#audrey: main.

[blightworn]

⌈ audrey | @relamb ⌋

Audrey doesn't leave the Ultra-Luxe very often. It's technically against their contract with Mr. House, outside of meetings and emergencies, but the Securitrons aren't advanced enough to recognize them without a mask. She's not the only one who makes her escapes; every family on the Strip has their own espionage operation.

Each casino has its own charms that keeps gamblers in and leaves the others with one less patron. Sometimes an undercover Chairman might throw a fit about unfair odds or an Omerta will start a fight with an unsuspecting Wastelander. The White Gloves are, of course, far more subtle in their little excursions- the fear of missing out is their bread and butter.

Her purposes are less vindictive, however. The only issue with The Diamond is that it's located on the second floor of the Ultra-Luxe. No one ever makes it that far unless they're staying the night. She can't have that, so she dolls herself up as nicely as she can, puts on her very best dress, and turns up the charm. Time to advertise.

Outside of Gommorah, she notices an interesting-looking stranger make her way through the gate. Oh, this one might be perfect. She waits for the woman to come a bit closer before she sets off in her direction, putting on her best smile. " Aren't you a pretty thing? " she says as she approaches. " Oh, your eyes... I have just the thing back at my shop! "

[empirewaste]

🌺 for Audreyyyyy

' i don't need you anymore! ' she shouts into the back room of the diamond boutique before storming out. she walks without thinking, exiting the ultra-luxe and crossing the street into the tops. she's made a few appearances since anna started singing at the casino, and they've agreed to an uneasy agreement.

anna lets audrey into the dressing room following her set, her questions about what's wrong going unanswered. she slumps into a chair, anna sitting beside her. breathing difficult, she takes a moment before finally letting out a quiet, ' i'm glad you're here. '

anna stands and goes to the vanity, plucking a marigold from an otherwise sad bouquet given from one of her suitors. she returns to her weary friend and kneels beside her. audrey watches, teeth worrying her bottom lip. the singer places the flower on the side of her hair, securing it with a bobby pin.

audrey grins and jumps up to look in the mirror, giggling in delight at the result. ' it brings out my eyes, don't you think, doll? '

[empirewaste]

' oh, darling. it's your facial structure that makes the wig! ' audrey declares with a laugh. she'd been... apprehensive when the ghoul entered. however, good customer service is paramount on the new vegas strip, and if she's a welcome guest of mr. house, then she'll be treated as such. ' now, that mojave sun doesn't play around. let's look at some hats too, mm? '

she directs the madam to the back wall of the diamond, where a selection of hats were available- simple caps, berets, wide-brimmed sunhats, fedoras, and a handful of jeweled, feathery numbers. audrey is quite proud of this corner; she procured a number of them herself.

' any of these speaking to you, sweetheart? '

@resonantnature ; starter call ; magpie and audrey.

with her meeting with one mr. house on the morrow, the ghoulish madam of the desert decides it is in her best interest to explore what the strip that the enigmatic leader holds dominion over has to offer. she finds herself in a quaint little boutique, standing with her good eye closed as the owner positions her newly cut and curled wig on her head. when the order comes that she may finally look, magpie's eye snap open to dart directly over to the display of mirrors she stands before. and the sight she is met with is one that would have caused tears to fill her good eye if not for the fact that her ducts have been irradiated away.

❝ oh my... ❞ nothing but fragments of words manage to escape past her lips, too stunned by her reflection staring back at her. if she turns her horrid side away, perhaps she could be normal. a hand reaches up to ghost over the artfully arranged black curls of her wig, careful so as to not disturb audrey's handiwork. ❝ miss o'reilly, it's beautiful. your talent knows no bounds. ❞

[softending]

+extra panel (nsfw)

i got zapped with a seymour/audrey ii beam attack and now i can't stop drawing them. more over on... twitter...

[descendantofthesparrow]

@c-rose2081 inspires me constantly ive drawn so much within the past month because of her lol

[vargamornight]

so imagine you've been talking mad shit about a guy to your new best friend, right. but it doesn't really stick, because the first time she ever meets him, he literally saves her life. so she's like "i don't really see what you see, he seems pretty chill" and you're like "whatever. you don't get it, i grew up with him, trust me, i know him better than you do and he sucks. you can't trust him, he's only out for himself." and she's like "okay" but she still hangs out with him, even though she tries to hide it from you at first.

and then that guy starts dying. you know he's gonna die, you can see it happening, he's just the most recent in a string of deaths. he is going to die, right in front of you, if your new best friend can't figure out how to help him. so what do you do? you sit with him. you hold him. you help him get comfortable. you listen to what may be his last words. and then, when he stops breathing, you realize you can't let him die. you start cpr right there, right on the stairs, and you hope and pray that your friend can undo whatever's been done to him before you break too many ribs.

