#but. i just assume i will never finish a video game unless its a short indie one

[tendercoretroglodyke]

enjoying hades so far btw :)

[aggravatetheaxe]

Hi there! I was wondering if I could request an imagine where a victim “escapes” from the slashers and hurts s/o in the process. What would the slashers do during and after? Thank you!!

Hi! I wasn't sure which slashers you wanted for this, so I put my list into a randomizer and went with the first 5!

Walter Sullivan

Thomas Hewitt

Jason Voorhees

Deacon Billings (OC Ghostface)

Erik ("The Phantom")

SLASHERS WHOSE VICTIM HURTS THEIR S/O

cw: mentions of suicide, reader being injured/in mortal peril, mentions of torture and killing etc etc

--

Walter Sullivan

Oh no. Oh dear.

You are possibly the only good, pure thing in this world or the Otherworld and someone hurt you? Walter is ... not happy, to put it lightly. The only person who should ever hurt you is him, and he won't do that unless it's for your own good.

This only enforces his belief that the world and everyone in it are monstrous. It drives home the truth he's already convinced of - this existence in terrible and torturous and needs to be destroyed if anything holy is ever going to be allowed to blossom again.

Whether The Victim is pre- or post- Walter's suicide, he's already stopping at nothing to go after them. He doesn't view it as personal, he doesn't hold any particular hatred for most (most) of his victims; they're simply links in a chain. But this person, the one who hurt you ... it's personal. They'll die in absolute agony.

If the victim in question is pre-suicide, Walter will bring them down and find somewhere to keep them for later. This will not be a quick death.

While they're bound/gagged or knocked out, he'll check on you. You're special, possibly even the Mother Reborn, and he can't let you die until the time is right. If you're seriously injured, he'll see to it that you're taken to the hospital, and pray to a dead God if he has to that you'll be alright. If you're not seriously injured, he'll do his best to patch you up - he lived on the streets for many years and had to take care of himself, so he knows basic first aid.

Once he's certain you're safe, he will put you somewhere where you won't witness what he's about to do. Even if you want to see it, he'll insist you stay hidden, saying the sinner doesn't deserve to be in your presence. You'll have to really convince him if for some reason you want to watch.

Their torture will depend on what they did to you. If it was just a few scrapes and cuts, he'll let them feel every ounce of pain before they die. If they really hurt you, their torture will be prolonged. In his mind, and according to his religion, death is a sacred sacrament, and this evil being doesn't deserve its release. If they did something to seriously traumatize and/or sully you ... the crime scene he leaves behind is going to be grisly, to put it lightly.

If the victim in question is post-suicide, the results will be similar, but he has absolute control over the Otherworld - and he will utilize that. He will have his creations take care of you and keep you somewhere safe ... they may be terrifying, but they won't hurt you unless he wills it. As for the victim, he can twist them into their worst nightmares over and over again before killing them. He will make them see their wrongdoings and pay for their evil. They will beg for mercy and there will be none.

After it all, he will simply move onto the next one, with you somewhere safe ... until it's time. Until it's time. You are so perfect.

Thomas Hewitt

Dammit. If he'd just been quicker or smarter, he could have caught them before they escaped and hurt you. He immediately blames himself.

There's no time to beat himself up over it, though. He briefly checks to make sure you're not bleeding from anywhere vital and sends you (or locks you up) somewhere safe before going after the victim. You're on your own for first aid for now - unless you're literally dying, he can't let them leave the property.

If you are literally dying, he's staying and doing all he can to help you. But if Hoyt yells, he may have to pawn you off on someone else and hope they do a good job taking care of you. He'll hold your face and give you tender kisses goodbye - whether you want them or not - because this might be the last time he ever sees you.

He chases the victim in a fever, much more erratic than you would expect from him. He's faster, less careful, more inclined to put himself at risk just to get a swing in at them. It's not generally anything personal when he kills someone - it's something he does for the good of his family, and because he was told to. This one he's not interested in saving for meat. They hurt you. You, his special person. He's going to grind them into the mud, and he's not even going to let Hoyt have a go at them.

Sometimes, sometimes, he struggles to see the animals in his victims. But this one ... he doesn't even feel the urge to twist them into an animal. That's a whole human, an evil one, one he wants to kill. It's a different feeling for him.

Once it's all over and everything's calmed down, he's rushing directly to your side. People don't come around all too often, so he's comfortable putting down the chainsaw for now. He neglects any skin projects he planned and lets someone else do the butchering, focusing on taking care of you, especially if you're seriously injured and put up in bed.

If you're not as seriously injured and tell him you're fine, he's still keeping an eye on you ... and making sure you're well-fed. You've been through a lot and it was all his fault. He doesn't want you to be exposed like that again. Next time someone comes around, he'll insist you hide somewhere.

Jason Voorhees

It's a toss up whether or not he'll actually notice you're hurt. Not because he doesn't care or anything, but because Camp Crystal Lake is a lot of ground to cover and there's a low chance he'll be in the same area as you at any given time.

For this imagine, though, let's assume you've found your way to him or he's sensed you're in trouble and has rushed to you.

You were supposed to be safe in the cabin, so he's a little irritated that you wandered out, but that's completely overshadowed when he realizes you're hurt. He stops everything he's doing and clinically and thoroughly pats you down, identifying every solitary injury.

Just like his mother before him, he is a vengeful soul, so he is not letting this go even if you're just scraped or bruised. If you are critically injured, he'll at least get you to the cabin and get a tourniquet on you.

Otherwise, he leaves you behind. Not very mindful, but you should know that he wants you to get back to the cabin or at least stay out of the way. He is no longer thinking of you - he has established his target and knows what he has to do. He's laser focused and decisive as he stalks after them, using anything at his disposal to get to them.

Their death is quick - he doesn't play around - but he has a lingering sense of irony and playfulness. If there's a particularly interesting weapon nearby, he'll take them out with that; or perhaps he'll hurt them in the way they hurt you, just, you know ... more fatal. And a lot gorier.

After that, he'll move onto their friends, until every last one is dead. Once his objective is completed, he is returning to you directly and finishing the job of patching you up.

He can't help but feel a little guilty that you were hurt. You shouldn't have left the cabin, true, but perhaps he should have been watching for you. He should have locked you up. Pamela might say rude things in his head. Then again, she might comfort him. If she doesn't like you, maybe she'll even wish he'd left you to die.

Deacon Billings (OC Ghostface)

Well ... you usually keep him around to scare off other Ghostfaces - something he's very handy at - but you don't usually run into trouble with his victims.

He doesn't really tell you to go anywhere in particular when he's killing. He knows you can take care of yourself. But now he feels stupid for not having a backup plan. Of course some asshole was gonna eventually identify you as his loved one and try to get cute. He should've had something prepared for that.

But, if he's good at anything, it's improvising. He skids into whatever room you're in, drops his weapon, and pulls his mask off right away to check you over. If you're only mildly injured, he's visibly relieved, and tells you to stay put while he deals with whomever hurt you. If you're more seriously injured, he'll grab your phone and shove it in your hand. "Get in the car, get the fuck out of here. Drive to the emergency room if you have to, just leave."

If you're unable to drive, he'll make you call emergency services - or call them for you, if he has to. The game is over, he's done playing; this isn't fun if he's not winning. Everyone in this place is gonna be dead and he'll be long gone by the time the ambulance shows up for you.

The one who hurt you is going to get an extra special surprise. A particularly grisly death, and a bunch of selfies/short videos of Ghostface with the corpse - taken with the victim's own phone, posted to their instagram, tiktok, facebook, sent to any discord groups, and any other social media they have. If he has the time, he'll even make them in meme formats (definitely posting with meme captions, the fucking troll). He'll probably send a copy to you as a "hey, look what I did!"

If there are survivors, especially if that survivor is the one who hurt you, you better believe he is immediately doxxing them. Since he's had a little time to cool down, he might even play the long game, maybe catfishing and blackmailing them. Ruining their pathetic little life even further would be pretty fun. In the end, though, they'll die like all the others.

When all is said and done, he's going to be there for you, helping you recover any way he can. He'd suggest rest (for an amount of time relative to your injury), some movies and candy, maybe some video games. And time spent with your favorite Ghostface, of course, right?

He'll never forget what happened, though. Even though the person is dead, he'll be stewing and pissed off about it for a long, long time. And he won't let something like that happen again, or at least, not without a contingency plan in place.

The hash mark/tally mark he stitches into his costume to symbolize this kill is gonna be twice as long and large as the others, maybe in the place you got hurt as a reminder.

Erik

You already know what's about to happen.

If anyone so much as hurts your feelings they're getting menaced and receiving a strongly worded letter - actually physically harming you? That's suicide.

If he can't immediately kill this person, or if you're seriously injured, his primary objective is helping/comforting you. He has to push down a lot of wrath to do it ... every instinct tells him to immediately dispatch the fiend responsible ... but you are more important to him than anything in this world, even revenge. He will administer any first aid you need and may even drug you with ether to ensure you rest.

Don't think that means your attacker is off the hook, though. As soon as he decides you're well enough, he will put you somewhere safe - lock you away if he has to - and kill them. His preferred method is the Punjab lasso, but if they did something particularly egregious, he'll knock them out and take them to his torture chamber. They have a lesson to learn before they go to Hades.

Another option is, like Deacon, playing the long game ... playing with his food, stalking them, making them live in fear before they die. But he has a lot of wrath in that skinny little body, so it's a toss up as to whether or not he'll actually be able to follow through with that for very long. It depends on his mood, really!

He will keep the killing and torture hidden from you, of course ... unless you express an interest in seeing the vengeance being carried out. He would be worried for you, however, and advise against it. Those sights are not for the faint of heart, and certainly not for someone as beautiful and good as you.

Once all is said and done, it's as if it never happened. As if that person never existed! What a happy thought! Sometimes you even think Erik has completely forgotten the incident ... until he's stalking another victim and he locks you away again, and you remember you are always on his mind. He will never, never let that happen to you again.

[ot3]

i watched red vs blue: zero with my dear friends today and i was asked to “post” my “thoughts” on the subject. Please do not click this readmore unless, for some reason, you want to read three thousand words on the subject of red vs blue: zero critical analysis. i highly doubt that’s the reason anyone is following me, but hey. 

anyway. here you have it. 

Here are my opinions on RVB0 as someone who has quite literally no nostalgia for any older RVB content. I’ve seen seasons 1-13 once and bits and pieces of it more than once here and there, but I only saw it for the first time within the past couple of months. I’ve literally never seen any other RT/AH content. I can name a few people who worked on OG Red vs. Blue but other than Mounty Oum I have NO idea who is responsible for what, really, or what anything else they’ve ever worked on is, or whether or not they’re awful people. I know even less about the people making RVB0 - All I know is that the main writer is named Torrian but I honestly don’t even know if that’s a first name, a last name, or a moniker. All this to say; nothing about my criticism is rooted in any perceived slight against the franchise or branding by the new staff members, because I don’t know or care about any of it. In fact, I’m going to try and avoid any direct comparison between RVB0 and earlier seasons of RVB as a means of critique until the very end, where I’ll look at that relationship specifically.

So here is my opinion of RVB0 as it stands right now:

1. The Writing

Everything about RVB0 feels as if it was written by a first-time writer who hasn’t learned to kill his darlings. The narrative is both simultaneously far too full, leaving very little breathing room for character interaction, and oddly sparse, with a story that lacks any meaningful takeaway, interesting ideas, or genuine emotional connection. It also feels like it’s for a very much younger audience - I don’t mean this as a negative at all. I love tv for kids. I watch more TV for kids than I do for adults, mostly, but I think it’s important to address this because a lot of the time ‘this is for kids’ is used to act like you’re not allowed to critique a narrative thoroughly. It definitely changes the way you critique it, but the critique can still be in good faith.  I watched the entirety of RVB0 only after it was finished, in one sitting, and I was giving it my full attention, essentially like it was a movie. I’m going to assume it was much better to watch in chunks, because as it stood, there was literally no time built into the narrative to process the events that had just transpired, or try and predict what events might be coming in the future. When there’s no time to think about the narrative as you’re watching it, the narrative ends up as being something that happens to the audience, not something they engage with. It’s like the difference between taking notes during a lecture or just sitting and listening. If you’re making no attempt to actively process what’s happening, it doesn’t stick in your mind well. I found myself struggling to recall the events and explanations that had immediately transpired because as soon as one thing had happened, another thing was already happening, and it was like a mental juggling act to try and figure out which information was important enough to dwell on in the time we were given to dwell on it.

Which brings me to another point - pacing. Every event in the show, whether a character moment, a plot moment, or a fight scene, felt like it was supposed to land with almost the exact same amount of emotional weight. It all felt like The Most Important Thing that had Yet Happened. And I understand that this is done as an attempt to squeeze as much as possible out of a rather short runtime, but it fundamentally fails. When everything is the most important thing happening, it all fades into static. That’s what most of 0’s narrative was to me: static. It’s only been a few hours since I watched it but I had to go step by step and type out all of the story beats I could remember and run it by my friends who are much more enthusiastic RVB fans than I am to make sure I hadn’t missed or forgotten anything. I hadn’t, apparently, but the fact that my takeaway from the show was pretty accurate and also disappointingly lackluster says a lot. Strangely enough, the most interesting thing the show alluded to - a holo echo, or whatever the term they used was - was one of the things least extrapolated upon in the show’s incredibly bulky exposition. Benefit of the doubt says that’s something they’ll explore in future seasons (are they getting more? Is that planned? I just realized I don’t actually know.)

And bulky it was! I have quite honestly never seen such flagrant disregard for the rule of “show, don’t tell.” There was not a single ounce of subtlety or implication involved in the storytelling of RVB0. Something was either told to you explicitly, or almost entirely absent from the narrative. Essentially zilch in between. We are told the dynamic the characters have with each other, and their personality pros and cons are listed for us conveniently by Carolina. The plot develops in exposition dumps. This is partially due to the series’ short runtime, but is also very much a result of how that runtime was then used by the writers. They sacrificed a massive chunk of their show for the sake of cramming in a ton of fight scenes, and if they wanted to keep all of those fight scenes, it would have been necessary to pare down their story and characters proportionally in comparison, but they didn’t do that either. They wanted to have it both ways and there simply wasn’t enough time for it. 

The story itself is… uninteresting. It plays out more like the flimsy premise of a video game quest rather than a piece of media to be meaningfully engaged with. RVB0 is I think something I would be pitched by a guy who thinks the MCU and BNHA are the best storytelling to come out of the past decade. It is nothing but tropes. And I hate having to use this as an insult! I love tropes. The worst thing about RVB0 is that nothing it does is wholly unforgivable in its own right. Hunter x Hunter, a phenomenal shonen, is notoriously filled with pages upon pages of detailed exposition and explanations of things, and I absolutely love it. Leverage, my favorite TV show of all time, is literally nothing but a five man band who has to learn to work as a team while seemingly systematically hitting a checklist of every relevant trope in the book. Pacific Rim is an incredibly straightforward good guys vs giant monsters blockbuster to show off some cool fight scenes such as a big robot cutting an alien in half with a giant sword, and it’s some of the most fun I ever have watching a movie. Something being derivative, clunky, poorly executed in some specific areas, narratively weak, or any single one of these flaws, is perfectly fine assuming it’s done with the intention and care that’s necessary to make the good parts shine more. I’ll forgive literally any crime a piece of media commits as long as it’s interesting and/or enjoyable to consume. RVB0 is not that. I’m not sure what the main point of RVB0 was supposed to be, because it seemingly succeeds at nothing. It has absolutely nothing new or innovative to justify its lack of concern for traditional storytelling conventions. Based solely on the amount of screentime things were given, I’d be inclined to say the narrative existed mostly to give flimsy pretense for the fight scenes, but that’s an entire other can of worms.

2. The Visuals + Fights

I have no qualms with things that are all style and no substance. Sometimes you just want to see pretty colors moving on the screen for a while or watch some cool bad guys and monsters or whatever get punched. RVB0 was not this either. The show fundamentally lacked a coherent aesthetic vision. Much of the show had a rather generic sci-fi feel to it with the biggest standouts to this being the very noir looking cityscape, which my friends and I all immediately joked looked like something from a batman game, or the temple, which my friends and I all immediately joked looked like a world of warcraft raid. They were obviously attempting to get variety in their environment design, which I appreciate, but they did this without having a coherent enough visual language to feel like it was all part of the same world. In general, there was also just a lack of visual clarity or strong shots. The value range in any given scene was poor, the compositions and framing were functional at best, and the character animation was unpleasantly exaggerated. It just doesn’t really look that good beyond fancy rendering techniques.

The fight scenes are their entire own beast. Since ‘FIGHT SCENE’ is the largest single category of scenes in the show, they definitely feel worth looking at with a genuine critical eye. Or, at least, I’d like to, but honestly half the time I found myself almost unable to look at them. The camera is rarely still long enough to really enjoy what you’re watching - tracking the motion of the character AND the camera at such constant breakneck high speeds left little time to appreciate any nuances that might have been present in the choreography or character animation. I tried, believe me, I really did, but the fight scenes leave one with the same sort of dizzy convoluted spectacle as a Michael Bay transformers movie. They also really lacked the impact fight scenes are supposed to have.

It’s hard to have a good, memorable fight scene without it doing one of three things: 1. Showing off innovative or creative fighting styles and choreography 2. Making use of the fight’s setting or environment in an engaging and visually interesting way or 3. Further exploring a character’s personality or actions by the way they fight. It’s also hard to do one of these things on its own without at least touching a bit on the other two. For the most part, I find RVB0’s fight scenes fail to do this. Other than rather surface level insubstantial factors, there was little to visually distinguish any of RVB0’s fight scenes from each other. Not only did I find a lot of them difficult to watch and unappealing, I found them all difficult to watch and unappealing in an almost identical way. They felt incredibly interchangeable and very generic. If you could take a fight scene and change the location it was set and also change which characters were participating and have very little change, it’s probably not a good fight scene. 

I think “generic” is really just the defining word of RVB0 and I think that’s also why it falls short in the humor department  as well.

3. The Comedy

Funny shit is hard to write and humor is also incredibly subjective but I definitely got almost no laughs out of RVB0. I think a total of three. By far the best joke was Carolina having a cast on top of her armor, which, I must stress, is an incredibly funny gag and I love it. But overall I think the humor fell short because it felt like it was tacked on more than a natural and intentional part of this world and these characters. A lot of the jokes felt like they were just thrown in wherever they’d fit, without any build up to punchlines and with little regard for what sort of joke each character would make. Like, there was some, obviously Raymond’s sense of humor had the most character to it, but the character-oriented humor still felt very weak. When focusing on character-driven humor, there’s a LOT you can establish about characters based on what sort of jokes they choose to make, who they’re picking as the punchlines of these jokes, and who their in-universe audience for the jokes is. In RVB0, the jokes all felt very immersion-breaking and self aware, directed wholly towards the audience rather than occurring as a natural result of interplay between the characters. This is partially due to how lackluster the character writing was overall, and the previously stated tight timing, but also definitely due to a lack of a real understanding about what makes a joke land. 

A rule of thumb I personally hold for comedy is that, when push comes to shove, more specific is always going to be more funny. The example I gave when trying to explain this was this:

saying two characters had awkward sex in a movie theater: funny

saying two characters had an awkward handjob in a cinemark: even funnier

saying two characters spent 54 minutes of 11:14's 1:26 runtime trying out some uncomfortably-angled hand stuff in the back of a dilapidated cinemark that lost funding halfway through retrofitting into a dinner theater: the funniest

The more specific a joke is, the more it relies on an in-depth understanding of the characters and world you’re dealing with and the more ‘realistic’ it feels within the context of your media. Especially with this kind of humor. When you’re joking with your friends, you don’t go for stock-humor that could be pulled out of a joke book, you go for the specific. You aim for the weak spots. If a set of jokes could be blindly transplanted into another world, onto another cast of characters, then it’s far too generic to be truly funny or memorable. I don’t think there’s a single joke in RVB0 where the humor of it hinged upon the characters or the setting.

Then there’s the issue of situational comedy and physical comedy. This is really where the humor being ‘tacked on’ shows the most. Once again, part of what makes actually solid comedy land properly is it feeling like a natural result of the world you have established. Real life is absurd and comical situations can be found even in the midst of some pretty grim context, and that’s why black comedy is successful, and why comedy shows are allowed to dip into heavier subject matter from time to time, or why dramas often search for levity in humor. It’s a natural part of being human to find humor in almost any situation. The key thing, though, once again, is finding it in the situation. Many of RVB0’s attempts at humor, once again, feel like they would be the exact same jokes when stripped from their context, and that’s almost never good. A pretty fundamental concept in both storytelling in general but particularly comedy writing is ‘setup and payoff’. No joke in RVB0 is a reward for a seemingly innocuous event in an earlier scene or for an overlooked piece of environmental design. The jokes pop in when there’s time for them in between all the exposition and fighting, and are gone as soon as they’re done. There’s no long term, underlying comedic throughline to give any sense of coherence or intent to the sense of humor the show is trying to establish. Every joke is an isolated one-off quip or one-liner, and it fails to engage the audience in a meaningful way.

All together, each individual component of RVB0 feels like it was conjured up independently, without any concern to how it interacted with the larger product they were creating. And I think this is really where it all falls apart. RVB0 feels criminally generic in a way reminiscent of mass-market media which at least has the luxury of attributing these flaws, this complete and total watering down of anything unique, to heavy oversight and large teams with competing visions. But I don’t think that’s the case for RVB0. I don’t know much about what the pipeline is like for this show, but I feel like the fundamental problem it suffers from is a lack of heart.

In comparison to Red vs. Blue

Let's face it. This is a terrible successor to Red vs. Blue. I wouldn’t care if NONE of the old characters were in it - that’s not my problem. I haven’t seen past season 13 because from what I heard the show already jumped the shark a bit and then some. That’s not what makes it a poor follow up. What makes it a bad successor is that it fundamentally lacks any of the aspects of the OG RVB that made it unique or appealing at all. I find myself wondering what Torrian is trying to say with RVB0 and quite literally the only answer I find myself falling back onto is that he isn’t trying to say anything at all. Regardless of what you feel about the original RVB, it undeniably had things to say. The opening “why are we here” speech does an excellent job at establishing that this is a show intended to poke fun at the misery of bureaucracy and subservience to nonsensical systems, not just in the context of military life, but in a very broad-strokes way almost any middle-class worker can relate to. At the end of the day, fiction is at its best when it resonates with some aspect of its audience’s life. I know instantly which parts of the original Red vs Blue I’m supposed to relate to. I can’t say anything even close to that about 0.

RVB is an absurdist parody that heavily satirizes aspects of the military and life as a low-on-the-food-chain worker in general that almost it’s entire target audience will be familiar with. The most significant draw of the show to me was how the dialogue felt like listening to my friends bicker with each other in our group chats. It required no effort for me to connect with and although the narrative never outright looked to the camera and explained ‘we are critiquing the military’s stupid red tape and self-fullfilling eternal conflict’ they didn’t need to, because the writing trusted itself and its audience enough to believe this could be conveyed. It is, in a way, the complete antithesis to the badass superhero macho military man protagonist that we all know so well. RVB was saying something, and it was saying it in a rather novel format.

Nothing about RVB0 is novel. Nothing about RVB0 says anything. Nothing about it compels me to relate to any of these characters or their situations. RVB0 doesn’t feel like absurdism, or satire. RVB0 feels like it is, completely uncritically, the exact media that RVB itself was riffing off of. Both RVB0 and RVB when you watch them give you the feeling that what you’re seeing here is kids on a playground larping with toy soldiers. It’s all ridiculous and over the top cliche stupid garbage where each side is trying to one-up the other. The critical difference is, in RVB, we’re supposed to look at this and laugh at how ridiculous this is. In RVB0 we’re supposed to unironically think this is all pretty badass. 

The PFL arc of the original RVB existed to show us that setting up an elite team of supersoldiers with special powers was something done in bad faith, with poor outcomes, that left everyone involved either cruel, damaged, or dead. It was a bad thing. And what we’re seeing in RVB0 is the same premise, except, this time it’s good. We’re supposed to root for this format. RVB0 feels much more like a demo reel, cutscenes from a video game that doesn’t exist, or a shonen anime fanboy’s journal scribbling than it feels like a piece of media with any objective value in any area.  In every area that RVB was anti-establishment, RVB0 is pure undiluted establishment through and through.  

[leam1983]

It’s the end of the work week and, well...

I’m having thoughts on labor culture.

My father was born in 1958. He lived as the son of an absent father of five children who had no ability to truthfully express his love and care, and who instead chose to bury himself in work as a means to display his commitment. My paternal grandfather made and sold mattressees and died quite young of a cancer strain that today would’ve seemed benign. He was described as a hard worker, either up to his neck in his business or wanting just a scant few hours per day to himself. It made an aloof lover out of him and a distant father - who still loved his wife and children to bits but who felt emotionally castrated in a sense, as were men of the era.

The family consensus is that his work killed him.

