#but he is NOT apologizing to the author of love simon. i wonder why.

[antiqua-lugar]

also as a quick note, "Who is James Somerton trying to fool"...exactly who he was trying to fool before, impressionable young queer people and anyone who watched his content without paying too much attention.

One of the most astounding things about Somertom is how blatant his lies were if you knew anything about the subject and how obvious his misoginy, queerphobia and racism were. He was also very open about how he DEFINITELY was the only queer voice worth listening to, to the point that he accused Nebula of being unable to accept a visionary like him.

He still got caught but he kept getting away with it using the same tactics. It was everyone's fault but his, the haters were out to get him for no reason, he was getting death threats and that's obviously more important than whatever controversy he was on...

And now he released an apology video where he actually did nothing bad, but if he did it's because he just cared so much about the queer community and because he is neurodivergent and has epilepsy and memory issues and also he is poor and his mother died and doesn't everyone deserve a second chance?

He seems also to be carefully deleting any comment that points out everything else he did not address and liking comments that think he should get a second chance.

If he manages to pull through he is probably gonna start a narrative where everyone deserves a second chance and everyone who brings up his past behaviour is just a bully who is not letting him grow or a desparate hater and "he apologized to everyone involved so what else do these people want from him :(".

hbomberguy and Todd In The Shadows' videos were amazing, but the world moves on and people have a tendency to forget. That's who he is trying to fool.

[hahaifolded]

Good... Really? - Simon "Ghost" Riley x POC!GN Reader Drabble

Warnings: Angst, ANGST, Angst (comment about eating habits) Author Notes: I don't know where this came from so I do apologize for this. I have a part 2 in mind but I don't know when I'll write that so... yeeeeah.

Imagine Simon "Ghost" Riley asks you, the temporary interpreter for the 141, on a date. Imagine how surprised you were when after the most recent briefing, this hunk of a man approaches you asking if you like Italian and free that same night for dinner. Imagine how nervous he is when he asks, eyes looking anywhere but you, hand fidgeting at his sides. It absolutely melted your heart to see the man that made your heart beat so fast that you might faint shy to talk to you.

So imagine your shock when you agree on said date and it's just... horrible.

Just imagine you walking in, seeing him at the booth and as you catch his eye, he immediately looks away. How when you approach the table, he stays seated and mumbles out a small hi. You assume it's just a cultural difference and quickly move past it.

Then later when you ask him about work, because well it seemed like the safest conversation starter, he snaps at you, saying "we're on a date, not on base. no work talk." While he may have a point, he didn't have to say it so coldly. You try to be cheeky and ask him what does he want to talk about, hoping to ease the tension. It doesn't. Instead, it makes it worse as he just looks down.

So you both sit in silence as you look at the menu. You try to make small talk and ask him what he was thinking of getting. He answers plainly and says a salad. A SALAD? He tells you he's trying to cut, but assures you that you don't have to be shy, he can tell you like to eat. Oh wow - that cut deep. You just nod and look back at the menu. Your appetite dies at that very moment. You consider leaving, but the waiter pops up, asking if the "lovely couple" was ready to order. Simon quickly places his order and glares at you, waiting for you to go. You're already here, might as well stick through it.

So after you order a small soup that Ghost felt so compelled to ask if you were sure you wanted something so small, you start fidgeting with the menu, wondering how long does it take to toss a salad and pour a bowl of soup.

Imagine your shock when Simon finally speaks and asks if you thought the weather was nice. You died a little inside. The weather, really? You answer with a yes and even start to share how you loved this time of year, because it's perfect for-- and his eyes are glazed over. Great, he's not listening. You go quiet. It seems like he comes back to and asks you to repeat yourself. You don't.

You both sit in silent for a bit. You're trying to get comfortable, but find that you can't. You can tell that he's feeling the tension as he takes in a deep breath and lays his arms on the table. You can't help but stare at his tattoos.

Without a second thought, you reach out and try to ask him a question about them. As your fingers graze his arm, he pulls back and hisses at you.

"Don't touch me!"

The entire restaurant goes quiet and stares at your Lieutenant cradling his arm as if you burned him. You quickly pull back and apologize. You've never seen anyone recoil so much by your touch. He looks around the room and realizes the commotion you/he caused and mutters out a simple, "it's fine."

Silence falls on the two you again.

Dinner finally gets here and you don't think you ever ate a bowl of soup so fast before in your life. However, you can't even celebrate your small achievement as when you look up, you see Simon's plate already empty.

You can't help but be confused. Why did Simon Riley invite you on this date if he so clearly doesn't want to be here?

And before you can stop yourself, you ask him why the sudden interest. You deserved to know.

But damn did you wish you didn't ask when he says,

"Johnny's been hounding me to ask you on a date so I finally did."

Oh.

He asked you after Johnny, the only person on this fucking base who's even aware of your little crush on Ghost, told him too. Wait, no, BEGGED him to.

You don't know how you did it, but you managed to not to explode right there on the spot.

Or how when the waiter comes by asking if the "lovely couple" wants desert, you politely decline and ask for the check.

Or when Simon says he'll pay, because Johnny told him he had to, you just nod instead of storming off?

You don't know how you held your head high at you walked out of that restaurant, knowing that Simon Riley wasn't even interested in you and probably felt like he had to go on a date with the boring interpreter that has a stupid crush on him.

So imagine your shock, when before you can rip Johnny to shreds, he tells you how Ghost thought the date went swimmingly and can't wait for the second date.

WHAT!?

Word Count: 880

Thanks for reading! — Folded’s Page Guide + Masterlist

[eleanor-bradstreet]

A Special Day

Anthony Bridgerton and family Modern AU Rated: G, pure fluff Ficlet <1k words

Summary: Anthony's choice of a lavender shirt causes a stir.

Author's Note: We love this outfit. C'mon, how can you not love this outfit?!? Sometimes Jonny Bailey dresses so well, I have to write a fic about it. This is one of those 💜

“Oh dearest, there you are. Thank goodness you came down. Everyone is waiting outside.” Violet flitted around the foyer, moving to greet her son at the foot of the curving staircase. 

“Yes, I am aware,” Anthony nodded. “Apologies for the delay.”

They were surrounded by Bridgertons and the low buzz of everyone speaking at once. Today was important. The annual meeting for Bridgerton House Enterprises hosted at Aubrey Hall. A spring tradition where the family mingled with hundreds of their employees in the flowering gardens of the estate and where Anthony delivered a keynote speech. This year press were in attendance as well, since he would be announcing a global spread into five new international subsidiaries. The day had been planned in meticulous detail. The Bridgertons were to present a united family front as the face of the company. His wife, children and mother would be at his side, as would all of his siblings who had cared to attend.

“My, you look quite smart.” Violet surveyed him top to bottom. He had chosen a neutral linen suit over a turtleneck, tailored to perfection and befitting the garden party atmosphere. But he could hear the passive concern in his mother’s tone.

“What is it?”

“Your shirt.” She leaned in closer. “The lavender really suits you dear, but the dress code… We agreed we would all be in the family color.” She gestured back toward the clump of his relations behind her, outfitted in an array of blue. Benedict in a dark blue linen suit much like his own. Colin in something powder blue and a bit too haute couture but passable. Daphne and Simon were present and his tie matched the cornflower blue shade of her dress. Kate was affixing navy bow ties to their two sons and was herself wrapped in a blue sari. His mother wore a white dress adorned with a print of blue flowers. He would stick out like a sore thumb.

“I know, Mother, but…”

“Anthony.” His wife had spotted him and marched over to join them, her tone much less forgiving. “What are you wearing? Purple? Really? Why did you change? We had your outfit laid out for you this morning!”

He knew he had to tread carefully when Kathani looked at him that way. “My love, I know. There was a last minute wardrobe adjustment.”

“Why?” She glowered. “What did you do?”

As he gawped, somewhat terrified, a third onlooker joined the crowd. 

“Well don’t you look lovely!” Benedict beamed at him, reaching out to smooth his lapels. “Uncharacteristic of you to break the rules brother, but it’s about time you tried it! That color is doing wonders for you. The combination shouldn’t work, but it does.” He plucked at the fabric of the turtleneck and Anthony swatted his hand away. 

“Thank you,” he growled. “I didn’t know this would be the cause of so much commentary. It’s only a bloody shirt and it’s what I am wearing for the day.”

“Oh but I’m sure we can find you a blue shirt,” Violet fretted.

“Anthony, what is the meaning of this?” Kate hissed.

An assistant called over the heads of his bustling family. “Two minutes, Lord Bridgerton! You’re needed outside.”

“Papa!” A small voice called from the top of the stairs. Everyone quieted and turned to see Charlotte, Anthony’s youngest, perched primly by the bannister. She too had foregone the blue outfit her mother had provided that morning and was instead wearing her favorite princess dress up costume; a polyester explosion of shimmering purple fabrics, topped off with a garish plastic tiara. 

A smile broke wide across Anthony’s face and he jogged back up the steps to take her tiny hand and help her down. At four years old and with one hand needed to gather her skirts, her father’s assistance was required to navigate the tall stairs. They slowly descended back to the family, then Anthony straightened his jacket and looked around at them all with a vindicated smirk.

He could see the exasperation in Kate’s eyes as she bent to their daughter. “Charunya, why did you not put on the blue dress I picked for you?”

The girl jutted her chin into the air, a perfect mirror of her mother’s obstinance. “Because Papa said today was special and so I wanted to wear my special dress. It’s my favorite color.”

Kate shot a glance up at her husband who could only shrug in mock defeat. They both knew once their daughter set her mind on something, woe betide any who tried to divert her from it. It was a behavior Anthony had grown quite familiar with during the course of his marriage. With a tight timeline for the day, he had chosen the path of least resistance and let Charlotte dress herself. 

“And did your Papa say he would wear purple with you?” Kate asked.

“Yes,” the little girl nodded. “So I would not be alone.”

Kate looked back at her husband with love in her eyes. Violet brought a hand to her mouth and Benedict swaggered away with a grin. Anthony reached down and took Charlotte’s hand again.

“Are you ready for our special day, my princess?”

“Yes, Papa,” she smiled. Then together they walked across the foyer and outside into the waiting crowds, leading a parade of blue-bedecked Bridgertons behind them.

Tagging: @angels17324 @bridgertontess @broooookiecrisp @secretagentbucky @colettebronte @sorryallonsy @queenofmean14

[thebibliomancer]

Essential Avengers: Avengers West Coast #63: "When Lives the LIGHTNING"

October, 1990

The original HUMAN TORCH vs the LIVING LIGHTNING!

Living Lightning? Comic fans in 1990 probably were thinking 'who?' but fans of specifically 60s Hulk comics were like whaaaaaat?

I know this guy from the future. He sharked the Grandmaster at poker. He was revealed to be gay in an off-hand joke about how the Great Lakes Avengers have the same initials as the Gay/Lesbian Alliance. Fun guy.

And this is his debut, woo!

Not sure why he's gotta bully poor Jim Hammond when life already does that enough, shrug.

Last times: there was this whole thing with Immortus manipulating Wanda to turn her into a conduit for the Proper Timeline to flow through, or something. For some reason, this involved turning her into a racist. But then Wanda maximoffed Immortus so hard that his bosses came down and gave him a promotion to inanimate object.

Also, Terminus and Terminus bouncing baby boy Terminus combined into a bigger Terminus in San Francisco, then went to St Louis, and then went into space and imploded into a black hole. The West Coast team was around for that too.

IT HAS BEEN A BUSY WEEK.

See, Wanda is only now getting check up after everything she went through. That's how busy it's been.

"When lives the lightning" is such an odd way to phrase something. Is that a complete sentence?

The Avengers are going to arrange a nurse so Wanda can recover at home. Money is no object. Janet van Dyne and Iron Man are both in the room and they love throwing money at friends.

But for now, doctor's orders are for everyone to give Wanda some space to rest and everyone filters out. Except Wonder Man, who lingers.

There's weird romance subplot baggage between them. Which got even weirder when she was briefly evil because she taunted him about it.

But now that she's not evil, they have an awkward conversation.

Scarlet Witch: "Simon... wait... please... I... I guess we showed Immortus where he could get off, didn't we?" Wonder Man: "You showed him, Wanda... when you threw off all that excess power he'd secretly bred in you. The rest of us were mostly just along for the ride." Scarlet Witch: "Sometimes, Simon Williams, you can be so silly. Well... good night." Wonder Man: "Good night."

Please don't use the word bred in context of Wanda and Immortus, Simon.

Also, gosh I really can't get behind this awkward romance subplot. I'm too salty about how the marriage Wanda was already in was hit in the knees with a crowbar because John Byrne didn't like it.

Even given Wanda has been through a lot, I think it would take her a long time before she'd want to date again considering her husband dumped her and moved to the other cost while she was having an emotional breakdown.

Anyway. Well away from Wanda's room, Quicksilver asks if Wanda will get her powers back when she's rested from her ordeal.

The doctor answers that he can't say because he's no authority. Unfortunately, he says it in a way that notoriously prickly Quicksilver takes as mutantphobia.

Quicksilver: "I hesitated to ask this in front of my sister, doctor, but... Will her so-called hex power return, when she is stronger?" Dr Sanford: "I'm afraid I really couldn't say, Mr. Maximoff. Before tonight, I never before treated a -- well, you know -- a mutant." Quicksilver: "You speak the word 'mutant' -- as it it were something unclean! By all that is holy, I will--"

And then Hawkeye slides in and tells Quicksilver to calm his tits. For his own sake and for Wanda's try to not to be so touchy. Quicksilver apologizes and runs off.

Wasp is impressed that Hawkeye is acting the peacekeeper instead of the hothead but, geez. We've had this character beat from him already. At least before Byrne reset his character. When Wonder Man was chafing at the demands of being an Avenger and the glitzy life of starring in a Not-Conan movie, he started giving Hawkeye a lot of grief and Hawkeye realized 'wow, this is what I put Cap through, back in the day.'

Anyway, Wasp also remembers that the Tigra subplot has just been dangling like mad for so long. They need to do a Tigra hunt, find teeny tiny six inch tall feral Tigra somewhere in the compound grounds.

It's amazing how much stuff Byrne set up and then did nothing with but now has to be addressed.

Iron Man can't help with the Tigra Hunt right now because he's been blowing off corporate work to help with various Immortus and Terminus-related things. And Hawkeye is meeting estranged wife Mockingbird in Hollywood.

In the only bit of 'huh I wonder if Iron Man is Tony Stark' wheel spinning from the Avengers, Hawkeye cheekily tells Iron Man not to let Tony Stark yell at him too much for skipping work because "we all know what a hard case he can be" to which Iron Man Who Is Definitely Tony Stark can just awkwardly agree.

That was mean and funny, Clint Barton.

So how about this Living Lightning thing?

Well, a guy follows a map that was in his dead father's possessions out to the Santa Ana Mountains and finds the hidden and abandoned lair of the Legion of the Living Lightning.

image

Miguel Santos has a probably biased view on what went down and who the Legion of the Living Lightning were, because his dad was a member and Miguel heard from a surviving legionnaire what happened.

They were a group that tried to take over the US "for its own good."

Miguel Santos: "The Lightning Lord would've saved America from people who didn't love it as much as my father, who'd come here from Mexico -- if not for that green-skinned monster."

Miguel wants to revive the Legion's dream of abolishing war and hatred by taking over the country and so he tries to reactivate the Legion's lightning machine and gets electrocuted.

Whoopsiedoodle.

Back at the Avengers side of the plot, US Agent makes an earnest if awkward attempt to bond with the team.

He suggests to Wonder Man that they play a quick game of pool before starting the Tigra Hunt. But Wonder Man is preoccupied with his own thoughts and turns down the offer to go make a phone call.

US Agent: "The story of my life as an Avenger, West Coast variety. They resent the way Uncle Sam forced me down their throats. Maybe I should've tried to make myself easier to swallow. Well, maybe it's not too late, right? Pym and his ex-wife, over there talking to that witch-dame, Agatha Harkness... they haven't cold-shouldered me the way that bone-headed bowman did... The way even Wonder Man did just now."

US Agent: "Maybe I should just walk right up to them... Tell them how proud I am to be an Avenger... But, hey -- what am I doing kissing up to them? The government appointed me an Avenger, and that's good enough for Jack Daniels, a.k.a. U.S. Agent. Who do these bozos think they are, anyway, looking down their noses at me? Frag' em!"

I want to point out that US Agent was so offended about the thought that maybe his off-putting personality was why he doesn't have any friends, that he forgot his name is John Walker, not Jack Daniels. Dingus.

Also, he was so close to an epiphany and then pride got in the way. There's a lot of reasons why John Jack Daniels Walker could never be a good Captain America and that there is one reason.

Anyway, Hank has no idea why US Agent walked up to them and then shook his fist and walked away. So he just continues his conversation with Agatha Harkness and invites her to move in. It'd be good for Wanda to have her around, since she sees Agatha as family.

A feeling which is mutual, so Agatha decides to stay until Wanda is recovered.

She also offers to have her terrifyingly cute horrible monster cat familiar Ebony help with the Tigra Hunt.

Hank and Wasp are grateful for the help but decide to go check on the robot Human Torch before starting the Tigra Hunt.

(Aw, man, they're never going to get to the fireworks factory...)

Human Torch was revived from the Immortus stuff in the West Coast Avengers Annual but maybe people didn't see that. So Hank explains for the sake of the audience that Jim Hammond had to go into downtime to replenish his energy after the fight against Terminus and also Terminus.

As Hank and Jan wander through the halls of the Avengers Mansion, the West Coast One, they also wonder if Human Torch (robot) will ever adjust to being an Avenger and also in the present.

Hank thinks so but it took even Cap a while to adjust.

Then the two happen to amble past the room where Wonder Man is making his call. To Vision.

Wonder Man quickly recaps everything that's happened with 'we got her out of Magneto's and then Immortus' clutches, long story' and then asks if Vision can come visit. Because Wanda has been through hell and lost her powers. She could use some cheering up.

Vision repeats the same ol' emotionless robot bit. Since the memories up to Byrne's run were deleted, he doesn't consider himself the same synthezoid that married Wanda. Therefore, they are not. And Vision has decided that ghosting her, going completely no contact, is the best approach.

Geez, white Vision. I don't know how much I can call you a dick because you're operating on very limited information, you're basically a baby in terms of having less than a year's worth of memories, and you haven't relearned social nuance yet. But dick move!

Wonder Man says he understands but then he crushes the phone receiver, smashes through the window, and flies off into the night.

Wonder Man: "Oh, I understand, all right... You better believe I do! I'm in love with a woman who loves a husband who's dead to her, and always will be! So how do I fight -- a ghost?"

Completely unnecessary to smash the window like that. Some of your big Hollywood bucks better find their way into the repair fund.

But, like, I get it. I don't like it. I don't like this romance plot and it was been initially written in a way that makes Wonder Man look like an ass before course correction happened.

He loves Wanda. But he's (now) not a jerk that's going to make a move when she's messed up emotionally from her husband dying and then ditching. Simon wants Vision to come visit Wanda so they get back together and there's no possibility for him to agonize over or so they don't get back together and Wanda has closure and can date again. But as it is, all three of them are stuck in a terrible romantic limbo.

That's dramatic.

But I don't have to like it.

Also, even if Vision came and he and Wanda had a talk that gave her closure on their relationship, I think she'd still not be in the headspace to date for a while.

Meanwhile, back in the Santa Ana Mountains, Miguel Santos did not get electrocuted to death. It hurt like hell but he lives.

As often happens in comic books, instead of dying from something that should definitely have killed him, he gained superpowers.

Miguel realizes that he's glowing with an awesome power. When he tried to fix the lightning machine, instead of fixing the superweapon, he has become one.

Miguel Santos: "That felt great -- Maravilloso! If the Legion'd had a few vatos like me, instead of having to use missiles and -- the machine! It could've been anybody who got charged up like this -- even somebody who hated everything the Legion -- and my father -- stood for! Well -- not any more!" -blows up the machine- "I can see now -- it's better this way. From this night on -- there's only one Living Lightning -- and its name is Miguel Santos!"

Usually, these freak empowering accidents are one in a million flukes that can't be replicated to mass produce superpowers. And it was probably the case here too. But he wasn't taking the chance.

Anyway, back at the West Coast Avengers Mansion, Hank and Wasp reach his lab and finds that the place is trashed. The robot Human Torch's resting tube is all melted and there's a hole melted in the roof. And Ann Raymond, who is still here for some reason, is staring in a daze and a little charred.

She was watching the Human Torch as he, well, not slept but was dormant. She wanted to ask more questions about her dead husband Toro who is definitely dead when Jim Hammond woke up/booted up, but when he did, he got this weird look and suddenly flamed on bright enough that it temporarily blinded Ann.

