#but it's this idea of taking out his magnifying glass and peering at this character that he's writing that he doesn't understand | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

soobadnoonecanstopher · 4 years ago

Text

Touch it for Real, Part 4

Genre: Humor / Fluff / Eventual Smut

Warnings: OMG they were roommates / slice of life / slow burn / mutual pining / crude humor / cursing / virgin!baek / idiots to lovers

A/N: The song featured in the kitchen scene is Fantasy by Mariah Carey.

Characters: Baekhyun X You/Female Reader

Description: You teach Baekhyun how to date. (Basically the Get You Alone M/V)

Part 1 , Part 2 , Part 3 , Part 4 , Part 5

You were puzzling. Alone in your bedroom, laying within the comfort of your own bed, you were positively puzzling.

After sorting out just who Ben was and fixing the damage Baekhyun had done to your reputation by explaining that your idiot roommate had just gotten a hold of your phone, you reintroduced yourself and apologized for the confusion.

This ‘Ben’ actually seemed to laugh off the odd behavior he’d gotten as a first impression of you, mentioning that your roommate seemed funny, if not weirdly protective of you.

You could see what he meant when you read through the rapid fire questions Baekhyun had asked him from his age, to his preferred operating system, whether or not Ben had Facebook so “you” and him could be friends, his profession, and his parents line of work, his current place of work, how long he’s worked there and whether or not he moves around a lot, his hometown, his hobbies and even whether or not Ben has now or has ever had any pets; it seemed that Baekhyun had actually done a whole lot of legwork to give you a pretty good idea of what Ben might be like.

But the moment Baekhyun’s conversation topic changed to innocently ask Ben for his astrological sign, something struck you as off to see Baekhyun proclaim you to also be the same sign and after the two compared birthdays you began to find the whole exchange quite odd.

You realized that Baekhyun had simply lied about your birthday. Baekhyun knew your birthday. Why had he given a fake date to Ben? Unless there was something else happening that you didn’t understand. Then again, Baekhyun had always been rather stingy about giving out personal information; both yours and his. He was probably just being cautious about revealing too much to a stranger.

And actually, Ben seemed rather …. nice. You always hesitated to give them this adjective right off the bat as most of the guys you met who seemed nice right away turned out to be very good at faking nice and stringing along at least three or four girls at once for the shot at fucking at least one of them, and the hopes of fucking all of them.

You’d been called the wrong name late at night, whispered through a sleepy voice over the phone. You’d been sweet-talked and then abruptly called a bitch for refusing to send nudes to a guy you’d been talking to for only a week. Apparently a week was his limit and all his other girls gave him what he wanted within a couple of days. You’d been ghosted by nice guys who felt victimized and led on when you said goodnight politely with a smile and a wave instead of inviting them inside for ramen.

You did want a nice guy. But you wanted a real one.

What you wouldn’t give for one of them, for just one of them to be honest with you and really show you their true self.

Perhaps you had been going about it all wrong.

Your conversation with Ben quietly fizzled and you put your phone away to charge and now, now you were simply puzzling.

It panged at your heart to think of it, but the upset with Baekhyun hours earlier kept replaying in your mind. You propped your feet up on your wall and let your head hang off the edge of your bed, enjoying the way the gravity pulled at the blood in your brain and you tapped your fingers on the bed absentmindedly to the soft beat of music you heard playing from his room.

And you puzzled.

Don’t use your beauty as a weapon against me.

You hadn’t been this bothered by something since you’d watched that Mission Impossible movie the first time and spent an hour and a half trying to wrap your head around the complicated plot.

A Weapon.

Your beauty … a weapon … against me.

Why did it bother you so much? Why had he been so upset that you were playing with him, that you were messing with him. He messed with you all the time. You messed with him just as much. He never got this upset. No, he never got upset in this way. In such a way as to call you out on using something you had, against him. Something that you hadn’t even known had any power at all to attack the man. Your beauty. Did you have such a thing?

You thought about the other times you fought with him.

Not really fought, the two of you never did that, but that fake sort of fighting like when he’d woken you up at 2am for the third night in a row with his loud working music and you found him out in the kitchen disassembling your favorite toaster, the one with the wide slots for bagels that also toasts four slices of bread at once and even has special buttons for frozen items. The stainless steel one that you won in a work raffle and proudly marched through the office carrying with a huge smile on your face. It was a deluxe model. Supreme even. The master of it’s craft. Said so right on the box. Your toaster in a million pieces on your kitchen counter; all because he needed some components or resistors or whatever the fuck it was and he decided the best move was to take your toaster apart rather than to just order what he needed online and wait two business days for them to arrive.

Sure, he put it back together a few days later but not without enduring the laser eyes you shot him over breakfast when you had to toast a piece of bread in a frying pan on the stove like a loser who did not own a four slice Deluxe Toastmaster Supreme.

You’d planned your revenge then. It was something tiny and it involved his TV remote. His precious TV was enormous, took up almost the whole wall, OLED or SUPER-NANO or ULTRA-NANO some similar nonsense words and had 8-Ks of pixels or so he claimed and had so many smart functions you could hardly get comfortable using it for anything that didn’t involve the Netflix button. And no, no, you didn’t do anything to the actual TV. Relax, this was just the remote. This was harmless. Absolutely harmless. Easy to solve really if he had half a brain in his head.

You just carefully cut out the smallest tiniest piece of IR blocking tape that fit exactly over the infrared sensor on the remote control and fit so well it was undetectable to the human eye. Unless you knew it was there and knew exactly where to stick your fingernail in under the plastic bezel to peel it back. You simply applied the tape and left the remote right on the coffee table before you left for work.

You’d come home that night to a pile of assorted battery packs all strewn about the coffee table, and the remote completely taken apart down to the tiny circuit board and Baekhyun was quietly touching the tip of some tiny tool to the different spots on the scary looking green part from inside of the remote with all the metal bits stuck to it and when you slowly walked by he looked up at you through the magnifying eye glasses he wore. His eyes looked comically enormous and you swallowed away your laughter and considered how long you’d let him suffer.

“Something wrong with your remote, Peanut Butter?”

“It was working fine yesterday. I just don’t understand it.”

“Maybe it’s the batteries,” you offered innocently and he just ignored your helpful suggestion as he began screwing tiny screws into place with a precision screwdriver.

He was reassembling it all now and you sat down beside him on the sofa about as amused as you had ever been to sit and watch him suffer.

He grabbed two new batteries from an unopened pack on the table and aimed the remote, pressing the buttons again and again. Nothing happened.

He was surprisingly calm about the whole thing and judging by the various shopping bags and different brands of batteries you saw, he seemed to have been working on this all afternoon. Probably for hours now.

“I’m going to have to take the TV apart.”

He was already standing up and walking across the room toward the wall mounted monstrosity when you leaned forward for the remote. He glanced back at you as you did it and he looked at you just in time to see you shake the remote back and forth and then hit it twice lightly against your left hand. Just a little knock-knock should do it. You were careful to keep the expression on your face calm and well controlled.

When you pressed the power button, the big TV came to life and you pressed the button for Netflix and scrolled through your recommended titles. You had a new episode to watch. You’d have to make time tonight for that. After he was done with his little project here.

Baekhyun instantly pulled his hands away from the TV and hopped back and away from the screen, peering up at it with his mouth hanging wide open. His eyes shot back to where you sat on the sofa holding the remote control. You did not allow your smile to form. Nothing in your whole life had ever been so difficult. You felt as if you could pop right here. You casually flipped through the menu on the screen and the man looked back up at the TV and back down at you again.

You could see him coming in then. He was moving fast with several large steps toward you and with the quickest movement you could manage you used the tip of your finger to slide the IR tape back over the remote sensor. You could not be as precise as you had been before with him coming right at you so quickly, but hopefully it wouldn’t be visible.

He reached for the remote. “What did you do, how did you fix it?” He held it up and pointed it toward the TV. Again, the remote did not work. You bit down hard on the inside of your cheek.

He was pressing buttons again and nothing happened with each new button he smashed down. You could see the madness growing in his eyes the more he tried.

He made the smallest whining sound from the back of his throat and it took every ounce of self control to keep from laughing as he lightly tapped the remote twice against his hand just as he had seen you do. Nothing.

You tried to hold it. You tried so hard. A tiny sound escaped, the smallest sniffle with a laugh broke free from your throat and you coughed lightly to hide it.

His face turned on you and those crazed eyes were back only instead of directing them at the remote, he was looking at you now.

“How did you fix it? Do it again.” He looked insane and desperate and a tiny smile betrayed you as you grabbed the remote from his hand. You played the smile off as part of the help you were willing to offer him but you also had to inhale a deep breath and carefully and slowly exhale it through your mouth to keep from breaking completely.

You held it up in your right hand and gave it a little shake. As quickly as you had done it before you turned the remote on its side as you gave those two little knocks and his head flipped toward the TV when you aimed. With his eyes averted you were able to slip the tape off just before pressing the button.

The Netflix logo greeted you and Baekhyun threw his head back and let out a loud frustrated yell into the ceiling above him.

You’d been holding your laugh for too long. It was becoming too difficult now and he was back, reaching for the remote when the first suffocating giggles took your composure and you laughed out loud.

Your laughter brought all of his attention right to you and only you. The entirety of his focus shifted and that brought those crazed eyes of his bearing down on you, wide and demanding.

It was, by far, the most successful and meanest prank you had ever played on him to date and you were gasping for air and laughing as he reached for you. He grasped both of your shoulders and he shook you as you laughed and laughed at the absolute madness in his eyes. Oh he was crazy. It was just so damn funny.

The remote was still in your hands and you flipped through the different inputs on the TV as you cackled and tears formed at the corners of your eyes.

“How did you do it? You devil! Tell me how you did it?”

He balanced with his knees on the couch and his hands were on you, roaming over the fabric of the sweater you wore, lifting your arms to look under them, maybe for spare remotes or for hidden batteries or secret formulas, who knows what he thought he might find.

You’d stashed the tiny circle of tape by sticking it to the skin inside your elbow and he was currently examining the fingers on all of your hands up close as if they concealed all of the secrets he was looking for.

It wasn’t until he searched higher, pulling your hand forward toward his chest and his thumb grazed against the shiny plastic of the tape circle you had on your inner arm when he did a double take, pulled your arm harder and lifted an accusing finger to point at the tape.

“What is that?!” He clearly thought himself to be the world’s greatest detective.

You allowed yourself to be manhandled by him a little bit more as you got every bit of humor about your recent victory out of your chest and you lifted your other hand, the one he did not have held hostage right now to wipe at the tears that had fallen from your eyes.

��Stop laughing and answer me, woman! What is it?”

“It’s my birth control patch,” you said through a laugh and his eyes widened as he pulled his hand back. It was a tiny movement but you were so close to his accusing eyes that it felt monumental and the dramatic reaction to your teasing lie made a fresh wave of laughter bubble up in your chest. You knew he would react this way. Any mention of your contraceptives always made him clam up.

“It’s IR tape, Baekhyun. Infrared blocking tape. I put it on the sensor this morning after breakfast. After I made toast in a pan instead of in my toaster.”

The truth pulled his whole head back and he fell down on his butt on the sofa briefly before he slipped and fell right off the couch onto the floor and he sat there with a blank lifeless look on his face; staring ahead without any focus in his eyes.

“Do you know how sad pan toast is, Baekhyun? Tell me, how am I supposed to be satisfied with pan toast when I should have been having Deluxe Toastmaster Supreme toast?”

He was shaking his head back and forth as you spoke and when he did move it was to lay down flat on his back on the floor of the living room. His hands were up and he rubbed roughly over his face.

“Oh my god. Oh my god—it’s so good. I would have never checked for tape over the sensor. Fucking tape. A piece of goddamn tape. I was so focused on the batteries.I went to three different stores today. The circuits to the sensor were all intact, I checked it, it was good — I never even considered this. Are you an evil genius? My sweet innocent Bug ... is actually an evil supervillain.”

You left him on the floor and made your way into the kitchen to make dinner. It was your night to cook and thanks to the man stewing on the floor of the living room you had to do it around the scattered carcass of your third favorite kitchen appliance.

You remembered the way he reacted then. He pouted and moaned on the floor for a few moments until he smelled the stew you were cooking on the stove. It was comfort food. Something with meat and potatoes and warmth and spices. It would lift anyone’s mood and his had been lifted almost immediately. There were no apologies or any tears. Just a promise to put the toaster back together tomorrow after he went to the store for the parts he needed and that was the end of it.

He didn't storm away. He didn't raise his voice or say you were mean or unfair or too beautiful for him to withstand. He didn't get angry about closeness being used the wrong way, in a way that was unfair to him. In a way that could hurt him, like a weapon.

If he said you had the kind of beauty that could be used against him, didn't that mean he found you beautiful? Wouldn't that mean that Baekhyun found you attractive?

The words protested inside your mind. You shook your head.

That was impossible. Definitely. You’ve been so close to him for so long without even a hint of that sort of a feeling from him. Sure you were close to each other. Sure you cared for each other. It was a familiar sort of affection you shared. But attraction? Because he found you beautiful in a way that was unfair?

The puzzling was giving you a headache. There were some things that just did not exist in the same space in your mind and that was the existence of your roommate, Byun Baekhyun, and the possibility that he was attracted to you in any way.

You’d been inside your bedroom for hours now and you were no closer to answers than when you first came in here.

Baekhyun would be done with his episode. He would have watched it with Mia and discussed themes or scenes or dramatic moments with her. Did he talk to her on the phone or maybe though a headset as they streamed the episode together.

Did he like her voice and did she like his jokes?

Did he make her laugh? Of course he did. He made everyone laugh. Baekhyun was charming and hilarious. But could she make him laugh? Could she make him giggle and shake like he laughed with you?

It was late. That didn't really mean all that much to Baekhyun, as the man didn't really have any set bedtime and usually just fell asleep when the sun began to come up. It was a weekend night and you didn't have work in the morning and frankly your curiosity had grown too much for you to just stay in here and fall asleep without at least checking on how the streaming date went.

You knocked lightly on his door. You could hear music playing inside. Nothing too loud or crazy. The man seemed to be having a somewhat low key evening.

“Yeah,” his voice called lowly and you opened the door and peeked your head inside.

“How is our girlfriend doing?” Baekhyun was sitting on his butt on the floor in front of his bed with his head laid over his arms and his phone abandoned in the middle of the floor out of arm’s reach.

He let out a long low groan but did not lift his head up when you stepped inside.

“I don't even know. I don't know.” He sounded defeated already and this had only just started.

“Peanut, what happened?” You picked up the phone and unlocked the screen, searching through his apps to find the dating app so you could see if they had said anything to each other that might give you some clues about what went wrong.

“Nothing happened. I was too quiet. I couldn’t talk at all. I didn't say anything during the entire episode. Why is this so scary. Uggghhh...I feel unsafe. It’s gross.”

You stepped over him and climbed onto his bed, sitting up against the head of the bed as you scrolled through the chat logs.

It looked normal. Not unfriendly. A little terse and abrupt on his part. The man didn't know how to loosen up when he talked to girls and you wondered if maybe you needed more one on one lessons with him before he was really ready for this stuff.

When you leaned back against the headboard you felt the bed dip and he climbed onto the bed beside you and angled his body toward where you sat up against the pillows.

When you got to the end of the chat you could see that she was the last one to speak and she remarked that he felt a bit different from when they spoke at the beginning of the day. He didn't say anything in response to that.

Baekhyun moaned with his eyes closed and he turned his head into your waist. He was obviously reliving some perceived embarrassment he must have felt during the interaction with Mia and when he moved his arm around your waist you looked down to find yourself trapped under his arm that constricted as he pulled tightly, hiding the entirety of his face somewhere in the shirt you wore. He was warm. The weight of his arm around you felt nice.

“I felt so unsafe,” he repeated his complaint from earlier and his voice was obscured and muffled as he hid himself. He switched the tense though and you wondered if he no longer felt unsafe now that you had come in.

You typed out a quick response to Mia. You didn't think it was right to just leave her hanging without an explanation for his strange silence during and after the show.

“I’m going to tell her that you were so quiet because you were nervous. I’ll also thank her for watching the episode tonight.”

You heard and felt a hum and the tightness of his arm around your waist relaxed a little as his arm went slack. He did not move though. He still hugged you. He was still warm and it took only a moment for your nose to pick up the pleasant smell of his clean bed sheets fresh from the dryer. You both had a schedule for washing things like towels and bed sheets. Yours had been cleaned today as well, but something about the smell of his bed felt better than yours had. Perhaps it had been all that difficult puzzling that had tainted yours.

Mia responded right away to your message. She was flattered by his nervousness. You could tell with the way she reassured that he really didn't have to be nervous around her. That she was an easy going kinda girl. Low maintenance she said. You scoffed at the thought of a computer geek being low maintenance. As if you didn't know how difficult to obtain fancy GPUs were and how expensive high powered CPUs, high capacity SATA drives, and their required cooling systems were. You looked around Baekhyun’s set up and figured it had to run somewhere in the multiples of tens of thousands of dollars; just in this room alone.

Low maintenance. Please, she was just as high maintenance as any other regular girl just with a different catalogue of parts.

You switched to the emoji keyboard and keyed off some random happy faces and closed her chat window with more force than was necessary; suddenly and unexpectedly irked when she responded with similar emojis and the notification popped up on the screen. You swiped it away quickly to be rid of it.

“She sounded nice though, even if I couldn’t talk. She sounded nice. Do you think she will even want to talk to me again? I think she likes you more than me.”

“She will like you. If she doesn’t she’s an idiot. A girl would have to be an imbecile, Peanut, to not fall for you.”

He lifted his face then, just enough for the corners of his eye to peek out and you looked down at the side of his face as he looked at you for a moment, absorbing the encouraging words you spoke to him. His leg began to shake somewhere on the end of the bed. You could feel the rhythmic motions. He often did this when he was tired.

You had been scrolling through matches on his phone, building on an idea that popped into your head.

The man needed some practice to build up his confidence. Maybe, just maybe you could find another girl. Someone who he could talk to, chat with, be friendly with, that maybe wasn’t just so wonderfully perfect for him. Someone just to break the ice with.

You stopped on a girl. Her dress was short and the neckline was low. She really left very little up to the imagination with this outfit. Outside of the revealing clothes, it was clear that she was a beautiful woman. She was sexy and very confident in herself despite the glaringly obvious grammatical typo in her bio.

You spun the phone around to show him.

“She looks nice,” you said. Baekhyun blinked at the phone and pulled his face back a little to see the image clearly.

“—-follow you’re dreams — you are — Never too old to follow you are dreams.” Baekhyun read out the sentence with the typo out loud and you laughed.

“Come on, she’s pretty,” you said softly, “right?” You probed gently and he chuckled once to himself and closed his eyes up with a sigh.

“Yeah, she’s pretty,” he said after a while and you felt yourself stiffen just a little bit with his admission. Of course she was. Anyone could see it. He’d be lying if he didn't admit it.

“Okay but like, just pretty or do you also think she’s beautiful?”

He hummed some non response and you focused your attention back on the phone in your hands. After scrolling through a few more profiles you found another woman whose beauty shone brightly right through the screen at you.

“And her? Is she pretty or is she beautiful?”

Baekhyun’s eyes opened again but just barely. He looked half asleep and you wondered if the reason his arm was still around you was because he was so sleepy he didn't realize he was still hugging you like this on his bed.

“Pretty,” he mumbled and pushed his face into your waist again. This time the shaking in his leg began to settle and you could hear a slow steadiness in his breathing.

“Should I message her? Maybe we can practice talking to her so you’re not so nervous talking to girls?”

“Sure Bug,” he said quietly, “you can do anything you want.”

He was falling asleep now. You could feel the change. It didn't matter. You’d let him rest a bit while you opened up a chat window and began talking to Candy.

She responded quickly and had a completely different feeling from Mia. Maybe this was good. Candy was easy to talk to but she had nearly nothing in common with Baekhyun. She casually asked what a computer programmer did and when you went into specifics you had trouble finding synonyms for words that didn’t just make it all more complicated. You finally settled on a simple explanation of what kinds of computer software Baekhyun had developed and left it at that.

After a while Baekhyun shifted in his sleep and uncovered his face. His lips were parted and from the upside down angle you could see the dark splash of his pretty eyelashes that landed over his soft cheeks. He looked lovely and peaceful. All the worries and fears of the day were gone and he was sleeping so calmly. You watched his sleeping face for a while, growing warm inside with the strange contentedness you felt.

You could see some light movement behind his eyes and you wondered if he was dreaming about anything.

Candy had asked for a picture. She was asking something superficial like what sort of car Baekhyun drove and you slipped into his picture gallery for the folder with the shots you took for him when he first bought his car. You found a nice one with him smiling behind the driver’s seat, bright red seatbelt across his chest and the logo of his fancy ride on the steering wheel.

‘Wooo, baby boy an Audi? you must be loaded. When are you gonna come pick me up in that?’

You laughed at her obvious reaction. Candy was exactly as you expected her to be. Baekhyun would be able to laugh and chat with her easily without too much pressure of impressing a complicated woman like Mia was. Candy was an open book. The stakes were lower with Candy.

Your giggle made him stir and you looked down to see his eyes open a tiny bit before he closed them again.

“It’s going well with Candy,” you whispered and he inhaled a breath and nodded his head as he closed his eyes again.

“Mmm, the pretty one?” he asked in a sleepy voice and you hummed your confirmation. Something buzzed inside of you; just a bit of nerve. Call it gumption.

“Baek,” you called quietly and his lips parted with his breathing but his eyes stayed closed this time. He did not respond. He didn't give any indication at all that he heard you call him.

“Baek, what about me?” Your voice was tiny when you asked it. You felt more warmth in this bed suddenly. You felt it in your chest and it seeped up to warm up your face too.

He hadn’t responded at all to your question. It had been pretty unclear though. He might not have heard it, or might not have understood it. Or his sleep may have just been too deep to register your words.

“Am I pretty or am I beautiful?” You said it so quietly there was little chance of him actually hearing it. He was asleep and you were just here, trapped in his embrace on his bed as he slept and you puzzled over the words he had told you during an upset. The words that you had pried from him when he was vulnerable and emotional. The words that you shouldn’t be over analyzing like this. Those words felt too risky to be giving this much thought to.

Here you were again, using your sneaking methods to try and trick him into something when you knew it wouldn't work, when you knew there was nothing really there and you were reading too far into things.

