#but I'm posting it here because I just love them!!!

[thirdeyeblue]

Can we please not blame Discord for fandom death and blame people for

NOT reblogging content right here on Tumblr?

(Hiding a rant beneath a cut)

Let's not pretend people on this website can't be awful. Tumblr is crawling with fans who (instead of seeking therapy for whatever trauma drives them to be a bad person) find it acceptable to dehumanize peers for simply having a different opinion... So, of course Discord is brilliant! You can surround yourself with people who "get it" with (almost no chance of ridicule).

But there will always be people who DO agree with you on Tumblr. And yet — between my friends, myself, and others—I've watched art, fic, gifs, meta, etc, sink like lead because all anyone wants to do anymore is maybe 'like' their posts.

I've never felt compelled to try to be a 'popular blog', so the bulk of the reason I even return to this site is to do my part to keep my fandoms alive. I've accepted that my art/gifs will never explode here (thankfully my primary focus is on fic, and I've got Ao3) — but I do reblog a lot of content from others, then proceed to see people 'like' it all day (with maybe a couple of reblogs).

THAT is what's driving people off of Tumblr/out of fandoms. How does somebody feel it's worth it to engage when any original content they post always just dies at a handful of notes? Not only that, but the rest of the time, they're wading through people being vile about the things they love?

I could go into another monologue about commenting on fanfic. I'm blessed to have exceptional readers, but many of them have followed me forever and know how much their love helps. I get way more kudos than comments, which are great too, but I'll pop open a fic I haven't touched in months and work on it if I get ONE comment from a person gushing about wanting to see more. That same concept can be applied all across fandom... Positive reinforcement! What a thing.

Don't blame Discord. I have a lot of friends who were once super active on here, but shied away as engagement got worse and worse and Discord became more rewarding. No one wants to feel ashamed just for liking something.

Also... I moderate a pretty fucking exceptional server for my OTP, and no one is discouraged from lurking. It just makes it extra exciting if they do pipe up from time to time, but it's not expected.

If you want people to stick around and feed your fandom, reblog their stuff. Comment on their fics. Their art. Their meta. Encourage them, for god's sake. Spread love. Otherwise, wtf are we doing this for?

imo a discord server should be like a breakout room for fandom. like the place to run your wips by your besties or discuss your otp in more detail with a few people who were insane about it on your post or organise events with a handful of trusted mutuals etc etc. if it’s where ALL the fandom activity is going to happen it will inevitably foster a cliquey environment where the fandom is divided into “those in the server” and “those who aren’t”, lurking is disincentivised if not made outright impossible, people who feel uncomfortable joining in conversations and would rather interact with fandom through reblogging etc are largely excluded because there’s no repost mechanism, and the fandom itself becomes an enclosed space so new fans are limited in how much content and meta they can access without having to make the plunge into Joining The In Group, there’s limited scope for interaction between different communities within the same fandom, god it’s just an altogether dogshit stupid idea. what if we moved all fandom activity to really massive private groupchats. STUPID

[abbotfan]

FUZZY PINK HANDCUFFS

jack abbot x reader (AFAB)

based on this request: "Handcuffing him to the bed while you sit on top of him, taking him insanely slow as he loses his mind 😊😊😊"

note: i blacked out when i wrote this dont ask me any questions this is my first time posting smut and i hate it but here we are

warnings: mdni, handcuffed s3x lmao, p in v, uhh idk what ppl usually put here i will probably edit more in later

"you sure about this?"

he was too kind for his own good. you wanted to absolutely ruin this man the way you had been imagining for months on end and here he was asking if you were sure. he was actually worried you had changed your mind.

you laughed, reaching into your nightstand drawer and pulling out a pair of handcuffs, "are you?"

he watched the pieces of metal with pink fuzz around the outside dangle from your index finger.

your heart jumped at the way he looked back at you— lust filled his hazel gaze. you loved every second of it... but that wasn't enough.

"i need a verbal conf-"

he pulled you against his body, a hand holding your waist to keep you pressed against his crotch. he was rock hard already, it was enough to make you smile.

"yes, i'm sure."

"good, because i am too. now strip."

-

jack was putty in your hands and you both knew it. he was straining against the handcuffs keeping him cuffed to the bed every time you touched him.

you were taking things slow, savoring every second you had him like this; it was potent. you had the object of all your desires practically dying just to touch you.

"sweetheart, please."

"please, what?"

"let me touch you."

you smiled. he was begging and you were smiling.

"i'm not above begging," he added, patience running thin, "please."

you dragged a hand over the taught muscles of his stomach, watching them jump under his skin, "you know the safe word, jack. if you want out, just say it."

and oh, wasn't that an interesting expression. jack abbot, rugged veteran with more demons than you could count, pained by something so simple. he could get out of those handcuffs in seconds if he just said the word, but he refused.

you fucking loved it... how could you not?

you pulled down your red lace panties and sat on his sturdy thighs. you couldn't miss the way he groaned as you grazed his dick, giving you another head rush. he leaned up to kiss you hungrily, his mouth almost bruising your soft lips. you almost caved and un-cuffed him yourself just so you could feel his needy hands on your body.

you pulled away, your forehead resting against his, "color?"

"green."

he stared at you with a determined look that told you he had meant what he said.

"good, because i wanna ride you... is that okay?"

"jesus, yes, yeah that's- that's great."

God, he could be such a dork.

you wasted no time putting the condom on his already leaking cock— as much as you hated to admit it, you were starting to get impatient too.

you lined yourself up and started sinking down onto his length when he first whimpered.

"fuck, you feel so good, sweetheart."

your head fell on his shoulder as he bottomed out, "shit, jack."

you could feel him sucking on the skin at your shoulder as he left a hickey.

when you finally started moving, you took it slow; your hips slowly ground against his so you could memorize how he felt.

"sweetheart, please."

"so needy," you hummed, gasping when he bucked up, "and impatient."

jack was putting his mouth on any skin he could reach, tugging against the handcuffs to leave little kisses everywhere.

you started riding him properly now, keeping a slow pace as his breathing got more and more ragged.

"you're doing great for me, jack," you mused with a particularly slow grind, making him let out another pained whine.

your hips started rolling at a much faster pace, now chasing your own pleasure, and he took that opportunity to start bucking into you too.

"

"yeah? me too, sweetheart."

you rolled your hips in the exact way that made him go breathless just a few more times and he came with a string of expletives flying out of his mouth. you continued riding him until you came too, your whole body feeling the release at once.

you were out of it, still a bit woozy from your orgasm when you hear him say it.

"tapestry."

you grab the key from the nightstand and rush to unlock the cuffs, "you okay? fuck, i'm sorry."

he stared at you with intense sincerity, "you did nothing wrong, why are you apologizing?"

"you said the safe word...?"

he smiled, rolling out his arms, "i wanted to help you clean up."

"oh."

jack went to the connected bathroom and came back with a wet hand towel and lotion. you massaged him with the lotion while he clean off your body with the damp towel. it was comfortable, pleasant, and incredibly easy.

when it was all said and done, he saved you a spot next to him on the bed. you curled up next to him and started drifting into sleep.

"next time, you're getting cuffed," he murmured.

[mintyys-blog]

Hi there! I'm new here. I just found and read all your posts recently — it's actually impressive how you're able to take requests and make them almost perfectly accurate! I'd also like to make a request.

Can you make Main Mark and his variants react to the reader being in a relationship with them for the first time, but she has no idea how to treat her boyfriend? So, she decides to learn how to bake cookies and wants to feed them to him next time. But when the moment comes, she gets too nervous and ends up shoving cookies into his mouth nonstop at high speed. I know it sounds weird and all, but I just really want to see their reactions. Thank you, love ! ❤

HEADCANONS | variants with s/o who baked them cookies

invincible masterlist

MAIN MARK

You show up with a container of homemade cookies, heart racing. “I, uh… I made these for you. Because… girlfriend stuff.” Mark lights up. “You baked for me? That’s so—”

Before he can finish, you panic and shove a cookie into his mouth. Then another. And another. “Mmfh—wait—babe—hold on—” he wheezes between bites, eyes wide, crumbs flying.

You freeze. “I’m sorry! I didn’t know what to do! Do boyfriends even like cookies?!”

He finally swallows, grinning around a sugar rush. “Yeah. Especially when they come with a side of emotional crisis.”

He leans in, crumbs and all, and kisses your cheek. “You’re adorable. Please don’t choke me next time, though.”

MOHAWK MARK

You’re pulling the last tray of cookies from the oven, face flushed with heat and nerves, when the door swings open.

“Yo, babe—smells like heaven in here,” Mark grins, tossing his bag aside.

You panic a little. You weren’t expecting him yet. “I-I was gonna cool them first, but—um—I wanted to surprise you—”

He doesn’t wait. He grabs one right off the tray and pops it into his mouth. And immediately spits it out with a choked hiss. “HOT—holy—! It’s lava in cookie form—”

Your heart sinks. “Oh my god, are they bad? They’re bad. I knew it. I suck at this—”

He’s waving his hand in front of his mouth like it’ll help. “No! No, babe—they’re good, I swear, I just… tongue’s on fire. It’s blistering. I might never speak again.” You stare, horrified. “I poisoned my boyfriend.”

Mark laughs, still breathless. He walks up and steals another cookie—this time blowing on it like a pro. “You didn’t poison me. You’re just dangerously cute when you try this domestic stuff.” He takes a real bite and lets out a soft hum. “Yeah… totally worth the tongue trauma.” And you? You’re still redder than the oven light.

SINISTER MARK

You stand in the kitchen, hands shaking just slightly as you plate the still-warm cookies. You made them for him—your boyfriend. You’re supposed to do stuff like this now, right?

When he walks in, silent as a shadow, you freeze. “Hi. I, um… baked. For you.” You offer him the plate like it’s a peace treaty. Mark raises an eyebrow. His crimson-tinged eyes flick to the cookies, then back to you. “You cooked? For me?” he says slowly, like it’s a concept he’s still chewing on.

He takes one, bites into it without hesitation. He doesn’t speak. You start spiraling. “Is it bad? I didn’t know if you like sweet things—I didn’t want to mess up, or make it weird, or—”

His fingers are suddenly under your chin, tilting your face up. “You’re panicking. Over cookies.” You whisper, “I just want to be good at this.” He smirks—sharp and cold. “You think baking earns you affection?”

He leans down, mouth brushing your ear. “Darling… I’d eat every burnt, half-baked mess you ever make. Not because it tastes good—” He presses a kiss to your temple. “—but because you made it. And I want everything you give me.” Even if it comes with a side of emotional meltdown and powdered sugar in your hair.

OMNI MARK

You hold the little bundle of cookies out to him with both hands, practically buzzing with nerves.

“I made these for you,” you say, clasping your hands together right after, like you’re holding your breath in your chest. Mark looks down at the offering. He doesn’t say anything at first—just unties the string, unwraps the wax paper, and picks one up like it’s made of glass.

You’re bracing for something. Silence. A frown. Maybe even that weird, thoughtful stare he gets before he gives a speech. Instead, he takes a bite. Then—quietly—he hums. “You like them?” you ask, barely a whisper.

He looks at you. Then, unexpectedly, leans down and presses a kiss to your temple, warm and slow. “They’re sweet,” he murmurs, lips still brushing your skin. “Like you.”

Then—completely deadpan—he steals another cookie before you can stop him. You gasp. “Hey! That one had extra chocolate!”

“Exactly,” he says, smug now. “You gave them to me. I’m entitled.” You roll your eyes, flustered. He smiles—small, but real—and wraps an arm around your waist like he plans on staying right there.

VILTRUMITE MARK

You hand him a batch of warm cookies, beaming. “I made these for you.” Mark takes one, bites into it, and lets out a low, pleased hum. “These are amazing.” He chews thoughtfully. “You know, our future kids are gonna love these.” Your entire system glitches. “Future—what?”

“You know,” he says casually, grabbing a second cookie, “when we settle down. Big house. Maybe off-world. Couple of little Viltrumite brats running around—”

“NOPE—” you panic, and without thinking, shove a cookie directly into his mouth. And then another. And another.

He blinks, mouth full, trying to speak. “Mmf—whuh—” You frantically stuff another one in. “Don’t talk about babies! I just learned how to bake!” He laughs—actually chokes a little trying to eat and chuckle at the same time—grabbing your wrists gently to stop the barrage.

“Okay, okay! I surrender!” he says, half-chewed cookie crumbs dusting his lips. You’re red-faced, mortified, mumbling, “I was just trying to be a girlfriend, not a space mom—”

He leans in, eyes twinkling, and kisses your forehead with cookie still on his breath. “Slow down, sweetheart. I’m not trying to knock you up—I’m just saying I could get used to this.” Ns Then he steals one more cookie with a wink. “…Practice makes perfect, right?”

PRISONER MARK

He sits on the stool at your kitchen counter, hunched slightly, still getting used to the quiet hum of civilian life—the lack of sirens, the absence of cold steel walls. You stand between his legs, holding a plate of warm cookies, heart pounding like you’re presenting a sacred gift.

Mark’s hands rest on your waist, rough palms steadying your nerves more than the tile beneath your feet. His eyes are on you—tired, curious, but soft. “I made these for you,” you say, voice wobbling.

You lift one to his lips. He bites it, slowly. Chews. Swallows. “Not bad.” You beam, then immediately panic and shove another one into his mouth. Then another. Fast.

“Easy, sweetheart,” he says around a mouthful, chuckling. “You trying to kill me? I just got out.” Your eyes widen. “I—I didn’t mean to! I just got nervous and then I kept going and now I’m feeding you like a malfunctioning vending machine—”

He sets the cookie down, grabs your wrist gently, and pulls you a little closer. “You’re nervous over this?” he asks, one brow raised, lips twitching like he’s holding back a grin. “You survived dating a convicted Viltrumite. You can survive giving him snacks.”

You groan, burying your face in his shoulder. “I’m the worst girlfriend—” He laughs—really laughs—and leans in to kiss your temple. “You’re the only good thing I’ve had in a long time.”

Then, with exaggerated caution, he plucks another cookie from the plate. “One at a time, though. Let’s not risk death by sugar. Yet.”

SHIESTY MARK

You’re standing in front of him, panicking, stuffing cookies into his mouth one after another before he can even chew.

“Mmfh—damn, babe—slow down!” he muffles, laughing with his mouth full. “You tryna kill me or fatten me up?”

“I’m sorry!” you squeak, red-faced. “I just—I got nervous and my hands wouldn’t stop—”

He grabs your wrist mid-cookie and grins, eyes glinting.

“You keep shoving things in my mouth like that,” he says low and playful, licking a smear of chocolate from his thumb, “I’m gonna start thinking it’s foreplay.” Your brain blue-screens.

“And if we’re doing that…” he leans in, voice dropping, hot breath ghosting your cheek— “I can stuff you next.”

You nearly drop the plate. “Mark!” you hiss, smacking his arm, face burning.

He just laughs—that laugh, smug and wicked—and plucks another cookie off the tray with his teeth. “You started it,” he teases. “I’m just following the recipe.”

[pedge-page]

hi mamas, lately I've been feeling a bit self-conscious when I look at recent photos of myself, and I've been going to the gym lately (pero like I be counterbalancing that with eating whatever I want :/) and think I look good in the mirror but when I see vids/photos of myself I just don't feel good. Could u possibly write post-pregnancy!reader and Joel (after either Sarah or Ellie's pregnancy) and its been months but she just doesn't feel or like herself but Joel is determined to change that perspective around ASAP!

Hi my love! I'm sorry you're feeling down about yourself, I go through those moments so frequently. Feeling dismorphia when you think you look ok and then see yourself in a different light. It ruins your whole mood. Thank you for asking this! I hope it brings a little comfort.

- - - -

Joel spent a lot of time helping you get lotioned up when you were pregnant. Even now, with Sarah out of your body and you can finally reach your toes, he still finds joy in lathering you with deep rubs as he spreads the cream over your skin. Almost obsessively. No inch of skin was left untreated. He'd even stick his tongue out as he glided a heavy palm up from your belly to tits, then back down your sides and over your hips.

you thought you'd had enough man handling when he goes to squirt 5 more pumps in one palm.

You put the heel of your foot on his forehead, stopping him from coming any closer. "Too much! I feel like I'm sweating in a oily pit."

He plants a kiss to your sole before nudging your heel down onto his shoulder. "Gotta keep your skin nourished. And hydrated. I missed a spot," He rubs his hands together greedily.

"No you didn't! You got it already!" the two of you wrestle slightly, his body draping over yours but your feet keeping his stomach at bay.

"Stop squirmin' and give me your tits!"

"You just wanna grope them and have make naked all the time!"

"...ok and your point?"

You giggle. Finally letting your guard down, he grins as he smoothes over your skin with the cream, lathering it up in hands to keep it warm. He made sure to knead it in well enough. And your body DID need it. Drinking it in like a fish out of water.

You breathe deeply, staring at the ceiling as his pays especially attention to the skin under your breasts, your stretched stomach and girthy hips, down to your cellulite and wobbly skinned thighs that used to make boys turn...

"Um..." your voice sounded meek, almost exceptionally unlike you when you're with Joel. "You're not doing it...because you think it will help my body bounce back... are you?"

He furrows his brows, not sure what you're talking about. The concern and fear in your face makes him feel a pain in his chest that he immediately needs to help settle.

"Because um... its not--my body--it's not. Gonna look the same as before... after her. Um so. This might not, make it much better. Um. I'll be saggy and wrinkly, and not very sexy anymore so--I get it if that's what you're trying to do--"

he sees the shine in your eyes as you lose your words, too embarrassed to look at him.

"No. Nononono. Baby, that's not at all what I'm doing here and don't you dare start thinking I'm gonna love you any different just cuz your body changing from our baby." He lies next to you and pulls you close, his hands clutching your to his lips. "You're still just a beautiful as the day I met, just as hot the second I put that little baby in you, and you're just as gorgeous after. I've got no intuition to change what your beautiful body is doing--performing fucking miracles. I just want you to feel safe, happy, cared for." he plants a wet kiss against your palm. "Want ya to stop going to bed with dry hands and feet. Scratching me up all Night."

You laugh with him, blinking away the tear that had built up. "That was a test. You passed."

"Mmmhmmm. Always testing me."

He spends the rest of the evening peppering your entire body in kisses while massaging your stress away. when you were finally snoring, he turned out the tight, but stayed where he was, his elbow propping his head up taking you all in.

Joel sits and watches you more than he wants to admit because he's so goddamn in love with you. You're so uncharacteristically peaceful now. Cuddled against your pillow, deep breaths rhythmically settling you. Soft and gentle as a newborn calf. Completely unlike the sassy snarky woman yelling at him all day. Even when you were berating him for dumb shit because your hormones were through the roof, he still loved you. You're the firey spitball of energy and emotions on a roller coaster that keeps him on his toes, reminding him that you're so full of personality and neediness and bursting with energy and he's the only one equipped to get it for you--the only one you'd ever feel so comfortable to ask --and demand and yell and bitch--and all of it makes him laugh on the inside because It's just you. So you. All you.

And he's amazed. Amazed every day when he gazes upon his little Sarah. A whole human your body grew inside you from start to finish. Amazed every day when he sees you rocking her in your arms, feeding her with your breastmilk. Its like your body never stops giving and giving. Amazed every day that you can move and groove, sway your hips and do cartwheels in the grass like you're a kid again, eager to make your little babygirl laugh heartily.

He doesn't care that your boobs are saggier than before. Doesn't care about the extra poof on your belly that won't go away. doesn't care about the stripes around your thighs and hips that are here to stay. When he sees those things, he doesn't see imperfections or negative changes. He sees you. A girlfriend then. A mother now. His wife always. And that brings joy to his soul, knowing you're sticking with him through it all.

He's already thinking about his tired, wrinkly, speckled worn old man hands rubbing you to sleep with lotion when the two of you are 90, so he can keep lookin at you just like he is now. and always has.

Amazed to call you mine.

[joelmillers-wife]

take my hand (joel miller x f!reader) chapter nine

18+, MDNI series masterlist: here | please check this for complete series warnings and tags pairing: joel miller x f!reader chapter summary: fully recovered from your injury, you and joel go on a typical routine patrol that takes a sharp turn wc: 11.5k. buckle up rating: this story is 18+ (minors, do not interact), there will be eventual smut in later chapters  chapter warnings and tags: cursing and tlou lore accurate outbreak content below, angst, graphic violence, gore, blood, TW: topics surrounding SA (nothing happens, it’s mainly just alluded to the subject but please be careful while reading and feel free to message me beforehand for specific details), hurt/comfort, trauma, small bits of fluff, reader has no description besides she has hair, jackson!joel, age difference: reader is in her 30s and joel is in his 50s, sloooow burn a/n: double update this weekend because i will be gone next weekend and won't be able to post until the last week of may. enjoy this long one (also as an apology for the last chapter being so short). be kind to yourselves. ao3 | follow @writtenbynic and turn on notifications for chapters! dividers made by: @saradika-graphics , check them out!

previous chapter | next chapter (coming soon)

IX. X&Y

I dive in at the deep end You become my best friend I want to love you but I don't know if I can I know something is broken And I'm trying to fix it Trying to repair it Any way I can

As you had assumed, your shoulder had healed well, courtesy of Joel’s fine stitching, and you soon were more than capable of returning to your usual routine. With the weeks that had gone by, the spring steadily unfolding into the welcoming heat of summer allowed you to become more appreciative of this season, considering the colder temperatures this city was capable of having. 

Your continuing friendship and abundant amount of time spent with Joel had settled any previous anxieties you had—the two of you falling into a pattern of familiarity that made his presence comforting and one that you purposefully sought out.

One thing that had changed was Ellie, specifically in regards to Joel. 

You hadn’t pushed, or even asked about it in the first place, but all you know is that things had been more… tense between them. A part of you chalked it up to her being so close to becoming an adult, and wanting more freedom. She was beginning patrol training soon, and the idea made Joel nervous with her being out there outside of his watch. Joel had asked Tommy to get her supervised shifts set up with the two brothers, you, or Jesse—the young man you had gone on patrol with the day your shoulder was injured, who had proven himself to be a good fit as an up-and-coming leader in Jackson.

The extent of what you had learned was that a certain patrol shift ended up with Joel and Ellie fighting off a decent sized group of infected when checking out a music store. Since that day, Ellie had been standoffish to Joel, and you could see the impact it left on him. He seemed more on edge and uncertain around her—a stark contrast to the easy understanding that usually flows between the two of them. It was a simmering tension that didn’t raise an eyebrow to all of Jackson, but you saw it.

The advice you had tried to give him was that she was a teenager who was growing and wanting her independence, but his reactions always gave off the impression something else had been going on—subconscious nods that told you your perspective on it wasn’t the full story. You had never, and would never, push the topic though. The most you’d been doing was hoping that Joel knew he could confide in you if needed. 

To you, Ellie was changing—not just physically, but also with the people she surrounded herself with. You stopped hearing much about Cat, her close friend you have briefly spoken to occasionally, and seen Ellie around a newer friend of hers that she has been spending an increasing amount of time with. Dina. She was a sweet girl. Very vivacious and teasing—her energy making it difficult for her to not capture everyone’s heart. You understood why Ellie had gotten close to her, and the idea warmed your heart. Ellie seemed more comfortable around Dina—the girl bringing Ellie out of her shell just a bit. It was a reassuring feeling to know that, whatever was going on in Ellie’s life, she seemed to have others she was close to that she could rely on.

“You all set?”

You’re brought out of your thoughts when hearing a voice as you were locking your front door behind you, turning to see Joel standing at the end of your walkway as you lock your front door—the warm air hitting your skin telling you that patrol would be good today.

“Yup. All good,” you respond with a smile.

Joel gives you a warm look in response as you make your way over to him, the two of you falling into pace with each other seamlessly as you make your way through town and over to the stables. Reaching the area, you find that Jesse is posted out front, and feel pleased as he greets you with a kind smile the moment he sees you.

“Hey Jesse, how’s your mom been?” You ask. 

You hadn’t spent so much time with the man at first, but ever since your injury, you had spent enough moments with him after that that you felt comfortable being friendly with him. He was polite enough to check on you after that day—occasionally stopping when he saw you around town to catch up and see how things were. Being one of the newer recruits, he was younger, probably early to mid twenties, but just as prepared as any of the others who went past the gates for patrol.

“She’s been alright. She told me Dina brought over some lemon cakes that were a recipe of yours she and Ellie made—it was amazing. Think she’d smack me if I didn’t pass along the compliment to you.”

A laugh bubbles out of your chest at his words, but your attention is cut off when you hear someone clear your throat behind you. 

You look back to see Joel standing closer over your shoulder, glaring down at Jesse. You didn’t notice how, or when Joel had gotten so close to you, but his frame hovers over you and nearly engulfs you in his presence. 

“Think we should head out now,” Joel says, a hint of bitterness in his tone.