My father is now 65 and survived a bout of Non-Hodgkinian Lymphoma. The oncologist and anyone with half a brain agreed that stress was the culprit. Early on, Dad had the family as an excuse for his tendency to overwork. He had to provide for us, after all, and garnish my mother’s meagre savings. All she has is her government-issued pension plan, while my father does have his own pension as a retiree of the City of Montreal’s Real-Estate Appraisal service. Considering, he felt obligated to pull a heavier load to bring in more, so they’d have better investment opportunities. Later on, he kept working out of a sense of fealty and attachment to his division, breaking out of retirement during the pandemic to join the work-from-home team. He wanted to help techs and city officials find ways to bring more of the traditionally snail-mail-based parts of the system online so the city’s Land Management service wouldn’t be paralyzed by COVID-19. What was supposed to be a single month turned into four, which turned into twelve.

By the end, they were begging him to stay on the team and to pull longer hours. We’re talking twenty hours per day, in some particularly grueling stretches. That means being logged in by breakfast and scarfing bagels down with Urban Design techs on Zoom instead of your own family, or having supper with your boss because she needs a play-by-play of the situation to stave off her executive anxiety.

Long story short, I didn’t see Dad much during the first wave. His reasoning was that he’d eventually stop, pool all this cash, and chuck it into his and Mom’s Registered Retirement Savings Account - with maybe an extra two thou or so in case the country reopened enough for their postponed trip to Cuba to take place.

Guess what? His zona flared up and he ended up with odd, shingly bumps along his scalp which to this day the local dermatologist grimaces at and tentatively has us dab with cortisone cream.

Mom, though? She’s a retired and registered nurse with a self-negating streak and a chronic propensity to undervalue her own physical ailments. Someone who quite literally understands the pain of busted hips on a clinical level because she was trained in Gerontology - and also someone who refuses to schedule an appointment with her GP and who inexplicably self-medicates with white wine.

As for me, I’m a 37 year-old man with a paycheck I consider massive with its meagre six bucks above the minimum-wage threshold - someone who chose to shack in with his folks until the current crisis ends and who therefore has a history of a single, willingly terminated apartment lease that originally began in the Planned Housing market. The apartment I want is basically a Barbie doll house for adults, a gleaming fantasy I’ll never have enough capital to touch unless I feel like trying my hand with criminal applications of my skills. The apartment I can get right now is a shithole, and I have the audacity to think I deserve a shithole that at least wasn’t someone’s former cockroach den.

Now here’s the kicker: I value my sanity and my health. I know my mental stamina levels and I know from experience that after working seven-point-five hours per day with the occasionally shorter Friday, I’ve found my limit. I could invest more if I worked more, yes, and I’m already in a better position than my parents, retirement-wise. I’ll never be rich, but I’m already set to be comfortable, provided I don’t spend my golden years trying to make it as an unsponsored TechTuber or anything else that’s equally ludicrous.

Where that’s a problem is in the toxicity this is generating. See, I have the gall to slide my daily schedule later so I can start at an hour that fits my biological clock and ends at an hour where I’m at my most creative. That means the folks saw me spending my pandemic mornings on Animal Crossing while Dad was trying to wrangle Excel spreadsheets for non-tech-savvy fellow Boomers while preventing the dog from eating his meeting notes. That means they guzzled vinho verde like it was Kool-Aid after seven while I made sure to find more concrete means to distance myself from work - ideally ones that didn’t involve functional alcoholism.

Naturally, what was bound to happen, happened: Dad soon spent his evenings calling me shiftless or “unwilling to commit”, while I was stuck watching him miss all the cues his stressed-out body were sending him. We already had Trump’s last desperate months and a global plague to handle, I really didn’t want my work to turn into more of a nuisance than it already is. I already love the people I work for and hate what I do (repeating the family cycle, it seems), but I’ve at least decided to give myself ample Me time every single day. 

I’ve paired that with smaller, if consistent portfolio investments, along with a few new habits I wanted to get into to stay saner. Dad pulls crosswords or plays competitive chess in the wee hours, while I usually lay down to meditate around midnight and fall asleep by 1 AM at the latest. I’m half-expecting my father to pull a Tyler Durden and to sneer at me, at some point. “Self-care is masturbation,” he’d probably say.

Looking at classifieds for rentals, it’s obvious that the entire system is predicated on abuse. Work yourself down to the therapist’s office, right down to the fucking bone, and you just might earn a half-decent retirement because nobody’s taught you to invest incrementally. Nope, Society seems to say, you’re supposed to buy, buy and buy some more, until you realize you have ten years left to start from scratch!

I remember Dad’s face on my eighteenth birthday. “Why would you want a Disability Care Savings Account, Brain? You just turned into a legal adult by Canadian standards - you’re in no rush, right?”

I told him the real gift I wanted for my birthday, that day, was a ride to the family’s Financial Investments counsel. I pulled up the PDFs I’d printed out and filled and brought them over. From then on, if I dropped a penny in my nest-egg, Ottawa would drop another one. If my share grew, so did the government’s. In the twenty-odd years since, it’s expanded exponentially.

Dad thought I’d done this to have a big cushion by the time I’d retire. Mom thought I’d done this in case my disability worsened and I started requiring equipment or physical assistance. Honestly, my dumb, if slightly prescient eighteen year-old self figured I’d rather spend my time reading or playing video games than working. I knew I’d need something to help cushion my admittedly low career-related ambitions. I might throw several thousands at a new computer every seven to eight years, but that’s because I’ve saved them up for just as long, little by little. I have no vices beyond what sillicon offers and what you’d find in the pages of a book and don’t exactly need a big ‘ol, stonkin’ humidor stuffed with conoisseur stogies.

I have a shoebox with a poked-out Ziploc bag and a sponge, with a handful of joints and a few Santa Anas I got off of a buyer’s pool from work. Five of us occasional chair-bar goons pooled cash together on Cigar Chief and cushioned prices with a single, shared and massive order. I’m nowhere near rich, but assuming the housing market can catch its breath eventually, I’ll be able to live modestly - with one or two markers of occasional luxury I’ll have chosen.

I have a shittier job than my father has had and I’ve chosen to be happier than him. It’s just sad that the usual response elevates overwork as the supposedly one, true way to leave a mark in society.

No, Dad. I don’t want to die while my own cells eat me alive, I want to die blazed out of my fucking mind, happy because I’ll have had time to enjoy my friends’ company and to finally make some sense out of Kerouac’s Subterraneans or to figure out what the fuck is going on in Joyce’s Illiad. I’ll die crusty as shit and fulfilled as a Pop Culture jockey, because I’ll have either finished Persona 5: Golden in my lifetime or I’ll have watched the entirety of the MCU’s output before Disney finally manages to kill their golden goose.

I want to die decades from now, feeling like I at least owned my choices and didn’t spend my time tethered to someone else’s professional expectations of me.

[yellowocaballero]

You And Me (And Your Friend Daisy)

Thanks for pushing me to finish this, Anon! This is a short, fun, and romantic story written in the verse of my other fics Bell, Book, and Candle and No Sin But Ignorance. Takes place some time post the ending of No Sin But Ignorance. That being said, this is probably very comprehensible without knowledge of those fics, so feel free to just view it as a no-apocalypse au. The majority of this was written while writing Feste - more accurately, when I needed a break from the crushing depression of Feste, so that’s why it’s so cheerful. :)

Yes, it’s named after that Garfunkel and Oates song, because that’s the plot. 

The rest of the story is under the cut!

*******************************************

“Are you going to tell me where we are?”

“You have to guess! And no peeking!”

Jon sighed, slouching in his seat. He hated surprise vacations. He hated being forced to leave work and ‘take a break’ because ‘you’re contractually obligated to use your PTO hours’. And he did take vacations, he didn’t know why everybody acted like he didn’t. He and Georgie took Gerry to Blackpool once a year for Spring Break. That was a whole week off. That was enough for anybody. 

But Martin had been pointedly sending him emails about ‘fun couple’s trips’ and ‘romantic getaways’ in an ultra-subtle act of subliminal messaging. Indeed, the three emailed promotional advertisements listing off fun, relaxing, and romantic things to do with your significant other were so subtle that Emma was forced to listen in on the automated JAWS voice reading them out and then call him a ‘fucking idiot’. 

Whatever. It wasn’t as if Gertrude took any vacations, and nobody got on her back for it. Jon was willing to bet that Dekker never sent Gertrude any passive aggressive emails. He would have to ask him later - they got boba together once a month, he was an excellent conversational partner. He was, of course, slightly insane, both for his fervent adherence to the ancient religions and willingness to come within five feet of Gertrude Robinson for personal reasons, but all the best supernatural hunters were. 

“Well, we’ve clearly been driving north for the past eight hours, judging from the angle of the sun,” Jon said, annoyed. The car radio was playing the Archers in a dull drone, which Jon had insisted upon, because he and Daisy never missed an episode. This confused and frightened Martin. A bag rustled, and Jon knew that Martin was fishing around in the plastic convenience store sack for more Jaffa cakes. “Combined with the time, that can only mean that we’re going to Scotland. I don’t have any close friends in Scotland and I’m willing to be you don’t either -”

“Hey!”

“ - so unless you assigned yourself the task of following up on the Scottish Slaughter Statement without me assigning it to you, and deciding to bring me along, I’m guessing that we’re going to stay in a hotel and do...touristy things.”

“Wrong again,” Martin said triumphantly. He liked keeping track of every time Jon was innocently incorrect about something, just to prove it to everyone else. “I mean, yes, we are in Scotland, you’re right about that, but we are not staying in a hotel. We’re staying in the country.”

“Darling, I would love to sit on the Scottish Moors and stare out into the endless, unceasing fog with you in complete silence,” Jon said lovingly, “but I thought you wanted to do something romantic.”

“That’s not romantic?” Martin gasped, horrified. “Have you even read Wuthering Heights?”

“You and Gerry are two peas in a goth pod.”

“He’s goth, I’m gothic. There’s a difference. And don’t tell me that you don’t enjoy gothic literature - you’re literally a Byronic hero.”

“Oh, here we go,” Jon sighed, as the car bumped over a speed bump. He hadn’t heard another car for hours now, and he knew that they had to be in the middle of nowhere. The weather had grown colder, more humid, and occasionally he could hear the bleat of cows. It was...calming. 

Then Martin started listing off the very many reasons why Jon was a classical Byronic hero, then Jon had to remind him that none of that stuff had technically happened, then Martin began insisting that it happened in their hearts, then Jon got deeply engrossed into today’s episode of the Archers and felt the need to inform Martin about its illustrious and aged history, which prompted Martin to put on Hatsune Miku when the episode was over and indoctrinate Jon into whatever ‘Vocaloid’ was, and by the time the car transitioned to skittering over bumpy gravel they were both entering a heated discussion about the most superior of the ‘Vocaloids’. 

“ - and she created Minecraft?”

“And she’s trans,” Martin said heatedly. 

“Good for her,” Jon said, just bemused. The car engine quieted, and keys clinked and rustled. “Are we here?”

“Yep! Seven hours later.” Martin sighed and made a quiet, satisfied noise, probably stretching, and Jon didn’t bother to fight his smile. Man was like a cat. “I want to show you around and everything, but honestly that drive was exhausting and I might take a nap first.” He sighed happily. “Peace. Quiet. No coworkers.”

“I’m your coworker,” Jon pointed out, opening the door of the car as Martin did the same. He stepped onto gravel, grinding his trainer a little into it, and breathed in. The air tasted...fresh. Clean. Pure and just a little chilly. It was nice. It perked Jon up, as the wind lightly tousled his curls. He stretched his legs too, cramped from being knitted up in the small car. Martin popped the boot and started loading packages into his arms, and Jon walked over and held his arms out so he could help Martin carry the packages. Martin dropped a picnic basket filled with snacks in his arms, and handed him his own suitcase, as Martin dropped his own suitcase on the ground with a heavy thump. “How does a teenage girl create a video game? That’s very impressive.”

“This week you are my boyfriend,” Martin corrected him, thumping the boot down. “No Emma getting on my case about misfiling the papers. No Michael concern trolling me. No Eric judging me for my taste in tea. No Gertrude terrifying me every second of the day. I am free. I am not going to think about work, or anybody related to work, for a single second. No Entities. No fear demons. No monsters, besides my boyfriend.”

“Thanks,” Jon said wryly. “Aren’t we forgetting someone?”

“Oh, darn it!” Martin opened the back door of the car, and pulled out a carrier. The wire door of the carrier cinched open and Tiresias came bounding out, barking madly and running in little circles around Jon, his tail beating against Jon’s leg. Jon laughed, lifting his burden higher in his arms, and let Martin loop his arm around Jon’s and guide him towards what he had to assume was some kind of building. “C’mere, boy. Good boy! You were so good for the trip! You’re getting a hundred snacks as soon we get inside.”

“Are you going to tell me where we are yet?” Jon asked, exasperated. 

Martin squeezed his arm happily as they walked up an incline, shoes scuffing dirt. “I got permission from Daisy to borrow it. It’s her cabin, just outside of Applecross. It’s really in the middle of nowhere, nobody around for kilometers. Just us and a great deal of cows. It’s really gorgeous, Jon, with such clean air and beautiful hills. I can’t wait to go for walks with you. You’ll get so much time to go through your audiobook collection. And we can snuggle, and I can cook for you, and we can listen to more radio dramas, and we can talk about our future, and you can pet the cows…”

“Sounds wonderful,” Jon said honestly, squeezing Martin’s arm back. They paused, Martin rustling his keys again, and Jon heard the grinding of metal before a door seemed to creak open. “I can’t wait to spend this week with you. I could use a little peace, I think.”

“Gods, me too. You have no idea how stressed I’ve been. It’ll be just you, me, and -”

That’s when Martin screamed, and Tiresias barked excitedly and ran forward, almost bowling Jon over, and a familiar voice broke the quiet of the rustic cabin. 

“Aren’t you a good boy, Tiresias? Aren’t you a good boy?” Daisy Tonner’s grin was audible through her words, but it held a familiar tint of ferociousness. “Hullo, Jon. Blackwood. What are you doing here a week early?”

“Early!” Martin squeaked. “I said we were coming up the first week of September -”

“Really?” Daisy said, voice casual. Seemingly. “Because I have it down in my calendar as the second week. This is my vacation. And I’m not leaving.”

Silence stretched between them. Jon smiled happily towards the sound of Daisy’s voice, placing his burdens at his feet, and soon Daisy walked forward and enveloped him in a bone cracking hug. 

“It’s so good to see you,” Jon said, hugging her tightly back too. “I’m sure we can share the cabin for the week. It’ll be fun, like a sleepover!”

“Oh, I think so too,” Daisy said, her voice tinged in a wolf’s grin. “Don’t you think so, Martin?”

“Good fucking christ,” Martin said. 

****

True to his word, Martin was exhausted enough that he immediately made the bed and collapsed into it. Jon lovingly took off his shoes and socks and Tiresias even, adorably, pulled the comforter up around Martin’s ears. But Martin didn’t sleep: he seemed preoccupied in angrily muttering to himself about how he didn’t get the time wrong, she did, this was all her fault, and it was also completely on purpose, devil woman, everybody was trying to ruin everything - 

“Love, if I ask her to go, she’ll go,” Jon said. 

“No! Ugh!” Martin screamed lowly, muffled, and Jon realized with amusement he was screaming into the pillow. “It’s her house, she’s doing us a favor, I don’t want to be rude! I can’t kick her out of her own home!”

“Are you going to be passive aggressive at her until she leaves?”

Incriminatingly, Martin was silent. 

“She’s more stubborn than you are. If you try to solve this with your usual methods she’ll outlast you.”

“I hate her so much,” Martin groaned. 

“Don’t say that,” Jon said loyally. “She’s really come around to you, you know. She hasn’t threatened to chop your dick off in - oh, two weeks now. That’s a new record.”

Martin groaned again. Jon kissed him on the cheek, turned the light off - “Jon, you just turned the light on.” - turned the light off for real this time, and went into the living room/dining room/kitchen to start putting away all the food they had brought. He bent over his suitcase, withdrawing Tiresias’ harness, and whistled to call him over before snapping the harness on. Tiresias stiffened into what Georgie called ‘Buisness Boy Mode’, and Jon grabbed his handle with one hand as he loaded the groceries into the other. 

“Here, let me help.” Daisy lifted the other load from the floor, leading the both of them into the kitchen and opening the fridge. “I know Georgie’s organizational system.”

Jon just sighed, slowly navigating his way to the fridge to put his own load away. They had clothing to unpack, things to set up, and arrangements to plan, but Jon had the sense that none of it was getting done immediately. 

“What were your plans for this week?”

“I normally go up here to hunt,” Daisy grunted, sliding cans into the cabinet. At Jon’s raised eyebrow, she clarified, “with guns. They’re all locked up in the gun cabinet, as is my ammo and knives. Neither you nor Martin have the keys, but the cabinet is in a closet near the bathroom. That should be locked too.”

“Goodness, Daisy, I’m not an errant toddler. I won’t play with your collection.”

“You’re my errant toddler,” Daisy said loyally, giving him a noogie and making him scowl. “Say it. Say you’re an errant toddler.”

“Goodness, Daisy, leave me be -”

Then she lifted him up, like he was nothing more than a bundle of sticks, and held him in the air as he screamed and kicked his legs, trying to get down. Tiresias, the Traitor, the Serpent, the King of Lies, barked happily. “Let me down! Daisy!”

“Say you’re an errant toddler and I’ll let you down.”

“I shan’t. Daisy, stop -!” But then she started tickling him, which was extremely dangerous, and Jon was forced to cackle out in breathless laughter, “Fine, I’m a toddler, let me down, you crazy woman!”

She tossed him lightly onto the pull-out couch, putting away the rest of the groceries herself, and Jon let Tiresias sit on top of him and lick his face as he could almost audibly hear Martin pouting in the bedroom. 

“This’ll be fun,” Daisy said, shutting the cabinet and rustling some familiar boxes. “Can’t believe Tim paid me fifty quid to do this. I would have done it for free.”

“Do what?”

“Never mind. I have your copy of Life, do you want to play?”

“Sure!” Jon sat up, feeling Daisy sit down next to him and set out the game pieces. Then something occurred to him. “Wait. What are you doing with my copy of Life?”

“Georgie lent it to me.”

“...why did Georgie -”

“I was going to leave it here for when you came up,” Daisy said easily, and Jon nodded in acceptance. “Spin the spinner to see whose turn comes first.”

Jon considered thinking deeper about this, but Daisy wouldn’t lie to him. She was the most trustworthy person he knew. She didn’t have a deceitful bone in her body. He shrugged and reached forward and found the spinner, giving it a good twist before rubbing his thumb over the braille. Something occurred to him. 

“Maybe we can ask Martin if he wants to join -”

“I’m sure he would prefer his rest.”

“Okay!”

This vacation was going to go great. Why had Jon been worried?

****

That night they had a delicious barbecue outside, cooked by Daisy. Martin ate it in angry silence, which was quickly broken by Jon’s frequent nudges and directions for conversation. He wasn’t the most socially adept person at the best of times, but Martin and Daisy were two of his best friends and he knew how to get the both of them talking. He was even able to draw them into a spirited conversation about 19th century literature - Daisy preferred Russian novels, while Martin preferred Gothic romances and Hugo and Jon tended towards nonfiction. Afterwards Daisy grabbed her gun, kissed Jon on the cheek, did something that made Martin squeak in fear, and tramped off to go hunt deer or something. Jon waved her off with a blessing, his sixth sense thrumming with satisfaction for the Sacrifice. 

He spent the night cuddled up with Martin, watching Beauty and the Beast on his laptop. Martin was obsessed with Disney movies in a way that explained a great deal about him, and Beauty and the Beast was his absolute favorite. Jon ran his fingers through his soft and feathery hair as Martin squeezed his hand, and Jon’s heart settled in complete contentment. The audio description voice droned gently about the heartwarming falling in love montages, but Jon wasn’t really paying attention: he just felt safe, and warm, and as if he wanted the moment to last forever. 

Then his mobile rang, a clear automated voice saying “Gerard calling. Gerard calling.”

“Oh, I should get that.” Jon straightened, throwing out a hand on the coffee table where he thought he had put his phone, and Martin pressed it into his hand. He accepted the call quickly, putting it on speaker and holding it up to his ear just like, he was reliably assured, ‘an old man’. “Hello, honey?”

“Jon!” Gerry yelled. “Did you get the cabin okay?”

“Oh, so everyone knew but me,” Jon said, amused. “You’re on speaker, Gerry, so say hello to Mr. Blackwood.”

“Hi Martin! Are you guys having a good time? You have to take me next time, I want to see Daisy’s guns!”

“You will not see Daisy’s guns,” Jon said quickly. 

“Hi Gerry,” Martin said, a smile clear in his somewhat strained voice. “Sure, you and Georgie should come up next time. Make it a party. Why not.”

“Told you she’d do it,” Georgie said, and Jon perked up. “Hullo, love. How’s your romantic getaway going?”

“Oh, it’s lovely,” Jon said, excited. “We’re going to walk down to the town tomorrow, check out some of their antique stores. I’ll let you know if we find any interesting art.”

“I’ve been up to Daisy’s cabin a few times with Melanie, it’s delightful. Great place for her to hunt and for me to practice my carrion photography. It’s always nice just to get away from it all! I hope you haven’t touched any work, Jon.”

“I haven’t,” Jon said loyally. He paused a beat. “Do Statements count? Because I was planning on listening to a few recorded ones as a sort of bedtime story?”

“That’s just self-care,” Georgie assured him. “Treat yourself, queen.”

“Thanks, honey. Make sure Gerry gets his homework done? Do you need any help? I have some time now -”

“I got it,” Georgie said, laughing slightly. “I can still help a fifteen year old with his English. I’ll make sure he brushes his teeth too. Just enjoy yourself.”

“Have a good time, Dad!” Gerry called, the affectionate nickname making Jon smile. “Bring me back a cow!” Slightly more muffled, Jon heard him say to Georgie, “Mum, when Jon goes on a romantic getaway, what do you think they -”

“Night, honey! Night, Martin! Love you!” Georgie called loudly.

Jon laughed, unable to stop himself from waving a little, as if they were there. “Night, you two. Love you too. Stay safe.”

“We will! Bye!”

The line clicked off, and Martin’s arm stretched across Jon’s shoulders squeezed a little tighter. Jon extended a foot and clicked the space bar on the computer, starting up the movie again. 

“You’d make a really good dad,” Martin said, almost to himself. 

Jon settled back against Martin, leaning his head against his shoulder. “I feel like one already, honestly. Obviously, I have far more experience with teenagers than babies, but they can’t be that hard. If I don’t drop them…why?”

Martin coughed a little, abruptly flustered. “No reason! No reason.”

“Do you want kids?”

“Can’t exactly have them biologically,” Martin muttered, before sighing. “Yeah, I’d love to...foster or adopt or something. I’ve had my - differences - with my parents, but I’m still glad they adopted me, you know? I’d like to pass that on. But...better. Much better.”

“Georgie is talking about fostering again once Gerard moves in with Eric,” Jon said quietly. The thought of Gerry moving out, of living full time with Eric again - it just seemed weird. Almost wrong, although it wasn’t - Eric adored Gerry, and he was a competent father. It was just that...well, technically, Gerry had been living with them since the beginning of the universe. On a purely literal level, they really had always had Gerry with them. It would be strange. “As a - recipient of the foster care system myself, I’d like to make a difference too.” He smiled thinly. “We’re very compatible, aren’t we?”

“Would it be...you and Georgie…?”

“I don’t know. Does it matter?”

Martin sighed a little. “Is it dumb that sometimes it feels like you already have a family built in?”

Hm. Jon hadn’t quite thought about it that way. “You know those jokes about me and Georgie being married are just jokes,” Jon said reproachfully. 

Martin moved away a little, leaning forward, slipping his arm from Jon’s shoulder. He abruptly missed the warmth. “But you’re partners. You’re raising a kid. And I know Daisy and Tim think of themselves as your overprotective big siblings, they aren’t even wrong.”

“Many people have siblings? And friends? Some even have kids, I’ve heard.”

“I don’t.” There was really nothing for Jon to say to that, so he didn’t say anything. “I don’t want my entire social circle to just be through you…”

“It won’t be,” Jon said firmly, reaching out a hand and brushing it against Martin’s arm. He squeezed it firmly. “You don’t have to be Lonely anymore, Martin. I won’t let you.”

“Is that a promise?” Martin said, as if he was joking, as if Jon wasn’t certain that he wasn’t. As if he needed the reassurance. 

“How can you be lonely when I’m here?” Jon said, and trailed his hand up along Martin’s arm until he reached his neck and he could cup his face. He rubbed a thumb against his wispy stubble, light and thin. “I’m right here.”

Martin kissed him, and then the movie was quite thoroughly forgotten as Jon necked with his boyfriend on the couch like a teenager. They forgot everything, and for a small period of glorious time Jon forgot everything that he knew, in all of its entirety, and his Eye saw only the here and now. 

Then the door thumped open, the wind blew into the cabin, and heavy footsteps thumped into the room. Something dragged behind the footsteps, something that sounded a bit...wet. 

Martin, who was thoroughly on top of Jon and almost done unbuttoning his shirt, froze. Jon just craned his head, trying to hear the sounds of what was likely a dead deer being pulled in through the entrance way better. 

“Hello Daisy!” Jon said, still pinned down. “How was your hunting?”

