#but it does seem to line up because she already hurts him in some big way in my drafts

[skunkes]

when you mentioned that talon takes up sex in the comic w/o elaborating much i immediately understood it was an instant gratification/desire for a quick touch without getting involved in the "mess" of love bc i did a similar thing with my oc and its genuinely SO cool to see someone else do it and mention specifically because its out of a deep seeded fear of getting too attached but still wanting some sort of touch bc they literally like. cant live without it for too long. i love it im chewing on talon

YEAS....im considering rewriting/reuploading that whole panel because in my need to not be a weirdo and unnecessarily go into depth on a characters abuse, i ended up being rly vague in the parts where I couldve explained more, but Im glad someone understood even before my clarification ^_^

(harder with talon as no matter how much he tells himself he'll never risk losing anybody again, he's very quick to get attached. Desperate for a home, a family, to curl up around something warm and kind)

[moonstruckme]

James being a big bear of a boyfriend and always just like lifting u up so easily to hug and sit on his lap and even tho u hate when anyone else does it he’s so BEEFY that you’re fine with him doing it

Yessssss I'm not much of a physical touch person irl but James I would allow

poly!marauders x fem!reader ♡ 847 words

Sirius is trying to follow Remus’ example and focus on the puzzle, but his eyes keep flitting up to you worriedly. You’ve monopolized the couch, laying flat with a hand cast over your eyes and your mouth pinched in obvious discomfort. He’d tried rubbing your calf and Remus had offered you tea, but they’d both given up when the attention only seemed to worsen your mood. Remus suggested they work on the puzzle while you rest (not Sirius’ favorite activity, but forced upon him because it keeps him quiet) and now they’re both simply trying not incur your wrath. 

“Quit looking at me,” you growl without opening your eyes. 

In Sirius’ case, not doing a very good job. 

“Fine, sheesh,” he says, and you press your lips together like you’re restraining yourself from snapping at him. 

You cringe when the door opens, every line of you pulling taut. James is all smiles as he tosses his gym bag to the floor with a heavy thump. “Hello, my loves!” His voice is a decibel short of booming, but it softens when he sees you on the couch. “Oh, sorry, is she napping?” 

Remus shakes his head, lips pursed as he watches your hand tighten over your eyes. “Headache,” he explains quietly. 

“Oh, I’m sorry lovie.” James reroutes from the kitchen, heading for you. Sirius tenses. “How bad is it?” 

“Prongs,” Sirius whispers urgently, “don’t—”

But James has already lifted you, one hand under your knees and another supporting your back as he moves you smoothly from your chosen position of rest and into his lap. He makes it look like nothing, which is the first offense (Sirius isn’t sure which of you he’s more jealous of), but the second is that you let him. Sirius and Remus have both looked up in alarm, waiting for a biting protest that doesn’t come. Instead, you remove your hand from your face, burying in it James’ brawny shoulder instead. 

“Bad,” you grumble, but your tone lacks the venom you’d spat at Sirius a moment before. 

James coos like he’s got a kitten in his lap instead of a viper, bringing his considerable arms around you. His palm cups the back of your neck, kneading gently at the tensed muscles there. “Where does it hurt, darling?” 

“Everywhere.” 

“By your eyes?” 

“No.” 

He hums, brows furrowing as he works steadily at your neck. You’ve gone nearly lax in his arms, trusting him to hold you up as you slump against his front. “Have you been drinking water?” 

“It’s not that.” Some of the irritation is back in your tone, Sirius notices, but it’s been markedly softened for James. “I had tons of water this morning.” 

“Probably a tension headache then, yeah?” He looks to Remus, who nods. The quiet boy looks as dumbstruck as Sirius feels. 

James moves his grip to your sides and lifts you again, rearranging his legs to get more comfortable before placing you back in his lap. He places a hand on each side of your head, thumbs pushing into your temples and rubbing in slow, soothing circles. You begin to look like you might fall asleep.

“This is so unfair,” Sirius hisses to Remus. 

“He has a power,” Remus admits weakly, “which transcends understanding.” 

“Do you want some tea?” James murmurs to you after a while. Sirius’ eyes have gotten stuck watching the movement of his forearms, and he snaps them reluctantly back up. 

You hum, uncertain but definitely considering it. Behind you, Remus throws up his hands. James sees him and smiles, shoulders shaking with quiet laughter. 

“I’m getting the sense this isn’t the first cup you’ve been offered,” he says, looking immensely entertained. 

You sigh, but even that sounds pleasurable as his big thumbs drill diligently into your temples. “Yeah, but I just wanted to be left alone.” 

Remus and Sirius exchange a look. You seem perfectly fine with company now. 

“Don’t be silly,” James chides lightly, “a warm drink will make you feel better. Remus, love, would you be so kind as to make her a cup?” 

“Sure.” His voice is gruff, but then you murmur a quiet thanks, Rem and Sirius actually sees the moment his heart turns to mush. “No problem,” he says, softer now. 

“Attagirl.” James’ hand drops to give your shoulder a squeeze, his bicep flexing slightly with the movement. Christ, Sirius might have to fake a headache later, if this is the sort of treatment those receive. “Drink your tea and then we’ll get you to bed, yeah? You can sleep the rest of this off.” 

“You know, I offered to carry her to bed earlier,” Sirius says, still slightly bitter, “and she told me very clearly to fuck off.” 

You don’t sound so much exasperated now as exhausted. “Siri, when you carrying me doesn’t involve setting me down every five steps for a break, then we’ll talk.” 

James’ laugh surprises both of you, and he apologizes hastily for jostling you, pressing a quick kiss to your forehead before resuming his ministrations. You don’t seem all that upset about it.

[thatmexisaurusrex]

What if in the big first disaster mini-arc of season 8, Tommy's helicopter crashes close to where the 118 are. Gerrard decides that the helicopter, and everyone that is in it, is a lost cause and that they shouldn't be wasting resources or his team trying to help anyone out of the crash. What if the entire team mutinies to go find Tommy, his team, his helicopter, and the patients he was transporting?

What if the people in the helicopter crash are scattered - some in the helicopter, some flung out of it? What if Tommy was one of the people flung out of the helicopter; lost and out of range?

What if the 118 manages to find the helicopter, only to see that Tommy is missing? But they have to secure the scene, they have to call for back up, they have to make sure everyone still in the helicopter is okay. But maybe Hen takes over the scene and tells Chimney and Buck to keep searching the woods for other survivors.

And Buck feels guilty that he's relieved that Hen chose him to go sift through the woods of this mountain for other survivors, but there's really no time to think about that. There's no time at all.

Lives are on the line.

Tommy is out there.

And in the woods, Tommy is hurt. He's hurt, but he can hear someone calling for help. So, he moves despite knowing full well that might be bad for him. He moves because he's a first responder and will always try to help someone in need. And he finds one of his patients worse off than before. And he feels guilt that due to bad weather conditions and how the fire in the woods traveled (did I not say there was a fire? There's a fire and it's threatening to reach their side of the mountain at any moment), he lost control of the helicopter (and I would like to think there would be another twist too, like the 118 find something was already messed up with the helicopter to begin with, so it was a miracle that Tommy could even fly it at all).

But Tommy could do this.

He could save this one person.

So, Tommy's doing his best. He's working through his own pain as he puts a splint on this person's leg, as he pops this person's dislocated arm back in, as he makes the split decision to burn a cut closed because he doesn't have the supplies and that was the best he could do without the person bleeding out during a hike. And he makes a fucking board out of low branches he rips off trees. And, damn it, he knows his radio is basically busted, but he tries for help, only getting broken static back.

But he is going through.

He just can't hear the other end.

But his words are getting through the radio - they're reaching Buck. And Buck is desperately trying to answer back, he's trying to far longer than he should, he should have realized the first four tries that Tommy can't here him.

But he knows which direction Tommy is going. Because he and Tommy hiked up this mountain before. Buck knows which trail Tommy is trying to get to, so it's a race against time - will Buck and Chimney get to Tommy and the patient before the fire gets to them?

And the answer is that they get there just as the fire does. Nipping at Tommy's heels, but it ends up being stopped by a water drop just in time. Tommy is stunned when he sees Chimney and Evan, he's truly stunned.

He didn't think anyone heard him.

He didn't think they were going to be found in time.

And Buck calls it in, asks for backup, asks for help. Chimney checks on the person Tommy did first aid on.

And Tommy.

And Buck.

They run to each other.

They collapse into each other's arms. Exhausted and running on adrenaline alone. And they're checking if the other is okay - both are very worse for wear. And things seem okay as they wait for help to get to them. Things are going great for Hen too, she successfully saves everyone else in the helicopter crash with Eddie and Ravi's help.

But then.

A tree nearby is unstable.

Tommy sees it just in time.

And Tommy pushes Chimney out of the way, only to be caught under the tree.

And this is bad.

Back breaking bad.

Body crushing bad.

Buck tries not to panic, but it's clear this has shaken him. Chimney is doing his best and is calling for more help.

Help gets there, help finally gets there. And they manage to pull the tree off Tommy. Buck rides with Tommy to the hospital, holding his hand. He paces, distressed, as he waits for the longest surgery in his life.

And Tommy? Tommy should make it. But he's out, he's been put into a medically induced a coma as he heals. And at first, that's okay. Buck can be there. He can make sure Tommy's warm. He can hold Tommy's hand and read to him, and sleep in a rolled in bed.

Until that stops.

Mysteriously, he's not allowed into Tommy's room.

He's not allowed any information.

He's not Tommy's family.

And Tommy's parents are, somehow, technically still Tommy's next of kin - they're in charge of his medical treatment. They're in charge of who sees him.

Buck tries to explain who he is.

They reject the very idea of it.

And it's devastating. Buck didn't think about this. He didn't know this could happen. Tommy hadn't spoken to his parents in over twenty years, yet they're just allowed to come and do this to him.

Buck doesn't know what to do. He can't eat. He can't sleep. People have to force him to do anything for himself as he wonders how Tommy's parents are treating him.

Are they reading to him? Are they spending time with him? Are they making sure he's warm? Are they doing anything at all? Is this all for spite?

Somehow, other people are allowed to visit.

Just not Buck.

Buck is blacklisted.

Eddie is allowed; Christopher too. Chimney, somehow; probably because Tommy had saved his life. Maddie, even. Hen isn't, they can tell something is queer about Hen. Ravi isn't either. Bobby was allowed at first, before he made a case to the Kinards to let Buck see Tommy and it went south.

But definitely not Buck.

And Buck? Buck is camped out in the waiting room. The waiting room he kissed Tommy in. He basically has grown a short beard in that waiting room, he hasn't been shaving.

And all Buck can ask when he sees Eddie or Chimney or Maddie is - how is he doing? Is he doing okay? Is his favorite blanket still on him? What did you talk to him about? What did you read him? How did he look?

And the nurses - they know Buck. They've known him for years. And some take pity on him one night, and let him at least near the room when the parents are gone.

And the parents file for a restraining order against Buck, but it was worth it just to see Tommy.

Tommy looked better than last time.

That was good.

That was what mattered.

And a few more days go by like that with Buck in the waiting room, unable to leave.

Until Tommy wakes up.

He wakes up.

He asks his parents to leave.

He asks for Evan.

And a band of nurses and maybe Chimney rush over and tell Buck the news.

And Buck is running.

Sprinting.

To get to Tommy's room.

He knows where it is.

He memorized where the room was.

And he sees Tommy awake.

And part of him hadn't realized that he wasn't sure if Tommy would wake up. That some little, horrible part of him thought that Tommy would never wake up and he would never see Tommy again.

Tommy makes a joke about how Evan looks like a caveman.

Buck laughs. And cries. And sobs as he rushes frantically over to Tommy and collapses into a hug.

Tommy holds Buck as best as he can in his state while mumbling fondly that Evan smells like a caveman too. Buck offers to go, get cleaned up, but Tommy holds onto him.

Asks Evan to stay.

Apologizes for his parents, that he hadn't expected them to come. That he is going to change his will as soon as he can.

And he just wants Evan there.

With him.

And Buck stays.

[ made a fic based on this on AO3 in my Denial-Verse series ]

[ztarvokwrites]

How the Cross Guild propose to you (+ Galdino)

a/n: i'm in a sappy mood today and altho i did have oc x canon headcanons lined up, i went overboard and now i cba to finish it lmao. instead, here is some cross guild loveliness to make up for it💜

not nsfw! just a lot of fluff and chaos in buggy's part ☺️

enjoy and don't forget to reblog if you like it!

Buggy

Man does not know how to pick out clothes for himself, let alone a ring-

So he drags Alvida along with him because God knows how badly he'll be mocked by Crocodile and Mihawk if he asked them for help lmao.

"I want something flashy for them! Something that truly makes them mine for good!"

"Do you even know their ring size?"

Silence.

When Alvida finds out your ring size, she ends up dragging him along to pick out a ring, despite his loud protest.

In the end, they end up picking out this ring, much to Alvida's dismay.

The proposal itself was unplanned and, as usual, chaotic.

Despite Buggy desperately trying to keep it to himself until he got you alone, one of his lackeys discovered the ring and loudly yelped about it, much to Buggy's annoyance.

"CAPTAIN BUGGY, YOU'RE GOING TO PROPO—"

"SHUTTHEFUCKUP!"

That lackey was not seen for a while afterwards.

You knew. Of course you knew. He wasn't being subtle about it, the way he was trying to get you alone but sweating his makeup off and trying oh so desperately to hide the small box in his large red pillow-y suit was a big giveaway.

So when the box dropped and you picked it up, you opened it and smiled, ignoring Buggy's pleas to try again.

He only froze when you said yes to his fumbled proposal and slipped the ring on your finger yourself with a grin on your face.

The loud cheer from everyone snapped Buggy out of it and he yanked you into his arms and sped away with you, desperate to make it up to you for his failed proposal with promises and kisses littered all over your face.

Sir Crocodile

He's done it once before, he can do it again, right?

Don't ask me what that means, idk his past, but for some reason it makes sense that he's proposed to someone before.

Any-who, this man knows what he's doing.

He doesn't need to ask for your ring size, he already bought you a few promise rings before, so it just makes it easier for him to pick out the perfect ring.

Except it doesn't.

There are so many rings that seem the perfect fit for you, yet he can't decide on which one to surprise you with.

He tries to find one that matches your eyes, or your smile, or your physique, yet nothing pops out to him.

Until he finds this ring.

It's beautiful, priceless — it's you.

Sir Crocodile doesn't care about how expensive it is, as long as it's you.

Now the only problem was getting you alone.

As much as he wants to whisk you away, he can't, not when he's busy fending off Marines or trying to deal with Buggy's antics.

The way he ends up proposing to you is subtle, displayed and masked as a simple gift for your upcoming anniversary, despite it being a week away.

He adored the way your eyes lit up when you received the gift bag he got you, promising him that you'll open it that evening when you were both in the comfort of your own bed.

And so you kept your promise, your eyes filling with tears once you opened the small box to discover the ring and the words "Will you marry me?" engraved into the lid.

Needless to say, you couldn't let go of him for the rest of the night, cuddling into him so tight that he held you against his chest even tighter — but not tight enough to hurt you, he'd never do that.

After all, you're his fiancé now :)

Dracule Mihawk

This man is absolutely thorough when planning anything, so a proposal is no sweat.

He already had his hawk-eyes set on the perfect ring for you, so now all he had to do is whisk you away from the party that Buggy has stupidly hosted, despite the protests of those who are serious about the purpose of the Cross Guild.

Mihawk isn't a man who gets nervous, nor is he easy to read, which is why you're confused as to why he's brought you so far away from the rest of the crew.

He's quite romantic with how he proposes; encouraging you to gaze up at the sky with him as you two sit on the grass and wait for the sunset.

When the time comes for the sun to disappear, the soft blue of the sky turning into a darkened orange, he pulled you up to stand.

That's where he got down on one knee and proposed.

"I know our situation is less than ideal, my Dear, but I promise you this place is only our temporary solitude. I want you to live peacefully with me, until our dying breaths. Will you do me the honour of becoming my spouse?"

Oh, you absolutely said yes and peppered his face with kisses once he slipped the ring on your finger.

And yes he held you in his arms as he carried you back to the party, upon your request to celebrate with him, much to his dismay.

BONUS! Galdino/Mr 3

I feel like people forget he can just... Make stuff out of wax.

So of course he makes a ring out of wax, accompanied by a nice shiny diamond he 'discovered' in Buggy's office.

The only thing now was to propose to you, yet that was certainly a challenge.

Buggy kept hogging his attention from you, making him ignore you completely for days until he finally realised that he hadn't been giving you the attention you deserved.

Cue him dragging you away from the weaponry tent and into the woods with a basket of food in hand, making a wax canopy for you both to enjoy a candle-lit dinner in.

He kept feeding you compliments and flirting with you to the point where you got suspicious.

"...You're awfully flirty this evening, Galdi. Is something wrong?"

"Nothing can go wrong when I'm with you, my Darling~."

He begins to melt and you get even more suspicious.

Eventually he gets too melty and gives up on the lying and just gets down on one knee in front of you and creates the ring, putting the diamond on it and presenting it to you with a nervous smile.

The sweet gesture of the dinner and the making of the engagement ring before your very eyes was enough for you to kiss him as you took the ring and slid it onto your finger.

You two finished your dinner, but didn't return after a little while as you two were too busy being sappy with each other.

starnote: guys how tf do you get rid of a cough that gets worse when you're trying to go to sleep-

creds to @/saradika for the star divider!

[rapunzellovesbooks]

The entitlement some people feel over Luke Newton´s career is baffling to me. Like, people out here saying "Oh, he has not milked the success of Bridgerton enough, his time has passed" or "He played his cards wrong" is just... wrong. Like, I get it, compared to Nicola, in the past few months, she has been much more active on social media than him, but can you actually blame him? Yall saw one picture where he was clearly uncomfortable, running away from the paparazzi and destroyed him online. Then he went on a vacation after months of press (and God knows which auditions, jobs or fittings on the side) and made it seem like he was committing a crime. Then he posts about a trip to Spain and some of you go call the hotel to check who he was with. If I were him, I would not post anything online ever again, because there is no winning, is there? He commented on one of Nicola´s post and she had to delete the awful comments people left. All because of what? A picture taken out of context with a girl who is not Nicola. News flash, people are allowed to have other people in their lives, romantically or otherwise. And to the people thinking that he did it to disentangle himself from Nicola, what drugs are you on? Like, he was holding so tight to her the night before, so excited for the premiere of Part 2, always praising her and looking at her with love in his eyes, even when no cameras were on them. I bet if people had not haunted him on social media he would have posted bts, or shared funny edits but the toxic fandom made it impossible for him to do so in real time. Because, apparently, to some people, if he had posted about Nicola while not being officially together with her, that is leading them astray. Umm, what?