Turning back to say goodbye to Jesse before heading out, you feel bad when you see the young man look down to the ground sheepishly. You assume that Jesse being with you when you were shot had made Joel act odd around him, at least when the topic revolved you. Joel was always fine with Jesse being around Ellie, even agreeing that Jesse has proved himself of his capabilities, but perhaps Joel didn’t like him when it came to your own safety.

Watching Jesse walk away, you and Joel mount your horses—a playful comment leaves your lips as you turn to him, prepared to make your way over to the gates. “Ready, partner?” 

Your words seem to make Joel’s body relax from his previous tense state around Jesse, a half-smirk gracing his lips before shaking his head lightheartedly—his chest moving a bit as you see him try to suppress a laugh. “Sure am, darlin’,” he says, before tugging the reins of Callus to alert him to begin moving with you following them close behind.

The trek to your destination went quick and without any difficulty. Finished checking your designated area, Joel suggested the two of you venture a bit further into a neighboring city. 

“Tommy told me ‘bout it. He said we could find some extra supplies in the area. Apparently he and Eugene had found it and said the area seemed mostly clear of infected. It’s a bit of a trip, but, I have the time if you feel up for it?”

You nod in agreement as the two of you ride your horses over to the city. As he said, it did take some time, but the two of you dismounted and tied up your horses before walking through the city, checking in and out of different stores for some items.

One store that you pass happens to be a coffee shop. The moment he notices the sign in the shop window with a faded coffee cup design, Joel lets out a half-sigh, half-groan—a vocal cue of nostalgia that makes you smirk.

“You know, you do have coffee at home. Like, so much.”

Joel makes a soft tsk sound. “Not the same, darlin’. S’good enough to make me pretend like it’s the real thing, but not the same.”

His words that end in a sigh have you breaking into a small laugh. “Ah, yes. Possibly the only thing worse than living with infected is not having Starbucks, huh?”

Joel catches the sarcasm in your town, side-eyeing you as you two continue to make your way in and out of the various shops along the street. 

“Okay, little miss trouble, you tellin’ me you ain’t got nothin’ you’d kill to have again?”

The nickname he’s used for you more often causes your face to flush, making you look down at your feet to try and shove the feeling away as you think about his answer. You let out an exaggerated hum, tilting your head to the sky and squinting as you try to figure out your answer. 

“Something for pleasure? Chocolate covered strawberries. Something practical? A silk pillowcase.

You turn to face Joel and see him give you an amused look. “Chocolate covered strawberries, huh?”

“Mhm. Chocolate covered strawberries were my favorite dessert.”

“Think you could make it?” Joel asks.

You ponder on the idea. “I think chocolate would be technically possible. Probably just wouldn’t taste as sweet as all those artificial things they threw in food. I know I seem to make good carrot cake and lemon cakes, but I’m not sure I even know what I would need to make chocolate.” 

Out of the corner of your eye, you see Joel open his mouth to speak before he seems to quickly shake away the thought. Instead, he twists his face in confusion. “And a pillowcase? You have those?”

His tone makes you slightly laugh. “A silk one, Joel.” Your clarification only makes him roll his eyes playfully, none the wiser of the difference. “It’s gentler on your hair. Guess I just miss tiny things for self-care. I always slept with a silk pillowcase before. Made my hair softer or whatever.”

For some reason, the memory stings more than you had thought as you miss the simple luxuries of the world before. You swallow down the thought and sigh. “Now… that is something I have no idea how to get.” With a teasing, yet wishful sigh, you say, “I’ll live, though.”

Joel breathes out what sounds like a laugh. “Still, I’m sure it’d be nice to have.”

You look over at him to see him giving you a thoughtful look, the intensity of his gaze causing you to break eye contact and look forward. 

The two of you continue roaming through the stores, only finding a few bits of supplies that could be taken back to Jackson.

“So,” Joel says, breaking the comfortable silence. “Jesse’s cute.”

You look over to him, a surprised look on your face at the sudden topic, when you see him with a firm look on his face.

“Didn’t know you swung that way, Miller.”

He laughs loudly, not expecting your response before clarifying. “I meant, like, for you or… somethin’.”

You scrunch up your face at that. “He’s kinda young isn’t he?”

“He’s around 23, I think… Not that far off from you.”

“I’m in my early thirties Joel,” you say while laughing awkwardly. “Not exactly the age range I’m looking for.”

“Closer to his age than mine. ‘Bout ten years is not much of a difference compared to the twenty-somethin’ year difference to mine.”

His persistence on the topic has you looking at him quizzically, only to find him looking straight ahead, avoiding eye contact with you as you see a muscle tick in his jaw. 

Trying to ease the odd tension that’s built, you laugh and ask, “You implying my only options are between Jesse and you?”

Joel tenses up at the question briefly, a sight that doesn’t go unnoticed by you. The rigidness goes away as quickly as it came as he shrugs with no other response, his lips settling into a tight line and a frown appearing on his face.

The awkwardness that’s been created from your words has you biting the inside of your cheek while trying to come up with a response to redirect the topic. “I mean, I guess? He’s cute and all but… no. He’s not someone I see like that.”

Joel gives a thoughtful nod as you two cross onto the other side of the street. “Thought it might be an option for you, is all. Assuming you aren’t with anyone–”

You give him a deadpan look at the suggestion before he can finish. “Trust me, you’d be the first to know if that was the case. Plus, I don’t know… I’ve had people ‘flirt’ with me without knowing because I just didn’t even think to see them that way. Maria and Ellie always have to call it out when it happens because I’m apparently ‘too blind’.”

The memory makes you laugh before another thought comes to your mind. “How about you? Anyone around?”

The mere thought has Joel scoffing as he shakes his head. “Think I’ve solidified myself as someone who is unapproachable.”

You laugh at that. “Hey, you didn’t scare me off that easily,” you say pointedly. The two of you continue walking side by side as you push a bit further. “What about Esther?”

Joel suddenly whips his head to look at you as if you spoke another language. “Esther? What about her?”

“Oh come on Joel,” you say with a playful roll of your eyes. “She’s always staring at you, trying so desperately to get you to talk to her. She seems cute—nice enough.” 

You’ve seen her around before and spoken to her. She was… fine. Pretty, though. An older woman, closer to Joel’s age, whose voice was a bit too high-pitched with a smile that was a bit too fake. You first picked up on her advances to Joel at the bars when she’d come sit beside him at the counter, leaning her body a bit too close to his to get him to look at her. He never did.

Your mention of Esther comes with a tinge of distaste in your tone, one that Joel doesn’t seem to miss as one corner of his lips quirk up just a bit before he shakes his head. “No chance in hell darlin’. She reminds me too much of the PTA moms I’d have to deal with at Sarah’s schools. Gonna be a big pass from me on that front.”

As you take in the information while nodding, an odd sense of relief falls off your shoulders. Something in you has you not wanting to drop the topic just yet. “So… there’s no one you got your eye on?”

You ask the question while looking at him, still walking side by side down the sidewalk, and see him turn his head to meet your gaze. His mouth parts open slightly as he looks down at your lips, his expression indicating he has a response.

“Hey there!”

At the sound, a chill runs down your spine as the two of you quickly spin your bodies around to see six men across the street a couple stores down, slowly walking closer to you. The one in the front and center appears to be older, with a handgun stationed at his hip, and a wide smile spread on his face. Two of the men stand on one side of him while the other three stay on his other side. Some are younger than the others, but each is seen holding shotguns and assault rifles in their hands positioned in front of them. 

Joel angles his body slightly in front of you, shielding their view of you as much as possible as he hisses, “Stay behind me.”

Complying, your hand slowly goes to rest on your own gun stationed at your hip as you take one step back to stand half-behind Joel.  You watch him as he grips his assault rifle slung around his neck a bit tighter.

The group settles about twenty feet away from you before the man in the middle speaks up with the same disturbing smile, making you realize it was him who spoke up in the first place. 

“You guys from around here?”

Resting your left hand on Joel’s back for comfort, you feel his body tense up further and see a slight tick in his jaw as he clenches it repeatedly, gritting out in a monotone voice, “Just passin’ through.”

The man waits for a few seconds to see if Joel will continue speaking before saying, “We don’t usually get many people come by here, so… it’s nice to see some friendly faces after looking at so many dead ones.” The words slip past his lips in an unsettling saccharine tone. “You two have a community of your own?”

Joel doesn’t respond verbally, and instead gives a single shake of his head, lying to the group so as to not let them know anything about Jackson. 

His smile falters for a moment before widening again. “You know, we got a settlement about a couple hours to the west… you two are more than welcome to come with!” His eyes trail away from Joel to settle on you before he adds, “We got plenty of women so your missus won’t feel too scared.”

The moment he looks at you to speak to you directly, you feel Joel shift in his feet for a moment before a low growl leaves his throat that’s only loud enough for you to hear. Voice thick and gruff, he responds, “We’re alright. Again, just makin’ our way through.” It’s clean. Final. Leaving no room for argument, but it doesn’t seem to satisfy them.

A younger one from the group speaks up, eyes on you over Joel’s shoulder. “Now, my mama raised me right, so I can’t in good conscience let a beautiful young lady go on her own when I could help her.” His eyes trail over Joel’s form before smirking. “Can’t imagine an old man like you is able to take… proper care of a woman like that in a world like this.”

The words insinuate something darker that has bile rising in your throat. Your palm on Joel’s back has you able to feel his reaction—his body tensing before practically vibrating in anger. Looking up to eye his profile, you see his jaw clenching and moving as he grinds his teeth together. From your view, Joel’s eyes can be seen shifting between the group frantically as his mind races with what the best move is.

Somehow, the group seems to realize his intentions before you do as you see them all grip their weapons tighter. At the same moment, Joel quietly spits out a sharp go to you. You waste no time at all as you immediately move to duck behind the abandoned car for cover that is parked to your right while you hear shouting before the men begin to shoot in your direction. You feel Joel’s hand on your back as he throws you both to the ground—the two of you pressing yourselves low against the side of the car.

The sounds of gunshots stop for a moment as you hear them walking closer to your position. You look at Joel with a panicked expression to see a focused look on him, but not before you see a flash of fear in his eyes when he looks at you.

Frantically, he looks around before he settles on one of the stores a few feet to the right of the car. You follow his gaze to notice that, in their attempt to shoot you two, the men had shot up the coffee shop you had gone into earlier—the glass windows shattered as shards of glass line the sidewalk below. Joel looks back at you for confirmation and you give him a single nod, knowing his plan without any words spoken between the two of you. He jerks his head in the direction of the café, instructing you to make a run for the shop as he peeks over to the car to cover you from the men. 

The place was further down from where the men were approaching from, allowing more distance to be created between them. Joel and you use the mailboxes and old bus stop benches for cover as you each take turns shooting at the men as you move. Making your way into the opening created from the broken windows, Joel makes sure to stay close behind you as you run in, the protection allowing you to duck behind the counter and bakery case before he jumps over to sit behind as well.

The continuous shooting as you two ran now stops. A voice you recognize as the first man who had spoken, the one who you assume is their leader, calls out to you both. “Oh come on, now. We don’t want to hurt you guys! Just want to make sure you both find your way out safely.” His voice drips with malice at the end, causing another bone chilling fear to course through you. 

Fear begins to wrap a hand around your throat and causes you to lose focus. You look at the wall in front of you while breathing erratically, trying to swallow down the panic and think of something. Joel nudges your shoulder to grab your attention, the contact briefly snapping you out of your thoughts. He gestures to your weapons that you both hold and nods in the direction to the group outside. You give your own nod of understanding, and he takes a deep breath while looking at you before you both take turns to poke your bodies out and shoot off a few shots to the group.

In the time you spend out of cover, you notice they are spread out around the front of the shop, surrounding you while using their own forms of cover.

The ordeal goes on for what feels like an eternity–the two of you only getting one man down in the process. Joel drops down next to you for cover again before cursing quietly. He looks around the shop and leans his body to look past you. Getting your attention, Joel leans in close to you to quietly rush out a command. “M’gonna go sneak around the side to try and catch ‘em off guard. You keep shootin’ them from the front to distract ‘em, alright?”

No time to debate, you simply nod in agreement and Joel wastes no time to crouch down and crawl his way behind the counter and back his way around. You lift your body to peek over the tops of the counter and fire off a few more shots at them before dropping back down. In that time, Joel’s plan succeeds by surprising them with the angle and getting down one of them in the process. More shouting is heard from the men, alerting you that Joel killed the one he snuck up on.

Two down, you tell yourself. You can do this.

The back-and-forth continues. You fire off a couple shots at them, take cover when they shoot at you. Inevitably, you knew someone would have to make a move that caught more off guard.

Thankfully, you’re able to take one more down and soon after, Joel takes his own down from behind one of the cars. You do a mental scan of the group, remembering who was a part of it and which ones would be left. Thinking over it, you realize that only two would remain—the younger one who couldn’t have been much older than a teenager, and the leader of the group who you haven’t heard from or seen him show himself as much as the others.

Angling your head a bit, you look to find Joel coming up on the younger one. The one who had made a comment about you.

Joel shoots him in the kneecap before swiftly kicking the gun out of the kid’s hand. A sharp cry of pain is heard from the boy as he begs for mercy. Looking through the foggy bakery case, you try to squint to see a better view of what was happening. What you find is the sight of Joel kicking the boy’s head back with the butt of his gun, repeatedly smashing it into his skull. The twisted sounds of bones breaking fill your senses, mixed in with garbled cries of pain and pleading words spoken from the boy.

You peek over the counter once again to fire out a shot in hopes that the sound makes the leader’s presence known, but you’re met with the soft click of the gun signaling you are out of bullets.

Dropping back down, you curse and force yourself to not panic but fail as you reach into your jacket pocket with shaky hands trying to find your spare ammo. In the process, you don’t hear the crunching sound of glass close to you until you feel a tight grip on your arm as you’re forced to a standing position. A sharp yelp leaves you from the movement and your eyes widen when they settle on the figure that grabbed you.

“Looks like you’re caught now, princess,” he sneers.

The leader of the group gives you a sick smirk and snarls as he yanks you out from behind the counter after taking your gun and throwing it off to the side. You desperately try to fight against him, wriggling your body to free yourself from his grasp and run away, but he just presses your back deeper into the front of his body. Locking his left arm in front of your chest with a bone-breaking grip, he drags you out onto the street a few feet away from Joel.

He’s still straddling the boy as he beats him far past death, seemingly distracted as he gives no indication he heard or noticed what happened. The realization that his right ear had been facing the coffee shop hits you, understanding why he wouldn’t hear above the sounds of his fist driving into the boy’s face.

The leader calls out to Joel with a wave of his knife before pressing it against your throat and applying enough pressure for you to feel the sharp edge dig into your skin, alerting you if you move too suddenly, it would slice you. In a desperate attempt to keep the knife away from you, you keep your left hand gripped on his arm across your chest and your right hand holding his wrist that holds the knife to your throat—hoping you could use the force to escape if his grip loosened in the slightest.

At the call, you see Joel straighten up. His head whips around as he looks wild and confused, before his eyes settle on yours and you watch his entire body freeze in an instant.

You don’t take your eyes off him as you try not to let panic consume you, trying to use Joel’s presence as a source of comfort, but you aren’t stupid. You are aware that there is little that can be done from Joel right now without triggering this man to hurt you in some way. What causes your composure to falter, is you can tell that Joel realizes it too.

Joel raises his hands slowly in front of him, his rifle still slung around his neck but the handle of it loosely held in his hand as he holds it out and away from his body.

“Let her go.”

The tone in Joel’s voice is one you haven’t heard before, one that makes you shudder. It’s a mix of pure blind rage, combined with complete fear, all while his eyes never stray from yours. Not once.

The man laughs disturbingly. “You think this is a fucking discussion? We just wanted to talk, and you killed my fucking men.”

You feel the grip from his arm wrapped around your chest tighten, simultaneously applying more pressure with the knife held in his other hand. You feel nauseous—bile rising in your throat for what seemed like the hundredth time today as you feel his body behind you press further into yours. 

Joel seems to notice the action as he looks down quickly to the lower half of your body before flicking his eyes up to the man, a sickening snarl on his face. You see his body twitching from anger despite the distance between the two of you, noticing the way his hand’s grip on his gun tightens.

The man brings his face against the side of yours, his nose pressed against your temple as you feel his breath fanning your neck. Side-eyeing Joel, he says, “Can’t say I blame you, though. I mean if I found something this pretty in a world so ugly, well… I wouldn’t want to let it go either.”

He looks between you and Joel, a smirk in his voice as he snickers. “It’s a good thing I’m willing to share.”

You try to slow your breathing back to a steady pace, desperately trying to come up with a way out of this situation. You know that it would be hard for Joel to make a sudden move without something happening to you in the process, and you can tell from his body language and from how well you know him that he realizes it too. But you can also see, feel, the anger in him and his growing impatience. 

Your eyes flick around the scene before you to figure something out. Out of the corner of your eye, you focus on the way the man holds the knife to your throat. His right arm is held up and out, and the knife is long enough to cover your whole throat. His grip on the handle makes it so his hand is not parallel to your body, but rather it is held just above your shoulder. Noticing the detail, you think of a plan.

God, you hope this will work.

As if he could hear your thoughts, Joel breaks eye contact with the man and settles his gaze back onto yours, his eyes softening in the slightest when they meet your own. You flick your eyes down to your grip on the man before very slowly taking your index finger you have on the man’s right wrist, and make two light taps on the back of his hand—the action so delicate that the man doesn’t notice. But Joel does.

The movement catches Joel’s eye instantly as he’s hyper aware of every single part of your body at the moment, making him look at the hand holding the knife. The furrow between his brows twitches in understanding, a movement only you would catch, before he locks eyes with you again. 

Silent words pass between you in mere seconds, and you know Joel understands what you need him to do. His jaw clenches briefly, a sign that tells you he isn’t happy with the plan, and he quickly looks back to the man’s hand before his eyes flick between both of yours, a sudden nervous look in them. 

The two of you understand the risk, but both know there isn’t another option.

Gritting his teeth, Joel moves with a swiftness as he tightens his grip on his rifle and positions the weapon to aim. The movement is so sudden that the man has no chance to process what is happening before Joel shoots once at the back of the man’s hand that holds the knife. 

You only feel a small sharp sting followed by relief as the bullet grazes the top of your shoulder instead of completely penetrating your skin as it goes through the man’s hand.

He yells in distress as he pulls his right hand off your throat and drops the knife in shock. The moment makes his grip on your chest loosen, allowing you to rip his left arm off you and elbow him in the stomach before throwing yourself forward. In the same moment, Joel reaches for you and catches you by your forearms to try and break your fall as you land on the ground from exhaustion.

Seemingly satisfied with your immediate safety, Joel begins walking over to the man that sits on the ground screaming in pain and repeatedly cursing, “You fucking bitch!”

His face shifts into one of fear when his eyes lift up to the sight of Joel marching towards him, whatever expression on Joel’s face makes him scramble to try and get up to run. Before he gets the chance, Joel reaches his cowering body and uses the toe of his boot to kick the man in the chin, sending him laying back down on the ground with another curse and blood rushing from his nose and mouth.

You stay on the ground, hands digging into the pavement behind you as you watch Joel tower over the man before climbing on top of him. Joel reaches forward to wrap his left hand around the collar of the man’s shirt and raises his right hand, balled into a fist, and brings it down onto the side of his face repeatedly.

Your senses are consumed by the violence before you. All you can focus your eyes on is the violence before you. All you hear is the disturbings sounds of the man wailing in pain, bones crunching, and Joel. His snarls and grunts fill your ears as he proceeds to slam his fist into the man’s face for what feels like forever.

Eventually, you stop hearing the sounds of pain coming from the man who had almost killed you. You realize he’s dead, but Joel doesn’t stop. 

Eyes unable to be taken off the right side of Joel’s body over his body, you watch as Joel begins to alternate between fists as he continues beating him—only using his dead body as a vessel to let out pure anger and adrenaline at this point. The sounds of impact become more wet as blood completely covers the dead man’s face, Joel pounding into him relentlessly with the occasional sounds of bones crunching still occurring. You didn’t even know there were so many bones in the face to break.

Time passes, you aren’t sure how long, before Joel’s movements slow down to a stop. You think he only stops because his body is exhausted as you hear his harsh breathing and watch the rapid rise and fall of his chest. His fists twitch as if holding himself back from continuing, and you look to see the knuckles on both of his hands are covered in deep bruises along with blood. So much blood, covering his hands, arms, and splatters of it on his face.

This is what Maria had meant that first day you were here. What Joel was capable of.

As if he entered his body again, Joel seems to freeze. Perhaps he was lost in the violence and forgot you were there. Maybe, with the right side of his body facing you, he didn’t hear your labored breathing. You watch him slowly stand up off the now dead body, hovering over it as he looks down with disinterest. He turns and begins to walk over to you silently, his head angled downwards as he extends a bloody hand to help you up. 

You take it, your fingers wrapping around his usually warm and calloused palm that now is wet and sticky with blood. Allowing him to pull you up, you try to duck your head to look at him, but he has his eyes trained on the ground since he stopped punching.

“Are you okay?”

The words come out broken through his hoarse voice, the question being the first thing he’s said in however long he was killing that man. His eyes don’t raise past your waist, still not making eye contact with you directly as his face is etched in a deep frown.

You just want him to look at you.

You nod your head for a second before speaking up, your own voice sounding so small—the effort of speaking being almost painful. “Yes.”

Joel doesn’t seem satisfied with your answer as he opens and closes his mouth for a second, his frown deepening even more before he harshly shuts his eyes for a moment.

“Did they–” The words sound as if they are being forced out of his throat, his voice catching and a choked sound coming out as he spoke. “Did he… did he touch you?”

“No,” you respond softly.

Joel nods slowly before looking around at the aftermath of the fight.

Why won’t he look at you?

After a few moments, Joel clears his throat and his voice breaks slightly as he says, “Sound could’ve attracted clickers. We better head back to Jackson. S’gonna get dark soon.” The words are factual, said with no real rush in them, as if he’s forcing himself to move on. He gestures towards the horses down the road behind you, walking past you for a few steps. You stand there, staring at the barely recognizable dead body ahead of you before you turn around and call out.

“Joel?”

Your voice cracks at the name and you watch as his movements halt, turning his body half towards you with his eyes still firmly fixed on the ground. All he gives you is a hum of acknowledgement before you take one hesitant step towards him, seeing him tense up and take an unconscious step back. The action makes a crack split in your chest.

“Joel,” you repeat, voice barely above a whisper. “Can you please look at me?”

Hearing the tremble in your voice, Joel slowly, yet carefully, lifts his eyes to yours. Seeing his brown eyes finally making contact with yours makes you take a shaky breath in. The same eyes that always look at you with so much warmth in them that it envelopes you in him. You feel so small at the moment, not knowing how to tell him what you want.

He studies you for a moment, his own breathing stuttering when he makes eye contact with you. His frown deepens at first until he sees something in your eyes that makes his hardened face soften into relief, as if he read your mind and could hear the thoughts you desperately wanted to convey.

You aren’t scared of him, as he feared. As he has feared, for almost two years. Fear that if you saw every side of him, you would recoil with disgust. Completely pulling yourself away from him and looking at him like a monster.

In that moment, he realizes you don’t fear him. You need him.

He lets out what must have been a breath he was holding in since the two of you heard the stranger’s voice for the first time, his entire body sagging before launching himself forward in your direction. The moment Joel moves toward you, you impatiently step forward too and throw yourself into his arms.

You wrap both of your arms as tight as possible around his waist, eyes screwed shut and burrowing your face into his chest. Smelling sweat, and blood, and him. His own arms wrap around your back, somehow holding you tighter than you were holding him, as if he wanted to feel every inch of your skin against his own. He brings his right hand to hold the back of your head, pushing you even further into him before resting his face against the top of your head and letting his eyes fall closed at the feeling of you safe in his arms.

The comfort somehow makes you want to crumble further, the freedom to be more vulnerable causing a sob to escape your throat. You try to stifle the sound but Joel already heard it, rubbing the back of your head with his thumb as he moves to dip his head into the crook of your neck and breathes you in deeply.

“I got you, darlin’. Always,” he whispers against your neck.

With those words, you let everything out.

The name he’s called you for months now somehow hits you harder than it ever has, making your knees buckle as the exhaustion and loss of adrenaline seems to catch up to you. You feel Joel adjust his grip to hold you tighter and keep you up, mumbling against your skin, “M’not gonna let you fall.”

His touch and his words provide you more sturdiness and protection than you have ever felt—more than you thought was humanly possible.

Your sobs and panicked breathing eventually even out into sniffles as you focus on the rhythm of his heartbeat that you faintly hear with your ears pressed against his chest. You stand there holding each other for what feels like too long, yet also not long enough. When you feel more calm, you begin to loosen your hold and pull away, but not before Joel’s grip on you tightens just a bit more before letting you pull yourself away first.