and she does! holy shit, she does! he starts breathing again, and so do you.

and then he doesn't remember any of that happening.

so you continue insisting that you hate him. that you don't trust him. but you start asking for his help—or, more accurately, you get your friend to ask for his help, because she's way more likely to get a yes than you are, because of your insistence that you hate him. he doesn't let you down, not like the last person you asked for help (she helped, but left you, because the kinds of things that happen to you and your friend were too much for her.)

your friend's birthday rolls around, and everybody gets together for a surprise party. you get her a nice sweater; he gets her a necklace that belonged to her long lost mother. you do hate him for that, just a little bit. she starts spending more time with him, trying to hunt down any information about her mother, which leads to finding out exactly how he's going to die. a man with a tattoo (a stylized maze, with four figures around it like compass points) kills him. you all know it's true. it was seen by a woman who predicted dozens of deaths. you've seen the tattoo before, too—on the arm of the first in the string of deaths you investigated all those weeks ago, when you held him as he died.

your friend spends a few nights in a row on his boat, drinking and playing poker with a mutual friend and two out of towners. you think nothing of it—at least, that's what you tell yourself. more honestly, you refuse to think about it. but then, it turns out, she was actually just spying on the out of towners, who turn out to be bad guys, thieves, after something on his boat. which is great news! she had a real, unrelated reason to be there! whew, that's a relief. out loud, all you say is that she has the right to spend time with whoever she wants, even him.

he asks you for help—his life is in danger. he was double crossed, and some very bad people want him dead. he asks you to help him. but him asking you for help sends a slice of spite through you, and you get the urge to remind him of a time he hurt you. you don't often get urges you can follow through with without facing criminal charges, so you give in to this one. he asks you if he deserves to die for being mean to you in the third grade. you shrug, you let him think you won't help, and then you set up an entire sting operation and arrest the people that double crossed him. he's safe. the two of you spend some time together and, for the first time in years, it's amicable.

a couple days later, he gets a threatening visit from a man, just released from prison, with the tattoo. THE tattoo—the one that belongs on the arm of the man who kills him. he freaks out, which is understandable. but then that man turns up dead, and your first thought is of him. you say it's because you suspect him of killing the tattooed man. you find him, panicked and paranoid, with a shotgun he looks more than ready to use, but his hands are shaking and his breath is uneven and when you tell him the man is dead, he's so visibly relieved it even makes you let out a breath. he's safe, and you know he didn't kill anyone, and he's safe.

your father dies that afternoon.

that evening, you are going to die.

maybe.

there's a very real chance that, if you go with your friend to try and help someone, you will die. you ask him to come with you. maybe you remember, think about the fact that when he was dying, you were with him. maybe you don't. maybe you don't think about why you're asking at all. but when he asks you that question without speaking—why would you want him there with you?—you say you want him there for her. maybe he believes it. maybe he's forgotten everything you've ever said about him. maybe he's forgotten that you tried to keep her away from him, claiming it was for her own good. maybe he's forgotten that, not six months ago, the only communication the two of you engaged in was when you would go to his boat just to slap him with whatever citations you could get away with. maybe he cares more about her than he does about you.

he comes with you, and he stays with you. he doesn't go with her, so now you both know you were lying. he stays with you when you collapse, hanging back and leaning forward, like he wants to hold you but he's afraid. (after all, there are people around.) but your friend is the best at what she does, and she saves you. he helps you back to your feet, holds your arms, looks into your eyes to see if you're okay. the bigoted old preacher who's hated you for decades sneers at the two of you, and insists "the lamb can never lie down with the lion." you wave the comment away.

later, he helps you dig your father's grave without even being asked. (that's a poem, all by itself.) he tells you, smiling: "i'm the lion." you smile too.

and that's just the first season, plus a premiere.

[miru667]

🥰 Audrey Grace, from teen to adult! 🌱🌻

[jazz-kitty]

buds

[callmesel]

MERRY CHRISTMAS @guess1mjustheren0w 🎄!