Judging by a melted clock (Hank Pym: "Hello, Dali!"), they can estimate robot Human Torch Jim Hammond flew off hours ago. Probably very confused.

But thankfully, Hank Pym has Rover, the flying vehicle who loves Hank.

He never gets tired of showing it off and I'm always glad when he gets the chance.

We love Rover here.

Meanwhile, robot Human Torch flies off Orange County and muses about how much time has passed since the 50s. His robot brain may as well be trapped in a logic loop because all he really does in these Avengers West Coast comics is fly over stuff and muse about how much time has passed.

Writers really have no idea what to do with him.

Anyway, Jim worries that the world has passed him by. Is there a place in a world that already has a more popular Human Torch blazing around as part of the Fantastic Four?

Maybe. The one thing Jim is sure of is that he's lost. Whoops.

He stops by a donut shop to ask for directions (because he used to be a cop, you see. He even lampshades it) but gets distracted once again musing about how he doesn't fit into society, even back in the 40s and 50s.

I guess all of Vision's robo-angst has concentrated on just Jim Hammond now that Vision lacks the emotional depth to worry about existential things.

Jim happens to overhear a news report about a flying, glowing man causing fires and electrical damage over at Fullerton and goes 'this looks like a job for me, the robot Human Torch!'

Also, Jim doesn't know how to get to Fullerton. He just flies off and figures he'll figure it out.

Over in Rover, Hank, Jan, and Ann Raymond hear the same news report. Even though Ann affirms that Jim wouldn't be causing such a ruckus, the superheroes go to investigate anyway.

Which you'd hope that they would! So I'm glad that they do!

Robot Human Torch lucks out and spots a black-out while flying around and figures that's gotta be Fullerton and goes to investigate a bright glow in the middle of the blacked out area. Which happens to be a gas station fire.

A bunch of panicking civilians assume that Human Torch is whoever did this, back to cause more trouble. And they don't listen when he tells them he's a different guy.

He puts out the fire by absorbing the fire, as Human Torches are known to do, and then looks for anybody who can explain to him what's going on.

Nobody is willing to have a conversation with him but luckily, what's going on shows up to explain himself.

The Living Lightning throws some ball lightning at Human Torch, then claims he was just testing his powers. Jim goes huh ok, well, we have a lot in common, actually... but Living Lightning starts ranting that Human Torch won't stop him, like how the Hulk stopped the Legion!

Which confuses Human Torch more because he has zero context for any of this. He didn't see the subplot where the guy got powers or recapped that old Hulk story.

So Jim starts throwing fireballs back at Living Lightning. Only for his great balls of fire to bounce off an electrical field around Lightning.

When Lightning retaliates with ball lightning, he misses Jim but the electricity hits the road, blinds a driver, and causes them to drive into a tree.

Human Torch: "Good thing seat belts have caught on, the past few decades!"

But Living Lightning declares that next he wants to try his powers out on a living person and targets the teens from the car.

Human Torch intercepts the attack, seemingly with his crotch, falling right into Living Lightning's trap. He didn't care about the teens, he just wanted a free shot at the Human Torch.

The teens try to run to Hammond's aid but he tells them to clear out of the area so they run away.

Living Lightning is going to finish off Hammond when Rover, our beloved flying ant-brained airship, swoops between Lightning and the Torch.

Hank Pym: "Well, ladies, that solves the mystery of the 'flying, glowing man'! Looks like the Torch dropped by to investigate, too." Wasp: "And nearly got his head handed to him for his trouble!"

You don't have to be mean, Jan.

She flies out of Rover to check on Hammond, who is feeling equally dismissive of his performance, to be fair.

Wasp: "You all right?" Human Torch: "Oh, sure. I'm just great. My first solo outing since the Eisenhower administration -- and I wind up flat on my backside!"

Meanwhile, Hank is trying various things. Like. Acid spray. He just goes right to acid spray. He sprays acid at a man he doesn't know whether or not can survive acid.

He can. He even thanks Hank for confirming that for him since Living Lightning is still in the trying things out phase.

Wasp tries to talk the Torch into getting back into the fight but he's decided he's a no-good has-been. Until Living Lightning zaps Rover, sending it into a crash.

So alarmed that Mrs Raymond has been put in harm's way, Hammond FLAMEs ON and starts throwing fireballs at Living Lightning.

Hank comes up with a Plan and throws Torch a metal cable. Which he misses catching. But Wasp catches it and flies it up to him.

Teamwork. Makes the dream work.

Human Torch throws the cable to Living Lightning, who catches it without really thinking about it. But that was a grounding wire and it slurps Living Lightning into Rover's battery. Also, Rover blows up because the electrical charge sets off the fuel tanks.

;_;_\

Farewell, you beautiful ant-craft.

Also, bye, Living Lightning. You'll be back and at some point you'll mellow out. I mean, Hammond even lampshades that the guy will probably be back.

Good thing Hawkeye wasn't around. This would definitely have been a wrinkle in the 'Avengers don't kill' debate.

Was Hank's intention just to trap him, siphon away his power, or did he know that he'd get exploded?

Who can say.

But Jim Hammond's emotional crisis is resolved anyway with Hank (kinda lying) and saying that it was Hammond's years of fighting experience that ensured victory and truthfully saying that Torch has a place in the Avengers West Coast.

Wasp even points out that robot Human Torch Jim Hammond has quite a history as a team player with his sidekick Toro, with the Invaders, and with the All-Winners Squad.

Hammond admits he was confused when he woke up but that everything seems to be falling into place for the first time in a long time. Hooray.

Now to get back to the compound.

Wasp: "That could be awhile. Unless, of course, Hank's got a spare miniaturized Rover in his pocket." Hank Pym: "Not exactly, Jan... Will a Quinjet do?" Wasp: "You know, Hank, I can't always recall why I divorced you... but somehow I can usually remember why I married you!"

Because he struck you and then tried to kill all of your friends to prove that he was a good team player.

Look, I go back and forth on whether Hank and Jan could get back together. And writers have different opinions on it too. But if they do get back together, they'll end in the same ugly place unless they remember why the relationship didn't work the first time.

And by they I mean the characters and the writers.

I don't have faith that the writers remember because since Byrne started shipping the characters together again, Wasp has been regressed back to her old, clinging to Hank and being his ego booster characterization.

I can't really see the Wasp that led the Avengers in her recent appearances in this book. And that's disappointing. And seeing writers trying to shove the characters back into a relationship and ignoring rather than addressing why they aren't together anymore... well, that's disappointing too.

As for this issue... Eh, it's a good one-off. A nice little adventure to unwind and rerail after a big event.

If this was Living Lightning's only appearance, he'd be a waste of an interesting character. But it's not so I won't judge too harshly.

Next in Avengers West Coast, my goodness, some Great Lakes Avengers filler! But also, we're back to alternating so instead of that, next week is more East Coast Avengers and the introduction of Rage.

Follow @essential-avengers because why not? What do you have to lose? Or to gaiiiiiiiin? Like and reblog to find out.

[anonymouslylovesyou]

Bridgerton ep 4

First of all I'm up way too fucking early but if I'm awake I may as well be watching the show baby

OH NO NOT HER IMAGINGING SIMON IN THE PRINCES PLACE BBY GIRL YOU GOT IT BAD

No wonder this is all so fast paced there's only 8 episodes in a season, even if the episodes are like an hour each instead of half an hour

Ooo Lady Whistedown still is rooting for Simon

The motherfucker inspecting Marina simply cannot be so choosy

Lord Featherington hardly says 2 words and is always looking at that damn newspapers

Daisies for Phillipa

Ah that one song inspired by Bridgerton that was popular is inspired by Eloise and Penelope ok

Anthony taking Daphne to the boxing ring :0

"Ooo women are too delicate for fighting" sir the woman you're talking to knocked someone out in one punch

Bruh you guys are straight up staring at each other from across the room this is embarrassing

Woo kick his ass Billy

Ooo the artist brother got a studio invite

Me watching Simon down the rest of his drink after the prince takes Anthony aside: I know what you are

"I do not know if the Duke was there" liar

Inch resting that she does not wear the necklace in private

God does their poor mom have to deal with her emotionally dense children acting like this every session??

Lady Danbury is reading this man for filth

"Love changes Nothing" ok buddy we'll see how long this lasts

Godd I love the idea of a dance card

Benedict is the artsy one, and he better not fuck the model

Fellas stop smoking inside its a fire hazard

I have like an hour to watch the next 35 minutes of this episode, wish me luck (guy who pauses so so much)

"I loved him" Phillipa you've met him twice I am glad we're getting more Penelope family lore

Eloise is trying out authority on someone to find out more about Lady Whistedown and its not going well

PENELOPE GIRLIE YOU CANT SAY THAT

Colin going after Marina???

Why are they doing a whole different dance than everyone else

IS THE PRINCE TRYIJG TO PROPOSE IN PUBLIC

AHH IN THE GARDEN

Yeah what are you doing in London still hm? "Saying goodbye" what happened to we aren't even friends

"Your apology has no effect on my life nor does your leaving London" SWEETHEART YOU DIDBT HAVE TO KILL HIM good for you tho

Oo a maze KISSIJG HER IN THE GARSEN SCANDAL

OH AND SHE IS KISSIMG HIM BACK THERE ITS MOVIE SO FAST

AH Daphne's face when he says I cannot marry you

All the language similar to Much Ado is driving me nuts but also that just how this time period is

"You would rather die than marry me" FUCK

Like I know why it is, it's his vow to his shitty dad, but also, man, he's dead. No one can tell him you found love

Benedict is doing some gay shit with that other art guy

Yeah girl what the fuck is your husband doing??

Ooo I know that Colin ends up with Penelope so this cannot end well

Ooo Penelope!!!! Sweetheart

Eloise is here, NOO THEY ARE FIGHTING TERRIBLE

Still crazy that Anthony is absolutely out here fucking girls and yet one (1) guy makes out with his sister and suddenly they have to duel to the death

Will is a good friend but also crazy of Simon to just break into his house for alcohol

Anthony bestie you can't be dueling for yourself just to run away from your responsibilities

No not the girls dowries....

Damn I do not like their mom but I do feel for her in this moment

"What are you going to do about" *he starts crying*

Cressida saww we think

It's way brighter than dawn out

Once again mad Simon is hot

I'd be so nervous on fucking up the pacing when rolling up to a duel

Girlie could have broken her arm

SIMON IS STILL REFUSING HER??

He's already making allowances in his little brain like "ok I can get married but no kids"

[sea-owl]

I’m bored at work so let’s come up with some more engagement of convivence au. Continuation of this post and this post

Dear gentle reader,

This author has heard that one Miss Penelope Featherington is now engaged to one Sir Phillip Crane. The two have been seen together at every ball this season so one should not be surprised that a proposal had followed. Though one must wonder . . .

Lady Whisteldown’s Society Papers, 20 May 1815

Penelope shrugs when she sends the column off. “It would be strange if she didn’t say anything.” 

Phillip nods in understanding. 

The gossip explodes when Phillip and Penelope’s engagement is announced. People have not forgotten that one Miss Marina Thompson had been Phillip’s wife first, and the children are biologically his brother’s. Some claim that Penelope was following in Phillip’s footsteps in marrying to honor her cousin’s wish to see her children looked after. Others wonder had something been going on between them before. Some even saw it as romantic that now the two can follow their hearts in love while others were confused. Wasn’t Penelope in a long courtship with Colin Bridgerton? Oh no, you didn’t hear? He broke it off last year, and at her own family’s ball to boot! Maybe this was why. 

The engaged couple ignores everyone as they plan out their arrangement. Penelope would travel to London during the season with the children to work on her writing and help expose the children to small doses of society before they would officially debut. Phillip would visit them at least once a month. They would hope more often but estate running can leave one busy. Penelope would then return to Romney Hall after the season is over and they would live their life in Romney Hall. 

That was their plan once they got married at the end of the season, it’s too bad that the Bridgertons planned on tearing it all to shreds. 

Neither of them really noticed it at first.

It started out with Eloise becoming their unofficial chaperon. Sticking to Phillip and Penelope like glue. 

Next was Colin calling on Penelope almost daily. He apologized about what he said last season. Penelope, whose rose-colored glasses were gone, and she had a future set, forgave him. They became friendly again, though Penelope is now stricter on trying to stop Colin from touching her as freely as he did before. 

Then there was the balls, which started to set off alarm bells in Penelope’s head. Phillip and Penelope would share a dance or two as would be appropriate for an engaged couple, even though both of them would be happier in their corner. Grabbing the gossip Penelope needed for her column and leaving at a considerate time. But surprise, Eloise drags Phillip to the dance floor, or off somewhere with a lot of plants, and Penelope’s dance card is almost full of dances by Bridgertons A, B, C, and Simon. Portia would try her best to run interference. Despite her daughter forgiving the boy Portia hadn’t, and she damn well remembers what Colin Bridgerton had the nerve to say in her own bloody home. That’s when Violet would jump in to distract her. 

It was during one of these distractions that Portia had enough.

“Why are your children so determined to keep Penelope away from her intended?” 

Violet paused. “Portia we’re not-”

Portia gives Violet an unimpressed look. “Violet I am not dumb. Whatever game your family is playing at it needs to stop. Your son practically ruined Penelope last season with his careless words. Now that she is engaged with a comfortable future ahead of her, he is back to taking liberties we both should have stopped years ago.” 

Portia sighs. “As your old friend, and as a fellow mother, I am asking you to please stop this. I know you believe in love, but that is not for everyone. Your family is lucky to have love matches.”

“Phillipa was a love match.”

“An exception, my girls knew from the beginning that a love match was a low possibility. I am thankful that Penelope sees that and not living in a fantasy.”

Violet follows Portia’s gaze to the dance floor where Phillip and Penelope were dancing. She looks further away to see two of her own children staring longingly at the couple. She knew that look on her third and fifth born. 

“Portia, Eloise is in love with Sir Crane.”

Portia stiffened, her eyes narrowing into a glare. 

“And Colin is in love with Penelope.”

Portia shook her head. “Love isn’t enough.”

[thesimpsbasement]

Can you do Simon Blackquill x male reader who is victim's twin brother

So basically the victim got stabbed by someone and male reader decided to pretend his twin

Before the UR-1 Incident,male reader dyed his hair and was a friend of Simon

Male reader and his twin was separated when they were little

(I was listening to evil of servant and got this idea)

Hello anon thank you for your request, I haven't listened to the song so when I did I fell in love with the concept! Hope you enjoy this!((also this is the first time writing a male reader so sorry if this is rusty))

Fandom:Ace Attorney

Character: Simon Blackquill

Author: Mod Betty

Warning/tags:reader has a twin brother obv,this is sorta based off the song but it doesn't have the whole royalty setting so the twin is a butler and the reader isn't royalty

Reader is male

Word count :1,212 words 

___________________

Oh, how cruel fate is sometimes.Before that fateful day of separation you were very close to your brother,you two would do anything and everything together,you were two peas in a pod. But nothing always lasts forever.And you were separated, but even if you haven't seen him for years after separation, you still cared for him.

You have built a nice life for yourself but your brother hasn't left your mind.You haven't stopped searching for him,hoping maybe that luck will be on your side. It has been for so long after all. You've met so many wonderful people, one of them being Simon Blackquill, a young man in his 20s with black hair and he was probably your closest friend. You two would often go together to Simon's psychology lessons. Metis found the 2 of you quite adorable and Aura teased you 2 calling you " lover boys". If you were being honest you began to catch feelings for Simon I mean how could you not he's caring,charismatic and always was by your side but seems like fate isn't so fond of you.

The UR-1 incident, the case that took away the other person you loved and cared for. Simon was too ashamed to face you so he has pushed you away,cutting contact. It's as if he just faded away from you right before your very eyes. And here you were alone again.You still tried to visit Simon, but he didn't say much, but on the day of his release, he was the one to come to you. When you saw him you were more than just surprised and confused but you didn't really care as you went and hugged him feeling tears run down your cheeks as you felt Simon's arms wrap around you " Sorry I took so long,but I'm here now" he said as he cupped your face and kissed you.

Years later and another miracle has seemed to accure. While walking you accidentally bumped into someone.Before you can utter an apology. You immediately froze when you saw the person's face.It was your twin brother! Finally, it seemed like everything was on your side. Being overfilled with joy you wanted to catch up with your brother and introduced him to Simon.All seemed well,Simon took a liking to your brother,understanding how important he was to you,he made sure to protect him alongside you. You've come to learn that your brother became a butler at a rich family and has been doing pretty well for himself.

Everything seemed to fall into place or so you thought until the storm showed up suddenly. One night, your brother asked you to meet up in a secluded area.

" What's the matter, brother? Why did you ask to meet up so late?" You asked him, feeling a bit uneasy,judging by the look on his face.

" Well, this might be hard to swallow but please do not panic" he says, waiting for you to agree with his conditions.

" You are currently targeted for murder by one of the members of the estate I work" he said as your face grew pale

" Target!? Of murder!? But why!?" You bombarded him with questions but he quickly gripped your shoulders.

" keep quiet and please keep calm,"

"Keep calm. What do you mean keep calm!? Why didn't you tell the authorities?!" You cut your brother off

"Because they'd just end up killing both of us! But I won't let it happen, at least not to you," your brother said before slowly releasing your shoulders.

" What do you mean? What are you going to do?" You asked,the uneasy feeling only growing inside you

" Well, we are twins, so it's quite simple really,I'll just disguise myself as you," he explained in a calm voice

" Are you out of your mind!?" you practically shouted, feeling tears forming

You just got reunited and now you'll be separated again and forever!? No way in hell you're letting it happen

" Listen, we don't have much time so here take my jacket and hand me yours and run on my command," your twin said before taking off his jacket and shoving it into your hands

" Are you sure about this?who's to say they'll kill you!?" You tried to reason

" Listen ____ unlike me you have people that care about you,are you really willing to leave Blackquill behind alone just because you wanted to save me!?" He said " Besides I wouldn't be able to live with the guilt of me not being able to save you" he muttered

" What makes you think I can!?" You retorted, losing hope by the second

" I know you'll be able to,you have for the past years. besides they were able to protect you far better than I ever could, " your brother said, looking at you with a sad smile

Realising you couldn't convince him, you slowly took off your jacket, giving it to your brother as you wore his. He looked around before saying " It was nice sewing you for once more" he said as he suddenly felt a shock of pain in his abdomen, You were in horror at the sight before you but you kept a serious face for the sake of the act. The killer removed the knife from your brother's corpse as they look at you "Seeing as people last saw you with him I suggest you stay in hiding till this case is closed now get out of here" they said and the only thing you could do is nod and run. You didn't go back to Simon,you couldn't so you just played your role as your twin. And eventually they found his body, but everyone assumed it was you considering you were reported missing before eventually finding the body.

Safe to say Simon was devastated,absolutely furious.Anyone in his vicinity would tremble at his terrifying aura.He decided to take the case to make sure to give you justice. You sat in the gallery with a hood on so people won't recognise you.

The trial itself was heated,Simon's rage sort of blinded him and the more mysteries that have been piling up.Eventually the possibility of your brother or well technically you being the culprit has arose is when things escalated.As you testified Simon couldn't help but feel as if something wasn't right, this wasn't your brother,it didn't feel right,it felt as if you were standing right in front of him. To erase this line of questioning in his head. He asked to get your finger prints because the body' fingerprints were burnt off and your hesitance was enough to confirm his thoughts.

The boy In front of him was you,his lover.

After a bit of pressure you finally confessed to everything.How you were originally meant yo the victim but your brother sacrificed himself for you.You felt as if the weight on your shoulders has been lifted off your shoulders but not fully…

And the culprit's been caught, and the case is closed.You felt empty, as if it was your fault he's gone forever, but Simon didn't let you blame yourself for it.He knew how much this will affect you and he'll make sure to stay by your side every step of the way.

[thekatebridgerton]

So I don't have any Philoise mutuals and I have to get this off my chest.

Well we know that Theo is most likely reappearing and some kind of a build up for future Eloise. And I was a little scarred that they would turn Theloise in Philoise and have them sending letters to each other and her running away to him, because Calam mentioned that Theo is also gardener like? And Eloise' family is going to keep an extra eye on her after that scandal. Then Theo asks her to visit him and to get married.

Now I realized that they could do this but in that case Eloise doesn't run away to him because maybe A. She feels something but it's not strong enough, B. She's to scared of her family, C. She's too scared of love.

Okay then years later the same story repeats itself with Phillip. Now Eloise is more experienced and actually wants to get married. And this time she doesn't want to miss the chance on love because she did it with Theo and regrets it and now she really likes Phillip or is just very curious. This time she wants to overcome her fear of love or her family, or this time she doesn't care if her feelings aren't strong enough.