You lean only inches back from him, eyes trained on the base of his neck as you feel his breath on your mouth. He brings the hand that was on the back of your head over to gently cup your cheek, rubbing his thumb underneath your eye to wipe away tears and the tenderness of his touch has your eyes falling shut. You feel him lean his forehead against yours for a few seconds before he pulls back enough to place a gentle and lingering kiss to your forehead.

Taking a step back from you, he moves his grip to place one on your waist and another on your upper arm. His eyes move across your face, taking in every detail before he breathes out to say, “We gotta go home, darlin’.”

His words cause you to snap back into reality as he was right. The sun had begun setting and it would be a long trip back to Jackson—you two had to leave now. It didn’t stop the small part of you that wished you could stay in his arms for the rest of your life.

You turn your body to head down the street when you feel him slip his hand into yours, squeezing tightly, before leading you over to your horses.

Déjà vu is a funny feeling. It’s something that people tend to forget just how odd of a sensation it is.

The blinding white lights that make your head pound intensely. The sterile smell of the hospital room. The hushed voices between the medical staff as they poke and prod you. Your own dissociative state as you sit silently, eyes unfocused on the wall in front of you. It’s all eerily similar to what you remember as your first day in Jackson.

All you want to do is go home and go to sleep for as long as humanly possible.

Joel and you had made your way back to Jackson, arriving close to midnight, you think. Due to how far you two had gone, it got dark fast. You had spent the ride back feeling Joel’s eyes on you at any chance he could get, but you had just stared straight ahead, too exhausted from the events that just occurred. About an hour in you remember Joel had called out to you, offering for you to ride on his horse sitting behind him so you could rest and use his back as support. His offer was due to his notice that your eyes had started fluttering shut more and more often, worrying him further on your current state. You declined, knowing that him having to steer his own horse while holding onto the reins of yours as she rode beside would only make the journey go slower.

You just wanted to be home as fast as you could.

Once arriving back to town, you found Maria, Tommy, and a few other leaders in the town waiting at the gates restlessly. Your absences had made the others worry something was wrong, and they seemed prepared to head out in search of you two.

You vaguely remember shouting. Tommy’s face growing alarmingly concerned at the sight of the state you two were in. Maria’s own body sagging with relief at the fact you two were alive before matching her husband in his concern once her eyes scanned over your form. You had felt hands grabbing you, bringing Joel and you to the doctor quickly to get you both checked for injuries. 

Since riding into Jackson, Joel hadn’t seemed to have taken his eyes off you now that he didn’t have to focus on the road ahead. You faintly recall his sounds of protest when the doctor had separated you two into your own rooms—Joel only succumbing to their efforts when Maria laid a firm hand on his chest to hold them back. “We’re giving her a female doctor to check her over, and I’ll sit with her the whole time. I promise.” Her words brought Joel a tiny bit of peace before becoming nauseous at the need for their decisions regarding you.

A hand touching your shoulder brings you back to reality for a moment, causing you to flinch at the sudden touch. Looking up, you realize the doctor was speaking to you with Maria behind her and looking over her shoulder to watch your reactions.

“What?”

The memory of your first day arriving here comes back to you once again when you speak, remembering the overwhelming feeling you had so long ago. The feeling of being underwater while drowned-out voices echo around you and try to grab your attention.

The doctor sighs before looking at Maria, not impatiently, but knowingly. “I’ve checked her thoroughly. Besides the small wound on the top of her shoulder from the bullet, she doesn’t seem to have any other injuries. Some bruising, sure, but I mainly think she’s just overwhelmed.” Her voice drops to a whisper as she leans closer to Maria, intending for you to not hear what she says. But you do. “The mental signs of infection are most likely due to the trauma.”

She talks about you like you aren’t there. Like you aren’t human. 

The question that races through your mind, the only question you care for the answer to, comes out of you. “Where’s Joel?”

Maria turns her attention to you when she hears your voice croak out the words. She gives a sad smile before replying, “Don’t worry honey, he’s just outside talking with Tommy right now. He’s alright, too…we figured you’d want your space–”

“I want Joel,” you say, leaving no room for argument in your tone.

Her eyes soften in understanding and she gives a small nod before the doctor opens the room to head out, Maria following her out. She leaves the door open a bit, allowing you to hear the hushed, broken sentences from Tommy and Joel—the door angled so you could see Joel leaning close to Tommy to whisper, their words fading in and out.

“...Where do you think they…”, you hear from Tommy first.

“Don’t know. Can't be too close. We were so far out and…”

“... Could be on their way if they see… Just like David was…”

David? Who was David?

“No, no… made sure they couldn’t follow…”

You wish they would speak up louder so you could hear more of what they were saying.

Then, in a weaker voice, you hear Joel say, “It happened again, Tommy… I couldn’t protect her, I couldn’t–”

Their conversation is interrupted as Maria walks up. You see Joel’s body language straighten out and tense up as he looks to her with stoicism. It isn’t until you hear your name being said in the mix of words that you see Joel’s head snap in your direction before he takes quick strides to get to your door.

The moment it opens, his eyes are alert—worried. “What’s wrong, sweetheart?”

You shake your head. “Nothing, just… wanted to see you. Make sure you’re okay too.”

His features soften, his round eyes so heartbreakingly beautiful that you forget about what happened for a single moment and only focus on him.

“Yeah, I’m alright, darlin’. Doc said you’re cleared. They patched up your shoulder and everythin’.”

You nod, not caring much for the state of your injuries as you can only focus on one goal. “Can we go home now?”

Joel nods without hesitation. “‘Course we can,” he says, walking towards your chair. His hand seems to hover over your back, wanting to guide you but knowing you had been jumpy to anyone touching you the whole time you were here. You take the initiative to lean your body into his when you stand up, giving him a silent cue that his touch was welcome—craved, even. You hear a small sigh of relief leave his mouth as he wraps his arm around your back, holding you close to him as he guides you both outside the building. 

You catch Tommy and Maria speaking in hushed tones outside the front door of the hospital before stopping when they see you two. They both look down to Joel’s arm around you—Maria with a firm look on her face, lips tight and brows twitching together, while Tommy offers a more softer and sympathetic look. “You guys let me know if you need anythin’, alright?”

Joel gives a nod of acknowledgement to his brother before Tommy comes over to pat his shoulder, leaning in as you hear Tommy whisper to him. “Take care of your girl, alright, big brother?”

The words don’t impact you as much as they might have before today, letting you know that you aren’t completely there, but they seem to affect Joel as you hear him take a sharp inhale of breath before giving a single nod in response.

It’s a short and silent walk to your house until you turn onto your walkway. Joel leads you over to your door as you reach into the inside of your jacket to take out your house key in the pocket there. Your hands uncontrollably shake as you try to get them, but your struggle is stopped not long after by the feeling of Joel’s hand gently laying on top of yours.

You look up to meet his eyes, seeing his eyebrows pushed together and up a bit as he gives you the same tender look he’s given you, and only you, all night whenever he looks at you. “Let me,” he softly commands, taking over to reach into your pocket. As he grabs the key and opens your front door, he still supports your body with his other arm as you lean into his side.

He gently helps you into your home before closing and locking the door behind him while you just stand there, numb, and looking around the entryway. When he finally turns around to look at you, he’s met with the sight of your back, unmoving, and his worry only grows. 

Slowly walking around to stand in front of you, he lifts his hand to carefully brush away stray pieces of hair that have fallen in front of your face, as if he’s done the action a million times. You look at his chest, yet stare at nothing in front of you as your eyes continue to stay unfocused. Noticing this, Joel begins to frown as he feels a lump in his throat—a pain stabbing him in his chest.

He brings his hand that brushes your hair away to cup your chin, delicately guiding your head upwards to try and get you to focus on him. It seems to do the trick as your eyes meet his, blinking repeatedly to adjust your eyes to your surroundings.

The sight of you more focused eases Joel’s worry a bit. You lift your eyes to his and watch as he smiles sadly. “There she is. Missed ya.”

You become aware of how you’ve been acting. “I’m sorry… I didn’t mean to–”

Joel cuts you off with a shake of his head before speaking to you with sincerity in his voice. “Absolutely nothin’ you need to apologize for, darlin’. Just want you alright is all.”

You numbly nod your head, watching as Joel straightens up to look over to your staircase leading upstairs. “How about you go up there, take a shower, and get ready for bed. I’ll give you some space if you want and head home to do the same before I–”

The thought of being alone makes you frantically shake your head, eyes wide as you begin rambling. “No, please don’t leave. I don’t want to be alone, please just–”

Surprised worry appears on Joel’s face as he places his hands on your arms to steady you and bring your attention back on to him, ducking his head down to level his eyes with yours once again. “Hey, hey,” he hushes soothingly. “I’m gonna come right back, make you some food to eat ‘til you fall asleep, okay?”

It’s not enough. You shake your head again. “Please don’t go yet… you can use my shower before I do and then we can eat. I have plenty of spare towels if you’re okay with that?”

Joel pauses for half a second before giving you a smile in response. “‘Course I can, darlin’. Let me go home to grab some clothes, then I can get washed up here and we can eat before you sleep. That sound alright with you?”

His suggestion is the most logical, so you nod in agreement. It doesn’t stop you from standing at your window and watching him as he walks across the street to his house, only to stare at his door waiting until he comes back out. The lights go on and off as he seems to move about the house before he comes back out shortly. Seeing him again has you letting out a breath of relief, taking no hesitation to swing open your door before he is even fully on your side of the street. 

The sound of you opening the door has his steps faltering for a brief moment, his movements pause until continuing to make his way inside—a small bag over his shoulder that you assume is filled with a change of clothes.

You hover close to him as you watch him cross the threshold and remove his shoes at the front of your door. He gestures upstairs with a nod of his head. “You take the first shower, okay?”

You try and argue, suddenly feeling bad about making him stay here with you, but he just shakes his head at you. “Nope, I’ll be alright ‘til you’re ready. I can start preparin’ some hot food for you so it’s nice and fresh for when you’re done. Take your time, okay?”

Nodding to him, you slowly make your way upstairs, turning at the top to see him watching you until you reach your bedroom. You then hear the sounds of him walking into your kitchen—the clanging sounds of pots assuring you he was still here.

Your body moves like a zombie. Your motions are on autopilot as you walk into your bathroom, turning on the shower to let it warm up before beginning to undress. Once completely stripped, you look at the pile of clothes that now lays on the bathroom tile—what looks like every inch of it covered in blood and fully ruined. You stand there for a few seconds too long, simply looking down and glaring at it as if its presence disgusts you, before deciding you would throw it out in the morning. Or maybe even burn it.

As you turn to step into the shower, you make an effort to avoid your mirror at any cost, forcing your legs to lift and settle into your position under the stream. The hot water burns your skin, a feeling you relish in that moment as you wish it would rip your skin off and allow your body to start over. You grab your various soaps and begin washing your hair, your body, your face—ending up scrubbing relentlessly in every spot you can possibly think of until the skin burns raw, the dried blood that was left on you far gone.

You aren’t sure how long passes after you finish removing the filth of the day from your body, but you stay standing under the water and let it cascade over your body—your arms folded across your midsection as you tilt your head down to stare at the drain as it turns from red to clear.

A knock on your bathroom door pulls your attention, followed by a call of your name. “You okay in there?”

It takes you a second to find the strength to speak before you’re able to call out a response. “Yes,” you reply, the broken sound of your own voice shocking you.

There’s a short pause before you hear Joel respond. “Alright… just wanted to let you know that the food’s ready, so you can come down whenever you’re done.”

Surprise hits you for a moment. “How long have I been in here?”

With a layer of worry in his tone, Joel calls out, “Uh, just lil’ over an hour… Why? Is somethin’ wrong?”

You shake your head before you realize that he can’t see you. “No… I’ll be out in a moment.”

You hear him say to take your time, but you already turned off the water and step out, beginning to dry off and put your pajamas on.

Once finished, you open your bathroom door expecting to see Joel standing in your bedroom. In his absence, panic begins to build inside you and has you calling out his name hurriedly before you see him poke his head into your bedroom door out of the corner of your eye. You turn to face him fully and sigh with relief, realizing that he was just standing outside in your hallway. 

“Sorry,” he sheepishly responds. “Just wanted to give you some privacy.”

You shake away his apology, feeling ridiculous for your reaction in the first place, and move to grab the clean spare towels you have in your cupboard and hand them to him. “Here.”

He gives you a polite smile before taking the pile of folded cloth into his hands, adjusting his grip to pick up the bag he brought here that was leaning against the wall outside your room.

“You go head downstairs and start eatin’. I’ll join you when I’m done. Should be only ten minutes, I promise.”

You nod and let him walk past you into your bathroom, closing that door behind him. 

For a moment, you stand in your bedroom doorway and look in the direction of your staircase. Hovering for a moment while fidgeting, you feel unsure of what to do with yourself until you decide to sit on your bed and wait there for him. The sounds of him turning the water on and moving around brought you a bit of peace, and you end up staring at the clock to watch the hands tick by while you wait for him.

He was right about the time as you hear the water turn off only twelve minutes… and thirty-seven seconds later—your eyes never straying from the moving lines on your clock until you hear shuffling, assuming he’s getting dressed before the bathroom door opens. 

Joel comes out with his head bowed down as he runs a towel quickly through his hair, wearing black sweatpants and a soft looking navy blue T-shirt. He takes two steps out of the bathroom before his head raises back up to see you sitting on the bed waiting for him with your legs folded beneath you.

He jumps slightly, not expecting you to be there, and looks out your bedroom before turning back to you with a confused expression. “Thought I told you dinner was ready?” He calmly says, no judgment or accusation in his tone.

You look down at your hands you’d been fidgeting with in your lap, picking at your fingernails. “I… I wanted to wait up here for you.”

He blinks once. The confusion stays with him for a second as he processes your response,  until his face shifts into warm understanding. “Okay. Let’s go down to eat.”

The moment he steps away from the bathroom door, the bright bathroom light he had shielded you from with his body no longer lays on you. When you stand, Joel takes a step towards you to help you up but freezes once he sees you under the light, his face hardening.

Confusion and worry consume you for a moment, but clarity strikes you when you see his gaze trained below your face. Due to the dim lighting of your house, and the fact your clothing up until now was covering most of your body, Joel had not yet seen the extent of your injuries that you avoided staring at in the bathroom.

His eyes stay glued to the brushing on your arms for a few seconds before they lift up to the bandage on your shoulder. His focus travels to your throat where you assume a long thing cut laid there from the knife that was pressed against you.

Still looking at your throat, you watch Joel’s top lip twitch before he swallows his emotions harshly. “C’mon,” he mutters softly, placing his hand on your shoulder and guiding you gently downstairs.

Reaching the kitchen, you see a pot of stew sitting on the now-off stove with two bowls next to the stovetop and a large ladle placed against the side of the pot. Joel pulls out a chair for you at your kitchen table, letting you sit before he goes over to fill up the two bowls with the food, coming back over to place them down in front of your respective spots before going to grab some water from the fridge.

You both settle into your seats and begin to eat silently, the only words spoken being a quiet thank you from you for him making you something to eat. He brushes off your appreciation lightheartedly, as if his sentiment was as natural as breathing and nothing worth being thanked for. The sounds of silverware clanking against the ceramic bowls mixed with the domestic nature of the two of you eating together in silence is enough for you a sense of safety and comfortability to wash over you, no words needing to be shared to fill the quiet.

When you finish your bowl, Joel moves to take it to the sink as he was done with his own a few minutes before, and starts to wash and put away everything. You watch his back silently as he moves, thinking you hear a very faint sound of humming coming from him, but it’s too quiet for you to be sure.

As he dries the last bowl left, you quickly rush out a question you've had on your mind since coming home.

Joel turns to face you, looking confused and making you realize you had spoken too quietly. You wait a few moments as he turns the water over, drying his hands on your dish towel and turning his body to face you directly as he leans back against the sink counter.

You clear your throat and look at the ground as you repeat your question. “Can you sleep here tonight?”

His lack of response for a few seconds fills you with shame, feeling stupid for even asking. Trying to rectify the embarrassment, you begin to ramble out more words with your head angled towards the floor. “I just… I don’t really want to be alone tonight. I know the couch is not the most comfortable thing to sleep on, so if you don’t want to I completely understand, I just–”

“Yes.”

The sound of his voice responding to you makes you shoot your head up to look at him, eyes wide as you hadn’t expected him to agree. Making eye contact with you, you see a sure look in his eyes mixed with… relief?

Did he want to sleep here tonight, too?

Mouth parted in a small “o” shape, you slowly nod. “Okay… um, I have some spare pillows and blankets in my bedroom closet. Let me go get them for you and I’ll set you up on the couch.”

Joel wordlessly nods, walking into the living room as you quickly make your eyes upstairs to grab the items. In your room, your eyes glance at the clock hung on your wall to see it was 2 am. Your body seems to snap back into its previously exhausted state as you realize how long the day has been—Joel’s presence since you arrived home seems to have distracted you from the reality of the toll your mind and body took on today.

You make your way downstairs to find Joel watching you carefully as you walk up to him and hand him the pillows and blankets. He takes them with a hum of appreciation before he begins to set up his space for the night.

The sight of him fluffing the pillow onto one end of the couch and stretching the fabric of your quilt across the narrow cushions has you wince. The guilt of making him, as big and broad as he is, spend the night on your cramped couch grows in you.

As he finishes his movements with a final flick of his wrist to throw one end of the quilt at the end of the couch, you open your mouth to tell him he can go home. Somehow, despite his back being towards yours, he turns to look at you before you can even speak, only to immediately say, “I want to be here.”

Your mouth flutters open and closed after he speaks with such confidence, momentarily stunned at the timing of your thoughts. Or perhaps he knew what you were going to say without even seeing that you had wanted to speak. 

You give him an attempt at a smile, your lips barely curling up in one corner, something that takes a bit of effort as you think you haven’t done it since before your run in earlier. You seem to be proven right when you see Joel’s shoulders sag with relief at the sight, grateful to have some emotion be shown out of you.

You look around the room, unsure how to say goodnight, while also not wanting to be away from him. He seems to notice your hesitancy, because he nods his head in the direction of your staircase. “Let me get you to bed, darlin’.”

Assuring him you can do so on your own, you shake your head and begin to protest. He carefully reaches his hand out to hold one of your hands as his eyes focus on you and speaks with the same confidence from before. “I want to.”

With that, you allow him to walk up with you to your bedroom—Joel opening the door for you and guiding you inside. You make your way over to your bed and watch with slight awe as Joel reaches over to pull the covers back, allowing you to slip in. The action makes your cheeks flush, and you become grateful for the darkness in the room as you crawl into bed and settle beneath the covers. You look at the lamp that sits on your dresser in the corner of the room before eyeing Joel nervously. His gaze follows yours to look at the lack of light with furrowed brows. 

“Could you… um…” you trail off, gesturing towards the lamp with your chin. He understands your request and walks over to turn it on so that a dim warm light fills your room. 

Embarrassment fills you for a moment, feeling like a fucking child who just woke up from a nightmare and needs their light on to sleep through the night. Maybe that’s what today was, you think. One big nightmare, and you’ll wake up tomorrow feeling normal again.

Logically, you knew you would recover. Having had these encounters in the past before, you always compartmentalized the experiences and moved on—forcing yourself to bury the complexities of your emotions in order for you to be able to keep going both physically and mentally. Today, though, you found yourself feeling safe in terms of your reactions. Joel’s patient and gentle nature with you makes you feel free enough to not need to keep it all in. For once, you could let yourself rely on someone else to be there for you.

As Joel makes his way back around to you, he sits on the edge of your bed beside you to begin adjusting the blankets until they cover you more properly. Satisfied with his effort, he rests one of his hands on top of yours that lay on your stomach overlapping each other. His eyes lift to yours with such warm intensity that it makes your heart skip a beat. You can’t recall a moment where anyone has ever looked at you with so much emotion and care in their eyes.

The two of you simply gaze into each other’s eyes for a minute before Joel breaks the contact by leaning forward slowly, slow enough for you to stop him if you wanted, but you don’t want to. His lips press a lingering kiss to your forehead, a deep inhale leaves his nose before he pulls back.

“Goodnight, darlin’,” he says as he stands and begins to walk backwards out of your room, eyes never leaving your face. 

“Goodnight, Joel.”

You watch him leave your room and notice how he keeps your door partly open so that you can see him walk down the staircase, deliberately leaving your dim staircase light on to give you more comfort.

reblogs and comments are appreciated! i hope you all enjoy <3 follow @writtenbynic and turn on notifications for updates!

a/n: sorry for the emotional rollercoaster, and posting it after episode 6. feeling masochistic. 🏷️: @dendulinka6 @suzysface @koshkaj-blog @orcasoul @emmasveinyahhdih @thatoneperson38747 @silksepia @orodaeh @ithinkimokeei @emnull0 @warriorkarol @luvwanda @pascal-mynightlyobsession @grayandthyme @crlsummer @ashleyfilm @darling-imobsessed @tjohn63

[trainer-from-unova]

secret

Ⓢ english ao3 Ⓢ spanish ao3 Ⓢ masterlist Ⓢ

ship: the void x f!reader (x bob reynolds)

summary: where you're dating the void, and not even bob knows it. it was easy to hide the secret from him, it was the others who were the problem.

au: bob and the void are different personalities / did

c/w: post-canon, hurt/comfort (but not for poor bob), void bullying bob

a/n: english isn't my first language and a kudo on ao3 will be appreciated even if you read it here <3

word count: 2281

It had been a good few months for Bob. Although he didn't dare use his powers again, he was now living free with the New Avengers in their tower. He had gained a group of friends, a family who loved him and really cared about him. What he didn't know was that he had also gained a girlfriend, kinda. And to his surprise, she was the one he shared the least alone time with, or so he thought.

It was easy to hide the secret from Bob, it was the others who were the problem. Luckily there were few of them in the team, but they still seemed too many. It didn't help that almost all of them were trained as spies and that one in particular could turn invisible, though at least Void had the ability to see her even if she turned invisible to the others.

They saw each other at night, when everyone was asleep and when Bob was supposed to be asleep, so Bob would have no gaps in his memory and wouldn't suspect anything. But it's hard not to make noise when you meet your partner in your room at night... Although the walls, doors and windows of the attic were soundproofed, they always tried to make as little noise as possible, as some of the team members had enhanced abilities.

And even if there was plenty of room, sometimes it was inevitable that they would bump into someone.

It was three o'clock in the morning when, kissing goodbye in front of Bob's bedroom door, they accidentally bumped into Bucky, probably awake due to insomnia or just awakened by a nightmare with traumatic memories. The couple separated quickly, and luckily the darkness of the place disguised well the facial expression of Void, so different and yet so similar to Bob's.

"I'm sorry, I didn't mean to-" said the soldier in a whisper.

"Don't worry about it," she said in the same tone, looking up at him as she took her boyfriend's hand, squeezing it tightly. And he understood perfectly what she was trying to communicate: "Play along with me and pretend". "Please don't say anything to the others, we want it to be secret," and in that sense she wasn't lying. "You haven't seen us and we haven't seen you, okay? This didn't happen."

Though it was dark they noticed him nod as he resumed his silent course, and Void merely said a silent goodbye to her as well, leaning over her slightly to kiss the top of her head as he grabbed the doorknob with one hand to slowly open the door and lock himself inside the room.

If only Bucky had been the only one who had discovered them unwittingly... But as time went on they all discovered them, and they followed the same strategy they had with this one.

Also, as time went on, Bob began to feel something for her. It was more than companionship and friendship, and perhaps it didn't make sense because he didn't have as close a relationship with her as he did with Yelena, but he could tell he had a special chemistry with her. He unknowingly caught the love that Void had for her.

And he might not remember the experiences of Void, but the muscle memory remained. He couldn't help but turn his neck in the direction ______ was facing, fix his eyes on her, sharpen his hearing at the sound of her voice, and even feel the urge to take her hand and kiss her. Clearly he didn't do that, because she wasn't his. He knew that. A voice inside him reminded him of it when he stared at her too long. "She's not yours." But he wanted to make her his, and he knew he needed female advice for that.

"Can we talk?" Bob asked quietly, shyly entering his best girl friend's bedroom after he knocked on the door with a few taps and she told him from inside that he could come in. "I need advice on a matter..." he said as he closed the door behind him.

"Sure," she replied as she got up from the bed she was lying on, sitting cross-legged and locking her mobile phone to put it away. "What is it?" she asked as she watched him approach her bed. "Is something wrong?" she asked as he sat on the edge of the bed.

"No no," he said quickly, reassuring her and dispelling any doubts about his mental health. "You see..." he sighed, staring off into nothingness, mentally thinking about what he was going to say and how he was going to say it, "I like ______," he said shyly, "and, I don't know," he shrugged, "I was wondering if you could give me some advice on... I don't know- Winning her over and maybe asking her out," she looked at him completely quizzical, frowning.

"Weren't you already dating her?"

"What?" he asked now, in the same tone and with the same facial expression. "No."

"Oh so you're just having an affair...?" she asked, a little less confused.

"No, not even that," he said still just as confused, and the same level of confusion returned in her.

