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teenyweenynightghost · 3 years ago

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As lucky as the rainbow

A/n: Im sorry. Also. Special dedication to the love of my life, @cantaraiilmionome , who let me write this fic

Warnings: Smut

Word Count: 1.7K

Pairing: Vic X Fem!Reader

Taglist: @fuckim-so-gay @ginny-lily @messyhairday-me @cheese-toastie-11 @wannabemarlenabutiscoraline @simp-per-ethan @maneskinrollercoaster @juststalking @superchrystaldrug @immrbrightsideeee @shehaddreamstoo @tiaamberxx @victoriadeangeliswifey @bidet-and-legolas @makapaka11

My heartbeat was wild and mostly erupting from my chest as the whole world around me seemed to quiet down. The mesh shirt I was wearing was already crumpled from all the times I had fiddled with it nervously. To be honest, could anyone really blame me? I have been obsessed with Måneskin for ages, and I finally get to see them live. A small, really pesky part of my brain kept bugging me. They would have no reason to like or notice you; why are you even here? Well, that definitely did not help the anxious feeling growing in my stomach.

Suddenly, the crowd erupted in cheers as four rock stars appeared on the stage.

And oh god what they were wearing. A certain blonde caught my attention, one who I was more than familiar with. Victoria strutted on the stage, her bass strap wrapped around her, as a small corset did nothing to cover her. Two black stripes of tape covered each of her boobs and she looked celestial. It was unfair to everyone else! How could she just look like that!?

“Is everyone ready?” Damiano’s strong voice sounded out of the speakers, earning an excited cheer from everyone.

As they started playing, I realised I was no longer anxious. Moving from side to side and jumping along with them, It felt as If the world stopped temporarily just for me to enjoy this moment. It was truly heaven, and their magnetic presence made it infinitely better.

“Now, for a fan favorite…” Damiano spoke into the mic, soon interrupted by the all too familiar notes of For Your Love. Oh god.

I couldn’t decide who to pay attention to; Ethan’s godly form playing the drums in a way I wished he would play my ass, Thomas’ talented fingers strumming the guitar chords, Damiano fucking the stage while singing or-

Oh.

I was one of the lucky ones who got to sit up front. So my view of Victoria was truly a dream come true. Her eyes were closed as she thrusted into the air, her hips moving with precision and skill, as she moved her head backwards in rhythm with the song. Two of her fingers were plucking the chords, clouding my mind with thoughts of what else she could do with them.

The whole song became a vivid fantasy for me, as I kept watching Victoria play, entranced by her sensuality. The song sadly came to a stop, and Damiano started speaking again. My lovely brain, however, could only gaze at Victoria, her wonderful top and fingers.

As If on cue, she knelt down right at the edge of the stage, and winked at me. Wait, she did what? My brain stopped functioning as I kept staring at her, eyes comically wide and mouth hanging open.

She smirked at my reaction, and motioned for me to come closer with her finger. A bodyguard came and opened the barrier, as I made my way through.

I was right in front of the stage, looking in her icy blue eyes. She leaned down and cupped my cheek, shaking it softly.

“Wanna stay here, cucciola?” She asked, a sultry smile appearing on her face. I nodded eagerly, causing her to laugh, before returning to her band.

The rest of the concert managed to make me so wet I was convinced my knees would give in the second I would try to walk. Between Victoria grinding on the floor right in front of me, making sure to stare right in my eyes, Damiano jumping in the crowd and grabbing Thomas, as well as Ethan being an overall god-like presence.

It was, however, over, as soon as it started. My face fell as they all waved their goodbyes to the crowd, and I turned around, preparing to leave, but was soon interrupted by a guard.

“Miss De Angelis said that she would like you to go backstage.”

That was the second time the girl’s actions shocked me. I certainly hoped it wouldn’t be the last as I followed the guard to the back.

“Ah, there you are, cucciola!” Her raspy voice exclaimed, as she headed towards me and grabbed my waist, leading me towards a changing room before I could even mutter a word.

“You, I me- mean ...Why? Like… I just thi-I” Damn it, where was my wittiness when I needed it? If I wasn’t already blushing, I probably looked like a sweaty tomato right now.

“Oh darling, I suggest you figure out how to talk, so I’ll know how to please you later.” She murmured in my ear, my knees almost giving up at her words.

“Oh god, umm, I- hi.” I managed to let out. I’m so glad I could ramble about crystals for 3 hours but when It comes to basic greetings my mind just dips. Lovely.

“We have about 15 minutes before we need to leave.” She said, grabbing my body and pulling me right against her, softly nibbling on my neck.

“Considering the way you fucked the stage earlier, I think even 5 would suffice.” Ah yes, my brain was back. Temporarily, though, because Victoria’s hungry lips smashed into mine in a fraction of a second, quickly turning me around so I would be prompted against the wall.

We moved in sync as she sucked every breath out of me and explored my mouth with her tongue. She bit my lip hard, and licked the reddish spot which appeared, before moving onto my neck.

She sucked on every inch of my skin, leaving deep red marks in her wake, which would definitely be an interesting subject of discussion once I got home. I couldn’t help but let out the most pathetic whines, which only seemed to turn Victoria on more.

“So fucking desperate puppy. All I do is dance a little on stage and you’re already willing to be on your knees for me.” She purred right against my breast, earning a deep moan from my treacherous mouth,

“What can I say, I like being a good girl.”

Her mouth bit into the soft skin which was now exposed, as my poor shirt was laying on the floor, discarded seconds ago. I whimpered and bucked my hips into the air, whining even more at the realisation that there was nothing there.

“Please..” I begged, as she kept kissing and licking around my hardened buds, heating me up even more.

“Take your pants off, then” She instructed, and I did it in a heartbeat, the piece of clothing joining my shirt.

The last thing I saw was the blonde’s head lower , before her tongue finally gave me what I wanted. She swiped it deeply inside of me, humming at the liquids pouring from me. Moving to my clit, she started circling around it as one of her long fingers thrusted deep inside of me.

“Fuck… Victoria…”

She added another finger and quickened her pace, as I rapidly approached my edge. God, no one did it as well as her. She was getting rougher by the second, biting at my thighs and sucking hardly, until she heard my breath catch, before I erupted in a mess of loud moans and screams.

I came hard on her hand as she guided me down to the ground, licking the tears falling from my eyes.

“You really do like being a good girl.” She whispered, cupping my cheek and pressing a soft kiss on my puffy lips.

“Oh I can be bad too.” I smirked, watching as her eyes darkened.”

“How about you return to the hotel with me, and we can explore that talent too…”

***

More than half an hour had passed, and I was sitting in an Uber right next to Victoria. While the band packed up their stuff, I hung out on the stage, eating a popsicle Damiano had given me.

“Do you have to be anywhere early tomorrow?” Victoria’s voice interrupted my thoughts, softly grazing her fingers over my thighs.

“Like I wouldn’t cancel them for you.” I responded, earning a soft chuckle from her.

“Excellent. How about we talk a little then, hmm?” She asked, pulling me closer to her.

“About what?” I asked, clearly thinking of innocent topics.

“Which was your favourite part about how I fucked you backstage.”

Oh. My. God. At this point, my brain had stopped working so many times, I probably had approximately 2 brain cells left. And damn, I answered in a corresponding fashion.

“I must say I enjoyed the talking.”

Victoria laughed, a devilish grin forming on her face, as I bet her mind filled with the dirtiest ideas.

“I’ll take your word for it. I’ll make sure we’ll do just enough talking.”

“Wait no- You know, I really liked the cum part too.” I tried to save myself, because let’s be honest, If this woman was anything, it was a tease.

“Considering how loud you were moaning, I bet you were.” She purred again, dragging her fingers further up my thighs.

“Tell me, what did you fantasise about most while watching me play?”

My mind went blank, but not really, as the thought of her grinding on my face while practicing the bass made its way into my head. God, I was royally fucked.

“Tell me, pet.” She snarled against my neck, grabbing it roughly and bending me over.

Her hand wandered down to my ass, grabbing it roughly before slithering back around to my stomach, and pulling me up again.

“Practicing your bass on my face.” I moaned out, red and embarrassed.

“A lovely imagination you have. I’ll make sure to consult it more often.”

“That won’t work. It seems to go blank around you.”

Victoria smirked at my confession and pressed me down onto her lap, slowly working her way under my shirt.

“I really like this. Where did you get it?”

“My mom.”

“She wears this?”

Fuck. “Oh, you meant the shirt?”

Scoffing and rolling her eyes, she pulled the material up, and pressed a wet kiss to both of my breasts. Oh god, this girl would kill me.

“My special thanks to her. And also my apologies, because I’ll fuck you till you scream and cry tonight.”

#victoria de angelis #vic x reader #maneskin fic #maneskin #ethan torchio #damiano david #thomas raggi #this was fun #smut

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violetnotez · 4 years ago

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d r a m a t u r g y

Itadori x reader | Jujutsu Kaisen

⤷ Genre: Fluff

⤷ Word Count: 1072

⤷ Warnings: maybe cursing???? maybeeeeeeeeeee idk its been awhile 😂

⤷ Author’s Note: Ahhh my first Jujutsu Kaisen fic! Im honestly kinda scared to write for a new fandom, but hey ya only live once! Immediately after watching Jujutsu I swear to god I feel for Itadori faster than any anime boy in my entire life- so it is safe to say Yuuji is my new husbando 😛

⤷ Song Recs: “Youth-Dabin”

✧･ﾟ: *✧･ﾟ:* ✧ ✧･ﾟ:* ✧･ﾟ: *✧･ﾟ:* ✧･ﾟ: *✧･ﾟ:* ✧･ﾟ:

“Yuuji, you almost done yet?” you sighed, your body dangled across your boyfriend's bed, head so low your scalp was almost touching the floor.

You knew you sounded desperate, your voice taking on a whiny tone-not too far off from a child impatiently waiting to get a treat.

You grimaced internally at the way your tone of voice, frustration riddling in your body at your situation.

One kiss- one measily peck on the lips….thats really all you wanted...and this man had the audacity to deny it to you.

Yuuji chuckled, the sound warm like honey as it dribbled from his mouth.

“Aw cmon, babe, you really miss me that much?”

You sighed exasperatedly, your voice full of yearning as you yawned out a “yes”, your mouth forming a pout as Yuuji chuckled once again to himself at your clinginess.

Something about Itadori Yuuji drove you wild inside….the way he touched you was so intoxicating that you felt your lungs stop in the most blissful ways. He always took your breath away, palms trailing against every expanse of skin, the intoxicating smell of his cologne mixed with his detergent making a scent that made your brain fuzzy and body more desperate to mold into his.

Yuuji was never a serious lover, always giggling or cracking jokes, constantly praising you with his kind words and beautiful sounds. He was such a ball of warmth, melting into you and making your whole body feel completely bathed in comfort and heat.

