#but a teenager isn’t supposed to be born 2015

[believeinavocado]

I just realised something. I know this very much may not happen, but IF I ever write a book and release it (which I’ve always dreamed of doing) it will probably be around the year 2030 because I have to finish school and grow up and actually write a book that is good enough to release, and if my book is about some teenager, that means they will have to be born like 2015. Like EXCUSE ME? 2015 was like five years ago? And that also means I won’t be able to write about someone who grew up listening to Taylor’s early albums, because they weren’t even born then! I can’t imagine reading a book about a teenager born after 2010 (and I’m not like a 30 year old person, I’m just used to reading about people who are like at least three years older than me).

[atruththatyoudeny]

Happy 28th! A new month - so new fics for you to find and enjoy! I can’t say it enough: all the authors in this fandom are truly amazing! Thank you so much for continuously sharing your hard work with us ♥ Here are the 14 fics I read and enjoyed this month:

A Hungry Heart | jacaranda_bloom | Great British Bake Off AU - famous/not famous - cliches - pining - angst - smut - 27k Harry Styles, florist and Great British Bake Off contestant, loves many things. He loves his flower shop, he loves baking, and there’s also that little crush he has on pop star Louis Tomlinson. But when Louis arrives on set as the surprise guest judge, Harry’s worlds collide. Throw in a cup of cuteness, a teaspoon of teasing, and a pinch of pining, and there’s all the ingredients for an epic love story, or absolute chaos. Or the one where the Bake Off tent has never been so hot, and it’s got nothing to do with what’s in the ovens.

Teenage Rebellion Never Worked Out So Well | panda_bear21 | arranged marriage - friends to lovers - 55k “I’m an adult!” He glanced down at Harry, who seemed anything but at the moment, where he was definitely on the brink of a temper tantrum. “We’re both adults!” Jay glanced to Anne again, before breathing out a heavy sigh. “Yes, but you’re both adults that do not have jobs and who live off of our money… Which means, you have to do what we say… or you’ll have to find a new place to live.” “You wouldn’t do that.” Louis dared, hoping his glare was enough to guilt trip his mother into calling the whole thing off. Or to tell them that it had all just been a huge joke and they weren’t actually being forced into marrying a complete stranger. “Oh, but we would.” Or the super cliché arranged marriage fic where things escalate way too quickly.

Heartbreak Hotel | noellehenry | time travel - 1950s - historical - pining - 29k British popstar Harry Styles is thrown back in time after an unfortunate accident on stage. He wakes up in a small town in the US in the 1950's, where life is slightly different from 2015. With help from Niall and Liam he tries to adjust to his new life; without mobile phones and a world wide web to keep up with the world and where showing interest in nice cute boys with bright blue eyes is a no-no. Time travel and 1950's AU where Liam is an English teacher, Niall owns the Best Song Ever record shop, James runs Corden's Diner, Elvis fan Louis is the cute boy with the blue eyes and Harry..... just tries to survive really.

Playdate | Larry_you_know | getting together - misunderstandings - kid fic - fluff - 7k When Harry’s sister asked him to pick up her son at a kids' birthday party he sure didn’t expect to be stunned by the blue-eyed brother of the birthday twins. Using his nephew to see Louis again, he falls hard and fast. But how does one turn a playdate into a real date?

tread lightly on my ground | fairytalelights | a/b/o - mpreg - touch-starved - miscommunication - friends to lovers - touch deprivation - smut - 21k No, that's the tragic part of this, the part that makes Harry feel like the universe is playing a cruel joke on him. The father of his baby is exactly right, exactly who he always imagined himself having kids with. He just imagined them married, bonded. Happy. He didn't imagine them barely talking, tip-toeing around each other because neither of them is brave enough to talk about what happened between them. He didn't imagine the father of his child not loving him back. or, the one where Harry is having Louis' baby, but Louis doesn't know it's his.

Not Ready for This | berzerkshires | kid fic - single parents - smut - 18k Prompt for HLSummerFest2021: Louis and Harry are both single fathers and their children decide to go out on a date. The dads insist on meeting one another before they agree to let their child go out on this date.

Secret's Safe With Me | alltheselights | boss/employee relationship - secret relationship - toxic relationship (not h/l) - slow burn - smut - 59k But here’s the thing about secrets that people tend to forget—they’re deeply personal things. Tiny pieces of information about someone that they keep locked inside and only let out at certain moments, or to certain people, or not at all. Secrets have value, you see, even if only to the person holding them inside. If those secrets were to be told, if those tiny jagged pieces of someone, the parts they hold most dear, the parts they hide out of shame or fear or regret—if those pieces were exposed to someone, it would have the potential to change everything. When bad turbulence and three glasses of wine have Louis spilling all of his secrets to the man sitting next to him on the plane, it's embarrassing, sure, but it's also easy enough to shrug off and block out of his memory forever. Or at least, it was until Louis went into work on Monday morning and realized that the man from the plane is the new CEO of his company.

Marks On My Baby | thinlines | a/b/o - college/university - friends to lovers - hurt/comfort - angst - fluff - smut - 32k “What’s that?” Harry hadn’t meant for his voice to sound so sharp and even he winced at his own outburst. It was more of a hiss than an actual question, but for now, he was too surprised to care. “What’s what?” The omega asked, eyebrows raised and lips pinched. Harry knew he was probably mad at him for interrupting his rant, but the alpha was too on edge to bother pleasing the boy. “On your neck… Your bondmark spot…” His voice had grown low and deep, almost a growl. Who knew a single love bite on his omega friend's neck would trigger Harry this much? Certainly not the alpha himself.

Rogue | Laventriloque | a/b/o - werewolves - minor character death - hurt/comfort - past abuse - past rape/non-con - soulmates - smut - 95k “No, Liam! How many times do I have to… before you finally… NO WAY … a rogue in our pack?… cannot trust him … don’t care to know him … have enough members to worry about.” He hears more indistinct shouts before he hears pretty clearly: “His own pack didn’t want him!” Sitting here, his precious bag between his feet and everyone in the room looking at him, some with pity, some with disdain, some with curiosity, Louis feels like someone squeezed his heart in their hands and isn’t letting it go. He wills his head to stay up high and his posture to stay confident. He will not flee the room. He will not let that stupid lump in his throat get the better of him. He will stay here until Liam returns. He will take the rejection in stride and move on. Like he’s been doing all his life." -- Louis is a rogue Omega who's suffered through rejection and abuse for the biggest part of his life. He stumbles onto the Styles pack, quite possibly the kindest one he's ever met.

indian summer | docklands | strangers to lovers - hurt/comfort - banter - smut - 30k Harry runs a smoothie shop, which also happens to be an ever-moving caravan. He spends one week in each location and drives straight to the next, always eager for adventure. It isn't until his van breaks down and he needs to call for a mechanic that he starts to ponder his life choices. Louis, the said mechanic, is an anchor in Harry's wild sea, but his hard metal might be too much for Harry's unpredictable antics.

A Silver Lining In A Storm (You Were Lightning, I Was Born) | FallingLikeThis | arranged marriage - royalty - a/b/o - mpreg - minor character death - murder - non-graphic violence - angst - hurt/comfort - 7k Omega Prince Harry had always known that he was going to have an arranged marriage. But after the death of his first fiancé, a man who turned out far worse than Harry thought possible, his subsequent marriage to the man's brother leaves Harry finding it difficult to trust that everything will work out. Especially considering the only responsibility he’s aware of is to give his husband, the future king, an heir.

A Twist of Fate | myfearlesslou | a/b/o - strangers to lovers - soulmates - angst - 35k Since the moment Harry presented as an omega, all he's ever wanted was to have a baby. Fate had another idea in mind for him. Giving up on trying to conceive, he decides to adopt a new born baby boy. After months of loving and caring for the boy, a strange man comes into his life, taking him by surprise. Not wanting to lose the child he's loved from the moment he laid eyes on him, Harry does whatever he can to keep the boy safe and in his arms. Even if that means following the handsome stranger to a part of the woods he's never seen before.

Trust Me Tonight | 28sunflowers | historical - royalty - regency - arranged marriage - first time - mpreg - pwp - 10k After Harry’s eighteenth birthday, his father calls him into a meeting to say that he is to be married to Prince Louis of France in just over a week. Harry is excited, of course. The arrangement is better than any he could’ve hoped for, with such a young, handsome and kind husband. There is just one issue: Harry doesn’t know what happens on his nuptials, or how to get pregnant to give Louis the heir that he needs.

i got a heart (but i don't got a soul) | tempolarriefics | mythical beings Á creatures - enemies to lovers - childhood friends - famous/not famous - soulmates - angel/demon relationship - demon/human relationship - 19k “We’re soulmates.” Louis’ eyes flick from the tattoo back to Harry’s face, where his eyes are shining with excitement. Louis wonders if he is supposed to feel excited, too. He’s supposed to feel something, surely, besides his usual bitterness for Harry. He thinks back to how Lottie had described meeting Sam, how she had known in her heart that he was meant for her even before he said his phrase. He can’t help but wonder if he would be feeling differently if he hadn’t gone and sold his soul. Or, the one where louis sells his soul before meeting his soulmate, harry is a popstar with a heart of gold, niall is inadvertently responsible for harry's boners, liam is a meddling angel, and zayn is a demon who made a mistake

[sawwyouuinadream]

FIFTH HARMONY EXPOSED

Isn’t this the type of headline that intrigues people? Well, here I will expose some myths that the so-called Exposing accounts go on exposing. Just declaring something here in the beginning: I love all my Fifth Harmony girls, OT5 that is, and read it at your discretion. The thoughts stated below are opinions of mine, gathered over months and years, and I firmly stand by them.

Cutting to the chase, here we go:

1)      Fifth Harmony the Band Image:

This group was manufactured by Simon Cowell on the X-Factor, back in 2012, and it broke up in 2018. On the show, Lauren Jauregui, the green-eyed white Latina was given the majority of solos and they performed songs in Spanish and garnered Hispanic fans banking on the fact that there were three Latinas in the group.

After they signed to Syco/Epic when the show ended, we saw Camila Cabello, the more convincing Latina, who was born in Cuba, get more and more solos. Normani Kordei was promoted as the “dancer” of the group, Ally Brooke as the “unproblematic one”, Lauren as the “broody edgy girl” and Dinah Jane as the “relatable Polynesian”.

Not surprisingly, Camila was the first one to do a solo venture with Shawn Mendes, the song I Know What You Did Last Summer, which, according to me, was a song to test the waters for both Shawn and Camila.

As more time passes, Camila was portrayed like the lead, not by HERSELF, but the trademark that Fifth Harmony was. She stopped talking in interviews, started doing more and more solo stuff, and even signed to a different manager. Voila, we were getting the rift in-band vibes galore.

Now here’s my verdict:

Fifth Harmony was made by Simon to not get the next One Direction, but to get the next Taylor Swift. Little Mix was already there in the U.K, and people know Girl groups don’t do as well as Boy Bands, mostly because of the inherent Misogyny in the society.

They wanted the next relatable girl next door who could influence teenage girls.  Camila being Latina, could now have an even larger fanbase, in Latin America as well as South Asia, because South Asian music is quite similar in a groove to Latin Music.

Why Not Lauren or Ally then?  Well, they were simply not interesting or Latin enough.

Why Not Normani? Do I have to tell? Those bitches are racist as fuck.

Why Not Dinah? Same thing. Less Appeal to a large fanbase.

That’s why Camila was the goofy dorky most relatable person on 5H. That’s why she readily had a high budget tour all set up for her the moment she left the group. That’s why they promoted her. 5H was never the long-lasting plan. Camila was. 5H was just an excuse to get her a strong fanbase and give Epic 4 more mediocre artists. I am really happy that Normani proved her worthiness and released smash hits as well. And mind you, this was done without Camila herself wishing for it. It was just the label’s decision.

 2)      Camila- the beauty or the bitch?

Camila Cabello is a very intriguing person to me. At the first glance, you haven’t seen a more dorky, goofy, and relatable celebrity like her, eating bananas and tripping on air. But then she starts talking about profound and deep experiences, and you go on her Tumblr and find quotes from books and aesthetic pictures. But then you see her leaked text messages and old Tumblr and all those images crumble before your eyes.

Think about this. Among the 5H girls, Dinah, Lauren, Ally, and Normani have friends outside the industry whom they talk to and hang out with. They have family they post about. Camila? She seems to have no friends apart from Sandra and Marielle Guzman, and those are the people we got the leaked texts with. What about her school teachers and school friends? Nothing.  All she hangs out with is Shawn Mendes and Taylor Swift and her mom who follows her like a hawk. She doesn’t seem to have a social life at all except for events she goes for business.

In my opinion, Camila has a pretty big secret that is guarded closely by everybody but her.

Is she racist? Yes. She was. She didn’t have any sensitivity to Black people or their struggles whatsoever. But you have to understand she is Hispanic, and not born in the U.S. And she has sort of always been a big mouth. I am from a country that doesn’t have a single black person in the near 30000 miles. We grow up using racial slurs as if it's nothing. I had to unlearn my indoctrinations and consciously undo the wrongs in my head and implement them in my actions. Bit it doesn’t undo things I said as a child. I bullied one friend of mine in middle school simply because her skin tone was darker than mine. But I was not canceled. Because I am not a celebrity. Have I learned? Yes definitely. I will never dare to act like that again because now I understand the pain of being ostracized and I recognize the struggles of black people. But that happened over time.

I feel like Camila is a changed person now, and tries very hard to educate herself. She is not perfect, but she doesn’t deserve so much hate. She deserves a second chance.  If she was indeed like that, Normani wouldn’t post a photo with her in IT on the eighth anniversary of 5H.

As far as her being a jealous bitch goes. The rest of 5H always had good things to talk about her after 5H dissolved in 2018. Lauren, the activist, even praised her. Dinah still seems pretty close to her.

Did she do solo stuff without 5H knowing?

No. If she did, and the whole not attending meetings thing happened, Dinah wouldn’t go to her Bad Things concert one day before she left the band. Lauren wouldn’t laugh with her in the VMAs like that if they weren’t friends and just work colleagues. The whole 5H vs Camila feud was planned by management because apparently shade helps sales. For both parties. Another manipulative misogynistic example of society.

 3)      Are/ Were Camila and Lauren romantically together?

All the roads lead to Rome honey. Camren has too many coincidences to NOT be real. From song lyrics to shady potato photos to weird comments and body language in interviews, I am pretty sure the Camren blogs will keep you covered.

Why does Lauren hate it so much? Why are we being invasive?

Lauren is supposed to nix it every time because she is contractually bound to do so. She needs to be the one to keep Camila’s straight image intact, although we have more than tons of evidence that Camila is anything but straight.

To everyone who says we shouldn’t force sexuality on people. Heterosexuality is not the default. Don’t force straightness on her. She never said she was straight. We’re just speculating she is with Lauren, and that’s it. Lauren just happens to be a girl. That’s IT.

Why did the nosy shippers out Lauren?

Nobody did. They just speculated on her sexuality based on assumptions. But no fan posted photos of her and Lucy from her aunt’s Facebook, because it was password protected. It was most probably intentional. Note that she shot a coming-out photoshoot with her “ex-girlfriend” Lucy Vives even before the Wedding where she was supposedly outed. Why shoot a photoshoot TO COME OUT and then hide behind the closet? Her coming out was planned as early as 2015, and so was the bearding of Camila simultaneously.

To me, Lauren and Camila are contracts bound to lie, at this moment. But they have a very grown-up and well-communicated relationship that is very sacred and private, and only the two of them know everything about it. Lauren and Camila are still related to the same contract, and this intuition of mine was confirmed yesterday. She was shooting something for Roger gold’s label. I hope the best for both of them, and I would love it if they were together. But them going public would be huge and in my opinion, detrimental to them.

4)      Who’s Shawn Mendes?

A really career-oriented artist. Shawmila is for him and his promotion only. Not his fault though. He is just a conceited boy with good guitar skills who wants to be extremely famous. I will not talk about his sexuality, because unlike Camila, I can’t trace him to anyone in particular.  But I can say this, Camila’s solo career had plans for Shawmila since the very start. I also believe it will end like Jelena and be back and forth for some time for minor promotions.

 Final Verdict:

Nobody is perfect. Don’t make this about Shawmila Vs Camren. Every artist has their struggles. But please break out of the shell of heteronormativity, misogyny, and racism. Love human beings. The 5H girls and Shawn Mendes are teenagers, now adults, who have been oppressed and manipulated by a capitalistic racist homophobic industry, for money and money only. And only the fans have the power to see the truth and choose the right stuff.