"I saw you together one night," she remembered, "kissing in the middle of the hallway."

"Are you sure it was me?"

"Well, yes — it was dark, but..."

And she stopped dead in her tracks, falling silent for a second. As soon as they both heard the word "dark" they looked at each other tense and nervous, but with understanding.

"Do you think she knows it's not me?" he asked.

"How could she not know? If she thought it was you she'd be throwing herself into your arms all the time."

Knowing that she was well aware that it wasn't Bob he felt a mixture of emotions: sadness, anger, surprise, confusion, envy, jealousy... He found it hard to believe, and if that wasn't enough, Yelena added more information:

"______ told me you wanted it to be a secret, asked me not to tell anyone and to pretend I hadn't seen anything even with you- with them," she corrected herself quickly.

"Good God," he said getting up from the bed, pacing back and forth hysterically, "How did- How did he- How did they- Oh my God," he was overwhelmed by all the questions on his mind, but he didn't want Void to show up to answer them, let alone lose control of the body. "What should I do?" he asked looking at Yelena at last.

"First calm down and then talk to her. There is no other option."

Unfortunately she wasn't present in the tower, she had gone out for a while and because of that he went to ask Yelena for advice at that very moment. He had to wait for her to return, and the wait became eternal and deadly.

"What is it, honey?" she asked as she set her bag on her desk, her back to him. He wasn't surprised by the nickname as she often called him and the other men in the group that. They were in her bedroom, with the door closed. She had just arrived and didn't even have time to take off her shoes.

"By that do you mean me? Or Void?" He said behind her, trying not to sound too annoyed, and it was a good thing she had her back to him, because the way her face darkened wasn't at all disguised. She tried to recompose her facial expression before turning to look at him.

"What?" She asked pretending to be confused, though she really was, but in the way she was pretending to be.

"Don't play dumb with me," he said, not completely annoyed but clearly not happy — he was nervous and tired, eager for this awkward moment to be over as soon as possible. He didn't like confrontations, even if they were only verbal and seemingly peaceful.

"What do you know?" she asked, now really serious.

"Enough," he nodded, infected by her seriousness.

"And how do you know that?" she asked as she crossed her arms.

"That doesn't matter now," he replied. "What kind of relationship do you have?"

"We're dating," she reported matter-of-factly but still folded her arms, lifting her shoulders slightly and looking at the ground for a second. The confirmation from her side felt like a stab in Bob's chest. There it was again, that mix of emotions inside his chest.

"Okay, leave him," he said.

"Just because you say so?" she said sarcastically as she laughed, snorting through her nose. She didn't mean to be rude, but she wasn't liking the conversation and wanted to make her position clear. "I'm not leaving him," she said shaking her head subtly, "and he's not leaving me. Our love life is none of your business."

"A monster like him can't fall in love," he informed her, trying to talk some sense into her.

"He's not a monster, and he can," she said annoyed and hurt.

"It's impossible," he replied.

"No," she shook her head again, growing more and more annoyed and hurt.

"I mean- You're wonderful, but-" he hastened to correct himself, blushing slightly, closing his eyes tightly and holding up his hands.

"I know him better than you do Bob," she said.

"Better than me!?" He couldn't help laughing in the same way she laughed before, but the laughter didn't last long. "I just want to protect you," he said desperately now.

"I don't need your protection," she said annoyed.

"You're not safe with him!" he said, also annoyed.

"He's changed!" She opened her mouth to say something else, but was interrupted.

"Oh, you fixed him?" he said annoyed but with a smirk, laughing as he looked at her raising eyebrows.

Now she was the one stabbed in the chest. Her face softened, but not in amusement or joy, but in utter hurt. She looked at him as if he had betrayed her. Her eyes widened like discs as she listened in surprise at such audacity, but they also trembled, as did her narrowed lips. He quickly realised the mistake he had made, and in sorrow he approached her to try to take her hands and apologise, but she took a step back.

"...He talks to me better than you do," she said again, wrinkling her forehead as she subtly shook her head.

"𝖄𝖔𝖚'𝖗𝖊 𝖗𝖎𝖌𝖍𝖙 𝕽𝖔𝖇𝖊𝖗𝖙, 𝖞𝖔𝖚 𝖆𝖑𝖜𝖆𝖞𝖘 𝖒𝖆𝖐𝖊 𝖙𝖍𝖎𝖓𝖌𝖘 𝖜𝖔𝖗𝖘𝖊."

"Nonono," he said in despair at hearing that, overwhelmed by the situation and feeling himself losing control. His facial expression and body language changed in an instant, as did his tone. "Robert, the hero," he said sarcastically as he moved closer to her to calm her in his arms. "I swear I'd kill him if I could," he said as he kissed her head furiously, looking furiously at the nothingness behind her back.

"He means no harm..." she said softly as she hugged him tightly.

"But bad execution," he said as he pulled away from her to put his hands on her cheeks, making her stare at him. "Don't listen to him. I love you," he said seriously.

"I know..." she said, looking him in the eyes. "But..." She looked down, sorrowful.

"He's jealous, he thinks he's a better choice for you," he said as he released her cheeks to take her hands.

"What?" she asked confused.

"Yeah, he's been in love with you for a while. I've tried to contain it as much as I can."

"Oh..." she said crestfallen and thoughtful. "Don't torture him too much," she looked back into his eyes, "he's got enough, the poor guy," and he rolled his eyes as she let go of his hands, but he had no choice. "I'm sure he knows it from the others," she said annoyed as she leaned her buttocks on the edge of the desk, arms folded. "Maybe it's time to come forward..." She sighed deeply, thoughtfully and worriedly as he raised his arms and rested his head in his hands.

She didn't like having a secret relationship, but she was aware of the opinion others had of her partner. It made her sick to remember it now, but in the beginning she thought badly of him too. How things had changed... She fell completely at his feet, but she had no regrets — he gave her no reason to do so, surprisingly.

"I don't give a fuck about what they think of me," he said nonchalantly, "but I know that unfortunately you don't," he huffed in annoyance, lowering his arms. "Are you sure about that? You know their first impression of me wasn't a good one."

"Why is that?" She said sarcastically, to which he couldn't help but laugh, moving closer to her, dangerously close, and placing one of his hands on the side of her hips, dropping the weight of his body on his arm and ducking his head and gaze.

"I can behave, you know that," he said smirking, and also leering.

"You can when you shut your mouth because you want them to think you're Bob," she reminded him without returning his gaze, still slightly annoyed, but he knew it wasn't personal but with the situation.

"I'll try," he laughed quietly, "just for you," he said softer now, sweeter, "mm?" He asked as he lifted and moved her chin in his direction with the index finger of his free hand, causing her to look back at him. She couldn't help but smile, albeit tiredly, and nodded her head silently. But then he leaned closer to kiss her on the cheek, now provoking a genuine smile and a slight blush on her.

© trainer-from-unova / alicent burton | don’t plagiarise or translate any of my work

[korrasera]

Pretty sure I got blocked by self-loving-vampire after I dismantled her last round of arguments, but I'll try to put this here before responding to sysid-ace:

This is exactly what a motte & bailey argument is? You're using the word "transmisogyny exempt" (as in, free from transmisogyny) but when this is challenged you retreat to a secondary definition of "transmisogyny collateral damage", which you continue to treat as synonymous with "exempt" when convenient and you go out of your way to argue that suffering transmisogyny collateral damage doesn't count at all.

I said rhetorical dodge because this is you inventing an argument to attack, using the claim of motte & bailey to cover up for your invention. Here are a few points that highlight what I mean:

I haven't retreated from transmisogyny exempt, as you can see if you read what I said above.

Nothing you've said has challenged any of my points, as all of your responses boil down to you reasserting your original position.

I haven't said that being affected by collateral damage doesn't matter at all. What I've said, repeatedly, is that being affected by collateral damage is not the same thing as living as the target of bigotry.

You haven't challenged anything I've said, why would I need to retreat?

Your assertions require that we equate collateral damage with being targeted by bigotry. You haven't proven that assertion, you've just said that it's so and you've asked everyone reading this post to take it on faith.

That's not an argument, that's just an appeal.

How do you expect this would go in real life? Be serious. Do you think someone being assaulted by a transmisogynist over a dress is going to just be left alone as long as he identifies the right way? If a transmisogynist attacked me do you think I could get out of it by lying and telling them that I'm actually a trans man or something? You're not living in reality if you think your thoughts hold such magical power over what other people do to you.

This is you rejecting any argument or evidence that disagrees with your position because you aren't actually making an argument, you're asking people to adopt the beliefs you hold because they're emotionally important to you.

Yes, a man wearing a dress can protect himself from transmisogyny by broadcasting his identity. You can tell in the way that literally everyone responds when this happens. People will defend him because he's a man by asserting his identity. Bigots can react in all kinds of ways, from ignoring him as no longer a target, to shifting to bullying him to conform by threatening him for wearing a dress.

You already brought up the idea that a cishet man who's too feminine is going to be the target of homophobia, and yet this example is functionally the same thing. Is the guy being attacked for wearing a dress experiencing homophobia? Transmisogyny? Is he going to become functionally a gay man and a trans woman because a bigot attacks him with both homophobia and transmisogyny?

In other words, you aren't actually looking at how these things actually work, you're relying on your feelings about how you think the world is built and you're rejecting anything that contradicts your worldview.

It's very simple: Practically no one actually believes Elon Musk is a trans man. Transvestigators are just irrelevant even when you're actually trans. Their opinions have practically no consequence among people who touch grass.

Translation: Counter-examples are irrelevant when I don't think they should matter, even when they demonstrate that my logic doesn't hold water. Much like saying 'touch grass' as an insult, this suggests that you're approaching this like a teenager would. With arrogance and an unwillingness to consider that you might not understand something.

How you are categorized socially matters more than how you identify in your own head, yes. How is that even controversial to you? The one single reason I didn't get killed or kicked out of the house was that I concealed my thoughts and intentions so that people were just not aware I was trans at all. Most people just default to assuming everyone is cis.

How you are categorized socially is based on your identity. If you will be killed or ostrasized if your identity is known to other people, then it's the identity that is the dangerous part.

The reason that you say stuff like 'how is that even controversial to you' is an indication of the ignorance and arrogance I mentioned before. You can't conceive of the world being different to how you know, so you don't understand it when people like me illustrate the many ways that you're incorrect about these things.

1- Being forced to be in the closet is itself a form of transphobia, so no.

This is a contradiction in your position, but you can't see it. Yes, being forced to be in the closet is an example of oppression in society.

For your position to correct, that must be false and being forced to be in the closet must not be a form of oppression. You can't say that appearance is how oppression works and then say it's not.

This contradiction stems from your misunderstanding of the topic, that's why I've been pointing out these contradictions to you.

2- However, notice that it is still true that how people treat you is dramatically different depending on whether you're closeted or not. A lot of other people in the same situation I was in simply died, and the more visibly trans they are the more danger they are in. The most prominent trans rights activist in my country was assassinated the very same week I had my asylum hearing.

This is true and it's more evidence to support my point. You're conflating vulnerability with visibility. When people are less visible, it's harder for bigots to target them with overt violence. If you can't find someone you can't easily attack them directly, no?

That doesn't mean the less visible person is less affected by bigotry. That doesn't mean that they're any less vulnerable to bigotry. It just means that in the moment they might be able to hide better.

Carrying your logic to its conclusion means that the person who is less visible is therefore not being targted by bigotry, so is not actually marginalized in that case.

A closeted or stealth trans person clearly experiences transphobia, but I don't think you can argue that it is the same as being known to be trans. Understanding this truth is why I'm still alive, and why my parents know less about me than randos on the internet.

Yes, I can, because it is. To make it particularly clear, this is central to the problem here. You seem to honestly believe that trans people who aren't visibly trans are not being targeted the way that visibly trans people are. You are putting them in a separate class and saying that they don't have it as bad as those of us who don't pass.

That's literally just prejudice towards other trans people, disguised as your take on how oppression works.

This is also why outing people is considered so dangerous and why those laws where schools must inform parents if their child is trans are a huge deal. If identity was all that mattered then it would not make a difference if the parents were aware or not.

This isn't just incorrect, it's highlighting your bias here because you're literally arguing against yourself with this point but I don't think you see it.

Outing someone ensures that they become highly visible. They face violence because, despite being not visibly trans, their identity is what's under threat. If apperance was what mattered in the way you say, outing them shouldn't matter because even if their identity was revealed they don't actually look trans and therefore aren't affected by bigotry the way that visible trans people are.

This is a whole lot of highly ironic unearned confidence from someone who hasn't read the core books on the subject and who thinks referencing academics is just an "appeal to authority", as opposed to just referencing nothing at all and making stuff up.

Did I tell you whether I've read those books? Or are you just assuming that because I didn't rely on quoting them to backup my point?

And the reason that it's an appeal to authority is because that's literally what pointing to an academic writing on the topic is doing. You aren't making an argument and supporting it on your own, you're pointing to the work Serano and Peterson did and saying, "Hey, they agree with me, so you have to agree with me."

Have you ever heard someone explain that all argument comes back to an appeal to authority? This is why. None of us do all of the tests and studies and experimentation ourselves, so at some point we're all citing the work of other people who have done that work. In asking people to take what those experts cite as proof, we are making an appeal to authority.

The difference here is that you can't actually formulate your own argument in a way that holds any water, so you're substituting academic sources because you don't have any evidence or reasoning.

How exactly did you prove your assertions? What evidence have you put forward for anything? What sources have you cited?

I proved my points with all of the supported assertions I already provided upthread, you can re-read it if you like. I've also dismantled every one of your points by demonstrating how they don't match what happens in reality, how they're not internally consistent or logical, and how you've had to contradict yourself several times as you've tried to make your points.

And I haven't had to cite any sources because I'm not making an argument that relies on any sources, my argument is built almost entirely out of reasoning, logic, and cursory observation. Like pointing out the reactions to Imane Khelif, for example, that just a matter of public record and you don't need to cite a source to invoke that controversy.

Because from my point of view you just sound like you think the true way to learn about transmisogyny is not books, studies, or articles but your friends' tumblr posts. It's not a serious position.

Yes, I get that. That's because you aren't yet willing to consider that you can be wrong about something and assume you're speaking as the authority on a topic you don't yet understand.

This is how the Dunning-Kruger Effect works. When we don't know very much about something we don't have enough knowledge to know what we don't know. Unfortunately, some people react to that by thinking they know a lot more than they do and then assume anyone who disagrees with them knows nothing. That's where arrogance comes from, people who don't understand something needing to lecture everyone else, even though they're talking to people that know a lot more than they do.

are you tme or tma

"i know you're nonbinary but which of these two arbitrarily constructed gender categories do you fit into" genuinely are you having a laugh

[elliesglock]

AI BABY ANALYSIS

so most of this live is spent without pazzi because they off doing sum freaky nasty in their dorm room or sum and can't join the party. big shocker i know. since there's not much from pazzi in this live this is gonna be a tiny analysis. hopefully you know how i like to yap. so welcome to part 458493 of redoing my analyses cause i nuked my account.

i'm gonna post the part 2 of the live because that's when paige and azzi decide to come up for air and join the gang. all time stamps in this analysis will be from that part 2 video i will link. okay guys girls and theys. these bitches are a freaky mess. 0:12 so everybody's vibing right and watching aubrey edits and then they start looking off into the distance and waving their hands for whoever just walked in to come in. now they're screaming and yelling and going NUTSOOOO right. and to me it's a teasy thing like they always do. they always scream and yell when paige and azzi join lives cause that's how we are and they think it's funny. but the energy gives this friend group's couple just walked in and everybody's excited, yelling and screaming to me funny. even aubrey is like yall have got to chill. they first start yelling at paige and personally i think it's because azzi's hidden behind her in the door and they think it's just her. their faces to me are like girl you're here but where's ur other half bookie! then eventually (i'm assuming azzi makes a face and comes into their sight due to jana's banshee screaming) because they all laugh and say azziii! and they don't look surprised at all. they're all so casual with the idea that paige and azzi walked in to together, this is an everyday thing. it's always assumed that where you see one you'll find the other because they just linger around each other that much. that's what this whole live gives. they off camera for most of it but it's sooooo noticeable how their friends act around them and treat them like a couple cause that's how they know them to be, insert example one how they react to them walking in. 0:30 azzi and paige poke their faces in the live to tease us and it's sooooo cute and why do they lowkey look exactly the same. idk this soulmate bs really messing around with them. kayla goes up to hug them and it feels sooo coupley, like i said being the friend groups couple. the friends all come to hug and say hi and ask how yall are doing because the love between you pulls people in, if that makes sense? i find it so sweet kayla went to hug them like they're everybody's moms who are in love with each other and in the best relationship known to man. it's also so prevalent in how jana looks at them, she just admires them so much it's so apparent in her eyes. because who wouldn't be happy watching their friends be that happy with their person. UGH OKAY WERE MOVING ON IM SICK. 1:00-1:19 alright yall im gonna get a little sick and twisted here and talk about the significance IN MY LIFE AND THOUGHTS of whatever the fuck is going w paige's hair in this live. it's in this like thrown up low bun kinda thing. and in a way it reminds me of a bun you put ur hair in when ur going down on.......yk. like u toss ur hair back and put it up quickly to get started and thats what her hair gives. she looks so lesbianism in this live im goofed. she also has this slow kinda walk to her and this goofy, playful energy around her that tells me she just got some before she walked in. this might be insane to put but im just saying it hardens my theory that they were busy doing something before they came to join. maybe kayla texted them to come over mid session and they came after yk. 1:19 also azzi kinda lingers in the back when paige goes to goof off with aubrey and it so gives she's watching her wife goof off with her buds and she's like shaking her head but in a lovey dovey wife way. idk just my projection but it def gives that. also everybody has this sus and funny ass look on their face watching paige walk cause hg is struggling bad. okay again im gonna be insane and say something, but to me paige's whole demeanor and look and fit and everything about her screams she just got kissed silly in bed for a bit, like she JUST rolled out of bed with her girl and came straight over. this is crazy to say but her energy gives she's been heavily loved that day and idk that sound weird but i can just see azzi holding, kissing, and loving on her in bed before they came and she still has that meek,

shy (only azzi) kinda facade on.

3:10 and this might constitute the teasy behavior they display in this next bit. so paige is talking to jana and then realizes she doesn't have her phone. idk if azzi is scrolling on it (she prob is) or if it's just laying near azzi, but paige asks azzi if she can have her phone. also the way she says please ugh that's your girl i know, i know ur so polite to her. this has been pointed out before on different accounts, but it seems as though azzi grabs her arm or hand and holds it and starts playing it. almost like she's playing with her fingers and hands because u can see paige's arm move. and she gets SUPERRRR tense like the kinda tense you get when ur pretty girlfriend is being touchy and teasy. she zones out because that's just what paige does when azzi touches her, it's literally like she's powering up everytime her girl even gets near her. and she's staring at the phone screen almost absentmindedly while her attention is subconsciously on azzi touching her. she has this awkward tense body language at the same time that doesn't paint a very single and not in a relationship picture lemme tell u. i just really love how paige responds to azzi. she's so sensitive to touch when it comes to her and it shows to me she really loves her and goes nuts when azzi even does anything close to fufilling her love language which i personally think is touch. and omg ill never forget the look on her face after she asks a few more times if azzi would please hand her phone to her. she accepts azzi just wants to hold her hand and she gets this little grinny/smirky look on her face like mmmm yeah that's my girl. LIKE SHES SO SMUG WHEN AZZI IS TOUCHY OMG I LOVE IT SO BAD. it's one of my favs cause paige really enjoys that shit. she wants to be claimed and she wants azzi to initiate, as one does yk, because it FEELS good to be wanted by someone you love so much. we never have to worry about it that spark ever goes away or if they get more casual as the years go on cause a sign of a healthy couple is ALWAYS if they still get nervous and smiley when their partner gets near/touchy w them. 3:24 eventually azzi lets go of paige's hand after she gives that look and she puts her hand down next to her. it also just screams to me that azzi DID have her arm or her hand because why else would paige just keep her arm there for no reason. after this, azzi seems so eager to give paige her phone back cause she knowsssss she's been touchy w her girl all day long and she just wanted to sneak in a little extra too around the familiarity of their friends. i ain't hating ur game azzi i know it.

3:34 now this next part :(((. it makes me so emotional omg im about to get my period but UGH it's literally so perfect, and sweet, and human the way they love each other. makes me want to put their love in a jar and never let anyone else have it. jana is showing paige a tik tok after she gets her phone back. she clicks on it and paige kinda reads through the slides and then her whole face lights up. SPECIFICALLY when a certain slide pops up she gets this huge shocked, happy face and laughs. now this specific slide is very dear to me because it's an AGENDA. it's an ai baby of what paige's kids would look like and i honestly think the original creator was being messy because they all look like paige and azzi's kids and not like one she just put in a random generator. ANYWHO. everybody around the phone looks at the video and smiles so wide at it. and it's very evident this is something that touches paige a lot cause she seems SO almost appreciative in her looks towards azzi but we'll get into that in a second. THIS MESSY BITCH JANA goes to the slide that paige was smiling at and says "this is yalls" AND NOT ONLY THAT BUT kayla's i don't have a poker face ass looks STRAIGHT at azzi as jana says it. perfectly describing to us whose kid it is. WE KNOW WHICH COUPLE IT IS THANKS KAYLA. idk the friends reactions get me cause again they admire their relationship so much and cheer it on so much that they'll send videos to paige about this being "their" kid. now paige just makes me so emotional during this clip and idk if it's the music in the background or if i wanna be loved this hard but the way she looks at azzi :( azzi's kinda confused bc she hasn't read through the whole tt yet and paige doesn't really wanna show the live what tt video it is because i honestly think she wants to keep it to herself. but paige looks up at azzi almost mapping her out and you can SEE how bad she wants a future w azzi reflects in her eyes when she looks at her. she sees the ai baby and she's like omg i want a life w this girl so bad. STOP, DEADASS IM STOPPING THE ANALYSIS THIS IS BS 💔. ugh one day these beautiful girls will be blessed w a marriage and babies and i'll be cheering them on so bad :(. i know they want it and i can see how much they want to have a future w one another and i think that's why this live makes me so emotional.

so it's a little more quiet from now on, i did yap so ofc there's more for yall to read and i stretched out this small ass live. i'm so bad w yapping my apologies. 7:11 paige kinda gives us permission to look at her girl for a second cause she wants everybody to see her so she turns to the camera to show everyone azzi the princess is here! she's like guys look at my gf!! she's so pretty! but you're only allowed to look at her when i say so! okay greedy ass we get it. oh look at me i'm paige bueckers and have an amazing relationship w this beautiful woman i've been in love with since i was born like OKAYYYYY.

grand finale folks:

they don't kiss BYE!

8:43 okay i'm kidding. now i don't know what was decided between paige and azzi because these next sequence of events tells me azzi decided to stay back for a second instead of leaving w paige. and ill explain why. paige waves goodbye to the camera and shuffles past everyone to wear azzi is standing off camera. the girls are watching tik toks and its very loud. i guess paige assumed since the music was on she could sneak a good bye kiss to azzi real quick but she gets caught oopsieeeeeee. personally at 8:48 i hear the kiss. it's def a goodbye kiss that paige is giving azzi as she says to aubrey she's going to go do some organizing or unloading or sum and she's leaving. it's like a bye baby i'll see u later kinda peck that accidentally gets caught cause they're so close to the camera. and ofc because this is always a teller, everybody's reaction around them makes me think they're like oh shit did the camera pick that up. cause kayla peeps it cause she can obv see more than we do and her eyes kinda widen before she looks back down at the phone to give them privacy and not draw attention. ice brady was in everybody's spirits this night. but yes i think paige kissed azzi rq to say goodbye and maybe said she loves her or sum like that. it's a quick kiss cause they're seeing each very soon again and that's the vibes.

here's what everyone anticipated the long awaited ai live analysis. hope you enjoyed and happy reading! feel free to leave ur thoughts as well pookies!! 💗

[toskarin]

how do you find new music? i feel like you've never even once posted a song i recognized (which makes sense because i'm terrible at finding new music but it's still impressive)

there's a few ways I go about it! here's a bit of a battery on that

as much as actually using it for intended function is the mindkiller, rateyourmusic is very handy for browsing for stuff that may or may not be on conventional streaming platforms. people love to curate and recommend, and if you find people whose taste you agree with (or lists that pertain to stuff you're curious about) you can sift through until you find something cool

I'd say lastfm is also decent for this, but if you're just looking for new music, it overlaps rym for this use case enough that you'd probably only really have reason to use it if you got something out of scrobbling

bandcamp's another good one, both for ease of publishing when it comes to getting smaller albums online and for the way that profiles work. if scrolling through tags you're interested in and clicking on releases doesn't get you what you're after, you can always click people's profiles and see what else they're buying

if you're into more underground genres, there's probably some indie labels dedicated to them somewhere out there. if you can find an indie label that's agreeable enough in its signings for your taste, then you can keep up with them that way. genre specialised labels can be a godsend here

I find following tape-focused indie labels to be great for metal because there's inherently a selection process of "the label owner likes this album enough to want to prepare a tape run for it," and if your tastes align with the label owner's, you can get some great selections that way

keeping up with the musicians themselves is another big one. if the genre you're after is played live, look at who your favourite musicians are sharing stages with, check who they're shouting out on instagram, generally just keep up with them on social media to see what they're up to

and of course, keep up with your friends. discovering music can absolutely be a social activity. have some friends you shoot recommendations to, have them shoot recommendations back to you, and get increasingly focused-in on each other's musical tastes as you go

[gentlemanjuniper]

Asexuality, Fic, and Murderbot

I'm seeing some heated posts on the tags essentially threatening fans who are interested in writing romance-adjacent fic and I'm getting nervous about the tone that this is striking. As a real-life asexual I have seen my experiences be policed a lot into categories of 'acceptable' asexuality (aka, no romance for you, no life partnerships for you, or are you really ace?) and I really hope that this fandom won't, in an effort to uplift ace and aro people, become hostile to people exploring those identities with nuance and complexity.