His steady breathing continued. His eyes remained closed and his arm still gripped around your tightly, holding you still, holding you close to him as he slept.

So you gave up. You’d moved back to the phone to respond to Candy; something silly and lighthearted, something easy just like she was, when you heard him speak.

“You are so fucking beautiful,” he said so far under his breath the statement sounded more like air than actual vocalization of any kind and your fingers stopped their rapid typing in the middle of your sentence.

Your eyes looked down. Your entire body was frozen. Half of you expected to find his eyes open and a wide teasing smile on his lips, begging for you to take the bait and believe his words just for the chance of laughing at your shocked face and making fun of you for being stupid enough to believe them.

He was asleep. His eyelids did not pull open when you looked down at him and his breathing remained as steady as ever.

Baekhyun was asleep.

That damn puzzling — your jaw was sore from clenching your teeth down and your lips were dry and chapped from biting them.

You had dropped the phone and it disappeared somewhere amid the bedcovers.

Baekhyun’s sleep was deeper now. He must have been very tired to be falling asleep so recklessly like this. You shifted downward and made some attempt to find the phone without waking him up and your small movement made him inhale a deep breath through his nose and he was moving now. You felt him shifting, moving his sleepy body up higher in search for some comfort; for something to lay on that was a bit more comfortable than flat on the middle of the bed like that.

You used the movement to reach for the blanket and pull it over his body so he could be warm at least and when he finally settled he shared the same pillow as you. His forehead rested against your shoulder and he was once again, fast asleep.

His arm though— you found yourself still very much trapped in nearly the same embrace as before, just shifted. A forearm landed over your chest and you felt a new heaviness of his bent leg land over your thigh.

You could wake him.

You could push him off and let him roll the other way so you could make an escape back to the peace of your own bedroom.

You would. You would do that soon.

Your current state of thoughts was simply too overloaded to follow through on any game plan. If you could only have a few more minutes of his warm steady breathing, you would move away from this. You would do it.

It wasn’t that you had never considered it. It was that you had gone through many lengths to come to this place. You were safe and secure here.

It was that you had nowhere else to go when it was over.

This place was your home.

Peanut was part of that home.

Things were nice right now; the way they were at home.

But…

As they sometimes do, and against your own will, your thoughts wandered.

You wondered as they wandered — wondered about him.

From the deepest parts of your mind; down where you’d shoved them roughly many times before, those wondering thoughts danced and swayed lightly to the soft music playing in this room.

Those secret thoughts about the sweetness in his eyes. Secrets about the fondness you felt for the little tips of him; the tip of his nose, the tips of his fingers, the pink tips of his ears. Thoughts you refused to encourage.

Baekhyun was asleep and you were thinking.

With the thinking came the shame and your skin was hot to the touch. The last thing you wanted was to ruin your home. With the thinking came the denial. You could not encourage anything. You could not afford to become complacent. You did not need these thoughts to become so brazen. You did not need them taking root. The last thing you needed was them making an appearance again.

The sounds he made while dreaming pulled your closed eyelids back open. You turned your face toward the sound. It was soft, the small groan from the back of his throat. But his face changed then; eyebrows screwed together and his lungs constricted as he let out a softer sound, like a whine. It was a complaint. His face showed signs of pain. The dream must have been unpleasant.

You lifted a hand then, shifted within his embrace you raised your palm and laid it carefully over the side of his face.

The shift happened with the warm contact and his features evened out and that pained look was gone.

You smiled then. So sleepy but satisfied that you could help when he needed it.

You would move after he got a little more sleep. After he’d had a little more comfort from you, you would move.

You weren’t the first to move. And it seemed by the change in light that shone through the windows that your visit had lasted much longer than you had intended.

It was the untangle that woke you up. A conscious and deliberate lifting of limbs; the careful grip of a hand lifting your arm by the wrist and setting it gently down on a flat mattress.

You opened your eyes when he pulled his own leg out from between your thighs. The temperature change was most jarring. You had felt so warm before.

Baekhyun was sitting up in his bed. His hair was standing up in places all over his head and he was moving slowly and carefully, in an attempt to disengage himself from the tangle of this woman he had just woken up with.

The sleep was still very thick in your head. It hadn’t been a full night’s sleep had it? You felt like you had just closed your eyes a minute ago and yet the sunshine was so bright outside already.

“Sorry,” Baekhyun whispered when he realized you were now awake and looking at him, “guess I got too comfortable...must have fallen asleep.”

His voice was thick with sleep and with embarrassment too, you could hear it everywhere, with the quick words he spoke to you and the pink that covered the back of his neck and flooded his cheeks too.

This situation...this was an embarrassment. Of course it was.

This was something that should not have happened. Not with two adults of similar age who shared so many liberties with each other; spending time in each other’s arms at night, well…

You felt awkward all over. What if—what if you’d done something in your sleep? What if you said something?

And he already wasn’t meeting your eyes as he climbed out of the bed and awkwardly made his way into his bathroom.

You could hear the sound of the running water faucet and the door closed with the smallest click like he went out of his way to close it as softly and quietly as possible to avoid disturbing you any further.

You could feel the heat burning on the skin of your cheeks and you used his absence to get up and get out of his bedroom before he came out and found you still, still tangled in his bed sheets like you’d been tangled in his legs and in his arms all night.

You had to ignore this. You had to forget it ever happened, and anyway, you were best friends with the guy...right? Wasn't this thing bound to happen in the course of a friendship? What if you went on a holiday with him and the hotel only had one bed? These things really did happen, you read about it on twitter once. Would you be that asshole best friend who let him sleep on the floor just because he was a man? No! You could build a little pillow wall between your bodies and sleep as still and motionless as possible, like a corpse.

This feeling would go away. The red hot embarrassment would wash down the drain of your shower. The sticky warmth left behind by his skin would go with it.

You’d made it as far as to undress and turn on the hot water when an awful memory dawned on you.

Baekhyun still had your shampoo.

You didn't have any other shampoo in this bathroom that you could use. You pulled open cupboards and drawers, searching for anything; tiny hotel sized travel bottles, a nearly empty bottle under the sink for a rainy day, even maybe something in the trash can that still had a few drops. Nothing.

You eyed the hand soap on your sink and pictured stepping out of the shower a frizzy, tangled mess.

A soft knock vibrated against your bathroom door.

“Bug, your shampoo.” Baekhyun’s voice called out, muffled by the sounds of the running water and the door itself, “it’s almost empty, but there’s a little left. Sorry, I’ll run to the store and get more.”

Your ear was pressed against the door so you could make out everything he said; so you could listen carefully to the tone and delivery of his words to see if he was still embarrassed about last night or if he’d brush it off easily like he did most things that seemed to bother him.

There were another two soft knocks, “B-Bug?”

“Yeah, Peanut, thank you. Can you just...put it by the door. I’m already undressed. I’ll grab it in a bit.”

He did not respond right away and you stayed with your ear against the door waiting for some sound. Some indication that he had left. The click of your door, anything.

“I left it by the door,” you heard his far away voice shout and then the click of your door.

When your shower was done and you were dressed in your favorite weekend outfit, the high waisted comfy shorts with pockets and a cute top that made you feel somewhat pretty even on a casual day and you emerged from your bedroom feeling ready to face whatever weird moods or wacky situations accosted you today.

You found him singing a song to himself in the kitchen as he made something that smelled delicious for breakfast. The radio was on a pop station that played hits from all the past decades and the upbeat rhythm of the song that played was a definite favorite that had him dancing at the stove.

It was a groovy little love song, quite old now that you thought about it and you felt the beat hit hard in your chest with each pop of his shoulders and hips. The joy you could feel in this song hit you just like that beat hit; heavy and prominent, and you smiled wide to welcome this morning mood it brought with it.

When you stepped into the kitchen to grab a mug to make yourself some coffee you couldn’t help but sing along to the song, you loved the song as much as he did and when he noticed you enter the room you could hear him singing the main parts; expertly, even though the singer was a woman, his voice could always reach the high notes as well as the low ones. She was the kind of epic singer with one of a kind of talent that was world dominating. Baekhyun was singing along, doing the same kinds of ad-libs and vocal runs that she did and he did it while holding the spatula up to his face like a microphone.

As you walked by he dipped his head and looked into your face and his eyes caught ahold of yours. You knew what was coming. You could hear it coming in the song, the chorus. The part you had to sing. These were the rules. He leaned hard and brought the spatula up to your lips just in time for your part to come on. You did not disappoint. You gave it your all closing your eyes up tight and throwing your head back, singing from the very center of you, this part you always sang during this song. The part that was made for you; he knew it and you knew it.

His smile was genuine and breathtaking and he grabbed your hand with his spatula-less hand and pulled you into him, the beat taking over whatever bit of nervousness he might have had before. This was different. This was dancing. This was singing to simply the best song for a Saturday morning and it was moving and laughing with your best friend and you let him spin you in a small circle, careful to keep your coffee mug lifted so it didn’t hit anything during the spin.

His sense of rhythm was perfect. His hips moved as if they were made for this. You had no choice but to follow. An occasional hand on your hip told you where to go. The song was reaching its peak and you knew it was a short one. The best ones always were. It was going to begin winding down now. It was always such a sweet and short lived moment of happiness that you always appreciated immensely.

As a final move, he gave you a little spin and released you to go on your way toward the coffee maker you so desperately wanted to get to when you first entered this kitchen.

He finished the eggs with the last notes of the song.

As you both sat down to eat, his eyes met yours and yours met his and you dug into the eggs and bacon he’d prepared. You offered him a perfectly buttered toast slice and he took it, nodding his head as he bit into the crisp corner.

“So Bug,” he spoke up between bites of eggs, chewing and swallowing thoughtfully, “about this...Candy.”

You swallowed the hot coffee in your mouth and clasped your hands together, suddenly remembering how asleep he had been when you had hit it off with Candy, his practice girl.

He listened to your explanation. Your theory that the stakes were simply too high with Mia and he needed someone to talk to that was a bit more of a relaxed task for him. You called it easy mode so he might get the game reference. He ate and listened to you talk and occasionally his eyebrows would lift or screw together with whatever sorts of thoughts he was thinking inside his head. You could tell by his body language that he didn't exactly want to start something with Candy and you had to emphasize that it was really just for practice, talking to her. It was to help build his confidence.

“She’s already in, Peanut. She thinks you’re super cool, she thinks you’re rich and thinks you have a very good job and plus, you make lots of money and she seems super into that.”

He was not speaking yet, despite how much you had talked and you were beginning to get worried that he didn’t see the benefit of practicing his conversation skills a little bit.

“It’s not even real, Baek, you just have to make some things up with her. Just to get over that anxiety about talking to women. Just until you are more comfortable.”

When he finally did speak, it was as you feared.

“It just feels kinda gross, Bug. She’s a real person too, even if she is obviously a gold digger. It just seems wrong. I’ve been...thinking lately. What if this is...wrong of us?”

“What if I just have to tough it out with Mia and get the fuck over it and just,” he thrust his hands forward over the food on the table for emphasis, “just — blehhhh — talk, just fucking talk to her.”

You lifted a fork with eggs toward your lips but your stomach protested. You suddenly didn't want any more food. The coffee you were drinking had suddenly gone too cold for your liking and you pushed the plate and mug away from you with your fingertips.

You were bothered.

Why did he choose right now to suddenly grow a conscience about this? Did he forget that Mia was chatting with both of you and not just him?

“I...I just — I want to try with Mia. I know I can get over it and talk to her. And I don't want to talk to Candy. The person Candy thinks I am, well...that’s just false. I can’t be the person she’s expecting me to be.”

He had obviously read through the entire conversation with Candy last night and found the tales you told simply too stretched out for him to try and live up to.

“But that’s what people do when they start dating. They stretch the truth, make themselves sound just a little bit better, make themselves taller, or make themselves look richer. They all do this.” You simply could not understand why he didn’t get this. Why he didn’t just play by the rules that everyone followed to get through the door so he could stand a chance here.

“Well I don't. I don't want someone to fall for a fake version of me. I want someone to like me now. This me. Byun Baekhyun. The Peanut with anxiety who lives with Bug who almost killed him over a cheese stick, but who makes really great toast.”

He was smiling now, joking about the funny memories. You pulled your lips into a forced smile and lifted the coffee for another drink so you didn't have to smile any more.

He was watching your face. You were sure he sensed it. Something had bothered you to the point of giving up on your breakfast and every pass your eyes made over his face led to the same thing. He was watching you.

“Why are you upset?”

You shook your head lightly. Willing the obvious signs to leave your face. You didn't even know why. You didn't have a name for this. So you just shrugged in response to him.

“Because I don't want to practice on Candy? Did you actually like her for me?”

You really made your best attempt. You inhaled deep and closed your eyes and you shook your head.

Candy did not matter and you knew it. There was something ugly inside of you maybe. Something that did not want Baekhyun to get along with perfect Mia. Something that was fighting against the idea of him being happy and healthy and free of this unhealthy attachment you had to him. Free and happy away from you.

“Then why?”

Enough. You were being unfair to him. You had promised him that you would help him. You had gotten him this far and you’d be the worst kind of asshole if you didn't see him through to the end; if you didn't follow through with your promise to find him someone who would love him like he deserved to be loved, exactly as he was now. The amazingly wonderful Byun Baekhyun.

“It’s nothing like that,” you smiled softly. It felt like a sad smile, but at least it was genuine. “I just worry when you get so anxious. You know you fell right asleep last night. As soon as I came in, you passed right out.”

Your words skillfully slipped out of your lips and you successfully changed the subject. You felt like a coward, but you simply did not have words for what was happening to you.

“I didn’t...say anything did I? Before I fell asleep?”

This question was quiet. His fingertips grazed over his lips as he asked it, nearly muffling the words he shyly asked you at the breakfast table, the morning after.

You are so fucking beautiful.

You lifted your coffee cup to drink the tepid liquid inside and dropped your eyes from his shaking ones. The answer to his question sat on the back of your tongue even after you swallowed away the liquid.

You swallowed again and it refused to budge and yet you sat in silence, unable to utter a single word in reply to his quiet question.

Your silence went on for too long and he looked up into your face. An instant smile lifted at the corner of your lips and you forced it up into your eyes.

“You just slept, Peanut. We—” you had to exhale the breath that you had been holding for too long in your lungs, “we just slept.”

Part 1 , Part 2 , Part 3 , Part 4 , Part 5

Tag list: @j-pping @blahblahblah-boo @his-mochi-cheeks @amyeonzing@littleflowercrown13 @baekinmylife @insta1010 @nana-banana @f4ncyvelvet@bbhbeth @totallynerdstuff @byunbabybaek @maijinki @bbyunz@theclawofaraven

#Baekhyun #Exo #Baekhyun fic #Exo fic #Baekhyun smut #Baekhyun fluff #Exo smut #Exo fluff #Baekhyun fanfic #Baekhyun ff #Baekhyun fanfiction #exo fiction #baekhyun fiction #exo ff #exo fanfiction #exo series #baekhyun series

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brawltogethernow · 4 years ago

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oh one hand YES on the Peter age reveal shenanigans. But otoh, last I read comics 616 Peter was what 5-6 years younger that the older Avengers at best? Like the "old"/1st-2nd gen Avengers were all early 20s/late teens when they first started heroing too - they were just also considered 'grown ups' because it was the 60s. Jan had her 21st b'day about when she married Hank which was some way into V1, and Clint, Wanda and Pietro were 18-19 when they joined up... Hank, Bruce & Don were older tho

Yeah i just checked, peter was in college already at ESU when he attended the Hank-Jan marriage crossover issue, so he's at best a couple years younger than jan , who is at best a couple years younger than tony and Steve I think. actually i feel at this point 616 peter comes off as YOUNGER than he actually is because of a stagnation into teenage mentality - IRL because "teenage" Spidey iconics, but i guess in-universe it still conveys because non-stop quips

This is true (and thorough!). Or, like, some of it is and none of it looks flagrantly wrong; my knowledge of these characters is variable. If Tony was actually like 23 in the sixties that kind of fucks me up, I'll be real. I certainly fucking hope Bruce “six doctorates” Banner was older lmfao.

It's not a secret that I think this trope is overdone and mostly misplaced. Though I've got to let it slide to a certain degree since at 25 when I encounter someone four years younger than me in real life I'm like It’s The Youths. It’s interesting, but the whole concept does nudge the content in a more nonsensical and generally worse direction the more it's perpetuated (by non-fannish sources, though Disney definitely took a MAGNIFYING GLASS to fandom last decade and lifted well-performing ideas to feed to their money harvesting machine, which has an efficient dreams/oil hybrid engine). It's also just weird, generally, like, Peter has been in a love interest role for a lot of these people? Stop making it weird? Stop calling them his aunts after you leave the MCU corner you're making me feel gross.

I can't singlehandedly banish this being a Thing though, so I'm going to squeeze fun out of it where I can. Also you're the ONLY person who's commented to take things more in a "they're all peers” direction instead of less. I've been expending great effort into not getting sarcastic at cute additions from enthusiastic people misinterpreting my stance on this for three weeks so thanks.

#i'm very tired and not sure if this is in english #marvel #asks answered #anonymous #spidey

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cursewoodrecap · 3 years ago

Text

Session 22: Five-Dimensional Man-Go

This is a session I’ve been looking forward to for quite some time. I get to introduce three of my favorite characters in the entire campaign.

In the real world it’s been a while, but this was the session we officially welcomed a new chaos goblin player to the table. And damn, am I glad we did.

Valeria goes to Hoeska’s armor smiths for some upgrades, and accidentally kicks off a goth fashion montage. Her new armor has gorgeous black detailing with purple rose accents, accessorized with a brand-new Shusva-skin bag with matching claw clasp. Gral picks up a fancy Shusva-leather cloak and belt. Shoshana, realizing that a vampire’s castle is basically a Hot Topic, gets some fishnet arm warmers to accompany her fang necklace. We also get some healing potions and hope they aren’t made from lost souls or anything.

Valeria resummons Aethis, who pops back into existence in a burst of glitter that’s entirely incongruous with the local grim aesthetic. Apparently celestial gators are only mildly inconvenienced by fatalities.

As we hitch up the horses to get back on the road, we find out Ser Boris is also preparing to head out. “Woods full of many nasty creatures. Must keep hunting! Maybe I find way down to Barroch, I have heard monsters are attacking workers there.”

Gral perks up at the name of his people’s capitol. “I’m sure the orcs will treat you well. What kind of monsters are they dealing with?”

“Wolves, bears, maybe werewolf? I will find out when I get there! Cursebreakers do not have much of working relationship with orcs, so info is scattered. That is why I must investigate!”

While he heads south into orc territory, we’re gonna go north toward Sturmhearst to look into all the Key nonsense Professor Bjork told us is goin’ down. It’ll be a long trip; it’s on the coast, and we’re well into the heartland of the wood. As we get closer, we’re gonna have to look for new maps, too – the patchwork of safe zones and Curse disasters changes rapidly, and the roads that were passable a month ago might be deathtraps today.

We trek for several blessedly uneventful days. One night, in a region where a sizable number of halflings have settled, we have the fortune of seeing an inn on the horizon as night starts to fall. A sign proclaims the Fusilier’s Rest, a combination winery and inn located on a lush vineyard. Valeria’s kind of suspicious of anything too plant-based right now, but the rest of us totally want a winery tour.

We hitch up our wagon next to a post labeled Valet Parking. Aethis parks themself in the stables. Looking at the place, with its rather low doorframe and quaintly painted décor, we suspect Demish wine snootery instead of weird plant cults.

We duck through the door and take in the scene. It’s on the upscale end of totally normal, with locals sitting around eating and a huge pot of Demish onion soup bubbling on the hearth. The old halfling bartender is wearing pieces of a worn but well-cared-for blue-and-gold uniform. Two polished old pistols hang within reach on the wall, along with a pristine old Fusille musket in a place of honor behind the bar. Shiny medals in a handmade case are proudly displayed atop the bar.

As is D&D protocol, we look around for any notably wacky characters. We find them in the corner: an old man with unkempt white hair and multi-lensed, colorful glasses, engrossed in a game of Man-go against a young human doctor. We know he’s a doctor, because he’s got a stubby-beaked Sturmhearst mask pushed up to expose a tired but friendly face. His coat might once have been a lab coat, but it’s since been patched and sutured together so many times that it’s probably done a full ship-of-Theseus. His right arm is in a makeshift sling, and he’s nursing a small glass of Kevan vodka; probably the closest thing they have to rotgut moonshine in a wine-snob place like this.

We’re like, neat. Let’s eat soup.

Valeria orders a local vineyard wine and chats with the bartender about it. “The man who runs it is a madman; he thinks he can grow good wine grapes in Valdia. But he pays my sister well, she does her best.”

“Oh, don’t listen to René, his sister does marvelous work! No halfling will admit that wine grown outside Demionde will be more than spoiled grape juice,” teases one of the local barflies.

Gral asks Valeria who’s winning the Man-go game. The old man is rambling pleasantly, barely paying attention, and he is absolutely crushing the young doctor. The doctor looks like he’s totally aware he’s being taken to the cleaners, but he’s gonna let the old guy have his fun. As the game draws to a close, the younger man smiles ruefully and hands over a few coins. Meanwhile, the old fella, his eyes magnified to mismatched sizes by his funky glasses, spots our most conspicuous party member.

“Kyr! How’s the wine?” he calls, beckoning her over.

“Quite good actually!” Valeria chirps. “Was that the Kiloni maneuver?”

“Yes, or a variant I picked up somewhere! The Killam maneuver…kilometer…kilowatt? Something of the sort.”

Valeria very much wants to play him, and the old guy’s defeated opponent is happy to trade her his spot. The young man’s propped up leg hits the ground with a suspiciously loud clunk as he vacates his chair for her.

The old man peers up at her, bright-eyed even behind multiple layers of glass. “So what brings a Knight of the Rose here?”

“We’re headed to Sturmhearst, actually!”

“I see! I’ve heard the roads between here and there are pretty tricky to travel, you know.”

“No kidding. Do you have an updated map?”

He snaps his fingers. “No, but I just came from there! I’ve got an old map and I can easily update it for you kids. René is on night watch, I’ll leave it with him so you don’t have to stay up waiting for me to finish it. I know a route that’ll get you there lickety-split and safe as trousers! Now let me guess, you played at the clubs in Aurentium? You have the look about you.”