I feel like this would fit so much better to show!Eloise. I mean I see why people would think that running away to Phillip wouldn't fit her and that she is different from book!Eloise. But with that build up it would make sense. Even the Philoise haters could see it then.

I haven't even finished TSPWL because I'm so scared that they could change it to Theloise and I don't want to mourn something I could have almost gotten. So I guess those theories are helpful to me.

What do you think about it?

Dear Anon relax everything is going to be okay with our ship. Philoise is wonderful and they can't take that from us.

That being said you picked the wrong person to ask about Theo, simply because I, like the rest of the Philoise shippers on Tumblr. Am too lazy to care about him.

My favorite philoise mutuals are @missielynne and @sirphillipcranestanaccount you could ask them. But as far as I know they are too lazy to care about Theo too.

Actually, I'm going to let you in on a secret, Philoise shippers on Tumblr are one of the most don't-care-a-bit people in the fandom. You know those people who sit in the corner of a coffeeshop nursing a cup of tea, who look extremely hungover but it's just because they haven't slept since they picked up their favorite author's new release and still need to get to work at 7? That's more or less how Philoise shippers are in general. And I say this affectionately. We couldn't care less.

Not about Theo not about Theo's relationship with Eloise. We care about our ship, it's been cannon in the books since the early 2000's. And we have busy lives, we've got coffee to drink, messy lives to lead, personal relationships to manage, and way more interesting characters to actually devote our attention to.

Philoise is in every sense of the word. A comfort ship.

So relax, enjoy yourself and don't pay attention to how the show chooses to push Eloise character development. As long as she gets said character development.

And I apologize Theloise shippers, but I find myself more invested in secondary working class characters like Mme Delacroix, and Will Mondritch when they don't only exist to provide character development for a main character. Part of the reason I couldn't care less about Theo is because he was literally introduced so Eloise could have a 'not like other girls' love affair.

If we were shown more about him that didn't directly corelate to Eloise or her interests, in the way Will's story wasn't all about his friendship with Simon or Mme Delacroix story still isn't all about her affair with Benedict. Then maybe I would care about Theo.

Callum is a great actor. He's been an absolute charmer in interviews. But in fact, so is Ruby Barker. But if I had to choose who is more interesting, then Ruby Barker's Marina is definitely going places.

Now to the second part of your ask

I think that when the time comes in the show Eloise kind of running away is not going to be about having a mid life crisis because her friend is getting married. But rather it's going to be about her needing a safe place to run to.

Sometimes when you live in your the spotlight for so long you just want the place that nobody knows about, that can make you feel protected and safe. Some place that really feels like you have found some refuge.

I think it's possible that Eloise will create a scandal so big that she's going to need an escape and that she has this pen pal, or rather she knows this guy, that Colin knows, who she's been writing to and he has this house that is conveniently very close to Aubrey Hall. And she's going to be like 'yeah there's some place that I can go to that is calm and that isn't far away from my family and nobody will look for me there and I can come back in a few days. And then there's this pretty harmless guy who is way too nice to kick me out so I can recoup there for a while. '

I think the show could do it that way because come on, it's Eloise she's not going to stop causing trouble everywhere she goes. I imagine her causing a scandal so big, she needs to run away and she needs to find a safe place where she can lay low and that is far away from her family because they're pretty angry at her

probably something big and feminists like leading a riot among other intellectual women or helping the bride of an influential arranged marriage escape their crusty abusive would be husband

And then it's going to happen just like you said, she doesn't want to fall in love, because she's been hurt before with Theo. And falling inlove with Phillip would happen entirely by accident for both of them. Because show Eloise has loved and knows what it's like she doesn't expect it to happen again

And Phillip, who is pretty much okay with Eloise doing whatever she wants, would be fascinated. Falling inlove with how chaotic she is and how much fun she has destroying his carefully boring post-marina life. And also getting along with the twins. because he's never had someone like her in his life before.

I can imagine Phillip trying to study Eloise the way he studies his plants. Trying to find why he likes her so much and not coming up with an answer.

Philoise is going to be a ship in the show that's going to take viewers but surprise because Phillip and Eloise started out in wildly different places and will come together when they are right for each other

And that's the tea

[kingstylesdaily]

Playtime With Harry Styles

via vogue.com

THE MEN’S BATHING POND in London’s Hampstead Heath at daybreak on a gloomy September morning seemed such an unlikely locale for my first meeting with Harry Styles, music’s legendarily charm-heavy style czar, that I wondered perhaps if something had been lost in translation.

But then there is Styles, cheerily gung ho, hidden behind a festive yellow bandana mask and a sweatshirt of his own design, surprisingly printed with three portraits of his intellectual pinup, the author Alain de Botton. “I love his writing,” says Styles. “I just think he’s brilliant. I saw him give a talk about the keys to happiness, and how one of the keys is living among friends, and how real friendship stems from being vulnerable with someone.”

In turn, de Botton’s 2016 novel The Course of Love taught Styles that “when it comes to relationships, you just expect yourself to be good at it…[but] being in a real relationship with someone is a skill,” one that Styles himself has often had to hone in the unforgiving klieg light of public attention, and in the company of such high-profile paramours as Taylor Swift and—well, Styles is too much of a gentleman to name names.

That sweatshirt and the Columbia Records tracksuit bottoms are removed in the quaint wooden open-air changing room, with its Swallows and Amazons vibe. A handful of intrepid fellow patrons in various states of undress are blissfully unaware of the 26-year-old supernova in their midst, although I must admit I’m finding it rather difficult to take my eyes off him, try as I might. Styles has been on a six-day juice cleanse in readiness for Vogue’s photographer Tyler Mitchell. He practices Pilates (“I’ve got very tight hamstrings—trying to get those open”) and meditates twice a day. “It has changed my life,” he avers, “but it’s so subtle. It’s helped me just be more present. I feel like I’m able to enjoy the things that are happening right in front of me, even if it’s food or it’s coffee or it’s being with a friend—or a swim in a really cold pond!” Styles also feels that his meditation practices have helped him through the tumult of 2020: “Meditation just brings a stillness that has been really beneficial, I think, for my mental health.”

Styles has been a pescatarian for three years, inspired by the vegan food that several members of his current band prepared on tour. “My body definitely feels better for it,” he says. His shapely torso is prettily inscribed with the tattoos of a Victorian sailor—a rose, a galleon, a mermaid, an anchor, and a palm tree among them, and, straddling his clavicle, the dates 1967 and 1957 (the respective birth years of his mother and father). Frankly, I rather wish I’d packed a beach muumuu.

We take the piratical gangplank that juts into the water and dive in. Let me tell you, this is not the Aegean. The glacial water is a cloudy phlegm green beneath the surface, and clammy reeds slap one’s ankles. Styles, who admits he will try any fad, has recently had a couple of cryotherapy sessions and is evidently less susceptible to the cold. By the time we have swum a full circuit, however, body temperatures have adjusted, and the ice, you might say, has been broken. Duly invigorated, we are ready to face the day. Styles has thoughtfully brought a canister of coffee and some bottles of water in his backpack, and we sit at either end of a park bench for a socially distanced chat.

It seems that he has had a productive year. At the onset of lockdown, Styles found himself in his second home, in the canyons of Los Angeles. After a few days on his own, however, he moved in with a pod of three friends (and subsequently with two band members, Mitch Rowland and Sarah Jones). They “would put names in a hat and plan the week out,” Styles explains. “If you were Monday, you would choose the movie, dinner, and the activity for that day. I like to make soups, and there was a big array of movies; we went all over the board,” from Goodfellas to Clueless. The experience, says Styles, “has been a really good lesson in what makes me happy now. It’s such a good example of living in the moment. I honestly just like being around my friends,” he adds. “That’s been my biggest takeaway. Just being on my own the whole time, I would have been miserable.”

Styles is big on friendship groups and considers his former and legendarily hysteria-inducing boy band, One Direction, to have been one of them. “I think the typical thing is to come out of a band like that and almost feel like you have to apologize for being in it,” says Styles. “But I loved my time in it. It was all new to me, and I was trying to learn as much as I could. I wanted to soak it in…. I think that’s probably why I like traveling now—soaking stuff up.” In a post-COVID future, he is contemplating a temporary move to Tokyo, explaining that “there’s a respect and a stillness, a quietness that I really loved every time I’ve been there.”

In 1D, Styles was making music whenever he could. “After a show you’d go in a hotel room and put down some vocals,” he recalls. As a result, his first solo album, 2017’s Harry Styles, “was when I really fell in love with being in the studio,” he says. “I loved it as much as touring.” Today he favors isolating with his core group of collaborators, “our little bubble”—Rowland, Kid Harpoon (né Tom Hull), and Tyler Johnson. “A safe space,” as he describes it.

In the music he has been working on in 2020, Styles wants to capture the experimental spirit that informed his second album, last year’s Fine Line. With his debut album, “I was very much finding out what my sound was as a solo artist,” he says. “I can see all the places where it almost felt like I was bowling with the bumpers up. I think with the second album I let go of the fear of getting it wrong and…it was really joyous and really free. I think with music it’s so important to evolve—and that extends to clothes and videos and all that stuff. That’s why you look back at David Bowie with Ziggy Stardust or the Beatles and their different eras—that fearlessness is super inspiring.”

The seismic changes of 2020—including the Black Lives Matter uprising around racial justice—has also provided Styles with an opportunity for personal growth. “I think it’s a time for opening up and learning and listening,” he says. “I’ve been trying to read and educate myself so that in 20 years I’m still doing the right things and taking the right steps. I believe in karma, and I think it’s just a time right now where we could use a little more kindness and empathy and patience with people, be a little more prepared to listen and grow.”

Meanwhile, Styles’s euphoric single “Watermelon Sugar” became something of an escapist anthem for this dystopian summer of 2020. The video, featuring Styles (dressed in ’70s-­flavored Gucci and Bode) cavorting with a pack of beach-babe girls and boys, was shot in January, before lockdown rules came into play. By the time it was ready to be released in May, a poignant epigraph had been added: “This video is dedicated to touching.”

Styles is looking forward to touring again, when “it’s safe for everyone,” because, as he notes, “being up against people is part of the whole thing. You can’t really re-create it in any way.” But it hasn’t always been so. Early in his career, Styles was so stricken with stage fright that he regularly threw up preperformance. “I just always thought I was going to mess up or something,” he remembers. “But I’ve felt really lucky to have a group of incredibly generous fans. They’re generous emotionally—and when they come to the show, they give so much that it creates this atmosphere that I’ve always found so loving and accepting.”

THIS SUMMER, when it was safe enough to travel, Styles returned to his London home, which is where he suggests we head now, setting off in his modish Primrose Yellow ’73 Jaguar that smells of gasoline and leatherette. “Me and my dad have always bonded over cars,” Styles explains. “I never thought I’d be someone who just went out for a leisurely drive, purely for enjoyment.” On sleepless jet-lagged nights he’ll drive through London’s quiet streets, seeing neighborhoods in a new way. “I find it quite relaxing,” he says.

Over the summer Styles took a road trip with his artist friend Tomo Campbell through France and Italy, setting off at four in the morning and spending the night in Geneva, where they jumped in the lake “to wake ourselves up.” (I see a pattern emerging.) At the end of the trip Styles drove home alone, accompanied by an upbeat playlist that included “Aretha Franklin, Parliament, and a lot of Stevie Wonder. It was really fun for me,” he says. “I don’t travel like that a lot. I’m usually in such a rush, but there was a stillness to it. I love the feeling of nobody knowing where I am, that kind of escape...and freedom.”

GROWING UP in a village in the North of England, Styles thought of London as a world apart: “It truly felt like a different country.” At a wide-eyed 16, he came down to the teeming metropolis after his mother entered him on the U.K. talent-search show The X Factor. “I went to the audition to find out if I could sing,” Styles recalls, “or if my mum was just being nice to me.” Styles was eliminated but subsequently brought back with other contestants—Niall Horan, Liam Payne, Louis Tomlinson, and Zayn Malik—to form a boy band that was named (on Styles’s suggestion) One Direction. The wily X Factor creator and judge, Simon Cowell, soon signed them to his label Syco Records, and the rest is history: 1D’s first four albums, supported by four world tours from 2011 to 2015, debuted at number one on the U.S. Billboard charts, and the band has sold 70 million records to date. At 18, Styles bought the London house he now calls home. “I was going to do two weeks’ work to it,” he remembers, “but when I came back there was no second floor,” so he moved in with adult friends who lived nearby till the renovation was complete. “Eighteen months,” he deadpans. “I’ve always seen that period as pretty pivotal for me, as there’s that moment at the party where it’s getting late, and half of the people would go upstairs to do drugs, and the other people go home. I was like, ‘I don’t really know this friend’s wife, so I’m not going to get all messy and then go home.’ I had to behave a bit, at a time where everything else about my life felt I didn’t have to behave really. I’ve been lucky to always feel I have this family unit somewhere.”

When Styles’s London renovation was finally done, “I went in for the first time and I cried,” he recalls. “Because I just felt like I had somewhere. L.A. feels like holiday, but this feels like home.”

Behind its pink door, Styles’s house has all the trappings of rock stardom—there’s a man cave filled with guitars, a Sex Pistols Never Mind the Bollocks poster (a moving-in gift from his decorator), a Stevie Nicks album cover. Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams” was one of the first songs he knew the words to—“My parents were big fans”—and he and Nicks have formed something of a mutual-admiration society. At the beginning of lockdown, Nicks tweeted to her fans that she was taking inspiration from Fine Line: “Way to go, H,” she wrote. “It is your Rumours.” “She’s always there for you,” said Styles when he inducted Nicks into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2019. “She knows what you need—advice, a little wisdom, a blouse, a shawl; she’s got you covered.”

Styles makes us some tea in the light-filled kitchen and then wanders into the convivial living room, where he strikes an insouciant pose on the chesterfield sofa, upholstered in a turquoise velvet that perhaps not entirely coincidentally sets off his eyes. Styles admits that his lockdown lewk was “sweatpants, constantly,” and he is relishing the opportunity to dress up again. He doesn’t have to wait long: The following day, under the eaves of a Victorian mansion in Notting Hill, I arrive in the middle of fittings for Vogue’s shoot and discover Styles in his Y-fronts, patiently waiting to try on looks for fashion editor Camilla Nickerson and photographer Tyler Mitchell. Styles’s personal stylist, Harry Lambert, wearing a pearl necklace and his nails colored in various shades of green varnish, à la Sally Bowles, is providing helpful backup (Britain’s Rule of Six hasn’t yet been imposed).

Styles, who has thoughtfully brought me a copy of de Botton’s 2006 book The Architecture of Happiness, is instinctively and almost quaintly polite, in an old-fashioned, holding-open-doors and not-mentioning-lovers-by-name sort of way. He is astounded to discover that the Atlanta-born Mitchell has yet to experience a traditional British Sunday roast dinner. Assuring him that “it’s basically like Thanksgiving every Sunday,” Styles gives Mitchell the details of his favorite London restaurants in which to enjoy one. “It’s a good thing to be nice,” Mitchell tells me after a morning in Styles’s company.

MITCHELL has Lionel Wendt’s languorously homoerotic 1930s portraits of young Sri Lankan men on his mood board. Nickerson is thinking of Irving Penn’s legendary fall 1950 Paris haute couture collections sitting, where he photographed midcentury supermodels, including his wife, Lisa Fonssagrives, in high-style Dior and Balenciaga creations. Styles is up for all of it, and so, it would seem, is the menswear landscape of 2020: Jonathan Anderson has produced a trapeze coat anchored with a chunky gold martingale; John Galliano at Maison Margiela has fashioned a khaki trench with a portrait neckline in layers of colored tulle; and Harris Reed—a Saint Martins fashion student sleuthed by Lambert who ended up making some looks for Styles’s last tour—has spent a week making a broad-shouldered Smoking jacket with high-waisted, wide-leg pants that have become a Styles signature since he posed for Tim Walker for the cover of Fine Line wearing a Gucci pair—a silhouette that was repeated in the tour wardrobe. (“I liked the idea of having that uniform,” says Styles.) Reed’s version is worn with a hoopskirt draped in festoons of hot-pink satin that somehow suggests Deborah Kerr asking Yul Brynner’s King of Siam, “Shall we dance?”

Styles introduces me to the writer and eyewear designer Gemma Styles, “my sister from the same womb,” he says. She is also here for the fitting: The siblings plan to surprise their mother with the double portrait on these pages.

I ask her whether her brother had always been interested in clothes.

“My mum loved to dress us up,” she remembers. “I always hated it, and Harry was always quite into it. She did some really elaborate papier-mâché outfits: She made a giant mug and then painted an atlas on it, and that was Harry being ‘The World Cup.’ Harry also had a little dalmatian-dog outfit,” she adds, “a hand-me-down from our closest family friends. He would just spend an inordinate amount of time wearing that outfit. But then Mum dressed me up as Cruella de Vil. She was always looking for any opportunity!”

“As a kid I definitely liked fancy dress,” Styles says. There were school plays, the first of which cast him as Barney, a church mouse. “I was really young, and I wore tights for that,” he recalls. “I remember it was crazy to me that I was wearing a pair of tights. And that was maybe where it all kicked off!”

Acting has also remained a fundamental form of expression for Styles. His sister recalls that even on the eve of his life-changing X Factor audition, Styles could sing in public only in an assumed voice. “He used to do quite a good sort of Elvis warble,” she remembers. During the rehearsals in the family home, “he would sing in the bathroom because if it was him singing as himself, he just couldn’t have anyone looking at him! I love his voice now,” she adds. “I’m so glad that he makes music that I actually enjoy listening to.”

Styles’s role-playing continued soon after 1D went on permanent hiatus in 2016, and he was cast in Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk, beating out dozens of professional actors for the role. “The good part was my character was a young soldier who didn’t really know what he was doing,” says Styles modestly. “The scale of the movie was so big that I was a tiny piece of the puzzle. It was definitely humbling. I just loved being outside of my comfort zone.”

His performance caught the eye of Olivia Wilde, who remembers that it “blew me away—the openness and commitment.” In turn, Styles loved Wilde’s directorial debut, Booksmart, and is “very honored” that she cast him in a leading role for her second feature, a thriller titled Don’t Worry Darling, which went into production this fall. Styles will play the husband to Florence Pugh in what Styles describes as “a 1950s utopia in the California desert.”

Wilde’s movie is costumed by Academy Award nominee Arianne Phillips. “She and I did a little victory dance when we heard that we officially had Harry in the film,” notes Wilde, “because we knew that he has a real appreciation for fashion and style. And this movie is incredibly stylistic. It’s very heightened and opulent, and I’m really grateful that he is so enthusiastic about that element of the process—some actors just don’t care.”

“I like playing dress-up in general,” Styles concurs, in a masterpiece of understatement: This is the man, after all, who cohosted the Met’s 2019 “Notes on Camp” gala attired in a nipple-freeing black organza blouse with a lace jabot, and pants so high-waisted that they cupped his pectorals. The ensemble, accessorized with the pearl-drop earring of a dandified Elizabethan courtier, was created for Styles by Gucci’s Alessandro Michele, whom he befriended in 2014. Styles, who has subsequently personified the brand as the face of the Gucci fragrance, finds Michele “fearless with his work and his imagination. It’s really inspiring to be around someone who works like that.”

The two first met in London over a cappuccino. “It was just a kind of PR appointment,” says Michele, “but something magical happened, and Harry is now a friend. He has the aura of an English rock-and-roll star—like a young Greek god with the attitude of James Dean and a little bit of Mick Jagger—but no one is sweeter. He is the image of a new era, of the way that a man can look.”

Styles credits his style trans­formation—from Jack Wills tracksuit-clad boy-band heartthrob to nonpareil fashionisto—to his meeting the droll young stylist Harry Lambert seven years ago. They hit it off at once and have conspired ever since, enjoying a playfully campy rapport and calling each other Sue and Susan as they parse the niceties of the scarlet lace Gucci man-bra that Michele has made for Vogue’s shoot, for instance, or a pair of Bode pants hand-painted with biographical images (Styles sent Emily Adams Bode images of his family, and a photograph he had found of David Hockney and Joni Mitchell. “The idea of those two being friends, to me, was really beautiful,” Styles explains).