And then you have the idea that he is not working. Nicola literally signed off to do Magic Faraway Tree before Part Two and has a small role in it, and the rest of her work has been in fashion. He went to fashion shows as well. Both of them are signed to Season 4 of Bridgerton and from what we have heard, they have quite a big part in it. If it took them 8 months to do their season, I can, at least, see them being there for maybe 4 or 5 months of shooting. That is work. Going to rehearsals and fittings is work. They literally get paid for that. It is astounding to me that Nicola has no future projects lined up yet, same as him, but everyone is on his ass for the same thing he has been doing for years, work in private. Now, I am a shipper, I do believe they will be together eventually, but I genuinely do not understand how that has anything to do with people trashing him for his upcoming projects. He may not have found the project he wants to do or is waiting to share info. Also, I bet you Nic or him would have shared a picture of going back to set already if some fans weren´t analysing pixels on screens.

I do feel like there is a double standard here, because if Nicola had done the same, gone on vacation or been photographed with a random guy, everyone would have been like "Good for her, etc.". She gets on the Top 100 List for, honestly, being more present online with the work she does, but there are so many people who do great work who are not and will never be on that list. If Luke had gotten on it, some people would be so mad at him, I just know it.

I just miss them together and I have to blame the toxic fans for not seeing them together anymore. I do not doubt they have been in contact since, I mean, this whole ordeal happened because we are so obsessed with their connection, they must have talked about that infamous day, but also, I think some fans are creating stories of them not talking or growing apart that are just hurtful. Even before the world tour, they did not see each other every day, they do not have to speak every day for them to have a great bond. They simply cannot share it online anymore or, at least he can´t, because people over dissect every thing, even if it is just a smiley. Taylor Swift was framed with the whole Kanye thing years ago and she disappeared for a year. She was still doing stuff and seeing friends but we just never knew about it. And I get it.

It hurts me so much to see a genuinely nice and kind guy who did an amazing job as Colin get so many negative comments over nothing. Every time Nic does something, people throw it directly in his face. Oh, he was not at the Emmys. Oh, he was not at a fashion show. Maybe he does not want to be?! Maybe he couldn´t? Does Zendaya have to be everywhere with Tom Holland? Like, what?!

#lukola #nicluke #lukenewton #nicolacoughlan

[maxwell-grant]

The Penguin Episode 5: "Homecoming" Breakdown

BREANNAH: I think, if Oz had it his way, I think Victor would carry on Oz's legacy. AMY: Do you think that Victor can ever see Oz as his Rex Calabrese? BREANNAH (sighs): I think that is what Oz wants. I think if Oz had it his way, by the end of this series, Victor would want to plan Oz's funeral and have a parade through the streets and be the, um AMY: The biggest parade ever? BREANNAH: The biggest parade ever. - The Penguin Podcast Episode 5

(Art by @butcherbilly)

(Episode 1) (Episode 2) (Episode 3) (Episode 4)

I wanna know who decided to bang up the Penguimobile so meticulously to give it the angriest, most anthropomorpic scarred face a Maserati can possibly have, on the second before it's given a Viking funeral. That thing looks like a wounded animal and I refuse to accept this was accidental.

I knew we were in for something special when it opened with "Did I ever tell of Rex Calabrese" and the Penguinmobile being burned, and then it turned out to actually be a funeral for the Penguinmobile and the history of why Oz wanted a Penguinmobile so badly, why was it so deeply important for him as a kid to dream that one day he'd get a big flashy stupid car to roll down the block with, and what burning the Penguinmobile means to him now.

"It wasn't just a car, it was a chariot. Made a kid with a bum leg feel like even he could be king." "End of an era."

"Only the good die young." Sure hope that bodes nothing terrible for Victor's future.

It is pretty funny that Oz has Tiktok installed on his phone and that this one scene confirms it exists in this universe, the jokes just kinda write themselves there.

Vic sure seems like he's rapidly getting a taste for the action, the decision he's made is bringing a fight out of him no one but Oz had ever really imagined was there. Not only is he getting comfortable with doing violence on Oz's behalf and making his own decisions, but he's gotten to a point where he's starting to actually look up to Oz, seeing him the way Oz wants to be seen.

Oh hey it's the police chief from The Batman, glad that he shows up here, especially in a context where he gets to eat shit.

I wish Eve Carlo showed up more, so far she hasn't really had too much to do although this episode definitely is the most we've seen. Someone who Oz doesn't really have much leverage with because she sees many of the cracks in his image and who's had a target on her back because of him the moment we were introduced to her, her protectiveness over the girls, the stuff mentioned in the commentary, all of that is interesting and I expect we're gonna get more elaboration regarding her down the line - it's already a big question mark whether she'll even survive the show.

"That's what I do, I fix things. That's all I ever fucking do."

I like these moments of pathetic defiance and pained regretful self-serving vulnerability that we get from Johnny Viti in this episode, with Sofia eating the scenery with the power she now holds over him even as what he reveals still very much hurts her.

The painful vulnerability of Francis nearly burning the house down while softly clutching a catcher's mitt, steeling up and joking with Victor about her bruises, and the sheer happiness and pride overflowing from her as she practically dances to the news that her son gassed an entire family to death, God what a character. She waited her whole life for these scumbags to die and die by her son's hand, it's gonna be a real gutpunch when or if she finds out the truth.

Oz doing everything he does so he can come home one day and have his mom tell him she's proud of him, and at the happiest and most prideful we've ever seen (and probably will ever see) Francis, he wasn't there to see it, and it was only because Victor spun a lie for him.

I wanna take a little aside just to highlight some of Shohreh Aghdashloo's comments regarding Nadia Maroni and her final moments, and this is probably the character I'm going to most miss because I was very interested in everything that she brought to the table, the history and the perspective that this character brings to Gotham, and what went into her creation and death.

She's coming from a huge family. She left the revolution behind. She has traveled the seven seas, she has learned a lot, and therefore she herself has been revolutionized. She's where she cannot tell the difference between right and wrong. All she's trying to do is to save her family, her husband, her son, and what's important to them. There is no right and wrong there. Which reminds me of a poem by the Persian poet Rumi, which says, "Beyond the notion of right and wrong, there is a field. Would you like to meet me there?". That's where she is standing.

Her country was invaded. Foreign occupation. Now she needs to make another country her country, and then save herself and her family. And she's willing to do everything to the point that she would even sacrifice herself for this family.

I guess when you go through a lot and do not have time to think about your doings, your past, your present, what's going to happen in the future, you're just involved with something like a snowball that comes out downhil. You really don't think properly. All you do is action, action, and what's right to do right now.

If she had been thinking thoroughly, she would have not done that - The Penguin Podcast Episode 5

‘Why does Nadia go there? She can send people to bring her son back,’” Aghdashloo says of Nadia’s characterization as an Iranian mother. “But she doesn’t, because she calls her son ‘joon,’ ‘dear,’ and she is ready to sacrifice herself for him. We can’t help it.”

Every time an Iranian mother talks to their son, their name is always followed by “joon,” or “dear.” And at the end of the conversation, it usually ends like this: “ghorbunet beram.” “I sacrifice myself for you.” Nadia literally sacrifices herself for her son. That is the best part, for me, of this scene. If she were a real mob boss, she wouldn’t get herself involved with this. But she is a housewife. She makes mistakes. That scene means so much to me. I’ve been asked, “Why does Nadia go there? She can send people to bring her son back.” But she doesn’t, because she calls her son “joon,” “dear,” and she is ready to sacrifice herself for him. Ghorbunet beram. - The Penguin’s Shohreh Aghdashloo Couldn’t Let Nadia Stay Quiet, by Roxana Hadadi,

Having established that, Jesus Christ.

Oh so that's why Shohreh Aghdashloo's name and eyes were superimposed behind the burning car the whole time in the credits, you fuckers, that's why.

The "You know my reputation?" line from the movie always took a whole different meaning with the show, but with that scene, Oz cooking a mother and her son alive while they embraced and gleefully watching it all happen, is the first time we see him deserve the reputation he boasted about, it's a real what-the-fuck moment in a way that even the stabbing in Episode 2 was not, in part because this was not necessary, and it was extremely premeditated. Oz may have done it only after the Maronis locked the door and tried to kill him, he may have done it as payback for them stealing his shrooms and trying to kill him, but he had already doused Taj in gasoline first. He likely expected Nadia to be there to retrieve him. He waited until Taj was in her arms. It's fucking vile and impossible to justify even more so than the other vile unjustifiable things Oz had done up to this point.

Extremely cool and good that, when asked if this is the worst thing Oz has done, Lauren Lefranc very quickly said No. Cool, cool cool, fun times ahead.

I highlight those excerpts where Aghdashloo discusses the character's morality because it is important to how the Maronis function differently from the Falcones, as we'll see with Sal later, but also the fact that Oz is not targeting people who are morally below him. He is not sticking it to the man by attacking the Maronis. Everything Aghdashloo describes above about Nadia's morality and decision-making aligns with how Victor and Oz function, but Nadia has more family to lose, and she respects a code that Oz wipes his ass with and actively exploits to beat them with. The Maronis still think that they can survive in this town by being strong principled gangsters, when this is a city of villains.

Something about the image of a self-pitying American gangster gleefully burning a middle-eastern family alive, under the pretense of payback but largely because he could get away with it.

"I think there's a reason that we're more interested in the life of the villains nowadays than Madame Curie or, you know, Dostoevsky, is the fact that we want to know what happens to a person that turns them from a human into a creature."

“Maybe today, where we’re standing at the junction of history, we need to get to know our villains so we know how to deal with them,” she says with a wink." -

I can't say too many of the Breaking Bad/Better Call Saul comparisons have been particularly warranted, but Oz losing his shit at daylight in a yellow/orange-lit deserted junkyard because he ruined his entire drug batch as a result of his cruel recklessness is an extremely BrBa/BCS moment, no notes.

Extreme credit to Colin Farrell that he's nonetheless able to elicit sympathy, despairing over his lifeline turned to ashes in his hands and begging Victor to get his mom somewhere safe, not even being able to name where exactly she would be, because even his mastery over the city is failing him.

Congratulations Sofia, you've risen up to the role of Batman Supervillain so fast that you even get your own Harley Quinn now

Dr.Rush is almost aggressively pathosless compared to everyone else in the show in a way that I think works for his role, that his presence is wildly uncomfortable to us in a lot of ways, and that he's even breathing speaks still to Sofia's buried need to have someone, anyone, in her corner, even a guy who was complicit in her torture.

It's easy to parse his sticking around as attraction to Sofia and I didn't quite know what to make of it, but Theo Rossi laid out a lot of very insightful commentary on the podcast regarding what he saw as the driving force of the character and those got me seeing Dr.Rush as a genuinely interesting spin on the Arkham psychologist. Even if very much not intentionally, I do think he's actually offering an interesting meditation on the broad strokes of Harley Quinn, specifically what drives an ethical-but-naive psychologist to throw themselves wholesale into submitting before the higher force-of-personality offered by a supervillain, even without being manipulated into doing so.

He, like many of us in life, was at the wrong place at the wrong time. I think that he went in with the best intentions to go into Arkham, and then he realized what Arkham was, and how horrific it was. I think, to deal with that, because someone who gives their entire life to a specific profession is kind of sheltered from real feelings, if you're dealing with other people's feelings. And I don't think he ever really explored his, in a way. So he gets this opportunity, and he sees what she has become, this butterfly. She had become something else. And he was so dying to become something else other than himself. And he had spent all these years after Arkham numbing himself and doing whatever. A lot of this came to me months after shooting (laugh).

There was a very significant part in Ep.2 where she slaps him, and what we had written in there is that he looks like he enjoyed it. It's like that he enjoyed the feeling of pain because he needed to feel something again. I think that he's become so incredibly numb to watching this horrific thing that he basically lost himself, and why he now dedicated his life to doing whatever was because he needed to rectify his soul, in a way, for what he had seen in this horrific thing.

This is someone who's lost in every single way due to the profession that they had followed, which in probably the beginning sounded like a really fantastic idea. I think that it's dedication to something and seeing now, adding on physical violence, this violence he's seeing, this true, horrific thing, and then also adding on guilt, and adding on, "Is she innocent? Am I complicit? How do I-"

And then add on his own stuff of, "I want what you have". How did you come from the depths of the worst place a human can be, to literally be thrown away, like we were just saying about Rosemary Kennedy. How do you come from there to gain your power and be fully in control? And really strut, like this peacock, where you go, "Oh my-How do I get that?". That's the superpower.

RIP in shit Johnny Viti, you died as you lived, being the idiot who thinks this is still about the money and not sending a message.

Like the other piece of shit backstabber in Sofia's life, all she needed him for was to open the door.

Extremely great incorporation of the Gigante name here, as is Sofia going to war with her mother's coat and painting her as a force too great for the Falcones to handle, assembling the final piece of the great burning self-mythology of family injustice she needs to put on a show as a Batman Villain, looking like she stepped out of the Tim Burton movies and declaring the new order everyone's gonna have to get in line with or die.

Sofia once again demonstrates the ways in which supervillains not only exist, but take over the existing orders: She arrives at the table with warpaint and fur, addressing these men as wronged underdogs like her and her mother, showing herself as a boss who will seriously and almost aggressively not screw them over for the sake of getting a cut, who will pay them ludicrously and generously if they stand by her as she chucks the royal lineage of Gotham in the trash and reaches out to their biggest enemies, as she guns down the Reasonable Businessman on the table so they can take the money caked in his brain matter - and only if they address her by her new nom-de-guerre first, of course.

Of course money is less than dogshit to her - she grew up never wanting for it, then she spend 10 years where it never mattered / actively screwed her over, and now she's single-minded on achieving vengeance and viewing money as only a necessary conversation tool - money was what Milos and Viti cared about, and that way of thinking died with them. They were the dinosaurs who thought they could out-reason or just buy out the meteor.

This new order is also part of why Sofia ultimately extends an invitation to Sal Maroni. A thing that I was not expecting about Sal, that Clancy Brown brought up as soon as he showed up on a post-episode segment, is that Sal Maroni is easily manipulated. He is the closest we've ever gotten to a classic Honorable Gangster, to a strong and silent Gary Cooper type, the Don who genuinely cares about honor and family and fairness, and he is a sucker. A dumb sucker who lost before the story began, only kept losing while in jail, who needed his wife to coach him and do the real work, and now needs Sofia, who's aiming to become an actually successful Honorable Gangster, to come in her place because he can't even avenge his family on his own.

This is how traditional crime gets it's back broken in Gotham: the mob spent two decades with cheat codes to infinite money, and then Batman took it away, and at the moment they most needed to seriously reorganize and adjust for having limited money, the freaks they created killed them and are now taking over with equally impossible promises far more appealing to regular people, continuining the chain of dominoes that reaches all the way back to the day Thomas Wayne saved Carmine Falcone's life and kicks off why and how Gotham City becomes the place where people like the Batman and the Riddler and the Penguin exist.

It is not only the episode where Sofia comes out to the world as a supervillain, but it's the one where Oz begins doing the same, as we'll see in the end.

He is not totally defenseless given the prison escape, but really the main reason he's not visibly and immediately and obviously clockable as a dumb sucker is because Clancy Brown is playing him, which fits his role as a counterpart to Carmine Falcone, Gotham's first villain The Hangman, because nobody would expect John Turturro to be the serial killer king orchestrator of everything wrong in the world. Sal is the anti-Carmine Falcone, and that's why Sofia extends him the grace of an invitation. Because he wouldn't have thrown his daughter to the wolves like that over nothing.

She knows he is right about "You Falcones eat your own", it's how she got here after all. I don't think she respects Maroni, but I think she respects every other man in Gotham even less. At least this one actually honors his word, for what good it does him, and he has just as much reason to pursue her war against Oz as she does, and in the new way of things, in this post-Batman world they live in, it is Justice and Vengeance that rule the city now.

Getting to see the horrific state Crown Point's in also goes a long way towards adding justification for Victor's decisions. That was where he lived up until Oz took him in, Squid was the most powerful person in his life up until that moment, that was the apocalyptic tragedy his beloved neighborhood had turned into. Victor has that love for Gotham and that connection to the family that died here, that the city took and he cannot accept that. That's what he shares with Oz, and with Bruce as well. Of course he couldn't leave it all behind to join Graciela in the sunset, of course he couldn't leave this city anymore than Oz or Bruce could.

Oz getting a bitter taste of his own bullshit when Eve maneuvers around his insecure temper tantrum and makes herself small so he can feel big and not endanger her any further, and he knows it - on some level he has to know she's playing him the way he plays everyone else, and he will go along with it.

Crushing stuff in that scene with Francis - Oz spinning too many plates and despairing and sinking morally and emotionally the whole episode, and then when he thinks he gets to just rest, when all he wants is to go back to his mom's arms for a beat, she shreds his heart to pieces and holds his feet to the fire so he will get back to work. Even more fucked up is that this is her doing the best she can possibly do for him at the moment, because that's how Oz gets things done. Through her negative reinforcement, when he's backed into a corner, when he's desperate and with no way out, that's when he gets miracle solutions and right now they desperately need one.

"My ma, she's what keeps me good" - even if that were even remotely true, your mom doesn't want you to be good, she wants you to win.

We're back to the shithole I raised you in and the only way we're getting out is if you become the Penguin, so be the fucking Penguin.

AND SO HE FINDS HIS OWN BATCAVE

Speaking as someone who always liked Penguin living underground as much as (maybe a little more) the Iceberg Lounge, no small part of me is happy that this one gets to do both, and that this choice of lair comes with a whole story. Oz used to play around here with his brothers, and now he's bringing along a new brother to join him down there.

Burned down to nothing but trauma and resourcefulness and the only person who hasn't given up on him, this person who's seeing him the way he wants to be seen, this kid who embodies the best of him, someone who makes this whole thing worth doing in the first place.

BREANNAH GIBSON: (on the comparison to Walter White and Jesse Pinkman) I think that's a great comparison, especially as you get into the later seasons of Breaking Bad where Walt just becomes this sort of, unrecognizable character from the pilot, and Jesse is - is sort of his moral compass. I think, in a way, Oz and Victor have a similar relationship because Oz keeps him around because he wants to mentor him, and in that way you can see that there's something good in Oz.

Like, I know that he says that his ma is good, and I think he believes that when he's saying it to Victor, but Oz would never admit that in the real situation that they're in, Victor is his moral compass here. Victor is the good in the situation, and Victor is that naive kid from the same neighborhood that Oz grew up in, that maybe Oz wants to see succeed.

And if he helps Victor succeed, he succeeds. And I think there's part of that that Oz is really enjoying about their relationship. And especially in this episode, you know, after Ep.3, Victor's all in. He came back for Oz. He saved him. He's now like, "It's the two of us, and there's nobody else." - Penguin Podcast Episode 5

Armed with these, he storms the underground to prove he can do the impossible and build an empire with two buckets.