“Not the clubs, precisely…”

“Ah! Street rules, then!”

Valeria, who played Man-go against literally everyone who would have her, shrugs. “Maybe?”

“René, we’ll need some cups and a dumb hat!” the old man calls.

The young doctor wanders over to the bar and gets a refill, settling down next to Shoshana. “Hey, wanna bet on their game? The old guy’s pretty sharp.”

Shoshana laughs. “Oh, my friend is definitely gonna lose. I’ll put a silver on her, though, out of loyalty.”

It’s an odd game to spectate. Valeria falls behind early on; an insight check shows he’s not cheating, he’s just VERY good. Oh, and also Valeria’s assuming an entirely different set of house rules than this guy, and it’s tripping her up. Wait, are we doing street style, or dock style? Anyway, Valeria’s wearing the dumb hat now. At one point they both spit on the board.

“Y’know, I’ve never seen anyone from Sturmhearst take the mask off,” Shoshana says to her new drinking buddy, watching the game with confusion.

“On the clock, it’d be a safety hazard! But off the clock, eh, it’s fine. Some people get more elitist than me about it, I’m a hometown Valdian through and through.”

(You’re from Joisey, I’m from Joisey! What exit?)

“I haven’t actually been to the university since the Curse started, but I’m heading back to research some stuff I found out up in the Grammelsmarsh swamps. Some real disconcerting stuff regarding undead, and the like. The locals refer to it as the Wailing Wight.”

Shoshana gives him a once-over, rolling a decent Perception. He’s scruffy, though that could mostly be from hard travel, and definitely looks like he’s had a rough time of it. His arm’s in a sling and the little exposed skin Shoshana can see has more than its share of nicks and scars. His gait when he walked over was slightly uneven, one leg making a suspiciously heavy thunk against the wooden floor. Over his shoulder, he’s carrying a long, heavy case sealed with tar for waterproofing.

Hold up. She points to the case. “Do you have an alive guy in there?”

“…Uh.”

“You hesitated, and that’s not great.”

“Uh…no. No, I do not have an alive guy in here,” he says awkwardly.

“Okay, because the last time there was a weird bag, there was a whole-ass dude in there, and it turned into a whole thing.”

“N-no, no no no, there’s no person in the case,” he protests, not quite meeting Shoshana’s judgy cat eyes. He definitely doesn’t want anyone to get the wrong idea, even though the case has started gently twitching.

Meanwhile, old Man-Go man has proved himself quite fluent in Draco-Aquilian, though with an unmistakable mammalian accent. Gral butts into the lively conversation when it winds back to Valdian. “It seems like you’re rather well traveled. What is your profession?”

“Oh, y’know, I go here and there. I’ve been around. There’s so much to see out there!”

Valeria smiles. “I can’t fault you there. Anything in particular you’re looking for?

“I go wherever the winds take me, mostly,” he says, as if Cursewood travel isn’t the most dangerous hobby since they invented pyromancer cookoffs.

Valeria, impressively, only loses the game by a little. The old man jovially shakes her hand and promises to go get started on that map to Sturmhearst for us, springing to his feet with surprising deftness for his age and bustling up toward his room.

Gral and Shoshana, meanwhile, are busy makin’ friends with the doctor guy. “What swamp were you fighting undead in?”

“The Grammelsmarsh? It’s downriver of Mornheim.”

“Ohhh! We heard some, uh, adventurers did a purifying ritual on the river. It might help your situation?”

“That’s great, but…I dunno. Once you mix in swamp gas, things get a lot more interesting.”

“The explosions kind of interesting?”

“…Sometimes.”

The players have noticed that our doctor friend here is, like…not an NPC, there’s another guy at the table (the same player as Isadora! :D), so we start sizing each other up as travel companions.

“You seem like a pretty decent guy,” Gral says, immediately insight checking.

“I mean, you guys seem on the up-and-up too?”

Shoshana winks at him. “Well, I’m not that up-and-up but these two are very diplomatic and important.”

“If you’re also headed up to Sturmhearst, it might make sense for us to travel together? I’m not very quiet,” he admits, knocking on his knee with a clang, “but if you-“

“Hello!” Valeria, hearing clanking, has clanked over loudly to join. “Kyr Valeria Argent, at your service!”

“Uh, hi! I’m Vigdor. I’m a doctor! I mean, you knew that, with the, uh-“ He points to his bird mask. “If you need any balms or salves – I mean, I’m mostly a surgeon, but I know some herbology.”

Is that so! We chat about Dr. Ulmus and Dr. Kjeller. Everyone loves Dr Kjeller!

“I’ve heard of Dr. Kjeller! I haven’t met the guy, but he’s the leading expert on troll physiology. Getting him to come lecture hasn’t worked out so far.”

We ask René the innkeeper about any local threats. Apparently this town’s gotten lucky; the biggest threats recently have just been bandits and one overaggressive badger.

“Oh yeah, one of my cats fought one of those, it went badly,” Shoshana remembers. “For the badger, I mean. I have weird cats.”

(The inn also has cat. His name is Jean Clawed.)

Eventually we all head upstairs. As the night bears on, the girls fall asleep, presumably after painting each other’s toe claws and gossiping. Gral’s still awake, practicing his lute in the rare luxury of a single room, when he pauses. Something doesn’t sound right.

Putting his lute aside, he listens cautiously at the window and feels a deep dread grow in his stomach. The faint scent of ozone drifts in the air. The crickets and night birds have gone dead silent, and in the unsettling quiet he can hear the terrible growling, piping sound he’s heard twice before: once in a house in a hole, and once as Bullbreaker’s expedition faced its destruction.

With great urgency and no volume control, Gral sends a Message to a sleeping Shoshana: “RED ALERT, KEY SHIT��S HERE.” Shoshana wakes up and kicks Valeria.

Gral then sends a Message to our new friend Vigdor, more calmly. “If you have weapons, get them now. Something is happening, it’s going to be dangerous.”

The early warning lets Vigdor and Valeria armor up, Shoshana helping Valeria buckle on the heavy pieces in a hurry. Meanwhile, Gral sprints downstairs, casting Mirror Image as he goes.

René the innkeeper is cleaning his fusille with practiced precision, humming an old marching song. Gral can hear something moving in the kitchen behind the old halfling, so he pops another stealthy Message cantrip. “This is the orc from earlier. I think something bad is in the kitchen – I’ve heard that noise before. Hold on tight to that musket, I’m going in.”

“The back door is locked, I would have heard someone come in,” the old soldier whispers back.

“These things don’t use doors,” Gral hisses.

A 17 Persuasion convinces René, who loads a bullet into his musket. “Where are those friends of yours?”

A heavy clank from upstairs answers that question, as Vigdor and Valeria thud toward the stairs. Gral scopes out the room and sees, on the bar, a big leather map case. The map from the Man-Go guy! Then he peers into the kitchen and, yup, that’s a fleshhound, all right.

Everyone else upstairs bursts into the hall just as a second fleshhound emerges into existence next to them. Shoshana, without hesitation, hits it with a gout of flame. Its strange ethereal flesh solidifies for a moment, but then it shakes itself and charges forward, its displacement energy restored.

Meanwhile, the one downstairs doesn’t aim for Gral or René, trying to run past them. Gral plays a discordant note on his lute, using his Minor Key at the opposite frequency to its vibration and preventing it from displacing, before he strikes. A spectral, scarred orc swings a warhammer down on the creature, Thrice-Burned’s ghost getting some payback as Gral’s blade strikes true.

René takes a shot with his musket and crit-fails, understandably freaked out by the writhing mass of teleporting tentacles, the wild shot careening directly into Gral. Luckily, it only pops a Mirror Image, but everyone upstairs hears a frustrated yell of “NO. FRIEND! ME FRIEND!”

Vigdor dashes past Valeria to the stairs, his previously-motionless arm reaching out of its sling to slap her on the armor with a resounding clash of metal. A silver Jotunn rune glows through the cloth of his sleeve, and she feels Protection from Good and Evil snap into place over her. She takes the cue and stabs the hound, rose vines bursting from her trident and stabbing their long thorns into its oddly flickering flesh.

The pupils on the Eyegis snap to the space behind the beast. Our normal eyes see nothing, but the Key-aligned shield’s eyes see a magical gate, faintly connected to the hound.

As a member of the Order of the Rose, Valeria’s trained to deal with fiendish incursions. This isn’t a portal to the Hells, but she thinks it might get closed similarly. As she charges forward to deal with it, everything seems to move twice as fast as it should: the Key’s spatial distortion has made certain areas the opposite of difficult terrain, where you can move double your speed. Nyoom!

Shoshana zaps it with lightning and heads downstairs to help Gral, who’s being slapped by tentacles. The zapped one flees toward the portal, but Valeria Sentinels and stabs it to death. The downstairs hound gets its tentacles into the real Gral.

Vigdor moves to Gral’s aid, ripping away the last of his sling and clamping a large circular blade to his forearm. With the pull of a ripcord, it loudly whirs into motion. As the Buzzing Butcher slams into the displacer hound with a gory squelch, he asks about sneak attack, like a rogue!

A very, very loud rogue.

Gral breaks away from the hound’s tentacles and looks around. Through the windows, more fleshhounds have appeared outside. The space outside is warped – leaving this inn is going to be very difficult while all this nonsense is going on. The lights of the vineyard seem miles away.

However, Gral realizes, the hound responded to the sound of his lute. And when he used his Minor Key he caught a glimpse of the portal it came through. He begins to play again, using the Minor Key to try to take control of it. The GM allows him to burn a 3rd level spell slot for a colossal roll of 33. He moves the portal inside a wall, to temporarily block anything coming through.

René takes a shot at the remaining hound and misses.

Valeria, upstairs, draws her chained sword and spends a 1st level slot to try to close the portal, the same way paladins close Infernal gateways. The chains of Rack extend from the sword and stitch the portal shut.

(Gral and Valeria each gain inspiration for using Portal Trixx!)

A Thing Occurs at initiative 0, and we hear strange piping coming from the stables. We’re kind of occupied, so we trust Aethis to bite anything that bothers the horses.

Shoshana sprints down the stairs and to the bar. Aw, there’s another flesh hound coming in from the kitchen. Her Chill Touch misses, and the new monster slaps Gral.

Vigdor nyooms through a Zoom, which makes some Really Weird doppler effects happen with his clanky leg and his buzzy arm. He slides across the bar like an action hero and slams his saw down, missing the hound and showering the room in a hail of splinters.

Valeria is still upstairs, and it is LOUD downstairs. She’s gonna dash to get the heck down there and rejoin the festivities.

Gral Phantasmal Forces the new fleshhound, and in its mind, horrible liquid tendrils emerge from the soup pot and constrict around it. The soup rises to the defense of the Fusilier’s Rest!

René gets his wits about him and takes a pistol shot at the nearer fleshhound, tagging it with a bullet and keeping it in place. “GET OUT OF MY HOUSE. OUR POLICY IS NO PETS! I will not make an exception for you, you do NOT seem particularly polite!”

The fleshhound grabs the map case off the bar and starts to run for it. René hits it with the butt of his rifle. The second hound can’t attack Vigdor since it’s too busy convincing itself soup isn’t dangerous, so Vigdor’s free to draw his pistol and unload a Sneak Attack bullet into the fleeing hound’s back.

René reloads his musket. It’s been a long time since he’s done it under fire, but the Royal Fusilier Corps of Demionde does not half-ass their training.

The portal the hound’s heading for bisects a wall now, so it might be hard for the hound to get through. Before it can worry about that, though, it comes face to face with Valeria, who’s ready to rumble. She kills it, dropping the map to the ground, and skitters through the Zoomy Zone to try to trident the second hound. It displaces out of the way.

Gral seizes control of another portal, and this time decides to use it to see what’s going on. He tries to hop out to the stables, where that weird noise is coming from. He enters a weird nether space full of the flickering bodies of fleshhounds, writhing and blinking, which the DM calls the Threshold. Gral accepts psychic damage to see what’s going on, and the patterns become clearer as the Key takes hold temporarily in his brain. These portals all connect to each other and the Threshold at the same time. Whatever’s out in the stables, making that eerie piping noise, is tied to the portals – it can’t fully exist in our realm. So if you close all the portals, it’ll force that thing to leave; if you drive it away, the portals will close. Either way, the Key’s influence on this place will fade.

Oh, and that thing out in the stables? It’s the Lurke r again.

Gral’s old enemy wrests control of the portal back from Gral, who stumbles back out into the inn, reeling from the sudden whammy of Key taint.

Shosha shoots lightning at the nearest hound, which retaliates by leaping through her, disrupting her matter with its own. It’s a highly unpleasant experience. A new hound jumps out of the portal next to Valeria. As Vigdor, Shoshana, and René all attack, Gral shuts another portal with his lute’s magic. “Guys, there’s something horrible in the stables!” he shouts. “If we bust enough portals it’ll go away!”

The Lurker continues to make mysterious dice rolls, but apparently it’s rolling poorly, so we don’t quite find out what it’s up to. It peers through one of the last few portals, only visible to Gral and the Eyegis. It’s hard to get a good look at, fifth-dimensional as it is, but it’s weirdly humanoid, actually? It’s surrounded by floating lanterns and holding some sort of pipe or flute.

(The DM notes that Jean Clawed is awake and doesn’t see why any of this is his business. He’s capable of using the portals; he’s not Key tainted, that’s just how cats are.)

We exchange blows with the remaining hounds, Chromatic Orbs flying and chainsaws buzzing. René bayonets a hound to death, for the honor of all NPCs.

Gral powerslides on his knees across the Zoomy Zone, playing a complicated riff, woobling himself right through the fireplace into the kitchen. He spends another level 3 spell slot to get the portal to dance itself shut. “And that was Through the Fire and Flames!”

René reloads his gun. Shoshana blasts the hound with fire, so Vigdor’s action goes off and he chainsaws it to death, the body and spine getting caught in the spinning chain. FATALITY.

The searing light of Shoshana’s fire casts sharp shadows on the walls of the inn, which begin to writhe and re-form, swirling together into a lithe, snarling feline shape that springs toward the Lurker. It pounces with an odd, broken yowl that’s incredibly familiar – although Valeria and Gral have only ever heard it once, from underneath an overturned laundry basket.

Vigdor, who’s never met a flesh-hound OR a cursecat before, makes an arcana check to figure out what in the seven hells is going on. It seems some sort of entity is thinning the barriers between realities? Its very essence seems to be intermingled with portal; it cannot fully leave the portal or exist in this realm. Like a malevolent, sentient pair of curtains.

He’s like okay, curtains sound like something I can chainsaw. It’s curtains for you, see? (Fun fact: if he rolls 21 or higher on attack roll with chainsaw, he gets sneak attack regardless of other circumstances. Because it’s a goddamn CHAINSAW.)

The Lurker turns its attention directly on us, or at least to the enormous hissing cat hellbent on ruining its day. Gral, still strumming furiously, realizes the Lurker’s only got a couple of portals left. He’s closed a portal already; he’s gonna try to close all of them for good. The DM imposes disadvantage and a brutal pile of psychic damage, but Gral is unphased, hitting a power chord that shakes the entire inn.

The Lurker screeches and reaches for him, the space around Gral beginning to warp, but it’s too late, the portal slamming shut against it. The Zoomy Zones vanish; the portals close, the strange atmosphere fades. The road looks to be the size it was before instead of an endless stretch of packed earth; the vineyard is once again an easy ten-minute walk away.

His big solo complete, Gral sways and collapses unconscious. Valeria runs over and Lays On Hands so he doesn’t die, while Vigdor starts casting Mending on the destroyed bar furniture. Shoshana, meanwhile, just stares dumbstruck at the place where a huge spectral cat is dissipating into shadowy smoke.

“…Schmendrick?”

René is holding himself together, but he’s an old man and it’s been a while since he fought this much. He took a bit of damage; Valeria pat pats him some HP. “Thank you, Kyr. I…I need to check on my other guests. The old man with the Man-Go game, we must find out if he lives.”

Valeria accompanies him upstairs. Rack’s glowing rose vines are still visible, stitching the portal shut; it’s healing more quickly than Valeria’s used to seeing. The door to the old man’s room swings open under Valeria’s cautious knock. The bed is unmade but empty, and the old man’s luggage is gone. The only things left are a generous tip on the counter and his odd multicolored glasses.

As Vigdor steps outside to clean viscera off his chainsaw, Gral scopes out the stables. There’s evidence of disturbed earth around the grounds, but nothing conclusive. Aethis seems to be unbothered.

We reconvene without much to show for our investigation. But we have one last clue: Why were the hounds so interested in the old man’s map? We spread it out on one of the bar tables and crowd around. It’s a map of Valdia, but the path it shows us to take to Sturmhearst makes No Sense. It’s not even contiguous! It tells us to start here and wander north, and then the line cuts off next to some scribbled equations, the route picking up again elsewhere, where he’s drawn a symbol we don’t recognize – and so on, in strange and nonsensical disconnected paths.

Shoshana, on a hunch, puts on the multicolored glasses the old man left behind. Like 3D glasses, they reveal the hidden image. Through the kaleidoscopic lenses, she can see remnants of the Key’s influence all around the inn; the fading Zoomy Zones and closing portals light up in ultraviolet. The map, meanwhile, has gained an entirely new dimension, like a layer of holographs. NOW the shortcuts make sense – they route through other dimensions along the z-axis, with additional symbols and labels giving helpful hints.

To be honest, it does look like a much faster route. And one of the notes says it leads to the “Drowned City” – hey, isn’t that where Bullbreaker ended up? But we’re all rightfully wary of hopping right back into another flesh-hound portal disaster.

We now have the Extradimensional Map and the Stranger’s Glasses.

Oh! The map has a note for us: “Happy Journeys to a fellow master of the game. Your friend, T.T.”

We immediately rifle through our notes and realize he may have been Professor Trevor Twombly, Headmaster of Sturmhearst. Vigdor, did you know that guy?!

Vigdor didn’t recognize him. Maybe the guy looked like Twombly, if you squint? There were a lot of old men at Sturmhearst, and they wear masks most of the time? Also he had distracting glasses? So, like…maybe?

As we bicker, Vigdor snags the glasses off the table and heads to his room, opening up his case and taking a look. The lenses don’t reveal anything new about the object inside.

Unfortunately, the poor rogue didn’t bother to stealth. “Whatcha doin’ in here?” says Valeria, who followed shortly behind.

“Um, just looking at my leg, seeing if anything is weird-“

Valeria immediately checks Vigdor’s lower limbs for wounds. “I can help! An extra pair of hands can always-”

“No, no! I think I’m okay! Really!” he protests. He glances into the case again, clearly torn, and sighs. “Let me explain.”

He lifts a whole human leg out of the case, kicking and twitching.

“This is my leg, and I’m taking it to Sturmhearst. I’m not sure if it’s wholly mine anymore.”

Through his torn pants, Valeria can see a clunky clockwork leg to match his buzz-saw arm.

One player immediately yells “FULL METAL ALCHEMIST.” Another player says it again, in a slightly different voice.

Dr. Vigdor Gavril has joined the party!

#the cursewood #session recap #the key #valeria argent #gral omokk'duu #shoshana bat chaya #vigdor gavril #schmendrick #trevor twombly

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disfictional · 4 years ago

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Let’s talk about the name “Alex”

There are three different characters named Alex in BBC Sherlock: Alex Woodbridge from TGG, the Alex who was a member of A.G.R.A, and Alex Garrideb from TFP.

The name comes up three times, so this is not a coincidence; the writers are trying to tell us something. All of the Alex characters are mirrors for Sherlock. Specifically, they are mirrors for how Moriarty tortures him with the quest to “burn the heart” out of Sherlock.

Some meta below the cut.

(Note: this relies on M theory’s ideas that Mary works for Moriarty, Mycroft is under Moriarty’s thumb, Moriarty is still alive in some sense, and Moriarty’s territory is Eastern Europe.)

The first Alex we meet is in TGG: Alex Woodbridge. He was killed by Moriarty’s assassin for being obsessed with space/the solar system and being right about the Veneer painting conspiracy. Who else do we know that was killed by Moriarty’s assassin?

Oh right, Sherlock!

Alex Woodbridge was obsessed with the solar system. We know that in this episode, the solar system = sentiment. This mirror foreshadows that Sherlock will ultimately become obsessed with space = sentiment, and he will be targeted by Moriarty for it. And, lo and behold, at the end of the episode, Moriarty tells Sherlock he will burn the heart out of him.

Beautiful, isn’t it?

Then, in The Six Thatchers, we find out that another Alex was a member of A.G.R.A. He was tortured to death after the Tbilisi incident. How do we know this?

Ajay, a strong John mirror, is tortured by the sound of Alex’s back breaking. This is a clear callback to John seeing Sherlock jump off the hospital roof in TRF. When Ajay says “he was tortured to death,” it cuts to Sherlock. Moriarty tortured Sherlock to fake death, leaving John bitter and traumatized. In TEH, we see Sherlock was also physically tortured when he was fake-dead.

In T6T, the name Alex, the fact that the incident takes place in Tbilisi, Moriarty’s Eastern Europe turf, and Mary’s involvement clue us into the idea that Moriarty is behind the Tbilisi incident (I think it’s very possible that Mycroft is involved, as well. We know that he oversaw A.G.R.A., and that he is under Moriarty’s thumb).

AND Ajay tells us that Alex was tortured for “nothing but fun.” Moriarty tortured Sherlock for the same reason. He just loves to watch Sherlock dance! It’s so funny that Sherlock has feelings! And it caused John a lot of pain. John’s reaction to Ajay’s story about Alex being tortured tells us everything:

The last Alex is Alex Garrideb in The Final Problem. In this scene, there is even a direct mirroring of Mycroft as Nathan Garrideb (the one who wears glasses), Sherlock as Alex Garrideb, and John as Howard Garrideb (the drunk).

Not subtle!

We learn a few things about Alex from Sherlock and Mycroft’s deductions. Underneath each point I’ve interpreted what I take them to mean about Sherlock.

Habitually wears glasses

In ACD canon, A Study in Scarlet was the first fictional story ever to incorporate the iconic magnifying glass. Sherlock “habitually wears glasses,” which I take to mean he is used to putting on the analytical, detective persona, in BBC Sherlock but also in other adaptations throughout history. Not to mention, Mycroft is mirrored as Nathan Garrideb, who always wears glasses.