“Lucrative. We’re eating venison tomorrow.”

“Great! Need any help getting that put away?”

“No, I’m good.” Tiresias barked happily. “Here, boy, you can have a little. Good boy. I’ll probably skin and clean it outside, I just wanted to get my gloves.”

“Take your time!”

Martin sighed and got off Jon, straightening his own clothing. “Yeah, Daisy, take your time.”

“Oh, am I interrupting something?” Daisy said blithely. “I didn’t mean to.”

“You’re fine,” Jon assured her, fixing his own hair from where it had grown tangled. “Want to finish this movie with us?”

“Sure, let me gut this animal first.”

“Great! Scooch over, Martin.”

“You know,” Martin said, “maybe we want to move to the bedroom?”

“If we stay in the living room I can hook up your laptop to the television and we can watch the movie that way,” Daisy said innocently. 

“That sounds good,” Jon agreed. He patted Martin’s hand. “Is that alright with you?”

Martin sighed. “Yeah. Of course.”

That night, Jon curled up next to Martin on the creaky wooden bed, listening to the flies buzz around them and the crickets hiss their lilting song outdoors. 

His earbuds were still nestled in his ears, the soft hum of his Walkman cutting the quiet night, his own pre-recorded voice reading out a story. Martin sat next to him, and occasionally Jon could hear the soft shift of the pages of a book turning. Every so often Martin would gasp, or make a little noise at some exciting event in his book. 

Jon rolled over, throwing out an arm and pulling Martin in close, resting his head on Martin’s shoulder as he let the earbuds roll gently out of his ears. Martin was soft and warm, the cotton of his t-shirt rubbing up against Jon’s cheek, and Jon let his mind gently bliss out and drift away. 

He thought about the breakfast he wanted to make the next morning, and of the soft beat of Scottish sun on his face. He thought about the creak of cobblestones as jumped-up jalopies rolled over them, and of the shifting and groan of old wood. He thought of the bright, sharp summer smell of the highlands, and the sinking and sticky marshland. 

“We should visit the antique store in town tomorrow,” Jon murmured. “Georgie’s been looking for a new lamp, and I think they should have a nice Rococo one for cheap.”

“Oh? Maybe I can pick something up too.” Martin gently scratched Jon’s scalp, making him bliss out even further. “Nice of you to always loop us in on the best deals, you little shopping catalogue.”

They, of course, had not been to the town yet, and there was no reason for Jon to know of the antique store, or the Rococo lamp. Jon hadn’t even thought about it, the information as available and easy as the layout of the convenience store down the street and a left turn from his childhood council flat. 

Martin’s voice broke the quiet, cutting through the buzz of insects. “You know I love you, right?”

“I know everything,” Jon yawned, snuggling into Martin’s side closer. 

“Not what I meant.” Martin hesitated, almost awkwardly. “You’re a literal mind reader and everything, but I’m not, so…”

“Oh, Martin.” Jon reached a hand up and cupped Martin’s cheek. “I built this world from the bedrock of my love for you.”

“Uh - wow! That’s - it’s kind of weird how you can just say that and have it be true!”

“Our lives are weird,” Jon agreed, brushing his thumb over Martin’s lips, and he carefully leaned his head up to kiss him, and they passed the long silent minutes just like that. 

Several hours later, Jon found himself jerking awake. Martin was snoring beside him, and he couldn’t feel any sun on his face, so Jon figured it was likely still nighttime. He carefully slipped out of bed, reaching out a hand and trailing it along the wall until he managed to leave the bedroom, navigate down the hall, and enter what he was fairly sure was the living room. 

“Jon?” A voice broke the night. Daisy, who had taken the pull-out couch. “You looking for the loo?”

It was only then that Jon realized that he didn’t know why he had gotten up. Tiresias snored loudly in the kitchen, adding a subtle undertone to the noise from outside, and Jon found himself shrugging helplessly. “I don’t think so. Did I wake you up?”

“Nah. Hold tight, I’ll help you to the couch.” Sure enough, after the almost silent footsteps echoed through the main room Jon felt a soft hand on his back, and she led him towards the couch. Jon lightly kicked it, testing its height, and gently lowered himself onto it, the springs of the pull-out bed breaking through the night. “What has you up?”

Jon just shrugged again. The bed creaked beside him, and he felt calloused fingers carding through his hair with gentleness that would have been surprising to most people. 

“Am I a bad boyfriend?” Jon asked, surprising himself. He hadn’t even known he was thinking that. 

“Did Blackwood tell you that you were?” Daisy asked sharply. 

“No! No, not at all.” Jon sighed. “I just...I just have different needs than him.” He could already tell what Daisy was thinking, and he shook his head. “Not about the - the you know what thing. I just...I know how much he loves me. I know what he thinks of me, I know his dedication to me. Sometimes I just assume that he’s - capable, of what I’m capable of. Do I not tell him I love him enough? Am I not affectionate enough?”

“You aren’t as perceptive as you think you are, Jon,” Daisy said, amused. “I think you’ll find that Blackwood has quite a few more secrets than you think he does.” She untangled her fingers from his hair and squeezed his arm. “Blackwood’s insecure. All insecure people want mindreader boyfriends. But you force him to use his words and ask for what he needs, Jon. It’s uncomfortable. But it’s good for him. He needs to learn to speak up for himself.” She hummed slightly. “He reminds me of Basira, a little. She’ll never tell you that you bothered her, and she just lets it pile up and up. But then you go just a little too far, and then she explodes all of that pent up anger and frustration on you. She likes to pretend she’s a real robot, but she’s just as human as the rest of them.”

“I’m so terrified of Basira,” Jon said miserably. “Remember when I dropped a plate and she told me that the reason why my gran didn’t love me was because I was an attention seeking nine year old?”

“She’s so mean. I love her so much.” Daisy patted Jon on the back. “Buck up. I’m working on Blackwood. You focus on enjoying your vacation.”

Jon let himself lean to the side, resting his head on Daisy’s shoulder. “I’m worried that Martin will realize that I’m not capable of expressing romantic affection in a socially typical manner and leave me.”

“God, shut up, whiner.” But the bed creaked and Daisy’s head gently slid out from under his shoulder, and Daisy gently helped Jon to his feet. “I’ll get you back to bed. Bitch about your imaginary relationship problems to me in the morning.”

Translated: I love you, I’ll always be here for you, and goodnight. Jon huffed a quiet laugh. “Aren’t the lights off? How can you see anything?”

When Daisy spoke again, a quiet bass growl echoed underneath her words, and Jon grinned with her. He Knew, like how he Knew that he loved Martin enough to destroy the world, that Daisy’s eyes were flickering yellow in the darkness. “Don’t be fooled by appearances, Jon.”

She helped him back to bed, and when Jon slept through the rest of the night he dreamed of nothing but Martin’s weight on his. 

****

“What a beautiful morning!” Martin said loudly. “The birds are chirping, the Scottish highlands are beautiful, I am here on my romantic vacation away from everybody with only my lovely boyfriend for company - and Daisy Tonner!”

“Glad to be here,” Daisy said affably. 

“This is so much fun!” Martin said, still loudly.

“I think so too!” Jon said enthusiastically.

Tiresias barked. 

After a breakfast pointedly prepared by Martin, they all got dressed and saddled up to go walk into the village. It was a quick walk, only about twenty minutes, and Martin and Daisy enjoyed the scenery as Jon enjoyed the warm grip of Martin’s hand in his and the breeze on his face. 

When the trail began sloping further downhill, and their footsteps began to slide against the incline, Jon pulled what Gerry would have called a ‘pro-gamer move’ and moved his grip up until he was clinging to Martin’s arm. Martin sprayed a hand out, resting it against Jon’s back, and helped him down the trail. 

“Whoah! You alright, honey? Careful of your step!”

“Jesus christ,” Daisy muttered. 

“It’s hardly Jon’s fault -” Martin began heatedly. 

“Yeah, Daisy,” Jon said, delighting in setting them against each other like the cold, uncaring god he was, “check your privilege.”

Then they were off, because despite Daisy was allergic to social consciousness, and Jon whistled a jaunty tune, composed in the 15th century and unknown to all but its lonely shepherd creator, as they navigated their way downwards. 

The village was small, nothing more than two streets with cheerful wooden facades and swing porches set out on the decks with wizened elderly people sipping from bottles of Irn Bru and smoking down cigarettes to the dregs. At least, as narrated by Martin, who seemed to already be mentally writing his small-town murder mystery in the Scottish highlands (Martin’s poetry needed work, but his fiction held a certain massmarket appeal). Knowing Martin, the protaganist would likely be either a grandmother with his own personality, or a thirtysomething gay man who had twelve counts of arson on his record and was running from the cops. 

Wait. Wait, Jon should use his words. Ask instead of look. Display interest in Martin’s inner life - which, granted, seemed to be a waste of time when Jon could just Know and not waste his breath, but Georgie had been coaching him in this. 

“You should give the ex-con narrator a boyfriend,” Jon said supportively. “Maybe bring back the gay bar owner from the last book?”

Martin almost tripped over the gravel. “How did you know I was thinking of - Jon, I told you not to read my mind!”

“Lay off, you know he doesn’t do it on purpose,” Daisy said uninterestedly, growling at what Jon guessed were passerby on the street. 

“Daisy, stop telling me how to talk to my boyfriend -”

“Oh, he’s your boyfriend now, is he?”

“Yes! Yes, he is!”

“Let’s get some ice cream!” Jon said loudly. 

“How did you even know there was an ice cream - fine! Fine, of course!” Martin sighed loudly. “Why not!”

As it turned out, they were right in front of ice cream. Jon loved it when things worked out. 

****

Twenty minutes later, after Martin laboriously reading out all of the entirely too many flavors to Jon, Daisy growling at everybody at the store like an errant dog, fighting with the owner of the store extremely politely about his actual dog existing, and finally taking their ice cream outside to sit at a picnic bench and attack their waffle cones, Jon felt content. 

He indicated this by telling everybody everything he knew about emulsifiers, which were extremely neat and a lot of fun! Because nobody was stopping him talking by saying ‘let’s talk about something else, Jon’ or ‘isn’t that a bit boring, Jon?’ he moved onto the history of waffle cones, safe in his assumption that everybody was as interested in the topic as he was. 

“I love you so much,” Martin said, somewhat dazed, when Jon stopped to draw a breath. “Did you know that this is the second time this has happened?”

That stopped Jon short, when nothing else did. “Really? Has it?”

Martin’s spoon scraped his small paper bowl. “Yep. Uh - for my birthday, I think. Me, Tim, and - and Sasha, and you. You ordered rum raisin. I was thinking...did you actually like rum raisin? Or did you just panic?” He laughed, somewhat self-consciously. “You didn’t remember about it even before the whole apocalypse thing, so no sweat, but…”

“Oh.” Jon realized, for probably the fifth time, that Martin held years and years worth of memories in him, and that Jon had only fragments and impressions. He knew that he had everything important, that everything he needed was within him, but - did he? What if he was missing the key to everything, the key to Martin, and all he needed was to just Look deeper? “That’s - I could remember it, if I wanted.”

“It’s fine, Jon,” Daisy said quietly. “Don’t go giving yourself a migraine.”

“I could,” Jon insisted. “I’d like to remember something like your birthday, Martin. Precious memories, or - or something. Give me a moment, I can send a quick prayer, and -”

“You know,” Martin said, and he squeezed Jon’s hand. “I’d rather make new memories right now. Where we are right now, that’s - that’s the most important place, innit?”

Jon smiled at him, and he knew, in the most mundane of ways, Martin was smiling back. “I like to think so too.”

“Ugh,” Daisy teased, although perhaps to an outsider it may have sounded mean, “get that sappy shit outta my face.”

“You’re just as bad with Basira,” Jon shot back, smiling. “You two are in love -”

“Take that shit back,” Daisy hissed. 

“You want to get married -”

“Who told you!”

Jon tapped the lens of his glasses smugly. “A little Eye told me.”

“Beholding cuck.”

“No, that’s Peter -”

“Martin would know all about Peter, huh?” Daisy sneered, and the pressure on Jon’s hand intensified for a brief second before it withdrew completely, leaving his hand cold and empty.

“Jon, can you give me and Daisy a few minutes of privacy, please?” Martin said pleasantly. 

Jon raised an eyebrow, licking the ice cream dripping down his hand. It was Vast flavor. Tasted like...ozone. “Why?”

“He doesn’t know the area, you can’t send him off alone,” Daisy shot back, strangely smugly. “Come on, Blackwood. Whatever you want to say to me, you can say it in front of him.”

“You know what, fine. Fine!” Martin thumped the table, making Jon start and Tireasias stiffen. “I have done nothing that warrants this kind of treatment from you. You are disrespecting me, disrespecting my relationship, and you are insulting my fucking intelligence. I appreciate you loaning us your cabin, but if I knew that it would come with strings attached then I would have paid for my own bloody hotel! Why are you doing this!”

“Tim gave me fifty quid,” Daisy said, like the wolf that had caught the canary. “Plus it’s fucking funny.”

“Done what?” Jon asked, confused. 

“I want you out of my vacation, Daisy,” Martin hissed. “If you won’t leave the cabin, then I am booking my own Air BnB and that’s fucking final! I don’t care if I have to - to fight you in the street about it, I can and I will, you don’t want to mess with me -”

“Sure.”

Martin stopped short. Jon licked his ice cream, fascinated by the drama. “What?”

“I said sure,” Daisy enunciated clearly. “I was waiting for you to fucking say it. I told Basira I’d be home by tonight, anyway. Knew you’d snap.”

“I - what! What! What?!”

“You’re a pushover, Blackwood,” Daisy said. “Your coworkers, your friends, everyone - they just walk all over you. It’s fucking stupid. You are the archival assistant who survived the apocalypse with memories and sanity intact. You lasted longer on the position than anyone since Emma Harvey, and you didn’t have to lose your soul to do it. You looked Elias in the face as you burned his Archives down. You’re not a pussy. And I was sick of seeing you act like one. It’s fucking annoying.”

“I hate you so fucking much,” Martin whispered, somewhat in shock. 

“Well, I hate seeing my best friend date a passive aggressive loser, so we’re both unhappy.” Daisy stood up, feet shuffling against the cement, and Jon felt her press a kiss against his forehead. “You two have a nice day out. I’m going to go hunt things, and head back to London. Take care of yourself, Jon. And cut out the PDA, it’s gross.”

Suddenly, violently, with a crushing realization, the entire vacation was recontextualized. 

“I don’t appreciate any of this,” Jon said crossly, scowling in her direction. “Honestly, Daisy, you don’t -”

“Blame Tim. Love you, Jon. Love you, sweet puppy. See you later, Blackwood.”

Jon and Martin sat in silence as the sound of footsteps receded from Jon’s hearing, and the low murmur of the small village set in around them. Martin still seemed to slightly be in shock, his ice cream slowly melting, and Tiresias yawned sleepily in the sun. 

“I hate her so fucking much,” Martin whispered. 

But Jon just smiled, and reached out to brush a thumb over Martin’s close-cropped hair. He leaned in, whispering into Martin’s ear. “Hearing you yell at the scariest woman I know who isn’t Gertrude Robinson was pretty fucking sexy, love.”

“I hate her so - wait, it was? Really?” Martin coughed awkwardly. “Well, she really had it coming, and it’s not a huge deal, and I know she’s your best friend and I should be nice to her, but -”

“ - but she was right,” Jon said firmly. “An arse about making her point, but she was right. I’m working on using my words. You should too. All of the books say communication is key in a relationship. So let’s communicate, alright?” He faltered a little, uncertain if Daisy would want him to say this. “And - and it was obvious, from what she said, that Daisy respects you. It’s a very difficult thing, to win Daisy’s respect. I think she was trying to help us, in her own - unorthodox manner.”

“I hate her so much,” Martin groaned. 

“It was very sexy,” Jon hinted. 

Martin leaned in and kissed Jon lightly, and Jon could feel his smile against his own. “How about we finish our food,” he said quietly, “walk around town for a bit, buy some souvenirs for your family, and then go back to the cabin and snog and cuddle for a very long time? If that’s okay with you?”

“I’d like nothing more,” Jon said. 

And he was right. It was messy, and weird, and painfully uncomfortable.

 It was perfect.

[rocketzealot]

——    CHARACTER  STUDY.

Tagged by:  @invictarre​ told me to steal it Tagging: Everyone who would like to have a go ;)

layer 001 :    the outside.

NAME  : Frederick “Fred” Ellsworth

EYE   COLOUR  : Brown, with a slight orange tinge

HAIR   STYLE   /   COLOUR  : Short, shaved back, looks like its touchably soft, like he “just woke up like that”, but really he spends a great deal of time getting it to look that way. Baby blonde.

CLOTHING   STYLE  : Likes a mish-mash of aesthetics. Bright, 90s call back fashion, graphic tanks, sports wear, plastic jewellery- a lot of trashy stuff he probably subconsciously picked up from his Mom. Also has a soft spot for oversized sweaters and hoodies.

BEST   PHYSICAL   FEATURE  :  These 💪  Guns 💪  Babey!

layer 002 :    the  inside.

FEARS  :  Loneliness. Humiliation. Manipulation. Death. Pikachu

GUILTY   PLEASURE  :  Slowpoke tails. Trashy pop. Slot machines.

BIGGEST   PET   PEEVE  :  Being underestimated. He feels talked over very often, or people assume he can’t do something, because he is stupid and small. He loves proving people wrong (when he can).

AMBITIONS   FOR   THE   FUTURE  :  Fred isn’t used to having ambitions. He’s never had one in his life, but for now, he just dreams of being acknowledged by his superiors. Every day he chases that feeling of ‘Well done, Ellsworth’.

layer 003 :   thoughts.

FIRST   THOUGHTS   WAKING   UP  : "Wassat? Wha’s goin’ on? Where am I s’posed t’be?”

WHAT   THEY   THINK   ABOUT   MOST  : Friendship :’) Fred would be an anime protagonist in another life or a cartoon horse.

WHAT   THEY   THINK   ABOUT   BEFORE   BED  :  Whatever he was just doing or whoever was just doing him. If it was setting his alarm, for example, he’s thinking about why he has to be up so early. If it was watching a video, it’s the contents of that video, maybe fantasising about the characters or hosts. He’s a simple man.

WHAT   THEY   THINK   THEIR   BEST   QUALITY   IS  : Oh no. Fred doesn’t have, in his opinion... a best quality. He may allow that some of his qualities are good. He tries hard, he loves his friends hard, he works out, but none of that really constitutes a best quality. He’s not that good, is he?

layer 004 :    what’s better ?

SINGLE   OR   GROUP   DATES  :  Groups! The more the merrier!

TO   BE   LOVED   OR   RESPECTED  : Hm. Tough one. He knows how no respect feels, but the instant gratification of ‘I love you’ is intoxicating.

BEAUTY   OR   BRAINS  : Fred vc: you chose books, I chose looks ✨

DOGS   OR   CATS  :  Dogs, obviously. But he’s not one of those dog people who thinks all cats are bastards, he’ll pat the HECK out of a friendly cat, and coo over how cute they are.

layer 005 :    do they…

LIE  :  Occasionally, but mostly to himself

BELIEVE   IN   THEMSELVES  : Sometimes, but mostly no.

BELIEVE   IN   LOVE  :  In a very hopeful, naive way, yes.

WANT   SOMEONE  : Not anyone in particular.

layer 006 :    have they ever…

BEEN   ON   STAGE  : Not unless you count a gym floor as a stage, no!

DONE   DRUGS  :  Yes, he has been offered weed on more than one occasion, but definitely couldn’t make a habit of it.

CHANGED   WHO   THEY   WERE   TO   FIT   IN  :  Yes.

layer 007 :    favourites.

FAVOURITE   COLOUR  :  Custard yellow, sunset orange, fuchsia pink... warm, holiday colours.

FAVOURITE   ANIMAL  : D-doggies owo

FAVOURITE   BOOK  : He’s not quite Jared, 19, but Fred doesn’t read unless he has to.

FAVOURITE   GAME  : He’s been getting lost in some gentle open world games, some dating sims and co-operative multiplayers recently. He’s... healing from the hurt of being friends with an aggressively competitive Smash player.

layer 008 :    age.

DAY   THEIR   NEXT   BIRTHDAY   WILL   BE  :  8th of July! Which next year is a Thursday!

HOW   OLD   WILL   THEY   BE  :  25! And it’s gonna be the last time I age him up on a birthday lmao.

layer 09 :    finish the sentence.

I   LOVE  :  "My friends!”

I   FEEL  : "Alright, I guess...”

I   HIDE  : "When Mr Proton finds out I ate his pudding :(”

I   MISS  : "Bein’ a kid.”

I   WISH  : "... I could have another go at this...”

[a-shiro-by-any-other-name]

Welcome Back (Shiro x F!Reader) N$FW

Hi guys! Here's a little something I've been working on for a long time that I forced myself to finish by Shiro's birthday. Happy birthday to everyone's favorite sexy space dad! ;3 

I hope someone out there enjoys it.

(The under the cut function on mobile is fuckin up and I cant fix it atm. My apologies)

To read on Ao3 under my main account CapsuleCorpDame:

https: //archiveofourown.org/works/17957087

        Shiro had finally returned to the Castle of Lions after disappearing. Relieved from the constant anxiety you felt in his absence, your emotions got the better of you. But before you could cover up your true feelings, he confessed his love to you. Later in the night he noticed you were wearing his shirt to sleep.

        “You can have it back if you want it.”

         “No- no, you can keep it. It looks good on you.” He smirked.

         “Are you sure?” You grabbed the bottom hem of your shirt with crossed arms about to lift it up past your shoulders. Slack-jawed and beet red he stared down at where your hands were.

“W-well….when you put it that way…”

“Y/N” Shiro stood there before you with his freshly cut hair and clean-shaven face. The day before, he had emerged from the shuttle with straggly long hair, a thin beard forming from his jaw. His haircut made him look more youthful than the undercut he had before. He was cleaner now, but you could still see the dark circles under his eyes. Of course you had been worried about him since he disappeared. The others were upset too but it showed on you and Keith the most. As stubborn as Keith was he didn’t want to talk much about it, and you didn’t want to burden anyone else with your pain; but it did show.

Upon his arrival you caught a glimpse of his disheveled face and ran off to your room to cry. To you it was irrational. You were happy he was back but who were you to him really? To sob in front of everyone was too embarrassing. You decided to wait for him to approach you first which didn’t take very long.

           Looking up at him you were speechless. You knew you looked like absolute hell and chose to bury your face in his chest, arms squeezing his waist tightly. Your breath hiccupped as the tears made their way onto his shirt.

“What- happened to you…?” It finally came out. He ran his fingers through your hair as you trembled against him, digging your nails into his sides, in an attempt to stable yourself.  

“I only remember escaping from a Galra ship on an escape pod. I have no memory of anything before that…” His other hand wrapped around your back. You grip on him loosened and you turned your head to press your forehead against his chest. A deep breath helped you compose yourself.

“I’m so glad you’re back.” You tried to smile at him knowing that your feelings for him were probably very apparent.

“I wanted to talk to you about something… do you mind if we take this to my room?”

Your heart skipped a beat. His room? Was its really that personal and private? Maybe he wanted to confront you about your feelings and didn’t want to embarrass you out in the open. You let go of his waist and nodded in acceptance. The two of you walked side by side in silence down the hallway. Shiro looked around when you approached his bedroom door, assuming it was to make sure no one was around to see. The door slid open and he ushered you in. It was amazing how immaculate his room was after all this time, the man sure was disciplined. He sat down at the edge of his perfectly-made bed and patted the spot next to him to signal you over. You tried to sit more comfortably than you felt but kept a small distance between you as to not seem so clingy.

“I’ve had a lot of time to think since I’ve been trying to get back to the castle…I had been trying to avoid talking about this for a while now until I saw how upset you just were.”

Involuntarily you gulped but tried to hold eye contact. Gears were turning in your head to try and find any words to stop him from finishing.

“I don’t want to hide it anymore. The gravity of our situation kept me from acting out on it but now I grasp that we could die at any time out here…”

What was he talking about? You suddenly realized this wasn’t about what you thought. “I’ve had feelings for you for some time now…and I don’t expect you to reciprocate them, but I wanted to tell you so that maybe we could move forward.”

“…What?” your mouth wouldn’t close. Did he just confess that he likes me?

“I- I don’t mean we have to have a romantic relationship! I just meant that if you didn’t feel the same that we could look past this and pretend it never happened!”

“I don’t understand… I’m a potato. Why would you want to be with a potato?”

He looked more confused than you. “A…potato? Why would you compare yourself to a potato? You don’t look anything like a potato, unless it’s because they’re delicious?”

You snort laughed at his response and covered your mouth, smashing your forehead into his shoulder. God he was so cute. You threw your arms around him in an embrace. “I don’t think I’ll ever comprehend why you like me, but I thought it was obvious that I liked you…”

He held you back tightly, pressing his nose to your temple. “I knew you cared for me, but I didn’t want to assume it was more than friendship. I really missed you… I was afraid I’d never get to tell you how I felt.” His breath tickled your ear as he spoke.    

“I always felt like I was just annoying you!” you practically shouted into his neck.