Not just the faint last hope, but the first thing he has that's actually by his doing - not owned by the Falcones and leased to him in his role as their court jester, not something he's paying other people to let him use, something he took for himself and then grew into a whole thing.

Which is what The Penguin does - he builds and grows and takes over and expands until Batman has to deal with him. Among the Batman villains, he is the empire builder, and this is where he starts. So far he's just been fixing, now it's time to start building.

And I'll leave the final words here with @davidmann95

OZ USES THE SAME ABANDONED SUBWAY SYSTEM AS BATTINSON BECAUSE THEIR HERO/VILLAIN PARALLEL IS ROOTED IN THEIR SHARED LOVE OF GOTHAM (AS WELL AS THEIR CONNECTIONS TO THE FAMILIES THEY LOST AS CHILDREN IN THIS TAKE THAT BOTH LEAD THEM HERE), SO GOOD

we talked around it a little before but this was definitely the 'okay, fuck it, I guess I'm a supervillain now' episode

Oz, the scummy wheeling-dealing doublecrosser trying to keep all his bullshit in the air and maneuver his way into a successful partnership with anyone he can that he can eventually get on top of Someday, reaches the end of his rope

So now The Penguin has to live in his subterranean childhood trauma lair to defeat all his enemies outright by eating Gotham from the inside out with Arkham super-drugs

[babydollmarauders]

WYD NOW? — JACK HUGHES

jack hughes x fem!singer!reader

summary: in which y/n writes a song about her ex-boyfriend, 3 years after their breakup, and it gets back to him, leading to their reconnection

notes: inspired by the song WYD Now? by Sadie Jean. ending kinda sucks, but ehh i did my best. pretty sure i lost motivation for this halfway through it, but i tried to power through.

not my gif

*** JUNE 17TH, 2018 ***

“i bet, at this time in a few years, we’ll be painting the walls of our shared apartment.” my boyfriend’s whisper rings through my ears as i turn my head to look at him.

heat rises to my cheeks, Jack’s blue eyes gazing into mine.

“yeah?” i laugh, running a hand through his hair, still damp from the shower he took before coming over.

“mhm.” he hums in confirmation, his hand snaking up under the stolen shirt that adorns my body, gripping my waist and pulling me closer. “i’ll be playing hockey, and you’ll be a big pop star, my little songbird.”

i bury my face into his neck in attempt to hide the redness on the apples of my cheeks from the nickname.

“you gonna write songs about me?” he whispers, pressing a kiss against the side of my head.

“i already do.” i murmur, my lips brushing against his collarbone, causing him to shiver.

*** JULY 30TH, 2019 ***

“i don’t think i understand.” it feels like my head is underwater, my lungs burning for oxygen, but unable to receive it.

“we can still be friends, y/n. you can call me whenever.” Jack sits on my bed, gripping my hands in his hold. “the future is just, so far away and we don’t know what’ll happen.

“i don’t want my dreams to hold you back from achieving yours, y/n. you may not see it right now, but this just seems like the best option for now. and maybe, down the line, once we’re both at a stable place in our careers, if we’re both single, we can revisit us.”

my head is bobbing ‘yes’ but my heart is screaming ‘no!’

it’s like my brain understands where he’s coming from, that he’s being logical and that he’s doing this for the greater good of both of us; no matter what we’ve always thought, we’re still just kids, we were dreaming. but my heart isn’t getting that message. all my heart knows is that it’s being crushed into a thousand pieces and it feels pretty unsalvageable right now.

“are you okay?”

it’s my instinct to tell him ‘yes’. my instinct to not let him know how much he’s really hurting me. how much i want to scream that we’ll be fine. that i would give up my dream to be by his side while he accomplishes his. but i know that would just hurt him; because that isn’t what he wants.

he may be hurting me, but he’s doing it for all the right reasons. he doesn’t want me to push my dreams aside for his, because he wants to see me living them. he wants the best for me.

“yeah, i’m okay. i understand.”

*** PRESENT: SOCIAL MEDIA ***

y/nonthegram

liked by tatemcrae and 246,517 others

y/nonthegram in your faded t-shirt

that i’ve kept this long

i still hear you laughing

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user13 NEW LYRICS??

user92 that’s what i was thinking too! seems too poetic to just be a caption

trevorzegras hey that looks familiar

user57 OH MY GOD NEW MUSIC?

user04 AHHH ANNOUNCE A NEW ALBUM PLEASE

user6 I’LL EVEN JUST TAKE A NEW SINGLE! I JUST NEED NEW MUSIC

tatemcrae my best friend writes the best captions

y/nonthegram MY best friend writes the best songs

tatemcrae says you!

user83 new love song? break-up song? both?

colecaufield what’s this 👀

y/nonthegram

liked by trevorzegras and 283,752 others

y/nonthegram surprise! ‘WYD Now?’ out tonight at midnight.

wholly written in my bedroom at 2am, this song means the absolute most to me, and i hope some of you can find comfort in it like i have <3

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user04 OH MY GOD! THANK YOU FOR BLESSING OUR EARS TONIGHT!

colecaufield so proud of you!

y/nonthegram thank you, coley ♥️

user94 since when does she know nhl players?

user63 she went to high school with some of the 2019 draft class

user72 I CAN’T WAIT OMG

user18 SHAKING, CRYING, THROWING UP! I’M SO EXCITED

_alexturcotte our little melody makin’ munchkin, making moves!

y/nonthegram oh god please don’t bring back “melody makin’ munchkin”

_alexturcotte too late

tatemcrae GO BEST FRIEND THAT’S MY BEST FRIEND

y/nonthegram LEMME KISS YOUR FACE!! MWAH!!

user55 i’m so curious to hear these lyrics 😭 how am i gonna wait 8 more hours?!

jackhughes

liked by y/nonthegram and 352,850 others

jackhughes 3/3

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user77 hey wait, didn’t @/y/nonthegram date Jack in high school? is the new song yesterday about him?

user55 yess! it’s gotta be!

trevorzegras dizzyyy

user91 you should go listen to y/n’s new song 👀

user02 have you heard ‘WYD Now?’ ???

user36 omg he remembered to post 3/3

colecaufield same time next summer? 🫡

subbanator 🚀

y/nonthegram

liked by jackhughes and 227,951 others

y/nonthegram i’m so grateful for all the love on ‘WYD Now?’ these past couple days! thank you all! <3

here’s some photos @/tatemcrae took at our song celly night last night to celebrate the release of WYD Now? and greedy!

in celebration, i’ll be answering some questions in the comments!

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user74 is the song fictional? or was it inspired by someone?

y/nonthegram not fictional <3

user99 is this a single off the upcoming album? or just a normal song?

y/nonthegram the album is still being written, so i can’t confirm or deny if this is a single because i’m not sure yet if it’ll be on the track list! <3

colecaufield omg y/n please come to Montreal! i love you so much! you’re my idol!

y/nonthegram hey remember that time i bumped you with my car? i think we should do that again! i’ll stomp on the gas this time!

colecaufield omg you noticed me!!

user42 at 18, where did you imagine yourself being at this age?

y/nonthegram New Jersey <3

trevorzegras where did he set the bar?

y/nonthegram above the moon

user28 if the song isn’t fictional, then who’s it about?

user96 it’s 100% about jack hughes. if you scroll way down on her page, there’s pics of her and jack in high school, but they stop when they were 18. then he moved to new jersey and now he’s playing hockey, like the song states “you finally got the job you like”. that we’re all aware of, she didn’t have any other boyfriends in high school. she and jack seemingly dated from ages 16-18 until he left for the NHL

liked by y/nonthegram

_quinnhughes 💙

user10 this song was amazing! i really related and it made me feel so seen!

user88 big question is: has jack heard the song yet?

jackhughes call me?

user98 @/user88 if he hadn’t, i’m guessing he has now

*** PRESENT: REAL LIFE ***

my heart races as the notification comes through.

i wasn’t sure if he listened to my music, or if the song would get back to him. i just needed to get my feelings down on paper, and then it turned into a song, and then i liked it too much to not release it.

the night i wrote it, i had played a small show in New York, and i could’ve sworn i saw him in the back of the venue. of course, i knew it wasn’t, but it had rattled me; bringing all my feelings for him back to the forefront of my brain.

“call him.” my head snaps up to face my best friend, her eyes soft as she looks at me from the doorway.

“i-” Tate cuts me off with a shake of her head.

“don’t make excuses, y/n. call him.” she repeats, “you deserve to be happy, and from what you’ve told me, he makes you happy.”

she doesn’t stick around; instead bidding me goodbye and heading back to my guest room to give me some privacy.

i pace my bedroom, iphone clutched in my hand. his contact is pulled up, but i can’t seem to build up the nerve to call him. though, it seems i don’t have to, because my phone begins to ring instead, Jack’s photo displaying on the screen.

“hi.” i breathe out, pressing the phone to my ear.

“hi.” he repeats. “i heard your new song. i’m so proud of you, my little songbird.”

my face heats up, blood rushing to my cheeks. i haven’t heard that nickname in almost four years.

“thank you.” my words come out a whisper, still in disbelief that i’m talking to him again.

“did you mean it?” the question causes a panic to erupt in me, swarms of butterflies erupting in my nervous system.

“did i mean what, Jacky?” i need him to say it.

“what you wrote,” he clears his throat, “in the song. did you mean it all? do you still think of me? do you really wanna try again?”

laying sprawled out on my bed, i stare up at the ceiling as i speak.

“i wouldn’t have written it if it wasn’t true.”

“oh- okay. so, uh,” he stutters, but i can hear the smile on his lips, causing the same reaction upon my own face, “where are you right now?”

“um, my apartment?” my brows thread together in confusion, but he just chuckles.

“i mean like, are you living in LA? are you home in Michigan? what state?”

“oh.” i bite my lip, squeezing my eyes shut in embarrassment. “i live in New York, Jack.”

“really?” his voice is emotionally distant and seemingly hurt. “so close?”

“yeah.” i nod, although he can’t see me. “i’ve gone to a few of your games.”

“you did?”

“mhm.” i hum in confirmation. “i just- i didn’t wanna be the one to reach out and then have you think oddly of me or have you already be in a relationship or something. i’m sorry i didn’t tell you, i just didn’t wanna be seen as that clingy ex-girlfriend or anything.”

“that’s not what you are, y/n.” he sighs, “would you wanna meet up soon? catch up? i’d love to hear about your glamorous new pop star life.”

“i’d love to. although, i wouldn’t call myself a pop star, Jacky.”

“you are to me.” i blush at his words, glad he can’t see how much of a mess i am at the moment. “are you free on saturday? i have practice in the morning, but after that, maybe we could go to lunch?”

“yeah, i can do that.” i confirm.

“okay great, i’ll text you on friday to hash out details?”

“sounds great!” my cool hand rises to press against my heated face in attempt to cool myself down.

“great. i gotta go, Luke and i are going out with the guys. i’ll talk to you soon, yeah?”

“yeah. bye, Jack.” i wait for him to repeat a goodbye before hanging up, burying face in my pillow and letting out a muffled scream.

***

my knee bounces underneath the table of the New York City diner, my hands clasped together on the table.

Jack should be here any minute, and saying i’m nervous would be an understatement. my palms are clammy, my legs won’t stop shaking, and i’m eighty percent sure that i have no skin left on my bottom lip because i’ve chewed it all off.

the little bell above the door rings and my head snaps up to look, but it’s just a young couple with their toddler. i send a friendly smile to the tired looking mother before looking back down at my hands that won’t stop fidgeting.

i zone out, retreating back into my head and all the thoughts that have been plaguing me since we planned this meeting.

what if he doesn’t like me anymore?

what if he has a girlfriend and he’s just trying to be nice?

or worse, what if he’s just asked me here so he could tell me to leave him alone? to stop writing songs about him.

“hi.” i’m pulled out of my thoughts by Jack sliding into the booth across from me, a gentle smile on his face.

his hand snakes across the table to hold mine, and i can’t help but feel like a teenager again, back when we used to have dates like this all the time; where he would hold my hand over the table and we would laugh and joke around for hours.

“hey.” i smile back, giving his hand a small squeeze in return.

“how are you?” he questions. he brings his hand back in order to hold his menu, but his focus remains on me, not even glancing down at the menu yet.

“i’m good!” i nod. “how are you?”

“good, i’m glad. i’m good too.”

we’re interrupted by a waitress, taking a second to look over our menu’s before giving her our orders.

once she retreats, i squirm from the small talk, never having been any good at it. which Jack seems to remember.

“so, how’s the pop star life?” he smirks teasingly, and i giggle.

“not a pop star.” i remind him, shaking my head. “but it’s good. i like where i’m at right now in my career. i like having a strong fanbase but still being unknown enough that i’m not being hounded on or followed like, say, Taylor Swift.

“i’m able to just write my music and put it out, go on small tours, interact with my fans on a more personal level; it’s really nice. i don’t know if i would want it to be more than that.”

he nods in understanding, a wide grin on his face as he listens.

“i get it. and i’m really glad you’ve achieved what you wanted. i’ve always rooted for you.”

“what about you? mr. ninety-nine point season!” he blushes at my words, shaking his head and looking down at his hands, which rest on the tabletop. “how’s that?”

“it’s good! really good.” he looks back up at me, and i have to fight myself from getting lost in his eyes like i would when we were seventeen. “i love it. it’s hard, it’s a lot of work, but it’s amazing. and honestly, i’m pretty glad i’m not on a canadian team. i like that i can go out and still have a pretty normal life outside of hockey, ya know? not be stopped on the street a bunch.”

“yeah, i get it.” i tell him. “i’m so glad you’re happy though. you play great, as you always have.”

he releases a ‘thanks’ before a silence settles over us, neither of us sure what exactly to say next.

i begin to play with the paper wrapper from my straw, winding it around my finger before sliding it off and gently pulling it straight again.

“so, Cole sends me your songs.”

snap! the paper wrapper breaks in two as i look up at him.

“he does?”

“yeah. you know i don’t get on social media too much, so i don’t always know right away when you put one out, but Cole sends me all of them. just in case i miss one.” he explains.

my head bobs up and down as i try to display a level of cool, “oh.”

“that doesn’t bother you, does it?” he asks. “that i don’t always listen to them right away?”

“not at all! i didn’t really think you listened to them at all.” i confess, sinking lower into the booth. “not really your genre.”

he smiles gently, reaching forward to hold my hand tightly in his.

“y/n, you could write a children’s nursery rhyme, and i would still listen to it.”

my head tips back against the booth, joyous laughter spilling from my lips. my nose scrunches, resulting in a small snort, which cause him to laugh as well.

“you’re just saying that.” i choke out, and he shakes his head.

“no! i’m serious! i would!” Jack insists, right as the waitress arrives with our food. she sets our food in front of us, making sure we’re all set before she retreats.

a comfortable small talk takes over as we eat; discussing our friends and their accomplishments since graduation.

“you remember that time,” Jack starts through broken laughter, “that you hit Cole with your car because he said he didn’t think it would hurt?”

“yes! and i barely even tapped him, but the big baby whined that it hurt so bad, i may have crushed his NHL dreams!” my face hurts from smiling so big, but i can no longer fight it.

“and then he was fine and back to practice that afternoon! not even a bruise left on him!” he retorts.

“ever the dramatic, Cole is.” i sigh, sitting back in my seat from position slouched over the table.

“since we’re walking down memory lane, do you remember how i said that maybe down the line, we could revisit us?”

i’m sobered up now, my smile gone as i eye him. he’s playing with his bracelets, a sign of nerves from him, and i just now realize that he’s still wearing the string friendship bracelet i gave him at eighteen; just before his draft.

i swallow the lump that built in throat, nodding, “yeah.”

“you think maybe now would be a good time to do that?” he asks. “start slow; go on dates again, maybe you could come over sometime for movie night with Luke and i, come to a few more of my games, where i actually know you’re there this time. and then see where that could take us?”

butterflies swarm my stomach, my heart beating rapidly in my chest, and my teeth sink into my lower lip, biting back a smile.

“i’d love that, Jack.”

[amostnobleyandere]

Yandere! Incel! Scaramouche x NB! Reader

This is an 18+ blog!!!! If you don’t like yandere content or are a minor, do not interact. thank you!

CW: Yandere content, stalking, creepy scaramouche, incel behavior, creepy behavior, toxic relationships, kidnapping, his friends encourage and enable his problematic behavior, brief fantasizing about a domestic husband/spouse dynamic, forced romantic relationship, non-consensual touching

*also just to be clear, this is loosely based off the term “incel,” his behavior is more like a creepy recluse if anything?? I just couldn’t think of a better word to use and I thought it fit okay. there’s no misogyny or extremely gross behavior involved, but he is creepy so just. keep that in mind. anyways, enjoy!

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Incel! Scaramouche who doesn’t get out much not because he has bad social skills (he does but that’s not the point), but because he loathes the idea of big crowds and being around lots of people. Socializing with people is already irritating enough, since he’s the only one on this earth who seems to have braincells. Why go out when he’s got everything he needs at home?

Incel! Scaramouche who has more money than he knows what to do with from his (insanely) loaded and emotionally distant mother (who gives it to him because she doesn’t know how to show affection any other way). he spends it all on expensive gaming set ups, take-out, and new technology all while being up in his top floor penthouse with a horizon line view.

Incel! Scaramouche who has friends, they’re just all online (and just as fucked up as he is) who he talks to (yells at) through the microphone while gaming.

Incel! Scaramouche who meets you while doing something mudane. He sees you at a grocery store picking over vegetables one day. Ignores you. 30 minutes later, he proceeds to bump into you and then acts like an asshole about you touching him, something that was clearly his fault. The two of you get into it, and eventually you’re the one to turn and walk away, already in a bad mood from the interaction. He’s interested now.

Incel! Scaramouche who isn’t delusional enough to convince himself that it’s fate, but who is curious enough to stalk follow you around for a while. He’s not hurting you or talking to you, what’s the harm done?

Incel! Scaramouche who while stalking monitoring you begins to note things about you. Unconsciously, of course. It’s not like his life revolves around you or anything. He just…starts to notice things. How you spend your days, what you like, what you don’t like, who you interact with and the places that you spend your time at the most. Soon enough he knows just as much about you habits and daily life as your friends do, if not more.