Has a frown line, meaning he’s used to a lifetime of “peering”

I take “peering” to mean Sherlock deducing/analyzing/being logical, and it’s caused frown lines- he’s forced it upon himself.

Is short-sighted (or he was) but he’s had laser surgery

Laser surgery = Sherlock realized he cares about people. He no longer needs to put on the “glasses” persona. More specifically, he cares about John; he loves him. No longer short-sighted = he wants a future with John, and a future in general. He cares about living. In TLD, this is a strong theme. Before Culverton tries to kill him, he says, emotionally, “I don’t want to die.”

Makes an effort with his clothes

to which John says: “that’s very good.” Confirmation that John likes the way Sherlock dresses *insert side smirk emoji*

Sherlock is making an effort for John, in multiple ways.

But quite literally, Sherlock does make an effort with his clothes

Suddenly he sees himself in quite a different light

Sherlock’s acknowledgement of his feelings has totally rocked his world.

But he is not used to his routine and his grooming is superficial

Sherlock is not used to caring so much.

His outward appearance is “superficial”, and may not reflect how he feels inside. Sherlock is trying (and failing) to hide his feelings for John.

I personally subscribe to the theory that TFP is in John’s mind palace/is his fever dream after being shot (by Moriarty, but that’s beside the point), so I interpret all of these deductions to be John’s thinking. But, I also enjoy the idea that Sherlock is putting himself in John’s shoes, and creating John’s mind palace in his own mind palace. But any way you look at this episode and this season, the Alex mirror is strong!

We find out that Alex Garrideb is the murderer, and Euros (who is a Moriarty mirror) asks Sherlock to condemn him. “Condemn him in the knowledge of what will happen to the man you name.” Sherlock condemning Alex Garrideb out loud = professing his love for John. Sherlock knows the consequences could be disastrous, but he has to say it to land the plane!

When Sherlock condemns Alex Garrideb, Euros/Moriarty kills the OTHER TWO. Moriarty was always going to kill Mycroft, and now that Sherlock has condemned himself (professed his love), John has to die, too. Moriarty definitely can’t have him hanging around after that- Sherlock is all his! But then, Euros/Moriarty kills Alex/Sherlock, too. Sherlock is too gone on feelings now to ever be of any use to Moriarty.

Tagging some people who always have great stuff to say (& if you want me to remove your tag, no worries)!

@sarahthecoat @possiblyimbiassed @ferm-acid @witch-lock @inevitably-johnlocked @inatshej @honeybeeswatson @itsallfine

#meta #bbc sherlock #alex woodbridge #alex garrideb #A.G.R.A.#M theory #tgg #tfp #tst

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kxhlzn · 5 years ago

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[iii.] the birdwatcher & his lover.

➳ synopsis: it's the summer of '89, and you discover new things about yourself— some good, and some you wish you could swallow and never see again. dealing with the newfound confusion of sexuality, you must learn the ins and outs of friendship and what it means to grow up.

➳ genre: coming-of-age drama, ANGST, fluff, slight crack.

➳ characters/pairing(s): eventual stanley uris/reader, unrequited!bev/reader, eventual benverly, eventual reddie (possibly unrequited.)

➳ wordcount: 5.9k

➳ warning(s): profanity, sexual comments, ANGST, jokes about 80s AIDS, hurt feelings, fireworks (don't try this at home, kids!)

➳ song rec: flowers in your hair by the lumineers.

➳ author's note(s): sorry i made richie cry, i hate myself too lmfao. also i love stan. that's all. that's the post. give me some recs on what you'd like to see happen to them in the future! :)

July, 1989.

the rain is constant; pattering, almost as if it expects you to open your window and let it sneak into your bedsheets, like a sneaky, horny, little teenager. except, the only teenager creeping through your window tonight is mischevious richie tozier, head full of grand ideas and schemes.

his hair is sopping when he slams on the glass, and you nearly lose ten years of your life at the scare. most of the terror racing through you isn't because you're shocked by his presence, but rather you didn't really want him to see your arms full of letters and graham crackers. he stares at you a moment, his glasses dripping with water, as a single crumb trickles onto the floor from the corner of your mouth. you consider, for a moment, that he didn't see it, but from the small smirk that appears on his lips, you know you were caught. he's crouched on the roof beside your window, tapping his knee patiently.

you don't rush to make a move, either, as you both have a staredown; richie is uncharacteristically patient, you notice, and it makes you loosen your grip on the items momentarily. but then, richie slips, and you throw them all on the bed and make a break for the window. once you've tossed it open, richie is already steady, his hands splayed out at hip height. he's preparing himself in case he slips again.

"what do you want, trashmouth?" you quip, propping the window open. you glance at the surrounding area behind him, and the sky is a deep grey. the trees are heavy with water, puddles scattered across the ground. what on earth could he need at this time?

"so, i got this cool idea," he says, gripping the sill as he slides through the crack of your window. now, he's got water dripping all over the floor, and you scowl at him as he shakes his head like a dog, flinging droplets across your bedroom. "what if we buy fireworks?"

you don't miss a beat. "what?"

"like, you know, fireworks. for fourth of july? i might know a guy."

"seriously? that'd be so cool!" you say, picturing lighting off rockets into the sky, at the quarry. richie nods in excitement, collapsing on the floor beside your bed, leaning his head against your sheets. one knee is propped up, and his arm slings comfortably on it. the water drips onto his (for once) solid color grey t-shirt and plaided black pajama pants.

"right?" richie agrees, "you can thank me later. i already told 'im to buy them. 'said he'll get back to me soon. what are those?"

you blink at him a moment, and draw your attention to where he is focused. he's eyeing the pile of letters on your bed behind him, and he starts to get grabby as he digs through them.

you jolt forward, swatting at his hands. "they're, uh... letters? to? someone?"

"your pops?"

"what? no. well, actually, most of 'em, yeah."

"he ever respond to the ones you sent last year?" richie asks softly, peering at you when you take a hesitant seat on your bed, near richie's mop of hair.

"nope," you shrug, "but it's worth a try to send some more, ya know?"

"nah. you're trying too hard, babyface. you ever think that maybe it's time to toss the towel in?" richie's hand lands on your knee, but you jerk away from him.

"toss the towel in? what the fuck, richie?" you stand, quickly, and take a few cautious steps away from him.

"no, urgh, listen. i just hate seeing you hurt yourself like this—" he stands, too, stretching his long legs in a couple strides toward you.

"what's so fucking wrong with me writing a letter to my dad?"

"it's stupid! i just think—"

"you're just pissed 'cause yours sits a room away from you, and he talks to you less than mine!" you bite, and you immediately regret it, a sour flavor sitting on your tongue.

"fuck you!" richie barks, pointing an accusatory finger at you. his voice cracks in the process. "at least my dad bothered to stay! i wasn't so fucking bitchy that he disappeared into the night, not able to deal with having me for a kid!"

you want to snap back, but you're afraid your voice will betray you, so you merely open and close your mouth like a fish. richie's shoulders are heaving, eyes blown wide enough to rival the size of his actual face, with the glasses magnifying them so much. his fists are clenching and unclenching, consistently while you stand in tense silence.

"you're right," you whisper, mostly to yourself, and you cradle your arms against your chest. you lean up against your wall and slide down until your arms hug your knees. richie gapes, mutters out a few incoherent words, and then collapses in front of you, his hands on your arms.

"no, fuck, no, i shouldn't have said that. i didn't mean it. we're both tired, and hungry, and frustrated. that was such an asshole thing for me to say," he sputters out, and he pulls your head into the crook of his neck while he coos softly.

"it's okay, i didn't mean what i said, either. i think, i just, i know you were right about the tossing in the towel thing, but i.. i just don't think i'm ready to, you know?" you mumble into his shoulder, and he nods.

"that's okay, it was just a suggestion, babyface. you want to send him a letter? fuck it, let's do it."

"okay."

you spend the next ten minutes sealing the letters up, stamping them, and tossing them into your desk drawer for later. you sit comfortably in your chair, finishing up writing the address on the last one, when richie hums to himself.

"what?" you ask, spinning around to face him. he holds a letter up from his seat on your bed, sitting crisscrossed. his magnified eyes are glued to the words.

"nothing, you just missed one. except, it's not for your pops..."

"what do you mean? i didn't write one for anyone e—..." and it dawns on you. "richie, can i have that letter, please?"

"uh, yeah, nope... 'dear beverly marsh—'"

"richie, god, please!" you fling yourself at him, and he screams, throwing his hand up so you can't reach it while you climb over him. there are a few grunts as you dig various body parts into his flesh, grabbing for the paper, but he's not having it.

"why the hell are you— ouch! —writing a letter to bev?" richie questions, shoving at you a bit to get a good look at the piece of lined paper. "is it a looove letter?"

your silence forces you both to stop your movements, and the pink on your cheeks makes richie blink a few times.

"wait..." he begins, "does that.. do you.. do you like beverly?"

"what does that even mean? 'like'? of course i like her, she's one of my best friends! why wouldn't i? she's kind, and pretty, and one of the best people i know."

"yeah, okay, but do you want to stick your hand down her pants?"

"richard tozier!"

"well, you know what i mean."

"unfortunately, yeah, i do. but... that's not.. i can't, you know, like her like that. she's a girl," you squirm, scooting over to the headboard of the bed. richie leans up next to you, his shoulder bumping yours.

"so she's a girl. if she were a dude, would you do it?" richie presses.

"do what?"

"stick your hand—"

"beep, beep, richie!"

"what i'm saying is, if she were a guy, would you like her?"

"uh, i don't know, i guess," you admit, your hands in your lap. you bite your lip.

"then what's it fucking matter?" he asks, brows curved inward, "just admit it."

you blink at him, kind of understanding where he's coming from. you suppose you never could accept how you felt because it's the 80s, and you're in derry, so same-sex relations remain strictly platonic. you wonder if others have felt, or feel, the same way you do. maybe it's not so bad. maybe you can say it out loud, to someone.

"i have a crush on beverly marsh."

it feels empowering. like you could stand on top of your roof and scream it to the entire world, make everyone know that you, a small-town girl in maine, likes another girl. it feels empowering, but also incriminating— like you have something to hide, like you should be guilty for feeling this way.

guilty of what? loving another human being?

"well, shockingly, that's not the most lesbian thing you've ever said to me," richie quips.

"beep, beep, richie."

"anyway," he clicks his tongue, desperate to change the subject, "so the fireworks. what's your game plan?"

"right. well, we'll probably have to ask bill to tell eddie's mom that they're studying. you know how she gets when me or bev call— rant about how he can't hang with us 'cause we'll force him into an orgy 'n shit," you laugh dryly.

"wouldn't mind an orgy with her," richie whistles lowly.

"her, and who else? stan's mom? she's too high-strung for that."

"with my charms? pft, please," he replies, signaling down his body.

you roll your eyes. "oh, for sure, she'll be on her knees in no time."

"nah, she'd break a hip."

you laugh. "okay, focus— so you got the fireworks, bill's got eddie's mom—" ("he'd better share!") and everyone else should be able to make it. bev and ben can sneak out, and mike is pretty much free to go wherever. i can convince stan's mom that we're spending the night at bill's, with supervision. she likes me, but i can't be sure she won't think i'm trying to fuck the jew out of him."

"he wouldn't mind."

"seriously, richie, learn when to shut the fuck up," you scold, and he laughs, "anyways— do ya think mike could scrounge up a picnic again, or should i go over to bill's to make one? i think mike would want to do it..."

"yeah," richie yawns, and he leans on your shoulder. you sigh softly, sweep his hair away from his face, and slip his glasses off, onto the bedstand. "should prolly head home."

"no, it's pouring out. you've stayed here before," you tell him, pushing him off of you so you can turn the light out. by the time you've turned yourself around, he's hogging all of the blankets and you frown. rolling your eyes, you mutter something along the lines of "didn't get to eat my graham crackers", and you stash them under your desk.

crawling beside richie, you kick him with your leg as a sign to scoot his ass over, or else. he doesn't listen at first, but another heel in his side, and he's doing as he's told. (richie won't admit it, but he likes being the little spoon); you wrap your arms around his torso and poke his back with your nose as you prepare yourself for sleep.

after a few minutes, richie turns over slightly, glancing at your face. when he is convinced you've fallen asleep, he sighs softly and bites his lip— there are so many things he wishes he could tell you. so many secrets. after hearing you admit you like bev, he feels safer; like someone can relate to him, like he's not alone. it would be the first time he ever admitted it, even to himself.

richie doesn't know you're even listening, but having you next to him makes it easier to say out loud. "okay, so uh, listen... i think.. i think i'm like you, okay? i think i like..."

he's quiet for a moment, but now you're focused; you hadn't been asleep yet, but this is odd of him. you sigh, and snuggle up against him. "eddie. it's okay."

his breath hitches, and he chokes out a "yeah". you think he's fallen asleep after, but you hear small sniffling, and you can't help but tear up too. your grip on his chest tightens, a sign that you hear him and understand. he flips his body around, and suddenly, rather aggressively, pulls you against him, his face in the crook of your neck. his small tears melt into sobs, and yours soon follow suit.

"it's okay, it's okay," you coo, combing your fingers through his hair. he sounds so hurt, so painfully heartbroken. but, so do you.

"is there something wrong with me?" richie cries, the droplets creating a pool in the skin of your neck, "with us?"

"i don't know," you reply, your shoulders shaking, "oh, god, i don't know."

how badly you wish you did; if not to ease your own pain, but most especially his. richie tozier did not deserve to be crying in your arms in the dark, because he fell in love with his best friend. he deserved a much better love story than that.

—

over cereal the next morning, you and richie don't talk much. you're both reeling from the many emotions that were expressed last night, and you're afraid if one of you speaks, it will spoil everything.

your stepfather and your mother are speaking in the other room, and you hear the pattering of footsteps — loud ones, at that, a sure one it's your stepfather — as he walks into the kitchen to pour himself a mug of coffee. he looks as dead as the two of you.

"hey, kiddo, i need you to take the trash out when you're done," he says, glancing at you. it takes him a moment to register that richie is sitting across from you. he gets an eyeful of him, and shrugs nonchalantly, "hey, rich."

"yo," richie replies, stuffing another spoonful of cereal into his mouth. the two stare at each other briefly, before your stepfather becomes bored and pads off into the other room to inform your mother of richie's presence, as she wasn't aware. you hear her nearly shriek, worried that the house isn't clean enough for guests.

"it's fine, mom, it's just richie," you raise your voice so she can hear you, "he literally doesn't care. like, at all."

she says something back, but you don't catch it, as you stand from the table and put your bowl in the sink. richie follows suit.

"so, um... i'll call bill, you handle the, you know, and then i can head over to stan's to let him know the plan. you got everyone else?" you quip, and richie smirks at you.

"you need to take the trash out, kiddo. but, yeah, i got everyone else."

"okaay," you reply, groaning.

richie leaves a few minutes after, through your window, for dramatic effect. you tell your parents he left through the second living room, a sliding door to the backyard in it. they accept it.

calling bill is easy; he always answers, (as he is always home and his parents don't care much for the phone), and rather quickly, too. it's easy to convince him, as well, as he's kind of excitable. he agrees to free eddie.

you call stanley, next. his mother picks up, and you curse to yourself. she's a hard nut to crack.

"hi, mrs. uris!" you tell her it's you, and you swear her tone becomes a bit sharper, but she stays polite. as is the way of jews.

"hello there, sweetheart."

"is stanley home?"

"yes, he is," she replies, you smile. he's always home, too, if he's not birdwatching.

"... could i speak to him?"

"oh! yes," she says, and she barks his name quietly, a sign that he was probably walking past her when you asked.

you tap your foot as there is brief movement on the other end, and stanley breathes into the phone just a millisecond before he speaks.

"hello," he says softly.

"hi, stanny! you free today? great!" you chirp cheerily, smiling against the telephone.

"o-oh, uh, yeah—"

"i thought we already established that."

"oh. um, yeah, i guess.. we have," he sounds dejected.

"kay. i'm coming over."

"what? wait, okay—"

you hang up, and hop slightly as you turn yourself around to grab your things. once you've gotten them, you head out to the place stanley calls home, a small house right outside of the synagogue.

you knock on the screen door at the back of the house and bounce on your heels as you await stanley. the locks on the door rattle briefly, and he's there, pushing open the door to let you in. you thank him and slip off your shoes in the entrance.

"so, you wanna hear about what we're doing tonight?" you say happily, poking his shoulder with a giant grin on your lips.

he swallows. "okay..."

you capture a handful of his collar, and pull him closer to you; he turns beet red. "we're gonna light off fireworks! but i gotta tell your mom we're staying at bill's."

"what? are you guys insane? that's dangerous!" stanley whisper shouts. he looks at you in complete and utter bewilderment.

"i know!" you cheer, "it'll be a blast!"

"no, i'm not doing that!"

"pleaaaase?" you beg, giving him puppy eyes, "it won't be fun without you."

he rolls his own. "no! that's ridiculous!" stanley crosses his arms, glances at your sweet face, and huffs dramatically. "ugh! fine! only because i don't want any of you doing something stupid. mostly you, because you're accident-prone."

"you know me too well, uris," you whisper sappily, and give him a strong hug. he refrains from doing it back for a second but sighs and wraps his arms around your shoulders.

"stanley!" mrs. uris calls out sharply, and she shakes her head stiffly at him. you immediately take a few cautious steps away from him. "what on earth are you doing?"

"i, uh, was just hugging her because..." he trails off slowly.

"my grandma died," you spit out.

"oh! goodness, when?" mrs. uris asks, putting down her basket of laundry.

"um—" you think of a random time, and say, "last night."

unfortunately, stanley says "this morning" simultaneously.

you glance at each other.

"last night," stanley says, "i forgot, and thought it was this morning."

"oh," mrs. uris mutters, "goodness, child, you almost had me thinking you just hug that girl for the sake of it."

"yeah, nope, i would never," he agrees, "she has like, um, ...cooties."

when the high-strung woman finally skitters away, you and stan release a breath.

you're the first to speak. "cooties, stanley? really? that was your genius idea?"

he throws his hands up in defense. "i'm sorry! it was the only thing i could think of. i couldn't say AIDS!"

"i think AIDS would have been more redeemable."

"hardly!" he exasperates, "'cause then she'd think you're a homosexual man with a sex addiction under that skirt and scrunchie!"

you break out into a fit of laughs and shove stanley's shoulder. he shoves you back, and then you're both laughing.

"what? so how am i supposed to convince her to let you come with me to bill's when she thinks my grandma just died and i have cooties?" you inquire as you both step into the main section of the house and prepare to enter the living room.

"with slow coaxing and distance."

—

somehow, all of the losers are able to come— with slow coaxing and distance.

a symphony of crickets echoes down the dirt path, matched with the small pattering of eight pairs of feet. the bugs' song drowns out eddie and richie's bickering at the front of the group, but soon, stanley's soft voice joins in. the sun has already dipped low past the horizon, coating the sky in a hazy blue-grey, but the large trees block out the color significantly. the greenery tickles at your ankles, sly weeds brushing up against you.

a few feet in front of you, stan's pearly whites sneakers kick up rocks, a thin powdery layer of dust residue sliding around the heels, and coating the sides. his laces are neatly tied, and he has taken extra care to tuck the ends away to avoid them from collecting dirt; a signature, and neurotic, move on his part. his socks are a snowy white, and nearly match the pale tone of his calf. almost as if he might turn suddenly and catch your prying eyes, you scrape them to the heavens, admiring the stars that begin to trickle into the blanket above you. you are startled as eddie shrieks, and you manage to catch a glimpse of richie waving a handful of mud from the mucky dissolve at the end of the path, which must have been created during the rainfall yesterday.

"that's literally so disgusting! no! richie, if you fling that at me, i swear to fuck—!" his voice heightens to a womanly pitch, as he withers back from richie's sopping palm. in turn, he snickers devilishly as he circles around eddie like a vulture, with stanley's disapproving expression prominent on his boyish face.

"do you realize how sick i can get from that, huh? flesh-eating bacteria can get into my fucking cornea if a rock cuts my eye!" eddie nearly wails, throwing his hands up to protect his face. richie makes inhumane sounds following eddie's spring for the opening up ahead.

bill shakes his head contently, mirrored nearly identically by beverly and mike. you glance around at the meadow, and your heart skips a beat when you catch sight of a small glow up ahead, hovering just above a patch of flowers.

you squeal and push past the others to get a closet look at the fireflies now littering the meadow. you like to catch them, but not with malice— you capture them, and let them crawl on your hands until they decide to fly again. you giggle, spinning around, arms wide open, admiring the plethora of them.

they're everywhere, and you're in your own personal utopia. richie appears next to you, and he allows a firefly to land on his finger. "hey, watch this."

you eagerly grin as he moves his other hand over the bug, and then— he crushes it, wiping the glow across his skin. you gape at him, and then scowl. "richie, you're such a dick! it was innocent!"

"yeah, but my skin glows!" he replies, showing his hand to the others. none of them are amused, as they peer at your now heartbroken expression.

"that was harsh, rich," bill says, shaking his head in disappointment.

"i thought it was cool," richie mumbles, adjusting his glasses.

you roll your eyes at his response and continue to gaze off into the dark at the glowing bugs. you manage to capture one and cup your hands as you march over to stanley.

"hey, hey, check this out," you tell him, and he cranes his neck to watch as you open your hands, and show him the lightning bug. he slowly reaches out, and it crawls onto his forefinger. "isn't he so cute?!"

"yeah, definitely," stan agrees. the glow from the bug as he raises it up to face reflects off his nose, illuminating some stray freckles on the bridge. his eyes are lit up to match, and they never leave the insect, even when it ultimately makes its flight elsewhere.

"hey, lovebirds! come help me collect some sticks! or should i wait 'til y'all are done gushing over a bug?" richie barks, raising his arms, which are full of twigs, for what you assume is a fire.

"we're not—" stanley begins, but richie is already turned away and focused on something else.

you toss stan a bashful grin. "c'mon, birdboy. 'm sure mike brought marshmallows 'n stuff for s'mores."

"wait—" stanley says suddenly, voice risen uncharacteristically as he grips your arm. when he's positive he has your full attention, he drops contact with you, and stares at the grass below. "u-um, i got you something. i-it's not like anything big, you know, just like.. i saw it, and thought of you, or, er, us."

you blink at him. "you didn't have to—"

"—no! uh, i mean, no. i wanted to," stanley replies, fishing into the pocket of his khaki capris. there, he turns over two bracelets— they're woven, some sections tan and others colorful. there are two short brown strings at the latch on both of them.