“He just has fun with clothing, and that’s kind of where I’ve got it from,” says Styles of Lambert. “He doesn’t take it too seriously, which means I don’t take it too seriously.” The process has been evolutionary. At his first meeting with Lambert, the stylist proposed “a pair of flares, and I was like, ‘Flares? That’s fucking crazy,’  ” Styles remembers. Now he declares that “you can never be overdressed. There’s no such thing. The people that I looked up to in music—Prince and David Bowie and Elvis and Freddie Mercury and Elton John—they’re such showmen. As a kid it was completely mind-blowing. Now I’ll put on something that feels really flamboyant, and I don’t feel crazy wearing it. I think if you get something that you feel amazing in, it’s like a superhero outfit. Clothes are there to have fun with and experiment with and play with. What’s really exciting is that all of these lines are just kind of crumbling away. When you take away ‘There’s clothes for men and there’s clothes for women,’ once you remove any barriers, obviously you open up the arena in which you can play. I’ll go in shops sometimes, and I just find myself looking at the women’s clothes thinking they’re amazing. It’s like anything—anytime you’re putting barriers up in your own life, you’re just limiting yourself. There’s so much joy to be had in playing with clothes. I’ve never really thought too much about what it means—it just becomes this extended part of creating something.”

“He’s up for it,” confirms Lambert, who earlier this year, for instance, found a JW Anderson cardigan with the look of a Rubik’s Cube (“on sale at matches.com!”). Styles wore it, accessorized with his own pearl necklace, for a Today rehearsal in February and it went viral: His fans were soon knitting their own versions and posting the results on TikTok. Jonathan Anderson declared himself “so impressed and incredibly humbled by this trend” that he nimbly made the pattern available (complete with a YouTube tutorial) so that Styles’s fans could copy it for free. Meanwhile, London’s storied Victoria & Albert Museum has requested Styles’s original: an emblematic document of how people got creative during the COVID era. “It’s going to be in their permanent collection,” says Lambert exultantly. “Is that not sick? Is that not the most epic thing?”

“To me, he’s very modern,” says Wilde of Styles, “and I hope that this brand of confidence as a male that Harry has—truly devoid of any traces of toxic masculinity—is indicative of his generation and therefore the future of the world. I think he is in many ways championing that, spearheading that. It’s pretty powerful and kind of extraordinary to see someone in his position redefining what it can mean to be a man with confidence.”

“He’s really in touch with his feminine side because it’s something natural,” notes Michele. “And he’s a big inspiration to a younger generation—about how you can be in a totally free playground when you feel comfortable. I think that he’s a revolutionary.”

STYLES’S confidence is on full display the day after the fitting, which finds us all on the beautiful Sussex dales. Over the summit of the hill, with its trees blown horizontal by the fierce winds, lies the English Channel. Even though it’s a two-hour drive from London, the fresh-faced Styles, who went to bed at 9 p.m., has arrived on set early: He is famously early for everything. The team is installed in a traditional flint-stone barn. The giant doors have been replaced by glass and frame a bucolic view of distant grazing sheep. “Look at that field!” says Styles. “How lucky are we? This is our office! Smell the roses!” Lambert starts to sing “Kumbaya, my Lord.”

Hairdresser Malcolm Edwards is setting Styles’s hair in a Victory roll with silver clips, and until it is combed out he resembles Kathryn Grayson with stubble. His fingers are freighted with rings, and “he has a new army of mini purses,” says Lambert, gesturing to an accessory table heaving with examples including a mini sky-blue Gucci Diana bag discreetly monogrammed HS. Michele has also made Styles a dress for the shoot that Tissot might have liked to paint—acres of ice-blue ruffles, black Valenciennes lace, and suivez-moi, jeune homme ribbons. Erelong, Styles is gamely racing up a hill in it, dodging sheep scat, thistles, and shards of chalk, and striking a pose for Mitchell that manages to make ruffles a compelling new masculine proposition, just as Mr. Fish’s frothy white cotton dress—equal parts Romantic poet and Greek presidential guard—did for Mick Jagger when he wore it for The Rolling Stones’ free performance in Hyde Park in 1969, or as the suburban-mom floral housedress did for Kurt Cobain as he defined the iconoclastic grunge aesthetic. Styles is mischievously singing ABBA’s “Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight)” to himself when Mitchell calls him outside to jump up and down on a trampoline in a Comme des Garçons buttoned wool kilt. “How did it look?” asks his sister when he comes in from the cold. “Divine,” says her brother in playful Lambert-speak.

As the wide sky is washed in pink, orange, and gray, like a Turner sunset, and Mitchell calls it a successful day, Styles is playing “Cherry” from Fine Line on his Fender acoustic on the hilltop. “He does his own stunts,” says his sister, laughing. The impromptu set is greeted with applause. “Thank you, Antwerp!” says Styles playfully, bowing to the crowd. “Thank you, fashion!”

[yetanotheremptypage]

can we get 82. pleaseeee thanks

Apologies for the delay!

no escaping your love #71: fuss (Read 1-70 here.)

“Will we see you at the Wentworths’ ball tonight?” the Earl of Norwich asked Anthony as they exited Parliament that day.

“I don’t believe so,” Anthony replied, palming his pocket watch in his pocket and wondering how long he had to avoid home in order to not run into Kate before she departed for said ball.

“Oh?” Simon said, shooting him a rather odd look.

“I have much work to do,” he said shortly. He nodded to the men and approached his carriage, blissfully far down the line. That meant it would take longer to get home, and he would not have to wait as long. Perhaps it would not be the worst thing to see Kate briefly before she left…

“I’m surprised to hear you’re not going tonight,” Simon called and Anthony turned, not enjoying the smirk on his brother-in-law’s face. “After all, I have it on rather good authority one Mr. Dorset shall be there this evening.”

Anthony froze with one foot poised to step up into the carriage. He turned to Simon.

“Dorset is attending the Wentworth ball?”

“So I’ve heard,” Simon said with a smirk.

Anthony turned to his footman. “I will give you a bonus for the month if you can have us out of here in the next five minutes.”

They made it home after Kate had already departed and he practically growled for his valet. As this was perhaps the fourth such insistence on Anthony’s part that he would not be accompanying Kate out that evening, only to return home and fuss his servants into getting him out the door, they were prepared for him this time.

He found Kate based on her laugh, floating to him from across the ballroom, and stalked right over to her and the man she was speaking to, a man he knew without even studying him was to be Dorset.

“There you are,” he said, smiling as he stepped in next to her, his body much closer to hers than was perhaps appropriate. “I’ve been looking all over for you.”

“Anthony!” she said, her own smile morphing from one of polite interest to that which he only ever saw her sport in his presence. “I thought you couldn’t make it tonight?”

“I was in the neighborhood.” He turned to Dorset with a nod. “Dorset.”

“Bridgerton.”

“If you don’t mind, I owe my wife a dance,” he said, relishing the way ‘wife’ rolled on his tongue and the expression on Dorset’s face when he said it. “Come along, my lady.”

He did pull her a little roughly into the string of waltzers. She gave him a look of false exasperation.

“‘In the neighborhood,’ were you?”

“Yes.”

“Hm,” she said, “And I’m sure that you learned before this evening that Dorset was to be here.”

He narrowed his eyes. “Why do I feel as if I’ve been duped?”

“I’m just wondering if you would’ve made such a fuss about stealing me away had I been engaged in conversation with someone who hadn’t attempted to court me.”

“I’ll always make a fuss for you,” he said, enjoying the way her blush took over her face turning it a shade quite similar to that of the dress she’d worn for her boatride that day, the stirring in his gut at the thought of other men realizing just how beautiful and wonderful Kate could be.

One day, someone like Dorset would--he hoped--come in and make her happy. But for now, she was in his arms, laughing at what he said, welcoming him to her bed. And that was going to have to be enough.

[elizabeth-mitchells]

Journeys end in lovers meeting - Sam/Deena - Fear Street x Bly Manor AU - Chapter 2

Chapters: 2/10 Fandom: Fear Street Trilogy (TV) Rating: Explicit Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Samantha "Sam" Fraser/Deena Johnson, Sarah Fier/Hannah Miller (Fear Street), Christine "Ziggy" Berman/Nick Goode, Samantha "Sam" Fraser & Deena Johnson Characters: Samantha "Sam" Fraser (Fear Street), Deena Johnson, Kate Schmidt (Fear Street), Simon Kalivoda, Josh Johnson (Fear Street), Constance (Fear Street Part 3: 1666), Christine "Ziggy" Berman, Nick Goode (Fear Street), Alice (Fear Street Part 2: 1978), Sarah Fier (Fear Street), Hannah Miller (Fear Street), Solomon Goode (Fear Street) Additional Tags: Alternate Universe, The Haunting of Bly Manor AU, Not Canon Compliant, Haunted Houses, Ghosts, Character Death, Minor Character Death, Canon Lesbian Relationship, First Meetings, Fluff and Angst, Eventual Smut, Happy Ending, Au Pair Sam, Gardener Deena, Housekeeper Kate, Cook Simon, Josh and Constance as troubled kids, Ziggy and Nick in an unhealthy relationship, minor Cindy/Alice, Martin cameos, special appearances of all the Shadyside killers as ghosts, Somebody Lives/Not Everyone Dies, The Rest Is Confetti Summary:

The year is 1994. Samantha Fraser recently moved to Shadyside, and she desperately needs a job that will help her leave her troubled past behind. She starts working as au pair at Shadyside Manor, where she is not the only one tortured by ghosts. Grief, regrets, guilt, innocent victims, and an ancient curse. At the center of all of it... love.

Chapter 2:

Sam hadn’t been kidding when she said she would deal with the kids by herself. About nine years as a teacher were worth it. She knew exactly how to balance patience and authority, and exactly when to crack a smile. It wasn’t time for smiles though. It was time to let the kids of Shadyside manor know that their days of self-government were over. Sam was brought there to bring them an education, and that included rules, discipline, and consequences to their actions.

So, if they locked her in a closet, there would have to be a sort of punishment. If they were responsible for the muddy footprints that appeared on the staircase of the house, there would also be a punishment. Nothing too severe, of course. Sam knew even the word punishment seemed too hard for kids. But she knew this would be her only chance at asserting her position in that place.

That was how, after breakfast, Sam found herself with nothing to do while Josh and Constance worked on cleaning up the stairs. Luckily, she was quickly approached by two of her coworkers.

“So, since you have put the kids to do my work,” Kate said. “Why don’t you come hang us for a bit?”

Simon pulled out one of the chairs from the table and with a flourish offered it to Sam, “Miss Fraser, would you care to join us for a mid-morning shit-talking session?”

“Oh, sure,” Sam chuckled nervously and accepted the seat. “And you can just call me Sam.” She couldn’t help repeating herself. She didn’t exactly have good memories attached to her name. She only ever wished to be just Sam.

“Don’t creep her out, please,” Kate told her friend and two of them took a seat as well. “So, Sam, what do you think of the house so far? And the kids?”

The new au pair took her time to answer. “The house is… big. It’s uh, I mean, sure, it looks scary. But once inside, it doesn’t feel as bad as the rumors make it out to be, you know?”

Kate nodded firmly, seemingly satisfied with that answer. Simon grinned playfully and leaned forward on the table as if about to discuss a secret, “You don’t have haunted houses in Sunnyvale?”

Sam chuckled bitterly at that. Apparently, it wasn’t a secret for anyone the place she came from. If only they knew the full story. “No we don’t,” she looked down and shook her head. “Sunnyvale has its different types of hauntings though.”

“What about the kids?” Kate blurted out.

“The Sunnyvale kids?”

“What? No! Constance and Josh,” Kate scoffed, and sent an unimpressed look in Sam's way. 

“Oh, right,” Sam laughed nervously. She desperately hoped she wasn’t blushing in embarrassment. Kate was staring at her very intently, studying her. But it was, somehow, not getting exactly the effect she was hoping for in Sam. Because yes, maybe Sam was deeply intimidated. But she could also tell that Kate’s harshness came from a place of being protective of the kids and caring about them. “They seem great, really,” Sam eventually replied. “Constance is bold and Josh is an introvert, but I’ve dealt with kids like that my entire life. I’m going to try my best with them though, that’s for sure. I just… have to get to know them.”

At that moment, Kate and Simon exchanged a look. Sam had no doubt it was true that those two had been best friends for a long time. It seemed like a really important conversation was silently happening between them. Finally, Simon spoke up.

“No, you haven’t worked with kids like them,” he replied, suddenly very careful with his words. “No offense, you know? But, bold and introverted mean different things in Sunnyvale and Shadyside. Here they mean something more along the lines of survivor and traumatized.”

A not completely discreet cough from Kate got him to stop talking. “No, I know, I’m sorry,” Sam was quick to apologize. They weren’t completely wrong. “I know, it’s just, well… I don’t know anything… I mean, what, uh, why…” She ended with a sigh and slumping in her chair, knowing there was no right way to ask the questions she had in mind.

“Constance’s parents died two years ago,” Kate said. She was speaking almost in whispers, but it nearly startled Sam, who didn’t think she’d get any sort of explanation. Afterward, she would hope she hadn’t. “Cindy Berman and husband. Plane crashed. Then, last year… her aunt. Christine killed herself here on the property. Really gives you some perspective into all the fucking rumors, doesn’t it?”

Afterward, Sam was beyond speechless. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t find a thing to say. That’s when Simon joined in.

“And Josh, he… uh, well, he is not one of the Bermans,” Simon was struggling to explain. “Look, he has his own fucked up past, okay? But I can’t tell you more because Deena would totally kick my ass. It’s their story to tell, you know? The past is the past anyway.”

Sam nodded thoughtfully. At least, she hoped she appeared thoughtful. Not too thoughtful though. Just thoughtful enough for someone that has perfectly normal reactions to hearing the name of a very particular co-worker. That momentary panic at least gave her an idea of how to reply to the tough conversation. A change of subject.

“What about you guys?” Sam asked. “How did you end up working at the manor?”

Instantly, Kate seemed to relax. “I just like bossing people around,” she grinned, earning laughter from the other two. “My aunt used to work here. Alice pays well enough. And if you don’t get scared easily, it’s not a bad place to live in.”

Sam smiled at her and then looked at Simon, noticing how he didn’t look half as relaxed as Kate this time. “What can I say?” he smiled in a way that kept a lot hidden. “It pays the bills. It’s close to home. And I fucking love food.”

The au pair decided it wasn’t time to push for more information. Instead, in that brief moment of silence, she turned her head to look through the door at Josh and Constance working on the stairs. They were doing well, but their day was far from over. From her point of view, she had no way of seeing the man standing on the other side of the stairs. Tommy Slater had been standing there for longer than he could remember. He was still wearing his red flannel shirt, still holding on to his axe, still looking impossibly sad, cold, and lonely.

--

As she made her way to the greenhouse, Sam tried to convince herself she wasn’t nervous at all. She had no reason to be anxious at all. Deena Johnson was another one of her coworkers. Sure, maybe she pulled Sam out of a pretty embarrassing breakdown the previous night. Yes, maybe she had an incredible smile that almost painfully reminded Sam of feelings she had spent a lifetime running from. But… she reached the greenhouse before coming up with a reason not to be on edge.

“Hi?” she called out, tentatively stepping inside the place.

“Over here,” a voice replied from the back of the greenhouse. A voice that was like no other Sam had ever heard.

“Um, hi, Deena,” Sam approached her slowly. “It’s me, uh, Sam.”

“Yeah, I can see that,” Deena replied, a small smile on her lips. She stood up from the ground, where she had been kneeling down to work on one of the multiple plants that filled this space. “What do you have there?” Deena asked, nodding toward the plate Sam was holding in her hand.

Sam looked down, as if she had forgotten what it was she was carrying. “Simon,” she blurted out.

“Oh. He looks a little bit different than I remember.”

That made Sam laugh nervously. “I mean, it’s your breakfast,” Sam said. “You didn’t come down for breakfast and Simon asked me to bring it to you.”

Deena nodded slowly, and accepted the plate from Sam’s hands. Then she moved to one of the two chairs at the back of the greenhouse and sat down, inspecting her breakfast.

Afterward, Sam might chastise herself for it, but at the moment she couldn’t help but blurt out, “You’re welcome.”

That earned her an annoyed sigh from the gardener. “Listen, you don’t have to do this,” Deena said.

“Do what?” Sam wondered, taking a seat on the spare chair.

“Play nice with us, with me,” Deena explained, nearly whispering the last part.

“I…” Sam stuttered, she was definitely taken off guard. “Well, we are coworkers now, we live under the same roof, I think-”

“I think you have no idea what you got yourself into. This place, and everyone here, is doomed,” Deena interrupted her. “You’re Sunnyvale, we are Shadyside trash. I know your type. I only hope you’ll run away before the kids get attached to you.”

For a moment, all Sam could do was stare, frown silently at Deena, as the other woman nonchalantly got started on her breakfast, as if she hadn’t just put Sam’s entire mood upside down. It was interesting though, the way Deena chose not to mention the fact that she skipped breakfast just to avoid a set of blue eyes that were too dangerously pretty to wander into Shadyside.

Sam jumped out of her seat, and took a deep breath to reign in her feelings. “You don’t know me at all,” was all she said before walking out of the greenhouse.

--

The rest of the morning passed by in a blur of hard work, mostly for the kids. Surprisingly though, at one point they stopped looking so bothered about it. Josh wasn’t the kind to complain out loud, but Sam noticed from the way his shoulders relaxed and his lips almost started to smile. Constance, on the other hand, was pretty content complaining as much as possible, but she seemed happier doing something new, entertaining, and different from studying. They especially seemed to enjoy working outside.

Sam had wanted to avoid the unkind gardener as much as possible, but she had already planned this, so there was no turning back. This was part of the kids’ education, hard work, and Sam was proud of her methods. The one thing she wasn’t proud of was the way the gardener was making her feel. Her plan to avoid Deena had backfired. Deena, Kate, and Simon were lounging in the garden, while Sam guided Josh and Constance on their work.

As hard as she tried, Sam couldn’t stop herself from second-guessing what her new coworkers were talking about. Were they talking about her? Good things? Did Kate and Simon feel the same way as Deena? Were they criticizing her? Those smiles on their faces, was that a good or bad sign? Deena’s posture on that chair, the way she held a cigarette, played with the delicate chain hanging from her neck, teased her young brother, locked eyes with Sam precisely once… did it mean anything at all?

--

The rest of the morning went by easily. Sam dragged Josh and Constance back to the house to continue cleaning, and they had to comply. Tragic as it seemed, they couldn’t complain to anybody. Kate, Simon, Deena, even Alice in the safety of her own home, they all would have supported Sam’s teaching methods at best, would’ve laughed in their faces at worst. 

Things couldn’t be perfect though. Sam would scold herself for letting her guard down at all. She had been in one of the bedrooms, assisting Constance with cleaning the windows, when it happened. One second it was just a window, showing the green grounds around the property, nothing more. Then the next second, all Sam could see was his face. Dark. Just a shadow. Furious. Disgusted. Head tilted. Observing her. Unforgiving. Horribly familiar.

Sam let out a yelp of surprise and stumbled backward. She caught herself before falling down to the floor, but not before Constance saw her. At first, the girl chuckled, but she sounded somewhat genuine when she asked, “Are you okay?”

“Yeah, I’m- uh, I’m okay,” Sam replied, voice trembling. “Give me a minute.”

She was out of that room before hearing the girl’s reply. She couldn’t move fast enough, but her legs were trembling. She couldn’t shake that image of her mind. Her own particular ghost. The monster that she hadn’t been able to leave in Sunnyvale. Following her reflection everywhere she went.

Sam stumbled down the stairs and out of the house. She finally found refuge behind one of the big bushes on the sides of the entrance. A place where she could break down in peace. She couldn’t stop the tears, and she could hardly breathe, and she was so scared.

“Are you okay?”

The question makes Sam choke one of her sobs. Of all people that could have caught her at this moment…

“I get it,” Deena cautiously added, from a safe distance away. “I swear I had the same reaction after I met Constance.” She could barely see Sam, hiding behind the bush, but she guessed that privacy was exactly what the blonde wanted. “If Josh’s the problem though, just let me know. You aren’t allowed to, but I can totally kick his ass.” That earned her a tearful chuckle from Sam, which was a very good sign. “Just so you know though,” Deena added, “That’s usually my spot for having an emotional breakdown. Now I have to go to this other corner and there are spiders and shit in there, no privacy at all.”

This time, there was a genuine laugh coming from Sam. The tears had stopped, and she managed to find the strength to look over her shoulder, show her face to Deena and say, “Thank you.”

Deena softly shook her head, dismissing Sam’s need to thank her. “You’re doing better than most people could,” she said. Seeing Sam smile sadly, acknowledging her tear-streaked face, Deena insisted, “I mean it.”

There was a pause then. Sam opened her mouth, desperately wishing she could say something else. All she wanted was to ask Deena how she could be so kind and so cruel as if a switch was flipped inside her. But Sam feared that saying more than two words would make her cry again. Deena took that as her cue to go on with her day.

“Back to work then,” Deena said, starting to march back into the house. “Stay strong, Sunnyvale.”