Incel! Scaramouche whos friends encourage his problematic behavior. They’re just as chronically online as he is, and have no conception of the morals and boundaries that come with having a healthy relationship. (Some of them, like Venti and Kazuha, even have a more romantic view of his infatuation interest, repeating that it’s okay to cross some lines, as long as it’s for love)

Incel! Scaramouche who has a weird view of relationships because his only knowledge on them comes from anime, the internet, and all the other types of weird media he consumes. (Should the kidnapping happen before or after your first date?) He’s not doing any of the cheesy shit the internet says. He’s not going to bring flowers, that would be stupid. (He’ll end up buying an overly large bouquet which he sends to your doorstep. there’s no note and you find it extremely creepy. You refuse to leave your home without pepper spray now)

Incel! Scaramouche who eventually just plucks you from the streets, right outside of your home/apartment building. No struggle to go along with it. Obviously you do fight back, but the men he hired to pick you up are far too experienced for you to even have a chance of running away.

Incel! Scaramouche who doesn’t really care about your feelings surrounding the whole situation. and well. he was getting a little lonely. most of his friends live too far away for them to meet up frequently, and it’s not like he’d want to see those crazy bastards everyday anyways. You’re much better company compared to those psychos, as much as he loathes to admit it. and you’re just so…pretty, and he can feel and touch you as much as he wants. it’s pleasant, and his apartment has never felt so full before, not at all empty like it did before he brought you here. you should be grateful you’re here too; he gives you everything you could ever want (within reason). really, you should feel grateful that you’ve been chosen by someone who’s so financially stable, who can provide for you.

you can have a good life with him, better than you could’ve had without him.

Incel! Scaramouche who kind of begins to see you as his little house spouse. nevermind that you’re here against your will; you’ve taken up doing chores around the house if only to fill the time, and it’s really only confirming his belief that kidnapping you was the best thing he could’ve done. when he comes through the door after a rare visit to the outside world and he sees you sitting there, idle, practically waiting for him? he feels like the typical breadwinner coming home to a loving domestic life. he’s not so delusional to think that you’re happy to be his little house spouse and captive, but it’s not like you can do anything about it, so he might as well enjoy the thought while he can.

[am-i-the-asshole-official]

AITA for how I handled the end of a relationship?

i genuinely thought it was simply communication struggles, and some shitty chance circumstances, but some of my friends thought i was a dick about it, so here we go.

I (16 M) started talking to this girl, let's call her K (16 F), last summer. we bonded over shared interests (zelda, mostly) and some shared trauma. without getting into it, we both helped each other through some very hard times. a month or two after we met, she asked me to homecoming (school dance). at the time, i was unsure of my sexuality, but I'm a pretty touchy/flirty person in general, and i guess we had been flirting. anyways, i ended up saying yes, and i genuinely thought i liked her romantically.

anyways. school starts up again, and we decided to call once a week, because we live a decent distance apart, and didn't see each other in person. over the course of these calls, i started to realize that i really wasn't sure if i knew what romantic love was, if i felt it for her, and stuff along those lines, but i always said "i love you" and stuff like that. now, about a month into us dating, it really hit me that i did not actually like her romantically, and that i simply felt very strong friendship feelings for her. i confessed this to her, telling her that i thought i was aromantic.

and that's where i fucked up. i told her that although I didn't romantically like her, i felt more than platonically toward her, something along the lines of queerplatonic, and said i would be okay with it if we kept dating, as long as she knew i didn't romantically like her. she agreed.

I don't know if she fully understood, at the time, but it ended up not mattering. about a month later, I brought K to my school's homecoming dance. she met all of my friends, and we had a lot of fun. but the big thing that happened was that i was struck very aggressively by the fact that i liked another friend of mine (X, 17 M) probably romantically, definitely aesthetically, possibly sexually. This led me to realize that i was, in fact, gay and some form of aromantic. (X still does not know i feel this way about him)

I didn't tell K the night of homecoming. Three days later, i was freaking out really badly ahout being in his relationship i probably should've ended already, and i texted her and told her i couldnt handle a relationship and that i was probably gay but that i still wanted to stay friends with her.

at the time, K seemed super chill with it, but i found out later from a mutual friend that she was actually super upset. K and i have talked about it since, and she doesn't seem upset anymore, and i think i was just doing the best i could with what i knew at the time and trying not to hurt anyone, but another friend of mine thinks i was a dick about everything.

so, Tumblr, AITA?

[sugar-omi]

I hate myself for thinking this but, what if MC finds out she’s pregnant and the first thing in her mind is that she’s fucking up Cove’s future. So instead of telling him she just breaks up with him and shuts herself away from him so he can’t convince her that they’ll work it out. Now Cove has no clue why the love of his life just broke his poor heart. Skip to five years later, Cove comes back to surprise visit his dad but surprise there’s MC, Cliff and a little five year old boy that looks way too much like Cove. Like I’m talking copy and paste that’s a little Cove

oh my fucking god.... i. pls i have some thoughts but also OUCH. BIG OUCH

mmm i'm not gonna make a full fic/detailed post... maybe later if we're all itching for some angst or i'm up for causing more heart ache n then i am very much open to expanding on this (already thinking abt cove getting to know his son.... omfg my heart HURTS)

but i wonder how MC "gets away" (for lack 'a better words) with not telling cove about the kid.

because i can tell you right now, cliff and kyra can't know about it and keep it a secret. not for 5 years at least.

so does she beg everyone in her family to keep it a secret? i think that's the best bet. moms would really prefer Not to keep it a secret, but they also can't force you to tell cove...

but i also don't see them letting 5 years without cove at least knowing, go by either... they'd try to keep the secret, but seeing cove's sad face would break them quickly, if not instantly.

also your friends!!! god, they can not keep a secrete to save their life, especially that big. so you can tell them, but expect the news to find its way back to cove in about.. mmm... 4 hours? so yeah....

anyway!!! lets say that your family kept the secret...

i think your son would eventually start asking about his dad. he sees how you and your family react to him, hears all the mumbling about how he looks so much like... "cove"? when you think he's in the other room.

and he sees how sometimes you look sad and how you slowly and tenderly run your fingers through his hair. and how sometimes you tell him "yknow, daddy has hair just like yours."

and when he asks why you're sad, if you respond with something along the lines of "you look just like your dad, thats all."

or even if you say that in response when he asks what his dad looks like (if you haven't shown him pictures), or if he overhears you saying he looks like this "cove" guy

you notice he starts looking at himself more often... maybe even asking, "does daddy have green hair like mine?" "are his eyes really blue, just like mine?" "does he wear glasses too?" and still in awe that he and this man he's never met, but already seems to adore him (as much as a toddler can adore someone they don't know), share the same features.

and if you show him pictures of cove, which i hope you do, but if you don't, don't worry because your son will probably realize "he has green hair like me!!!!" and he'd either run up to enthuse about it or run up to ask him if he's his daddy bc they have the same hair color... or just call him daddy n if anyone tries to argue about it, wdym?! they have the same hair color, what more do you need?!

so hopefully, cove is the only man with specifically seafoam green hair. otherwise, you're shitting yourself every time your son runs off to meet his green-haired-brethern

anyway. I think all your sons questions, and seeing pictures, knowing that he shares so many traits with cove, and seeing you miss him.

oh god, seeing you sad would make him insist so so much on seeing cove.

"if we meet daddy, will you be happy again?"

also can't believe I almost forgot.. your son being sad about not having a dad, and being jealous of other kids for spending time with their dad, etc.

he'd ask you questions about why he doesn't have a dad, n if he does. why isn't he around? and a real heartbreaker.. does daddy hate him? does he not love him? is that why he isn't here?

so I guess that means it's time to go back to sunset bird! and finally explain why you moved away n never looked back, and why you don't talk to anyone but your parents from back then...

now I won't get into everything right now (im a fuckin liar. I can feel a tangent coming on)

but I wanna talk abt how cove would feel, just a bit, and how I think your future with him would look...

I think at first, he'd be really shocked, seeing this carbon copy of his much younger self. the only thing telling him that his 4-5 year old self didn't jump out of one of his many childhood pictures,

is any birthmarks or beauty marks that maybe you have, or the boys hair being curlier than his, or his skin tone, or maybe he has your nose. whatever it is, he knows he's looking at the imperfect combination of you and him.

(cove's heart is beating outta his chest right now, n you're lucky he only stumbles instead of fainting, because this really is a shock... but that deeper part inside of him, that egotistical, primal almost, part of his heart swells up at the thought, the reality. that his son looks mostly, if not entirely like him.)

but after shock, he's sad. I think he'd be really sad, because he realizes that this is why you broke up right? and no matter how in control of your emotions you think you may be, your wide eyes show how afraid, nervous, and sad you are. he knows. he knows without even talking to you and it hurts

and after he gets past the anger and confusion stage, maybe even in between in fact- which would be more natural since, I think he'd feel this all at once but that's besides the point

he'd be really sad he missed all his sons milestones. walking, first words... God he probably dreams about it (when he does eventually fall asleep), and now his heart is tugging at the seams and the seams are RIPPING.

he also starts thinking about how hard it must've been doing it by yourself. and going through all that without him, your partner.

but maybe you didn't rely on him like he relied on you? maybe you didn't trust him like he did you, maybe you just... didn't need him. like he needed you.

you did break up afterall, and you never let him know about the kid until now, so maybe you thought he'd be a failure of a father and nipped it in the bud before disaster struck...

but I also think that's where anger comes in. because you didn't tell him. he didn't have a choice at all.

he knows he had a tendency to hesitate or run away, but he thinks really hard about it, and he knows he wouldn't have ran away from this.

leaving you alone would scare him a lot more than being a father. being a bad or absent father would scare him a lot more than trying to be a good one. knowingly abandoning a life he helped create, would scare him so much more. he wouldn't be able to sleep otherwise.

so while he gets it. he doesn't get why you didn't try.

and if you explain that you worried about ruining his future, he's so upset and so mad because how could you make that choice for him? how could you take on the burden alone?

this is also where confusion merges in, because while the answers are so obvious or easy to guess, he just can't believe it. he doesn't wanna believe it...

now about your future...

cove still loves you. he's loved you his whole life, it's hard to stop even 5 years later... and seeing you, it makes his heart throb because he's dreamed about this for many nights.

you broke up with him without giving any answers. you even up and moved by the end of the week so when he tried to give you space, before talking to you, it was too late. your room was pretty much void of every sign of life.

you took all your treasured items, your clothes- spare some youd been meaning to get rid of, your pictures, your hobby items. everything. he's surprised you didn't just take the bed and frame.

he's surprised you didn't just carve out his heart n take it with you, because if it's still in his chest, why does it feel so hollow?...

it'd take a really long time to even think of a romantic relationship. if at all. maybe cove's even accepted the break up at some point, depending on how long you'd been together. but if you'd been together since you were 13, it's a hard pill to swallow. bc you can put up with his angsty teenage self, what changed...?

I think seeing you be a parent, and so adored by your son, warms up his heart. makes him fall in love a bit at the sight.

it's not instant, he's getting to know you again. and getting to know this life that he didn't even know was waiting for him.

it's a good 2 or 3 years of figuring out this mess until it becomes something that makes sense. or as much sense as it can make. and if there's still something there, no matter how miniscule. it will catch fire.

now about the kiddo... he's so scared. and I hope you took a few days of talking with cove, and prbly cliff n Kyra bc they have a lotta feelings n thoughts on this too, before you try to integrate cove into his life.

it's small. cove meeting you at the park, and either your son is asking cove a billion questions (both abt why the sky is blue, and awkward questions abt why he wasn't present before...)

or he's trying to drag him on the monkey bars (doesn't work, cove's feet are on the ground still....)

or he's sitting silently on the blanket, reading, occasionally showing cove his favorite scene of the picture book or making him pronounce a word

but it does get bigger, it becomes lunch-n-movie dates, spending the night at your house (at your son's insistence. prbly bc he didn't want him to leave after a fun day), then cove taking him out alone..

it's a lot. and sometimes it feels like you're going backwards or that you're not moving at all because it's hard, for awhile. and even though his dad is on speed dial, there's not enough information he can give cove in how to take care of and deal with a kid he just met a few months ago.

especially a kid who already has a bit of personality, is hell on wheels (like most 5 year olds), possibly has many questions n sometimes problems with cove suddenly being here... it's a lot. n cliff can't help with any of it really.

he does get comfortable, eventually. although there's still times when he's sad, sometimes even angry about what happened, and all he's missed out on, he's so so happy to not miss out on anything else.

[ananiel]

Hello! I’m so sorry to annoy you, can you do Reader x William Moriarty, where Reader randomly get’s panic attacks, and the first thing to notice is that she sweats?

I’m sorry if this is alot, or this makes you uncomfortable.

Oh, You are not annoying me at all, don't worry, and Yes, i can do that , i hope You will like it!

And please, do not be afraid to ask, there's no reason to!

Genre : hurt/comfort

Headcanons + smaller story

------———------—-———----———------——-

William james moriarty x reader that has panick attacks randomly

Headcanons:

- that will hardly be something that he couldn't deal with, better said, not hard at all for him

- he's always been perceptive, so i think that, even if You don't know it yourself, he'll notice that before a panick attack, You would sweat.

- so prepare to have your hand in his at all times to hold it and feel sweat, or to have him, while talking to someone or to You, steal glances from now and then continue talking if all is good

- also i think that he made some preparations, like, "if You don't see me, get up and..." to make sure that even if he is away, You will be good (he's worried, he cares so much about You that he is afraid something would happen while he is away)

- if he does notice sweat, the alarm bells in his hand are ringing, he'll make You sit down, wherever there is space and quiet, and will wrap his arms around You, softly caressing your back and kissing the top of your head, sitting like that for as long as needed, without complaint

- i strongly believe that he made sure to have, if he didn't already, a small towel or something that he could make You wind with it, to help with the passing of it

- also, he'd notice some things that could cause the panick attacks, and would try to avoid them as much as posible.

- if You ever feel guilty that he doesn't really go to balls anymore because he knows they make You uncomfortable, yeah, don't worry, he could be thanking You by kissing your feet from how greatfull he was that the only balls he has to go would be to ensure the Lord of crime work

- another thing it's needed to know is that, he's smart, he probably already read about this things, and probably read so much that he could write his own books, BUT, he Will call a physician after a peculier panick attack that was big, or simply, just to check, because panick attacks can cause difrent things, he wants to know that you are healthy

- even if he, presumly, he could've done the check up himself, he prefered to let a specialist do it, to make sure that nothing is left I turned and that You are fine

------------———------——----------------------

Small story :

IT was at a ball held by a noble family that wanted to get back on the noble's list of being famous and generous.

You and William had to go, as there was no way to avoid it without causing drama in the house of lords, so with a groan, You went.

The room was full of people, talking, chatting outside of the ballroom in the balcony over a cigarette or glass of something.

But what caught your attention were the gossiping.

The ladies made snarky, not so quiet remarks at everyone that passed, or, at the women that the noble men came with.

You wanted to make yourself small and to not seem apealing to them, but alas, when your partner is the walking eye candy that he is, it is hard to stay away from their line of discusion

"did You see her?"

"Yes, what does someone like Lord Moriarty see in her"

"i could be a much better fit"

"indeed, not that it is hard to be better than her"

Their words made You sweat.

You knew that the ladies were rude, were bitter for The fact that You had a partner and they didn't, but damn, was it hard not to think of it when they were talking behind You, not even a table away from you. William was nowhere in sight, but You knew he want after a noble, that could be tedius work, and take a long while, there was no way You could just wait for him to return, before he could You would've made a fool out of yourself and him too. Not that he cared, he didn't care at all of it meant that You were safe, but You did.

You got up taking deep breaths and trying to walk to your asigned bedroom, steps wobly as You felt that horrible panick attack come after You.

You tried to take a deep breath again, it stopping in your throath as You felt a pair of hands wrap around Your middle, making You gasp and try to move away.

"it's me, darling, it's me"

Said William, soothingly kissing up and down your neck as he pulled You closer to him

"breath,love, i am here"

You leaned in his touch as he wraps his arms around You more tightly, kissing your forehead.

"let's leave this place, go home, You and me, you're safe now, you're safe, everything is fine"

He gives her hand a gentle squeez as he Kisses her forehead, before interwining his hands with hers and making her sit on his lap untill she calmed down.

Like he always does.

[pryllee]

Delirious

Blade x Fem! Reader

Blades kinda ooc, slight mention/use of ’red string’ theory, feelings became mutual, slight use of daydreaming/delusions, stellaron hunters, kinda took inspo from smt. Reader was set up lowkey. Reader taking the initiative for a kiss??? , also not proofread

A/N: Kinda hate this with the weird often transitions and overuse of some words, I don't have that big of a vocabulary though so...

——

Working under a slave of destiny was... interesting? Kind of. The thought of warping to every planet every week or so really wasn't for you.

However, the one colleague that always caught your eye was Blade. You couldn't help but be drawn to him for some reason—like you were attached to him, his blank expression was indeed odd but it lowkey is hot.

And you also couldn't help but imagine that thin line on his face slightly tilting upwards into a small smile if he ever felt the same about you.

You always saw him somewhere or had an encounter with him almost everyday, till one had a girl in it, oh Aeons. Recounting the memory is already such a pain.

During one of the missions you'd been assigned to with him, a pair of girls talking saw him in one of his... ’disguises’ yet one whispered to the other making the other laugh hitting at the girls back, as they looked back with a look of admiration, you shot them a death stare back.

"What?" He asked. And you shook your head in response with a visible annoyed frown on your face.

"How come you're acting like a child again? I won't know what to say if you don't speak." Bit unusual he seemed to talk more this time to engage in a convo.

He clearly still remembered that time where you didn't talk to him for days on end because his replies were so unbelievably dry like you didn't matter—well technically you didn't...or don't really matter to him... And that does hurt a bit.

"Nothing. Those girls prob' would've reported us if they found out." Making up an excuse on the spot, a dumb one infact.

—

Yet somehow, you ended up in this position where Silver Wolf was ordering French fries, nuggets, and a large bucket of mayo.

"... Do you really need that much mayo?"

"Yeah, what about it?" She asked, clicking her tongue. "Nothing..." You irked up a brow seemingly disgusted at the taste of so much mayonnaise on one nugget, or fry.

"I'll get an iced coffee," Kafka smiled.

You glanced at Blade, still with a monotone face as usual. "...What about you?" You said in a quizzical tone, leading him to shake his head slightly in response like a statue... A perfect scuplture in fa— I mean...

You sat opposite of Kafka, and Silver Wolf. Still seemingly irked at the bucket of Mayo as she dips a nugget double fry combo in it... well more like drowning it.

You glanced over your shoulder, looking at Blade who still just stood as still as a statue.

"What?" He scowled, avoiding your gaze to look out the rain filled window. "Why come if you won't even have anything...?" You said, popping a single fry into your mouth.

"Because–" He paused. "Because what?" Again having him shake his head slightly in response. The sudden change of behavior was peculiar to you, was this really the same ”Blade” you knew... ? Feels like the real ones probably locked up away somewhere else.

"Calm down, hes real." Kafka waved at you knowingly,

"Kafkas right–" Silver Wolf mumbled, still eating with a bulge showing through her cheeks "Whenever you look at Blade, your thoughts become kinda obvious."