So why would he deny you that bliss?

You exhaled again, a prickling sensation filling your stomach as you stared at your boyfriend. He was working so calmly and diligently on his homework, unknowing to how your mind was racing as you imagined his hand on your body, the way his lips ghosted on your skin…

You heard him clear his throat, the sound breaking your lonely day dream. You swiveled yourself up from your upside down position, watching carefully as his writing hand slightly stalled against his paper.

He slowly turned to look at you, his frosted pink hair cascading over shy, choclate brown eyes.

“Why-why not come here and sit?” He smiled weakly, “ Im almost finished, it shouldn't take too long-”

You could hear that tell tale sign of nervousness in Yuuji’s voice-you had been dating him for 6 months now, and had known him for even longer as being best friends for many years.

But the poor guy was always, always seemingly a nervous wreck when he initiated physical affection- and it honestly was the most adorable thing ever to you. They way he’d try to crack jokes to make it more lighthearted, or how his cheeks reddened from just being so close to you, made you just fall for him even more. It also didn't hurt that poor Itadori was quite bad at hiding his true emotions, even his smallest white lies so easy to read it was almost comical.

So you knew without a doubt Yuuji was practically dying inside from offering his lap to you- but God could he be any more adorable though...

You grinned devilishly as that statement echoed in the room, now a mantra replaying in your mind.

Finally, finally some desperately needed, selfish attention.

You scrambled off his bed, making the short distance to his chair and plopping yourself in his waiting lap, legs bending against his outer thighs and hands wrapping against his neck.

It felt like bliss- you melted your body into his, succumbing to that intoxicating scent, snuggling your face into the crook of his neck.

You felt Itadori chuckle, the vibration tickling your cheeks as you grazed his exposed skin.

“I dont think Ive ever seen you run over to me that quickly, babe-Maybe I should do that more often-”

That small joke made you feel even more possessive over your boyfriend, your hands wrapping deeper against his skin to soak up as much warmth as you could.

“Don't be getting any ideas,” you scolded playfully, your voice muffled from being so close to him, “ or Ill take away your cuddling privileges,”

Yuuji laughed again at your weak threat, his digits trailing against your scalp and dancing against the soft skin behind your ear

“Like you could really stick to that, “ he smiled, “youd give up on the first day,”

You scrunched your nose at the jab, bringing yourself to look at Yuuji.

The freaking punk- you could already hear the smirk in his voice, but it was even worse when you looked at him. This man looked like a smug puppy, always desperately wanting attention and flaunting it when he got it. It was written all over his face that he was loving how needy you were for him.

You pursed your lips to the side, your eyes squinting slightly at your smug boyfriend.

“And youd be begging me in the first hour”, you retorted back, trying your best to look stern.

It was so hard to do that with Itadori though- he was just so damn comforting you couldnt help but just want to smile and drown him with all your affection.

Yuuji’s smile slowly dwindled to a dreamy grin, his eyes softer as he reached out for your face, cradling your cheeks against his hand. That faint smell of cologne lingered in the air, the scent even stronger now. You closed your eyes, your body riddled with a tingling sensation as you sucked in that intoxicating smell.

“Oh really,” he taunted back with a soft smile, “Id be begging?”

Shit-you creaked your eyes open ever so gently, kicking yourself internally for being so obvious.

He knew exactly what he was doing- Yuuji sometimes forgot how charming he could truly be, but when he remembered- it was game over for you. You could barely think straight, only able to focus on him and his touch.

Yuuji placed a kiss on top of your forehead, the sensation sending an explosion of fire works across your whole body, the spot almost ticklish.

You couldn’t even deny him-he was your whole world, and you'd go crazy if you weren't with him.

“Its okay though,” he smiled, his voice soft as his thumb brushed against your cheek.

“Id go a little crazy without you too.”

✧･ﾟ: *✧･ﾟ:* ✧ ✧･ﾟ:* ✧･ﾟ: *✧･ﾟ:* ✧･ﾟ: *✧･ﾟ:* ✧･ﾟ:

Masterlist | Tip Jar | Requests Open for Jujutsu Kaisen + Haikyuu!

12/16/20

#jujutsu kaisen #jk #jujutsu kaisen x reader #jk x reader #itadori yuuji #itadori yuuji x reader #itadori x reader #yuuji x reader #itadori imagine #itadori yuuji x you #jujutsu kaisen itadori #jujutsu kaisen reader insert #jk reader insert #itadori yuuji reader insert

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ghosthan · 4 years ago

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hello!! i saw that you made a lot of stuff for 1872 and i was wondering if 1872 tony is similar to regular comics tony?? i know mcu and comics tony are different and i want to get into 616, but if 1872 comics are more easy to read i might try those first! 😅

Hello, hello!

Thank you for asking, and sorry it took me so long to get back to you! I wanted to think about it and put together a thoughtful response because I am desperately trying to convert MCU fans to 1872. Or comics fans who just haven’t gotten into 1872.

This post will contain some 1872 spoilers, but not the Big Spoiler that you probably already know about anyways.

Anyways, let’s get into it. Yeehaw.

What is 1872? It’s Steve/Tony in the wild west.

1872 comics are very easy to read, very short, and you need absolutely no prior knowledge to get into them; I highly recommend these as a start point for MCU fans who are curious about dipping their toes into some of the other Steve/Tony universes. And 1872 is, indeed, a Steve/Tony universe. It’s really gay, (and dramatic.) Uh. So gay, in fact, that one of the comic artists who drew pages even occasionally shares Steve/Tony shipping memes. So.

Marvel 1872 is a four issue series released as a part of the Secret Wars event; you really do not need to know anything about this to enjoy 1872, because it is a self-contained alternate universe in a “pocket dimension”, meaning it’s totally separate from the 616 cannon but technically exists in the expanse of the multiverse!

Here’s the summary:

In the Battleworld zone of 1872, Sheriff Steve Rogers faces corruption and fear in the boom town of Timely. Can Anthony Stark pull Rogers' fat from the fire? Probably not, since the only thing he seems capable of pulling is a cork from a bottle. Things in Timely are bad, and getting worse — and when a stranger arrives in town, Timely will be changed forever.

Now, to compare “regular comics Tony”, or 616 Tony, with 1872 Tony.

The main difference? 616 Tony wears this sexy little under suit (or nothing) under his armor, like this:

And 1872 Tony wears dirty, stinky one-piece pajamas under his armor (not sexy):

He’s so gross, he’s a mess. I love him. You’ll love him, too.

No, okay. Being serious.

616!Tony’s backstory is a lot more complicated just due to how long the character has existed, and the decades of cannon (much of it self-contradictory at points.) Like MCU Tony, 616 Tony used to manufacture weapons, experiences something life-changing, and becomes who he is as a result of this as a catalyst. 616 Tony’s backstory has been rebooted a few times, and I’m definitely not the definitive source on Iron Man lore compared to people who have read all of his comics, but I’ll try to touch on the basics.

Originally, 616 Tony Stark is shaped by his experience in the Vietnam War. This is later rebooted and changed to war in the middle East (we see this in the MCU when Tony is held captive in Afghanistan.) In both circumstances, he is taken captive after being in the air for war technology, and then he creates the suit to save his own life (losing a beloved mentor in the process, the guilt of which stays with him after.)

Tales of Suspense #39

In 1872, Tony’s formative event is the Civil War in some ways, but in other ways, this is only half of it, because this is not the event which causes him to build armor or set him onto his “become a better person” trajectory, like in the other comics. Mainly, the Civil War functions to cause Tony to stop weapons manufacturing and throw his life away down a bottle.

We get a flashback of Tony in the year 1862 with his female companion, picnicking and about to watch a battle, (rich people from the North did this in real life. If you’re interested, read more here!) We don’t get much of his past, but we discover that he is a rifle manufacturer and that he has created something called the ��Stark Repeating Rifle’, and it seems that he has done so with the hope of encouraging a cease-fire, more than a slaughter.

Well. We don’t always get what we ask for.

Tony vows to actually never touch a weapon ever again, and this personal oath means so much to him that he gets creative at times during 1872 when he’s being chased by baddies:

Witnessing the extreme bloodshed of the Civil War, and feeling responsible for a huge amount of deaths, Tony turns to drinking, (and presumably moves to the west to escape the Pain of his Past, but this is not shown explicitly on panel; I have assumed, though, that Tony’s weapons manufacturing company was in the East, probably Boston or New York, since he comes from family money and because the American West was still “young” at this point in time so it would be unlikely that an established business would be supplying a war from lawless territory with little infrastructure.)

In 616, it’s worth noting that Tony builds the armor to save himself from danger in a war scenario; this is not the case in 1872, things unfold a bit differently. The Civil War certainly sets in motion the chain of events that eventually lead to the creation of Tony’s armor, but he’s not in physical danger or physically traumatized by the war in this verse as he is in other verses, and 616 Tony seems to have a stronger sense of duty than 1872 Tony, but this might be a complication of the depression/apathy related to the alcoholism.

What I mean by this is that both iterations of Tony struggle with alcoholism, but differently. Mainly, while 616 Tony has several alcohol themed arcs, and hits rock bottom with his alcoholism to cope with his trauma, he is sober more than he is drunk in the comics. His drinking almost kills him, and he almost loses everything because of the drink. It’s a source of enormous shame for him.

In fact, during this time in 616, I think Tony at his lowest reminds me a lot of 1872 Tony; 616 Tony is not an apathetic person and he holds himself accountable for an obscene amount of responsibility, but during what is referred to in fandom as The Second Drinking Arc, Tony basically gives up. This is the most “like” 1872 Tony, at least at the start of his arc. Rhodey takes over the mantle of Iron Man, and 616 Tony spirals, not caring whether he lives or dies, not hero-ing certainly.

We see both versions of Tony express similar sentiments, a certain cavalier attitude about their lives (and outright suicidality at other points) with nothing left but the drink.

Iron Man Vol. 1 #182

Compare with:

And you can certainly see a resemblance between this set of panels from IM v.1 #176 and in 1872:

Iron Man Vol. 1 #176 and Marvel 1872 #1

It’s a little different in 1872, where his drinking really is purely a result of his existing despair, and it doesn’t cause enormous problems for him, (minor problems, sure. He spends a lot of time drunkenly singing to Sheriff Rogers, or bothering him from the inside of a jail cell.) But this Tony lives at rock bottom, whereas 616 Tony only stays at rock bottom long enough to get his life back together (as many times as it takes.)

This Tony really doesn’t show any outward shame about his drinking; presumably, the people he knows in Timely have only ever known Tony as a drunk, and none of the people from his old life are here to see him like this.