[mikemoon]

( choi yeonjun, cis man ) have you seen MICHAEL “MIKE” MOON ? i heard HE is a COMPUTER SCIENCE MAJOR at SAN VERTO COLLEGE and an EMPLOYEE at HALL OF FILM. they’re 22 years old and they’ve been living in san verto for 6 YEARS. they tend to be CARE-FREE & ADVENTUROUS, but rumor has it they can also be GRUMPY & CLUMSY. [ tally, 25, gmt+4, she/her ] @foolsstarters​

tw // mentions of depression, cheating, divorce, underage drinking and smoking

michael moon, born myungjun moon –– choi yeonjun fc

birthday: september 9, 1998 - 22 yrs old ; virgo

cis man, he/him, bisexual

born and raised in philadelphia, pennsylvania

mike grew up being an only child, and always around the company of his mother in their house. his father was always traveling back and forth from south korea to the states for work. his parents have met at work on one of his father’s trips to the states, and they fell in love. his mother being american-born, she couldn’t really leave philadelphia. she loved it there. so they decided to keep it a long distance relationship.

sometime during those fleeting meetings, she had gotten pregnant with michael. and of course, his father spoiled them both, giving them everything they wanted. he never left them to fend for themselves. when the boy was born, his father named him myungjun, and his mother decided to name him michael for his english name. the nicknames jun, mike, and sometimes junnie were often heard whenever his parents or childhood friends called him.

up until mike was five years old in 2004, he’s lived with his mother, while his father was leaving and coming back for a week or two. but that year, he’s finally moved to the states and stayed with them for longer nights. he even finally married michael’s mother. of course, he still disappeared for a few days or weeks on end for work.

but that was also the year michael’s mother found out that her husband was with another woman. michael has never seen his mother break down like that before. sadly, the young boy was peering into the room when the fight happened and witnessed everything. his mother made her partner choose between the two women, and he eventually told her that he was going to divorce his first wife for her, and appeared to have gone through with his promise. because after that incident, he’s been around more often.

by early 2015, when michael had just turned 16, his mother had gotten a teaching job in ashdown academy, which resulted in their move to san verto, california. meaning, new school and new friends for mike. meanwhile, his dad was still traveling a lot for business and coming back whenever he could.

michael has grown up as a cheerful and energetic child. his friends at any school he went to would tell you how much of a great friend he is, how trustworthy and caring he is. it was so easy for him to make friends anywhere. he was the type of friend who would smile at you and listen to you talk on and on about whatever you liked, and the type who would cheer you on with anything you want to achieve. he wanted everyone to feel included and loved.

so it wasn’t that hard for him to get along with new people once he moved to town. he was a very social person. 

he was also the type of teenager who was out there doing things he wasn’t supposed to. he missed his old friends and his old home, but he wanted to have fun with all the new kids he was befriending. that simply resulted in him going to house parties as an underaged teen to ‘have fun’. his mother didn’t approve of him coming home very late at night, clearly smelling like smoke and alcohol. 

internally he was a depressed mess. of course, no one is completely happy as they grow up. his family was a mess, even if it appeared as fine to everyone else. his family life affected him so much while growing up. mike sometimes could disappear for a few days in his room, and it was always during some of his bad spells.

what made it worse was the day he found out the truth.

it was 2017 when michael walked into his father’s office in their house, looking for him to ask him about something. and instead of finding the man, he found a stack of papers poking from underneath his father’s laptop. upon closer look, they appeared to be divorce papers. michael’s heart sunk, thinking his parents were breaking it off.

michael is a curious kid, he couldn’t help but close the door and read the papers. but what he saw wasn’t his mother’s name, it was another woman. his heart raced, as he put things back where they were and immediately left the room. michael had found out one of his father’s many secrets. he never divorced his first wife all those years ago. he lied and somehow stayed with both women without suspicion... well, until now. clearly the other woman was breaking it off for a reason. 

michael couldn’t help his curiosity. he came back to the room later that night and snapped as many pictures as he could of evidence he could find. he even found his father’s phone (which was easy to figure out the password of) and found a plethora of pictures of the man with a different family, different kids and a different partner. he airdropped the pictures to himself to avoid leaving any traces behind and quickly left again.

a quick search on facebook, and he managed to find the first wife. it was easy with the name and pictures he had. if anything, michael prided himself on being a good internet detective... or stalker. he spent everyday trying to find the rest of the family on the internet. he found the woman’s young daughter on instagram and twitter, along with her older son’s accounts as well. it felt weird. it was a constant “now what?” for michael. he’s found them. what was he going to do now? he couldn’t just message them and tell them everything. and he couldn’t break his mother’s heart by letting her know.

except he had to let her know. he could never live with the fact that he knew his father was betraying her this entire time. and so michael told her everything, and after comforting her all night when she broke down yet again, she immediately ended things and asked for a divorce. now it was just michael and his mother, all alone. and for once, having to get by on their own.

thankfully they were safe, with his mother’s amazing money management skills, and the job she got at the academy, they managed to live their regular lives despite the heavy feeling of a broken family looming around them. the two just wanted to be happy again.

michael spent the next few years trying to lead a normal life. his mental health had gotten worse after everything he’s found out. he went to college, and he continued trying to do well in school. he really wasn’t the best when it came to grades, but he was trying his best.

and truthfully, he couldn’t help but make a few spare accounts on some social medias to follow his father’s other family.

but he eventually decided to just let it go, assuming they definitely knew about his mother and himself, which would explain the first divorce. so he decided to put it in the past and move on.

his mother has moved on as well. she found herself someone who actually cares about her so much (mike’s stupid ass has done a secret background check to make sure this dude wasn’t another cheater lmaoo) and now mike isn’t an only child anymore. it’s been 2 years since his little sister yuna was born, and he loves her so much. he still isn’t used to the idea of a new fatherly figure in his life, but he’s.... getting there. 

little dumb hcs

mike majors in computer science at san verto college, with a concentration in game development and design

hes a lil gamer boy,,, u KNOW he’s that annoying dude with a gamer chair that has a sound system in it khjkh

he posted a few videos on youtube but rly just ditched the channel after like a month. he still posts whenever he feels like it tho and it’s usually just.... messy gaming videos or opinions no one asked for

his dad’s dumb ass still doesn’t know it was mike who exposed him to his mother. he thinks she found the divorce papers on her own. therefore.... mike still gets money from his dad on a monthly basis and gets to keep the car he bought him for his 18th birthday lmaooooo a win 

you probably heard me say this before but.... theres a hc that mike is allergic to eggs. simply bc the idea of him shopping in the vegan section is funny to me 

this boy has a love for frogs ? idk where the obsession came from but you bet you’re gonna see a cute lil frog sticker on everything he owns. he doodles them on everything too ? it’s a habit at this point. he also knows random little facts about them and tells them to anyone who didnt ask for them 

. embarrassing but.. this dude... omg.... a big sana stan.... he has a photocard collection.... he went to a twice concert like 5 times.... dont be surprised if you see a feel special sana photocard in his phonecase.... im embarrassed of him 

he also has a hyunjin mcdonalds hashbrown photocard framed that a friend gave to him for christmas bc.. it’s a rare card,,, and you can see it on a table by the door when you walk into his apartment 😭

mike also has a habit of buying things he doesn’t need ?? he has a plushie collection that has been growing since he was young, and now is getting bigger with the rise of squishmallows

there’s this random hc where he drunk bought a cardboard cutout of john cena ,,,, don’t ask,,, it’s currently guarding his room back at his mom’s house djfhdj

can you tell mike is my most embarrassing , most chaotic character,, 

also he moved out after graduating school and when he started to attend college,,,, gimme some roomies pls

connection ideas ??

michael’s childhood friends; could’ve gone to the same school back in philly before he moved away ?? 

friends he made when he moved to town?? mike is very social and was... kinda popular in school, i’d say. he made friends with basically anyone he found interesting

michael’s ex; they could’ve ended on a bad note, or even on a good one and ended up being friends. im really up for plotting anything.

michael’s best friend; PLEASE i love wholesome best friend plots. it doesn’t matter if they met in san verto or philly

roomies pls !!! i would love it if he could have some roommates who have to deal with his very . peculiar decorating habits 

co workers ?? customers ? regulars ? he works at hall of film ! 

like this to plot or hmu !

[liligee]

Got any Original content op

Oh boi i had to dig these up from my old fb group lol some 2015-2018 sketches

I had a runaway wife of a magus ( never gave her a name yeet ) who was supposed to be used as a sacrifice catalyst but became a master. The blond gal there is her servant ( fanservant) Giulia Tofana assasin class.

I had to censor out the side cause that was my old name lol

———

Then there’s mah old mastersona Hyeim an illegal Homuculus creation created to develope, experiment or be a placeholder of mystic eyes illegaly harvested from unsuspecting common folks.

After being confiscated from her makers, she was due to be disposed off but due to her compatibility on rayshifting she was assigned as a master instead.

her being an illegal homuculus she was quite disposable, there was no harm on sending her to chaldea to make matters favorable to her new handlers. If she ever goes astray they could just wait for her to expire.

Her expiration marked is located behind her back mid spinal area 11/11 year not indicated

Her eye socket looks a bit worned out with all the in n’ out of the eyeball experimentation in the past, The current she has isn’t hers either but of a teenage victim that was unfortunate fortunate? To be born with Mystic eyes of breadth ( basicly just scoping lol seeing more than kilometer when used i just wanted make it sound fancy //slapped)

using an organ originally not hers would have backflash effects on her, sensory/information overload and burning sensation in her eyesockets, but if used longer despite the effects coming to play next would be instability of her magic circuits trying to negate the backlash of the eyes ( think of it like white blood cells trying to eradicate foreign matter but attacks the body instead thinking its the enemy aswell )

——

Theeen thats about it thanks for coming to my ted talk-

Tho I love making oc i never post abt them cause I’m absolutely horseshit at roleplaying lol i tried oTL so these are just some self indulgents~

Hyme tho i do want to redo her eyecolor and hair to fit her bg story

[big-bad-ulf]

The Prodigal Wolf Returns || Ulfric & Winn

Timing: Midday, Thursday 4th of June  Parties: @packsbeforesnacks, @big-bad-ulf Summary: Ulfric meets with Winn to discuss what drove him out of town, and consider their next moves.  Warnings: Mentions of assisted suicide, depression, and grief.

The clearing in the woods was quiet, remote, and neutral. Somewhere they could both feel at home, but that neither could claim ownership of. Hearing footsteps approaching, Ulfric dropped the cigarette stub between his fingers, stamping it out into the leaf litter below to conceal most of the evidence of the bad habit he’d picked up again after Celeste’s passing, though the smoke still lingered accusingly. “I suppose thanks are in order, for coming all the way out here,” he greeted Winn stoically, before finally turning to face the returned wolf. “As you’re aware, I’m not the one who you need to explain your actions to.” He hoped it was apparent he meant Layla and Ariana, but the young man didn’t have the best track record thinking things through to their logical conclusion. “But I’d like one, because as it stands I can’t imagine a scenario in which ‘sparring’ with a tiny human girl while in wolf form was necessary? Nor was fleeing town when you knew others of your kind were in danger.” The older werewolf’s tone was tired, weighed down by the collective suffering of White Crest’s pack over the last few weeks, but an anger borne of disappointment simmered beneath the weariness. 

Winn had been dreadin’ this conversation since he’d figured out everyone thought he’d skipped town. Ulfric was… intimidating, to say the absolute least. Winn could handle teenagers. He could handle folks in his own (relative) age group. And Simon was, well, kind, in a way that he wasn’t sure Ulfric was. But part of the problem was that he didn’t know Ulfric. Didn’t know most of the wolves, really, all friendliness aside. So, worst-case scenario, Ulfirc hated him. Best case scenario, Ulfric thought he was an idiot. As he entered the clearing, smoke tickled his nose. The Full Moon was on them and Winn was pretty sure he’d have smelled it even if Ulfric hadn’t just been smoking, but he stowed the frown. It wasn’t his place to judge someone’s habits; he’d had bad habits of his own. Still had some. “I appreciate it,” Winn said, “but it’s unnecessary. I should thank you, for bein’ willing to hear me out.” He leaned against a tree, scrubbing at his eyes. Reconciling with his father and (part of) his former pack hadn’t helped his sleep, much as he wanted it to and, with Natalia out of town, he was running low on aram. “Talked to both of them. Only one left that knew, I think, is you.”

He weighed what he knew about Blanche in his mind, what he knew about Ulfric, and his newfound fondness for the truth. “Blanche is… like a sister, to me. She’s a trouble magnet. If there’s supernatural nonsense goin’ on in White Crest, I head her way. ‘Cause chances are, if she isn’t already involved, she will be in, like, an hour. I know it was stupid, thought I had better control than I did. After I got a hold of myself, I dipped, for just a few minutes. Came back, told Blanche that I was leavin’ to take care of some things, left a note somewhere I thought she’d find it. Phone had been dead before that, and I figured if she told folks I was gone, they’d know that I’d be back soon and couldn’t really make a twelve-hour drive shorter.” Winn sighed. “That’s usually the part of the story where folks have questions, so hit me. Oh, right. Social media. A shirtless photo of mine got flagged and, since I didn’t have my phone, I couldn’t contest the deactivation. That one was just coincidence. Lady Luck wasn’t in my favor.”

“It was stupid,” Ulfric confirmed when Winn was through with his explanation. He crossed his arms and paced in a tight, restless pattern as he weighed the other wolf’s actions, to decide what needed asking. It wasn’t like he could pass any judgment in an official sense, it would be up to Layla and Ariana and any of the other wolves who felt slighted to decide for themselves how they felt and how they wanted to interact with him on a personal level. But as a more experienced wolf, he felt obligated to address the aspects of Winn’s behavior that had the potential to harm the entire pack, or even their entire species. “I understand this girl means something to you, but we don’t need to be teaching more humans how to fight us.” Not that it was likely a human of average strength would stand much of a chance, even with whatever ‘mind powers’ Blanche supposedly possessed, but that was beside the point, their weaknesses were meant to stay between them. “Learning that would only help her against our kind, and if you’re worried any one of us is a threat to her that’s something that can be dealt with internally… It’s the fact you don’t seem to know your limits that troubles me most, though.”

Ulfric stopped and stood his ground as he came to that conclusion, looking over Winn appraisingly as he remembered the young wolf bragging about having killed a hunter. He’d chalked it up to mostly harmless arrogance at the time, but when he later explained he hadn’t done it on purpose that should’ve raised more red flags than it had. “You don’t seem like you’re that new to this. You should have a better grasp of how much control you do or don’t have. So, I suppose my questions are, do you know what pushed you over the edge? What do you plan to do to ensure this doesn’t happen again?”

Winn tried not to bristle at the half-accusation, pushing himself off the tree and walking towards Ulfric as, hopefully, non-threateningly as possible. “With all due respect, I never said that I was trainin’ her to take out wolves,” he said. And he hadn’t been! Werewolves were just big and so were, what, half of the things B would run into? “She only knows the bare minimum, assumin’ she hasn’t talked to Kaden ‘bout his other job. Ain’t hard for a human to try silver, given only every story about us tends to revolve ‘round that fact.” He took a deep breath, exhaling through his nose. “But we can argue ‘bout Blanche later, it’s not like I’ll be sparrin’ with her in wolf form again.”

“It worries me, too. ‘Cause I’ve…” he paused, looking up into the canopy to choose his words carefully. “Let me backtrack. You don’t know much about me, and it might be… helpful. Since you’re the wolf ‘round here with the most experience…” Now, Winn was pacing. “I was turned almost eight years ago. The only turned wolf in a pack of, uh, werewolf fraternity brothers, down south. They guided me through my first dozen shifts, taught me how to be calm. So, believe me when I say: I have plenty of control, ‘specially for not havin’ been a wolf all my life. And don’t get your britches in a bunch, I know that sounds like bullshit, right now.” Winn ran a hand through his hair, uncomfortable with the conclusions he was beginning to draw about his time ‘changed.’ “I said I accidentally killed a Hunter… well, that was half-true. The accident was my own — I was sleepin’ with a Hunter, didn’t know he was a Hunter. The killing was on purpose. Self-defense, when he abused my trust, tried to go after my pack.

“After that, I was in… a dark place. That would’a been late 2015. Next thing I remember, I was in Europe, staggering in my human form out of the woods in early 2018. Thought, until recently, I’d spent a year or two in and out of my wolf form… but, I’m startin’ to question that. Couple theories’ve been tossed around, maybe it isn’t true. But when I… attacked B, it felt different. On a Moon, when I let the wolf come to the forefront… even when I was tryin’ to keep us separate, I still knew what was goin’ on. But with B, I don’t remember anything between getting thrown into a tree and pullin’ myself back from the brink. It was, well, dissociative is maybe the closest way to say it. I was there, and then I wasn’t. I’ve never lost control like that. Not even, y’know, when I was still new at this. It’s… it’s like hittin’ that tree pulled something out of me, something from under my conscious. I— Have you ever heard of anything like that? Where a wolf just… wasn’t himself, or even his wolf self? Even if it had been, say, Ariana, I don’t think it would’ve changed it. I still think that… part of me would want to attack everything.”

“There’s no need for that if you’re not going to do it again.” Ulfric agreed with Winn’s statement about Blanche. Truthfully, he did not want to be having this argument in the first place. A good old-fashioned brawl could be cathartic but having to play the role of stern lecturer just made feel weary, worn-out, and old. Running wild together, celebrating a successful hunt, sharing tales of old legends and recent exploits, those were the things he’d looked forward to about being a part of a pack again. Having to step up and confront things that put them in jeopardy was a responsibility that came with that privilege, but not one he enjoyed or hoped to have to take up often.

The older werewolf couldn’t contain a small grimace of disgust upon hearing Winn’s story. The chance that they might be a hunter was one of the many reasons it was a bad idea to get involved that way with humans, but he didn’t bother to voice his opinion on that. The man was an adult capable of making his own choices and he’d also spent a lot of his life as a human, so it was easy to see where that mistake had come from. Besides, it seemed he’d more than learned his lesson on that front.

“I’m sorry that you had to go through that. I can’t imagine how hard it must have been to come back from a betrayal like that.” Ulfric replied at last, because the tale was tragic, if difficult for him to relate to on a personal level. “I haven’t heard of wolves entering an abnormal state like that,” Of course, his own ‘wolf self’ was similar in some ways to what Winn had described, an entirely animalistic being, but even then it retained the animal instinct not to attack its own kind without severe provocation and the risk of that side of himself emerging outside of a full moon was very low. “It seems the answers may lie in what happened in those lost years. What are the theories?” Staying transformed for the better part of years… Was such a thing truly possible? Ulfric could’ve almost been jealous of Winn for having that freedom from morals and responsibilities of the human world for so long, if the suffering it was causing him now wasn’t so apparent.

“Have you tried… it could be possible, or so I’ve heard, to bring some memories back through mystical means.” He suggested hesitantly. “I don’t like getting involved with such things, but you can’t just… go on the way you are, not without having to isolate yourself.” And that was the last thing he wanted for any of his kind, regardless of whether he held them in high regard or not. “If something were to bring on this feral state in front of a crowd that would mean disaster for all of us. And I’m sure you know that,” He leveled the younger wolf with a hard-nosed look. “Even if some of your actions suggest a distinct lack of judgment of the more mundane variety.”   

“I— Thanks.” Winn frowned, stopping his pacing as Ulfric spoke. “I have a… friend, who looked into some, uh, wolf causes. Didn’t find much, some reports of wolves stayin’ transformed who went… feral, who couldn’t change back into their human form.” What Rio had told him had scared him, but it hadn’t felt, well… correct. It seemed like even those wolves had the sense to not attack other wolves, that they retained some of their humanity, even if they became more animal than human. ‘Course, many of them didn’t live to tell their tale, and the records that Rio had found could only tell them so much. Some had been written by Hunters, others written by a wolf who had to put one of his own down. But Winn had come back, which seemed to be the wrinkle. No Hunter had ever tried to bring a wolf back to themselves, but not even a packmate could. So, if Winn had been transformed, how could he have come back?

“Given I’m back, though, my friend and I ruled that out. ‘Specially for a bitten wolf to come back from bein’ feral? Seemed unlikely. Not when there was another explanation. Which is, um…” Alright, okay. He could admit this aloud. “My dad is a huxian. He thinks it might be mystical, yeah. Somethin’ taken from me, or somethin’ I gave up.”

He swallowed, mouth dry. “I’m still tryin’ other avenues. R— My friend is lookin’ into… side-effects of wolfsbane. What shit street wolfsbane might get spiked with. I—” Winn scratched at his arms, almost wishin’ that he was wearin’ a shirt. “I took wolfsbane for months, after I killed that Hunter. Blamed myself for what happened to the pack. And I guess I… stopped.” He looked up into the canopy. “But you’re right. I need to figure out my shit, so I don’t put us all at risk. And, short of goin’ back on the wolfsbane — which I’m not gonna do — we really don’t have any leads. If there’s… a part of me, that’s missin’, then I don’t want to go on like this. I can’t. Even if…” Well, there was always this part. Winn looked back down at Ulfric, mouth set in a hard line. “Don’t… I don’t want your pity. This isn’t y’all’s problem, but there’s… well, if I’m missin’ two years, there’s a chance that…” He coughed. 