"oh, my god, stan!" you say quietly, sticking your wrist out happily. you're grinning, and you can't explain the butterflies in the pit of your stomach or the heat rising to your cheeks. "they're so cute!"

"heh, thanks," he says, stepping forward to slip the bracelet over your wrist. it feels oddly intimate. "i, uh, it's not much, but.."

"no, no, i love it," you chirp, keeping a hold of his hand while you admire the charm. your grin reaches your eyes as they rise to meet his. the feelings expressed by simply the contact of your gazes sends rushes of excitement into your bloodstream. "i'll never take it off. not once."

then stanley suddenly stares into the sky, his lower lip tucked under his teeth. his brows are now curved in concentration. "d-don't look at me like that."

"like what?"

"like this is the best present you've ever gotten. l-like this is the happiest you've ever been."

"it is," you say softly, "this bracelet means the world to me. i've never felt so cared about, not ever."

you take the second bracelet from his hand that remains stretched out, like he's offering the jewelry. you slip it onto his wrist, and use it to pull him into a warm embrace, your arms wrapped around his neck. your right hand rests on the flesh of it, a few curls brushing against your skin.

"thank you, stanley."

your entire being buzzes incessantly as he accepts your gratitude, and you pull away. the air hitting your chest leaves you chilly, the empty kind; disconnecting with him now feels like abandoning the other half of your body, and leaving it frozen in place. you feel as though without him you will always be cold. the empty kind.

richie makes short work of the fire, relaying a grand story about his survival in the woods at six years old, and his incomparable courage that winter. the flames are low and small, but no one dares tell him to stoke them or toss in some leaves for an extra shove, as he seems so content with the low burn as it is. you all subtly cuddle up next to each other, but bill is the most obvious, physically— he scowls and wraps his arms around himself while eddie is vocally unhappy.

beverly leans into ben, subconsciously, and the sweet boy glows brighter than the fire, his skin illuminating a deep red, like an apple. beverly's scarlet hair, in turn, rivals the fire as it roars. her hair, and the way it is ruffled and sharp with each sliced strand, resembles the flames as they lick up towards the sky. the reflection of the campfire makes it burn ever the more vibrant, and it melts onto the skin of her freckled shoulders and nose.

you're cut from your stupor when richie nudges you, and he whispers, "you're staring", as though you weren't already aware. the others don't catch on, fortunately, as they all listen intently to the process of shelving meat, as expressed by mike. you find it riveting, really — as riveting as the tale of processed and packaged animal flesh can be. a silence ensues once richie makes a horrible joke about vegans, and then he clears his throat awkwardly.

"so, fireworks? who dares me to blow one up eddie's ass? maybe it'll get the stick outa there," he chirps, and eddie shrieks and chucks a stick at him.

richie smirks at him and tells him to follow him so they can fetch the fireworks and eddie reluctantly agrees. they scatter off, and you watch contently as they bump shoulders. your brows draw in, a bit depressed by the two of them— how badly you wished they knew. how badly you needed them to know they were everything you dreamed to be.

while you all wait for eddie and richie, ben and beverly disappear behind the trees to go explore this stream ben had found. he told her he felt very poetic being near it, which he had hoped would signal something to her, but she hadn't noticed. in the meantime, you and stanley stay by the fire and discuss his journal, as he gushes about a ruby-throated hummingbird, and shows you a light sketch of one — he shaded the throat, and it makes you smile. he's certainly improved on his work, and you feel a rush of pride break through the dam of your chest.

"stanley, you've really been practicing," you tell him, running your index finger over the graphite lining the yellow paper, "i can tell it's a bird this time! and it's not having a heart attack!"

he nods in approval, and he takes a second to realize you were referring to the first time you met when you told him his art looked like it was having a health scare. his dull eyes blink at you momentarily, like he's trying to figure you out or understand you— and it dawns on you that he's not thinking about the drawing anymore— but rather, he's trying to understand you as a whole— as though you are some sort of puzzle he can't quite put his finger on.

stan's attention retreats back to the journal, flipping occasionally to the next page and reading the notes he's taken on each bird. when your eyes drag down his face, you feel a twinge in your stomach— there's simply something about stanley uris that you can't quite put your finger on, either, and you rather like that about him; it gives you space to unravel and discover each day. you always feel like you're learning something new and jarring about him, and you like to think that gives him depth.

however, his face holds something harsh and cold— something that remains constant, despite the circumstances of his mystery— and it's the sadness. it's the sadness and the fatigue, written like scars across every inch of flesh, a consistent tattoo of sorrow. he's imprinted with it, as though it's simply the base coat on the canvas of his life— and it hurts you, seeing him sad. and it's worse knowing that you don't think you've seen stanley uris any other way.

and you consider, briefly, just for a striking moment— that maybe he's only sad when he's looking at you.

stan recounts a conversation he had with a girl in your shared english class, persephone— known universally as percy — an introverted blonde girl, who has a curious knack for all things odd and quirky. she likes to wear lacy, flowy dresses, and unusual jewelry. she has a rather soft voice, like listening to a cloud speak— and she too enjoys birds. he says it's been a while since he's had a decent talk with someone about the animals, and that he's happy she appears genuinely interested and engaged in the topic. you aren't surprised, by this, though; you half expect percy to be some sort of angelic tree nymph.

you open your mouth to reply to his story, a bitter tang of jealousy on your tongue you don't recognize, but richie tozier beats you to it. almost to your relief.

"what's up, whores?! you ready to blow this place up?" he calls out, raising some fireworks, with exhausted eddie dragging behind him. he looks like he wants to swallow gunpowder and then a match.

you find yourself beside him, hands on his shoulders. he's too tired to even remove them. "eds, what the hell happened to you?"

his eyes are hazy. "richie thought it would be smart to go through the shit path, and now i've probably got seven diseases, at least."

richie smirks. "didn't want to go the usual way. woulda got caught by the po-po."

"you're a handful, tozier," you say.

"you love it," he replies, blowing you a kiss.

"you got me."

the rest of the night is soft chaos; richie lights off the fireworks, and they burst in bright and vibrant colors, lighting up the night. the air is crisp and free, and the grass between your toes is heavenly. you become drunk on your youth, an alcoholic in your own right. you wonder, briefly, if this is the peak— if this is the highest point of your life, if this is what you're meant for. if you're the peter pan of your successful friends, if they will all grow to be everlasting lovers and soulmates.

if this is where your journey with them ends.

and, by god, watching the way beverly looks when she's in her element, dancing barefoot with the rest of you— the way they all gaze at her like she's some sort of angel, some sort of saving grace. the way you gaze at her. how your chest aches. how it burns, to be amongst her beauty, to be jealous and insecure and in love all at once. your feet buzz with the shake of the earth, the fire in the sky. your skin sears, like ashes racing to compete. at this moment, you swear you feel your entire being burning alive.

and it is exhilarating.

and as you watch them, hooting and screaming and letting their voices be heard, you feel infinite. like the world is putty in your hands, like they are the most exhilarating people you'll ever know and you'll spend the rest of your life just settling. and your heart calms, because suddenly everything is simple; you want to hang out with these people until the end of time.

and stanley, the way his curls glow under the fireworks— the way his skin shimmers in possibility. the sadness so present in his face has faded, like he's suddenly hazy and thoughtless. his movements, they're slow and unsure, like he's seconds away from making a fool of himself. but he's beautiful— like some sort of saint— stanley is the human form of apollo, he's the sun himself. apollo— you crave that for him. and his soil eyes stray from the others and meet your excitable ones; his expression is not blank, but rather glowing. you can't define a single emotion on it, but rather a feeling. one that doesn't have a word. one that just is.

and he's looking at you like you're a goddess— you, with a crown of flowers sewn into your chaotic head of hair, you, with your flowy skirt and bare feet— and you know no one has ever looked at you like that. it sparks something in you, something luminescent and empowering. and god, he glows. that boy glows.

and it hits you both at the exact same time, like a comet striking the earth— an epiphany in the form of a human.

i want to hang out with this person until the end of time.

and maybe, you consider, just for a moment, almost a guilty thought—

he wants to hang out with you, too.

is that so bad to wish for?

a person to spend the rest of your youth with?

a person to spend the rest of your life with?

a person to call your own?

and by god, you want it to be him.

let your cries shake the earth, if it isn't.

[🌿] taglist:

@hannarudick @cedricisnotonfire @russian-romanova

#it #the losers club #stanley uris x reader #losers club x reader #beverly marsh x reader #stephen king #it 2017 #stanley uris #stan uris #it fanfiction #stanley uris imagine #beverly marsh imagine #kassie writes #BW

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theonewiththefanfics · 5 years ago

Text

Limited Space (one-shot)

Synopsys: One room. Two beds. But will both of them be used?

Pairing: Tom Holland x f!Reader; OC!Juliet (Reader’s character’s name)

Genre: fluff, tiny bit of angst, like blink and you’ll miss it

Warnings: like one swear word I think :D

Word count: 3739

“Y/N.” “Yes, Jimmy?” she dramatically flipped her head to the side causing her hair to swish which made everyone laugh a bit at her antics. “When you found out you weren’t going to be in ‘Civil War’ with these guys, and Tony was going to get a new protegee in Spider-Man, what were your thoughts? Did you kinda go up to Kevin Feige and ask if he was replacing you?” “Funnily enough,” Y/N pointed at Tom, “when we first met on the carpet for ‘Civil War’ that was the first thing he said. “Please don’t think I’m replacing you!”" she imitated his London accent though quite badly making everyone chuckle, and Tom had to bite his lip to keep the smile at bay. “If I’m being genuine –“ she continued, “I was just terrified I was gonna be fired. Cause after ‘Age of Ultron’ where it turns out the Hulk took the plane to space and ended up in Sakaar, I thought that’s what would happen to me. And I was pumped,” Y/N emphasized the word, “but like, Mark and I were keeping in non-stop contact while it was leading up to Phase 3 announcements, 'cause neither of us had any idea what was happening to our characters. And when it was announced Hulk would be in 'Ragnarok', yet for me, it was radio silence, and then Spidey flipped into the ‘Civil War’ trailer… I-“ she laughed, “I kinda started sweating.” Robert patted her knee as Y/N made a motion of ‘cooling off’ with her hand. “And then for like two more weeks, there was nothing. Mark knew zip, though that was a smart decision on Marvel's part.” “Is he still not trusted by anyone?” Jimmy chuckled, and Robert rolled his eyes. “Listen,” the legend started, “everyone loves him, and he’s such a kind person. Whenever something slips past those loose lips,” he looked over his tinted glasses at Tom as well, “it’s never from a malicious place. Like those two are just excited and want to share that with the world, but when you stream the first fifteen minutes of the movie on your Instagram… you kinda lose the access to the secrets.” The audience erupted into laughter as did Y/N. She had gone to the 'Ragnarok' premiere to support her friends, and the movie and clearly remembered the woman poking Mark in the back and angrily whispering for him to turn off the Instagram Live that was still going. At the afterparty, for the first twenty minutes, that’s what everyone was talking about. “And what about you, Tom?” Jimmy brought the conversation back on track. “When you found out you’d be in Civil War but had no contact with Y/N or Juliet in this case what was your first thought?” “I was really scared that she’d hate me,” Tom laughed rubbing his neck and looked at Y/N, who waved him off. “ ‘Cause Tony’s and Juliet’s relationship is one of the strongest in the MCU, and now that he’s recruited Peter, I was genuinely terrified. Especially of her fans, like they are passionate about Juliet, which I totally get. I just hoped that she’d be nice and accepting when we did meet and got to work together.”

Y/N rolled her head to the side and looked at Tom. “And am I as scary as you thought I’d be?” “In the mornings, horrifying,” Tom sassed, and Y/N slapped his shoulder with mock hurt on her face while Robert exclaimed a ‘watch it, kid, that’s my daughter! I might be dead, but I’ll come back to haunt your ass.’ “Did you kinda help him fit into the dynamic of everything?” Jimmy continued on, and Y/N looked at Tom. “Not really, no,” she shook her head. “He just fit in so perfectly on his own, that nobody had to do anything. Sure, like helping out with the scenes and advice like that as peers, yeah. But there was no ‘here’s Tom. Now be friends’ kind of a thing. And in the end, I was off in space, and they were kicking Cap’s ass back on Earth.” Someone in the audience hollered a ‘Team Iron Man’ making Robert blow a kiss in the person’s direction. Given how he wasn't with them to promote Marvel anymore and was there for the re:MARS initiative, it was nice for all of them to catch up. “Honestly,” he piped up, “I couldn’t wait for Infinity War and then Endgame, to film with this one, and then see us on the big screen reunited,” he affectionately ruffled Y/N’s hair. “Me too,” she smiled, “though, when we saw Spidey and Iron Man interacting with the Guardians, yet no Juliet, I started to think maybe it was just like a mock scene that wouldn't end up being used. 'Cause by that point, everyone knew she was rolling with the Space Avengers, and maybe it was just to throw everyone off. But filming it was a really amazing experience, ‘cause Juliet hadn’t seen her father for what now,” she looked at Robert for confirmation, “three-four years? And suddenly they meet again, but he has a new protegee and stuff. It was interesting to see how the dynamic would evolve, and how she’d feel about Peter. As evident in the movie – she kinda liked him.” “So, no rivalry between the two of you?” Jimmy motioned with his hand. And Tom placed his head on Y/N’s shoulder making the audience aww. “None whatsoever.” “Good answer,” she patted his head. “I’ve trained you well.” But as everyone laughed, Y/N was completely unaware of how Tom’s heart galloped in his chest from that small touch and show of affection. Fuck, he was in deep.

***

“Ugh,” Y/N groaned putting a hand against her back and stretching, feeling the air between her vertebra pop. “I feel like I could sleep for a week.” Robert gently patted her shoulder. “You and me, kid, but we know we can’t. Chris will kill us if we miss the barbecue.” “Which one?” Tom asked, dropping his suitcase on the floor. “Pratt? Evans? Hemsworth? Pine?” Robert cocked his eyebrow. “Since when did we have Pine?” Tom shrugged his shoulders. “Zoe is slowly collecting all of them. And honestly, I wouldn’t be that surprised if they had some sort of a Chris-convention.” “Chrisvention?” Y/N quirked her eyebrow settling on the arm of the couch. “Chris-con?” Tom offered. She snorted. “That just sounds like crisscross.” Robert rolled his eyes removing his glasses and placing them on the mantlepiece. He had invited the two youngsters to stay with him since they both were like his kids, especially after having known Y/N for almost a decade, and now having taken the young Brit under his wing, he didn’t want the two to sleep in hotels if he could offer the comfort of his own house. “Okay, you two, off to bed,” Robert clapped his hands interrupting the weird conversation they were having and shooed them up the stairs having grabbed Y/N’s suitcase much to her grumbling that she could do it herself. “Now, the other guestroom is under renovation so you’ll be sharing. Two beds, one bathroom, unfortunately. Need you to be up bright and early so we could get to Renner’s. And no funny business!” “Ok, Bobert!” They heard a high-pitched whine of ‘stop calling me that!’ as he retreated before a door closed shut, leaving the two with their eyes rolling and heads shaking. “I swear, he’s such a diva,” Y/N joked bringing her suitcase in and dropping it on top of the bed. “The Marvel fame’s really gotten to his head.” “I know!” Tom exasperated in that same ‘I don’t actually mean it’ tone. “It’s like – chill it, Rob!” Y/N snorted and zipped open her bag pulling out a set of pyjamas consisting of an incredibly old and stained shirt with some shorts. “Rob?” “I know,” he wrinkled his nose. “Regretted that as soon as I said it.” She hummed listening to how Tom unpacked a few of his things and gentle music erupted all around them when he hooked his phone to the speaker. “Any requests, m’lady?” he said in a very much so overly exaggerated British accent which Y/N didn’t think was possible, seeing as he was, well, already British. “Why yes, I do actually,” she spun around, her bag of toiletries pressed against her chest as if it was her palm. “Let it be ‘Bowling for Soup’ – ‘Here’s Your Fricking Song’.” Tom bowed and typed in the name. “As the lady wishes.” With the upbeat track of late 2000s punk-rock, Y/N skipped to the bathroom and started to get ready for the night. Without even thinking the two had engaged in a sing-along, and she even held her toothbrush as a microphone. “I get drunk and you get pissed!” she screamed, and Tom responded, “You start dreaming I don’t exist!” “I say yes, and you say no!” Without missing a beat, he sang, “Like Katy Perry says, you’re Hot and Cold!” “With all the shit that we’ve been through, this the best that I can do!” they sang in unison, Y/N almost choking on her toothpaste. “Can I still get lucky tonight?” Cackling she entered the bedroom and bowed in front of Tom. “The bathroom’s all yours, kind sir.” The pure happiness on Y/N’s face was a sight Tom never wanted to forget. It was just the way her Y/E/C eyes lit up, that sparked his own joy and released a horde of butterflies to trash around his stomach. Venturing away from Y/N he released a shaky breath and looked at himself in the mirror. “Pull yourself together,” Tom muttered to his reflection as if the counterpart could actually take charge and calm him down. The music still played switching from one song to another as he brushed his teeth and washed his face from all the makeup that had been caked on his skin for the show. With satisfaction, Tom watched as the beige and brown colours went down the drain with the running water, freeing him from its confines and bringing back his own face Sure, there were impurities. Acne spots, little pimples pushing to the surface, a scar here or there. Usually, when he was around people without them covered, Tom could feel a bit insecure, as if each and every person had a magnifying glass to their eye and were focusing in on just those things. But with the people he was comfortable with, the people he trusted and loved, there was none of that because more likely than not, he had seen them in that same kind of state. Or in Y/N’s case, with her face covered by a white spot-treatment mask making her look like a weird version of a Dalmatian. She was sat against the bed’s headboard with a book in her lap (her usual state) and sweet melodic music Tom recognized to be the soundtrack for ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’ wafted around her. “Getting in the mood?” he asked moving to rest on his own bed, acting as if his heart wasn’t beating a mile a minute. “Kinda,” Y/N muttered through pursed lips. “In the movie, the scene where Tristan and Yvaine are up in the clouds they spent so much more time with the Captain, where in here,” she pointed with her chin to the pages of ‘Stardust’, “it’s barely been two pages, and they’re already off. And his name isn’t even Shakespeare!” “What outrage!” Tom mocked and received a pillow in the face for that, phone dropping to his lap. “Rude much?” he threw it back, but Y/N easily caught it. “Captain Shakespeare is my favourite character!” “And you still have the movie to see him in,” Tom’s eyebrow rose. She had nothing but a groan as her response. Y/N read for a bit more while he distracted himself with social media, but it wasn’t long when she placed a candy wrapper as her bookmark and turned off the bedside lamp. “ ‘Night, Tom,” Y/N yawned and hugged a pillow closer to her chest. “ ‘Night, Y/N,” he replied, watching her relaxed features for a bit, before residing to the night himself. Nothing but the moon and stars twinkled outside, illuminating the bedroom with a pale-ish glow, and while he waited for sleep to claim him, Tom watched Y/N rest, her body cast over with the moonlight making him think she was some sort of a princess from a fairytale under a spell, and the glimmer was showing him the way to break the curse. The dead silence of the night was interrupted by his soft voice uttering her name. “Y/N?” “Yeah?” “Are you awake?” She snorted and turned on her back. “Given how I just responded to you, yeah. I’d say I’m awake.” “I dunno,” Tom chuckled. “You could be sleep talking.” “Then I must be a pretty bomb-ass coherent sleep talker,” he saw her put a hand behind her head. “What’s up?” “I can’t sleep.” "Why not?” “ ‘S just… I dunno… It’s stupid…” “Well, it’s not that stupid if you’re losing sleep over it,” Y/N propped herself on her elbow to get a better look at Tom. Even in the complete darkness, she could distinguish the worry in his face and what seemed to be embarrassment. “I won’t judge.” With one last huff, Tom relented. “It’s just when we were in England doing press, I could go home, and sleep, and Tess always slept next to me. I dunno… I just guess I miss something warm to cuddle next to… told you it was stupid.” “No,” came Y/N’s instant response. “It’s not stupid at all. If you wanna hear something stupid, is that when I first got the role of Juliet, which was my first role like ever, I slept in Evans’s trailer for like three weeks, 'cause he had Dodger with him, and I had forgotten Huks home. Took a while for it to arrive, so I had to improvise.” She saw his eyebrow raise. “Huks?” “It’s a plushie husky. Couldn’t go to sleep without it… in fact, I still have worse sleep if it’s not with me than when it is. So, no. I don’t think missing Tessa or her cuddling with you is a stupid reason to be unable to fall asleep.” Tom just wanted to scream out that it was the most adorable thing ever, and that Y/N had to stop before his heart did, but before he could even mutter that her reason wasn’t stupid either, she managed to speak up first. “Do you maybe wanna sleep next to me? Not in a weird kinda way, just… you know… you said you miss something warm next to you...” “Are you sure? ‘Cause I don’t want you to d-“ “Stop worrying and get under the covers,” Y/N hissed but she was smiling as she did so, waving him to come to her bed. “Though, I do have to warn you – I’m a very violent sleeper,” she said scooting to the side. “How does… that work?” “It means,” she grunted pushing a bit further to the edge and settling down as Tom slipped beneath her bedding, “that I might just, unconsciously kick you, and no matter how far you sleep from me, you’ll end up either on the very edge of the bed or on the floor.” “Also,” Y/N extended a hand, “this is you promising not to sue me for whatever damages my sleeping-self might cause you. A broken nose or a rib – awake me is not at fault.” Tom clasped her hand and sighed. “And here I was getting ready to cash in.” “Sucks to be you then, cause this deal is unbreakable,” she shrugged and gave him one last smile before turning her back to the man and giving a ‘goodnight’. “Goodnight,” Tom muttered to her already softly breathing form, but he himself couldn’t find rest. Although he thought it might actually help him to have something warm to sleep next to, it seemed like his brain was going into overdrive, and his heart was about to collapse. She stirred for a second and rolled over to face him, making his breath hitch. Y/N was so close to him that he wouldn’t even need to stretch his hand to caress her face. “You’re so beautiful,” Tom whispered looking at Y/N’s closed eyes. And unbeknownst to him, her heart almost exploded because although she looked like she was dead asleep, a twitch in her body had jolted her awake, and now she was very much so alert. “I wish I could tell you this while you’re awake… or just in general, I wish I could just grow a pair and do it, but I guess this’ll have to do for the time being. You’re so, so beautiful,” his thumb brushed over her cheekbone, and Y/N had to suppress the hitch of her breath. “And I don’t just mean how you look ‘cause fuck, darling you are a dream… marvellous… but your mind… your heart… the first time we met I thought I’d have a panic attack because you looked at me so softly, I felt my mind go numb and everything just tuned out of focus.” “And then we got to know one another more,” he released a barely-there sigh, but Y/N still heard it, “and I couldn’t help myself. I started to fall for you. You had a boyfriend at the time, so I knew I had zero chances, but it didn’t matter to me. I was giving my heart to you every day bit by bit, and it didn’t even matter if you broke it or not, ‘cause it was already yours to do as you pleased.” Tom released a bitter chuckle, and Y/N could feel him shake his head. “But still somehow I’m too much of a coward and a twat to say how I feel despite it being almost four years, despite both of us being single.” She felt his gaze roam her face and tried her hardest not to flutter her eyelashes. “I guess I’m just too afraid to lose you. In any kind of capacity. I’d rather have you as a friend than not at all… that I couldn’t take…” That was the thought that made his heart clench the most, and tears prickled at the corners of his eyes. One of the biggest fears, when it came to relationships and friendships he had, was, if he told her how he felt, that Y/N would just shove him out of her life completely. So he surrendered himself to loving her from afar. And he let her love him her own way. It was better than nothing. Quickly before they to dropped to the pillow, Tom wiped the tears away and finally settled for the night, the weight pressing on him lifted if only for a moment before it would come crashing down in the morning. But Y/N had other plans. “Do you mean that?” her voice trembled, and Tom’s eyes shot open to see her already looking up at him “Y-Y/N? I thought you were asleep.” “Answer the question, Holland,” she murmured sliding her hand up to the nape of his neck and pulling his face closer. “Do you mean what you said?” “Yes,” the word was a breathless whisper as his forehead now rested on hers. “I mean every. Single. Word. I am in love with you.” And she needed nothing more than to nudge his head away, brush her nose against his and press their lips together. The two practically sagged against one another with relief that the kiss was reciprocated. Y/N’s hands had gently woven to tangle up in Tom’s chocolate locks, both to feel the softness of them and to pull him closer, while one of his palms had settled on her waist and the other was cupping her cheek, his thumb gently stroking the side of her face. But something just had to ruin the mood, and it was Tom’s laughing. “What?” Y/N pulled back annoyed and frustrated because that one kiss was just not enough after almost two years of her own pent up emotions. “Robert said no funny business,” he giggled. Her eyebrow quirked up. “And?” “And this is funny business.” “Oh my god,” she groaned, chuckled and slipped out of the bed. “You’re a literal child.” Smacking a pillow over his face, which Tom easily caught Y/N bounded over to the bed he had been previously occupied and slipped under its covers. “Wait, no, come back!” he whined reaching over the end of the bed, flopping down on his belly with an extended hand. “Please,” and he gave such an adorable pout that it almost broke Y/N, but no. She crossed her arms and put her nose up in the air. “Nope,” she shook her head, but even in the pitch-black darkness, Tom could see the smile she tried to suppress. “You thought it was funny kissing me, so no kisses or cuddles.” “Please?” “No.” “Please?” his voice increased with each syllable. “No.” And then Tom rolled onto his back and pouted, giving Y/N the best puppy-dog eyes in the world. Like if there existed a contest for that kind of a thing, he’d totally get the prize. “Please come back to bed and cuddle with me?” She couldn’t say no anymore. She never could and never will be able to say no, and that’s when a realization hit her – he had Y/N completely wrapped around his finger, but she didn’t mind that. If the kiss and his warm arms wrapping around her waist was what greeted her when she clambered back under the sheets, and his steady heartbeat lulled her to sleep, she didn’t mind being wrapped around his finger at all. And truthfully, with how huge the grin was that spread across Tom’s face as he kissed her forehead ‘goodnight’ this time for real, neither was he too upset how wrapped around her finger he was. In the morning he had to remember to say ‘thank you’ to RDJ for the limited space he had in his house. And although he did wake up with a sore in his ribs where Y/N had accidentally kneed him during the night, he had never been happier about a predicament in his life. After all, it’s what gave him the chance to speak his heart.