Definitely done with her tears, Sam was having trouble holding back her smile. She tried to sneak another glance at the gardener, but Deena was gone, leaving behind only a pleasant warmth in Sam’s heart and a firm smile on her face.

--

Nine years of teaching had taught Sam a lot. She knew how to handle kids, that was for sure. The unruly ones, the proud ones, the ones that struggled, and the ones that shined brightly. Simon had been right when he said she had never worked with kids like Josh and Constance. Still, she was prepared to deal with Josh picking up spiders from the garden, and trying to scare her. She didn’t lose her ground even when Constance’s attitude sometimes made Sam feel like she was the teenager out of the two of them.

What she did that day wasn’t the worst Sam had to do for one of her students. Still, it was pretty awkward explaining to Deena how her younger brother had massacred the rose bushes to give the flowers to Sam.

When the two women arrived at the scene of the crime, it was a huge mess. Josh had picked a few roses for Sam and destroyed the rest. He must have been pretty aggressive to earn that small limp he had when he walked toward Sam a few minutes earlier.

The teenager fell to second place in the forefront of Sam’s mind though. She was slightly more preoccupied about the furious gardener gripping the broken stem of a rose as if it were a knife.

“I’m going to fucking kill him,” Deena yelled, not for the first time in the past minute, and tried to walk away.

“Hey,” Sam stopped her with a firm tone and a hand on her shoulder. “I’ll deal with him, it’s my job.”

Deena took a deep breath. She was pretty much shaking with anger still. She pursed her lips, suddenly aware of the way she had been yelling at the innocent au pair for god knows how long now. She wasn’t good at apologizing though. She slumped her shoulders and exhaled.

“It’s just… he should know better than this,” Deena said bitterly. “We are lucky to be living here. He knows he has to stay out of trouble.” She looked up into Sam’s blue eyes and the careful attention she found there nearly turned her breathless. “That was the deal,” Deena added softly, taking a moment to gulp nervously. “I made a deal with Cindy Berman years ago, when we had nothing. Josh and I could live here, and I’d pay her by working on the grounds of the manor.”

Sam nodded slowly, with a barely-there smile that let Deena know she had listened, and understood. “It’s okay,” Sam said. “I don’t think it’ll be a big deal. I won’t say anything if you don’t.” The two women exchanged a smile. “It’s just a few flowers-”

“It’s not just a few flowers,” Deena protested immediately.

“I know, I know,” Sam quickly said. She was tiptoeing the line between fearing Deena’s temper and being endeared by how protective she was of her plants. “They’re also a weapon, apparently.”

Deena tilted her head in confusion. “Ah,” she said when she looked down at the rose’s stem she was still holding in her hand. She couldn’t say anything else though. Sam had taken the initiative to reach out and gently pry open Deena’s fist to take the stem away. That’s when they both noticed there had been thorns involved. “Shit,” Deena cursed.

“Um,” Sam mumbled pensively as she stared at the couple of red spots on Deena’s hand. “You know, to be a teacher, you have to learn a thing or two about first aid. Do you want help?”

Deena was already shaking her head. Her wild curls shook with her movement. “No, it’s okay- fuck!” She exclaimed in pain the moment she tried to close her hand again. Now there were a few drops of blood on her palm. “Fine,” she grumbled. 

--

Deena was so upset about having someone bandaging her hand, that Sam found the whole process much easier than she had expected. It was a little bit like dealing with a kid, not that she would ever admit such a thing to the gardener. 

“So, you really like those roses, huh?” Sam asked while cleaning up the little wounds in Deena’s palm.

“They’re some of my favorites from the entire property,” Deena shrugged. “I like all these plants more than most people, that’s for sure.”

Sam nodded, picking up the bandages. “Why would he do this?” she asked. “Josh, I mean. He doesn’t seem to be the type to vandalize the gardens.”

“He isn’t. There was one bad fucking influence and…” Deena replied. Her words were hiding a lot, but her resentful tone warned the au pair against making any further questions. Instead, Deena looked up and added, “or maybe… he just really likes you, Sunnyvale.”

Sam laughed at that, and ducked her head to avoid those gorgeous brown eyes. Surprisingly, she decided to admit something right then and there in the otherwise empty kitchen of the manor while holding on to Deena’s hand. “You do know I’m not even from Sunnyvale, right?” 

“What?” Deena asked. She looked caught off guard for the first time since Sam met her.

“You guys don’t fact-check your gossip, huh?” Sam chuckled. “I was born here, in Shadyside. I moved away when I was little, after my father died, but… I guess, now I’m trying to find my home, you know?”

“Right,” Deena replied.

She blinked slowly, and her eyebrows furrowed into a small frown as she took in the information, the significance of Sam sharing it with her, and the unknown reason why the word home sounded so perfect coming from Sam’s smiling lips.

After a brief silence that felt like it stretched for hours, Deena cleared her throat. “Well, uh, thank you, for giving me a hand,” she said. The mention of her hand made both women realize that this entire time they hadn’t let go of each other’s hands. They pulled away from each other quickly, but nothing could have wiped the smiles off their faces. “It’s not the worst I’ve dealt with so I better get back to work. I guess I’ll see you around… Sunnyvale.”

Sam didn’t even attempt to hold back her grin. Distantly, she wished she wasn’t blushing too much, but that was it. She turned around to watch Deena walk away from the kitchen. Then she was rewarded with the sight of Deena looking back at her once before crossing the doorway.

When she was alone again, Sam leaned her back against the counter and sighed. It was a mixture of contentment and exhaustion. She had tried her best to maintain a good impression in front of Deena, and now she could finally relax. She was starting to understand her better too, how Deena’s boldness came from a good place of being protective over her brother, and maybe even over the whole property. Sam’s exhaustion though, didn’t come from anywhere near Deena, the teens, or the house. She was only realizing how absurdly debilitating it had been to keep up a false version of herself at all times during those years in Sunnyvale. Slowly but surely, she was leaving all that behind.

Sam took a deep breath and straightened up. Then she started to walk out of the kitchen following the path Deena had walked a minute ago. She didn’t have to look back before crossing the doorway, she just kept walking. This way, she missed Ryan Torres’s presence in one corner of the kitchen. Lonesome, unknown, fumbling with the knife he still carried at all times.

--

“Josh! Constance! You guys are way too old for this kind of game!” Sam was yelling as she walked around the house. She didn’t understand how Kate hadn’t heard her yet.

She wasn’t scared. Just because they had turned off all the lights and she was only barely familiar with the house didn’t mean she should be scared. The kids wanted to improvise a game of hide and seek to avoid going to bed? Fine. Sam wasn’t scared of the dark. In the darkness she couldn’t see her reflection and whatever cursed company she would find there. If she had to drag a couple of teenagers to their beds from their ears then so be it. 

When Sam caught sight of the curtains of one room moving strangely, she hurried towards it and pulled at it, but there was nobody there. She sighed, disappointed, stressed, but not scared, not yet. She heard footsteps behind her, and when she turned around, she distinctly heard the front door of the house open. Chills ran through Sam’s spine. It was unsettling, but not too bad, right? She would be deeply upset if she had to chase a pair of teenagers out in the middle of a storm, but it could be worse.

It could be worse… Maybe it was much worse than she imagined. That was the thought going through Sam’s mind when, very slowly, she turned back around to face the window again. At first, it looked like a blur. Then, she feared it was that same ghostly silhouette that followed her everywhere. Somehow, it was worse. Somehow, the figure moved closer and it became clear. There was a man standing on the other side of the window. Tall. Dark hair. Hazel eyes. Smile that never, under any circumstances, would have been mistaken for friendly.

Sam took a step backward, so did he. Then she took off running. Not in the direction some might have expected. She wasn’t running away to hide. She ran out of that room, taking the fireplace poker from its stand and gripping it with force as she rushed out of the house.

“I’m going to call the police!” Sam yelled while the rain poured down on her. “I’m going to call the fucking police!”

She ran toward the window where she’d seen that man. He was nowhere to be seen but, as if it was all part of a pattern, she stumbled across the worst possible scenario.

“Sam?” Josh mumbled. He was just standing there, shaking with cold, drenched from the rain… then he just crumbled down, falling to the ground, unconscious.

[embracedthevoid]

Hej💜 I would love to know more about your history with writing.

- How long would you say you've been a writer?

- Do you still remember your first stories, what were they about?

- Did you enjoy writing/english in school ? Were you "good" (as in did you get high marks) ?

- Do you enjoy reading as well or are you more of a storyteller? Do you have any favorite books as an adult? What about when you were young ?

- Are you only writing fics at the moment or other things as well? Is it different writing fanfiction vs other things ?

- When / why did you write your first fic ? Were you nervous to post it ?

- What do you do with your writing, do you have like a file or a document or cloud or how do you "store" it ? Are they well organized or all over the place?

-Does your own writing make you cry or laugh often ? Do you think it's necessary for a writer to feel the things they are writing about ?

-Is it always pleasant to write ? Does writing ever make you feel bad (like writing about sad or dark stuff)?

- Do you feel like it's easier for you to write either from Wille's or Simon's pov, why do think that is ?

-Who is your favorite characters to write about other than W & S ?

So sorry hear you've had A Week™, I'm sending you some of my sunshine, hope the rest of the week is better☀️💜 (why do i sound like a grandma, but you know, sending you lot's of love) Puss och kram !

- JJ 🦋

Hello lovely!! Ahhh, I'm so excited that you're sending me an ask on here! And thank you for asking so many questions!! I just adore you!

I'd say I've been a writer for the last three years. Or at least that's when I started taking my writing a bit more seriously.

Yesss I wrote stories as a kid! They were often about whatever was going on in my friend group when I was like 8 years old. I once wrote a story for my friend when we got into a massive fight based on our fight, and got the characters to resolve their issues and I gave it to her as an apology.

I was horrible in English and barely ever passed. I was constantly behind the other kids when it came to reading and writing, and didn't get put into 'normal' English classes until I was 12.

I love love loveeeee reading. I don't think I have a favourite book but I have a couple that I revisit often. As a kid, I hated reading, but that was only because I would get frustrated and give up haha.

I am writing an original story, but I've been focusing a lot on fanfic lately. However, I do often incorporate my OCs in my fics to help round them out as characters.

I wrote my first fic when I was 15. I had a series similar to my missing moments for the show once upon a time for the ship captain swan hahah. I wasn't really nervous to post it, but mostly cause I didn't think anyone would read it haha.

I have a google docs system that keeps my fics organized, but recently I wrote them all out on flashcards and pinned them to a corkboard. It was getting a little chaotic and I needed more of a visual to keep my thoughts organized.

No, I don't think I've ever cried because of my writing, I have laughed though. I don't think it's necessary to feel the things an author is writing about, but I'm sure it helps.

It's mostly pleasant but sometimes frustrating. Especially when I'm stuck on a scene. And I don't think I've ever made myself feel bad with my writing, which I'm thankful for because I'm sure that wouldn't be fun.

I find Wille's pov easier to write and I think it's because I relate to his character more.

I love writing my version of Henry. He's a kind-hearted himbo that does wonders for moments of comedic relief.

Thank you sm for asking these questions friend. You are the loveliest and I hope to hear from you soon 💙

[echo-three-one]

Whatever It Takes

While Soap, France and the two hostages try to recover, Gary stands by for action. It's a waiting game before they make their next move. Can Gary's lungs handle the training?

Previous Chapter : Reunited

Chapter 6 to another story made by Ray (echo-three-one) Comments and Reviews appreciated! I hope you enjoy! Love you all ❤️

A Walk to Remember

Gary "Roach" Sanderson

Task Force 141

Task Force 141 - Briefing Room

Gary was able to share his raccoon story, but he wasn't contented. He actually wanted a certain someone to listen to it. He wanted to see her smile. He knew their time together was short but he grew curious about the blonde girl. He felt concern, almost guilty that he triggered her massive headache. He wanted to apologize, but since then she's still unconscious. Guess he'll have to wait.

"The concern is that Augustus' squad had been forcibly and convincingly recruiting troops from a local border militia and informants reported that they have siezed their small village camp." The caterpillar-moustached general briefed, gaining murmurs from the rest of the squad.

"We'll be sending Alex tomorrow to negotiate with the squad and if he's successful. We could formally assist them and take back their base, crippling Augustus forces. Gathering intel on the village is a bonus." he added, making everyone else nod. Gary looked determined to help out, and for now all he could to is to train more and have faith in Alex's skills.

"That's odd." Ghost nudged from beside him.

"Yeah?" he replied quickly.

"I know that face… Something's bothering the bug. Come on. Spill." he whispered. Ghost may look cold and distant at one glance but he tries hard to show concern, especially for Roach, who has been there to absorb his problems ever since they met.

"It's the mission." Gary lied and he was not convincing at that.

"Sod off mate. I can tell you're lying. Is it the girl? It's always about the girl." he teased. Gary found himself speechless as he puffed his cheeks.

"Yeah. We'll you're bothered about France too. And threatened about how close they are with Soap." he whispered, Ghost fell silent and stopped bugging him. Gary wanted to quickly apologize for hitting a nerve, but he turned his focus to Shepherd.

"That's about all of it for today. I want all available squad members at the training areas now. We're not going to let that same blunder happen again." he scolded as everyone silently left. Ghost walked behind Gary, his quiet demeanor was normal but somewhat odd.

"You think she's interested in him? They used to fight a lot." he muttered and Gary turned to him.

"Look mate, I have no idea what's going on around them. They just met, and I'm no love doctor but if you're really into her then take small steps. Get to know her, talk to her, those kind of things. Then you'll finally get the answer you're looking for." Roach advised and Ghost actually showed agreement by nodding as they continue to the training room.

Task Force 141 - Jogging Oval

THE NEXT DAY

It's the fourth time that Roach lost to Ghost on a one lap sprint. A sign that he still has a lot of lung endurance exercises to do and he's still a long way to go to master holding a sniper rifle. He looked down, hands on his knees and sweat dropped from his forehead as he panted heavily.

"Roach! You okay?" a familiar scottish voice called from nearby. He looked and saw Samantha, Maxine, France and Soap together early in the morning. Samantha was pushing Maxine's wheelchair while France pushed Soap's. It looked like he still can't get up properly yet and might not make it on the next mission. His eyes now turned to Maxine who was looking at Samantha, laughing at something. Her smile brought happiness to Roach's face and he felt like he could run another lap.

"I'm fine." Gary replied with a thumbs up, jogging toward them, taking France's spot.

"Where are you going?" he asked.

"Oh. Nowhere. The nurse said we could use a little sunshine." Soap replied and the rest of them nodded. Maxine turned to Gary and smiled.

"You. You helped me back there. Eased the pain from the sprain. What's your name?" she asked. Gary took the time to let her voice fill his mind.

"Gary." he replied.

"Thank you Gary." she smiled and turned back to Samantha, resuming their conversation. France quickly nudged him to which he winced in pain.

"Whatever you're thinking, it goes through me first. I'm her sister after all." she warned, Gary pretended to look confused but there was no use hiding to a woman. They could sense intentions a mile away. 

"Does she um… remember you?" Gary asked. France's face shifted from threatening to sad.

"Not really." She sighed. "But she will recover and recognize me someday." 

"What happened to his leg? Hey hey Is that Alex?! Samantha it's Alex! Heyyy Pretty boy! Over here!" Maxine excitedly called him. He was walking to the hangar with his backpack and gym bag, looking focused. Everyone else were confused as to how Maxine knew Alex and Gary started to feel odd about it.

"Hey… um… you." Alex greeted awkwardly, smiling at the group.

"Alex. This is Samantha over here. I remember you looking for him at the bar. You know, a childhood friend you want to reconnect with?" She excitedly winked as he looked at Samantha. Gary could sense a little something going on between the two.

"Max, I don't know no Alex from my childhood…" Samantha muttered and Maxine frowned. This wasn't the kind of reunion she expected. It was a shame that that was the last thing she could remember.

"Yeah. I think you may have mistaken me or something. But I did look for her, returned a pendant she dropped back then." Alex replied and ran back to the airstrip.

"I swear I remember him correctly. I know full well which memories hurt me." Maxine whispered to herself as Samantha rubbed her back.

"He does look familiar. But then again I saw him back then and mistook him as a stalker. I mean, look at those tattooes. Turns out he's just there to return my pendant. It's a huge coincidence he works here though. Like one in a million." she mused as they quietly watched him walk away.

Gary started pushing Soap and the rest followed. He was happy Maxine's all peppy and well, but he can't help but feel jealous about the way she reacted upon seeing Alex. He wished she'd do the same for him. But who was he for her? Nothing but a random stranger.

"Huh?" Maxine asked and Samantha just nodded, making her quiet and realize things. Soap looked at Roach and they just exchanged weird glances and shrugged. Mentally noting that they'll have to talk to Alex about this after the mission.

~

"So, any new news?" Ghost stood by Gary as he gulped down a bottle of water.

"Not really. Except from the fact that Maxine claims to know Alex and Samantha knows Alex. And also Maxine is Francine's sister?!" Gary exhaled leaving Ghost in a momentary confusion.

"Wai.wai wait.. For real?!" he asked. Gary downed another bottle and nodded.

"Yeah. When briefing told us Alex was somehow connected, he was actually all over the place. I want answers from him." 

"Yeah. So where is he?" 

"He's already on his way back to Germany. Let's hope he convinces a whole army to help us out." Gary wondered as Ghost nudged him back to the gym. 

"Let's train that lungs of yours again."

All Gary could do was groan in  frustration as he followed Ghost to the gym.

"Man, Nero's a mysterious guy huh. Did you know Alex helped catch the CIA Mole he's working with. The one that supplied him the serum that's behind all of this." Gary overheard two random soldiers at the gym discuss. He couldn't help but stop whatever he was doing and asked them for more details.

"They already publicized the report on the website. They're actually desperate for any Nero-like activity to report to them immediately." one of them informed, Gary turned to Ghost and they both nodded, quickly running to the Base's library.

"Here it is. Alex's report." Gary muttered as Ghost peeked beside him, they slowly scrolled across pages of information written by Alex himself. He didn't hide anything from them, except from thr fact that they're after her because she had memories of an IP Address. Then further through the report they concluded that they weren't successful in extracting it. Then at the end of the file was a footnote, regarding Samantha's state. It read:

Due to a special favor promised by Samantha's father, he has authorize to apply an MK Ultra procedure to her, whose main intention is to Alter her memories of the IP Address along with the events that happened prior to kidnapping.

"So that's why she didn't know Alex." Gary realized.

"Hence the responses earlier." Ghost added.

"Maxine wasn't mentioned in this footnote this means her memories weren't rewritten." Gary spleculated. Ghost scratched his head in confusion.

"This whole thing is nuts." Was all Ghost could say.

Task Force 141 - Quarters

2000H

"Same routine tommorow, okay?" Ghost grinned and it made Gary groan.

"Fine. My lungs are going to hate you for eternity, Simon." he complained and the trainer just chuckled.

"We didn't have the chance to talk to Soap today. He surely has a lot of new information about the two." 

"Nah. More like more information on France." Ghost retorted fake chuckling.

"If he's ever in the competition, I can judge that he's one step ahead." Gary remarked, attempting to tease Ghost who was already leaning away from him.

"Rest up, Bug. Another big day tomorrow." he muttered, almost angry.

"Yeah. Big day."

Next Chapter : Just Like Old Times

tagging the notification squad

@enderio

@samatedeansbroccoli

@whimsywispsblog

@smokeywhalee

@beemybee

@ricinbach

[hldailyupdate]

Playtime With Harry Styles

THE MEN’S BATHING POND in London’s Hampstead Heath at daybreak on a gloomy September morning seemed such an unlikely locale for my first meeting with Harry Styles, music’s legendarily charm-heavy style czar, that I wondered perhaps if something had been lost in translation.

But then there is Styles, cheerily gung ho, hidden behind a festive yellow bandana mask and a sweatshirt of his own design, surprisingly printed with three portraits of his intellectual pinup, the author Alain de Botton. “I love his writing,” says Styles. “I just think he’s brilliant. I saw him give a talk about the keys to happiness, and how one of the keys is living among friends, and how real friendship stems from being vulnerable with someone.”

In turn, de Botton’s 2016 novel The Course of Love taught Styles that “when it comes to relationships, you just expect yourself to be good at it…[but] being in a real relationship with someone is a skill,” one that Styles himself has often had to hone in the unforgiving klieg light of public attention, and in the company of such high-profile paramours as Taylor Swift and—well, Styles is too much of a gentleman to name names.

