didn't want to abuse her power of having a flexible schedule.

"Now, what was your other question?"

Y/N noticed how he almost immediately got nervous when she said that, making her stomach start to sink.

"I don't want you to see me asking you this as rude, or as if i'm using you, because that is definitely not the case whatsoever,"

"Babe, I know that you're not using me." She almost laughed, "what is it that you want to ask me?"

"The last tour, the suits I wore were a large part of my performance, since the fans loved them so much," He was completely rambling now, "and I loved them too, they were amazing. I just wanted to know there was any way-"

She cut him off, already know what he was going to ask. "You want me to design your suits for tour again."

He let out a sigh of relief before nodding.

"Of course I will bub!" She was now the excited one, "I've been waiting for you to ask me, I just didn't want to overstep if you already had picked out a designer."

"Oh thank god." He let out a sigh of relief.

"I've had so many designed that i've put aside for you. Home many shows are there going to be?"

Y/N was a very smart woman, and Harry knew that from the start.

When the two of them first met, it was when Harry had done the Gucci campaign in 2018. Y/N was just an employee at that time, working in the design as well as the management department.

She had been the one to style him for all of his photo shoots for that day, and at the end of, Harry knew he had to see her again.

That's when Gucci offered to design a suit for each one of his tour stops, which he was ecstatic about.

Y/N had been apart of the main design team working on all sixty of the suits, top to bottom. She had always secretly been a little star struck by Harry, always wanting to impress him.

Now though, four years later, they had been dating for almost three years and Y/N was now one of the CEO's at Gucci.

Her dream.

Some people thought that the only reason Harry got special promos, suits and other things of the sort was because his girlfriend had such an important role in the business. But what they didn't know, was that everyone in the entire Gucci enterprise work team loved Harry.

"Can i see some of them?" He asked, speaking of the designs she had mentioned.

She immediately got up out of her seat at the barstool she was sat in, trekking quickly towards the foyer to retrieve her work bag. She pulled out her design binder, where all of the pictures of the modeled suits were.

She set the large binder in front of him on the counter, "Now, I know that most of these drawers are on female models, but please, keep an open mine."

"When do I not?" He sent a smirk at her before opening the binder.

The couple spent the next couple of hours looking at all of the suits that Y/N had sketched, deciding what on the designs to keep, and what parts needed to be reconfigured.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

"Baby, I love how you look in pearls. They make your eyes shine." She gleamed as she walked into Harry's fitting room in her designing room.

"I really like this, actually." He told her, before attempting to adjust the suit jacket.

She took over, "Here, let me." He fixed the Jacket and the collar before directing him back towards the large mirror.

"Perfect." She stated.

"I really love it."

Y/N was over the moon looking at her boyfriend, seeing the many visions she had of the suits she designed for him come to life. The black suit jacket was lined with pearls, along with some pretty gold buttons that laid against Harry's torso.

She was smiling from cheek to cheek. "I'm really glad, hopefully you like all the suits I've designed for you."

That's when Harry turned around to walk into her office, immediately stopping in his tracks as soon as he entered. Y/N furrowed her eyebrows, wondering what he was looking at.

Until she herself walked in her office behind him, then she knew exactly what he was looking at.

"Please tell me that one is for me." His pleasing eyes were already begging her.

In the center of her room, was a standing mannequin, covered in a dark purple suit, covered in pink and silver rhinestones.

"Um-"

He widened his eyes, grabbing his girlfriend by the shoulders dramatically. "Y/N, angel, I will literally pay you however much you want if i can have this suit."

It was in fact not meant to be for Harry, but looking at his face, Y/N didn't think she could ever say no to him.

"You don't have to fucking pay me for it, Harry." She laughed at her boyfriend's offer, but he only narrowed his eyes at her playfully.

"But I will."

"I don't want you to." She protests back before beginning to take the suit jacket off of the standing mannequin. "Let's see if this even fits."

As soon as she put the jacket on him, his eyes lit up like a Christmas tree.

"Fits like a glove." Y/N smiled, adjusting the buttons on the suit.

"Okay, you have to give this to me now." Harry looked at himself in the mirror hung on the wall of her office.

"I'll see what I can do."

He sat down on the couch that was sat against the wall, opposite of Y/N's office. "Who was it originally for anyway?"

She sat on her desk, facing her boyfriend. "Well, it was supposed to be for Justin Bieber, he wanted a suit for the Met Gala that matched Hailey's, but i'll figure something out."

"Oh my-" He gasped in shock at the fact he was wearing a suit that was intended to be warm by Justin Bieber. "Wait," He then started.

"What now, Harry?" Y/N rolled her eyes playfully.

"You're telling me my girlfriend is the CEO of Gucci, and i've never got to wear a cool matching suit with her? What the fuck is that about?"

"Ya know, I usually don't have the time to make myself a fancy dress to match Mr. I want a bright red suit that is entirely covered in hand sewn crystals."

"Oi! You have to admit that suit was one of the best I've ever worn!" Her boyfriend protests.

"One of them? It was the best!" She shoots back with a hint of shock in her tone. "Anyways, maybe I'll design us some fancy matching suits for when my insanely talented boyfriend sweeps the Grammys."

"Holy shit, I love you." He gasps as he plants his lips against here.

Y/N smiles into the kiss, "You better."

AUTHORS NOTE:

i hope you enjoyed, please send any requests that you have and I will try to respond to them asap!! thank you for reading! TPWK<3 xoxo- hails

#harry styles x y/n #harry styles x ofc #harry styles blurb #harry styles x you #harry styles x reader #harry styles blog #harry styles imagine #harry styles one shot #solo harry #harry styles #ceo! y/n