“There’s this Hunter I know. Luke mentioned him at the meeting. He… If I did somethin’ bad, hurt an innocent life, he’s the one I trust to… put an end to me. But I don’t want him knowin’ about what happened with B, and— I don’t know what could happen, if I get those memories back. No one I’ve talked to so far does. But if he’s… if I’m different, if I try to hurt someone, I need y’all to be willin’ to stop me. If that happens… As the person I am now, I want you… to take me down. If you can’t kill me, let me rot. If I can’t control myself, I am… I am not more important than all of you.” His voice was hoarse, tears pricked at the corners of his eyes. He couldn’t remember crying this much in a very long time, but he needed to be firm. “Promise me. Please. I’m sorry, so sorry, to put that burden on you.” He held out his hand, for the other wolf to take, to seal the pact. “But it has to be done.”

As Winn’s explanation continued, it became more and more clear to Ulfric that his actions couldn’t be explained away by stupidity or cowardice. That was a shame really, both of those causes would’ve been much easier to deal with than this mystery of missing memory. Everything Winn said seemed to introduce a new piece to the puzzle (Huxians, wolfsbane, and of course, the seemingly inescapable interference of hunters), but it was unclear how they whole fit together or how much of a threat would be revealed when the big picture came together. When the young wolf came to the end of his speech and what he was asking him to do sunk in, Ulfric’s blood ran cold. Protecting the pack was paramount, but the thought of killing another wolf was profane, it would be the ultimate sacrilege towards the gift his ancestors had bestowed upon him. 

“I’m not going to sit idly by and let you harm other members of the pack, of that you can be certain,” he answered carefully, considering his options. If Winn were to slip into a permanent state of mindless, unbridled aggression, the usual ‘last resort’ of exile would do little to keep him from returning and causing havoc in their territory. Caging was another possibility, but he knew if their circumstances were reversed, he’d prefer a quick death over a life spent in chains, and it seemed the young man would as well. And finally, allowing hunters to deal with him in that state would only further inflame their hatred towards his kind, along with being plain undignified. “If your continued existence poses a threat to their survival, I promise you, I’ll do what needs to be done.” Ulfric accepted after a long moment’s deliberation, giving Winn’s hand a firm, resolute shake, though the clamminess of his palm betrayed his instinctual, visceral reaction against the plan. “Let’s not let it come to that though,” He added, more of an instruction than a hope. “I’ve had my fill of death for the time being.” 

““Thank you,” Winn said, quietly. “But… Agreed. Don’t want it to come to that.” It wasn’t that Winn hadn’t considered his death before. Hell, after what had happened with his old pack, there had been times where he’d… well, where he’d really considered dying. Winn liked to think he was better, now. If not totally well-adjusted, at least pretty solid on the ‘me dying wouldn’t fix the issue’ mantra. Counseling helped that, and learning about counseling only reinforced it. Which is part of why he knew: “I need those memories back, though. Even if it hurts, or if there’s… a reason I buried them. Now that I know they might not be there, it’s like… it’s like I can feel the space where they used to be. They’re a blindspot, sure, but more than that they’re… part of me. I can’t…” He sighed, sitting down on the forest floor and breathing in the woods for a moment before continuing. “As I am now, I can’t imagine what reason I could have had to bury them or… take them? I don’t know anybody who’d have the answers. Plus, there’s all the shit with Luke, and what happened with Ari, and… Fuck, man, I haven’t even asked you how you’re doing. I… I mean, I didn’t know Celeste, but I talked to Ari some, and… I know it’s a cheap question, but are you okay, Ulfric?”

“I think I can understand that. Why you’d want them back.” Ulfric assured him. He was familiar with having gaps in his memory, though he’d never had much choice in the matter. Berserkers had lost the ability to remember most of their actions while transformed centuries ago, and their intentions behind that, if there were any, were shrouded in mystery and myth. He did have a choice, though, between taking the easy way out and walking away from the carnage he’d caused while in wolf form and reconstructing what happened during that time as best he could. Ever since his ill-thought-out vengeance against the hunters who took his younger siblings, he’d chosen to do the latter. Chosen to look at the carnage and accept why it had happened, and that it was a part of him.

 “What we do is what we are,” he pondered aloud, before directing his attention back on Winn more fully. “I respect your choice and wish you luck. You can count on me for… whatever it is you think I can provide.” Which wasn’t much, given his lack of expertise in the realm of the magical. He couldn’t even truthfully say he’d provide friendly support, because he was still too wary of the young wolf and the potential danger he posed to the pack as a whole to consider him a friend. An alliance was clearly in both their best interests though, so Ulfric refrained from repeating his earlier comments about not wanting any help from him when he asked how he was. “I’ll survive, so will you,” he stated simply and firmly instead, almost ordering the fates to make it so. “Any other option doesn’t bear thinking about.” The older wolf turned briskly and took off into the trees. Action was required of both of them, if the White Crest pack was ever going to be able to consider itself safe. They could spare no more time for conjecture and contemplation.

[phanfictioncatalogue]

Transgender (FTM) Masterlist

Links Last Checked: June 2nd, 2022

AmazingFiona to AmazingPhil (ao3) - RachelEmberLee

Summary: You’ve been there since the beginning. You’ve seen your favorite YouTuber go from AmazingFiona to AmazingPhil.

Any Good Boyfriend Would Do It - analphancones

Summary: FTM trans!Dan is forced into going to school in a pushup bra by his mom because she washed his binder, otherwise known as his sports bras. Good boyfriend Phil comes in and gives Dan his hoodie, making sure his chest is well hidden to dull down Dan’s massive dysphoria. The bell rings before they get to class so they ditch and have sex at Dan’s house. Through singing Troye and kissing through giggles, Phil always makes Dan feel like the boy he knows he is.

A Soldier Gone to War (ao3) - the_toadlet

Summary: Fiona Victora Alexandria Lester is the royal princess of the United Kingdom

According to most of the country, anyway.

Fiona becomes Phil and runs amok in her city, slowly falling in love with Daniel Howell, a minor nobleman who slept outside because he was being a ‘rebel’.

Bells For Becca (ao3) - asherisnotfunny

Summary: Phil's long-term girlfriend mysteriously vanishes without a trace. With her history of suicide attempts her family fears the worst. He, however, does not lose hope. He spends 5 years desperately searching for her. Just when he thinks of giving up he receives new information on her possible whereabouts... One thing is for sure: a person can change a lot in 5 years.

Gorgeous - philskoolkatz

Summary: N/A

Grayscale (ao3) - orphan_account

Summary: Danielle is 15 when she looks at the mirror and says out loud, "I am a boy. I am gay. My name is... Dan," she picks, moving her hands outwards in front of her chest.

For a moment, she feels comfortable and happy.

Happy For You - midnightskydan

Summary: In which Phil tries to prove to his boyfriend that he’s every bit as masculine as Phil- even without top surgery. Trans!Phan.

Human //Phan (wattpad) - -bearr

Summary: My name isn’t Fiona. My name is Phil. I am a boy. I am not a girl. I’m only human.

Iced Caramel Macchiato (ao3) - SimplyUndead

Summary: Danielle Howell never felt comfortable in her own skin and she couldn’t figure out why.

#IPreferDan (ao3) - asherisnotfunny

Summary: He never planned on keeping the pill a secret from Phil because he never planned on Phil and him living together so comfortably for over 3 years. He'd banked on a year maybe a year and a half before they went their separate ways. He'd only banked on 2 months max before Phil found out what the pills were for. Dan couldn’t believe it was 2015 and Phil didn’t know yet.

Or the one where Dan was born female and refuses to tell anyone.

Red, Lies and ‘I Love You’s - philsdrill

Summary: Phil and trans!Dan are at Playlist Live and run into a complication when Dan gets his period during a meetup. Phil and Louise come to the rescue. Fluff.

Regrets Almost Made - nightowlhowell

Summary: Dan ends up coming out to Phil not in the way he would have preferred.

The Problem With Sleepovers - contentedlyconfused

Summary: Teenage FTM!Phil starts his period in the middle of the night, while sharing a bed with Dan - who doesn’t even know Phil is transgender.

The Way it’s Supposed to Be - crescendohowell

Summary: Soulmate AU where the name of your soulmate is written on your wrist from birth.  Phil’s has always said Danielle Howell, but one day that changes.

Your Freudian Slip (ao3) - TheOceanIsMyInkwell

Summary: Trans!ftm!Phil Lester is trying to start a new life at university away from his abuser, but the grip of his past seems impossible to erase. Though his best friend from online, Dan Howell, saves him from his thoughts by showing up on his doorstep one New Year’s Eve, nothing is at it seems on the surface. Thrust together at the darkest time of their lives, Dan and Phil have yet to trust one another with their secrets. Then an accidental kiss, a crisis of sexuality and a subpoena for a court appearance all begin to unravel the web of pretense.

[dogsliampaynedoesntinstagram]

hi, I'd like to read the sun interview with louis, but don't want to click or go to their website. you tagged one of your responses with "Thanks Jen for the transcript", can you please point me to the blog of this person, so that I can read it? thank you

Hi Anon, 

@jlf23tumble didn’t post it on her blog, but she did message it to me - so here it is:

AS a cheeky teenager in One Direction, Louis Tomlinson conquered the world – performing in stadiums around the globe and amassing a multimillion-pound fortune along the way.

But while he achieved pop superstardom, few 28-year-olds have suffered more trauma in their relatively short lives than the Doncaster-born singer.

In the four years since the group’s “hiatus”, Louis has faced unimaginable tragedy with the passing of both his sister Felicite aged 18, last year and his mum Johannah in 2016, before choreographing an impressive comeback with a debut solo album, Walls.

His personal journey back to full strength has been nothing short of remarkable — with the singer forced to deal with loss of his younger sibling and his mum in the full glare of publicity.

In an exclusive interview with The Sun, Louis explains: “Initially, when the news broke (about Felicite) last year, I was bitter about the fact that everybody was talking about it.

“Loads of people were speculating online about what might have happened. I was just told that it was the reality of the situation, which it is, and I had to accept it.“So that’s the negative side to it, but a positive side to it and something I wasn’t prepared to feel was the love from my fans.

“I wasn’t ready to feel like that, but I really needed it at the time.

“What was difficult was people speculating about details straight away, discussing online what might have happened when nobody really knew, and talking about my family. But actually when I looked further almost all of it was kind, and I felt loved.”

Just over two years before Felicite’s death from an accidental drug overdose, Louis’ mum Johannah tragically passed away, aged 43, following a long battle with leukaemia. It is a loss that continues to shape his life.

But he tells how, over time, he has come to learn from the experience — and now hopes to support others through his own experiences.

He adds: “I’m still getting asked about my mum now, but I’ve grown to understand it I suppose, and I feel like I can maybe help others.

“When I wrote a song called Two Of Us, I had fans talking to me about a loss they’d had, and they listened to the song and told me I’d helped them in some way. That makes it all worthwhile.“Despite how difficult it can be to deal with these things when people are watching, if I have the possibility to help even one person, that’s massive.”

Today, Louis is calm, reflective and down-to-earth when we meet in a low-key west London pub — despite him having sold more than 50million records globally with One Direction.

Louis talks with a broad Doncaster accent, and laughs as he reflects on his career, which began when he found fame with 1D at the age of 18.

He admits he has “f***ed things up” plenty of times in the past but hopes to have learnt from his mistakes.

His new single, Walls, recounts his experiences of love and loss. It is a clearly autobiographical reflection on his life over the last decade, which has seen him fall in love with his childhood sweetheart, Eleanor Calder, before splitting in 2015, and reconciling two years ago.In the years in between he fathered his first child, a son, with a US stylist but the pair soon separated and his romance with model Eleanor is now so strong marriage rumours have begun to swirl, although he’s quick to insist they are premature.

He explains: “Yeh I saw some of that. It isn’t true, but the luxury with Eleanor is I’ve known her since before our first single What Makes You Beautiful, so she’s felt the whole growth of everything.

“As I’ve got to understand it, she has too, and I have the benefit with her that we’ve seen it for what it is.”

So is marriage a possibility? He adds: “One day, yeah, I’d imagine so. If you’re asking me if I’m going to marry her? Yes, I think so! And more kids, I’d say so.”

His lyrics reflect on the ups and downs of his time in the spotlight, as he explains: “It’s about overcoming some of your problems and learning from your mistakes.

"It’s looking back at a certain time of my life and I’m sure there’s lots of people who can relate to that idea of being alone and waking up, being used to having someone there, then they’re not.“It’s a bit of, “Oh no, I’ve f***ed it up, yeah. But I’ve understood that now and I’ve come back stronger.

“You learn from your mistakes, and the song is about owning them, putting your hands up and saying ‘I know what I did was wrong, but I understand it a bit better now’”.

While in One Direction, Louis earned himself a reputation, alongside some of his other bandmates, as a party boy.

Today he’s learnt to control himself, but jokes that he can “still put a few beers away”. He’s keen to expand his mind now after missing out university when he found fame with One Direction on The X Factor.

He says: “I’ve been very lucky but one experience that I know I would have loved is university, mobbing out and meeting new people.

“Someday it will happen. I’d study psychology. And I’ve just started reading again, I just picked up this Beatles book, so I’m trying to educate myself a bit more.

“I just thought I’d pick up a few books, because I realised that I don’t read at all — and for a songwriter that’s pretty criminal.”

With a huge bank balance and global fame, there’s appears to be little to achieve. For Louis, fame has come first — but now he’s determined to prove himself as an artist in his own right, even if he is never able to achieve the enormous record sales One Direction enjoyed.

The album has been almost four years in the making. He scrapped a huge quantity of material and started over after he realised his first efforts had failed to fulfil his own ambitions.

He adds: “I’ve never been driven by money, but I’ve got a point to prove to myself. I think I was frustrated before, because I was in a few writing sessions where no matter what I said at the start of the session, the concept at the end was always something different. But after a while I decided to scrap all of that, and own this myself.

“I struggled with it for the first couple of years. I was trying to work out exactly what my sound was.

"I didn’t have the luxury every other developing artist has of making mistakes in the background until you land on that one you get excited about and that’s why it took me a second go to get it right.”

However successful his solo efforts may prove to be, alongside those of 1D bandmates Harry Styles, Liam Payne, Niall Horan and Zayn Malik, the question of a prospective reunion will always loom large for Louis — who remains in contact with his former bandmates but admits they are very different people.

He adds: “I used to feel more pressure about matching up to anything any of the others do, but the reality is we have different skill sets and different fans.

“Harry’s a star, there’s no two ways about it. I’m much more reserved. If I carry myself in a slightly different way, I might be able to get a different market but it’s all about staying true to you and that’s what we’re all doing.

“I spoke to Liam a couple of days ago but haven’t spoken to Niall in a couple of months. Me and Harry don’t speak quite as much but he sent me a text about the single and I sent him one about his, and there’s a mutual respect there, definitely.

Louis debut solo album, Walls, is released January 31. His single, also titled Walls, is out now.

[elceeu2morrow]

Simon Boyle, Bizarre Editor 24 Jan 2020, 21:35 | Updated: 24 Jan 2020, 22:29

AS a cheeky teenager in One Direction, Louis Tomlinson conquered the world – performing in stadiums around the globe and amassing a multimillion-pound fortune along the way.

But while he achieved pop superstardom, few 28-year-olds have suffered more trauma in their relatively short lives than the Doncaster-born singer.

In the four years since the group’s “hiatus”, Louis has faced unimaginable tragedy with the passing of both his sister Felicite aged 18, last year and his mum Johannah in 2016, before choreographing an impressive comeback with a debut solo album, Walls.

His personal journey back to full strength has been nothing short of remarkable — with the singer forced to deal with loss of his younger sibling and his mum in the full glare of publicity.

In an exclusive interview with The Sun, Louis explains: “Initially, when the news broke (about Felicite) last year, I was bitter about the fact that everybody was talking about it.

“Loads of people were speculating online about what might have happened. I was just told that it was the reality of the situation, which it is, and I had to accept it.

“So that’s the negative side to it, but a positive side to it and something I wasn’t prepared to feel was the love from my fans.

“I wasn’t ready to feel like that, but I really needed it at the time.

“What was difficult was people speculating about details straight away, discussing online what might have happened when nobody really knew, and talking about my family. But actually when I looked further almost all of it was kind, and I felt loved.”

Just over two years before Felicite’s death from an accidental drug overdose, Louis’ mum Johannah tragically passed away, aged 43, following a long battle with leukaemia. It is a loss that continues to shape his life.

But he tells how, over time, he has come to learn from the experience — and now hopes to support others through his own experiences.

He adds: “I’m still getting asked about my mum now, but I’ve grown to understand it I suppose, and I feel like I can maybe help others.

“When I wrote a song called Two Of Us, I had fans talking to me about a loss they’d had, and they listened to the song and told me I’d helped them in some way. That makes it all worthwhile.

“Despite how difficult it can be to deal with these things when people are watching, if I have the possibility to help even one person, that’s massive.”

Today, Louis is calm, reflective and down-to-earth when we meet in a low-key west London pub — despite him having sold more than 50million records globally with One Direction.

Louis talks with a broad Doncaster accent, and laughs as he reflects on his career, which began when he found fame with 1D at the age of 18.

He admits he has “f***ed things up” plenty of times in the past but hopes to have learnt from his mistakes.

His new single, Walls, recounts his experiences of love and loss. It is a clearly autobiographical reflection on his life over the last decade, which has seen him fall in love with his childhood sweetheart, Eleanor Calder, before splitting in 2015, and reconciling two years ago.

In the years in between he fathered his first child, a son, with a US stylist but the pair soon separated and his romance with model Eleanor is now so strong marriage rumours have begun to swirl, although he’s quick to insist they are premature.

He explains: “Yeh I saw some of that. It isn’t true, but the luxury with Eleanor is I’ve known her since before our first single What Makes You Beautiful, so she’s felt the whole growth of everything.

“As I’ve got to understand it, she has too, and I have the benefit with her that we’ve seen it for what it is.”

So is marriage a possibility? He adds: “One day, yeah, I’d imagine so. If you’re asking me if I’m going to marry her? Yes, I think so! And more kids, I’d say so.”

His lyrics reflect on the ups and downs of his time in the spotlight, as he explains: “It’s about overcoming some of your problems and learning from your mistakes.

"It’s looking back at a certain time of my life and I’m sure there’s lots of people who can relate to that idea of being alone and waking up, being used to having someone there, then they’re not.

“It’s a bit of, “Oh no, I’ve f***ed it up, yeah. But I’ve understood that now and I’ve come back stronger.

“You learn from your mistakes, and the song is about owning them, putting your hands up and saying ‘I know what I did was wrong, but I understand it a bit better now’”.

While in One Direction, Louis earned himself a reputation, alongside some of his other bandmates, as a party boy.

Today he’s learnt to control himself, but jokes that he can “still put a few beers away”. He’s keen to expand his mind now after missing out university when he found fame with One Direction on The X Factor.