Her words made you flush a slight red, as you swiftly grabbed alot of fries and nuggets drowning them in Mayo shoving it in her mouth making her choke a little,

"Ugh— Do you want me dead?!" She complained, holding on her slightly sore throat, while Kafka decided to observe for a little longer sipping on her coffee.

"No, just bothered me how little you take a time but drown it in SO much mayo." You replied, making Kafka chuckle a little.

"I do NOT drown my food in sauce! It's a perfectly fine amount!" She slammed her hands on the table, making the food fling up shortly as you slammed on the table back in response.

"Oh reeeaaally? How come?" You spoke through clenched teeth, "Listen to me, calm down you two." Kafka waved her hand, as you both sunk back into your seats.

"That bad, hm?" Blade asked in a dull tone.

"Shut up before I forcefully shove fries and a nugget down your throat too." You threatnened, as he shot a look of; ’Try me.’ making you furrow your brows in annoyance pouting slightly in sarcasm as you looked away.

Suddenly someone gripped onto your chin, making you turn to them as they forced a nugget into your mouth. "Too bad, I did it first." He spoke, yet this time it was in a different tone—a smug one that pissed you off. You felt like tearing his vocal cords off but you're actually somewhat surprised he ’fed’ you something.

"Ooh...~" Silver Wolf teased with the ’also smug smile’. "Shut." You bit your lip in embarrassment, as you fiddled with your fingers. You wondered what his lips would taste like—hoping for an occasion for you both to be alone as... Ahem.

Your train of thought is interrupted as someone busts the door open making you jerk upwards a little at the sound, screaming for the ’intergalatic criminals’ or whatever to come out.

"Uugggghhgghg..." Silver Wolf groaned, "We barely even ate any, can't I just bring this with me?"

"Just store it in your technique menu console thing, can't you do that?" You asked, as she shook her head a doubtful ’no’.

"Dunno, don't think so. I'll eat this basket of fries on the go." She said as she dumped the whole bucket of Mayo making you irk up a brow once again.

"You four, hands up!" The officer demanded, but Blade almost instantly just threw his sword into the poor guys chest hurrying you to get out of the booth so he could take it back.

You felt a small lump in your throat as he pulled out the sword, blood pooling out from under the officer.

"Don't feel bad now," Kafka whispered into your ear, softly saying your name. As Silver Wolf opened up a path to somewhere else. "C'mon, hurry."

You took one last glance at the people in the place, seeing their bewildered faces were kind of laughable.

But why exactly does Silver Wolf need to worry about the food if she can just open a path up...?

—

You sat down on the grassy field, staring into the sky seemingly in a daze with the scenic location.

"Where are we?" You asked Silver Wolf.

"Dunno, just chose a random spot that looked nice so I could eat my food 'n peace. Kinda sucks though since it's making my fries cold and soggy."

"You shouldn't have poured the whole bucket of Mayo on it..." You criticized, making her scoff in response. You just sat there, admiring the sunset with how wide this field of grass was. It felt soft to the touch, so peaceful. If you were apart of the Garden of Recollection you would probably engrave this into your mind forever as you sat on a small hill.

You felt someone obviously staring at you, causing you to glance over at the source as you just make eye contact with Blade before he turns around, walking away to Aeons know where.

"Where are you going, Bladie?" Kafka asks, turning around making him pause for a bit. "Somewhere. Oddly familiar with this place."

You actually somewhat could relate. This place felt nostalgic with a sliver of mechanoly hidden in it. It feels like you've been here before.

"Enjoying the place I picked out?" The silver haired asked, as you just reluctantly nod even though you clearly knew it was meant to lowkey mock you...

"I'm gonna go find a spot to try play the Violin." Kafka hummed, walking away to somewhere nearby where she'd still be in sight but as a small figure.

The abrupt change from a weird restaraunt with a mix of a cafe due to the iced coffee to such a calming nostalgic place was odd, but you see weirder things everytime on a mission, so who are you to complain?

Hearing the soft yet elegant demeanor thrumming of a violin made the atmosphere all more peaceful. It perplexes you though, how come it's so... Quiet and nice here? This is like a ’once in a life time chance’.

The bodies of water drew you in though, causing you to go closer when you hear a muffled yell from behind,

"Don't go near the water!" It sounded like Silver Wolf, but her voice rang in your ears sharply, and you touch the clear water with the colors of a pretty sunset. It looked like one of those art pieces a true master would make back in the old days really—

As you come back to your senses when you hear loud rhythms of thuds behind you—presumably footsteps, the body of water drags you in shocking you.

"What the fuck?—" You spoke, yet it echoed out loud and clear. You were stuck in some weird place under the water, but somehow could breathe freely.

Being in such a narrow place wasn't your cup of tea though, the thought of being stuck here in such a small place made your eyes narrow speeding up your beating hearts pace. Suddenly, your surroundings change to a cave, with Blade inspecting some weird murals on the walls.

"...Uhm. Blade?" You asked, cocking your head to the side perplexed. Blade seemingly immersed in observing the mural, you suddenly realize it felt like he was stuck in place—yet his head slightly turned around to glance at you when the water spat you out abruptly.

You coughed up some water aggressively still confused as fuck, "What just happened? Why was Blade looking at a dang wall?" You shake your head, trying to dry off thinking it'll work with you even though it's mainly for dogs...

"... Uhh, you saw Blade?" Silver Wolf asked in a concerned tone as she whispered something to Kafka. Your confusion only got worse when Kafkas expression was slightly changed to show a slight sliver of surprise.

"Oh my!" The lady laughed in a teasing manner, "I never thought you really knew Blade that way."

Processing what she said for a second, your cheeks suddenly dusted a low tint of red as you try to play dumb thinking what you think it might be, "What? Knew what about Blade?"

—

While Blade noticed your figure, seemingly stuck in a box floating with your hair drifting upwards as you held your palms out but seemed to be restricted.

He was slightly confused seeing your wide eyed expression, as he was about to call your name out in a quizzical tone, you disappeared.

As worried as he was, he tried to find his way back to where you all warped to.

"What happened?" He asks, having Silver Wolf say nothing happened, yet as he recounts the previous memory both of the girls eyes widen with a ’knowing’ look.

"Oh, I see...! I think we should, uhm, go back now to the base!" Silver Wolf spoke in an awkward tone, making both of you confused, well you can't see if Blade really was confused or not... It's like he has no face muscles to smile. You just nod in response running your fingers through your wet hair.

—

A few days had passed again, after that... Water incident. From time to time Kafka and Silver Wolf would smile and laugh about something whenever you and Blade were there.

Silver Wolf had asked you to do something—which was to give something to him. Apparently from Elio or whatever. You found yourself growing tired when you looked through each corridor and room till you realized he was probably out on the rooftop. Ugh, seriously?

Opening the door, you finally found him...with a girl?

Are you seeing things right? A girl. Presumably one of the other newer colleagues, was laughing and smiling with him. You had no idea what his expression was since his back was turned.

You felt your heart drop as you clearly saw her hand over a letter with a heart stamp seal.

Too bad you couldn't back out in handing whatever Silver Wolf gave you to him now if it really is one of Elios.

Putting on a fake measly smile, you walked closer as you called out to him saying Silver Wolf had something to give to him. Ugh. Couldn't she have sent it through the phone if it's a text?

"Hm—What is that...?" The girl pouted making you cringe a little. And you take that as your cue to leave, telling them to have a ’good’ time walking away back to the door with an empty pit inside of your stomach.

Yet when you need to close the door you somehow accidentally slammed it loudly, making a loud noise echo in 'n out as you hurried down stairs before someone went to check making you embarrassed.

You then find Silver Wolf in the same spot, reporting to her that her dumb request is done.

"Huh? Whats with the sudden gloomy vibe? You were so carefree when I asked you like 30 minutes ago." She asked, blowing gum before it popped taking it back inside her mouth chewing it.

"What gloomy vibe? I'm the same as before." Putting on a fake annoyed smile again at her remark making her tell you to chill and you could go.

As you closed the door behind you in your room, you threw yourself into the bed screaming into your pillow.

It didn't matter how much you'd scream since this place is soundproof for ’disguise’.

"Who the actual FUCK was that bitch?!" You spoke in a mildly loud annoyed tone, scratching your head aggressively messing up a part of your hair when you suddenly hear a few rhythmical knocks on your door. Who the crack could it be now?

You unlock the door, opening it to see Kafka wave as she sat down on your bed inviting herself inside.

"I didn't say you could come in." You scoffed.

"Thats true, but were you the one who slammed the door to the rooftop?" She asked, looking at you with those same gentle hypnotizing eyes tilting her heading slightly. The question embarrassed you, how does she even know that?

"... How do you know that?"

"Silver Wolf. Blade. Girl." She listed how one by one, as you shot her a confused look.

"Doesn't matter though, I just needed to know that—but another thing, why slammed the door after confessing to him?"

Confessing? Confess what? What exactly did you give to him that Silver Wolf wanted you to hand over?

"What?" You deadpan.

"Oh, y'know... The thing. The thing you gave to him." She recounted your memory of it as you felt yourself flush a bright red, yelling at her to get out and that you have NO idea what shes talking about as you lock the door again in a hurry to go to sleep and forget.

Since it was finally the time for the sweeeeet time off, you could just relax at the base—however your encounters with him became more frequent.

As you saw him with Kafka following from behind from afar in a corridor slowly walking closer, also remembering what Kafka said, and how Blade seemed to look at you differently. You instantly turned the other way walking to the closest next hallway you could find trying to avoid his sight.

"Hmm? Thats odd, she usually joins us for a walk when you're here, Bladie."

But he just stays silent, seemingly confused at why you walked away so quickly when you saw him and you were clearly trying to go somewhere. He only continued to walk without a word assuming you went the wrong way

However, that same thought couldn't be kept with how frequent your "wrong ways" became.

When you sat down for a leisure cup of coffee with Kafka and Silver Wolf, you somehow knew he was behind you, but not too close or too far. You glugged the piping hot cup down your throat not caring about the after effects, as you slam your hands down onto the table; "I need to go, just remembered something important."

"Hm? Is it not a good time to relax?" Kafka spoke with a clear sarcastic tone, leading you to swiftly walk away with a hurting mouth, throat, and stomach.

The loud slam caught his attention, noticing how you walked away in a hurry was out of character for you. Don't you usually like coffee times where you three sit down to talk about stuff? Well I guess it should be more like ’tea’ time. Haha, get it?

And another, when you were in your room just chilling sitting in front of your desk on your phone, you heard a few knocks. You asked who was there, but in response was pure silence. So you just reluctantly open the door.

Looking down, "Yes, whos there..." speaking with a lazy tone with a sliver of annoyance looking up to find their eyes, you immediately slammed the door locked when it was Blade who was about to speak.

You immediately curled up into a ball in front of the door out of pure embarrassment. When you finally heard footsteps going away, you got up with extreme wobbling legs walking to your bed.

Also after that, you stayed in your room for the whole day ignoring any knocks on your door, even if it was rhythmical probably being Kafka or a barrage of impatient knocks which was usually Silver Wolf.

And one of the most recent ones were much like the first, in a corridor. You were trying to find a vending machine when you saw him heading your way. His eyes somewhat seemed to light up slightly when he noticed you.

But you were not gonna walk away this time—instead of that, you avoided making eye contact as you kept walking in the same direction, completely ignoring him.

He was shocked, genuinely. Probably pissed too. Why are you the one ignoring him after you'd basically confessed to him? You were talking to everyone expect him.

Blade couldn't help but realize how genuinely depressing his already annoying life was without you, though he knew he couldn't have any of those feelings again with how he planned to finally die after finishing whatever Elio promised.

But it hurt a little. It wasn't fair. Wasn't fair for neither of you. Why even are you avoiding him if you like him so much? At some times you think about finally talking to him and he'd accept your feelings—but you brushed that ’useless’ thought away assuming he thinks you're a creep for wanting him...especially with the weird fantasies you've had.

–

Kafka eventually noticed Blade seeming to be more out of it than usual. It looked like he was sulking hugging his almost broken sword as he leaned against a pillar.

"Uh. What's wrong with him...?" Silver Wolf pointed his peculiar behavior out. Kafka only shrugged in response with a concerned sigh, "Whats wrong, Bladie?"

"Nothing." He mumbled to himself.

"Oh please, I feel like shes influenced you with the blatant lying." Silver Wolf scoffed, clearly referring to you.

"Speaking of her, is she the reason?" Kafka took a turn to ask. But he was just silent. Probably thinking if you really are the reason.

"I'm guessing thats a yes." Kafka smiled, "Lets go find her, shall we?" Gesturing for Blade to follow. Silver Wolf only stayed behind knowing exactly why.

–

"So, why are you avoiding Blade?" She asked, with the atmosphere being tense as Blade just sat Beside you. You were sandwiched in the middle by these people.

You had no way to escape now. Your heart thrummed heavily.

"I don't know what you're talki–."

"You've been avoiding me for almost the whole break." Blade interrupted with a stern tone making the atmosphere worse making your eye twitch from how awkward it was.

"I'll leave the room so you two can be more honest with each other." Kafka abruptly got up, as your hand extended out slightly to tell her to stay with how you didn't want to stay here all alone with him, but your voice felt like it disappeared when you saw him staring at your hand from the side.

"Ah..." You mumbled, taking your hand back placing it on your lap trying to avoid making eye contact.

"Why?" He asked, leaving you confused.

"Why what...?"

"The ’avoiding’." He quoted, like it was a movie title for some reason.

"I—...uhm. Thats erm." You tried to find a good excuse for the moment, but the way he suddenly placed his hand on one of yours made you speechless.

Why the actual fuck is he suddenly so intimate? Well I guess Kafka could've gave him a tip or two.

"Do you wanna... kiss?" He bluntly asked, making you cringe a little in perplexation. What exactly type of tips did Kafka give him? Like the consent thing is nice and all but...???????????

You sigh, since hes the one that asked, I guess it won't really matter.

You grab onto his collar with both hands pulling him closer, kissing him like an amateur. As you pull away you feel yourself heat up when you clearly see his frown slightly lift into a small—almost unnoticeable smile.

He kisses you back this time, as your grip on him loosened melting into the kiss. You knew he couldn't hug you due to the injuries on his body, but it's fine.

Nothing else mattered. Atleast for now.

–

But for some reason, you only got shyer from there. Sure you've always wanted to be with him but...

Blade would randomly hold onto your hand sometimes and you'd shake it off quickly with a bright red face. He didn't find it offensive at all, more like he found it funny. His expressions were still pretty much blank around you but it was still nice to see a small smile a few select of times.

It didn't help with how he only got bolder from there—randomly kissing you during missions leaving either Silver Wolf or Kafka in a state of shock if they happened to see it.

Silver Wolf would just walk away in disgust and tell you both to go get a room. Well, in a joking manner.

Kafka would laugh and tease about it for a whole week making you pissed, it didn't help with how Blade managed to be there by your side each time too.

"Stop following me around like a lost puppy..." You spoke in a low, awkward tone.

"I'm pretty sure you like that."

"Touché– But don't you have anything else to do other than cling onto me whenever we see each other?"

"I do. I just like doing it with you."

First of all, that sentence was horribly worded. Sure he had no idea what it sounds like, but you on the other hand imploded into a red brighter like nothing else before.

"Wrong phrasing, Blade." Silver Wolf replied for you.

Till one thought came to you... What happened to that girl that confessed to him?

——

hint: someone killed her :)

[mapofthesea]

goalie!hoseok x social media manager!reader, fem!reader

hockey!au

genre: fluff, smut, some angst

word count: 5.7k

summary: on paper, keeping your relationship with internationally famous goalie Jung Hoseok quiet is a great idea. In practice, it makes shaking off the attention of other men without suspicion quite difficult.

warnings: general sports talk, Hoseok is possessive, pre-existing but lowkey relationship, swearing, arguing (between hobi & rival player), brief mention of hockey game logistics/terms, hobi talks about hurting someone and subsequently throws hands (hockey level violence, mention of blood), reader and hobi are very in love. Specific smut warnings include: Dom!hoseok x sub!reader, unprotected sex, mild degradation but she's into it, praise, oral (m receiving), fingering (f receiving), slight hair pulling, dirty talk, consent because its sexy, he presses on her stomach while he’s inside her (idk what to call that 😬), sloppy kisses, multiple orgasms, he cums inside, aftercare ofc.

PSA: for those of you who are hockey literate: I know that goalies cannot be team captains, so it makes no sense that Hoseok would be the one doing the ceremonial puck drop at the beginning of the game, but creative liberties and all that.

(tagging @here2bbtstrash as per previous request :) )

an: as always, please DO NOT read this if you are under 18 or uncomfortable with the content. I am not responsible for your media consumption when I provide proper warnings! Alsoooo this is a work of fiction, and it never hurts to remember that. As always, I do not proof read so there may be some typos. Happy birthday month Hobi, ty for being one of my muses, love you <3

Hoseok leans into his stretch, making a show of extending his pretty neck side to side as you watch on. He catches your stare and smirks, heat blooming your cheeks as you try to focus on editing the graphic on your phone. It’s the late afternoon of a big game day where the Bangtan Boom are coming head to head with the largest rival team in the region. The game is already sold out, and a feeling of uncertainty has befallen the arena that even the all-star line can’t seem to shake.

Hiding your smile becomes hard when Hoseok lets out a satisfied sigh, plopping down on the bench just far enough away from you to be unassuming to onlookers if there were any.

“Hey there!” He addresses you like you’re nothing more than coworkers, and despite the vacancy around you, you decide to indulge him.

“Oh, hello there.” You blink owlishly at him, “is there anything I can help you with?”

A heart shaped grin splits his face as he tries to keep up with the charade. “Oh, I just wanted to come take a little break.” He drums his fingers against his thigh, and you just know that underneath his loose athletic shorts there’s a wealth of firm, smooth skin. You swallow harshly and glance around before sliding over, leaving just inches between the two of you.

It feels delightfully childish to be inching toward him like this; looking around for watchful eyes as if your mom would pop out and catch you canoodling with the handsome goalie if you weren’t careful. This close up, you can see the pretty lashes fluttering against his cheeks with every blink.

“My, you’re quite handsome for a hockey player,” you tease, squinting as if you’d never considered the fact before. His face lights up, eyes crinkling with the force of his smile.

“Really? That’s what my girlfriend says too! Don’t worry, I won’t tell her. She tends to get jealous.” He extends an arm behind you on the bench, grazing the side of your neck with his calloused fingers. A shiver wracks your body but you pretend to be unaffected as you pout at him.

"Oh, damn, I didn't know you had a girlfriend! She must be pretty lucky..." He smiles at your leading statement, now thumbing at the soft locks of hair at the nape of your neck.