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lubdubsworld · 4 years ago

Text

Better Man.

~~~~~~~~~~~~`Just to see you smile, I’d do anything. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Taehyung x Oc

Rated 18 +

Post Divorce, Getting Back Together, Second chances, Angst.

Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Do you ever truly know what someone is feeling?

You could spend decades , breathing the same air, hands held , your fingers brushing ....connected physically and even mentally but a person’s emotions, they’re hidden away.

You only ever know what they’re willing to show .

And yet,

all of us build relationships, convinced that we know exactly what the other person will feel when we act a certain way. Buying her flowers will make happy....visiting him at work will take away that little bit of stress.

But sometimes, what we think someone feels, may not be what they truly feel.

And that’s when your actions, well intended actions..... end up with disastrous consequences.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“So....last night...” Jungkook’s teasing voice did nothing to ease the pounding in my head.

“I do believe you promised not to tease me about it if I drank two glasses of water, which I did by the way.” I told him firmly, trying to bring the words on my planner into focus as i squinted. Three meeting. Each two hours long.

kill me now.

“I wanted to ask HR to give you the day off but you have quite a schedule today. “ He said casually, leaning over me to peer into the planner . I glanced at his wrist resting on the table, the expensive rolex showing that it was a little past 9.

“ We’re planning out the Christmas campaign first and I have a meeting with Taehyung’s team in the afternoon so we can go over the contract see if they have any requirements and then the social media team in the evening at four to discuss promos and revamping the website.” I glanced up at him.

He gave me a smile before casually leaning down, lightly gripping my chin and tilting my face up. I felt the brush of his lips against mine, fleeting and gentle.

‘You’re beautiful.” He smiled.

I blinked.

And then took a deep breath.

“Your wife...” I said softly. “ I saw her today.”

Jungkook went completely still at that.

“She was waiting in the lobby on my way up. I didn’t know who you were married to and I was a little shocked and also little upset because....” I glanced at him. “ She was my best friend in college. “

Jungkook swore.

“Fuck.. I told her to stay the fuck away from my company. Did she say something to you?”

i shook my head.

“I didn’t greet her because I wasn’t sure if she remembered me. And I wasn’t sure if i was remembering her right. i didn’t know she was your wife till i heard someone mention it in the elevator on my way up. Did you know that she and i knew each other?”

Jungkook looked just a little guilty.

“When you first joined the company, she saw your resume on my cvomputer. told me a lot about you. She remembers you. Fondly. She wanted to come meet you but...things happened. “ He shrugged.

Things like infidelity and divorces .

“Ahh...” I smiled. “ Tell me i wasn’t another way to get back at your ex wife, Jeon Jungkook ssi...”

He made a noise of protest.

“no... No of course not Christ...it’s just...I’ll admit she made me curious about you. She spoke of you being spontaneous and fun and wild and I’d seen you as this demure, elegant woman in the office. i was curious. I wanted to know which one was the real you. “

“Were you curious before she cheated....or after?”

“ Jang Mi...this isn’t what it looks like .. I’m done with her. She fucked my best buddy and ruined my fucking life...” He sounded pained.

I frowned.

“It’s hard to believe she would do something like that. The Aera i remember had a very strong moral compass.”

“Yeah well, apparently, you can live whole entire lives with someone and never really know the person. Listen, do we really have to talk about my ex wife?” He asked, eyes shining with discomfort.

I shrugged.

“I’m not fond of drama. I won’t tangle myself in a relationship that risks hurting a lot of people Jungkook. That’s just not the kind of person I am. I’m sorry.”

He made a noise of impatience, shaking his head.

“We won’t be hurting anyone... We have fun together. We like each other. We’re attracted to each other...that’s all that matters....” He said sharply.

“ If we were in our twenties , without kids ....maybe. But that's not how it is now. I have a son, you have a daughter and I think I’m not completely over my marriage yet.” I said softly.

He froze.

“And i don’t think you’re completely over your wife either.” I smiled.

He glared at me.

“Ex-wife.” He snarled.

“She makes you feel things, Jungkook. You need to sort that out before you start something new with someone else. I’m only saying this because we’re old enough not to

He growled and punched the desk.

“God, how can she keep ruining my life even when she’s out of it.” He muttered, stepping away from me and moving to the door.

I watched him storm out of my office and bit my lip.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

By the time evening rolled around, I was exhausted. But the day had been productive and I was happy because the contract had been finalized, the theme had been decided and we’d also spent an amazing three hours redesigning the website. Although it wasn’t in my job description I had studied web design in college and the creative department always welcomed my inputs.

“You’re in a good mood...” Taehyung’s voice was a complete surprise and I turned to him, shocked. He was dressed in a black t shirt and blue jeans and sneakers and looked a whole decade younger.

I felt affection rise up my throat so fast I nearly choked.

“What are you doing here?”

“My agent told me you guys were incredibly cooperative today. She also told me you were quite possibly the loveliest woman she’s ever met and that I’m an idiot to have let you go.” He smiled.

I laughed, shaking my head and my gaze shifted to the small bunch of tiger lilies in his hand.

I felt warmth bloom in my chest.

“You remembered.” I said softly, pleased.

“Thirteen years since our first date. The lily to my tiger. ” He held the flowers to me and I grinned, pressing the flowers to my chest.

“Man I feel old.” I muttered.

“You are old.” Tae grinned and i grimaced, before tossing him a glare. .

“You’re supposed to say I still look as beautiful as i did thirteen years ago.” I said.

“But you don.t” He grinned impishly. “ You look a billion times more beautiful.”

I felt the atmosphere shift, the air charged with something dangerous and i looked away. Usually, this was when I would laugh and throw my arms around him. Pull him close and press my lips against his , slip my fingers into his t shirt and trace the skin of his back. Feel his hands on my waist as he lifted me up to twirl me around and kiss me just like that.

How often had we kissed that way? Thirteen years is a long time to count the number of kisses we’d shared.

We both stayed quiet, looking anywhere but at each other.

“I...there’s a reason I came.” He said finally.

I glanced at him.

“Oh?”

“The lawyer. Ms. Lee she ... recommended a relationship counselor”

I blinked, my breath catching in my throat.

“Taehyung we’re-”

“Just hear me out. Its not mandatory and it won’t affect the divorce in anyway. its just something the court offers all couples going through a divorce and we’re free to refuse it. “

“Did you?” I asked.

“Did I what?”

“Refuse it. Did you tell her no?”

He stared at me.

“No.” He said finally.

I exhaled sharply.

“Wow.” I whispered, feeling jittery and unbalanced. He sighed and came closer, reaching out to lightly grip my wrists. I let him tug me closer into a hug and held him tight, my heart pounding with anxiety.

“Mia.... I just... I’m not saying we should try to fix this.... relationship.” He said softly, eyes gentle and pleading, “ I just think this whole thing has taken a toll on both of us and maybe we can heal better if we get the help of a professional. Come out of this with closure. Instead of battling guilt and regrets everyday. Just ....it could help us move on. Don’t you think?”

You could never really tell what the other person is feeling.

I couldn’t tell what Taehyung was feeling right now?

Hope ?

Hope that we would fix our marriage....

or maybe hope that he would finally move on from me.. Maybe this whole thing was his final attempt to end things with me for good. So he could walk out of my life forever without any lingering guilt or regret.

I would never know.

I clung to him harder and somehow the pain of the entire two years we’d been apart, rammed into me at once.

I choked on a sob. Breathing became difficult and I felt myself gasping for air.

“Mia?” Taehyung’s panicked voice was the last sane thought that registered.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“Are you sure you’re going to be okay? I can stay the night if you want. I’ll sleep in the spare bedroom . ” Taehyung whispered, seated on the warm fluffy blanket that he’d managed to dig out of the closet in the spare bedroom. i was already tucked into the bed, fingers clutching the satin lined edges .

i shook my head.

“I know how much you need your gazillion pillows. Go on... I’ll be fine.”

“i feel terrible. i pushed you into a panic attack.”

I waved off the guilty words.

“You didn’t . i was already a little frayed and i guess i haven’t really been processing all the stuff between us the way i should have. i just got a little overwhelmed.”

A panic attack. At the age of 32. The last time i had one I was twenty four. I wanted to crawl into the bed and never resurface.

Taehyung’s gentle fingers , stroking my cheek brought me out of my own head.

“I was so scared.” He said softly and my heart ached.

“I’m sorry i scared you.” I said apologetically, gripping his wrists lightly and stroking the skin there with my thumb.

“I really want to stay. i don’t think I’ll be able to sleep if I go home right now.” He whispered.

I bit my lips.

“Okay... but... You need to hug something. To sleep. “

He grinned at that.

“I’m old enough to survive one night without a pillow, Mia .” he chuckled.

I flushed, sinking deeper into the covers.

“Okay.”

“You don’t have to worry about the counselor thing. I’ll tell Lee we don’t want to do any-”

“No!!” I said quickly, a lot louder than I’d intended.

Taehyung blinked.

“I just... I realized that I haven’t been dealing with any of this...the right way. I’m so confused and disoriented all the time and I .. I don’t mind getting some help. To sort things out. Just for myself you know...without the pressure of trying to fix...well us.” I finished .

Taehyung gave me a wide smile before bending down and kissing my forehead.

“ Okay, Mia mine. Sleep well, and I’ll see you in the morning.”

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~`

#taehyung fic #taehyung smut #taehyung fanfic #bts smut #bts fic

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une-nuit-pour-se-souvenir · 4 years ago

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random stuff on songs in Sansa I ~ AFFC

All her nights were full of song, and by day she prayed for silence.

Sansa loves songs, but in truth they are just a sanitised version of history. Sansa's role in history will be big, from her stay at King's Landing to her return to Winterfell, on and on. She's already part of a song, she's just not aware of it.

And the songs he chose . . . He sang of the Dance of the Dragons, of fair Jonquil and her fool, of Jenny of Oldstones and the Prince of Dragonflies. He sang of betrayals, and murders most foul, of hanged men and bloody vengeance. He sang of grief and sadness.

No matter where she went in the castle, Sansa could not escape the music.