He says: “I’ve been very lucky but one experience that I know I would have loved is university, mobbing out and meeting new people.

“Someday it will happen. I’d study psychology. And I’ve just started reading again, I just picked up this Beatles book, so I’m trying to educate myself a bit more.

I just thought I’d pick up a few books, because I realised that I don’t read at all — and for a songwriter that’s pretty criminal.”

With a huge bank balance and global fame, there’s appears to be little to achieve. For Louis, fame has come first — but now he’s determined to prove himself as an artist in his own right, even if he is never able to achieve the enormous record sales One Direction enjoyed.

The album has been almost four years in the making. He scrapped a huge quantity of material and started over after he realised his first efforts had failed to fulfil his own ambitions.

He adds: “I’ve never been driven by money, but I’ve got a point to prove to myself. I think I was frustrated before, because I was in a few writing sessions where no matter what I said at the start of the session, the concept at the end was always something different. But after a while I decided to scrap all of that, and own this myself.

“I struggled with it for the first couple of years. I was trying to work out exactly what my sound was.

"I didn’t have the luxury every other developing artist has of making mistakes in the background until you land on that one you get excited about and that’s why it took me a second go to get it right.”

However successful his solo efforts may prove to be, alongside those of 1D bandmates Harry Styles, Liam Payne, Niall Horan and Zayn Malik, the question of a prospective reunion will always loom large for Louis — who remains in contact with his former bandmates but admits they are very different people.

He adds: “I used to feel more pressure about matching up to anything any of the others do, but the reality is we have different skill sets and different fans.

“Harry’s a star, there’s no two ways about it. I’m much more reserved. If I carry myself in a slightly different way, I might be able to get a different market but it’s all about staying true to you and that’s what we’re all doing.

“I spoke to Liam a couple of days ago but haven’t spoken to Niall in a couple of months. Me and Harry don’t speak quite as much but he sent me a text about the single and I sent him one about his, and there’s a mutual respect there, definitely.”

Louis debut solo album, Walls, is released January 31. His single, also titled Walls, is out now.

[justlikeeddie]

otp meme

List your Top 5 Canon and Top 5 Non-Canon OTPs. Then, tag 10 people to spread the love, and so on and so on…

I was tagged by @rcmclachlan! It’s fun to excavate your fandom history!

This is a GOOD QUESTION in that, y’know. What is a canon OTP? (What is a pairing? What is canon? What is ‘is’?) The answer, for this post, is “whatever made it easiest for me to split these into two sets of five”.

CANON OTPs

Aziraphale/Crowley, Good Omens

This is canon. “Fight me”? No need. Fight Michael Sheen.

Do say: “And when I’m off in the stars, I won’t even think about you!”

Don’t say: Hey, have you thought recently about the fact that Crowley’s snakeskin shoes might actually just be his feet?

Look at an art: A little ancient Grecian collusion by @seraph5

Read a fic: nothing but the wild rain by @singlecrow

Have I written it? In a desperate exercise in exorcism immediately after watching the show, yes: Going Native and Riding in Cars With Demons. And I have about five WIPs in charliekellypepesilvia.jpg frantically plotted notes stages. Watch this space. (For some time. I’m a bizarrely slow writer.)

Flint/Thomas, Black Sails

Do say: “People can say what they like about you, but you're a good man. More people should say that. And someone should be willing to defend it."

Don’t say: I was enjoying the show so much that I ignored the fact they made captain flint gay but to wrap up the series on the notion he would put his sword down to pick daisies with his male lover is just too much to bear. I miss the 90’s

Look at an art: Journey into the Dark by @riisinaakka-draws

Read a fic: Unaccommodated Man by @septembriseur

Have I written it? Yes, although astonishingly, I only ever finished one fic: Some Affair.

Strange/Arabella, Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell

Do say: “The excitement of it was very much to see how you would look at me. The excitement of life was very much to see how you would look at me.”

Don’t say: HE WAS A MUCH WORSE HUSBAND IN THE BOOK AND HE LET HER DIE AS A TREE (I know. I know)

Look at an art: Padua by @cobbledstories

Have I written it? Not as a foreground pairing, although I do have a very detailed Strange/Arabella/Grant fic that lives eternally in my head in the hope it will one day fit a Yuletide request.

Morse/Joan, Endeavour

Do say: “You mean the world to them. You mean the world…” [trailing off in tears]

Don’t say: You do realise he’d make her miserable and she deserves better? (I KNOW)

Cry at a simple gifset: :′′(

Have I written it? No, happy to let the show itself continue to take anything that Morse might hold dear and crush it into the dirt, no need for me to help.

Jake/Amy, Brooklyn 99

Truly the opposite to Morse/Joan in every possible way, aside from the involvement of law enforcement personnel

Do say: “There’s a typo in this crossword puzzle.”

Don’t say: …Title of your sex tape. (Or anything about Season 6, which I haven’t seen yet.)

Look at an art: Jake & Amy by @ivy6am

Have I written it? No, because Brooklyn 99 is an example of that rare and complete joy, Show That Textually Contains Literally Everything I Want From It And Then Some.

NON-CANON OTPs

Sam/Gene, Life on Mars

My “formative” tag on Tumblr is probably overused, but, like. Extremely. Formative. Truly the ur-fandom in terms of my future trope and fic interests. God bless you, weird mid-00s genre experiment broadcast at a particularly impressionable point in my teens.

Do say: Gene Hunt constructs intricate rituals that allow him to touch the skin of other men.

Don’t say: The ending of Ashes to Ashes is canon.

Watch a vid: There Is Too Much Light In This Bar by AbsoluteDestiny

Read a fic: Tangible/Intangible by @lozenger8

Have I written it? I went back to this fandom for Bent for Yuletide a few years ago, but everything else was written when I was literally 17, so caveat lector.

Merlin/Arthur, Merlin

Genuinely wondered whether I should have included this in the canon list. Two sides of the same coin? Merlin's mum desperately trying to get them together about halfway through the first series? “I was born to serve you, Arthur”? As ever, in thinking about this, I’ve just made myself furious again that this objectively fucking stupid children’s TV show remains one of the most emotionally and erotically resonant pieces of media I’ve had the misfortune to consume.

Do say: “I could take you apart with one blow.”

Don’t say: “I could take you apart with less than that.” (It’s been nearly eleven years since this exchange aired on children’s TV and I’m still reeling)

Watch a vid: Alone by sisabet

Read a fic: Past Imperfect by @thehoyden

Have I written it? Yes, although, again, I was a teenager and didn’t really know how to words: Cross You Off My List. I also have a passionately-planned and half-written epic about the ten years of their evolving relationship from boys 2 men (not the band), and its delicate balance between private interaction and public performance, which I thought I was finally going to finish for the ten-year anniversary of the show last year, but at this rate, might be done in time for the twentieth.

Fraser/Kowalski, due South

Do say: “Partnership is like a marriage, son.”

Don’t say: Anything that will wake the Vecchio anon.

Watch a vid: Goody Two Shoes by @laurashapiro-noreally and pipsqueak

Read a fic: Kowalski is Bleeding by @cesperanza

Have I written it? Weirdly way less of it than makes sense for the amount of time that this was my primary fandom, but yes, published some time after the fact: Homecoming and Poles.

Strange/Grant, Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell

Surprise double-entry for JSMN! Except not at all a surprise, because I am into so many aspects of this book and show that I could probably have filled most of the ten entries with JSMN rarepairs. (Please, talk to me about the criminally underexplored sexy class politics of Strange/Childermass.) But anyway, Strange/Grant was, somewhat to my surprise, my takeaway pairing from the TV adaptation.

Do say: “There are any number of magical things my friend could do to prove it,” while looking like you’re about to combust from how excited you are by the prospect.

Don’t say: HE WENT TO VENICE IN A PUDDLE WITH NO GOODBYE (I know)

Look at an art: Major Grant by erebusodora (technically only one half of the pairing, but it’s just a very nice painting)

Read a fic: Wilderness by @the-omnishambles, ie The First Strange/Grant Fic On The Internet

Have I written it? Yes, went a bit mad in 2015. A peculiarity of the Iberian Peninsula (long, slightly sad); An England that is dead (shorter, sadder); and Sound and Vision (no redeeming features).

Charles/Erik, X-Men

Again… IS THIS CANON. Explain any single thing that happens in any of the X-Men timelines if this pairing isn’t at LEAST unconsummated canon

Do say: “I couldn’t disobey you even if I wanted to.”

Don’t say: Sorry, what exactly was the plot of X-Men: Apocalypse?

Look at an art: A sketch by loobeeinthesky (the watch!!!)

Read a fic: Wisteria by by @columbinepurples

Have I written it? Yes: The Width of a Circle.

In turn, but only if you’re bored and like making a list as much as I do, tags for:

@confusinglyamusingly

@butteronmyroll

@johnnyvod

@the-omnishambles

@sixohsixoheightfourtwo

@cribins

@septembriseur

@itsmapes

@deputychairman

@drawsaurus

(You don’t… have to go into as much detail as this… I think you’re just supposed to say who the pairings are, but listen I’m staying with my parents this week and I have a LOT of tumblr downtime)

[the-untitled-writing-project]

The Untitled Writing Project

By: just-another-anonymous-author

I have spent my entire simple - albeit short - existence on this planet searching everywhere for something - a feeling or some kind of meaning, I guess. But, this isn't one of those narratives that will end with a lesson or some assessment of morality or some larger social impact; this is just a story. 

When I was born, it was because it was the logical next step for my parents. I won’t spend a lot of time on my parents because they were just doing what they thought they should, but it is necessary. My parents were in love once, I think, but by the time I can remember their relationship, that was all gone. My dad was basically a piece of shit. He was abusive and mean and left with my brother and me when I was eight - can you say kidnapping? - but he had some semi-redeemable qualities, I guess, and he’s my dad so I loved him. Only now, looking back, do I understand how truly toxic that man was in my life. But this isn’t about me now, so let’s not get too distracted by that. 

My freshman year of high school, I stopped speaking to my father. He couldn’t support me unless everything was going his way - much like a toddler - and he made his disgust known. He didn’t like the high school I was going to or the people I was spending time with or the fact I wanted to be a writer - in fact, he constantly told me that I was just going to be mediocre like him, so I should stop trying so hard -  and I couldn’t take it anymore, so I hung up the phone on him and haven’t spoken to him since. After one conversation with a judge in chambers, he lost any claim to custody of my brother and me. But I am getting a little ahead of myself. See, my dad’s constant emotional abuse made me anxious and depressed in a very real way. It was hard for me to function in any capacity. My reality was harsh and I would do anything to remedy that fact. 

[Enter a boy.]

When I met him, I was immediately taken. Compulsively searching for any meaning in life, I was a heat-seeking missile looking for something, anything to give me a reason to wake up in the morning.

When I saw him, four things happened almost simultaneously:

My heart skipped a beat - or maybe a few.

My stomach tied itself in so many knots it felt like a necklace chain you would eventually just give up on.

My hands started to shake - though that may have been the fact that I hadn’t eaten all day.

My mouth dried up like the Sahara Desert on the hottest day of the year.

The very moment my eyes landed on him my mind shut down, my body seized up, my life was shifted permanently. I had never felt anything like it before. It was like the most beautiful sunrise, the smell right before it rains, watching hundreds of birds take flight, the perfect sip of tea, a quiet Sunday morning in a cafe. Everything just felt complete. 

The first time we spoke it was like I had known him my entire life. I felt comfortable, I felt safe, I felt like I was home. I suppose that sounds like a cliche, but I am just trying to be as honest as I can. I guess that feeling of comfort and safety is why when he left I felt like I was on fire and drowning and being buried alive all at once. But, we aren’t there yet, so I’ll start at the beginning, yeah?

When I met him, we instantly clicked. I knew in my heart and soul - my mind isn’t really involved in the beginning - that we were going to fall in love. I never could have predicted how fast and hard we would fall for each other. We were like a meteor plummeting to the Earth and wiping out a small island. Our love was powerful. Our love was overwhelming. And, overall, our love was destructive.

The first time we kissed it was like something out of a fairytale or a romance novel or a Lifetime movie. It was sweet, slow, and beautiful. We were just teenagers - young and dumb and naive. We were at a park. It was dark and you could see all of the stars. It felt like there was no one else in the universe - it was just the two of us floating on a cloud way above the ground - and we were pointing out constellations in the sky. It was getting late. He got up from the dew-covered grass and as he offered his hand to help me up, he tripped and caught himself over me. We looked at each other for a second. Then it happened. He leaned in, kissed me, and my entire world exploded. I felt like there was electricity coursing through my veins; like I had just witnessed the Big Bang; like nothing could ever hurt me ever again. Our kiss was short but absolutely and utterly perfect.

We became inseparable. Where I was, he was. Where he was, I was. It was that typical “young love”, I guess. He became a part of me. I hate to admit that looking back, but it is true. There was a room in my heart with his name written all over the walls. It was like I let a toddler loose with a box of Crayola markers and they wrote the only word they knew over and over and over again until they ran out of ink. It may be dramatic, but that’s how it felt to my young heart. 

We instantly became dependent on each other. See, we are both very good at reading people and could tell when the other was upset. When I was anxious, he knew how to calm me down. When he was angry, I could help him reasonably solve the problem. When I was having full-blown panic attacks, he would hold me, soothe me, and remind me that I needed to breathe to live. He could calm even the harshest of storms in my mind. The problem with that is we eventually got tired of solving each other's problems and wanted to focus on our own. 

[Enter a wedge in our relationship.] 

Beyond this, however, we still had a great time together and a great amount of love for each other. 

The first time we had sex it was terrible. Honestly, we both had no idea what we were doing. We were fumbling and just doing our best. It was not good, but I still look back on it fondly. It was two teenagers figuring each other out, doing what we thought we should, using all of our public school education to appease our crazy hormones. 

Speaking of hormones - bad transition, I know, but this is train of thought writing, so I can do what I want - the first time we fought it was like my entire world was crumbling around me. We are two of the most stubborn people that exist - I am sure of this fact and there is no debating this - so every fight, no matter how small, felt like the absolute and utter destruction of all of humanity. We would scream, I would cry, he would storm off, we would make up. No matter what we fought about - how to spell a word, not answering texts, hanging out with an ex, whether it was Johns Hopkins or John Hopkins - we gave it our all and ended up fuming. The great Johns Hopkins debate of 2015 made me feel like my brain was on fire and I had smoke coming out of my ears. Even when it was stupid or pointless, we both had to be right. See, the thing is that we loved each other, but we were young and reckless and thought it would last forever. 

The first time I wrote him a love letter I felt I had finally found my muse - ironic, isn’t it, seeing as I am writing about him here, once again. We wrote each other letters back and forth for months. I would type out everything I felt about him, I would type out apologies, I would type how much I loved him over and over. He wrote me a handwritten love letter once. I folded it up and kept in my wallet from that moment on. Whenever I doubted myself, whenever I missed him, whenever I felt especially bad, I would read his letter over and over again. He wrote everything I had never felt about myself - that I was brave, that I was beautiful, that I was smart, that I was going places.

After a million different instances of supporting me through my severance from my father, he showed up to the Court House on the day my father lost any claim to his children. See, he knew we would be there and he knew I was going to be having a very bad day. He came to make sure I was okay, he took my mother, brother, and me to lunch. He hugged me, he kissed my head, he reassured me that what I was doing was right and necessary for my mental health and future successes. The thing is that at this point we were very dependent on each other in an extremely unhealthy way. Neither of us had much of a childhood, let alone an easy one, so it was two teenaged “adults” trying to make sense of trauma we should never have had to experience in the first place. 

The first time we spent a week apart since we started dating was torture. It was shortly after a successful, but literally physically painful and stressful court date. At this point, we were fighting like a married couple and our relationship was mainly texts and FaceTiming late at night. As two very jealous people - we’re both water signs, if you follow astrology you’ll understand - we were not doing well with a slowly separating relationship. I was thrilled to get back from my trip and spend time with him and work on us. He had other ideas.

The first time we broke up it was like nothing would ever matter again. You see, I feel everything so deeply and when we broke up I went numb. He came back the next day and said he regretted it, he didn’t want to lose me, he wanted to pretend it never happened. I agreed, but something was different. Suddenly, the sun rises were duller, the smell of rain wasn’t as crisp, there were only a few birds taking flight, the tea was lukewarm and bland, the cafe was packed and the coffee was burnt. He told me he still had things to think about. He told me he didn’t want to break up but didn’t know if we would be together long term. He told me he just wanted to love me. I told him I wouldn’t wait around for him to make a decision and to take me home. That was the second time we broke up.

The second time we broke up I cried for three days. My mother had never seen me so upset about anything - and trust me I had experienced plenty of hardship before this relationship. The second time we broke up I didn’t get out of bed for a week. After three days of crying, my mother called him. She didn’t know what else to do. She knew we broke up, but she thought he could help me. She knew he was the only person who could. He came over and came into my room. He tried to coax me out of bed with the promise of seeing a movie and going to dinner. I told him to go away and that I didn’t want him to come back. I heard him get up off of my floor. I heard him open the door. I heard him hesitate. I heard him leave. 

The first time I ever truly felt nothing was terrifying in hindsight. After he left my house, I stopped crying. I got out of bed, I showered, I got dressed. I sat in the middle of the room with my arms wrapped around my knees, my chin on one kneecap, and I stared at the walls of my bedroom for hours.  It was like my heart was sealing up the room with his name all over it. My muscles ached as if I had just been stretched on a taffy puller. My head was pounding like a smurf was banging on the inside of my skull with a hammer. My bones ached as if all of the bone marrow had been extracted with a rusty scalpel. My world truly felt like it stopped turning. 

The first time I deleted all of the pictures of the two of us off of my phone it was like burning a part of myself alive in a bonfire. I stared at every picture for what felt like hours before finally hitting that tiny trash can. I guess I thought I could rid my heart of him by deleting him off my phone. When I finally had to change my background, I didn’t know what to change it to. What did I love more than this ridiculous, stubborn, idiot of a boy? Nothing. I couldn’t think of anything I wanted to see more on that screen than his face. So, I changed it to a blank black background. 

The first time I saw him after I went numb, it was like we had never met. I felt nothing - no emptiness, no pain, no anger. I was just numb. He acted as if nothing had happened. He talked to me like we were best friends. I deserve an Oscar for acting like I was okay with that. I would laugh at his jokes, I would go with him to the movies, I would sing along to the radio with him. I acted like it wasn’t killing me to sit in his car without holding his hand; like it wasn’t weird to go from strangers to in love to just regular friends so rapidly; like I was okay with existing beside him, yet without him. 

The first time he broke my heart I thought nothing could ever hurt worse than that moment. My entire body was on fire, but after I went numb, I thought I might never feel again. Then, he broke my heart again. He moved on from me like I was nothing, just a short story in his chapter book. He told me he was dating someone new over a cold, short text message. I wasn’t surprised, but I also wasn’t ready. I mean how can someone move on so fast and expect everything to be fine? I honestly felt like I deserved it. I felt I deserved no respect at all. The thing is I was not a secure person at all - I saw all of my flaws and knew one day they would lead to our demise. I wasn’t shy to this fact, so when we broke up and he moved on so fast, I blamed myself and sunk into a sea of bitterness like a boat in a hurricane.