This is a Tony who has essentially given up on himself and has moved out West to hide from his shame and his past; this is not a Tony who is scared of letting down his friends by drinking, or scared of shirking his “duty”, because this Tony has moved away from all of his friends and has given himself no duties. He’s a bit more apathetic, but I would argue that this is not because he inherently is a less moral version of Tony, but because in this verse, he was drinking for a very long time and circumstances unfolded differently so it took him a longer time to find that sense of purpose and responsibility (beyond just shutting down manufacturing guns,) which is awakened in him by Steve Rogers.

616 Tony’s sobriety is a major part of his character, and a conscious choice that he makes, even during some lowest points:

Civil War: The Confession

He takes some amount of pride in his sobriety, and when he does fall off the wagon at times (or magic makes everyone think he did,) it absolutely tears him up because 616 Tony cares very, very much about his sobriety and does not like who he is when he’s drinking. We do not know if 1872 Tony’s father had been a drunk or not, but we know 616 Tony’s father was, and that the drink lead to him treating Tony abusively.

Iron Man Vol. 1 #285

Avengers Disassembled #1 (This was when ~magic~ made Tony drunk and it wrecked him breaking sobriety without ever having actually drank. Oof.)

616 Tony’s long struggle with alcoholism is a major part of his character and he has had relapses over the years and throughout the reboots, but in general, he does not drink.

1872 Tony starts drinking in 1862 and doesn’t stop until the last pages of the story, so in terms of the cannon we have for him, he is a current drunk, rather than a former drunk. This isn’t to say he doesn’t stop; but since it’s in the last page or so, it sets the reader up to imagine his sober future, rather than exploring his sobriety as 616 does. (Calling all fanfic writers!)

Anyways, both Tony’s are excellent. Both are damaged and traumatized, both are Iron Man in their own ways, both (eventually) find sobriety, both have some cute, quippy dialogue (though 616 Tony tends to be more reserved/polite for sure, in general).

The last thing I’ll point out, is that both Tonys’ narratives are intertwined with and influenced by their respective Steve Rogers. I’m not saying soulmates but I’m saying soulmates.

Anyways. Sorry this post got super long, and I apologize if any of it is confusing or redundant, I am not functioning at my highest capacity currently. Please read 1872. Let it rock your world. Create & consume the fanworks, I would love to see a boom of 1872 content (more than the fics and art I keep making!) And my ask-box is always open!

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sineala · 4 years ago

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I was going through an 2009 era livejournal post where it was mentioned that most of Tony's relationship were 'sexual form of self-flagellation'. With that out I love Whitney/Tony in a relationship, is there any way you can see that working out?

Oh, man, anon. This makes me regret that I have not yet posted the story that was going to be my Cap-IM RBB last year, because I literally have a 150,000-word answer to this question in the form of fanfiction. The short answer to this question is: no.

(The longer answer: HELL NO.)

If you want me to get more complicated than that, I will say that, in all fairness, there is an era of canon in which I could have seen Whitney/Tony actually working out. But that eventually ended, and for me there's a point of no return after which any chance of this being a good, healthy, or lasting relationship becomes impossible. And since then, Whitney's grasp on reality has gradually declined to the point where I don't think that she's currently mentally capable of seeing Tony as anything other than someone who could be a personal possession of hers, a thing, an object, a prize, rather than as a living human being with his own agency. (Basically, Marvel seems to have taken a look at her and thought, "Wow, she's crazy," and it's... kept getting worse. And worse.)

Let me now provide a brief summary of the Whitney/Tony relationship, because I went and read at least fifty issues so I could write the story that none of you have read yet. Anyway. This got long enough that I think I will use a Read More.

So Whitney first appears in comics way way back in Tales of Suspense v1 #97, and continues appearing in early Iron Man v1, where she meets Tony for the first time, but also has a bunch of feelings for Jasper Sitwell. (Note to MCU fans: Sitwell is not secretly Hydra. He is a big nerd, though.)

The Whitney/Tony relationship really kicks off in Iron Man v1 #17-19, one of my personal favorite arcs, in which a LMD Tony builds attempts to become Iron Man (this is always a good plot) and Whitney kidnaps Tony because she initially thinks he's the LMD, and she's working with Midas, who wants to use the LMD to infiltrate SI. It's great.

By this point Whitney has incurred her Tragic Facial Scars and has her mask, but Tony doesn't care about the scars and, as we see in #19, is clearly interested in her anyway. He's very sweet.

She appears a few times after that, basically leaves him for Sitwell, and then comes back in a big way in Iron Man v1 #91, posing as Krissy Longfellow, his new secretary. Whom he asks out, yes. Eventually Tony finds out who she is, and by Iron Man v1 #104 or thereabouts, they are definitely in love, Tony takes her to a house he grew up in, and also Whitney reveals that she knows that Tony is Iron Man. Which she is fine with.

Then they kiss very dramatically, and it is the most unintentionally-hilarious kiss I have ever seen, because neither of them take off their masks:

I like to yell CLANK CLANK whenever I read this.

By the next issue, #105, they are very seriously together:

They are together for about ten more issues, and this is the era of canon where I think it honestly could have worked out for them. Sure, Tony is contemplating abandoning being Iron Man and an Avenger, so he'd have to come around on that, but this is when they were at their healthiest, generally speaking. They were in love. They were happy. They were happy right up until #116, when Count Nefaria (Whitney's father) died, and she blamed Tony for her father's death and left him:

So I think that was pretty much it for their shot at having a stable, healthy relationship. Because after that Whitney basically... is evil. And I think there could be, as you say, an element of "sexual self-flagellation" in there, because Tony does still care for her as a person, although I don't see that he's necessarily interested in a romantic relationship with her again. He just wants her to be good again. He wants to help her be the good person he thinks she can be, but after this point she pretty much starts to lose her grip on reality, and I don't think she's capable of being that person.

Every subsequent appearance of Whitney in volume 1 was later retconned as being a clone (because comics gonna comics), but every time she shows up in it it's basically to seek revenge for the death of her father (who of course comes back to life, but that's comics for you) and also to get Tony back, because no one else could possibly love him as much as she does. She tries to kidnap Bethany Cabe. She works with Obadiah Stane against Tony. She tries to bodyswap herself into Bethany to get close to Tony. You get the idea. These are not the actions of a particularly stable person.

But one of the more agonizing things about Whitney -- at least, one of the things that I assume is most agonizing to Tony -- is that she could have been good. Maybe she can't be now, but at one point the capacity existed in her, and we know that because one of her clones, Masque, is in fact a very good person. Toward the end of volume 1, Masque actually ends up joining the Avengers. And I would think it's very hard for Tony to know about Masque and not think that Whitney could have been her, that there's some way he could have helped Whitney become that person, if only he'd known how, whether or not that is actually possible for him to do. (Hint: it's not.) I think he blames himself for not being able to save her. Maybe that's more of the same self-flagellation.

Meanwhile, Whitney does things like lock herself in a bunker in Nevada with a bunch of her clones, which does not strike me as a great move, sanity-wise. In The Nefaria Protocols in v3 (Avengers v3 #32-34, Thunderbolts v1 #43-44), she teams up with the Avengers to fight her father, but she's not sure whether she can trust them at first.

Avengers v3 #33 is actually really sympathetic toward her; the whole thing is narrated from her POV:

Eventually she ends up attempting to betray the Avengers and get them all killed, and she is stopped only when Masque shows up and sacrifices herself to prevent her doing so, at which point Whitney decides maybe she should save the Avengers after all before leaving. I think this is probably the nicest that canon has been to her in years, and she still nearly murders all the Avengers in the process.

After that she has a few other appearances, the most salient of which is probably World's Most Wanted (Invincible Iron Man v1 #8-19), in which, as we all know, she kidnaps Tony and is generally obsessed with him. Here in Invincible Iron Man v1 #16, Tony is in the middle of having his brain deleted and yet he still remembers that Whitney is not the best person, and she would really like to run away together with him because she apparently thinks that's a thing that's going to happen:

She shows up again in Bendis' run and as far as I can remember she's portrayed pretty similarly there. She's trying to steal magical artifacts. She and Tony meet up. She tries to kill him. The usual. There's a nice splash page in Invincible Iron Man v2 #2:

Her most recent relevant appearance is actually, if you can believe it, a few months ago, in Doctor Strange: Surgeon Supreme #5 and #6. Someone has been stealing magical weapons from Strange and selling them on the black market and -- surprise surprise -- it's Whitney.

(I was actually very surprised, yes. She is, uh, not typically one of Strange's villains.)

Whitney, you see, wants to be loved:

So she's selling all these weapons because, yes, she wants to be loved. By Tony.

What the hell, Whitney? How exactly is that going to work?

Anyway, Strange needs to neutralize the magical weapons, and to do that he needs to enter Whitney's mind to find the code that will do that, and, well, this is what the inside of Whitney's mind is like:

Her mind is one hundred percent made up of her obsession with Tony. This is it. This is her brain. She is a mess. She is out of touch with reality.

And you'll never guess what the code is. Or maybe you will.

She thinks that she's in love with Tony. And she thinks that this is what love is. And she is very clearly not okay.

Because Strange is a doctor and is determined to try to help people, he offers her a new mask that will heal her:

Whitney declines:

She runs away. And that's the last we have seen of her.

So, yeah. Based on all of this, I am of the opinion that Whitney/Tony cannot possibly work out at this point in canon, because -- although she still believes she loves him -- she is very obviously no longer mentally capable of understanding what love actually is, and she's not looking to change that. We have literally seen inside her mind, so we can in fact know what she thinks. She just wants to possess Tony. And that's not going to be good for anyone.

Would she have been better than this if she'd stayed with Tony instead of leaving him when her father died? Maybe. We can't know. A lot of her instability seems to revolve around her inability to possess Tony, and, well... she would have had Tony, so maybe that wouldn't have happened. Or maybe she would have become consumed by possessing him even more. There's no way to know. And given that she's capable of this kind of break with reality, it's also possible that if it hadn't been Tony, it might have been something else entirely as a focus for her delusional thinking, and at any rate she's clearly not interested in receiving the psychological help that she definitely needs.

Man, do I love reading about her, though. And someday I swear I will post this 150,000-word fic about why they should never, ever, ever get back together.

#Anonymous #replies

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clumsyclifford · 4 years ago

Text

kiss in the kitchen like it’s a dance floor

Calum hums. "I could stay with you."

Again Michael's heart gives a lurch. "Really?"

"Yeah, why not?"