This is the history she has not lived yet. We know this is true because the very first, the Dance of the Dragons, has a second equivalent that has just only started and hasn't affected her as of yet (not even in her first chapter of TWOW).

Anyway, three songs: Dance of the Dragons, Florian and Jonquil, and Duncan and Jenny.

It floated up the winding tower steps, found her naked in her bath, supped with her at dusk, and stole into her bedchamber even when she latched the shutters tight. It came in on the cold thin air, and like the air, it chilled her.

There are four moments these songs catch her in. It's the second that gives it away as to how it should be interpreted because they match 1:1. But starting from the start...

"He sang of the Dance of the Dragons" VERSUS "It floated up the winding tower steps."

The Dance of the Dragons redux has started when Young Griff outed himself as Aegon VI and invaded Westeros. He opened the "hostilities" when he refused to grovel for Daniella's favour and went to get his birthright himself. Daniella will also participate because she sees the throne as her birthright and has no problems usurping the rightful heirs (Viserys). It's likely Jon will be dragged into this, as he's Targaryen as well.

"It floated up the winding tower steps" projects the idea of an upwards movement. The dragon song is coming up North. There are two options here, Sansa will flee North because the dragon war reaches the Vale (in whatever form, even if by rumour) straight to the arms of another dragon (Girl in Grey) and / or the dragon war will eventually come North. It's my conviction that the Targaryen brothers will fight each other for a time (Aegon's Conquest meets Northern Independence) before reaching a truce, which would qualify as part of the Dance of Dragons.

"Jonquil and her fool" VERSUS "found her naked in her bath"

This is the most obvious sign that they should be paired as said, since Florian and Jonquill's story is literally that, Florian finding Jonquill naked in a pool and falling in love with her. There is more to this story (it also involves dragons), but in specific the bath part is mentioned here. BTW this is a stupid story. Nobody falls in love with another because they see them naked, at most they fall in lust. Regardless, if Sansa is up North (either way from the previous song she's already there and as of TWOW she's heading there soon), then there's one candidate, the Winterfell Hot Springs.

We can guess a male finds Sansa naked at the Hot Springs, and something that can be passed of as romance happens. Much like before, there are several ways this can come to be but there are only two characters that are associated with frisky times in the Godswood of Winterfell, Theon Greyjoy and Jon Snow. The former is too traumatised by sexual torture while the latter has fantasies of bathing naked with his woman and then have exibitionist sex in front of the Heart Tree, so the latter is the likelier candidate.

I know it's not a popular theory because it's somewhat disgusting, but it all adds up. The Stark kids bathed naked at the Hot Springs (Bran confirms this in ACOK, but this also happens at the Water Gardens until they're 12-14,). A 12-14 male teen is at that age when they start getting "interested" in the opposite sex (only worse if thy parade around naked), so imagine a teen getting "interested" in someone they shouldn't at the weekly Stark kids bathing routine and this horrifies them so much because tHeY'Re NoT tArGaRyEnS to the point of wanting to join a celibate order, sacrificing their biggest wish (family). And that's remembered by this teen, now a man, in a "take two" of this event. Truly a fool though, as he knows nothing about "tArGaRyEnS" or that they're actually not siblings.

"Jenny of Oldstones and the Prince of Dragonflies" VERSUS "supped with her at dusk, and stole into her bedchamber even when she latched the shutters tight"

"supped with her at dusk" projects the idea of just before the night starts, which in ASOIAF also projects the idea of the Long Night and before winter. Such this all gives us the time frame, just before the dead come. You know, around the time the northern campaign happens. It's my conviction, from a number of feasts Sansa attends where she supped "trouts", that this suggests the norther campaign will likely extend to the Riverlands and may meet with Aegon's Conquest campaign (Dance of Dragons V2, congruent with song 1).

"stole into her bedchamber even when she latched the shutters" projects the idea of a thief getting inside an intimate place (where she sleeps, where her bed is) despite her best efforts not to. The simpler conclusion is rape. The most likely conclusion though, is something much more benign.

"stole into her bedchamber" in ASOIAF is associated with wildling custom of marriage. Most (if not all) accounts of this ritual involve the man getting the woman while she's asleep. I can recall three stories where it happened as such. Bael stole a Stark maiden from her bed. Yggrite accuses Jon of stealing her the night the Night's Watch raided their camp, she's the one that was asleep. Longspear stole Munda from her bed while she was asleep. Interestingly, the first is a Stark, the others are redheads. These fit Sansa perfectly.

So Sansa stolen by a wilding or someone that qualifies as one. Any will do, but in specific there's a character that has already been mentioned twice in regards with these songs and also fits into this one. Jon Snow has been accused of having become a wildling / half-wildling due to spending time with them and making peace with them. He was accused of stealing Ygritte but refused that he did it, considered stealing another to make a family but also refused to usurp Sansa's claim (we'll get to that below), so there's a third coming up for him.

"even when she latched the shutters" suggests resistance and that's also according to wildling custom, as the woman is supposed to fight against stealing. While a wildling woman fights physically, Sansa fights psychologically. As for sex, Sansa fought against Sandor with kindness and fought against Tyrion with courtesy, so neither succeeded in stealing her. However, Sansa "latching the shutters" suggests a different kind of resistance than those used before (both Sandor and Tyrion entered her bedchamber without stealing into it), as if she put barriers in place.

Sansa putting up barriers happens in ASOS / AFFC. She doesn't believe anyone will marry her for love ("It is not me she wants her son to marry, it is my claim. No one will ever marry me for love.") and she doesn't really want to marry again. ("A marriage . . ." Her throat tightened. She did not want to wed again, not now, perhaps not ever."). Such, "stole into her bedchamber even when she latched the shutters" suggests that Jon convinces her otherwise. The question is... how.

"Jenny of Oldstones and the Prince of Dragonflies" Now, for the song that goes with it, is also kind of telling. The story of Jenny and Duncan is about Duncan falling in love with Jenny and abdicating so he can marry her. So someone throws away their claim, breaking through Sansa's belief that nobody will marry for love but for her claim, and will ease her into wanting to marry again.

Jon actually has two claims. The first is Robb's will, which names Jon as his heir over Sansa. Jon wanting to void the will not only follows the Jenny and Duncan song (the man throws away his claim for the woman) it also destroys half of Sansa's barrier (he protects her claim, we already know he did this once per Stannis' insistence, incidently stealing a woman was mentioned, as said before it appears it's all thematically linked).

The second is by birth, as he's Rhaegar Targarye's son. If somehow Jon is legitimate, then he's King Aegon VI's heir until he has children, and he's also a prince. If I recall, most of Sansa's allusions around a Targ union are with a Targaryen prince, not a Targaryen king). If Jon is a bastard, then he'll be considered a threat to a Aegon VI, just like every bastard is (the Targaryens are well known for bloody wars between legitimates and bastards). I would assume this will be a doozy for brothers to deal with.

Somehow, either or both claims should have a hand in convincing Sansa that Jon would want to marry her for love instead of her claim as well as convincing Sansa to marry again. Robb's will clearly covers the former but not the latter (she can't marry her brother, tHeY'Re NoT LaNnIsTeR oR TaRgArYeNs, even though they are). However, Jon's second claim is what allows that marriage. For example, if Aegon accepts peace between the South belonging to him and the North belonging to Sansa as long as Jon throws away hs claim, yeah that's it. But any that fits the Duncan and Jenny story as well as Sansa being stolen despite her misgivings, will do.

It's worth noting Robb's will and it's implications (Sansa being usurped and Jon's kids being a threat to the legitimate line) are discussed at lenght between Cat and Robb at Oldstones, precisely where legend says Jenny and Duncan met (or where she came from, I cannot remember now the specifics), next to a sepulcher that represents Jon's true birthright as a Targaryen (the sepulcher is of a king with a warhammer upon his chest, which is how his father Rhaegar died, and covered with wild roses, which are a symbol of his mother Lyanna), and solves Robb's will implications (they can marry each other, so his children are hers, so they're no threat to the Stark legitimate line). As said, all tightly thematically linked and I cannot blieve this us a coincidence.

It came in on the cold thin air, and like the air, it chilled her. Though it had not snowed upon the Eyrie since the day that Lady Lysa fell, the nights had all been bitter cold.

So Dance of Dragons starts (Aegon's Conquest), some shenanigans at Winterfell's Hot Springs, then some claim throwing to the trash and a marriage. And after that comes winter. So it kind of suggests this all happens BEFORE the War of the Dawn, not after.

After the songs bit, we have the "meat" of the chapter, which is what the whole thing revolves around. Petyr and Sansa must lie about Lysa's fate to both Robyn and the Vale Lords. I would just like to point the following.

“Some lies are love, ” Petyr had assured her. She reminded him of that.

“When we lied to Lord Robert, that was just to spare him, ” she said.

“And this lie may spare us. Else you and I must leave the Eyrie by the same door Lysa used.” Petyr picked up his quill again. “We shall serve him lies and Arbor gold, and he’ll drink them down and ask for more, I promise you.”

He is serving me lies as well, Sansa realized. They were comforting lies, though, and she thought them kindly meant. A lie is not so bad if it is kindly meant.

Petyr, who's pretending to be Sansa's father, lied to her cousin Robyn about his mother, to spare him from the pain of the truth. Likewise Ned, who's Sansa's father, most likely lied to her cousin Jon about his mother, to spare him from the pain of the truth. Some lies are love, they are kindly meant.

Petyr, who's sort of Warden of the East for the time being, must lie to the Vale's lords & company about Lysa's fate, as he believes if he told the truth, he and his fake child (Sansa) would die. Likewise Ned, who's Warden of the North, must also lie to the rest of the realm about Lyanna's fate (death by childbirth), as he believes if he told the truth, he and his fake child (Jon) would die. Some lies spare innocents (Sansa / Jon), they are also kindly meant.

There's more stuff, but I don't feel like writing it now.

I always lol at Sansa's cousin being upset about his mother's death so he soughts her bed to nuzzle at her breasts and wet the bed (*shifts eyes*). This is important because Sansa bars the door to keep him out ("she latched the shutters"), yet at the end of the chapter, her cousin gets inside anyway ("stole into her chambers") because she forgot to bar the door. No idea what's that supposed to suggest, right?