“I don’t think you’re annoying, I think you’re fun!” He pressed a kiss to your cheek and your face immediately became hot. “Does this mean…you want to give us a shot?” He pulled back to look at your face. He too had a blush on his cheeks under his scar. Agreeing that time was too short, you began to close your eyes and lean in to him. The tips of your noses slid past each other abruptly bringing your lips together sloppily. You could feel how smooth his lips were when you brushed by them.  It took a second to reform your lips for a proper kiss, aiming to place your lips around his bottom one. You had dreamt of this moment for so long the feeling was overwhelming. He initiated the second kiss gliding his hand from your hair across your jaw cradling your face. Outside the door you heard a small stampede passing by, a certain blue paladin shouting: “Dinner!” as if it were miracle.

“Maybe we should…” Shiro pulled away as if to suggest following them. You nodded in agreement, unsure of how the two of you would eventually reveal your relationship to the others. The two of you went to the dining hall rather awkwardly, at least to you. Throughout dinner you couldn’t help but steal glances at Shiro now that your brain was overclocked with thoughts of him. When he caught you, he would smile until someone distracted him with conversation. At one point he silently gestured you had goo left on your lip, to which you used your thumb to wipe it off before licking your thumb. It was innocent enough as you weren’t looking directly at him when you did it but the thought sparked something in him.

Dinner was over and it seemed that everyone decided to go their separate ways for the night. Shiro had said he was going to retire for the evening but you weren’t sure if you should talk to him further. Trying to keep a sense of normalcy you said nothing and went to your room to shower.  

Shiro wanted to continue being with you but was unsure what he would say. He ended up walking up to your door, stopping when he heard the sound of your voice. You were…singing. He rested his hand on the door, pausing to recall the times you had sung in the shower before. The words were often muffled but he still liked to sit outside your door to listen so long as he knew no one would come by and spot him. He took a seat next you your door for old time’s sake.

The shower had taken a tad bit longer than you planned once you decided to shave. Shave for what? Most of the time you didn’t care about your body hair since no one ever saw it but… maybe tonight…no. Outside the bedroom door sat Shiro, waiting until he felt enough time had passed to let you unwind after the shower. Hearing footsteps in the hallway he immediately got to up to go back to his room to avoid whoever it was. Given up, he decided to wait to talk to you tomorrow instead.

You lie down on your bed naked, chosen to air dry tonight. The sheets felt good against your newly smooth skin, but you couldn’t stay nude all night. You never knew when there’d be an emergency, and learned that the hard way. Over time you had secretly collected shirts from the other paladins (aside from Pidge since she was much smaller) to use as sleep attire. Hunk and Shiro’s shirts had proven to be most useful but when Shiro had disappeared you couldn’t help but take a few more from his room out of grief. The scent brought you comfort. His shirt and a pair of shorts would be your usual pajamas.

Lying in bed unable to sleep, you had no idea how much time had passed but you were growing restless. Boldly you chose to go bother Shiro, but it took you a while to finally get to the door. You contemplated what you would do if he were asleep. You couldn’t just wake him up after all he’s been through. The halls were dark and quiet except the faint sound of the video game you assumed Pidge was playing on the big screen in the common room. Taking a deep breath, you knocked on his door lightly.

“Shiro…?” You tried to stay quiet by bringing you mouth close to the door.

“Come in.”

You pressed the button on the code entry to have the door slide open for you. Back pressed against the headboard Shiro sat up in his bed. You stood in the door-way unsure of what to do. He waved you over with a smile. Practically jumping onto his bed

 “Is this my shirt?” He slipped his thumb into the back of your collar to look at the tag.

“Did Takashi Shirogane just look down the back of my shirt!?”

“Well technically it’s my shirt so…”

You play-slapped his chest in awe at his joke. “You can have it back if you want it.”

“No- no, you can keep it. It looks good on you.” He smirked.

“Are you sure?” You grabbed the bottom hem of your shirt with crossed arms about to lift it up past your shoulders. Slack-jawed and beet red he stared down at where your hands were.

“W-well….when you put it that way…” He touched his forehead to yours before pressing your hip back downwards to the bed. This was really happening! You slid your hands behind his neck to plant a kiss on him, gesturing approval. His Galra arm was positioned above your head, supporting his weight over you, as his left hand gently cupped around your hip. His mouth never left yours even when he paused to bite his lower lip in anticipation. You ran your fingers through his hair relishing the soft texture between your digits. Stealing glances at his face, you became proud at how intense his expression was as he hovered over you. His eyes stayed closed as you began to nudge his mouth open with the tilt of your head. You softly bit his bottom lip, arching your back as the kiss ended. This triggered him to let out a breathy exhale at the crook of your neck, sliding his rough hand up the hem of your shirt.

“Y/N… we shouldn’t…” But his mouth ended up on the soft spot of your neck.

You let out a gasp from the tingling sensation. “W-why not?” You raised your knee to graze your thigh against his groin, feeling a hard surprise. In response he ground into you, while bringing his thigh up against your wetness.

“Is this really what you want?” He completely stilled himself awaiting a response.

“Yes…” you thrust yourself against him again, this time attacking his neck with kisses.

With a groan he followed your rhythm with his hips, no longer concerned with any doubts he may have had. Over and over, he kept the pace, gradually increasing the pressure as much he could without inciting a burn. Your hands slid around his shoulders and down to the waistband of his sweatpants. Hooking your thumbs under the fabric, egging him on. He gave a husky growl, causing him to stop and trace both hands up your sides under the fabric, face buried in your neck, looking into your eyes asking for permission to continue. You arched your back and slid downwards on the bed, letting him glide the cloth up over your breasts and taking it completely off you. Immediately he nuzzled his face against your chest, gliding his tongue over your nipple. You produced a moan before he took it upon himself to knead the other nipple between his fingers.  

           “Jesus Christ!” Your thoughts were going wild and you resumed dry humping the life out of him. You grabbed at his shirt feeling his toned back, as you desperately wanted to feel his skin against yours. He paused when he realized this.

           “Y/N-” He didn’t bring his eyes to yours. “My body isn’t… all that pleasant to look at.” Imagining that he was referring to his scars, you reassured him.

           “I don’t believe that. I need to feel you against me.” You pulled at his shirt again with no more resistance from him. The poor man was battered and littered with pink, raised scars. Despite that he was of course jacked beyond belief. To avoid possibly seeing your shocked expression he immediately went back to fondling your chest with his tongue. You arched your back and relished in all the warmth this man was bathing you in. His fingers traced your skin downwards, leaving a tickling sensation behind before slipping his massive hand under both layers in your shorts. You let out a gasp at his bold gesture.

           “Nnhh you’re so wet.” His fingers were sliding around every crevice that was smothered in your wetness, trying to spread it was far as he could. Out of desperation you bucked your hips causing his finger to slide into you inadvertently. You both groaned in response. Immediately he pulled out and yanked your shorts and panties right off your hips. In slight embarrassment you clamped your thighs together, face turning an even brighter red.

           “Now now, no need to be self-conscious. Today we’re overcoming our insecurities, right?” He gingerly grabbed your thighs and pried them open, watching your expression to make sure you still wanted it. Your insecurity washed away as soon as he plunged his finger back inside you. It was thicker and deeper than your own fingers could ever go. Moaning, you moved against him in response. Taking the hint, he drew out his digit and slowly pushed it back in, feeling you from the inside. The wet sound and glistening image drove him over the edge. Using his other hand, he parted you open and dove in tongue first against your clit. You let out a long moan in pleasant surprise. It had been so long since you felt this good. His tongue lapped you up while his fingers filled you over and over; it was getting to be too much in the best way. Seeing the muscles on his back flexing as he fingered you was exciting you even more. “Oh fuck…” you couldn’t help but to moan as your back arched. It was too late to turn back; the intense stimulation had you seeing stars before you could stop yourself. Riding out the wave of pleasure; you knew it wasn’t going to be enough. He pulled away and wiped his mouth on his arm.

Reaching your fingers around the elastic of his pants, you began pulling them down away from his hips. You kissed him as leaned back, as he helped you undress him. Springing forth from his boxers his member looked strained for release, immediately hitting his stomach, erect.

As you egged him backwards towards the bed you crawled downwards to trace your tongue along his shaft. He let out a deep groan when you wrapped your lips around the tip. Unable to take him fully in your mouth, you used one hand to grasp the rest and the other hand slipped under his balls. You sucked him as far as your throat would let you without gagging. Rhythmically you slid him in and out making sure your tongue massaged every inch it could. His groaning was red-hot indulgence to your ears. You could tell he was trying not to slam dick down your throat. “Y/N…” your name escaped his lips. Hissing, he gently pushed you away from his groin to steal a kiss. Sliding his big hands under your ass, he scooped you towards him making sure your wet slit was pressed up against his crotch. Mouths intertwined, your hands around his neck, he pulled you back and fourth against him making sure you were good and soaked for him to enter. Gingerly, he slid the tip inside of you causing you both to shudder. Slowly pushing you towards the bottom of his shaft, Shiro let out a throaty moan, clearly excited. You could tell how tight you were by how big his dick felt inside you. You began to move gently against him knowing by his hesitation that he didn’t want to hurt you. Rolling your hips really helped to completely sheath him within you. He waited for you to move faster to be sure you were ready. You built up a steady pace before he started moving his hips with yours. The room was echoing with your panting breathes. One fist in his hair, you whispered in his ear :“I want you to feel good.” You found the soft spot on his neck and began to suck until he squeezed your ass in reaction.

With both hands he lifted you off him and pushed your back against the mattress. With both hands placed above your head he slid his dick back inside you. The new position let you feel his hard-sculpted body against yours, his pelvis rubbing against your clit with every push. Wrapping your arms and legs around him brought you closer. Although he was kissing you gently his pounding was forceful. He was beginning to lose control. Pumping in and out of you, his grunting became more erratic. Knowing that he was enjoying himself brought you great pleasure which you expressed by moaning loudly. “Y/N I can’t hold it much longer. Nngghh. You feel so fucking good.” This was exactly what you wanted to hear. “Takashi…please cum for me.” With those words he pounded you into the mattress. Back arching, you let out the build up that was growing within you. The deep hum of his groans and increased speed had you seeing stars. With one last deep thrust he hovered above you panting for air. He cradled you in for a soft kiss as he pulled out, rolling over so you could lay on top. Being there on his chest was all you’d been fantasizing about for months.

“Thank you…” He pressed his lips against your ear. “It’s felt like a lifetime since I’ve been able to immerse myself in anything other than fighting the Galra… You make me… happy.”

“I missed you so much Takashi.” Your words barely a whisper. “I’m glad I can bring you joy after all you’ve been through.” For the first time in years, the tears you shed were rooted in bliss.

[p-jiminaa]

Couple Game. (Part 2)

Jeon Jeongguk and  You

Summary: The game between you and him officially start.

Genre: Fluffy!!!!!!

Gif is not mine. Credit to the owner.

Masterlist

| Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 |  Part 7 |  Part 8 |  Part 9 | Part 10  | Part 11 |  Part 12 | Part 13 |  Part 14 | Part 15 | 

A ferrero chocolate bouquet placed in the middle of the dining table and when you walked towards the table, you spotted a small rose pink coloured envelope sat beside the bouquet but then you realized that the envelope was already open, meaning someone had read the content and that someone is none other than your mother.

Letting out a long breath you pick up the items before you heard her from behind. “My girl finally found a boyfriend.” She says cheerfully.

“Good Morning Mother.” You said it sternly before walking past her towards your bedroom. Really, one thing you asked your mother since day one you moved back with her is giving you your own privacy but then seems like unless you moved out again, you will never have your own privacy. 

“Don’t forget to introduce him to me.” You heard her as you were about to close the door. No, I would never introduce him to you. 

Putting the bouquet on your desk and picking up one of the chocolate and unwrapped it before you eat it, you took out the card from the small envelope. 

Can my baby bring me lunch today?

You rolled your eyes reading his short message that he wrote on the card. As if you could not sense that he’s planning something for you so that why he asked you to come to his company. 

***

Knocking on the door but open it nevertheless as you heard the blaring music from outside. You regrets your decision though. One because they just finished practicing their mic drop dance then suddenly they got into their formation where they turn their back towards you and when the music start, that when you regret your decision of coming earlier than usual. Two is because this song will mostly include the ‘hip thrust’ and you watched their dance practice on youtube and witness how hot your bestfriend are! Oh God, please save my heart today!

The moment the music start and when they turn to face the front, Jeongguk eyes laid on you and immediately let out a smirk. Oh God! He caught you. He must now can read your mind as he realized your uncomfortable facial expression and WHY out of the other day, he’s wearing the same outfits that he wore for the dance practice video.

You put the food on the desk situated at the back before the staff call you to sit with them which is in front of them. Why would they put a chair in front. How they are going to check their dance step or whatever mistake they made from the mirror. But you keep this question to yourself as you didn’t want to be rude to ask a question in the middle of the staff observing the members dance step. 

Never ever you thought that a three minutes song took a very long time to finish. Jeongguk eyes never left yours nevertheless especially during the ‘hip thrust’ part. That when he observed your expression the most. You were actually fine if he’s dancing this song without any expression on his face but then when he smirk or intentionally looking at you with a smug or lick his lips that when you can’t take it any longer other than moving your gaze to other members while blushing really hard. And when you think that the ‘hip thrust’ is the movement that going to give you a heart attack, guess you were wrong. During Yoongi and RM part where the members were supposed to be waiting or dancing beside them, Jeongguk intentionally walked to you and took that few seconds moment to tease you by dancing in front of you. Your heart really can’t take this and you kept your head down most of the time.

When the song ended, you stood up and stride towards the door and immediately went to the toilet. You need a water to cool you down. Hence the moment you open the tap, you splashed a water onto your face to cool you down. You look at yourself to the mirror. Oh Y/n! That was only a dance practice! But that made you go crazy. You pulled out a tissue and wipe out the water from your face. Thank God you wear waterproof makeup today and speaking of makeup! Since when did you even started to doll yourself up since all this time you would not really care about your appearance when you’re meeting him. Guess you really took this challenge seriously. Well its disneyland ticket. Who wouldn’t want that?

When you were exiting the loo, you almost jump when his voice startles you. “I think I almost got your heart.” Instantly, you turn towards the source of the voice and there he is standing beside the door with a devilish grin plastered on his face. 

“You wish.” You said it casually, trying to camouflage your true feelings. 

He scooted closer to you slowly while his eyes stayed on you. When he’s standing an inch closer, he stop and slowly lean down to your level. He wrapped his arms around your body. Surprised by his action you put up both of your hand on his chest, trying to push him away but then his grip was tight on your lower waist when you try to push him. He is definitely entertained by your reaction as you see his lips tuck upwards. 

“Baby...” His said it with deep voice. Did he just call you Baby? The sudden used of pet name caused your heart bounced at your chest and you just love the way it rolled his tongue. There was a long stretch of silence and just when you’re about to imagine something romantic going to happen, he spoilt it by saying “On your next visit, prepare a towel for me. That what a girlfriend should do.” He smile when he witness you flustered expression and he let you go and walk back towards the dance practice room again. You saw his satisfied smile when he saw your flustered expression. God Y/n! You really need to mask your feeling and not to let it shown easily. 

You let out a long breath before entering the dance practice studio again. You saw Jeongguk already took out the food that you brought earlier. When he realized you’re walking towards him he turn. “Thank you for the food Noona.” He says as he took a sit on the chair. He acted as if he did not just made your heart flutter earlier.

“Y/n... Come sit here.” Taehyung call you and invited you to sit beside him just across Jeongguk. You don’t even know if his members know about the ‘couple game’ between you and him but seeing his members look when you entered earlier, yes they knew about it. 

Jeongguk happily eat the food that you bought and when he realized your eyes on him, he look up at you and wink his eyes before continuing to eat his food again. Fine! You’re going to play it like this. Then I hope you’re ready for your fate.

***

Baby, I miss you.

It’s only been five hours since the last time you saw him which is during the lunch time earlier.

I am coming, any minutes from now. 

You press on the lock button before walking towards the entrance of their apartment. This was actually supposed to be a surprise visit but then guess you’re unable to hide it anymore since he texted you when you’re about to get out from your car. Not like you have to tell him about your arrival but then logically thinking, he’s unable to prepare anything now.

“Kookie...” You called him the moment you open his door but you shut your eyes tightly when your eyes laid on Jeongguk who is only wrapped with towel and still with wet hairs. “What the... Jeongguk Why are you naked!” You blurted out. He’s not even naked! Guess you were just startles seeing him only with his towel or his body to be exact! You heard his soft chuckles. Did he intentionally did this? But how? It’s not like he has time to prepare... ah whatever.

“Cute.” He mumbles and you felt him moving closer to you so you put one hand up to stop him. “Wear your shirt or I’ll shout.” Your word doesn’t even make sense right now. It’s not like your shout would actually change anything. Well since the members knew about this game so your shout would not make them run to Jeongguk room right away. 

“Can you like... do it faster.” You says to him as you heard some sound which you assumed he’s trying to put on his shirt or pant? You just don’t want to know about it as long as he covered himself.

“You can open your eyes now Y/n. I am presentable.” You open your right eye first, and when you see him wearing his white t-shirt and black puma sport pant you then open your left eyes. You close the door behind you and he took a sit on the edge of the bed.

“I hate you.” You blurted out while taking a sit on the chair in front of his laptop.

“I thought girl love to see my abs.” You turn your head to face him with raised eyebrows and give him a look. “I mean is everytime I pull up my shirt during the fake love song, army go crazy.” He says it proudly. You rolled your eyes to this. “Guess that does not applicable to you which is kind of surprising. Are you perhaps not straight Y/n?”

“Are you seriously asking me that?” You asked him as if you dare him to say no.

“I am.” He answered you back.

You let out a smirk and without thinking much about it, you immediately stride towards him and without giving him a warning, you placed a kiss on his lips. He was of course shock as he did not expect your move and you witness his eyes widened as your lips touched him and before he's able to reciprocate the kiss, you pull yourself from him.

“Did that answer your question?” You asked him with a small smile plastered on your face. His eyes blink few times, as if he could not just believe that happens moment ago. You then realized his reddening cheek and sensing that you realized that he’s in fact surprise by your action, he stood up and went outside the room. You burst into a fit of laugh as you could not believe at what you just witness. Did he just get flustered from the kiss? And he’s the one that wanted to do this game.

You heard the door open and Jeongguk blocked your view from watching the TV. “What you have done earlier was unfair!” He says while crossing his arms. 

“Since when did you play fairly?” You retorted. As if showing his ‘hip thrust’ earlier was a fair play. 

He rolled his eyes. He’s sulking, again!

You patted the space beside you but you know how stubborn he is, he stayed there until you throw one of his pillow and that when he moves and sat beside you on the bed while back resting on the headrest. He then placed his head on your shoulder and intertwined your hand with him. This really make it look like you were both a couple.

“But Baby, we agreed not to fuc* each other.” You wanted to laugh when he say the F*** word but you resist your laugh because you have a better idea to make him regret his doing earlier. 

“It’s just a kiss Kookie.” You glanced down towards your hand. You’re now unable to concentrate to the movie you’re watching.

He then whispers to your ear. “But Baby, what if I can’t control myself and that happens.” You were of course surprised by his statement but then remembering what he did earlier today, you smirked devilishly. He thought he’s winning as you did not respond to his statement as he turned his to you but you leaned in and whisper back to him in the most romantic voice you could use.

“Let it happen then.” His eyes widened, his face is red as potato  and you see him biting his lower lip when you utter that. Not only that, you go on with another action by giving him a peck of kiss on his lips and pull yourself from him.

“Dream about it tonight.” Again you said it in whisper but you make sure he’s able to hear it. You stood up, leaving him still frozen in his place.

“Y/n... you’re not suppose to win this!” You heard his shout when you’re about to close the door. You shook your head in disbelief that the action you did earlier made his heart beat so fast. Did you actually successfully made his heart flutter today. Can’t really believe that it so easy to make him flutter.

PS: Anyone who wanted to feel ‘the oc hardship’ or wanted to scream watching Jk ‘hip thrust’, his facial expression, how Jungkook go from cute Kookie to Hot Jungkook in general, you are invited to search Baepsae dance practice. 

[caranfindel]

Recap/review 14.04: “Mint Condition “

THEN: Michael's gone. Supposedly. Dean feels bad. Ghosts are a thing. Salt circles. Monster Kaia's magic spear.

NOW: A comic book/collectibles store. The camera pans over a variety of figurines and memorabilia, including a poster for the movie Hell Hazers, which you may remember from Hollywood Babylon, (thank you, Continuity Fairy!) and briefly pauses on a poster for the movie All Saints' Day before showing a television. Someone's watching Shocker TV, showing scary movies "24 hours a day, all week long." We see clips from Route 666 and that movie they were filming in Hollywood Babylon, whose name escapes me, as well as from a movie we will eventually find out is All Saint's Day. Cut to a guy unpacking a box of collectibles under the watchful eye of a long-haired freak right out of All Saints' Day. I keep waiting for this guy to realize he's being watched, but I am the one who eventually comes to a realization - that's not a guy, it's a statue.

The guy unpacks a box and literally drops it in shock. Because it's haunted, right? No, it's just a Thundercats collectible figure Panthro, in its original box. (No one in my house knows anything about Thundercats, but I assume this is a real character.) He stuffs the box in a backpack, and then his phone rings. The incoming call is a video call, which is weird, because people this age don't even call each other, let alone via video, but it makes for better television, so we'll let it go.

The caller is a girl named Sam, who is apparently his boss. She immediately starts berating the guy for his bad customer service, which resulted in a negative Yelp review. He promises to do better and confirms that she's coming over for game night. Stewart picks up his bag and a set of keys on a Batman keyring and locks up the store, under the watchful eye of the creepy statue.

(Boy, this is a lot of recap before we even get to the title card...)

We see Stewart at his house, arguing with a pizza delivery place. Panthro is sitting on a table and he turns and looks at him. It's surprisingly well done, BTW. Stewart turns to see Panthro on the floor, gets closer, watches Panthro swing his mace, and then screams.

Title card!

Bunker. Dean's lying on his bed, eating pizza and watching Hatchet Man: All Saints' Day, which is a gloriously cheesy salute to the 80s. Well, I'm glad he finally got a TV in his room, but does this mean the Fortress of Deanitude is no more? Is it full of refugee hunters now? Aw, that's sad.

{Sidebar: I wonder if this movie is called All Saints' Day because they knew the episode would be shown on All Saints' Day, and were being meta/clever? Or is it just supposed to be a riff on the Halloween franchise?}

Sam comes in and asks what he's doing, and when Dean looks up, he's shocked to see the Beard of Despair is gone. "Why are you so surprised?" Sam says. "Obviously, judging from my glorious scruff, it's been a few days since I shaved. Have you really not seen me in a day or two?" (No, he doesn't really say that.) But Dean says "it's so smooth; it's like a dolphin's belly." And it's not. It's really not. And as much as I love the scruff - which is quite a bit - I'd also like to see Sam's pretty face smooth as a dolphin's belly sometime. Just sayin'.

Sam (still) wonders if Dean's okay, since he hasn't really come out of his room in a week, which I guess explains how he missed the Big Shave. Dean expositions that Cas is "showing Jack the ropes," because if Jack wants to learn how to be a hunter, there's no better teacher than Cas, right? Absolutely no one. And with Monster!Kaia and Michael "in the wind," and his home full of strangers, Dean apparently figures he's got nothing better to do than hole up in his room watching Hatchet Man movies. (Is Hatchet Man the franchise, and All Saints' Day just one of the titles? I'm having trouble getting a grip on this.)

He knows Sam doesn't get it, because Sam doesn't even like scary movies. "Our life is a scary movie," Sam points out. And speaking of which, he's found a case. He shows Dean a YouTube video of a bloodied Stewart describing his Panthro attack, and I wish I could take credit for this catch, but I saw it on Tumblr... look at the left side of the screen. The "Recommended for You" videos are about zombies, a conspiracy theory, and how to clean your sink, which are all very interesting, but look at the "Up Next" video.

IT'S A FUNNY CAT VIDEO. HAS SAM BEEN WATCHING FUNNY CAT VIDEOS?

Oh, Sammy knows just what he's doing, and I love him for it. He's all, we don't have to take this case involving KILLER THUNDERCAT TOYS if you're not interested, but he's got Dean exactly where he wants him.

His smug little face at the end of this scene gives me life.

Guys, I was so ready for this. A MotW, and Sam giving Dean a hunt he knows he'll enjoy just to help him kick his Michael blues... This is the show I'm here for!

The guys show up at the comic book store dressed like absolute dorks, in short-sleeved shirts and ties. Sam has a pocket protector. I don't know why. But it's single-layer Winchesters and I'm gonna embrace it. Looks like this episode is happening on Halloween and not on All Saints' Day, because they're accosted by costumed children outside the store. Dean comments that Sam still isn't a fan of Halloween (which we've known ever since the pilot; thanks again to the Continuity Fairy). Sam confirms.

Apparently this red mask is a character Jensen voiced in an animation? And of course Jared was in House of Wax. Pretty deep meta here, Show.