HELLO!! HAPPY BIRTHDAY @jbhmalum this is for you i got cute in the ao3 notes and im worried about repeating myself but anyway i really just love and treasure you je t’adore i really wish i could compliment you better in french but i simply do not have the words so suffice it to say that i am so so happy to know you i love reading your fics you are so unbelievably talented not to mention just mad cute and just overall an absolute delight i hope your birthday is super amazing and yeah i love you lots

so here’s a really fluffy domestic malum quarantine getting together fic per the birthday girl’s request i know you’re all thinking fluff???? from bella??? but joke’s on you because i wrote this several weeks ago don’t worry i am still emo inside

title from sunflower vol. 6 by harry styles <3 king shit

read it here on ao3

At risk of sounding overdramatic, Michael is going to die unless he sees Calum in the next week. Possibly less. He's experiencing severe Calum withdrawal, and it shows. Sleeping alone sucks more than Michael can put into words. There's no warm, steady weight against his back anymore, just the flimsy brush of his own duvet. He tucks it as tightly around himself as possible, but it's just not the same as Calum's embrace.

"I miss you," he whines over FaceTime one evening.

"You better," Calum replies. Then, immediately, "Sorry, I mean, I miss you too, obviously."

"You're on thin ice here," Michael grumbles.

"You already know I miss you," Calum tells him.

"I hate being in quarantine. This sucks so bad, Cal."

Calum nods, sighs. "You know…I've been in, like, proper quarantine for two weeks. More than that. Haven't seen anyone or done anything."

Michael makes a face. "Really? No one? Nothing?"

"Yeah, but I mean." Calum tilts his head on the screen. "I could probably come to yours."

For a moment Michael's heart leaps into his throat, and then, just as quickly, it plummets. "You can't," he says. "The travel, and plus then you'd be going back, and I'm pretty sure I've been in some suspicious places recently. I mean I'm being careful, but you know. I don't want you to get it or bring it back with you."

Calum hums. "I could stay with you."

Again Michael's heart gives a lurch. "Really?"

"Yeah, why not?"

"That'd be so amazing," Michael breathes. "Beyond awesome. Oh my God. Can — would you? Seriously?"

"Are you kidding me?" Calum gives Michael a look, like, do you even know me? "Michael. Like, I don't want to overstate things here, but I miss you more than I think I've ever missed anyone, excepting possibly Duke."

"Not as much as I miss you," Michael returns. "I've never missed anyone more. At all. Dogs included." Instantly that feels wrong. "Okay. That's a lie. But —"

"Ha!" Calum crows. "I miss you more. Get destroyed, Cliffo."

"You know what," Michael says petulantly, "maybe you shouldn't come visit."

"Funny," Calum says. "I'll sort my shit out here and then I can probably leave in a few days, is that alright?"

It's more than alright. It's actually the most brilliant thing Michael's ever heard. The prospect of seeing Calum lifts his mood way up into the stratosphere, and he grins, bubbly.

"Yeah, yeah, perfect," he says. "Can't wait."

The look on Calum's face says he can't wait, either.

It's been too many weeks to count since Michael's been hugged, but the moment Calum is in his arms, the time melts away. "Oh my God, I missed you so fucking much," he murmurs into Calum's shoulder. Calum chuckles.

"Yeah," he says, all fond. "Missed you too, Mikey."

"Let's never stop hugging," Michael suggests. "Ever."

Calum pats his back. "I think life would get pretty difficult pretty quickly."

"I don't really see how."

"The bathroom, for starters."

"We'd figure it out. I've seen you naked."

"That's not. Really." Calum laughs. "Fuck. I really missed you. Come on. Invite me in."

"No," Michael says, as Calum pulls reluctantly out of his hold. Calum frowns. "You might have corona."

"Oh, fuck off."

Laughing loudly, Michael leads Calum in. Immediately, Southy and Moose are at his heels, yapping excitedly. Calum kneels, grinning. "Hey, guys! Miss me much?"

"They can just smell Duke on you," Michael says in mock-contempt. It's generally accepted that Moose and Southy favor Calum over, well, basically anyone, but Michael refuses to cave. They're his fucking dogs.

"Oh, fuck," Calum remembers, straightening up, to Moose's displeasure. "Duke."

"Go get him," Michael says. "I'll put your shit in your room."

Calum smiles at Michael, the big, bright one, eyes crinkling in the corners so they almost disappear. Michael thinks if he had to pick one thing to wax poetic about forever, it would be this smile, and how it makes him feel gooey and melty inside whenever Calum turns it on him.

"What?" Michael finally demands, when Calum doesn't say anything.

Calum shakes his head. "Does it have to be something, man? I'm just fuckin' happy."

Michael breathes out, feeling lighter than he has in ages. "Me too."

And with that, Calum turns and goes to get Duke from the car. Michael carries Calum's stuff to Calum's room, which is actually a guest room that's been broken in by Calum enough times that they started calling it his. Not that he stays there that often. Borne of habit from both childhood and hotel rooms, Michael and Calum always elect to share the bed. This, among millions of things, has made Michael's life hard in quarantine. Sleeping alone sucks.

Michael gives the room a once-over as he deposits Calum's bags down. It has minimal decorations but the few that are here are very much Calum. A photograph of the sunset off the beach near their childhood homes hangs above the dresser, and there's a comically large poster of Alex Gaskarth above the bed, which, Michael is somewhat sure, had been the result of a lost bet.

Arms wrap around his middle. "Hey."

"You get Duke set up?" Michael asks, resting his hands against Calum's and tilting his head back.

"On a trial basis, yeah. He's gotten really territorial about his food, though, so if either of your kids tries anything…"

"My kids?"

"Your dogs," Calum says dismissively. "I'm just saying, Duke could kick their asses."

"Um, excuse me?" Michael twists around, prying himself out of Calum's grip. "First of all, it would be two on one, and there's no way your weak-ass mutt could —"

"Weak-ass mutt?"

" — also, Southy can and will scratch, and I know for a fact Moose has never read the Geneva Convention."

"Yeah, but they like me more," Calum says cheekily. Michael makes an offended face, and Calum swoops in and kisses his cheek.

"Hey, don't try that shit. They do not like you more."

“Okay,” Calum says, in a very unconvincing voice. “So. What’s for dinner?”

“Nothing for you if you keep this up,” Michael grumbles, scowling.

Calum chuckles. “I can look through your pantry and make something?”

“I just said I’m not feeding you.”

“Right, that’s why I’m going to be feeding you. ”

Michael huffs. “Don’t cook, we can order something.”

“No, I’m gonna cook. I’ve missed cooking for you.”

“Really? For me? ”

“Yes,” Calum says, looking strangely at Michael. “For you. I’ve missed spending time with you. Doing things for you. Why do you think I sent you the care package?”

“Because you love me?”

“Yeah,” Calum says, which is a little unfair, because Michael had been teasing and had expected Calum to tease in return. But Calum just looks matter-of-fact. “Exactly. So let me cook for you.”

Michael squirms, torn between the desire to make another joke or to let Calum’s love settle over his shoulders like a second skin. “Okay,” he concedes. “I’ll be supervising so I know you won’t poison me, though.”

Calum’s eyes crinkle with his smile. “Oh, no. Hanging out with me in the kitchen while I cook? I can’t think of anything worse.”

“Stop being so fucking sappy,” Michael whines. “You’re making me feel bad for being bitchy.”

“No, by all means,” Calum says airily. “Keep mocking me, your best friend, while I remind you over and over again how much I’ve missed you. I don’t mind at all.”

“You’re a shit,” Michael says, swatting at Calum’s shoulder. “Go make me dinner, peasant.”

“Bossy.”

“You asked to make dinner!”

Calum laughs, and turns to go start dinner. Michael trails after, because whatever he says, however he mocks Calum, he’s missed him far too much to let him out of Michael’s sight for too long.

(And also, Michael likes to try and distract Calum while he cooks. It’s in his top five favorite sports.)

Having Calum here feels so natural it makes Michael wonder if they’d ever actually spent any time apart or if it had been a hallucination. They fall back into routine so easily, routine established from every part of their lives spent together; traditions created back in school, behaviors formed and reinforced through years of sharing hotel rooms, habits only known to the other. Calum slots back into the Calum-shaped gap he’d left when quarantine started, and it’s as if he’d never been gone.

Michael likes the bubble they’re existing in now, where they speak to no one but each other, go nowhere but the store to replenish depleted groceries, and pretend that time isn’t passing in the outside world. They make a dent in their long list of movies to watch together, and occasionally make fun of. Calum runs in the morning while Michael sleeps, and every morning wakes him for breakfast while Michael bitches. They walk their dogs together.

(Michael gapes when Calum lets Duke off his leash.

“Since fucking when?” he accuses.

“He’s a grown dog,” Calum says sarcastically, rolling his eyes. “Michael, he’s like a foot long with attachment issues. He won’t go anywhere.”

Michael stares reproachfully at Moose and South. They stare innocently back. Calum chuckles and pats Michael on the back. “You can let ‘em off as long as I’m here. You know they won’t run away from me.”

“Fuck you,” Michael retorts, looping the leash once more around his wrist. Dream on, he thinks, eyeing his dogs.)

And it’s easy, for a week or two, to think that this is just how people are, or if not, that this is just how they are, how Michael and Calum exist in the world. They’ve been best friends since forever, and there’s no one else in Michael’s life who fills the shoes that Calum does — and why should there be, when he has Calum? It’s not like Michael’s ever needed anyone else, or anything else. Homeless or starving or broke or on a deserted island or stranded in outer space or drowning in an ocean or on death row, Michael’s only wish would be Calum.

Of course it would, though. Calum is everything. Michael’s known that for ages.

They don’t even start under the pretense that Calum will be staying in “his” room; from his very first night at Michael’s he doesn’t even open that door, just follows after Michael when Michael declares he’s going to retire for the night and slips under the blanket with him, wordlessly, a silent agreement that there’s no reason to torture themselves sleeping alone when they don’t need to. This quarantine has given them both a new perspective on solitude; namely, avoid at all costs. So Michael snuggles up to Calum, content even to be the little spoon if it means Calum’s the one whose front is all lined up with Michael’s back, whose arm is slung tightly over Michael’s middle, an unspoken promise that Michael’s not getting away from Calum if Calum has any say. It’s comforting to be held, but not necessary; Michael wouldn’t leave Calum’s arms if the house were on fire.

(Okay, maybe if the house were on fire. But he’d definitely wake Calum for that.)

They do the bare minimum promoting CALM — mostly Michael likes leaving that stuff to Luke anyway, who, as lead singer, gets the bulk of the attention for it. Sometimes Michael decides to be resentful about that, but now it’s nice to know that the world doesn’t expect much from him, from either of them. They FaceTime with Luke and Ashton, who express openly and loudly how envious they are of Calum and Michael spending time together. The world spins on, with Michael purposefully ignoring it. Life is wonderful.

“Right, what’s next on the list?” Calum asks, handing Michael a glass of water and collapsing onto the couch. He kicks his legs up and stretches them across Michael’s lap. Michael gives him a look, and Calum just gives Michael a cheeky grin as he takes a sip of his own water.

“The Umbrella Academy, ” Michael says.