The first - and only - time I returned all of the things he ever gave me I did it in a blind rage. After he told me he was dating someone new, I went home, I found every single thing I owned that reminded me of him. I found books, stuffed animals, cards, handwritten love letters, jewelry, pictures, blankets, t-shirts. I stuffed them all in a bag with tears streaming down my cheeks. My mother called my best friend as she heard things crashing around my room. As soon as they came over, I broke down. The wall of numbness I had built around my heart came crumbling down - evaporated into a cloud of smoke. I cried, I packed, they tried to talk me out of it. I guess what they said was right… I shouldn’t have done it like that. I was hurt, angry, defeated, utterly crushed by what I felt was an act of betrayal. I simply was not ready to give him his stuff back, but I did. I dropped the bag of his stuff off at his house and left without saying a word. He called me heartbroken. I responded with the same coldness as his text. 

The first time another boy flirted with me it was like I had never met someone of the opposite sex before. I didn’t know what to do or say or how to stand. Have you ever seen those videos of giraffes attempting to walk directly after they’re born? They’re all shaky and awkward. I was like that any time I received male attention. See, the thing about him is that he is the jealous type. While we were dating, he constantly told me my male friends had crushes on me, that they wanted to date me, that they were gonna try something as soon as we were alone together. Though he was right about my best friend, it still made me cautious about any prolonged attention. 

The next time I answered his call his girlfriend was across the country. He wanted to hang out at his house. He wanted to talk and catch up. And, I was full of bitterness and anger and wanted the chance to tell him off. Instead, we had sex. Every inch of my body burned as I walked up to his door, but when I saw his face, I felt all of my emotions come rushing back. I left and locked myself in my bathroom, turned on the shower, and sobbed for an hour.

The first time I tried to move on was a tragedy. I met a lovely boy, the opposite of the one I had fallen so deeply in love with. He wasn’t well polished or reaching past the stars into another galaxy. He was just a regular boy who had long hair and big shirts and a guitar. He was a nice boy, a sweet boy, a boy who liked me. I reveled in the thought of finally moving on and being happy. I thought about being able to ignore an ex-boyfriend when he called or asked probing questions or came around being jealous and nosey. So, I flirted with a boy. A boy who liked me, but had never had a girlfriend. A boy who didn’t know everything about my past relationship or my family or any of my hardship. We texted constantly, hung out every day at school, and all of our friends encouraged us. The thing was… I couldn’t get my heart to tear down the last few walls with a name written all over them. My mind was constantly running. Will he be jealous? Will he be angry? He already moved on, why shouldn’t I?

The first time I went on a date with my nice boy we went to the zoo. It was nothing magical or truly extraordinary, just two kids getting to know one another. My nice boy didn’t tell me he liked me - he was shy - but he held the door and he told me jokes and he made me a playlist of his favorite songs. My nice boy and I finally decided to date only each other, but after one month, I got a text. A request to come over and catch up. See, the thing is, I had a boyfriend and on the outside, it looked like I had moved on, but in reality, all I was doing was pretending. I still missed him. The way he laughed, the way he smelled, the way his dimples showed when he was genuinely happy. So, I went to his house. It was dumb. No one was there. He started asking about school, about my nice boy, about my mother. Then, he tried to kiss me. He said he missed me, he wanted to “hook up”. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t consider it. I mean here is a boy I once loved - still loved - offering me a chance to be with him again. But, even though my entire body ached and my heart was in my throat, I told him no. I got up, grabbed my keys, and closed the front door behind me. 

The first time I almost cheated I sat in my car and cried for an hour. I beat myself up for days. My mind was screaming at my heart - Why would you go over there? Why would you think he would want anything else? Why did you set yourself up to fail? But, my mind also knew what I had to do… I had to break a heart. By this point, my nice boy had fallen in love with me - and told me so. I had to break up with him. I couldn’t look him in his eyes knowing I had briefly considered cheating on him. I am not that person, I was not that person, I would never cheat. But, for .05 seconds… I thought about it. 

The first time I broke a heart it destroyed me. I had to break up with my nice boy, but I couldn’t tell him why. I made up some excuse about college. It was one thing to break up with him, but I couldn’t - I just couldn’t - tell him what happened. After we broke up, I was truly and deeply upset, but my nice boy couldn’t even look at me. I felt so much guilt and shame that I avoided all of our friends as often as I could. No one could beat me up the way my mind could.

The first time I decided I couldn’t talk to him any more my heart cracked right down the middle. I knew - was absolutely certain - that we just couldn’t be friends anymore. I mean, how can I move on if he’s calling and texting and sending me funny pictures on Facebook? How could I let him ask me to cheat on someone I truly cared about? How could he even ask me to do that after how jealous he was during our relationship? How could he disregard my feelings so quickly? Was I simply someone to have sex with to him? So, as I dreaded each push of a button, I unadded him on social media, I deleted his contact - though I still had his phone number memorized - and I exhaled the weight of the last two and a half years. 

After cutting off a majority of our contact, he noticed. Of course he noticed, and he was annnnggggrrrryyyyyyy. How could I act like we weren’t friends? He asked. How could I try to cut him off? I told him I needed time, that I couldn’t see him, that I couldn’t read about his new girlfriend or his college experiences. He didn’t understand. He thought that I loved him and we had decided to be friends. Eventually, I stopped taking his calls. 

The next time we actually spoke was two years later. He came home from school and wanted to talk. He told me to meet him at “our” spot - the same spot where we shared our first kiss, where we snuck away to when the world started to close in, where I fell in love with him. I was in the thick of healing and was looking forward to my future, but his voice had a sense of urgency and something in me told me I had to go. So, I went. We sat for hours and caught up, talked and laughed like we used to before anything went wrong.

The first time he apologized to me was genuine and raw. He told me he was sorry for how he mistreated me, how he was looking for something else, how he took advantage of me. I told him I had moved on and accepted his apology, but that it wasn’t okay. I told him that if I found out he was treating someone else like that I’d kill him myself. We talked for two more hours. The more we talked, the more I felt that crack deep in my heart start to truly heal. I was finally making progress. 

The last time I wrote him a love letter was the night he apologized. It wasn’t your traditional love letter and I would never send it in a million years, but I thanked him for every single thing he ever did for me, including hurting me. I thanked him for showing me I didn’t need him to achieve my goals, I thanked him for making me see that I am brave and smart and beautiful, I thanked him for showing me that I was only moving on to get over him not because I was ready. I wrote to him that I loved him and that I couldn’t wait to see him succeed in everything he does. Then, I closed it without saving it. 

Over the past few years, we have met up, we’ve talked, we’ve been polite friends. It doesn’t sting as much as it used to because all of this feels like it happened lifetimes ago. Sometimes the little girl in me, the one who fell in love with him, wonders “What if?” What if you’d stayed together? What if you’d done things differently? What if you’d never met? But those thoughts aren’t helpful to me. 

See, the thing is, he has always been my muse. Even when I was hurt and writing hate poems, I was writing about him. The thing that was different about this last letter is that it felt like closure. I felt like I could finally close our chapter in my life story and just live for me - which, for the record, I am doing. 

So, why am I writing about this now? To be completely honest, I have no idea. It started as a therapeutic way to approach my emotions after all this time. I guess that is what happened. This is the first time I have ever been able to think about our entire relationship - the good, the bad, and the ugly. In the past, I was hyper-focused on my love for him or the things he did wrong, but I have never approached them at the same time before. I guess what I am trying to say is that our relationship was toxic and heavily codependent, but there were also good things. We did love each other, we did have good times, but we were also very bad for each other. 

During the past few years of reflecting with trusted and loved confidants, I have received a single question hundreds of times: “Would you ever go back to him?” My answer is always the same: We are not the same people, we have different dreams and different paths in life, paths which most likely will not cross in that way again. I’ve made progress, I’ve made peace, and I’d like to truly thrive on my own for a while. You can’t do that by living in your past. 

So, after I finish the next few lines, I am going to close this document and stop thinking about it for a while. Like I said before, there is no lesson or moral to this story, this is just my train of thought on a document no one will ever read. 

It’s cheaper than therapy, I suppose.

[idasessions]

Famous Muses & Groupies in Rock Music Pt. 3

GROUPIE: Lori Mattix/Maddox (modeling name Lori Lightning)

Researching this woman is honestly such a headache that I almost wasn’t even sure where to start….So I guess we’ll begin with everything we know to be definite fact. Lori was born on November 11th, 1958, and raised in Los Angeles with her single mother and three sisters. By the time Lori was in middle school, her mom (supposedly a talent agent or a waitress depending on the source) started signing Lori up for photoshoots in music magazines like Creem and Star (a vintage groupie rag, not the modern tabloid). In these photos, Lori was usually posing in skimpy outfits with fellow teen models and friends Sable Starr, Shray Mecham and Karen Umphrey to appeal to the rock music scene. From these modeling gigs and her friendships with baby groupies Sable and Queenie Glam, Lori very quickly spent nearly all her free time at clubs on the Sunset Strip from about 1972-75. She’s possibly the most profiled and interviewed baby groupie from back then, and still lives in LA running her own clothing boutique when she isn’t glamorizing her groupie days as ‘the best time ever’ or whatever.

[Note: this entry ended up three pages long….Good luck following this mess]

Besides this, everything regarding Lori’s reputation as a teen rock groupie gets very muddled and confusing. During an interview in 1985 with writer Stephen Davis for the sensationalist Led Zeppelin biography Hammer of the Gods, Lori states that she was with Jimmy Page from 1972 to ’75 and he was the only rockstar she was involved with. But in Pamela des Barres’ 2007 groupie compilation Let’s Spend the Night Together, Lori claims she lost her virginity to David Bowie and Sable in a threesome before she met Jimmy, and that she hooked up with a ton of musicians. In the 2010 filmed version of Pamela’s book, Lori makes no mention of Sable being involved in her alleged incident with Bowie. In the 2004 documentary A to Zeppelin, Lori sloppily says she was “a vir—I mean come on, I was like a baby then,” when she met Jimmy. In a 2015 interview with the publication Thrillist, Lori claims she originally turned down Bowie after he propositioned her and didn’t sleep with him until 1973, even though she occasionally suggested that the incident was more likely to be late 1971 or early 1972. She also claims in this article that she continued to keep in touch with Bowie intimately for the rest of the decade, when previously she suggested it was only a one-night stand.

The people over at Medium penned a rather informative expose in 2016 on how inaccurate her stories are on her alleged hook-up with Bowie based on date history. Though it should be noted the piece doesn’t include that in the 1997 punk scene biography Please Kill Me, Sable participated in a rare interview where she revealed she and Lori did meet Bowie in 1973. But Lori got cold feet at the last minute, and only Sable ended up fooling around with the musician. The journalist of the Medium article also gives Lori a little too much credit on the legitimacy of her affiliation with Jimmy Page, as there are a lot of contradictions there too.

As has been reported by multiple sources, Jimmy infamously left his main US groupie Pamela des Barres for Lori while the three of them were partying on the Strip when Zeppelin was in Hollywood. Pamela usually says this happened at the Whisky a Go-Go in either 1972 or 1973. There is photographic proof of Jimmy, Pamela and Lori together at the English Disco that was originally credited on Getty Images as John Bonham’s 24th birthday party on May 31st, 1972. But the only problem is that the band was not in California the week of his birthday, and only played in the state for the last week of June. Zeppelin was however in Los Angeles on his birthday the following year, and the band’s hair and wardrobe in the party pictures match closer to how they looked in summer ’73 rather than ’72. The incident also seems more likely to have happened in ’73 as Lori was Jimmy’s date to a press event at the Continental Hyatt House sometime in June 1973. Both Jimmy’s and Lori’s hairstyles there are identical to how they looked in the English Disco photos as well.

On the 2007 DVD Way Down Inside, Lori says she first met Jimmy randomly at a pool party on the roof of the Hyatt House. In the Let’s Spend the Night Together documentary, she says she met him backstage at the Hollywood Palladium. In the book version and in Thrillist, she claims he personally called her house to introduce himself—but in LSTNT she says they first physically met clubbing at the Whisky before hopping over to the Hyatt House, while in the 2015 interview she says she met him in person at the Hyatt House and then they left to party at the Rainbow. In A to Zeppelin, she claims that Jimmy contacted publicist Lee Childers to set up a date for her to meet the band after he saw one of her photoshoots, rather than call her personally. On Instagram, Lori posted one of the photos of herself with Jimmy and Pamela at the English Disco with a caption stating that was the night she was introduced to Jimmy. If the two did meet backstage, it would have had to have been on either May 31st or June 3rd, 1973 when the band played the LA Forum, as LZ never performed at the Palladium. If he did set up a supposed date, it was probably the night he dumped Pamela. The pool party claim would also make sense, as the week Jimmy and Lori met, the infamous episode where Bonzo threw George and Pattie Harrison into a pool during his birthday party also happened. Except apparently this party was in Laurel Canyon, not at the Hyatt House, and Lori has never been name dropped in retellings of that story.

Besides the month of June in 1973, the only other confirmed time Jimmy and Lori were together is the week of May 10th, 1974, when Jimmy ditched her at the Swan Song label opening party in LA for older groupie Bebe Buell. Bebe went into detail in her 2001 memoir Rebel Heart, of how Lori became hysterical when she realized Jimmy was leaving her for Bebe. The model recalled Lori jumping her and wildly pulling her hair in anger at Bebe ‘stealing’ Jimmy from Lori. Lori conveniently leaves this accusation out when she talks about the break-up. So this is about four to five weeks in Los Angeles when Lori could have socialized with Jimmy, and quite possibly the only times they saw each other in 11 months.

In Hammer of the Gods, Lori asserts she was secretly on tour with the band for two years. Except that between June 1973 and May 1974, the band was only on tour for a month in July. In the novelized Let’s Spend the Night Together, she insists Jimmy arranged to have her visit him in NYC whenever he wasn’t in LA. Lori would eventually completely backtrack ever traveling as a teen and claim she only saw Jimmy when the band was in LA. In the Thrillist piece, she claims that they would travel back to Hollywood after every show and spent the whole summer of 1973 in the city. Not only did the band reportedly spend the last week of touring staying at NYC’s Drake Hotel, but journalist Lisa Robinson tagged along on this tour, and remembers LZ spending nights in a lot of major US cities. Lori’s also infamously said numerous times that she had to be kept locked up (either on tour or in his LA hotel room depending on the interview) while she was with Jimmy because she was underage. Seeing as how there are three different sets of famous party pictures of the pair posing together, taken by professional photographers and originally published the years they were shot, that doesn’t make much sense.

In both Hammer of the Gods and Way Down Inside, Lori says she was kidnapped by LZ roadie Richard Cole, who allegedly yelled at her to get into his car before taking her to Jimmy’s hotel room. In the Thrillist piece, she says Zeppelin manager Peter Grant was the kidnapper and he tossed her into their limo. In a Q&A Lori participated in after the premiere of Let’s Spend the Night Together in 2010, she suggests Jimmy himself kidnapped her. (In the same Q&A, Lori also says that Jimmy broke up with her when she was ‘16’ right after the FBI got involved with the band’s hotel safe theft in NYC. But this obviously isn’t true, as the FBI incident was only two months after she met Jimmy in 1973.) In A to Zeppelin, she makes no mention of any kidnapping and says she just followed him back to his room. Lori has also continually asserted that she and Jimmy spent the rest of the night in his room ~falling madly in love.~ 🙄

Lori says in the Thrillist piece that she had to hide when Zeppelin went back to LA after the FBI got involved in a theft from the band’s hotel safe in NYC at the end of July 1973. In Let’s Spend the Night Together, she erroneously states that the theft happened in 1975, right after she was flown out to visit Jimmy, and then quickly forced to go back home. But many biographies, including A to Zeppelin, report that the band just went back to England after the FBI episode without any mention of Lori. There are photos of Lori partying with musicians after the theft, but most of them are with Iggy Pop and the New York Dolls in LA.

It is also interesting to note that of all the pictures of Lori with musicians from 1973-75, the rockstar she was photographed with the most is Sylvain Sylvain of the NY Dolls. The two of them are even featured in the documentary All Dolled Up (2005) partaking in PDA in vintage 1973 footage. But funny enough, she’s never talked about Sylvain in interviews. Probably because all the photos and footage of them together were at the same time frame she knew Jimmy, and that disputes her story of how she and Jimmy were committed to each other the whole time they were together.

Other things that are likely fake/made up by Lori:

In most interviews, Lori claims that her mom gave Jimmy her blessing to go out with her teenage daughter because he didn’t have a criminal record and ‘wasn’t a terrorist.’ I mean…I guess this could be true, but it has to be the worst excuse I’ve ever heard of a parent letting her 14-year-old child date a man pushing 30.

In the Let’s Spend the Night Together book, Lori has a story of how Jimmy once saw her smoking a cigarette, then forced her to smoke a whole pack, and that made her never smoke again. Three months after Jimmy dumped Lori, she was photographed smoking at Keith Moon’s 28th birthday party, as well as in a personal picture from the early 1980s.

Lori likes to brag about how Robert Plant and Jimmy would dedicate concerts to her while she was with Jimmy, but within the 11 months they were familiar with each other, there were only two shows in LA. Both at the Forum on May 31st and June 3rd, and neither known bootleg recordings of either show feature any shout outs to her.

Lori has gone as far as to say that when she was in LA and Jimmy was back in the UK, he would call or write her every day. Seeing as how in 1973-74, Jimmy was in another country writing, recording and producing songs on the album ‘Physical Graffiti;’ living with model Charlotte Martin and their daughter Scarlet; and having an additional affair with Krissy Wood, he might have been a bit too busy to include some teen halfway across the world. Lori also claims that Jimmy had to choose Charlotte over her because they had a toddler together, and that he would be a jerk to Charlotte to prove he loved Lori. (Never mind the fact that Lori simultaneously calls Jimmy the ‘sweetest’ man ever.)

Some articles and blog posts state Lori and Jimmy got back together for a while in the ‘80s, but this conflicts with Jimmy’s own relationship history as there were only two years in between his separation from Charlotte in 1983 and the meeting of his first wife Patricia Ecker in 1985. On top of that, whenever he would visit the US in the ‘80s when he wasn’t with Charlotte or Patricia, he was usually with a photographer named Ashley Hamm. (Could this man be anymore promiscuous.) A few times, including in Thrillist, Lori has said she still keeps in touch with Jimmy. Yet he has never mentioned her publicly and there have never been any personal photos of them together, such as on Lori’s social media, where she’s posted photos of herself reuniting with Pamela, Rodney Bingenheimer, Robert and Sylvain in modern times.