This is for @percyweasleyapologist ‘s secret Santa

I know it’s not exactly one of your favourite ships but I hope you like it :D (if you squint your eyes it kind of is a Percy x Audrey x Oliver x Penny x Marcus or maybe not and I’m just delusional)

I’ve done more versions because I wasn’t sure which one you would like best so I’m putting it under the cut + a little extra thing

This extra is an apology because I can’t draw Oliver’s hair and this isn’t exactly great

[matamorose]

The decision in TP to drop any interaction between Audrey and Coop was a bad one. I think that their dynamic is a great way to refract a lot of the themes of the show, and it has a lot to do with TP’s multiple ways of viewing “good people.” (Something I’ve been stewing about for a while— hopefully soon I can articulate some of those thoughts)

Anyway,

Audrey is a great character, and it makes perfect sense for her to be intrigued by/attracted to a kind, handsome older man. She’s also badly neglected, and models the ways of gaining power + autonomy + attention that she sees in front of her, something that puts her in danger and is in no way a good thing. I get that all the characters’ ages/the timelines are fucked so there’s some ambiguous wiggle room, but she’s a kid. A very smart and resourceful one who wants to be the mysterious and competent adult that others see as a person, but still.

She wants Coop something fierce, and gets herself into intense peril pursuing that. She's tenacious and smart and badly damaged, and a teenage girl who's ignored + allowed to do whatever she wants, which is a very potent combination.

And Coop is textually attracted to her: I think that that’s very important to understanding a lot of his character, and ignoring it does a disservice to a lot of what the show is saying. MLMT does a lot of heavy lifting to explain and explore a history of childhood sexual misuse + hypersexuality with him, but even in just the show canon I think it’s very apparent and easy to understand that he’s grappling with his attitudes and attraction towards women, and especially with his own past and traumas.

The scene where Audrey surprises him naked in bed had the potential to be the fulcrum moment in their relationship, imo. Cooper is visibly wrestling with his attraction to her— something he knows and expresses aloud would be very wrong to act on— and Audrey is in an extremely fragile state, for all that she was trying to be assertive and take control in a relationship with an older man (a cop, even).

When Cooper lets her down gently and says that what she needs is a friend, that’s a very powerful moment. This is the “adult men sexually abuse young girls” show, but their relationship in particular has been set up to be interesting and alluring— I don’t think that people are nuts for picking up on the very intentional tension. It’s there, you’re supposed to see it.

So when Cooper says that she needs a friend, he makes the right choice, something that he doesn’t have a great track record of doing.

It’s a really powerful thing, that surrounded by all of these men who choose wrongly, and do wrong intentionally, Cooper is maybe the only adult man in Audrey’s life who makes the choice to respect and protect her, and that’s profoundly compelling. Like, I get it if someone wants to take that in another direction.

(There’s a more specific point to be made about Audrey’s father very nearly sexually assaulting her, and another, older man who is into her consciously deciding not to act on that, but I’ll toss it around and try to express it later)

You can debate it all day— which can be interesting and enriching— but for him to enter into a relationship with her would have been a clear, gross abuse of his power, and followed the pattern set by all of the other monstrous men in the show.

TP makes its stance on adult men sleeping with teenage girls crystal clear, there’s no way that they would have had their main character— morally iffy though he can be sometimes— go to bed with the teenage peer of a murder victim and then be like “awesome!” Cooper would be a very different man if he acted on it.

Which, I think is one of those moments where you as the viewer are supposed to look past the aesthetics and how pretty both adult actors are, the same way we all need to look past the quality of the coffee to understand what happened to Laura: a federal agent in his 30s who picks up a rural, neglected teenage lover in the wake of a grisly sex crime + said teenager’s father is a major player in the crime ring that allowed that to happen, is not a good man. That is a real-life horror that follows the framework of the show, and I think that part of the original intention was to leave that avenue open for later in the series, but more on that later.

All that being said, he absolutely thinks about it. He’s very tempted. That’s something that I feel like a lot of people don’t want to admit, but he’s explicitly attracted to her. It’s a testament to his character, and an interesting mirror to his ultimate failure of courage, that he, mister "Give Yourself a Present," was able to recognize a desire as harmful and squash it.

He’s less interesting if you just wave your hand and say “oh, he never even thought about it!” He did. He totally thought about it, he considered it, and wrestled with it, and ultimately came out on top. That’s infinitely more interesting— and IMO fits in better with the backstory established for him— than the idea that he’s just too morally pure and untouchable.

Even so, he elects not to do something that will harm her, and chooses to be her friend instead, something that she badly needs. That scene easily could have transitioned them from a very unequal “will-she-won’t-he” to a friendship that would benefit both of them, and give the characters some more room to flex + explore the facets of their similarities/their links to Laura and what they share with her.

Cooper sees Audrey, instead of blindly buying into her adolescent facade, or just looking past her. Even many of the angles their scenes are shot with reinforce that. He doesn’t ignore her.