"Nah, I'm the lucky one. She's beautiful, and smart, and talented, and funny, and sometimes she does this thing with her tongue-" Your face flames and you drop the act, shoving his side in retaliation to the words. Hoseok lets out a belly laugh as your attempt to move him fails. "What? It's all true!" He throws his hands in the air in mock resignation and an unbidden laugh bubbles out of you.

"You're ridiculous. And I love you." You can feel your cheeks strain with the force of your smile, and there's no denying that Hoseok is the only person who makes you feel this way. He was the only person you had eyes for long before you began dating, and even after 2 years you still feel giddy being near him.

"I love you too, baby." His voice has dropped an octave from its usual, and your brain stalls as he slides away from you, taking his body heat and penetrating stare with him. You want to pout, but the sound of dress shoes clacking against the concrete floor steels you.

"Hoseok, there you are!" A suited team executive yells, immediately clapping your boyfriend on the shoulder as soon as he stands. "We were looking for you everywhere, we have to get into the locker room and start warming up!" Hoseok nods easily, more than ready to go, but the executive catches you in the corner of his eye.

"Oh, miss Y/N! Nice to see you, too. I would have assumed you'd be up in your office!" His eyes slide between you and Hoseok, and alarm bells ring in your head.

"O-oh, I was, but I needed a quote from Hoseok for our charity game posts...so, that's why-" you lick your lips nervously, careful to avoid Hoseok's eyes, "I'll be going now!" You rush off before he can say anything else, stomach churning with anxiety at the situation. The walk to your office is already brief, but you make it there in about half the time. In the solitude you let out a shaky breath, smacking your own forehead in reproach. There's no way he would have been suspecting your involvement with Hoseok at the beginning of the conversation, but after your awkward explanation, he might be connecting the dots.

You feel sick to your stomach at the thought, sure of the media storm that would follow the news. You force yourself to swallow the burn in your throat and collect your frayed nerves. The game was just hours away, and being visibly nervous wouldn't help anything. Until you got home tonight you had to pretend that Jung Hoseok was nothing more than a player on the team you work for.

---

That's always easier said than done. No matter how many hockey games you had watched and worked, the sight of Hoseok sweaty and fresh off of the warmups ice always makes your heart flutter. You steal sneaky glances his way while he converses with his teammates, a severe look on his face. The crease in his brow reminds you of just how serious this game is to him, the chance to prove himself against their fiercest competition; but it also lights a fire of arousal in your stomach to see him that focused. He licks his lips and you feel like you may spontaneously combust, reminded of just how adept he can be with that tongue, and the way sweat runs in rivulets down his face and neck...

"Miss Y/N!" The same executive from earlier appears to materialize out of thin air as he calls your name. You startle and turn to face him, plastering a smile on your face.

"Hi, what can I do for you?" You ask, hoping that the genial way you clasp your hands together will excuse the unprofessional staring from before. The executive grins and points widely toward the rink entrance where special guests help facilitate the ceremonial puck drop.

"As you know this is a big game, so we have someone pretty important for the puck drop and I would love to make sure you get something posted for the accounts about it." He supplies.

It's an easy enough task, and you don't bother to tell the older man that you were planning on doing so anyway. The walk there is fairly long, looping past the staff bathrooms and break room before you come close to passing the guest locker room. The door to it is closed, but a man stands on the opposite wall, looking confused.

He's tall and built like you would expect a hockey player to be- with a small mop of unruly blonde hair and bright blue eyes. He's surely handsome, but you haven't found anyone as attractive as Hoseok since the day you met him. You're intent on walking right past the man, but he sees your ID and lights up immediately.

"Hey, excuse me! I uh- need to go over for the ceremonial puck drop and I don't know which way to go." He smiles apologetically and you finally register the sewed on 'C' on his jersey, a mirror of Hoseok's own but in a different color. Although he's the rival team's captain, he's still a human being first, so you return a smile.

"I'm heading there too, you can come with me. I'm Y/N, the social media manager. You are?"

If he takes offense to you not knowing his name it doesn't show. He easily falls in step next to you as you circle the arena. "I'm Brenden March. Nice to meet you, Y/N. And thanks for walking me. I tend to get lost at away games and my guys make fun of me." You can't help but chuckle at him; seeming so unassuming even though he's likely a beast on the ice.

"No problem, I'm used to rounding up our guys anyway; they're always all over the place."

"I can see why they send you to do that. Any guy would be lucky to have you walk them around an arena." The playful lilt of his voice gives you pause, and you nearly have to shake your head to clear it. Surely he wasn't flirting with you? You had been out of the game so long, it's genuinely hard for you to tell what his intentions are.

"I'm just usually walking around anyway," you offer, gauging his reaction as you reach the right entrance for the rink.

"I'm sure you do more than that around here," he fully grins at you now, leaned against the nearest wall with his arms crossed over his chest. The two of you are the first to arrive and anxiety spikes in you. You want to be hospitable, as you do represent the team, but you weren't sure how much longer you could talk to him without it being awkward.

"Other than running our socials, I try to keep out of the way, to be honest." You feel small under his intense gaze, especially so when he tuts at you.

"They gotta hide you away, pretty. I can only imagine how distracted those guys must get if they see you out there," he jabs a finger toward the ice and you hope desperately for a third party to join you and break the tension. "There's a reason coaches are always men," he continues, smirking at you as if you're supposed to find that flattering or funny.

You say nothing, but you can feel your face flush from anxiety, which he of course mistakes for flattery.

"Awe, don't have anybody to compliment you around here, pretty? I wouldn't mind taking that role if it needs filled..." his voice takes on a unmistakable drawl that makes you want to vomit. Before you can even respond, you feel the air shift as Brenden straightens against the wall.

You know his presence, his scent, before he even speaks.

"She's more than taken care of by this team, thanks." The venom in Hoseok's voice makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up. He skirts around you, careful not to touch you and give himself away. Brenden gives a scoff at his words.

"You gonna let him speak for you, Y/N? Is he your boyfriend or something?" He seems inordinately upset, likely more mad at being ignored by you than anything else. He pushes himself off of the wall to stalk closer to you and it takes a lot out of you to stand your ground. Hoseok is calculated in his movements, standing behind the rival so you can see him over the mans shoulder. The look on his face is positively murderous; eyes narrowed in on the two of you.

"No, he's definitely not my boyfriend! I just don't- no thank you." You finally squeak, peeking back at Hoseok. You always feel awful for denying your relationship in front of him, even though it was a term you both agreed on. Brenden seems decent enough to back down when you say no, or at least he's given up on the pursuit now that Hoseok is around.

No matter the reason, the special guest arrives with his family seconds later, and the two players morph into media ready smiles at the drop of a hat. You introduce yourself and set them up for a few photos together before the game officially starts; but you can still see the venomous looks being passed between the men. A feeling of helplessness washes over you as they do the puck drop; the two players crouched head to head over the puck as the whole arena watches on. Hoseok's jaw is clenched, and you can only imagine what kind of foul things he's holding back.

The special guest and his family are ushered to their seats and Brenden disappears to head back to his team's entrance. Hoseok hesitates, eyes burning into your figure.

"I'm gonna fucking crush him." He whispers, brushing a gentle peck against your forehead before leaving.

---

Usually you make a habit of circulating the rink during games, either taking photos of talking to other workers, but today you find yourself rooted to the glass behind Hoseok's goal. It's not the most convenient place to watch the game, and you constantly flinch as pucks fly your way, but it's the best you can do to be close to him for now. They're tied at the end of the final period, and you can tell Hoseok is shook up from the way he smacks his stick against the ice as his teammates get stuck at the other end, fighting for the puck. The whole arena seems to be holding its breath to see the outcome of the top two teams coming head to head.

"Fuck, come on guys!" Hoseok yells loud enough that you can hear him, and you have the overwhelming urge to yell support back to him but you hold your tongue. His team loses control of the puck and race back to play defense, Hoseok immediately putting his guard back up as he gets advanced on. You only have eyes for him but that doesn't mean you're invisible to everyone else, and unfortunately Brenden is among the pack advancing on Hoseok. You can see him smirk even from behind the glass as he circles up, vying to get the puck so he can take the glory of a goal. Luckily the defensemen keep him off and he skates to behind the goal.

To the crowd and his teammates, it certainly looks like a strategic move to catch the puck if one of his teammates whiffs it around the back, but it's evident to you that he only went there to mess with Hoseok.

"Can't keep the fucking pucks out today, buddy? Still wound up about earlier?" His taunting makes you wince even though its not for you. Wisely, Hoseok gives no reaction. Two players fight over the puck, so Brenden has time to continue. "She's real pretty, you know? Sure you never went for it? You seemed awful upset. Did she turn you down?" Hoseok hunkers down further, taps his stick against the ice again. "Oh, I get it, she's fucking one of your buddies?" Your heart clenches despite knowing its not true, and you want nothing more than to personally punch Brenden in the face. The players fighting over the puck begin to move; thankfully Hoseok's teammates are the ones taking the puck with them. Despite to being time for him to move, too, Brenden can't seem to resist one final jab. "Hey, by the way, when we win- I'm gonna show her what she's missing."

You suck in a breath, shortly getting drowned out by the sound of the roaring crowd as the puck gets closer to the net, playing in tandem to the seconds ticking down. One strong shot at the net and it's over, loud sirens and cheers marking a game well played and victory for the Bangtan Boom. You let out a sigh of relief, glad that the horrific night can finally come to end- until you see Hoseok flying across the ice, gloves disregarded on the ice as he goes. His teammates try to catch him; pull him into a celebratory hug as the announcers praise them, but he bypasses them all and launches straight for Brenden, swinging for the man's face.

Several gasps of shock, including your own, punctuate the air as Brenden struggles to fight back, pulling on Hoseok's jersey and landing a few punches of his own. The refs jump on them as soon as they realize what's happening, and in a flurry of fists and whistles they separate. As always, the crowd cheers as a ref steers Hoseok off of the ice but your stomach turns. Instigating a fight outside of game time will surely cause him trouble- and what would he say if anyone asked him the reason? Goalies starting fights is rare to begin with, but especially so outside of game time.

The rest of the players shuffle into the locker room and you dumbly follow suit, unsure what to do next. You don't dare to go near the locker rooms, fearful of both Brenden and whatever punishment Hoseok might be getting, so you loiter dumbly in the hallway near the bathroom.

Other staff members pass you and wave and you return the gesture without much thought. You have no idea how long you stand there; but eventually the team heads out of the locker room looking showered and refreshed. Hoseok is at the very tail end, emerging behind even the coaching staff. The skin under his left eye is already bruising. Unbidden, your lip wobbles as a sob works its way up your throat.

"Hobi..." you gasp his name before the tears come on strong; blurring your vision so much that you don't see him approach before he's engulfing you in a hug.

"I'm okay, why are you crying? It's not like I've never been in a fight before!" You nod against him but continue crying despite the logic. Hoseok pets your hair down and sighs.

"Let's get to the car first." You offer no resistance as he leads you out of the arena. It cleared surprisingly fast, and only a few cars remain in the parking lot. The two of you don't usually travel to or leave from games together, but Hoseok abandons your cautions for now and gathers you into his SUV.

He turns the heat up to your preferred temperature and makes sure you're buckled before he begins the drive home.

"Sorry for crying, I was just worried about you." You offer, admiring the slope of his nose as he drives. "Just...did you get in trouble for it?"

His Adam's apple bobs. "Not too much, baby. Just not starting lineup next game. Nothing to worry about, I promise. And that fucker deserved it." He takes a left turn much harder than usual, and you know the fight didn't assuage all of his anger. "If you could have heard the awful things he was saying to me, chirping out the ass behind the net when his team needed his help-"

"I did," you offer meekly. "I did hear it. I was behind you." Hoseok's freshly bruised hands flex and tighten on the steering wheel.

"Well then I should have beat him harder. Bashed those smug fucking teeth in until he was spitting them out." He growls and your stomach flutters with arousal over how willing he was to stand up for you, even if you weren't publicly declared as a couple.

"It's okay, Hobi. I wouldn't want you in any more trouble." You pause to admire the lights of the city and how they reflect off of the shine of his hair. "Even though it is pretty sexy to see you fight for me," you tease, placing a hand on his knee and gently squeezing.

"Well, I can tell you that's never happening again." He carefully laces his fingers with your own and you take that as an indication he's starting to feel lighter.

"Damn, so no more fights in my honor? But you're soooo brave, my handsome prince!" He grins despite the heavy night and it makes your heart soar to provide him with the same weightless feeling he gives you.

"No, no more hiding this. Us. I know you're worried about our jobs, but baby, fighting every douchebag player who finds you hot is gonna do a lot more damage than us going official. I can't stand not being able to claim you anymore." Your face flushes at the sincerity in his voice; and as he parks in your garage you pull his face towards you.

He will surely be black and blue in the morning; but it's just a faint pink for now. He doesn't hesitate to kiss you, pressing his chapped lips against your own for only a moment before he indulges in your taste altogether.

"You can claim me whenever you want, Hobi." You whisper against him and he moans, deep and guttural, and you both work to rid yourselves of the confines of the car.

Making it to your bedroom isn't even a conscious decision- your bodies carry you on instinct alone until you're in the unmade sheets from this morning, devouring each other's mouths.

There's no preamble to taking off your clothes. Each of you understand exactly where this is going, and you're too preoccupied with getting his mouth back on yours to discuss it. You groan in appreciation as his smooth skin is revealed, lean and capable muscle taunting you as he sheds his bottoms. Hoseok has always been proud of his body, but the admiration from you never hurts to reinforce his confidence.

You shiver with excitement at the sight of his cock already bobbing at his stomach, the slight curve of it so tantalizing that you forget that your underwear is still on.

Hoseok laughs and bends down to level with you at your spot on the bed. "Do I have to do that for you?" He teases, eyes twinkling as your startle. You start to hesitate but he's already creeping his fingers up your thighs, leaving paths of lightning against your skin. Your underwear are gone in a few tugs, forgotten on the bedroom floor, but Hoseok's fingers remain. They coax your thighs apart, gentle eyes encouraging you to lay back onto the messy sheets.

"My pretty baby..." He muses, ghosting over your pelvis, just above where you're throbbing with need for him. Your hips lift, hoping to persuade him to travel further and he surprisingly relents. A gasp leaves you as he traces the seam of your lips, parting them gently with two long fingers before collecting the wetness already there.

"You always wet for me, or was it the fight?" You know he's only teasing but the arousal in your veins has turned you complacent and pleasantly fuzzy.

"Always," you whine and lift your hips into his hand again, hoping to feel one of his fingers catch along your clit. He seems content to avoid it for now; instead burying the tip of his finger into your opening.

"'m gonna stretch this little pussy out, cause I know you can't take me if I don't." The truth of the words strikes through you, nodding rapidly as your wetness makes way for his finger.

You clutch his strong wrist; able to feel the flex of every muscle in his hand as it works inside of you. A second finger pushes in and your walls adjust immediately, eager to suck in whatever he offers you. His thumb finally presses against your clit with just enough pressure to remind you its there.

"Hobi," you sigh his name and he gives you a signature heart-shaped grin.

"Love it when you say my name like that with my fingers wrecking your little pussy."

"F-for you," you echo as he crooks the pair just right, brushing the spot that makes your eyes roll back. "Yours."

Hoseok moans, loud, and you feel your insides light with pride again.

"That's right, all mine. Mine for ever and ever." He speeds his pace and you choke on a gasp. Pleasure wells in you surprisingly fast and Hoseok knows the signs; your thighs tremble, nails digging into his wrist, and he leans down to steal a kiss from you right before you come.

You moan into the kiss, the gentle ebb of your first orgasm increasing as Hoseok works you through it and nibbles on your neck. Your mind clears and you bristle against the strands of his hair tickling you.

"Hobi, stop it," you giggle, playfully shoving at his head while he extracts his fingers. You can feel his pout against the burning heat of your neck but he easily retracts. Your eyes can't help but track him so you can only watch in awe as he sticks the fingers that were just inside of you into his own mouth and cleans them off with a lewd pop. If you weren't already liquified with pleasure, the look of ecstasy on his face would've done it.

"Look, now we'll match," he remarks casually, trailing his saliva covered fingers over the bruise he left on the column of your neck. You shudder under his touch and the intensity of the stare he levels at you.

A sudden thought wracks you. "Hobi, honey, I never thanked you." You lean into the saccharine sweetness of your voice as you sit up and his eyebrows raise in interest. He seems happy to let you guide the moment, sitting back onto the bed so you can rise onto your knees. Your fingernails bite into the hard planes of his chest and create a tantalizing trail downward over his nipples, between the ridges of his abs. Delight runs through you when he shivers and drops his head back against his shoulders.

"Do you mind if I say thank you?" You tease, finally cupping his cock in your hands.

"Fuck, of course not baby. Love it when you thank me." You can hear the smirk in his voice and you have to hold back a laugh as you lower yourself onto your knees and elbows and waste no time engulfing his cock in your mouth. You lick the tip, circling your tongue the way you know he likes and the praise flows instantly. His hands tangle in your hair and tug you down further, forcing your mouth full as you sputter. Spit escapes you and coats his cock but only aids the glide as you bob up and down on him.

"Shit, baby. I love you and your dirty little mouth," he hazards another thrust of his hips and you swallow around his length in response. "Lettin' me do whatever to you, thanking me for fighting for you, my sweet little girl? Happy to go brain numb and let me use you?" You keen and nod around him, pushing yourself down on his cock until your eyes are watering.

"God, wish I knew that asshole's number so I could show him what he's really missing." The moan that leaves you is instant, rumbling against his cock and inspiring a similar sound from his own throat.

"Like that idea? Want him to know how good you suck my cock?" Hoseok pulls errant strands of hair away from your face and the gentle touch makes your heart kick up in happiness. "Sorry baby, not gon' happen. I'm the only one that gets to see your pretty eyes when you suck my dick." His voice wavers as you choke around him, making a mess of him with the saliva.

You feel his cock twitch rapidly and he sucks a deep breath in. His hands leave your hair to press under your jaw, thumbs resting presently over your pulse points. "Off." He demands, and the edge in his voice tells you he means now, and you have no interest in disobeying him after today.

A string of saliva connects you as you pull off and clear your throat, immediately sitting up on your knees and gripping his wide shoulders.

"Hi, my pretty girlfriend." He muses, kissing your forehead. You highly doubt that you look exactly pretty right now; you had no time to take your makeup off and you know there's trails of spit over your chin and neck.

"Hi, my pretty boyfriend." You mirror, massaging your fingers into his shoulders, allowing both of you a moment to reset and catch your breath before the endurance match coming next. Your insides twist with anticipation as he coaxes you into a sloppy kiss, nipping at your bottom lip with reckless abandon as he guides you to lay down again.