A lot of LZ books and posts state that the song ‘Sick Again’ is about Lori and her fellow baby groupie friends. This…actually is true, but the tone of the lyrics is intentionally sarcastic as Robert was known to be one of the few rockstars that era not interested in teen girls. He even said in a 1975 Rolling Stone interview that he felt sorry for the Star girls revolving their lives around how many celebrities they could meet.

TL;DR: Lori was a real, legit groupie in the mid-1970s. There are enough pictures of her with dozens of celebs and other groupies to vouch for that. Feel free to judge these adult men for getting involved with teenagers, they mostly deserve it. But it’s also pretty obvious this woman was not in serious, long-lasting, or romantic relationships with any of these rockstars and just likes being famous, no matter what context. (And she is a terrible, terrible storyteller).

[annashipper]

Questions

Where is Emily?  The last time we saw her hanging around Ben was on the 2nd of December, 2016 at the Sky Women In Film And TV Awards.

How come no one’s ever spotted Ben buying anything for either of the pillows?  Does he wear his special disguise when going into department / toy stores?

Why did Sophie Hunter wear a maternity-friendly gown when she escorted Ben to the Jaeger-Lecoultre event despite the fact that she's as whippet-thin as ever?

Whatever happened to the unblurred, HD pics from the pap set taken on the 31st of October 2016 at JFK airport?

Are we ever going to get to see a picture of Ben, Weirdo, Pilo and Pilo 2.0 in the frame, in HD, with all of their faces unblurred, looking like a normal human family?  Extra points if Weirdo isn’t smiling straight into the paparazzo lens.

Has Pilo 2.0 been christened yet?   If so, have the paparazzi stopped camping outside Mottistone regardless of the fact that it’s such a celebrity hotspot?

When are we going to be treated to what Ben’s heroic wife has been constantly hard at work on since before the summer of 2016?

When was the last time Letters Live divulged information regarding what percentage of their earnings go to charitable causes?

Will Gambles be performing music on any London street corners this week?  If so, will Weirdo be contributing to his worthy cause?

How does AnythingBatch spend her time nowadays?

How do the team of die-hard Weirdo fans that were running SHC spend their time nowadays?

Where is Pilo?

Where is Pilo 2.0?

Wasn’t Pilo 2.0 supposed to have “alien eyes like Ben”?  All I see on the Heath pap op disaster is a baby with perfectly generic, normal human eyes.

Whatever happened to the Red Ribbon Stalker?

Whatever happened to Sophie Hunter’s logo?  It’s been almost two years since it appeared on the internet, only to be removed from circulation less than 24 hours later, and we never heard anything about it ever again…

Why has Ben never supported any of Weirdo’s projects?

Why was Ben photographed escorting a blonde woman at the National Theatre on August 20th of 2014, 2 months and a half after the showmance with Weirdo had been launched at the French Open on June 8th of 2014?

Why can’t anything involving Weirdo and her “art” be straightforward?  (LINK to the question which includes multiple sub-questions)

Since Ben is hounded by the paparazzi and they obviously know all three of his addresses in London, why hasn't a single pap ever photographed Weirdo going in or coming out of any one of Ben's houses in the past 4 years?

Why did Ben walk The Imitation Game red carpet without Sophie Hunter by his side at the London Film Festival on the 8th of October, 2014?  Sophie Hunter was there and dressed for success after all.

Why were the interns working for SHC blurring Ben out of pictures when they were (still) trying to sell clothes and shoes?

Why does Weirdo not have a speaking part in this Showmance? 

Why was Weirdo creating mood board(s) for a wedding gown which came straight off the rack, and photographed for Vogue wearing a wedding gown that didn’t match the one she was wearing on her wedding day (which came off a collection that was a year old by that time)?

Why is Weirdo the exception to every gestation rule known to humanity?

Why has Ben’s name been removed from the list of producers for The Current War on IMDb?

Since there was no public notice, how did the paparazzi know to set up camp at Mottistone on the IoW for Pilo’s Christening? Setting aside the fact that it’s a celebrity hot spot of course.

Why was Weirdo smiling at the paps both times (March and October of 2016) Pilo was photographed by paparazzi in NYC?

What was the reason behind all the fluffing of Sophie Hunter’s CV?

Why was Weirdo on holidays with friends during the summer of 2014 instead of Ben?

Why was Weirdo re-introduced to the world* in the fall of 2017, with no work to follow it up?  (LINK)

Why did Weirdo yank Ben’s arm to put it around her shoulder while posing for the paps, but pushed him and his arm away from her as soon as she thought the cameras weren’t rolling anymore during a pap walk?  (LINK)

Has Weirdo taken her husband’s last name or not?  If so, why has no publication ever used it?  If not, why did People run that article back in the day?

Why did Ben, who once said during an interview "there are rooms in my head not made for public consumption” suddenly become so open about his private life since he started his Oscar campaign in 2014?

Why was Ben giving weird quotes to ELLE about how important it is “to be able to have some fun with your currency” in 2014?

Since Ben and Weirdo had known each other for 17 years before they got engaged and have been together for... only Harvey knows how long, why had Guy Garvey, the singer of Elbow who is a dear friend to Ben, never met Weirdo before the wedding at the IoW?  (LINK)

Why did SunnyMarch go into a “bidding war” (according to a Nonny who claimed to work for Picador:  LINK and LINK) to secure the rights to a book that was being sold at 50% off, the minute it hit bookstore shelves?

Why are there never any sightings of Weirdo and the pillows in London when Ben’s out of the country alone?

Why is Weirdo allowed to have a previous long term relationship listed on her Wikipedia page, but Olivia has been erased from Ben’s?   Will "they" erase her when they get divorced?

Why did Ben try to issue a kill order for a picture of his motorcycle parked outside his new property in London but not the 8 HD pictures of his firstborn son’s face taken in NYC?  I’m asking about these two particular sets because the motorcycle pic was never published by any media outlet, and the unblurred version of the NYC pics were never touched by any publication either.

Why wasn’t Benedict Timothy Carlton Cumberbatch’s name printed correctly on the engagement announcement for The Times?

Why was Ben on the verge of tears when asked about the announcement of his engagement to Weirdo during his interview with Good Morning America?  (LINK)

Why did a teacher (who’s linked to Weirdo) break the law by reporting on social media about Pilo and Ben attending one of her classes? (LINK)

Why did Ben’s mom ask Caitlin Moran to find her son a bird in 2013 if he was already in a relationship with Weirdo? (LINK)

Why hasn’t Ben tried to set up a directing / screenwriting / acting gig for his heroically hard working wife on one of the projects he’s worked on during the past 4 years?  She could have directed his Hamlet, adapted the screenplay for The Grinch, played Eurus Holmes on Sherlock, etc.  Why waste so many opportunities to share her boundless talent with the world?

Why did Sophie Hunter resort to plagiarizing an academic’s essay on Beckett to put together an article for The Guardian in July of 2015?

Why don’t Ben’s friends mention him on social media anymore?

If Skeptics are so vile, why don’t Ben’s friends defend him on social media?  Especially considering his latest quote about being well aware of what everyone says about him on social media and assuming he’s so bothered by it all.

Weirdo’s resume, such as it is, features a few bit parts and the occasional vanity project.  Where is the long, hard slog of crap work?  Every artist, from those who have not been discovered to Beyonce, has a long string of unglamorous obscure work that they took to stay in the business.  For many artists, that’s most of their careers: shooting commercials so they can afford to make the movie they love. Singing jingles while they wait to hear from the major producer.  We have not seen that with Weirdo. Not by a long shot.

If Ben travels with his family and is never without them, why has no one ever spotted the entire family at any airport travelling together since Pilo 2.0 was born a year and a month ago?  

Are there no family-friendly, vegan restaurants in NYC where Pilo and Pilo 2.0 could have joined their parents for dinner on the 3rd of April, 2018?

Why was Weirdo removed from circulation during the Pilo 2.0 pregnancy?

Did Weirdo ever get the memo that Ben is fiercely protective of Pilo and that he feels like he’s constantly being bombarded with possible threats to his wellbeing?  (LINK)

Why does Ben who once said: “If you have an over-preoccupation with perception and trying to please people’s expectations, then you can go mad.” (to Empire magazine in 2013) care enough about people’s perception of his family to go on record stating his wife and child are not a PR stunt (on his Vanity Fair interview for Doctor Strange promo in 2016)?

Did the paparazzi who took pictures when furniture and dead plants were being moved into the rental place in Camden, where Ben and his family supposedly live while they’re waiting for his new property to be renovated, follow the movers from his old flat at the Heath to the rental place in Camden?  If so, where are the pictures of the furniture and dead plants being moved out of his old flat and into the trucks?  If not, how did they know Ben and his family were moving to a rental place, and who gave them the Camden address?

Have Pilo and Pilo 2.0 travelled to LA for the IW premiere / promo tour since Ben’s had to be away from home for more than a few weeks?  If so, have Californian paparazzi developed a new respect for Ben's privacy between the pap walk extravaganza of August 2016 and now?

How did the fan pic that Ben and Weirdo took with 4 teenagers, at the Gallerie dell'Accademia in Venice on the 13th of February 2016, end up on a local paper?  Did none of the 4 teenagers pictured have a social media account at the time?  Has none of them created a social media account in the 814 days that have passed since? 

How did Weirdo get 5 month old Pilo to sit still for 4 hours straight daily in order for him to Skype with Ben, while the latter was away from home filming Doctor Strange?

Why have the paparazzi stopped spotting Ben at airports?

Out of the full set of pics from the Bora Bora honeymoon in late February of 2015, why were some crystal clear, while all of the ones featuring Weirdo in a bikini were extra blurry?

Why was Pilo’s birth ready to be announced on People magazine on the 8th of June 2015, but then the article was removed?  (LINK)

If Ben and his family have relocated to a rental house or into Ben’s new property, why does Google Maps continue to block the “street view” of his old street in Hampstead Heath? (LINK)

Why did Weirdo’s friends congratulate her on her birthday and on escorting her husband to the Oscars on her Facebook page in 2015, but not on Pilo’s birth?

When was Weirdo born? (LINK)

Why is the renovation for Ben’s new property not finished yet?  556 days is a bit long to wait out with one’s family, living at a rental place instead of one’s own two story flat, no?  Especially when the owner is a multimillionaire who could certainly speed things along with handsome bonuses to his contractors.

Why did Weirdo never make a move to protect her belly when Ben almost ran her into a bin at LAX on the 12th of January 2015 and kept smiling for the paparazzi instead?

Why are Ben and Weirdo travelling sans the pillows again?  Taking into consideration this quote on a German publication from Ben: “When I work I almost always bring my family with me. As of yet I’ve not been away from them a week. Since my second son was born it has been a weekend, I think. The time with the children is so precious that I prioritize them at any time. For me it is very clear: work is work, family is family. When I get home, I leave anything related to work outside the door.”

Why did Ben step in front of his wife, effectively blocking her access to a reporter at the Vanity Fair after Oscars party on the 22nd of February 2015?

Why have Ben and Weirdo not been spotted IN LONDON by the paparazzi while walking the street / out on a date since August of 2017?  Is Ben wearing a mask when he steps out of the house with his wife and children that are definitely real and not a PR stunt nowadays?  (LINK)

Whatever happened to Eggsbenedish?  (however many people were running) That blog set the stage for the showmance, went away when they made sure people were talking, came back to do some damage control when things started getting out of hand, realised they were terrible at herding cats, deleted the blog entirely after the birth of Pilo was announced officially, and now someone has re-opened the blog, but of course all of the posts are gone.

Why did Weirdo not perform on the second Letters Live show (held on the 19th of May 2018) in NYC?

Why was Weirdo smirking during the NYC pap walks in May of 2018 while Ben was being pissy? (LINK)

Did Weirdo attend the LL event on the 19th of May 2018?  If so, why didn’t they arrive together at the venue?  (LINK)

Almost 2 years in, is it safe to assume Weirdo’s logo will never be ready to “go live again”? (LINK)

Why did ATCB try to pass a paid-for paparazzo shot off as a sneaky fan pic on the 6th of August 2016?  (LINK and LINK)

Why did Ben become a brand ambassador for Hisense (a relatively low-end electronic and home appliances manufacturer) instead of signing up for one of the countless roles that major movie studios are presumably throwing at his feet?

Why was there a baity blurb on the Evening Standard about Weirdo’s ring back in February of 2017*, which was then removed entirely less than a week later, leaving only traces of the tags under the original article**? (* LINK and LINK) -  (**LINK)

Why did the Fail never run any of the pictures they purchased the rights to from the Pilo 2.0 pap op at the Heath that were taken mid August of 2017?  (LINK)

HOW???? (LINK)

Why is Weirdo’s name not listed among the people who have performed for Letters Live in Ben’s letter to the general public who visit the Letters Live official page on the internet? Did he forget about his “very cool” wife, is he just not that impressed by her “heroic hard work”, or does it turn out she’s a liability rather than “an asset, a tool” because of her overwhelming fetchlessness?  (LINK)

Why was every announcement / milestone / major pap walk where we got some new bit of information regarding Ben, Weirdo and the most bizarre pregnancy documented in the history of humanity perfectly timed to coincide with Ben’s Oscars campaign and voting close offs back in 2014-5?  Why is every outing / interview with weird quotes from Ben regarding his family still timed perfectly whenever Ben needs some free publicity to promote a new project, 4 years into this showmance?

Were the pillows in LA for Infinity War / Patrick Melrose promo?  (LINK)

Why can’t the press get Weirdo’s name and/or face right 4 years after she’s been introduced (and then re-introduced multiple times) to the world, considering also that she’s supposed to be super duper mega successful in her own right?  (LINK)

Is Weirdo really so bad at reading that the people running Letters Live (including, but not limited to her husband) had to create the entirely new role of Announcer of Names Of Talented People Who Get To Read Actual Letters On Letters Live, in order for the fetchless wonder to get a variation of her name mentioned in the press?

Did either of the pillows appear at Hay?  Cause going through the Hay tags on Instagram and Twitter, I see a myriad of babies and children of all ages joining their parents at the festival, but I haven’t seen a single Nanny (and there were quite a few at the festival last weekend) mentioning they caught a glimpse of Ben’s pillow-y offspring.

Why is Ben’s ring missing from the main Hisense print ad (I’m assuming it’s the main one, since it’s the one featuring the Hisense and World Cup logos), but is there for all of the rest of the pictures from that shoot?  Does the image of MarriedToAFamewhoreDismalBatch who is also a #fatheroftwo to two mostly invisible pillows not appeal to all potential customers of the Hisense product range?  (LINK)

Why did Ben, an actor whom everyone describes as a consummate professional, skip rehearsal with Paapa Essiedu, Tim Minchin, Harriet Walter, David Tennant, Rory Kinnear, Ian McKellen, Judi Dench and Prince Charles on the 23rd of April 2016?  Was the photo op with Weirdo at President Obama’s speech so important?  (LINK)

Why does DorkyBatch never come out to play whenever Weirdo is around him, even though Ben has been pretty darn dorky / silly / happy during interviews / red carpets / promo sessions for the past 3 months?

How is it that when Weirdo was asked to contribute a piece of art to a Christmas bid for Anno’s Africa charity foundation in December 2016, the work she submitted appeared to draw inspiration straight from the art work her ex boyfriend, Conrad Shawcross, submitted for the same charitable bid?  (LINK)

Why does the timeline regarding the proposal / engagement / wedding of much privacy and impeccable timing for Awards season voting closeoffs make no sense when one’s source is Benedict Cumberbatch?  (LINK)

How is it that Ben’s heroically hard working wife who is a director, wanna-be-producer, playwright, curator, narrator, theatre operator, singer, mime, visual artist, clown, Wimbledon spectator, model, and… ACTRESS has been in no way involved with Patrick Melrose, a project so close to Ben’s heart, that is a 5-part series which involved a cast of 100 people (93 of the roles being speaking ones)? Is it that Weirdo didn’t want to steal Ben’s thunder, or just that Ben didn’t trust Weirdo to even stand in the background of one of the numerous scenes involving extras in the cast?

Why was Weirdo photographed consuming champagne at the London Evening Standard Theatre Awards on the 30th of November 2014, when she was already 12 weeks along and certainly knew she was “pregnant” at the time?

Why did Ben and Weirdo choose a remote location, only accessible by boat, where there are no immediate medical facilities in case of urgency, and which requires not-advised-for-pregnant-women vaccinations against tropical diseases for their honeymoon?

Does Ben understand anything about babies?  Going by his interviews, he didn’t seem to know a whole lot about taking care of his firstborn (what with Pilo getting sunburned no matter how much lotion his parents put on him, skyping for 4 hours straight with his dad at less than 5 months of age, getting bathed after 11pm because it was the only time available to Ben during Hamlet, using a potentially toxic and filthy movie prop as a teether, being fed apple slices when it was still a choking hazard for him, etc)

Why does Ben keep travelling alone to and from London, only for Weirdo to show up at the final destination for a few pap ops?  (LINK)

Why has Ben not tried to shield either of the pillows’ faces from the paparazzi on 4 separate occasions?  He clearly knew how to do it for himself before Weirdo entered the scene and he started conducting set-up pap walks to prove how real and not PR-stunt driven his marriage and children are.  (LINK)

Why were the Bora Bora honeymoon pics pulled the same day they were published on Popsugar, on the 24th of February 2015?  How is it that Ben had both the motivation and means to issue a kill order for this set of pics within a few hours (while being loved up with his wife on their honeymoon no less)?  Couldn’t he muster the same drive to issue a kill order for the set of pics featuring Pilo’s unblurred face in HD from NYC, which remained on sale on the (for hire) pap agency site for months?  If he couldn’t be bothered trying to issue a kill order for the NYC set of pics, why didn’t he just buy the entire set off the pap agency site, and had them removed that way?

Did anyone ever find Weirdo’s name on any of the Oxford Alumni lists?

Why do the paparazzi only ever spot Ben and Weirdo out in public when Ben is gearing up to start promotion on a new project nowadays?

Was it a fortunate coincidence (publicity wise) that Ben and Weirdo got married on the 14th of February, 3 days before the Oscars voting close offs on the 17th of February in 2015?  (LINK)

Bonus Question:   Who is in charge of uninstalling PRStuntBatch and reinstalling Benedict Timothy Carlton Cumberbatch®?

[avaalons]

Chris Evans Fic: Hiking and Hypocrisy (Chapter 1)

This was born from a prompt given by the fabulous @yourtropegirl based on Anthony Mackie’s 2015 assertion to E! that all Chris Evans needs is a normal girl in his life. And, as always, I got totally carried away with it.

Hiking and Hypocrisy also features basically every trope known to man, including everyone’s favourite: there’s only one bed! Enjoy!

“Chris needs a regular girl. Chris needs a girl who is just down to earth, who’s smart and that’s hard to find,” Mackie revealed to E! News exclusively before playing golf at the 11th annual Irie Weekend benefiting the Irie Foundation. “Those girls are not celebrities. Those are not girls you know.”