I can only speak for myself, but I don't feel like people writing 'ship' fic (say, ART/Murderbot) are disrespecting or disregarding me. I feel like they are asking really interesting questions that brings them closer to my experience: how might two asexual beings navigate a relationship? What might a non-traditional, non-heteronormative definition of 'romance' or 'partnership' look like for two robots whose feelings aren't mappable onto human romantic or sexual feelings? What might intimacy look like without sex? What are the boundaries between romantic love and platonic love anyway, how do we define them, and how can a world of sentient robots allow us to think through those questions through the symbolic space of fiction? I think that stuff is really interesting BECAUSE I'm ace!!!

Idk, I'm not the voice of all aces everwhere obviously. I'm just really hoping that this fandom doesn't become so hostile to people writing fic that we lock ourselves into an extremely narrow definition of acceptable asexuality*. My own relationship to asexuality has changed so much over my lifetime and has involved negotiation with attraction, romance, and sex. It makes me bummed to think we're already policing this stuff. *Focusing on asexuality here because I don't personally know, having only read the first three books so far, if Murderbot is definitively aromantic or not, since this entire conversation assumes that any relationship to romance would be through a bot lens anyway and not human in nature to begin with. Is there a robot equivalent to romance that is distinctly non-human in nature, utterly resisting human binaries of romantic/aromantic? If so what would it look like? This is the stuff I want fandom to not be heckled out of exploring!!!

[nostalgebraist]

on exordia (a "rant"?)

Yesterday I said I'd write a longer post about Exordia. Here it is.

This will be... sort of review-shaped, but not quite a review? I dunno.

I'll try to avoid spoilers, although some amount of (largely minor or indirect) spoilage will be inevitable.

As I said in my earlier posts, there was a lot I liked about this book, but also a lot that frustrated me. This post will focus almost entirely on the latter; it will be a big long list of gripes, which I'm posting mostly to relieve a certain mental pressure that built up over the course of the reading experience.

I want to clarify at the outset that the negative angle here doesn't faithfully represent by overall stance toward the book.

Yes, I often found it extremely annoying, but it was a lot of fun, too – often it was both, at the same time. I am normally a pretty slow reader, but I sped through Exordia's 500+ pages very quickly; even when I was annoyed with this or that feature of the book, I was pleasantly engrossed, too. And I feel like writing out a bunch of thoughts about it, which has to mean something good, right? Even if those thoughts are critical in nature.

----

Why do I feel like writing so much about the book? And why do I care so much about the fact that it was "frustrating"? (There are lots of bad books out there; sometimes, I read them; in itself, this is just business as usual, and not worthy of note.)

I think it comes down to what I said in my first post (see link above). Because Exordia feels so much like something I would absolutely love, I feel more incensed about its flaws than I would be about the more thoroughgoing flaws of something that was simply, wholly, and straightforwardly bad. There's a tantalizing sense of unrealized potential, unfulfilled promises.

Exordia would be so good if it were good.

----

Talking about this book's flaws is difficult, because most of them are closely related to one another, and it's difficult to break down that big ball of tangled-up string into manageable chunks.

But there are a few things that are relatively self-contained, so I'll pick them off first. (The main course starts in section "3" below.)

Oh, also: this ended up extremely long. As in, just over 10,000 words. If you wanted to read 10,000 words of Exordia critique today then this is your lucky day I guess.

----

1. frontloading

Exordia has a very strong opening. When I was 30 pages in, I was almost certain that I would end up loving this book and recommending it to everyone I knew.

Ha! Little did I know!

----

The book is divided into five sections called "Acts."

Act One is very brief. It ends on page 38, less than 10% of the way into the book.

And it's very, very good. Or more precisely, it's very, very promising, as a way to begin a story.

Right off the bat, we get two instantly charming and intriguing characters, with an instantly charming and intriguing dynamic.

Then – starting barely five pages in – we are suddenly assailed by a rapid-fire barrage of incredibly cool sci-fi shit. Bizarre neologisms, alien biology and psychology, quasi-theological revelations about physics and the early universe! "Narrative prisons"! "Weapons that mark their victims for damnation"! An "observatory" that can see the afterlife!

All three of those examples I just quoted are from one single page (p. 21).

And Exordia is over 500 pages long.

I was like: holy shit. If this is what it's like now, what is the rest of it going it be like?

Well. Now I've read the rest of it, so I know. What was it like, then?

----

What it's like is this:

On page 38, Act One ends.

Act Two begins by switching over to a completely different set of characters.

In Act One, it seemed obvious that we were meeting the book's main characters. All the usual conventions of novelistic storytelling were practically screaming at us: behold, the protagonists! Better figure out how you feel about them in short order, reader, because you'll be strapped in with them for the long haul.

But – psych! Turns out that we are not strapped in with the Act One characters for the long haul. Eventually they do show up again, but they spend most of the book on the sidelines due to a succession of plot devices which seem designed specifically to keep them there.

The fast pace slows to a crawl.

We discover that we're in a completely different genre: not wild-eyed cosmic science fiction, but Tom Clancy military-techno-thriller. And so a large fraction of the text, by volume, is stuff like this:

"What's up?" Mike Jan asks, like they've just bumped into each other at the gym. "Something bad?" "Something undetermined," Erik says. "One of the EBADs broke. One more check, then we go in." So they do a final test on their MOPP protection, which is an absolute nightmare in the rising sun. Masks that fog up if the seal isn't perfect, baggy JSLIST oversuits, paper wraps that turn bad colors if they contact known agents (what good will that do?), gloves and booties over their boots. All perfect for poaching them in their own sweat. "Can't see shit in here," Ricardo says, without unhappiness: just the condition of things. "I know. Mike, bodyguard Anna. Skyler, get the drone up. Ricardo, load a mouse. All call signs, Zero-Six, now proceeding into the target area. Out." They walk straight toward Blackbird. Skyler flies a quadcopter drone ahead: a Teal Drones Golden Eagle with a fifty-minute charge. Ricardo Garcia follows its course, waving a ten-foot spear with a live mouse in a plastic lattice canister. The idea is that the mouse will die in time to warn the rest of them. "Pretty out here," Mike Jan remarks. "Looks like a Windows desktop." Of course Mike has never changed a default desktop wallpaper in his life.

I'm sure some people like this kind of thing – it's an established genre, after all, and it sells well. But it's not really my jam, and (more importantly) it's not what the opening led me to think I was getting myself into.

(Sidenote: the last two lines in that quote have nothing to do with the point I'm making, but I included them anyway, because they confuse me and I want to know whether I'm missing something that would make sense of them. "Has never changed a default desktop wallpaper in his life" is apparently meant to be some kind of telling character detail, and it's delivered as though we'd immediately grasp its significance. But what IS its significance? "Oh, we all know those guys – the ones who don't change their desktop wallpapers. You know what I'm talking about, wink wink." Huh???)

The new characters are mostly U.S. military/government/intelligence guys (at this stage anyway – later on there will be even more new characters, and then more, etc). The book tries its hardest to make us care about them, but it's fighting an uphill battle because it has to work against our frustration at the bait-and-switch that has been pulled on us.

Plus, frankly, they're just not all that interesting. Sorry.

Sooner or later, we realize that Act One was the odd one out. When Act Three arrives, it's just "Act Two: The Sequel" – and so on. Except in a few parts very close to the end, the book never recaptures the energy and wonder that it used as a hook in Act One.

It gets worse. Remember how I said that Act One rapidly reveals a bunch of sci-fi lore to the reader?

Well, a large fraction of Acts Two through Five are a mystery story in which the new, less-interesting characters study a classic BDO and try to figure out what its deal is, plus a bunch of related ancillary mysteries. And in some cases, the reader can guess the answers long before the characters get there, because the answer is something we were told back in Act One.

(This is only possible, by the way, due to the previously mentioned sidelining of the Act One characters. These characters re-appear, and the other protagonists get to know them, but for most of the book the two groups are unable or unwilling to communicate for some reason or another. If these communication blockers weren't there, the Acts Two+ guys could just ask the Act One guys what was going on... and the book would be several hundred pages shorter.)

This is a baffling structural choice.

I have no idea how one could possibly try to justify it; I simply can't think of any arguments in its favor, even bad ones.

2. the path, grant!

This isn't even a complaint, per se. Just something about my reading experience that seems like it should get mentioned in this post, somewhere.

In a lot of ways – big and small, important and trivial – this book feels weirdly close to the kind of thing that I would write myself.

Indeed, it feels weirdly close (in a lot of ways, big and small etc.) to some things that I did in fact write, myself.

Namely, Floornight and Almost Nowhere.

I'm not claiming that Seth Dickinson ripped me off, or anything. It seems very unlikely that he's read any of my work, or even heard of it. Like I said in my earlier post, it's probably all just a matter of shared influences and/or pure coincidence.

Still, I have to talk about it, because I couldn't stop noticing it.

In the first ten pages, I learned: this is a story about first contact with aliens. It involves a lot of exotic invented terminology, and the worldbuilding includes novel connections between fundamental physics, psychology, and ethics.

And I thought: wow, this sure is right up my alley. Nice!

On page 11, the book started talking about the Shahnameh.

Ten pages later: souls are real! But this is arguably bad, because it's been used as the basis for exploitative and dystopian technologies.

I dunno, it's not like I has a monopoly on that concept. (I stole part of it from Madoka, for one thing.)

Nor, as I happens, do I have a monopoly on the concept of "wacky eccentric scientists who live in a remote setting apart from most of humanity, studying Lovecraft-style mind-bending entities from the beyond." That's just taking well-worn, well-liked tropes and combining them in a natural, appealing way. (And what's more, I stole part of it from Annihilation.)

But in any case – monopoly or no – Exordia does in fact have those wacky scientists, and that remote zone, and those creepy, soul-physics-related objects of study.

It also has a character named "Anna" – with a sort-of-similar role in the story to Almost Nowhere's Anne.

And a character named "Rosamaria," who...

But I'm sure you can guess how that sentence ends.

Some of this stuff is hard to talk about without violating my rule about spoilers.

But, uh, that said – remember that big scene about 2/3 of the way through Floornight, the one with a raised platform that gets used as a stage? The one in which [HUGE FLOORNIGHT SPOILER] happens?

And then the chapter right after that, which has an unusual name, because it portrays things from an unusual point of view?

Oh, you haven't read Floornight. Well, then. Do you remember that scene near the end of Exordia...

Some of the "connections" I thought I saw are flimsier than this. Some aren't really much of anything, in retrospect. Early on we learn that the aliens have some technology called "the way of knives," and I thought: ah, just like AN's "knife-power"! But in fact the two things have nothing else in common. And surely I don't have a monopoly on the word "knife."

I dunno. How about this? Is this anything?

The Ubiet burbles away in her arms: clarification and amplification of aretaic event in self-like past, recursive self-caricature by protoprecosmic influence, WARNING WARNING WARNING pathology! pathology! pathology! pathology! pathology! Until that word, pathology, starts to sound like path-ology, the study of paths. The discovery of the way.

3. the geeky badass hive mind

Okay, here begins the part I called "the main course" above, where I lay out the really big thing that irked me about Exordia.

Hmm... where to start...

There is a problem with the characterization in this book. There is also a problem with the narration in the book.

These two problems are sort of the same, and the fact that they are sort-of-the-same is itself a noteworthy symptom of the problem.

Whoa, whoa – too broad, too abstract! Let's start with something small and concrete. Something that anyone who's read the book will have noticed, and which I am definitely not the first person to complain about.

So: Exordia is full of geek culture references.

The characters make incessant references to specific sci-fi/fantasy books, anime series, video games, and popular movies and TV shows. The 3rd-person narration also does this frequently.

It gets pretty "cringe" at times.

Here's a very early (and hence memorable) example. Anna, our Act One pseudo-protagonist, is learning the deep secrets of the universe from a snake-headed alien. The alien tells her that souls exist.

And in response, Anna says:

"Souls? You mean immortal souls? Are those real? Is this some kind of, like, Evangelion thing?"

I was like: seriously? Seriously? Come the fuck on.

But a moment later, I got my balance. I thought: wait, I see what this is. This is a character trait. It's a feature of this person, not the book/world.

Anna is a person who makes these kinds of nerdy, "cringe" references at inappropriate times, just like (as we learn in the first few pages) she is a person who has been fired from multiple jobs for being too abrasive, too upfront with people. That tracks. There's a coherent person, here, and I'm getting to know her.

Ha! Little did I know!

Act One ends, and Act Two starts.

We are introduced to our first "Acts Two+ protagonist": Clayton Hunt, Deputy National Security Advisor in the book's alt-universe version of the Obama administration.

Clayton is a slick charmer, a skilled and versatile liar, a power-hungry schemer who deliberately orchestrated his rise through the ranks of the National Reconnaissance Office bureaucracy. He is – if we are to judge by his (disturbing) past deeds, which are recounted as crucial backstory – a cold-hearted psycho sonuvabitch who's way, way too eager to kill people "for the greater good." At first glance, he seems to have nothing at all in common with Anna (too honest for her own good, a basically normal person struggling to keep her basically normal life afloat, etc).

Does Clayton make nerdy, often "cringe" geek culture references – incessantly, come hell or high water? You bet he does.

We meet Clayton's once-and-future best friend and right-hand man, Major Erik Wygaunt: Rhodes Scholar, badass soldier, doctrinaire quasi-deontological moralist. Totally different guy from either of the forenamed – or so one would think.

But in practice, in what he actually does and says? Erik is exactly the same sort of argumentative, obscure-trivia-knowing, geek-culture-referencing dork as Clayton and Anna and – yes – virtually every other character in the book.

Here's a typical passage, from page 86. Clayton (dialogue in italics) is in conversation with Erik (no italics):

“My guess is that Blackbird is dispersing some kind of communication agent. It seeks out information-dense substrate and … interfaces with it. Tries to use it to grow a message or a system. It’s trying to talk to us by amplifying patterns it finds. Not how I’d go about first contact. But how I might do it if I were very, very strange.” Erik can’t help making a technical protest: like they’re both optimizing their colonies in Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri, arguing over the details of the science fictional technologies in play. “Then it should be bursting open every cell in our bodies. If it’s looking for information coding, then DNA would be the first thing it’d find. Seven hundred megabytes of digital data in each cell.”

By this point, I had long since discarded my "characterization for Anna" hypothesis. I'd gotten the hang of what was really going on.

And so I didn't even blink when, on page 103, a character is introduced as "Captain Davoud Qasemi of the Islamic Republic of Iran Air Force" – and he immediately begins rattling off the names of specific video games he liked as a kid, rambling about the homosexual overtones in Top Gun, and saying things like "It's marvelously ironic! It's so classically ironic that it's invented pederasty and gone to war with Sparta."

That's just how everyone in the world talks, apparently.

Everyone in the world. This book is about a Kurdish village that is suddenly crisscrossed with deployments from the U.S. and Russia and China etc., in what seem likely to be the last days of the human race; it is, in large part, about the culture clashes and strained attempts at international collaboration that result from this arrangement.

But the characters are helped along in their efforts by the fact that there is at least one culture to which they all belong.

They would all seem perfectly at home sitting on a big couch in a dorm common room at some nerdy liberal arts college, nominally watching a movie but in fact talking over most of the dialogue as they strive to out-do one another in the game of pointing out its scientific and historical inaccuracies.

Now, don't get me wrong. This is a perfectly fine way to be.

But it is not the only one.

----

It is probably clear that I did not like this aspect of the book. But why?

Well, there is the thing I just mentioned, about how it undermines the attempt at portraying culture clashes. But that's not the only problem, and it's not really the main problem.

What else, then?

In his (in)famous essay about "hysterical realism," James Wood wrote (my emphasis):

By and large, these are not stories that could never happen (as, say, a thriller is often something that could never happen); rather, they clothe real people who could never actually endure the stories that happen to them. They are not stories in which people defy the laws of physics (obviously, one could be born in an earthquake); they are stories which defy the laws of persuasion. This is what Aristotle means when he says that in storytelling “a convincing impossibility” (say, a man levitating) is always preferable to “an unconvincing possibility” (say, the possibility that a fundamentalist group in London would continue to call itself KEVIN).

Exordia is not hysterical realism, and it contains plenty of events which deliberately contravene the (known) laws of physics. Nonetheless, while reading it, I kept thinking of that line about "defying the laws of persuasion."

In the case of any one character, the traits I'm pointing to would be perfectly acceptable. (We saw this with my reaction to Anna, above.)

What's more, they would be acceptable even if they went against the expectations set by other attributes of the same character. The world is huge, and contains billions; every oddball combination of traits you can imagine quite possibly does exist, at least in someone, somewhere.

And besides: as Wood says, the "laws of persuasion" are not the same as the "laws of physics." The requirements needed for something to "feel plausible," in a work of fiction, are not the same as the requirements needed for something to be plausible, in real life.

But there is a set of requirements in the case of fiction. It's just a different one.

Meet the terms of the contract, and the reader will happily "suspend their disbelief," even in the face of actions and dialogue that would be extraordinarily unlikely in the real world. But if you break the contract? Then piling on more "realism," more geeky period/setting detail and laws-of-physics plausibility, will only heighten the disconnect and slide things further into the uncanny valley.

It's like watching a 3D 60-fps movie, back when Hollywood was going through its simultaneous 3D and 60-fps fads.

Yes, yes, there is technically more information, it's technically closer to the signal your senses would receive from the real world. But you have broken the terms of the illusion, suspended the suspension of disbelief, and so I am no longer seeing your world and characters, anymore. I am seeing the remaining gaps in your inevitably flawed illusion.

On page 136 of Exordia, we meet a female Kurdish shepherd. She's an extremely minor character, really just a horror-movie extra who's there to get picked off (ambiguously, "off-screen") by the spooky powers at play, and thereby give the reader an (ambiguous, tantalizing) hint of what those powers can do.

But, as is the convention in such matters, Seth Dickinson gives her just a smidgen of characterization, to humanize her before she goes.

What kind of person is she, this poor doomed shepherdess?

You already know the answer, don't you?

Tonight she thinks only of her sheep. Oil smuggling paid for her phone and the rifle on her back, but this flock is part of the village’s common wealth, and she is responsible for it. Or so her mother is always reminding her. And even if she watches too much anime and spends too much time getting into fights on Facebook, she wants to do her mother proud.

She watches too much anime? Fine. Maybe she does. Maybe she does.

Maybe – if it were only her. If the seams in the illusion were not showing through so plainly.

I'm a fairly cooperative reader. The implausible and the impossible do not bother me. I am capable of believing just about anything.

But not like this.

----

The characters of Exordia are geeks. That much I've covered already.

They are also badasses, every one of them. Geeky badasses.

That's the phrase that came to mind, pretty early on, when I was trying to formulate what bothered me about these guys. "Every single character in this book is a geeky badass," I thought.

I'm sorry. It's a very, uh, "cringe" phrase. But that too is apposite.

What do I mean, "badasses"?

For one thing I mean that they are hypercompetent. They know all kinds of stuff – geek culture trivia, academic esoterica in seemingly every discipline, hands-on working knowledge of whichever military or scientific devices the plot needs them to use. They are quick on their feet, relentlessly thoughtful and logical, cool under pressure (or hot under pressure in an impressive and charismatic manner), capable of creative problem-solving.

They never fail.

Nothing fazes them. Or rather: when they are fazed, it is brief, and they look great doing it, and it doesn't matter in the end anyway.

Many of them have dark, traumatic personal histories (exciting! dramatic! potentially sexy!), but however bad their trauma, it does not dare disturb their hypercompetence when the latter is at work.

This book is about the cataclysmic end of the world-as-we-know-it. It contains a staggering quantity of violence and death: on-screen and off-screen, mass-scale and intimate, dealt out by a diverse range of human and inhuman actors and weapons. But no one ever just breaks down in the face of it all. Or rather: if they do "break down," they do so only briefly, and they look great doing it, and...

One of the main characters is, explicitly, an alcoholic with PTSD. But this doesn't really ever come up as a serious obstacle, either to her or to anyone else. Mostly, it just means that she jokes around with the other characters about being the town drunk, sometimes, in between one moment of epic badassery and the next.

One might argue that this is sort of... I don't know, "tasteless"? I don't know. I had some sort of problem with it, anyway, that or some other one.

For a book that is so thoroughly about nerds, it is remarkable how little it contains in the way of humiliation. Of straight-up, unalloyed uncoolness.

As always, things start off with uncharacteristic promise. In the first few pages, Anna loses her job, then breaks up with her boyfriend in a very awkward manner and instantly regrets it.

This, remember, is the same character who says that cringe line about souls and Evangelion. So far, so good! We've gone from zero to #relatable in record time. We have a confirmed blorbo, stable under laboratory conditions. Sources familiar with the situation report that she is "a hot mess" and "literally me."

But that's all in Act One (may it rest in peace). Soon enough, Anna is taken up into the geeky badass hive mind, and from then on she too is never seen to fail. Except in a cool way, sometimes.

Soon enough she is just like the rest of them. Quick-witted, effortlessly articulate, situationally aware, ready for anything, an endless font of witty geek banter.

Is this bad? Why?

I'm not sure. Maybe I just don't like it. Maybe there's nothing more than that.

But... okay, look. This is a book about the likely end of the human race, about humans trying to work together in the face of cultural differences and mutual mistrust. It wants you to hope. In its moments of triumph, it wants you to feel proud of your whole species.

And, in the name of these goals, it tries so very hard to humanize its characters. It tries, it tries! They have so many traits, so much specificity! They will tell you all about their home towns, their cultures, their hopes and dreams and fears! Look, look, the book says: surely these are people? Look at them, they're doing so much people stuff!

But at the moment where "being human" might entail "not being effortlessly cool and badass literally all of the time," the book suddenly relents. That cannot be allowed, of course. Every threshold can be crossed, except that one.

Maybe it's just me, but I can't relate. I'm not a badass. I do embarrassing shit all the time, and I'll probably just go on doing it until the day I die. I don't think I could hold my own with these demigods in the anime-referencing game, much less the high-pressure-military-operations game.

I guess "people" are like this, sometimes. But only because the world is big, and so for every X, there are some people who are X, somewhere.

This book is about the human race, except it isn't. To be human is (among other things) to kind of suck, and no one in this book kind of sucks, not even the military psychopaths, not even blorbo-candidate Anna.

On page 10, Anna asks her alien how she views humanity, and the alien's characterization is humorously blunt, underwhelming, and undignified:

“You’re a species of gangly distance runners, adapted to sweat and throw stuff. You like watching each other fuck. [...] “You are wired for small social groups, so all human organization degenerates into power trading and gossip between a tractably sized elite, no matter the stakes. You have two sources of authority—dominance and prestige—which conflict in interesting ways. Something killed most of you, and so your survivors are very inbred. Very similar. Your meat smells the same.”

Act One really is so very different from the rest, isn't it?

Ah, those were the days!

4. differentiation of hive mind tissue

In the last section, I argued that the characters were overly similar. Possessed of the same "geeky badass" traits in a way that defied "the laws of persuasion."

That is true, but it's not to say the characters don't have distinguishing traits. They definitely have those.

But even here, in the realm of differences, something feels... off. To me, anyway.

It's sort of like this:

To a zeroth-order approximation, every character in Exordia is identical. Just another dollop of homogeneous geeky badass paste, scooped up from the same wellspring as all the rest.

That's only the zeroth-order approximation. Look closer, and you can see differences.

What kinds of differences?

Well, here's an example. There's a character named Chaya. Who is she? Besides a geeky badass, I mean?

She is [takes a deep breath] a Ugandan-Filipina Catholic butch lesbian plasma physicist!

That's a long list of traits, but it was very easy for me to recall them all from memory just now, even though Chaya is just one member of this book's long roster of protagonists. Why?

Because whenever Chaya appears in a scene – whenever she says anything, and whenever the narration is filtered through her perspective – these traits are mentioned over and over again.