Tags (crossed out wouldn’t take): @lumelgy @palaiasaurus64 @supernaturalbaesduh @breezy1415 @crazy--me @thatawkwardlittlefangirl @sea040561 @staryeyedgirl @deathbyarabbit @s-c-a-r-e-d-po-t-t-e-r @reblogger-not-a-blogger @m-a-t-91 @dalilx @i-need-a-hero-i-need-a-loki @maladaptive-ninja-returns @averyrogers83 @in-the-end-im-still-trash @gallifreyansass @dewy-biitch @avxgers @unlikelygalaxygiver @sweet-ladyy @magicwithaknife @ollyoxenfrees @bnhvrdy @tvwhoresblog @celebsimagines @thatkindofgurl @sj-thefan@nerissa98 @happyseagrill @asguardiansoftheavengers @crazybutconfidentaf @wishingforahome @pizzarollpatrol @desir-ae

A/N: should I do like a part two of the next day????????

P.S. what did ya think?

P.S.S. my tags are always open. just drop a message :)

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zodiacal-dust-and-curls · 6 years ago

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Take Care

A/N: I wrote this for me. It’s been a hell of a weekend. No other proofreaders, so all mistakes are my own. Enjoy. 📷 by: @gwilymleefan

Warnings: Talk about menstruation, a lot. Pain. Headaches. PMS.

Word Count: 2.2k

“Love, you need to wake up.” Gwilym whispered as he pressed kisses into your hairline and brushed your hair away from your face. It certainly wasn’t the worst way to wake up.

At least, that’s what you thought until you shifted your hips to try to get up. That’s when you felt it, the all too familiar slide that came every month. It had decided to be three days early.

“Love,” Gwil said a little more urgently, “Y/N, I think you need to get up and take a shower, okay?”

Slowly, you opened your eyes to see a set of furrowed brows and a hard set mouth. “I’ll just change the sheets real quick and -”, you couldn’t help the yawn that broke out. You knew what had happened, and you just wanted to clean up and get this over with.

“No. love.” He cut you off while you were still trapped by the yawn. “I’ve got the sheets.” His eyes softened as you finished sitting up in bed.

The grimace that crossed your face as you sat up couldn’t be stopped. The cool, slick feeling of your underwear against your skin was both unpleasant and unwelcome. You would have rushed to the shower, but your sheets were already stained. What was the point in rushing while half asleep and possibly injuring yourself to save a scrap of fabric?

“ ‘M sorry, dearest.” Your eyes were tearing a little. “I swear I’ve been keeping up. It’s early.” You looked up into Gwil’s eyes. Everything about his expression had softened since your first glance at him.

“Don’t worry about that right now, okay?” He slowly reached out to caress your cheek. “Have a shower. I’ll change the sheets and then we can just relax like we were supposed to. Yeah?”

You nodded as you stood to escape to the bathroom. Gwilym took advantage of the large shirt you wore to bed and used it as a tether to pull you into him as you passed. He pressed one chaste kiss to the crown of your head before releasing you.

Gwilym watched as you retreated into the adjoining bathroom and waited for the sound of running water before setting to work.

A quick look at your backside in the mirror proved that your shirt had escaped this little episode unscathed. Well, you said ‘your shirt’, what you meant was ‘shirt you stole from Gwilym the moment he got home from filming in Australia and had never given back’. It was fine, he’d assured you. He would much prefer to see you enjoying it, than to look at it hang in his closet every day.

The underwear you’d worn to bed that night were now trash. There would be no saving them, so you were left to mourn the loss of your favorite pair. They weren’t overly cute or sexy, but they certainly weren’t the ugliest you owned. They had struck the perfect balance between functional and comfortable, and were even suitable for date night if you were in a hurry.

Once you’d shed your clothes, you stepped into the steaming shower to cleanse your skin. Gwilym had promised a lazy day in bed no matter what yesterday, so you decided to go ahead and go through your usual routine. Nothing like a complete refresh to try and improve your mood.

Just as you were about to step onto the rug, you were struck with the realization that you hadn’t brought any clothes with you. But before you could call out, you spotted two folded squares of fabric on the counter. Gwilym was truly a God send sometimes.

He’d managed to find you favorite pair of lazy shorts and a duplicate of your previous underwear, that somehow were the exact same cut from the same manufacturer but weren’t as comfortable. You quickly situated yourself and redressed.

Gwilym was reclined on the newly changed sheets reading a book while waiting for you. “How are you feeling, love?” He quickly shut the book to look up at you, his brilliant blue eyes magnified behind his glasses.

“It’s all starting to hit me now that I’m awake.” The cramps had hit in the shower, nothing too severe yet, but you were sure they’d get worse. “Can I just go back to bed?”

“Of, course. Come here.” He lifted his arm and invited you in.

You didn’t waste one second and quickly clambered in to your bed to cuddle up to his side and pillow your head on his chest. The sheets were warm, probably from him. The great thing about Gwilym was that he was a living space heater. It even extended into his hands, which gave you an idea.

“Dearest?”

Gwilym hummed in response, not quite ready to take his eyes off the page.

“Will you rub my hips?” You made sure to put on your classic puppy eyes as you peered up at him through your lashes. The pain wasn’t too bad yet, more of a dull ache than anything. But you just wanted to try to quiet the pain as early as possible.

“Yeah.” He kissed your forehead. “Let me finish this chapter, and then I’m all yours.”

You waited patiently for him to finish and decided to distract yourself by watching him. Gwilym was absolutely lost in his book, it seemed. His brow rose and fell at certain lines. His bit his bottom lip and released it, only to press his mouth into a hard line at whatever event was occurring, The hand that he had on your hip seemed to tap impatient beats on your skin or swirl in anticipation of what would happen next.

Finally, he closed the book and set it on his night stand along with his glasses. “Okay, love. Come here.”

You rolled so that your chest was pressed to his and his hands quickly found they’re way down your sides. You pressed a kiss to his chin as you settled yourself more comfortably.

“So what seems to be the problem?” His eyebrows rose as he waited for your response, his hands already applying pressure where he knew you were always the sorest.

“Just aches.” You hummed out. “Enough to keep me up.”

“I’ll gladly help put you back to sleep, but it’ll cost you.” You could feel the words rumble through his chest.

“Cost me?” You elongated the last word for dramatic effect. “Name your price. I shall pay it.”

“You have to keep me entertained. I have to stay awake and my hands are too busy to hold a book for me to read. So it’s up to you to keep me conscious.”

“Gladly.” You took a few moments to think of how to entertain Gwilym. He’d been reading Robin Hood to prepare for a new role. You didn’t know much about it, but you did know that the best way to entertain him was to get his thoughts on it.

“Tell me about the new role. I know it’s Robin Hood, but I know nothing else.”

Gwilym let out a chuckle at that. He hadn’t had the news for long, and you’d been so busy in the days since, that of course you didn’t know much.

“Well, I will be voicing good Sir Robin of Loxley.” He dug his thumbs into the meat of your hips at that moment and enjoyed the sigh of relief that left your lips. “But luckily, it’s mainly voice acting. So I don’t have to learn any choreography for fight scenes.”

You hummed your ascent “So tell me about the interpretation. What do you think of it so far?”

“I think it’s going to be very interesting. I’ve never seen this side of the character before.” He paused to adjust his technique on your hips. Deciding to switch to gentle kneading and using his natural heat tendencies to help relax the muscles.

He continued to give you his thoughts on the character and the job. You held on for as long as you could, but after about 15 minutes of the killer combination of his hands and voice, you were out like a light.

When Gwilym felt your body go lax with sleep, he pressed one final kiss to your hair and picked his book back up. Moving carefully, as not to wake you.

You woke up a few hours later to intense pains rolling from your belly button to your knees. Gwilym had left you on his chest, which helped keep warmth on your midsection but was not helping with the new pain in your chest. The one thing you never missed was the pain that came with your time of the month. It always slammed into you upon waking, as if you needed to be reminded that you were currently being punched in the uterus by life.

To relieve the pressure on your chest you pushed yourself off of Gwilym with a loud sigh. Nothing was improved by being removed from your favorite heat source, at least not emotionally. Physically, your chest thanked you for getting off of it and your back seemed to release a little with the mattress underneath it.

“How are you doing now, love?” Gwilym was still reading. He seemed to be much further along than earlier, but just as engrossed.

“Worse.” You felt your bladder finally wake up and decided it was time to get fully up. “I’ll be back.”

Your trip to the restroom could best be described as a horror show. You were hit with nausea upon getting vertical and turning on lights set your head down it’s own pounding path. Today was going to be rough.

Luckily, you kept all your meds in the cabinet and quickly took them. You also found your electric heating pad, which was great because you no longer had the desire to be touched by anyone.

Gwilym didn’t stop you as you stumbled through the bedroom. He knew where you were going. Despite what you thought, he was very much used to this schedule of events. Even if he thought you’d have a few more days before it started, he was still ready to get through it with you.

He found you on the couch, electric cord running from under the biggest blanket you owned to the wall and surrounded by enough pillows for him to know that you were not going to share. Gwilym sat on the chair next to you and started reading while you tried in vain to go back to sleep.

“Will you read to me?” Your soft voice seemed to float from the pile of fluff that contained you.

Gwilym merely nodded and started on the next line. He kept his voice gentle as he could. The room was quiet enough to have an echo and that wouldn’t help your headache.

You listened to his story and actually stayed awake through the entirety of what he had left. It was a good book, you’d have to read the beginning some day.

Eventually, your meds kicked in and the pain lessened. Your head quit throbbing and the nausea from cramping died down enough for you to finally feel hungry. You couldn’t imagine how poor Gwil felt. He’d been up longer than you and trapped with you without any real breaks.

“What do you want for -” you looked at the nearest clock. It was only 10 am, your day must have started much earlier than you thought. “Brunch?”

“I had a quick cuppa and toast while you were in the shower, love.” He could read you better than his book. “Make whatever you want and I’ll have the same.”

You stood and went into the kitchen to start your breakfast. Your stomach growled to tell you to hurry up, and your neurons decided that something sweet, maybe chocolate, sounded good. So you reached for your favorite pancake mix and chocolate chips and started mixing.

Thirty minutes later, you’d made enough pancakes, scrambled eggs, and tea for the both of you. Before you could call his name, Gwilym walked into the kitchen. He didn’t approach you immediately, still unsure of if your no-touching rule was on.

You walked up to him quickly and threw your arms around his waist. He reciprocated immediately and rested his head on your shoulder.

“Scared me for a minute there this morning, love.”

“I know it’s gross and awful and I’m so so sorry.” you spoke so quickly that your words seemed to trip over themselves and run together.

“It’s alright. I’m always more than happy to take care of you.” He pulled back just enough to pull your face to look at him by your chin. “I wish you’d let me do it more often. You stay so busy and on top of everything in both of our lives. It’s nice to know that you can depend on me when you need it.”

“Of course, I depend on you, dearest. Who else would put up with me and my moods?” You smiled up at him, a true smile that could hit your eyes now that your least favorite side effects were muted. “But for now, let’s eat. You can take care of me again later.”

Tag List: @rogers-wristbands @deakydeckme @gwilym-may

#tw: periods #tw: pain #gwilym lee fluff #gwilym lee x reader #gwilym lee imagine #t writes

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pollylynn · 5 years ago

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“I thought you were a writer. What happened?” —Ronnie, Private Eye Caramba! (7 x 12)

Title: Why We Fight Rating: T WC: 1000

His mind is too busy for sleep, even after a couple glasses of wine and time well spent ensuring that his second customer of the day is well and truly satisfied. It’s too alive with smoldering lines of dialogue from the lips of Sofia Del Cordova, with Ronnie the lobby guy’s hunched demeanor and low-key greed, with Pam the restroom attendant’s sharp eye for personality, relationships, intentions.

He rests a palm on her spine, feeling the smooth, steady breath between her shoulder blades, then slips from the bed into his study. His hands reach instinctively for his laptop, but he hesitates. He pushes it aside in favor of a fountain pen and a good pad of paper. He switches on the neglected desk lamp, angling the shade so the spill of light licks out over the desk. He sits, nib poised over the elegant, lined sheet, and waits to see how this will shake out—how the plot points and character quirks will make their way out into the world.

Nothing comes at first. He doesn’t expect that. It’s a mystery writer’s gold mine, or it will be once he strips away the tedium and less than glamorous aspects, and he wonders what his damned hand is waiting for.

He taps the expensive nib at the upper left of the first line. He lets the weight of the pen carry the barrel around the back of his thumb, then catches it on the palm side. He fidgets and sketches and doodles, and even though there’s still a clamor of things about the case he wants to capture before they fade, nothing he thought he was thinking about will come.

He shifts gears. He takes his eye off the page and lets it fall where it will, somewhere in the middle distance. He lets it drag down the glass wall to the outside world and sweep along the narrow seam of deeper shadow at the bottom of the door to the bedroom. He lets himself study the back of his own hand without intention until the pen seems to move of its own volition.

Pink bunny.

That comes out first. He doesn’t know what it means. He lets himself not know. He moves the pen, or the pen moves itself, and the word Locket comes out. Ring. Her mother’s ring, underscored several times, circled reverently. He jumps back and forth in the timeline—Grocery Bag, Drop Key, Blue Butterfly, Broken Keychain. By the time Brag Book makes its way out of his pen, he has an idea about the idea.

He’s thinking about evidence, objects, things, and the way people connect to them. He’s thinking about the way they link people to one another and how they’re infused with meaning, with motive, with significance that shifts in different kinds of light. He adds Rhinestone to his haphazard cloud of words, then with the fond memory of its balance in his hand, Magnifying Glass nearby.

He gets a little scene out of that. The sound of the crystal tumbling on the scarred surface of the wooden desk as it comes loose from the purse, sudden intuition, confirmation, insight, followed hard on by the appearance of his femme fatale. He gets his Maltese Falcon moment down on paper, everything right up to the bait and switch—the worthless purse and the key to the dreams of three different women, the nightmare of their killer.

He gets the mechanics of it down and one or two quick-stroke emotional beats, but for all its familiarity, he doesn’t quite understand it. He doesn’t quite grasp where the moment will go or why it matters.

“You’re not out here being your own muse, are you?” She’s a heart-stopping silhouette in the bedroom doorway, right on cue.

“Definitely not.” He holds out a hand to her and the words are like punctuation dropping in to make sense of the scattered mess he’s committed to the page. “You are the once and future muse.”

“Damn straight,” she says smugly as she drops into his lap. She shifts the weight of their bodies to swing the chair around. She steals a peek at the desk. “Pen and paper. Old school.”

He shrugs, tracing the continuation of an idea down the bare expanse of her thigh with busy fingers. “It’s what was working tonight.”

“Writing working?” She rests her head on his shoulder. She lands a sloppy kiss on the underside of his chin and settles in for the story, whichever one he wants to tell.

“Yes and no,” he says. The no is a surprise and part of the solution to the problem of the page. He’s figuring out in real time which story it is that he intends to tell. “I was just thinking through the case.”

“Your first case.” She lands a proud, sloppy kiss on the underside of his chin.

“My first,” he echoes, though he’s not thinking of it that way tonight. Not exactly. “I thought I was just looking for a purse, and then I thought I was looking for a really expensive purse, and then it was a fake and . . .” He trails off, then starts up again, the words coming in a bashful rush. “I think I did good today.”

He feels his cheek grow hot, and he’s glad of the cool press of her skin against it. He’s glad for the cover of darkness.

“Of course you did good,” she tells him with a sleepy laugh. “You do the job, you do good. That’s how it goes on the best days.”

“That’s how it goes.” He peers over the top of her head to the mess of thoughts spilled out on the page. He sees objects—things—fixed there and the meaning they make holding everything together. He understands better what he wants to do with the P.I. business and why. He understands that it’s what he’s done alongside her for years. “You’d think I’d know that by now.”

#Castle #Caskett #Castle: Season 7 #Castle: Private Eye Caramba!#Kate Beckett #Richard Castle #Fic #Fanfic #Fanfiction #Fan Fic #Fan Fiction #Writing #Drabble #Drabble Fail #My Brain is Fucking Incorrigible

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reddieforlove-archive-blog · 6 years ago

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meet at a bar and “hookup”

Eddie let out a soft sigh, leaning his head back as warm lips trailed over his throat, pressing soft kisses to his heated skin as they went. He shuddered when teeth nipped a particularly sensitive spot, his fingers tugging at dark curls. His eyes were heavy-lidded, nearly closed as he moaned quietly at the feeling of hands holding his hips firmly.

Then the elevator dinged and he blinked, torn away from the moment. Richie lifted his head slowly, staring at Eddie with dark eyes filled with desire. He leaned in, pressing a slow, lingering kiss to Eddie’s mouth before nipping at his lower lip and soothing the sting with a sweep of his tongue. Then Richie leaned away as the doors slid open and Eddie let out a small protesting noise that earned him a lazy answering grin.

Richie caught his hand, walking backwards out of the elevator as he tugged a very willing Eddie along. As soon as they were in the hall, Eddie closed the distance between them and hooked one of his fingers in Richie’s belt loop, tugging him in close before pushing up on his toes to kiss him deeply, stroking his tongue over the seam of his lips and humming when Richie’s free hand pressed to his lower back.

“Fuck,” Richie groaned against his lips. “You’re gonna be the death of me, cutie.”

Eddie grinned into the kiss, squeezing his hand lightly. They staggered down the hall without breaking away until Richie turned his head, his eyes tracing over the door to their left before he pulled Eddie just a little further, digging into his pocket for his keys. Eddie released him so that he could turn and unlock the door but Richie didn’t let him go far, keeping a hold on his hand so they could walk inside.

His first thought was that the studio apartment had character. Possibly more so than any other apartment Eddie had ever seen. Instead of plaster, the walls were made of dark brown brick. There were still posters, signs, and even some paintings hung up on them. A dark brown leather couch, matching chair, and small flatscreen television on what looked like a plain wooden crate stood between them and the full-sized bed with messy covers.

Eddie’s eyes fell on a desk covered in books and papers as Richie closed the door, locking it behind him. A turntable stood on a small table next to the desk with a basket of records just beneath it. Instead of a dining table, there were two bar stools sitting just on the other side of the decent-sized kitchen. As he let his eyes linger on the bay window with a window seat, his favorite part of the place, Richie stepped up behind him and tugged his jacket from his shoulders.