Mackie continued, “Chris just needs a regular and down to earth smart girl…Somebody that can take care of him you know because he is Captain America.”

***

‘Honey, you know I love you and I know you mean well, but she’s not going to thank you when she figures out what you’ve done and I’m telling you right now that this is a bad idea,’ Sheletta tried reasoning with her husband, who was currently scrolling through his contacts to find your number.

‘How can this be bad? They’re both single and haven’t I always said that Chris just needs a steady, regular girl? I don’t know why I haven’t thought about this before now,’ Anthony’s thumb hovered over your contact, ready to call. ‘Let’s just have them over for dinner. Just once. Please?’

Sheletta threw her hands up in surrender, ‘Okay, baby, but this is on your head and yours alone. Let it be known that at this very moment, I told you it was a bad idea. I know you think Chris needs a steady girl but wants and needs don’t always match up with that guy. If she ends up getting caught in some Hollywood crossfire and getting hurt, it’s your fault, got that?’

Her husband nodded, barely even listening to a word.

‘Now I got to go get the kids from school but I’ll host on one condition: you tell her straight up what the deal is. That way she can back out if she wants to. Don’t send her in blind Anthony, for the love of God.’

‘Got it. I’ll tell her. See you in a little while honey,’ he finished as his wife walked out of the front door and he pressed ‘call’ under your name.

***

‘Hey stranger!’ You’d heard your phone ringing and a smile stretched across your face when you saw who it was. ‘To what do I owe the pleasure?’

‘I think it’s about time we had you over for dinner. Sheletta misses you, the kids miss you and, to a lesser extent, I miss you too,’ you rolled your eyes in amusement at his comment, ‘so we need some catch up time. How’s next Friday for you?’

‘Yeah, I can do Friday. I’d love to come round and see Sheletta and the kids and, to a lesser extent, you. Any special occasion I should be aware of?’

‘No, nothing at all. Just a nice family dinner with friends.’

‘Okay, sounds great. See you around seven? I’ll bring dessert as usual.’

‘I’ll let Sheletta know. See you Friday!’

***

You’d finished work on Friday, making sure you had planned your lessons for the Monday and Tuesday and put your resources in for copying. You decided on taking your smallest class of work home to mark over the weekend and packed up your bags to head out.

You popped your head in at the door of your closest colleague’s classroom to wish them a good weekend.

‘Got any nice plans?’ Nina looked up from her pile of marking on her desk to smile at you, a wry nod towards the amount of bags you were taking home.

‘Just a tiny bit of marking this weekend, I swear! I’m going for dinner at a friends’ house tonight, I need to get home to bake dessert to take with me.’

‘Oooh, what kind of ‘friend’ are we talking here?’ She was instantly interested, marking pen paused in her hand.

‘No, nothing like that! It’s a couple that I’m friends with. They take pity on my single state every once in a while and invite me round for food so I don’t need to cook for myself on a Friday.’

‘Sweetie, you need to get out more,’ Nina shook her head, ‘I know we’re teachers but we are allowed our own lives, not just spend all our weekends marking and planning.’

‘Who are you trying to convince here, Neen, me or you? Because it’s five pm on a Friday and you’re the one still sat at your desk,’ you grinned.

‘That’s because I’m going out tomorrow. I plan to spend all tomorrow getting pampered and all of Sunday lying in my bed nursing a very bad tequila hangover. Leave the bag of marking here and come out with me and my friends tomorrow.’

‘I need to get these done though…’ you knew Nina could hear the weakness in your voice. A night out did sound incredible.

‘Come on, stop being coy. Go dump it in your room and I’ll text you the details. We need to find you a man, or get you under one at least.’

You’d already started walking back to your room but still heard her crude comments and told her so.

‘I heard that Nina!’ You called back.

‘You were supposed to, dumb ass!’

***

A couple of hours later, you were on the doorstep of the Mackie household, clutching your handbag, presents for the kids, a chocolate pecan pie in a ceramic pie dish and two bottles of wine, struggling to balance everything as you reached up for the doorbell when you heard a deep, melodic voice from behind you.

‘Here let me get that.’

An arm snaked past your head and a finger pushed the bell. You turned to look at who this mysterious stranger was, only to find a man you knew was Chris Evans.

He smiled before reaching for the pie dish and taking it from your grip so you could hold the wine bottles properly.

‘Wouldn’t want you to drop anything, especially something that looks this good,’ he told you, nodding towards the pie.

All you could do was stare, unable to find your words. What the fuck was he doing here? You knew he and Mackie had become friends over their years working together, but he’d never visited the family home as far as you were aware. You’d always figured they were ‘bros’ at work, but that their friendship hadn’t really extended into having dinner with each other’s families. Apparently you were wrong.

It was all you could do to blink and as you heard the door open behind you, you spun around to see Mackie’s smiling face.

‘So you two have already met, I see!’

And you instantly knew what was up.

***

‘Letta! He’s totally blindsided me!’ You whisper-shouted at her in the kitchen as she poured you a large glass of wine.

Mackie had taken Chris out to the back garden where he was planning on grilling dinner. You could see them through the window, laughing and drinking from beer bottles as the boys ran around playing soccer and you rolled your eyes, frustrated mainly at Mackie but also for some reason at Chris. Just his presence was annoying you, considering what Mackie had tried to set up.

‘I know sweetie, I’m so sorry. I told him and told him this was a bad idea. I told him to tell you what the deal was when he called. Asshole.’

‘What can possibly have made him think that I’d be interested in Chris fucking Evans? Does Mackie know me at all? Do I look like the type that wants to spend an evening with a dumb jock? I’m a high school teacher for Christ’s sake, I deal with enough of them at school.’

Sheletta sighed, clearly sympathetic, but then she tried to placate you, ‘Look, it’s just dinner, right? I’m going to having a few words with my husband later but it’s just a couple of hours and you never need to see Chris again if you don’t want to. But I would say, he’s an okay dude, no worse than your average charming guy who likes sports and drinking with his buddies. I think Mackie was thinking some, you know, not famous company might be good for him.’

You evened your breathing and took a sip of your wine before resolving to make the best of a bad situation.

‘Don’t worry Letta, I’ll play nice, for you. But don’t expect me to laugh at his stupid jokes or bat my eyelashes at him.’

Sheletta raised her glass to yours in a cheers, ‘I would never expect you to.’

***

‘So what is it that you do?’ Chris asked from your right hand side. Of course Anthony had manoeuvred the seating so you were sat side by side at the outdoor dining table.

Granted, it hadn’t been too awful so far. The kids had kept you entertained for the most part and Mackie and Sheletta were clearly working hard to keep the conversation flowing and prevent any awkwardness. But there had been a lull in the conversation as Mackie helped Letta take the dishes inside from the main course and fetch more beers, and the boys had run off to play with the toys you had brought them. You’d tried to get up and help Sheletta but Mackie insisted you stay exactly where you were so you slumped back in your seat reluctantly, realising you were about you be left on your own with Chris and that was exactly what Mackie wanted, of course.

You reached for your glass and settled in for some mundane and predictable conversation.

‘I’m a high school history teacher,’ you told him.

‘Brave lady,’ he grinned. ‘My mom teaches theatre groups but it tends to only be younger ones and they-‘

‘-choose to be there? Yeah, not so lucky with high school. I got to drag them all through, one way or another. They’re not bad though, it’s less of a battle than you’d think, mostly.’

‘I bet you run on sarcasm though, right?’

‘Me?! What would ever give you such an idea?’ You purposefully over-egged it for comedy effect.

‘There it is. A teenager’s best friend.’

You raised an eyebrow at him, ‘Know a lot of teenagers, do you?’

‘No, but I was one, once.’

‘And I bet you still are in your head, right?’

He inclined his head in acknowledgement, ‘Sometimes. Probably more than I’m willing to admit. But being grown up one hundred per cent of the time isn’t much fun, is it? Besides, my niece and nephews would never forgive me if I tried to be too mature all the time.’

Family man? You hadn’t expected that.

‘How many do you have?’

‘Three, two nephews, one niece. All siblings. My sister Carly’s kids.’

You worked out the implication in his words, ‘So I guess you have more than one sibling then?’

‘Yeah, two sisters, one brother. Carly, Shanna and Scott. Shanna, Scott and I all remain childless so far though, leaving the favourite child title to Carly. My mom loves being a grandma.’

You saw your opening to tease him. May as well have some fun while you were here, right?

‘Oh, so the hunt for a baby mama is on, is it? Try and get back in the good books?’

He laughed at that: at your openness or shamelessness, you didn’t know. You waited to see if he would bring up the obvious set up arrangement of the evening, but he didn’t.

‘Nah, I’m her oldest boy, I can do no wrong,’ he smiled around his bottle as he took a mouthful. ‘How about you? Big family?’

‘Not really. My parents live on the other side of the country. I don’t really see them that often but we check in from time to time. My brother is high up in a law firm in Chicago. Divorce law. I see him even less,’ you had to stop yourself rolling your eyes. You and your brother couldn’t be more different if one of you had been adopted.

‘Not a big family girl then?’

You thought for a moment. Was Chris trying to scope you out? You felt immediately on the defensive, affronted that he found it so easy to pass judgement against you. You almost told him he didn’t need to bother, that you had zero intention of ever seeing him again after tonight, but you remembered your promise to Sheletta.

‘It’s not that. I guess my family aren’t ‘big family’ people. That’s why I live out here I think. I made my own family out of friends. I’m basically a fake auntie to the Mackie kids, for example. There’s plenty of people I consider to be as close to me as family.’

You looked at him to see what his reaction was but he just smiled at you, not giving much away, and then there was a lot of hustle and bustle as the Mackies returned to the table. Anthony was weighed down with beer bottles and wine and Sheletta carried your pecan pie dessert and a jug of cream.

‘Sweetheart, this looks delicious,’ Sheletta told you as she placed the dish in the middle of the table. ‘Boys! Come and get dessert!’

‘You should serve it up, it being of your own creation and all,’ Anthony addressed you, handing you a cake knife.

‘Okay, but I’m warning you, no little slices around here. Go big or go home,’ you said jokingly but you subtly glanced at Chris as you began serving extra generous helpings of pie, expecting him to make some gym-related excuse as to why he couldn’t possibly enjoy a slice of dessert, but he didn’t. He took the plate you offered him with polite thanks and moaned his appreciation when he ate a huge spoonful.

‘This is incredible! Wasted as a teacher, clearly!’

There he went again, making assumptions about you and your life. And you resented that he talked down your career so easily. Who did he think he was to make a comment like that? He had no idea about anything to do with you, so why did he keep on insisting that he did? It would have been so easy to have made a ruthlessly sarcastic comment back, but you kept your mouth shut and your eyes trained on your dessert.

Whether Mackie and Sheletta noticed your discomfort or not, you weren’t sure, but they kept the conversation going between them and aside from the few comments that made you bristle, the evening wasn’t a total disaster you supposed. You felt exhausted though, probably from being so on edge all evening, the large elephant in the room (or patio, as was the case) shaped like a blind date weighing you down. You always had hated feeling the expectation that came with dates, like you were supposed to just switch on this charming, flirtatious version of yourself. You hated that it seemed to always be down to the woman to make the man feel at ease, feel attractive, feel funny, even if she didn’t really like him. You… well you wanted someone to feel like they needed to work a little harder to get your attention. Why should it be all on you?

The conversation circled around to weekend plans and you were asked if you were going hiking this weekend. The boys instantly tuned into the conversation and you got a chorus of ‘when we can go with you again?’

You smiled at them indulgently. You loved that they enjoyed the outdoors as much as you did, and you loved introducing them to all the skills they needed to hike safely for a whole day or even a weekend. You hadn’t done a camping hike with them yet, but you had done a full day, teaching them how to make the most of their food and how to make water drinkable if they ran out.

‘Not this weekend boys, I have somewhere to be tomorrow night. Next weekend maybe? Do you want to do all day Saturday?’

You looked to Mackie and Sheletta to check that would be all right with them and Sheletta began to nod slowly, obviously checking her calendar mentally, ensuring they had nowhere to be.

‘Wait, you hike?’ you heard Chris’ surprised voice next to you.

‘Yeah, it’s quite a normal hobby, you know, for regular people,’ you kept it light so it didn’t appear too cutting but this man was working your last nerve.

‘I just meant… I’ve always loved the outdoors and loved the idea of getting into hiking but I wouldn’t know where to start on my own and I’ve never known anyone that was into it.’

Before you could tell him that the Internet was a wonderful invention if he ever wanted to do some research, Mackie interjected.

‘Hey, I’ve got an idea, why don’t we all go next Saturday?’

There was a millisecond of silence before everyone launched in at once. Sheletta glanced at you awkwardly before saying ‘Babe…’ to her husband in her most quiet warning voice, the boys yelled out their excitement, Chris was at your side declaring that he was, in fact, free next weekend, Mackie was grinning around the table, clearly pleased with himself for coming up with such a wonderful idea and you could hear the beginnings of excuses desperately tumbling from your lips but it was no good. You’d basically walked yourself into this one by telling the boys you’d take them next weekend.

Sheletta tried and you loved her for it, ‘Anthony, she’s an expert, she doesn’t want to be stuck with three kids and three adults who are hiking amateurs. That’s hardly a good use of her weekend when she’s so busy the rest of the time with work.’

But Mackie waved her off, clearly too wrapped up in his own matchmaking attempts to pick up on the edge in Sheletta’s voice.

‘She doesn’t mind, do you?’ He stated, rather than asked, looking to you, ‘The boys go with her all the time and it’s only a one day hike. We won’t take up her whole weekend. It will be fun, all of us together. You’re up for it Chris, right?’

‘Yeah, course, count me in. Just tell me what I need.’

‘Take Chris’ number so you can text him the details,’ Mackie was on fire now. You subtly rolled your eyes at his transparent attempts to keep this thing going when you knew full well it was a pointless activity.

‘I’m sure Chris doesn’t want to give his number out to just anyone, Mackie. Can’t you just forward the details if I send them to you?’

‘That seems unnecessarily complicated. Just take it off him, he doesn’t mind.’

You sighed quietly, thinking that Mackie seemed to know an awful lot about what people did and didn’t mind tonight, but dutifully took out your phone to take Chris’ number.

‘Do I need to put you in under a pseudonym?’ You asked him teasingly as you tapped out his digits.

‘Depends, how likely are you to have your phone hacked?’ He joked back.

‘Hmm, low to zero, I would say, given my ‘nobody’ status.’

‘Then ‘Dumb Jock’ should work just fine. Unless you feel like you deal with enough of them already?’

You looked up sharply and he was grinning, knowing he’d caught you out earlier. How had he heard you say that? You and Letta had been in the kitchen and he’d been outside, hadn’t he?

‘I think I’ll just settle for Chris E,’ you looked back down quickly when your face flushed, not wanting him to see your embarrassment. You made to put your phone away when he stopped you with a hand on your arm.

‘Will you give me a callback, so I’ve got your number and I know who it is when you text?’

You looked down at his hand where it was making contact with you and you fought the urge to shake him off. Hollywood types were always so touchy-feely all the time.

When you answered, you knew you were being purposefully difficult and frosty but this was a guy who must have been so used to getting what he wanted, you just didn’t want to give him the satisfaction.

‘You’ll know it’s me when you get a big list of all the kit you need to get hold of by next Saturday.’

[greenwichvillagehq-blog]

“Love many things, for therein lies the true strength, and whosoever loves much performs much, and can accomplish much, and what is done in love is done well. ”

STATS

FACECLAIM: Matt Bomer CHARACTER NAME: Lucas Andrews PRONOUNS: he/him BIRTHPLACE: Boston, Massachusetts DATE OF BIRTH: March 11th, 1981 AGE: 37 OCCUPATION: Art Curator at The Whitney Museum of American Art

IN THE VILLAGE

CHARACTER LABEL: The Gentleman HOUSING: Waverly Place Townhouses FREQUENTED LOCATIONS: The Whitney Museum of American Art, Stumptown Coffee Roasters, Goods For The Study, Joe’s Pizza, The Spaniard, Smalls, Analogue, Bleecker Street Records

BIOGRAPHY

It was a cold Tuesday afternoon in the year 1981, March 11th to be exact, when Lucas Andrews was born to a loving mother and father in the busy city of Boston, Massachusetts. He was a sweet, sensitive child with enough energy to wipe out an entire city of people and have enough strength to keep going. He was closest to his mother, who was always warm and nurturing while on the other hand, there was always something he found a little cold about his father. He was distant and their relationship felt impersonal in comparison to the bond he had with his mom.

However, to compensate the suddenly split attention that was due to the arrival of his new baby brother, his dad pulled his guitar out of the closet and started showing Lucas the wonders of it and he fell in love with music. Their little weekly lessons together only lasted for so long until the man started canceling on his son, apologizing and explaining that he was busy. Eventually the apologies stopped and the lessons did, too. Just when Lucas had began warming up to him, his father had ripped away their common ground and his presence became more and more scarce over the next few years up until he packed his bags and left for good. Lucas wasn’t sad but he was furious and disappointed. It was his first time seeing just how terrible someone could treat the person they were supposed to love and it was the first chip in his outlook on life and the way he carried his emotions.

In his teenage years, Lucas started to break out of his shell and a big part of that was joining the drama club in high school. He started acting out from time to time and being sneaky, but his grades were always kept up. Discovering himself had never been much of a challenge for Lucas, it wasn’t something he ever had an internal struggle with. He was one of the lucky ones who didn’t question everything and give themselves a headache, instead he just went with the flow. Lucas was never interested in getting emotionally involved with anyone, all throughout attending college in New York he had a plethora of opportunities but he didn’t need that kind of relationship. He enjoyed having a small group of friends and reoccurring casual encounters. A lot of this had to do with his habit of keeping any negative emotions he had locked away, which only ever got worse over the years. He dabbled in a little bit of everything throughout college and became a stranger in comparison to the person he used to be. In despite of all that, he worked himself to the bone taking extra class after class and workshop after workshop. Art was his passion, it was what made his heart sing. It was what he dedicated his everything to. He attended a four year college, art history was his major but he minored in fine art and theater arts – his ultimate career goal being owning his own gallery someday. When he wasn’t at school or working, Lucas was making time to travel back and forth from NYC to Boston to be with his family. His mother and his brother were the only two people that he let have his heart, even if he didn’t often express that openly. They were the two most important people in the world to him but for some reason, he kept them at arm’s length and refrained from letting even them know too much.

After obtaining his bachelor's degree, his path went astray and Lucas dove head first into the theater world straight out of college. It wasn’t the initial plan, but he thought it was a long shot. To his surprise, he made out well for a beginner – snagging Off-Broadway roles often even when they were minuscule. He climbed the ladder, scoring bigger and better parts and eventually began booking jobs on Broadway from the years 2005 to 2006. Lucas became the next hot thing among all the Broadway buzz and did very well for himself over the next couple of years, but he bounced around often which was a clear display in his inability to commit or stay interested in something.