#jonsa #should i tag this that if its just random thoughts with no finesse

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ellieredsnake · 2 years ago

Text

𝑬𝒅𝒅𝒊𝒆 𝒎𝒖𝒏𝒔𝒐𝒏 𝒙 𝒐𝒄 (𝑷𝒊𝒄𝒕𝒖𝒓𝒆 𝒚𝒐𝒖𝒓𝒔𝒆𝒍𝒇 𝒂𝒔 𝒎𝒂𝒓𝒍𝒆𝒏𝒂)

𝐥𝐞𝐭𝐬 𝐩𝐫𝐞𝐭𝐞𝐧𝐝 𝐥𝐚𝐧𝐚 𝐝𝐞𝐥 𝐫𝐞𝐲 𝐢𝐭𝐬 𝐚𝐧 80' 𝐬𝐢𝐧𝐠𝐞𝐫

-Lena, you have to cover for me, I swear that if I ask him to move again one of his campaigns he will kill me and make a campaign about my death," Rogo lucas once again chasing after the red-haired girl.

This made the girl laugh and exclaimed -much better, if that happens I will play in that campaign, don't worry I will win in your honor- exclaimed lena with amusement in her voice.

-This is serious woman, I need you to do this for me, you know how important the practices are, if I don't die in Eddie's hands I will die in Jason's hands.

Okay, but if I play I get one of those t-shirts? -She exclaimed sarcastically.

-Obviously! Everyone gets a t-shirt, we make them ourselves and..." explained the brunette, but he closed his mouth when he saw her friend's amused face.

-Come on, go on," she muttered, trying not to let out her laughter.

-Are you being sarcastic? -Sinclair asked, she just lifted her shoulders and ran into the school at last.

(...)

-Damn, it's about time," exclaimed Marlena as she heard the bell ring indicating it was time for recess.

So she hurriedly grabbed her things and left the boring science classroom as fast as she could.

As she was on her way to her locker, lena began to hear several voices calling her name, to which she immediately turned her head, she let out a sigh of relief when she realized it was just Mike, Dustin and lucas coming towards her wearing their ridiculous t-shirts, but you can't blame her for being paranoid, when you've saved the world three years in a row from some weird interdimensional shit your head plays tricks on you.

-Hey," said Mike trying to sound casual.

-Hey?" exclaimed Lena strangely, Mike was acting weird? More than usual.

-So... About the campaign tonight? -Lucas commented as he put his hand on his friend's shoulder and started walking with her towards the cafeteria.

Followed by Mike and Dustin who didn't say another word, they only prayed to some higher being, even a Demogorgon that by the power of the portals they could convince Lena to help them with their game.

-You already have my answer Sinclair, I don't want to go, I have never in my life crossed words with Munson and I don't think he wants to do it, ok? I'm not going to be uncomfortable for two hours just because of a stupid game.

This drew a sigh from Dustin who looked at her offended, putting a hand on his chest.

-I'm sorry, did I hear right? -He said reaching her friend and stopping in front of her and stopping her steps, "Dungeon and dragons is not a stupid game Marlena De Angelis and I ask you to take it back now.

This made the red-haired girl roll her eyes for the thousandth time since she arrived at the school.

-Oh sorry Dusty-bun but if I remember correctly, your precious game was quite boring when will wanted to play it a few months ago, because of you guys -she said looking only at mike- I had to play ten hours straight with him to end up losing anyway.

Hearing this Dustin shook his head and went back to his place behind lucas, while Mike kept his head down and kept walking, he remembered his argument with will, and lena had made him feel some guilt.

-Don't do it for them, do it for me, will you? -said lucas giving his best smile to Marlena, but she just rolled her eyes and accelerated her pace.

Lucas murmured, Lena, upon hearing her friend's suspicious tone, stopped and looked at him intensely.

-What do you have in mind, Lucas," she exclaimed worriedly.

-Oh, you know what I have in mind, De Angelis, you know very well.

-NO! No, no, no, don't even think about it Sinclair, that's very low of you.

While Marlena turned red as a tomato, Dustin and Mike just looked at each other in confusion. What could Lucas know that would make Lena so confused?

-Marlena, if you don't save me tonight, I'll tell Steve that you had a crush on him for over a year, and you even wrote his name next to yours inside a heart on the back of your notebooks.

-Shit! -exclaimed Henderson and Wheeler at the same time.

-I'm sorry lena, but this is life or death, so if lucas won't do it, I will. .... Please?

-Way to threaten me, Wheeler... Let me get to the cafeteria in peace, if I starve to death I can't help you," exclaimed lena grumpily, but she would rather put up with Eddie Munson than risk Steve Harrington discovering her secret love for him.

-Does that mean you'll help us? -Sinclair asked hopefully, lena just nodded slightly, "Shit! Well, well... For starters, could you sit with them at the hellfire table? Maybe?

Lena stopped in her tracks ready to argue, Lucas just tilted his head suggestively, making Marlena keep walking, but with a frown on her face.

-They're idiots.

(...)

After taking her food, Lena began to doubt. Was her secret really worth that much? It had been a long time since Lena had spoken to Munson, on the other hand, she had spoken to Garreth once or twice in Spanish class, she liked him.

-Lena! -she heard Dustin yell as he jumped up and pointed to the club table.

Lena just lowered her head in shame and hurried her steps in the direction of her friends.

-Damn it Henderson Don't you want to yell louder?

-Oh, but what's the matter, is the princess embarrassed? Don't you want to be associated with the losers? -Eddie exclaimed, making his presence known.

Wow, his first interaction after so long and Marlena already wanted to throw him out of his seat, one of the punches hopper taught him would work.

Lena smiled at her own thought and proceeded to sit down.

-It's not that, munson -this made him raise his eyebrows Did she remember his name? -but I like to keep a low profile Any problem with that?

Hearing the redhead's challenging tone he just smiled, maybe she wasn't as annoying as he thought.

-Where are the other two? -De Angelis asked.

-Detention," Garreth blurted out simply.

-Okay, Angel, can you even play? -asked Munson.

-Two things, one, of course I know how to play, it wouldn't make sense for me to be here otherwise. Second, my name is Marlena, not Angel.

-Lena to her friends," added Dustin.

-That's right, you can call me Marlena," she blurted out with a fake smile on her face.

Eddie only found her anger amusing.

-Whatever you say angel, okay. If you know how to play I don't see a problem.

(...)

To Eddie's surprise, with the help of Marlena or 'the red witch' as was her name in the game - Max's choice who had nicknamed her that after watching her fight the previous years - they had come to victory, but as strange as it was for him, he wasn't upset that he had lost, in fact he hadn't had time to be upset. He was too focused on trying to hide the stupid grin that he wanted to plaster on his face at the sight of Marlena's leaps of joy.

-Well, does that answer your question? -Marlena blurted out to Eddie.

-Oh yes, we all saw that you play well, don't let it go to your head angel.

-That's right! You could even join the c...- but Lena didn't let him finish.

-Don't even think about it Dusty-bun, this is a one time thing.

-Wait, Dusty-bun? -asked Munson in confusion.

-Long story," Henderson blurted out immediately before Marlena could tell her embarrassing tale.

(...)

The next day, Marlena was thankful she didn't have to go to school, the week had been very stressful, she had missed Jane and will so much. Even Joyce and Jonathan, although sometimes she regretted not having moved with them to California, seeing her best friend -also known as Robin Buckley- every day reminded her that her decision had been the right one, with what her mother sent her from London and what she earned singing was enough to live on.

And that's where she was headed, Lena loved music, she had a weakness for a new artist, she called herself Lana del Rey and she was the one who had pushed Marlena to want to sing in public.

She had made a space for herself every weekend in a small bar called the hideout, it wasn't the best, but it was where she had started. Besides, the drunken girls in pain tip very generously when they hear her sing.

After pedaling all the way there, she finally arrived. Upon entering she was greeted by the familiar smell of tobacco and broken hearts that enveloped the place, Lena was used to it, she even liked it.

But as she walked deeper into the bar and tried to enter the "dressing room"-it was really just an old utility room where she was getting ready-the door was locked from the inside, which annoyed her, but she was mostly confused.

So she continued on her way until she reached the owner of the bar.

-Hey, I'm Marlena, remember me? I sing here every week," explained the red-haired girl. "I tried to go into the room to get ready, but someone locked it from the inside and...".

But the guy didn't let her continue.

-Oh! Marlena, I remember you. I'm sorry girl, but I forgot to tell you that the freaks are playing today too, I accidentally gave them the first round. You come later, don't worry.

Although this infuriated Marlena, she didn't show it. How the hell did she expect me to play second shift? It started at nine o'clock at night, a time that in the girl's opinion was too late to ride her bike home. Ever since will she was extremely careful.

-The freaks? What are you talking about? I've been playing here for a long time, come on, can't you move them around a bit?

But before the man answered, someone spoke from behind them, an irritatingly familiar voice.

-We're ready in five, you can switch on the sound... Angel? What the hell are you doing here," asked the owner of the voice in an annoyed tone?

-Wow munson, I'm going to start believing that you are following me -Responded De Angelis ignoring the tone of the metalhead's voice.

-I asked you a question Marlena, this place is not safe for a girl like you.

Although this made Lena melt inside, she didn't say anything about it, as her tenderness melted into the anger that grew in her. A girl like her? What did he mean by that?

-What do you mean a girl like me Edward, is the place too masculine for me? -Lena asked annoyed.

-Listen, I didn't mean it to sound like that," said the guy defeated, "but this place has no security at all and drunk guys come here every day, you shouldn't be here alone.

-I've come here alone many times munson, I know how to take care of myself. Now answer me something, are you the one who took my place?

- I don't have the slightest idea what you're talking about," said Eddie confused.

-I sing here Eddie, and the owner of the place just told me that and I quote 'the freaks' will play before me," said Lena imitating the owner's voice, "I can only imagine that he means Corroded Coffin, am I right?

This made Eddie smile, maybe she hadn't forgotten him completely.

And they weren't complete strangers, way back when Eddie wasn't yet a total metalhead, they had been friends, their friendship didn't last long anyway, after the fire at starcourt Eddie stopped talking to her.

Lena thought she had done something wrong so she just gave him his space. But in reality Eddie had heard that Lena was at the mall when the fire happened, and he was so scared that when he realized she was okay, he decided to stop talking to her.

If that's what it had felt like to almost lose her, he didn't want to know what it would feel like to actually do it, and he foolishly thought that by pushing her away he would stop caring about her. But obviously none of that worked.

-I-heh, I... If it's us, I didn't know you sang here or we would have taken the night shift.