“Make yourself comfortable,” he said, brushing his lips over the side of Eddie’s neck before moving away.

Eddie moved further into the apartment as Richie hung their jackets on a coat rack before drifting into the kitchen.

“Something to drink?” he called out.

“I’ll take some water if it isn’t too much trouble,” Eddie said, glancing over from where he was studying one of the canvas paintings hung on the wall.

Richie nodded, pulling two bottles of water from the fridge.

“My friend painted that,” he said, walking over. “She’s got a studio in Tribeca.”

“It’s beautiful,” Eddie breathed out, admiring the sweeping strokes and magnificent textures as Richie pressed the bottle into his hand.

“Mm-hm,” Richie murmured as he leaned back against the arm of the couch.

Eddie glanced over him only to see that his eyes were fixed on him, not the painting. A light flush filled his cheeks and he turned away with a smile tugging at his lips, his eyes going to a small gathering of pictures atop a crowded bookcase. Richie was in almost all of them but there were other people scattered throughout the frames too.

A young Richie who couldn’t have been out of elementary school beamed at the camera with two of his front teeth missing and his arm thrown over the shoulders of a pale boy with curly, golden hair and a smaller yet no less happy smile. Eddie smiled at how cute little Richie was, even with his thick coke bottle glasses that magnified his warm brown eyes.

The next picture was of a group of teenagers crowded into the back of a dusty pickup truck. Richie and the curly-haired guy were there, sitting on opposite sides with a muscular, dark-skinned guy between them and a redhead girl sitting sideways across their laps, her arms looped around Richie’s neck. They were all laughing, heads tossed back and eyes bright with happiness.

Another picture depicted Richie alone, his back to the camera but easily identifiable by his riotous curls, even though they were pressed down by a graduation cap. A similarly colored gown covered him down to his knees and he was throwing two middle fingers up at what looked like a high school. Eddie couldn’t help but smile.

There was another of Richie and the redhead, sitting side-by-side on a curb with their legs outstretched and crossed, cigarettes hanging loosely from their fingers, and facing one another with their tongues sticking out. They looked like two sides of the same coin, to Eddie’s eyes, and he couldn’t help but admire how careless and free Richie looked in each picture.

“You don’t have to admire me in pictures, babe,” Richie said, finally speaking up again. “You got the real thing right here.”

Eddie glanced over at him with a smile tugging at his lips just as Richie patted his lap.

“You were cute,” he said, crossing over to him as he took a drink of water.

“Mmm, I bet you were cuter,” Richie said, reaching out to hold Eddie’s hips, drawing him in until he was standing between his splayed legs.

Eddie huffed out a laugh, looking down at Richie.

“What the hell happened to us?” he wondered.

Richie laughed too, his eyes crinkling at the corners.

“We grew up,” he said as Eddie dropped his bottle of water to the couch so that he could card his fingers through Richie’s hair.

“Well how the hell do you make that stop?” Eddie said with a mock frown.

“It’s not all so bad,” Richie said, looking incredibly content as he leaned his head into Eddie’s hand. “Some things make it worth it.”

He couldn’t help but agree with that. He bent over, pressing a soft kiss to Richie’s lips. The other man responded to his gentleness, reaching up to brush his thumb over Eddie’s jaw. Then he was standing and walking Eddie back to the bed and they didn’t break away even to kick their shoes off.

Eddie let himself be guided to the mattress, sliding his arms around Richie’s shoulders as they deepened the kiss in perfect sync with one another. Then Richie began kissing his way down to his throat and Eddie tilted his head back, his eyes drifting to the side was warmth flooded his body at Richie’s closeness and the way his soft lips brushed over Eddie’s skin.

Then Eddie’s eyes caught on something sitting on the nightstand next to a lamp and laughter rose in his chest, bubbling out before he could help it. Richie lifted his head, his eyes slightly alarmed and confused. Eddie didn’t look at him, instead reaching out to snatch up the troll doll with a shock of hot pink hair on its head.

“Why do you have this?” he asked, still laughing as he held it up.

Richie grinned, reaching up to flick his fingers over the ridiculous doll’s hair.

“Bev got it for me,” he said, flopping on his side next to Eddie. “She’s the redhead in those pictures and the artist I told you about.”

“Why would she get you something so ugly?” Eddie asked, a smile still lingering on his lips.

“I’ll have you know that Trevor has been with me through thick and thin,” Richie said, showing faux outrage on his face as he plucked the doll from Eddie’s fingers. “I’ll not stand for slander in this house.”

Eddie pressed his lips together, trying not to laugh as Richie tossed it back onto the nightstand.

“You named it Trevor?” he asked, his eyes shining with mirth.

“Would you shush and let me kiss you?” Richie asked, looking equally amused as he curved a hand over Eddie’s hip.

“Says the guy who wouldn’t stop using that British accent at the bar,” Eddie said with a roll of his eyes.

“We weren’t kissing then,” Richie shrugged, seeing nothing wrong with one of his many Voices.

“Maybe we would have been if you’d have closed your piehole for a few seconds,” Eddie said, raising one eyebrow.

“I got us here, didn’t I?” Richie shrugged.

“You did that all alone, did you?”

Eddie’s tone was dry but he looked no less amused.

“You’re killin’ me here, Eds,” Richie huffed, letting his head fall to Eddie’s chest dramatically. “I’m gonna die.”

“You’re utterly ridiculous,” Eddie informed him.

“Kiss me,” Richie’s voice was muffled by his shirt.

“Kinda hard to do that with your lips way down there, genius.”

Richie lifted his head just a little bit, mischief playing in his eyes. Then he was pushing Eddie’s shirt up to his ribs, pressing hot, open-mouthed kisses over his stomach. Eddie shivered and let his eyes flutter closed, his fingers delving into Richie’s hair once more. It felt glorious for a few moments until Richie stiffened a little and pulled away.

“What’s this?” he murmured, his thumb stroking over a spot just below his ribs.

Eddie didn’t have to look down to see what he was talking about. He simply sighed and continued stroking at Richie’s hair as he peered up at the ceiling.

“A scar,” Eddie said simply.

“No shit,” Richie said, looking up at him. “It’s okay if you don’t want to-”

Eddie pushed up onto his elbows, meeting Richie’s eyes.

“Surprisingly enough, people in the fabulous town of Derry, Maine don’t really like the idea of anyone being gay,” he said, the words rolling off his tongue easily. “That plus the asthma and my general lack of height pretty much sealed my fate.”

“Someone did this to you?” Richie said, horror and anger filling his eyes.

Eddie shrugged, watching as Richie looked down at the faded scar.

“I’m okay, Richie,” Eddie said, reaching down to stroke his fingers over his freckled cheek. “That’s all four hundred miles away and ten years ago. I got past it.”

Richie did answer him or even look up, staring at the scar for a long few moments before shaking his head and bending down to brush his lips over it. Eddie watched with a tender smile before sitting up, guiding Richie to do the same before kissing him again. Richie cupped Eddie’s face gently in both hands, brushing their lips together again and again until they were breathless. Eddie moved and Richie followed, letting himself be pushed back against the bed and moaning a little against Eddie’s lips when he straddled him.

“Do you have any scars?” Eddie asked, pulling away and feeling just a little bit curious.

Richie laughed lightly, breaking away to look at him.

“I’m a disaster,” he said, reaching down to the hem of his t-shirt.

He tugged it over his head and tossed it to the side, laying back on the bed when Eddie pushed on his shoulder lightly, his eyes traveling over Richie’s torso. His skin was a map of a few scars and even more tattoos. Eddie’s eyes trailed over the appendix scar that sat just above his waistband, the beautiful cursive writing over his ribs, the scar that ran down the length of one bicep and the upside down black triangle filled with the night sky and the silhouette of a tree on the other.

“It’s beautiful,” Eddie said, running his fingers over the winking stars.

“Bev designed it for us both,” Richie said, glancing down at the tattoo. “It wasn’t easy for us… growing up. Sometimes when shit got too hard for one or both of us, we’d just lay in the bed of my truck all night watching the stars.”

There was something in his voice that ached and spoke of a time of hardship. Eddie could relate and sympathize.

“She means a lot to you,” he said.

“Yeah,” Richie said simply, looking up at him. “She’s my family.”

Eddie bent down, brushing a kiss over his heart.

“I’m glad you had her.”

He meant it. Though he’d only known Richie for a couple of hours, it felt like it had somehow been a lifetime. And Eddie could see a kindred soul in him. He leaned up again, tracing the tip of his finger over the writing on his ribs.

“I’ll come to your emotional rescue,” Eddie said, the words sounding incredibly familiar.

Richie nodded, humming out something as he let his head fall back against the bed.

“It’s a song?” Eddie asked, sitting up again.

“Is there nothing I can say? Nothing I can do to change your mind?” Richie sang in response, his voice ridiculously high. “I’m so in love with you.”

Eddie blinked as a slow smile formed on his face. It didn’t seem like Richie would be half bad if he wasn’t trying to sing like whoever it was.

“Oh come on,” Richie said, breaking out of his song to stare up at Eddie, willing him to recognize it. “Don’t tell me you haven’t listened to the Stones.”

“A few of their songs,” he said with a shrug. “It sounds familiar.”

Richie let out a pained noise, clutching at his chest.

“This just won’t do,” he said, dramatically wheezing out the words before displacing Eddie from his lap.

“What the-”

Richie held up a hand, shaking his head mournfully as he scooted off of the bed and darted over to his record player.

“Seriously?” Eddie said, raising his eyebrows. “You’re abandoning me to play music.”

“They are one of the most influential rock bands in history. I listened to this shit on repeat since I was ten,” Richie said, pulling out a record and popping it on.

The sound of symbols filled the air, followed by guitar and drums. Then the voice that Richie had been emulating moments ago began singing.

“Is there nothing I can say? Nothing I can do to change your mind? I’m so in love with you. You’re in too deep. You can’t get out. You’re just a poor girl in a rich man’s house.”

Eddie couldn’t help but laugh as Richie danced over to the bed, singing along the whole way. He collapsed on his back, his head in Eddie’s lap as he drummed out the beat on his thighs.

“Don’t you know promises were never meant to keep? Just like the night, they dissolve off in sleep. I’ll be your savior, steadfast and true. I’ll come to your emotional rescue.”

Richie winked up at Eddie as he sang.

“You’re a fucking dork,” Eddie said over the music.

He simply shrugged, continuing on even until the song got to a part where one man was speaking. Richie did the accent and everything, pulling giggles from Eddie as he acted it out dramatically where he was lying. When the song ended, Richie turned over onto his stomach and propped up on his elbows, his chin in his hands.

“Whaddya say, Eddie Spaghetti? Think I have a future in show biz?”

“That’s the worst nickname ever,” Eddie said with a laugh, dropping onto his back.

“You didn’t answer my question,” Richie said, pushing his lower lip out in a pout.

Eddie sighed, rolling his eyes at his dramatics.

“I think you’re the kind of person who can do anything,” he said honestly, returning his gaze to Richie’s.

Richie’s eyes softened and he smiled before reaching out to stroke his thumb over Eddie’s hip where his shirt rode up.

“Tell me about you,” he said.

Eddie couldn’t deny his surprise at Richie’s words.

“Thought you wanted to do other stuff,” Eddie said, raising one eyebrow.

Richie shrugged, gazing at him.

“There’s plenty of time for that,” he said, leaning his head on Eddie’s thighs. “I want to hear you talk.”

Eddie felt warmth flooding him for a completely different reason as he curled his fingers into Richie’s hair.

“Well… I’m a doctor…”

That was just the beginning. They laid there for hours, music playing softly as they talked about anything and everything. They followed every tangent their conversations took off on and swapped stories from their childhoods and college. About their best friends and first loves. About shitty parents and shittier towns. They fell asleep tangled together and woke up stiff and exhausted but happy in one another’s arms, heading out to a nearby diner with bleary eyes, stifled yawns, and contentment filling the air around them.

Richie was right, as it turned out. There was plenty of time for everything.

#rated t

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jennaschererwrites · 7 years ago

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How Instant 'Black Mirror' Classic 'USS Callister' Guts Toxic Fandom - Rolling Stone

It's a familiar image: a strapping, confident young white guy seated in the captain's chair of a spaceship, blaster at his hip, hair coifed just so, one elbow on the armrest, legs spread wide as if to say, "Mine is no tiny penis you are dealing with." He's a hero we all know, love and trust do the right thing in the end, whether it's James T. Kirk or variants like Han Solo, Peter Quill or Mal Reynolds. This is his story. He takes the lead. He gets the glory, and ever it shall be.

Except when it's 2018. And except when it's Black Mirror.

Charlie Brooker and Annabel Jones' anthology sci-fi series kicks off its fourth season with an episode – "USS Callister" – that begins with what seems to be a loving homage to the original 1960s Star Trek. Then, slowly, methodically, the story starts unfurling its true form: a damning exploration of toxic masculinity and the dark side of fanboy nostalgia culture. Here, the heroic captain is anything but, and the misunderstood "nice guy" is the true monster lurking on the dark fringes of the galaxy.

We open on the bridge of the Starship Enterprise-like USS Callister, where the swaggering Captain Daly (Jesse Plemons) and his trusty crew are fighting a space battle complete with harrowing music, old-school special effects and lots of high-grade phlebotinum ("plasmorthian crystals," anyone?). True to every trope, the good guys win the day.

Naturally, this being Black Mirror – a show that revels in gut-wrenching turnabouts – nothing is as it seems, least of all the hero. Daly is a bit tooswaggering; his crew is a bit too trusty. After he defeats the bad guy with suspicious ease, the men launch into a round of "For He's a Jolly Good Fellow" while the women line up to be kissed by the good captain. Something is deeply wrong with this squeaky-clean scene: The crewmembers' smiles are plastered on, and there's a glint of malice in their fearless leader's eyes.

Cut to gray reality, where we meet the real Robert Daly: a whey-faced office drone with a receding hairline and the stooped posture of the pathologically insecure. He's the CTO of Callister Inc., a company that designs an immersive MMORPG called Infinity, in which players can explore a virtual cosmos in their very own virtual starships. The members of his "crew" are there too, belittling or ignoring him: The USS Callister's bowing and scraping second-in-command, James Walton (Jimmi Simpson), is the ultra-alpha head of the company; the communications officer (Michaela Coel) won't give Daly the time of day.

Our beta male is the brains behind the game, but everyone at his company treats him like gum stuck to the underside of their shoes. His office is decked out with posters and memorabilia from Space Fleet, a Star Trek-esque TV show from a bygone era whose aesthetic we instantly recognize from the opening scene. So is he a put-upon sweetheart, bullied by his peers, who escapes the drudgery of his day-to-day via a rich but ultimately harmless fantasy life?

Not so much. Turns out he's been secretly harvesting his coworkers' DNA in order to create digital clones to populate his own walled-off version of Infinity. We see him enact the process on Nanette Cole (Cristin Milioti), a new employee who idolizes Daly for his coding genius but commits the grievous sin of not wanting to hook up with him. And so he finds a way to possess her the same way he meticulously collects his complete set of Space Fleet DVDs (and Blu-rays and VHS tapes, natch).

We discover along with Nanette, who wakes up aboard the Callister in a pastel polyester miniskirt, just how bad things are for Daly's digital prisoners. He's the god of this tiny universe, forcing his crew to LARP along with him using torture and intimidation. He's every disaffected nerd-bro with an X-Box and an ax to grind who delights in torturing NPCs (non-player characters) for the sheer sadistic thrill. Except these are real people, and Daly has knowingly trapped them in his own private Hell.

And to make matters worse, he's pedantic about it, lecturing them about the vintage show's moral code ("It is a belief system, founded on the very best of human nature") even as he brutalizes anyone who defies his will. Daly's rigid adherence to Space Fleet fandom extends to more than just words: Women don't get guns, no one ever really dies and unwholesome genitalia are morphed into the flat, undifferentiated physique of action figures. This is the last straw for Nanette, who declares in a moment instantly GIFed 'round the Twitterverse: "Stealing my pussy is a red fucking line."

And that's when "USS Callister," thrillingly, becomes a rip-roaring space caper in its own meta-narrative. Except the scrappy, charismatic hero isn't Daly, with his posturing and his forced Shatnerian speech patterns; it's Nanette, who's smart as hell and sick to death of putting up with his expectations.

The best Black Mirror episodes – of which "USS Callister" is definitely one – identify issues lurking beneath the surface of the real world and extrapolate them into a future where technology has given them form and heft. In this case, it's the fanboy backlash that's become an all-too-familiar presence in our pop-culture conversation. We're talking about legions of speculative fiction fans on the Internet who feel that, in expanding the worlds of beloved sci-fi properties to include more diverse representation and worldviews, something is being taken from them.

Their complaint, broadly, is founded on the deeply limiting idea that all narratives should center on straight, white men, who have been the unquestioned default protagonists up until very recently. This is an idea that's particularly ironic in the world of sci-fi, which is all about imagining potential futures in which anything is possible. Daly, on the other hand, builds himself a world that is incredibly constricted, based on his devotion to a retrograde narrative. Does any of this sound familiar?

It's only a step from there to the current, very loud backlash against The Last Jedi, Rian Johnson's addition to the Star Wars universe that takes on some of the franchise's sacred cows: It puts a largely non-white, non-male cast at the center of the narrative, takes aged golden boy chosen one Luke Skywalker in an unexpected direction and asks whether the Jedi Order is really all it's cracked up to be. Certain loud, angry corners of fandom hated Jedi so much that a petition was created to have it struck from the canon and a group of alt-righters (surprise!) launched a campaign to lower the movie's Rotten Tomatoes score.

Equal ire has been leveled at Doctor Who, another sci-fi institution that shook off the dust recently when the good Doctor, who's been played by a series of men since 1963, regenerated into a woman (viva Jodie Whittaker!) And then there's Star Trek: Discovery, CBS All Access's long-awaited return to Gene Roddenberry's universe that has faced unabashedly racist reactions for casting a black female lead (Sonequa Martin-Green).

And just like Daly, they're deeply missing the point. What Star Wars, Doctor Who and Star Trek have in common – aside from decades of canon and rabidly devoted fandoms – is a vision of vast, multifaceted galaxies and universes teeming with diverse societies and life forms. All three franchises have taken a great leap forward in recent months to make their central characters reflect that ethos, and it's far past due. There will always be Dalys, but there will also always be Nanettes, too, boldly going where no man has gone before. (Black Mirror itself did, too, in its way — all of Season Four's six episodes feature female leads.)

The denouement of "USS Callister" offers one of Black Mirror's rare hopeful endings — and a low-key revenge fantasy to boot. The Callister has escaped and left Daly trapped in the starless black of his own switched-off bubble universe. (Turns out he was never a god ... just an oversized kid burning ants with a magnifying glass.) Released into the vast, Net-connected cosmos of Infinity, the liberated crew is thrilled to make contact with someone from the real world. But "Gamer691" (voiced by Aaron Paul) turns out to be an all-too-familiar kind of asshole who threatens to "bomb them to shit" if they don't get out of his quadrant.

And rather than bothering to engage in this unwinnable, childish fight, Nanette claims the captain's chair and instructs her crew: "Stick us in hyperwarp and let's … fuck off somewhere." They're off to explore the universe, and Gamer691 is left shouting into the empty vacuum of his lonely corner of the galaxy: "You better run! King of space right here. King of space." But no one is listening to him anymore.

#jenna scherer #black mirror #uss callister #rolling stone #toxic masculinity #television #sci-fi #sexism #the last jedi #star wars #fanboys #misogyny #representation #doctor who #star trek discovery #star trek

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insanescriptist · 8 years ago

Note

I know you don't like Self Insert Story lines but if you did do one in the Katekyo Hitman Reborn universe, who would you be reborn as if you had to fill the role of a new OC character? Think of it as you doing a SI without any of the things you find that other people do that you dislike aside from the OC character part, which is kinda needed unless you'd like to take over a Canon characters life.

My main dislike for SI-OC fics is just hatred for bad writing.

First, I generally hate the whole ‘reincarnation’ bit as a whole. Mostly because most authors drag it out. Like here is baby who remembers being adult and dying and has full complex thoughts and can see perfectly clear even though that’s not physically possible for human babies?

It’s just poorly handled a lot. Not always, but a lot.

And when it’s not ‘remembered from birth’ it is ‘remembered due to near-death experience,’ which is vaguely better. But the near-death experience never quite seems to have consequences other than suddenly remembering another life. Like where is the trauma? The other people reacting? How are other people reacting to SI-OC suddenly seeming to change?

It just never seems to happen.

Second, a lot of times there’s assumed knowledge. Like hello, ninja, I’ve clearly been reborn in Naruto. See, canon character! This is my family member! Eeep!

This just makes things worse, really. It’s a bad sign for a fic, in terms of writing skill. Some fics turn out fine despite terrible beginnings but by then it’s like chapter six, the SI-OC is maybe eight and plotting to insert themselves in canon-character’s life.

Third is the assumed responsibility that the SI-OC takes on. Sometimes it is for a good reason as character X is now my younger sibling! I shall protect character X who I already liked and deemed precious! I don’t want character X to suffer character Y!

Sometimes there isn’t a good reason. Beyond, this is the Main Character of the show and I don’t want character Z to get friendly with X because Z is going to betray us all in episode six of the show!

This sometimes results in possessive and obsessive and manipulative behavior. Which isn’t really acknowledged beyond, ‘I hate having to do this but character Z is lying to you and I know this because I vaguely remember the script to this show!’ Which is again, bad writing.

It’s also not acknowledging that doing so is going to be somewhat self-destructive. Worse is people doing things they’re not inclined to do because of this person -it’s self-destructive, not heroic or noble. Someone who objects to fighting plans to be a med-nin except there’s issues on becoming the medic part and so end up as ninja anyway and then there’s angst and drama and it’s just messy.

And then I tend not to care because the SI-OC tends not to be interesting due to investing so much of their time and self into this character X but they never establish their own character.

It’s another boring day, so I yawn and want to go back to sleep. Mother objects to this so I end up dressed -unwillingly in this stupid uniform- and fed in short order and then walked to school.

Reminder to self, burn the school uniform again. It’s disgustingly cute and I hate it. Maybe this time the teachers will let me wear what I want to class?