That sweatshirt and the Columbia Records tracksuit bottoms are removed in the quaint wooden open-air changing room, with its Swallows and Amazons vibe. A handful of intrepid fellow patrons in various states of undress are blissfully unaware of the 26-year-old supernova in their midst, although I must admit I’m finding it rather difficult to take my eyes off him, try as I might. Styles has been on a six-day juice cleanse in readiness for Vogue’s photographer Tyler Mitchell. He practices Pilates (“I’ve got very tight hamstrings—trying to get those open”) and meditates twice a day. “It has changed my life,” he avers, “but it’s so subtle. It’s helped me just be more present. I feel like I’m able to enjoy the things that are happening right in front of me, even if it’s food or it’s coffee or it’s being with a friend—or a swim in a really cold pond!” Styles also feels that his meditation practices have helped him through the tumult of 2020: “Meditation just brings a stillness that has been really beneficial, I think, for my mental health.”

Styles has been a pescatarian for three years, inspired by the vegan food that several members of his current band prepared on tour. “My body definitely feels better for it,” he says. His shapely torso is prettily inscribed with the tattoos of a Victorian sailor—a rose, a galleon, a mermaid, an anchor, and a palm tree among them, and, straddling his clavicle, the dates 1967 and 1957 (the respective birth years of his mother and father). Frankly, I rather wish I’d packed a beach muumuu.

We take the piratical gangplank that juts into the water and dive in. Let me tell you, this is not the Aegean. The glacial water is a cloudy phlegm green beneath the surface, and clammy reeds slap one’s ankles. Styles, who admits he will try any fad, has recently had a couple of cryotherapy sessions and is evidently less susceptible to the cold. By the time we have swum a full circuit, however, body temperatures have adjusted, and the ice, you might say, has been broken. Duly invigorated, we are ready to face the day. Styles has thoughtfully brought a canister of coffee and some bottles of water in his backpack, and we sit at either end of a park bench for a socially distanced chat.

It seems that he has had a productive year. At the onset of lockdown, Styles found himself in his second home, in the canyons of Los Angeles. After a few days on his own, however, he moved in with a pod of three friends (and subsequently with two band members, Mitch Rowland and Sarah Jones). They “would put names in a hat and plan the week out,” Styles explains. “If you were Monday, you would choose the movie, dinner, and the activity for that day. I like to make soups, and there was a big array of movies; we went all over the board,” from Goodfellas to Clueless. The experience, says Styles, “has been a really good lesson in what makes me happy now. It’s such a good example of living in the moment. I honestly just like being around my friends,” he adds. “That’s been my biggest takeaway. Just being on my own the whole time, I would have been miserable.”

Styles is big on friendship groups and considers his former and legendarily hysteria-inducing boy band, One Direction, to have been one of them. “I think the typical thing is to come out of a band like that and almost feel like you have to apologize for being in it,” says Styles. “But I loved my time in it. It was all new to me, and I was trying to learn as much as I could. I wanted to soak it in…. I think that’s probably why I like traveling now—soaking stuff up.” In a post-COVID future, he is contemplating a temporary move to Tokyo, explaining that “there’s a respect and a stillness, a quietness that I really loved every time I’ve been there.”

In 1D, Styles was making music whenever he could. “After a show you’d go in a hotel room and put down some vocals,” he recalls. As a result, his first solo album, 2017’s Harry Styles, “was when I really fell in love with being in the studio,” he says. “I loved it as much as touring.” Today he favors isolating with his core group of collaborators, “our little bubble”—Rowland, Kid Harpoon (né Tom Hull), and Tyler Johnson. “A safe space,” as he describes it.

In the music he has been working on in 2020, Styles wants to capture the experimental spirit that informed his second album, last year’s Fine Line. With his debut album, “I was very much finding out what my sound was as a solo artist,” he says. “I can see all the places where it almost felt like I was bowling with the bumpers up. I think with the second album I let go of the fear of getting it wrong and…it was really joyous and really free. I think with music it’s so important to evolve—and that extends to clothes and videos and all that stuff. That’s why you look back at David Bowie with Ziggy Stardust or the Beatles and their different eras—that fearlessness is super inspiring.”

The seismic changes of 2020—including the Black Lives Matter uprising around racial justice—has also provided Styles with an opportunity for personal growth. “I think it’s a time for opening up and learning and listening,” he says. “I’ve been trying to read and educate myself so that in 20 years I’m still doing the right things and taking the right steps. I believe in karma, and I think it’s just a time right now where we could use a little more kindness and empathy and patience with people, be a little more prepared to listen and grow.”

Meanwhile, Styles’s euphoric single “Watermelon Sugar” became something of an escapist anthem for this dystopian summer of 2020. The video, featuring Styles (dressed in ’70s-­flavored Gucci and Bode) cavorting with a pack of beach-babe girls and boys, was shot in January, before lockdown rules came into play. By the time it was ready to be released in May, a poignant epigraph had been added: “This video is dedicated to touching.”

Styles is looking forward to touring again, when “it’s safe for everyone,” because, as he notes, “being up against people is part of the whole thing. You can’t really re-create it in any way.” But it hasn’t always been so. Early in his career, Styles was so stricken with stage fright that he regularly threw up preperformance. “I just always thought I was going to mess up or something,” he remembers. “But I’ve felt really lucky to have a group of incredibly generous fans. They’re generous emotionally—and when they come to the show, they give so much that it creates this atmosphere that I’ve always found so loving and accepting.”

THIS SUMMER, when it was safe enough to travel, Styles returned to his London home, which is where he suggests we head now, setting off in his modish Primrose Yellow ’73 Jaguar that smells of gasoline and leatherette. “Me and my dad have always bonded over cars,” Styles explains. “I never thought I’d be someone who just went out for a leisurely drive, purely for enjoyment.” On sleepless jet-lagged nights he’ll drive through London’s quiet streets, seeing neighborhoods in a new way. “I find it quite relaxing,” he says.

Over the summer Styles took a road trip with his artist friend Tomo Campbell through France and Italy, setting off at four in the morning and spending the night in Geneva, where they jumped in the lake “to wake ourselves up.” (I see a pattern emerging.) At the end of the trip Styles drove home alone, accompanied by an upbeat playlist that included “Aretha Franklin, Parliament, and a lot of Stevie Wonder. It was really fun for me,” he says. “I don’t travel like that a lot. I’m usually in such a rush, but there was a stillness to it. I love the feeling of nobody knowing where I am, that kind of escape...and freedom.”

GROWING UP in a village in the North of England, Styles thought of London as a world apart: “It truly felt like a different country.” At a wide-eyed 16, he came down to the teeming metropolis after his mother entered him on the U.K. talent-search show The X Factor. “I went to the audition to find out if I could sing,” Styles recalls, “or if my mum was just being nice to me.” Styles was eliminated but subsequently brought back with other contestants—Niall Horan, Liam Payne, Louis Tomlinson, and Zayn Malik—to form a boy band that was named (on Styles’s suggestion) One Direction. The wily X Factor creator and judge, Simon Cowell, soon signed them to his label Syco Records, and the rest is history: 1D’s first four albums, supported by four world tours from 2011 to 2015, debuted at number one on the U.S. Billboard charts, and the band has sold 70 million records to date. At 18, Styles bought the London house he now calls home. “I was going to do two weeks’ work to it,” he remembers, “but when I came back there was no second floor,” so he moved in with adult friends who lived nearby till the renovation was complete. “Eighteen months,” he deadpans. “I’ve always seen that period as pretty pivotal for me, as there’s that moment at the party where it’s getting late, and half of the people would go upstairs to do drugs, and the other people go home. I was like, ‘I don’t really know this friend’s wife, so I’m not going to get all messy and then go home.’ I had to behave a bit, at a time where everything else about my life felt I didn’t have to behave really. I’ve been lucky to always feel I have this family unit somewhere.”

When Styles’s London renovation was finally done, “I went in for the first time and I cried,” he recalls. “Because I just felt like I had somewhere. L.A. feels like holiday, but this feels like home.”

“There’s so much joy to be had in playing with clothes. I’ve never thought too much about what it means—it just becomes this extended part of creating something”

Behind its pink door, Styles’s house has all the trappings of rock stardom—there’s a man cave filled with guitars, a Sex Pistols Never Mind the Bollocks poster (a moving-in gift from his decorator), a Stevie Nicks album cover. Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams” was one of the first songs he knew the words to—“My parents were big fans”—and he and Nicks have formed something of a mutual-admiration society. At the beginning of lockdown, Nicks tweeted to her fans that she was taking inspiration from Fine Line: “Way to go, H,” she wrote. “It is your Rumours.” “She’s always there for you,” said Styles when he inducted Nicks into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2019. “She knows what you need—advice, a little wisdom, a blouse, a shawl; she’s got you covered.”

Styles makes us some tea in the light-filled kitchen and then wanders into the convivial living room, where he strikes an insouciant pose on the chesterfield sofa, upholstered in a turquoise velvet that perhaps not entirely coincidentally sets off his eyes. Styles admits that his lockdown lewk was “sweatpants, constantly,” and he is relishing the opportunity to dress up again. He doesn’t have to wait long: The following day, under the eaves of a Victorian mansion in Notting Hill, I arrive in the middle of fittings for Vogue’s shoot and discover Styles in his Y-fronts, patiently waiting to try on looks for fashion editor Camilla Nickerson and photographer Tyler Mitchell. Styles’s personal stylist, Harry Lambert, wearing a pearl necklace and his nails colored in various shades of green varnish, à la Sally Bowles, is providing helpful backup (Britain’s Rule of Six hasn’t yet been imposed).

Styles, who has thoughtfully brought me a copy of de Botton’s 2006 book The Architecture of Happiness, is instinctively and almost quaintly polite, in an old-fashioned, holding-open-doors and not-mentioning-lovers-by-name sort of way. He is astounded to discover that the Atlanta-born Mitchell has yet to experience a traditional British Sunday roast dinner. Assuring him that “it’s basically like Thanksgiving every Sunday,” Styles gives Mitchell the details of his favorite London restaurants in which to enjoy one. “It’s a good thing to be nice,” Mitchell tells me after a morning in Styles’s company.

MITCHELL has Lionel Wendt’s languorously homoerotic 1930s portraits of young Sri Lankan men on his mood board. Nickerson is thinking of Irving Penn’s legendary fall 1950 Paris haute couture collections sitting, where he photographed midcentury supermodels, including his wife, Lisa Fonssagrives, in high-style Dior and Balenciaga creations. Styles is up for all of it, and so, it would seem, is the menswear landscape of 2020: Jonathan Anderson has produced a trapeze coat anchored with a chunky gold martingale; John Galliano at Maison Margiela has fashioned a khaki trench with a portrait neckline in layers of colored tulle; and Harris Reed—a Saint Martins fashion student sleuthed by Lambert who ended up making some looks for Styles’s last tour—has spent a week making a broad-shouldered Smoking jacket with high-waisted, wide-leg pants that have become a Styles signature since he posed for Tim Walker for the cover of Fine Line wearing a Gucci pair—a silhouette that was repeated in the tour wardrobe. (“I liked the idea of having that uniform,” says Styles.) Reed’s version is worn with a hoopskirt draped in festoons of hot-pink satin that somehow suggests Deborah Kerr asking Yul Brynner’s King of Siam, “Shall we dance?”

Styles introduces me to the writer and eyewear designer Gemma Styles, “my sister from the same womb,” he says. She is also here for the fitting: The siblings plan to surprise their mother with the double portrait on these pages.

I ask her whether her brother had always been interested in clothes.

“My mum loved to dress us up,” she remembers. “I always hated it, and Harry was always quite into it. She did some really elaborate papier-mâché outfits: She made a giant mug and then painted an atlas on it, and that was Harry being ‘The World Cup.’ Harry also had a little dalmatian-dog outfit,” she adds, “a hand-me-down from our closest family friends. He would just spend an inordinate amount of time wearing that outfit. But then Mum dressed me up as Cruella de Vil. She was always looking for any opportunity!”

“As a kid I definitely liked fancy dress,” Styles says. There were school plays, the first of which cast him as Barney, a church mouse. “I was really young, and I wore tights for that,” he recalls. “I remember it was crazy to me that I was wearing a pair of tights. And that was maybe where it all kicked off!”

Acting has also remained a fundamental form of expression for Styles. His sister recalls that even on the eve of his life-changing X Factor audition, Styles could sing in public only in an assumed voice. “He used to do quite a good sort of Elvis warble,” she remembers. During the rehearsals in the family home, “he would sing in the bathroom because if it was him singing as himself, he just couldn’t have anyone looking at him! I love his voice now,” she adds. “I’m so glad that he makes music that I actually enjoy listening to.”

Styles cuts a cool figure in this black-white-and-red-all-over checked coat by JW Anderson.

Styles’s role-playing continued soon after 1D went on permanent hiatus in 2016, and he was cast in Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk, beating out dozens of professional actors for the role. “The good part was my character was a young soldier who didn’t really know what he was doing,” says Styles modestly. “The scale of the movie was so big that I was a tiny piece of the puzzle. It was definitely humbling. I just loved being outside of my comfort zone.”

His performance caught the eye of Olivia Wilde, who remembers that it “blew me away—the openness and commitment.” In turn, Styles loved Wilde’s directorial debut, Booksmart, and is “very honored” that she cast him in a leading role for her second feature, a thriller titled Don’t Worry Darling, which went into production this fall. Styles will play the husband to Florence Pugh in what Styles describes as “a 1950s utopia in the California desert.”

Wilde’s movie is costumed by Academy Award nominee Arianne Phillips. “She and I did a little victory dance when we heard that we officially had Harry in the film,” notes Wilde, “because we knew that he has a real appreciation for fashion and style. And this movie is incredibly stylistic. It’s very heightened and opulent, and I’m really grateful that he is so enthusiastic about that element of the process—some actors just don’t care.”

“I like playing dress-up in general,” Styles concurs, in a masterpiece of understatement: This is the man, after all, who cohosted the Met’s 2019 “Notes on Camp” gala attired in a nipple-freeing black organza blouse with a lace jabot, and pants so high-waisted that they cupped his pectorals. The ensemble, accessorized with the pearl-drop earring of a dandified Elizabethan courtier, was created for Styles by Gucci’s Alessandro Michele, whom he befriended in 2014. Styles, who has subsequently personified the brand as the face of the Gucci fragrance, finds Michele “fearless with his work and his imagination. It’s really inspiring to be around someone who works like that.”

The two first met in London over a cappuccino. “It was just a kind of PR appointment,” says Michele, “but something magical happened, and Harry is now a friend. He has the aura of an English rock-and-roll star—like a young Greek god with the attitude of James Dean and a little bit of Mick Jagger—but no one is sweeter. He is the image of a new era, of the way that a man can look.”

Styles credits his style trans­formation—from Jack Wills tracksuit-clad boy-band heartthrob to nonpareil fashionisto—to his meeting the droll young stylist Harry Lambert seven years ago. They hit it off at once and have conspired ever since, enjoying a playfully campy rapport and calling each other Sue and Susan as they parse the niceties of the scarlet lace Gucci man-bra that Michele has made for Vogue’s shoot, for instance, or a pair of Bode pants hand-painted with biographical images (Styles sent Emily Adams Bode images of his family, and a photograph he had found of David Hockney and Joni Mitchell. “The idea of those two being friends, to me, was really beautiful,” Styles explains).

“He just has fun with clothing, and that’s kind of where I’ve got it from,” says Styles of Lambert. “He doesn’t take it too seriously, which means I don’t take it too seriously.” The process has been evolutionary. At his first meeting with Lambert, the stylist proposed “a pair of flares, and I was like, ‘Flares? That’s fucking crazy,’  ” Styles remembers. Now he declares that “you can never be overdressed. There’s no such thing. The people that I looked up to in music—Prince and David Bowie and Elvis and Freddie Mercury and Elton John—they’re such showmen. As a kid it was completely mind-blowing. Now I’ll put on something that feels really flamboyant, and I don’t feel crazy wearing it. I think if you get something that you feel amazing in, it’s like a superhero outfit. Clothes are there to have fun with and experiment with and play with. What’s really exciting is that all of these lines are just kind of crumbling away. When you take away ‘There’s clothes for men and there’s clothes for women,’ once you remove any barriers, obviously you open up the arena in which you can play. I’ll go in shops sometimes, and I just find myself looking at the women’s clothes thinking they’re amazing. It’s like anything—anytime you’re putting barriers up in your own life, you’re just limiting yourself. There’s so much joy to be had in playing with clothes. I’ve never really thought too much about what it means—it just becomes this extended part of creating something.”

“He’s up for it,” confirms Lambert, who earlier this year, for instance, found a JW Anderson cardigan with the look of a Rubik’s Cube (“on sale at matches.com!”). Styles wore it, accessorized with his own pearl necklace, for a Today rehearsal in February and it went viral: His fans were soon knitting their own versions and posting the results on TikTok. Jonathan Anderson declared himself “so impressed and incredibly humbled by this trend” that he nimbly made the pattern available (complete with a YouTube tutorial) so that Styles’s fans could copy it for free. Meanwhile, London’s storied Victoria & Albert Museum has requested Styles’s original: an emblematic document of how people got creative during the COVID era. “It’s going to be in their permanent collection,” says Lambert exultantly. “Is that not sick? Is that not the most epic thing?”

“It’s pretty powerful and kind of extraordinary to see someone in his position redefining what it can mean to be a man with confidence,” says Olivia Wilde

“To me, he’s very modern,” says Wilde of Styles, “and I hope that this brand of confidence as a male that Harry has—truly devoid of any traces of toxic masculinity—is indicative of his generation and therefore the future of the world. I think he is in many ways championing that, spearheading that. It’s pretty powerful and kind of extraordinary to see someone in his position redefining what it can mean to be a man with confidence.”

“He’s really in touch with his feminine side because it’s something natural,” notes Michele. “And he’s a big inspiration to a younger generation—about how you can be in a totally free playground when you feel comfortable. I think that he’s a revolutionary.”

There are references aplenty in this look by Harris Reed, which features a Victoriana crinoline, 1980s shoulders, and pants of zoot-suit proportions.

STYLES’S confidence is on full display the day after the fitting, which finds us all on the beautiful Sussex dales. Over the summit of the hill, with its trees blown horizontal by the fierce winds, lies the English Channel. Even though it’s a two-hour drive from London, the fresh-faced Styles, who went to bed at 9 p.m., has arrived on set early: He is famously early for everything. The team is installed in a traditional flint-stone barn. The giant doors have been replaced by glass and frame a bucolic view of distant grazing sheep. “Look at that field!” says Styles. “How lucky are we? This is our office! Smell the roses!” Lambert starts to sing “Kumbaya, my Lord.”

Hairdresser Malcolm Edwards is setting Styles’s hair in a Victory roll with silver clips, and until it is combed out he resembles Kathryn Grayson with stubble. His fingers are freighted with rings, and “he has a new army of mini purses,” says Lambert, gesturing to an accessory table heaving with examples including a mini sky-blue Gucci Diana bag discreetly monogrammed HS. Michele has also made Styles a dress for the shoot that Tissot might have liked to paint—acres of ice-blue ruffles, black Valenciennes lace, and suivez-moi, jeune homme ribbons. Erelong, Styles is gamely racing up a hill in it, dodging sheep scat, thistles, and shards of chalk, and striking a pose for Mitchell that manages to make ruffles a compelling new masculine proposition, just as Mr. Fish’s frothy white cotton dress—equal parts Romantic poet and Greek presidential guard—did for Mick Jagger when he wore it for The Rolling Stones’ free performance in Hyde Park in 1969, or as the suburban-mom floral housedress did for Kurt Cobain as he defined the iconoclastic grunge aesthetic. Styles is mischievously singing ABBA’s “Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight)” to himself when Mitchell calls him outside to jump up and down on a trampoline in a Comme des Garçons buttoned wool kilt. “How did it look?” asks his sister when he comes in from the cold. “Divine,” says her brother in playful Lambert-speak.

As the wide sky is washed in pink, orange, and gray, like a Turner sunset, and Mitchell calls it a successful day, Styles is playing “Cherry” from Fine Line on his Fender acoustic on the hilltop. “He does his own stunts,” says his sister, laughing. The impromptu set is greeted with applause. “Thank you, Antwerp!” says Styles playfully, bowing to the crowd. “Thank you, fashion!”

[hlupdate]

THE MEN’S BATHING POND in London’s Hampstead Heath at daybreak on a gloomy September morning seemed such an unlikely locale for my first meeting with Harry Styles, music’s legendarily charm-heavy style czar, that I wondered perhaps if something had been lost in translation.

But then there is Styles, cheerily gung ho, hidden behind a festive yellow bandana mask and a sweatshirt of his own design, surprisingly printed with three portraits of his intellectual pinup, the author Alain de Botton. “I love his writing,” says Styles. “I just think he’s brilliant. I saw him give a talk about the keys to happiness, and how one of the keys is living among friends, and how real friendship stems from being vulnerable with someone.”