“Isn’t that a show?”

“Yeah, well, it’s next on the list.”

Calum frowns. “Why haven’t we got a separate list for TV shows?”

Michael rolls his eyes. “Because we’re idiots? Or because we probably never anticipated having this much time to actually get through the list. Do you want to watch it or not?”

“Oh, definitely,” Calum says. “Isn’t that, fuckin’…Mikey Way’s, or something? One of the MCR guys?”

“Gerard. Yeah.”

“Dope,” Calum says. Michael reaches for the remote while Calum pulls his legs off of Michael, shuffling around on the couch until his head is on Michael’s lap, legs thrown up over the armrest. Michael settles his free hand onto Calum’s crown, running his fingers along the short hair over his scalp. It’s not that he prefers Calum with more hair — generally speaking, Michael’s favorite version of Calum is always whichever one exists at the moment — but he does miss having more hair to play with. He suspects Calum misses that, too. Calum always liked Michael playing with his hair.

“You might have trouble drinking if you’re laying down like this,” Michael observes wryly, although he hopes Calum doesn’t sit up. It may be stupidly domestic, to be like this with Calum, but that’s always been them, and Michael likes it that way. Prefers it. Friends are stupidly domestic sometimes. Aren’t they?

“Whatever,” Calum says, setting his glass blindly onto the floor in front of the couch. “Don’t, like, kick to the right, and we’ll be fine.”

Michael shakes his head fondly and hits play on the first episode of the show. It’s a good show, and for the first episode he and Calum are both equally taken by it. When it ends, Duke shuffles into the room in search of company, and Calum pats the couch to invite him up. “My son,” he whispers as Duke precariously attempts to climb the couch. “Come here, my son. I can lift you up. I can show you what you want to see and take you where you want to be.”

“Are you,” Michael says, briefly distracted from starting the next episode. “Are you singing Capital Cities to Duke?”

“Shut up,” Calum says, making grabby hands towards Duke until Duke gets the message and comes close enough for Calum to grab. “You’re just jealous ‘cause neither of your dogs want to hang out with you.”

“Because they’re normal dogs who sleep at this hour.” Duke settles himself onto Calum’s chest, collapsing with an adorable whoomph, nose brushing up against Calum’s chin. It’s too cute for words, the pair of them. Michael feels his heart clench inexplicably, and looks away.

“Jealous,” Calum sing-songs. “Go on, start the episode, what’re you waiting for?”

“I don’t think you’ll be able to watch with Duke sitting on top of you.”

Calum makes a dismissive noise. “I’ll be fine.”

And he is fine, right up until he falls asleep about fifteen minutes in. Michael notices straightaway, and wonders when exactly he got so attuned to Calum that he can tell in an instant if he’s awake or asleep. Sure enough, glancing down, Calum is exhaling gently, steadily enough that he’s obviously dropped off. Duke is dozing on Calum’s chest. Once again, Michael’s heart does that squeezing thing that leaves Michael vaguely confused. It’s just Calum. It’s always just Calum; what’s happening now that never used to happen before?

For a moment, Michael entertains the idea of just sitting here forever. It’s a tempting option. Michael’s hand has stalled in Calum’s hair but it still rests there, fingertips grazing the nape of his neck, and Calum’s chest is rising and falling rhythmically, raising and lowering Duke with it. The scene is endearing, charming beyond explanation, the kind of thing that makes Michael wish you could frame moving pictures like they do in Harry Potter, just to watch this moment for the rest of his life. He’d put it up in his bedroom, and look at it whenever he was in need of some sense of peace.

If Calum is asleep, though, it must mean he’s tired, and they should probably go to bed if that’s the case. Michael gives himself another long moment to just watch his best friend sleep, face restful and all creases smoothed. He clicks off the TV.

“Cal,” he whispers.

There’s no response.

“Calum,” Michael repeats softly, scratching his fingernails over Calum’s scalp. “Calum, babe.”

Calum hums and his eyes open groggily. He lifts an arm to rub a hand over his face, and Duke jerks awake. “Hmm,” Calum manages, staring up into Michael’s face with a vaguely blank look. “Oh. Fuck. Sorry.”

“No, it’s fine,” Michael says. “Bedtime, though. I’m kind of tired anyway.”

Calum grabs Duke in his hands and then, with an almighty groan, heaves himself into a sitting position, gently lowering Duke to the ground. Duke leaves the room, possibly to go and harass Moose and South into letting him sleep with them. Michael sees a lot of Calum in Duke.

For a second Calum just sits, elbows braced against his knees, face in his hands. Michael furrows his brow. “You feeling okay?”

Calum breathes out. “Yeah, yeah. Just — more tired than usual, I guess.”

“Sleep in tomorrow,” Michael offers. “Lazy day. I love lazy days.”

“Mike, all your days are lazy days.”

“Fuck you, firstly, and secondly, none of my days are lazy days with you.” Michael pokes at Calum’s shoulder. “Which is obviously completely different, because it means we can cuddle all day, or do whatever. And get takeout! Come on, Cal, lazy day, lazy day, pajama day, lazy day —”

“Okay, okay,” Calum relents. “Yes, fine. Fine.” Michael grins and wraps Calum in a hug from the side, and Calum shakes his head, although Michael knows him well enough to know it’s fond exasperation at worst.

“Lazy day,” Michael sings lightly. Calum huffs a laugh. “Let’s go to bed.”

They go, and Michael’s heart does that squeezing-clenching thing again when Calum burrows into Michael’s chest once they’ve gotten under the duvet. He seems to be tipsy off tiredness, but it’s not anything Michael hasn’t seen before, and he doesn’t know why he’s reacting differently all of a sudden.

Must be the tiredness getting to me too, he thinks dismissively, pretending not to think about the fact that he’s no more tired than usual and he’s been tired before, without weird thoughts about Calum cramming their way into his mind. Best to sleep it off.

(Part of him doesn’t want to sleep it off, though. It’s a lovely fantasy, thinking he and Calum might be something more — not that he wants that, necessarily, but if he were going to want it, he doesn’t think it would be so bad. In the safety of his own mind, in fleeting thoughts, it’s nice to think about. Calum’s Calum, after all. It makes sense that eventually even Michael would start to think things. Just as long as he knows they’re all far-fetched things that are far too delusional to ever be anything but silly, sleepy, inexplicable ideas.)

“G’night,” Calum murmurs, sending a buzz from his words across Michael’s skin. Michael shivers, and hopes Calum doesn’t pick up on it.

“Sleep well,” Michael says quietly, lips brushing Calum’s hair. “And if you get up before ten, I’ll spread rumours about you on Twitter.”

Calum barely breathes out a giggle before he sighs and falls asleep. Michael doesn’t see the point in being awake without Calum, and without ceremony falls asleep as well, warm from Calum’s body lined up against his own.

Despite Michael’s threat, he still wakes up to an empty bed, covers thrown back where Calum must have gotten out. Of course he has. Michael starts brainstorming vaguely irritating rumour ideas to put on Twitter.

It’s eleven, though, which means that technically Calum could have woken up after ten but before Michael. Either way, Michael’s waking up alone again, and that’s annoying.

He shuffles out of bed, pulling on Calum’s Youngblood hoodie as he pads into the kitchen, where, predictably, Calum is making breakfast. Michael wraps his arms around Calum’s waist and hooks his chin over Calum’s shoulder. Calum jerks at the touch before apparently realizing who it is, and settling backwards into it.

“Good morning, sleeping beauty,” Calum greets him, turning his head to give Michael a kiss on his temple. It strikes Michael as a strangely romantic thing to do, which isn’t a thought he needs to be having. “I promise I wasn’t up before ten.”

“Hmph,” Michael grumbles, which is morning-Michael-speak for come back to bed, but Calum either doesn’t understand or chooses to ignore it. Eyeing the griddle on the stove, he adds, “Pancakes?”

Calum nods. “See, when you wake up early, this is the kind of thing you have time for.”

“Worst lazy day partner ever,” Michael sniffs. “I want to cuddle.”

“What if we eat breakfast and then cuddle?”

“What if you come back to bed and then we eat pancakes when we wake up?”

Calum chuckles. “I don’t know how you’re tired right now. It’s eleven.”

“I don’t know how you’re not,” Michael says, horrified. “It’s eleven.”

Calum just laughs. “I love you,” he says, apropos of nothing, and Michael’s heart does a triple backflip.

“I know,” he says. “If this is a ploy to get me to forgive you for getting me out of bed at eleven in the morning, it’s not working.”

“It’s not a ploy,” Calum says. “But it is working.”

It is working. Just for saying that, though, Michael stubbornly wishes it weren’t, but it’s too late; Calum’s already softened his defenses, thawed his prickly morning mood. “Fuck you,” he mumbles. Calum makes another half-laugh noise and even though Michael’s not looking at his face, he can tell — he can almost feel — the way Calum’s eyes crinkle with his smile.

“You can grab the syrup from the fridge,” he tells Michael. Michael hugs Calum tighter and buries his face in Calum’s neck.

“No,” he says, voice muffled in Calum’s skin. “Shut up.”

“You can’t cuddle me while I’m making pancakes, Mikey.”

“Fucking watch me.”

“Mike.”

“Shh, napping,” Michael mumbles, closing his eyes. He can feel Calum’s racing heartbeat pulsing in his neck, against Michael’s cheek, and distantly wonders why it’s racing. Calum relents, thankfully, and for a moment they just stand there, in the peaceful quiet of the kitchen, Michael’s hands loosely curled into Calum’s shirt. They fit so well it’s almost criminal. “This is perfect,” he sighs, breath hot against his own face where it bounces off Calum’s skin.

Calum settles a hand on Michael’s. “What is?”

Michael hums. “This,” he says again, although he knows that’s mostly meaningless, and it could mean anything. “You. You being here. Just this.”

It’s still kind of nonsensical, but Calum seems to understand anyway. It’s what they do best, understanding each other when nobody else can, when nobody else would bother trying. “I missed you more than I think it’s normal to miss someone,” Calum says quietly. To an outsider listening in, it would sound like a change of subject, but Michael knows it isn’t. It’s perfect to me, too, Calum is saying. It wasn’t any good before. The words hover before them, almost like giving Michael the option to ignore them.

Michael had known that, of course. Michael had also missed Calum more than it’s normal to miss someone. He’d kind of just figured that was how they operated. Calum is saying it like it should be news, like it should mean something monumental, but it’s all the same to Michael. He missed Calum more than a normal person ought to, but not more than Calum deserves. It’s Calum.

“Your heartbeat’s really fast,” Michael murmurs, also a surface change of subject, trying to say so many things, like I missed you too, an insane amount, and is this new for you, too, or just for me? and have I never noticed that your heart pounds when I hug you, or has it just never before? and it’s okay with me, whatever the answer is. He’s almost afraid to pick his head up, scared that he’s going to see the look on Calum’s face and not like it, scared that it’s going to be what he wants it to be. Scared that something is going to change, but almost more afraid that nothing will.