-Whatever, I'll go wait for you guys to finish before I bore you and you avoid me again like the plague, you have experience with that don't you? -Marlena blurted out making the metalhead's heart clench.

If only she knew how many times he had to restrain himself from running up to her and hugging her from behind like he used to do when they were friends.

Eddie was about to blurt out an excuse, however he didn't have time as Garreth arrived just in time to cut his speech short.

-We're going to start now man, what's taking you so long? Marlena?

Lena just smiled slightly and nodded her head.

-What are you doing here, are you alone? -asked the concerned boy, making Eddie roll his eyes. Since when did Garreth care so much about Marlena?

-You know I'm here to sing, you saw me the other day, remember? -How the hell did Garreth know and he didn't?

-You knew that she.... -He couldn't finish anyway, as they went on with their talk.

-oh yes, I remember... Will you have the second shift? Hell lena that's too late.

-I know, but a bunch of idiots took my place," replied the redhead in a friendly tone.

-Hey, Eddie what do you say we let Lena sing a song with us, you know so she doesn't completely waste her time.

This made Lena's eyes widen but she didn't protest, singing with a band didn't sound bad at all.

- Come on man, we haven't heard her sing once, how will we know what to play," asked Munson in an obvious tone.

Right after that comment, a soft melody began to reach the ears of the two boys.

-It's this one, it's just this one and I'll wait until it's my turn, come on Munson. If I remember correctly you can imitate a melody just by listening to it a little bit, aren't you so good on the guitar anymore?

Eddie was ready to refuse immediately, but when he listened to the girl, and noticed that she did remember their friendship and most probably the afternoons where he sat her on his lap to teach her how to play the guitar, there was no way to refuse.

-ok..."he said, making Lena smile, but before letting her speak, he said, "but on one condition.

-anything, yes, yes.

-You will not stay for the next shift, you will wait until we finish playing our turn and you will let me take you home," said Eddie in a firm tone.

-I came here on my bike, Munson.

-Oh, I can take it myself, so Eddie doesn't have to make any more stops, and if you come back tomorrow I can give it back to you," exclaimed Garreth excitedly.

-I don't sing tomorrow Garreth, what would I come for?

-You could always stay to see us -Suggested Munson shyly, and without looking at anything but his shoes.

This made the girl's heart race, of course she would stay, she would for days if that was what he wanted.

-You're right, I could do that," Lena blurted out in a soft tone.

Garreth didn't know if his brain was failing, or it was his eyes but even a blind man could tell that those two had something going on, something that no way would come up on a game night.

They had history.

-Anyway, I'll leave my walkman for you to listen to the song a couple of times, I'll go call the rest of his band.

And with that he left leaving Eddie mesmerized and Garreth confused.

(...)

Eddie and the rest of the band were already feeling up to playing the song, in their opinion it wasn't too difficult. No one had protested when they heard the "we'll play a song for Marlena, so we'd better practice this fast" in a rather authoritative tone from munson.

The last to take the stage was Marlena, who had left her leather jacket in the "dressing room" and had been left alone in her black strapless dress and black boots. And Eddie just prayed, that if God existed he would help him concentrate on playing the right notes and not on the dream ahead of him. A dream that had a name, Marlena De Angelis.

-Okay, when Eddie plays the first note I'll start singing, is that okay? -asked Marlena looking in the direction of the boys.

She got a nod from all of them and turned her head back to the "audience" which to the boys' surprise, this time was more than just a couple of drunks.

A group of girls filled a couple more tables, they knew Marlena was singing at this hour, and they loved not only the girl's voice, they identified with her lyrics.

The red-haired girl gently tapped the microphone three times, making sure it was ready to receive her voice, and began:

Ta-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da

Da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da

They say I'm too young to love you

I don't know what I need

They think I don't understand the freedom land of the seventies...

Marlena started filling the place with her soft voice, surprising Eddie who had never heard her sing before.

But it was not the only thing that touched him, as he felt those lines in a personal way, since more than once he wanted to be more than friends with the redhead, but he always stopped himself remembering that he was two years older than her.

She was seventeen, and he was nineteen.

Not knowing that this never mattered to her.

Well my boyfriend's in a band

He plays guitar while I sing Del Rey

I've got feathers in my hair,

I get down to beat poetry

And my jazz collection's rare

I can play most anything

I'm a Brooklyn baby...

Eddie couldn't have been more puzzled, is that why she had chosen that song? It was more than obvious that every word that came out of Marlena's mouth in the form of a melody was directed at him.

It was he who was in a band.

It was he who played the guitar.

It was no one but him who teased her enormous love for jazz.

And it was he who had taught her to play her favorite song.

It was him and that song was for him.

However, Lena continued her song without noticing how Eddie clutched the guitar to his chest, or how every time the lyrics got too personal he clenched his jaw.

Reaching the end of the song, Marlena, getting caught up in the moment, stepped back until she was right in front of Eddie, one hand tightly gripping the microphone and the other behind Eddie's neck, causing him to open his eyes.

While Munson tried not to let his nerves show, Marlena gently swayed her hips, with her eyes closed and her hand tangled in the metalhead's hair.

Yeah my boyfriend's pretty cool

But he's not as cool as me

Cause I'm a Brooklyn baby

I'm a Brooklyn baby...

Finished Marlena softly stopping the movement of her hips along with Eddie, who stopped the movement of his fingers on the guitar.

Without noticing their actions the young people put their foreheads together for a moment, just enjoying each other's company, forgetting that they were in a bar, on a stage and that there were more people than just the two of them.

-We are Corroded Coffin and she was Marlena De Angelis, ladies and gentlemen," finished a very excited Garreth.

Since they were playing in the place they had never gathered so many people, nor had they heard so many applauses as at the moment.

When the two of them were alone on the stage, Eddie moved away softly, taking Marlena's hand and leaving his guitar gently on the stand, he pulled the red-haired girl's hand with delicacy, telling her to get off the stage and go to the small corner where nobody could see them.

-Okay, what did you think? -asked Lena looking straight into the metalhead's eyes.

-I think you should sing with me more often, it should be a crime that you never let me listen to you sing before," whispered Eddie while he placed his hand on the girl's cheek, starting to move his thumb on the spot.

Marlena could only look at him, and wonder how she had been able to accept them walking away, maybe it hadn't been her fault but she still felt she should never have let him go.

And when Eddie looked back into her eyes, she gave up. He stopped fighting the desire to kiss her until his lips were swollen and began to bring his face closer to hers.

-Please tell me I can kiss you," Eddie whispered against her lips.

-Kiss me like you want me to stay," Marlena answered as she brushed her nose against his.

-Oh my angel, I will kiss you so you will never leave my side again....

𝒘𝒆𝒍𝒍, 𝒇𝒊𝒓𝒔𝒕 𝒐𝒏𝒆 𝒔𝒉𝒐𝒕 𝒉𝒆𝒓𝒆. 𝑹𝒆𝒒𝒖𝒆𝒔𝒕𝒔 𝒂𝒓𝒆 𝒐𝒑𝒆𝒏 𝒊 𝒂𝒍𝒔𝒐 𝒉𝒂𝒗𝒆 𝒂 𝒐𝒏𝒆 𝒔𝒉𝒐𝒕𝒔 𝒃𝒐𝒐𝒌 𝒐𝒏 𝒘𝒂𝒕𝒕𝒑𝒂𝒅 𝒘𝒊𝒕𝒉 𝒎𝒖𝒍𝒕𝒊𝒑𝒍𝒆 𝒇𝒂𝒏𝒅𝒐𝒎𝒔 𝒐𝒏 𝒊𝒕 ♡︎ 𝒍𝒐𝒗𝒆, 𝒆𝒍𝒍𝒊𝒆.

#eddie fanfic #eddie munson #eddie munson fluff #stranger things #eddie my love <3 #eddie my beloved #rockstar

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josefavomjaaga · 3 years ago

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By the end of November, Eugène, finally back in Milan with wife and daughters after the campaign of 1809 and that pesky revolt in the Tyrol, receives a curious letter from his imperial stepfather

November 26, 1809:

My son, I desire, if no major impediment prevents you, that you leave Milan so as to arrive in Paris on the 5th or 6th of December. Come alone with three carriages and four or five persons of your service of honour. Pass through Fontainebleau. This is assuming that major events do not prevent you from leaving.

For comparison: at the end of this post I’ve quoted the letter that Napoleon wrote four years earlier in order to … invite Eugène to his own marriage (»twelve hours at the latest after receiving this letter, you will depart with all speed [...]«). Let’s just say, this is an unusually timid and hesitating tone for Napoleon’s correspondence (it almost sounds as if he has a bad conscience). And because it is, I imagine that on this November day in Milan, not one but two heads are leaning over the paper, looking rather perplexed. Until Auguste claps her hands in excitement.

Auguste: »Oh my God! I think I know what this means!«

Eugène: »You do?«

Auguste: »He’s calling you to Paris in order to make you his heir! His heir to the throne of France!«

Eugène (who has already heard lots of rumours in Vienna, awkwardly): »Err… no, darling. I really don’t think so.«

Auguste: »No? But then surely he will finally make you King of Italy! You have done such great work here and you’ve helped him so much in the last war, he must reward you somehow!«

Eugène (forced smile): »Y-yes. That’s probably it, honey.« (gulps)

***

In the meantime, on the evening of November 30, Palace of the Tuileries, Paris. Dinnertime. Lots of people in fancy clothes standing in a half-circle. Emperor and empress are sitting at a table, occasionally poking at their plates, staring blindly ahead. Silence. A clock ticking in the background.

Napoleon (muttering): »What’s the time?« As nobody answers, a bit louder: »The time!«

Somebody answers, Napoleon stands up, so does Josephine.

Napoleon: »I need to talk to you, madame.«

Emperor and empress disappear through a door into Napoleon’s cabinet. Everybody else heads out of the room, except for Bausset, who is on duty and remains in the anteroom.

More clock ticking. Bausset yawns.

A piercing female scream from behind the closed door. Bausset whirls around. The door opens wide, Napoleon stands on the threshold, white as a sheet and utterly shocked.

Napoleon: »Bausset! You gotta come! The empress! Unwell! Help!«

Bausset and Napoleon hurry back into the room. Josephine lies on the carpet, motionlessly (and very decoratively draped, of course, because Josephine).

Napoleon (close to panic): »I just told her that I was going to divorce her. And then she kinda … dropped down. To the floor! Unconscious! Why do these things always happen? I had talked to her daughter before, she was supposed to have prepared her! And now she doesn’t move! What do we do now, Bausset?«

Bausset: »How about we take her downstairs to her own rooms, Sire?«

Napoleon: »Good idea! Then her ladies can take care of her. We’ll use the private stairs so nobody sees us. Let’s go. I’ll grab the legs, you take the upper half.«