Virtually everything that she says or thinks is:

A) Narrowly pragmatic, directly related to what's happening in the immediate plot, could have been said/thought by any one of the characters

B) Directly related to one or more of the traits listed above (e.g. she's Catholic, so she's praying or talking about God with one of the irreligious / differently religious characters)

C) Some mixture of the two (e.g. she is making some smart practical comment about a current dilemma in the plot, which any one of the characters might have said, except that where one of the other characters would have said "fuck!", she says "mama Mary!")

I almost feel kind of gross, dissecting a character in this way. Especially when it's a character like Chaya, who I kind of liked!

I almost feel that way, but then I remember it's not really me doing the dissection. The characters come this way, marked with convenient labels for ease of disassembly.

I said I "kind of liked" Chaya, and I did. When I was reading the book quickly, swept along by the story – when I sort of defocused my brain, and didn't pay too much attention – I felt that she was a likable character. She had the general shape of a "likable character." My brain could match her against familiar templates, and accept the match, if I let my brain work without too much conscious deliberation.

When I focused harder, though, the joints began to show.

When I focused harder, I could watch (well-crafted, clever) lines of dialogue and narration flow past, and see through the Matrix to the calculated flecks of trait-relevance which adhered to each and every one of those lines.

This is a Chaya section, so I am getting told over and over again about God and rosary beads and plasma physics and what Uganda is like and what the Philippines is like and the woman Chaya has a crush on and how Chaya has a crush on that woman and how these two have a vaguely butch/femme dynamic.

(Sidenote: although this book seems like it's taking great pains to be culturally sensitive – or, perhaps, because of that fact – I kept noticing that the American characters are not constantly thinking and talking about what America is like. Only the people from places presumptively unfamiliar to the reader do that kind of thing. And it almost feels like the American characters are given more "slots" in which to fit distinct character traits, because they don't have to spend any slots just to establish their national origins.)

These are the Chaya topics. I am being told about them, and I will be told about them later, in other Chaya sections. Except for "the plot," these are the only topics I will ever be told about in Chaya sections.

If this were a Clayton section, I would be hearing for the 50th time about how Clayton is manipulative and conflicted about his manipulativeness. Or, hearing about one of the other Clayton topics. There's a list of those, with maybe five or six items, just as there was with Chaya. In Clayton sections, you hear about these things, and only these things.

It reminds me of the kind of improv where you're handed a brief description of your character, and have to immediately start acting as that character, with no time to prep. There's no way you could invent a whole fleshed-out human being in under a second, of course. So you lean hard on the traits listed on your character sheet. You find ways to weave one or more of them into each and every line. See: I'm doing it right! I'm playing my character!

----

Exordia's characters have no small traits. Only big ones, like "being Catholic" or "being Chinese." They do not act whimsically or inexplicably, ever; they do not play against their fixed types, ever.

Real people are microscopically detailed, incompressible, differentiated from one another by millions of little quirks that are essentially arbitrary and cannot be satisfactorily "explained" except by narrating huge segments of their life histories ("see, that's where it came from," one might say, after relating years of experience in unsparing detail).

In fiction, this stuff can't possibly be conveyed in full, and so a faithful portrayal of its consequences tends to just look like "noise," arbitrary behavior, the whimsical, the inexplicable.

Which is fine. Good fictional characters often come with such halos of static around them. It's a part of making a fictional world feel real, rough-edged, lived-in.

And on the other hand, sometimes it's fine for a fictional character to just be a type, and play out that type. A lot of science fiction is this way: it simply isn't much interested in character, which is okay, because it has other interests with which to keep your attention.

But Exordia is trying to have it both ways.

It's not just a standard hard SF story where the characters are types, and are clearly and only those types, and that's okay. Compared to that sort of story, Exordia spends way more time lingering on its characters, "zooming in" on them. Inviting you to consider them, study them, love them.

But this causes a feeling of intuitive wrongness, an uncanny valley effect. We should be zoomed in far enough to see the details, the noise-haloes. So where are they?

You can zoom in and in, but all you see is a magnified version of the stuff you'd already seen at lower resolution. A surface of unreal smoothness, unmarred by dust or fuzz.

4b. so meta

It's annoying (I keep using that word...) to talk about these aspects of Exordia, because the book involves a sci-fi conceit that could potentially explain its unusual flatness of character.

Explain it in-universe, I mean. As a "real" thing that causes these people to be this way, for a specific reason, in a specific place and time. Leaving everyone outside of the frame potentially intact, with dust and fuzz still in place.

(Wait, that was in Floornight too! Huh. I literally didn't realize that until just now.)

I'm not going to say anything more about this due to the spoiler rule, except that I don't think it really works when you think about it. The stated causes don't actually match up with the effects: the former are too narrow in scope, the latter too pervasive. The characters are flat even when the sci-fi flat-causing mechanisms aren't supposed to be in effect.

At most, I guess you could say the flatness is "thematically appropriate." Connected to other stuff that the book talks about, elsewhere. But... I dunno. Who cares? What's the point?

4c. the voice of the hive

Like a lot of modern fiction, Exordia is mostly written in studiously maintained free indirect speech.

If you don't know (or don't remember) what that is, the Wikipedia page I just linked has a nice example, which I'll reproduce here.

Quoted or direct speech or narrator's voice: He laid down his bundle and thought of his misfortune. "And just what pleasure have I found, since I came into this world?" he asked. Reported or normal indirect speech: He laid down his bundle and thought of his misfortune. He asked himself what pleasure he had found since he came into the world. Free indirect speech: He laid down his bundle and thought of his misfortune. And just what pleasure had he found, since he came into this world?

It's third person. But the third-person narration is commingled with the perspective of one of the characters (where this focal character can vary over the course of the text). Often the "narrator" just says stuff as though it's objective reportage, when in fact it is (and the reader knows it is) what this specific character thinks or believes.

The use of free indirect speech accidentally provides a useful way to "directly measure" the characterization problems described above.

Consider: although the book is written this way almost all of the way through – and you can discern that fact if you pay attention – it is easy to forget in the moment that it is written this way.

Why? Because, although the narration follows the thoughts of one character and then another, the characters are too similar to one another for this to make much of a difference.

Mostly, the narration just describes things the way you'd imagine a "geeky badass" might describe them, with lots of flashy clever phrasing, and lots of arguably pedantic detail about science / engineering / military matters / etc.

Free indirect speech already blurs the distinction between the authorial voice and the character voices, by design, but here the blurring is taken to its limit, and the distinction collapses entirely. Is "the author" describing events this way? Or, is one of the characters describing it in that way? Or not them, but a different character? We can't tell, because all of these people would say precisely the same string of words.

Of course, we can usually tell who the focal character is, because the items listed on their character card are getting sprayed all over the place. If every other sentence of the narration mentions a Clayton topic, then Clayton must be the focal character, and likewise for the others.

Even here, though, there's a curious departure from the way free indirect speech works in most other books. Note that referencing the "Clayton topics" is not the same thing as conveying Clayton's moment-to-moment thoughts: the former is a fixed list of 5 or 6 items, while the latter presumably roves all over the place as time passes.

I say "presumably" because if the characters' thoughts do rove around in this way, we mostly don't see it. All we hear about is their "topics," again and again.

Maybe these are Clayton's thoughts; maybe Clayton is an obsessive monomaniac who just thinks endlessly about the fact that he's manipulative and so on. Maybe they are all like that. Who knows? It's impossible for me to tell, because the narration is ambiguous in this odd, specific way.

One section, late in the book, begins as follows:

An awful light from the sky finds Anna. She’s, barely, smart enough not to look straight at it.

I was briefly startled by this. I interpreted that "barely smart enough" remark as something said by the omniscient third-person observer. I was like: dude, that's kinda harsh, isn't it?

But a few sentences later, I realized: oh, the focal character in this scene is Anna's mom. It's Anna's mom who's judging her like this. That makes sense.

This particular example is just sort of a narration glitch. I'm not sure it'd be possible to avoid the effect I'm describing, here, without rewriting the scene so it's clear who the focal character is before the "barely smart enough" judgment occurs.

But this case stuck out to me when I encountered it, because that feeling of disorienting perspective-realignment – although it's just kind of awkward, here – is what good multi-character free indirect speech usually feels like, all the time.

"The book should have more of this," I thought. "It should be constantly calling the characters stupid, or whatever, from the perspective of other characters."

(It's not like that doesn't happen at all, mind you. It just happens way less than usual, and way less than it ought to, IMO.)

"With this much perspective-shifting, I should be getting vertigo," I thought. "So where is it? Why is everything so smooth?"

5. the forbidden word

My division into sections is sort of breaking down, here. There's a thing I want to mention that doesn't really deserve its own section, but doesn't quite fit anywhere else. Whatever.

It's yet another annoying quality of Exordia's characters. ("Wait," you're saying. "You said you enjoyed this book?")

Basically everyone in this book is so...

Look, guys, I really don't want to say "woke," okay? If no one ever used the word "woke" again, we would live in a better world. I have said it twice already in this paragraph, and thus made our shared world worse, twice. Sorry.

I'm just not sure what else to call it.

They're feminists. They're against racism, and it's not the kind of hollow and unreflective "opposition to racism" that (e.g.) most Americans will assent to if you poke them about it – no, these people have subtle, thought-through ideas about racism, and its causes.

And so on, w/r/t other forms of bigotry, and the like.

And it's not just that the characters hold these views, themselves. These views are a fluid in which they swim, in a mostly invisible fashion. Everyone assumes without asking that everyone else is like this, and acts accordingly.

Or, more precisely, all the main characters are like this. There are a few bit players who are vaguely suggested to have more right-wing attitudes: the "Mike Jan" who we briefly met above, he of the unchanging desktop background, seems like the type of guy who'd watch Alex Jones, for instance. And on really rare occasions – like maybe 2 or 3 times total – some barely characterized nonentity will actually say something racist or sexist, but nothing much comes of it (remember, our mains are emotionally impregnable badasses), and then the guy who made the comment gets beheaded by an alien laser on the same page or something.

Meanwhile, all the Important Characters are (I guess) invisibly equipped with Important Character Detectors that let them hone in on each other, ignore the hapless maybe-bigoted redshirts around them, and proceed immediately into sophisticated conversations about social justice with one another. No need to feel out the other party's general point of view beforehand: this guy's a protagonist. He's cool, he's one of us.

Is this bad?

I mean, if it is, it's not really a big deal, I guess? Not compared to the other issues I talked about earlier, the deeper ones that plague the fundamental ingredients of the work (character, plot, structure).

But I did find it kind of offputting. Especially at first, before I'd accepted that the Exordia world is just like this.

I remember specifically being startled by an early scene, during the part where the Act One characters are getting introduced to the Acts Two+ characters, in which Anna and Erik suddenly – without warning or preface – launch into a discussion of Kurdish feminism, and potentially distorted/simplified/problematic Western views of Kurdish feminism, and whether Kurdish feminism really matters at all in light of the dire geopolitical position of the Kurds, and that sort of thing.

Again: the problem is not that this is "implausible," in itself. We barely know Erik at this point, and insofar as we know him it's mostly as some hardcore soldier type of dude, but – sure, whatever. There are plenty of feminist men in the military, I'm sure. The military is big, it's got all kinds of people in it.

Again: the violation is not against the laws of physics, but against the laws of persuasion. It's not that this couldn't happen. It could!

And yet.

"Yes, this could happen. I guess it could. But like, come on. Really?"

Sometimes the reader is a harsher master than reality.

And beyond that, this just seems like... I don't know. Like a half-assed, cowardly way to make your book "about" social justice in some sense, without ever really confronting the topic head-on?

A book in which everyone verbally agrees with one another about their enlightened views is not a book about the content of those views. It's just a book in which some characters happen to agree with one another about some things, and also some other stuff happens.

(I'm being at least sort of unfair here: the book really is "about" the Kurds and the Anfal campaign, for instance.)

For a book about culture clashes and genocide and the struggle for international collaboration under tense circumstances, Exordia has a remarkable lack of ideological tension. Or even non-ideological international tension, depicted "on-screen."

Mostly, people in the book... just kind of instantly get along with each other? And then immediately start exchanging packets of nerd banter and/or trenchant commentary on the evils of U.S. imperialism. Members of the geeky badass hive mind, recognizing one another on sight, conversing in the native language of the hive.

Once again: is this bad? Even if so, how bad is it, really?

I think, maybe, that if your book is about the sorts of things that Exordia is about, then sometimes your characters should very much not get along immediately. That they should be riven apart, and driven to extremes, by identity and ideology – if not forever, then at least for a time.

Maybe.

6. proof by intimidation

Man, this post is long!

And somehow I haven't really touched upon what Exordia's prose actually feels like, most of the time, word by word.

That's what this last section is about.

I don't mean the prose style, exactly. Actually, the prose style per se is... really good, mostly! I don't have that much to say about the ways in which it is good, but for the sake of balance and accuracy, I ought to make it clear that they exist.

Seth Dickinson is clearly a very good writer. In the "writes high-quality prose" sense, at least, and – despite all that I've said – in plenty of other ways too. (I'm told that his other books are better than this one; I will probably read them sometime. And I look forward, warily but with a considerable measure of hope, to his future work.)

But. You know what's coming. This post is negative-only. I've got something bad to say about the prose, it seems. Not about the style, but about... something else?

What, then?

Well, let me show you some examples.

He [i.e. Clayton] has seen enough satellite timelines of mass graves to know exactly which stage the corpses have reached. Their skin and bone cells are still alive. Their suits are bloating with gases now. Death signals the beginning of a final uprising, when the three pounds and 60 percent (by count) of your cells that are bacterial clients claim their last meal. They eat you so greedily and so well.

Sixty percent, huh. TIL!

I didn't know that, but Clayton did, apparently. (Free indirect speech in action.)

Of course he did. Clayton is a geeky badass, and like all of his kind, he knows every gee-whiz fact (and factoid) in existence.

And like all geeky badasses – like the book itself – he is not shy about letting you know that he knows.

What else does the book know? Here's some chemistry:

Their X-ray frequency gun isn’t working. Maggie Gaboury breaks out the breakdown spectrometer. A neodymium-doped yttrium aluminum garnet laser attacks the hull; the plume of excited vapor releases a rainbow of light that the spectrometer can read like a bloody fingerprint.

"Breakdown spectrometer"? I've never heard of those. Am I supposed to know this? Is it important?

Two pages later:

The US Radar 110XLS is designed to survey down to two hundred feet below ground, seeking out oil deposits and land mines. Emme didn’t expect the radar to work—after all, their radios are burned out, and radars are giant radios. But radio doesn’t go through metal. The radar’s storage unit protected it. So now they’re aiming it at this alien hull, which Joel says isn’t metal. It’s some kind of stable excimer, or Rydberg matter.

"Ah, the US Radar 110XLS, huh?" I say, smiling and nodding.

Just keep smiling and nodding, I tell myself. Keep your mouth shut. Or else Seth might catch on that you're a fucking moron who doesn't even know what a "breakdown spectrometer" is.

Later, here's some physics:

She knows how matter behaves around black holes. This thing is not behaving like a black hole should: it ought to be pulling in nearby air, forming a friction fireball. It’s not. But even if it isn’t actively pulling, some air is going to move into it anyway. Air molecules at room temperature move shockingly fast—about 350 meters per second.

350 meters per second. Smile and nod. Smile and nod.

God, I'm dumb. All the fucking things I don't KNOW.

The areas which the book knows all about, and which I know virtually nothing about, are too numerous to name. Does it know aeronautical engineering? And astronautical engineering? You bet:

Volume around 12,000 cubic meters. Assuming the same density as a 747, this implies a mass of 5,400 metric tons, just short of two fully fueled Saturn V rockets. Blackbird has wings, but they’re too thick to produce much lift. The fuselage shows no sign of area ruling for efficient transonic flight. It’s not a plane. As a spacecraft design, Blackbird almost makes sense. The entire fuselage could serve as a lifting body while Blackbird glides down to a water landing. In space, the wings and their jagged trailing edges could act as radiators. There are no visible engines, but maybe the tail stuck in the mountainside is the exhaust.

That all sounds logical enough, I guess. But then again, if it wasn't, how would I know? Man, I don't even know what the phrase "area ruling" means.

Perhaps, despite my pretensions, I am not in fact cut out to disparage this book at all. It's above my pay grade. It's smarter than me.

You want more? Here's, um, a "BLEVE":

The blast tips the nearest helicopter on its side, snapping rotors, the fueling hose lashing like hell’s elephant. The helicopter carries a tank of helium cryogen for food storage and magnetic resonance systems. The heat of the fireball envelops the tank and pushes the helium above its boiling point. It tries to revert to a gas but it can’t: no room in here! For an instant the tank holds back tons of super-pressurized liquid helium trying to boil off into gas. Then a seam fails, and every molecule inside flashes to steam. The result is a BLEVE: a boiling liquid expanding vapor explosion. It ruptures the kerosene fire and kills the luckier men instantly. The inert helium snuffs the fire and replaces it with a zone of asphyxiation and paradoxical cold. The blast wave slaps the lab complex’s tunnels taut and snaps the laundry lines in Tawakul.

Maybe you knew what that was already. Not me!

Is... is that what the blast wave resulting from a BLEVE would do, under those circumstances? Look, I'm not saying it isn't. I'm not casting doubt. I'm just saying, I have no clue.

Did Seth Dickinson do some sort of calculation, here, to make sure this made sense? How much research did he do, how much homework? Did he run simulations?

This stuff reads like he did. It reads like he was so careful, so laboriously conscientious about the science and engineering details, that he just has to tell you everything he learned along the way, or else it would all be for naught.

The book knows about military hardware. Oh god does it know about military hardware. The following excerpt is merely a drop from an ocean:

A column of Spetsnaz BMD-4s roll south down the riverside road, bristling with hundred-millimeter rifles and thirty-millimeter autocannon and anti-tank missiles and active hard-kill defenses. Spetsnaz riding atop their transports watch every incremental tick of the compass. Brand new Azart-P1 radio sets squall with static, still picking up the aurorae hidden behind the low gray sky.

Seth, is there anything you don't know?

I'm not even touching on the learned, labored excursions into history and geopolitics, here – just focusing on the science-y parts for brevity (ha ha, "brevity," I'll be here all night).

But even then, there are plenty more domains of science and engineering left to cover! Behold:

The copper tracks that connect components on the board have been duplicated, as if the etching process was performed twice before the final UV burn. Some of the pin connectors have dwarf copies. The CPU socket is crusted in a dark mass, like over-applied thermal paste.

The world is vast, nearly as vast as my own ignorance of it. Would you believe I have no idea what "over-applied thermal paste" looks like on a circuit board?

Like Seth, I do an arguably excessive quantity of research. Look, I spent a while this morning finding all those quotes, and there's no way I'm going to leave them un-quoted after all that work, okay? Here they come:

The KingFisher can read DNA sequences at targeted locations, but it can’t physically examine the structure of DNA. For that, she needs to get purified DNA extract from the KingFisher machine, then mount the DNA on slides of mica and put them under an atomic force microscope.

But of course. (Smile and nod.)

Did you know that certain ways of getting killed cause you to ejaculate as you die? Clayton does!

"Gunshot trauma to the cerebellum causes post-mortem erection and discharge," Clayton says.

More physics, and some speculative engineering:

The engine that forms the “quill” is a sheared-flow-stabilized Z-pinch fusion rocket. This is a fancy way to say that it turns spin-polarized heavy hydrogen and light helium into a continuous thermonuclear explosion. This is itself a fancy way to say that it runs on a rolling nuclear fireball. The magnetically confined tailpipe puts out about 100 grams of helium-4, protons, loose neutrons, and unburnt hydrogen-helium fuel every second. Add gamma and X-rays for taste, and, in situations where you need extra thrust at the cost of efficiency, dump some extra mass into the beam as a kind of afterburner. The resulting exhaust plasma moves at 3,500 kilometers per second: Mach 10,000, or about 1 percent of lightspeed.

Even more:

Some of the atoms take direct gamma-ray hits to their nuclei, breaking apart the strong-force bonds that tie protons to neutrons: a process called photodisintegration.

Did we really need to be told, after having this phenomenon explained to us, that it was called "photodisintegration"?

I mean, maybe we did. Or at least, maybe I did.

Since, you know.

Since I didn't know that, before.

Of course I didn't.

----

One last time: Is this bad? If so, why?

Maybe the problem is that I've written too much fiction, myself. (And SF, even, sometimes.)

And so, I can no longer look at this stuff and just think, "ooh, cool science facts, described in a flashy way. Fun!"

Instead, I just feel an immediate, intimate sense of exhaustion.

"God, how much work this must have been. How long it must have taken to gather all this info, and double-check it, and integrate it with the story in the right places."

(The fact that it has to actually suit the story means that a lot of this kind of "homework" never even makes it to the page, because the plot points that might once have required it get edited out or modified! Ugh, I'm feeling drained just typing this.)

Exhaustion – and self-doubt.

"God, so many things to potentially get wrong in an embarrassing way. So many fields that I'm an amateur-at-best in. And since I'm writing fiction, I'm taking those fields 'out of distribution,' taking them places that have never been studied by their real-world practitioners! Fuck, I have to make novel predictions! I'm screwed. Everyone is going to know exactly how much of an idiot I am."

This isn't just about science, mind you. It's about everything. Writing fiction inherently requires one to assume a posture of staggering arrogance, or what would be staggering arrogance in any other context.

"Here's what happened, to these people who are not like me, in all these places I've only visited, at most. Here is exactly what they did and said and even thought, inside their heads, where no one else could see. How the hell would I know, you ask? It's simple: I know everything. I know all the things there are to know, about all the things that exist. (And the ones that don't exist, for that matter.)"

I do manage to assume the posture, at least for long enough to get the words written when I want them written. But outside of that trance-like state, I start to doubt myself.

Who am I to do this thing? My ignorance is vast, nearly as vast as the world of which I'm ignorant.

And it's there, in that world, that they live. The readers. Aren't they going to notice how badly I'm getting it all wrong? They will, won't they?

This is neurotic, I know.

And so, perhaps the only thing that we're learning here is the following:

A) I am a writer who is very intellectually insecure, and

B) Exordia is a novel with a majestic stock of implicit intellectual self-confidence.

Is that bad? Could it be bad, "objectively," apart from my issues? I mean, surely not, right?

Nonetheless, I notice that reading Exordia filled me with this kind of tetchy, defensive intellectual competitiveness – which is a thing that most books do not do to me, though "my issues" remain a constant.

Perhaps – to psychologize myself further – this objection is downstream from the others, and has no life of its own. Perhaps I just felt annoyed with the book for other reasons, and at the same time felt like the book was asserting itself to be superior to me in some sense, and so I felt a need to say:

"No, all of this is bad somehow, because if it were good it would mean this whole book is good – and that would have dire implications for my own work, given how similar-and-yet-maybe-inferior it is to the incredibly-annoying-and-yet-objectively-superior novel Exordia."

Which is... extremely neurotic, and self-regarding, and also barely even makes sense. I don't want it it just be that, but maybe it is.

(The legitimately high-quality prose did not help, in this respect. It really is good! Five hundred and twenty-nine small-print pages of good. It's so fucking polished, way moreso than anything I could ever imagine putting out. And so fucking clever, so fucking smart...)

(Jeez. Get it together, man.)

----

However, there is one more thing that I notice.

There are works of fiction that make me feel smart, and works of fiction that make me feel dumb.

And I think, all else being equal, it is preferable to make the reader feel smart. Not by cheating, not by lowering your intellectual standards to what you imagine the reader can handle. But by trusting them, and then giving them something hard in a way you trust them to digest themselves.

Rather than... I don't know, bludgeoning them into cowed reverence through sheer force of accumulated, exhaustive, exhausting showing-off?

I don't know how objective this quality is, this feel-smart/feel-dumb thing. I'm sure it's reader-relative to some extent, maybe a huge extent. Maybe it varies so much that it's not even worth talking about in the abstract; you just gotta hope the right reader finds your stuff, and feels smart.

Still, here I am, talking about it.

What defines the works that "make me feel smart"?

Mainly that they are complicated and difficult by virtue of the complicated and difficult novelties they create, as part of the creative act that they are. They involve things which are equally hard for anyone to wrap their mind around, because no one had ever needed to wrap their mind around such things at all, before the work existed.

That, and the fact that these works – despite being inherently complicated and difficult – do not talk down to you, or hold your hand too much.

They act kind of like you already know what their deal is – which you don't, but then again, no one does. (The playing field is level.)

They say:

"Congratulations. You have passed the entrance exam. Welcome to the class. It will be hard, but I trust you to do your best. If you aren't smart enough now, perhaps you will become so, by your own efforts, by the end. Good luck."

They expect the reader to be a genius, but they know, deep down, that the reader is not really the right sort of genius – not yet, anyway. That is the point of presenting the challenge: so that you will rise to it, and see a new kind of thing, beyond what you had believed to be the horizon.

This is how I feel about Homestuck, say, or The Quincunx.