BossLady!Sam is there, wearing a red plaid shirt, and Dean comments that she's like Sam's twin. "I don't know what you're talking about," Sam says, as he and BossLady!Sam tuck their hair behind their ears in sync, and I die.

That’s me, in a puddle on the floor.

“Soft, delicate features," Dean points out. "Luxurious hair. She's like your Wonder Twin." All of this is true, Dean, and good on you for noticing that your brother has soft, delicate features and luxurious hair. Sam notices a guy stocking the shelves - black All Saints' Day t-shirt, shortish spiky hair, lollipop just like the one Dean snagged at the door - and says "if that's me, then that's you over there."

Dean's distracted (and delighted) by the Hatchet Man statue, giving him the name David Yaeger. {Sidebar: did you know the word jager means hunter in German?} His doppelganger encourages him to push a button that plays his catch phrases from the movie, including "we all do bad things sometimes." Which is, like Dean's motto. Dean's joy is infectious and adorable.

BossLady!Sam finishes her business with the police and asks what she can do to help the guys, offering "Funko Pops, Magic cards," and given the number of Supernatural Funko Pops decorating my office, I'm pleased with that shout-out. Sam asks about Stewart as Dean asks about vintage Hot Wheels, and Dean, I am very sad to inform you that Hot Wheels apparently never made a 1967 Chevy Impala.

The guys introduce themselves as Ian Gillan and Ritchie Blackmore (Deep Purple, The Husband points out) from Campbell and Sons Insurance (hee!), wanting to speak to Stewart. Presumably not about Hot Wheels, unless he got run over by one. They'd gone to his place, but his roommate said he moved out. Or got kicked out. BossLady!Sam explains that Stewart is an "acquired taste" who makes a lot of online enemies, and he can be found at his mom's house.

I still don't understand why the guys are dressed like nerds. Is it a Halloween costume? Because we've seen them as insurance agents before, and they were wearing regular suits.

Mom's house. Mom puts a couple of mugs on the table - one is a superhero (Flash, maybe?) and one is decorated with cats - and announces that Stewie will be up in just a minute. Dean reaches for the superhero mug, even though it was placed in front of Sam, but the joke's on you, Dean, because we now know Sam likes cats! But more importantly, Dean has added a pair of black Clark Kent eyeglasses to his getup. WHY? I mean, it's hilarious, but WHY?

I DON'T KNOW WHAT'S GOING ON HERE.

We hear Stewart pitching a fit in the basement. He stomps upstairs and sees the Winchesters, and I know the guy in the store was supposed to be Dean's avatar, but this guy is wearing a RED SHIRT WITH A SQUIRREL ON IT. COME ON .

Truly a Red Shirt of Bad Decisions.

We learn that Sam is aware of Fortnight, and Dean notices the smell of burning sage. Stewart explains that he dated a goth chick who told him it would bring good luck, but he broke up before they could "merl." Dean's as confused as I am about "merl," but Sam explains it's MIRL - Meet In Real Life. Dean asks how he knows what that means, and Sam very quickly changes the subject. And this opens up all sorts of interesting possibilities, doesn't it, regarding Sam's online activities and his knowledge of MIRLing, and that would certainly be an entertaining rabbit hole to go down, and I hope some of y'all indulge in that, fic-wise or meta-wise or whatever. I look forward to reading it.

Anyway. Sam asks about the Panthro attack, and Stewart jumps in to say he made it up. When Dean presses, he gets mad and kicks them out of the house and then we cut to an exterior shot and WHAT THE FUCK? NOW DEAN HAS A TACKY CHECKERED BLAZER? It's like he's slowly turning into Matt Foley from SNL. At some point in this episode he's got to say something about living in a van down by the river.

Dean refers to Stewart as "Big Bang," which reminds me that I meant to ask, when we first learned his name, if he was a shout-out to Stewart the comic book store owner on Big Bang Theory. {Sidebar: Would this be a reciprocal shout-out, since that show has a character named Kripke? Is there a connection I don't know about?} Given Stewart's Wiccan girlfriend, they think the toy might have been under a spell, and they decide to check the house for hex bags later. Although I don't know how she would have left any in the house, since they never MIRLed.

Later. The guys are sitting in the car, still outside Stewart's house, when a little lumberjack and vampire walk by. Look, it’s Dean and Benny!

Sam’s instructing someone to use lamb's blood and "stay safe," because he's still Chief, Dean, whether you like it or not. Dean asks "seriously, what is your deal with Halloween," and "don't give me that 'every day is Halloween for us' crap." It's kind of odd that he doesn't already know. I mean, we already know. His life is Halloween. And his mother died two days after Halloween. {Sidebar: Is it just headcanon, fueled by fanfic, that John got blind stupid drunk every year around the anniversary of Mary's death? Or is that canon?} The conversation is interrupted when Stewart's mom leaves the house, and the guys have to duck - toward each other - to avoid being seen. It's ridiculous and hilarious and I love it.

Dean could have just taken off the Clark Kent glasses.

Sam suspects Stewart changed his story because he's being brutally mocked online. And he won't say the word bitch. Is this something we can't do now that we're airing at an earlier hour, Show? Then Stewart comes out of the house, bloody and screaming for help. Dean goes inside, gun drawn, and follows a trail of blood to Stewart's man cave (um, boy cave?). As he gazes at a Texas Chainsaw Massacre poster, he hears a chain saw, which hurtles into the room and barely misses his pretty head.

Hospital. Stewart's mom, still in costume, sits at his side and thanks the guys for saving his life. She wants to go home and get his favorite pillow, but they convince her to stay. "Everything's fine," Dean tells her. "Everything is not fine," he says to Sam, as they leave the room. He says he swept the room for hex bags and found nothing, but the EMF went crazy. So it's a ghost. Hey, guys, you should have watched the "Then." We already knew that. Dean is going to stay at the hospital and keep Mom from going back to the house, while Sam asks around to see if anybody "got dead lately."

At the house, Sam finds the light switch in the Den of Stewartitude doesn't work, even though a lamp and computer monitors are turned on in the room. He laughs at himself for being startled by the Panthro toy and says "nice, Sam, smooth," and for some reason this just almost makes my heart burst open. The toy isn't putting off EMF now, which he finds odd. Then he looks at one of the monitors and sees a group photo of Stewart, LadyBoss!Sam, Dean's doppelganger, and an older man.

Back at the hospital, Dean's doppelganger is standing outside Stewart's darkened room. He is wearing an army green canvas jacket and has acquired some scruff of his own and he's just such a precious little mini Dean; I can't stand it. He asks what Dean's doing there, and Dean says he's just keeping an eye on Stewart. "He must have awesome insurance," Doppelganger says. Which is very funny, and also very Dean, because he says "awesome" so much. I love it.

Dirk explains that Stewart is a jerk, but he's his best friend, and he's there when Dirk needs him. They eat pizza and watch movies and who else does that, my friends? You know who. Then the guys bond over their love of scary movies, and it looks like the franchise is actually called All Saints' Day. I'm sure you were really dying to know. Stewart comments that no hospital would ever be that empty, and Dean says he's been to a lot of hospitals at night, and "trust me, it gets pretty empty," and at first that's just heartbreaking because I figure he was at these hospitals because John or Sam were injured. But maybe he's just thinking about hunts in hospitals. (Again, I need to differentiate fic-fueled headcanon from actual canon.) And then Dean says he likes to watch movies "where I know the bad guy's gonna lose" and yep, my heart is definitely broken.

Sam shows up at the store and asks BossLady!Sam if anyone close to Stewart has died lately. She explains that Jordan, who used to own the store, was kind of a Willy Wonka to her, Stewart, and Dirk (Aha! His name is Dirk! Which is close to Dean, and hasn't Dean actually been called Dirk before?). He died and left the store to BossLady!Sam and Dirk. Not Stewart, because he fired him twice for stealing. But she hired him back because he's a friend. It seems like Stewart has better friends than he deserves. She tells Sam that Jordan was cremated, and then we see something frosting over behind her.

Sam is adorable, trying to look casual as he pulls out his EMF meter and it lights up like a Christmas tree. He tells her it's a carbon monoxide detector and she needs to leave. He starts to tell her she's in danger, and then the David Yeager statue smacks him into the comic book display and knocks him out cold. Even though he hits it with his back. (Handwave!)

When he wakes up, BossLady!Sam is terrified but unhurt. She gets a quick version of the "monsters are real" speech and finds that the door is locked, and Hatchet Man took the keys. He throws something at the door, but it's shatterproof glass. Apparently Jordan was serious about thieves, which explains why he's so keen on killing Stewart, that Panthro-stealing little asshole.

He calls Dean, who's fanboying with Dirk about horror movies, and tells him it's Jordan's ghost. And the David Yaeger figure is on its way. Dean can hardly believe his luck. He pours a ring of salt around Stewart's bed, having given him the speech, and orders him to stay in it. Boy, it's a good thing they reminded us what salt is for in the "Then," or else we'd be really confused right now.

Store. BossLady!Sam figured out what I did, that Jordan wants to kill Stewart because he's a thief. She says she's been taking money out of his check to pay for what he steals, but Jordan wouldn't know that. Sam breaks his lockpick, and then asks if they have any cleaning supplies.

Hospital. Ghost stuff starts happening in Stewart's room, and Dirk panics and flees. Dean takes a hatchet out of a fire emergency box, even though I think that would probably set off a fire alarm. (Handwave!) Dirk's mom is carrying a tray of food from the cafeteria and comes across the Yaeger figure. She drops her tray and screams, just like the woman in the movie. Dirk shows up and puts on a stern face and tells Jordan that if he's going to kill his friend, he has to go through him. Oh Dirk, you sweet little thing, you're channeling Dean so hard now and I adore you. Jordan does come for Dirk, who says "crap" and runs off. There's a funny sequence where we cut back and forth between Dirk and some hospital guards who are watching All Saints' Day and ignoring the actual mayhem happening on their monitors.

Meanwhile, Sam is mixing drain cleaner and something else in a Scooby Doo lunchbox. {Sidebar: I'm not a Scooby Doo fan, but I love the show's constant references to it and the way the Continuity Fairy always remembers Dean's a fan.} BossLady!Sam asks how he learned to do this, and he says "I had a messed up childhood." It's funny because it's true. He hangs the lunchbox bomb on the door and they hide behind the desk. After it blows the door open, they both slowly peek over the desk and simultaneously say "cool." I'm starting to love Sam and his little doppelganger too.

Hospital. Dirk hides in the morgue (no, Dirk, never in the morgue!) and gets a scary hand on his shoulder, but it's Dean. Then a body on one of the gurneys sits up. Yeah, it's Yaeger.

At this point there's a fake movie promo for All Saints' Day III: The Reckoning. It starts out "Three Years Ago," which reminds me very much of a certain scene that starts out "Twenty two years ago." Looks like David Yaeger was killed in a fire on October 31, 1983, which is two days before Mary Winchester dies in a fire. Oh, you clever, clever show.

Back to the show. Dean gleefully fights the Yaeger figure. At least he's gleeful until it seems he's not doing very well. Sam and BossLady!Sam show up, and she's wearing Jared's coat from the EW Halloween photoshoot last year.

Bless you, Show.

She figures out that Jordan must be attached to the Batman keychain. Meanwhile, Dean is cornered, and about to get axed, when precious little badass Dirk stabs Jordan in the back. It doesn't kill him, of course, but it gives Dean a chance to get up and start losing the fight again. The Sams run in and BossLady!Sam figures out that alcohol will help them burn the keychain faster. Whoosh! There goes Jordan, and the statue falls lifeless to the floor.

Aftermath. The guys tell Dirk and BossLady!Sam that everyone is safe now. The Impala scene starts with Dean thanking Sam for "giving me a win." Sam asks him to stop hiding out in his room. "What happened with Michael, you said yes for me, for Jack, for your family. You did the right thing." He says nothing Michael did afterward is Dean's fault, and he needs to stop blaming himself.

"I'm never gonna get over it, okay?" Dean says. "I'm just not." And once again, Sam could say "yes, I understand how you feel, because I've been there too," not to make this all about him, but just to commiserate and show Dean that he's not just blowing off his horrific experience, he knows how bad it was and he might have some good ideas about getting past it. And once again, he does not. But that's okay. What isn't okay is what happens next. Dean asks again why Sam hates Halloween, and Sam tells some ridiculous story about having a crush on a girl in sixth grade and throwing up on her at her Halloween party, and you know what? I just refuse to accept this. WE KNOW WHY SAM HATES HALLOWEEN. AND IT HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH A GIRL IN SIXTH GRADE. I don't know why you're doing this to me, Davy Perez. You're usually so good about canon. I cannot accept that Sam Winchester, whose entire life has been Halloween, whose mother died two days after Halloween, is distressed because of something that happened in sixth grade. I'm going to pretend this part never happened. Who's with me?

Dean says that next year, he and Sam are going to wear couples costumes (and if you happened to be wearing your shipping goggles, I think I heard you squealing). Batman and Robin. Bert and Ernie. (!) Rocky and Bullwinkle. (!!) Shaggy and Scooby. Turner and Hooch. Ren and Stimpy. Thelma and Louise. "We just it in drive and go." {Sidebar: Who wants the show to end that way, Thelma and Louise style?}

Meanwhile, back at the hospital, one of those useless security guards finds the Yaeger figure in the morgue. The guys left it there? Oh well. It's a good horror movie ending.

So! For the most part, this was just what I needed after three episodes of mytharc. A good MOTW with lots of humor and nods to canon. On the other hand, there's that one thing. But since I'm ignoring that one thing, I guess this was a fantastic episode! What did you guys think?

Please help me stay unspoiled, thanks!

[miximax-hell]

There have been people, some truly wonderful souls, who have followed my blog during my long period of absence. For that, thank you. Thank you from the bottom of my heart. I don’t deserve that kindness. With that out of the way, hello! Once again, it’s been so long... And that’s exactly we won’t delve in the past now. Let’s get right to it!

Today’s miximax is one that can barely be recognised at all unless you’re specifically told who the vessel and aura are. So, just in case my handwriting is THAT awful, we’ll be talking about Sakuma’s miximax today! For him, I’ve chosen a wonderful character that is, quite literally, part of the history of videogames as a whole. After the news about a new Smash coming soon, the promise of Metroid Prime 4 for Switch, and the very successful (AND SPANISH) remake of Metroid II, it feels like a great time to bring Samus Aran into the battle! The coolest intergalactic bounty hunter there ever was makes for a very simple-looking miximax, but it was still quite tough to draw because of RUST. Ah well. No one to blame but myself.

Anyway, I think this deserves a proper explanation, so let’s see why these two make for a fantastic combo! For more on that, please check under the cut. As usual.

Well, you’ve made it this far, so let’s delve a little in the past now. ww Just yesterday, I finally finished writing my graduation thesis!! That means I’m finally free... for a little while. Just enough to enjoy half a month of debauchery AND SPEND TIME WITH MY GIRLFRIEND, WHOM I MISS VERY MUCH. Oh, and my internship ended about two and a half weeks ago, too. While I am free in that sense as well, I can’t say I’m a scriptwriter and game designer right now, which kinda sucks. But they might still hire me...! And I’m ruminating some exciting ideas of my own. I highly doubt the company I worked for will be interested in them, but, well, it’s worth a shot. And good practice, in any case. So, yeah! I hope you’ve all been well!

Anyway, let’s get right to it. A single paragraph of my life struggles was enough. ww

This is still a fairly small blog with less than 100 followers. And it will always be because of how niche it is. ww Not only that, but most of said (active) followers aren’t even friends of mine, but the aforementioned kind souls who, somehow, grace me with their presence here. That means that, for example, if I were to go on Twitter to talk about my projects for this blog (as I’ve done a couple of times in the past), only one or two of my friends would give a crap about it. And that’s assuming they see those specific tweets at all! Otherwise, the reactions I get are non-existent unless I’m specifically mentioning someone. And even that is far from being failproof. So, whenever I want to share my ideas with someone, develop them through conversation or brainstorm, there’s only one person I can rely on: my lovely girlfriend. She’s patient and super supportive of my work. Bless her soul. I’m so in love with her.

Anyway, thanks to how much I’ve ranted to her about SakuSamus, I’ve already typed down most of what needs to be said about why I think these two work so well together. I can also get away with mostly copying and pasting what I already told her over Skype and simply adjusting it a bit to make it more readable as a blog post and adding some extra details. ww So, let’s get to it!

Coming up with proper combinations for this blog can sometimes be a chore and require a lot of overthinking. However, as the wonderful @miyukiko​ would say, great ideas suddenly come to you sometimes. This had a bit of both. I'll try to skip the uninteresting bits of the creative process, but this is the important part.

Now that we've seen Sakuma in Ares and he's obviously won a lot of... prominence, if you may put it that way, it felt like a good time to take a closer look at him. Sakuma is a forward, and a pretty talented one, at that. When he becomes captain in the Ares timeline, though, his team comes to rely on him on a much deeper level too. Or so it seems, at least. To top it off, his descriptions in the original games say that he helps Kidou and acts as a strategist that coordinates the team. That’s pretty much the base we can build upon.

As a forward, he seems pretty thorough and tries to stay cool and calm, since that's the kind of soccer they play at Teikoku. And, from what we've seen in Ares, as a captain, he worries so much about his team's well-being and about being a good leader for them. You know, the usual "Am I fit to be captain?" thing that IE loves so much. ww

But there's a lot of bad stuff about Sakuma, too.

For one, despite his cool act, when he loses it, he loses it good. We all know how he reacted when he was part of Shin Teikoku and how extremely mad he would get with Kageyama, for example. Also, when he does lose it (and, arguably, even when he’s still somewhat sane), he's very self-destructive.

I think that's somehow linked to his fears: he simply doesn't want to be left alone. He panics when Kidou leaves Teikoku and, again, loses it completely. When his insanity reaches that kind of point, nothing else seems to matter, so he goes all out even if it can cost him his life. Or his legs, at least.

Related to that, and this is much more relevant in terms of sheer gameplay, he is extremely dependent of others.

He's supposed to be some super cool ace striker, but absolutely all of his shots are combo hissatsus no matter what timeline or age you’re looking at. Koutei Penguin 2gou and 3gou, Twin Boost, Death Zone, Deep Jungle... They all need 2-3 people, and, usually, Kidou's involved.

So, tough as it is to say, if Sakuma isn't by Kidou's side, he's subpar. And if he's all alone, he's basically worthless. And to add insult to injury:

He usually depends on people who aren't even forwards to score goals.

He is turned into a defender as an adult because, as I said, he's subpar as a forward if he's alone.

That makes Sakuma a very interesting case: in a universe that is all about the power you get from of your teammates, what he lacks is individuality. ...Especially when you consider that his only motivation to play soccer seems to be to play with Kidou. www

As he is, he's the absolute definition of support character. Pretty sad, if you ask me. (Oh. And many of his in-game hissatsus are very dirty and the referee complains more often than not about them. That counts too. ww)

So, here comes the difficult question: who can give Sakuma the strength, the individuality and, partially, the safety that he needs to be relevant without killing himself? After thinking about it for quite a long time, I felt like he could really use the power of Samus Aran.

(Not to go all BuzzFeed on you guys, but the answer would’ve surprised you if I hadn’t said it from the very beginning. ww)

On a technical level, Samus is strong af. Not only has she survived to and successfully finished every mission she's embarked on (as far as I’m aware), but she's pretty much exterminated full races, DESTROYED PLANETS and killed the same evil pterodactyl alien... thing that wants her dead like 11 times by now.

And what's more: she's done all of this completely alone. (Except maybe for Other M. I haven’t played that game yet, but it looked like there were more people, idk) All in all, she's a beast. But that's not all, of course. There are many heroes who go and do their thing alone. It could've easily been Lara Croft too, for example--at least in the original games.

Sakuma, as I said, seems to be driven by a will to be with Kidou and is very much dependent of other people. And when things go wrong and he loses it, he is... spiteful, to say the least. And I don’t know if you guys were aware of this, but Samus is 120% salt. I read a post about the hatred between Ridley and Samus that when Ridley was announced for Smash and all, but I sadly can’t find it right now. If any of you guys know that post, please let me know and I’ll add the link here because it was SO GOOD.

According to my limited knowledge on the Metroid Series, Samus fights three main things: metroids (you never saw that one coming, I'm sure), space pirates, and Ridley (who is the leader of the space pirates, but is not a space pirate because I, too, would listen to my Evil Pterodactyl Lord if he were to give me orders).

Long story short, the space pirates and Ridley killed Samus’s parents. She was adopted by people from a civilization called the Chozo, but the space pirates killed the Chozo too. And when Samus found a baby metroid that saw her as its mother, the space pirates and Ridley kidnapped the metroid and it eventually died because of them.

Samus doesn't fight for the greater good. Samus fights because she's fucking pissed.

But, unlike Sakuma, she uses that rage against the right people and in the right way: she is still salty as hell, but she stays cool, kicks ass, makes everyone go boom, and she's out. She does what Sakuma does, but better. Even when she's pissed. Oh, and she does things the way they should be done: with legal permission, without turning evil and stuff. And she's super respected and feared because of it, which is precisely what a captain and a forward should be like, respectively.

And the icing on the cake?

In IE3, when Sakuma has levelled up enough, he learns how to use Space Penguin. also, Samus has a visor thing that can replace Sakuma's patch and that sounded cool to me

Anyway, that would be the gist of it! As I said earlier, I’m not the biggest Metroid connoisseur in the world: I’ve only beaten Fusion and Zero Mission, and I’m currently playing Prime and Return of Samus. As such, excuse me if some other game I haven’t played debunks all I’ve said, but I haven’t found any traces of such a thing. ww

However, despite my few experiences with Metroid games, Samus is a character I love and have very fond memories of. This series represent what I love the most about the video game genre: that sense of continuous and hard-earned improvement that only comes from experiences that are constantly giving you new abilities (and even new looks) to reflect your progress. It’s similar to RPGs, a genre I love as well, but RPGs reward you more for personal progress and dedication, such as grinding for levels, and not (usually) so much for just pushing forward and defeating bosses.

Last (and least), for those who have made it this far, here’s a little something you might be interested in knowing: I’ve been inactive here, but I’m still constantly trying hard to come up with interesting ideas for miximaxes! And I think I have found some cool stuff for both Kidou and Shishido, so feel free to tell me on which of those you’d like me to work on next. They’re both very challenging to draw and fiddle with, but I’m always happy to shift my priorities in any way you guys want me to. ww

[bambamwolf87]

"New Neighbors" Ch 3

Summary: Loki and Thor are living at Stark Tower. You're a new hire, hired to help the brothers learn more about the ways of life on Earth.

Thor has declined to go with Loki and you...

Stepping back into your living room, Loki spots you instantly.

“Aren't you a ray of sunshine? Pardon the cliche phrase, but that yellow makes you stand out. In a good way, or so I think.”

Trying not to blush at the long comment.

“Thank you, I was aiming for something less daunting than black and gray.”

Loki looks down at himself, he is in a black suit jacket and slacks, with a light green shirt and a dark green tie. Thinking it has more color than usual for himself, he stands. Holding out an arm to you, with a soft grin upon his face. You hesitate for a moment, but give in and place your hand on his sleeve. Getting a cab to head out for today's adventure.

First place was to go pick out a smartphone for Loki. Getting out at the phone store, you lead him inside. Yes you could have stayed in the Tower and showed him pictures, but you wanted him to hold the item to help him decide. You had always prefer a hands on experience.

Loki walks around the counters, eyeing the pieces on display. No associate approached him. You find one, to get their help in opening the Avengers account while he's browsing. You meet Loki where he is standing, as he is swiping and tapping on some screens.

“Find something you like?”

“I don't know, this is entertaining to me, like one of the video games Groot plays.”

“Would you like to try this model? If you don't like it, we can exchange it within the first few weeks, if you are unhappy with it.”

He tries to pick it up, unknowing how displays work. Placing your hand over his, you look up to meet his eyes.

“You don't take that one, that's just for an example to see and try. We'll be getting you a brand new one.”

Luckily he liked a phone with a similar system to yours. Making him an email was going to be a challenge. Tony said all employees had email addresses with nicknames to help prevent hacking… Tony has had a few nicknames for Loki, all you wish to avoid.

Remembering Thor’s was ‘dawn_of _snakes’, using it for some inspiration. ‘dusk_and_daggers’. Typing it and letting Loki see it, he questioned your choice, “Why did you choose that?”

“It is the opposite of Thor's, his starts with ‘dawn’, you're both so opposite. ‘Daggers’ is due to your weapon of choice.”

Loki was secretly impressed by your knowledge of him. He smirks and nods his approval. Then puts the device into his jacket pocket.

Walking to the nearby library, Loki got to learn of audiobooks, many on disks, some online only. Learning how his email could help him learn more information pleased the prince.

Lunch time comes around, finding an Italian restaurant, you both are seated and the waiter assumes you're a couple. It's made apparent when they offer you a bottle of wine or champagne. Loki just wants a beer, and you get sparkling cider.

Loki keeps observing you, unknowingly to you. You gush about your favorite dishes and desserts that they had in the menu. He committed these to his memory.

He trusts your judgment and gets the same order as you. Getting garlic and shells pasta with shrimp and breadsticks.