***

A narrow, poorly lit stairwell. The steps are steep. Napoleon, his arms wrapped around Josephine's knees, impatiently carries his spouse down the stairs. Behind him, Bausset, not exactly slim and rather clumsy, struggles with Josephine's weight and his sword of honour, constantly scraping the wall or catching on the banister. Both men are puffing from exertion and agitation.

A look at Josephine's face. Her eyelids flutter imperceptibly.

Josephine (hissing softly): »Bausset!«

Bausset (stares open-mouthed).

Josephine (whispering): »Don't squeeze me like that!« (»faints« again).

Napoleon: »Are you doing all right back there, Bausset?«

Bausset (startled): »Oh, yes yes. All fine, Sire.«

***

A couple of days later. Young Louis Tascher, a relative of Josephine and aide-de-camp to Eugène, has been sent to the Tuileries from Italy in order to report on the progress made in pacifying the Tyrol. He has himself announced, is called up and steps over the threshold into Napoleon's audience chamber.

Napoleon (enraged): »Aha! Did Eugène send you to spy on me, eh?«

Tascher (flabbergasted): »Actually I was supposed to talk to Your Majesty about that Andreas Hofer guy, Sire ...«

Napoleon (embarrassed): »Oh. Oh, right. Anyway, that's not important now. Have you seen your cousin yet? I mean the Empress.«

Tascher: »N-no, I've only just got out of the carriage, the one still down there in the courtyard ...«

Napoleon: »Then see to it that you visit her at once!«

Tascher, utterly perplexed, is led through the Tuileries to the empress's appartment. The door opens, revealing a dozen richly dressed ladies, Josephine and Hortense among them, all of them sobbing into their handkerchiefs.

Tascher (uneasy): »Hello? Your Majesty? I've come from Milan, from Eug...«

Polyphonic sobbing.

Josephine: »Where is he? Why doesn't he come? Has everyone left me? Oh, I am the most unhappy woman in the world!« (More crying all around.)

***

Meanwhile, Eugene writes to his wife from the hospice on Mont Cenis that they are stuck in absolutely terrible weather. And that Caroline Murat has already crossed the mountain, headed for Paris, a couple of days before him. Not a good sign.

***

Again a little while later, in the Tuileries. Hortense has gathered around her those few members of the family still reasonably in tune with their senses: Tascher and Lavalette.

Hortense: »So, we are agreed. We absolutely must intercept Eugène and groom him before Napoleon gets hold of him and talks my dopey brother into this divorce at a bargain price. We don't know which road he'll take, so we split up. Tascher, you go to the right, Lavalette to the left, and I'll cover the main route via Nemours. Off you go!«

***

Next day, Nemours. Eugène's coach rolls into the courtyard of the local post station, where Hortense's carriage has already pulled up. The Queen of Holland and the Viceroy of Italy both step out of their respective vehicles, admired by some dozen teary-eyed spectators. It's the very first meeting of brother and sister after a separation of almost five years, there's hugs and air kisses all around, cheering and happy sighs by the audience. Then queen and viceroy both board Hortense's coach, and as soon as the door is closed and the carriage moving, they can start their conversation.

Eugène: »So. Is it good or bad?«

Hortense (wailing): »Baaad. It's the worst. It's the divorce.«

Eugène: »O god. - How does Mum take it?«

Hortense (exasperated): »Why, BADLY, of course!« (subtone: You insensitive dimwit of a brother!) »She's crying all the time and she says he can't do that to her and that she has been married in church and that the Pope will never allow it and that he at least must pay her debts and make you king of Italy and that she wants to keep her diamonds and that divorces aren't even allowed in the constitution, she has looked that up herself - and besides, if he gets to divorce our mother, why can't I also divorce Louis, huh?«

Eugène (staring into the off): »Sure, sure ...«

Hortense: »You must tell him, Eugène! You must tell him that he needs to give Mum at least a pension of some millions or she'll always be in debt, which of course she most likely will be anyway but do not tell him that, and he must give her Malmaison and a house in Paris and she also wants to keep her parrots and her dogs and go to Plombières every summer and if he really does this to us then the least thing he can do is to let me get rid of Louis. Do you understand?«

Eugène: »Uh-huh.« (mutters in despair) »How the hell am I going to explain this to my wife?«

___________

That’s the story of how Eugène learned about Napoleon’s decision to divorce Josephine, if you combine the memoirs of Hortense and Bausset and add some details from DuCasse’s publication of Eugène’s letters (and a little malignancy from myself). Unfortunately, it ends here, as there are no outside witnesses for the actual negotiations between the three Beauharnais and Napoleon, so we only have the official story of noble self-denial and generous renunciation. But I would have loved to be a fly on the wall during those discussions.

#napoleon #eugene de beauharnais #auguste of bavaria #josephine de beauharnais #hortense de beauharnais #bausset #louis tascher

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allisondraste · 4 years ago

Text

Announcing: Ambivalence

It has been exactly one year to the day since I published the final chapter of my Nathaniel Howe/F!Cousland long-fic, Temperance, and I could not think of a better time to unveil it’s first sequel, which I have had on the back-burner while I took a much-needed hiatus from writing.

This will be a far briefer story than it’s predecessor, but tells an important part of Nate and Liss’ story.

I hope you all enjoy!

Fandom: Dragon Age

Pairing: Nathaniel Howe x Female Cousland

Story Summary: It has been just over a year since Nathaniel Howe and Elissa Cousland were reunited, childhood friendship forged into a love that endured a decade apart. However, every love is tested at some point. Presented with circumstances that could either make or break their relationship, Nate and Liss are no different.

[AO3 Link]

Chapter 1: Pity and Pride

Chapter Summary: It is no secret that there is trouble in paradise, and Nathaniel is quickly becoming tired of his friends’ concern.

Vigil’s Keep, Solace 9:33 Dragon

Sunlight poured into the room, undeterred by curtains carelessly drawn open the night before, forming a halo around the woman who lay next to him with bare limbs draped comfortably across his body. It was rare that he awoke before her, rarer still to catch a glimpse of her sleeping peacefully, features unmarred by the nightmares that so often plagued her rest. It was difficult to fret over their privacy when the uncovered window painted such a beautiful portrait. How many years had he longed for moments such as this, fleeting and perfect, always just out of his reach?

And now Liss was there, snoring softly and tangled in bedsheets. Unable to quell the urge to touch her, to make sure she was real, he reached forward and brushed a lock of hair from her face before allowing his fingertips to settle on her cheek. She stirred, thick brows pressing together as her eyes flickered open, rich, brown, and sparkling with a groggy smile.

“Good morning, Nate,” she said quietly, voice hoarse as she shifted beneath the sheets and brought her hand up to cover his, an intricate ring glittering on her finger.

“My love,” he whispered, allowing his eyes to blink closed just briefly.

Then, he awoke.

Nathaniel sighed as his eyes opened, not to a lovely sun-soaked room in Antiva, but rather to his own tomb-like quarters in Vigil’s Keep, with nothing but low-burning sconces illuminating the depressing stone walls and floors. It was too cold, and he rolled over to be closer to the warmth of his bed partner, stretching out an arm to drape across her.

However, his arm fell only against a mound of blankets, his dreams having played a cruel trick on him once again. This was not the first time in recent days that he’d woken up to find his bed empty, the woman who had lain with him the night before gone without a trace other than the turned back sheets and coverlet on her side of the bed. In fact, it seemed that he woke up alone more often than not.

“Liss,” he asked the empty room, as if it could summon her for him, as if he did not know she was already up and running about the Keep pretending that everything was fine.

When the room did not answer him, he sighed and sat up begrudgingly, shivering as the chilly air met his bare skin, and slid out of bed. Without any windows, discerning the hour proved difficult, yet he figured it was past time that he got ready and behaved as an acting Warden-Constable anyway.

In peace, vigilance , and all of that.

A rustling from his closet drew him from his thoughts and his head darted toward the direction of the noise out of instinct. Cautiously, he made his way over to the door and placed an ear up against it, hoping to get a better idea of what lay inside.

Meow .

Nathaniel sighed and shook his head as he opened the door, glancing down to a pair of bright green eyes examining him. Ser Pounce-A-Lot was a ridiculous name for a creature who only ever snuck about and examined the world with cold calculation, pouncing very little, if at all.

“This,” he grumbled, stepping out of the animal’s way, “Is how curiosity kills your kind . ”

The cat tilted his head in an almost unnatural way before mewing again and sauntering forward, snaking himself around Nathaniel’s leg and purring gratuitously for several long moments.

“You are keeping me from my duties, Your Lordship ,” Nathaniel said, glaring down at Ser Pounce, who appeared wholly undeterred, before stopping, blinking up at him, and then chomping down on the back of his heel. He hissed in pain and pulled away reflexively.

Reaching down to give the cat a scratch behind the ears, Nathaniel said,“Perhaps you were meant to be a war beast after all.”

Ser Pounce nuzzled into his hand, gave a final meow, and pranced out of the room as if nothing had transpired. He wondered how he had ended up caring for the damnable creature in the first place. Then again, it was not as if Anders had been in any sort of condition to care for a pet when he fled the Keep, nor was Nathaniel certain Justice would have allowed him to. He shook his head free of the disappointing, bitter memories of his friends. He had more pressing matters to attend.

It took him little time to dress himself in his Warden attire. The days had been short and peaceful since The Mother and her spawn were destroyed, yet he preferred to dress the part of a Grey Warden, armed and prepared for an attack at any moment. In the aftermath of Loghain’s slanderous campaign against them, and with the decision to allow Amaranthine to fall looming over their heads, the Wardens had ample other enemies now, enemies that the Darkspawn threat had once held at bay. Anything could happen.

Appropriately equipped, Nathaniel straightened his posture and stepped out into the hallway.

It was an odd experience to reside in his childhood home, yet on an entirely different floor and wing. When Delilah assumed control of the arling, she had kindly offered that he keep his old room, as part of the Howe family. He promptly declined, having no fond feelings for the room to which he’d been unfairly banished more times than he could count. Besides, he preferred to stay with the other Wardens, his new family.

Nathaniel made his way through several dark corridors and down multiple flights of stairs, feet guided more by muscle memory than sight, until he’d reached the ground floor. He couldn’t say for certain he would find Liss in the great hall, but it was as good of a place as any to start.