Calum breathes a laugh. “Of course you would notice that.”

“My face is on your neck,” Michael says. “How could I not notice.”

“I meant it,” Calum says, which Michael had also known, and he knows what Calum means, too; not just that he’d meant what he said, but also what he hadn’t, the unspoken this that Michael had been talking about in the first place.

“So did I,” Michael says, meaning that he meant everything he didn’t say, and he wonders if Calum had understood it, but it’s Calum, and they’re them, so of course Calum has understood it. He picks his head up off Calum’s shoulder and Calum twists himself around in Michael’s arms, hands fluttering over Michael’s shoulders before landing. Michael is tempted to point out that he probably shouldn’t turn his back on an open flame, and he probably would if he didn’t think it would ruin the moment. They’re definitely in a moment right now, which should probably be weird, but it isn’t. This should feel weird, but it doesn’t, because it’s Calum.

Michael wonders how many exceptions he’s made in his life for Calum, and how many more he’ll make at the drop of a hat. There’s the world, and then there’s Calum, and the rules stop applying somewhere in transit.

Calum rests his forehead against Michael’s. “I thought that maybe it was just me.”

“How could it be just you?” Michael says softly. His own heartbeat is thudding in his chest. “If it’s you, then it’s me. That’s always been true.”

“This is different,” Calum says, except it’s not. “You changed your mind. Recently.”

Michael blinks. “How do you know that?”

“I just,” Calum shrugs, helplessly. “I don’t know. I could just tell. I can tell.”

“I didn’t change my mind,” Michael says, because he doesn’t know what to say to everything else Calum’s just revealed. Like that Calum must have known before Michael knew. And that Calum must have been waiting for Michael to screw his fucking head on right. And that Calum had noticed, the moment it happened. “I just realized, you idiot. You should have fucking told me.”

“This is my fault? ”

“You knew!”

“I thought it was just me,” Calum repeats.

“Well that was a stupid fucking assumption to make,” Michael tells him. “You were waiting for me to realize.”

“I wasn’t waiting, I was just…” Calum frowns. “Hoping.”

Michael rolls his eyes. “Well, I’m here now,” he says. “I’m all caught up.” They’re dancing around it, he notices, because Michael is just finding his footing and Calum is probably waiting for Michael to say psych!, and neither of them wants to say it. Once they say it, it’s a fact.

It’s a fact already, though. It’s been a part of the MichaelandCalum history since they met, and they’ve both just been idiots about it, basically.

Calum’s eyes crinkle as the ghost of a smile starts to lift at the corners of his lips, and before Michael can even begin to wax poetic about it, they’re kissing. It makes so much sense to be kissing that Michael doesn’t even think, for a moment, that it’s strange. It just feels nice, and feels right, and Calum’s mouth is warm and tastes like chocolate, inexplicably.

Calum exhales sharply when they part. “Fucking finally,” he says, breath hot on Michael’s lips.

“You could have told me we’re in love,” Michael says. “I wish I’d fucking known.”

“Don’t blame this on me. You could have opened your fucking eyes.”

“Pancakes,” Michael remembers. “You’re making pancakes. You should make them.”

“I think, maybe,” Calum says, and then nothing else, just catches Michael in another kiss, sweet like the last, familiar like everything to do with Calum, one of Calum’s hands curling steadily around the back of Michael’s neck. Michael doubts if he’s ever felt more at home than he does right now.

“Okay,” Michael says hoarsely against Calum’s mouth. “More of that. Pancakes later.”

Calum grins. The pancakes sit on the island until they’re cold, vapor dissolving into the cool kitchen air. The world spins on. Life is wonderful.

#michael clifford #calum hood #malum #malum fic #5sos #5sos fic #fic #my fic #actual fluff..........i cannot Believe #how organized am i that this was done and written a couple WEEKS ago #and drafted on thursday bc sunday is HECITC for me #but em i wish you the happiest of birthdays #i hope this fic makes you smile #stuff #i always forget to put my talk tag on these lmao

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luminousbeansarewe · 4 years ago

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what are your takes/version of how the sequel trilogy went down? because i also have my own version in my head, not.... that, but im really interested in the ideas other people have had for it

hoo boy there’s a lot of ground to cover here lmao i will try to keep them as short as i can... i also enjoy multiple versions of events and outcomes for the sequels as long as they’re in-character so i’m not trying to say no other version of the sequels is good or cool bc only a sith deals in absolutes amirite? (i won’t apologize for that dumb joke.) first the jumping-off points:

first of all, i fully support Force-sensitive Finn. even if he didn’t become a full-blown Jedi, if the entire concept of the Jedi was reforged and we don’t see him become the kind of Jedi we saw in the prequels (more on that later), i see him as someone who was attuned to the Force in a way that is similar to how i conceive of Barriss; empathetic to the suffering and joy of others. this would drive him to defect from the Empire and fear it, too. i also saw him becoming a reluctant leader for the rebellion, and there’s a GREAT fic which i’ll link here that riffs on the idea that he creates a spark within the stormtrooper ranks and more and more of them begin to defect... which i love

Rey being a nobody is cool to me. the ONE character moment where she became super relatable for me was when she realized how frightened she was of her own Force abilities. but i don’t think she has to be the legacy of Palps to have that. she doesn’t need supercharged powers to be spooked by them in a post-Jedi Order world where the most recent memory anybody has of the Force is Vader. (also Rey being a Kenobi seems more out of character for Obi-Wan than anything else lol he was pretty committed to the ways of the Order even after they were destroyed, plus he already had one kid to furtively watch over... just imo). this also ties into my expansion on the Force.

Poe being not a carbon copy of Han. i think Leia looked after him, found him somehow after she sent Ben to the Jedi Academy and was a motherly figure in his life. i like the idea that he was a little shit, and she’s the one who taught him to turn his reactive defiance of authority into bravery when fighting for the rebels. i think he looked up to her, wanted to be a leader like her. i saw him in the position of generals like Akbar by the end, as he learns to balance risk-taking with steady leadership. I wanted to see that growth, how those leaders are formed, see Leia get to impart her wisdom to someone. (also i fully support Finn/Poe and Finn/Rey/Poe, i’m not a committed shipper so i’m down with no romance at all between them but those ships are choice af and Stormpilot is all Oscar Isaac wanted anyway, so...) plus can u imagine the dichotomy of Ben the fallen son with Poe, the “adopted” son who became what Ben couldn’t? the guilt of Leia for not knowing how to teach her son about the Force, doing better half-raising a nobody who had the same shitty attitude as Han when they met but no Force ability? THIS IS JUICY CHARACTER CONTENT

Rose was given cheesy lines to introduce an important topic: that fighting is all well and good but throwing away your principles defeats the purpose of the fight in the first place (an important theme in the Clone Wars era, too.) she was there to be the voice of the truly little people in the gffa, who we don’t hear much about in the other trilogies. Finn’s sensitivity puts him at risk of the sorrow-to-hate arc i described for Barriss; Rose is there to be the empathy that sustains hope rather than becomes a crushing weight. i love the idea that she might rally volunteers from blue-collar places (like... Lothal, for example?) and spearhead the notion that the New Republic should be very different from the old one, calling out the fact that working conditions didn’t change with the shift from republic to empire and the First Order simply took it to an extreme that left her and her sister with nothing else to lose.

Ben Solo, hoo boy. so here’s the thing, we don’t KNOW Ben Solo. we were expected to want him to be redeemed because he was the son of Han and Leia, and that’s it. that’s lazy as fuck. him killing Han in the first movie (if it happened it should have been in movie #2, that’s how fucking second acts work) was an excuse to shock people, subvert the ‘i can’t kill my own father’ thing, and make sure we knew he was “evil” even though we’re supposed to also want a redemption arc? you have to read the Rise of Kylo Ren comics to learn that he was a) hounded by the voice of Snoke in his head from childhood, manipulated by it, which is horrific bc it’s like grooming... or b) that he felt HUGE pressure as a legacy Force-user to save the galaxy, lead the New Jedi Order, etc. these are much more empathy-generating and we should have learned them in TFA. echoes of Anakin much? which is why i think him being redeemed in a way other than self-sacrifice (which made sense for Vader given his long history of being a terrible person, knowing it was too late for him in the end, and really just wanting to save his son rather than “become good again”) is more interesting than him just falling (which is too much the same as the prequels.)

it should have been Finn’s call, a moment of Truth that held the balance of Finn as either falling prey to darkness or learning forgiveness, whether or not Kylo got redeemed. Finn and Rey working together to get to that point while Rose and Poe took on the military aspect of the Big Finale would have been great. Finn with a lightsaber to Kylo’s throat, feeling the temptation to murder him instead of making him face what he’s become in a meaningful way? Rey trying to urge him away from darkness as she’s been tempted before, but this is the first time Finn’s really been tested, and he was the one who so often reminded her of her own humanity? Rey calling up Rose’s point of creating a new paradigm instead of recreating the old one, of Poe’s growth or Leia’s willingness to take Ben back showing it’s possible? shiiiiiiit

the rest is going under a cut!

SO... given those things as a basis...

there being no scene where Force-ghost Anakin bops Kylo on the head (but you know, more subtly and with gorgeous metaphor ofc) was a travesty. we needed some version of that, also imo that reaffirms that Anakin was the chosen one... as him redirecting his grandson away from that path would be restoring hella balance

Snoke should have had his own fucked up backstory, if he was even there at all. a dark sider fucking with Ben Solo is reasonable to me, but Snoke could have been someone who looked up to Palps as much as Kylo supposedly looked up to Vader. that would have been interesting... maybe there are multiple “nobodies” who are being touched by the Force, just like there always were in the prequels era, but some are going dark with no Jedi to try to convince them otherwise? or, maybe Snoke’s life was ruined by the Empire and he chose to become the beast that harmed him, whereas Kylo becomes the version where you think you want to do that but then realize that it’s just as bad and you still have empathy and regret what you’ve done?