Declining on dessert after becoming full, you pout about missing out on the German chocolate cake slice you had your eyes set on. Moving on, to an antique bookstore. Looking for first editions of some authors, you leave Loki to explore for himself.

He remembers that you mentioned him and Thor learning how to cook… what if he could teach himself? Be a step ahead of his big brother. Picking up a few books that were on cooking and food preparation.

You find a handful of books to add to your collection. At the counter, he is waiting for you, as he flips through a magazine. Not looking at his stack of books, you pass your work card to pay for them.

Back inside the Tower, you see Pepper, waving at each other. Tony following a few steps behind her, he waves and calls out to you and Loki. “Nice email, I'd have gone with ‘reindeer-games’, but I'm sure that's already taken. First time you have left this place without Thor. Good to know (y/n) is doing her job well.” Stark winks at you.

“It really didn't feel like work, if I'm to be honest with you. I enjoyed the day out after staying inside the Tower over a week.”

Loki nods, not speaking during the exchange. Tony took it as his queue to go.

Loki doesn't follow to your door this time. He turns to you from his doorway, “Thank you for today. Iron Man was correct, I've not left this building unless with my brother.”

“He has a name, ya know.”

“I'm aware, but since he never calls me by mine, I don't intend to call him by his.”

Rolling your eyes at his childish reasoning.

“Loki, you can't keep being so anti-social. Aren't you lonely? I saw how annoyed you were with Thor. You should make an effort, this is your home.”

He listened to you, but not answering your question. “I'm going to relax, I probably won't see you at the cafeteria tonight.”

Then he goes into his quarters and you hear the door click closed.

You crack open a book and read until you go get dinner, sitting down at an empty table. Until a couple of women sit at your table. Looking up, they're both beautiful, but they had eyes focused on you. Their scrutiny made you nervous.

“Can I help you?” You ask, in case they need any supplies or something.

One was blond, you recognize her as Black Widow. The other you had some knowledge of, as Scarlet Witch. Unfortunately, you didn't know their personal names.

“I'm Natasha, this is Wanda. We’ve seen you around the building the past week. Maybe we could have a girls night sometime.”

Smiling at the invitation, “Uhh, thank you. I'm not a hero, I'm just an employee.”

Wanda spoke next, “You put up with Thor and Loki in the same room this morning, that is heroic in its own way.” The redhead smiled, but then looked sad. “I envy them, they have each other, I'd do anything to have my Twin at my side. Thor can be a bit of a bully, but I'm not sure he realizes it.”

Her words had a ring if truth in your mind.

“Maybe over the weekend, if you're not busy with a mission, I'd like to hang out with you.”

This makes both smile widely.

You go back to your room. Getting into pajamas, of mid-thigh shorts and a t-shirt with matching butterflies on them. Turning in early to bed, you fall asleep quickly.

The next morning you do your morning routine, but just have a light breakfast. Then head to the gym. You see who you can only assume is the Valkyrie Thor mentioned earlier. She looked a bit intimidating. As you get onto the small trampoline, to do a workout, she spots you.

“Wanna wrestle?”

Shaking your head from side to side as a ‘no’. You step off of the trampoline to the elliptical, so you could change and work on cardio. Then you see Thor and Loki come into view. The Valkyrie makes a howling noise, excitement at the blond royal. Loki looks like he doesn't want to be there. She lightly punched Loki's shoulder.

“Why don't you ever spar with me? You could be a formidable challenge, if you tried.”

Your ears perk up as someone gave him a compliment. He shakes his head, making his curling black locks sway around his face.

“I admire and respect you too much to ‘try’.”

“Ha! I knew you let me win on Sakkar!”

Thor chimed in, “I had wondered why you were bound that day… you let her win?”

Loki smiles for the first time since you’ve seen him in the gym room. You believe him.

You finished your workout and made your goal. As you were in the back corner of the room, the brothers hadn't seen you yet.

The woman whistles at you, “I'll go easy on you, promise!”

“I'm not a fighter, I'm more of a klutz.”

You wave at the guys, as you exit.

You have managed to get a shower and then a knock comes from your door. You try not to panic, as you're not expecting company. It's almost lunch time, who would be at your door?!

Throwing on your terry cloth robe, and a towel wrapped around your dripping hair. You make sure everything is covered, expecting Tony or Pepper. Opening the door a few inches, you see Loki. He is holding a tray. It had a few plates on it. You can't see what's under the lids.

“Yes? What can I help you with Loki?”

He looks up from his feet, to see you. His mouth opens and closes, but no words spill out. He makes a quick glance at your attire.

“I was told you hadn't been to lunch yet. So I thought to bring it to you. Although, I think I really do have bad timing.”

His face flushed pink, even his ears were turning red. It was cute. Add his crooked grin, you couldn't help but usher him inside.

“Get in here! Quick, before someone else sees me like this.”

He sets the tray onto your small dining table. You pull out a chair and sit down. He looks oddly at you.

“Are you going to stand while eating, or did you not bring anything for yourself?”

Blinking his eyes a few times rapidly, his raven eyelashes fanning his flushed cheeks. Loki seats himself and looks into your eyes.

“I wanted to surprise you. Show you I could learn something on my own. Lunch is from the cafeteria, but dessert I made myself.”

Removing the lids, the hot lunch was teriyaki chicken with rice and vegetables.

“Shouldn't you get dressed?”

“Then my food would be cold! I can eat and dry out at the same time.”

You had no idea what your state of dress was doing to Loki. Surely he's seen plenty of bodies, and yours was still covered. Granted pulling a couple of large strings that make a belt and it would be exposed. Eating the warm meal, you were delightfully surprised by his gesture. When finished, he clears his throat. Looking up, starting deeply into his eyes, like you could drown in them.

He breaks the silence, “You ought to get dressed before you get sick.”

You giggle at the idea, he's more mothering than you had expected. He starts to tap his long fingers on the table's surface, seemingly as if inpatient. He wasn't smiling.

“Oh alright, gosh. You're such a worrywart.”

That was a new name he hadn't been called before. To be fair, he didn't know what came over him. His need to impress this small woman. Then not wishing to witness her to become ill, especially because of his arrival.

You return, in dark jeans and a green silk blouse. Not even knowing that all shades of green were his favorite color. Oh how he watched the silk cling to you, as you must've still had damp skin and hair. He realizes how good you look in his color.

“Okay, happy now?” You do a twirl.

“Very.” The tone to that one word makes your breath catch for a moment.

“I made this for you.” He opens the last lid, its a cake. Looks like a German chocolate cake, maybe eight inches round, at least 2 layers tall. You smell the scent of chocolate, but can't believe he made it.

“Now, be honest!”

“I am. One of the books I got yesterday at the bookstore, it had a recipe and directions to make what I'd heard you say you wanted at the restaurant. I went to the kitchens, getting the supplies and bringing them up to my room's kitchen. It took me two tries. The first taste tester was my brother. Not by choice, but because he barged into my room and cut himself a slice. Joke was on him!” A deep chuckle filled the air.

“And what about the second attempt? Who tried that?” You ask nervously.

“Oh I took the cake to the kitchens, to have the cooks try it and tell me of my wrong doing. Then made it again and they tried it, thankfully. The two available said it was correct. So that's why it's missing a couple of slices. So ta-da!”

The look of pride upon his face made you smile. Reassured that it was edible, you take a slice and put one on each of your plates. He watches you as you cut into it with your fork. You look at it for a moment, then sliding it into your mouth. Your eyes close as the bite melts on your tongue.

“The problem on the first one was the frosting was made wrong. It is a messy mix, but it looks like the picture I saw.”

Opening your eyes, as you stare at the prince who cooked two cakes for you.

“I'm completely flattered and floored that you did that just for me. No man has ever baked a cake for me.”

After eating the cake, Loki puts the rest into your fridge.

“I won't see you for the next few days, maybe a week. I was invited to go on a mission. I thought I'd go try to make more friends. Valkyrie, Spiderman, and Stark are going. The sorcerer, Dr. Strange is recovering from his last adventure. They think my magic could be helpful.”

You stand up from the table. You lean towards Loki, wanting to hug him. He lets you wrap your arms around his waist. Your head on his shoulder. He finally closes his arms over your back.

“Don't worry or work too hard in my absence. Teach my brother something. Don't take any crap from him.”

You force a laugh. He pulls back, looking down to kiss your forehead. Loosening your arms as he walks out of the embrace. He smiles and waves as he leaves your apartment. You're shaken in a way you don't understand… the day was only halfway through, but you had lost the motivation to do much more than curl up on your couch.

(End of chapter 3!)

[eternalnightingale]

Thanks for tagging me @themavencycle!!

Rules: answer these 85 questions and tag 20 people

Last:

1. Drink: peach juice

2. Phone call: from Canada’s Wonderland to tell me I’ve got a screening for one of their seasonal jobs on Saturday including an interview (and if I do well on that) a group interview! As a shy introvert who is uncomfortable in social situations ESPECIALLY with strangers, that terrifies me. Please kill me.

3. Text message: “Okay”

4. Song you listened to: Not sure but I think it’s Deep in Abyss (Made in Abyss’ opening song) by Miyu Tomita and Mariya Ise

5. Time you cried: last week

6. Dated someone twice?: Never dated

7. Kissed someone and regretted it: Never kissed anyone

8. Been cheated on: Never been a relationship

9. Lost someone special: not really?

10. Been depressed: well yes but not so bad that I’d be diagnosed with depression

11. Gotten drunk and thrown up: Never had a drink (asides from a sip of my mother’s drink) and never been drunk

Fave colours:

12. purple

13. blue

14. red

In the last year have you…

15. Made new friends: no, and honestly not like in a few years. It’s hard for me to make friends since I’m shy and not a people person, and I get uncomfortable, scared and overthink in social situations irl

16. Fallen out of love: never been in love (I’ve only had 2 crushes in my 20 years and both happened in elementary school)

17. Laughed until you cried: not until the point I cried

18. Found out someone was talking about you: no

19. Met someone who changed you: no

20. Found out who your friends are: I don’t know how to answer this

21. Kissed someone on your facebook friends list: once again never kissed anybody unless non romantic cheek kisses count

General:

22. How many of your facebook friends do you know irl: I know about 98% of my Facebook friends but I can’t really call them all friends. (some are family and some are just classmates from high school)

23. Do you have any pets: no I’m not a big animal lover

24. Do you want to change your name: nah

25. What did you do for your last birthday: just went out to dinner with my mom and brother like usual and I got two books from my mom’s friend

26. What time did you wake up today: not sure because when I got up I laid in bed for an hour or two just staring at the ceiling or my plushies like I always do

27. What were you doing at midnight last night: on Youtube watching videos

28. What is something you cant wait for: the final book in Red Queen, the spring anime season, Shane’s new video tomorrow, my Centreville/Centre Island job interview tomorrow (which I am scared), and more things

30. What are you listening to right now: the TV as background noise

31. Have you ever talked to a person named Tom: I don’t know a Tom personally

32. Something that’s getting on your nerves: people who say “you’re missing out” on things or “you’re boring” if you don’t do the popular things such as go to parties, go to clubs, drink, etc (when I go into the work force I know those are going to be coming my way), rapists, pedophiles, when people say they fell in love at first sight, and a bunch of other stuff

33. Most visited website: I have a lot cuz I keep the tabs up on my laptop. youtube, tumblr, reddit, kissanime, goodreads, steam, epic reads, Maven Calore’s wiki page (I like to read the comments for some reason?), Ao3, Google Docs (so many Thomaven and Komahina ideas/fics I started but never finished. Procrastination at its finest)

34. Hair colour: dark brown

35. Long or short hair: short because my hair is relaxed

36. Do you have a crush on someone: haven’t had a crush since 8th grade and that only lasted like two months

37. What do you like about yourself: ……uhhhh my ability to be lost in a daydream and escape reality

38. Want any piercings?: no, I already have ear piercings since I was little

39. Blood type: don’t know

40. Nicknames: nikki

41. Relationship status: single (and not interested to mingle)

42. Zodiac: scorpio

43. Pronouns: she/her

44. Fave tv shows: Cardcaptor Sakura, Miss Kobayashi’s Dragon Maid, No Game No Life, a few more anime that I’m too lazy to list

45. Tattoos: i want a butterfly

46. Right or left handed: right

47. Ever had surgery: nope and surgery terrifies me because there’s the possibility of amnesia awareness

48. Piercings: ears

49. Sport: i hate sports

50. Vacation: I want to go to Japan

51. Trainers: ????

More general:

52. Eating: I just finished eating rice and chicken for dinner

53. Drinking: just drank peach juice with my dinner

54. I’m about to watch: something on youtube or investigation discovery channel

55. Waiting for: didn’t I already explain it above?

56. Want: a lot of things

57. Get married: no not interested in relationships

58. Career: I DON’T KNOW

Which is better:

59. Hugs or kisses: hugs

60. Lips or eyes: neither

61. Shorter or taller: well I’m shorter than my brother and mother so a bit taller

62. Older or younger: i don’t know?

63. Nice arms or stomach: neither

64. Hookup or relationship: NEITHER. not interested in sex or relationships. don’t see the appeal…and sex also terrifies me

65. Troublemaker or hesitant: hesistant

Have you ever:

66. Kissed a stranger: no

67. Drank hard liquor: no

69. Turned someone down: hahaha, you assume I ever get asked out and if I did that would be a no

70. Sex on first date: NO

71. Broken someones heart: 

72. Had your heart broken: yes… by books

73. Been arrested: no

74. Cried when someone died: fictional characters

75. Fallen for a friend: nope

Do you believe in:

76. Yourself: no

77. Miracles: sure?

78. Love at first sight: HELL NO

79. Santa claus: no

81. Angels: yeah

Other:

82. Best friend’s name: well idk because all of my main friends and i have drifted apart =( 

83. Eye colour: dark brown

84. Fave movie: Spirited Away

85. Fave actor: don’t have one

Sorry for the long paragraphs of my rambling😅just realized how long some of my answers are

Tagging: @rosejiannahasnolife @lostinyaoi @gema-wind @tabitha-abadeer and anyone else who wants to do this!

[sapphicscholar]

Chapter Text:

Maggie braced herself at the teasing cackle in Kate’s voice. She had grown accustomed to Kate’s teasing many years ago, but Alex—well, Alex was another story. “The day after you set up all those cameras to stream right to me, Mags? You wanted to show off your new undercover girlfriend to all your co-workers back here?”

“It wasn’t like that,” Maggie grumbled. “We didn’t have time, and we sure as hell couldn’t have Sam catching a glimpse of Alex designing an anti-kryptonite.”

“I know, I know. You know I have to give you shit about it, right?”

“Yeah, well, we already got it from J’onn…”

“Ah, yes, I can’t imagine the big stick in the mud over at the Department of Extralegal Operations was all too pleased with the show.”

“Extranormal Operations,” Alex corrected before burying her face in her hands once more. There were certain things—no matter how obviously staged and faked—in her life that J’onn had really never needed to see.

“Both sound true to me…”

“Play nice,” Maggie warned Kate. “Now, did you manage to find anything else about any of those projects?” J’onn had been intensely interested in Project Proteus—a fact that seemed to make quite a bit of sense to Alex, though Maggie was left feeling slightly confused by their rapid-fire conversation conducted in what sounded like some kind of shorthand developed over years of working closely together.

“We think there’s something more to Project Hydra that you’re not being told.”

“Sam’s keeping it from us?” Maggie asked.

Alex leaned in once more. “No, I don’t think she knows much more than we do—at least about that one.”

“I have to agree with Alex,” Kate admitted. “Studying the feed and her body language and speech patterns, it really looks like she’s just as uncomfortable with the project as Alex is. And, all things considered, I doubt it’s squeamishness.”

Considering the aims of the other projects, Maggie found herself agreeing. “But why bring it to Alex at all?”

Kate shrugged. “You’re certainly not the only two being watched, and I can only assume reporting to Lillian might be even worse than answering to Sam on occasion.”

“And I guess by giving me the choice of projects, she made sure that she could tell Lillian I had all the information but was simply opting to start with a different one.”

“Any thoughts on why?” Maggie asked.

“Well, they said living host, but I think, based on the numbers we could see in the video, they meant living human hosts.”

“So she’s trying to find a way to kill humans with microbes?” Maggie shuddered, wondering if there would be ways to drop the microbe into food or water and rapidly disseminate it.

“I don’t think it had to do with killing,” Alex cut in. “They wanted it to reproduce and live long enough to colonize its host. If it was just going in to kill right away, they could inject it with some kind poison and not care about how long it lasted.”

“So you think it’s something more insidious?” Kate asked.

“I think so. Colonizing a host sounds like…like mind control or something. Maybe a way to kill someone from a distance if there were a way to trigger it.”

“Maybe Hydra isn’t for random civilians.” Alex turned to look at Maggie, and Kate remained quiet, waiting for her to elaborate. “Maybe it’s for her own agents—make sure they’re staying on task, have certain ways of keeping them in line.”

“That would explain why Sam’s body language read as particularly tense when she brought up that project,” Kate mused. From what she’d heard about the anti-alien rally, Sam hadn’t had any qualms about sending off hordes of civilians with weaponry to kill and be killed in a senseless attack, so the idea that she would suddenly be concerned about more or less indiscriminately killing off humans seemed unlikely.

“Think there’s dissent in the ranks? That could make things easier.” Alex wondered if Sam had confirmation that this project was for control of Cadmus agents or just had her suspicions.  

“It’s worth keeping an ear to the ground, trying to figure out if Sam and her people are planning anything.”

“I’ll listen to the tapes while you’re at work.”

“Oh fuck, I’m gonna be late!” After yelling a quick goodbye to Kate, Alex took off for the bedroom, changing her shirt and grabbing her helmet and bag before bolting for the door.

By the time the bar was closing down, Alex was exhausted. After a near sprint on her bike up the final hill, she’d wanted nothing more than to take a few minutes for herself to stretch and grab a large glass of water as she stopped sweating and her fingers and toes defrosted after the much too cold wind—an odd and beyond uncomfortable mixture of sensations. But no, instead the bar was understaffed and busy as hell for a weekday, and she couldn’t find it within herself to ask for a couple of minutes when Waverly was running orders, manning the bar, and somehow washing dishes all by herself. So she’d thrown herself right into the crowd, taking over the bar and helping to run orders out when the bar quieted enough to allow her a few extra moments’ peace.

“What the hell is with the crowd?” Alex hissed when Waverly slumped down against the bar next to her, the crowds finally quieting.

“First big rivalry game of the season,” Waverly answered, as though it were completely obvious. When Alex just stared blankly at her, Waverly clarified, “NCU vs. Metropolis. You really didn’t know?”

“I…sports aren’t really my thing.”

“That’s pretty obvious, Cat,” Waverly snorted.

“I take it you’re a fan?”

“You don’t get to be head cheerleader without knowing a thing or two about the team.”

Alex felt her brain short circuit at that image—no, nope, no need to fall for another coworker, definitely shouldn’t picture those things ever at all. Forcing herself back into the present, Alex nodded. “Right, yeah, right. Makes sense. Um, I’m gonna go get started on those dishes.”

“They’re already done,” Waverly called out, her voice dropping off by the end when she realized that Cat was already out of sight. She’d figure it out soon enough.

Eventually Alex made her way back to the front after taking a few minutes to clear her head and check her phone—a text from Maggie serving as a nice reminder of exactly who was waiting for her at home, until the end of the mission, at least. “How’s it going?”

“Not bad. Game’s ending now, and unless we somehow pull a win out from nowhere, there won’t be any post-game celebrations to deal with. Probably just a last call, then we can kick everyone out.”

Alex nodded, watching as dejected fans started gathering their coats and finishing their drinks. A few ambled up to the bar, requesting a final beer or shot to dull the pain of losing to their rivals. Once Waverly had finally shooed them all out of the bar, they split up the tasks, Waverly going to the back to take care of dishes and counting the register, while Alex dealt with cleaning the bar and the tables and mopping the sticky floor.

As she bitched to herself about just how much drunk people managed to spill and drop, having to bend over to pick up what felt like the twentieth half-eaten chicken wing of the night—something that absolutely did not get less gross with practice—Alex heard a loud scuffle coming from the back. She raced past the bar and through the door leading to the kitchen, following the sounds of muffled cries and grunts to the back hallway, where she found Waverly getting in one last hit with the butt of that old rifle she pulled out every now and again when it looked like a bar brawl was about to break out.

“And there’ll be so much more of that if you ever try to steal from my people again you—you—thief person!”

Alex couldn’t help a snort at that.

“Cat?” Waverly whipped her head around, keeping one knee pressed firmly against the would-be-criminal’s back.

“Hey, I heard what sounded like a fight. Thought you might be in trouble but…” she gestured at the scene, “I guess you’ve got it covered.”

“Not just head cheerleader and the most popular person in town.” Waverly grinned as she flipped her hair over her shoulder.

“Yeah, I can, uh, see that.” Alex tried not to dwell on the fact that Waverly had just gotten about a thousand times more attractive.

“Caught him trying to break into your locker,” Waverly added, “so if you want the privilege of getting a hit or two in, be my guest.”

Alex’s jaw clenched when Waverly forced the man to sit up; she didn’t know him well, but she’d seen him sitting with Victor and Sam more than a few times. A chill ran through her at the idea that Cadmus was growing suspicious. She wondered if Sam had seen something when she dropped in for her surprise visit the other day.

“What the fuck, man?” Alex snapped, schooling her face into one of annoyance but not fear. “You some kind of pervert or something? Looking for pictures of my girl?”

“What? No! Never!” This was supposed to be an easy little mission to prove himself to Sam: jimmy the lock, take a picture, get out. Instead he found himself covered in bruises that felt like they wouldn’t be going away for weeks, cowering in front of Cat herself.

“I’ve seen the way you look at her,” Alex growled. In fact, she only remembered seeing them interact once or twice. “You stay the fuck away if you know what’s good for you.”

“Yeah—yeah, okay,” he squeaked, pulling himself to his feet. His eyes darted around the room, clearly looking for an exit.

“You done with him?” Waverly asked. Alex couldn’t quite get a read on the expression Waverly was giving her.

“Uh, yeah. But if I ever see you around here again, Waverly and her gun will be the least of your problems.”

He nodded quickly before scurrying off.

“Thanks,” Alex mumbled, pulling open her locker and making sure her stuff was still there.

“Anytime, Cat. I meant it when I said I was here for you.”

“Appreciate it.” Waverly tapped her foot against the ground, waiting for Cat to finish with her locker. Finally she stood up, bag slung across her shoulders. “Just need to finish mopping, then I’ll be out of here.”

“What if you tell me what’s really going on?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean why don’t you tell me about what’s going on with all of your Cadmus friends.”

“How do you know that?” Alex had a hand in her bag to call for backup almost instantly.

“There’s footage of all of you together at the rally, Cat. And, in case you’ve already forgotten, my girlfriend’s a cop. She knows what goes on around here.”

“You already knew I didn’t support aliens. Why’s this some big surprise?”

“Oh, your being involved with a terrorist anti-alien organization? Now, see, that one was disappointing, but not too surprising.” Alex pursed her lips. “But realizing that you were bugging them…well that came as a surprise. And it looks like they’re trying to do it right back to you.”

Alex slapped a hand over Waverly’s mouth. “Who are you?” Before letting Waverly respond, Alex had her phone out, sending an SOS text to Maggie.

Alex could feel Waverly’s mouth moving against her hand, but the sound was far too muffled for her to catch anything. “Not in here,” Alex finally growled. She forced Waverly to the back door, locking up behind them even as she kept her hand across Waverly’s mouth, her elbow locked to keep her in place should she try to run.

Before Alex could decide on how she was about to get Waverly somewhere relatively secluded to interrogate her, Alex heard the sound of gun’s safety being clicked off.

“Get your hands off of her.”

Fuck. Of course Nicole would be here. Alex wished she had brought her gun with her. As it stood now, she only had a human shield, and she wasn’t about to sink to true Cadmus levels.

“Nicole, it’s not what you think. Put the gun down, and no one gets hurt.”

“I know what you are,” Nicole spat, advancing forward a step or two, her gun still raised and pointed at Cat.

Alex hissed as Waverly bit down hard on her finger, and loosened her hold just enough for Waverly to break free when Waverly sent the hard heel of her boots swinging back straight into Alex’s shin. “Fucking hell.”

“Cat Sullivan, you’re under arrest for attempted kidnapping,” Nicole growled, quickly advancing on the woman now that Waverly was out of harm’s way. “Hands where I can see them.”

Alex complied, wondering how high her bail would be set for trying to kidnap an officer’s girlfriend.

“You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law.” Nicole spun Cat around, pushing her up against the wall of the bar as she cuffed her. “You have the right to an attorney. If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be provided for you. Do you understand the rights I have just read to you?”

“Yes,” Alex gritted out through clenched teeth.

“I can’t hear you. Wanna try again?”

Alex had never heard Nicole sound quite so threatening.

“Babe,” Waverly whispered, tapping on Nicole’s shoulder. “It wasn’t quite kidnapping.”

“What? Not now.”

“No! Remember that thing—the thing we talked about?” Waverly asked, arching an eyebrow and hoping Nicole would catch her meaning.

“Uh, yeah. But, baby, this really doesn’t seem like the right time.”