In 2008, Lucas was a special guest for one of his old instructor’s acting workshops and throughout the entire class, he and one of the students kept making lingering eye contact. At the end of the class they introduced themselves to each other—her name was Carmen del Rossi, she was a 21 year old aspiring singer/songwriter and stage actress—and there was a tension between them that neither could ignore. He invited her out for a drink and they barely made it through the first round before going back to his apartment in the city where she stayed the night but neither of them slept. It was the beginning of what turned into a five year relationship. The two of them were happy, wild, and reckless together. They shared a passion for music and theater and an even greater passion for each other.

Carmen was the first person that Lucas shared himself with fully and knew him from the inside out, she was the first person he ever brought home to his mother and brother, and she was the first to make him want to live openhearted. But Carmen also turned out to be the second person in his life to crush that spirit. Lucas was in a good place and that made him want to take it easy, but Carmen was seven years younger than him and she wasn’t exactly ready to stop living loud and impulsively. They ended up fighting a lot and they didn’t want to destroy their bond, so they came to a mutual agreement to break things off for the sake of keeping things from getting too sour. Foolishly, they wound up getting back together out of falling into old habits but they came to realize that as much as they loved each other, they were toxic. This time Carmen left, leaving Lucas with a kiss on the cheek and his heart badly bruised.

He went through a time of crisis, he forgot how to live without Carmen and it drove him crazy. He moved across country from New York to Los Angeles where he lived for two years to distance himself from the things and people that he loved, he had his first taste of feeling weak and he never wanted to feel it again. Lucas went to LA with the intentions of starting anew and he did, but it wasn’t what he was looking for. He began working in television and films but he was often just a pretty face and a nice body to the people in Hollywood. Even when he purposely bombed an audition, sometimes he still got the role based on his ‘look’ and he loathed it. His manager continuously pressured him to get into modeling and product endorsements, always going on about making “them” a fortune. Lucas gave into those pressures eventually and it was a dehumanizing experience for him, but he went along with it for a while anyways. Eventually he had enough and realized that his journey of self discovery had only led to him losing himself all over again. His family was thousands of miles away and suddenly he couldn’t look in the mirror anymore without thinking about his father. He was distant, closed-off, and he left the people he loved. That was his wake up call.

Lucas worked in LA for a few more months but he was pickier now and planned to make his way back to New York once a contract he had was through with. His saving grace was a call he got from a producer, pitching the role of J.M. Barrie in Finding Neverland on Broadway to him and attempting to persuade him to come audition for the directors. Lucas didn’t hesitate before accepting. His return to New York was a big relief to him, he finally felt like he had a solid grip on his life and he could get back to what was important to him. What he didn’t expect was to meet a woman that made him feel like he could open his heart to someone again. He starred as the leading male role in Finding Neverland at the Lunt-Fontanne theater from March 2015 up until May of 2016. Somewhere along the way he suffered an emotional breakdown, ruined his new relationship, and dropped off the radar to figure out how to get better and what could bring him true happiness and fulfillment in his life.

Being done with the spotlight and anything remotely fame related, Lucas reverted back to his original plan of working with fine art. He attended a summer intensive program at NYU to complete all courses required to earn the Appraisal Studies Certificate in Fine and Decorative Arts. He worked as an assistant to an appraiser for five months before transitioning into an official art appraiser. He spent quite some time doing that and was excellent at it, but in the meantime he focused on networking and climbing the ladder in the art world. Now, curator at The Whitney Museum of American Art, Lucas is at a peaceful place in his life now and wishes to keep things that way. He still struggles with his personal relationships but is actively working on it. Being a bit of a loner has always been something he dealt with but was never happy about, he just couldn’t seem to help it or open himself up. Things with his infamous ex-flame have rekindled over this time, Lucas isn’t sure what that means for the future but he’s willing to ride the wave so long as she is a part of his life.

( — Lucas Andrews is played by Kayla, they/them, 22, EST )

[1dreality]

It must have been well over a year ago now, when Liam Payne realised he had absolutely nothing interesting to say. The singer, known to most as ‘Liam from One Direction’ until the group’s indefinite hiatus in January 2016, had returned to the studio, settled into the idea of being a solo artist for the rest of his days, and promptly drawn a blank. He was, he says, just too darned happy to think of anything.

Everything in his life had fallen into place. He’d found love, moving in with Cheryl (formerly Cole), a fellow junior royal of the Top 40. Their first child, a son named Bear, was well on the way. He had signed a huge record deal with Capitol. He felt fitter and healthier than he had in years. And, yes, there’s no denying it: he was pretty pleased that he no longer had to be in the biggest boyband in the world.

‘I had a bit of a problem formulating what was going on in my brain into the music at first,’ he says, ‘because I was so content with everything in my personal life. It’s easy to spill your guts out on a ballad. But I was thinking, “Oh God, I’m really happy – what am I going to write about?!”’

More than 12 months on, the answer to that question still isn’t entirely clear. Payne’s debut album, as yet untitled, won’t be released until early 2018. There have been two singles, though, with a third, the unsubtly titled Bedroom Floor, arriving next month.

Of those we’ve heard, the first, Strip That Down, a R&B-inflected club hit released in May and co-written with Ed Sheeran, marked a departure from One Direction’s stadium pop-rock. It was also chock-full of hoary by-the-way-I’m-an-adult-now signposts: there are references to nightclubs, drinking rum and coke, driving Ferraris and having girls ‘grind’ on him. And mixed in with all that were lyrics that caused a minor stir among his acolytes: ‘You know I used to be in 1D, now I’m out, free / people want me for one thing, that’s not me’. Payne, it seems, is keen to reintroduce himself.

‘When I left the band, I felt a bit stranded,’ he says, when we meet in an enormous boardroom at his management’s offices. ‘It took time, but I know as an artist I am starting fresh now.’ He slaps the table with melodrama. ‘This is Moment One. It’s the start line.’

Liam Payne is 24 years old. He is athletically built, as anyone who has seen his shirtless Instagram posts will know, and kind of everyday handsome, in a Love Island, former-youth-footballer way. Both his arms and hands are almost entirely upholstered in tattoos, highlights of which include some thick black arrows on one forearm that look like road markings; the number ‘4’, in reference to One Direction’s 2014 album of the same name, on his ring finger; and, on his left arm, a scale depiction of Cheryl’s eye, that appears to follow you around the room as he gesticulates. ‘It’s so my missus can always keep an eye on me,’ he likes to say about that one.

He is impossibly nice. Before we meet, he plods through the office, saying hello to everybody in the building individually, and in most cases remembering something about them: that they beat him at Fifa last time he dropped by, so they must have a rematch before he leaves (‘I’ll whoop ya with West Brom!’), or they’ve surely had a haircut, haven’t they? (‘It looks really great anyway, man!’). It is the manner of somebody both impeccably raised and intensely keen for people to like him, and it appears genuine and successful.

To an extent, Payne says, the five members of One Direction – or four, after Zayn Malik left the band in 2015 – ended up playing characters over the six years they were together. Whereas the Beatles (arguably the only other group with a comparable scale and speed of world domination), grew increasingly cantankerous towards the end of the 1960s, One Direction stuck resolutely to the caricatures that fans and management assigned them right to the end.

Malik was brooding and mercurial, Harry Styles was a cool, flamboyant ladies’ man, Niall Horan was charming and laid-back, and Louis Tomlinson, who has since admitted to feeling a little redundant, was fun and energetic. And Payne? Well, Payne was The Responsible One.

‘I’ve always been a bit of an older soul,’ he says, mulling over his place. ‘It’s funny: there’s a thing on the net where the fans put what they think are our mental ages. All the boys were around their real ones, but then they put me at about 37.’

Payne admits to feeling a little daunted in 2010, when Simon Cowell thrust the band together on X Factor after they’d auditioned as solo artists. Keeping up with the other personalities in the gang was exhausting, so his coping mechanism was to attempt to rein them in as best he could, and work with management in doing so. Like the popular schoolboy teachers identify as mature enough to be a trusted emissary for his recalcitrant friends, Payne carved himself a valuable niche.

‘I was put with a group of rowdy teenagers, and when I was a teenager, I had mates, but I was always with my dad. I’d go out to the pub and chat with him. So when I was stuck with these boys I was thinking, “F— me, I don’t know how to do it.”

‘When something was going wrong, I’d get a phone call. If there was an apology needed, it was me. I was the spokesperson for the band, as it were, with the press and the label.’

Along with Tomlinson, Payne shares comfortably the most writing credits of the band on One Direction songs. Over their five albums, dozens of songwriting collaborators contributed to the group’s success, but it seems nobody worked harder than the two least-heralded members. Neither was the showiest or best singer; but they kept things ticking over.

One Direction’s hordes of fans around the world noticed the assumed roles, and nicknamed Payne ‘Daddy Directioner’. He lived up to it with them, too. In 2013, on tour in Australia, Payne tweeted a message to warn girls waiting outside the band’s hotel of snakes living in the surrounding fields. ‘It’s just not worth it someone’s gunna get hurt [sic],’ he pleaded.

Two years later, he gave an interview lamenting the fact he and the other boys were being sent sexually explicit pictures of themselves drawn by underage admirers. While the rest of the band seemed to find that funny, Payne called it ‘the sad and sorry side of what we’ve done.’ Yeah, all right, Dad.

Becoming a real-life father has at least given the nickname some purchase. Rumours swirled at the end of 2015 that he had started dating Cheryl – formerly Fernandez-Versini and Cole, née Tweedy – after her second marriage ended in divorce. By the next summer, she was pregnant with the second One Direction baby (Tomlinson, the eldest of the bunch, had one first).

The couple live in a mansion near Woking, Surrey, and aren’t married, but he considers them ‘basically at that stage’. Bear, with whom Payne is besotted, was born in March, and named for the growling noises he was making during his first sleeps. So far, no photographs have been released, but he instantly shows me one on his phone. And here, I can exclusively reveal that the heir Bear is – as you’d expect of a baby with that name, born of two professionally good-looking parents – very cute.

‘We’ve only shown him in glimpses,’ Payne says, explaining their decision to shield him. ‘We don’t want him to have the pressure that me and Cheryl have, as household names. We want him to enjoy himself first and then figure it out.’

Born and raised in Wolverhampton, Payne has an unexpectedly thick Midlands accent that gets thicker the longer he talks – which is a lot. His preferred conversational feature is the anecdote, resulting in a version of the phrase, ‘I remember, there was this one time…’ prefixing the majority of his utterances, which are in turn regularly punctuated with singular handclaps of self-incredulity. It can be mildly alarming, like interviewing a young, heavily-tattooed Ronnie Corbett, but I suppose it speaks to the amount of life experience he has already accrued.

Growing up, Payne’s father, Geoff, worked as a fitter, while his mother, Karen, was a nursery nurse. Money was tight and the house small, but he remembers it as a happy one.

‘My place was on the floor with the dog, there was no space on the sofa. It was great, though we didn’t have much. Dad was in debt, but they did the best they could. It makes you dream a bit, you know?’

As a child, he had two routes to possible stardom, both of which Geoff pushed hard for. One was singing, the other was long-distance running. For a time in his teens, Payne was one of the fastest 1500m runners in the country, getting up to train before school and seconds from qualifying for the London 2012 squad. It was before that, as a 14-year-old in 2008, that he first applied for X Factor.

Auditioning with Fly Me To The Moon, since it was one of the few songs he could manage while his voice was breaking, that year he got as far as the ‘judge’s houses’, before Simon Cowell told him to come back in two years and try again. He became a mini-celebrity back home in that between-period, and carried on performing around town. The adulation was short-lived, though.

Once, performing a Justin Timberlake cover at an under-18s gig in Oceana Wolverhampton, somebody lobbed a coin at his face and managed to draw blood. He laughs about it now. These days – admittedly a largely cashless society – it’s only bras and knickers they fling.

‘I had become less and less famous. One time, I was in McDonald’s with a girlfriend and someone shouted ‘X Factor reject!’ at me. The whole restaurant turned. It was like coming out of fame. So I knew what it was like at 15, and it helped me.’

Following Cowell’s advice, he returned to X Factor in 2010 and found himself shoved into One Direction with the four other boys, eventually finishing the competition in third place, but with easily the brightest future. Within weeks, he had moved out of his Wolverhampton bedroom and into a penthouse apartment in Canary Wharf.

And six years later, One Direction had sold more than 20 million records, become the first band in history to have their first four albums go to number one in the US, touring the world numerous times, and earned a preposterous amount of money in the process. Payne is now estimated to be worth £40 million. He hasn’t been back to Wolverhampton in a long time, but he paid off his father’s debts years ago, and bought his parents a new house in addition to funding the renovation of their family home. He refers to his time spent in One Direction as ‘like uni’.

When they were in the thick of things, all the boys used to obey Cowell’s omertà – relentless enthusiasm at all times, please – and never discussed any negative aspects of their experience. Now safely out the other side, Payne is frank on matters of burnout and claustrophobia.

‘Cabin fever. It sent me a bit AWOL at one point, if I’m honest. I can remember when there were 10,000 people outside our hotel. We couldn’t go anywhere. It was just gig to hotel, gig to hotel. And you couldn’t sleep, because they’d still be outside,’ he says, before telling several stories of how he and Tomlinson would sneak out of hotels just to feel freedom, only to find themselves bored once they got out.

‘People were speaking to me about mental health in music the other day, and that’s a big issue. Sometimes you just need some sun, or a walk.’

Every stop on tour became the same. Earlier this year, Payne was asked which was his favourite city of those he visited with One Direction. ‘One in Italy with a big white cathedral,’ he responded.(The band performed in Milan at least five times.)

‘One of the problems was that we never stopped to celebrate what we’d done. I remember us winning loads of American Music Awards and then having to get on a plane straight away. It got to the point where success was so fluid. I don’t even know what happened to our songs, we just sang them, then sang some more. It was like a proper, hard job. Non-stop. I can concentrate a lot more now.’

The paparazzi and fan attention sounds just as draining. It must feel weird having a Twitter following larger than the population of Australia, as he does, but especially odd to have fans so obsessed that they’ve set up multiple fake profiles pretending to be your mother, for some reason.

Moreover, footage of One Direction out and about makes A Hard Day’s Night look tame: thousands of screaming fans all over them, police escorts everywhere they went, an unending run of selfie requests... It came to a head in New York in 2012, when Payne was walking to a restaurant with his parents and a paparazzo accidentally pushed his mother over. He was incensed.

‘I was like, “Oh, f— this. F— this s—t.” There was a swarm of them and I just wanted a burger with my parents,’ he says, unsmiling for a moment. ‘I cried my eyes out. I thought, “I can’t do this”, and really hated my life.’

He soldiered on, but it wasn’t a healthy lifestyle; none of them seems to miss it now the ‘break’ is on.

‘It’s great that people can see what we’re really like away from each other,’ Payne says. ‘It got to a point in the band where we were just playing characters, and I was tired of my character. Apart from the daddy thing, I was really loud and bubbly. There were a lot of personalities in the band to keep up with, so I had to be all, ‘Ey!’, the rowdy lad, and I don’t have to now.’

There were times when the band would celebrate hard, and in that, Payne had catching up to do: as a child, he was diagnosed with a scarred kidney, meaning he didn’t taste alcohol until he was given the all-clear at 19. Tell a teenage millionaire they can now safely drink, and they’ll go for it. He admits ‘the floodgates opened’ that year.

‘I wasn’t happy. I went through a real drinking stage, and sometimes you take things too far. Everyone’s been that guy at the party where you’re the only one having fun, and there were points when that was me. I got to 13 stone, just eating crap. I got fat jibes, and it affects your head. I have nothing to hide about it…

‘As I say, it was like a musical university. We were pretty reckless, but I got it out of my system. I had my fun.’

The hiatus seems to have come at just the right time. But before he could take a breath, Payne lurched on in life, becoming involved with Cheryl almost at once.

Nobody asks how they met; their introduction is on YouTube for all to see. Ten years his senior, she was an X Factor judge in 2008 when the 14-year-old Payne shuffled in, all mop-hair and waistcoat, to perform his Sinatra number. He winked at her, she called him ‘cute’, they bumped into one another over the years, ended up working on a remix of one of her songs in 2014, and the rest is recent pop history.

Not everybody was happy when the relationship was initially confirmed. That Cheryl was in a quasi-pastoral role when they met raised eyebrows in the usual eyebrow-raising camps, as did the couple’s decade-wide age gap. Liam doesn’t care. In fact, he can still barely get over the fact she’s his girlfriend.

‘It’s a ridiculous place to be in,’ he says. ‘She’s even more amazing than I thought. I was watching her do Fight For This Love [her debut solo single, from 2009] when I was a kid, and now we’re together with a kid. I feel like I’m X Factor’s biggest winner.’

It helps having Cheryl around to ask about business matters. Like Payne, she was scouted on a TV pop contest (2002’s Popstars: The Rivals), had massive success in a group (Girls Aloud), and then went solo with a more urban sound. She is also the unlikely possessor of the record for number-one singles by a British woman.

‘We think about the same things. She understands what my life is like. She knows what it’s like to sit on the Graham Norton couch [or] we can talk about her L’Oréal work. It’s not that we’re “a brand” as a family, but we can help each other.’

In Who We Are, one of One Direction’s seven books, published in 2014, Payne writes in his chapter that he’s ‘worried about the idea of failing outside of this band’ and declared he’d become a low-key songwriter, because ‘there would be less attention on my life’.

The opposite of that is what’s happening, I inform him.

‘Yeah, that was a point when I was scared of our success, and we didn’t want to take a step back from it,’ he says. ‘I just wanted to be a songwriter and not be famous, but happy. Then Simon and Cheryl told me this is where I am supposed to be, and I’d miss the stage. The pressure of what was coming next was scary, but they talked me down.’

The solo product he’s come up with is the sort of music he’d always wanted to make: radio-friendly R&B in the style of his heroes, Justin Timberlake, Usher and Pharrell Williams, and more informed by the rap music he listens to than the pop he’s famous for. Who knows if he can shake the ‘embarrassing dad’ brand to pull it off, but the signs point to success. Strip That Down has been streamed more than 300 million times on Spotify alone.

‘I wanted this to be for people my age. The themes are a bit older, but you have to grow up with your fans. I can’t make bubblegum pop any more,’ he says.

One Direction fans needn’t despair. They might have dispersed and almost all signed elsewhere, but Payne is excited about the idea of a comeback gig in years to come. As, I’m sure, are the band’s accountants.

But that won’t be for a little while, if Payne has it his way, because – as he keeps on telling me – he is just far too happy with his lot at the moment to take a step backwards. When it reaches our time to wrap up, he’s still at it.

‘I feel great about what’s going on in my life,’ he says, giving it one last handclap and springing to his feet. ‘I’m extremely lucky. I feel like I’m in a comatose dream. I’m like, “when did I last bump my head?” because I can’t believe this…’

Liam Payne’s next single, Bedroom Floor, is out on 20 October