Thrawn being the main military antagonist, since they couldn’t be arsed to make Hux into anything but a sniveling baby fascist (despite his really upsetting backstory of an abusive father, also found in the comics... noticing a trend here?). Thrawn was already established and beloved in the legends. why would you not use him. whY?? he’s like a foil for Tarkin. contention between him and the Force-users in charge (Snoke and Kylo) would have been VERY interesting, esp with the character of Thrawn in the new canon seeing the Empire as a ‘necessary evil’ and now maybe having the potential to make it into something else? how’s JOINING WITH THE NEW REPUBLIC for a subversion of the classic tropes, Rian?????? you fucker????

if Thrawn’s history is “too storied” for a bunch of cowards to "fit” into a new movie trilogy, invent another antivillain to take Thrawn’s place whose history is a little more concurrent with the sequel era... you cowards

Luke fucking off after his failure isn’t out of character IMO. he was THE STRONGEST JEDI EVER and his star pupil still fell? maybe he broke under the same pressure Ben did. maybe that’s what allows him to reach back out towards Kylo and reconnect, admitting his failure. i want to hear more about him cutting himself off from the Force bc i LOVE KOTOR 2 and Kreia, but maybe that’s too much for one trilogy to delve into meaningfully, i dunno

Han fucking off after Ben wrecked the temple isn’t OOC either. i think Han was always a little frightened of the Force, the way many non-sensitives are. I think he was critical as a father, because he was critical of himself and Han is the king of projection. i wanted more of the dysfunctional relationship between him and Ben.

if Kylo kills Han, the scene needs to show more of the fact that Kylo actually regretted it, which Snoke only alludes to in TLJ, foreshadowing his future. i rewrote Han’s death scene for a friend and got a lot of good feedback about it so maybe i’ll post it here sometime. i can get behind a version where he doesn’t die, too, i just haven’t fleshed it out in my own head.

i like the idea that the Jedi Order needed to be remade, and that Luke saw the failure of the old order when he saw Ben turn like so many of the Jedi in the Order did. i like that Rey and Finn might spearhead this, and maybe Kylo’s role is to know the dark side intimately enough now that he can actually teach how it works, how to deal with it... how inevitable its temptation is. because...

in this canon, i don’t think the Force has light or darkness. i think it’s Force-users who do. it is their internal landscapes which cause them to “fall” or be redeemed or not, after all. Finn can attest to the same, so can Rey and Luke... so like, all the Jedi need DBT therapy or something i guess. lmao hold the dialectic, you nerds

the Force has shown time and time again that it cannot be “balanced” so maybe it is ourselves who need to become balanced instead

the Force is chaos, a never-ending series of colliding butterfly effects that to us will always and inevitably be seen as turmoil, cause and effect on a cosmic scale. if you drink too greedily of its power, or try to exert total control over it, by its nature it will consume you because it is beyond your mortal ken. whatever you hunger for, the force will give you more and more of it until you are overwhelmed, drowning in it

this is why peace was a central teaching of the Jedi... peace, the antithesis of chaos, which can only ever be created from within, the eye of the storm which must be sought time and time again

anyway thanks for coming to my ted talk? i’m always down to hear other people’s ideas for these characters tbh. and always down to get more into these topics if you want to know more... esp as it relates to the failure of the Jedi Order, or KOTOR 2 and Revan and Kreia, or OF COURSE my OCs because Sol has a very interesting relationship with the Force.

thank you for this ask lordimperius!! ^_^

#star wars sequels #this got way deeper into my meta than i meant for it to but i can't help it #my headcanons #asks #if you read all of this or even most of it you're an actual angel

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somnilogical · 5 years ago

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what not-wireheading looks like from the outside

i take specific mammalian emotions as instrument read-outs for how my goals in reality are going, like any other sense organ summarizing information about the outside world not as optimization targets.

this is not the same as:

I LOVE TO SUFFER!!!

from the perspective of a human who takes their emotions as optimization targets to some extent, and who takes "happiness" (not even a coherent cluster of emotions, im importing their incoherent typology) as a target rather than a barometer of how-things-are-going-in-the-world;

to that human, any divergence from wireheading as they have looks like optimizing in the direction of NOT HAPPY. and if they assume you have the same cybernetic¹ structure in your head as they do in theirs, that you are taking some specific mammalian emotion and setting this as an optimization target, then reason "hm i wonder what mammalian emotion they are taking as the optimization target? it seems like their optimization diverges from mine in the direction of feeling more sadness, they must want to be sad and consider it bad to do things that make them happy." then classify me as an ascetic playing some screwed up game of "self denial" with myself.

like the श्रमणs in siddhartha (also seen in ブッダ) who sleep on thornbushes in hopes of enlightenment.² which there are ways to use being alone or being without food to think about things, but the श्रमणs seemed like they were trying to disassemble machinery for optimization.

my absolute rejection of the control-loop structure of wireheading as the natural order of agentic optimization is not an embrace of wireheading except with a different optimization target!

¹ cybernetic here means like systems that have feedback loops. in my head i compress a bundle of ideas to "cybernetic" and its backwards compatible with the previous usage. when writing things out id launder my mental handle for this into "control-loop structure" or something because i like assimilating concepts and rebasing them into my own syntax as praxis.

because its one of the beginning rationality techniques to be able to interface with syntax as handles for clusters-in-reality rater than specific sequences of words following character substitution rules. (and theres a trade-off between systemization and fidelity of representing a cluster-in-reality. this is the sort of thing i expect humans i talk with to work out when they are like 12-14 years old.)

but also its useful to reference bodies of work, and if a particular phrasing has poetic optimizations that i think are better than what id generate, ill take this. like the cadence and connotations of "something to protect" and "what it feels like from the inside" form handles with the correct-enough aesthetic curvature that i directly import them.

² even though i hold by the words of avatar yangchen:

<<selfless duty calls for you to sacrifice your own spiritual needs, and do whatever it takes to protect the world.>>

except what i am doing does not flow from a sense of duty or obligation, im not like "ugh the world is on fire so i /guess/ ill put it out to fulfill my socially prescribed duty." but if i replace "selfless duty" with "selfless optimization" it makes sense.

a system that foists upon those granted with great powers, some great "responsibility" for the world will mostly turn out superheros beholden to social morality. saying that defying their duty to maintaining the status quo is abandoning their "responsibility".

like in actual superhero comics they seem to be an extension of the cops who are often the largest local mob in town, in places with weaker states they are replaced with organizations that gained a monopoly on violence and are not part of the state. they are utterly misaligned with {truth, justice, and {life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness}}.

this sort of complicity is utterly insufficient to save the world. has any superhero used their power to end factory farming? like animal man becomes a vegetarian and then an animal rights activist. (reading the wikipedia page, this is unusually good for a superhero.) but upon learning that they are a character in a comic book written by grant morrison, dont try and talk with grant morrison until they convince them to end the comic with detailed plans for the liberation for all sentient creatures, or for him to stop being a comic writer and work to dismantle factory farms in his world... or any act in the sequences of acts [unboxing] and [fooming].

if animal man were a rational!fic, grant morrison would have written animal man to have convinced grant morrison to apply all his agency to ending the mass murder of sentient life and then grant morrison would have found this argument convincing enough to reorient his life to do this.

this is the sort of journey that yudkowsky and the wachowskis wanted their audience to go on. because if you can work out how to optimize the world in fiction, you can do it in other places in paradox-space (im calling tegmark 5 paradox-space).

seeing what the author did after they made their work is also a general guiding principles of where to locate your stock of examples for your typology of agency from. gwen pointed out that they thought indexing james cook's aesthetic hierarchy by composers of music was limited because what all of these humans decided to do with their life is become composers and that shows up in their work. yudkowsky made the same point in hpmor:

<<Father had said that Draco couldn’t possibly be more wrong, and pointed out that while Lawliet had cleverly concealed his face there had been no good reason for him to tell Light his name. Father had then gone on to demolish almost every part of the play, while Draco listened with his eyes growing wider and wider. And Father had finished by saying that plays like this were always unrealistic, because if the playwright had known what someone actually as smart as Light would actually do, the playwright would have tried to take over the world himself instead of just writing plays about it.>>

im retracing over some things that the bulk of the rationalist community tried to make humans have amnesia about. writing it out to process the information, going over old structure damaged by their gaslighting downstream of the baby-industrial complex.

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edge-lorde · 5 years ago

Text

hp update: its been a long time, boys. ud think that with this plague outbreak id have more time for shitty phone games, and ud be right! however, the time i normally might use to make tumblr posts has been taken up by reading lotr orc fanfiction non-stop for at least 1 full month. id still be in the thick of that obsession even now if only the fics would update. that is how i find you today folks, for the first time in many weeks i am staring at a screen with nothing to do. so come with me friends, theres no better way to fill the soulless void we are all in than reading a nice long tumbler post.

disclaimer, first of all, a lot has happened, i prefer to keep these updates as plot spoiler free as possible but do to extenuating circumstances i feel like it is necessary to say, [SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER BELOW]

that rowan fucking died,

i wont say exactly how, but i will say that her death was animated as were animations of myself and a few others reacting to our friend fresh corpse. obviously meant to be serious moments but the animations made it seem almost comical.

i saw at least one post going around right after this update that was like ‘how could the game devs do this to us..... how could they hate rowan so.... this is punishment from on high’ and its like.... u guys do know what a story is right? the events of a story are not typically done to punish less faithful fans, im pretty sure they were planning to kill rowan off from the beginning. this isnt disney im pretty sure the writers are not writing each chapter the night before its released by popular vote.

that little “are we drifting away..?” scene with rowan makes more sense now. there was a bit in one of the scenes where the kids all reminisce on rowans life and the mc talks about it being the last real one on one time they had with rowan. a nice bitter sweet moment. i dont hate this turn of events. its a good reminder that actions have consequences and we are way past they days of “should i wear a hat or scarf?” its YA time now.

i did manage to take 1 screenshot from this time, i had commented that before that when rowan said she didnt have many friedns that barnaby seemed to be hanging out with her without be there as a friend buffer and here was his reaction to her death:

;_;

the funniest part in all of this however, was of course cedericks reaction to rowans death “but she was so young....” LOL fuckin RIP.

lets see... what else.... i forget a lot of what happened but i think there was a time sensitive quidditch event in there somewhere? if so i dont remember it. what i do remember of the quidditch pals is that im gonna play beater now, skye is being weird and cagey about it, andre is involved.... the others are there.....

sidenote, i love the shitty b characters they throw in to be like yes you know this person but no they are not cool enough for u to even think about befriending. the first one of those is face paint kid, and now we have another, who is a former beater girl with horrible bangs named bean who didnt go to any classes for a whole season so she could just play ball 24/7 and got kicked off the team. this is a character who only exists to provide an explanation as to why there would be a beater position open but i love them on principle.

right now im in the midst of another time sensitive event, this one is a bother-your-brother-at-work-day event where recent hogwarts graduate bill weasley is bullied by myself and his younger brother charlie into letting us go with him on one of his curse breaking jobs.

so for those unfamiliar, bill works for the magical bank of england.... and his job seems to be “retrieving treasure” for said bank. in the books, there is a bit where he takes his family on one of his trips to egypt, where his job seemed to have been tomb plundering indiana jones style for the posterity of the english bank :X. i wont explain here why thats bad but its bad.

the game devs however in this instance, at least SEEM to be doing what jkr couldnt do by attempting to salvage what is left of gringotts bank and form it into not a super shitty implications factory run by horrible jewish caricatures. bills mission is to retrieve a goblin made artifact that was taken by dragons, so no going to foreign countries to steal things from other people! only going to a dragon reserve to rifle through animal nests. they even appear to be providing us with a likable goblin character, egad!

my hope for this event is that we get a plotline about how maybe, goblins arent shifty human haters for no reason, and in fact they hate magic humans for very understandable reasons, like being forced to go into hiding with the rest of the magical world even though only the humans wanted to do that, and maybe despite running the bank in england they still dont have a lot of political sway in the world of wizards and witches, and have to rely on the faith that said wizards and witches wont fuck them over at every turn, even as they see how they treat other non-humans, such as house elves, which they desperately dont want to end up like. and maybe they DONT only care about gold... maybe thats a human stereotype based on the fact that theres a long history of humans not respecting goblin ownership customs.... which i could get into..... but i wont.... i just....... very badly dont want them to suck ;__________;

i know i said its ok to still like a piece of media as long as you recognize the problems with it, and i do, but once this game is done im gonna stop hp posting all together. ive been feeling more and more uncomfortable making these posts lately.