I think that all of that goes into making their relationship extremely compelling, and, in my opinion, totally dropping that relationship after a point was just shitty writing. The whole weight of his choice to be her friend and to do right by her + her choice to accept that disappears when the show just truncates that entire plot line and dynamic. She needed that friend, needed and accepted what he was willing to offer her! Not to get shuffled off to the side and into a somewhat baffling plot line

(And if the show had gone on longer, or gone a different direction, I think that that would have been the avenue they chose to hammer in to viewers that as sexy as it sounded to a teenager, this is a bad thing, and that Coop was letting hangovers from past trauma/abuse get the better of him— something that is also very thematically appropriate. In a S3 that never was, I think it’s likely that possessed Coop/his doppelgänger/whatever direction they would have gone in the 90s would have attacked or initiated a relationship with her. TPTR alludes to this, I think, with Mr. C’s fathering Richard.)

I understand that there were tensions on set, and actors/execs had very strong opinions, but I do think that the “okay ew that’s over now” way that the show chops off a major undercurrent is badly done, and that the show is poorer for it.

Anyway, that relationship is one that really bugs me in how it developed in the show. Let me be clear that this is absolutely not an anti-ship post: do as thou wilt, have fun whatever I’m not here to pick a fight, and I really don’t care what other people ship. What strangers want to do with two fictional characters isn’t really my business.

But I don’t think that people are making something out of nothing, there, even if I have a much different stance on it. I think I’ve made my opinion of that relationship as romantic pretty clear at this point, but I have eyes and understand when you’re supposed to pick up on tension between characters.

I think that many people try far too hard to pretend that something very explicitly onscreen isn’t there, because they don’t want to wrestle with the thornier parts of it. (For a show that centers around a child being raped and murdered by her father, a great many watchers get surprisingly precious about unpleasant or even gray subjects, it seems to me.)

But I think it’s a shame that one of the most interesting relationships in the show got cut off so severely, and it’s really interesting to think of how they might have followed through on the punch, had there been fewer disasters surrounding the series.

I went on a little longer than I meant to about the idea of the pair of them as a romantic item, and that’s not the major point of this. Really, it’s that I think both characters lost out on that could have developed into something really compelling, because the bones were there. The setup was very strong, and the scene I talked about above absolutely could have transitioned those two into something, anything, more narratively satisfying and interesting than what we got.

I really like both of them, and I think that there’s a tendency to swing wildly one way or the other with Audrey. She’s much more nuanced than I think a lot of people give her credit for (which in fairness is something that afflicts basically all of the teenage characters, not to mention dear Dale), and there’s a place to think about her in-between outright fetishism a la coquette blogs, and pretending like she has no agency or desire/that her neglect has no impact on what she wants and how badly she’s willing to fight to get it.

She’s a major character in the show for a while, and I don’t like it that A) her character gets sidelined so abruptly B) many people in fandom go out of their way to minimize her role in the story. She’s not even one of my big favorites, I just think that she gets a raw deal.

My favorite thing about the show is the deep and knotted relationships, and I think that there was a warm-up swing and a really big miss with this one.

[potionofpower]

sighs. cringe is dead, wandersong ocs are forever.

[dialogue text under the read more]

Audrey: “y’know, a lone hero could do with a little compensation..”

Oc (currently unnamed): “aww..kys! <3”

[blightworn]

⌈ audrey | continued from here | @redriighthand ⌋

Audrey sighs. She admires Rose, truly she does, but it's impossible to have a proper conversation, even when she can't smell the other woman from ten feet away. Some of her friends have nose-blindness since the Ultra-Luxe reopened, but Audrey has had no such luck. " You were going on about an adventure to a textile mill you found, " she prompts with an impatient tone. " So I can find new dress materials, instead of selling old rags to these classless idiots. " It isn't for their benefit, of course; Audrey simply wants to bring back some true style to New Vegas.

[empirewaste]

⌈ @ilingeron liked for a starter✨ ⌋

' you're the only competition we let in here, y'know? ' audrey starts with a giggle. ' must be that charm of yours; don't make us regret it, darling. ' all smiles, all levity, as she turns to retrieve her jewelry collection from the wall safe. the strip is relatively secure, but the diamond won't be losing her gems any time soon. ' i have a new piece; it reminded me of your act. '

[idontmindifuforgetme]

One of my personal goals at the moment is not to box myself in when it comes to fashion. Fashion is important to me bc I was raised by a mother who refused to leave the house unless she looked the most elegant and classy she possibly could, and bc of her I also developed a taste for that kind of vibe. But I also feel like I play it safe most times and just want to experiment w things every now and then I think

[gaypirate420]

I always liked Chad he was so sassy and stupid. When I was younger I swore I could fix him.

[a-cloud-for-dreams]

tagging: @rc-catalog