“Just listen to me—we were right. She freaked out when I mentioned it.”

“Waves! I told you to wait for backup!”

“I’m not some kid, god. I’m not going through that again.”

“Yeah, and I’m not gonna be left out again, either.”

“Still here,” Alex grumbled, the cold, rough concrete of the wall digging into her cheek.

“And who keeps calling you?” Nicole snapped, feeling the vibration Cat’s Alex’s phone against her hip once more.

“Who’s to say it’s a phone?” Alex taunted.

Nicole pulled the phone out of Cat’s back pocket. “I am.” She looked at the screen, and Alex prayed Maggie hadn’t said anything that would give them away. “So your girlfriend’s on her way. Wants to know if she should bring back up.”

Alex glared but kept her mouth shut.

“I have to wonder if she knows she’ll be arrested for abetting a criminal in attempted kidnapping.”

Alex remained silent. She’d been through interrogations much worse than this before—interrogations that started with a hard slap to the cheek and ended only when she lost consciousness.

“What if they know something that could help your investigation?” Waverly whispered, eying Cat.

“Well they can talk from the back of the police cruiser.”

The rev of an engine pulling up behind the bar drew their attention, and Maggie threw herself out of the car, phone in hand and knife tucked into her sleeve. “What’s going on here?” she yelled, noting Alex’s cuffed hands.

“Your girlfriend’s under arrest for attempting kidnapping. And you, Maria Sterling, are under arrest too.”

“For what?”

“Aiding and abetting.”

“That’s a bullshit charge.”

“Then you can get it cleared in the morning. But you’re spending tonight in jail.”

Maggie debated trying to disarm Nicole before grabbing Alex and making a run for it, but she figured being on the lam wouldn’t exactly make running a legitimate business in Metropolis too easy. “I’m calling my lawyer.”

“Can you all just wait?” Waverly cried out, her voice tight with exasperation. Everyone turned to stare at her, and she managed a smile. “Just…let’s get in the car to talk where it might be safe. I think there’s more going on here that we won’t know if Maria and Cat are in jail.”

“My car,” Maggie insisted.

“Not a chance in hell,” Nicole said.

“What if we keep Cat in cuffs and I get to drive. They can’t kidnap us if I’m the one driving,” Waverly pointed out.

Eventually everyone relented, though no one seemed particularly pleased with the outcome. Nicole loaded the handcuffed Cat into the front seat, while she forced Maria into the back, keeping her gun out and pointed at her in case she got any ideas.

Figuring they were as settled as they could be, Waverly took off, driving in slow laps around the city. “Here’s what we know,” she began. “Cat and Maria are part of Cadmus.” Maggie began to protest, but Waverly spoke over her. “Sam and Victor are local Cadmus leaders—Nicole’s been investigating them for ages.”

“Fine,” Maggie relented. It wasn’t good to be a known member of a terrorist organization, but at least their covers were still intact.

“But Cat bugged their table months ago. She’s the only one that willingly goes near them, and I found a bug under the table while I was cleaning just a couple of weeks after she started at the bar.”

“You can’t say that with certainty,” Alex interjected.

“No…but it seems like a lot to be a coincidence,” Waverly shrugged, her voice light for such a tense situation. “Now, I brought Nicole in to see it one night.”

“Waves, stop,” Nicole hissed.

“No, they should know how much we already know. Maybe they’ll help us.”

“And if they don’t?” Nicole shot a pointed look at their two could-be prisoners.

“I’m sure Wynonna could be persuaded to come back to town and lend a hand if the problem gets out of control.” Nicole just rolled her eyes. “Anyway, you’ve got some pretty fancy tech for a bartender, then we caught you on the back camera listening in on headphones once or twice.”

“I was listening to music on my break.”

“Mm, but you weren’t.” Waverly looked far too pleased with herself. “I checked.”

Maggie wondered at what point she needed to call for backup. It would be hard to make two prominent members of the community disappear, but she’d had to deal with worse before.

“But then Lillian Luthor rolled into town.”

“Confidential, babe,” Nicole hissed.

“If they work for her, they already know!” Waverly turned her attention back to the road in time to brake for a red light. “But she comes back, and suddenly one of your ‘friends’ is breaking into your locker with a camera out. So I’ve gotta think that not everything’s so peaceful in paradise right about now.”

“What?” Maggie asked, but Alex just shook her head.

“And as soon as I pointed all this out to Cat, well, I got a little bit kidnapped—nothing I couldn’t have stopped, of course. But that all seems to confirm that something hinky’s going on.”

“If you cooperate, I might just forget about the kidnapping,” Nicole added, figuring she might as well back up her girlfriend. “So what’s it gonna be?”

[do-u-ever-just]

All I Want For Christmas

Rated G.  2.6k words.  Sheith.  Mentioned Allurance.

Read on AO3

It had been a joke.  A funny, ironic, painfully cheesy joke. That’s all.  So, how did it turn out this way?

Shiro had seen it at the mall.  It was just one of those things he had spotted and had immediately done a double take because, seriously, could such a thing even exist?  Which, to someone who had battled in an intergalactic war and seen much, was really saying something.  

The colour, for one thing (mustard yellow and bright green?  Really?) was bad enough but the design was a whole different story.  The white stitching around the collar?  The disgusting little balls of fluff sewn in a string around the sleeves?  Was that really necessary, Shiro had to wonder.  The deformed sheep (not reindeer, sheep) dancing across the slogan wearing, what he had to assume, were Santa hats, but only looked more like odd horns coming off their heads.  Then there was the slogan, scrawled in cursive, stitched in hazardously (a design choice or the tailor was just uncoordinated, he’ll never know), reading across the chest at a most awkward angle.

“Fleece Navidad,” Shiro reads, holding the sleeve of the sweater between a thumb and forefinger, as if the sweater so ugly it might burst into flames any second, hoping to burn itself out of existence.

Shiro wouldn’t blame it.

“Wow.  That’s…bad,” Lance mutters, also staring at the sweater in wonderment, but not the usual kind of wonderment found on people’s faces this time of year.  This was stale wonderment.  A look of horror and unguided disgust.  “Coming from someone who lives for bad jokes and puns this is…this is the work of Krampus.”

Shiro laughs.

“You laugh, but it’s true!” Lance continues, now also holding the opposing sleeve of the offending sweater.  “This was obviously knit from the fur on Krampus’ back!  That’s the only explanation as to how this hellish object of the holiday exists!”

Shiro continues to laugh.

“Hang on, I gotta show this to Allura!” Lance whips out his smart phone, snapping a few photos from different angles, sending it off to his fiancé.  

Shiro adjusts the shopping bags in his hands while they wait on Allura’s response, trying to find a way to carry all of Lance’s bags, as well as the few of his own, in a way so they wouldn’t be hitting him in the calves with every step.  He couldn’t find one, so opted for just suffering in silence instead.  

Lance’s phone chimes, and he laughs at the message on screen, turning it around to show Shiro the animated vomiting cat sticker Allura had sent.  An appropriate choice.

“Haha, okay, okay,” Shiro starts to turn, rolling his shoulders.  They had been back on Earth for a few years now, yet he still found Christmas shopping to be far more strenuous than any of the training exercises Allura had put them through in the Castle of Lions.  “Are we ready to head home?”

“Yeah, yeah! Just one more stop!” Lance snaps out of his temporary state of rest, as he usually does, suddenly remembering their original task and speed-walks into the neighbouring jewellery store.  “I have a few necklaces on hold I gotta check out!”

“Are these for your sisters?”

“No, they have the cinema gift vouchers! These are for Allura!”

“Didn’t you already buy her the couch cushions? And the crystal vase? And I saw you sneaking out of a pet store before.”

Lance doesn’t hear him, however, already at the counter.  Shiro rolls his eyes, though smiles fondly as his friend looks over his options.  He can’t really blame Lance for wanting to take advantage of the festive season and shower his beloved in expensive gifts, especially when they’re so much more used to worrying about other more pressing matters than how many wrapped boxes should sit under the Christmas tree.

As Shiro waits outside, various bags at his feet, that horrible sweater manages to catch his eye again.  It seems so harmless from across the walkway, but Shiro can still remember how daring it had looked up close and how Allura had reacted to the garment.  So, with significant others in mind, he had to wonder, how would Keith react?

Keith was slow on social cues.  That hadn’t changed in the years they had grown and developed together.  He didn’t get jokes unless they were blatantly obvious, blunt and bad.  He never laughed at the more, well-crafted jokes, but give him a simple one-liner and he’d be giggling about it for weeks.  It was one of his more endearing qualities.

Yet, Shiro felt Keith would appreciate this little turn of phrase.  He liked Christmas carols after all, so was no stranger to the lyrics of the well-known folk song.  He’d hate the colours though.  Keith was a man of total habit, and black and red were still the only colours he had in his wardrobe to this day (aside from the white tux that hung carefully from a hook at the end of their closet, next to Shiro’s own).  

The little decorations would drive him over the edge the most, however.  The fluffy cotton balls would irritate him like dust irritates a cat. The fabric would itch around his neck and he would constantly complain about the impractical fit.  

In short, Keith would hate it.  He’d think Shiro an idiot for gifting it to him.  Still, Shiro knows Keith would laugh at the pun, poke fun at the design, torment over the contrasting colours, and do it all with a smile on his face. He’d grin and laugh and take the joke in stride.  

Now Shiro can’t get the image of Keith, happy and bubbling laughter pouring from his lips, out of his head.

Lance walks out twenty minutes later with not one, not two, but three jewellery cases.

“I couldn’t decide which one she’d look more beautiful in, as she’d look beautiful in them all, so I just got all three and oh my God you didn’t…” Lance trails off in utter horror as he eyes the bag Shiro is adding to the pile.  The shop’s logo plain and clean on the white paper bag.  The logo belonging to that horrible Christmas sweater’s home.

“It’s a gag gift for Keith,” Shiro explains.  Of all the people willing to see Keith suffer even for a moment, he figured Lance would be top of the list.  Their one-sided rivalry had never really faulted, merely put on the back-burner until light and benign moments like these.

“I will pay you all the money I have if you record his face when he opens that!”

“I’m sure Allura will be so pleased with her empty bank account.”

“I mean, she might be a little disappointed at first, but she’ll understand!”

Shiro hums in mild agreement as they make their way back to the car.

---

There’s no smell of gingerbread or candy canes when Shiro walks through the door, but he can see the glow of the fire from the foyer, and hears the faint chime of the piano music Keith has playing on their record player.  There’s no fairy lights strung up through the hallway, or tinsel over the banisters, but Shiro gives their small and modest Christmas tree a fond look as he makes his way into the living room.

Keith is lounging on the couch, tapping his foot to the music, a glass of red in one hand and a book in the other.  He looks so at peace, the fire light making his skin glow, his long eyelashes brushing his cheeks as he blinks tiredly.  His hair braided down his scalp and ending in a little tuft at the back of his neck. He’s beautiful, and Shiro wants to kiss him.

So, he does.

“Back already?” Keith asks when their lips part, though leans in for another before Shiro can reply. Shiro smiles against his husband’s lips.

“Lance is an exhausting person to shop with,” Shiro says, straightening up and dumping his few bags on the adjacent arm chair, though makes sure to take a certain one with him to the couch.  “How do I forget that every year?”

“I have a feeling it’s something to do with his constant whining that he doesn’t know what to get Allura when, in fact, he does know.  He just can’t decide-“

“-and then ends up buying everything he picked for her anyway,” Shiro finishes.  

Keith smiles, marking his place in his book and gently placing it on the floor, his nearly empty glass with it.  “Was your own shopping trip successful?”

“I got presents for Hunk, picked up our cake for dinner with the Holts.  I managed to sneak away and get that new video game while Lance wasn’t looking.  Allura’s shoes are being back ordered but they should be here by Christmas.”

Keith nods at all this, a pinch forming between his brows.

“I’m sorry I couldn’t go with you,” he begins.

Shiro hushes him with another peck to the lips before Keith can bury himself too deep under his own self-doubt.

“I told you, it doesn’t matter!  I know you don’t like crowds,” Shiro takes hold of Keith’s hands, silently marvelling at how small they are in comparison to his own.  “You do more than your fair share of Christmas preparation.  Shopping in a mall is a very small part of the holiday season.”

“But to leave you alone with Lance of all people?” Keith cocks his head, worry still imminent in his features, though an amused smile tugs at the corner of his lips.

Shiro smiles back.

“I’ll admit, it’s hard. I fought valiantly.  Blood was shed.  Old wounds, re-opened.  I thought I might never see you again!”

Keith laughs as Shiro places a hand over his heart, faking deep battle wounds.  Lord knows, they’ve had enough first-hand experience.

“I’m so proud you came back to me,” Keith plays along.  He leans forward to gently cup Shiro’s face in his hands.  “Would my victor like his spoils now, or later?”

“How about both?” Shiro practically purrs as he leans in close.  

Their lips meet, and its sweet and soft and deep.  They’re both smiling wildly, their teeth clacking at awkward intervals, but as Shiro places his hands lightly on Keith’s waist and shuffles closer, he finds he doesn’t mind when Keith giggles against him and clutches his face even tighter.

When they’re done making out on the couch like teenagers, when Shiro has poured his own glass of red and settled back next to his partner, arm around Keith’s shoulders and the fire warming his socked toes, Keith takes notice of the bag sitting beside them so inconspicuously.

“What’s that?” he asks, sliding ever close to Shiro, despite being so close to him already.  Keith does that.  Again, creature of habit.

“Oh, right!  I got you something!”

Keith only looks confused as Shiro offers the bag over.  Keith is not familiar with apparel stores and what they might hold, beyond knowing the common department stores like Target or Walmart, so the logo is no giveaway to him as to what it could be.

“Do I open it now?” Keith takes the bag anyway.

Shiro had considered leaving it until Christmas day and placing the sweater under the tree alongside the rest of their gifts for each other, but figured this was too good of an opportunity to pass.

“Yeah!  It’s just something small I thought you’d like.  It made me think of you, so figured, why not?” Shiro doesn’t miss the way Keith’s fingers inexplicably tighten around the paper, crumpling it in his hold.

Keith is careful as he pulls apart the tissue paper, reaching in and pulling out the sweater. He places the bag on the ground, and unravels the travesty of clothing slowly, holding it up so he can look at the full thing in all of its horribly-designed glory.  Shiro waits with bated breath as Keith looks over the sweater, reads the writing on the front, notices everything from the scratchy wool it’s knitted out of to the fluff surrounding the sleeves and the bottom.  It feels like he could hear a pin drop in the room, even over the record still playing its soft tune in the background and the fire crackling in front of them.

Finally, Keith looks to Shiro, and grants him the largest grin ever seen.

“I love it!  Thank you!”

A record scratch echoes in Shiro’s ears, like something out of a cartoon.

“Shit, hang on,” Keith takes the sweater with him, carefully folded over his arm, as he walks over to the record player and flips the vinyl.  He takes his time placing the needle back at the beginning, so the music can continue to play.  

Keith returns hurriedly, sitting so close to Shiro he may as well have crawled into his lap.

“Shiro, you really didn’t have to!” Keith gushes again, still clutching the sweater, holding it up so he can look over it again.

Shiro is dumbfounded, left speechless, unsure of how to handle this turn of events.

“You don’t have to lie for my sake, Keith,” Shiro tries, nervously looking over Keith’s expression as his husband continues to study the absurd piece of clothing.

Keith turns to Shiro so their eyes lock.

“I’m not lying!  Why would I lie to you?  I love it, Takashi!  You said you thought of me when you saw this, that you’d think I’d like it, then went out of your way to get it for me.  How could I hate something like that?”

And Shiro can see that Keith is genuine.  It’s in the call of ‘Takashi’ that left his lips, in the light in his eyes that has nothing to do with the roaring fire.  It’s in the quirk of his smile and the hold of his shoulders.  Shiro is beginning to see how, to Keith, this is more than just a mere gift, and more a physical reminder that Shiro thinks of Keith when he’s not around.

Shiro thought he had all of Keith’s habits pinned down to the letter.  From his preferred sleeping position (spooning, Shiro the little spoon, pressed tightly against Keith’s chest all night long) to how he takes his tea (white, no sugar).  From how Keith dances when he’s sure no one is looking, to how he keeps his books, clothes and knives organised.  

Then something like this will happen, and Shiro has to relearn his husband all over again.

It’s never a bad thing, just another reminder that no matter how complacent Shiro is, Keith will continue to surprise him in the best of ways.  Even after the war has ended and peace has reined throughout the universe, even after years of therapy and finally allowing himself to settle down with the love of his life, Keith serves as a constant reminder that his life will never be boring.

“Really?  You love the sweater?” Shiro has to be sure.  Has to be certain this is not Keith playing his own prank.

“Yes!” Keith nods almost violently, his bangs bobbing and probably hitting him in the eyes as he does, but he remains steadfast in his decision of how amazing this sweater apparently is.

“Well, I’m glad.”

Because what else is he supposed to say?  ‘Haha you genuinely love a gift I was giving to you as a joke’?  He could never torment his husband that way, and besides, why would he ever want to take away the joy Keith has found in a gift Shiro gave, even if his intentions weren’t exactly pure?

Keith is standing now, pulling on the sweater over his shirt, despite it already being warm in the house.  He stands proudly there for Shiro when he’s done and has it settled over his collar, predictably already scratching at his neck.  Shiro grins, pulls Keith down next to him again, and slides their lips together again.  Keith kisses him warmly, sweetly, and when he reaches up to stroke Shiro’s jaw, the balls of fluff tickle and the wool irritates his skin, but Keith is happy, and that’s all Shiro could ever want for Christmas.

[workingontruth]

Our 2 Kings 7 Kind of Life

Don’t you love it when God shows up?

Have you ever missed it when God showed up?

What about now?

Today, opinions are a dime a dozen. Talk to a dozen people, and you’ll get a dozen different angles on any of a dozen subjects. But in spite of our differences of opinion on any of a wide range of topics, I think we all agree on one thing these days; had I interrupted your Christmas celebration this past December (whether or not I were wearing camel’s hair and in need of a good flossing to extract locust legs from between my teeth), telling you the following list of things would all come true in less than 90 days, you would have labeled me a complete crazy man and would’ve told me to go back beneath the rock from which I had come.

“In less than 90 days,…”

1.       You, over there in the Free Enterprise motor coach pullover (that would’ve been me) … you will be returning to the University of Indianapolis with the Men’s Lacrosse team from South Carolina before playing the final game of your trip–but oddly enough, both teams will be fully healthy, the weather will be ideal, and the trip will have been coasting along without a hitch. Oh, and the university’s administration will also require the other eight remaining U Indy teams, participating in their various collegiate sporting events from Florida to California and everywhere in between, to immediately return to campus as well. And, once you return, your entire fleet of buses will be emptied of fuel, removed from insurance plans, and put out of service–though all machines are mechanically sound and all drivers are healthy and available to drive.

2.       And you, in the red Community Hospital valet shirt (that would’ve be my wife) … you will be in your new role in the front office of the Center for Genetic Health. But having been asked not to congregate with your co-workers in the perfectly suited and newly designed office space the hospital had just finished, you and all of your co-workers will be working from home to reschedule all patient appointments sixty days or more into the future–unless they are willing to conduct their appointment over the phone or via video-chat.

3.       The NBA post-season will never happen, and the balance of the season itself will be stopped cold in its tracks at half-time of a game in the Mountain Time Zone on Wednesday, March 11th.

4.       All NCAA spring athletic events will be cancelled for the remainder of the school year and March Madness won’t happen.

5.       There will be no date set to begin the MLB season.

6.       Grocery stores will have been unable to keep chicken, ground beef, bread and toilet paper on their shelves.

7.       Gasoline will, in some places, be under a dollar a gallon, but few will be filling up.

8.       The nation’s restaurants will be closed for all dine-in experiences while the fortunate will try to stay in business by doing carry-out or drive-through business only.

9.       All shopping malls, strip malls, barber shops and hair and nail salons will be closed.

10.   The Federal Government will be sending $1,200 tax-free cash gifts to the vast majority of American citizens.

11.   The world will have a drastic shortage of personal protective equipment.

12.   The Down Jones Industrial Average will suffer 3 of its worst days since the “Black Monday” market crash in 1987 in the span of less than a week, losing roughly one-third of its value in a matter of about eight days.

13.   State governors will be requesting their citizens “shelter in place” by remaining home but for essential trips for food or health-related emergencies, while in some states it will be a finable offense to travel anywhere but to secure such.

14.   The President and VP of the United States will be holding daily, 2-hour press briefings for weeks on end.

15.   Frequent air travel will be little but a memory, international travel banned, airfares costing less than a good meal out (which will no longer be happening).

16.   The President will sign a presidential memorandum that will require the likes of General Motors to begin manufacturing respiratory ventilators.

17.   Dozens of privately held companies like Michael Lindell’s “My Pillow,” will be transformed into N-95 facemask factories.

18.   Samaritan’s Purse will have set up and be running a fully-functioning hospital in the middle of New York City’s Central Park.

19.   The United States Naval Hospital Ship “Comfort” will have been deployed to New York to help in the cause.

20.   Most people will be wearing PPE masks everywhere they go.

21.   All public concerts world-wide will be on hold.

22.   Churches will be asked not to meet, and nearly all will comply without resistance.

23.   Employees representing nearly every U.S. industry will be furloughed, let go or kept on payrolls with forgivable loans from the Fed.

24.   People will be asked to stand in lines outside Lowe’s stores at six-foot intervals to ensure active shopper customer quotas are kept while both one-way entries and exits are monitored.

25.   Many stores will be required to close down public access to much of their merchandise not deemed “essential,” to help support the cause.

26.   Pork, chicken and other meat packing plants in the U.S. will be closing down.

27.   U.S. unemployment will be at the highest rate since the Great Depression as new weekly filing claims will be counted not in the hundreds of thousands, but in the millions.

28.   The nation’s, and most of the world’s movie theaters, will be closed.

29.   People without facemasks will be shunned and avoided by “mask-wearers.”

30.   Neighbors will be sitting in their driveways and on FRONT porches again.

31.   College students will be home with their families, taking part in online classwork since all university campuses will be closed prior to semesters’ end.

32.   In lieu of our celebrating athletes and Hollywood types, doctors, nurses and healthcare workers will be the new heroes.

33.   People in some industries will be earning more to stay at home than while working full time.

34.   The Fed will be paying the unemployed an additional $600/week over and above the state provisions.

35.   All elective surgeries will be halted while hospital ORs remain unused.

36.   Online church “attendance” will skyrocket, leading to thousands and thousands of new believers.

37.   American celebrity musicians will be holding online “Global Citizen” concerts to raise millions of dollars to give to the World Health Organization which is being held liable for its part in enabling the death of hundreds of thousands in nearly 200 countries world-wide.

Would any of these things been plausible just a few months ago?

Obviously, this is only a partial list, and one to which most of us could quickly add another dozen. And NOTE they’re not all bad! Isn’t it just like God to orchestrate blessing in the face of difficulty? 

But in my mind, these “90-days-ago incomprehensible occurrences” are not unlike the similarly baffling predictions that Elisha, in 2 Kings Chapter 7, was revealing to the king and his officer.

Here’s the short version:  

Elisha replied, “Hear the word of the Lord. This is what the Lord says: About this time tomorrow, a seah [probably about 7 lbs] of the finest flour will sell for a shekel and two seahs of barley for a shekel at the gate of Samaria.” 

The officer on whose arm the king was leaning said to the man of God, “Look, even if the Lord should open the floodgates of the heavens, could this happen?”

“You will see it with your own eyes,” answered Elisha, “but you will not eat any of it!”

The officer was utterly confounded. “Really? How could this be?” And to be sure, there is no way, given their circumstance at the time, they could have concocted such an unlikely series of events.

(Read verses 3-13 to learn how this mystifying prophecy actually took place.)

But then, the verdict is recorded in the later verses...

“So they selected two chariots with their horses, and the king sent them after the Aramean army. He commanded the drivers, “Go and find out what has happened.” They followed them as far as the Jordan, and they found the whole road strewn with the clothing and equipment the Arameans had thrown away in their headlong flight. So the messengers returned and reported to the king. Then the people went out and plundered the camp of the Arameans. So a seah of the finest flour sold for a shekel, and two seahs of barley sold for a shekel, as the Lord had said.”

Now the king had put the officer on whose arm he leaned in charge of the gate, and the people trampled him in the gateway, and he died, just as the man of God had foretold when the king came down to his house. It happened as the man of God had said to the king: “About this time tomorrow, a seah of the finest flour will sell for a shekel and two seahs of barley for a shekel at the gate of Samaria.” ...but your officer will not eat any of it.

What’s my point?

God often does things in ways no man would ever script. What we deem impossible is a drop in the bucket of God’s immeasurable and endless power and insight. After all, He knows the future!  

But here’s what WE do.

If told of how the above-mentioned improbables would come true by late-March, we would have responded, “Oh I see. What a tragic series of events. But I understand now how that will happen. It all makes sense.”

And because it “makes sense” in hindsight, we disregard the overriding variable of the supernatural God into the equation and chalk up the now-plausible circumstance as nothing more than the “natural” occurrence of things.  