The largest room in Vigil’s Keep, was the only room with any semblance of warmth. One of the longest-standing, impregnable fortresses in Ferelden had no use for stained glass windows, open courtyards, or natural lighting of any kind. His father had always declared that it was called a keep and not a castle for a reason, an underhanded criticism of the things Nathaniel pretended not to love about Castle Cousland when he was a child.

He scanned the space before him, nearly vacant with the exception of pages and scouts milling about waiting to be assigned tasks. He thought to approach one of them to ask if they’d seen Liss, but thought better of it. They likely had no idea who she was or what she looked like, and they no doubt had better things to do than participate in this unnecessary game of hide-and-seek.

“Morning, Nathaniel,” called a voice off to his side, a voice he did not particularly wish to hear at present. He turned to see Alistair standing several feet away, wearing that lopsided, cheerful grin that usually occupied his face. The younger man had thickened up slightly since they’d first met over a year prior, an effect of safety, security, and not carrying the weight of a Blight on his back. He looked healthy and happy, and Nathaniel envied his ability to bounce back.

“Morning, Alistair” Nathaniel replied dryly. He paused, eyes darting around the room in another cursory sweep before returning to the other man. “Have you seen Liss, by any chance?”

Alistair flinched at the question. “You mean, you haven’t seen her this morning?”

“No.”

“Damn...” he shifted his weight, laughing nervously and bringing a hand up to scratch the back of his head, “I, um.. I haven’t seen her either.”

“Wonderful,” Nathaniel muttered, shaking his head.

“Listen, you know how she is,” Alistair said, placing a hand on Nathaniel’s shoulder in what was undoubtedly an attempt at reassurance, a gesture of pity. “She probably just got one of those wild hairs of hers, ran off to the library in the middle of the night, and is now passed out under a pile of books. I’m sure everything’s fine.”

Nathaniel blinked at him several times, then looked down to glare at the hand that was resting on his shoulder. “Uh…huh.”

The other man withdrew his hand awkwardly, frowning. “Sorry,” he remarked pointedly, holding his hands up in defeat, “Remind me to wait until you’ve woken up properly next time I decide to show you basic human decency.”

Nathaniel deflated at Alistair’s words. “No, I apologize. I am just a bit tense as of late.”

“Yeah.” Alistair looked down at the floor and kicked at the stone with the toe of his boot before looking back up. “I know. For what it’s worth, if I was in your shoes I’d… I don’t know what I’d do. Probably fling myself into the nearest body of water.”

Nathaniel snorted derisively. “Thanks.”

“That sounded bad didn’t it? What I meant is--”

“I know what you meant.”

“Right.” Alistair let out a nervous laugh and shook his head. “I’m going to stop talking now, before I put my other foot in my mouth.”

Nathaniel offered him a hint of a smirk to indicate that there had been no real harm done, then teased, “I believe that is a wise decision.”

Alistair smiled in return and nodded. “Anyway, I was actually meant to inform you that the commander would like to speak with you. She’s in her study right now.”

“I shall see her at once.”

“And if I run into our Dear Lady Cousland, I will tell her you were looking for her.”

“Please, do.”

Concluding his conversation with Alistair, Nathaniel headed immediately toward the corridor that led back to the commander’s study, the room that had previously belonged to his father’s portraits and trophies. As a child, he’d spent many hours hiding away in that damned room, dreaming himself up a better father than Rendon would ever be. He was grateful Lucia now occupied the space, her solemn kindness and humility painting over the history that had once lived there, and he hoped that with time, she would eliminate his father’s stain completely.

The large wooden door was left slightly ajar, a small band of lamplight leaking out into the hallway. He still stopped and decided to knock, rather than just entering as others would have. Despite her open-door policy, he refused to startle her without need. Three quick raps, and he waited for her response.

“You can come in, Nathaniel,” she called just loud enough for him to hear her.

He pushed the door open and entered, laughing. “How did you know it was me?”

Lucia looked up at him with a hint of a smile. “You’re the only person I know who knocks when the door is open.”

“Right,” he replied, pressing the door closed behind him.

The young woman he called his friend and commanding officer stood bent over her desk, despite a perfectly adequate chair sitting just behind her. She propped herself up with one hand flat on the surface of the desk, as she thumbed through pages of some antiquated tome with the other. Though her long, dark hair was styled in a low ponytail, it still fell down and cast a shadow over her face. Surrounding her were stacks of other old texts and scrolls.

Lucia had been rather consumed by research as of late. An unassuming journal had found its way into her hands, one with writings that had been identified as Warden-Commander Duncan’s. In it, he had documented an encounter with their very own Architect. She hoped the record would provide them with some valuable information about the unsettling creature, and it had. But it had also made mentions of an unnamed Grey Warden, a mage, who was freed from her calling, tainted blood healed and unable to be re-joined.

Ever since, Lucia had been pouring over Grey Warden lore and history and manuscripts about obscure magics, no doubt searching for something they all wanted deep down: A cure. As honorable as membership in the order sounded, the same power that granted them their Blight-stopping capabilities became an unbearable curse in peaceful times, each moment that passed one breath closer to The Calling. The commander was so young, and he understood her newfound compulsion to find a solution. She was not the only one struggling to cope with the reality of a Grey Warden’s fate.

“You asked to speak to me,” he stated tentatively, almost as a question.

Lucia’s gaze darted up to him, and she straightened her posture. “Yes, I did.”

“And?”

She walked around her desk to stand in front of him, piercing eyes searching his face for an answer to a question she had yet to ask. “How are you holding up?”

A twinge of irritation sparked through him. “Holding up?”

“Perhaps it is presumptuous of me to say as your commanding officer, but we are also friends, and as your friend I feel obligated to point out that things with Elissa have been a bit… tense since you two returned from Highever.”

“That is presumptuous,” Nathaniel replied through his teeth, “Even as my friend.”

Lucia stood, unfazed and blinking. “You can be annoyed with my concern if you wish, but that won’t make it go away.”

“Your concern is wasted.” His words were clipped, and he crossed his arms. “I am fine.”

“Nate,” she urged him, dropping her typical formality and reaching forward to place a hand on his arm, a gesture of which he was quickly tiring. Still, they were friends, and he wondered if it might give him some clarity to discuss the matter with the woman.

He opened his mouth, prepared to provide a more honest answer, but clamped it shut as a knock rang out on the door behind him. He released the breath he’d been holding, never more grateful for an interruption.

“Who’s there,” Lucia asked.

“It’s Liss. I just spoke with Alistair, and he said you wanted to see me.”

Nathaniel glared at Lucia waiting for an explanation that she did not provide. Instead, she released his arm and moved to sit down in the chair at her desk. “You can come in.”

The door creaked open slowly, and Nathaniel turned to see Liss. She froze in the doorway when their eyes met, wincing as if his presence had inflicted physical pain. Then she blinked suspiciously between him and the commander before flashing a smile and bouncing into the room. ”

“Good morning, Lucia,” she announced cheerfully, as she moved to stand beside Nathaniel, giving him a confusing, playful nudge with her elbow. ”Hey Nate.”

“Now that you’re both here,” Lucia began formally, “I have an assignment for you two.”

“Oh?” Liss perked up, and fidgeted excitedly.

“Some sort of Warden business, I presume,” Nathaniel asked, making every effort to hide both his discomfort and his relief.

“Yes. ” Lucia nodded. “As you know, a new Junior Warden was transferred to us from the Warden Fortress at Montsimmard last week.”

“The woman from Kirkwall?”

“Her name’s Bethany,” Liss corrected with a quick laugh, “I met her in passing near the baths. She didn’t seem too keen on having a conversation with me at the time.”

“Warden Bethany has been through quite an ordeal in the past six months,” Lucia explained, “She is an apostate who was living as a refugee in Kirkwall with her family after they fled Lothering during the Blight. She was Joined by a contingent of Orlesian Wardens after an encounter with darkspawn in the Deep Roads.”

Nathaniel frowned and brought his hand to his chin. “The Deep Roads? What was she doing in the Deep Roads?”

“It seems pretty fortunate that she would have stumbled into a group of Grey Wardens, too,” Liss chimed in.

“It had nothing to do with fortune,” Lucia continued, words stern and direct. She stood up, clenching her fists at her sides. “Bethany and her older sister were part of an expedition into the Deep Roads to search for artifacts and treasure, accompanied by one of our own, who provided them with confidential Warden maps to help them navigate.”

The palpable vitriol from Lucia meant one thing, and one thing only.

“Anders,” Nathaniel asked.

“Yes,” she responded defeatedly, “According to Bethany he’s been living in Kirkwall ever since he deserted, running some sort of healing clinic. He is the reason they were able to find the other Wardens.”

“Wow,” Liss remarked, “That all seems uncharacteristically noble of him.”

“Uncharacteristic of Anders, perhaps,” Nathaniel stated, “But not of Justice.”

“Right.” Lucia’s gaze was fixed on the ground, deep in thought. She looked up at them before sighing and speaking again, “As unorthodox as it may seem to assign a mission based upon personal feelings, I believe my reasoning is sound. Anders is still a Grey Warden, one who I conscripted, which makes him my responsibility. I would like for you two, along with Bethany, to travel to Kirkwall and pay him a visit. ”

“And do what exactly,” he asked, annoyed by what felt like a waste of time, “Drag him back to the Keep by his collar?”

“That would be a sight.” Liss chuckled at his side and he rolled his eyes. “Ten silvers he sets your little chin hairs on fire.”

“He would have to catch me first. Twelve silvers.”

She smiled and winked at him. “It’s a bet.”

“If I am being completely honest about my intentions, I just want you to check in on him, “Lucia continued more softly, paying no heed to their irreverence to the task, “Make sure that he is safe and warn him against sharing too many delicate Warden secrets.”

“So this is not “official” Warden business then,” Nathaniel asked.

“I’m not sure the Wardens ever do anything ‘officially,’” Liss stated flatly.

“This is just for my peace of mind,” Lucia answered with a sad smile, “Besides, I thought you two might enjoy some time away together.”

Her investment in their relationship shamed him, causing his face to flush. Lucia had so many other things that she could and should have been fretting over instead. He flicked his eyes over to Liss, wondering if she felt as he did.

She only frowned and shrugged out a reply. “I could use a vacation.”

“Kirkwall is a shithole,” Nathaniel told her frankly, words more pointed than he’d intended,”It won’t exactly be a vacation.”

“Not with that attitude, it won’t be,” she chirped, not missing a beat.