He slots perfectly above you, legs fitting between your open thighs with practiced ease. The press of his hard cock against your pussy makes you breathless and needy for him again; the relief from your first orgasm long replaced by renewed desire.

"Hobi," your face flames in anticipation of your next words, the effect that they'll have on his plans for the night. He locks his eyes on you, expectant of more as he rocks his hips minutely against you. "Claim me?"

"You perfect woman, how could I ever want to do anything else?" Tears well and threaten to spill as he smiles blindingly. "Now lemme..." he traces your lower stomach, enjoying the way you squirm under his touch. Anticipation burns you from the inside out. He finally acquiesces, rearing his hips back to give his cock a few strokes. They're wholly unnecessary, but you still enjoy the show.

"Good?" His voice rasps but you can make it out and voice your readiness. He pushes your knees toward your chest and puts his bruised knuckles on display; a stunningly sexy reminder of what partly lead you here. Your stomach dips and flutters as he presses the fat head of his cock against your entrance.

The feeling of instant relief strikes you both as he pushes in, allowing the contours of his cock to shape your inner walls. With your legs held in place by his bodyweight, he takes the liberty to hold onto your waist; big hands spanning across you and over your stomach.

Your moans leave you unbidden as he works his entire length inside of you. "Like coming home." He whispers, and the simple statement loaded with so much truth makes you keen, muscles tightening around him.

"Hobi, please do something-" His tendency to start slow was always for your benefit, but right now it was something you could certainly live without.

He puffs out a breath and surprisingly obeys; likely just as needy as you are. He moves quickly, raising the tempo of his hips so abruptly that you nudge up the bed and rumple the sheets even more. His pretty grunts mix with the lengthy moans you can't contain to create a sinful cocktail that only makes you feel more consumed by him.

"Fuckin' like that!" You encourage, eager for him to repeat the exact angle and tempo that made your toes curl.

"Got you, baby. Right there?" He teases, repeating the motion but this time with the added pressure of his hand over your abdomen, pressing directly into the spot where the tip of his cock reaches. You convulse under his ministrations and as reliable as always, Hoseok intuits your needs and strums a finger over your clit. Electricity sparks your veins and you tighten around him, encouraging the stuttered tempo of his hips that signals his end.

"C'mon baby, waiting for you to soak my cock so I can fill you up." A loud moan erupts from you at the statement. "Isn't that what you wanted, hmm? Me to claim you and this pretty pussy all for myself?" He pushes on your stomach again, adding to the pressure already mounted inside your pussy and you only squeak before you cum. The world flashes white behind your eyelids and you feel like you're floating, faintly aware of Hoseok's moans as he praises you for coming.

His efforts double and you fight through the fog in your head to focus on the beautiful expression on his face as he comes, pulsing deep into you. He slumps, beautiful skin slick with sweat sticking against your own as he lays his weight on you. Normally it would be suffocating or annoying- you often had to poke him awake if he laid on you like this at night- but the contact grounded you. His face nuzzles into your neck and you wrap your arms around his frame, tracing the planes of his back as well as you can.

"I love you, Hobi. Like a lot." You don't know why tears burn behind your eyes at the words; they were exchanged between the two of you several times a day. He shifts, pushing his body up over you and beginning the slow removal of his cock. You both wince at the chance but he softens the feeling by grinning at you.

"I love you too, Y/N. Can I ask you something?" He blushes and you instantly worry your brow, curious as to what could have your wonderfully outgoing and vocal boyfriend so nervous.

You nod, cupping his warm, bruised cheek in a gentle hand. He still glows even after such a long day.

"Do you-. Earlier I said that I wanted to claim you," you both flush at his words now that the haze of arousal has subsided. "And as much as I enjoyed that, I meant..." He frowns and you mirror it.

"Can we go public? In whatever way you're most comfortable with, but please, Y/N? I can't keep doing stuff like today." He's sincerely nervous to ask, but your face melts into an immediate smile once you hear.

"Of course we can, Hobi. I'm tired of it too. You know, I think that executive was starting to put the pieces together and it honestly made me want to puke." You grimace but he laughs, bubbly and sweet and everything purely him.

"Baby, he already knows. He wanted to set me up with his daughter a few months ago, and I couldn't come up with a good excuse so I just told him." Your mouth slacks open and he laughs even harder, rolling onto his back and clapping a hand over his mouth.

"I'm sorry, baby. I thought the reveal would be funny. I was right." You roll your eyes and smack his arm playfully, a joyful mirror of the way the two of you began the day at the arena.

"I'm leaving!" You huff dramatically and haul yourself up from the bed, leaving a whining Hoseok behind to go to the ensuite bathroom. All it takes is the sound of the shower running for him to reappear by your side, practically begging to get back in your good graces.

[blitzsicedcoffee]

Ficlet: I'll Save You

(Admittedly, I shouldn't be writing this, because my wrists hurt like a bitch, but I'm a bitch to myself and I have THINGS IN MY HEAD that need to get out of said head, so here. Have my head hehe).

Here you go @blitzwhore :)

Setting the Scene:

Stolas works for IMP, he has been asking over and over to go on a mission with the gang and Blitz kept saying no because he was worried it's "Too dangerous". Stolas followed up with "I am literally an eldritch god" to which Blitz said, "Fucking fine but do what I say".

Blitz falls through the portal, face first while Millie giggles and Moxxie shakes his head, both stepping through behind him. Stolas comes through last, gasping, "Blitz! Are you alright?" he reaches his hand down and Blitz waves it off,

"Yeah yeah yeah I'm fucking fine", he says, wiping snow off his jacket. Moxxie chuckles, "He does that like every day".

"Really?!" Stolas asks again and Millie nods. Blitz rolls his eyes,

"ANYWAY, let's go over the job gang. So we're here in...fuckin...what is this, Russia?" he looks to Moxxie and he opens the maps on his phone.

"Yes, we seem to be somewhere in the tundra of Russia, sir". Moxxie affirms and Blitz nods, "Good I guess. Millie why are we here again?"

Millie pulls out the briefing that Moxxie typed earlier, "It seems like we are looking for some guy in a cabin? Real remote person".

"What'd he do?" Blitz asks, Moxxie has been taking clients directly recently while Blitz and Stolas take longer getting to work. For...reasons.

Moxxie replies, "Well, it seems he shot up a preschool in a nearby village, sir. The teacher wants revenge".

"Holy fuck, okay", Blitz says, polishing his gun.

Stolas puts his hand to his mouth, "My word! He definitely deserves this then, we must be quick!" they all stare at him then back at Blitz.

"Yeah-it's fine Stols, we'll just go at our regular pace. Just wish it wasn't so fucking cold here, Satan's taint!" he shivers, holding his arms in his big coat with the hand sewn IMP patch that Stolas resewed after the last one got mildly burnt during the last mission in Antarctica, as someone decided to light a fire near the portal.

Stolas can't help but admire how cute Blitz looks in his little coat. He's only in a small wool sweater himself, his feathers giving him plenty of warmth already. As they walk toward the location of the cabin, the M's hold hands and Stolas grazes his near Blitz's hand and he blushes, putting it behind his head.

"UUUhhhh, m-maybe not while we're on mission", Blitz says shyly, his words having trouble finding their footing. He's realized that since they started dating, literally every brush, every touch, even potential is a fucking recipe for disaster in his head and body. He fucking melts like an ice cream cone in Wrath.

"Oh, right", Stolas replies, pulling his hand away and looking down, frowning. But Blitz can't take his sad owl eyes and reluctantly holds his hand, red hot spreading across his cheeks. Stolas doesn't say anything to the sudden change of heart, just smiles and winks at Millie when she looks back at them.

Blitz pulling his hand away from Stolas, he pushes him down by placing a hand at the small of his back as they all duck behind some bushes.

"Okay what's the plan?" Moxxie asks, looking to Blitz who shakes his head, "Huh?" he replies, clearly distracted and Millie and Stolas giggle.

"Sir! The plan! For killing this guy!" Moxxie says again, annoyed now as Millie runs her hand up the back of his hair under his hat and he calms a little.

Blitz scooches away from Stolas and takes a deep breath, "Right. So Moxx, you flank the back with Mills. I got the front with Stols". They nod and separate, but the target is good at realizing his surroundings.

He steps out of the cabin, holding his shotgun.

"I FUCKING HEARD SHIT OUT HERE!" he says in Russian and Blitz shrugs, "Alright I just need to line up the shot", he lines up the rifle through the bush and Stolas puts a hand on his shoulder.

"You don't think we should wait until he's back inside?" Stolas asks and Blitz scoffs, "Nah, this'll do fine". He looks back in his scope but the target is gone.

"Fuuuuck", he whispers under his breath. Stolas looks around, "I dont see him..."

"See M&M anywhere?" he asks, still whispering and Stolas shakes his head, "Fuck" he replies in a whisper again.

Suddenly the target tries to tackle Blitz, kicking Stolas to the side against a tree. Putting his hands around Blitz's throat.

"Blitz!!" he turns eldritch, swiping a black claw straight through the targets body, slicing him in half right over Blitz, their blood dripping down Blitz's face as Stolas's eldritch form looms over him.

"Holy fuck...." he whispers, barely audible. The blood in his body flooding his face and...other parts.

Stolas quickly pushes the split body of the target aside and changes back to his regular form, blood splattered all over his face.

"Blitz are okay?! I'm so sorry if I scared you I-" he starts but Blitz pulls him down by the back head feathers into a deep, tongue twisting kiss.

"That was the hottest fucking thing I've ever seen", he says, both breathing heavily as they continue making out in the blood stained snow.

"Sir! Are you-WHAT THE FUCK?!" he says, gesturing to them and Millie chuckles, "Oh Moxx don't be mad, this is literally us every time we do a mission".

Moxx sighs, "You're right", then he sees the body of the target, "Satan-daaaaammnnnn. Was that you Stolas?!" he asks and Stolas nods, Blitz sitting up and pulling Stolas close, "You're damn right it was him!! My sweet murder bird", he coos and gives pecking kisses all over Stolas's face, him hooting in response.

Moxxie takes a picture of the body and holds Millie's hand, "Okay how are they more gross than we are".

"It's cute!" Millie says, smiling. Blitz blushes, standing up and Pulling Stolas up with him and easily pressing the crystal portal open.

"Come on gang! I'm fucking horny, and if I don't get to fuck this bird in the next ten minutes I'm gonna explode", he scoops Stolas up in his arms to his surprise,

"OOoh hoo hoo!" He hoots in response, kissing Blitz on the horns as he's carried through the portal.

[poetzproblem]

I am so with you on the Agatha All Along brainrot. What are some of your favorite headcanons about the show and/or Agatha and Rio's relationship?

This got very long, so apologies. I'm hiding it all under that cut and also recommending that you go read creator, you destroy me by velvetprayer if you haven't already. It more or less matches my own personal headcanon about the Agatha/Rio past, though her version of Lady Death might be a little gentler overall than I imagine her to be - although fully as angst ridden.

My winded rambling as follows:

So, I’ll preface this all by saying that I’m not really deep into Marvel lore. I only know any of it through the cinematic universe, but I can’t say I’ve ever watched the entire filmography, I did watch Loki and Wandavision, and I obviously fell in love with Agatha from that. I did a rewatch after the first episode of Agatha All Along dropped to refresh my memory, and it helped me form a headcanon for her, though there are some pretty big missing pieces that I haven’t quite worked out, mostly due to the incomplete backstory in AAA and Marvel’s general monkeying up of timelines between their television projects. (The Darkhold was an entire plotline on Agents of Shield, but WV and AAA both imply Agatha has had that book for a significantly long time.) 

So before I go too deep into character headcanon, I will say that I mostly loved AAA. I think it was well written overall with so much foreshadowing and so many easter eggs that really make rewatching the episodes a joy. I appreciated the practical effects, and the song was a banger in every version. I will admit to being a little disappointed that the Road wasn’t real all along but a pocket dimension created by Billy, though I did just enough research about him to know it was one of his powers and saw the speculation about that twist being talked about, so I was expecting it by the last two episodes. 

I also was disappointed with the Salem Seven being a big non event. Rio describes them in the first episode as "the worst of them," and they’ve supposedly been hunting Agatha for something like 320 years, so I expected them to be a real threat. But from what little we saw of them, beyond being creepy, they had no real bite. It felt very much like a fully powered up Agatha, especially one in possession of the Darkhold, could have easily squashed them all a century or two ago? (Again, when did she actually acquire that damned book?)

So Agatha. She’s unapologetically wicked, but I think of her as more selfishly power-hungry than outright evil. Knowledge of the craft is important to her, that was clear in her whole initial confrontation with Wanda, so she’s clearly well studied in addition to powerful. I imagine she really does think she’s more deserving of every other witch's power than they are, so why not take it? 

Her one tiny line in the sand (or salt circle) seems to be not hurting children, although she really didn’t seem all that concerned with Billy or Tommy disappearing with Wanda’s powers during WV. I can only assume that was because Wanda magicked them up in the tiny span of a day or two out of nothing but her chaos magic with fake sitcom labor, so Agatha didn’t see them as real. And now that I know she had a son who she carried for (presumably) the full nine months and put in the real work for, I can kind of understand that. 

WV showed her coven trying to kill her in 1693, and AAA put Nicky’s birth in 1750. That’s 57 years of wrecking havoc with her lover, Lady Death, and my own take on that is that they didn’t actually meet until after Agatha offed her coven. I’m sure Death was there for that event, and I even play with the idea that Death had been hovering around her long before that, but I don’t think she showed herself to Agatha at that point and Agatha wouldn’t have noticed her physical presence yet.  

I don’t actually believe Agatha could control her siphoning powers before she killed her coven - in fact, she seemed genuinely surprised that she wasn’t dying when they blasted her and that her own power was pulling theirs into her. And her coven and Evanora sure as hell couldn’t have known she could do that, or they would have chosen another way to kill her. 

And now that we know Agatha could absorb magic with her touch (kiss?), since that’s what she did with Rio in the end, I think that’s probably how her power worked before the attempted execution. In fact, I headcanon that she started siphoning Evanora’s powers during childbirth, and that’s why her mother thought she was evil and wanted to kill her at birth. I think the trauma of being born triggered baby Agatha’s magic and Evanora started growing weaker and weaker as it dragged on, and she felt her magic being leeched by the child she was birthing, but because Agatha was only a baby and not really all the powerful yet, she couldn’t draw enough to kill her mother outright, only severely weaken her. 

And yes, I also imagine Lady Death was hovering in that room, waiting to see if she’d be taking Evanora Harkness or the baby, and maybe Agatha and her potential intrigued her from those first moments, so maybe she kept an interested eye on her - since Death is technically everywhere all at once. 

There are so many circumstances when a young Agatha could have had her siphoning ability triggered. Like, imagine her trying to steal a treat or something and Evanora grabbing her hand away only for Agatha to start sucking up her magic through the touch. It would have made Evanora slap her away and refuse to even touch her again, and she certainly wouldn’t have ever wanted to allow Agatha to have the knowledge of how to use her power with intent. So of course young Agatha has to go looking for knowledge on her own. I don’t believe she had the Darkhold at this time, but there are certainly other tomes of dark magic she could have gotten her hands on and started reading, trying to understand what she is and why her magic works differently than the others in her coven.

Side note - siphoning through touch would only work in small doses, since once the other witch noticed it, she’d be able to push Agatha away. I mean, Agatha didn't exactly seem skilled at hand to hand combat there, so I imagine her childhood was a series of accidents or ‘accidents’ until Agatha figured out a much better way to employ her magic stealing touch. Let’s just say, I don’t think using her lips to steal Death’s power was the first time she used that trick, and I imagine the other witch might be too pleasantly distracted to realize what was happening for quite some time. 

Maybe this is even the way she betrayed her coven and got put on trial. Both defiling the natural order by cavorting with other women and killing a fellow witch with her touch.  

Anyway, she doesn’t figure out the much easier and, more importantly, faster way to steal power until her coven tries to kill her, but once she does, she gets very good at getting witches to blast her. (I also think this is why she told Lilia the supposed trick to her siphoning - because if she couldn't immediately provoke her, she could have tried going old school with it by latching onto her until she used her magic on her to shake her off, and then she’d get what she wanted the fast way. I mean, Lilia seemed old and frail. Agatha probably though she could take her no problem.)

So, back to past Agatha, now sans coven. She undoubtedly ends up killing more witches sooner rather than later, supposedly in self defense, after she pisses them all off enough to provoke an attack, and that finally brings Lady Death fully into her orbit. There are a number of fic writers who have already imagined the ‘meet deadly’ moment, so I won’t spend much time on that because this answer is already too long with no end in sight.  Suffice to say, they spent 57 years being gay and doing crime. Agatha got more powerful and Lady Death - Rio now in her corporeal, Agatha-loving form - got her bodies and a taste of life that she'd never had before. 

I headcanon that they did (still do) love one another in their own very disturbed, ultimately unhealthy way. And I definitely think Agatha was learning so many things from Rio in relation to magic during their years together. Rio is, after all, The Green Witch, so presumably no one knows more about green craft than her. And as Lady Death, she probably knows about every magic, and Agatha would just soak in all that knowledge over their time together. She probably learned to control her siphoning abilities from Rio so there wouldn’t be any accidental draws on the ancient power that would kill her. 

I also imagine Rio’s presence might have kept the Salem Seven at bay for those earlier years.  (Were they a factor during the Nicky years? Did Rio keep them at bay then too to protect her family from a distance? Why didn't they make a move in the any of the 200 years after?)

Anyway, jump skip to Agatha’s pregnancy which was doomed from conception. If we go with the thought that Nicholas was somehow created by both of them, then he carried the essence of Death inside of him and couldn’t have existed in a mortal body, doomed by his very nature. If we go with Agatha making him herself from scratch, it might have been her own inherent magic that doomed him. Maybe it was even a combination of both. 

In either case, I imagine Rio warned Agatha what Fate would demand from the beginning if she carried the pregnancy to term - what she’d force Rio to do. (If Nicky is hers too, then his very existence is an abomination against the sacred balance.) But Agatha, with her severe mommy issues, was determined to go ahead with it and prove her mother wrong, because the rules of magic have always bent to her power. Death herself has bowed before Agatha - certainly she’d do the same again. Certainly, Agatha is powerful enough to bring her child into the world unharmed. 

Spoiler: she is not. 

But Rio does, in fact, bend the rules for her again, and grants the only thing she can - time. This is why it cuts Rio so deeply when Agatha throws all of that special treatment back in her face on the Road (that isn’t real) - why that argument de-escalates at the mention of Nicky and what really happened. Because what is more awful than the truth that Agatha had loved and been loved by Death herself and even that - even all her own power and the power she stole from other witches - couldn’t save her (their) child?