In turn, de Botton’s 2016 novel The Course of Love taught Styles that “when it comes to relationships, you just expect yourself to be good at it…[but] being in a real relationship with someone is a skill,” one that Styles himself has often had to hone in the unforgiving klieg light of public attention, and in the company of such high-profile paramours as Taylor Swift and—well, Styles is too much of a gentleman to name names.

That sweatshirt and the Columbia Records tracksuit bottoms are removed in the quaint wooden open-air changing room, with its Swallows and Amazons vibe. A handful of intrepid fellow patrons in various states of undress are blissfully unaware of the 26-year-old supernova in their midst, although I must admit I’m finding it rather difficult to take my eyes off him, try as I might. Styles has been on a six-day juice cleanse in readiness for Vogue’s photographer Tyler Mitchell. He practices Pilates (“I’ve got very tight hamstrings—trying to get those open”) and meditates twice a day. “It has changed my life,” he avers, “but it’s so subtle. It’s helped me just be more present. I feel like I’m able to enjoy the things that are happening right in front of me, even if it’s food or it’s coffee or it’s being with a friend—or a swim in a really cold pond!” Styles also feels that his meditation practices have helped him through the tumult of 2020: “Meditation just brings a stillness that has been really beneficial, I think, for my mental health.”

Styles has been a pescatarian for three years, inspired by the vegan food that several members of his current band prepared on tour. “My body definitely feels better for it,” he says. His shapely torso is prettily inscribed with the tattoos of a Victorian sailor—a rose, a galleon, a mermaid, an anchor, and a palm tree among them, and, straddling his clavicle, the dates 1967 and 1957 (the respective birth years of his mother and father). Frankly, I rather wish I’d packed a beach muumuu.

We take the piratical gangplank that juts into the water and dive in. Let me tell you, this is not the Aegean. The glacial water is a cloudy phlegm green beneath the surface, and clammy reeds slap one’s ankles. Styles, who admits he will try any fad, has recently had a couple of cryotherapy sessions and is evidently less susceptible to the cold. By the time we have swum a full circuit, however, body temperatures have adjusted, and the ice, you might say, has been broken. Duly invigorated, we are ready to face the day. Styles has thoughtfully brought a canister of coffee and some bottles of water in his backpack, and we sit at either end of a park bench for a socially distanced chat.

It seems that he has had a productive year. At the onset of lockdown, Styles found himself in his second home, in the canyons of Los Angeles. After a few days on his own, however, he moved in with a pod of three friends (and subsequently with two band members, Mitch Rowland and Sarah Jones). They “would put names in a hat and plan the week out,” Styles explains. “If you were Monday, you would choose the movie, dinner, and the activity for that day. I like to make soups, and there was a big array of movies; we went all over the board,” from Goodfellas to Clueless. The experience, says Styles, “has been a really good lesson in what makes me happy now. It’s such a good example of living in the moment. I honestly just like being around my friends,” he adds. “That’s been my biggest takeaway. Just being on my own the whole time, I would have been miserable.”

Styles is big on friendship groups and considers his former and legendarily hysteria-inducing boy band, One Direction, to have been one of them. “I think the typical thing is to come out of a band like that and almost feel like you have to apologize for being in it,” says Styles. “But I loved my time in it. It was all new to me, and I was trying to learn as much as I could. I wanted to soak it in…. I think that’s probably why I like traveling now—soaking stuff up.” In a post-COVID future, he is contemplating a temporary move to Tokyo, explaining that “there’s a respect and a stillness, a quietness that I really loved every time I’ve been there.”

In 1D, Styles was making music whenever he could. “After a show you’d go in a hotel room and put down some vocals,” he recalls. As a result, his first solo album, 2017’s Harry Styles, “was when I really fell in love with being in the studio,” he says. “I loved it as much as touring.” Today he favors isolating with his core group of collaborators, “our little bubble”—Rowland, Kid Harpoon (né Tom Hull), and Tyler Johnson. “A safe space,” as he describes it.

In the music he has been working on in 2020, Styles wants to capture the experimental spirit that informed his second album, last year’s Fine Line. With his debut album, “I was very much finding out what my sound was as a solo artist,” he says. “I can see all the places where it almost felt like I was bowling with the bumpers up. I think with the second album I let go of the fear of getting it wrong and…it was really joyous and really free. I think with music it’s so important to evolve—and that extends to clothes and videos and all that stuff. That’s why you look back at David Bowie with Ziggy Stardust or the Beatles and their different eras—that fearlessness is super inspiring.”

The seismic changes of 2020—including the Black Lives Matter uprising around racial justice—has also provided Styles with an opportunity for personal growth. “I think it’s a time for opening up and learning and listening,” he says. “I’ve been trying to read and educate myself so that in 20 years I’m still doing the right things and taking the right steps. I believe in karma, and I think it’s just a time right now where we could use a little more kindness and empathy and patience with people, be a little more prepared to listen and grow.”

Meanwhile, Styles’s euphoric single “Watermelon Sugar” became something of an escapist anthem for this dystopian summer of 2020. The video, featuring Styles (dressed in ’70s-­flavored Gucci and Bode) cavorting with a pack of beach-babe girls and boys, was shot in January, before lockdown rules came into play. By the time it was ready to be released in May, a poignant epigraph had been added: “This video is dedicated to touching.”

Styles is looking forward to touring again, when “it’s safe for everyone,” because, as he notes, “being up against people is part of the whole thing. You can’t really re-create it in any way.” But it hasn’t always been so. Early in his career, Styles was so stricken with stage fright that he regularly threw up preperformance. “I just always thought I was going to mess up or something,” he remembers. “But I’ve felt really lucky to have a group of incredibly generous fans. They’re generous emotionally—and when they come to the show, they give so much that it creates this atmosphere that I’ve always found so loving and accepting.”

THIS SUMMER, when it was safe enough to travel, Styles returned to his London home, which is where he suggests we head now, setting off in his modish Primrose Yellow ’73 Jaguar that smells of gasoline and leatherette. “Me and my dad have always bonded over cars,” Styles explains. “I never thought I’d be someone who just went out for a leisurely drive, purely for enjoyment.” On sleepless jet-lagged nights he’ll drive through London’s quiet streets, seeing neighborhoods in a new way. “I find it quite relaxing,” he says.

Over the summer Styles took a road trip with his artist friend Tomo Campbell through France and Italy,setting off at four in the morning and spending the night in Geneva, where they jumped in the lake “to wake ourselves up.” (I see a pattern emerging.) At the end of the trip Styles drove home alone, accompanied by an upbeat playlist that included “Aretha Franklin, Parliament, and a lot of Stevie Wonder. It was really fun for me,” he says. “I don’t travel like that a lot. I’m usually in such a rush, but there was a stillness to it. I love the feeling of nobody knowing where I am, that kind of escape...and freedom.”

GROWING UP in a village in the North of England, Styles thought of London as a world apart: “It truly felt like a different country.” At a wide-eyed 16, he came down to the teeming metropolis after his mother entered him on the U.K. talent-search show The X Factor. “I went to the audition to find out if I could sing,” Styles recalls, “or if my mum was just being nice to me.” Styles was eliminated but subsequently brought back with other contestants—Niall Horan, Liam Payne, Louis Tomlinson, and Zayn Malik—to form a boy band that was named (on Styles’s suggestion) One Direction. The wily X Factor creator and judge, Simon Cowell, soon signed them to his label Syco Records, and the rest is history: 1D’s first four albums, supported by four world tours from 2011 to 2015, debuted at number one on the U.S. Billboardcharts, and the band has sold 70 million records to date. At 18, Styles bought the London house he now calls home. “I was going to do two weeks’ work to it,” he remembers, “but when I came back there was no second floor,” so he moved in with adult friends who lived nearby till the renovation was complete. “Eighteen months,” he deadpans. “I’ve always seen that period as pretty pivotal for me, as there’s that moment at the party where it’s getting late, and half of the people would go upstairs to do drugs, and the other people go home. I was like, ‘I don’t really know this friend’s wife, so I’m not going to get all messy and then go home.’ I had to behave a bit, at a time where everything else about my life felt I didn’t have to behave really. I’ve been lucky to always feel I have this family unit somewhere.”

When Styles’s London renovation was finally done, “I went in for the first time and I cried,” he recalls. “Because I just felt like I had somewhere. L.A. feels like holiday, but this feels like home.”

“There’s so much joy to be had in playing with clothes. I’ve never thought too much about what it means—it just becomes this extended part of creating something”

Behind its pink door, Styles’s house has all the trappings of rock stardom—there’s a man cave filled with guitars, a Sex Pistols Never Mind the Bollocks poster (a moving-in gift from his decorator), a Stevie Nicksalbum cover. Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams” was one of the first songs he knew the words to—“My parents were big fans”—and he and Nicks have formed something of a mutual-admiration society. At the beginning of lockdown, Nicks tweeted to her fans that she was taking inspiration from Fine Line: “Way to go, H,” she wrote. “It is your Rumours.” “She’s always there for you,” said Styles when he inducted Nicks into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2019. “She knows what you need—advice, a little wisdom, a blouse, a shawl; she’s got you covered.”

Styles makes us some tea in the light-filled kitchen and then wanders into the convivial living room, where he strikes an insouciant pose on the chesterfield sofa, upholstered in a turquoise velvet that perhaps not entirely coincidentally sets off his eyes. Styles admits that his lockdown lewk was “sweatpants, constantly,” and he is relishing the opportunity to dress up again. He doesn’t have to wait long: The following day, under the eaves of a Victorian mansion in Notting Hill, I arrive in the middle of fittings for Vogue’s shoot and discover Styles in his Y-fronts, patiently waiting to try on looks for fashion editor Camilla Nickerson and photographer Tyler Mitchell. Styles’s personal stylist, Harry Lambert, wearing a pearl necklace and his nails colored in various shades of green varnish, à la Sally Bowles, is providing helpful backup (Britain’s Rule of Six hasn’t yet been imposed).

Styles, who has thoughtfully brought me a copy of de Botton’s 2006 book The Architecture of Happiness,is instinctively and almost quaintly polite, in an old-fashioned, holding-open-doors and not-mentioning-lovers-by-name sort of way. He is astounded to discover that the Atlanta-born Mitchell has yet to experience a traditional British Sunday roast dinner. Assuring him that “it’s basically like Thanksgiving every Sunday,” Styles gives Mitchell the details of his favorite London restaurants in which to enjoy one. “It’s a good thing to be nice,” Mitchell tells me after a morning in Styles’s company.

MITCHELL has Lionel Wendt’s languorously homoerotic 1930s portraits of young Sri Lankan men on his mood board. Nickerson is thinking of Irving Penn’s legendary fall 1950 Paris haute couture collections sitting, where he photographed midcentury supermodels, including his wife, Lisa Fonssagrives, in high-style Dior and Balenciaga creations. Styles is up for all of it, and so, it would seem, is the menswear landscape of 2020: Jonathan Anderson has produced a trapeze coat anchored with a chunky gold martingale; John Galliano at Maison Margiela has fashioned a khaki trench with a portrait neckline in layers of colored tulle; and Harris Reed—a Saint Martins fashion student sleuthed by Lambert who ended up making some looks for Styles’s last tour—has spent a week making a broad-shouldered Smoking jacket with high-waisted, wide-leg pants that have become a Styles signature since he posed for Tim Walker for the cover of Fine Line wearing a Gucci pair—a silhouette that was repeated in the tour wardrobe. (“I liked the idea of having that uniform,” says Styles.) Reed’s version is worn with a hoopskirt draped in festoons of hot-pink satin that somehow suggests Deborah Kerr asking Yul Brynner’s King of Siam, “Shall we dance?”

Styles introduces me to the writer and eyewear designer Gemma Styles, “my sister from the same womb,” he says. She is also here for the fitting: The siblings plan to surprise their mother with the double portrait on these pages.

I ask her whether her brother had always been interested in clothes.

“My mum loved to dress us up,” she remembers. “I always hated it, and Harry was always quite into it. She did some really elaborate papier-mâché outfits: She made a giant mug and then painted an atlas on it, and that was Harry being ‘The World Cup.’ Harry also had a little dalmatian-dog outfit,” she adds, “a hand-me-down from our closest family friends. He would just spend an inordinate amount of time wearing that outfit. But then Mum dressed me up as Cruella de Vil. She was always looking for any opportunity!”

“As a kid I definitely liked fancy dress,” Styles says. There were school plays, the first of which cast him as Barney, a church mouse. “I was really young, and I wore tights for that,” he recalls. “I remember it was crazy to me that I was wearing a pair of tights. And that was maybe where it all kicked off!”

Acting has also remained a fundamental form of expression for Styles. His sister recalls that even on the eve of his life-changing X Factor audition, Styles could sing in public only in an assumed voice. “He used to do quite a good sort of Elvis warble,” she remembers. During the rehearsals in the family home, “he would sing in the bathroom because if it was him singing as himself, he just couldn’t have anyone looking at him! I love his voice now,” she adds. “I’m so glad that he makes music that I actually enjoy listening to.”

Styles’s role-playing continued soon after 1D went on permanent hiatus in 2016, and he was cast in Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk, beating out dozens of professional actors for the role. “The good part was my character was a young soldier who didn’t really know what he was doing,” says Styles modestly. “The scale of the movie was so big that I was a tiny piece of the puzzle. It was definitely humbling. I just loved being outside of my comfort zone.”

His performance caught the eye of Olivia Wilde, who remembers that it “blew me away—the openness and commitment.” In turn, Styles loved Wilde’s directorial debut, Booksmart, and is “very honored” that she cast him in a leading role for her second feature, a thriller titled Don’t Worry Darling, which went into production this fall. Styles will play the husband to Florence Pugh in what Styles describes as “a 1950s utopia in the California desert.”

Wilde’s movie is costumed by Academy Award nominee Arianne Phillips. “She and I did a little victory dance when we heard that we officially had Harry in the film,” notes Wilde, “because we knew that he has a real appreciation for fashion and style. And this movie is incredibly stylistic. It’s very heightened and opulent, and I’m really grateful that he is so enthusiastic about that element of the process—some actors just don’t care.”

“I like playing dress-up in general,” Styles concurs, in a masterpiece of understatement: This is the man, after all, who cohosted the Met’s 2019 “Notes on Camp” gala attired in a nipple-freeing black organza blouse with a lace jabot, and pants so high-waisted that they cupped his pectorals. The ensemble, accessorized with the pearl-drop earring of a dandified Elizabethan courtier, was created for Styles by Gucci’s Alessandro Michele, whom he befriended in 2014. Styles, who has subsequently personified the brand as the face of the Gucci fragrance, finds Michele “fearless with his work and his imagination. It’s really inspiring to be around someone who works like that.”

The two first met in London over a cappuccino. “It was just a kind of PR appointment,” says Michele, “but something magical happened, and Harry is now a friend. He has the aura of an English rock-and-roll star—like a young Greek god with the attitude of James Dean and a little bit of Mick Jagger—but no one is sweeter. He is the image of a new era, of the way that a man can look.”

Styles credits his style trans­formation—from Jack Wills tracksuit-clad boy-band heartthrob to nonpareil fashionisto—to his meeting the droll young stylist Harry Lambert seven years ago. They hit it off at once and have conspired ever since, enjoying a playfully campy rapport and calling each other Sue and Susan as they parse the niceties of the scarlet lace Gucci man-bra that Michele has made for Vogue’s shoot, for instance, or a pair of Bode pants hand-painted with biographical images (Styles sent Emily Adams Bode images of his family, and a photograph he had found of David Hockney and Joni Mitchell. “The idea of those two being friends, to me, was really beautiful,” Styles explains).

“He just has fun with clothing, and that’s kind of where I’ve got it from,” says Styles of Lambert. “He doesn’t take it too seriously, which means I don’t take it too seriously.” The process has been evolutionary. At his first meeting with Lambert, the stylist proposed “a pair of flares, and I was like, ‘Flares? That’s fucking crazy,’  ” Styles remembers. Now he declares that “you can never be overdressed. There’s no such thing. The people that I looked up to in music—Prince and David Bowie and Elvis and Freddie Mercury and Elton John—they’re such showmen. As a kid it was completely mind-blowing. Now I’ll put on something that feels really flamboyant, and I don’t feel crazy wearing it. I think if you get something that you feel amazing in, it’s like a superhero outfit. Clothes are there to have fun with and experiment with and play with. What’s really exciting is that all of these lines are just kind of crumbling away. When you take away ‘There’s clothes for men and there’s clothes for women,’ once you remove any barriers, obviously you open up the arena in which you can play. I’ll go in shops sometimes, and I just find myself looking at the women’s clothes thinking they’re amazing. It’s like anything—anytime you’re putting barriers up in your own life, you’re just limiting yourself. There’s so much joy to be had in playing with clothes. I’ve never really thought too much about what it means—it just becomes this extended part of creating something.”

“He’s up for it,” confirms Lambert, who earlier this year, for instance, found a JW Anderson cardigan with the look of a Rubik’s Cube (“on sale at matches.com!”). Styles wore it, accessorized with his own pearl necklace, for a Today rehearsal in February and it went viral: His fans were soon knitting their own versions and posting the results on TikTok. Jonathan Anderson declared himself “so impressed and incredibly humbled by this trend” that he nimbly made the pattern available (complete with a YouTube tutorial) so that Styles’s fans could copy it for free. Meanwhile, London’s storied Victoria & Albert Museum has requested Styles’s original: an emblematic document of how people got creative during the COVID era. “It’s going to be in their permanent collection,” says Lambert exultantly. “Is that not sick? Is that not the most epic thing?”

“It’s pretty powerful and kind of extraordinary to see someone in his position redefining what it can mean to be a man with confidence,” says Olivia Wilde

“To me, he’s very modern,” says Wilde of Styles, “and I hope that this brand of confidence as a male that Harry has—truly devoid of any traces of toxic masculinity—is indicative of his generation and therefore the future of the world. I think he is in many ways championing that, spearheading that. It’s pretty powerful and kind of extraordinary to see someone in his position redefining what it can mean to be a man with confidence.”

“He’s really in touch with his feminine side because it’s something natural,” notes Michele. “And he’s a big inspiration to a younger generation—about how you can be in a totally free playground when you feel comfortable. I think that he’s a revolutionary.”

STYLES’S confidence is on full display the day after the fitting, which finds us all on the beautiful Sussex dales. Over the summit of the hill, with its trees blown horizontal by the fierce winds, lies the English Channel. Even though it’s a two-hour drive from London, the fresh-faced Styles, who went to bed at 9 p.m., has arrived on set early: He is famously early for everything. The team is installed in a traditional flint-stone barn. The giant doors have been replaced by glass and frame a bucolic view of distant grazing sheep. “Look at that field!” says Styles. “How lucky are we? This is our office! Smell the roses!” Lambert starts to sing “Kumbaya, my Lord.”

Hairdresser Malcolm Edwards is setting Styles’s hair in a Victory roll with silver clips, and until it is combed out he resembles Kathryn Grayson with stubble. His fingers are freighted with rings, and “he has a new army of mini purses,” says Lambert, gesturing to an accessory table heaving with examples including a mini sky-blue Gucci Diana bag discreetly monogrammed HS. Michele has also made Styles a dress for the shoot that Tissot might have liked to paint—acres of ice-blue ruffles, black Valenciennes lace, and suivez-moi, jeune homme ribbons. Erelong, Styles is gamely racing up a hill in it, dodging sheep scat, thistles, and shards of chalk, and striking a pose for Mitchell that manages to make ruffles a compelling new masculine proposition, just as Mr. Fish’s frothy white cotton dress—equal parts Romantic poet and Greek presidential guard—did for Mick Jagger when he wore it for The Rolling Stones’ free performance in Hyde Park in 1969, or as the suburban-mom floral housedress did for Kurt Cobain as he defined the iconoclastic grunge aesthetic. Styles is mischievously singing ABBA’s “Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight)” to himself when Mitchell calls him outside to jump up and down on a trampoline in a Comme des Garçons buttoned wool kilt. “How did it look?” asks his sister when he comes in from the cold. “Divine,” says her brother in playful Lambert-speak.

As the wide sky is washed in pink, orange, and gray, like a Turner sunset, and Mitchell calls it a successful day, Styles is playing “Cherry” from Fine Line on his Fender acoustic on the hilltop. “He does his own stunts,” says his sister, laughing. The impromptu set is greeted with applause. “Thank you, Antwerp!” says Styles playfully, bowing to the crowd. “Thank you, fashion!”