“Will you go,” Lucia asked.

“Of course,” he replied, with a reassuring smile. Liss nodded along with him.

“Thank you both.” Lucia seemed to relax, and sat back slowly into her chair. “You all should prepare to head out to Amaranthine first thing in the morning. I’ve arranged passage for you there.”

Nathaniel nodded in acknowledgement, noticing Liss do the same as she spoke, “Is there anything else you needed, Commander?”

“No,” she shook her head, “You are free to go. Safe travels.”

When he turned to face Liss , she was biting her lip and appeared to be lost in thought, a small wrinkle between her brows. It was ridiculous to ache for someone who slept beside him each night, to miss her. And yet he did. Maker did he miss her. That their companions sensed some sort of tension between them was not inaccurate, and had he been honest with Alistair and Lucia, he would have admitted that things were not “fine.” He just was not ready to broach the topic of what happened in Highever with anyone other than Liss, and she had been all but avoiding any opportunity they had to discuss it for the better part of two weeks.

Shaking himself free of his own thoughts, he nudged Liss with his elbow and held his arm out to her. There was no guarantee that she would accept it, but he would be damned if he did not offer it to her. When she glanced over to him, then down at his arm, and back up to meet his gaze, her face lit up, bright and warm, and relief washed over him. Thank The Maker he could still make her smile.

Without hesitation, she looped her arm through his and blinked up at him expectantly. “Shall we?”

A quiet chuckle escaped him. “Of course, my lady.”

Liss had always been adept at filling silences, or at the very least making them comfortable; however, as they left Lucia’s study together, arm-in-arm, an oppressive and awkward quiet fell over them. Nathaniel was no stranger to uncomfortable silences, but to share one with Liss was an entirely new experience. He racked his mind for anything to talk about that would not cause her to withdraw from him, but came up short. Hopefully he would be able to suffer his own discomfort until they made it back to their shared quarters.

“So,” she spoke up suddenly, much to Nathaniel’s relief, “Kirkwall. Just the two of us… and that Bethany person, of course. This’ll be fun.” She held his arm more tightly and let her head fall to rest against his shoulder.

“You really think so,” he asked, amused at her optimism.

She pulled away suddenly to look up at him, a pain he did not intend to inflict buried in her expression. “You don’t?”

“That’s not what I—” he paused, immediately frustrated and attempting to keep his composure— “It wasn’t meant to be serious.”

Liss continued to glare up at him, tears welling in her eyes, and he did not have a shred of an idea how to respond. She had never been a rational person, but this was a bit extreme. He squeezed and released his hands at his side as he fought the urge to reach out to her.

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s fine,” she muttered, looking down at the ground, “You’ve done nothing wrong. I’m just—”

“Liss,” he urged, hoping that she would finally open up to him, give him some clue as to why she kept pushing him away and erecting walls between them that had never been there before.

“Nate,” she whispered, a single tear falling from her lashes and rolling down her cheek.

Without thinking he reached forward to wipe it away with his thumb, allowing his hand to linger on her cheek. Her gaze softened at the touch, and for a moment he thought her defenses might falter, that she might let him in. She brought her hand up to cover his, briefly allowing her eyes to flutter closed. When she opened them again, there was steel in her expression and she grabbed his hand, gently pulling it away from her face. With that, he withdrew his hand completely and stared back at her in disbelief, jaw clenched.

“Talk to me,” he pleaded, voice hushed, “Please.”

“I can’t… do this right now.” She shook her head frantically, emotions barely held beneath the surface. “I’m sorry.”

“This is not something you can run from and hope it disappears, Liss,” he replied tersely, his frustration getting the better of him, “You can’t keep avoiding me.”

“I’m going to get some air,” she snapped, indignant and completely ignoring his remarks, “We can prepare for our journey after I come back.

“Liss, wait—”

“I’ll talk to you later, Nate,” she interrupted as she turned to walk away toward the front door.

They had done this dance too many times for him to be taken aback or even confused. No, the only thing he felt at the moment was exhausted. Countless times since they’d returned, he’d tried to get her to discuss how she was feeling, or to at least listen to how he felt, but she’d consistently found excuses or other ways to escape an actual conversation. It was ridiculous and immature, and he was at a complete and utter loss.

Ego bruised and chest aching, he made his way over to the bench along a nearby wall and sank down, resting his elbows on his knees as his face dropped into the palms of his hands. What was he to do next except give her space and hope that things would be sorted out with time?

His ruminations were cut short as his ears caught the distinct shuffle of footsteps that slowed to a stop as they neared him and a hushed murmur of women’s voices. He could not make out what they were saying, but the voices were familiar, and it was obvious they were attempting discretion and failing miserably.

“You two are not subtle,” he said with a sigh as he looked up to see the elf and dwarf blinking at him sympathetically, a look that had become all too common since he’d returned from Highever. Did people sincerely believe him to be so pitiable? His friends, especially, should have known better.

Velanna glanced between Nathaniel and the empty space beside him on the bench, brow furrowing slightly as she asked, “May I?”

“Be my guest,” he replied motioning to the seat, then letting his head fall to his hands again briefly before sitting up straight and watching as she sat down beside him. Sigrun remained standing, but moved to lean against the wall.

Nathaniel glanced from one to the other several times, noting their heavy silence and persevering looks of pity. He settled on Velanna, whose pinched expression he presently found the most irritating and asked, “Is there something you wished of me? Or do you intend to continue staring at me as if I were a lost puppy?”

“We are not—” Velanna began to retort, words echoing off the walls. She sighed and continued more quietly, “We are simply concerned for you.”

“There is no reason to be concerned for me,” Nathaniel protested, “I am fine.”

“Hah,” Sigrun interjected, laughing, “You don’t think we’re going to buy that, do you?”

“You don’t have to,” he retorted sarcastically, turning to face his other friend, “I am offering it to you for free.”

“Come on, Nate. We’re your friends, and we know better,” she pressed, “Besides, with the way you’ve been moping about the Keep these past two weeks, there are lost puppies I feel less sorry for.”

He bristled at her words, muscles tensing as he clenched his fists. Just as he was about to snap, Velanna’s hand fell on his shoulder and his gaze darted back to her instead.

“ Lethallin ,” she said firmly, a word from her own language. She’d once told him it was a term of endearment for her People, one used to signify the closeness between friends. He relaxed slightly, and she withdrew her hand to rest on her lap. “Was it not you who once told me I needed to stop viewing every expression of sympathy as a personal attack.?”

“That does sound like something I would say.” Nathaniel shook his head, snorted out a laugh, and slouched forward. “I can’t say I expected that to come back and bite me in the arse.”

It was silent for several beats, then he continued, apologizing for what seemed like the thousandth time in just an hour or so. “I am sorry, truly. Everyone is so concerned about me, and I know that I should be appreciative, but... if I am being completely honest, it’s humiliating.”

“That is…” Velanna said, “Understandable.”

Sigrun nodded her agreement. “Definitely.”

“I—” he began to speak again, but was interrupted by the loud bang of a door slamming back against the wall. Several scouts and pages gasped in surprise at the form that entered the hall, battle axe slung effortlessly over his shoulder. “Nevermind,” Nathaniel muttered quickly.

“Never fear, Ol’ Oghren’s back and better than ever,” Oghren shouted at the far end of the hall as the door slammed closed behind him. He appeared to scan the room, perking up when his gaze met Nathaniel’s, and immediately sauntering over to the bench.

Velanna sighed and rolled her eyes as Sigrun straightened up to wave and greet him.“Hey Oghren! How’s the family?”

The dwarf had been away for just over a month visiting with Felsi, and their brood. Ever since the turmoil in Amaranthine had ended, and most of the resulting mess cleared up, he’d been taking intermittent leave to be a more present husband and father. He was certainly rough around every edge, but he was trying to be better, and that was admirable.

“Oh you know, same ol’, same ol’,” he answered jovially, stopping as he stood just a few feet away from the rest of them. He brought one hand up and stroked his elaborately-plaited auburn beard proudly. “Felsi’s expectin’ again.”

“Maker’s Blood, man! Are you intending to father a legion?” Nathaniel exclaimed with a laugh that was cut short by a sudden realization. He squinted at Oghren and continued, “Wait. Congratulations and all, but... how is that even possible?”

Oghren shrugged. “Beats the shit out of me. The Commander told me Grey Wardens weren’t s’posed to be able to… y’know...”

His words trailed off into a low chuckle and he waggled his eyebrows, eliciting a groan of disgust from Velanna. At the same time, a mischievous smirk crossed Sigrun’s face and she tilted her head, crossed her arms and said with faux innocence, “No, Oghren, I actually don’t think we know.”

“Do not encourage him, lethallan ,” Velanna scolded, standing up as if preparing to escape.

To Nathaniel’s surprise, Oghren ignored the opportunity to pop off with an inappropriate joke, and instead looked at him, a hint of a genuine smile sparkling in his eyes, but hidden beneath his beard. “So, Howe, I figure congratulations are in order for you too, eh?”

Nathaniel stiffened, heart sinking like lead into his abdomen. He shook his head and let out a laugh that was more bitter than he had hoped. “No. No that won’t be necessary.”

“Wait… what?” Oghren scowled and examined Nathaniel for a moment before protesting. “Don’t tell me you changed your mind? Didn’t take you to be a chickenshit.”

“I didn’t.” Nathaniel stood up abruptly at the words, startling the others. “And I’m not.”

“Shit, I—”

“I’d prefer not to talk about it.”

“Nate,” Sigrun said gently, grabbing his arm.

He shrugged her off and stepped away. “I should go prepare for my trip to Kirkwall.”

“Nathaniel,” Velanna urged him, “Wait.”

“Thank you for talking with me,” he said flatly, glancing between Velanna and Sigrun, then over to Oghren, “It is good to have you back, my friend.”

“Yeah… sure.”

With that, Nathaniel gave his friends a nod, and turned to make his way to the nearest stairwell, heart racing as he struggled to remain calm.

“What crawled up his breeches,” he heard Oghren ask behind him.

Nathaniel did not linger to hear Velanna and Sigrun brief Oghren on the events that had transpired while he was away. He did not need to be reminded.

#dragon age #dragon age origins #dragon age origins awakening #nathaniel howe #nathaniel howe x cousland #my writing #ambivalence tag

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