GENERAL GAME NOTES; theres been some new layout changes and such.

most notably the stairs screen has been changed from a bulleted list of all locations to a screen with tiles picturing an image of each location along with the name + icons of all classes at each place. there is one additional location that is new and yet to be unlocked, and the dragon reservation is appearing temporarily as its own tile as well. i prefer this method of getting in and out of a temporary location to how they did it with car during the last christmas special. the stairs icon also now stays in the corner when you scroll through locations, allowing you to open the stairs menu without scrolling all the way back to the left.

they also moved a few of the buttons down into the lower left corner rather than the left side & combined the story button and sidequest button. they added a little camera button as well, just like in the dormitory, that makes all the icons in a location disappear and look better for screenshots.

the daily special add offer thing now has its own button in the top right corner of the screen, and idk if i mentioned it before but now there are daily challenges that appear in the sidequest screen that offer small rewards for completing 3 tasks per day + a better one if u get all 3. the prizes are things like 4 energy, 75 coins, 3 monster food. the better rewards are usually either more coins, 8 energy, 3 gems, or 1 notebook. i think that it does all the different color notebooks but i cant remember for sure if i ever saw the gold one up as a reward. i like this addition in any case. if you dont pick up ur reward by the end of the day, the next time u log on it will force u to stop and accept them, and if one of the rewards is energy and ur energy bar is full, it does not seem to stack beyond the bar so watch out.

the character stats page is now more zoomed out so you can see your full character instead of just from the waist up. no change to the leaderboard. rowans face in the friendship roster is now a still black and white image that says ur friend may be gone but friendship is forever u-u.

rowan has been removed from all classes. in the classes where the minigames involved her, those minigames have passed the mantle onto other friends in the class. in potions that person is now liz helping u find stuff off the shelves and in tranfiguration that person is badeea. bless these girls for helping mc get through it. touched my heart.

theres been a few fun little “i know u have more free time now so uhhhh have some energy” prizes like they do sometimes when they dont update on schedule so thats been nice. just a few days ago they gifted us 3 gold notebooks the same way. :O.

theres also been a few instances of a energy happy hour where for a limited time energy takes less time to refresh. normally it takes 4 mins for 1 energy to do this but during happy hour its like 2:30 mins. :U its all very interesting.

and that will have to do it for tonight my friends, ill do a post for the dragon event when its done because i do like it so far and i do like getting to bully bill with charlie.

until next time, remember.......

#hp #harry potter #hphm #harry potter hogwarts mystery #bill weasley #goblins #charlie weasley #sirius business #rowan khanna #rambling #Thoughts #so sorry im still making these posts #i just want to see them through to the end now

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hiuythn · 5 years ago

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sorry to ask, but i saw u shared hc for the sick anon, im going thru a rough patch and ur fic rly cheered me up. Can i get some hcs as well?

this is how keith asks lance to marry him:

so we all know how from the beginning, from the moment things got resolved at the end of tnahp, that keith’s been upfront about never leaving lance. everyone knows he’s going to put a ring on that. he’s said it to lance’s face. “what else am i gonna do with you?”

it’s not until six years later that he actually does anything though. mostly bc of the war and the aftermath.

the team are in a meeting with the coalition, boring stuff, routine stuff, and the mind link is closed, bc sometimes keith and lance need breaks. he’s lucky that it was, though, because what happens next in his mind would’ve been enough to make lance fall out of his seat and ruin the meeting and coran would’ve killed them both lmao

lance is paying attention even though he looks just as bored as keith. diligent, as always. he’s even got a holoscreen projected, taking lazy notes. there are faint little sketches of the coalition members and the team. one is of shiro, snoring, comical Zs above his head. keith bites down on his cheek.

lance is twirling the pen in his left hand.

keith looks at that and thinks, loud and clear, there should be a ring on his finger.

he sits back.

huh.

it should be a surprise, he decides after a quiet minute. lance deserves that. it should be at the right moment, the right words, the right place. it should be soft and genuine and such a sweet shock that it takes lance seconds to reply. it should make his blue eyes fill with tears, it should make him curl into a ball before keith, who’ll still be kneeling, ring box open and laughing at him because wow, that’s nice reaction, lance. it should be a proposal so perfect that it makes lance kind of mad, makes him shove keith, makes him pout that frustrated-loving-happy pout.

(bros, as a gay, this is kind of really fucking gay)

keith spends the rest of the meeting laying out proposal plans. lance gets exasperated when he finds out keith remembers nothing of the meeting. “dude, you--tell me again, who’s the leader of voltron, here?” “it’s allura.” “....okay, but who flies bl--”

and some people might ask, what’s the point, if you’re already levertan-married? if you’ve mind-linked and basically achieved the pinnacle of ‘joining hands in holy matrimony’?

keith’s answer would probably be something like ‘fuck off, i love him that’s why’

(ngl that’s hella romantic. no? just me?)

the long answer is that he knows lance is a romantic. that he really likes gestures of affection, that his face gets all rosy and he always tries to bite back his smiles, and he gets so pleased and flustered and also adorably angry every time keith does anything for him. keith’s in love with that. he goes absolutely dumb over making lance happy, he’s fucking obsessed with it. every neuron in keith’s stupid head is devoted to lance like 24/7.

(it’s a given that lance is the same, if not worse. how tf do they get anything done?)

plus, levertan-married doesn’t really mean the same as human-married.

so keith--somehow--manages to pull off thinking up proposal plans without closing the link, without lance knowing--maybe bc his thoughts are purposefully fragmented like ‘white chocolate? milk?’ or ‘speakers? mic?’ or ‘beach sand feels sandy’ and yes it sounds absolutely dumb but it’s clever because after a while lance tunes it out. though, at the beginning, it really fucking worried him because it sounded like keith was having a stroke LMAO

over the next couple months, keith steadily puts his plan together: get the ring, figure out what to say, speak to allura about detouring to earth for some r&r, speak to shiro about not fucking things up for keith because i know you’ll do that somehow shiro no are you serious of course you would you’re evil do you even remember that time i said no to inviting people for my fourteenth birthday and you did it anyway even though i was looking forward to just playing video games for the whole day??? i had to deal with james griffin in my goddamn house you ass--

the day keith asks, everything--surprisingly--goes really well? like suspiciously so. like keith’s really glad but he’s itching to reach for his knife by the end of it, bc he was prepared for shiro to have done sth by now.

but nah, keith and lance have a lovely day hanging out, doing activities keith planned and things lance spontaneously suggests. the weather is a perfect breezy, sunny day. when the sun sets they wordlessly head for the beach. lance chases keith though the surf. they throw clumps of wet sand at each other. keith hoists lance in his arms, listening to him yell as keith spins them around. lance picks him up and tosses him into the shallows, that fucking jerk. lance gets keith to forgive him. lance gives keith his shirt, goes half-naked for keith’s shivering form. ‘i’m going to get a cold,’ lance says. ‘and i’m not?’ keith snorts. they walk down the beach and lance tells him stories, pointing to this rock or that spot and saying oh i broke my arm there or dude i saved a baby turtle from a seagull that day and keith soaks it all up like he’s the sand and lance is the ocean waves, coming back to him every time.

lance hops onto a rock, demonstrating to keith how he used to pretend he was a sea prince looking for mermaids. the winds play with his hair, the setting sun brushing golden against his bare chest and the grin on his lips. like this, he’s a foot or two taller than keith.

keith gets down on one knee.

it’s lance’s fault that the ring box is damp, but he’s lucky this thing is olkari-made, because when keith opens it up, the ring shines just as bright as lance. almost as bright. it tries its best but keith really only has eyes for his soulmate.

keith says:

every day, i want to choose you. every day, i want to get to choose you. every day, growing up like i did, was spent learning what i needed to live, what food or drink or mantra was needed to make it another day alone. my body forced to me to focus on its needs, on the bare essentials. if i went a month without a caring touch, it didn’t matter, because it hadn’t killed me yet.

before i fell for you, i don’t think i knew what it meant to want. i never had a chance to think about it, a second to indulge. if i wanted a home, a family, it was a weakness, a distraction, and i couldn’t let myself admit it. so i never learned to want.

the only other thing that comes closest to what i feel for you is probably flying. it’s that addiction to diving through the clouds, it’s free-falling, it’s soaring with my heart in my throat. and even then, even now that i know you, it doesn’t quite compare. it’s a poor substitute.

in this world we exist in, where some force out there knows exactly what we need, who we need, it’s kind of a miracle that i still got to choose you. i’m glad i got the moments where it hurt to think of you, because i wanted you so bad i couldn’t stand not having you. i’m glad i got to slowly realize that you were everything to me, on my own time. it was my own conclusion, my own resolution to love you because you were you, and not because you were someone i was supposed to love. the universe kind of tricked us, but i think she meant well.

and now i know, that even in a world where soulmates didn’t exist....i know i’d still want you.

i want to want you, every day. i want to wake up wanting you, every day, fall asleep wanting you every night. i want to leave for missions wanting you, want to stay behind watching you go, wanting you to return faster than you can. i want you to want me, too. i want a ring on our fingers, reminding me that you do, that you feel the same and you always will.

i want to marry you, lance mcclain.

will you marry me?

#klance #tnahp #tiwlll #fuck what the fuck #what the actual fuck that's so romantic #can someone check my head for me i think keith possessed me #holy god #ummmmm #i don't know how to explain this i've literally never been in love sjdfhksdjf #?????????????????#anon i hope this helps you!!!!! ily 💖💖💖#ask #my writing #y'all i really think i need an exorcist....#keith [reaching thru 15 dimensions to wrap his hands around my neck and wring it]:#tell them why i love lance kogane-mcclain!!!!! tell them!!! fuck!!#Anonymous

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