Would it ultimately have been kinder for Rio to have just taken Nicholas before he’d drawn his first breath?  Maybe. Maybe not. I don’t think there was an answer that could have saved their love at this point, but Rio did (does) love Agatha, and she went against her very nature and defied the laws she was bound by to grant her love time with her (their) son. 

And we know how that part of the story plays out, though I do share the popular headcanon that Rio was lurking around for those six years that Nicholas lived, perhaps visiting him in his sleep, because he went to her without fear or hesitation in the end. She obviously has the ability to infiltrate the mind-space - she did it with the spell Agatha was trapped in. 

That it happened when he was asleep - more importantly, when Agatha was asleep - is the thing that I think has fueled her anger and resentment of Rio all this time. Yeah, she was always going to hate Rio for taking him and be angry for a very long time, but Rio never gave her the chance to say that final goodbye, and that's what made it truly unforgivable. Rio probably thought it was better that way - a more peaceful death for Nicky - but Agatha could never be capable of understanding that. 

So Agatha immediately embarks on centuries long rage and grief spree to gain even more power using the ballad she’d written with her son, and you’d better believe she’s gleefully using those bodies to taunt her ex along the way. That’s what we see, anyway, and there were no black fingers, so she wasn’t actively using the Darkhold for that Witch's Road con she was running. (Again, when did she find that book?)

Rio clearly implies in the first episode that it’s been a long time since they’ve seen each other and that Agatha has been using the Darkhold to hide behind - essentially hiding from Death. Did she have it for fifty years? One hundred? Two hundred?  You’d think she would have gone looking for it soon after Nicky’s death, maybe hoping it would have some spell or ritual to resurrect him. But she didn’t. Or maybe she couldn’t? Maybe Nicky, being the son of Lady Death, didn’t end up in the same place as other, purely mortal souls, so whatever spell the Darkhold contained couldn’t work to draw his soul back?   

(And if anyone is interested after this long ass post, I also have a separate headcanon about Nicholas and the Afterlife that I won;t get into here.)  

I haven’t fully settled on how I think the timeline of those missing years lines up. I’m leaning toward Agatha having had the Darkhold for at least a century - long enough to make it really hurt for Rio to not be able to see or sense her, left with only bodies she knows Agatha left in her wake. 

Now, Rio. Lady Death. 

When we first meet her, she’s inserted herself into Agatha’s crime drama spell. I don’t think she was physically there at the time but projected herself into Agatha’s consciousness, and at this point it’s been either decades or centuries since she’s been able to sense her ex. First the Darkhold hid her and then Wanda’s spell - “You live here now. No one will bother you” - and as soon as both of those are gone from the multiverse, the spell begins to break. No, I do not think Billy broke it. It was already breaking before he tried his analog magic spell. At best, he sped up Agatha’s awakening. 

So Rio has been unable to confront Agatha for a very, very long time, but I believe there were confrontations before Agatha got the Darkhold and after Nicky died. I think it’s fair to assume those were violent and angry on Agatha’s side and probably sad and regretful on Rio’s. They probably hate fucked a time or two. But any mention of Nicky would have set Agatha off and sent her running, safe in her anger and hatred of Rio, so other than the blame game, I don't think they actually have a real conversation about him.

I think Rio probably tries at least once to see her and apologize and assure her that Nicky is at peace and being watched over, but that really wouldn't have be met with anything but venom.  

Agatha is the only mortal Death has ever loved and who has ever loved Death, and she doesn’t know how to let go of that. And then Agatha ghosts her metaphorically before ghosting her literally. 

But still, Rio is surprisingly patient with Agatha as Agnes, even though she very definitely made a beeline to Westview the moment Agatha’s aura came back on the map. When Agatha is finally free of the spell and confronts Herb, he says she’s been acting extra weird on her true crime kick for a few days. That implies she was just rolling along in the Nosy Neghbor Agnes persona prior to that, while Wanda was alive and the spell was still in full effect. 

I think her change in behavior should have coincided exactly with Wanda’s death, even though it doesn’t exactly jive with ‘Ralph’ knowing Wanda was dead when Billy seeks him out. That’s one of the rare plot holes in the writing of this show. Unless he just assumed Wanda was dead since she disappeared after Westview and went into hiding. 

Anyway, Rio shows up and assesses the situation her ex is in, deciding she needs to help Agatha wake up before she tears into her over the decades / centuries of ghosting her. Because what satisfaction can she get if Agatha doesn’t even remember why she hates Rio? 

Billy stumbles into the situation after Rio, so his presence can only speed up what was already started. 

And then Agatha is awake, and what we see in that first confrontation is an angry and hurt Lady Death wanting to strike back at the love of her (un)life for almost certainly stealing the Darkhold and using it to hide from her (and the Salem Seven and probably the Sorcerer Supreme and every other witch/witchhunter out for revenge) while likely also trying to the resurrect their dead son against the laws of the universe and upset the sacred balance. 

She’s saying she wants Agatha dead - which for her would also mean Agatha would be hers forever, no way to run again - but she also clearly still just wants her back in a more willing way. This first fight is very likely flirting for them, and she does want Agatha to get her purple back. She wants them back to the way they were before Nicky. It’s impossible, of course, but after 270-ish years, she’s hoping maybe Agatha has finally processed her grief enough to forgive her. 

I don’t think Billy is on Rio’s radar at this point. Maybe this is because of the sigil. Maybe it’s that William Kaplan wasn’t dead long enough to pull her to his body when Billy jumped in. Maybe it’s a combination of both. 

I do think he’s on her radar the moment the Road becomes real - or at least, the chaos magic that created it is. And since Wanda is gone, that really only leaves one possibility. 

Rio is definitely already in the neighborhood for poor Sharon. She clearly doesn't need the door they opened for her with the summoning spell to come and go from the Road, as she demonstrates when she tears through reality to leave it in episode 8. She does tell Agatha that it wasn't her choice since magic took the path of least resistance, but I interpret that to mean that their spell gave her an excuse to show herself to all of them and investigate what was going on.

When she’s acting as Death, she’s stoic and calm. With Agatha, she’s sad and angry and creepily playful - the humanity Agatha brings out of her on full display. With the others when she arrives on the Road - well, she’s exactly what Agatha accuses her of being - a tourist. She knows the Road wasn’t real before exactly as Agatha does, so her reaction to being there is exactly what you’d expect. She’s admiring the scenery, the vibe, and the magic that created it. She even says, “this is cool,” when she first starts walking it. 

I believe she knows Teen is Billy Maximoff before the sigil breaks. She asks about him as soon as she and Agatha are alone in Alice’s trial, and Agatha immediately tries to distract her with the promise of bodies. And when he ends up hurt, Rio once again makes an exception for Agatha when she begs, “Don’t.” She could have taken him then and maybe had a chance of grabbing his soul before he reincarnated because he hadn’t fully come into his powers yet in this life. But she waits because her guilt over taking Nicky is still a tangible thing, and Billy is saved, and Rio is going to lose her chance to re-balance the scales. 

She’s still hoping for Agatha’s forgiveness, and she makes her confession of Agatha being her scar, and then they share that moment in the woods. But Rio isn’t truly forgiven for Nicky, and she knows it, and she stops Agatha because she doesn’t want her misplaced gratitude for sparing Billy Maximoff.  After multiple viewings, I’m now reading - “That boy isn’t yours” - as less Rio reminding Agatha that Billy isn’t Nicholas and more warning her that Billy isn’t hers to save. He isn’t her second chance at motherhood with a powerful, magicked up son. He’s Wanda’s boy. He’s an abomination. He ultimately shouldn't exist, and his soul (and possibly William Kaplan's suppressed one) belong to Rio. 

If she was going to ignore the sacred balance for anyone, it would have been Nicholas. 

I’ve already posted about Rio’s reaction in Agatha’s trial. How the camera cuts to her after Evanora says she ought to have killed Agatha at birth. First we see Agatha, obviously, because it''s the confirmation that her mother has always thought her evil from birth, and the pain of that statement is twofold for her because she literally begged Death to spare her own child and then spent six years, presumably, trying to amass enough power to somehow save him. I think she believed that if she killed enough witches, if she collected enough of the kind of magic that she didn’t have - healing, protection, divination - she might one day figure out how either outrun Death or conjure more time for her son. 

But right after Agatha, we see Rio with that look of pain, closing her eyes and looking away, because she nearly did with Agatha’s son - with her own son - what Evanora wanted to do. She nearly took him at birth because he wasn’t meant to exist in the living world, and then she was still forced to take him eventually. Just as Agatha hasn’t forgiven her for it, Rio has never forgiven herself for what she had to do.  

And when we next see her after this episode, we see stoic Lady Death again, collecting Alice with bored indifference. Because that’s her job. Her vacation is over. The trials on this fake Road aren’t any fun anymore, and she’s done humoring Agatha with whatever con she’s trying to run this time. Because she knows Agatha could have ended all of this before it started if she’d admitted the Road was never real and Billy created it. 

Billy has come into his powers at this point, and Rio’s likely pissed at herself for letting her chance to collect him slip away thanks to her eternal soft spot for Agatha. Once again, she’s given special treatment and risked upsetting the balance for this woman.  And on top of that, Lilia easily took out the Salem Seven - bad ass of Lilla but so anticlimactic for whatever threat the Salem Seven were intended to be - so Rio's chance of finally getting Agatha over to the other side just took a nosedive. She’s not allowed to do it herself, and I’m not sure she’s yet at the point where she really wants to torture Agatha into begging her for release. If Agatha manages to finish the Road and actually gets her purple back, Rio will be chasing after her again for another century or two. 

She’s close to the end of her patience with her ex at this point. Poor Nicky is never going to see her (other) mother again. 

And then Agatha offers to deliver Billy to her, which I think Rio realizes is bullshit. I don’t think she really believes that Agatha intends to follow through without a trick, and even if she did, she doesn't believe Agatha will actually be able to convince Billy to give himself over to Death. But Rio plays along, wondering what Agatha wants from her this time. Maybe she even thinks Agatha will want to trade him for Nicky - one abomination for another. Maybe Rio actually hopes it would be this because it would give her a loophole to finally say yes. Maybe the prophesied demiurge would be more than an equal trade for the son of Death alive in the world again.

And incidentally, I do find it hilarious that Agatha’s condition is for Rio to stop following her - like, you’ve spent 300 years killing witches. It’s impossible for Death to do anything else but follow you.  But it’s the part about not wanting to see her face when Agatha eventually does die that finally breaks Rio. I mean, that was basically the whole point of wanting Agatha dead now - a way for them to be together with their son. 

It guts Rio, and you can see it in her expression. 

And I believe Agatha fully expected her to refuse - to tell her that it wasn’t possible. All roads lead to (Lady) Death, after all. She’s the inevtiable end of all things, and she hates ghosts. There’s no way for Agatha to avoid her. The best she could do is greet her in her true form and let Rio Vidal die. 

But for Rio, this isn’t just a rejection of her. It’s also a rejection of everything about their shared past. A rejection of Nicholas. If Rio can’t take her soul to the Afterlife, then she can’t take her to Nicholas either. Is Agatha really that much of a coward? (The answer, of course, is yes.) So she reluctantly agrees, heartbroken, but she also expects that Agatha won’t be able to keep her end of that deal, so she won’t need to keep hers. 

It’s kind of a stalemate where they both think - shit, what the fuck did I just agree to?

It’s ironic really. To some degree, I think Agatha finally comes to some acceptance of Nicky’s death in that final trial. "Sometimes, boys die." "From death, life."  

At the same time, this is when Rio fully snaps. She’s stewing over this whole Witches Road deal and Agatha's final rejection, and frankly, fully aware that Agatha just helped Billy create another abomination, messing even more with the rightful balance of things. 

Yeah, Rio has been angry with Agatha, but also guilty and hurt and lovesick, so it’s tempered her somewhat. She’s been the antagonistic kind of angry where Agatha could easily assuage her, but now, with Agatha’s last rejection of everything about their shared past and helping that kid disrupt her domain even more, she embraces her rage in a way she hasn’t allowed herself up to this point. The human emotions that Agatha sparked in Rio take over all her reason and balance and duty, and she lashes out.  The rejected lover, finally allowed to indulge the anger and grief that Agatha spent two centuries indulging with her own rampage. 

I know we didn’t get to see the magical battle due to budget restraints, and honestly, I’m only a little disappointed by that. The Wanda/Agatha one wasn’t exactly spectacular with the boring energy blasts. But we get enough of it to see that Rio never hits Agatha with her full power. She isn’t trying to kill her here; she only wants to hurt her - vent her own rage and heartbreak. They’re even back to their weird kind of flirting halfway through it, but then Billy gets involved again, and oh yeah, the kid is still here. Something has to be done about him, because Rio can’t ignore her duty forever, and Agatha knows she can’t defeat Death. 

So finally, we get that moment, when Agatha looks like she’s getting what she wanted and Billy is willingly surrendering himself, and she could walk away with a nice charge from his power and the promise to never have to see Rio again. 

It’s my understanding that Billy’s mental plea wasn’t originally in the script, and I actually wish they’d left it out. I don’t actually think that his mention of Nicky in that moment would have changed her mind anyway. I think it would have probably had the opposite effect since she’s always reacted badly to the mention of him except when Rio brought him up in that last conversation on the Road.

But, in the context we got, that isn’t how Nicky died. He’d been stolen away in the night after Rio had granted him six more years than he should have ever had. Agatha would have never traded his life for hers. She would have traded hers for him in a heartbeat.  So yeah, I get why that was added, but I don’t fully think it was necessary. Agatha was always going to realize that leaving Billy with Rio was the wrong thing, and she was crossing the one meager moral line she had - hurting children. And this one, specifically, reminds her too much of her lost son. 

She puts a hand to her chest before she turns, right where we know her broach always sat. I’ve watched that scene a few times, and I noticed that we can’t see her broach on her costume for maybe the only time since she broke out of Wanda’s spell. But it’s obviously there somewhere because it’s the one thing left behind when Rio speed runs her decomposition - yet another bit of special treatment in allowing it to remain as a means of tying her spirit to the mortal realm. 

And yeah, like Agatha said, it was a calculated risk. I don’t think Rio has ever outright lied to her or broken a deal, and Agatha technically upheld her end of their bargain but also very much didn’t, but Rio does slightly change the terms of the bargain before that last battle, such as it is. She gives them both the choice - “One of you is coming with me.”  

And yet, she hesitates to take Billy as soon as he offers himself. Because taking him means losing Agatha forever, and despite her anger, she isn’t fully ready to do that. In the end, her hesitation gives Agatha the time to change the terms. She gives Rio what she’s claimed to want from the beginning - Agatha’s death. 

Agatha gives herself to Rio in a way that speaks of both acceptance and forgiveness. And maybe, it’s also forcing the bargain that Rio never gave her the chance to make for Nicky. Her life for his. 

And Rio keeps their bargain about seeing her face again anyway, because I think she knows that she’s finally been forgiven, but Agatha still isn’t ready to face Nicky. She doesn’t collect Agatha’s soul and even allows that broach to stay behind for Billy to take. I think Rio knows full well she just allowed Agatha to remain as a ghost, but she lets her go. She finally lets Agatha go and lets herself grieve their lost love. 

She lets Rio Vidal die with Agatha and reclaims her eternal role as Lady Death. 

And now her sacred balance is shot to hell, because she’s got not one, but two, abominations roaming around in bodies that don’t belong to them, and one stubborn, ornery ghost who she knows damn well is going to meddle in all of that chaos magic.  

And, I think, she also hopes that maybe one day, Agatha will be ready to cross over and see Nicholas again - maybe even see her again - but, it’s all in Agatha’s power now. 

Like Rio said in the very first episode - “If you want to be in control, you can be.”  And it speaks volumes that Rio has honored that at every turn.

Now she just has to explain to Nicholas how she let his mama slip through her fingers again and stick around to mentor that Maximoff boy.

[deathlooksgoodonyou-if]

AAAAAAAHHH!!! Just found your If and I can already say that I can feel myself bitting at the bars of my cell, this is SO GOOD!

I'm already obsessed about so many different parts of this story and the demo hasn't even come out yet!! So I'm going to do what my little heart and messed up brain can and word vomit about my little fucked up MC!

So, you said they had a rough upbringing and that their situationship with Jules was also not healthy, so I did the sane thing and started projecting on them!

My little guy, my baby boy Kyrin, is absolutely not coping well and he mostly decides that any mean thoughts or emotions that surface are nothing important and immediately bottles them up for another day, month, year. They will never let anyone see under their mask because, well, why would anyone need to know? They like this version of him, so no matter how many things he has to say or thinks, they won't ever see the light of day.

And he does his best to seem like a well adjusted member of society, he even makes some friends (which to him is an epic win!!), and then he meets Jules.

And sadly, for everyone involved, it seems they match each other's freak.

Kyrin and Jules share something in common. Love is strange and scary for them, never having felt this strongly about anyone before, they have no idea how to handle it.

Kyrin, completely fumbling this whole new human experience, loves too hard and too bright. He wants Jules to like them, to spend time with them, to get any shred of attention from them as he can. And he doesn't even understand why.

Jules, of course also doesn't understand this love thing, and is in result scared by it.

The obvious happens.

It's when Jules begins dating another person that Kyrin's mask breaks. Years of anger, grief and a thousand other things finally breaking the camel's back.

Things get messy. Kyrin is angry. Jules is angry. They can't find a middle ground. Bridges are burnt.

And then Jules is murdered.

Kyrin is left alone, mask broken and a whole lot of emotions to sort through for the first time in a long time.

At this point, in the present, Kyrin is less of a wet cat and more of a feral stray kitten. Scared, angry and functioning entirely on his fight or flight mode.

With everything going on, he will absolutely choose to close himself off from others, feeling terrified of being so vulnerable and with so much in his plate that putting on his mask is near impossible at this point.

I have ideas of what I want his story to be, no pressure to add anything of this of course.

His main arc would be obviously getting his shit together and finally figuring himself out as a person but that's going to be pushed far back on the line of things to care about with the whole murderer on the lose and the incarnation of his grief, loss and self hate coming to haunt him.

For romance, it'll be a real hit or miss as the only one I can see him even willingly getting close is Mia and that is mostly because of the whole 'She will hurt you' part. After Jules passing, Kyrin absolutely doesn't believe they can or should be loved and that train of thought will only be reinforced by the new mean Jules in his head.

Of course, this is a big maybe because if that sanity stat does what is says, and by god I hope it does (little guy so fucked up that he is taking control of the narrative!!), then Kyrin will either kill someone or himself before the story ends. I want that stat as low as it can go!

Either way, this is going to be a really messy ride with an even messier ending and I can't wait for it!

kyrin is such a gorgeous, gorgeous name! He gives off major "I confuse instinct for desire. Isn't bite also touch?" vibes. 😭😭

I love it when people talk about their MCs in my asks. It helps me understand what y'all want and write them better. 🫶