Or The Lymond Chronicles, or The Recognitions, or Ulysses.

Some of these are extremely dense with learned and carefully prepared authorial research. And, where this is the case, they are certainly not shy about showing it to you.

And yet, these works make me feel smart.

And then, there are works like Exordia, which make me feel dumb as fuck.

The end!

[jung-koook]

CREATOR TAG GAME — post some gifs before and after colouring! thank you so much for tagging me @jkvjimin and @jjungkkook ♡

this is my favorite tag game ♡ I just love seeing everyone's before and after but because of how busy my year has been, I forgot to post it. even with that, there are so many sweet people who are always tagging me in these game tags and I get so emotional knowing that some people still remember me here for these things. I've been thinking a lot about what my trajectory here will be like after bangtan returns. being here posting about them is something I love but because I don't have much time for it, I feel like I'm "missing" something. if you've been here since the beginning, you know that I literally made gifs of everything and since I'm no longer doing this crazy thing of making gifs of all the content, I feel like I'm not delivering much on this blog. it's a strange feeling that I can't quite put out there in a clear way.

now here we go, here is the before and after of my gifs that I've already posted. even though I'm busy, making gifs of bangtan is still one of my favorite things. ♡ (I was going to post the links to the original sets but there are so many and I'm lazy;;)

tagging some people who I think haven't done it yet and who always remember me for these games: @heybaetae, @btsjk-biased, @yooboobies, @kimtaegis, @joonie, @namchyoon, @taee, @cordiallyfuturedwight, @taehyunghobi, @thatgoddamngingerundercut ♡ (only if you want to!)

[lavenderprose]

Seeing you Emmrich posts reminds me of that time someone on Twitter was saying some thing about how "Women demand men be strong and powerful. They don't fantasize about them being sad insecure and pathetic" and all I can could think is "good sir you clearly haven't seen what tumblrinas do when they set their sights on a man between the ages of 35 and 65"

I think that what young men genuinely do not realize is that women are BEGGING them to be vulnerable. I don't have a dog in this race, I'm a married lesbian and I enjoy my men fictional exclusively, but there are a lot of very real boys and men out there who believe that shit. They go into a relationship or marriage genuinely believing that they have to be strong and invulnerable, often to the exclusion of kindness. My father was an extremely loving man. Did he cry often? No. I can remember him genuinely crying on a handful of occasions, one of which was the death of my mother. But he LAUGHED. He smiled. He sang. He hugged my sister and I whenever we asked and he touched us lovingly and often. He told us of his hopes and fears. He never disrespected our mother in front of us, even when he was angry.

That's vulnerability. We LOVE a pathetic man here on Tumblr dot com, myself included, but really it's about openness. Emmrich appeals because he's gentle, earnest, kind, patient. And yes, ALSO, because he cries when he comes. But a little bit of vulnerability goes a long way, even if it's just a smile.

[illum1z]

Lonely Star

Starboy!Gojo Satoru x F!Reader

You’re lonely. You’re grown enough to admit that. You’re also boring. Maybe a party will fix that. Your friend seems to think it will.

tags: voice kink, pet names (baby, pretty girl, angel etc.) body worship, slightly obsessive, implied stalking, soft mdom, pleasure dom gojo, HEAVY praise kink, just filth, drug use (weed, alcohol)

wc: 7.3k

Inspired by my favorite song by the weeknd (originally posted this on ao3, decided to make some tweaks and post it on here too) :p

.................... .................... .................... .................... ...............

Proverbs 27:12

“The prudent sees danger and hides himself, but the simple go on and suffer for it.”

A faint nausea roils deep in your gut as you stare at the blank document in front of you. An essay that’s no way near done, half a can of room temperature winter Red Bull, and over 50 unopened emails. You wanted to rip out your hair strand by singular strand. You wondered why you chose to do this to yourself.

You had checked Instagram a total of—count them—18 times since you sat at your desk 25 minutes ago, intending to finish up any schoolwork. Posts slowly trickled onto your feed from old high school friends in Europe or some other South American country. Their token good boy boyfriends took photos of them facing the vast cobalt turquoise waters or gothic architecture that stretched so high the steeples disappeared into the grey clouds. Truly, as much as it disgusted you, you felt immensely jealous of the lives they could choose after taking their diploma on that stage a couple of years ago.

For as long as you can remember, you never actively tried to seek out adventure or anything of the sort. You could usually be found cooped up in your room, nose in a book, or in your kitchen baking different cute little desserts for yourself, quaint music flowing from your speakers as you mixed batter or iced cakes. This was ideal for you anyway. Why would you rather be out snorting lines of coke in the back of some limo with girls you barely trust? You stayed out of trouble, stayed out of danger, and were happy that way.

You have nobody to impress by doing things like that, and you loved your quiet little life. So, what is this feeling that is like something is sitting on your chest? A voice nags that says, “You’re boring. You’re lame, and nobody likes an average Joe.” You did your best not to think about it, opting not to even like the posts your acquaintances posted and simply just trying to ignore them. Out of sight, out of mind. But these things never actually come easily to you.

You dragged your hands down your face, and the unfamiliar piercing ring of your cell phone snapped the silence in half. (You don’t receive calls very often if that wasn't already apparent.) Reluctantly, you look at your phone, expecting it to be your doctor wanting to schedule a follow-up for some old labs or something, but instead, you immediately notice the profile picture of one of your friends. Friend is kind of a stretch, she tends to reach out to you only if she has nothing else going on with anyone else.

You pressed the green answer button and put her on speaker. “Hey, Oakley, to what do I owe this pleasure?” You sounded slightly sarcastic, with maybe a tinge of annoyance in your voice.

She trilled her lips in an exaggerated sigh, the quality of the phone call crackling when she spoke. “You sound like you need a drink. Don’t worry, your best friend is to the rescue!”

“Best friend is kind of reaching, yeah?” you drawled, light-heartedly, you hoped, because you didn't want to hurt her feelings. You could practically hear her roll her eyes over the phone.

“Whatever (Name), you know you miss me a little at least.” You shrugged to yourself, a ghost of a smile making an appearance.

“Anyway, I can only imagine what you’re doing right now. Are you reading in bed or something?”

“Actually, I'm sitting at my desk, writing an essay with invisible ink, so close.”

“Okay, so nothing important, I want you to come with me to a party.”

You immediately opened your mouth to shoot her down. Parties were not your thing. It was like tossing a grasshopper in the ocean. That territory was very unfamiliar to you. The last party you went to was freshman year, the classic frat party that left you with a hangover that could kill God and a chipped tooth you later got filled in. Parties were dangerous for somebody like you.

“Oakley, I would rather-”

“I’m not listening to your excuses. All you do is sit and read. Or work, or bake, or shit that doesn’t get your blood pumping.”

“Reading gets my blood plenty pumping, mind you. I will not take this slander.”

“You’re a hermit, nerd. And I will not stand for this. You are 20 going on 21. The prime years of your life, and you don’t even try to have fun. I’m begging you, as an early birthday present, to come to this party with me. You can come to my place and get all dressed up, be a girl with me, please. It’ll be fun, I swear.”

The line went silent for a moment, and then you narrowed your eyes at the screen, imagining that she was in front of you.

“Your other friends bailed out on you, didn’t they? And your birthday was literally 3 months ago,” you rubbed at your temples, feeling a headache creep up from the very back of your skull.

“That doesn’t matter right now; I want to hang you with you on Thursday, can you please just pull the stick out of your ass and at least pretend you want to come.” You felt a pang in your chest as you realized you truly do have a stick up your ass. Like you were thinking earlier, you are boring, and it's not a good look. Another beat of silence.

Finally, you sighed. “Whose party is it?” You could almost hear her throw up her fist in victory at your submission. “A friend of a friend. I promise it’s nothing to worry about, it's safe, we’ll have a driver, and it's kind of exclusive in a way. We’re gonna have so much fun! Thursday, 3 pm, come by my place and I’ll give you all the details while we get ready, okay?”

The pure excitement in her voice swayed your heart in a way you weren’t expecting. It hurt a little, knowing just how excited she sounded that you’d be doing this with her, maybe she was scared to go on her own. “Yes, ma’am,” You sighed and went to hang up. “I’ll see you Thursday.”

The phone hung up, you decided to be done for the night. It was 11 pm after all. Switching off your lamp and cleaning up your desk, you made your way to the shower.

Thursday arrived before you knew it. Waking up that morning, you were dreading the night. After a thorough shower and a nice breakfast, you decided to run some errands. First on the list, cash this check your grandma sent to you for your birthday. Your grandmother has always been very generous and insisted on sending money every few months to help you navigate adult life. Although your birthday is no time soon, she tends to get a little foggy in the brain, but you don’t complain, she’s trying her best.

Slipping on a sweater and some leggings, you gathered your tote bag and your water bottle. November was always a weird transition month for you. The cold was biting, but the snow hadn’t arrived yet. Christmas is still so far away, and Halloween seems so far behind you now. It was a very sad month, it was like January but a little less depressing.

Stepping out of your quaint townhome, you started your journey down the street. The public had already arisen way before you, the streets bustling with college students, people late for work, dog walkers with 4 leashes in one hand and a coffee in the other. The streets were always so alive, no matter what time of day it was, and it motivated you somewhat. Everyone is going through it, you’re all suffering together in a way.

The bank was about 8 blocks away, and with a new set of determination, you picked up your stride with purpose, the cold wind nipping your nose, burning just a little. With the check nestled safely in your purse, you crossed street after street, passed shop after shop, in your own little world. Your headphones snug on your head, blaring music and protecting your ears from the cold gusts of wind that stirred the leaves on the streets.

Unfortunately, you weren’t paying attention to your surroundings, cue the embarrassingly clumsy move of bumping into someone walking in your direction. Your forehead rammed directly into somebody’s chest, not hard enough to knock you back, but hard enough to hurt.

You quickly stepped back to get out of this person’s personal space, thinking silently to yourself that they must be freakishly tall because, by all means, you were not short.

You dragged your eyes up the slender but built figure of who you bumped into. An apology instinctively falls from your lips. “I am so sorry; I truly am just forgetting that I’m in public, I genuinely did not see… you.” As your eyes landed on the face of the person, words seemed to fail you for a split second.

The first thing you noticed was the icy pair of cornflower blue eyes the stranger had. Very bizarre, it was like he had just come through a saturation chamber, a pair of small circular sunglasses sat languidly on the bridge of his nose. Then the rest of him, good god. He had to at least be 6’3, carrying this air of being cocky; his posture was fixed, authoritative, and overly confident. Literally your worst nightmare, with snowy hair that sat on his head perfectly, the bangs framing his soft, yet still sharp face. Plush pink lips that any girl would be jealous of, and of course, these luscious lashes that made you want to rip them out and replace your own. He looked familiar, like maybe a face you’ve seen on a billboard or two, but you couldn’t quite place it.

He flashed you a charming smile, eyes crinkling as a chuckle hit your ears. “Woah! Hey, you alright? You seemed up in ya head a little, yeah? Almost knocked me on my ass.” His large hands engulfed your shoulder to hold you steady to ensure you didn’t fall.

Oh my god, you were gonna throw up. He had the most resonant, mellifluous drawl of a voice. A lazy and carefree tone, yet still having the power to command a room at his will.

“You went quiet on me, sweetheart, did ya hit your head too hard?” He bent down to your level, his palm moving to lift your hair off your forehead, his eyes studying you with a worried look as if to check for injuries, a slight frown dawning on his pretty lips. You blinked and smiled at him awkwardly.

“No, I’m okay, thank you. I'm sorry again, I should be paying more attention to where I’m going.” His smell seemed to envelop you, hints of vetiver, a smoky amber with a trace of vanilla chasing after it. You blocked out the people around you and focused all your attention on the man in front of you.

“No harm done, you’re good hun.” Not once did he stop smiling; the navy blue bomber jacket he donned slowly slipped off his shoulders. His hands finally fell from your shoulder, but not before giving them a gentle, almost absent squeeze. “Where are ya heading in such a rush?” He stood back up to his full height before tilting his head at you curiously like a puppy, still taking the whole of you in.

You opened your mouth to answer, but stopped yourself, narrowing your eyes slightly. You don’t know this guy, and he's definitely not some normal dude in some ways. The question may not seem personal to anyone else, but you don’t get out very much.

He seemed to pick up the switch in your energy and raised his hands defensively. “Promise I’m not being weird, just trying to get in some small talk before you walk out of my life,” with the smoothness of butter, he grinned, all teeth on show as his hand came up and played with one of his bangs.

You raised an eyebrow and couldn’t help but smile, loosening up a little. “Just running some errands before I begrudgingly go to the party my friend is dragging me to.”

It may have been a trick of the light, but you swore you saw a glint in his eyes akin to being up to no good. His grin widened, and his voice dropped slightl.y “Oh yeah? You don’t seem like much of a party girl if you don’t take offense to that.”

You didn’t but you didn't really vibe with the way he was somewhat psychoanalyzing you.

The walls came back up.

“A little strange that you think you know me so well already, Mr..?” You prompted for his name, and a look of bewilderment crossed his face, like he wasn’t expecting you to expect an introduction from him.

Nevertheless, a simple, sultry laugh rumbled in his chest, and your brain almost short-circuited.

“Gojo, Satoru Gojo.” He removed his sunglasses and slipped them into his pocket. His eyes were trained on you, and he didn’t break eye contact once. It felt like the guy was scrutinizing you. “The pleasure’s all mine. And ‘m guessing you’ll give me your name in return..?”

His eyes bore into yours as if he were trying to pry your eyes out and peer past your sockets to study your brain.

His effect was too much for you; his presence was overwhelming your senses, and you needed to escape NOW.

With a quick once-over of him, you began to step around him. His eyes continued to follow you like they were stuck. “Maybe if we happen to meet again, I’ll tell you, but right now, places to be, things to do, so I’ll be going now.”

He pouted childishly as he watched you go. He smiled, his dampened slightly, not even enough for you to notice. “Aw, you don’t wanna stay here with me, hm? Not even a name to put to that darling face?”

Turning on your heel, you went to cross the street, waving at him. “It was nice to meet you, sir. Take care of yourself!” And you melted into the crowd on the crosswalk.

Gojo continued to search for you in the crowd, unmoving until he saw you emerge on the other side, walking a little faster than before.

First, he noticed the frazzled look on your face, paired with the hand rubbing your temples, while the other hand fidgeted with the buckles and zippers on your purse.

The second thing he noticed was how you had looked back after you had made it across, as if to see if he was still standing there observing. When you didn’t see him, he saw you mumble something to yourself before checking the time and booking it down the street.

Third and foremost, the small nervous smile that pulled your lips apart. He made you nervous, and that rattled a desire in him that made him want to squeeze something until it popped. His smile had disappeared as his gaze remained trained on you until you finally disappeared around the corner. The hand in his pocket clenched as he finally ripped himself from the trance and began to walk the opposite way down the street. His jaw ticked, and with a deep breath, his smile returned at a thought he had.

He looked forward to hearing you tell him your name. Not like he didn't already know, he was looking forward to breaking down that wall and earning that submission from you.

Soon.

Errands had been run, and you found yourself sitting on Oakley’s bed. She was blowing your hair while your hands got to the steady work of painting her toenails and a deep forest green color. You felt the intimate soft tickle of her fingers on your neck as she parted sections and slowly raked the dryer brush through them. The open window helped balance out the what of the dryer as you listened to the loud whoosh of the dryer and the faint sound of FKA Twigs poured from Oakley’s speaker on her desk.

“Again,” She speaks over the dryer, her fingers raking through your hair and massaging your scalp. “Thank you for coming, truthfully, I was scared of going alone. It's such a big-time party, and I was almost sick thinking about it. But I need to let loose more than anything right now, and so do you. Don’t forget to chillax tonight, have some drinks, and have a blunt. tonight is about to be hot, so let loose, and remember you’re still young. Staying hunched over your computer is bad for you all the time.”

You quietly nodded as you finished her toes just as she finished your hair. “I appreciate you thinking of me, Oaks. I do, I’m just nervous. I don’t know if you remember my last party, but i literally broke my tooth.”

“Who hasn’t?” She exclaimed, in an attempt to make sure you didn’t back out on her. It did not help settle your soul.

“You’re gonna be fine.” She massaged your scalp for a second before standing up.

“Alright! The party is in an hour and a half, let's pick an outfit, and then we can do our makeup.” You stood up with her and meandered into her closet with her, flipping through all her options.

After a long 30 minutes of decision-making, a dress was picked. Together, you guys sat in her large bathroom in front of her vanity, doing makeup. The music blasted in the background, and she occasionally used a makeup brush as a microphone to sing along. You couldn’t help but have fun with her, she was always so carefree and expressive it was hard to act nervous. Hell, you even joined in a few times.

After a long period of getting ready, you guys stood in the mirror together and looked over your work.

Oakley shrugged before wiggling her eyebrows at you suggestively. “I’d fuck you.” Mouth agape with an untimely snort slipping out, she laughed, shaking her shoulders. She laughed with you, playfully grabbing at you. You were already having so much fun.

You needed this.

You both pre-gamed the party, sharing a bud and a couple of shots of vanilla Schnapps. You both stood on the sidewalk, Oakley checked her phone, her eyes already a little low-lidded and pinkish. “Our ride should be here in just a second.”

Oakley’s hand intertwined with yours as if she feared you’d change your mind last minute and run away. Time was sort of getting away from you, and before you knew it, you were in a limo 5 minutes away from your destination.

A giggle bubbled up from your chest as you turned to your friend in the moving car. “Girl, I don’t even remember getting in the car.” The high was sort of wearing off already, and anxiety sat heavy in your stomach like an anchor.

She squeezed your hand as you focused on the streetlights and building windows that flew by as you made your way to the venue. Before she could reassure you, remember something.

“Oakley…”

She immediately let go of your hand. “Please don’t tell me you're about to puke because if you throw up, I will too.”

“You never actually told me whose party this is, or even where it's being held.”

She smiled sheepishly and looked out the window. “Oh, it's nothing, it's being held at a penthouse by some really rich guy, no biggie.”

Your eyes widened as you took in this information. “Are they even gonna let us in?!”

She quickly turned to you and smiled.

“Yes, I know for a fact they will. Don't worry. Please stop worrying, you’re gonna make my anxiety act up again. It's going to be fun, I promise.”

The limousine came to a slow stop. The driver pressed a button that automatically opened the doors. “We’ve arrived, ladies. Go ahead and walk into that building and tell them your names, and you’ll be good to go.”

You both thanked the driver and stepped out with your purses, closing the doors behind you and standing on the sidewalk. The skyscraper stretched far beyond the dark skyline, the illuminated windows disappearing far beyond the eye can see. The building looked pretty empty from the outside. Nobody was outside, and from what you could see, nobody was inside either.

“Are you sure this is right? It seems empty, Oakley.” She smiled and led you to the glass door entrance, opening it for you and gesturing for you to go inside.

“Trust me, it's just a little high profile. This is right.” You walk into the building with your friend in tow. Inside, it was sleek, the whole lobby decorated with black and white marble floors and dark ebony wood walls. There was an empty reception desk to the right and an elevator to the left. Any and all doors in the lobby had no windows, and it seemed like nobody was inside.

Oakley walked to the elevator and pressed the top floor, before waiting for it to come down. With a pleasant ding, the doors slid open, and she dragged you inside, waiting for them to close.

“Now, just be calm,” She rubbed your back reassuringly, her warm skin caressing the expanse of your shoulder blades in your open-back dress. “My friend told me there’s like an extra step to this or something. To actually get to the party.” After a minute, the elevator dinged again before opening to a small room, the same as the lobby, but with no windows and no doors, just a plain room. Inside stood two tall men, both wearing navy blue suits and ties, intimidatingly staring you both down as soon as the doors opened. You both walked into the room slowly, heels clacking against the floors and bouncing off the empty walls.

“Names?” The man on the left asked, holding a table of sorts, eyeing you both up and down.

Oakley spoke first. “Oakley Summers.” She looked at you next, prompting you to give your name. When you said it, both men raised their eyebrows in acknowledgment and nodded at each other. He tapped on the table and smiled warmly.

“Alright, ladies, you’re free to go. Take this keycard and hold it up to the keypad by the emergency button, and you’ll get where you need to go.” The man on the right handed you a small white keycard and smiled a little less warmly.

“Enjoy.” His voice bordered on a warning, like he was giving you a chance to turn back. You took the keycard with confidence and thanked them quietly under your breath. You and Oakley walked back onto the elevator before you scanned the card. The doors shut, and you began ascending again. So that wasn’t the top floor?

You and Oakley shared looks and burst into a fit of laughter. “High profile you said? This is literal FBI shit Oaks.” She shrugged and poked your side.

“This is gonna be the best night of our lives.”

The elevator doors opened again after about a minute, and you were not prepared for what you saw. What could be the biggest room you have ever seen was filled to the brim with people, packed like sardines. Loud chatter, singing, music so loud you could feel the bass vibrate your ribcage. Red, purple, and blue lights flashed everywhere, it felt like the ground was shaking. Past the crowd were large lounge areas with what could only be described as nightclub furniture. You could see 3 bars alone from the elevator, women on poles littered about the room, giving everyone a show they wouldn’t dare forget.

Oh yeah, this was unfamiliar territory.

Oakley stood next to you in shock and awe, a huge grin creeping onto her face. She grabbed your hand and dragged you out of the elevator. “Come on!”

You held tight as you weaved your way through sweaty, grinding bodies. The room smelled like alcohol, weed, and 100’s of different colognes and perfumes. The lights bounced off the layer of smoke that sat above the room, casting an eerie glow on the crowd.

You guys eventually made it to the closest bar and sat on stools next to each other. Oakley immediately ordered a few shots for you two to share as you took in your surroundings, There were so many people. How did it look so empty outside?

When your drinks arrived Oakley handed you your shot. “On three?” She yelled over the thumping music. You smiled and nodded. On 3 you both downed your shot.

You coughed the burn searing your throat as your eyes watered.

“Holy shit what was that?” You coughed into your hand trying to look at your friend, who was struggling equally as much.

“Probably – agh fuck - Everclear or something.” She shook her head and reached out her hand. “Shall we dance?” You took her hand and she dragged you to the middle of the crowd, immediately hopping into rhythm with the upbeat song.

So many bodies surrounded you two, Oakley stood behind you, hands on your waist as you both jumped and rocked to the song. She laughed and sang along behind you, the alcohol settled into your system, a pleasant buzz simmering in your veins as you got into the rhythm.

Lost in the song, you forget about your responsibilities and your worries and live in the moment with your friend. Everything faded away, like a light at the end of a harbor. It was all so distant, so far away. It felt like your body was floating in a warm pool as a soft storm descended over the waters, the rain gently kissing your face, the lightning warming the blood in your veins. The thunder pounded in your chest, and you drowned.

Before long, the song ended, and you turned around to face your friend, but she was nowhere to be seen. Before you could process that she wasn’t there, a new, slower, and more sensual song began to play. Coming Down reverberated in your ears, the slow intro coaxing you to get back into the rhythm. The bodies in the room began to slow down; the lights dimmed to set the darker mood.

Before you could call out to her, a pair of hands settled on either side of your waist, a broad chest pressed against your back. You were going to retaliate before that familiar smell enveloped you again, but this time tenfold. Vetiver, amber, and vanilla, with a new twinge of smoke added onto the layers. Soft locks of hair tickled the back of your neck and a pair of lips gently rested against your ear.

They blew cold air against the shell of your ear before kissing it ever so softly, like you would shatter into a million pieces if they were too rough.

The hands snaked forward further, cupping your stomach and putting pressure on your lower abdomen, pressing you further against his chest. Then there was that fucking sin of a voice of his.

“Look who decided to bless me with her presence once again.” His voice tickled your skin, that lazy drawl of his coaxing you to lean further back into him, to meld into him like he was another part of you. You weren’t sure if it was the alcohol, but you wanted nothing more than to be so close to him that nobody would be able to tell your intertwined limbs apart. Your hand came up and cupped the back of his neck as he slowly swayed you both to the music, him not moving away from your neck. He pressed languid kisses along your exposed shoulder, dragging his lips down as one hand left your stomach to lift your wrist to his lips. He ghosted his lips down the inside of your arm until his lips rested on the pulse point on your wrist.

“You’re breathtaking tonight angel.” He murmured into your hair, the hand on your stomach moving to squeeze your hip. You still haven’t been able to see him yet, he remains behind you, holding you so gently, yet his grip on you is like a vice, and you’re not sure if you want him to let go.

You were drowning in him now. Gojo had you wrapped around his finger, the lights danced off your skin, and all he wanted to was take a bite, but he would never give these people the privilege of seeing him do that to you.

You were his for tonight. You were giving him this Thursday. He wanted you all to himself, away from prying ears and eyes. He finally turned your body around, guiding your hands to come up and wrap around the back of his neck as his own held your hips tight, guiding you closer.