No matter how crazy things get, when viewing world events on merely the natural plane, most won’t need a God to “see it.” It will all make logical, cause-and-effect sense.

In the same way, I believe much of what will lead up to Revelation 12 and is told us in Daniel 11:31 and following, will likewise “make good sense” to the mind of mankind at the time. Going so far as to think of the Anti-Christ to come, we have to assume he will not come into power forcefully, but peaceably, with the full support of a global community…one that is now forming rapidly. Yes, it will all “make perfect sense,” for the answers and charismatic leadership of the one we know is to come will help to solve what will have become the world’s most pressing and previously unsolvable complexities. And the world community will give him his prominent role. 

Still, for those in Christ, let me be clear that these can be days of amazing intrigue and anticipation, not fear and worry. 

But, you see, my point is that this is how God usually chooses to bring about his plans, through a course of events that will be laced in the common sense of man … so much so that even the elect would be deceived were it possible (Matthew 24:24).

BUT, He gives light to the eyes of his children. Our great and unshakeable God has let us in on his plans. We are his friends if we do what He commands (John 15:14). And as friends of the Son of God, the Son has made known us to his agenda (John 15:15).

Now, my intention is not to insinuate we are absolutely on the cusp of the rapture of the Church, or teetering at the edge of the Tribulation–though I’m also not saying that we couldn’t be, for the Father alone only knows the day of Jesus’ return for his children (Matthew 24:30-42).

What I am saying is that if we can learn anything from history, and from an acquaintance with the scriptures, we can assume that the initial events predicted in the Bible will likely “make sense” in the moment to the mind of unregenerate man.

So, one last question. 

Given our current sermon series at my home church, Northview Church, I am wondering if you are listening, watching and fellowshipping with the Holy Spirit living inside you? It’s something about which I wrote in great length as well in SET FREE. 

Do you know the mind of Christ? Do you have the mind of Christ? 

If not, it’s time to change that. If not, you may be missing that God himself is showing up right now on planet Earth.

Place your trust in Jesus Christ. He is ready to open your eyes.

Maybe it’s time you learn more about the God who is doing something incredible right now in the midst of this unprecedented time. Maybe it’s time you gain in you the Resource that dispells anxiety and replaces it with a calm assurance the world will never understand. 

You can learn more about having a relationship with Jesus here. Or, reach out to a pastor at Northview Church by texting “NEXT” to 85379 and selecting Option 2.

God is showing up right now. Don’t miss him in the details.

Keep watching.

[attract-mode-collective]

The Making Of Porn Parody Of An Old Kenji Eno Game, Part 1

[NOTE: as mentioned when describing the new direction for the blog, those long-form pieces that I had been debuting in the newsletter will now appear here first. Though, perhaps predictably, one that I’ve been working on is taking forever to finish, so I figured that it wouldn’t be a bad idea to republish ones that only subscribers had access to. Which many couldn’t even read in the first place, due to technical reasons. Hence why I am pleased to present to the general public, something that first appeared in the Super Attractive Club newsletter #10! The following is largely presented as it, though the author of the game’s Twitter handle has been added. Oh, and one more thing: Part 2 is headed your way fairly soon...]

One of my semi-regular haunts on the internet is the video game message board Select Button. Recently, a thread popped up entitled “This Ain’t Kenji Eno’s D: The XXX Porno Parody” in the back corner, for members only (hence the lack of any link).

It was started by an individual who goes by the handle HOBO and the following is all of his posts, presented largely as is, with minimal editing, for the sake of maintaining historical accuracy.

The formatting is also mostly the same; everything italicized is either someone else’s comments or my own notes and everything else is HOBO’s words, which have been published with permission.

D3: The Natural Playboys is still in the midst of development and I will provide further developments when the time is right…

10/27/16

I am on the SB Discord right now, as StanHansen, the #1 gajin pro-wrestler of all times. I have vowed that I will make the video game DDD, a sequel to D2. My sequel won't be for Dreamcast. It probably won't even be a video game. I downloaded Klik n Play, which I was competent enough to use way back when but now I'm a slow-witted fellow. I can't figure out how to get this shit running in W7. So this is gonna be a Ren'py game.

I don't want to draw characters so I'm just going to cut faces out of old porno mags I stole. I still keep under my bed. I highly recommend everyone invest in old timey pornography, or, if you're fortunate, make your own. We'll probably be spending a lot of the future in the dark and smut can help you through some hard times.

One of the magazines hidden under my bed is the May 2001 issue of TORSO: The bodybuilding magazine of the future. It has features such as Building Strong BONERS: Do you Kegel? and Confessions of a Dildo Connoisseur, both of which may be better ideas for games than DDD: The Natural Playboys. I'm flipping through it now and I am not sure I want any of these faces in my Kenji Eno tribute game. All these guys look like they were auditioning for an infomercial for a nose hair trimmer and got tricked into taking off their clothes. And getting boners. All slightly confused and not into it, as if they're saying "Like this?" through their forced smiles. Lots of Caesar haircuts. Not enough photos of guys holding up their cocks while wearing boxing gloves -- only one. There is a list of Hot New Web Sites made to look like an classic Mac OS window. None of the websites have proper domain names. Half of them are msn communities. One of them is on webtv: Todd's Erotic Wrestling Gallery. I assume none of them work nowadays.

I am now flipping through an old issue of Penthouse. One thing I am learning: the people who did pornos really dug Mac OS. There is a nude spread, in black and white with a few colored highlights, where half the page will have a butt and some cowboy boots, and below it a quote from Homer or William Blake. I don't think you can find that on pornhubs...can you? There's a comic about space lesbians having sex and stabbing aliens. It looks kinda 2000 AD. There is a review of Matthew Sweet's "Altered Beast" that mentions the video game but doesn't mention anime so it's worthless. There is an ad for Franklin Mint commemorative plates featuring dogs. I would buy those plates. And the final page advertises next month's issue. Its lead: The Hottest Women in America, featuring Hillary Rodham Clinton. Also some stories about the evils of industrial fishing and maintaining wood on a porno set.

Playboy gave Paris is Burning three Playboy bunnies out of four. Defending Your Life only got 2. Oliver Stone's Doors movie: four stars. Wilson Phillips, MC Hammer, Kenny G, and Hank Williams Jr won rock, r&b, jazz, and country albums of the year, respectively. Wow! There is a 20 questions with Whitney Houston, who claimed her horny level varied depending on the fullness of the moon. She also liked Public Enemy and admired Farrakhan. I am learning so much from this 25 year old issue of Playboy Magazine.

Anyway I was going to post this thread to shame me into finishing a bad idea game but instead it became a bad idea review of old porno mags. Please, if you have old pornos...tell me about them.

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Digital actress Laura, Jr. will be the only character who has never been horny, because she is 100% digital DNA.

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When asked: “arcade sequence action y/n”...

There will be an action sequence. The game will prompt you to open a separate exe and you'll have to play through a snowmobile sequence. When it's over you will return to the main game, and you better not lie about having cleared the snowmobile sequence. If you violate the honor rule you ruin things for everybody!

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Someone comments with: “Hypercard is an aesthetic we should all seek to return to, IMO.”

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10/28/16

There's a Hypercard framework for Ren'py. I thought I'd finally use it for this. Plus Jimmy Maher's been writing about Hypercard lately, which made me want to finally play the Manhole...but instead of doing that I decided "Let's spend the weekend making Hypercard game."

I don't know how anyone has the patience for sprite work. It is too damn hard. Everything has to be so exact! Unless you don't give a shit. I generally do not give a shit. I will just plop lines down anywhere. I can always fix them easily later! But if you only got a few dozen dots you better slap those dots down in the right spots, otherwise shit looks all wrong.

The stuff I've worked up so far looks all wrong but it's still fun to mess around with. I do not know if I have it in me to keep going like this -- I may have to go back to cutting up porno mags -- but it's been fun.

That's right. This game is copyrighted. Back off, software pirates!!

I stole this logo from somewhere, right? Is the Tri-Ace logo like this? Some album cover? What ever. It took 10 minutes. It's done.

I woke up and decided player character Laura is going to spend the whole game locked out of her apartment in her bathrobe. She might run into other digital actress Lauras. They won't be wearing bathrobes. This will allow me to reuse the same faces over and over but I can justify it by pretending I'm clever.

I'll get her eyebrows and everything else right sooner or later.

There will definitely be a Kenji Eno like-a-look in this software. He had a very good face.

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10/29/16

Oh God the main reason I posted another reply was cuz I meant to link to this imgur gallery and I forgot to do it. I love it so much. I want this guy to add my stuff to it.

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11/4/16

My Kenji Eno tribute gamesoft is the only thing keeping me going at the moment. I'm feeling pretty good about it, even though it's currently nothing but character sprites and background art and a few lines of placeholder dialogue in Ren'py.

Kenji Eno is hard to draw. I gotta fix up his suit. It's all wrong. His face...I dunno, maybe it's close enough? I have always loved his face. I have always loved Kenji Eno. Earlier today I finally listened to the Hinge Problems ep about Kenji Eno. I downloaded it years ago, and I have put off listening to it...for years. It was fun to listen to. But I also think Kenji Eno got the short end of the stick on there. I think Kenji Eno is a few tiers above Tommy Wiseau. I think if he kept living and people kept giving him money to make games he woulda finally hit a target. Maybe not the one he was aiming at, but he woulda hit eventually. Imagine how great games would be if we had a dozen Kenji Enos?

One of the things I learned from doing google-image-search "kenji eno" is that he wasn't always a fat dude. He was pretty slim by the end. He was kinda handsome! It made me feel bad about drawing King-Sized Kenji Eno...but that's my Kenji Eno, and he's dead so he can't stop me from doing it.

This is player character Laura, taking a shower. I deleted the shower lines. They were not to my satisfaction. A lot of it is not to my satisfaction. But trust me: she is taking a shower. That is a Kenji Eno thing, showers. That was a 20th century thing. People would pay money to watch ladies take showers in movies! Isn't that crazy? Should probably fix her shoulder. Maybe the bridge of her nose.

I think I once read something about Daniel Clowes being the sweatiest cartoonist of all times and I thought "No way. I am going to take his place. I'm already 70% of the way there." And I promise you all: everything I ever do is going to have a ton of sweat.

So M.C. Laura has an apartment where she showers. That means it's not at all gratuitous! It's all good! She gets locked out of that apartment soon after this. Maybe after she picks up that skull from the potted plant. Maybe you go back in there later and crack that safe.

I thought maybe this would be a young Laura who joined the D Navy but she doesn't look young enough. Do they give you cleavers in the navy? To chop potatoes? Maybe they should. I will add waves to the ocean later. Maybe you will climb that lighthouse. Maybe Kenji Eno is up there. Who fuckin knows! It's all a mystery...

I think Navy Laura MAY be cute and may be a bit too generic...but that may mean she is my personal character find of 2016. in this version she has a :GENKI: emote on her hat...but she is lacking the outlining on her tights. Pixel art is hard, and for suckers. Never do it!

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11/11/16

It's been hard to muster the enthusiasms to work on this or anything else, but I finished a background and another character, so I figured I would post it.

The background is a basement, and drawing a basement made me feel depressed, but then I got to fill in the pictures on the TVs. That made me feel better. I just wanted to draw some TVs.

The game now involves a cult. This Laura started off as a cult member. She may still be. She had the masquerade mask but she was topless, covered in paint, and really hairy, with a padlock piercing her left nipple and a skunk fur stole wrapped around her neck. It was a confused design and the more I worked on it the worse I felt about it, so I said fuck it, she's still a drunk and maybe she's still in the cult but she's also a digital actress who needs to blow off steam after shooting a period picture in uncomfortable costume. Which she wore home. To her basement. With all its TVs. Yeah, maybe this needs work.

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11/13/16

Someone says: “Hypercard is an aesthetic we should all seek to return to, IMO.”

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11/15/16

LET ME TOUCH YOU, DADDEH

Big Laura: Cyber~Lipqueen Edition.

I thought Laura would live in a cyber version of Philip Marlowe's apartment building from Altman's the Long Goodbye, but I got tired of trying to draw shit good so I said "LET'S JUST DRAW WHATEVER AND FILL UP SPACE WITH GRAFFITI AFTERWARDS." Yes, that is a graffito tag depicting a disembodied cartoon Laura head shouting "I'M GAY!", and if you click on it you will be able to modify it so it says "I'M SO GAY!"...but only if you win the lotto first, and use the winnings to buy a cyber-marker that lets you draw on the one-hundred percent digital walls of Miami South: The New Hollywood.

Gonna get Genki on the Moon.

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11/18/16

Hey every body it's a . . .

. . . Friday . . !

Don't hesitate to say "FUCK YOU" to any one who ticks you off...unless it's me. I didn't mean to piss you off, I swear.

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11/20/16

... After the election I was feeling really low and wondering if I should even bother making anything but now I think I gotta keep going...I gotta get really :genki:

… Last night I went to a screening of Blue Velvet. The experience was kinda awful -- it was in a cafeteria where they projected the Blu-Ray onto a big screen so MAYBE it's not a real-deal screening, the place was jam-packed, and almost everyone there was normal and attractive and on a date, which seemed really weird to me? Like, none of those squares were gonna go home and engage in real sickie sex. I don't think you should take a date to that movie unless one of you is gonna do some consensual face-punching after the fact.

But anyway, I saw Blue Velvet, and it had Laura Dern, who is a wonderful actress. Have you ever watched Enlightened? That was a fantastic television program. Maybe the last new program I watched and truly enjoyed. I mourned its death, which is something I haven't done for a TV program since I was a child. I highly recommend watching that show. But this Blue Velvet audience, they laughed a lot at Laura Dern, which upset me. I think she did a fine job. I also think maybe she was the inspiration for Laura. I haven't see Wild at Heart yet, but I think there's a 50/50 chance Kenji Eno bought a laserdisc player just so he could beat off to Laura Dern banging Nic Cage at the highest possible home video quality available in the early 90's. And even if she wasn't Kenji Eno's Laura I think she might be my Laura. Way skinnier, but she's my Laura. So if I ever get sued by the Eno estate let's submit this shit as evidence: Diane Ladd's daughter was my muse, not that Japanese weirdo.

Over the weekend I drew a gas station. It is also a diner. You ever write up a list of your top 10 gamesoft? I've done that a few times, but I don't think I've ever put Sam & Max Hit the Road on mine, even though I'm sure I've spent my entire life pining for that kinda road trip experience. I've spent so much of my life in a car, but most of the time I wasn't going anyplace fun. I wasn't going to Stuckey's, or Waffle House, or miniature golf, or some kind of mysterious cavern. And it's unlikely I'll ever get to go on a crazy road trip at this point in my life. So I think this game is going to be a game about hitting the road and, maybe, having a good time. It's going to be the game I wish FF15 was. I played that FF15 demo today -- it fuckin blew. D3 might blow ass but at least it won't be 90 hours long. I respect your time. I respect you.

I'm still not sure if alcoholic, adversarial Laura is going to be the cult member who takes over your apartment, or if you can hit the road with her...but I like her, even though I'm having the hardest time drawing her. I've spent the last month or so reading Gilbert Hernandez comics, because they bring me great comfort and I'm pretty sure he's the greatest living cartoonist (and possibly artist). I am now aware that I nicked so many concepts of this game from him, and it's probably more of a Beto tribute game than an Eno tribute game but in the end...above all...it's a tribute to me, and select button, all the girls I've loved before.

I recently re-read that 1up interview with Eno. It's a very good interview and I recommend looking it up on google cache, even though a few pages are missing from it. He mentioned that he added a story to D at the last minute, and that made me feel a bit better about how I'm approaching this game. I thought I was probably lying to myself, thinking that I can just generate assets and throw them together later and have a game...but fuck, if my boy Kenji could do it, why can't I? Why can't all of us. Let's all make games, cuz games suck and they could be so much better.

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11/27/16

No one's bad enough to endure 9 hours of D3, never mind 90! No one's bad enough! Believe it! Because D3 asks Tough Questions and forces the player to make Hard Choices! D3 is now FULL BLOWN GAMES-AS-ART because now it has...A MORALITY SYSTEM.

"How far will you go to get juice?" -- the tagline to "Juice (2031 Remake)" starring Laura, Jr. and Jermaine "Huggy" Hopkins IV.

Laura is a digital actress. She was designed for the screen, not for the streets. She's got a lotta learning to do now that she's locked out of her apartment with no money, no shoes...and no scruples! In this scene Laura has wandered into a convenience store only to find its clerk is asleep on the job. That means no one can stop you but you! Click on the cigs, the booze, the rubbers, or the raccoon...take whatever you want! But choose carefully, because you can only carry one item at a time -- remember, you're a damp actress with no pockets, and I'm an inept programmer who doesn't know how to properly implement an inventory system. I'll figure it out eventually, but for now let's all agree that my limitations are inspiring great art.

I am proud of the condoms, so here they are, zoomed in but not blown up. Don't blow up condoms before wearing them. It's a terrible idea! The condoms are an homage to Leisure Suit Larry, which is a horrible game that I think I might love? I played it for the first time a few years ago. I've thought about it nearly every day since. The scene where Larry tries to buy condoms is really, really racist. Does referencing it make me racist, too? Probably, so let's keep this magnum-sized condom art a select butt exclusive "easter egg".

I'm also proud of these cigarette boxes. I don't smoke, but I'd start if the boxes looked this cooł. I'd totally take money from Tobacco of any size if they wanted to make a Laura Boy brand -- I'm ready to sell out, and you can't judge me.

There are two Kids in this game. Here is Kid Lotto. You can visit him and play games of chance. Or you can kick his ass, cuz he's a fuckin tiny and you're way stronger than him. What's stopping you? NOTHING.

The other kid is Kid Blotto. He's an alcoholic and you can beat him up too, but it'll probably be really depressing and he'll probably puke on you. I haven't drawn him/her yet.

The following image was presented in a blurry fashion, using the site’s SFW tools...

I am blurring this behind spoiler text, cuz it's got bare lady boobs -- I want to make sure this thread is "work safe", even though it's got XXX PORNO PARODY in the title. I should maybe spoiler blur this too, because it'll be a shocking swerve when it's revealed that the leader of the cult that takes over Laura's apartment is ALSO the alcoholic masquerade ball Laura seen previously on this page...! Fuck!

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12/8/16

... Last week my tablet died, which slowed down my productivity. I couldn't easily draw pictures! Which may be for the best. Maybe if you're trying to make a video game you should focus on the game aspect. So I have spent a lot of time thinking about how to make this an interesting video game...a lot of wasted time, cuz I have no fuckin clue. But I did draw more pictures, I composed some music, and wrote a bunch of words.

I'm going to play Unlimited SaGa this weekend. I bet I can learn something from that. I bet D3 could be an unofficial sequel to a Kawazu and Eno game. I'm that confident.

While daydreaming about playing games I thought "Maybe Laura D. will wander Miami South: The NEW Hollywood in her bare feet, and she will have to rest occasionally, cuz her feet get so bloody and sore. She cannot wear shoes, because she is 100% digital, and her DNA lock keeps her from wearing tacky footwear such as sandals, or socks with sandals." And maybe I'd draw her feet, being all bloody and sore? But fuck, feet are the worst. No offense to anyone who's really into feet -- I am convinced foot fetishists are very focused, productive people and I'm deeply jealous of them -- but at a young age my older sister shamed me for my Fred Flintstone-looking feet, and I also read a lot of Rob Liefeld comics around the same time, so I have zero tolerance for feet. I believe they are ugly and also very hard to draw. But feet are an important part of the human anatomy and if you wanna make decent art you can't really avoid them. So I drew a few feet. You can see one of them here. Unlike most of the art I've posted so far I doubt I will ever revise this, cuz drawing feet is the worst.

I decided The Lauras would be pure digital beauty, except for their feet. Maybe that wasn't my Kenji Eno's thing. Maybe I'm projecting there. Maybe it's beautiful if your second toe is longer than your big toe? Please tell me this is the case, cuz I want to feel better about my feet.

HERE'S A LIST OF TOP 5 WORST THINGS TO DRAW:

1) Cars, except for those cute Choro-Q style cars Toriyama always drew in Dr. Slump. Those rank #6, cuz they're hard but maybe worth the effort. 2) Feet. 3) Ladies. I can't imagine being a dude or a lady drawing their horny ideal all day. Wouldn't that drive you crazy? How do you not spend all day pounding off rather than drawing? I avoided drawing ladies for this very reason. Well, that and cuz I bet my mom wouldn't approve of me drawing super hot babes. I'm getting over that now. D3 is all hot babes, all the time. No one can stop me! 4-5) I dunno, I forgot what the rest of the list was gonna be. Probably one body part or another -- humans are gross, and awful.

Miami South: The NEW Hollywood is where the world goes to make entertainment. Some of the entertainment is wholesome, some ain't...but a lot of it straddles the line between kid-friendly and the kinda shit your sickie dad would buy on clips4sale. This cop Laura who stars in CD-ROM video films where she somehow always ends up in her own handcuffs...she is a peek into the future of Pixar and such. Believe it. Furtopia...

Was Furtopia the name of that furry Pixar movie? I'm too lazy to google it. Either way...we all gonna see dads and moms covertly pounding off in the theater to Pixar movies within the next decade. I'm sure of it.

This is Ton Hardcore. She is the #1 character find of the 21st century, even though she's a total knockoff of Dump Matsumoto. Dump is the coolest of the pro-wrestlers. On the Discord I am StanHansen, but only because I was too chickenshit to take the name "DumpMatusmoto", because she was so tough and bad ass and beautiful.

A few years ago I wrote a screenplay featuring my tough gal Ton Hardcore. It was titled "Hooker #1". In the opening scene she butt-fucked a billionaire so hard he cried and gold coins fell from the pockets of his pajamas. There probably won't be any butt-fucking in D3, but if any of you guys got the Hollywood hook-up I have a script for the 2023 Pixar project ready to go.

Someday I would like to make a game about a pro-wrestler. One that focuses more on surviving on the road than performing in the ring. D3 may end up being that game. I bet being a digital actress ain't much different from being a pro-wrestler.

Ton Hardcore is my true Laura. She is going to be in everything I do. She's on my joystick. If you ever go to a FG tourney in the Northeast of the USA I will show you her looking cool, and in color, and bloody, cuz she's on my joystick. She's #1.

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12/15/16

A discussion about wrestling game emerges and someone says: “Still waiting for the 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand of wrestling games.” Def Jam Fight for New York is brought up, and then I mention my favorite guilty pleasure for the Xbox 360, Def Jam Icon…

I played the demo for Def Jam Icon way back when. I paid it no regard, because it was not by AKI. Perhaps that was unfair of me, but I believe hip hop and rapping is very cool, but not as cool as full-blown pro-wrestling....and the best pro-wrestling was delivered by AKI on the Nintendo 64.

I think AKI is the most successful b-tier late 90's j-gamedev that isn't From. Hell, maybe they are more successful. Demon's Souls is probably my favorite game of the last decade (it's almost January 2017, and GOD HAND came out in October 2006, so please do not debate this -- Demon's Souls is the best), but given the choice...I think I'd rather make a Style Savvy game than a Souls game. Though a cross between both...that's a dream game, right there.

I've spent most of the last week thinking about video-games, and trying to program them. I think the visual novel is bad. I can count the VNs I've enjoyed on one hand. I would like to make a video-game that I would enjoy, and that's probably a bad thing to think about. I have high standards! So maybe I should just settle for making a visual novel. But sometimes...you gotta believe. Sometimes you gotta go Kawazu. Sometimes you gotta try to program a board-game in Ren'py despite your incompetence as a programmer/gamedev.

The drawing above is from a diner scene. I think Laura D. will occasionally "take a load off", and visit a diner with the companion of your choosing. That is my 21st century "power fantasy", going to a diner with another human being. Just eating food, or having a drink, and talking about things. That is something I haven't done in the longest time, and can't imagine ever doing in the future. That is what DDD is shaping up to be. Lots of eating, and driving, in an America that never existed.

That Laura D. will not be in the final DDD. I like that drawing, but it's "off-model" as they say in the biz. On-model Laura D. isn't quite as chibi. She's leaner. Colder. She's a digital actress and she really isn't that interested in what anyone else is saying.

She's totally cool and may look more like this.

That image will also not appear in the final game, because I fuckin hate how static it looks, and how the feet are probably all wrong, and how there are no cars in that parking lot. Again, cars are almost as bad as feet, but maybe not as bad as horses. Horses are a fucking bitch to draw.

The Sailor, whose name hasn't been decided on yet, should be eating French fries but uh...I see I forgot to draw the French fries. Pretend she is a sulky teen who ordered only fries at D's diner. Every character will order a different food! You will learn so much about Laura D's companions at the diner, and so much of it will come form what they eat.

In the past I would have ordered a grilled cheese and fries at a diner. Now? Who the hell knows. I try to avoid having a good time. I try to avoid diners.

Earlier today I was drawing billboards. I fuckin love drawing billboards. I now love spirtework, cuz I can cut and paste shit and no one can shame me for it, cuz if you don't recycle shit video-games don't work. I liked how this image came out after cutting, pasting, and mirroring. I'd get it tattooed on my soul. On your soul. I'd make it my select-button avatar if the site still supported super big ass avatars. It's 100%