[transparenttriumphzombie]

Harry Styles On Vogue

Source:

 https://www.vogue.com/article/harry-styles-cover-december-2020/amp?__twitter_impression=true

From Vogue MAGAZINE

Playtime With Harry Styles

THE MEN’S BATHING POND in London’s Hampstead Heath at daybreak on a gloomy September morning seemed such an unlikely locale for my first meeting with Harry Styles, music’s legendarily charm-heavy style czar, that I wondered perhaps if something had been lost in translation.

But then there is Styles, cheerily gung ho, hidden behind a festive yellow bandana mask and a sweatshirt of his own design, surprisingly printed with three portraits of his intellectual pinup, the author Alain de Botton. “I love his writing,” says Styles. “I just think he’s brilliant. I saw him give a talk about the keys to happiness, and how one of the keys is living among friends, and how real friendship stems from being vulnerable with someone.”

In turn, de Botton’s 2016 novel The Course of Love taught Styles that “when it comes to relationships, you just expect yourself to be good at it…[but] being in a real relationship with someone is a skill,” one that Styles himself has often had to hone in the unforgiving klieg light of public attention, and in the company of such high-profile paramours as Taylor Swift and—well, Styles is too much of a gentleman to name names.

That sweatshirt and the Columbia Records tracksuit bottoms are removed in the quaint wooden open-air changing room, with its Swallows and Amazons vibe. A handful of intrepid fellow patrons in various states of undress are blissfully unaware of the 26-year-old supernova in their midst, although I must admit I’m finding it rather difficult to take my eyes off him, try as I might. Styles has been on a six-day juice cleanse in readiness for Vogue’s photographer Tyler Mitchell. He practices Pilates (“I’ve got very tight hamstrings—trying to get those open”) and meditates twice a day. “It has changed my life,” he avers, “but it’s so subtle. It’s helped me just be more present. I feel like I’m able to enjoy the things that are happening right in front of me, even if it’s food or it’s coffee or it’s being with a friend—or a swim in a really cold pond!” Styles also feels that his meditation practices have helped him through the tumult of 2020: “Meditation just brings a stillness that has been really beneficial, I think, for my mental health.”

Styles has been a pescatarian for three years, inspired by the vegan food that several members of his current band prepared on tour. “My body definitely feels better for it,” he says. His shapely torso is prettily inscribed with the tattoos of a Victorian sailor—a rose, a galleon, a mermaid, an anchor, and a palm tree among them, and, straddling his clavicle, the dates 1967 and 1957 (the respective birth years of his mother and father). Frankly, I rather wish I’d packed a beach muumuu.

We take the piratical gangplank that juts into the water and dive in. Let me tell you, this is not the Aegean. The glacial water is a cloudy phlegm green beneath the surface, and clammy reeds slap one’s ankles. Styles, who admits he will try any fad, has recently had a couple of cryotherapy sessions and is evidently less susceptible to the cold. By the time we have swum a full circuit, however, body temperatures have adjusted, and the ice, you might say, has been broken. Duly invigorated, we are ready to face the day. Styles has thoughtfully brought a canister of coffee and some bottles of water in his backpack, and we sit at either end of a park bench for a socially distanced chat.

It seems that he has had a productive year. At the onset of lockdown, Styles found himself in his second home, in the canyons of Los Angeles. After a few days on his own, however, he moved in with a pod of three friends (and subsequently with two band members, Mitch Rowland and Sarah Jones). They “would put names in a hat and plan the week out,” Styles explains. “If you were Monday, you would choose the movie, dinner, and the activity for that day. I like to make soups, and there was a big array of movies; we went all over the board,” from Goodfellas to Clueless. The experience, says Styles, “has been a really good lesson in what makes me happy now. It’s such a good example of living in the moment. I honestly just like being around my friends,” he adds. “That’s been my biggest takeaway. Just being on my own the whole time, I would have been miserable.”

Styles is big on friendship groups and considers his former and legendarily hysteria-inducing boy band, One Direction, to have been one of them. “I think the typical thing is to come out of a band like that and almost feel like you have to apologize for being in it,” says Styles. “But I loved my time in it. It was all new to me, and I was trying to learn as much as I could. I wanted to soak it in…. I think that’s probably why I like traveling now—soaking stuff up.” In a post-COVID future, he is contemplating a temporary move to Tokyo, explaining that “there’s a respect and a stillness, a quietness that I really loved every time I’ve been there.”

In the music he has been working on in 2020, Styles wants to capture the experimental spirit that informed his second album, last year’s Fine Line. With his debut album, “I was very much finding out what my sound was as a solo artist,” he says. “I can see all the places where it almost felt like I was bowling with the bumpers up. I think with the second album I let go of the fear of getting it wrong and…it was really joyous and really free. I think with music it’s so important to evolve—and that extends to clothes and videos and all that stuff. That’s why you look back at David Bowie with Ziggy Stardust or the Beatles and their different eras—that fearlessness is super inspiring.”

The seismic changes of 2020—including the Black Lives Matter uprising around racial justice—has also provided Styles with an opportunity for personal growth. “I think it’s a time for opening up and learning and listening,” he says. “I’ve been trying to read and educate myself so that in 20 years I’m still doing the right things and taking the right steps. I believe in karma, and I think it’s just a time right now where we could use a little more kindness and empathy and patience with people, be a little more prepared to listen and grow.”

Meanwhile, Styles’s euphoric single “Watermelon Sugar” became something of an escapist anthem for this dystopian summer of 2020. The video, featuring Styles (dressed in ’70s-­flavored Gucci and Bode) cavorting with a pack of beach-babe girls and boys, was shot in January, before lockdown rules came into play. By the time it was ready to be released in May, a poignant epigraph had been added: “This video is dedicated to touching.”

Styles is looking forward to touring again, when “it’s safe for everyone,” because, as he notes, “being up against people is part of the whole thing. You can’t really re-create it in any way.” But it hasn’t always been so. Early in his career, Styles was so stricken with stage fright that he regularly threw up preperformance. “I just always thought I was going to mess up or something,” he remembers. “But I’ve felt really lucky to have a group of incredibly generous fans. They’re generous emotionally—and when they come to the show, they give so much that it creates this atmosphere that I’ve always found so loving and accepting.”

THIS SUMMER, when it was safe enough to travel, Styles returned to his London home, which is where he suggests we head now, setting off in his modish Primrose Yellow ’73 Jaguar that smells of gasoline and leatherette. “Me and my dad have always bonded over cars,” Styles explains. “I never thought I’d be someone who just went out for a leisurely drive, purely for enjoyment.” On sleepless jet-lagged nights he’ll drive through London’s quiet streets, seeing neighborhoods in a new way. “I find it quite relaxing,” he says.

Over the summer Styles took a road trip with his artist friend Tomo Campbell through France and Italy, setting off at four in the morning and spending the night in Geneva, where they jumped in the lake “to wake ourselves up.” (I see a pattern emerging.) At the end of the trip Styles drove home alone, accompanied by an upbeat playlist that included “Aretha Franklin, Parliament, and a lot of Stevie Wonder. It was really fun for me,” he says. “I don’t travel like that a lot. I’m usually in such a rush, but there was a stillness to it. I love the feeling of nobody knowing where I am, that kind of escape...and freedom.”

GROWING UP in a village in the North of England, Styles thought of London as a world apart: “It truly felt like a different country.” At a wide-eyed 16, he came down to the teeming metropolis after his mother entered him on the U.K. talent-search show The X Factor. “I went to the audition to find out if I could sing,” Styles recalls, “or if my mum was just being nice to me.” Styles was eliminated but subsequently brought back with other contestants—Niall Horan, Liam Payne, Louis Tomlinson, and Zayn Malik—to form a boy band that was named (on Styles’s suggestion) One Direction. The wily X Factor creator and judge, Simon Cowell, soon signed them to his label Syco Records, and the rest is history: 1D’s first four albums, supported by four world tours from 2011 to 2015, debuted at number one on the U.S. Billboard charts, and the band has sold 70 million records to date. At 18, Styles bought the London house he now calls home. “I was going to do two weeks’ work to it,” he remembers, “but when I came back there was no second floor,” so he moved in with adult friends who lived nearby till the renovation was complete. “Eighteen months,” he deadpans. “I’ve always seen that period as pretty pivotal for me, as there’s that moment at the party where it’s getting late, and half of the people would go upstairs to do drugs, and the other people go home. I was like, ‘I don’t really know this friend’s wife, so I’m not going to get all messy and then go home.’ I had to behave a bit, at a time where everything else about my life felt I didn’t have to behave really. I’ve been lucky to always feel I have this family unit somewhere.”

When Styles’s London renovation was finally done, “I went in for the first time and I cried,” he recalls. “Because I just felt like I had somewhere. L.A. feels like holiday, but this feels like home.”

“There’s so much joy to be had in playing with clothes. I’ve never thought too much about what it means—it just becomes this extended part of creating something”

Behind its pink door, Styles’s house has all the trappings of rock stardom—there’s a man cave filled with guitars, a Sex Pistols Never Mind the Bollocks poster (a moving-in gift from his decorator), a Stevie Nicks album cover. Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams” was one of the first songs he knew the words to—“My parents were big fans”—and he and Nicks have formed something of a mutual-admiration society. At the beginning of lockdown, Nicks tweeted to her fans that she was taking inspiration from Fine Line: “Way to go, H,” she wrote. “It is your Rumours.” “She’s always there for you,” said Styles when he inducted Nicks into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2019. “She knows what you need—advice, a little wisdom, a blouse, a shawl; she’s got you covered.”

Styles makes us some tea in the light-filled kitchen and then wanders into the convivial living room, where he strikes an insouciant pose on the chesterfield sofa, upholstered in a turquoise velvet that perhaps not entirely coincidentally sets off his eyes. Styles admits that his lockdown lewk was “sweatpants, constantly,” and he is relishing the opportunity to dress up again. He doesn’t have to wait long: The following day, under the eaves of a Victorian mansion in Notting Hill, I arrive in the middle of fittings for Vogue’s shoot and discover Styles in his Y-fronts, patiently waiting to try on looks for fashion editor Camilla Nickerson and photographer Tyler Mitchell. Styles’s personal stylist, Harry Lambert, wearing a pearl necklace and his nails colored in various shades of green varnish, à la Sally Bowles, is providing helpful backup (Britain’s Rule of Six hasn’t yet been imposed).

Styles, who has thoughtfully brought me a copy of de Botton’s 2006 book The Architecture of Happiness, is instinctively and almost quaintly polite, in an old-fashioned, holding-open-doors and not-mentioning-lovers-by-name sort of way. He is astounded to discover that the Atlanta-born Mitchell has yet to experience a traditional British Sunday roast dinner. Assuring him that “it’s basically like Thanksgiving every Sunday,” Styles gives Mitchell the details of his favorite London restaurants in which to enjoy one. “It’s a good thing to be nice,” Mitchell tells me after a morning in Styles’s company.

MITCHELL has Lionel Wendt’s languorously homoerotic 1930s portraits of young Sri Lankan men on his mood board. Nickerson is thinking of Irving Penn’s legendary fall 1950 Paris haute couture collections sitting, where he photographed midcentury supermodels, including his wife, Lisa Fonssagrives, in high-style Dior and Balenciaga creations. Styles is up for all of it, and so, it would seem, is the menswear landscape of 2020: Jonathan Anderson has produced a trapeze coat anchored with a chunky gold martingale; John Galliano at Maison Margiela has fashioned a khaki trench with a portrait neckline in layers of colored tulle; and Harris Reed—a Saint Martins fashion student sleuthed by Lambert who ended up making some looks for Styles’s last tour—has spent a week making a broad-shouldered Smoking jacket with high-waisted, wide-leg pants that have become a Styles signature since he posed for Tim Walker for the cover of Fine Line wearing a Gucci pair—a silhouette that was repeated in the tour wardrobe. (“I liked the idea of having that uniform,” says Styles.) Reed’s version is worn with a hoopskirt draped in festoons of hot-pink satin that somehow suggests Deborah Kerr asking Yul Brynner’s King of Siam, “Shall we dance?”

Styles introduces me to the writer and eyewear designer Gemma Styles, “my sister from the same womb,” he says. She is also here for the fitting: The siblings plan to surprise their mother with the double portrait on these pages.

I ask her whether her brother had always been interested in clothes.

“My mum loved to dress us up,” she remembers. “I always hated it, and Harry was always quite into it. She did some really elaborate papier-mâché outfits: She made a giant mug and then painted an atlas on it, and that was Harry being ‘The World Cup.’ Harry also had a little dalmatian-dog outfit,” she adds, “a hand-me-down from our closest family friends. He would just spend an inordinate amount of time wearing that outfit. But then Mum dressed me up as Cruella de Vil. She was always looking for any opportunity!”

“As a kid I definitely liked fancy dress,” Styles says. There were school plays, the first of which cast him as Barney, a church mouse. “I was really young, and I wore tights for that,” he recalls. “I remember it was crazy to me that I was wearing a pair of tights. And that was maybe where it all kicked off!”

Acting has also remained a fundamental form of expression for Styles. His sister recalls that even on the eve of his life-changing X Factor audition, Styles could sing in public only in an assumed voice. “He used to do quite a good sort of Elvis warble,” she remembers. During the rehearsals in the family home, “he would sing in the bathroom because if it was him singing as himself, he just couldn’t have anyone looking at him! I love his voice now,” she adds. “I’m so glad that he makes music that I actually enjoy listening to.”

Styles’s role-playing continued soon after 1D went on permanent hiatus in 2016, and he was cast in Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk, beating out dozens of professional actors for the role. “The good part was my character was a young soldier who didn’t really know what he was doing,” says Styles modestly. “The scale of the movie was so big that I was a tiny piece of the puzzle. It was definitely humbling. I just loved being outside of my comfort zone.”

His performance caught the eye of Olivia Wilde, who remembers that it “blew me away—the openness and commitment.” In turn, Styles loved Wilde’s directorial debut, Booksmart, and is “very honored” that she cast him in a leading role for her second feature, a thriller titled Don’t Worry Darling, which went into production this fall. Styles will play the husband to Florence Pugh in what Styles describes as “a 1950s utopia in the California desert.”

Wilde’s movie is costumed by Academy Award nominee Arianne Phillips. “She and I did a little victory dance when we heard that we officially had Harry in the film,” notes Wilde, “because we knew that he has a real appreciation for fashion and style. And this movie is incredibly stylistic. It’s very heightened and opulent, and I’m really grateful that he is so enthusiastic about that element of the process—some actors just don’t care.”

“I like playing dress-up in general,” Styles concurs, in a masterpiece of understatement: This is the man, after all, who cohosted the Met’s 2019 “Notes on Camp” gala attired in a nipple-freeing black organza blouse with a lace jabot, and pants so high-waisted that they cupped his pectorals. The ensemble, accessorized with the pearl-drop earring of a dandified Elizabethan courtier, was created for Styles by Gucci’s Alessandro Michele, whom he befriended in 2014. Styles, who has subsequently personified the brand as the face of the Gucci fragrance, finds Michele “fearless with his work and his imagination. It’s really inspiring to be around someone who works like that.”

The two first met in London over a cappuccino. “It was just a kind of PR appointment,” says Michele, “but something magical happened, and Harry is now a friend. He has the aura of an English rock-and-roll star—like a young Greek god with the attitude of James Dean and a little bit of Mick Jagger—but no one is sweeter. He is the image of a new era, of the way that a man can look.”

Styles credits his style trans­formation—from Jack Wills tracksuit-clad boy-band heartthrob to nonpareil fashionisto—to his meeting the droll young stylist Harry Lambert seven years ago. They hit it off at once and have conspired ever since, enjoying a playfully campy rapport and calling each other Sue and Susan as they parse the niceties of the scarlet lace Gucci man-bra that Michele has made for Vogue’s shoot, for instance, or a pair of Bode pants hand-painted with biographical images (Styles sent Emily Adams Bode images of his family, and a photograph he had found of David Hockney and Joni Mitchell. “The idea of those two being friends, to me, was really beautiful,” Styles explains).

“He just has fun with clothing, and that’s kind of where I’ve got it from,” says Styles of Lambert. “He doesn’t take it too seriously, which means I don’t take it too seriously.” The process has been evolutionary. At his first meeting with Lambert, the stylist proposed “a pair of flares, and I was like, ‘Flares? That’s fucking crazy,’  ” Styles remembers. Now he declares that “you can never be overdressed. There’s no such thing. The people that I looked up to in music—Prince and David Bowie and Elvis and Freddie Mercury and Elton John—they’re such showmen. As a kid it was completely mind-blowing. Now I’ll put on something that feels really flamboyant, and I don’t feel crazy wearing it. I think if you get something that you feel amazing in, it’s like a superhero outfit. Clothes are there to have fun with and experiment with and play with. What’s really exciting is that all of these lines are just kind of crumbling away. When you take away ‘There’s clothes for men and there’s clothes for women,’ once you remove any barriers, obviously you open up the arena in which you can play. I’ll go in shops sometimes, and I just find myself looking at the women’s clothes thinking they’re amazing. It’s like anything—anytime you’re putting barriers up in your own life, you’re just limiting yourself. There’s so much joy to be had in playing with clothes. I’ve never really thought too much about what it means—it just becomes this extended part of creating something.”

“He’s up for it,” confirms Lambert, who earlier this year, for instance, found a JW Anderson cardigan with the look of a Rubik’s Cube (“on sale at matchesfashion.com!”). Styles wore it, accessorized with his own pearl necklace, for a Today rehearsal in February and it went viral: His fans were soon knitting their own versions and posting the results on TikTok. Jonathan Anderson declared himself “so impressed and incredibly humbled by this trend” that he nimbly made the pattern available (complete with a YouTube tutorial) so that Styles’s fans could copy it for free. Meanwhile, London’s storied Victoria & Albert Museum has requested Styles’s original: an emblematic document of how people got creative during the COVID era. “It’s going to be in their permanent collection,” says Lambert exultantly. “Is that not sick? Is that not the most epic thing?”

“It’s pretty powerful and kind of extraordinary to see someone in his position redefining what it can mean to be a man with confidence,” says Olivia Wilde

“To me, he’s very modern,” says Wilde of Styles, “and I hope that this brand of confidence as a male that Harry has—truly devoid of any traces of toxic masculinity—is indicative of his generation and therefore the future of the world. I think he is in many ways championing that, spearheading that. It’s pretty powerful and kind of extraordinary to see someone in his position redefining what it can mean to be a man with confidence.”

“He’s really in touch with his feminine side because it’s something natural,” notes Michele. “And he’s a big inspiration to a younger generation—about how you can be in a totally free playground when you feel comfortable. I think that he’s a revolutionary.”

STYLES’S confidence is on full display the day after the fitting, which finds us all on the beautiful Sussex dales. Over the summit of the hill, with its trees blown horizontal by the fierce winds, lies the English Channel. Even though it’s a two-hour drive from London, the fresh-faced Styles, who went to bed at 9 p.m., has arrived on set early: He is famously early for everything. The team is installed in a traditional flint-stone barn. The giant doors have been replaced by glass and frame a bucolic view of distant grazing sheep. “Look at that field!” says Styles. “How lucky are we? This is our office! Smell the roses!” Lambert starts to sing “Kumbaya, my Lord.”

Hairdresser Malcolm Edwards is setting Styles’s hair in a Victory roll with silver clips, and until it is combed out he resembles Kathryn Grayson with stubble. His fingers are freighted with rings, and “he has a new army of mini purses,” says Lambert, gesturing to an accessory table heaving with examples including a mini sky-blue Gucci Jackie bag discreetly monogrammed HS. Michele has also made Styles a dress for the shoot that Tissot might have liked to paint—acres of ice-blue ruffles, black Valenciennes lace, and suivez-moi, jeune homme ribbons. Erelong, Styles is gamely racing up a hill in it, dodging sheep scat, thistles, and shards of chalk, and striking a pose for Mitchell that manages to make ruffles a compelling new masculine proposition, just as Mr. Fish’s frothy white cotton dress—equal parts Romantic poet and Greek presidential guard—did for Mick Jagger when he wore it for The Rolling Stones’ free performance in Hyde Park in 1969, or as the suburban-mom floral housedress did for Kurt Cobain as he defined the iconoclastic grunge aesthetic. Styles is mischievously singing ABBA’s “Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight)” to himself when Mitchell calls him outside to jump up and down on a trampoline in a Comme des Garçons buttoned wool kilt. “How did it look?” asks his sister when he comes in from the cold. “Divine,” says her brother in playful Lambert-speak.

As the wide sky is washed in pink, orange, and gray, like a Turner sunset, and Mitchell calls it a successful day, Styles is playing “Cherry” from Fine Line on his Fender acoustic on the hilltop. “He does his own stunts,” says his sister, laughing. The impromptu set is greeted with applause. “Thank you, Antwerp!” says Styles playfully, bowing to the crowd. “Thank you, fashion!”