Class is again boring. It’s easy. There’s a vague feeling of having done this before and I have. The year before this and the year before that year. There’s a nagging thought that this should be more interesting but all that is interesting is that Wasagawa-sensei’s tie wasn’t done properly and Yuhi-sensei’s shirt was very sheer and she obviously hadn’t realized that if you wear a thin white shirt you should wear a skin-toned bra under it, so the bra is not obvious. White shows up under white and it’s just obvious that’s there.

Bad form for both of them being teachers. At least I kept quite about it this time, since adults don’t like to have mistakes pointed out to them. My ‘peers’ don’t either but they at least know they can come to me for homework help.

How to burn this uniform though? It’s too difficult to go out and buy a simple lighter, can’t get a middle school student to get it for me as I don’t know who would of them and it is very hard to start a fire without wood even if you know how to do that.

The memory of burning through leaves with a magnifying glass comes to me. I’ve never done that, but it’s nice to know that focusing the suns’ power is very good for starting fires. A pile of leaves, the stupid school uniform and I’ll have a pretty bonfire going.

So how to get a magnifying glass? Too much interest in science might net me a kiddie microscope since I do like Science. Maybe a detective? Because detectives have magnifying glasses and Sherlock-style clothing. That’s a good plan of action.

In the mean time, vandalizing the shirt with something is a fun idea. Maybe at lunch? Mother handed me a bento, maybe there’s a sauce I can use to get rid of it?

What can I say, I really hate the uniform more than any mere parental disapproval?

“Hibari Azuma, stop daydreaming and translate what’s on the board to English!”

Oh, so they want me to show off? Ugh, such an awkward sentence.

“The boy goes to the market to fetch his mother the milk she wanted.”

“Good diction as always.” The teacher says, as if getting tongue and brain to cooperate and make language understandable is hard. Just a matter of thought and practice. The way Ayumi mangles the next sentence is familiarly cringe-inducing, even if I keep getting snippets of Spanish mangled by an American Southern accent is equally terrible if not worse. The sense of deja vu waves in and out at all times before it fades.

School is easy and terrible and the uniform is going to burn. Pretty sure that mother has nail polish remover? That and a magnifying glass will make a bonfire for sure.

Maybe middle school will be better. Better than wearing some sort of sailor costume. If I wanted to wear one of those, I’d join the navy or something. Not go to school.

Huh, maybe I wouldn’t even need the detective bit, if I could get some glasses or something. Anything that had glass with a curve to focus the light rays…

Arson’s not the most usual hobby but I’m bored and a boy. Boys can do all sorts of things that girls can’t. It’s nice to have some behavior just flat out excused, no consequence. Like burning the school uniform because you hate it.

Well, there’s reputation and all that to consider in theory, but it’s not like I have grand dreams and a vision of what I want to do. Travel yes, maybe write and do things that others dream about but yeah… it’s something of a pipe dream. The world doesn’t work like that for most people and passion is nice, but doesn’t always pay the bills and can be detrimental to health.

Clearly I am a born drifter who just so happens to be cursed with practicality and an unending hatred for my elementary school uniform.

Ashes, I swear, it will be ashes.

Basically, I’m against turning SI-OC into plot-devices so as to do a fix-it or make things better while not doing anything but doing that.

#Izzy answers #Izzy does fic

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biasedwriting · 8 years ago

Text

Reading in a Club [EXO, Kai]

Characters : EXO’s Kai || OC

Rating : G

Warning : borderline crack

Aff link

Follow up to this oneshot

The ground shook with the thumping base as he squinted at the book in his hands. His eyes travelled over the dance floor as the members of his band danced around with drinks in their hands, downing some more as they intoxicated themselves in alcohol and sweat and all the things he deemed quite unworthy of his time. Damn, this place didn’t even serve fried chicken let alone offer him with a peaceful enough corner to just doze off. He pondered over why he was even at this fancy club when he’d rather be curled up in bed with a novel in his hands.

At least he had one of the two he acknowledged as his eyes swept over the novel in his hands. Sighing he cursed the idiot who came up with the idea of going clubbing.

Curse you Baekhyun.

Sighing again he squinted back into the book which he had brought along against the wishes of his bandmates. He had refused to get up from the seat once he had settled down on the moment arrived and had accepted only water to drink considering he’d probably be the only sober one by the end of it. The dratted lighting wasn’t letting him actually read the novel properly, who the hell came up with the idea of a dark club?

“Fancy seeing you here.” Her amused voice reached his ear as his eyes shot up. She wore an amused smile on her face as her hands rested on her hips. Thick glasses perched on her nose magnified her almond shaped eyes that reflected her pure amusement at seeing him holed up in the corner of a club with a novel in his hands.

“Hey Minah,” he began, rubbing the back of his head slightly embarrassed “yeah, got dragged here and uhm…” he tried to explain, resorting to gestures and waving his book around.

“So we share the same fate,” she grinned nodding her head towards a group of girls who were making their way onto the dance floor before turning back to him “so, didn’t think you were into classics.” She said, nodding towards the copy of Pride and Prejudice he had been trying to read.

“Sister suggested it to me.” He said, looking down at the novel before meeting her eyes again as she smiled.

“It’s one of my favourites!” she grinned, plopping down beside him.

“Let me guess, you like Darcy?” he chuckled she turned around with a very serious face.

“Mr. Darcy is almost every girl’s dream alright? Don’t judge me!”

“I’m not.” He laughed, bemused by her defensive pout.

“Are you liking the book though?” she leaned back into the sofa and stretched as his eyes trailed over the fitted black top she wore and the blue denim that hugged her legs. She turned back to him and blinked as Jongin shifted his eyes away in an attempt not to be caught. The music in the background thumped away as Jongin fumbled for words.

“Well it’s definitely different from what I usually read. It’s been quite interesting though.” He said, looking back down into the book and freezing as he felt his friend’s head on his shoulder. Her long mop of hair tumbled down her shoulders and her sweet scent teased his nostrils as he took a quick breath, tensing.

“Which part are you reading?” She peered into the book, pressing closer to him. He felt the warmth of her body permeate through the fabric between them.

“Well, I’m coming closer to the end really. Darcy and Bingley are visiting the Bennets.”

“Oh, read read!” She nudged him but made no move to shift off his shoulder as he attempted to refocus his attention to the novel in hand. The two read the last chapter together, completely ignorant of the music and lights around them. Wrapped up in their own little world our two readers curled up in the little dingy corner of the club, and for the first time in the night, neither were complaining.

Jongin heard a little squeal when Mr. Darcy asked Elizabeth to marry him for the second time (because Mr. Darcy was quite an idiot the first time around). He turned around only to find himself inches away from Minah’s face. Her eyes were glistening behind her large spectacles and her lips were parted in surprise. Their breaths mingled as they drowned in each other’s eyes until she broke out of the trance and shifted away in surprise.

Jongin blinked.

“So, you’re done,” She ended the silence, looking down as a blush crept up her cheeks “did you like it?”

“Yeah, only sometimes I feel that Darcy is an idiot.” Jongin commented, still looking at the blushing face in an attempt to fight one creeping up his cheeks.

“That he is, especially when he’s so surprised that Lizzy says no to him. It’s quite ridiculous to be expected to accept when you’ve been nothing but a douche to her.” Minah pursed her lips.

“And yet Darcy is a fantasy.” Jongin smirked, amused as Minah frowned at him.

“Oh hush you.” she blushed, waving her hand as Jongin fought the urge to catch hold of it. The conversation flowed as the two discussed various aspects of it and slowly delved into their other interests such as their dogs and their silly antics, catching up on each other’s lives since they had last met.

All to be very rudely interrupted.

“Jonginnnieee you asss get here and daance!” Chanyeol’s deep voice slurred as Jongin spun around to see his bandmate towering over him with a huge grin plastered on his face.

“I’d rather not.” Jongin replied. He’d had enough dancing in the studio and all he wanted was some peace and quiet.

“Come on!” Jongdae’s voice piped in “you’re THE dansheen masheen!” He giggled at the thought as Jongin fought the urge to facepalm. He heard a chuckle beside him and noticed Minah covering her mouth and laughing.

“Dansheen masheen,” She echoed as Jongin raised his eyebrow. She nudged him ahead “go on, I want to watch you dance. It’s been ages!”

“Yeah! Listen to her, who is her?” Chanyeol piped in, looking over at Minah as Jongin sighed.

“Give me one good reason why I should get up from my comfortable seat and dance?”

“Because I asked you to?” She said.

“Need a better reason than that.” He crossed his arms, uncrossing them to swat away Jongdae’s hand tugging at him.

“You look very attractive dancing and you could land a girl that way?” Minah suggested as Jongin’s eyes widened. Was she referring to herself? Because if she was, he’d dance till his feet hurt. He found himself getting up from his seat as Minah laughed and the other two hooted and cheered drunkenly before stumbling off onto the dance floor

“I knew this would work. Mention the ladies and you go nuts.”

“Come on, you’re coming with me.” He wiggled his fingers.

“Nope.”

“Come on.”

“Give me one good reason why I should get up from my comfortable seat and dance?” She stuck her tongue out as she repeated his words.

“Because I said so.”

“Need a better reason than that.” She smirked, leaning back into the couch as Jongin frowned.

“Stop being a pain!”

“I don’t dance, you go.” She said, smiling as Jongin felt himself being dragged away by someone he assumed was his bandmate.

And somehow he danced, he danced because he knew she was watching him. He drowned in the beats as his body moved on its own as he only thought of her eyes on him. Carried away by everything he danced three dances straight with his band and the rest of the dancers cheering him on and by the end of it, all he wanted to do was go back to his couch and ask her if she had found him as attractive as she had said.

Stumbling over the dancing bodies and taking a sip of liquid courage from Sehun’s glass. He walked over to the couch to see the most surprising sight of his life.

Her head was on the table, hair spread out and breaths even as she slept peacefully through all the music and ruckus. Jongin gaped at the sleeping figure, wondering what on earth he was to do now that he was all riled up to talk to her and ask her the questions he had really been dying to ask.

Curse you Chanyeol and Jongdae!

The book lay beside her, her hand covering it as he eased it out. He heard Joonmyun call his name as he spun around to see that his bandmates were leaving. Groaning he took another look at the sleeping girl, wondering if he should wake her up.

But she looked too adorable to.

“I’ll handle her, it’s alright.” A stern looking girl turned up beside him and dropped herself next to Minah.

“Uh, alright.” He said, taking one last look at her before scurrying after his band.

It was later that night he received a text from his old neighbour and new crush.

“Truthfully, you look more attractive reading than dancing.”

And a smile spread over his lips.

“Meet me in the national library on Saturday?”

“It’s a date :P”

#kai #kimjongin #jongin #exokai #exo #exofanfiction #exofanfic #exo fanfic #exo fanfiction #exo scenario #fluff #kpop #kpopfanfics #kpopfanfic #kpop fanfiction #kpop fanfic

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cobrienba1b · 6 years ago

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Weekly Summary 20

Showreel

This is the last week of my showreel project, I have successfully completed my showreel, have gotten the music for it and placed in my best work. In this week also, I have made a mini animation to place into the start and end point of my showreel, it is small and subtle but it really personalizes my showreel and gives it a nicer feel. I am quite proud of this showreel, I was worried about not being able to get it done because of the deadline was closing in and there were still lots of projects to get done, in the end I managed to get them all done and then dedicate a day to my showreel, I have finished it, however, I don’t think I have time for a second iteration.

Pros: I got my showreel done very quickly which meant I was able to finalize everything, I also got really lucky with the music since it manages to fit my style quite well. I also managed to get lucky with the length of my shorter animations since most of them fit the beat of the soundtrack which was very beneficial.

Cons: My computer had crashed a couple of times whilst doing this showreel, there was a lot of things added into this showreel, I also duplicated a lot of images to put them in the background blurred. I also had a tough time for the beginning as it did hit the beat the way I wanted to so I had to spend a lot of time trying to animate a small thing that will transition into the first animation that fits the beat, but I did it in the end.

Overall I am very proud of how this turned out, although I do wish I could have started it earlier because there are a lot of animation ideas and remastering of old animations that I wanted to do.

Fantastical Creatures

This is the final week for my Fantastical Creature project, I have finalized everything by finishing the cast line up sheet. This was fairly easy because my peers also did aquatic/land creatures just like myself. I had 3 people join me on my cast sheet, Ben with his Slizard, Lewis with his Manta-Mantis and Zayrick with his Ocean Majin. There was one obstacle that needed to be overcome and that was the fact that my creature stood towers above the rest. This turned out to be ok though because I had an idea to make the cast sheet and have it to scale, but use a magnifying glass effect to show the characters in full detail as if it were a regular cast sheet. This was a good problem solver that could also be seen comedically.

Pros: I managed to completely finish this project, everything is in the showreel and I am completely happy with how it all turned out. As well as this, the cast line up sheet did not take long at all, the good communication between my team led to a swift finish.

Cons: The one problem I had when making this was halfway through, realising that the page dimensions were too big, so I had to spend a little while trying to figure out how to cram it all in whilst still showing as much detail as I can.

Overall, I feel like this has been my favourite project, I really enjoyed all the processes and it feels really good to have finished it all.

#weeklysummary

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frangrantharborthoughts-blog · 7 years ago

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Short Story: The Cloudy Eye

This is a short story I submitted to a local writing contest. It didn’t win but I liked it and want to publish it here.

The Cloudy Eye

“It’s just your imagination. Hong Kong is one of the safest cities on earth. When was the last time you heard about something bad happening to someone? Especially to a foreigner?”

Lena, laying on her back in the double bed that took up most of the tiny, Sai Ying Pun bedroom, didn’t look at John. As her boyfriend, he was usually sweet, supportive, and empathetic, but he refused to accept any hearsay when it came to his hometown.

Yet, Lena hadn’t been able to quell the anxious feeling that someone was following her. Her skin prickled as she waited at the bus stop, wove in and out of crowded streets, and dutifully stood firm on the escalators. She navigated the city in a daze, colliding head on with other pedestrians while crossing the bridge over Connaught Road and tripping over her feet as she jogged the trails in Pokfulam. The charming characters she passed in the village on her way home from the ferry—the old man in the round glasses doing tai chi, the tan fishermen and their mountains of beer cans, the waiters tending to green, murky fish tanks, the retired British teachers nursing their weeknight cocktails, and the tiny grandmothers peddling skinny, white flours and fat, brown bananas—were ominous to her. Her hands trembled when she tried to eat. The summer was brutally hot, but she shivered.

A few weeks ago, at the beginning of the summer, she had been browsing the news on her phone as she usually did in the mornings when an article caught her eye. It had taken place at her alma mater in the US, a school where she’d spent four of the greatest years of her life. A Chinese PhD student named Li Yuchen had gone missing. She’d been kidnapped, and still, weeks later, hadn’t been found. She was presumed dead.

She had originally browsed the story with a frown. How sad, she thought. How unfortunate.

Then, the text ended. Instead of seeing a picture of the missing woman, she was looking into the strangest mirror. She squinted at her reflection, her opposite, distorted slightly but still recognizably her. There was the picture of an aspiring biologist, excitedly pursuing her education in a faraway land where everyone looked different, spoke a foreign language, and followed strange customs. There was a woman who moved where she didn’t know anyone to the opposite side of the world, taking a huge risk for her passion.

Lena blinked.

This wasn’t her reflection. This was a photograph of a Chinese woman whom she’d never met whose life happened to have some similarities to hers. They didn’t resemble each other at all in appearance, but she couldn’t shake the feeling that they were twins in spirit. Two halves of a same whole.

“You’re just tired.” John had explained, the first time she’d confessed the feeling to him over drinks at the new, trendy craft beer joint that had opened in between auto-repair and noodle shops around the corner from his apartment. He sipped a sour beer inspired by salty limes. Her stomach did flip flops. She couldn’t drink her pale ale and hadn’t even touched the bowl of peanuts she usually devoured.

She had been a little overworked, she admitted silently. She had volunteered to tutor in a summer science camp for high schoolers in addition to her usual lab work, research assistant duties, and writing. Her thesis was due at the end of the year and although she excelled at analyzing bacterial samples, she was a slow writer. Every time she sat in front of her laptop to write, she thought of something else she would rather be doing and most of the time she got up and did it. Like the half marathon in the mountains of northern Vietnam she’d seen advertised online. She had to sign up and train for that. Spending her evenings trail-running would get her blood flowing and help her think and come up with ideas for when she did, eventually, try to write.

I am exhausted, she thought as she watched the bubbles float to the top of her bright, yellow beer as songs from her middle school days blared in the background. Good Charlotte and Blink-182 filled the emptiness in her failure to reply.

What she had wanted to say was that a few years ago, during another hot summer like this one, she remembered reading in the news about some boys who had been murdered in Israel. Then, some other boys had been murdered in response. This chain of events stood out to her because she was supposed to have travelled to Israel that summer but couldn’t because of the sudden violence. She thought about the boys and the murders and wondered if someone, somewhere, was stewing with resentment towards Americans who could come to Asia to study and live, unmolested and unafraid.

After John had finished his drink and polished off hers, they’d walked back to his apartment. Lena held his arm tightly and tried to act casual even though everyone was looking at them—at her. She who was so foreign that passersby on the street wrenched their eyes from their phones or their newspapers to glower until she turned the corner and was out of sight. Then, new eyes pored over her, examining her for weak spots, for an opening to strike, for a reason to chase her back to where she came from. For a way to get even.

She’d lain awake that night, in the double bed that barely fit, thinking about the dissertation she needed to write, the Israeli boys, Li Yuchen, and how little anything that could be seen without the use of a microscope made sense to her.

Except later that week, she sat in her lab, looking under her microscope and it didn’t make sense to her. Everything was all wrong. Instead of her samples, carefully cultivated in a dish over the past few days, she saw an eye, eerily magnified, brown and cloudy.

Her eye stayed cloudy. Standing in front of her class, a gaggle of overeager sixteen-year olds from China’s best high schools, she couldn’t read her notes. She couldn’t tell whether her stammering caused them to frown or their judgmental scowls had made her lose her train of thought. Eighteen pairs of dark eyes watched her struggle, saying nothing, though thinking: this foreigner doesn’t belong here.

“They didn’t think that.” John assured her later as they sweated over bowls of wontons and noodles in the restaurant below his apartment. She hated this place—the wontons were rubbery and the broth was bland. Plus, who in their right mind eats soup in the summer? That was one custom she would never understand.

And maybe she shouldn’t. Maybe that was the sign that she should pack her bags and go back to where she belonged. Where soup was for cold, snowy Midwestern winter nights and noodles went with chicken not pork.

“You should probably get going soon.” John had said a few minutes ago. Lena had protested. He had launched into his reasons as to why she had nothing to worry about and she realized, bitterly, that he didn’t really understand.

“My roommate doesn’t want you staying over so much.” He added. “You should leave now so you don’t miss the last ferry.”

She rose, dressed, and trudged to the door. She said goodbye tersely with a peck on the cheek and hoped he couldn’t feel her clammy lips trembling.

She was sure the night was muggy and warm but she had goosebumps. At just after midnight, the city was unnaturally empty. Her footsteps were loud, echoing off the buildings that stretched precariously up into the dark pinkish sky. Drying clothes and bedsheets flapped above, independent of any breeze. She noticed that she could hear them so clearly because there were no others sounds—no dogs barking, horns honking, phones ringing, shopkeepers shouting—all that she could hear were her steps, the laundry, and her heartbeat which was rapidly increasing. The old cliché crept into her head, it was quiet…too quiet. She couldn’t decide whether she wanted to stop walking and look around or sprint back to safety. She was sure that something had to be up; positive that there was someone hiding in a shadow, just out of reach, biding their time until she was most vulnerable, until she least expected it. They had been tailing her for weeks, probably, and watching and waiting for this grand opportunity to catch her and get even. To get her cloudy eye for the clear eye that had been lost. Kidnapped. Murdered.

She was about to turn down a shortcut, when she finally heard a noise. Her knees buckled and she stumbled, stretching a weak hand towards the grey apartment building for balance. She could run a marathon usually, up mountains and over hills but that training was useless. The blood drained from her face and her ankles broke out in sweat. Was it the rustling of a rat or the heavy breathing of someone unfriendly…

Slowly, she peered around the corner.

An old woman stood alone, balancing heavily on a cane. She was brightly illuminated by street lights and framed by a haze rising up from the ground. For a moment, Lena imagined an absurd scenario straight out of an old kung-fu movie. The woman, revealing herself to be the young, beautiful, blind assassin, flew towards her with poisoned daggers ready. But, the woman didn’t move. She hunched over her walking stick, still as a statue.

Lena breathed a sigh of relief and brushed past her, murmuring an mgoi, as she did. The woman didn’t seem to notice which was strange, but not threatening. Worriedly, she paused to glance over her shoulder. The woman was gone but mist continued to creep out the alleyway, filling her now unoccupied space.

She stared in front of her now, at High Street which was equally deserted, and wondered if she’d just hallucinated the old woman. She really was exhausted, then irritated, as she inwardly chastened John for not letting her stay over and herself for not standing up to him more. She resumed walking, though her legs still felt noodly.

The feeling of being watched hadn’t entirely dissipated but she took deep breaths to clear her head and not think about it. She was being silly. She just needed to sleep. Everything would work itself out in the end: she would arrive home safe, she would finish her dissertation, they would find Li Yuchen alive and well.

She chuckled out loud to herself at the empty street. How peaceful it was at night! She loved this city. How lucky she was to live here! She ambled along, her heart racing as her adrenaline turned to nervous glee.

At the entrance to the train station, an old woman sat. Was it the same woman as before?

Lena wasn’t sure. She waved and approached her, examining her face. It had been too dark in the alley. Now, in the bright white light of the station entrance, everything was clear.

The woman frowned at her. Her dark eyes set angrily in a brown, wrinkled face. Her fuzzy grey hair messily tied back in a bun and her gnarled hands clasped her cane.

The feelings of relief drained so fast Lena felt dizzy. The woman raised her cane with surprising agility. Lena watched it, hypnotized, wondering what she was going to do. She knew she should just walk by now, to go into the safety of the train station, the protective shell of the subway, and the assuring route towards her ferry and her home but she was rooted to the spot. The lights flickered.

“We’ve been following you, Lena.”

Lena turned slowly towards the voice.

An eye for an eye, she thought.

#shortstories #fiction #hongkong #horrorfiction

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