Finally, you were able to get a good look at him in this lighting, The blues and purples flowed over his skin like light beams on ocean waves. His eyes bore into your eyes like your first meeting, his hands traced up then down, up then down…

“Mm, don’t look at me like that, baby. Ya havin’ fun?” His forehead rested against yours. There was no personal space here.

His nose brushed against yours, a slow lazy smile creeping onto his lips. “So pretty, so beautiful. I just want to get on my knees and worship you.”

Of course, there was small doubt in your mind, but as soon as he saw that shadow of insecurity on your face, he buried his face into the crook of your neck, taking a deep breath in. “I do, sweetheart, I do, yeah, I do.”

Oh my god, he was going to kill you.

His arms tightened around you, both of his entire arms encircling your whole body, one hand on your back while the other lifted your leg with a firm grip on your thigh, pulling you impossibly closer. He pulled his face back from your neck and pressed gentle, chaste kisses all over your face.

First, your nose, then both of your eyelids, behind your left ear, and the lobe of your right. One on each cheek, and the corner of your lips. You opened your mouth to speak, but words failed you once again. He smiled at you, before cupping your face in his hand.

“No, no, baby, it's okay. You don’t need to speak; this is all about you tonight. All I need from you is a yes. That's all…” He kissed your cheek again, his eyes half-lidded and pupils dilated. “Just a simple yes, and I can make this night unforgettable for you.” His breath mingled with yours, god he was so close.

You were so lost in the moment that you didn't realize at least 6 songs had played already before one that you recognized began to play.

“If, all I could say is if.” Gojo followed along with the intro aloud, his lips ghosting against your own as he spoke. Your head felt fuzzy and his arm pressed into your lower back, moving your body farther up.

Closer to him.

“Promise me you won't regret me like the tattoos on my skin.

I belong to you

Promise me when they all love you that you'll remember me

When you fuck them, you'll see my face

My body is yours

Every Thursday.”

With the indolence of a disciplined man, his lips melted into yours like chocolate, and his warmth spread from your mouth to the tips of your toes. You didn’t even realize you were leaning towards him until he deepened the kiss, his tongue tracing your lips before taking your bottom lip between his teeth, smiling against you, groaning audibly before diving right back like a man starved.

His hands roamed as if he were searching for something, like he was searching for a way to pry you open and crawl inside your skin, to become one with you.

“Oh (Name,) please. ‘M gonna need a yes from you soon. I can’t even breathe, baby. C’mon, pretty girl, tell me you need this. Let me help you get a glimpse of heaven.”

You didn’t even bother to ask how he knew your name, you moaned into his mouth, gripping his hair in fistfuls. “Yes, mm god yes please Satoru.”

That was all he needed to hear. He ripped his lips away from you before taking your hand in his own and hurriedly guiding you out of the crowd. You couldn’t see where you were going, blindly following behind Satoru.

He led you further and further away until the sound of the crowd and the music was a muffled, faint hum in the background as he took you to an unoccupied lounge behind a closed door. As soon as the door shut, he guided your back against the door and pressed his entire body against you, swallowing your whimpers with his lips, like he needed you to breathe.

He kissed you with a fever that could only be described as desperate, nasty, and consuming. One hand held your neck, while the other traced down the length of your torso, before snaking underneath your dress. The pads of his fingers pressed against that bundle of nerves underneath your panties, tracing lazy circles over it as his tongue licked patterns into your mouth.

“Is my pretty girl wet for me?” He moaned into your mouth, laughing when in response your body jolted like you had been shocked. It felt so fucking right. You grabbed onto his arm, grounding yourself when he pushed your panties to the side, tapping his middle finger against the entrance of your cunt.

“Gotta get you good and ready for my cock, yeah? Don’t wanna hurt you sweetheart..” He slipped his middle finger in, and you nearly fell apart then and there. It was so long and slender that it reached farther than you’ve ever been able to reach yourself. He would never admit it to you, but the thought of hurting you just a little sent a dark and deep shiver down his spine. He imagined you arms tied being your back as he dug his tongue deep into your sweet cunt and eating you out until you were so overstimulated you couldnt breathe, then shoving his cock in you and fucking you absolutley stupid, no matter if you were all fucked out already. He’d love to use your body until you passed out on him. He would resort to slow, deep, torturous rolls of hips to coax your stupid brain out of sleep before pounding you into the mattress all over again.

But who knows when he’d have you again. Gojo wanted to take his time with you tonight and take care of you. He just hopes he can control himself.

“Ooh, yeahhh… ya feel that?” He kissed your collarbones, licking along them before sucking little purple marks into your neck. “Does that feel good, baby? I bet it does…” You nodded, unable to form words, too busy focusing on the feeling inside of you. Slowly, he added a second finger, making a slow, deep, come-hither motion inside of you.

“Let me hit that spot, beautiful, let me find it, make you fall apart for me.” And that’s exactly what he did, gently applying the most delicious amount of pressure to your G-spot, coaxing you to let yourself go. A pressure in your stomach began to curve and coil, your brain went foggy, and your ears began to ring as his words touched the deepest parts of you.

He dove back into your neck, his finger moving a little faster, but focusing more on the pressure. “Feel that for me, feel it all in your body. C’mon, give me one baby. I need one before I fuck you so good you can’t think. Empty that pretty little head of yours. Let go.”

You did as you were told, the tight coil in your lower tummy snapped, your back arched against the door, your hands twitching and reaching out to grasp onto his clothes.

“Oh, my fucking g-god. Satoru!” You saw white, briefly going blind. Before you knew what was happening, your world was spinning, and you were lying on a bed in the lounge room. He hovered over your splayed and spent body, his shirt gone as he unclipped his belt.

You sink into the mattress, the ivory cream sheets swallowing you in gently silky waves of white.

Satoru crawled on top of you, shimmying you out of your dress till you were completely bare below him. One hand grabbed your left thigh and pushed it up to rest right by your torso, the other hand pressed, not too hard, not too soft, against your lower abdomen, right on your tummy.

“I wan’ you to feel everything. How deep inside of ya I can go. I need you to feel all of me. Can ya handle that angel?” The look he gave you was almost pitiful, like he knew just how much he was about to affect you.

Nodding frantically, you close your eyes, “Yes, Satoru, I can handle it. I can handle you, please, please..”

He groaned and leaned down so he could kiss you. “Deep breaths, beautiful. Look at me and breathe.” You locked eyes with him, his gaze never shying away as he guided himself to your entrance. Breathe in. Breathe out. In… out…

When Satoru first split you open your first thought was, there is no way he’ll fit. But he must have seen the look in your eyes. He kissed your eyelids again, the hand holding to your thigh rubbing slow circles.

“It will, I promise. Just breathe like I asked. You can do it.” You breathed with him as he slowly pushed himself inside you with such gentleness that you wouldn’t believe how he would be obliterating your guts in a few minutes.

“Good job, good job, look at you go. My pretty little party girl. Taking me so well.” He thrusts oh so slowly, giving you time to adjust.

You were to fucked out to notice, but if you really payed attention to him, you would most likely feel scared. The look in his eyes was nothing short of animalistic. Like he’s been chasing after you for years, getting so close to capturing his fluttering, evasive dove, just for you to slip from his fingers yet again. A deep frustration knitted into his brows, and his fingers sank into the plush flesh of your lower body, resisting a primal urge in his gut to drag his nails across your smooth skin and carve his mark into you. Claim you as his.

He smiled a sick, cocky smile, taking in your absolute cock drunk expression, your eyes shut froms shyness, and your legs twitching when he hit that spot deep, deeeeep in your guts. The way your fingers twitched when he applied more pressure to your stomach. How your eyes rolled back and your cunt clenched when he got close to your ears, groaning and whispering about how good you were being for him.

Holy fuck, he was so impossibly deep. You could feel it in your throat. Your hands gripped the sheets above you, biting your bottom lip so hard you swore you tasted blood,

“Ah ah ah, none of that.” He slipped two fingers past your lips to coax you to open your mouth, pressing down on your tongue. “Let me hear that gorgeous voice. Let - ngh - let me hear you..”

You complied, not holding yourself back. He had returned down to your stomach, and with one particular deep, slow, hard thrust, you could feel the bulge in your stomach where he pressed down.

“Yessss..” He moaned, mouth slipping around your nipple, his thrusts seemingly digging deeper and deeper with each pull and push of his hips. He kissed your breasts all over, your shoulders, your neck, your face, worshipping your body. “Make those noises for me, cmon. You love this, don’t you? Tell me you love it with those fuckin moans.”

“Been wanting you for so long, needing you for so long.” Each thrust of his hips made you feel ever more full than the last.

“Satoru…!” You whimpered, his touch leaving a hot trail of fire everywhere.

“I know you like the back of my hand, know you like you’ve been mine since the beginning of time. Know your body so well. Ah, fuck… beautiful, beautiful girl..” He could feel his morale slipping the more he lost himself in your sloppy cunt. He’d fuck you full of his children. He’d hide you away from everyone else, so nobody could look at you. You would be all for him and him alone.

This went on for god knows how long, he littered you with praises as he bullied his cock deep inside of you, never failing to hit that spot that made you see stars. His thrusts gain momentum and power throughout before every thrust knocks the air from your lungs.

“Gonna come one more time for me, sweet girl? Please, I need you to come again.” He had to make this last, he had no idea when the next time he’d see you would be. He wants you more than he needs oxygen. Needs you more than food and water.

But he can’t keep you. He WILL have you again another day, he’ll tie you down to his bed and fuck you so good you’ll come crawling back to him, begging to see heaven again. But it wouldn’t last. He’d scare you off. So he pushes it down and relishes in the fact that he has you now. Falling apart underneath him, drawing the most sinful sounds from you, sounds only HE can pull from you. He has you this Thursday, and he will not let this night go to waste.

“C’mon, baby. Give me one more. One more, you can do it…” Satoru begins to rub quick circles on your clit, hissing when he feels you clench around his cock.

“Oh god oh god oh god, Satoru I’m gonna come..” His grin spreads, ferally almost. Refusing to let up he pulls you into a deep, invading kiss.

“Go ahead,” his eyebrows dip as he watches every micro-expression you make. “Come for me, baby girl. Give it to me. I’ll give you anything and everything. Kill anyone who dares to lay a finger on you. You’re mine. Mine.. Come, pretty girl, please.”

Satoru’s pretty, breathless voice tipped you over the edge to your last orgasm of the night. Your mind shattered like a mirror, and you swore you passed out for a few seconds.

Your body twitched and convulsed when you came; it made Gojo feel like God, the way he could pull these reactions out of you.

He spilled himself inside of you, groaning in your ear before he bit the lobe, rocking his hips deeper into you to fuck him cum right back into you. He could die right now and die happier than ever.

He lay on top of you, spent, his chest swelled, and his head was fuzzy. You lay underneath him, almost already asleep. You both know deep in your hearts that come morning, this can be no more. He can’t keep you all to himself on Friday morning.

So, for now, you both relish this feeling of satisfaction.

Promise me, when they all love you that you'll remember me

When you fuck them, you'll see my face

My body is yours

Give them any other day

but Thursday

Belongs to me

[knit-me-a-blanket]

A Beginner's Guide to the Different Types of Knitting Needles

If you’re just getting started with knitting, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed by the array of knitting needles out there. A couple of months ago, I went through my "stash" of needles because I realized I had a box of a random assortment, and it wasn't useful. From straight to circular, bamboo to metal, and everything in between, the options were endless.

In my time as a knitter, I'm sure of one thing: each type of knitting needle serves a purpose, and once you understand the basics, you’ll feel more confident choosing the right tools for your project and your style. Let’s break it down.

1. Straight Needles

Best for: Flat projects like scarves, dishcloths, and panels for sweaters.

These are the classic needles most people picture when they think of knitting—two long sticks with a stopper on one end and a point on the other. They’re great for beginners because they’re easy to handle and ideal for simple, flat pieces.

Pros: Easy to find, beginner-friendly, great for straightforward patterns.

Cons: Can feel bulky for large projects and limit the number of stitches you can comfortably work with.

But I will be honest here, don't buy that many. As you grow in your projects, you'll likely find yourself reaching for circular needles more often than not, and this is for a couple of reasons.

Heavy garments can bend straight needles, especially plastic or metal needles.

Heavy garments aren't well distributed on straight needles either, so it can put more stress on your hands while working.

2. Circular Needles

Best for: Everything from hats to blankets to sweaters—both flat and in-the-round projects.

Circular needles consist of two shorter needle tips connected by a flexible cable. Don’t be fooled by the name—you can use them for flat knitting (going back and forth) or circular knitting (working in the round).

Pros: Distribute weight better (great for heavy projects), versatile, easier on the wrists.

Cons: Cable length matters—you may need multiple sizes for different projects.

There's also something called the magic loop method, which lets you use long circular needles to knit small circumferences like socks or sleeves! I'll have a post about this method in a couple of weeks. It's something that I swear by!

3. Double-Pointed Needles (DPNs)

Best for: Small, round projects like socks, mittens, sleeves, and hats.

DPNs come in sets of four or five and have points on both ends, letting you knit in the round when your project is too small for circular needles. They’re a bit fiddly at first, but many knitters love them for precision and control.

Pros: Great for detailed circular work, no seams.

Cons: Can be tricky to manage all the needles at once, especially for beginners.

DPNs are great for a lot of things, but for the most part, everything you can do with a DPN you can also do with a circular needle. It's nice to have options!

4. Interchangeable Needles

Best for: Knitters who work on a variety of projects and want flexibility.

Interchangeable sets allow you to switch out needle tips and cables, essentially giving you many needle combinations in one. They're an investment, but often more cost-effective in the long run.

Pros: Customizable, space-saving, convenient for travel and diverse projects.

Cons: Can be pricey, and quality varies by brand.

5. Cable (Flexible) Needles

Best for: Creating cable patterns and twists.

These small needles aren’t for general knitting but are essential tools for cable knitting. They hold stitches temporarily while you twist and knit them out of order.

Pros: Useful for intricate textures and cable patterns.

Cons: Limited to specific use cases.

In my opinion, cable needles are a hit or miss. Oftentimes, when I'm making my cables, I find myself reaching for a DPN rather than a cable needle. This is because they are a bit sturdier, and I'm more comfortable working with them.

Needle Materials: What They’re Made Of Matters

Bamboo or Wood: Warm to the touch, slightly grippy—great for beginners or slippery yarns.

Metal (Aluminum, Steel): Smooth, fast, and durable—ideal for speed knitters.

Plastic or Acrylic: Lightweight and affordable—somewhere in between bamboo and metal in terms of grip.

When it comes to needles, metal needles are my favorite. Choosing the right knitting needle depends on your project, your yarn, and your personal preference. I always find myself snapping plastic needles, so I try to stay as far away from those as possible. As you gain experience, you’ll develop a feel for what types of needles work best for you.

The most important thing? Find tools that make the process feel enjoyable. Knitting should bring you peace, not frustration—so grab those needles and let your creativity flow, one stitch at a time.

[midnight-mourning]

L'appel de la Mer

🐟🐟Midnight's DCA MerMay Day 5🐟🐟

i will get caught up, it may seem impossible rn, BUT I WILL GET CAUGHT UP-

anyway, please enjoy this silly little thing

Prompt: Hello, hello, dear! Here is a little request: Kraken Sun and Kraken Moon hear the beautiful singing of Mermaid Y/N, and the boys decide to court them to win their affections, wishing for Y/N to become their mate. Y/N is cold at first, but softens as they see how adorable and silly the charming Krakens are, such darling gentlemen that truly mean their words of love. Y/N accepts their courtship, singing for the boys, while Sun and Moon brush Y/N's hair.

DCFPU prompt used: Seashell(s)

Word Count: 1982

Story will be posted to ao3 soon!

🌊🎣🌊🎣🌊🎣🌊🎣🌊🎣🌊🎣🌊🎣🌊🎣🌊

The warm sun feels soothing against the chill of the water lapping below you. It's only in rare moments like this do you truly get to enjoy moments such as these. Best not to take it for granted. You shift slightly, scales sliding against the rock, and sigh, face nuzzling into it for good measure. 

Usually at this time of day you'd be busy with a flutter of activity. Though not willingly mind you. Sailors passing through, mers approaching with gifts and trinkets galore. All of them with the same thing on their mind; you. Or rather, having you for themselves. 

It hadn't been intentional, if anything it was anything but. You just simply enjoyed singing. It made you happy, made you feel fulfilled in your long, otherwise uneventful life. Singing was your outlet for joy, but in so many cases, it had become nothing but a burden. 

Anymore, you rarely sang. Finding that by avoiding it you avoided any and all unwanted attention. It made you sad, disheartened even, but you were better off for it in the long run! At least, that's what you told yourself. 

Nevertheless, you could at least enjoy this moment of peace for what it was worth. In fact, you almost want to fall asleep, all cozy and warm. Like laying near an underwater vent. 

Almost unknowingly, out of control, you start to hum to yourself a sort of lullaby. That hum grows into soft mumbling, trailing into singing before you know it. 

It's sleepy and jagged, but it's soothing to you as you feel yourself begin to drift off from your own song. 

"So you're the source of all that lovely music."

You spoke far too soon. 

Annoyed, you pretend to not hear whoever it is that's stumbled upon you now. Based on the singular voice it must be another mer and not a passing ship. Good and bad. Less to deal with, but harder to slip away from. You'll play this out and see how it goes. 

The second mer is a surprise. 

"I don't think they can hear your praise, Moon. Can't you see they're resting?"

A chuckle. "Resting yes, but asleep? Far from it. I think I'm simply being ignored."

"You're saying that as if you don't deserve it. You are interrupting their midday nap after all."

"If I recall correctly, coming up to the surface to see them had been your idea, Sun."

You scowl against the rock as they continue to bicker back and forth. When it delves into a full argument you make a noise of displeasure. But just as you're about to look up and say something you're hit with a sudden wave of water, shocking you fully awake and nearly knocking you off the rock. 

Sputtering, you look up and open your mouth to share a few choice words, only to be stunned into silence by the sight in front of you. 

Currently having it out with each other are two mers that are much larger than you. One blue, the other yellow. One with fins surrounding its head, the other with a cap-like structure. Both have several large tentacles for their bottom halves, and both are utilizing said tentacles to fight against the other. 

Kraken mers. 

Your favorite. 

You shake off your initial surprise and go back to being displeased at having your sunbathing interrupted by not just one, but two mers. And if they think you're going to let them get by with it just because you're a bit intimidated they are sorely mistaken. 

"Hey." You yell, though it does nothing. You try again, louder. "Hey!"

Still nothing, another large wave splashes against you, now completely ruining the warmth of your rock. Angry now, you look around for something to throw, picking up a nearby lose chunk of stone. You gather your strength and hurl the chunk in their general direction. 

It happens to be timed just right to hit the yellow one on the forehead. It startles him at most, but he stops what he's doing--holding the blue mer down in the water--to look at you.

"What was that for?" He pouts, the other mer snickering in the background. 

You scoff, then shake your head, feeling completely enraged for a moment. You raise to your full height possible on the rock, lifting your hands up in disbelief. "You've ruined my rock, that's what! Coming up here and bothering me while I'm trying to enjoy the nice weather, do you have any idea how long I've waited for a day of peace and relaxation?"

As you go on, you see them both cower at your words which, internally, gives you a bit of a power trip but in turn you lose your train of thought. "So, if you don't mind, I'd like to finish my nap in quiet. Thank you very much." You twist around, laying on your back now and ignoring the feeling of cool dampness against your skin and scales. 

For a minute or so, there is relative silence all around you, and your anger slowly begins to leech away. In fact, you feel your frown slip into a serene smile as the sun starts to evaporate away the water from your skin. 

A quiet ripple to your left catches your ear. 

"We're terribly sorry, sweet thing. I'm afraid we got a bit caught up in the moment."

"Yes, very sorry. Didn't mean to be a bother."

You feel your frown return, though a bit softer.

"It's fine. Though I suppose now you have something to say, don't you?" Your eyes remain closed. You're already prepared for the usual spiel, you hope they'll be quick. 

There's a splash again. "Actually, a gift. Though plenty of words if you'd like them."

"Multiple gifts at that if you'll allow."

You crack an eye open. It’s been some time since you’ve received gifts for your singing. 

Sure enough, you find the yellow mer is holding a sparkly seashell out to you. When you turn your head to the right, you see the blue mer is also holding a shell of his own. And while never participating much yourself, you know the rules around courting. You're just genuinely taken aback by what is occurring. 

Sure, you know your singing attracted mers to you, and you'd been asked for your hand on more than one occasion as a result, but very few had ever taken the actual steps to prove it. You were flattered for a brief moment, and then highly suspicious. Maybe your sleepy singing had been better than you thought. 

You keep your expression neutral. "I appreciate the gesture, but I cannot accept."

"Are they not pretty enough?" The yellow one asks. 

"We can find better options. Say the word and we'll find exactly what you like."

You're not used to this. The... genuinity in their tones, but you let it go, you're overthinking it. 

Still, you'll give a bit of sympathy, considering the slight fear you still hold of them. 

"How about a couple names?" You ask. "You don't even know mine and here you are wanting to court me like it's nothing." You can't help the bitterness which boils under the surface of your words. 

The two krakens look between each other, as if realizing something. Profusely, they apologize. Surprising you even further. 

Yellow puts a hand. To his chest, bowing slightly. "If you'll allow us a chance to amend our blunder, my name is Sun."

"Moon." States the blue one. "And yours, pretty pearl?"

You tell them yours, blunt. To the point. They seem bothered by it. 

"We'll find better options to present to you." Moon nods, seeming already determined to prove himself. 

Sun agrees. "Just give us some time, sweet. But hopefully these will be a suitable start."

Before you can protest, they gently set the shells down and dive back under the water. You get another wave sent your way in the process. 

You give up on sunbathing. 

Sun and Moon however, don't give up on you. To your eventual amazement and utter confusion. 

They each bring you shells, stones, and sea glass galore. Snacks and meals of shellfish, kelp or heaping piles of fish. Coral and pearls and quite literally anything they can find. Very pretty things however, you won't deny. All of it you know meant to be offerings for the ability to court you. 

At first you just rejected them because you didn't believe either mer held any sincerity with their gifts. Their sweet words or declarations and promises. It was far too unbelievable. All just the same as it always was. Surely they would grow tired, or your unintentional enchantment would wear off soon enough, right? You haven't even been singing lately!

Now though, now you were beginning to doubt yourself. Because of the conversations you had. Their poetic words met by your cold but wry banter. The days spent following you around, the nights spent watching the stars, offering you both companionship and assistance--when you desired it. Another baffling fact of the matter was that they kept their distance when you asked for it. Most never offered you such a courtesy. 

Both had their own traits that made them 'tolerable'. Though you'd be lying if you said they were just tolerable at this point. Slowly you'd warmed up to at least consider Sun and Moon your friends. 

Moon with how he'd cheekily tease you while he flirts. Sun with his wide-smiled compliments that after a while began to make you blush. They'd really started to grow on you. But it's not until one day, while sitting in their cave--which always had an open-invite for you--that it hits you. 

You're quietly humming to yourself as you sort through today's offerings, having become a bit of a game between the three of you by this point. Meanwhile behind you, the two of them fuss over your hair, both with each other and with the mess you've left them with to manage. To your credit, when you have enough trinkets given to you, at least some of them are going to wind up in your hair. How else were you supposed to enjoy them? 

Regardless, it's in that moment, that split second, realization rolls over you. You're singing. Quietly, barely much at all, but still singing nonetheless. You haven't done that in months. Not unless you were assured absolute and utter privacy. 

It was a combination of hoping Sun and Moon would finally grow bored, and developed into a fear that this friendship you'd foster would end up nothing but a farce. But now, you were finally comfortable enough to be around them to do it. To hum, to sing, to simply be you. Without the worry that it would be taken at face-value. 

"I accept." You blurt out then, astonished. 

You feel one set of hands stop their movement. The other continues without pause. 

"What."

"Hmm?" 

"Do you mean it?" Moon presses, bending down to meet your gaze. 

You nod, smiling and then laughing. "I do, yes."

"You do what, Sweetfin?" Sun asks absentmindedly, still not connecting things. 

You tilt your head back to see him. "Accept your offer to court me. If it's still available, that is?"

"Of course Starlight, now look forward again so I can—" Sun stops, shaking his head. "Truly?!"

He scoops you up, hugging you tightly as you laugh again. "I already said yes!"

Thus, after a bout of affection-filled confirmations, you find yourself back to being pampered, with the two mers back to bickering over your hair. Sun wanting to take the proper time to brush it out, and Moon urging him to move quicker so they weave in their favorite shells and such to proudly display your new status as partners. 

And for the first time in a long time, you sing without a care in the world. 

Well, maybe two. 

🌊🎣🌊🎣🌊🎣🌊🎣🌊🎣🌊🎣🌊🎣🌊🎣🌊

Thank you @amarynthian-chronicles for the lovely idea! I had much fun writing these three and their silly dynamics ^^

Masterlist post is here

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